RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/new_york_city_adds_4000_to_its_wuhan_virus_dead_by_recategorizing_deaths.html

New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio abruptly added 4,000 deaths to the city’s roster of Wuhan virus deaths. He did this even though there are no tests proving that these 4,000 people died because of the virus. The mayor claims he made the change to increase statistical accuracy, but he may have been acting upon baser motives.

One problem with getting a handle on the Wuhan virus is that we have no accurate count telling how many people have become sick with or died from it, whether at home or abroad. Different countries use different tests; different tests have various rates of fake results, both positive and negative; and not everyone is or can be tested. Moreover, in different places, people are classified as Wuhan virus deaths if they tested positive for the virus regardless of what killed them.

We know that there may be people who have the virus but don’t know it, people who are sick with something that may or may not be the virus, and people who die from causes that can be attributed to the virus, although without any real certainty. Antibody tests are useful for providing some mathematical probability about the virus’s prevalence in a given population, but the tests also don’t home in on the exact number of people who are or have been ill.

Put another way, virus counts around the world are subject to a lot of guesswork. The inability to get accurate numbers allows different jurisdictions to adjust the numbers depending on their policy goals.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/justice-department-declines-to-support-blocking-hillary-clinton-deposition/

“The most notable thing about the case is the extreme lengths to which Hillary Clinton is going to avoid answering questions under oath about her email practices — a matter on which she has made a slew of contradictory public statements, some of them proven untrue by the FBI’s criminal investigation. ”

Far from being political retribution, the move, which came in a FOIA case related to Clinton’s private-server use, applied standard DOJ guidance.

The Justice Department has declined to join former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s effort to block depositions of both herself and a key aide in a case concerning her use of a private email-server system to conduct Obama administration business.

Though the DOJ’s decision will inevitably be reported as political retribution against President Trump’s 2016 election rival, there is actually nothing much here. The Trump State and Justice Departments have defended the former secretary throughout the suit in question. The government’s refusal to support Clinton’s latest gambit to avoid answering questions under oath is consistent with Justice Department policy and will have no bearing on the outcome of the case.

The depositions of Clinton and Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s State Department chief-of-staff and longtime confidant, were ordered by federal judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia. The case is a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit brought by Judicial Watch, the private-watchdog group. It focuses on talking points the Obama administration generated to guide official public statements following the 2012 jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/governor-cuomo-wants-his-states-rights-and-his-federal-cake-too/

Governor Andrew Cuomo seems a bit confused. After months of begging the federal government for medical supplies he didn’t stockpile for his state, beds he didn’t have, and medical personnel he said he needed and then getting all of it, he’s waxing poetic on Twitter about state’s rights. This is Cuomo’s response to Trump saying opening the nation is the president’s decision and not the call of individual governors.

  ✔ @NYGovCuomo
“State governments possess inherent advantages, which will ever give them an influence & ascendency over the Nat’l Gov & will forever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties can be subverted by the federal head is repugnant…” —Alexander Hamilton
After finding that Alexander Hamilton quote on Goodreads, or wherever, and feeling superior about his power as the executive in his state, he went immediately back to begging for more federal aid. In twenty minutes, Cuomo gave himself whiplash. Let’s talk about that Hamilton quote. It seems an awful lot like what President Trump has been saying to the governors every damn day!

https://spectator.us/sovereignty-rules/

At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed.

It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent. Hanging folds of pink belly were swinging wildly out of his clinging T-shirt.

The driver walked the pizza to the back of his car and laid it on the trunk, along with a paper bag. Now it was obvious what was going on. He had suggested to the boys that they take possession of the pizza in such a
way that they not make contact with him. That was the safest thing, given the epidemic — for him, for them and for all the customers he would have to serve during the rest of the day. Smart thinking. I thought, not for the first time that day, of the heroism of delivery drivers like this, who make it possible for people like these kids to stay home and ride out the storm in their rich neighborhoods.

That was not Fatty’s view. He just found the whole routine weird. He jostled past the driver and reached into the paper bag, and now, suddenly, he was angry. ‘Where’s the lava cake?’ he asked. ‘I ordered a lava cake!’ The driver mumbled. ‘Drive back to Tenleytown and get it, can ya?’ the kid threatened. ‘Can you make that a priority? Can you get me an extra one, too?’ The driver mumbled a little more and, looking scared, drove off.

Anyone who has read Defoe, Manzoni or Camus, or who can put two and two together, ought to realize that, wherever plague is, looting, strikes, war, hunger and other unrest are not far away. That evening on my street, you could have been forgiven for thinking there was less to fear from coronavirus than from standing between a fat American and a steaming box of pizza. But a situation where idlers try to boss around hardworking people risking their lives is not likely to hold for long. And where will that leave us?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/steele-dossier-disinformation-update-11586897258?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Russia interfered in America’s 2016 election, as several government reports have established. The latest disturbing news is that Russia may have received an assist from no less than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That’s the takeaway of newly released portions of last year’s Department of Justice Inspector General report about the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion. That report showed how the FBI abused its powers by misleading a secret court into granting surveillance warrants on the Trump campaign. Thanks to Congressional pressure, the Justice Department has now declassified footnotes showing that the FBI’s main source for its collusion allegations—Christopher Steele—may have been targeted as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The FBI was warned of this threat but ignored it.

Mr. Steele was tasked by contractors for the Hillary Clinton campaign in spring 2016 with assembling a summary of Trump-Russia allegations. This document, which became known as the Steele dossier, was fed to the FBI and became the central evidence in its applications for warrants against Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The FBI should have been wary of Mr. Steele’s reporting, having been warned he was connected to the rival campaign.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/492405-ag-barr-just-signaled-that-things-are-about-to-get-ugly-for-the-russia

“Travesty” is not a nice word. It usually is applied to gross perversions of justice, and that apparently is the context Attorney General William Barr desired when he dropped it into an interview answer the other day in the breezy courtyard of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

His composed, understated delivery almost disguised the weighty magnitude of that disturbing word and the loaded adjective that preceded it. “I think what happened to him,” he said, referring to the president and the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into his campaign, “was one of the greatest travesties in American history.”  

Okay, it’s important to pause for a moment and absorb what the AG said. He just called an FBI investigation not just a travesty but one of the “greatest” travesties in the nation’s history. It was an unprecedented statement by an attorney general about his own department’s premier agency.  

The FBI has made plenty of mistakes, but never in its 112-year history has an FBI investigation been characterized as a travesty, let alone one that equates to other hall-of-fame travesties in American history.

Is the AG’s assessment fair? The answer is entwined in his next statement: “Without any basis [the FBI] started this investigation into [Donald Trump’s] campaign … .”

Oops, stop again right there. Mr. Barr is making a definitive statement about that which many of us have speculated all along, namely that the weirdly unprecedented investigative team put together by former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe did not have adequate legal reasons to open a case into the Trump campaign in the first place. The attorney general just confirmed that.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/492548-wholl-decide-when-we-can-reopen-its-not-who-you-might-think

President Trump is not a lawyer. No shame in that — some of our best presidents haven’t been. But he frequently gets out over his skis when he discusses constitutional law. It is a subject he sometimes mangles when speaking or tweeting, though his eventual actions tend to be respectful of the Constitution and congressional authority.

This tension is seen in a pair of tweets (here and here) that the president posted Monday morning. To wit:

“For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect. It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!”

As a matter of constitutional law, this is wrong. The importance of the wrongness can be — and, judging from media coverage, is being — overstated. The thrust of Trump’s remarks is that the president and the governors must collaborate, and they are doing so.

Our Constitution prescribes a federalist system of divided power. Contrary to popular misconception, it is “the People,” not the federal government, that is sovereign. Furthermore, governmental power is split between federal and state officials.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25527

He is ready to gamble that his “pragmatic” solution is the correct one and he furthermore demands that we all gamble along with him — no matter the stakes.

The Wall Street Journal recently featured a remarkable op-ed column by Henry Kissinger about Covid-19. What was conspicuously absent in the piece is any mention of China. Kissinger failed to mention China even once.

And it’s not like Kissinger has forgotten about China. The very last time Kissinger made headlines, at a November 14, 2019 speech before the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, he was warning about the danger that a permanent state of conflict between the U.S. and China would pose and he now ignored China’s role in the spread of Coronavirus. The question is why.

Is the article an illustration of Kissinger’s willingness to ignore the vital security needs of America and her allies? 

Kissinger still clings to his lifelong belief that dictatorships should be accepted by the West whether the dictatorships are Communist or Arab ones.

And Kissinger is most remembered by historians for two episodes.

The first was the success of his secret 1971 diplomatic mission to China, which led to the U.S. recognizing China –  and betraying Taiwan.

The second was his 1973 “Shuttle Diplomacy” aimed at forcing Israel to retreat from land it won in defensive wars. Kissinger must have realized he was forcing Israel to surrender lands to dangerous despots and risking its very survival by wanting it to go back to indefensible borders.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/civil-liberties-group-pushes-hud-to-stop-confiscation-of-bibles-in-public-housing_3310264.html

Attorneys with the Americans for Civil Liberty and Justice (ACLJ) filed comments with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Monday urging officials there to support a proposed rule to stop public housing managers from confiscating Bibles and other religious literature from their facilities.

“We believe the rule should be implemented fully as the department has proposed,” ACLJ Executive Director Jordan Sekulow said in an April 13 letter to HUD made available to The Epoch Times.

The proposed rule is entitled the “Equal Participation of Faith-Based Organizations in HUD Programs and Activities: Implementation of Executive Order 13831.”

Otherwise, “religious organizations that currently, or in the future may, participate in department programs would continue to be targeted and burdened unequally merely because of their faith-based nature,” Sekulow wrote.

“The rule would serve to bring the department’s implementation of its programs in-line with the requirements of federal law, including the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” he said.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/13/new-info-doj-fbi-knew-trump-surveillance-was-based-on-russian-disinformation/

These facts establish the FBI used Russia’s meddling with the 2016 election as a pretext to investigate Donald Trump and the special counsel’s office was complicit in this ploy.

On Friday, the Department of Justice released newly declassified information from an inspector general report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, revealing for the first time that the FBI had received information indicating the Christopher Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation. The newly unredacted portions of the IG’s report also confirmed there was no “network of sources” backing up Steele’s reporting.

While both revelations provide further fodder for attacking the Carter Page surveillance proceedings, the significance is much greater: These facts establish the FBI used Russia’s meddling with the 2016 election as a pretext to investigate Donald Trump and the special counsel’s office was complicit in this ploy.

More than two months ago, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson dispatched a letter to William Barr requesting the attorney general declassify information and unredact information contained in four footnotes in Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 478-page report on FISA abuse. In their letter, the senators noted that they “[were] deeply concerned about certain information that remains classified.”