“I want to start with what we just saw,” MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle said at the outset of the Wednesday interview. “Contrast states like Florida and California. California [is] basically in a lockdown and their numbers aren’t that different from Florida.”
New numbers coming out of both states have suggested, to the surprise of many public health experts, that states with harsh lockdown policies have not been more successful at combating the virus than states that adopted more open approaches.
Slavitt, appearing confounded, responded, “Look, there’s so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that’s just a little bit beyond our explanation.”
Then, without providing evidence, he claimed, “What we do know is that the more careful people are, the more they mask and social distance, and the quicker we vaccinate, the quicker it goes away and the less it spreads.”
“But, we have got to get better visibility into variants — we don’t know what role they play — umm, large events, etc.,” he continued.
“But as we all have learned by this time, this is a virus that continues to surprise us,” he added. “It’s very hard to predict. And all around the country, we’ve got to continue to do a better job, and I think we are, but we’re not done yet.”
The Biden administration, which endorses restrictive lockdown measures, has targeted Florida in recent days, floating the idea of imposing a domestic travel ban on the state to mitigate the spread of more contagious virus variants. The notion immediately drew ire from Republicans in the state of Florida, including Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio.
DeSantis shot back, saying the potential plan “stinks to high heaven,” and blasted the Biden administration for employing a blatant double standard, contrasting the potential travel ban with Biden’s lax immigration enforcement.
“It is a huge contradiction and you can’t square wanting opening borders for illegal aliens, but then also restricting U.S. citizens from basically traveling around the country as they see fit and I think the American people see the hypocrisy in that,” he said.
Rubio wrote a letter to Biden slamming the idea as “an outrageous, authoritarian move that has no basis in law or science.”
“Instituting a travel ban, or any restriction of movement between the states, would be an outrageous, authoritarian move that has no basis in law or science. Instead, it would only serve to inflict severe and devastating economic pain on an already damaged economy,” the senator said in a statement.
Trish Regan | February 19, 2021
Before reading, please take a quick moment to sign up for my podcast. You can download the clip and sign up here below.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appeared on CNBC Thursday afternoon to push for more stimulus spending saying that, “a big package” is necessary to help the economy recover and that, “the price of doing too little is much higher than the price of doing something big.”
Apparently, the Treasury Secretary is not familiar with the Fall of the Roman Empire (or, she is, but is deliberately choosing to ignore.) It was Rome’s debt crisis that led the fall of the Roman Republic and it’s not inconceivable that the history could repeat itself in modern day America.
The reality is: $1.9 Trillion is a lot of money. Especially on the heels of the multiple trillions already spent. But, the Biden administration has its script and it’s sticking to it. “Give me more!” is the mandate.
Kamala Harris went on the Today Show Wednesday to plead for stimulus to open the schools (interestingly, of the $128 billion being demanded for education, only $6 billion is allocated for the opening of schools in 2021 – the rest is spread out over the next seven years.)
And, President Joe Biden keeps talking his “book” — by highlighting every negative in the economy in an effort to create more pressure for stimulus spending. Though the economy added jobs last month, Biden tells us, “at this rate it will take ten years to return to full unemployment.”
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is signaling its willingness to continue printing money with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell telling the Economic Club of New York last week that although he is seeing some signs of inflation, it’s just a “transient thing that we think will pass.”
I wouldn’t count on that.
Again, I return to the biggest causes of the fall of Rome: massive debt, rampant inflation, over-taxation, too many freebies, feudalism, and an enormous trade deficit with Iran (rather like China today.)
Consider the similarities: We have massive debt, high taxation, too many freebies, major trade deficits, a kind of feudalism (a system that benefits the wealthiest Americans seemingly at the expense of the middle class) and we are soon to be looking at rampant inflation. How could we not? Last year alone, in 2020, we raised the money supply 24% — the biggest surge in the 150 years that we’ve been tracking our currency.
All this spending has consequences. Sadly, our politicians are too selfish to recognize any long-term economic issues. It’s always about the next election and they’ll spend as much money as it takes to get ahead in the polls. But, as Mark Twain said,
“history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Let’s not let the United States of America go the way of the Roman Empire.
A whistleblower leaked shocking images of Coca-Cola’s online training modules instructing employees to “try to be less white.” Karlyn Borysenko, an anti-critical race theory activist, obtained the images from an internal whistleblower and posted them online:
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“Confronting Racism: Understanding what it means to be white, challenging what it means to be racist”
“Try to be less white”
To be less white is to:
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“In the US and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white. Research shows that by age 3 to 4, children understand that it is better to be white.”
Karlyn Borysenko posted a video to her YouTube channel breaking down the images provided to her by a Coca-Cola whistleblower.
WATCH:
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Political cartoon by A. F. Branco ©2021.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.
Trump found a new place to set up his new office of Former President, rent Free. Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Ann Coulter | Posted: Feb 17, 2021
Source: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
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Here is this week’s installment of “The New York Times is ALWAYS lying about criminals (and probably everything else).”
The Times desperately wants you to believe that there are actual cases of innocent people being put to death in America. Their current poster boy for the cause is Sedley Alley, executed in 2006. But the Criminal Lobby is hoping a post-mortem DNA test — on evidence that has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence — will allow them to howl that an INNOCENT man was executed!
I knew nothing about this case, but I knew the Times’ description of the facts was a lie. How did I know?
1) No jury would have convicted a man, much less sentenced him to death, much less had that sentence repeatedly upheld, on such a flimsy record; and
2) There is no credible evidence that a single innocent person has been put to death in this country for at least 75 years.
Here are the facts the about the Criminal Lobby’s latest baby seal.
On the night of July 11, 1985, two Marines from a naval base in Millington, Tennessee, reported a possible kidnapping after they heard a female jogger screaming, “Don’t touch me!” “Leave me alone!” They ran in her direction, but just as they got close, a station wagon peeled off the side of the road. A gate guard also reported seeing a station wagon, which he said was being driven by a man constraining a woman.
All three witnesses described the car as a late-model green or brown Ford or Mercury station wagon with wood paneling, Kentucky tags and a loud muffler.
Alley, who owned a dark green 1972 Mercury station wagon with wood paneling and a Kentucky license plate, was brought in for questioning at 1 a.m. that night. The Marines who’d reported the kidnapping identified Alley’s vehicle as the one they’d seen, both by sight and by the roar of the muffler.
But Alley and his wife gave a satisfactory explanation for their whereabouts and were released.
At 6 a.m. on July 12, the body of 19-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Suzanne Collins was found in a nearby park. Alley was arrested and promptly confessed to murdering her — claiming it was an “accident.”
He told his wife, “Yes, I killed the gal at … Orgill Park.”
In his lengthy, tape-recorded confession, Alley tried to soft-pedal his barbaric crime, claiming he’d hit Collins with his car by accident, and only decided to savagely beat her to death because, as he was driving her to the hospital, she threatened to turn him into the police.
Alley then took investigators to the precise spot where he’d murdered Collins and even showed them the tree where he’d broken off the branch that he’d jammed inside of her.
At trial, Alley admitted he did it, but pleaded insanity. The jury didn’t buy it, convicted him and sentenced him to death.
Here is what the Times’ Emily Bazelon tells that paper’s clueless readers about Alley’s case:
“[T]wo Marines … reported crossing paths with Lance Corporal Collins while she was running. They said that moments after they saw her, they dodged a brown station wagon with a blue license plate … [L]aw enforcement officers stopped Sedley Alley, then 29. He was driving a dark green station wagon with a blue plate.”
Times readers are led to believe that although witnesses said it was a BROWN station wagon, Tennessee yokels picked up a guy in a GREEN station wagon!
Except that’s not true. The BOLO alert (“be on the lookout”) put out by the Naval Investigation Service identified a “a brown or green Ford or Mercury station wagon with woodgrain on the sides.”
Bazelon:
“When the investigators began interrogating him, Mr. Alley, who had been drinking, denied knowing anything about Lance Corporal Collins and asked for a lawyer. But 12 hours later, he signed a statement confessing to the murder.”
Times’ readers are supposed to think these backwoods Nazis interrogated Alley without a lawyer for 12 hours until he confessed!
In fact, the only reason he signed a statement “12 hours later” was that, after being questioned the night of the crime, he was sent home. Alley wasn’t arrested until after Collins’ body was discovered the next day, whereupon he quickly confessed.
Bazelon:
“Mr. Alley’s admission, which he later said was false and coerced …”
Yes, “later” in the sense of “20 years later.” For two decades, Alley never denied he’d murdered Collins. He only recalled that his confession was “coerced” in 2004, when he was trying to delay the hangman’s noose.
Bazelon:
“But the location he gave for the collision didn’t line up with the witness accounts.”
There were no “witness accounts” for “the collision” for the simple reason that there was no collision. “My car hit her by accident” was Alley’s attempt to mitigate his barbarous crime.
You know what else, Emily? His car wasn’t seen driving in the direction of the hospital, either!
Somehow, his lies not matching the facts is supposed to be a point in Alley’s favor.
Bazelon:
“[Alley’s confession] did not match the physical evidence. … He said he … stabbed her with a screwdriver and killed her with a tree branch. … And the autopsy report showed that Lance Corporal Collins was not hit by a car nor stabbed with a screwdriver.”
Again: There was no collision.
I’m not sure what Bazelon’s point is about the screwdriver and the tree branch, but here’s the evidence presented at trial:
“The pathologist, Dr. James Bell, testified that the cause of death was multiple injuries, [many] of which could have been fatal. … He testified that the injuries to the skull could have been inflicted by the rounded end of defendant’s screwdriver that was found near the scene … He identified the tree branch that was inserted into the victim’s body. It measured 31 inches in length and had been inserted into the body more than once, to a depth of twenty inches …”
Bazelon:
“Tire tracks found at the crime scene didn’t match Mr. Alley’s car, shoe prints didn’t match his shoes, and a third witness who saw a man with a station wagon, close to where Lance Corporal Collins was killed, described someone who was several inches shorter than Mr. Alley, with a different hair color.”
Times readers are perfectly prepared to believe that a jury of toothless hicks looked at evidence overwhelmingly clearing Alley and convicted him anyway.
But that didn’t happen, because having seen the evidence for themselves, Alley and his lawyer decided his best course was to admit he did it and plead insanity. All this alleged evidence is post-hoc nonsense invented by defense lawyers that has not been admitted under the rules of evidence, has not been subjected to cross-examination, and would not prove his innocence.
Seventy-five years and counting with no credible evidence that a single innocent person has been put to death in America.
Thousands of people gathered in the heart of Atlanta to worship, pray, and repent for systemic racism in late June 2020 for an event hosted by OneRace Movement. | Courtesy of Adventures in Mission
As a theory, CRT descends from European and North American philosophical traditions, particularly Marxism and Postmodernism. Like these worldviews of its intellectual ancestry, CRT sees the world in terms of power dynamics. In this way of thinking, social evils such as poverty, crime, or oppression result not from universal human frailties but from Euro-Americans intent on securing and increasing their economic and social power. Based on this metanarrative, equality and justice demand privileging the stories of those kept out of power. CRT sees members of the oppressed group as morally right, and members of the oppressor group as morally wrong.
CRT, like any worldview framework, should be evaluated. That, however, is easier said than done, even in the Church. Advocates often point to common ground between Critical Race Theory and the Christian worldview (for example, the commitment to justice and human dignity), and label any critiques of CRT as convenient ways to avoid confronting injustice and racism (which may not be true, but often is).
Many Christian critics, myself included, are specifically concerned with how CRT conflicts with a Christian worldview, particularly in areas of identity and morality. Not everyone agrees. Recently on Twitter, a defender of CRT boldly tweeted, “Whoever told you CRT is a worldview was either lying to you or didn’t know what they were talking about.” Of course, assuming malice or greed is a way of dodging the question rather than making an argument.
Another Twitterer offered a different response, “If CRT is bad because it’s a ‘secular worldview’ and we must only derive our worldviews ‘biblically’ then I better not see a TRACE of Aristotle or Plato in your worldview either, brother.” This one is a slightly more clever way of missing the point or, specifically misunderstanding what it means for a worldview to be “biblical.” To have a Christian worldview is to hold views that are consistent with the Bible, not to only have views that are in the Bible. The problem with Critical Race Theory is not that it isn’t found in the Bible; it’s that it offers a very different explanation of humanity, sin, and redemption than the Bible does.
Like the postmodernism that birthed it, Critical Race Theory can be considered a worldview. It does more than just offer a handful of specific ideas about race and society; CRT offers a complete framework of beliefs, a universalizing story of the world. CRT describes who we are, what’s wrong with the world, and prescribes how to fix it and what “better” would be. In other words, like Christianity, CRT answers the basic questions any worldview does. Except, the answers CRT provides are very different than those Christianity offers, even if both worldviews recognize the world is broken by evils such as racism and injustice.
Critical Race Theory has critical errors. By simplistically reducing evil to power dynamics and external social realities, CRT denies moral agency and the redemptive potential of entire groups of people because of their racial identity.
At the same time, those who oppose Critical Theory must do more than simply write off all its concerns. Like Marxism, Critical Theory is something of a Christian heresy, taking the Christian themes of human dignity and justice and a world remade, and re-orienting these causes under new management. Most pertinently, CRT is slipping into the space where the Church belongs but is too often absent.
If we don’t want unbiblical explanations of life and justice sweeping through the Church or culture, we’d better make sure we communicate and embrace the full ramifications of Christian truth for society, and then act justly and love mercy. If we rob our Faith of its social implications, we are no longer talking about Christianity. Such a personalized, privatized moral system may make us feel better, but it will never stand up to the rival worldviews of our day. 
Over the next four Tuesday nights, The Colson Center is hosting an online course taught by Dr. Thaddeus Williams, on his book, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth. This is the book I’ve been waiting for, the book that carefully and biblically walks through a Christian view of justice. Dr. Williams carefully explains not only why theories like CRT aren’t true, but what the Bible asks of Christ’s followers when it comes to justice. Space is limited. Register today at breakpoint.org/Williams.
Because, the best antidote for the failings of Critical Theory and its inadequate worldview is for the Church to understand and live consistently with the Bible.
Originally posted at breakpoint.org
From BreakPoint. Reprinted with the permission of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or distributed without the express written permission the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. “BreakPoint®” and “The Colson Center for Christian Worldview®” are registered trademarks of The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Stonestreet is the President of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and co-host with Eric Metaxas of Breakpoint, the Christian worldview radio program founded by the late Chuck Colson. He is co-author of A Practical Guide to Culture, A Student’s Guide to Culture and Restoring All Things.
Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration. | Wikipedia
Russell Vought, the former director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under former President Donald Trump, announced the creation of the Center for American Restoration late last month. In an interview with The Christian Post Tuesday, Vought elaborated on the new think tank’s goals. He gave details about how the organization will operate. While Vought acknowledged that there are many things he would have liked to accomplish in a second Trump term, he embraces the opportunity to start a new venture, calling it “the silver lining in some respects of … not being in office.”
“A lot of the things that have been rattling around in my mind for a number of years are the things that the Center for American Restoration is going to be working on,” he said. “I think that this gives us an opportunity to articulate and work on issues and proposals and ideas that you need a little bit of time outside government to be able to work on and to be able to set up future policy-makers to work on these issues.”
He explained the goals of the new organization in an op-ed for The Federalist published on Jan. 26. According to Vought, the Center for American Restoration will “help restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.” Vought remarked that “notwithstanding policy victories on taxes, welfare, and the right to life in the last several decades, the tide of progressive liberalism has not been turned.”
He argues that “few are equipped to stand athwart the age and make a full-throated defense of something other than ‘progress’ or going forward.” He believes that “most won’t fight because they no longer believe, and repeatedly lose policy fight after policy fight because they have no firm footing.”
“The Center for American Restoration exists to provide that footing,” he wrote. “Its mission statement is to restore an American consensus of a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities.”
Vought, who was questioned about his evangelical beliefs by Sen. Bernie Sanders during a 2017 confirmation hearing, decried liberals’ control of “the commanding heights of culture.” He said those heights include “the academy, the media, [and] the entertainment industry.” He described the Trump presidency as “the first real counter assault to the left in decades.”
The Center for American Restoration’s overarching theme is that “the counter-assault” against the political left that began with the Trump presidency must not come to an end even though he has left office.
“We hope to give voice to the common, forgotten men and women across this great country, possessed with extraordinary intuition, who work hard, pay their taxes, and attempt to raise their families in healthy communities,” he maintained.
According to Vought, it is important to remember that “we’re a country under God.”
“We were created to honor God, to be for God,” he told CP. “And to the extent that we are, that it impacts our happiness [and] our satisfaction in life. That should be a part of what we align public policy with.”
In his op-ed, the former Office of Management and Budget director criticized the American foreign policy that led to “endless war, America-as-world-policeman, sclerotic multilateralism, and trillions spent on foreign aid and a sprawling defense-industrial complex.”
He also took issue with “the plundering of the American economy by multinational corporations eager to claim the benefits of American law while disclaiming all responsibility to provide remunerative employment to American workers.”
He also criticized immigration policies that led to “borders being overrun for generations, creating unfair labor competition for the least off in America without any debate by its citizenry and laying great burdens on local communities.”
Vought told CP that “there will be two organizations,” the Center for American Restoration and American Restoration Action. The former organization, a think tank, will “flesh out these ideas, put them into concrete proposals, [and] think through implementation.” American Restoration Action, an activist organization, will work to establish “policy fights that are informed by where we want to take the policy over time.”
“My view is that policy fights are a good thing, that they provide an opportunity to educate and allow people to see both sides of a conversation,” he said. “We’ll be involved in the think tank side and we’ll be trying to get activists into the fight and giving the support that’s needed to members of Congress and those who are championing our ideas in the media.”
As a nonprofit organization, the Center for American Restoration will not actively recruit candidates who share its values to run for public office. However, Vought expressed hope that “the people running for office … are running … on public policies that we have been championing, that put America first, that stress for God, for country and for community.”
“That is our hope for the next several years, and we hope to the extent that people are talking about us, they’re talking about those ideas,” he continued.
Other endeavors the Center for American Restoration plans to undertake are “extending the principle of being pro-life to a nationwide enthusiasm for promoting life and increasing the birth rate” by encouraging people to have more children and bigger families.
The think tank also will reject “the militant ‘successor ideology’ that has taken root in elite institutions” and seeks to dampen the power of “cancel culture.”
Vought, who studied at Wheaton College in Illinois and George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., previously worked for the conservative lobbying group Heritage Action. He also previously served as executive director for the Republican Study Committee and policy director for the Republican Conference of the U.S. House of Representatives. Vought began his career in Washington, D.C. as a legislative assistant for Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas.
Tenney said she had asked former Attorney General William Barr to look into nursing home deaths in New York as early as March 2020, after a nursing home resident contacted her to report that COVID-positive patients were being moved from hospitals into nursing homes. She also talked about the recent reports that Cuomo’s secretary, Melissa DeRosa, admitted that the administration intentionally hid data on the coronavirus death toll in nursing homes out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors.
“Now this cover-up has become a crime,” Tenney said. “It could very much be at least criminal negligence, what the governor has done.”
Watch the video below to catch more of the conversation:
The changes are reportedly part of an effort by the Biden administration to portray itself as more welcoming on immigration than the previous administration under President Trump, which would use terms such as “illegal aliens” to describe people who bypassed U.S. laws and security perimeters to enter and remain in the country.
According to Axios, an email sent Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials described how the agency’s acting director, Tracy Renaud, had signed a memo encouraging “more inclusive language in the agency’s outreach efforts, internal documents and in overall communication with stakeholders, partners and the general public.”
The memo, obtained by BuzzFeed News, instructed officials to stop referring to people as “illegal alien,” “alien,” or “undocumented alien” in internal and external communications, but instead use the terms “noncitizen,” “undocumented noncitizen,” or “undocumented individual.”
It also urged USCIS officials to discontinue their use of the term “assimilation” in exchange for “integration” and begin referring to those who apply for benefits like green cards as “customers,” BuzzFeed reported. USCIS is a subsidiary agency which operates within the DHS.
Interestingly, besides planned use in the agency’s internal communications and any communications it has with the public, the wording changes are not set to affect forms or operational documents where using the previous terminology is deemed most appropriate. That fact indicates the changes are nothing more than a messaging makeover. Though, by continuing to soften language associated with illegal immigration, the administration undoubtedly hopes to move public opinion on the matter toward greater acceptance of illegal entry and favor for open borders.
The words being replaced in the agency’s messaging are in fact the most accurate technical terms to describe issues at hand. Even BuzzFeed acknowledges that the term “alien” is routinely found within U.S. Code and is “regularly referenced in the immigration system and in court rulings to describe everyone who is not a US citizen.”
Speaking with Axios, Robert Law, a former Trump administration official who now works at the Center for Immigration Studies, noted, “By statute, ‘alien’ literally means a person not a U.S. citizen or national.”
“That is not offensive, and neither is ‘assimilation,'” he said.
Not only is the reopening of schools being postponed, but it is so low on San Francisco’s “to-do” list that simply discussing reopening schools has been postponed. Fox News reports “the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) postponed Tuesday’s scheduled talks on how to safely reopen classrooms despite an ongoing lawsuit by the City Attorney’s Office.”
“Opting instead,” adds Fox News, “to work on renaming 44 of the city’s public schools.” Over 110 private schools have managed to open successfully, some as far back as September, but the San Francisco Board of Education is currently working on renaming schools they believe are “offensive” due to their representation of “White supremacy.”
Changing names alone is estimated to cost between $400,000 to $1 million dollars. Instead of spending that money to help the lapse of education children have endured from an entire year in quarantine, the money will be spent on signs, uniforms, insignias and more to accommodate name changes.
“Schools named after historical and currently prominent figures like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein have been slated for the chopping block for their connections to slavery, genocide and colonization” reports Fox News.
Read more at https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/17/rush-limbaugh-dead-wife-announces/
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 04: Radio personality Rush Limbaugh sits in the First Lady’s box ahead of the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 04, 2020 in Washington, DC. President Trump delivers his third State of the Union to the nation the night before the U.S. Senate is set to vote in his impeachment trial. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Shortly after his diagnosis, former President Donald Trump awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020. The surprise award at the State of the Union address led to the radio host tearing up as then-first lady Melania Trump placed the medal around his neck.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest award given for a civilian.
Limbaugh launched “The Rush Limbaugh Show” in 1988 and it became the most listened-to radio show in America, according to Fox News. He would go on to become one of the most well-known figures in conservative politics and media.
“I wasn’t expected to be alive today,” Limbaugh told listeners during his last show of 2020. “I wasn’t expected to make it to October, and then to November, and then to December. And yet, here I am, and today, got some problems, but I’m feeling pretty good today.”
Limbaugh is in the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame, as well as the Radio Hall of Fame. He was a best-selling author and appeared on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list in 2009.
Prior to his cancer diagnosis, Limbaugh learned he had an autoimmune disease that affected his hearing beginning in 2001. A few years later in 2003, Limbaugh went into a treatment facility for an addiction to pain medication, according to Fox News.
Limbaugh also worked on ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown” for a short time in 2003, but resigned after comments he made about an NFL quarterback sparked backlash.
US President Donald Trump alongside radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh arrive at a Make America Great Again rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri on November 5, 2018. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
While Limbaugh had many well-known moments throughout his career, Fox News described his 2009 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference as “one of the most important moments” for his work. During this speech, Limbaugh aimed to detail exactly “who conservatives are,” saying that they “love people” and see “potential” in everything.
“We love people,” Limbaugh told the crowd. “When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims. We don’t see people we want to exploit. What we see — what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not see that person with contempt. We don’t think that person doesn’t have what it takes.”
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The East Side Community School teacher even included a white supremacism spectrum for parents to self-identify.
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According to East Side Community School the goal is to become a white abolitionist. But these steps are subjective, not clearly defined and ALWAYS up for evaluation by your peers.
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Apparently this list of the eight “white identities” has been passed around on Facebook for a couple of years.
Its author is Professor Barnor Hesse.
Hesse is an Associate Professor of African American Studies, Political Science, and Sociology
His research interests include post-structuralism and political theory, black political thought, modernity and coloniality, blackness and affect, race and governmentality, conceptual methodologies, postcolonial studies. His book, Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, reconsiders the meanings of multiculturalism in the West. In introducing a new conceptual language, the volume stresses the importance of distinguishing between the multicultural as a signifier of the unsettled meanings of cultural differences, and multiculturalism as the signified of attempts to “fix” their meaning in national imaginaries. The book also casts the debates about multiculturalism in the contexts of globalization, post-colonialism, and what Barnor Hesse calls “multicultural transruptions”–which he sees as resurgent, irrepressible multicultural issues.
DeSantis specifically highlighted the newly released CDC guidelines for reopening schools. The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration’s new guidelines effectively would do away with full in-person learning for the foreseeable future, even as cases drop around the country, because to have full in-person learning the rates of community transmission would need to be “quite low,” which The Post notes does not exist almost anywhere in the U.S.
“Florida schools are open for in person instruction, every single parent in this state has a right to send their kid to in person instruction,” DeSantis said during a press conference this week. “We have done it the right way, we are not going to turn back. What the CDC put out five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, I wonder why they would do it then, was quite frankly, a disgrace. It would require if you actually followed that, closing 90% of schools in the United States.”
“We have been open, they will remain open and we are not turning back,” DeSantis continued. “We’ve been open the whole time since August. We had kids doing camps and athletics and all that over the summer. And we’ve been in person as much as anybody in the country. And yet, we’re 34 out of 50 states and DC for COVID-19 cases on a per capita basis for children. Thirty-three states have more cases per capita than than Florida, for children per capita. And many of those don’t have a lot of in person instruction in school. And so there is no evidence to suggest that kids should do anything else other than be in school. This has been clear for months and months and months, we followed the data when we worked to get the parents the option to send the kids back because we had looked at what happened in Europe, places like Sweden and all these other places.”
“And it does not require another 100 billion dollars,” DeSantis continued. “The school reopening plan that makes the most sense, if you want to open schools, open them, open the door, let them come in and let them learn. And the only reason that that is not happening across this country like it is in Florida, like it is in a handful of other states, it’s one reason and one reason only, because the Democratic Party puts the interests of education unions and special interests ahead of the well being of our children and our families. These kids have been out of school in parts of this country for almost a year. And if you follow that CDC guidance, they will not go back in this this school year and they may not even go back in the fall. That is a disgrace. That is not science. That is putting politics ahead of what’s right for kids. That is putting politics and special interests ahead of what the evidence and observed experience says.”
WATCH:
Public health experts Joseph G. Allen and Helen Jenkins wrote in The Washington Post:
The new report on schools from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be a wake-up call to parents everywhere: If they’re not back already, your kids are not going back to school full-time this year.
The report adds new and unnecessary demands that will ultimately keep millions of kids out of school. In particular, there are two items that will act as barriers: the use of community-spread metrics to determine whether schools should open, and the requirement of routine screening testing. …
The science is clear: Kids — especially young children — can get and transmit covid-19, but they are less likely to do so than adults. Kids can die from the disease, but the risk of that happening is one in a million; they are about 10 times as likely to die by suicide. Teachers also have lower risk than other occupations and can be kept safe through adherence to universal precautions.
The science is also clear that keeping children out of school is doing real harm: Loss in literacy progress. An exploding mental health crisis. Billions of missed meals. Women dropping out of the workforce. Hundreds of thousands of kids missing school. The effects are compounding daily.
Even CNN’s Jake Tapper grilled CDC Director Rochelle Walensky this week, saying that he had “high hopes that schools would be able to resume in person learning, because so many scientists and health officials, including you and Dr. Fauci and others, had been talking about the science supports opening the schools as much as possible.”
“I know that a lot of teachers are very concerned, and I know the teachers unions have been pushing back on this,” he continued. “But it sounds to me like you’re asking for 100 percent mask compliance and a number of measures that we’re never going to be able to achieve. And that makes me feel like, boy, I don’t know if the schools are ever going to open until everybody’s vaccinated.”
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Even while the Biden administration is preparing to double down on Obama’s abuse of the national security state to target his political opponents, it’s also giving real terrorists a pass. Joe Biden, whose biggest bundlers included the Iran Lobby, announced he was ending support for American allies fighting the Houthis, and then went even further by preparing to remove the terrorist organization whose motto is, “Death to America”, which took American hostages and tried to kill American sailors, from the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations.
The motto of Iran’s Houthi Jihadis is, “Allahu Akbar, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.” The Houthis took over parts of Yemen as a result of the chaos unleashed by Obama’s pro-Islamist Arab Spring. Since then they’ve been engaged in a protracted war while causing a local famine by confiscating food from the local population.
Last year, the Trump administration had finally secured the release of three American hostages, Sandra Loli, an American aid worker who had been held for 3 years, another American who had been held for a year, and the body of a third American, in exchange for 240 Houthis, including three dozen Islamic terrorists who had been trained in the use of missiles and drones by Iran. Like those launched at the USS Mason.
The Houthis lived up to their “Death to America” slogan by repeatedly launching cruise missiles at the USS Mason which had been protecting shipping in the area. And they lived up to the second half of their slogan by ethnically cleansing the remaining local Jewish population, locking them up, and confiscating their homes and land. Local reports stated that the Houthis were “cutting off water & electricity to Jewish homes and preventing Jews from purchasing food.”
“No Jew would be allowed to stay here,” one of the Jewish refugees said.
The Iran-backed Islamic terrorists fight using 18,000 child soldiers. The soldiers, many abducted, some as young as 10, are taught to hate America and to kill enemies of Iran. None of this stopped Biden’s State Department from taking the Houthis off the terror list.
“Secretary Blinken has been clear about undertaking an expeditious review of the designations of Ansarallah,” the State Department claimed. “After a comprehensive review, we can confirm that the Secretary intends to revoke the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist designations of Ansarallah.”
‘Ansarallah’ or ‘Defenders of Allah’ is what the Houthis call themselves. Blinken had only been confirmed on Tuesday. By next Friday, he had already somehow completed the “comprehensive review”, amid all the other minor business like China, Russia, and a global pandemic, and decided that the Islamic terrorists whose motto is “Death to America” aren’t really terrorists.
How can the Biden administration deny that Islamic Jihadis backed by Iran who attacked Americans are terrorists? The State Department claimed that this, “has nothing to do with our view of the Houthis and their reprehensible conduct, including attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens.” Not to mention the attacks on the USS Mason. But the Biden administration isn’t even going to pretend to care about attacks on our military.
The Bidenites are claiming that they’re taking the Houthis, whom they don’t deny are terrorists, off the list of designated terrorist groups because of the “humanitarian consequences”. That’s a lie, no matter how often you hear it in the media, because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would be providing licenses to “humanitarian activities conducted by non-governmental organizations in Yemen and to certain transactions and activities related to exports to Yemen of critical commodities like food and medicine.” That’s despite the fact that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen was caused by the Houthis.
Nevertheless the media, echoing propaganda from the Iran Lobby and Qatar, a close terrorist ally of Iran, has falsely claimed that the Houthis are the victims of the Yemen famine. A number of politicians, mostly Democrats, but some Republicans, as well as various aid groups, have pushed this same disinformation campaign about the causes of the Yemen famine.
America and its allies have spent billions providing food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid to Yemen. That aid has been seized by the Houthis who have used it for their own troops or to resell on the black market. This is a familiar problem from Syria to Somalia, and aid groups have refused to honestly address their complicity in aiding the terrorists who caused the crisis. There’s no money in admitting that the aid an organization is providing is being seized by the terrorists, prolonging the conflict and worsening the humanitarian crisis. Some aid organizations share the same goal as the Houthis of worsening the crisis because it boosts their donations.
That’s why international aid organizations don’t want to talk about the Houthis taking their food donations, or about their use of child soldiers. “It’s a taboo,” an anonymous aid official had said.
When Secretary Pompeo announced that the United States was finally designating the Houthis a foreign terrorist organization, the United Nations took the lead in claiming that it would cause a humanitarian crisis. But the UN’s World Food Program had already admitted that its food shipments weren’t getting to the starving people because the Houthis were intercepting them. The Middle East director for UNICEF also admitted that the Houthis were seizing food.
An Associated Press investigation found entire stores selling “cooking oil and flour displaying the U.N. food program’s WFP logo.” The former Houthi education minister said that 15,000 food baskets that were supposed to go to hungry families instead went to the Houthi terrorists whom the Biden administration is defending. Massive amounts of aid have been pumped into Yemen, and the famine has only grown worse because the Houthis have used starvation as a weapon.
The only way to end the famine is to end Iran’s grip on Yemen through its Houthi terrorists. That’s obviously not what Biden or the Democrats have in mind. The loudest Democrat voices against designating the Houthis as a terrorist group have a troubling history with Iran.
“Reversing the designation is an important decision that will save lives and, combined with the appointment of a Special Envoy, offers hope that President Biden is committed to bringing the war to an end,” Senator Chris Murphy tweeted.
Murphy had been among the loudest voices against the designation.
And Murphy had met with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif last year. That same year, he had advocated lowering sanctions on Iran for “humanitarian reasons”. Biden had also joined the push to use the pandemic as a pretext for reducing sanctions on the terror state. That same year, the Left succeeded in forcing out Rep. Elliot Engel, one of the few remaining pro-Israel Democrats, and replaced him with the militantly anti-Israel Rep. Jamaal Bowman, whose election was backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her antisemitic ‘Squad’.
Engel, who had served as Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was replaced by Rep. Gregory Meeks, a strong backer of the Iran Deal. Meeks’ position was cheered by Iran Lobby groups. As far back as 2009, Meeks had declared at a hearing, “I have developed a tremendous appreciation for the work of the National Iranian American Council. I am pleased that we will hear the perspective of NIAC’s President, Mr. Trita Parsi.”
Emails released allegedly showed Parsi telling Iran’s Foreign Minister, “I am having a meeting with Gilchrest and Meeks, and they asked for our assistance in getting some communication going between the parliamentarians.” Speaking to the Islamic Republic News Agency, the official state news agency of the Islamic terrorist state, Chairman Meeks allegedly stated that he was willing to travel to Iran and had been engaged in dialogue with Iranian legislators. Meeks took the lead in attacking the designation of the Houthi Islamic terrorists as terrorists, arguing that, “No solution in Yemen will be sustainable unless the Houthis are involved.”
And that gets at the real reason why Biden and Democrats oppose the designation. It’s not about humanitarian aid, which would have kept on going anyway, only to be stolen by the Houthis. It’s about supporting Iran’s bid to take over parts of Yemen in order to control shipping and tighten the grip of the Islamic terrorist regime over the entire region. The ‘diplomatic’ solution advocated by Biden and the Democrats would finalize Iran’s grip over parts of Yemen. Designating the Houthis as terrorists would get in the way of another in a series of Islamist dirty deals with Iran that began with Obama and that will continue on under Biden.
Even while the Democrats insist loudly that the Houthis must be part of the solution in Yemen, they just as vocally cry that the Republicans must be isolated and eliminated in America. The Democrats militarized D.C. with an armed occupation and are criminalizing political dissent. They have claimed that one riot, after a year full of them by their own activist wing, requires a permanent state of emergency that will be run through the National Security Council.
The Biden administration is not only taking the Houthis, and likely other Islamic terrorist groups, off the terror list, it’s putting the domestic political opposition on its terror list. This is an extension of the same Obama policy that illegally shipped foreign cash to Iran even while it was using the NSA to spy on pro-Israel members of Congress and on the Trump campaign.
The Democrats are happy to fight terrorism by designating their domestic political opponents as terrorists while removing the “Death to America” Houthis who have kidnapped and killed Americans, who fired on the USS Mason, and ethnically cleansed Jews, from the terror list. And what do the Houthis plan to do with their newfound support from the Biden administration?
In addition to sanctioning the Houthis, the Trump administration sanctioned three of their leaders, beginning with Abdul Malik al-Houthi. The Houthi leader has made it clear that he intends to build up the same missile program that was used to attack the USS Mason.
“To have rockets that could reach far beyond Riyadh, this is a great achievement,” he said, referring to the Saudi capital. He also promised to send terrorists to fight against Israel.
“Many of Yemen’s tribesmen are ambitious to fight against Israel, and they are looking for the day to participate along with the freemen of the Islamic nation against the Israeli enemy,”
This is the terrorist group that the Biden administration and the Democrats are bailing out even while they’re criminalizing the Republican political opposition as terrorists. “Death to America” is something that the Houthis and their Democrat supporters can agree on.
We’ve reported since the election on the unreal results in Virginia on Election night. We uncovered a pattern that occurred in Virginia as well as in other states that we labeled the “Drop and Roll”:
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Then this week we found out that the drop in Virginia occurred in Fairfax County:
After some more work, we have located the Congressional Districts that include Fairfax County in their results. This is where more than 300,000 votes were recorded for Biden late that night. There were actually 5 entries – in and out and in and out and in – netting to more than 308,000 votes for Biden and only 79,000 votes for President Trump – an 80/20 ratio. This makes no sense. But here’s something interesting, according to the “official” results:
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In 2020 Fairfax County (when accounting for Biden and President Trump votes only):
VA-8 went 74/26 Biden/Trump
VA-10 went 65/35 Biden/Trump
VA-11 went 72/28 Biden/Trump
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This is the result AFTER the bulk dump of 308,000 votes that went 80/20 for Biden after the two 90/10 Biden batches were added then removed. This dump of 308,000 represented 73% of all Fairfax County votes for Biden.
In 2016 Fairfax County went as follows:
VA-8 went 68/25 Hillary/Trump
VA-10 went 56/37 Hillary/Trump
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VA-11 went 66/27 Hillary/Trump
Here are the questions that need to be answered:
** Where do these 308,000 80/20 votes come from in Fairfax that were dropped?
** How could Biden outperform Hillary by such vast margins in that particular large dump, where no district came close to 70/30 much less 80/20?
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** And VA-10 in Fairfax went from a 19 point Hillary margin in 2016 to a 29 point margin for Biden? Really?
Hillary won VA only by 5% in 2016, and only by 212,000 votes. In this one late night 80/20 vote dump in Fairfax, Biden picked up a margin of 230,000 votes, more than Hillary’s statewide margin in 2016. And in 2016, there was both a libertarian and a never-Trumper (Evan McMillan) that both pulled votes from Trump.
Surgery was also expensive, and Gita’s husband, Babukaji, a Buddhist priest, refused to pay his Christian wife’s expenses. Doctors in Singapore gave 19-year-old Suroj two days to decide whether to let his mother live in terrible pain or risk her death. He prayed, then decided it was best to do the surgery. But he didn’t know what he would tell his family if Gita died, he said.
“At that time, I felt so alone in Singapore because it was my first visit, and I had nobody to share my problems with besides talking with the Lord in prayer,” he added.
Suroj heard a knock at the door. It was a group of local church members who wanted to pray for Gita. After 20 minutes of prayer, a miracle happened, he said. Gita stood up. She kicked out with her left foot, which hadn’t moved for years. She punched out with her left arm. Suddenly, she could move. Gita started to weep and praise God, Suroj recalled.
“There was no pain and sadness, which she had before. Her face was changed into joy and happiness,” he said.
Afterward, Suroj said doctors didn’t believe Gita was the same woman. Babukaji didn’t believe his wife had been healed without surgery until he saw she had no scars. Then along with his son, Suman, he became a Christian.
Such stories happen often in Nepal, said Suroj, who’s now a 41-year-old church elder. Despite persecution and poverty, the Nepalese church has grown incredibly quickly. The South Asian country has one of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world.
To secular Westerners, it might seem impossible. But the mountains of Nepal have witnessed incredibly fast church growth in part because of miraculous healings. Suroj told CP that he became a Christian at 8 years old after God healed him from food poisoning.
“Firstly, church growth is because of miracles,” Suroj asserted. “[If] people don’t [get healed] from the hospital, they go to the church and ask for prayer from the church leaders. When the church family and church leaders pray for the sick people, they are getting healed.”
To those who see the world from a materialistic viewpoint, reports of miracles might sound impossible or far-fetched. The miraculous break nature’s laws and can’t be replicated. But that alone doesn’t disprove their existence, Wheaton College Intercultural Studies Professor Scott Moreau told CP. Not all of reality can be understood by using scientific methods.
“It’s not that science clashes with religion [when it comes to miracles],” he said. “They have completely different toolkits to get at the understructure of reality. One has testable formulae, but miracles don’t work that way.”
While miracles can’t be explained by natural laws, Moreau said they can be observed or verified.
“You can examine whether the reports of a miracle are consistent with each other,” he said.
People around the world agree that miracles exist, Moreau added. The fastest-growing Christian denominations around the world emphasize the miraculous.
Church growth in Nepal
In 1951, Nepal reported no Christians in its government census. And by 1961, that number increased to just 458. Today, the World Christian Database ranks the country as the 12th fastest-growing Christian population in the world with 1,285,200 believers, said database co-director Gina Zurlo. The real number might be higher.
“In some countries, fast growth rates of Christians are due to migration. In other countries, high birth rates may contribute more. But in Nepal, the main factor for growth is conversion from other religions,” she explained. “We estimate that Nepal is 4.25% Christian.”
Most Nepalese people today practice Hinduism, the world’s third-largest religion. The polytheistic Hindu religion values behavior and community belonging over belief. Until 2008, Nepal was a Hindu kingdom. For Hindu radicals, being Nepali means being culturally Hindu, Pastor Tanka Subedi told CP.
Subedi leads Nepal’s Family of God Church and serves as director of the International Nepal Fellowship. Although most Hindus live in peace with Christians, he said some fiercely oppose the Gospel.
“The prime minister himself says he doesn’t believe in God but is Hindu,” said Subedi. “State media and government officials [say] Christianity is coming to Nepal to destroy our culture. It’s challenging to evangelize people who have that mindset.”
The pressure and violence Christians experience from Hindus places the country at No. 34 on Open Doors USA’s global persecution watch list. Nepal is known for criminalizing actions that lead people to change their religion, International Christian Concern South Asia Regional Manager Will Stark told CP. Hindus fear Christianity because it threatens the Hindu caste system, Stark said. They believe that people get reincarnated based on what they did in their past lives. Bad people are reborn to do degrading or “unclean” jobs. They are “low caste” or “untouchable” because it’s believed that they spiritually pollute other Hindus. Hindus in higher caste positions often treat them with cruelty or contempt.
When Christians preach equality before God, Hinduism crumbles, Stark asserted.
“The Gospel tells you that all people are equal and Jesus cares about you and being your personal Savior,” he detailed. “The caste system is based on dividing out or stratifying the community. Without the bottom of the pyramid, the rest of it doesn’t really exist.”
Nepal’s anti-conversion law says that “‘any act that causes a religious conversion will be punished.” This broad wording gives police the right to punish Christians for even mentioning the name of Jesus in public, Stark noted. Hindu radicals who attack Christians also justify their actions by saying they were enforcing the law.
Bishwa Raj Pokharel, spokesman for the Nepalese National Police, claimed, “One can choose the religion they want to follow,” in a statement to the Global Press Journal in response to a January article about Christians who accused police of targeting them for their faith.
“But one cannot take advantage of a person’s situation and induce them to change their religion. The law says that you can change your religion, but you cannot change someone else’s religion.”
Persecution increasing
Government persecution has increased recently, said Subedi. In 2019, Nepalese authorities threw 73-year-old Christian Cho Yusang in jail for distributing Bibles. Two weeks in prison damaged his health so severely that he had to be admitted to a hospital.
After an orphanage closed this year, Nepalese Pastor Hari Tamang opened his home to shelter children for 10 days. In response to his generosity, police arrested him on false charges of trafficking and attempted religious conversion.
According to Open Doors USA, Christian persecution in Nepal rose during the watchdog organization’s 2020 reporting period as pressure is high for Christians “in every sphere of life.” The group reports that governing authorities in Nepal “make life difficult for followers of Christ.”
China and India both support Nepal’s government in its persecution of Christians, but for different reasons, Subedi said. India wants Nepal to remain Hindu, while China fears that Christians will support political movements to free Tibet, he explained. Despite rising persecution, Christians continue to share their faith, Subedi said, because the government can’t arrest them all.
“We come from a persecuted background. We were never free. We are used to it,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a state apparatus to use [the anti-conversion] law for mass arrests.”
People also feel eager to become Christians because of the reality of the Christian faith, Subedi added. God works visible miracles in churches and traditional healers can’t compete. Christians point to a historical Jesus in contrast to mythical Hindu gods.
“If you go deeper [into Hinduism], you find nothing. They’re just stories from different places with different gods,” the pastor contended. “When you hear about Jesus, it is solid. It is a fact. It happened in history and people can accept it. People are looking for a real God. All the Christians pray for healing and healings happen.”
Suroj stressed that Christianity also changes the lives of believers.
“When a man comes to the church and accepts Jesus, his life will be changed,” he said. “Before coming to the church, he used to take alcohol and smoke. But after coming to the church, he leaves all these things. The people who are not Christian want to come to the church and leave all the negative things in their life. People from other faiths feel excited and amazed that these things happened.”
Subedi noted that so many people become Christians in Nepal that it’s difficult for current believers to teach them all. He estimated that the church grows between 5% and 10% per year.
“The Hindu people are so scared of the Christians,” said Suroj. “They know that the Christian community is growing in very large ways. They are scared that if it happens for a few more years, in Nepal there will be no more Hindu people.”
In an increasingly connected world, many religions have spread far from their original homelands. Buddhism has gained popularity in America over the decades, and ideas from Hinduism influence popular American movies like “Star Wars” and “The Matrix.” In Asia, Christianity has grown more rapidly than ever before. But there’s a difference between the way Western people have sampled Eastern religions and the way Eastern people have believed in Christianity, according to Wheaton College Anthropology Professor Brian Howell.
“They are two really different phenomena. In the West, people are picking up Eastern religious influences in a very piecemeal fashion. They are doing it as self-expression,” he told CP. “With people finding Christianity, they are finding a community and a tradition they can connect to globally.”
Americans want some Eastern religious ideas; Nepalese people want to become Christians, Howell said.
Nepalese believers tend to gather in churches smaller than 100 people, although some churches are far larger, said Suroj. Believers in rural villages want practical teachings on how to live out their faith, while believers in cities want to know more about Christian theology.
“Giving, repentance, all these practical things, we teach in the church. We also teach the theological part of the Bible because the church believers we have in Nepal are about 60% uneducated people,” he said. “They love to learn and hear practical things.”
Church members in Nepal also help and care for each other, he said. They become family.
“The Christian people face many problems from his or her [Hindu] family and community,” Suroj added. “The church helps these Christian brothers and sisters in whatever way the church can. We are staying as one family. We help each other, we care for each other, we teach and we support each other.”
As it grows, the Nepalese church faces many difficulties, said Subedi. Poverty and persecution cause problems, but the biggest need is pastors who can help people fully understand their faith.
“This is one of the biggest challenges, to disciple people,” he said. “A lot of pastors in the villages haven’t gone to school. My organization tries to teach them at home. There is a huge need for training pastors and leaders in the villages.”
New Testament communities
In countries with heavy persecution, small churches grow faster, Moreau explained. House churches split as they grow larger and believers commit to share their faith. Small churches also resemble the New Testament Church.
“If it’s a house gathering, it tends to be more organic. If it’s in buildings, it tends to be more programmatic. The biblical evidence seems to point to the more organic method as the norm,” he said. “In the Muslim world, the organic churches have grown bigger faster simply because when a church becomes visible in the public arena it can get shut down very quickly.”
As Nepal’s church has grown in size and reputation, a small number of people have tried to join for the wrong reasons, Suroj said. Christians in Nepal have a reputation for politeness, hard work and honesty, so people become Christians in an attempt to get a job or visa.
“They think, ‘If I become a Christian, I can easily get a job,’” he said. “One family came to my church office and was asking for a Christian certificate even though they are not Christian, churchgoers or baptized. They offered money to the church and said if the church wants money, we need the baptism certificate.”
In many ways, the church in Nepal resembles the church of the New Testament.
At once hated and admired, it’s a new community that people join even at the cost of their families. It heals the sick, helps the poor and transforms sinners. People want the life the church gives, sometimes even for the wrong reasons. Despite persecution, it multiplies.
“It’s like the time of Jesus for Nepal. Believing in Jesus means you are a second-class citizen. You may be disconnected from your family,” Subedi said. “It’s a big sacrifice to follow Jesus. It was bigger in the past, but it has not changed a lot. We’re still considered second-class citizens, outcasts from many things. It costs you a lot.”
US actress Gina Carano arrives for Disney+ World Premiere of “The Mandalorian” at El Capitan theatre in Hollywood on November 13, 2019. NICK AGRO/AFP via Getty Images
“In the late 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood studios — under pressure from the right — promised they would not ‘knowingly employ a communist,’” Jonathan Chait wrote. “This blacklist eventually became notorious, especially in Hollywood, which came to lionize its victims in several films. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers.”
Chait highlighted the post from Carano that sparked accusations of anti-Semitism, which compared the current political state in the U.S. to Nazi Germany.
“The post in question, which triggered a social-media firestorm that quickly led to her firing and loss of representation, was not anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition,” Chait wrote. “The post simply argued (uncontroversially) that the Holocaust grew out of a hate campaign against Jews, which it then likened (controversially) to hatred of fellow Americans for their political views. … There is no hint anywhere in this post of sympathy for Nazis or blame for their victims.”
Chait argued that a “fairer and more liberal society” is able to separate the political views of an individual and the position of that person’s employer. The piece states that those in the entertainment industry should be able to work in the industry regardless of which political leaders they support.
The piece comes as thousands of Carano’s most diehard fans have started a petition to get Disney to rehire her for the “Star Wars” TV series, “The Mandalorian.”
Fox News reports:
A new Change.org petition started by fans calling for Lucasfilm and Disney to give Carano her part on the show back and to keep politics out of their artistic decisions going forward.
The petition states that the “firing celebrities over their political views has been happening way too often, and once again, Hollywood has struck down another conservative.”
“What she said may have been a little extreme, and I can even see why some people may have been offended, but her tweet was not made to incite violence or to express discrimination or hatred of any sort to any particular group,” the petition’s author writes. “And now, once again, a beloved actress has been fired for speaking her mind. This petition is for the executives at Disney. Please, why can’t you just leave politics out of the industry and press on? ‘The Mandalorian’ is a fantastic show, and Gina Carano’s portrayal of Cara Dune is a joy to watch. The Mandalorian wouldn’t be the same without her.”
“To the fans of ‘The Mandalorian,’ please. Speak out,” the petition concluded. “Disney needs to stop the trend of firing actors for controversial tweets, and just keep treating the fans to a great show. Rehire Gina Carano. Firing her isn’t justice.”
Mike Lawler | 15, 2021
Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Reign Has Been Devastating, And It’s Time For A Reckoning
A few weeks ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, without a hint of self-awareness, said, “Incompetent government kills people. More people died than needed to die in COVID.” Sadly, I couldn’t agree more.
While many in corporate media glorified Cuomo’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping create a cult of personality for him among Democrats across the country, an examination of his decision-making reveals that he failed New Yorkers on many fronts.
Cuomo was given near-unilateral emergency powers to tackle the pandemic, with the state legislature forfeiting all decision-making and responsibility to the governor and his team. Thus, Cuomo’s decisions and the repercussions of his actions fall squarely on his shoulders. First, and most jarring, is the revelation that the Cuomo administration’s decided to cover up the true cost of their Department of Health order on March 25 that sent COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes. That fateful order was subsequently deleted from the state’s Department of Health website in the beginning of the cover-up by the Cuomo administration.
Following that order, tens of thousands of nursing home residents lost their lives and the Cuomo administration moved into overdrive on blocking transparency efforts, shutting down inquiries at every turn, and even releasing a phony report absolving them of any responsibility. Two weeks ago, we learned in a report by New York Attorney General Tish James, a Democrat, that Cuomo’s administration hid the true cost to lives of this non-scientific order, under-counting nursing home deaths by almost 50 percent. Just this weekend, we learned the Cuomo administration intentionally hid and withheld information from federal authorities.
We need a full, thorough, and independent investigation with subpoenas to Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, the governor’s staff, and the governor himself.
It also speaks volumes that for months on end, the governor stonewalled transparency efforts by families that lost loved ones while mocking their efforts. His cruelty in this regard was on full display in January when he said “Who cares?” when asked about the death toll.
We care, governor. Those families deserve answers and justice.
Second, Cuomo’s administration forced out many of the public health experts who should have been developing New York’s vaccine plan, deciding instead to recruit expensive consulting firms. This led to an incredibly slow, ineffectual, and confusing rollout of the vaccine. My legislative office is still receiving daily calls from seniors older than 80 who simply cannot get an appointment no matter how hard they look.
While media outlets continue to sing Cuomo’s praises, the reality on the ground is that his top-down, Soviet-esque management style has hampered the efficacy and speed of the vaccine rollout, tying local health departments in knots. Every county health department in New York already has a mass vaccination plan, yet the governor refused for weeks to let them use those plans, instead of forcing them into the system created by his high-priced and high-brow consulting firms, all at taxpayers’ expense.
Third, Cuomo’s extensive lockdowns and subsequent non-scientific decisions to limit capacity in houses of worship shut down indoor dining, and restrict in-person learning (even temporarily) have hurt millions more. Setting unconstitutional caps on houses of worship was rejected by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, a case that shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. Many houses of worship, spanning all types of faiths, were already setting limits on themselves to ensure the health and safety of their worshippers. Recommending that they be shut down or capped was ludicrous, and an affront to the basic right to freedom of religion in our nation.
Another group whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by Cuomo’s insatiable desire for control is restaurant owners and restaurant workers. Shutting down indoor dining in New York City made zero sense at the time, with people being infected at less than 1.5 percent (lower than the state positivity rate) when dining indoors. Now, Cuomo has reopened dining when the infection rate has climbed significantly.
These decisions are not being made based on science, but what the governor “feels” is the right move. That is a recipe for disaster that cannot be allowed to continue. Cuomo’s actions are driven by his need for control, his ego, and his ability to legislate freely, as Democrats in the state legislature have completely abdicated all their duties as a co-equal branch of government.
Finally, it’s clear that New York students are rapidly falling behind other students around the globe. The lack of in-person interaction and learning is having devastating impacts on our children’s academic and social futures, as they are not learning the important lessons we all learned in grade school. To the governor’s credit, he didn’t outright ban in-person learning, but he certainly hasn’t been a champion for it either. Hybrid-learning programs are still leaving our kids behind, and his silence on this subject is deafening. I’d hazard a guess he’s spent more time bashing former President Trump at his press conferences than he has talked about the needs of our students.
In short, the governor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been nothing short of disastrous for the millions of New Yorkers who call the Empire State home. While CNN, MSNBC, and other major news outlets remain busy pumping up Cuomo’s ego and image to the American public, Americans need to hear that his decisions cost tens of thousands of New Yorkers their lives, hundreds of thousands of students their educational advancement, and millions of New Yorkers their livelihoods.
Mitch McConnell trying to have it both ways, by voting to acquit and then condemning Trump, is trash. But that shouldn’t be surprising, because as I’ve been saying for years, old Ditch is trash. He was trash before Trump, one of the main reasons people turned to the likes of Trump, and he’s trash now.
Trump’s mistake was thinking he could do business with him and his ilk, even to the point of putting Ditch’s wife in his administration. Giving Ditch credit for approving a bunch of judges is like giving your kid credit for not skipping school. That’s the baseline expectation of the job, and it doesn’t even consider that too many of these judges will be useless to awful anyway because of the pagan law schools from whence they came. Too many of the worst judicial bowel movements have come from GOP appointees or majority GOP-appointed SCOTUS justices. If Ditch wants to charge someone for inciting the riot on Jan. 6, he can look in the same place OJ needed to find the real killers — a mirror.
Republicans such as McConnell are modern-day Esaus, surrendering the country’s future in exchange for a corporatist kickback to grease their palms now. Disenfranchising voters election after election by not only not keeping their campaign promises, but openly betraying those voters at the same time.
I don’t believe in rioting. Otherwise I’d be rioting. But I have been warning for a while now that if there is not peaceable yet firm opposition to the spirit of the age that has taken over the Democratic Party, it will eventually devolve into other forms. People are not just going to sit quiet forever and watch their way of life being taken away. That’s the harsh lesson of history. It’s a lesson I’d like us to avoid repeating, but for that to happen, there must be a real opposition party. A real platform for people who oppose the regressive deconstruction of Western civilization to channel their principles and values within the system and into action. Unfortunately, no such vehicle exists within the nation’s capitol and hasn’t for a long time. Thus, frustration and angst have only grown out here in flyover country.
Republicans such as McConnell are the reason why. They are the enabling collaborators who have permitted the left’s “long march through the institutions” to be almost complete. They are feckless, technocratic wretches playing conventional smarmy and corrupt politics, while the spirit of the age is playing for keeps and conducting a cultural hijacking. They play trite and tacky political games, while the left plays conqueror.
Now that he’s acquitted, Trump should announce all-out war in the 2022 primary cycle, with the goal of high political body count.
Yes, Trump is his own worst enemy too often, as I’ve pointed out in specific moments. Like last year, when I spent most of it criticizing him for surrendering his presidency to the malevolent Fauci and quack Birx, which cost him re-election in my opinion — for setting into motion the very mail-in voting scheme that toppled him. That being said, any reformer or outsider you put up there — no matter how much nicer and more charming and more worldly they may be — will be treated the same way by the Swamp. Pick a name, and the process might look different given their different personalities, but the endgame is the same.
Trump ran for office on “drain the swamp” and then was done in by his failure to do so as president. Once in office, he went “art of the deal” instead and was ultimately knifed by the swamp he failed to drain but naively thought he could cut deals with. Now, finally, is the time for Trump to keep that promise, not to mention settle a personal vendetta. And I have no problem indulging Trump’s vendettas when they’re to my/our benefit.
This one most definitely would be.
Trump’s lack of restraint has led to his undoing at times, and frankly I think the odds of his acquittal were improved ironically because he’s been de-platformed from places where he could knee-jerk react. His lack of social media presence forced Democrats to make a case on the merits, without Orange Man Bad as a straw man to play off, and the case couldn’t pass muster once cross-examined.
There have been many biblical comparisons to Trump in recent years, but not the one I think fits most. Samson, also, was a towering figure who cast a large shadow, but whose lack of restraint was his undoing at times. However, his final act — plunging the pagan temple to the fish demon Dagon facedown in the dirt — ultimately justified his legacy. This great pruning of the GOP establishment could (and should) be Trump’s lasting legacy.
Grab the jawbone of an ass, Mr. President, and sweep the leg.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The University of California-San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay reported record-high numbers of suicidal children seen and treated last month. “The UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital has seen a 66% increase in the number of suicidal children in the emergency room, and a 75% increase in youth who required hospitalization for mental health services, the lawsuit said, quoting pediatricians, child psychiatrists and emergency room doctors,” USA Today reported. Doctors also saw an increase in anxiety, depression, and eating disorders among children.
The lawsuit calls for San Francisco’s public schools to reopen, saying classroom closures are “catalyzing a mental health crisis among school-aged children.” Schools have been closed for in-person learning since March.
The lawsuit filed by San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera includes “alarming testimony from hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, doctors, and parents on the emotional and mental harms of extended distance learning.”
“The medical evidence is clear that keeping public schools closed is catalyzing a mental health crisis among school-aged children in San Francisco,” Dr. Jeanne Noble, director of COVID Response for the UCSF Emergency Department, said.
One San Francisco parent said her 7-year-old son had “uncontrollable meltdowns that turn (the) whole house upside down.” Meanwhile, her 10-year-old daughter is exhibiting “depression and anger.” The mother believes her daughter’s “mental health will continue to suffer” as long as she is kept out of the classroom.
Another mother said her 15-year-old daughter cries often, is frustrated, and “losing faith not just in [San Francisco Unified School District] SFUSD but in the world.”
“Distance learning is a form of instruction; it is not school,” the lawsuit says. The suit argues that children need the emotional, social, and developmental skills that can only be learned in-person. The lawsuit says that denying students to go to school “constitutes a substantial violation of their constitutional rights.”
“SFUSD and teachers’ union leadership need to step up. Get your act together, [district] leadership has earned an F,” Herrera said. “It’s unfortunate we have to take them to court to get it sorted out, but enough is enough.”
Public health officials gave the green light for schools to reopen in September, but the district and teachers unions have not been able to reach an agreement to reopen classrooms. The San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education did have time to bar a gay parent from being appointed to the Parent Advisory Council because he was white. School officials also found time to begin a campaign to rename several San Francisco schools that are deemed “inappropriate,” including Presidents George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.
“We wholeheartedly agree that students are better served with in-person learning,” the school district’s spokeswoman, Laura Dudnick, said on Thursday. “Bringing students back to school in a large public school district is very complex and requires partnership.”
“We are eager for the city to make vaccines available to our staff,” Dudnick said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines on how schools should reopen, and the health agency declared that school reopening’s should not be conditional on having teachers and faculty vaccinated.
In July, Dr. Robert Redfield, the now-former director of the CDC, warned about the psychological damage that lockdowns and remote schooling could inflict on children.
“But there has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools,” he said. “We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID.”
The former CDC director also said in July that he would “100%” have his grandchildren go back to school.
Last month, the nation’s fifth-largest school district declared that it wants to reopen as “quickly as possible” following a rash of student suicides. Clark County School District in Nevada saw double the amount of student suicides in nine months this year compared to all of last year.
Guy Benson | @guypbenson | Posted: Feb 12, 2021
Source: AP Photo/John Minchillo
As you’ve been reading last night and today, the dam has finally broken on Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home cover-up. On one hand, it’s extremely frustrating because large media organizations that have acted as shameless boosters of the guy for the better part of a year are only now getting around to acknowledging long-available truths — now that election season is over, that is. Despite an ongoing scandal, about which we we’ve been shouting for months, Joe Biden hailed Cuomo’s leadership as a “model” for the nation during the Democratic National Convention. Many in the press played along as Cuomo went on his morally-warped book tour, helping him sell his ludicrous declaration of victory, even if some privately winced. Now that Democrats are safely in charge, with Biden settling into the presidency, the sordid reality of Cuomo’s failures can finally become ‘a thing.’ That’s very much what the timing suggests.
The stunning admission of a coverup was made by secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting…In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.” “And basically, we froze,” she told the lawmakers on the call. “Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.” DeRosa added: “That played a very large role into this.”
Their timeline is still incorrect, but here’s your loose translation: Cuomo didn’t want to give any ammunition to the critics who were accurately attacking him for his terrible decision to force thousands of COVID-positive people into nursing homes, thus creating death traps for vulnerable seniors (more on that in a moment). Cuomo wanted to deny Trump the ability to score those points, and didn’t want federal investigators to have ugly statistics to look into, so the real data was suppressed. The governor publicly touted the faked “good” numbers, pretending that New York was outperforming nearby states. New York was doing no such thing; the books were cooked, for reasons of political advantage and corruption. And the only apparent contrition is, appropriately enough, partisan in nature:
After dropping the bombshell, DeRosa asked for “a little bit of appreciation of the context” and offered what appears to be the Cuomo administration’s first apology for its handling of nursing homes amid the pandemic. But instead of a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors or the critics who say the Health Department spread COVID-19 in the care facilities with a March 25 state Health Department directive that nursing homes admit infected patients, DeRosa tried to make amends with the fellow Democrats for the political inconvenience it caused them. “So we do apologize,” she said. “I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.” Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried (D-Manhattan) immediately rejected DeRosa’s expression of remorse, according to the recording. “I don’t have enough time today to explain all the reasons why I don’t give that any credit at all,” said Gottfried, one of the lawmakers who demanded the death-toll data in August.
It’s pure politics, all the way down. And they’re so blind, they don’t realize how sociopathic this sounds — even to their fellow partisans, several of whom are quoted as blasting the “apology.” One lawmaker said it sounded like “they admitted that they were trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence that might put the administration or the [Health Department] in further trouble with the Department of Justice.” That’s exactly right. Cuomo’s aide said so. Meanwhile, the Associated Press is out with another story quadruple-confirming the cover-up that right-leaning media outlets have been flagging for months. I guess now the important people can finally decide to pay attention and profess their outrage:
The flurry of new disclosures began last month after state Attorney General Letitia James, a fellow Democrat, issued a blistering report accusing the administration of underreporting its long-term care deaths by more than 50%. That was consistent with an AP report from August that focused on the fact that New York is one of the only states that counts just those who died on nursing home property and not those who died after being transported to hospitals. Under heavy pressure to change its methodology, New York began issuing reports in recent weeks that added thousands more to its long-term care death toll since March. The new data also confirmed that COVID-19 deaths at some nursing homes are double or more what had been previously reported.
Will there be any actual accountability here? Angry quotes from some elected Democrats suggest that fissures in their coalition are opening up, as they recognize that this scandal can no longer be contained by duct tape and spin. It’s bad, and they know it. And while the Janice Dean’s of the world are at least feeling some true vindication, will there be widespread introspection within the media class for obsequious coverage like this?
And what about this? Washington Republicans were often ridiculed in the press for averting their eyes from Trump tweets and declining to comment. Any thoughts on the giant COVID-death-cover-up situation in one of America’s biggest blue states, Chuck and Nancy? Still excited about the New York “model,” Joe?
Or is Biden now part of the cover-up?
Editor’s Note: We’ve been telling the truth about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous and deadly nursing home scandal since day one.
Ann Coulter | Posted: Feb 10, 2021
Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Senate Republicans should offer to convict Donald Trump in return for Democrats agreeing to fund the wall. Trump is not going to run again anyway. In four years, he will be as viable a presidential candidate as Hillary was in 2020. You wouldn’t have guessed that, either, from all the gnashing of teeth about the MOST QUALIFIED WOMAN EVER TO SEEK THE PRESIDENCY immediately after she lost.
The reason elected Republicans, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax and a hundred talk radio hosts are terrified of supporting conviction is that they don’t want to look like Mitt Romney and incur the wrath of the Trump base (whatever remains of it).
Trading conviction for a wall solves that. It will remind Trump loyalists that he betrayed them on his central campaign promise, and also will actually fulfill that promise.
Democrats, if they have half a brain, will leap at the offer. They are about to destroy Biden’s presidency by defining themselves — as The New York Times’ Frank Bruni put it — as “antonyms to Trump.” Trump was for a wall. Ipso facto, Democrats are for open borders.
Trump was lying, liberals! Even President Obama was for border security. Great socialist hope Bernie Sanders has denounced open borders as a gift to the Koch brothers.
They don’t care. Trump supporters wanted a wall, so we’re going to punish them by throwing open the border!
If Biden continues with his tsunami of open border executive orders: 1) COVID-19 cases will multiply, as untested, unvaccinated third-worlders pour in at breakneck speed; 2) Black and Hispanic unemployment will go through the roof; and 3) crime — already reaching mind-blowing proportions — will become as potent a political issue as it has ever been.
Good luck in 2022, Democrats!
But if Democrats were to trade wall funding for the holy grail of a Trump conviction, they could save Biden’s presidency, humiliate Trump, and explain to their nut base, We know, we know — walls don’t work — but we had to trade it to convict Trump! Aren’t you happy?
It’s win-win-win all around.
Sitting on a nation-unifying idea like that, I never should have tuned into the impeachment trial. I knew the Democrats would somehow manage to turn me against conviction. I’m still not pro-Trump — that’s a tall order. But could Democrats please ease up on the hysterical weeping?
The president is not supposed to be organizing protests at all, much less against his own vice president. Isn’t that enough? You don’t need to juice up the story, Democrats.
Impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin:
“All around me, people were calling their wives and their husbands, their loved ones to say goodbye ….
“[My] kids, hiding under the desk, placing what they thought were their final texts and whispered phone calls to say their goodbyes. They thought they were going to die.”
Yes, being forced to listen to the Trump “shaman” gas on about organic food could have annihilated legions!
Trump is a selfish, ignorant child. But he is not responsible for the reactions of neurotic liberals.
It would be as if Raskin’s neighbor smashed into his parked car, then drove off. Raskin has a perfectly good case without having to wail, I WAS AFRAID HE WOULD COME TO MY HOUSE AND MURDER MY ENTIRE FAMILY!
Raskin’s most precious argument was this:
“Of all the terrible, brutal things I saw … watching someone use an American flagpole, the flag still on it, to spear and pummel one of our police officers ruthlessly, mercilessly, tortured by a pole with a flag on it that he was defending with his very life.”
First, give me a break, Democrats, pretending to give a crap about the American flag.
Second: “Tortured”?
Impeachment managers apparently used a thesaurus to write their speeches:
Siri, give me a synonym for “poke” or “strike.”
Siri: jab, punch, prod, thrust, wallop … TORTURE.
Really?
Yup, it’s right there in Roget’s!
Curiously, even the teary-eyed Raskin didn’t allege that Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by the protesters, a claim being made hourly on MSNBC.
Raskin: “People died that day. Officers ended up with head damage and brain damage. People’s eyes were gouged. One officer had a heart attack. One officer lost three fingers that day. Two officers have taken their own lives.”
Jeremy Bash, later that day on MSNBC: “They killed a cop, Nicole!”
If Officer Sicknick’s death truly resulted from injuries sustained at the hands of the mob, it would be the case in chief against the protesters. (We’re not counting heart attacks, much less suicides that occurred days, or weeks, later.) But no one in the media has been able to scare up a single eyewitness to the attack on Brian Sicknick?
Unlike defund-the-police liberals, I actually am heartbroken about the death of a Trump-supporting law enforcement officer.
But the media are lying about his death. First, they claimed he was hit on the head with a fire extinguisher. Then they said he was dragged into the crowd and beaten. All that is known for sure is that after Sicknick returned to headquarters, he collapsed and later died.
Last week, CNN nonchalantly inserted this into a story on Officer Sicknick: “Medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.”
There’s no hope for our media, who are irredeemable liars. But there’s still a chance for everyone else to come out a winner here! Trade conviction for a wall, Republicans.
HUG YOUR SUPERHERO
I’ve lost a year with my kids battling over school and I’m done.
My seven year old and I were in the midst of our usual asynchronous day battle. I had his writing homework in my hand from school. He’d written several full, well-thought-out sentences.
But he won’t do the same for me, at least not without a fight.
I told him he didn’t have to write about his best day like his teacher asked, he could write about his worst. He could write about whatever he wanted as long as he wrote a few sentences.
He said he’d get in trouble. He said he was doing a bad job in first grade. He was on the brink of tears but didn’t know why.
And it hit me.
Instead of getting frustrated and pushing the assignment, I sat down with him at his desk in his superhero bedroom.
I said “you won’t get in trouble and you can’t fail first grade. In fact, you’re kind of a superhero yourself.”
He sat up in his chair just a little and looked at me with disbelief.
I said, “Do you know that no kids in the history of kids have ever had to do what you’re doing right now? No kids in the history of kids have ever had to do school at home, sitting in their bedroom, watching their teacher on a computer. You and your friends are making history.”
A visible weight lifted from his seven year old shoulders, “What does that mean?”
I told him it means I haven’t given him nearly enough credit for rolling with the punches. I told him how proud I am of him and his friends. That kids this year are doing the impossible and they’re doing a really great job.
I apologized for not saying it sooner and more often. A little tear fell down his cheek.
We’ve thanked everyone from healthcare workers to grocery store employees but we haven’t thanked the kids enough for bearing the burden of what we’ve put on their shoulders this year.
We’ve said kids are resilient, and they are. But they are the real superheroes in this whole scenario for having ZERO say in their lives but doing their best to adjust every day.
We closed his school-issued laptop and spent the rest of the day playing. This was supposed to be temporary and here we are a year later still trying to hold our head above water.
This is our home and I won’t turn it into a battle ground anymore over something we can’t control. Something that no longer makes sense.
Hug your little superheroes today and don’t forget to cut them the slack we’ve given everyone else.
Join me in the trenches at
!!
blob:https://mewe.com/2d989ea3-61aa-415c-bf60-539c39621c0b
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
“THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION (CDC) STANDS ACCUSED OF VIOLATING FEDERAL LAW BY INFLATING CORONAVIRUS FATALITY NUMBERS, ACCORDING TO STUNNING INFORMATION OBTAINED BY NATIONAL FILE.
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CDC illegally inflated the COVID fatality number by at least 1,600 percent as the 2020 presidential election played out, according to a study published by the Public Health Initiative of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge. The study, “COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective,” was authored by Henry Ealy, Michael McEvoy, Daniel Chong, John Nowicki , Monica Sava, Sandeep Gupta, David White, James Jordan , Daniel Simon, and Paul Anderson.”
The study is 25 pages long with over 100 citations. However, the main main points can be summarized.
A major point is that testing inaccuracies and unreliability combined with unscientific procedures and methods resulted in demonstrably massive false-positive spikes:
“The CDC is now legally requiring red-blooded Americans to wear face masks on all public transportation as globalists try to push the concept of “double-masking” on the populace. Since the election, the World Health Organization admits that PCR tests are not totally reliable on the first try and a second test might be needed. This corresponds with CDC’s quiet admission that it blended viral and antibody test results for its case numbers and that people can test positive on an antibody test if they have antibodies from a family of viruses that cause the common cold. Hospitals in Florida had so many accuracy complications that Orlando Health had to admit that its 9.4 percent positivity rate got recorded at 98 percent. (READ: The TRUTH About Fauci and Gates And NIH Owning A Stake in the Vaccine).”
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There are also profound legal implications raised by the study that need to be dealt with in courts around the country if America is to ever be free again. The data you have been spoonfed by the CDC for a year raises serious legal issues. Much like the 2020 election, massive changes in rules for reporting and collecting data were instituted exclusively for Covid which resulted in a 1600% inflated number of fatalities:“The groundbreaking peer-reviewed research…asserts that the CDC willfully violated multiple federal laws including the Information Quality Act, Paperwork Reduction Act, and Administrative Procedures Act at minimum. (Publishing Journal – Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge / Public Health Policy Initiative) Most notably, the CDC illegally enacted new rules for data collection and reporting exclusively for COVID-19 that resulted in a 1,600% inflation of current COVID-19 fatality totals,” the watchdog group All Concerned Citizens declared in a statement provided to NATIONAL FILE, referring to the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge study.
“The research demonstrates that the CDC failed to apply for mandatory federal oversight and failed to open a mandatory period for public scientific comment in both instances as is required by federal law before enacting new rules for data collection and reporting. The CDC is required to be in full compliance with all federal laws even during emergency situations. The research asserts that CDC willfully compromised the accuracy and integrity of all COVID-19 case and fatality data from the onset of this crisis in order to fraudulently inflate case and fatality data,” stated All Concerned Citizens.”
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But that is not all. Other major Covid collection and reporting standards created on March 24th of 2020 that inexplicably and intentionally changed decades old practices in order to hide comorbidities and preexisting health conditions on death reports. These underlying health conditions may likely have been the actual or most important cause of death:
“On March 24th the CDC published the NVSS COVID-19 Alert No. 2 document instructing medical examiners, coroners, and physicians to deemphasize underlying causes of death, also referred to as pre-existing conditions or comorbidities, by recording them in Part II rather than Part I of death certificates as “…the underlying cause of death are expected to result in COVID-19 being the underlying cause of death more often than not.” This was a major rule change for death certificate reporting from the CDC’s 2003 Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting and Physicians’ Handbook on Medical Certification of Death, which have instructed death reporting professionals nationwide to report underlying conditions in Part I for the previous 17 years. This single change resulted in a significant inflation of COVID-19 fatalities by instructing that COVID-19 be listed in Part I of death certificates as a definitive cause of death regardless of confirmatory evidence, rather than listed in Part II as a contributor to death in the presence of pre-existing conditions, as would have been done using the 2003 guidelines. The research draws attention to this key distinction as it has led to a significant inflation in COVID fatality totals. By the researcher’s estimates, COVID-19 recorded fatalities are inflated nationwide by as much as 1600% above what they would be had the CDC used the 2003 handbooks,” stated All Concerned Citizens.
And, still, there is MORE! Last spring the CDC created covid-19-exclusive rules that violated federal law by outsourcing data collection rule development and wrote new rules to count probable cases without any definitive proof of infection. The new rules also allowed tracers to practice medicine without a license while disallowing any measures to be put in place to prevent a patient from being counted multiple times:
“Then on April 14th, the CDC adopted additional rules exclusive for COVID-19 in violation of federal law by outsourcing data collection rule development to the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), a non-profit entity, again without applying for oversight and opening opportunity for public scientific review. On April 5th the CSTE published a position paper Standardized surveillance case definition and national notification for 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) listing 5 CDC employees as subject matter experts. This key document created new rules for counting probable cases as actual cases without definitive proof of infection (section VII.A1 – pages 4 & 5), new rules for contact tracing allowing contact tracers to practice medicine without a license (section VII.A3 – page 5), and yet refused to define new rules for ensuring that the same person could not be counted multiple times as a new case (section VII.B – page 7),” stated All Concerned Citizens.
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Why would those in power wish to do such inhumane things to the entire population of America?
The National File concludes:
“By enacting these new rules exclusively for COVID-19 in violation of federal law, the research alleges that the CDC significantly inflated data that has been used by elected officials and public health officials, in conjunction with unproven projection models from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), to justify extended closures for schools, places of worship, entertainment, and small businesses leading to unprecedented emotional and economic hardships nationwide. A formal petition has been sent to the Department of Justice as well as all US Attorneys seeking an immediate grand jury investigation into these allegations,” All Concerned Citizens stated.”
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There is much more to the report, and we suggest that you read it at the link provided in the beginning of this article.
All data since last year suggest that Covid-19 hysteria is part of an orchestrated coup against Western values, nations, and laws.
At what point will the evidence and data be enough to break the spell cast on millions of Americans by the Covid Cult?
Please, bring this report to your local officials and insist that they read it and reverse the policies being implemented and ramped up across the country or America is surely dead.
(Courtesy of Jason Jimenez)
It didn’t matter the media outlet. They all loved reporting on how Biden was a “deeply devout Catholic” and that his faith is a huge factor in “shaping his politics.” Even Speaker Pelosi publicly praises Biden’s faith and willingly admits that his Catholic faith has shaped his career and public policies. An article in The New York Times stated, “President Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies.”
Interesting, isn’t it? How the media and every single big-time progressive politician have no problem mixing Biden’s faith with politics. But suppose you are a Christian who is pro-life and not in favor of the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage. In that case, the response you get from the Left is the complete opposite. How was Judge Amy Coney Barrett (also a deeply devout Catholic) treated during the Senate confirmation hearings? Senator Dianne Feinstein and her colleagues didn’t praise Judge Barrett for her faith. Instead, Senator Feinstein expressed her concern about how Judge Barrett’s faith might influence her decisions by stating, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” But if the Left is so concerned about a person’s faith interfering with their public service, why isn’t the Left disparaging Biden from talking about how his faith shapes his public policies?
The main reason? Because President Biden is as much of a progressive as he is a Catholic. He is what I refer to as a “Progressive Catholic.” Don’t believe me? Listen to what he said in his book, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, “I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic.” Biden continues, “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world, comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the culture.”
Because Judge Barrett is a conservative Catholic and not a progressive, liberal Democrats are concerned about her “dogmatic” positions embedding on her judgment. Therefore, she must be censored at all costs. However, in President Biden’s case, he gets a pass because he’ll keep on advancing progressive policies like the Equality Act (which will eviscerate religious freedoms in America), government funding of abortion, and the Green New Deal.
It’s not a question of whether President Biden has a right to express his religious beliefs. He has that right under the Constitution. It’s really about charging the media for being inconsistent by not allowing conservatives to do the same.
Let’s hope the media will admit to their intolerance and learn to be more receptive to Americans who hold conservative viewpoints.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jason Jimenez is president of Stand Strong Ministries, a faculty member at Summit Ministries, and a best-selling author who specializes in apologetics and biblical worldview training. Check out www.standstrongministries.org.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)
“It is crazy. The Biden administration has put in placed a moratorium on all deportations,” Cotton told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
“They further are proposing that they will ignore serious crimes like assault or DUI when it comes to deportations,” Cotton said, while noting reports like the one from Jackson County, Texas sheriff A.J. Louderback, who suggested to Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that illegal aliens are being allowed into the U.S. without a coronavirus test.
Under President Joe Biden’s non-deportation rules, immigrants can’t be deported if they get a DUI, commit fraud, tax crimes or assault, Fox News reported, noting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be stood down. In January, a federal judge in Texas ruled against the Biden administration’s plan to have a 100-day moratorium on most deportations.
Cotton said Biden is keeping America closed with reported travel restrictions that include requiring anyone flying domestically to successfully pass a coronavirus test first.
“Just think about that. Illegal aliens can come into our country without vaccination, without even a negative test but we may not be able to fly in our own country without a negative test.”
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) told Politifact that agents perform inspections for symptoms of COVID-19 on immigrants who cross the border and refer them to local hospitals if they are at risk. CBP also told Politifact that procedures on the coronavirus have been in place since the beginning of the pandemic. Procedures included “screening individuals for COVID-19 symptoms when they are initially processed at a facility, and continued monitoring for potential COVID-19 symptoms for as long as they remain in CBP custody,” according to a 2020 inspector general report.
“Joe Biden is keeping America closed but is keeping our borders open,” Cotton added.
Biden’s eight-year path to citizenship plan would allow all illegal immigrants living in the U.S. as of Jan. 1, 2021 to achieve temporary legal status in five years and to apply for citizenship after an additional three years.
Honduran migrants walk towards the Honduras-Guatemala border as part of their journey to the U.S. on Jan. 15, 2021 in Nueva Arcadia, Honduras. (Photo by Milo Espinoza/Getty Images)
Individuals would be expected to pay taxes and be subject to background checks during this process.
The Biden administration is not encouraging migrants to cross the southern border and has attempted to reduce expectations of mass asylum.
Carlson said that the Biden administration is “releasing thousand of foreign nationals” into American neighborhoods without making sure that they are COVID-free before doing so. He noted that people from countries with high infection rates “are being sent forth into the population as though COVID isn’t real.” This, he says, is the policy of the Biden administration.
On Friday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki “didn’t care enough to answer the question” as to whether or not this is the case. The program is a result, Carlson said, of a Biden Executive Order basically authorizing the “catch and release” of illegal immigrants. He quoted a border control worker who said definitively that they do not test immigrants before releasing them into the US. Sheriff Leon Wilmot, who works in border control, sent a message to Sen. Krysten Simena, saying “This is a particularly dangerous approach, as there is currently no protocol for testing any of these people for the Covid-19 virus.”
Wilmot also said “…Nor is there any support being offered by the federal government to house, feed, medically treat or transport these immigrants.”
Carlson said that this was basically only the tip of the iceberg with regard to the Biden administration’s plans for integrating illegal immigrants into society at large, including criminal offenders. Much of these new orders have to do with the feeling that protecting Americans against illegal immigrants is racist, and that the only reason Americans are opposed to criminals staying on the American side of the border instead of being deported is because of racism.
Carlson showed a panel of leftist journalists who intoned that concept and refused to note any additional issues with illegal immigration into the US. He quoted an ICE memo that said “Effective immediately Convictions would include: Drug based crimes, simple assault, DUI, money laundering, property crimes, fraud, tax crimes… gang tattoos.”
Former Acting Director of ICE Tom Homan
WATCH:
“Be clear what’s happening here. President Biden has declared the entire country a sanctuary jurisdiction, which means more tragedy is going to come,” Homan told “Fox & Friends.”
“Mark my words. People will die. People will be raped. People will be victimized by criminals that shouldn’t even be here. This is — it’s coming,” he continued.
Under President Joe Biden’s non-deportation rules, immigrants can’t be deported if they get a DUI, commit fraud, tax crimes or assault, Fox News reported, noting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be stood down.
In January, a federal judge in Texas ruled against the Biden administration’s plan to have a 100-day moratorium on most deportations. But Homan said Wednesday that the Biden administration is “circumventing the judge’s order” by telling ICE officers to stop arresting illegals or releasing them in to local communities.
“What kind of message does that send to the rest of the world?” Homan asked. “If you come to the country illegally, if you can get past the border patrol, don’t commit an aggravated felony, and you’re home free. You get to stay because ICE is not looking for you. It’s no longer illegal to be here illegally.”
Noting that he “started as a border patrol agent,” Homan said he “climbed the ladder to be the ICE director” and can say that the situation at the border is the result of “the most anti-law enforcement, pro-criminal policy that I could ever imagine in my worst nightmare.”
LOS EBANOS, TEXAS – SEPTEMBER 10: A U.S. Border Patrol agent gives instructions to families, mostly from Central America, who had crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico and presented themselves to agents on September 10, 2019 in Los Ebanos, Texas. Although the number of families seeking political asylum at the U.S. southern border has dropped in recent months, the number still far exceeds historic averages during summer months. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Homan said the non-deportation order “is sending a message to the rest of the world” and as a result “the border is surging.” He claimed the Biden administration is creating another crisis at the border but “they fail to mention the surge at the border is of their own making because of their promises and enticements — that’s why there’s a surge at the border.”
Biden’s eight-year path to citizenship plan would allow all illegal immigrants living in the U.S. as of Jan. 1, 2021 to achieve temporary legal status in five years and to apply for citizenship after an additional three years. Individuals would be expected to pay taxes and be subject to background checks during this process. The Biden administration is not encouraging migrants to cross the southern border and has attempted to reduce expectations of mass asylum.
The video was clearly intended to convince members of Congress that Trump did in fact stoke violence and incite an insurrection as has been laid out in impeachment charges filed against him. But in order to make that case more emphatically, impeachment managers conveniently excluded key portions of Trump’s speech, including one during which he asked followers to “peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.”
Shortly after the video was played and began streaming across the internet, Right Side Broadcasting Network, a media organization supportive of Trump, and others, pointed out the misleading edits.
Donald Trump Jr. posted a video on Twitter of a Newsmax interview during which Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin (N.Y.) also criticized the deceptive editing.
“If they’re going to start playing the video of what the president said, how do you cut it out at the point where the president’s telling his supporters to [protest] peacefully and patriotically?” asked Zeldin.
Left-leaning outlet, Newsweek, published a fact-check on the claims that the video was “edited to remove Trump’s call for peace before the riot” and determined the claim was true.
“According to a transcript of the speech and footage of it in its entirety, Trump did make the statement on January 6,” the Newsweek report stated. “The video played at Trump’s trial Tuesday showed the violence that occurred at the Capitol but does not include that part of his speech.”
“The montage presented by [lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)] shows the tens of thousands of Trump supporters at the Ellipse as he echoed unsubstantiated claims of a stolen election. It then cuts to rioters marching to and storming the Capitol before the conclusion of the speech, then returns to a later portion of Trump’s remarks,” it added.
In response, former Republican congressman, Jason Chaffetz, suggested that the video may have violated a House of Representatives rule that bars images, videos, or audio files presented in the chamber from being “manipulated with the intent to mislead the public.”
“Go to page 34 of House Rules. Did the manipulated video violate the House Rules?” Chaffetz tweeted Tuesday afternoon. The rules state:
The Committee on Ethics is directed to report to the House, not later than December 31, 2021, any recommended amendments to the Code of Official Conduct, as well as any accompanying regulations, intended to address the circumstances and instances, if any, for which a Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House may be subject to discipline for the dissemination by electronic means, including by social media, of any image, video, or audio file that has been distorted or manipulated with the intent to mislead the public.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Several months ago, I wrote an op-ed about how concerned I was for the state of the Church in America if persecution were to reach our shores. Unfortunately, that time may be upon us. I spent over a decade after 9-11 as a US government contractor building community-based programs that would detect and deter Islamic radicals. We used words like “violent extremists” instead of “Islamic” to distinguish between peaceful Muslims and those who used religion to justify violence. “Words matter” was a fundamental US policy because we took pride in protecting religious liberty and the freedom to express unpopular beliefs.
However, since the US Capitol attack, many of our elected officials are unwilling to apply those same principles to conservative Christians. Though a tiny group of anarchists perpetrated the violence, we hear the entire conservative movement described as violent radicals who must be identified, marginalized, and even subject to criminal penalties. It is very alarming to hear Congressional representatives talk about their fellow Americans with such disdain and intolerance. Vilification of millions of Americans who passionately defend the rights of the unborn, Biblical gender roles, and the Christian ideals that are the cornerstone of our constitution can have far-reaching consequences.
Our beliefs are not inherently violent or intolerant. We do not seek to impose our values through violence as the Islamic terrorists explicitly advocate. Yet some in the media and government are equating the two as if we are the new “enemy of the state.” What will be the response of our Christian leaders and the Church at large to such a gross mischaracterization? Do we have the internal fortitude and courage to defend our ideals even if we become social outcasts or suffer physical consequences?
God says in the Book of Revelation, “Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown.” He teaches us that we must be bold during such times, whatever the cost, and never fear the consequences that men can bring. Paul the Apostle knew this principle all too well. He experienced physical torture, ridicule, and even gave up his own life for one reason – his unwavering devotion to spreading the Gospel. Salvation occurs at the moment we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, but that is not the only goal of our redemption. We are called to preach the Gospel so that the whole world can be redeemed and placed perfectly whole at the throne of God. The fact that we get to experience sanctification and the joy that comes from a relationship with Christ is a welcomed byproduct; but, we cannot forget the great commission to reconcile the whole world unto Him, regardless of the personal cost.
After a year of being locked in our homes for fear of a pandemic, having our kids suffering immeasurable harm from being out of school and without meaningful social interaction, people need the grace and peace that can only come from being in a relationship with Jesus Christ. Now more than ever, our society needs Christians to provide a way out of the turmoil of personal circumstances. The power of redemption does not rely on who is president or what society says is acceptable but is based on God’s infallible word found in the Bible, going forth from the church. It is the only unwavering source of peace in what would otherwise be a chaotic world. Regardless of how they want to characterize us as extremists or radicals, we know the true power of Jesus Christ to redeem, restore and transform the lives of all who accept Him. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:16
ABOUT THE COMMENTATOR:
Hedieh Mirahmadi was a devout Muslim for two decades working in the field of national security before she experienced the redemptive power of Jesus Christ and has a new passion for sharing the Gospel. She dedicates herself full-time to Resurrect Ministry, an online resource that harnesses the power of the Internet to make salvation through Christ available to people of all nations.
New research has revealed what doctors critical of transgender medicine have been saying for years, that puberty-suppressing drugs given to gender dysphoric youth stunt their bone growth.
Published in PLOS One last week, the study, “Short-term outcomes of pubertal suppression in a selected cohort of 12 to 15 year old young people with persistent gender dysphoria in the UK,” found that puberty blockers do not alleviate psychological distress regarding one’s gender by any measurable benefit. The study does claim, however, that the overall experience of the patients on the blockers was “positive.” The study followed a cohort of 44 children who had undergone the experimental treatment in the United Kingdom’s lone gender clinic with the National Health Service.
When the children completed chemical puberty blockade at age 16, the researchers found “reduced growth” in both height and bone strength. Additional research is necessary to say whether the weakened bones are irreversible, researchers said.
“In both cases (height and bone strength) there was some growth but less than would be expected during those years without hormonal suppression,” states the paper, which was published nine years after the research began.
Amid increasing visibility of gender identity policies and legislation, transgender activists and others have often asserted that such drugs are a mere “pause button” to allow children more time to decide whether to proceed with a full medicalized gender-transition, which includes cross-sex hormones and various cosmetic surgeries to appear more as the opposite sex.
Of the 44 children that the latest study followed, 43 went on to take cross-sex hormones.
Dr. Michael Biggs of Oxford University, who has criticized the study’s methodology, said he found it “striking” that the youth who were tracked experienced no improvement in gender dysphoria.
“We would have expected a large positive placebo response, as these kids and their parents were desperate to get the drugs,” he said, as was reported in the UK Times.
In 2019, California endocrinologist Dr. Michael Laidlaw detailed in a Heritage Foundation panel the harms of gender identity medicine that Biggs had previously discovered through a freedom of information request. Biggs found that at the Tavistock gender clinic — which a U.K. high court ruled against in a recent judicial review — children that were treated at the facility reported greater self-harm with these particular medications, and girls exhibited greater emotional problems and dissatisfaction with their bodies.
In a Feb. 3 comment on the study on the PLOS One site, Biggs explained that “it is hard to square this finding with the authors’ claim that ‘pubertal suppression may be both a treatment in its own right and also an intermediate step in a longer treatment pathway.’”
“Considered as a treatment in its own right, the suppression of puberty with GnRHa might be the only treatment provided by the NHS for which there is no objective evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks — as the authors themselves admitted in their statistical plan. The only justification for puberty suppression is to prepare a child for lifelong medicalization with cross-sex hormones and surgeries, with irreversible consequences for sexuality and fertility.”
Still, the Tavistock director, Dr. Polly Carmichael, who was part of the study, maintains that the research shows that “patient experience on the blocker is positive overall and there were no unexpected adverse events, but that more research is needed around this complex issue.”
The study’s acknowledgment of reduced bone strength dovetails with what doctors critical of the medicalization of gender have been saying for years about treating psychologically distressed youth with untested hormonal agents, children who are otherwise physically healthy.
In a 2018 interview about Lupron — a drug that is approved for and is routinely used to treat prostate cancer in men and endometriosis in women but is now being used to treat gender dysphoria in children despite lack of FDA approval for that purpose — Dr. Quentin Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist from Atlanta, told The Christian Post of the numerous repercussions of using high-powered drugs to suppress normal puberty.
Unlike when a hormone blocker is administered to a child who is dealing with precocious puberty, another medical condition for which the drug has been formally approved, “when you give puberty blockers to a pubertal-aged child, what you’re doing is sideswiping them out of the physiological development that puberty is intended to create and facilitate,” Van Meter explained at the time.
“You are taking calcium out of the bones of girls which cannot be introduced later; you’re putting them at risk for osteoporosis. On top of that, you’re taking the ovaries and testicles, which have not yet started to mature to the stage of fertility, and you’re cutting them off at the knees, essentially making them sterile,” he said.
“Higher wages would increase the cost to employers of producing goods and services,” the report said.
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“Employers would pass some of those increased costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices, and those higher prices, in turn, would lead consumers to purchase fewer goods and services. Employers would consequently produce fewer goods and services, and as a result, they would tend to reduce their employment of workers at all wage levels.”
One of the reasons Democrats have been pushing for a higher minimum wage is because they argue that the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is not enough to live off of.
There are three problems with applying this argument in order to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
First, most minimum wage jobs were not meant to be full-time careers. On the contrary, their purpose was often to create opportunities for younger people to get into the workforce before they start a full-time career.My parents, myself and many of my friends started minimum wage jobs in our teenage years in order to get work experience. While working those jobs, I received an education in an effort to one day start a full-time career.
Some people do attempt to live off of minimum wage jobs, which is fine. But the idea that minimum wage jobs must be enough to comfortably live off of was never a rule, but rather a talking point for the left.
Second, increasing the minimum wage to $15 will cost 1.4 million jobs. Part of the reason for that is the fact that $15 is almost double the current amount.
If the Biden administration were to propose increasing the minimum wage to $9 or $10, that would be more practical. Yet even at the current rate, it’s likely that those 1.4 million people would rather make $7.25 an hour than none at all.
Lastly, the report said that raising the minimum wage would encourage companies to begin “accelerating investments in automation and machine labor.” The premise here is pretty simple. If the minimum wage gets too high, it will eventually be cheaper for companies to invest in machines that can do everyday tasks that humans once did. The fast-food industry, one of the main minimum wage job providers, has already begun this process with electronic ordering kiosks that require no interaction with employees.
Again, this results in minimum wage employees losing more jobs. In an attempt to try and help minimum wage workers, Biden’s policy would instead send many to unemployment lines.
In addition to the job losses, raising the minimum wage to $15 would cost the U.S. a whole lot of money.
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“The incremental wage hike would also contribute an additional $54 billion to the federal deficit because of anticipated increases in the costs of goods and services and increased spending on unemployment insurance,” the Washington Examiner said.
Instead of addressing that problem, progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders decided to just dismiss it altogether.
“I find it hard to understand how the CBO concluded that raising the minimum wage would increase the deficit by $54 billion,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Two years ago, CBO concluded that a $15 minimum wage would increase the deficit by less than $1 million over ten years.”
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Never mind the fact that the CBO is non-partisan or that Sanders has no counter-evidence. He just doesn’t believe it. In fact, he went so far as to argue that the CBO’s report was a win for Democrats because it showed evidence that they could raise the minimum wage via budget reconciliation rules.
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“The CBO has demonstrated that increasing the minimum wage would have a direct and substantial impact on the federal budget,” he tweeted.
“What that means is that we can clearly raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour under the rules of budget reconciliation.”
It apparently does not matter to him that the direct impact is a negative one, only that it gives progressives a right to pass the measure using budget reconciliation. For people that claim to care so much about others’ well-being, the left is showing a blatant disregard for the livelihoods of 1.4 million Americans.
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This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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“As a matter of fact, if you look at the words that I used, the strongest thing I said was tell them they’re not welcome. ‘Talk to them. Tell them they’re not welcome.’ I didn’t say, ‘Go and fight.’ I didn’t say anybody was going to have any violence. And so they can’t make that stick.”
WATCH:
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Maxine Waters is a liar and we have the video of her calling for harassment and violence against Trump officials. In June 2018, Maxine Waters told a crowd of supporters in Los Angeles to confront and harass Trump officials if they were seen out in public.
“If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said.
WATCH:
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The liars at PolitiFact jumped in to protect Maxine Waters and laughably claimed she never said Trump supporters are “not welcome here.” Maxine Waters literally said those words, but when have facts ever mattered to Marxists?
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Joe Biden killed tens of thousands of jobs his first day in office when he canceled contracts with the Keystone XL pipeline. Biden said there will be high paying “green” jobs available to energy workers and ‘Special Climate Envoy’ John Kerry told the out-of-work oil workers to “go make solar panels.”
Peter Doocy asked Psaki, “When do they get their green jobs?”
Psaki was clearly irritated by the questions.
WATCH:
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Doocy wouldn’t back down and pointed out that tens of thousands of people are out of jobs who need money now to support their families.
“But there are people living paycheck to paycheck. There are now people out of jobs…It’s been 12 days since Gina McCarthy and John Kerry were here. It’s been 19 days since that EO, so what do those people who need money now — when do they get their green jobs?”
Psaki’s response? Joe Biden has a plan to roll out a plan about his plan.
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“[Biden] has every plan to share more about his details of that plan in the weeks ahead,” Psaki said.
WATCH:
“What President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels,” Kerry said.
But before anyone says that “they can make solar panels” is the new “learn to code”, just hold your fire for a bit. These really can be union paid jobs, and this is a growth industry, unlike fossil fuels, which for now is the most hated industry in Congress and among the World Economic Forum jet set.
Solar jobs are manufacturing jobs that don’t require STEM degrees from Stanford and MIT, unlike computer science. I will never learn to code and make a blockchain platform or build the new hologram phone. I can barely get my laptop’s fan to stop spinning and making noise. But I bet I can learn to run the machines that make solar cells and modules.
However, the key word here is “make”. In fact, it is the only word that matters.
If Kerry wants laid off Keystone workers to “make” solar panels then the Administration that he works for will have to do something about protecting the American market from a flood of Chinese solar panels.
China: Let Us Be Your Green OPEC
Of the top 10 solar panel manufacturers in the world, 8 are Chinese. The only big U.S. player is Ohio-based First Solar FSLR +1.5%. They make the solar cells and modules that are turned into the solar panels you see in the southwest desert, on California hilltops and, increasingly, on American rooftops.
South Korea’s Hanwha Q-Cells manufactures here. As does Chinese firm Jinko Solar, now manufacturing in Jacksonville, Florida. They set up shop primarily due to anti-dumping and countervailing duties imposed on solar panels during the bygone Trump era. That helped Q-Cells and First Solar gain market here. Otherwise, it’s all China imports. And if it is all China imports, then the only jobs on offer will be installer gigs, and the usual white collar professional services jobs of project planners, sales and engineering consultants.
If the U.S. is going to do what the solar importers want – all of them Chinese – then it’s mainly a job for people drilling solar panels into roofs, or washing them with Windex. (That’s a joke.)
China is ramping up its solar manufacturing capacity.
An employee works in a factory of solar panel and parts in Jiujiangu in central China’s Jiangxi … [+]
BARCROFT MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES
“The recent wave of investment and capacity expansion announcements by China’s largest solar manufacturers threatens the (U.S. solar) recovery with massive overcapacity that will drive producers out of the business, and establish Chinese domination of the entire solar power manufacturing supply chain,” says Jeff Ferry, chief economist with the Coalition for a Prosperous America in a report published on January 28.
China’s big solar multinationals, like Jinko and JA Solar, have announced new expansion projects throughout southeast Asia as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s industrial strategy to dominate key Western supply chains.
The U.S. and European Union have been telling Chinese leadership that they are terrified of ice melt and super storms, and China has responded by saying “let us be your green OPEC.” As a result, China is now key in EV battery supply chains (it controls a lot of the mined materials that go into making battery cells); dominates solar supply chains; and is replacing Europe as the go-to place for wind turbines.
Many of the European brands like Vestas now manufacture in China, though for now that is supposedly staying in China.
Solar industry publication PV Tech called the scale of China’s solar expansions “jaw-dropping.” In 2020, China had the capabilities to produce 90 gigawatts of solar panel power. This year, they will have 180 gigawatts of installed capacity. To put that into perspective, Brazil’s Itaipu dam, the second largest hydroelectric dam in the world, and one that powers more than half of the country, has the capacity to generate 14 gigawatts of electricity. China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, has the capacity to generate 22.5 GW. So China’s installed capacity for solar is equal to making the equivalent of 8 Three Gorges Dams if they were to manufacture to their full capabilities.
Massachusetts based 1366 Technologies is building new solar technologies. To grow the solar … [+]
CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Last year, the U.S. had 12.2 GW of installed capacity, led by First Solar and Q-Cells. This year that is expected to increase to 14.7 GW. We make baby steps. China makes Super Mario triple jumps.
U.S. solar makers have been growing steadily in the last two years thanks to the 2018 Section 201 tariffs that were imposed to restrain solar module imports worldwide, not just from China. There are roughly a dozen smaller firms bringing U.S. innovation to solar again, and that has helped increase capacity by another 5 GW. What usually happens is the innovation happens here and then it is brought to scale in Asia to lower the price. China then commodifies it, and the sector becomes dominated by service providers.
Many U.S. producers are aiming to expand production. But all of that will be upended if China floods the market in hopes to capitalize on Biden’s climate change policies. More demand here is good for China because U.S. firms — at the moment — cannot meet that demand. They could invest in meeting that demand, creating more blue collar jobs, maybe even union jobs, the kind that were lost at Keystone.
The Section 201 tariffs, soon to be dropped to 18%, may not be enough to protect the U.S. suppliers who will easily be outpriced by anything Made in China or southeast Asia. If that happens, the climate friendly “Build Back Better” Biden Administration will face a decision on whether to build their solar future here, or import it and create jobs in China and Malaysia and Vietnam.
A growing bipartisan consensus has emerged on China, and that can be seen even in the segue from Trump to Biden.
Both parties now recognize the U.S. has to address the risk China poses to U.S. economic and national security. Congress and the Trump administration made progress over the past four years in setting the table to correct the profound imbalances in the U.S.-China relationship, Florida Senator Marco Rubio says in a recent Washington Post op-ed.
“The choice facing Biden is simple: support American workers and our national security, or side with Wall Street and the CCP,” Rubio writes.
During the Senate hearings of key Biden cabinet picks, Janet Yellen, Anthony Blinken, Pete Buttigieg and Gina Raimondo all cited climate change as a key part of their mandate in their new roles. China was also talked about, along with domestic manufacturing.
Solar is on the rise in the U.S. But it will be all Made in China unless Washington comes up with something that says – if you want to put solar panels on your house, you can buy them from anywhere. But if you’re the governor of a state that wants to put solar panels on state land to generate electricity, then everything from the polysilicon to the finished product should be made here. If that does not happen, then no, the Keystone Pipeline workers will not be getting jobs making solar panels.
What Did You Say? 
Written
on February 19, 2021