
Diversity!


President-elect Joe Biden released his 100-day plan intended to combat the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) on Tuesday evening. That three-part proposal, however, features at least one unworkable premise: “Everyone wears a mask.”
Biden’s proposed national mask mandate was not elaborated on in the initial offering but the incoming administration made an effort to clarify that prong of their plan after several hours of nonstop and trenchant criticism online; from various shades of political opinion.
“My first 100 days is going to require–I’m going to ask for a masking plan–everyone for the first 100 days to wear a mask,” Biden explained in a video posted on Twitter late Wednesday morning.
The soon-to-be 46th president elaborated: “It will start with my signing an order on day one to require masks where I can under the law, like federal buildings, interstate travel on planes, trains, and buses.”
Overall, Biden’s proposal is a bit unclear, contains multiple caveats, and poses definite legal problems.
Joe Biden has selected former general Lloyd J. Austin III to be the next secretary of defense, assuaging fears among antiwar activists that the position would go to bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy as commonly predicted.
As has become the standard ritual for Biden’s cabinet picks, the mass media are holding a parade to celebrate the fact that Austin would be the first Black chief of the U.S. war machine while virtually ignoring the murderous agendas he has facilitated throughout his career.
As head of Central Command Austin actively campaigned to resurrect the Pentagon’s spectacularly failed program of trying to arm “rebels” in Syria to fight ISIS, and in 2014 he backed immunity for U.S. troops from war crimes prosecutions by the government of Afghanistan.
He helped spearhead the Iraq invasion, and he is a member of the same private equity fund which invests in defense contractors as Flournoy and Biden’s warmongering pick for Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

On Wednesday, YouTube announced that it will begin removing any content alleging widespread voter fraud influenced the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election.
In the immediate aftermath of the November 3rd election, YouTube came under fire for allowing channels to publish videos making false claims about election results. In one instance, One America News Network, a verified YouTube channel, published a video declaring that “Trump won” the election. At the time, YouTube defended its decision to let the video stand, saying in a statement, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YouTube.”
The company went on to say that content from “authoritative news organizations” were “the most popular videos about the election.”
A frontrunner to be president-elect Joe Biden’s labor secretary oversaw the payment of nearly $1 billion in fraudulent benefits to California prison inmates.
Julie Su is the secretary of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which operates the state’s pandemic unemployment system. The system paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment payments to prison inmates and convicts, prosecutors announced on Tuesday.
The fraud involved over 35,000 unemployment claims filed between March and August under the names of California state prison inmates. The inmates included two serial killers responsible for the deaths of at least eight people, as well as the well-known murderer Scott Peterson, who was convicted in 2004 for killing his pregnant wife. The Sacramento County district attorney called the scandal “one of the biggest fraud of taxpayer dollars in California history.”

Since Eisenhower’s pointed warnings, and long before Trump’s election, the massive power and incomparable dangers of the U.S. Deep State have been widely and explicitly documented — from leftist foreign policy critics Mike Lofgren and Peter Dale Scott to the 2013 book by journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady entitled “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry.”
A three-part Washington Post exposé in 2010, by two-time-Pulitzer-winner Dana Priest and William Arkin, was entitled “Top Secret America.” It described the “hidden world, growing beyond control,” which “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” This, said the Post, all “amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.”
During the Trump years, the U.S. media alternated between vehemently denying the existence of this well-documented Deep State to celebrating the Deep State’s noble anti-Trump subversions. As I noted last week:
[Democrats and allied media outlets were] cheering reports that unelected security state officials were concealing information they did not want the elected President to have, and more recent reports that they misled him about troop positions in Syria to prevent his withdrawal efforts: classic Deep State coup behavior whereby unaccountable military and intelligence officials prevent the elected president from implementing polices they decide are misguided.
The more honest liberal pundits explicitly said they were grateful for the Deep State. Writing under the headline “God bless the ‘Deep State,’” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson — while dismissing right-wing claims of a “Deep State conspiracy” — nonetheless argued that the hidden intelligence officials who operate in the dark are performing a vital service in undermining Trump: “with a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.”
Biden, whose environmental agenda is heavily influenced by the recommendations of a unity task force set up with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) after the Democrat primaries, has proposed spending $2 trillion over four years to combat climate change.
A major portion of the money will be used to create one million new jobs in the auto industry by boosting the production of energy-efficient vehicles. In order to achieve the goal, Biden is backing legislation, introduced by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), to incentivize individuals to trade in their gas-powered vehicles for ones running on either electricity or hydrogen.
The former vice president has also proposed to adopt a 100 percent clean-electricity standard by 2035. A similar idea was initially raised by Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) during his own ill-fated run for the Democrat nomination in 2019. If implemented, it would ensure that all electricity produced in the United States would be “carbon-free.
Joe Biden may have just said the quiet part out loud.
During a Thursday CNN interview with Kamala Harris, Biden was asked about his relationship with his running mate, to which he gave a rambling reply capped off with the most awkward of ‘jokes’: that under certain circumstances he’d fake an illness and resign.
“It’s a matter of, the thing – we are simpatico on our philosophy of government. Sympatico on how we want to approach these issues that we’re facing. And when we disagree, it’ll be just like so far, it’s been just like when Barack and I did. It’s in private, she’ll say ‘I think you should do A, B, C or D,’ and I’ll say ‘I like A, I don’t like B and C, and s’go OK…’
“And like I told Barack, if there’s a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I’ll develop some disease and say I have to resign.”
Biden then goes on to gush over Kamala’s credentials – saying “The great thing is she has a background in the Senate on intelligence, the intelligence community, she has a background in the Senate on a whole range of things that are gonna be pertinent to what we have to do.”
“It’s a matter of who takes what, when.”
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