RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/17/rachel-levine-committed-cuomocide-in-pennsylvania/

“UPDATE: We’ve been told Sen. Rand Paul placed a hold on the Levine nomination. We hope that prevents floor action until Pennsylvania taxpayers and the American people receive the answers they deserve.”

Pennsylvania’s state health director Rachel Levine is ticketed to be the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Policy. A Senate floor vote on her confirmation is expected next week. We generally believe that presidents deserve the advisers they choose, but Levine is about the last person in America you would want devising the nation’s health policies. 

On March 18, 2020, Levine issued a Cuomo-order that said:

“Nursing care facilities must continue to accept new admissions and receive readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital who are stable to alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings. This may include stable patients who have had the COVID-19 virus.”

While Levine defended this policy, “ABC27 learned the health secretary’s mother recently vacated a personal care home in the Midstate.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/18/biden-tax-hikes-aim-at-the-rich-but-hit-the-poor-middle-class/

If you’re an American of average income, listen up. You’re about to become a lot poorer. President Joe Biden’s proposed soon-to-be-unveiled multi-trillion dollar tax hike, the first major increase in taxes since 1993, will ensure that.

With a massive wave of new spending on the way, it was only a matter of time before Biden and his far-left economic team came up with massive new tax increases to match. You might be happy with your $1,400 “stimulus check,” but you won’t be happy with the higher taxes you’ll be paying from now until you die.

That’s right, because no matter what the Democrats said during last year’s presidential campaign about “taxing the rich” and “big corporations” it’s the middle class and the poor who will really take a hit.

Though still in the discussion phase, the White House says only those earning more than $400,000 a year will feel the pain. They’ll face higher taxes on their estates and so-called pass-through businesses, including limited-liability companies and partnerships. Millionaires might get a double-whammy, with both higher income and capital gains taxes.

A tax-fairness win for the little guy? Don’t believe it. Biden also wants to raise the corporate tax rate from the current 21% to 28%, a one-third increase. And that tax on “pass-through” businesses? That’s a tax-code euphemism for “small businesses.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/mitch_mcconnells_grand_guignol_performance_in_the_senate.html

The Grand Guignol was a theater in Paris in the first half of the 20th-century that specialized in amoral horror entertainment. On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gave his own version of Grand Guignol when he rained fire and brimstone on the Senate, detailing the horrors Democrats would suffer if they were to do away with the 215-year-old filibuster. He knew, of course, that his speech was meaningless because he already gave the filibuster away in January. Once it’s gone, Republicans will never again have the power to take revenge on the Democrats.

Back in January, I wrote about how Mitch McConnell preemptively gave away the filibuster. He agreed to Chuck Schumer’s demand regarding Senate rules that, in the 50-50 Senate, there would be “power sharing” (hah!) in exchange for Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema promising not to ditch the filibuster, which has been part of the Senate rules of operation since 1806. While Sinema is something of a maverick and might be trustworthy, Joe Manchin, after pretending to stand strong, always sides with the Senate majority.

On Tuesday, McConnell was back again talking a big game on the filibuster. What triggered him was that Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) was caught on a hot mic telling Transportation Secretary Pete (he likes to play with toy trains) Buttigieg that Democrats were planning to pass an infrastructure bill and were going to do it without Republican votes. The presumption is that Cardin said this because he knew that the Democrats were going to move to end the filibuster – that is, he knew that Sinema and Manchin were reneging on their promise to McConnell.

As the New York Sun explains, McConnell got angry. In many ways, he delivered a stellar defense of the filibuster:

Mr. McConnell responded today with a prediction of the kind rarely heard in the upper chamber. “Let me say this very clearly, for all 99 of my colleagues,” the Kentuckian rasped. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin — to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like. None of us has even served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity and consent.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/16/soft-science-has-no-place-in-government-policymaking/

‘Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon.” This observation, from Alondra Nelson, the newly appointed deputy director of President Joe Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), certainly qualifies for a prominent place in the Pantheon of Inane Statements. The core of science is, in fact, the scientific method – posing and testing hypotheses; carefully gathering, examining, and generating experimental evidence; and finally, synthesizing all the available information into logical conclusions.

Nelson’s assertion is inauspicious, but perhaps we should not be too surprised by a “squishy” statement from someone whose undergraduate degree was in sociology, and her doctorate, in “American Studies.” What, we wonder, qualifies her to be deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy? And how does it comport with Biden’s commitment always to rely on “science and truth.” We suspect it is an example of how lip-service to science has invaded the domain of real science.

“Hard” sciences are a framework for understanding physical, chemical, sub-atomic, biological, and other natural or even manmade phenomena. The disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and especially mathematics, have nothing to do with society as such, because the phenomena they characterize exist independently of humans. Mathematics is typically the language of this framework, whether it is arcane calculus, probability theory, combinatorics, topology, or some other branch well understood by only a very select group.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/17/democrats-are-forever-slaves-to-wretched-ideas/

A White House aide wants the president “to start acting now” on reparations without congressional approval. But not even the consent of the House and Senate would legitimize reparations. It’s a policy so divisive, and so impossible to implement, that the idea, which is an ugly societal wedge of its own, needs to be dropped and never brought up again.

While decent Americans have moved past racial politics and are starving for genuine unity, senior adviser Cedric Richmond “sees first-term progress on reparations,” reports Axios, which recently interviewed the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

“We have to start breaking down systemic racism and barriers that have held people of color back and especially African Americans,” Richmond said. “We have to do stuff now.”

The U.S. House is considering a bill with 169 cosponsors that “establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.” The panel would “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.” A companion bill has also been introduced in the Senate.

Biden, according to his press secretary, “certainly would support a study of reparations,” and Vice President Kamala Harris has publicly endorsed a committee that would explore reparations. Neither of which is a surprise. Just as they can never let a crisis go to waste, Democrats are unable to resist virtue-signaling, and in some cases outright punitive measures against their countrymen, whether warranted or not.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/03/15/paralyzed-by-fear-johns-hopkins-doctor-notices-something-peculiar-about-the-cdc-n2586291

Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was bold in his projection that we’ll have herd immunity by April. This has been disputed by those who are nowhere near his level of expertise when it comes to public health, but I get the pushback since it shreds the Democratic Party’s COVID lockdown regime. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Makary says that we’re underestimating natural immunity and with the pace of vaccinations, we’ll reach that critical benchmark towards reclaiming normality by tax season. 

“About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%,” Dr. Makary wrote. With those figures, he estimates that two-thirds of the country has already had the infection. We’re rapidly approaching 100 million vaccinations. It’s not an insane projection, but one he says other health experts are afraid to push for fear of impacting the rate of vaccinations. That’s not their job, he argued. Good health news should be disseminated, not buried. There was pushback, and there will be more when he recently wrote about the vaccine protocols.

The good doctor cited an Israeli study that shows those given the Pfizer vaccine are virtually “bulletproof” four weeks after the first dose. That’s the keyword right there. So, we can be returning to normal if the CDC wasn’t so busy peddling exaggerated threats about the virus and being stricken with fear, which Makary noted with their latest guidelines. Is it ‘follow the science’ or ‘be afraid, be very afraid’?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/secretly-taped-facebook-executive-company-too-powerful-broken-up

A senior executive at Facebook was secretly recorded saying that the social media giant harms the world, that it needs to be broken up, and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be removed.

A video released Monday of Benny Thomas, Facebook’s global planning lead, shows him candidly expressing his opinions about his employer to an undercover journalist from Project Veritas, a right-wing activist news outlet founded by James O’Keefe.

“I work for a company that is doing a lot of damage in the world,” Thomas said in the video.

“It’s doing a lot of good, but it’s doing a lot of damage,” he added.

Thomas said that other platforms that Facebook owns, such as Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, “need to be separate companies” because it’s “too much power when they’re all one together.”

“I would break it up, and I would remove [Mark Zuckerberg] as the CEO,” Thomas said.

In a recent survey of 1500 tech industry employees, 77% said Big Tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google have too much power. Only 8% disagreed.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/meghan-markle-george-floyd-muhammad-and-free-speech/

The latest scandal surrounding the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is noteworthy. This isn’t because of the ire that it’s been arousing, however; righteous indignation is literally and figuratively all the rage during these days of “woke.”

No, the element that sets this brouhaha apart from its predecessors is the absence of mass murder. Yes, when the ink dries on the current pages of the Paris-based periodical and the Twittersphere moves on to the next hashtag, there won’t be any corpses to count.

The current storm involves a lampoon of Oprah Winfrey’s March 7 interview on CBS with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Titled “Why Meghan quit Buckingham,” the March 13 cartoon depicts Markle being kneed in the neck by Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, with the explanation: “Because I couldn’t breathe anymore.”

The reference was to the May 25 killing of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The insinuation is that Markle, whose mother is black, whisked her husband out of the United Kingdom as a result of her being slowly suffocated by the ostensibly “racist” royal family.
The former member of the “Suits” cast even indicated this during her intimate chat with Oprah that was viewed by more than 60 million people worldwide.

https://spectator.org/covid-vaccines-dr-fauci/

One year into this pandemic, we are seeing signs of hope that life will return to normal sometime this year. States across the country are relaxing COVID restrictions. This is drawing criticism from some, including President Biden, calling such moves “Neanderthal thinking.” Perhaps it takes one to know one, Joe. Who let you out of the basement, anyway? Far from being Neanderthals, millions of people are rightfully celebrating a relative return to normalcy in many states across the country. Godspeed to them, I say.

How did we get here? How did we come to a point where we feel gratitude that our government is “allowing” us to begin to live normally again? COVID itself undoubtedly harmed many people’s health and has sadly killed over half a million of our citizens, but the mitigation policies also have caused much harm to others. Many of us have been shocked to learn that we live in a country where the stroke of an executive’s pen can shutter businesses, force masking, etc., with no legislative input whatsoever.

How did they get away with this type of societal control? Well, every good story of psychological manipulation has a bogeyman (or perhaps I should say “bogeyperson,” to please the woke crowd). Whom did the writers of 2020 pencil in as the monster in this tale? In order to maintain complete control, they intelligently picked the most damning and insidious villain possible. They picked you.