Displaying posts published in

May 2020

MY SAY: WHY DID FOX NEWS AND CHRIS WALLACE INTERVIEW THIS MAN ?

Maybe next week Wallace should interview Eliot Spitzer to talk about prostitution? rsk

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/05/06/did-we-forge

“Former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tom Frieden avoided jail time on Tuesday after pleading guilty to groping a longtime family friend in New York. Frieden, who is also the former New York City health comissioner, turned himself in to police in August 2018 after the woman reported that he had grabbed her butt without her permission inside his Brooklyn apartment, court documents said.By pleading guilty, Frieden wasn’t required to explain what happened during the October 2017 incident to Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Edwin Novillo. Frieden was facing up to a year in jail for misdemeanor forcible touching, third-degree sexual abuse and second-degree harassment charges, prosecutors said.”

Everything Important In Life Involves Tradeoffs Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-16-everything-important-in-life-involves-tradeoffs

One of the fallacies of progressivism that I frequently mock at this blog is the proposition that the government can operate without having to make meaningful tradeoffs of one goal or value versus another.

This fallacy appears, for example, in the illusion of infinite resources in the hands of the government. As individuals we all know that we face constrained budgets and limits on what we can do. Eat out too much, and you need to postpone getting the new TV or new car. Decide to become a lawyer, and you will need to forego becoming a doctor. Your money and your time only go so far. But somehow it can appear that the government is so huge and has such vast resources at its command that there are no practical limits, and no need for tradeoffs. And thus we get monstrosities like the Bernie Sanders (and Joe Biden?) program for a federal government that eliminates all downsides of human life by passing out the infinite free money. Or see the latest “Heroes Act” out of the House of Representatives — $3 trillion to take care of everyone’s pain from the coronavirus response; Medicare for All, Free College, and Batteries not included (yet).

Another aspect of the no-tradeoffs-necessary fallacy is the idea that the right thing for political leaders to do in a crisis is to rely on the “experts.” One problem with that is that so-called “experts” are as likely as not to have no idea what they are talking about.

Obama Exposed: There Were No FISA Warrants, There Was No Incidental Surveillance, There Was The Hammer — The Persecution Of General Flynn By Mary Fanning and Alan Jones |

https://theamericanreport.org/2020/05/15/obama-exposed-there-were-no-fisa-warrants-there-was-no-incidental-surveillance-there-was-the-hammer-the-persecution-of-general-flynn/

For years, Sally Yates and James Clapper were acutely aware that the Obama administration was engaged in illegal domestic surveillance.

In August of 2014, CIA contractor-turned-whistleblower Dennis Montgomery met with Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Royce C. Lamberth, one-time presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  Montgomery handed over to Judge Lamberth a cache of Special Access Program (SAP) classified documents.

Judge Lamberth then approached FBI Director James Comey and Lamberth’s longtime friend FBI General Counsel James Baker, in an attempt to assist Montgomery’s efforts to become a whistleblower and expose illegal domestic surveillance programs run by President Obama and his intelligence chiefs John Brennan, and James Clapper.

The government was desperate to get back Dennis Montgomery’s evidence, even if it meant granting Montgomery whistleblower immunity.

Brennan and Clapper, Montgomery says, illegally commandeered a U.S. government foreign surveillance tool known as The Hammer, then relocated that system to Fort Washington, Maryland on February 3, 2009, according to The Whistleblower Tapes.

FBI Director Robert Mueller provided the computers for The Hammer, according to Montgomery.

New York admits purposely undercounting nursing home deaths after changing reporting rules by Andrew Mark Miller

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/new-york-admits-purposely-undercounting-nursing-home-deaths-after-changing-reporting-rules

The state of New York omitted coronavirus deaths from nursing homes and adult care facilities after it was revealed that a significant amount of individuals were dying from the virus in those types of residences.

The New York Department of Health admitted that its most recent reporting does not fully account for the known coronavirus deaths among nursing home residents, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In early May, reports from the state started to leave out long-term care residents who lost their lives from the coronavirus in hospitals, and New York still leads the nation in nursing home deaths, with 5,433 as of Wednesday.

The New York Department of Health confirmed it was disclosing nursing home deaths regardless of whether the patient died there or in a hospital until around April 28. But the department made a “subtle” change around May 3, according to web archives, and now only reports deaths if the patient died while physically present at a facility.

New York’s coronavirus tracker “currently does not include out of facility deaths,” Jill Montag, an NYSDOH spokeswoman, said. “Deaths of nursing home and adult care facility residents that occurred at hospitals is accounted for in the overall fatality data on our COVID-19 tracker.”

Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties The Blue Party’s Trump-era Embrace of Authoritarianism Isn’t Just Wrong, it’s a Fatal Political Mistake Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks.

Coronavirus: China’s Disappeared Heroes and the Silence of the West by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15972/china-coronavirus-dissidents-arrests

These intrepid dissidents showed how fragile, vacuous and dangerous is the edifice of the Chinese regime.
The Chinese Communist Party “is the biggest and most serious virus of all… It is time to recognize the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to all humanity. The CCP represses and manipulates information to strengthen its hold on power.” — Chen Guangcheng, blind Chinese dissident, now a refugee in the US. Asianews.it, April 27, 2020.
Today…if we know something about China we owe it to China’s vanished heroes. We have, horribly, chosen to abandon them. Very few in the very free West call out the Chinese authorities and ask these great men and women to be released.
The Australian University of Queensland, with close links to China is actually trying to take disciplinary action, including possible expulsion, against a student, Drew Pavlou, known for his criticism of Beijing. We are playing Beijing’s game of repression of dissent.
Bloomberg News is said to censor articles that might anger China and expose Xi’s personal wealth. And the European Union just softened criticism of China in a report on disinformation about the pandemic… It looks as though free thought is more valued among China’s daring dissidents than in many corners of the West.
To paraphrase Leon Trotsky: You may not be interested in China, but China is interested in you.

Three Chinese internet activists have disappeared and are believed to have been detained by police. They have reportedly been charged with preserving articles that were removed by China’s online censors. Chen Mei, Cai Wei and Cai’s girlfriend went missing on April 19.

Mullahs’ Missiles Kill Iranians but Can’t Defend Iran Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16030/iran-missiles

That leaves the third angle, missiles, to thrive. Missiles are the weapon of the poor, especially when copied from foreign models courtesy of North Korea, China and, to a lesser extent, Russia.

One more problem is Iran’s continued dependence on North Korean and Chinese partners for spare parts, technology, maintenance and training-for-use of virtually all its missiles. There is no guarantee that either Beijing or Pyongyang would want to be dragged into a war that the Islamic Republic might trigger to prolong its existence as an exporter of revolution.

More importantly, perhaps, there is no evidence that as many Iranians today would be “volunteers for martyrdom” as the time the ayatollah developed his nightmarish dream.

Last Monday’s tragedy in the Gulf of Oman in which 19 Iranian naval officers were killed and 15 others injured in a “friendly fire” incident has focused attention on the Islamic Republic’s failure to develop a realistic defense doctrine that reflects Iran’s interests as a nation rather than as a vehicle for an ideology.

John Brennan and the Plot to Subvert an American Election Tyranny is always more palatable when swaddled in the conviction of its own virtue. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/16/john-brennan-and-the-plot-to-subvert-an-american-election/

Let’s talk about John Brennan a bit. You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier intelligence service under Obama. In 2014, having put childish things behind him as St. Paul advised, Brennan spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He denied it indignantly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

Nothing happened to Brennan for spying on U.S. senators.

If he could get away with that, what else could he get away with?

How about starting the bogus investigation into fictional “collusion” or “coordination” between the Russians and the campaign, and then the administration, of Donald Trump? How about that?

In Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy offers a meticulously researched overview of the origins and character of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible links between Trump and the Russians. That began in May 2017, shortly after Trump fired James Comey from his post as Director of the FBI. McCarthy also looks carefully at the background to that investigation, operation “Crossfire Hurricane” and several tributary investigations into possible Russian collusion with various U.S. persons and entities. Crossfire Hurricane began on July 31, 2016, about three months before the presidential election.

New York State Deliberately Covered Up Full Extent of Coronavirus Nursing Home Deaths By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/16/new-york-state-deliberately-covered-up-full-extent-of-coronavirus-nursing-home-deaths-n397998

On March 25, New York state ordered nursing homes to accept patients regardless of their coronavirus status. That order proved to be a deadly mistake. It was well known that the elderly were more vulnerable to the virus, so having patients who tested positive for the coronavirus in nursing homes allowed the virus to spread, as Governor Andrew Cuomo put it, “like fire through dry grass.”

Despite this, Cuomo defended the policy. Nursing homes “don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that,” Cuomo said during a daily briefing last month. He finally rescinded the order on May 11, but the damage had been done.

But New York state was covering up just how deadly this policy was. By not counting the deaths of nursing home residents who died in hospitals in their tallies of nursing home resident deaths, New York was vastly undercounting nursing home deaths. In fact, it was the only state with a large outbreak to do this, and they finally admitted to this in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Andrew Cuomo is a deadly failure The New York governor is a bungler, yet he’s hailed as a hero Roger Kimball

https://spectator.us/new-york-andrew-cuomo-coronavirus-response/

Have we reached peak Cuomo? I think that the climacteric came when the media was aflutter with rumors that the governor of New York wore nipple rings. Alas, it turned out to be only a rumor, or so we have been assured.

There are two questions that continue to bedevil Cuomo watchers. The first is whether his handling of the Wuhan Flu is the absolute worst of any governor or only among the worst.

The second question is how, given how appalling his leadership has been, he has managed to float along with such high approval ratings (some say 80 percent).

As to the first, we have a veritable litany of failure, much of it deadly. Cuomo began by downplaying the seriousness of the virus and boasting that New York, being ‘fully coordinated’ and ‘fully mobilized’, was going to handle it much better than many places. That was on March 2. Fast forward two months and New York leads the country in coronavirus deaths, accounting for a third or more of the nationwide total. At some point the governor began to panic, shouting that New York would need 140,000 beds (it needed 18,500 at the peak) and 30,000 ventilators. Soon I expect to see them littering antique stores repurposed as planters.

What made Cuomo’s handling of the situation so bad? Critics point to a host of policies.