RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/18/pandemic_power_grabs_143222.html

Most policy discussions about the pandemic focus on the agonizing trade-off between public health and economic survival. That’s understandable — those are the central issues — but they have overshadowed two other major questions: Is the crisis shifting more power to Washington, D.C.? Is it undermining essential legal protections and, if so, for how long?

National crises often lead to more centralized power. But everything about this one is unusual, including President Trump’s decision to let state and local authorities make nearly all decisions about daily life and business activity. Washington provides expert advice, policy guidance, backup supplies, emergency personnel, and massive funding. It has not issued national mandates. Trump has refused to shift more power to the central government.

Trump’s approach contrasts sharply with Washington’s one-size-fits-all response to the oil crisis of 1973-74. To save gasoline, Congress passed, and Richard Nixon signed, a bill setting a new national speed limit, 55 mph, to be applied everywhere in the country. It wasn’t popular everywhere, particularly in the sprawling and sparsely populated West, but the feds had a hammer for states that didn’t want to comply: no 55 mph limit, no federal highway money.

Washington planners also demanded every state let drivers turn right at red lights.  The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 required it if states were to receive any federal energy-conservation money. That rule, like the national speed limit, fit some locales better than others. In Boston, for example, politicians initially resisted the idea. They knew local drivers considered stop lights little more than “suggestions.” Permitting right-on-red would only add to the chaos. No matter. They buckled rather than lose Washington funding.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/498180-were-risking-national-suicide-if-we-dont-adjust-our-pandemic-response

By now, everyone recognizes Dr. Anthony Fauci. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is one of the most cited immunology researchers of all time and unquestionably one of the most acclaimed. As specified in his own bio, his deep expertise is in research of immune-mediated and infectious disease, particularly their basic mechanisms and treatments. During this COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci has been a central figure, a key adviser to President Trump and a man to whom the entire country, indeed the world, looks for wisdom and expertise. 

However, our elected representatives, the public and the media misunderstand his focused role and even his expertise as a scientist. Basic science underlying a viral pandemic is absolutely critical. But now is the time for the design of sound public policy — and that involves a far broader formulation than a single-minded focus on stopping COVID-19 at all costs.

Policymakers and the public have not received several key messages that are critical to alleviate fear and guide a safe reopening of society. That has led to a gross failure in policy at the state level:

There has been a failure to remind everyone that the stated goal of the policy – total lockdown and whole-population isolation – has been accomplished in most of the United States, including the epicenter of New York. Specifically, two curves, hospitalizations per day and deaths per day, have flattened. The goal was to prevent hospital overcrowding and, aside from a few in the New York area, hospitals were not overcrowded. Today, most hospitals stand under-filled, necessitating layoffs of personnel. More importantly, it was never a policy goal to eliminate all cases of COVID-19. That is impossible, unnecessary and illogical, when 99 percent of infected people have no significant illness from it.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/the-left-is-what-it-once-loathed/

Compare the current progressive view about civil liberties against the old liberal positions of the past.

Surveillance and spying on U.S. citizens? Remember liberal Senator Frank Church of Idaho and his 1975 post-Watergate select Senate investigative committee? It found the CIA, FBI, and NSA improperly over three decades had tapped into the phones of Americans, opened their mail, and worked with telecommunications companies to monitor the data of supposedly suspect politicians, actors, celebrities, and political activists. “Collusion” with the communists and the Russians was often the pretense to surveil American citizens.

Consider Church either a bastion of civil liberties protection or a dangerous firebrand who weakened the CIA and FBI. But the point is that the Left’s position had once mostly been that the government’s unelected deep-state intelligence officers simply had too much power to trust. 

Indeed, the ACLU was outraged at what the committee revealed. Church was deified as a liberal hero uncovering government abuse. About the worst thing a government could do, liberals reminded us, was to spy on its own citizens. 

Then we were also warned that the scandal was the result of the government, for over 30 years, targeting mostly liberals on grounds of trumped-up suspicions that they were sympathetic to Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Yet in addition, the Left argued that the state had no business spying on any American at all, unless it had a certified warrant and ample criminal cause—or we found ourselves in a war with enemies at home among us.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/michael-flynn-versus-nidal-hasan-lloyd-billingsley/

The Department of Justice has halted the prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn but judge Emmet Sullivan, who thought the charge should have been treason, is bringing in retired judge John Gleason to argue against the DOJ. The delay provides time to contrast the campaign against Gen. Flynn with government actions against another U.S. military officer.

Gen. Flynn, a Democrat, regarded the previous president as a weak leader and spineless coddler of terrorists. In his speech to the Republican convention in 2016 Flynn said, “We should always remember that our country, was built upon Judeo-Christian values and principles.” Hillary Clinton, Flynn said, “put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private e-mail server,” and “Donald Trump recognizes the threats we face and is not afraid to call them what they are.” That would be radical Islamic terrorists.

The “composite character,” David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama did not want Gen. Flynn to become National Security Advisor, least of all with Trump in the White House. So the president targeted Flynn to facilitate action against Trump that would continue during his presidency.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/team-obamas-unmasking-dodge-11589746154?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The media are mostly ignoring the news that 39 Obama officials sought to read the transcripts of Michael Flynn’s conversations with foreigners, but here and there they’ve asked a question. The unpersuasive answers suggest there’s more to learn.

Take Joe Biden, who “unmasked” Mr. Flynn only a few days before leaving office as Vice President. Last week Mr. Biden told ABC that he knew “nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn.” George Stephanopoulos reminded Mr. Biden that he attended a Jan. 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting when the FBI’s Flynn investigation was discussed. Mr. Biden replied that he’d misheard the question and admitted he was “aware that there was, that they’d asked for, an investigation. But that’s all I know about it.”

This was more straightforward than what Mr. Biden told MSNBC when he was asked about his “involvement in the investigation of Michael Flynn.” Mr. Biden replied: “I was never a part or had any knowledge of any criminal investigation into Flynn while I was in office.”

Except at the time there was no criminal investigation into Mr. Flynn—as Mr. Biden knows. In 2016 The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn, and it was under that pretense that it conducted the interview in which it later claimed that Mr. Flynn lied. The lack of a criminal investigation is the primary reason the Justice Department moved this month to drop its prosecution. Mr. Biden still hasn’t explained why he personally unmasked Mr. Flynn.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/no-spike-in-ccp-virus-in-places-reopening-says-hhs-secretary_3354015.html

There has not been an observed spike in CCP virus cases in areas that have reopened, while some areas that remain shut down have seen an increase in cases, said Health Secretary Alex Azar.

“We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases,” Azar told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday morning. “We still see spikes in some areas that are in fact close to very localized situations.”

A number of governors have imposed stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China, last year. Such stay-at-home orders have forced the closure of numerous businesses deemed nonessential, leading to more than 30 million job losses in about two months, according to Labor Department statistics.

Azar said that reopening is the choice of local governments.

“These are very localized determinations. There should not be a one size fits all to reopening but reopen we must because it’s not health versus the economy. It’s health versus healthy,” he said, noting that keeping places like hospitals shut down for other medical procedures than COVID-19 could create a separate public health crisis.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/new-york-admits-purposely-undercounting-nursing-home-deaths-after-changing-reporting-rules

The state of New York omitted coronavirus deaths from nursing homes and adult care facilities after it was revealed that a significant amount of individuals were dying from the virus in those types of residences.

The New York Department of Health admitted that its most recent reporting does not fully account for the known coronavirus deaths among nursing home residents, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In early May, reports from the state started to leave out long-term care residents who lost their lives from the coronavirus in hospitals, and New York still leads the nation in nursing home deaths, with 5,433 as of Wednesday.

The New York Department of Health confirmed it was disclosing nursing home deaths regardless of whether the patient died there or in a hospital until around April 28. But the department made a “subtle” change around May 3, according to web archives, and now only reports deaths if the patient died while physically present at a facility.

New York’s coronavirus tracker “currently does not include out of facility deaths,” Jill Montag, an NYSDOH spokeswoman, said. “Deaths of nursing home and adult care facility residents that occurred at hospitals is accounted for in the overall fatality data on our COVID-19 tracker.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/16/john-brennan-and-the-plot-to-subvert-an-american-election/

Let’s talk about John Brennan a bit. You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier intelligence service under Obama. In 2014, having put childish things behind him as St. Paul advised, Brennan spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He denied it indignantly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

Nothing happened to Brennan for spying on U.S. senators.

If he could get away with that, what else could he get away with?

How about starting the bogus investigation into fictional “collusion” or “coordination” between the Russians and the campaign, and then the administration, of Donald Trump? How about that?

In Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy offers a meticulously researched overview of the origins and character of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible links between Trump and the Russians. That began in May 2017, shortly after Trump fired James Comey from his post as Director of the FBI. McCarthy also looks carefully at the background to that investigation, operation “Crossfire Hurricane” and several tributary investigations into possible Russian collusion with various U.S. persons and entities. Crossfire Hurricane began on July 31, 2016, about three months before the presidential election.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/16/new-york-state-deliberately-covered-up-full-extent-of-coronavirus-nursing-home-deaths-n397998

On March 25, New York state ordered nursing homes to accept patients regardless of their coronavirus status. That order proved to be a deadly mistake. It was well known that the elderly were more vulnerable to the virus, so having patients who tested positive for the coronavirus in nursing homes allowed the virus to spread, as Governor Andrew Cuomo put it, “like fire through dry grass.”

Despite this, Cuomo defended the policy. Nursing homes “don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that,” Cuomo said during a daily briefing last month. He finally rescinded the order on May 11, but the damage had been done.

But New York state was covering up just how deadly this policy was. By not counting the deaths of nursing home residents who died in hospitals in their tallies of nursing home resident deaths, New York was vastly undercounting nursing home deaths. In fact, it was the only state with a large outbreak to do this, and they finally admitted to this in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

https://spectator.us/new-york-andrew-cuomo-coronavirus-response/

Have we reached peak Cuomo? I think that the climacteric came when the media was aflutter with rumors that the governor of New York wore nipple rings. Alas, it turned out to be only a rumor, or so we have been assured.

There are two questions that continue to bedevil Cuomo watchers. The first is whether his handling of the Wuhan Flu is the absolute worst of any governor or only among the worst.

The second question is how, given how appalling his leadership has been, he has managed to float along with such high approval ratings (some say 80 percent).

As to the first, we have a veritable litany of failure, much of it deadly. Cuomo began by downplaying the seriousness of the virus and boasting that New York, being ‘fully coordinated’ and ‘fully mobilized’, was going to handle it much better than many places. That was on March 2. Fast forward two months and New York leads the country in coronavirus deaths, accounting for a third or more of the nationwide total. At some point the governor began to panic, shouting that New York would need 140,000 beds (it needed 18,500 at the peak) and 30,000 ventilators. Soon I expect to see them littering antique stores repurposed as planters.

What made Cuomo’s handling of the situation so bad? Critics point to a host of policies.