It’s Friday, March 27th, 2020…but before we begin, here’s what the Dims are running against The Donald:

The increasingly hapless Biden reminds us of the time James Tiberius Kirk caught an aging disease, and was forced to endure the indignity of a competency hearing (view the video below from 32:59 to the 35:00 mark):

As we discussed with Daniel Francis yesterday, the biggest challenge The Donald will face in the presidential debates will be not generating sympathy for his increasingly infirm opponent…

…assuming Biden’s caretakers don’t decline the traditional face-to-face format in the first place.

Since we’re on the subject of the sick and infirm, here’s a helpful primer from Balls Cotton to determine whether you (a) might have the Wuhan Flu, and (b) what to do if you exhibit certain symptoms:

Showing Signs of the Wuhan Virus? Read This NOW

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the last edition of the week with a forward from Jeff Foutch, as, writing at UncoverDC.com, Tracy Beanz provides info inquiring minds want to know, as she answers the question… 

Why Italy?

Italy has been ravaged by the Wuhan Coronavirus, but the reasons why are linked more closely to globalism than the age of the infected.

“Thirty years ago, Italy saw the beginnings of what would become a serious issue with illegal immigration. What was surprising, was that the immigrants couldn’t just walk over a border to enter the country, they had to flock from China. It began with Italians hiring the Chinese off the books at cheap wages to work making garments in towns and villages renowned for their craftmanship, and morphed into Italians seeing the Chinese learn how to do it faster and cheaper; often times watching as their family owned businesses were shuttered because they were outbid. The Chinese took over the Italian craft and made it their own. What didn’t change was the coveted “Made in Italy” label. The NY Times began documenting the trend in 2010 writing:

Over the years, Italy learned the difficult lesson that it could no longer compete with China on price. And so, its business class dreamed, Italy would sell quality, not quantity. For centuries, this walled medieval city just outside of Florence has produced some of the world’s finest fabrics, becoming a powerhouse for “Made in Italy” chic.

And then, China came here.

Chinese laborers, first a few immigrants, then tens of thousands, began settling in Prato in the late 1980s. They transformed the textile hub into a low-end garment manufacturing capital, enriching many, stoking resentment and prompting recent crackdowns that in turn have brought cries of bigotry and hypocrisy.

The city is now home to the largest concentration of Chinese in Europe; some legal, many more not. Here in the heart of Tuscany, Chinese laborers work round the clock in some 3,200 businesses making low-end clothes, shoes and accessories, often with materials imported from China, for sale at midprice and low-end retailers worldwide.

The trend continued as whole villages in Italy became Chinese villages, with the Chinese displacing the Italians who lived there, creating their own neighborhoods, and pushing out decades of Italian family owned business. They weren’t known for following the rules. It caused much local consternation; the Italians were forced to pay their taxes and follow the employment guidelines, while the Chinese seemed to have built flourishing enterprises by skirting the rules, treating their people poorly, and engaging in rich human smuggling operations, to boot. There was little accountability for the Chinese, and much for the native Italians. (Sound at all familiar?!?)

…In March of 2019, Italy entered into a new agreement with China, part of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, a sweeping economic agreement with the country that saw the port of Triesta in northern Italy “revitalized” and managed by The PRC.

The project makes enormous infrastructure investments to move Chinese goods and resources. Italy became the first of the Group of 7 nations that once dominated the global economy to take part in China’s “One Belt One Road” throughout Asia, Africa and Europe.

The Trump administration, which tried and failed to stop the deal, focused in the days leading up to Mr. Xi’s visit on blocking any Italian use of 5G wireless networks developed by the Chinese electronics giant Huawei, which Washington warned could be used by Beijing to spy on communications networks.

Italy, which is saddled with crushing debt, hopes to lift its lagging economy by exporting goods to China and inviting more Chinese investment.

But opponents of the project in the Trump administration and in the European Union worry that Italy has turned itself into a Trojan Horse, allowing China’s economic — and potentially military and political — expansion to reach into the heart of Europe.

The detailed reporting on this slow takeover is expansive, and we could continue here for many paragraphs, but let us fast forward to early 2020. As China withheld information about the seriousness and spread of Wuhan corona-virus, many of these immigrants were returning- and arriving – from China. Once news of the virus became mainstream and China felt increasing backlash over the handling of the crisis, they turned to one of their major economic hubs for some help.

It wasn’t chance. It wasn’t age. It wasn’t overall health, and it wasn’t the good-hearted nature of the Italian people that caused the virus to ravage their nation. It was a leadership who are now under the thumb of the Chinese government.

This video was released on February 4, and was produced by the Chinese government. Under the guise of being “woke”, the Italian government prodded their citizens to erase the stigma surrounding the virus, and hug one of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who had been living, recently returned, or recently arrived in Italy. Italy had become dependent on China, and their capital is a large percentage of the Italian economy. When “One Belt, One Road” began early in 2019, the Italians made clear they were willing to partner with China in their quest for global dominance, and sadly it appears in their attempt to please the purse strings, they put a large percentage of their citizens in harms way.

This may also explain the enormous amount of aid and assistance flowing into Italy now by way of China. Far from being compassionate, the Chinese are likely looking to protect their investment…”

As Helen Raleigh reveals at The Federalist, the same holds true of Iran.  We cannot emphasize enough, while hiding the truth from the world, Italy and Iran included, the ChiComs allowed millions of people to travel out of Wuhan, a city they KNEW to be the center of what was then merely a domestic epidemic.

Hells bells, even Beethoven could hear the message Xi Jinping’s handling of the Wuhan Virus is sending…loud and clear.

Next up, two items which examine what we perceive to be the overreaction to what is, at least for now, a pandemic which hasn’t begun to approach the lethality of the Swine Flu under Obama.  First, the WSJ‘s Kim Strassel records the destructive power of the…

Big-Government Contagion

Appropriators throw hundreds of billions at the virus—and at everything else.

“The Senate did something good Wednesday night, passing a bill to inject liquidity into a virus-ravaged economy. It also did something dangerous, requiring the public to be on guard.

Members of Congress are pointing out the many parts of society aided by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, styled the Cares Act. Checks for American families. Some $377 billion for small business. Help for air carriers and other industries. Money for hospitals.

Missing from their list is an important category, which underlines an inescapable fact: Government mostly “Cares” for government. Bills that hand out money are written by appropriators. And appropriators never miss an opportunity to expand departments, agencies, bureaus and commissions. A rough calculation suggests the single biggest recipient of taxpayer dollars in this legislation—far in excess of $600 billion—is government itself. This legislation may prove the biggest one-day expansion of government power ever…”

Second, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson relates the universal cry for…

“For Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other comrades in the socialist vanguard of the Democratic Party, the coronavirus epidemic proves that the world needs socialism. For admirers of Western European universal health-care systems, the outbreak proves the need for the United States to build a Western European universal health-care system. (Like Italy’s?) For Joe Biden, the plague proves that the world needs Joe Biden. It is pretty easy to imagine Joe Biden demanding “More cowbell!” but that is what every political opportunist is saying right now. Like climate change or that infinitely plastic thing known as “national security,” the coronavirus epidemic is a policy palimpsest that political entrepreneurs will be writing over forever, or at least until something more convenient comes along. We know how that story goes, because we have heard it so many times before: Al-Qaeda flies airplanes into a building and Arianna Huffington gets to tell you what kind of car to drive.

…The current shortages are less matters of trade than they are matters of the “just in time” model of inventory management and operations, which works very well — if things actually get done in time. The current shortages of everything from ventilators to toilet paper are forcing a reevaluation of the risks associated with low inventories. That’s a classic problem of mispricing risk: Businesses immediately realize the savings associated with reductions in the costs of building and operating large warehouses, but the tradeoffs are not given their due because the costs imposed by them are not immediate. Many of the people who say “We need to run the government like a business!” would not say that if they knew more about the way many American businesses are run. It is worth keeping in mind that Krispy Kreme went bankrupt selling doughnuts to Americans.

A more narrow and more difficult issue than that of international trade is that of trade with China, which groans under the corrupt misgovernment of a single-party gulag state. Trade with China is the right policy for the United States for both economic and national-security reasons: Trade leaves both countries better off in material terms, and the United States is better off with a middle-income China than with a poor and desperate China. While it is wrong to believe that liberal reform in China will come to pass inevitably as a result of its increasing prosperity and its limited economic reforms, almost none of what the United States wants from the U.S.–China relationship is easier to get from a poorer China. Even real problems in the economic relationship, the theft of intellectual property prominent among them, are more tractable to Washington when China has more to lose. The problem for the United States is that Washington is lazy and reliably reaches for the wrong weapon — tariffs — because our national leadership lacks the intellectual capacity and long-term political commitment to pursue our interests in an intelligent and productive way.

Our relationship with China has to be managed like our relationship with any other country. In the case of China, there are elevated risks that have to do with the nature of the country and with the nature of the Beijing regime, and we owe it to ourselves to be realistic and clear-eyed about what those are and how they can be most effectively mitigated.

The failure of a New York City hospital operator to stock a sufficient supply of medical masks is not an indictment of the world economic order or “capitalist pathologies.” It is an indictment of the management of New York City hospitals, and hospitals elsewhere. That is a big enough problem without imagining it to be grander than it is.

But if you play the cowbell, then “More cowbell!” is what you want to hear.“

Though we have to say, The Donald, for all his lack of intellectual capacity, has had more success forcing the ChiComs to the bargaining table than all of his predecessors combined.

Moving on, also writing at the WSJ, Holman Jenkins sees hope on the horizon just as soon as…

The Happy Few Are the Cured

Now let’s get on with saving the economy while protecting the vulnerable.

“The giddiest among us soon will be those who tested positive and now have it behind them. The world will be their oyster. A Craigslist page will soon appear for coronavirus antibody-positive personal services. People will get paid hundreds of dollars an hour if they can document their immunity. Starbucks is opening up again in Wuhan. In the U.S., Seattle or New York will get the first antibody-positive Starbucks: Every barista will be able to prove they’ve had the coronavirus.

Half facetiously, we need infection camps where millennials can go and get exposed and frolic for two weeks and then come back and go to work. You may think all we are doing is about protecting them and you from getting the virus. No. Our “flatten the curve” strategy is premised on all of us being exposed to the infection; some of us will die. We are crushing our economy simply to meter out how quickly these consequences fall on our exhausted health-care workers.

…But I repeat: We are slowing the economy to a crawl to slow the rate of a thing happening that will have to happen anyway.

It will beyears before we can make sense of our experience. Path dependence—small contingencies that determine the flow of events—may explain why 2020 wasn’t 1918, 1957, 1968 or 1977, when pandemics didn’t cause global depressions. The mesmerizing apparition of China suppressing the virus, after first hiding its existence, may turn out to be a misdirection—the invention of the idea that a flu-like disease can just be stopped...”

In other words, all this disruption may have been not only ill-advised, but to no avail…and solely intended to prevent Trump’s reelection.

Which brings us, inappropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this meme from our sister-in-law Amy…

…another from Breeze Gould…

…and this string from Ed Hickey:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and one more success you can chalk up to The Donald:

U.S. indicts Venezuela’s Maduro on narcoterrorism charges

State Department announced rewards of up to $55M for info leading to arrests,convictions of Maduro, associates

Hopefully, Hillary’s next.

Magoo