Social Security COLA for 2022 Biggest since 1982, But Still Won’t Cover Actual Cost of Living Increases for Many Retirees thumbnail

Social Security COLA for 2022 Biggest since 1982, But Still Won’t Cover Actual Cost of Living Increases for Many Retirees

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By Wolf Richter

For retirees, 2021 was a nasty year: Red hot inflation and a stingy COLA. In 2022, they might fall behind more slowly.

Among the red-hot inflation data released today was the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), which is used to calculate the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for Social Security benefits. The COLA to be applied to Social Security benefits starting in January 2022 is the average year-over-year percentage increase of CPI-W in the third quarter. And today, the September data was released.

For September, the CPI-W soared by 5.9% year-over-year, after having soared by 5.8% in August and by 6.0% in July. The COLA for 2022 will be the average of those three: 5.9%, the highest since 1982:

A COLA of 5.9% might sound good, and there are hopes that this COLA will allow Social Security benefits to keep up with the actual costs of living, and that may be true for some people, depending on how and where they’re situated, but for many, it won’t be enough, and their actual costs of living will continue to outrun the COLA.

The big issue now is rents, and many Social Security recipients who rent, depending on where they live, already faced double-digit rent increases this year. Then there’s gasoline, which jumped on average 42% year-over-year in September, and utility natural gas which jumped on average 21%. Traveling, now that you have time? The CPI for hotels and motels has jumped by 20% and rental cars by 43%.

And forget buying a vehicle, new or used, because those prices have spiked out of reach for any COLA.

The reason the COLA is still relatively low compared to reality on the ground is that housing costs, which account for nearly one-third of the overall CPI, have been artificially repressed by the calculation method.

The CPI for rent rose only 2.4% year-over-year, while actual rents have soared in many cities by 10% or more, and in some by 20% or more….

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Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

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New Reasons to Dislike Hate Crimes

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By Bruce Bialosky

Hate crimes always seemed like a stupid idea to me. If you are a Jew and your family member is murdered, do you really care that the murderer is a Jew-hater? It goes the same for Blacks, Gays, or any other group. Personally, I would not care what the murderer’s motivation was; I would want them dead regardless. It is not a stretch to understand that people would use the law to expand the notion of a hate crime. That has once again been proposed making it an even better idea to junk the statute.

Hate crime legislation was first proposed in the 99th Congress which lasted from 1985 through 1986. It finally passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives in the 101st Congress in 1989 and then did the same in the U.S. Senate that year. George Bush, the elder, signed it into law that year. Just because it was passed with such large numbers and signed by a Republican president did not make it a smart idea.

It was initially passed to collect and publish data on crimes of race, religion, or ethnicity. In 1997, the categories of sexual orientation, gender or disability were introduced as additional categories. They passed and became law in 2009.

The question of motivation is always open to interpretation. As you may remember, a person went into some facilities that were deemed to have sex workers in them, mostly of Asian heritage. Of course, you must believe all Asians are exactly alike even though they could be in the U.S. from more than a dozen countries. When it became evident that the murderer was more interested in their employment orientation than the native heritage of the people he murdered, the press adjusted their storyline to question whether there was now a new category of hate crimes — against sex workers.

“Hate crime legislation has never been about punishing people for their beliefs or speech. Rather, it is about punishing people for their criminal actions.” That is a quote from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) website. Of course, it is about punishing people for their thoughts or words; otherwise, there would not be enhanced penalties for violent crimes because it is perceived that the person who perpetrated the crime does not like Jews or Blacks, or Gays. The hate comes specifically from what they said or what they have been shown to believe. Very few hate crimes have people writing on the chest of the victim that the only good Jew (Black or Gay) is a dead Jew (Black or Gay).

“There is a troubling new expansion of antiscience aggression in the United States. It’s arising from far-right extremism, including some elected members of the US Congress and conservative news outlets that target prominent biological scientists fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.”

That statement by Peter Hotez, MD, Ph.D., Dean National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University, was made in an article in the Public Library of Science Biology Journal. He calls for hate crime protection for scientists — especially Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Though the article does not cite any physical threats made against various scientists, it does cite where people have questioned their decisions and findings. With the Left, including President Biden, constantly telling us we must listen to the scientists and criticizing anyone who dares to question the advice of the anointed, it does seem it was the logical next step to make it illegal to question “scientific authorities.”

To further justify the rationale of his lofty argument, Professor Hotez compares the people who denounce scientists to you guessed it — Nazis. For good stead, he not only names Hitler, but Mussolini, and throws in Marxists to be inclusive. But there is no mention of the erratic and inconsistent advice offered by the scientists for the past two years; just that one is evil for questioning them.

You are saying to yourself that this idea is from one person in one journal. Don’t bet against the proposal moving forward. This is how Critical Race Theory, ballot harvesting, and other harebrained ideas have moved forward into the mainstream and adopted as the gospel by the Left. After all, that is how we got the idea of hate crimes in the first place. On many college campuses today one can be accused of spewing hate speech by skipping over trigger warnings.

Jumping on the hate crime bandwagon is the National School Boards Association. The organization sent a letter to President Biden asking for federalizing enforcement against parents protesting the actions of school boards across the country. That is despite little to no acts of physical violence against school board members and certainly no cases of parents protesting outside of elected school board members’ homes or following them into bathroom stalls. In the letter they stated, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” It had to come, parents protesting policies regarding the education of their children taken by school boards at public schools is now proposed to be a hate crime.

Is it far behind to consider it a hate crime to criticize the President? Unless, of course, the President is a Republican.

*****

This article was published on October 10, 2021, in FlashReport, and is reproduced with permission from the author.

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If Hospitals Are Overwhelmed, Maybe They Should Stop Threatening to Fire Staff

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By Arizona Free Enterprise Club

As if COVID hysteria hasn’t been bad enough, President Biden took it to the next level last month. In a troubling press conference, Biden announced vaccine mandates for private companies that employ 100 or more people—making sure to emphasize that this is not about “freedom or personal choice.”

But this wasn’t the first time we’d heard about mandatory vaccines. Some employers around the country, especially those in healthcare, already had their own mandates in place.

And so far, the consequences have been disastrous. In the past month:

  • One hospital in New York (which had announced its own vaccine mandate in August) had to pause delivering babies after experiencing mass staff resignations due to the vaccine mandate.
  • Also, in New York, Governor Hochul had to deploy the National Guard to fill hospital staff shortages.
  • In Houston, 153 hospital staff members either resigned or were fired for refusing to get the vaccine.
  • And in Louisiana, the CEO of the state’s largest hospital system said in August that they “cannot find” nurses to bring in for help with the shortages. So, what did he do about it? The hospital doubled down on its mandate, now instituting fines for employees with unvaccinated spouses!

Arizona certainly hasn’t been immune to the problem. Right here in our very own state, one hospital administrator told AZ Free News that there have been issues ensuring beds at smaller hospitals due to delays in replacing equipment. But the main issue, the administrator said, is that Arizona’s larger hospital chains are losing staff due to the vaccine mandates.

Despite all this, the establishment media continues to beat the same drum. They want you to believe that hospitals are near or over capacity even though the current wave, which is subsiding, has been much smaller than previous waves.

But perhaps the problem isn’t more cases and COVID hospitalizations. Perhaps the problem is that hospitals are overwhelmed because they are experiencing staffing shortages due to the vaccine mandate. Or what if the capacity issues are tied to other contagious illnesses, such as RSV? Or maybe it’s because people are now starting to deal with other ailments and elective surgeries that they’ve been putting off because of COVID.

Of course, corporate media doesn’t want to look into these possibilities. Nor do they want to ask questions about why so many good healthcare professionals, who have stood on the frontlines of the pandemic, are refusing the vaccine.

Instead, they want to turn these medical professionals into villains, simply because they refuse to fall into line and get the jab. No dissent, discussion, or debate is allowed in the woke media echo chamber.

These divisive and authoritarian tactics must stop. If someone wants to get a vaccine for COVID, or anything else, they should have the freedom to do so. And if they don’t want the vaccine, that should be their choice.

But no free people should ever be compelled by force of government into certain medical decisions they disagree with.

Giving up that freedom could cost us a lot. And now, it’s costing us a lot of vital healthcare professionals—and some hospital beds.

*****

This article was published on October 15, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the Arizona Free Enterprise Club.

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A Reflection on Indigenous Peoples Day

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By Craig J. Cantoni

There’s a much better name for the day, one that captures the true spirit of today’s America

October 11 was Indigenous Peoples Day. It used to be called Columbus Day before it became woke.

Unlike some of my fellow Italians, I don’t have heartburn over the demise of Columbus Day. However, the silly wokeness behind the name change does have me chewing Zantac tablets like they’re M&Ms.

Columbus Day never connected with me for two reasons.

First, Italy didn’t become a nation-state until 1861, or 369 years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean. Therefore, he couldn’t have been Italian. Actually, he was born in the Republic of Genoa, which is famous for Genoa salami. It is not known if he brought salami with him on his voyage.

Second, Columbus sailed on behalf of Spain, or more specifically, on behalf of Hispanics. Hispanics are the people who brought slaves to the present-day Americas before the English did, brought a lot more of them than the English (and Dutch) did and inflicted horrible cruelties on not only African slaves but indigenous peoples.

Hispanic cruelties have been conveniently forgotten during National Hispanic American Heritage Month, which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.

Likewise, the horrible cruelties inflicted by indigenous peoples on other indigenous peoples have been conveniently forgotten in the naming of Indigenous Peoples Day. It’s as if the Aztecs, Comanche, Sioux, and scores of other indigenous peoples were humanists instead of butchers.

Not forgotten, however, are the cruelties inflicted by so-called white people on slaves and indigenous peoples.

That history should be told, and in fact is told in many of the history books in my personal library. To wit, I just finished a history of Cuba that details what American (and English and Spanish) imperialism and slave-trading had inflicted on the island. Now I’m reading a history of the failure of Reconstruction due to President Andrew Johnson’s racism, written from the perspective of the brilliant African American, Frederick Douglass.

On the other hand, it’s a corruption of history bordering on propaganda (agitprop?) for wokes to whitewash the evil deeds of “non-whites” but not whites, especially when the whitewashing is done for reasons of politics or racial pandering.

“Non-whites” is in quotes because some of the people considered non-white by wokes are actually very white, whiter than this swarthy Italian. Many Hispanics, for example, are as white as Elizabeth Warren or Mitt Romney, especially those who are descendants of the Spanish aristocracy and still hold positions of privilege and power in much of Latin America.

In a further misuse of language for political purposes, the hackneyed label of “person of color” is affixed willy-nilly to Hispanics and even Asians.

Does China President Xi look like a person of color? How about professional golfer Sergio Garcia?

Once the equal rights movement morphed into equal results and expanded beyond African Americans and Native Americans to ersatz races, it was doomed to degenerate into absurdities.

An example is the misuse of the word “minority” to describe all non-whites, including those with considerable wealth, privilege and political power, such as East Indians, who rank at the top in household income in the U.S. At the same time, all so-called whites are seen as privileged, as if the descendants of John D. Rockefeller are no different from a coal miner in W. Virginia.

An exception to the convention is made for white Hispanics, who are considered minorities even though they are white.

Is your head spinning?

By the way, what color is your spinning head? It doesn’t matter to me but does matter to wokes. My color is Sherwin-Williams Cool Beige, 9086.

The misuse of the word “minority” becomes even more confusing in light of the fact that there are so many ethnocultural groups in the United States that none of them is in the majority, statistically speaking. Every ethnocultural group is a minority group, including the scores of groups that are classified as white. For example, the Walloons are both white and minorities. The same for Iranians. Neither of the groups is privileged.

Are you still with me?

Perhaps Indigenous Peoples Day should be renamed Asian Day, given that Asians crossed a land bridge in the Bering Sea and populated what had been an uninhabited continent, not counting the few Polynesians who might have made it across the Pacific before the Asians arrived.

On second thought, that’s a bad idea, in view of the fact that certain empires, nations, and peoples of Asia have been guilty throughout history of slavery, genocide, oppression, injustice, and racism.

What is needed instead is a name that captures the spirit of America today, especially the doublespeak that passes for wokeness. A perfect choice would be Orwell Day.

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Groceries Feed Gains in the Everyday Price Index in September

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By Robert Hughes

The AIER Everyday Price Index increased by 0.6 percent in September, the tenth consecutive month of gain.  Over the last 10 months, the monthly increases have been between 0.4 percent and 1.2 percent, putting the 10-month gain at 7.5 percent or an annualized pace of 9.1 percent. Including the two months prior to the run of increases, the 12-month gain is 7.2 percent, the fastest pace since September 2008.

Food at home (a.k.a. groceries) was the largest contributor to the increase in the Everyday Price Index in September, contributing 24 basis points to the gain. Combined with a 10 basis-point contribution from food away from home (a.k.a.) restaurants, food categories added 34 basis points or about 60 percent of the total monthly rise. Household energy was the other significant contributor to the September increase, adding 11 basis points while motor fuel added 4 basis points.  Combined food and energy categories accounted for 90 percent of the monthly gain in September.

The Everyday Price Index including apparel, a broader measure that includes clothing and shoes, rose 0.7 percent, also the tenth consecutive increase. Over the past year, the Everyday Price Index including apparel is up 6.9 percent, the fifth month in a row above 6 percent. Apparel prices jumped 1.8 percent on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis in September. Apparel prices tend to be volatile on a month-to-month basis, posting six increases and six decreases ranging from -2.2 percent to 2.9 percent over the last 12 months. From a year ago, apparel prices are up 3.4 percent.

The Consumer Price Index, which includes everyday purchases as well as infrequently purchased, big-ticket items and contractually fixed items, rose 0.3 percent on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis in September. Over the past year, the Consumer Price Index is up 5.4 percent.

The Consumer Price Index excluding food and energy rose 0.1 percent for the month (not seasonally adjusted) while the 12-month change came in at 4.0 percent. The 12-month change in the core CPI was just 1.3 percent in February.

After seasonal adjustment, the CPI rose 0.4 percent in September while the core increased 0.2 percent for the month. Within the core, core goods prices were up 0.2 percent in September and are up 7.3 percent from a year ago while core services prices were up 0.2 percent for the month and are up 2.9 percent from a year ago.

Among the notable increases in the core goods category were new vehicles (up 1.3 percent in September and 8.7 percent from a year ago) and household furnishings and supplies (up 1.3 percent for the month and 4.8 percent from a year ago).

Among core services, gainers include motor vehicle insurance (up 2.1 percent and 4.8 percent from a year ago) and owners’ equivalent rent (a.k.a. housing, up 0.4 percent and 2.9 percent from a year ago), while decliners include public transportation (-5.0 percent), lodging away from home (-0.6 percent but up 17.5 percent from a year ago), and auto rentals (-2.9 percent but still up 42.9 percent from a year ago).

Prices for many goods and services in the economy remain distorted by lingering effects from government restrictions on consumers and businesses including shortages, logistical and supply chain issues, and labor problems. As activity returns to normal, supply and demand will adapt and likely lead to slower price increases, but it may take some time before the economy completely returns to normal functioning. Nevertheless, a 1970s-style upward price spiral remains unlikely.

Note: The Everyday Price Index for August is based on incomplete data due to restrictions on data collection by Bureau of Labor Statistics personnel because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

*****

This article was published on October 13, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

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The Erasure of ‘Women’ Is Escalating

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By Jay Richards

The campaign to erase references to women has reached new levels of absurdity. In just the last few weeks, it’s made forays into social media, medical journals, and even federal legislation.

For example, if you’ve spent much time on social media lately, you’ve likely seen the ACLU’s edits of a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to remove offending references to “women.”

Last October, now-Vice President Kamala Harris had no problem quoting an uncensored Ginsburg in the Senate confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett. But conventions on these delicate matters change fast. Eleven months later, the ACLU felt the need to strike the affronting words.

The stunt stirred up enough controversy that the ACLU had to apologize. Executive Director Anthony Romero confessed that “it’s somewhat Orwellian to rewrite historical utterances to conform to modern sensitivities.”

Still, “having spent time with Justice Ginsburg,” explained Romero, “I would like to believe that if she were alive today, she would encourage us to evolve our language to encompass a broader vision of gender, identity, and sexuality.” In other words, while it may be best not to alter past quotes, we should avoid regressive references to “women” from now on.

The Lancet’s Sept. 25 cover is even more disturbing. It features a single, stark quote on white background, reducing women to “bodies with vaginas.”

The medical journal, like the ACLU, has issued its half-hearted apology. They didn’t intend to dehumanize and marginalize women, explained Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton. Their goal, rather, is to “emphasize that transgender health is an important dimension of modern health care, but one that remains neglected.” He goes on and on in this exculpatory fashion, lamenting the scourge of “menstrual shame and period poverty.”

Or, in the words of Demi Lovato: Sorry, not sorry.

Both episodes have played out on social media. But there’s another erasure campaign underway in the shadows. Take, for instance, the Newspeak that has crept into the 2021 budget reconciliation bill now going through Congress. This sweeping tax-and-spend proposal would affect far more than just our fiscal health.

Sex-specific words such as “women,” “females,” and “mothers” have gone missing in some of the very places you’d expect them—such as with “maternal mortality.” Instead, we discover awkward constructions, over and over, like “pregnant, lactating, and postpartum individuals and individuals with the intent to become pregnant.”

Reconciliation packages are supposedly limited to budgets. But for gender ideologues, the process has become a chance to start erasing references to women and females.

While “individual” or “person” is common in legal documents when the referent could be male or female, that doesn’t explain what’s happening here. The authors of this section intend to neuter references to women.

How do we know? Because they’re departing from past usage, and even the typical usage still present here and there in the reconciliation text when referring to or quoting preexisting law. Take, for example, the Medicaid section, which must still refer to “pregnant and postpartum women.”

It’s no surprise that a simple word search of existing law turns up 96 references to “pregnant women” already in the federal code. A search for “women” turns up 1,118 references.

And then, just last month—with few precedents—this changes.

This comes on top of other efforts to advance this Newspeak. For instance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, early this year, made degendered language standard practice for Congress.

Gender activists have pushed a sweeping piece of legislation—the misnamed Equality Act—which would enshrine their views in civil rights law. But as they work toward that goal, activists are focused on erasing women incrementally by slipping the same kind of language into bills moving through Congress now.

These efforts are provoking resistance, however, and not just from committed traditionalists. Most Americans object to gender ideology. Whether it’s being pushed on minors in the doctor’s office or the sports arena, this is true. Hence the pushback to the flag-flying stunts from the ACLU and The Lancet. And why both groups had to issue apologies.

The campaign also is facing resistance from nonconservative quarters. Atheists like Richard Dawkins have pushed back against the transgender ideology that inspires these language games. Many feminists, including radical feminists, also oppose it.

Meanwhile, activists’ efforts are sporadic and contradictory. We see this even in the internal inconsistencies of the budget reconciliation bill text, as noted above.

Finally, gender ideology contradicts natural reality. Not just the natural moral law written on every heart. We’re talking about mammalian biology.

Hard facts like these should give us hope that common sense will prevail against gender activists’ efforts to erase women.

*****

This article was published on October 13, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

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Judge Rules Against Arizona In Minimum Wage Lawsuit

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By Cole Lauterbach

A county judge says Arizona cannot extract the additional cost of doing state business in a city that increased its minimum wage, making it more expensive to operate there.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge James Smith sided with the city of Flagstaff about whether a provision in the 2019 Arizona budget allowed the state to fine the city for the difference in doing state business at a higher minimum wage compared with the state minimum hourly rate.

The state is affected by the minimum wage difference because it employs contract workers in the city who would be subject to the higher wage law, which reached $15 an hour this year.

The state minimum wage is $12.15 an hour. In an assessment, the state said the difference is more than $1.1 million the city owes.

In the Monday ruling, Smith didn’t bite on the city’s claim the fine was unconstitutional by violating the Voter Protection Act of 1998. Instead, Smith ruled that Arizona officials missed the July 31 deadline to issue the fine because the nonemergency legislation didn’t take effect until late September.

However, Smith did hint that siding with the state could require the court to essentially change the law regarding the assessment, not notification, of a potential fine for such an offense.

“If the Legislature meant to write ‘notify,’ then it presumably would have done so,” Smith wrote.

Flagstaff City Hall would not comment on the ruling. A spokesperson for Gov. Doug Ducey’s office refrained from offering a comment because the litigation is still ongoing.

The case is set to continue in a trial at an undecided date.

Should the state ultimately lose the challenge, it would have consequences outside of Flagstaff. Tucson voters will decide next month on whether to approve Proposition 206, which would increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 by Jan.1, 2025. It would increase annually based on inflation.

*****

This article was published on October 12, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

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Beware of the Progressive Redefinition of Moderates

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By Gary M. Galles

Progressive thought control efforts have turned to a new attack on moderates.

As reported on The Hill, first-year Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), said “Referring to the small handful of conservative Democrats working to block the president’s agenda as ‘moderates’ does grave harm to the English language and unfairly maligns my colleagues who are actually moderate yet by and large understand the stakes of this historic moment.” He linked moderates and progressives together, as “united in our commitment to passing President Biden’s agenda,” and that “Anyone trying to obstruct that agenda” is not a moderate.

This redefinition of moderates is reminiscent of the treatment of the Tea Party during an earlier impasse over the debt ceiling. In the wake of a historic explosion of federal power and spending (though dwarfed by current proposals) and when 40 percent of every federal dollar was borrowed, left-leaning politicians and pundits called for moderates to join them in supporting President Obama’s demand for higher taxes and bigger government. Predictably, they called everyone who wanted to undo some of that profligacy an extremist.

In both cases, Democrats demonized those who were at least moderately concerned with citizens’ constitutional rights and wallets. They hoped to find people willing to support their budget priorities, and the massively higher burdens those priorities required. In the end, they hoped to remake America in their own image, while buying off the smallest number of citizens necessary to implement their 50 percent “landslide.”

It is important to note that in both such cases, as well as many others, the moderation Democrats called for was moderation in defense of liberty. Those who resisted were branded unreasonable extremists and shown the door.

While such rhetorical distortions reflect current progressive-left thinking, there is a source Americans can turn to for a more reasonable point of view. It comes from an “electoral manifesto” written by Frederic Bastiat in 1830. His dead-on discussion of moderation is worth recalling now:

Moderation…plays a role in this army of sophisms.

Were those who each year voted for more taxes than the nation could bear moderates? What about those who never found the contributions to be sufficiently heavy, emoluments sufficiently huge, and sinecures sufficiently numerous…the betrayal of the confidences of their constituents?

Are those who want to prevent…such excesses extremists? I mean those who want to inject a dose of moderation into spending; those who want to moderate the action of the people in power…those who do not want the nation to be exploited by one party rather than another.

Left to itself, [government] soon exceeds the limits which circumscribe its mission. It increases beyond all reason…It no longer administers, it exploits…It no longer protects, it oppresses.

This would be the way all governments operate…if the people did not place obstacles in the way of governmental encroachments.

Prodigality and liberty…are incompatible

Where can there be liberty when the government, in order to sustain enormous expenditures and forced to levy huge fiscal contributions, must resort to the most offensive and burdensome taxation…to invade the sphere of private industry, to narrow incessantly the circle of individual activity, to make itself merchant, manufacturer, postman and teacher.

Are we free if the government…subjects all its activities to the goal of enlarging its cohort of employees, hampers all businesses, constrains all faculties, interferes with all commercial exchanges in order to restrain some people, hinder others, and hold almost all of them to ransom?

Can we expect order from a regime that places millions of enticements to greed all around the country…increasingly spreading the mania for governing and a zeal for domination.

Do we want, then, to free government from the plotters who pursue it in order to share out the spoils, from factions who undermine it in order to capture it, and from the tyrants who strengthen it in order to control it? Do we want…order, freedom and public peace?

Do we want the government to take more of an interest in us than we take in ourselves? Are we expecting it to restrain itself if we strengthen it and become less active if we send it reinforcements? Do we hope that the spoils it can take from us will be refused…Should we expect a supernatural nobility of spirit…in those who govern us, while for our part we are incapable of defending…our dearest interests!

Be careful…we should not shut our eyes to the evidence…are we going to destroy [liberty’s] work?

Frederic Bastiat wrote his electoral manifesto at a time when politically popular “moderates” enabled expanding government coercion, while “extremists” defended liberty. Unfortunately, little seems different today. But if we recognize with him what is at stake–liberty too precious to be bargained over–we might yet turn this destructive tide.

*****

This article was published on October 9, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

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Democrats Want To Give Illegal Aliens $80 Billion In Handouts In Reconciliation Bill

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By Jordan Davidson

Democrats want to give illegal aliens $80 billion in handouts through the Child Tax Credit provision included in the massive reconciliation bill that is currently under consideration by Congress.

While Democrats, progressives, and Republicans are still fighting over whether they will pass the expensive social policy bill that grants the administration’s leftist agenda trillions of dollars, an analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal aliens in the United States will get $8.2 billion in payments per year if the legislation is passed. Over 10 years, American taxpayers will have paid approximately $80 billion to migrants living in the U.S. illegally.

Illegal migrants previously received funding through the Additional Child Tax Credit, but the new version of this government handout program ensures that “the arrival of any low-income immigrant (legal or illegal) who has a U.S.-born child will have a much larger negative fiscal impact than was previously the case.”

Immigrants, both legal and illegal, are also more likely to qualify for the program and, on average, receive higher payments than U.S. citizens. According to the analysis, the average payment for illegal aliens will be $5,100 while legal migrants are set to receive an average of $4,000 and native-born U.S. citizens will get $4,600.

In the long run, legal migrants are expected to receive a higher share of the money annually, $17.2 billion, but illegal aliens will still benefit greatly.

“Relative to the old ACTC, illegal immigrants with children will be receiving larger payments not only because the program is much more generous for everyone, but also because the old work requirements made it difficult for some illegal immigrants who worked off the books to demonstrate employment,” the analysis explains. “Dropping the work requirement makes it easier for all illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children to access the new program, even those who do not work.”

Over the weekend, demonstrators funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros harassed Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a bathroom at Arizona State University to demand that she vote for President Joe Biden’s expensive “Build Back Better” plan and the legislation that will give millions of illegal aliens U.S. citizenship. Up until now, Sinema and her Democrat colleague Joe Manchin have staunchly refused to sign onto the $3.5 trillion legislation despite pressure from the administration and congressional progressives.

*****

This article was published on October 5, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

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COVID expert Dr. Peter McCullough urges ‘unbreakable resistance’ to vaccines for kids

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By Patrick Delaney

This ‘can’t be about COVID at this stage,’ he said. It’s about ‘some type of totalitarian takeover that’s occurred all over the world. Something very dark is going on.’

(LifeSiteNews) — Eminent COVID-19 expert and highly published physician Dr. Peter McCullough provided a comprehensive well-documented presentation to colleagues regarding the “unbelievable atrocity” occurring in the West due to gene-transfer vaccine campaigns, the necessity for an “unbreakable resistance” against children receiving the jab, and the “astounding … ineptitude and willful misconduct” of public health agencies.

McCullough, who has made the case that no one in the world has more authority on this topic than him, provided detailed analysis of multiple scientific studies and data reports demonstrating the “failure of the vaccine program,” the suppression of effective early treatments, and the “robust, complete and durable” qualities of natural immunity.

Dr. Robert Malone, the architect of the mRNA platform used by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and organizing co-signer of a recent public declaration in defense of early treatments, promoted the presentation, tweeting, “I’ll say it again. Watch the speech from Dr. Peter McCullough. He is on fire. And he is spot on. He [sic] summary of the data are [sic] precise and detailed. Please take the time to watch that video. And get outraged.”

Among many topics addressed by McCullough at the October 2 annual meeting of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons was an initial focus on the serious lack of transparency of safety data and proper monitoring of the program.

“I have chaired data safety monitoring boards for over two dozen therapeutic products,” McCullough told his audience. His participation in this capacity has included heading boards for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Big Pharma corporations.

Data Safety Monitoring Boards (DSMB) are defined as a “ committee of clinical research experts … who monitor the progress of a clinical trial and review safety and effectiveness data while the trial is ongoing. This committee is independent of the people, organizations, and institutions conducting the clinical trial … [and] can recommend that a trial be stopped early because of concerns about participant safety …”

“I have made some critical calls as a chairman of a data safety monitoring board to shut down a program when it wasn’t safe,” McCullough explained. “And, I can tell you, that threshold is a few cases where we can’t explain it, a few cases. We get to five unexplained cases [and] we start to get very, very uncomfortable.” When “we get to 50 unexplained deaths in a release of a product, it’s gone. It’s gone. We shut it down and we figure out what went wrong. For new biologic products demand safety, safety, safety.”

1976 Swine flu vaccination campaign stopped after 25 death reports

He went on to discuss the 1976 swine flu vaccine campaign the government suspended after just 10 weeks due to 25 sudden deaths and 550 reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome following vaccination.

“The comfort level was gone. We had vaccinated 25% of our 220 million people in the United States [at the time]. And that was it! The concern for safety was too great. Deaths escalated after stopping the program up to 53. This was the standard, and still should be the standard today,” explained the editor of two medical journals.

In contrast, with our current COVID-19 gene-transfer vaccination campaign, “we are far beyond that,” McCullough said. In fact, the current death numbers are 652 times higher than they were in 1976 when the government shut down the swine flu vaccination program.

The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) released October 8 reports 778,683 adverse events in the U.S. following COVID vaccination, including 16,310 reports of deaths and 75,605 reports of hospitalizations, between December 14, 2020, and October 1.

In addition, it remains a concern that these figures are just “the tip of the iceberg,” as a “2010 Harvard-executed study commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed that reported vaccine injuries to VAERS represent an estimated 1% of actual injuries.

More recently, whistleblowers have documented at least 45.000 and 48,000 deaths respectively from just one government database at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS).

No DSMBs in place, and ‘No safety review! That is malfeasance.’

McCullough cited a paper from May involving 57 authors from 17 countries which, having noticed no evidence of DSMBs and External Advisory Committees (EAC) established to monitor the COVID-19 vaccine drive, wrote “vaccination should be halted immediately.”

“If we don’t have safety mechanisms in place for the vaccine programs, shut them down,” McCullough said, “because [the highest priority is] safety, safety, safety. Our concern was this was a dangerous mechanism of action, we had skipped all the critical testing to understand what this is going to do long term to the human body.”

To this day, “there’s been no external advisory committees, no human ethics committee, data safety monitoring board,” he described. “The FDA and the CDC are the sponsors of the program. They cannot be the adjudicators of death. They cannot. That violates every regulatory law that we know.”

As early as January 22, “we had a big problem. We had 182 deaths,” McCullough continued (displaying slide 11 of his power point presentation). “The expected number of deaths, [from] all vaccines combined, [is] 158 per year [from approximately] 287 million shots per year in the United States. 182 [deaths using the COIVD vaccines] were over the line. And if we had a data safety monitoring board, this program would have been shut down in February for excess mortality and it would have been reviewed.

“We only had 27 million people vaccinated in the United States [at the time]. What happened? Nothing! No safety review! That is malfeasance. Malfeasance is wrongdoing by those in position of authority. And that’s what happened,” he said.

Further, McCullough accused the CDC, FDA, NIH, the White House, Senate and House of Representatives of being “all implicated in this. None of them demanded an effectuated safety report and a stop in February. They are all culpable.”

‘One is more likely to die after the vaccine’ than from COVID itself

Citing another early peer-reviewed safety warning by Jessica Rose (slide 12), with bar charts showing an enormous jump in reports and deaths due to vaccines in 2021, 40 times higher than in 2020, he observed, “We had Americans dying after vaccination. It was obvious. This is an obvious data signal. All experts agree it’s obvious,” and yet the vaccination program was not shut down…..

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Continue reading this article, published on October 11, 2021 at Life Site.

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Taiwan’s Wealth Shows Cuba’s Poverty Is the Result of Socialism, Not a Blockade

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By Emmanuel Rincon

Cuba and Taiwan began the ’70s with similar economies, but today the GDP of the Caribbean island is five times less than that of Taiwan.

For decades the Communist Party of Cuba has blamed the United States for Cuba’s misery and poverty, alluding to the “blockade” that the U.S. maintains against Cuba. However, the alleged blockade wielded by the island is in reality a trade embargo that only makes it impossible for people and companies in certain sectors within the United States to do business with Cuba, the rest of the world can trade freely with the island.

Even the United States annually exports about $277 million in goods to Cuba despite the trade embargo, a majority of these exports are foodstuffs.

In addition, despite the establishment of a dictatorial regime in Cuba that has been in power for more than 60 years without any kind of alternation, elections, or basic freedoms, the whole world recognizes the communist authorities and Cuba has a presence in all multilateral international organizations, the main one being the United Nations.

Then there is Taiwan, which has characteristics very similar to those of Cuba since it is also an island that is close to one of the two world powers—China. In the case of the authorities of Taipei they have been completely blocked by the Asian giant, since China claims sovereignty over the island.

Taiwan is recognized by only a dozen nations around the world, has no representation in the United Nations, and its official name cannot even be pronounced at any international event: be it an Olympic Games, a United Nations General Assembly, or even by the embassies of most countries in the world—including the United States. And yet, despite all these difficulties, today Taiwan’s economy is one of the most important in the world, with a poverty rate of 0.7%, as opposed to Cuba, which has one of the most depressed economies on the planet and 90% of its population living in poverty. What is the difference between the two islands? The economic and political model they applied in their nations.

Two Islands With Similar Histories

Cuba and Taiwan, despite being located at two different poles of the planet earth, have very similar characteristics, the one that most resembles them is the fact that they are less than 200 kilometers away from the two superpowers of the world—the United States and China respectively—and suffer trade embargoes or political blockades by the neighboring superpowers; on the other hand, Cuba has a little more than 11. 3 million inhabitants—a couple of million more have fled the country, while Taiwan has 23.5 million residents, despite the fact that Cuba has a land area about three times larger.

Despite the similarities, both nations are currently a long way apart in terms of economic, social, cultural, and technological development, as well as individual freedoms and democracy. Today, Taiwan’s economy is five times larger than Cuba’s, but fifty years ago things were not so different, in the 1970s the GDP of both countries was similar and the largest industry of both was agriculture.

Taiwan: Capitalism, Liberty, & Free Markets

The painful results of the cultural revolution in Mao Zedong’s communist China, which caused the death by famine of at least 30 million Chinese, illuminated the path of the region’s governments, who quickly understood that the failed model of putting the State in control of the means of production would make them all more vulnerable and miserable.

Then the People’s Republic of China’s neighbors began a series of economic and political reforms that would drastically change the quality of life of their inhabitants; Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and, of course, Taiwan, would begin to open their markets, encourage private enterprise and transform their authoritarian regimes into nations with democratic institutions, and little by little the sun began to shine for the so-called Asian tigers.

Despite territorial limitations and China’s political blockade of the island, Taiwan’s inclusive institutions paved the way for the production of technology to supply a severely deficient world market. Taiwanese entrepreneurs began to specialize in the production of semiconductors, those microchips that today we find in all electrical devices in the world, from computers to smartphones and even cars, and little by little the poor island of the past became a rich and developed country.

Currently, Taiwan has the sixth freest economy according to the Index of Economic Freedom, Singapore is the first nation in this section, while Malaysia ranks 22nd and South Korea 24th.

In an article published by the Taiwanese embassy in Mexico, the authorities stated that: “Taiwan, thanks to the policies of its government, began a rapid and overwhelming commercial development, becoming a stable industrial economy. Today it is the 22nd largest economy in the world. This allowed it to establish relations with countries that were in search of good trade relations.”

In the same brief they explain the transition that occurred in Taipei:

“Despite having started as a one-party military dictatorship, in the 1990s it began a process of democratization that today has it as one of the freest countries in the world, with high rates of press freedom, health service, public education, economic freedom, and human development. That is why communist China sees Taiwan, and its international recognition, as an existential threat. The contrast is stark. Democracy has not only proven that it can work but has brought multiple benefits to the population. The Taiwanese have a better quality of life, and opportunities for personal development, than the average Chinese on the mainland. And all this within a framework of freedoms that are unthinkable in a communist China that censures dissidence and whose ruling party increasingly tightens its control over all aspects of the country”.

Cuba: Socialism, Misery, & Ideology

On the other side of the planet, in Cuba, they decided to cover their eyes with the results of the cultural revolution perpetrated in China, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union. While Taiwan took off with a capitalist model, Cuba remained anchored in the old revolutionary dogmas of Fidel Castro, who far from trying to change, he sought to expand his regime of misery in the rest of the continent, achieving it quite successfully in countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The Cuban revolution took power on the island in 1959 by force of arms and never let go again. With popular slogans such as redistribution of wealth, supposed aid to the poor, and socialism, Fidel Castro began to expropriate land and private companies to be managed by the state, and in a short time Cuba, which used to be one of the largest producers and exporters of sugar in the world, found that it could no longer even produce sugar for internal consumption and had to import it.

For decades, the Cuban revolution was able to stay in power exclusively thanks to the financing offered by the Soviet Union with the aim of increasing the ideological enemies in the backyard of the United States. After the fall of the USSR, in the ’90s Cuba lived one of the worst decades of its history, until the political astuteness of Fidel Castro managed to put Hugo Chavez in power in Venezuela, and since then they lived off the oil of that country until the same failed socialist model ended up ruining the nation with the largest oil reserves in the world, and Cuba was again involved in a tremendous economic crisis, with millions of citizens in extreme poverty, which has recently provoked one of the largest civil uprisings against the communist authorities.

Cuba and Taiwan began the decade of the ’70s with similar economies, but today the GDP of the Caribbean island is five times less than that of Taiwan, and 90% of its population lives in poverty, while in the Asian island only 0.7% of its population is poor.

It is definitely not the fault of the “blockade”, but of socialism. 

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This article was published on September 29, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from FEE, Foundation for Economic Education.

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Tucson Keeps Missing the Bigger Picture

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By Craig J. Cantoni

That’s especially so on immigration, Amazon, and the minimum wage.

The Tucson establishment often misses the bigger picture in the pursuit of transitory feel-good measures. Take the subjects of immigration, Amazon, and the minimum wage—subjects that I don’t have ideological or partisan heartburn over but do care that Tucson is consigning itself to permanent also-ran status by missing the bigger picture.

Immigration

Establishment leaders are planning to provide temporary housing and devote other resources to aid poor and poorly educated migrants who are crossing the border in record numbers. No doubt, they and their constituents care about the migrants and feel they are doing the right thing. Kudos to them for caring.

The bigger picture is similar to what it was a hundred years ago with my poor and poorly educated Italian immigrant forebears—namely, such immigrants can be a net positive for the nation as a whole in the long run, but in the shorter run, they can put a strain on local communities in terms of increased costs for education, medical care, social welfare, and law enforcement.

In other words, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are dispersed.

The City of Tucson can’t afford the concentrated costs. It already suffers from a poverty rate twice the national average, a rate of property crimes near the top nationally, horrendous test scores in too many k-12 schools, a below-average rate of homeownership, large swaths of unkempt public and private property, crumbling streets from decades of deferred maintenance, and a brain drain of young talent that moves to Phoenix and other vibrant cities for opportunities.

The surrounding unincorporated county is wealthier but is an amorphous, poorly maintained blob without a center or defining character. Being unincorporated, it is incapable of providing the level of services and amenities that a well-run municipality can offer.

The blame for Tucson’s travails shouldn’t be put on migrants, however—not when most of the travails are due to shortsighted, poorly run, and highly partisan city and county governments, enabled by voters who have voted for the status quo for decades and by establishment leaders who don’t seem to know how badly the governments and the metropolis compare to well-run locales on key measures.

By the measure of the cost of municipal services, it doesn’t compare well at all. For example, when my wife and I moved four years ago for family reasons from metro Phoenix to metro Tucson, to a house of equal value, our combined cost for property taxes, water, fire service, and trash pickup increased by 50% while the quality of public services and amenities fell significantly.

That doesn’t include the value of the time we spend picking up litter along a busy street every morning on our daily five-mile walk, a chore not done by government or by property owners that front the street, including retail businesses, apartments, condos, a gated HOA, a private golf course, an upscale resort, and a public school. Clearly, something is amiss with civic pride in the Tucson metropolis.

Amazon

The foregoing problems are compounded by Tucson being largely bypassed by big, rich companies as a location for headquarters or major offices, even though the companies claim to value diversity and care about the poor. The truth is, their “woke” executives and knowledge workers favor sparkling, dynamic, prosperous enclaves.

Local leaders celebrated when Tucson was selected as the location for two low-wage Amazon warehouses, which are two out of over 900 Amazon facilities across the U.S. But they apparently didn’t see the bigger picture of Amazon locating highly paid software engineers, logistics experts, marketing specialists and other professionals in scores of other cities across the nation, including Phoenix, but not in Tucson.

To that point, the company chose leafy, clean, prosperous Arlington, Virginia, as the location for its second headquarters for its highly paid professional and managerial employees. Arlington is next door to the imperial city of Washington, D.C., where bad immigration policies have been hatched by both political parties and imposed on the provinces.

Pop Quiz: Do you think that Arlington or Tucson can better afford the costs of assimilating and aiding large numbers of poor and poorly educated migrants? Hint: The median household income in Arlington is $120,000, versus $43,400 for Tucson; the poverty rates are 7.6% and 22.5%, respectively; and the percentages of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree are 75.3% and 27.4%, respectively.

If your answer is Arlington, then that raises the question as to why local leaders haven’t demanded that migrants without visas be transported to Arlington or similar wealthy towns for temporary living and follow-up actions instead of a poor city like Tucson (and Del Rio). Not only can those other places better absorb the costs, but the migrants would be better off in terms of facilities and resources.

Minimum Wage

Tucson is considering an increase in the minimum wage, an issue that comes with pros and cons. But once again, the bigger picture is missed in the debate.

The bigger picture is that whatever the minimum wage ends up being, it will do nothing about the root causes of Tucson’s socioeconomic problems. The root causes include a paucity of political competition within the city and county, a lack of large municipalities in the metropolis to compete with the power of the City of Tucson and Pima County and shake them out of their hubris, the fact that 36% of the metropolis is unincorporated (versus 6% in metro Phoenix), the paradox of the dominant culture being anti-development but the metropolis being marred by some of the ugliest development imaginable, and another paradox of Tucsonans valuing the metropolis’s natural setting and nearby national forests but tolerating a plethora of commercial businesses and apartments with tacky and often illegal signage in front, with frontages overgrown with weeds and littered with trash, and with acres of parking lots devoid of anything green.

But the biggest root cause of all is that provincialism keeps local leaders from seeing the bigger picture.

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Civil Forfeiture Lawsuit Against Arizona Moving Forward

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By Ted O’Neil

A federal appeals court has ruled a Washington state couple’s lawsuit against the state of Arizona over what they say was an unconstitutional seizure of their property can continue.

Terry and Ria Platt loaned their vehicle in 2016 to their son to use on vacation when Arizona state troopers stopped him on Interstate 40 in Navajo County for having tinted windows. A K-9 search discovered a small amount of marijuana in the 2012 Volkswagen Jetta, and police also found $31,000 in cash.

Police seized the car and money, although neither the Platts nor their son was ever charged with a crime.

The couple is being represented pro bono by the Virginia-based nonprofit Institute for Justice.

According to Institute for Justice attorneys, the Platts filled out the necessary paperwork to get their car back but could not afford a lawyer or to attend a court hearing on the matter at the time.

Institute for Justice said Navajo County prosecutors told a judge the paperwork was filled out incorrectly but never produced the evidence in court. Once Institute for Justice got involved, the state returned the vehicle to the Platts but maintained it was not wrong with seizing it in the first place.

“After five years, the Platts can finally have their day in court.” Keith Diggs, an attorney with Institute for Justice, said in a news release. “Policing for profit violates due process, and we will vindicate the Platts’ rights against the abuse that happened here.”

Institute for Justice is seeking a symbolic payment of $1 and for Navajo County to admit its actions were unconstitutional.

“This long-running case shows how complicated it can be to sue the government for violating your constitutional rights,” said Paul Avelar of Institute for Justice. “But it also shows how much Arizona has changed its forfeiture laws for the better since the Platts were first victimized.”

Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill in May reforming the state’s civil forfeiture laws, five days after the bill passed both chambers of the Arizona Legislature with bipartisan support.

“Currently, this civil process does not require a criminal conviction before a person’s property is forfeited to the state and there are many stories of property being taken, forfeited, and sometimes sold without the person ever being subject to criminal prosecution,” Ducey said at the time. “House Bill 2810 provides this balance. It ensures that property being taken is truly connected to criminal activity while innocent persons have the ability to get their property back.”

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This article was published on October 8, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

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Navajos Oppose Drilling Ban in Biden’s massive “Human Resources” Bill

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By Bonner Cohen

A provision tucked into the $3.5 trillion spending and tax bill would ban new drilling for oil and natural gas on and near Navajo land in northwestern New Mexico.

Convinced that the ban would cause severe economic harm to tribal members in the affected area, the 24th Navajo Council sent a Sept. 27 letter, obtained by the Washington Times, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy requesting a field hearing in Nageezi, New Mexico before Congress acts on the legislation.

“We applaud Congress for its inclusion of tribal program investments in the propose $3.5 trillion budget resolution and reconciliation proposals,” the letter said. “However, we write to respectfully inform you of our opposition to the [manager’s] amendment of the House Natural Resources Committee proposal that includes a section to prohibit new oil and gas development within the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area in northwestern New Mexico and the Navajo Nation.”

The House Natural Resources Committee’s Democratic chairman, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, sponsored the manager’s amendment withdrawing new mineral leasing and nullifying inactive leases within a 10-mile buffer surrounding the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area, a 34,000-acre site known for its ancient architectural ruins. No drilling is allowed with the park.

Confronted with the bill’s anti-drilling language, the Navajo favor a five-mile buffer zone, which would protect the site and allow for energy development that will benefit tribal communities.

“The official position of the Navajo Nation reflects the interests of the Navajo allotted landowners [allottees] in the greater Chaco area and it provides a compromise between a threat to their livelihoods and the bills calls for increased protections from mineral development,” the letter explained.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, told the Washington Times that the five-mile buffer would “ensure protection of cultural resources while enabling responsible development of energy.”

“Environmental Injustice”

“Now the Democrats are trying to sneak into the reconciliation bill a measure that would shut down the livelihoods of Navajo families who depend on oil and gas for income in an otherwise marginal, impoverished area,” she said in an email to the Times. “Depriving them a major source of income is not only environmental injustice but bad for Navajo consumers paying high prices at the pump.”

The Times reports that the manager’s amendment “further curtails mineral development by reversing a land swap between the federal government and mining interests in Arizona’s Oak Flat area; prohibits new oil-and-gas leasing in Colorado’s Thompson’s Divide; and bars offshore leasing in the Outer Continental Shelf …”

At this point, it appears that the $3.5 trillion spending and tax bill will have to be scaled back if it is to receive enough Democratic votes to pass the Senate. This means that some provisions will have to go, a process that will be negotiated in the coming weeks. Whether Grijalva’s manager’s amendment survives and, if so, in what form is anybody’s guess.

If the amendment is left intact, the Navajos in New Mexico will become the latest victims in the headlong – and heedless – rush to rid the nation of fossil fuels in the name of combatting climate change. The effort will have no effect on the climate; the same cannot be said for the Navajos.

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This article was published on October 8, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow.

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Communist China’s Aggression in the South China Sea

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By Judith Bergman

In March, a huge Chinese fishing fleet descended on Whitsun Reef, which lies within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. The Philippine government called on China to cease “militarizing the area”. Almost eight months later, however, more than 150 Chinese vessels reportedly remain in Philippine waters. Pictured: Whitsun Reef, as seen from space. (Image Source: United States Geological Survey/NASA/Wikimedia Commons)

Tensions continue to rise in the South China Sea, as China, or, rightly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ramps up its military activities in the region. Within only the first four days of October, China conducted a record-breaking 150 incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) — after China’s People Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) had already, in September, set another monthly record with 117 incursions, some with nuclear-capable bombers, fighter jets and reconnaissance planes. The incursions were reportedly the highest monthly number on record since Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense began reporting Chinese aerial incursions 13 months ago. In addition, in August, the first-ever incursion of Chinese military helicopters into Taiwan’s ADIZ took place, with experts suggesting that the PLA was probing Taiwanese defense capabilities by using different aircraft.

Tensions continue to rise in the South China Sea, as China, or, rightly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ramps up its military activities in the region. Within only the first four days of October, China conducted a record-breaking 150 incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) — afterChina’s People Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) had already, in September, set another monthly record with 117 incursions, some with nuclear-capable bombers, fighter jets and reconnaissance planes. The incursions were reportedlythe highest monthly number on record since Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense began reporting Chinese aerial incursions 13 months ago. In addition, in August, the first-ever incursion of Chinese military helicopters into Taiwan’s ADIZ took place, with experts suggesting that the PLA was probing Taiwanese defense capabilities by using different aircraft.

Also in August and September, China conducted assault drills near Taiwan with war ships, early-warning aircraft, anti-submarine aircraft and bombers. “The joint fire assault and other drills staged by the Eastern Theater Command troops are a necessary action to further safeguard China’s sovereignty under the current security situation in the Taiwan Straits,” Colonel Shi Yi, spokesperson for the PLA Eastern Theater Command said, “and also a solemn response to the interference of foreign forces and the provocation of ‘Taiwan independence’ secessionists.” Shi stated that military exercises would be “conducted regularly” based on the situation in the Taiwan Strait and the “need to maintain sovereign security”. China has conducted 20 naval island-control exercises in the first half of 2021, compared to 13 in all of 2020.

This activity — in addition to diplomatic and economic pressure — is evidently meant to exhaust Taiwan, force it to capitulate to China and relinquish its independence without China firing a shot. “China is pursuing an all-of-party approach that seeks to coerce, corrupt and co-opt the international community,” former commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Philip Davidson, recently warned, “in a way in which they may be able to achieve their geopolitical edge… to force Taiwan to capitulate because of extreme, diplomatic, economic, pressure and strain”. Failing that coercion, Davidson estimates:

“the changes in the [People’s Liberation Army]’s capabilities, with their missile and cyber forces, and their ability to train, advance their joint interoperability and their combat support logistics, all those trend lines indicate to me that within the next six years they will have the capability and the capacity to forcibly reunify with Taiwan, should they choose force to do it.”

With China assessing America’s lack of resolve to protect its allies — China’s illegal takeover of Hong Kong and Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan, where the US even failed to save all US citizens — China could be planning to use force to capture Taiwan much sooner than that — while the opportunity looks inviting. The question is: if China attacks Taiwan, whether the US will defend the island — or even put in place serious deterrents. It will not help anyone except the Chinese Communist Party if the consequences for invading Taiwan consist of nothing more damaging than “strong letter to follow.”

Taiwan’s Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng announced on October 6 that China already has the ability to invade his country. “By 2025, China will bring the cost and attrition to its lowest. It has the capacity now, but it will not start a war easily, having to take many other things into consideration.”

Elsewhere in the South China Sea, also in September, the PLA air force conducted troop transports with a number of large Y-20 transport aircraft to three airstrips in the Spratly archipelago, where China has built and militarized artificial islands on top of the reefs, according to Chinese state media. Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mouthpiece, wrote that the aircraft “conducted amphibious landing drills under complex conditions, showing the PLA’s capabilities in safeguarding peace and stability in the region.” It was the first time that the PLA confirmed that it had used aircraft of this type to transport personnel to the islands. Vietnam, which also claims sovereignty over the disputed Spratly archipelago, protested China’s transport mission to the islands and called it a violation of Vietnam’s sovereignty.

“Surely, this announced feat is aimed at demonstrating the PLA’s force projection capability over vast maritime distances across the South China Sea,” said Collin Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“And definitely it’s aimed also to demonstrate that the airstrips constructed on the artificial islands are capable of supporting flight operations by large aircraft. If Y-20 can be supported, so will the H-6 bomber.”

China considers almost all of the South China Sea, an area covering roughly 3.5 million square kilometers, and its estimated 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 11 billion barrels of oil, in addition to maritime resources such as fish, part of Chinese territory. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague firmly rejected China’s sovereignty claim in 2016 but five years after that ruling, China continues to reject the court’s authority. China’s claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea and its willingness and ability to pursue it has long been creating friction with countries in the area, who stake their own claims to parts of the sea, including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

China also regularly uses its large civilian fishing fleet to further its goals in the South China Sea. In March, a huge Chinese fishing fleet descended on Whitsun Reef, which lies within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. The Philippine government called on China to cease “militarizing the area”. Almost eight months later, however, more than 150 Chinese vessels reportedly remain in Philippine waters. On September 29, Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. said he wanted diplomatic protests “filed on China’s radio challenges against Philippine maritime patrols, unlawful restriction of Filipino fishermen from Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal), and the continued presence of Chinese ships in the vicinity of Iroquois Reef…”

In addition, China’s newly revised Maritime Traffic Safety Law (MTSL), which entered into force on September 1, requires certain foreign vessels sailing into Chinese “territorial waters” to notify Beijing in advance. Foreign vessels such as foreign submarines, nuclear-powered ships, ships carrying radioactive, toxic or hazardous materials and any other vessels that “may endanger the maritime traffic safety” of China are required to provide information including their ships’ names and numbers, recent locations, satellite telephone numbers and dangerous goods. “Article 2 of the MTSL expands application of the law from ‘coastal waters’ to ‘sea areas under the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China.’”

“The term ‘sea areas under the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China’ is not defined in the law and is purposely vague”, wrote Captain Raul Pedrozo, Professor of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College.

“Enacting ambiguous and imprecise laws allows China to alter its position on the applicability of the law based on the circumstances at the time. Nonetheless, given China’s excessive maritime claims and prior enforcement activities, the MTSL is likely intended to apply to all waters and seabed areas (1) encompassed by the nine-dash line in the South China Sea, (2) extending to the Okinawa Trough in the East China Sea, and (3) beyond Ieodo (Socotra Rock) in the Yellow Sea…China is once again testing the international community to gauge how it will react to the enactment of yet another maritime law that exceeds the permissible jurisdictional limits of international law, as reflected in UNCLOS [The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.] China will undoubtedly use the new law to engage in grey zone operations below the threshold of armed conflict to intimidate its neighbors and further erode the rule of law at sea in the Indo-Pacific region.”

Vice Admiral Michael McAllister, commander of the US Coast in the Pacific saidthe revised law was “very concerning”, and seemed “to run directly counter to international agreements and norms”, while building “foundations for instability and potential conflicts” if enforced.

“This looks like part of China’s strategy of casting legal nets over areas that it claims … to ‘normalize’ these claims,” said Robert Ward, senior fellow for Japanese security studies at The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “Enforcement will be difficult, but this may matter less for Beijing than the slow accumulation of what it sees as a legal underpinning”. The Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana has already said that his country will ignore the revised maritime law. “Our stand on that is we do not honour those laws by the Chinese within the West Philippine Sea because we consider that we have the sovereign right within this waters. So we will not recognise this law of the Chinese,” Lorenzana said during an event marking the Philippines’ Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) with the United States.

The revised maritime law came into effect just seven months after China’s new coastguard law went into force on February 1. The Chinese coast guard law gives China’s coast guard authority to use lethal force on foreign ships operating in Chinese waters, including disputed areas such as the South China Sea. In January, the Philippines filed a diplomatic protest against the Chinese coast guard law saying that it is a “verbal threat of war to any country that defies the law”.

*****

This article was published on October 7, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the Gatestone Institute.

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Sorry, World Bank and Mainstream Media, Climate Change Not Driving Immigration

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By H. Sterling Burnett

A Google news search today of the term “climate change” turns up dozens of stories carried by the mainstream media claiming a study from the World Bank shows climate change could force more than 200 million people to migrate within the borders of their own countries from farms to cities. Like previous predictions made about climate change forced immigration, this is wrong. The claims are based on simulations from flawed computer models. Real-world data paints a quite different story, showing crop production is increasing.

The Associated Press, The Hill, NBC News, Reuters, and Voice of America, were among the dozens of mainstream media outlets and news services publicizing a new report from the World Bank, titled “Groundswell.”

“Climate change is a powerful driver of internal migration because of its impacts on people’s livelihoods and loss of livability in highly exposed locations,” writes the World Bank. “[C]limate change, an increasingly potent driver of migration, could force 216 million people across six world regions to move within their countries by 2050.”

The main driver of internal migration, according to the World Bank, is that climate change will make farming increasingly difficult, forcing millions of people, mostly in agrarian developing countries, off their farms and into cities unprepared to handle the influx.

Had the media outlets hyping the Groundswell report bothered to examine existing data, they would have found the World Bank’s claims were unfounded. The World Bank’s immigration projections are based solely on computer models which the U.N. has recently admitted are flawed.

For example, CBS News’ coverage of the World Bank report highlights the purported likely internal migration of tens of millions of people within Algeria, Bangladesh, and Tunisia as a result of climate change.

Wheat and barley are the two most important crops in Algeria and Tunisia. Between 2000 and 2019, a period the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has referred to as the warmest two decades on record, crop production data from the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show:

Wheat production in Algeria increased by more than 409 percent and barley production increased by more than 909 percent.

Wheat production in Tunisia increased by more than 71 percent and barley production increased by more than 289 percent.

Rice is Bangladesh’s top crop by a large margin. Between 2000 and 2019, FAO data show rice production in Bangladesh increased by more than 45 percent, setting new production records 13 of the past 19 years.

What’s true of Algeria, Bangladesh, and Tunisia is true for every region studied by the World Bank. As explained in Climate at a Glance: Crop Production, almost every nation on Earth is benefiting from steadily increasing crop yields as the Earth modestly warms. And as documented by the United Nations, the number of climate-related disasters has been declining this century.

It is a shame the mainstream media seems to have swallowed the World Bank’s bogus climate-induced migration claims hook, line, and sinker. Journalists should be more skeptical, especially since international agencies have made similar false predictions repeatedly in the past two decades only to have their prognostications prove untrue. For example, as detailed in Climate at a Glance: Climate Refugees, in 1989, a senior U.N. environmental official claimed, “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Also, in 2005, the U.N. claimed, “Rising sea levels…will create up to 50 million environmental refugees by the end of the decade.”

Neither of these predictions, both based entirely on computer model projections, came true. The latter projection became such an embarrassment for the U.N. it tried to “disappear” the claim.

Climate change may provide an impetus for migration from farms to cities, but for good reasons, not bad. As crop yields improve, fewer people are needed on farms to raise crops. As nutrition improves and incomes increase, the history of development in developed countries shows, increasing numbers of people demand greater access to education and over time migrate to cities to take non-farm-related industrial, commercial, and white-collar jobs.

Surely the World Bank and the mainstream media can’t disapprove of economic development and the poor in developing countries raising themselves out of poverty previously so intractable that generation after generation of people are farm laborers out of necessity rather than choice.

*****

This article was published on September 13, 2021, in Climate Realism and is reproduced with permission from the Heartland Institute.

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Putting Power in Parents’ Hands: Wisconsin Legislature Passes Law to Stop Politics in K-12

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By Editorial Staff

Wisconsin has become the first state in the nation to pass powerful new Academic Transparency legislation to bring sunlight in—and take politics out—of its K-12 classrooms.

Based on the Goldwater Institute’s model policy language, and with the support of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), the Wisconsin State Senate and State Assembly today passed mirror bills establishing parents’ rights to know what is being taught in their schools by requiring school districts to post on a publicly accessible portion of their website a listing of the specific learning materials being used at each school.

Spearheaded by Senator Duey Stroebel and Representative Elijah Behnke and co-sponsored by more than 25 Wisconsin lawmakers—including the State Legislature’s education committee chairs Senator Alberta Darling and Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt—SB 463 and its companion bill AB488 passed overwhelmingly (19-12 in the Senate, 60-38 in the Assembly).

Under the legislation, prospective parents will no longer have to guess and gamble about whether a nearby school is informally slipping into the classroom content such as the New York Times 1619 Project, or assigning literature like Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, which tells students, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”  Instead, as noted by Rep. Behnke, this new Academic Transparency legislation “allows families to make informed decisions about their children’s education experience.” Indeed, for the first time, parents will have the ability to identify and distinguish between schools pushing radical politics versus those affirming core academic principles before they’re forced to choose where to send their children.

Opponents of the legislation found almost no objection too outlandish to level against the new measure, including declaring during the final votes that “this bill censures history” and that its sponsors “are taking away local control of school boards,” despite the fact the bill allows school boards and teachers to continue selecting whatever curriculum materials they wish. The real problem, it seems, is that now they will have to disclose them.

As Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute observed of Academic Transparency even before Wisconsin’s latest votes, “This proposal is starting to catch fire across the country. It has been introduced in Texas and Illinois, and passed in the Arizona State Senate and the North Carolina State House…[and] earlier this month, Wyoming became the latest state to take up this proposal.”

Now, with the passage of SB463, Wisconsin lawmakers have officially set the bar high for other states looking to empower parents and contain the outbreak of politically radical, racially divisive content flooding our K-12 school system.

With Academic Transparency in place, no longer will parents like Nicole Solas of Rhode Island be forced to navigate a maze of public records requests—and endure threats of retaliatory litigation by her school board and teachers union—simply to know what her incoming kindergarten daughter could expect to see in the classroom. No longer will major school systems like the Madison Metropolitan School District be able to insist on thousands of dollars to disclose to the public the materials being used in just a handful of its classrooms.

It now falls to Wisconsin’s Governor, Democrat Tony Evers, to sign this legislation and ensure it becomes law, rather than actively blocking parents from knowing what is being taught in their schools. And more broadly, it now rests with state lawmakers across the country to bring the same level of transparency to the parents and constituents of their own communities.

To learn more about Academic Transparency, see Academic Transparency to Protect Students from Radical Politics in K-12 Education, visit https://goldwaterinstitute.org/academictransparency/, or contact Heather Curry at hcurry@goldwaterinstitute.org.

*****

This article was published on September 28, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY BLOG,  a project of the Goldwater Institute.

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Daily News Roundup

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By The Editors

NOTABLE QUOTE

Richard Bernstein contributor to Real Clear Investigations: . . . in exhaustive analysis of the research supporting the “current microaggression construct,” or CMC, Cantu and Jussim find that a microaggression is basically what a microaggression researcher subjectively believes it to be, with almost nothing in the way of scientific evidence that racism is embedded in it or that its alleged victims even see it as racist or harmful.

Dr. Paul Marik the endowed professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and a world-renowned clinician-researcher:“If you were to say, tell me the characteristics of a perfect drug to treat COVID-19, what would you ask for?” I think you would ask firstly for something that’s safe, that’s cheap, that’s readily available, and has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. People would say, “That’s ridiculous. There could not possibly be a drug that has all of those characteristics. That’s just unreasonable. But we do have such a drug. The drug is called Ivermectin.”

Jaimee Fougner a potential kidney transplant donor was told that she would not be eligible to donate her kidney to a patient on the kidney transplant list unless she was vaccinated:  “When I explained that no, I wouldn’t be able to take the COVID shot, then the comment was, well your journey ends here, because we require all of our donors and recipients to have the COVID-19 vaccine.

Katie Hopkins contributor to Frontpage Magazine describes a visit to NYC: The city is divided. And yet, because it’s not about race or color, somehow, no one seems to care. Apartheid is acceptable here — as long as it’s about medical choice or lack thereof.

Benjamin Braddock contributor to American Greatness: There is no question about whether or not vaccine mandates are acceptable. They’re not. There is no question about whether vaccines pass the risk/benefit test for low-risk groups or those with natural immunity. They don’t. There is no question about whether or not our leaders are acting in good faith. They aren’t. The only question that remains is, what are we going to do about it?

THE DEMOCRAT LED WAR ON AMERICA’S CHILDREN

(July 2021) Bernstein: The Macro Subjectivity of ‘Microaggression’ Studies – Part 2 of a Series on ‘Social Justice’ Research

Ever since the most blatant forms of racism and discrimination in America faded, what are called microaggressions have, in the view of leftist academics and social justice activists, taken their place. These are “a form of racism,”  the slights and insults that, though subtle and small and typically unconscious, are insulting and harmful to their targets. As noted by Edward Cantu and Lee Jussim — respectively, a law professor at the University of Missouri and a professor of social psychology at Rutgers — microaggressions are a hot topic, as universities, diversity trainers, and others are “operationalizing” the microaggression idea “as if it were the product of rigorous science.” But in an exhaustive analysis of the research supporting the “current microaggression construct,” or CMC, Cantu and Jussim find that a microaggression is basically what a microaggression researcher subjectively believes it to be, with almost nothing in the way of scientific evidence that racism is embedded in it or that its alleged victims even see it as racist or harmful.

Read more at Real Clear Investigations.

BEHIND THE DEEP STATE

Sperry: Durham Probes Pentagon Computer Contractors in Anti-Trump Conspiracy

Cybersecurity experts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland security contracts and high-level security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia and trigger an FBI investigation of him and his campaign, according to several sources familiar with the work of Special Counsel John Durham. Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic Internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016 and again in 2017, sources say — political dirt that sent FBI investigators on a wild goose chase. Prosecutors are also investigating whether some of the data presented to the FBI was faked or forged.

Read more at Real clear Investigations.

Sundance: A Compilation Video – Following the Vaccine Science Can Be Troublesome When the Vaccine Scientists Have an Independent Agenda

On October 29, 2019 (nearly 2 months before the first reported cases of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan), Anthony Fauci and Rick Bright went on C-SPAN and spoke of the urgent need to switch over from egg-based vaccine manufacturing to mRNA-based vaccines. They said that due to public resistance to gene-based therapies (mRNA), there would need to be some “disruptive” event that causes a scenario where they would not be “beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes.” Here is a compilation video {Direct Rumble Link} showing the “scientific discussion” as it took place.  Perhaps ‘following the science’ was not a good strategy considering the vaccine scientists had an agenda.

Watch the 3: 44 minute video at The Conservative Treehouse

Winters & Kassam: 6 Scandals The Media Won’t Tell You About Outgoing NIH Director Francis Collins.

Appointed by President Obama in 2009, Collins issued a statement this week saying: “I fundamentally believe … that no single person should serve in the position too long, and that it’s time to bring in a new scientist to lead the NIH into the future.” But it is unlikely Collins’s belief in a revolving door at the NIH that has prompted the move. Rather, with pressure mounting on key public figures such as his minion Anthony Fauci and arms-length brother-in-arms Peter Daszak, it is worth looking at what the media won’t be saying about Collins this week.

Read more at The National Pulse

U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS SEIZED CONTROL OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION

(Denver) Kruegel: No COVID vaccine? No organ transplant, Colorado hospital decides

A patient on the kidney transplant list was moved to inactive status by UCHealth for not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. Her living donor is also unvaccinated and UCHealth said both need to be vaccinated for the transplant process to continue. The letter Leilani Lutali received states: “The transplant team at University of Colorado Hospital has determined that it is necessary to place you inactive on the waiting list. You will be inactivated on the list for non-compliance by not receiving the COVID vaccine. You will have 30 days to begin the vaccination series. If your decision is to refuse COVID vaccination you will be removed from the kidney transplant list. You will continue to accrue waiting time, but you will not receive a kidney offer while listed inactive. Once you complete the COVID vaccination series you will be reactivated on the kidney transplant list pending any other changes in your health condition.” Lutali said she has religious concerns with the vaccines, as well as concerns that the vaccine would not be effective after receiving immunosuppressant drugs post-surgery.

Read more at KDVR/Fox 31 Colorado.

Prestigiacomo: Man Dies From COVID-19 After Hospital Rejects Court Order For Ivermectin: Report

A 75-year-old New York man died last weekend after a hospital refused to give him the drug Ivermectin in a last-ditch effort to save his life, despite an order from a judge, an exclusive report from News10NBC’s Jennifer Lewke revealed. Although Jeremy L. Carter was vaccinated against COVID-19, he still caught the virus at the end of August, Lewke detailed. He became sick enough to be hospitalized at Rochester General Hospital and continued to deteriorate to the point where he was placed on a ventilator. […] . . . the hospital refused to administer the drug to Carter, even though the family said they would gladly sign away any right to file a malpractice lawsuit. Still, though, Rochester General Hospital refused. Rochester Regional Health filed an appeal on Saturday, and a hearing was scheduled for Monday, Lewke’s report said. Carter died on Sunday.

Read more at The Daily Wire.

(H/T AA) Capuzzo: The Drug That Cracked COVID

Ivermectin.  […] Mom was sleeping twelve hours a day. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t lift the phone. “I’m fine, I’m just tired,” she kept saying. But Judy was always up with the sun. After raising two children as a single mother, working thirty-five years as an office manager for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, she was still cleaning houses five mornings a week with her girlfriends to “keep busy.” On December 22, three days before Christmas, Judy tested positive for COVID-19. “We were devastated,” Michael said. The family Christmas Eve dinner was cancelled, Judy spent Christmas in quarantine in her house, four days after Christmas she was taken by ambulance to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, and on New Year’s Eve Michael and Michelle got a call from the hospital that their mother was being admitted to the ICU. It all happened so fast. “We can’t be with her,” Michael said. “We can’t hold her hand, we can’t sleep in the room with her.” He started keeping notes to make sense of it all. “Hearing her voice crack on the phone as she agreed to go on the ventilator was HEART-BREAKING,” he wrote. His mother was sedated and unresponsive, as if she were in a coma, as a ventilator mechanically breathed for her. The doctors said there was little more they could do, and her chances of survival were bleak. Judy was getting the global standard of COVID-19 care recommended by the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, and all major public health agencies. It was called “supportive care.” […]  In other words, Judy would have to save herself. […]  But as Judy lay dying in the small hospital eight miles northeast of Buffalo, almost six hundred miles south in Norfolk, Virginia, Dr. Paul Marik, sixty-three, the endowed professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and a world-renowned clinician-researcher, was unknowingly preparing to save her life with a “wonder drug” that obliterates COVID-19. Discovering the drug was one thing, but getting it to Judy’s doctors in time to save her, getting it to the many thousands of people who needed it, would be a harrowing journey to rival the Iditarod mushers’ 1925 serum run of 675 miles through ice and snow to Nome, Alaska so Dr. Curtis Welch could stop the diphtheria epidemic. But this “Great Race of Mercy” had far less chance of success, for the obstacles were not in nature but in the minds and hearts of other men. […]  Marik had been keeping tabs on Ivermectin . . .

Read more Mountain Home.

Waldman: How Democrats’ ‘Infrastructure’ Packages Would Devastate American Health Care

Everyone knows the U.S. health care system is unsustainable, while medical care is already both unaffordable and too often inaccessible. Democrats’ answer to our nightmare is to hide changes to health care within their bills disguised as “infrastructure” — changes that will make care even less available. […]

. . .infrastructure bill contains two important health policy changes. Both reduce Americans’ access to medical care. The bill resumes a 2 percent cut in payments to Medicare providers, on top of all the other federal payments reductions. By cutting provider reimbursements (again), Democrats’ infrastructure bill reduces the availability of care, the same way the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) Medicaid cuts reduced access to care for enrollees. […]  A second health care provision buried in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill delays implementation of the . . .

Read more at The Federalist.

VACCINATION APARTHEID

Hopkins: Inside Apartheid NYC

When the ‘unclean’ and non-compliant are excluded from the privileges accorded to the rest. I’m not quite sure how I thought this trip to New York City would work out. I kind of figured the crazy new rules regarding vaccination passes didn’t apply to me, or somehow that reality would be different to the headlines — stating that you needed to be vaccinated to go into bars, restaurants, and hotels in the city that never sleeps. I have faith in humanity and no fear. I couldn’t believe for a moment this place I used to call home would actually be enforcing the rules fabricated by de Blasio and the drug-pushers in power.

But I was wrong. Every hotel, bar, and business is pushing this vaccination apartheid. There are signs on every doorway, and just in case you missed those, there are more signs at eye height in the foyers. You may only be inside, sit inside, or dine inside if you are double-jabbed and have a vaccination card and ID to prove it. […] Wooden shelters and fabricated huts are hastily thrown up onto the sidewalks outside these places — crashing into the gutter alongside the trash and the parked cars. Restaurant owners are scrambling to create some kind of outdoor alternative for the unclean and non-compliant who have failed to get their jabs and are excluded from the privileges accorded to the rest.

Read more at FrontPage Mag.

FAUCI’S VIRUS: IT’S POLITICAL

MERCK SELLS FEDERALLY FINANCED COVID PILL TO U.S. FOR 40 TIMES WHAT IT COSTS TO MAKEThe Covid-19 treatment molnupiravir was developed using funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. A FIVE-DAY COURSE of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to a report issued last week by drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London. Merck is charging the U.S. government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price. [Note: A five day course of Ivermectin, another Merck developed  anti-viral pill is around $45. It is alleged that  Ivermectin and the “new” molnupiravi work in the same way.]

Read more at The Intercept.

BIDEN/HARRIS/OBAMA REGIME: TRANSFORMING AMERICA

Quinnipiac: Americans Give President Biden Lowest Marks Across The Board, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Majority Say The Biden Administration Is Not Competent

Today, Republicans (94 – 4 percent) and independents (60 – 32 percent) disapprove of the job Biden is doing, while Democrats approve 80 – 10 percent. Biden received negative scores in the double digits on all but one key issue when Americans were asked about his handling of …

Read more at Quinnipiac University Poll.

Forbes Breaking News: JUST IN: Psaki Pressed On ‘Domestic Terrorism’ Controversy Over Parents Protesting School Boards

Watch the 1:54 minute video.

Carnick: Gas Prices Hit 7-Year High

Gas prices have reached a seven-year high, skyrocketing nearly 50 percent over the last year. The national average price of gas on Wednesday hit $3.22, according to AAA, up from $2.18 just a year ago. The spike comes as oil prices have surged in recent weeks to their highest level since 2018. Analysts say the elevated energy prices can be attributed to a global shortage of natural gas, which has heightened demand for alternative fuel sources such as oil. The increase in energy prices has worsened the economy’s inflation, which is at a 13-year high. The price of energy commodities climbed nearly 42 percent over the last year, the Labor Department reported last month.

Read more at Free Beacon.

Chasmar: DCCC’s new top hires promoted anti-police rhetoric, defund police movement

New top hires at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) have a history of promoting anti-police rhetoric.  Christale Spain, a former senior adviser of the South Carolina Democratic Party, expressed her excitement Tuesday night after being tapped as the DCCC’s senior adviser for Black engagement. In May 2020, as protests continued to rage across the country following the killing of George Floyd, Spain tweeted the definition of “rebellion.” “An act of violent or open resistance to an established government or ruler #JusticeforGeorge,” she wrote, seemingly endorsing the notion. […] The DCCC also hired Kristin Slevin as its chief of staff after she spent the last several election cycles working for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. […]  In June of last year, Slevin encouraged people to keep ” . . .

Read more at Fox News.

Johnson: THE OMAROVA THESIS

There must a Robert Ludlum series lurking in the saga of OCC Comptroller nominee Saule Omarova. One installment of the series would be The Omarova Thesis — the thesis she wrote at Moscow State University on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship: “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.” It must have been a good one — so good that she has scrubbed it from her current résumé. […]  Senator Toomey “noted that presidential nominees are required to submit all copies of their published writings,” but Omarovia has not responded to questions about the thesis or the revision to her résumé. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is also maintaining radio silence.

Read more at POWERLINEBLOG.

Singman: Top Republican says ISIS suicide bomber was prisoner released from Bagram Air Base, cites Indian intel

A top Republican on a key military panel said he reviewed intelligence that the ISIS-K suicide bomber that killed 13 U.S. service members outside of Hamid Karzai International Airport in August was a prisoner released from Bagram Air Base after the Taliban seized control of the facility. Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., the top Republican on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, told Fox News that Indian intelligence sources are reporting that the suicide bomber was one of the 7,000 prisoners housed at Bagram prison, and released by the Taliban last month.

Read more at Fox News.

McMurray: Ugandan Family That Illegally Crossed Border From Mexico Into Texas Is Caught On Camera Boarding American Airlines Flight With No ID [VIDEO]

The photo below shows the Ugandan woman, her husband, and her son preparing to go through “security” before boarding their American Airlines flight. According to Avila, neither the woman, her husband, or her son had any identification and were given a yellow packet containing boarding passes and paperwork from the US Border Patrol that allowed them to bypass the identification process with TSA. When the retired ICE special agent reached the TSA agent, he was asked for identification. Avila asked why he should have to show identification to fly when the entire family in front of him didn’t have to provide any identification? The TSA agent became hostile and demanded he provide ID or they would refuse to allow him to pass through security. Avila asked the TSA agent, “Do you remember 9/11? You are the DHS! You just allowed 3 people from Africa that are illegal in this country but you won’t allow me, a US citizen and retired federal agent to board without an ID? This is upside down and backwards!”

Read more/Watch the 44 second video at 100 Percent Fed Up.

Saavedra: Bernie Sanders Refused To Sign On To Statement Condemning Activists Harassing Sinema In Bathroom: Report

“Sanders wanted the statement to urge Sinema to drop her opposition to prescription drug reform, as well as Biden’s $3.5 trillion” social spending bill, Axios reported. “An email exchange between Senate Democratic leadership aides, obtained by Axios, reveals Sanders withheld his name from a joint statement declaring protesters who followed Sinema into a bathroom — and filmed her while using the restroom — as ‘plainly inappropriate and unacceptable.’”

Read more at The Daily Wire

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S MARXIST PLAYBOOK: CANCEL CULTURE

Adams: The Mob Attacking Trump’s Lawyer Is More Dangerous Than Anything John Eastman Is Accused of Doing

This week’s victim in the campaign to cancel attorneys who committed the sin of representing former president Trump is John Eastman. Eastman wrote two opinion memos for President Trump about the Electoral College process. Because they do not like Eastman’s client, or his legal reasoning, a swarm of signatories has asked the State Bar of California to investigate whether his representation violated California’s legal ethics rules. The transgression? Eastman wrote his pair of private memos to the president of the United States providing his legal opinion about the functioning of the 12th Amendment, federal statutes, some of which Eastman characterized as unconstitutional, and how the vice president, consistent with the text, could potentially either delay the counting of electoral votes or refuse to accept contested slates. Back in the old days of representing GITMO detainees, we called that the sacred right to legal counsel. In olden days, lawyers representing terrorists were allowed to fill their terrorist-clients’ heads full of reasons they weren’t guilty of trying to kill Americans. Times have changed. Indeed, the chief author of the bar complaint against John Eastman is Stephen Bundy, a Berkeley law professor. In an October 1999 American Lawyer article about lawyers not wanting to defend tobacco companies, Bundy commented on the importance of making sure everyone has legal representation: “If you’re the last lawyer in town, you have to put your feelings aside.” Bundy now borrows from the reasoning of another time and another place: Your guilt or innocence depends on your politics. In Bundy’s view in 2021, if you’re the last lawyer in town, you better not represent Donald Trump.

Read more at PJ Media.

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Americans Reject President Too Weak to Take on Radicals in His Own Party

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By Neil Patel

President Joe Biden’s poll numbers are tanking, especially among independent voters. The American people do not like weak leaders, and they do not like the craziness that’s infiltrating their daily lives.

Biden campaigned as someone who could bring the country together. Since taking office, he’s made no effort to do that. Instead, he has continually conceded to his party’s far-left wing, which is growing crazier by the day. It’s not clear if Biden is just too weak to take them on or if he is buying into their craziness, but either way, people are not happy. The Democrats are somehow making the Republicans seem appealing again to your average non-politically aligned voter. Given the current disarray in the Republican Party, this was a tall task. It’s almost as if the two parties are competing to see who can turn off the middle more. This week, the Democrats are in the lead. Their policies are so crazy not even their allies in the dominant corporate media can succeed in selling them.  

First, the numbers: Quinnipiac University is a major polling outlet not known for a bias. In their latest poll, Biden’s overall job approval has plummeted down to 38% from highs in the mid-50s earlier in his presidency. Things look even worse for Biden when you look at the complete collapse of his support from political independents, who now disapprove of him by a 60%-to-32% margin.

It gets worse yet again when you look at key issues independent voters really care about. On the economy, Biden’s underwater by 28 points. On taxes, by 30. On immigration overall, Biden is down 48 points among independents with only 22% approving, versus 70% disapproving. On Mexican border matters, it’s even worse, with a net negative of 55%. Sixty-three percent of independents don’t think Biden is a good leader, versus only 34% who do. Finally, only 35% of independents think the Biden administration has been competent running the government, versus a whopping 62% who think they are incompetent.  

It’s not a pretty picture.

How did Biden squander all his popularity? It’s not hard to see when you analyze each issue.

On immigration and border security, the hard left is in favor of open borders. Biden claims to disagree with this view, but the policy changes he’s put in place since coming to office have obliterated any semblance of security America had on the southern border. Millions of migrants are crossing illegally. The U.S. government doesn’t even know the real number, and it also does not know how many terrorists or criminals are crossing or how much deadly fentanyl is making it across with so little resistance. People don’t want this.

On economic issues, the socialist wing in the Democratic Party is firmly in charge of the agenda in Washington. The new policies they are trying to ram through Congress will add trillions of dollars in new spending and taxes. Somehow, Biden seems to have been convinced that ramming through this level of increased government involvement in our economy will make him a historic leader. Nobody voted for this. Certainly, the many independents who voted for Biden to help heal a broken country did not sign up for it. The hard left is harassing the two Democratic senators who stand in the way of the socialists, and Biden is passively watching it happen.

The situation in American schools is out of control. Radicals are instituting programs and curricula that are most accurately described as racist in school districts across the country. A school in Buffalo, New York, for example, prescribed a curriculum including Marxist teachings on “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” A private school in New York City even encouraged its students to stop using the terms “mom” and “dad.” 

And racial segregation is back. Its advocates this time are so-called anti-racists, as opposed to the traditional brand of racists who used to advocate for such policies. The results are the same. A school in Madison, Wisconsin, for example, segregated students and parents by race into so-called affinity groups for class discussions. And in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the public school hosted an event pushing a so-called healing space available only to minority students. The school did not try to hide its overt racism: “Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, not for students who identify only as White.”

Parents are understandably up in arms over these attempts by radical educators to brainwash their children with Marxist thought or even overt racism. They have taken to school boards in record numbers to push back. The Biden administration’s response? This week, the attorney general sent a memorandum to the FBI and federal prosecutors asking them to work with local law enforcement to crack down on parents protesting school board actions. Nobody is in favor of parents threatening or committing violence against teachers, but the memorandum was worded so broadly as to be reasonably viewed as itself an attempt to intimidate parents away from questioning the radical ideologies being imposed on students across America.

Biden has earned his unpopularity through some combination of weakness and incompetence. The left wing of the Democratic Party has gone firmly out of the American mainstream in several policy areas. Instead of standing up to this fringe, Biden and the party have been catering to the socialists. It’s not clear if they do this because they agree with the insanity or they are too weak to oppose it, but either way, the good news is the American people are not buying it.

*****

This article was published on October 8, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

GOP Governors: Biden Ignores Meeting Request On border crisis, propose own solutions thumbnail

GOP Governors: Biden Ignores Meeting Request On border crisis, propose own solutions

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By Bethany Blankley

Twenty-six U.S. governors requested to meet with President Joe Biden to propose solutions to the ongoing border crisis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said at a Wednesday new conference. Because Biden did not respond to the request, the governors said they decided to take their message to the American people, proposing their own solutions to the drastic increase in illegal immigration this year that’s led to what they called a humanitarian crisis across the country.

Convening in the border town of Mission, Texas, Abbott, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and eight others said they’ve proposed a 10-point plan to help end the humanitarian crisis caused by Biden’s open-border policies.

“We’re not going to sit around while Biden refuses to act,” Ducey said. “We’ve tried to meet with the president and be part of the solution, but he refuses. No, worse – he ignores us, just like he’s ignoring the border and the well-being of the American people. If the president won’t meet with us, then we’ll share our policy ideas today. Hopefully he will hear our solutions and begin to act.”

Abbott and Ducey created an Emergency Management Assistance Compact in June requesting aid from governors to help quell the overflow of migrants entering the country illegally. Many governors sent law enforcement personnel on short-term missions to help Texas’ and Arizona’s efforts.

The governors’ 10-point plan includes the reinstatement of the “Remain in Mexico” policy that requires immigrants to return to their home countries until amnesty hearings are concluded in the U.S.; and finishing securing the southern border with Mexico, including completion of the border wall that was a priority of former President Donald Trump.

A third demand is the reinstatement of Title 42 health restrictions at the border, which require immigrants to be deported if they pose a health risk, including testing positive for COVID-19. Another is ending the Obama-era catch and release program, which they said is incentivizing criminals and cartels to illegally traffic people and drugs into the country.

The proposed solutions also include clearing the judicial backlog that is slowing the legal immigration process, and deporting all migrant criminals, a policy the Biden administration also changed. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ most recent memorandum states that even entering the U.S. illegally is not reason enough to be arrested even though illegal immigration is a federal crime.

The governors also propose the federal government dedicate more resources to eradicate human trafficking and drug trafficking, which they said has over-extended local law enforcement agencies across the south. And they propose re-entering all agreements with Northern Triangle partners and Mexico, which Biden let lapse.

The majority of the proposed solutions are in direct opposition to Biden administration policies.

Prior to engaging the help of other states, Texas launched its own border security measures after Biden took office, costing Texas taxpayers $3 billion so far.

The Texas Legislature also passed several bills, which Abbott signed into law this year to strengthen border security efforts, including a budget authorization to build a border wall in Texas.

New state laws that went into effect this year increase penalties for those committing crimes in Texas, including nine that crack down on human trafficking, and manufacturing or distributing the highly addictive narcotic fentanyl. Several governors at Wednesday’s news conference said they have seen drastic increases in fentanyl distribution and overdoses in their states.

“The Biden administration’s open border policies have led to complete chaos at the southern border, and pose a threat to the safety of Texans and all Americans,” Abbott said. “Texas has stepped up to keep our communities safe and mitigate this crisis ourselves, and our efforts have been made stronger by the support and assistance of governors from across the nation.”

Joining Abbott and Ducey were Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Idaho Gov. Brad Little, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, Texas Military Department Adjutant General Tracy Norris and Deputy Adjutant General Monie R. Ulis, and National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd.

*****

This article was published on October 7, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

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