RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/guilt-accusation-bruce-hendry/

Editors’ note: Below is Part 3 of a new essay written by Bruce Hendry: Democrats, Progressives and Socialists. Stay tuned for the ensuing chapters. [See links to previous chapters below this article].

 Guilt By Accusation.

Brett Kavanaugh is an outstanding jurist who was nominated by Donald Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court. Nothing from his judicial past could be seriously be challenged by the Democrats, so at the exact moment when it would cause the most damage, they charged him with groping Christine Blasey Ford at a party 37 years before, when he was all of 15 years old.

Ford, couldn’t initially remember in what year it happened, although she eventually decided on 1982, or where it occurred, or how she got to the party or home from the party.  She did remember the names of four people that were at the party, including her best girlfriend.  Not one of those four people, including her own girlfriend, remember the incident. Her girlfriend said that she had never met Brett Kavanaugh.

End of story, right?  To any fair minded person this woman is either mentally unbalanced or a liar, and the fact that this accusation was withheld for 37 years and then made at the precise moment that would cause the most damage to the Supreme Court nominee would strike any normal person as being staged. The Democrats, both Group Two Democrats, the politicians and Group One Democrats, the loyal but clueless big hearted group rallied behind this ridiculous and destructive tale.

“Guilty until proven innocent;” “she wouldn’t lie because she’s a woman;” “If you don’t believe her, you are insulting every woman that has been sexually assaulted;” they said. But to believe Christine Ford one would also have to believe that every accusing woman always tells the truth and that every accused man lies.

In a “how to sell” seminar one learns about the “assumptive close.” One assumes that the other party agrees with one’s assumption without actually talking about it, then one proceeds to the close. The assumption here was that if Brett Kavanaugh dry humped a girl when he was 15 years old, then 37 years later, as an adult, he would be disqualified from any responsible position. There is no evidence that he did such a thing, but even if he did, as a teenager, that certainly would not in itself disqualify him for responsible positions for the rest of his life. That’s ridiculous. But that’s what the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee argued.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-ginsburg-to-recuse-herself-11583367515?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Trump recently lashed out at Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related, matters!” he tweeted. He’s wrong about Justice Sotomayor but has a point about Justice Ginsburg.

In a lone opinion dissenting from the court’s order in Wolf v. Cook County, Justice Sotomayor said she wouldn’t stay a lower court’s injunction against a Trump immigration policy. “Claiming one emergency after another,” she wrote, “the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each.” (Three other justices dissented without issuing opinions.)

Justice Sotomayor’s opinion doesn’t disparage Mr. Trump. She criticizes the government’s position, but she’s harsher on her colleagues in the majority, writing that their “recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others.” Mr. Trump is the one personalizing a legal dispute, and it would pervert justice if litigants could force judges to remove themselves from cases simply by denouncing them publicly.

Justice Ginsburg is a different case. In public interviews in 2016 she called Candidate Trump a “faker” and said: “I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president.” She even mused about fleeing the country: “‘Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.” She apologized—kind of: “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.” She admitted her remarks were “ill advised,” and that “in the future I will be more circumspect.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schumer-threatens-the-court-11583368483?mod=opinion_lead_pos

Democrats like to accuse President Trump of violating institutional democratic norms, and often he does with his rhetorical broadsides. But at least he’s never directly threatened the U.S. Supreme Court the way Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did on Wednesday.

Speaking to a crowd on the Supreme Court steps, the leading Senate Democrat declared: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” He meant Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the newest Justices who were appointed by President Trump.

Mr. Schumer was speaking before abortion-rights activists as the Supreme Court considers whether to curtail the ability of abortion providers to sue on behalf of women seeking abortions—a doctrine known as third-party standing. Mr. Schumer, still addressing Messrs. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, added: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

The “whirlwind”? “What hit you”? We won’t go so far as to call that an incitement to violence, but it surely was a threat of political reprisal against the Justices if they don’t vote the way Mr. Schumer wants. Does he mean impeachment or packing the Court?

https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-rate-lower-than-we-think.html

There are many compelling reasons to conclude that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is not nearly as deadly as is currently feared. But COVID-19 panic has set in nonetheless. You can’t find hand sanitizer in stores, and N95 face masks are being sold online for exorbitant prices, never mind that neither is the best way to protect against the virus (yes, just wash your hands). The public is behaving as if this epidemic is the next Spanish flu, which is frankly understandable given that initial reports have staked COVID-19 mortality at about 2–3 percent, quite similar to the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people.

Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold. The true case fatality rate, known as CFR, of this virus is likely to be far lower than current reports suggest. Even some lower estimates, such as the 1 percent death rate recently mentioned by the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likely substantially overstate the case.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the numbers are inflated. In past epidemics, initial CFRs were floridly exaggerated. For example, in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic some early estimates were 10 times greater than the eventual CFR, of 1.28 percent. Epidemiologists think and quibble in terms of numerators and denominators—which patients were included when fractional estimates were calculated, which weren’t, were those decisions valid—and the results change a lot as a result. We are already seeing this. In the early days of the crisis in Wuhan, China, the CFR was more than 4 percent. As the virus spread to other parts of Hubei, the number fell to 2 percent. As it spread through China, the reported CFR dropped further, to 0.2 to 0.4 percent. As testing begins to include more asymptomatic and mild cases, more realistic numbers are starting to surface. New reports from the World Health Organization that estimate the global death rate of COVID-19 to be 3.4 percent, higher than previously believed, is not cause for further panic. This number is subject to the same usual forces that we would normally expect to inaccurately embellish death rate statistics early in an epidemic. If anything, it underscores just how early we are in this.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/can-we-please-be-sober-minded-about-the-coronavirus/

EXCERPT

The coronavirus may not prove as threatening as first feared, but one way to ensure that it isn’t is for American officials to take it seriously. Foolish happy talk aside, the administration has, by and large, acted appropriately. The targeted travel restrictions can at least slow the influx of infected people while researchers work to develop treatments and vaccines. In addition to providing resources to those researchers and streamlining the testing process, federal agencies should promptly disseminate the number of cases and work with localities to quarantine patients as warranted.

To hear the Democrats tell it, Trump has already stumbled into a debacle. They’ve hit him for alleged cuts to the CDC, but Congress has in fact increased funding to the agency during Trump’s presidency. The cool-headed analysts at the New York Times also chimed in. Readers of Gail Collins — who titled a column “Let’s Call It Trumpvirus” — can be forgiven for thinking the president concocted the virus in the West Wing. Paul Krugman absurdly said Trump’s fear of “scary brown people” left the government ill-prepared to combat the crisis.