RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/trump-announces-federal-surge-against-violent-crime-wave/

‘Operation Legend,’ named after a four-year-old shot to death in his sleep, relies on longstanding cooperation between federal, state, and local authorities.

President Trump announced this afternoon a “surge” in the federal effort to quell the violent crime that is spiking in major American cities.

The effort is along the lines of what Rich Lowry and I discussed on The McCarthy Report podcast last week, and in a column I wrote earlier this month about potential federal approaches to violent crime.

As we’ve noted, there was no need to re-create the wheel here. There is abundant law that gives federal agencies jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute violent crime. Just as significantly, the federal government (the U.S. attorneys’ offices, the FBI, DEA, other federal agencies, and the U.S. courts) not only has a longstanding presence in our nation’s biggest cities. For decades, we’ve also had federal-state task forces, which are joint investigative efforts involving the police and prosecution agencies of the federal, state, and municipal governments to combat gang crime and its staples — street-level narcotics trafficking and gun crimes.

The president, with elaboration from Attorney General Bill Barr, explained that the new effort is called “Operation Legend,” in honor of LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy who was senselessly shot to death in his sleep last month when a still-unidentified gunman opened fire on his family’s apartment in Kansas City.

Barr detailed that Operation Legend had already commenced with a ramp-up of federal agents in Kansas City, where 200 arrests were made in a two-week period. The initiative is now being expanded to two other cities with soaring crime, Chicago and Albuquerque. Amid a litany of bloody statistics, Trump noted that 23 people were shot in Chicago just yesterday — 15 of them at a funeral home, where respects were being paid to a man who’d been killed in an earlier drive-by shooting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/progressives-to-cities-drop-dead-11595458490?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

On Tuesday the New York City sky was clear, blue and filled with sunshine. That’s it for this week’s good news. We turn now to Portland, Ore.; Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and all of America’s other seemingly Godforsaken cities.

President Trump watches a lot of television, so he’s seeing the same daily urban nightmares we’re seeing. It’s hard not to sympathize with his instinct to send in federal authorities to restore civil order to cities like Portland, as he proposed Wednesday with the expansion of an urban anticrime initiative called Operation Legend to Chicago and Albuquerque.

It’s equally hard to disagree that, other than protecting federal facilities, Mr. Trump should let all of these smug Portlandia American cities stew in their own juices.

I loved it when Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, said the federal presence “is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.” Where’s Groucho Marx when we need him to make sense of nonsense?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-vaccine-progress-report-11595461075?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Life probably won’t return to normal until we have a widely distributed Covid-19 vaccine, and the good news is this may happen sooner than expected thanks to years of private investment and new cooperation between the U.S. government and drug companies.

On Wednesday the Trump Administration announced a $1.95 billion advance order for 100 million doses of a promising vaccine candidate by Pfizer and Germany-based BioNTech that could be available by the end of the year. Dare to dream. The drug makers plan to begin the final phase of their clinical trials this month and seek regulatory approval as soon as October.

***

The Administration’s Operation Warp Speed is accelerating vaccine development as well as the manufacturing of ingredients and equipment with the aim of delivering 300 million doses by January 2021. That’s an ambitious target, but the Administration is placing several bets with vaccine makers with the hope that at least one or two will pay off.

Evidence from early-stage clinical trials so far has been promising. Pfizer and BioNTech this month reported preliminary results from 45 volunteers showing that their mRNA vaccine candidate generated levels of neutralizing antibodies 1.8- to 2.8-times higher than those in recovered patients. The vaccine programs cells to produce a viral protein that stimulates an immune response.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/22/list-of-183-monuments-ruined-since-protests-began-and-counting/

Most monuments torn down were not by protesters, but by city officials after pressure or threats from protesters.

Thirty-three statues of Columbus. Nine of the Founding Fathers. Eight of Saint Junipero Serra. With the frequency of the ongoing iconoclasm, it can be hard to gain a scale of the problem.

For each story that has breached the news cycle, at least a dozen went unreported outside of local media. This detailed list records each instance monuments have been defaced, vandalized, and or torn down since nationwide protests began, updated as more occur.

Some key takeaways include:

At least 183 monuments, memorials, statues, and major historical markers have been defaced or pulled down since protests began in May.
While Confederate monuments have taken the lion’s share of media coverage, they actually form a minority of the statues targeted.
By far the most popular target was Christopher Columbus, with 33 statues in total having been defaced and pulled down.
The next most popular targets were Robert E. Lee (9), Serra (8), and Thomas Jefferson (4).
The vast majority of the vandals were never charged, with 177 out of 183 instances having no arrests.
Most monuments torn down were not by protesters, but by city officials after pressure or threats from protesters.
By far the most common route for monuments being destroyed was for protesters to damage it, then the city quickly removing it as a “public safety” hazard, not to be returned.
For a majority of the statues removed, the fate of the artwork is currently unknown, while a minority have been moved to cemeteries and museums.

The list begins with the most recent instance of iconoclasm and continues backwards in time until the first instance connected with nationwide rioting, in late May.