NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama torpedoed U.S. relations with Russia — to perpetuate lies about Trump, Durham report found By Monica Showalter

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/obama_torpedoed_us_relations_with_russia__to_perpetuate_lies_about_trump_durham_report_found.html

In late 2016, Obama was angry.

Oh, not about the election of Donald Trump, of course, if his public statements were any indication.

He was supposedly angry, so angry, at Russia and its supposed interference in our 2016 election that he got out his pen and phone and expelled 35 Russian diplomats. 

Here is what the New York Times reported:

WASHINGTON — President Obama struck back at Russia on Thursday for its efforts to influence the 2016 election, ejecting 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposing sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services.

The administration also penalized four top officers of one of those services, the powerful military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U.

Intelligence agencies have concluded that the G.R.U. ordered the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations, with the approval of the Kremlin, and ultimately enabled the publication of the emails it harvested to benefit Donald J. Trump’s campaign.

The Hill reported that it was quite an array of sanctions at the time:

The measures include a slate of economic sanctions, diplomatic censure, and public “naming and shaming.” The president also hinted at possible covert cyber measures but did not provide details. 

The president also announced that the State Department will expel 35 Russian intelligence operatives and shutter two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used by Russia for intelligence purposes. 

The Times added:

Taken together, the sweeping actions announced by the White House, the Treasury, the State Department and intelligence agencies on Thursday amount to the strongest American response yet to a state-sponsored cyberattack. They also appeared intended to box in President-elect Trump, who will now have to decide whether to lift the sanctions on Russian intelligence agencies when he takes office next month.

Obama even amended his own executive order to extend his powers to sanction, with travel bans and asset freezes on some Russian officials.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Mask Mandates Unmasked Congress must end white coat supremacy and make a case for pandemic reparations. By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/23/mask-mandates-unmasked/

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “There’s no reason for you to be walking around with a mask.” But the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) soon changed his stance. Although not 100 percent effective, Fauci said, wearing masks is “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing.”

Masks should be worn, he said, even by those who were vaccinated, although they did not need to wear a mask outside. On another occasion, Fauci recommended people wear two face masks. The NIAID boss gave little if any indication that face masks could cause health problems.

“Circumstantial evidence exists that extended mask use may be related to current observations of stillbirths and to reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance in children born during the pandemic.” That is the contention of “Possible toxicity of chronic carbon dioxide exposure associated with face mask use, particularly in pregnant women, children and adolescents,” a recent study out of Germany. The paper highlights “the toxicological aspects of wearing a mask for special user groups resulting from a low-level CO2 exposure.”

During the COVID pandemic in 2020, 77 percent of nations introduced mask requirements, and 58 percent of people around the world “have been confronted with a mask obligation.” In many countries, “children in schools in particular are/have been heavily exposed to the mandatory wearing of masks for long periods.” As it happens, that is not good for the children.

“Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2, while wearing masks more than five minutes bears a possible chronic exposure to carbon dioxide of 1.41% to 3.2% of the inhaled air,” the authors observe. “U.S. Navy toxicity experts set the exposure limits for submarines carrying a female crew to 0.8% CO2 based on animal studies which indicated an increased risk for stillbirths.” 

In addition, “data exists on the exposure of chronic 0.3% CO2 in adolescent mammals causing neuron destruction, which includes less activity, increased anxiety and impaired learning and memory. There is also data indicating testicular toxicity in adolescents at CO2 inhalation concentrations above 0.5%.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Majority Of Americans Know Regime Media’s Favorite Narratives Are Fake News By: Samuel Boehlke

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/23/majority-of-americans-know-regime-medias-favorite-narratives-are-fake-news/

While the news from Harvard CAPS/Harris’ recent poll that received the most coverage was former President Donald Trump’s lead over President Joe Biden, the poll also demonstrates that a majority of American voters disagree with corporate media narratives. Journalist Glenn Greenwald drew attention to the report and key themes on Twitter over the weekend.

The Harris Poll and HarrisX conducted an online survey on May 17-18, 2023, of 2,004 registered U.S. voters, weighing the results by demographics according to their proportion in the population and likelihood of online presence.

According to key results released on May 19, a majority of Americans believe the allegations included in the Steele dossier and Russia collusion stories are “false,” but approximately 70 percent of Democrats still believe those corporate media lies.

A majority of Americans also know “the Hunter Biden laptop is real.” A majority of Democrats, however, still believe legacy media’s claim — devised by Biden’s team and a cohort of corrupt intelligence officials — that it was Russian disinformation. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Corruption of Climate Science Instead of fighting anti-civilization lunacy, corporations are taking their money off the table, along with their life-affirming affordable fuel. By Edward Ring

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/23/the-corruption-of-climate-science/

“We need to criticize the people who got us here,” says Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of Fossil Future. “We can’t keep treating these designated experts as real experts. They are not real experts, they are destroyers. They are anti-energy, non-experts. And that needs to be made clear.”

Epstein is right, and his advice has never been more urgent—or as difficult to make people understand. It is no exaggeration that every major institution in America has now committed itself to the elimination of affordable and abundant energy. If it isn’t stopped, this commitment, motivated by misguided concern for the planet but also by a lust for power and money and enabled by moral cowardice and intellectual negligence, will destroy Western civilization.

For over 50 years, with increasing frequency, corrupted, careerist scientists have produced biased studies that, amplified by agenda-driven corporate and political special interests, constitute a “consensus” that is supposedly “beyond debate.” We are in a “climate crisis.” To cope with this climate emergency, all measures are justifiable.

This is overblown, one-sided, distorted, and manipulative propaganda. It is the language of authoritarians and corporatists bent on achieving even more centralized political power and economic wealth. It is a scam, perhaps the most audacious, all-encompassing fraud in human history. It is a scam that explicitly targets and crushes the middle class in developed nations and the entire aspiring populations in developing nations, at the same time as its messaging is designed to secure their fervent acquiescence.

What is actually beyond debate is not that we are in a climate crisis but that if we don’t stop destroying our conventional energy economy, we are going to be in a civilizational crisis.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Barack Obama’s True Legacy And how he continues to “fundamentally transform” America. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/barack-obamas-true-legacy/

On the cusp of the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama galvanized an ecstatic crowd at Missouri University by claiming that he and his supporters were “five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Not making America great again, but fundamentally transforming her. This unsettling vow, from the man who would later declare that American exceptionalism was no more valid than British or Greek exceptionalism, promised not restoration, but revolution. It made clear that his incoming administration intended to toss the greatest country in the world onto the trash heap of history to make way for a Progressive utopia centered on social justice and on the dismantling of American power.

Obama’s threat took two presidential terms to gather momentum; former President Trump temporarily stalled its course, but then Obama managed to get a shot at a third term in 2020 – vicariously through his former Vice President Joe Biden. Under the decrepit figurehead Biden, Obama and his muses Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett could accelerate the fundamental change he promised. Indeed, it has been cascading to fruition so rapidly that one is reminded of a Hemingway character’s explanation about how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

The Biden administration is already securing its place in history as the most disastrous American presidency to date. In less than two-and-a-half years, the angry Divider-in-Chief Biden has presided over more domestic and foreign policy debacles than Barack Obama could ever have hoped for. As General Michael Flynn catalogs in the foreword to a brand new book titled Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America, our nation now faces

chronic unemployment and inflation, a border crisis, grave threats to our constitutional liberties, increased violence and lawlessness from the leftist groups Antifa and Black Lives Matter, a weakening dollar, the emboldening of our enemies worldwide, and even worse on the horizon… This is the world Barack Obama has made. This is his legacy.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How The West Sanctions Enemies: Floods Them with Rewards by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19647/turkey-sanctions-rewards

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tirelessly struggles to harm Western interests. He should be punished and sanctioned for doing that. Instead, the UN, under U.S. direction, rewarded Turkey by appointing a close Erdoğan confidant to a critical Afghan post, and the Biden administration rewarded Erdoğan by requesting Congressional authorization to sell critical fighter jet parts to Turkey.
In an effort to help Putin evade sanctions, Turkey agreed to pay 25% of its natural gas bill to Russia in rubles. In return, to help Erdoğan find a way out of a punishing economic crisis, Putin deferred repayment Turkey’s $20 billion gas debts to Russia until 2024.
By contrast, Turkey’s relations with the West have seen one bottom after another.
Erdoğan’s request for the extradition [from Sweden and Finland] of “terrorists” does not fit into the judicial system of any democratic country: he insists that everyone who opposes his rule is a “terrorist” — therefore more than half of 85 million Turkish citizens are terrorists.
On April 17, the Biden administration officially notified Congress about the planned sale to Turkey of critical avionics software upgrades for its current fleet of F-16 fighter aircraft. “Turkey is a longstanding and valued NATO ally,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. “The Biden administration supports Turkey’s efforts to bring the avionics of its F-16 fleet up to standard.”
Anything for a sale?
Perhaps the Turkish foreign minister was right to call Biden “charlatan.”

Some Western governments, in particular the U.S. administration, have a bizarre way of sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s staunchest allies: by flooding them with rewards. Take for instance, Putin’s not-so-secret Trojan Horse in NATO, Turkey.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘No Correlation’: Steve Milloy Slams Climate Alarmists’ Extreme Weather Claims By Catherine Salgado

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/05/22/no-correlation-steve-milloy-slams-climate-alarmists-extreme-weather-claims-n1697219

As usual, climate alarmists need to chill out. Junk Science’s Steve Milloy slammed recent scare-mongering that man-made climate change is supposedly causing increasing extreme weather events. “There is no correlation between emissions and any type of extreme weather event,” Milloy said in exclusive comments to PJ Media.

Braindead climate crazies made news Sunday when they dyed Rome’s iconic Trevi Fountain black to protest fossil fuels and “catastrophic” flooding in Italy, which the climate alarmists attribute to climate change. But some experts are calling their bluff, insisting that extreme weather events are not worsening and climate change is not spurring them. That includes Steve Milloy, who has been a leading truth-teller critiquing climate dogmatism for over 20 years.

“There is no correlation between emissions and any type of extreme weather event. So the activist effort to link ‘climate change’ with extreme weather is simply without a basis in fact,” Milloy told me. “Activists like to dramatize their concern for the environment, but it’s always evident they have spent little time learning anything about it.”

Climate change “experts” have been wildly and consistently wrong in their predictions for 50 years now. In fact, just recently, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — confirmed by NASA satellite data — provided evidence that there has not been any global warming for the past eight years. Furthermore, evidence showed that major hurricanes dropped to a near-record low in 2022. Things just aren’t adding up the way climate doomsayers claim.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where’s a Special Counsel When You Need One? Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://themessenger.com/opinion/wheres-a-special-counsel-when-you-need-one

Some people say nothing is certain in this life. I beg to differ, and I defy anyone to show that I have this wrong: If Donald Trump were president, and one of his sons had been under investigation by his Department of Justice (DOJ) for several years with no action, and his attorney general had stubbornly declined to appoint a special counsel — lamely contending that there was no insuperable conflict of interest for the president’s Justice Department to investigate the president’s son — that would be the lead story in nearly every press outlet. The outrage in Washington would be palpable.  

Of course, it wouldn’t come to that. The media-Democrat complex drumbeat would be too tirelessly cacophonous. Conservative pundits would concede that, while they were generally skeptical of special counsels, the Justice Department is bound by regulations to appoint one when there are (a) good-faith grounds for an investigation or prosecution, and (b) a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from credibly investigating or prosecuting the matter in the normal course.

Congressional Democrats would inveigh on the Capitol steps, in its hearing rooms, and in ceaseless cable TV interviews from the Rotunda, that a special counsel must be appointed — and, if not, then the attorney general should be held in contempt of Congress or perhaps even impeached. It would not take long before the Republican-controlled Justice Department wilted, just as the Trump Justice Department did in 2017, amid the hysteria of the “Russiagate” farce and the equally nonsensical claim that Trump’s firing of then-FBI director James Comey amounted to an “obstruction” of the supposed Russia-collusion caper (i.e., the investigation that the FBI knew by then was baseless, according to the Durham Report). And just as the Bush DOJ did in 2003, in response to a manufactured controversy over the leak of a CIA officer’s identity (under circumstances where investigators already knew who the leaker was and that the leak had not violated federal law).

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Can Trump Escape The ‘MAGA Extremist’ Label? I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/24/can-trump-escape-the-maga-extremist-label-ii-tipp-poll/

It has become increasingly common to hear both the media and Democratic politicians describe so-called MAGA followers of Donald Trump as “extremists.” Whether true or not, that label appears to have stuck among a large share of the American electorate and could pose a major challenge for Trump going forward, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

In early May, we asked Americans the following question: “Do you agree or disagree with describing Trump supporters as MAGA extremists?” The online poll of 1,480 adults across the country was taken from May 3-5. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

The overall results suggest a possible electoral hurdle for the Trump campaign: Among those queried, 50% agreed that Trump supporters could be described as “MAGA extremists.” Roughly 39% said they disagreed.

Broken down a bit further, 34% said they “strongly agreed,” while 27% said they “strongly disagreed.” Another 16% said they agreed “somewhat,” versus 12% said they disagreed somewhat.

Not surprisingly, there was an overwhelming response depending on a person’s political affiliation. Some 70% of Democrats called MAGA followers “extremist,” compared with just 24% of Republicans and 46% of independents.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Wokesters in Search of Nonbinary Birds Another dispatch arrives from the exciting frontiers of politicized science.James Freeman

Posted By on May 24th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wokesters-in-search-of-nonbinary-birds-1d65ed47?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The politicization of formerly respected scientific publications is one of society’s more disturbing recent trends and it seems that yet another periodical is willing to surrender its claim to authority.

Laura Helmuth, Editor in chief of Scientific American, recently tweeted:

White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways
P.S. Nature is amazing
P.P.S. Sex is not binary

Other Twitter users were not impressed. Ms. Helmuth’s missive now carries an attachment from Twitter:

Readers added context they thought people might want to know
White-throated sparrows have 2 sexes with 4 unique chromosome combinations.
There are still just 2 sexes that produce either sperm or eggs.
The female types are the white-striped females and the tan-striped females. The male birds are white-striped males and tan striped males.

One can debate whether and how Twitter should address errors in user comments, but it’s clear that the operators of the social media platform are not the only ones raising an objection to the claim of a sparrow with four sexes