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THE TOTALITARIANS' COVID CON UNINTENTIONALLY EXPLAINED BY CNN PUBLIC HEALTH 'EXPERT'
By Thomas Lifson, April 4, 2021

Too much freedom is a bad thing because it limits the ability of the state to coerce its subjects (“citizens” seems almost archaic as the Great Reset looms) into behavior they otherwise would resist. That’s the basic message explained to Chris Cuomo by a professor of public health policy that CNN favors with its airtime.

We lost an incredible amount of the freedom we formerly took for granted when Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, and was greeted by world leaders as a pandemic justifying the radical curtailment of liberty and enhancement of their own power. Now, they and their lackeys in the academic and medical establishment see the restoration of those liberties as a threat. George Washington University Public Health Policy Professor Laura Wen said it out loud – a classic Kinsley gaffe of accidentally telling the truth about something that politicians would rather the public not understand. A lot of people noticed, including Ace of Spades, Legal Insurrection, and Instapundit. This tweet with 38 seconds of video has gotten almost 4 million views:

Transcript via LI, with their emphasis:

It’s clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket to pre-pandemic life….and the window to do that is really narrowing. You were mentioning, Chris, about how all these states were reopening. They are reopening at 100 percent….and we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status.

Because, otherwise, if everything is reopen, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things…here’s all these freedoms that you have.” Because, otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy those freedoms anyway.” [emphasis added]

You can’t have people enjoying freedoms before the government forces them all to take a experimental drugs, some of which act on their genetic makeup. One that has caused severe reactions in some, including a number of deaths.            

As Ace puts it:

[T]he goal of stripping our liberties is to then offer us the "carrot" of getting them back... as long as we do what the government says.

When people in positions of influence and authority openly bemoan the restoration of liberty as a lost opportunity for state coercion, they demonstrate that a new, terrible era is upon us, one of “public health” tyranny.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com

MICHIGAN BUREAUCRATS WANT PERMANENT COVID REGULATIONS
Michigan workplace regulators propose permanent rules for temporary problem
By Michael Van Beek, April 19, 2021

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer just extended emergency COVID-19 rules that all Michigan employers must follow. Among other things, they require businesses to conduct daily health screenings of employees, require masks to be worn whenever anyone could be within six feet of someone else and isolate employees who have a suspected case of COVID. Unless rescinded, these rules will continue until October. But they could last even longer, because the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration wants to transform these emergency rules into permanent ones.

In the department’s filings, required by state law to create new administrative rules, MIOSHA admits that only one other state in the country has created permanent COVID-19 regulations like these — Virginia. But the Virginia rules MIOSHA references are labeled “emergency temporary standards,” so it is not clear that this is the case. Either way, Michigan is one of the first states where unelected bureaucrats are seeking permanent COVID regulations on businesses.

The department says in its filings with the state’s Office of Administrative Hearings and Rules that these regulations are needed because “Michigan’s experience with COVID-19 demonstrates that the disease can spread rapidly without protective measures and standards in place.” But that rationale doesn’t hold much water, considering identical emergency rules have been in place since last October, and Michigan has experienced two separate COVID-19 waves since then.

Regardless of whether the state should impose permanent regulations in response to a temporary emergency, the proposed rules raise concerns for several other reasons. Here are some of them:

They do not automatically expire when the COVID-19 pandemic is over. Even after the state health department rescinds its “epidemic orders” and no other emergency declarations are active, these rules can stay on the books. They only require state bureaucrats to “examine the continued need for these COVID-19 rules” after the state’s other emergency controls are lifted.

The rules do not mention the word “vaccine” and could remain in place regardless of how many people are vaccinated. This means that employers would still have to require their employees to wear masks, work from home and socially distance even if the entire workplace is fully vaccinated.

Some of the proposed rules originate from mandates issued by Gov. Whitmer through executive orders last spring and are based on an outdated understanding of the coronavirus. For instance, they prohibit employees from sharing equipment and require employers to “increase facility cleaning and disinfection.” That’s because last spring it was thought that virus could easily spread on surfaces. That’s no longer supported by the science, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that the chance of catching COVID from surface contact is one in 10,000.

Some mandates are ill-defined and poorly written, making it difficult for employers to know if they are complying. For example, they require businesses to “create a policy promoting remote work for employees to the extent that their work activities can feasibly be completed remotely.” But what counts as “feasible” or “promoting” is not defined, so employers will have to make a guess of it.

The rules turn businesses into mask police; it mandates that they require customers to wear face coverings. Current epidemic orders — mandates from the state health department distinct from MIOSHA rules — obligate everyone two and older to wear masks in public. But even after those orders are lifted, these rules would obligate employers to force customers to mask up nevertheless. Businesses will be stuck between turning away customers who don’t want to wear masks (even fully vaccinated ones) or risk state penalties.

As part of the rulemaking process, the department must submit a form called a “regulatory impact statement and cost-benefit analysis,” which requires it to consider the compliance costs these rules will impose on Michigan businesses. Amazingly, and somewhat disingenuously, MIOSHA claims these rules will impose “no additional burdens.” Its reasoning is that identical mandates are already in place, so businesses won’t face any new costs if these rules are made permanent. That’s akin to knocking a guy to the ground and then claiming that pinning him there won’t do him any harm because he’s already lying down.

Given an inch, MIOSHA stands poised to take a mile. Unfortunately, this has been the typical approach by the Whitmer administration, perhaps the only consistent aspect of her COVID-19 strategy.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited. 

USA STANDS UP FOR AN EMBEZZLER, BUT NOT FOR A MILLION SLAVES
By Don Surber, 4/19/2021 https://donsurber.blogspot.com

Remember way back on January 19, when America had a president?

The Biden administration sent one of its boys -- national security adviser Jake Sullivan -- on CNN to rattle a saber over the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who is in prison on embezzlement charges, a fact that CNN conveniently omitted from its report.

Sullivan said, "We have communicated to the Russian government that what happens to Mr. Navalny in their custody is their responsibility and they will be held accountable by the international community. In terms of the specific measures that we would take, we are looking at a variety of different costs that we would impose and I’m not going to telegraph that publicly at this point.

"But we have communicated that there will be consequences if Mr. Navalny dies."

Ah yes, the vaunted International Community.

You know, the same lummoxes who cower before Red China and refuse to call it out for enslaving and sterilizing a million Uighur Muslims.

Why are we punishing Russia for imprisoning Navalny? Our own American dissident, Lyndon LaRouche, went to prison after being convicted of mail fraud after running for president in 1976, 1980, 1984, and 1988. He ran four more times, including 1992 when he ran from prison.

Being a dissident does not grant one immunity from prosecution. Let us not deify Navalny. He falls somewhere between Konrad Adenauer and LaRouche when it comes to dissidents.

The same people who decry a fake interference by Russia in our 2016 presidential campaign are trying to interfere with Russia's next election.

The hypocrisy does not bother me because I expect Washington Establishment politicos and pundits to be hypocrites who do exactly the opposite of what they say.

My complaint is that this is a phony issue compared to the very real enslavement and pending genocide of Uighur Muslim in Red China.

Threats of sanctions on Russia are tiresome and pointless.

Sanctions on Red China would get response.

But Biden owes his presidency to the Communist Covid, does he not?

So the sabers are rattled on CNN against Russia, while Nike continue to import its slave-made shoes unmolested.

BOTTOM LINE: DEMOCRATS ARE AFRAID OF YOU
By Christopher Chantrill, March 30, 2021

I’m having a problem deciding whether the Biden administration is stupid or evil or just flat-out afraid of us Commoners.

And then I realized that it’s all three. Here’s why.

Our liberal friends never imagined that a Trump could happen. Nothing in their world prepared them for him. So what happens when you are confronted by something completely unexpected? You stop dead in your tracks.

That is one of the basic themes in Jordan B. Peterson’s oeuvre. As he writes in Beyond Order. 12 More Rules for Life:

Many herbivores, comparatively defenseless, facing imminent and brutal death, freeze in place, paralyzed by fear… But to have no more courage than a rabbit is definitely not to be everything you could be.

The Real Five Laws of American Politics

And Nancy Pelosi is no herbivore, despite her fetish for storing ice-cream in $24,000 refrigerators. Non-herbivores, after freezing in place for a moment when threatened by the fearsome Trump dinosaur, decide what to do next. Friend or foe? Should Dems ignore Trump as a flash in the pan? Should they figure he represented a few dumb deplorables? Or should they treat him as an existential danger?

We know what happened. The Dems chose Door Number Three and embarked on a mission to destroy Trump and everything he represented.

When you choose all-out war, the next thing that happens is that you make Trump and his supporters the frightful enemy, that will smash everything we hold dear -- reinstate Jim Crow, smash our wonderful administrative state, and make every woman into a house slave of the patriarchy -- unless we act now. And then you bombard your supporters with non-stop propaganda, just like our great leaders did in World War I and II and the Cold War.

Were they right? Did Trump and his MAGA supporters represent an existential threat to the progressive project? Or was the real problem that ordinary American Commoners don’t get no respect from the Democratic educated class, and Donald Trump made them believe that he cared about people like them? You decide.

I suspect that if the Dems had given Trump half a loaf then the whole Trump-MAGA phenomenon would have died away and by 2022 the Dems would be winning a big second-term midterm, and back to business as usual.

But they fought Trump for every slice of the loaf, and the rest is history.

Today the Dems are so scared of the Trump dinosaur that they have convinced themselves they need to revamp the elections system with HR1, protect Capitol Hill with troops and a fence, and ram their agenda down the throats of the opposition in a nearly 50-50 Congress. It is a fight to the death, with no quarter.

Yet their agenda of unlimited immigration, Green New Deal, and systemic racism has absolutely nothing for the ordinary American Commoner. Do they really think they can game the election system enough to stop the blowback in 2022?

To me, the obvious folly and knavery of all this is self-evident. The question I ask is this: is there any way we can persuade our Democratic friends to step back from their determination to win at all costs, to slay the evil dragon of Trumpism even if they destroy America in the process?

The answer is: probably not. When you have persuaded yourself and your supporters that you are fighting evil -- especially an evil dragon -- you are fighting for survival and for good over evil and nothing you do is too much if it slays the evil dragon.

Back in the day some people thought it would be a good idea to separate morality and politics just a little. The idea was that if you limited government to stuff that almost all people could agree on, such as fighting foreign dictators and domestic thieves and robbers, then people could practice their different moralities without fighting over them in government.

But then, of course, whatabout slavery? Whatabout the workers? Whatabout women? Whatabout systemic racism? Whatabout the inalienable right of transgenders to compete in women’s sports? And off we go to the races.

Did you know there is a word for a society that combines politics and morality? Totalitarian. It might not be such a problem were it not for the historical record, that when you combine morality and politics you get the killing fields of the war of all against all.

Do our liberal friends not get that? Well, maybe, but meanwhile they have terrified their supporters into believing that white supremacy will kill us all.

I suppose the best we can hope for is a resounding 2022 midterm to return Congress solidly into the Republican column -- despite the Democrats having done everything possible to make sure that no Republican ever wins an election ever again.

Then, all of a sudden, Democrats will discover the importance of minority rights in the legislature, the eternal sanctity of the filibuster, and the horror of legislating morality.

Christopher Chantrill@chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com

SUNRISE SIDE REPUBLICAN WOMEN'S CLUB

The Sunrise Side Republican Club holds monthly meetings on the 4th Monday of the month.  The location and speaker will be announced for each meeting.  Unless otherwise stated, the lunch will be at 11:30 a.m.

The officers are: Linda Glomski, President, 739-7170, Jane Hayward, Vice President, 739-3126, Sonia Glass, Secretary, 739-9731, and Rachel McCready Treasurer, 362-2337.

 You can correspondence to SSRWC P.O. Box 234 Tawas City, MI 48764.  

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