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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Gmail is hiding emails from conservatives By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/gmail_is_hiding_emails_from_conservatives.html

It’s not uncommon for the American Thinker staff to learn that emails from readers and writers have vanished into Gmail’s automatic spam filter. It’s extremely irritating but is it deliberate? One study suggests that it probably is. That’s either because the email’s content is obviously conservative or because the email comes from Proton Mail, a site to which conservatives gravitated after the FBI’s partisan crackdown following January 6.

Six years ago, Russ Vaughn authored an American Thinker post revealing that his email box appeared to show a distinct bias in the way Google automatically sorted email:

I decided to clean out my email trash, and after completing the task, I turned to my spam to do the same.  But upon clicking into that folder, I made the interesting discovery that almost all of the emails relegated to spam by Gmail’s filters (I have no personal filters in place) had a common thread: Almost all were from conservative sources.  In fact, ninety percent of them were from Republican or conservative causes, most seeking contributions. 

It turns out that what Russ observed was not limited to his own inbox. North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science decided to look into the matter. Fox News reports that it recently published its findings in “A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020.” The results completely supported Russ’s suspicions:

“We made several important observations in our study. For example, as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left while Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right. Yahoo retained about half of all the political emails in inbox (up to 55.2% marked as spam) while outlook filtered out the vast majority of emails (over 71.8%) from all political candidates and marked them as spam,” the proposed methodology section continued. “Gmail, however, retained the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam).”

Never Admit Anything The popular and overused Biden mantra. John Stossel

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/never-admit-anything-john-stossel/

“Apologizing for mistakes is something we teach little kids to do. Is that too much to ask of our media and social media giants?”

President Joe Biden says he never talked business with his son.

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe that Ukrainian gas company paid Hunter Biden half a million dollars because he has unique business skills that no one else noticed.

It’s possible.

But unlikely.

Now a Justice Department investigation may tell us whether Hunter is a sleazy opportunist who broke the law and whether his father knew, or even helped.

But equally revealing is the arrogance and bias the reporting on Hunter’s laptop revealed among wide swaths of media and big tech gatekeepers.

Even today, most will not admit they were wrong.

Bill Clinton’s Corrupt Love Affair With Putin The last thing the Clintons wanted was democracy and an end to the corruption. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/bill-clintons-corrupt-love-affair-putin-daniel-greenfield/

Bill Clinton, once the youngest governor in the country, now only four years younger than Biden, came out of the shadows with a defensive op-ed, titled, “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path”.

While the Clintons, like Obama, fashionably embraced Putin-bashing when it served their agenda of inventing a Russia scandal as a pretext for discrediting the 2016 presidential election and spying on their Republican political opponents, Bill’s history tells a very different story.

In My Life, his 2004 memoir, Bill Clinton praises Putin and uses him to attack Republicans.

After his first meeting with Putin, Bill Clinton wrote that he came away believing “Yeltsin had picked a successor who had the skills and capacity for hard work necessary to manage Russia’s turbulent political and economic life” and the “toughness to defend Russia’s interests”. He called Putin’s appointment, which helped end democracy in Russia, a “wise and shrewd move”.

After Putin was elected, Bill Clinton recollects that he “hung up the phone thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia together.” Soon Clinton is using Putin to bash Republicans, sneering that “even the Russian Duma was more progressive on arms control than the U.S. Senate” and supporting Putin’s refusal to hold off on the anti-ballistic missile treaty because “Republicans had been enamored of missile defense since the Reagan era, and many of them wouldn’t hesitate to abrogate the ABM Treaty in order to deploy it.” Putin good, Republicans bad.

Why was Bill Clinton flattering Putin in his autobiography?

Joe Biden Still Talks Like a Senator Philip Klein

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/joe-biden-still-talks-like-a-senator/

His Russia–Ukraine stumbles are the product of somebody who spent decades in a job where off-the-cuff statements have no consequences.

Over the course of the Ukraine–Russia conflict, President Biden has made a number of reckless statements that have undermined or confused American foreign policy. A popular explanation among critics has been that his propensity to make such statements reflects his being gaffe-prone in general and also that he is undergoing an age-driven mental decline. But another explanation is equally likely: He is not being as careful about what he says because his formidable political experience was as a senator, a position in which off-the-cuff statements do not matter as much.

The president’s extemporaneous comments repeatedly have created problems for his administration.

In a January news conference during the run-up to the invasion, Biden talked about the potential response to an offensive by Vladimir Putin and speculated, “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, etc.”

This created uncertainty about the resolve of NATO countries to hold Putin accountable, and top White House officials scrambled to do cleanup.

Last month, during a mostly restrained speech in Poland, Biden went off-script and added the line, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The statement reverberated around the world, as it appeared that the president of the United States was calling for regime change, which would represent a significant escalation in the conflict.

This statement, too, had to be walked back so the White House could tamp down the idea that the U.S. was pushing for Putin’s ouster.

Then there has been the loose talk around war crimes.

Last month, after the conclusion of an event at the White House, Biden initially responded “no” when a reporter asked if he thought Putin was a war criminal, and walked away. But then he made his way back to the reporter and said, “Oh, I think he is a war criminal.”

America is still paying the price for Hillary Clinton’s treachery Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/america-is-still-paying-the-price-for-hillary-clintons-treachery/ , NYPost.com

However this era of angry polarization, crime and violence ends, it will be left to historians to decipher how America got so far off track. Instead of building on our unprecedented prosperity and role as the world’s ultimate superpower, we declared war — cultural, political and social — on each other. Even our nation’s Founders are not spared. 

The reasons will be better understood in hindsight, but it’s hard to believe the 2016 presidential campaign won’t be seen as an inflection point. Our move toward disunion didn’t begin then, but it certainly gained steam and vitriol during and after the election of Donald Trump. 

Two recent developments illustrate how that campaign remains a radioactive hot spot. With both developments centering on Hillary Clinton, they underscore her role and the depths of her venality. 

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst of her, proof emerges that she was even more duplicitous than we knew. 

The first evidence came in a little-noticed decision from the Federal Election Commission. It ruled on a complaint from the Coolidge Reagan Foundation that Clinton and the Democratic National Committee violated federal law by hiding how they funded the odious Christopher Steele dossier, perhaps the most destructive disinformation document in United States history. 

The FEC agreed with the complaint and ruled that Clinton and the DNC, which she effectively controlled, hid their payments to Steele as merely “legal fees,” without mentioning him or his work. In fact, the money was funneled through a law firm, Perkins Coie, which then hired the smear merchants at FusionGPS, who hired Steele, a former British spook. 

The layers and false claim about legal fees were intended to put distance between Clinton and Steele because knowledge of the truth would have destroyed her campaign. Although her lawyers and the DNC argued they did nothing wrong, they agreed not to contest the findings and quietly paid fines totaling $113,000.

Press looks the other way 

$54M in Chinese gifts donated to UPenn, home of Biden Center By Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein

https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/54m-in-chinese-gifts-donated-to-upenn-home-of-biden-center/

A government watchdog is demanding the US Attorney probing Hunter Biden in Delaware investigate tens of millions in anonymous donations from China to the University of Pennsylvania, where an academic center is named for his father, President Biden.

The Ivy League college raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through June 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016, according to public records.

Most of the anonymous donations came after the university announced in February 2017 that it would create the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Joe Biden, whose term as vice president had just ended, was to lead the center and was also named a professor at the university.

The center, which is located in Washington, DC., opened its doors in February 2018. Antony Blinken, whom Biden named as Secretary of State, briefly served as its managing director.

The Ivy League university received $15.8 million in anonymous Chinese gifts that year, including one eye-popping $14.5 million donation in May 2018, records show.

The flurry of donations may be related to Hunter Biden’s business interests in China, the National Legal and Policy Center, a Virginia-based watchdog, alleged in complaints sent in May and October 2020 to the Departments of Education and Justice.

States of Covid Performance A new study compares outcomes on economy, education and health.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-of-covid-performance-economic-schools-study-working-paper-lockdowns-11649621806?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The NBER working paper presents the data straight without policy conclusions, but here’s one of ours: The severe lockdown states suffered much more on overall social well-being in return for relatively little comparative benefit on health.”

More than two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s time to draw some conclusions about government policy and results. The most comprehensive comparative study we’ve seen to date was published last week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and it deserves wide attention.

The authors are University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan and Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They compare Covid outcomes in the 50 states and District of Columbia based on three variables: the economy, education and mortality. It’s a revealing study that belies much of the conventional medical and media wisdom during the pandemic, especially in its first year when severe lockdowns were described as the best, and the only moral, policy.

FBI Kidnapping Caper Was Flagrant Election Interference The only people pushing to do something big before Election Day resided in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/09/fbi-kidnapping-caper-was-flagrant-election-interference

On October 8, 2020, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced shocking news: federal authorities had arrested several men for conspiring to kidnap and possibly kill her before Election Day. After indulging in a moment of self-pity, Whitmer quickly pinned the blame on President Trump, a man with whom Whitmer had engaged in a very public feud throughout 2020 over pandemic-related lockdowns.

Trump, Whitmer claimed, fueled the rage of alleged white supremacists and right-wing militias responsible for the dastardly abduction plot. “When our leaders meet with, encourage, or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimze their actions,” Whitmer said in a televised speech. “And they are complicit.”

Earlier that day, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, also a Democrat, and officials from the U.S. Department of Justice detailed the charges in a separate press conference. “Last night, the FBI and Michigan State Police arrested six individuals charged in a criminal complaint with conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer,” explained Andrew Birge, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan. The defendants, Birge claimed, plotted to kidnap Whitmer from her vacation cottage “before the November election.”

His office took the lead in prosecuting the six defendants, who also faced weapons of mass destruction charges.

Justice Has Been and Will Be a Long Time Coming No movement without recognized legitimacy can last. That’s the good news. The bad news is that “not lasting” can describe a lengthy and turbulent time. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/09/justice-has-been-and-will-be-a-long-time-coming/

On Friday, April 8, the biggest domestic news came from Grand Rapids, Michigan. On that day the world learned that a jury had voted unanimously to acquit Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta of conspiring to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020. The verdict, as Julie Kelly noted in her column for American Greatness that day, was a “huge defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice.” One can only hope. It was also a huge, if tardy and incomplete, win for justice, lower case, no “Department of” preceding the noun. 

Kelly recounts the sordid details of this saga of FBI entrapment, deep-state political maneuvering, and media malpractice. The case made national headlines and, coming when it did, just before the 2020 presidential election, was clearly designed to affect public sentiment regarding the Donald Trump campaign. “Heavens help us! Troglodytic Trump supporters are trying to kidnap noble Democratic public servants! Can you believe it?” 

Turns out you would have been foolish to believe it. But in retrospect, it seems clear that it was a sort of dry-run for that later entertainment, the January 6 worse-than-Pearl-Harbor or 9/11, Civil-War-like “insurrection” and/or attempt to “overturn the election” and/or overthrow “our democracy” at the U.S. Capitol. 

There were some two dozen people involved in the “Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer” saga. Fully 12 were FBI assets. They were not there to infiltrate the loser militia members. They were there to egg them on. The FBI helped to define and finance the plot from the beginning. They even set up a fake “militia” for the others to rally around. They also helped to equip, not to mention bribe, the motley crew whom they assembled for the caper. The FBI did not uncover a plot. They were prime movers in fomenting a plot. They did not so much uncover evidence against the plotters as they entrapped them. And it’s not as if this is a one off. It is part of a pattern of abuse and irresponsibility. As the Wall Street Journal’s Holmon Hunt put it last fall, “The agency should be scrapped and something new built to replace it.”

We do not yet know the full extent of government involvement in the January 6 jamboree, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that it was premeditated, extensive, and criminal.

Has the FBI ever before looked this pitiful? By Pete McArdle

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/has_the_fbi_ever_before_looked_this_pitiful.html

It’s one thing for the FBI, once considered the pre-eminent law enforcement agency in the world, to turn to the dark side and become the secret police of the Democrat party.  Again and again, the FBI has shown its partisan colors, overlooking obvious Democrat criminality (see Clinton, Hillary and Biden, Hunter) while chasing after Donald Trump and his supporters like Brian Stelter chasing down a Mister Softee truck for seconds.

But although it’s unsettling to know that the FBI is only supporting one side of the political aisle, what’s truly incredible is how bad the Feebs are at partisan warfare.  Forget stopping actual terrorists, like the ones involved in 9/11, Orlando, and San Bernadino; recent history tells us the Bureau can’t even run a coup right.

Under a previous director as tall as he was self-righteous, the FBI tried to take down presidential candidate Donald Trump (R-MAGA) with the infamous Russia Collusion scam.  But what a lousy effort it was!

The FBI case, such as it was, relied primarily on a dossier —French for “phony opposition research” — centered on a supposed video of prostitutes wetting the bed in a Moscow hotel for Donald Trump’s entertainment.  Talk about purple prose!  I’ve written stuff that lurid and bizarre, but sadly, it never gets published.

Although not-so-special agent Peter Strzok told his horse-faced FBI side piece, “Don’t worry, we’ll stop it (Trump becoming president),” the Feebs’ pathetic plot fell apart, and Trump was elected.