RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/15/covid-19-shows-how-to-create-a-pandemic-panicand-keep-it-going/

This week, California, which has a death rate that is less than half the national average, is rolling back its reopening amid an increase in coronavirus cases. Elsewhere, we’re awash in stories about how states have reopened “too soon.” Why the continued panic when we know that the disease is far less lethal than originally feared?

If nothing else, the coronavirus pandemic is a textbook example of how to create fear and anxiety that is out of proportion to the threat, and spur panic-induced policies that needlessly kill people (like seniors in New York nursing homes). It also demonstrates how to keep the panic going, even as evidence piles up that the initial fears were wildly exaggerated.

Before anyone accuses us of being indifferent to COVID-19 deaths, or of being conspiracy mongers, we feel the need to point out that we aren’t saying that the coronavirus isn’t a serious public health threat. It obviously is. The question is whether the risk is being exaggerated and whether public policies enacted in the wake of it are necessary or effective.

Here are five steps that the got the coronavirus panic started and why it continues to this day.

1. Wildly exaggerate the deadliness of the disease. Most perceptions of the coronavirus were formed when the World Health Organization announced that the fatality rate was above 3%. If true, there would be millions of people dead. But it wasn’t even close to accurate. Based on ever greater amounts of data, we know that that the death rate is more like a bad flu season than the plague. Then there was the report from the Imperial College of London in March that claimed that even with draconian lockdowns in place, a million people in the U.S. would die from the coronavirus. That model has since been debunked, but the combination of the two extremely dire forecasts set the public’s perception of the disease and acceptance of draconian control measures.

2. Overcount deaths and undercount cases. These perceptions have continued because of the way cases and deaths are counted. On the one hand, the number of “confirmed” cases is a fraction of the actual number of people who’ve contracted the disease. That’s because many have symptoms that are minor or nonexistent, and so they never bother to get tested. In fact, one reason for the increase in “confirmed” cases is the fact that testing is more routine, even for those who are asymptomatic.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16239/district-attorneys-investigate-presidents

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that presidents are exempted from certain laws that are applicable to the rest of us. They cannot be prosecuted while serving in office. That, too, is the law.

The argument against allowing state prosecutors to rummage through a sitting president’s papers and documents is that there is no limiting principle…. A president who received subpoenas from hundreds or thousands of local jurisdictions could become overwhelmed by the task of assisting his lawyers in thoroughly vetting them for claims of privilege. This is not a fanciful prospect in our current age in which the criminal justice system has been weaponized by both parties seeking partisan advantage.

So the Supreme Court’s decision…. may also constitute a setback for the power of the presidency and our system of separation of powers and federalism.

Despite the unanimity of the justices, I think the case was wrongly decided. If a sitting president cannot constitutionally be tried for a crime, it should follow that he should not be compelled to be a defendant in a civil case, since civil cases can be brought by anybody for nearly anything. I think the recent case was wrongly decided as well. No sitting president should be burdened by an unlimited number of subpoenas from an unlimited number of local district attorneys, at least some of whom may be motivated by partisan or self-serving considerations.

It is a truism that no person is above the law, but under our Constitution certain office holders are exempt from certain laws. That does not place them above the law. That is the law.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-shameless-gaslighting-by-andrew-cuomos-defenders/

There is no measurement at our disposal and no level of gaslighting that will change the fact that Cuomo-led New York was an utter failure.

On March 25, New York governor Andrew Cuomo made one of deadliest mistakes of the coronavirus crisis, signing an executive order forcing nursing homes in his state to accept patients who tested positive for coronavirus. Around 4,800 New Yorkers died from COVID-19 in those nursing homes from March to May — approximately 25 percent of all fatalities in the state.

Many medical professionals opposed the policy. A report by ProPublica, certainly no right-wing outlet, found that deaths had spiked after Cuomo’s order. States issuing similar policies — Michigan and New Jersey — saw similar disasters unfold.

By any standard, the New York tristate area’s numbers are the worst in the country. By most measures, the numbers are some of the worst in the world. As the New York Times noted in May, New York City seeded the wave of outbreaks across the nation. Some of the carnage was likely unavoidable, but we can attribute the high number of nursing-home deaths, at the very least, to Cuomo’s ineptitude.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/evaluating-faucis-record/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

“Dr. Anthony Fauci has a spottier record on predicting the course of pandemics than the media would have you believe. ”

The White House is getting a lot of heat by pointing out that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious-disease official, has a spottier record on predicting the course of pandemics than the media would have you believe. “White House officials now want to rein in Fauci by cherry-picking instances in which they can take Fauci out of context to use the uncertainties of the pandemic against him,” noted the Washington Post.

I understand that “cherry-picking” issues over the course of someone’s career can lead to a distorted picture. But one problem with coverage of Fauci is that the coverage has rarely offered any context beyond glowing profiles of the 79-year-old career civil servant and his behind-the-scenes clashes with Trump officials.

Dr. Fauci was challenged a bit on Sunday’s Meet the Press when the top U.S. coronavirus-testing official, Admiral Brett Giroir, said Fauci is “not 100 percent right” because his calls for now reinstituting lockdowns in some states come from “a very narrow public-health point of view.” Giroir argued that as an epidemiologist Fauci “admits that (he doesn’t) have the whole national interest in mind.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/roger-stone-commutation-judge-demands-clarification-from-president/

“I do wonder, though, whether any federal judges have intervened to make sure that the terrorists whose sentences were commuted by Presidents Clinton and Obama are reporting to their probation officers.”

The judge is no doubt disturbed by the commutation. Legally, she cannot do anything about it, but politically, she is not letting it go.

  W ell, it wouldn’t be the Trump era — indeed, an election year in the Trump era — if a federal judge simply accepted a lawful presidential action that Trump critics found upsetting.

So it is that, Monday morning, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., the Obama appointee who presided over Roger Stone’s trial and imposed the 40-month sentence that President Trump commuted Friday night, has demanded that the president clarify the extent of his clemency order.

Specifically, Judge Jackson has ordered the Justice Department and Stone’s counsel to provide the court with a copy of the executive order commuting the sentence, and to address its “scope,” meaning, “whether it involves the sentence of incarceration alone or also the period of supervised release.”

Supervised release is a term of years during which the probation office monitors a convict after the incarceration phase of a sentence is completed.

With a few important exceptions not relevant to this discussion, a trial judge’s role in the defendant’s imprisonment ends when she imposes sentence. The execution of a sentence is mainly an executive function, overseen by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons. That’s why, when a judge pronounces a prison sentence, it is customary to say the defendant is “committed to the custody of the attorney general” for some term of months or years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/06/30/the-trouble-with-speaker

Membership in the U.S. Congress is an exclusive club that comes with lucrative, taxpayer-funded privileges. Retirement perks include a lifetime pension and a taxpayer-matched savings plan with taxpayer-paid contributions of up to five percent of salary.

As the longest-serving member of Congress, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) would qualify for a yearly pension of $167,040 if he retired today. Former speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was eligible to draw a $84,930 pension when he turned 50 in January after serving for twenty years and retiring at age 48.

Critics question the necessity of such a system. Why are U.S. taxpayers providing public pensions to millionaire members of Congress on top of a 401(k)-style plan? (The median net worth for a member recently exceeded $1.1 million.)

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com broke down benefits received by leaders from both parties: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (net worth est. $50 million to $72 million): She’ll reap $153,967 a year in public pension and social security benefits at retirement. In addition, Pelosi could cash out an estimated $1 million lump sum through her federal saving account – and that’s just the portion of the account that was taxpayer-funded.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-green/2020/07/13/hcq-helps-contain-covid-19-cases-new-evidence-and-a-major-retraction-n636361

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — the controversial COVID-19 treatment touted by President Donald Trump — might be gaining new traction in the fight against the Wuhan coronavirus.

The latest positive results come from Vadodara, India, where city officials have conducted a major study involving more than 300,000 people, including “health workers and other frontline staff.”

The Indian Express reports:

The administration has analysed a sample of over 1 lakh [lakh = 100,000] residents, who were mostly close contacts of positive persons and the effect of HCQ in containing the transmission of the virus. According to the analysis, of the 48,873 close contacts of positive patients who took one dose of HCQ, 102 turned Covid-19 positive and 12 succumbed to the infection whereas 48 of the 17,776 close contacts of positive patients who took two doses of HCQ turned positive and only one died. The study also states that of the 33,563 close contacts of patients who took three HCQ doses, 43 tested positive and one died.

Local health official Dr. Devesh Patel told the paper, “It has shown positive results. We have the numbers and not one person has complained of complications. The only side effect reported is mild gastritis, which is common with administering heavy medicines and can be effectively handled.”

In other words, anyone who has taken the much more common azithromycin antibiotic for a simple sinus infection has probably suffered about the same distress — all gastric — as a subject of the Vadodara study.

Dr. Mohammad Hussain, who runs Vadodara’s Faith Hospital, told the Express, “There are conflicting studies about the use of HCQ. While initially the US studies rejected it and cited side-effects, European countries backed its prophylactic use. In Vadodara, it has shown positive results. We have been able to restrict cases in clusters. Nagarwada no longer has a huge number of cases.”

Hussain reiterated that no serious side effects were reported.

Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton noted on Friday that Trump Derangement Syndrome almost certainly cost lives in the fight against COVID-19:

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/13/6-ways-leftism-acts-like-a-religion/

Leftism has transformed from an obscure cult into a dominant religion in our country. The progressive promised land is here now.

Conservative commentators have been mocked for years for describing leftism as a new religion of sorts. Since 2016, it has become clear that the modern left was determined to prove us right.

What we have witnessed unfold in this country over the last few years, and have seen increase exponentially as the 2020 election comes near, especially with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement, is an expression of religious zealotry so widespread, unforgiving, and violent that it might have made the Puritan governors of 17th-century Massachusetts worry they were being outdone.

Leftism is not a political ideology anymore. It is a full-fledged religion complete with tithing, penance, forced confessions, iconoclasm, internet inquisitions, public rituals, excommunication, heavily policed virtues, sacred texts, seminaries, and online auto-de-fes.

The proof is too plentiful to ignore. 

Here are the signs that we’re truly confronting a theocracy of totalitarian religious extremists.

1. Conformity, Strictly Enforced Virtues, and Excommunication

Throughout history, religious nonconformists and dissenters of theocracies like the one we’re now confronting have been denied political and civil rights. Those who fail to express their undying loyalty to the Church of Leftism and participate in its public rituals are marked as heathens and “canceled” faster than you can say “due process.” Those who dissent publicly from their established doctrine are routinely censored, humiliated, shunned from certain schools or organizations, and even deprived of their livelihoods.

In this religious system, heretics and apostates are ruthlessly suppressed and denied the full benefits of participation in the body politic. Even if you’re silent, the media choir will call it violence and demand you be shamed and unfollowed. If that’s not enough puritan madness, the choir will also instruct you on how to be sufficiently woke. The New York Times recently ran a piece suggesting you must demand your family and friends donate to left-wing causes or threaten them with excommunication.

http://www.news12.com/story/42359319/blm-back-the-blue-protesters-clash-in-bay-ridge

Black Lives Matter protesters and demonstrators who support the police came face-to-face in the streets of Bay Ridge.

Protesters marched 20 blocks towards the 68th Precinct.

Supporters of BLM say they are fighting for peace and equality that is long overdue.

However, ‘Back the Blue’ demonstrators say it is time they took a stand after weeks of protests around the nation calling to defund to the police.

They waved American flags and held signs showing support for President Donald Trump.

Many protesters were shoved to the ground and some American flags were burned in the streets.