Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF) has 17 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of September 9, with 14 cases coming from individuals who have been fully jabbed.
The public school, located just outside the city of Chicago, lists on its COVID dashboard 79% of students as fully jabbed and 88% of teachers and staff fully inoculated. At least 11 cases are students and four are employees, but the breakdown of vaccinated individuals is not provided.
Illinois Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker has mandated all school staff receive the jab as a condition of employment. College students must also get jabbed.
While K-12 students are not required to get vaccinated in the Land of Lincoln, the high school has encouraged its enrollees to get jabbed.
“Earlier in the pandemic, the overall target for approaching herd immunity was 70% of our population fully vaccinated,” the school said. “However, the Delta variant has changed the equation. According to our most recent guidance, we should aim for a fully vaccinated rate of closer to 90% or higher.”
It has also hosted jab clinics for teachers and staff and asked everyone to submit inoculation proof, though it is not yet mandatory.
LifeSiteNews emailed OPRF on September 14 but did not receive a response to questions. LifeSite asked communications director Karin Sullivan and communications coordinator Jackie McGoey if they could confirm the infection data and if they had any comment on the infections among fully jabbed students and staff.
(Read more at LifeSiteNews for correlations to UK and Israeli studies)
If the initial projections had been correct, herd immunity would have been reached with 70% vaccination
The fact that people can catch, transmit, and die from COVID-19 (maybe better described as COVID-1984) after getting the vaccine argues strongly against getting the vaccine. The additional heart inflammation risks associated with the vaccination (refer to article #7 in this post, since WordPress cannot handle stable in-file links) really brings this business into question.
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Virus surge hits New England despite high vaccination rates
Hospitals across the region are seeing full intensive care units and staff shortages are starting to affect care. Public officials are pleading with the unvaccinated to get the shots. Health care workers are coping with pent-up demand for other kinds of care that had been delayed by the pandemic.
“I think it’s clearly frustrating for all of us,” said Michael Pieciak, the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation who monitors COVID-19 statistics for the state. “We want kids to be safe in school, we want parents not to have to worry about their child’s education and health.”
Even though parts of New England are seeing record case counts, hospitalizations and deaths that rival pre-vaccine peaks, largely among the unvaccinated, the region hasn’t seen the impact the delta variant wave has wrought on other parts of the country.
According to statistics from The Associated Press, the five states with the highest percentage of a fully vaccinated population are all in New England, with Vermont leading, followed by Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. New Hampshire is 10th.
According to the AP data, full vaccination rates across the six New England states range from a high of 69.4% in Vermont to 61.5% in New Hampshire.
Despite the relatively high vaccination rates — the U.S. as a whole is averaging 55.5% — there are still hundreds of thousands of people across the region who, for one reason or another, remain unvaccinated and vulnerable to infection.
Now, a Rhode Island official said he didn’t think the 70% vaccination goal, once touted as the level that would help end the pandemic in the state, is enough.
“What we’ve learned with delta and looking beyond delta, is because that’s where our focus is as well, to really reach those levels of vaccination, to give you that true population level protection, you need to be in excess of 90%,” said Tom McCarthy, the executive director of the Rhode Island Department of Health COVID Response Unit.
“We have it in our power to end this needless suffering and heartbreak; a way to protect our health and that of the people we love; a way to give our heroic doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals a much-needed break; a way to protect our children – please get vaccinated today,” Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said recently.
Yet the head of UMass Memorial Health, the largest health system in central Massachusetts, said recently that regional hospitals were seeing nearly 20 times more COVID-19 patients than in June and there isn’t an ICU bed to spare.
Case counts in Vermont, which has continually boasted about high vaccination and low hospitalization and death rates, are the highest during the pandemic. Hospitalizations are approaching the pandemic peak from last winter and September was Vermont’s second-deadliest month during the pandemic.
On Sept. 22, Maine had nearly 90 people in intensive care units, a pandemic peak for the state. Maine also recently passed 1,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Dr. Gretchen Volpe, an infectious disease specialist at the 48-bed York Hospital in Maine, said the delta surge has made it harder to find care for patients who need more assistance.
(Read about the national issues and responses in Vermont at the Associated Press)
Biden told us a lie when he said that “this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
If the vaccinated are catching and dying of COVID, then this is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
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Former CDC Director gives alarming statistic on fully-vaccinated COVID deaths
Speaking during an interview with Fox News Monday afternoon, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said that more than 40 percent of people who have recently died from Wuhan coronavirus in Maryland were fully vaccinated.
“A lot of times people may feel it’s a rare event that fully vaccinated people die. I happen to be the senior advisor to Governor Hogan in the state of Maryland. In the last 6-8 weeks, more than 40 percent of people who died in Maryland were fully vaccinated,” Redfield said, responding to the death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Dr. Robert Redfield just told @MarthaMacCallum on @Foxnews that 40% of the recent Covid deaths in the state of Maryland were among people who are fully vaccinated. Redfield says this under scores the importance of maintaining a high level of immunity.
(View their video and read a quote from the Wall Street Journal at Townhall)
Forty percent. Tell me which of ABC, NBC, or CBS told us about 40% of hospitalized COVID patients being fully-vaccinated
If you post a link to the recording of the evening news broadcast that announced 40% or more of the COVID patients being fully-vaccinated, I will do my best to publicize the newly-discovered truthfulness of the main stream media. I will put it on Twitter, Parler, MeWe, and every other social media outlet I can access. However, if nobody can, I will also do the same.
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“Fully vaccinated” were the majority of COVID deaths in Sweden, UK in September
“Fully vaccinated” people accounted for the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden and the U.K. last month, government data has revealed, amid a rise in breakthrough cases and deaths in other Western countries.
The Public Health Agency of Sweden reported earlier this month that 70 percent of COVID-19 deaths between September 1-24 occurred in the “fully vaccinated,” according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Sweden recorded around 130 fatal COVID cases during that timeframe.
“It is still mainly about the elderly, but vaccine experts still see a tendency towards declining vaccine protection in Sweden,” Svenska Dagbladetsaid.
Possible reasons for the uptick in vaccinated deaths include “that it has now been quite a while since the oldest ones were vaccinated, that the vaccine coverage has increased, that the restrictions have been eased, and that the Delta strain has taken over,” microbiology researcher Farshid Jalalvand told the paper.
Sweden’s death numbers crashed after health officials scaled back restrictions at the beginning of June, however, with virtually no COVID fatalities reported in the Scandinavian country throughout July and August. Deaths began to climb again by mid-September, by which time nearly 75 percent of Swedes older than 16 were “fully vaccinated.”
Despite Sweden’s mass vaccination campaign, the recent surge in infections has led to the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Swedish senior care residents since February.
New testing protocol announced by Swedish authorities last week may make breakthrough cases less of a factor in future data reporting in any case. On Thursday, the Public Health Agency announced that “fully vaccinated” people with coronavirus symptoms will be exempt from testing requirements, days after the agency revealed the spike in post-vaccination COVID deaths.
UK: 70% of COVID deaths were ‘fully vaccinated’
Recent data published by British health authorities indicated a similar breakthrough surge in the U.K.
A report by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) published October 7 noted that most British COVID-19 deaths in September were among the “fully vaccinated,” as were most hospitalizations. The U.K. has a nearly identical vaccination rate to Sweden’s.
Between September 6 and October 3, 70 percent of deadly COVID cases occurred in the fully-jabbed, according to the UKHSA data, with 2,281 deaths in “fully vaccinated” people and just 611 in the unvaccinated within 28 days of a positive test. Partially vaccinated people accounted for 98 deaths.
(Read more at LifeSiteNews about deaths among the multiply vaccinated)
Thankfully, the British press does expose a degree of the problem
Again and again, America finds itself beholden to foreign press outlets (like those in Canada, Britain, Australia, and Europe) for accurate news (as opposed to the bilge produced by the liberal American press).
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Data shows increase of vaccinated people among hospitalized Marylanders
While state data shows the vast majority of Marylanders currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are either unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, the percentage of people fully vaccinated is ticking upward.
Infections, illness and hospitalizations are increasing rapidly among fully vaccinated people, according to data from the Maryland Department of Health and new research.
Some experts said it’s time to reframe thinking that the vaccine likely won’t prevent you from ever getting sick, but it will probably keep you out of the hospital and almost certainly prevent you from dying.
“It’s scary, very scary. You think you’re safe, but you’re not,” said Deborah Hernandez, of Baltimore County.
Hernandez got her second dose of the Moderna vaccine in the beginning of February. Seven months later, she got COVID-19.
“I was pretty surprised to say the least,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez was at the Baltimore Convention Center Field Hospital on Tuesday for a two-hour infusion with monoclonal antibodies. She’s worried about long-COVID and passing the virus on to her grandchildren, especially since she had been so vigilant already.
“Just because I have been cautious throughout — not going to restaurants and avoiding big crowds — it just kind of took me by surprise,” Hernandez said.
Health experts said this is the reality of the outbreak this September. While it remains rare for somebody who’s fully vaccinated to die from COVID-19, it is no longer rare for the fully vaccinated to get sick — and sick enough to be hospitalized.
Anne Arundel County Health Officer Dr. Nilesh Kalyanaraman said it’s likely a combination of waning vaccine efficacy and the rise of the delta variant.
“Because delta spreads more easily and causes more severe disease, we do see some hospitalizations,” Kalyanaraman said.
Over the past three months in Anne Arundel County, about 30% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 are fully vaccinated.
There’s a similar timeframe and trend in neighboring Howard County, where health officials said roughly 30% to 40% of people hospitalized with COVID-19 are fully vaccinated.
(Read more at WBAL to get the illogical statements of people telling you to get vaccinated)
Also, I tip my hat to the small-town outlets who report on the facts
Here, just as the former CDC director observed that 40% of COVID patients were fully-vaccinated, a local news outlet bucked the trend and reported that 40% of Marylanders hospitalized with COVID were fully-vaccinated. Thank God for truthful people who remain in journalism.
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NIH Admits to Funding Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan, Says EcoHealth Violated Reporting Requirements
A top NIH official admitted in a Wednesday letter that U.S. taxpayers funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and revealed that EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. non-profit that funneled NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was not transparent about the work it was doing.
In the letter to Representative James Comer (R., Ky.), Lawrence A. Tabak of the NIH cites a “limited experiment” that was conducted to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” The laboratory mice infected with the modified bat virus “became sicker” than those infected with the unmodified bat virus.
The revelation vindicates Republican senator Rand Paul, who got into heated exchanges with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease director Anthony Fauci during his May and July testimonials before Congress over the gain-of-function question. At the second hearing, Paul accused Fauci of misleading Congress by denying that the U.S. had funded gain-of-function projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Gain-of-function research involves extracting viruses from animals and artificially engineering them in a laboratory to make them more transmissible or deadly to humans.
In keeping with Fauci’s refusal to use “gain-of-function,” Tabak avoids the term, though the work he described matches its commonplace definition precisely.
A previously unpublished EcoHealth grant proposal filed with NIAID, obtained by The Intercept, had already exposed that $599,000 of the total grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was for research designed to make viruses more dangerous and/or infectious.
(Read about how Fauci’s statements can be proven false at National Review)
If I remember a Senate hearing or two, it seems that Mr. Fauci may find himself brought up on a charge of contempt of Congress
Because it is obvious that Mr. Fauci has lied to Congress and accused Senator Paul of lying (when Senator Paul was telling the truth), I hope we can look forward to setting the record straight soon.
Today during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel of expert advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discussed rare instances of heart inflammation among mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients. The committee agreed the vaccines are likely linked to cases of myocarditis and pericarditis but said the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.
The first reports of myocarditis and pericarditis occurred in Israel in January, the experts said, and have followed in all countries using mRNAs. The myocarditis (inflammation of heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissues surrounding the heart) associated with vaccines are usually mild and respond well to a course of treatment with non-steroidal anti-inflammatories.
“Clinical presentation of myocarditis cases following vaccination has been distinct, occurring most often within 1 week after dose two, with chest pain as the most common presentation, ” said Grace Lee, MD, chair of ACIP’s safety subcommittee.
“mRNA vaccines may be a new trigger for myocarditis, yet it does have some different characteristics,” said Matthew Oster, MD, MPH, from the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force.
The most common symptoms reported by patients were chest pain, shortness of breath, and difficulty sleeping.
Cases mostly in males under 30
Tom Shimabukuro, MD, MPH, MBA, the deputy director of the Immunization Safety Office at the CDC, said the agency has received reports of 1,226 cases of myocarditis, with 827 (67.5%) reported after dose two of either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.
Of those cases identified after second doses, 563 followed the Pfizer vaccine series. In total, that’s approximately 12.6 heart inflammation cases per million doses administered in the United States.
Among the 1,226 patients, 484 are younger than 29, and roughly two-thirds are men.
A major talking point through the ACIP meeting was that only Pfizer is approved for emergency use in the United States for teens ages 12 to 18. For this age-group, adenovirus-based vaccines, such as Johnson & Johnson, are not currently available.
Doran Fink, MD, PhD, deputy director-clinical, division of vaccines and related products applications at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said the agency would add warnings about the rare side effects on Moderna and Pfizer fact sheets. The CDC also said patients who develop heart inflammation after a first dose of mRNA should wait until their inflammation heals before getting a second dose, and should talk to their care providers.
(Read more at CIDRaP on the heart risks of COVID alone)
Of all the reasons set forward for not taking the jab, this is the most compelling
Out of all of the reasons presented in this blog post that argue against taking the jab, this is the one that makes the greatest call for not getting the jab.
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Finland joins Sweden and Denmark in limiting Moderna COVID-19 vaccine
Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna’s (MRNA.O) COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its use.
Mika Salminen, director of the Finnish health institute, said Finland would instead give Pfizer’s vaccine to men born in 1991 and later. Finland offers shots to people aged 12 and over.
“A Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly higher risk than others of developing myocarditis,” he said.
Swedish and Danish health officials had announced on Wednesday they would pause the use of the Moderna vaccine for all young adults and children, citing the same unpublished study.
Norwegian health officials reiterated on Wednesday that they recommended men under the age of 30 opt for Pfizer’s vaccine.
The Finnish institute said the Nordic study would be published within a couple of weeks and preliminary data had been sent to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment.
The EMA’s safety committee concluded in July that such inflammatory heart conditions could occur in very rare cases following vaccination with Spikevax or the Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty jab, more often in younger men after the second dose.
Regulators in the United States, EU and the World Health Organization have however stressed that the benefits of shots based on the mRNA technology used by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech in preventing COVID-19 continue to outweigh the risks.
A Moderna spokesperson said late on Wednesday it was aware of the decisions by the Swedish and Danish regulators.
“These are typically mild cases and individuals tend to recover within a short time following standard treatment and rest. The risk of myocarditis is substantially increased for those who contract COVID-19, and vaccination is the best way to protect against this.”
Italy’s Health Minister Roberto Speranza told reporters Italy was not planning to suspend the Moderna vaccine and said European countries should work together more closely to coordinate better.
If you are under 30 or have a heart condition, it seems a good thing to avoid the jab
Because the function of the mRNA vaccination is to cause reactions that will make the body fight off the virus, it seems likely that the “cure” might be more deadly than the sickness.
Nonetheless, of course medical decisions should be made on an informed basis (which would involve the consulting of a trusted medical professional — not necessarily a blog).
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So much for gloom. Here are the comics that don’t run for office.
Better for you to jump, Biden
Biden Oil Policy
Bidenomics – I just hope he doesn’t have a dead-man’s switch
Love him or hate him, Michael Tracey offers commentary that neither side is truly going to like, but it’s necessary, nonetheless. Progressives hate him because he shatters their fragile narratives about racism, Black Lives Matter, Russian collusion, and the overall Trump derangement that has engulfed the Democratic Party and the liberal media establishment. He’s not a conservative, so there you have it regarding what he says about the GOP. Still, to get an honest take from the other side, he’s worth a follow.
As of now, he seems to be angering the Left more with his pervasive attacks against the insanity that has engulfed his side of the aisle for almost four years. During the debate on Tuesday, he ripped the media for recycling the white supremacist nonsense again. First, he noted that he’s been on the ground to areas heavily impacted by leftist riots. There were no white supremacists.
“As someone who spent two months covering the aftermath of the most widespread riots in at least 50 years, this never-ending fixation with illusory organized ‘white supremacist’ groups couldn’t be more absurd. It’s 99% a media invention totally disconnected from reality,” he wrote.
As someone who spent two months covering the aftermath of the most widespread riots in at least 50 years, this never-ending fixation with illusory organized "white supremacist" groups couldn't be more absurd. It's 99% a media invention totally disconnected from reality
"Proud Boys" and similar groups would be marginal non-entities if the media didn't chronically exaggerate their influence to advance a fictitious narrative -- it's such a joke that they would even be mentioned in a presidential debate
It's fun when self-proclaimed leftists mindlessly regurgitate evidence-free FBI claims when it appears to support their delusional certainty that white supremacist militias are the biggest power centers in contemporary US society
The biggest ally of the small number of "white supremacists" who actually do exist is the hysterical profit-driven corporate media -- as well as activist dupes who march in lockstep -- which constantly pumps up these non-entities for clicks, ratings and cheap anti-Trump theatrics
Left-wing media activists can make fun of Tom Friedman all they want, but their comically apocalyptic conception of Trump is roughly the same as his. Bernie screams about the need for a Popular Front, AOC says literal fascism is on the ballot, etc. https://t.co/6Tmhy11GpB
NYT finally discovers the existence of nationwide insurrectionary anarchist networks, around four months late. But we're all supposed to be in a panic about dumpy guys who think Gavin McInnes is funny pic.twitter.com/Z5SWpts2Et
Manufacturing hysteria around "Proud Boys" and other joke right-wing groups is a standard left/liberal conformity-enforcing tactic. Instead of producing a rational argument against Trump (not difficult) they once again use emotional manipulation to stoke fake "fascism" fears
The media's total incuriosity about the ideological underpinnings of the most pervasive riots in half a century now creates a situation where pundits can say with a straight face that the most worrisome source of potential street unrest are joke organizations like "Proud Boys"
Trump has rejected the premise of "WILL YOU DISAVOW???" questions for five years because the questions are virtually always asked in bad faith. And the term "white supremacist" has been stretched beyond recognition, so who exactly would he be "condemning"https://t.co/rYa43pHxCd
That’s sure to trigger the liberal media, but Tracey added, “’Proud Boys’ and similar groups would be marginal non-entities if the media didn’t chronically exaggerate their influence to advance a fictitious narrative.”
Well, of course, you can imagine the reactions to this from the lefties. Tracey has been one of main targets inside the ship for the legions of the ‘woke.’ Yet, how long have we heard about white supremacist terrorism and how it’s somehow an existential threat? Besides those who actively seek them out for interviews, I have yet to actually see a Proud Boy, a Nazi, or a Klan member. It’s the same thing the QAnon nonsense. These people don’t number in the millions. It is over-blown. And one of the worst pivots the liberal media has made in the past ten years on this stuff is trying to say that white supremacist terrorism is more deadly or troublesome than that from radical Islamic terror groups. The KKK is a bigger threat than ISIS or al-Qaeda? Yeah, sure, Jan.
Yet, his latest thread is sure to bring the left-wing clowns into full froth, where Tracey highlights the real allies of white supremacy: the liberal media [emphasis mine]:
“The biggest ally of the small number of ‘white supremacists’ who actually do exist is the hysterical profit-driven corporate media — as well as activist dupes who march in lockstep — which constantly pumps up these non-entities for clicks, ratings and cheap anti-Trump theatrics.”
In addition to this revelation, I also ran across a statement from the Proud Boys that said they had won a suit against the bigoted Southern Poverty Law Center for calling them racist
It seems that the Proud Boys have not only won a suit against the SPLC, they have announced a suit against Joe Biden for calling them racist.
Mr. Biden, the best way to eliminate racism is to stop being racist. Considering your association with the Exalted Cyclops and Grand Dragon, you might want to come clean.
"Do you have any idea, John, what an 'Exalted Cyclops of the KKK' is?
Joe Biden’s campaign team has lifted the curtain on their latest campaign ad target: Christians. The team will air several ads featuring the Democratic presidential candidate engaged in various church-related activities and present him as a man of faith.
The new ads show Biden speaking from a pulpit, head bowed in prayer, or standing in front of church’s stained-glass window.
A radio ad includes a parishioner from his home church talking about how Biden is a regular at Sunday Mass. “That’s Joe Biden, a man guided by faith.”
The ads will air in several key battleground states where the former vice president has struggled to resonate with religious voters. Biden has consistently deflected criticism of his inability to impress Christian voters by reminding them that he grew up Catholic and at one point attended mass regularly.
The ads will air in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio, all places where the margin between Biden and President Trump has consistently shrunken in recent weeks.
According to the Washington Post, one of the ads, titled “Morning,” features Biden leaning on his faith to move forward after experiencing personal tragedy. Biden, who lost his first wife and infant daughter to a car accident and his adult son Beau to brain cancer, has never been hesitant to discuss his personal tragedies on the campaign trail.
Supporters featured in his ads, another of which is called “Principles,” prop up Biden by saying he is a man led by faith and that he has been seen multiple times attending mass. However, Biden’s inability to appeal to Christian voters is not rooted in his mass attendance; it’s specifically related to his and his party’s support of unlimited abortion.
Although Biden was once part of the Democratic Party that supported abortions only if they were “safe, legal, and rare,” has rejected any pro-life sentiment in recent years and has largely bled built-in support from Catholic Americans who are by-and-large against abortion.
If you are a Christian, it will be evident by your works
Although works are not a precondition for being saved, works will be part of the saved person’s life. That is, you do not have to work your way into heaven as shown to us in these verses:
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9 NASB)
For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.
However, once you are saved, you will want to show proof of that salvation. Furthermore, if there really is a saving faith in you, it will have to come out in the following characteristics of saving faith.
Faith is not indifferent, but involved – This comes out in James 2: 14-16.
What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can [n]that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? (James 2: 14-16 NASB)
Faith is not independent, but in a partnership – Faith and works go together. Authentic faith always has some results. By “dead,” James means “useless and impotent.” James means it is a phony faith.
Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself. (James 2: 17 NASB)
Faith is not invisible, but on display – The word “show” means “to bring to light, to display, or to exhibit.” We delude ourselves if we think it doesn’t matte whether we show our faith or not. James whole point is that if we don’t show it, we don’t have it.
But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” (James 2:18 NASB)
Faith is not merely intellectual, but from the heart – James mocks those religious intellectuals who love to debate, but have no intention of committing themselves to Jesus.
You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless? (James 2:19-20 NASB)
Specifically, Joe Biden should not just say he is faithful, but prove it
First, because I already have enough information to make an informed decision on matters concerning Joe Biden, the spiritual wellbeing of Joe Biden might be a prayerful concern to me (but it does not change my own situation). To put it more bluntly, talking about the foul-ups of Joe Biden can amount to gossip on my part since:
Jesus said to him, “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow Me!” (John 21:22 NASB)
So, now that I have completed at least a first round of hair-splitting regarding the borderlands between making good judgements (Matthew 10:16) that involve people and being judgmental to those people (Matthew 7:1-3), we can look at the things wrong with Biden claiming to be a faithful Catholic.
If Biden is a true Christian and Catholic, let him make substantive changes to the Democrat abortion, justice, and healthcare policies. Otherwise, he can save his advertising dollars for dementia care. https://twitter.com/markone1blog/status/1311801169103249408
Cases of the new coronavirus that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan have expanded into the thousands, with more than 170 deaths. The virus’ spread elsewhere — including the U.S., which has at least six confirmed cases, the last one marking the first time the illness was spread from one person to another here — contributed to the World Health Organization’s decision to declare the outbreak a public health emergency. The Gazette spoke to Professor of Epidemiology Marc Lipsitch, director of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’sCenter for Communicable Disease Dynamics and an expert on the spread of infectious diseases, including his work during the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003.
Speaker:
Quote
GAZETTE:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified a handful of coronavirus cases in the nation and is investigating others. How worried should residents be?
LIPSITCH:
At this point, worry won’t accomplish anything and doesn’t help. It is reasonably likely that there will be more cases in the United States, but whether that means double digits or many more still remains to be seen. I do think it may be more challenging to control than SARS, because it seems that a lot of cases are relatively mild, which makes them harder to identify.
GAZETTE:
It’s a coronavirus, which includes not only SARS but things like the common cold. Does this mean, when the symptoms are mild, that it’s easy to get it mixed up with something like a cold or the flu?
LIPSITCH:
It seems that way. Some of the symptoms are more severe than colds or than typical flu, but not everybody has a severe infection. So the milder infections can certainly be missed.
GAZETTE:
One thing that struck me watching this unfold is the rapid expansion in China. Is that because it’s more infectious than we had thought, or is it because now that we’re looking for it all these mild cases are turning up?
LIPSITCH:
I think it’s a mix of things. I think responsible people weren’t saying how infectious it was until recently. The most optimistic scenario — that it’s acquired from animals and then transmitted among humans only very modestly — is no longer credible. Each day it seems clearer that transmission is relatively common — estimates are converging around something similar to SARS. Reporting has been very irregular, so the big jumps in case numbers don’t necessarily mean new cases, just newly reported cases. We should remember that it’s only been about a month since the problem was recognized. The fact that we’re able to test and confirm cases of a completely unknown virus is amazing and a testament to very, very good biological work being done very quickly.
So it’s quite extraordinary that we know as much as we do, but we still don’t know that much. By comparison, however, SARS broke out in November of 2002, and it didn’t come to global attention until February [2003]. So this epidemic may have started that same time in 2019 and came to light within a month or two of its start date.
Speaker:
Quote
GAZETTE:
How big a difference does that time make, as far as the number of cases you have to deal with?
LIPSITCH:
It’s much better. People are still trying to figure out the doubling time of the epidemic. Because right now, what we’re seeing is doublings of cases, sometimes even in one day, but that’s because people are getting tested, not because new cases are appearing. But whatever the doubling time is, a month is probably at least enough time for it to grow four- to 10-fold, if not more. A month is a lot of time in an epidemic.
GAZETTE:
How does this virus compare to SARS as far as its death rate?
LIPSITCH:
We don’t know. Of the diagnosed cases of SARS, about 10 percent of them died. By comparison, seasonal flu is about a tenth of a percent or lower. This one, we don’t know either the numerator or the denominator for that calculation. Not enough cases have been diagnosed to know how many people have been infected even to an order of magnitude. There were probably some deaths that weren’t attributed to this virus. Maybe not that many, but some, especially in places that weren’t looking for them at the time. So I think we just don’t know. It doesn’t look like it’s as bad as SARS, which is very good from one perspective, but it also means that it may be more challenging to control if the overall spectrum of illness is milder, because it’s harder to recognize and isolate cases.
If you read this with a discerning eye, it shows how little we knew
As you read through the above interview, note how much dodges the question. A few questions honestly answer with “we don’t know” or “why worry?” From this lack of information, those in the political and media drove a panic in the nation.
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China lied on the coronavirus. It put everyone at risk.
Compared with the response in some previous outbreaks, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and swine flu in 2009, biomedical detective work got underway quickly in China in December, when people began to suffer a pneumonia-like illness. Chinese researchers isolated the new coronavirus, sequenced its genetic code and prepared reagents for diagnostics. But during all the weeks of this activity in December, Beijing largely kept the lid on information. It did not alert the public until well into January. The thought police were still on the beat, even as the virus spread.
The common reactions of Chinese leaders to crisis — strict secrecy, media censorship, desperate attempts to protect “stability” and slavish adherence to central authority — were evident throughout the early period of the crisis, according to a detailed insider account published by the China Media Project. On Dec. 30, this account says, the Wuhan Health Commission “issued an order to hospitals, clinics and other healthcare units strictly prohibiting the release of any information about treatment of this new disease.”
The account says that while Chinese officials informed the World Health Organization of a new coronavirus outbreak, “they did not inform their own people, but instead maintained strict secrecy.” A free press might have made a difference — it might have at least raised questions about people’s illnesses. But such a press does not exist in China.
The World Health Organization on Thursday decided not to declare the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak a global emergency, despite the spread of the dangerous respiratory infection from China to at least five other countries.
Although the disease has reached beyond China, the number of cases in other countries is still relatively small, and the disease does not seem to be spreading within those countries, agency officials said. Of more than 800 cases now reported, the wide majority — and all the 25 deaths — have been in China, according to Chinese officials.
“At this time, there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission outside China,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, said at a news conference in Geneva. “That doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
“Make no mistake,” he added. “This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one.”
The committee weighing the decision was divided, its chairman, Dr. Didier Houssin, said during the briefing. Some members felt the course of the outbreak warranted an emergency declaration now, but others said it that was too soon to decide, citing the limited number of cases in countries outside China as well as the country’s efforts to contain the virus.
The money that we have poured into the WHO meant nothing; however, the loyalty of the WHO to a communist country obviously was more important than life
We should never again believe the words coming out of the WHO; therefore, we should never again devote our dollars to their support.
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In an example of incomplete information, Townhall suggested why the world shut down for the Wuhan Coronavirus, but not MERS, swine flu, SARS, or Ebola
So, for a virus that isn’t as lethal as say Ebola, why did we have to lock it down? Why didn’t we do so for the SARS or MERS outbreaks? FiveThirtyEight broke it down:
If the name didn’t give it away, SARS was caused by a virus similar to the one that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, but it didn’t have nearly the same impact. This is in spite of having a relatively high case fatality rate of 9.6 percent, compared to the current estimate for COVID-19: 1.4 percent.
Another respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, has an even higher case fatality rate of 34 percent. But it’s also led to fewer deaths than what we’ve already seen from COVID-19: As of January 2020, there have been 2,519 cases of MERS and 866 associated deaths from the infection.
SARS and MERS didn’t cause the same level of devastation that COVID-19 has largely because they aren’t as easily transmitted. Rather than moving by casual, person-to-person transmission, SARS and MERS spread from much closer contact, between family members or health care workers and patients (or, in the case of MERS, from camels to people directly). These viruses also aren’t spread through presymptomatic transmission, meaning infected people don’t spread it before they have symptoms. Once people got sick, they typically stayed home or were hospitalized, making it harder for them to spread the virus around.
As for Swine Flu, FiveThirtyEight noted that Swine Flu spread easily, though it was not as contagious as COVID-19 and not nearly as deadly, preventing our health care system from being overwhelmed:
“The 2009 pandemic, the H1N1 swine flu, that [disease] spread very, very well, but the fatality rate was quite low, and that’s the reason why it wasn’t dubbed as a particularly serious pandemic,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, in a February livestream.
Even with such a low case fatality rate, the swine flu had a high overall death toll due in part to how easily it spread. With an even higher case fatality rate and perhaps even a higher rate of transmission, COVID-19 has required drastic measures to prevent its spread.
What about Ebola, a disease with a mortality rate that can reach as high as 90 percent? Again, a highly lethal virus, perhaps the deadliest on this list, but blessedly hard to contract. It doesn’t spread like the flu:
Similar to MERS and SARS, Ebola is not easily transmittable. Infected people don’t spread the virus until they start showing symptoms, and even then the virus is hard to catch because it is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluid of an infected person, like blood, sweat, and urine, rather than through the kind of particles produced when someone sneezes or speaks. Unless you’re nursing patients (either at home or in a hospital setting) or tending to their body after they’ve died, it’s unlikely you’d acquire the infection.
Ebola also tends to cause pretty severe and identifiable symptoms, such as fever and fatigue followed by vomiting and diarrhea. Not only can infected people not spread the virus until they’re sick, but once they become sick, they’ll know it.
“If you want to see illnesses which are controllable, they all have transmission very much tied to symptoms, and this includes SARS and Ebola,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “If you’re in an Ebola zone, you can be pretty sure whether or not the person you’re talking to is a potentially risky contact.”
This makes it easier to isolate infected individuals and protect health care workers to limit the spread, which is what occurred in the 2014-2016 outbreak. It’s a striking difference from COVID-19, which we know can be spread without any symptoms at all, and even when people get sick, some people might have symptoms so mild that they’re not sure they have COVID-19 in the first place.
I will respectfully disagree with Townhall. We shut down due to misinformation and a lack of information
From poor information, people took guesses to be facts. For example, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo took the projections by Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins who said 583,000 would die in Texas (since he took the then-current projections of COVID ACT NOW as gospel). Now the projections are that there will be 1,000 deaths in Texas (refer below). We are not near that, but people still give some of this too much consideration.
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The mortality rate has fallen far below the projections
The model showed 6,000 would die in Texas. Now it’s 1K. What’s changed?
A revised model suggests Texas could have 5,000 fewer COVID-19 deaths than previously estimated.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is forecasting that Texas will have 957 deaths by Aug. 4, 2020. IHME models have been used by the White House.
That model had previously forecast around 6,000 deaths. Then 4,000, and now just under 1,000, said Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine.
If you continue to read, the “expert” suggests our quarantine worked
However, if that is the case, why does Sweden have a lower coronavirus mortality rate than Michigan (when both have the same population and Sweden never quarantined)?
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New York coronavirus general population mortality rate falls to 0.5%
The Hill points out that antibody testing has shown coronavirus infection rates in New York state may currently be at 14% and at 20% in New York City while the mortality rate for coronavirus has fallen to 0.5% for the general population of New York.
Preliminary data shows about 13.9 percent of the population of New York state — about 2.7 million people — have at some point been infected with the coronavirus.
About 3,000 people were randomly tested at grocery stores and other public locations to allow officials to get a broader sense of how widely the virus has spread in New York and how many people might now have immunity.
In New York City, 21 percent of residents had antibodies for coronavirus, compared with 3.6 percent in upstate New York, 16.7 percent in Long Island and 11.7 percent in the Westchester and Rockland area.
“They were infected three weeks ago, four weeks ago, five weeks ago, six weeks ago. But they had the virus, they developed the antibodies and they are now recovered,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said Thursday.
The data indicates the COVID-19 death rate in New York is about 0.5 percent. The tests were conducted over a two-day period in 19 counties and 40 localities.
Nearly everything we’ve been told about models, rates of infection, deaths, and recoveries was inaccurate.
I’m not here to argue that it was malfeasance or ignorance — both are unacceptable. But the one thing that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s stunning announcement made clear on Thursday is that there are some pretty shocking — and what should be — reassuring truths.
The implication of this is a shockwave to the system.
With a population of 19,540,500 the findings point out that over 2,500,000 New Yorkers had the virus and have recovered. Keep in mind that as of this writing that only 263,000 New Yorkers have currently confirmed cases. Also as of this writing New York has reported 19,543 fatalities.
We’ve been told that the true death rate is 7.4% in New York. We were told there would be hundreds of thousands dead. We were told that this was worse than the flu, which has still recorded more deaths to date in this past flu season—even though the CDC instructed medical personnel to start counting influenza, heart disease, pulmonary, respiratory, drug overdose, and possibly even car crash deaths as COVID-19 deaths.
We were told that we had to upend an economy, go into solitary confinement, and divorce ourselves from normal life because this would rage beyond any previous pandemic. We were told that this virus with 846,000 current confirmed cases was worse than the H1N1 that broke out on Obama’s watch that infected 60,000,000 people. (We were conveniently not told that Obama had authorized $3.7 million U.S. tax dollars to be used at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to utilize corona viruses in bats in 2015 — but that’s yet another deception of omission.)
But none of these “truths” turned out to be so.
The death rate in New York State isn’t 7.4%, it is actually .75%. The recently ended influenza season numbers from the CDC indicate possibly 56,000,000 cases of flu, 740,000 hospitalizations, and 62,000 deaths. Under the current count from the Johns Hopkins Dashboard in this five month stretch CoVid19 has racked up 845,959 confirmed cases, 122,000 hospitalizations and 46,972 deaths.
A couple of other observations are extremely relevant. To begin with the flu — which has no vaccine but rather a randomized version of a shot designed to help develop antibodies to fight the version of the flu that “smart people” *think* will be the primary version that particular year — has remedies that physicians prescribe in primary care on an as needed basis. So we’re not accustomed to thinking that the flu is this deadly killer that all of life must be shut down to prevent. CoVid19 had no known treatments at the beginning of the breakout, and for political reasons—and possibly financially incentivized ones to boot—the most effective treatment for CoVid19 became a political football. Even the supposed “negative” trials that were reported on this past weekend, had cherry picked subjects that were mostly late stage victims of the virus. As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko pointed out on my show this week, doing so created the negative outcomes “purposefully & by design.” When used under a physician’s care, in the primary care basis, and early on after testing or onset of symptoms, the hydroxycholoroquine, azithromycin, & zinc cocktail reduced the rates of deaths and long term infectious stages. Zelenko’s numbers to date: 1,450 patients treated, two deaths, four ventilator cases (all fully recovered,) and all others recovered. Zelenko and other physicians using the treatment are releasing the world’s largest Meta-study to date within the next few days that will examine more than 2,000 confirmed cases.
The antibody numbers from Cuomo also scream one other harsh reality. The virus was in America long before January.
… In case you’ve missed it, Sweden has taken a radically different approach in dealing with the coronavirus. It has essentially opted for a strategy of “herd immunity” through exposure.
This strategy posits that most people under age 65 who get the coronavirus — if they do not have major pre-existing medical conditions — will either experience it as a typical or tough flu, or completely asymptomatically, and the number who will get so sick that they require hospitalization or emergency care will reliably be less than the number of beds needed to care for them.
So, if you do your best to shelter and sequester all of those over 65 and those with serious pre-existing conditions — notably heart and lung disease and diabetes — and let much of the rest of the population circulate and get exposed and become naturally immune, once about 60 percent of your population has gone through this you’ll have herd immunity and the viral transmission will be blocked. (This assumes that immunity for some period of time results from exposure, as most experts think it will.)
After all, herd immunity is our goal — either from vaccination or from enough people building natural immunity. Those are the only ways to achieve it.
The upside of Sweden’s strategy — if it works — is that your economy does not take such a deep hit from lockdowns. It is unlike the strategy of suppression pursued in cities across America right now — as well as around the globe — where, when the lockdown is over, your population largely has not developed immunity and so most everyone remains vulnerable to the virus, and to a second wave in the fall.
Think of the challenge of New York City. Its hospitals would have been overwhelmed by the sudden crush of patients, so the months of lockdown of millions will surely, and vitally, have saved lives. But it has come at huge cost to jobs and businesses and with little progress to herd immunity — and with the prospect that the virus can come roaring back as soon as the lockdown is lifted, unless there is Chinese-level testing, tracking, tracing and quarantining those carrying the infection. And even that might not work.
Now think of Stockholm. Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency — the nation’s top infectious disease official and architect of Sweden’s coronavirus response, said in an interview published in USA Today on Tuesday: “We think that up to 25 percent people in Stockholm have been exposed to coronavirus and are possibly immune. A recent survey from one of our hospitals in Stockholm found that 27 percent of staff there are immune. We think that most of those are immune from transmission in society, not the workplace. We could reach herd immunity in Stockholm within a matter of weeks.”
Tegnell explains that Sweden is not just blithely letting all Swedes get the disease to achieve herd immunity, but rather is pursuing a designed strategy for the most sustainable way to navigate through this pandemic. So colleges and high schools are closed, but kindergarten through grade nine are open, as are many restaurants, stores and businesses.
But the government has also issued social-distancing guidelines, which many people are abiding by, encouraged working from home and discouraged nonessential travel. Most important, it has encouraged everyone over 70 to stay at home and banned gatherings of more than 50 people and visits to nursing homes.
The result, so far, Tegnell noted, has been a gradual building of herd immunity among those least vulnerable while the country has avoided mass unemployment and an overwhelming of the hospital system.
Additionally, a study discussed in the Wall Street Journal backs this up
When you consider that scientists mentioned by the Wall Street Journal seem to indicate that lock downs don’t help, you begin to wonder why we have subjected ourselves to this jail time without cause.
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Democrats use the coronavirus to kill parts of our economy
Report: 2,500 oil and gas workers in Texas lose their jobs in a 10-day period
Texas Workforce Commission information shows that the oil and natural gas industry shed another 2,500 jobs over the past 10 days, according to a report from the Houston Chronicle.
The report shows 13 companies laid off 2,525 people. The service sector, which includes drilling rig operators, hydraulic fracturing crews and manufacturing, took the hardest hit, according to the Chronicle. The report blames record low oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic hurting demand for products and services.
The layoffs, according to the Chronicle article, included:
Houston-based NexTier Oilfield Services — 1,041 employees working at its headquarters, another Houston office and field offices in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale.
Midland oil-field service company ProPetro Service — 584 layoffs in the Permian Basin where losses now total 584 layoffs.
Houston oil-field service company Baker Hughes — 184 jobs cut after merging operations at two locations in Houston.
The report also states U.S. Silica laying off 105 people in Midland; Fort Worth-based Black Mountain Sand laying off 87; and Ohio-based Covia laying off 82 people.
Among the fuel distributors, the Midland office of tanker truck hauler Sun Coast Resources reported laying off 70 people from its Midland truck yard while the fuel distribution arm of Sunoco cut 55 jobs from its Odessa truck yard, according to the Chronicle article.
The Democrat hate for the oil/gas industry surely doesn’t need an introduction
After years of blogging on Al Gore, Maxine Waters, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, surely there should not be a need for explaining why Democrats would love to tank the oil/gas industry.
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Farmers say they may have to kill and discard baby pigs as slaughterhouses close and the industry faces losing $5 billion
Hog farmers are struggling in the face of absent workers, shuttered pork packaging plants, and a loss of buyers in restaurants and international markets due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The result is a glut of excess hogs, making it more expensive to sell pigs to be made into pork than to simply kill the animals.
The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) said on Tuesday that farmers will lose almost $37 per hog and almost $5 billion collectively for every hog marketed for the rest of 2020, citing economists Dr. Dermot Hayes and Dr. Steve Meyer. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the NPPC said analysts predicted farmers would earn roughly $10 per hog.
On a call with reporters, NPPC President Howard Roth said that euthanizing is going to start coming up in farmers’ discussions “absent immediate and significant government intervention,” Star Tribune’s Adam Belz tweeted. According to Roth, the number of baby pigs being euthanized will “soar dramatically” without intervention.
“Hogs are backing up on farms with nowhere to go, leaving farmers with tragic choices to make,” Roth said in a statement. “Dairy producers can dump milk. Fruit and vegetable growers can dump produce. But, hog farmers have nowhere to move their hogs.”
The NPPC is asking that the federal government purchase more than $1 billion in backed-up meat supply, which the USDA can use to supply food banks. The organization is also seeking equitable direct payments to pork producers and to allow family farms to take out emergency loans offered by the Small Business Administration.
Considering the pork that was stuffed into the PPP, why didn’t Pelosi help the pork farmers?
It would just seem natural that Pelosi, such a lover of pork, would help the pork industry. However, her parts of the Paycheck Protection Plan put greater restrictions on the USDA and swine raising industry.
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Farmers fear USDA’s $19B in coronavirus aid won’t ‘scratch the surface’
A 28 April 2020 United Press article points out how the monies set aside to aid the cattle industry will likely be vastly insufficient. Thanks, Democrats.
As the federal government prepares to distribute an unprecedented $19 billion in aid to farmers struggling through the coronavirus pandemic, farm industry experts say it won’t be enough.
“That $19 billion helps,” said Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Minnesota. “But if things deteriorate further, that may not even scratch the surface for what people are going to need to get through this.”
The issue is especially severe among livestock producers, Westhoff said.
That sector is facing an immediate crisis because the widespread closure of meat packing plants because of outbreaks of the virus makes it impossible for many farmers to sell all their animals.
“It’s a mess,” said Jim Petrik, a South Dakota rancher who raises cattle and hogs. “Almost all our local plants are out. It’s going to be a bloodbath for producers.”
Hog producers are losing money every day. The National Pork Producers Council on April 17 released a “conservative” estimate that hog farmers would lose a collective $5 billion in 2020.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has allocated $1.6 billion in aid for the hog industry.
For the Democrat’s supposed empathy for those in “food deserts,” there was no planning in Pelosi’s stimulus (Kennedy Center, etc) for food
If Democrats really cared about the poor inner city people within “food deserts,” why didn’t they arrange to get the soon-to-be-wasted beef, pork, and vegetables from the farms with some compensation to the farmers?
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Farmers plow crops under
In an 11 April 2020 New York Times article, we find how farmers have felt forced to destroy the crops they spent their recent lives at growing and harvesting.
In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.
After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.
The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.
The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.
Many farmers say they have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, which have been overwhelmed with demand. But there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb.
And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half their paying customers disappear. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, who has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.
The widespread destruction of fresh food — at a time when many Americans are hurting financially and millions are suddenly out of work — is an especially dystopian turn of events, even by the standards of a global pandemic. It reflects the profound economic uncertainty wrought by the virus and how difficult it has been for huge sectors of the economy, like agriculture, to adjust to such a sudden change in how they must operate.
Even as Mr. Allen and other farmers have been plowing fresh vegetables into the soil, they have had to plant the same crop again, hoping the economy will have restarted by the time the next batch of vegetables is ready to harvest. But if the food service industry remains closed, then those crops, too, may have to be destroyed.
UBS predicts that up to one in five restaurants in the US could close permanently because of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Wednesday, UBS analyst Dennis Geiger referenced the National Restaurant Association saying that about 3% of restaurants in the US have already closed permanently.
That would mean 30,000 restaurants have already shuttered, based on the NRA’s estimate of more than 1 million restaurants in the US. According to Geiger, the carnage is far from over.
“Closer to 20% is possible considering the health and overleverage of independent owners and select franchisees across casual dining in particular,” Geiger wrote in Wednesday’s note.
If one in five American restaurants closes, it would result in about 200,000 locations permanently shuttering. The industry employs 15.6 million people in the US, according to the NRA.
The NRA surveyed more than 4,000 restaurant owners and operators last week. About 11% said that they anticipate they would permanently close within the next 30 days.
Beaumont Mayor Becky Ames left Tuesday’s City Council meeting to find her phone flooded with text messages and angry social media criticism after a picture surfaced of her getting service at a local nail salon.
A cropped version of the photo first appeared on a local blog, saying Ames went to have her nails done on Monday.
Nail and hair salons are among the businesses ordered to close across Beaumont during the coronavirus pandemic.
Ames, who signed the stay-at-home orders on March 27, acknowledged that the photo could make people think she was getting a manicure.
Noting that there is no nail technician in the photograph, however, the mayor insisted that she did not violate any of the stay-at-home orders.
Violating the restriction is punishable by a fine of up to $2,000.
“I did not do anything wrong,” she told The Enterprise. “I would not be upset with anyone who I found out did this.”
Ames said she’d stopped in to pick up acetone to soak off artificial “dip” nails after they’d grown out and become painful. She said she felt she could not take them off herself.
“Six weeks ago or more, I went to get a manicure and ended up getting the powder nails for the first time. I loved it and it looked great, but as they grew out I started looking like a witch,” she said. “I tried to take them off and texted the lady that did them, who is the owner of the salon, to ask what to do.”
Ames said the salon owner told her the shop wasn’t open, but that she would mix up some solution for pickup. The photograph was taken, she said, while Ames was soaking her nails to learn how to take them off.
The photo shows Ames, wearing a face mask, with her fingertips in a bowl.
The mayor said she stopped by the salon Tuesday, not Monday, and was there for about 10 minutes before going straight to the Beaumont City Council meeting. She said she was able to remove half of the dip nails during that time.
Texas’ biggest counties and cities, including Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, are shouldering that burden on their own, officials said during a launch event at the Children’s Museum Monday.
Lina Hidalgo (hypocrite and Democrat) not enforcing social distancing
“We are doing everything we can to make sure that folks participate, said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. She called Census 2020 a crucial moment “to live up to that right that we have…to be counted.”
More lack of social distancing among the crowd in this predominantly Democrat area
Amid heightened tensions for immigrants under the Trump administration, Hidalgo made an impassioned plea, in the Spanish version of her remarks, to prospective participants to set aside any fears about filling out the form.
Packed like sardines for this Montrose event with Lina Hidalgo
“The Census is very safe, I want to make that very clear, that under penalty of prison or fine, nobody can share your personal information from the Census — not ICE, the FBI, no organization or federal agency can access your personal information about the Census,” she said in Spanish.
These Democrats send us home from jobs for weeks on end, empty our jails, but do not practice social distancing or limit their crowds to less than 10.
Something tells me that the crisis might only be in the media, unless you are a Democrat who needs to rally the troops. …
Chicago mayor defends getting haircut after her $500 stay-at-home violation fines: ‘I am the face of the city’
BizPacReview reported in a 7 April 2020 article how the mayor of Chicago decided to defend her getting a haircut after issuing a stay-at-home order with a $500 fine for violation of that order.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot defended getting a haircut in defiance of her state’s stay-at-home order.
The Democrat insisted that she’s “the face of this city” who needs to look good for her adoring fans. So it’s okay that she broke her own rules against people leaving their homes unnecessarily.
Hairstylists and barbers are not on Illinois’ list of essential businesses and must be closed during the coronavirus outbreak.
A defensive Mayor Lightfoot said: “The woman who cut my hair had a mask and gloves on, so I am practicing what I’m preaching.”
For the record, the Facebook photo of Lightfoot with her hairstylist shows that neither wore a face mask, and they stood just inches from each other.
In a recent public service announcement, Lightfoot urged Chicagoans to stay home to save lives. She told women: “Getting your roots done is not essential.”
I don’t have much time to myself these days, but I felt I needed to make sure everyone knows how I feel about this Stay at Home Order. Which one motivates you the most to stay at home? #StayHomeSaveLivespic.twitter.com/pDbCdySMQk
— Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) March 30, 2020
I have news for Chicago’s mayor, she was not elected for her looks
While I have reviewed her political stances and, therefore, cannot determine why anyone might want to elect her, whether or not she had a haircut would not make a difference in most people’s vote.
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Democrats and those who benefit from the crisis have bumped the numbers
Drug overdose, head trauma deaths added to coronavirus death toll
A 37-year-old California man who died of a drug overdose has been added to the novel coronavirus death toll.
Though the death of the unidentified man was caused by a drug overdose, he also tested positive for the novel coronavirus, which was coded as a “significant continuing condition,” according to Ventura County spokeswoman Ashley Bautista, VA Star reported Thursday.
“Ventura County’s coronavirus death toll increased to 16 on Thursday as county officials reported two additional deaths, including a 37-year-old man,” the report said.
“The man died as a result of a drug overdose while infected with COVID-19, a significant contributing condition, according to county spokeswoman Ashley Bautista. He is the youngest victim to die from the virus yet in the county,” VA Star added.
Last month, a 61-year-old Pennsylvania man who died from a head injury and tested positive for COVID-19 was added to the coronavirus death toll, too.
“Lehigh County Coroner Eric Minnich confirmed the patient died Friday night at St. Luke’s University Hospital in Fountain Hill,” Lehigh Valley Live reported. “He said the primary cause of the man’s death was a head injury from a fall at home, but that the virus was listed as a contributing factor to his death.”
Earlier this month, leading voice on the White House Coronavirus Task Force Dr. Deborah Birx explained that COVID-19 deaths in the United States have “very liberal” recording guidance, noting that anyone who tests positive for the virus and dies would be included in their numbers of coronavirus deaths.
“I think in this country, we are taking a very liberal approach to mortality. And I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks,” she said, adding, “If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that.”
“There are other countries, that if you have a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus called you to go to the ICU (intensive care unit) and then have a heart or kidney problem,” she added. “Some countries are recording that as a kidney issue, or a heart issue, and not a COVID-19 death.” In the U.S., Dr. Birx suggested, “we’re still recording it” as a COVID-19 death.
Pennsylvania has had to remove hundreds of coronavirus deaths from its official death count, following questions of accuracy and highlighted discrepancies by area coroners.
New York City, already a world epicenter of the coronavis outbreak, sharply increased its death toll by more than 3,700 victims on Tuesday, after officials said they were now including people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it.
Considering all of the federal money going into the coffers of the New York City medical community, there is little question as to why they expand these numbers.
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Dr. Birx: “Unlike some countries, if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”
At Tuesday’s White House coronavirus press conference, task force member Dr. Deborah Birx said that while some countries are reporting coronavirus fatality numbers differently, in the U.S. you are counted as a victim of the pandemic if you die while testing positive for the virus, even if something else causes your death.
: DR. DEBORAH BIRX: So, I think in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality. And I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that when there wasn’t testing in January and February that’s a very different situation and unknown.
There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem some countries are recording as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now we are still recording it and we will I mean the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to market as COVID-19 infection the intent is right now that those if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) signed a coronavirus emergency order last week allowing her to ban the sale and transportation of firearms.
She signed a follow-up proclamation on March 16, 2020, further emphasizing her emergency powers to “suspend or limit the sale, dispensing, or transportation, of alcoholic beverages.”
The declaration declaring the mayor’s power to restrict gun sales and transportation says she is “empowered, if necessary, to suspend or limit the sale of alcoholic beverages, firearms, explosives, and combustibles.”
On March 16, 2020, the Second Amendment Foundation responded to Cantrell’s claims of emergency powers over firearms by reminding her that they sued over Second Amendment infringement following Hurricane Katrina and will do so during the era of coronavirus if needed.
What could the reason for this ban be, other than symbolic?
This does not stop any law-abiding gun owner from protecting his or her property. However, it might keep a cash-strapped gun owner from paying his or her mortgage or rent in the event that there have been coronavirus-related layoffs. Additionally, it would prevent a law-abiding person from buying a firearm in a time of need.
However, there will be criminals in New Orleans with new guns. There may be coyotes selling an array of firearms not available legally and LaToya will not have a thing to say about it.
Still, now that she has pulled this little stunt, she will later produce a Mike-Bloomberg-esque commercial claiming that she stood up to the National Rifle Association.
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Nancy Pelosi added these items to the first coronavirus relief bill
Jails across the country are seeing more and more inmates and workers infected. In Dallas County, there is an effort to control the spread by releasing some inmates.
The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed 42 positive cases of COVID-19 in inmates. That’s 30 more than were reported this past week. Another 16 detention officers and deputies have contracted the virus, although two of those officers have returned to work.
About a thousand inmates have been released from the Dallas County jail to help reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 inside the facility. Inmate advocacy groups applaud the move, but still have concerns.
Tiara Cooper, formerly incarcerated at Lew Sterrett, now advocates for inmates with live free faith in Texas. She says they would still like to see more inmates released to allow for more distancing inside the jail.
She also said there’s concern for newly released inmates and the communities they return to. She worries some inmates may have been exposed to the virus and of those released, she says many will end up homeless or return to communities with an already high number of COVID-19 cases.
“My hope for the people that are being released is that they be tested as soon as possible and that they have those direct services that are needed and necessary in this hour,” Cooper said.
A spokesman for the sheriff’s office says inmates are screened before being released and if there’s a possibility that person has been exposed to COVID-19, he or she is provided instructions by Parkland Hospital medical staff about what they need to do when they get out.
A writer with the leftwing New York Magazine asked President Donald Trump at a coronavirus briefing at the White House on Monday if he deserves to be re-elected given the fact that more Americans have died from the virus than did in the Vietnam war.
According to the National Archives, 58,220 Americans died fighting in the Vietnam War. The number of deaths from coronavirus as of April 25 was 52,459, according to the Statista website.
Olivia Nuzzi asked Trump, “If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be re-elected?”
As we have observed from the beginning of the Trump administration, there is no reporting
From the beginning of the Trump administration, there has been in the range of 98% negative propaganda from the Democrats that remain employed in the main stream media. For that reason, I do not read their papers and magazines unless their articles come up through an online search.
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Governor Whitmer appoints committee to research the racism of coronavirus
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Thursday she is appointing a coronavirus task force to recommend ways to address the racial disparities in the occurrence of the disease COVID-19 among Michiganians.
She noted that over 40% of deaths due to COVID-19 in Michigan have been among African Americans, although African Americans make up 14% of the state’s population. About 31% of deaths have been among whites, 24% of unknown race and 3% among individuals of multiple races.
The trend has also played out nationally, with one in three patients requiring hospitalization in the first month of the COVID-19 epidemic were African American, according to hospital data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This virus is holding up a mirror to our society and reminding us of the deep inequities in our country — from basic lack of access to care, to access to transportation, to lack of protections in the work place,” Whitmer said during a press briefing.
“These inequities have that hit people of color and vulnerable communities the hardest.”
While there may be racial issues with how people approach medical issues or are treated at hospitals, germs don’t discern race
While I hope there are no cases of racism at hosptials and I hope that people of all races will seek medical help when it is needed, we don’t need to find out whether germs are racist. There is no racism among germs.
However, as with the following article, there may be payoffs between Democrats.
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Michigan Governor Whitmer cancels contract with two Democrat-linked firms that she tapped to track coronavirus
Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan’s administration abruptly canceled a contract with a firm tapped to help carrying out contact tracing
The firm was going to help track down contacts of infected people
The contract was worth $200,000 but Whitmer’s administration has admitted it circumvented the process by which state contracts are normally awarded
Republicans complained the company is owned by a Democratic consultant who planned to use software developed by a firm with ties to Democratic campaigns
Mike Kolehouse, a Democratic political consultant tweeted: ‘I hope he gets coronavirus ASAP. Can someone do the country a favor and cough on that man?’
The Democratic Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, has announced she is to rescind a state contract on tracking the spread of coronavirus that had been awarded to a Democratic consulting firm.
Whitmer’s decision to hire a Democratic political firm to run a public health project drew an immediate backlash after it was announced on Monday.
The firm, Great Lakes Community Engagement, is run by Mike Kolehouse, a Democratic political consultant who had made unsavory comments about President Trump in recent weeks.
Kolehouse wrote in a tweet regarding Trump in March: ‘I hope he gets coronavirus ASAP. Can someone do the country a favor and cough on that man?’
The consultancy firm had planned to use software that is also used by a Democratic data firm that is also working to help get the governor reelected.
The contract was worth $200,000 over an eight-week period, but Whitmer’s administration has now admitted that it circumvented the process by which state contracts are normally awarded.
Republican’s then weighed in and accused the governor of surreptitiously obtaining data that might be useful for her political campaign under the guise of a healthcare project.
Christianity Today took another step toward main stream media when it quoted only from the Democrat side of the impeachment scandal and parroted the Democrat call for the President’s removal.
n our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment.
The typical CT approach is to stay above the fray and allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible. We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.
That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love. We love and pray for our president, as we love and pray for leaders (as well as ordinary citizens) on both sides of the political aisle.
Let’s grant this to the president: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.
But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.
(Read more at Christianity Today, even though that would profoundly waste time)
This magazine’s un-Christian act follows a tradition of pro-media, anti-Christian comments
This “Christian” magazine made this assertion just as Christianity Today previously tried to convince Christians of the rightness of:
Not standing against the deviancy of transgenderism (although the magazine does not mention the high suicide rate of transgenderism).
Christianity Today has decided to try to convince Christians to stand against the continued presidency of Donald Trump. However, there are these problems with their argument:
As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley (and I would challenge to say he’s probably the most respected — and we all know it — a Democrat who did not vote for the President) said under oath, “There was no bribery. There was no extortion, no obstruction of justice, and no abuse of power.” Based on the facts, based on the truth, based on the lack of evidence, Turley called it “the fastest, thinnest, and weakest impeachment in the U.S. history.” Such a definitive answer should be the end of all of this.
Tell Vlad, after the election, I’ll be more flexible.
If corruption is an issue for the Christianity Today, one has to ask why they did not hold Senator Menendez to their high standard (and, notably, he still serves as a Democrat). For we all know that the Daily Mail reported:
Senator Bob Menendez only ‘likes the youngest and newest girls’ says Dominican prostitute who ‘attended alleged sex parties with him’
For all of their articles on forgiving the ways of the world and deviance like transgenderism &mdash this article included — I do not remember that many articles telling us to forgive Donald Trump.
For an alternate view from their Democrat-parroting, anti-Biblical view, consider the quotes and tweets cited by the Daily Caller. Chief among the tweets cited are the following:
.@CTMagazine released an editorial saying @POTUS Trump should be removed from office & they invoked my father’s name, so I felt I should respond. Yes, @BillyGraham founded Christianity Today; but no, he would not agree w/ their piece. He’d be disappointed. https://t.co/XO5Fj0hxnc
Less than 20% of evangelicals supported @HillaryClinton in 2016 but now @CTmagazine has removed any doubt that they are part of the same 17% or so of liberal evangelicals who have preached social gospel for decades! CT unmasked! https://t.co/O7WjyZSwiW
The New York Times editorial board suggested Saturday that Congress needs to impeach President Donald Trump.
“In the end, the story told by the two articles of impeachment approved on Friday morning by the House Judiciary Committee is short, simple and damning,” The Times wrote.
“President Donald Trump abused the power of his office by strong-arming Ukraine, a vulnerable ally, holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid until it agreed to help him influence the 2020 election by digging up dirt on a political rival,” the board argued in what is a recapitulation of what House Democrats have been saying since start of the impeachment inquiry drama.
The Times suggested the president was “caught in the act” and then proceeded to show “unprecedented, categorical and indiscriminate defiance” even after being issued multiple subpoenas. Because Trump “made it impossible for Congress to carry out fully its constitutionally mandated oversight role,” the editors accuse the president of trespassing “the separation of powers, a safeguard of the American republic.”
The Times noted that impeachment will move to the full House of Representatives on Wednesday.
For reasons like those shown in the above article, we need to resist the NYTwits
We need to avoid the NYTwit app. We need not pick up a paper copy of that vile rag. And, unless it is needed to prove a point with some idiot lib who still accepts them as a “paper of record,” there is no reason to reference the online version (as I have for the reason of trying to convince those who see it as a “paper of record.”)
Mind you, here, I did not actually refer first to the NYTwits.
The IG report on FISA abuse finally dropped this week, and the media is still reeling from all of the lies it uncovered.
In this special episode of “Unfit to Print,” host Amber Athey is running through the craziest things the media said about Rep. Devin Nunes, the Steele dossier, Carter Page, and more.
Namely, the IG report found that the Steele dossier was “internet rumor” yet was used by the FBI to launch illegal surveillance against the Trump campaign’s Carter Page, who was falsely accused of being a Russian agent.
The media is going to be very embarrassed this week as they run through all of the silly things they said about Crossfire Hurricane — CNN has already issued a correction admitting the campaign was spied on by “confidential human informants.”
Of course, Carter Page should be able to sue the socks off of multiple entities
Without listening to this review, I can tell you that the IG report revealed 17 instances where the law was broken. While the IG says that there was no biases evident within the FBI, that may only mean that nobody confessed.
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Local media admits a border wall in Laredo will happen, like it or not
With or without Congress’ blessing, the Trump administration is moving money around to fund the construction of a wall in Laredo — and they’re acting quickly.
In his meeting with Laredo officials this week, Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was upfront about the “different pockets of money” they have to fund wall construction in Laredo, according to Mayor Pete Saenz.
“He was clear. ‘We’ve got the money, we’re moving forward, whether you cooperate or not,’” Saenz recalled of their conversation. “… I thought we had more leverage going in, but apparently not.”
President Donald Trump is demanding that 450 miles of border wall be constructed in 2020, which would mark the fulfillment of his campaign promise in time for the November election.
And Webb and Zapata counties are wall-free and ripe for the taking as far as the Department of Homeland Security is concerned. This stretch of riverfront is their first priority for new wall construction.
Even as Trump’s ability to use budgeted military funding for wall construction has been shot down by two federal district judges, officials are planning to use more of this money plus counternarcotics funding to get the wall built in and around Laredo, according to Rep. Henry Cuellar.
Plus, Congress is lined up to appropriate another $1.4 billion for the border wall next week in order to avoid another government shutdown.
But if the city were to cooperate with the Trump administration, they could receive a little reward — a mile of more aesthetically pleasing, levee-style wall from the railroad bridge to bridge 2, leaving an unimpeded view of Mexico from the Outlet Shoppes, La Posada Hotel and Tres Laredos Park.
This is called a bulkhead. It would create a kind of sharp cliff above the river, and serve as a promenade and sloping park above.
The price will be City Council’s signature on right of entry documents for the feds to conduct surveys on the rest of their 10 miles of riverfront property, from Laredo College to Slaughter Park.
This is the Trump administration’s key to what they need most: speed.
The House Judiciary Committee’s final report accompanying its articles of impeachment misquotes President Donald Trump — again — talking about his powers under Article II of the Constitution.
As Breitbart News reported during the Judiciary Committee’s hearings earlier this month, Democrats repeatedly misquoted Trump as claiming that Article II of the Constitution entitles him to do “whatever I want” as president.
The context of Trump’s remark, which he has made several times, was clearly his power under Article II to hire and fire executive branch employees, specifically Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating so-called “Russia collusion.”
Yet Democrats — including Judiciary Committee counsel, and Democrat donor, Barry Berke — played deceptively-edited video of Trump that suggested, falsely, he believed he had absolute power under Article II of the Consitution.
On Tuesday in Washington, D.C., at Politico’s Women Rule Summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) admitted the impeachment process of President Donald Trump has been going on for “two and a half” years.
When asked about criticisms of “the speed” of the House Democrats impeachment, Pelosi replied, “Speed? It’s been going on 22 months—two and a half years, actually.”
She continued, “I think we are not moving with speed. Was it two a half years ago they initiated the Mueller investigation? It’s not about speed. It’s about urgency. One of the charges against the president of the United States—saying he was violating the oath of office by asking for government to interfere in our election undermining the integrity of our elections.”
She added, “If we did not hold him accountable, he would continue to undermine our elections. Nothing less is at stake than the central point of our democracy, of a free and fair election not to be disrupted by foreign powers.”
This admission invalidates any claim that the impeachment is based on misdeeds during a phone call in July 2019
If any Representative claims to vote for impeachment because “nobody is above the law,” they are lying. Beside the fact that no instances of lawbreaking were cited during the impeachment hearings in the House, the fact that work on impeachment goes back to the first quarter of 2017 shows that this impeachment has no basis in fact. …
FISA Court Rebukes FBI Abuse, Sets January Deadline for Reforms
Breitbart outlines the rebuke of the day-late-and-dollar-short FISA Court Judge.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance warrants on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page said in an order on Tuesday that the FBI’s handling of the warrant applications was “antithetical” to its “heightened duty of candor.”
The order, issued in response to reports the FBI provided false information to the Justice Department and withheld information that went against their case, stated, “When FBI personnel mislead NSD in the ways described above, they equally mislead the FISC.”
The order described the process in which the FISC grants Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, stating that it was “useful” to understand the requirements in getting a FISA warrant “in order to appreciate the seriousness of that misconduct and its implications.”
The FISC judge must determine whether the government’s application provides probable cause to believe the proposed surveillance target is a “foreign power” or an “agent of a foreign power,” the order said. It added that Congress intended that the judge act as an “external check on executive branch decisions to conduct surveillance” to protect U.S. persons’ rights.
House Democrats voted to impeach President Donald Trump Wednesday, making Trump the third president in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.
The House passed article one of H.R. 755, which charges Trump with abusing the office of the presidency.
Article one passed on mostly partisan lines, 230-197, with Republicans united against the resolution. Two Democrats, Reps. Collin Peterson (D-MN) and Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ), voted against the resolution.
The second article of impeachment, which charges that Trump obstructed Congress, passed the House with 229-198 votes. Three Democrats, Reps. Van Drew, Peterson, and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) voted against the resolution.
Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI), a former Republican, voted in favor of article one of impeachment.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who is running for the Democratic nomination for president, voted present for article one of impeachment. She also voted present on the resolution establishing the rules surrounding the impeachment bill.
(Read Breitbart to see the balance of things Republicans need to do to the next Democrat president)
Unfit To Print Episode 32: Media Scrambles To Retract Obama’s Immigration Record
The Daily Caller points out how the media scrambled to retract Obama’s immigration record when they discovered that they had incriminated Obama rather than Trump.
Media outlets discovered they received misleading data from the UN this week, but instead of correcting their stories, they erased them entirely.
On this week’s episode of Unfit to Print, Amber Athey explains why AFP and Reuters retracted articles claiming the U.S. has 100,000 children in migrant detention centers after they found out that statistic is from 2015, when President Barack Obama was in office.
The story apparently wasn’t as important when it couldn’t be used to attack President Donald Trump!
Odd that there were no retractions, no corrections
Since they could not continue their 95%+ negative reporting on Trump and would have to point out that the reporting would have to bring down their demi-god Obama, they tried to just sweep it under the rug.
Since we regularly see the main stream media (the ones that are rarely quoted here because they do not report on issues critical of Democrats) relentlessly attack conservatives and then lob softballs at Democrats, there can be no wonder why few trust journalists.
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Elizabeth Warren Denied Sending Her Kids To Private School, Despite Sending Son To Elite Private School
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren denied sending her children to private schools, despite the fact that she sent her son to an elite private school.
When school choice activists confronted her after a campaign rally Thursday, Warren said her children didn’t go to private schools.
“We are going to have the same choice that you had for your kids, because I read that your children went to private schools,” one activist told Warren. “No, my children went to public schools,” the Massachusetts senator replied.
Holy shit. I have Warren on video lying about where she sent her kids to school.
Sarah Carpenter: "I read that your children went to private schools"
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) November 22, 2019
But publicly available records show Warren, who has pledged to crack down on school choice if elected, chose to send her son Alexander to Kirby Hall, an elite private school in the Austin area, as the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. Kirby Hall’s 1987 yearbook lists Alexander Warren among the school’s fifth-graders.
If Ms. Warren wants to reach minority communities, she might want to consider supporting charter schools
Charter schools have enjoyed a strong support among a number of minority communities (possibly since they provide a way out of the failed inner-city schools). Therefore, if Ms. Warren has more kinship with the poor than with the education bureaucracy, she might want to reconsider her blind support of the Department of Education as the Democrats have imagined it.
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Former Harry Reid Staffer Jabs Buttigieg: ‘Sneaky Pete’ Only Got 8,500 Votes in His Last Election
Breitbart went to a Harry Reid staffer who observed that Buttigieg only got 8,500 votes in his last election. This could be a problem during an election where Democrats have hemorrhaged voters.
Democrats continue ripping Mayor Pete Buttigieg for only earning 8,500 votes in his last campaign for re-election as the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana — which has a population of roughly 100,000 people.
Former Deputy Chief of Staff to Sen. Harry Reid Adam Jentleson mocked Buttigieg on Friday after the mayor released a new ad against giving tuition-free college education for children of wealthy parents.
“A guy who received a total of 8,500 votes in his last election now wants to be POTUS because he believes in his own ambition above all else,” he wrote on Twitter.
Watching sneaky Pete throw progressive policies under the bus to embrace a consultant-tested talking point is unintentionally revealing. A guy who received a total of 8,500 votes in his last election now wants to be POTUS because he believes in his own ambition above all else. https://t.co/2w9qZEwwLz
Jentleson called Buttigieg “Sneaky Pete” for throwing ideas embraced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders “under the bus” for a position that was more “consultant-tested.”
The attack against Buttigieg’s weak voter draw was also deployed by Democratic strategic Alexis Grenell in April as proof that sexism was “alive and well in 2020.”
…
Buttigieg frequently cites his election in a midwestern city within the red state of Indiana as proof he can appeal to all voters.
But South Bend is overwhelmingly Democrat, thus explaining the low voting numbers. The last time the city elected a Republican mayor was in 1964.
Buttigieg not only cannot connect with current Black Democrats and lost his share of voters in successive elections, he was (as shown from the above article) elected by a small group
As opposed to the theme that Buttigieg has promoted where he was repeatedly elected as a popular Democrat mayor, it seems that Buttigieg slipped into the office because of voter apathy.
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College students Fainting From Starvation in Venezuela’s Failing College System
Tons of of kids filed into their college courtyard to listen to a neighborhood Catholic bishop lead prayers for his or her schooling.
“We pray for the youths who’re on the streets and may’t come to highschool,” mentioned Bishop Jorge Quintero, addressing the Augusto D’Aubeterre Lyceum college within the seaside city of Boca de Uchire on a steamy morning in October. “There are a number of them.”
By the tip of the 15-minute ceremony, 5 youngsters had fainted and two of them have been whisked away in an ambulance.
The faintings on the major college have turn into a daily prevalence as a result of so many college students come to class with out consuming breakfast, or dinner the evening earlier than. In different faculties, youngsters wish to know if there’s any meals earlier than they resolve whether or not to go in any respect.
“You possibly can’t educate skeletal and hungry folks,” mentioned Maira Marín, a trainer and union chief in Boca de Uchire.
Venezuela’s devastating six-year financial disaster is hollowing out the varsity system — as soon as the satisfaction of the oil-rich nation and, for many years, an engine that made the nation one of the upwardly cell within the area. These faculties prior to now supplied youngsters even in distant areas with a strong shot on the nation’s greatest universities, which in flip opened doorways to high American faculties and a spot amongst Venezuela’s elite.
Starvation is simply one of many many issues chipping away at them now. Thousands and thousands of Venezuelans have fled the nation in recent times, depleting the ranks of scholars and academics alike. Most of the educators who stay have been pushed from the career, their wages made practically nugatory by years of relentless hyperinflation. In some locations, barely 100 college students present up at faculties that after taught 1000’s.
The collapse of the schooling system in Venezuela is just not solely condemning a whole technology to poverty, however dangers setting the nation’s improvement again many years and severely stunting its development potential, specialists and academics say.
“A complete technology is being left behind,” mentioned Luis Bravo, an schooling researcher on the Central College of Venezuela in Caracas. “In the present day’s schooling system doesn’t permit youngsters to turn into significant members of society.”
The federal government stopped publishing schooling statistics in 2014. However visits to greater than a dozen faculties in 5 Venezuelan states and interviews with dozens of academics and oldsters point out that attendance has plummeted this yr.
An illegal alien woman returned to the United States soon after being deported for killing four American children in a 2008 school bus crash in Cottonwood, Minnesota.
Olga Marina Franco del Cid, a 35-year-old illegal alien from Guatemala, was found guilty for 24 charges including four counts of criminal vehicular homicide after she ran a stop sign on February 18, 2008 and killed 13-year-old Jesse Javens, 12-year-old Reed Stevens, nine-year-old Emilee Olson, and nine-year-old Hunter Javens.
The four children Franco del Cid killed were among 28 students on a school bus at the time, 14 others of which were injured in the crash.
In October 2008, Franco del Cid was sentenced to just 12 and a half years for the children’s deaths. By April 2016, she had served only eight years in Minnesota and was set free. Immediately on release she was turned over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and deported from the U.S. in May 2016.
Sometime between late 2016 and 2019, ICE officials said Franco del Cid returned to the U.S. and was living less than three hours away from where she had left those four children dead in 2008.
…
This week, Franco del Cid was arrested by ICE in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota. The illegal alien may face between 10 to 20 years in prison for illegally re-entering the U.S.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) added three significant freshman Democrats — Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Katie Porter (D-CA), and Deb Haaland (D-NM) — as co-chairs of her campaign, she announced on Friday.
While the majority of the ultra-leftist “Squad” endorsed Warren’s fellow contender and ideological similar Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Warren landed an endorsement from Pressley, who hails from her home state, and secured the backing of freshman Democrats Porter and Haaland.
“It’s my honor to have @Deb4CongressNM, @KatiePorterOC, and @AyannaPressley as my Campaign Co-Chairs. Big structural change can’t wait, and we’ll fight for it—together.” Warren announced on Twitter:
Haaland, one of two Native American women in Congress, faced backlash for endorsing Warren, given the presidential hopeful’s past of falsely claiming Native American heritage.
The House quietly passed a bill on December 3 to crack open a backdoor route for wealthy Chinese to buy their way into U.S. citizenship by lending money to the U.S. real estate industry.
Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) portrayed the bill as a boost to trade between the United States and Portugal. But the bill allows wealthy Chinese to get into the United States after first buying Portuguese citizenship.
“Congress is getting duped. … [The bill is] creating a new path for Chinese people,” said one Capitol Hill source.
Wealthy Chinese can buy “golden visa” citizenship from Portugal’s government in as little as 35 days. If House bill H.R. 565 is approved by the Senate and becomes law, then the new Chinese citizens of Portugal will be able to move into the U.S. by getting E-1 Treaty Trader or E-2 Treaty Investor renewable visas.
Cicilline’s office declined to comment to Breitbart News.
The bill may have a lot of hidden support in the Senate because it could provide a band-aid fix for the backlogged EB-5 program.
The EB-5 program allows wealthy foreigners to buy green cards by lending money to U.S. businesses, mostly to real estate investors. But the money inflow has shrunk because immigration law seeks to promote diversity among immigrants by capping the annual share of EB-5 green cards that can be bought by people from each country, such as China or India. This “country cap” rule means that new Chinese EB-5 buyers must wait more than ten years to get delivery of their backlogged green cards.
Lifezette outlines a primary reason Americans oppose illegal immigration.
…
Unfit To Print Episode 32: Media Scrambles To Retract Obama’s Immigration Record
The Daily Caller points out how the media scrambled to retract Obama’s immigration record when they discovered that they had incriminated Obama rather than Trump.
Media outlets discovered they received misleading data from the UN this week, but instead of correcting their stories, they erased them entirely.
On this week’s episode of Unfit to Print, Amber Athey explains why AFP and Reuters retracted articles claiming the U.S. has 100,000 children in migrant detention centers after they found out that statistic is from 2015, when President Barack Obama was in office.
The story apparently wasn’t as important when it couldn’t be used to attack President Donald Trump!
Odd that there were no retractions, no corrections
Since they could not continue their 95%+ negative reporting on Trump and would have to point out that the reporting would have to bring down their demi-god Obama, they tried to just sweep it under the rug.
Since we regularly see the main stream media (the ones that are rarely quoted here because they do not report on issues critical of Democrats) relentlessly attack conservatives and then lob softballs at Democrats, there can be no wonder why few trust journalists.
…
Elizabeth Warren Denied Sending Her Kids To Private School, Despite Sending Son To Elite Private School
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren denied sending her children to private schools, despite the fact that she sent her son to an elite private school.
When school choice activists confronted her after a campaign rally Thursday, Warren said her children didn’t go to private schools.
“We are going to have the same choice that you had for your kids, because I read that your children went to private schools,” one activist told Warren. “No, my children went to public schools,” the Massachusetts senator replied.
Holy shit. I have Warren on video lying about where she sent her kids to school.
Sarah Carpenter: "I read that your children went to private schools"
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) November 22, 2019
But publicly available records show Warren, who has pledged to crack down on school choice if elected, chose to send her son Alexander to Kirby Hall, an elite private school in the Austin area, as the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. Kirby Hall’s 1987 yearbook lists Alexander Warren among the school’s fifth-graders.
If Ms. Warren wants to reach minority communities, she might want to consider supporting charter schools
Charter schools have enjoyed a strong support among a number of minority communities (possibly since they provide a way out of the failed inner-city schools). Therefore, if Ms. Warren has more kinship with the poor than with the education bureaucracy, she might want to reconsider her blind support of the Department of Education as the Democrats have imagined it.
…
Former Harry Reid Staffer Jabs Buttigieg: ‘Sneaky Pete’ Only Got 8,500 Votes in His Last Election
Breitbart went to a Harry Reid staffer who observed that Buttigieg only got 8,500 votes in his last election. This could be a problem during an election where Democrats have hemorrhaged voters.
Democrats continue ripping Mayor Pete Buttigieg for only earning 8,500 votes in his last campaign for re-election as the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana — which has a population of roughly 100,000 people.
Former Deputy Chief of Staff to Sen. Harry Reid Adam Jentleson mocked Buttigieg on Friday after the mayor released a new ad against giving tuition-free college education for children of wealthy parents.
“A guy who received a total of 8,500 votes in his last election now wants to be POTUS because he believes in his own ambition above all else,” he wrote on Twitter.
Watching sneaky Pete throw progressive policies under the bus to embrace a consultant-tested talking point is unintentionally revealing. A guy who received a total of 8,500 votes in his last election now wants to be POTUS because he believes in his own ambition above all else. https://t.co/2w9qZEwwLz
Jentleson called Buttigieg “Sneaky Pete” for throwing ideas embraced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders “under the bus” for a position that was more “consultant-tested.”
The attack against Buttigieg’s weak voter draw was also deployed by Democratic strategic Alexis Grenell in April as proof that sexism was “alive and well in 2020.”
…
Buttigieg frequently cites his election in a midwestern city within the red state of Indiana as proof he can appeal to all voters.
But South Bend is overwhelmingly Democrat, thus explaining the low voting numbers. The last time the city elected a Republican mayor was in 1964.
Buttigieg not only cannot connect with current Black Democrats and lost his share of voters in successive elections, he was (as shown from the above article) elected by a small group
As opposed to the theme that Buttigieg has promoted where he was repeatedly elected as a popular Democrat mayor, it seems that Buttigieg slipped into the office because of voter apathy.
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College students Fainting From Starvation in Venezuela’s Failing College System
Tons of of kids filed into their college courtyard to listen to a neighborhood Catholic bishop lead prayers for his or her schooling.
“We pray for the youths who’re on the streets and may’t come to highschool,” mentioned Bishop Jorge Quintero, addressing the Augusto D’Aubeterre Lyceum college within the seaside city of Boca de Uchire on a steamy morning in October. “There are a number of them.”
By the tip of the 15-minute ceremony, 5 youngsters had fainted and two of them have been whisked away in an ambulance.
The faintings on the major college have turn into a daily prevalence as a result of so many college students come to class with out consuming breakfast, or dinner the evening earlier than. In different faculties, youngsters wish to know if there’s any meals earlier than they resolve whether or not to go in any respect.
“You possibly can’t educate skeletal and hungry folks,” mentioned Maira Marín, a trainer and union chief in Boca de Uchire.
Venezuela’s devastating six-year financial disaster is hollowing out the varsity system — as soon as the satisfaction of the oil-rich nation and, for many years, an engine that made the nation one of the upwardly cell within the area. These faculties prior to now supplied youngsters even in distant areas with a strong shot on the nation’s greatest universities, which in flip opened doorways to high American faculties and a spot amongst Venezuela’s elite.
Starvation is simply one of many many issues chipping away at them now. Thousands and thousands of Venezuelans have fled the nation in recent times, depleting the ranks of scholars and academics alike. Most of the educators who stay have been pushed from the career, their wages made practically nugatory by years of relentless hyperinflation. In some locations, barely 100 college students present up at faculties that after taught 1000’s.
The collapse of the schooling system in Venezuela is just not solely condemning a whole technology to poverty, however dangers setting the nation’s improvement again many years and severely stunting its development potential, specialists and academics say.
“A complete technology is being left behind,” mentioned Luis Bravo, an schooling researcher on the Central College of Venezuela in Caracas. “In the present day’s schooling system doesn’t permit youngsters to turn into significant members of society.”
The federal government stopped publishing schooling statistics in 2014. However visits to greater than a dozen faculties in 5 Venezuelan states and interviews with dozens of academics and oldsters point out that attendance has plummeted this yr.
An illegal alien woman returned to the United States soon after being deported for killing four American children in a 2008 school bus crash in Cottonwood, Minnesota.
Olga Marina Franco del Cid, a 35-year-old illegal alien from Guatemala, was found guilty for 24 charges including four counts of criminal vehicular homicide after she ran a stop sign on February 18, 2008 and killed 13-year-old Jesse Javens, 12-year-old Reed Stevens, nine-year-old Emilee Olson, and nine-year-old Hunter Javens.
The four children Franco del Cid killed were among 28 students on a school bus at the time, 14 others of which were injured in the crash.
In October 2008, Franco del Cid was sentenced to just 12 and a half years for the children’s deaths. By April 2016, she had served only eight years in Minnesota and was set free. Immediately on release she was turned over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and deported from the U.S. in May 2016.
Sometime between late 2016 and 2019, ICE officials said Franco del Cid returned to the U.S. and was living less than three hours away from where she had left those four children dead in 2008.
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This week, Franco del Cid was arrested by ICE in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota. The illegal alien may face between 10 to 20 years in prison for illegally re-entering the U.S.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) added three significant freshman Democrats — Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Katie Porter (D-CA), and Deb Haaland (D-NM) — as co-chairs of her campaign, she announced on Friday.
While the majority of the ultra-leftist “Squad” endorsed Warren’s fellow contender and ideological similar Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Warren landed an endorsement from Pressley, who hails from her home state, and secured the backing of freshman Democrats Porter and Haaland.
“It’s my honor to have @Deb4CongressNM, @KatiePorterOC, and @AyannaPressley as my Campaign Co-Chairs. Big structural change can’t wait, and we’ll fight for it—together.” Warren announced on Twitter:
Haaland, one of two Native American women in Congress, faced backlash for endorsing Warren, given the presidential hopeful’s past of falsely claiming Native American heritage.
The House quietly passed a bill on December 3 to crack open a backdoor route for wealthy Chinese to buy their way into U.S. citizenship by lending money to the U.S. real estate industry.
Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) portrayed the bill as a boost to trade between the United States and Portugal. But the bill allows wealthy Chinese to get into the United States after first buying Portuguese citizenship.
“Congress is getting duped. … [The bill is] creating a new path for Chinese people,” said one Capitol Hill source.
Wealthy Chinese can buy “golden visa” citizenship from Portugal’s government in as little as 35 days. If House bill H.R. 565 is approved by the Senate and becomes law, then the new Chinese citizens of Portugal will be able to move into the U.S. by getting E-1 Treaty Trader or E-2 Treaty Investor renewable visas.
Cicilline’s office declined to comment to Breitbart News.
The bill may have a lot of hidden support in the Senate because it could provide a band-aid fix for the backlogged EB-5 program.
The EB-5 program allows wealthy foreigners to buy green cards by lending money to U.S. businesses, mostly to real estate investors. But the money inflow has shrunk because immigration law seeks to promote diversity among immigrants by capping the annual share of EB-5 green cards that can be bought by people from each country, such as China or India. This “country cap” rule means that new Chinese EB-5 buyers must wait more than ten years to get delivery of their backlogged green cards.
Rachael Bade, the Washington Post staffer who publicly shared her “Merry Impeachmas” celebration and is now apparently lying about it, does not just work for the Washington Post, she’s a congressional reporter for the Washington Post… and a CNN contributor.
Paul Kane identifies as a Washington Post congressional reporter.
Karoun Demirjian identifies as a Washington Post reporter and CNN analyst.
Seung Min Kim identifies as a Washington Post White House reporter and CNN analyst.
Mike DeBonis identifies as a Washington Post congressional reporter.
So what we’re talking about here, is not a group of opinion columnists or pundits. These are five people who identify, who pass themselves off as, and who are sold to us as unbiased, capital “J” journalists.
And yet, here they are, not only joyously celebrating Donald Trump’s impeachment… Oh, no, that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that they know the institution they work for — the corporate media — is now so corrupt, so deranged with hate, so bubbled and tribal, that it is okay to “own the Trumptards” by tweeting out a photograph of that celebration without any fear it will result in any kind of disciplinary action.
I mean, here it is… And while you gasp, keep in mind “journalism is worth paying for”:
If you need another reason to abandon the main stream media, here it is
The main stream media has no respect for you. They hate you. They mock you. Why would you hand good money over to them when there are outlets like Breitbart?
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Mainstream media’s glee over Trump impeachment could have president ‘laughing all the way to re-election
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., urged Democratic lawmakers to treat impeachment of President Trump as a somber moment not warranting celebration – but several members of the mainstream media couldn’t help themselves.
Trump has been an outspoken critic of many mainstream media organizations, often calling CNN “fake news,” declaring The New York Times “failing,” mocking “Amazon The Washington Post” and sometimes claiming NBC is the worst of the bunch. But when lawmakers voted to impeach the president for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on Wednesday night, many media members seemed to display the bias that Trump has so often alleged.
A group of Washington Post reporters who moonlight as CNN pundits celebrated “Impeachmas” over drinks, bragging about the gathering in a now-delated tweet.
“Ladies & gentlemen, your fair and objective press corps in action! What a joke,” Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, tweeted in response. “Media needs to stop acting like they are ‘impartial.'”
The Saudi student who fatally shot three sailors at a U.S. naval base in Florida hosted a dinner party earlier in the week where he and three others watched videos of mass shootings, a U.S. official told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Officials investigating the deadly attack were working Saturday to determine whether it was motivated by terrorism, while President Donald Trump indicated he would review policies governing foreign military training in the United States.
The Navy on Saturday identified the three victims and hailed them as heroes for trying to stop the shooter and flagging down first responders after being shot.
“The Sailors that lost their lives in the line of duty and showed exceptional heroism and bravery in the face of evil,” Capt. Tim Kinsella, the commanding officer of Naval Air Station Pensacola, said in a statement. “When confronted, they didn’t run from danger; they ran towards it and saved lives.”
The shooter opened fire inside a classroom at the naval base on Friday, killing three people and wounding two sheriff’s deputies, one in the arm and one in the knee, before one of the deputies killed him. Eight others were also hurt. Both deputies were expected to survive.
The official who spoke Saturday said one of the three students who attended the dinner party hosted by the attacker recorded video outside the classroom building while the shooting was taking place. Two other Saudi students watched from a car, the official said.
Ten Saudi students were being held on the base Saturday while several others were unaccounted for, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity after being briefed by federal authorities.
The FBI identified the shooter in a statement Saturday night as Mohammed Alshamrani, 21. Investigators said he was a 2nd Lt. in the Royal Saudi Air Force and was a student naval flight officer of Naval Aviation Schools Command. A U.S. official on Friday said the FBI was examining social media posts and investigating whether he acted alone or was connected to any broader group. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Two U.S. officials said Friday that authorities were investigating whether the attack was terrorism-related. They spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose information that had not yet been made public.
In remarks at a gathering of top U.S. defense and military officials on Saturday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked whether he could say definitively that the shooting was an act of terrorism.
“No, I can’t say it’s terrorism at this time,” he said, adding that the investigation needs to proceed. He declined to discuss details of the investigation so far.
President Trump also declined to say whether the shooting was terrorism-related. The president tweeted his condolences to the families of the victims on Friday and noted that Saudi King Salman had reassured him in a telephone call that the shooter “in no way shape or form represents the feelings of the Saudi people.”
The Saudi national who opened fire in a classroom at a naval air station in Florida Friday morning, killing three before being shot dead by officers, wrote anti-American and anti-Israeli tweets before the rampage, reports say.
Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, who was said to be a second lieutenant in a flight training program for foreign military personnel at Naval Air Station Pensacola, posted a short manifesto to Twitter, AFP reported, citing the SITE Intelligence Group, a group that monitors jihadist media.
A spokesperson for Twitter told Fox News in an email statement Saturday that the account was suspended but they declined to comment further as to when the manifesto was tweeted out.
The FBI told Fox News it was aware of the anti-American Twitter post, but would not comment on whether they’re looking at it as part of the investigation.
Alshamrani entered a classroom early Friday morning and opened fired, killing three people and injuring several others, including two Escambia County Sheriff’s deputies, who were the first to respond.
Sources told Fox News that the scene of the shooting — the classroom, where students usually spend three months at the beginning of the program — indicated that the shooter was a student who was “early” in his training.
It seems at least one Republican took one step further than President Trump by calling for Saudi Arabia to be suspended from an American military training programs after a student pilot from Saudi shot and killed three sailors at a U.S. naval base in Florida.
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Six Saudis Detained After Pensacola Shooting, Including 3 Who Filmed Attack
Six Saudi nationals, including three who allegedly filmed Friday’s attack on Naval Air Station Pensacola, were reportedly detained after the shooting.
Breitbart News reported that a gunman opened fire at the air station Friday morning, killing three and wounding numerous others.
The Associated Press reports that the Pensacola gunman was an aviation student from Saudi Arabia, and NBC News reports that the gunman’s name was Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani.
Now the New York Timesreports that six other Saudis were detained after the shooting and three of those six allegedly filmed the shooting as it unfolded in Pensacola.
The shooter was reportedly at the Pensacola to train. Former Gov. Rick Scott, currently Sen. Scott (R-FL), expressed concern that the Saudi attacker was in Pensacola training on a U.S. base:
I'm very concerned that the shooter in Pensacola was a foreign national training on a US base.
Today, I’m calling for a full review of the US military programs to train foreign nationals on American soil. We shouldn't be providing military training to people who wish us harm. pic.twitter.com/JkypdikYI9
The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist media, identified the gunman as Mohammed al-Shamrani, saying he had posted a short manifesto on Twitter that read: “I’m against evil, and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil.”
We train their people in Saudi and they attack us for having a Christian nation in the heart of Islam. We bring them into the United States and they still act on their death cult. https://twitter.com/STR1KER/status/1205126614452977670
An assailant involved in the prolonged firefight in Jersey City, N.J., that left six people dead, including one police officer, was linked on Wednesday to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, and had published anti-Semitic posts online, a law enforcement official said.
The violent rampage on Tuesday took place largely at a kosher supermarket where three bystanders were killed. The authorities now believe that the store was specifically targeted by the assailants, whom they identified as David N. Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50.
Mr. Anderson appeared to have a connection to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, though the extent of his involvement in that group remains unclear, the law enforcement official said.
The Black Hebrew Israelites, which has no connection with mainstream Judaism, has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy group that tracks such movements.
Since the Black Hebrew Israelites antagonized the Native Americans and Nathan Philips, liberals should be well acquainted with them
Since the liberals were so willing to blame the Covington Catholic boys earlier in 2019, they should easily remember that the people antagonizing everyone were the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Every time that this group has appeared in the news, they have been characterized by physically and verbally aggressive Black men working in pairs.
The Black Hebrew Israelites are the group that just commit a terrorist attack in NJ. They are the same group that yelled racial slurs at the Covington Catholic students and told me earlier this year that all white people must be killed. Why does the media ignore this hate group? https://t.co/JbbRiJ1ocl
Antisemitic Rep. Rashida Talib (D-MI) falsely blamed white supremacy for Tuesday’s heinous murders in Jersey City that targeted Jews.
“This is heartbreaking,” Tlaib tweeted, a little before 7 a.m. on Thursday. “White supremacy kills.”
Tlaib then deleted her tweet without comment and without explaining what made her believe this lie and then spread it a full day after the actual attackers had been identified as 47-year-old David Andersen and 50-year-old Francine Grahm, both of whom were black.
Tuesday’s rampage resulted in four murders. After killing Anderson and Grahm in a massive gun battle, police say they found antisemitic posts written by the suspects online. There was also a manifesto left in their car.
Local media reports say that Anderson was once associated with the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black nationalist group made up of racists and antisemites who made the news this year after they were caught on camera hurling homophobic and racist slurs at a group of students from Covington Catholic High School.
To the surprise of no one, America’s fake media smeared the innocent students as racists and portrayed the black nationalists in the most sympathetic light possible.
Anyway, this is all old news. Everyone knew all of this yesterday, and yet a full day later, Social Justice Warrior Tlaib is blaming white supremacists???
Well, maybe Tlaib has found something she loves more than how much she loves smearing Jews — spreading fake news.
“It’s telling, and frankly sick, that Tlaib tweeted out sympathies for the Jews that were murdered blaming it on white supremacists,” tweeted journalist Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll. “Didn’t care enough to find out what happened. Just enough to use dead Jews for her political agenda.”
Such a lie about Tlaib. She deleted her tweet calling the attack on Jews white supremacy. She was wrong because it was the Black Hebrew Israelites, so she deleted it. Her tweet of condolence remains, and she retweeted it. https://t.co/DlyBcupNWapic.twitter.com/zkbPE0EVBr
Rep. Rashida Tlaib event at Poway school cancelled day after Trump signs anti-Semitism executive order
San Diego TV Station KUSI reports that Representative Tlaib’s scheduled event at the Poway school was cancelled after President Trump signed an anti-Semitism executive order.
A day after President Trump signed an executive order that targets the growing problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses, the scheduled Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) event featuring Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), has been cancelled.
CAIR’s event, “A Conversation with Rep. Rashida Tlaib,” was originally scheduled for Saturday, December 21, at Westview High School in Poway. Tickets were $65 per person, and Democrat candidate for California’s 53rd Congressional District, Tom Wong, was also going to be featured.
The Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund confirmed the event’s cancellation due to a school-related scheduling conflict.
Tuesday, they sent a letter to Poway Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Marian Kim Phelps, expressing concern that Rep. Tlaib’s appearance in Poway may cause controversy after an anti-Semite shot and killed a congregant at the Chabad of Poway synagogue and wounded three others, during a passover service in April. The letter stated, “Rep. Tlaib has a public history of making anti-Semetic remarks and espousing animosity toward the State of Israel.”
In November, Poway City Council approved a petition to rename a street in memory of the shooting’s victim, Lori Gilbert-Kaye. The Synagogoue’s Rabbi was one of the three injured in the attack.
The Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund executive director, Daniel Piedra said, “Congresswoman Tlaib certainly has a First Amendment right to express her views, but nowhere would her views be more offensive than in a city still healing from an anti-Semitic hate crime.”
Since taking office, Rep. Tlaib has repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks “espousing animosity toward the State of Israel.” For example, she has compared the boycott movement against Israel to the American boycott of Nazi Germany, has claimed that thinking about the Holocaust gave her “kind of a calming feeling,” and has decried the “racist policies of the government and state of Israel.”
“Poway is still healing from the horrific massacre at the Chabad center. Our letter was a sign of support for the local Jewish community and a notice to Congresswoman Tlaib that anti-Semitism is not welcome in San Diego. Rep. Tlaib’s divisive rhetoric—although protected by the First Amendment—would only have opened fresh wounds,” said the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund.
The executive order President Trump signed Wednesday makes it clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to anti-Semitic discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. The President has also directed federal agencies to identify other ways the government can use nondiscrimination authorities to address anti-Semitism.
The order instructs the U.S. Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism — which can include criticism of Israel — when evaluating discrimination complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. On that basis, the education department could withhold funding from universities that it finds in violation of the article.
Maybe this was preemptive use of good judgement — It’s been a long time in coming.
Considering the number of times that Tlaib has insulted both Jews and Americans, it would not be beyond the pale to assume that Ms Tlaib would always insult both Jews and Americans every time she opened her mouth. Therefore, her canceling this appearance before a school was probably the best of ideas.
Nancy Pelosi calls President Trump a coward & then invokes God
As reported by Yahoo News on 6 December 2019, Nancy Pelosi reacted violently to a question from James Rosen of Sinclair News. Possibly in response to the observed Trump Derangement Syndrome observed by the reporter, that reporter asked, “Do you hate President Trump?” In response, the following came:
I think the president is a coward when it comes to helping our kids who are afraid of gun violence.
I think he is cruel when he doesn’t deal with helping our “Dreamers.” I think he’s in denial about the climate crisis. However, that is about the election. Take it up in the election. This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office.
As a Catholic, I resent you using the word “hate” in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love and always pray for the president. And I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time. So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.
So she says that she does not hate; however, what do her actions say?
First, take the actions within this presser
Even if we limit our attention to this presser, we see that she called the President a “coward” for not accepting gun control measures. In truth, no gun control law has made people more safe (otherwise, Chicago would be one of the safest cities in the nation — rather than one of the leading murder capitals). Therefore, her calling the President a “coward” was nothing but an empty insult.
Regarding empty insults, Jesus said (but the emphasis is mine):
But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘ You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell. (Matthew 5:22 NASB)
In addition to endangering herself of fiery hell by assigning an empty insult to the President, Ms. Pelosi went on to mix in several lies. First, she accused him of cruelty regarding “our Dreamers.” The problem is that the last President originally repeatedly said that he could not change immigration law. Then he changed it by executive fiat (also known as abuse of power). No laws were passed to accommodate this new class of non-citizens (although Trump offered a deal that the Democrats and Pelosi rejected). Hence, she cannot honestly claim that Trump alone has acted cruelly toward the Dreamers.
Consider her actions for and against the powerless
By asking you to consider her actions regarding the powerless, I primarily speak of the unborn. Her side calls them “fetuses” and uses other euphemisms. However, more to the point, her party has recently promoted full-term abortion. And though we cannot blame her for the over 45 million babies killed in the US between 1973 and 2015, Democrats cannot be held blameless. Therefore, for Pelosi to claim her Catholic faith while not renouncing her commitment to abortion means denying the core of the following Biblical mandates:
You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you afflict him at all, and if he does cry out to Me, I will surely hear his cry; (Exodus 22:22-23 NASB)
You have seen it, for You have beheld mischief and vexation to take it into Your hand. The unfortunate commits himself to You; You have been the helper of the orphan. (Psalms 10:14 NASB)
A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows, Is God in His holy habitation. God makes a home for the lonely; He leads out the prisoners into prosperity, Only the rebellious dwell in a parched land. (Psalms 68:5-6 NASB)
The Lord protects the strangers; He supports the fatherless and the widow, But He thwarts the way of the wicked. (Psalms 146:9 NASB)
Open your mouth for the mute, For the rights of all the unfortunate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, And defend the rights of the afflicted and needy. (Proverbs 31:8-9 NASB)
Learn to do good; Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:17 NASB)
Honor widows who are widows indeed; (1 Timothy 5:3 NASB)
Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. (James 1:27 NASB)
but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:6 NASB)
By asking you to consider her actions regarding the powerless, I also could be talking about her lack of action in support of the poor of America. That is, the people who the Democrats have forgotten in their headlong rush to accommodate illegal aliens. Admittedly, while we will always have poor in America, opportunities for the poor have reduced with the Democrat’s drive to aid the illegal aliens through sanctuary cities, Democrat policies, and other initiatives.
Nancy Pelosi dictatorially proclaimed an impeachment inquiry instead of holding a vote on the impeachment inquiry (as with the Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton impeachments). If she were as much of a loving Christian as she claims, would this unfairness be the case?
Only Committee chairs (Schiff and Nadler) can call witnesses in this one-sided, unfair process (unlike the Clinton impeachment, where his lawyers called 14 witnesses to minimize his lying under oath and obstruction of justice [where he intimidated witnesses]). How can she stand by such unfairness?
Under current Democrat rules, the President does not have the right to face his accuser. In other words, an unknown person (who may not exist) can make accusations against the President and he has to defend himself. In all other American courts, Americans have due process rights. If Nancy were a Christian, would she allow this?
The Democrats — the party who booed God and removed reference to Him from their party platform — this is the party that Nancy Pelosi leads. Therefore, this is the party that might have some Christian influence were she as much of a Christian as she claims. In her position in the “party of the “nones” and the party whose most recent President sued religious organizations to force them to violate their consciences — she could make a difference.
That is, she could make a difference if she were a true follower of the Church.
Give the devil his due, she does make one right references
Pelosi does correctly note that Christians should pray for their leaders, for we are told:
First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. (1 Timothy 2:1-2 NASB)
However, as we know of Satan when he came to tempt Jesus, he came misquoting and then ignoring the central points to scripture (Mark 4:1-11).
Additionally, while we know that Christians are saved by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9), we also know that faith without works is worthless (James 2:18-26). Therefore, Nancy Pelosi’s proclamation of Christian love, prayer, and faith without any proof of it within her professional life seems pretty useless.
Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF) has 17 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of September 9, with 14 cases coming from individuals who have been fully jabbed.
“Fully vaccinated” people accounted for the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden and the U.K. last month, government data has revealed, amid a rise in breakthrough cases and deaths in other Western countries.
A top NIH official admitted in a Wednesday letter that U.S. taxpayers funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and revealed that EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. non-profit that funneled NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was not transparent about the work it was doing.
Today during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel of expert advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discussed rare instances of heart inflammation among mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients. The committee agreed the vaccines are likely linked to cases of myocarditis and pericarditis but said the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.
Texas Workforce Commission information shows that the oil and natural gas industry shed another 2,500 jobs over the past 10 days, according to a report from the Houston Chronicle.
Beaumont Mayor Becky Ames left Tuesday’s City Council meeting to find her phone flooded with text messages and angry social media criticism after a picture surfaced of her getting service at a local nail salon.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) signed a coronavirus emergency order last week allowing her to ban the sale and transportation of firearms.
The Saudi national who opened fire in a classroom at a naval air station in Florida Friday morning, killing three before being shot dead by officers, wrote anti-American and anti-Israeli tweets before the rampage, reports say.
An assailant involved in the prolonged firefight in Jersey City, N.J., that left six people dead, including one police officer, was linked on Wednesday to 
Antisemitic
I think the president is a coward when it comes to helping our kids who are afraid of gun violence.
Nancy Pelosi dictatorially proclaimed an impeachment inquiry instead of holding a vote on the impeachment inquiry (as with the Johnson, 
Additionally, while we know that Christians are saved by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9), we also know that faith without works is worthless (James 2:18-26). Therefore, Nancy Pelosi’s proclamation of Christian love, prayer, and faith without any proof of it within her professional life seems pretty useless.
Mark 1:1 
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