Good morning! Here is your news briefing for Friday March 13, 2020.
THE DAILY SIGNAL
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Mar 13, 2020
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Happy Friday from Washington, where President Trump warns liberals not to use the coronavirus as an excuse to try to win fights they couldn’t win before. Fred Lucas reports. The Chinese have some explaining to do, Rep. Jim Banks writes. Why the bipartisan House vote to change surveillance practices? Cully Stimson explains. On the podcast, the newest U.S. senator talks about her transition and the growing health crisis. Plus: a judge blatantly reveals his bias, the EPA restrains itself, and black liberals spread destructive rhetoric. On this date in 1942, the Army begins training dogs for the new War Dog Program, dubbed the “K-9 Corps.” Have a great weekend. |
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JUST THE NEWS
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AXIOS
🔮 It’s Friday the 13th. What could go wrong?
- Today’s Smart Brevity™ count: 1,169 words … 4½ minutes.
🎬 Sunday on “Axios on HBO” (6 p.m. ET/PT): House Majority Whip James Clyburn, credited with igniting Joe Biden’s surge, tells Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei that the U.S. “could very well go the way of Germany in the 1930s.”
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Every shutdown by an office, school, restaurant or store is stress-testing our ability to live life without leaving home.
- Why it matters: Coronavirus is triggering a grand experiment. Remote work and remote learning have long been buzzwords. But the sudden switch to telecommuting en masse has the potential to accelerate shifts in how work is conducted and the way we think about it, Axios’ Erica Pandey writes.
The coronavirus could be the catalyst that gets firms to adopt remote work policies in far greater numbers than we see now, even after the pandemic ends. But it’s not as simple as just closing offices and classrooms. Most companies and universities aren’t built for the virtual world.
- They’re filled with managers and professors who value face-to-face interaction.
- Workplaces exist precisely because sharing physical space fosters teamwork and sparks creativity.
Some tech companies are already entirely remote, and have set up virtual water coolers — calls where employees can join to chat about topics outside of work — to recreate the social experience of an office.
- But the vast majority of organizations aren’t built this way. And the abrupt switch to telecommuting brings a host of logistical problems.
Albina Pascucci, 89, in central Rome. Photo: Alessandra Tarantino/AP
The coronavirus outbreak in Italy has gotten so bad so quickly that some doctors are now forced to practice “catastrophe medicine” — determining which severely ill patients should, and should not, get care based on the resources available, Axios health care business reporter Bob Herman writes.
- Between the lines: The U.S. is not at that point. But a week ago, neither was Italy.
- The rapid deterioration there underlines the importance of taking preventive measures seriously, and the need for political and health leaders to start thinking about hard ethical questions.
Where it stands: The rapid spread has forced Italian leaders to quarantine the entire country and close all shops except for pharmacies and grocery stores.
- The Italian health care system, which many experts hold in high regard, is overworked.
Experts say the biggest lesson for Americans is that trying to limit the virus’ spread — mainly by limiting contact with potentially infected people — really is important.
The U.S. has no national plan for how to ration care if intensive care units and ventilators are all in use.
- State leaders and hospitals would need to write down actual policies now to avoid making those decisions on the fly, like Italian officials have had to.
- “You cannot have that conversation in the midst of the crisis,” said Alan Regenberg, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins.
Less than 3% of CEOs of the world’s largest companies are women. That’s according to Fortune, whose annual Fortune Global 500 list featured just 14 female CEOs last year, Axios chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon writes.
By the numbers: The average tenure of a global CEO is now five years. So in a typical year, about 100 of the CEO slots at Fortune Global 500 companies will be filled with someone new.
- If 50 of those 100 slots went to women, you would expect the number of female CEOs to more than quadruple to 61 in 2020, then continue to rise to 201 in 2026 and 230 in 2030.
Above: Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell bump elbows yesterday as they attend a lunch with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Capitol Hill.
- Below: During an Oval Office meeting, President Trump and the prime minister joke about not shaking hands.
“In a week that brought the wildest market swings since the financial crisis, [yesterday] hammered investors with something crazier — a 10% drop in the Dow, the end of the longest bull market on record and the biggest sell-off since 1987’s Black Monday,” Bloomberg reports.
- “[T]he S&P 500 smoldered 27% below records set barely three weeks ago and wiped out all its gains since the end of 2018.”
Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at The Leuthold Group, tells Axios’ Dion Rabouin: “There is no explanation for why the market is falling 5-10% a day.”
- “We’re not trading on any kind of reason or sanity, it’s just emotion and panic at the moment.”
The Fed has clearly gotten the message from financial markets — “OMFG!!!” — and has acted accordingly, Axios Markets editor Dion Rabouin writes.
- Why it matters: A recession is starting to shift from possible to overwhelmingly likely, with the only question being how bad things will get.
Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO of Quill Intelligence and a former adviser to the Dallas Fed, said yesterday’s selloff shows just how limited the central bank is
- “The Fed loaded and fired a bazooka and it was not a big enough shock to staunch the bloodletting in the stock and, more importantly, credit markets.”
Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios
Tech platforms have gotten smarter about deliberate disinformation from bad actors, but the coronavirus’ spread presents a different misinformation threat.
- False information is being spread by people who are well-intentioned, but fearful and naive, Axios chief tech correspondent Ina Fried reports from S.F. as part of our “What Matters 2020” series.
- The threat was vividly illustrated yesterday when actress and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted an image (later deleted) listing incorrect recommendations for how to avoid contracting the virus.
The big picture: In the coming days, the problem may get worse as the disease — and rumors — spread.
- The major platforms all say they are prepared and are already taking action. However, many of their statements point to actions and policies devised to combat deliberately-spread disinformation.
⚾ Major League Baseball’s opening day had been scheduled for March 26.
- The decision announced by Commissioner Rob Manfred left open whether each team would still play 162 games. Go deeper.
🏀 March Madness, one of the biggest events in American sports, a marathon of buzzer-beaters, upsets and thrills involving 68 teams from schools big and small, was cancelled.
- The three-week tournament generates almost a billion dollars in revenue each year for the NCAA and its hundreds of member schools, most from a TV contract with CBS and Turner.
- NCAA President Mark Emmert told AP that the NCAA had insurance to cover a business stoppage but gave no details. Go deeper.
🏀 The NBA said its virus hiatus will likely last “at least” a month. Go deeper.
🇯🇵 Japan’s Olympics minister today brushed off President Trump’s suggestion the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to begin July 24, be postponed.
- Olympic minister Seiko Hashimoto told a news conference that the International Olympic Committee and Japanese organizers are “not considering cancellation or a postponement, absolutely not at all.” Go deeper.
Source: AP
The New York Times Magazine’s annual Music Issue, has three cover stars for a “25 Songs That Matter Now” list:
- Megan Thee Stallion (“Hot Girl Summer”) … Billie Eilish (“Everything I
Wanted”) … and Lil Nas X (“Old Town Road”).
In an opening essay, story editor Nitsuh Abebe writes:
After a long stretch during which the top tier of pop music was dominated by big stars and their earnest, millennial-friendly anthems, the last few years have seen success for some stranger, more singular, sometimes darker and very much postmillennial personalities. (Billie Eilish, who is 18, released her debut single four years ago.)
📬 Thanks for spending this tough week with us! Please tell a friend about AM/PM.
THE WASHINGTON POST MORNING HEADLINES
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THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
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PRO TRUMP NEWS
THE HILL
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ROLL CALL
Morning Headlines
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were nearing agreement on an economic stimulus package to combat the effects of the coronavirus pandemic but weren’t close enough to be ready for a vote Thursday night. Read More…
Despite widespread cancellations of campaign events and everyday activities across the nation amid the new coronavirus pandemic, four states with primaries next week are sending the message: Voting will go on, but with an extra dose of hand sanitizer. Read More…
Tommy Thompson: The new coronavirus has no partisan preference
OPINION — Rather than casting aspersions on those who are in the arena, let’s be supportive of the great team working to address this crisis and see how we as a country can come together, former HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson writes. Read More…
Click here to subscribe to Fintech Beat for the latest market and regulatory developmentsin finance and financial technology.
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‘I hope we don’t have an attack this weekend’ — FISA tools to expire before Senate takes up renewal
Three intelligence surveillance tools are set to expire on Sunday with the Senate leaving for the weekend without acting on a stopgap extension. Read More…
Presidential candidates argue over coronavirus response
The two leading Democratic presidential candidates and President Donald Trump traded barbs Thursday over the administration’s handling of the coronavirus-based pandemic, opening an election-year fight over a public health issue with deep economic and personal consequences for American voters. Read More…
Big talk, little walk from Sanders in the Senate
Bernie Sanders and his supporters have taken pains to rebut the charge from Democrats that he won’t make a good president because he hasn’t been a good senator. But the record shows that Sanders is not among the noted legislative craftsmen of his generation. Read More…
How lawmakers are spending their coronavirus self-quarantines
Politicians are by nature social animals. After all, they win their jobs by meeting with thousands of people. So what happens when they have to enter isolation? Musings on life and death, for one thing, plus discussions of toilet seats. Read More…
‘They aren’t American’ — Democrats aim to block aid to struggling cruise companies
As the travel industry reels from the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has suggested some sort of federal help for the travel industry, specifically singling out the cruise line industry as one that might need help. But multiple Democratic lawmakers are cool to the idea. Read More…
Senators remind colleagues about Capitol contractors amid coronavirus
Three lawmakers are urging protections for contract workers who serve the Capitol in food service, custodial and other roles from burdens the coronavirus epidemic may pose, as Congress takes steps to protect themselves and their salaried staff. Read More…
How do you restore the budget process in Congress? Eliminate the Budget committees
OPINION — To the extent Congress’ complex and cumbersome budget procedures are contributing to our fiscal problems, incremental adjustments around the edges of the budget process are no longer good enough. A more fundamental change is needed, former House Budget Chairman Tom Price writes. Read More…
CQ Roll Call is a part of FiscalNote, the leading technology innovator at the intersection of global business and government. Copyright 2020 CQ Roll Call. All rights reserved Privacy | Safely unsubscribe now.
POLITICO PLAYBOOK
POLITICO Playbook: Is the coronavirus TARP 2.0?
Presented by
DRIVING THE DAY
YOU THOUGHT TARP WAS BAD? The federal response to the coronavirus is shaping up to be a monthslong legislative slog that will almost certainly have a bigger price tag than the bank bailouts of 2008. By all indications, it will be broader, too, and will come amid the heat of a presidential election with the incumbent — DONALD TRUMP — atop the ballot.
THE WARM-UP ACT COMES TODAY: LATER THIS MORNING, Speaker NANCY PELOSI is set to announce that she has a deal with Treasury Secretary STEVEN MNUCHIN to institute free coronavirus testing, put in place two weeks of paid sick leave and up to three months of paid family leave, bolster unemployment benefits, ensure school lunches for those who need them and boost Medicaid funding. This legislation is coming to the House floor under a fast-track process that requires a two-thirds majority — in other words, it’s expected to pass with big margins.
BUT IN ANNOUNCING THIS PACKAGE to her colleagues Thursday night, PELOSI let it be known that this is far from the last bout of legislating for Congress this year. The speaker wrote in a letter to her colleagues that the House would immediately “get to work on a third emergency response package that will take further effective action that protects the health, economic security and well-being of the American people.”
“WELL, HOPEFULLY, we will be able to take inventory, find out the extent of the crisis in our country,” PELOSI said, when we asked her if she anticipated the Congress would be dealing with this for the foreseeable future.
PART OF CONGRESS’ CHALLENGE, at this point, is that the United States has no actual idea how many Americans will ultimately be diagnosed with the deadly COVID-19 virus. The fatality estimates alone range from the low hundreds to more than 1 million, to say nothing of total cases. But while there’s no way to gauge the total scope of the crisis, it’s obvious the federal government will require massive resources to cushion the economic blow and manage the outbreak.
THERE’S ALREADY TALK OF A SWEEPING, MULTI-INDUSTRY response. The administration seems intent on rescuing airlines, hotels and cruise lines — the White House thinks tax credits are going to be enough, but administration officials also thought they’d be able to get a payroll tax cut this week, so take their view with a heap of salt.
INSURERS MIGHT END UP NEEDING federal support, if they are required to pay an unusual number of claims for large-scale events that get canceled. CONGRESS might have to give Americans mortgage relief and student debt relief. Democrats are pushing for direct cash payments.
WHAT WILL CONGRESS HAVE TO DO if airlines are grounded and entire regions of the country suffer unusually large outbreaks? Lawmakers are talking about this right now.
THIS CRISIS WILL TEST THE RESILIENCE of Congress and the presidency like never before. Lawmakers and insiders still talk about the scars from the 2008 TARP vote, and how it came to define the career of some lawmakers — House Minority Whip STEVE SCALISE (R-La.) speaks with pride about his “no” vote. These types of votes could be more frequent.
THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS — TRUMP’S handling of it and Congress’ stewardship — could also come to define the 2020 election. JOE BIDEN had already premised his candidacy on the notion that TRUMP was unfit for office and could not govern. Is this proving him right? And will Republicans down the ballot start to suffer politically, too? Or will the president, however implausible it might seem right now, come out looking good in the end?
SCOOP … THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION will announce this morning a series of steps they believe will increase the capacity for tests across the country:
— THE FDA WILL ALLOW New York state to authorize public and private labs to begin testing.
— THE FDA will authorize labs to run tests on Roche’s high-volume platform.
— HHS will put Adm. Brett Giroir in charge of testing efforts among public health service agencies.
— THE FDA will create an around-the-clock hotline for labs if they can’t get authorized tests, need to process tests or have issues validating a test.
BTW: On Capitol Hill, the crisis talks are creating a new level of appreciation for MNUCHIN, at least for now. TRUMP can barely speak to PELOSI — the last we checked, they hadn’t spoken this entire crisis. The man who prides himself on cutting deals had absolutely nothing to do with this deal in the middle of a massive crisis. MNUCHIN and PELOSI spoke eight times Thursday.
… TO WIT — NYT’S PETER BAKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN, with a “News Analysis” bug: “The President as Bystander: Trump Struggles to Unify a Nation on Edge”: “After feeling besieged by enemies for three years, Mr. Trump and some of his advisers view so many issues through the lens of political warfare — assuming that criticism is all about point scoring — that it has become hard to see what is real and what is not, according to people around the president. Even when others with Mr. Trump’s best interests at heart disagree, they find it hard to penetrate what they see as the bubble around him. …
“Among the advisers who share the president’s more jaundiced view is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who considers the problem more about public psychology than a health reality, according to people who have spoken with him. Mr. Kushner has gotten more involved in the response in recent days, according to three White House advisers. A person close to Mr. Kushner said his views were being misinterpreted, and that he was focused on trying to find answers to the most immediate measures to mitigate the virus’s spread.”
— “Ten minutes at the teleprompter: Inside Trump’s failed attempt to calm coronavirus fears,” by WaPo’s Phil Rucker, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW … READ: John Bresnahan, Sarah Ferris and Heather Caygle
WSJ’S MIKE BENDER: “Coronavirus Crisis Tests Trump’s Unusual Governing Style”
NEW … AUSTRALIA’S SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: “Prime Minister Scott Morrison will not be tested for coronavirus despite spending hours behind closed doors this week with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who was in a Brisbane hospital on Friday night after testing positive for the disease. …
“The home affairs minister flew to the United States earlier this month to meet security ministers from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in Washington on Thursday, March 5. He met with US Attorney-General William Barr and Ivanka Trump during the trip.” With pic: SMH
BRUTAL DAY ON WALL STREET — “Stocks Plunge 10% in Dow’s Worst Day Since 1987,” by WSJ’s Caitlin McCabe and Caitlin Ostroff: “U.S. stocks plunged Thursday in their worst day since the 1987 crash. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 10%, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq tumbled nearly as much to join the Dow in a bear market.
“The furious falls in share prices on rising fears of a global slowdown due to the rapid spread of coronavirus occurred despite a $1.5 trillion intervention in short-term funding markets by the Federal Reserve.” WSJ
AND THIS MORNING — AP: “Asian shares dive, then trim losses after Wall St sell-off,” by Elaine Kurtenbach in Bangkok
Good Friday morning. HEY, REMEMBER IMPEACHMENT? Seems like a million years ago, and feels so irrelevant at this point.
WHAT’S ON TRUMP’S MIND — @realDonaldTrump at 10:20 p.m.: “Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!”
ALEX ISENSTADT and NATASHA KORECKI: “Coronavirus consumes Trump’s reelection bid”: “When Donald Trump’s top campaign advisers met with the president in the White House Wednesday, they came prepared with reams of polling data on his standing with voters eight months out from the election. But Trump was focused on something else: The coronavirus.
“Before the group could begin their long-planned presentation on the 2020 race, the president launched into a commentary about how travel from Europe was ‘a mess’ and needed to be shut down. He ordered White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and chief economist Larry Kudlow into the room to talk about ideas for addressing the pandemic. And he sent two other top aides, Jared Kushner and Hope Hicks, outside to draft a to-do list.
“The episode illustrated how the coronavirus crisis has upended the election for both parties. Nearly every element of the presidential campaign is being adjusted or put on hold, from rallies to fundraising to staff work. Advertising campaigns are being paused and both parties are trying to gauge how to reach voters online.
“‘You could make a strong argument that the only thing that matters to the president’s reelection now is getting the response correct,’ said Scott Jennings, who served as a top political aide in the George W. Bush White House. ‘No rally is going to save you if you are judged as having failed as the president.’” POLITICO
— “Trump officials did sound the coronavirus alarm. They just don’t work there anymore,” by Meridith McGraw
NEW … PAGING IVANKA AND JARED … THE LINCOLN PROJECT is going up with its first ad this morning on MSNBC, Fox News and CNN. “Grifters: Episode One” features a woman speaking as if she is IVANKA TRUMP bragging about how her family has been enriched by the White House and Republican politics. The group counts George Conway, Steve Schmidt and John Weaver among its advisers. The ad
MEANWHILE, ON THE TRAIL — “Biden and Sanders aim to project presidential stature on coronavirus after Trump’s shaky address,” by WaPo’s Matt Viser and Jenna Johnson
— “A ‘Never Biden’ movement vows not to vote for Joe,” by David Siders and Holly Otterbein: “On Tuesday night, Joe Biden’s campaign was celebrating his latest primary night triumph. By Wednesday morning, #NeverBiden, #WriteinBernie and #DemExit2020 hashtags began trending on Twitter.
“There’s no question it’s been a banner two weeks for Biden. But lurking in the background of his sudden ascension to all-but-presumptive nominee is evidence that at least some Bernie Sanders supporters might not migrate to him in November, weakening him in the general election. The significance of the problem became apparent in the same string of primaries that put Biden on the cusp of the nomination.
“In Michigan — a state critical to Democrats’ efforts to reclaim their general election footing in the Rust Belt — just 2 of 5 Sanders backers said they would vote Democratic in November, regardless of who became the nominee, according to exit polls. Four in five said they’d be dissatisfied with Biden as the Democratic standard-bearer.
“Though it’s unclear how widespread or adamant the #NeverBiden contingent is — will they really stay home when the alternative is another four years of President Donald Trump? — the misgivings at least put the Biden campaign on notice that it has significant work to do to bring along Sanders’ base.” POLITICO
TRUMP’S FRIDAY — The president will meet with industry executives on the COVID-19 response in the Cabinet Room at 1:30 p.m.
SUNDAY SO FAR …
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FOX
“Fox News Sunday”: Anthony Fauci … Steven Mnuchin. Panel: Josh Holmes, Julie Pace, Gillian Turner and Charles Lane. Power Player of the Week: Vanilla Beane.
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CBS
“Face the Nation”: Anthony Fauci … Scott Gottlieb.
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ABC
“This Week”: Anthony Fauci. Panel: Julie Pace, Rick Klein, Jonah Goldberg and Stefanie Brown James.
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CNN
“State of the Union”: Anthony Fauci. Panel: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Mia Love, Jennifer Granholm and Scott Jennings.
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NBC
“Meet the Press”: Panel: Yamiche Alcindor, Peter Baker, Lanhee Chen and Amy Walter.
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CNN
“Inside Politics”: Seung Min Kim, Lisa Lerer and Kaitlan Collins.
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Gray TV
“Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren”: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) … Kevin Cirilli.
-
Sinclair TV
“America This Week with Eric Bolling”: Anthony Fauci … Surgeon General Jerome Adams … Charlie Kirk … Andrew Pollack. Panel: Sebastian Gorka and Ameshia Cross.
PLAYBOOK READS
POLITICO MAGAZINE’S FRIDAY COVER … ANNA GRONEWOLD in Albany, N.Y.: “Andrew Cuomo, a Man Alone”
REMEMBER THIS? — “U.S. strikes back at militia group after 2 American troops killed in Iraq,” by Lara Seligman: “U.S. and coalition aircraft conducted retaliatory airstrikes on Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia group locations in Iraq on Thursday after two U.S. troops were killed in a rocket attack a day earlier, the Defense Department announced.
“The strikes come just hours after Pentagon leaders blamed Iranian-backed Shia militia groups and warned that the United States would respond to the deadly attack, which also killed a British service member and wounded 14 others. The airstrikes targeted five Kataib Hezbollah weapons facilities and were aimed at hurting their ability to conduct future attacks against U.S. and coalition forces, according to a Defense Department statement.” POLITICO
GRENELL UPDATE … NYT’S JULIAN BARNES and ADAM GOLDMAN: “Acting Intelligence Chief Freezes Hiring and Looks to Cut Office”: “The acting director of national intelligence imposed a hiring freeze and ordered a review of the agency’s personnel and mission, officials announced Thursday, an effort that some intelligence officers viewed as politically motivated.
“Though some Republicans have viewed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence skeptically and sought to scale it back, the timing of the review by the acting director, Richard Grenell — after President Trump’s downsizing of the National Security Council staff — caused concern inside the nation’s intelligence agencies. Some current and former officials said they saw the effort as an attempt to oust intelligence officers who disagreed politically with Mr. Trump.
“Those officials questioned why Mr. Grenell, in the job temporarily, would undertake a large-scale reorganization, particularly one that previous directors had considered but put aside.” NYT
TRUMP, INC. — “Cancellations hit Trump’s hotels and clubs amid coronavirus outbreak,” by WaPo’s Joshua Partlow, David Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell: “Mar-a-Lago this week has been setting up for a massive, 700-person charity luncheon — the ‘Wine, Women and Shoes’ bash to raise money for Big Dog Ranch Rescue, an animal shelter. The chairs of the event include Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Lea Trump, and the daughter of Trump’s former presidential rival, Georgina Bloomberg.
“The organizers said Thursday they planned to proceed despite the Brazilian official’s positive test.” WaPo
DATA DU JOUR … THE UPSHOT’S AARON CAROLL: “A crucial thing to understand about the coronavirus threat — and it’s playing out grimly in Italy — is the difference between the total number of people who might get sick and the number who might get sick at the same time. Our country has only 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people. That’s fewer than in Italy (3.2), China (4.3) and South Korea (12.3), all of which have had struggles. More important, there are only so many intensive care beds and ventilators.
“It’s estimated that we have about 45,000 intensive care unit beds in the United States. In a moderate outbreak, about 200,000 Americans would need one.” NYT
POLL … USA TODAY’S SUSAN PAGE and JOEL SHANNON: “Women were more likely to report washing their hands more often than men were, 58% compared with 50%. The gap was much larger between Democrats and Republicans: 63% of Democrats were washing their hands more often, but just 48% of Republicans were doing so.” USA Today
NEWS YOU CAN USE — “The Dos and Don’ts of Social Distancing,” by The Atlantic’s Kaityln Tiffany
VALLEY TALK … THE VERGE’S CASEY NEWTON: “If Wednesday was the day where the full magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis became clear to many Americans, Thursday was the day that the country seemed to enter shock. …
“One question you could ask, if you were desperate to turn your attention away from the public health implications of the crisis, is how spending a month or two mostly indoors will affect American life — both in the moment and afterward. We are social creatures, and we’re about to be deprived of much of that socialization.” The Interface
PLAYBOOKERS
Send tips to Eli Okun and Garrett Ross at politicoplaybook@politico.com.
TRANSITION — Jordan Markwith is now head of external affairs at Lyft. He most recently was managing director at Capital Strategies.
BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Katelyn Polantz, CNN justice and courts reporter. How she’s celebrating: “I was born on a Friday the 13th, so this is an extra special birthday since it’s a Friday. I was planning on spending the weekend with my dear friend (USC journalist and professor) Christina Bellantoni and her family in sunny Los Angeles. But because the public health crisis has put a damper on travel, I may be looking forward to catching up with friends and family this weekend far and wide instead — over the phone.” Playbook Q&A
BIRTHDAYS: Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) is 63 … Sarah Makin … Ari Rabin-Havt, Bernie Sanders’ deputy campaign manager, is 41 … Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is 64 … Madeline Seaman … Jeff Weiss … Nancy Soderberg … Kiki McLean (h/ts Jon Haber) … Steven Hurst … Laurel Touby … POLITICO’s David Lim (h/t Joanne Kenen) … Sarah Mulcahy … Ashley Hoy, partner at Monument Advocacy … Shawn Turner … Erin Billings of Global Strategy Group … James Wesolek of Texas Values (h/t dad Tim) … Matt Butler … Eddie Wytkind … former Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) is 62 … former Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.) is 53 … former Rep. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.) is 62 … Joe Rubin … Mike Dovilla is 45 … Steve Rochlin … Erin Harbaugh … WSJ’s Ryan Tracy is 36 … Yelda Altalef, booking producer at MSNBC (h/t Brian Latimer) …
… Kalen Pruss, DNC policy director … Mark McNulty … Jennifer Morgan, co-CEO at SAP … John Kelly, VP for exec comms at SAP … POLITICO’s Tamar Barsamian … James Carr … Facebook’s Caroline Chalmers … Doug Sachtleben … Scott Fear … DeJuana L. Thompson … Hannah Chatalas … Dan Milich … James Russell, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, is 62 … Allie Banwell … Lauren Smith … Erik Greathouse is 48 … Edelman’s Kristy Schmidt … Lauren Inouye, VP for public policy and government affairs at the Council of Graduate Schools … Georgetown’s Christina Roberts … Brian Gaston … Theresa Zagnoli … Natalie McLaughlin … Diamond Naga Siu … Microsoft’s David Pryor Jr. … Jonathan Bing … Tony Newman … Chris Gaspar … Joshua Phoebus … Rich Ransom … Mark Kitchens … Sabrina Fendrick
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CAFFEINATED THOUGHTS
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CONSERVATIVE DAILY NEWS
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PJ MEDIA
The Morning Briefing: Screw It America, I’m Beer Blogging
I Hate You, Coronavirus
The coronavirus finally broke me a little bit on Thursday. I am forever grateful that I have you, my dear readers, to talk me off of the ledge from all of this madness.
A few days ago I wrote that I might just turn this into a beer blog if the news kept being about nothing but THE PLAGUE. I was mostly, but not entirely, joking.
I woke up Thursday to a series of texts that ended up cancelling the trip I had scheduled to see my daughter and our family in Michigan.
An hour or so later, the NCAA issued a statement that cancelled all Division I winter and spring championships, thus ending my child’s collegiate athletic career.
She is heartbroken, which makes me hate the panic-mongers even more.
As you are all aware, I have been writing about being personally responsible while dealing with this coronavirus scare. I’m still in a self-induced quarantine because I may have been exposed to someone who had the virus two weeks ago. I’m all for being cautious.
Cancelling everything on Earth isn’t being cautious, it’s insane.
There is no end game to any of the cancellation madness. If there were, it would all make more sense. Put some metrics in place that would trigger the end of the postponements and cancellations. What we’ve seen in the last two days is all-out panic, which is never useful.
By the time Monday’s briefing rolls around there is a real possibility that most the public school districts in America will have cancelled classes for an indefinite period of time. This is madness.
Give us some parameters. Give us an end game. Let us know when the STAY AWAY FROM EVERYONE is supposed to stop.
That’s all we want.
As for the beer…
The Flagstaff stuff was disappointing. Flat and tired is the best way I can describe it.
The Citrazona is one of my favorites though. Just a hint of citrus in it, and it still packs a bit of a punch.
Have a great weekend, my friends.
PJM Linktank
Slow Kid on the Block: Joe Biden Blasts Trump’s Coronavirus Response, Then Plagiarizes Trump’s Plan
Smollett Case Roils the Race for Cook County State’s Attorney
Mark Levin Takes Aim at the New York Times’ 1619 Project
Globalization May Be the Greatest Victim of the Coronavirus
Visible From Space, Iran’s Coronavirus Mass Graves Give the Lie to the Mullahs’ Propaganda
Chilling Testimony Reveals U.S. Medical Supply Chain Vulnerable to China Amid Coronavirus
I’m out. Is There Anything Worse Than Sarah Palin Rapping ‘Baby Got Back’ Dressed as a Furry?
VIP
Biden’s Coronavirus Advisor Explains Why Joe Biden Shouldn’t Be President
VIP Gold
Politico: Will A Biden Blowout In Florida Mean Trump’s In Trouble At Home?
From the Mothership and Beyond
Gun Company Now Offering ‘ANGRYJOE-14’ Lower Receiver
Breaking: NRA Cancels Annual Meeting Set For Nashville In April
Theater Company Claims To Want Conversation On “Gun Violence,” But Do They?
How Are Brick And Mortar Stores Coping With COVID-19 Precautions?
The NY Times Issues A Long-Overdue Correction To The 1619 Project
Disneyland Is Closing Over Coronavirus Concerns
Iran: Satellite Images Show Massive Burial Pits For Coronavirus Victims
Oh. A tearful Alyssa Milano thanks God for Joe Biden’s leadership during the COVID-19 crisis
The irony: Climate change alarmists cancel museum die-in because of the coronavirus
Starbucks stores may go drive-thru only or limit seating
Joe Biden’s ‘Plan’ for Dealing With Wuhan Virus Was Mostly Plagiarized From the Most Amazing Source
Hillary Clinton Tells President Trump How to Deal With Wuhan Virus Crisis, It Doesn’t Go Well
The Border Emergency Continues to Be an Emergency, New Shocking Stats Show
Biden’s Latest Campaign Hire Shows Joey Boy Is Putting The Second Amendment in the Crosshairs
U.S. Launches Retaliatory Strikes After Two U.S. Soldiers Are Killed in Rocket Attack
Race For A Vaccine (The Earliest Availability Appears To Be November)
Bee Me
The Babylon Bee@TheBabylonBeeParents Worried They’ll Have To Raise Their Own Children As Government Schools Shut Down https://buff.ly/3cWZ0qW
Parents Worried They’ll Have To Raise Their Own Children As Government Schools Shut Down
U.S.—Parents across the nation have expressed their worry, fear, and shock at having to raise their own children now that government schools have temporarily shut down.Those who send their children…
babylonbee.com
The Kruiser Kabana
Street Art Magic@streetartmagic
We’re not canceling anything here, my friends.
___
PJ Media Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.”
THE DISPATCH
The Morning Dispatch: Thursday Was One for the History Books
Plus, Sunday’s Democratic debate is dangerous for Biden.
| The Dispatch Staff | 40 min |
Happy Friday. It’s been a tough few days for coronavirus news, and we hope you’re all staying safe out there. As a note of encouragement, we’ll remind you that the best thing you can do for yourself, your community, and your country as we fight this thing is to be diligent with the basic precautions of keeping up scrupulous hygiene and practicing social distancing. If we all pull together, we can all stay apart! Let’s get on to the news.
Just a reminder: You are getting this version of the Morning Dispatch as one our non-paying members. To get the full version, please join now!
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- In an effort to prop up cratering markets, the Federal Reserve announced it would inject more than $1 trillion in short-term liquidity into the financial system. Nevertheless, markets continued to free fall, with the Dow shrinking 10 percent—the biggest single-day crash since 1987.
- Congress announced Thursday that the U.S. Capitol and surrounding House and Senate office buildings will be closed to the public through April 1 over coronavirus concerns.
- U.S. and Iraqi forces carried out retaliatory airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq on Thursday.
- Medicare will cover tests for the novel coronavirus, “generally” without co-pays, according to CMS administrator Seema Verma.
- The NCAA canceled the upcoming men’s and women’s March Madness basketball tournaments (and a lot of other stuff). Major League Baseball is suspending operations for four weeks, bringing spring training to an abrupt close and pushing back Opening Day from March 26 to April 9 at the earliest.
- A Brazilian official who met and posed for a picture with President Trump last weekend has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Coronavirus Response Goes Into Overdrive
In yesterday’s Morning Dispatch, we covered President Trump’s Wednesday night address to the nation. The speech itself was riddled with serious errors. Trump said the new travel restrictions on Europe would apply to trade and cargo; he later had to clarify that they wouldn’t. He promised health insurance companies would “waive all copayments for coronavirus treatments;” they had only agreed to do so for testing. Bloomberg News has an excellent look at how the speech came together.
But policy pronouncements aside, the address served an important purpose: Trump finally seemed to get serious about the threat COVID-19 poses and the importance of Americans taking basic precautions to slow the spread of the virus, beyond just the economic effects.
The Pitfalls of Sunday’s Debate for Joe Biden
Amidst the wave of COVID-19 closures and cancellations, CNN announced that it was moving Sunday’s Democratic Primary debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders—previously scheduled in Arizona—to its Washington, D.C., studios without a live audience. With almost all sporting events cancelled for the foreseeable future, viewership may actually tick up as a result.
Another round of big primaries are scheduled for Tuesday—Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and Ohio—with nearly 600 delegates at stake. Notably, three of those four are swing states that Democrats lost in 2016, along with a top-tier senate race in Arizona.
Worth Your Time
- There’s been a lot of talk lately about the importance of “flattening the curve,” or slowing the spread of COVID-19 to avoid overburdening our existing medical infrastructure. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrics professor at Indiana University school of medicine, writes in The Upshot that the biggest thing to worry about regarding the coronavirus is “the ability of the American health care system to absorb a shock.” He continues: “It’s estimated that we have about 45,000 intensive care unit beds in the United States. In a moderate outbreak, about 200,000 Americans would need one.”
- Foreign Policy gives an overview of the latest coronavirus news from China, where people are returning to work in Wuhan and the government is now pushing propaganda claiming the virus didn’t originate in mainland China.
- The prepping industry was, ironically, not prepared for the level of demand for its products that coronavirus has brought. People across the country are making bulk purchases of medical supplies, canned food, and “bug out” kits—including those made by Preppi, a luxury doomsday prep brand that is carried by Nordstrom and at one time offered a $10,000 package that included real gold bars. Kate Knibbs has the full, fascinating story at Wired.
Presented Without Comment
Toeing the Company Line
- You’d hardly know it from this newsletter the last few days, but we’ve got some good non-coronavirus stuff up on the site this week too. Be sure to check out Tom Joscelyn’s latest Vital Interests newsletter(🔒), which examines Iran’s ongoing attempts to shield their nuclear program from foreign transparency and takes a close look at how the mullahs’ chummy relationship with China helps to shield them from accountability.
- Meanwhile, our podcast cup runneth over: In this week’s The Remnant, Jonah has an interesting interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about his recent book The Decadent Society. And on the latest episode of Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah discuss President Trump’s coronavirus address, the 23-year sentence handed down to disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, and Hulu’s new docuseries on Hillary Clinton. Give it a listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- Speaking of David: his latest French Press (🔒) takes a look back over our nation at large’s response so far to the coronavirus outbreak, discusses the ongoing proxy conflict with Iran in Iraq, and fires off a bittersweet salute to the NBA season, cut down in its prime.
- Up on the site today, Danielle Pletka has a piece walking through China and Iran’s botched coronavirus responses and arguing that “the epidemic itself is yet another piece of evidence that the United States should be in the business of exporting democracy, rule of law, and transparency.”
Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).
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March 13, 2020  Trending now
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Listen live to Blaze Radio Tune in to the next generation of talk radio, featuring original content from hosts like Glenn Beck, Pat Gray, Stu Burguiere, Steve Deace and more!
One last thing …  On Thursday’s program, Glenn was joined by Andrii Telizhenkowa, former advisor to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, to give the latest on what he believes Alexandra Chalupa and the whistleblower were working on with Joe Biden.Andrii Telizhenkowa was on a train headed to D.C. to testify when he received news he would not be called as a witness. Gle … Read more
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NOQ REPORT
NOQ Report Daily |
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- 3 ways the coronavirus is being exploited by bad actors
- The Jefferson View
- The death rate for coronavirus for people under 50 is 0.1%, or 1 out of 1000 infections
- Chris Murphy demands President Trump take over all coronavirus decision-making
- Short memory: Media turns breathless over term ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ after forgetting their own words
- President Trump: Democrats had rallies but nobody showed up even before the coronavirus
- True liberals are leaving the left. It’s time to welcome them to the side conserving liberty.
- Dr. Drew Pinsky takes on the media COVID-19 narrative
- Watch: Steven Furtick’s modalism exposed
| 3 ways the coronavirus is being exploited by bad actors
Posted: 13 Mar 2020 02:38 AM PDT The Wuhan coronavirus is an opportunity. At least it is for opportunistic types who generally see the world as a playground for their machinations and a way to advance their agendas. The rest of us are sheep following where they point, but some of us try to step back from the flock to see what’s really going on. There are three major ways plus dozens of minor ways bad actors are using the coronavirus as a platform for their version of progress. Before I get into those, let’s look at a couple of ways it’s being used but not necessarily by bad actors. Smart players on Wall Street are going to make a killing off the coronavirus when the markets rebound, but that’s not because of some nefarious plan or bad actions on their part. They see the panic. They know prices will drop dramatically as they continue to do. They know there’s a bottom, and when that bottom is reached it’s clear skies for them to launch their money rockets. The vast majority of them can’t be blamed. The world gave them a way to make a ton of money, so they’re going to do it. That’s not them being bad actors. It’s just them being smart. Despite this, I’m seeing a lot of fingers pointed in their direction as if they’re pulling the strings to make the market drop. That’s just not happening. They don’t have that much influence. Another conspiracy theory I’ve heard is that the coronavirus is being pushed by insurance companies as a way to prevent Medicare-for-All or its less-potent little brother, Joe Biden’s Obamacare 2.0, from being taken seriously. This is a ludicrous take and I won’t put much energy into it other than to say this: The health insurance industry will use its brute political force to stop bad legislation, but they won’t do so in a way that will harm them. They are not profiting off the coronavirus. It’s harming their bottom line tremendously right now and will continue to do so until it subsides. The last big false finger-pointing is at Chinese scientists. No, I’m not suggesting the Chinese Communist Party was not completely in the wrong for keeping information back or manipulating the World Health Organization to save face. They’ve done plenty wrong, but one thing they didn’t do wrong was to have scientists engineer the coronavirus and unleash it on their population for… whatever reasons some are claiming. This is an absurd and dangerous perspective to spread. When this is over, China will be crippled economically and politically for years, even decades as a result. They didn’t do this on purpose. They were just stupid to cover it up when they had the opportunity to contain it. With those out of the way, here are three examples in which bad actors are exploiting the coronavirus: Mainstream media and Democrats hitting President TrumpThis is the obvious one and anyone with ears to hear should be able to recognize this prima facie.
The left has been trying for two years to crash the economy. Seriously. They’ve predicted dozens of downturns that are “just around the corner” and it never happened. With the coronavirus, they finally found a chaos factor to exploit, and judging by the lines in the toilet paper aisle and the direction of the stock market, it’s finally working. Their timing may have been off, though. If the threat of the coronavirus subsides relatively quickly, perhaps by the middle of summer, the economy will have time to boom again before the election. Leftists pressing their agenda through coronavirus legislationOf the three ways bad actors are using the coronavirus, this is the most putrid. Washington DC’s response to the coronavirus needs to be sensible and streamlined. Yet there are those, particularly on the left, who are seeing this as a way to sneak in horrible components of legislation that would otherwise never see the light of day with a Republican-controlled Senate and President Trump in the Oval Office.
If reports that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is trying to push an abortion “slush fund” into coronavirus legislation turns out to be accurate, it would be the most heinous example. If not, there are plenty of other examples of bad actors using the coronavirus to plug in terrible and unrelated legislation. This needs to stop. Vaccine rushing and normalizationNo, I’m not an “anti-vaxxer.” With that said, I’m one who is skeptical about information given to the public about vaccines. On top of being a strong proponent of vaccine transparency, I’m also one who believes vaccines must be thoroughly tested before they’re administered to the masses.
The coronavirus scare is a way to cut through safety protocols and standard best practices to ram a lightly tested vaccine through. It will receive no pushback as the masses will line up to be test subjects if there’s a reasonable expectation that it will work. A disease that is no more deadly than the flu for people under age 50 should not force bypassing full-scale testing. The risks are simply too high. Whenever a minor chaos factor is introduced into a large-scale situation, bad actors will figure out ways to exploit it. The coronavirus may be the ultimate chaos factor in modern times and bad actors are licking their chops at the opportunities it presents. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post 3 ways the coronavirus is being exploited by bad actors appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| The Jefferson View
Posted: 13 Mar 2020 01:34 AM PDT Ever since the rise of the modern conservatism movement, there has been an open wound of conflict between what we can term neoconservatism and paleoconservatism. On the one side are those who advocate for American leadership and engagement in the world. On the other are those who support disengagement and avoidance of global entanglements. When the Berlin Wall fell and the threat of global communism vanished from geopolitical reality, this discord only widened. Neoconservatism has generally been espoused by conservatives who are traditionalists, centrists, and moderates open to some progressive government. Paleoconservatives have usually been libertarians or nationalists. It, therefore, is quite a shock to some when they find liberty-minded conservatives like myself advocating for America’s energetic role in the world and sometimes even for military intervention. The connection between isolationist and libertarian tendencies is so ingrained in people’s minds, their reaction to me when I take “unusual” stances often assumes some underlying hypocrisy or intellectual inconsistency. And yet, I see myself as entirely consistent in how I follow the traditions of Jefferson and Madison. It may be difficult for some to shed the mechanics of our modern politics and grasp the factions and issues of the early American Republic. Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist Party were the advocates for more extensive and more involved government in that period. It was Hamilton who established a national bank and argued for an increase in the debt to establish credit for the new nation. It was John Adams, also a federalist, who signed the alien and sedition acts, one of the worst violations of rights passed by Congress. And yet, it was the Federalist Party and its greatest ally, George Washington, who stood most solidly in favor of isolationism. On the other end of the spectrum were Jefferson, Madison, and their Republican Party. The early Republican Party was the party of limited government and the rights of individuals. When Jefferson ran against Adams for the presidency, he called it the second revolution, believing his election would solidify the values of the first revolution in the young republic. And yet, it was Jefferson who advocated for American involvement and support for the French Revolution. It was Madison and his supporters who were termed the original War Hawks as they advocated for war against the British. At the heart of the question between an energetic foreign policy and isolationism isn’t support for liberty or openness to big government. It is whether we should view liberty as a global concern or only a national concern. One of Jefferson’s famous quotes is, “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” In fact, Jefferson was so supportive of the French Revolution that Washington’s position on the matter was a significant part of Jefferson’s decision to resign as Secretary of State. Jefferson never spoke to Washington again and became an enemy of John Adams for many years. Liberty-minded conservatives such as myself get a lot of flack for advocating for strong American leadership and a decisive role in the world’s affairs. Yet, our stance remains grounded in liberty with pragmatic consideration of the world’s realities. I leave you with two final points. First, I see myself as an inheritor of the Jefferson view: that liberty threatened anywhere is liberty threatened everywhere. Divorced from a purely nationalist consideration of liberty, I see the American Revolution as one that continues, both within and without America’s shores. I find common cause with freedom fighters the world over. The Hong Kongers, the Venezuelans, the Kurdish Peshmerga; they are not Americans, but they are just as much my brothers and sisters in the fight for liberty. Second, I recognize the realities of the modern era. The globalist/nationalist debate is largely abstract and divorced from reality. The world is smaller than it used to be. The vast and intricate interconnection of nations and peoples is a geopolitical fact. The butterfly effect is very real. Instability in any region of the world threatens America’s interests. Pretending that we can retreat from the world without significant consequences reaching our own shores is to put our head in the sand. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post The Jefferson View appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| The death rate for coronavirus for people under 50 is 0.1%, or 1 out of 1000 infections
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:09 PM PDT Now that more data about the Wuhan Coronavirus is coming out from a reliable source, namely South Korea, irrational fears should subside. Of course, that likely won’t be the case since so many Americans are being irrational about the manufactured terror stimulated by a mainstream media industrial complex that is bent on doing harm to America for the sake of November election considerations. This is why good news out of South Korea is barely being reported by American mainstream media. The government there is adjusting their strategies now that they understand the severity of the disease has been overblown by the World Health Organization and others. Much of what was originally reported was based on data from China, but now that Italy and South Korea have enough cases for statistical significance, we can start getting a better picture of what we’re dealing with. Thankfully, the picture is looking better than most expected. We can trust the data coming out of South Korea for two reasons. First, they are testing so many people that they’re getting an accurate understanding of the scope of the infection. Second, they are not a nation known for propaganda; their government and press work hard to make the available truth known. This is why it’s so important to understand the motivations of American media outlets when they report on the coronavirus. Left-leaning Business Insider reported the same numbers we’re getting, yet they spun them so badly to turn the legend of the coronavirus (as compared to the reality of it) into one of devastation. It was a display of Propaganda 101: Make good news seem bad by framing it unfairly. Here’s the reality based on data from South Korea:
To put it into perspective, that translates to one person dying out of 1000 infected among people under 50, and four deaths out of 1000 people between 50-59. The death rate for people under 50 is effectively the same whether they contract the coronavirus or the flu.
Does that mean shouldn’t be concerned? Of course not. Once we add in older Americans, the death rate goes up dramatically. In South Korea, infected people 60-69 have a 1.44% death rate. 70-79 age range jumps to 4.83%. Those over 80-years-old who were infected died 8.23% of the time. The disease is clearly very dangerous to the elderly. The elderly or those who come in contact with the elderly must take major precautions. The disease is exponentially more deadly to them than people under age 50. Everyone else needs to calm down. Catching it is very likely not the end of your world. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post The death rate for coronavirus for people under 50 is 0.1%, or 1 out of 1000 infections appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Chris Murphy demands President Trump take over all coronavirus decision-making
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 06:05 PM PDT Arguably the best news that has come out of the whole Wuhan coronavirus mess is state, county, city, and local government, plus private sector organizations, stepping up to make decisions on how to protect the people they serve. As limited-government federalists have known for centuries, the best way to address government’s influence on a majority of issues is at the most localized level possible. What a community decides about a local event supersedes what the federal government recommends when it comes to something like the coronavirus because local government knows better what’s entailed with their decisions. Unfortunately, Democrats and mainstream media are so busy trying to lay all of the blame on the shoulders of the President, they often make unhinged arguments about how to handle the situation. Case-in-point: Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut. He Tweeted out one of the most asinine complaints against the President of the entire coronavirus saga.
The decisions to close down schools and cancel events have been made by state, local, and private sector leaders because it is undeniably their responsibility to do so. Period. This is not a dictatorship and we are not ruled by a totalitarian regime. The President shouldn’t tell any school districts to close as he nor anyone in the federal government understands the needs of and risks for a community better than the community. The President should not tell the NBA to cancel the season because that’s their call. Murphy’s and the Democrats’ love of authoritarianism demands they look to the highest levels of government to decree what everyone else in the country must do. It’s part of their base ideology to consolidate power in one office and rule with an iron fist over local officials who are just too unimportant in the eyes of the left. Power bleeds from the top down for radical progressives. To hyper-leftists, government must be the source of all wisdom, and the higher the level, the more wise the government officials allegedly are. This is all completely wrong and unconstitutional, and Twitter let Murphy have it.
The level of “government” most responsible for defending against the coronavirus is the individual/family level. It is incumbent on us, as American citizens, to do what is best for us and our families. From there, the responsibility works its way down (though most classify it as moving up) the government hierarchy to local, then city, county, and state, with the federal government having responsibilities surround only those things they are best suited to handle. From DC, we should be receiving information (we are), financial corrections (in the works), travel/border restrictions (started long ago), and guidance (as compared to decrees, or “leadership,” as Murphy calls it). The irony is, of course, the massive contradictions constantly coming from Democrats like Murphy. They say President Trump is making bad decisions even when they’re proven to be correct, such as the travel ban the left lambasted before. Then, they say the President needs to be making more decisions even as good decisions are being made by local, city, county, and state officials. Democrats are lost in the maze of lies they’ve created for themselves. There have been plenty of bad decisions made at every level regarding the coronavirus. As much as I’d love for every individual to properly handle their own responsibilities to keep themselves and their families protected, we’re still seeing long lines for toilet paper of all things. We’re going to stumble as nothing like this has happened in the modern era. We’ve had outbreaks worse than this, but we haven’t seen panic like this since the Spanish Flu, which was an exponentially more dangerous disease at the time. We, as a nation, must come together and handle our individual responsibilities to fight the coronavirus. Despite Chris Murphy’s authoritarian, unconstitutional desires for supreme leadership, we must fight the left’s narrative and make better decisions. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post Chris Murphy demands President Trump take over all coronavirus decision-making appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Short memory: Media turns breathless over term ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ after forgetting their own words
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 04:08 PM PDT Today, many on the left and particularly in mainstream media are spreading the narrative that using the phrases “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Chinese coronavirus” is racist finger-pointing by the Trump administration and Republicans in general. There’s a major and obvious problem with this. Media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and ABC have been using the phrases or variations of them for nearly two months. It’s like a page out of 1984. What was once acceptable is now unacceptable because of who’s saying it. But just like in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, the left is trying to rewrite history. In their view, “Wuhan coronavirus” is racist and always has been, and regardless of recordings of the left using the term in the past, they’re sticking with the story that they never said it. Damn our lying eyes and ears, they imply. From the West Nile Virus to the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), geographic location of origin or prominence has always been part of the naming protocol for diseases. The Wuhan coronavirus is the first disease to have social justice warriors at the World Health Organization act specifically against properly naming it. They even cited fears of xenophobia and racism as reasons for giving it the meaningless name “COVID-19.” But this is actually more than just virtue signaling. WHO executives are in the pockets of the Chinese Communist Party. The odd naming of the disease was not a decision as much as a directive from Beijing. In their perpetual quest to save face, the CCP has invoked global influence for the sole purpose of propaganda that deflects blame for allowing this disease to spread to the rest of the world. The folks over at MRCTV put together all the video proof we need to see the hypocrisy of people like Jim Acosta, Chris Cuomo, and other mainstream media talking heads who feel they must assign blame to President Trump at all costs to their credibility. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post Short memory: Media turns breathless over term ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ after forgetting their own words appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| President Trump: Democrats had rallies but nobody showed up even before the coronavirus
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 03:37 PM PDT The overblown coronavirus panic is canceling events around the country. From the NBA and NCAA March Madness to closing down Disneyland, people are being asked to stop gathering in large groups to prevent further spread of the flu-like disease. There have been calls to stop political rallies as well. When asked about Democrats halting their rallies, President Trump said something that has been infuriating the left. Unfortunately for them, he’s correct. “I think the Democrats won’t be having rallies but nobody showed up at their rallies anyway, so what difference does it make?”
The self-fulfilling coronavirus panic has paralyzed much of the United States. But this will pass, probably sooner than most expect, and those who are overreacting will feel a little silly when Armageddon doesn’t come from all of this. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post President Trump: Democrats had rallies but nobody showed up even before the coronavirus appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| True liberals are leaving the left. It’s time to welcome them to the side conserving liberty.
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 02:14 PM PDT The authoritarian left is at war with itself these days, going in many different directions in an orgy of self-destruction. It has run out of new ideas, trying to sell that which can be traced to ancient Greece. Control is the only guiding principle for the left these days. Some are wanting to rip apart the economy because it’s unfair or simply because they want to use varying crises to control others merely for the sake of controlling others. Their desire for control is the only common principle they have left, the only thing that binds them together.
While they go by varying labels, they are still on the “want people to be controlled” side of the political spectrum. Those who are on the side of liberty are beginning to take notice of this disturbing trend. Every ‘serious crisis’—global cooling, the non-existent gun violence epidemic and now the COVID-19 crisis—are incessantly exploited by the authoritarian left to empower themselves, never mind if it will actually do anything to solve the crisis. The left values political power above everything else. The problem for them is that many are taking notice that their control obsession is antithetical to the cause of liberty. After all, these people still claim to be rooted in freedom, falsely implying with their exploitation of the term ‘liberal’.
[Emphasise added] True liberals are leaving the authoritarian left in drovesWe are witnessing a movement in real time of people who used to consider themselves to be part of the left leaving it and becoming politically homeless. They have varying reasons for this, but it’s primarily because the authoritarian left has lost the plot. Many in the #WalkAway movement leaving the left find themselves politically homeless because they don’t see our side as any better. Focusing on pragmatic populism only works for a little while, then many start questioning where we are going. This is why we need to have a set of bedrock principles for ourselves and in contrast to the other side that merely craves power over the people. This is exemplified by the case of Dr. Karlyn Borysenko who became an accidental political commentator who first became prominent in going to a rally for President Trump and writing about in medium. She penned another article: This liberal went to CPAC. And it was nothing like I expected. As well as broadcasting a Live Stream: Why I became a Democrat and what ultimately made me walk away. While she still holds many views in disagreement with the pro-liberty right, she characterizes herself as a ‘classic liberal’ like many who have walked away from the authoritarian left. Welcoming those who are leaving the authoritarian leftThe main point in all of this is to contrast ourselves with the authoritarian left by standing up for the cause of liberty. There are many like ‘classic liberal’ Dave Rubin who used to consider themselves part of the far-left. Now many are leaving and they are politically homeless because we have failed to articulate a message of liberty and limited government. This is why we of the pro-liberty right have to articulate a set of principles based in conservation of liberty, individual rights and economic freedom. That is not to say give up on some of our core beliefs just for the sake of having a ‘big tent’ but one of having a clear set of beliefs that are in common with true liberals. This is a case of being forthright in what we believe and letting the chips fall where they may. Perhaps many of these politically homeless will join our ranks. Still others may form their own group that is on the pro-liberty side of the political spectrum and we can have respectful debate on a few of the issues on which we disagree. The point is to offer those leaving the left with a clear choice in the matter. During the Steve Deace interview on the Glenn Beck program, he made the point that at present we offer only ‘goulash’ while the authoritarian left is offering steak. Howbeit, this is steak paid for with other people’s money taken by force and it is just the mere promise of steak. Given a choice, many will accept bad principles for no principles at all. This is why we need to have a common set of principles, set in liberty and limited government instead of control and unlimited government. For far too long the left has been able to deceive many under the pretense being liberal or progressive, it’s time to show who they are and offer a home to those who do not share their authoritarian principles. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post True liberals are leaving the left. It’s time to welcome them to the side conserving liberty. appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Dr. Drew Pinsky takes on the media COVID-19 narrative
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 06:49 AM PDT If you listen to the mainstream media, you would think our healthcare system was about to collapse under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact the World Health Organization (WHO) labelled the virus outbreak a pandemic yesterday ratcheted the chorus up even more. A Calmer VoiceAt least one medical professional has been pointing this out on every platform that will let him. Dr. Drew Pinsky spoke with WMAL host Larry O’Connor yesterday and shared some important information with listeners. First and foremost, he told listeners in no uncertain terms to stop listening to journalists.
Instead the public should be listening to Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC in going about their business. Wash your hands and get a flu shot. If you are in the high risk categories, especially those over 65 with special attention to those with a pre-existing condition or a smoker over over 50 avoid public events and practice social distancing. For the vast majority of the population this virus will present as a cold or mild flu according to Dr. Drew. he points to the experience of South Korea as instructive. There the death rate from COVID-19 is 0.8% as of today and they have a medical delivery system and population over the age of 65 that is similar to the United States. He referred to the panic over healthcare resources in this country, such as the number of ventilators as “total BS”. Dr. Drew also explained the difference between testing and screening. “You don’t test people willy-nilly,” he said. To administer a test there is medical criteria that the doctor evaluates the patient’s symptoms against. When the index of suspicion is high, you administer a test. If it is moderate you tell the patient to go home and isolate. Testing of asymptomatic people is called screening, which is not typically done during viral outbreaks in the U.S. The U.S. ResponseThe host, O’Connor specifically questioned Dr. Drew on two items. First, he asked what if anything the administration and the agencies could have done better. Dr. Drew said the WHO, CDC and other agencies should be taking a bow. The virus has been identified, mapped and accurate test has been developed and work on treatment and vaccinations are underway. He noted other countries may have a faster practice to get them to market than the U.S. testing protocols allow, and this is something that should be looked at. He reiterated numerous highly trained technical professionals like Dr. Fauci have been doing this work inside the NIH and CDC for decades. You could add they have managed these illnesses under multiple administrations, including the last one. To assume they have become sloppy or stupid all of a sudden as the media is positing is ridiculous and insulting. Dr. Drew added, “This is insanity. It is a level of insanity that is making me angry.” How Viruses ActO’Connor then asked why the doctor said that high risk populations should limit their exposure “for the next couple weeks” and if that was really what he expected. Dr. Drew responded:
Dr. Drew noted all the doctors he has spoken with across the medical community agree. You know who else supports this conclusion? The NIH. Here’s what they found with the SARS coronavirus:
If you would like some perspective on the unending cycle of doomsday coverage, I suggest you listen to the full segment. And remember the talking heads on cable news and in the print media are the same ones Obama Bro Ben Rhodes told you were uninformed and easily manipulated. Be ProactiveIn the meantime, do something proactive. If you are healthy and outside the high risk population, offer to go shopping or pick up needed items like prescriptions for a senior in your community so they can more easily practice social distancing. Monitor the CDC guidance for updated information. take a walk in the fresh air and maintain your own physical health. And by all means avoid listening to any media segment that is not focused exclusively on information from a current agency professional involved in the management of the COVID outbreak. The post Dr. Drew Pinsky takes on the media COVID-19 narrative appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Watch: Steven Furtick’s modalism exposed
Posted: 11 Mar 2020 10:01 PM PDT Steven Furtick is the pastor at Elevation Church, on of the biggest names in contemporary Christian music. Despite this worldly success, the man preaches a heretical understanding of the Trinity called modalism. This view of God is unfounded in Scripture. Jesus says he is the bread of life; the light of the world; the gate; the good shepherd; the Resurrection and the life; the way, the truth, and the life; and the true vine. Jesus claims to be God. He does not claim to be the Father nor the Holy Spirit. For more information about Evangelical Dark Web For further resources on Discernment American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We have two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats and supporting strong conservative candidates. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post Watch: Steven Furtick’s modalism exposed appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
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ARRA NEWS SERVICE
ARRA News Service (in this message: 17 new items) |
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- Surgeon General: US Shifting Into ‘Mitigation Phase’; Communities Should Think About Canceling Large Gatherings
- Church School Calls in the Fired Department
- Green New Deal Would Ruin America’s Dairyland, Study Warns
- California Is A Cruel Medieval State
- Coronavirus Update, Purim
- The Most Important Coronavirus Question
- I’m Joe Biden . . .
- The Remarkable History of Women’s Suffrage
- The Biden-Sanders Dilemma the Democratic Party Now Faces
- Does Bernie Know? Muslim Cleric Says: ‘Animosity Towards Jews is Obligatory Religious Duty’
- Sockpuppet . . .
- Joe Biden to Gun Confiscator O’Rourke: “You’re Gonna Take Care of the Gun Problem With Me”
- Are We Graduating from Plastic?
- Trump Taps Mark Meadows, Conservative Stalwart, to Be Next Chief of Staff
- Trump Hits Democrats’ Coronavirus Bill as Stuffed With Unrelated ‘Goodies’
- What We Don’t Know About the Coronavirus Is What Scares Us
- Be Sensible But Reject Hysteria
| Surgeon General: US Shifting Into ‘Mitigation Phase’; Communities Should Think About Canceling Large Gatherings
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:50 PM PDT by Susan Jones: U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the coronavirus outbreak in the United States is spreading, “Absolutely,” and as that happens, life may change for people in affected communities. “Initially, we had a posture of containment, so that we could give people time to prepare for where we are right now,” Adams said: But it also means communities need to be thinking about things like, should we be canceling large gatherings? What are our telework policies? Should we be closing schools? And that’s going to be different in Seattle than what it’s going to be in Jackson, Mississippi. But communities need to have that conversation and prepare for more cases, so that we can prevent more deaths. Host Jake Tapper complained about “confusing information” coming from administration officials who insist that the virus has been contained, “when it has not been contained,” Tapper said. Adams responded that the messaging “is hard.” “But here’s what I want the American people to know. From a public health point of view — and I am a public health expert — the first thing you want to try to do is contain the virus. And some parts of the country have contained it, meaning they’re preventing spread into their communities in the first place.” Tapper noted that so far, there aren’t enough test kits to determine how many people may have the virus: “Well, what we do know is that if we had massive numbers of cases, we would be seeing more deaths,” Adams said: And a very important point here, we now know more about who is at risk. Average age of death for people from coronavirus is 80. Average age of people who need medical attention is age 60. We want people who are older people who have medical conditions to take steps to protect themselves, including avoiding crowded spaces, including thinking very carefully about whether or not now’s the time to get on that cruise ship, and whether now’s the time to take that long-haul flight. For most people, you’re going to be fine. But if you have medical conditions, or you’re older, now’s the time to rethink that.Adams noted that in more than 80 percent of people infected, the symptoms are mild. Tags: Susan Jones, CNS News, Surgeon General, US Shifting, Into ‘Mitigation Phase’, Communities Should, Think About Canceling, Large Gatherings To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Church School Calls in the Fired Department
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:50 PM PDT  by Tony Perkins: Joshua Payne-Elliott had worked at Cathedral High for 13 years. He knew the rules. So when the social studies teacher married another man, he knew he was putting his Catholic employer in an impossible situation. For 22 months, the Indianapolis Archdiocese and Joshua tried to talk it out. But eventually, there was nothing left to say. If Cathedral kept him, the school would be turning its back on Catholic teaching. If they let him go, they’d be inviting a legal firestorm. In the end, the school chose its beliefs. It was an agonizing decision, Archbishop Charles Thompson said soberly. But at the end of the day, if the church strives to be “Christ-centered,” then that means upholding Jesus’s teachings. “Every human being deserves respect and dignity,” he agreed, and the church will continue to “embrace, love and welcome all persons.” But the Bible’s “teaching on marriage as one man and one woman continues.” That doesn’t mean he or anyone else is perfect, Thompson was quick to add. “I’m a sinner too,” the archbishop pointed out. But he pointed people to an old poster he once saw on the door of a science lab. “[It] read, ‘Truth is not determined by majority opinion.’ The Church has taught for 2,000 years that marriage by nature is designed by God as one man and one woman… [That] doesn’t mean we don’t care,” he pointed out. But it does mean they won’t compromise. When Joshua sued the school for letting him go, he said he hoped it would “put a stop to the targeting of LGBTQ employees and their families.” That’s a convenient argument, but a phony one. Cathedral High School isn’t discriminating against anyone. This teacher, like everyone else on staff, agreed to uphold the teachings of the Catholic Church in their personal and professional lives. If Payne-Elliott didn’t like that, he didn’t have to teach there! Instead, he’s trying to make the Archdiocese look like a villain for upholding the faith he knew it subscribed to. That’s not just unfair, the president’s Department of Justice is arguing, it’s dangerous. In fact, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband believes this case is so important that his team will be on hand in Indiana tomorrow to personally defend Cathedral High School in state court. “The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right of religious institutions and people to decide what their beliefs are, to teach their faith, and to associate with others who share their faith. The First Amendment rightly protects the free exercise of religion.” Payne-Elliott’s lawyer, Kathleen DeLaney, tried to shame the White House for getting involved in what she called “a local employment issue.” “What I take away from this is that the Trump administration is politicizing a legal dispute about an Indiana business tort,” she argued. But what the rest of us should take away from it is that the president will go to any lengths to protect religious liberty. That’s especially important after eight years of Barack Obama, whose DOJ openly sided against churches in these situations. Of course, the most famous example of that was the Hosanna-Tabor case, where all nine Supreme Court justices broke with Obama and agreed: the government shouldn’t meddle in the personnel decisions of faith-based groups. Nothing’s changed since then. The courts still can’t “second-guess how religious institutions interpret and apply their own religious laws,” Trump’s attorneys argue. It’s true that the Left is trying. We’ve seen their outrage play out over and over again with private Christians schools, which they’re desperate to push into some sort of spiritual ghetto. Fortunately, liberals haven’t had the benefit of another radical president to implement their plans — but we don’t have to guess what they’ll do if they get one. The leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden, has already said his very first priority in office is a bill that would destroy religious schools: the Equality Act. So while we’re grateful for everything President Trump has done, it’s important to remember that we’re just one election away from losing the freedom that schools like Cathedral enjoy. “It’s a difficult time for the church,” Archbishop Thompson agreed. In fact, “It’s a difficult time for any institution of faith right now… I sometimes think,” he said, “[that] society has pushed the church to the margins and peripheries. But we must continue to engage the world, engage society, and engage culture with our message, with that Good News, with those teachings, and what we believe the word of God and the tradition of the church has revealed… [and take] that call to others.” Tags: Tony Perkins, Family Research Center, FRC, Family Research Council, Church School, Calls in, the Fired Department To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Green New Deal Would Ruin America’s Dairyland, Study Warns
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:51 PM PDT
by M.D. Kittle: It’s been pretty clear that the Green New Deal would be a disaster for businesses and for consumers. Now a new study confirms just how disastrous the environmental and wealth-redistribution plan would be for Wisconsin. Wisconsin families would be shackled with $40,000 in new costs, and the Dairy State’s struggling agricultural sector would be crippled, according to the multistate analysis authored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Power the Future. The Green New Deal—as championed by liberals such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., and many of the Democratic presidential candidates—calls for shifting energy consumption entirely to electric current from today’s primary sources, principally fossil fuels. Doing so, the report finds, would cause $200 million in losses to Wisconsin farmers, while clobbering the state’s iconic dairy industry with $2.5 billion in additional costs. Estimates say the dramatic carbon-free shift alone would cost trillions of dollars. The report notes that energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that the greening of the U.S. power sector would come with a $4.7 trillion price tag, including around $1.5 trillion to add 1,600 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity and $2.5 trillion of investments in 900 gigawatts of storage. An additional $700 billion is estimated for new high-transmission power lines to move that electricity from sun-drenched deserts and windswept plains to the urban areas where it would be used. Competitive Enterprise Institute President Kent Lassman said the Green New Deal is not a serious proposal. “At best, being most generous, it is simply negligent in getting its arms around the transition costs to the American life,” he said at a press conference at a Milwaukee-area manufacturing center. “At worst, it is political malpractice.” The broader research looks at the Green New Deal’s impact on 11 states. It measures additional electricity demand, costs associated with shipping and logistics, new vehicles, building retrofits, decreased crop yields, and the carbon tax on farmers. In Wisconsin, households in the first year of implementation would face $75,000 in additional costs on the Green New Deal’s expensive ride to zero carbon dioxide emissions within a decade. The increased costs would top $40,000 every year thereafter. Alaska would face the highest costs of implementation, at north of $84,000 in the first year, and nearly $52,000 after six years of the green plan in operation. That’s more than $10,000 higher per year than the other 10 states measured in the study. Will Flanders, research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, contributed to the study. Flanders said the Green New Deal may play well in Washington, D.C., but it doesn’t cut it in “get real” places such as the Midwest, which rely on affordable, reliable energy. The climate-change alarmist plan would “drive middle-class families into poverty by imposing staggering annual costs,” he said. For Green New Deal-backing Democrats who have talked so much about the plight of the U.S. farmer, the sweeping carbon dioxide reductions would be a liberal-inflicted blow on the agriculture industry. Wisconsin’s dairy farmers have slogged through a four-year milk price recession, protracted trade wars, anti-animal agriculture activists, and a punitive regulatory climate, said Cindy Leitner, president of the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance. The study finds the Green New Deal would force dairy farmers to pay an additional $500 to $2,000 per cow per year in compliance costs. “How does that translate? That means an average farmer in Wisconsin of 150 cows will pay between $75,000 and $300,000 per year in addition to what they are doing now,” Leitner said, adding: “Most provisions of the [Green New Deal] are so broad and open-ended,” the report notes, “that the list of potential programs necessary to implement the program is only limited by the capacity of legislators to imagine new government programs. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate the maximum cost of the GND.” Tags: Josh Waldoch, Empower Wisconsin , Green New Deal, would ruin, America’s Dairyland, study warns, The Daily Signal To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| California Is A Cruel Medieval State
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:51 PM PDT
Victor Davis Hanson: The Golden State has become a cruel and unusual place because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion. One way of understanding California is simply to invert traditional morality. What for centuries would be considered selfish, callous, and greedy is now recalibrated as caring, empathetic, and generous. The current ethos of evaluating someone by his or her superficial appearance—gender or race—has returned to the premodern values of 19th-century California when race and gender calibrated careers. We don’t pay medieval priests for indulgences of our past and ongoing sin, but we do tweet out displays of our goodness as the penance price of acting amoral. A paradox ensues that Californians both have a high, indeed smug, view of themselves and yet do a lot of damage to their fellow human beings. Their haughtiness is based largely on the reality that Silicon Valley, sandwiched between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, became the birthplace of the global computer, internet, social media, and a high-tech revolution. For progressives who deprecate the capitalist lifestyle, having a lot of money still allows one to say one thing and live out the opposite. The state’s multi-trillion-dollar companies have hired tens of thousands of seven-figure, mid-level executives and computer experts who assume that life in the California coastal corridor is a birthright paradise. The resulting tax revenue bonanza to the state allows one-party-rule to rid California of the old bothersome Reagan-Deukmejian-Wilson working- and middle-classes by embracing not-in-my-backyard zoning, identity politics, anal-retentive regulations, steep tax rates, utopian green agendas, open borders, and decriminalization of things that used to be felony offenses. Indeed, the bigger and wealthier California became, the more the rich sought to privatize their lives and to give up on public services, the more the middle classes left the state, the more the poor from Mexico and Latin America crossed the southern border illegally, the more its schools deteriorated, and the more its infrastructure ossified and became decrepit, from century-old power transmission towers to pot-holed and jammed highways. The resulting medieval society is now one of a few thousand millionaires and millions of lower-middle-class wage earners as well as millions of abject peasants and poor serfs. Those on the bottom receive relatively generous subsidies to just get by. Over a quarter of the state’s population was not born in the United States. A fifth lives below the poverty line. One-third of welfare recipients in the United States live in California. These are statistics of which our moralists in Malibu or Mill Valley either are ignorant, or simply shrug that they don’t care. In a paradoxical way, California would have to become much more impoverished than it is now to seem a far worse abode than the birthplace of most of its current immigrants from southern Mexico, Central America, China, and Southeast Asia. That is, while the middle class has been leaving in droves, given the abject decline of their beloved native state, the even poorer newcomers have a quite different benchmark of comparison. Compared, to say, Oaxaca, or rural China, California’s is rich, free, and eager to subsidize even illegal arrivals. Out of Sight, Out of Mind First, state redistribution of some of their vast incomes doesn’t hurt all that much, while offering atheists, agnostics, and secularists generous medieval penance and fides as true-blue progressives. As long as the coastal tech economy, financial services, entertainment, tourism, and blue-chip research universities keep booming, the state within a state doesn’t worry about the funding-to-benefit relationship between soaring California taxes and commensurately declining public services. Second, the coastal enclaves have enough money to navigate around the ramifications of their own ideology, whether by avoiding much of the state’s interior, putting their kids in private schools, living in tony gated communities, buying concierge private healthcare, and ensuring that the Other, who daily ventures into their neighborhoods to do domestic and outdoor chores, leaves by nightfall. Buying a Range Rover or Mercedes SUV or even a Gulfstream is a good way to ease the burden of fighting climate change, just as one’s concierge doctor can galvanize his support for Medicare for All. Third, our blessed lords and earls envision California not as a single state. Indeed, most coastal dwellers have never visited the small towns of the Central Valley or the Sierra foothills or the northern third of the state. Instead, they see these areas the way Manhattanites look at Rochester, or Chicago looks at southern Illinois. In their view, freakish 19th-century mapping created California, and so they have no concern what Outer Californians think of the way they govern the state. The result is abject cruelty. How can state leaders impose the highest gasoline taxes in the country, and then allow sections of their main longitudinal freeways—large swaths of the 99, the central coastal 101, or most of the West Side I-5—to become gory 4-lane motorized gladiatorial arenas? As traffic quadrupled over the last half-century, the state’s freeways necessary to drive across California remained calcified. And the result was that lots of people simply died, and that calculation was always baked into California governance as tolerable. By that, I mean, our masters of the universe couldn’t care less that the 99 “freeway” has become, by most metrics, the most lethal major thoroughfare in the United States. Out of sight, out of mind. “Winners” and “Losers” Yet no major reservoir has been built in nearly 40 years, a period during which the population doubled. No doubt, 19th-century California was a paradise—Hetch Hetchy undammed, the lush delta flooding over millions of acres, upstream salmon fighting the San Joaquin River white water from the Bay to the Sierra Nevada. But such fantasies are no way to run a 21st-century state with open borders, 40 million people, and a population that to survive and eat needs daily vast transfers of irrigation and municipal water from the wet north and east to the parched center and west. Releasing to the sea millions of acre-feet of reservoir water or never allowing it to be banked in established manmade lakes means that millions of struggling rural residents drill new, multi-thousand-dollar domestic wells to survive, farmers idle land, and the poor lose jobs. The elite response is that there is no mental connection for them between what is sold at Whole Foods and what is grown outside of Bakersfield or Salinas. They muse why do such exploiters of nature have to drain our state’s aquifer? And they assume that while Hetch Hetchy and the Owens Valley are critical to bring the anointed water, all other such huge water transfer projects should become negotiable. One of the strangest sights in California is the horde of trailers, ratty cars, and dilapidated Winnebagos parked throughout moralistic Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, juxtaposed with gleaming high-tech corporate campuses. The most empathetic and caring people in the world, as they remind us hourly, turn out to be pretty callous about the “losers” in their midst who live in mobile and makeshift quarters on the street to keep Silicon Valley humming. At least 19th-century company mining towns did not have the percentages of transients and homeless as does the richest, most caring landscape in the world. Those who can afford $1,000-a-square-foot coastal cottages assume that the losers who can’t code just couldn’t cut it. If you insist on driving a semi, or welding tanks, and you are not willing to program, then why in the world should you dare imagine that you deserve to live within 50 miles of the California coast? To walk in areas of downtown San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, or Sacramento is to venture into the pages of Boccaccio or Dickens, as thousands defecate, inject, eat, drink, and urinate on the sidewalks. Should the coronavirus ever incubate there among California’s hundreds of thousands on the street, the result would make the current nationwide caseload look like the common cold. Indeed, an epidemic among the tents and grocery carts of the state’s main cities would become hideous and terrifying—and right out of the accounts of Thucydides or Procopius. These ebbs and flows of homeless villages often lap up near the commuting corridors of the hyper-wealthy pedestrians and commuters. The former appeared bothered and so play the role of mounted knights that rode on by beggars outside the walls of the keep. Truth and Consequences What is now considered unethical would be either to provide planned suburban or rural homeless campuses with sanitation, clean food, and dormitory shelters, or to ask illegal immigrants in their home countries first to apply for U.S. residence through legal channels, to undergo legal, health, and job audits, and in the interval to learn English and the customs and laws of their desired new home. Instead, opening the southern border to millions of destitute Central Americans and southern Mexican nationals is proof of one’s morality among the wealthy of La Jolla, Santa Barbara, Pacific Heights, and Sausalito—again at least in the abstract. Few of them venture to a Merced, Sanger, Madera, or Firebaugh school to see the impact of tens of thousands of immigrant youths, without English, money, or skills suddenly overwhelming local school districts. Fewer experience the effects on driving and law enforcement when millions of foreign immigrants navigate without prior experience of U.S. traffic laws, and without licenses, insurance, and registration. No moralist seems to worry that tens of thousands of Americans, among them Mexican-American citizens in particular, depend on access to state and federal dialysis centers and hospital emergency rooms, many of which are now overwhelmed with non-citizen new patients. To write the above is proof of one’s callousness, to be its architect evidence of one’s caring. So those who craft sanctuary cities never venture into the Reedley emergency room, or know what a rural Tulare County sheriff encounters on a Saturday night, or what it is like to drive late on a Saturday night on a rural road in Central California, or would dare put their children in the Delano public schools, or to live outside of Mendota with the house pump sputtering sand. Those who insisted on continuing with a money-draining, high-speed rail boondoggle rarely try to drive east on Highway 152 outside Gilroy and thereby learn the consequences of allowing roads to become Road Warrior death zones. Those legislators and executives who dreamed up decriminalizing thefts under $950 never worried about how the lost inventory of a family-owned store destroys middle-class aspirations. They certainly are careful about where not to shop, especially not where hordes of teens swarm and walk out each with mysteriously less than $950 in loot. California has become a cruel and unusual state because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion. Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, McIntosh Enterprises, California, Cruel Medieval State To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Coronavirus Update, Purim
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:51 PM PDT  by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Coronavirus Update Things may change dramatically by the time you receive this, but as of early this morning, it was apparent that the world’s financial markets are in the grips of a panic. American stock futures plummeted and world oil prices dropped 25 percent amid a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia and growing uncertainty over the COVID-19 coronavirus. This means that if oil prices continue to decline, one of the strongest areas of the U.S. economy over the last decade – our oil and gas industries – will suffer a major shake-up that will likely drive many small and medium-sized drillers out of business. That may very well lead to significant job losses in states like Pennsylvania and Texas and could, in turn, affect the elections this November. The Green New Deal crowd on the left has been demanding a shutdown of America’s energy industry for years. Some leftists on social media are even celebrating the panic in our energy sector this morning. Meanwhile, we conservatives have warned that such a shock to our energy industry could cost millions of jobs and cause untold human suffering. If the coronavirus crisis plays out the way it looks, it will provide a window into what it would look like if we got rid of our oil and gas industries. It won’t be a pretty picture. The markets seem to be panicking at the moment, but there’s no reason for the public to follow suit. While there is still a lot we don’t know about coronavirus, much of what we do know is reassuring.
Even in a best-case scenario, it is going to take at least another 30 to 45 days to know with greater certainty the degree of damage done to the economy and to those infected by this virus. But there’s one thing we know for certain right now. President Trump has been warning for years about the dangers of rampant globalism and the risks of transferring our manufacturing base to other countries like China. Trump was right, and coronavirus is proving that once again. This virus could deal a body blow to globalism. Let’s hope it hastens the return of U.S. companies who decades ago left for China, even if it means slightly higher prices or lower corporate profits here. I think this virus will bolster political populism on both the right and the left. It’s hard to sort out what any of this might mean for a Trump-Biden presidential campaign. But consider this: In Trump, you have a president who was ahead of the curve in warning about the dangers of unbridled globalism. His entire presidency was predicated on growing the economy and withdrawing from our engagement with China. Trump wants to make the economic pie bigger so that all Americans can benefit. He wants less regulation and lower taxes. We’ve seen the fruits of those policies throughout Trump’s three years in office. Just last Friday, the government reported that 273,000 new jobs were created in February, smashing economists’ predictions of 175,000 new jobs. On the other side you have Joe Biden, who’s been soft on China and who’s running for the nomination of a party that’s been all in on globalism, that’s at war with the energy industry and that’s completely devoid of ideas for growing the economy. Their only ideas involve more government regulation, higher taxes and a slippery slope to government control of virtually every aspect of America’s economy. They’ve also been at war with the health care industry, which is doing its best to save us from an even worse situation on coronavirus. Imagine if our entire health care system were government-run: Do you think we’d be better off right now? Today’s economic panic may hurt President Trump in the polls a little, as it would any president. But I think the longer-term effect will be to expose how out of touch the progressive movement is in addressing the fiscal and health challenges that America faces. Purim Just as it did so many centuries ago, Israel is once again facing an existential threat from modern day Persia. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, routinely promises a second Holocaust and the annihilation of Israel. His regime is working feverishly to develop ballistic missiles and other weapons of mass destruction, while his terrorist proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, encircle the Jewish state from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. So long as God gives me breath, I promise to fight the ancient evil of anti-Semitism and to always stand with Israel and its people, the apple of God’s eye. To all of our Jewish friends and supporters, Chag Purim Sameach! Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, Coronavirus Update, Purim To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| The Most Important Coronavirus Question
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:51 PM PDT  by Alex Berezow: The first person to die from coronavirus on American soil passed away on Feb. 29 at a Seattle area hospital – incidentally, the same hospital where my daughter was born just ten and a half months ago. For epidemiologists, the most important unanswered question about the Wuhan coronavirus, or COVID-19, is the case-fatality rate. But for the general public, the question is much more personal: “Might I – or anyone I love – get sick and die?” When faced with uncertainty, people make decisions cautiously, and they base them on emotion and personal experience instead of statistics. If enough people answer “Yes,” there could be major repercussions as panic sets in around the world. Small behavioral modifications, such as telecommuting or reducing factory activity to avoid spreading the disease, made by millions of people can have a large impact. The United Nations already estimated $50 billion worth of exports worldwide will be affected, excluding non-trade economic activities such as travel tourism, as manufacturing slows and governments impose measures like port restrictions. This is why it is necessary to develop a “risk of death” profile for COVID-19. The first substantial effort to do just that was published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Though these numbers should be thought of as preliminary (and perhaps specific to only China), they allow us to begin to comprehend the risk that our global society is facing. After analyzing 44,672 confirmed cases, Chinese health officials estimated the case-fatality rates by age group: Of the 416 children aged 0 to 9 who contracted COVID-19, precisely zero died. This is unusual for most infectious diseases, but not for coronaviruses; the SARS coronavirus outbreak also had minimal impact on children. For patients aged 10 to 39, the case-fatality rate is 0.2 percent. The case-fatality rate doubles for people in their 40s, then triples again for people in their 50s, and nearly triples yet again for people in their 60s. A person who contracts COVID-19 in their 70s has an 8 percent chance of dying, and a person in their 80s a nearly 15 percent chance of dying. The virus can be lethal in a variety of ways. Viral infections in the lungs can trigger an immune response so strong that it fatally damages the lungs. In others, a systemic immune response, called a “cytokine storm,” can cause multiple organ failure. This could explain why some young, healthy people are killed by the virus, such as Dr. Li Wenliang, the 34-year-old doctor who died shortly after alerting the world to this new strain of coronavirus. An older person’s immune system may not be able to fight a respiratory virus. Underlying conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes can worsen outcomes. The above statistics are no doubt frightening numbers. But there are at least three major mitigating factors. First, the number of mild or asymptomatic cases is unknown and probably substantial. Second, China is still a poor country with low-quality health care and, at the epicenter of the outbreak in Hubei province, was overwhelmed by the virus. (The case-fatality rate in Chinese provinces outside Hubei, where hospitals aren’t overloaded, is much lower.) Third, smoking is much more prevalent in China than America, especially among men (52 percent in China versus 16 percent in the U.S.), and smoking is a risk factor for poor responses to respiratory infections. Together, this means the case-fatality rate is likely inflated, and it would be a mistake to apply these figures to the United States or other advanced nations. The real question, then, is how inflated the case-fatality rates are. At this point, it’s impossible to determine because scientists are still collecting data on how widespread the virus is. But to get a sense of how exaggerated these numbers might be, it is useful to examine the case-fatality rate for seasonal influenza. For the 2018-19 influenza season, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention provides estimates for the number of cases (defined here as “symptomatic illnesses”) and deaths. From these, we can derive case-fatality rate estimates by age group. If COVID-19 ends up being similar to seasonal influenza, then the case-fatality rates for COVID-19 are inflated by a factor of 20 to 100. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. NIAID, co-authored an editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine in which he wrote: We have reason to believe this view is closest to reality. In South Korea, public health officials screened about 100,000 people and detected over 7,300 cases. So far, the death toll is 50, which translates to a case-fatality rate of 0.7 percent. That’s still seven times worse than seasonal flu, but it’s far lower than the initial reports from China. The Future of COVID-19 In neither scenario does COVID-19 resemble the Spanish flu of 1918, which disproportionately killed young people. In neither scenario does the virus mutate to become more lethal. Most likely, the opposite will be true. There is an inverse relationship between lethality and contagiousness; that is, the most contagious viruses tend to be less lethal. Evolutionary pressures – namely, the biological imperative to reproduce as far and wide as possible (which means not killing people) – may push COVID-19 down this path. For now, influenza remains the far bigger global public health threat. Each year, about 1 billion people become infected with seasonal flu, killing some 300,000 to 500,000. This season alone (2019-20), about 20,000 Americans have died from flu, including 136 children. Yet, very few people fear the flu. Society has accepted it as part of reality, and people carry about their daily lives without excessive concern over influenza. This is the likely future for COVID-19. Until then, perhaps the last word should be given to virologist Dr. Lisa Gralinski, who told The Scientist, “If you’re over fifty or sixty and you have some other health issues and if you’re unlucky enough to be exposed to this virus, it could be very bad.” While everyone else should remain vigilant and take proper precautions (e.g., washing hands and avoiding crowds) until more data comes in, from a scientific perspective the public alarm is disproportionate to the risk. Tags: Alex Berezow, To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| I’m Joe Biden . . .
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:52 PM PDT . . . And I Forgot This Message.  Tags: Editorial Cartoon, The Patriot Post, Joe Biden, I forgot this message To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| The Remarkable History of Women’s Suffrage
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:52 PM PDT . . . Women’s History Month is a fine time to learn of how the 19th Amendment was ratified.  by Robin Smith: In a letter penned by Abigail Adams to her husband John on March 31, 1776, she made the request for women’s suffrage. The future first lady petitioned her matrimonial mate, who served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, very directly: “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors…” It was not until 1920 — 144 years after Adams’s petition — that universal suffrage was included in the U.S. Constitution via the Nineteenth Amendment, which reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” In the pre-1776 colonies, women cast their ballots for local leaders alongside the menfolk. But, by 1807, every state constitution had some limits on women voting, which fueled the Seneca Falls, New York, convention that served as the launch to the organized movement including leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, Ida B. Wells, Lucy Stone, and so many more. These women had no partisan stripe and they were from different states. Some stood on religious grounds and others were more activist with hunger strikes and enduring arrest. Originally hoping to be part of the Reconstruction Amendments of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War, the early Suffragists were defeated. The Fifteenth Amendment was the obvious home for the inclusion of women’s suffrage, but it was passed by Congress in 1869 to read, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” No mention of sex. As America’s westward expansion occurred, the governing documents of most states west of the Mississippi River permitted some type of ballot access for women. In 1878, Sen. Aaron A. Sargent (R-CA) introduced the words that would later become the Nineteenth Amendment. For the next 40 years, his bill would be regularly reintroduced in some form. It wasn’t until President Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inaugural, however, that the Woman Suffrage Movement, with 5,000 women marching in a procession, had gained traction. The first World War interrupted but also served as a boost to the argument of women. The American economy was supported by the nontraditional roles filled by women who had previously remained in the home and unemployed. The talents, skills, and value of women were on display, aiding the push for what had then become known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Between January 1918 and June 1919, votes to pass the historical language occurred five different times, with Southern Democrats successfully defeating the federal amendment until abandoning the filibuster. Then, the action turned to the 48 states to ratify the amendment. By June 1920, the amendment had been ratified by 35 of the constitutionally required 36 states. All eyes turned to Tennessee, which appeared to be the last hope for the opposition. Democrat Governor A.H. Roberts called a special session. The proposed legislation passed relatively easily in the Tennessee Senate with 25 ayes, four nays, and two not voting. McMinn County Senator H.M. Candler gave an earth-scorching speech opposing the “petticoat government” supported by the “low-neck, high-skirt” suffragists. He wore the red rose on his lapel representative of the Anti-Suffragist movement, while other Tennessee legislators supporting suffrage donned the yellow rose. This “War of the Roses” moved to the state House chamber, where opponents used procedural moves to avoid a vote. By August 17, 1920, a motion to concur with the Senate’s adoption of the Joint Resolution was offered by Rep. T. K. Riddick (D-Memphis), with the chamber appearing to be in support of the yellow-rose vote. But the heavy-handedness ensued. House members were summoned home under the pretense of emergency to impact the outcome. Supporters were threatened with election challenges, while lucrative promises were made for votes to oppose suffrage. When the morning of August 18 came, suffragist Anita Pollitzer had been told by the youngest legislator, Harry Burn (R-Niota), that his vote would never hurt the cause. Yet there he stood wearing a red rose on his suit’s lapel. Nevertheless, Burn’s college-educated, widowed mother, who ran the family’s farm, had written him a seven-page letter in which she voiced her suffrage support: “Hurrah and vote for suffrage.” At 10:30 am, Speaker Seth Walker handed over his gavel to take to the House floor to make a tabling motion that, if passed, would end debate and doom the chances of the Nineteenth Amendment ratification. The vote was tied, 48-48. After procedural attempts, Speaker Walker returned to the original motion to pass the Senate version that would either ensure women’s right to vote or halt the forward movement of the Suffragists. The roll was called with the red-rose-wearing Harry Burn declaring “Aye!” The amendment was ratified and pandemonium ensued. Burn later offered this explanation: “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.” March is Women’s History Month. Find time to read about your own state’s role in ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment. Tags: Robin Smith, The Patriot Post, Remarkable History, Women’s Suffrage To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| The Biden-Sanders Dilemma the Democratic Party Now Faces
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:52 PM PDT  by Newt Gingrich: One week ago, no one expected the current race for the Democratic nomination. Remember this the next time you see or hear one of us so-called experts on television or radio confidently predicting a future we don’t understand. With the backdrop of the emerging coronavirus threat, the wild swings in the stock market, the signing of an Afghanistan peace plan, the Chuck Schumer attack on Supreme Court justices, here is what happened in seven short days. Former Vice President Joe Biden went from being almost out of the race to being the front runner and probable nominee. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., went from being the strong front runner and probable nominee – who was going to sweep Super Tuesday – to being a battered and isolated challenger underdog who may not have a path to the nomination. Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg went from being a media darling, to having an incredibly weak showing in South Carolina, to withdrawing and endorsing Biden. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., got remarkably few votes in South Carolina and faced a devastating series of defeats on Tuesday. So, she withdrew, endorsed Biden, and flew to Texas to join him on stage at a rally on the evening before the state’s primary. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, after spending more than $620 million, figured out his debate disasters had wiped out the positive effect of his advertising and withdrew, also throwing his support to Biden. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, emerged from obscurity to endorse Biden before the Texas primary and locked Biden into an anti-gun (potentially gun confiscation) position. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., stayed in a few extra days, but after coming in third in her home state to Biden and Sanders decided she, too, was withdrawing. As of now, she has not endorsed anyone (although remember in 2016 she endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Sanders). Now, the race is down to Biden and Sanders, with the Democratic National Committee preparing to change its debate eligibility rules to keep Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, off the debate stage. Standing with two old white guys, she could maybe make an appealing contrast and represent a last stand for diversity – but not with the Democratic establishment that hates her firmly in control. Biden and Sanders find themselves with real dilemmas, but the dilemmas are different for each candidate. In Biden’s case, he is already looking ahead to the general election against President Trump. A major selling point in the flood of endorsements is the belief among establishment Democrats that Sanders is simply too far to the left. So, one challenge for Biden will be to communicate that he is more reasonable. (His campaign and the media will use the word “moderate,” but the fact is Biden is well to the left of Obama and without Sanders in the race it would be obvious how many of Biden’s positions are opposed by most of the American people.) However, if Biden over-emphasizes his differences with Sanders, he may make the convention in Milwaukee unmanageable. The left-wing activists might see the party establishment once again supposedly stealing the nomination from the left-wing challenger. Biden must be asking himself if his major goal should be, like Bill Clinton in 1992, to find a “Sister Souljah” moment to take on the hard left and repudiate one of its more unpopular positions. Or, should Biden adopt the principle of “no enemies to the left” and keep absorbing the ideas and proposals of Sanders and his supporters? This could lead to a more unified Democratic National Convention – but unity might come at the expense of independent voters and moderate Democrats who conclude that Biden is so close to the Sanders’ positions that he is simply too big a risk to become president. Meanwhile, Sanders has his own dilemma. If he wants to become the Democratic nominee, he has to take Biden down. This means speeches, advertising, and debate performances that are harshly critical of Biden and expose his many weaknesses. Biden is potentially susceptible to attacks on his family making money overseas, or his past positions to a whole series of issues which now run afoul of left-wing canon. Still, a truly effective, harsh assault on Biden may alienate those Democrats whose primary focus is on how to beat President Trump. There may be a real penalty among party loyalists for either candidate if they are seen as weakening the Democratic Party’s chance to beat the president. All of this will begin to be obvious in the next few days. Sanders cannot get back into the nomination race without forcing major differences with Biden and pushing the former vice president in the hope that Biden will make a major mistake. Biden cannot become passive and look toward the general election until Sanders has been defeated. Bloomberg’s passive debate performance was a vivid reminder that remaining passive while being attacked looks like a combination of weakness and guilt. The race is very different than we thought it would be a week ago, but it remains incredibly interesting – and in many ways still capable of great surprises. Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary, Biden-Sanders Dilemma, the Democratic Party, Now Faces |
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| Does Bernie Know? Muslim Cleric Says: ‘Animosity Towards Jews is Obligatory Religious Duty’
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 09:52 PM PDT . . . At last: the truth about the root cause of the hatred held by Omar, Tlaib, Sarsour and Co.  by Robert Spencer: As Bernie Sanders and his surrogates and supporters, including the notorious anti-Semites Linda Sarsour and Rep. Ilhan Omar, try to convince Democrats and the nation at large that the old Communist is a “proud Jew,” the Palestinian Muslim cleric Yousuf Makharzah has shown himself to be more honest about what Islam teaches regarding Jews. His words illuminate and explain the Jew-hatred that Omar, Sarsour and Tlaib have so often manifested, and illustrate why Sanders is so foolish, or so sinister, or both, to throw in his lot with them. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Makharzah preached in a recent Friday sermon that was televised on Lebanon’s Al-Waqiyah TV, an affiliate of the international pro-Sharia and pro-caliphate organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, that “you will find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers to be the Jews, and those who associate others with Allah.” Heavens to betsy, Makharzah is an “extremist,” right? Everyone knows that Islam reveres the Jews as one of the “People of the Book,” and that anyone who dares to suggest that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has any basis in Islamic teaching is a racist, bigoted “Islamophobe,” right? Everyone knows that the relationship between the Jewish and Muslim communities will be positively chummy once the Israelis stop building “settlements” on “occupied territory” and a Palestinian state is finally established, no? If that is done, then all the “intense…animosity” between Jews and Muslims will melt away, won’t it? Well, no. Makharzah is no “extremist” at all. His statement about the animosity that Jews would have for Muslims was a quotation from the Qur’an (5:82). The idea that the Jews are the worst enemies of the Muslims is not just something he believes, but something that informed and devout Muslims believe to be a truth revealed by Allah that will remain valid until the end of time. And there is more. The Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the well-being of the Muslims. They fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they claim that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies (5:41); they disobey Allah and never observe his commands (5:13). They are disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. They are under Allah’s curse (9:30), and Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law, which denies non-Muslims basic rights (9:29). Will any Muslim leader in the West kindly explain how Yousuf Makharzah is misunderstanding Islam? No? I thought not, but it’s noteworthy that not just Bernie Sanders, but virtually every non-Muslim leader in the United States and Europe would take for granted that Makharzah is wrong on Islamic grounds, and yet that has not been established. Note also Makharzah’s total confidence in the Islamic accuracy of what he is saying. He addresses Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whom he suspects of wavering on the Islamic imperative of hating Jews: “Mr. President, where have you learned Islam? Have you learned it from [your advisor] Al-Habbash? Or have you learned it before from Yossi Sarid or Yossi Beilin? Where have you learned Islam?” Yet the lack of congruity between Makharzah’s Islam and Islam as it is assumed to be by Bernie and others will not be addressed or even noticed. Tags: Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch, Front Page Mag, Does Bernie Know?, Muslim Cleric Says, Animosity Towards Jews, Obligatory Religious Duty To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Sockpuppet . . .
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 07:04 PM PDT . . . Democrats feel that their best shot to defeat Trump is to stop overtly socialist Bernie and back a feeble-minded Joe Biden.
Tags: editorial cartoon, AF Branco, Sockpuppet, Socialist Bernie, Feeble-minded Joe Biden To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Joe Biden to Gun Confiscator O’Rourke: “You’re Gonna Take Care of the Gun Problem With Me”
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 07:03 PM PDT  by NRA-ILA: Presidential contender Joe Biden’s fortunes have recently shifted, with game-changing wins in several important Democrat primary contests. He has succeeded in part by positioning himself as the Democrats’ “safe” choice to square off against President Trump, at least in comparison to self-proclaimed Socialist Bernie Sanders. But make no mistake, Biden offers no safety to gun owners of any party, as shown by his recent promise that avowed firearm confiscation advocate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke would lead the Biden administration’s effort against the “gun problem.” On the Monday before Super Tuesday’s multiple state primaries, O’Rourke endorsed Biden for president at a rally in Dallas. Biden reciprocated by offering his former rival in the Democrat primary a job. “I want to make something clear,” Biden said to the cheering crowd of Democrat voters. “I’m going to guarantee you this is not the last you’ll see of this guy.” He continued by addressing O’Rourke: “YOU’RE going to take care of the gun problem with me. YOU’RE going to be the one who leads this effort. I’m counting on ya.” Just what sort of position Biden has in mind for O’Rourke is not exactly clear. Trump’s economy has certainly been strong, with historically high levels of employment among various groups. But it might take a Democrat administration with favors to repay to finally land a paying job for Robert Francis O’Rourke. Average Americans, including those voting in the Democrat primary, certainly were not interested in O’Rourke’s services, forcing him to abandon his presidential run all the way back in November. The little-known candidate from Texas had tried to distinguish himself from his primary competition and gain some free media exposure by adopting the most extreme anti-gun platform in the field. He had planned not just to ban America’s most popular defensive rifle but to ensure they were stripped from owners who had obtained them lawfully. O’Rourke’s infamous boast, “Hell, yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15”, even adorned t-shirts his campaign was selling, no doubt to offset his lack of actual contributors. O’Rourke was also the only candidate to endorse the unhinged gun control “Peace Plan” put forth by David Hogg and his cohorts at March for Our Lives. A scheme that even the anti-gun mass media called “sweeping,” “ambitious,” and “far-reaching”, the Peace Plan is actually a roadmap to ending gun ownership as America currently knows it. The “plan’s” centerpiece, of course, is a massive ban on semi-automatic firearms, backed by a forced surrender program. But it additionally calls for annual licensing of gun owners (including in-person interviews and mandatory training), government-funded propaganda to scare people out of owing guns, a ban on online sales of ammunition and gun parts, a national firearms registry, and ruinous civil liability for the gun industry. And those are just some of the lowlights. Because none of this is consistent with the Second Amendment, the plan would promote a “different interpretation of the Second Amendment” through imposing anti-gun litmus tests for future judicial appointees. The U.S. Supreme Court itself would also face unspecified “reform” under the plan, the better to ensure that “structural limitations” did not stand in the way of the court eventually reversing what the plan calls the “excoriated” and “controversial” Heller decision. Biden’s choice of Robert Francis O’Rourke to be his gun control point man means that any form of gun control would be on the table under his administration, up to abolishing the Second Amendment’s individual right altogether. It is, in short, a declaration of war against American gun owners, with appointment of one of their staunchest enemies as the supreme commander of the effort. Of course, Joe Biden is not yet the Democrats’ presidential nominee. He still faces a stiff primary challenger in the likes of Bernie Sanders, himself an increasingly bombastic gun control advocate. But gun owners should take note that the supposedly “moderate” Joe Biden has now positioned himself to the left even of the aged Socialist when it comes to confiscating firearms from law-abiding Americans and assailing the individual right to keep and bear arms. Tags: Gun Confiscator, Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, NRA, ILA To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Are We Graduating from Plastic?
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 07:03 PM PDT  by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: In The Graduate (1967), the young man played by Dustin Hoffman gets advice from an elder. “Just one word: plastics.” “Exactly how do you mean, sir?” “There’s a great future in plastics.” When the world bans all plastic in 2021, that will be the end of that market opportunity. Other components of civilization will be discontinued in 2022. Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. After all, there’s always the black market. A plastic-bag ban is underway in New York City. Four states and five territories have already banned disposable plastic bags, as have countries around the world. New Yorkers are reportedly two-to-one in favor. A friend who lives there confirms this widespread resignation. “I’m not happy about what it [plastic] does to the environment,” says one New Yorker. “But . . . what it does to my environment if I don’t have them is a nightmare.” “This is a good thing because it’s helping the environment,” says another. The problem of trash disposal has been solved. We use garbage cans, pickups, landfills. It’s a problem that must be continuously re-solved. Like many other problems . . . such as how to carry groceries. We adopted plastic bags because they are much more convenient than paper. Convenience, efficiency, effectiveness: many man-made components of civilization serve these goals. Reduction to absurdity can persuade only if the listener rejects the absurd. In 1967, the idea of banning plastic bags and plastic straws seemed, to most, absurd. Today, maybe two thirds of New Yorkers lament the inconvenience but add whaddyagonnado . . . when you gotta protect the environment? That this measure will not protect much of anything, but merely allow activists to think well of themselves is, itself, absurd. This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. Tags: Paul Jacob, Common Sense, Are We Graduating from Plastic? To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Trump Taps Mark Meadows, Conservative Stalwart, to Be Next Chief of Staff
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 06:20 PM PDT  by Katrina Trinko: A conservative congressman known for his anti-establishment approach will be President Donald Trump’s new chief of staff. Trump announced Friday he had picked Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., tweeting, “I have long known and worked with Mark, and the relationship is a very good one.”
Meadows will replace Mick Mulvaney, who has been acting chief of staff since January 2019. Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman, was also the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He now will become special envoy to Northern Ireland, Trump said. Meadows, who was first elected to Congress in 2012, was a co-founder in 2015 of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of a few dozen conservative lawmakers who had a notable impact on policy when Republicans controlled the House. In 2016, Meadows became the second chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, succeeding Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. Meadows played an instrumental role in former House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to resign. In 2015, shortly after he filed a motion to vacate the chair, a rarely-used maneuver that could have resulted in a vote that ousted Boehner, the North Carolina congressman told The Daily Signal, “It is a critical time for our leadership to listen to the American people.” “It’s very easy to say you are willing to pay any cost. It’s a very different thing to actually be willing to go through and lay it all on the line. … I am willing to stand up and say, ‘This is what the people back home want, this is what they’re asking for,’ even if it makes it difficult on me in Washington D.C.,” he also said. After Boehner stepped down in September 2015, Meadows told The Daily Signal, “If this is the first step in allowing Capitol Hill and Washington, D.C., to listen to the American people, [then] we can look at this as a giant step forward.” Meadows’ GOP House colleagues, including current House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and Republican Study Committee Chairman Mike Johnson, R-La., celebrated the news of his new role on Twitter:
…. (Numerous congratulations) Heritage Foundation President Kay C. James praised Meadows as “a strong leader, principled conservative, and excellent choice to serve as President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.”
“In this new role at the White House, he will be in a position to advance the president’s agenda and promote conservative policy ideas,” James said in a statement, adding: ——————- Katrina Trinko (@KatrinaTrinko) is editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast. Tags: Katrina Trinko, The Heritage Foundation, President Trump, Taps, Mark Meadows, Conservative Stalwart, to Be Next, Chief of Staff To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Trump Hits Democrats’ Coronavirus Bill as Stuffed With Unrelated ‘Goodies’
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 05:35 PM PDT
by Fred Lucas: President Donald Trump said Thursday that he doesn’t support House Democrats’ coronavirus bill in its current form because it includes too many “goodies” that have nothing to do with the disease. While the bill addresses providing testing and masks to respond to the coronavirus, it also expands unemployment insurance and food stamps, requires the Social Security Administration to provide paid sick leave, and mandates that employers give paid permanent sick leave to their employees. A reporter asked Trump at the White House if he supports the legislation. “No, because there are things in there that have nothing to do with things we are talking about,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office as he sat with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. “It’s not a way for them to get some of the goodies that they haven’t been able to get for the last 25 years,” the president said of House Democrats. As of Thursday afternoon, there were 36 deaths in the U.S. from the new coronavirus disease, called COVID-19, with a total of 1,215 diagnosed cases across 42 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Wednesday Trump delivered a prime-time address to the nation, in which he announced a ban on travel to the U.S. from most European countries and proposed a payroll tax cut and assistance for industries hit hard by the virus. The president previously restricted travel from China, where the virus originated. “The Families First Coronavirus Response Act is focused directly on providing support for America’s families, who must be our first priority in this emergency,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a public statement. The spread of the coronavirus has prompted calls for more government action. The Democrats’ bill includes free coronavirus testing, paid emergency leave for up to 14 days, and more protections for health care workers who might come in contact with infected people. “We cannot fight coronavirus effectively unless everyone in our country who needs to be tested knows they can get their test free of charge,” Pelosi said. “We cannot slow the coronavirus outbreak when workers are stuck with the terrible choice between staying home to avoid spreading illness and the paycheck their family can’t afford to lose.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., contended that the Democrats are playing politics, but said Congress should remain in session until it gets the bill right. During the Oval Office session, Trump elaborated on why he excluded the United Kingdom from the ban on travel from Europe. “One of the reasons [is] the U.K. basically has got the border … it has got very strong borders, and they are doing a very good job,” Trump said. “They don’t have very much infection at this point, and hopefully they keep it that way.” Trump said life and death issues guide his decisions in dealing with coronavirus: “Whether it affects the stock market or not [is] very important, but it’s not important compared to life and death,” Trump said. “Frankly, the people that are professionals praised the decision. It’s something I had to do. I think you’ll see the end result is very good because of it, but it will take a period of time.” Trump said he is “not concerned” about reports that a member of a Brazilian delegation who tested positive for COVID-19 had contact with him last weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued a statement later, however. “Exposures from the case are being assessed, which will dictate next steps,” Grisham said, adding: He said the officials talked about sharing more data, how artificial intelligence can be used, and data-sharing repositories. In the Oval Office session with reporters, Trump was asked if larger quarantine zones in the United States are an option. “It’s a possibility if somebody gets out of control, if an area gets too hot,” Trump said. “You see what they are doing in New Rochelle, which is good frankly, but it’s not enforced. It’s not very strong. But people know they are being watched. It’s a hot spot.” A reporter asked the Irish and American leaders if they shook hands. They replied that they hadn’t, and instead placed their own palms together in greeting, which was “sort of a weird feeling,” Trump said. The president said that in India and Japan, where he has visited, shaking hands is less customary. “They were ahead of the curve,” he said. Trump acknowledged his reputation as a bit of a germaphobe before entering politics. “I was never a big hand-shaker as you probably have heard, but once you become a politician, shaking hands is very normal,” he said. The Irish prime minister followed by saying, “It almost feels like you’re being rude, but we just can’t afford to think like that for the next few weeks.” Tags: Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal, President Trump, Hits Democrats’ Coronavirus Bill. as Stuffed With Unrelated ‘Goodies’ To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| What We Don’t Know About the Coronavirus Is What Scares Us
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 05:33 PM PDT  by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson: The recent spread of the coronavirus is causing a global panic. Our shared terror arises not so much from the death toll of the new flu-like disease—more than 3,000 people have died worldwide—but from what we don’t know about it. Experts at least agree that the virus originated in China. But Beijing’s authoritarian government hid information about its origins, spread, and severity for weeks. Such duplicity only fanned the fears of a global plague—a hysteria not seen since the groundless fears of a Y2K global computer meltdown in the year 2000, or the political feeding frenzy during the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Wild speculation followed that the coronavirus was a virulent or mutated superbug. Had it arisen naturally or escaped from a nearby military lab? Did it originate from a sick lab animal? A conspiracy theory arose that it was a manufactured virus that had escaped from scientists’ botched efforts to create either a vaccine or a biological weapon. Is the outbreak an indication that China’s scientists are well behind their Western peers, at least in the areas of virology and bacteriology? Or is the problem that Chinese culture still features outdated traditions such as open-air “wet markets”? Unfounded rumors spread that the virus may have originated in one of these markets, where exotic mammals such as bats and pangolins are still sold for human consumption. For all China’s gleaming high-speed rail lines and new airports, hundreds of millions of Chinese still live in places with suspect food safety and waste disposal—the historic incubators of epidemics. The method of the contagion has been perplexing to experts. Why is the mortality rate for infected patients in Iran roughly double that of patients in countries such as South Korea, Italy, and Japan? Why have almost no children under 10 died from the infection? Are governments unable (or unwilling) to count the infected, given the similarities in symptoms between the coronavirus and various colds and flus? Does such uncertainty suggest that we are undercounting the number of people sickened or killed by the coronavirus? Or are we instead overestimating its dangers? Thousands of patients may have already recovered from mild cases—and perhaps never knew they were sick in the first place. Evidence suggests that only about 2% of patients will die after infection. As in the case of other viral illness, the unfortunate victims are mostly elderly people with existing illnesses. Does that pattern suggest the coronavirus may be more like annual influenza outbreaks—deadly to thousands but hardly the stuff to shut down a global economy? The common theme of history’s great plagues—Athens in 430 B.C., Constantinople in 541, and the Black Plague of 1347—was that preindustrial conditions of filth and ignorance helped spread what were usually bacterial diseases transmitted by lice, fleas, and rodents. Real plagues can certainly change history. A stricken Athens afterward lacked the power to defeat Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Byzantine emperor Justinian would never finish his half-completed dreams of a new reunited Rome. The Black Plague helped usher in the end of the Middle Ages. Great literature—from Thucydides, Procopius, Boccaccio, and Camus—often chronicled the human suffering, and especially the hysteria, that follows from the breakdown of civilized norms. History also reminds us that nature remains unforgiving. We may live in the age of the internet, smartphones, and jet travel, but viruses are indifferent to so-called human progress. Modern life squeezes millions into cities as never before. Jet travel, with its crowded planes and airports, can spread diseases from continent to continent in hours. Globalization is a two-edged sword. It may enrich billions of people, but the leveling effects of instant communication and travel can spread disease at a speed undreamed of in the past. The dissemination of sophisticated Western science to non-Western societies that lack advanced research centers may be increasingly suicidal. Borders are now considered passe in the age of globalization. But their enforcement reminds us that not all nations are alike. All sovereign peoples should have the right to take measures for their own safety well beyond the purview of the transnational elites. Finally, is it wise or safe to allow hundreds of thousands of homeless to live crowded among filth, vermin, and squalor on the sidewalks of America’s major cities? The coronavirus threat and the unfounded hysteria that has accompanied it will pass. But the specter of a pandemic offers a timely warning to remember that we are not necessarily any more immune from volatile nature—and humankind’s paranoid response to it—than were the ancients. Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, What We Don’t Know, About the Coronavirus, Is What Scares Us To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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| Be Sensible But Reject Hysteria
Posted: 12 Mar 2020 04:55 PM PDT  by Mario Murillo Ministries: Separating what is true from what is false about Coronavirus is difficult, because this is a new pathogen. I am the last person to ever recommend risky behavior, so I did a lot of homework before coming to the conclusions you will read here. The best information I could find tells me that in 80% of the cases of those who have actually contracted the Coronavirus, the symptoms are mild. Out of 350 million Americans, as of today, 17 have died. And, in almost every one of those cases, there were serious pre-existing health issues. In the field of viruses, I trust Doctor Marc Siegel as much as anyone. He has been on the frontline of several of these kinds of incidents. He said, “I have never seen a new virus or bacteria handled as well by our public health officials as this one, with sober attention paid to identifying, isolating and tracing contacts of known or suspected cases along with restricting travel as best they can.” The bottom line is this: That by no means is an excuse for reckless behavior. We are still facing an unknown outcome. We must be vigilant but not terrorized. At the very least wash your hands frequently and thoroughly. That means using soap for longer than 20 seconds. And avoid touching your face.  Now, let’s talk about the agenda of evil. Bill Maher said two things that indicate the Left may be trying to promote a panic. He said that he hoped the economy would tank so that Trump would not be reelected. No, I am not making that up. He wants people thrown out of work and millions of Americans broke, just to get rid of Trump. When you see hysteria being stirred up, all you need to do is look for who that benefits. If our economy is being devastated, who benefits from that? Look for those who are rooting for that to happen just to put the blame on Trump. However, the greatest evil is coming from Satan himself. I believe he is trying to destroy the momentum of the church—a church that is just now shaking itself out of complacency! He wants panic to keep you out of gatherings where the fire and glory of God is flowing. It is certainly not my intention to make this sound ‘super-spiritual.’ But, I can’t think of a better and safer place for you and your immune system than a Holy Ghost meeting! What better place could you be, than in church praising and worshiping where the anointing is strong? Come on now. Instead of hunkering down and turning your home into a bomb shelter, grab the family and get to the house of God!  Talking about soul winning—now is the time to get a friend who is in the grip of fear and take them where the healing waters flow. Declare, “Washing your hands is important, but washing your soul is infinitely and eternally better. Come with me, I promise all your fears will vanish.” The sick will be healed. The pastor, prophet, evangelist, teacher, or apostle will declare a word over you that will bring joy, power and boldness! Stay home? Never! That God-ordained conference must go on. That Sunday and midweek service is more important now than ever! Why sit at home to avoid an infection, when you can go to the House of God and get an infusion? Hallelujah! The television news is attempting to pour human wisdom and dread into your spirit. Why not rather meet with a vessel of God who will rightly divide the Word of Truth and tell you what God says about your health, your future, and your destiny? We must refuse to allow a human-based panic to cause us to become an underground church before the time. Come together with the body of Christ, because: God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of self-control. (2 Tim. 1:7) And finally, these powerful promises: You shall not be afraid of the terror of the night…nor of the plague that stalks in darkness, nor of the destruction that surprises at noonday. Though a thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, it shall not come near you. Only a spectator shall you be as you witness the reward of the wicked. Because you have made the Lord your refuge, and the Most High your dwelling place, there shall no evil befall you, nor any plague come near your dwelling. Psalm 91:5-7, 10 Tags: Mario Murillo, Ministries, Be Sensible. But Reject Hysteria To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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From NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann FIRST READ: Coronavirus response represents a watershed week in the 2020 campaign This has been a week that has changed the trajectory of the 2020 election, as well as the trajectory for the entire nation. The disruption from the spread of the coronavirus – and the political reaction to it – is certainly the biggest part of that change.  Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images An economic recession now seems almost inevitable. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders got to contrast their leadership abilities with President Trump’s. And as for Trump, the coronavirus plays into all of his weaknesses – blaming others, misstating facts, not leading by example and an inability to unite the country – and few of his strengths. But the coronavirus isn’t the only thing that changed the 2020 race this week. Joe Biden has taken absolute command of the race for the Democratic nomination, and the next two weeks of contests look even better for him. And when it comes to the 2020 race for the Senate, Democrats convinced Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to jump into the state’s Senate contest, giving them a real pickup opportunity in that red state. So the Senate is even more in play than it was a week ago. At some point – we hope – the 2020 election will return to the center stage, with traditional campaigning, a focus on the daily polls, and your typical back-and-forth between Democrats and Republicans. And when that happens, Democrats will find themselves on higher ground than they were before.
TWEET OF THE DAY: It’s Year 4 in office and he’s still blaming Obama 
Sanders – finally – wins California, per NBC News On Thursday, NBC News projected Bernie Sanders the winner of California’s Democratic primary – nine days after it took place. Other news organizations called it earlier, but NBC News waited to see the actual votes come in due to how slowly the state counts its ballots. With 88 percent of the vote now in, Sanders leads Biden in California by 6.7 points, 34.3 percent to 27.6 percent. Joe Biden currently holds a 153-delegate lead over Bernie Sanders in pledged delegates, 854 to 701, according to the count from NBC News’ Decision Desk. Biden has won 51 percent of the pledged delegates that have been allocated so far, while Sanders has won 42 percent. To reach the 1,991 pledged delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination on a first vote, Biden needs to win 50 percent of the remaining delegates. Sanders needs to win 56 percent.
2020 VISION: Welcome to the virtual campaign On the campaign trail today: Joe Biden holds a “virtual” get-out-the-vote for his campaign activities in Chicago – ahead of the Illinois primary on Tuesday.
On Sunday, Biden and Sanders participate in their one-on-one debate at 8:00 pm ET from CNN’s studios in DC.
Dispatches from NBC’s campaign embeds: The word from all three active campaigns is the same: work from home and go virtual. President Trump, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are all switching their 2020 activities to virtual, and their campaign staffers are now working from home, per NBC’s Monica Alba, Marianna Sotomayor and Gary Grumbach. For Trump that means, “Trump Victory, the joint operation between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, will shift to ‘virtual’ events for volunteer-oriented gatherings, according to the GOP group.” For Biden and Sanders, it goes even further, Sanders’ campaign will not have any staff working in offices, according to the campaign’s communications director. “In light of concerns about coronavirus and out of an abundance of caution for our staff, volunteers and supporters, the Sanders campaign has asked all staff to work from home and will no longer hold large events or door-to-door canvasses, instead moving to digital formats and outreach wherever possible.” And the Biden campaign echoed that statement. All of Biden HQ staff will work from home for the “foreseeable future” and only plan to hold virtual campaign events and virtual fundraisers.
DATA DOWNLOAD: And the number of the day is … 44 points. 44 points. That’s Joe Biden’s lead over Bernie Sanders among likely Florida Democratic primary voters, according to a new poll from the University of North Florida. The poll showed Biden as the top choice of 66 percent of likely voters, while just 22 percent backed Sanders. The survey also found that Biden is the overwhelming choice of Florida Hispanics, with 65 percent naming the former vice president as their vote choice. The primary is Tuesday, March 17.
THE LID: This or that? Don’t miss the pod from yesterday, when we looked at how Joe Biden’s speech on the coronavirus threat aimed to provide voters with a clear picture of how his administration’s leadership would be different than President Trump’s.
ICYMI: News clips you shouldn’t miss NBC’s Shannon Pettypiece traces the administration’s dramatic change in strategy as the coronavirus crisis worsened.
Benjy Sarlin talked to a top Obama economist about how bad the economic downturn could be. Here’s how the 2020 candidates are shifting to a virtual campaign. The Dow had its worst day since 1987. The Washington Post does a deep dive into the administration’s failed efforts to calm the nation through a presidential address. The U.S. launched a strike on weapons facilities in Iraq in retaliation for a rocket attack that killed two American service members.
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“All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!”
“Sunday’s debate could be an important step to heal and strengthen the party.”
He “just can’t see having no people there.”
“We stand by our story.”
“It’s about testing, testing, testing.”
“I don’t want to get sick, but I don’t have a choice.”MANHATTAN INSTITUTE
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March 13 2020
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