Daily Digest

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• Media Closing Ranks Around Biden on Ukraine
• Kamala Harris ❤️ Rapists?
• What Don’t the Bureaucrats Want You to Know?

Media Closing Ranks Around Biden on Ukraine Posted: 23 Feb 2022 08:30 PM PST (Steven Hayward) Scott noted here that has taken over 80 years, but Hollywood finally got round to exonerating Neville Chamberlain for his malfeasance in Munich in 1938. Today’s media isn’t even waiting 80 hours to exonerate President Biden. They are already declaring this to be Biden’s finest hour. Behold the Washington Post just three days ago: With or without war, Ukraine gives Biden a new lease on leadership Six months ago, the transatlantic alliance was on shaky ground, with President Biden's promise of a reinvigorated NATO under U.S. leadership severely undermined by the Afghanistan debacle and a foreign policy that seemed unready for prime time. Today, Biden and his team have redeemed themselves in the eyes of many NATO allies, with a tough stance on Ukraine and the successful wrangling of the often-fractious alliance to support it. And this tweet on Monday from Paul Begala seals his reputation as a hack and lightweight: All that diplomacy sure has worked just like they teach it in every “conflict resolution” seminar in every IR department in every university. Well, it least it gets you news copy like this: The team has patted itself on the back, with Blinken telling MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that during the Ukraine crisis "there have been more than 200 engagements, meetings, phone calls, video conferences with NATO, with the European Union, with the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], with allies and partners throughout Europe, even beyond." Left out: how many weapons delivered to Ukraine? Because weapons are the fundamental tool of diplomacy, not the telephone or email. Chaser—oil has spiked to $100 a barrel tonight on the news of Russia’s invasion:

Kamala Harris ❤️ Rapists? Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:02 PM PST (John Hinderaker) I assume Kamala Harris would claim to be opposed to rape. But during and after the George Floyd Riots, she not only contributed to but enthusiastically promoted a group called the Minnesota Freedom Fund. MFF pretended to exist for the benefit of “peaceful protesters,” but in fact it immediately bailed violent criminals of all kinds out of jail, most of whom had nothing to do with any sort of “protest” but were merely rapists, murderers, and so on. Harris received plenty of criticism from us and others for her involvement with the pro-criminal Minnesota Freedom Fund, but she never denounced that group or disassociated herself from it. Harris is insulated from violent crime as she has been throughout her privileged life, but her perverse political ideology has damaged countless Minnesotans who are not so fortunate. My colleague Jeffrey Van Nest documents the fact that Kamala is still at it, long after public attention has moved on: The Minnesota Freedom Fund, which pays criminal bail for those who cannot afford it, is facing another instance where a client is rearrested shortly after release. According to Crime Watch Minneapolis, Gregory Jones, 28, was in jail until February 8th on attempted rape changes when the Freedom Fund made the decision to have Jones released after covering his $40,000 bail. Jones was charged with the attempted rape of a woman in a downtown Minneapolis bathroom. The criminal complaint describes him as a "danger to public safety" who was "also under investigation for several other incidents of indecent exposure." Three days later, on February 11th, police were called to the FAIR Senior High School in downtown Minneapolis after receiving complaints of a man exposing himself to students and staff. Police learned that Jones was seen lying on the floor near the entrance to the school masturbating with his pants down and penis exposed. He spoke to students as they attempted to enter the school. When a staff member told him to stop, Jones became aggressive and started swearing at her. According to security officers at the school, he was previously removed for trespassing based on the same behavior. Good going, Kamala! This is one of many instances of Harris’s loosing criminals on a helpless population. The Freedom Fund promised to change its ways, but it hasn’t followed through: Previously, the Freedom Fund assured the community that its protocols would be revised after it bailed out George Howard, 48, who was facing domestic assault charges. Freedom Fund paid the $11,500 bond for Howard's release on August 11, 2021. Less than a month later, on August 29th, Howard was charged with second-degree murder for killing Luis Martinez during a road rage incident on an interstate I-94 entrance ramp in Minneapolis. In a social media posting, Freedom Fund representatives assured the community that following the Martinez murder changes would be made. Not enough changes, apparently. Links are omitted: It remains unclear what, if any, changes the Freedom Fund has made to further protect the community from dangerous criminals awaiting trial. This comes on the heels of Freedom Fund's sponsoring bond payments for violent criminals such as a twice-convicted rapist, a man accused of sexually penetrating a young child, a man who curb stomped his victim, and several serial domestic abusers. Does Kamala Harris care about the chaos that her advocacy for this corrupt organization has wrought? Evidently not: if she cared, she would at a minimum recant her support for the ill-named Minnesota Freedom Fund. But she hasn’t even done that, let alone express any sympathy for the Freedom Fund’s many victims of violent crime. Does Kamala Harris actually want more murder, rape and assault? Or is she just so insulated from the world by her privileged status that she has no idea of the consequences of her actions? Your guess is as good as mine.

What Don’t the Bureaucrats Want You to Know? Posted: 23 Feb 2022 04:50 PM PST (John Hinderaker) The Centers for Disease Control is a federal bureaucracy and, like all government agencies, is political. CDC employs scientists, but the idea that it is some sort of ivory tower representing “science” is ridiculous. We are reminded of this fact by an article in the New York Times that Steve referred to briefly earlier today. The article is headlined, “The C.D.C. isn't publishing large portions of the Covid data it collects.” For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public. *** Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country's response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. So why hasn’t CDC made public the large majority of the data it has collected, forcing “the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice” to rely on Israeli data? CDC is, after all, a public agency, presumably working for all of us. Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data "because basically, at the end of the day, it's not yet ready for prime time." She said the agency's "priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it's accurate and actionable." Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said. We live in an age in which “misinformation” commonly means information that is inconvenient for the powers that be. Likewise, when CDC says it fears that its own data might be “misinterpreted,” it is reasonable to suspect that this means the data might reasonably be seen as contradicting CDC–i.e., Biden administration–narratives. But now the case gets interesting, as the Times has updated the linked article twice, on Monday and Tuesday. The final version is considerably longer and is more forthcoming on what might possibly be prone to “misinterpretation.” It includes this paragraph: The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective. Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. We have just lived through a period of intense pressure on everyone, down to small children, to be vaccinated and boosted on the ground that only vaccination can save us all from covid disaster. Vaccine passports have been imposed in many locations, unvaccinated people have been treated as second-class citizens, and many liberals have argued that unvaccinated people should not be treated in hospitals if they become sick. Now the CDC is telling us that, if you and I had access to all of their data, we likely would *misinterpret* it to indicate that the vaccines don’t work very well. (Independent analysts have already raised such questions based on other data sets.) Who knows, the CDC may also have data indicating that adverse side effects from vaccination are more common than the government has let on. I don’t know about that, but I do know that I, and a great many others, are perfectly competent to analyze data without “misinterpreting” it. It seems obvious that in this case, “misinterpretation” means drawing conclusions that are unhelpful to the Biden administration, Anthony Fauci, and the Democratic Party. It is long past time for CDC to release the reams of data it has in its possession and let the rest of us argue about what conclusions we should draw from it. This is a quaint idea: it presupposes a democracy in which bureaucrats actually work for the people who pay their salaries.

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