Monday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

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TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Medicare for Some ... Depending
on Their Politics?
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Illegals Learn Nasty Lesson as They Get 
Stuck on New Trump-Built Border Wall
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By Ben Marquis  
{ westernjournal.com } ` One of the primary critiques of President Donald Trump’s new border wall is that such a barrier would be ineffective at achieving the stated goal of increasing security... Specifically, some critics have ludicrously claimed that barriers at the border won’t stop drug traffickers and illegal aliens from entering the country. They argue that at best it would be little more than a costly hindrance that could be rapidly overcome. However, three illegal aliens from Mexico learned the hard way that the border wall critics were incredibly wrong in that assessment. The trio of interlopers attempting to sneak into the country ended up trapped atop a section of the 30-foot-tall fence in the San Diego, California, area on Jan. 5, The Washington Times reported. After U.S. Border Patrol agents spotted the three perched atop the tall wall, and with an assist from the San Diego Fire Department, they were promptly helped down from the precarious position and taken into custody. According to a news release from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, the three individuals had attempted to use the cover of a dense fog in the area to illegally enter the United States. Unfortunately for them, after reaching the top of the 30-foot steel wall near Otay Mesa, the three intruders found that they were unable to safely descend to the other side of the fence due to the wet and slippery condition of the mist-slicked steel. Making matters worse for them, it also appeared that they had been abandoned and left atop the wall by whoever had initially assisted their attempt to smuggle themselves across the border. Once safely lowered from the top of the wall, the three individuals — a man and two women — were questioned and discovered to be Mexican nationals who’d illegally entered the country. At that point, they were taken into custody and transported to the nearest Border Patrol station for processing. “These three were very fortunate to not have fallen from the top of the wall which could have resulted in serious injury or death,” Aaron Heitke, acting Chief Patrol Agent of the San Diego Sector, said in a statement. “These dangers are not important considerations to smugglers, who place an emphasis on profits over safety.” The Times noted that the three illegals trapped atop the wall were indeed lucky to have not fallen and hurt themselves. Falling off the wall is apparently a fairly regular occurrence that Border Patrol agents must deal with, according to Supervisory Agent Jeffrey Stephenson, who pointed out that injured illegal aliens are immediately given whatever medical attention is necessary as soon as they are discovered. He explained, “The falls have led to numerous serious injuries including broken legs, broken ankles, skull fractures, brain bleeds, broken scapula, fractured vertebrae, and appendicitis.”...  https://www.westernjournal.com/illegals-learn-nasty-lesson-get-stuck-new-trump-built-border-wall/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=CTBreaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=conservative-tribune  
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US has spent over $1B to prevent spread of coronavirus; border authorities on high alert
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by Sandra Sanchez
{ tristatehomepage.com } ~ The deadly coronavirus has cost the federal government over $1 billion already, and immigration officials are using extreme caution as they screen incoming travelers and migrants crossing the Southwest border... a South Texas lawmaker said. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar said during a news conference Wednesday that these costs so far include over $700 million in coronavirus research, which is being conducted National Institute of Health. He said officials with the Department of Homeland Security are in constant talks with members of Congress to ensure enough money is available to provide preventative measures “to make sure the men and women doing their jobs are protected.” The virus has infected nearly 275,000 people worldwide and is blamed for at least 2,228 deaths. In the United States, there are 29 active cases, including one patient who is being treated at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Cuellar says a reduction in flights from China, as well as travel restrictions on those returning from certain countries, has helped to keep the virus from spreading en masse to the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that “the U.S. government has taken unprecedented steps” to prevent the spread of the virus. This includes a Feb. 2 White House proclamation restricting entry to any foreign nationals who have been in China within 14 days...   https://www.tristatehomepage.com/news/us-has-spent-over-1b-to-prevent-spread-of-coronavirus-border-authorities-on-high-alert/   
US Coronavirus Cases Double 
as New Influx Arrives
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by westernjournal.com ~ At least 18 Americans who returned home from a quarantined cruise ship are infected with the new virus, bringing the number of cases in the U.S. to 35, health officials said Friday... More confirmed cases are likely among the returned passengers from the Diamond Princess which had been quarantined in Japan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. More than 300 passengers were flown back to the U.S. last weekend and are now quarantined for two weeks at military bases and hospitals. The U.S. tally dates back to Jan. 21 and includes three people who were evacuated from the central China city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began. The rest are mostly travelers who fell ill after trips to China; two spread it to their spouses. New traveler cases were announced this week in California, including one person in Humboldt County, who is said to be doing well and in isolation at home. On Friday, Sacramento County officials said a resident who returned from China earlier this month has tested positive. More than 76,000 cases have been reported worldwide, mostly in China. Of the U.S. patients, some have recovered. Others are being treated in special isolation units in hospitals. The virus causes a flu-like illness and can cause pneumonia. “We’re not seeing community spread in the United States yet,” the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier said during a Friday briefing for reporters. “It’s possible, even likely, it will eventually happen.” The CDC is adapting its 2017 guidelines for preventing pandemic flu for use if the virus starts spreading widely in the United States, Messonnier said. Closing schools and canceling gatherings could become necessary. To detect whether the virus already is spreading silently beyond the known cases, the CDC is adding testing to the network that normally tracks flu...   https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-us-coronavirus-cases-double-new-influx-arrives/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=patriotupdate&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=libertyalliance   

9 South Koreans test positive for coronavirus 
after returning from Israel
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by timesofisrael.com ~ The Health Ministry on Saturday said nine South Koreans tested positive for the coronavirus after a recent visit to Israel... The Koreans were in Israel from February 8-15 and were confirmed to have the virus upon their return to South Korea, according to a statement from the ministry. The ministry called on anyone who was in close contact with the Koreans to report this and self-quarantine for 14 days from the date of their last interaction. It also posted a list of places the group visited, among them Netanya, Caesaria, Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, Beersheba, Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Hebron. The statement from the ministry came shortly after a BBC reporter in Seoul said seven South Koreans from a tour group to Israel of 77 organized by the Catholic Church tested positive for the virus upon their return home. It was not clear whether they were carrying the virus when they arrived in Israel. Symptoms of the virus can take up to two weeks, and possibly longer, to present. South Korea has reported over 400 cases of the virus to date. “We’re trying to clarify if someone from the local churches was in contact with them the South Koreans,” Wadih Abu Al-Nasr, the Vatican’s spokesman in Israel, told Channel 13 news. “I’m hoping they weren’t infected in Israel. I wish them a speedy recovery and hope and pray that none of our people here were infected by this problematic virus,” he added. The manager of a Jerusalem hotel where the group stayed during its visit told Channel 12 that staff that cleaned the group’s rooms had been instructed by the Health Ministry to self quarantine...  https://www.timesofisrael.com/7-south-koreans-said-to-test-positive-for-virus-after-returning-from-israel/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2020-02-22&utm_medium=email   
NSA Whistleblower Reality Winner Submits 
Clemency Petition Alongside More 
Than 4,000 Letters of Support
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by Taylor Barnes  
{ theintercept.com } ~ On Monday, a Texas civil rights attorney launched a clemency petition for National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner in Dallas... The attorney, Alison Grinter, encountered Winner through Crystal Mason, a Texas mother who served time alongside Winner in a Fort Worth federal prison after receiving a five-year sentence for “illegal voting” in the 2016 presidential election. Mason and Winner became friends in the facility’s newsroom, where they spent long hours watching TV news and debating current events.  After hearing about Winner from Mason, Grinter began corresponding with the whistleblower’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, on Twitter. Last year, the two women drove hours across the state of Texas — Winner-Davis up from the panhandle, and Grinter down from Dallas — to meet at an Austin restaurant, where they spoke late into the night. “It was incredible talking to her,” Winner-Davis said of Grinter, “because she had the same dream and vision that I had and the kind of passionate energy about it.” Grinter pulled together a petition — signed by Winner and delivered to the Trump administration’s Office of the Pardon Attorney — that invokes the whistleblower’s military service; her health conditions and inadequate treatment behind bars; and the circumstances of her case. Winner, who was reported to have leaked an NSA document detailing attempted Russian cyberattacks against U.S. election systems, is serving the longest federal sentence ever given to a journalistic source under the Espionage Act, World War I-era legislation increasingly used in recent years to prosecute government insiders who share classified information with journalists. “Our country was attacked by a hostile foreign power,” Grinter said at a Monday press conference in Dallas alongside Winner’s family. “Our national healing process cannot begin until we forgive our truth tellers and begin the job of rebuilding what was taken from us: election security, accountability for those who endeavor to undermine our democracy, and safeguarding the American right to government by and for the people. None of this can begin in earnest while we are still punishing those who tell us the truth.”...  https://theintercept.com/2020/02/17/reality-winner-clemency-petition/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f425a2d764-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_02_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e00a5122d3-f425a2d764-131896129   

Foreign-Funded Dark-Money Groups Lobby IRS 
to Repeal Remaining Reporting Requirements
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by Lee Fang  
{ theintercept.com } ~ Dark-Money groups backed by foreign corporate donors are supporting the Trump administration’s decision to roll back... one of the last remaining ways for authorities to monitor the flow of unlawful campaign cash in American elections. In recent years, 501(c) nonprofits have become the entities of choice for secret campaign spending. These nonprofit groups, which do not have to report any donor information to the public, can receive unlimited contributions from any source and, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, spend unlimited amounts on elections. Foreign spending, whether by a foreign national or a foreign-owned corporation, is still illegal under federal law. But the law has been poorly enforced, and the few instances in which penalties have been applied in recent years have come in reaction to publicly reported foreign corporate spending to Super PACs, such as The Intercept’s reporting on Chinese corporate donations in 2016 and the recent federal indictment over a shell company owned by a Russian national that gave to President Donald Trump’s Super PAC in 2018. The one check on foreign contributions to dark-money groups has been the Schedule B form, which reports 501(c) donor information confidentially to the Internal Revenue Service. Under a new rule proposed last September by the Treasury Department and the IRS, nonprofits will no longer be required to report donor information, even to the government, allowing an unprecedented level of secrecy.  Lobbyists for foreign-funded groups have pushed the administration to move forward with the rule, which is close to being finalized...   https://theintercept.com/2020/02/15/dark-money-irs-reporting-501c/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f425a2d764-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_02_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e00a5122d3-f425a2d764-131896129   

Social Justice Rites
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by DAVID AZERRAD
{ lawliberty.org } ~ Anyone who has thought about identity politics—the great intellectual disorder of our age—must conclude that the term obfuscates more than it illuminates... Identity politics is first and foremost not a politics of identity, but an obsession with oppression and victimization. Only those who claim to be victimized get to have their identity recognized, affirmed and honored. Where we once bestowed on monuments, civic buildings, and streets the names of great generals, statesmen, and authors, today we only honor members of victimized identity groups. They get museums, holidays, commemorative stamps, movies, and books sanctifying their suffering and celebrating their accomplishments, both real and fake George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. Their purported oppressors—men, heterosexuals, and above all, white people—are denied this privilege. They must atone in perpetuity for the sins of their fathers. In Congress, for example, one finds a Congressional Black Caucus, both a Hispanic Caucus and a Hispanic Conference, an LGBT Caucus, a Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, and nothing stands in the way of Representatives worthless-Ilhan Omar and worthless-Rashida Tlaib starting a Muslim Congressional Caucus for those not persuaded by identity politics, there is, of course, no need for such groups. It goes without saying that there is no Caucasian Conference, Heterosexual Cis-Caucus, or Congressional Caucus for Men’s Issues. To the identarians, white, male, and straight cannot form identity groups because they sit atop the structures of power. In her thoughtful essay, Molly McGrath coins the term “Sacrificial Politics” to describe our current political dispensation. Sacrificial Politics, she correctly observes, is a “Christian-influenced” ideology driven by “the sacred and the desire for sanctity.” Under this pseudo-religion, victims of collective oppression are endowed with sacred status and all must defer to them. Any one particular individual is not required to have personally suffered to be held sacred. He must only belong to a victimized group and, McGrath reminds us, follow the script assigned to his group. Hell hath no fury like the opposition visited on an African American who criticizes affirmative action McGrath calls those who refuse to think of themselves as victims, Defectors. Given the ferocity with which they are denounced—Justice Clarence Thomas has repeatedly been compared to a member of the Ku Klux Klan—I think Heretics would be more fitting...
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Medicare for Some ... Depending on Their Politics?
cn9M9h-i8C8__y7pFaKtrTnhOTqA-XQTkPZ5FNm1oYlrZvTIIRCwZq3IZWgTb2jv8xe5U1Qgs99jpoz-1Ja0DiuAov1bgaXCzqLAr-CYgA7z09D0TyP5QA8uMXB1k4nA8-bX1kYG0DMJd467kN795DbIkx8=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=  Laura Hollis
 

Twenty-three years ago, I was asked to give a talk to the New York City Bar Association as part of a symposium titled “Executioners, Jailers, Slave Trappers and the Law: What Role Should Morality Play in Judging?” I was charged with addressing what judges should do when faced with moral quandaries over issues like partial-birth abortion (also called “dilation and evacuation abortions,” or “D&E abortions”) and physician-assisted suicide. While I was discussing the present, the other panelists — most of whom were judges — were discussing the past (as in, “What should judges have done about slavery?” or “Should judges have taken stronger stances against fascism in Germany?”).

Observations I made back in 1997 strike me as even more significant now. I said: “How does an unjust law come into existence? How does an evil law come into existence? … (These laws) do not come sweeping into our lives like a blizzard. They come in like cold air through cracks in a window. … I must confess, I am particularly concerned by the modern advocacy for physician-assisted suicide at a time when we are also arguing for more government intervention, if not control, over the health care system. … I am very concerned about the prospect of a faceless bureaucracy making decisions about the adequacy, the appropriateness and the finality of care. We all should be.”

One thing that did not occur to me in 1997 was the prospect of withholding health care based upon one’s political views. In the current climate, with Democratic presidential candidates advocating for “Medicare for All,” it should.

Universal health care activists love to point to England’s National Health Service, or NHS, as a model. It isn’t a model for plenty of reasons including chronic underfunding, staff shortages, bed shortages, long wait times (even NHS champions admit that patients can wait over a year for anything beyond basic care), “war zone” conditions for easily anticipated situations (like winter flu season) and shockingly poor cure rates.

That is concerning enough. But this week, Sky News reported that new rules that will take effect in April permit NHS staff to refuse to treat patients who are homophobic, sexist or racist.

To be clear, this rule applies only to nonemergency care. And it is intended to shield NHS workers from barrages of verbal abuse. (There are similar rules in place now that apply only to aggressive or physically violent behavior.)

Medical caregivers should not be subjected to vicious and insulting tirades by people they are trying to help. But I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the United States were to implement single-payer health care and such a rule were put into place here.

A few years ago, the idea that someone could be refused health care because of his or her politics would have seemed hysterical and absurd. But perhaps not anymore.

In 2013, it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service under the administration of former President Barack scumbag/liar-nObama had been deliberately holding up and delaying applications for tax-exempt status if they were filed by conservative organizations or had “tea party” in their name, leaving them unable to fundraise in support of conservative candidates in the 2012 elections. Lois Lerner, then-director of exempt organizations for the IRS, apologized, saying that these decisions were inadvertent and not deliberate discrimination. She was placed on administrative leave and then resigned. But Lerner refused to testify before a congressional committee when asked to do so, instead invoking her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. She was subsequently held in contempt of Congress. Congress then asked the IRS for Lerner’s emails, which mysteriously disappeared when her server “crashed.” This doesn’t sound “inadvertent.”

Similarly, Americans wonder why some people who are accused of lying to Congress or law enforcement — like Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos and former national security advisor Michael Flynn — receive convictions and/or face long prison sentences while others — like scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton and Andrew McCabe — get a pass.

When the IRS can discriminate against the president’s political opponents, and when we see a two-tiered system of justice that appears to favor rich, powerful or well-connected Democrats, that does not inspire much confidence that a government-run system of health care would be operated fairly and dispassionately.

As noted above, the new NHS rule is intended to protect health care workers from insults and slurs. But it is easy to see how something similar in the United States could be twisted for political advantage, particularly given the widespread tendency in some quarters to treat every political, policy or cultural disagreement as an expression of hate: racism, sexism, homophobia or other bigotry.

Left-wing organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center smear Christian activists as homophobic and post them on their map of “hate groups.” Social media giants pull down posts and videos from conservatives and pro-life activist groups such as Prager U and Live Action. College campuses are notoriously intolerant of conservative speakers, and shut down speakers and other events with threats of violence.

And then there’s the antifa movement, which treats every political disagreement as incipient fascism that justifies violence.

The point is not that these groups are arms of the government. The point is how easy it has become to smear people as “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic” or “haters.”

Under those circumstances — and given the discrimination we have seen our government engage in — I am even more leery of government-run health care than I was back in 1997.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68713?mailing_id=4876&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4876&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

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