As it became clear Mitt Romney would be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, the Obama campaign fired up its Chicago-style machine to attack the incumbent president’s election foe. Team Obama identified several Romney donors to smear publicly; one was a wealthy businessman from Idaho.

A former Democrat Senate staffer, according to a 2012 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, contacted an Idaho courthouse seeking the divorce records of Frank VanderSloot, who had donated $1 million to Romney’s campaign. The operative was traced to a professional opposition research shop based in Washington, D.C.

The name of the outfit? Fusion GPS.

It might seem overheated to say electing Joe Biden would turn America and the world over to Communist China, but is it?  Not in the slightest.

Joe, you see, realizes an elementary truth about communism as practiced in China, Russia or wherever it takes power—it exists on corruption. Corruption was and is one of the motors of communist, indeed all totalitarian, societies, second only to nepotism.

Biden already knew this in 2014 when he flew to Beijing on Air Force Two accompanied by his crack-loving, womanizing son Hunter of Burisma fame. Hunter returned with $1.5 billion investment for his BHR Equity Investment Fund Management.

And what might the Chicoms expect their ROI will be?  Especially when they’ve got how the whole deal went down on surveillance camera.

TTP background for Cashill, from the August 3, 2018 HFR:

 “In May of last year, Fox reported that “Murdered DNC Staffer Seth Rich Shared 44,000 Emails with Wikileaks.”  He was infuriated about John Podesta and the DNC rigging the primaries against Bernie Sanders and for Hillary.

Shortly afterwards, the suspicion is, Podesta hired thugs to murder him – then began inventing the cover-up myth that the Russians did it by hacking into DNC computers – impossible as the clock speeds of the email downloads show it was done on the inside, not via an external internet connection.”

Clevenger represents Ed Butowsky, a high-profile author and financial adviser who dared to ask questions about the late Seth Rich and was sued for his troubles.

In the response to the coronavirus pandemic, leftists see a model for the future.

“Not only will America need a massive dose of big government to get out of this crisis,” one wrote, “but we will need big, and wise, government more than ever in its aftermath.” As a conservative, I’m going to argue the opposite.

What has happened in this crisis so far is not an indicator of the future. A new era of big government in the economy is unlikely, undesirable and far from inevitable.  Here’s why this doesn’t herald a new age of big government.

Bethany Mandel, one of the editors at Ricochet, on Wednesday (5]07) shared a thread on Twitter about the Wuhan coronavirus and the need to "flatten the curve."

From the start of this pandemic, Americans were told to practice social distancing, wash their hands and stay at home as much as possible. At first we were told to do this for 15 days... then 30. Now it's beginning to seem like a never-ending cycle. Now she says, “I am done.”

It's as though these government officials fail to remember what the term "flatten the curve" means. The goal was to keep the virus from spreading as much as possible.  Bethany says “I am done” with that.

But people are out of work. Businesses are going under. People are losing their livelihoods. Millions have filed for unemployment. What they want – and need – isn't a government handout in exchange for a lockdown but the ability to go back to work.

Bethany Mandel did an excellent job of explaining that sentiment:

The more we learn about the evils done to Michael Flynn, and they increase day by day, the more the FBI comes to resemble the KGB.

Or is it the earlier version, the NKVD, whose leader, Lavrentiy Beria, famously declared, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

James Comey—the head of the FBI during this period of extraordinary moral turpitude—never said anything anywhere near that pithy or memorable, but he did Beria one better.

Comey, with then-agent Peter Strzok, didn’t just find a crime, they invented one.  So. What was really going on with what was essentially the “forced confession” of Flynn?

It’s a legitimate question. For the truth is, the media exists in name only but not in fact.  If we lived in a fair and just world, most of the current media would simply go away and try something else.

The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well.

The crisis instead is that they are now almost always wrong, and predictably wrong because they are lazy and biased—and they deny it to the point of self-delusion. The result is that, for all practical purposes, journalists no longer exist for the general public as sources of news.

Nowhere has the media nadir been clearer than in the case of ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.  It’s the latest evidence the walls really are closing in on a vanishing media.

Suifenhe is a county-level city on the eastern edge of China’s 4,300-kilometer/2,500 mile border with Russia. It is 2,000 km away from Wuhan, where the COVID-19 crisis began late last year, and until recently, the epidemic may have felt quite distant.

Locally, Suifenhe is best known for a series of increasingly extravagant national gates in its land port, which are designed to project China’s progress over recent decades, in the face of Russia’s simultaneous decline.

Right now, it is the focus of the huge problemsbetween Russia and China due to the China flu virus.