RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbi-received-repeated-warnings-about-steele-informant

The FBI received repeated warnings dating to 2015 that Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy it used to build a case against President Trump, had concerning contacts with Russian oligarchs and intelligence figures that might call into question the credibility of his intelligence reporting, newly declassified documents showed Monday.

The suspect sources included a person described as a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a Russian intelligence figure under separate counterintelligence investigation by the FBI, the memos show. And the red flags included a warning that Russian intelligence appeared to be aware as early as July 2016 that Steele was working on a U.S. election-related investigation, making him susceptible to misinformation.

The revelations are found in newly declassified footnotes from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December, 2019 report about failures in the Russia probe that included using false evidence to secure a FISA warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in October 2016.

Some of those red flags were raised prior to the bureau’s decision to rely on Steele’s dossier as key evidence in seeking the FISA warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the 2016 election, and nearly all were raised before Special Counsel Robert Mueller opened his probe in spring 2017.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/16/the_stress_pandemic_142944.html

Deliberately closing down the economy, which has never been done before, has created a more infectious, possibly more lethal disease than COVID-19. Let’s call it the Stress Virus. For the Stress Pandemic there can be no vaccine. There is only one cure — more jobs, more economic growth. Federal, state, and local governments should immediately begin to open the economy. Conditions in states, cities, localities vary. State and local officials should act accordingly with a clear goal: remove restrictions as fast as prudently possible.

The United States, and the world, have gone to war against COVID-19. Just weeks ago, little was known about this mysterious virus. When the news broke, it was accompanied by apocalyptic predictions: untold millions of infections and deaths. The threat seemed obvious. The focus was clear: Do everything possible as soon as possible to diminish the number of fatalities. The main thrust? Encourage people to isolate themselves. Almost overnight, this appeal swiftly morphed into a demand and the economy was essentially shut down by government fiat.

As we learned more about the virus and the models began to take this knowledge into account, the projected rates of infections and deaths declined dramatically. From 2.2 million projected deaths in the United States alone down to about 240,000 worldwide. This in but a few weeks. It’s fair to ask — and the answer may be unknowable — was the less cataclysmic modeling due to the social distancing, or were the models wrong all along? This much is known, however: The world economy has never been closed for any reason and the effects of the economic contagion are painfully obvious — massive unemployment, massive business closures, massive wealth destruction.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/15/are-we-witnessing-a-targeted-hit-against-trump-voters/

If you tried to design an attack against the president’s supporters, you couldn’t do better than what the experts have done in the name of public health.

The debate about “reopening the economy” is a phony debate.

It’s phony because “the economy” isn’t shut down. Far from it. Walmart is still open. Dollar General is open. Amazon is open. Alibaba is open.

It just so happens that the big-box mass merchandisers and online retailers responsible for flooding our country with crap from Communist China are open.

Meanwhile, other, very specific parts of the country are shut down.

Family-owned shops and workshops, the backbone of America, are closed. Fast-food franchises remain open—drive-through windows are operating at full tilt—but independently owned restaurants are shuttered or trying to survive at diminished capacity doing takeout only.

Conveniently, if not coincidentally, small-business owners make up an important segment of Trump’s base. Like the president, they have signed the front of a paycheck, experienced the brunt of the well-meaning administrative state, and endured the predations of giant corporations and subsidized Chinese competition. That’s why they love President Trump–he understands what they go through.

While these largely family-owned, small and medium-sized enterprises are laying off workers by the millions, Amazon and Walmart are hiring.

In the energy industry, the big guys can weather the storm while small, independent producers are getting crushed as oil prices fall off the cliff along with demand.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Zoom and other giant internet overlords are seeing more traffic than ever as people are locked in and white-collar professionals work from home.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/michigan_residents_take_to_the_streets_for_a_massive_protest.html

The experts assured Americans that, unless they addressed aggressively, the pandemic wave about to sweep over the country would kill millions of people, while breaking the healthcare system and, by extension, destroying America itself. The only way to make a dent in this apocalyptic scenario was for America to come to a complete halt. People had to isolate themselves within their homes, venturing forth for only the most essential errands.

Michigan was one of the states that took these prescriptions more seriously than others, shutting down virtually every aspect of life in Michigan, including earning any type of living. On Wednesday, several thousand Michigan citizens, as well as citizens from surrounding states. got fed up and took to the streets.

First-term Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a rising star in the Democrat party who gave the rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union Address, made national headlines when she banned hydroxychloroquine in her state. She seemed motivated more by animus to President Trump, who had expressed his hope that the medicine would be a “game changer,” than by any risks the medicine posed. Whitmer reversed that order only when more reports emerged that hydroxychloroquine, combined with azithromycin and zinc, seemed effective at short-circuiting the virus in its early stages.

Aside from her abortive attempt to ban hydroxychloroquine, Whitmer still has a long list of edicts she insists are necessary to protect her citizens. Some are the same ones we see in other lockdown states, such as proscribing in-person public meetings, requiring that medical and dental facilities postpone all “non-essential procedures” (if you’re not dying, giving birth, or in agony, it’s not essential); preventing evictions; and authorizing early criminal releases.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/presidential-power-is-limited-but-vast-11586988414?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Trump has come under attack this week for saying he has “absolute authority” to reopen the economy. He doesn’t—his authority is limited. But while the president can’t simply order the entire economy to reopen on his own signature, neither is the matter entirely up to states and their governors. The two sides of this debate are mostly talking past each other.

The federal government’s powers are limited and enumerated and don’t include a “general police power” to regulate community health and welfare. That authority rests principally with the states and includes the power to impose coercive measures such as mandatory vaccination, as the Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). Nor may the federal government commandeer state personnel and resources to achieve its ends or otherwise coerce the states into a particular course of conduct. There is no dispute about these respective state and federal powers.

In most federal-state disputes, the question is what happens when authorities at both levels exercise their legitimate constitutional powers at cross-purposes. Here, the president has the edge. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause requires that when the federal government acts within its proper sphere of constitutional authority, state law and state officials must give way to the extent that federal requirements conflict with their own. Federal power encompasses a broad power to regulate the national economy. Thus although the president lacks plenary power to “restart” the economy, he has formidable authority to eliminate restraints states have imposed on certain types of critical commercial activity.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/15/exclusive-josh-hawley-says-its-vitally-important-to-open-the-country-as-soon-as-we-possibly-can/

Remaining on lockdown for year to get a vaccine ‘is just not going to work, we can’t do that, it will end up being a humanitarian crisis and nobody wants to do that.’

The United States needs to push hard to open back up, with states taking the lead, Sen. Josh Hawley told The Federalist in a Tuesday interview, saying, “It probably will be a decision the states make state by state because states are going to vary, and what’s good for New York is not what we’re going to need in Springfield, Missouri, for instance, so you’ve got to let the data be the guide there.”

America, he added, has to take a long hard look at our global economy and its vulnerabilities: “We’d be nuts to have suffered through this crisis, suffered through the vulnerabilities in our medical supply chain and our broader economy that this has exposed, and do nothing about it.”

“It’s vitally important that we get the whole country open back up as soon as we possibly can,” Hawley said, “And I can just say here in Missouri people want to do their part, they are doing their part, the streets are empty ,the schools are closed, the shops are closed, but nobody likes this. Americans don’t like not working, they don’t like not going to school… They want to go back to work. Over and over and over people ask me when they can get back to work, when are we going to be able to get back to school … We have got to be pushing hard toward breaking the back of the epidemic and getting to a sustainable place where we can open back up, not only for peoples’ psychologies, not just to support family life, though those things are hugely vital, but also we’re seeing incidents of hunger.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/15/coronavirus_lessons_fact_and_reason_vs_paranoia_and_fear_.html

Given the most recent mortality rates and modeling, it appears that the death toll in America from coronavirus will end up looking a lot like the annual fatality numbers from the flu. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state is now projecting 68,841 potential deaths in America. It is also estimating lower ranges than that. The flu season of 2017-2018 took 61,099 American lives. For this we have scared the hell out of the American people, shut down the economy, ended over 17 million jobs, taken trillions of dollars out of the economy, closed places of worship, and massively disrupted civic life as we know it. Some of our major public officials tell us, still, that there will be no returning to a status quo, that we will have to get used to a new normal. We strongly disagree with that mindset.

A panic and hysteria over a pandemic that does not look to be what so many frightened us into thinking has radically degraded this country. What should be the major lessons learned here? How did we go from an ethos of “Let’s Roll!” when America was hit by a major attack from outside forces two decades ago to “Let’s roll up in a ball”? 

First, New York City is where the epidemic has struck the hardest. The media is centered in New York City. Although sensationalism is not new, something in the 21st century media landscape is: Reporting the news has been replaced with raising alarms, heightening political tensions, and funneling information through a strictly partisan lens. Lost is the notion that if something is too bad to be true — or too good to be true — it probably is not true. Conspiracy theories and extreme rhetoric have replaced fact and reason, as well as reasonableness. These dark impulses have been aided and abetted by a series of left-wing notions that have come to dominate our politics, giving us a new “paranoid style in American politics.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-problem-with-new-york-citys-covid-19-death-rate-estimates/

More on the continuing saga (see here, here, here and here) of the COVID-19 mortality rate — specifically, on why it is so hard to get accurate statistics, notwithstanding that these statistics are essential to decisions about reopening the economy.

Those of us who have been watching the daily numbers closely could not help but notice the dark cloud that drifted Tuesday over what was otherwise cautiously optimistic news. The number of coronavirus cases seems to be dropping, but deaths are suddenly spiking. Why?

It would overstate the matter to say that the tally of new cases is “plummeting,” but the drop has been noticeable: from a level of over 30,000 new cases per day from April 6 through April 11 (and, on three of those days, over 33,000 new cases), we’ve been down to about 27,000 on each of the three days since Sunday.

Initially, deaths also seemed to be dropping markedly: from around 2,000 per day from April 7 through April 11, down to about 1,500 on Sunday and Monday. Then, suddenly, deaths shot up on Tuesday, to 2,407, by far the highest one-day total yet (surpassing the previous high of 2,035 recorded on April 10).

What gives? Well, the main problem right now is New York. As governor Andrew Cuomo noted yesterday, although daily deaths seemed to be edging downward, below 700 on Monday for the first time in a week, they spiked up over 800 again on Tuesday. (Gov. Cuomo is nevertheless heartened by a decrease in hospitalizations, which will hopefully lead to a trend of declining cases and fatalities.) There were also marked daily death toll increases in New Jersey, Louisiana and Michigan, and less pronounced but noticeable increases in Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/15/world-health-organization-director-again-parr

While many have noted World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ effort to deflect criticism of his organization’s response to the Chinese coronavirus by playing the race card, far more revealing was whom he played it against. Under fire for his bias toward communist China, the Beijing-backed director-general, known simply as Tedros, sought to defend himself by slandering Taiwan, the thorn in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) side.

During an April 8 WHO press conference, Tedros unleashed a seemingly unprovoked tirade at Taiwan. He claimed its people were leveling racist attacks at him, apparently with tacit governmental support. Taiwan’s foreign ministry unequivocally denies this charge. Tedros stated:

[S]ince I don’t have any inferiority complex when I am personally affected or attacked by racial slurs, I don’t care because I am a very proud black person or Negro. I don’t care being called even Negro. I am. That’s what came from some quarters and if you want me to be specific, three months ago this attack came from Taiwan. We need to be honest. I will be straight today, from Taiwan and Taiwan the foreign Ministry they know the campaign they didn’t dissociate themselves. They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur but I didn’t care.

In response to Tedros’ remarks, I asked the WHO:

Can you provide any specific examples of the “attacks” to which the director-general was referring?
Can you point to evidence suggesting the attacks came from Taiwan, and clarify whether the director-general was saying that private citizens from Taiwan were engaging in such attacks, or rather that its government was doing so?
Can you point to evidence regarding the assertion that Taiwan’s foreign ministry was aware of this “campaign,” and “didn’t dissociate” itself?

As of this writing, the WHO has not responded to these inquiries.