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Reedley Chinese COVID Lab Received Tax Credit of $360,000 From Gov. Newsom’s ‘GO-Biz’

Reedley Chinese COVID Lab Received Tax Credit of $360,000 From Gov. Newsom’s ‘GO-Biz’

At the epicenter of current controversy, an illegal California lab run by a Chinese biotech firm, Prestige Biotech, was recently discovered in a warehouse in Reedley, California. The lab contained mice which were genetically engineered to spread COVID-19.

According to National Review, “court documents further showed that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) conducted tests on the more than 800 chemicals found at the site and that over 20 infectious agents were found present, including Hepatitis B and C, streptococcus pneumonia, chlamydia, rubella, and Herpes 1 and 5.” As a federal investigation is underway, where will the money trail lead us?

As recently discovered, Prestige Biotech is registered in the State of Nevada, but unlicensed to conduct business within the State of California. Code enforcement officials from the City of Reedley spoke to Xiuqin Yao, President of Prestige Biotech, as identified via emails and court documents. Ms. Yao informed authorities that the company was the largest creditor of Universal Meditech (UMI), Inc. which filed for bankruptcy. UMI had been relocated from the City of Fresno to the Reedley warehouse following an electrical fire, and when UMI ceased operations. According to NBC News, “Prestige Biotech was a creditor to UMI and identified as its successor, according to court documents.”

document released on March 24, 2019 by Governor Newsom’s Office of Business and Economic Development, a California Competes tax credit allocation agreement of $360,000 was cemented with UMI.

CDC conducted found more than 800 chemicals at the site and over 20 infectious agents

 

By Adina Flores,

 

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Just putting this out there. The Obama Factor A Q&A with historian David Garrow.

Just putting this out there. The Obama Factor A Q&A with historian David Garrow.

There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.

 

Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

 

At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.

 

In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

 

No doubt, Obama’s evolving race-based self-consciousness did distance him from Jager; in the end, the couple broke up. Yet it is revealing to read Obama’s account of the breakup in Dreams against the very different account that Jager offers. In Obama’s account, he was the particularist, embracing a personal meaning for the Black experience that Jager, the universalist, refused to grant. In Jager’s account, the poles of the argument are nearly, but not quite, reversed: It is Obama who appears to minimize Jewish anxiety about blood libels coming from the Black community. His particularism mattered; hers didn’t. While Obama defined himself as a realist or pragmatist, the episode reads like a textbook evasion of moral responsibility.

 

Whose version of the story is correct? Who knows. The bridge between the two accounts is Obama’s emerging attachment to Blackness, which required him to fall in love with and marry a Black woman. In Obama’s account, his attachment to Blackness is truthful and noble. In Jager’s account, his claims are instrumental and selfish; he grants particularism to the experience and suffering of his own tribe while denying it to others.

 

In evaluating the truthfulness of these two competing accounts, it seems worth noting that Jager is something more than a woman scorned by a man who would later become president of the United States. Obama asked her to marry him twice; she refused him both times, before going on to achieve her own high-level professional successes. A student of the great University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, Jager is a professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College whose scholarship on great power politics in Southeast Asia and the U.S.-Korean relationship is known for its factual rigor. In contrast, Dreams from My Father, as Garrow shows throughout Rising Star, is as much a work of dreamy literary fiction as it is an attempt to document Obama’s early life.

 

Scholarship aside, there is another reason to assume that Jager would be less likely to misremember an incident involving race and antisemitism than Obama. As it turns out, Jager’s paternal grandparents, Hendrik and Geesje Jager, were members of the Dutch resistance, whose role sheltering a Jewish child named Greetje in their home for three years led to their recognition as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. In that context, at least, it seems quite likely that Jager would remember the particulars of a fight with Obama related to antisemitism, and be turned off by his response—while Obama’s version of the fight has the feel of an anecdote positioned, if not invented, to buttress the character arc of the protagonist of his memoir, which positioned him for a career in public life.

 

Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.

 

The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.

 

Yet when it came out six years ago, Rising Star was mostly ignored; as a result, its most scandalous and perhaps revelatory passages, such as Obama’s long letter to another girlfriend about his fantasies of having sex with men, read today, to people who are more familiar with the Obama myth than the historical record, like partisan bigotry. But David Garrow is hardly a hack whose work can or should be dismissed on partisan grounds. He is among the country’s most credible and celebrated civil rights historians—the author of The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bearing the Cross (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography) and one of the three historian-consultants who animated the monumental PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, as well as the author of a landmark history of abortion rights, Liberty and Sexuality.

 

In part, Garrow’s failure to gain a hearing for his revision of the Obama myth lay in his timing. Rising Star felt like old news the moment it was published in May 2017—as whatever insights the book contained were overtaken by the fury and chaos surrounding the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. As Trump’s incendiary carnival barker act took center stage, it was hard even for Republicans not to miss the contrast with Obama’s cerebral mannerisms and sedate family life. The idea that Obama was simply another self-obsessed political knife-fighter who played fast and loose with the truth didn’t resonate. In any case, Obama was now a footnote to history—a reminder of kinder, gentler times that the country seemed unlikely to see again anytime soon.

 

Yet there was also evidence to suggest that the idea Obama was no longer concerned with power or involved with power was itself part of a new set of myths being woven by and around the ex-president. First, the Obamas never left town. Instead, they bought a large brick mansion in the center of Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood—violating a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes. In the Obamas case, the reason for staying in D.C. was ostensibly that their youngest daughter, Sasha, wanted to finish high school with her class at Sidwell Friends. In June 2019, Sasha went off to college, yet her parents remained in Washington.

 

By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.

 

Given the stakes, then, it seemed churlish to object to the Obamas’ quiet family life in Kalorama —or to report on the comings and goings of Democratic political operatives and office-seekers from their mansion, or to the swift substitution of Obama as party leader for Hillary Clinton, who after all was the person who had supposedly been cheated out of the presidency. Why even mention the strangeness of the overall setup, which surely paled next to the raw menace of Donald Trump, who lurched from one crisis to the next while lashing out at his enemies and probably selling out the country to Vladimir Putin?

 

In a normal country, the exhaustive report issued in April 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which uncovered no evidence that the 2016 election had been decided by Russian actions, let alone that Trump was a Russian agent, might have been a cue for the Obamas to go home, to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Martha’s Vineyard. The moment of crisis was over. Russiagate turned out to have been a politically motivated hoax, just as Trump had long insisted.

 

But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.

 

The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. The whispers about Biden’s cognitive decline, which began during his bizarre COVID-sheltered basement campaign, were mostly dismissed as partisan attacks on a politician who had always been gaffe-ridden. Yet as President Biden continued to fall off bicycles, misremember basic names and facts, and mix long and increasingly weird passages of Dada-edque nonsense with autobiographical whoppers during his public appearances, it became hard not to wonder how poor the president’s capacities really were and who was actually making decisions in a White House staffed top to bottom with core Obama loyalists. When Obama turned up at the White House, staffers and the press crowded around him, leaving President Biden talking to the drapes—which is not a metaphor but a real thing that happened.

 

That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.

 

David Garrow

David Garrow

TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY LLC/ALAMY

 

Instead, every few months a sanitized report appears on some aspect of the ex-president’s outside public advocacy, presented within limits that are clearly being set by Obama’s political operatives—which conveniently elide the problems that are inherent in having a person with no constitutional role or congressional oversight take an active role in executive decision-making. Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a long article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office. Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school D.C. reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion. But the D.C. press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful.

 

There is another interpretation of Obama’s post-presidency, of course—one shared by many Republicans and Democrats. In that interpretation, Obama was never the leader of much of anything, neither during the Trump years nor now. Instead, he was focused on buying trophy propertieshanging out with billionaires, and vacationing on private yachts while grifting large checks from marks like Spotify and Netflix—even if his now-stratospheric levels of personal vanity also demanded that every so often he show up President Biden for the sin of occupying his chair in the White House. 

 

In the absence of what was once American journalism, it is hard to know which portrait of Obama’s post-presidency is truer to life: Obama as a celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or as a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society from his basement, in his sweats.

 

Yet the answer is, I believe, somewhere in David Garrow’s book.

 

At bottom, Rising Star is a tragic story about a young man who was deeply wounded by the abandonment of both his white mother and his Black father—a wound that gifted him with political genius and at the same time made him the victim of a profound narcissism that first whispered to him in his mid-twenties that he was destined to be president. It is not hard to see how Garrow has come to believe that Obama’s ambition proved to be toxic, both for the man and for the country. But why?

 

As a human being who was sentient for long stretches of time between 2008 and 2017, I was, in general, a fan of Barack Obama and his presidency. What I could never understand was Obama’s contempt for the idea of American exceptionalism. Even as president, Obama insisted on poking exceptionalists in the eye, saying that he believed in American exceptionalism “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Why would the president of the United States feel the need to disabuse his countrymen of the idea that they are special?

 

What made Obama’s rejection of American exceptionalism seem particularly weird to me was his attachment to Abraham Lincoln, whose cadences and economy of language he urged his speechwriters to emulate. As a historian, one might plausibly argue that Lincoln was a saint who saved the Union or a monster who shed rivers of blood—or that he didn’t go far enough. But there is no arguing with Lincoln’s belief in the uniqueness of the American destiny, for which he sent hundreds of thousands of young men to die. Of all men, Abraham Lincoln would have been baffled by an American president who denied that America was exceptional. What did all those people die for, then? And what exactly did Obama think that Lincoln’s speeches were about?

 

 

 

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Quick hide your children Progressives claim Trumps out to kill all who get in his way.

Quick hide your children Progressives claim Trumps out to kill all who get in his way. Former President Trump made a statement that.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”  Well, the fanatics on the left are in fear. Some maybe even went into hiding. According to Jackie Boy the statement was a threat of violence against the witnesses and Smith and his crackerjack team.

The judge bought the lie and now wants a response from Trump as to what he meant. My first thought was to tell the judge to rotate on it. But seriously this will be a long string of complaints that will be filed.

Under the process known as discovery, prosecutors are required to provide defendants with the evidence against them so they can prepare their defense.

“It could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case,” prosecutors wrote in their filing, adding Trump has a history of attacking judges, attorneys and witnesses in other cases against him.

At his arraignment on Thursday, Trump swore not to intimidate witnesses or communicate with them without legal counsel present.

Protective orders are routine in cases involving confidential documents, but prosecutors said it was particularly important to restrict public dissemination given Trump’s social media statements.

A Trump spokesperson issued a statement defending the former president’s social media post.

“The Truth post cited is the definition of political speech, and was in response to the Rino, China-loving, dishonest special interest groups and super PAC’s,” the statement said.

 

 

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FDA Head Robert Califf Battles Misinformation — Sometimes.

 

This is a clown who served during the Obama administration. Thought the job was all fun and games. Much of this article is Government misinformation. But there are parts that they get right. Come 2024 all these clowns that took part in the attacks on our young and elderly will be gone or in jail.

FDA Head Robert Califf Battles Misinformation — Sometimes.

Robert Califf, MD, the head of the FDA, doesn’t seem to be having fun on the job.

“I would describe this year as hand-to-hand combat. Really, every day,” he said at an academic conference at Stanford in April. It’s a sentiment the FDA commissioner has expressed often.

What’s been getting Califf’s goat? Misinformation, which gets part of the blame for Americans’ stagnating life expectancy. To Califf, the country that invents many of the most advanced drugs and devices is terrible at using those technologies well. And one reason for that is Americans’ misinformed choices, he has suggested. Many don’t use statins, vaccines, or COVID-19 therapies. Many choose to smoke cigarettes and eat the wrong food.

Califf and the FDA are fighting misinformation head-on. “The misinformation machine is really causing a lot of death,” he said, in an apparent ad-lib, this spring in a speech at Tufts University. The pandemic, he told KFF Health News, helped “crystallize” his need to tackle misinformation. It was a “blatant case,” in which multiple studies gave evidence about very effective therapeutics against COVID. “And a lot of people chose not to do it.” There were “large-scale purveyors of misinformation,” he said, poisoning the well.

Occasionally, though, Califf and the FDA have added to the cacophony of misinformation. And sometimes their misinformation is about misinformation.

Califf hasn’t been able to consistently estimate misinformation’s public health toll. Last June, he said it was the “leading cause of meaningful life-years lost.” In the fall, he told a conferenceopens in a new tab or window: “I’ve been going around saying that misinformation is the most common cause of death in the United States.” He continued, “There is no way to prove that, but I do believe that it is.”

 

At other times, as in April, he has called the problem the nation’s “leading cause” of premature death. “I’ll keep working on this to try and get it right,” he said. Later, in May, he said, “Many Americans die or experience serious illness every year due to bad choices driven by false or misleading information.”

Americans’ health is indeed in dire straits. The CDC noted the country’s life expectancy has dropped 2 years in a rowopens in a new tab or window — it’s at 76.1 years as of 2021 — a dismal capper to 4 decadesopens in a new tab or window of lagging gains. Countries such as Slovenia, Greece, and Costa Rica outrank the U.S. Their newborn citizens are expected to live more than 80 yearsopens in a new tab or window, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Several factors are at the root of those differences. But Americans’ choices, often informed by bad or misleading data, political jeremiads, or profit-seeking advertising, are among the causes. For instance, one 2023 paper estimated that undervaccination against COVID — caused in part by misinformation — costs as much as $300 million per dayopens in a new tab or window, accounting for both the costs of healthcare and economic costs, like missed work.

Outside experts are sympathetic. Misinformation is a “huge problem for public health,” said Joshua Sharfstein, MD, a Johns Hopkins University public health professor and former FDA principal deputy commissioner. Having a strategy to combat it is crucial. But, he cautioned, “that’s the easiest part of this.”

The agency, which regulates products that consumers spend 20 cents of each dollar on per year, is putting more muscle behind the effort. It’s begun mentioning the subject of misinformation in its procurement requests, like one discussing the needopens in a new tab or window to monitor social media for misinformation related to cannabis.

The agency launched a “Rumor Control” pageopens in a new tab or window seeking to debunk persistent confusion. It also expects to get a report from the Reagan-Udall Foundationopens in a new tab or window, a not-for-profit organization created by Congress to advise the FDA. Califf has said he thinks better regulation — and more authorityopens in a new tab or window for the agency — would help.

Califf has noted small victories. Ivermectin, once touted as a COVID wonder drug, “eventually” became one such win. But, then again, its use is “not completely gone,” he said. And, despite winning individual battles, his optimism is muted: “I’d say right now the trend in the war is in a negative direction.”

Some of those battles have been quite small, even marginal.

And it’s difficult to know what to take on or respond to, Califf said. “I think we’re just in the early days of being able to do that,” he told KFF Health News. “It’s very hard to be scientific,” he said.

Take the agency’s experience last fall with “NyQuil chicken” — a purportedly viral cooking trend in which users roasted their birds in the over-the-counter cold medicine on social media platforms like TikTok.

Califf said his agency’s “skeleton crew” — at least relative to Big Tech giants — had picked up on increasing chatter about the meme.

But independent analyses don’t corroborate the claim. It seems much of the interest in it came only after the FDA called attention to it. The day before the agency’s pronouncement, the TikTok app recorded only five searches on the topic, BuzzFeed News found in an analysis of TikTok dataopens in a new tab or window. That tally surged to 7,000 the week after the agency’s declaration. Google Trends, which measures changes in the number of searches, shows a similar pattern: Interest peaked on the search engine in the week after the agency announcement.

Califf also claimed “injuries” occurred to participants “directly” due to the social media trend. Now, he said, “the number of injuries is down,” though he couldn’t say whether the agency’s intervention was the cause.

Again, his assertions have fuzzy underpinnings. It’s not clear what, if any, actual damage the NyQuil chicken fad caused. Poison control centers don’t keep that data, said Maggie Maloney, a spokesperson for America’s Poison Centers. And, after multiple requests, agency spokespeople declined to provide the FDA’s data reflecting increased social media traffic or injuries stemming from the meme.

In countering misinformation, FDA also risks coming off as high-handed. In September 2021, the agency tweeted about purported mythsopens in a new tab or window and misinformation on mammograms. Among the myths? That they’re painfulopens in a new tab or window. Instead, the agency explained that “everyone’s pain threshold is different” and the breast cancer-screening procedure is more often described as “temporary discomfort.”

Statements like these “erode trust,” said Lisa Fitzpatrick, MD, MPH, MPA, an infectious diseases physician and currently the CEO of Grapevine Health, a startup trying to improve health literacy in underserved communities. Fitzpatrick has previously served as an official with the District of Columbia’s Medicaid program and with the CDC.

“Who are you to judge what’s painful?” she asked, rhetorically. It’s hard to brand subjective impressions as misinformation.

Califf acknowledged the point. Speaking to 340 million Americans is difficult. With mammograms, the average patient might not have a painful experience — but many might. “Getting across that kind of nuance and public communication, I think, is in its early phases.”

Scrutiny over the agency’s role regarding food and nutrition is also mounting. After independent journalist Helena Bottemiller Evich wrote an article criticizing the agency for relying on voluntary reporting standards for baby formula, Califf tweeted to correctopens in a new tab or window a “bit of misinformation,” saying the agency did not have such authority.

An agency communications specialist made a similar intervention with New York University professor Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, referring to a “troubling pattern of articles with erroneous information that then get amplified.” The agency was again seeking to rebut arguments that the agency had erred in not seeking mandatory reporting.

“As I see it, the ‘troubling pattern’ here is FDA’s responses to advocates like me who want to support this agency’s role in making sure food companies in general — and infant formula companies in particular — do not produce unsafe food,” Nestle retortedopens in a new tab or window. Notwithstanding the agency’s protests to Evich and Nestle, the agency had only recently asked for such authority.

Efforts to respond to or regulate misinformation are becoming a political problem.

In July, a federal judge issued a sweeping, yet temporary, injunctionopens in a new tab or window — at the instigation of Republican attorneys general, multiple right-wing political groups, and prominent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense — barring federal health officials from contacting social media groups to correct information. A large section of the ruling detailed efforts by a CDC official to push back on suspected misinformation on social media networks.

An appeals court later issuedopens in a new tab or window its own temporary ruling — this time countering the original, sweeping order — nevertheless underscoring the extent of pushback on government pushback against misinformation. Califf has consistently played down the government’s ability to solve the problem. “One hundred percent of experts agree, government cannot solve this. We have too much distrust in fundamental institutions,” he said last June.

 A photo of Robert Califf, MD

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Weekend Funnies: Toast The last man left standing

Weekend Funnies: Toast The last man left standing

 

 

The things one finds on facebook…







.













I love Branco – but this time he didn’t see the elephant in the room…


How Things Are Going At Meta’s Threads (on Rumble)

(JP hit it out of the park with this one.)




 

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Ex-Capitol Police Chief Called Jan. 6 Events a Cover-Up.

Ex-Capitol Police Chief Called Jan. 6 Events a Cover-Up.

Former Capitol Hill Police Chief Steven Sund called the events of Jan. 6 a cover-up in an interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, an interview that never aired but resurrected by The National Pulse.

Sund made the comments on Carlson’s show, “Tucker Carlson Today.” But according to the Pulse, the interview was buried by Fox.

In the interview leaked by the Pulse, Sund tells Carlson he believes that Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had intelligence of what was coming on Jan. 6 but failed to communicate it and subsequently covered it up in the aftermath.

“Everything appears to be a cover-up,” Sund told Carlson. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist … but when you look at the information and intelligence they had, the military had, it’s all watered down. I’m not getting intelligence, I’m denied any support from National Guard in advance. I’m denied National Guard while we’re under attack, for 71 minutes …”

Sund resigned his post shortly after the riots. He was chief of the Capitol Police beginning in 2019 and served as a police officer for more than 30 years.

At one point, Carlson begins to posit a question to Sund, saying, “It sounds like they were hiding the intelligence.”

Sund responded: “Could there possibly be actually … they kind of wanted something to happen? It’s not a far stretch to begin to think that. It’s sad when you start putting everything together and thinking about the way this played out … what was their end goal?”

In a bipartisan Senate report released in June 2021, the panel concluded that federal agencies did not raise a sufficient alarm concerning the threat of violence and that the Capitol Police’s intelligence division did not adequately communicate what it knew with the department’s leaders and rank-and-file officers.

Sund told Carlson that should have started at the top.

“If I was allowed to do my job as the chief we wouldn’t be here; this didn’t have to happen,” he said.

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Florida versus California is the election we should be having DeSantis and Newsom are willing to debate major policy issues in front of the country.

 

Florida versus California is the election we should be having DeSantis and Newsom are willing to debate major policy issues in front of the country.

DeSantis and Newsom are willing to debate major policy issues in front of the country

National elections should be about contrast and choice — and those choices should offer the clearest opportunity for parity in the candidates and the parties. If the polls are to be believed, the 2024 election as it stands now, before any debates or primaries, does not offer that. Instead the country currently faces the prospect of two senior citizens clashing, both with low approval ratings, personal and legal baggage and questions of mental acuity.

There is a side debate forming, however, between Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a declared candidate for president in 2024 and the only polling alternative to Donald Trump at the moment, and California governor Gavin Newsom, an all-but-declared candidate running a standby campaign, should Joe Biden decide to step aside and Kamala Harris be found unviable (as her own polls would suggest).

This week, while appearing on Hannity, DeSantis accepted a debate offer from Newsom, with Hannity moderating, possibly to happen in the fall. It’s an unorthodox move by a presidential candidate to appear in a debate with a non-candidate, and it carries risk for DeSantis. It also carries a huge reward as he continues to poke Newsom into declaring against Biden, where he would certainly be viewed as a serious alternative to a president whose own party is concerned about both his age and stamina for another five years in office.

All the grandstanding and politicking by governors and candidates aside, there could not be a better debate for this country coming out of the pandemic. As we are still attempting to navigate a post-pandemic world, there’s an profound contrast between the current extreme progressive model of California Democratic policy versus the hyper-wartime conservatism on offense of DeSantis and Florida. The country has yet to have an open policy debate about the fallout of Covid policies that saw record numbers of Californians pack up their homes and move out of state, with approximately 500,000 of them landing in Florida in 2020.

 

Governor Newsom has never really had to account for his own masking and lockdown policy of schoolchildren, as he dined at exclusive restaurants and went on state-funded excursions. On the other hand, DeSantis has made a national name for himself on keeping schools mask-free and open, disagreeing with the national media, local Democrats, teachers’ unions and both Trump and Biden White Houses.

Newsom has been one of the most outspoken critics of Florida’s new education policies, which has removed pornographic books from K-3 libraries and made the Parental Rights in Education act law. Newsom and his media allies have stood by enacting a school curriculum that celebrates LGBTQ culture, while leaning into the progressive framing of Florida’s law as “Don’t Say Gay.”

California’s large city municipalities are being swallowed up by rising energy costs due to a “green” agenda, as well as record crime, open-air drug use and immigrant populations descending due to the Biden administration’s relaxed border polices. DeSantis has made a name flying migrants to progressive enclaves, sending assistance to Texas and signing a law protecting fossil-fueled gas appliances, such as stoves.

Whether it’s post-Covid policy with vaccine and mask mandates, Critical Race Theory and gender debate in schools, energy independence, AI development and regulation, border policy or crime and prosecutorial enforcement… every major policy and culture fight happening in this country is taking place at the intersection of California and Florida.

It’s good that DeSantis and Newsom are willing to debate these issues in front of the country. It’s the debate and the election we should be having. It’s the one we could still have, if we wanted it.

 

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Why we don’t need Wind and Solar as a major supplier of energy. Power plant at landfill updated.

Why we don’t need Wind and Solar as a major supplier of energy. Power plant at landfill updated.

EDL, a global energy producer, and project stakeholders including Republic Services have started operations at the Carbon Limestone Renewable Natural Gas Facility near Youngstown.

EDL owns and operates a portfolio of 97 power stations in North America, Australia and Europe. It has upgraded an existing landfill gas-to-energy power plant to a renewable natural gas facility near Republic Services’ Carbon Limestone Landfill. It is said to be one of the largest plants of its kind in North America.

Renewable natural gas is biogas that has been upgraded and placed in the conventional natural gas system.

Partners in the venture are NW Natural Renewables and Pennant Midwest. A goal of the project, those involved said, is decarbonizing their energy system across North America and reaching climate goals.

The new facility is designed to process and condition landfill gas — a by-product of naturally decomposing materials in the Carbon Limestone Landfill — and is expected to ramp up to 1.7 million British thermal units of pipeline-quality renewable natural gas in 2024.

Richard M. DiGia, EDL chief executive officer-North America, said EDL is proud to leverage its waste-to-clean energy expertise to drive development and construction of the Carbon Limestone project.

“The limestone facility is one of the largest plants of its kind in North America. It captures landfill gas that would otherwise be wasted and converts it into renewable natural gas that is a clean fuel source for powering vehicles, heating homes through the natural gas system, or electricity generation,” DiGia said.

“This facility is designed to produce volumes of RNG comparable to removing the emissions from 13,170 passenger vehicles from our roads each year. … We’re pleased to be assisting a key customer to progress toward their goal of decarbonizing through renewable natural gas supply.”

Republic Services Inc. provides customers with services such as recycling, solid waste, special waste, hazardous waste, container rental and field services. Republic Services said it has set ambitious sustainability goals to reduce emissions and increase the beneficial reuse of biogas by 2030.

“At Republic Services, our vision is to partner with customers to create a more sustainable world now and for future generations,” Republic Services Area President Chris Nie said.

“Through our partnership with EDL, we are capturing gas that is created by decomposing waste in our landfill. This project allows us to convert that gas into a lower-carbon fuel source that reduces greenhouse gas emissions.”

NW Natural Renewables, a competitive RNG business, has agreements in place for a 20-year supply of RNG produced by the facility. NW Natural Renewables Holdings said it is committed to leading in the energy transition and providing renewable fuels to support decarbonization in the utility, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors.

“We’re excited for this project to begin operations and start providing renewable natural gas to NW Natural Renewables and its customers,” said Mike Kotyk, president of NW Natural Renewables. “We believe renewable natural gas will play a critical role in decarbonizing our energy system across North America and helping us reach our collective climate goals.”

Pennant will transport up to 6,000 cubic feet of RNG per day through its existing system from the landfill, redelivering the gas to EDL’s downstream markets. Pennant is a wholly owned subsidiary of UGI Energy Services

Pennant Midstream operates both wet and dry gas and natural gas liquid gathering pipelines in Mercer and Lawrence counties, Pa.; and Mahoning and Columbiana counties in Ohio. Pennant operates a giant natural gas processing plant located near New Middletown.

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Trump Endorsements in Ohio Reflect Sea Change.

Trump Endorsements in Ohio Reflect Sea Change.

As former President Donald Trump was under legal fire and rumors swelled of another indictment, Sen. J.D. Vance and a virtual who’s who of Ohio Republicans endorsed him for the presidential nomination in 2024.

The list of endorsements, released by the Trump campaign Tuesday morning, includes two of the three Republicans vying for the U.S. Senate nomination next year, five of Ohio’s 10 GOP U.S. Representatives, and State Treasurer Robert Sprague.

While two of the Senate hopefuls — Secretary of State Frank LaRose and businessman Bernie Moreno — weighed in with strong endorsements of Trump, the third major GOP contender was not on the list and is unlikely to be on any future list of Trump supporters.

State Sen. Matt Dolan, who disparaged Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, ran for the Senate nod in 2022 with the backing of much of the more moderate GOP “establishment.” He ended up third behind Vance and former State Treasurer Josh Mandel, both of whom ran as Trump Republicans. (First-time candidate Vance actually got Trump’s endorsement in the primary).

Along with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, the Trump supporters in Ohio’s GOP U.S. House delegation are Reps. Mike Carey, Max Miller (a former Trump White House staffer), Bill Johnson, and Troy Balderson.

“No elected officials — not even in the state House or Senate — are backing [Ron] DeSantis or anyone else,” said a Columbus-area GOP activist who requested anonymity. “There is a fear of getting a Trump-backed primary challenge.”

A poll from Ohio Northern University shows that among likely GOP primary voters, Trump holds a hefty lead with 64% of the vote, followed by entrepreneur and Ohio native Vivek Ramaswamy with 12%, and Florida Gov. DeSantis 9%.

Trump’s strength among Ohio Republicans reflects a sea change in the party. In 2016, then-Gov. John Kasich defeated Trump in the primary by 46% to 35%, with the rest going to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Kasich subsequently refused to endorse Trump and, in 2020, was a high-profile Republican for Biden.

The Ohio presidential primary will be held March 19.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax.

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Links from other news sources. Reprints from others. The Courts

Sweet. Fifth Circuit Reverses Lower Court ATF Pistol Brace Ruling.

Sweet. Fifth Circuit Reverses Lower Court ATF Pistol Brace Ruling. We have this from the Fifth Circuit.

“We move on to plaintiffs’ claim that the Final Rule violates the APA’s procedural and substantive requirements. On that front, plaintiffs establish a substantial likelihood of success on the merits. The ATF incorrectly maintains that the Final Rule is merely interpretive, not legislative, and thus not subject to the logical-outgrowth test. The Final Rule affects individual rights, speaks with the force of law, and significantly implicates private interests. Thus, it is legislative in character,” the panel stated.

The circuit court also homed in on the differences between the ATF’s Proposed Rule and its Final Rule. It said that the difference between the two “violates the APA” and pointed out that “the Proposed and Final Rule must be alike in kind so that commentators could have reasonably anticipated the Final Rule.”