PODCAST: Outbreak In the Early Warning Hours

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Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) doesn’t have a medical degree. But what he has, he jokes, are two eyes. And while the rest of the city was too spun up over impeachment to see straight, his sights were 7,500 miles away — on a doomsday he worried was coming. Donald Trump, he tried to tell Congress, isn’t the threat. China is.

While the rest of the Senate plowed through hours of absurd testimony, Senator Cotton was convinced they were missing “the biggest and most important story in the world.” The outbreak, he warned, would be catastrophic — a message he left his chair to deliver to the White House personally. By January 22, he was sounding the alarm at HHS. “While others slept,” John McCormack writes, “Tom Cotton was warning anyone who would listen that the coronavirus was coming for America.”

Now, while Democrats whine and complain about the president’s handling of the pandemic, a lot of people — Cotton included — know they’re just as much to blame as anyone. “It came up,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointed out earlier this week, “while we were tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government because everything every day was all about impeachment.”

While Congress may have been distracted, thank goodness the president wasn’t. For hours at a time, Senator Cotton told us on “Washington Watch,” he would sit with the White House team and explain what he was seeing in China and the severity of the outbreak. “I discussed that with some of my Senate colleagues [at the time], and they seemed interested. But frankly, they [were focused] on what Adam Schiff was saying [or what] the president’s lawyers were saying. So there’s no doubt the partisan impeachment of the president did distract attention away from the ordinary business of the Senate. And the ordinary business would have been addressing a growing crisis in China… But all of Washington was obsessed.”

So what was it that made Senator Cotton so unnerved about the situation in China before anyone else noticed? It wasn’t classified information, he explained. Or any sort of infection expertise. It was “common sense.” “Just this weekend,” he pointed out, “China shut down all of its movie theaters again in their entire country after having opened them up a week ago.” Does that sound like a country that feels confident it’s conquered the virus? “This is the exact same reason why I knew in January how serious [things] were, because China was saying it had everything under control. [Meanwhile,] they were locking up 100 million people and shutting down schools nationwide. So the propaganda from the Chinese Community Party — contrasted with their actions — tells you that China is, of course, still lying to this day.”

It’s a wake-up call to the planet of just how untrustworthy the Chinese Communist Party is. (A fact that new intelligence has now confirmed.) And yet, Senator Cotton is heartened — as we all are — that the president took action anyway. “I’ve got to say, many of these public health bureaucrats… [and organizations like] the World Health Organization gave very bad advice about travel restrictions… Their concerns seem quaint these days… [But] the president, to his credit made that decision, even though it wasn’t very popular at the time.” Democrats like Joe Biden kicked and screamed, calling it “hysterical xenophobia.” The situation, even the Washington Post admits, would have been a lot worse if liberals had gotten their way.

“Nearly four years of irrational Trump hatred has brought us to the point where any action he takes is subject to criticism…” Henry Olson laments. “Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t… No European leader stockpiled COVID-19 tests or ordered ventilators and masks in preparation for the worst… The rational [person] sees these facts and notes that it is extraordinarily difficult for politicians to foresee an event unpredicted in modern times. But Trump-phobia, of which impeachment was only the most obvious symptom, prevents too many from seeing the obvious now. This must end if we are to get through the present crisis.”

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action podcast with column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

A Virus Worse Than the One from Wuhan

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Socialism is an intellectual virus, and it’s more deadly than the one from Wuhan.

The Wuhan virus pandemic may teach us many new lessons before it’s over—in science, hygiene, interpersonal relations, economics, and more—but one thing is plainly evident already. Socialists need to self-isolate.

They are learning nothing from the crisis. Indeed, these righteous opponents of exploitation are exploiting it to promote their stale, toxic brew of concentrated state power as the solution to every problem—even when the state itself is complicit in the problem’s severity.

For example: “In pandemics, we are all socialists,” declares Ross Barkan in City and State magazine. Sorry, Ross, but you don’t speak for me. I’m not about to shun one virus and embrace an even worse one. Barkan thinks profit is the problem in health care and if we just turn the whole thing over to the federal government, we can eliminate profit and all get better health care for “free.”

But wait, there’s more! Just when you thought a virus calls for maybe medication or face masks, doctor-wannabe Barkan says it cries out for “rent stabilization available to anyone” and government ownership of utilities. That’s right. Illness in the land? Seize the power company!

Former bartender, now expert-on-everything Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declares that measures to combat the virus must include “making moves on paid leave, debt relief, waiving work req’s (requirements), guaranteeing healthcare, UBI (Universal Basic Income), detention relief,” etc. You’d think the federal government must be stricken with a bad case of a budget surplus and disappearing debt.

The amazingly accomplished problem-fixer Bernie Sanders took time out from selfless public service to claim that the pandemic is proof we have too many competing insurance companies. (Do you follow that?) Replace them, he says, with just one big one in Washington that dispenses Medicare for All. He freely admits he neither knows nor cares how many tens of trillions of dollars that might cost. Coincidentally, that’s precisely the same attitude my rat terriers take regarding their vet bills.

Boasting a resume no more complicated than “social activist,” Alexis Isabel shamelessly pronounces over her avocado toast that “this pandemic is showing how the US has failed by promoting individualism instead of collectivism.” Somebody please inform her that the virus originated in one-party, collectivist China, whose regime lied about it and jailed individual dissidents who tried to warn us about it.

Yes, these reactions to the pandemic confirm my worst fears about socialists. They are quacks, snake-oil salesmen, con men, shysters. While others are pouring out their hearts and treasures to actually help suffering people and solve a calamity, these pontificating mountebanks are proposing remedies akin to medieval blood-letting.

To socialists, I say: Here’s the kind of emergency in which you can shine. No need to wait for government action. In this panic environment, you can show the way! All you have to do is get your virus-free comrades together, sell your possessions and share the proceeds communally. If this form of “brotherhood” ever had a chance of success, surely it’s now. In a disaster scenario, people are willing to give just about anything a whirl.

Once you’ve assembled, then you can tax each other to your heart’s content. You can impose regulations on yourselves, the more the merrier. If you catch anybody getting rich by creating wealth for somebody without permission, you can vilify and expel them. You can even write personal checks to the government; indeed, send them everything you’ve got, if you want. The country will marvel at the example you’ll set.

Nothing prevents socialists from doing any of these things by voluntary agreement amongst themselves. That’s one of the great advantages of capitalism: You and your willing friends can practice socialism if you so desire, whereas a great disadvantage of socialism is that you can’t practice capitalism until socialism fails so miserably that even its sycophants throw in the towel.

But a safe bet is that in a world of some eight billion people, not a single socialist will make the slightest attempt to do any of these things. The whole idea of socialism—which explains the inherent hypocrisy of its advocates—is not to freely practice what you preach. It’s to use power to force others to practice what you preach.

No doubt that extraordinary moments require extraordinary responses, even from government. A case can be made that at least some measures to combat an invasive virus is a matter of national defense, the most legitimate purpose of government and the one that socialists are usually the most reluctant to support. The point of this article is not to offer all the right answers even if I knew what they were, but rather, to warn us all not to lose our heads, or inflate the capabilities of the state, or welcome a heap of new problems by drawing the wrong conclusions and imposing non-sequiturs as long-term policy.

In a powerful commentary in the March 20 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel puts it bluntly:

Here’s the lesson of the virus so far: Relying solely on government bureaucracy is insane. To the extent America is weathering this moment, it is in enormous part thanks to the strength, ingenuity and flexibility of our thriving, competitive capitalist players.

“Drug companies,” notes Strassel, “will save lives, even as Bernie Sanders is denouncing them.”

If the pandemic truly argues for a short-term boost in government spending, let’s remember that near-record peacetime deficits in a booming economy (mostly for stuff socialists favor and demand more of) put us in a terrible financial position to afford new spending. For its fiscal insanity, the federal government deserves not more power, money, and cult-like worship but the harshest calumny for its hopeless mismanagement.

Before we embrace more government to bail out a sinking private sector, let’s pause and appreciate that it’s the private sector—even in a crisis—that bails out the government sector every day of the week. Where would government be if there wasn’t a private sector to pay its taxes and buy its burgeoning debt? How much could it spend if private people and businesses didn’t earn it in the first place?

We should be naturally suspicious of any ideology that requires a deadly, worldwide pandemic to make its case superficially viable, if only for the short-term. Surely, the need to stuff the statist genie back in the bottle when this is over will be existentially urgent, or the long-term cost to our liberties and economy could outweigh any short-term victories against the virus. Yet, the collectivists are telling us that they want pandemic-like behavior from government now and forever, crisis or no crisis.

In the 14th Century, the Black Death wiped out about a third of the European population. In those superstitious times, governments responded in many counterproductive ways. But fortunately, the world did not descend into a permanent Dark Age. Centers of power and coercion actually began to break down as early as the Renaissance of the 15th Century, followed by the Reformation of the 16th and the Enlightenment of the 18th. The world was unimaginably freer in the 19th than it ever was before, and more prosperous by many orders of magnitude because of it. Socialism could have institutionalized the misery of the Black Death but fortunately the world was smart enough to move in other directions.

Socialism is an intellectual virus, and it’s more deadly than the one from Wuhan. There are hordes of Venezuelans, Cubans, North Koreans and former East-bloc citizens who attest to that. If anyone needs a short refresher course on the topic, here’s a list of recent articles that raise questions about government’s role in the present emergency instead of blindly endorsing its dubious and massive expansion:

COLUMN BY

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Ambassador for Global Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also author of Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

White House Projects 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. Deaths From COVID-19

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Even if Americans follow mitigation guidelines, the United States could see 100,000 to 200,000 deaths as a result of the coronavirus, according to projections explained by health officials Tuesday evening at the White House.

“This is going to be a very, very painful two weeks,” President Donald Trump told reporters of the days to come.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had mentioned before the possibility of more than 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

But the number now is the government’s formal projections.

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, explained the numbers in a slide show, noting pronounced increases in the states of New York and New Jersey.

“It’s a projection based on using what’s in Italy and then looking at all the [computer] models,” Birx said, adding:

As you saw on that slide, that was our real number, 100,000 to 200,000 [deaths]. We really believe and hope every day we can do a lot better than that [by saving lives], because that’s not assuming 100% of every American does everything they are supposed to be doing. But I think that’s possible.

Trump announced Sunday that the administration was extending social distancing and related government guidelines to “slow the spread” until April 30.

The computer models suggest the number of deaths will peak over the next two weeks, then begin to slowly decline. But deaths will continue into June.

“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” Trump said, adding:

We’re going to go through a very tough two weeks. And then hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting, after having studied it so hard, you’re going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel. But, this is going to be a very, very painful two weeks.

“They’re shocking numbers,” the president later said. “Even at the low end, they’re shocking.”

Trump explained that he wanted to be positive.

“It’s easy to be negative,” he said. “I’m a cheerleader for this country.”

The president noted models showing that if officials took no mitigation actions, COVID-19 would have killed 2.2 million Americans.

Asked later if it is likely the United States will have 100,000 coronavirus deaths, Fauci said, “The answer is yes.”

“As sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it,” Fauci said. “Is it going to be that much? I hope not, and I think the more we push on the mitigation, the less likelihood it would be that number. But to be realistic, we need to prepare ourselves that that is a possibility.”

Fauci also explained that COVID-19 deaths will continue to occur into June.

“Deaths always lag,” he said. “So you will be seeing deaths at a time when, as an epidemic, we are doing really, really well. Because the deaths will lag.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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1 Million Americans Tested for Coronavirus; Rate Now 100,000 Per Day

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A total of 1 million tests for the coronavirus now have been administered, President Donald Trump announced Monday evening during a Rose Garden press conference.

On a table outside the White House, Trump demonstrated two COVID-19 tests that can be completed within five to 15 minutes.

“Today we reached a historic milestone in our war against the coronavirus. Over 1 million Americans have now been tested, more than any other country by far. Not even close, and tested accurately,” Trump said.

The news comes a day after Trump announced that social distancing and sanitary guidelines that originally were set to lapse today would be extended until April 30 and that the government expects U.S. deaths from the contagious disease to peak in two weeks before declining.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

“By very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives,” Trump said Monday. “Our future is in our own hands, and the choices and sacrifices we make will determine the fate of this virus and, really, the fate of our victory.”

“We will have a great victory,” he added. “We have no other choice. Every one of us has a role to play in winning this war.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. has 140,904 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 2,405 total deaths.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar thanked the “many American companies, entrepreneurs, and scientists” who made the boost in testing possible.

“We are now testing nearly 100,000 samples a day, also a level that no other country has reached,” Azar said.

Trump asked several corporate CEOs to speak, including from Honeywell International Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and MyPillow.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said his company has deployed 75% of its employees to produce cotton face masks.

Lindell went on to read remarks that he said he wrote “off the cuff,” lauding Trump’s leadership and calling for the country to use this time of crisis to return to God.

“God had been taken out of our schools and lives. A nation had turned its back on God,” Lindell said. “I encourage you, use this time at home to get back in the word. Read our Bibles and spend time with our families.”

During the press conference, Trump chose to duel with a longtime antagonist, CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta.

“What do you say to Americans who are upset with you over the way you downplayed this crisis over the last couple of months?” Acosta asked, then read a series of Trump quotes from February and early March suggesting that the coronavirus was under control.

Trump said the statements were true and that Acosta was trying to cause panic.

“It will go away. I do want them to stay calm. If you look at those individual statements, they’re all true. Stay calm,” Trump said. “It will go away. You know it is going away. It will go away and we are going to have a great victory.”

Trump continued:

It’s people like you and CNN that say things like that, it’s why people just don’t want to listen to CNN. You could ask a normal question. The statements I made are that I want to keep the country calm. I don’t want panic in the country. I could cause panic, much better than even you. It would make you look like a minor league player.

But you know what, I don’t want to do that. I want to have our country be calm and strong and fight and win. And it will go away. And it is incredible the job that all of these people … are doing. I am very proud of the job they’re doing. …

It’s almost a miracle, and it is, the way it has all come together. Instead of asking a nasty, snarky question like that, you should ask a real question.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Why the Feds Should Social Distance Themselves From an Election Process Takeover

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COVID-19—is there anything the coronavirus can’t do? Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., seem to think it should make the feds tell the states how to run their elections.

They’ve introduced a bill that would do just that.

S. 3529, the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020, is aptly named because it could bring an electoral disaster in November. Not only is it unnecessary, but it would also make it easier to fiddle with election results.

Under our Constitution, Congress sets the time, place, and manner of federal elections, but it is the states and particularly county governments that actually administer the elections.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Our Founders designed this structure because they understood that giving the federal government authority to run elections would also give that government—including the incumbents controlling Congress and the incumbent in the White House—the ability to manipulate election rules to ensure their desired election outcomes.

Since Democrats took over the House in 2018, they have been pushing bills to increase federal control of our elections. They started with H.R. 1, which was dead on arrival the minute it hit the Senate. Now, amid the coronavirus crisis, they seem to think the time is ripe to take another stab at it.

According to Klobuchar’s March 18 press release (the text of the bill was still not available at Congress.gov as this was being written), the “disaster” bill would require every state to offer at least 20 days of early voting and “no-excuse” absentee balloting. Talk about gilding the lily!

Every state already allows absentee balloting, and two-thirds don’t require you to have an “excuse”—such as sickness, disability, or being out of town on Election Day—for using them.

As a former county election official in two different states, I can guarantee that every election official in the country would consider the current threat posed by COVID-19 to be more than sufficient reason for citizens to avoid the polls and vote absentee instead.

But the problem with the bill goes beyond the fact that there is no need to impose a federal mandate on top of already existing state requirements. The larger problem is that it would require changes in how absentee ballots are handled and processed—and the prescribed changes would increase the risk of election fraud.

While the health crisis may necessitate greater use of absentee ballots, no one should be happy about it. That’s because absentee ballot fraud is one of the most common—and easiest—methods used to cheat and intimidate voters.

Just look at what happened in the (ultimately overturned) 2018 9th Congressional District race in North Carolina. There, political operatives took absentee ballots from voters, then altered or filled them out before submitting them.

(You can find many more cases involving absentee ballot abuses in The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database.)

So, what are some of the changes the new bill would mandate? Well, currently, states require absentee ballots to be postmarked by Election Day. This is to prevent people from seeing voting results and then organizing an after-the-fact, get-out-the-(absentee) vote campaign to try to change those results.

Yet S. 3529 would force states to accept absentee ballots as long as they have been supposedly “signed” by the voter before the polls close. Obviously, there is no way to verify that.

This is very different from election officials accepting the official postmark of the U.S. Postal Service as evidence that an absentee ballot was cast before the polls closed. This change would give individual voters (or vote harvesters who collect their ballots) the ability to easily cheat by waiting until they see the results before voting.

The bill also orders states to begin processing votes cast during early voting or by mail 14 days before Election Day to “avoid delays” in the counting of votes on Election Day.

Most states don’t allow early votes to be processed and tabulated before Election Day for a very commonsense reason: to obviate the possibility of early results being leaked.

If leaked to the media, early results could discourage some voters from casting ballots. If leaked to candidates or political parties that are trailing, it could give them information they can use to modify or refocus their strategy to change the results.

As for the provision to force states to allow 20 days of in-person early voting, how does that make sense at a time of social distancing, when we are limiting—even banning—public gatherings?

Even if it were desirable, a federal mandate is hardly necessary. Fewer than a dozen states don’t already allow some degree of early voting, and those that don’t could surely change that on their own, should health concerns somehow make that advisable.

While the health advantages of early voting are dubious, at best, the electoral aspect has some shortcomings, as well.

This month, Klobuchar herself exposed one of those shortcomings in ending her presidential run. She withdrew from the race on March 2, just one day before the Super Tuesday primaries. Pete Buttigieg dropped out a day earlier.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of early voters in those states—including 455,000 in Texas and California—wound up wasting their votes on withdrawn candidates, effectively disenfranchising themselves by voting early.

Something similar can also happen during general elections.

We all know that information about candidates, sometimes scandalous information, often comes out just before Election Day. If that information is relevant to a voter’s choice and that voter has already early voted, there is nothing she can do to recall or change her vote.

Moreover, studies have shown that early voting actually hurts turnout; it does not increase it.

Yet another bad provision in the Klobuchar/Wyden bill would “guarantee” that all voter registrations submitted 21 days before the election must be “deemed valid.”

States have varying registration deadlines, ranging from 30 days before an election to registration on Election Day.  Those deadlines reflect the varying amounts of time it takes for states to check the validity and accuracy of voter registration information. (Typically, the larger the jurisdiction, the longer this process takes.)

But this bill apparently takes away the right of states to do any verification at all. Rather, it says states must consider as “valid” any voter registrations they receive—even if officials know the individual is ineligible to vote because he is a felon, an alien, or doesn’t actually live where he claims to reside.

Hopefully, given all of the measures being put in place by the federal, state, and local governments, this health threat will have peaked and subsided long before the Nov. 3 election.

A spokesman for the National Association of Secretaries of State says that the secretaries—who are in charge of administering elections in their respective states—are “closely monitoring COVID-19 public health alerts, working with their state public health departments, and assessing their state emergency preparedness plans.”

State election officials already have all of the legal authority they need, as well as the detailed knowledge and experience to administer their elections even under extraordinary conditions.

The last thing we need is federal interference from Washington bureaucrats and political know-it-alls who think they can do it better.

Originally published by PJ Media

COMMENTARY BY

Hans von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research.Twitter: .

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Biden Accused of Sexually Assaulting Staffer

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WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) – Before President Trump nicknamed him “Sleepy Joe,” the former vice president was known in some circles as “Creepy Joe” — a nickname Tara Reade understands well. As his former staffer, Reade claims in graphic detail how Joe Biden attacked her.

Last April, when Reade saw Nevada politician Lucy Flores on television speak of how Biden, a self-identified Catholic, had inappropriately sniffed her hair and kissed the back of her head as she waited to go on stage at a rally in 2014, it brought back strong memories.

When Biden responded, saying that “not once” in his career did he believe that he had acted inappropriately to women, it made her blood boil. Flores’ allegation sounded accurate to Reade, because, she said, she had experienced something similar one day in Biden’s Senate office years earlier.

After Reade saw an episode of the ABC television show The View, in which most of the panelists stood up for Biden and attacked Flores as politically motivated, Reade decided that she had no choice but to come forward and support Flores. This week Reade spoke to rising and the Katie Halper Show about her allegations against Biden.

Reade was a staff assistant for then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1993, when the alleged assault took place. She says she did not know him personally. She alleges one day Biden’s secretary gave Reade a gym bag to take to Biden at his request, who waited for her in a private area in his office building. Thinking nothing of it, Reade took the bag to him and, according to Reade, this is where the attack occurred. It was when she offered him the bag, she recalls, that he walked her up against a marble wall and began assaulting her.

“Then his hands were on me, and underneath my clothes. He went down my skirt and then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers; and he was kissing me at the same time and … I remember him saying to me, ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?'”

After she pulled away from him Biden allegedly said to her “Come on man, I heard that you liked me!”

Reade claims that he angrily dismissed her and walked off. She says that the assault left her shaking in a stairwell, “trying to grasp what had just happened and what I should do or what I should say.”

There were no witnesses. Shaken and confused, Reade found no place in her memory that could have been reasonably mistaken for signs that she “liked him.”

Since she’s come forward, Reade has been branded by many liberals as politically motivated and a Russian agent for Vladimir Putin. But Reade is no political conservative.  She supported Elizabeth Warren and then Bernie Sanders during this year’s primary season, and is no fan of President Trump. Reade’s leftist mother had raised her to oppose “American imperialism” and be skeptical of American exceptionalism.

In January, Reade decided to reach out to the organization TIME’S UP, established in the wake of the #MeToo movement to help survivors tell their stories. Housed within the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), Reade spoke with the program director and was encouraged by the conversation.

By February, Reade learned from a new conversation with TIME’S UP, which also involved Director Sharyn Tejani, that no assistance could be provided because the person she was accusing, Biden, was a candidate for federal office, and assisting a case against him could jeopardize the organization’s nonprofit status.

The public relations firm that works on behalf of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund is SKDKnickerbocker, whose managing director, Anita Dunn, happens to be the top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign. A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment on the allegations.

As for influencing the election or helping Trump, Reade said she was deeply conflicted about continuing to come forward, given that Biden’s opponent in the general election is someone she sees as far worse than him politically. “I don’t want to help Trump. But what can I do?” she said. “All I can do is stand on my truth.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Well, After Reading His Accuser’s Account of What Sounds Like Rape, Joe Biden 2020 is Canceled

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column with videos is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Little of Pelosi’s Wish List Made It Into COVID-19 Relief Bill. That’s a Relief in Itself.

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On Friday, the House passed the massive $2 trillion-plus coronavirus relief package that the Senate had passed on Wednesday.

There’s a lot in those 880 pages, and much of it is problematic: The bill is neither targeted and temporary, nor directed exclusively at the coronavirus—as scholars at The Heritage Foundation and its president, Kay C. James, have explained.

Before the bill made it through the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., temporarily derailed it by insisting that any relief bill include a left-wing wish list unrelated to the ongoing pandemic and the economic slowdown that it’s causing.

Among other things, Pelosi would have:

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

  • Mandated “diversity” on corporate boards and in banks.
  • Required airlines to disclose and reduce emissions.
  • Mandated that states allow voting by mail.
  • Increased union bargaining power.
  • Expanded tax credits for wind and solar power.
  • Prohibited universities from disclosing the citizenship status of their students.
  • Provided a bailout for some private pensions.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Pelosi was not going to be accused of letting a crisis go to waste.

In what is becoming a familiar theme (think of her failed attempt to control how the Senate conducted its impeachment trial), Pelosi backed down shortly after making her demands.

With the legislation now through Congress, how much of Pelosi’s wish list made it into the bill?

None of the wish-list items listed above made the cut, but there remains a lot of unnecessary and unwise spending in it.

Diversity requirements for banks and corporate boards are out, as is Pelosi’s demand for a Securities and Exchange Commission advisory group to promote corporate “diversity.”

Also out is her demand that companies taking relief funds establish and staff a minimum five-year “diversity and inclusion” program. Indeed, the words “diversity” and “inclusion” don’t appear in the legislation passed by the Senate.

The package also does not include any new carbon emissions restrictions or disclosure requirements for airlines or other industries.

Similarly missing are any of her proposals for a federal takeover of state elections.

Her attempt to give unions a handout failed, too, as did her attempt to give a handout to wind and solar power providers.

The bill does not prevent colleges and universities from disclosing their students who are illegal aliens, or provide any other shroud for illegal status.

Likewise, the private pension bailouts she demanded are nowhere to be found in the Senate bill.

Pelosi succeeded in delaying the relief package by several days, but she failed to capitalize on what her No. 2 lieutenant, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., called a “tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”

Still, Pelosi took to Twitter to celebrate her success in turning the Senate Republicans’ bill “upside down.”

In the end, Pelosi supported the bill wholeheartedly.

But despite her self-proclaimed success in turning the Senate bill upside down, progressives in her party are not happy with it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., thinks that the relief package favors the businesses that employ the vast majority of Americans. She had threatened to delay the bill’s passage.

Even before this relief package becomes law, politicians on both sides of the aisle were already calling for another one to follow, so expect Pelosi and the progressives to try again to make the wishes on their wish list come true.

COMMENTARY BY

GianCarlo Canaparo

GianCarlo Canaparo is a legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEOS: Joe Biden accuser Alexandra Tara Reade speaks out about Biden’s ‘inappropriate touching’!

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Alexandra Tara Reade, J.D. in an article titled Powerful Men and The Women They Choose to Destroy wrote:

Then came Washington DC. I worked for a prominent congressman and was hired later by Senator Joe Biden. Joe Biden was my political hero. The following months and events crushed my spirit in a way that is hard to express. I reported Joe Biden’s sexual harassment of me at a time when no one listened and supervisors looked at me like I was the one with the problem. Some women even suggested, I comply with serving drinks to those male donors as suggested, to advance my career and winked they would like his attention or to be in the room with some of those men. This was my life, I wondered, to parade in front of men hoping I am worthy of their attention?

 Yet, this was the message in the 1990s and even 2000’s. Play along to get along. Then, something happened that changed me forever.

I just did not want to be an object. I wanted to start a political career not sleep with powerful men. I dated boys my own age in their 20’s and even then, married, powerful men were to be feared and steered clear from, not entertained. I learned what men with power could do to women in Hollywood. [Emphasis added]

Read more.

The Hill reported:

Former staffer for Joe Biden Tara Reade recounts her experience from the 1990s with then-Senator Joe Biden including inappropriate touching, and her denial of legal resources from the #MeToo organization Time’s Up.

The Hill posted this following video Rising TV report on its YouTube site:

Video courtesy of Rising.

Rising is a weekday morning show with bipartisan hosts that breaks the mold of morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before. The show leans into the day’s political cycle with cutting edge analysis from DC insiders who can predict what is going to happen. It also sets the day’s political agenda by breaking exclusive news with a team of scoop-driven reporters and demanding answers during interviews with the country’s most important political newsmakers.

Joe Biden’s accuser finally tells her full story – Katie Halper’s interview with Tara Reade

© All rights reserved.

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VIDEO: Coronavirus and Anti-Semitism

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While the world is dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic, some see it as an opportunity to attack Israel with lies and anti-Semitic slurs.

Watch BDS activists and white supremacists share shockingly similar conspiracy theories about the global crisis, including that Israel and Jews are behind or are exploiting the virus. Meanwhile, Israel is working hand-in-hand with Palestinians to combat the virus!

WATCH AND SHARE!

Have you seen any other examples of this? Share your answers in a comment on Twitter. 

Watch the video on Twitter 

Watch the video on Facebook  

Watch the video on Youtube

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EDITORS NOTE: This Canary  Mission video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

A Free Nation Cannot Long Survive If Its Press Takes Sides.

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Pandemics can temporarily set a free society on its heels; a cheerleading press can kill it for good.

Gay lied in saying Trump told governors they are on their own

Gay lied in saying Trump told governors they are on their own, thus misleading readers to think he refused to provide the governors with federal funds for critical medical equipment. Below is what Trump actually said — the part in boldface is what Gay selectively quoted, everything else is what she maliciously omitted:

“We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”

After unequivocally promising to back the governors with federal help, Trump suggested that some medical supplies could be obtained more quickly if they deal directly with vendors.

What Gay did was journalistic malpractice at its most evil, a fake news political hatchet job against a president she hates in hopes of torpedoing his re-election. Mara Gay is no rookie reporter who made an innocent mistake. She’s a member of the New York Times Editorial Board. Her dissembling brand of destroy-Trump journalism has been practiced non-stop for nearly four years by virtually the entire mainstream media.

Another recent example.  When the coronavirus outbreak hit the news in January, mainstream journalists routinely referred to it as the “Wuhan coronavirus” or the “Chinese coronavirus.” When they noticed Trump was using the same descriptions, and sensing a chance to cripple him politically, they abruptly stopped using those terms, and are now accusing him of being a xenophobic racist for calling the virus what they themselves called it until they sensed a chance to bleed him. Ten days after the first confirmed coronavirus case in this country, Trump took decisive action by restricting flights into the U.S. from China. Rather than applaud the decision, or merely question it, the mainstream media called him a xenophobic racist for that too.

Esteemed admiral slams Trump for complaining about biased media

Now retired, Admiral William McRaven became one of America’s most heralded military commanders for overseeing the SEAL Team Six raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As reported by the Washington Post, McRaven has harshly criticized President Trump for calling the media “the enemy of the American people.”

In opening the door for literalists to say he meant all news outlets, the words Trump used in his initial statement were not well chosen. He since has clarified the remark by saying that fake news is the enemy of the American people, which, as I’m sure Adm. McRaven would agree, it most certainly is, no matter which side propagates it.

Polls show media coverage of Trump is overwhelmingly negative.  But most of the scorched earth press he receives derives from politically slanted reporting by news organizations that loathe him and the party he represents. From the time he won the Republican nomination, mainstream media outlets have savaged him with slanted, anonymously-sourced reports later found to be totally false. To the best of my knowledge, none of those outlets ever apologized for having trafficked in fake news.

An attempt to justify slanted reporting was acknowledged in August 2016, when the New York Times openly abandoned its fairness standards in covering Trump, because, in its hyper-partisan opinion, he is “so abnormal and potentially dangerous” that he doesn’t deserve fair coverage. Thus given a green light by the nation’s leading newspaper of record, other mainstream outlets followed suit by abandoning their own fairness standards in favor of slanted coverage of Trump. How else to explain the 93% negative press he receives?

As the most insidious form of journalistic corruption, politically slanted reporting is known by another name: propaganda. In this day and time it’s also called fake news. Whatever name is used to describe it, slanted reporting is an enemy of the search for Truth, and therefore an enemy of the American people. It’s also an enemy of journalism, a once-respected profession that’s seen its reputation plummet as a direct result of its most prominent members having morphed themselves into willing mouthpieces for one of America’s major political parties.

In an article published on TheHill.com, opinion contributor John Solomon argues that the greatest threat to journalism today is the non-objectivity of many of its practitioners, journalists whose personal views cause them “to stray from the neutral, factual voice their teachers in journalism school insisted they practice.” That the mainstream media have veered sharply away from neutrality is a premise that cannot be intelligently challenged.

In an address to students and faculty of the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas-Austin, Adm. McRaven said that Trump calling the media the enemy of the American people was “perhaps the greatest threat to democracy” he’s ever seen. It’s a good thing he left himself some wiggle room by saying perhaps, because there’s an infinitely greater threat to the constitutional democracy he swore to protect and defend from all enemies, foreign and domestic. That clear and present danger is domestic in nature, and can be summed up in the following nightmare scenario:

A free nation cannot long survive if its press takes sides.

Stuck pigs squeal the loudest

It doesn’t take an esteemed admiral to see the truth in that. When the German press took sides in the 1930s, the German people witnessed firsthand their country’s loss of freedom, as did all others throughout history who suffered ruthless oppression meted out by single-party authoritarian regimes, the misdeeds of which were covered up or defended by a cheerleading press that took sides.

Protect Press Freedom (PPF) is a wolf in sheep’s clothing propaganda arm of the mainstream media. The organization’s website cites this Thomas Jefferson quote: “The only security of all is a free press.” That observation by America’s third president is 100% true, but a non-objective press is not a free press, it’s the polar opposite, an open gate to tyranny, a mortal threat to Liberty. PPF’s website also says this: “Free Press, Free People.” That too is 100% accurate, and so is this: “Cheerleading Press, Enslaved People.”

In a thinly veiled broadside against President Trump, PPF’s website makes this declaration: “The government is responsible for following the First Amendment and upholding our nation’s press freedom principles, but sometimes government officials use their power and platform to intimidate members of the media and chill reporting.”  Trump calling out the cheerleading mainstream media for its non-objective reporting doesn’t intimidate them, nor does it chill their reporting—his opinions have done nothing to change their transparently partisan behavior. Feigned outrage by mainstream “journalists” over being called out for their unprofessional bias is remindful of the saying that stuck pigs squeal the loudest.

EDITORS NOTE: This Canada Free Press column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Chinese Bio-Warfare Causes Economic Destruction

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“A financial panic is a very bad thing, but a government panic can do far greater damage in a far shorter time.” –  Tom McClintock

“Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux.” – Stephen King

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” –  Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels.

“No country can survive being ruled by people who hate it.” –  Tucker Carlson

Like many Americans, I am sick of hearing about Covid-19.  We want our normal lives back, no “sheltering in place,” no more containment or quarantine, no masks, no travel bans, no closed schools, restaurants, and stores, and an end to the media propaganda and brainwashing.  The Covid-19 bio-warfare virus is dangerous to everyone, but more so to our immune compromised elderly, yet the yearly flu is still far more hazardous to life than this fast spreading and highly contagious Chinese biolab virus.

The evil trait of COVID-19 is its ability to infect others by people who appear healthy. Those infected often manifest no symptoms for up to two weeks, yet can transmit the disease to any person who comes within six feet of them for that entire incubation period, indicating the virus was most likely made in a biolab. Our healthy young people still believe they’re immortal and the virus won’t touch them.  They fail to curb their activities, resulting in countless others being infected.  And driven by a social media craze, teens are purposely coughing on grocery store produce.

The Sinister Reality

What has this viral respiratory illness done?  It has instilled fear in large portions of our population, closed down our country’s entire economy, eliminated normal activities and probably changed our lives forever.  That is the definition of bio-terrorism.

The politicians look blameless and at the same time they’ll increase their power through new laws, just as was done after 9/11.  A long-time friend who has watched the government’s power grow exponentially over the years said, “What is actually happening Kelleigh, is the nationalization of all businesses. It is also happening in Europe. It is a big step toward more socialism. Trump has no choice in the matter.  Keep in mind he has to do what they want or he could end up like Kennedy.”

I’ve watched the look of horror on President Trump’s face as this nightmare unfolded.  He was not a happy camper, but he shouldered the burden and took control as much as he could. And thank God we have Trump, not Hillary and not Biden.

The communists in our government will do anything to sabotage this president, and I have no doubt they have gotten together with their Red Chinese friends to destroy our economy and the stock market and instill fear in Americans.

A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.

Chicago’s former mayor, Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The democrats are using this virus as their last chance to oust President Trump in November.  The soaring economy he created is temporarily in the tank, and 401k’s have lost 25 to 30 percent of their previous gains. Since the Democrats own the banks and the media, they are utilizing everything they can to tear down President Trump’s legacy.  They are absolutely thrilled with the decimation our country is experiencing from Covid-19, and they are blaming our President just like Red China.  And now the increasingly unstable media is demanding blackouts of Trump’s Covid-19 briefings.

WHO, CDC, NIH and Dr. Fauci

As for the World Health Organization, Director Tedros Adhanom is the first Director without a medical degree. He is also a member of the Marxist-Leninist Tigray People’s Liberation Front which was founded as a communist revolutionary party that came to power in 1991.  It was listed as a terrorist group by America in the 90s.

Tedros was promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who financed many of the phony large-scale health operations in Ethiopia that Tedros had facilitated. The Director and Bill Gates should be tried for crimes against humanity.  Please watch this important 13 minute video expose of Tedros.

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is married to Lisa Barsoomian. She was exposed in Marilyn Barnewell’s article, Deep State Husbands. Up until 2011, she was the attorney for WHO.  She has represented the Clintons, the FBI and many other corrupt characters.

Nancy Messonnier, MD, is the Director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) at the CDC.  She is also Rod Rosenstein’s sister.  Her initial statements about the extreme danger of Covid-19 are what the media is using as ammunition in their propaganda.

Interesting that the CDC started hiring quarantine program managers last November to cover quarantine centers in Texas, California, New York, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts and more.  Was this advanced warning?

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has been called “the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases.”  He has increased Americans Covid-19 fear with his pessimistic statements. He actually contradicted the president on national TV and told him he shouldn’t be so hopeful.  He has stated that “Trump is coming at the virus from a layperson’s standpoint, I’m coming from a scientific standpoint.”

Careful observers have noted that after the almost daily White House news conferences with President Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force, Fauci, a regular attendee and the task force’s chief medical spokesman, often runs to Trump-hating media like CNN to contradict — usually with a degree of nuance that gives him plausible deniability — what the president has just said.  The Daily Mail of London noted this behavior in a March 20 article, “Dr Anthony Fauci caught rolling his eyes and smirking as President Trump rants about the ‘deep state’ during coronavirus press conference.”

Within the WikiLeaks Hillary Rodham Clinton email files there’s a letter from Fauci to Hillary Clinton through her aid/lawyer Cheryl Mills, “Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.” He wrote this to her after her Benghazi testimony. Fauci is just another Deep State Hillary-loving stooge.

Senators Dump Stocks

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and several of her Senate colleagues reported selling off stocks worth millions of dollars in the days before the coronavirus outbreak crashed the market, according to reports.  Republican senators Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Ron Johnson and Jim Inhofe sold significant stock shares following a January 24th meeting on the coronavirus threat. Loeffler has claimed she is only informed of her stock transactions weeks after they occur.  Really? Doesn’t sound like a good stockbroker to me!

Before the stock market tanked, these politicians saved their own bacon because they had market knowledge.  Martha Stewart is probably wondering why they have not received the same punishment she received.

Second Amendment

Jim Kouri’s latest article at NewsWithViews exposes the massive gun and ammunition sales during this pandemic.  The largest sales are in states where the virus has spread.

Journalist Daniel Greenfield noted in Front Page Magazine that the CDC has focused on liberal causes du jour rather than their mandate of actually keeping Americans safe from legitimate public health crises.

Greenfield noted that one of the “social justice” causes that have been pushed by the CDC are unconstitutional gun control schemes.

Gun permits have been suspended in several states and counties due to the virus panic.

Covid-19 Treatments

Seattle’s nursing home lost a number of their patients from the virus, but one 90 year old gal survived and is doing well even though she had other health problems.

New York City cases of Covid-19 started multiplying when a 39 year old woman returned from Iran to Manhattan and tested positive for the disease on March 1st.  New York now has at least 5,000 cases.  Daniel Horowitz tweeted, “Nearly the entire outbreak in New York came from a traveler from Iran, a place that was supposed to have a travel ban, but thanks to lower courts continuing to militate against Scotus decision, it was rendered moot.”

A new study whose results were published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has found early evidence that the combination of hydroxychloroquine, a popular anti-malaria drug known under the trade name Plaqenuil, and antibiotic azithromycin (aka Zithromax or Azithrocin) could be especially effective in treating the COVID-19 coronavirus and reducing the duration of the virus in patients.

Three international studies in China, Australia and France found that Chloroquine with Azithromycin shows a 100% success rate in treating coronavirus in six days! Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malarial drug while azithromycin is an antibiotic.

President Trump has called for these drugs to be used immediately and has even sent them to New York City where there’s an explosion of the virus.  Dr. Fauci disagrees with him, but then that’s to be expected.  These drugs are producing strong results in trials involving hospitalized American patients.

President Trump said, “Nothing will stand in our way as we pursue any avenue to find what best works against this horrible virus.”

Conclusion

Managing a pandemic shouldn’t require tanking the economy.  The mainstream media created a worldwide panic and they did it on purpose to see how much power they can wield.  Unfortunately, as comrades of the socialist democrats, it is a huge amount.  Their goal is to damage President Trump beyond repair.

Americans from coast to coast understand this is a different sort of virus, but it hasn’t the numbers that yearly flus have shown regarding those who get sick and those who die.  Both federal and state governments have gone berserk destroying our civil rights, and the very rights of American business, whether small or large to keep their doors open during this so-called WHO “pandemic.”

Steve Mnuchin has now moved Tax Day from April 15th to July 15th, which is an anomaly for this country and absolutely unnecessary for the “pandemic” total of Americans affected by Covid-19.  We have entered the twilight zone with how this virus is being treated.

There are 14,371 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US.

  • There are 217-250 deaths blamed on the coronavirus.
  • The current mortality rate from confirmed cases is 1.5%, and we know that’s too high.
  • There are no official numbers that include the number of citizens who had the virus but were not sick enough to seek medical attention.
  • There are an estimated 22,000 flu deaths and 36 million cases in the US each year.

So why the panic?  Why the shutdown of schools, businesses, restaurants, sports, doctor’s offices, etc.? What is the true reality here?  Are American citizens being played?  Why the loss of civil rights?  And why has AG Barr’s DOJ asked Congress to expand legal authorities to circumvent those pesky civil liberties that are already being excessively curbed and destroyed?

We truly are in dangerous waters…stay tuned.

P.S.  Everyone is suffering because of the Covid-19 outbreak. NewsWithViews needs funds to continue to operate and bring you daily truth about what is happening in America…truth the mainstream media never reports.  We count on donations to survive.  Please help us by donating whatever you can every month.  And ask your friends to sign up to receive the daily reports.  You can donate here.

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Is This a PANDEMIC or a DEMPANIC?

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VIDEO:

Now that we’re in a de facto Martial Law mode––a shutdown of entire industries and small businesses, nighttime curfews, social isolation, a run on goods, huge sports events cancelled, a “shelter-in-place” mandate in California, releasing prisoners in New York (God forbid these  miscreants get a flu!), Broadway gone dark, and a craven media inciting and delighting in the panic they’re causing, it is relevant to ask:

  • Are the powers-that-be withholding information about a deadly germ-warfare attack on the entire world, started by an aggrieved Chinese Communist nation that was perfectly happy with the Bush1 and Clinton1&2 and Bush1&2 and Obama1&2 regimes that kowtowed to their outrageous demands and unfair trade deals but is now existentially threatened because a Patriot President expects more equitable deals?
  • Isn’t it both alarmist and immoral, as reported in American Thinker by Andrea Widburg, that the fake-news media have never told the American people that the scary statistics from Italy are the result of Italy’s recent Silk Road Project agreement with China, which resulted in more than 300,000 Chinese workers entering Italy?
  • Is it just one of those strange coincidences that one of the four richest men in the world, the uber-leftist and population-control fetishist Bill Gates––just weeks after the corona virus hit in January––stepped down from the Microsoft giant he founded in 1975, and just weeks earlier, in December, sponsored a “fictional” simulation of such a corona virus catastrophic event which spread wildly and caused 65 million deaths worldwide? Just asking.
  • What are the powers-that-be not telling us? The worldwide population is nearing eight billion. America has between 330-370 million people (the last 40 mil being illegals). Every day in America, 130 Americans die from an opioid overdose, 102 people from car accidents, and 2,500 from heart attacks. And yet, so far in America, 19,000 people have contracted the corona virus and 256 have died from it. Got that? Over 330-million people; 256 deaths. The swine flu of 10 years ago caused 60.8 million illnesses, and 12,469 deaths.
  • Or is this yet another hysterical, sky-is-falling anxiety attack by the hand-wringing left designed to convince the American public that either Communist Bernie Sanders or a clinically cognitively-diminished Joe Biden––both inveterate tax-and-spend liberals––would be just the man to help America recover from this traumatic event and revive the stock-market they both revile?

Of course, neither one of these Big Government hacks would be capable of such a feat. Thank God for the cool, calm, collected and seasoned business mogul, President Donald J. Trump, who is guiding us through the corona virus scare with decisive action and great success––with no less than 56 bold initiatives––and who not only brought us the greatest economy and employment record in the 243-year history of our country, but will revive it when this virus scare passes into history––shortly, I predict!

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

All praise to the brilliant graphic artist (above) who captured so perfectly what we are witnessing today––the last-gasp efforts of:

  • A crazed, out-of-ammunition Democrat Party,
  • A doddering presumptive Democrat presidential candidate,
  • A deranged leftist media, furious at their low and devolving ratings,
  • Socialist/Communist/Islamicized Europeans,
  • Huge investors in the Globalist economy,
  • Angry Chinese leadership,
  • Failed Trump saboteurs Michael Avenatti (now in jail), Michael Cohen (now in prison), Anthony Scaramucci (now in nowheresville),
  • The Russian-collusion hoaxers of Obama’s FBI, CIA, State, Homeland Security, et al.
  • The exposed liars in the Ukraine phone-call hoax,
  • The losers of the crashing failure known as the impeachment hoax,
  • The cringe-producing sore-loser Hillary Clinton, who “lost” $6-billion dollars when she was Sec. of State, and presided over the tragic loss of American lives in the Benghazi catastrophe––and then lied about it!

These are just a few of the forces who have been working overtime for the past four years to sabotage, undermine, and ultimately destroy both candidate and then President Trump, the man who single-handedly exposed:

  • The Left’s seditious and I believe traitorous anti-American agenda and behavior,
  • The criminality they’ve engaged in for decades with absolute impunity,
  • The gouging of the United States’ economy for their own ideological and personal benefit, extorting billions that was laundered and stuffed into their own pockets,
  • Their devoted allegiance to colossal hoaxes like Global Warming,
  • Their abject neglect of blacks in education and where ignorance leads––ta da––prison,
  • Their seething contempt if not downright hatred of the United States of America.

And yet, with all their impressive advanced college degrees, fancy credentials, exalted titles, tenure-for-life government jobs, social-media collaboration with leftist Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al, and the flagrant abuse-of-power they’ve gotten away with––but not for long!––such as illegal FISA warrants, lying witnesses, shadow-banning, rigging elections, the list goes on…they still could not bring down THE. SMARTEST. GUY.IN.THE.ROOM.

TEARING THEIR HAIR OUT

Now, almost eight months from a presidential election, all of these forces are desperate, anguished, just-about suicidal with frustration. What can we do, they are asking themselves, to stop President Trump from winning a second term and then crushing for all time the remaining malignant remnants of the leftist agenda?

While none of them are smart enough to have created the corona virus threat, they secretly celebrated the fact that this crisis would prevent the president from conducting his two or three rallies a week around the country, where upwards of 50,000-75,000 people line up for days on end to applaud and support their president.

Well, they got their wish. Now he is on TV every single day, showing the entire country (and world) what genuinely strong and effective leadership is all about––which is why his approval ratings are skyrocketing!

Undaunted, the frantic left is spending untold billions, not to help the deserving people affected adversely by the corona virus, but, as Daniel Greenfield documents exhaustively, “to smear President Trump and undermine the administration. How patriotic of them.”

Greenfield cites the SuperPac which leftist billionaires––Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, financier George Soros, the list is long––are using to attack President Trump over the corona virus. Many if not all of them are more successful and savvy than most people in the world––but I repeat, none of them a match for THE. SMARTEST. GUY.IN.THE.ROOM!

WHERE ELSE THE OPPOSITION COMES FROM

Three years ago, I wrote an article called “The Hate-America Death Squads” in which I described the forces we are witnessing today, all of whom exult when America has trouble.

DEATH SQUAD #1 is the Cloward-Piven Strategy, begun in 1966 and flourishing to this day. In short, the founders of this plan, from Columbia Univ., loathed America and insisted that capitalism could be collapsed by overloading the government with financial demands that could not be met. They also formed voter-fraud schemes like Project Vote, ACORN, etc, still extant only with different names. And surprise, surprise – ACORN’s lawyer was none other than Barack Obama. Birds of a feather, and all that.

DEATH SQUAD #2 Saul Alinsky, a community organizer from Chicago, wrote the bible for hate-America leftists: Rules for Radicals. Hillary Clinton wrote her Wellesley thesis about Alinsky and remained close friends with him years after she graduated, and Barack Obama became a community organizer in the Alinsky mode. Both of them shared Alinsky’s real goal––to destroy capitalist America and turn it into the socialist-cum-communist regime they preferred.

DEATH SQUAD #3 is and was the leftwing media––or what Dr. Drew Pinsky calls  “the corrupt, uninformed, morally reprehensible American press––notorious for skewing the “news” in a Marxist direction. Remember, most media anchors and news readers take their marching orders directly from bosses who are extremely invested in the global economy and not in President Trump’s economy, which has brought millions of jobs and manufacturing and profits back to the United States in order to Make America Great Again and Keep America Great!

DEATH SQUAD #4 is the Muslim Brotherhood which seeks the downfall of America, a phenomenon writer Linda Goudsmit explains in explicit and exquisite detail: “Islam is an expansionist socio-political movement with a religious wing created 1400 years ago.” Then and now, Islam “seeks world dominion––the establishment of a worldwide Islamic caliphate ruled by Islamic sharia law,” which is incompatible and anathema to American law and the U.S. Constitution.

DEATH SQUAD #5 is comprised of leftwing billionaires, mentioned above, who fund the hate-America groups like Occupy Wall St., Antifa, et al, as well as the politicians who have brought us Sanctuary Cities, no-bail laws, and attempts to rob Americans of their First Amendment right of Free Speech, Second Amendment right to bear arms, the power of capitalism to lift all boats, and belief in God.

THE GOOD NEWS

  • Medications to treat the corona virus are now being discussed, as Scott Johnson from Powerline reports, among them is the anti-malaria drug, The Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva is donating six-million doses of the medication to U.S. hospitals starting March 31st, and by the end of April 10 million will be shipped. President Trump has asked the Food and Drug Administration if it can expand the use of the drug as an experimental treatment for coronavirus patients. A related article in Gateway Pundit reported that a chloroquine study showed a 100% cure rate for patients infected with the corona virus.
  • And just as I’m writing this article, an explosive article is broadcast reporting that three international studies from China, Australia and France show that chloroquine with the antibiotic azithromycin shows100% success in treating corona virus in six days!
  • The ridiculous ban on plastic grocery bags is being temporarily lifted because, as John Tierney reports, the reusable tote bags “that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public…can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses…[a fact] that was clearly demonstrated in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health. “
  • Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who teaches structural biology at Stanford University…offered the public reassurance during the peak of China’s coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. “Levitt did not discover a treatment or a cure…he crunched the numbers” and predicted that the spread of the virus would come to a halt. “His forecasts turned out to be correct: the number of new cases reported each day started to fall as of February 7. A week later, the mortality rate started falling as well.”
  • Here is a good way to track the progress of the corona virus.
  • Here is an imporant video on the origins of the Chinese corona virus.

All this is devastating to Democrats, but there is a solution. Simply plaster this poster in every newspaper and all over the Internet and watch how quickly the corona virus scare vanishes into thin air!

© All rights reserved.

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Panic Has Led to Government “Cures” That Are Worse than the Disease, History Shows

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Let’s take the novel coronavirus seriously, but let’s not throw reason, prudence, or the Constitution out the window.

Anyone who’s seen the John Hughes movie Ferris Beuller’s Day Off probably remembers the scene where Ferris’s economics teacher (Ben Stein) explains the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to a roomful of bored, sleeping students. The scene is brilliant for many reasons, perhaps most so because it perfectly demonstrated how some of the most boring things in history are also the most important.

Smoot-Hawley was, of course, one of the great blunders in history.

Passed in 1930 over the objection of more than a thousand economists, the legislation increased tariffs (which were already high) on imports to protect US industries and farmers, sparking a trade war that deepened the Great Depression. It’s a perfect example of authorities taking decisive action to alleviate a crisis—and making things much worse.

What many forget is that Smoot-Hawley didn’t cause the Depression. It was a response to the Depression. Indeed, it may never have passed at all without the catalyst—the Stock Market Crash of 1929—that sent the nation into a frenzy. Senate Republicans had defeated the legislation the previous year, but trade restrictionists found a convenient crisis in Black Tuesday, which triggered widespread hysteria, allowing the law to squeak through.

Designed to protect Americans during the economic crisis, Smoot-Hawley proved disastrous. Imports fell from $1,334M in 1929 to just $390M in 1932. Global trade fell by roughly 66 percent, government data show. By 1933 unemployment was 25 percent, the highest in US history.

To “correct” things, Americans elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, who launched a series of federal programs—which made the crisis even worse. The rest, as they say, is history.

Smoot-Hawley and the New Deal are hardly the only examples of government actions making a panic worse.

In his book Basic Economics, the economist Thomas Sowell recounts several instances in which governments turned small problems into major ones by using blunt force—often price controls—to respond to public panic about rising costs of a given commodity.

One of the more famous examples of this is the gasoline crisis of the 1970s, which started when the federal government took a small problem (temporary high costs of gasoline) and turned it into a big one (a national shortage).

It began when OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), a newly formed oil cartel, cut oil production, causing fuel prices to rise. To address the rise, the Nixon administration (and later the Ford and Carter administrations) resorted to price controls to keep fuel prices low for consumers.

The result? Mass fuel shortages across the country that led to long lines and many Americans unable to buy fuel. This “energy crisis,” as it was dubbed at the time, in turn wreaked havoc on the automotive industry.

As Sowell explains, however, there was not an actual scarcity of gasoline. There was nearly as much gas sold in 1972 as the previous year (95 percent, to be precise). Similarly, Americans in 1978 consumed more gasoline than in any other previous year in history. The problem was the resources were not being allocated efficiently because of state-imposed price controls.

The energy crisis was entirely predictable, two Soviet economists (who had vast experience in the arena central planning-induced shortages) later observed.

In an economy with rigidly planned proportions, such situations are not the exception but the rule—an everyday reality, a governing law. The absolute majority of goods is either in short supply or in surplus. Quite often the same product is in both categories—there is a shortage in one region and a surplus in another.

No one likes high gas prices, but the energy crisis of the 1970s wasn’t truly a crisis until the government created it. Nor was the result unique. Similar examples kind be found throughout history, from the grain shortages in Ancient Rome brought about by Diocletian’s “Edict on Maximum Prices” to the mortgage crisis in 2007 and the financial crisis that ensued.

This might seem obvious in hindsight, yet similar mistakes are made today during crises, just on a smaller scale. To address alleged crises in housing, California and Oregon recently passed rent control laws that will surely have a devastating impact on residents in those states. Similarly, anti-price gouging laws (and social pressure) regularly lead to mass shortages during national emergencies.

As America endures the most frightening pandemic in a century, the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s important that decisions affecting the lives, liberties, and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people are being reached through reason, not collective fear.

Pandemics are clearly different from economic depressions and fuel shortages, but some of the same lessons apply. Like an economic panic, pandemics incite mass fear, which can lead to flawed and irrational decision making.

We know that human beings by nature are prone to crowd-following, especially during periods of social unrest and panic. This instinct has resulted in some of the greatest tragedies in human history.

COVID-19 may very well prove to be every bit as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe. Epidemiologists, vaccine researchers, and other medical experts agree it’s highly contagious and deadly, especially for certain at-risk demographics (the elderly and people with compromised immune systems and lung damage, for example). Yet many of the same experts disagree on the scope of the COVID-19 threat.

One of the problems medical professionals are encountering is they simply don’t have a lot of reliable data to work with.

“The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable,” John P.A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University who co-directs the university’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, recently wrote in Stat.

Let’s face it: pandemics are scary. This is probably doubly true in the age of social media, when the scariest models tend to be the ones most shared, which fuels even more panic. Because of the heightened level of fear, it’s not unreasonable to think public officials could “follow the crowd,” which is a bad idea even when the crowd isn’t totally petrified.

“Crowds do not reason….they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts,” wrote Gustave Le Bon in his seminal 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

It’s no secret or coincidence that crises—foreign wars, terrorist attacks, and economic depressions—have often resulted in vast encroachments of freedom and even given rise to tyrants (from Napoleon to Lenin and beyond). In his book Crisis and Leviathan, the historian and economist Robert Higgs explains how throughout history, crises have been used to expand the administrative state, often by allowing “temporary” measures to be left in place after a crisis has abated (think federal tax withholding during World War II).

“When [crises occur] … governments almost certainly will gain new powers over economic and social affairs,” wrote Higgs. “For those who cherish individual liberty and a free society, the prospect is deeply disheartening.”

Let’s take the novel coronavirus deadly seriously, but let’s not throw reason, prudence, or the Constitution out the window while doing so.

If we do, we may find the government’s “cure” for the coronavirus cure is even worse than the disease.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and Fox News. 

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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Coronavirus Is the Chinese Government’s Curse Upon the World

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The World Health Organization and other sensitive souls have instructed us to stop referring to the new strain of the coronavirus as the “Wuhan” or “Chinese” flu because of the racist connotations.

I’m disinclined to curb my speech to placate Chinese propagandists, and it seems to me the aversion to those terms is less about racism than about averting blame. But in the spirit of comity, and avoiding disparaging an entire nation, I’m happy to call it the ChiCom Flu moving forward.

There are many traditional naming conventions that don’t really make that much sense. Somewhat weirdly, for example, we often name diseases after the people who “discover” them—Hodgkin’s disease after Thomas Hodgkin, Parkinson’s disease after James Parkinson, and so on.

But naming viral diseases after places—Guinea worm, West Nile virus, Ebola, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, etc.—is probably just intuitive. Viruses “come” from someplace, after all, and thus people gravitate to those names. I doubt we came up with “Lyme disease” because of some deep enmity toward Connecticut.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Anyway, “COVID-19” or “H1N1” don’t exactly roll off the tongue.

The latter was, until very recently, widely referred to as the “Spanish flu,” a virus that killed around 675,000 Americans and tens of millions of others around the world in the early 1900s.

“Spanish flu” has now retroactively fallen into disfavor as well. And to be fair, there is some historical evidence that the virus may actually have originated in China or France, so if we must call it the French flu moving forward, so be it.

But while the Spanish have a good case to be annoyed, the Chinese government does not.

As Jim Geraghty notes, the communist Chinese have been far more effective in stopping the spread of information about the coronavirus than in stopping the spread of the coronavirus itself. Today, for example, China expelled most American journalists from the country.

Early on, the communists destroyed samples and suppressed vital information that could have helped mitigate the damage of this new strain of the coronavirus.

The government also silenced doctors who warned about the disease. Some were censured for “spreading rumors” or sharing test results with colleagues, and some were forced to write self-critical public letters—a Marxist mainstay—admitting that the warning “had a negative impact.”

The Chinese communists probably let 5 million people leave Wuhan without screening, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Chinese communists, like all communists, hide societal problems. There is no crime, disease, or addiction in the collectivist state. This kind of secrecy and dishonesty can be disastrous, especially in a highly interconnected world.

Though millions of Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty through free trade, with modernity comes some basic responsibilities—for instance, not killing everyone in the world with preventable zoonotic diseases.

The Chinese regime is perfectly capable of administering an array of authoritarian policies to suppress the rights of its own people. But it’s apparently unable to exert even mild cultural pressure warning them that their eating habits can be extraordinarily dangerous and hold the potential of creating massive socioeconomic problems.

If reports are correct, it was in Wuhan’s popular “wet markets” that vendors were selling the bats—and possibly snakes—that may have caused the COVID-19 outbreak. “Wet” because the meat sold in its unsanitary stalls was only recently slaughtered.

This kind of thing happens quite often. And not always in China, of course. But the avian influenza was likely transmitted to humans from chickens in a “wet” market.

Scientists have been warning for years that the eating of exotic animals in southern China “is a time bomb.” Acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) also originated in China, and probably jumped to humans through bats. Other coronavirus strains are also likely connected to bats.

I hate to thrust my Western cultural values on anyone, but maybe it’s time to stop eating bats.

It’s important to stress that it’s not the Chinese people who are the problem. Just look at their success in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States. The ChiComs are the problem.

If the Chinese government spent as much time working on educating its people and regulating dangerous markets as it does on secrecy and propaganda efforts, maybe it wouldn’t have to worry as much about diseases being named after it—or about the catastrophic death and economic pain their negligence helps cause.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of “First Freedom: A Ride through America’s Enduring History With the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.” Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Senate Bill Would Give $1,200 to Many Americans as COVID-19 Relief

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that the Senate will not leave Washington before approving an aid package to ease financial problems during the coronavirus pandemic through direct payments to individual Americans.

Other provisions of the package, which has a total cost estimated at up to $1 trillion, would provide loans to airlines and other struggling industries.

Under the proposal, couples earning up to $150,000 a year would get checks for $2,400 in the mail and individuals earning up to $75,000 would get $1,200 checks.

After reaching those income thresholds, relief would scale downward to as low as $600 for some Americans.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Individuals earning more than $99,000 a year and couples earning more than $198,000 would not get anything from the government under the current bill.

The Democrat-controlled House would have to pass a version of the bill. The Trump administration already has signaled support for many of the initiatives.

“Senate Republicans want to put cash into the hands of the American people,” McConnell said in a Senate floor speech.

McConnell said the goal of the bill—called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act—is to “get assistance to individuals and families as rapidly as possible.”

“No tangled Washington process with a thousand cooks in the kitchen, no piles of forms for laid-off workers or busy families to fill out,” the top Senate Republican said. “Money for people, from the middle class on down.”

The bill also includes a $500 payment for each child in a household, depending on family income.

This stage marks “phase three” of economic relief packages during the coronavirus pandemic that have gained bipartisan support in Congress.

Congress passed an initial $830 billion relief package in early March focused on medical and emergency relief.

On Wednesday, Trump signed another, $100 billion bill that includes unemployment benefits and free testing for the new coronavirus disease, which health officials call COVID-19.

The proposed CARES Act includes direct payments to Americans, as well as delays in employer payroll taxes and estimated tax payments for businesses.

The proposal also would provide $208 billion in loan guarantees, including $50 billion for the airline industry and $8 billion for air cargo carriers.

The total confirmed U.S. cases of COVID-19 reached 10,442 as of noon Thursday, with 150 confirmed deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some conservatives, including Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, showed reluctance to support too much spending or large bailouts for industries.

McConnell likely will need support from Democrats to pass the legislation.

In a joint statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the Democrats made other demands. It said, in part:

The number one priority is addressing this health crisis, which requires a Marshall Plan to rebuild our health care infrastructure on a continental scale and ensure the resources are there to test and treat everyone who needs it. To earn Democratic support in the Congress, any economic stimulus proposal must include new, strong and strict provisions that prioritize and protect workers, such as banning the recipient companies from buying back stock, rewarding executives and laying off workers.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

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