RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/turtles-on-a-treadmill-joni-ernst-blasts-ludicrous-government-waste-in-scathing-senate-speech

The dysfunction of the federal government is almost humorous until one remembers that we taxpayers are the ones footing the bill for the state’s foolishness.

Of course, few lawmakers in Washington actually seem to care, as both parties’ establishments have made peace with bloated budgets and sky-high deficits so long as their pet projects and interests get funded. Sen. Joni Ernst appears to be one of the rare and welcome exceptions, reminding us of her willingness to fight for fiscal conservatism with a scathing Senate speech Wednesday afternoon.

The Iowa Republican drew a spotlight to one particularly egregious example of waste, a taxpayer-funded study that blew almost a million dollars putting turtles on treadmills, both dead and alive, then comparing their speeds. And it’s not like this is some one-off fluke: The federal government spends taxpayer money on everything from scaring monkeys to the point of brain damage to funding the Pakistani film industry to subsidizing Serbian cheese production.

“Your tax dollars actually paid for a study that put turtles on treadmills,” Ernst lamented. “To no one’s surprise, it turns out that turtles are really, really slow. That’s what our tax dollars went to.”

“Now, how many of your tax dollars went to this study, exactly? Your guess is as good as mine … because there is no legal obligation for most federal agencies to disclose the price of government projects — even though the American taxpayers are paying for them,” the senator railed. “Folks, this is your money: So, shouldn’t you have a right to know how it’s being spent?”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/12/how_to_get_the_stock_market_back.html

Election years make cowards of governments.  How else can you explain the White House response to the challenge of markets in panic over the new coronavirus? The Trump administration has moved into a defensive crouch. Its best ideas seems to be to rail at the Federal Reserve, or to reduce the payroll tax.  A quick-stim payroll tax cut may be just the ticket for an administration desiring to supply a momentary pocketbook break to a maximum number of voters. The president isn’t doing more because – or so goes the logic – to propose dramatic changes requiring legislation is to run the danger of humiliating rejection by Congress. And this White House, any White House, wants to look strong in an election year.

But the reality is that a temporary payroll-tax cut is a baby-step Keynesian move that won’t get America its market back. And one can’t count on the Federal Reserve, whatever it does, to restore our economy single-handedly. It’s worthwhile, therefore, to suspend disbelief for a moment and at least consider the “impossibles” — what could be done for markets by the White House and Congress if this were not an election year. There are plenty of measures that would bring the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 roaring back to where they were before the panic – or yet higher. And those increases would come not just because of post-panic euphoria, but also because the prospects for growth in the United States would ratchet upward. Herewith are four transformative growth proposals:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/mit-biologist-and-inventer-of-email-dr-shiva-ayyadurai-says-deep-state-fear-mongering-on-coronavirus-will-go-down-as-biggest-fraud-to-manipulate-economies/

Ayyadurai is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is best known for his claim to have invented email.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, who performs research nearly every day on the humun immune system, says the coronavirus scare the #coronavirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest fraud to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!

Dr.SHIVA Ayyadurai, MIT PhD. Inventor of Email

@va_shiva
·
Mar 9

As an MIT PhD in Biological Engineering who studies & does research nearly every day on the Immune System, the #coronavirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest fraud to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!
Quote Tweet

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
· Mar 9
The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant. Surgeon General, “The risk is low to the average American.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/great-coronavirus-war-stay-calm-rational-easily-defeat-enemy/

If we stay calm and rational, we can easily defeat the enemy, whose reputation is likely far scarier than its reality.

Try this thought experiment. Envision the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, as a living, breathing enemy — which, of course, is exactly what it is.

But imagine for a moment that we are in real war with a cognizant, thinking, and clever enemy whose sole reason to live is to hurt, maim, or kill as many of us as it can.

COVID-19 may not have jets, tanks, or nukes, like our past enemies. But its arsenal, numbers, cunning, and willpower are said to be formidable.

To win its war against Americans, COVID-19 must infect and sicken lots of Americans each day. If it cannot infect enough victims to multiply and sustain a hungry army of viruses, COVID-19 will soon sputter and die. It will get trapped in just a few hosts among an otherwise victorious and healthy nation of about 330 million.

Nature has given COVID-19 some weapons that its defeated cousins — the H1N1 swine flu and the MERS and SARS viruses — lacked.

It is more clever by being less lethal — and a little tougher in its ability to live outside a host. Viral resiliency ensures that it rarely turns into a suicide bomber by dying with a terminally sick host, and that it does not perish so quickly when orphaned in the air and on surfaces.

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

On Wednesday night, a solemn President Trump spoke for less than ten minutes to tell Americans what steps the federal government has taken and will take to address the spread of coronavirus around the world. These steps include stopping all travel from Europe, payroll tax relief, small business loans, and aide for American workers who become sick or must care for someone who is sick.

Although it was not a flowery speech, Trump reminded Americans that health crises are a fact of life. What matters is how one responds. In the face of the panic sweeping America, Trump promised us that, “This is not a financial crisis. This is just a temporary moment in time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”

After detailing the practical steps he will take, Trump ended by saying that America has tremendous financial resilience, which makes his proposals possible, and incredible human capital. He also urged Americans to put aside partisan differences to provide the most robust response to a temporary, albeit severe, problem.

Within minutes, Democrats and Never Trumpers ignored the President’s request that the country works together on the problem. Instead, they swung instantly into action, castigating him for doing nothing (even though he acted quickly to restrict travel from China and quarantine travelers) and dreaming of all the horrible things that should happen to Trump and America.

Here are just a few examples of the hysteria and pure hatred that Democrats and NevertTrumpers expressed for Trump and America itself.

Garry Kasparov, a Never Trumper, voiced an elaborate fantasy that the most successful conservative president in modern American history was motivated by the fact that he’s being exposed as a “fraud”:

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: