RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/mark-meadows-new-white-house-chief-of-staff-replacing-mike-mulvaney/

President Trump on Friday named Representative Mark Meadows (R., N.C.) as White House chief of staff, replacing acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

“I have long known and worked with Mark, and the relationship is a very good one,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “I want to thank Acting Chief Mick Mulvaney for having served the Administration so well. He will become the United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland. Thank you!”

Meadows announced in December that he would not seek reelection after an eight-year run in the House, during which he clashed with former House speaker John Boehner, called for balanced budgets, and was chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. More recently, the congressman has been a staunch ally of Trump, and has called the impeachment proceedings against the president “a baseless, fact-free sham that ignores rules, obliterates precedent, and ultimately runs directly contrary to the will of the people.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/economy/jobs-report.html?emc=edit_

For the second month in a row, the economy churned out a blockbuster number of jobs, the government reported Friday, an impressive performance in an era of slow-and-steady employment growth.

With the coronavirus outbreak shaking economic confidence, the solid showing in February may not be a harbinger of continued strength.

Still, the report from the Department of Labor offered a refreshing breath of positive economic news. Employers expanded payrolls by 273,000 jobs in February, while revisions to data from previous months added 85,000 more jobs to the tally. The jobless rate ticked down to 3.5 percent.

“It’s certainly a relief that we had a strong tailwind,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. “Service, leisure and hospitality, these are all very vulnerable. The good news is that these workers had some cushion ahead of time. It helps blunt the blow.”

https://worldisraelnews.com/us-house-democrats-block-anti-bds-bill/?utm_source=M

Lawmakers defeated consideration of the bill by a tally of 219-194.

By JNS

Democrats blocked a bill on Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives that would have prohibited U.S. support for the anti-Israel BDS movement.

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), would have expanded the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to include prohibiting U.S. support for foreign boycotts of Israel from groups including the European Union and the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“We cannot be quiet when it comes to combating anti-Semitism and anti-Israel mentalities,” said Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) on the House floor. “We need to work together in Congress and pass common-sense legislation on this issue. H.R. 5595 does just that.”

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/why-it-bad-threaten-supreme-court-justices

The bipartisan shredding of America’s established constitutional norms continues apace. The latest culprit is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, he issued a chilling, direct threat to two sitting justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. He deserves broad condemnation. He received it only from Republicans. Save for some prominent lawyers, Democrats remained silent.

Schumer told a cheering crowd, “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price!” The crowd was rallying for abortion rights as the Supreme Court heard a case on that issue. The minority leader was there to support them, a perfectly legitimate political act. What’s illegitimate is his call to arms, his over-the-top threats. Schumer concluded by saying the two justices “won’t know what hit them” if they decide the wrong way.

Could a US politician’s behavior get much worse? Actually, it could. Schumer doubled down when he was rebuked. It took him a full day, some tongue-lashing on the Senate floor, and doubtless some phone calls behind the scenes for him to admit he was wrong.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/schumer-the-supreme-court-and-the-mob/The senator treats the Court like a political body — which it is.

Should Chuck Schumer be censured? Of course he should, in the sense that the rule of law, were it actually our cynosure, would cry out for it.

On Wednesday morning, the Democrats’ Senate minority leader stirred up the mob outside the Supreme Court, unabashedly threatening Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” Schumer inveighed. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Inside, the justices were then hearing argument on what ought to be a straightforward abortion case (i.e., one in which the “right” invented in Roe v. Wade is not up for consideration). When called on his menacing remarks, rather than apologize, Schumer brazenly lied about what he had done. This morning, he was still lying — a tepid apology, offered under pressure while insisting that “in no way was I making a threat.”

In a rule-of-law society, that should rate censure. Case closed.

Except it’s not closed, because we are not a rule-of-law society. We just pretend to be. In a rule-of-law society, a mob would not gather on the steps of the courthouse in the first place.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/05/morning-greatness-trump-admin-reverses-obama-era-regulation-blocking-coronavirus-testing/

The House passed an $8.3B measure for emergency funding to combat coronavirus and now it will go to the Senate. Meanwhile, we have some more cruise ship trouble.

Two shiploads of passengers may have been exposed. State and federal officials are scurrying to contact 2,500-plus passengers who disembarked Feb. 21 from the San Francisco-Mexico cruise at the same time as the man who died, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

California is also keeping Grand Princess passengers on the current San Francisco-Hawaii trip in the Pacific Ocean indefinitely until state and federal officials can assess how many passengers and crew have coronavirus or have been exposed.

Twenty-one people on the Grand Princess are showing signs of possible infection.

The Trump Administration has rolled back an Obama FDA rule that required “state-run laboratories to only run medical tests pre-approved by the F.D.A.”

“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing, and we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place at a much more accurate and rapid fashion,” Trump stated. “That was a decision we disagreed with. I don’t think we would have made it, but for some reason it was made. But we’ve undone that decision.”

Keep calm, wash your hands and don’t panic. People are freaking out that they can’t get tested for the virus, but does it matter if you aren’t showing life threatening symptoms in this time of crisis? If you go to the ER, and you aren’t sick you will be when you leave because that is where the sick people are. If you do have the virus but aren’t dangerously sick, they are going to send you home to self-quarantine, you won’t be admitted because hospitals are saving space for really sick people like the elderly and immuno-compromised.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/05/without-consequences-or-penalties-fisa-should-expire/

Most Americans no longer have faith in the government and political apparatus that fortifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Republican lawmakers shouldn’t either.

Two years ago, a controversial memo first alerted the public to the politicized use of a secret court to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At the time, most Americans—myself included—knew next to nothing about the clandestine workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Most Americans trusted that the law enforcement, intelligence, and judicial “experts” involved in the process took the utmost care with their duties and sought a diligent application of the law to protect cherished constitutional rights while keeping us safe.

After all, most Americans had defended these surveillance tools as necessary weapons in the war on terror after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The notion that such a powerful, intrusive means of collecting information from suspected foreign terrorists instead would be weaponized against a volunteer for the wrong political campaign—a private U.S. citizen—was so far fetched that it would have bordered on tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense conceived by the deepest corners of the far Left or Right had anyone said it out loud.

That’s why, when then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued his February 2018 memo detailing how Barack Obama’s Justice Department presented unproven political opposition research—the “Steele dossier”—as evidence to the FISA court in order to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, many detractors accused Nunes of acting as a “deep state” conspiracy theorist. (The FBI, by the way, objected to the memo’s release.)

Journalists and pundits on the Left howled that Nunes was promoting a Fox News-manufactured conspiracy theory lacking veracity. “Instead of evidence, the memo engages in the same dark and misleading conspiracy theories that have characterized other efforts by President Trump’s allies to discredit the Russia investigation,” wrote New York Times columnist David Leonhardt in January 2018.

Nunes’s intelligence committee counterpart, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), prepared his own memo to denounce the majority’s work, an official congressional document filled with distortions and outright lies. Schiff, too, accused his colleague of peddling right-wing quackery.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schumer-and-the-war-on-judges-11583448040?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s verbal threats against two Supreme Court justices aren’t surprising, in light of three years of “resistance” hostility to Trump judicial picks. What is remarkable is that Democratic leaders continue to take such a losing approach to an issue that will be central to the 2020 election.

Mr. Schumer did hit a new low Wednesday, when he stood outside the Supreme Court and rallied a mob of abortion-rights activists by vowing that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch would “pay the price” for releasing “the whirlwind.” “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” he thundered. When even liberal legal scholar Larry Tribe called the remarks “inexcusable,” Mr. Schumer made a halfhearted attempt to walk them back, saying he “shouldn’t have used the words.”

Yet the Schumer threats are of a piece with today’s standard Democratic approach to the court: Attack and intimidate. Of everything Democrats lost to Donald Trump in 2016, the forfeiture of the judicial branch still grates the most. They remain furious that Obama nominee Merrick Garland never got his Supreme Court robe. They are livid that the Kavanaugh confirmation provided the high court its first solid conservative majority in decades. They are outraged that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has confirmed nearly 200 Trump judges, including 51 on the appellate courts.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/4/what-we-dont-know-about-the

Fanning fears of a global plague

The recent spread of the coronavirus is causing a global panic. Our shared terror arises not so much from the death toll of the new flu-like disease — more than 3,000 people have died worldwide — but from what we don’t know about it.

Experts at least agree that the virus originated in China. But Beijing’s authoritarian government hid information about its origins, spread and severity for weeks.

Such duplicity only fanned the fears of a global plague — a hysteria not seen since the groundless fears of a YK2 global computer meltdown in the year 2000, or the political feeding frenzy during the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

Wild speculation followed that the coronavirus was a virulent or mutated superbug. Had it arisen naturally or escaped from a nearby military lab? Did it originate from a sick lab animal? A conspiracy theory arose that it was a manufactured virus that had escaped from scientists’ botched efforts to create either a vaccine or a biological weapon.

Is the outbreak an indication that China’s scientists are well behind their Western peers, at least in the areas of virology and bacteriology? Or is the problem that Chinese culture still features outdated traditions such as open-air “wet markets?” Unfounded rumors spread that the virus may have originated in one of these markets, where exotic mammals such as bats and pangolins are still sold for human consumption. For all China’s gleaming high-speed-rail lines and new airports, hundreds of millions of Chinese still live in places with suspect food safety and waste disposal — the historic incubators of epidemics.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/downplaying-virus-could-lose-trump-the-election/

Panic returned to the US stock market on Thursday as the federal government fumbled in the face of a health crisis of unknown proportions, and President Donald Trump appeared to downplay the scale of the problem in a Fox News interview. Someone should tell the president that reality shows don’t go as scripted when the studio is on fire.

Meanwhile, no one in the United States knows how fast Covid-19 has spread, where it is spread, or how it is spreading. The nationwide shortage of test kits has become an election-year issue, with Democratic officials denouncing the Trump Administration, and President Trump blaming regulatory decisions by the Obama Administration. That is a fight that the incumbent president only can lose: the incumbent president always will take the fall for a perceived fumble in a national emergency. The Obama-era policy, which required hospitals and private laboratories to submit test procedures to lengthy Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review, was an obstacle to rapid testing. But it wasn’t rescinded until February 29, six weeks after Washington State authorities believe that the first case appeared in that state.

Federal officials, meanwhile, are backtracking on promises of a rapid response.

Earlier this week FDA chief Stephen Hahn told Congress that a million test kits would be in use by Friday, but Republican senators warned Thursday that it would take much longer for testing to get underway. “There won’t be a million people to get a test by the end of the week,” Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida told Bloomberg News. “It’s way smaller than that. And still, at this point, it’s still through public health departments.”