RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-now-he-tell-us-hunter-biden-talks

For months Hunter Biden has maintained strict silence about allegations involving his business dealings in Ukraine and China, both when his father was vice president and after. Nothing could make him talk. But now, he’s submitting to media interviews, probably several of them. What changed? The younger Biden now has a book to sell. That’ll do it every time.

In his first interview, with CBS Sunday Morning, Biden admits that the laptop that was the subject of reporting in the New York Post in the final weeks of the presidential campaign could, in fact, be his. Remember that Biden’s defenders denounced the story as “Russian disinformation,” social media giants Twitter and Facebook suppressed it, and many big media organizations did their best to ignore it. Now, though, with a book to sell, Biden says it “certainly” could have been his laptop.

In a true tease, CBS has released just a snippet of the interview between Biden and correspondent Tracy Smith. Here is the entirety of that exchange:

SMITH: Was that your laptop?
BIDEN: For real, I don’t know.
SMITH: I know, but you know this —
BIDEN: I really don’t know what the answer is. That’s the truthful answer.
SMITH: You don’t know, yes or no, if the laptop was yours?
BIDEN: I don’t, I have no idea whether —
SMITH: So it could have been yours?
BIDEN: Of course, certainly. There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mississippi-texas-not-seeing-cases-mask-mandates

Mississippi and Texas are defying the national trend of rising COVID-19 cases, despite the fact that they eliminated mask mandates and other restrictions in March.

Gov. Tate Reeves lifted the mask mandate in Mississippi on March 3, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott followed on March 10.

Cases have fallen in Mississippi from a seven-day average of 465 on March 13 to 211 on April 1. In Texas, the current seven-day average is 3,688, down from 4,461 on March 16.

President Joe Biden was harsh in his criticism of the states’ decisions at the time.

“The last thing — the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it. It still matters,” Biden said.

One possible reason that the states have seen declining cases even as the pandemic has worsened in states such as Michigan and New Jersey is that the variant from the United Kingdom, known as B.1.1.7, has not yet spread through Mississippi and Texas as it has in other states. That variant is estimated to be 40% to 70% more transmissible than the original virus.

“The reason you’re not seeing a rise in states in the South is that the variant did not seed there as it did in the North,” said Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease physician at the Rollins School of Public Health. “It is almost certain that we will see the same rise in the South that we are seeing in the North.”

The first known cases of the U.K. variant in the United States were reported in Colorado and California.

On Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said that the U.K. variant now accounted for 26% of new cases and was the predominant strain in five regions — but she did not specify which regions. Chances are that Mississippi and Texas are not in those regions. Confirmed cases of the variant in Mississippi are about 1.3 per 100,000 population, and in Texas, it is 1.4. By comparison, in New Jersey, it is about 4.4 per 100,000, in Colorado, it is 8.1. and in Michigan, it is 12.4. In California, where cases have been declining, variant cases are 2.1 per 100,000.

It is also likely that much of the population in Mississippi and Texas are still wearing masks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/defiant-federal-judge-calls-out-the-media-democrat-complex/

One D.C. Circuit jurist pulled no punches as he sounded the alarm on ‘one-party control of the press and media.’

‘T he flak only gets heavy when you’re over the target.” This oft-cited World War II fighter-pilot wisdom is the best way to understand the strident reaction to Judge Laurence Silberman, the formidable senior jurist on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as a result of the dissent he filed in a recent libel case.

In the course of controversially urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the foundation of its modern libel jurisprudence, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Judge Silberman had the audacity to notice that the mainstream media function as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. When this development is combined with the activist progressivism of Silicon Valley techies who control social-media platforms, the result, he concluded, is “one-party control of the press and media.” This “threat to a viable democracy” is apt to lead “to countervailing extremism” — hard to argue with that these days.

Silberman’s point was that, without constitutional justification, the Supreme Court’s judicially legislated federalization of libel law substantially enhanced the power of the press. New York Times v. Sullivan supplanted the traditional state common law of defamation with a rule, speciously claimed to be mandated by the First Amendment, that requires defamed public figures to prove actual malice — i.e., to prove that any libelous statements were intentionally false or made with reckless disregard for their falsity. This daunting burden makes it virtually impossible for public figures — including private persons who are transmogrified into celebrities by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence — to sue successfully, even in cases where they have been slandered with false information.

This might not be a terrible result if the media were scrupulously non-partisan. But once the media and other channels of information exchange become adjuncts of one political party, the Court’s standard creates an incentive to portray the opposition party in the worst light, knowing that any misimpressions thereby created and any reputational damage will not be actionable.

More to the point, whatever one thinks of the policy choice that it is better to encourage more reporting, rather than accurate reporting — such choices are for legislatures to make, not the courts.

https://townhall.com/columnists/larryoconnor/2021/04/02/dr-scott-atlas-just-unloaded-on-fauci-birx-cdc-dir-walensky-and-mask-mandates-n2587330

I just finished an interview with Dr. Scott Atlas. Dr. Atlas was a member of President Donald Trump’s COVID task force. He’s a well-known health care policy advisor, a Senior Fellow at Standford’s Hoover Institution and was Chief of Neuroradiology at the Stanford University Medical Center. 

He’s also been an outspoken critic of the widespread lockdown strategy recommended by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx and employed by the vast majority of American governors over the past year. 

Generally, when I sit down for an interview with a figure like Dr. Atlas, my goal is to elicit some response or statement that separates this “media hit” from any other interview Dr. Atlas may have committed to. The thought process is: “If I can generate one good headline out of this interview, I’ve done good work.” 

Well, Dr. Atlas went above and beyond here. He is so candid and so direct in his observations and criticisms of his former colleagues and those now directing policy for the Biden White House I’m at a loss as to where to begin. 

One good headline? How about several?  

O’CONNOR: Could you lend a little bit of context to Dr. Fauci taking credit for the vaccine? 

ATLAS: The vaccine development was first initiated by the president’s realization that he was going to do what turned out to be a very smart thing, which was to take the risk away from the company’s developing the vaccines and just paying for hundreds of millions of doses and development and production in advance of them even having the vaccine developed, and that was a smart gamble. But then after that, the point of the development and vaccine distribution and everything was done by other people. 

Dr. Slaoui was in charge of the vaccine development program. General Perna and FEMA and other people were in charge of logistics and distribution planning. Alex Azar the Secretary of HHS and his team were overall in charge of Operation Warp Speed. 

The name that you mentioned earlier is missing from the list of people that were involved in the vaccine. 

O’CONNOR: That’d be Dr. Anthony Fauci. I just want to quote him, “When I saw what happened in New York City almost overrunning our healthcare system, that’s when it became very clear: the decision we made on January 10th to go all out and develop a vaccine may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to intervention as a director of the institute.” From your first-hand knowledge of this situation, this was not his decision? 

ATLAS: For him to claim credit for that is sort of unconscionable. 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disintegration-of-the-aclu-james-kirchick

Think of the American Civil Liberties Union during the last two decades of the 20th century, and a certain type of person invariably comes to mind: shrewd, thick-skinned, and possessed of an unwavering—some might say irritating—commitment to principle. The men and women of the ACLU were liberals in the most honorable, but increasingly obsolescent, meaning of the term. They understood that the measure of democracy lies in the impartial application of its laws, and were prepared to defend anyone whose constitutional rights were trampled upon, irrespective of their political views or the repercussions that mounting such a defense might entail.

The archetypical ACLU figure was also often Jewish, as immortalized in the 2003 Onion story, “ACLU Defends Nazis’ Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters.” That joke was based upon the real-life case of National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, wherein the organization represented a group of neo-Nazis who were denied a permit to march through a Chicago suburb that was home to a significant number of Jewish Holocaust survivors. The image of Jewish ACLU attorneys defending the free speech rights of American neo-Nazis was a source of shame for some Jews but pride for many others, a testament to Jewish confidence in the institutions and values of American liberalism. No American minority had reaped more from its faith in the country’s professed commitment to pluralism and tolerance than the Jews, a gift they repaid many times over by supporting the institutions—the universities, the Democratic Party, the ACLU—which upheld them. In the same way Lenny Bruce classified Ray Charles and fruit salad as Jewish (while claiming that “Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it”), so the ACLU was seen as scrappy, authentic, and emblematic of an underdog quality. As Bruce might have put it: the ACLU, Jewish; the McCarthyite American Jewish League Against Communism, goyish.

No one embodied that late-20th-century cultural archetype of the fiercely outspoken, intellectual, principled, and Jewish ACLU activist more than Ira Glasser. From his appointment as national executive director in 1978 until his retirement in 2001, Glasser transformed the ACLU from a mom and pop outfit into a “nationwide civil liberties powerhouse,” broadening its mandate to include issues such as sexual orientation discrimination and abortion rights. Through his ubiquitous and spirited media appearances, Glasser became the face of civil liberties in America. When Vice President George H.W. Bush campaigned to succeed his boss in 1988—and spoke like a Connecticut blueblood’s idea of a Texas hayseed—he derided his opponent Michael Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” It was guys like Glasser whom Bush was trying to conjure up in the minds of the voting public.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dr-fauci-tear-off-these-masks-11617387381?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

When will it be safe to shop at a grocery store or show up at the office without wearing a mask? Sooner than most experts are willing to admit. If the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. continues on its current trajectory, the need for masks outside particular local outbreak areas will pass in a matter of weeks.

One way to think about the problem is by analogy to seasonal influenza. Hardly anybody wears a mask in ordinary settings to protect against the flu, and no one is required to do so. The worst flu seasons of recent years saw an average of 220 deaths a day nationwide. The seven-day moving average for Covid-19 daily deaths hovers around 900, still considerably worse. But that’s a 78% reduction since January, and the trends are favorable almost everywhere in the country. When the 14-day rolling average of daily Covid deaths has come down below flu level, which may happen within the next month or two, we should adjust our thinking about the coronavirus accordingly.

Vaccination is the main reason for the sharp decline in Covid cases and deaths. Some three million shots are being administered each day, and once immunity has kicked in, the vaccinated are at negligible risk of being infected, never mind spreading infection. If you’ve been vaccinated, there’s almost no direct safety benefit—to yourself or others—of wearing a mask. You still have to do so only because immunity is invisible. The expectation or requirement of mask-wearing is impracticable to impose only on those who are vulnerable or may be dangerous.

At some point, however, herd immunity is achieved: Enough of the population is immune to make the risk of infection minimal in the population as a whole. Anthony Fauci puts the threshold for herd immunity at full vaccination of 85% of the U.S. population, including children. Since the vaccine has been authorized only for patients 16 and older and not all adults are willing to accept it, Dr. Fauci’s goal almost certainly won’t be reached for another year, if ever. The current figure is only 17% of total population.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-not-bigotry-to-tell-the-truth-about-china-11617294842?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Does criticism of China imperil Asian-Americans? A rash of recent commentary in the wake of last month’s shootings in Atlanta that killed eight people, six of them Asian women, makes that claim. But its factual basis is doubtful.

Columbia University historian Mae Ngai wants the U.S. to “pull back from treating China as an adversary.” In the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and Asian-American studies professor Janelle Wong argue: “When officials express fears over China or other Asian countries, Americans immediately turn to a timeworn racial script that questions the loyalty, allegiance and belonging of 20 million Asian Americans.” Journalist Peter Beinart warns that “if America’s leaders are serious about combating anti-Asian violence” at home, “they must stop exaggerating the danger that the Chinese government poses.”

Such arguments are deeply misguided. There is no contradiction between abhorring violence against Asian-Americans and criticizing a repressive regime that squelches human rights at home and undermines liberal democracy abroad. Most Americans are capable of making this elementary distinction. They make it every day.

How we approach this issue matters. China’s authoritarian system of government, economic heft and technological prowess make it the foremost challenger to the U.S.-led international order that has underwritten global peace and prosperity for more than seven decades. At the same time, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders—some 19.3 million strong according to the Census Bureau—are America’s fastest-growing demographic group. Those who call on the U.S. to drop its criticism of China for the supposed well-being of Asian-Americans are asking Washington to enter a geopolitical boxing ring with one arm tied behind its back.

https://nypost.com/2021/04/02/suspect-who-smashed-into-barrier-at-us-capitol-identified-reports/

The driver who killed a US Capitol cop before he was gunned down by police is a Nation of Islam devotee from Indiana, according to reports and his social media.

Noah Green, 25, who may have been living in Virginia, described himself as a “Follower of Farrakhan” on his Facebook page, in reference to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Green appeared to have come on hard times from his Facebook page reviewed by The Post before his account was taken down.

“I was on the right track and everything I had planned was coming into existence. It required long hours, lots of studying, and exercise to keep me balanced while experiencing an array of concerning symptoms along the path (I believe to be side effects of drugs I was intaking unknowingly),” he wrote on March 17, signing the message Brother Noah X.

“However, the path has been thwarted, as Allah (God) has chosen me for other things. Throughout life I have set goals, attained them, set higher ones, and then been required to sacrifice those things,” he continued.

His Facebook posts were first reported by MSNBC, which read them on-air.Green allegedly slammed into a fence outside the US Capitol just after 1 p.m. Friday and struck two officers before crashing into a barricade.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/02/president_jim_eagle_145519.html

EXCERPT

Joe Biden ran for president promising to end the ugliness, and to work at uniting the country. He vowed repeatedly that, as president, he’d work as hard for those who voted against him as for those who supported him. In his inaugural address, he spoke evocatively about Americans not demonizing one another. Think of those who disagree with you politically as neighbors, he said, not enemies. As for his policies, unlike Trump, Biden embraced the mainstream thinking in his political party. But that positioning is proving incompatible with his desire for national “unity.” Americans are witnessing the flip side of the Trump dynamic. Biden isn’t leading, he’s following. And the Democratic Party is taking Biden to places he shouldn’t want to go.

In his first presidential news conference, Joe Biden attacked Republicans over voting rights. Democrats say they want to make it easier for all Americans to vote. God bless them for that. Republicans respond that they want to ensure that new voting procedures don’t lead to voter fraud. In a sane and civil political environment — the kind candidate Biden said he wants to restore — the nation’s two major political parties would seek the middle ground: obliterating barriers to voting, but with safeguards.

But that is neither the environment Biden inherited nor the one he is fostering. Instead, he attacked the GOP position in Georgia and other states as “pernicious,” “sick,” “un-American” — and utterly racist. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” Biden said. “I mean, this is gigantic, what they’re trying to do.”

Speaking specifically of Georgia, Biden added in an official statement the next day, “Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” This is a falsehood: Although the new Georgia statute does contain a goofy provision barring partisan activists from furnishing water or food to those waiting in line to vote, it neither closes the polls early nor restricts early voting. It expands early voting.

Although invoking Jim Crow was insidious, it didn’t spring from Biden’s brow: It’s a Democratic Party talking point.