RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/comey-told-intel-chief-steele-dossier-was-not

The very day in January 2017 that then-FBI Director James Comey signed a FISA surveillance warrant application declaring content from Christopher Steele’s dossier had been “verified,” he wrote President Obama’s outgoing intelligence community chief with a very different assessment of the British spy’s intelligence on Russia collusion, a newly released memo shows.

“We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting,” Comey wrote in a Jan. 12, 2017 email to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that was declassified and made public through an open records lawsuit by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The memo recounts an internal debate inside the U.S. intelligence community during one of the most delicate moments in the FBI’s then six-month old Crossfire Hurricane probe.

CIA officials had already informed Comey’s FBI that the target of the FISA warrant, Carter Page, wasn’t a Russian spy but rather an asset helping U.S. intelligence. The bureau had received warnings about Steele and the reliability of his source network, including that it might have been compromised by Russian disinformation. Agents had also just recommended on Jan. 4, 2017 shutting down the probe’s inquiry into incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lack of evidence.

The FBI had been warned the previous summer that Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have planted the false Russia collusion story as a way to “vilify” Trump and distract from her email scandal, and agents were about to interview Steele’s primary sub-source, who would discount much of the information in the dossier attributed to him as bar talk and unconfirmed rumor not worthy of official intelligence.

And the larger intelligence community had decided it did not want to vouch for the Steele dossier in its official Intelligence Community Assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/16/do-dems-care-minimum-wage-hike-will-devastate-poor-minorities/

Democrats like to talk about helping the “little guy” struggling to make it in an economically hostile world. But instead of providing help, their policies often punish the most vulnerable among us. So it is with the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, as recent research shows.

Democrats have included a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion pork-a-palooza reconciliation bill they call “stimulus.” The left-media, predictably, have supported the idea. But a minimum wage hike is not stimulus. It is, in fact, a devastating blow to small, struggling businesses and, worst of all, for the poorest Americans; it’s a recipe for fewer jobs, lower incomes and lasting economic inequality.

We’ve written about this numerous times (for example, here, here, and here) because, as policies go, the minimum wage is awful. While sounding as if it’s a great gift to working people (in polls, it routinely garners more than 50% approval), the minimum wage’s real beneficiary is one of the Democrats’ major financial backers: Organized labor.

Unions love minimum-wage hikes because many of their contracts have clauses that automatically raise union wages or allow the unions to renegotiate contracts when minimum wages go up.

So, not by coincidence, Democrats love minimum-wage hikes, too. Unfortunately, recent research has bad news for minimum-wage hike supporters.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/house-gopers-demand-answers-from-pelosi-on-jan-6-security-failures_3697484.html

Ranking Republicans on four key House committees concerned with security at the Capitol complex are demanding answers from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) about her actions before, during, and after the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol building.

“It has been widely reported and confirmed by multiple sources that when [then-Capitol Hill Police] Chief [Steven] Sund requested the National Guard be activated ahead of the January 6th Joint Session of Congress, the response from the Sergeant-At-Arms (SAA), acting on your behalf, was that the ‘optics’ of having the National Guard on-site were not good and the intelligence didn’t support the move. The request was not approved,” the four GOP representatives told Pelosi in a lengthy letter made public on Feb. 15.

“Furthermore, on January 6th, in the middle of the on-going attack of the Capitol, Chief Sund again notified the SAA of his request for approval to authorize the National Guard. It took over an hour for his request to be approved because the SAA had to run the request up the chain of command, which undoubtedly included you and your designees.”

The four signers of the letter are Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Administration, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-administration-our-new-vaccination-sites-will-not-include-vaccine-doses/

This morning brings another example of how the Biden administration’s much-touted plan to expand and accelerate the pace of vaccinations is less than meets the eye. The plan to establish 100 federally supported vaccination sites by the end of February means the federal government will deploy tents and staffers . . . but not more doses of vaccine, which is pretty fundamental to running a successful vaccination site.

Eager to protect more people against the coronavirus, health officials in Oklahoma jumped at the chance to add large, federally supported vaccination sites. They wanted them in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and a third, mid-size city, Lawton, thinking the extra help would allow them to send more doses to smaller communities that had yet to benefit.

“We felt like if we could get them in the metro areas, what that would allow us to do is . . . free up a lot of our other resources to do more targeted vaccinations in underserved areas,” said state Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed.

Those plans are now on hold after the state learned that the sites would not come with additional vaccines. Instead, the doses would have to be pulled from the state’s existing allocation, and the three sites alone might have used more than half of Oklahoma’s vaccine supply.

“We’re not prepared to pull the trigger on it unless it comes with vaccine,” Reed said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/alex-berenson-attacks-the-vaccine-that-will-end-the-lockdowns/

Neither argument holds much water. Berenson, who has been right on most issues relating to Covid is not an epidemiologist and Schorr who has been wrong so often is not a virologist. But much is yet to be determined on the relatively new vaccines….rsk

Some people just won’t take “yes” for an answer.

Alex Berenson, an independent writer who was once at the New York Times, has been among the loudest critics of the restrictions that have been put in place to fight coronavirus. And, in some cases, he has been right. Which makes it all the more confounding that, just as the vaccines are making it possible to loosen or abolish those restrictions, Berenson is trying to convince the public that the vaccines don’t actually work.

Berenson argues that our focus should be “on the Israeli data showing thousands of infections and scores of deaths in people who have received both doses” of the vaccine. But this is absurd. Only four Israelis have died two weeks after receiving their second dose, which is the amount of time needed for the vaccine to be maximally effective. All four were over the age of 60 and therefore particularly vulnerable to the disease.

None of this should be surprising to anyone with even the most modest understanding of how vaccines work, or with the slightest willingness to look into the data. Vaccines are not catch-all solutions. Some vaccinated people will get sick, some will die. What the vaccines are meant to do is mitigate risk, and my goodness, do they mitigate a whole lot of risk. A new study analyzing 600,000 vaccinated and 600,000 unvaccinated Israelis showed that “the inoculated group produced 94 percent fewer symptomatic COVID-19 cases, and 92 percent fewer cases of serious illness.” Berenson’s point is that because that number isn’t 99 or  100 percent, it’s not worth taking. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so injurious.