Under a $7.6 billion COVID-19 relief bill just approved by the California state legislature, while the state’s small businesses are still shuttered and suffering, $600 stimulus checks will be given to illegal immigrants.
In a related story, California Democrats are circling the wagons and preparing to pull every dirty trick and rule change in their arsenal to block voters from being able to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.
President Biden accused President Trump of being like Joseph Goebbels and telling a “Big Lie” so many times that people believe it. Ironically, the best example of this in years is the Democrats’ lie that Trump said there were “very fine people” on the side of white supremacist rioters in Charlottesville. He actually said there were probably very fine people on both sides of the argument about renaming or removing Confederate parks and monuments, but that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists should be “condemned totally.”
That fact didn’t keep this Big Lie from being repeated so many times that Biden claimed hearing Trump say it inspired him to run for President (impossible, since he never said it.) And no matter how many times it’s been corrected (I’m tired of typing the same words myself), Democrats refuse to stop repeating it.
Here’s Republican Rep. Andy Biggs going to the videotape to school Rep. Sheila Jackson lee after she repeated it in Congress yet again:
And here's my favorite headline of the week: "Princeton president says 'false ideas' are 'inconsistent' with university's values...then spreads false idea about Trump.”
Guess which false narrative he repeated?
And they claim Republicans are “low information voters” who believe in things that aren’t true? They need to hire some real fact-checkers.
President Biden and Vice President Harris just marked 50 million COVID-19 vaccinations in their first month in office.
Here are the words conspicuously missing from their comments:
“Thank you, former President Trump, for your unprecedented Operation Warp Speed program that developed multiple vaccines in record time. We sincerely apologize for mocking you and saying it wasn’t possible. Also for obviously falsely suggesting that you had no plan in place to distribute the vaccine when we took office, because nobody could have possibly started from scratch and vaccinated 50 million people in one month. You’d have to be an idiot to believe that.
Oh, and speaking of idiots, sorry for calling you xenophobic for shutting off travel from China so early in the pandemic.”
From our “Punish First, Examine Evidence Later” file comes this story about Smith College, a very liberal arts college in Massachusetts. In 2018, a student made an accusation of being harassed in the dining hall because she was black. As the social media cancel mobs raged, the school made institutional changes and four employees were vilified as racists, had their reputations destroyed and some lost their jobs. One was hospitalized when the stress inflamed her lupus.
An independent investigation has now determined that the accusation was a hoax. I'll give you an update if the person responsible ever pays any price for all that destruction.
Obama’s failed SCOTUS nominee and now Biden pick for Attorney General Merrick Garland is being questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Keeping up with all his evasions is like trying to focus on a hummingbird’s wings.
Instapundit rounded up a collection of headlines and links to more details of some of his worst dodges and deflections.
To sum up a few: he can’t say whether he would protect the Durham investigation, or oppose trans men destroying women’s sports or consider entering the US illegally to be a crime…and he’s not sure whether it was domestic terrorism for Portland rioters to try to burn down a federal courthouse because, hey, it was closed at the time. Yes, wasn’t it closed because of all the RIOTING?
Heaven help us if he becomes Attorney General. Judging from what we’re seeing now, I’d say that America dodged more bullets than Rambo when we didn’t get him on the Supreme Court.
Congratulations to all the scientists, engineers and others who helped accomplish yesterday’s milestone landing of the rover Perseverance on the surface of Mars.
The mission was timed for the closest alignment of Earth and Mars, but that still meant a trip of 300 million miles, or seven months of traveling – so far away that radio signals from Percy (the rover’s nickname) take nearly 12 minutes to reach Earth. It will spend the next two years drilling into the Martian surface to collect rock samples, which will be brought back by another rocket by 2031 to search for signs of bygone microscopic life. Let's hope that by that time, there are still signs of intelligent life on Earth.
Two other spacecraft, from the UAE and China, are also orbiting Mars. China also plans to send down a small rover to seek signs of life. And if it finds any, to immediately oppress it.
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I've repeatedly made it clear that I condemn the Capitol Hill riot on January 6 and want to see accountability, including jail time where appropriate, for all crimes committed that day. But the media narrative of what happened at the Capitol during Trump’s otherwise-peaceful rally for an honest election is far from what actually occurred.
Just as President Biden has clung tightly to the fiction that President Trump referred to white supremacists as “good people,” he also maintained after Trump’s acquittal that Officer Brian Sicknick had lost “his life while protecting the Capitol from a violent, riotous mob on January 6, 2021.” As the story went, Sicknick had been bashed in the head by a violent pro-Trumper and had died of his injury. THE NEW YORK TIMES had said that the mob “overpowered Sicknick” and “struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher,” after which, “with a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.” But, as journalist and free-speech advocate Glenn Greenwald points out, “the problem with this story is that is it is false in almost all respects.”
"...This horrifying story about a pro-Trump mob beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher was repeated over and over,” Greenwald writes, “by multiple journalists on television, in print, and on social media. It became arguably the single most-emphasized and known story of this event, and understandably so --- it was a savage and barbaric act that resulted in the harrowing killing by a pro-Trump mob of a young Capitol police officer.”
I wonder how many people who have repeated this false story even know where it originated. Not surprisingly, it started with that report from the TIMES, which cited as sources only anonymous law enforcement officials. That's all there was. As Greenwald writes, “Despite this alleged brutal murder taking place in one of the most surveilled buildings on the planet, filled that day with hundreds of cellphones taping the events, nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided.” He died later, and we don’t know the cause.
The unsourced NYT story seems to be good enough for President Biden, though; he is either far too credulous or a calculated liar. Perhaps he didn’t see another story that ran the same day as the TIMES story –-- an interview in ProPublica with Sicknick’s brother that said nothing at all about a head injury or a fire extinguisher, only about a possible reaction to pepper spray. It said Sicknick had texted from the hospital that he was “in good spirits.”
And perhaps Biden didn’t read the entire CNN story that, deep within (not in the headline, of course), said "...medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.”
To be sure, many if not most Americans pay attention only to the first few paragraphs of a story or even just the headlines, and one of the NYT articles carried this one: “He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed By a Pro-Trump Mob.”
Greenwald makes the case that as it became clearer that no other deaths could be attributed to the pro-Trump mob --- that the other fatalities all had other causes --- it became even more important to spread the fake fire extinguisher story, which was the ONE WAY to depict the riot “in the most violent and menacing light possible.”
It should be possible to condemn the riot –- as I and most other Trump supporters did –- without spreading outrageous lies about what happened that day, but the left doesn’t know how to do that. Creating huge fake whoppers is their stock and trade. And now that they’ve had seven weeks to repeat this one over and over, at least half the country wrongly believes Office Sicknick was beaten to death by a pro-Trump mob. Greenwald says, “There is no circumstance or motive that justifies the dissemination of false claims by journalists. The more consequential the event, the less justified, and more harmful, serial journalistic falsehoods are.”
This particular lie was extremely consequential. It even made it into the impeachment hearing and subsequent trial, with the one article of impeachment against President Trump falsely claiming that Trump supporters “injured and killed law enforcement personnel.” As noted by legal analyst Andrew McCarthy, the House impeachment managers explicitly said on page 28 of their pretrial memorandum that “the insurrectionists killed a Capitol police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”
Finally, on February 9, REVOLVER NEWS ran a compilation and analysis of what we know, and don’t know, regarding Sicknick’s death –- I believe we commented and linked to that story –- and Tucker Carlson reported on it the following day. But so much damage had already been done. And most of the media outlets that had spread the lie in the first place simply ignored the real story. THE NYT still has not written a retraction or correction, just a vague “update” on their original reporting that says, “New information has emerged regarding the death of Capitol officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.”
Another false narrative about a man carrying zip-ties was also spread, presumably to make the security breach seem like a premeditated attempt to forcibly detain people. But this was shown to be wrong as well; Greenwald’s article gives details.
Yet another particularly damaging lie is the insistence that this was an “armed insurrection.” That suggests there were guns, when there’s no evidence of any protester having a gun inside the Capitol. And if there were no guns, what kind of an “insurrection” (or “coup”) is that? On January 15, REUTERS published an article with the headline, ‘U.S. says Capitol rioters meant to ‘capture and assassinate’ officials.” Mainstream reporters and TDS-infected tweeters such as Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe picked that up and ran with it.
And now Nancy Pelosi, with her insistence on militarizing the Capitol and blaming pro-Trump “domestic terrorists” for armed soldiers and fences topped with razor wire, inflates the narrative even more. THIS IS ALL BASED ON A LIE that they just keep telling, to further marginalize Trump supporters.
One last point: Officer Brian Sicknick lay in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, one of only four in our country’s history to do so, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Yes, all who lose their lives as law enforcement officers are heroes, but in this case is it too cynical to think of this honor as also being used as a stunt by Democrats to help perpetuate their false narrative? I don’t think so, especially since Pelosi and Schumer took the opportunity to release a joint statement again calling it a “violent insurrection.” Tell me, when have they shown such deep concern for officers who died in leftist mob violence?
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Having spent their first month in office dismantling America's fuel industry and energy independence and eviscerating the First Amendment, the Biden Administration is now turning to the Second Amendment. But did you expect anything less from a man who said he would put Beto "Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15" O'Rourke in charge of gun control? No wonder gun sales have gone through the roof since November (and they were already high, due to the riots and looting, another thing gun sellers can thank Democrats for.)
You can read about what Biden is planning to do here, but it's questionable whether it would make it past the Senate filibuster or the Supreme Court. The SCOTUS would also likely end up weighing in on any attempts to get around Congress and undermine the Second Amendment by executive order.
I've been writing about this issue for years now, so I know that anytime you question new gun laws, you're accused of wanting more people to DIE! So here are just a few of the problems with these laws, stripped of the overheated emotional rhetoric:
1. They violate the Second Amendment, and many, many Americans cherish that Amendment.
2. While gun control advocates constantly talk about banning "assault weapons" and "weapons of war," those are vague terms conjured up by people who know nothing about guns. An AR-15 isn't a "weapon of war," it's a hunting rifle with some features that make the unitiatied think it looks like it might be used by soldiers. An "assault weapon" is no more lethal than any other gun (in the wrong hands, isn't any gun an "assault weapon?"), it just has to have any of a list of traits that gun control activists find scary, even though some are purely cosmetic, or safety features (a barrel shield keeps you from burning your fingers on a hot barrel) or convenient (an adjustable stock allows people of different sizes, like a husband and wife, to share the same rifle at a target range without having to buy two of them.)
3. This is the most important, yet least mentioned fact of all: the left is constantly demanding more gun laws despite abundant evidence that the ones we already have either aren't working or aren't being enforced. They demand that authorities devote an incredible amount of time, hours and taxpayer money to tracking, checking and policing law-abiding gun owners who aren't the problem. But how many times have we seen a mass shooting and later learned that under current laws, the culprit already should never have been allowed to buy a weapon - but a form was misplaced, or a judge let them go, or the police never got around to investigating a complaint, etc. etc. etc.
In virtually every case, mass shootings stop when someone else with a gun, whether it's a cop or an armed citizen, arrives on the scene and starts shooting back.
Yet when it comes to gun laws, liberals have the same attitude that they have toward socialism: it's never, ever worked anywhere, ever...but maybe if we just try a little more of it, it will start working.
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The New York Times, the same ultra-politicized newspaper that can't tell the difference between its own news and opinion pages yet thinks we need a government-appointed "Reality Czar" to police our speech, has quietly backed away from one of its most explosive claims: that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died after being struck in the head by a fire extinguisher hurled by a rioter.
As we'd already reported in this newsletter, Officer Sicknick had assured family members that he was okay after the violence ended, he died later that day, and no blunt force trauma was found on his body. Weeks went by without any official cause of death being given, until people began to speculate on whether he might have had a stroke or a reaction to chemicals used at the scene.
This lack of facts, however, didn't deter the New York Times from running with their story, nor Congressional Democrats from shamelessly politicizing Officer Sicknick's death after a year in which many of them showed little respect for the dangers faced by police officers. They even used it to give emotional weight to their empty impeachment case against the President, blaming him for Officer Sicknick's death, just as he's personally responsible for every coronavirus death, even the ones in New York nursing homes, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who forced the nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients.
A lot of people are asking what all these Trump-hating obsessives will do if they don't have Trump to hate and curse and scream about all day. I just wonder who they'll blame for all their own mistakes and failures.
Incidentally, thanks to Ed Driscoll at Instapundit for pointing out this perfect response from the satirical site, the Babylon Bee: "Ignorant Senator Shares New York Times Article Thinking It's Real."
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This week, a federal judge permanently blocked New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on indoor worship services that the Supreme Court put under a temporary injunction last year.
A Michigan judge threw out charges against six hair stylists who cut hair in front of the state Capitol to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s draconian business shutdown policies.
And a federal judge in Texas extended his stay on President Biden’s executive order to halt all deportations of illegal aliens.
You can tell things have really changed when all of the good political news is coming from judicial rulings!