NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Coronavirus: Constitution Abuse by Karen Lugo

Posted By on May 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15957/coronavirus-constitution-abuse

Once freedoms were surrendered, [Chief Justice William] Rehnquist warned, they would be even easier to take away when a future crisis or greater good came calling.

The very orders that citizens across this land were protesting have been delivered wrapped in lack of transparency: forbidding only some assemblies; preferring big box stores; shutting down churches and gun stores but not liquor or cannabis stores; motor-boating prohibited but sailing is not; vacation rentals banned but not lodges; among many more disparities.

It is vital that “We the people” keep on overseeing this process to ensure that the attempted power grabs — for instance by those who would use this crisis to “restructure things to fit our vision” — continue to be judged as intolerable acts.

Shutting down America has caused many to ask who suspended the Bill of Rights. The re-opening of this country would do well to include close attention to righting wrongs that may — deliberately or inadvertently — have been inflicted on the US Constitution.

At the end of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s life, one of his great concerns was the government’s use of crisis power at the expense of civil liberties, a concern he shared with law students during his last summer constitutional survey course in Cambridge, England.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Johns Hopkins: Leaked coronavirus model on death spike not final

Posted By on May 6th, 2020

https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/trump-johns-hopkins-coronavirus-model-statistics

Johns Hopkins University said Tuesday that a leaked FEMA document featuring charts projecting nearly double the current daily coronavirus death toll by the end of May is not a “final version.”

The charts used data from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Neil Ferguson, who started the lockdown panic, cheats on his own lockdown By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on May 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/neil_ferguson_who_started_the_lockdown_panic_cheats_on_his_own_lockdown.html

“The icing on this cake is that Staats, the married girlfriend in the posh London home, works for an anti-Semitic, hard-left Soros-funded organization”

England’s initial impulse with Wuhan virus was to go with the plan that Sweden implemented: Keep the country open while protecting those most vulnerable to the virus. Neil Ferguson changed all that. He and his Imperial College London epidemiology team predicted that, if Britain went ahead with that plan, more than 500,000 people would die. He also warned America that anything less than a total, Chinese-style lockdown would result in 2.2 million deaths.

It was Ferguson who sparked the lockdown frenzy in both countries. He later lowered his estimates and real events have shown how grossly wrong he was. Still, thanks to his initial hysteria, the harm was done.

Ferguson has often been wrong. When Frederick Forsyth blasted the British government for relying on Ferguson, he referenced past Ferguson predictions:

He was the genius who, on the issue of swine flu, confidently forecast global deaths at four million. The worldwide total turned out to be 18,500. In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. Between 2003 and 2009, just 282 people died worldwide from the disease.

With that track record, it’s possible that Ferguson doesn’t believe in his own data. That would explain the major story that broke in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.  It seems that Ferguson was forced to resign from his government advisory position because, while he was on lockdown, he got several visits from his girlfriend, a married woman with two children:

HISTORY Comments turned off

Coral Sea, the forgotten battle that saved America By Robert Arvay

Posted By on May 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/coral_sea_the_forgotten_battle_that_saved_america.html

Seventy-eight years ago this week, (May 4–8, 1942) the United States Navy, despite being outnumbered and outgunned, repelled a large Japanese invasion fleet in the Battle of the Coral Sea, just east and north of Australia.  It was the first naval battle in history in which the opposing fleets never came within sight of each other.  All of the fighting was done when aircraft from both opposing fleets attacked the other’s ships and planes.

That distinction (of being first) is often credited to the later, and more famous, Battle of Midway, but it rightly belongs to the brave men who fought, many of whom died, in the Coral Sea.

Because of the courage and sacrifice of undaunted American warriors, two Japanese aircraft carriers were put out of action, with a third, smaller Japanese carrier sunk.  However, there was a great cost.  The United States lost the aircraft carrier USS Lexington and two other ships, with heavy loss of life.  At the time, the Allies regarded the battle as a disappointing defeat, but history was to reveal a brighter outcome.

Had the U.S. lost the battle, it likely might have lost the subsequent Battle of Midway, opening the path to a Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor and even the U.S. mainland.  Instead, the USS Yorktown, significantly damaged in the Coral Sea, managed to return to Pearl Harbor in time to be repaired and fight, and to sink two of the four carriers that the Japanese lost at Midway.

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SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospitalized with Infection By Megan Fox

Posted By on May 6th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/05/05/scotus-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-hospitalized-with-infection-n388463

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is reportedly hospitalized with a gall bladder infection. ABC News reported,

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized Tuesday afternoon for “a benign gallbladder condition” that had caused an infection, according to Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.Ginsburg is expected to remain at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a day or two but still participate in the telephonic oral arguments Wednesday when the court will hear oral arguments in a case involving the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

Ginsburg, 87, had participated in the oral arguments that the SCOTUS held via teleconference on Monday and Tuesday on a live stream due to the Chinese virus lockdown precautions. The famous judge has had a string of health scares over the last year. Unlike leftist Twitter that jumped on a chance to kick a conservative when he is down, like Rush Limbaugh when he announced his cancer diagnosis, conservative Twitter is wishing the far-left radical judge well.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Modest Proposal for Opening Universities: Some Faculties Should Remain Closed By Philip Carl Salzman

Posted By on May 6th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/05/05/a-modest-proposal-for-opening-universities-some-faculties-should-remain-closed-n388408

“The main influence undermining academic work is discrimination based on ideological bigotry, given special preferences and benefits based on gender, race, sexuality, disability, and illegal alien status. Replacing academic disciplines are grievance studies programs, with the discrimination manifested also in segregated dining, housing, and ceremonies. This has all been engendered by a set of neo-Marxist models of society dividing everyone into evil oppressors and innocent victims, and jettisoning academic considerations for gender, racial, sexuality advocacy. Academic responsibility has been almost universally betrayed by colleges and universities in favor of so-called “social justice.” 

The Chinese coronavirus has closed North American colleges and universities or at least chased students and staff off of campuses. These institutions wait breathlessly to reopen, to bring students and their tuition payments back to campus. But how will campus crowds fare without social distancing, and how can social distancing be implemented in large classes, cafeterias, and administrative offices?

Perhaps the “old normal” or “all or nothing” model is not workable for the foreseeable future. Of course, there is much about the “old normal” that was not workable in any serious academic sense, but this was not the result of an exogenous influence, but the result of internal evolution. Here I am not speaking primarily of the gargantuan expansion of administrators in relation to professors and students or the gross inflation of tuition costs riding on government loans to students. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The final days of the Iran nuclear deal Caroline Glick

Posted By on May 6th, 2020

http://carolineglick.com/the-final-days-of-the-iran-nuclear-deal/

There is a growing chance that by October, the nuclear deal with Iran, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will be dead. Under the deal with the U.S. China, Russia, Germany, Britain and France, Iran purported to accept limitations on its nuclear program. These limitations included capping its low enriched uranium stockpiles at 300 kg, restraining its enrichment activities and accepting the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency’s right to inspect its declared and undeclared nuclear sites.

In exchange, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany agreed to cancel the Security Council sanctions resolutions that had been imposed on Iran due to its illicit nuclear activities over the previous decade.

The JCPOA, which was never formally signed, was anchored in UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which was passed immediately after the JCPOA was concluded.

At the time, the JCPOA was vociferously opposed by U.S. lawmakers from both sides of the partisan divide. Their opposition owed to the fact that even if Iran abided by the restrictions on its nuclear activities prescribed by the JCPOA, it would still be able to develop a full-blown nuclear arsenal within ten to fifteen years.

To placate the deal’s opponents, and secure its approval in the Senate, the Obama administration added two safeguards to Resolution 2231. The first imposed a five-year embargo on conventional weapons sales to Iran.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Will The Rogue FBI/CIA/DOJ Operatives Ever Be Brought To Justice For Crossfire Hurricane? Francis Menton

Posted By on May 5th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-4-will-the-rogue-fbiciadoj-operat

It has been obvious now for multiple years that the whole Trump/Russia “collusion” narrative was a total hoax from the start, concocted by high-ranking but rogue members of the intelligence community in the latter days of the Obama administration. This misuse of the powers of the government by the intelligence community to attempt to influence the 2016 election, and then to undermine President Trump after his election, has been described by many as the greatest scandal in American political history. The perpetrators of the scandal range from CIA head John Brennan, to FBI head James Comey, to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, to senior FBI agent Peter Strzok, and many others too numerous to mention.

All of the people named have lost their previous jobs, but beyond that none have thus far faced any consequences, particularly any criminal prosecution. They have books on sale or cable news gigs or both. We know that a federal criminal prosecutor, John Durham, has been named by Attorney General Barr to look into the matter, but after many months, we hear nothing. Several commenters have asked for my thoughts on whether criminal consequences are likely for any of these miscreants, and, if so, on what basis.

My bottom line: As egregious as the conduct of these people was, I still think it’s only about 50/50 that any of them get charged and convicted of any criminal offense. There are two major issues: (1) What is the crime? and (2) How do you prove the case?

What is the crime?

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

The third wave of the left’s attempted destruction of America Andrew Thomas

Posted By on May 5th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/the_third_wave_of_the_lefts_attempted_destruction_of_america_.html

We are currently in the third wave of the left’s attempts to totally deconstruct America into the image of the leftist utopia.  There is no love of this country or its traditions or its Constitution among the left.  Remaking it into a radical ideological hellhole is leftists’ only objective.  

The impoverished and criminals are sacrosanct and must be preserved.  They enable the corruption and absolute power the left craves.  Two classes, the rulers and the ruled, constitute the society that the left requires.  This is absolute evil, and it is the way the world has functioned for centuries.  They have history on their side.

America has been the prime exception to this history.  Personal freedom and free markets have made this the greatest economy and the greatest civilization in the history of mankind.  We have defeated fascism and communism.  Without us, the world would be an unbearably horrible place to live.  It is only because we love God and freedom.  That’s it.

Since 2016, there have been three mortal attacks against these beliefs.  The left has attempted to continue Obama’s (and Soros’s) transformation of America away from its destiny as a savior of humanity into a prison of slaves ruled by their elite masters.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Coronavirus Deaths: The Most Predictive Factor David Catron

Posted By on May 5th, 2020

https://spectator.org/coronavirus-deaths-the-most-predictive-factor/

There is only one reliable metric that reveals how likely you are to die from COVID-19 in a given state, and it isn’t what you’re seeing in the legacy media. The number of new cases and deaths, for example, are staples of news stories about the pandemic. Neither of these factoids, however, tells us very much in the absence of sophisticated epidemiological data that just isn’t yet available. A far more predictive metric is “death rate per million.” Why? Testing is far more consistent for fatal cases. By this measurement, you are probably more likely to die from coronavirus if you live in a blue state rather than one of its scarlet counterparts.

If you live in New Jersey, you are 13 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than if you live in Florida. The Garden State’s death rate per million is 895.2, according to the RealClearPolitics coronavirus tracker, compared to only 65.1 deaths per million for Florida. This disparity can’t be written off to demography or testing. Florida has a huge elderly population, and it has conducted twice as many tests as New Jersey. Finally, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted the draconian stay-at-home orders imposed by his Democratic counterpart in New Jersey and hasn’t been afraid to point out that he was right:

You look at some of the most draconian orders that have been issued in some of these states and compare Florida in terms of our hospitalizations per 100,000, in terms of our fatalities per 100,000. I mean you go from D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan.… We had a tailored and measured approach that not only helped our numbers be way below what anyone predicted but also did less damage to our state going forward.