RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Cuomo’s initial limited vaccine roll out proved disastrous—vaccines were being thrown out because of the difficulty of finding patients who exactly matched strict guidelines while huge penalties loomed if anyone else was vaccinated—the governor decided that as of January 11, New York State would also vaccinate people who fell into the next priority class, including teachers and those over 75 years old. 

My husband and I live in Westchester County, are both over 75, and decided to register for vaccination.  So, on Jan. 11, we went to the state web site (Covid19vaccine.healthny.gov/what you should know) and discovered what we should know was that we should call a local Rite Aid for an appointment, with the phone number given for various Rite Aids.  As any five year old could have foreseen  (but not apparently the “experts” employed by the governor), all you got by phoning was a busy signal.  (A Northwell Hospital web address was given as an alternative.  I hit that and was informed there were no slots available.)

Given the permanent busy signal, today (Monday) I went into one of the Rite Aids listed on the web site. I spoke to the pharmacist who said they had no vaccines and had never had any vaccines and to the best of his knowledge no Rite Aid had received any vaccines.  

If you go to the health/gov website now there has been a change.  In a slight bow to reality, the Rite Aids are still listed but unlike yesterday, the viewer is cautioned to wait  a few days before trying to make contact.  There are assorted other individual pharmacies listed with their phone numbers suggesting the state is claiming they  have the vaccine.  Of course if you try to phone any of them all you get is the inevitable busy signal.

Our son is computer savvy and managed to get the email of the NY state government communications officer.  I sent an email to him reporting that we were not able to schedule an appointment through the website and in reply he said we could schedule an appointment by calling 1-833-NYS-4-VAX.  We have called that number innumerable times with the same result—a recorded message saying the call cannot be completed at this time.

In other words,  the vaccine roll out that was supposed to start Jan. 11 is a complete sham.  Apparently determined to escalate the chaos even more, Cuomo has now asserted he is expanding eligibility of the vaccine—which no one over 75 can get–to those over 65.   

Today’s (Jan. 12) New York Post  complains of glitches in the city’s roll out of the vaccine, but at least the city is vaccinating people in the group on whom Cuomo has perpetrated a hoax worthy of the tailors in the Emperor’s new clothes. The applauding audience in this case, apart from Cuomo himself, is the media.  (I can’t wait to hear Cuomo congratulate himself before an ecstatic media for his achievement in making the vaccine available to all,  never forgetting the demands of social justice.)  Cuomo  is definitely due for another Emmy—all show and zero substance.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/cuomo-fiddles-with-vaccine-while-new-york-burns/

Unused vaccines go into the garbage as Cuomo’s horrific mismanagement continues.

 A ndrew Cuomo forced vaccine doses to be thrown away. It can’t be stated often enough or loudly enough: After the miraculous and heroic efforts of great pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines before the first American had even been infected, and after the usual testing and regulatory hurdles consumed nearly eleven months, and after the first New Yorker accepted her jab on December 14 in an event Cuomo celebrated and streamed on his official channel, the governor of New York has been preventing people from getting the vaccine. “Bedlam” and “chaos” are two of the more polite words being used by administrators on the ground as they tiptoe their way through the regulatory minefield Cuomo quickly engineered between health-care professionals and the people of New York.

As the vaccine started being distributed to states, Cuomo continued, utterly predictably, to engage with the catastrophe in his oblivious I’m-the-king style. Micromanaging the vaccine, he issued one diktat after another determining what sorts of people should receive the vaccine first, with a close and obsessive eye on the perceived value of varying groups. He decreed via executive order that million-dollar fines and other penalties would be meted out to those who failed to follow to the letter the Byzantine rules he threw together on the fly and made official policy via executive order. New York City’s comptroller noted on Sunday that the sign-up process involves completing a tricky 51-point survey and uploading an insurance card, two significant barriers to seniors. Would-be users reported spending three hours trying to log on to the state site without getting through. Meanwhile, Israel, whose population is comparable to New York City’s, has vaccinated nearly ten times as many people as Gotham.

As of last Friday, half of the miraculous doses New York State had received, and two-thirds of those delivered to New York City, were sitting unused on shelves like a cruel bureaucratic parody of the Island of Misfit Toys. Some unknown number of doses simply expired unused, and had to be tossed in the garbage.

Andrew Cuomo forced vaccine doses to be thrown away.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-disaster-and-a-tragedy-for-america

Even before the transfer of power in America due on January 20, it’s already horribly clear that fears for the future of freedom and justice under a Democrat administration, with the broader forces of the left now unconstrained, are justified.

Most attention is understandably being directed at the clampdown on free speech by big tech after last week’s Capitol riot, and on the determination of Speaker Nancy Pelosi et al to impeach President Trump for a second time over his behaviour on that awful day.

We can already see that it’s not just Trump who is in the sights of the Democrats and the oligarchs of the left. It is also conservatives in general, the police, the US constitution and the indivisible principles of freedom, justice and equality.

President-elect Joe Biden’s statement after the storming of the Capitol was a shocking indication of how this is going to play out. With a police officer having been killed in the riot, and with graphic evidence of the onslaught on the wholly outnumbered and inadequate police force (another story), Biden actually accused the police of being soft on the rioters and, quite incredibly, accused them of racial discrimination. 

Referring to a text conversation he’d had with his grand-daughter, comparing how law enforcement officers were treating the Capitol rioters with the way in which Black Lives Matters activists had been treated during last year’s demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, Biden said:

She sent me a photo of military people in full military gear. Scores of them lining the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Because of protests by Black Lives Matter. She said, “Pop. This isn’t fair.”

No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true. And it’s unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/01/11/tulsi_gabbard_why_are_people_celebrating_free_speech_crackdowns.html

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) breaks down why Big Tech censorship is so dangerous in an interview with FOX News host Tucker Carlson.

https://spectator.us/jack-dorsey-twitter-giant/

Where is Jack? You know, Jack-the-Giant-Killer? The little fellow who caught the giant Cormaran in a deadfall and dispatched him with a pick-ax? Who strangled the giant Blunderbore and his brother? And who tricked the double-nobbed giant Two-Heads into stabbing himself?  

I realize that today’s children’s books are less sanguinary, and some readers may need a refresher in the exploits of the Cornish boy who set things right back in a time when giants were in the habit of abusing their monopoly on size and strength. Jack made up in ingenuity and quick thinking what he lacked in brawn. And we could use his help right now.

For once again, we have a plague of giants. Giant Twitter. Giant Apple. Giant Facebook. Giant Google. As Jack knew, it is best to take on one giant at a time, and Giant Twitter right now has earned pride of place by canceling President Trump’s Twitter account and thereby denying him his most direct access to his legions of supporters.

Critics of the other Jack — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey — have harrumphed that he ought to let the users of his social media service decide whether they can stand to read Trump’s opinions on ‘covfefe’ and other topics of the day. Dorsey, weighing the situation from a beach somewhere in French Polynesia, decided the dangers of such free speech on his platform were too great to endure. He would rescue us from ourselves by silencing our loquacious president — and others who wandered into the vicinity of agreeing with his now unmentionable sin, which consists of saying something that sounds like ‘correction prod’.  We cannot hear about correction prod because the words possess a dark magic that turns people into lawless beasts.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/shame-on-arnold-schwarzenegger/

 Arnold Schwarzenegger was a great admirer and defender of Kurt Waldheim,  was the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and President of Austria from 1986 to 1992. In 1987, the United States D.O.J.  in an investigation conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) had established a prima facie case that Waldheim participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution……rsk

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger received a lot of ill-deserved praise this week for his response to the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill.

In a seven-and-a-half-minute video clip that he posted on social media, not only did the body builder-turned-movie star-turned-Republican politician compare last week’s events in Washington D.C. to Kristallnacht, but did so with the self-assured “authority” of someone born and raised in Austria in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) was the Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews on Nov. 9-10, 1938, which involved the smashing of storefronts, synagogues, schools and hospitals. Right off the bat, Schwarzenegger describes this as “a night of rampage against the Jews carried out … by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.”
This would be laughable if it weren’t such an egregious distortion. The Nazis were not “equivalent” to a gang of American and Canadian extremists who cropped up in 2016. If anything, it’s the other way around, and even that’s an immoral stretch of the imagination.

Schwarzenegger goes on to explain that, in some ways, the siege on the meeting place of the U.S. Congress was worse because “the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol; they shattered the ideas we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy; they trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/01/12/the-morning-briefing-andrew-cuomo-reminds-us-that-hes-the-worst-ever-n1331886

EXCERPT

Andrew Cuomo — Fredo the Elder — crawled out of the cave where he spends his days pulling wings off of flies and smelts participation trophies for his handling of the pandemic in his state to remind us that he is perhaps the worst governor in America.

I only said “perhaps” because who knows what Gavin Newsom will do this week?

Of all of the strange drama that has played out since the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu descended upon this great land perhaps none has been stranger than the random amnesia that Andrew Cuomo has been exhibiting before our eyes. This piece of work racked up a massive body count in record time because he so mishandled the early days of the pandemic. He’s made countless blunders in the months since then but is still convinced that he’s the Boy Wonder of pandemic state executives.

One thing you have to give Cuomo — he’s consistently the worse at dealing with the plague. At present, Cuomo is utterly cocking up his state’s vaccine administration plan.

Stacey wrote a post yesterday chronicling Cuomo’s incompetence:

More recently, he has led what might be the most botched vaccine rollout in the country. Originally he had set strict rules about who would have priority to receive the vaccine, and threatened to levy fines of up to $1 million if a healthcare provider gave it outside of his specified hierarchy. When doses, which have a short shelf life, expired, they were thrown in the trash.

Meanwhile, businesses are dying in the state, especially in New York City. As of August, the New York Times reported that up to one-third of the state’s small businesses were closing for good. In-person schooling has been an on-and-off affair thanks to the teachers’ unions insisting on a ridiculous 3% positivity rate to trigger closings. By way of example, Georgia’s students have been in school with a statewide test positivity rate of 25%, and Florida schools have stayed open with a positivity rate of nearly 13%.

What’s particularly galling is that Cuomo has been patting himself on the back throughout all of his monumental failure.