Joe Biden Blasts Trump’s Coronavirus Response, Then Plagiarizes Trump’s Plan

Joe is a Democrat

Worth clicking over

Sundance:

“…The level of media opposition and snark against President Trump is simply so ridiculous at this point there’s a desperation to it. So let us consider…

From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:

1. 1. The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States. A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
   2. The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States. A return to economic independence.
   3. The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products. China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.

Donald Trump was alone on these issues. No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.

Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?

In early 2017 President Trump and his administration coined the phrase: “economic security is national security”, and the economic team set about starting a very complex process to ensure the past three decades of trade policy was reversed.

One month after taking office, February 2017, President Trump met with labor unions and assembled a corporate manufacturing council, telling all of them they needed to change their thinking about manufacturing overseas.

The members of the council didn’t like the conversation; many of them were Wall Street multinationals who were themselves part of the historic shift in moving jobs to Asia and beyond. Several months later the council disbanded amid the policy contention; but Trump persisted with the America First agenda.

President Trump, never wavered; he warned the corporate CEO’s they needed to adjust their thinking and bring back their manufacturing jobs. Trump warned them to reorient their supply chains because they had become too dependent on China; and that dependency was manifesting as geopolitical risk if the U.S. and China were in conflict.

Time after time, conversation after conversation, in the background of events where few media were paying attention, President Trump spoke privately and publicly about the issue of over-reliance on Chinese products and critical goods from southeast Asia.

Then, after months of warnings, came the tariff hammer.

Those same manufacturing council executives and their Wall Street pundits screamed into every microphone they could find that President Trump was going to collapse the economy; that consumer prices would skyrocket; that Steel and Aluminum tariffs would mean everything from beer to soup would no longer be affordable.

Team Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and USTR Robert Lighthizer didn’t waiver. President Trump accepted the criticism of “Tariff-Man”; he owned the downside and then expanded the tariffs even higher upon more goods. The CEO’s shrieked louder, but eventually, reluctantly, some started moving supply chains out of China.

While Team Trump renegotiated trade with South Korea and Japan; and while Trump renegotiated NAFTA with Mexico and Canada; the president kept the pressure on those U.S. corporations and multinationals to return critical manufacturing to the United States.

Now, with the global pandemic known as Coronavirus, people are starting to awaken to the real dangers of our medicines, pharmaceuticals and critical health care products being made overseas. Right now we see the clear reasons why President Trump was so adamant about a conversation no-one wanted, Wall Street hated, and few were paying attention to…”

Original

 

Hey guys, looks like we just killed another senior Iranian military commander. Sorry to interrupt. https://t.co/zOK9wyjbRl

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) March 13, 2020

Good piece, worth clicking over

I & I Editorial Board:

“…The hysteria over the coronavirus has hit, if you’ll pardon the expression, fever pitch. The media are full of dire prognostications about the future, while online sites run scary data projections showing potentially millions dying from the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19. And of course, financial markets have cratered, investors fearing the worst.

But is the hysteria warranted? What do we really know about this virus? There are, according to the most recent estimates, roughly 128,000 people with the COVID-19 virus, spread over 111 countries. So far, about 4,700 people have died.

The problem is, no one knows if those numbers are even close to correct. Reports of new cases keep arising, and anecdotal reports of mass graves for COVID-19 victims in Iran and body disposals in China do little to encourage optimism…

…Yet because the flu hits so many people during flu season, the death toll is high. Last year, in the 2018-2019 flu season, 61,000 Americans died from the flu, about 12 times the total global toll for COVID-19 so far. The season before that, it was 80,000 dead.

How do the 4,700 COVID-19 deaths worldwide stack up so far to deaths from the plain old flu? Michael Fumento, who has written extensively on epidemics and science for three decades, reminded us earlier this week in the New York Post: “Flu, by comparison, grimly reaps about 291,000 to 646,000 annually.”…

…This year, Townhall columnist Jack Kerwick cites Centers for Disease Control data to remind us “that between October and Feb. 22, there have been 45 million cases of the flu in the United States, 560,000 hospitalizations, and 46,000 fatalities.”

Where’s the hysteria over that?…

…it was a good idea for President Donald Trump to speak to the nation on Wednesday night about the COVID-19 threat, and what the government is doing about it. He struck a presidential note, cautioning against hysteria and urging Americans to work together to beat the coronavirus, regardless of political beliefs.

While we need to remain concerned and vigilant, the hysteria — much of it driven by an irresponsible U.S. media seeking to whip up fear and division to remove Trump from office — is getting out of hand…

…don’t blame Trump for this. China didn’t tell the world about its exploding problem with the virus until late in the game. Trump acted early, and aggressively, and was criticized for it.

Since then, the very same Trump-hating U.S. media have relentlessly whipped up both fear and hysteria, with some even hoping for COVID-19 to become “Trump’s Katrina” or “Trump’s Chernobyl.”

These are people who would rather get rid of Trump than save your life. Please remember that.

Americans, and U.S. businesses, need to reject the politically driven hysteria. Yes, there are likely to be thousands of new cases, as is inevitable with a pandemic of this sort. And, sadly, there will be more deaths. But we will get beyond this. Hysteria is no replacement for facts…”

Original

They claim Trump is racist for saying the Coronavirus is a foreign disease. The media in this country are a disgusting joke. They have no credibility.

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now

College student charged with faking hate crime against herself

This is too good.

Dr. Drew Pinsky: Media creating ‘a panic that is far worse’ than coronavirus outbreak

I thought the president did fine. The formal oval office setting and speaking from a teleprompter script are not his normal means of public speech. He is better in a rally environment. The content of his speech; however, was spot on.

The insane get-Trump media hated every minute. Was there a question about what the media response would be? The stultifying blockheads on MSNBC and CNN played their rote role perfectly. If a reasonable American watches those channels, he or she must discount the news and opinion as thoroughly and consistently biased.

Numerous analyses from a variety of media watchdog organizations have shown media coverage of Trump to be greater than 90% negative. That kind of uniformity, either positive or negative, is usually only found in state media from authoritarian regimes.

The media/Democrat driven hype over the Coronavirus and their failure to report and comment carefully and thoughtfully are a disservice to our country.

I applaud the President for his decisions and leadership.

KATHY GILSINAN:

“…Heinrichs is an exception in the old GOP national-security world—which for the most part has stuck to its Never Trump positions—but she’s the norm in the party as a whole, which gives Trump a 94 percent approval rating. The 150-odd names on letters such as the one she signed represent the last major bastion of Republican resistance to Trump; prominent members continue to slam the president for his insulting tweets and his volatile temperament, even questioning his very ability to behave like an adult. But outside of this club—whether for reasons of ambition, genuine approval, or a combination of both—elected officials and operatives have largely fallen in line behind the president. And Heinrichs, unlike many of her peers, decided she could accept the character flaws because the foreign-policy results looked good.

“His personal flaws are so transparent that they can distract truly well-meaning people or turn people off altogether,” she told me. But fundamentally, she feels Trump is fighting for a powerful America. “I have long argued for American primacy and President Trump is, even if sometimes clumsily, defending it and fighting for it. I’m not going to yell at the clouds over his tweets or obsess over this or that expression of bad manners…”

Original

Approval of U.S. Congressional Republicans Tops Democrats

Could not happen to nicer set of Democrats

“…There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.

Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”

The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.

That grim math explains why so many people — including me — are worried about the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease known as covid-19. And why so many other people think we are panicking over nothing.

During the current flu season, they point out, more than 250,000 people have been hospitalized in the United States, and 14,000 have died, including more than 100 children. As of this writing, the coronavirus has killed 29 people, and our caseload is in the hundreds. Why are we freaking out about the tiny threat while ignoring the big one? . . .

But go back to those lily pads: When something dangerous is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t. In the early days of the Wuhan epidemic, when no one was taking precautions, the number of cases appears to have doubled every four to five days.

The crisis in northern Italy is what happens when a fast doubling rate meets a “threshold effect,” where the character of an event can massively change once its size hits a certain threshold.

In this case, the threshold is things such as ICU beds. If the epidemic is small enough, doctors can provide respiratory support to the significant fraction of patients who develop complications, and relatively few will die. But once the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ventilators and ICU beds and other critical-care facilities, mortality rates spike. . . .

The experts are telling us that here in the United States, we can avoid hitting that threshold where sizable regions of the country will suddenly step into hell. We still have time to #flattenthecurve, as a popular infographic put it, slowing the spread so that the number of cases never exceeds what our health system can handle. The United States has an unusually high number of ICU beds, which gives us a head start. But we mustn’t squander that advantage through complacency.

So everyone needs to understand a few things.

First, the virus is here, and it is spreading quickly, even though everything looks normal. Right now, the United States has more reported cases than Italy had in late February. What matters isn’t what you can see but what you can’t: the patients who will need ICU care in two to six weeks. . . .

Second, this is not “a bad flu.” It kills more of its hosts, and it will spread farther unless we take aggressive steps to slow it down, because no one is yet immune to this disease. It will be quite some time before the virus runs out of new patients.

Third, we can fight it. Despite early exposure, Singapore and Hong Kong have kept their caseloads low, not by completely shutting down large swaths of their economies as China did but through aggressive personal hygiene and “social distancing.” South Korea seems to be getting its initial outbreak under control using similar measures. If we do the same, we can not only keep our hospitals from overloading but also buy researchers time to develop vaccines and therapies.

Fourth, and most important: We are all in this together. It is your responsibility to keep America safe by following the CDC guidelines, just as much as it is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s or President Trump’s responsibility to lead us to safety. And until this virus is beaten, we all need to act like it…”

Original

hat tip to Glenn Reynolds

Diversity and inclusion monitors to join faculty hiring committees at SDSU.

Higher learning or forced conformity to liberal orthodoxy?

The snow is melting already! 😂 pic.twitter.com/ppDkNunXPl

— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) March 10, 2020

I feel sorry about the poor education and poor parenting this young girl has received.

Professor Doubles Down – ‘Whiteness Is Terrorism’

You can’t make this stuff up!

Clyburn calls for DNC to cancel debate, shut down primaries…

NEW: House Majority Whip James Clyburn tells NPR if Bernie Sanders doesn't win any states tonight, the Democratic National Committee should "shut this primary down" and "cancel the rest of these debates." https://t.co/qdk7LADWXk pic.twitter.com/ZxbEOb6hPl

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) March 11, 2020

If Clyburn says it is a foregone conclusion, why would anyone disagree?

Trump Endorses Tommy Tuberville over Jeff Sessions in Alabama Senate Runoff

On the other hand, Tuberville seems like a decent guy