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Ruth King

Boeing whistleblower found dead in hotel parking lot just days after testifying against airplane giant By Joe Tacopino and David Propper

https://nypost.com/2024/03/11/us-news/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-found-dead-after-testifying-against-company/

A Boeing whistleblower was found dead in his truck in the parking lot of his South Carolina hotel after he failed to show up for the second part of his testimony for a bombshell lawsuit against the company, a report said Monday.

John Barnett, 62, had raised safety concerns at the airline’s factories and provided his first testimony just days before he was found dead from an apparent “self-inflicted” gunshot wound, the Charleston County coroner told the BBC.

Barnett’s attorney, Brian Knowles, told TMZ that he had explicit doubt about the circumstances of his death, and called the self-inflicted gunshot “alleged.”

“Today is a tragic day,” Knowles told Corporate Crime Reporter. “John had been back and forth for quite some time getting prepared. The defense examined him for their allowed seven hours under the rules on Thursday.”

The whistleblower had been staying at the hotel to provide a deposition in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.

Why Americans No Longer Trust the Healthcare System By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/why_americans_no_longer_trust_the_healthcare_system.html

Trust is foundational in relationships, whether between individuals or between individuals and institutions. A Gallup survey from last summer found, “Americans’ faith in major societal institutions hasn’t improved over the past year following a slump in public confidence in 2022.”

Notable other examples where surprisingly few Americans have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in major institutions include Congress at 8%, big business and television news at 14%, and the criminal justice system at only 17%. The medical system fared slight better with 34% of Americans expressing confidence. But two thirds have lost trust.

YouTube screen grab

Doctors, hospitals, and healthcare systems used to be held in high esteem, but no more. Aren’t these the “experts” in white coats? What happened to that trust? Why do only 1 in 3 Americans trust what was once a sacred healing profession?

Rasmussen Reports recently asked American adults three questions

On health-related issues, how much trust do you have in experts who give advice on TV and other media?
In terms of your own health-care decisions, which is closer to your attitude, that it’s safe to trust advice from experts, or that it’s important to do your own research?
Thinking back on the COVID-19 pandemic, were most of the experts basically right or wrong?

Not surprisingly, trust is low. What is interesting is the partisan divide, with Democrats far more trusting in medical instructions than Republicans.

Biden Revises History to Shame Israel Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/biden-revises-history-to-shame-israel/

Trying to pressure the Jewish state into ending its war on Hamas by appealing to America’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is breathtakingly cynical.

For the better part of a month, Joe Biden’s anxious Democratic allies had indulged the fantasy that the president could shore up his ailing support among what should be his base voters if only he did more interviews. The president took their advice over the weekend. But in sitting down with Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, even for the tightly edited ten-minute interview NBC News released, Biden demonstrated why he is better off sticking with the teleprompter.

Rich delved into the president’s self-abasing effort to walk back the strongest moment of his State of the Union address — an ad lib in which he displayed a small measure of the passion shared by the millions of Americans for whom the migrant crisis over which Biden has presided has become intolerable. And Phil identified the incoherence in Biden’s attempt to placate the unappeasable rabble for whom the exercise of Israel’s right to self-defense is anathema. But it’s also worth pointing out that in trying to reconcile his desire to see Hamas defeated with his desire for Israel to stand down before that objective is achieved, Biden descended into a historical revisionism that serves only to indict the country that made him president.

In his insistence that Israel’s effort to neutralize Hamas has gone too far, Biden has presented himself as the Jewish state’s best friend — devoted only to dispensing “tough love” to America’s wayward ally. In his interview with Capehart, Biden noted that his advice is a product of America’s experience in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

“Don’t make the mistake America made,” Biden began. “We went after Bin Laden until we got him, but we shouldn’t have gone into Ukraine – I mean, we shouldn’t have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary. It just caused more problems than it erased — than it cured.”

The Anti-Democratic Democratic Left The defense of those destroying democracy is that they are doing it to prevent others from doing what they would do, should they have been on the receiving end of exactly what they are now doing. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/11/the-anti-democratic-democratic-left/

Joe Biden has claimed that his opponents are assaulting democracy on the basis of the January 6, 2021, buffoonish riot.

Aside from the fact that storming the Capitol Rotunda sometimes is apparently deemed permissible—as in the recent pro-Hamas takeover of it—or aside from the fact that disrupting a federal government proceeding is deemed exempt—as in the recent pro-Hamas throng that blocked the route of the presidential motorcade and thus delayed the State of the Union address to the nation by 26 minutes—who really is attacking democracy?

Take the Supreme Court. After the Court went to a 6-3 conservative majority, liberal law professors, progressive activist groups, and many ends-justify-the-means Democrats in Congress began advocating “packing the court” to gain additional new billets for left-wing judges.

In other words, the left had little confidence that it would hold the White House and the Senate when a judicial opening came up, so it sought to force the issue while it had the power in both.

Formerly, any such notion would have been written off as lunatic and dangerous, given that the nine-justice Supreme Court has been canonized for 155 years since 1869. Second, during the last time Democrats attacked the nine-justice Supreme Court over its supposedly too conservative rulings—Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 notorious court-packing scheme—even fellow liberals opposed the toxic gambit. They knew that it would only lead to a tit-for-tat fluid court every time a new administration took power.

Then there was the public demonization of the court, which saw efforts to scare it into “correct” rulings. The effort was multifaceted.

Sometimes the left-wing method was direct intimidation. So in 2020, then Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led a throng of pro-abortion protestors to the court’s very doors, threatening Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh by name. He was not subtle in his warnings: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.” 

Hit you? Pay the price?

Later, when left-wing mobs thronged at the private homes of some conservative judges with the intention of intimidating them and leveraging their decisions—in violation of a 1950 federal law—the Biden administration did nothing. No wonder a potential assassin soon showed up near the home of Justice Kavanaugh, and, fortunately, did not go through with his planned attack.

One Angry Biden And one lie after another. by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-angry-biden/

A demagogic fuming Biden gave another Phantom of the Opera speech blasting conservatives for all the destruction that he has caused and has resulted in his own historic unpopularity.

All too aware that he was confused and incoherent, his handlers felt that the antidote was to come out barking and bellowing at his imaginary enemies.

Any Never Trumper who would vote for such a screeching maniac is suicidal. The night’s nadir? Joe, of the Hunter-Biden family consortium, damned the money-grubbing “rich” who “don’t pay their fair share of taxes”—all of this when his own son is now facing multiple felony counts for not paying any income tax at all! And Joe himself has received lots of family money without paying tax on such “loan repayments”.

In truth, Biden gave the most livid state-of-the-union address in modern memory, a surreal teleprompted rant from a “get off my grass” old man. At points, he started howling at the seated opposition and even called out Supreme Court Justices. Determined not to reveal cognitive decline, Biden instead came late to the podium shouting nonstop, grimacing in reptilian style for over an hour.

If the planned Adderall-fueled screaming was to prove he was still alive, most would have preferred his drowsy incoherence.

But mostly the speech was one of abject lies as he either blamed all his disasters on others or claimed they were his greatest achievements.

Biden’s Budget Proves What An Epic Disaster He’s Been 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/12/bidens-budget-proves-what-an-epic-disaster-hes-been/

This is Biden’s true legacy. And if he’s allowed to dig the hole any deeper, we may never climb out.

President Joe Biden brags that the budget he released on Monday would cut the deficit by $3 trillion, even while offering truckloads of new goodies to Americans.

That will get headlines.

What won’t make the news is the fact that his Fiscal 2025 budget provides clear and incontrovertible evidence that he has caused a fiscal and economic disaster of epic proportions.

How do we know this? Because buried in the back of the annual budget document is a table called “Baseline by Category.” This is a forecast of spending, revenues, and deficits that would result if the government is left on autopilot.

So, we dug out Biden’s first budget — released in early 2021 — to see what the administration said would happen if Biden did nothing. In other words, what would spending, revenues and deficits look like if all of President Donald Trump’s policies remained in effect. Let’s call this the Trump baseline.

Then we compared that with the latest “Baseline” projection in Biden’s new budget — which assumes that all of Biden’s current policies remain in effect for the foreseeable future. We will call this the Biden baseline.

What did we find?

What’s Behind the Propaganda War Against Israel The Jewish state has a right to defend itself, Biden seems to say, but it should stop fighting Hamas in Gaza now. By Gerard Baker

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-behind-the-propaganda-war-against-israel-why-biden-pushes-to-end-fighting-24694f11?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

What does Israel have to do to be allowed by the rest of the world to defend itself?

The insistent effort by some governments, officials and much of the media in the U.S. and Europe to get the Jewish state to relent against enemies that actively seek to destroy it gives rise to the suspicion that for too many of them, perhaps Israel doesn’t deserve the right to exist at all.

Fortunately, Israel doesn’t need the West’s permission to save itself. It’s still worth reflecting on why, singularly among nations, Israel’s right to fight for its survival is widely disputed.

The Biden administration has commendably resisted the clamor from the increasingly strident anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party to ostracize the Jewish state. But it’s a mark of the power of that wing that the president feels obliged to balance his support with a rhetorical campaign of increasingly shrill, daily denunciations of Israel’s efforts in Gaza. Israel has a right to defend itself, he seems to be saying, but it should stop the war now.

Mr. Biden expressed this dichotomous position in his State of the Union address last week. He was at it again over the weekend, when he told MSNBC that the offensive in Gaza was “hurting Israel more than helping Israel. . . . It’s contrary to what Israel stands for and I think it’s a big mistake.”

If you’re inclined to think that war fatigue and understandable pain at the deaths of Palestinian innocents are driving the pleas for an end to Israel’s offensive, let me remind you that calls for Israel to call off its response to the Oct. 7 attacks have been coming since days after the massacre of Jews on a scale not seen since the Holocaust.

Global Chaos or the Orange Peril? Biden hopes voters will fear Trump 2.0 more than a drift toward World War III. Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-chaos-or-the-orange-peril-biden-hopes-voters-fear-trump-more-than-war-555e35c8?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The clearest takeaway from President Biden’s State of the Union address last week was that he believes that Donald Trump poses a greater peril to the U.S. than Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Ali Khamenei, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all rolled into one. The president came to the podium less focused on unifying America in the face of proliferating foreign threats than on launching his re-election campaign against the Orange Peril.

That was probably a mistake. Even if Mr. Biden is 100% correct about the danger Mr. Trump poses to American democracy, voter concerns about the competence of the Biden foreign policy may end up helping Mr. Trump return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Rather than telling voters, again, about Mr. Trump’s shortcomings, Mr. Biden needed to explain why the world situation has grown so dramatically worse on his watch and how he intends to stop the grim slide.

Having survived four years of Mr. Trump in the White House, many voters may be less worried about Trump 2.0 than what looks increasingly like a global drift toward World War III. Mr. Biden’s approach to foreign threats doesn’t inspire much confidence. A Feb. 21 Quinnipiac poll showed 60% of respondents disapproving of the president’s foreign policy, with 36% approving. The poll found 62% disapproved of his response to the Israel-Hamas war, and 63% disapproved of his handling of the situation at the Mexican border. An Associated Press/NORC poll conducted in late January found only 38% of voters approved of how Mr. Biden is handling “the U.S. relationship with China.” A February Harvard CAPS-Harris poll got similarly dismal results, with 61% calling Mr. Biden’s Iran policy “unsuccessful” and 71% wanting tougher policies on the southern border.

Worse for the incumbent, as the world crisis grows hotter, voters care more about foreign policy. AP/NORC pollsters found that the share of Democrats who named foreign-policy issues other than immigration as a major priority more than doubled (from 16% to 34%) from December 2022 to December 2023. The share of Republicans increased from 23% to 46%.

Fani Willis Is Probably Guilty of Perjury: Who Will Prosecute the Prosecutors? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20468/fani-willis-perjury

If Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were prosecuting citizen Fani Willis and her former boyfriend Nathan Wade for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, she would have an extremely strong case.

Based on this and other incriminating evidence, the real issue is not whether this pair should be allowed to continue to prosecute the case against Trump, but instead whether this pair should be investigated, indicted and convicted of serious crimes.

The presiding judge in the case has no power to commence a criminal investigation or prosecution. But other law enforcement authorities do. If they fail, they will be damaging the rule of law, the integrity of the US legal system and the waning trust that many Americans already have in equal justice.

If Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were prosecuting citizen Fani Willis and her former boyfriend Nathan Wade for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, she would have an extremely strong case. The evidence of perjury is overwhelming; many individuals have been convicted on far less evidence.

Recall that Willis and Wade testified under oath to the material fact that Willis did not hire Wade as special prosecutor while they were having a romantic relationship. They both testified that the romantic relationship began after the hiring decision was made. If that was a deliberate lie, it satisfies all the elements of perjury.

Let us look at the evidence. First, there is the testimony of two witnesses, both of whom have provided evidence that the relationship began before Wade’s appointment as special prosecutor. As Willis herself reminded us when she was challenged about having no corroboration that she paid Wade back in cash, the testimony of one witness is evidence – meaning her own self-serving testimony – certainly, the testimony of two witnesses is even better evidence. In addition, there is the text by another witness confirming that the relationship began earlier than testified to.

Words of Wisdom from the Edge of a Volcano by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20471/words-of-wisdom

As our great nation begins its countdown to the November 5 presidential election, words of wisdom from three great heroes of history of come to mind.

The first, from America’s Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, reminds us that:

“Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.”

While technically we have been living “in peace and with reasonable happiness,” China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have been very much on the warpath, even if our government has been reluctant to admit it. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by President Xi Jinping, with North Korea in tow, has openly been prosecuting a “People’s War” – “the asymmetric challenge from the tactical and military to the strategic and political” — since at least 2019, when, already then, he tried to blame China’s declining economy on America, and not on him.

In addition, Xi has repeatedly lied to America about not building military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea; about the human-to human transmissibility of the Wuhan virus, Covid-19; and, through the Chinese Embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, that the 2023 spy balloon was just a weather balloon. Xi has, in the meantime, been poisoning more than 100,000 in America each year with fentanyl – more than all the soldiers killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam combined.

The Chinese Communist Party has also been buying up US farmland, especially near military bases; genetically engineering rats in a secret laboratory in California to carry deadly bio-warfare viruses; sending thousands of military-aged men through America’s open borders in groups, possibly as future saboteurs; secretly planting surveillance or sabotage equipment in the electrical grid and shipping cranes sent to America, and entrenching TikTok as a “Trojan Horse” to spy on Americans and spread anti-US propaganda. These are just a few of the antics that the CCP has produced, in addition to years of industrial-scale espionage and trillions in intellectual property theft.