What if?

New England Journal of Medicine: Coronavirus Could Be No Worse than Flu

BERNIE’S OWN PRIVATE DENMARK. He lies and the media nods.

BERNIE’S OWN PRIVATE DENMARK

Whenever Bernie Sanders’s socialism comes up in the Democratic debates, he deflects criticism by saying he favors something along the lines of Denmark’s model. Sanders’s debate rivals almost invariably let this answer pass. (I think Pete Buttigieg tried to take it on in the last debate but couldn’t get the floor.) 

In reality, the policies Sanders advocates bear little resemblance to those of Denmark and other Scandinavian countries today. They do resemble many of the policies these countries tried 50 years ago. However, these policies failed and were discarded. 

The Vermont socialist is getting away with false advertising, including bait and switch. 

But with Sanders now the clear frontrunner, and perhaps on the verge of nailing down the nomination, some liberals are starting to look behind Sanders’s Denmark dodge, as Buttigieg tried to do in the most recent debate. 

Fareed Zakaria calls Sanders on it in this Washington Post op-ed. He writes:

The image [Sanders] conjures up is of a warm and fuzzy social democracy in which market economics are kept on a tight leash through regulation, the rich are heavily taxed and the social safety net is generous. That is, however, an inaccurate and highly misleading description of those Northern European countries today.

Take billionaires. Sanders has been clear on the topic: “Billionaires should not exist.” But Sweden and Norway both have more billionaires per capita than the United States — Sweden almost twice as many. Not only that, these billionaires are able to pass on their wealth to their children tax-free. Inheritance taxes in Sweden and Norway are zero, and in Denmark 15 percent. The United States, by contrast, has the fourth-highest estate taxes in the industrialized world at 40 percent.

The Scandinavian economies were once more in line with Sanders’s socialist vision, but these policies were ruinous. Accordingly, they eventually were abandoned:

In Sweden, government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product doubled from 1960 to 1980, going from approximately 30 percent to 60 percent. But as Swedish commentator Johan Norberg points out, this experiment in Sanders-style democratic socialism tanked the Swedish economy. Between 1970 and 1995, he notes, Sweden did not create a single net new job in the private sector. In 1991, a free-market prime minister, Carl Bildt, initiated a series of reforms to kick-start the economy. By the mid-2000s, Sweden had cut the size of its government by a third and emerged from its long economic slump.

The story is essentially the same throughout Northern Europe, including in Denmark, according to Zakaria. And speaking of Denmark:

A 2008 OECD report found that the top 10 percent in the United States pay 45 percent of all income taxes, while the top 10 percent in Denmark pay 26 percent and in Sweden 27 percent. Among wealthy countries, the average is 32 percent.

The United States has a significantly more progressive tax code than Europe, and its top 10 percent pays a vastly greater share of the country’s taxes than their European counterparts.

Sanders doesn’t want Denmark’s taxation policy. Nor does he advocate other key elements of the Danish model — flexible labor markets, light regulations, and a deep commitment to free trade. 

Sanders favors policies much more along the lines of those that failed Scandinavia in the 1960s and 1970s. Or perhaps a mixture of those policies and the ones that are failing in Venezuela today.

As I said, liberals have been slow to point this out. If Sanders is the Democratic nominee, conservatives, with President Trump in the lead, won’t be.

Time to deal with corruption in Puerto Rico

It's time to audit Puerto Rico for real

Political sweetheart deals leave the Caribbean jewel on the brink of bankruptcyA

• PUERTO RICO

FILE - In this July 29, 2015 file photo, the Puerto Rican flag flies in front of Puerto Rico’s Capitol as in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A senior Puerto Ricon official said Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020, that the island’s government ... more >

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Thursday, February 27, 2020

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

It’s been several years since Puerto Rico was wrecked by successive hurricanes. Yet, as we recently found out, insufficient progress has been made toward normalcy because the territorial government is in worse shape than the infrastructure.

It’s a shame it took a natural disaster to expose endemic corruption going back years. Sweetheart deals between the politicians and the unions that put them in office have left America’s Caribbean jewel on the brink of bankruptcy. Congress stepped in near the end of the Obama administration with legislation leading to the appointment of an independent financial oversight board authorized to restructure the debt owed to the island’s creditors. So far, it’s work has been sub-par — in part because corrupt local officials devoted their efforts to finding workarounds to keep the money flowing rather than pitching in on a plan to put things right.

Things cannot be allowed to continue as they have. Puerto Rico will continue to find it difficult to attract the capital investment needed to rebuild essential infrastructure if the markets cannot be guaranteed those investments make sense. An audit that laid out in plain and easy to understand terms how deep the debt runs and identifying the roadblocks hampering efforts to pay it back would be a good first step.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva, Arizona Democrat, recently called on the island’s financial overseers to define the government’s essential services so everyone can understand better which services cannot be reduced and for an audit of the island’s debt.

There’s always a risk in any investment. Buying government bonds and investing in utilities are less speculative than other investments and, therefore, considered safer. If it defaults — and there’s no sentiment in the current administration for a U.S. government bailout if they do — then investors will be left holding the bag while the capital markets shut Puerto Rico out. The money needed to get the lights back on, the hospitals and phones fully functioning, and to make other repairs and improvements to make the next hurricane less damaging won’t be there.The oversight board is pushing a plan to restrict more than $50 billion in unfunded pension liabilities that creditors are calling insufficient. Those owed money want a clearer picture of the finances than they have been given — and to which they are entitled. Puerto Rico can’t dig itself out of the hole it’s in until we know how deep it is. The audit Mr. Grijalva and others want is badly needed and should begin post-haste.

One more thing for Bernie on Cuba's glorious free health care: It killed Hugo Chávez

Bernie Sanders got himself into hot water with Florida's voters by praising Cuba's "literacy programs," which were ugly coercive propaganda efforts for those who experienced them.

It's far from the only thing he's praised about the Castroite communist hellhole.  According to the New York Times:

MIAMI — In the spring of 1989, as the outgoing mayor of Burlington, Vt., Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, traveled to Cuba on an eight-day trip, with the hopes of meeting the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro.
The 47-year-old Mr. Sanders didn't get time with Mr. Castro, but he toured Havana, met with its mayor and marveled that visitors could take a cab anywhere in the country. "The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be," he said back home, according to The Burlington Free Press, and commended Cuba for providing free health care, free education and free housing.

Free health care?  That one's worth a teaching moment for Bernie, too.
Not only do citizens get experiences like this, but it's worth noting that even Fidel Castro himself knew better than to use it.  Socialist systems may create two-tier health care systems for the ordinary people and the elites, which is bad enough, but in the absence of any innovation and the only incentives to "excellence" being political ones, even the elites' system eventually goes to hell, too, at least on life-or-death matters. 
Castro knew this, which is why he decided to import his doctor from Spain to treat his malignant diverticulitis.
His little pawn, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, wasn't quite as savvy.  He actually believed the lies about Cuba's free health care system — and with some sort of internal cancer, paid for his faith in Castrocare with his life.
Shortly before Chávez's 2013 death in a Cuban hospital, the truth came out about the disastrous state of Cuban health care — even for the elites — back when I was writing editorials at Investor's Business Daily:

Americas: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dying of cancer in Havana, in a live demonstration of Cuba's vaunted socialized medical care. He went there instead of Brazil because he wanted to make a political statement. What irony.

...and...

Most galling for him: It didn't have to happen this way.
His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.
"In July 2011, during (a)... summit in Caracas, Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, told a few of her colleagues — in private — that Chavez was likely to die as a result of 'his excessive paranoia rather than as a consequence of his serious — yet treatable — cancer,'" wrote Venezuelan consultant Pedro Burelli in a newsletter.
"What she meant to say," Burelli added, "was that by choosing secrecy in Cuba over medical competence at the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo (where she had been treated successfully for lymphatic cancer) Chavez had condemned himself to a shorter life."
Burelli noted that it corresponded to his own sources, who told him that Chavez's chosen successor, Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, flew to Brasilia to meet with Rousseff and her oncologist.
He presented the diagnoses from Caracas and Havana and the Brazilian specialist "considered it treatable under world-class protocols available in his center."
Maduro signaled interest. But the Chavista regime then demanded to pretty much take over the 400-bed hospital, which the Brazilians rejected. "From that moment on the patient was doomed," Burelli wrote.

The Cubans, it turned out, gave Chávez the wrong cancer treatment — probably radiation or chemotherapy, which has limits on uses — and, as a result, were unable to correct it after they discovered the error.  That doomed Chávez, a victim of the very Castrocare he touted, as Bernie Sanders does now, as the solution to all of Venezuela's ills.  Venezuela's hospitals now look like Cuba's or, given the lack of water, electricity, and money, probably worse.  But it was Castrocare itself, the elites-tier version, that did Chávez in.
Would Bernie Sanders consent to Cuban-style health care for his own heart condition?  Not if he wanted to live.  The examples of Castro, treated with Western medicine, and Chávez, going down with a treatable illness made untreatable by Castrocare, tell the whole story about the worth of such a system. 
Someone should ask him.

Racist America? Countering the 1619 Project’s False Narrative 

“1776 Unites” initiative corrects New York Times’ lies about slavery and race in America. 

by ZIVA DAHL

Agroup of predominantly black scholars, journalists, entrepreneurs, clergy, and community leaders, led by Robert Woodson Sr., a respected anti-poverty activist, have launched “1776 Unites” to counter the false and harmful narrative promoted by the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

The Times rolled out its woke narrative of America the racist nation as a Sunday magazine in August. Then it swiftly disseminated the collection of essays, along with teacher guides, lesson plans, and other educational aids, to thousands of classrooms nationwide, according to the Pulitzer Center, which crafted the curricular materials.

Woodson and his colleagues are very concerned about the “lethal” impact of this race grievance ideology on children who are being taught that blacks are forever second-class American citizens, lacking agency to improve their lives.

The 1619 Project postulates that the actual founding of America occurred not in 1776 with our independence from Britain, but rather in 1619 when the first slaves arrived on our shores. Distorting the historical record, it argues that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and characterizes Lincoln as a racist who “opposed black equality” and believed that free blacks “were a ‘troublesome presence’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people.” The project promotes the idea that America’s success, politically, economically, and culturally, happened on the backs of subjugated blacks. Despite the abolitionist movement, the more than 360,000 Union deaths in the Civil War, more than 50 years of affirmative action, white participation in the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the election of a black president, 1619 Project authors claim that African Americans have fought against racism basically alone. The Times accuses whites of sole responsibility for the condition of blacks today. Worse yet, the 1619 Project asserts that the United States today is a nation where all whites are powerful victimizers and all black people are powerless victims, and is therefore hopelessly racist.

continue

Democrats: the ends justify the means

Democrat grills Pompeo on whether coronavirus is a hoax — then Jake Tapper exposes his misleading question

This is how Democrats feed the fake news machine 

Photo Composite Sources: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images and Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 CARLOS GARCIA

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) made headlines when he grilled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a supposed quote from acting White House chief of staff Mike Mulvaney, but it turns out he was misleading everyone about the quote.

"Donald Trump's chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told the Conservative Political Action Conference that the coronavirus was the hoax of the day. Do you agree with Donald Trump's chief of staff that the coronavirus is the hoax of the day?" asked Lieu.
"The State Department is doing everything it can to protect American citizens from around the world," responded Pompeo.
"Do you believe coronavirus is a hoax of the day?" interrupted Lieu.
"I'm not gonna comment on what others are saying," said Pompeo, who appeared to be losing patience with the question.
"Do you believe the coronavirus is a hoax?" asked Lieu.
"It's a gotcha moment, it's not useful," Pompeo responded.
While the interaction has been used by left-wing media outlets to make it appear as if Pompeo might possibly believe the coronavirus was a hoax, CNN's Jake Tapper unraveled the false premise behind the question by Lieu.

"That's not what Mulvaney said," tweeted Tapper.

"Mulvaney said at CPAC today that 5-6 weeks ago, the admin. held coronavirus briefings on the Hill and only 5 senators & 10-15 congressmen showed up," added Tapper, and quoting Mulvaney, who said, "We were dealing with it. The press was covering their hoax of the day."
Mulvaney was in fact criticizing the media for ignoring the briefings in order to cover the impeachment, which he called the "hoax of the day."
Tapper then criticized Mulvaney for his rebuke of the media. "It's preposterous to assert that by covering an impeachment and impeachment trial of the president the media was covering our 'hoax of the day,'" he added in a third tweet.
Lieu went on to call Pompeo "shameful" for himself going to speak at CPAC on the same day that he gave only giving two hours of time to testify before Congress.

Here's the video of the exchange:

Sanctuary jurisdictions have put over 17,000 illegals with criminal records back on the street.

Illegal immigrant who has been arrested 36 times was released three times under sanctuary polices. Now he is accused of stabbing a judge.

The crime could have been prevented

MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images

 PHIL SHIVER

An illegal immigrant from Mexico recently charged with stabbing a Denver-area judge was reportedly the subject of three deportation attempts that failed due to local sanctuary policies in the months leading up to the alleged crime.

Ditch the fake news ==> Click here to get news you can trust sent right to your inbox. It's free!

According to a new investigative report from KUSA-TV, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement lodged three separate detainer requests for Jose Armenta-Vasquez, 39, last year — only to have Denver Sheriff's Department deputies ignore or deny them each time.
ICE submits detainer requests when someone suspected of being in the country illegally is arrested for a crime. The detainers are designed to inform local law enforcement so that they can hold the individual in question until federal immigration officers perform an investigation.
In this case, Denver law enforcement chose to release Armenta-Vasquez back into the public without giving ICE "adequate notification." Just one month after the third detainer request, police believe that Armenta-Vasquez repeatedly stabbed Adams County Magistrate David Blackett near his east Denver home. Blackett nearly died from his stab wounds, KCNC-TV reported.

Though the crime was committed last summer, the suspect was not arrested until Jan. 14.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation reported that Armenta-Vasquez has been arrested a whopping 36 times over the past two decades and has used two dozen aliases.
KUSA reported:

The detainer requests remain a sore subject in an ongoing feud between the city of Denver and ICE. Denver city officials have repeatedly said they cannot continue to hold anyone — no matter their immigration status — without a signed order from a judge.

ICE leadership, on the other hand, has repeatedly criticized the city of Denver for not being more cooperative with its detainer requests. ...

... When an inmate under a detainer request leaves the Denver jail — in lieu of bond, for example — Denver has elected only to give ICE what amounts to a short "heads up" via fax of the imminent release. Sometimes the fax comes a half-hour before release, and sometimes it comes a few hours before release, according to documents.

"They're not allowing us to assume custody in their jails," ICE Deputy Executive Director for Enforcement and Removal Operations Henry Lucero said on Fox News last month with regard to Denver's practices.
Denver is not the only jurisdiction in the U.S. that has adopted sanctuary practices that ultimately put the public at risk.
A recent Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report found that sanctuary policies employed in jurisdictions around the country have amounted to more than 17,000 illegal aliens being at large as of last year.

We have a serious problem with the unelected; judges and bureaucrats. Remove the names and ask for forgiveness later.

Wisconsin appeals court strikes down an order to remove 209,000 voters from voter rolls before the 2020 election

Democrats want to postpone the purge until after the election

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 PHIL SHIVER

On Friday, a Wisconsin appeals court overturned a ruling that ordered state election commissioners to remove 209,000 individuals from voter rolls who are suspected as having moved out of the state.

Ditch the fake news ==> Click here to get news you can trust sent right to your inbox. It's free!

A previous ruling on the matter last month found the commission — and specifically three of its Democratic members — in contempt of court for refusing to comply with the order, which instructed the commission to remove individuals flagged as having potentially moved and who subsequently failed to respond within 30 days to a deactivation notice.
Last fall, the deactivation notice was sent to roughly 234,000 residents, and by the end of the year, 209,000 voters had yet to respond requesting for their voter status be continued.
In the January ruling, Ozaukee County Circuit Judge Paul Malloy moved to fine the commission $50 a day and the three members $250 a day until the commission started the removal process. But no fines were ever paid because the Wisconsin court of appeals temporarily blocked the motion the following day.

"I can't be any clearer than this, they need to follow my order," Malloy said at the time.
But now with the new appeals court ruling, the contempt of court order has been vacated along with the order to immediately purge, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

The battle centers on the 2020 election

When the deactivation notice was sent out to flagged individuals late last year, the commission was planning to remove those who failed to respond in 2021.
But then three voters represented by a conservative group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, sued, appealing to a state law that calls for the removal of voters from the rolls if they do not respond to a deactivation notice. They also argued that a delay in removal could compromise the 2020 election. Judge Malloy agreed and ordered the purge.
The appeals court, however, concluded that law applies only to local clerks and not to the state election commission.
Rick Esenberg, the president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, has vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court.
"Wisconsin deserves clean elections in 2020," he said in a statement, the Journal-Sentinel reported. "It is our intent to seek review in the Wisconsin Supreme Court to ensure that the Wisconsin Elections Commission complies with state law."
Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul praised the ruling, saying, "I think that this decision is a win not only for the voters who were close to being purged, but also for democracy."
Every vote counts in Wisconsin, which is projected to be a key battleground state in the upcoming presidential election. In 2016, President Donald Trump narrowly won the state by just over 20,000 votes. Wisconsin holds its primaries in April.

A Democrat and violence in just seem to go together (especially if you disagree)

Congressman Threatens Don Jr. on Live TV for Saying Dems Want Coronavirus to Spread: If I See Him ‘There Would Be A Serious Altercation’

By Charlie NashFeb 28th, 2020, 10:53 am 

Democrats have a predilection for fabricating CV's...Bloomberg stolen success

Bloomberg takes credit for leading NYC through 9/11 — when Giuliani was mayor

By Ebony Bowden

February 26, 2020 | 10:32pm | Updated 

It Won't Work | Mike Bloomberg for President

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Presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg takes credit for leading New York “through” the 9/11 attacks in a campaign ad.

But there’s one problem: He didn’t become mayor until four months later.

Touting his leadership chops, the billionaire released a 30-second video including the claim.

“I led a complex, diverse city through 9/11 and I have common-sense plans to move America away from the chaos to progress,” Bloomberg, 78, is seen saying at a campaign rally.

But Rudy Giuliani was mayor during the attacks, and he didn’t hand Bloomberg the keys to Gracie Mansion until Jan. 1, 2002.

The businessman has so far poured $500 million of his $62 billion personal fortune into his campaign, including flooding the airwaves with campaign ads.

Bloomberg served three terms as mayor — twice as a Republican and once as an independent.

He was praised for leading the rebuilding of a decimated Lower Manhattan in the decade after the attack, but was considered wooden when it came to connecting with victims’ families compared to his predecessor, Giuliani.