RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judges-are-umpires-not-ringmasters-11589387368?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Constitution limits the jurisdiction of federal judges to actual cases and controversies. They may not offer advisory opinions or intrude on executive or legislative powers, except when the other branches have exercised them in an unconstitutional manner. Federal judges are umpires deciding matters about which litigants disagree. If the litigants come to an agreement, there is no controversy. The case is over.

Many judges disapprove of this limitation on their power. Not happy being umpires, they want to be commissioner of baseball. Thus courts have arrogated to themselves powers the Constitution explicitly denies them. They have invented exceptions to give themselves jurisdiction over cases in which there is no longer any controversy between the litigants.

It is against this constitutional background that we should evaluate Judge Emmet Sullivan’s Tuesday order inviting friend-of-the-court briefs advising him whether to accept the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the case against Mike Flynn—a motion to which the defense consents.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-michael-flynn-debauchery-11589410340

Barack Obama is turning into the reverse Oracle of Delphi. He sometimes gets it right for the wrong reasons.

Sensing the populist mood in 2008, he intoned about people “who get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.” Missed in translation was that these “people” thought elites like him were the ones who had separated culturally and politically from mainstream Americans.

Now he says the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against Mike Flynn because of multiple prosecutorial violations of rules protecting defendants’ rights means “the rule of law is at risk.” Right subject, wrong lecture.

Herewith a tutorial. Back in the 1980s, writers for the Journal’s editorial page coined the phrase “inside the Beltway” to describe the moatlike highway around the nation’s capital, whose inhabitants had become politically and psychologically isolated from the rest of the country.

Many Americans then came to believe presidential elections were the one way they could send the Beltway a message. In 2016, we had an Earth-to-Beltway election, whose message was about more than Donald Trump.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/obamagate-isnt-a-conspiracy-theory-its-the-biggest-political-scandal-of-our-time/

When former president Barack Obama told supporters last week that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against former White House National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is a “threat to the rule of law,” he was relying wholly on the fiction, willingly propagated for years by a pliant media, that the Russia-Trump collusion probe launched by his administration was lawful and legitimate.

But of course it wasn’t. A string of recently released documents have confirmed that the entire Russia-Trump investigation, which eventually entrapped Flynn and forced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself, was an unprecedented abuse of power that amounted to organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was in effect an attempted coup.

If you haven’t picked that up from the news media, it’s not your fault. Instead of grappling with the implications of newly released details about what Obama officials were doing to undermine the incoming Trump administration during the transition, the mainstream media have fixated on Trump’s use of the term “Obamagate,” dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.

A Brief History of the Flynn Case

This is to be expected. For years now the media have done everything they can to push the Trump-Russia collusion hoax—even after a years-long special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller turned up nothing—using the complexity of the scheme to hide the greatest political scandal of our time in plain sight.

A key aspect of that scheme was—and is—to make the case against Flynn appear legitimate. Flynn faced trumped-up charges that he mislead FBI agents about conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration. (As the incoming national security advisor, Flynn was doubtless having conversations with numerous heads of state and ambassadors during this time, so there was nothing unusual about him talking to the Russian ambassador.)

The Obama administration already knew about the conversations with Kislyak because it had recordings of them thanks to a series of investigations it spun out of the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign. Crossfire Hurricane, launched in the summer of 2016, was itself a bogus investigation based on the Steele dossier—an entirely fraudulent document riddled with Russian disinformation and paid for by the Democratic Party.

https://spectator.us/generation-unmasked-trump-world-war-two-mask/

President Trump invited World War Two veterans to Washington to commemorate the Allied victory in Europe last week — and the media and public health establishments threw a fit. ‘Ninety-three-year old veterans will be traveling to visit the White House — they should not be traveling!’ groused MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace on May 7, the day before VE (Victory in Europe) Day. ‘People should not be doing non-essential travel,’ fretted one of the channel’s health experts. ‘Don’t leave home!’

Trump compounded his public health heresies by not wearing a mask during the ceremony. The day after the commemoration, the New York Times complained: ‘The president hosted a wreath-laying ceremony at the World War Two Memorial in Washington on Friday to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany by inviting several veterans aged 95 and over, even though they were in the most vulnerable age group.’The photo of the ceremony in the print edition was captioned: ‘President Trump did not wear a mask Friday during a wreath-laying ceremony that was attended by World War Two veterans, who are in the 90s and highly vulnerable.’

The mask scolds were silent about the fact that the medal-bedecked veterans, standing yards behind the president and saluting the flag, were also unmasked.

The furor over the maskless VE celebration highlights the forces driving this moment of national fear and submission. At stake is whether there are any values more important than maximal safety and protection from risk.

The first thing to be said about the VE Day episode is that the criticism of Trump for not donning a mask outside is based on no science at all. Outdoor transmission of viruses in a wide-open space is virtually unknown. Infection occurs overwhelmingly indoors, and requires close and prolonged contact. People are less likely to get infected by the coronavirus outside than they are to die inside from falling, poisoning themselves, or choking, as Vanity Fair writer T.A. Frank has pointed out. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-politicized-order-inviting-amicus-briefs-against-the-flynn-cases-dismissal/

Judge Sullivan’s blatantly political directive is designed to frame the Justice Department as politicized.

Late Tuesday, federal district judge Emmet Sullivan issued a bizarre order, inviting third-party groups with no legal interests in the case to file amicus briefs addressing the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the false-statements charge against Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national-security adviser.

The cantankerous jurist is stoking opposition to the dismissal. He knows the law calls for him to accede to attorney general Bill Barr’s decision. But Barr can’t stop Sullivan from turning the dismissal into anti-Trump group therapy — and who knows, maybe the grieving Legal Left will figure out some way for the judge to convict Flynn despite DOJ’s retreat.

Flynn’s counsel relates that on 24 prior occasions, Judge Sullivan has summarily refused to entertain input from non-parties to the case. No federal criminal rule authorizes such interventions. Yet Sullivan now encourages them.

There is no complex legal issue to be resolved. DOJ’s dismissal motion may be politically controversial, but legally it is pro forma. The only branch of government constitutionally authorized to proceed with a criminal prosecution is the executive. The Justice Department has declined to prosecute. There is nothing for the judge to do besides the ministerial task of ending the case on the court’s records.

tps://www.nysun.com/editorials/united-states-v-flynn-an-invitation-to-the-anti/9112

The decision of a United States judge to stall America’s motion to drop its case against General Michael Flynn appears calculated to delay the matter until after November. That’s how it looks, at least to us, in the wake of the judge’s decision to invite outside parties to file friend-of-the court briefs on what to do next. Could it be that the judge hopes the Democrats will win the election and, come January, drop the motion to drop the case?

In offering that line of speculation — and that’s all it is — we do not intend to question the integrity of the judge, Emmet Sullivan. We see as long-overdue and courageous Attorney General Barr’s decision to move to dismiss the case against General Flynn. The judge, though, has had a long and distinguished career on the bench. He was elevated to his several judgeships by Presidents Reagan, George Bush ’41, and Clinton.

Nor was it was ever, in our view, a foregone conclusion that the judge would grant America’s motion to end the case against the general, even if the betting around the courthouse is that the judge, in the long run, has few options but to grant the motion. After all, there is no longer an actual case or controversy, which is the only thing the Constitution grants the courts the power to decide.

Note, though, our caveat “in the long run.” What Judge Sullivan did today was issue a written order saying the court “anticipates that individuals and organizations will seek leave of the Court to file amicus curiae briefs” in the case. He must have been reading the op-ed pages. His order is practically an engraved invitation to the entire industry devoted to destroying the Trump presidency to pile on against the general.

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.