LOL, National Review reports AOC expels protesters at her own townhall in Queens, characteristically buried on the Friday night of the summer's first big holiday weekend to minimize such things

 

‘American Citizens before Migrants’: Protesters Heckle AOC at NYC Town Hall

Brittany BernsteinMay 27, 2023 11:06 AM

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) speaks at a U.S. House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., December 13, 2022. (Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)none

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Protesters booed and heckled Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a town hall she held in Queens, N.Y., on Friday night.

A man holding small American flags approached the progressive “Squad” member and shouted, “American citizens before migrants.”

“Where are you on the migrant issue? You’re a piece of s***,” he added.

Ocasio-Cortez said, “OK,” as the man was escorted off.

New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) declared a state of emergency in New York after the expiration of Title 42 earlier this month. The state has roughly 60,000 asylum seekers relying on social services. New York City has gotten so overwhelmed with the influx of migrants that the city has begun sending them to the suburbs. Hochul said she is “looking at all state assets to help ameliorate the problem that is at a crisis level here in the City of New York,” which could includes housing migrants at SUNY campuses, closed psychiatric centers, large parks and parking lots.

Protesters at the town hall held signs concerning a number of issues: “America First. Vetted legal migrants only,” “Stop funding Ukraine,” “AOC: An Obvious Criminal,” and “AOC: Stop pushing drag queen story hour,”

More protesters came forward throughout the evening, including a woman who was critical of Ocasio-Cortez’s support for U.S. funding in Ukraine. The New York Democrat voted to send $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine last year.

“Stop funding this war, there’s a lot of communities that need help and need that money,” another woman said as she was removed from the event.

Ocasio-Cortez was met with both boos and cheers from the crowd when she suggested the Biden administration should abolish the debt limit, as a June 5 debt default deadline looms.

“$100 billion for Ukraine that you voted for!” one man shouted in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on the debt ceiling.

The progressive lawmaker said earlier this week that the “stakes of a default cannot be understated.”

“The chaos that would ensue and the impact on people’s everyday lives would likely be immediate and it is one of the reasons why we need to take default off the table,” she said.

Send a tip to the news team at NR.

 

 

The Dingbat meant overstated, not understated.

If California won't do anything to clean up the fuel for wildfires, the insurers will do it for them

 

State Farm to stop accepting homeowners insurance applications in California due to wildfires, construction costs

Owner-occupied housing levels are still a long way off from those reached pre-Great Recession

 

Democrats should impeach Bill Gates lol

 REVEALED: Bill Gates's Russian 'lover' and her links to notorious Kremlin spy...

The voters have made yet another colossal error in judgment, but NBC doesn't really want to tell you how big

New research published this month, involving millions of people worldwide over decades, is adding to worries that heavy use of high-potency cannabis and legalization of recreational weed in many U.S. states could exacerbate the nation's mental health crisis in young adults. “There is a big sense of urgency not just because more people are smoking marijuana, but because more people are using it in ways that are harmful, with higher and higher concentration of THC,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), said in an interview. ... The magnitude of the connection between cannabis and schizophrenia for young men surprised study author Volkow, who was expecting the number to be closer to 10%. “This is worrisome,” she said.

 
But NBC doesn't tell you the number:

Among 16–20-year-old males, no clear pattern over time is observed, with PARFs generally fluctuating between 10% and 20%. In older males, the PARFs show a clearly increasing pattern, ending up around 20–30% until the age of 31–40 when PARFs fluctuate between <1% and nearly 20%.

 

 

More.

 

Let's see how long G$$GLE leaves this up before censoring me like last time.

 

 

 

Inflation remains stuck, year over year in April 2023 at 4.7%, meaning at minimum that interest rates will remain higher for longer

The Fed can't do it alone.

Congress needs to rein-in spending.
 

Supremes slap down EPA meddling in property owners' wetlands under Clean Water Act, reversing yet another pestilent view of former justice Anthony Kennedy

A majority in Rapanos (2006) couldn’t agree on how to limit EPA’s authority over wetlands. Four Justices said the Clean Water Act’s scope extended to “only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water” such as oceans, rivers and lakes, and wetlands that were directly adjacent and “indistinguishable” from those waters.

However, the agencies and lower courts have adopted Justice Anthony Kennedy’s lone opinion that federal jurisdiction extends to land that has a “significant nexus” to a waterway. This test is as clear as a swamp.

While all nine Justices ruled for the Sacketts, they disagreed on the scope of federal power. The majority strips away the “significant nexus” ambiguity from Justice Kennedy’s Rapanos opinion, but reaffirms the conservative plurality’s view that a “wetland” must “be indistinguishably part of a body of water that itself constitutes ‘waters’ under the CWA.”

Ronald Reagan's worst appointment.

More.

Kim Strassel: Republicans should claw back $80 billion IRS infusion in wake of IRS targeting of Taibbi and Shapley

 IRS Needs a Cage, Not More Cash

The cases of the whistleblower Gary Shapley and journalist Matt Taibbi show why the GOP should claw back that $80 billion infusion.

As House Republicans and the White House wrangle over a debt-ceiling deal, one GOP demand ought to be nonnegotiable. A politicized Internal Revenue Service has no business keeping its untrustworthy fingers on last year’s $80 billion cash infusion.

More.

This is lol great

 

“On day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” DeSantis said in his response. ...

DeSantis replied, “I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big.”

The Justice Department said this month more than 1,033 defendants have been arrested as part of its probe of the Capitol riot. ...

DeSantis said he planned to use the pardon power “at the front end” instead of waiting until the end of his term in the White House.

“We’re going to find examples where the government’s been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate. But it will be done on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

More.

Excellent News: Insurgent "Eight-Year Alliance" forms from 100 former Trump administration officials who now back Ron DeSantis

 

According to multiple sources within the group, officially known as "The Eight-Year Alliance," DeSantis is "a proven winner," a contender with a depth of policy proven by what he's accomplished at the state level, and a leader who "does what he says."

The primary motivation of the group, the sources said, is to promote a candidate they feel would be a viable contender for two presidential terms, something they see in DeSantis. They also want to prevent former President Donald Trump "immediately becoming a lame-duck president" should he win back the White House, considering the polarizing affect his persona has had on American politics.

More. 

Key point: depth of proven policy in Florida sustainable nationally over two presidential terms is a better choice than another drama-plagued and by definition ineffectual presidency under the best of conditions.

The salient feature of the coming Draco will not be to enslave but to kill, to purge

Yes, he will be busy.

 

 

Good morning

 

UFO spotted on dark side of moon in broad daylight

  VIDEO: UFO spotted in broad daylight on moon...

Mystery emerges as ‘UFO is spotted’ on the other side of the moon in wild video recorded in broad daylight

From this stupid story we're supposed to believe that the man who graduated Yale and Harvard with honors doesn't have a thought in his head but for his wife

 The Casey DeSantis Problem: His Greatest Asset -- and Liability...

Never trust a story which features Roger Stone and Rick Wilson as sources.

They're so afraid this guy will win

 

French Revolution, here we come

 

No One Participates in Politics More than Atheists

Ryan Burge, Graphs About Religion 

 

 

Bud Light is the official beer of Forg's Gay Raptor pick 'em up truck owners

Found. On. Road. Gay. 

LOL, New Hampshire Democrats to hold primary first because it's state law, Biden faces losing there because he can't be on their ballot and honor his choice of South Carolina going first at the same time

 Too funny.

Politico reports here.

Want the job much lol?

 

Megyn Kelly: Hannity Is Not The Answer At 8pm, He Hasn't Been The Answer At 9pm Since Tucker Left

Democrats who rammed Obamacare down our throats 13-years ago say it's totally broken

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders renews push for Medicare for All to end ‘totally broken’ health-care system

Mean annual snowfall: 81 inches lol

Duluth becomes 'climate' haven...

Planet of the Apes, here we come

 NYC sinking under weight of its buildings...

 

Tech executive Bob Lee who was stabbed to death was most definitely a libertarian

 Before His Killing, Tech Executive Bob Lee Led an Underground Life of Sex and Drugs:

Mr. Lee remained close to his wife, Krista Lee, even though they were separated. He recently moved to Miami with his father, a widower, but regularly returned to San Francisco to visit his two teenage children, Dagny and Scout, named after characters in “Atlas Shrugged” and “To Kill A Mockingbird.” The family had planned a trip together to Japan in August.

Anti-Trump lunatics Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr, and Glenn Simpson of FUSION GPS, all go back together to 2010 to an Expert Working Group on International Organized Crime

 

In the 1990s, she taught Russian history at Vassar. According to an online profile, she went on to work as an "independent contractor doing research and translation projects on topics in Russian science and technology," dates unknown. There is not much more public information about her career until she pops up in 2010 as a CIA analyst in an Expert Working Group (including her DOJ husband and future Fusion boss Simpson) on international organized crime; then, finally, in 2016, at the center of the Fusion GPS/DOJ/FBI anti-Trump web.

 

All part of The Red Thread. 

See here for the EWG.

 

See here for Nellie Ohr's self-identified employer, Open Source Works, an in-house CIA operation:

 

Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information.  Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization.  In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.

Expert Working Group Report, 2010

 

Nellie Ohr of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, employed by the Hillary campaign, and wife of DOJ prosecutor, Bruce Ohr, first authored the Trump Dossier's Millian fictions in April 2016 according to Durham

  Nellie Ohr is an ex-CIA contractor.

She wrote her first Millian report in April 2016, the month before Fusion GPS hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to put his imprimatur as a supposed former “spy” and "Russian insider" on the dossier. 
 
"This report was prepared just ten days after Fusion GPS was retained by [Clinton campaign law firm] Perkins Coie to conduct opposition research on Trump,” the Durham Report states, "and prior to Steele being retained by Fusion GPS." 

Durham suggests Nellie Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the allegations attributed to him.

In fact, Durham says that Millian initially wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector" Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who's admitted much of the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip. Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said “implicated" Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor added, Bruce Ohr, an anti-Trump Democrat, pushed his wife’s reports that cited Millian — 12 in all — onto the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI headquarters that was investigating Trump and his campaign for possible espionage. Agents used her reports as a source of corroboration for the Steele reports they received in the summer and fall of 2016, even though it was circular reporting. ...

In other words, Steele was not the catalyst behind the dossier’s central claims. Rather, it was Clinton's contractor Fusion GPS -- but more specifically, the wife of a senior DOJ official who worked for Fusion. So the FBI wasn’t really investigating "Crown reporting,” as officials referred to Steele’s dossier, implying it was British intelligence. More accurately, it was investigating information from inside its own department that was laundered through Steele and his dossier.

The Durham report shows that the FBI had the dossier reports in July 2016, two months before the time in September insisted upon by the FBI.

The Ohrs are ground zero for the Trump-Russia-collusion disinformation operation. 

More. 

IRS whistleblower says he and his entire team have been removed from the Hunter Biden investigation by Joe Biden's Department of Justice

 ABC News, here.

Previously the whistleblower has alleged that the investigation of Hunter Biden is being mishandled.

Trump predicated his entire 2016 campaign on attacking the deep state, the Bush GOP, and Hillary, so he should have been ready to have ZERO allies anywhere, but was not

 Why anyone remains indignant about this, like Goodwin, is beyond me.

A presidential campaign in the US is normally a war, between the two parties. Turning it into a multi-front war, however, as Trump did, was pure hubris on his part.

His catastrophic record of appointments simply amplifies the point.

Trump didn't bring with him into government his own army, let alone get the loyalty of the GOP army he had attacked relentlessly for 18 months. NeverTrump didn't materialize out of thin air. Getting anything accomplished in Washington with your side on your side is hard enough. Trump didn't have even that.

Trump narrowly won the battle of 2016, but utterly lost the war, because he was unprepared.

Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?  Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace.

Trump Stabbed in Back By Deep State

Michael Goodwin, New York Post

The biggest fool to ever hit the big time

 

Late-term abortion ally of George Tiller from Boulder, Colorado, says about half of the late term abortions he performs involve no devastating medical diagnoses for the fetus

His name is Warren Hern. His conscience used to bother him in the early days, but he got over it. 

Christianity, he told me, not for the first time, “is now the face of fascism in America.” ... Hern sent me a copy of his poetry collection and his new book on global ecology. In the latter, titled Homo Ecophagus, he compares mankind to a cancer on the planet, writing that our unrelenting population growth will ultimately lead to the demise of every species on Earth.

The story is here:

 Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses. He and his staff are just as sympathetic to other circumstances. Many of the clinic’s teenage patients receive later abortions because they had no idea they were pregnant. Some sexual-assault victims ignore their pregnancies or feel too ashamed to see a doctor. Once, a staffer named Catherine told me, a patient opted for a later abortion because her husband had killed himself and she was suddenly broke. “There isn’t a single woman who has ever written on her bucket list that she wants to have a late abortion,” Catherine said. “There is always a reason.”

LOL, ex-FBI Frank Figliuzzi knows damn well Mueller never investigated "collusion" because it ain't a thing in law, but still beats that idiotic drum for the natives

It wasn't against Trump early on. It was to determine whether or not there was Russian interference with the presidential campaign. He slips into this too conveniently. "It was against Trump." Early on it was just about hey, have the Russians colluded or intervened in this campaign?

And as you accurately pointed out they did. There are two dozen Russians charged with indictments under the Mueller inquiry, six of them at least were card-carrying Russian intelligence officers from the GRU. You can't say there was no collusion found here. 

Here. 

Frank slips from interference to collusion too conveniently.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

One man who gets it

 

Nunes: Durham Probe Shows "DOJ And FBI Are Solely Owned By The Democratic Party And Their Propaganda Regime"

 

 

The guy on the left slaughtered 60 million Chinamen, the guy on the right slaughtered a cherry tree

 

.

.

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise.

John Durham ends investigation of FBI Trump-Russia investigation with bupkis, shows how he and the law were totally flummoxed by the FBI's political capture by Democrats

 Politics is legal in America. That's precisely the problem. Only the communists have figured out the solution: staff the institutions with your own cadres.

A nation of laws is powerless against them.

From the story, here:

Durham goes further in his criticism, however, arguing that the FBI rushed to investigate Trump in a case known as Crossfire Hurricane, even as it proceeded cautiously on allegations related to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In particular, the report notes that while the FBI warned Clinton’s team when agents learned of possible evidence by a foreign actor to garner influence with her, agents did not give a similar defensive briefing to the Trump campaign before quickly launching an investigation.

The FBI’s handling of key aspects of the case was “seriously deficient,” Durham wrote, causing the agency “severe reputational harm.” That failure could have been prevented if FBI employees hadn’t embraced “seriously flawed information” and instead followed their “own principles regarding objectivity and integrity,” the report said.

As examples of confirmation bias by the FBI, Durham cites: the FBI decision to go forward with the probe despite “a complete lack of information from the Intelligence Community that corroborated the hypothesis upon which the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was predicated”; agents ignoring information that exonerated key suspects in the case; and the FBI being unable to corroborate “a single substantive allegation” in a dossier of Trump allegations compiled by British former spy Christopher Steele.

Uh oh, Twitter's new CEO is Yaccarino

 

Unregistered foreign agents: While VP Biden clan used more than 20 shell companies to hide $10 million in payments from foreign nationals

“From a historical standpoint, we’ve never seen a presidential family receive these sums of money from adversaries around the world,” said House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican.

The web of Biden family LLCs was uncovered by scouring four Biden family bank accounts. The companies were used in what investigators say was a complex money laundering scheme that filtered money from foreign companies, through Biden LLCs and eventually into the bank accounts of nine Biden family members, including one of the president’s grandchildren.

Republicans said a web of foreign transactions generated 170 suspicious activity reports by the banks where Biden family members and business associates deposited money.

The findings also contradict statements from the president, who said his family did not receive any money from China.

“That was a lie,” Mr. Comer said. “And he continues to lie to the American people now. The Bidens have received millions of dollars from China. It is inconceivable that the president did not know it.” ...

The FBI told the panel Wednesday that it would not comply after Mr. Comer asked FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to turn over a Biden-related whistleblower complaint by noon. The complaint says Mr. Biden took bribes from a foreign national while serving as vice president. The whistleblower is credible, Republicans said.

More.

 

Core CPI inflation has been 5.5% yoy for four straight months

 

Byron York: E. Jean Carroll case v. Trump was bankrolled by a billionaire when she said it wasn't, also claimed to have suffered after saying she hadn't

 

'Hoffman's money has made some waves in the Carroll case because, in her October 2022 deposition, Carroll denied that anyone was paying her legal fees. Here is what Carroll said: 

Q: Are you presently paying your counsel's fees?

A: This is a contingency case.

Q: So you're not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date. Is that correct?

A: I'm not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.

Q: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?

A: No.

'As the trial approached, Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, wrote to the Trump legal team to admit that what Carroll said was not true. ...

'In addition, advocates for the Adult Survivors Act wanted to address the tremendous suffering that victims of sexual abuse experience. The lawsuit says Carroll endured "significant pain and suffering" and uses some form of the word "suffer" 11 times. Yet in a June 24, 2019 interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, part of the book promotion, Carroll declined to refer to what happened to her as a "rape" and offered this statement: "I just have trouble with the word. I just have trouble. I write an advice column for 25 years and women write to me with these devastating stories and they have been violently, you know, disposed of by men. And I just — I feel too much respect for their suffering. I didn't suffer, Anderson. I did not suffer. I did not lose my job. I wasn't beaten."'

More.

Evidently the New York jury in the civil case which just found Trump liable knew neither fact.

Republicans started to ditch Catholic Mass after Francis became pope in 2013

 Data here.

 

Drudge relentlessly repeats the relentless lies of WaPo on a Tuesday in May, or any other day, that's how much the Republican victory in 2022 stung

 Six months after midterm losses, election deniers mount new efforts... 

As far as WaPo is concerned, all Republicans are election deniers and didn't win the House, dammit:

Among the more than 150 election deniers projected to have won by midnight: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Rep. Greg Pence (Ind.), the brother of former vice president Mike Pence.

And:

At least 145 Republican election deniers running for the House had won their races as of Wednesday afternoon, ticking past the 139 House Republicans who objected to the counting of electoral votes following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

 

 

 

Fidelity Investments: Average retirement account in 2022 fell to $104,000

 

 And most retirement nest eggs are much smaller now than a year ago. By Fidelity’s estimate, the average retirement account lost one-fifth of its value in 2022, dwindling from $135,600 to $104,000.  

More.

Naughty, naughty

 

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema: Biden Had Two Years To Prepare For The End Of Title 42 And Did Not Do So

Full time jobs rebound in April 2023

 Full time employment as a percentage of civilian population in April 2023 came in at 50.2%, smartly ahead of 1Q2023 at 49.7 and ahead of 2022 whole year average 50.1%. Full time peaks in summer.

Recession delayed again.

Catholic Biden's US military doesn't renew decades-old contract with Franciscan college at Walter Reed, hires for-profit secular firm instead

 Story.

Incompetent lab inspectors from CDC completely missed rusting wastewater system at Fort Detrick Army biolab which spilled 2,000-3,000 gallons of contaminated water into Carroll Creek, USAMRIID response took 6 days until photo emerged

 Unsterilized laboratory wastewater from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, spewed out the top of a rusty 50,000-gallon outdoor holding tank, the pressure catapulting it over the short concrete wall that was supposed to contain hazardous spills.

It was May 25, 2018, the Friday morning before Memorial Day weekend, and the tank holding waste from labs working with Ebola, anthrax, and other lethal pathogens had become overpressurized, forcing the liquid out a vent pipe.

An estimated 2,000-3,000 gallons streamed into a grassy area a few feet from an open storm drain that dumps into Carroll Creek — a centerpiece of downtown Frederick, Maryland, a city of about 80,000 an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital.

But as the waste sprayed for as long as three hours, records show, none of the plant’s workers apparently noticed the tank had burst a pipe. This was despite the facility being under scrutiny from federal lab regulators following catastrophic flooding and an escalating series of safety failures that had been playing out for more than a week. ...

Lab inspectors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had apparently failed to recognize the plant was in such disrepair. The CDC offered no explanation of how the problems were missed, but after the incident it created a new policy and task force for overseeing labs’ wastewater decontamination systems.

Samuel Edwin, director of the CDC’s select agent regulatory program, did not grant an interview. Two years before the plant flooded and failed, the CDC had hired Edwin from USAMRIID, where he had spent eight years as the biological surety officer and responsible official in charge of making sure USAMRIID’s labs complied with federal regulations.

The whole story is a comedy of incompetence which would be funny if it weren't so serious, here.

World Health Organization declares global public health emergency over today, a week ahead of the US

WHO declares end to Covid-19 global public health emergency

The spread of Covid-19 is no longer a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared Friday.

“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva.

“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “It’s therefore with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a global health emergency.”

Nearly 7 million people have died from the virus worldwide since the WHO first declared the emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, according to the U.N. organization’s official data. Tedros said the true death toll is at least 20 million.

The WHO’s decision comes as the U.S. is set to end its national public health emergency on Thursday.

Tedros said there is still a risk that new variant could emerge and cause another surge in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they have built to fight the virus.

“This virus is here to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.

But the WHO chief said the time has come for countries to transition from an emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases. ...

“Covid-19 has been so much more than health crisis,” Tedros said. “It has caused severe economic upheaval, erasing trillions from GDP, disrupting travel and trade, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty,” he said.

“It has caused severe social upheaval with borders closed, movement restricted, schools shut and millions of people experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression,” Tedros said.

More.

The pandemic wraps on May 11

 US Covid Case Count to Go Dark as Public Health Emergency Ends

(Bloomberg) -- The US government’s count of new Covid-19 cases has been dropping for months. Soon, it will disappear entirely. 

Thousands of Americans are still contracting the coronavirus each week. But when the public health emergency ends May 11, laboratories across the country will no longer be required to report Covid test results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That will eventually mean no more weekly infection, transmission and community-level numbers in CDC’s Covid Data Tracker. 

Concern about the pandemic is rapidly flagging as infection levels fall to those seen in the earliest months of the outbreak. The World Health Organization also moved to end its global health emergency Friday, lowering its alert level for the pandemic three years after the lethal disease was first seen in China. 

US infection data had already become increasingly unreliable as Americans began opting for at-home, rapid Covid tests — which most patients don’t report — rather than laboratory assays, like PCR. CDC will turn its attention to tracking severe Covid illness via hospital admissions, officials said on a call with reporters, while continuing to analyze wastewater and tests of international travelers to determine how the virus is spreading and evolving.

More.

Billionaire says Florida too expensive for him

 THIEL: Moving to Florida from Silicon Valley Now Too Expensive...

Moderna's stock price is down 73% from its Aug 9, 2021 high of $484.47 as of this morning

 

 

LOL, Moderna's surprise quarterly profit plunged 97% per share amid collapsing vaccine demand, comes from Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022, first quarter sales tank 69%, CNBC says 30%

CNBC, here:

Moderna on Thursday blew past estimates for first-quarter earnings and revenue, posting a surprise quarterly profit, despite lower demand for Covid vaccines, its only marketable product.

The biotech company generated first-quarter sales of $1.9 billion, driven by Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022. That’s down more than 30% from the $6.1 billion it recorded in the same period a year ago amid a resurgence of Covid cases.

Moderna posted net income of $79 million, or 19 cents per share, for the quarter. That’s compared with $3.66 billion in net income, or $8.58 per share, reported during the same quarter last year.

Seeking Alpha got it right, noting the inventory write-downs of "excess and obsolete COVID-19 products" nobody wants:

 

I'll just put this here for the record in the event CNBC later corrects their reporting without saying so:

Besides their bad character, what do Trump and Obama have in common in 2009 and 2020?

 Trump and Obama signed off on the two most fiscally irresponsible periods in post-war history, and Biden two years in looks set to join them.

The Executive is supposed to be a check on irresponsible spending. But both Trump and Obama went right along with it instead of vetoing the outrageous spending of the periods.

What else do they have in common?

Two crises, both of which plunged the country into hysteria.

The Great Financial Crisis did not begin to end until March 2009 when the FASB signaled its intent to suspend mark-to-market rules. The stock market bottomed almost immediately, but as with all cases of mass hysteria it took time for the panic to pass as other sectors recovered "one by one". 

The Pandemic Crisis gripped the country in March 2020, sending millions home from work, stocks plunging, toilet paper into shortage, businesses into bankruptcy, and on and on. With just about everyone vaccinated who was going to be by the end of 2021, the country gradually started to come out of it in 2022, eschewing jabs, masks, and social distancing as it became clear that the Omicron variant was infecting tens of millions despite all those measures.

2020 was the single most fiscally irresponsible year in the post-war since 1953. Federal expenditures, bloated by panicked bailouts, outpaced tax revenues by a whopping 216%.

Only 2009 comes close, at 210%, the second worst year on record.

Third, not shown, was 2010 at 196%, and fourth, not shown, was 2021 at 176%, each a part of the respective crisis periods.

Do you know what else those two years share in common?

Spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives.

In 2009 and 2020 its Speaker just happened to be the same person, as she was in 2010 and 2021.

Nancy Pelosi owns the four most fiscally irresponsible years in the entire history of the post-war. Her two speakerships literally busted out all over. 

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Bank failure No. 3 of 2023: First Republic Bank of San Fran Freako, California

 

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be about $13 billion. This is an estimate and the final cost will be determined when the FDIC terminates the receivership.

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