RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/war-trump-matthew-vadum/

The leftist NAACP, which never met a conservative it didn’t consider to be a racist hatemonger, is suing former President Donald Trump using an obscure law that was wielded against the Democratic Party-affiliated terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered blacks and their Republican enemies after the Civil War.

The Ku Klux Klan Act is an unusual tool to pull from a cobweb-covered chest of old laws nobody knew were still in existence. President Ulysses S. Grant (he’s the guy on the $50 bill, millennials!) used the statute to declare martial law, penalize terrorist organizations, and use military force to suppress the KKK after the Civil War.

Those who filed this baseless, pie-in-the-sky lawsuit don’t give a farthing’s cuss about justice. The Democratic National Committee needs a reason to keep squeezing its donors and Trump is the most impressive object of revilement Democrats have had to shriek at in decades.

This is just part of a long-running campaign of harassment aimed at destroying Florida’s own Trump, who was acquitted after an unprecedented two impeachment trials, besting the previous record-holding acquittees Andrew Johnson of Tennessee and Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

It comes after an armada of court-authorized fishing expeditions and emoluments lawsuits failed to take away the presidency that Hillary Clinton so devoutly wished had been hers.

We all know that The Left was fine with Trump until he got into politics on the Republican side. It bestowed a truckload of honors on him before he became president, including the Muhammad Ali Entrepreneur Award (2007) and alongside Rosa Parks, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (1986). But these blindly hateful people need to keep busy and sewing quilts, downvoting disfavored books on Amazon, and throwing Molotov cocktails at cops and burns up so much of the day.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-conservatism-is-now-a-public-health-risk-11613690706?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

From “Public policy and health in the Trump era,” a Feb. 10 report by the Lancet, a British medical journal:

Trump exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia. . . . His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights; ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/return-of-the-swamp-creatures-11613690674?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Washington doesn’t usually make it easy to pinpoint the moment when things went wrong. So thanks to Rep. Rosa DeLauro for publicly heralding the return of the swamp.

The announcement actually came from a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, which the Connecticut Democrat oversees. “Chair DeLauro supports Member-directed funding for community projects,” Evan Hollander told HuffPost this week. For those uninitiated in Washington doublespeak, earmarks are back.

A few other English words to describe what’s returning: Pork. Logrolling. Sleaze. Bridges to nowhere. Republicans banned earmarks in February 2011 after the term became synonymous with Congress’s embarrassing habit. The late Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had led a yearslong campaign to expose earmarks as a “gateway drug” to greater spending and corruption. In the face of a tea-party revolt, his colleagues finally chose wisdom.

Democrats are choosing power. According to reports, Ms. DeLauro and Senate Appropriations Chairman Patrick Leahy will soon announce that earmarks are welcome in annual spending bills. Why would Democrats risk such a move? Politico explains that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has reassured his party that it won’t suffer, since the effort will be “bipartisan.” Democrats are banking on spend-thirsty Republicans to provide cover.

The question is whether the GOP will succumb, handing the Democratic leadership a uniquely powerful tool in today’s narrowly divided Congress. Republicans may botch their first opportunity to draw a stark contrast in governance, wield some real power, and energize their base.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, chief medical adviser to Sesame Care, and author of “The Price We Pay.”

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-tweaks-legal-position-in-arizona-voting-case_3702650.html

The Biden administration changed its position on an upcoming Supreme Court appeal dealing with Arizona’s electoral integrity laws, disavowing the previous administration’s interpretation of anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Although the Biden administration won’t present oral arguments in the case or update a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Trump administration, it signaled to the justices and the public that it’s leaving the door open to adopting a more aggressive interpretation of the statute in the future.

Section 2 of the law forbids voting practices that result “in a denial or abridgment of the right … to vote on account of race or color [or language-minority status],” and provides that such a result “is established” if a jurisdiction’s “political processes … are not equally open” to members of such a group “in that [they] have less opportunity … to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

“That text must be construed in light of Section 2’s constitutional context, as an exercise of Congress’s authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on intentional discrimination,” the Trump administration’s brief filed last year stated.

The filing comes as the litigants prepare to present oral arguments to the Supreme Court in the case on March 2.

The case is two cases that the court consolidated. The first is Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (DNC). The second is Arizona Republican Party v. DNC. The reach of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is at issue.