RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/04/27/why-illinois-is-in-troubl

Illinois could soon be the first state in history to have its bonds rated as “junk.” Last month, both Moody’s MCO and Standard & Poor’s downgraded Illinois debt to just one notch above junk status.

Last week, the Illinois State Senate President Don Harmon (D-Chicago) wrote a letter to Congress requesting a $41.6 billion bailout. Critics balked.

In many ways, Illinois may have already crossed the Rubicon.

Our analysis at OpenTheBooks.com shows that an Illinois family of four now owes more in unfunded pension liabilities ($76,000) than they earn in household income ($63,585). In a state of 13 million residents, every man, woman, and child owes $19,000 — on an estimated $251 billion pension liability.

Our auditors discovered 110,000 public employees and retirees who earned more than $100,000 last year.

We found tree trimmers in Chicago making $106,663; nurses at state corrections earning up to $277,100; junior college presidents making $491,095; university doctors earning up to $2 million; and 111 small town managers who out-earned every governor of the 50 states ($202,000).

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-4-27-what-is-the-real-level-of-mortality-from-the-chinese-flu

Several commenters on yesterday’s post express a strong interest in learning the true level of mortality from the Chinese Virus. Are the numbers reported at sites like Worldometers as “Coronavirus Deaths” accurate and reliable, or are they inflated? Or, for that matter, could it be that the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” is under-reported for reasons that could include people dying at home without ever being tested?

My answer is that it is impossible to know at this point. The best indication we will get will come when the CDC issues final data for deaths from all causes in the U.S. for the month of April. When we get that number, we can subtract from it the approximate “normal” number of deaths that would have occurred anyway during April. The difference will be a good estimate of the number of excess deaths attributable to the virus. My prediction is that that number will be far less than the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” being officially reported. I’ll bet on about half or even less; but I’m the first to admit that I could be proved wrong.

The problem with attributing deaths to the virus begins with the fundamental problem of all scientific endeavor, which is that events in the real world have not just one but many causes. As a common example closely related to the subject of this post, many patients with cancer get pneumonia at the final stage of their disease. Did they die from the cancer or from the pneumonia? Or from both? When you look at the CDC statistics, you will see that each death has been assigned uniquely to just one of the major categories. In this case, each death has been assigned either to cancer or to pneumonia, not both. But how did someone decide that death A was from cancer, but death B was from pneumonia, when the patients had both and were in terminal condition? Generally, there is not much riding on the decision, and if it is made arbitrarily — half to one, half to the other — that’s probably fine.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/27/the-covid-19-tragedy-at-the-nations-nursing-homes/

Rather than focus on how to safeguard the most vulnerable among us, politicians have been preening for cable news cameras, blaming the president, halting the sale of vegetable seeds, and warning against small dinner parties in private homes. A tragedy, a failure, and a disgrace.

When the full history of how experts and politicians handled the spread of COVID-19 is written, the account will be littered with missteps, overreach, and unintended consequences.

Decisions that must be included on that long list of failures are the reliance on the disastrous charts produced by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, also known as the Murray model; the unprecedented quarantine of tens of millions of healthy Americans; the abrupt and devastating shutdown of the world’s most powerful economy; and freedom-destroying actions by power-grabbing politicians from governors down to judges and small-town mayors. It’s very possible, in terms of containing the disease and preventing future outbreaks, nearly everything we’ve been instructed to do has been wrong.

But the gravest mistake, historians likely will conclude, has been the deadly decision to knowingly mix COVID-19 patients with uninfected residents and health care workers in nursing homes.

The total death count due to COVID-19 in the United States, according to several tracking sources, is roughly 50,000 people since March 1. About 25 percent of the total fatalities tallied so far stem from nursing homes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-reward-states-bad-decisions-11588026132?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Congress has taken significant action over the past two months to address the unprecedented economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

We’ve pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the health-care system, significantly boosted unemployment insurance that directly helps those who have lost their jobs, created a loan program to help small businesses, and provided funding to reimburse states and local governments for coronavirus-related expenses.

There’s more Congress can do, but one thing we absolutely shouldn’t do is shield states from the consequences of their own bad budgetary decisions over the past few decades.

The debate began last week when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the point plainly. “There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side,” he said, “to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/criminalizing-politics-the-investigation-of-general-flynn/

The Obama administration detested Flynn and targeted him with trumped-up charges that are falling apart under scrutiny.

Author’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from my book Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig and Election and Destroy a Presidency, published in August 2019. The endnotes have been omitted, though I have included supporting links to several relevant reports that are cited in the endnotes. The excerpt contends that that there was no basis in fact or law for the investigation of General Michael Flynn, an argument I began making when reports about the investigation first emerged in early 2017. As further explained in my column today on the NR homepage, last Friday evening, the Justice Department belatedly disclosed exculpatory information indicating, reportedly, that there was no valid law-enforcement reason for the FBI to interview Flynn in January 2017, and that he later pled guilty under the threat that if he did not do so, prosecutors would charge his son with a crime — an understanding that was withheld from the court at the time of the guilty plea. In making the disclosure, the Justice Department signaled that more disclosures about the case are forthcoming.

Could anything have made the Obama administration giddier than the prospect of making a criminal case on Michael Flynn?

Flynn is a retired Army lieutenant general, who made his mark on modern insurgent warfare by helping revolutionize the rapid dissemination of battlefield intelligence. He was promoted by President Obama to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is also a headstrong man who got himself on Obama’s bad side by questioning counterterrorism strategy, particularly the administration’s weakness on Iran. He was detested by Obama political and national-security officials for calling them out on politicizing intelligence. The FBI was not a fan, least of all Deputy Director Andy McCabe, because Flynn had supported an agent who claimed the Bureau had subjected her to sex discrimination.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/explosive-revelations-in-the-flynn-case/

New documents suggest that Flynn ‘was set up by corrupt agents’ who threatened Flynn’s son and made a secret deal with Flynn’s attorneys.

‘Why was the FBI investigating General Flynn?” That is a question I posed more than three years ago, in the days immediately after President Trump fired Michael Flynn — fleetingly, his first national-security adviser — in February 2017.

There was never a good answer to that question. That has always been a big problem for the current and former government officials whose actions in the blatantly politicized probes of the Trump campaign and its surrogates are currently under investigation by the Justice Department.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/26/wait-how-long-are-we-supposed-to-stay-in-lockdown/

What are we waiting for? The question can be posed in either a wild, irresponsible way — or a sane, measured way. In New York, our “pause” will continue until at least May 15, and New Yorkers are asking, in a measured, sane way: What exactly are we waiting for?

In the beginning, we had a goal: to flatten the curve. We were warned that COVID-19 would overtake our hospitals and cause a health-system collapse. We were to stay home to give our medical heroes a fighting chance.

So we did, and thanks to the strength of our system, it worked. The Javits Center never filled up; the USS Comfort is sailing away. Three weeks ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was vowing to seize ventilators from upstate hospitals and send them to Gotham. Last week, we were dispatching our ventilators out to other states.

We did our part; we flattened the curve. So why is there no move to loosen regulations?

In February and March, expert and elite opinion seemed to understand that ­patience with lockdowns would at some point wear thin. But not anymore. Last week, Cuomo used a graphic in his daily presentation that listed the lengths of various wars and previous pandemics. The 1910 cholera outbreak lasted a year. World War II lasted six years. And so on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/andrew_cuomo_is_in_for_a_reckoning_for_placing_covid19_patients_into_vulnerable_ny_nursing_homes.html

Remember when the New York City official, Scott Stringer, declared that President Trump had “blood on his hands” over his coronavirus response?

He ought to have been directing his remarks to the vaunted Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, instead.  His policies are precisely why New York has the worst coronavirus record of any U.S. city, and he’s going to have to start answering questions.

Here’s how bad it was, from the Daily Wire:

On March 25, New York’s Health Department issued a mandate that state nursing homes could not refuse COVID-19-positive patients who were “medically stable,” meaning facilities that housed the most vulnerable populations were forced to introduce the virus into their midst.

A nursing home in Queens received two coronavirus patients who had been discharged from a hospital (but were still contagious and in need of care) – along with a box containing body bags, The New York Post reported. An executive at the facility told the Post it had been free of the coronavirus prior to accepting those two patients. The executive also said that along with the two patients arrived a shipment of personal protective equipment and the body bags.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/27/china-style-internet-control-is-one-of-the-worst-ideas-for-solving-coronavirus/

Including the line ‘China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong’ discredits any piece of writing that discusses civil liberties and the rule of law.

My former law professor Jack Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona Law School, have a remarkable article in The Atlantic that defends technology companies’ surveillance and speech controls regarding coronavirus information. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet,” they write, “and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”

I’m a constitutional lawyer, not a tech-regulation expert, so I’ll defer on the relevant policy issues to Goldsmith, who co-authored the insightful “Who Controls the Internet?” back in 2006, and Woods, a Cambridge Ph.D. who focuses on this area in his teaching and writing. But what I found stunning about their article wasn’t policy prescriptions—of which there are few—but the blaming of American constitutional culture for preventing the sort of government interventions that might help us during the current pandemic.

Here’s the nut graf: “The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.”

In other words, people would have better coronavirus-related news, and public-health officials would have better contact-tracing programs, if it weren’t for our Constitution’s pesky protections for speech and privacy. “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

Now, even if it’s true that the U.S. government could more effectively target criminal activity, let alone “fake news”—whichever ideological side gets to define it—if it could elide constitutional rights, is that something we’re seriously willing to consider doing? Including the line “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” discredits any discussion of civil liberties and the rule of law.

And that’s before we even weigh the trade-offs. My Cato colleagues who work on technology policy say that the digital contact-tracing programs being proposed—those for which Goldsmith and Woods want a more flexible constitutional structure—wouldn’t even achieve the goals of traditional contact-tracing, which seeks to identify and isolate disease carriers.