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Many conservatives are upset by President Obama's 60th birthday party, even calling it the "height of elite hypocrisy".

Here was our climate czar, John Kerry, flying in private. His mode of travel was preferred by a host of left-leaning eco-warrior celebs, all Obama's "close friends," of course, descending on an already understaffed and emotionally depleted Vineyard.

"His birthday party is insane," one of Obama's caterers told The Post last week. "What is he thinking?" ...

"This outdoor event was planned months ago in accordance with all public health guidelines and with COVID safeguards in place," Obama spokesperson Hannah Hankins told the press last week. "Due to the new spread of the delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends."

That, we now know, was a lie.

The Obamas hosted hundreds of guests, all free to go unmasked, while their 200 servers were reportedly forced to mask up. The tiny island's residents, meanwhile, endured "a s--t-show" of traffic and sudden road closures enforced by the Secret Service.

Is there a more disgusting display of elitist "Rules for thee, not for me" than this?

As is said, hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue. Obama and his guests were simply acting on what they and I believe: we should all be free to make our own choices about risk, whether that's pandemic risk or climate risk.

I, for one, am grateful to Obama for setting this example of individual liberty and responsibility.

"A fourth law enforcement officer who responded to the Capitol on Jan. 6 has died by suicide" according to The Hill.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention the annual suicide rate in America is 13.93 per 100,000. The Metropolitan Police Department has "over 4,000 sworn and civilian members". So, doing some rough math, since January 6th the MPD has had an annualized suicide rate of over 170 per 100,000 -- over 12 times the national average.

According to the AFSP, men have a suicide rate of 3.63 times the rate of women, and all four MPD suicides were by men. All else being equal, and assuming that MPD is all-male (certainly not true) we'd expect approximately 0.25 suicides over the past seven months, not four.

We pray for the health and safety of our law enforcement personnel and all our leaders in government.

(HT: Vodkapundit.)

The biggest companies in the world worked together to destroy President Trump and upstart free-speech platform Parler. You can love Trump, hate Trump, or be extremely conflicted about Trump, but you can't deny the fact that the richest, most powerful corporations in the world have claimed the right and power to decide who can speak and who can't. What's playing out is completely bizarre.

As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months -- banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts -- so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. "Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs," reported TechCrunch.

It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don't like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies -- Amazon, Google and Apple -- abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

Big Brother claims that Trump and Parler are inciting violence, but the truth is that the Capitol Hill riot was planned on Facebook and Twitter. (I condemn all political violence in America.)

The pretext for singling out Parler is that some people have posted threats there, which is a violation of Parler policy. There is no claim that the riot at the Capitol on January 6 was coordinated through Parler -- not even Apple, in its letter terminating services, made that claim. USA Today, citing other sources, gave examples of calls for violence prior to the Capitol Hill riot -- on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and a single video on Parler:

Violent rhetoric including threats against elected officials and police officers flooded all social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube, not just online forums popular with extremists.....

On Facebook, pages and private and public groups urged civil war if Democrats were not arrested for election interference, alleged police officers were assisting "Antifa" and claimed "Antifa" members were impersonating "patriots" at the Capitol. A video encouraged protesters to bring pepper spray, tear gas, batons, tasers and knives.

A Facebook page called Red-State Secession shared addresses of "enemies" including members of Congress. One post urged people to prepare "to use force to defend civilization." Facebook removed the page Wednesday.

Even the president of anti-conservative Media Matters points to Facebook as the main organizing site:

Facebook had much bigger role in creating conditions that led to as well as organizing for January 6 event. We tracked people using FB to organize attendees to bring guns to the Jan 6 event. FB did nothing.

So why aren't Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit being deplatformed? Why are they picking on Parler? [...]

So the claim that Parler represents some unique risk to safety is a lie. It's a lie driven by politics, exploiting the justifiable national outrage at the Capitol Hill riot to purge political rivals through unprecedended collusion among the internet oligopolies, furthered by isolation tactics to cut Parler off from legal and other services.

To top it off, Twitter just had the balls to write this.

The response to Twitter has been widespread mockery, as it should be. Will the people behind this behavior come to realize that they've cast themselves as the villains?

As Princess Leia told Grand Moff Tarkin right before the destruction of Alderaan: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Tarkin didn't care about public sentiment because he believed he could force submission through fear. He destroyed Parler Alderaan as a warning to any other uppity planets that might object to Imperial domination.

While we're making Star Wars references, remember that Obi-Wan Kenobi told Darth Vader: "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

Well... Gab has already brought Trump back from the dead.

Gab CEO completely backed up President Trump's Twitter account before it was deleted and recreated him on Gab! What's even more impressive is he did this while traffic was up 700% and under attack from leftists. Gab is currently having servers upgraded to handle the large influx in traffic but we're told it should stabilize soon.

Will he be more powerful than we can possibly imagine? (I hope not.)

The Left doesn't realize that it's reifying -- acting out -- making real -- bringing into existence -- an instance of the Hero's Journey, and they've cast Trump as the Hero (e.g., Simba) and themselves as the Tyrannical King (e.g., Scar). Note: I'm not saying Trump's a Hero -- the Left is putting him into that role. I'm not saying the Left is the Tyrannical King -- they're taking that role on themselves. I can only speculate why the Left is doing this, but it looks like a foolish plan.

The burden of proof is on Trump's campaign to show evidence of election fraud that will convince courts or state legislatures, and so far they haven't done it.

However, the public is under no obligation to work under the same standards of evidence as a court, and the public has different incentives than legislators. The public sees the smoke of electoral fraud and isn't convinced otherwise by establishment cries of "debunked" or "no evidence", no matter how loudly or frequently proclaimed. If Trump's legal and political challenges fail, the burden of proof will be on the establishment to convince the rest of America that Trump's protests are faulty, and so far they aren't even trying to make that case.

Their rough consensus is that GOP voters who still support the president are either treasonous or stupid, reinforced constantly by a brittle insistence that there was "no fraud" in the presidential election. A totemic front-page declaration by the New York Times, "ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD," has been repeated everywhere, mantra-like. Any claims of voter fraud or ballot-counting irregularities, whether from President Trump or the tens of thousands who marched over the weekend, are "baseless," "unfounded," and have "no evidence" behind them.

There's a palpable nervousness about the media's insistence that the election was as pure as the driven snow. Maybe they seem so nervous because they know what everyone in America knows: there was nothing pure or secure or even ordinary about the election.

How could there be? Under the pretext of ensuring "voter access" during the pandemic, Democrats, leftist nonprofits, and activist judges across the country unleashed a flood of changes to election rules in the months leading up to the vote, including an unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, an inherently fraught method of casting ballots that removes almost all oversight from the process.

No matter. States pushed ahead, mailing ballots to outdated voter rolls en masse and recklessly loosening oversight for how those ballots could be collected and counted. Chain-of-custody for absentee ballots went out the window, along with whatever meager safeguards usually apply to absentee voting. Ballot harvesting, long a tradition of corrupt Democratic political machines in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, was introduced in some places for the first time. Take together, all these pandemic-inspired reforms presented an ideal opportunity for Democrats to flood absentee ballot-counting centers in major cities and run up the vote-count long after the polls closed on Election Day.

Despite judges dismissing the significance of hundreds of sworn affidavits, this testimony is pretty compelling to most people who are allowed to hear about it.

No wonder scores of Republican poll challengers in Michigan filed sworn affidavits claiming tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots were counted for Biden in Detroit. No wonder that in Philadelphia, poll watchers reported how they were forcibly kept from observing the counting of absentee ballots, as required under state law.

Not all the reports of ballot-counting skullduggery amount to old-fashioned voter fraud, but as my colleague Margot Cleveland has noted, they're just as important because they undermine the integrity of an election just as much as, say, thousands of dead people voting.

Trump didn't cause the division and mistrust in America -- he is a symptom of a larger social trend that won't be extinguished when he leaves office. To paraphrase Princess Leia: The more the establishment tightens its grip, the more the public will slip through its fingers.

I personally hope that there wasn't widespread election fraud, but if there was then we need to know about it and fix our election system so that it never happens again.

I've been avidly following the numerous statistical analyses that data experts have been performing and posting online. Statistical analysis alone isn't proof, but it's sufficient evidence to justify an investigation. Here are a few sources worth reading -- but some links may eventually be taken down by our tech overlords.

• Election Fuckery Is Afoot; The More Fuckery Update
• A time series analysis of in-person and mail-in vote counting
• Applying Benford's Law to county vote totals -- (background on Benford's Law)

There are many other examples, but those three are representative. All together, these analysis provide a lot more public evidence to justify an investigation than we had in Florida in 2000 or that we had for "Russian interference" in 2016. The stats don't tell us exactly who may have done what, but they give us a good idea of where and when to look. Maybe it's all just statistical noise that doesn't mean anything, but it's worth finding out.

Anyway, the stats adventure has been fun! But even if you don't care about or believe in these statistics, now we've got a sworn affidavit from City of Detroit employee named Jessy Jacob who says that she witnessed and participated in election fraud at the direction of her superiors. I have a feeling we'll see more affidavits like this today.

Matthew Cochran is correct that "America Won't Trust Elections Until The Voter Fraud Is Investigated".

In 2020, the body of evidence eclipses that of 2000. Today, the confusion arises from half a dozen states rather than one. The reported incidents indicate outright fraud more than they do simple incompetence, especially since they all just happen to benefit the same candidate. Shouldn't this evidence give us even more reason to investigate the matter than we had two decades ago?

And if your memory doesn't work that far back, you should at least remember 2016. A few Russian dollars spent on Facebook during the election and a highly questionable dossier were all it took to trigger FBI and congressional investigations into President Trump for years. There is far more evidence to justify an investigation into voter fraud in 2020.

So let's see how things play out. We've got plenty of time to investigate, and smart and dedicated people from across the political spectrum who are dedicated to the truth. Right?

I don't have anything intelligent to add to the wildfire election discussion.

Is it super sus that the media "calls" states for Biden instantly, but delays calling anything for Trump until the call won't give him even a temporary electoral vote lead? Yes.

Is it super sus that states where Trump is leading decide to stop counting for a while, and promise to get back to us in a few days? Uh, yes.

Will it be super sus if Biden wins by a handful of votes in the states that stopped counting overnight? Oh fo sho.

Will it be super sus if this election gets decided 5-4 or 6-3 by the Supreme Court? Yep.

These electoral shenanigans are embarrassing.

Pollsters: LOL you are terrible.

Media: LOL you are terrible.

Divided government? If Biden wins but Republicans hold the Senate, that's pretty decent.

Best case scenario: Supreme Court unanimously picks a winner.

The Conservative Treehouse writes that Trump supporters are organically routing around social controls and posts several insane videos of Trump parades around the country. I say "Trump parades", but Trump isn't at any of these events, and his campaign didn't organize them. Check this one out from yesterday in Beverly Hills, California. The crowd goes on and on and on. This is nuts.

This is BEVERLY HILLS this weekend. Yes Beverly Hills, CALIFORNIA. Meanwhile Joe Biden can't get 40 cars to come hear him speak even with celebrity speakers. Something is happening that isn't reflected in polls... Look at how diverse the crowd is. This is @theDemocrats nightmare! pic.twitter.com/6Jq5wmtB9d

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 25, 2020

There are dozens, even hundreds of videos like this. It's unbelievable. I know the polls show Trump losing handily to Biden, but these events make it hard to believe those numbers.

There's nothing equivalent for Biden. I wrote last week that everything points to a Trump victory except the polls, and that's more true now than ever. Crowds like this don't lose elections.

Even if Biden legitimately wins the election, the movement that Trump mid-wifed isn't going away.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Last month I wrote that pollsters must have learned something from their humiliating failure in 2016. At this moment, it seems like the only indication of a win for Biden is media polling -- which shows a landslide in his favor. Can an incumbent president really lose when 56% of people say they're better off than four years ago?

It is an odd election season. Pretty much everyone thinks the Democrats are on their way to a crushing victory, yet it is hard to see why. A whopping 56% of Americans say they are better off now than they were four years ago, and President Trump draws large, enthusiastic crowds wherever he goes. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is a pale shell of his formerly buffoonish self. When Joe is able to get out of bed, his campaign schedules intimate invitation-only events. Supposedly this is because of COVID, but everyone knows it is really because he doesn't want to be embarrassed by his inability to draw a crowd. Probably no one outside of Biden's immediate family particularly wants him to be president.

So what is going on?

Kevin McCullough writes that the polls are wrong because Trump voters are reluctant to admit who they're voting for.

Now the "smart people" will tell you [that a Trump win is] not possible and that he lags Joe Biden in the polls by margins too big to overcome. If you only look at the selective polls listed in the Real Clear Politics average one might come to that conclusion (Just like they did in 2016).

One thing they won't tell you though is that the hesitancy to tell pollsters what they think is a real phenomenon. A little more than a month ago Bloomberg published a survey that demonstrated Republicans and Independents are more than twice as likely as Democrats to not reveal to pollsters their true thoughts.

Maybe. I think it's more likely that any significant errors stem from inaccurate demographic mixes -- that they're underweighting Trump's support among Blacks, Hispanics, gays, and others.

Mollie Hemingway points out that Trump is polling better now than he did in 2016.

So you see that Biden is averaging a 7-point lead in Pennsylvania, but Clinton was averaging a nearly identical lead there four years ago -- before Trump won it narrowly on election day. Likewise, Biden's Florida lead is very similar to Clinton's lead four years ago. Trump won Florida.

Biden is not performing as well in Wisconsin as Clinton was four years ago. Trump won that state. Biden is doing less well in Michigan, according to the polls, than Clinton did four years ago. Trump won Michigan. Biden's doing a bit better in North Carolina than Clinton did but Trump won that state by a 4-point margin.

There are a lot of people who don't put much confidence in polling, but this table shows that even according to the polls themselves, Trump's performance at this point in the election process is on track with where he was in 2016.

I'm not good at predicting elections, but I will: Trump will win re-election.

I don't have much to say about Trump's illness and recovery, but this video cracked me up.

pic.twitter.com/jNxNQSqNZ4

— markmaycott (@markmaycot) October 5, 2020

Well that was weird and unpleasant.

Wallace's questions were stacked against Trump overall. Wallace did ask Biden a couple of tough questions, but then let him get away without answering.

Oddly, Biden was much ruder to Trump than vice versa, calling the President a "clown" and "the worse president ever", and even telling him to "shut up". Trump interrupted a lot, which is also rude, but not in the same way. I think most viewers would have expected Trump to be ruder than Biden.

Biden didn't seem senile. He's leading in the polls without much effort. That seems likely to continue.

Trump was combative and aggressive, which I assume is what he was going for. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't as funny or effective as he often is.

I think Michael Brendan Dougherty is right about Trump's biggest tactical weakness:

By far Trump's most self-defeating habit in these debates is to refer to stories rather than tell them. He speaks as if he's talking to people who, like himself, spend hours a day watching Fox News and have a shared folklore of scandal stories that can be referred to in shorthand. He refers to events, like ballots found in a wastepaper basket, but doesn't tell the story of where they happened, or why they matter.

Most people won't get these references and may think Trump is just blustering.

Both sides are spinning this as a win, but surprisingly to me 2/3 of Telemundo Spanish-language viewers gave Trump the victory. I presume all the crosstalk couldn't be translated in real-time, so maybe that helped Trump come off stronger?

Every time a Supreme Court seat opens up the ensuing political fight reminds us that the Supreme Court shouldn't be so important.

The point isn't whether the Court got the questions right. The point is that it decided these important [political] issues and, having done so, took them off the table for democratic politics. When Congress decides an issue by passing a law, democratic politics can change that decision by electing a new Congress. When the Court decides an issue by making a constitutional ruling, there's no real democratic remedy.

That makes the Supreme Court, a source of final and largely irrevocable authority that is immune to the ordinary winds of democratic change, an extremely important prize. And when extremely important prizes are at stake, people fight. And get hysterical. ...

So to break it down: All the hysteria about a Ginsburg replacement stems from the fact that our political system is dominated by an allegedly nonpolitical Court that actually decides many political issues. And that Court is small (enough so that a single retirement can throw things into disarray) and unrepresentative of America at large.

I'm actually not against "packing" the Supreme Court. There's no reason it needs to have exactly nine justices. Pack it out to 100 and we might gain two advantages: first, higher throughput for our court system; second, less political fighting over SCOTUS nominations. Reynolds suggests that each state governor nominate a justice:

In an earlier article, responding to Democrats' plans to "pack" the Court with several additional justices whenever they get control back, I suggested going a step further, and add fifty new justices, one each to be appointed by every states' governor. My proposal wasn't entirely serious, being meant to point up the consequences of opening the door on this topic. But on reflection, maybe it was a better idea than I realized.

Sounds like a fine plan to me. Put some power back in the hands of the states.

This is surprising. At least hundreds of Trump supporters parading on the freeway in Portland.

TRUMP CAR PARADE IN PORTLAND!!🇺🇸🚘

There has never been a car or boat parade for Joe Biden!
pic.twitter.com/22QN4tA1Bs

— Kyle Martinsen (@KyleMartinsen_) August 30, 2020

Democrats are floating another trial balloon to test which way the winds are blowing: would voters let Biden get away with not debating Trump?

She explained she did not think "the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that anybody should, and has any association with truth, evidence, data, and facts," and as a result, any debate with him would just be an "exercise in skullduggery" by Trump.

"I wouldn't legitimize a conversation with him, nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States," she said, though she acknowledged that the Biden campaign had a different view on the debates. Pelosi called Trumps's conduct during his 2016 debates with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton "disgraceful."

So far Biden is staying committed to debating the President.

Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates said Biden would continue to take part in the debates. The campaign would "certainly agree with Speaker Pelosi on her view of the President's behavior. But just as she has powerfully confronted that behavior in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, Joe Biden looks forward to doing the same on the debate stage."

Asked later Thursday on MSNBC about Pelosi's comments, Biden said "as long as the (Commission on Presidential Debates) continues down the straight and narrow as they have, I'm going to debate him."

"I'm gonna be a fact-checker on the floor when I'm debating him," he said.

Biden has to appear 100% committed until and unless he decides he can get away without debating, in which case he'd have to flip immediately and give a good explanation for his decision. Any wavering on a decision like this would be devastating.

Personally, I don't think a candidate could win without debating in this day and age. It's certainly fair to wonder whether or not debate performance is a useful indicator for governing ability, but that's beside the point. Presidential debates are more like trial-by-combat, and there's something very primal about the ritual. Something deep inside us knows that you don't get to lead the tribe if you won't even fight for it.

In the aftermath of the explosion in Beirut (video) we must send material aid, but we also must pray for the people and the city. Pray that the wounded would receive the medical care they need, and that the families of the dead will find comfort. Pray that the leaders of the country and city will have wisdom and humility. Pray that the city will have peace and security. Pray that God's love will shine brightly through people even in this tragedy.

In March Anthony Fauci and other health experts told the public not to wear masks to protect ourselves from COVID-19:

"You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Surgeon General Jerome Adams said during an appearance on "Fox & Friends" earlier this month.

"If it's not fitted right you're going to fumble with it," warned Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar late last month, when asked about N95 respirator masks.

"Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and a public face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, on CBS' "60 Minutes" earlier this month. He, like the others, suggested that masks could put users at risk by causing them to touch their face more often.

Apparently they were intentionally lying to us. Now we're told:

"Masks are not 100 percent protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who maybe feels well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don't even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else," Fauci said.

"But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work," Fauci added.

Why did they lie?

[Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn't feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.

That's still a lie. Masks weren't "not recommended" -- experts recommended against wearing masks.

Remember this whenever you consider giving the government more power over anything.

On Monday the media almost universally reported that police in Washington DC used tear gas on peaceful protesters to clear a path for Trump to visit St. John's Episcopal Church. But now it's clear that no tear gas was deployed and the protesters weren't peaceful.

Facts were no barrier to their narrative. They spun a tale of violent, jack-booted cops running rampant through the streets over innocent docile protesters, using tear gas to clear the area. It turns out none of that was true.

Every single major media outlet falsely reported that Park Police were unprovoked when they used "tear gas" to clear the area. If any of that were true, it might mark the first time in history that cops without gas masks launched tear gas in an area that the president of the United States easily walked through minutes later.

After thousands of false tweets, print stories, and broadcast stories to the contrary, local journalist Neal Augenstein of WTOP reported that a Park Police source said "tear gas was never used -- instead smoke canisters were deployed, which don't have an uncomfortable irritant in them." Further, the source said the crowd was dispersed because of projectiles being thrown by the "peaceful protesters" at the Park Police and because "peaceful protesters" had climbed on top of a structure in Lafayette Park that had been burned the prior night.

I'm not really sure what I have to add to the current news-cycle.

• The killing of George Floyd by the police was horrible and should be prosecuted.
• Peaceful protesting is good and useful to bring attention to legitimate grievances and to promote positive change.
• Rioting, looting, and burning is disgraceful and should be prosecuted.
• Civil disorder is the kind of thing that makes people long for an authoritarian to restore order. If you want more and worse Trump, this is how you get it.

It seems like political agitators of various stripes -- but primarily left-wing self-described anti-fascists Antifa -- are using the terrible killing of George Floyd to foment violence to undermine Trump and provoke him to an authoritarian overreaction. I don't think this move will play out well for the Left because it undermines the class realignment that has been happening since the 2016 campaign and Trump's election. The nature of that realignment has been that suburban white women have begun to align with the globalist class, and working-class white men have begun to align with the small-c conservative cohort. The rioting and violence threaten to undermine the leftward movement of white suburban women, which could leave the Left without a dance partner.

It's unfortunate that it needs to be said, but yes, churches need to obey shutdown orders issued by the authorities to protect public health. The pastors and churches that are refusing these orders are not advancing the Kingdom of God, but in fact are bringing dishonor and shame to the name of Jesus Christ.

Romans 12:1-7:

1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. 6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. 7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

It's conceivable that a shutdown order could in some hypothetical situation be cover for government oppression of the church, but that's definitely not the case right now.

Instead of fomenting conflict with the government, churches should be praying for our leaders, medical professionals, and infrastructure workers. Christians should also be doing whatever we can to relieve suffering, provide for those in need, and share the Gospel while obeying the health directives of our government.

The New York Times nails the subtext of my earlier post about the Iowa Democrat Caucuses: without secret ballots, have the caucuses been a fraud this whole time?

An hour after the caucuses began, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman, Troy Price, huddled in another room with other officials, none of them with a clear strategy to manage the unfolding chaos or answers to share with increasingly exasperated presidential campaigns. A conference call with the campaigns ended with Mr. Price hanging up on them, amid accusations that caucus results in Iowa may have been incorrectly reported for decades.

As disastrous as the 2020 Iowa caucuses have appeared to the public, the failure runs deeper and wider than has previously been known, according to dozens of interviews with those involved. It was a total system breakdown that casts doubt on how a critical contest on the American political calendar has been managed for years. ...

"You always had to calculate these numbers, all we're asking is that you report them for the first time," Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders's closest adviser, said he told Mr. Price on the call. "If you haven't been calculating these numbers all along, it's been a fraud for 100 years."

Mr. Price ended the call.

It's time to end the caucuses. They aren't democratic, and it seems likely that they've been fraudulent since their inception. The new reporting rules simply revealed the errors that have been there all along.

The Republicans are going to get a lot of mileage out of Pelosi ripping up Trump's state-of-the-union speech. Here's a video of her ripping interspersed with clips of the outstanding American's that Trump recognized during his speech.

One of America's last surviving Tuskegee Airmen.

Scholarships for quality education.

Young leaders.

Comfort for mourning Americans.

A soldier's reunion with his family.

"I tore it up. I was trying to find one page with truth on it. I couldn't." - Speaker Pelosi pic.twitter.com/gRummbjsBq

— Senate Republicans (@SenateGOP) February 5, 2020

(HT: Powerline Blog)