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Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students enroll at U.S. colleges and universities each year, and right now, a lot of them are freaking out.

As schools try to figure out how to start the fall semester amid the coronavirus pandemic, some — including Harvard University and the University of Southern California — are opting for online-only instruction. And that means their foreign students will have to leave or transfer, according to new rules issued Monday by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency.

In order to keep their student visas, foreign nationals have to take in-person classes, according to ICE. The new guidelines quickly sparked rage and anxiety in China, which sends more students to U.S. schools than any other country.

Not to mention rage and anxiety amongst college administrators — typically, foreign students pay full freight, and colleges depend on that cash flow to keep in the black.

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The father of a 19-year-old killed in Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) said he received a call from President Donald Trump regarding his son’s death, but not from Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan.

In an interview, Wednesday, Horace Lorenzo Anderson Sr., spoke about the murder of his son and said that Trump reached out after hearing the news. Lorenzo mentioned that Durkan, who allowed for the Autonomous Zone to stay up for weeks, had not yet called him.

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Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois announced on Thursday that she is blocking Senate confirmation of 1,123 senior US Armed Forces promotions until she receives assurances that the promotion of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key witness in President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, won’t be blocked.

Duckworth, a combat veteran who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is seeking written confirmation from Defense Secretary Mark Esper that he has not and will not stop Vindman, a decorated veteran, from being promoted to the rank of Colonel.

Duckworth’s power play, which her office described as “unprecedented in modern history,” takes advantage of unanimous consent procedures in the Senate that are used to efficiently conduct Senate business. Typically, a large batch of non-controversial military promotions, like the ones Duckworth is holding up, would be passed all at once with just a few words exchanged on the floor between Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and whoever is the presiding officer.

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NOT the Babylon Bee.

Steve Sailer.

My wife’s black friend from the office who became a Chicago policewoman told us that she was amazed by the number of calls they went on to adjudicate really stupid domestic disputes, such as the time a man and woman were having an argument over which TV show to watch, so they called 911 to send out a police officer to tell them who was right about which show was better.

So, there are a lot of calls, especially from the black community, demanding the police come out and resolve inane disputes that shouldn’t require a policeman.

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There is really no reason to have a Department of Education; education is none of the business of the Federal government. It was carved out of the old HEW department and made a full cabinet slot in order to funnel money to the teachers’ unions and lock in their votes for the Democrats — it’s pure pork, from start to finish.

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Over the weekend Minneapolis’s FOX 9 broke Tom Lyden’s story of the three Minneapolis city council members who have private security officers protecting them at city expense. Tom’s story is posted here. The video is below.

The three council members are vocal proponents of substituting a Department of Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows for the Minneapolis Police Department. They all voted in favor of the ordinance advancing such a proposal last week. I posted a copy of the ordinance here yesterday.

The council members — Andrea Jenkins, Phillipe Cunningham, and Alondra “Arma virumque” Cano — are a little vague about the threats to which they have been subject. Lyden obtained this giggle-inducing quote from Jenkins: “My concern is the large number of white nationalist(s) in our city and other threatening communications I’ve been receiving.” I’m thinking the number of white nationalists in Minneapolis must be smaller than the the number of Minneapolis members in our local chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Considerably smaller.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, or the place would be like Texas.

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Democrats say Black lives matter but it’s becoming clear they only matter sometimes, which explains why Democrats blocked Tim Scott’s justice reform bill.

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While the broadcast networks spent over seven combined minutes (7:25) Wednesday evening huffing about a D.C. appeals court ordering the case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn be dropped, and suggesting that Attorney General William Barr was corrupt, ABC, CBS, and NBC were on a mission to cover up evidence that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had a hand in the Russia probe. They also blacked out how Biden had lied about not knowing anything about the investigation.

They wouldn’t do that, would they?

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“You’re the only president in my 23-year career that has actually come down to the border multiple times to look at — assess what actually needs to be done,” president of the National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd said in a conference with Trump and several other officials, according to the Washington Examiner.

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One of the most pernicious phenomena of modern times is the collusive lawsuit. This is how it works: a left-wing organization sues a government agency that is also controlled by the left. The lawsuit alleges that the agency is obliged to do something that the agency would like to do, but the Democrats can’t get it passed. Then the parties–supposedly adverse, but actually in collusion–“settle” the case by having the agency agree to do what it wanted to do all along. If all goes well, a court enters an order enforcing the settlement. So the net effect is that a policy that the Democrats couldn’t get passed is now a court-ordered mandate. This happens often.

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In Minnesota, Democrats control the House side of the legislature, but Republicans control the Senate. Thus, if police “reform” is to be enacted, the two parties must agree.

They don’t. Republicans are in favor of reform legislation. They back eleven steps including banning choke holds and requiring officers to stop colleagues from using excessive force. Those two measures alone, if followed, would have saved the life of George Floyd.

But Governor Walz calls the Republican proposal “weak sauce.” He and his fellow Democrats demand a more radical bill.

Among the provisions Democrats insist upon are restoring voting rights to tens of thousands of felons (which has nothing to do with police reform) and placing the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, in charge of prosecuting police killings. They also demand a ban on “warrior training” which, as I understand it, teaches police officers how to fight off attacks.

Democrats want felons to be able to vote because felons are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, as the most cursory thought will reveal to be true.  It’s just another case of ‘Let No Crisis Go To Waste’ political maneuvering.

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If you violate federal immigration laws and settle in New York, the state will give you a driver’s license (and lots of other benefits too).

If you work at the New York Department of Motor Vehicles and you comply with a request for information from either Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), you could be charged with a Class E felony, be locked up for as long as five years, and forfeit many basic rights, including the right to vote.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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More evidence that hugely expensive public taxpayer subsidized pack-em-in-like-sardines transit systems are Just So Fifteen Minutes Ago. (Not to mention breeding grounds for disease and crime.)

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All of them are Democrats, and almost all of them are black.

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If they wanted to give DC residents representation, they merely need to give DC back to Maryland, as the did with the portion that fell in Virginia. The federal government doesn’t need its own Fantasy Island — they don’t do anything with it anyway, now that they have a city administration to give out jobs to black people.

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Senator Durbin, who has been on the public payroll all his adult life, is certainly free to introduce legislation that he regards as better, if he doesn’t like what Senator Scott ( the Only Black Senator) has done.

UPDATE: Sen. Tim Scott Slams Dick Durbin For Calling His Police Reform Bill ‘A Token’

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The Germans argue that they pick up financial slack in other ways, like accepting Syrian refugees. Creating a refugee crisis in Europe was a choice. But it has nothing to do with defense of the continent from … who? Let’s not forget it was Germany that shut down its clean-ish nuclear energy program and made a $10.5 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline import deal with Putin, potentially giving Moscow more political leverage over Europeans than it has had in decades. It is only American sanctions that are holding up the deal.

Germany, incidentally, boasts a $3.948 trillion national GDP while Russia has a GDP of $1.658 trillion. There’s little reason for the United States to continue to subsidize the budget of a nation well positioned to defend itself.

Why are we spending a single dime on keeping troops in Germany to defend against a threat that disapeared THIRTY FARGIN YEARS AGO?

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Since Democrats are the Party of Death, they aren’t wrong.

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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For fiscal 2020, the IRS has received a two-year, $180 million chunk for business systems modernization.

Here’s what the commissioner says about it: “The US economy has achieved impressive increases in productivity through investments in information technology. The IRS, which is still dependent on systems installed in the 1960s and 1970s, has established the Business Systems Modernization Program to take advantage of new technology to revamp the way we do business. I firmly believe the program is on the path to succeed.”

Oops, that was Charles Rossotti, writing in a 2000 progress report. He promised real results starting in 2001. In intervening years, the IRS has in fact modernized many of its systems and procedures. Plus, soon after that report, the IRS made it successfully through the conversion to 4-digit date codes. The IRS would go on to spend billions, but none of the contractors could ever convert the Individual Master File, coded in assembler language, to modern code.

And socialists want the government to run the economy. Yeah, that’ll work.

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Keeping people safe is one of the essential functions of a government. It has never  been a Democrat priority as public budgets are more and more crowded with giveaways for their captive Underclass voting base.

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In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests/riots calling for “defunding the police,” Democrats have started targeting police unions, saying they are obstacles to accountability and reform. Do they realize that the same can be said of teachers’ unions?

If they do, they aren’t saying.

Like any other public-employee union, teachers’ and police unions are locked in a one-hand-washes-the-other relationship with the Democrat party, where they trade their block of votes for extra-sweet levels of wages and benefits, especially unfunded pension benefits that can be forward-loaded onto future generations.

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Nearly 54 scientists have resigned or been fired as a result of the ongoing investigation, which aims to spot foreign funding that could pose a national security risk as the federal government cracks down on Chinese government influence within America’s most prestigious institutions. Of those who were fired or resigned, 93% were receiving hidden funding from a Chinese institution, Science Magazine reported.

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During a live interview with New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, on NBC’s Today show Monday morning, a heckler could be heard screaming at the Democratic politician, calling him a “dictator” and “hypocrite” for his coronavirus shutdown policies. It got so bad, co-host Savannah Guthrie was forced to acknowledge “this rage that people feel about businesses not being opened fast enough.”

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If Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender didn’t exist, Portlandia would have had to invent her.

…

Militant bike activists are the dumbest and most loathed figures in urban civics. No group of people is as entitled, obnoxious, or clueless as a bunch of white hipsters in lycra shorts out to convince city officials that giving them more bike lanes will end wars, eliminate racism, and save the planet. There was only one possible career pathway for Bender in Minneapolis. Urban planning through politics as a DFLer.

…

Minneapolis still isn’t a college campus, but it has the first student council to run a major city. Besides Bender, there’s Keith Ellison’s son, who describes himself as a “visual artist, storyteller, and political organizer”, Phillipe Cunningham, whose bio is, “progressive, Black, queer & trans”, Lisa Goodman, “activist and dog mom”, and assorted other characters who ought to be debating at the student center.

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A new Trump administration policy enabling U.S. government financing for nuclear energy projects abroad could help accelerate the use of smaller reactors, a budding technology that supporters see as a lifeline for the struggling industry.

…

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation proposed this week to reverse an Obama-era ban that prevents it from funding civil nuclear projects overseas, a development first reported by the Washington Examiner.

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This is the very definition of insurrection, for which the National Guard is the designated response.

If I lived in Seattle, I would leave as soon as possible.

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It is a truth universally acknowledge that when the government hands out ‘free’ money a lot of it will get stolen.

While there’s no exact measure of how many fraudulent claims have been made, states from Washington to Maine say they’ve seen an increase and numerous federal agencies are working to fight it.

“About 10% of (unemployment insurance) payments are improper under the best of times, and we are in the worst of times,” Scott Dahl, the inspector general for the U.S. Labor Department, told the House Subcommittee on Government Operations. Dahl estimated that at least $26 billion in benefits could be wasted, with the bulk of that going to fraudsters.

This forces unemployed workers, already reeling from the loss of a job, to fight for the benefits they need and are entitled to.

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The entire 57-member squad of the Buffalo Police Emergency Response Team resigned Friday in protest, after two of their officers were suspended without pay for pushing a 75-year-old man, according to the Investigative Post.

And so it starts.

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The Department of Justice has filed a statement of interest in a lawsuit filed by seven Michigan businesses challenging restrictions imposed by Governor Whitmer in response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. The plaintiffs are a real estate brokerage, a lawn and property maintenance company, an automotive glass exporter, an engine oil and auto parts distributor, a small jewelry store, a dental office, and an association of car washes. They brought their federal case in the Western District of Michigan.

Scott Johnson at Powerline is not happy.

Tom noted somewhere in his tweets that he hasn’t been blacklisted. I have.

MDH included me on the press briefing conference call notices and responded to my questions by email until April 27. Then they cut me off. They have refused to tell me why. They have failed to respond to any of my several inquiries. Something happened. I don’t know what it is.

It seems to have had something to do with the questions I was asking. Working on a story about my experience, however, the Washington Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson elicited a statement from MDH to the effect that they only allow “professional journalists” on the briefing. And yet I was included until April 27. Collin’s story about my experience is here. I wrote about Collin’s story here.

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Thousands of Canadians who hold American citizenship will receive stimulus checks despite not living in the United States since they were sent based on recent tax filings, which citizens living abroad still have to complete.

Seems fair to me. If you have to pay U.S. taxes even if you don’t live here, then you ought to be eligible for U.S. benefits, even if you don’t live here. You can’t have it both ways.

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You need to get 500 tons of supplies from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Arctic Ocean—a journey of about 400 miles through pure wilderness. There are no roads, very few airstrips, and the ocean is a solid sheet of ice. You’re going to have to withstand minus 68 degree temperatures. Also, nuclear armageddon is on the menu if you’re not quick about it.

You, my friend, need a LeTourneau land train.

The noise you hear is my Y-chromosome sitting up and barking like a dog.

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Shortly before wrapping up an impromptu press conference in which President Trump declared places of worship essential during the pandemic, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany delivered a scorching presentation to the White House Press Corps on Friday – after accusing them of failing to do their jobs regarding ‘Obamagate.’

“Did anyone take it upon themselves to pose any questions about Michael Flynn and unmasking to President Obama’s spokesperson?” she asked.

One journalist stammers, “but buh but Flynn’s name wasn’t mas–”

To which McEnany cut back in, continuing “So I would like to lay out a series of questions and perhaps, if I write them out in a slide format – maybe we’re visual learners and you guys will follow up with journalistic curiosity.”

The new White House Press Secretary is bringing a gun to a knife fight. Pure Trump.

Scott Johnson at Powerline rips the mask off of Minnesota.

Minneapolis boy mayor Jacob Frey is concerned that Governor Walz is enjoying all the action. He means to get in on it. Frey has now ordered face masks to be worn by those over the age of 2 inside all places of public accommodation, effective next week. Noncompliance is subject to a $1,000 fine.

Who was that unmasked man? We are about to find out. The rest of us will avoid places of public accommodation in Minneapolis and tell Mayor Frey to shove it. I could write the Star Tribune editorial that will support this imposition in my sleep tonight.

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And he was a … wait for it … Democrat. What are the odds?

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We have known for more than two years that, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration and just minutes before she left the White House for the last time, Susan Rice, then President Obama’s National Security Adviser, wrote a memo to herself about “Russia.” Specifically, she documented the fact, presumably for her later protection should the matter become public, that on January 5, 2017, President Obama had directed her to lie to her incoming counterpart, General Michael Flynn, about the Russia investigation that was then ongoing, in which General Flynn himself was, unbeknownst to him, one of the targets. This deception violated all historic norms, but it was vital if the Obama holdovers (James Comey et al.) were to be able to continue their “Russia investigation,” a bare pretext for unraveling Trump’s presidency, post-inauguration.

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Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the purpose of government was to hire and pay government workers, and nowhere is that more true than Blue states like California.

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Leaked phone calls between Joe Biden and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko explicitly detail the quid-pro-quo arrangement to fire former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin – who Poroshenko admits did nothing wrong – in exchange for $1 billion in US loan guarantees (which Biden openly bragged about in January, 2018).

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New York has been by far the worst center of Wuhan virus infection in the U.S., and it seems clear that New York’s governor, Andy Cuomo, has done a terrible job. Among other things, he went out of his way to force New York’s nursing homes to accept residents who had tested positive for COVID-19, an absolutely irrational act that killed thousands, which he has since rescinded.

Nevertheless, even as his incompetence cost thousands of lives, Cuomo has adopted a pose of moral superiority, aided and abetted by the press: “If it saves just one life,” Cuomo notoriously said, damaging and, in many cases, destroying the lives of millions of New Yorkers was worth it.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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At this point, most market participants outside California know LA County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer as the public servant whose “miscommunication” Tuesday afternoon about a three-month extension to her county’s stay at home order was blamed for reviving anxieties about the economic reopening in the US that helped hammer stocks lower last week. The good doctor – who, as it so happens, isn’t a medical doctor, but the owner of a Ph.D in “Social Welfare” (whatever the f**k that means) – would like you to know she is truly sorry for the error, and the ensuing public furor she accidentally unleashed.

She looks like a zombie.

Will Congress Bankrupt The Mom-And-Pop Landlord With This Socialist New Bill?

‘Don’t Expect Us To Do It’: Democratic Michigan Sheriff Will Not Enforce Whitmer’s Lockdown Orders

Trump Rips ‘Radical Left’ Leadership at Tech Giants

Remember How Everybody Was Going to Die Because Georgia Ended Lockdowns?

CNN’s Toobin Rants Over ‘Outrageous’ GOP Lawsuit in Wisconsin, a ‘Failed State’

Google refuses to remove the state-sponsored app used to spy on Russian citizens

Taxpayer-Funded PBS Stations Are Airing Pro-China Propaganda

Inside the Media’s Desperate Cover-Up of ‘Obamagate’

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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For decades, we’ve been fed a near-daily diet of claims that public schooling is one of the most important—if not the most important—institutions in America. We’re also told that there’s not nearly enough of it, and this leads to demands for longer school hours, longer school years, and ever larger amounts of money spent on more facilities and more tech.

And then, all of sudden, with the panic over COVID-19, it was gone.

It turns out that public schooling wasn’t actually all that important after all, and that extending the lives of the over-seventy demographic takes precedence.

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Dr. Qing Wang was arrested and charged with false claims and wire fraud after knowingly omitting affiliations with a Chinese university and accepting $3 million in research funding from China while also accepting $3.6 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency, according to the Justice Department’s statement.

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“People are showing up in San Francisco from other places and asking where their hotel room is,” Mayor Breed complained.