Daily News Roundup
NOTABLE QUOTES
Daniel Greenfield contributor to FrontPage Magazine: 20 years ago, 71% of Democrats were members of a church. A decade later, in the Obama years, it fell to 60% and is now down to 46%.
Rep. Andy Barr (R., Ky.) sounds the alarm on the House Democrat push to limit America’s ability to fight terrorists in the Middle East: Voting to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) without a replacement is voting to disregard the terrorist threats in Iraq. This decision also surrenders the role of Congress in consenting to the use of military force under Article I of the Constitution. Congress should instead reassert its role in the process of authorizing military force and examine ways to update the 2002 AUMF to better reflect the current national security threats in the region.
Conrad Black contributor to American Greatness on the January 6the reaction by our nation’s Representatives in the U.S. House: The most accurate reflection of the spirit of the occasion was the image of the senators hiding under their desks wearing ludicrous protective headgear: the apotheosis of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”
Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in testimony challenging the notion of the importance of a racially diverse judiciary: So make no mistake: It would be profoundly offensive—and un-American—to tell the world that you’re restricting a judgeship to members of only one race. It’s offensive to people of other races. And it’s offensive to people of that race—because you’re suggesting that the only way they’ll get the job is if you rig the rules in their favor.
Tucker Carlson Fox TV host: . . .the George Floyd trial has finally started in Minneapolis and the other channels are covering it like a championship game, which makes sense if your job is to make Americans hate each other. If your job is to divide the country and that’s how they see their job, the opportunity to talk about George Floyd all day is like your Super Bowl.
Jeff Minick contributor to Intellectual Conservative: Guns prevent 2.5 million crimes every year, including 400,000 life-threatening violent crimes, the Foundation for Economic Education reports. This is a crucial part of the argument often overlooked by those wishing to regulate or confiscate our firearms.
Jack Kerwick contributor to FrontPage Magazine: Think about it: a cough, running nose, sore throat, chills, chest congestion, fever, loss of taste and smell—these are all symptoms of a plethora of things, from the common cold to seasonal influenza and a whole lot else. Particularly since the vast majority of COVID cases are “mild,” it’s with the greatest of ease that any single one of these symptoms or any number of combinations of them can be used as a pretext by which to establish a “COVID case.”
Julie Kelly contributor to American Greatness exposes Dr. Fauci: Not only does it require an audacious level of arrogance to tell tens of millions of parents, without hesitation, what their children can and cannot do, it signals a deep-seated malevolence toward the most helpless human beings. Prohibiting children from participating in the fundamental joys of childhood while forcing them to wear dirty, dehumanizing face masks is physical and psychological child abuse. Fauci should be widely condemned for his remarks and CBS News should be ashamed for giving voice to such abusive, unscientific advice.
Read more at The Conservative Treehouse.
Jim Desmond Republican San Diego County Supervisor: T]he Office of Education is sending teachers over for in-person classroom training. Our own kids here in San Diego County can’t get in-person training. But here are these migrants, who, actually, I’m glad they’re getting that educational opportunity, but so should our kids that have been waiting over a year to get back into school.
PRESIDENT TRUMP
Sundance: The Office of President Donald J Trump Launches a New Website
“The Office of Donald J. Trump is committed to preserving the magnificent legacy of the Trump Administration, while at the same time advancing the America First agenda. Through civic engagement and public activism, the Office of Donald J. Trump will strive to inform, educate, and inspire Americans from all walks of life as we seek to build a truly great American Future. Through this office, President Trump will remain a tireless champion for the hardworking men and women of our great country – and for their right to live in safety, dignity, prosperity, and peace.”
Read more at The Conservative Treehouse.
Hinderaker: AN EX-PRESIDENT STRIKES BACK
Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned. They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine—putting millions of lives at risk. We developed American vaccines by an American President in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world. We bought billions of dollars of these vaccines on a calculated bet that they would work, perhaps the most important bet in the history of the world. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression. Families, and children in particular, would be suffering the mental strains of this disaster like never before. In a fake interview last night on CNN, Dr. Fauci, . . .
Read more at POWERLINE Blog.
Nelson: Mark Meadows slams Fauci, Birx for ‘revisionist’ account of COVID response
Ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Monday hit back at new criticism of the COVID-19 pandemic from former White House coronavirus task force members Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, calling their accounts “revisionist” and “disingenuous.” “What we heard last night on CNN was rhetoric we never heard in the West Wing from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx,” Meadows told Steve Bannon, once former President Donald Trump’s strategist, on his “War Room” podcast.
Read more at New York Post.
BEHIND THE DEEP STATE
Pullmann: An FBI So Corrupt It Lets Mass Shooters Rampage Needs To Go
According to a police affidavit, six days before Alissa shot 10 people to death, he purchased a pistol. That would have required him to pass a federal background check also run by the FBI. It seems the FBI is not very good at this “stopping mass shooters” thing. This is not an anomaly in the FBI’s history. It in fact appears to be a pattern of negligence. During the Barack Obama presidency, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., grilled FBI Director James Comey about the “known wolf” problem — of 14 Islamist attacks in the U.S. during Obama’s tenure, the FBI had been aware of at least 12 before the violence erupted, and did nothing. […] The FBI had also been warned numerous times about the Parkland, Florida school shooter, before he killed 17 and injured 17 more in 2018. It also knew beforehand about the 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Waffle House shooter, who killed four and injured two more, and the 2020 Nashville RV bomber.
While the FBI has been failing to stop terrorist attacks by known threats like these, it has conducted numerous political operations on behalf of Democrats. The ones we know about include Crossfire Hurricane‘s use of federal spy power to affect election outcomes and prevent effective governance by elected Republicans. That operation included spying on Fox News. […] It also appears the FBI is using its police power to prosecute people in connection with the Capitol riot who participated in no violence, including one who never went inside the Capitol nor harmed any person or public property . .
Read more at The Federalist.
RETURN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POWER TO THE STATES
Chalberg: Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment?
do” list of the narrow Democratic majority these days. Their preference seems to be to do end runs around the Constitution instead. But maybe it’s time for the Republican party to build a case for repealing a previous constitutional amendment. Here the case would not be to “repeal and replace,” but to repeal and return. Specifically, we should scrap the 17th Amendment, which gave us the direct election of senators, and return this task to the state legislatures, which called this shot until 1913. Repeal a constitutional amendment? Why not? It’s happened before— . . . […] The charge against the senate of the late 19th century was that it was a millionaires’ club. The best estimate is that perhaps a dozen senators qualified for this level of membership. Today more than half of our senators are millionaires more than once over. […] The Founders may not have anticipated machine politics, but they did understand what they were creating, as well as the precariousness of its prospects. Remember the famous Ben Franklin line? When asked what form of government had emerged from the Philadelphia convention of 1787, he replied, “a republic, if you can keep it.” Notice he did not say a democracy. A republic we were at the outset, and a republic we must try to remain. Whether we are the republic that we once were is another matter, but we were certainly never a town hall democracy writ large. Nor were we ever intended to be.
Read more: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2021/03/repeal-seventeenth-amendment-chuck-chalberg.html?mc_cid=4f3378223a&mc_eid=3b0a55e3b8
ON D.C. STATEHOOD
Gordon: Taxation with Representation
Though Democrats haven’t made any formal moves on the idea yet, statehood for the District of Columbia is very much on their wish list. Ostensibly, it would cure a constitutional anomaly that gives the residents of the District no voice in Congress other than a nonvoting delegate in the House. In a country born under the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” it’s more than a bit embarrassing that citizens of that country’s capital city are taxed without representation. Yet everyone realizes that the real reason behind the move is to create two new Senate seats that would be held by Democrats for the foreseeable future. […] The Framers of the Constitution didn’t want the capital to be located in a state, fearing that the state would have too much influence as a result. So they authorized the creation of a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, . . . […] In 1960 Congress passed the Twenty-Third Amendment, giving the District’s citizens the right to vote for president, with the District having no more electoral votes than the “least populous state.” Widely perceived as fair, it was ratified in just nine months. In 1978, Congress passed a proposed amendment that would have treated the District of Columbia, for purposes of federal elections only, as though it were a state, giving it two senators and at least one congressman. But this proved a bridge too far: only 16 states ratified the amendment before the seven-year time limit ran out. The opposition to the amendment centered on the fact that the District of Columbia . . . […] With a revived constitutional amendment unlikely to be ratified, Democrats now want to do an end run around the Constitution and make the District a state by legislation. Would that be constitutional? In a word, no. […] There is, however, a way to give the citizens of the District of Columbia the same rights as other Americans—without doing violence to the Constitution or tilting the balance of power in the Senate. All we need is a simple and fair constitutional amendment: . . .
Read more at City-Journal.
Speed: Beating Statehood for D.C.
Radical Democrats, not content to control all three electoral elements of the federal government, are urging that two new states, Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., be added to the union. Legislation to make Washington D.C, a state has already been drawn up. Given that Democrats control both D.C., and Puerto Rico overwhelmingly, this would insure at least four more permanently Democrat controlled seats in the U.S. Senate, thus potentially ensuring Democrat control of that body for generations. Democrats correctly view the nineteen months between now and the 2022 Congressional elections as their window of opportunity to consolidate their electoral stranglehold on American politics. While it is crucial to defeat their proposals to do away with the filibuster and to defeat their companion effort to make permanent and nationalize the measures they took in swing states to stack the deck against Republicans, it is also time for Republicans to prepare for the battle ahead and respond to the arguments Democrats make in favor of the proposal to make D.C. a state with concrete proposals of our own. We must get ahead of this onrushing train. To this end we must acknowledge that with respect to Washington D.C., the district is not what it was when Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson agreed that the site on the Potomac should be set aside as the seat of the national government, or when Pierre L’Enfant laid out the original plan of the city. […] Democrats almost always clothe their most radical demands in the language of justice. We can expect them to do so in this case. This is one of the reasons so many of the general public tend to support otherwise outrageous demands made by the left.
Read more at American Thinker.
SECOND AMENDMENT
Harsanyi: Rahm Emanuel: Hey, Let’s Strip Gun Owners of Due-Process Rights
Alas, the bill didn’t stall because of the infamous filibuster — though demanding a 60-vote threshold for legislation predominately aimed at red states shut out of the lawmaking process would be entirely legitimate — but because moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin and Jon Tester would likely have a difficult time supporting the House efforts. Manchin, who wrote a more modest “universal background check bill” a few years ago, represents a state where an estimated 54 percent of households have guns. In Montana, the number is over 52 percent. But Democrat Rahm Emanuel has an idea. The only way his party can pass gun-control legislation, he argued on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, is by focusing less on firearms and more on people. He reasons Democrats should compromise with Republicans by focusing on “criminals,” “mental health,” and the No-Fly List. […] Yet, Emanuel’s most egregious proposal is “No Fly, No Buy.” The idea here is to confiscate the guns of American citizens who’ve been arbitrarily placed on various secret government no-fly and watch lists without any probable cause, any assumption of innocence, or any due process.
Read more at MSN.
Minick: Some Arguments for Guns You Never Hear
Two recent mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado, have once again roused those whose goal is to destroy the Second Amendment. Before the bodies of the slain were buried, before the bereft were given even a day or two for grieving, these politicians and commentators were calling for new restrictions on gun ownership. Do they have justifiable cause for such demands? Every month, a copy of America’s 1st Freedom arrives in my mailbox. A publication of the National Rifle Association, the articles in this magazine range from political topics to profiles of celebrity gun owners. A regular column in the magazine is the “The Armed Citizen,” which offers readers half-a-dozen or so accounts of Americans defending themselves with their firearms. Here is a typical one: . . . […] Guns prevent 2.5 million crimes every year, including 400,000 life-threatening violent crimes, the Foundation for Economic Education reports. This is a crucial part of the argument often overlooked by those wishing to regulate or confiscate our firearms.
Read more at Intellectual Takeout.
BIDEN/HARRIS/OBAMA: TRANSFORMING AMERICA
Lowry: The Voter-Suppression Lie
President Joe Biden is so committed to bipartisan cooperation and fact-based governance that he’s launched an ignorant and incendiary attack on the new Georgia voting law. Biden says the new law is “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and “an un-American law to deny people the right to vote.” It’s now practically mandatory for Democrats to launch such unhinged broadsides. Elizabeth Warren, accusing Georgia governor Brian Kemp of having stolen his 2018 election victory over Democratic activist Stacey Abrams (a poisonous myth), tweeted, “The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.” Anyone making this charge in good faith either doesn’t understand the hideousness of Jim Crow or the provisions of the Georgia law.
Read more at National Review.
Nester: Education Secretary: It’s Too Soon to Say If Schools Can Reopen by Fall
In a Wednesday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Cardona said the rate of COVID-19 transmission in a community would play a role in determining whether K-12 students will receive face-to-face instruction. Hayes pressed Cardona for the Education Department’s stance on whether remote learning should continue at the start of the 2021-2022 school year. “It’s premature to tell,” Cardona said. “One thing I know as a former commissioner of education, COVID-19 numbers will dictate how we move to reopen schools. So it’s not just about what’s happening in the schools. It’s about what’s happening in the community.”
Read more at Free Beacon.
Widburg: The meaning behind Kamala’s cackle
Video emerged of Kamala Harris recently speaking about the problems parents face when their schools are closed but they can’t afford childcare. This is a serious issue with massive repercussions for children’s development and for working mothers. So what did Kamala do? She cracked herself up, laughing so hard she could barely get the words out. What the heck is going on with that woman? Here’s the video, so that you can see I’m not exaggerating. For some reason, Harris finds it inordinately funny that parents and children are suffering, even as she backs away compulsively from her audience: . . . […] Kamala also thought it was hysterically funny that people are suffering along the southern border now that the Biden administration has thrown aside America’s immigration laws: . . . Kamala also couldn’t stop laughing when asked if she was a socialist: . . . And then there was the time in 2018 when Kamala thought it was hysterically funny to joke about killing Republicans, including Trump and Pence – a joke that, were any other person to make it, would earn a knock on the door from the FBI: . .
Read more/Watch the Harris videos at American Thinker.
COVID: IT’S POLITICAL
Kerwick: All of those COVID Deaths
But are they from COVID? In this series of articles on The Virus, I’ve been exposing the gaping holes in various aspects of the Narrative. If SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified, and extracted according to the scientific procedures that have long been in place for isolating, purifying, and extracting bacteriophages and other “giant viruses,” then two questions need to be asked and answered: (1) What accounts for the endless stream of COVID cases upon which Big Media has been breathlessly reporting for the last year? (2) From what are all of these people getting sick and dying? In my last essay, I answered (1). Here, I address (2). As I showed in my last piece, the PCR test, as its inventor, Karry Mullis conceded, was never intended to quantify viral loads. “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron,” he said. So, the PCR test—the only test, beyond the bare presumption of doctors examining patients, used to identify COVID cases—is intrinsically and significantly limited. But as it has been implemented in practice, per the recommendation of the CDC, it is worthless. […] The Principle of Parsimony—better known since the 14th century as “Ockham’s Razor”—applies: When confronted with two or more explanatory hypotheses, all things being equal, reason dictates that we opt for the one that is simplest. Since many of the symptoms now being associated with COVID until recently were explained in terms of, say, the flu, and, given the foregoing facts regarding the science—or lack of science—behind the COVID Narrative, it makes better sense to continue explaining those symptoms in terms of the flu. […] Especially shocking was the realization that heart disease, which has always been the number one killer in America, appeared to have suddenly lost that distinction with the onset of COVID. Moreover, deaths from all other causes decreased just in proportion to the extent to which COVID deaths increased.
Read more at FrontPage Mag.
