RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/13/cuomos-covid-19-panic-condemned-thousands-of-vulnerable-seniors-to-death/

In New York, 5% of the seniors living in nursing homes have died from COVID-19. In Florida, the disease has claimed less than 0.6% of those in nursing homes. What explains the vast difference in death rates among this vulnerable population? New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo panicked about COVID-19, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did not.

Over the weekend, Democrat Cuomo announced that nursing homes would no longer have to accept patients discharged from hospitals unless they were COVID-19 negative. Which leads to a question: Why in the world were they required to do so before?

The reason was that Cuomo was panicked about hospitals being overrun. So to clear beds, he told nursing homes that they had to take the elderly, whether or not they had COVID-19.To be precise, the health department’s order read that nursing homes “are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

New York’s March 25 directive was immediately condemned by the American Health Care Association, the Society for Post-Acute Long-Term Care Medicine and the National Center for Assisted Living, who issued a joint statement calling it “a short-term and short-sighted solution that will only add to the surge in COVID-19 patients that require hospital care.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/coronavirus-rand-paul-pandemic-response-marred-by-wrong-prediction-after-wrong-prediction/

Senator Rand Paul said Tuesday that the response to the coronavirus pandemic has been hampered by “wrong prediction after wrong prediction” as he advocated for schools to reopen in the fall.

“The history of this when we look back will be of wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction,” Paul said during a Senate hearing Tuesday at which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, testified.

“I think we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what’s best for the economy,” the Kentucky Republican said. “As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end all. I don’t think you’re the one person who gets to make a decision,”

Paul said he believes it would be a “huge mistake” not to open schools in the fall and noted that the mortality rate from the coronavirus for children “approaches zero.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/trump-russia-investigation-obamagate-not-conspiracy-theory/

There’s no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that Obama administration officials were corrupt in their handling of the Trump–Russia investigation.

Those sharing #Obamagate hashtags on Twitter would do best to avoid the hysterics we saw from Russian-collusion believers, but they have no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that suggests the Obama administration engaged in serious corruption.

Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2020/05/12/fauci-confrontational-n2568669

In his testimony before the Senate HELP committee on Tuesday, Dr. Fauci was given an avenue to directly correct the media’s fabricated narrative, in a question directed at all of the health officials, from Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA):

“The mainstream media and, indeed, some of my colleagues in the senate seem to want to paint each of your relationships with our president during this wartime effort as confrontational and lacking consensus. Can you categorically say here to the American people today, whether this is true or untrue?” Sen. Loeffler asked. “From your testimony today, I’ve seen a very coordinated effort to address this with the administration to combat this pandemic.”

Indeed, Dr. Fauci refuted the narrative pushed by Democrats and the mainstream media.

“No. There is certainly not a confrontational relationship between me and the president. As I’ve mentioned many times, I give advice and opinion, based on evidence-based scientific information. He hears that, he respects it, he gets opinions from a variety of other people, but in no way, in my experience over the last several months has there been any confrontational relationship between us,” Dr. Fauci said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/doj-does-wont-release-list-of-obama-officials-who-unmasked-flynn/

The Department of Justice is not planning to release a declassified list of Obama administration officials who were reportedly behind the “unmasking” of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, according to multiple reports.

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell handed over the list to Attorney General Bill Barr last week, after the DOJ dropped its case Flynn — who pled guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI — after reviewing “newly discovered and disclosed information.” While officials said Barr could release the names “at any time,” a senior department official told ABC News that “we do not intend to release the list.”

A source told Fox News that the DOJ is “confused” why the releasing of the list is under their jurisdiction. “Given that ODNI is the owner of that information, if they want to release it they can do it, that’s their call,” the official said.

https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2020/5/11/21254518/covid-19-pandemic-economy

“But when you ask questions from a different perspective, it becomes clear there is another side to the story. Sixty percent (60%) of voters believe every business that establishes safe social distancing protocols should be allowed to open. Every business! Not just a chosen few. Just 26% oppose the idea.”

One of the great joys of being a public opinion pollster comes when results to different questions seem to contradict each other. Some people — far too many in the political world — simply dismiss such apparent contradictions as evidence that people are either irrational or stupid. However, for those of us who trust the commonsense wisdom of everyday Americans, seemingly contradictory results provide an opportunity to better understand the public mood in a more nuanced manner.

I’ve seen many examples of this since first writing about how pollsters may be asking the wrong questions about the coronavirus pandemic. Last week, I noted that most Americans understand it’s not a question of stay home to stay safe or go out and get sick. Instead, most recognize that there are significant health risks involved in continuing the lockdowns. Since no options are completely safe, voters are weighing the difficult trade-offs based upon the underlying facts.

My polling this past weekend found that 23% of voters think government officials have gone too far in shutting things down. However, 71% believe those officials have either not gone far enough (35%) or have found the right balance (36%).

Most pollsters have found similar results. In most cases, the polls show slight growth in the number who think the government has gone too far, but that perspective still reflects a minority view. Using this as the only point of reference, one might conclude that voters remain committed to maintaining the lockdowns. Indeed, that’s the way much media coverage defines the public mood.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5

Have you been thinking lately that the more we learn about the Obama administration’s Russia hoax, the less sense it makes? For years now, the working hypothesis of conservative pundits has been that the narrative of Trump campaign collusion with Russia was a Deep State plot from the likes of Brennan/Comey/McCabe/Strzok to weaken and potentially remove Trump from office — a “soft coup,” if you will. That hypothesis was always hard to understand — why would such high ranking officials take big risks with such a transparently ridiculous narrative with little chance of succeeding? — and in my view has become even less consistent with what we know as more facts have recently come out.

So what was the Russia hoax really about? Here’s my alternative hypothesis. Its origin was entirely about giving Hillary an illicit assist in winning the 2016 election. Plenty of Democrat-partisan operatives in the intelligence community would be only too happy to use the government’s surveillance infrastructure to spy on the Trump campaign. As these operatives learned what Trump was up to, that information could be passed along to the Hillary campaign for strategic advantage. But the operatives needed a patina of legal authorization to point to in the off chance that the wrong side won, or there was a leak, and the spying got discovered. For that, the Hillary campaign and DNC ginned up the Trump/Russia dossier, to be used to open FBI investigations and/or get FISA warrants to authorize listening in on any member of the Trump campaign who had ever traveled to Russia or talked to a Russian, or maybe had used Russian dressing on a salad.

Note that my hypothesis implies something that we have as yet learned nothing about, namely: Somewhere, prior to the election, the fruits of the surveillance would have been systematically passed from the FBI, via some channels, on to the Clinton campaign. Likely these communications took place at the very highest levels. I would strongly suspect that Obama and Clinton were personally involved to at least some degree, although that was most likely not the exclusive channel of communication. Possibly the participants in these communications were careful enough to have made no written message, although that is quite difficult to accomplish in our current world. Even if all these communications took place by oral telephone calls between Obama and Clinton, I would suspect that the government has recordings of the calls somewhere in its vast intelligence archives. Anyway, if I were Barr and Durham, this is certainly what I would be looking for.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/12/trumps_methodical_destruction

We’ve all seen footage of those carefully timed explosions that bring down antiquated buildings and clear the ground for new ones. A horn sounds, the detonations begin, the building shakes, suspended for a frozen moment, and then collapses in a vast cloud of dust. That, metaphorically, is what is happening to the Obama administration’s legacy.

The presidential edifice has come down in two episodes, and the dust has not yet settled from either one. The first wrecked President Obama’s most consequential policies: the Affordable Care Act and the Iran nuclear deal. The second, happening now, is crushing its reputation for integrity, for following the most basic rules for conducting free and fair elections.

Consider Barack Obama’s biggest policy achievements. Trump campaigned on overturning both Obamacare and the Iran deal. And that’s what he’s done as president. For Democrats, these were bitter losses. Liberals and progressives alike were determined to defend them, even after losing the House and Senate in 2016. On those and other touchstone issues, such as immigration and judicial appointments, they were not looking for compromise solutions.

Neither was Donald Trump. As the new president, his most fundamental decision was to obliterate those Obama policies, not modify them at the margins. He wanted to erase the Affordable Care Act before it became an indelible feature of American life. Although the Republican Congress fell just short of repealing it and the Supreme Court didn’t do the job for them, Trump did manage to eliminate its essential funding mechanism (the “individual mandate”) and to lop off as much else as he could. (He and his party still haven’t figured out how to replace it. Obama’s lasting achievement is that even conservative Republicans realize they must do more than repeal it. They must deliver a replacement.)