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An Allied Plan to Depend Less on China The U.S., Australia, Japan and India already have a forum for coordination. By Paula J. Dobriansky

Posted By on May 1st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-allied-plan-to-depend-less-on-china-11588288513?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Covid-19 pandemic is prompting reconsideration of issues that were thought to be settled. One is the wisdom of China as a hub in vital supply chains, a reality driven by cost considerations and the belief that integrating China into the global economy would moderate Beijing’s behavior. Unfortunately, China hasn’t moderated. Beijing has been an unreliable supplier that pressures trading partners.

Roughly three-quarters of American companies report supply-chain disruptions in China, according to a spring survey conducted by the Institute for Supply Management. The Japanese and Australian economies have been severely hurt by China’s lockdown of Hubei province and other supply interruptions. China’s official Xinhua News Agency has threatened to exploit Beijing’s control over medical supply chains as retaliation against U.S. efforts to hold China accountable for its actions during the pandemic.

A re-examination is overdue. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has set aside $2.2 billion of Tokyo’s stimulus package to assist Japanese companies in relocating production from China to Southeast Asia. The White House’s Larry Kudlow has suggested that the U.S. government could pay moving costs for U.S. companies that leave China. South Korea appears to be planning to shift several important factories from China to India.

Washington and its partners in Asia should set up new supply chains, restructure trade relations, and start to create an international economic order that is less dependent on China. A multilateral “coalition of the willing” approach would better align trading ties with political and security relationships. It would also help India and nations in Southeast Asia develop more rapidly, becoming stronger U.S. partners.

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Why We Must Teach Western Civilization By Andrew Roberts

Posted By on May 1st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/why-we-must-teach-western-civilization/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The legacy of our culture is unsurpassed in human history; to ignore it is an act of rank self-hatred

On Tuesday, December 3, 1940, Winston Churchill read a memorandum by the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart that advocated making peace with Nazi Germany. It argued, in a summary written by Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, that otherwise Britain would soon see “Western Europe racked by warfare and economic hardship; the legacy of centuries, in art and culture, swept away; the health of the nation dangerously impaired by malnutrition, nervous strains and epidemics; Russia . . . profiting from our exhaustion.” Colville admitted it was “a terrible glimpse of the future,” but nonetheless courageously concluded that “we should be wrong to hesitate” in rejecting any negotiation with Adolf Hitler.

It is illuminating — especially in our own time of “nervous strains and epidemics” — that in that list of horrors, the fear of losing the “legacy of centuries” of Western European art and culture rated above almost everything else. For Churchill and Colville, the prospect of losing the legacy of Western civilization was worse even than that of succumbing to the hegemony of the Soviet Union. 

Yet today, only eight decades later, we have somehow reached a situation in which Sonalee Rashatwar, who is described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as a “fat-positivity activist and Instagram therapist,” can tell that newspaper, “I love to talk about undoing Western civilization because it’s just so romantic to me.” Whilst their methods are obviously not so appallingly extreme, Ms. Rashatwar and the cohorts who genuinely want to “undo” Western civilization are now succeeding where Adolf Hitler and the Nazis failed.

 The evidence is rampant in the academy, where a preemptive cultural cringe is “decolonizing” college syllabuses — that is, wherever possible removing Dead White European Males (DWEMs) from it — often with overt support from deans and university establishments. Western Civilization courses, insofar as they still exist under other names, are routinely denounced as racist, “phobic,” and generally so un-woke as to deserve axing. 

Western civilization, so important to earlier generations, is being ridiculed, abused, and marginalized, often without any coherent response. Of course, today’s non-Western colonizations, such as India’s in Kashmir and China’s in Tibet and Uighurstan, are not included in the sophomores’ concept of imperialism and occupation, which can be done only by the West. The “Amritsar Massacre” only ever refers to the British in the Punjab in 1919, for example, rather than the Indian massacre of ten times the number of people there in 1984. Nor can the positive aspects of the British Empire even be debated any longer, as the closing down of Professor Nigel Biggar’s conferences at Oxford University on the legacy of colonialism eloquently demonstrates.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrat feminists excuse Democrat sexual predators…because they’re Democrats By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on May 1st, 2020

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

Democrats, especially people who identify as women and also identify as Democrats and especially people who identify as women and identify as Democrats and also identify as feminist, seem to believe that it is perfectly fine for men who identify as Democrats to assault and sexually harass women or otherwise take advantage of them.  This is a decades-old line of Democratic thinking, as there are now senior citizen Democratic women who still swoon over noted Democratic, er…Lotharios such as Sen Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Skipping through the decades to the present, there are the many Democratic women who not only excuse President Bill Clinton (D) despite all the solid proof of his sexual predatory behavior against women, but also defend him.  Most notable is his supposed injured wife, noted feminist Hillary Rodham Clinton, who dismissed the charges and allegations against her husband as “a vast right-wing conspiracy” in numerous public outings.  (What she thought in private might have been different.)  Incidentally, Hillary added Clinton to her name, not in 1975 when she married Bill, but years later to help her husband win re-election as governor of Arkansas.

Here’s how Bill Clinton explained it to Bruck:

When she came to me and said she wanted to change, I could see in her eyes that she had made the decision to do it. And I said, “I do not want you resenting me. I would a lot rather lose the election than lose you.” She said, “I’m not going anywhere.” I said, “I know, but I don’t want you to resent this for the rest of your life. You made this decision when you were a child. I like it. I approve of the decision. I don’t care about it.” And she said, “Look, Bill, we cannot—this is stupid! We shouldn’t lose the election over this issue. We shouldn’t run this risk. What if it’s one per cent of the vote? What if it’s two per cent? You might win or lose the election by two per cent.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Covid Tearing Apart our Social Fabric, Thread by Thread By Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD

Posted By on May 1st, 2020

Contributor & author:  Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD, (Oakland-California) board-certified anesthesiologist and immediate past President of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

Preview: COVID-19’s angel of death spares most people: 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths occurred among persons aged 60 years and over; about 25 percent of all deaths were sick and elderly residents of long term care facilities; nearly 90 percent of persons hospitalized have one or more underlying medical conditions. Oddly, the CDC is boosting the official death toll by including not only people who died due to COVID-19 but those who died of other causes and had the virus that causes COVID-19 in their system.

It seems like some folks have used the ghost of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara as their guide through the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States. “To send men to the firing squad [job loss, suicide, substance abuse], judicial [scientific] proof is unnecessary… This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate [of President Trump].”

Apparently, Ché was on to something. Forty-three percent of U.S. adults and 52 percent of low income adults say they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut due to the outbreak. How can any American stuck at home not be disgusted by politicians who are still collecting their full paychecks while the middle class and working poor descend into an abyss. To be fair, Michigan’s governor announced that she would take a 10 percent pay cut in solidarity with the people who had a 100 percent pay cut. Nonetheless, many have unquestionably accepted the government’s oft times contradictory mandates.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that despite the disruption of their lives 80 percent of Americans say strict shelter-in-place measures are worth it to protect people. This blind acquiescence is evidenced by unthinking people wearing masks while driving alone in their cars with closed windows. And perversely, designer face masks are proliferating. Wearing a mask is a sometimes necessary, serious, unpleasant thing to do. It is not fun. It is not cute.

It is not only the evil Chinese Communists that caused panic about the coronavirus in the U.S. via text messages falsely saying President Trump was imminently going to lock down the entire country. The media are complicit in the hysteria. Again, Ché Guevara had it right: “Foreign reporters—preferably American—were much more valuable to us at that time than any military victory. Much more valuable than recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” Media hacks are collecting their paychecks to scare our bodily fluids out of us with day in, day out, COVID, COVID, COVID. We’re all going to die! (Of course, they don’t discuss the 1,300 people a day who die of complications of high blood pressure.)

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

A Republican Underdog Fights for a Senate Seat in Wisconsin By Alexandra DeSanctis

Posted By on April 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/leah-vukmir-wisconsin-republican-senate-candidate-underdog/?itm_source=parsely-api

Leah Vukmir just survived one of the toughest GOP primaries of the cycle. Now, she’s aiming to upset incumbent Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin in November.

Wauwatosa, Wisc. — Don’t count Leah Vukmir out yet.

While many political observers have written off the U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin as unwinnable for the GOP, Vukmir, a Republican state senator, has already pulled off a big victory in a tight primary earlier this month — and she intends to give incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin a real challenge between now and November.

Vukmir, a Wisconsin state senator since 2010, has already weathered one of the toughest Republican primaries this cycle, defeating Marine Corps veteran Kevin Nicholson for the GOP nod last Tuesday.

President Trump, who eked out a marginal victory in Wisconsin in November 2016, declined to endorse either of the primary candidates. That left Nicholson — a businessman and former Democrat who billed himself as a political outsider in the mold of Trump — to build the core of his support from conservative groups outside the state. Heavy hitters such as the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and Tea Party Patriots backed him enthusiastically, and his fundraising numbers showed it.

But Vukmir dominated where it mattered most: the state’s GOP establishment. The Republican party in Wisconsin is one of the strongest and most influential state parties in the country, and as a long-time local politician with high name recognition, Vukmir was confident in her ability to win the support she needed at the polls. In May, she locked down the Republican party of Wisconsin’s endorsement with a whopping 72 percent of ballots, a resounding vote of confidence from state party insiders. She also managed to obtain key endorsements from Wisconsin congressman Sean Duffy and House speaker Paul Ryan. It proved to be more than enough, propelling her to victory over Nicholson on August 14 with nearly 49 percent of the vote to his 43 percent.

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No COVID-19 Spike from Wisconsin’s In-Person Voting By John McCormack

Posted By on April 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-wisconsin-election-no-spike-cases-after-in-person-voting/

Some good news, for a change.

More than three weeks after 413,000 Wisconsin voters went to the polls, there has not been the spike in COVID-19 cases attributed to the election that many feared.

“The state said about two dozen people may have been infected on election day,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Wednesday. “Some have characterized these numbers as an ‘uptick,’ but the experts are cautious.”

Ryan Westergaard, the chief medical officer at the Department of Health Services, told the paper that a link could not be established between the election and the very small number of cases that had developed among the 413,000 voters who showed up to the polls on April 7.

“With the data we have, we can’t prove an association,” Westergaard said. “It would be speculative to say that was definitely the cause without really investigating closely and being clear that somebody really had no other potential exposure to infected people. I don’t think we have the resources to really do that to know definitely.”

“I don’t think that the in-person election led to a major effect, to my surprise. I expected it,” Oguzhan Alagoz, an expert in infectious-disease modeling at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the Journal Sentinel.

A Democratic state senator suggested last week that there had been a surge of cases because of the election, but as Politifact Wisconsin reported, the surge was due to an outbreak at several meat-packing facilities in Brown County, home to Green Bay. Even when accounting for the delays in testing and the virus’s incubation period, a spike in new cases due to the election should have showed up by now if it were going to occur.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Joe Biden Selects — I’m Not Making This Up — Chris ‘Waitress Sandwich’ Dodd to Lead VP Search By Bryan Preston

Posted By on April 30th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/bryan-preston/2020/04/30/biden-select-im-not-making-this-up-chris-waitress-sandwich-dodd-to-lead-vp-search-n386844

File this in “you can’t make this stuff up.” The “stuff” being both the facts of the case and how the media are already responding to it.

Presumed Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden has selected his pal, former Sen. Chris Dodd, to head up his veep search. Axios reports, while leaving out some very important context.

Joe Biden is one step closer to naming a running mate, announcing four co-chairs and a committee to vet candidates for a job he has committed to filling with a woman.

Driving the news: The vice presidential selection committee will be headed by Biden’s longtime friend former Sen. Chris Dodd; Cynthia Hogan, a longtime aide and adviser who served as Biden’s vice presidential counsel in the Obama White House; and two national campaign co-chairs, Delaware Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

That first name in the paragraph is important. Dodd is a particularly problematic figure in Biden’s current circumstances. As we and others have been reporting, Biden is facing an allegation that he sexually assaulted his then-Senate staff member, Tara Reade, in 1993. Reade’s story has been corroborated. That doesn’t mean he’s guilty, but Biden pushed the Kavanaugh narrative as much as anybody, and that narrative explicitly sought to deny Kavanaugh due process.

Having learned nothing at all, Biden taps Dodd to seek his veep. Why is this a problem?

Because Dodd was best pals with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, a well-known notorious womanizer who left Mary Jo Kopechne to die at Chappaquiddick — and who with Dodd performed the notorious “waitress sandwich” at La Brasserie restaurant.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lockdown Critics May Have Some Valid Points [Bloomberg] Joe Nocera ****

Posted By on April 30th, 2020

https://www.yahoo.com/news/lockdown-critics-may-valid-points-152936053.html

Three months after the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in the U.S., has the time come to start paying more attention to the critics? 

I’m referring to people like John Ioannidis, the Stanford University School of Medicine scientist who argued early on that the coronavirus was far less deadly than the models were predicting. Or the Swedish epidemiologist John Giesecke, who says that protecting the elderly and frail — and allowing the rest of society to go about its business — makes far more sense than lockdowns, whose efficacy, he believes, remains unproved. And yes, I’m even referring to Alex Berenson, the pugnacious former journalist who has become a national villain (except at Fox News) for poking holes in the conventional wisdom about how to mitigate the virus and pointing out the various harms that have resulted from measures like lockdowns.

As the online publication UnHerd put it recently, “The debate about lockdown is not a contest between good and evil.” In that spirit, I would like to offer four contrarian arguments that, at the very least, ought to be taken more seriously.

We’re still acting as if the original models were correct. In mid-March, a team at Imperial College in London estimated that 500,000 British citizens and 2.2 million Americans would die from an uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus. That estimate caused the governments of both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to begin stressing self-isolation measures, according to the New York Times. In the U.S., state after state shut down their economies while a mad scramble took place to create hospital space for Covid-19 patients.

Since then, the major models have been revised downward significantly. According to data compiled by the Reich Lab at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, models now estimate 67,000 to 120,000 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. Yet strict measures like lockdowns, which were put in place based on the original modeling, remain in place, while hospitals around the country, many of which are largely empty, continued to be reserved for nonexistent Covid-19 patients.

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Michael Flynn case should be dismissed to preserve justice By Jonathan Turley

Posted By on April 30th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/495405-michael-flynn-case-should-be-dismissed-to-preserve-justice

Previously undisclosed documents in the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn offer us a chilling blueprint on how top FBI officials not only sought to entrap the former White House aide but sought to do so on such blatantly unconstitutional and manufactured grounds.

These new documents further undermine the view of both the legitimacy and motivations of those investigations under former FBI director James Comey. For all of those who have long seen a concerted effort within the Justice Department to target the Trump administration, the fragments will read like a Dead Sea Scrolls version of a “deep state” conspiracy.

One note reflects discussions within the FBI shortly after the 2016 election on how to entrap Flynn in an interview concerning his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. According to Fox News, the note was written by the former FBI head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, after a meeting with Comey and his deputy director, Andrew McCabe.

The note states, “What is our goal? Truth and admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” This may have expressed an honest question over the motivation behind this targeting of Flynn, a decision for which Comey later publicly took credit when he had told an audience that he decided he could “get away” with sending “a couple guys over” to the White House to set up Flynn and make the case.

The new documents also explore how the Justice Department could get Flynn to admit breaking the Logan Act, a law that dates back to from 1799 which makes it a crime for a citizen to intervene in disputes between the United States and foreign governments. It has never been used to convict a citizen and is widely viewed as flagrantly unconstitutional.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Something seems rotten in Flynn’s case — and maybe others, too Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on April 30th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/495366-something-seems-rotten-in-flynns-case-

The prosecution of Michael Flynn was rocked last Friday by the disclosure of new exculpatory information, leading to speculation that the exoneration of President Trump’s first national security adviser could be imminent. That would be an amazing reversal, since Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents and, later, declined a federal judge’s invitation to withdraw that plea — reaffirming his admission of guilt. (Flynn has since sought to vacate the plea; the court has not yet ruled.)

The Department of Justice’s letter to Sidney Powell, Flynn’s current lawyer who has persisted for months to pry exculpatory evidence from DOJ, indicates that further revelations may be forthcoming. For now, the disclosure has two salient aspects. 

The first involves the factual basis for the Obama-era FBI’s investigation of Flynn — or, rather, the lack of a basis. Under federal law, a false statement made to investigators is actionable only if it is material to the matter under investigation. If there was no basis to believe Flynn had committed a crime, his counsel could have argued that any false statements allegedly made by Flynn when he was questioned in January 2017 were immaterial. Ergo, Ms. Powell contends that the withholding of this information violated the government’s duty to disclose exculpatory evidence.