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The obvious issue for the Trump administration is whether it can truly trust that scumbag/liar-Biden would remain uninvolved in the years-long FBI investigation into his son’s shady business dealings. scumbag/liar-Biden’s response anytime the mainstream media has dared to ask about Hunter makes it clear that the answer is a resounding “no.”

Responding to scumbag/liar-Biden’s latest Hunter comments, The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway  asserted that Joe’s dismissal of the investigation is argument enough for the appointment of a special counsel. “The guidance for when to start a special counsel is when there’s a conflict of interest,” Hemingway noted. “scumbag/liar-Joe Biden has already said he thinks this is a fraudulent investigation. He says he loves his son and does not believe he is capable of doing anything wrong. There is already enough problem here posed by what scumbag/liar-Joe Biden has been saying to make it questionable about whether he will allow this Justice Department investigation to continue unabated.”

Furthermore, Hemingway contended, “If you really believe what everybody said during the Russia-collusion hoax, there’s no question that there should be a special counsel instigated now. And that doesn’t get into the fact that scumbag/liar-Joe Biden has said things contrary to the public record about how involved he was in the scumbag/liar-Biden family business.”

Meanwhile, scumbag/liar-Biden recently tapped as press secretary Jen Psaki, another Barack scumbag/liar-nObama retread. She dubiously claimed, “[scumbag/liar-Joe Biden] will not be discussing an investigation of his son with any attorney general candidates. He will not be discussing it with anyone he is considering for the role, and he will not be discussing it with a future attorney general.” In fact, she insisted, “It will be up to the purview of a future attorney general in his administration to determine how to handle any investigation.” She concluded, “As you know, U.S. attorneys are — that’s a personnel decision. We’re far from there in the process, given we haven’t announced an attorney general. … But we’re going to allow the process to work how it should, which is for the Justice Department to be run independently by the attorney general at the top.”

This denial brings back memories from scumbag/liar-nObama AG Loretta Lynch and the secret tarmac meeting in 2016 with scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton in which they claimed to have talked about little other than each other’s grandkids. Certainly not the criminal probe into  scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton’s illegal email server!

Furthermore, who truly believes any of scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s denials? His are especially specious claims when it comes to his son Hunter, with whom scumbag/liar-Joe claimed to have never discussed his foreign business dealings, a demonstrably fallacious claim. This is the same scumbag/liar-Biden who continues to parrot the Charlottesville lie against Trump as he falsely accuses him of racism. And this is the same scumbag/liar-Biden who has an embarrassing history of plagiarism and a shameless relationship with the truth.

Will AG William Barr appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden as his parting act? Nope. He said just this morning that it’s not necessary, because the current probe was “being handled responsibly and professionally.” To the contrary, however, we’d argue that Biden’s recent comments demand it.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/76618?mailing_id=5544&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5544&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

In theater, one actor can hide behind a mask to play a role or switch masks with another to change identities, roles, or positions. The word hypocrisy originates from the ancient Greek word meaning to pretend, play a part, or be a judge in a mask.

Hiding behind the mask of public health and safety, governments have limited church and religious gatherings in Colorado, California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New York (as well as urban counties around the nation) despite the recent Supreme Court rulings that clearly protect the First Amendment right and practices of Americans to exercise their faith in peaceful assemblies.

In Nevada, casinos were being limited to 50% capacity while churches were limited to 50 people. In New York, a coalition bringing Orthodox Jewish groups and the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn together received a favorable 5-4 ruling from the Supreme Court reversing the selective closure of synagogues and churches by Governor Andrew Cuomo. In that opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, “It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques.”

In Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam is the pediatric neurologist-turned-politician who supported a third-trimester abortion proposal by asserting that, in the case of a child born with health deformities, he would deliver the child and discuss with the mother if the baby should live. This same man espoused his spiritual thoughts on the subject of public safety, saying, “We need to think about what is truly the most important thing. Is it the worship or the building? For me, God is wherever you are. You don’t have to sit in the church pew for God to hear your prayers.” Northam hides behind a somewhat accurate mask — God is omnipresent, or everywhere at all times — but the bait and switch comes with the hypocrisy seen by the experts who embrace limitations on churchgoers but demand freedom for those engaged in gambling, imbibing, or protesting.

In June, Dr. Rhea Boyd, a southern California pediatrician and community health advocate, gave an interview to Time magazine, stating, “Protest is a profound public health intervention.” The streets were filled with protests, vandalism, riots, and property destruction, all supposedly forms of “speech” protected under the First Amendment.

Dr. Boyd wasn’t alone. A letter penned and signed by more than 1,200 other medical and health colleagues proclaimed their concern “that protests around the United States could be shut down under the guise of coronavirus health concerns.” Some actions are taken under the guise of coronavirus health concerns? You don’t say. From behind one mask, experts declare that the exercise of some First Amendment rights jeopardize public health, and from behind another they proclaim that the same rights are a profound public health intervention.

There was a nine-point drop in the positive mental health of adults, according to a December 7 Gallup poll. Interestingly, this poll reported that the only cohort demonstrating an improvement in mental health from 2019 to 2020 were those who participated in weekly religious services. Those adults surveyed who did not engage in religious activity reported a 13% drop versus the four-point gain among the faithful.

But by all means, Northam says, you don’t need to go to church to worship.

As COVID surges and immunity builds in the U.S., Americans are struggling to balance their lives, their health, their livelihoods, and their Liberty. But the masked tragedy is that “experts” make arbitrary partisan policies that selectively interpret our rights. We mustn’t let them destroy the foundation of that which makes America unique and free.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/76603?mailing_id=5544&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5544&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

In the first month or two of 2020, we had the first hint of a new, strange disease that originated in Wuhan, China. By March, we were locked down in our homes and have lived unprecedented disruptions of normal life since then. All along we have looked to science for a remedy — holding our breath behind our masks.

Finally, two COVID-19 vaccines are now being released. This is extremely good news. The virus that causes COVID-19 is an insidious little beast that has disrupted the entire world, and effective vaccines are welcome. In a cost-benefit analysis, vaccines offer tremendous blessings with relatively few drawbacks.

But suddenly there’s a lot of hesitation about this thing we have looked to as our hope out of this mess. Some are reluctant to take the vaccine because of its development during a political administration they don’t like, and some are reluctant to take it because of its administration (to most of us) during a political administration they don’t like. And its stunning speed getting to us is concerning to many.

I think we have acquired cultural amnesia about vaccines.

I grew up not long after the Polio scares, and in my childhood heard horror stories about outbreaks that left many in iron lungs for the rest of their lives. The disease claimed paupers and presidents; even President Franklin Roosevelt was not exempt, his body permanently weakened and crippled after acquiring the disease as a young man. Decades ago, vaccines were not taken for granted, because we were close to the plagues that still tormented us. The Spanish Flu epidemic was a century ago, and during this holiday from history we have forgotten how desperately people desire to prevent or cure or just effectively treat disease, but there was no technological cure to assuage the suffering of a century ago.

We in the 21st century have drunk from the river Lethe. We have forgotten why we had to develop all these vaccines, and why it was necessary to immunize.

Smallpox was a disfiguring scourge that may have killed up to 10% of humanity before the advent of Jenner’s innoculation. COVID-19 is not so bad as that, but it is bad enough. There has never been a coronavirus vaccine developed for humans. Two other coronaviruses are deadly, but not very contagious, and cases are rare, so it was not deemed necessary to develop vaccines for them. Four others cause some colds, but these are rarely dangerous, so developing a vaccine (or antiviral drugs) is a waste of effort when pharmaceutical expertise could be directed to more needful projects.

Now we have another coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease we call COVID-19. When it first came to light, I told my students that a vaccine would be developed soon, hopefully by the end of the year.

I suspected that small-molecule antiviral drugs to lessen the severity of the illness would be very difficult to find, and it has proven to be so.

Why was I confident that we would be able to produce vaccines against COVID-19? It has to do with the mutation rate of the virus. HIV mutates so quickly that it’s almost impossible to raise a vaccine against it, although researchers are still trying. Epidemiologists and virologists must decide each year which strains of influenza viruses they want to raise vaccines against, and they do a good job predicting the season to come, but it can be hit-or-miss, because the mutation rate of flu bugs is so high. SARS-CoV-2 mutates with some frequency, but fortunately its mutation rate is roughly a quarter that of influenza viruses.

I thought that COVID-19 would be a good candidate for a vaccine. In early fall 2020, there were several vaccines in phase III trials worldwide. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine triggered too many contraindications (deleterious side effects) and was withdrawn. Two vaccines are being approved and implemented in the United States as of this writing, with others in development and testing.

This is a signal accomplishment, and all responsible — from President Donald Trump and his Warp Speed program to all the researchers worldwide — should take a bow. These are mRNA-based vaccines, too, which is really slick. Never has a vaccine gone from pathogen discovery to vaccine approval in less than a year — it is unprecedented.

The president removed a lot of regulations and accelerated the process of vaccine discovery. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the emergency of COVID-19 enabled us to figure out how to make fast vaccines with streamlined regulations. I believe most of these regulations should be permanently removed, so that drug and vaccine discovery don’t cost well over a billion dollars and a decade of development time. That’s not sustainable.

The time and expense it takes to create a vaccine or to market a drug is a regulatory nightmare. It should never take that much time and treasure to manufacture vaccines and drugs. But because that’s what we’re used to, some assert that the COVID vaccines are “rushed.”

That might be true relative to what we have had to live with in the last decades. The expense of vaccine and drug discovery has been escalating, to the point that manufacturers can’t afford to bring to the public many drugs that are critical to human well-being.

For example, new antibiotics are too expensive to develop, because the manufacturers know they cannot turn a profit on them. This is tragic, because we now see more antibiotic-resistant bacteria than ever before. Pharmacologists see an impending crisis barreling towards us. The amount of regulation we have now is far more than was required in the 1960s, when the FDA was cautious enough to ban thalidomide for pregnant women in the United States.

It is indeed cause for celebration that COVID vaccines are already being distributed, and I will not hesitate to take the vaccine, though I have a good understanding of the coronavirus and do not fear it. I think we have done what our historical moment called for, and I hope biomedicine of the future will be all the better for it.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/76585?mailing_id=5544&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5544&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

HANS VON SPAKOVSKY 

Justices Punt on Census Apportionment,

So, will illegal aliens be included in the population count used for apportionment of the House of Representatives? We still don’t know.

In a 6-to-3 decision Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it was too early to make a decision on the issue and that New York and the other states challenging the Trump administration did not have standing (yet) to sue.

At issue in Trump v. New York was a memorandum issued by President Donald Trump to the secretary of the Department of Commerce (where the Census Bureau is housed), directing him to exclude illegal aliens from the population to be used for apportionment of the House of Representatives “to the maximum extent feasible.”

Under federal law, the secretary presents the president with the base population to be used for apportionment. The president then applies a statutory formula to that population to determine the number of members of the House to which each state is entitled.

New York sued over the memorandum and obtained an injunction from a district court judge to prevent the directive from being followed.

The Justice Department had argued that the president had the authority under Supreme Court precedent to determine whether a person should be deemed an “inhabitant” or “usual resident” of a state for purposes of determining the population and, therefore, the political representation of that state in the House.

But the district court judge held that the president did not have that authority and that the memorandum “chilled” illegal aliens from responding to the census.

The lower court held that that degraded the quality of census data used to allocate federal funds to the states, and that the president violated the federal statute governing the census by ordering the secretary to provide two different sets of numbers.

However, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court issued a per curiam (unsigned) opinion vacating that judgment and instructing the district court to dismiss the lawsuit — but without deciding the merits of the substantive constitutional and statutory issues involved.

Instead, the court noted that the census count is already complete and that the “case is riddled with contingencies and speculation that impede judicial review.”

Whether the commerce secretary can even implement the directive from the president, the court said, “is no more than conjecture,” since it’s unclear whether there are sufficient administrative records on illegal aliens in the federal government that can be matched with “census data in a timely manner” to provide a number that is not just an “impermissible” estimate.

The court also noted that, with regard to the federal funding claim by New York, the Justice Department claimed that federal funds are tied to data derived from the census, not necessarily to the apportionment population, which is a separate number from the entire population of the country reported by the Census Bureau.

Moreover, the court stated, the injunction entered by the district court “underscores the contingent nature of the plaintiffs’ injuries,” since it prohibits the secretary from informing the president of the number of illegal aliens, which not only affects the president’s authority under the Opinions Clause of the Constitution (Art. II, § 2, cl. 1), but reveals that the supposed injury is the action that “the secretary or president might take in the future.”

So, according to the majority, so far, the plaintiffs have suffered “no concrete harm from the challenged policy itself, which does not require them ‘to do anything or to refrain from doing anything.’” Thus, the resolution of the dispute is “premature,” at least according to the six members of the court’s so-called conservative bloc.

In other words, the court said New York had not yet been injured by a policy that might or might not actually be implemented. So, New York didn’t have standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place, and there are so many contingent unknowns at this point that the case is not “ripe” or ready to be decided.

Most importantly, however, the majority expressed “no view on the merits of the constitutional and related statutory claims presented.”

It should come as no surprise that Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented, arguing that New York has standing since the policy, if implemented, would harm the state, and that it is ripe for resolution.

The dissenters said they would decide the case in the plaintiffs’ favor on the merits because the plain meaning of the statutes, historical practice, and uniform interpretations of all three branches “demonstrate that aliens without lawful status cannot be excluded from the decennial census solely on account of that status.”

What’s so odd about these arguments by the three liberal justices is that illegal aliens are legally prohibited from voting, making donations to federal candidates (including individuals running for the House of Representatives), or running for Congress.

Yet, the dissenters think that illegal aliens must be included in apportionment, distorting the political power of the states in the House of Representatives, giving states that obstruct federal immigration law and attract illegal aliens through sanctuary policies more representation in the House than they are otherwise entitled to.

That is, of course, the real reason that states such as New York are trying to prevent this from happening. A study by the Congressional Research Service in 2015 analyzed what the representation would have been in the House of Representatives after the 2010 census using only the estimated 2013 citizen population, while excluding noncitizens.

California would have lost four congressional seats and New York, Texas, and Florida each would have lost one seat. On the other hand, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia would have gained one seat each.

So, what this case is about is pure political power and whether U.S. citizens will be disenfranchised and have their votes and representation in the House of Representatives diluted by aliens who are in this country illegally. That’s the bottom line.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/76606?mailing_id=5544&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5544&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body