RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/scotus-front-war-faith-bruce-thornton/

The Senate confirmation hearings on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court are an opportunity for progressives to indulge their irrational bigotry against faith, as well as try to block the appointment of a constitutionalist justice to the court. They are right to be in panic mode, for if Barrett is confirmed, the originalists will have a 6-3 advantage, meaning conservatives can afford John Roberts completely morphing into Anthony Kennedy.

Politics, of course, lies behind the Democrats’ attempts to obstruct Barrett’s confirmation by any means possible, and potentially damage Donald Trump’s chances of reelection. The hearings give them an opportunity to bash Trump and recycle the patent lies­­––the President’s refusal to condemn the marginal number of white supremacists, and other DNC duplicitous talking-points like his alleged bungling of the coronavirus pandemic. And don’t forget the patently specious claims serially flogged on Monday that nominating Barrett in an election year somehow violates some sacrosanct tradition. The only authority for what presidents and Congressmen do is the Constitution, and its enumerated powers of the executive do not cease until his last day in office.

More broadly, Democrats are worried that Obamacare and, more importantly, Roe v. Wade and other pro-abortion decisions, may be up for review and possibly overturned. Hence the usual preposterous rhetorical tropes like “coat-hangers” and “back-alley” abortions supposedly prevalent in pre-Roe times. In fact, natural toxic abortifacients like pennyroyal were probably more prevalent. But “pennyroyal” lacks the gruesome frisson of “coat-hangers.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-latest-updates-10-13-2020-11602576041

The U.S. reported the smallest increase in new coronavirus infections in a week, while hospitals in some parts of the country are seeing rising numbers of Covid-19 patients.

The total number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. topped 7.8 million, as the nation reported more than 41,000 new cases for Monday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The death toll surpassed 215,000.

U.S. hospitalizations, meanwhile, are at the highest level since Sept. 2, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. As of Monday, there were 35,056 patients hospitalized across the country, more than 16% higher than the level a week earlier. While hospitalizations are rising, they are still lower than July’s daily highs of more than 59,000.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dr-fauci-protests-too-much-11602541864?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

In the case of Anthony Fauci vs. Donald Trump, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doctor and the media say the Trump campaign is running an ad that takes Dr. Fauci’s words in vain. Readers can decide, so let’s go to the videotape.

The 30-second Trump ad released last week says “President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America” and goes on to note “together we rose to meet the challenge, protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time.” It then features Dr. Fauci saying “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”

The quote was pulled from a Fox News interview in late March when Dr. Fauci was asked if he had ever seen as large a public response by an Administration to such a health threat. He responded: “We’ve never had a threat like this, and the coordinated response, and there are a number of adjectives to describe this, impressive, I think is one of them. We’re talking about all hands on deck.”

He went on to detail the White House coronavirus task force’s ’round-the-clock phone calls and meetings. “So I can’t imagine that under any circumstances that anybody could be doing more,” he concluded.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/12/why-has-google-censored-the-great-barrington-declaration/

As much of the world gears up for a second round of lockdowns, and restrictions on everyday life grow ever tighter, a group of infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists have come together to propose an alternative. The Great Barrington Declaration was spearheaded by Martin Kulldorff from Harvard Medical School, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University Medical School.

The declaration was bound to cause controversy for going against the global political consensus, which holds that lockdowns are key to minimising mortality from Covid-19. Instead, the signatories argue that younger people, who face minimal risk from the virus, should be able to go about their lives unimpeded, while resources are devoted to protecting the most vulnerable. The lockdowns, they argue, have not only caused an intolerable amount of collateral damage, but have also contributed to a higher number of Covid deaths. But for making this argument, the declaration has been censored.

Tech giant Google has decided that the view of these scientists should be covered up. Most users in English-speaking countries, when they google ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, will not be directed to the declaration itself but to articles that are critical of the declaration – and some that amount to little more than smears of the signatories.

Among the top results Google would prefer you to read is a hit-piece from the ever-conspiratorial Byline Times, which insinuates that the scientists have an ulterior, shady motive for challenging lockdown. Google is also happy for you to read about pranksters signing up to the declaration using fake names like ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’, as well as critical commentary from the Guardian and W

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/520583-senate-must-end-sham-politics-of-precedent-for-amy-coney-barrett

The story broke that Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett did not disclose that she spoke to antiabortion student groups in 2013. The only thing less surprising than a former academic not remembering two talks with student groups is that Barrett spoke to prolife groups. The news was about as earth shaking as discovering that Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke to prochoice groups in 1973. Both jurists started their careers by writing and advocating on procreational issues from opposite sides. Yet this is all part of the theater of the absurd Senate confirmation process.

It is no secret that Barrett is prolife and a critic of Roe versus Wade. Much like Ginsburg, Barrett would come to the Supreme Court with defined and deeply considered views of jurisprudence. Unlike some former nominees, she is no work in progress. She comes fully formed as a legal intellectual. When Clarence Thomas was asked about Roe in his confirmation hearing, he said he really had not thought much about it. It was unclear whether it was worse that a nominee had not thought about a defining issue for the Constitution or was lying to avoid talking about his view.

Barrett has thought a great deal about Roe. She has written sophisticated articles on her objections to the ruling. The Supreme Court rejected much of the original rationale for Roe while still backing the protected right. But Barrett will likely decline to discuss it despite her view which is known and obvious. The reason is the justice she seeks to replace. Ginsburg declined to discuss her view of Roe in her confirmation hearing despite her written record supporting the case and the right to choose. It has become known as the Ginsburg rule. Now her likely successor will be asked to discuss the very same issue despite her own clear intellectual record.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/jews-betraying-jews/

The Jewish Democratic Council of America, in its Trump as Nazi ad, covers up the truth about who is battling anti-Semitism and who is abetting it.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America recently released a television ad comparing Trump and his administration to the Nazi regime. The ad was criticized by some Jewish organizations, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the American Jewish Committee, with critics repeating the long-held Jewish insistence that facile comparisons to Nazi Germany demean the suffering of victims of the Holocaust and trivialize the unprecedented nature of the industrialized mass murder that claimed their lives. Yet others, who should know better, such as historian Deborah Lipstadt, and former Anti-Defamation League head and Holocaust survivor Abe Foxman, defended the advertisement. Lipstadt suggested that it was fine because it was comparing the present administration not to the Nazi regime’s extermination campaign, but to its anti-Semitic policies and practices early in its ascension to power.

The most troubling aspect of the ad, to any fair-minded observer, has nothing to do with which particular Nazi policies it invoked, but with the lie at the heart of its analogy and the dangers of that lie. The producers of the ad seek to cast it as an effort to protect American Jews in the face of troubling developments in U.S. society. But the ad fails to address the particulars of such developments and seeks to divert attention away from their primary source. It’s not designed to protect Jews from increasing abuse, but rather to protect the Democratic Party from criticism for its role in fostering that abuse.

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/jeff-reynolds/2020/10/12/portland-rioters-topple-statues-of-roosevelt-and-lincoln-smash-windows-at-oregon-historical-society-n1022591

On Sunday night, rioters in Portland, Ore., toppled statues of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage at the Oregon Historical Society. Declaring a day of action, the “indigenous wing” of antifa threatened violence to anyone caught live-streaming or recording video of their actions leading into Columbus Day.

After toppling the statues, rioters smashed windows at the Oregon Historical Society, an expansive museum on the South Park Blocks near Portland State University.The east side of the Oregon Historical Society building faces SW Broadway Street, a heavily traveled thoroughfare through downtown Portland. That side of the building has a large, multistory mural depicting events from Oregon’s history. Rioters defaced the mural by pelting it with paintball guns.

Rioters then moved on to cause serious damage to several businesses in downtown Portland.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24638/why-cancer-is-called-a-silent-killer

  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

http://lindagoudsmit.com

Cancer has been called a silent killer because it kills its victims gradually without causing serious or alarming symptoms in the early stages. Cancer is not the only silent killer disease. High blood pressure, diabetes, coronary artery disease, even osteoporosis are considered silent killers because their early warning signs are disguised and diffuse, subtle symptoms that are often ignored until it is too late. So, programs of early detection have been instituted to oppose silent killers.

What about the body politic?

Wikipedia explains, “The modern understanding of the concept means a body politic comprises all the people in a particular country considered as a single group forming what we know as a nation.”

What are the silent killers of nations? What are the often ignored subtle and diffuse symptoms?

Silent killers attack the infrastructure of the body and its essential organs. So it is in politics. The U.S. Constitution is the infrastructure of the United States of America. Its central organs are the separated powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The silent killers attack them all.

Our Founding Fathers created the first government in world history based on individual freedom. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, was a completely revolutionary concept of government because it completely rejected the binary structure of rulers and ruled. Monarchical England went to war against American independence and its founding philosophy. What happened?

America prevailed, grew and prospered because Americans, from the very beginning, were incentivized to work hard. They reaped what they sowed and developed a robust middle class enriched with private property. The middle class and private property distinguished American governance from every other society in the world. The middle class and its upward mobility made America great in the first place, and explains why the enemies of America target the middle class.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/senator-whitehouses-opening-salvo-at-barrett-hearing-dems-obamacare-diatribe/

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) is among the most insufferable hacks on Capitol Hill. It was he, recall, who suggested that energy companies should be sued under the federal racketeering laws for purportedly being “deniers” of climate change. He was also the laboring oar among a handful of Senate Democrats on an unhinged court amicus brief in a recent Supreme Court Second Amendment case, extortionately threatening that the Court could be “restructured” — translation: subjected to ruinous partisan court packing — if the justices continued what the senator portrayed as its Trump-era conservative drift.

So it comes as no surprise that Whitehouse’s opening statement in the confirmation hearing on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an absurd attack along lines I have previously described: Republicans are supposedly desperate to get Barrett on the Court so she can be the deciding vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in toto, including its guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Whitehouse’s diatribe was aimed less at Judge Barrett than at Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas.), a supporter of the district judge in Texas (a Bush-43 appointee), whose ruling is at the center of the case now before the Supreme Court.

There is no chance that the justices are going to invalidate the ACA. I doubt a single one would vote to do that. I repeat what I wrote about this nonsense two weeks ago:

The notion that Judge Barrett, or for that matter the other Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, are on the warpath against the Affordable Care Act is laughable. The ACA issue is being contorted into a convenient political talking point in the stretch-run of a presidential campaign because President Trump, foolishly and reportedly against the advice of Attorney General Barr, has supported a weak legal challenge to the law. The case is California v. Texas, and the justices are scheduled to hear arguments about it on November 10.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-judge-barrett-did-not-criticize-the-affordable-care-act/?utm_source=

Democrats are continuing their disingenuous strategy of framing Judge Amy Coney Barrett as President Trump’s stealth weapon, being rushed onto the Supreme Court by Republicans in order to kill Obamacare in a case the Court is scheduled to hear arguments in on November 10 (see my earlier post). In this vein, Senator Chris Coons (D., Del.) posits that Barrett has publicly criticized the Affordable Care Act. 

This is false.

As a judge, Barrett has not ruled on Obamacare. As a scholar, she has taken the firm position that a judge’s important but modest role is to say what the law is, not to formulate public policy. The best prediction of her position on legislation, therefore, is that its policy direction is for Congress to decide; the judge’s narrow role is to ensure that enacted law complies with constitutional requirements, regardless of its political or ideological bent. That, for what it’s worth is why I’ve predicted (see the earlier post) that neither Judge Barrett nor any of the eight justices currently sitting on the Court (including its four conservatives, two appointed by President Trump) would vote to invalidate Obamacare.

Senator Coons is apparently referring to an article – actually, a book review, “Countering the Majoritarian Difficulty” – that Judge Barrett, as a Notre Dame Law School professor, wrote for a scholarly publication of the University of Minnesota Law School in 2017. The article was not specifically about Obamacare. Instead, it arose out of a roundtable discussion in which several academics discussed Our Republican Constitution, an excellent, provocative book by Randy Barnett, a superb law professor at Georgetown.