RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/09/after-burning-police-union-portland-rioters-threaten-nearby-house-were-gonna-burn-your-building-down-n767345

In the wee hours of Sunday morning on the 71st straight night of violent antifa riots in Portland, rioters who had again set a fire inside the police union threatened to burn a civilian’s home apparently because he had the audacity to look outside his window. For the last few nights, rioters have targeted police buildings in a residential neighborhood, harassing Portlanders in the middle of the night.

While multiple protests during the day remained peaceful, a group of protesters that had remained peaceful until that point marched toward the Portland Police Association (PPA) Office, the police union, at around 9:50 p.m. Support vehicles moved alongside the rioters, illegally blocking all other vehicle traffic, Portland Police reported.

Rioters “erected a fence, pushed dumpsters into the street to block traffic, set a dumpster on fire, vandalized the PPA office with spray paint, and destroyed security cameras.” At around 11:35 p.m., antifa rioters broke a police union window, barged in, and started a fire with what looks like burning cardboard or pieces of paper. Police released footage of the fire.

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/stacey-lennox/2020/08/08/6-questions-an-honest-intelligent-reporter-would-ask-dr-fauci-about-covid-19-n760478

If you had been going down the rabbit hole of COVID-19 research for long enough, a few things would be astounding to you. First, how uninformed, uncurious, or deceptive reporters in the corporate media are on a matter of life and death. Second, how much publicly available information about COVID-19 is on the internet contradicts what is reported and said by Health Experts™on cable news. Finally, it is impossible to believe Dr. Anthony Fauci enjoys a 62% approval rating.

Of course, part of the reason Dr. Fauci enjoys this level of trust is that reporters who interview him put a sort of religious faith in every word he utters. Having worked with doctors for years, I don’t suffer from any such affliction. There are some great ones, some awful ones, and some who are great at one thing and not another.

It is also quite reasonable for doctors to disagree. Medicine is the art of applying science and it is rarely “settled.” This healthy tension is why patients get second opinions. Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, only one doctor has had almost no pushback in any public interview. This is journalistic malpractice, but not surprising. Most of the corporate media agree with his recommendations or can use panic porn clicks.

However, if there were a courageous and intelligent reporter who could score an interview with Dr. Fauci, here is a list of questions I would suggest.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/08/the-man-who-wasnt-there/

Those things with which we are most familiar are often hardest to see. This is perhaps particularly true of such fraught subjects as politics. There we are every day staring at the same people, reading news stories that are virtually indistinguishable from one another, and what do we know?

Our situation is similar to Alice’s in Through the Looking Glass when she finds herself in a shop that seemed full of curious things. “[T]he oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.” 

I feel that way about Joe Biden. Gertrude Stein once quipped of her native Oakland, California, “there is no there there.” Isn’t that how it is with Joe Biden? He doesn’t make gaffes; he is a gaffe, poor thing. (I’ve expatiated on this elsewhere.) 

I suspect that most Americans, whatever side of the political aisle they occupy, do not really see Joe Biden—especially when, like Alice, they are looking directly at him. They need to manage a sidelong glance, a sudden shift of perspective to catch his drift (and I employ the word “drift” advisedly). 

This was brought home to me by an article that appeared a few days ago in Le Figaro, the biggest newspaper in France. The headline summed up its burden: “La stupéfiante indulgence des grands médias américains envers Joe Biden”—“The stupefying indulgence of big American media towards Joe Biden.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/fear_fatigue_is_more_dangerous_than_covid19.html

Our daily lives are filled with risks — lots of risks. Just look at these examples:

• Every year, 30,000 to 40,000 Americans die in automobile accidents, yet none of us is willing to give up cars to avoid the possibility of dying in a crash.

• Heart disease kills more than 600,000 of our fellow citizens annually, yet we continue to eat fast food and pack on extra pounds.

• Diabetes puts more than 80,000 Americans into their graves each year, yet we do not ban the use of sugar.

• Close to 50,000 Americans take their own lives annually, yet we have instituted COVID-19 policies that have increased the incidence of suicide to the highest levels seen since the Great Depression.

• Millions of children are infected with influenza each year, and hundreds die from the disease.  But we have never closed our schools or insisted on masking the population to prevent the spread of flu.

• Child abuse and child sex-trafficking are at record levels in this country, and many specialists believe that it is due, in part, to our schools being closed while adults are unable to go their normal daily routines.

http://q4j-middle-east.com/

 Months ago, I was having a discussion with friends about favorite rice dishes. I usually prefer wild varieties.

A bit later, the story surfaced about the horrendous travesty of justice that General Michael Flynn, a much decorated career army officer and President Trump’s former National Security Adviser, was subjected to via the machinations of the previous Obama Administration–whose real target was/is President Trump himself. So this got me thinking about various “rice species” even more fervently again. 

The clincher prompting what follows below came at the end of the first week of August 2020. Breaking news said that President Trump’s opponent in the upcoming American election, former Obama VP Joe Biden, narrowed had his choice for a vice-presidential running mate down quite substantially.

Dr. Susan Rice–like Biden, another former pea in President Obama’s like-minded, carefully chosen pod–had made the final cut.

Given the above, let’s focus on certain “rice species” in particular…

The first is preferred by Republicans–that would be the Condoleezza variety—the one which/who shares many of her fellow Republican petro-business-related buddies’ interests in the Middle East. Think the likes of James (“F-the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway”) Baker III, the Bush family, John Sununu, and numerous others who made mucho dinero off of assorted autocratic Arab petro-potentates’ black gold. James Baker’s law firm, for example, was chosen by the Saudis to represent them against American 9/11 victims, and his law partner was the American ambassador to that desert kingdom.

Let’s turn the clock back to learn more about this bright, attractive, but somewhat troublesome rice variety–at least for those folks hoping that Israel would get a fair shake in Washington.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/should-judge-sullivan-be-disqualified-from-flynn-case-an-appeals-court-is-asking/

D.C. Circuit judges seem disturbed by the degree to which Judge Sullivan has exhibited bias in Flynn’s case.

Maybe Judge Luttig was right all along.

I had the misgivings you’d expect back in late May, when I disagreed with J. Michael Luttig, the stellar scholar and former federal appeals court judge, regarding how the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should handle the Flynn case.

At the time, that court’s three-judge panel had not yet heard oral argument on Michael Flynn’s mandamus petition — i.e., Flynn’s request that the panel find that federal district judge Emmet Sullivan was acting lawlessly. Sullivan had not only failed to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn; he had appointed a former federal judge (the overtly anti-Trump John Gleeson) to posit the argument abandoned by DOJ — to wit, that Flynn should proceed to sentencing because he had pled guilty to a false-statements charge, waiving his right to contest the case any further in exchange for the government’s agreement not to file any other charges. Basically, Flynn was asking the appellate court to order Judge Sullivan to dismiss the case.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Luttig contended that “there are ample grounds in the actions the district court has already taken for the appeals court to order that the government’s motion to dismiss be heard by a different judge, and it should so order.”

It is interesting to revisit this assessment in light of an order issued by the D.C. Circuit on Wednesday. The Circuit directed that the participants in the dispute over Judge Sullivan’s actions, including Judge Sullivan himself, must address the question of whether Sullivan should either recuse himself or be disqualified by the Circuit. Arguments in the case will be heard this coming Tuesday, August 11, in a rare en banc review by the full Circuit (i.e., all active judges who have not taken senior status, minus one who has recused himself, so it will be a ten-judge panel).

Let’s back up for a moment.