Category: zerohedge

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Some leftists are blaming “Russian propaganda accounts” for the embarrassing fallout from the Iowa caucus, fulfilling a prediction by President Trump that they would do precisely that.

The results from last night’s caucus were delayed to to a “reporting issue” related to an app called Shadow, the owner of which Tara McGowan is a Mayor Pete Buttigieg supporter and is married to one of his advisers.

Buttigieg declared victory last night despite internal polling showing he had lost to Bernie Sanders.

This prompted the hashtag #MayorCheat to trend on Twitter and that in turn prompted numerous hysterical Buttigieg supporters to claim the hashtag was a creation of Russian-controlled bots.

“When will the Democrats start blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, instead of their own incompetence for the voting disaster that just happened in the Great State of Iowa?” asked President Trump in a tweet.

When will the Democrats start blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, instead of their own incompetence for the voting disaster that just happened in the Great State of Iowa?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2020

Fact is, many on the left were already doing exactly that even before Trump tweeted.

“While I can’t yet prove it, I feel safe in saying that both #BernieWon and #MayorCheat are trending because Russian propaganda accounts are amplifying them,” tweeted David Slack.

“Putin’s goal is to divide us. Instead, let’s stand together, elect Democrats, and sanction his ass out of office,” he added.

Hi.

While I can’t yet prove it, I feel safe in saying that both #BernieWon and #MayorCheat are trending because Russian propaganda accounts are amplifying them.

Putin’s goal is to divide us. Instead, let’s stand together, elect Democrats, and sanction his ass out of office.

— David Slack (@slack2thefuture) February 4, 2020

“If you are legitimately tweeting the #MayorCheat hashtag then you are either: a) A Russian operative b) A GOP operative or c) A useful idiot playing right into Trump/Russia’s strategy of dividing the Democratic party,” tweeted another user.

If you are legitimately tweeting the #MayorCheat hashtag then you are either:

a) A Russian operative

b) A GOP operative

or

c) A useful idiot playing right into Trump/Russia’s strategy of dividing the Democratic party

Any Democrat is 1000X better than Trump. #IowaCaucas

— Ms. Krassenstein (@HKrassenstein) February 4, 2020

“Morons! #MayorCheat is trending because Russia is manipulating you idiots. Fuck all this! How are Americans this fucking stupid?” claimed Edan Clay.

Morons! #MayorCheat is trending because Russia is manipulating you idiots. Fuck all this! How are Americans this fucking stupid?

— Edan Clay 🇺🇸 (@EdanClay) February 4, 2020

“#MayorCheat Russia trolls are starting this and morons are making this trend stop,” asserted another.

#MayorCheat Russia trolls are starting this and morons are making this trend stop. #VoteBlueNoMatterWho

— Slomo (@slowmo1032) February 4, 2020

However, most respondents ridiculed the idea that anyone other than Buttigieg himself was to blame for the hashtag trending.

Some leftists are still so beset by Russia Derangement Syndrome, they think any criticism of their preferred candidate must be some kind of Kremlin-orchestrated conspiracy.

No wonder Trump’s approval rating just hit an all time high.

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Back in October, in the aftermath of the historic WeWork fiasco, we asked if the company’s new majority owned and anchor investor SoftBank is the bubble era’s (that would be now, for those unclear) short of the century.

While that thesis has yet to play out especially since the post-WeWork period was marked by another major reflation of asset bubbles courtesy of the Fed’s QE4 and the return of the ECB’s own QE, it appears that one by one the rats are starting to leave the sinking ship.

According to the FT, the US head of SoftBank’s $100bn Vision Fund is leaving after expressing concerns about “issues” at the technology conglomerate, which as regular readers know all too well, has suffered a string of setbacks over the last year, not only its catastrophic investment in WeWork, but disappointing returns on both Uber and OyO.

Michael Ronen, who as luck would have it is a former Goldman banker who joined SoftBank in 2017, told the Financial Times he had been “negotiating the terms of my anticipated departure” for several weeks. Ronen was the managing partner of its US investment office and in charge of the Vision Fund’s US investments, “leading its bets on transportation and logistics start-ups such as Getaround, GM Cruise and Nuro. According to the FT, Deep Nishar, a former LinkedIn and Google executive, and Colin Fan, a former Deutsche Bank executive and close associate of SBIA chief Rajeev Misra, are likely to take on Mr Ronen’s responsibilities in the Americas.

Ronen departure comes as SoftBank has failed to raise any outside investment for the company’s second Vision Fund, the FT notes.

He is not the only one expressing doubts about the fate of what until recently was the world’s most generous investor in startups: SoftBank is also in discussions about Ron Fisher’s future at the company, according to FT sources. Fisher, who is not a former Goldman banker, is SoftBank’s vice chairman and one of Masa Son’s “longest-serving lieutenants and was a leading advocate of SoftBank’s outsized bet on WeWork.”

Fisher joined in 1995, making him one of Son’s closest advisers, and while Son signed off on SoftBank’s $10bn-plus investments in WeWork, it was Mr Fisher who sat on the board of the co-working office-space provider and who worked closest with management on its strategy and growth plans.

So after WeWork took a multi-billion writedown on WeWork in Q4, one can see why he may be concerned about his future there, even though a SoftBank spokesperson told the FT, Fisher was “a valued member of the SoftBank family” and was “not going anywhere.”

Yet while Ronen and Fisher’s future is nebulous at best, a far bigger question is what happens to the man at the top: after a series of catastrophic investments shook confidence in the Vision Fund, founder Masayoshi Son has struggled to raise any outside capital for its sequel fund.

As a reminder, last July Son unveiled a roster of investors including Apple, Microsoft and the National Bank of Kazakhstan for the fund, which he said committed a total of $108bn, even without any funding from the first Vision Fund’s largest outside backers, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. However, none of the would-be investors have yet to firm up their non-binding commitments in the second Vision Fund, even though SoftBank has provided around $5bn in backing for the second Vision Fund to begin making investments, a lot of it “extracted” from the company’s own “volunteer” employees.

Ironically, even Saudi Arabia which for years was considered the world’s dumbest money, appears to have learned its lesson about “investing” with Masa Son: after contributing $60BN to the first Vision Fund, the Gulf investors “have become worried about the perception of pouring money into SoftBank funds following several high-profile flops from the first Vision Fund”, the FT cited people familiar with the discussions.

For its part, since the pulled WeWork IPO, SoftBank has scrambled to show the world it is a disciplined investor, announcingd new management at WeWork, and pressuring other companies it has backed to cut their losses and increase their profits. Alas, the investing world has not been impressed, and SoftBank’s share price tumbled 25% since last April when it hit its highest level since the early 2000s before a string of high-profile SoftBank-backed companies had embarrassing stock market debuts, including Uber and Slack.

Luckily for Masa Son, much of its poor performance has continued to be masked by stock price gains at China’s ecommerce giant, Alibaba, which has seen its shares climb sharply and reached a market value of $600bn. SoftBank, in its best investment ever, purchased and still owns a 25% stake in Alibaba.

Earlier this morning we pointed out that with the coronavirus pandemic showing no signs of slowing, and in fact claiming its second offshore death, after a surprisingly young, 39-year-old Hong Kong man passed away, US equity futures soared after the Shanghai Composite managed to stabilize and rebound from the worst drop since the bursting of China’s equity bubble as traders realized that Beijing will do as much as is needed, whether adding liquidity, fiscal or outright market support (as we discussed on Sunday) to support if not the real economy which is slowly grinding to a halt, then at least financial assets. And with China’s president Xi Jinping making a rare admission that Coronavirus epidemic is a threat to societal stability, the opportunity cost to intervene like never before is nil.

Which is why bulls today can thank the PBOC for the staggering market reversal that has sent stocks 1.5% higher (for now), and which will result in even more gains, because as China’s ability to stimulate its economy is now virtually nil, since China’s record debt load has now made it virtually impossible to push the country’s credit impulse higher…

… Beijing will instead throw the kitchen sink at risk assets and stimulating consumption and borrowing.

So what will China do next? First let’s take a look at what Beijing has already done, courtesy of Nomura:

• The PBoC cut the OMO rate by 10bps
• On Monday, the PBoC injected RBM 2.1T of short-term interbank liquidity, which against currently maturing loans, will see total liquidity in the banking system ~ RBM 900B higher than during the same period in 2019
• On Tuesday, the PBoC injected a further RMB 400 billion in reverse repo liquidity, marking the largest single-day addition since January 2019.
• The CSRC suspended securities lending from Monday until further notice, with some funds receiving so-called “window guidance” from regulators to avoid actively selling stocks
• The CSRC told brokerages that their prop traders “aren’t allowed to be net sellers of equities this week” (Bloomberg)
• The CSRC also said it would halt night sessions for futures trading and allow some share pledge contracts to be extended by as long as six months
• The MoF announced an interest subsidy scheme for new loans ear-marked for medical supply companies fighting coronavirus
• The MoF announced policies to extend loans to entrepreneurs and SMEs which have been hit-hard from the coronavirus, as well as potentially delay mortgage repayments or adjust credit policies to repay the loans for those individuals or entities who may have temporarily lost sources of income

So looking ahead, what will China do? According to Nomura’s Chinese Econ Team, expect more policy and fiscal-easing measures to be announced in coming weeks, and of course an avalanche of more money:

• Expect the PBoC to deliver a 50-100bp RRR cut and conduct more MLF operations and OMOs in coming weeks to inject both long- and short-term liquidity into the banking system (this would add RMB 800-1600BN)
• Expect the 1Y MLF rate to be cut by 10bps in coming weeks, which should be reflected in the release of the Feb “Loan Prime Rate” (LPR) to be released Feb 20th
• Expect to see waving, cutting or postponing tax and fee payments for the virus-affect regions, industries, companies and individuals for several months until the virus is fully contained
• Rising likelihood of increasing unemployment and medical insurance benefits for individuals who have lost income or been infected with the virus
• Expect authorities to grow bolder on fiscal deficits and increase the transfer of central government revenues to local governments in virus-affected regions, with Beijing raising the fiscal deficit target as well as raising the annual quota of net local government special bond issuance in 2020
• Expect Beijing to introduce favorable tax policies to boost final demand, such as cutting the auto purchase tax to boost auto production and sales
• Most critically, Nomura expects authorities to give local governments more flexibility in easing restrictions on the property sectors (e.g. price controls, caps on new home purchases and property developer financing), while also rolling-out more favorable urbanization policies to attract talent and migrant workers to large cities to beef up production and consumptions.

The biggest beneficiary of this arsenal of Chinese bazookas? As the chart below shows, it’s not Chinese stocks, which are barely up from a year ago. No, the biggest beneficiary is the one “barometer” which Donald Trump believes is all that matters to get him reelected in November: the S&P500.

Authored by Chris Andrew at Clarmond Wealth

It strikes me that one of the first actions following our super-duper new free trade agreement with the USA would be to export over to them a large box of British pencils.

On the 24th June 2016, by approximately 6am, we had managed to count 33,577,342 votes in the UK Brexit Referendum. These votes were counted by hand and we all voted by putting a simple cross in a box, using a trusty pencil.

Now, the voting in the Iowa Caucus has been closed for over 16 hours and, as of now, there has been no result. In fact only 1.9% of the votes have been tallied and are being reported. To put this into context in the last Iowa Caucus in 2016 approximately 171,517 votes were cast. It is both staggering and worrying that the world’s most powerful democracy cannot count.

What has happened?

Well it does not take much digging. The Democratic party were using an ‘App’ to count the votes; you cannot make it up but the tech company creating the app is called SHADOW, a name generally given to a Bond villain. To add to this Bondness, SHADOW is owned by another group called ACRONYM, whose CEO is Tara McGowan, Obama’s digital strategist. Gerard Niemira, who worked on Hilary’s 2016 campaign is CEO of SHADOW and finally David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, sits on the board of ACRONYM.  Additionally, the Buttigeg and Biden campaigns paid SHADOW for work done. Strange coincidences indeed.

This sleuthing took me all of 20 minutes when you asked me to see what the heck happened in the Iowa cornfields. There are two explanations: it is a conspiracy of the Washington Consensus cabal denying Bernie a clean win and essentially muddying the waters…or it is total and utter incompetence of bringing an untested, non-transparent technology into the democratic process.

Either we have a FUBAR (an American acronym…look it up!) of American democracy, which is now as brazen as any Developing world dictator wannabe. Or technology has made the population so dependent that they have forgotten how to organize and count. We can all make our own decision on this but my suggestion to PM Boris would be export our election expertise to America – along with some free pencils.

Iran announced Tuesday its judiciary is set to execute a man for “spying for the CIA” and attempting to pass information to the US related to Iran’s nuclear program, according to a Fars news agency report cited in Reuters. 

Authorities did not give a date for the execution of the convicted prisoner, identified as Amir Rahimpour, but only said it would happen “very soon” after the nation’s top Islamic court upheld his death sentence.

Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili alleged that Rahimpour received a “big payment” from the US intelligence service for his operation to leak sensitive nuclear information. “Amir Rahimpour who was a CIA spy and got big pay and tried to present part of Iran’s nuclear information to the American service had been tried and sentenced to death and recently the supreme court upheld his sentence and he will see the consequences of his action soon,” the spokesman said.

No evidence or further details related to the conviction were given — a similar scenario to prior alleged “spy rings” broken up by Iranian authorities. Last summer Iran claimed to have uncovered a major spy ring involving 17 people. The Rahimpour case appears to be related to the busted alleged spy network.

After that prior July claim by Tehran, which also included announcements that death sentences had been handed out, President Trump tweeted that “The Report of Iran capturing CIA spies is totally false. Zero truth. Just more lies and propaganda.” Iran had gone so far as to publish photos and personal information of alleged CIA operatives attempting to recruit Iranians. 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had told Fox & Friends at the time: “It’s part of their nature to lie to the world,” as well as, “I would take with a significant grain of salt any Iranian assertion about actions they’ve taken.”

The Report of Iran capturing CIA spies is totally false. Zero truth. Just more lies and propaganda (like their shot down drone) put out by a Religious Regime that is Badly Failing and has no idea what to do. Their Economy is dead, and will get much worse. Iran is a total mess!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2019

However, it was recently confirmed that an Iranian who had worked with US intelligence was executed in 2016. Deutsche Welle reports: 

The last alleged US spy to be executed in Iran was Shahram Amiri, who was hung in 2016. Amiri had defected to the US at the height of Washington’s efforts to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. When he returned to Iran in 2010, he received a warm welcome from politicians and was a popular guest on talk shows. He suddenly disappeared before it was confirmed that he was tried and killed for epsionage.

Iran on Tuesday cited another case involving two people falsely working ‘under cover’ of a charity who were also alleged spies.

They were each given a total of 15 years on spying and related breach of national security charges. Little further information was given, or whether or not they could be dual nationals. 

The Democratic candidates appear to be headed for an epic court battle to determine who won the Iowa caucus – a court battle that could potentially outlast the entire primary season and ensure that the real winner of Iowa (cough – Bernie Sanders – cough) is never revealed.

Following a morning of grumblings and whispers among the five campaigns – Warren, Klobuchar, Biden, Buttigieg and Sanders – the Biden campaign has sent a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party warning them that Biden is ready to take the issue of who actually won the primary all the way to the Supreme Court.

Biden campaign general counsel Dana Remus sent a letter to top Iowa party officials demanding “full explanations and relevant information” about the abysmal breakdown of the Dems support-tallying app.

JUST IN: Biden campaign general counsel Dana Remus sent a letter to top Iowa Democratic Party officials demanding “full explanations and relevant information” for the “failed” systems the IDP deployed for tonight’s caucuses.

Read the letter: pic.twitter.com/w6RtTVkDPt

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) February 4, 2020

The letter noted that both the primary system for counting votes – the app made by mysterious Bond-villain wannabe SHADOW – and the backup system – telephonically phoning in results – failed. Now, caucus chairs, the leaders of each individual caucus district, are attempting to report results via telephone to the party brass, but many of them aren’t getting through.

But here’s the kicker: The Biden campaign would like a “full explanation” of what happened before the results are released.

That little detail shows exactly what the Biden campaign is getting at. His team is clearly aware that the chaos benefited all of the centrists still in the running – Buttigieg, Biden and Klobuchar – while hurting Sanders (believed to be the real winner) and Warren.

The letter was sent before a Tuesday morning conference call between the IDP and the campaigns. During the call, the party said they would report half of the results at 5 pm ET (4 pm local time). There were reportedly many objections to this plan on the call. We imagine most of those objections came from the Buttigieg and Biden camps.

As Nate Silver explains, if the results aren’t released immediately, the winners will be robbed of the post-Iowa bump, giving the moderates in the race a ‘mulligan’.

There’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa won’t see their expected bounce, while the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan.@NateSilver538 on chaos in the Hawkeye State: https://t.co/agsB3UdK0s

— ABC News (@ABC) February 4, 2020

Other reports claim Bernie campaign staffers went around recording vote totals at many Iowa precincts – unbeknownst to the party machine. When their early tallies didn’t match the recorded results from campaign workers, his campaign sent 5 lawyers to complain.

I am now hearing that the Sanders campaign sent workers to every caucus to record the live results.

The DNC was unaware of this. When their early tallies did not match the recorded results from campaign workers, his campaign had 5 lawyers contact the DNC. Now they’re meeting.

— 🌹 Salem Snow For Congress (@Salem4Congress) February 4, 2020

Biden just needs to stay in the game until we get to South Carolina, where Sanders is weakest. Meanwhile, political talking heads are talking about how this incident could rob Iowa of its first-in-the-nation status. But if a legal battle erupts, Biden wins by default: A delay in releasing the Iowa results is a win for Biden and Buttigieg, and a huge problem for Bernie – at least in theory.

In reality, his campaign now has plenty of ammunition to revive the narrative that the primary has been rigged against him – much to the consternation of party loyalists.

American democracy – ain’t it grand?

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It’s too early to declare victory and too early to assume the virus can be completely eradicated in a few weeks on the SARS model.

Many people are already anticipating the end of the coronavirus pandemic and a quick return to “normal life” and renewed global growth. But if we examine the history of previous pandemics and the spread of this contagious virus, we reach a much different conclusion: “Wave 2” and “Wave 3” arising after the initial wave recedes are distinct possibilities.

The corporate media and conventional economists in the U.S. and China’s PR machine share a common goal: reassure consumers in the U.S., China and the rest of the world that everything will return to normal soon and they should continue buying stuff they don’t need (5G phones, etc.) with borrowed money.

Meanwhile, authorities in China are tracking down everyone with a Wuhan residency ID card in the hopes that quarantining every one of the tens of thousands of Wuhan residents who traveled before the citywide quarantine took effect will stop the pandemic.

There are two problems with this official assumption that house-arresting everyone from Wuhan will end the pandemic:

1. Given that Wuhan residents traveled freely around China for the month before the citywide quarantine, infecting people in other cities, there is now a pool of carriers who did not come from Wuhan, so quarantining everyone from Wuhan won’t stop these people from infecting others.

2. Much of the dirty, poorly paid work in China’s cities is done by “illegal migrants” from rural areas who don’t have official residency in the city. These people may have lived and worked in Wuhan but do not have Wuhan ID cards. They make up another reservoir of virus carriers who it will be difficult to track down and quarantine via residency permits and ID.

As mentioned previously, many of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese with overseas jobs returned home for New Years and are now anxious to get back to their jobs in other countries. Those without symptoms who are outside locked-down cities are free to find “work-arounds” to exit China by whatever means are available. Some consequential percentage of these people might be asymptomatic carriers of the virus.

As the city-wide quarantines limit the spread of the virus, victory will be declared and the quarantines will be lifted. But since the reservoirs of the virus have not been eliminated, the virus will start spreading again once the quarantines are lifted. This is “Wave 2.”

Pandemics tend to decline in summer and then re-emerge in Fall. These renewed pandemics may be even more consequential than the first wave.

If an effective vaccine is developed and billions of doses are made and distributed globally by Fall, then a re-emergence will have been thwarted. But that’s a tall order, and there may be areas where the vaccine (assuming one is developed) is not universally distributed.

A re-emergence in Fall would be “Wave 3.” Perhaps this wave will be limited to impoverished nations without adequate healthcare systems; perhaps the virus mutates in some unexpected way. It’s too early to declare victory and too early to assume the virus can be completely eradicated in a few weeks on the SARS model.

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An app developed by a Democratic digital nonprofit group that botched the Iowa caucus results is run by former staffers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Obama’s presidential campaign, as well as Google, Apple and former DNC employees.

The app was created by Shadow, Inc., which was acquired in January 2018 by the nonprofit, ACRONYM and paid $60,000 by the Democratic Party for “website development“ – which, according to the Huffington Post, was used to develop the app which caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their locations. According to the Post, Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira, COO James Hickey and product manager Ahna Rao worked together on the Hillary for America campaign.

As the Washington Examiner reports, the Nevada Democratic Party also paid Shadow $58,000 for “website development.”

Perhaps even more disturbing, however, is FEC filings which reveal Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s campaign paid the software company tens of thousands of dollars on July 23, 2019 for “software rights and subscriptions.” Buttigeig, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, claimed victory on Monday night before any official numbers were in, saying in a tweet that he was “going on to New Hampshire victorious.” His campaign claims they paid Shadow for “text messaging services to help us contact voters.”

ACRONYM CEO Tara McGowan was notably very excited after Buttigieg announced his candidacy.

the CEO of the company that owns Shadow lol https://t.co/0eIlvpHY82

— Tim 🕊🌿🐊 (@timtakestime) February 4, 2020

ACRONYM, meanwhile, has distanced themselves from Shadow, Inc., claiming that they are merely “an investor.” In a late Monday statement, spokesman Kyle Tharp stated last Monday that the nonprofit is “not a technology company,” and has “not provided any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party, Presidential campaigns, or the Democratic National Committee.”

ACRONYM also clarifies that it does not wholly own Shadow, saying that Shadow has “other private investors.”

But ACRONYM has previously said that it is “launching” Shadow — so the ties between these two organizations are obviously close.https://t.co/qCKmygQezs

— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) February 4, 2020

Shadow’s App was supposed to make reporting caucus results faster and more convenient, only to completely fail on Monday after numerous Iowa Democrats reported major problems trying to download the app and upload results.

In a Tuesday morning statement, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price acknowledged that Shadow’s app was at fault, and that backup procedures had taken longer than expected.

“While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data,” said Price. “We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. This issue was identified and fixed.”

The party says they used paper documentation to verify that the app’s data was “valid and accurate,” and that the results will be released “as soon as possible today.”

In yet another stunning statement from the Director-General of the World Health Organization, up is down, war is peace, and caution is dangerous.

Having once again earlier denied that the novel coronavirus is a ‘pandemic’, saying instead that it’s an epidemic with “multiple foci,” and with people dropping down dead on the streets in China (and being forced into ambulances), WHO Director-General Tedros reiterated his previous stunning praise for China’s “forceful measures” to halt the spread of the virus.

However, a member of the World Health Organization’s emergency committee on coronavirus has accused China of not reporting cases fast enough in the early stages of the outbreak last month, raising fresh questions about Beijing’s response to the health emergency. John Mackenzie, emeritus professor at Curtin University, said it defied logic that there was no increase in new cases at the same time that Chinese officials were holding local political meetings in January.

“There must have been more cases happening that we weren’t being told about. I think they tried to keep the figures quiet for a while because of some major meeting they had in Wuhan but I think there was a period of very poor reporting, or very poor communication,” he said, calling Beijing’s response “reprehensible”.

“I think [China] were very quick to let WHO know . . . about it being a novel disease, they were very quick in being able to isolate the virus and share the genome sequence but I think on some of the more government public health type issues, they have been rather recalcitrant.”

Additionally, Tedros appeared to blast the rest of the world, advising countries NOT to impose travel or trade restrictions on China, saying that such measures can cause “fear and stigma.”

This is happening at the same time as China is blocking travel to Macau and enforcing martial law almost nationwide.

Since when did the WHO not err on the side of caution? This is stunningly irresponsible advice.

We are reminded of Peak Prosperity’s Chris Martenson’s comments that WHO appears to be prioritizing money over human life.

The W.H.O. then proceeded to downplay the risk to public health and took pains to make it clear it doesn’t recommend placing restrictions on global trade & travel at this time. What?!? When we may be in dealing with a viral outbreak as (or more!) virulent than the Spanish Flu? (aka The Great Influenza)

Folks, this is nothing less than a political decision to keep business/commerce flowing without regard to public health. The W.H.O. has chosen money over people’s lives.

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad.

In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, with a near-certain majority vote to acquit the president of all charges.

As weekend polls show socialist Bernie Sanders surging into the lead for the nomination in the states of Iowa, New Hampshire and California, the sense of panic among Democratic Party elites is palpable.

Former Secretary of State and Joe Biden surrogate John Kerry was overheard Sunday at a Des Moines hotel talking of the “possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole.”

Tuesday, Trump takes his nationally televised victory lap in the U.S. Capitol with his State of the Union address, as triumphant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a humiliated Speaker Nancy Pelosi sit silently side-by-side behind him.

Democrats may declare the Trump impeachment a victory for righteousness, but the anger and outrage, the moans and groans now coming off the editorial and op-ed pages and cable TV suggest the media know otherwise.

History, we are told, will vindicate what Pelosi and the Democrats did and stain forever the Republican Party for voting to acquit.

Perhaps, but only if some future Howard Zinn is writing the history.

Reality: The impeachment of Trump was an attempted — and failed — coup that not a single Republican supported, only Democrats in the House and their Senate caucus. The impeachment of Trump was an exercise in pure partisanship and itself an abuse of power.

What was the heart of the Democrats’ case to remove Trump?

Trump failed to invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the White House, and held up military aid to Kyiv for several months, to get Zelenskiy to hold a press conference to announce that Kyiv was looking into how Hunter Biden got on the board of a corrupt energy company at a retainer of $83,000 a month while his father was the chief international monitor of corruption in Ukraine.

The specific indictment: Trump’s suspension of military aid imperiled “our national security” by denying arms to an “ally” who was fighting the Russians over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here.

And what was the outcome of it all?

Zelenskiy got his meeting with the president. He got the military aid in September. He did not hold the press conference requested. He did not announce an investigation of the Bidens.

No harm, no foul.

How did President Obama handle Ukraine?

After Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and intervened to protect pro-Russian secessionists in the Donbass, Obama’s White House restricted U.S. lethal military aid to Kyiv and provided blankets and meals ready to eat.

What punishment did House and Senate Democrats and anti-Trump media demand for the pause in sending weapons for Ukraine?

Capital punishment, a political death penalty.

Democrats demanded that a Republican Senate overturn the election of 2016, make Trump the first president ever impeached and removed, and then ensure that the American people could never vote for him again.

Nancy Pelosi’s House and the Democratic minority in the Senate were demanding that a Republican Senate do their dirty work and keep Trump off the ballot in 2020, lest he win a second term.

For four years, elements of the liberal establishment — in the media, “deep state” and major institutions — have sought to destroy Trump. First, they aimed to smear him and prevent his election, and then to overturn it as having been orchestrated by the Kremlin, and then to impeach and remove him, and then to block him from running again.

The damage they have inflicted upon our country’s institutions is serious.

U.S. intelligence agencies are being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham for their role in instigating an investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign. The FBI has been discredited by exposure of a conspiracy of top-level agents to spy on Trump’s campaign.

The media, by endlessly echoing unproven claims that Trump was a stooge of the Kremlin, discredited themselves to a degree unknown since the “Yellow Press” prostituted itself to get us into war with Spain. Media claims to be unbiased pursuers of truth have suffered, not only from Trump’s attacks, but from their own biased and bigoted coverage and commentary.

The NSC and State Department have been exposed as employing individuals with an exaggerated view of their role in the origination and the execution of foreign policy. Disloyalty and animosity toward the chief executive appear to permeate the upper echelons of the “deep state.”

Not in our lifetime have the institutions of government and the establishment been held in lower regard.

Almost all now concede we have become an us vs. them nation.

How we accomplish great things again, giving our seemingly unbridgeable differences, remains a mystery.