RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/charts_compare_covid_deaths_in_countries_that_used_hydroxychloroquine_early_and_those_that_didnt.html

Monday, the Family Foundation of Virginia reported that the State health commissioner, Dr. Norman Oliver, intends to use his emergency powers to force every Virginian to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available. 

Virginia’s Gov. Northam (survivor of his infamous blackface scandal) has taken no official policy position so far.  However, the Democrat-controlled Legislature has killed at least three Republican bills that would have offered a way for someone with a sincere religious objection to be exempt from any COVID-19 vaccine mandate.  The most recent casualty, H.B. 5082, “would’ve ensured that Virginia didn’t mandate a COVID-19 vaccine if it is derived from human fetal tissue, changes the RNA or DNA of a person, or was not first tested on laboratory animals before being tested on humans.”  These actions triggered a “March against Mandates” in Richmond on September 2 by Virginia Freedom Keepers.

But wait — there’s more politics brewing.  Yesterday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch published a letter from a former FDA medical officer.  He agrees that using convalescent blood plasma from patients who developed antibodies works, and he cited its many successes dating back to the 1918 flu pandemic.  However, he claims that the number of people tested this time was “far out of proportion to the number needed for safety analyses.”   He also objects that authorities in the FDA and Donald Trump made overly optimistic claims that it could result in a 35% reduction in mortality and said this type of politics undermines the FDA’s credibility. 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2020/09/01/the-lockdown-has-gone-from-a-mistake-to-a-crime-n871865

Four months ago, I wrote a column titled “The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.” I explained that “‘mistake’ and ‘evil’ are not synonyms. The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil people.”

Regarding the economic catastrophe in America and around the world — especially among the world’s poor who are dependent upon America and other first-world countries for their income through exports and tourism — I wrote, “It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe.”

Unfortunately, I was right.

The world should have followed Sweden’s example. That country never locked down and has even kept children under 16 in school the entire time. As Reuters reported on July 15, the number of Swedish children between 1 and 19 years of age who have died of COVID-19 is zero. And the percentage of children who contracted the illness was the exact same in Sweden as it was in Finland, which locked down its schools.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/09/01/open-season-on-police-as-st-louis-cop-killed-and-2-chicago-officers-wounded-n873794

“Black Lives Matter has ginned up so much fear and outrage against the police — most of it false and defamatory — that there are more and more officers going to work every morning wondering if they’ll make it home safely that night.”

A 19-year-old man, Jeffon Williams, was arrested and is facing several charges for shooting and wounding two Chicago police officers during a traffic stop.

Criminal Court Judge John F. Lyke Jr. said Williams showed “utter disregard for any person, any human being.” He set bail at $10 million, but Williams will not be released because he violated the terms of previous bonds.

And in St. Louis, a 29-year-old officer, Tamarris Bohannon, was murdered and another was wounded after responding to a shooting call. Details are still emerging, but it appears the gunman set a trap for the officers. The suspect, 43-year-old Thomas Kinworthy, was wanted for sexual assault in Florida. He entered a home and then barricaded himself inside and shot at officers from a second-story window.

Bohannon was the eighth St. Louis police officer shot since June.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/michael-flynn-case-dc-circuit-rules-against-mandamus-case/

Judge Sullivan should dismiss the Flynn case.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who listened to the oral argument (or, ahem, read the coverage of it here at National Review) that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has denied Michael Flynn’s petition for a writ of mandamus against District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan. General Flynn, President Trump’s original national-security adviser, was seeking to persuade the appellate court to order Judge Sullivan to dismiss the case against him on the Justice Department’s motion.

The ruling by the en banc court (i.e., consideration by all ten active Circuit judges who were not recused from the case) was 8–2. As predicted here, a strong majority of the court — whose Democratic appointees easily outnumber their Republican counterparts — lined up against two dissenting Republican appointees. In May, those dissenters, Judges Neomi Rao and Karen L. Henderson, had formed the majority of a three-judge Circuit panel that initially ruled in Flynn’s favor. The panel ruling was vacated when the full Circuit decided to hear the case.

Flynn pled guilty in 2017 to a false-statements charge brought by the Mueller investigation. He subsequently hired new counsel and moved for dismissal of the case based on alleged misconduct by the FBI in the investigation, and by the prosecutors in the court proceedings. Attorney General Bill Barr appointed a Justice Department prosecutor (St. Louis U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen) to review the case, and the review turned up several investigative improprieties. The Justice Department determined that there had been no underlying basis to investigate Flynn (i.e., there was insufficient predicate to investigate him as a criminal suspect or as a clandestine agent of Russia). From this premise, DOJ reasoned that none of the allegedly false statements Flynn made to FBI agents were material to a matter under investigation — an essential element of a false-statements offense. Prosecutors thus moved to dismiss the case, under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.