RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2021/01/15/new-study-lockdowns-didnt-stop-spread-covid-19/

As always, approach all stories that headline the word “study” with some caution. Newsweek’s report on a new study from Stanford published this week in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation should carry the same caveat — one study does not a scientific foundation make. However, the findings in this study of the impact of lockdowns on COVID-19 transmission do seem to fit our own observations, especially in the pandemic’s second and third waves:

The most restrictive non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID‐19 are mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs).

We first estimate COVID‐19 case growth in relation to any NPI implementation in subnational regions of 10 countries: England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. Using first‐difference models with fixed effects, we isolate the effects of mrNPIs by subtracting the combined effects of lrNPIs and epidemic dynamics from all NPIs. We use case growth in Sweden and South Korea, two countries that did not implement mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures, as comparison countries for the other 8 countries (16 total comparisons).

Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a non‐significant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, e.g., the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95CI ‐5%‐19%) when compared with Sweden, and +13% (‐12%‐38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro‐contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/13/the-impeachment-of-freedom-of-speech/

“He did not call for a riot; he did not call for anyone to enter the Capitol Building; he did not say anything about insurrection. As Alan Dershowitz has said, all of Trump’s comments fall under the protections of the First Amendment. It was legitimate political speech – whether you liked it or loathed it – not a cry for the use of imminent violence.”

Donald Trump has once again made history in a way he would rather not have. He has become the first president in the history of the American republic to be impeached twice. The House of Representatives has voted to impeach him for ‘incitement of insurrection’. He will now be put on trial by the Senate. If he is found guilty – not impossible, given how many Republican representatives and senators have been making pro-impeachment noises – he will be turfed out of office at the very end of his presidency and barred from ever standing for political office again.

Who could be against this? Trump, as most of the media, the social-media oligarchies and politicians of all persuasions have been insisting incessantly since the breaching of the Capitol last week, is the new Hitler. The Capitol riot was the Reichstag Fire / the Beer Hall Putsch / Kristallnacht 2.0 – pick your favourite Holocaust metaphor – and Trump is responsible for it. The protesters were insurrectionists – worse, they were terrorists – and Trump was the spiritual and operational instigator of their terrorism. That’s the narrative we have been suffocated with for a week now. The Capitol breach was the 9/11 of our times, serious journalists madly claim, and Trump was its Osama bin Laden. People have actually said this.

In such a moment of hysteria – and we really have reached hysteria now – it can be difficult to call for calm and reflection. But that is what we must do before things go too far. The truth is that this impeachment of Trump is deeply problematic. It is an indictment not just of a president who has done many gravely questionable things in recent weeks, but also of freedom of speech; of the right of everyone – whether president or plebeian – to express him or herself plainly and passionately. Trump is essentially on trial for making heated political comments, for pushing an ideological line – that the 2020 election was ‘fraudulent’ – that many people find offensive. If he is found guilty, he will be found guilty of expressing himself in a way that the political elite considers problematic. Everyone needs to stop, breathe, and consider the impact this would have on the already frail culture of freedom.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/14/revenge-of-the-neocons/

The conflict between neoconservatives and the Trump base sets up a major battle for which faction will control the Republican Party in the post-Trump era.

The conflict between neoconservatives and the Trump base sets up a major battle for which faction will control the Republican Party in the post-Trump era.

It is the retaliation the Bush-Cheney regime has craved for more than a decade.

In a blistering interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in October 2008, Donald Trump wondered aloud why then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had not impeached George W. Bush. “The [Iraq] war is a total catastrophe,” Trump said on the once-friendly network that’s been his mortal enemy since 2016. “There’s only one person you can blame and that’s our current president.”

The Manhattan real estate mogul insisted Bush should have been removed from office for lying about Saddam Hussein’s secret trove of weapons of mass destruction, the rationale for the 2003 invasion. “Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying. By saying they had WMDs, by saying all sorts of things that happened not to be true.” Bush was, Trump claimed, “the worst president ever.”

Trump also unloaded on Bush’s inner circle, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney. “He’s a hawkish guy,” Trump said about Cheney. “He said a few months ago the war was going fantastically . . . you know, it’s just very sad. I just know they got us into a mess the likes of which this country has probably never seen.”

More than 12 years later, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), the literal and figurative heir to the neoconservative “bloodline,” voted to impeach President Donald Trump. Calling the Capitol the “most sacred place in our Republic”—when you’ve been weaned on the mother’s milk of Beltway bravado and no-bid defense contracts, federal buildings in Washington, D.C. are the most hallowed ground—Cheney announced her intention to support Pelosi’s latest political stunt.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/14/an-impeachment-incitement/

Donald Trump was impeached again on Wednesday, a week before leaving office in one of the great travesties of modern politics.

Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce.

One, impeachment was never intended by the founders to become a serial effort to weaken a first-term president. But this latest try will mark the third failed attempt of Democrats in Congress to remove Trump before his allotted tenure.

The first Democratic impeachment effort of December 2017 fizzled. The second impeachment of December 2019 succeeded but predictably failed to obtain a Senate conviction.

This third try will likely not result in a Senate conviction, either.

But from now on, House impeachment will be used by the out-party as a periodic club to wound a first-term president. President-elect Biden should beware.

Two, the country is wracked by a pandemic, recession, a summer of Black Lives Matter and Antifa looting, arson, and violence, and the recent rogue group of Trump supporters storming the Capitol. Washington, D.C. is now militarized in a way not seen since the Civil War. Over 20,000 troops patrol the streets.

Thousands are dying from COVID-19. Politics and incompetence at the state level slow down the widespread vaccination of the vulnerable.

So the last thing Americans now needed was the distraction of virtue-signaling politicians to impeach a lame-duck president who will be gone in a week.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/our_leaders_have_betrayed_us.html

Millions of Republican activists in every state in the country are asking themselves, what can we do now? All of our political lives we put our faith in our elections.

Millions of Republican activists in every state in the country are asking themselves, what can we do now?

All of our political lives we put our faith in our elections.

When we lost, we analyzed our mistakes and sought lessons for how next time to run a better campaign. When we won, we aspired to work with our former opponents for the betterment of the country. On both sides.

It’s what we’ve done in America for the past one hundred and sixty years.

Today it sounds quaint, but our differences ended at the nation’s shores. That quarantine around foreign policy and national security disputes dissolved during the Clinton years when deep divides over trade agreements and China split our country – not along party lines, but into globalists and what the global elites derisively termed the “nativists.”

Those “nativists” – the left-behinds of the Rust Belt, and those “old-fashioned” Americans derided by Obama for “clinging to their Bibles and their guns,” became the Deplorables that defeated Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/13/5-things-to-know-about-the-spread-of-big-tech-tyranny/

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram’s lifetime ban of President Trump has set off an insidious assault on free speech that is reaching into all corners of the free markets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/trumps-democrat-impeachers-and-double-standards-john-perazzo/

A mere 12 days after President Trump took office in January 2017, Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas became the first of many elected Democrats to publicly call for his impeachment. In that case, Castro’s concern was with regard to Trump’s executive ban on travel to the U.S. from nations rife with Islamic terrorism. By the end of 2019, House and Senate Democrats had proposed more than 70 additional reasons for impeaching Trump. Nancy Pelosi, for her part, went full-fascist when she declared, less than four months ago: “We can impeach him every day of the week for anything he does.”

And now, this same Nancy Pelosi has brought her totalitarian vision to life, impeaching Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” a sin supposedly committed in the same January 6 speech where the president explicitly and unambiguously encouraged his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Yes, Pelosi and her fellow Democrats assure us that — even though it now seems highly unlikely that the people who breached the Capitol that day were among those who had attended Trump’s speech — the president himself was somehow responsible for the actions of the several hundred lamebrains who chose to break the law.

By the Democrats’ same “logic,” however, a much stronger case can be made for the idea that the words which so many Democrats themselves have spoken over the past four years could, and should, have been used as justifications for removing them from political office.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/v-benjamin-plotinsky/

With mere days before a new president takes office, leftist Democrats and useful-idiot Republicans voted Wednesday to impeach President Donald John Trump on false grounds for a second time, a move that places the United States on a fast-track toward banana-republic status.

The vote to impeach on January 13 was 232 to 197. Ten Republican lawmakers voted to betray their own party and impeach President Trump.

They are: Adam Kinzinger of Illinois; Liz Cheney of Wyoming; John Katko of New York; Fred Upton of Michigan; Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington;  Dan Newhouse of Washington; Peter Meijer of Michigan; Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio; Tom Rice of South Carolina; and David Valadao of California.

The reason why they did this is clear: despite everything that has happened, Trump’s voters are standing by him. That makes him a threat –not to the republic, as the Left claims— but to the deep state-globalist-socialist-communist alliance that in a few days will control both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. They want Trump out of the picture so things can return to so-called normal. Even if they can’t get the impeachment trial underway in the Senate before Trump leaves office at 12 Noon on January 20, they want the Senate to convict the president and bar him from seeking office again. Some legal scholars, though, notably not Alan Dershowitz, say a president leaving the office does not deprive the Senate of jurisdiction to hear the case.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/14/chinas-not-swedens-or-denmarks-is-the-government-democrats-want/

When Democrats propose “progressive” policies, they say their objective is make the U.S. more like Europe’s welfare states, not socialist nations such as Venezuela and Cuba. Maybe at one time that was true. But not now. In recent years, China has become the nation they want to emulate.

Let’s clear up one possible misunderstanding right away. We’re not calling the Democrats communists. There are hard socialist leanings within the party, and far too much just-below-the-surface authoritarianism. But we’re not saying they’re communists, though they have no reservations about calling conservatives and Republicans fascists and Nazis, even when they know the charges are untrue.

Nor are we going to try to make the case that Democrats are in bed with China. We simply want to point out that Democrats want to reign over this country the way the communist party rules China.

The Democrats’ appetite for following the China model goes back more than a decade. One of its early manifestations is found in the fever dreams of New York Timesman Thomas Friedman. In 2008, he openly yearned for America to be “China for a day.” He called it a “fantasy, basically,” yet he wondered:

“What if we had a government here that could actually make decisions? Okay? That could actually come together, Democrats and Republicans, and make a long-term plan and pursue it?”

Those remarks were made on what is loosely called a “comedy report.” In a more sober interview with news anchor Tom Brokaw, Friedman didn’t stray from his chosen course.

There’s only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, the Chinese form of government, and that’s one-party democracy. You know, in China, if the leadership can get around to an enlightened decision it can order it from the top down, OK. Here, when you have one-party democracy, one party ruling, basically the other party just basically saying no, every solution is sub-optimal.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/13/democrats-are-using-the-recent-capitol-riot-t

America’s Cold Civil War will only heat up as those with all the power take precisely the wrong lessons from the Capitol Hill riot.

The Capitol Hill riot was an inexcusable, pathetic, and disgraceful display. Its consequences will extend well beyond the bloodshed and property damage inflicted by those who shamefully acceded to the left’s view that force is legitimate means of persuasion — exhibited repeatedly via the left’s normalization of political incitement and violence throughout President Trump’s term in office.

The riot not only overshadowed the corruption that marked the 2020 election and undermined the MAGA movement’s people and principles, but set up Americans of all political stripes for an onslaught on their rights and cherished freedoms. The riot was an accelerant for what was already likely planned under Democrat rule in Washington: crushing dissenters from its leftist orthodoxy as part of an effort to achieve total power by disenfranchising the opposition.

President Trump has personified this dissent, but the effort to delegitimize, de-platform, and ultimately destroy him and anyone around him is merely the opening scene of the “Godfather”-like settling of scores with all who threaten the ruling class’s power and privilege. This effort will directly harm not just the thousands of peaceful patriots who had descended on Washington D.C., and their tens of millions of like-minded neighbors across the country, but all Americans.

The coming crackdown on dissenters in the political realm was pre-ordained in the wee hours of Jan. 6, when both Georgia Senate seats flipped to the Democrats. Now, should Senate Democrats successfully blow up the filibuster, they will work to pass an agenda in which any one item, let alone all, could put Democrats in a virtually unshakeable control of the federal government for years to come.