RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15997/michael-flynn-innocent

From a legal and policy point of view, encouraging the FBI to misuse its legitimate authority to investigate past crimes, solely to create future crimes is both immoral and illegal.

Let us hear now from the former civil libertarians for whom any violation of law is permissible, as long as it is directed at a Trump associate.

Anyone who knows how the system works in practice would understand why an innocent man—or a defendant in a close case—might be coerced into pleading guilty…. in this case, it is alleged that the government threatened, if Flynn did not plead guilty, to indict his son.

There must be a single standard of justice and civil liberties — including the presumption of innocence — that transcends partisan politics. This message has been forgotten by both parties.

More than a year ago I wrote that it was clear General Michael Flynn should never have pleaded guilty because he did not commit a crime. Even if he lied to the FBI, his lie was not “material.” For a lie to be a crime under federal law, it must be material to the investigation – meaning that the lies pertain to the issues being legitimately investigated. The role of the FBI is to investigate past crimes, not to create new ones. Because the FBI investigators already knew the answer to the question they asked him—whether he had spoken to the Russian Ambassador—their purpose was not to elicit new information relevant to their investigation, but rather to spring a perjury trap on him. When they asked Flynn the question, they had a recording of his conversation with the Russian, of which he was presumably unaware. So his answer was not material to the investigation because they already had the information about which they were inquiring.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/07/is-the-cdc-meddling-with-the-2020-election/

The coronavirus crisis is reaping big political benefits for Democrats. President Trump’s signature achievement—a booming economy with record low unemployment, rising middle-class wages, and a sky-high stock market—lies in tatters. At least 33 million Americans abruptly and without warning are out of work. Second-quarter gross domestic product estimates are horrifying, a double-digit dive that the country has never experienced even in the direst economic times.

Americans are scared for their health and fearful of the future. Neighbors are turning on each other; the inner tyrant of every state governor, mayor, and police officer has been unleashed. And President Trump has been denied access to his only stimulant—energetic political rallies where he connects directly with supporters across the country.

Instead, the president has been stuck in Washington, D.C., listening to the advice of “experts” who used fraudulent models to convince him in late March to “shut down” the country.

Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, has been safely shuttered away in his home studio where he struggles to read teleprompter scripts or offer articulate responses to softball questions from late-night hosts. The Democratic National Convention has been canceled so the American electorate won’t be able to assess Biden’s frailty and incoherence on a national stage a few months before Election Day.

At the same time, near-daily disclosures confirm that corrupt federal prosecutors and cops loyal to Barack Obama targeted Trump associates to sabotage his 2016 candidacy and then derail his presidency under the ruse of Russian election collusion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/covid19_governments_bad_choices_and_the_impact_on_doctors.html

Private physicians’ offices across the country have had to furlough core staff, often with decades of service to their businesses, because of the coronavirus-induced, government-mandated shutdown.  Doctors who own these small business ventures, many of whom were on the front lines in the battle against AIDS back when it was 100% lethal, have been forced to sit on their hands at home for this pandemic.  Surgery centers, frequently the lifeline between economic solvency and bankruptcy for both private surgeons and hospitals, are lying dormant, their fixed costs still accruing.

Promised federal bailout money is not going to come close to repairing the long-term damage done by this medieval “fix” recommended by “the scientific experts.”  Those advising our leaders have provided a great excuse for the forces seeking to justify government-run health care and expand the power of an unchecked, totalitarian federal bureaucracy.  Medical practices, like many small businesses across the country, are being killed off for the cause of “saving just one more life.”  What they have done is unconscionable, poorly justified, and quite frankly, un-American.

History will not be kind to the CDC when the dust settles from this crisis.  The Communicable Disease Center exists to help us with situations just like COVID-19, pandemics being its purview.  It could be argued that having the nation prepared with accurate means of testing for novel viruses and being equipped with an adequate number of masks and ventilators would be an obvious first purpose for the agency.  Yet in the past couple of years, the agency has spent well over a billion and a half dollars for things like chronic disease prevention, health promotion, environmental health, and injury prevention.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-p-goldman/2020/05/07/dont-forget-why-the-deep-state-targeted-mike-flynn-n389003

Now that the Justice Department has abandoned its prosecution of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, it’s important to remember what made the case of Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn so central to the Intelligence Community’s mutiny against Trump. As a reminder, here is what I wrote in Asia Times last November:

As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.

The Syrian debacle brought Russia into Syria in 2015; the American-backed jihad had turned into a Petri dish for Russian Muslims from the Caucasus, as well as Chinese Uighurs and a motley assortment of foreign militants. Russia had interests of opportunity, for example, a warm-water refueling station for its Mediterranean fleet, but the risk of blowback from the Syrian civil war was the most urgent motive for President Vladimir Putin’s intervention.

That is the background to the mutiny in the US Intelligence Community against the elected commander-in-chief.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/let-the-doctors-work/

Sweeping bans on ‘non-essential’ procedures have left medical professionals idle and patients less healthy.

Buried in the recent announcement by the Bureau of Economic Analysis that real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020 was a remarkable fact: Nearly half of the GDP decrease was due to reduced spending on health-care services. You read that correctly — in the middle of the worst pandemic in over a century, and after decades of unrelenting expenditure growth, we spent less on medical care. How can one explain this anomaly?

It is because Americans, in response to government guidance and fear of an unfamiliar pathogen, are putting off medical care — care that is often essential to their health. Both the CDC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) instructed hospitals and outpatient facilities to delay elective procedures and to reschedule all non-urgent ambulatory visits and hospital admissions, in order to preserve medical manpower, hospital beds, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (PPE) for treatment of an expected surge of COVID-19 patients. State and local authorities issued stay-at-home guidelines and travel bans.

Hospitals, health-care providers, and patients have complied. Hernia repairs, hip replacements, colonoscopies, mammograms, and a variety of other common procedures are no longer performed unless urgent need can be demonstrated. Visits to physicians’ offices have plummeted as patients shelter in place and as fear of contracting COVID-19 at a medical facility has taken hold.  Primary-care visits have dropped by 50 percent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/rosenstein-scope-memo-confirms-baselessness-of-trump-russia-probe/

A spurious prosecutor futilely investigated four nobodies who did not commit the nonexistent crimes they were ridiculously accused of.

Finally, three years coming, the Justice Department is showing a little more leg on the Rosenstein “scope” memo — the directive by which then–deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein defined the parameters of the investigation he’d appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to conduct.

Of course, the games never end in the Trump–Russia probe, so there’s a hitch. The scope memo remains partially, tantalizingly redacted. Disclosure is limited to Rosenstein’s purported grounds for investigating four members of the Trump presidential campaign: Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn. But six lines of text, which appear to describe a fifth person, and the supposed basis for investigating that person, remain blacked out.

Does this redacted section refer to President Trump? We do not know.

We do know that the FBI had opened a criminal investigation of Trump, based on the untenable theory that a president’s firing of the FBI director could amount to obstruction of justice. The last 200 pages of the special counsel’s voluminous report, moreover, demonstrate that the cabal of activist Democrats that Robert Mueller recruited to conduct the investigation tried like hell to make an obstruction case on Trump. But was that aspect of the special counsel’s enterprise licensed by Rosenstein’s scope memo? For some reason, we’re not being told.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/experts-damned-by-their-own-research/

“The lockdowns in the UK and US were largely inspired by the ‘expert’ projections and recommendations of two men, Neil Ferguson and Anthony Fauci, who not only share a sorry history of dud predictions but also admit they are ‘not at all certain’ where the pandemic is going, how best to stop it or if yesterday’s advice will be the same as tomorrow’s.”

Our conclusions, to a degree, are encouraging for ongoing pandemic planning efforts in the US that emphasize the potentially key role that might be played in a future pandemic by exactly the sort of public health measures used in 1918′ (emphasis mine).
                                                                         –Neil Ferguson

These closing remarks aren’t exactly beaming with confidence. Yet this is the conclusion of Neil Ferguson’s 2007 publication on the public health interventions during the 1918 pandemic, the same leading expert whose advice and epidemiological models has greatly shaped and influenced the pandemic responses of both the U.S. and U.K.

Ferguson and co-author Martin C.J. Bootsma compared data from 16 cities during the 1918 influenza outbreak and cautiously argued there is correlative evidence that the mortality rate can be reduced by up to 25 per cent through non-pharmaceutical interventions.  One might imagine that such a study could recommend what specific public health measures might play a “key role”, such as closing schools or banning public gatherings, except that the authors openly admit their research offers no insight into any specific measures but only  “overall reductions in transmission caused by the whole range of control measures used.”

Moreover, the authors acknowledge serious limitations to their research:

Extrapolating from 1918 to the present day requires great caution; the U.S. of 1918 was a very different place from today” and that, “we cannot exclude the possibility that there may have been some other factor that varied among cities, and that might have been partly responsible for the observed variation in overall mortality.

https://cms.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/new-york-nursing-home-deaths-appro

The numbers are going to keep getting worse.

Last month, in 1 in 5 Coronavirus Deaths Could Have Been Prevented by Securing Nursing Homes, I documented some of the scale of the malfeasance in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Virginia, and other parts of the country by Team Lockdown.

In neighboring New York, nearly 1 in 4 coronavirus deaths emerged from nursing homes. Those 3,060 deaths are only part of the story and represent an extremely incomplete picture. The Health Department had battled against releasing the information, claiming that it was protecting the privacy of residents. Even when the people pleading for the release of the information were their own loved ones.

In one facility, 17% of the residents have died. In 5 others, more than 10% are dead.

Governor Cuomo’s Department of Health had issued an order that, “no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19” and also prohibited requiring testing of returning patients. Sending hospitalized patients with coronavirus to the same mismanaged nursing homes was a death sentence for countless seniors in those facilities.

The Cuomo death toll is now much worse.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-6-why-are-government-employees-supposedly-immune-to-layoffs

It’s the time of the coronavirus, and as we all know, that means that it is the moral responsibility of all governors and state health officials to issue “lockdown” commands, compelling all “non-essential” businesses to close until further notice. Although the sweep and severity of these “lockdown” commands has varied from state to state, at this point the governors of most states have ordered the closure of nearly all restaurants, bars, hotels, gyms, hair salons, and thousands of similar businesses. Obviously, the immediate result of these orders was going to be that the employees of the businesses would get furloughed or laid off. Some 26 million new unemployment claims had been filed by late April, with more undoubtedly to be revealed in the next weekly report.

Of course, with thousands of businesses shuttering, and their revenues disappearing, state and local tax revenues are also falling off a cliff. So if the same rules apply to these governmental entities as to private businesses, they would be about to make massive layoffs as well.

And yet, if you look at discussion about how state and local governments should deal with their own financial issues, somehow the whole idea that government workers might get laid off is beyond the purview of polite discussion. The same people who have effectively ordered the layoff of close to 30 million people in the private sector at the same time think that every single job of a civil service bureaucrat is somehow sacrosanct.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/justice-department-drops-case-against-michael-flynn/

The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.

The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”