RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16860/ag-william-barr

AG Barr was installed to manage President Trump and put him on a glide-path to defeat in last month’s election. President Trump did not select Barr to be his Attorney General — the choice was made for the President by professional Republican political operatives and then presented to him as the only acceptable and Senate-confirmable solution….

When Judicial Watch obtained Justice Department records documenting that 27 phones from the Mueller team were mysteriously “wiped clean” — what did Barr do? Nothing.

Barr allowed Republicans to look at each other, nod and then smile about “what was coming” — until it never materialized. No justice for Hillary, or Comey, or Strzok, or Brennan or the remaining 30–odd names in the coup litany.

In recent weeks I have asked, “Why Does Barr Let Wray Lie and Flout the Law?,” and “Will They Really Get Away With It?” Then, just a few days ago, we learned that Attorney General (AG) Barr hid two probes into alleged criminal conduct of Hunter Biden for months. Barr also announced that he could not see any election fraud — or that he could — but it wasn’t really that bad. Barr told the Associated Press, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election” [Emphasis added]. That’s like a mob witness answering, “I have no specific recollection, at this time.” It does not engender deep confidence and faith.

Keep in mind that while President Donald Trump was being impeached over the phony “Ukraine!” controversy, Barr and his FBI Director Wray were in the possession of Hunter Biden’s laptops (since December 2019) – loaded with who-knows-what Burisma information, etc., and did not utter a syllable. Are we beginning to see a pattern of conduct?

Many have wondered for months what, exactly, Barr was up to. He said some strong things supporting the president, then acted in a contrary manner. He talked a good game but seemed to miss a lot of glaringly obvious prosecution opportunities. Why? It seems we now have our answer.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/susan-rice-discover-networks/

On December 11, Joe Biden named Susan Rice to lead his White House Domestic Policy Council. Rice’s consistent track record of dishonesty, prevarication, and poor judgment stretches back decades.

By the time she graduated from Stanford University with a degree in history in 1986, Rice was already a committed leftist with a heart and mind full of racial grievance. That year, she wrote an 86-page book titled A History Deferred, which claimed that because most U.S. students were “taught American history, literature, art, drama, and music largely from a white, western European perspective,” “their grasp of the truth, of reality, is tainted by a myopia of sorts.” “The greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child,” Rice elaborated. “The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant. And so are you.’” Published by the Black Student Fund — an advocacy group for which Rice interned — A History Deferred served as a guide for elementary- and secondary-school teachers who aspired to teach “Black Studies” from an Afrocentric perspective.

In 1985 Rice was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and subsequently attended New College, Oxford, where she earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 1988 and a Ph.D. in the same discipline two years later.

Praising the Dictator Robert Mugabe

While at Oxford in 1990, Rice wrote a 426-page dissertation praising, as “a model and a masterpiece in the evolution of international peacekeeping,” the 1979-80 British peacekeeping operation that had led to the political ascendancy of Zimbabwe’s bloodthirsty Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe. In her dissertation, Rice lauded Mugabe as a “pragmatic, intelligent, sensible, gentle, balanced man” who possessed considerable “patience and restraint.”

Politicizing the Rwandan Genocide

Rice served on the Bill Clinton administration’s National Security Council from 1993-97, and as Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1997-2001.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/14/essential-facts-about-covid-19/

Given the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, Just Facts is providing a trove of rigorously documented facts about this disease and its impacts. These include some essential facts that have been absent or misreported in much of the media’s coverage of this issue.

This research also includes a groundbreaking study to determine the lethality of COVID-19 based on the most comprehensive available measure: the total years of life that it will rob from all people. This accords with the Centers for Disease Control’s tenet that “the allocation of health resources must consider not only the number of deaths by cause” but also the “years of potential life lost.”

On one hand, these facts show that:

The average death rate for people who contract COVID-19 is well below 1% and is much closer to that of the seasonal flu than figures that were commonly reported by the press.
The average years of life lost from each COVID-19 death are significantly fewer than from common causes of untimely death like accidents and suicides.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is “very vulnerable to antibody neutralization” and has very limited ability to mutate, which makes it unlikely to take masses of lives year after year like the flu and other recurring scourges.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/15/this-is-not-america/

What is the United States of America? A society of elitists vs. the rest? A culture that’s given up on itself? A land of censorship? A nation in which policies and orientation are not merely matters of disagreement but causes of internal and irreconcilable turmoil? It was supposed to be none of these. But today it seems a foreign place, with more in common with the many dystopias of literature than anything the founders of a free nation ever imagined.

Just a single quick scan through the blogs and aggregators of the Internet makes us wonder who and where we are as a nation:

Many of those who hold political, economic, and cultural power favor the system of China, where a single-party autocracy “led by a reasonably enlightened group of people” who live privileged lives plan and execute a top-down national plan the entire country is expected to follow without objection.
At the same time, this class believes it is its job to oversee the decline of America.
Voter fraud and election theft have become normalized nationally rather than confined to big cities run by Democrat political machines.
Voters have put prosecutors who refuse to prosecute into office all over the country. It seems to be one man’s objective to foul our communities so completely that we’ll eventually go begging for tyrants to save us.
The Constitution is being tread upon by sort of tyrants we’ll be asking for in the name of keeping us healthy.
Voters have also put a team in the White House that will be beholden not to the country and Constitution it will swear to protect but to China.
Most of both the media and academia have become naked propagandists for one party rather than objective dispensers of news and even-handed educators.
Corporate America is becoming increasingly captured by woke forces and climate zealots, which makes life harder on the middle and lower classes.
Identity politics and a “social justice” are splitting the nation into warring tribes.
Our freedoms to speak and worship freely are being diminished almost daily.
Dissent from hard-left orthodoxy is punished by job loss, ostracization, and on occasion violence.
Rioters, looters and domestic terrorists are being coddled and even encouraged by the media, academia, and rotten-to-the core politicians.
As Pat Buchanan wrote last week, “we are two nations, two peoples seemingly separated indefinitely. Can a nation so divided as ours, racially, ideologically, religiously, still do great things together, as did the America of days gone by, to the amazement of the world?”   

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-isnt-the-one-politicizing-science-11607969209?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Politics has infected many issues over the past four years and has now reached the supposedly objective halls of official medicine. In an editorial for the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Misguided Use of Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: The Infusion of Politics Into Science,” Dr. Michael Saag claims that “the politicization of the treatment” was more important than the science in promoting the use of the antimalaria drug to treat Covid-19. This evidence-free claim is contradicted by information in the same editorial and the scientific literature.

Dr. Saag doesn’t cite a single source to support his claim that President Trump’s April 4 promotion of the drug influenced physicians’ prescribing decisions. His claim that “no health official” in the U.S. government endorsed use of hydroxychloroquine is contradicted in his next sentence, which notes that the Food and Drug Administration approved an emergency-use authorization for hydroxychloroquine on March 28, one week before Mr. Trump’s comments. The FDA granted that authorization at the request of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or Barda, another U.S. government health agency.

Physicians prescribed hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 because they had reason to believe it could work. In the early days of the pandemic when there were no established therapies, clinicians noted the severe immune response that the SARS-CoV-2 virus elicited in severely ill patients. They began to deploy hydroxychloroquine because it has long been used to treat autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, with a good safety profile.

Hydroxychloroquine and its cousin chloroquine had also been studied as antivirals with activity against the similar SARS coronavirus and other viruses. Several encouraging preclinical studies and small clinical trials, including a French study published in March and cited by Dr. Saag, reinforced physicians’ willingness to try hydroxychloroquine.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“In stage three [of Trump Derangement Syndrome], one is ready to believe anything– anything pernicious or salacious, that is – about Mr. Trump and to reject anything he has done that might be good for the country, if only because of the man who did it.” Joseph Epstein Wall Street Journal July 9, 2020

While I have not fussed much over last month’s election results, I believe, despite the Electoral College certifying the election, that there was fraud and other shenanigans. How else to explain halted vote counting in swing states; election rules changed without authorization from state legislatures; unsigned mail-in ballots, etc. Can we really believe that a candidate who spent much of the campaign in his home received ten million more votes than did Barack Obama in 2012? Congress and state legislatures should ensure that voter laws are explicit and fair. One is left wondering, not only about voter fraud, but about the size of the turnout. Apparently 156 million people voted, or 66% of registered voters, the highest percentage since 1900 and twenty percent more people than in 2016! Now, Mr. Trump’s options are gone; nevertheless, when politics smell fishy, it is usually more than a week-old Mackerel in the trunk of a car.

 Last Friday’s lead editorial in our local paper, The Day, stated: “But Trump has caused profound damage, having convinced tens of millions of people who voted for him that Biden is not a legitimate president.” Whether the statemen is true or not, I do not know, but the hypocrisy of the paper’s editorial board is heavier than a London fog. They, and most of mainstream media, never condemned the “Resistance” that for four years claimed Trump was an illegitimate president. They avoided the subject of Mr. Biden’s noticeable deteriorating mental acuity and stayed away from the Hunter Biden scandal. The Day posits itself as independent. Their masthead reads: “The newspaper should be more than a business enterprise. It should also be a champion and protector of the public interest and defender of the people’s rights.” Sadly, the paper, like so many others, has become a defender of the progressive movement and a foe of the messiness that is natural to the democracy of a free and independent people. In looking for potential threats to liberty, the media has a habit of ignoring peril from the left, like the hairbrained schemes of stacking the Supreme Court and doing away with the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Wannabe tyrants do not alienate the media and reduce the power of government, as Trump has done with his sarcastic remarks to the press, and as he did in cutting regulations. Budding despots befriend the media, and they increase personal and government power through rules and regulations, like Governors Cuomo and Newsom.

https://spectator.org/eric-swalwell-china-spy/

Washington

Sanctimony is proving to be a bad look for Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., since Axios reported on his ties with a suspected Chinese spy. Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, insinuated herself with a number of up-and-coming U.S. politicians between 2011 and 2015. Swalwell was the biggest fish.

The Chinese national’s efforts, Axios reported, included raising money for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign. Fang also helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s House office.

According to Axios, Swalwell did nothing wrong and was unaware Fang may have been working for Beijing until U.S. intelligence officials alerted him in 2015. Swalwell cut off all ties with Fang, who left the United States.

Problem: If you judge Swalwell by the standard he applied to President Donald Trump, he shouldn’t hold public office. Swalwell frequently met with an operative of a foreign government who was helping his campaign. When Trump campaign dons had one meeting with a Russian national with ties to the Kremlin, Swalwell called that collusion.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report concluded Trump’s campaign did not collude with Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” interference in the 2016 election. Didn’t matter. Swalwell still saw “strong evidence of collusion.”

Of course, House Republicans have started to demand that Swalwell surrender his seat on the House Intelligence Committee. As I write this, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has no such concerns.

I wonder why a national security apparatus that did not warn Trump about Russian mischief in 2016, even after he won office, nonetheless did warn Intelligence Committee member Swalwell and other elected officials in Fang’s orbit in 2015. And unlike the Russian probe, there were no press leaks at the time.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/12/14/us-announces-accountability-to-for-iranian-officials-who-killed-bob-levinson-n2581507

The White House announced Monday that Iranian officials responsible for the death of FBI agent Bob Levinson will be designated for sanctions. 

“Today, the Department of the Treasury announced designations on two individuals from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security for their direct involvement in the abduction, detention, and probable death of Robert Levinson.  It is clear that not only were senior Iranian officials responsible for Mr. Levinson’s disappearance, but that they took deliberate actions to obscure their involvement through an extensive disinformation campaign,” the White House released in a statement. “With this announcement, the United States Government is initiating the first public actions against the Iranian government to hold them accountable for the abduction of Robert Levinson—the longest ever held American hostage.  The United States will relentlessly pursue all others involved as the investigation continues.” 

“Since the beginning of this Administration, President Trump has made it clear that Iran will be held accountable for its use of detention and hostage taking as a tool of “diplomacy” and that the United States will no longer accept Iranian excuses for what we know they have done to Mr. Levinson,” the statement continues. “No family should ever endure the pain the Levinson family has for nearly 14 years.  Iran is responsible and can end this nightmare by answering questions for which only they hold the answers.  Any future talks with Iran must include resolution to this case.  We stand by the Levinson family, and we will never cease in our efforts to bring justice for Bob and his family.”