Sunday, April 25, 2021

The Cover-Up Continues as Gov. Andrew Cuomo Refuses to Release COVID Nursing Home Death Numbers

The nursing home scandal Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) is facing gets shadier and shadier. As Laura Ingle reported during Saturday's "Fox News Live," about this "exhaustive fight... which it looks like while go on a lot longer," the embattled governor has denied media outlets their FOIA requests to get a hold of nursing home death data. 

A statement from the governor's office explains it won't grant such requests for data it gave to the federal government because doing so "would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

Assemblyman Will Barclay, the Leader of the New York State Assembly Republican Conference, called out that nonsense for what it is.

"This has never been about protecting families," Barclay said. "If that was the case, he would have been releasing that information to the ones who lost loved ones in nursing homes a long time ago. This is all about protecting Andrew Cuomo and his political career."

Ingle mentions that the State Assembly Judiciary Committee is looking into if the Cuomo administration undercounted the numbers, which has been the suspicion for some time now. Gov. Cuomo claims the numbers have taken so long in the name of accuracy. Something tells us it's because he wants to know how long he can put this off for. 

The governor is currently under FBI investigation, which not even the New York Times have shielded him from, in addition to do with their reporting that Cuomo's aides admitted they underreported the number of deaths


Gov. Cuomo is also facing a scandal to do with multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, all of which he denies. He and his supporters have emphasized waiting for results of an investigation to come out. There are also reports that he provided COVID tests behind the scenes to friends and family members at the beginning of the pandemic, when they were supposed to be for those with symptoms.

 

Infrastructure Bill Should Benefit America—Not China

The $2 trillion infrastructure plan may be the mother of all spending bills. And without changes, the major winner is set to be China. 

China has huge market shares of the raw materials we will need to repair and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, from bridges to pipes. China had a 51 percent share of the global steel market in 2018. The US, Canada, and Mexico combined only produced 6 percent. China also controls more than half of the global cement market. 

As things stand, much of the $2 trillion in U.S. taxpayer dollars will wind up lining the pockets of China’s big businesses, all of which are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s apparatus. 

Instead of transferring a huge amount of wealth from the US to China, lawmakers have an opportunity with this bill to support American manufacturing.

There’s good reason to be skeptical of the quality of Chinese-made materials. Chinese drywall made with cancer-causing chemicals was put into an estimated 100,000 homes between 2001 and 2009, exposing American families to deadly health risks. In the Lumber Liquidators scandal in 2015, Chinese-made laminate flooring exposed Americans to high levels of formaldehyde, another cancer-causing substance. 

Chinese-made steel is infamous for being cheap and full of defects. Cutting corners on steel puts the integrity of bridges and other structures at risk of catastrophic failure, which could have deadly results for pedestrians and drivers. 

Toys with lead paint, shoddy car tires, deadly contaminated pet food–the list of Chinese products with harmful defects is long. 

China’s gains in its share of the global steel market and other areas have been driven by government subsidies and dumping–the deliberate flooding of a market with cheap goods to undercut competition. It’s an issue we’ve seen hit our supply chain in another, even more important area: medicine.

It may shock you to learn that you are almost entirely at the mercy of China to get medicine. According to a federal analysis, China controls 97 percent of our antibiotics and about 80 percent of our generic drugs.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we discovered that much of our personal protective equipment (PPE) is also made in China. And in a global emergency, the Chinese government wasn’t afraid to hold up shipments of masks to other countries, even PPE made by U.S. firms operating in China. China sent defective masks to other countries.

China accounts for about 80 percent of our mined rare earth metals. These are needed to make lithium batteries for electric cars and for the functioning of electronic devices–including military equipment.

In 2018, the Trump administration slapped tariffs on Chinese steel to breathe some life into American steel production. The Biden administration has acknowledged their effectiveness

Now, the infrastructure bill provides a bigger, $2 trillion opportunity to make more gains on this front. Congress must look at securing more supply chains of goods ranging from cement to medicine to rare earth materials. If we are redefining infrastructure, then manufacturing is a key part of that new definition.

Overreliance on China is a threat to our national security and independence. As one Chinese professor remarked of China’s control over medicine: “Should we reduce the exports, the medical systems of some western countries will not run well.” Given the Chinese government puts its citizens in concentration camps, we shouldn’t risk finding out the hard way

 

To Save The Republic, Destroy The Media

 

o produce some viruses for study, in the hope of eradicating them, scientists use monkey kidney cells. It’s the perfect environment for them to replicate; to grow. For the virus that is progressivism, the media is the monkey kidneys, and to eliminate the threat that this left-wing sibling of communism, socialism, and fascism poses to the world, that delivery device needs to be destroyed. 

The profession, or at least what it used to be and is supposed to be, is important to the country. People need to know what is happening in their world. But what we have now is not journalism, it’s something else, something beyond propaganda. It can’t be reformed, the core isn’t rotten, it’s deliberately corrupt and hell bent on the destruction of our way of life.

Journalism has always had bias, but they at least used to try to hide it. They’d report some truth, leaving out other, inconvenient parts on the cutting room floor. Now they make it up. They make it up for the express purpose of manipulating people, herding people into groups, then turning those groups against one another. All in service to the Democrat Party. 

Just this week alone, there have been more examples than I can count of propaganda and lies that would make Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels embarrassed. 

Paul Krugman at the New York Times told his 4.6 million followers, “In reality, given that GOP supporters believe that rampaging mobs burned and looted major cities — somehow without the people actually living in those cities noticing — getting them to see facts about something as abstract as the deficit is a hopeless cause.” C

This isn’t mistake, he didn’t get it wrong or word it poorly, and he’s not uninformed; it is a deliberate lie. 

Multiple media outlets have gone after civilians for donating to the defense fund for Kyle Rittenhouse, getting people fired for as little as $10. Stalin was more tolerant of differing points of view than these people. 

The day after it was announced that South Carolina Senator Tim Scott is to deliver the Republican response to Joe Biden’s multi-trillion dollar Oprah-style giveaway before a joint session of Congress, the Washington Post ran a preemptive hit piece on him under the guise of a “fact-check.” The only thing was there was nothing to fact-check. 

The Post’s Glenn Kessler spontaneously decided to “fact-check” something unrelated to policy proposals. It was personal – how, in his family, they’d gone from his grandfather picking cotton to him being a United States Senator.

Seems like an odd thing to “fact-check,” especially since he hasn’t told the story this year. But his story exemplifies the greatness that is America, and there’s nothing liberals hate more than the idea of American greatness. 

What was deemed misleading about the story? That Scott’s grandfather dropped out of school to pick cotton and support his family wasn’t, it was that Scott didn’t add that the farm on which he was picking that cotton was owned by his great-grandfather. I’m not kidding, the Post basically argued that a black man really didn’t have it as tough as Scott said in the Democrat-controlled Jim Crow south because his family owned the farm he had to drop out of school to work on to keep it from going under. This wasn’t fact-checking, it was barely opposition research, it was really a warning shot against a black conservative letting him know his place while trying to discredit him before he speaks to the nation with the very people Democrats fear he could reach. 

Any disagreement with Barack Obama was called racism, but real racism can be deployed against any black conservative as needed and it’ll win awards.

Then there was the shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, the wannabe murderer prevented from achieving her goal by a hero police officer. I have never seen people wish for the stabbing death of another person before, yet that’s what the leftist media spent the week doing. I don’t know who the woman in the pink jumpsuit is but, with rare exception, the media spent the better part of the week arguing that she should be dead without actually saying it. If the police officer had not shot Bryant, the woman in pink would be dead. No one disputes it, they just don’t care. They need another George Floyd more than a junkie needs another fix, and if they have to manufacture it, well, damn it they were going to make one. Even in the face of irrefutable video evidence to the contrary. 

When Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo are the voices of reason in your profession, by a lot, simply by acknowledging a police officer did his duty and saved a life, it’s a pretty good indication your profession has passed the point of no return. 

There is no rehabilitating it, there is no coming back. The “cure” has become the disease. I know conservatives like to talk about how they don’t “do boycotts.” All taking the “high road” does when fighting the left is give you a great view of your defeat. It’s time to get serious or to surrender, because just going along to get along is no longer an option. Don’t buy the products that fund them, don’t watch the shows on the networks that spread their lies, and do not stop until they’re all “learning to code.” They’d cheer your ruination, return the favor and hasten theirs. The media has to be destroyed and everyone in it replaced, or they will destroy everything else.

The US Should Be More Careful When Picking Foreign Opposition Leaders to Support

 here is an assumption in America that new political leaders across the world campaigning against long-term incumbents or establishments must, naturally, share the full spectrum of western, liberal and democratic values cherished in Washington D.C.

The premise is as dangerous as it is mistaken. Recent decades are scattered with “great western hopes” that have not only disappointed when they finally reached office – but even turned out worse than those they replaced, with civil unrest, rollbacks of human rights, and severe deterioration in the lives of minorities.

There is Aung San Suu Kyi. Once named by TIME Magazine as one of the “Children of Gandhi”, she was for years a guest star at American and British liberal dinner parties. But her time as great helmsman of Myanmar – following a long opposition to the military junta – saw her government complicit in a genocide against the Rohingya, which she then insisted on defending personally at the International Court of Justice

There’s the youthful prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed. He was the nation’s first leader who was Oromo, the largest ethnic group that had led opposition to one-party government for decades, campaigning against their own political and economic marginalization. Shortly after winning the Nobel peace prize, Ahmed was leading an ethnic war against Tigrayans, who had historically dominated the upper echelons of power in the country.

And then there’s Adama Barrow of The Gambia in west Africa. Ushered into office by American progressive lobbyists following the fall of authoritarian Yahya Jammeh, he has reneged on his pledge to serve only three years as president, quashed an attempt to restrict presidential terms (intended to avoid a repeat of the years in office of his demented predecessor), and renounced his promise to overturn the country’s violent anti-gay laws.

Equally, there are times when misguided support for those who have lost still has consequences. Emboldened, the loser claims the election was stolen without evidence, leading to mass civil unrest  and the undermining of the democratic process. This is the case in Uganda.

There, the vote earlier this year saw opposition leader Bobi Wine go down to defeat. Feted by Western liberals as Africa’s new hope, Wine at least on the surface has much to offer: Glamorous, erudite, the anti-corruption campaigner is also a ghetto-to-hero chart-topping reggae artist.

More importantly, however, it is what he claims to be against that draws the international interest. The current president and governing party of Uganda has held democratic power for a generation in a country where the average age is 16. Whilst both have continued to be re-elected, stability and longevity have blinded many to the character of the challenger. A quick look at Bobi Wine’s past reveals some distinctly anti-liberal edges – particularly when it comes to LGBT rights – that should have been a cause for extreme caution when offering support.

In 2014, his emphatic homophobia was the reason he was denied a visa to UK. Slated to play in London and Birmingham, gay rights campaigners objected to allowing the artist to perform hate songs. The change.org petition stated: “Ugandan artist Bobi Wine writes songs with blatant homophobic lyrics and calls for gay people to be attacked, or killed… allowing such an artist to appear in public is clearly going to raise tensions”. They were referring to lyrics such as “burn all the batty man” and “All Ugandans get behind me and fight the batty man.”

This seems to have been forgotten by those in the West who rallied behind him. Of course, his views should not bar him from running for president, nor being elected. That is for Ugandans to decide – and, in a country where conservative views on the matter are prevalent, it should have even helped him. So it begs the question why, when he did not win, the State Department seems to be sustaining his claim that the election was stolen.

It is all the more surprising given Wine withdrew his petition to overturn the result before the courts. Though he claimed it necessary with political placement in the judiciary, for anybody who had been paying attention his allegations simply didn’t add up. On many recent occasions, the courts had ruled in his favor. They halted a legal attempt to deregister his party as the election was beginning, and then when security services surrounded his home following the election result, it ruled they leave immediately. Indeed, it was the same courts that rejected as unconstitutional an “anti-gay law” that would have made homosexuality in Uganda a capital offense, a law for which Wine’s song had rallied support.

The real reason for Wine’s withdrawal was lack of evidence, especially given the scale of his defeat (nearly 2.5 million votes behind from a turnout of 10 million). But it is easier to win in the “court of public opinion,” so that is where he has taken his case. Meanwhile, his actions cause the democratic process and rule of law in Uganda to be eroded in the eyes of his supporters, the electorate as a whole, and the international community.

For Africans, and certainly Ugandans of a certain age, the West’s often unquestioning – and often barely researched – support for political figures such as Wine has troublesome echoes of the past. In the late 1960s another young Ugandan opposition leader seemed at least on the surface to have much to offer: “A splendid type… not very bright…completely reliable” is how the British described the deranged dictator Idi Amin in the years immediately before he staged a coup and declared himself “King of Scotland.”

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Top 100 Trance songs 2021