RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/trump-declassifies-information-on-russia-investigations-but-it-may-be-too-late/

The American people needed to know the truth about efforts by the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration to sabotage the president’s campaign sooner.

President Trump made a stunning announcement this week when he ordered the declassification of all documents related to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Trump’s decision was heavily influenced by a recent letter from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to the Senate Judiciary Committee revealing that Russian intelligence believed in July 2016 that Clinton had personally authorized a scheme to smear the Republican nominee for colluding with Russia to distract from the scandal that had arisen over her private email server. Ratcliffe reported that this knowledge came from then-CIA director John Brennan’s notes, and that although it may have been Russian disinformation, it was taken seriously enough at the time that President Obama was briefed on it and it was referred to the FBI for an investigation.

In light of the Ratcliffe letter, Trump said “Enough!” He is fed up with years of delays and in getting the truth out on the Russia collusion hoax. The letter, which included crucial details on the hoax that have been kept from the American people since 2017, was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Specifically, the president’s decision is a rebuke of former DNI Dan Coats and current CIA director Gina Haspel. Coats turned a blind eye toward the hoax and at times even seemed to promote it. He also, like Haspel, repeatedly blocked the release of information to Congress related to it. A House Intelligence Committee source has told me that Haspel is currently blocking the release and declassification of a House Intelligence Committee report that found Brennan personally blocked the inclusion of intelligence from a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment which stated that Russia wanted Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/520153-not-treason-not-a-crime-but-definit

President Trump did himself no favors with Wednesday’s ALL-CAPS tweet about how the latest disclosures from Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe implicate President Obama, Vice President Biden and Hillary Clinton in a “TREASONOUS PLOT.” 

Ratcliffe has declassified and released handwritten notes by former CIA director John Brennan (undated, but probably from late July 2016) and a memo from the CIA to the FBI (dated Sept. 7, 2016). These documents corroborate Ratcliffe’s revelation, in a Sept. 29 letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, to wit: In late July 2016, Russian intelligence assessed that Mrs. Clinton approved her campaign advisers’ proposal to blame Moscow’s hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails on a conspiracy between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Put aside Ratcliffe’s acknowledgement that, although U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Russian intelligence assessment is authentic, they cannot say with confidence that it is true. There is, after all, abundant evidence that the Clinton campaign blamed Trump for the Russian hacking of DNC emails that were published on the eve of the 2016 Democratic national convention. The Clinton campaign would not have done that unless the candidate authorized it.

That said, what is the crime?

Don’t get me wrong. I have argued for years that the real “collusion” in the 2016 presidential campaign was not between Trump and Russia — it was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration, which put its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus in the service, first, of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and, ultimately, of the Democratic Party’s resistance to Trump’s presidency. This arrangement centered on a false political narrative that Trump and his campaign were complicit in Russia’s suspected hacking of Democrats’ emails.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.”James Madison (1751-1836)

We should forever be thankful for the brave and wise men who fought our revolution and created our government, between the years 1775 and 1789. They defeated the world’s foremost military power. Their experience with Parliament and the King made them wary of governmental power. They knew enough about human nature to recognize that power was an aphrodisiac. In February 1775, Alexander Hamilton wrote in “A Farmer Refuted:” “A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.” They recognized that warning applied to them – and their political heirs.

Later, looking back on those years, Madison, in the same speech quoted in the rubric above, spoke to the risks of different forms of government – that monarchies can become despotic and aristocracies may sacrifice the rights and welfare of the many to the demands of the few. In republics, he added, “the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.” It was because of the failings and risks of other forms of government, along with the fallibility of man, that the Founders created a government based on a written Constitution, which emphasized the natural rights of individuals that must be protected. It clearly stated that power would be diffused through three equal branches, with the legislative branch being bicameral – a lower chamber reflecting the population of the nation and a Senate representing each state equally. It further stated that powers not delegated to the federal government, nor prohibited by it, are reserved for the States or the people. Freedom for the individual came foremost; governmental abuse of power was the great internal risk.

In 1789, the federal bureaucracy consisted of employees in three departments – State, Treasury and War. Today, the Federal Register lists 454 departments, agencies and sub-agencies.  Excluding members of the military, approximately three million people are employed in the federal government, plus about four million federal government contract employees – the fastest growing segment of the federal workforce.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house/91291/

Too bad there’s not a 25th Amendment-type clause in the Constitution granting to the cabinet the power to remove from office the Speaker of the House. That’s our reaction to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that she is going to lead tomorrow in the House a discussion in respect of using the 25th Amendment against President Trump. She’s upset that he called off negotiations with her over a Covid relief bill.

It seems the speaker thinks that might have been a reaction to the steroid the president is taking for his case of the coronavirus. The Daily Mail is reporting that some doctors are concerned that it can cause insomnia, mania, mood swings, and rage. Then again, Congress itself has been known to cause in ordinary taxpayers insomnia, mania, mood swings, and rage. So this could yet turn out to be tomorrow quite a discussion.

Plus, one doesn’t have to be taking a steroid to see the logic of Mr. Trump calling off negotiations with the Speaker and her camarilla. Just read the Wall Street Journal, which issues what is, clinically speaking, the sanest editorial page in the Milky Way. It noted that the talks from which Mr. Trump withdrew were over a “ransom demand” for a $2 trillion “blowout” in new covid relief spending. Mrs. Pelosi would take nothing less.

That’s just crazy. Particularly since in order to get the $2 trillion, the Congress would have to borrow the money from the Chinese communists or other lenders. Or just have the Federal Reserve create it out of pixels (it would be borrowing 2 trillion dollars whose value has not been set by, in the Congress, the only body empowered to regulate the value of the dollar). Put that, as they say, in your 25th Amendment and smoke it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-wont-the-media-listen-to-these-scientists-11602013456?st=eb16j3x84nc3q0n&reflink=article_copyURL_share

This week dozens of esteemed medical experts with blue-chip academic credentials published a warning about the destructive policies adopted to address Covid-19. Since the Sunday publication of this “Great Barrington Declaration” more than a thousand biological scientists and more than 1,500 medical practitioners have added their names to the petition. Yet it’s been almost entirely ignored by the media outlets that spend much of their days presenting themselves as obedient to science.

Maybe this is because the accomplished group of scientists behind the declaration is refusing to obey political narratives. According to the petition:

Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.

The scientists go on to note that the poor are “disproportionately harmed” by current policies and that for children, “COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.” They add that the best approach “is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”

This means that those “who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal,” including attending schools, going to restaurants, participating in sports and even gathering at public events. Meanwhile attention should be focused on protecting those most at risk. According to the scientists.

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/biden-surrogate-jane-fonda-calls-covid-gods-gift-to-the-left/

“I just think that COVID is God’s gift to the Left,” Fonda said. “That’s a terrible thing to say. I think it was a very difficult thing to send down to us, but it has ripped the band-aid off who [Trump] is and what he stands for and what is being done to average people and working people in this country.”

“What a great gift, what a tremendous opportunity, we are so lucky, we have to use it with every ounce of intelligence and courage and wherewithal we have,” she added.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/over-11000-scientists-sign-petition-against-covid-19-lockdowns_3530807.html

More than 11,000 scientists and medical practitioners have signed a petition against lockdown measures put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, saying that they are causing “irreparable damage.”

At least 7,000 medical practitioners, and 4,000 medical and public health scientists joined more than 100,000 members of the general public in signing the petition, which was created on Oct. 4 and co-authored by Harvard professor of medicine Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Oxford professor Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection,” reads the petition, which is titled the Great Barrington Declaration after the Massachusetts town it was signed in.

The petition calls for an end to current lockdown policies, saying that they are producing “devastating effects” on short and long-term public health.

Some of these devastating effects, the doctors wrote, including lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health. They argue that this will, in the future, lead to greater excess mortality, with the working class and younger generation “carrying the heaviest burden.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/warren-buffett-black-lives-matter

The Tides Network is a powerful instrument leveraged by billionaires working to change America, while shielding their philanthropic dollars from public scrutiny. Here’s how it works.

In July of 2013, the seeds of the most powerful protest movement of the modern era were planted.

In a restless climate of nationwide demonstrations touched off by the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an activist named Alicia Garza uttered the phrase “Black lives matter.” A few months later, in October 2013, Garza took a job with an organization called the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the nonprofit immediately saw a dramatic increase in its funding from organizations tied to some of the wealthiest people in the world—people with names like Buffett, Soros, and Rockefeller.

This spring, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the movement became a global interest: Some 1.1 million individual donations worth an estimated $33 million flowed into its coffers. Large corporations, especially in Silicon Valley and retail, have been quick to follow suit, with brands like Square, Ubisoft, Google, Spanx, Tom’s Shoes, Lululemon, Nike, and Anastasia Beauty all making six- and seven-figure organizational pledges.

The received wisdom, echoing the official mythology around Black Lives Matter Global Network Inc.—co-founded by Garza along with fellow activists Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors—is that BLM is a grassroots movement that rose up organically out of the widespread rage sparked by viral videos of Black American men killed by police officers. According to this account, the political priorities of activists in Brooklyn screaming at cops and calling to defund the police have been fused with those of suburban moms in Peloton T-shirts, hand-painting signs with their kids using the BLM hashtags of large multinational conglomerates—an unusual union of protesters and the corporate boardroom spurred on by nothing more than everyone’s shared outrage over racism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/new-files-highlight-brennans-role-promoting

The CIA was not seeking an FBI probe of Clinton; rather, it was pushing an investigation of Trump consistent with her baseless allegations.
On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified and released parts of the documents underlying his earlier revelation about Hillary Clinton’s role in orchestrating the Trump-Russia collusion farce.

The new revelations are important, particularly in clarifying a suggestion, made last week by Ratcliffe, that U.S. intelligence agencies referred former Secretary of State Clinton to the FBI for investigation. That suggestion was then repeated by Senate Republicans and in media commentary (including my column, here).

There was no referral of that kind. That perhaps explains why, in his Senate testimony last week, former FBI director James Comey maintained that he recalled no such thing – to the seeming exasperation of Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.). In reality, when read in conjunction with other information that I addressed in Ball of Collusion, Ratcliffe’s disclosures underscore that the Obama administration, including its law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, was on the same page with the Clinton campaign in peddling the collusion narrative.

Ratcliffe’s revelation last week, in a letter to Senator Graham, related that, in late July 2016, Russian intelligence agents assessed that Clinton sought to blame Donald Trump, her opponent in the presidential race, for Russia’s suspected hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails. U.S. spy agencies “obtained insight” into this Russian assessment through some highly classified method. That explains, at least in part, why the documents Ratcliffe has disclosed are so heavily redacted (and probably why it has taken so long for the Trump administration to disclose this crucial information).

Clinton’s alleged objective was to divert attention from the scandal over her use of a non-secure homebrew server system to conduct State Department business. According to Ratcliffe, the U.S. intelligence community (IC) judged that the Russian assessment was authentic, in the sense that it really did come from the Kremlin’s intelligence services. The IC drew no conclusion, however, about whether the Russian government actually believed the assessment was true – i.e., as Ratcliffe put it, to some extent, “the Russian analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” For what it’s worth, I surmise that the Russians probably did believe Clinton had approved this political narrative because it lines up with contemporaneous events – it would not have taken a genius to figure it out. But that is a story for another day (coming soon).

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/06/trump-atlas-time-to-face-down-coronavirus-fear/

It’s increasingly likely the election will be a referendum on Coronavirus and its after-effects, which means Trump’s new tack is a risky, but necessary, one.

The uproar over the president’s COVID-19 diagnosis made one thing abundantly and terrifyingly clear: Coronavirus hysteria is here to stay—and there are signs it might be getting worse seven months after we first confronted the unknown disease.

Rather than accept that nearly all the early advice dispensed by self-proclaimed “experts” was not just wrong but resulted in devastating consequences that will impact the country for years to come, lots of Americans—including the entire news industry and leaders of both political parties—are endorsing more punitive government decrees to “stop” a virus that poses almost no serious health threat to the overwhelming majority of Americans.

People are fixated on masks; the president of the United States isn’t allowed to take a brief ride in an SUV with people trained to take a bullet on his behalf without enduring widespread condemnation for “risking the lives of others” even though everyone wore a mask and other protective gear. Most of Monday night’s town hall meeting with Joe Biden revolved around mask use.

Panic rules daily life at the same time we have fewer reasons to panic. Recent data crunched by the Centers for Disease Control confirms that nearly everyone under the age of 70 who contracts the disease recovers; 95 percent of adults over 70 recover, too. Most sufferers report mild symptoms; overly-sensitive tests give false positives for people showing no symptoms at all. Hospitals are not overflowing with COVID patients and, with few exceptions, never were.