Joe Biden flip flops on China travel ban
It makes sense that when you are the leader of a country and you hear through your intelligence that there is a potentially deadly virus in a country that you would restrict travel to and from that country. It also makes sense that if it were bad enough you might just come right out and ban travel to that country and not let flights come into your country from China that country whatsoever.
It is also predictable that when your opponents oppose everything that you say or do that they will also oppose you taking precautions to help protect the American your people, this means they will act reactionarily to oppose a travel ban.
And that is exactly what happened in this thinly-veiled reference to COVID-19 and Donald Trump’s reaction to the threat. Instead of coming out in support of a tough decision the Democrats claimed the President was a racist, and a bigot, and a Xenophobe while condemning his decision. Compounding their obviously politically motivated befuddlement at the President’s action was the fact that this was an election year and these are accusations the left has been trying, unsuccessfully, to pin on Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy several years ago.
Nobody was more vocal in opposition than Joe Biden, who said:
“In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do,” he said. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia, to uh, and fearmongering.”
According to Joe Biden this travel ban was “hysterical Xenophobia” and “fearmongering” but that was then and this is now. Good ole Uncle Joe has quietly changed his position and is now supporting Donald Trump’s travel ban. Here is more:
“Joe Biden supports travel bans that are guided by medical experts, advocated by public health officials, and backed by a full strategy,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told CNN. “Science supported this ban, therefore he did too.”
Apparently Donald Trump was not being reactionary or Xenophobic, nor was he fearmongering at the end of January when he imposed this travel ban, it was Joe Biden who was being the reactionary one, for now according to Joe Biden science actually supported the ban and it did all along. If you are a Joe Biden supporter and want to defend your candidate by saying he did not have all the information about the virus when he made the earlier statements in opposition about the travel ban you are probably right but that is another reason why he should have kept his mouth shut.
So here are the questions this brings to mind about this flip-flop to the right position after a couple of months of thinking about it: How long as President would Joe Biden have been frozen in the grips of political correctness and how long would he have been afraid to act for fear of offending people before he finally came to the realization a travel ban to and from China was in the best interest of protecting the American people? How many more people would have died because of his paralyzation? And how much worse would this already bad situation be if Joe Biden were at the helm?
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
NRA sues New York for closing gun shops during pandemic
For the most part the people are lying supinely on their backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope as the government uses the coronavirus pandemic to wipe its feet on the Constitution.
But there is one organization which is fighting back against this long train of abuses and usurpations and that group is the NRA. The NRA is already fighting California for using the pandemic as an excuse to shut down gun shops and now they are suing New York for the same. Here is more:
The NRA explains that the suit centers on the closure of gun stores resulting from “Executive Order 202.8, issued by Gov. Cuomo on March 20, 2020, in response to the COVID-19 health crisis.”
The NRA claims the gun store closures “effectively and indefinitely suspended a key component of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution – shutting down all gun stores in the State of New York, including federally licensed gun stores, by deeming them ‘non-essential’ businesses.”
NRA CEO and Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said:
There isn’t a single person who has ever used a gun for self-defense who would consider it nonessential. This is clearly another assault by Gov. Cuomo on the NRA, on the rights of New Yorkers to defend themselves and their families, and on our Second Amendment freedoms. The NRA will continue to fight all such attacks until Gov. Cuomo recognizes that constitutional rights are for every New Yorker and every American – and not just for politicians and their privileged friends.
These two lawsuits are most likely not going to be settled before this crisis is over but this is still important because now that the government has seen how easily the people rolled over and how willingly they accepted this abuse of power we are going to see more and more of this and for longer and longer periods of time. This is only the beginning…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
The Justice Department has already admitted that there were several mistakes made in the application for approval to spy on Carter Page, in fact they actually admitted that two of the FISA warrants were not even valid.
This raises questions about how widespread the problem is and it turns out the process is not being followed properly in many cases. Here is more:
A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of secret surveillance warrants has found widespread problems with the law enforcement agency’s process for ensuring that facts are backing up the claims made to judges when seeking a warrant.
The finding of broader failings in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program came in a review launched by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz after an earlier inquiry found numerous errors in applications to monitor former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. In a bid to assess whether the faults in the Page’s surveillance process were an aberration or a chronic problem, Horowitz’s audit team zeroed in on 29 applications for surveillance of U.S. citizens or green-card holders over a five-year period.
Horowitz found an average of 20 errors in each of the applications.
For each of the 29 applications, Horowitz’s team reviewed whether the “Woods procedures” for justifying an application were properly followed.
“We do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with FBI policy, or that the process is working as it was intended to help achieve the ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications,” Horowitz wrote ina “management advisory” addressed to FBI Director Chris Wray.
One troubling finding in Horowitz’s ongoing audit: the files providing detailed support for four of the 29 applications reviewed were missing.
“We could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed,” he wrote.
That is very troubling indeed, especially the finding that in a few cases they could not even determine if the proper documents for requesting a FISA warrant ever existed.
The FISA court is unconstitutional in the first place and it should not be reauthorized even if there was no abuse, but the abuse makes not reauthorizing the FISA court a no-brainer to anybody in the government who values liberty and freedom. But of course there are not many…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Back in October of last year ABC was caught claiming footage from a gun range in Kentucky was actually video of Syria bombing the Kurds after Donald Trump pulled a couple of dozen troops from the country. This was a blatant attempt by the news outlet to paint a bleak picture due to a Trump policy.
Not to be outdone in trying to create a bleak picture which can be blamed on Donald Trump CBS was caught over the weekend using Italian hospital footage in a story about New York. CBS is claiming it was an “editing mistake.”
CBS News acknowledged it aired the wrong footage while reporting last week on New York hospitals and the ventilator shortage during the coronavirus outbreak.
Inquisitive social media users noticed that CBS This Morning aired footage on Wednesday during a report on Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s response to the coronavirus pandemic that looked to be the same as footage from a recent Sky News report about a hospital in Bergamo, Italy.
“It was an editing mistake,” a CBS spokesperson told the Washington Examiner when asked about the footage. “We took immediate steps to remove it from all platforms and shows.”
The footage of the Italy-based hospital was presented as imagery from a hospital in New York, but the same clip was seen during a Sky News segment on Italian hospitals and the COVID-19 virus on March 22.
This so-called “mistake” was caught by people on social media and yet we are supposed to believe that nobody in the editing department knew where the footage came from? Just like ABC and the gun range video from last October I do not believe this was done by mistake, somebody who works at CBS purposely slipped this footage into the story hoping that nobody would catch it. Somebody needs to lost his or her job over this.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Sunday, March 29th open thread: ‘Kiss Off’
“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24 KJV)
Here is this week’s open thread. Please feel free to post links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues arise during the course of the day. Nothing is off-topic here.
You can subscribe to America’s Watchtower to receive email updates and you can also follow America’s Watchtower on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the links on the right.
Here is a very young looking Violent Femmes performing “Kiss Off” live in 1983:
One of the first actions California Governor Gavin Newsom took after declaring a state of emergency in California was to shut down the gun shops and now, according to this story, the NRA is suing. Here is more:
The National Rifle Association accused Governor Gavin Newsom in a lawsuit of taking away the right of Americans to access firearms by shutting gun stores during the coronavirus outbreak.
The nation’s leading gun-rights group filed the complaint Friday in Los Angeles federal court along with two individuals, retailer Gun World and three other firearms advocacy groups.
“The circumstances posed by the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak are noteworthy, but do not excuse unlawful government infringements upon freedom,” the NRA said in the suit.
Firearm and ammunition retailers help Californians defend themselves, their loved ones and their property from potential dangers during the crisis, the group said.
It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out. The last chapter most likely will not be written until after the state of emergency is over anyway, but this is still important because now that the precedent has been set I expect to see multiple crises in the future used to take gun rights away.
But I would go further and say it is not only gun rights which have been infringed upon–and will also be in the future now that this precedent has been set–but just about every right which was supposed to be protected in the Constitution.
And the greatest threat to our rights is the fact that so many people did not adhere to Benjamin Franklin’s warning and were willing to trade their rights in for some perceived security. While I am on the subject, whatever happened to those 3%ers who were so vocal during the Obama years? I guess they were Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Joe Biden accused of 1993 assault
According to this story a woman has come forward–or actually I should say she has been trying to come forward for many years but is finally being listened to–claiming that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her back in 1993. Here is more:
Tara Reade has been trying to tell her story since it happened in 1993, when she was working as a staff assistant for Joe Biden. She told part of her story– about how Biden would put his hands on her shoulders and run his fingers up and down her neck– in the spring of 2019 after Lucy Flores accused Biden of kissing the top of her head and smelling her hair inappropriately. But Reade didn’t tell her full story. As Ryan Grim reveals at The Intercept, Reade asked for help from Time’s Up, but the organization said it could not support her because a case taking on Biden would jeopardize their non-profit status. Tara is finally telling the story she’s been trying to tell for decades. While there were no witnesses to Biden’s alleged sexual assault of Tara Reade, her brother and close friend, both of whom I’ve spoken to, recall Reade telling them about it at the time.
I am not going to go into what she alleges Joe Biden did to her but you can listen to an interview with the victim by following the link above. She wanted to come forward before but nobody wanted to take on the powerful Biden family.
We can expect the left to defend the presumptive Democratic nominee by claiming these are unfounded accusations from many years ago but the left has taught us over the last four years that there is no statute of limitations when it comes to accusations such as these so they can no longer use this defense.
We saw the left take a crass locker room comment Donald Trump made decades ago and use it to claim he was unfit to be President because he actually acted out on his comment although there was no proof or accusations of any such behavior. The left then paraded out accusers who were all debunked one by one. (Oh, and this woman is accusing Joe Biden of actually doing what Donald Trump said in that infamous comment, and much more…)
But that was just the tip of the iceberg. We saw the way the left went after Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and we also remember that the left said women who make accusations of sexual assault deserve to always be believed regardless of evidence or possible motivation. So, using the precedent they set by going after Republicans and Republican appointees they should be calling for Joe Biden to step out of the race.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
A couple of days ago it was reported that the Department of Justice was seeking extraordinary emergency powers which included the power to indefinitely detain Americans without a trial.
This naturally set off a firestorm with civil liberty advocates and today the Department of Justice “clarified” its position on this issue. Here is more:
A Justice Department spokesperson issued a clarification overnight regarding a recent “emergency powers” request to Congress involving prolonged pre-trial incarceration during the coronavirus crisis that drew a backlash on social media.
The DOJ claimed that there had been “confusion” after Politico and Rolling Stone wrote that the department was seeking new “emergency powers” for itself that would “suspend” certain rights in criminal matters. In reality, the spokeswoman said, judges would be the ones to determine whether a defendant could be held in custody for longer than normally permitted.
“Bottom line: The proposed legislative text confers powers upon judges. It does not confer new powers upon the executive branch,” said a statement posted by DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec early Monday morning. “These provisions are designed to empower the courts to ensure the fair and effective administration of justice.”
There you have it, the Department of Justice is not seeking the power to detain Americans indefinitely but rather is seeking to give the judges the power to do so. The bottom line is the Justice Department does want the government to have this power, does this make it any better in your eyes? It does not make me feel any better…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Homeland Security denies rumor of national shutdown
There have been some pretty scary rumors out there about a totalitarian national lockdown but the Department of Homeland Security is denying that this is something under consideration by Donald Trump and his administration.
Here is more:
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Saturday shot down rumors of a potential national lockdown because of the coronavirus, saying that there are no such plans and that such rumors are “disinformation.”
“It’s simply not true,” Wolf said on Fox & Friends. “What we see is a lot of disinformation campaigns via text, via social media, so we want to make sure we refute those, knock those down… a lot of this information is just that: disinformation.”
“We want to make sure that individuals are getting information from trusted sources, so those are your state and federal officials, and we’re asking them not to spread this information around,” he said.
“So we have no plans for a national lockdown or a national quarantine, and again it’s just that — its disinformation.”
It is up to you to determine for yourself if you think you can believe the Federal Government, I for one stopped many years ago, but do not forget the Department of Justice is not denying the report that it is seeking broad emergency powers which include the indefinite detention of Americans during this and any following crises like say, oh I don’t know, a gun violence crisis when a Democrat takes over the Presidency in January.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
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