Out of an abundance of caution, President Trump consented to be tested for coronavirus. The president's physician, Sean Conley, confirmed the negative test result.

“Last night after an in-depth discussion with the President regarding COVID-19 testing, he elected to proceed,” Conley wrote in a statement. “This evening I received confirmation that the test is negative.”

President Trump was just recently exposed to the coronavirus at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while dining with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.  Bolsonaro's press secretary, Fabio Wajngarten, also present, tested positive for the coronavirus. On Friday, Bolsonaro tested negative for the disease.

The White House is conducting temperature checks on the press corps.  White House Deputy Press Secretary, Judd Deere, explained,  “Out of an abundance of caution, temperature checks are now being performed on any individuals who are in close contact with the President and Vice President."

Perhaps, out of an abundance of caution, the president should not allow reporters into the daily press conferences at all. He would be safer and we, American people, wouldn't have to listen to them yell questions at the president.

National emergency

President Trump declared a National emergency and invoked the Stafford Act, freeing up $50 billion dollars to deal with the coronavirus crisis facing the US. The Stafford Act has been used in times of national emergency by many presidents, including most recently Obama, Bush, and Clinton. President Trump invoked it in the spring of 2019 during the flooding in Nebraska and Iowa.

Drive-thru testing for coronavirus

President Trump is working with Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, and Target to implement drive-thru testing in the US.

South Korea has been using drive-thru testing on 20,000 people a day. The technicians wear protective gear and masks to do the testing. There is no need for the testee to get out of the car, limiting exposure for the tester and the testee.

According to ABC News, "Under the new protocol, using the drive-thru sites, "the goal is for individuals to be able to drive up and be swabbed without having to leave your car," President Trump said on March 13. The test uses a nasal swab."

Let's hope we can get this going and get a better idea of the extent of infection in the US.

Democrats continue to play games with people's lives

Congress, led by Nancy Pelosi, has failed to produce a bill that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on. The Democrats included medical spending in the bill without the protection of the Hyde amendment, which prohibits taxpayer dollars to be spent on abortion. Pelosi, predictably, continues to play games, this time, with people's health.

More cancellations and quarantines

The Master's golf tournament has been canceled. Saint Patrick's Day parades and the Boston Marathon are canceled.

Local events, organizations and gatherings are all canceling to try to stop the spread of the virus.

Spain has declared a nationwide lockdown, allowing people to leave their homes only to buy food and medicine. All schools, restaurants, bars, hotels, and non-essential retail stores are closed.

The Covid-19 or coronavirus outbreak has brought some much-deserved attention to American dependence on foreign medical and pharmaceutical supplies.

Many Americans are and should be alarmed to find out that the US is dependent on China and other countries for most of our medical supplies, including face masks, and our pharmaceuticals e.g. antibiotics, blood pressure medication, and almost all generic drugs.

Our dependence on China is especially alarming because of our adversarial relationship. China could wreak havoc on our health care system just by refusing to ship supplies to the US. They could also send us pills that are contaminated with chemical or biological agents.

Many of the active ingredients in pharmaceuticals (API) are sourced from China. Christopher Priest of the Defense Health Agency said, “The national security risks of increased Chinese dominance of the global API market cannot be overstated.”

China could "weaponize" pharmaceuticals and medical supplies

Rosemary Gibson, co-author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America's Dependence on China for Medicine,” testified before Congress: “Medicines can be used as a weapon of war against the United States. Supplies can be withheld. Medicines can be made with lethal contaminants or sold without any real medicine in them, rendering them ineffective.”

A former central bank adviser, Li Daokui,  suggested that China could curb its exports of antibiotics to the United States as a trade war retaliation tool. According to Politico, Li Daokiu said, “We are at the mercy of others when it comes to computer chips, but we are the world’s largest exporter of raw materials for vitamins and antibiotics. Should we reduce the exports, the medical systems of some western countries will not run well."

Li Daokui raised the prospect of Beijing curbing its exports of pharmaceuticals as a countermeasure in the trade war with the US. By some estimates, America imports 96 percent of its antibiotics from China.

President Trump will issue an executive order to "buy American"

President Trump is working on an executive order to reduce or eliminate US dependence on other countries, some of them hostile, for our medical supplies.

According to The Daily Caller, "White House Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro confirmed Wednesday the administration is working on an executive order to eliminate the government’s reliance on foreign-made medical supplies."

Reducing our reliance on China for essential medical supplies and drugs should have ended years ago, bur former administrations did not tackle the problem. President Trump brought the problem to light in his negotiations to get a better deal with China.  So far, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies were exempted from the trade talks, but that could easily change, which is why it is good that the president signed this executive order.

Senator Marco Rubio said, "The coronavirus outbreak has been a wake-up call that we must combat America’s supply chain vulnerabilities and dependence on China in critical sectors of our economy."

Covid-9 has hit the world like a planet-wide tornado, turning everything topsy-turvy and leaving unbelievable destruction in its wake.

The US economy, touted just a month ago by President Trump as the strongest in history, is now, according to some experts, headed for a "light" recession. The US stock market and other markets around the world have plummeted across the board due to uncertainty and fear of what the impact from the coronavirus might be. (Why wait and see, let's just drive the market into "bear" territory in anticipation of what might happen.)

Trillions of dollars of wealth have been erased by fear, not deaths, not even cases of coronavirus, just fear of what might happen.

It is hard to believe Democrats are anything but happy about the coronavirus and its effect on the US stock market. They have been strategizing for months, and worrying that they could never win back the presidency from Trump if the economy is strong.

Never let a crisis go to waste

The Democrats are following former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel's advice. He said, "Never let a crisis go to waste..."

Instead of bringing a bill to the House floor that will help people survive the economic disruption of the coronavirus, the Democrats have filled the bill with Democrat items that Republicans can't in good conscience, support.

Some are saying that the Democrats even sneaked some abortion funding into the bill.

Even so, either outcome is good for the Democrats and bad for the Republicans, a classic "heads I win, tails you lose" setup. If the Republicans vote yes, the Democrats get what they want and the Republicans are losers.

If the Republicans vote no, the Democrats can say the Republicans don't care about people. The Republicans should have brought their own bill first so they could turn the tables on the Dems.

 

Fearmongering

The coronavirus is spreading rapidly and older people and immuno-compromised people are at risk. Precautions should be observed, such as washing hands, staying out of crowded places, etc.

In fact, some states like California are banning non-essential gatherings of more than 250 people and suggesting that smaller gatherings be canceled if non-essential. Keeping your distance, or "social-distancing" will be forever a part of America's vocabulary.

Having said that, there does seem to be some fearmongering going on, so let's look at the numbers. At this date:

Bernie Sanders

Speaking of fearmongering, Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders fears that the coronavirus will kill more people than the number of soldiers that died in WWII. The death toll for the virus is less than 5,000 at this date. 20 million soldiers died in WWII. Here is the comparison: 5,000 is .00025 percent of 20 million. Fearmongering much?

America at a standstill

  • Disneyland and Universal Studios are closed for the rest of March
  • The NBA and the NHL have postponed their seasons. Schools are canceling classes.
  • There will be no March Madness for the NCAA.
  • In MLB, the 2020 Opening Day to be delayed by at least two weeks; Spring Training Games canceled beginning today.
  • Broadway shows are canceled at the request of New York governor, Andrew Cuomo
  • SXSW and other festivals and concerts are being cancelled all over the country

Many community meetings are being canceled. Governors are issuing executive orders. The Federal Reserve is lowering interest rates. The president is banning travel from Europe.

Hopefully, all of these cancellations will result in diminishing the spread of the coronavirus.

America has a choice. A choice between progressives or conservatives to run this country.

In the presidential race, we have a progressive masquerading as a center-left Democrat, Joe Biden. We also have a populist with conservative instincts, maligned by the media, the Democrat establishment, and even the whole globalist elite, Donald Trump.

The prize is the most powerful country with the largest economy in the history of the world. One candidate sees America as a country to control and exploit, the other one sees America as a country of great freedom and incalculable potential, a country that a president has an obligation to put first in all of his or her thoughts.

The choices seem disparate but Conservatives and progressives have one thing in common. They both believe "something" is wrong and needs to be fixed, they just don't agree at all on what that "something" is. That "something" is all the difference between freedom and subjugation.

Conservatives

Conservatives believe that the founding documents of the United States have provided the most freedom for the most people in the history of the world. They believe that the principles embedded in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be adhered to, defended, protected, and preserved. They believe in the oath that all federal employees and elected officials take:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

President Abraham Lincoln considered the Constitution the only guard of our liberty: "Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."

Conservatives believe that the founding of the country is good, that the people of America are good, but the government is out of control. They believe that the officials, both elected, and especially unelected, are overstepping their bounds and abusing the great powers with which they have been entrusted.

Conservatives believe that the problem, the thing that is wrong, is that the government is no longer by the people or for the people. The people running our government think that Americans are their servants, providing them with an endless and ever-increasing revenue stream and that is a serious infringement of our liberty.

Progressives (leftists)

Progressives see government as the solution to their problem, which is America. To them, America is inherently racist. To them, America has committed unforgivable sins. To them, America uses more than her share of resources. America is too rich and too free for their taste. They think America drives too much, etc. For progressives, the real problem is America.

Remember when President Obama or Candidate Obama said he wanted to "fundamentally" change America? "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” — Barack Obama, October 30, 2008

His progressive wife Michelle went farther, "We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” — Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

If our founding, our fundamentals are good, why would they need changing? But President Obama was and is a progressive, and for him, the Constitution is fundamentally flawed and inherently racist. How does a progressive really uphold the oath of office, the oath to defend and protect a document they don't even believe in?

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn't think the Constitution applies to the modern era. As Egypt was preparing to write a new constitution, Ginsburg counseled them: "I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012."

She then suggested that Egypt look to South Africa and the European Convention on Human Rights, not the US Constitution. It seems that Ginsburg should recuse herself from interpreting a Constitution that she thinks is archaic and unfit to govern modern life.

Why do progressives think America is the problem? Why do they think the constitution is fundamentally flawed?

I would posit that progressives view the Constitution as an obstacle, something standing in the way of their totalitarian instinct. They think people should not be free, they should be controlled. One of the members of FDR's Brain Trust, Guy Rexford Tugwell, knew that what they were doing to take control of America in the name of the people's well-being was antithetical to the Constitution.

The battle between progressives and conservatives is decades old and hoary with age. Progressives have made impressive inroads in dismantling the rights and freedoms the Constitution guarantees to Americans, such as the right to our own property (money), the right to bear arms, the right to worship God, and the right to speak, the right to be free from government intrusion, etc.

They have been gaining ground for almost a hundred years now, growing the administrative state, saddling employers and businesses with strangling regulations. They have successfully destroyed any hope of affordable and high-quality health care as they continue to push regulations that interfere with the freedom of both providers and patients. Higher education and science are so beholden to progressivism, they are losing their legitimacy and value.

Instead of pursuing happiness, many Americans find themselves fearing the future. Anxiety, not happiness, is the constant state of many, wondering if the government, state or federal, will pass more laws that destroy their jobs or destroy their home values. Sadly, the progressives have us just where they want us.

What is the solution? Don't vote for progressives. Study the Constitution and the fundamental principles that created America. Fight for your rights. Remember, America is not the problem, progressivism is.

In the end, it really isn't Biden vs. Trump, it is freedom vs. control, it is conservatism vs. progressivism, it is the Constitution vs. totalitarianism.

In the midst of all the hype and fearmongering surrounding the coronavirus, candidates are still running to win the Democrat nomination though they have canceled rallies due to fear of the virus. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are having a hard time getting attention. Tulsi Gabbard is being shunned by the party, but she is still in the running.

Sanders doesn't have much of a chance to win now that the entire Democrat establishment has thrown their support behind Biden. The former candidates that have endorsed Biden include Andrew Yang, Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Michael Bloomberg, and others. Elizabeth Warren has yet to endorse anyone.

Tucker Carlson offers his theory that Sanders is weak and that is why he can't win the nomination.

Biden seems a sad choice for the Democrats as he is obviously displaying cognitive decline, evidenced by his many and continuing gaffes. Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza recently discussed how the Democrat party had a choice between a "clinical" nut (Biden) and an "ideological" nut (Sanders).

D'Souza argues that there isn't a lot of difference between Biden and Sanders ideologically, but Sanders made the mistake of saying what he believes out loud and Biden hides his socialism, which makes him the preferred candidate for the Democrat Party.

Belligerent Biden

Biden also continues to display belligerence when asked questions he doesn't like. In the latest incident, he tells a union member in Michigan that he is full of sh*t when the man accused Biden of infringing his and other's 2nd amendment rights.

No women in the race

In other sad news, the party of identity politics is lamenting the fact that there are no more women running for the nomination, completely ignoring Tulsi Gabbard.

Nancy Pelosi wants a woman to run for president. Elizabeth Warren believes she was the last woman to leave the race, lamenting that little girls will no longer have anyone to look up to. Kamala Harris also claimed there are no women in the race. All of this is news to Tulsi Gabbard, who is still running for the nomination.

Gabbard describes herself as a woman of color and the first female combat veteran to run for president. She seems to check all the boxes for the diversity party, but to the Democrat establishment, Gabbard is invisible.

Gabbard does not stand a chance of becoming the Democrat nominee, but she continues to run to keep important issues like regime change wars on the table because Sanders and Biden won't.

Watch:

In a long-anticipated move, President Trump has replaced his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, with Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC). Mick Mulvaney, in a series of verbal flubs, made himself less than useful to the president.

The president announced the change via twitter:

Mick Mulvaney became controversial during the"quid pro quo" Ukraine controversy which ultimately led to the impeachment and acquittal of the president. The House Democrats accused the president of using a quid pro quo with the president of Ukraine to get political dirt on a political rival, Joe Biden.

Mulvaney, apparently unaware that Democrats wait like spiders for verbal gaffes, put his foot in his mouth and said that the president does this all the time. Oops, now he is on his way to Northern Ireland, far far away from Washington D.C.

Meadows, a staunch conservative, along with Jim Jordan and other conservative House members, formed the Freedom Caucus during the Obama administration. Recently, Meadows and his conservative colleagues in the House played an important role defending the president during the unfair and biased proceedings during the House impeachment inquiry.

Meadows, Jordan, Elise Stefanik, John Ratcliffe, Louie Gohmert, and others were the only defense the president had as he was not even allowed to have counsel present in the secret and open impeachment meetings.

Meadows has served in Congress since 2013. He announced in December 2019 that he would not seek re-election. Meadows, having proven himself an able defender of the president, will now take on the important role of permanent Chief of Staff.

Watch:

New York City has experienced 22.5% rise in crime since the same time last year. Serious crimes such as robbery, assault, burglary, shooting, and auto crimes all saw increases.

The blame for the significant rise is being placed on new criminal justice reforms recently enacted into law. The NYPD stated in a press release, “Criminal justice reforms serve as a significant reason New York City has seen this uptick in crime."

According to Politico:

In the first two months of the year, the NYPD says 482 people who were released after being charged with a felony where cash bail is prohibited went on to be arrested for 846 new crimes. Of those, 299 were the seven major crimes the department uses to calculate crime stats.

Mayor Bill DeBlasio, one-time Democrat presidential candidate who supported bail reform, is now recognizing it as the source of the rise in crime in the city, saying,  “There’s a direct correlation to a change in the law, and we need to address it, and we will address it."

Governor Mario Cuomo, who previously demanded that the reforms be enacted, is now admitting that there are "unintended" consequences that need to be addressed. “We’re going to work on it because there are consequences we have to adjust for. There’s no doubt this is still a work in progress, and there are other changes that have to be made." He is now demanding reform of the reforms.

Many voices cautioned that the new law would lead to an increase in crimes. It did.

Take, for instance, the case of Tiffany Harris, a 35-year-old in Brooklyn who was arrested for attacking three Jewish women in Crown Heights. She was then released because of the new bail law. She assaulted someone else the very next day. Hers is just one of the hundreds of similar stories since bail reform became law.

New Jersey also enacted bail reform but gave judges the power to detain some criminals for trial with the proviso of a speedy trial. They also provided funding for more judges. New Jersey has seen a spike in crime but it is not as steep as New York's increases.

California lawmakers wrote SB10, a no-bail law that will go before the voters in the 2020 general election. Californians should look well to the New York and New Jersey before they approve such a law.

This video discusses the spike in crime one month after it took effect:

 

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chair, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis)  and his committee are conducting an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, and Joe Biden's son Hunter.
Senate leader Mitch McConnell has signaled his support for the investigation, saying, "I think it's worth taking a look." He revealed his hands-off approach, saying he does not tell committee chairpersons what to do.

Mitt Romney

The probe has been ongoing for  months but it has not garnered much media attention until this week when Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah)  said he would not support a subpoena of a witness in the probe, and then reversed course after he was assured that witnesses would be deposed privately.
Romney earned the ire of Republicans everywhere when he was the sole Republican to vote to convict President Trump for abuse of power in the impeachment trial in the Senate.
Some see his reversal on the investigation into Burisma and Biden as an attempt to appease his Republican colleagues. Romney's reversal should give the committee the needed number of votes to get a simple majority to approve the subpoena of Andriy Telizhenko, a former official at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington D.C.

Getting to the bottom of Ukraine affair

Johnson and Senator Grassley (R-Iowa) are also conducting a broader investigation of the Obama administration's White House meetings with Ukrainian officials in 2016.
Senator Johson expressed his desire to get to the bottom of this business, saying:
We are going to get to the bottom of what all has been happening here. Hopefully we will get access to the information to make it available to the American public so they really do understand what’s been happening.

Democrats are making it clear that if you're a woman who doesn't toe the ideological party line, they don't consider you a woman at all. Democrats in 2020: "All women are equal, but some women are more equal than others."

Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris have all dropped out of the presidential race, leaving a field that with one exception, is male. That exception, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, has clashed with the Democratic party enforcers on issues like tech censorship and bipartisan compromise.

While she remains stridently anti-Trump, and a woman of the left, Gabbard has shown just enough independence to warrant savage reprisals from the party, as well as many of its more well-known members, like Hillary Clinton and the entire American media outside of Fox News.

That's why failed candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris feel comfortable erasing Tulsi's very existence. 

The Washington Times reports Kamala Harris as saying:

“There are no women currently in this race. We can have a longer discussion about it, but the reality is there is still a lot of work to be done to make it very clear that women are exceptionally qualified and capable of being the commander in chief of the United States of America,” Ms. Harris told reporters.

Ms. Warren was asked by a reporter what she makes of the Democratic nomination coming down to two white men and the message that sends to young women.

“All those little girls are going to have to wait four more years — that’s going to be hard,” she said.

The Gabbard campaign declined to comment on being overlooked by her former rivals.

Conservative women like Sarah Sanders, Kelleyanne Conway and Nikki Haley have known this for years.

Liberal enforcers claim that the Democratic party is pro-woman. But they save their most vicious and dehumanizing invective for women that don't toe the party line. Just ask Sarah Palin. Or Candace Owens. Or Laura Ingraham. And the list goes on.

When will the Democrats stop erasing women that disagree with them?

Senate minority leader Charles "Chuck" Schumer is so rabidly pro-abortion that he went to the Supreme Court steps and threatened Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch if they dared to make "awful" decisions about any case concerning abortion.

Schumer and the radical Democrats are raging because the Supreme Court is now hearing arguments about the Louisiana law requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals.

Democrats tried to equate what Schumer did with what President Trump said recently about Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg. In that case, Trump criticized Justice Sonya Sotomayor for a critical dissent that she wrote, implying that the court was favoring President Trump or his policies. Trump suggested that she and Ruth Bader Ginsburg recuse themselves from cases that concerned him or his policies. For more on this story go here.

Criticizing is not equal to threatening

Criticizing and asking or even telling justices to recuse themselves is not a threat. Telling justices that if they make "awful" decisions they will pay the price and they won't know what hit them is.

Schumer's office claimed that Schumer's words really meant that a grassroots movement would rise up and politically punish Republicans, but even CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin considered Schumer's words a threat, saying, "I’m certainly not going to defend what Chuck Schumer said. It did sound like a physical threat."

Chief Justice Roberts considered Schumer's statements threats and rebuked him, saying, “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

Senator McConnell rebukes Schumer

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opened the Senate with a strong rebuke for Schumer and read Schumer's threat into the congressional record. He addressed the first argument that Schumer wasn't threatening Gorsuch and Kavanaugh but Senate Republicans.

McConnell explained that the third branch of government, the judiciary, must remain independent from political passions in order to deliver justice. He reminded the Senate of the recent attacks made on the judiciary including Schumer's bullying of Justice Roberts during the recent impeachment trial of President Trump.

McConnell also reminded the Senate that reckless rhetoric had resulted in an enraged man shooting Republican congressmen at a baseball game in 2017. Congressman Steve Scalise nearly died from the gunshot wound he received. The shooter made sure the baseball players were Republican before he opened fire.

After McConnell finished his rebuke, Schumer rose to defend his indefensible words, saying that he would never threaten physical harm and that Republicans and McConnell were manufacturing the problem.

He said he believed passionately in "women's rights," using them to justify his threatening words, claiming that the right for women "to choose"(to abort their children) justifies the attack on the judiciary if that "right" is threatened by their decisions. If you dare to touch woman's right to choose (abortion), we'll burn the house down!

Chuck Schumer always gets plenty of screen time, so his defense is easy to find. McConnell's warnings are harder to find, but much needed so they are included in their entirety.

Watch McConnell explain the seriousness of Schumer's threats to the judiciary:

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