‘Whether it’s an ember or a flame, we’re going to put it out. But we’re not closing our country…’
Anthony Fauci and Donald Trump / IMAGE: CBS News via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump said Thursday that he would not implement another shutdown—even if a second wave of the coronavirus struck in the fall.
“People say that’s a very distinct possibility. It’s standard. And we’re going to put out the fires,” Trump said of a possible second wave.
“But we’re not going to close the country. We’re going to put out the fires,” Trump told reporters during a tour of a Ford manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Trump said he is confident that the U.S. will be able to contain future outbreaks, referring to them as “embers.”
“Whether it’s an ember or a flame, we’re going to put it out. But we’re not closing our country,” the president continued.
Health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, have warned that a second wave of COVID-19 is more than likely.
“The virus is not going to disappear,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s a highly transmissible virus. At any given time, it’s some place or another. As long as that’s the case, there’s a risk of resurgence.”
But even Fauci has said that the outcome will be “very, very different” the second time around.
“Our ability to go out and be able to test, identify, isolate and contact-trace, will be orders of magnitude better than what it was just a couple months ago,” Fauci explained.
Trump has made it clear that he wants the country to get back to work and return to normalcy, even though advisers such as Fauci are hesitant to do so.
“We have to open our country,” Trump told Fox News last week. “Now, we want to do it safely, but we also want to do it as quickly as possible. We can’t keep going on like this. You’re having bedlam already in the streets. You can’t do this.”
‘What we’ve seen from the Left is a willingness to change any rule … if it prevents even the slightest friction for their ground game this November…’
A voter in Oregon sends in an absentee ballot via mail. / IMAGE: Politico via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) A Texas federal appeals court on Wednesday issued a temporary stay of a lower court’s ruling expanding mail-in voting in the state.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals halted federal Judge Fred Biery’s attempt to expand the “disability” provision in the state’s vote-by-mail election code.
The rule would have allowed all registered voters “who lack immunity from COVID-19 and fear infection at polling places” to vote by mail, according to CNN.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had requested the temporary stay, which will become permanent if the 5th Circuit decides to take up Paxton’s appeal of Biery’s ruling.
Texas Democrats have been trying to expand the state’s mail-in voting system, using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to do so. But Paxton has argued that “the fear of the coronavirus” is not a good reason to open Texas’s elections to rampant vote fraud.
“The law is pretty clear. It doesn’t allow for people to get mail-in ballots for fear of coronavirus or anything else, fear of being hit by a car on the way to vote. We trust our voters to do the right thing,” Paxton told MSNBC on Wednesday.
Paxton also rejected accusations that the state government’s fight against mail-in voting is a form of voter suppression.
“The governor has just recently changed the dates for voting. Instead of 10 days of early voting, he’s given 20 days of early voting,” Paxton explained. “We surely want to make sure we have as safe of voting locations as we can, just like we have open grocery stores and restaurants.”
Mail-in voting is a highly problematic system that lends itself to rampant fraud, according to Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
Democrats know this, he said, but they don’t care so long as they “get as many votes into the hands of voters as possible, regardless of whether those voters are real,” he explained.
“What we’ve seen from the Left is a willingness to change any rule or any law or any practice if it prevents even the slightest friction for their ground game this November, in terms of getting out to vote,” Snead said.
‘If I was concerned about my health—and if I firmly believed what the governor said about staying home—I would stay home…’
Darren Bailey / IMAGE: WGN News via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The Illinois state legislature voted to remove a Republican lawmaker on Wednesday because he did not want to wear a face mask, according to NBC Chicago.
State representatives voted 81-27 to remove Rep. Darren Bailey after he reportedly refused to wear a mask within the chamber.
The vote was bipartisan, with several House Republicans voting in favor of removing their colleague. But Bailey defended his decision not to wear a mask, arguing that he would not “sit in there and be part of just a puppet game.”
Several other House Republicans originally said that they would also refuse to wear masks, but they agreed to wear them after the House passed a vote to require masks within the chamber.
“If we are required, I will play along,” GOP state Rep. Chris Miller said. “I don’t want to be a distraction from the real issues of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s leadership.”
Bailey has been a frequent critic of Pritzker’s shutdown restrictions. Pritzker responded to the state House’s vote to remove Bailey from the session by blasting Bailey as a legislator with “callous disregard for people’s health.”
“I hear that there are people that are planning to show up in Springfield in the legislature not wearing a mask,” Pritzker said. “Think about what that says, right? Because a mask isn’t designed to protect you. It’s designed to protect the people you’re with.”
House Republican Leader Jim Durkin agreed with Pritzker, arguing that the health of the entire legislature is more important than Bailey’s objections.
“We cannot ignore nor compromise the health and safety of every member in the General Assembly, their family members, and every one of our staffers who work tirelessly for us,” Durkin said.
Bailey, however, argued that there is little evidence proving that masks really do protect individuals’ health.
“If I was concerned about my health—and if I firmly believed what the governor said about staying home—I would stay home,” Bailey said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“So, some of these Democrat representatives are buying all in to staying home, so why on Earth are they coming to Springfield to put themselves in harm’s way?” he added.
‘I don’t think it’s any secret that there’s a growing hostility toward churches across the board…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) A Mississippi church that continued to hold services throughout the coronavirus shutdown was burned to the ground by an arson, according to authorities.
An unidentified suspect reportedly vandalized and set fire to the First Pentecostal Church of Holly Springs on Wednesday morning, leaving a message spray-painted on the church property.
First #Pentecostal Church in Holly Springs, Mississippi, refused to close due to #COVID19 restrictions and in retaliation the #Church was set ablaze today. The Arsonists spray painted these words in the pavement, “BET YOU STAY HOME NOW YOU HYPOKRITS”. pic.twitter.com/FjvrBTt1Qk
— Rev. Stephen M Leach (@revstephenleach) May 20, 2020
Stephen Crampton, an attorney for the church, told WHBQ-TV that this message makes it clear that the church was targeted for “being outspoken and somewhat firm about seeking to protect their constitutional rights” by refusing to close during the pandemic.
“We’re in a time where I don’t think it’s any secret that there’s a growing hostility toward churches across the board,” he said. “And now, here are churches like First Pentecostal that are sort of stirring up the waters by being outspoken and somewhat firm about seeking to protect their constitutional rights.”
First Pentecostal has vocally opposed the city’s executive orders, the first of which was issued on March 23.
The church’s pastor, Jerry Waldrop, even filed a lawsuit against the city in April after police officers handed him citation for holding an Easter service. As a result, the church has received a slew of hateful comments online in recent weeks, Crampton added.
“There is just a segment [of people] that takes issue with the church standing up, and the church just being the church,” he said.
Maj. Kelly McMillen of the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department said his office is investigating the fire as as an intentional act of arson. Officers found a can of white spray paint and a flashlight at the scene, he said.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said he is “heartbroken and furious” about the fire.
I am heartbroken and furious. In Mississippi, a church was just burned to the ground. They had been trying to open services. There was graffiti on the lot which read “Bet you stay home now you hypocrites.”
But Waldrop said the church will continue to meet, even if they can’t do so within their building.
“We are going to keep the faith, and we’re going to keep doing what we have always done, and maybe not on this location,” Waldrop said.
“I’ll get with our faithful people, and maybe we’ll rent a building or whatever we need to do for the time being,” he continued. “We have the means, so whatever it takes, that’s what we will do. … It’s just hard to wrap your head around the idea that someone may have orchestrated this or done this.”
‘They should ask President Trump. I think that will stop the conversation…’
Andrew Cuomo / IMAGE: ABC News via Youtube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been dodging blame for his policy forcing long-term-care facilities to accept COVID-19 patients.
Now he’s arguing that President Donald Trump is responsible for the thousands of nursing home deaths in his state.
More than 5,000 New Yorkers have died from the coronavirus within the state’s nursing homes—though that number is likely much higher.
According to health experts, the state government has not been counting the deaths of COVID-19 patients who die outside of the facilities, even if they were nursing home residents.
When confronted about the policy failure recently, Cuomo waved off the death toll, arguing that vulnerable, elderly citizens were going to die anyway.
“Anyone who wants to ask why did the state do that with COVID patients and nursing homes, it’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance,” Cuomo claimed during a press briefing. “So they should ask President Trump.”
Cuomo insisted that the CDC guidance required nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients, since nursing homes were not allowed to “discriminate” against coronavirus patients, according to the federal agency.
But this guidance did not mean that nursing homes had to care for and treat coronavirus patients within their facilities, thereby exposing other uninfected residents to the virus.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, stongly discouraged nursing homes from accepting COVID-19 patients, instead pressuring hospitals to continue caring for them throughout the mandatory 14-day quarantine.
But this fact hasn’t stopped Cuomo from deflecting as much blame away from himself as possible—a familiar tactic that the governor has previously deployed on such matters as his state’s $2.3 billion budget shortfall.
“They should ask President Trump,” he repeated. “I think that will stop the conversation.”
‘This administration led by the president just hides from the truth…’
Chuck Schumer / IMAGE: Maddow Blog via Twitter
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., blasted President Donald Trump for firing multiple inspectors general, accusing the president of launching a dictatorship.
“This administration led by the president just hides from the truth,” Schumer told CNN on Wednesday. “They hate the truth. And that’s why this is not the only inspector general who’s been fired. I think there have been four in the past few months.”
Several of the so-called government watchdogs were Obama administration holdovers who had failed to conduct due oversight of the prior administration during the crooked Russia-gate hoax.
Some—most notably former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson—also went above and beyond the call of duty in supporting anti-Trump resistance during House Democrats’ recent impeachment efforts.
Schumer pounced on the opportunity to spin the narrative against the president, despite the obvious double-standard.
“It’s like a dictatorship,” he claimed. “It’s not like a democracy; we depend on truth in this democracy, and this president runs away from it. And it’s hurting the American people every single day.”
In response, congressional Democrats once again launched an investigation. They demanded on Thursday that Trump reinstate State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, whom the president had fired this week, reportedly at the best of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“Based on longstanding concerns with your actions—and new reports this week about potential abuses—this assault on the integrity and independence of Inspectors General appears to be an intentional campaign to undermine their ability to expose corruption and protect taxpayer dollars from waste, fraud, and abuse,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Pompeo.
Congressional Democrats have also tried to include restrictions on Trump’s authority over inspectors general in new coronavirus relief legislation.
The $3 trillion proposal, which was unveiled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., last week, specifically states that Trump would not be allowed to fire inspectors general without giving Congress a 30-day notice and a list of reasons explaining the removal.
However, Pelosi’s grandstanding HEROES Act is unlikely to clear the Senate, much less be signed into law by the president.
Trump has defended his right to appoint and fire government officials who are not working towards the interests of his administration.
In regards to Atkinson, he said that the Democrats’ impeachment probe made it clear he could no longer trust Atkinson.
Atkinson “did a terrible job” and “took a fake report and gave it to Congress,” Trump said, referencing the anonymous Ukraine whistleblower document, which triggered the Democrats’ impeachment probe.
‘When you send out 7.7 million mail-in ballots, there’s forgeries…’
A voter fills out an absentee ballot for the November 2020 election. / IMAGE: Politico via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump reiterated his threat to withhold federal funding from states that expand vote-by-mail systems, arguing that mail-in ballots are riddled with “tremendous fraud.”
On Wednesday, Trump had blasted Michigan and Nevada, two crucial battleground states, for using the current health crisis as a cover to commit vote fraud.
Nevada, which announced that it would hold a mail-in primary election, is creating a “great voter fraud scenario” that will encourage people to “cheat in elections,” Trump said.
And Michigan, which sent absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in the state, is illegally dragging its state “down this voter fraud path,” he said.
Trump deleted his tweet about Michigan, in which he mistook absentee ballot applications for actual ballots. But he doubled down on his criticism of the vote-by-mail system.
“Mail-in ballots are very dangerous. There is tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality,” he said on Wednesday.
“When you send out 7.7 million mail-in ballots, there’s forgeries,” he continued. “There’s, frankly, duplication where they print ballots on the same kind of paper with the same kind of machinery, and you can’t tell the difference, and then send in thousands and thousands of fake ballots.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, whom Trump had attacked in his original tweet, responded to the president’s criticism and said she was “dumbfounded” by it.
“Democratic and Republican secretaries of state are doing just what we’re doing here in Michigan,” Benson told MSNBC, accusing Trump of launching “an effort to misinform and confuse voters about their rights in this state.”
But as Trump has previously noted, the vote-by-mail system is ripe for “fraud”—especially since many states refuse to maintain their already corrupt voter rolls, said Catherine Engelbrecht, president of True the Vote.
These voter rolls are filled with voters who no longer live in the state, voters who aren’t even alive anymore, and voters who aren’t legally registered.
Under the Democrats’ proposed mail-in system, these voter rolls would become extremely problematic, Engelbrecht said.
On Wednesday, the conservative watchdog filed a complaint with the Department of Education requesting a probe into one of the presidential hopeful’s pet projects, a policy institute at the University of Pennsylvania called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
“It is apparent that the Biden Center is beholden to China for its operations,” said NLPC Chair Peter Flaherty. “This has an insidious [e]ffect on shaping the programs it produces.”
The Penn Biden Center is one of three such Biden-backed entities that have refused to disclose their funding sources, reported the Washington Free Beacon.
Spokesman Stephen MacCarthy declined to respond to the newspaper’s requests for more details about the center’s funding, deferring to his “colleagues at [the] main university.”
But the Free Beacon reported that UPenn saw a threefold spike overall in foreign donations—with China being the largest source—ever since the center’s soft opening in March 2017.
“These multi-million dollar donations from China are bad enough,” said NLPC counsel Paul Kamenar, “but the flagrant reporting violations over the years are simply outrageous.”
The Ivy League school relied in large part on anonymous donors—which policy analysts say is a common Chinese practice for deceptively covering their tracks.
“Anonymous giving to universities is an easy tactic the Chinese Communist Party can use to further its pernicious influence in American universities,” Michael Sobolik, an Indo-Pacific studies fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told the Free Beacon.
At other times, however, these foreign investors appear to be hiding in plain sight. Such was the case with a Jan. 31 forum, the 2020 Penn China Research Symposium, which featured opening remarks from Chinese consul general Huang Ping.
Coincidentally, it occurred on the same day that Trump banned most travel to and from China as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
It was later revealed that China had covered up the scale of the pandemic, which it was aware of at the time, and it continues to defy calls for transparency surrounding the virus’s origin, as well as its realistic infection rates.
Biden has nominally tried to spin Trump’s earlier signing of a trade agreement as a liability, claiming the president had “rolled over for the Chinese” while attempting to hammer him for his coronavirus response.
Donald Trump left our country unprepared and unprotected for the worst public health and economic crisis in our lifetime — and now we’re paying the price. pic.twitter.com/aCxcqQqUqw
But the reality is that the presumptive Democrat nominee is deep in China’s back pocket, said NLPC’s analysts.
“Joe Biden’s affiliation with the Penn Biden Center further raises concerns of foreign influence not unlike those raised when the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in donations while Hillary Clinton was running for president,” their complaint said.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man… They’re not bad folks, folks … They’re not competition for us,” he said in a May 2019 speech, according to Axios.
But a month later, Biden’s outlook became markedly more dire.
“You bet I’m worried about China,” he said at a June 2019 campaign stop in Iowa. “… While Trump is attacking our friends, China is pressing its advantage all over the world.”
Trump has continued to stand firm on holding China accountable for everything from its predatory trade practices to its espionage and human-rights violations to the recent health crisis.
He issued a scathing letter to the World Health Organization this week calling on a full and independent investigation of the virus outbreak.
And on Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services signed a $354 million contract with a Virginia pharmaceutical startup to begin a reduction of U.S. dependency on Chinese drug manufacturers.
But it may have been Huang, during his opening remarks at the Penn China symposium in January, who best articulated where Biden’s true north stands on the oriental superpower.
“Considering China’s advantages in cost, market and supply chain, and its growing edge in innovation, to decouple from China is to decouple from opportunities,” he threatened.
The fearmongering opponents of democracy have viciously criticized the state for moving forward with its scheduled elections during the health crisis.
Contrary to their claims, subsequent scientific studies revealed that there was no evidence of a mass outbreak resulting from the April 7 in-person voting.
In its Absentee Voting Report, however, the Wisconsin Elections Commission noted that the increase in mail-in absentee ballots did cause a rise in voter disfranchisement.
“At a local level, the extraordinary volume placed enormous stress on election officials, elections systems, and the United States Postal Service,” said the report.
It noted that the 964,433 mail-in ballots cast in the primary far outpaced the usual number and broke the record, as far as the state was concerned, when compared with other primary elections.
But “[w]hile voter participation for this election was consistent with historic turnout numbers for similar elections, it is also impossible to determine how many voters were unable to cast a ballot for this election due to concerns and complications,” the report noted.
The overall turnout for the election was down by about a quarter relative to the prior presidential primary in 2016, from 2,113,544 to 1,555,263.
And since only a quarter of the overall votes were cast in-person on Election Day, questions about the suppressed turnout largely lay with the absentee process.
As it so happens, nearly 10 percent of the absentee ballots requested—just under 121,000—were never returned.
But others who thought they had voted may never have been counted.
Three USPS tubs totaling 1,600 ballots were discovered in Chicago the day after Wisconsin’s April 7 special election. / IMAGE: TMJ4 News via YouTube
Buried deep in the report, the WEC revealed that on the day after the election, a postal-service hub in Chicago had reported finding three large tubs of ballots from the Appleton/Oshkosh region.
“The official was unable to confirm how many ballots were in the three tubs but stated that ‘it could be quite a lot’ as they were large two–handled tubs,” said the report. “In a follow up communication, the USPS indicated that there were approximately 1,600 ballots in the batch.”
The report also outlined a number of other ballot processing failures, including many from the heavily Republican region.
In total, issues of ballot mishandling outlined in the report resulted in “upwards of 3,000 voters” likely being disfranchised, said Dan O’Donnell, writing for the pro-free-market MacIver Institute.
“Strangely enough, the same people falsely promising that in-person voting in April would be disastrous are now promising that mail-in voting in November will go off without a hitch,” O’Donnell said. “It won’t.”
As Democrats begin waging lawsuits to force the state to issue absentee ballots to every voter in November for the much larger presidential election, O’Donnell warned that the result “will be a chaotic, fraud- and disenfranchisement-filled nightmare.”
The Long Con
The mishandling of ballots from conservative parts of the state likely had little impact on the Democratic primary. Former Vice President Joe Biden‘s victory there led Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to end his campaign, making Biden the presumptive nominee.
But another major race—an election for the state Supreme Court—could wind up being even more consequential for national politics.
Liberal Jill Karofsky prevailed over conservative independent Daniel Kelly, the incumbent justice, by just under 163,500 votes statewide—about 10 percent of the total.
Although ostensibly nonpartisan, the state court, much like the U.S. Supreme Court, has a narrow ideological split, with the balance now likely tilting leftward on matters like the upcoming redistricting effort.
Already, left-wing activists have used the Wisconsin courts in order to force the battleground state to redraw its legislative maps.
Coincidentally, Holder also has been behind significant legal battles in swing states like North Carolina to use the courts to force mail-only ballots for November.
Although these electioneering efforts began well before the current pandemic crisis, leftist partisans have sought to mislead the public by reframing the scheme to blame their opponents for playing defensive.
“This thing in Wisconsin was one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen in my life,” left-wing strategist James Carville said on MSNBC the night of the state election.
“Just the extent they’ll go to to hold on to power,” ranted Carville, a longtime Bill Clinton associate. “It was all about one Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. They will kill people to stay in power, literally.”
‘Cooper has a crisis within a crisis … and he needs to do more than tell officials to move faster…’
Roy Cooper / IMAGE: MSNBC via YouTube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) North Carolina‘s two largest newspapers ran identical editorials on Monday that criticized Gov. Roy Cooper for the state’s unemployment “disaster.”
The editorial ran in theCharlotte Observer and Raleigh’s News and Observer, both owned by the same parent company, McClatchy.
It said that “hundreds of thousands” of North Carolinians still have not received unemployment compensation after “two months” for a process that should take “two weeks.”
Neither Cooper nor the state’s unemployment office have explained what the problems are.
“I am pushing them to move faster,” Cooper said at a news conference last week.
The editorial said Cooper is coming close to “blame shifting,” at a time when he needs to “own this problem, address it, and fix it.”
The situation in North Carolina is not much different from the rest of the country.
Less than 60 percent of Americans who have applied for unemployment benefits have received them, CNBC reported. North Carolina is at about the same percentage.
But the editorial said bureaucratic mismanagement within the state’s Division of Employment Security had been a significant factor for North Carolina’s troubles.
“Cooper has a crisis within a crisis with the mess at DES, and he needs to do more than tell officials to move faster,” the editorial board wrote.
Many people cannot even speak with the state about unemployment.
“At the least, they need to know what’s going on,” the editorial board wrote. “In North Carolina, communication is sparse and it’s too difficult to get a human on the phone.”
State Sen. Jeff Jackson, D-Mecklenburg, said state officials answer the phone, but then do not know how to help citizens.
“They have to make sure the person who answers can actually help,” Jackson said. “And that’s been an issue.”
The DES has 1,100 employees to answer 50,000 calls per day, but the state recently hired 350 more employees.
“Even that isn’t really sufficient,” Jackson. “They really need to staff beyond average daily capacity to make sure they bring down wait times and can handle days (like last Monday) when calls topped 70,000.”
Despite their criticisms, both newspaper still lauded Cooper’s decision to put North Carolina’s residents into “very necessary stay-at-home restrictions that followed.”
The Democratic governor, who faces re-election in November with Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest posing a strong challenge.
Cooper initially encountered strong backlash for his authoritarian quarantine orders, but he has used at least the appearance of easing restrictions to placate conservative protestors within the volatile swing state.
North Carolina was slated to move into phase 2 of its reopening process on Friday, allowing some businesses to partially resume under tight social-distancing restrictions.
However, that phase was expected to continue for several more weeks before Cooper might reassess whether to fully reopen.
Republican leaders, including U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, a staunch supporter of returning to normalcy, have criticized Cooper for lacking transparency in the process behind his arbitrary decision-making.
“He doesn’t give us data or the models that are underlying his evaluation,” Bishop told Newsmax TV in April. Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
