A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

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MAY 21, 2020
A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

By the Children’s Health Defense Team

From the moment of “COVID-19’s” naming—and particularly since the imposition of unprecedented restrictions on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—some people have smelled a rat. And with each passing week, the smell becomes worse. A growing chorus of ordinary citizens and world-renowned medical and scientific experts is raising questions about matters ranging from the coronavirus’s origins to the rationale for continued lockdowns (see here, here and here).

The mainstream media have shown themselves only too ready to lob ad hominem attacks against any and all such non-conformists. However, one does not have to be insensitive to the illness and deaths associated with COVID-19 to recognize that powerful agendas are riding on the coattails of SARS-CoV-2. Citizens are waking up to the fact that the countries, officials and public figures who embrace draconian interventions such as immunity certificates, microchipping, forced vaccination and the removal of children from their homes also approve of making our sovereign rights—whether to earn a living, maintain bodily integrity, congregate to practice our spirituality, enjoy the arts or protect and educate our children—contingent upon our acceptance of these Big Brother measures and technologies.

To make it easier for the public to assess what is happening and what is at stake, Children’s Health Defense has put together the following timeline of selected events. We invite readers to consider how these events—some of them seemingly unrelated—and the network of partnerships and relationships that they illustrate have contributed to the unfolding set of circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

While the lockdown is a cataclysm for the world economy, it is an opportunity for Gates” and his billionaire brotherhood…

Notes/Explanatory Context

Gain-of-function research: COVID-19 has prompted renewed questioning about a long-debated branch of virology that, around 2012, scientists benignly rebranded as “gain-of-function” (GOF) research. GOF experiments seek to generate viruses “with properties that do not exist in nature” or, stated another way, “alter a pathogen to make it more transmissible or deadly.” One of the leading proponents of GOF work is Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), a “legend in coronavirology” and “trailblazer of synthetic genomic manipulation techniques” who specializes in engineering lethal coronaviruses from “mail-order DNA.” Baric and other GOF enthusiasts argue that this type of viral tinkering is “critical to the development of broad-based vaccines and therapeutics,” but critics, such as Dr. Thomas Inglesby (director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), dispute this putative benefit.

Big Data and Big Telecom: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dafna Tachover (director of CHD’s “Stop 5G and Wireless Harms Project”) wrote on May 8: “5G has almost nothing to do with improving your lives; it’s all about controlling your life, marketing products, and harvesting your data for Artificial Intelligence purposes. The 21st century’s ‘black gold’ is data.” They note that Bill Gates, along with a number of other players and companies, is helping set up a “microwave radiation-emitting spider web [that] will allow Big Data/Big Telecom and Big Brother to capture what happens inside and outside every person at every moment of life” using a sinister brain-machine interface and other technologies, many financed by Gates. In short, “While the lockdown is a cataclysm for the world economy, it is an opportunity for Gates” and his billionaire brotherhood, ably assisted by an unadmirable fleet of medical and scientist yes-men.

Timeline of selected events
1998
May 18: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 20 states file antitrust charges against Microsoft.

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2000
2000: Bill Gates steps down from his position as Microsoft CEO, and Bill and Melinda Gates launch their eponymous foundation.

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2000: The Gates Foundation (along with other partners) launches the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), known today as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The foundation has given $4.1 billion to Gavi over the past 20 years.

2001
November: After initially losing the antitrust lawsuit and appealing the decision, Microsoft settles its case with the DOJ out of court.

2002
November 2002: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) researcher Ralph Baric publishes a “breakthrough work” in gain-of-function research (studies that alter pathogens to make them more transmissible or deadly, see Notes above), describing the creation of a synthetic clone of a natural mouse coronavirus.

November 2002: China’s Guangdong province reports the first case of “atypical pneumonia” (later labeled as SARS).

The speed of the Baric group illustrates how quickly a qualified team of virologists can create a synthetic clone from a natural virus, and therefore make genetic modifications to it.
2003
October 28: A paper by the Baric research group at UNC describes their synthetic recreation of the “previously undescribed” SARS coronavirus. (Writing in 2020, a scientist states, “The speed of the Baric group illustrates how quickly a qualified team of virologists can create a synthetic clone from a natural virus, and therefore make genetic modifications to it. Moreover, that was back in 2003. Today, a qualified laboratory can repeat those steps in a matter of weeks.”)

2005
December: Congress approves the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “to issue a PREP Act Declaration . . . that provides immunity from liability for any loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of countermeasures to diseases, threats, and conditions determined in the Declaration to constitute a present or credible risk of a future public health emergency.”

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2009
2009-present (and earlier): The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awards millions of dollars in global health funding to Imperial College London; funding covers areas such as polio, HIV, family planning, malaria, health care delivery, agricultural development, information technology and “public awareness and analysis.”

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2009: The Gates Foundation funds human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine trials in India, administering the vaccine to 23,000 young girls in remote provinces. Seven die and approximately 1,200 suffer autoimmune conditions, fertility disorders or other severe reactions. Ethical violations include forged consent forms and refusal of medical treatment for the injured girls.

October 2009: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), goes on YouTube to declare that serious adverse events for the H1N1 influenza vaccine are “very, very, very rare.” Months later, serious adverse events such as miscarriages, narcolepsy and febrile convulsions explode in multiple countries.

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2010
January: Bill Gates pledges $10 billion in funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) and announces “the Decade of Vaccines.”

May 18: Senator and physician Tom Coburn calls out Dr. Fauci for misleadingly touting “significant progress in HIV vaccine research”—research that has ushered millions into NIAID’s coffers. Dr. Coburn stated, “Most scientists involved in AIDS research believe that an HIV vaccine is further away than ever.”

2011
December 30: Dr. Fauci promotes gain-of-function research on bird flu viruses, arguing that the research is worth the risk. The risks worry other “seasoned researchers.”

2012
April 20: Baylor College researchers publish their evaluation of four vaccine candidates for SARS, concluding that “Caution in proceeding to application of a SARS-CoV vaccine in humans is indicated.”

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May: The 194 Member States of the World Health Assembly endorse the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with NIAID, WHO, Gavi, UNICEF and others. Dr. Fauci is one of five members on the GVAP’s Leadership Council.

2014
2014: Dr. Deborah Birx takes the helm of PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which Dr. Fauci helped launch (in 2003) and which benefits from generous Gates Foundation support. Birx and Fauci are long-time allies, having worked together during the early years of AIDS and sharing overlapping career paths.

October 7: National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins announces a “new phase of cooperation” between NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including partnering for vaccine development.

October 17: Under President Obama, the NIH halts federal funding for gain-of-function (GOF) research (see Notes) and asks federally funded GOF researchers to “agree to a voluntary moratorium.” The funding hiatus applies to 21 studies “reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” NIH later allows 10 of the studies to resume.

[T]hese data and restrictions represent a crossroads of [gain-of-function] research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens.
2015
2015: NIAID, under Fauci, awards a five-year, $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance (whose director gets credit on subsequent publications for “funding acquisition” rather than scientific work) to conduct gain-of-function studies on the “risk of bat coronavirus emergence.” Ten percent of the award goes to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does “the bulk of the on-the-ground sample collection and analysis.”

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January: In a public appearance, Bill Gates states, “We’re taking things that are genetically modified organisms and we’re injecting them into little kids’ arms; we just shoot ‘em right into the vein.”

September 24: UNC’s Ralph Baric is granted a patent for the creation of chimeric coronavirus spike proteins.

November 9: Baric and the Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zheng-Li (the leading GOF coronavirus researcher in China) publish what some refer to as “the most famous gain-of-function virology paper” (in Nature Medicine), describing their creation of a synthetic chimeric coronavirus. The authors state: “[T]hese data and restrictions represent a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens [emphasis added]. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.”

2016
2016: The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity states that “very few government-funded gain-of-function experiments [pose] a significant threat to public health.”

…researchers blame the Gates-funded polio vaccination campaign for almost half a million cases of childhood paralysis.
2017
February 8: The Modi administration in India severs ties with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, after researchers blame the Gates-funded polio vaccination campaign for almost half a million cases of childhood paralysis.

November 30: Shi Zheng-Li and coauthors publish a paper in PLoS Pathogens describing the creation of eight new synthetic coronaviruses.

December 19: The NIH and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID restore federal funding for gain-of-function research, ending the moratorium that began in October 2014.

December 19: Dr. Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health tells the New York Times that the type of gain-of-function experiments endorsed by Dr. Fauci’s NIAID have “done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

NIAID awards a six-year renewal grant of $3.7 million to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to continue their gain-of-function studies on bat coronaviruses.
2019
2019: NIAID awards a six-year renewal grant of $3.7 million to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to continue their gain-of-function studies on bat coronaviruses. The renewal is approved “unusually quickly,” receiving a “really extremely high priority for funding.”

August 14: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation owns 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle International Corp., representing the Foundation’s second largest tech holding after Microsoft. Crown Castle dominates ownership of 5G infrastructure throughout the U.S., including cell towers, small cell nodes and fiber.

October: A report released by NBC News in May, 2020 declares, “The analysis of commercial telemetry data in Wuhan suggests the COVID-19 pandemic began earlier than initially reported” and “supports the release of COVID-19 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” NBC’s May 8 summary states, “there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a ‘hazardous event’ sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.”

October 6: On May 5, 2020, British and French researchers publish a study estimating that COVID-19 could have started as early as October 6, 2019.

October 18-27: Wuhan hosts the Military World Games (“Wuhan 2019”), held every four years. More than 9,000 athletes from over 100 countries compete. The telecom systems for the Athletes’ Village constructed for the event are powered by 5G technology, “showcas[ing] its infrastructure and technological prowess.”

October 18: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security convene an invitation-only “tabletop exercise” called Event 201 to map out the response to a hypothetical global coronavirus pandemic.

November-December: General practitioners in northern Italy start noticing a “strange pneumonia.”

December 2-3: Vaccine scientists attending the WHO’s Global Vaccine Safety Summit confirm major problems with vaccine safety around the world.

December 18: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report the development of a “novel way to record a patient’s vaccination history,” using smartphone-readable nanocrystals called “quantum dots” embedded in the skin using microneedles—this work is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

December 31: Chinese officials inform the WHO about a cluster of “mysterious pneumonia” cases. Later, the South China Morning Post reports that it can trace the first case back to November 17.

Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College … tells a Congressional Committee that coronavirus vaccines have always had a “unique potential safety problem”
2020
January 7: Chinese authorities formally identify a “novel” coronavirus.

January 10: China makes the genome sequence of the new coronavirus publicly available.

January 11: China records its first death attributed to the new coronavirus.

January 20: The first U.S. coronavirus case is reported in Washington State.

January 23: Shi Zheng-Li releases a paper reporting that the new coronavirus is 96% identical to a strain that her lab isolated from bats in 2013 but never publicized.

January 30: The WHO declares the new coronavirus a “global health emergency.”

Jan. 31, 2020: A group of Indian scientists publishes a study finding HIV sequences in the 2019-nCoV coronavirus. The scientists withdraw the study within 24 hours, presumably under some pressure.

February 4: Sixty-seven year-old scientist Dr. Frank Plummer, head until 2015 of Canada’s level-4 National Microbiology Laboratory, dies under mysterious circumstances while in Nairobi, Kenya. During the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, Plummer told the New York Times that 60% of “probable” and “suspected” SARS cases had failed the test needed to confirm a link between coronavirus and SARS: “[W]hether it is the entire explanation for SARS I am just not sure yet.”

February 4: With just 11 people in the U.S. who are confirmed to have COVID-19, HHS issues a Declaration, published on March 17 in the Federal Register, that places the new coronavirus under the umbrella of the 2005 PREP Act, making medical countermeasures (including vaccines) immune from liability.

February 5: Bill and Melinda Gates announce $100 million in funding for coronavirus vaccine research and treatment efforts.

February 10: French and Canadian scientists publish a paper about the new coronavirus describing an “important” anomaly—12 additional nucleotides—not observed in previous coronaviruses. They suggest that the distinct feature “may provide a gain-of-function . . . for efficient spreading in the human population.”

February 11: The WHO gives the disease thought to be caused by the new coronavirus a name: “COVID-19.” WHO’s Director-General explains, “We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease.”

February 24: Moderna, Inc. sends the first batch of its experimental coronavirus vaccine, mRNA-1273, to its research partner, NIAID.

February 25: Moderna stock shares trade 15% higher.

February 29: The U.S. reports its first COVID-19 death.

March 5: Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College (who has previously tried to develop a SARS vaccine) tells a Congressional Committee that coronavirus vaccines have always had a “unique potential safety problem”—a “kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon.”

March 6: President Trump signs an $8.3 billion emergency coronavirus spending package, much of which “directly benefit[s] the drug industry.”

March 10: Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia expresses concerns about the push to “rush [a vaccine] through,” particularly in the absence of “any history of making a coronavirus vaccine.”

March 10: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard commit $125 million to identify, assess, develop and scale up COVID-19 treatments, forming the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The $50 million in Gates Foundation funding is part of the $100 million in COVID-19 funding announced by Gates on February 5.

March 11: The WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic.

March 13: Bill Gates steps down from the Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to “dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities.”

March 16: Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, scientific advisor to the UK government, publishes his computer simulations warning that there will be over two million COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. unless the country adopts “intensive and socially disruptive measures.”

March 16: Dr. Fauci tells Americans that they must be prepared to “take more drastic steps” and “hunker down significantly” to slow the coronavirus’s spread.

March 16: NIAID launches a Phase 1 trial in 45 healthy adults of the mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine co-developed by NIAID and Moderna, Inc. The trial skips the customary step of testing the vaccine in animal models prior to proceeding to human trials.

March 17: The Nation publishes an analysis covering conflicts of interest in the Gates Foundation’s charitable giving, describing “close to $2 billion in tax-deductible charitable donations to private companies,” including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and “close to $250 million in charitable grants . . . to companies in which the foundation holds corporate stocks and bonds,” including Merck, GSK, Sanofi and other pharmaceutical corporations. A critic states that the foundation has “created one of the most problematic precedents in the history of foundation giving by essentially opening the door for corporations to see themselves as deserving charity claimants at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high.”

March 22: U.S. bioweapons expert Dr. Francis Boyle repeats earlier statements that the purpose of Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) labs such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology “is the research, development, testing and stockpiling of offensive biological weapons” and that the new virus is a “weaponized” SARS coronavirus that leaked out of the Wuhan BSL-4 lab.

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Bill Gates announces significant funding for a company, EarthNow, that will blanket Earth with $1 billion in video surveillance satellites.
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March 24: Bill Gates announces significant funding for a company, EarthNow, that will blanket Earth with $1 billion in video surveillance satellites.

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March 26: Microsoft announces that it is acquiring Affirmed Networks, a company focused on 5G and “edge computing.”

March 26: Dr. Fauci publishes an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (with senior NIAID official H. Clifford Lane and CDC director Robert Redfield), stating that “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza,” with a case fatality rate of perhaps 0.1%.

March 27: President Trump signs the $2 trillion CARES Act into law.

March 27: Children’s Health Defense publishes its video and article, “Dr. Fauci and COVID-19 priorities: therapeutics now or vaccines later?” Shortly thereafter, Mailchimp deactivates CHD’s account with no advance notice and no violation of Mailchimp’s rules.

March 29: President Trump extends nationwide social distancing guidelines until April 30.

March 31: White House coronavirus advisors Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Fauci cite models showing a potential 100,000 to 240,000 coronavirus deaths “even if the country keeps stringent social distancing guidelines in place.” Fauci describes social distancing and lockdowns as “inconvenient” but “the answer to our problems.”

April 2: Bill Gates states that a coronavirus vaccine “is the only thing that will allow us to return to normal.”

April 3: Forbes reports that Moderna’s CEO has become an overnight billionaire after the company ended 2019 with a net loss.

April 6: Dr. Fauci describes a COVID-19 vaccine as a “showstopper” and states, “I hope we don’t have so many people infected that we actually have . . . herd immunity.”

April 9: Dr. Fauci states that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus “looks more like the 60,000 [range],” adding the “models are really only as good as the assumptions that you put into the model.”

April 9: The Gates-funded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) reports that 115 COVID-19 vaccines are in the pipeline.

April 9: Children’s Health Defense publishes “Gates’ globalist vaccine agenda: a win-win for pharma and mandatory vaccination.”

April 11: Children’s Health Defense publishes “Here’s why Bill Gates wants indemnity… Are you willing to take the risk?”

April 15: Bill Gates pledges another $150 million to coronavirus vaccine development and other measures. He states, “There are seven billion people on the planet. We are going to need to vaccinate nearly every one.”

April 16: Moderna announces up to $483 million in funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to speed up the mRNA-1273 vaccine’s development.

April 18: Professor Luc Montagnier, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of HIV, appears on French television and states that SARS-CoV-2 has been “manipulated” to include “added sequences” from HIV. Professor Montagnier asserts that this “meticulous” insertion could only have been carried out in a laboratory. Others raise similar questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

April 18: News outlets report that the country’s first coronavirus tests are ineffective due to CDC lab contamination and the CDC’s violation of its manufacturing standards.

April 21: Washington State announces plans to have a 1,500-person contact tracing team in place by mid-May.

April 23: Researchers issue a preprint reporting “direct evidence” of at least 30 different SARS-CoV-2 genetic variants.

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April 23: News outlets report that American billionaires’ wealth increased by 10% during the first few months of COVID-19.

April 23: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “The Bill Gates effect: WHO’s DTP vaccine killed more children in Africa than the diseases it targeted.”

April 24: The NIH cancels the funding awarded to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses (funding awarded continuously since 2015). The NIH and Dr. Fauci decline to comment.

April 27: Former FDA head Scott Gottlieb (now with Pfizer) and former Medicare/Medicaid official Andy Slavitt urge the Trump administration to dedicate $46 billion to contact tracing and isolation.

April 28: A Newsweek article reports, “Dr. Fauci backed controversial Wuhan lab with U.S. dollars for risky coronavirus research.” Fauci does not respond to requests for comments.

April 29: Bloomberg publishes a story about President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” a planned pharmaceutical-government-military collaboration to shrink the development time for a coronavirus vaccine.

April 30: Bill Gates writes that “the world will be able to go back to the way things were . . . when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” Gates also states that “Governments will need to expedite their usual drug approval processes in order to deliver the vaccine to over 7 billion people quickly.”

April 30: Dr. Fauci states that it is “doable” to have hundreds of millions of doses of a coronavirus vaccine available by January 2021.

May 1: Dr. Thomas Inglesby (director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), discussing gain-of-function research, states that “laboratory systems are not infallible, and even in the greatest laboratories of the world, there are mistakes.”

May 1: Democratic Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois introduces the TRACE Act (“HR 6666: COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, and Contacting Everyone”). The conspicuously vague Act would allocate $100 billion to CDC-hired entities for contact tracing and “other purposes,” including family separation. (See also May 15.)

May 4: Bill Gates pledges another $50 million toward COVID-19, for a total of $300 million in commitments.

May 4: President Trump states that the U.S. will have a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020.

May 5: British and French researchers publish “Emergence of genomic diversity and recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2,” suggesting that the recurrent mutations detected “may indicate ongoing adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 to its novel human host.”

May 5: Neil Ferguson resigns from the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) after flouting his own social distancing rules. The married lover with whom Ferguson has his trysts works for an organization “loosely connected with Bill Gates, through the World Economic Forum.”

May 5: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “Redfield and Birx: can they be trusted with COVID?”

May 6: An anonymous software engineer (ex-Google) pronounces Neil Ferguson’s COVID-19 computer model “unusable for scientific purposes.”

May 6: New York governor Andrew Cuomo announces that the state will partner with “visionary” Bill Gates to restructure education by placing “technology at the forefront.” Cuomo appoints former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to lead a blue-ribbon committee for this purpose. Critics push back, describing past Gates-Foundation-funded educational fiascos that amassed “detailed personal information about millions of students” in the cloud.

May 7: Business Insider reports that over 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the seven-week period since COVID-19 restrictions began.

May 7: NPR reports that 44 states and the District of Columbia have plans to deploy a contact tracing workforce of over 66,000 workers.

May 8: NBC News releases a private report describing an unconfirmed shutdown of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2019.

May 8: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dafna Tachover (director of CHD’s “Stop 5G and Wireless Harms Project”) publish “The brave new world of Bill Gates and Big Telecom.”

May 11: UK chief medical officer Dr. Chris Whitty (an insider who has received millions in malaria research funding from the Gates Foundation and who endorses stigma as a useful public health intervention) states that COVID-19 is “harmless to [the] vast majority.”

May 13: Australian researchers report that “SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely adapted to infect humans, raising important questions as to whether it arose in nature by a rare chance event or whether its origins might lie elsewhere.”

May 14: Microsoft announces that it is acquiring UK-based Metaswitch Networks “to expand its Azure 5G strategy.”

May 15: The House passes the 1,815-page, $3 trillion HEROES Act (“Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act”), sneaking in portions of the TRACE ACT that would funnel $75 billion to the CDC for “coronavirus testing, contact tracing and isolation measures.”

May 18: Moderna announces interim results from the Phase 1 trial of its mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine. The company reports that three out of 15 healthy participants (20%) experienced Grade 3 systemic adverse events following a second dose. (The Merck Manual defines Grade 3 as “severe or medically significant but not immediately life-threatening; hospitalization or prolongation of hospitalization indicated; disabling; limiting self care.”)

May 18: Discussing the interim results from Moderna’s Phase 1 trial of its mRNA-1273 vaccine—co-developed with NIAID—Dr. Fauci states: “I must warn that there’s also the possibility of negative consequences, where certain vaccines can actually enhance the negative effect of the infection.”

May 18: After describing its interim Phase 1 results as “promising,” shares of Moderna stock soar 25%, closing at a “record high.” The company’s stock has gained 241% since the beginning of 2020.

May 19: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “How Bill Gates controls global messaging and censorship.”

May 20: Microsoft announces its new supercomputer intended to create “human-like” artificial intelligence.

Stop the conveyor belt
Around the world, many people are understandably reeling in shock at the rapid economic, social and cultural changes that have followed in the wake of the phenomenon called “COVID-19.” Many of these changes involve ever-tighter restrictions on our rights and freedoms, accompanied by inexorable messaging—both public and subliminal—that a “vaccine for all” and 24/7 tracking and surveillance are the only way out. Increasingly, however, there are hopeful signs that more members of the public are recognizing the duplicity and self-interest of those offering false salvation. Each of us needs to do our part to expose these issues, standing up for individual sovereignty and working to halt the transition “to a totalitarian singularity more despotic than Orwell ever imagined.”

Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. CHD is planning many strategies, including legal, in an effort to defend the health of our children and obtain justice for those already injured. Your support is essential to CHD’s successful mission.

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2016 STATE OF THE JUDICIARY ADDRESS THE HONORABLE CHIEF JUSTICE HUGH P. THOMPSON SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA January 27, 2016, 11 a.m. House Chambers, State Capitol

016 STATE OF THE JUDICIARY ADDRESS
THE HONORABLE CHIEF JUSTICE HUGH P. THOMPSON
SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA
January 27, 2016, 11 a.m.
House Chambers, State Capitol

Lt. Governor Cagle, Speaker Ralston, President Pro Tem Shafer, Speaker Pro Tem Jones, members of the General Assembly, my fellow judges and my fellow Georgians:
Good morning. Thank you for this annual tradition of inviting the Chief Justice to report on the State of Georgia’s Judiciary. Thanks in large part to your support and the support of our governor, as we move into 2016, I am pleased to tell you that your judicial branch of government is not only steady and secure, it is dynamic; it has momentum; and it is moving forward into the 21st century with a vitality and a commitment to meeting the inevitable changes before us.
Our mission remains the same: To protect individual rights and liberties, to uphold and interpret the rule of law, and to provide a forum for the peaceful resolution of disputes that is fair, impartial, and accessible to all.
Our judges are committed to these principles. Each day, throughout this state, they put on their black robes; they take their seat on the courtroom bench; and they work tirelessly to ensure that all citizens who come before them get justice.


Our Judicial Council is the policy-making body of the state’s judicial branch. It is made up of competent, committed leaders elected by their fellow judges and representing all classes of court. They are assisted by an Administrative Office of the Courts, which is under a new director – Cynthia Clanton – and has a renewed focus as an agency that serves judges and courts throughout Georgia.
A number of our judges have made the trip to be here today. Our judges are here today because the relationship we have with you is important. We share with you the same goal of serving the citizens of this great state. We could not do our work without your help and that of our governor.
On behalf of all of the judges, let me say we are extremely grateful to you members of the General Assembly for your judicial compensation appropriation last year.


Today I want to talk to you about Georgia’s 21st century courts – our vision for the future, the road we must travel to get there, and the accomplishments we have already achieved.
It has been said that, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
Since a new state Constitution took effect in 1983, our population has nearly doubled to a little over 10 million, making us the 8th most populous state in the country. We are among the fastest growing states in the nation, and in less than four years, our population is projected to exceed 12 million.
Because it is good for our economy, we welcome that growth. Today, Georgia ranks
among states with the highest number of Fortune 500 companies, 20 of which have their global headquarters here; we have 72 four-year colleges and universities; we have the world’s busiest airport and we have two deep-water ports. Georgia is a gateway to the South, and for a growing number of people and businesses from around the world, it is a gateway to this country.
All of this growth produces litigation – increasingly complex litigation – and just as our state must prepare for this growth by ensuring we have enough roads and modes of transportation, enough doctors and hospitals, and enough power to reach people throughout the state, our courts also must be equipped and modernized for the 21st
century.
While our population has nearly doubled since 1983, the number of Georgia judges has
grown only 16 percent. We must work together to ensure that our judicial system has enough judges, staff and resources in the 21st century to fulfill the mission and constitutional duties our forefathers assigned to us.
A healthy, vibrant judiciary is absolutely critical to the economic development of our state. Thanks to many leaders in the judiciary, as well as to our partnership with the governor and to you in the legislature, we are well on our way to building a court system for the 21st century.


This time next year, with your support, we will have put into place an historic shift in the types of cases handled by the Georgia Supreme Court – the highest court in the state – and by the Court of Appeals – our intermediate appellate court. Thanks to Governor Deal’s Georgia Appellate Jurisdiction Review Commission, this realignment will bring the Supreme Court of Georgia in line with other state Supreme Courts, which handle only the most critical cases that potentially change the law. Serving on the Commission are two of my colleagues – Justice David Nahmias and Justice Keith Blackwell – as well as two judges from the Court of Appeals – Chief
Judge Sara Doyle and Judge Stephen Dillard.
I thank you, Justices and Judges, for your leadership.
Under the Georgia Constitution, Supreme Court justices collectively decide every case that comes before us. Currently the state’s highest court hears divorce and alimony cases; we hear cases involving wills; we hear cases involving titles to land; and we hear disputes over boundary lines.
But the Governor’s Commission, and a number of reports by other commissions and
committees issued since 1983, have recommended that such cases should be heard by our intermediate appeals court, not by our highest court.
Both of our courts are among the busiest in the nation. But unlike the Supreme Court, which sits as a full court with all seven justices participating in, and deciding, every case, the Court of Appeals sits in panels of three. With your approval last year of three new Court of Appeals judges, that court will now have five panels, so it will have the capacity to consider five times as many cases as the Supreme Court.
Modernization of the Supreme Court makes sense. In a 19th century court system, when
most of the wealth was tied up in land, maybe title to land cases were the most important. Maybe they had the greatest implications for the public at large. But as we move into the 21st century, that is no longer true.
In answer to questions such as who owns a strip of land, what does a will mean, and who should prevail in a divorce settlement or an alimony dispute, most judicial systems believe that three judges are enough to provide the parties with a full and fair consideration of their appeal. It no longer makes sense to have seven – or nine – justices collectively review these types of cases.
There is no doubt these cases will be in good hands with the Court of Appeals.
Let me emphasize that all these cases the Commission recommended shifting to the Court of Appeals are critically important to the parties involved.
Let me also emphasize that the purpose of this historic change is not to lessen the burden on the Supreme Court. Rather, the intent is to free up the state’s highest court to devote more time and energy to the most complex and the most difficult cases that have the greatest implications for the law and society at large.
We will therefore retain jurisdiction of constitutional challenges to the laws you enact, questions from the federal courts seeking authoritative rulings on Georgia law, election contests, murder and death penalty cases, and cases in which the Court of Appeals judges are equally divided.
Significantly, we want to be able to accept more of what we call “certiorari” cases
which are appeals of decisions by the Court of Appeals. The number of petitions filed in this category during the first quarter of the new docket year is nearly 14 percent higher this year over last. Yet due to the amount of appeals the law now requires us to take, we have had to reject the majority of the petitions for certiorari that we receive.
These cases are often the most complex – and the most consequential. They involve
issues of great importance to the legal system and the State as a whole. Or they involve an area of law that has become inconsistent and needs clarification.
Businesses and citizens need to know what the law allows them to do and what it does
not allow them to do. It is our job at the highest court to reduce any uncertainty and bring consistency and clarity to the law.
Under the Commission’s recommendations, our 21st century Georgia Supreme Court will
be able to accept more of these important appeals.


As we move into the 21st century, plans are being discussed to build the first state Judicial Building in Georgia’s history that will be dedicated solely to the judiciary. We are grateful for the Governor’s leadership on this. The building that now houses the state’s highest court and the Court of Appeals was built in 1954 when Herman Tallmadge was governor. Back then, it made sense to combine the state judicial branch with part of the executive branch, by locating the Law Department in the same building.
But the world has changed since 1954, and the building we now occupy was not designed with visitors in mind. It was not designed with technology in mind. And it surely was not designed with security in mind. Indeed, it was designed to interconnect with neighboring buildings that housed other branches of government.
A proper Judicial Building is about more than bricks and mortar. Outside, this building will symbolize for generations to come the place where people will go to get final resolution of civil wrongs and injustices; where the government will go to safeguard its prosecution of criminals; and where defendants will go to appeal convictions and sentences to prison for life.
Inside such a building, the courtroom will reinforce the reality that what goes on here is serious and solemn; it is a place of great purpose, in the words of a federal judge. The parties and the lawyers will understand they are all on equal footing, because they are equal under the law.
There is a majesty about the law that gets played out in the courtroom. It is a hallowed place because it is where the truth must be told and where justice is born. The courtroom represents our democracy at its very best.
No, this building is not just about bricks and mortar. Rather it is a place that will house Georgia’s highest court where fairness, impartiality, and justice will reign for future generations.


We are no longer living in a 1950s Georgia. The courts of the 21st century must be
equipped to handle an increasingly diverse population. Living today in metropolitan Atlanta alone are more than 700,000 people who were born outside the United States. According to the Chamber of Commerce, today some 70 countries have a presence in Atlanta, in the form of a consulate or trade office. We must be ready to help resolve the disputes of international businesses that are increasingly locating in our state and capital. Our 21st century courts must be open, transparent and accessible to all. Our citizens’ confidence in their judicial system depends on it. We must be armed with qualified, certified interpreters, promote arbitration as an alternative to costly, courtroom-bound litigation, ensure that all those who cannot afford lawyers have an avenue toward justice, and be constantly updating technology with the aim of improving our courts’ efficiency while saving literally millions of dollars. For all of this, we need your help.


When I first became a judge, we had no email, no cell phones, no Internet. People didn’t Twitter or text, or post things on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram. The most modern equipment we had was a mimeograph machine.
This past year, by Supreme Court order, we created for the first time a governance
structure to bring our use of technology into the 21st century. Chaired by my colleague Justice Harold Melton, and co-chaired by Douglas County Superior Court Judge David Emerson, this permanent Judicial Council Standing Committee on Technology will lead the judicial branch by providing guidance and oversight of its technology initiatives.
Our courts on their own are rapidly moving away from paper documents into the digital age. At the Supreme Court, lawyers must now electronically file all cases. This past year, we successfully launched the next phase by working with trial courts to begin transmitting their entire court record to us electronically. The Court of Appeals also now requires the e-filing of applications to appeal, and this year, will join the Supreme Court in accepting electronic trial records.

Our goal is to develop a uniform statewide electronic filing and retrieval system so that lawyers and others throughout the judiciary can file and access data the easiest way possible.
Using a single portal, attorneys will be able to file documents with trial courts and appellate courts – and retrieve them from any court in the state. This is the system advocated by our partner, President Bob Kaufman of the State Bar of Georgia, and by attorneys throughout the state.
Such a system will not only make our courts more efficient at huge savings, but it will make Georgia safer. When our trial judges conduct bond hearings, for example, they often lack critical information about the person before them. They usually have reports about any former convictions, but they may not have information about cases pending against the defendant in other courts. The technology exists now to ensure that they do.
Also on the horizon is the expanded use of videoconferencing – another electronic
improvement that will save money and protect citizens’ lives. After a conviction and sentence to prison, post-trial hearings require courts to send security teams to pick up the prisoner and bring him to court. Without encroaching on the constitutional right of confrontation, we could videoconference the inmate’s testimony from his prison cell. Again, the technology already exists.
Our Committee on Technology will be at the forefront of guiding our courts into the 21st century.


As Georgia grows, it grows more diverse.
Our Georgia courts are required by the federal government to provide language services free of charge to litigants and witnesses, not only in criminal cases but in civil cases as well.
Even for fluent English speakers, the judicial system can be confusing and unwelcoming.
My vision for Georgia’s judiciary in the 21st century is that every court, in every city and every county in Georgia, will have the capacity of serving all litigants, speaking any language, regardless of national origin, from the moment they enter the courthouse until the moment they leave. That means that on court websites, signs and forms will be available in multiple languages, that all court staff will have the tools they need to assist any customers, and that court proceedings will have instant access to the interpreters of the languages they need.
Chief Magistrate Kristina Blum of the Gwinnett County Magistrate Court has been
working hard to ensure access to justice for all those who come to her court, most of whom are representing themselves.
Recently her court created brochures that provide guidance for civil trials, family
violence matters, warrant applications, garnishments, and landlord-tenant disputes. These brochures provide basic information about each proceeding – what to expect and how best to present their case in court.
Judge Blum, who is in line to be president of the Council of Magistrate Judges and is a member of our Judicial Council, has had the brochures translated into Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese. Such non-legalese forms and tutorial videos that our citizens can understand go a long way toward building trust in the judicial system, and in our entire government.
The Supreme Court Commission on Interpreters, chaired by Justice Keith Blackwell, is
making significant strides in ensuring that our courts uphold the standards of due process. With the help of Commission member Jana Edmondson-Cooper, an energetic attorney with the Georgia Legal Services Program, the Commission is working around the state to educate judges,court administrators and lawyers on the judiciary’s responsibilities in providing language assistance.
The essence of due process is the opportunity to be heard. Our justice system is the envy of other countries because it is open and fair to everyone seeking justice. By helping those who have not yet mastered English, we reinforce the message that the doors to the best justice system in the world are open to everyone.
Our law demands it. Our Constitution demands it.


The courts of the 21st century will symbolize a new era. A turning point in our history occurred when we realized there was a smarter way to handle criminals.
Six years ago, my colleague and then Chief Justice Carol Hunstein accompanied
Representative Wendell Willard to Alabama to explore how that state was reforming its criminal justice system. Back in Georgia, Governor Deal seized the reins, brought together the three branches of government, and through extraordinary leadership, has made criminal justice reform a reality. Georgia is now a model for the nation.
Today, following an explosive growth in our prison population that doubled between
1990 and 2011 and caused corrections costs to top one billion dollars a year, last year our prison population was the lowest it has been in 10 years. Our recidivism rate is the lowest it’s been in three decades. And we have turned back the tide of rising costs.
For the last five years, the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform – created by the governor and your legislation – has been busy transforming our criminal justice system into one that does a better job of protecting public safety while holding non-violent offenders accountable and saving millions in taxpayer dollars. I am extremely grateful to this Council and commend the steady leadership of co-chairs Judge Michael Boggs of the Court of Appeals and Thomas Worthy of the State Bar of Georgia.
Throughout this historic reform, Georgia’s trial court judges have been in the trenches.
Our number one goal in criminal justice reform is to better protect the safety of our citizens.
Central to that goal is the development of our specialty courts – what some call accountability courts.
These courts have a proven track record of reducing recidivism rates and keeping our
citizens safe. Nationwide, 75 percent of drug court graduates remain free of arrest two years after completing the program, and the most conservative analyses show that drug courts reduce crime as much as 45 percent more than other sentencing options. Last year, these courts helped save Georgia more than $51 million in prison costs.
From the beginning, you in the legislature have steadfastly supported the growth in these courts, most recently appropriating more than $19 million for the current fiscal year.
Georgia now has 131 of these courts, which include drug courts, DUI courts, juvenile and adult mental health courts, and veterans courts. Today, only two judicial circuits in the state do not yet have a specialty court, and both are in the early stages of discussing the possibility of starting one. In addition to those already involved, last year alone, we added nearly 3500 new participants to these courts.
Behind that number are individual tales of lives changed and in some cases, lives saved.
Our judges, who see so much failure, take pride in these success stories. And so should you.

Chief Judge Richard Slaby of the Richmond County State Court, speaks with great pride of Judge David Watkins and the specialty courts that have grown under Judge Watkins’ direction. Today the recidivism rate among the Augusta participants is less than 10 percent.
The judges who run these courts are committed and deserve our thanks. We are grateful to leaders like Judge Slaby, who is President-Elect of the Council of State Court Judges and a member of our Judicial Council; to Judge Stephen Goss of the Dougherty Superior Court, whose mental health court has been recognized as one of the best mental health courts in our country; to Chief Judge Brenda Weaver, President of the Council of Superior Court Judges and a member of our Judicial Council. Judge Weaver of the Appalachian Judicial Circuit serves on the Council of
Accountability Court Judges of Georgia, which you created last year by statute. Its purpose is to improve the quality of our specialty courts through proven standards and practices, and it is chaired by Superior Court Judge Jason Deal of Hall County. Judge Deal’s dedication to the specialty court model in his community, and his guidance and encouragement to programs throughout the state, are described as invaluable by those who work with him.


We may not have a unified court system in Georgia. But we have judges unified in their commitment to our courts. Among our one thousand four hundred and fifty judges, Georgia has many fine leaders. I’ve told you about a number of them today. In closing, I want to mention two more.
When the United States Supreme Court issued its historic decision last year on same-sex marriage, our Council of Probate Court Judges led the way toward compliance. Three months before the ruling was issued, the judges met privately at the behest of the Council’s then president, Judge Chase Daughtrey of Cook County, and his successor, Judge Don Wilkes of Emanuel County. Together, they determined that regardless of what the Supreme Court decided, they would follow the law. Both Governor Deal and Attorney General Sam Olens also publicly announced they would respect the court’s decision, despite tremendous pressure to do otherwise.
These men are all great leaders who spared our state the turmoil other states endured. The bottom line is this: In Georgia, we may like the law, we may not like the law, but we follow the law.


The day-to-day business of the Georgia courts rarely makes the news. Rather judges,
their staff and clerks spend their days devoted to understanding the law, tediously pushing cases through to resolution, committed to ferreting out the truth and making the right decision. It is not easy, and they must often stand alone, knowing that when they sentence someone to prison, many lives hang in the balance between justice and mercy.
So I thank all of our leaders, and I thank all of our judges who are leading our courts into the 21st century.
May God bless them. May God bless you. And may God bless all the people of Georgia.
Thank you.

The FresnoBee: “Congress cannot simply rewrite history and strip the Confederate flag from existence,” Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Miss.

What really happened in flag debate in Congress

http://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article27002098.html

National Park Service, House Dems say GOP change meshed with Obama policy

Several Democrats wanted tougher stance on flag than White House’s

House majority leader, Rep. John Lewis talk behind closed doors


In this photo combination, the Confederate battle flag is raised in front of the South Carolina State House in Columbia, S.C., on July 1, 2000, left, and the same flag is taken down on July 10, 2015, right, ending its presence on the Capitol grounds. The flag’s removal seemed unthinkable before the June 17 massacre of nine black parishioners at a Charleston church during a Bible study. Dylann Roof, a white man who was photographed with the Confederate flag, is charged in the shooting deaths, and authorities have called the killings a hate crime.
PAULA ILLINGWORTH, JOHN BAZEMORE AP
BY WILLIAM DOUGLAS
wdouglas@mcclatchydc.com

WASHINGTON
The head of the Democratic Party said they were among the darkest hours in the history of the House of Representatives. The White House said Republicans were strikingly eager to defend the Confederate flag.

Republicans said they were merely proposing to enforce existing policies about the sale and display of the flag in national cemeteries set by the Obama administration itself in the wake of the massacre at a Charleston, S.C., church.

The bottom line: The Republicans were correct that they were moving to maintain Obama policies.

But that’s only part of the story. Also true: House Democrats wanted to go farther than Obama and ban most Confederate flags from national cemeteries. And in the furor, they failed to note that Obama could have already done what the House Democrats want.

Here’s what happened.

On Tuesday, Democrats proposed three amendments to a bill financing the Interior Department. They would ban the sale of Confederate flags at vendors or the display or Confederate flags at gravesites in national cemeteries.

The House approved them by voice vote.

“The language of the amendments were clear,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., one of the authors. “Everybody knew what we were doing.”

He added that Democrats didn’t seek roll call votes on the amendments because it would have put some Republicans uncomfortably on the record and “we did expect that a few of them would probably vote against these amendments if there was a roll call.”

Less than 24 hours after the Democratic amendments passed, several Republican House members from Southern states complained to their party’s leadership about the recently passed amendments, according to several lawmakers.

“Congress cannot simply rewrite history and strip the Confederate flag from existence,” Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Miss., said in a statement. “Members of Congress from New York and California cannot wipe away 150 years of Southern history with sleight-of-hand tactics. I will fight to ensure that this language is not included in any bill signed into law.”

Late Wednesday night, Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee for Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, introduced a one-paragraph amendment that didn’t specifically mention Confederate flags.

Instead, it stated that “none of the funds made available by this Act may be used to prohibit the display of the flag of the United States or the POW/MIA flag or the decoration of graves with flags in the National Park Service national cemeteries as provided in the National Park Service Director’s Order No. 61 or to contravene the National Park Service memorandum dates June 24, 2015 . . . with respect to sale items.”

That affirmed the Obama administration policies set in 2010 and updated last month after the Charleston shootings.

But in so doing, it also reversed Huffman’s amendments, which had been agreed to Tuesday.

The White House slammed the GOP amendment.

“When you hear me say that congressional Republicans have an agenda that is out of step with the vast majority of Americans, this record at least in part is what I’m referring to,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said, “The last 24 hours in the House of Representatives are some of the darkest I have witnessed as a member of Congress.”

But Calvert said all his amendment would do is codify current National Park Service policy regarding Confederate flags set by the Obama administration.

That policy prohibits the sale of items with Confederate flag imagery but allows the Confederate flags to be flown in “specific circumstances where the flags provide historical context, for instance to signify troop location or movement or as part of a historical re-enactment or living history program.”

Current policy allows visitors to place small Confederate flags at the graves of rebel soldiers buried in federal cemeteries on Confederate Memorial Days in Southern states that mark the day. The flags must be removed by the end of that day.

“The intent of the leadership amendment was to clear up any confusion and maintain the Obama administration’s policies with respect to those historical and educational exceptions,” Calvert said in a statement.

National Park Service officials and House Democrats involved in the flag debate agreed Friday that the Republican amendment would have continued the exemptions allowed by the administration.

“It would revert to the status quo,” said Huffman.

A Park Service official concurred that the amendment would have meant “a continuation” of current administration policy.

The White House declined to say why the administration, which changed the policy on its own in 2010 and again on June 24, is not changing it again to accommodate the requests from House Democrats.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, pulled the Interior appropriations bill Thursday to avoid the flag vote and called for an “adult conversation” among members about what to do about issues involving Confederate flags and symbols.

On Friday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights-era icon, walked off the House floor together to a nearby room. A Republican aide shuttered the blinds to the room’s glass doors.

“We had a friendly conversation,” is all Lewis would say afterward.  

William Douglas: 202-383-6026, @williamgdouglas

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article27002098.html#storylink=cpy