Cuomo Sinks. Meaningful Op Ed's That Validate My Thoughts. 2024 Governor of Florida With Either Haley or Tm Scott. Pompeo As Sec. of State Trump Gov of Fla.

 

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As Cuomo’s fortunes collapse Lee Zeldin mulls a run—my exclusive interview 

By Salena Zito

Click here for the full story.

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On Monday (2/22) I had a Dr's. appt and then I went for a blood test and EKG.  On Tuesday (2/23) I had a dentist appt and a Cat Scan.    I was previously at  these places within the past 6 months yet, I had to fill out the same forms. My writing is now so bad I can't even read it so the attendants obviously took my forms and went to their computers to validate the same information.

At the dentist's office, I go to, they now have three dentists doing different types of procedures and thus 5 women at the front desk and I was told they  have 3 more simply answering phones because,  they receive 100 calls /hour on average.  The cost of a normal visit , ie. cleaning, fluoride treatment and special tooth paste and exam has risen from $110 to $210 and God only knows how many trees were cut down to handle the paperwork which was, I am sure, totally, ignored.

The two women at the Cat Scan facility spent most of the time I was in the reception room chatting with each other.

I mention this because this is big government at work, creating nonsense and vast amounts of duplicate record keeping while creating unnecessary employment and increased health costs. This is what happens when lawyers and bureaucrats take over and politicians pass laws that increase costs, are basically irrelevant to the service required and delivered and they never calculate the cost or the denial of one's freedoms.

I arrived t the Cat Scan facility early so I brought my lap top and they did not have a Wi Fi connection but the name of the facility showed up so big technology brother knew where I was even though I was not connected to the Internet.  More loss of privacy. I do not own a cell phone so cannot be tracked through that medium.

Everywhere government has weaponized what we do including restrictions on language and, again, God only knows, how many laws a law abiding citizen breaks every day.  We now have a political party solely devoted to clipping our freedoms as if they were a newspaper article.

I seriously doubt this was what the "founding fathers" intended.  I was taught government served me not the other way round.  Where did all this go wrong.  Was it because of wars, politicians seeking ever greater power, the cost of elections and/or the influence of money? Whatever ,it is dangerous, pernicious, creeping as well as creepy. We are allowing our freedoms to be destroyed while our republic crumbles.

The rest of this memo is devoted to WSJ op ed's that make relevant points on a variety of topics and go to the heart of what I have just written.

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This memo is the most chilling.  In essence the minute Trump told NATO Members they had to meet their obligations they concluded America could not longer be a trusted ally. Trump was not an isolationist but a realistic pragmatist and he saw no need for America to fight endless wars with no intention of winning and where there was no end game. Why bleed oneself to death?

What I found most telling is Europe believes our political system is broken. They see more clearly that which we also may realize but, lamentably, have no solution.

‘America Is Back,’ but Europe Has Moved

Macron and Merkel respond coolly to Biden, and public opinion backs them.

By William A. Galston

President Biden set out to declare a triumphant U.S. return to the trans-Atlantic alliance. “America is back,” the president said in his speech this week to the Munich Security Conference. The leaders of France and Germany promptly made it clear that the four years of the Trump presidency had changed the relationship.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron renewed his call for Europe’s “strategic autonomy,” which would require the Continent to be prepared to defend itself. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel bluntly stated that the interests of the U.S. and Europe wouldn’t always converge, which most listeners took as a reference to the European Union’s recent trade pact with China, along with Germany’s determination to complete the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline from Russia. The U.S. may be back, but it can’t expect to reclaim its old seat at the head of the table.

Underlying the muted response to Mr. Biden’s speech is what the European Council on Foreign Relations calls a “massive change” in European public opinion toward the U.S. The group’s recent poll finds: “Majorities in key member states now think the US political system is broken, that China will be more powerful than the US within a decade, and that Europeans cannot rely on the US to defend them.”

These beliefs are driving fundamental changes in European policy preferences. “Large numbers think Europeans should invest in their own defense,” the poll found, “and look to Berlin rather than Washington as their most important partner. They want to be tougher with the US on economic issues. And, rather than aligning with Washington, they want their countries to stay neutral in a conflict between the US and Russia or China”—a stance endorsed by at least half the electorate in each of the 11 countries surveyed.

In every country except Poland and Hungary, pluralities agreed with the statement that after voting for Donald Trump in 2016, the American people can no longer be trusted. In Germany, a majority endorsed this sentiment.

For decades, Europeans believed that American politics would oscillate within defined boundaries that assured our reliability. Mr. Trump’s election undermined this belief, and Mr. Biden’s victory didn’t restore it. The revolt against elites in both major U.S. political parties isn’t going away, and populists may someday be back in power.

The problem goes deeper than the destruction of political guardrails. Sixty-one percent of Europeans believe that the U.S. political system is “broken.” This figure includes 66% of the French, 71% of Germans and, remarkably, 81% of British respondents. In a such a system, gridlock and drift are the most likely outcomes.

In Europe’s eyes, America’s decline coincides with China’s rise. Fifty-nine percent of Europeans—including 56% of Germans, 58% of the British, and 62% of the French—believe that within 10 years, China will displace the U.S. as the world’s leading power. This helps explain why in case of disagreement between the U.S. and China, 60% of Europeans believe that their country should remain neutral, compared with 22% who say that they should take America’s side.

This stance extends to the threat from Russia. Amid tension between the U.S. and Russia—which seized the Crimea and threatens Ukraine’s territorial integrity—59% prefer neutrality, while 23% want to cast their lot with America. Astonishingly, the Poles—the most anti-Russian people in Europe—opt for neutrality over taking the U.S. side, 45% to 36%.

As perceptions of America’s weakness mount, more Europeans are starting to favor being tougher on the U.S. on economic issues. These Europeans resist American pressure to distance themselves from China, which they regard as an important trading partner, and they will be in no rush to renegotiate their trade relationships with the U.S. “America First” has triggered a reaction—Europe First.

The weakening of America has also heightened European perceptions of Germany’s significance. A majority of countries surveyed regarded Germany as the most important power. Germany—long the staunchest defender of America’s role in Europe—now regards France as its most important ally.

No one can predict how these attitudes might change in the face of a military threat from the east. And if the Biden administration masters the pandemic, unlocks economic growth and stabilizes American political institutions, Europeans may reconsider their views about the trans-Atlantic alliance. Still, the Biden administration is learning the truth of Heraclitus ’ ancient maxim: You cannot step into the same river twice.

And:

Progressives, radicals and dumb Democrats like Biden are buying into concepts that are tearing our nation apart and doing harm to any sense of cohesion that made us a unified and great nation:

The Equality Act Makes Women Unequal

H.R. 5 erases ‘sex’ as a legal category, with dire consequences.

By Inez F. Stepman

 

All people are created equal, but Congress is considering a bill that would make some people more equal than others.

H.R. 5, styled the Equality Act, would redefine “sex” under federal civil-rights laws to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” overriding basic biology along with millennia of tradition.

This isn’t only a question of semantics. Nor is it merely an attempt to prohibit employment discrimination against sexual minorities. A 2020 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court already does that.

The Equality Act would go much further by making it illegal to distinguish “identity” from biology and thereby prioritize transgender people over women. By erasing sex as a distinct legal category, the measure threatens to open up female-only spaces and opportunities designed to increase representation for girls to biological men, which can endanger the safety of women and girls.

The Equality Act would threaten the existence of women’s prisons, public-school girls’ locker rooms, and women’s and girls’ sports teams. It would limit freedom of speech, freedom of association, accurate data collection, and scientific inquiry. It would threaten the rights of physicians who doubt the wisdom of performing life-changing, reproduction-limiting procedures, and parents who seek to protect their minor children from such treatment.

This isn’t hyperbole. Similar state laws have already resulted in such harm. In California, Catholic hospitals have faced lawsuits for declining to perform life-altering “gender affirmation” surgery in September 2016. In Connecticut, two biologically male athletes won a combined 15 girls state championship races, allegedly taking opportunities for further competition and scholarships from female runners in June 2019. Alaska’s Equal Rights Commission opened an investigation into a women’s shelter after it turned away a biological male in September 2019. H.R. 5 would impose the most extreme form of these laws on the whole country.

The bill is so broad that even some who support the measure in principle have called for Congress to carve out exceptions. Writing in the Washington Post in 2019, tennis legend and activist Martina Navratilova asked Congress to exempt athletic competitions. “The reality,” Ms. Navratilova wrote, “is that putting male- and female-bodied athletes together is co-ed or open sport. And in open sport, females lose.”

Women forced to compete against male athletes risk not only losing competitions, but also serious injury. Ask Tamikka Brents, whose orbital bone was fractured by transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox in the latter’s first professional fight as a woman. Ms. Brents said she felt “overwhelmed” by the fight.

The reason that some contexts require separation of the sexes is obvious: Women have unique physical vulnerabilities. Female inmates are kept separate from male inmates for just this reason. How can we possibly reduce the number of sex crimes against women if the law refuses to recognize such basic differences?

Under the guise of fairness, the Equality Act would forbid policy makers from ever taking into consideration the differences between men and women that are necessary in order to guarantee safety and equality of the sexes.

The Equality Act isn’t about protecting people from discrimination; it’s about compelling adherence to gender ideology. Don’t let its name fool you.

Ms. Stepman is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum.

And:

Let's hear it for The University of Chicago. They make the Administrator's of all The Ivy League Schools look sick and pathetic:

No Speech Coddling in Chicago

A new journal from students who refuse to be cancelled.

By  The Editorial Board

Most college administrators are no doubt exhausted by constant student demands that range from the type of cereal served in the dining hall to the latest intersectional fad. So those running the University of Chicago must be pleasantly surprised by the arrival of Chicago Thinker on their campus this school year. It’s an online journal by conservative and libertarian students who refuse to be canceled.

Their mission statement makes the point: “We demand not to be coddled. Embracing the experience of unfettered inquiry and free expression is precisely the point of these years of intense study: to rigorously confront and challenge our most deeply-held beliefs—and to emerge from the experience as more thoughtful, informed human beings.”

They build on a firm foundation. In 2015 the university released a statement reaffirming its commitment to “free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation.” In 2016 the university’s incoming freshmen received a letter informing them that “we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

The Chicago Thinker’s latest posts include stories on the “insane COVID rules and snitch culture” at today’s universities, a definition of conservatism offered “in defiance of egregious caricatures,” and a piece on “how leftism ruined ‘Stargirl,’” a superhero TV series based on the character from DC Comics. Good for the Chicago Thinker—and even more for the university that promises never to coddle the students running the publication.

And:

More radicalization nonsense but if we are going to allow Democrats, assorted radicals and progressives  fill up America will illegals let's , at least, do so with Asians who understand more what it is to be an American than a shrinking number of Americans.

‘White Nationalism’ Isn’t American Minorities’ Biggest Problem

Racial paranoia and taboos feed crime against Asians and black distrust of Covid-19 vaccinations.

By Jason L. Riley

“End the violence toward Asians,” said the promotional fliers. “Let’s unite against white nationalism.”

Demonstrators gathered in New York on Saturday in the wake of a spate of unprovoked violent attacks on Asian-Americans. Earlier this month, Noel Quintana, a 61-year-old native of Manila, was slashed in the face with a box cutter while commuting to work on a crowded subway car. He survived but required about 100 stitches to close his wounds. Other victims have been less fortunate.

In Milwaukee last September, a 36-year-old Hmong American named Ee Lee was sexually assaulted in a city park and died at a hospital from “blunt force trauma to her head.” The suspects fled on bicycles.

In San Francisco last month, Vicha Ratanapakdee, 84 and originally from Thailand, was on his regular morning walk when a passerby knocked him to the ground and ran away. Ratanapakdee died from his injuries a few days later. Across the Bay, in Oakland’s Chinatown, police have documented an uptick in assaults, particularly on the elderly. On Jan. 31, a man was caught on camera in separate incidents approaching a 91-year-old man and 55-year-old woman from behind and shoving them to the pavement. The woman lost consciousness.

 “It’s not unique to Chinatown or to the Asian community, the increase in crime we’ve seen across the city and across the county,” said the district attorney for Alameda County, which includes Oakland, at a news conference earlier this month. “But we have seen in the last several weeks and month a very specific increase in crimes committed against Asians.”

Some have attributed these attacks to the previous administration’s coronavirus rhetoric, while others see them as part of a broader increase in crime rates during the pandemic. Maybe it’s both. What’s harder to demonstrate is that these attacks stem from a rise in “white nationalism,” as that New York flier claims. Despite efforts to shoehorn such incidents into the left’s favorite political narrative, all the suspects in the attacks described above are black. There have been white-supremacist attacks on Asians, such as the 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, which killed six. But are white nationalists responsible for blacks committing crimes against Asians?

Liberals continue to pretend that racism and prejudice are one-way streets—that only whites can be perpetrators, while blacks can only be victims. But criminals and victims come in all colors. Surveillance cameras have caught young black men playing the so-called knockout game, which involves sucker-punching random white pedestrians for amusement. And federal data have long shown that while in most cases the victim and perpetrator of a violent crime are of the same race, black-on-white violent-crime rates far exceed the reverse scenario.

Liberals skirt these plain truths out of a belief that it helps them politically, and perhaps it does. Racial paranoia helps civil-rights activists raise money, and it helps Democrats get elected by scaring black voters to the polls. But it also comes with a downside for blacks: It undermines trust in American institutions and society.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of Feb. 16, blacks were only 6% of Covid-19 vaccine recipients, even though they are 13% of the U.S. population. “Across the 34 states reporting data on vaccinations by race/ethnicity, there is a largely consistent pattern of Black and Hispanic people receiving smaller shares of vaccinations compared to their shares of cases and deaths and compared to their shares of the total population,” explains an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Some point to a general and longstanding lack of trust in government among many blacks. Often invoked is the infamous Tuskegee experiment begun in the 1930s, in which black men were promised but never given treatment for syphilis. But my creeping suspicion is that something more sinister has taken place.

In recent years, and at a much louder volume than before, black Americans have been encouraged by liberal elites to hate their country and to distrust others based on race and ethnicity. This is the message that undergirds everything from the New York Times’s “1619 Project” to workplace “diversity” training and critical race theory. Now it’s working to undermine public health. Blacks aren’t going to fight the virus any differently than other groups. We’re in this together, and the newfangled racial separatism that now operates under the guise of wokeness does no one any good, especially black Americans.

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Finally:
If the entire world is unwilling to to stand up to China and impose significant penalties on the CCP and bring that corrupt party to it's knees then we deserve every pandemic they inflict upon the world.

The more I think about 2024 the more I believe the Governor of Florida and either Nicki Haley or Senator Scott from South Carolina would make a good team and Pompeo would fit as Sec. of State again. Pompeo has all the attributes of what a great president needs but does nor have enough charisma to get elected. I would love to see Donald Trump Run as Governor of Florida.

Biden is already toast and when Kamala becomes President she will take the Democrat Party back to oblivion.

China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk

Beijing is obsessed with viruses, but not biosafety. We are paying a high price for its lapses.

By Mike Pompeo and Miles Yu

 

The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with viruses. Its army of scientists claim to have discovered almost 2,000 new viruses in a little over a decade. It took the past 200 years for the rest of the world to discover that many. More troubling is the party’s negligence on biosafety. The costs and the risk to world health are enormous, as evidenced by a novel coronavirus that escaped Wuhan. This situation can’t continue. The world must hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and punish Beijing if it fails to uphold global biosafety standards, including basic transparency requirements.

The most recent example of this malfeasance is playing out around us. The evidence that the virus came from Wuhan is enormous, though largely circumstantial, and most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In America, concern about the site is now broad and bipartisan. The Biden administration stated that it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with the investigators’ work.

The world has known for a long time that WIV poses a huge risk to global health. Two 2018 State Department cables warned of its biosafety problems. They even predicted that SARS-CoV-2’s ACE2 receptor, identified by WIV scientists, would enable human-to-human transmission. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s biosafety level 4 lab, warned, “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edge sword: It can be used for the benefit of humanity, but can also lead to a disaster.” He listed the shortfalls prevalent among China’s biology labs, including a lack of “operational technical support, professional instructions” and “feasible standards for the safety requirements of different protection zones and for the inoculation of microbiological animals and equipment.”

The Chinese public took note, with several bloggers alleging that WIV’s virus-carrying animals are sold as pets. They may even show up at local wet markets. After the Wuhan outbreak, one since-disappeared blogger asked a WIV researcher to debate the lab’s biosafety practices in public. The offer was ignored.

Beijing has a moral and legal obligation to take biosafety seriously, especially given the kind of research going on at WIV. In 2015, WIV’s Dr. Shi Zhengli co-wrote an article titled “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence” in which she admitted that her team had engineered “chimeric” and “hybrid” viruses from horseshoe bats. In a 2019 article titled “Bat Coronavirus in China,” Ms. Shi and her co-authors warned, “It is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.” At the time, WIV housed tens of thousands of bat virus samples and experiment animals.

China resisted international monitoring at WIV. The lab was built with French assistance, but China abrogated its promise to allow French scientists to participate in essential research there. China then accredited WIV through its own agency as its only level 4 facility, and the country’s National Health Commission quickly approved it to handle some of the world’s most dangerous viruses. The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology completed a comprehensive safety and management survey of China’s 75 bioresearch labs in 2016, finding that WIV didn’t even make the top 20 in terms of quality.

The People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, has admitted to developing bioweapons. In 2011 China informed the International Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Review Conference that its military experts were working on the “creation of man-made pathogens,” “genomics laying the foundation for pathogen transformation,” “population-specific genetic markers,” and “targeted drug-delivery technology making it easier to spread pathogens.” A 2015 PLA study treated the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak as a “contemporary genetic weapon” launched by foreign forces. And in January 2021, the State Department confirmed that people had fallen mysteriously ill at WIV in fall 2019, and that WIV conducts secret bioweapons research with the PLA.

The negligence at China’s biolabs, especially WIV, was so dangerous that the PLA dispatched a general to take over the facility soon after the outbreak in Wuhan. Xi Jinping’s first speech on the outbreak highlighted “lessons learned” about “shortcomings” and “leaking holes” in China’s management of biological material and biological-security system. He demanded that “a new biological-security law” be made part of the “national-security system.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s recklessness has already cost the world too much, and its obfuscation guarantees this won’t be the last such tragedy. It ordered the destruction of virus samples collected from the earliest patients. It banned the release of key data. It silenced journalists, doctors and scientists. And it impeded the WHO’s investigation. Beijing doesn’t want the world to know the true origin of the coronavirus and its serious biosafety lapses.

The Chinese government must change course. It must be open about its biosafety systems, fix its errors and curtail its dangerous ambitions. Lives and livelihoods across the world are on the line. We all have a responsibility to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party isn’t given a free pass.

Mr. Pompeo served as U.S. secretary of state (2018-21) and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2017-18). Mr. Yu served as Secretary Pompeo’s principal China policy and planning adviser. Both are fellows at the Hudson Institute.

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