Inside the Beltway: The prospect of germ terrorism has arrived

NEWS AND OPINION:

It is a possibility that world leaders may not want to address quite yet — but the topic has now entered the global discourse.

“Council of Europe security experts have warned of the danger of terrorist attacks with biological weapons in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic,” reports the Funke Media Group, a German news syndicate.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how vulnerable modern societies are to viral infections and their shock potential,” the council’s Committee on Counter-Terrorism said in a statement Monday, according to the German news group.

“There is no reason to believe that terrorist groups will forget this lesson from the coronavirus pandemic. All countries are susceptible. The damage is quick and potentially global,” advised the counterterrorism committee, which is based in Strasbourg, France.

Is there reason to fret?

“Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the country’s domestic security agency, said that it had not seen ’concrete or abstract plans’ regarding bioweapon terror attacks so far, but said a well organized group such as Islamic State would likely be behind what they determined to be an ’unlikely’ attack,” writes Chris Tomlinson, an analyst for Breitbart News who evaluated the new report.

“While biological weapons are rare compared to attacks using explosives, firearms, and knives, Germany has seen at least one foiled biological terror attack in recent years,” he says.

CORONAVIRUS UPSTAGES THE ELECTION

Those who discover that liberal bias in the media has been around for decades are often annoyed. Consider that the phenomenon was first identified in the 1970s, while the term “media elite” was coined in 1980 by Robert Lichter, the scholar and pollster who discovered that up to 94% of journalists supported Democratic presidential candidates.

A veteran broadcast news executive now admits that the bias is so entrenched that the press might as well own up to it rather than pretend they are fair and balanced in their coverage.

“The ’liberal leaning’ media has passed its tipping point. A return to balance would be commercially unviable. The best solution may be an honest embrace of bias,” writes former CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter, in an new op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

“News organizations that claim to be neutral have long been creeping leftward, and their loathing of Mr. Trump has accelerated the pace. The news media is catching up with the liberalism of the professoriate, the entertainment industry, upscale magazines and the literary world,” said Mr. Sauter — who once took a complaint about the practices of liberal journalists from Jeane Kirkpatrick, foreign policy advisor to President Reagan and a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“There’s probably no way to seal the gap between the media and a large segment of the public. The media likes what it is doing. Admires it. Celebrates it. There is no personal, professional or financial reason to change. If anything, the gap will expand. Ultimately, the media finds the ’deplorables’ deplorable,” Mr. Sauter observed.

Ratings are revealing. It is also telling that Fox News, considered to lean right by most, has remained the No. 1 cable news channel for 18 consecutive years according to Nielsen Media Research, which might suggest that many members of the liberal media don’t really know the American audience.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY

“The general election scenario that Democrats are dreading: ’We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,’ says a top former economic adviser to Obama.”

The headline is from Politico, which cited Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard, who made the remarks before “frightened wonks” via Zoom in early April — and continues to make the case that Democrats fear positive signs in the economy.

President Trump could benefit in the 2020 election if the timing is right.

“Trump could be poised to benefit from the dramatic numbers produced during the partial rebound phase that is likely to coincide with the four months before November. That realization has many Democrats spooked,” Politico wrote.

RED MEAT POLITICS

Grocery shoppers are often stunned at the price of steak and hamburger. So are government officials.

The Justice Department is now taking a look at Tyson Foods, JBS, National Beef and Cargill, the companies that supply 85% of the beef in the U.S. The Agriculture Department, meanwhile, is exploring the price fluctuations — which meatpackers have mostly blamed on an uneven workforce due to coronavirus-related absences.

“But the coronavirus crisis is highlighting how the American system of getting meat to the table favors a handful of giant companies despite a century of government efforts to decentralize it. And it’s sparking new calls for changes in meatpacking,” write Politico analysts Leah Nylen and Liz Crampton.

They cite Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has requested federal investigations into “market manipulation and unfair practices within the cattle industry. The Iowa Republican has company: 19 other senators and 11 state attorneys general have also called for the same thing. They only need to look at the numbers.

“The average retail price for fresh beef in April was $6.22 per pound — 26 cents higher per pound than it was the month before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, at the end of April, the average price for a steer was below $100 per hundred pounds; the five-year average for that same week was about $135 per hundred pounds, according to USDA’s weekly summary,” Ms. Nylen and Ms. Crampton point out.

POLL DU JOUR

• 86% of U.S. teachers are personally worried about schoolchildren right now; 60% of U.S. parents agree.

• 76% of teachers say distance learning is causing children to fall behind in their education; 46% of parents agree.

• 65% of teachers expect that their schools will “likely reopen in fall”; 63% of parents agree.

• 64% of teachers say children will eventually be able to make up lost ground; 73% of parents agree.

Source: A USA Today/IPSOS poll of 505 K-12 teachers and 403 parents, conducted May 18-21.

• Kindly follow Jennifer Harper on Twitter @HarperBulletin.