A look back at the people and events that made news the past week. Week-ends is a regular weekly feature of  This Just In…

HEROES OF THE WEEK

San Antonio community

Chicago neighbors

Garbage truck driver

VILLAINS OF THE WEEK

Joe Biden

Andrew Cuomo

Teachers unions

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

“There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
Joe Biden. Remember, he said this on October 15, 2020: “We’re eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump still doesn’t have a plan to get this virus under control. I do.”

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Anthony Fauci (March 8, 2020)

“If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.”
Anthony Fauci (January 25, 2021)

“The speech (Biden’s inaugural)  promised unity, togetherness, and finding common ground – it was a speech of classic American bipartisanship and civic goodwill. He promised to reach out to everyone, work with everyone, and be an American president, rather than a Democratic, partisan president.

“Hours after giving his excellent inaugural speech, President Biden went to the White House and signed 17 executive orders – including more than a dozen which totally contradict his pledge of bipartisanship, unity, and finding common ground. Instead, he began the process of tearing down everything President Donald Trump did – erasing everything he achieved – no matter how it benefited Americans or how many Americans supported it.”
Newt Gingrich

“As soon as [Biden] entered the Oval Office, he promptly signed more than a dozen executive orders and every one was a finger in the eye of conservatives. … Where is the comfort in telling people that he is going to be the president of those who didn’t vote for him when he has devoted his presidency to relentlessly attacking their values?”
Gary Bauer

“The Keystone pipeline was entirely a private sector project that had obtained its legal permits. … I can’t think of another example of a president crushing thousands of private sector jobs at a stroke in the absence of a genuine legal reason. Biden offered no legal reason, such as defects of the permit or violations of the permit conditions. He just doesn’t like it.”
Steven Hayward

“[Joe Biden] issued an executive order last week, which, if it stands, will potentially destroy women’s sports over the next decade, denying your daughters and granddaughters of the opportunities that Title IX has provided for the past 49 years. So, the president who is in office largely because he won the women’s vote has just created a regime where your 17-year-old daughter may have to compete against a 17-year-old boy in track and other sports. When she loses the competition, she may have to take a shower with him when it’s all over.”
Gary Bauer

“When you take the greed of those who want their tax cut, that’s probably a small number, but nonetheless a number, and then you take the abortion issue — and many of these people are very good people, that’s just their point of view. But they were willing to sell the whole democracy down the river for that one issue.”
Nancy Pelosi ripping anti-abortion voters

“To begin with the obvious: Nancy Pelosi does not speak for the Catholic Church. She speaks as a high-level important government leader, and as a private citizen.

“And on the question of the equal dignity of human life in the womb, she also speaks in direct contradiction to a fundamental human right that Catholic teaching has consistently championed for 2,000 years. This is not the language of unity and healing. She owes these voters an apology. ‘Right to choose’ is a smokescreen for perpetuating an entire industry that profits from one of the most heinous evils imaginable. Our land is soaked with the blood of the innocent, and it must stop.”
San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone

“To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness. Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.”
NYU history professor Cristina Beltrá in a Washington Post op-ed entitled, “To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness.”

“Yes, you read that right —multiracial whiteness. President Donald Trump increased his 2016 percentage of the minority vote — up 6% among black men, 5% among black women, 4% among Hispanic men, and 7% among Asian voters. Hispanic women stayed the same. In order to explain away this impossible contradiction of minorities voting for Trump, progressives are forced to create a mythology where anyone who is evil is ‘white.’

“It couldn’t possibly be because they supported and benefited from the Trump policies that led to the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment rate in U.S. history, or the five-fold increase in per capita income over the Barack Obama years. And it couldn’t be because Trump made America safer by cracking down on illegal immigration and reducing the flow of drug mules, gang members, and sex traffickers across the southern border. Or due to his investment of billions of dollars in Opportunity Zones in poor minority neighborhoods. Or because he pushed and signed criminal justice reform.

“No, leftists say, it’s because these misguided minorities want to be white at any cost, even selling their souls.”
Louis DeBroux, the Patriot Post

“What a benevolent racist. A racist white man with power on his way out of the most powerful position in the free world took the time to pardon black rappers, black politicians, black drug dealers, and black hip-hop moguls. What kind of racist would go out of his way after being robbed of an election to reach back and free the very ones who, generally speaking, considered him a racist? Enter, or should I say, exit, President Donald J. Trump.

“No matter what, Trump will get no credit in forgiving the prison debt many owed to society because, somehow, he’s still racist. If Trump is a racist for pardoning black inmates from prison after serving hard time, then tell me, what is Joe Biden for implementing ways for black “super predators” to be put on a conveyor belt into prison? Doesn’t this sound absurd to anyone except me?”
Willie Richardson Jr., the Patriot Post

“This ‘systemically racist’ nation has elected a black president and a black vice president. We have had a black attorney general and black Supreme Court justices. Many of our major cities, including our nation’s capital, are led by black mayors, police chiefs, and city councils. Yet to the left, this progress is never seen as evidence that America is a good and decent country. It is continually doubling down on the idea that America is racist to its core.”
Gary Bauer

“What happened on Jan. 6 was not an ‘insurrection.’ There was no serious attempt to ‘overthrow’ the United States government. Was there a riot? Yes. Was it deliberately disruptive of government business? Definitely. But an attempted coup? Ridiculous on its face. … The target of the ‘insurrection’ propaganda campaign is not so much Donald Trump as it is the 74 million-plus people who voted for him. Americans were stunned when Hillary Clinton referred to only half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’ in 2016. But Trump had millions more supporters in 2020, and now all of them are being demonized by Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media as threats, as ‘seditionists’ and ‘white supremacists’ who need to be ‘deprogrammed,’ ‘reprogrammed,’ imprisoned in ‘reeducation camps’ or subjected to ‘Nuremburg trials.’ … This is beyond political difference. It is a sickness.”
Laura Hollis

 “[Ted Cruz] almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out. Happy to work w/ almost any other GOP that aren’t trying to get me killed. In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign.”
AOC

“AOC’s incessant claim that Cruz not voting to certify the Electoral College vote was tantamount to trying to murder her makes almost as much sense as her Green New Deal.”
Tom Elliott

“This is almost like we’re suffering an attack from Mars — some extraterrestrial species. We have to come together in what I call planetary realism.”
Former California Governor Jerry Brown on climate change

“The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in American history. Murder was up nearly 37% in a sample of 57 large and medium-size cities. Based on preliminary estimates, at least 2,000 more Americans, most of them black, were killed in 2020 than in 2019. Mainstream media and many politicians claim the pandemic caused this bloodbath, but the chronology doesn’t support that assertion. And now the criminal-justice policies supported by President [Joe] Biden promise to exacerbate the current crime wave, while ignoring its actual causes.

“The calculus for engagement has changed. An Oakland, Calif., officer who has arrested dozens of known murderers and gang members over his career tells me he is scared for the first time, ‘not because the criminals are necessarily more violent, even though they are.’ But if he has to use force on a resisting suspect, he could lose his career, his life, or his liberty, he says. A ‘simple cost-benefit analysis’ recommends simply responding to calls for service and collecting a paycheck. ‘All cops now understand this.’

“The Biden Justice Department will treat disparate stop or arrest rates as evidence of police bias and seek to put as many police departments as possible under costly consent decrees [i.e., court-ordered reform plans].”
Heather Mac Donald

 “A state may not require an individual to provide any form of identification as a condition of obtaining an absentee ballot. … A state(s) may not require notarization or a witness signature or other formal authentication (other than voter attestation) as a condition of obtaining or casting an absentee ballot.”
Democrat bill HR 1, stipulating that the federal government will have the power to set universal regulations regarding voter-identity requirements in order to implement universal bulk-mail balloting

“I think it might be a good idea for President Biden to call a climate emergency. … Then he can do many, many things under the emergency powers of the president … that he could do without legislation. Now, Trump used this emergency for a stupid wall, which wasn’t an emergency. But if there ever was an emergency, climate is one.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer

 “I don’t see how we can reduce racial tension in this country when the left is constantly pointing fingers and agitating. Everything is race, race, race. This exploitation might not be as toxic if Democrats, including Biden, hadn’t been trying to cast all conservatives as bigots, but sadly, they have. It also might not be as toxic if Democrats weren’t using race to villainize conservatives and as a Trojan horse to usher in their socialist agenda.”
David Limbaugh

“Memo to Joe and Kamala: Waiting on your unequivocal condemnation of inaugural day riots in Seattle and Portland, where leftist cadres attacked police, ransacked private and public buildings, and burned flags. Still waiting…”
Mark Alexander

“You can create jobs if you’re rich. You can give money to philanthropy if you’re rich. A poor person never gave me a job. And the person who came up with the phrase, ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is a moron. Money is not the root of all evil. Lack of money is the root of all evil. The reason people hold up 7-11 is they don’t have money. Why would I ever hold up a 7-11 when I could just buy the block?

“The reason for crime is people don’t have enough money. One of the cures for lowering crime is give people jobs, give them something to do so they can feed their families, so they don’t have to go out and steal. That’s the way out. And don’t get me started on drug addicts; that’s another thing. There are a lot of rich white boys who are on opioids and crack. That’s another story and I’m not qualified to comment.”
Gene Simmons, member of the rock group KISS

“Is it too late to impeach George Washington for owning slaves? I don’t see how we can let that slide.”
Scott Adams

OUTRAGE OF THE WEEK

Black Lives Matter movement nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

MOST UNDER-REPORTED STORY OF THE WEEK

The March for Life

MOST OVER-HYPED STORY OF THE WEEK

Trump is gone, but the hateful Left continues its campaign to denigrate Trump supporters

MOST UNUSUAL STORY OF THE WEEK

Joy Reid said what?