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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

The Real Center of the Pandemic Saving nursing homes from Covid-19 Chris Pope

https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-super-spreaders-nursing-homes

The Trump administration has called nursing homes “ground zero for Covid-19,” and the analogy is apt—one New York City facility has seen 98 residents die from the disease, while more than two-thirds of Massachusetts nursing homes have reported infections. Though the link to long-term care facilities from deaths after hospitalization is not always recorded, 19 percent of those dying from the virus in Hungary, 51 percent in France, and 62 percent of those in Canada were identified as nursing-home residents.

The population in nursing facilities is vulnerable, and the disease is easily transmitted through extensive personal care in crowded quarters from staff who travel back and forth from the wider community. Several innovative senior homes have secured their facilities by paying bonuses to staff to stay on-site during the most hazardous phase of the crisis. Many lives could be saved if Congress were to support expanding these efforts. Indeed, preventing nursing homes from acting as super-spreaders might help broader communities more swiftly return to normal, too.

In 2016, nursing homes housed 1.3 million Americans, 39 percent aged 85 or over; 800,000 more lived in assisted-living facilities. Nursing-home residents are extremely vulnerable to the coronavirus due to multiple comorbidities: 72 percent have hypertension, 38 percent heart disease, and 32 percent diabetes. Even under normal circumstances, this population faces disproportionately high mortality risks: in 2016, while nursing-home residents made up just 0.4 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for 19 percent of deaths.

Why Did Obama Tell The FBI To Hide Its Activities From The Trump Administration? Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/11/why-did-obama-tell-the-fbi-to-hide-its-activities-from-the-trump-administration/

Even after Barack Obama had left office and James Comey had a new commander-in-chief to report to, Comey obeyed Obama by withholding intel from President Trump.

In 1980, a teenage Amy Carter left a burnt cake in the oven of the White House’s family quarters in a reflex of childish revenge for her father’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan. In 2017, Barack Obama and Joe Biden avenged Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton by leaving what they claim was a Russian agent in the West Wing.

That conclusion inevitably follows if one accepts as credible the FBI’s supposed predicates for launching the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign and the four related probes into George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn.

On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, purportedly to learn if members of the Trump team were “coordinating or cooperating” with the Russian government to influence or interfere with the 2016 elections. By August 16, 2016, the FBI had opened four subsidiary investigations on individuals connected to the campaign, claiming their connections to Russian businesses, pro-Russian factions, or Russian-owned entities “reasonably indicated” they “may wittingly or unwittingly be involved in activity on behalf of the Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the national security.”

Obama Laments Flynn Dismissal . . . after Granting Clemency to FALN Terrorist Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/obama-laments-flynn-dismissal-after-granting

” He recruited and trained a small army of terrorists to murder his fellow Americans. He built bomb factories. He taught the young and impressionable how to make devices that would kill and maim. . . . When he was put on trial, he admitted to doing all he had been accused of — he showed no remorse.”

The best defense is a good offense. That was my first thought on learning that former president Barack Obama has decided to make himself heard on the dismissal of the prosecution of Michael Flynn. As I’ve been noting for years, notwithstanding his pretensions about never interfering in FBI investigations, Mr. Obama was smack in the middle of his administration’s investigation of the Trump campaign. This week, in the exhibits appended to the Justice Department’s Flynn dismissal motion, it was revealed that Obama was neck-deep in the investigation of Flynn, concocted into a collusion caper by his intel advisers and the FBI. It is not a spotlight the former president covets, so he’s lashing out . . . and the usual wagons are circling.

My friend Joe Connor, whose father was killed by FALN, reminds me that in one of his last official acts, Obama granted clemency to Oscar Lopez Rivera, one of that Marxist terrorist organization’s front-men. Ben Domenech put it well at the time:

” He recruited and trained a small army of terrorists to murder his fellow Americans. He built bomb factories. He taught the young and impressionable how to make devices that would kill and maim. . . . When he was put on trial, he admitted to doing all he had been accused of — he showed no remorse.”

Why dismiss the Flynn case? Because the FBI can’t prove it Andrew McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/497064-why-dismiss-the-flynn-case-because

The guiding tenet of the criminal justice system is that the government bears the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the system’s rules are rooted in this principle. These include the prosecutor’s ethical obligation to dismiss a charge in the absence of a good-faith belief that a rational jury could convict the accused based on the government’s evidence.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) last week dismissed the prosecution of Michael Flynn, who fleetingly served as President Trump’s first national security adviser. In all the heated commentary over this decision, scant attention has been paid to the most compelling reason for vacating Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea to one count of making false statements to FBI agents: The government wouldn’t have a prayer of convicting Flynn at trial.

Allowing the conviction to stand would have been a travesty. This basic fact, this utter lack of sufficient evidence, is obscured by the DOJ’s heavy reliance on a legal rationale for dropping the case. In its 20-page memorandum in support of dismissal, the DOJ contends that any false statements by Flynn could not have been material because there was no legitimate basis to investigate or interview him. Federal law makes materiality an essential element of a false-statements charge.

The sky is falling, run for your life, shelter in place – you fools! Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/the-sky-is-falling-run-for-your-life-shelter-in-place-you-fools/

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. ~ T.S Eliot

Two men and one Global organization managed to accomplish what two world wars could not, the near destruction of Western culture and the end of freedom. With the flick of a switch, millions of people peacefully gave up their freedom; yes, sir, no sir, anything you say, sir, because of a paralyzing fear of an invisible enemy, an enemy not clearly understood nor defined.

Our actions demean, denigrate and disrespect the sacrifice of millions of men and women who sacrificed their lives for our right to live freely and free from government overreach.

There is a reason for the statement in the Bible “Do not fear, for I am with you,” because fear takes away individual moral agency; free will, allowing others to rule over us. And it can take years to recover from that fear.

We allowed two men, Ferguson and Fauci, aided and abetted by the WHO, the propaganda arm of the Chinese government, who brought forth the Chinese Virus, to frighten all of us, especially our leaders, to shut down our economies and end our freedom of movement. Except for one country, Sweden.

There had been predictions that 2.2 million would die in America, alone!  As of May 9, 2020, the GLOBAL death toll is 275,000. In a world of 7.8 billion.

Who are these two men?

Obama’s General Flynn Problem When the real message of ‘Dreams from My Father’ becomes clear. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/precedential-election-news-lloyd-billingsley/

“And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

That was former president Barack Obama last week after the DOJ dropped the case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had not been “charged with perjury,” or anything else. The FBI set up Flynn in a perjury trap, with threats against his family, and that violated both institutional norms and the rule of law. The 44th president set up the whole thing in a January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting with FBI boss James Comey, vice president Joe Biden, CIA boss John Brennan, and other administration officials. This revelation created a stir, but it’s really old news.

“POTUS wants to know everything we are doing,” Lisa Page texted to Peter Strzok, the FBI factotum in the campaign against candidate and President Trump. To keep that operation going once Trump took office, POTUS needed to take down Flynn. The January 5 meeting was key but in May of 2017 a bigger bombshell would explode.

‘Dreams from My Father’ was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.

More Covid-19 Patient Data, Please New York finds some surprising results about those who test positive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-covid-19-patient-data-please-11589148282?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

EXCERPT

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has directed hospitals to begin asking new coronavirus patients for their occupation, usual transportation mode and neighborhood. Although New York has been shut down for seven weeks, several thousand people are still testing positive and hundreds are being hospitalized each day.

Last week Mr. Cuomo disclosed some preliminary findings: Twenty-two percent of those who entered the hospital came from a nursing home or assisted living facility. Ninety-six percent had an underlying health condition. Yet only 17% were employed, and only 4% in New York City had been taking public transportation.

“We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work—that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case,” he said. “They’re not working, they’re not traveling, they’re predominantly downstate, predominantly minority, predominantly older.”

Democrats Are Out To Destroy the Presidency They Covet

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/democrats-are-out-to-destroy-the-presidency-they/91125/

Sometimes we wonder whether the Democrats intend to run for the presidency on a campaign to bring back the New Jersey Plan. Not the plan to disrupt traffic on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Rather, the famed plan presented to the real George Washington at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It would have granted the executive power of the United States not to a single individual but to members of an executive committee.

What invites the question — however hypothetical — is the reaction of the Democrats to the decision of the United States to move to drop the criminal case against President Trump’s first National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn. This has driven the New York Times to paroxysms of self-righteousness in an editorial headlined “William Barr’s Perversion of Justice.” It amounts to a geshrai over the constitutional concept of the unitary executive.

This is the idea that the Constitution grants the president all the executive power of the government. This drives the left crazy whenever there is a Republican in the White House. Yet it comports with the plain language of the Constitution. It is sketched in the first sentence of Article 2, which says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The Article commands the president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

Remember when Gov. Kemp was excoriated for re-opening Georgia? Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/remember_when_gov_kemp_was_excoriated_for_reopening_georgia_are_you_wondering_how_that_has_worked_out.html

It was just over 2 weeks ago that Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp was a monster with blood about to be on his hands for greatly loosening the restrictions on residents of the Peach State? Even President Trump joined in, criticizing this move as risky.

Since then, we haven’t seen much about the disaster that was supposed to automatically result from ignoring the gospel of Dr.Fauci.

Which tells you what has happened in this era of corrupt and dishonest propaganda media.

Amanda Prestigiacomo of the Daily Wire fills in the details that any reasonable person would infer from the media blackout:

 Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia celebrated the state’s lowest number of hospitalized novel coronavirus patients and the fewest number of COVID-19 patients on ventilators on Saturday, 15 days since the Republican loosened lockdown restrictions in the face of persistent attacks from the mainstream media and the public disapproval of President Donald Trump.

Respiratory symptoms of COVID-19 “typically appear an average of 5-6 days after exposure, but may appear in as few as 2 days or as long as 14 days after exposure,” per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), UC San Diego Health notes.

“Today marks the lowest number of COVID-19 positive patients currently hospitalized statewide (1,203) since hospitals began reporting this data on April 8th,” Kemp posted to Twitter on Saturday. “Today also marks the lowest total of ventilators in use (897 with 1,945 available). We will win this fight together!”

Are Endless Lockdowns the Result of Malice or Stupidity? By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/05/10/are-endless-lockdowns-the-result-of-malice-or-stupidity-n389548

In a harrowing article for PJ Media, Dennis Prager argues that the COVID-19 global lockdown is “possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made,” leading to a mortality rate eclipsing anything the virus could have delivered. Widespread famine in Third World Countries and extreme poverty across the globe are now imminent, “all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.” A study released on May 4 by the nonprofit research institute Just Facts confirms Prager’s argument, concluding that “the total loss of life from all societal responses to this disease is likely to be more than 90 times greater than prevented by the lockdowns.”

Despair, anxiety, bankruptcies, suicide, reduced productivity, diminishment of life expectancy as well as “quality of life,” and postponement of elective surgeries (just one example of undoubted millions: my wife’s mother is going blind but corrective treatment has been put off indefinitely) are some of the consequences of the great “flattening.” 

When one factors in the economic costs and attendant suffering, the effect is almost too staggering to contemplate. How could our leaders have committed such a blunder? Prager is at pains to clarify that the economic catastrophe we are undergoing globally should be attributed not to evil intentions but primarily to rank incompetence. He is obviously invoking “Hanlon’s razor” that advises us: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” 

Prager writes: “The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil people.” I suspect the razor applies to many government leaders who simply did everything wrong and then doubled down on their error rather than admit mortal fallibility. They were stupid—and too proud to acknowledge their mistake. They ensured that the remedy would be worse than the disease, but they cannot be blamed for malice aforethought.