Please note that you can leave a comment on any of our posts at our Facebook page.  Subscribers can also comment at length at our Angel's Corner Forum.

JUNE 1,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

A JOURNALISTIC SCANDAL – FROM FOX:   New York Times writer David Leonhardt told "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter on Sunday that the media made a "mistake" by ignoring Sen. Tom Cotton, R.-Ark., and others who suggested for months that COVID-19 could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, before new evidence surfaced last week giving credence to the lab leak possibility.  A Wall Street Journal report released last week revealed that a few researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were ill in November 2019 with COVID-like symptoms. Once word spread, media outlets who once dismissed the lab leak theory as "fringe" suddenly started treating it as credible, such as the New York Times, who published starkly different headlines from May 2020 to May 2021.  New York Times writer David Leonhardt told "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter on Sunday that the media made a "mistake" by ignoring Sen. Tom Cotton, R.-Ark., and others who suggested for months that COVID-19 could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, before new evidence surfaced last week giving credence to the lab leak possibility.  I'm mildly pleased that some journalists have found religion.  It's long overdue.  But they now have to go on to other journalistic misadventures, like climate change and the reporting of the Vietnam War, and concede major inaccuracies and exaggerations that misled the country.  They can also throw in their sweetheart reporting of Barack Hussein Obama Jr, leading to the election of one of the worst presidents of our lifetime.

June 1, 2021       Permalink

THE HISPANIC VOTE AND A GOP VICTORY – OVERNIGHT:  There is clear political movement within the Hispanic communities of America, and Republicans plan to benefit from it.  They may well do so.  From RealClearPolitics:

Marco Rubio and Rick Scott gathered reporters in a conference room early Thursday morning at the National Republican Senatorial Committee for a light breakfast, a PowerPoint presentation, and a paradigm shift.

The vaunted “coalition of the ascendant,” that mix of young voters and minority voters and white college-educated voters who together carried Barack Obama to a second term, has fractured.

Projected demographic changes will continue but will not lead to permanent Democratic majorities. Anyone looking to forecast the future of American politics should look to red Florida, not blue California.

At least so said GOP pollster Curt Anderson, who laid out the findings of a new NRSC survey of Hispanic voters in battleground states. The top line from his 34-page slide deck? “The coalition of the ascendant is descending.” The proof? The two senators sitting at the table who won election in a Sun Belt state that has become “substantially less white and more Republican.”

The moment for their multiethnic, multiracial working-class coalition has arrived, Republicans hope, and Hispanic voters are the key. “They said how well Marco would do because he is of Cuban descent,” Scott said, noting how Rubio won 48% of those voters in his 2016 race, “but when I did it, they said, ‘Well, there is something different about Florida.’ If you look at these poll numbers, it is not. If you look at these poll numbers, Hispanics across the country are Republicans.”

The GOP theory of the case ahead of the midterms, where Republicans must not only defend 20 of their own seats but also flip at least one Democratic seat to retake the Senate, sounds simple. “If Republicans reach out to them,” Scott said of Hispanics, “we are going to win.”

The survey of 1,200 Hispanic likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, conducted by OnMessage Strategies, is welcome news to a party that went, in just four years, from unified control of Washington to banishment in the electoral wilderness. It shows an increasingly conservative Hispanic population open to the culture wars that Donald Trump waged.

These voters reject socialism and favor the free market by a margin of 63% to 17%, a sentiment that holds roughly the same among all Central and South American subsets.

They agree also, 67% to 28%, with the widespread angst that the nation is in decline and fear their children will not enjoy the same opportunities. About four out of five say that public schools are failing, while two-thirds worry that too many Americans are “losing our traditional values centered on faith, family, and freedom,” and agree that “cancel culture has gotten out of hand.”

The in-house numbers dovetailed with the biography of Rubio, himself a second-generation Cuban American. “The argument from the left is that this country is a place that has not been good for people, other than the majority, over much of our history,” he said. “And Hispanics just don't buy it. And the reason why they don't buy it is very simple: They know what life is like in another country.
“You can just imagine it, right? You came from Venezuela, you came from Cuba, or you came from Nicaragua, or you’re Colombian, and you saw what happened in those countries,” he added. “Now you put your kids in schools where they try to teach them that Che Guevara was some kind of hero?”

Rubio admitted that his message might be lost on some, perhaps the white college-educated slice of the ascendant coalition who “have the luxury of imagining” some “utopian country somewhere that has a better history and a better life than America.” This is not, he insisted, the case for a majority of Hispanics.

“When you have come from somewhere else, and you know what life is like in another country, you know how special this country is,” he said. “You sure as hell don't want to live in a second country where those things are lost.”

COMMENT:    Read the whole thing.  It's very compelling.  The Hispanic communities are poised to play a leading role in returning America to traditional values, values they came here to embrace and defend.  Compare please with the "bring it down" mentality of the other side.

June 1, 2021       Permalink

MAY 31,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

HOW JUICY – FROM FOX BUSINESS:    A conservative group representing small businesses that says MLB's decision to move its All-Star game out of Atlanta is proof Commissioner Rob Manfred has "no balls" is now ready to throw another brush-back pitch.   With more than 30 partners ranging from the Nevada Chamber of Commerce to the National Restaurant Association, the Job Creators Network says baseball's decision to boycott Atlanta over its objection to Georgia’s voting law is wrong and it is taking MLB to court. 
FOX Business has learned that the right-leaning trade group founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus — plans to file a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court Tuesday morning alleging that MLB's decision has injured Atlanta’s small business community. Also to be named in the lawsuit, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter is the Major League Baseball Players Association – the union which represents some 1,200 players – and which the Job Creators Network contends played a role in the decision to move the game out of Atlanta to Denver.  Read the whole thing.  I love it.   Major League baseball suddenly went woke, and damaged its franchise.  Sports should stay out of politics.  I hope the challengers win their lawsuit, and then start working on the NFL, another franchise that has lost its mind...and its viewers.

NOTHING TO SEE, NOTHING TO SEE – FROM AP:   VIENNA (AP) —  The United Nations’ atomic watchdog has not been able to access data important to monitoring Iran’s nuclear program since late February, when the Islamic Republic started restricting international inspections of its facilities, the agency said Monday.  The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in a confidential document, distributed to member countries and seen by The Associated Press, that it has “not had access to the data from its online enrichment monitors and electronic seals, or had access to the measurement recordings registered by its installed measurement devices” since February 23.  While the IAEA and Iran earlier acknowledged the restrictions limited access to surveillance cameras at Iranian facilities, Monday’s report indicated that they went much further. The IAEA acknowledged it could only provide an estimate of Iran’s overall nuclear stockpile as it continues to enrich uranium at its highest level ever.  Iran started limiting inspections in a bid to put pressure on the government of US President Joe Biden to lift crippling sanctions reimposed after then-president Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran unilaterally in 2018.  Under the deal, the IAEA placed around 2,000 tamper-proof seals on nuclear material and equipment. Those seals communicated electronically to inspectors.  This is pretty serious stuff.  Iran is clearly developing nuclear weapons, and the missiles to deliver them.  And yet we're negotiating with the Iranians to get back into Obama's nuclear deal, which was a farce.  And now we learn that we don't have reliable data with which to conduct our negotiations.  Dangerous and unsmart.

May 31, 2021       Permalink

THE STORY EXPANDS – OVERNIGHT:  And with it, one of the greatest journalistic scandals of our time.  From Fox: 

British intelligence services are now reportedly reassessing their position on the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A Sunday report from the Sunday Times of London quotes British spies who initially dismissed the lab leak theory, but now say it is "feasible."

"There might be pockets of evidence that take us one way, and evidence that takes us another way," the paper quoted a source as saying. "The Chinese will lie either way. I don’t think we will ever know."

The quote comes as both the United States and Britain are stepping up calls for the World Health Organization to take a deeper look into the possible origins of COVID-19, including a new visit to China, where the first human infections were detected.

WHO and Chinese experts issued a first report in March that laid out four hypotheses about how the pandemic might have emerged. The joint team said the most likely scenario was that the coronavirus jumped into people from bats via an intermediary animal, and the prospect that it erupted from a laboratory was deemed "extremely unlikely."

The Biden administration wants to step up calls for China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off complaints from opposition Republican senators that the president has not been tough enough, as well as to use the opportunity to press China on alleged obstruction.

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory accident rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal in China.

During an interview with CBS’ ‘Face The Nation’ on Sunday, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said accidental lab leaks "happen all the time."

COMMENT:  The unspoken issue is whether a "lab leak" was intentional.  I have no independent evidence on this, nor have I seen any, but to rule it out is reckless, and a violation of sound national-security planning.  Bio-warfare is a reality, it is developed, it is deadly.  Just look at the damage done to the United States and its allies in the last year.  If you were an enemy, wouldn't you dream of inflicting that wound?  Again, no immediate evidence.  But we must prepare for a bio-warfare future.

May 31, 2021       Permalink