RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/28/heroes_act_democrats_wasteful_bailout.html

Taxpayers of America, you may soon be funding a $500 billion bailout of the 50 states, all U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia. But where is this vast sum of money going?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “HEROES Act” — more accurately titled “Pelosi Throw-Money-at-the-States Bailout Bill” — vividly illustrates why transparency is crucial. If the Senate passes the legislation, taxpaying citizens of financially responsible states will bear the burden of financially irresponsible states.

At OpenTheBooks, our goal is transparency. We are nonpartisan. We believe you, the American taxpayer, should be able to access every government expense — local, state, and federal — in real-time on your mobile phone, iPad, and computer. It’s your money. You deserve to see where every dime is spent. We have posted 5 billion government expenditures online.

Last year, we filed 41,500 Freedom of Information Act requests. We documented the salaries and pensions of 23 million public employee. We sued three states that refused to give us information about how they spent your money.

Here are a few of the unlimited examples in just four “deep blue” Democratic areas — California, New York, and Illinois, along with Washington, D.C. Here you can see how your tax dollars are wasted, which the Pelosi Bailout Bill conveniently overlooks, and why blank checks are unwise even during an economic crisis.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/charles-jacobs-video-failure-jewish-leadership-frontpagemagcom/

This video is brought to you by a Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration on a new exclusive webinar series, Teach-Ins for the Twenty-First Century. Join us as some of the leading thinkers and pundits on the scene today discuss key issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and its ongoing implications, confronting the Left, the jihad terror threat, and much, much more. And make sure to ask your own questions of our experts.

Hosted by Anni Cyrus, producer of The Glazov Gang and Founder of Live Up To Freedom.

This new webinar features Dr. Charles Jacobs, the president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance,

Charles discusses The Failure of Jewish Leadership Today, unveiling how the leadership of major Jewish organizations is failing to protect the community. And he answers the question: Why?

Don’t miss it!

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/nikki-haleys-stellar-performance-as-ambassador-and

No wonder her appointment caused then-Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon to cheer, and Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations Riyad Mansour to flinch.

Nikki Haley is a star. There’s no other way to describe the former governor of South Carolina, whose subsequent two-year term as America’s ambassador to the UN was one of the most memorable in recent history.Her appointment to the latter post by then-President-elect Donald Trump came as somewhat of a surprise. She had supported Marco Rubio in the Republican Party primaries, and when he dropped out of the race, she backed Ted Cruz.When Trump became her party’s nominee, she announced that she would vote for him, in spite of her reservations about his character and abilities. She then called on him to release his tax returns, a move that elicited one of his notorious Twitter offensives.

Nevertheless, he selected her for the sensitive position based on what he considered to be her professional merit. This did not prevent critics from highlighting her lack of experience in foreign affairs.

To be fair, Haley seemed to many at the time who hadn’t heard of her to be an odd choice for a job that requires not only familiarity with global politics, but a rejection of conventional diplomacy – certainly by representatives from countries like the US and Israel.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/26/discipline-determination-and-data-will-get-us-through-the-pandemic/

While discussing many pandemic-related issues with friends and colleagues, we were reminded of the quip of journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

As we battle the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the illness it causes, COVID-19, the “fog of war” continues on both the medical and epidemiological fronts. On the public health side, different studies, especially those that involve modeling, seem to reach conflicting, or at least ambiguous, conclusions. And politicians and pundits have jumped in to make the fog denser, with many policy prescriptions contaminated by misinformation, ideological spin, and partisan politics.

                                                       Obtaining clarity about many aspects of COVID-19 has been elusive. Dr. Anthony Fauci has emphasized the virus’s unique “protean manifestations”: “I have never seen a virus in which you have 20 percent to 40 percent of individuals who could have no symptoms at all, to individuals who get mild illness and do not need to go to a hospital, to people confined to their beds at home for weeks with multiple post-viral syndromes,” he said. 

SARS-CoV-2 is also unusual in being able to infect a broad spectrum of body tissues beyond the respiratory tract, including the digestive tract, neurons that mediate smell and taste, kidneys, and most critically, the heart and lining of blood vessels. 

Infection often leads to widespread inflammation and tiny clots, which cause secondary deleterious effects. Moreover, an Italian research study found that upwards of 85 percent of patients who had been hospitalized have persistent, sometimes serious aftereffects that can drag on for an indeterminate amount of time, and possibly permanently. (The virus is too recent to know conclusively.)

The clear lesson is that efforts to prevent infection are critical. But, absent a vaccine, which is still likely far off, that’s complicated and involves difficult cost-benefit calculations.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16421/alan-dershowitz-pursue-justice

Now, at 82, I am demanding justice for myself. I have been falsely accused by a woman I never met of having sex with her…. Indeed, the best evidence of my innocence is in her own words: a series of emails and manuscript that she tried to suppress in which she essentially admits that she never met me. Her lawyers own words — she is “wrong… simply wrong” in accusing you — constitutes an admission attributable to her.

Another of her lawyers has acknowledged that she lied about other prominent men. She told her best friend and her best friend’s husband that she was pressured by her lawyer to falsely accuse me.

The words in Hebrew are “Lo takir panim,” which means do not base your decision on the faces or identities of the litigants. Base it instead on the facts and the evidence. I wish people today would abide by that 3,000-year-old wisdom.

I also wish judges and prosecutors paid more heed to another command of my Bible portion: “The judges shall inquire diligently; and behold if the witness be a false witness and has testified falsely against his brother, then shall ye do unto him as he had proposed to do unto his brother…” I have invited prosecutors and judges to “inquire diligently” into my accuser and me. If they do, they will conclude that she has “testified falsely” and should be punished under the law of perjury.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/26/jacob-blakes-mother-thanks-trump-for-phone-call-expresses-disgust-with-kenosha-rioters/

Jacob Blake’s mother on Tuesday denounced the violent rioting that has rocked Kenosha since her son was shot, and said that she and her husband were praying for police officers.

Blake’s mother Julia Jackson also apologized to President Trump for missing a presidential phone call that was made following her heartfelt remarks at a news conference earlier Tuesday.

In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Jackson expressed disgust with the rioting, calling it “not acceptable.”

“My family and I are very hurt. And quite frankly disgusted,” she told Lemon. “And as his mother, please don’t burn up property and cause havoc and tear your own homes down in my son’s name. You shouldn’t do it, people shouldn’t do it anyway, but to use my child or any other mother or father’s child—our tragedy—to react in that manner, it’s just not acceptable,” she said.

Jackson, who was accompanied by the family’s attorney Benjamin Crump on the Skype call, pointed out that the ongoing violence was not helping her son or anyone else who has suffered from alleged police brutality.

When asked by Lemon whether she had a message for any politicians, including Trump, Jackson took the opportunity to apologize to “our President Trump” on behalf of a family member who had said something that was “not kind.”

“She is hurting, and I do apologize for that,” she said. “That does not reflect our behavior.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/ongoing-riots-prove-again-dangers-appeasement-bruce-thornton/

The riots and protests that began in late May have been like wildfires of the sort currently blazing in California. Just as riots have lessened in intensity in some cities, in others they have flared up to new levels of destruction. In Kenosha Wisconsin, the arson has spread more widely, and fatal gun-battles have erupted between the “peaceful protestor” thugs and armed citizens defending their lives and property.

Also like the wildfires, the continuing violence is the consequence of unforced errors made by civic leaders in thrall to dubious ideologies. California is burning because of government environmental policies that encourage mismanagement such as not thinning its huge tracts of forest, resulting in lethal loads of dead and dying trees that provide abundant the fuel for the fires.

In the cities most afflicted with violent protests, mayors who embrace the progressive demonization of law enforcement and the racial melodrama about “systemic racism” have not acted quickly and vigorously enough to stop the violence before it escalated. Police have been ordered to stand down, restricted in their tactics and weapons, and left on their own without moral and material support from their civic bosses.

The ancient lesson has once again been proven: Failure to act preemptively and forcefully to violent disorder, and the appeasement of aggressors with concessions, lead to ever escalating levels of violence and mayhem.

America’s historically most destructive riot provides an object lesson. In July of 1863, New York erupted in widespread rioting over a recently passed federal law instituting a draft-lottery. Working class New Yorkers went on a rampage, attacking buildings and free blacks, who were not subject to the lottery. Five days of rioting left over 100 dead, including 11 black men who were lynched, 3000 blacks left homeless, 2000 blacks and whites wounded, and millions of dollars in property damage.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/president-sending-troops-law-enforcement-to-kenosha/
The violence has to end, or it has to be ended.

President Trump tweeted early this afternoon (here and here) that, after consultation between administration and Wisconsin officials, Governor Evers has agreed to accept federal security and law-enforcement assistance. Thus, the president says he will forthwith be dispatching National Guard troops as well as federal law-enforcement — I presume (though he does not say) agents from the various Justice Department components that, in the main, are carrying out Operation Legend.

Let me just quickly repeat a few things I’ve been saying since late May, when the rioting began.

The prerequisite for enforcing the rule of law is the establishment of order. Law enforcement agencies — federal, state, and local — are capable of maintaining law and order, but not of establishing it. They simply do not have the resources to impose order if it has been lost due to insurrectionist violence. And trying to conduct law-enforcement operations when order has been lost is like the concept we used to ridicule in connection efforts to treat jihadist war as if it were a problem fit for courtroom adjudication — you can’t turn battlefields into crime scenes.

In our system, the president has not only the authority but the obligation to protect the people of states in which order has broken down and widespread violence, beyond the capacity of law enforcement to quell, has taken hold.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/25/we-could-beat-covid-19-before-a-vaccine-is-ready/

Is a vaccine the only way to return to normal after ­COVID-19? New research into the virus suggests not — that the infection rate may drop to tiny levels before then.

Since the spring, scientists have known the virus’s infection fatality rate — how many people it kills compared to the number it infects — is under 1 percent, perhaps as low as 0.2 percent. That lower figure translates into one death for every 500 people infected.

We have also known that deaths are seriously skewed by age. The media says older people are at “more” risk from the novel coronavirus than younger people. That’s true, but it understates the reality. Most people do not realize that the risks to people over 80 are hundreds or thousands of times higher than those younger people face.

The fatality rate for children, meanwhile, is very small. In July, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it’s about one in a million infected.

Of course, most of the media simply ignored Redfield’s comment — maybe because it would have made parents less afraid to send their kids to school.

But the fatality rate is only half the puzzle when scientists try to figure out what the final death toll from the coronavirus might be. And even with a small rate, the numbers are staggering. If the entire nation was infected, it would mean potentially 500,000 or more Americans dead.

https://www.city-journal.org/minneapolis-2040-plan

In the months before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a small group was doing its best to spread the message that the city was deeply racist. They were not protesters or looters, or the organized African-American community of the city’s soon-to-be-burned North Side, but rather the mayor and city council. Their focus was what might have seemed an obscure and technical topic: zoning. They were led by one-time San Francisco city planner Lisa Bender, president of the city council, a position considered almost as powerful as that of the mayor.

“We’ve inherited a system that both for decades has privileged those with the most and forgotten the people that we really have left behind,” Bender said. “And housing is inextricably linked with income, with all these other systems that are failing, especially in Minnesota, people of color.” She put forth a plan to relax single-family zoning and to permit more multifamily home construction in a city that was—at least pre-George Floyd—attracting millennials and increasing its population, anomalously for the Upper Midwest. Mayor Jacob Frey shared Bender’s view. The city, he told Politico, was perpetuating “racist policies implicitly through our zoning code.”

What might have been both an effective consensus reform and a change that could inspire other cities and suburbs to follow suit backfired, thanks to being tied—unnecessarily and unjustifiably—to alleged racism. The plan did not originate in the city’s black community, and black leaders in Minneapolis have not even mentioned it as part of what the city must do to expunge racism in the wake of Floyd’s death. It was driven by the city’s white progressive leadership.