RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_gop_chairwoman_challenges_the_leftist_narrative_that_trump_is_a_donothing.html

Epidemic illnesses are always going to be scary. That scariness is there even when we marshall the facts. One good fact is that this is the flu, with a probable top mortality rate of 4.6 percent, not the Black Death, with its 40-90 percent mortality rate. Another good fact is that the 4.6 percent rate is dropping because we can track the virus better. We’ve always known how many people died, but we’re learning that more people were sick than was first assumed. As the number of recovered sick people expands, the mortality rate drops.

What makes this outbreak exceptionally frightening, though, is the number of people who want it to be awful. Some of them are just drama queens, reveling in the horror of the moment and the even more horrific possibilities of the future. These people are toxic and need to be avoided.

Worse, though, are those people who see this as Trump’s Waterloo. The problem for them, though, is that the only way Trump can measurably fail is if lots of people die and the entire American system collapses. These people, therefore, are cheering on the possibility of death, economic collapse, and social chaos. That’s not just toxic, that’s evil.

One of the things the Waterloo-wishes are doing is attacking everything Trump has said or done. When he banned flights from China and quarantined people, he was racist. When coronavirus still made it to America, he was ineffective. And when he announced that he was closing flights from Europe, people announced, without a scintilla of evidence, that it was too little too late.

Even before Trump’s latest announcements about slowing the spread of coronavirus and securing the economy, Ronna McDaniel, the GOP Chairwoman, had put out a short thread reminding America what Trump was doing, even as the Democrats were attacking him:

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/10/some-reality-testing-of-rosy-predictions-about-a-coronavirus-vaccine/

A Wuhan virus vaccine in the foreseeable future? Let’s get real. In spite of the rosy predictions by self-interested corporate executives, politicians, and pundits, don’t count on it.

When President Trump met with drug-company executives at the White House on March 2, at the top of the agenda was the development of a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, the respiratory infection caused by the Wuhan coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (the World Health Organization’s designation for the virus). “We’ve asked them to accelerate” work, the president told reporters.

As the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, with cases now found on every continent except Antarctica, and the world is hit with widespread social and economic disruption, there is intense interest in the development of a vaccine, and several U.S. drugmakers have begun working on them, independently or with the National Institutes of Health.

The media are hungry for claims about vaccines—the more extravagant, the better.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15703/distorting-legal-arguments

In response to a question whether it matters “If there were a quid pro quo,” I said that would depend on “If the quo were in some way unlawful.” If the politician’s motive were “corrupt” — for example, if he were seeking a kickback, that would be an impeachable crime. But if his entirely lawful act had “mixed motives,” including his re-election, that would not turn a lawful act into a crime or impeachable offense.

“Start with the media claim that defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz said a President can do anything to further his re-election as long as he thinks it is in the national interest. This isn’t what he said. The Harvard professor said explicitly that a President can be impeached for criminal acts.” — Wall Street Journal, Editorial, January 30, 2020.

Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of distorting the so-called “Dershowitz doctrine” into a justification for any and all presidential actions, is that it may create a dangerous precedent. Because of the persistent mischaracterization of “Dershowitz doctrine,” the Senate vote to acquit may be taken as a confirmation that a president who believes his re-election is in the public interest, can do anything he wants — even commit serious crimes — to help himself get re-elected. That is not what I said or believe. Nor is it the precedent the senators who vote for acquittal intended to establish.

It has now been a month since the Senate acquitted U.S. President Donald J. Trump, but the lies persist. Democratic leaders and the media continue to put on trial what they have denominated as “The Dershowitz Doctrine”: namely that a president can do anything — even commit serious crimes — as long as he believes his election was in the public interest. Congressman Adam Schiff described it as a “lawless” variation on the “Nixon” doctrine that whatever a president does is, by definition, lawful. Senator Schumer said that under “my” doctrine, former President Richard M. Nixon did not commit any impeachable offense, despite evidence of his numerous crimes. (Ignoring my explicit statement that I supported Nixon’s impeachment.) Media pundits went even further: Joe Lockhart, former Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton, accused me of making arguments that would justify the genocides of Hitler and Stalin.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/21-words-uttered-fisa-court-change-russia-collusion-case

For much of the last three years, key law enforcement leaders have insisted they did nothing wrong in pursuing counterintelligence surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign starting during the 2016 election. And, they’ve added, if mistakes were made, they were unintentional process errors downstream from them and not an effort to deceive the judges.

But in a little-noted passage in a recent order, U.S. District Judge James A. Boasberg, the new chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took direct aim at the excuses and blame-shifting of these senior Obama administration FBI and DOJ officials.

In just 21 words, Boasberg provided the first judicial declaration the FBI had misled the court, not just committed process errors. “There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications,” Boasberg wrote.

The no-fault mantra has been spread by everyone from President Trump’s former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who insisted the DOJ took its responsibility to submit “admissible evidence, credible witnesses” very seriously, to the ex-FBI Director James Comey, who declared recently it was “nonsense” to suggest the bureau opened a probe without good cause.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/10/what-to-do-about-stock-market-meltdown-how-about-nothing/

No doubt about it, it’s a bad time to be fully invested in the stock market. Prognosticators abound, yet no one really knows what the stock market will do next. What’s happening, and what should you do?

First, let’s recap Monday’s market mayhem.

Before the market even opened, stock futures for S&P 500 index flashed a huge 7% decline. That triggered so-called “circuit breakers,” rules that require trading to be suspended 15 minutes to prevent a panicked rush for the exits. That’s always a bad sign.

Equally bad, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tanked more than 2,000 points, off 7.8% at day’s close, while the growth-stock rich Nasdaq Index plunged more than 7.3%.

Why has the stock market suddenly gone so sour, after hitting record highs repeatedly early in the year? The one word reply is: fear. More specifically, fear of the unknowable, fear of what comes next.

The Covid-19 virus’ spread is the main unknown, sending waves of panic through global markets. The World Health Organization says there are now some 110,000 Covid-19 cases worldwide, with an estimated 3,809 deaths.

Another fear relates to the shocking collapse in oil prices and interest rates, usually signs of impending deflation and declines in future investment across the economy. Monday’s near-21% plunge in oil prices was the biggest since the financial crisis, while the 10-year Treasury rate hovers around 0.5%, not far above zero.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2020/03/08/covid-19-and-the-economy-as-seen-from-a-technology-investment-conference/#4c13a064fc7c

COVID-19 infected the American psyche and stocks rather suddenly during the final week of February. Last week I attended at large technology investment conference in California — The Montgomery Summit 2020 — and was eager to see whether investors and entrepreneurs were pulling in their horns. I also moderated two discussions on the pandemic’s likely damage to the economy, markets and supply chains around the world.

My first session was with Michael Milken, the noted financier and philanthropist. Milken was cautious for the short term, but generally optimistic. Computer power for gene sequencing and AI models to predict infection spread, he said, are vastly more capable than during the SARS scare of 2002-2003 and the H1N1 epidemic of 2009-2010, when 700 million to 1.4 billion people became infected worldwide and upwards of 500,000 died. Technology can identify and solve problems much faster today.

Milken cited the U.S. polio epidemic of 1952 and the HIV/AIDS panic of the late 1980s as times when fear gripped the population. “People were afraid to be in the same room with someone infected with HIV.”

Fear, of course, is hard to break. The polio fear persisted a few years after the Salk vaccine. Milken said it was popular figures like Elvis Presley, photographed during his Army vaccine, that broke the spell. What lifted the clouds for AIDS were new drug cocktails that eliminated the death sentence, along with thriving patients such as basketball star Magic Johnson.

Capitalism, reasonably regulated, Milken reminded us, has remarkable recuperative powers.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/this-is-a-not-a-panic-but-adjustment-to-a-mild-recession/

Financial panics occur when investors sell what they can, not what they want to. And that happens when they can’t finance their positions. Credit remains freely available for sound borrowers, and the rise in the cost of credit has been orderly – except for energy companies below investment grade.

There is no sign of sudden liquidation from popular exchange-traded funds that buy high yield debt, despite steep price declines. Equity multiples shrank and probably will shrink further as the market prices in a mild recession during 2020. But that’s a far cry from 2008, when major banks levered $2 trillion worth of phony AAA-rated securities sixty-to-one.

The stock market’s 15% fall from its February peak is painful, but not panicky. The coronavirus probably will cause a mild contraction of US economic activity during the second and third quarters, as travel and hospitality businesses shrink, consumers avoid shopping malls, and Americans, in general, save rather than spend as a precaution.

Consumer spending was the only significant source of US growth during 2019, as investment and manufacturing shrank in response to the incipient trade war. Strong economic data for the first two months of 2020, including an exceptionally large increase in February employment, indicated that the US economy was improving after the conclusion of a “Phase One” trade deal with China – before the coronavirus problem emerged.