Editor’s Note: This is truly one of the best independent news sources available that likely you’ve never heard of (although it’s been publishing since 2000). Their story is a courageous one, staunchly anti-communist and anti-socialist as the founders of this newspaper experienced Chinese oppression first-hand. Tune in to their video and subscribe as the newspapers and mainstream news channels have continued to sell out both journalism and the American people.
Source: The Epoch Times
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Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard fires back at former first lady over comments suggesting she was being groomed by Russia.
n Friday, Democratic Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard absolutely shredded failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton after she falsely stated that Gabbard was a Russian asset.
“Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.” Gabbard tweeted. “From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.”
She continued: “Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”
This scathing statement from Gabbard immediately set the internet on fire, resulting in hundreds of thousands of tweets relating to the subject matter.
Gabbards tweets come in response to a conspiracy theory promoted by Hillary Clinton on Friday where she falsely claimed that Russia was “grooming” Gabbard to help President Trump win again in 2020.
The corrupt Democrat made the conspiracy theory during a podcast with President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe.
“They are also going to do third party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said while referring to Gabbard.
“She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset,” Clinton bizarrely continued.
“They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate, and so I do not know who it’s going to be, but I can guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”
Unlike Clinton, Gabbard has honorably served her country and has never been an asset to a foreign country. The failed presidential candidate and the rest of the Democratic party as a whole is spreading this conspiracy theory for one reason and one reason only. Gabbard is the only Democratic candidate who hasn’t sold her soul to the far-left base.
During the CNN debate on Tuesday, Gabbard went nuclear on CNN and the New York Times for slandering her, when they, like Hillary Clinton called her a Russian asset. CNN and the NYT also previously lied about her position on regime change in Syria, which Gabbard said was “completely despicable.”
The 38-year-old Iraq War veteran shredded CNN and the New York Times to their faces over their extremely biased coverage of her.
“Not only that, New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime change war,” Gabbard said.
“Just two days ago The New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad apologist and all these different smears. This morning a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia,” she added.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: Trending Politics & Al Jazeera
By Joel Moskovitz
Editor’s Note: Science is allegedly the foundation for sound reasoning when it comes to evaluating the short and long-term benefits (and drawbacks) of any new technology, but in the case of 5G there is no reliable science to assure us of its safety. Quite the contrary, it’s being deployed globally without concern for the safety of those exposed.
The telecommunications industry and their experts have accused many scientists who have researched the effects of cell phone radiation of “fear mongering” over the advent of wireless technology’s 5G. Since much of our research is publicly-funded, we believe it is our ethical responsibility to inform the public about what the peer-reviewed scientific literature tells us about the health risks from wireless radiation.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently announced through a press release that the commission will soon reaffirm the radio frequency radiation (RFR) exposure limits that the FCC adopted in the late 1990s. These limits are based upon a behavioral change in rats exposed to microwave radiation and were designed to protect us from short-term heating risks due to RFR exposure.
Yet, since the FCC adopted these limits based largely on research from the 1980s, the preponderance of peer-reviewed research, more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating.
Citing this large body of research, more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF) signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for stronger exposure limits. The appeal makes the following assertions:
“Numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines. Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is growing evidence of harmful effects to both plant and animal life.”
The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.
The FCC’s RFR exposure limits regulate the intensity of exposure, taking into account the frequency of the carrier waves, but ignore the signaling properties of the RFR. Along with the patterning and duration of exposures, certain characteristics of the signal (e.g., pulsing, polarization)increase the biologic and health impacts of the exposure. New exposure limits are needed which account for these differential effects. Moreover, these limits should be based on a biological effect, not a change in a laboratory rat’s behavior.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) found “clear evidence” that two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy replicated the key finding of the NTP using a different carrier frequency and much weaker exposure to cell phone radiation over the life of the rats.
Based upon the research published since 2011, including human and animal studies and mechanistic data, the IARC has recently prioritized RFR to be reviewed again in the next five years. Since many EMF scientists believe we now have sufficient evidence to consider RFR as either a probable or known human carcinogen, the IARC will likely upgrade the carcinogenic potential of RFR in the near future.
Nonetheless, without conducting a formal risk assessment or a systematic review of the research on RFR health effects, the FDA recently reaffirmed the FCC’s 1996 exposure limits in a letter to the FCC, stating that the agency had “concluded that no changes to the current standards are warranted at this time,” and that “NTP’s experimental findings should not be applied to human cell phone usage.” The letter stated that “the available scientific evidence to date does not support adverse health effects in humans due to exposures at or under the current limits.”
The latest cellular technology, 5G, will employ millimeter waves for the first time in addition to microwaves that have been in use for older cellular technologies, 2G through 4G. Given limited reach, 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation. 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive multiple inputs and outputs, known as massive MIMO) which pose unique challenges for measuring exposures.
Millimeter waves are mostly absorbed within a few millimeters of human skin and in the surface layers of the cornea. Short-term exposure can have adverse physiological effects in the peripheral nervous system, the immune system and the cardiovascular system. The research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin (e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g., sterility).
Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.
5G will not replace 4G; it will accompany 4G for the near future and possibly over the long term. If there are synergistic effects from simultaneous exposures to multiple types of RFR, our overall risk of harm from RFR may increase substantially. Cancer is not the only risk as there is considerable evidence that RFR causes neurological disorders and reproductive harm, likely due to oxidative stress.
As a society, should we invest hundreds of billions of dollars deploying 5G, a cellular technology that requires the installation of 800,000 or more new cell antenna sites in the U.S. close to where we live, work and play?
Instead, we should support the recommendations of the 250 scientists and medical doctors who signed the 5G Appeal that calls for an immediate moratorium on the deployment of 5G and demand that our government fund the research needed to adopt biologically based exposure limits that protect our health and safety.
Source: Scientific American
By Eugene Kiely, Brooks Jackson, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley, D’Angelo Gore, Jessica McDonald, Angelo Fichera and Chelsey Zhu
Summary
We found several false and misleading claims in the October Democratic presidential debate:
Twelve candidates for president met for the Oct. 15 debate hosted by CNN and the New York Times in Westerville, Ohio.
Analysis
Castro Wrong About Job Losses
Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio and HUD secretary, was wrong when he said, “Donald Trump has broken his promises because Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania — actually in the latest jobs data — have lost jobs, not gained them.”
In August, which is the most recent month for seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, total nonfarm employment went up by 16,500 in Pennsylvania, by 6,100 in Michigan and by 3,700 in Ohio.
Castro’s campaign issued a press release during the debate that said the “data from August … is preliminary due to incomplete data and will be revised by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the end of this month.” The press release added, “This fiscal year, from March through July, the latest month with final numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, non-farm payrolls are down in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.”
That’s all true, but it’s not the claim that Castro made during the debate. The “latest jobs data” for states, although preliminary, is for August — not July.
The estimated job gains in August for Pennsylvania and Michigan surpassed the job losses from March through July. However, Ohio has lost 3,600 jobs from March through August.
Furthermore, the campaign’s argument is misleading. The fact is, since Trump took office in January 2017, total nonfarm employment is up — not down — in those three states and nationwide. That’s whether one measures up to July or August.
Biden Wrong on Syria
Biden mistakenly said that American troops withdrawing from Syria were “being fired on by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s people.”
According to news reports, Turkish militias fired artillery rounds near a U.S. military outpost in northeastern Syria last week, though no U.S. forces were injured. There have been no reports of Assad’s Syrian government forces firing on American troops.
Biden: I would not have withdrawn the troops and I would not have withdrawn the additional thousand troops who are in Iraq, which are in retreat now, being fired on by Assad’s people.
After a phone call on Oct. 6 with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Donald Trump announced he would be withdrawing troops from northern Syria. After initially withdrawing 50 American troops from the Syrian border with Turkey, the Pentagon this week began pulling out all of its 1,000 soldiers from Syria, a process that was expected to take several weeks.
With the U.S. troop withdrawal, Syrian government forces have moved to retake territory in the country’s northeast, but there have been no reports that they have fired upon retreating U.S. forces, as Biden said.
New York Times, Oct. 14: Syrian government forces streamed into the country’s northeast on Monday, seizing towns where they had not stepped foot in years and filling a vacuum opened up by President Trump’s decision to abandon the United States’ Syrian Kurdish allies.
Less than a week after Turkey launched an incursion into northern Syria with Mr. Trump’s assent, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, considered a war criminal by the United States, has benefited handsomely, striking a deal with the United States’ former allies to take the northern border and rapidly gaining territory without a fight.
News reports made no mention of Syrian forces firing upon withdrawing U.S. troops, though.
Steyer Wrong on Wages
Tom Steyer, the billionaire liberal activist, was wrong when he claimed that “90 percent of Americans have not had a raise for 40 years.”
Even the liberal Economic Policy Institute — a think tank that advocates for low- and middle-income earners — reported in February of this year that the annual wages of the bottom 90% of wage earners have gone up 22.2% since 1979, even after adjustment for inflation. (See Appendix Figure A.)
And that’s only through 2017. Wages have risen further since then. Average weekly earnings of all production and nonsupervisory wage earners in the private sector have gone up 2.1%(after adjustment for inflation) between December 2017 and last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
EPI reports that wage growth has been “sluggish” for the vast majority of workers, compared with a 157% increase for the highest-paid 1% of earners since 1979. But Steyer goes too far when he claims there has been no growth at all.
Minimum Wage Hike vs. Universal Basic Income
When asked about how he would convince GM workers to end their strike, Booker took the opportunity to compare his bill to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour to Yang’s universal basic income plan.
Booker: Well, first of all, the one point I wanted to make about the UBI conversation — and I hope that my friend, Andrew Yang, will come out for this — doing more for workers than UBI would actually be just raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It would put more money in people’s pockets than giving them $1,000 a month.
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would eventually put more than $1,000 a month in some pockets, but Yang’s so-called “Freedom Dividend” would pay “$1,000 per month, or $12,000 per year, to all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 … no questions asked.”
Booker is a cosponsor of “Raise the Wage Act,” which would increase the minimum wage to $15, but not until six years after enactment. Under the bill, there would be a seven-step phase-in period, beginning with $8.40 an hour and then increasing $1.10 per hour each year for the next six years.
“The annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker is $15,080 at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25,” according to the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis. An increase to $15 per hour would more than double that to $31,200 — a difference of $16,120, or $1,343 a month.
But it would take five years for a person earning minimum wage to earn more than $1,000 a month in additional income.
Under the Raise the Wage Act, the minimum raise would increase to $8.40 an hour no later than 90 days after the bill is signed into law. That’s an increase of $199 more per month — compared with Yang’s $1,000-per-month plan.
Five years after the bill takes effect, the minimum wage would increase to $13.90 an hour, providing an additional $1,153 per month. The $15 minimum wage would be fully implemented six years after the bill takes effect, providing $1,343 per month in additional income.
After seven years, Yang’s plan would have provided $1,000 a month, while the phasing-in of the minimum wage would provide only an average of $771 a month.
Also, unlike Yang’s plan, the minimum wage pay hike would not affect every American. And increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour would result in job losses, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In a July report, CBO said a $15 minimum wage would directly increase the wages of 17 million workers, but “1.3 million other workers would become jobless.”
Yang’s plan would put more money in more pockets than raising the minimum wage.
Warren’s Wealth Tax
As she has in past debates, Warren ticked off a list of things she says could be paid for with her proposal for an annual wealth tax on all assets over $50 million. As we have written, it is a matter of debate among economists and tax experts as to whether her plan would raise as much as she expects.
One of Warren’s challengers at the debate, Yang, noted that several European countries have repealed their wealth taxes “because it had massive implementation problems and did not generate the revenue that they’d projected.” That’s backed up in a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But the report also argues that a wealth tax is likely needed to close the wealth inequality gap, and it outlines a number of proposed improvements to make a wealth tax more effective than those in Europe. Warren’s plan incorporates many of those suggestions.
Under Warren’s plan, households would pay an annual 2% tax on all assets — net worth — above $50 million, and a 3% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. During the debate, Warren highlighted some of the things that tax could bankroll.
Warren: And right now in America, the top 0.1 percent have so much wealth — understand this — that if we put a 2 cent tax on their 50 millionth and first dollar, and on every dollar after that, we would have enough money to provide universal child care for every baby in this country, age zero to 5, universal pre-K for every child, raise the wages of every child care worker and preschool teacher in America, provide for universal tuition-free college, put $50 billion into historically black colleges and universities … and cancel student loan debt for 95 percent of the people who have it.
Warren estimates her wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years, based on an analysis by University of California, Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, who study wealth inequality.
When we wrote about Warren’s plan back in June in our story “Facts on Warren’s Wealth Tax Plan,” we noted that several prominent economists and tax experts cast doubt on Warren’s estimate of the revenue the tax would generate, warning that wealthy people would find ways to avoid the tax.
Yang noted that that was one of the reasons several European countries scrapped their wealth tax plans.
Yang: And a wealth tax makes a lot of sense in principle. The problem is that it’s been tried in Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, and all those countries ended up repealing it, because it had massive implementation problems and did not generate the revenue that they’d projected. If we can’t learn from the failed experiences of other countries, what can we learn from? We should not be looking to other countries’ mistakes.
Indeed, while as many as a dozen countries in Europe had a wealth tax in the early 1990s, that number has dropped to three as of 2018, according to an OECD report. (In 2018, Francereplaced its net wealth tax with a new real estate wealth tax.)
“Decisions to repeal net wealth taxes have often been justified by efficiency and administrative concerns and by the observation that net wealth taxes have frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals,” the report stated. “The revenues collected from net wealth taxes have also, with a few exceptions, been very low.”
However, the report “also argues that capital income taxes alone will most likely not be enough to address wealth inequality and suggests the need to complement capital income taxes with a form of wealth taxation.”
The report makes several recommendations to bolster the effectiveness of a wealth tax — lessons learned from the European examples. Warren’s plan has attempted to incorporate many of those suggestions.
For example, the OECD report recommends a wealth tax only be levied on the very wealthy, that the rate should be low, exemptions and reliefs should be limited (to prevent those subject to the tax from moving assets into exempted categories), and that payments should be allowed in installments for those “facing liquidity constraints.” All of those are part of Warren’s plan.
Under the Warren plan, those with liquidity issues would be able to defer tax payments, with interest, for up to five years. And to guard against wealthy Americans simply moving out of the country to avoid the wealth tax, Warren’s plan would assess a one-time 40% “exit tax” on the net worth above $50 million for those who renounce their citizenship.
We take no position on whether those provisions in the Warren plan would address the lower-than-expected revenues generated by some European countries that tried a wealth tax, but we simply note that there is significant disagreement among economists and tax experts.
Biden on Medicare for All
As he has done in past debates, Biden repeatedly criticized the Medicare for All proposal as a budget buster, saying it would increase federal spending by $30 trillion over 10 years. But Biden ignored that nearly all health care spending by businesses, local governments and individuals would go away.
At one point, Biden said: “The plan is going to cost at least $30 trillion over 10 years. That is more on a yearly basis than the entire federal budget.” He turned to the issue later in the debate, saying something similar: “It costs $30 trillion. Guess what? That’s over $3 trillion — it’s more than the entire federal budget.”
We should start out by saying that $30 trillion over 10 years is not “more than the entire federal budget.” In its August report on long-term budget projections, the Congressional Budget Office estimates federal outlays will be $57.8 trillion over 10 years, from 2020 to 2029.
Also, as we’ve explained before, we don’t know how much Medicare for All would cost, since many details are yet to be determined. But two estimates, one by the Urban Institute and another by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said the federal government cost would be $32 trillion or $32.6 trillion over 10 years.
The government would have to raise taxes or fees, or cut other spending, to cover the costs. But Biden ignores the fact that current health care spending by private insurers, employers, individuals and states would shift to the federal government.
Opioid Epidemic
In relating the severity of the opioid epidemic, Yang and Steyer gave inaccurate figures for the number of overdose deaths from opioids.
“I think this is one of the most heartbreaking experiences that America’s had — 72,000 people died of opioid overdoses last year,” Steyer said in response to a moderator’s question about how he would address the opioid epidemic.
Steyer’s statistic, however, is for 2017, and applies to deaths from overdoses from any drug, not just those from opioids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, there were 70,237 deaths from any drug in 2017, with 47,600, or 67.8%, involving opioids.
For 2018, provisional CDC data suggest that overdose deaths fell, to 68,618 deaths from any drug. The agency estimates that 47,625 deaths, or 69%, were opioid-related.
The 72,000 number that Steyer used is well known because it was widely reported as a provisional 2017 figure from the CDC in August 2018 (the final data, which we report above, differs slightly, and is limited to U.S. residents).
Yang made a similar error when he claimed that Purdue Pharma was responsible for eight deaths per hour.
Yang: There was a point when there were more opiate prescriptions in the state of Ohio than human beings in the state of Ohio. And for some reason, the federal government thought that was appropriate. They ended up levying a $600 million fine against Purdue Pharma, which sounds like a lot of money, until you realize that company made $30 billion. They got a 2% fine, and they killed tens of thousands of Americans, eight an hour.
We contacted the Yang campaign to find out the source of the eight deaths an hour claim, and we were directed to a Vox news article reporting on the initial 2017 estimate of 72,000 overdose deaths, which noted that the death toll was equivalent to nearly 200 per day. The campaign then spelled out the math, explaining that 200 divided by 24 hours was 8.33.
The math checks out, but as with Steyer, those eight deaths per hour were not due just to opioids. Rather, opioids were involved in about 5 deaths per hour in 2017.
Yang’s other error is to ascribe all of the overdose deaths to Purdue Pharma. While Purdue Pharma, as the maker of OxyContin, is arguably responsible for many opioid-related deaths, the company isn’t responsible for all of them.
Medical Bankruptcies and the ‘Underinsured’
Sanders stated that “500,000 people” are “going bankrupt” because “they came down with cancer.” As we wrote in September, Sanders is referencing a March 2019 editorial article in the American Journal of Public Health. Of the 910 respondents who declared bankruptcy between 2013 and 2016, 66.5% said medical expenses or medical problems either “somewhat” or “very much” contributed to their bankruptcies. This percentage translates to just under half a million bankruptcies when applied to the 750,489 non-business bankruptcies filed from 2015-2019.
Medical issues weren’t the sole reason for some of those bankruptcies. Also, the survey did not ask about specific medical conditions, so there’s no evidence those bankruptcies happened only because of medical expenses related to cancer or any other disease.
Sanders repeated another claim he has made in previous debates, saying that “87 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured.” As we’ve written before, this figure comes from a Commonwealth Fund study and includes 19.3 million who were insured when they were surveyed but had a gap in coverage in the previous year.
“Of the 194 million U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 in 2018, an estimated 87 million, or 45 percent, were inadequately insured,” the study said. It broke down the “inadequately insured” into three different categories: 24 million uninsured, 43.8 million who were “underinsured” and 19.3 million who were insured but had been uninsured at some point in the prior year.
Climate Change
Debate moderators did not ask candidates about climate change, but that didn’t stop a few candidates from referring to it, including Sanders, who used a descriptor that could use some clarification.
“We’re forgetting about the existential threat of climate change,” Sanders said early on in the debate.
“Existential” has become a popular word among Democrats to describe the danger that climate change poses. As we’ve written in our coverage of a previous debate, it’s not entirely clear what politicians mean when they use the word. But if taken literally to mean the end of humanity, the descriptor is incorrect.
Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann told us previously in an email that the idea that humans would go extinct because of climate change “simply cannot be defended scientifically.”
Yet scientists are clear that climate change does pose serious risks to civilization through increased temperatures, sea level rise and extreme weather, among other factors — especially if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.
In some cases, this could even mean a specific location would be uninhabitable, said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA. But does he think climate change is going to wipe humanity off the face of the Earth? “No,” he said.
Yang Wrong About Amazon — Again
Yang doubled down on a false claim about Amazon.com.
Yang: Amazon alone is closing 30% of America’s stores and malls, soaking up $20 billion in business while paying zero in taxes.
As we reported Aug. 1, after he made the same claim in the second Democratic debate, Yang went way beyond the facts. We found no factual basis for the claim that 30% of stores have closed, and some evidence that the number may be increasing. The National Retail Federation reports that “54 percent of surveyed retailers plan to open new stores in 2019, and 36 percent of those surveyed will have a higher store count than in 2018.” Furthermore, the retail services firm JLL reported last year that 850 new stores were being planned over the next five years by firms that previously had sold only through the internet.
We also noted that the Wall Street Journal has estimated that Amazon paid 8% of its income in taxes for the years 2012 through 2018 — which the Journal noted was “low, but not zero or negative.”
It’s true that a 2017 Business Insider report estimated that 30% of retail malls (not stores) were being pushed “to the brink of death” (but not necessarily over it) by a wave of store closings by old-line retailers including JCPenney and Sears. But malls are not stores, and even that report didn’t cite Amazon’s competition as the sole cause of the malls’ distress.
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Sanger-Katz, Margot. “Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017.” New York Times. 15 Aug 2018.
Lopez, German. “2017 was the worst year ever for drug overdose deaths in America.” Vox. 16 Aug 2018.
Allyn, Bobby. “Purdue Pharma, Accused Of Fueling Opioid Crisis, Files For Chapter 11.” NPR. 16 Sep 2019.
Source: FactCheck.org
By Daniel John Sobieski, a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Perhaps House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), would like to produce a transcript of his secret meeting with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2018. Or maybe someone like ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) can make up a “parody” and read it into the record, as Schiff did with President Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, both of whom publicly denied any collusion, pressure, or quid pro quo.
Liar and leaker Schiff had a transcript of the call and still made up his fable rivaling his fairy tale about having mounds of available evidence for everyone to see abut Trump’s mythical collusion with Russia. We don’t have a transcript of Schiff’s meeting with Simpson, so we should be even freer to make stuff up about what each said, what each meant and heard, and what quid was promised for which quo.
Like Schiff’s Russian collusion delusion, Ukrainegate, to coin a phrase, is a made up scandal involving a questionable document with unverifiable or incorrect statements and allegations, chock-full of made up stuff and hearsay. Like the Steele dossier produced through Fusion GPS, the Ukraine “whistleblower’s” letter to the inspector general is largely unverifiable hearsay or outright fiction. Written by a CIA mole assigned to the White House who was not in the room or on the call, it is designed for one purpose: to bring down a sitting and duly elected president.
Now we find that Adam Schiff and committee staff had a copy of the letters before it was submitted to the I.G. On Wednesday, the New York Times published a report that Schiff “learned about the outlines of a C.I.A. officer’s concerns that President Trump had abused his power days before the officer filed a whistle-blower complaint.” As the New York Times related:
The early account by the future whistle-blower shows how determined he was to make known his allegations that Mr. Trump asked Ukraine’s government to interfere on his behalf in the 2020 election. It also explains how Mr. Schiff knew to press for the complaint when the Trump administration initially blocked lawmakers from seeing it. …
Before going to Congress, the C.I.A. officer had a colleague convey his accusations to the agency’s top lawyer. Concerned about how that avenue for airing his allegations was unfolding, the officer then approached a House Intelligence Committee aide, alerting him to the accusation against Mr. Trump. In both cases, the original accusation was vague.
The House staff member, following the committee’s procedures, suggested the officer find a lawyer to advise him and file a whistle-blower complaint. The aide shared some of what the officer conveyed to Mr. Schiff.
Schiff and his staff claim they had no hand in writing or editing the letter and did not coach the so-called whistleblower, even though his letter reads more like a legal brief written by a committee of lawyers. Schiff, with his track record, is not to be believed.
Take Schiff’s meeting with Simpson, an exercise in hypocrisy if nothing else. Schiff, it may be remembered, accused House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes of conspiracy with President Trump. Conspiracies against President Trump and conspiring with Deep-State players are okay in Schiff’s alternate universe. As Chuck Ross writes in the Daily Caller:
The Schiff-Simpson meeting has come under scrutiny because of Simpson’s role in pushing the unverified Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory. Simpson has also been accused by some Republican lawmakers of lying to the House Intelligence Committee about his interactions with government officials while working on the dossier.
During testimony to the House panel on Nov. 14, 2017, Simpson withheld that he met with Justice Department official Bruce Ohr prior to the November 2016 election. Simpson said that he met Ohr only after the election. But Ohr told Congress on Aug. 28, 2018 that he and Simpson met on Aug. 22, 2016 at Simpson’s request. They met again on Dec. 10, 2016.
Ohr’s wife worked as a contractor for Fusion during the 2016 campaign. And after the election, Ohr served as the back channel between the FBI and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who worked for Fusion GPS on the dossier project.
During the same testimony in which Simpson has been accused of lying, Schiff sought investigative leads from the Fusion GPS founder.
Schiff, who once called the rooftop heroes of Benghazi liars, is at it again. He is not uncovering corruption; he is part of it. His is the corruption that needs to be exposed, and his Intelligence Committee is part of the swamp that needs to be drained.
Count Schiff among the many leakers who have released classified information and testimony designed to damage and slander the Trump administration. During the testimony of Donald Trump, Jr. before the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Schiff repeatedly left the room. Coincidentally, of course, leaked information from that testimony began appearing in anti-Trump media even before the testimony concluded:
Donald Trump Jr. and his lawyer formally requested an investigation Tuesday into leaks from the House Intelligence Committee that followed Trump’s participation in a closed-door interview with committee members and staffers last week.
“The public release of confidential non-public information by Committee members continued unabated” for 24 hours after Trump’s supposedly confidential interview last week, Trump’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, wrote in a letter delivered Tuesday afternoon.
The four-page letter, addressed to Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), the panel chairman overseeing the Russia investigation, complains about public comments made by three members of the panel, all Democrats, including the highest-ranking minority member of the panel, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.). The letter says that members and staffers began “selectively leaking information” even before the closed-door meeting ended.
Schiff sent a House intel staffer on a trip to Ukraine during August 24–31, just 12 days after receiving the whistleblower complaint. To do what? To dig up what? It is reported the staffer met with the previous president of Ukraine, a friend of President Obama’s.
As reported by Gateway Pundit, Adam Schiff has strong ties to a prominent Ukrainian arms-dealer, Igor Pasternak, who has organized fundraisers for Schiff:
In 2013 Ukrainian Igor Pasternak held two different fund raisers for Schiff asking for contributions between $1,000 and $2,500[.] … Pasternak was reportedly in and around the Ukraine at the same time that Vice President Joe Biden had his son appointed to the Board of the Ukraine’s largest oil and gas producer[.]
Let’s investigate collusion with Ukraine to affect U.S. elections, Rep. Schiff. Yours.
Schiff has defended Hillary Clinton and lied about her involvement in Uranium One and giving Russia 20 percent of our uranium reserves. Talk about collusion with Russia!
Adam Schiff is a political hack, a swamp creature slithering past the truth while saying the American people can’t handle the truth. What they can’t handle is swamp things like Adam Schiff. It is he who should be impeached and removed from office
Source: American Thinker
IN BRIEFThe tussle between Democrats calling for Trump’s impeachment and Republicans calling for an investigation into Joe Biden’s influence-peddling in the Ukraine is just the latest act in the never-ending saga of American political theatre.
Still, there is value in examining the details of this particular drama–as objective observers rather than as polarized partisans–in order to strengthen our understanding of our role as citizens impacted by all the machinations within the political arena.
That’s precisely what Joe Martino and I attempt to do in our latest episode of ‘The Collective Evolution Show’ on CETV. Below is a clip from the show that outlines the strong-arm tactics Joe Biden used–by his own admission–against the Ukranian government to fire a prosecutor who was investigating an energy company that was paying Biden’s son an exorbitant salary for being on their executive board. You can see the whole episode when you start a free 7-day trial on CETV.
The saga all starts with Joe Biden’s meeting in March 2016 with then-president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, where he threatened to cancel $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to pressure the president to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Biden himself discloses exactly this in a 2018 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The problem here? While Joe Biden claims he wanted the prosecutor fired because he was inept and corrupt, Biden’s son Hunter Biden was on the executive board of Burisma Holdings, which Shokin was in the process of investigating. U.S. banking records show that Hunter’s American-based firm Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC received regular transfers into one of its accounts—usually more than $166,000 a month—from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015.
This significant remuneration is brought further into question by the fact that Hunter Biden reportedly has no formal knowledge about the energy industry.
In a sworn affidavit, Viktor Shokin makes it clear why he believes he was fired:
“I was forced out because I was leading a wide-range corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine, and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was a member of the board of directors.”
“We had plans that included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
And memos that are now surfacing from the Ukraine offer some corroboration for Shokin’s claims that he was not fired because he was corrupt or inept:
Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered “an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures” about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor’s firing was announced. (source)
In other words, Burisma was made well aware of the decision to fire Viktor Shokin the day it was made, and worked quickly to ensure their influence over the new prosecutors coming in, whom Joe Biden characterized as “solid.”
Was Joe Biden involved in some ‘pay-to-play’ scheme in which one or more Ukranian businesses would be able to count on Joe Biden’s influence in exchange for payments that were being made to Biden’s son Hunter, sheltering Joe Biden himself from those transactions? It would seem so.
But all this only became news after the electoral victory of new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in March of 2019, and a phone call from Donald Trump on July 25th, 2019, where Trump requested that Mr. Zelenskiy cooperate with AG Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani in investigating the firing of prosecutor Victor Shokin.
In turn this phone call only surfaced because an anonymous ‘whistleblower’ came out in August and claimed to have first-hand knowledge of the phone call and disclosed that Donald Trump had pressured Zelinskiy to investigate Biden, and that Trump’s tactics involved a quid pro quo.
Mainstream media ran with this right away and ramped up rhetoric that this phone conversation was the new and serious grounds for impeachment, which was then taken up by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
This prompted Trump to release a transcript of the phone call, in order to certify that he had done nothing wrong. Democrat Adam Schiff, in an attempt to spin the gist of the phone conversation, seems to ignore the fact that the transcript had just been released and went ahead with his ‘interpretation’ which he later excused as a ‘parody’, while making it seem as though he was quoting from the transcript:
On September 25th Trump held an in-person press conference with Zelinskiy to quash any rumors that he had pressured the Ukranian PM, and followed with an ongoing counter-attack against Schiff on Twitter that continues today:
So where does this leave us? What are we to make of this debacle?
Well, if you’re on the right, you are probably getting absolutely fed up that high ranking people on the left who have obviously been involved in criminal activity have not yet been indicted and prosecuted. If you’re on the left, you may see Trump as an embarrassment and are desperate to see him removed from power, whether legitimately or even through questionable political maneuvers.
But there is a bigger question here. Amidst the ever-polarizing political battle that has been playing out since Trump became president, over a host of issues of which this Ukraine matter is only the most recent, how do we really want to participate in this?
If we continue to take sides, and believe that some form of legal action within the political theatre will solve our problems, whether it be indictment or impeachment, we are only supporting the madness and continuing to give our power away to forces who clearly don’t have our best interests at heart.
What is needed is to see current politics as it is, truly theatre of the absurd, and its only real value to us is to awaken us to what we are really giving our power away to, so that we eventually gain the conviction to withdraw our consent to these systems in favor of something that really is in service to us, the people.
So rather than getting angry, and continuing to believe that the people on our chosen side of the aisle will save the day for us, tempting as this continues to be for some, what will really benefit us is to move to neutrality, observe how senseless and pointless this drama has become–comical, we could even say–and begin having clear-minded conversations about how we step away from the whole ugly production.
At CE, we encourage people to look at world events as a projection of our collective consciousness. When we see polarized turmoil being played out in front of us, it means our inner grievances and prejudices are being brought to the surface, smack in front of our eyes in order for us to confront them. When we have finally had enough of investing in the never-ending struggle between two polarities, neither of which offers the whole truth or the prospects of peace and harmony, we can choose to disengage from identifying with one side or the other, and transcend the battle in search of greater possibilities for ourselves and for humanity.
Source: Collective Evolution
CNN Redemption Project with Van Jones, 549793
Editor’s Note: Even the CNN contributor Van Jones is cautioning the Democrats about their careless and ill-prepared impeachment inquiry which is increasing Trump’s approval ratings and may very well shrink the Democrats base for the next election.
On Thursday, CNN contributor Van Jones appeared on CNN’s “OutFront” to talk about the Democrats’ efforts to impeach President Donald Trump, acknowledging that the Left is going to end up regretting their decisions.
“Yeah, it’s interesting, you know — it’s a tricky thing, the impeachment process because for some Republicans it makes them want to rally around the flag. when I was anti-Bill Clinton from the left in the ’90s, and then they tried to impeach him, and suddenly Clinton was my best friend,” Jones noted. “I was like, ‘Leave Bill Clinton alone.’ So, I think you get crosscurrents in this thing, and at the same time, the Democrats are in a lose-lose situation.”
“If they don’t do something, their own base is going to feel disappointed and feel like maybe Trump gets away too much,” he continued. “If you don’t do the impeachment, though, you divide the country further, you take the oxygen away from your candidates, and you still don’t solve the problem of interference. Just because you impeach a president, it doesn’t mean you don’t still have the problem of foreign interference. It’s a big mess.”
Jones seems to be right considering President Trump’s approval rating has actually increased since Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced her impeachment inquiry.
According to the new Hill-Harris poll, President Trump’s rating has increased to a shocking 49%. This poll was generated after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry against President Trump so this poll is a good indication of what the American people think about the impeachment agenda.
Check out what The Hill reported:
President Trump’s approval ticked up to 49 percent — its highest mark this year, according to a new Hill-HarrisX survey released on Wednesday.
The figure marks a 2-point increase from a Sept. 11-12 poll, but a 2-point decrease from its previous peak of 51 percent in August 2018.
Trump’s disapproval rating, meanwhile, dropped to 51 percent, which marks his lowest level so far this year.
The nationwide survey was conducted on Sept. 28 and 29, less than a week after House Democrats launched a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump over concerns raised in a whistleblower’s complaint about the president’s communications with Ukraine.
Last week, House Speaker Pelosi announced an official impeachment inquiry against President Trump based off of a second-hand politically biased whistleblower’s claim that President Trump bribed Ukraine’s President with military funds to start an investigation into Joe Biden for getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired who was investigating his son.
This move by the Speaker is an obvious political hit job with the sole intention of removing our duly elected president from office.
The whistleblower claimed that President Trump set up a quid pro quo agreement regarding military aid with Ukraine and in return, Ukraine would investigate Joe Biden. Pelosi used the whistleblower’s claim to begin an impeachment inquiry, however the transcript of the call which was released the next day, revealed that President Trump did not leverage military aid in any way. The Democrats started an impeachment inquiry based on lies.
Source: Trending Politics & CNN
Vaccine injury cases are on the rise people, so if you’ve got your head in the sand and you haven’t been paying attention, it’s time to wake up.
Here’s a little background for those of you just getting started.
Ronnie Reagan… almost 30 years ago to the day, the 40th president of the United States signed away the rights of Americans to sue vaccine makers, replacing them with a law that forces families who have suffered vaccine injury or death to sue the U.S. government instead of a pharmaceutical company.
As a result, special masters from the United States Special Claims Court, also known for our purposes as the vaccine court, are given full authority as judge with no jury to decide the fate of Americans who have had the unfortunate ‘luck’ to be stricken by a vaccine injury — which can range from chronic, mild symptoms to death.
Once a year, this non-traditional court provides the public with a glimpse into its inner workings, by issuing an annual report on its website — a ritual that happens every January. The report is sent to the President of Congress, otherwise known as the Vice President of the United States, where it is intended to serve as a bell weather monitoring reactions the American public may be having to vaccinations that are increasingly becoming forced by government mandates around the country.
Great, right? Accountability in action?
Wrong.
The report, which is consistently ignored by mainstream media/politicians/health officials and the CDC, lies dormant on the reports page of the U.S. Special Claims Court website.
No headlines, no press release, no analysis, no alert the media, no nothing.
No surprise, given that most people in America don’t even know that vaccines were ruled to be unavoidably unsafe by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011. Also no surprise, that mainstream, co-opted, globalist elite media constantly ignore this report, along with sane arguments made by health freedom advocates about the dangers and risks of vaccine injury (‘look! a unicorn!’), instead using terms like ‘the science is in,’ and vaccine risk has been ‘debunked,’ to deter rational discussion pertaining to evidence that is hiding in plain sight.
Also no surprise that the U.S. Special Claims Court offers up an ineffective, low tech, archaic version of the report every year. Instead of a nice, sort-able spread sheet, the court posts a scanned PDF document — a format which requires labor-intensive activities to conduct any sort of concrete analysis. One must either re-data-entry all 220+ pages which would take weeks, or conduct an extensive, hand-written breakdown by vaccine of each case, combined with extensive tallying and organization efforts in order to identify statistical relevance and trends emerging from the vaccine court.
Is this by design? Perhaps. Most definitely it is at the very least a deterrent from having anybody actually sit down and try to analyze the damn thing.
Which is exactly why we do it, every year since 2014. Not to be deterred, it took us 10 months to finally finish our analysis of this year’s report. But once we did, the trends we found were shocking — not just because of what they revealed about the continual increase in vaccine injury, but also because of the deafening silence present among the halls of mainstream media, as vaccine injury continues to be a subject that journalists and media outlets ignore — chalking it up to yet another conspiracy theory from yet another fake news site.
Well pull up a chair and hold on to your hats, because guess what we discovered:
The rest of the settlements not pictured here are: Tetanus, $4 million; HPV $3.4 million, up from almost nothing in 2014 (one to watch in January when the 2016 report is issued); MMR, which actually decreased from the number one position last year to under $1 m — an 88%+ decrease in payouts; pertussis, $1.7 million; thimerisol $1.5 million; HIB, $345k, menginococal $500k, HEP A $408k, DPT & Polio, $210k & rotovirus $76k.
You may have noticed we omitted the second place winner, ‘other.’ Here’s why.
‘Other’ illustrates perfectly the dodgy nature of the vaccine court report, and its lack of transparency in the vaccine court process. Instead of identifying which combination of vaccines are being charged with injury or death and labeling the case accordingly, a special master can decide to label a vaccine case ‘other,’ thereby diluting its affect on the overall numbers in the final analysis.
In 2015, the ‘other’ category was the second largest increase in vaccine settlement payments, totaling $21.5 million in payouts, up 388% from $4.4 million in payouts the year before.
We’re not accusing anybody of anything. But, 388% increase is a lot. What combination of vaccines is causing such an increase? Doesn’t the public have a right to know? If the court decided, for example, that there were too many flu shot settlements mounting for the year, couldn’t it simply skew the data by categorizing certain cases as ‘other,’ which would artificially deflate the flu category?
Did we mention that these results are ONLY for the judgements — cases that are found in favor of the plaintiff. It does NOT include the EXTENSIVE legal fees for both sides, which are paid for by the U.S. government whether the lawyer wins or loses the case? Those are categorized as costs. And instead of submitting them in the report along with any judgments that are awarded, often they are entered as separate entries, making the exercise of linking them with their judgement payouts that much harder, requiring yet another step in the arduous, analysis of data.
The total dollar payout of legal fees for the vaccine court in 2015 is $42 million.
Also, a hand full of settlements in the payout are based on annuities — that means that the payouts (many of which total more than $1 million) reoccur annually. That’s because life as they knew it for some plaintiffs disappeared after their vaccine injury occurred, and the costs to care for them in perpetuity for the life of the plaintiff requires an annual sum that is often extensive.
Share far and wide people, it’s time to turn the tide.
Republished with permission of The Mom Street Journal. Read the full article at TheMomStreetJournal.com.
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