RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-hate-is-making-it-harder-to-study-hydroxychloroquine/

Yesterday, I pointed out the potential consequences of having an overwrought, childish, partisan debate over a lifesaving drug that’s used by millions of Americans. Today, I see, Joe Biden is comparing hydroxychloroquine to poison. “It’s like saying maybe if you inject Clorox into your blood it may cure you,” Biden said of Donald Trump’s admission that he takes the drug. “C’mon, man! What is he doing? What in God’s name is he doing?”

Now, I get that Biden thinks it’s cute to merge the myth that Trump wants Americans to inject themselves with bleach and the president’s unproven prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine. It’s worth noting, however, that the presumptive Democratic Party nominee is also now telling Americans — including those who need this low-risk prescribed drug that has been approved for all public use for over 70 years — that taking hydroxychloroquine is tantamount to injecting yourself with bleach.

Listen to this NPR interview with some doctors trying to conduct tests of hydroxychloroquine effectiveness. Dr. John Giles, a rheumatologist at Columbia University, who says that the partisan fight over hydroxychloroquine has made it virtually impossible for him to find people to test the effectiveness of the drug against coronavirus. Why would anyone want to swallow Clorox, right?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-ron-desantis-florida-covid-19-strategy/

The Florida governor explains a COVID-19 strategy that has gotten bad press and favorable results.

A  couple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decided that Governor Ron DeSantis was a public menace who was going to get Floridians killed with his lax response to the coronavirus crisis.

In an interview with National Review, DeSantis says he was surprised at “how knee-jerk” the hostile coverage was, but he “also knew that none of these people knew anything about Florida at all, so I didn’t care what they were saying.”

The conventional wisdom has begun to change about Florida, as the disaster so widely predicted hasn’t materialized. It’s worth delving into the state’s response — as described by DeSantis and a couple of members of his team — because it is the opposite of the media narrative of a Trump-friendly governor disregarding the facts to pursue a reckless agenda. DeSantis and his team have followed the science closely from the beginning, which is why they forged a nuanced approach, but one that focused like a laser on the most vulnerable population, those in nursing homes.

An irony of the national coverage of the coronavirus crisis is that at the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/19/why-california-is-in-trouble–340000-public-employees-with-100000-paychecks-cost-taxpayers-45-billion/#20e8a6df5fb8

Despite California’s $54 billion budget deficit and $1 trillion unfunded pension liability, there are 340,390 government employees bringing home six-figure salary and pension checks.

Recently, though, Gov. Gavin Newsom asked U.S. taxpayers for a bailout.

The governor wrote a letter to Congress requesting a $1 trillion in coronavirus 50-state aid. Then, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi obliged by adding $500 billion for the states into the HEROES Act – the bill passed and now awaits action in the Senate.

Here, in part, is why California is asking for taxpayers help.

Our auditors at OpentheBooks.com found truck drivers in San Francisco making $159,000 per year; lifeguards in LA County costing taxpayers $365,000; nurses at UCSF making up to $501,000; the UCLA athletic director earning $1.8 million; and 1,420 city employees out-earning all 50 state governors ($202,000).

Using our new interactive mapping tool, quickly review (by ZIP code) the 340,390 California public employees and retirees who earn more than $100,000 and cost taxpayers $45 billion (FY2018-9). Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-rice-cya-memo-unredacted/

How amusing to find President Obama’s national-security advisor, Susan Rice, suddenly calling for public release of the Flynn–Kislyak conversation intercepted by the Obama administration in late December 2016. I called for its release nearly three-and-a-half years ago. Dr. Rice, in a familiar pattern for her, has spent the ensuing years saying things that were obviously untrue only to reverse herself once the paper trail starts to dribble out.

Try not to get dizzy. Rice has gone from claiming to have had no knowledge of Obama administration monitoring of Flynn and other Trump associates, to claiming no knowledge of any unmaskings of Trump associates, to admitting she was complicit in the unmaskings, to — now — a call for the recorded conversation between retired general Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to be released because it would purportedly show that the Obama administration had good reason to be concerned about Flynn (y’know, the guy she said she had no idea they were investigating).

Naturally, we have now learned that Rice was deeply involved in the Obama administration’s Trump–Russia investigation, including its sub-investigation of Flynn, a top Trump campaign surrogate who was slated to replace Rice as national-security advisor when President Trump took office. Last night, I did a column for Fox News, analyzing the newly unredacted paragraph from Rice’s previously reported email memorializing a White House meeting on these subjects.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/19/fauci-ism-dream-or-nightmare/

The takeover of America’s state, local, and federal governments by Fauci and his team is a dream come true for the progressives. Since at least the time of Woodrow Wilson, the progressives have dreamed of and campaigned for an America ruled by experts.

Rule by experts: this is it. How do you like it?

Fauci and Co. have taken control of the lives of individual Americans to an extent that surpasses anything achieved by fascism’s great original, Benito Mussolini. Of course, there is a difference. Mussolini was a pompous orator who favored a military uniform. Fauci speaks softly and wears the mantle of science. But just as Mussolini’s oratory led Italy to disaster, Fauci’s pronouncements have already done enormous damage to America. The full extent of the damage to America by Fauciism is yet to be determined.

Though it pains me to say so, it is up to you to determine how much damage to America he is going to be allowed to do.

Fauciism has been a long time coming. About a century ago, Woodrow Wilson, the first American president to reject utterly the American founding, set in motion the changes that brought us to our present circumstance. The Founders, I reckon, would not be surprised by the upsurge of Fauciism, human nature being what it is, and the wisdom of the Founders’ generation being hard-won and too easily lost.

Just in case you are puzzled by what I have to say about Wilson, here he is, speaking for himself:

No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle…

Wilson, the very model of the modern progressive, completely rejected the Founders’ self-evident truths and unalienable rights. Wilson and the modern progressives saw the Declaration and the Constitution as anachronisms that America needed to progress beyond.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/americas-gay-hero-bruce-bawer/

If you’d told me a couple of decades ago that leading conservative commentators would one day be celebrating an openly gay man as an American hero, I’d never have believed it. But that’s exactly what’s happening now. The man in question, of course, is Richard Grenell, currently serving both as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany and as the Acting Director of National Intelligence, and hence a member of the Cabinet.

It was under intense pressure from Grenell that the House Intelligence Committee, on May 7, released the transcripts of 53 interviews conducted privately in connection with the probe into President Trump’s alleged Russian ties. In those interviews, former members of the Obama Administration – several of whom had publicly insisted, on cable news shows and elsewhere, that there was firm evidence of collusion between Trump and the Kremlin – swore under oath that they were unaware of any such evidence.

And it was Grenell who, four days later, declassified the list of Obama Administration officials who, in the interval between the 2016 election and the Trump inaugural, requested the “unmasking” of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s choice for National Security Advisor, so they could listen in on his phone calls. When Grenell made that list public two days later, he immeasurably aided the effort to get to the bottom of the plot against Trump now known as Obamagate.

“It was a brilliant move,” wrote Stephen Kruiser about Grenell’s decision to release the list. “Grenell ain’t playing. It’s a thing of beauty the way he’s handling the Left….Not all heroes wear capes.” On his podcast, Dan Bongino, author of two definitive books about Obamagate – which he has dubbed “Spygate” – called Grenell “terrific.” On Sebastian Gorka’s radio show, Victoria Toensing, also an expert on Obama Administration perfidy, said, “Thank God for Ric Grenell!” Gorka, who briefly served in the Trump White House, replied: “Bless him, he’s working hard to get the truth out!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-arts-of-government-criminality/

Destroying or altering evidence, lying under oath, leaking classified info … but no pre-dawn televised raid for any of the wrongdoers.

 I n the entire 2016–19 efforts to derail the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA, and other government bureaus have consistently sought to distort reality. Some of our best and brightest have destroyed evidence, altered documents, lied, leaked, and pled amnesia when questioned about their reprehensible conduct. At each stage, they were aided and abetted by a compliant media.

The dissimulation over the past four years has fallen into four rough categories. Here are a few examples of each.

Deletion of Evidence

Christopher Steele, who bragged for years of his meticulous research and whose work has been quoted chapter and verse as proof of Trump wrongdoing, recently testified under oath to a British court that he now has no records of his supposed conversations with “sub source” Russian informants. His lawyers previously had insisted that his sources were “meticulously documented and recorded.” Now Steele sheepishly admits that such an assertion was a lie, given that he can produce no evidence at all for his meticulous allegations. He admits that his emails and documents were wiped clean from his devices by January 2017.

http://www.alexberenson.com/commentary-why-so-many-people-in-the-media-dislike-my-efforts-to-spread-facts-about-covid/

(Note: I first posted this thread on Twitter, but given its length I decided to run it as a single page here. Also: “Blue-checks” is Twitter slang for people with verified accounts, who are often prominent reporters. As is sometimes pointed out, I also have a blue check, though I am no longer part of the media establishment.)

I’ve thought a bit about why the media blue-checks hate me so (and, let’s be honest, they do hate me so). I’m nobody, really; I don’t have a primetime news show or a syndicated column; I have all of 103,000 followers on Twitter. But I am a particular burr for three reasons:

I’m a class traitor. Not just because I worked for The New York Times for 10 years and wrote lots of hardball pieces about companies (not to mention our failures in Iraq) that make me tough to dismiss as a right-wing nutter, much as they’d like to try.

No, I’m a class traitor in another, arguably more important way, too; the media/academic left tries to cudgel its opponents with an attitude of mocking scorn and intellectual superiority. The President has been a useful foil for them in this (as they have been for him).

But that game doesn’t work with me; I’m as credentialed as the people shouting at me , only I follow the facts where they go. (This is why these people hated Tell Your Children so much; one can know cannabis has serious mental health risks and still want it legalized, but the blue-checks had been telling each other the same nonsense for so long they genuinely didn’t understand that cannabis was dangerous. They’re still trying to figure out what to do with that news. And they can’t stand knowing it.)

So yelling at me to shut up doesn’t work, and trying to bait me into arguments doesn’t work, and telling me my tone is wrong doesn’t work (even when it is); I keep on merrily presenting studies and facts, and even if the media won’t pay attention, other people will.

And the email I get – which is overwhelming, and overwhelmingly in favor of this effort – suggests many, many people – some fancy, some not – are sick of feeling mocked and told they’re stupid for their sincere beliefs about the dangers of the lockdowns.

The second reason is I think it’s clear by now that my wife and I practice what we preach; we don’t fear #COVID, not for ourselves or our kids. So accusing us of being hypocrites won’t fly. As for those folks calling me a grifter? I’ve done this for free the last two months, with one minor exception, Hillsdale College paid me to make the video about the failure of the models. Maybe I’ll write a book one day, maybe not, but financially this has been nothing but a distraction. (No matter; I never imagined John Wells would have the career he did, and I was always careful with the novel money, which was… surprising. And we are a two-income family.)

The third reason is the most obvious: the hysterics have been wrong. They know it, whether they admit it or not. Except for the most at-risk populations – who should be the focus of our protective efforts – #COVID looks to be a minor risk. And with every day that goes by, every state and country that reopen without catastrophe, the lockdowns appear more insane.

We should all be THRILLED about this fact, but too many of us aren’t. So the media (and the lockdown governors) are stretching further and further to try to scare people – the recent pediatric stuff being only the grossest example. I’m going to keep calling them out. Plenty of other people will too, but not necessarily as aggressively.

And now we come back to tone. Well, I’ll be honest…

As far as I’m concerned, I bite my tongue a lot of the time. If these blue-checks knew what I REALLY thought of them or the damage they have done AND ARE STILL DOING by refusing to accept the data and facts and science…

They’d hate me even more.

Have a great night.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/declassified-email-reveals-obama-comey-conversation-about-flynn_3357016.html

Then-FBI Director James Comey and President Barack Obama discussed intercepted calls between incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador during a meeting at the White House on Jan. 5, 2017, according to a newly declassified email written by one of the meeting’s attendants, national security adviser Susan Rice.

Rice’s email had previously been released, but a portion pertaining to the conversation about Flynn remained redacted until May 19. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence approved the declassification after a request by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

The previously public portions of the email, which Rice sent to herself after the meeting, showed that Obama advised the senior officials present about being “mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it pertains to Russia.”

The newly declassified portion of the email shows that Comey responded to that instruction by pointing out that he is concerned about the frequency of communications between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.