RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/04/dems-covid-19-bill-is-a-grab-bag-of-leftist-goodies-not-stimulus/

After a group of 10 Senate Republicans duly trudged to the White House on Monday to show their “bipartisanship” on yet another COVID-19 stimulus bill, President Joe Biden did the predictable: He looked at their outreached hand of political comity and spat on it. Just as well, since the only thing the Democrats’ plan will “stimulate” will be more debt.

Biden and his party were never really interested in bipartisanship at all, despite their claims to the contrary. The whole point of this choreographed Kabuki political theater was to humiliate the Republicans, who foolishly took Biden and the Democrats at their word.

Republicans had suggested a more-or-less stripped-down bill of “just” $600 billion, compared to the Democratic wish-list of $1.9 trillion, which includes such non-COVID-19-related items as a $15-an-hour national minimum wage, a $350 billion bailout for poorly run states and cities, $170 billion for K-12 schools and colleges, $25 billion for “rental assistance,” and so on. Democrats also want checks of $1,400 for most households.

Republicans seek checks of $1,000, but would exclude families with more than $50,000 in income from the handouts. Their spending on all other aid is roughly two-thirds what the Democrats seek.

In rejecting compromise, Biden gave Congress a green light to totally ignore Republican input by passing a stimulus package through reconciliation, not the normal budget process. That will require a simple majority of 51 senators, not a supermajority of 60, to pass.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/andrew-cuomo-was-a-villain-all-along/

A deep dive into New York AG Letitia James’ COVID report reveals disturbing truths about the celebrity governor’s pandemic deception.

F or much of the past year, the mainstream media and Democrats have largely blamed former president Donald Trump and his administration for most of America’s COVID-19 deaths. Trump did indeed fail in certain aspects of coordination, messaging, and inserting politics into the parts of the process where it didn’t belong. He deserves credit, however, for Operation Warp Speed, the initiative that (ultimately successfully) fostered the development of coronavirus vaccines, one of the most successful public-private ventures in modern history. But Trump’s overbearing personality tended to absorb all the attention, leaving little room for real debate on the successes and failures of other politicians, except when the media found time to criticize Republican governors. But serious criticism of Democrats in this period was rare.

Until now.

It is important not to dismiss a critical fact here: James herself is a longtime Cuomo political progeny. He supported her attorney general campaign. That someone who for years has been closely aligned with Cuomo released this report is damning in and of itself. Yet the evidence it contains is even worse than the report itself suggests. If anything, the media response to it has been an underreaction.

The 76-page report relates, in great detail, the state’s irresponsible reaction to COVID raging through extended-care centers, primarily nursing homes. James and her team went straight to nursing homes to obtain the data, bypassing the state’s own data-collection entities. They took a random data sampling from 62 nursing homes around the state and found that 1,914 of their residents had died from COVID, 56 percent more than the 1,229 the state reported. If that sample is truly representative of the total for New York, the state’s nursing-home deaths total more than 13,000, where the state tallies just 8,711. (Overall New York COVID deaths remain unchanged.)

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/why-we-still-need-a-militia-and-how-to-build-one/

In an obscure but important footnote to the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wonders what would have become of the Soviet terror if the citizens of Russia had armed themselves with hammers, axes, pokers—anything—so that arresting officers of the NKVD would have had to worry whether they would survive each night. The most powerful tyranny in the world could not have stood up against such action. Instead, tens of millions of Russians submitted meekly to the state, one by one. Why?

The same question came up in my elementary school unit on the Holocaust—why did the Jews get onto the trains? Did they fail to understand what was in store for them? In my childhood mind, I tried to unravel questions that seemed as bitter as the fact of the Holocaust itself: Why was there no effective resistance? Was submission so ingrained in these people, or individual courage so lacking?

The answer in both cases is that it was not courage that was lacking, but organization. This concept glimmers through Solzhenitsyn’s description like a fleck of gold in the pebbly shallows of a stream: He imagines a group of neighbors, a half-dozen perhaps, lying in ambush downstairs for the secret policemen. He specifies a group of neighbors. He specifies collective action. One courageous man resisting alone is a suicide. But one courageous man leading a few of his friends can put up a fight.

The wording of our Second Amendment—or, rather, the placement of a single comma—has engendered a raging debate that reached the Supreme Court and persists to this day: Is the second clause of this all-important sentence operative, or dependent? Is the right to bear arms absolute, or does it exist only because of the need for a militia?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/03/is-biden-blowing-his-covid-vaccine-rollout/

When not attacking the Trump administration for the pace of COVID-19 vaccine distribution, President Joe Biden said he’d dramatically accelerated the rate at which Americans got treated. What’s more, he was supposed to be ready on day one. At least, that’s what he and his team kept telling the public.

So why is the growth rate of daily vaccinations decelerating? And why is Biden now busy making excuses?

Before taking office,  Biden stated that he’d directed his team to prepare a “much more aggressive effort, with more federal involvement and leadership, to get things back on track.”

T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden’s transition, told CNN in early January that “the president-elect believes we must accelerate distribution of the vaccine while continuing to ensure the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible.”

The Boston Globe reported on Jan. 8 that “President-elect Joe Biden plans to order the distribution of almost all available doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, in a striking departure from the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back roughly half of the stock to ensure those who have been vaccinated would receive their second dose.”

So, what’s happened since Biden took office?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/kamala_harris_already_becoming_a_problem_for_biden_white_house.html

I suspect that regret already is setting in among his handlers over their pick of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden’s running mate. The first of what will be many clean-up efforts began yesterday for her bungling an incident 8 days in office.  CNN reports:

The White House called Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin after Vice President Kamala Harris conducted interviews with West Virginia media, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation.

The outreach comes after Harris’ apparent move to apply pressure on Manchin frustrated the conservative Democrat, something that he made clear over the weekend.

The pressure VP Harris attempted to apply came in the form of an exclusive interview she granted to WSAZ TV in Huntington, WV. Curiously, I have been unable to locate a video clip on Rumble or YouTube or Twitter. Even WSAZ’s own website is not making available what has to be one of the most newsworthy broadcast moments in the station’s history.

In the interview, Harris tried to pressure the popular former governor by speaking directly to his own constituents:

On Thursday, Harris promoted the $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan in interviews with television stations in West Virginia and Arizona — states that are home to Democrats whose votes could be critical to passing Covid relief, including Manchin in West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, along with Sen. Mark Kelly, who will face re-election in the state in 2022, in Arizona.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/02/trump-lawyers-claim-impeachment-is-a-legal-nullity-n1422577

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s lawyers Bruce L. Castor, Jr., and David Schoen released Trump’s answer to the Democrats’ article of impeachment accusing him of “incitement of insurrection.” Trump’s response breaks the Democrats’ impeachment article into eight separate allegations and responds to each claim. In a nutshell, the former president argues that it is unconstitutional for the Senate to remove a president when he has already left office and that he is innocent of the Democrats’ charges.

Trump asks the Senate to “dismiss Article I: Incitement of Insurrection against him as moot, and thus in violation of the Constitution, because the Senate lacks jurisdiction to remove from office a man who does not hold office. In the alternative, the 45th President respectfully requests the Senate acquit him on the merits of the allegations raised in the article of impeachment.”

The Senate already voted to take up the impeachment, with five Republican senators joining 50 Democratic senators in holding the matter constitutional. However, 45 Republican senators voted not to hold the trial, given constitutional concerns. This vote signified that the Senate is not likely to convict Trump.

The former president makes a few extremely salient arguments against the Democrats’ impeachment article. In addition to the claim that the Senate cannot convict a former president on impeachment, Trump argues that the Democrats violated his free speech and due process rights in rushing to impeach him and that the article of impeachment is deceptively drafted in an unfair manner. Trump also claims that disqualifying him from office would constitute a “bill of attainder,” which has been broadly interpreted to mean a legislative act against a class of people that inflcits punishment on them without a judicial trial.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-cancels-the-u-s-senate-11612288061?mod=opinion_lead_pos5 Google’s YouTube has ratcheted up censorship to a new level by removing two videos from a U.S. Senate committee. They were from a Dec. 8 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on early treatment of Covid-19. One was a 30-minute summary; the other was the opening statement of critical-care specialist Pierre Kory. […]