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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

The Clownish Disinfo Czar Got The Boot, But Biden’s ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Hired Monster Replacements Diana Glebova

https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/19/nina-jakowicz-jamie-gorelick-michael-chertoff-disinformation-governance-board-dhs-patriot-act/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired the co-author of the PATRIOT Act, arguably the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in modern American history, and an official under former President Bill Clinton to head the Disinformation Governance Board during its “pause.”

The DHS shut the board down Monday after just several weeks and its head, Nina Jankowicz, wrote a resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. Jankowicz was scrutinized for pushing disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was possibly “part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.” She also called Republicans who criticize critical race theory (CRT) “disinformers.” Videos of her singing as the “Mary Poppins of disinformation,” “fucking her way to the top” and satirical, sexualized renditions of Harry Potter themes have also raised eyebrows.

The department announced Wednesday former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Secretary General Jamie Gorelick under Clinton “will lead a thorough review and assessment” of the board that was “grossly and intentionally mischaracterized.”

Why Is Joe Biden Still President?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/20/why-is-joe-biden-still-president/

The U.S. recently passed the 1 million mark for COVID-19 deaths, a grim milestone recognized with the lowering of flags to half staff around the country. More than 60% of those deaths have come during the bungling tenure of President Joe Biden, who said in a late-October 2020 debate with Donald Trump that the president should be kicked out of the White House because of how many had died from the virus on his watch. Based on his own standard, Biden should be back in his Delaware basement.

When asked at that debate how he’d “lead this country out of this crisis,” Biden responded with his usual “Big Guy” pomposity:

“220,000 Americans dead. You hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who … is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”

About three months later, Biden was inaugurated president. By early November 2021, Biden’s death toll had exceeded 332,000. The total for his 16 months in office is now about 600,000, even though vaccines have been available throughout his term and effective treatments arrived late last year.

Compare these numbers to the Trump presidency, during which 400,000 were killed by COVID in about a year, the majority before vaccines had been rolled out.

Though the Democrats and the press ghoulishly held Trump directly responsible for COVID deaths during his last year in office, we think it’s distasteful, and careless, to blame Biden for lives lost to the virus while he’s been president. There’s only so much a White House can do during a pandemic.

The Baby Formula Shortage Was Made in Washington The politicians tacitly admit that their policies are responsible.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/governments-baby-formula-shortage-abbott-mead-johnson-tariffs-wic-fda-perrigo-democrats-11652996346?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

““I think there might be a need for indictment,” Nancy Pelosi said this week. She means business executives, not Members of Congress, alas.”

Politicians are scrambling to pacify mothers angry about the baby formula shortage, but the one thing they won’t do is look in the mirror. Fixing the shortage requires fixing the government policies that helped to create it.

The shortage began after Abbott Laboratories shut down a plant in Michigan after four infants who consumed formula made at the facility fell seriously ill. Abbott controls about 42% of the U.S. market, and the other three large manufacturers (Perrigo, Nestle and Mead Johnson) haven’t been able to increase production fast enough to compensate. Ergo, empty shelves.

Enter President Biden, who on Wednesday invoked the Defense Production Act. The Cold War-era law lets the federal government conscript private businesses to produce goods for national defense and to reorder supply chains, putting some customers ahead of others. Progressives think government is the solution to every problem, which is why the law has become their household remedy to every product shortage.

Mr. Biden says the law will let his Administration prioritize raw ingredients for baby formula. He also plans to send government planes to fly in supply from overseas. But there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of formula ingredients. Nor is there a problem transporting it. The main barriers to increasing supply are regulatory.

He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He’s Collecting Unemployment. Suzy WeissBehind the fall of David Sabatini, ‘one of the greatest scientists’ of his generation. Suzy Weiss

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=r

In 2018, David Sabatini was a world-renowned molecular biologist. He was a tenured professor at MIT. He ran a major lab at the Whitehead Institute, overseeing a team of 39 researchers, postdocs and technicians. Their job was to disentangle the mystery of the mTOR signaling pathway, a protein Sabatini had discovered while still in medical school, at Johns Hopkins. The mTOR signaling pathway plays a critical role in tumor development. Figuring out how it works would go a long way toward saving countless lives. 

This was why Sabatini was predicted to win the Nobel Prize. It was how he reeled in between three and four million dollars every year for his lab from the National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. It is why his colleagues have described him to me with words like “genius,” “one of the best scientists alive,” and “a pillar.”

“It’s like working for Steve Jobs. He can be brutal,” said one scientist. “But why would you want to work for anyone else?” 

Today, Sabatini is unemployed and unemployable. No one wants to be associated with him. Those who do risk losing their jobs, publishing opportunities, friends, visas, and huge federal grants. “What wormhole did my life take, to billionaires and protests and being called a sexual predator? What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” Sabatini asked me.

The entrance to the wormhole can be found in Rockville, Maryland, at a hotel that Sabatini was staying at while attending a conference about lysosomes and cancer sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. There, on the night of April 18, 2018, after an evening of whiskey tasting—Sabatini is a whiskey aficionado—he and Kristin Knouse had sex. Knouse was an incoming cancer researcher at the Whitehead, where she would also head her own lab; hers focused on liver regeneration. He was 50. She was 29. He had split with his wife, and was in the process of getting a divorce. 

Globalist Enemies of the State by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/26222/globalist-enemies-of-the-state

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

An enemy of the state is defined as a person accused of certain crimes against the state, such as treason. Treason is defined as the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government. Treason, however, does not address the highest of all crimes against the state, the attempted dissolution of the state itself. The globalist elite are guilty of the highest crimes.

Globalism is a supremacist replacement ideology that seeks to destroy American sovereignty and make the United States part of a one-world planetary nation, ruled through the United Nations by the globalist elite. Globalism is an enemy of the current world order of 193 sovereign states, and cannot succeed without collapsing the United States into its planned unistate. Globalism is absolute totalitarianism on a planetary scale, deceitfully marketed as global peace, harmony, security, and public health.

The essence of globalism is totalitarian centralization of power into the hands of the supremacist globalist elite, who unapologetically plan to rule the world through the auspices of the United Nations, its international infrastructure of UN institutions, and the globalist business entities that support them. The world is in the final battle of globalism’s war on the nation state, and the globalist elite fully anticipate their planetary coup d état will succeed in 2022 with the support and collaboration of the treasonous Biden regime.

Is Biden’s ‘Success’ Our Mess? What Americans see as an abject catastrophe, the Biden Administration cheers on as stunning and planned progress. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/18/is-bidens-success-our-mess/

If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions, what would it have done differently than what Joe Biden has done? 

So is Biden malicious, incompetent, or a wannabe left-wing ideologue? 

When pressed about inflation and fuel price hikes, Biden either blames someone or something else, gets mad at the questioner, or claims Donald Trump did it. 

His administration apparently believes things are going well and according to plan. 

When polls disagree, his team either believes the American people are brainwashed or that they themselves have not supplied sufficient propaganda. So they never pivot or compromise, but rededicate themselves to continued failure. 

Why? Apparently, what most in the country see as disasters, Biden envisions as success. 

Take the border—or rather its disappearance. 

Never in U.S. history has an administration simply canceled immigration laws, opened the border, and welcomed in millions of illegal aliens. All arrive illegally, and without audit, or vaccinations and tests in times of a pandemic. 

Cartels now import lethal drugs at will into the United States. We have no idea how many terrorists walk across the border each day. 

Wicked witch of the woke Nina Jankowicz resigns as Disinformation Governance Board is put on ‘pause’ By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/wicked_witch_of_the_woke_nina_jankowicz_resigns_as_disinformation_governance_board_is_put_on_pause.html

Just when I thought the Biden administration was beyond shame, they (at least temporarily) pulled the plug on the Disinformation Governance Board, causing the buffoonish Nina Jankowicz to resign. I can’t recall a speedier and more embarrassing belly flop of a government initiative than the announcement of this transparently Orwellian state organ headed by cringeworthy exhibitionist besotted with her own musical talent and purported wisdom.

The astonishing lack of forethought in choosing Jankowicz as the arbiter of truth, when she is on the record affirming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation (even the Washington Post and New York Times have given up the ghost on that fraud) betrays an administration with no leadership at all. As the old saying goes, “A’s hire A’s; B’s hire C’s,” and when you have a D at the top, they really have the scrape the bottom of the barrel to find subordinates that do not threaten the apex of the authority structure.

Naturally, the news of the “pause” and of Jankowicz’s departure were leaked to none other than Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post, another left winger crybully with no self-awareness, a classic mean girl who outs the identity of anonymous internet posters but who self-righteously denounces any inquiry into her own transgressions. Lorenz’s Washington Post article is behind a paywall, but the Ace of Spades and Robby Soave of Reason have delightful takedowns of its utter fatuousness. It is as ludicrous as Jankowicz, whihc s saying a lot.

 The question that immediately concerns me is whether the “pause” is merely a face-saving way to shut it down without admitting the a swift death, or whether it is itself a matter of disinformation, intended to lull critics into the assumption that it is gone for good, only to awaken in some new, less Orwellian guise with a less comical head. Lorenz tweets out a statement from DHS that suggest it may be reborn after a decent interval of 75 days as “experts” cogitate.

Economic Optimism Has Collapsed Under Build-Back-Better-Biden: TIPP Poll

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/19/economic-optimism-has-collapsed-under-build-back-better-biden-tipp-poll/

Last week, President Joe Biden gave a speech about the economy, saying that “as I go across the country, our economy has gone from being on the mend to on the move.” What country is Biden talking about, exactly? Because here in the U.S., the economy went from booming under President Donald Trump to disaster under Biden. 

The latest evidence of Biden’s detachment from reality comes from the IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, which plunged 9.5% in May, dropping down to 41.2 (anything under 50 signals pessimism).  

That puts it below the Index’s worst reading during the height of the COVID pandemic, when it bottomed out at 44 in July 2020. By the time Biden took office, it had rebounded and was back above 50, where the Index had been during the entirety of the Trump administration. 

The IBD/TIPP Financial Stress Index, meanwhile, has shot up to 69.3 (anything above 50 indicates high stress), roughly where it was during the 2008 financial crisis. It has climbed 22% on Biden’s watch. 

For Biden to say the economy “is on the move” is truly delirious. GDP was down 1.4% in the first quarter, and nearly half of adults think we are already in a recession, the IBD/TIPP poll found. 

Biden also bragged about how the economy created “8.3 million jobs in my first 15 months in office – a record.”  

Big deal. 

Fentanyl Overdose Rates Are Rising Fast The drug will continue killing Americans until Biden decides to get control of the border. By Joseph Grogan and Casey B. Mulligan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/overdose-rates-are-rising-fast-cdc-drugs-opiod-crisis-substance-abuse-addiction-fatal-syringe-11652904604?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The latest tally of fatal drug overdoses from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows nearly 108,000 fatalities in 2021. This is far more than in 2017, when President Trump declared drug deaths a public-health emergency. Among blacks, the drug mortality rate has quadrupled in less than eight years.

The Trump administration acted aggressively and directed agencies to implement several recommendations from the Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. These included changes to prescribing patterns, treatment paradigms and law-enforcement procedures. The rate of deaths from drug overdoses slowed and then dipped. But then Covid hit, with all its mental-health consequences. The addiction and overdose crisis is now the most important public-health issue facing the country.

Apart from asking Congress for more money, the Biden administration hasn’t focused on this crisis. President Biden’s most recent budget pays scant attention to it, while his National Drug Control Strategy provides resources, such as clean syringe programs, that aren’t coupled with strategies to help patients beat their addictions.

Most of the additional fatal overdoses post-Covid involve methamphetamine and fentanyl made in Mexico, China and India. For each overdose death, more than 100 people struggle with debilitating addictions to these dangerous substances.

Chicken Wings for $34? Pent-Up Inflation Will Drive US Food Costs Even Higher Amy Yee and Tarso Veloso Ribeiro

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chicken-wings-34-pent-inflation-140006054.html

(Bloomberg) — With a gallon of milk up about 25% since before the pandemic, and retail bacon 35% higher, it’s hard to imagine how US food inflation could get any worse. But evidence suggests that even higher prices are on the horizon.

Consumers have actually been shielded so far from the full brunt of soaring expenses that are facing producers, distributors and small businesses like restaurants. But they can only hold back for so much longer.

Take the case of Jeff Good, who co-founded three restaurants in Jackson, Mississippi. Around 18 months ago, a 40-pound box of chicken wings cost him about $85. Now, it can go as high as roughly $150. Expenses for cooking oil and flour have nearly doubled in the past five months, he said. But it’s not just ingredient prices going up. He’s paying more for labor and services, too. Even the company that maintains his air conditioners has tacked on a $40 fuel charge per visit. To cope, he’s raised menu prices.

A 15-piece order of chicken wings, a signature dish at his Sal and Mookie’s pizzeria, went for $13.95 before Covid hit. Now, wing costs can vary so much they’re labeled at “market price,” like some restaurants do with lobster. At peaks, the menu price can be be about $27.95 — but that represents a barely-there margin — and Good estimates the “real cost” is closer to about $34. He’s trying to decide whether to keep raising prices or take wings off the menu.

“We have never, ever seen anything like what we’re seeing right now,” said Good, who opened his restaurants nearly 30 years ago.

The difference between prices received by producers for their goods and those paid by everyday customers at cash registers can be seen by comparing the producer and consumer price indices.

he CPI, a benchmark for gauging inflation cited in headlines and by economists, has been surging. Consumer prices for food rose 9.4% in April compared with a year earlier, the biggest gain since 1981, government data showed this month. There were record increases for chicken, fresh seafood and baby food.