1 After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.
2 There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. 4 The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
5 The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. 6 He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
Wishing you and yours a joyous and blessed Easter.
Please pray for the persecuted this Easter.
Please pray for this country.
This #Easter Sunday, I send greetings to all Americans and their loved ones as we come together to reflect on the importance of family & faith. May God bless our great nation!
While the US shuts down all commerce for weeks and destroys the economy, other countries like Sweden and Brazil are doing the opposite and allowing the China coronavirus to run its course.
Data indicates there no material differences in fatalities between the three countries. In fact it now appears the COVID-19 numbers are dropping significantly in both Brazil and Sweden. This leads the casual observer to question why is the US killing its economy?
The US continues to prevent nearly all commerce from occurring to combat the China coronavirus. Many other countries are following suit. But some countries like Sweden and Brazil are keeping their countries open for business.
Data shows that the fatalities related to the coronavirus in these countries are very similar to those in the US.
President Trump got duped by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and the so-called coronavirus experts.
It’s time to open the US economy before the damage is too great to reverse.
Fired ICIG Michael Atkinson acted like a mad man when he broke all the rules and pushed forward with the fraudulent whistleblower’s report that led to the most corrupt act against a President in US history. Atkinson did this as a last ditch effort to cover for his previous crimes.
Last week we reported on the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General report related to the FBI’s actions its FISA procedures.
DOJ IG Horowitz’s office found errors in all of the 29 FISA applications it reviewed during an audit as follow-up to the investigation of the Bureau’s illegal spying of Carter Page and therefore candidate and President Trump.
The OIG released a report on Tuesday revealing the FBI’s FISA abuse is still a widespread ongoing problem.
“As a result of our audit work to date and as described below, we do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the OIG said in a 17-page memorandum.
The “Woods Procedures” provide for additional documentation and support for the FISA requests being requested by the FBI from the FISA Court (FISC).
The FISC last Friday ordered the FBI to provide “names” and “docket numbers” for the 29 applications “for which the FBI could not locate a Woods File and the three for which it could not say whether a Woods File ever existed,” reported CBS’s Catherine Herridge.
The FISC will assess whether the errors render the spy applications invalid.
#FISA BREAKING: Fallout from IG Horowitz audit 3/31 as surveillance court orders FBI to provide “names” and “docket numbers” for 29 applications “for which the FBI could not locate a Woods File and the three for which it could not say whether a Woods File ever existed” @CBSNewspic.twitter.com/DF1JTsnJ04
Notable is the fact that the FISA documents reviewed by DOJ IG Horowitz’s team overlap with the time that former Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Michael Atkinson worked for the DOJ in the role of ensuring the FISA warrant requests were legal.
#Ukraine Atkinson DNI bio “he served in DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD) as the Acting Deputy Assistant AG for National Asset Protection and as Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General” Timing Overlaps IG Horowitz FISA audit released Tuesday https://t.co/gVVF0q0dyU
Former US Attorney Joe diGenova was on the air this past week and he discussed the recent FISA Report released last week by the DOJ IG Horowitz. Rightfully so, diGenova shared his disgust with former ICIG Michael Atkinson.
Atkinson’s testimony in the basement of the US Capital in front of Adam Schiff’s corrupt impeachment sham has to this day not been released by Schiff and the Democrats in Congress. Once the Republicans take back the House, this document can be released. Clearly, Schiff has not shared this testimony because it will be damning to Schiff’s entire bogus case against President Trump.
What diGenova also discussed in his segment this week is that the Obama Administration was not following rules or laws related to FISA warrants during most, if not all of his Administration. Former and now fired ICIG Atkinson was at the heart of these criminal activities at that time in the Obama Administration.
It now is clear why Atkinson was so reckless in pushing the fraudulent whistleblower’s report leading to the Trump impeachment. Atkinson and his Deep State accomplices felt if he could remove President Trump from office, either through the impeachment or the upcoming election, then his corrupt actions while under the Obama Administration would go away.
This is the reason behind all the corrupt efforts to have President Trump removed from office. It is all about preventing prior crimes from being discovered.
In late March Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer limited access of doctors from prescribing the lifesaving drugs hydroxychloroquine and Z-Paks to save senior citizens in the state from Coronavirus.
Hydroxychloroquine and Z-Paks have are widely used by doctors the world over to treat the Coronavirus.
This week Governor Whitmer banned packaged seeds, tiling, carpet, flooring… And US flags.
One of the main takeaways from the interview Attorney General Bill Barr did with Laura Ingraham was his saying that the Russia hoax would lead to criminal charges and would prove to be “one of the greatest travesties in American history.” Barr, however, didn’t limit himself to the Russia hoax.
In addition, Barr discussed America’s COVID-19 response and, specifically, addressed the media’s disgraceful behavior regarding hydroxychloroquine. As he said, they were temperate in talking about the drug until Trump expressed enthusiasm about it, at which point they went on a “jihad” (emphasis added):
And the politicization of decisions like hydroxychloroquine has been amazing to me. Before the president said anything about it, there was fair and balanced coverage of this very promising drug, and the fact that it had such a long track record, that the risks were pretty well known, and as soon as he said something positive about it, the media’s been on a jihad to discredit the drug, it’s quite strange.
As if to lend credence to Barr’s words, NPR’s Vanessa Romo wrote an article that implies that a Houston doctor – a Republican Houston doctor – is another Dr. Mengele, the monster of Auschwitz, because he’s giving nursing home patients the Z-Pack of Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and zinc. The jihad starts with the headline, COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In ‘Disconcerting’ Move, and then goes on from there:
Concern is mounting after a doctor at a Texas nursing home started giving the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to dozens of elderly patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and tracking the outcomes in what he’s calling an “observational study.”
Use of the drug to treat coronavirus infections has set up a heated debate between the Trump administration and leading health experts over its efficacy against COVID-19.
President Trump has been an enthusiastic champion of hydroxychloroquine, calling it a “game-changer.” But some of the nation’s most respected health officials have said there is insufficient evidence showing that the 80-year-old drug, which is typically used to stave off malaria or treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is a viable treatment in battling the new virus.
Regarding this alleged “concern,” the only concern Romo could find comes from Katherine Seley-Radtke, a medicinal chemist at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Seley-Radtke is unhappy as a general matter that a doctor is prescribing medicine without first doing the years’ long strict protocols required for new drugs. Seley-Radtke also obligingly coughed up the fact that hydroxychloroquine, like every other medicine in the world, can have side effects.
Armstrong’s observations, however, show real-time benefits and no problematic side-effects:
“It’s actually going well. People are getting better,” Armstrong told NPR, adding that after just a handful of days, some of the 39 patients on the medication are showing signs of improvement.
Seley-Radtke’s concerns also run counter to the fact that doctors all over the world consider the Z-Pack to be the best available treatment. Moreover, while hydroxychloroquine can have side effects, for the most part it is an innocuous and beneficial medicine that has saved lives for almost 100 years.
For Romo, though, facts are irrelevant, because unnamed scientists say that an urgent situation is no time to abandon ordinary protocols that take years to perform. Worse, implies Romo, even though Armstrong’s patients don’t have side effects, they could have side-effects.
Halfway through the article, Romo gets to Dr. Armstrong’s real sin: He’s a GOP activist who used Republican contacts to get the drugs to help his patients:
Armstrong, who is a prominent GOP activist, called Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He says Patrick reached out to Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, also a Republican, who knew someone on the board of the New Jersey-based company Amneal Pharmaceuticals. The company, which makes and distributes the drug, has donated more than a million tablets nationwide, including to the states of Texas and Louisiana.
Throughout the article, Romo implies that Armstrong, like Mengele himself, is experimenting on unwilling subjects who are unable to defend themselves against his evil practices. Here’s how she starts one sentence: “He acknowledged that some families were not aware their relatives were put on the drug….” It turns out, though, that most residents were able to give consent.
In any event, Romo admits that, as Dr. Armstrong told her,
[I]t is common for physicians to prescribe new medications to patients without explicit consent from the patient or family members. “It’s not required,” he said.
The article ends with a statement that, in July 2019, the nursing home violated 14 state standards. For those accustomed to dealing with state inspectors, that’s not bad. Many inspectors justify their salaries by finding things that are wrong.
NPR illustrated perfectly Barr’s assertion that the media is on a jihad against a medicine that is indeed proving to be a “game-changer.” This is utterly unprincipled behavior and consistent with everything we’ve come to expect from a media suffering from unmitigated Trump Derangement Syndrome.
One of the main takeaways from the interview Attorney General Bill Barr did with Laura Ingraham was his saying that the Russia hoax would lead to criminal charges and would prove to be “one of the greatest travesties in American history.” Barr, however, didn’t limit himself to the Russia hoax.
In addition, Barr discussed America’s COVID-19 response and, specifically, addressed the media’s disgraceful behavior regarding hydroxychloroquine. As he said, they were temperate in talking about the drug until Trump expressed enthusiasm about it, at which point they went on a “jihad” (emphasis added):
And the politicization of decisions like hydroxychloroquine has been amazing to me. Before the president said anything about it, there was fair and balanced coverage of this very promising drug, and the fact that it had such a long track record, that the risks were pretty well known, and as soon as he said something positive about it, the media’s been on a jihad to discredit the drug, it’s quite strange.
As if to lend credence to Barr’s words, NPR’s Vanessa Romo wrote an article that implies that a Houston doctor – a Republican Houston doctor – is another Dr. Mengele, the monster of Auschwitz, because he’s giving nursing home patients the Z-Pack of Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and zinc. The jihad starts with the headline, COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In ‘Disconcerting’ Move, and then goes on from there:
Concern is mounting after a doctor at a Texas nursing home started giving the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to dozens of elderly patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and tracking the outcomes in what he’s calling an “observational study.”
Use of the drug to treat coronavirus infections has set up a heated debate between the Trump administration and leading health experts over its efficacy against COVID-19.
President Trump has been an enthusiastic champion of hydroxychloroquine, calling it a “game-changer.” But some of the nation’s most respected health officials have said there is insufficient evidence showing that the 80-year-old drug, which is typically used to stave off malaria or treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is a viable treatment in battling the new virus.
Regarding this alleged “concern,” the only concern Romo could find comes from Katherine Seley-Radtke, a medicinal chemist at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Seley-Radtke is unhappy as a general matter that a doctor is prescribing medicine without first doing the years’ long strict protocols required for new drugs. Seley-Radtke also obligingly coughed up the fact that hydroxychloroquine, like every other medicine in the world, can have side effects.
Armstrong’s observations, however, show real-time benefits and no problematic side-effects:
“It’s actually going well. People are getting better,” Armstrong told NPR, adding that after just a handful of days, some of the 39 patients on the medication are showing signs of improvement.
Seley-Radtke’s concerns also run counter to the fact that doctors all over the world consider the Z-Pack to be the best available treatment. Moreover, while hydroxychloroquine can have side effects, for the most part it is an innocuous and beneficial medicine that has saved lives for almost 100 years.
For Romo, though, facts are irrelevant, because unnamed scientists say that an urgent situation is no time to abandon ordinary protocols that take years to perform. Worse, implies Romo, even though Armstrong’s patients don’t have side effects, they could have side-effects.
Halfway through the article, Romo gets to Dr. Armstrong’s real sin: He’s a GOP activist who used Republican contacts to get the drugs to help his patients:
Armstrong, who is a prominent GOP activist, called Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He says Patrick reached out to Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, also a Republican, who knew someone on the board of the New Jersey-based company Amneal Pharmaceuticals. The company, which makes and distributes the drug, has donated more than a million tablets nationwide, including to the states of Texas and Louisiana.
Throughout the article, Romo implies that Armstrong, like Mengele himself, is experimenting on unwilling subjects who are unable to defend themselves against his evil practices. Here’s how she starts one sentence: “He acknowledged that some families were not aware their relatives were put on the drug….” It turns out, though, that most residents were able to give consent.
In any event, Romo admits that, as Dr. Armstrong told her,
[I]t is common for physicians to prescribe new medications to patients without explicit consent from the patient or family members. “It’s not required,” he said.
The article ends with a statement that, in July 2019, the nursing home violated 14 state standards. For those accustomed to dealing with state inspectors, that’s not bad. Many inspectors justify their salaries by finding things that are wrong.
NPR illustrated perfectly Barr’s assertion that the media is on a jihad against a medicine that is indeed proving to be a “game-changer.” This is utterly unprincipled behavior and consistent with everything we’ve come to expect from a media suffering from unmitigated Trump Derangement Syndrome.
“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a recent interview.
“Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.”
“Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19,” reads a new report from Bloomberg.
“People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”
“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine. However, civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of power once the immediate threat has passed,” reads a recent VentureBeat article titled “After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal”.
He is not wrong!
"Snowden Warns Governments Are Using Coronavirus to Build ‘the Architecture of Oppression’"https://t.co/7Bkhr52U1U
“White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions,” reads a recent article by Politico, adding, “But the prospect of compiling a national database of potentially sensitive health information has prompted concerns about its impact on civil liberties well after the coronavirus threat recedes, with some critics comparing it to the Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks.”
“Mass surveillance methods could save lives around the world, permitting authorities to track and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus with speed and accuracy not possible during prior pandemics,” The Intercept’s Sam Biddle wrote last week, adding,
“There’s a glaring problem: We’ve heard all this before. After the September 11 attacks, Americans were told that greater monitoring and data sharing would allow the state to stop terrorism before it started, leading Congress to grant unprecedented surveillance powers that often failed to preempt much of anything. The persistence and expansion of this spying in the nearly two decades since, and the abuses exposed by Snowden and others, remind us that emergency powers can outlive their emergencies.”
As we discussed recently, it’s an established fact that power structures will seize upon opportunities to roll out oppressive authoritarian agendas under the pretense of protecting ordinary people, when in reality they’d been working on advancing those agendas since long before the crisis being offered as the reason for them. It happened with 9/11, and we may be certain that it is happening now.
The reason for this is simple: the powerful are afraid of the public. They always have been. For as long as there has been government power, there has been the fear that the people will realize the power of their numbers and overthrow the government that is in power. And understandably so; it has happened many times throughout history.
Leaders are made vastly more fearful and skittish by the fact that this dissatisfaction with the current world order just happens to be occurring at a time when that world order is already at its most tenuous point in decades, with a surging China poised to surpass the US as a superpower on the world stage and collaborating with Russia and other unabsorbed nations to create a truly multipolar world. It becomes much more difficult to control dominant narratives in a way that can effectively manufacture consent for the aggression that will be necessary to freeze and reverse this shift away from unipolar domination when the denizens of that unipolar empire are out in the streets demanding its downfall.
The escalations in internet censorship and the escalations in surveillance are both directed at a last-ditch effort to control the masses before control is lost forever, and neither are intended to be rolled back when the threat of the virus is over. People are now off the streets, with their communications being restricted and the devices they carry in their pockets being monitored with more and more intrusiveness. There are of course some good faith actors who legitimately want to protect people from the virus, just as there were some good faith actors who wanted to protect people from terrorism after 9/11, but where there is power and fear of the public there will be an agenda to reel in the freedom of the masses.
Journalist Jonathan Cook said best when he wrote, “Our leaders are terrified. Not of the virus — of us.”
A pro-Trump troll pranked CNN hard on Thursday night during their "global town hall" on coronavirus "facts and fears" with Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Someone in the CNN control room isn’t familiar with conservative terms like Trump Derangement Syndrome. When the audience was asked to send questions for Dr. James Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, one that managed to make it on air was: “Is Stage-4 TDS considered an underlying morbidity?”
In an effort to help contain the coronavirus pandemic, Tech goliaths Apple and Google have joined together to create software that would assist in contact tracing in order to alert people who have come in contact with people who have contracted COVID-19.
From Apple:
Since COVID-19 can be transmitted through close proximity to affected individuals, public health officials have identified contact tracing as a valuable tool to help contain its spread. A number of leading public health authorities, universities, and NGOs around the world have been doing important work to develop opt-in contact tracing technology. To further this cause, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. Given the urgent need, the plan is to implement this solution in two steps while maintaining strong protections around user privacy.
First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.
Second, in the coming months, Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities. Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.
Hot Air’s Allahpundit, however, is skeptical about the ability for people to truly “opt out” of this data mining.
“If I understand that correctly, they’re going to roll this out quickly by first providing it as an app available for download — called Contact Tracing, neatly enough. Then, in stage two, they’re going to build it right into the iOS and Android operating systems while providing some sort of option to opt out. That’ll deliver the software to three billion people or so,” Allahpundit wrote. “An obvious early question: How thorough will the “opt out” be, exactly? Given how much personal information is collected surreptitiously by tech companies already, it’s impossible to believe that the movements of opt-outs won’t be quietly tracked too. The “opt out” might prevent you from being alerted if someone you’ve been in contact with is sick, but no one wants to opt out of that part. It’s the movement tracking to which some will object. Is that realistically preventable once it’s built into the OS? Is there any doubt that eventually the default setting on contact tracing will be to turn it on and force users to turn it off?”
Allahpundit noted that Apple and Google’s app looks like it will function at least somewhat like a program that Germany instituted to combat the virus, which broadcasts different IDs every 30 minutes as someone goes about their day. If a person tests positive for coronavirus, then it would trace which IDs came into contact with the temporary IDs of the coronavirus-positive person and send them an alert that they may have interacted with someone who had COVID-19.
Of course, as Allahpundit noted, this requires widespread testing for the virus, something we just don’t have yet.
A 12-year-old girl was playing basketball alone on a court near her family’s home when city officials arrived and removed the hoop as part of “social distancing” enforcement.
The girl’s mother, Laura Vandercook, wrote about the episode at The Federalist (where I also have a byline). She said her family lives on “a small mountain in a suburb of Little Rock, Arkansas,” which butts up against a city green space that includes a small basketball court, a court she said is “fairly ignored.”
To emphasize how much the city ignores this particular court, Vandercook said her family used their own money to purchase a net for the basketball hoop, since it was missing. Her husband also dug a drainage canal to keep it from flooding, and regularly cleaned it of debris.
“On April 6, my 12-year-old daughter was playing basketball alone at the court, as she often does, when a city truck drove over to her. She quickly came home to get me. I headed down to the court to talk to the city workers, who told me that they were taking down the basketball rim to keep groups from gathering,” Vandercook wrote. “I was really conflicted by this news. On the one hand, I am really glad that our city is still employing the folks who work for the Parks and Recreation Department. On the other hand, this basketball court is seldom used by anyone besides my three children and is never used by a crowd. It is a public court that my tax dollars pay for.”
Vandercook wrote that she called the mayor to discuss the hoop’s removal, but he said basketball courts should be closed because all public playground equipment had been closed off for use during the coronavirus pandemic.
Further, residents of Vandercook’s community took issue with children being outside in the afternoon, as they assumed the children had enough schoolwork to keep them indoors and requested the mayor place a curfew on children during school hours and then in the evening.
“My children are homeschooled. My daughter prefers to wake up before anyone else and do about half of her school work before 8 a.m. when the house is quiet. Because of this, she is finished with her work before lunchtime,” Vandercook wrote. “It would be wonderful if after five hours of diligently working on school, I could allow her to go play some basketball at a court that I can see from our window and that my tax dollars pay for, but this liberty has been stripped away.”
The mayor, at least, appears to be resisting the curfew.
She wrote that her suburb was not under a stay-at-home order, but local, “non-essential” businesses have been forced to close – except abortion facilities.
“Arkansas is a state with a population of 3.014 million people. At the time I am writing, 21 people in my state have died and there are 841 active Covid-19 cases, which is less than 0.028 percent of the population. The total number of Covid-19 patients who are currently hospitalized is 73 in Arkansas, with 31 patients on ventilators out of the 750 total in the state,” Vandercook wrote.
At least her daughter had a wise response to The Man: “Well, they can take away my library, and they can take away my basketball goal, but they can’t take away my piano.”
Tens of millions of American workers will lose their jobs because of inept government officials and their bogus models.
For weeks now we have known that the victims of the coronavirus are elderly seniors with an AVERAGE age around 80, diabetics and the morbidly obese.
The doctors at the daily coronvirus press briefings know this disease affects elderly seniors and those with underlying health problems.
Why do they not stress this fact?
Ugh. This isn’t rocket surgery. Quarantine the most vulnerable and continue common-sense social distancing and good hygiene, but plan to move back toward a functioning society within weeks, not months, or the economy won’t recover. pic.twitter.com/pCgaN6UXMl
In Massachusetts where they release daily coronavirus numbers – only 2 of 96 coronavirus victims were under 60!
The average age of COVID-19 victim was over 76-years-old!
These facts are public knowledge.
But this is not what is reported to the American public.
If the American pubic knew that more 100-year-olds are dying than those under age 50 would they choose to shut down the economy?
Would the American public shut down the economy if they know that those under 30 are not dying from the disease except in very rare circumstances?
The American public is not being told the truth.
This is horrible injustice to those who will lose their income and security.
