By Andrea Widburg(American Thinker)

If there is one person who became the living emblem of the incursion into the Capitol on January 6, it is the man dubbed the “QAnon Shaman.” Jacob Chansley showed up in several pictures with his face painted red, white, and blue; his body covered with shamanistic tattoos; and his head attired with a fur hat sporting large horns. This horror, the media told America, was the living emblem of the evil, racist Trump supporters who were committing a deadly, armed insurrection against the seat of the American government.

Interestingly, the best evidence that, as is often the case, Democrats’ narrative was a lie came from a video The New Yorker published. It shows that Chansley is an odd bird, but obviously was not acting violently. Instead, he engages very politely with a Capitol Hill police officer:

Because of Chansley’s costume (which he’s worn before – and more on that later), he was easy to identify and the government quickly arrested him. He’s been in solitary confinement ever since, with no bail. This is in stark contrast to the way in which BLM and Antifa protesters were treated last year. Despite their heinous acts of looting, property destruction, and attacks on police officers, they were usually released instantly, whether without bail or with monies from leftist celebrities who paid for their bail. And just yesterday, we learned that the Biden DOJ is dismissing Portland Antifa cases left and right — or just left and left, I guess.

On Thursday, 60 Minutes+ put online an interview with Chansley. Without his rather magnificent costume, he seems very shrunken but, to his credit, he’s not going to accept the reporter’s accusations against him. (And again, just try to imagine Laurie Segall taking that antagonistic tone with someone from BLM or Antifa. The media treated those “peaceful” protesters with something akin to reverence.

Chansley denies completely having engaged in any violent or destructive acts – and there’s no video footage showing anything to the contrary. Meanwhile, Segall lies right from the get-go, referring to “one officer killed.” In fact, there’s no evidence at all that poor Officer Sicknick was “killed.” He died either from a stroke or, possibly, from an allergic reaction. Of course, the FBI’s Christopher Wray refuses to say – despite Sicknick having already been subject to a coroner’s report and then cremated.

Segall also calls her on her lie that he violently broke into the Senate chambers. In fact, he says, a police officer escorted him in. At every turn, Segall lies and Chansley corrects her. He may be loopy, but she’s a leftist shill pushing a dishonest narrative. Thus, in another example of dishonesty, she says a “mob broke through Capitol doors,” but footage she doesn’t show reveals that the police opened the doors from inside and invited people in.

What the media doesn’t report is that Chansley may be a patriot and non-violent (and good for him on both those scores) but he hasn’t always been a friend to Trump. Instead, less than two years ago, Chansley was an ardent Climate Change activist who opposed Trump. For copyright reasons, I can’t reproduce the photos here, but you can see him in the first picture from the report about a September 2019 march on the Arizona State Capitol to protest Trump’s policies. The sample caption says:

Jake Angeli [aka Chansley], shamanic practitioner, leads the crowd in a yell before the march in solidarity with climate activism groups across the country to the Arizona State Capitol Building Friday, September 20, 2019.

He shows up in another photo saying that he is in the march “to demand action on climate change.” And in another photo, in which he’s in a bull costume and identified as Jake Chansley, he’s holding this sign:

At some point, Chansley lost interest in climate change and found QAnon.

Chansley is a character; indeed, he’s a lost soul. As he moves from one issue to another, his motives are always because he’s always searching, never finding.

But as between a 60 Minutes talking head and Jake Angeli Chansley, the latter is more honest. He’s defending himself and she’s spouting the leftist party line as if it’s the truth. Incidentally, I cannot find any evidence of Segall speaking out against BLM, Antifa, or the shrieking hysterics who invaded the Senate during the Kavanaugh hearings.

By Theodore Bunker(NEWSMAX)

A new book detailing the 2020 election claims that former President Barack Obama privately urged President Joe Biden not to run for the White House in 2020, and was “enamored” with one of his primary opponents.

“Obama’s fears about Biden and his team ran deep — deeper than defeat,” wrote Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their new book “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency,” according to excerpts from The Washington Free Beacon. “Obama worried that his former vice president would embarrass himself on the campaign trail and that the people around him would not be able to prevent a belly-flop.”

They add that Obama repeatedly pushed Biden not to run, writing that “it had stung Biden badly in 2015 when Obama made clear his preference for Hillary Clinton.”

The authors note that “Obama, like much of his brain trust, seemed to be enamored with a former Texas congressman, Beto O’Rourke,” in the 2020 Democratic Party primary.

The former president previously praised O’Rourke for his Senate run, saying in 2018 that he was an “impressive young man who ran a terrific race in Texas,” when asked on CNN’s “The Axe Files” in an interview.

“The reason I was able to make a connection with a sizable portion of the country was because people had a sense that I said what I meant,” Obama said at the time, according to CNN. “And that’s a quality that, as I look at what I’m sure will be a strong field of candidates in 2020, many of whom are friends of mine and whom I deeply respect — what I oftentimes am looking for first and foremost is, do you seem to mean it? Are you in this thing cause you have a strong set of convictions that you are willing to risk things for?”

WENDELL HUSEBO

WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar apologized for saying coronavirus is “really good for [CNN] ratings” during the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.

WarnerMedia is the parent company of CNN.

“It turns out that pandemic is a pretty big part of the news cycle, and that’s not going away anytime soon,” Kilar said, noting that things are different these days “from a political drama perspective,” but fortunately for CNN and WarnerMedia they still have the deadly virus to fall back on. He went on:

If you take a look at the ratings and the performance, it’s going well. And I think it’s going well because, A, the team at CNN is doing a fantastic job. And B, it turns out that the pandemic and the way that we can help inform and contextualize the pandemic, it turns out it’s really good for ratings.

The comments were first reported by Wall Street Journal media correspondent Joe Flint.

Kilar responded to Flint about an hour after his tweet, apologizing for his phrasing and saying he is eager for the pandemic to end.

CNN and Fox News Channel split the prime time ratings title in February, with Fox News winning among total viewers and CNN taking first place among viewers 25-54, the key demographic most valued by advertisers. CNN’s ratings performance marked the network’s best-ever February.

Fox News Channel’s total audience of 2.473 million viewers in prime time led all cable news networks, followed by MSNBC (2.193 million viewers), and CNN (1.687 million viewers). In the key demo, CNN was first with 411,000 viewers, followed by FNC (365,000 viewers), and MSNBC (340,000 viewers).

Breitbart

BY ZACHARY STIEBER(EPOCH TIMES)

The Senate on March 4 advanced President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan, with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaking vote.

All Republicans voted against beginning the debate on the plan, while all Democrats, including two nominal independents, voted for it. That left the decision up to Harris, the president of the upper chamber.

“On this vote, the yeas are 50. The nays are 50. The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative and the motion to proceed is agreed to,” Harris told the body.

Harris has broken three ties since being sworn in on Jan. 20, compared to former Vice President Mike Pence’s 13 tiebreaking votes across four years.

After the vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) shook his head up and down and appeared to smile, reporters in the room said. He and other Senate Democrats reached an agreement with Biden about crucial details in the package earlier this week.

Following the vote, the Senate clerk began reading the legislation. Schumer tried to waive the reading, although Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) objected, forcing a full reading of the 600-page measure.

Johnson was also leading an effort to arrange shifts of lawmakers to offer a flurry of amendments to the package to prolong the debate.

“Historically, what’s happened in vote-a-ramas is—I don’t have exact figures, but it seems like we’ve always offered a couple of hundred amendments on the Republican side. You get a couple of those voted on and people tire out. I’m just setting up a process that keeps us from tiring out,” he told reporters on Capitol Hill.

A vote-a-rama is a process during which the party in the minority can force on-the-record votes on amendments, which are added to the bill if they receive a simple majority.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he and some fellow Republicans are working on several amendments and are hopeful they can get some support among Democrats.

“But my guess is it’s not likely that many of our amendments will get any Democrat support, so I think it’s very unlikely that any Republicans will support the final bill,” he said.

One example is requiring that funding only go to states or municipalities that either had a reduction in revenues or unreimbursed COVID-19 expenses.

“It would probably mean less money would go to states and localities,” Romney said. “California, for instance, has a huge surplus this year, and yet under the $1.9 trillion plan, they’re supposed to get another [approximately $20 billion] more. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to go borrow that money to give to a state that doesn’t need it.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), perhaps the most moderate Democrat in the Senate, told reporters that he was considering the amendment. He signaled that he will support the final package.

Republicans largely oppose including funding to states and municipalities at all in the relief package. Democrats failed to get it included in the last bill, which was passed in December 2020 and signed by President Donald Trump.

The lower chamber passed the relief package last week through the budget reconciliation process, a procedural move that enables Democrats to pass it in the upper chamber with no Republican support.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has said she’s open to voting for the bill, voted against advancing it but maintained a willingness to support it. She told reporters after the vote that the latest version of the bill had just hit her inbox, so she hadn’t gotten a chance to read it.

“So I’ve said, I’m going to look and see what’s in it,” she said, noting that some of the provisions already included “are clearly not COVID-related.”