Defense Secretary Austin announces working group to counter ‘extremism in the military’

We live in the age of stupid.

Now CNN Thinks Fonts Are Racist

President Biden today will sign an EO forming a presidential commission to review the Supreme Court’s size, the possibility of term limits along with rules and practices:

 

According to Joe Biden in 2005, what he’s exploring this year as president is corrupt and a power grab:

https://twitter.com/EddieZipperer/status/1380572833898713094

Biden spoke of court-packing with similar language back in the 1980s:

There's a very different Joe Biden in the White House. He's a doormat to the extreme Left. https://t.co/5ffexXEOZX

— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) April 9, 2021

Biden considering direct cash payments to illegals in Central America to stay home

We live in the age of stupid

Biden sending illegal migrant kids to former Japanese Internment Camp

Cornell quietly removed race-based exemption for flu vaccine before mandating COVID vaccine

The #BidenBorderCrisis is the opposite of compassion. It turns migrant children into effective admission tickets to America, and many are exploited and abused.

It’s also a massive toll for US taxpayers — a rate of $195,000 per child annually!#ChalkTalk pic.twitter.com/E2qfNIOv0u

— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) April 9, 2021

Hat tip to Kane

Grenell launching ‘Fix California’ to bring change to the Democrat-dominated state

Black BLM founder buys $1.4 million home in upscale white neighborhood (photos)

71 Percent Increase of Migrants at the Border in March

Bone-headed stupidity

Still no chain of custody records provided for scads of Georgia absentee ballots put in drop boxes

Ga. election chief Raffensperger in ‘coverup mode,’ says plaintiff in Fulton Co. vote fraud suit

Confirmed: The Laptop Belongs to Hunter Biden…And the Liberal Media Can Eat a Ton of Crow

“…The liberal media peddled lies and more lies about Hunter Biden and the laptop that exposed the sordid business dealings of the Biden family. It was the 2020 October Surprise that the media depth charged. Why? It’s obvious. It made Joe Biden look bad. It torched the narrative that the former vice president knew nothing about his son’s business dealings. He was in the thick of it, especially on the failed CEFC China Energy deal. China still gave the Biden family millions, however.

The contents of the laptop were acquired by The New York Post who had the scoop and Big Tech censored them for it. It was a coordinated attempt to keep the image of squeaky clean Joe alive. They muzzled conservative outlets and allowed the liberal media titans to peddle a false narrative about the laptop being Russian disinformation. Former Obama intelligence clowns who also were die-hard believers in the Russian collusion myth threw this into the echo chamber. It was the Democrat-media complex at work…”

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1380238517389955075

Then Dorsey told senators that anyone could tweet the story, even as Twitter was *still* blocking the link. https://t.co/JmJpGmDtwT

— Abigail Jackson 🇺🇸 (@abigailmarone) April 8, 2021

TRANSLATION: Twitter censored a factual story to help get Joe Biden in the White House https://t.co/Lfulqbyufz

— Cabot Phillips (@cabot_phillips) April 8, 2021

Governor DeSantis destroys the dishonest CBS smear campaign against his state government

Harvard Doctors Promote Race-Based Discrimination In Boston Hospital In Order To Be ‘Antiracist.’

Stupid!

TRUST THE SCIENCE: THE BLUE STATE SURGE IS REAL

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

“…For months the conventional wisdom among Democrats, amplified by their obliging claque in the media, was that lockdowns played an essential role in containing COVID-19. The great heroes, in addition to Anthony Fauci, were hardline governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California’s Gavin Newsom and, most of all, New York’s Andrew Cuomo.

Yet now, more than a year later, the lockdown states—starting with New York and New Jersey—are again leading the nation in coronavirus infections and deaths per capita.

By contrast, some of the states with Republican governors who were routinely castigated for unlocking things and supposedly killing their residents, most notably Florida, Georgia and Texas, did indeed suffer an increase in fatalities last summer. But since then, even after opening their economies, these states continue to suffer fatality rates per capita well below those of the locked-down Northeastern states and about equal to California, which has maintained one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns.

What emerge from these trends are some clear issues with transmission that transcend lockdowns, mask mandates and other punitive measures. However justified, such actions have not addressed the fundamental reasons why some geographies and populations have suffered so much more than others. That’s to say that while the blue state governors aren’t necessarily to blame for the surges their states are experiencing, it’s clear that the economically and personally disruptive measures did not have the expected impact.

What did make a big difference, it turns out, is not so much the severity of lockdowns but pre-existing conditions. The likely cause here can be best identified as “exposure density” brought on by crowded housing, transit, and office environments…”

Why Hasn’t the Mainstream Media Pilloried 60 Minutes for Spreading Misinformation?

“…Earlier this week, 60 Minutes dropped a bombshell: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, had granted Publix a vaccination contract as a kickback for a $100,000 campaign donation, according to a report by journalist Sharyn Alfonsi.

Then the story swiftly fell apart. Publix was neither the first nor the only vaccine distributor in Florida; the idea to use a grocery chain with more than 800 locations across the state was a good one, and did not originate with the governor; moreover, DeSantis explained all of this to Alfonsi, but his quotes were edited in a misleading way for the version that appeared in the 60 Minutes segment.

Bafflingly, CBS News is standing by this atrocious hit job. “For over 50 years, the facts reported by 60 Minutes have often stirred debate and prompted strong reactions,” said the network in a statement released Tuesday. “Our story Sunday night speaks for itself.”

This story should be a source of deep embarrassment for the network: Alfonsi made incendiary claims that she utterly failed to prove, and the report actively concealed from viewers the more plausible explanation offered by countless government leaders involved in the decision, including DeSantis himself. (Florida’s director of emergency management, as well as the mayor of Palm Beach County—both of them Democrats—have subsequently released statements blasting CBS’s distortions.)

It should have also drawn a thorough debunking, as well as outright condemnation, from other corners of the mainstream media. An accusation of corruption leveled by a major television network against a likely 2024 contender is a big story. It’s perhaps an even bigger story when it turns out the network got it completely wrong. Media critics at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere should be all over this.

The Times has published 10 articles that reference DeSantis in the last week, but not a single one of them concerns the 60 Minutes story. The Post linked to the story in its Monday email but has had nothing to say about its collapse.

Axios, on the other hand, published an article about the “clash” between DeSantis and 60 Minutes that was overly favorable to the latter. Axios made it sound like it was still an open question whether the Publix contract was a kickback and did not go into detail about the unfair editing of DeSantis’ explanation.

Astonishingly, Axios then published a second, significantly worse article that accused DeSantis of milking his “spat” with 60 Minutes. “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump ally with his eyes on the White House, is dialing up a dispute with 60 Minutes—seizing on a juicy chance to ingratiate himself with the GOP base by bashing the media,” wrote Axios, as if the media-bashing was not well-deserved in this case…”

‘GEORGIA IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS,’ declares Governor Brian Kemp, as his executive order removing most statewide COVID restrictions takes effect today.

Too much risk aversion is too risky

Michael Barone:

“…“This is not politics,” Joe Biden said last week. “Reinstate the mandate if you let it down.” Give him credit for consistency: When Gov. Greg Abbott ended Texas’s mask mandate last month, Biden called it “Neanderthal thinking.”

But maybe the Neanderthals got it right. COVID-19 deaths in Texas plunged in March, and as National Review’s Philip Klein points out, there’s no relationship between mask mandates and coronavirus levels.

Biden is clearly wrong on another point. This is not “not about politics.” America’s constitutional federal system, and the latitude both the Trump and Biden administrations have given to state governments, has produced distinctly different Democratic and Republican coronavirus policies.

Democrats have tended to impose mask mandates, to order the closing of restaurants and retail businesses, and to require distancing rules. Republicans have tended to push for full-time instruction in schools and to allow open-air gatherings in playgrounds and beaches.

Yes, there are exceptions here and there. But what’s most striking is the prevalence of partisan patterns. Look at the maps of school closings, mask mandates, and mask usage, and the partisan patterns are obvious.

The economic results are obvious, too. With more restrictions, Democratic states have seen higher unemployment and less economic growth than Republican states.

Why the partisan correlation? The answer is that different responses to a pandemic reflect different degrees of risk aversion, and political differences often reflect differences in risk aversion, as well. As economist Allison Schrager argues, welfare state protections have appealed to risk-averse traditional Democrats, while deregulated free markets have appealed to more risk-taking Republicans.

Women tend to be more risk-averse for obvious evolutionary reasons (they’re needed for species survival) and more Democratic and dovish; men, more willing to take risks, are more Republican and hawkish. There’s a reason every society protecting itself against attack has always depended on strong, aggressive, and utterly non-risk-averse young men.

One oddity of COVID-19 responses in the United States has been the one-dimensional perspective of liberal decision-makers. They claim to be following “the science,” but with a narrow focus.

To prevent the spread of a virus that is often asymptomatic and less lethal than influenza to people under age 65, they have imposed restrictions that have reduced lifesaving medical screenings and produced mental illness and stunted development among children and adolescents…”

California forces Christian college employees to undergo gender identity training at odds with faith