Flotsam and Jetsam - CPAC '23

So, Stacy McCain went to CPAC, made some Celebrity Sightings, picked his long-shot of the election cycle, Why Not This Guy? (Vivek Ramaswamy), was unimpressed by some of the arrangements ‘Media Logistics’ & a Strange Memo From the National Affairs Desk and concluded Trump Is Still the Big Dog. At CTH, sundance hosts the Trump speech, if you wish to see it, President Trump CPAC 2023 Keynote Address. WaEx notes that at CPAC 2023  Tulsi Gabbard accuses Democrats of becoming ‘racists they claim to hate’. PJ Media's Stacey Lennox calls CPAC 2023: the End of an Era:

The hollowing out of CPAC is heartbreakingly evident. The staff of National Review has not attended for the last several years. The last time I recall seeing them was in 2016 when they gave me a commemorative Never Trump t-shirt. Still, it would have been a pleasure to have a beer with Charles C.W. Cooke during RinoCon at the Public House as we paid tongue-in-cheek homage to Mitt Romney. However, it appears that kind of levity and collegiality is no longer a feature of the conference.

Althouse finds an article in support "At the most famous annual gathering of America's conservatives, the chairs are empty, the energy is low—and everyone seems a little bit defensive about it." ""The Sad, Desolate Scenes of CPAC 2023" (The New Republic).Well, you don't expect a positive review from them. Also quotes Mike Pompeo, "Don’t hand that government more power under the guise of conservatism.... We shouldn’t look for larger-than-life personalities, but rather we should fight power in the rooms like this one."   Rusty Weiss at PI has the VIDEO: Senator John Kennedy Gives Hilarious CPAC Speech About ‘Weird’ Liberals And How the Biden Administration ‘Sucks’. Charlotte Hazard at JTN reports Taylor Greene vows at CPAC to push ahead with bill for national ban for youth transgender therapies, "The bill makes it a felony to perform gender affirming care on anyone under the age of 18." I'm OK with the idea, but let the states do it.

At Hat Hair, Capt. Ed wonders what name for DeSantis Trump will settle on, Tiny D? Or Tired D?

From Fox, Biden admin makes stunning admission on climate agenda in leaked internal memo, "Internal Biden admin memo rejects proposal it admits would produce 'greater energy security,' citing climate considerations." At Da Wire, Union Says Biden Administration Violated Labor Rules With New Transgender Policy, "How many people have been working on this… when it takes six months to get an initial disability decision?” 

The grievance went on to say the policy violates employees’ freedom of religion and free speech rights by forcing workers to address people by their preferred pronouns and creates a hostile work environment for employees who do not agree for political or religious reasons.

“This new policy will create a chilling effect on them and is essentially forcing them to agree with this political view in spite of their own personal political or religious beliefs,” it added.

At Am Great, Lloyd Billingsley considers Deception and Failure "From Wilson to Roosevelt to Biden, and beyond." KT at Hat Hair points out Prickly president pivots away from White House press when asked about China. ET reports Rep. McCaul claims Blinken is Stalling Congress on Withdrawal From Afghanistan. Althouse reads NYT, "Twice in the past week, Republicans scored wins and divided Democrats by employing an arcane maneuver known as a resolution of disapproval..."

".... The biggest victory came on Thursday, when President Biden told Senate Democrats that he would sign a Republican-led resolution blocking the District of Columbia’s new criminal code if it reached his desk. It was a reversal from his earlier opposition and a frank acknowledgment that Republicans had gotten the better of Democrats on the hot-button topic of violent crime. It is somewhat unusual for the president to have to confront legislation he opposes when his party controls at least part of the Congress — in this case the Senate — since his allies on Capitol Hill can usually bottle up legislation they don’t like and spare him from a veto or a tough decision...."

Writes Carl Hulse, in "Republicans Use Arcane Political Tactic to Thwart Democrats/The party has used resolutions of disapproval to confound President Biden and Democrats, forcing them to make tough decisions and debate issues they would prefer to avoid" (NYT).

Slate, cited by MSNBC whines about Why Biden Stabbed D.C. in the Back. Insty, D.C. SHOULDN’T EVEN HAVE HOME RULE, BUT DEMOCRATS DON’T SEE IT THAT WAY . . .  "Crime is the Democrats’ kryptonite, and listening to woke idiocy has been a huge, unforced error. Even Slow Joe is figuring that out."

At PM, Hunter Biden advised then-VP Joe’s office on how to answer questions about Ukrainian connection. Breitbart has a report that  Hunter Biden Linked to Chinese Military Company Now Aiding Russia.

At Da Caller, FBI Shielded Identities Of Undercover Assets Who May Have Been Inside Capitol On Jan. 6, Whistleblower Says. Insty quips OF COURSE THEY DID: "It’s going to turn out that they set this whole thing up, isn’t it? Given that it’s already been established that the government allowed/ encouraged weapons to move from U.S. gun stores to Mexican cartels, so that they could use the presence of U.S. guns in Mexico as an excuse for more gun control, we can’t even pretend that they’d never stoop to something like that." You'd have to believe the FBI is stupid to think they didn't have people embedded in the D.C. crowd, and whatever you think about the FBI, they're not stupid. also at Da Caller, FBI Whistleblower Claims Agency Forced Him To Juice Domestic Terrorism Numbers, FBI Moved To Target Pro-Lifers Under New ‘Threat Tag,’ Agent Says and Bank of America Worked With Feds To Target Gun Owners, Whistleblower Confirms. I see an investigation of their finances in the offing. Natalia Mittelstadt at JTN records FBI politicized J6 cases, targeted pro-lifers, whistleblowers tell House panel on weaponization "After the Supreme Court's​​​​​​ decision to return abortion to the states, the FBI prioritized possible threats against the justices from pro-lifers, focusing on "pro-life adherence," FBI whistleblower Garret O'Boyle testified." Bob Spencer at PJ Media notes The FBI Targeted Patriotic Conservatives Exercising Their First Amendment Rights: ‘They’re All Bleeping Terrorists’

Hill testified that on a nationwide call with all 56 FBI field offices, Steve Jensen, who was at that time the chief of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Center Section, asked the Philadelphia feds about their investigations of three individuals. “The Philadelphia office said the individuals had posted on social media about being pro-Second Amendment and anti-abortion, but that it didn’t mean they were ‘insurrectionists seeking to overturn our democracy,’ Hill recalled.” This cut no ice with Jensen, who shot back: “I don’t give a blank, they’re all bleeping terrorists, and we’re going to round them up.”

Sundance is concerned that the People Behind Biden Announce Creation of Formal National Surveillance State, Yet No One Seems Bothered.

Elevator Speech:

(1) The Patriot Act turned the intel surveillance radar from foreign searches for terrorists to domestic searches for terrorists.
(2) Obama/Biden then redefined what is a “terrorist” to include their political opposition.

John Sexton at Hat Hair is worried that 'Forest defenders' begin week of action to block Atlanta police training center. A good excuse to shoot a few more of them. 

Mike Miller at Red State reports on a Mom Who Tells Congress Teachers Union Sued Her for Asking if Her Kindergartner Was Taught 'Radical Gender Theory. The Peacock whines Resumes including ‘they/them’ pronouns are more likely to be overlooked, new report finds. Makes sense, they're more or less an admission that they're looking for an opportunity to sue you.

K.T. at Aces (not KT from Hat Hair, to the best of my knowledge) has a long post that features Jordan Peterson interviewing Chris Rufo, that's well worth the time, if you have it. Who's afraid of the conservative activist?

At Red State, 'Propagandist Nut-Crackery': Russell Brand Annihilates MSNBC Analyst Over Network's COVID Hypocrisy and from Twitchy, Russell Brand was challenged to give examples of MSNBC pushing misinformation (that was a BAD idea). Seriously, though, Capt. Ed wonders why The Atlantic wonders why we're still arguing about masks. It's the wrong question.

And this leads us to the right questions, which are these:Why were we prevented from arguing about masks in the first place, on social media and elsewhere, in part by government agencies like the CDC?

• Why were questions about mask mandates — government policies — shut down and marginalized as “denialism”?
• Why did these same elites try to paint people asking about naturally acquired immunity — a well-known biological reality — as the pandemic version of flat-earthers?
• Why did media and government paint people as racists for arguing that a novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan might not be coincidental to the lab in Wuhan that was conducting gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses?

The answer to that last question may be the easiest. As I have written earlier this week, the conclusion that COVID-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology sets up an accountability tree that threatened those in power during the pandemic. NIH chief Francis Collins reversed the previous ban on gain-of-function (GOF) research on pathogens over the prophetic warnings against it from the Cambridge Working Group. That decision by Collins in December 2017 allowed funding to flow through the NIH and NIAID headed by Anthony Fauci to groups like the Eco Health Alliance, which funded the Wuhan lab — even while the State Department warned the next year that their Level 4 biosafety practices were “sloppy,” and also predicted disaster as the Cambridge Working Group had in 2014.

I take it as a given that the WuFlu leaked out of the Wuhan Lab. What I still think is unknown, at least to the public, is whether it was the product of GOF research, and if so, how much did the US contribute to the funding. And I suspect very powerful forces exist to keep those answers buried as deeply as possible.