RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/the-shame-of-joe-biden.php

Politicians are not, in general, renowned for honesty. Spin is universal and exaggeration goes with the territory. But actual lying–verifiable, damnable lying about an important public issue–is relatively uncommon. Unless we are talking about Joe Biden.

During the campaign, Biden absurdly alleged that President Trump had mishandled the COVID epidemic, and therefore had murdered the several hundred thousand Americans who allegedly died from that disease. The theory was that if Trump had done something differently–God knows what–the U.S. would have been the only country on Earth with zero Wuhan deaths. Reporters went along with Biden’s fantasy.

Since his inauguration, Biden has continued his assault on his predecessor by claiming, repeatedly, that little was going on with regard to vaccinations until he took office, and that the Trump administration “had no plan” to effectuate vaccinations. This, too, is a damnable lie.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/26/the-democrats-woke-equality-act-another-awful-idea-that-would-radically-change-america/

“The bottom line is, this radical, divisive bill won’t unite us, but further divide us. And it’s a sad reminder that we’re only ever one election away from truly crazy things emerging from Congress. The Equality Act is one of them. What’s next?”

The just-passed Equality Act no doubt sounds wonderful to many. Who, after all, can disagree with a bill to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation”? But it’s a wretched bill, one that would have many terrible consequences.

Passed Thursday by a 224-206 vote, with only three Republicans in support, the legislation now goes to the Senate, where it’s expected (but not guaranteed) to fail. After all, the same bill also passed the House early last year, only to die in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to get beyond that chamber’s filibuster. With a 50-50 party split in the Senate, that makes it unlikely to pass this time, too.

But, like a bad meal, the Equality Act is likely to come up again.

As we said, there’s nothing wrong with “equality” for anyone under the law. Our Constitution, indeed, guarantees that under the 14th Amendment. It’s a bedrock of American jurisprudence.

But the Equality Act of today has nothing to do with “equal rights,” at least as most Americans would understand them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-censorship-party-11614296803?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Imagine if a pair of Donald Trump’s allies in Congress had sent a letter to cable company CEOs in 2017 blasting CNN and other progressive media outlets and asking why their content is still broadcast. Then imagine that a GOP-run committee in Congress staged a hearing on the societal menace of fake news and the need for government and business to rein in the hostile press.

The media would have treated that as a five-alarm political fire, an existential threat to a free press, the First Amendment and political norms, and a step toward authoritarian rule. “Democracy dies in darkness,” and all that. Yet that’s exactly what Democrats in Congress did this week, targeting conservative media outlets, but the media reaction has been silence or approval.

On Monday Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney sent letters pressing 12 cable and tech CEOs to drop contracts with right-of-center media outlets including Fox News. Two days later the Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing about “disinformation and extremism” in conservative media. The only notable extremism on display was the majority party’s appetite for regulating and policing the free press.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2021/02/25/rand-paul-roasts-rachel-levine-for-supporting-the-chemical-castration-of-kids-n1428413

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) delivered a harsh rebuke of the philosophy that minor children should be allowed to use off-label hormone blockers to delay puberty for the purpose of “transitioning” due to gender dysphoria. He exposed the moral insanity of this idea during assistant health secretary nominee Rachel Levine’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday. Levine is transgender and advocates for the chemical altering of children with gender dysphoria.

Rand Paul, like many medical professionals, is concerned about the unknown long-term effects of puberty blockers, an off-label treatment that has not been sufficiently studied. There are many young people who have used hormones and puberty blockers and are now having difficulty de-transitioning. Paul asked Levine a question the doctor refused to answer.

Should minors be making these momentous decisions? For most of the history of medicine, we wouldn’t let you have a cut sewn up in the ER but you’re willing to let a minor take things to prevent their puberty and you think they’ll get that back?

Paul went on to destroy the Left’s double standard, noting that many leftists screamed like hyenas that off-label use of medication was the end of the world when it came to hydroxychloroquine use for COVID-19.

I find it ironic that the Left that went nuts over hydroxychloroquine being used possibly for COVID are not alarmed that these hormones are being used off-label. There’re no long-term studies. We don’t know what happens to them. We do know there are dozens and dozens of people who have been through this who regret that this happened. And a permanent change happened to them. If you’ve ever been around children, 14-year-olds can’t make this decision…we should be outraged that someone is talking to a three-year-old about changing their sex.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/once-secret-fbi-informant-reports-reveal-wide-ranging

Once-secret reports show the FBI effort to spy on the Trump campaign was far wider than previously disclosed, as agents directed an undercover informant to make secret recordings, pressed for intelligence on numerous GOP figures, and sought to find “anyone in the Trump campaign” with ties to Russia who could acquire dirt “damaging to Hillary Clinton.”

The now-declassified operational handling reports for FBI confidential human source Stefan Halper — codenamed “Mitch” — provide an unprecedented window both into the tactics used by the bureau to probe the Trump campaign and the wide dragnet that was cast to target numerous high-level officials inside the GOP campaign just weeks before Americans chose their next president in the November 2016 election.

 Among the revelations, the memos make clear that:

Almost immediately after the FBI opened a Russia collusion probe on July 31, 2016 narrowly focused on the foreign lobbying of a single Trump campaign aide named George Papadopoulos, agents pressed Halper for information on more than a half dozen other figures, including future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, foreign policy adviser Sam Clovis, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, economic adviser Peter Navarro, future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser Carter Page.
Halper provided significant exculpatory evidence to the FBI — including transcripts of conversations he recorded of targeted Trump advisers providing statements of innocence — that was never disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approved a year of surveillance targeting the Trump campaign, and specifically Page.
While current FBI Director Chris Wray has insisted the bureau did not engage in spying on the Trump campaign, Halper’s taskings include many of the tradecraft tactics of espionage, including the creation of a fake cover story (he wanted a job at the Trump campaign), secret recordings, providing background on targets, suggested questions to ask and even contact information for potential targets.

But the memos’ most explosive revelations are the sheer breadth of the FBI’s insufficiently predicated dragnet targeting the Trump campaign, and the agents’ clearly stated purpose of thwarting any Trump campaign effort to get dirt from Russia that could hurt his Democratic rival.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/math_the_latest_battleground_in_the_war_against_truth.html

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, set in the superstate of Oceania, the government propagates the absurd equation 2 + 2 = 5. Through steady indoctrination, and under the ever-watchful Thought Police, the citizens accept it as an unquestionable truth. The equation symbolizes the extinction of free thought in repressive totalitarian societies: facts, truths and objective reality are subordinated to political will and twisted to serve the authoritarian goals of the Party and its leader, Big Brother.

Something similar is happening in many American schools. An eerie Orwellian shadow is being cast over math instruction. The focus is insidiously shifting from arithmetic, geometry, and algebra to critical race theory, ethnic studies, and intersectionality. Ridiculous as it may sound, an objective field of knowledge is being thrust into the realm of social experimentation. Students are being taught not how to think but what to think. Instead of developing critical thinking skills, today’s math classes stipulate that students hold particular views about the world and instruct them on how they must extinguish what is posited as “wrongthink.”

Across America, math teaching practices that were considered essential are suddenly being condemned as racist, requiring students to display the steps in solving a problem is now deemed white supremacist; teachers’ corrections, and even the concept of a correct answer, are considered suspect or undesirable; polite interaction, raising hands before commenting or asking questions, and maintaining order in the classroom are viewed as reinforcing paternalism and condemned as “power hoarding.”

This idiocy has swept, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the fruit of the worst practices of monopolistic capitalism but now quick to align itself with left-liberal, pseudo-egalitarian causes. The foundation is providing more than $140 million to ‘A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,’ an organization of 25 educational institutions that contend that math is synonymous with white supremacy and upholds “capitalist, imperialistic and racist” views. Pathway offers a five-part toolkit and videoconferences to make educators “reflect on their own biases” and commit to advance math “equity” by understanding that students of color use math differently than do white students.

https://www.city-journal.org/lockdowns-impact-on-mental-and-physical-health

At the start of the pandemic last year, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti chose “safer at home” as the motto for his lockdown policies. If the past year has shown us anything, it’s how misguided that notion is. Lockdowns have created not just economic devastation for America’s small businesses, restaurants, museums, and zoos. They have also taken a significant toll on the mental and physical health of everyone from small children to the elderly (while doing little to contain the virus itself). To get a sense of this, compare two states that took opposite approaches: New York and Florida.

Despite the hysteria about how bad things were in Florida and the Biden administration’s recent threat to restrict travel to the state, statistics suggest that you’re better off in the Sunshine State. Currently, Florida has 224 people per 1 million in hospitals for Covid-19; New York State has 338 per million, or 50 percent more. In New York, blacks are 2.3 times more likely than whites to die of Covid; in Florida, blacks are equally as likely as whites to die. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous policies have resulted in much higher mortality rates in New York’s nursing homes than in Florida’s.

The lockdowns themselves have also been deeply destructive. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Florida saw a 4.6 percent drop in employment from December 2019 to December 2020. New York’s drop was more than twice that, at 10.4 percent. To judge by recent news coverage of businesses fleeing New York for Florida, it’s possible that a number of those jobs simply went from one state to the other.

The pandemic’s toll on physical and mental health has also been severe, no doubt related to these economic losses but also caused by the severe isolation people experience under lockdown. At the beginning of the pandemic, Florida entered a brief lockdown phase in the same way that New York did. As a result, both states saw a severe decline in the number of cases reported to state child-abuse hotlines.