RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/26/four-covid-19-charts-democrats-cant-let-you-know-about/

If the Democratic National Convention made anything clear, it is that Democrats are entirely invested in making the coronavirus pandemic look worse than it is in the United States.

Almost every speaker decried the response and blamed President Donald Trump for the scale of the disease in the country.

In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” Later he said, “We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths.”

Fact checkers somehow missed Biden’s flagrant abuse of statistics. NPR’s “fact check” of Biden’s speech said only that, if anything, Biden undercounted the number of COVID-19 deaths.

But the number of infections and deaths is meaningless out of context. What matters is how many have died per capita, how many who’ve been infected have succumbed to the disease and where the trends are right now.

When you do that, the picture looks far less bleak.

The U.S. is far from the worst in the world in terms of the death rate per million population. The U.S. ranks 10th for per capita deaths worldwide, and notably better than the United Kingdom with its socialist health care scheme, and Sweden, which adopted a much more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic than the U.S.

On confirmed cases per million, the U.S. ranks 9th, but this is in part due to the extensive testing we’ve done. In fact, despite what Biden and Co. will have you believe, we are in the top of the pack when it comes to COVID-19 tests per capita. (Note also that only four of the other 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations do better than the U.S. on tests per capita.)

When it comes to the case fatality rate – the share of confirmed cases who have died – there is no comparison. Not only does the U.S. outperform most countries – as well as the world overall – the case fatality rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdowns-economy-pandemic-recession-business-shutdown-sweden-coronavirus-11598281419?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

Blanket business shutdowns—which the U.S. never tried before this pandemic—led to a deep recession. Economists and health experts say there may be a better way.

In response to the novel and deadly coronavirus, many governments deployed draconian tactics never used in modern times: severe and broad restrictions on daily activity that helped send the world into its deepest peacetime slump since the Great Depression.

The equivalent of 400 million jobs have been lost world-wide, 13 million in the U.S. alone. Global output is on track to fall 5% this year, far worse than during the financial crisis, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Despite this steep price, few policy makers felt they had a choice, seeing the economic crisis as a side effect of the health crisis. They ordered nonessential businesses closed and told people to stay home, all without the extensive analysis of benefits and risks that usually precedes a new medical treatment.

There wasn’t time to gather that sort of evidence: Faced with a poorly understood and rapidly spreading pathogen, they prioritized saving lives.

Five months later, the evidence suggests lockdowns were an overly blunt and economically costly tool.

https://spectator.us/playing-fire-portland-riots-west-coast/

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means… Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’

Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city. It began as a protest against police mistreatment of African Americans after George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody and has morphed into a festival of violent nihilism, tinged with Marxism.

Across America, demonstrators have demanded police reforms and, quite often, dramatic cuts to law enforcement budgets — and the Democratic politicians who govern nearly all major cities have been woolly in their response. The demonstrations themselves were generally peaceful during daylight hours and often violent at night. Some protesters made political points, painting slogans on walls, pulling statues off pedestals. Others simply engaged in mindless destruction, such as defacing statues of abolitionists, or greedy opportunism. There’s nothing political about smashing store windows and grabbing an armful of shoes, computers, or TVs. Or about torching the corner grocery store.

https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/local-business-owners-find-livelihoods-smashed-following-second-night-of-kenosha-unrest

KENOSHA — More community devastation in Kenosha following another night of civil unrest which led to businesses and institutions in the city to being destroyed in the aftermath of the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Along 60th street, near the Department of Corrections building at 13th Avenue, several businesses were destroyed.

The Department of Corrections building was set ablaze and crews worked to demolish the building on Tuesday morning. Hot spots and flames still shot out of a neighboring business, B&L Furniture, which was targeted by vandals overnight as well.

“It’s just all gone,” said Linda Carpenter as she cried into her son Scott’s arms. She and her family have owned their furniture shop for nearly 40 years before it was reduced to a pile of burning debris.

“My next job is to clean this up and then after that, I don’t have a job,” said Scott as he realized their livelihoods had been smashed.

On the same block, several car dealerships were destroyed and local businesses were busted into and vandalized.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/clinesmith-guilty-plea-using-a-digraph-to-conceal-a-massive-deception-of-the-court/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=featured-writers&utm_term=first

He twisted the meaning of a CIA term to define Carter Page as an unwitting CIA source rather than what he was: a CIA informant willingly providing info for use against Russians.

Author’s Note: This is the second of a three-part series (see Part 1).

Kevin Clinesmith’s lies and document doctoring, which resulted in his guilty plea to a felony false-statement charge last week, were prompted by what turned out to be the worst-case scenario, for both him and the FBI.

To recap, we are focusing on June 2017, when the FBI was preparing to submit an application for a fourth 90-day warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The “SSA,” a supervisory special agent at FBI headquarters whom we met in Part 1, was to be the affiant on that application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Not assigned to Crossfire Hurricane until December 2016, the SSA had not been involved in the investigation when the bureau opened it five months earlier. He was personally unaware that, months before the first Page FISA warrant was sought in October 2016, the CIA had informed the FBI about Page’s years of work as a CIA informant, authorized by the agency for “operational contact” with Russians. Though the SSA was not on the investigative team, he had been the headquarters official assigned to swear to the truth of the renewal warrant applications in January and April 2017. He thus knew that the bureau heavily relied on Page’s prior years of contact with Russians in portraying Page to the FISC as a clandestine agent of Moscow, at the center of a suspected Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy.

The SSA became alarmed when Page, while vehemently denying that he was a spy for Russia, publicly claimed that he’d been a U.S. government intelligence source against Russia. The SSA realized that if Page was telling the truth, it would “seriously impact the predication of our entire investigation.”

That was not the half of it. When the SSA asked Kevin Clinesmith, the bureau’s point man for contact with the CIA, to check on Page’s claims, Clinesmith faced the worst-case scenario, not only because Page was telling the truth, but because the FBI had every reason to know — before it began seeking surveillance warrants from the FISC eight months earlier — that Page had indeed been a CIA informant. Moreover, Clinesmith, a lawyer in the FBI branch that reviewed FISA applications, had been involved from the start.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/08/25/ten-ways-binge-buying-bureaucrats-spent-91-billion-in-a-year-end-2019-shopping-spree/#74915f754c45

Christmas comes in September, not December, for federal contractors.

In the final month of the fiscal year, federal agencies scramble to spend the leftovers in their annual budgets. They worry that spending less than Congress appropriated this year will mean a thinner budget next year.

So, rather than admit the department could run efficiently on fewer taxpayer dollars, federal agencies embark on a shopping spree. This is the “use it or lose it” spending phenomenon – and it happens every year on the taxpayer dime.

Our OpenTheBooks oversight report – The Use-It-Or-Lose-It Spending Spree, How The Feds Spent $91 Billion In September 2019 detailed 642,567 transactions – or about 21,418 expenditures per day.

In the final nine days of the year, federal agencies signed $51 billion in contracts, which exceeded the spending in each of the trailing eleven months. In the final two days, agencies authorized a whopping $23.8 billion.

In February 2020, President Donald Trump committed to ending the bureaucratic binge-buying in his budget to Congress FY2021. So, we reached out to the budget hawks at the Office of Management And Budget (OMB) for comment.

PROMOTED

OMB Director Russ Vought responded: “The practice of use it or lose it spending has cost American taxpayers an untold amount of money. It’s a practice that needs to stop and OMB will continue our efforts to end this wasteful spending.”

https://worldisraelnews.com/edward-alexander-a-champion-of-the-jewish-people-1936-2020/

Edward Alexander should have been a household name in the Jewish community. Perhaps the community was too busy celebrating the very people he was defending them against, the likes of Thomas Friedman, Michael Lerner, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Peter Beinart, and many others.

Alexander was a professor of English literature who wrote on the great Victorians, notably John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. About 40 years ago, he shifted gears to largely write on Jewish issues. His style sharpened by studying literature’s greats, he entered the lists an eloquent champion of Israel against its detractors. His writing was  arresting: “The birth of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations of life ever made by a martyred people.”

In an essay praising historian and thinker Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State for analyzing the maladies of Israel’s intellectuals, Alexander writes that in Hazony Israel has perhaps found its latter-day Jeremiah, “but given the widespread tone-deafness of the country’s enlightened classes to their Jewish heritage, perhaps what is needed at the moment is an Israeli Jonathan Swift.” Alexander himself is the closest the Jews have come to their own Swift with his erudition, wit and scathing shafts against the moral hypocrites and self-haters.

For Alexander was fierce as well as erudite and eloquent. His erudition and masterful style was on display in works like The Holocaust and the War of Ideas and The Resonance of Dust. But he also impaled the sacred cows of the literary and political establishment. In The Jewish Wars he unmasked Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Tutu, “whose speeches against apartheid” writes Alexander in 1990 “return obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/chinas-champion-dianne-feinstein-lloyd-billingsley/

Back in April, Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt, a Republican, filed a lawsuit charging that Chinese Communist officials are “responsible for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world, including Missourians.”  For Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the  Missouri lawsuit was the problem.

“We launch a series of unknown events that could be very, very dangerous,” said Feinstein in a July 30, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.  “I think this is a huge mistake.” As Feinstein doubtless knows, the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD) , which bagged a $1 billion mask deal with California, is suing Vice Media for a story charging that BYD had links to the Chinese military and forced labor. Feinstein did not say if that lawsuit was a mistake, and possibly launch unknown events that could be very dangerous. On the other hand, she had only praise for the Chinese government.

“Where I live, we hold China as a potential trading partner,” Feinstein said in the hearing. “As a country that has pulled tens of millions of people out of poverty in a short period of time. And as a country growing into a respectable nation among other nations. And I deeply believe that. I’ve been to China a number of times. I’ve studied the issues.” Much of that study, it turns out, has been on location.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/what_will_replace_the_police_ten_historical_examples.html

The future of local police departments has become a top election issue. Rasmussen released recent polls showing that Americans pay close attention to debates about law and order.  For instance, 50% of likely voters want to see harder crackdowns on urban unrest, while only 38% support continuing protests in cities.  Overall, 72% are concerned about recent reports of urban violence.  Over 60% of Americans said their feelings about the protests will have an effect on their November voting.

Perhaps we have found the Democrats’ Kryptonite.  Conservatives have noticed for quite some time that the left never showed adequate concern about far-left extremism (listen here).  The far left has greater numbers and, unlike the far right, is entrenched in major institutions like colleges.  The far left hopes to claim the anti-police violence as a historic win for its side (see here).  Democrats can’t claim that the Floyd protests had nothing to do with rioting.

Protests have become linked in Americans’ minds with riots.  The organization seen as leading these demonstrations was Black Lives Matter (BLM), whose premier issue was defunding or abolishing the police.  BLM leaders like Alicia Garza never hid their intent.  Most BLM activists rejected talk of mere reform as too weak and compromising.

Attempts by skittish Democrats like Jim Clyburn to disown anti-police slogans can’t undo the effect of many fellow Democrats’ embracing of a group whose trademark demand is shutting down police.  While some Democrats insist that “defunding” means simply reinvesting in alternatives to standard policing, Americans remain wholly unsupportive of replacing their local police departments with social workers, mental health respondents, charities, community elders, or healers — all stand-ins put forward by advocates of taking away police funding and firing cops.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-loses-another-round-to-manhattan-da/

A quick update on developments in Manhattan District attorney Cyrus Vance’s investigation, in which the DA has subpoenaed years of President Trump’s financial records (including tax information) from his accountant, Mazars.

The DA’s office has just agreed to forbear from any effort to enforce the subpoena until after the Second Circuit federal appeals court has a chance to review the president’s motion to stay the latest ruling he just lost. At the end of last week, Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) issued a lengthy opinion denying Trump’s motion to quash the subpoena.

Before I go on with that, let’s back up to how we got here, because I believe the DA’s grand jury investigation has been widely misinterpreted.

The common assumption has been that Vance is focused on the hush money payments to the two women who claim to have had trysts with Donald Trump about a decade before he ran for office. Of these, the Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a Stormy Daniels) transaction would presumably be of more interest to the DA because it more directly involves the Trump Organization. On that deal, Michael Cohen (the now-convicted former lawyer and self-described “fixer” for Trump) laid out the payment and was reimbursed by the Trump Organization, and there are questions about whether the business properly accounted for the payments under New York law.

To be clear, I am not saying a crime was committed — I have no idea. I am just saying the DA’s interest in and jurisdiction over that transaction is easy to grasp. By contrast, the Karen McDougal transaction involved the purchase of her story by American Media Inc. (owner of National Enquirer), with no reimbursement by the president or his business conglomerate.