RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/coronavirus-media-wrong-about-trump-testing-strategy/

How we ramped up coronavirus testing.

The White House had the idea of opening hundreds of ambitious mobile testing sites at the outset of the coronavirus crisis. But there was a problem: Officials quickly realized that creating that many sites would use up an inordinate amount of the nation’s limited supply of testing swabs.

“We had 1.2 million swabs in the country for the month for everything,” recalls Admiral Brett Giroir, the HHS official who became the administration’s testing czar in mid-March and soon will be returning to his regular duties.

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That number wasn’t going to come close to meeting the need, and it wasn’t clear how the gap would be made up. “We thought there were eight or ten suppliers of swabs,” says Giroir, “because they came under different packages, but when you found out about it, these were really repackaged swabs. There were really only two sources of these rare kinds of swabs.” One was based in Italy, the other a small company in Maine called Puritan.

“Now,” he continues, “we couldn’t get anything out of Italy because it was locked down. Literally, in those first couple days the Air Force sent a C-17 to Italy to physically go get the swabs and bring them back to the U.S.”

The swab crunch in March was just one of the obstacles to clearing the way for what needed to be an unprecedented ramp-up in testing to address the COVID crisis.

“When we first started peeking under the covers,” says Giroir, “we were going to do in two or three weeks, even early on, what the country does in a year on other sophisticated molecular tests.”

NOW WATCH: ‘Are Coronavirus Patients Contagious if They Test Positive after Recovery?’

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The story of how the country went from nothing to more than half-a-million COVID tests on some days is a tale of inspired private–public cooperation. After bad initial stumbles when the Centers for Disease Control fouled up the initial test (at a time when it had a monopoly on testing) and when a Food and Drug Administration regulatory bottleneck stymied the development of testing in the private sector, the administration found its footing.

It used cooperative data, governmental authorities, relationships with the private sector, and improvisation-on-the-fly to work through supply shortages and other problems. Giroir’s team, a group of trouble-shooting aides around White House adviser Jared Kushner, the FDA, and the Department of Health and Human Services all played important roles. Meanwhile, private companies — often working hand-and-glove with the administration — quickly innovated and scaled up their production of everything from swabs to test kits.

At the beginning of March, there were fewer than 1,000 tests in the country on most days. By the end of March, there were more than 100,000 a day. The number climbed again before hovering somewhere around 150,000 a day for much of April.

Then it bumped up again, to more than 200,000 at the end of the month. It surpassed 400,000 for the first time on May 17. On May 29, it was nearly 500,000. It’s been in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 most days since, with a high of more than 580,000 just this just Friday.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/mother-all-fake-news-new-york-times-ari-lieberman/

I think that by now, it is painfully obvious to all but the most myopic that the New York Times represents the embodiment of fake news. In fact, in this era when false and misleading, partisan leftist propaganda is disseminated with dizzying regularity, it is not a stretch to argue that the New York Times represents the mother of all fake news. It is also fair to characterize the New York Times as a leftist blog akin to Mother Jones or Buzzfeed, rather than a legitimate, newsworthy paper.

Several recent incidents plaguing this troubled paper highlight this unfortunate development. Recently, the New York Times published an article stating that “former President George W. Bush won’t support the re-election of [Donald] Trump,” and cited “people familiar with [his] thinking.” There is no indication that the journalist responsible for authoring this drivel made any effort to corroborate the claim with Bush. In fact, Freddy Ford, a spokesman for Bush, said the report was simply not true and characterized it as “completely made up.”

On June 5, a Rasmussen daily tracking poll showed that black likely voter approval of Trump was at over 40 percent. Rasmussen is a serious, well-respected public opinion polling source and the June 5th polling data, even if considered an outlier, is a significant news story considering historic black voting patterns. In 2016, Trump garnered only 8 percent of the black vote and still won. If this recent Rasmussen polling is accurate, it bodes poorly for Democratic chances to reclaim the White House in 2020. Yet this newsworthy development failed to grace the pages of the Gray Lady. The reason is obvious: the New York Times is the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and negative polling data that runs counter to the narrative the New York Times wishes to present is all but ignored and censored. Omission of newsworthy events due to political considerations is just as malignant as publication of false facts, and in any event, that strategy worked out poorly for the so-called establishment media in 2016.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/nyt-and-wapo-fawn-over-seattle-autonomous-zone-anarchists/

The mainstream press gives the “conservatives pounce” treatment to left-wing anarchists.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have in recent days provided sympathetic and even outright celebratory coverage of the Seattle “Autonomous Zone,” emphasizing the “freedoms” secured by the far-left anarchists who drove the police out, rather than neutrally reporting on the phenomenon of militia-style checkpoints choking off American streets.

The Seattle Police Department abandoned its East Precinct on Monday after days of clashes with George Floyd protesters. As the police withdrew, activists moved in and assumed control of the precinct and the surrounding blocks of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, setting up barricades and spraying graffiti on local businesses and residences, including the message “Leaving USA,” to designate their new fiefdom.

The occupiers have released a list of demands to the government, including the “abolition” of the Seattle Police Department and its attached court system, free college for all people in the state, as well as “the abolition of imprisonment, generally speaking, but especially the abolition of both youth prisons and privately-owned, for-profit prisons.”

While the situation has so far been peaceful, far-left groups such as Antifa have called for “people with guns at the CHAZ” on Twitter, while others have vowed to “fight to keep” the area. Journalists have documented armed guards at the entrances to the zone.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/11/cnn-commentator-wants-all-washington-and-jefferson-statues-removed/

Where did protestors around the nation get the idea to deface, behead, and pull down statues, even some of America’s most prominent abolitionists? Talking points spouted by CNN commentators are just one source of influence.

In a segment on CNN in 2017, Impact Strategies CEO and frequent commentator on the network Angela Rye announced her belief that statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other slave owners need to be removed.

“Whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not, [Washington] wasn’t protecting my freedoms,” she said.

Rye’s comments were in response to an argument proposed by Daily Beast Editor John Avlon suggesting that “Washington spent his life trying to unite the nation.” According to her, Avlon’s perspective is incorrect. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/if-not-for-lies-they-would-be-mute/

Trump knows capitalism and nothing else is the key to prosperity. He knows a nation cannot stand without strong borders. He knows America cannot retain its place in the world without a peerless military. Unable to argue the point, the Left and its media auxiliary peddle the whole cloth of their daily fabrications, from Russiagate to blatant misquotation

This is part of a “news” item in The Telegraph (UK) on 6 June:

President Donald Trump has said that strong new jobs numbers marked a “great day” for George Floyd, the man whose killing last week sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against African-Americans.

Apparently referring to a surge in employment, Mr Trump said: “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ “This is a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody.”

The reporters who wrote this, Josie Ensor and Gareth Davies, are either malicious liars or completely and utterly incompetent. And, when it comes to Trump, ditto for much of the MSM everywhere.

I saw the live press briefing on TV as it was happening. It could not have been misinterpreted. When Trump brought Floyd into the picture he was talking about civil rights and Floyd’s death bringing renewed focus and energy into seeing that everybody is treated equally by law enforcement. He was not at all referring to job numbers. And, to reiterate, no such interpretation could possibly have been inferred by any honest reporter. Below, Trump’s actual words in context:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/as-the-new-york-times-goes-so-goes-biden/?utm_source=recirc-

The resignation of the editorial page editor of the New York Times for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to quell the riots marks the completion of the long, slow transformation of the Democratic Party. Whatever face the Democrats present to the world, their woke left fringe is now in charge. That fringe has not only abandoned core American principles like freedom of speech and due process, it has reimagined American history as a story of “systemic” oppression and demanded radical transformation along identitarian–socialist lines. If the New York Times can’t stand up to Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of its odious and just-plain-false 1619 Project, how will Joe Biden stand up to a woke New York Times?

Past his prime, without a policy compass to speak of, Biden would be long gone if he hadn’t been the Democratic establishment’s last best hope of blocking Bernie Sanders. Biden is supposed to give the party a moderate face that will appeal to centrist voters. Increasingly, however, the bases of the two parties are becoming the real contestants in this election, while the candidates are just along for the ride. True, Trump is larger than life and a constant media obsession. Yet Trump appeals to Republicans — whether they like his style or not — chiefly because he protects them from the illiberalism and cultural overreach people such as Hannah-Jones. Trump’s larger-than-life personality matters less than it seems because he’s all about the base.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/09/campus_war_on_free_speech_spreads_to_us_newsrooms.html

Two weeks ago, if you’d asked what American institution was most intolerant of dissenting opinion, preoccupied with promoting radical ideology, and prone to erupting into disruptive temper tantrums, the answer would have been easy. Now it’s not so clear – the hysteria on college campuses has spread to America’s newsrooms.

Over the weekend, the opinion page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, resigned under pressure, and another opinion editor, Jim Dao, was reassigned to the newsroom. Their offense was soliciting and publishing an op-ed by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton last week on invoking the Insurrection Act. After recent protests in over 700 cities, polling showed a majority of Americans, including nearly four in 10 African Americans, were amenable to using the military to restore order.

Whatever you think of the need for the Insurrection Act, which was last used during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Cotton’s op-ed had undeniable news value. That didn’t matter to the more than 1,000 employees of the Times who signed a letter objecting to the Cotton op-ed. “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” was the message that upset Times employees spread across Twitter.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/yoel-roth-explains-it-all-you-lloyd-billingsley/

President Trump recently tweeted about the dangers of mail-in ballots and voter fraud, particularly in California. Twitter attached an alert claiming the tweets were “potentially misleading” and directed users to allegedly corrective website. The president pushed back, but with a pandemic and insurrection going on, the conflict failed to get the attention it deserved.

Twitter did not reveal who, exactly, was charging the president with potentially misleading information. It soon emerged that the culprit was Twitter’s own “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth, an avid tweeter his own self.

In 2017, for example, Roth referred to Trump staffers as “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE” and the content cop wasn’t done. When Kellyanne Conway goes on television, Roth tweeted, “we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days.” As Eric Idle once quipped, “I hate people who vent their loquacity with extraneous bombastic circumlocution.” On the other hand, the man is a deep thinker.

As Roth reflected in another tweet, “How does a personality-free bag of farts like Mitch McConnell actually win elections?” On that theme Roth does not hesitate to weigh in. Back in 2016, for example, he tweeted, “I’ve never donated to a presidential campaign before, but I just gave $100 to Hillary for America. We can’t f–k around anymore.” As Olson Johnson said  of Gabby Johnson’s speech in Blazing Saddles, “who can argue with that?” And as fellow tweeters might wonder, who is this powerful prose stylist?

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/06/06/lisa-page-hired-by-nbc-and-msnbc-as-legal-analyst/

Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer who resigned in the midst of the Russian investigation scandal, has been hired a NBC and MSNBC as a legal analyst.  The move continues a trend started by CNN in hiring Trump critics, including officials terminated for misconduct, to offer legal analysis on the Trump Administration. We have previously discussed the use by CNN of figures like Andrew McCabe to give legal analysis despite his being referred for possible criminal charges by the Inspector General for repeatedly lying to federal investigators.  The media appears intent on fulfilling the narrative of President Trump that it is overly biased and hostile in its analysis. Indeed, it now appears a marketing plan that has subsumed the journalistic mission.

Page appeared with Rachel Maddow and began her work as the new legal analyst by discussing her own controversial work at the FBI. Page is still part of investigation by various committees and the investigation being conducted by U.S Attorney John Durham.

I have denounced President Trump for his repeated and often vicious references to Page’s affair with fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok. There is no excuse for such personal abuse. I also do not view her emails as proof of her involvement in a deep-state conspiracy as opposed to clearly inappropriate and partisan communications for someone involved in the investigation.  Indeed, Page did not appear a particularly significant figure in the investigation or even the FBI as a whole.  She was primarily dragged into the controversy due to her relationship with Strzok.