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May 2020

The Fear vs. Hope Election Are November’s results now out of the hands of the candidates? By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fear-vs-hope-election-11590605085?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

“EXCERPTS”

Have Donald Trump and Joe Biden already made their most important campaign decisions? An influential political analyst argues that the results of the 2020 presidential election will now be determined by events largely outside of their control.

“Each candidate seems to have settled on a strategy. The President, for his part, is spending a lot of time in toss-up states. The Journal’s Catherine Lucey reports:

On Wednesday, the president heads to Florida, his fourth battleground-state destination in four weeks, where he will witness the launch of the private SpaceX rocket, manned by NASA astronauts. While his megarallies are on hold, Mr. Trump’s incumbency affords him the ability to hit the road in his official capacity, in contrast with likely Democratic rival Joe Biden, who made his first foray out in public Monday but didn’t leave his home state of Delaware.

Meanwhile even as a campaign shut-in, Mr. Biden is trying to get young leftists enthused about his candidacy. He’s planning to expand his proposal to replace American energy sources. The Journal’s Eliza Collins reports:

So far Mr. Biden has proposed a $1.7 trillion climate plan over a decade. During the Democratic primary, Mr. Sanders, who dropped out of the race in April, proposed more than nine times that amount of spending over the same period.

“As for 2020, Mr. Rasmussen writes in the Deseret News that the election “will once again be decided by public reaction to the key issue of the day. For this election season, that issue is how successfully American society reopens in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. If in November voters are more optimistic than today, the president will be reelected. If not, he will be defeated”. Adds Mr. Rasmussen:

While both sides are still fumbling for a final answer — and the dynamics are clearly different from state-to-state — a broad campaign theme has emerged. Republicans want to focus on reopening society more quickly while Democrats are resisting and prefer a much slower approach. A related sub-theme has emerged with Republicans placing more trust in voters to make their own decisions while Democrats place more trust in government officials to establish rules for reopening.
Now that the political teams have chosen sides, real world events will decide the outcome of Election 2020.

India Is a Natural U.S. Ally in the New Cold War America beat the Soviets by helping democracies get rich. In Asia, it’s high time to revive that approach. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-is-a-natural-u-s-ally-in-the-new-cold-war-11590600011?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

It’s been an interesting week in India. A heat wave took temperatures up to 117 degrees in the sweltering north. An earthquake shook the northeastern state of Manipur as a massive cyclone slammed into coastal Odisha. Swarms of locusts have descended on cities and farms across the northwest. Record numbers of new cases were reported in India’s rapidly escalating Covid-19 epidemic. Meanwhile, villagers in Kashmir spotted and captured a “spy pigeon” with a coded message attached to a ring on its leg. As the code has not yet been broken, the pigeon’s mission remains unknown. Despite both a costly lockdown and a continuing surge in new Covid cases, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to dominate the political scene, with approval ratings of 80% or more in recent polls.

With the emerging cold war between the U.S. and China threatening to become the new central axis of world politics, the subcontinent has been pulled into the storm. Chinese and Indian troops have clashed this spring and the standoff continues. Pakistan is among the largest recipients of Chinese Belt and Road Initiative investments. Swallowing whatever qualms the Islamists among Pakistan’s leadership have about the plight of the Uighurs, the country has turned increasingly to China for aid, trade and diplomatic support. That is hardly surprising. With a population of 212 million and a gross domestic product of $325 billion, Pakistan can only maintain its rivalry with India (population 1.35 billion, GDP $2.7 trillion) with the help of a great-power ally.

American strategists, meanwhile, are anxiously—and correctly—keeping a close watch on India’s development. A wealthy, powerful and democratic India would help frustrate China’s hegemonic ambitions and substantially offset Chinese influence in Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. The stronger India becomes the less the U.S. must contribute to a balancing coalition of India, Japan, Australia and Vietnam that keeps Chinese ambitions in check.

U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Passes 100,000 By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-us-death-toll-passes-100000/

More than 100,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the U.S. as of Wednesday, with almost 1,700,000 infections confirmed throughout the country.

As of May 22, 43 percent of coronavirus victims were residents of nursing homes or assisted-living facilities, according to an analysis conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. In the state of New Jersey alone, one-tenth of all long-term care residents in nursing homes have died during the pandemic.

The state of New York, which has seen over 5,000 coronavirus deaths in nursing homes, along with New Jersey and Michigan, have compelled nursing homes to readmit coronavirus patients discharged from the hospital. That policy stood in contrast to Florida, where state health officials worked to keep coronavirus patients out of nursing homes. At least 650 Florida nursing home residents have died of coronavirus.

A China–India Border Clash as Beijing Aims for Regional Hegemony By Daniel Tenreiro

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/a-china-india-border-clash-as-beijing-aims-for-regional-hegemony/

Surrounded on all sides by foes, Xi Jinping faces mounting obstacles to his goal of ‘national rejuvenation.’

As China reopens its economy after months of lockdowns, the country’s leadership has initiated a broad offensive to expand its influence at home and abroad. A new Hong Kong security law that attemps to stamp out dissent in the autonomous region sparked another round of anti-Mainland protests. Meanwhile, China has scaled up military exercises in the Yellow Sea, which will extend into the South China Sea this summer. Now a standoff between forces on the Sino–Indian border has opened a new front in Beijing’s offensive. This latest development in a decades-old dispute between the world’s two most populous countries underscores the myriad obstacles that Chinese president Xi Jinping faces in his goal of “national rejuvenation.”

Over the past month, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has reportedly moved at least 5,000 troops to the “Line of Actual Control,” which demarcates the border between China and India. The mobilization of troops to the Galwan River valley, on the westernmost border between the two countries, led to a clash on May 5, when Chinese and Indian forces engaged in fisticuffs and stone-throwing. In keeping with Sino–Indian border protocols, both sides were unarmed, but the skirmish — and another in the Naku La region near Tibet on May 12 — left several troops injured.

Cuomo Claims ‘Obligation Is on The Nursing Homes’ to Reject Covid Patients, Despite His March Order Prohibiting Testing By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cuomo-claims-obligation-is-on-the-nursing-homes-to-reject-covid-patients-despite-his-march-order-prohibiting-testing/?utm_

New York governor Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday said that nursing homes are obligated to transfer coronavirus patients if they cannot provide “adequate care.”

“The obligation is on the nursing home to say, I can’t take a COVID-positive person,” Cuomo said at a press conference. “The regulation is common sense: if you can’t provide adequate care, you can’t have the patient in your facility and that’s your basic fiduciary obligation — I would say, ethical obligation — and it’s also your legal obligation.”

Cuomo’s March 25 executive order forbid nursing homes from rejecting Covid-positive patients or even testing prospective patients for Covid after they were released from the hospital.

“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. [Nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission,” the order states.

New York health commissioner Howard Zucker said at the Wednesday press briefing that he was not aware if the state’s Health Department had received any requests from nursing homes to transfer coronavirus patients to other facilities.

Exposing the Hoaxes Killing America- An Interview with Linda Goudsmit

In this interview with The New American’s Alex Newman, author and political analyst Linda Goudsmit outlines some of the pseudo-humanitarian hoaxes that have been used by world-government advocates to undermine American freedom on the road to a New World Order.

https://youtu.be/OpyvCOjlwLk

Italy and its productive or parasitic new left thinking Francesco Sisci

http://www.settimananews.it/politica/italy-and-its-productive-or-parasitic-new-left-thinking/

Perhaps there is a broader and deeper theoretical design behind the daily havoc caused by the ruling coalition in Italy, made up of the M5S (Five Star Movement) and the PD (Democratic Party): the effort to rebuild a new left.

In fact, with the end of the Cold War, the idea of an overall change to the production system that would abolish capitalism disappeared. From here, the drive of Western social-democratic groups that had asked for and obtained a part of redistribution of income also gradually slowed down.

In the past, on the one hand, the social-democratic groups had freed “the proletarian masses” from the lure of the communist sirens. On the other, they increased the standard of living of the middle class, which had become the backbone of the West.

The end of the communist alternative also weakened the pressure on Western business classes to redistribute wealth. The social divide has deepened, and the search for continuous uninterrupted economic growth is the only task entrusted to politicians. Once growth stops, the temporary social pact between voters and a political leader is broken, and other politicians are voted in.

These are the themes dear to a neo-Marxist like Thomas Piketty but also to the Church and to the great religions that almost institutionally care about the poor masses.

Perhaps this is the opinion of PD guru Goffredo Bettini, who is also fascinated by and a scholar of the experience of the neo-populist party of Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand. Clinging to the populism of the M5S, strengthening it in the PD, and transforming it into popular thought can be an interesting strategic idea. It would seek to embolden and expand an endangered middle class.

New FBI document confirms the Trump campaign was investigated without justification By Kevin R. Brock

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/499586-new-fbi-document-confirms-the-trump-campaign-was-investigated-without

Late last week the FBI document that started the Trump-Russia collusion fiasco was publicly released. It hasn’t received a lot of attention but it should, because not too long from now this document likely will be blown up and placed on an easel as Exhibit A in a federal courtroom.

The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham, will rightly point out that the document that spawned three years of political misery fails to articulate a single justifiable reason for starting the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation.  

Those of us who have speculated there was insufficient cause for beginning the investigation could not have imagined the actual opening document was this feeble. It is as if it were written by someone who had no experience as an FBI agent.

Keep in mind the FBI cannot begin to investigate anyone, especially a U.S. citizen or entity, without first creating a document that lists the reasonably suspicious factors that would legally justify the investigation. That’s FBI 101, taught Day 1 at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va.

To the untrained eye, the FBI document that launched Crossfire Hurricane can be confusing, and it may be difficult to discern how it might be inadequate. To the trained eye, however, it is a train wreck. There are a number of reasons why it is so bad. Two main ones are offered below (if you would like to follow along, the document is here):

First, the document is oddly constructed. In a normal, legitimate FBI Electronic Communication, or EC, there would be a “To” and a “From” line. The Crossfire Hurricane EC has only a “From” line; it is from a part of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division whose contact is listed as Peter Strzok. The EC was drafted also by Peter Strzok. And, finally, it was approved by Peter Strzok. Essentially, it is a document created by Peter Strzok, approved by Peter Strzok, and sent from Peter Strzok to Peter Strzok.