RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/put-job

With so many big stories breaking, it’s hard to get attention even for important news about the FBI’s and CIA’s misdeeds. Still, the wrongdoing at James Comey’s FBI and John Brennan’s CIA was serious, as the news this week amply demonstrates.

On July 17,  we learned that the FBI knew, just as Trump’s presidency was beginning, that there was no evidence his campaign had colluded with Russia. That’s the significance of a memo written by FBI agent Peter Strzok in mid-February 2017 and just released.

The news matters for three reasons. First, almost all the public investigation and damaging narrative about “Trump-Russia collusion” came after investigators knew how little supporting evidence there was.

Second, the more we learn about the ensuing investigations, the more they look like concerted abuses of government authority. We give law-enforcement and intelligence agencies tremendous power so they can protect us; when they abuse that power, they need to be held accountable and reined in. That seldom happens to anyone in Washington’s sprawling bureaucracies. The Swamp protects its own within its gurgling ecosystem of power, profit, regulation, and rent-seeking. Just ask Lois Lerner.

Third, when the FBI, Department of Justice, and intelligence agencies act in biased, partisan, and illicit ways, they cut to the very heart of our constitutional democracy, damage our institutions, and undermine trust in them. That is exactly what happened in 2016 and afterward. Public trust was undermined by these prolonged investigations and the narrative about them. It will be undermined further as we learn how the investigators themselves likely pursued partisan goals, ignored crucial evidence, and broke laws to do it. (The counter-charge, already being made, is that exposing these violations is itself partisan.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-says-trump-is-americas-first-racist-president/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

SITTING ON HIS BRAIN TAKES A TOLL ON JOE….RSK

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called President Trump the country’s first racist president during a virtual town hall Wednesday.

“The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” Biden said at the virtual event organized by the Service Employees International Union when a healthcare worker brought up Trump’s habit of blaming Asians for the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has regularly referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus,” the “Wuhan virus” and the “Kung Flu.”

“No sitting president has ever done this,” Biden said. “Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”

Last year, when asked by the Washington Post if it was wrong to describe Trump as “a racist with a white supremacist policy agenda,” Biden said no, but did not want to go so far as to label Trump a racist, saying instead that the president was promoting “racist policies.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/07/22/nancy-pelosi-calls-the-wuhan-coronavirus-the-trump-virus-n670314

ILHAN OMAR’S NEW NANNY…RSK

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during a Tuesday interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer that the United States is suffering from the “Trump virus.”

“I think with the president’s comments today, he recognized the mistakes he has made by now embracing mask-wearing and the recognition this is not a hoax, it is a pandemic that has gotten worse before it will get better because of his inaction. And, in fact, clearly, it is the Trump virus,” Pelosi said.

“What do you mean when you say the Trump virus?” Blitzer asked.

“The Trump virus: If he had said months ago, let’s wear masks and let’s not – let’s socially distance instead of rallies and whatever they were, then more people would have followed his lead,” Pelosi replied. “He’s the president of the United States.”

There are a number of falsehoods in Pelosi’s claims.

For starters, Trump never called the coronavirus a hoax. In fact, while Pelosi was distracted by impeachment, the Trump administration was busy addressing the coronavirus outbreak, taking various measures to limit the spread of the virus in the United States, that were quickly politicized by the Democrats once impeachment was over. Trump’s travel ban with China, for example, was described as an overreaction, and Democrats accused him of trying to scare the public. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science,” said Joe Biden, who (like many others) has since flip-flopped on the travel ban.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/20/democrats-the-party-of-science-fiction/

We don’t know for sure but we’d bet most of those we see smugly wearing NASA T-shirts are Democrats, because, after all, they’ve declared theirs to be The Party of Science. But that’s about as true as one famous Democrat’s claim that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

From President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, to the political right’s warranted skepticism of the man-is-overheating-Earth narrative, the Democratic machine, which includes the legacy media and an ever-expanding segment of academia, has peddled the indictment that Republicans and conservatives are anti-science.

According to failed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, the Trump administration denied the science and denied the experts when it tossed out a public health crisis “playbook for any administration that followed” that had been left by the Obama White House. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has labeled the GOP as the “anti-science” party. Just a few months back, noted Democrat Barack Obama said Republicans have “denied the science of climate change just as they denied the science of pandemics.”

Before the pandemic, Democrats called anyone who didn’t kneel before the shrine of Al Gore and activist researchers trafficking in climate fear to be a “science denier,” just as they will again once the coronavirus no longer dominates the headlines.

“The Republican War on Science,” written by journalist Chris Mooney, summarizes as well as any other rant the Democrats’ contention that the political right is anti-science. The Publishers Weekly reviewer, no doubt eager to join the charge, said the tome “is the first to put the whole story, thoroughly documented, in one place.”

This is all rather funny, because the “science” the Democrats put their faith in is often little more than a set of baseless theories that fit their policy agenda. They treat their own share of “settled science” as if it’s witchcraft.

For instance, the left is convinced that genetically modified foods are mysterious products that pose a profound health threat. The fanaticism and fear-mongering of GMO crops are much like the 20th century – and the 21st century in Democrat-run Portland – resistance to fluoridated water that has left a trail of harm. 

https://spectator.org/why-the-polls-predict-trump-will-win/

Lately, pollsters and pundits have been nervously pondering the following question: “If Trump is behind in the polls, why do most voters say, in the same surveys, that he will win the upcoming election?” As Harry Enten recently noted at CNN, “An average of recent polls finds that a majority of voters (about 55%) believe that Trump will defeat Biden in the election. Trump’s edge on this question has remained fairly consistent over time.” This is far more than mere statistical curiosity by number nerds. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that surveys of voter expectations are far more predictive of election outcomes than polls of voter intentions.

Voter expectations concerning who would win a given election were consistently more predictive than surveys using only conventional polling questions. 

The polls that appear to portend a one-term presidency for Trump actually predict that the president will trounce Biden badly this November.

According to studies conducted by researchers in the United States and in Europe, any pollster attempting to divine the outcome of an election should pay far less attention to what survey respondents say about the candidate they plan to vote for than the candidate they actually believe is going to win. Professor Andreas Graefe of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LSU Munich), proclaims these citizen forecasts, as they are sometimes categorized, “the most accurate method that we have to predict election outcomes.” Dr. Graefe elaborates on this assertion at considerable length in Public Opinion Quarterly under the title “Accuracy of Vote Expectation Surveys in Forecasting”: