RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-conservatism-is-now-a-public-health-risk-11613690706?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

From “Public policy and health in the Trump era,” a Feb. 10 report by the Lancet, a British medical journal:

Trump exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia. . . . His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights; ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/return-of-the-swamp-creatures-11613690674?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Washington doesn’t usually make it easy to pinpoint the moment when things went wrong. So thanks to Rep. Rosa DeLauro for publicly heralding the return of the swamp.

The announcement actually came from a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, which the Connecticut Democrat oversees. “Chair DeLauro supports Member-directed funding for community projects,” Evan Hollander told HuffPost this week. For those uninitiated in Washington doublespeak, earmarks are back.

A few other English words to describe what’s returning: Pork. Logrolling. Sleaze. Bridges to nowhere. Republicans banned earmarks in February 2011 after the term became synonymous with Congress’s embarrassing habit. The late Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had led a yearslong campaign to expose earmarks as a “gateway drug” to greater spending and corruption. In the face of a tea-party revolt, his colleagues finally chose wisdom.

Democrats are choosing power. According to reports, Ms. DeLauro and Senate Appropriations Chairman Patrick Leahy will soon announce that earmarks are welcome in annual spending bills. Why would Democrats risk such a move? Politico explains that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has reassured his party that it won’t suffer, since the effort will be “bipartisan.” Democrats are banking on spend-thirsty Republicans to provide cover.

The question is whether the GOP will succumb, handing the Democratic leadership a uniquely powerful tool in today’s narrowly divided Congress. Republicans may botch their first opportunity to draw a stark contrast in governance, wield some real power, and energize their base.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, chief medical adviser to Sesame Care, and author of “The Price We Pay.”

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-tweaks-legal-position-in-arizona-voting-case_3702650.html

The Biden administration changed its position on an upcoming Supreme Court appeal dealing with Arizona’s electoral integrity laws, disavowing the previous administration’s interpretation of anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Although the Biden administration won’t present oral arguments in the case or update a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Trump administration, it signaled to the justices and the public that it’s leaving the door open to adopting a more aggressive interpretation of the statute in the future.

Section 2 of the law forbids voting practices that result “in a denial or abridgment of the right … to vote on account of race or color [or language-minority status],” and provides that such a result “is established” if a jurisdiction’s “political processes … are not equally open” to members of such a group “in that [they] have less opportunity … to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

“That text must be construed in light of Section 2’s constitutional context, as an exercise of Congress’s authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on intentional discrimination,” the Trump administration’s brief filed last year stated.

The filing comes as the litigants prepare to present oral arguments to the Supreme Court in the case on March 2.

The case is two cases that the court consolidated. The first is Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (DNC). The second is Arizona Republican Party v. DNC. The reach of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is at issue.

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-with-no-mask-mandate-and-schools-open-florida-ranks-11th-lowest-in-excess-deaths-among-seniors

There’s a reason why the Biden regime is trying to attack Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and create an illusion of a disproportionate viral crisis in the state. With no declared emergency restrictions in place at the state level since last September, the fact that Florida is doing better than the national average completely exposes the lie of lockdown and masks having any effect whatsoever on the fixed natural progression of the virus.

Dr. Fauci is suggesting a novel scientific principle – that schools can’t reopen until Congress passes yet another “stimulus” bill. Yet in Florida, schools have been open all year, and the state’s excess deaths for 2020 rank the 16th lowest in the nation, according to a new analysis. What’s more, the Sunshine State, which is regarded as God’s waiting room for seniors, experienced the 11th lowest per capita rate of COVID deaths for seniors in 2020.

A new analysis conducted by RationalGround.com and exclusively obtained by TheBlaze collated CDC excess death data for 49 states (excluding North Carolina, which has incomplete data) and ranked the states from smallest to largest increase in excess deaths from 2019 to 2020. As we have seen in study after study, there is absolutely zero correlation between non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as business and school closures or mask mandates, and a lower rate of excess deaths.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/02/18/u-s-will-pay-who-200-million-in-dues-after-trump-cut-funding-n1426476

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has informed the United Nations that the U.S. will pay the World Health Organization $200 million in dues. The money is owed to WHO after the Trump administration cut funding to the group.

The cash certainly isn’t for a job well done. As of today, more than 2.5 million people have died in a pandemic that the WHO knew about early on and after the organization failed to take steps against China to mitigate the disaster. In fact, the organization has been a Chinese toady throughout the pandemic, running interference for China and keeping a lid on Chinese incompetence, mismanagement, and perhaps even negligence in handling a dangerous pathogen.

The WHO hasn’t saved a single life and probably cost lives with their contradictory and confusing directives on how to stay healthy. Why give them anything?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/02/18/unity-watch-democrats-introduce-a-bill-to-punish-trump-when-he-dies-n1426572

Democrats want to make Donald Trump’s death as miserable as they tried to make his life in office.

The Democrats began trying to politically kill off Donald Trump before he took office and now they want to kill off his memory up to and after he leaves this mortal coil.

California Democrat Congresswoman Linda Sanchez has introduced a bill to deprive President Trump of the typical honors of every former president.

Her bill, HR 484, is called the “No Glory for Hate Act,” and seeks to deprive the former president from being buried in Arlington National Cemetery or to have any kind of memorials erected in his honor.

Attorney and GOP activist Harmeet Dhillon has a question for Sanchez and her co-sponsors.

This is pathetic, even for you, House Democrats. I heard some of you went to law school. Ever heard of a bill of attainder?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/02/team-bidens-witches-brew/

“Until differing opinions aren’t censored and their advocates de-platformed or fired; until law and order (including at the border) is highly prized; until jobs are a priority; and until education and hard work are widely esteemed, things look bleak for the US. And that means things look bleak here in Australia and throughout the West.”

Last week I was speaking on matters political with Larry Alexander, an American friend who also happens to be one of the world’s leading legal philosophers. Larry’s rather unusual in that he’s a US academic who holds right-of-centre political views in a US law school.  I thought it worth giving readers the gist of his views about our current situation, all of which are spot-on in my view.  You see Larry believes that we are living in what seem to be terribly fraught times, times that are even more worrisome than those at the height of Cold War tensions.  So what are these overweening concerns of his?

Many relate to US government policies. The Biden administration seems hell bent on reversing every Trump administration policy, even those that were quite successful. On illegal immigration, which the Trump team managed to reduce significantly, Team Biden seeks to make illegal entry easier and its legal consequences less of a deterrent. This will almost assuredly result in a significant influx of the unskilled, themselves infiltrated by gang members, cartel mules, and parentless children. Where the Trump administration managed to achieve energy independence, Team Biden has now halted drilling on federal lands and offshore and has killed the Keystone pipeline. With respect to the climate, which saw carbon emissions decrease during the Trump years, Team Biden has announced its intention to rejoin the Paris Accord, which will have no effect on the world’s major polluters but will impose needless costs on Americans, and other signatories, including Australians. (And why, if Team Biden is really concerned with greenhouse gases, does it not push for nuclear power?)

The Trump administration, pre-pandemic, engineered a very good economy with spectacularly low unemployment rates and widespread increases of incomes. It did so with a combination of deregulation and lower taxes. Team Biden appears to favor a large influx of foreign unskilled labor, a more than doubling of the minimum wage, the elimination of energy sector jobs, higher taxes, and more regulation. This is a witches’ brew of anti-employment, anti-growth policies.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/17/our-descent-into-collective-madness/

An ungracious and neurotic elite whose judgment is bankrupt and whose privilege is paid for by those who don’t have it threatens to drag us to the depths of unreason.

These are crazy times. A pandemic led to national quarantine, to self-induced recession, to riot, arson, and looting, to a contested election, and to a riot at the Capitol. 

In response, are we focusing solely on upping the daily vaccination rate? 

Getting the country back to work? Opening the schools as the virus attenuates? Ensuring safety in the streets? 

Or are we descending into a sort of madness?  

It might have been understandable that trillions of dollars had to be borrowed to keep a suffocating economy breathing. 

But it makes little sense to keep borrowing $2 trillion a year to prime an economy now set to roar back with herd-like immunity on the horizon. 

Trillions of dollars in stimulus are already priming the economy. 

Cabin-feverish Americans are poised to get out of their homes to travel, eat out, and socialize as never before. 

Meanwhile, the United States will have to start paying down $30 trillion in debt. But we seem more fixated on raising rather than reducing that astronomical obligation. 

We are told man-made, worldwide climate change—as in the now discarded term “global warming”—can best be addressed by massive dislocations in the U.S. economy.