“The infection starts with a sniffle. Next comes a barking cough. Soon, there’s a fever, maybe vomiting and diarrhea, possibly an ear infection or tonsillitis or pink eye.
These are common symptoms in preschool, where viral outbreaks are as ubiquitous as finger paints and apple juice. In a typical year, an otherwise healthy preschooler will bring home 12 to 18 upper respiratory infections — at least six to eight colds, two cases of croup and, more often than not, a bout of the flu, among others.
But 2020 is not a typical year, and SARS-CoV-2 — the technical term for the novel coronavirus — is no day-care germ. Now, with hundreds of large centers reopening across California, many families are asking: Is preschool safe?
“That’s the big question,” said Dr. Nava Yeganeh, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at UCLA and a preschool mom. “We can’t mitigate risk down to zero, but it seems like in general preschools have done very well.”
Though scientists can still only guess at why, a growing body of evidence suggests preschoolers are uniquely resilient to the novel coronavirus. Recent studies from the U.S., U.K., Singapore and Australia, among others, suggest they are far less likely to contract and spread the illness than older children and dramatically less likely to get sick from it than children even slightly older or younger.
“This is the most bizarre virus,” said Dr. Naomi Bardach, a professor of pediatrics at UC San Francisco. “Normally we think about kids getting coughs and colds all the time and giving it to each other all the time, and [giving] it to their teachers. In this disease, it’s a totally different model.””
“GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF CUOMO’S CORONAVIRUS NURSING HOME SCANDAL
Janice Dean reports on the weather for Fox News. She lost both of her in-laws to the Wuhan coronavirus. Both contracted the disease at long-term care facilities, but her mother in-law died at a hospital.
New York apparently does not include cases like the mother-in-law’s in totaling up the nursing home death count. Thus, New York is under counting the number of deaths that arose at such facilities.
Dean has long wanted to testify about New York state’s disastrous response to the coronavirus in nursing homes. However, she was removed from the witness list for a hearing by the legislature on this subject.
Dean says a Republican New York Senator told her the Democrat majority was “uncomfortable having [her] as a witness.” Dean believes the majority was responding to pressure from Governor Cuomo or his associates. Cuomo’s office denies the charge.
The Republicans countered by inviting Dean to their own event. She called for an independent investigation into whether nursing homes kept coronavirus patients separated, had enough employees, tracked workers who worked at multiple health care facilities, and provided staffers with adequate protective gear. There’s also the fact that the Cuomo administration required these facilities to accept people known to be infected.
Because of the way New York counts coronavirus deaths (see above), no one knows how many people died from the virus after contracting it at such facilities. The Cuomo administration refuses to provide such information even though it has been requested by both Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature. Clearly, Cuomo is trying to prevent a full assessment of the carnage that resulted from his policies.
Fortunately, as I discussed here, the Trump Justice Department has sent a letter to Governor Cuomo (among other governors) seeking this information. The letter asks for:
The number of Public Nursing Home residents, employees, other staff, guests, and visitors who died of COVID-19 including those who died in a Public Nursing Home or after being transferred to a hospital or other medical facility, hospice, home care, or any other location.”
“Skyrocketing demolition costs for riot-damaged Minneapolis, St. Paul properties delay rebuilding”
“One day after rioters destroyed the Sports Dome retail complex in St. Paul, a construction crew hired by the city knocked the building down because it was dangerously unstable.
Then the city presented the property owners with a $140,000 bill for what it would cost to haul away the debris.
“We were really upset about that,” said property owner Jay Kim, whose insurance policy covers a maximum of $25,000 in demolition costs. “We thought that was high. But we didn’t know how much demolition would cost at the time.”
Like dozens of other investors whose properties were severely damaged in the May riots, the Kim family was stunned to discover that the money it would collect from its insurance company for demolition won’t come close to the actual costs of doing the job. Most policies limit reimbursement to $25,000 to $50,000, but contractors have been submitting bids of $200,000 to $300,000. In many cases, the price of the work is not much lower than the actual value of the property, records show.
“I think that is price-gouging and they should contact the attorney general,” said Andrea Jenkins, vice president of the Minneapolis City Council. “That is a symbol of capitalism run amok.”
Contractors acknowledge that prices for riot-related work are far higher than usual, but they said that is because government regulations require them to treat all debris from a burned-out building as hazardous. Industry veteran Don Rachel said those rules can double demolition costs.
“We aren’t taking advantage of anybody,” said Rachel, CEO of Rachel Contracting, one of the largest demolition contractors in the state. “Some people might have sticker shock, but how do they know? Most of these folks have never had to wreck a building.”
Demolition costs are so high that many rebuilding projects remain stuck in neutral, leaving large sections of Minneapolis and St. Paul with scorched buildings and piles of rubble that will linger for months.”
“Foundation With Biden Campaign Ties Funding Leftist Agitators On U.S. Streets
While activists Ford funds desecrate cities and terrorize regular folks, the foundation gives millions to the ‘Defund the Police’ movement.”
“Last Sunday, the site of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte witnessed a night of violence leading to at least five arrests. Since Friday, Black Lives Matter activists terrorized the Queen City, including beating police officers, in an effort to intimidate GOP attendees and business owners.
By contrast, the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee brought only a small gathering of peaceful activists, who declared: “We decided that it would make sense for us to make the emphasis of our action the one point of unity that deals with police crimes.”
Here we have a real “tale of two cities.” To understand the disparity of these two convention host cities separated by only a week, let’s examine some financiers of organizations fomenting the riots now taking place across the country.
Big Money, Connections to Top Democrats
Claiming to be America’s second-largest private foundation, the Ford Foundation has poured almost $2 billion into groups active in “disrupting systems to advance social justice,” according to its grant database.
The Ford Foundation boasts key members of the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaign as alumni executives. Harris’s sister and ex-campaign chairwoman Maya Harris served as the Ford foundation’s vice president alongside Biden’s now senior advisor, Cristóbal Alex, who served as its program director during the Obama presidency.
Some of Obama’s top staffers are now Ford Foundation’s top staffers. Taara Rangarajan, now Ford’s chief of staff, served as Obama’s national security advisor from 2013-2016. Before that, she served as a special assistant to Susan Rice during the Benghazi affair. Another Ford exec, Xavier de Souza Briggs, served as President Obama’s associate director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Funding for Communist-Connected Street Agitators
During the final months of the Obama presidency, Ford Foundation gave prominent leaders of the communist Workers World Party (WWP) funding to form the Southern Vision Alliance (SVA), a collective of activists that includes members of the group raining down terror in Charlotte last week at the RNC convention.
Shortly after getting $200,000 from the Ford Foundation in 2016, these activists performed one of the first violent and illegal teardowns of a historic monument in the country, in Durham, North Carolina. After the activists were arrested and charged for rioting and property damage, they are being defended in court, for free, by lawyers from another Ford grantee: the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
Flush with Ford Foundation cash, these activists continue to promote property destruction and violence during demonstrations.”
“This takes some parsing, but it’s worth the dig. Real events are happening, but there’s a big gulf between what they actually are and how they’re being represented by the mainstream media. The whole enterprise is an excellent study in the misuse of classified intelligence as a vehicle for disinformation.
The convenience of classified intelligence for this purpose is that it’s classified, so someone can always claim there’s something you don’t know about it that only emerged behind closed doors. The public, having no way to judge any original statements that may (or, equally, may not) have been made, have to rely on what partisans are trying to sell us all on instead.
The latest development in this saga is a complaint by Democrats about the DNI move, conveyed in a letter on 28 August, to brief Congress on election security via written documents, with few if any closed-door, in-person briefings being given on Capitol Hill. They will get the same information as before, but in written form.
The formal reason for this is that the DNI doesn’t want members of Congress making selective, misleading leaks about such briefings. Politico, which has the latest story, has faithfully written up earlier episodes in which leaks of this kind appear to have occurred.
But I’m not so sure they were actually leaks. My take, looking at the sum total of the tale so far, is that the existence of in-person briefings has allowed Democrats to feed information to the media about things that didn’t really happen. In other words, the Hill Democrats weren’t “leaking” things they had been briefed on. They were using a classified briefing as a pretext to feed a propaganda line to the media under the pretense that they were “leaking.”
They were just making stuff up.
There were hints that this was occurring early in 2020 when House Democrats claimed to have been briefed by an ODNI official that Russia was meddling in the 2020 election with the intention of getting Trump reelected. Since the same official, only days earlier, had said in an NPR interview that the intelligence community hadn’t drawn a conclusion about specific efforts by Russia in this year’s election, the claim of the Democrats was quickly called into question.
In a rare public response, the acting DNI, Richard Grenell, came out with clarifying information about the actual position of the IC on Russian interference in 2020. He also announced that ODNI would be taking good care to communicate a single, authoritative message on crucial national security topics like election security – a subtle signal that the intel community’s no-kidding assessments would come from the intel community, and not [timpani flourish] from the background “leaks” of Congress members or staffers on the Hill.
Fast-forward to early August 2020, and an intelligence “report” on election security published by the National Counterintelligence Security Center (NCSC), a subordinate agency of ODNI. I wrote it up at the time, characterizing the report as inane. I stand by that characterization, but elaboration by Politico on the shenanigans surrounding it on Capitol Hill sheds light on why it may have turned out as it did.
It appears, in hindsight, that the report was published as a way of putting something on the record, to stop made-up stuff “leaked” by Democrats from hijacking the intel community’s public disclosures about election security and potential election interference.
Democrats complained before the report was posted that the DNI – now John Ratcliffe – and his henchmen were failing to properly brief the public on the election threat. The basis for this was said to be a contentious briefing in which Nancy Pelosi reportedly accused ODNI briefers of not reporting on a Democratic theme that Russia is behind information coming from Ukraine about the Bidens’ activities there.
Beyond the complaint that the public wasn’t being told this – which we know about because it was “leaked” to Politico – Democrats in the Senate also demanded a brief from the FBI on the Democrats’ narrative about Russia, Ukraine, and the Bidens. The Democrats are peeved with Republicans for not insisting that the narrative be deposited with the Senate on the record.”
“I met some protesters face to face on Thursday night and I am here to tell you this:
They were not good people — and calling them “protesters” is a slur on lawful protest.
I was walking from the White House to my hotel behind an elderly couple. People were milling about the street, yelling obscenities at the police and Secret Service officers standing behind the fence, but our hotels were just across the street and down the block.
So, we passed through the gate to cross the street — and ran into a gauntlet of hate.
Two people first rushed to within inches of me, screaming obscenities in (and on!) my face. I held my fingers up in a peace sign, proceeding without pushing them out of my way, steeling myself for a blow and considering if and when I would need to fight.
My peace sign actually attracted more people to me, screaming vilely, as I said, “Settle down, settle down!” The elderly woman in front of me fell to the ground. Screaming people swirled around her as she knelt on the street; her husband bent down to help her up. I stepped behind her and stretched out my arms, trying to create space for her to get up and move on. I backed across the street a few more steps trying to keep my eyes on the people threatening me, but they were moving all around me. So, I turned and finished crossing the street, waiting for a blow, seeking to convey dignity, mentally preparing to respond. A few steps further and we encountered some police officers; more came, and they set up a protective cordon to restrain, but not arrest, the criminals.
Separately, a friend helped another elderly couple through a similar assault: The elderly woman dropped her earring and was too frightened to pick it up, until my friend stepped in to assist them. A Chicago police officer in town for the event, she said it was the first time she felt like a civilian relying on police. Sen. Rand Paul would later thank the Washington police for saving him from this same “mob.”
There are a thousand similar crime stories this morning. And yes, the people we encountered were criminals: Assault is a crime in every state and municipality. At a minimum, they violated section 22-404 of the D.C. Criminal Code, the penalty for which is imprisonment for up to 180 days.
Assault is an overt act that is intended to, and does, cause an apprehension of harmful or offensive contact in the victim. Assault is a crime distinct from battery. However, assault can lead to retribution or worse crimes (like battery, theft, arson and murder) and unprosecuted assault desensitizes people to the humanity of others.
This was not the first rodeo for the hate-filled people engulfing us — consider their inhumane preying on the elderly. They maneuvered in a practiced, agreed-upon manner, co-conspirators in a plan to cause mayhem and provoke a response — including the amateur videographers who stayed a step or two back filming as we struggled through the gauntlet. They are criminal gangs that have done and will do even worse things until they fear the consequences of their actions.”
There’s nothing unorganized about this. It’s easy to see when as Rand noted above, you see the same faces in different cities. That’s no coincidence. And someone is bank rolling it.
“DOJ ‘targeting and investigating’ leaders, funders of far-left groups and rioters, Wolf tells Tucker
DHS head tells Fox News investigators believe organized agitators ‘are moving around’ US”
“The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the organization and funding of the violent protests that have disrupted several U.S. cities in recent months, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday.
“This is something that I have talked to the AG personally about,” said Wolf, adding that the DOJ is now focused on “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, [and] the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.
“What we know, Tucker, is that we have seen groups and individuals move from Portland to other parts of the country,” Wolf addeed. “Almost 100 of them were from out of state.”
Wolf revealed the probe days after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called on the Justice Department to investigate those funding the organized riots after he and his wife were accosted by demonstrators on the final night of the Republican National Convention.
Paul commented on the issue in an opinion piece for Fox News published Friday, revealing some of the protesters were actually staying in the same hotel — and on the same floor — as he and his wife.
“My question is: Who are these people?,” he wrote. “Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in? Law enforcement needs to look at the funding of violent criminal activity like this. And national Democrats need to confront it. It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent. It’s not about Black lives or any lives; it’s about anarchy and destruction.”
According to Wolf, investigators agree that violent actors “are moving around” the country.
“We have seen them in D.C., in Sacramento, and elsewhere,” he said. “They are organized. We have seen similar tactics being used from Portland and other cities across the country as well.””
Earlier in the night in Portland, antifa rioters calmly smashed up a random business to protest police & @tedwheeler. They stole furniture from inside to use as tinder for their fire. They then set the office’s lobby on fire. #PortlandsRiotshttps://t.co/b7rNvAEqNn
Using bats, antifa black bloc rioters are smashing up property around @tedwheeler’s Portland condo. There have been no police at all tonight per Wheeler’s directive of “deescalation.” #PortlandRiots#antifahttps://t.co/D0RtQtGL6j
It doesn’t matter what he threw. He lunged at and tried to take his weapon. The kid defended himself against a known scumbag with an extensive record. Don’t fall for the false narrative.
This article blames everyone involved, making the point that mistakes and blunders were made on both “sides” of the matter. The writer swears, and I’m not fond of his snarkyish attitude, but I take it that that is his schtick, I guess. Even so, I think it is worth reading and considering.
AJ – The reason I asked is that it seems some are making a big deal of him throwing a weapon, while others dismiss it as only a bag of something, so I am wondering if we know one way or the other.
Just unbelievable framing. 3 months of left-wing groups committing daily violence and media’s only narrative is that the real threat is just on the right. https://t.co/6Qhg8FKcHh
And people keep falling for this “blame the victim” garbage. Even people who should know better.
You should definitely continue with this sort of dismissive, smug tone. It’s super telling and will help viewers understand your point of view when they watch you on CNN covering the inevitable violence. https://t.co/IF89on1Ave
Usual question: given that she knows this isn't true, & her readers know she knows this isn't true, & she knows her readers know she knows this isn't true… who could possibly be the intended audience? It doesn't even count as good fan servicing. pic.twitter.com/pZrYVr5g9H
Written by someone who clearly has never spoken to a Marine. Marines reject identity politics, and they would put their lives on the line for each other, regardless of race, creed, or religion. This op-ed screams of attempts to sow division where there isn’t any. It’s sad. https://t.co/MHbIuoVKOT
Wandering Views 
They’re mask-licking germ bombs 🙂 yet preschoolers aren’t catching Covid 19.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-28/few-preschoolers-catch-coronavirus-data
“The infection starts with a sniffle. Next comes a barking cough. Soon, there’s a fever, maybe vomiting and diarrhea, possibly an ear infection or tonsillitis or pink eye.
These are common symptoms in preschool, where viral outbreaks are as ubiquitous as finger paints and apple juice. In a typical year, an otherwise healthy preschooler will bring home 12 to 18 upper respiratory infections — at least six to eight colds, two cases of croup and, more often than not, a bout of the flu, among others.
But 2020 is not a typical year, and SARS-CoV-2 — the technical term for the novel coronavirus — is no day-care germ. Now, with hundreds of large centers reopening across California, many families are asking: Is preschool safe?
“That’s the big question,” said Dr. Nava Yeganeh, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at UCLA and a preschool mom. “We can’t mitigate risk down to zero, but it seems like in general preschools have done very well.”
Though scientists can still only guess at why, a growing body of evidence suggests preschoolers are uniquely resilient to the novel coronavirus. Recent studies from the U.S., U.K., Singapore and Australia, among others, suggest they are far less likely to contract and spread the illness than older children and dramatically less likely to get sick from it than children even slightly older or younger.
“This is the most bizarre virus,” said Dr. Naomi Bardach, a professor of pediatrics at UC San Francisco. “Normally we think about kids getting coughs and colds all the time and giving it to each other all the time, and [giving] it to their teachers. In this disease, it’s a totally different model.””
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Getting to the bottom of Cuomo’s greatest failure and shame.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/08/getting-to-the-bottom-of-cuomos-coronavirus-nursing-home-scandal.php
“GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF CUOMO’S CORONAVIRUS NURSING HOME SCANDAL
Janice Dean reports on the weather for Fox News. She lost both of her in-laws to the Wuhan coronavirus. Both contracted the disease at long-term care facilities, but her mother in-law died at a hospital.
New York apparently does not include cases like the mother-in-law’s in totaling up the nursing home death count. Thus, New York is under counting the number of deaths that arose at such facilities.
Dean has long wanted to testify about New York state’s disastrous response to the coronavirus in nursing homes. However, she was removed from the witness list for a hearing by the legislature on this subject.
Dean says a Republican New York Senator told her the Democrat majority was “uncomfortable having [her] as a witness.” Dean believes the majority was responding to pressure from Governor Cuomo or his associates. Cuomo’s office denies the charge.
The Republicans countered by inviting Dean to their own event. She called for an independent investigation into whether nursing homes kept coronavirus patients separated, had enough employees, tracked workers who worked at multiple health care facilities, and provided staffers with adequate protective gear. There’s also the fact that the Cuomo administration required these facilities to accept people known to be infected.
Because of the way New York counts coronavirus deaths (see above), no one knows how many people died from the virus after contracting it at such facilities. The Cuomo administration refuses to provide such information even though it has been requested by both Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature. Clearly, Cuomo is trying to prevent a full assessment of the carnage that resulted from his policies.
Fortunately, as I discussed here, the Trump Justice Department has sent a letter to Governor Cuomo (among other governors) seeking this information. The letter asks for:
The number of Public Nursing Home residents, employees, other staff, guests, and visitors who died of COVID-19 including those who died in a Public Nursing Home or after being transferred to a hospital or other medical facility, hospice, home care, or any other location.”
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Adding insult to injury.
The property owners aren’t at fault here. The Democrat run cities and cowardly politicians who allowed rioters to loot and burn did this.
But the average Joe is now paying the price for the Dems aiding and abetting of criminals.
https://www.startribune.com/skyrocketing-demolition-costs-for-riot-damaged-properties-delay-rebuilding/572269302/?refresh=true
“Skyrocketing demolition costs for riot-damaged Minneapolis, St. Paul properties delay rebuilding”
“One day after rioters destroyed the Sports Dome retail complex in St. Paul, a construction crew hired by the city knocked the building down because it was dangerously unstable.
Then the city presented the property owners with a $140,000 bill for what it would cost to haul away the debris.
“We were really upset about that,” said property owner Jay Kim, whose insurance policy covers a maximum of $25,000 in demolition costs. “We thought that was high. But we didn’t know how much demolition would cost at the time.”
Like dozens of other investors whose properties were severely damaged in the May riots, the Kim family was stunned to discover that the money it would collect from its insurance company for demolition won’t come close to the actual costs of doing the job. Most policies limit reimbursement to $25,000 to $50,000, but contractors have been submitting bids of $200,000 to $300,000. In many cases, the price of the work is not much lower than the actual value of the property, records show.
“I think that is price-gouging and they should contact the attorney general,” said Andrea Jenkins, vice president of the Minneapolis City Council. “That is a symbol of capitalism run amok.”
Contractors acknowledge that prices for riot-related work are far higher than usual, but they said that is because government regulations require them to treat all debris from a burned-out building as hazardous. Industry veteran Don Rachel said those rules can double demolition costs.
“We aren’t taking advantage of anybody,” said Rachel, CEO of Rachel Contracting, one of the largest demolition contractors in the state. “Some people might have sticker shock, but how do they know? Most of these folks have never had to wreck a building.”
Demolition costs are so high that many rebuilding projects remain stuck in neutral, leaving large sections of Minneapolis and St. Paul with scorched buildings and piles of rubble that will linger for months.”
————-
Own it Dems. You did this.
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Biden finally came out of his basement and condemned the rioters.
Now maybe he can explain his relationship with one of the groups funding the unrest.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/31/foundation-with-biden-campaign-ties-funding-leftist-agitators-on-u-s-streets/
“Foundation With Biden Campaign Ties Funding Leftist Agitators On U.S. Streets
While activists Ford funds desecrate cities and terrorize regular folks, the foundation gives millions to the ‘Defund the Police’ movement.”
“Last Sunday, the site of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte witnessed a night of violence leading to at least five arrests. Since Friday, Black Lives Matter activists terrorized the Queen City, including beating police officers, in an effort to intimidate GOP attendees and business owners.
By contrast, the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee brought only a small gathering of peaceful activists, who declared: “We decided that it would make sense for us to make the emphasis of our action the one point of unity that deals with police crimes.”
Here we have a real “tale of two cities.” To understand the disparity of these two convention host cities separated by only a week, let’s examine some financiers of organizations fomenting the riots now taking place across the country.
Big Money, Connections to Top Democrats
Claiming to be America’s second-largest private foundation, the Ford Foundation has poured almost $2 billion into groups active in “disrupting systems to advance social justice,” according to its grant database.
The Ford Foundation boasts key members of the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaign as alumni executives. Harris’s sister and ex-campaign chairwoman Maya Harris served as the Ford foundation’s vice president alongside Biden’s now senior advisor, Cristóbal Alex, who served as its program director during the Obama presidency.
Some of Obama’s top staffers are now Ford Foundation’s top staffers. Taara Rangarajan, now Ford’s chief of staff, served as Obama’s national security advisor from 2013-2016. Before that, she served as a special assistant to Susan Rice during the Benghazi affair. Another Ford exec, Xavier de Souza Briggs, served as President Obama’s associate director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Funding for Communist-Connected Street Agitators
During the final months of the Obama presidency, Ford Foundation gave prominent leaders of the communist Workers World Party (WWP) funding to form the Southern Vision Alliance (SVA), a collective of activists that includes members of the group raining down terror in Charlotte last week at the RNC convention.
Shortly after getting $200,000 from the Ford Foundation in 2016, these activists performed one of the first violent and illegal teardowns of a historic monument in the country, in Durham, North Carolina. After the activists were arrested and charged for rioting and property damage, they are being defended in court, for free, by lawyers from another Ford grantee: the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
Flush with Ford Foundation cash, these activists continue to promote property destruction and violence during demonstrations.”
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Rand Paul has had enough. He’s right. Watch.
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The Dems and media are using classified intelligence as a vehicle for disinformation. This is the same thing they did during the Russia hoax.
Well…. they were. Not no more. 🙂
https://lidblog.com/dni-moves-to-block-disinformation/
“This takes some parsing, but it’s worth the dig. Real events are happening, but there’s a big gulf between what they actually are and how they’re being represented by the mainstream media. The whole enterprise is an excellent study in the misuse of classified intelligence as a vehicle for disinformation.
The convenience of classified intelligence for this purpose is that it’s classified, so someone can always claim there’s something you don’t know about it that only emerged behind closed doors. The public, having no way to judge any original statements that may (or, equally, may not) have been made, have to rely on what partisans are trying to sell us all on instead.
The latest development in this saga is a complaint by Democrats about the DNI move, conveyed in a letter on 28 August, to brief Congress on election security via written documents, with few if any closed-door, in-person briefings being given on Capitol Hill. They will get the same information as before, but in written form.
The formal reason for this is that the DNI doesn’t want members of Congress making selective, misleading leaks about such briefings. Politico, which has the latest story, has faithfully written up earlier episodes in which leaks of this kind appear to have occurred.
But I’m not so sure they were actually leaks. My take, looking at the sum total of the tale so far, is that the existence of in-person briefings has allowed Democrats to feed information to the media about things that didn’t really happen. In other words, the Hill Democrats weren’t “leaking” things they had been briefed on. They were using a classified briefing as a pretext to feed a propaganda line to the media under the pretense that they were “leaking.”
They were just making stuff up.
There were hints that this was occurring early in 2020 when House Democrats claimed to have been briefed by an ODNI official that Russia was meddling in the 2020 election with the intention of getting Trump reelected. Since the same official, only days earlier, had said in an NPR interview that the intelligence community hadn’t drawn a conclusion about specific efforts by Russia in this year’s election, the claim of the Democrats was quickly called into question.
In a rare public response, the acting DNI, Richard Grenell, came out with clarifying information about the actual position of the IC on Russian interference in 2020. He also announced that ODNI would be taking good care to communicate a single, authoritative message on crucial national security topics like election security – a subtle signal that the intel community’s no-kidding assessments would come from the intel community, and not [timpani flourish] from the background “leaks” of Congress members or staffers on the Hill.
Fast-forward to early August 2020, and an intelligence “report” on election security published by the National Counterintelligence Security Center (NCSC), a subordinate agency of ODNI. I wrote it up at the time, characterizing the report as inane. I stand by that characterization, but elaboration by Politico on the shenanigans surrounding it on Capitol Hill sheds light on why it may have turned out as it did.
It appears, in hindsight, that the report was published as a way of putting something on the record, to stop made-up stuff “leaked” by Democrats from hijacking the intel community’s public disclosures about election security and potential election interference.
Democrats complained before the report was posted that the DNI – now John Ratcliffe – and his henchmen were failing to properly brief the public on the election threat. The basis for this was said to be a contentious briefing in which Nancy Pelosi reportedly accused ODNI briefers of not reporting on a Democratic theme that Russia is behind information coming from Ukraine about the Bidens’ activities there.
Beyond the complaint that the public wasn’t being told this – which we know about because it was “leaked” to Politico – Democrats in the Senate also demanded a brief from the FBI on the Democrats’ narrative about Russia, Ukraine, and the Bidens. The Democrats are peeved with Republicans for not insisting that the narrative be deposited with the Senate on the record.”
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‘Protesters’ in Name Only: Mob Terrorized Us on D.C. Streets
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/29/protesters_in_name_only_mob_terrorized_us_on_dc_streets_144097.html
“I met some protesters face to face on Thursday night and I am here to tell you this:
They were not good people — and calling them “protesters” is a slur on lawful protest.
I was walking from the White House to my hotel behind an elderly couple. People were milling about the street, yelling obscenities at the police and Secret Service officers standing behind the fence, but our hotels were just across the street and down the block.
So, we passed through the gate to cross the street — and ran into a gauntlet of hate.
Two people first rushed to within inches of me, screaming obscenities in (and on!) my face. I held my fingers up in a peace sign, proceeding without pushing them out of my way, steeling myself for a blow and considering if and when I would need to fight.
My peace sign actually attracted more people to me, screaming vilely, as I said, “Settle down, settle down!” The elderly woman in front of me fell to the ground. Screaming people swirled around her as she knelt on the street; her husband bent down to help her up. I stepped behind her and stretched out my arms, trying to create space for her to get up and move on. I backed across the street a few more steps trying to keep my eyes on the people threatening me, but they were moving all around me. So, I turned and finished crossing the street, waiting for a blow, seeking to convey dignity, mentally preparing to respond. A few steps further and we encountered some police officers; more came, and they set up a protective cordon to restrain, but not arrest, the criminals.
Separately, a friend helped another elderly couple through a similar assault: The elderly woman dropped her earring and was too frightened to pick it up, until my friend stepped in to assist them. A Chicago police officer in town for the event, she said it was the first time she felt like a civilian relying on police. Sen. Rand Paul would later thank the Washington police for saving him from this same “mob.”
There are a thousand similar crime stories this morning. And yes, the people we encountered were criminals: Assault is a crime in every state and municipality. At a minimum, they violated section 22-404 of the D.C. Criminal Code, the penalty for which is imprisonment for up to 180 days.
Assault is an overt act that is intended to, and does, cause an apprehension of harmful or offensive contact in the victim. Assault is a crime distinct from battery. However, assault can lead to retribution or worse crimes (like battery, theft, arson and murder) and unprosecuted assault desensitizes people to the humanity of others.
This was not the first rodeo for the hate-filled people engulfing us — consider their inhumane preying on the elderly. They maneuvered in a practiced, agreed-upon manner, co-conspirators in a plan to cause mayhem and provoke a response — including the amateur videographers who stayed a step or two back filming as we struggled through the gauntlet. They are criminal gangs that have done and will do even worse things until they fear the consequences of their actions.”
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As always, follow the money.
There’s nothing unorganized about this. It’s easy to see when as Rand noted above, you see the same faces in different cities. That’s no coincidence. And someone is bank rolling it.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/chad-wolf-doj-investigating-far-left-rioters
“DOJ ‘targeting and investigating’ leaders, funders of far-left groups and rioters, Wolf tells Tucker
DHS head tells Fox News investigators believe organized agitators ‘are moving around’ US”
“The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the organization and funding of the violent protests that have disrupted several U.S. cities in recent months, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday.
“This is something that I have talked to the AG personally about,” said Wolf, adding that the DOJ is now focused on “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, [and] the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.
“What we know, Tucker, is that we have seen groups and individuals move from Portland to other parts of the country,” Wolf addeed. “Almost 100 of them were from out of state.”
Wolf revealed the probe days after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called on the Justice Department to investigate those funding the organized riots after he and his wife were accosted by demonstrators on the final night of the Republican National Convention.
Paul commented on the issue in an opinion piece for Fox News published Friday, revealing some of the protesters were actually staying in the same hotel — and on the same floor — as he and his wife.
“My question is: Who are these people?,” he wrote. “Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in? Law enforcement needs to look at the funding of violent criminal activity like this. And national Democrats need to confront it. It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent. It’s not about Black lives or any lives; it’s about anarchy and destruction.”
According to Wolf, investigators agree that violent actors “are moving around” the country.
“We have seen them in D.C., in Sacramento, and elsewhere,” he said. “They are organized. We have seen similar tactics being used from Portland and other cities across the country as well.””
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Just another night in another liberal Utopia….
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And you know who to thank for allowing it…..
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And we’re paying for this trash.
https://twitter.com/MichaelJPartyka/status/1300659899010093056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1300659899010093056%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fsarahd-313035%2F2020%2F09%2F01%2Ftaxpayer-funded-npr-busts-donald-trump-for-claiming-without-evidence-that-kyle-rittenhouse-may-have-acted-in-self-defense%2F
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https://twitter.com/StickeeNotes/status/1300650493358735360
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https://twitter.com/CherCee59/status/1300497741454487552
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Do we know for sure what it was that Rosenbaum threw at Rittenhouse? Others are saying it was a plastic bag with something in it.
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Biden needs to be put in front of a teleprompter with only three words for him to read: “I give up.”
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Kizzie,
It doesn’t matter what he threw. He lunged at and tried to take his weapon. The kid defended himself against a known scumbag with an extensive record. Don’t fall for the false narrative.
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This article blames everyone involved, making the point that mistakes and blunders were made on both “sides” of the matter. The writer swears, and I’m not fond of his snarkyish attitude, but I take it that that is his schtick, I guess. Even so, I think it is worth reading and considering.
https://www.bullshido.net/anatomy-of-a-catastrophe/?fbclid=IwAR3ZZCAJ74nv1aTVC7oLRTDil8wIT9FkwBn5D9spj2YZmshSLiTdf86d5HE
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AJ – The reason I asked is that it seems some are making a big deal of him throwing a weapon, while others dismiss it as only a bag of something, so I am wondering if we know one way or the other.
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Kim was right. The whole country is being gaslighted.
Who’s helping pay bail for rioters?
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Own it Dems.
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https://twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/1300522480587739137
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Do you smell gas?
https://twitter.com/jason_howerton/status/1300827401195323392
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I swear I smell gas……
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And people keep falling for this “blame the victim” garbage. Even people who should know better.
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https://twitter.com/Btaylor74/status/1300857884079616005?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1300857884079616005%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fsarahd-313035%2F2020%2F09%2F01%2Fthey-think-youre-stupid-cnn-has-officially-entered-full-blown-gaslight-mode-when-it-comes-to-leftist-violence-in-portland%2F
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The Marines are a target now too.
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