RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bad-state-decisions-about-nursing-homes-are-heavily-driving-the-coronavirus-outbreak/

Coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes have been particularly deadly in California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

You could make a strong argument that the country’s deadly coronavirus problem is largely a nursing home problem, dangerous everywhere but far more prevalent in a half-dozen or so of the country’s more heavily and densely populated states. What’s more, many of these states enacted coronavirus response policies that likely put nursing and assisted-living home residents at higher risk for infection.

Notice the California policy described by the San Jose Mercury News:

Even as senior care centers have been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus — with patient and staff deaths accounting for nearly 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths across California — the state is calling on assisted living facilities to house infected patients in exchange for money.

A letter from the state Department of Social Services sent to licensees of senior and adult care residential facilities on Friday urged them to temporarily take in patients who have tested positive for the virus — for up to $1,000 a day — to make room in hospitals for people who become critically ill and require acute care.

But health experts and advocates say the plan risks introducing the virus into facilities that have been spared or those already dealing with their own outbreaks.

That need continues to grow. As of May 3, nearly 10,000 patients and staff in long-term care facilities in the state of California have tested positive for the virus, and 926 of them have died, according to figures released by DSS, which oversees assisted living, and the California Department of Public Health.

Notice the complaints described by Health News Illinois: “The Illinois Health Care Association and the Health Care Council of Illinois, the state’s two largest nursing home associations, say they have been asking for more testing for weeks. And that personal protective equipment has been hit or miss across facilities, with some operating on a day-to-day supply.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/08/obama-biden-oval-office-meeting-on-january-5-was-key-to-entire-anti-trump-operation/

Susan Rice’s bizarre Inauguration Day email about that meeting helps explain the campaign of leaks, lies, and obstruction that followed.

Information released in the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case it brought against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn confirms the significance of a January 5, 2017, meeting at the Obama White House. It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration.

“President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia,” National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote in an unusual email to herself about the meeting that was also attended by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI Director James Comey, and Vice President Joe Biden.

A clearer picture is emerging of the drastic steps that were taken to accomplish Obama’s goal in the following weeks and months. Shortly thereafter, high-level operatives began intensely leaking selective information supporting a supposed Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, the incoming National Security Advisor was ambushed, and the incoming Attorney General was forced to recuse himself from oversight of investigations of President Trump. At each major point in the operation, explosive media leaks were a key strategy in the operation to take down Trump.

Not only was information on Russia not fully shared with the incoming Trump team, as Obama directs, the leaks and ambushes made the transition chaotic, scared quality individuals away from working in the administration, made effective governance almost impossible, and materially damaged national security. When Comey was finally fired on May 9, in part for his duplicitousness regarding his handling of the Russia collusion theory, he orchestrated the launch of a Special Counsel probe that continued his efforts for another two years. That probe ended with Mueller finding no evidence of any American colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election, much less Trump or anyone connected to him.

https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/michael-flynns-prosecution-was-a-travesty-of-justice/

It has long been obvious that the case brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against Michael Flynn stunk to high heaven. That has been copiously confirmed over the last three weeks as the Justice Department made a series of stunning disclosures that undermined whatever vestige of propriety remained.

General Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, served fleetingly as President Trump’s first national security advisor. At the time, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat in the 2016 election, the media-Democrat complex fueled a “collusion” narrative — purportedly, Trump had schemed with Russia to hack Democratic email accounts, and would now do the Kremlin’s bidding from the Oval Office.

Flynn was caught up in this fever dream because, as a top Trump campaign adviser and transition official, he had some conversations with the Russian ambassador — just as he was speaking with many foreign dignitaries.

Although the FBI and the Obama administration had recordings of these calls and knew Flynn had done nothing improper, the fact that they occurred was used to stoke the claim that Flynn may have agreed on Trump’s behalf to drop sanctions Obama had imposed on Russia. He had not, but the mere mention of sanctions was politically explosive.

There was no basis to believe Flynn, a decorated former US combat commander, would ever be Moscow’s mole, much less that he had committed a crime. But Obama officials speculated that perhaps they could nail him for violating the Logan Act. On the books since 1799, this provision purports to make it a crime to engage freelance diplomacy without government authorization. It is almost certainly unconstitutional, no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for violating it, and the government hasn’t even tried to indict anyone on it since before the Civil War. It would be absurd to try to apply it to any American, but to contemplate doing it against a transition official slated to become national security adviser was particularly ludicrous.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/05/stealth-fascism-ii-dissalution-of-civil.html

I wrote the following just to illustrate a term I invented to capture the character of what is happening today, in 2020, because of the coronovirus and about the changing character of America:

Stealth Fascism

Taking my cue from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead , what would Howard Roark do or not do? Imagine he is faced with the likes of the Coronovirus in the 1920s and 1930s. He would laugh.

He would touch his face, while scratching his head over a designing problem.

He would not regularly disinfect his architectural drawings to show to prospective clients or employers.

He would take occasional trips to shop.

He would not constantly wash his hands, using a disinfectant; or a hand sanitizer.

He would go out, not stay at home, and wonder what the hell ws “discretionary” or “essential” travel.

He would go to work.

He would not use his elbow to sneeze into.
He would not wear a mask.He was already in conflict with the collectivism of his time.

He would eat and drink in a speakeasy, when he had the money.

He would not maintain a social distance from Dominique Francon.

 He would perform other actions or non-actions we should take for granted, as sane behavior, as normal in his world.

I’m really surprised and disappointed by how readily Americans are to submit to stealth fascism. It’s not a world I want to live in. It’s becoming less and less tolerable for me.

I have a good mind to order a Lone Ranger mask from Amazon.

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.