RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

To those of you scratching your heads about what is going on in America today, what with violence in the streets aided by local politicians, quitters like Naomi Osaka treated as hero(ine)s, woke corporations insulting their customers, China apologists (like the NBA) hiding in plain sight, COVID hysteria fanned by politicians and the media, white-hatred (e.g., 1619/CRT) being promoted by liberal white women, and P.C. everywhere…we have to ask what it all means.

What it all means is getting illegals the vote.  The rest is head fakes.

Consider the following: if you were a liberal politician and your goal were permanent liberal big government, wouldn’t the quickest route be (aside from voter fraud) to get illegal aliens the vote?  With anywhere between 20 and 40 million illegals in the U.S. today, that goal is now in sight, using COVID as an excuse, while not letting this “crisis” go to waste (per Rahm Emanuel).

The first step toward this goal is to terrify everyone with COVID horror stories, cherry-picked data, and so-called “expert” guidance and testimony.  This gaslighting has already been accomplished by leftist politicians, the CDC, Big Media, and Big Tech.  Next, vaccine passports will be mandated to “protect” everyone and coerce the unvaccinated.  This step has already been floated by the Biden administration, which means that it is deep into vaccine passport polling and planning.  After the vaccine passports are distributed, someone (a leftist, of course) will naturally suggest that they be used for voter identification, using this to counter Republican accusations of rampant voter fraud that were engendered by the 2020 elections.  After vaccine passport distribution, tens of millions of new voters will magically appear in red and purple states to flip them blue.

My suggestion is to resist vaccine passports vigorously so this unhappy chain of events will never occur.  Luckily, many minorities feel the same way, which is why the Biden administration has created what could be called a Civilian COVID Corps (transforming into AOC’s Civilian Climate Corps later) to convince this important liberal voting bloc to vaccinate.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8612317/Cook-County-prosecutor-Kim-Foxx-dismissed-25-000-felony-cases-including-Jussie-Smollett.html?ito=amp_twitter_share-top

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped charges against 29.9% of felony defendants during her first three years in office, the Chicago Tribune found
Foxx’s case dismissal rate is more than 35% higher than that of her predecessor
The state’s attorney told the Tribune that its analysis gave an ‘incomplete picture of her commitment to keeping the public safe’
She said she’s dropped cases against low-level, nonviolent offenders so prosecutors can focus on violent crimes
But data showed Foxx’s office has dismissed cases involving murder, shootings, sex crimes and serious drug offenses at a much higher rate than her predecessor
Foxx gained notoriety last year when her office dropped felony charges against Jussie Smollett, the actor accused of staging a racist, anti-gay attack on himself

https://www.wsj.com/articles/governor-andrew-cuomo-resignation-economic-regulation-taxes-minimum-wage-fracking-nuclear-11628632159?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation was memorable, but we shouldn’t forget his policy legacy. New York state was slowly emerging from the Great Recession when he was elected governor in 2010. Amid massive job losses and collapsing revenues, he took office in 2011 with a focus on rebuilding public finances and promoting economic growth.

During his first term, he positioned himself as a Clintonesque centrist with a pro-business tilt. He’s still often called a moderate, but the label has been inaccurate for years.

By the start of his second term, in 2015, Mr. Cuomo was promoting “economic justice” in the form of a $15 minimum wage, initially restricted to New York City. In his third term, starting in 2019, he sprinted to the left and loudly proclaimed his progressive credentials as a new generation of left-leaning Democrats assumed control of the formerly split Legislature.

Things were different a decade ago. “New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation,” he declared in his 2011 State of the State address. “Our young people will not stay. Our business will not come. This has to change.”

Within six months of taking office, Mr. Cuomo closed a $10 billion budget gap, drew a hard line in contract talks with state employee unions, and persuaded lawmakers to approve a strict 2% cap on annual growth in property taxes. The cap doesn’t apply to New York City, but it’s still among the most significant limited-government reforms ever enacted in the Empire State.

But Mr. Cuomo failed to back up the tax cap with the relief from state mandates that local governments need to manage efficiently. Instead, after a few months of tough talk, he consistently pandered to public-sector labor unions. He nurtured a close alliance with New York City’s overfed building-trades unions, whose generous contracts and inefficient work rules are largely responsible for New York’s excessive capital infrastructure construction costs.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/11/three-charts-the-delta-variant-scaremongers-dont-want-you-to-see/

While the sharp rise in Delta-variant COVID cases has sparked a renewed push for mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccine “passports,” there’s been little attention paid to just how dangerous this variant is. Perhaps that’s because the evidence suggests it is far less of a public health concern than previous outbreaks.

Just how much less of a threat isn’t precisely known. But there are ways to gauge the risk. One is to look at the number of COVID cases and the number of deaths happening right now, compared with what happened a year ago.

What do you find? First of all, there are fewer cases than last year. From June to August this year, there have been more than 2 million recorded COVID cases in the U.S.

Over the same days last year, the total number of COVID cases was above 3.1 million.

How about deaths? From June 1 through Aug. 9, the total number of COVID fatalities was 20,149. Last year, the death count was 62,287.

In other words, cases are 41% lower than during this time last year, and deaths are 66% lower.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/opinion/israel-ben-and-jerry.html

Ben & Jerry’s last month announced to controversy and fanfare that it would no longer sell its ice cream in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, though it says it will continue selling it elsewhere in Israel. “Ending the sales of ice cream in the occupied territories is one of the most important decisions the company has made in its 43-year history,” Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the company’s founders and former owners, explained in a guest essay in this newspaper. “It was especially brave.”

To which my reaction, based on 21 years of reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was: Who the hell eats Peace Pops in Hebron? And just how big a hit to the global bottom line of Unilever, the consumer-goods giant that is Ben & Jerry’s corporate parent, will be the loss of sales in Jerusalem’s Old City?

We live in the era of “Woke, Inc.,” to borrow the title of Vivek Ramaswamy’s delightful new book on what he calls “corporate America’s social justice scam” — an era in which corporations adopt trendy causes to help shield them from criticism while pumping up their stock prices. There’s Gillette, trying to peddle razors by decrying toxic masculinity. There’s Nike, minting money off Colin Kaepernick’s protests. There’s BP, rebranding itself as “Beyond Petroleum” — and then spilling 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.

But Cohen and Greenfield are the godfathers of Woke Inc., pioneers of a unique marketing magic that seeks to get people to believe that buying a high-fat, high-sugar product that contributes to diabetes and obesity also makes us more virtuous. I don’t want to overstate things here, since I’m as guilty as the next guy of scarfing down a half pint (OK, sometimes more) of New York Super Fudge Chunk. But at least I don’t pretend that I’m making the world a better place in the bargain.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/cori-bush-wants-to-defund-the-police?token=

The congresswoman can afford private security. Those who live in Oakland, California, don’t have that luxury.

Leighton Akira Woodhouse is a documentary filmmaker and journalist whose work spans factory farming, animal rights, immigration, the alt-right, and pompous European social theory.

I first came across his work in The Intercept, but he’s written for Newsweek, The Nation, The New Republic and Gawker. (I try not to hold that last one against him.) Leighton also lives in East Oakland, where he’s been reporting on the movement to defund the police — and its passionate opposition.

So when Cori Bush, the Democratic congresswoman from Missouri, was roundly criticized for defending her private security detail and defunding the police in the span of a single minute, I was keen to find out what Leighton had to say about the matter. — BW

…..”In February, a mile and a half from my house, at a park featuring an “I Can Do Anything” mural, a 38-year-old basketball coach named Reuben Lewis was gunned down in front of dozens of children. Two of his three sons, who he was picking up from football practice, watched him die.

In March, about four miles from that park, a 58-year-old man named Andre Weston got into an argument with a homeless man named William Vann. He doused Vann with an accelerant and lit him on fire.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-nsas-inspector-general-opens?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNDc5M

The NSA’s independent investigator, Robert Storch, is a long-time D.C. bureaucrat, making it unlikely he’d formally investigate frivolous allegations of “unmasking.”

The independent watchdog agency which investigates potential wrongdoing by the National Security Agency (NSA) announced on Tuesday morning that it has opened an investigation into “recent allegations that the NSA improperly targeted the communications of a member of the U.S. news media.” Though the oversight unit, the NSA’s Office of the Inspector General, did not specify the journalist in question, the statement leaves no doubt that the investigation pertains to news reports that the identity of Fox News host Tucker Carlson had been improperly “unmasked” and illegally revealed within the intelligence community.

The full statement from the Inspector General reads:

The NSA’s Inspector General, Robert P. Storch, is a long-time Executive Branch functionary. He was first appointed to this position by President Obama in 2016 but failed to receive Senate confirmation. He was then re-appointed by President Trump in 2018 and the Senate then confirmed him. A widely respected bureaucrat in Washington, he also previously served as deputy Inspector General in Obama’s Justice Department, and, prior to that, was a federal prosecutor. It is, to put it mildly, difficult to imagine him opening an investigation into frivolous allegations.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/appellate-court-overturns-pre-trial-detention-for-j6-detainee/

In a stunning but well-deserved rebuke, the D.C. Court of Appeals on Monday ordered that the pre-trial detention of George Tanios, one of two men accused of spraying Officer Sicknick and others on January 6, be reversed.

The brief ruling, which did not include the usual opinion explaining the court’s decision, bluntly stated:

“ORDERED and ADJUDGED that the district court’s May 12, 2021 order be reversed and the case remanded for the district court to order appellant’s pretrial release subject to appropriate conditions, including home detention and electronic monitoring. On this record, we conclude that the district court clearly erred in determining that no condition or combination of conditions of release would reasonably assure the safety of the community.”

Tanios and his friend, Julian Khater, were arrested in March. A grand jury indicted the men with numerous felonies including conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a “dangerous or deadly weapon.” Tanios and Khater brought chemical irritants, including bear spray, to the capital in anticipation of scuffles with leftist agitators. Tanios, however, is not accused of spraying his key chain pepper spray container. Their arrest and indictment are aimed at keeping alive the lie that Sicknick was killed in the line of duty by Trump “insurrectionists,” a falsehood repeated in the news media and by Joe Biden as late as Thursday at the White House.

Biden’s Justice Department asked the court to keep Khater and Tanios behind bars awaiting trial. They have been incarcerated in the harsh D.C. Deplorable jail since March; Tanios has no criminal record, operated a college campus sandwich shop (which is now shuttered) in West Virginia, and is the father of three young children.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/andrew-cuomo-resigns-new-york-metoo/

The announcement that Andrew Cuomo will resign in two weeks follows the total collapse of his political support among Democrats in New York State and Washington. His advisers told him impeachment was now certain, and he resigned just ahead of the inevitable, as President Nixon did when he was given the same message by his erstwhile congressional supporters.

The headlight of that oncoming train has been visible in Albany for months. The crash became certain when Attorney General Letitia James of New York issued her damning report on Cuomo’s behavior, buttressed by testimony from 11 accusers. After James’s report and press conference, all the top Democrats in the state and country began calling on Cuomo to resign. The major papers, which always support Democrats, did the same. How could any of them do otherwise in an environment where sexual harassment is, quite rightly, a prominent issue commanding bipartisan agreement?

As Cuomo’s defeat became inevitable, his enablers and enforcers began jumping ship or being thrown overboard. Since Cuomo had always ruled by fear, he was finished as soon as other Democrats no longer feared him.

Cuomo’s announcement leaves cable news with hours of airtime to fill. It’s obvious how they will fill it — and how they won’t. They could tell you about the Senate passage of a pork-laden $1.2 trillion bill, and the progressives’ demand, echoed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that the bill is too small and that she will only move it forward if it is coupled with another tax-and-spend bill that is three times as large.

We all know that won’t be their focus, and we all know why. T-and-A is a much bigger ratings draw than roads-and-bridges. The latest evidence for that eternal truth is that Cuomo was brought down by his grabbing and kissing, not his deadly mistake in sending COVID-positive patients back to nursing homes and then covering up what had happened and what he knew about it. That whole subject was far less interesting to news channels than harassment, and far less damaging to the governor. So, the cable channels will fill hours of air-time with predictable commentary about Cuomo’s fall, his misbehavior in the workplace and the end of a two-generation political dynasty.