Hanson Corona Virus Commentary. BIBBI Get Another Chance. The Visa Card.

New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama BY: Victor Davis Hanson

Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person. Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms.  Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico.  It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards) Fine—politicians and bureaucrats misspeak. It is no surprise that radical progressives like Holder are both partisans and tribalists or that they don’t always have positive thoughts about America, past or present. But Obama won the election. So voters had ample warning from his past that he would likely put as many leftists as he wished into government. He had the legal right and political rationale to do so, without his opponents inventing crimes to remove them.  At least he did before the Trump hysteria.  Criminalizing Politics I once served briefly on the nonpartisan presidentially appointed American Battlefield Monuments Commission that oversees the cemeteries and graves of Americans who died and were buried overseas. The fellow commissioners, dedicated professionals with far longer tenures on the commission than my own, were never political but shared a common commitment to protect and enhance the integrity of one of America’s most hallowed institutions. Yet all of us were summarily fired, shortly after Obama was elected in 2008, and told to surrender immediately our official passports and vacate the commission. As a result, the board went inert until belated new Obama appointments were made. Again, fine, I thought at the time. Such is the way of all politics when another party takes the White House. I most certainly did not think Obama was creating a “climate of fear” or was “paranoid” in weeding out, even from nonpartisan, unpaid honorific posts, any non-supporters. Nor did I think it was so odd when Obama went much further, and fired dozens of U.S. attorney holdovers from the Bush Administration. “Elections matter,” I remember Eric Holder saying of the mass firings at the time. He was right; they do. Clinton fired far more prosecutors than did Trump—as was his perfect right as well. So, who was to say that Obama was “paranoid” in “eliminating” potential critics, whether attorneys, government appointees, or ambassadors? Who knows? If I were president, I might well have fired myself from even such a nonpartisan commission. Who knows? Had Obama left in office a Bush holdover federal attorney, the partisan might have become a Viva la résistance“Resister”, or invoked the Logan Act to hound one of the president’s own liberal appointees, or impeded his administration, or refused to carry out a presidential executive order, or helped to surveil Obama appointees, or even leaked confidential presidential conversations to the media, or called up the New York Times and Washington Post to give a rendition of an Obama phone call to the president of Mexico, or might have written an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times? For that matter, I certainly did not join any “Resistance” in 2009—on the sick rationale that Obama might be a Nazi-like interloper who had occupied the United States as Hitler did France, and sent us true patriots into the Maquis to “resist.” Do not insult our collective intelligence by suggesting that Donald J. Trump abused the Constitution and the office of president in a way that would have been unthinkable to Barack Obama. Obama was elected for four years. We critics lost the 2008 election, and would have to wait four years to send him home, or, as it turned out in 2012, eight years to find relief. That is the American way. Obama’s clever campaign made both McCain’s and Romney’s amateurish in comparison, and so there was a logic in his victory over two inept candidates, even if both would have made better presidents. We don’t recall either the media or critics suggesting that Obama was crazy in his often repeated “elections matter” and “I won” hyper-partisanship, or that he should have been removed under the 25th Amendment for silly apologies tours or riffs on the Crusades or Americans not being exceptional or his adolescent furtive duck-outs to have a smoke.  No mainstream pundit claimed Obama was a pathological liar for making up most of his “autobiography” or flat-out lying about Obamacare. When Reggie Love claimed he and a bored Obama played spades during the Bin Laden raid, few paid much attention. Nor did Obama do anything impeachable for stupidly and frequently weighing in during ongoing arrests and criminal proceedings—such as those of the Skip Gates Cambridge psychodrama or the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin shootings.   The Bowe Bergdahl disastrous swap was illegal, dangerous, and stupid, but not therein grounds for impeachment. Nor was impeachable the even worse Iran Deal that deliberately created an echo chamber among obsequious media to hide key elements of the “treaty”—hostage payoffs and nocturnal shipments of Danegeld. After all, presidents sometimes do stupid stuff. If we impeached every president for chicanery, we would have had no Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus and rounded up Copperhead opponents, or FDR who put U.S. citizens of Japanese descent into detention camps. All presidents can get rough in their language. I noted and criticized Obama’s occasional potty mouth (e.g. “teabaggers”) and his puerile braggadocio about taking guns to knife fights, getting in their faces, and punishing enemies. All that was silly and nauseous, but certainly not proof that Obama should have been impeached or become the object of a FBI, CIA, or special counsel investigation.   Scandal Upon Scandal I don’t know quite what “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” mean in the context of impeachment. But if they now exist as legitimate impeachable offenses, then we should have called for Obama’s impeachment when he refused congressional subpoenas in the Fast and Furious mess, subverted the treaty-making prerogative of the U.S. Senate with the Iran deal, and simply nullified federal immigration law with executive-order amnesties and laxities in a manner that on over 20 prior occasions he had warned supporters that to do so would have been illegal and monarchical.  When Lois Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment and the subsequent testimonies of others established that the Obama IRS deliberately sabotaged conservative nonprofits to emasculate their criticism during the 2012 election, I thought the gambit was outrageous, even criminal. But I assumed that we still should let the voters in a few months, not a special prosecutor, decide to what degree Obama himself was directly responsible for such skullduggery.  Ditto our former president’s outrageous quid pro quo deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he was caught in a web of pre-election deceit and finagling, this time on a hot mic in Seoul. Even from inadvertent snippets, it was clear Obama was outlining how he would consider being flexible on missile defense in Europe (and later he was so elastic that he canceled the needed project) if “Vladimir” would just give him some space before his reelection bid. And Vladimir did just that by putting off his invasions of Crimea and Ukraine until after Obama was safely reelected.  What is little noticed about Obama quid pro quo is that he and Putin actually went through with it—and to the clear detriment of Eastern Europe, Crimea, Ukraine, and U.S. security. Remember, the hot mic was an inadvertent public reminder, an encapsulation of what had likely been spoken earlier in private and at length. We did not need a special counsel to investigate the disastrous reset policy and years of Russian appeasement that had reversed George W. Bush’s sanctions after Putin’s 2008 invasion of Ossetia. I thought it outrageous, but not proof of impeachable “collusion,” that Obama refused to sell the hard-pressed Ukrainians Javelin anti-tank missiles, in fears of agitating “Vladimir.” We still rue that John Kerry foolishly invited Putin into the Middle East after a 40-year Russian hiatus. All that Obama could offer to Putin for years of election interference was a lame “cut it out.” But then again, he just knew Hillary was going to win and did not wish to give the sure loser Trump any grounds for whining about the election results. After the Benghazi hearings—another pre-reelection scandal—it was obvious that the Obama administration had been caught flat-out lying. It had systematically relaxed security in Libya after its disastrous regime-change bombing of Gaddafi (remember Hilary Clinton’s “We came, we saw . . . he died”? [Cackle! cackle!]), and then lied by denying such laxity had led to American deaths.  Then it prevaricated yet again to cover up that lie by claiming it was impossible to send aid to our fighters trapped and in extremis.  Then it lied still once more about the lies about the lies by claiming that a single obscure video maker had caused the mayhem. Therefore, Obama summarily had a pathetic resident alien fall guy Nakoula Basseley Nakoula jailed on a trumped-up charge of a minor parole violation. According to the new progressive standards, we were all wrong to simply snooze when Obama overreached. Speaking of civil liberties, was it an impeachable offense to monitor the communications of journalists like the Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen? Why did Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan lie twice under oath to Congress and why did James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, also perjure himself? Weren’t those greater offenses than the campaign contribution violation of Dinesh D’Souza’s that sent him to jail? Why did the Obama Administration tap the communications of foreign leaders from Benjamin Netanyahu to Angela Merkel? And why did it collude, using U.S. taxpayer dollars no less, with the opposition in the Israeli election of 2015 in hopes of defeating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Are not, we are told, governments not to interfere in the free elections of other countries? Who set or tolerated such a corrupt culture?  Still, excesses happen. I did not argue that Obama should be impeached for such flagrant sabotages of the rule of law—neither when James Comey interfered in the 2016 election with his schizophrenic press conferences and confused and contradictory public statements, nor when Attorney General Loretta Lynch met secretly with Bill Clinton on a tarmac at the Phoenix airport and hid such a meeting.   I don’t remember anyone calling for mass firings, but then again Obama kept quiet how his FBI and Justice Department were warping the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance courts to spy on Carter Page in hopes of finding dirt on Donald Trump before the election. Comey, Brennan, and Clapper were all briefing Obama on their illegal activity—a fact that might explain why they are now so sure they will never be held to account.  Perhaps without such Obama-appointed scoundrels, there would have followed no “Crossfire Hurricane” hit job that seeded a Clinton-bought phony dossier on Trump, her campaign rival, throughout the highest levels of the Obama Administration and the media, and thus ensured it bore fruit before the 2016 election.  Insulting Our Collective Intelligence The media, the current progressive party, and the unhinged punditocracy have redefined all of the above behavior. According to their own standards, we were all wrong to simply snooze when Obama overreached. Under our just established current rules of presidential audit, Obama obstructed Congress by ignoring subpoenas and invoking executive privilege. He abused his power by making up immigration law and undermining the enforcement of existing statutes. Presidents are supposed to faithfully execute our laws, not undermine them or make them up. Obama allowed sanctuary cities to openly negate federal law and went after the state of Arizona when it dared to help to enforce federal law.  Obama weaponized federal agencies like the IRS, and used his presidential leverage to go after the Trump campaign and transition, by using Hillary Clinton’s hired foreign national, Christopher Steele, to dump false information before an election. The Obama scandal-ridden Veterans Administration was a veritable wreck. People died in Benghazi, at VA hospitals, in Fast and Furious, and because of the Iran Deal and the Bergdahl swap. Obama cut quid pro quo deals with foreign leaders to assist his own reelection at the expense of the nation’s security. He paid one of the highest fines leveled in the history of federal financing of campaigns, for flagrant violations in 2008—a fact that was mysteriously not released to the public and voters by federal officials until four years later and only after Obama was safely reelected in 2012.  Under Obama’s supervision, foreign money and foreign actors improperly played roles in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections. Meanwhile, Eric Holder ignored clear evidence of election interference at the polls by dropping charges against New Black Panther Party activists intimidating voters. In terms of the current pettiness in the context of the various complaints against Trump, we forget that Obama likewise never released his medical records (other than a boilerplate one-page “summary” from his doctor), played an excessive amount of golf, lied repeatedly with assurance that Americans would neither lose their doctors nor health plans under Obamacare, and in general presaged what is now considered alleged proof of Trump’s unfitness to be president.   Neither Adam Schiff nor Nancy Pelosi offered a word of rebuke about Russia’s interest in Uranium One, Bill Clinton’s speaking in Moscow, huge donations to the Clinton Foundation from Russian-connected oligarchs, the cancellation of anti-Russian missile defense or the denial of Javelins to Ukraine—much less that a bought foreign national worked for Hillary Clinton in league with Russian actors to smear her opponent before the election—a fact known again to President Obama whose intelligence agencies worked hand-in-glove with the Steele dossier. OK and fine. But do not insult our collective intelligence by suggesting that Donald J. Trump abused the Constitution and the office of president in a way that would have been unthinkable to Barack Obama.   Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that are now defined as impeachable, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause.

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This from a very reliable source and a lot of it is common sense:

Dear Family and Friends, as some of you may recall, when I was a professor of pathology at the University of California San Diego, I was one of the first molecular virologists in the world to work on coronaviruses (the 1970s). I was the first to demonstrate the number of genes the virus contained. Since then, I have kept up with the coronavirus field and its multiple clinical transfers into the human population (e.g., SARS, MERS), from different animal sources.

The current projections for its expansion in the US are only probable, due to continued insufficient worldwide data, but it is most likely to be widespread by mid to late March and April.

Here is what I have done and the precautions that I take and will take. These are the same precautions I currently use during our influenza seasons, except for the mask and gloves.:

1) NO HANDSHAKING! Use a fist bump, slight bow, elbow bump, etc.

2) Use ONLY your knuckle to touch light switches. elevator buttons, etc.. Lift the gasoline dispenser with a paper towel or use a disposable glove.

3) Open doors with your closed fist or hip - do not grasp the handle with your hand, unless there is no other way to open the door. Especially important on bathroom and post office/commercial doors.

4) Use disinfectant wipes at the stores when they are available, including wiping the handle and child seat in grocery carts.

5) Wash your hands with soap for 10-20 seconds and/or use a greater than 60% alcohol-based hand sanitizer whenever you return home from ANY activity that involves locations where other people have been.

6) Keep a bottle of sanitizer available at each of your home's entrances. AND in your car for use after getting gas or touching other contaminated objects when you can't immediately wash your hands.

7) If possible, cough or sneeze into a disposable tissue and discard. Use your elbow only if you have to. The clothing on your elbow will contain infectious virus that can be passed on for up to a week or more!

WHAT I HAVE STOCKED IN PREPARATION FOR THE PANDEMIC SPREAD TO THE US:

1) Latex or nitrile latex disposable gloves for use when going shopping, using the gasoline pump, and all other outside activity when you come in contact with contaminated areas.

Note: This virus is spread in large droplets by coughing and sneezing. This means that the air will not infect you! BUT all the surfaces where these droplets land are infectious for about a week on average - everything that is associated with infected people will be contaminated and potentially infectious. The virus is on surfaces and you will not be infected unless your unprotected face is directly coughed or sneezed upon. This virus only has cell receptors for lung cells (it only infects your lungs). The only way for the virus to infect you is through your nose or mouth via your hands or an infected cough or sneeze onto or into your nose or mouth.

2) Stock up now with disposable surgical masks and use them to prevent you from touching your nose and/or mouth (We touch our nose/mouth 90X/day without knowing it!). This is the only way this virus can infect you - it is lung-specific. The mask will not prevent the virus in a direct sneeze from getting into your nose or mouth - it is only to keep you from touching your nose or mouth.

3) Stock up now with hand sanitizers and latex/nitrile gloves (get the appropriate sizes for your family). The hand sanitizers must be alcohol-based and greater than 60% alcohol to be effective.

4) Stock up now with zinc lozenges. These lozenges have been proven to be effective in blocking coronavirus (and most other viruses) from multiplying in your throat and nasopharynx. Use as directed several times each day when you begin to feel ANY "cold-like" symptoms beginning. It is best to lie down and let the lozenge dissolve in the back of your throat and nasopharynx. Cold-Eeze lozenges is one brand available, but there are other brands available.

I, as many others do, hope that this pandemic will be reasonably contained, BUT I personally do not think it will be. Humans have never seen this snake-associated virus before and have no internal defense against it. Tremendous worldwide efforts are being made to understand the molecular and clinical virology of this virus. Unbelievable molecular knowledge about the genomics, structure, and virulence of this virus has already been achieved. BUT, there will be NO drugs or vaccines available this year to protect us or limit the infection within us. Only symptomatic support is available.

I hope these personal thoughts will be helpful during this potentially catastrophic pandemic. Good luck to all of us.

James Robb, MD FCAP

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BIBI pulled it off?

Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc wins majority - exit polls

It is expected that after the third election in one year, this time the prime minister will succeed in forming a government.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing bloc beat Benny Gantz's Blue and White Party-led Center-Left bloc in Israel's third election on Monday winning 59 seats needed for a majority in the Knesset, according to exit polls on the major television networks.

Exit polls published by Channel 12 predict that the Likud Party stands at 37 seats while Blue and White is on 33 seats. The Joint List, according to the poll, has 14 seats. A total of 9 seats are predicted for Shas and 7 for UTJ, while another 7 seats are for Yamina. Otzma Yehudit will not pass the threshold. Labor-Gesher-Meretz are predicted to receive 7 seats, meaning the right-wing bloc stands at 60 seats altogether whilst the center-left stands at 40, with Yisrael Beytenu on 6.

While Netanyahu fell short of the 61 majority needed to form a ruling coalition, he is expected to begin immediately trying to recruit two defectors from the Center-Left camp who he would need to form a government. 

The results were viewed as a major victory for Netanyahu whose right-wing bloc after the last election in September was only 55. The country has had a caretaker government since the first election was called in December 2018

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I listened to the"Town Hall" interview of Bloomberg this evening. First it was a saner approach, it gave me an opportunity to hear him respond to questions, the questions were good and he answered them in a thoughtful manner.

Were I a progressive he would be my candidate and were he to be elected, which I still believe is a long shot, I would feel comfortable he is the best of the lot of bizarre Democrat selections.

I still am not comfortable with his age, nor do I believe his policies would necessarily be substantially better than Trump's. Yes, he would make a more dignified president. 

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What I am about to write will be viewed as racial whereas, I believe it is basically factual and I am simply writing what others fear saying.

Black citizens have been cheated when it comes to being given the opportunity to get a solid education that will prepare them for the coming decades. They are partly to blame because they continue to be enslaved to a party that supports unions which are more interested in protecting their jobs and political power than seeing all children get the finest education our system is capable of providing/delivering.

Quality of education has become an economic issue and wealthy have options.  Symbolically, Trump made this evident during two episodes of his SOTUS when he gave a young black female student a scholarship and the male grandson of a newly promoted  black officer an educational opportunity as well.

I have written for decades, education, a solid curricula, is the best way for all our citizen's  to lift themselves out of their economic and social plight because education. in combination with one's genes and family background, is a powerful force.  This does not mean all will succeed but the leverage students obtain from education cannot be replaced. There is no substitute.

That said, and I seriously doubt many will disagree, I will now wander off the reservation and extrapolate the failure of the type of education I spelled out with what I see happening.

It seems to me, Democrats work over time constructing voting blocs and pandering to them during the campaign season. I consider this to be the height of hypocrisy. Far too many of our inner cities are run by less than qualified politicians. Schools no longer teach civics and those who govern  have no idea what standards are associated with what it means to be a good citizen. Far too many are nothing but shysters.

They have not been exposed or challenged to give this any thought. How many even know who that French Dude was who came over to America, wrote about what he found that made America exceptional? I daresay they have never been exposed to the dictates of our constitution much less our Bill of Rights.  They probably think it can be paid with a VISA Card.

Consequently, it is little wonder our Republic now rests on a weak foundation and politicians, like Bernie Sanders,  have traction among our "unwashed" youth.  That they would give thought to replacing capitalism with socialism is abysmal. 

When progressives demand a fair educational shake to voters they pander to then, and only then, will America be capable of true greatness. Until then, we will muddle along best as we can until the biggest and most dangerous virus of all, disparate educational opportunities, will bring our society crashing.

Incidentally while politicians, and even Trump, harangue the drug industry to move faster on an anti-virus inoculation my wife said they should demand we do the same in solving cancer? I love it when she is logical and sees through all the nonsense that surrounds us and fills the air.

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I have been a supporter of Fitton's "Judicial Watch" for years.  As I always say, the law grinds fine and ever so slow.

Thank You, Judicial Watch: Hillary Clinton Must Be Deposed Over Her Private Email Server Fiasco

The judge who has ruled proves our society is open and change occurs when those who care are focused and persistent. Seriously doubt this would happen under a tyrannical form of government.

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Chris Matthews finally got an electric shock up his leg.

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