RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/a_grandiose_rep_cori_bush_says_the_quiet_part_out_loud.html

Rep. Cori Bush (D. Wokeistan) is an honest politician. She’s also narcissistic, histrionic, manic, intellectually corrupt, and has delusions of grandeur but, darn, if she isn’t honest. And the great thing about her honesty is that, when it comes to every Democrat, Progressive, and leftist politician, she says the quiet part out loud. We’ve all known about this quiet part: It’s the one that says that high-level leftists, the ones who want to take our cars, air conditioners, heating, health care, travel rights, and money, do not have to abide by their own rules. Rules are for the little people and, when it comes to Bush’s need for personal security guards while she’s defunding your police, Bush is happy to explain why she’s special.

I have a question for you: Have you ever seen a tax-the-rich, “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” leftist when he or she comes into money, redistribute a single penny of that wealth? I can’t think of a single one.

When Bernie Sanders, who yearns for Cuban socialism, started raking in money for his bucks, he bought a sports car and now owns three houses.

When Al Gore, who insisted that we must give up our cars, and heated-and-air-conditioned homes to save the world, made $330 million selling carbon offsets and unloading his Current TV channel to Al-Jazeera, which the oil-producing, slave-owning Qataris fund, he went big on big real estate. He didn’t redistribute a penny.

When Barack Obama (the one who said “at a certain point you’ve made enough money”) quickly escalated his net worth to more than $70 million dollars thanks to Netflix and book deals, he, like Gore, went on a real estate buying binge, including an oceanfront home right where the climate change is supposed to happen. He also didn’t redistribute his money.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nina-turner-cori-bush-cost-progressivism/

In victory or defeat, the progressives are consistently hurting the Democratic party.

Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, who lay on the stairs of the US Capitol in a sleeping bag to protest the end of the eviction moratorium, is a perfect case study. Both she and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hammed it up for the cameras this week. Ocasio-Cortez was even cynical enough to throw her mask back on when she realized press photos of their heroic protest were being taken. She wouldn’t want the Twitter trolls to turn on her for going maskless outdoors — the horror!

Luckily for Bush and AOC, the protest worked! President Biden, true to form, caved to their demands. The miserable whiners outside the Capitol managed to crack a smile for a few minutes. Bush was applauded by her army of activists and she grinned from ear to ear while holding a bouquet of roses in her arms. It was a victory! Small landlords across America might never get paid again thanks to these courageous advocates.

But the costs of these pyrrhic socialist victories are growing for the rest of the Democratic party. After all, Biden had to very publicly cave to the pie-in-the-sky progressives. After admitting to reporters that extending the eviction moratorium wasn’t in the cards — or the Constitution — Joe flip-flopped and decided to try it anyway.

One CNN headline read, ‘President Biden shows he’s ready to make drastic moves in the COVID-19 fight — even if he’s not sure they’re legal.’ Au contraire — Biden is very sure that these moves are not legal. Earlier this week, when discussing extending the moratorium he said that the ‘bulk of constitutional scholars say…it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster’. Then again, if it stops the Bernie brats from throwing a tantrum on Twitter, then who cares about ‘norms’ — or the millions of small landlords prattling on about contractual obligations and the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment?

Most of those financially hard-pressed property owners probably voted for Trump, right? Who cares about the moderate Democrats who only backed Biden because they thought he would restore a bit of middle ground to the political landscape?

Now consider how on Tuesday night, former Ohio state lawmaker Nina Turner lost her bid for the state’s 11th congressional district to Cuyahoga County Council member Shontel Brown. Turner’s candidacy was supported by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. Brown was backed by old-school Democrats like Hillary Clinton and House majority whip James Clyburn.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dems-see-the-endless-possibilities-of-the-illegal-but-good-agenda/

“With eviction victory in hand,” a Washington Post headline informs us, “congressional Democrats turn attention to student loans”:

A torrent of Congressional Democrats is calling on the White House to extend a soon-expiring pause on federal student loan payments, emboldened by their success in pressuring the Biden administration to approve a new eviction moratorium.

It wasn’t “congressional Democrats” who procured this “victory.” It was a “torrent” of activists who happen to be in Congress who were successful. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted yesterday, they took “direct action” and pressured the president of the United States to nullify property rights while ignoring Congress and SCOTUS. Congress did nothing but abdicate its responsibilities.

It’s true that Democrats celebrating this week’s eviction moratorium see the delegitimizing of courts and circumvention of Congress as a “victory.” Why wouldn’t they expect their agenda to be unilaterally implemented via the executive branch? What limiting principle stops Biden from ripping up student-loan agreements? Or mortgages, for that matter? What limiting principle stops the CDC from dropping a national vaccine mandate — with penalties, including jail time — or instituting national vaccine passports? It might be illegal, but if it saves lives, right? And why only the CDC? Why not other federal agencies? Democrats will, of course, whine when President Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump 2.0 governs via similar diktats. But Democrats will have set the precedent: If the president deems his actions “good,” it’s kosher now.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=8d27aee23c

Here in New York, the news today is dominated by one big story: a supposedly “independent” investigative report issued by the Attorney General has apparently validated allegations of a pattern of sexual harassment committed by our Governor, Andrew Cuomo. From CBS News, August 3:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple current and former staffers as well as women who did not work for his administration, the state’s attorney general Letitia James said Tuesday during a press conference summarizing the findings of an independent investigation.

Suddenly, a guy who had been riding high on a wave of (ridiculously) favorable publicity for his (disastrous) handling of the Covid-19 crisis now faces calls from all over the place — even from President Biden! — to resign. How could this all have gone so wrong so quickly?

The New York Post today has an 8-page special section that starts off on page 4 with the headline “AG: Governor Is A Groper.” Here’s the lead paragraph:

Gov. Cuomo was exposed in a blockbuster investigative report made public Tuesday as a dirty old man who used his powerful position to sexually harass female underlings less than half his age — including by touching their “intimate body parts” without consent.

Here’s the cover from today’s Post:

What has occurred is that lawyers working under the authority of Attorney General Letitia James have spent the past several months looking into allegations of sexual harassment by various women against Cuomo. Yesterday, the investigators issued their 165 page Report. The Report considers claims by some eleven women, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate touching to groping to lewd comments. (Unlike with, say, Bill Clinton, there do not appear to be any allegations of actual unwanted sexual intercourse.). The investigators find the claims to be credible, and the conduct of the Governor to be in violation of state law.

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/08/it-doesnt-take-censorship-to-fight.html

After Biden’s spokeswoman boasted that the administration was ordering Facebook to censor some people’s speech, Fauci joined the campaign by appearing on CNN to warn about the dangers of letting anyone say whatever they think. “We probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now,” he falsely claimed.

Fauci as usual is wrong. The polio vaccine was the subject of numerous controversies which played out in public.

There were anti-vaccine campaigns long before Facebook. The most bracing of these took on the polio vaccine with the headline, “Little White Coffins” declaring, “Only God above will know how many thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury the victims of Salk’s heinous, fraudulent vaccine.” Walter Winchell, who at his peak reached over 50 million people, warned that one particular version of the vaccine, which contained a live virus, was a “killer”.

Contrary to Fauci’s fantasies (aided and abetted by a media eager to find a pretext for censoring any open marketplace of ideas), the fifties were not a totalitarian dystopia in which free speech did not exist. Many of the same controversies as today, from socialism to science, played out to large audiences across a bewildering array of national and local newspapers, radio stations, mailings, books and magazines in a country where the media had not yet been consolidated.

Today, much of the newspaper, radio, and television markets, not to mention publishing, are controlled in one way or another by a handful of giant companies. While the fifties had their massive chains and networks, they were far more intellectually diverse, and had plenty of different owners and perspectives in the mix. The American cultural environment today would strike people from that era as Communist because it resembles the tight centralized control of the Soviet Union. America has never had as little free and open debate as it does now because never have the means of debate been clutched in as few hands as is now the case..

There was aggressive promotion of the polio vaccine by the government, by local authorities, and by non-profit advocacy groups, but there was also vigorous opposition by a variety of people, some credible and some not, and the scientific debates over the vaccine, most notably between the live virus and the inactive virus, played out in public with ordinary people following the back and forth between Salk and Sabin. When Salk’s inactive vaccine was replaced with Sabin’s live virus, the vaccine researcher turned to attacking it as unsafe and dangerous.

Americans not only survived a vigorous public debate over the polio vaccine, but managed to stop polio because the debate over the vaccine between advocates and opponents, and between scientists, played out in public creating a sense of transparency and trust.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/04/vaccination-weaponization/

 It was always going to be Herculean to inoculate, with an untried vaccine, a multi-ethnic nation of 330 million, across a vast continent—in an era when the media routinely warps the daily news. 

Some minorities understandably harbored distrust of prior government vaccination programs. 

Nearly 40 million foreign residents in America are from countries where corrupt governments had long ago lost the trust of the population. 

The anti-vaccination movement was distrustful of what the government said was safe—given the rush to produce previously untried mRNA inoculation methodologies. 

Rural and inner-city poor were sometimes not so easily reached, much less persuaded. 

Yet politics played the most obstructive role early on. Candidate Joe Biden talked grandly of reviving the World War II war production board. He deliberately omitted that it was Donald Trump who emulated FDR’s mobilization of private enterprise under government auspices. 

Trump offered legal protections for companies to accelerate their research and development—in hopes that competition, profits, and public oversight would result in COVID-19 vaccinations just 10 months after the pandemic hit. 

And it worked. Mostly safe and effective vaccinations were rolled out shortly after the election. Some 17 million were inoculated by the time of Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration. 

Yet Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the days when he still posed as a bipartisan professional, had dismissed the idea of any viable vaccination in the election year 2020. Joe Biden publicly doubted that Trump’s vaccination efforts would either work or be safe. 

In a nationally televised debate, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris shamefully said she would never be vaxxed with any shot associated with President Trump. All that proved disastrous messaging for an already skeptical nation. 

Pfizer had promised a breakthrough vaccination announcement in late October on the eve of the election. Then it mysteriously went silent—only to suddenly announce its successful  vaccination, just a few days after the November 3 voting. 

Joe Biden continued the politicization of the vaccination program by bizarrely and falsely declaring on CNN that there had been no vaccinations given until he entered office. Yet Biden himself was first vaccinated on December 21 on live television. 

Soon Biden grandly promised that all those who were vaccinated would be safe from infection from the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus. And thus they could resume normal lives without masks, quarantines, or social distancing. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/opposition_to_vaccination_passports_comes_from_an_unexpected_quarter.html

The Democrats, for much of the 20th century, represented the American working class. However, they built their latest political empire by targeting myriad special interest groups: Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQs, Muslims, Jews, the handicapped, etc., in addition to the reliable college-educated, White voters. Despite Democrats’ paeans to diversity, though, the coalition’s disparate members often dislike each other. That schism is showing as Blacks and Hispanics realize that the vaccine passports that White Democrats are urging damage their communities. Boston’s mayor, though, is pushing back.

It’s unquestionable that both Blacks and Hispanics have been resistant to the vaccine:

“No, Black people, there is no white supremacist scheme behind the COVID vaccine”
“CDC: Blacks and Hispanics still least likely to be vaccinated”
“US Black and Latino communities often have low vaccination rates – but blaming vaccine hesitancy misses the mark”
“Young Latino and Black people have the lowest rate of COVID-19 vaccination in L.A. County, new data show”

Given their consistent unwillingness to subject themselves to the vaccine, it will have a profound effect on Blacks and Hispanics that Democrat politicians and political bodies (mostly White), on the one hand, and corporations (mostly White-managed), on the other hand, are working together to demand vaccine passports to function in the modern world.

In New York, Bill de Blasio is requiring a vaccine passport for New Yorkers who want to eat inside restaurants (as opposed to on the street with the crazy homeless), attend performances, or go to the gym. Timothy Carney has rightly pointed out that this will create an illegal disparate impact:

Here’s where it gets hairy: There are great racial disparities in vaccination rates in New York City, which means there will be a hugely disparate impact from de Blasio’s rules.

More than 47% of white New Yorkers are vaccinated, according to Bloomberg’s tracker, compared to 33% of black New Yorkers and just under 45% of Hispanics in the city.

That means that black New Yorkers will be barred from public accommodations at a far higher rate than will white New Yorkers. This is kind of an awkward policy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zero-covid-coronavirus-pandemic-lockdowns-china-australia-new-zealand-11628101945?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Much of the pathology underlying Covid policy arises from the fantasy that it is possible to eradicate the virus. Capitalizing on pandemic panic, governments and compliant media have used the lure of zero-Covid to induce obedience to harsh and arbitrary lockdown policies and associated violations of civil liberties.

Among all countries, New Zealand, Australia and especially China have most zealously embraced zero-Covid. China’s initial lockdown in Wuhan was the most tyrannical. It infamously locked people into their homes, forced patients to take untested medications, and imposed 40-day quarantines at gunpoint.

On March 24, 2020, New Zealand imposed one of the most onerous lockdowns in the free world, with sharp restrictions on international travel, business closures, a prohibition on going outside, and official encouragement of citizens to snitch on neighbors. In May 2020, having hit zero-Covid, New Zealand lifted lockdown restrictions, except quarantines for international travelers and warrantless house searches to enforce lockdown.

Australia also took the zero-Covid route. While the initial steps focused on banning international travel, the lockdowns there also involved closed schools, occasional separation of mothers from premature newborns, brutal suppression of protests, and arrests for wandering more than 3 miles from home.

New Zealand’s and Australia’s temporary achievement of zero-Covid and China’s claimed success were greeted with fanfare by the media and scientific journals. China’s authoritarian response seemed so successful—despite the country’s record of lying about the virus—that panicked democratic governments around the world copied it. The three countries lifted their lockdowns and celebrated.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/progressives-callous-indifference-loss-small-bruce-thornton/

Last year’s politicized and panicked lockdowns of the economy will be exacting costs for years. From deaths of despair like suicides and drug overdoses, to lost years of learning in schools and psychological fallout from children being isolated––we will be dealing with such consequences of policies that have nothing to do with science, and everything to do with political expediency. One other calamity is the fate of small businesses, met with callous indifference on the part of our cognitive elites who worked from home and never missed a paycheck.

Last year about 200,000 small businesses, with millions more still at risk, were another casualty of our feckless federal bureaucrats and state government tyrants. In addition to the lockdowns, these businesses also fell prey to months of nationwide riots, arson, looting, and vandalism that was tolerated and often abetted by state and federal authorities. Years of hard work were lost and dreams destroyed.

And now the hyped Delta variant hysteria is generating calls for more lockdowns and other impediments to small business success. This blow comes on top of the damage to the work force inflicted by giving the unemployed––who could have been hired by small enterprises trying to restore their businesses––perverse incentives to stay home, leaving many businesses chronically understaffed. Meanwhile, the people morally preening and shouting about “social justice” and “empathy” just callously pass on by.

One of this country’s most important avenues for fulfilling the American Dream has been blocked, and the virtues of self-reliance, self-control, frugality, hard work, and independence––the bedrock virtues that make us worthy of political freedom and that define the American character­­––are disappearing.

I learned the important role of small businesses from my own family. My grandfather came from Italy in 1906, an “illiterate peasant” according to the officials at Ellis Island. He made his way to the San Joaquin Valley to work in the fields. With hard work and persistence he managed to own his own country store and gas station, a feat impossible in the still-feudal conditions of rural Southern Italy. His four children were all successful, as were his grandchildren and now his great-grandchildren. One even managed to become a professor, something else unthinkable for an illiterate peasant’s grandchild in Southern Italy.

I also know what it’s like to own a small business from my father. He was a Dust-Bowl migrant from West Texas who dropped out of school and rode the rails to California. He trained as a barber, but his dream was to raise cattle. He did both, owning his own barber shops and raising cattle on 180 acres––not enough to support his family by running cattle, but enough to satisfy his boyhood dream and earn some extra money. By the time I was 11 or 12, my brother and I provided the labor, and my mom kept the books for both enterprises.