Friday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

It’s Good Friday and religious freedom is under assault with petty tyrants throughout the land running amok just before Easter.

The Old Man And The “C”

By Ben Garrison

Bon Voyage Bernie!

The old commie Bernie Sanders has given up on his latest presidential fishing expedition. His promise of ‘free stuff’ resonated with many, but the end result was the same. The sharks in the Democratic Party didn’t want Bernie and that was that. Instead, the Democrats have tied an albatross named Joe Biden around their unlucky necks.

I doubt Bernie will make another go at the presidency. He’s too old right now and has had heart trouble. His biggest trouble has been selling his communism or socialism, or whatever he wants to call it these days.

He wanted to reel in voters with his lure of free stuff. It did indeed attract many young voters, but those same young voters didn’t really turn out in the primaries. His bigger problem was many Americans realize socialism has never and can’t ever work. All the free stuff is quickly devoured. Once the money of others runs out, then workers must work hard to keep the free stuff flowing. Those workers have guaranteed jobs and pay, though. Why work hard if that’s the case?

Hard workers soon realize they receive no extra pay or advancement from any extra effort. They also see their co-workers getting the same pay for goofing off. Soon, everyone is goofing off. After all, the government guarantees free stuff and equality. Only the latter can be guaranteed. Everyone becomes equally poor.

The promised big fish of free stuff is soon reduced to bare bones. That’s when the government resorts to force. Everyone must work or face the threat of murder or gulags. That’s what the old Soviet Union did and it enabled them to last a bit longer than they should have lasted.

Bernie should retire, relax, and enjoy his millions. You can bet he won’t be doling it out to you and me.

Check out all of Ben’s great cartoons and commentary HERE.

Democrats opt for blackmail over small-business money — and the media covers for them

Via The New York Post

What a deal for Democrats: They get to hold the economy for ransom, and the media blithely cover for them.

On Thursday, Senate Democrats nixed a simple but urgent request to boost cash in the emergency small business loan program Congress set up this month from $350 billion to $600 billion.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin requested the cash because funds are running low, just weeks after the program launched.

Rather than comply, Democrats issued demands: They insisted the new money include $60 billion for “community-based lenders” that serve minorities, women, nonprofits and other groups. And the bill also had to OK an immediate $250 billion for cities, states, hospitals, food stamps and other needs.

“Everything is an opportunity,” explained House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Democrats, she said, will use talks over more loan funds as a way to address “disparities” in America.

And if they don’t get their way, no one gets a dime more. Never mind that businesses face bankruptcy or that 17 million people filed for jobless benefits in recent weeks.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pleaded for action: “I am literally talking about deleting the number 350 and writing 600 in its place.” That’s it. “Please do not block emergency aid you do not oppose just because you want something more.”

McConnell essentially promised other needs would be addressed in the next big rescue package, once it’s clear what those needs are. Yet Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats refused to budge.

And the press proceeded to cover for them.

Read the entire article HERE.

What Democratic Party Rule Will Do to America

Via American Greatness

Just like COVID-19, the governing philosophy of the Democrats is rolling out of the coastal Democratic strongholds to infect the entire nation. And just as with COVID-19, if and when it does, nothing will ever be the same again.

Recent and ongoing events, historic by any standard, have emphatically refuted anyone who thought a black swan event could not possibly disrupt America’s 2020 election. Recent events might also suffice to remind us that yet another Black Swan event could transpire before the November election, creating additional political disruption.

Regardless of how America’s public health and economic fortunes withstand this current ordeal, most establishment media along with the social media monopolies are firmly in the camp of the Democrats. They will present everything that happens between now and November in a manner to favor Democratic candidates and harm Republicans.

It’s hard to win when nearly every special interest group in the nation is getting its pockets greased by policies supported by Democrats, and every one of them is using every financial resource they’ve got to elect more Democrats.

What’s astonishing isn’t that Republicans still cling to a razor-thin majority in the U.S. Senate, it’s that there are any Republicans left, anywhere.

With billions of dollars pouring in from leftist billionaires, multinational corporations, and public-sector unions, the Democrats have set ambitious goals. The liberal website Vox identifies no fewer than 11 U.S. Senate races they claim Democrats could take and unseat incumbent Republicans. The politically neutral Cook Political Report ranks four races for the U.S. Senate, in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina, as “toss-ups.” As reported in The Hill, “changing demographics” (along with a stupefying amount of out-of-state money) have put North Carolina in play.

And what about Montana, one of four additional states ranked by Cook as “lean Republican”? To the delight of the Washington Post and the New York Times, popular Democrat governor Steve Bullock recently decided to run against Montana’s incumbent freshman Republican Steve Daines. Can he win? With or without additional black swan events, he’s got the entire weight of America’s Democratic establishment behind him. But Montana voters need to think carefully about the choice they make in November.

California Illustrates the Consequences of Democratic Party Rule
Montana may have harsh winters, but these residents of the frozen north are spared the inclement consequences of Democratic rule. They are, along with residents of states like Oregon (except in Portland) and Vermont, living in societies that don’t have to shoulder the economic deadweight and social disruption created by Democratic Party policies.

They need to come to California, where Democrats wield absolute political power. Then they need to visualize these conditions in every city and town and county and school district in their own beautiful state.

The first thing to understand about California is that it is run by leftist billionaires in partnership with government unions. In exchange for pension benefits that were breaking the budgets of California’s state and local governments prior to the COVID-19 sparked economic crash, public-sector employees have become a Praetorian Guard for the super-rich in California. Their tactics are brilliantly deceptive.

The premise of California’s Democrats is that they are saving the planet from wealthy corporations and saving the people from racists and sexists. Both of these premises are wielded like bludgeons to silence anyone who tries to question their policies. But the policies they’ve enacted have ruined everything. The poor are trapped in poverty, the rich get richer, and the middle class is leaving.

Read the entire article HERE.

Progressive Destruction: The Pandemic is the Perfect Time to Abolish the Family

Via Front Page Magazine

Amid lockdowns and “shelter-in-place” orders and social distancing from strangers and even friends, the coronavirus pandemic has been a time, for many of us, of reaffirming the centrality of family in our lives. For utopians of the radical left, though, the pandemic is an opportunity to deconstruct flawed, traditional familial bonds and remake the world along the lines of new-and-improved, collectivist possibilities. As author Sophie Lewis (pictured above) puts it bluntly in a recent opinion piece at Open Democracy: “We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.”

The author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis’ academic work “focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care,” which seems like a lot to fit on a business card.

Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it’s time to abolish the family,” Lewis addresses what she calls “the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home” to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home, and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”

“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down… A quarantine is, in effect, an abuser’s dream – a situation that hands near-infinite power to those with the upper hand over a home.”

Read the entire article HERE.

86% of New Yorkers Who Died With Chinese Virus Had Other Illnesses, Conditions

Via The New American

Data released from New York state show that the vast majority of Empire Staters who supposedly died from the Chinese Virus had at least one underlying disease or condition, and that almost the same number of people were more than 60 years old.

And even those in a younger cohort who died also had other health problems called comorbidities.

The latest data show that healthy young people aren’t likely to die from the disease, and invite the question of why quarantines are directed at the whole population, rather than the most vulnerable — the sick and the elderly.

The Numbers

Perhaps the most telling numbers are those that show the vast majority who have died suffered underlying illnesses or conditions: 4,732 out of 5,489 of the deceased, or 86.2 percent.

For instance, of those victims 80 to 89 years old, 836 had high blood pressure, 488 had diabetes, and 227 had coronary artery disease. Another 157 suffered kidney disease, 148 had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 136 had cancer, and 132 had congestive heart failure.

Those figures are similar in the 60-69 age cohort: 572 had high blood pressure and 444 had diabetes, while 133 suffered with kidney disease and 119 with coronary artery disease. Another 88 had cancer and 46 had congestive heart failure.

Yet even younger carriers suffered with other potentially fatal diseases.

Of those who died between ages 40 and 49, 83 had high blood pressure, and 77 had diabetes. Eighteen suffered with kidney disease, while eight had coronary artery disease and four had congestive heart failure.

Nine people in the 20-29 cohort had diabetes and four had high blood pressure.

The data also confirm that the most vulnerable cohort is 50 years or older: 93 percent of those who have died were 50 or older, and 82.3 percent were 60 or older.

Not surprisingly, those figures mesh almost exactly with those who suffered underlying disease: Victims 50 years and older suffered 96.8 percent of comorbidities.

The more than 5,400 people who have died in New York had more than 9,500 underlying illnesses or conditions, which means, not surprisingly, that some suffered with more than one.

Only 32 people younger than 30 years old have died.

Read the entire article HERE.

Student newspaper characterizes criticism of Chinese Communist Party as ‘racist’

Via Campus Reform

According to the University of California Davis student newspaper, criticism of the Chinese Communist Party is “racist” and “propaganda.”

On March 18, the California Aggie, the student newspaper of UC Davis, reported an on-campus incident in which a shipping container was spray-painted with the words, “The Chinese Communist Party = a danger to society” and a drawing of a man in a surgical mask.

The paper asserted in this “breaking news” article that the graffiti characterizing the Chinese Communist Party as dangerous was “part of a rise in racist and xenophobic propaganda all over the world, taking place in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic thought to have originated in Wuhan, China.”

The article also pointed to a statement issued by the UC Davis Aggie Student Union asking students to “uphold the Principles of Community in this time, especially in regard to xenophobia and discrimination attached to the coronavirus.”

“With the rise of xenophobia, racism, and attacks against Asians across the globe as a result of the coronavirus epidemic, ASUCD hopes to reaffirm our stance against discrimination,” wrote the student government association before calling out President Donald Trump’s choice of language surrounding the virus.

“With leaders in our political sphere today explicitly linking the coronavirus to China and Chinese individuals, we want to recognize that the virus is not targeting a specific racial population, nor should it be treated as such,” wrote the students.  Trump has correctly maintained that the virus originated in China. The president’s branding of COVID-19 is a part of a long history of naming diseases where they originate.

Read the entire article HERE.

Movement That Demands Forceful Silencing Of All Opposing Viewpoints Unsure Why Nation So Divided

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

U.S.—A political movement that immediately demands that people they disagree with be forcefully silenced by myriad means such as having their sponsors pulled and having them fired from their jobs expressed Friday that they weren’t 100% sure why the nation was so polarized and divided. Lamenting the significant problem of America’s deep divisions while simultaneously creating internet mobs to lynch those with whom they disagree, the nation’s liberals collectively stated they couldn’t figure out why polar opposites continued to drift further and further apart.

Representatives of the left, who recently campaigned for advertisers to tank a show they did not like and for a magazine to fire a man they did not agree with, expressed their bewilderment that the nation can’t just unite and all get along. A barrage of social media posts and opinion pieces by progressives all expressed similar confusion at the nation’s polarization.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” one opinion writer at Slate wrote, in an article entitled “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along And Also Agree With Me Or I Will Kill You?” “Why can’t our nation get along? Also, if you breathe an opinion even slightly different from our own, we will destroy you. But yeah, let’s all be united and stuff.”

“This is America, after all, a land where we are all free to express our own opinions, so long as they agree with mine,” the article concluded. “Or I will bring your livelihood crashing down so fast you and your family won’t be able to breathe.”

One liberal took a break from applauding The Atlantic for firing a conservative opinion writer for having conservative opinions to call for national unity on his Facebook account, while another progressive bookended his Twitter post calling for advertisers to pull from a conservative talk show with quotes about love, unity, and brotherhood.

At publishing time, sources had been able to confirm that the nation’s liberals were rapidly refreshing their Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for differing opinions, so they could find a new target to destroy.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and culture HERE.

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