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A Joe Biden SCOTUS List Would Be Good News . . . By David Harsanyi

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/a-joe-biden-scotus-list-would-be-good-news/

. . . for conservatives.

CBS News is reporting that liberal groups are calling on Joe Biden to release a list of potential Supreme Court nominees and “copy the playbook” of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

At first glance, this seems like a useful idea. Trump’s SCOTUS list was a highly effective campaign maneuver, shoring up wobbly support from originalists and social conservatives. Before the election, I was highly skeptical that Trump would adhere to his promises on judges, but he has, and for many of us, these picks are the most important legacy of his first term.

But what does Biden gain from assembling such a list? Probably not much. In fact, it could hurt him.

While it’s true that the liberal base is animated by resisting conservative justices, contemporary Democrats have never been exceptionally troubled by the philosophical disposition of their judges, mostly because their presidents never make mistakes.

Of course, it’s easy to make the right call when you’re picking from a group whose only unifying ideology of jurisprudence is malleably partisan. There is no Federalist Society laying down intellectually consistent cases on the left, because there can’t be any consistency. There is virtually no space between the Left’s conception of Constitution and the Left’s constantly evolving views and policy goals. And those goals increasingly lay outside the limits of traditional constitutional governance. Liberal judges exist to justify, literally, those policy goals, and in the vast majority of cases, they do.

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Stacey Abrams Says She Could Help Biden By Turning Out More Black Voters

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/stacey-abrams-says-she-could-help-biden-by-turning-out-more-black-voters/ar-BB13653l?li=BBnb7Kz

Former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams reiterated her interest in serving as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate, saying she would be valuable in ensuring people of color turnout to vote in the November election.

Abrams, who previously served as the minority leader in the Georgia state House of Representatives, has repeatedly voiced her interest in running as the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate. The politician from Georgia reasserted that desire and explained why she’d make a good partner for Biden during an interview with CNN’s David Axelrod on the Thursday episode of his podcast The Axe Files.

“I have the deepest respect for every woman who is being talked about and who should be considered for this post,” Abrams told Axelrod. “But I know that for communities of color, particularly for the black community, there has got to be a recognition that their needs are met. And we have to have candidates who are able to not only speak to them, but turn them out.”

“There has to be an intentionality to turning them out. A lot of folks can do that. I’m one of those people,” she said. “And I have proven it by turning out more people of color in an election than anyone in 2018 did. Not by race, but by raw number.”

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How the media made the crisis even worse Covid-19 has brought the conformism, apocalypticism and self-importance of the media to the fore. Mike Hume

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/23/how-the-media-made-the-crisis-even-worse/

The news media in the UK and worldwide has rarely seemed more important or influential than during the coronavirus crisis. Web searches for ‘news’ have hit record highs, with Covid-19 dominating more than any issue on record.

The British government lists journalists as ‘key workers’; media sources praise them as the ‘unsung heroes’ of the crisis. Top news correspondents have become the main public interface with the authorities, questioning government ministers and experts in front of millions at daily briefings. When The Sunday Times published a lengthy attack on the UK government response to coronavirus, headlined ‘The 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’, the UK government felt obliged to issue an unprecedented rebuttal of the allegations that was almost as long.

The coronavirus crisis has clearly demonstrated the value of good journalism. Yet the response of too much of the media has also shown how bad journalism can help to make a terrible situation even worse.

Here are a few quick notes on some problems with the media response to Covid-19. Most of these issues are not new. The crisis has acted as a catalyst and accelerated some dangerous trends that were already becoming evident in the media BC – Before Coronavirus.

Apocalypse News

The coronavirus crisis is quite real and bad enough. It surely does not need any sensationalism or exaggeration. Yet too often it has seemed that the worst-case scenario makes the best and biggest headlines. When a senior war correspondent from a top British newspaper can write that, in corona-hit London, ‘popping out to buy milk might prove as deadly as driving on Kabul’s most suicide-bombed road’, you know that journalism has taken a wrong turn towards apocalypticism.

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The Chinese Coronavirus Is This Generation’s Tiananmen Test Ben Weingarten

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/22/the-chinese-coronavirus-is-this-generations-tiananmen-test/

We are suffering a catastrophe of the Chinese Communist Party’s making. It must be held accountable, made to pay for the destruction it has caused, putting every lever of American power on the table to ensure it.

Observers of the Chinese coronavirus crisis have cast it, with good reason, as a potential Chernobyl for General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party regime.

America, too, is faced with a challenge with relevant historical parallels, separate and apart from the wartime comparisons regarding the mobilization and sacrifices of our countrymen.

As with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, we are once again at an inflection point in our relationship with China, faced with the carnage caused most directly by a malevolent CCP.

The Chinese coronavirus crisis may well represent this generation’s Tiananmen Square test.

The test is as follows: With the CCP inflicting incalculable costs in blood and treasure through its unique role in spreading the coronavirus, and its related menacing behavior, will we demand reparations, or will we let the regime off scot-free, emboldening it, and encouraging it to act with impunity and still more reckless abandon in its quest for hegemony going forward?

We failed this test in 1989.

Then, when presented with the image of “Tank Man,” we did something even worse than turning our back on him. Our immediate response to the CCP’s massacre of democracy protesters was toothless. But ultimately, we proceeded still further to embrace the Communist regime, effectively rewarding its villainy by integrating it into the global economic, financial, and geopolitical system.

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From WHO to the UN It’s high time for us to distance ourselves from the United Nations. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/who-un-lloyd-billingsley/

President Trump is cutting off funding for the World Health Organization, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as a Reuters report notes, “the first director-general in the WHO’s 72-year history not to be a medical doctor” but a favorite of China with a radical leftist past. This is not the first time a Communist regime installed their mouthpiece and deployed an international body for their own purposes.  

The WHO is part of the United Nations, which dates from the waning days of World War II. Stalin’s foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss, a Stalinist spy, as the first Secretary General, the first and only time a Soviet leader suggested an American for an international post. Hiss was duly appointed acting Secretary General, so the Communists got the man they wanted.

U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who had been under the wing of Hiss and Harry Hopkins, delivered a speech to the opening UN conference in San Francisco in May-June of 1945. The speech had been written by Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, brought to the conference by Alger Hiss. Stettinius was so pleased with Trumbo’s speech that he requested an autographed picture of the screenwriter,  but Stettinius later denied he ever knew Trumbo.

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Fake News and Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” Today’s ‘progressive’ journalists perpetually reveal their true calling. Michael Cutler

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/fake-news-undermines-trump-administration-and-michael-cutler/

President Trump is credited with coining the term “Fake News.”  Fake News reports are not only irritating but have become so pervasive and impactful that it threatens our very democracy.

Fake News has two elements – the use of Politically Correct language and blatant lies.

Americans are among the most compassionate and considerate people in the world.  Today, by turning that virtue into a vulnerability, Americans have been conditioned to use “Politically Correct” language to ostensibly be kind and compassionate.  Under the guise of political correctness, Americans have permitted themselves to accept Orwellian Newspeak that alters their understanding of critical issues.  Humans think with words, consequently language control results in thought control.  

The very term Politically Correct is Orwellian for Newspeak!

I focused on this threat in my article, Language Wars: The Road to Tyranny Is Paved with Language Censorship.

George Orwell understood the power of words and, in his novel 1984, devised Newspeak which exploited manipulation of language that enabled the mythical totalitarian government in his novel to maintain iron-fisted control over the masses.  It was the contradictorily named “Ministry of Truth” that administered Newspeak.

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The Deadly Costs of Extended Shutdown Orders By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/22/the-deadly-costs-of-extended-shutdown-orders/

The focus on saving “just one life” from the coronavirus to the exclusion of all other considerations likely will prove a catastrophic failure of policymaking. The devastation to individuals’ ability to flourish or even survive may soon become irreversible.

More than a dozen governors extended their economic shutdown orders recently into May and beyond. Those officials should have publicly addressed the following questions first:

How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
How many workers will have lost their jobs?
How many businesses will have closed for good?
How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?

Instead, the announcements of the prolonged shutdown were representative of government decision-making during the coronavirus crisis: opaque, lacking in criteria for measuring success and failure, and bereft of any attempt to measure the benefits of mitigating one particular health problem against the costs—including other health problems.

New York’s tele-ubiquitous governor, Andrew Cuomo, for example, announced on April 15 that New York’s economy would now be shut down through May 15, instead of reopening on April 29, as previously scheduled. How did he arrive at May 15? It is a mystery. Other governors had just as inscrutably chosen May 3, May 4, May 8, May 20, or June 10 for their extensions.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Erdoğan Is Getting Coronavirus Dancing to His Tune by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15914/erdogan-approval-coronavirus

One of the laws Turkey’s rubber-stamp parliament passed before the recess allowed the release of tens of thousands of common criminals to ease overcrowding in jails and protect inmates from the coronavirus pandemic. The amnesty, however, excluded hundreds of political prisoners including journalists, writers, academics and social media users critical of Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime

In 2020, the collective fear is the coronavirus pandemic. And just as in the previous instances based on fear, it seems to be working in Erdoğan’s advantage.

“The people tend to unite behind strong leaders in times of national crisis like war, terror, security threats, disasters or pandemic.” — Özer Sencar, president of Metropoll, non-partisan pollster, Hurriyet, April 16, 2020.

When a group of military officers attempted a putsch to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016, the Islamist strongman replied with two reflexes: survival, and a vigorous political campaign to make political gains from the failed coup. He succeeded in both.

Most Turks, including Erdoğan’s opponents, weary of decades of military coups, united behind him to resist the putsch that ended up killing 250 people and wounded more than 2,000. Erdoğan’s approval rating rose sharply from 45% before the failed coup to 67.6% in its aftermath. For many observers, that was not a surprise. Only a year earlier, Erdoğan had gambled over the Turks’ collective security concerns and won.

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Iran’s Ayatollahs Will Struggle to Survive the Oil Slump by Con Coughlin

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15923/iran-struggle-oil-price

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has tried to put a brave face on the latest setback to hit the regime, claiming that Iran is unlikely to suffer as much as other countries from the oil price drop because it is less reliant than others on crude exports.

If that were truly the case, then Tehran would not be asking the IMF for a bailout, and Mr Rouhani, together with Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister, would not be begging Washington to remove sanctions.

The truth of the matter is, for all the regime’s attempts to claim it has everything under control, that the country is teetering on the brink of collapse, and the ayatollahs are fast running out of options to save themselves.

At a time when Iran’s Islamic regime is already facing unprecedented pressure over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as its disastrous handling of the economy, the global slump in oil prices could well prove to be the final straw for the ayatollahs.

Even before this week’s dramatic collapse in global oil prices, which saw the key gauge of U.S. crude prices, the West Texas Intermediate benchmark, tumble into negative territory for the first time in history, the mullahs were already under intense pressure over their catastrophic running of the country during their four decades in power.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Venezuela: Maduro’s Cuban Army by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15921/venezuela-maduro-cuban-army

The U.S. Department of Justice accuses Maduro of having served as the chief of a narcotics organization called “the Cartel of the Suns.” Maduro’s drug cartel is further alleged to have helped arm an extremist faction of the Colombia-based Marxist terrorist group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in its decades-long campaign to overthrow Colombia’s government. Maduro’s cartel has also allegedly worked with FARC to flood the U.S. with cocaine.

The intensity of Maduro’s attack against Trump may indicate a sense of panic at the possibility that the U.S. drug indictment might be setting the stage for some kind of military action against the socialist regime that will oust him from power.

Short of a U.S.-supported invasion by an international coalition, including free Latin American states, perhaps sometime after the U.S. election, Maduro will continue to wreck the formerly oil- rich country as its people continue to live in misery.

More than fifty countries in the Euro-Atlantic and Hispanic Free World consider the Venezuelan regime led by dictator Nicolás Maduro to be illegitimate. This view also seems to be shared by millions of Venezuelans, more than four million of whom have fled the country’s political oppression and economic depression.

The main reason for the charge of illegitimacy stems from the view that Maduro’s victory for a second six-year term as president in Venezuela’s 2018 national elections was fraudulent. Opposition protests have failed to dislodge the socialist-led regime, which has so far been sustained by Chinese loans, Russian weapons and Cuban troops. The Venezuelan people, disenfranchised and disarmed, have, in addition, been bullied into submission by pro-regime neighborhood revolutionary leftist gangs called “colectivos.”