RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been hailed in the press as the nation’s top infectious disease expert.  He’s been feted with presidential honors and high praise for his medical acumen.  His policy disagreements with President Trump, supposedly as the voice of “science,” have made him a hero on the left.  Such laurels and the implied power conveyed have led to some weird side-effects — such as his image featured on ladies’ underwear and declarations that he’s the sexiest man alive.

But it’s about time this idol topples, based on this summary about Fauci’s startlingly bad medicine and bad medical policy on COVID, which has in fact cost thousands of lives.  And yes, he is very specifically to blame. 

Virologist Steven Hatfill, writing in RealClearPolitics, summed up just how disastrous Fauci has been for America’s COVID response, based on Fauci’s suppression of evidence about hydroxychloroquine, the safest and most effective treatment for COVID based on all reputable studies, and the political power he’s used to halt its treatment even as the rest of the world got well from the inexpensive medication’s use.

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

Americans are being urged to, forced to, guilted into, and bullied into wearing masks. If we don’t wear masks, Democrats smugly tell us, we’re selfish killers who have no regard for the life and safety of others. But is that true? It turns out that the science about masks is anything but settled – and that masks come with some significant downsides.

Even as Fauci the Hypocrite says masks for thee but not for me, serious scientific authorities are moving in the other direction. Holland’s scientific community holds that masks don’t help and could hurt:

‘Face masks in public places are not necessary, based on all the current evidence,’ said Coen Berends, spokesman for the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. ‘There is no benefit and there may even be negative impact.’

[snip]

[The Outbreak Management Team] believes they detract from a clear three-pronged message that has kept deaths from coronavirus down to less than half the rate in Britain: wash hands regularly, maintain social distancing of 1.5 metres and stay at home if suffering any symptoms.

The one exception outside of the medical frontline has been on public transport, where masks are mandatory on the basis it is difficult to stay apart on crowded buses, ferries and trains.

[snip]

‘The evidence for them is contradictory. In general, we think you must be careful with face masks because they can give a false sense of security. People think they’re immune from disease or stop social distancing. That is very negative.’

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/24/barrs-dilemma-how-to-get-politics-out-of-the-justice-department/#slide-1

The Democrats’ case against the attorney general is wildly distorted

Attorney General William P. Barr has a dilemma: how to purge federal law enforcement of the politicization that has left its reputation in tatters, while simultaneously ensuring accountability in one of modern history’s most politically combustible criminal probes.

That probe, conducted at Barr’s direction by John Durham, the United States Attorney for Connecticut, is scrutinizing the origins and predication of what even the attorney general has taken to calling “Russiagate.” This is the “investigation of the investigators,” focusing on the Obama administration’s — in particular, the FBI’s — counterintelligence and criminal investigations into claimed suspicions of Trump “collusion” with Russia. Based on rank hearsay and speculation, much of it sourced to the Hillary Clinton campaign and since discredited, Obama officials developed a theory that Donald Trump had been complicit in the Kremlin’s hacking of Democratic Party emails. The Kremlin’s supposed goal was to snatch the 2016 presidential election from the heavily favored Hillary Clinton and force Trump, under threat of blackmail, to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding in the Oval Office.

Durham’s probe has drawn the rapt attention of our mercurial president, who, in familiar Trumpian understatement, describes the Obama gambit as “treason.” Ditto for the restive Trump base, which longs for the Democrats’ comeuppance after a three-year “witch hunt,” first by the FBI and then by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. With Election Day less than three months away, Barr has indicated that decisions about whether criminal charges should be filed are imminent.