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Pence’s Time For Choosing

Pence’s Time For Choosing

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics.com,

Mike Pence is a man of God. He is also a practiced politician of intense discipline who answers every question, no matter how aggressive or personal, with carefu

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Pence's Time For Choosing

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics.com,

Mike Pence is a man of God. He is also a practiced politician of intense discipline who answers every question, no matter how aggressive or personal, with carefully prepared talking points delivered in a reassuringly measured Midwestern cadence.

He is always on message. He has hardly ever, as vice president, strayed from the MAGA line.

When asked about his prayers during the pandemic, Pence explained in one breath how he offers prayers of intercession (that the suffering would be comforted), prayers of petition (that leaders would be given wisdom), and prayers of thanksgiving (that Donald Trump is his boss). “I have to tell you,” he told RealClearPolitics aboard Air Force Two shortly after accepting the nomination for vice president in August, “I really could not be more proud of this president's leadership through this global pandemic.” That Pence would turn a question about faith into an answer about Trump is not surprising.

He has been nothing but dedicated to the president, and no controversy -- not the Ukraine scandal, not the St. John’s church photo op, not even the “Access Hollywood” tape -- has ever caused Pence to abandon his post. Disciplined. On message. Loyal. Pence is all of that: A vice president straight out of central casting, who has backed up Trump at all costs but who will now risk four years of earned goodwill in one afternoon. He has to count votes.

As vice president, Pence serves also as president of the Senate, meaning that on Wednesday he will preside over a pro forma certification of the Electoral College vote. The duty is normally procedural. But by clinging to power and alleging widespread voter fraud, Donald Trump has foisted an uncomfortable decision on his loyal lieutenant: ratify the victory of President-elect Joe Biden or back his boss.

“There is a famous verse coming out of the Book of Esther,” David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth and a longtime friend of Pence, told RCP. “I think that applies to Mike right now.” Pence knows the scriptural passage McIntosh is talking about. It is the story where the queen in Babylonian exile must decide whether to denounce a plot to slaughter the Jewish people or to say nothing and ensure her own safety. The Word of the Lord:

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for a time such as this?

The parallel is obvious. The choice, less so. Pence is faced with a difficult decision that will affect not only the nation but his entire legacy. The vice president, no doubt, is seeking divine wisdom. And for a time such as this, he has reportedly sought guidance from political advisers and legal experts and the Senate parliamentarian. McIntosh, for his part, didn’t say who the “Babylonians” are in this case.

Trump has made his thoughts known. “I hope that Mike Pence comes through for us. He’s a great guy,” the president said Monday night at a rally in Georgia. The hopes of Trump World rest on playing the so-called Pence Card, the idea being that the vice president would unilaterally reject the election results. “Of course, if he doesn’t come through,” Trump added, “I won’t like him quite as much.”

This would be a bitter pill for Pence, who is widely believed to harbor Oval Office ambitions of his own. Being a party to a quixotic attempt to overturn the election results, however, could very well make him a pariah in any future general election.

But close friends as well as current and former colleagues stress that the vice president has a higher allegiance.

“He’s very loyal to President Trump, who obviously is very interested in the outcome, but the most important feature about Mike is that he really is a constitutionalist,” McIntosh said.

As for the gaggle of Senate Republicans who plan to challenge some state results, McIntosh predicted that Pence would limit himself simply to using “the chair to give them an appropriate hearing for their motion.” Nothing more.

The task before Pence is simple, at least on paper.

The vice president is to open envelopes that contain the Electoral College votes reported from the individual states and then, “in the presence of” both chambers of Congress, hand them to the tellers of the House and Senate. Trump adviser Peter Navarro argued that Pence has broader authority, that he could delay the process and grant a 10-day audit of the results. Pence is apparently unmoved by this curious theory.

“Peter Navarro is many things,” the VP’s chief of staff, Marc Short, told the Wall Street Journal. “He is not a constitutional scholar.”

While Pence has signaled that he is open to GOP efforts to overturn the election result, he hasn’t tipped his hand. It still isn’t clear what he will do, other than serve his constitutionally mandated clerical role. The vice president, his office said in a statement, “welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on January 6th.”

The Trump campaign and its allies have filed no fewer than 60 legal challenges alleging widespread fraud. None have been successful in court. Meanwhile, there has been whispering among White House staff that the vice president is not a true believer when it comes to election conspiracies. The New York Times reported that Pence even told the president that he didn’t believe he has the power to block congressional certification of a Biden victory. This, Trump said late Tuesday night, was “fake news.”

“The Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act,” Trump said in statement, later adding that the “election was corrupt in contested states” and therefore “was illegal.”

“Our Vice President has several options under the U.S. Constitution,” Trump’s statement added.

“He can decertify the results or send them back to the states for change and certification. He can also decertify the illegal and corrupt results and send them to the House of Representatives for the one vote for one state tabulation.”

If Pence doesn’t exercise those oddball options as Trump prescribes, he could alienate the president’s base. But what good is a base that isn’t large enough to win national elections? That is the question of GOP strategists surveying the wreckage of 2020. Trump couldn’t secure his own reelection, let alone keep Republican Senate majority which, as of Wednesday morning, appears lost.

There may be an opportunity in all of the chaos, a chance for Pence to place a steady hand on the wheel of government as the peaceful transition of power begins. “It only helps his future ambitions,” said Rep. Jim Banks, the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee that Pence once helmed.

“Only the wacky fringe elements of the Republican Party believe that Mike Pence should stand up before the nation, on the floor of the House, and not perform his constitutional duties of counting the electors from the States,” added Banks, who predicted, “Pence will be president one day.”

Those ambitions were evident to former Rep. Mark Souder from early on. The two Hoosiers served in Congress together, and Souder watched as Pence moved steadily through House leadership to the Indiana governor’s mansion and finally to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across a parking lot from the White House. “He is gonna have to choose,” Souder said of the vice president’s last, and most consequential, decision. “Pence respects the institution too much; he’s signaled it, and he is not going to overturn the vote, court cases, and state election officials because he built his career on states’ rights.”

“I can't see him selling out,” Souder added. “Not for this guy.”

Pence will preside over a joint session of Congress, his office confirmed late Tuesday night, to count electoral votes at 1 p.m. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 01/06/2021 - 12:15

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International

US Spent More Than Double What It Collected In February, As 2024 Deficit Is Second Highest Ever… And Debt Explodes

US Spent More Than Double What It Collected In February, As 2024 Deficit Is Second Highest Ever… And Debt Explodes

Earlier today, CNBC’s…

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US Spent More Than Double What It Collected In February, As 2024 Deficit Is Second Highest Ever... And Debt Explodes

Earlier today, CNBC's Brian Sullivan took a horse dose of Red Pills when, about six months after our readers, he learned that the US is issuing $1 trillion in debt every 100 days, which prompted him to rage tweet, (or rageX, not sure what the proper term is here) the following:

We’ve added 60% to national debt since 2018. Germany - a country with major economic woes - added ‘just’ 32%.   

Maybe it will never matter.   Maybe MMT is real.   Maybe we just cancel or inflate it out. Maybe career real estate borrowers or career politicians aren’t the answer.

I have no idea.  Only time will tell.   But it’s going to be fascinating to watch it play out.

He is right: it will be fascinating, and the latest budget deficit data simply confirmed that the day of reckoning will come very soon, certainly sooner than the two years that One River's Eric Peters predicted this weekend for the coming "US debt sustainability crisis."

According to the US Treasury, in February, the US collected $271 billion in various tax receipts, and spent $567 billion, more than double what it collected.

The two charts below show the divergence in US tax receipts which have flatlined (on a trailing 6M basis) since the covid pandemic in 2020 (with occasional stimmy-driven surges)...

... and spending which is about 50% higher compared to where it was in 2020.

The end result is that in February, the budget deficit rose to $296.3 billion, up 12.9% from a year prior, and the second highest February deficit on record.

And the punchline: on a cumulative basis, the budget deficit in fiscal 2024 which began on October 1, 2023 is now $828 billion, the second largest cumulative deficit through February on record, surpassed only by the peak covid year of 2021.

But wait there's more: because in a world where the US is spending more than twice what it is collecting, the endgame is clear: debt collapse, and while it won't be tomorrow, or the week after, it is coming... and it's also why the US is now selling $1 trillion in debt every 100 days just to keep operating (and absorbing all those millions of illegal immigrants who will keep voting democrat to preserve the socialist system of the US, so beloved by the Soros clan).

And it gets even worse, because we are now in the ponzi finance stage of the Minsky cycle, with total interest on the debt annualizing well above $1 trillion, and rising every day

... having already surpassed total US defense spending and soon to surpass total health spending and, finally all social security spending, the largest spending category of all, which means that US debt will now rise exponentially higher until the inevitable moment when the US dollar loses its reserve status and it all comes crashing down.

We conclude with another observation by CNBC's Brian Sullivan, who quotes an email by a DC strategist...

.. which lays out the proposed Biden budget as follows:

The budget deficit will growth another $16 TRILLION over next 10 years. Thats *with* the proposed massive tax hikes.

Without them the deficit will grow $19 trillion.

That's why you will hear the "deficit is being reduced by $3 trillion" over the decade.

No family budget or business could exist with this kind of math.

Of course, in the long run, neither can the US... and since neither party will ever cut the spending which everyone by now is so addicted to, the best anyone can do is start planning for the endgame.

Tyler Durden Tue, 03/12/2024 - 18:40

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Government

Buried Project Veritas Recording Shows Top Pfizer Scientists Suppressed Concerns Over COVID-19 Boosters, MRNA Tech

Buried Project Veritas Recording Shows Top Pfizer Scientists Suppressed Concerns Over COVID-19 Boosters, MRNA Tech

Submitted by Liam Cosgrove

Former…

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Buried Project Veritas Recording Shows Top Pfizer Scientists Suppressed Concerns Over COVID-19 Boosters, MRNA Tech

Submitted by Liam Cosgrove

Former Project Veritas & O’Keefe Media Group operative and Pfizer formulation analyst scientist Justin Leslie revealed previously unpublished recordings showing Pfizer’s top vaccine researchers discussing major concerns surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. Leslie delivered these recordings to Veritas in late 2021, but they were never published:

Featured in Leslie’s footage is Kanwal Gill, a principal scientist at Pfizer. Gill was weary of MRNA technology given its long research history yet lack of approved commercial products. She called the vaccines “sneaky,” suggesting latent side effects could emerge in time.

Gill goes on to illustrate how the vaccine formulation process was dramatically rushed under the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization and adds that profit incentives likely played a role:

"It’s going to affect my heart, and I’m going to die. And nobody’s talking about that."

Leslie recorded another colleague, Pfizer’s pharmaceutical formulation scientist Ramin Darvari, who raised the since-validated concern that repeat booster intake could damage the cardiovascular system:

None of these claims will be shocking to hear in 2024, but it is telling that high-level Pfizer researchers were discussing these topics in private while the company assured the public of “no serious safety concerns” upon the jab’s release:

Vaccine for Children is a Different Formulation

Leslie sent me a little-known FDA-Pfizer conference — a 7-hour Zoom meeting published in tandem with the approval of the vaccine for 5 – 11 year-olds — during which Pfizer’s vice presidents of vaccine research and development, Nicholas Warne and William Gruber, discussed a last-minute change to the vaccine’s “buffer” — from “PBS” to “Tris” — to improve its shelf life. For about 30 seconds of these 7 hours, Gruber acknowledged that the new formula was NOT the one used in clinical trials (emphasis mine):


“The studies were done using the same volume… but contained the PBS buffer. We obviously had extensive consultations with the FDA and it was determined that the clinical studies were not required because, again, the LNP and the MRNA are the same and the behavior — in terms of reactogenicity and efficacy — are expected to be the same.

According to Leslie, the tweaked “buffer” dramatically changed the temperature needed for storage: “Before they changed this last step of the formulation, the formula was to be kept at -80 degrees Celsius. After they changed the last step, we kept them at 2 to 8 degrees celsius,” Leslie told me.

The claims are backed up in the referenced video presentation:

I’m no vaccinologist but an 80-degree temperature delta — and a 5x shelf-life in a warmer climate — seems like a significant change that might warrant clinical trials before commercial release.

Despite this information technically being public, there has been virtually no media scrutiny or even coverage — and in fact, most were told the vaccine for children was the same formula but just a smaller dose — which is perhaps due to a combination of the information being buried within a 7-hour jargon-filled presentation and our media being totally dysfunctional.

Bohemian Grove?

Leslie’s 2-hour long documentary on his experience at both Pfizer and O’Keefe’s companies concludes on an interesting note: James O’Keefe attended an outing at the Bohemian Grove.

Leslie offers this photo of James’ Bohemian Grove “GATE” slip as evidence, left on his work desk atop a copy of his book, “American Muckraker”:

My thoughts on the Bohemian Grove: my good friend’s dad was its general manager for several decades. From what I have gathered through that connection, the Bohemian Grove is not some version of the Illuminati, at least not in the institutional sense.

Do powerful elites hangout there? Absolutely. Do they discuss their plans for the world while hanging out there? I’m sure it has happened. Do they have a weird ritual with a giant owl? Yep, Alex Jones showed that to the world.

My perspective is based on conversations with my friend and my belief that his father is not lying to him. I could be wrong and am open to evidence — like if boxer Ryan Garcia decides to produce evidence regarding his rape claims — and I do find it a bit strange the club would invite O’Keefe who is notorious for covertly filming, but Occam’s razor would lead me to believe the club is — as it was under my friend’s dad — run by boomer conservatives the extent of whose politics include disliking wokeness, immigration, and Biden (common subjects of O’Keefe’s work).

Therefore, I don’t find O’Keefe’s visit to the club indicative that he is some sort of Operation Mockingbird asset as Leslie tries to depict (however Mockingbird is a 100% legitimate conspiracy). I have also met James several times and even came close to joining OMG. While I disagreed with James on the significance of many of his stories — finding some to be overhyped and showy — I never doubted his conviction in them.

As for why Leslie’s story was squashed… all my sources told me it was to avoid jail time for Veritas executives.

Feel free to watch Leslie’s full documentary here and decide for yourself.

Fun fact — Justin Leslie was also the operative behind this mega-viral Project Veritas story where Pfizer’s director of R&D claimed the company was privately mutating COVID-19 behind closed doors:

Tyler Durden Tue, 03/12/2024 - 13:40

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International

Association of prenatal vitamins and metals with epigenetic aging at birth and in childhood

“[…] our findings support the hypothesis that the intrauterine environment, particularly essential and non-essential metals, affect epigenetic aging…

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“[…] our findings support the hypothesis that the intrauterine environment, particularly essential and non-essential metals, affect epigenetic aging biomarkers across the life course.”

Credit: 2024 Bozack et al.

“[…] our findings support the hypothesis that the intrauterine environment, particularly essential and non-essential metals, affect epigenetic aging biomarkers across the life course.”

BUFFALO, NY- March 12, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as “Aging (Albany NY)” and “Aging-US” by Web of Science) Volume 16, Issue 4, entitled, “Associations of prenatal one-carbon metabolism nutrients and metals with epigenetic aging biomarkers at birth and in childhood in a US cohort.”

Epigenetic gestational age acceleration (EGAA) at birth and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) in childhood may be biomarkers of the intrauterine environment. In this new study, researchers Anne K. Bozack, Sheryl L. Rifas-Shiman, Andrea A. Baccarelli, Robert O. Wright, Diane R. Gold, Emily Oken, Marie-France Hivert, and Andres Cardenas from Stanford University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Columbia University, and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai investigated the extent to which first-trimester folate, B12, 5 essential and 7 non-essential metals in maternal circulation are associated with EGAA and EAA in early life. 

“[…] we hypothesized that OCM [one-carbon metabolism] nutrients and essential metals would be positively associated with EGAA and non-essential metals would be negatively associated with EGAA. We also investigated nonlinear associations and associations with mixtures of micronutrients and metals.”

Bohlin EGAA and Horvath pan-tissue and skin and blood EAA were calculated using DNA methylation measured in cord blood (N=351) and mid-childhood blood (N=326; median age = 7.7 years) in the Project Viva pre-birth cohort. A one standard deviation increase in individual essential metals (copper, manganese, and zinc) was associated with 0.94-1.2 weeks lower Horvath EAA at birth, and patterns of exposures identified by exploratory factor analysis suggested that a common source of essential metals was associated with Horvath EAA. The researchers also observed evidence of nonlinear associations of zinc with Bohlin EGAA, magnesium and lead with Horvath EAA, and cesium with skin and blood EAA at birth. Overall, associations at birth did not persist in mid-childhood; however, arsenic was associated with greater EAA at birth and in childhood. 

“Prenatal metals, including essential metals and arsenic, are associated with epigenetic aging in early life, which might be associated with future health.”

 

Read the full paper: DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205602 

Corresponding Author: Andres Cardenas

Corresponding Email: andres.cardenas@stanford.edu 

Keywords: epigenetic age acceleration, metals, folate, B12, prenatal exposures

Click here to sign up for free Altmetric alerts about this article.

 

About Aging:

Launched in 2009, Aging publishes papers of general interest and biological significance in all fields of aging research and age-related diseases, including cancer—and now, with a special focus on COVID-19 vulnerability as an age-dependent syndrome. Topics in Aging go beyond traditional gerontology, including, but not limited to, cellular and molecular biology, human age-related diseases, pathology in model organisms, signal transduction pathways (e.g., p53, sirtuins, and PI-3K/AKT/mTOR, among others), and approaches to modulating these signaling pathways.

Please visit our website at www.Aging-US.com​​ and connect with us:

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For media inquiries, please contact media@impactjournals.com.

 

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