Saturday, March 28, 2020

While the President fights for us, the media continue to fail America


Poll after poll after big beautiful poll show that the American People resoundingly approve of President Trump's coronavirus response, with many also showing his overall approval rating up!

We could probably make a whole post about just how great those numbers are; but instead, it's with that last graphic from Gallup, specifically looking at the bottom, that's perhaps the most telling in our current predicament, but also in general, and a topic that David Harsanyi latches onto concerning how the political media is failing America...
Their ineptitude, bias, childishness, and outright stupidity have become a genuine danger to the health of the republic.
Only one institution that Gallup asked about, the media, had negative approval rating — sitting 19 points behind its archenemy Donald Trump. And there are likely many other people and places that the public has more trust in than journalists.

This reality is a disaster for a liberal democracy, and much of it is brought on by the press’s own blinkered, sanctimonious, and transparently partisan temperament. On this topic, I could provide a book-length list of grievances. Every day brings an exasperating number of misleading and bad-faith takes by political journalists and “fact-checkers.”

But for now, I’ll just note that it’s not merely a problem of traditional bias among reporters and cable news networks, which preach exclusively to their choirs (no one is innocent on that count.) I’ve long read major newspapers, whose nonpolitical product is often amazing, through a filter. The institutional bias at the Washington Post and the New York Times certainly isn’t new. But there used to be a corresponding level of professional gravitas that engendered reader trust.

Some of that trust has been corroded over years of Obama adulation, echo chambers, conspiracy mongering, and knee-jerk partisanship. Some of that trust has also been corroded by the litany of Trump-slaying “bombshells” that have fizzled over the past years. I don’t know how many times I’ve recently heard people affix “if it turns out to be true” to a breaking news story.

Sorry, it’s difficult to trust a newspaper that allows its headline writing to be controlled by left-wing Twitter mobs or one that sends a senior editor from the Washington Post to write a piece on some Twitter rando with 400 followers to own Trump — and then track down his poor parents for good measure. How do we trust producers who believe Dan Rather — a man who pushed multiple forged documents, which smeared Bush 43, on the American public — is the perfect guest to lecture Americans about accuracy?

All three of those things happened this week.

Worse than all that — or maybe it’s for the best — everyone can now see the hive mind of political journalism at work on Twitter.

For years, media organizations have whined about the lack of White House press briefings, which were mostly childish spectacles that pitted pompous media personalities against disingenuous government personalities.

Once the coronavirus crisis hit, the White House began daily press briefings with the president and his task force. These have featured Trump’s usual braggadocio and exaggerations, but they have also been quite informative — especially when Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx have spoken. The briefings bring in big ratings.

From the start, the ostensibly serious press often focused on frivolous gotchas rather than pertinent questions — why is the president calling a virus unleashed by the Chinese communists a “Chinese virus?” and so on. At yesterday’s White House briefing, a reporter — I couldn’t track down the name or publication of the journalist, but he had all the pretensions of serious reporter — asked the president of the United States, “How many deaths are acceptable?”

This stupid query might have seemed strange to anyone who didn’t exists in Twitter’s zeitgeist, where mainstream journalism’s agenda is dictated by left-wing punditry. But the question was a manifestation of a talking point pushed by leftist pundits: Their hot take is that Trump wants to sacrifice your grandparents to pump up the Dow.

Trump — who had never once told anyone to stop social distancing or ordered people to go back to work (as if he even could) — mentioned his perhaps unrealistic hope of the economy beginning to open by Easter. A legitimate question regarding societal balance, one inherent in nearly every debate over public policy, was quickly reduced to a childish false choice.

Here is how CNN covers it now:
In any event, the media’s inane and badgering questions may well have helped Trump’s poll numbers. As soon as the media organizations saw that public wasn’t reacting in the way they had hoped, stations such as NBC and CNN began debating whether they should cover the pandemic press briefings at all. This is, of course, their prerogative. It also is the latest example of why so many Americans don’t trust them.

The media’s ineptitude and malfeasance — merely damaging and divisive during an impeachment hearing or a Supreme Court nomination fight — are dangerous during a pandemic.
Indeed they are, and that the majority of the America People see it, demonstrated through all of these polls, speaks volumes. Levin doesn't call them the unfree press for nothing, nor does the President in referring to them as "the enemy of the people" when they incessantly tear away at the fabric of our greatness.
Posted by an ebb and flow at 7:00 PM

Monday, March 23, 2020

Could the cure be around the corner? (UPDATES)

Or perhaps already here! And the stories we're hearing thus far sound promising...

President Trump mentioned the use of this drug on Thursday; then by Friday, the public heard from a NY doctor who said his hospital was already using Hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic version of Chloroquine, for coronavirus patients and has had ZERO deaths!



Earlier today, it was reported that a Florida man who was on the verge of death was administered Hydroxychloroquine and it appears to have saved his life!



And now Lost actor Daniel Dae Kim is touting hydroxychloroquine as ‘crucial’ to his recovery from the coronavirus!



It's a bit disheartening to continue to hear local news reporting lives lost overnight, when this seems like something that could be administered to EVERYONE infected NOW! Yes, it's still in testing, but because the drug has already been out there, the President has stated that this is already accessible. Hello, Media! How about we stop overemphasizing the mortality and turn the focus towards what could be a cure?!

ADDENDUM: More positive results!

Another NY doctor says Trump was RIGHT, touting fantastic results with Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin on 350 coronavirus patients!
UPDATES: Good news hit Thursday when the Trump administration cut through red tape on the production of Hydroxychloroquine to meet treatment demands!
The FDA has just announced that it’s green lighting the mass production of hydroxychloroquine by pharmacies in order to meet the demand for treatment of coronavirus as well as the normal diseases it treats:
And on Friday, the FDA approved a major breakthrough in testing...
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency authorization on Friday for a new coronavirus test that can deliver results in just 5 minutes and is so small that it can be used nearly anywhere.
...progress. Keep it going!
Posted by an ebb and flow at 6:47 PM

Evidence vs hysteria: controlling the virus narrative

After watching the outbreak of COVID-19 for the past two months, I’ve followed the pace of the infection, its severity, and how our world is tackling the virus. While we should be concerned and diligent, the situation has dramatically elevated to a mob-like fear spreading faster than COVID-19 itself. When 13% of Americans believe they are currently infected with COVID-19 (mathematically impossible), full-on panic is blocking our ability to think clearly and determine how to deploy our resources to stop this virus. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared of what we are doing to our society through law and hysteria, not of infection or spreading COVID-19 to those most vulnerable. ~ Aaron Ginn, "COVID-19 - Evidence Over Hysteria"
So, a techie took a look at the numbers, and over the weekend published a data-drive look at the Wuhan coronavirus...
Aaron Ginn is a Silicon Valley technologist who has written for Breitbart, TechCrunch, TheNextWeb, and Townhall. Ginn has published a piece at Medium about the Wuhan coronavirus. It’s called “Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19.”

Ginn is not a scientist or a doctor, but he seems like a capable numbers cruncher and analyst. Moreover, he marshals views of medical and health professionals.

I think his piece is worthy of your consideration. However, as with just about everything written on this subject, it should not be considered definitive. At this point, some level of skepticism is almost always in order.
...it didn't take long for censorship to ensue!

For attempting to argue against the hysteria, Big Tech (ironically) in the form of social media began a campaign to quash one of its own! Medium, the articles original publisher, has taken down Ginn’s post and replaced it with an ERROR 410 page that says his post “is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.” What does that mean? It means what he wrote goes against the grain of the doom-and-gloom narrative, and we can't have anyone besides Big Media controlling the virus narrative...
The coronavirus threat creates new challenges for social-media companies already grappling with the limits of free speech online. China is waging an information war to whitewash its handling of the virus and impugn the U.S. Meanwhile, charlatans hawking bogus science or false cures could endanger the public.

Yet some of the web’s gatekeepers are tempted to go further and stamp out the free debate that helped alert Americans to the threat of the virus in the first place. They want to require conformity with the judgment of expert institutions, even as many of those institutions themselves woefully misjudged the situation months or weeks ago.

Over the weekend Medium, a web-publishing platform, took down a long article entitled “Evidence over hysteria—COVID-19” that had been viewed millions of times. The piece, by Silicon Valley technologist Aaron Ginn, was an exhaustive case for optimism about the coronavirus. It highlighted some of the most hopeful available estimates, mostly from good authorities, of the virus’s growth rate, severity, transmissibility, and responsiveness to warmer weather.

Those estimates may be wrong, and the piece doesn’t address more troubling evidence. Yet Mr. Ginn did not deny the virus is a public-health threat or urge people in hot zones to go to nightclubs. The page now says “this post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.”

Meanwhile, Twitter has unveiled sweeping restrictions on posts about the coronavirus. The company says it will restrict “content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.” If you click on the link to the Medium post from Twitter, you get a page warning it is “potentially harmful.”

The problem is that the situation is changing with blinding speed and so has “guidance from authoritative sources.” The World Health Organization—widely seen as subject to pressure from Beijing—tweeted in January that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.” And while the U.S. public-health response has finally kicked into gear, organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have hardly been perfect oracles.

Twitter users and bloggers were sounding the alarm about the potential damage from coronavirus and inadequate testing before the authorities and major media. The idea that “democratizing information” leads to better outcomes is often exaggerated, but the freewheeling marketplace of ideas has sometimes performed better than the central authorities. The churn of arguments and data will improve the response to coronavirus as new information becomes available, and shutting it down may undermine public faith in the official response.
I've been running my own stats throughout, because it's important to maintain perspective. Here's the latest: Of the U.S. deaths compared to total recorded American cases, the mortality rate is around 1.2% (actually down from last week at 1.3%). If we divide that by the total U.S. population, that mortality number goes down to .00016% (I rounded up). Not to say anything against the seriousness of this virus nor to criticize precautions taken against it, but just trying to apply some perspective against the panic...just as the President's trying to provide hope for Americans, while the damn MSM seek to sensationalize.

Related link: Ricochet: Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19
Posted by an ebb and flow at 3:36 PM

Dems block coronavirus stimulus bill and further tank stock market! (UPDATES)

Now is when Pelosi and Schumer wanna play politics?! Who are the heartless ones, again? It ain't Republicans...they're not the ones blocking a relief bill for THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!
Democrats rejected a Republican bill meant to be a stimulus for the coronavirus epidemic, and the markets tanked on the news… even further.
Apparently Democrats are working on their own bill, but that is going to take time that will further tank the stock market. So in other words, hang on to your 401ks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
Can't blame McConnell for being furious about this destructive partisanship...
...burning the whole country down...and it still won't win them the White House!

Related link: You can actually see New York Times headline evolve from truth to propaganda on coronavirus stimulus

ADDENDUM: McConnell calls'em out, AGAIN!
“This is a tremendous opportunity to restrict things to fit our vision.”
~ Pelosi’s top lieutenant Rep. James Clyburn

UPDATE: Senate Democrats block stimulus bill AGAIN! This via tRS:
Democrats have again blocked the stimulus bill from progressing in the Senate, which is reportedly up to 2 trillion dollars now:
The bill started last week at just below 1 trillion dollars. Now, presumably due to Democrat demands, it’s doubled in size to 2 trillion and yet they still won’t vote for it? Considering all that’s going on with closures, stay-at-home orders and the spread of the coronavirus, I do find this quite shocking and believe Democrats are playing a dangerous game with the elections only months away. That being said...2 trillion dollars???

WTH?! Shameful. And for what exactly? This...

Related link: Trump puts pressure on Democrats to pass the coronavirus stimulus bill TODAY

UPDATE II: Two days later...but there's still a maybe...

So there you go. 2 trillion dollars will pass with unanimous consent and, assuming there are no objections in the House when it gets there, should land on the president’s desk to be signed tonight or tomorrow.
We'll see when we get there, but there's no reason this should have take this long. Dems have played the worst kind of politics at the worst possible time.

ADDENDUM II: Passes the Senate! Now on to the House...


UPDATE III: And now passed the House...on to the President's desk...


You can just about bet there's some Pelosi pork in there, unfortunately.

 ADDENDUM III: And there ya go...

The bill includes $500 billion in direct checks to American families, $500 billion in small business loans, $150 billion in hospital funding and a $150 billion relief fund for state and local governments, among other measures. ...

Despite both sides of the aisle working tirelessly with each other to pass the act in just one week, no Democrats were in the Oval Office for the signing.

The president was joined by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and McConnell’s wife, Transport Secretary Elaine Chao.

Noticeably absent were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Posted by an ebb and flow at 12:49 AM

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Recaps and Records: while the Trump admin works towards solutions, the Left continues the practice of disunity

The all-encompassing talk of the nation this week has been COVID-19... well, that along with the lib media and Democrats (but I repeat myself) incessantly criticizing, blaming and attacking the President, while peddling 'policy' that wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference towards a remedy (in some cases, to the contrary). So let's cut through all the armchair quarterbacking of the week with this brief recap...


  • banning all travel from Europe for the next 30 days (UK was the exception, extended today)
  • asking Congress to provide payroll tax relief for business owners and financial relief for workers who are ill, quarantined, or taking care of others to mitigate the economic challenges the coronavirus is causing
  • ordering the SBA to provide more loans to small businesses during this crisis and ordering the IRS to defer April 15 tax payments without interest or penalties to those who are affected by the coronavirus.
  • declaring a national emergency - will give the Trump administration access to around $50 billion in disaster relief funds that they can send to states to help with their responses to the coronavirus.
  • pulling the private sector together to respond to the need for testing - will include biomedical laboratories like Labcorp and Roche who will be doing much of the testing, along with retail stores like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and others who will make their parking lots available for a quicker ‘drive-thru’ style testing, and also noted that Google has 1,700 engineers working on a website that will link all of this coronavirus testing for the public.
  • testing itself - will encompass half a million over the next few weeks, and up to 5 million people in a month's time through this new system.
  • ordering the federal government to buy enough oil to fill up our reserves.
  • ordering his administration to suspend student loan interest on federally owned student loans.
Of particular significance was the stock market's reaction to the latter, up almost 2,000 points on Friday, taking off as soon as the President's news conference began. I'm positive that the optimism of the business leaders surrounding him went a long way. And on that same optimistic note, this was certainly the press conference the American public needed to see, providing hope for those worrying about the virus's spread.

Now... from that brief recap to a broader recollection, let's compare and contrast what the Democrats and their media lapdogs were doing while COVID-19 was spreading versus how the Trump administration was working to address the virus well before it reached our shores. This is a compilation of RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel's helpful thread and investigative journalist Joel Pollak's shocking timeline of the two developments...
  • January 11: Chinese state media report the first known death from an illness originating in the Wuhan market.
  • January 15: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds a vote to send articles of impeachment to the Senate. Pelosi and House Democrats celebrate the “solemn” occasion with a signing ceremony, using commemorative pens.
  • January 21: The first person with coronavirus arrives in the United States from China, where he had been in Wuhan.
  • January 23: The House impeachment managers make their opening arguments for removing President Trump.
  • January 23: China closes off the city of Wuhan completely to slow the spread of coronavirus to the rest of China.
  • January 30: Senators begin asking two days of questions of both sides in the president’s impeachment trial.
  • January 30: The World Health Organization declares a global health emergency as coronavirus continues to spread.
  • January 31: The Senate holds a vote on whether to allow further witnesses and documents in the impeachment trial.
  • January 31: President Trump declares a national health emergency and imposes a ban on travel to and from China. Former Vice President Joe Biden calls Trump’s decision “hysterical xenophobia … and fear-mongering.”
  • February 2: The first death from coronavirus outside China is reported in the Philippines.
  • February 3: House impeachment managers begin closing arguments, calling Trump a threat to national security.
  • February 4: President Trump talks about coronavirus in his State of the Union address; Pelosi rips up every page.
  • February 5: The Senate votes to acquit President Trump on both articles of impeachment, 52-48 and 53-47.
  • February 5: House Democrats finally take up coronavirus in the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia.
Pollak's bullet points demonstrate that for twenty days, from the day of the virus's first death, Democrats did nothing about it. They were too busy trying to impeach Trump in an election year!
To the extent that they commented on coronavirus at all, it was only to tear up the president’s remarks or to call him a racist. They told the nation that he, not coronavirus, was a threat to the national security of the United States.
Instead of pulling together, the above contrasts reveal the true cost of hyper-partisanship. Democrats and their press have used this virus to attack the president and stoke panic from Day One, while Trump and his administration have worked towards management and containment of the virus to calm the American people as professionals work towards a vaccine.
Democrats including Joe Biden have lied about Trump saying it was a hoax. Lied about saying the CDC was cut. Lied about Trump muzzling scientists. Biden even put out an ad including the lies, trying to stoke more angst.

Meanwhile folks like Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. Anthony Fauci (for the administration) have been trying to put it into perspective so as not to create panic and do more harm to people.
So now you know, the left insists on never letting a crisis go to waste, not even when it's literally affecting American lives, and especially not in a presidential election year. They can't afford to allow unity. To echo McDaniel, pretty vile.

Related links: The Politicization of COVID-19
Pelosi caught trying to backdoor abortion funding in Coronavirus bill
Schumer is blaming Trump and the Republicans for a delay in coronavirus bill that Pelosi caused
Posted by an ebb and flow at 4:31 PM

Monday, March 9, 2020

Addressing the media-driven FREAKOUT over coronavirus

Stay calm and STOP FREAKING OUT!! A helpful message not only for the general public, but especially for the daily press-created hysteria!



Related links: Dr. Drew Pinsky slams media for inciting coronavirus 'panic'
We Go From Hysteria to Hysteria

Not that the coronavirus isn't serious, but the media hype is sharply overblown...
...coronavirus has infected around 90,000 people that we know of, and killed around 3,000, and made its way into 60 countries across the globe. No rational person would claim that it is unimportant or imaginary. But rational people will say, and are saying, that the panic, hysteria, and media hype are way overblown. We are not facing the apocalypse or anything close to it. Arguably, this isn’t even a pandemic (though it depends on how you define the term). I’m not sure that our culture is capable of being serious but not hysterical about something, but on this we should give it a try. And here are a few facts that hopefully put the issue into perspective:
1. The virus is not killing young, healthy people. Surprisingly it isn’t killing infants or children either. So far, the vast majority of serious and fatal cases are among the elderly and the sick. Of course, deaths in that demographic are tragic, too, but many illnesses are serious or potentially fatal to the very old and the immune-compromised.

2. The real mortality rate is almost certainly not the 2 or 3 percent that’s been reported. That number only applies to reported cases. In order to be a reported case, you need to go to the doctor or a hospital and get tested for the illness. Everyone who had the virus, never got tested, and recovered, is not counted against the official mortality rate because we don’t know about them and we don’t know how many of them there are. The important point is that majority of cases are mild. ... Some researchers think [the real mortality rate] might be a little less than 1 percent but even that is conjecture. We simply don’t have a large enough sample size. One other thing to remember: most of the 3,000 dead were in China where the healthcare system is in shambles. Even so, cases of coronavirus are already falling exponentially in China. There’s another reason for cautious optimism.

3. It’s easy to forget that we have suffered through and survived pandemics before, including very recently. Only 10 years ago the swine flu managed to infect over 60 million people and kill over 12 thousand — in the US alone. Globally, the death toll topped half a million. This, again, doesn’t mean that the coronavirus isn’t serious. It just means that the media-fueled panic is out of proportion and lacks perspective. As is always the case with panics.
Likewise, the media is spreading fear by reporting the number of deaths and cases without context: approx. 90,000 cases, resulting in approx. 3000 deaths...compared to WHAT?! How about EVERYTHING ELSE!
...when compared to the global annual mortality of other diseases, the number of total deaths is relatively insignificant.
Measles: 140,000 deaths

Influenza: 650,000 deaths

Tuberculosis: 1.5 million deaths

Infectious gastroenteritis: 1.8 million deaths
Imagine a world in which every death from the flu was reported on the front page of every media outlet. You might be surprised, for example, to find out that in the U.S. 105 children have died from the flu so far in 2020 - the second-highest number of deaths at this time of year since records began in 2004.
Furthermore, the markets are following the media in this overhyped sensationalism and driving all of our investments into the toilet...
Our intensely interconnected societies and sensationalist media mean that this failure of judgment can translate into mass hysteria and fear in the markets that can have a tangible impact on the world economy. Oil prices have collapsed, stock markets have fallen by the largest amount since the 2008 financial crisis and the Dow Jones saw its largest single-day points drop in history. All of this has come from the spread of the coronavirus from China to South Korea, Italy, Iran, and Japan. But as this spread continues there is one key factor that market observers appear to be missing, highlighted by the below chart.


This is an epidemic curve showing the number of new cases per day in China (the world’s second-largest economy and the world's largest importer of goods). It appears that China is in the process of successfully containing the coronavirus and, for that reason, has already begun to reboot its economy (the large jump in the middle of the above graph was caused by China changing its recording method from positive test cases to clinical diagnosis).

China is getting back to work. And you can be sure that the Chinese government will be doing everything in its power to stimulate growth. Here are some other key indicators that show the same thing:


But these are generally not the statistics or the graphs reported by the media. Instead, they report cumulative data and crude numbers out of context.


These cumulative graphs suggest that coronavirus deaths and cases are increasing and therefore the epidemic is getting worse. Of course, in a cumulative graph, the cases will only ever go up or plateau.


This graph, which is far more relevant, shows a general downward trend in global new confirmed cases per day and an increase in new recovered cases. This data would suggest that containing the coronavirus is very much a possibility and if governments continue to follow good practice the new outbreaks can be controlled without impacting the economy too severely.

In fact, the largest threat to the markets at the moment is not an epidemic of disease but an epidemic of hysteria. Governments and medical institutions are reacting, as they should, to prevent a worst-case scenario. But for societies and markets to react in the same way is neither logical nor healthy.
Kinda hard not to think about all those frenzied celebrities, pundits and politicians (you know, the aristocratic bourgeois) just last year before the impeachment hoax hoping for a recession to defeat President Trump...never mind jobs, retirement, the wealth and well-being of the general public (you know, WE THE PEOPLE)! Is the unfree, lib press now taking their cue? A question worth pondering in this overhyped, misunderstood, media-driven freakout. Whatever the case, here's to hoping it ends soon for all our sakes.
Related links: Fear, Death and the Coronavirus
Why Dems Are Backing Off on Blaming Trump for the Coronavirus
Market Plunges Over Oil, Not the Coronavirus
What the Coronavirus Should Teach Us
The Right Response to the Coronavirus

ADDENDUM: How about this positive message beyond the panic:

An American woman who has recovered from the novel coronavirus has a simple message for people who are worried: Don't panic -- but do think about high-risk individuals and stay home if you feel ill.

Elizabeth Schneider lives in Seattle, the biggest city of Washington state, which has the most deaths in the United States from the disease sweeping the globe.

The 37-year-old, who has a PhD in bioengineering, said she was sharing her story "to give people a little bit of hope" through her own relatively mild experience with the infection, which she treated herself from home.
Interesting, real story here with some solid advice.

Related link: ‘Freaking out doesn’t help.’ 10 things you can do right now — instead of losing your head about the Dow or coronavirus
Posted by an ebb and flow at 1:32 PM

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Your 'Super Thursday' report...

Just had to...



Yes, the Gaffe Master has pulled ahead of the Red! There's still concerns to consider, however...

First, a word about Dem primary voters' rejection of the media's favorite candidates...
...Super Tuesday finally transfigures the Democratic presidential nomination process into a binary choice between two old, occasionally problematic white men whose enduring popularity is consistently underrated by a baffled mainstream press...

Democratic voters indicated over and over again that they were most interested in the popular former vice president and the iconoclastic but well-respected runner-up from the 2016 Democratic race. Before the actual primaries, Biden consistently led in polls and Sanders performed well—and then the eventual voting followed this pattern, with early wins for Sanders and a comeback surge from Biden. The idea that any other candidate had a particularly likely shot at the nomination was always pundit-driven misdirection from a class of commentators demanding more interesting, intersectional characters, because the commentators themselves are more interested in identity-based diversity than the rest of the country. ...

At present, Biden and Sanders are locked in a battle for delegates. Both men have a good shot at the nomination. But this was true a year ago as well. They were both better-known and better-liked than many in the media seemed to grasp, and an endless series of magazine covers, fluff pieces, and editorial board endorsements aimed at other candidates couldn't make any difference whatsoever.
Secondly, Joe Biden’s big night still doesn't solve Democrats’ Bernie problem...
With a sweep of the south and key victories in Minnesota and Massachusetts, the media narrative today will be all about how Joe Biden is the comeback kid, back from the dead, risen like a Phoenix from the ashes. That sort of thing.

It’s the kind of story the media loves. They love it so much it doesn’t matter whether it’s true, or whether the media was writing Biden off less than a week ago. The surprise comeback, vindicated frontrunner narrative is going to be pushed so hard by the mainstream press and the Democratic establishment in the coming days, you’ll think Biden’s nomination is pretty much a done deal.

What the headlines and the narrative won’t tell you is what any casual survey of the Democratic primary map plainly shows: Super Tuesday didn’t solve the Democratic Party’s Bernie Sanders problem. ...

...let’s not kid ourselves that the driving force behind Biden’s Super Tuesday resurgence was the consolidation of the moderate vote just in the nick of time. Who knows whether this eleventh-hour clearing of the field was simply blind luck or the secret machinations of the Democratic Party determined to stop Sanders at any cost, but the effect was to deliver a significant number of delegates to Biden in Minnesota, Massachusetts, Virginia, and elsewhere.

Above all, Super Tuesday has clarified the race, finally, and revealed it for what it has been this entire time: an attempt by progressives to overthrow the establishment and transform the Democratic Party into a European-style democratic socialist party. That effort is not dead, not by a long shot. The Sanders wing of the party on Tuesday showed that it cannot be muscled aside, certainly not by Biden and the also-rans, and certainly not before the convention in July.

Therein lies the danger for the Democrats. Nothing about Tuesday’s results suggests any change in the fundamental problem facing the party. It is divided, almost down the middle, between moderates who will do anything to stop Sanders and leftists who will support no one but Sanders. No amount of narrative-shaping by the media or chest-thumping by Biden will change that.
I'm still baffled by the labeling of Biden as a moderate throughout so many publications, even conservative ones. I suppose next to Bernie the Red, but that can hardly be a measurable bar! As far as delegates, it's very likely that most of the dropouts' will go towards Uncle Joe's count, as they've already sided with his candidacy, you know, moderate and all. And as of this writing, Pocahontas is calling it quits, so hers will likely default into the Bern.

In the end, I believe what I've implied before still stands: Democrat voters are split between a continued leftward march towards bigger, centralized government, or a completely off-the-scales pursuit of a nonexistent, idealized, socialist utopia with a willingness to burn down the party and country to get there, neither of which are promising for an American future.

Related links: 'Bernie is problematic on all levels': why centrist Democrats are flocking to Biden
WATCH: Biden mixes up his wife and sister during his victory speech; Brit Hume wonders how many voters think Biden is approaching senility
Trump: Biden’s Mind So Far Gone He Doesn’t Even Know What He’s Criticizing
Trump: Bernie Is ‘A Good Puppy’ Who Will Do What ‘He’s Supposed To Do’
Posted by an ebb and flow at 11:29 AM

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Enough of these open THREATS from miscreants like Schumer...

So this nuttery happened today: a sitting U.S. Senator openly THREATENED Supreme Court members over the Democratic sacred cow of abortion-on-demand (hogwash about 'reproductive rights')...
At a pro-choice rally near the Supreme Court, Chuck Schumer threatened both Supreme Court justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in an effort to intimidate them regarding Louisiana’s abortion law:
“I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Of course by the end of the video, you see that prompted the Chief Justice to respond:


Schumer's spokes-idiot tried making excuses, saying Republicans are misinterpreting what he said. No, Schumer’s threats were as plain as plain can be. He wasn't talking in generalities, he specifically targeted SCOTUS justices, and it was appropriate for the Chief Justice to respond, just as it was for the President to call Schumer out on it...
...and just as appropriate for Senate Republicans to now seek censure!

This is exactly what Senate Republicans need to do and I hope McConnell doesn’t get soft and put the kibosh on it. It’s too serious to do nothing about it.
Expect Schumer to get a complete pass from the MSM. However, the next Republican to be interviewed by a member of the so-called free press needs to bring it up and confront them with such dangerous language. Just imagine if this had been a Republican Senator talking about Sotomayor and Ginsburg!
Related links: Chief Justice John Roberts Blasts Schumer’s Threats As ‘Inappropriate’ And ‘Dangerous’
Trump Calls For ‘Serious’ Action To Be Taken Against Schumer For ‘Threatening’ Justices
Senator To Bring Motion To Censure Schumer, Democrat Suggests He Step Down
WATCH: Schumer Pushes Video Of His Abortion Speech, Leaves Out Threat To Gorsuch, Kavanaugh

ADDENDUM: Levin was spot on in his assessment last night...
Reacting to the public threats Schumer made Wednesday, in which the senator singled out for retribution the two justices by name, Levin tweeted that Schumer’s “loathsome conduct” has endangered the justices and attempted to coerce them.

Schumer’s comments are especially egregious, given that he is both a lawyer and a Senate Democrat leader, Levin wrote, calling for the American Bar Association, the Senate and the Justice Department to take action:
McConnell went to the Senate floor this morning, condemning Schumer for threatening both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh yesterday.







Undoubtedly, Schumer should be censured, but also as Levin suggests, he should be disbarred and have ethics charges filed against him for such threatening language. And speaking of the latter...WOW!

Landmark Legal Foundation has asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate and sanction Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for his outrageous and deadly serious threats against U.S. Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Read our complaint here.
Will the Senate and ABA follow suit, past the lip service, to ACT?!
Posted by an ebb and flow at 10:42 PM
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