RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/comeys-stalinists/

Friday’s news brought the welcome report that U.S. Attorney John Durham, investigating possibly illegal misconduct by the FBI and CIA against the Trump campaign, is focusing on the FBI’s illegal acts in prosecuting President Trump’s first national security advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn. According to reports by the Washington Examiner and Fox News, Durham is looking closely at newly revealed documents in the Flynn case.

As I wrote here on September 2, there was a conspiracy between the FBI and CIA to prevent Trump’s election and, when that failed, to interfere in his transition to the presidency. The conspiracy aimed at violating the civil rights of Trump and others, including Flynn and Carter Page. As that column explained, acting under color of law — i.e., as a federal official — to violate someone’s civil rights is illegal under 18 U.S. Code Section 242. A conspiracy to do so is a felony under 18 U.S. Code Section 371 punishable by five years in jail.

What was done to Flynn — apparently by then-FBI director James Comey, then-deputy director Andrew McCabe, then-assistant director Bill Priestap, and middle level managers such as then-FBI agent Peter Strzok — was illegal. People should be punished for what was done to Mike Flynn and the other targets of the conspiracy.

Why target Flynn?

By the beginning of his second term in 2013, Obama had thoroughly politicized the intelligence community. His director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and his CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw the IC to ensure it sang Obama’s song to Congress and the public despite the facts.

Flynn’s conviction should be overturned, his confession withdrawn, and the Justice Department required to bring the case to trial or dismiss it.  

Flynn was appointed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012 and fired in 2014 after not toeing the Obama line. When asked in a Senate hearing if al-Qaeda was on the run — as Obama claimed — Flynn said it wasn’t. He was fired from the DIA job soon after.

When Trump won the election, Obama reportedly took the trouble to warn Trump not to hire Flynn. Why? Was it negative psychology to ensure Trump hired Flynn, or — more likely — was it because Obama didn’t want his politicization of the IC overturned by a maverick like Flynn?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/02/gov-cuomo-had-the-worst-response-to-the-crisis-of-any-governor-in-america-n387642

The press has been gushing about the performance of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for weeks. The media often compares Cuomo’s “decisive” response to the coronavirus pandemic to the president, and guess who always wins?

Whether it’s good PR from the governor’s office or just the media worshipping a liberal who says mean things about Donald Trump, it hardly matters. What matters is results. And in that department, Andrew Cuomo has been a miserable failure — using several metrics.

And it’s not just the numbers. The panicky, sometimes hysterical New York governor began whining about the federal government (specifically the president) not doing anything to help the states with getting medical supplies. Back in March, he kept saying he needed 30-40,000 ventilators. And when Trump pointed out that was silly, he accused the president of being an unfeeling monster.

National Review:

“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump said on March 27. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he added, referring to Cuomo’s estimate for New York state. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and others said they had “facts” on their side.

By the middle of April, New York was sending ventilators to other states.

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/495779-epstein-had-his-own-office-phone-line-at-harvard-even-after-his-2008-conviction

Harvard University admitted Friday that Jeffrey Epstein had his own office and phone line at the university and also made several visits there even after he was convicted in 2008 of soliciting sex from minors. 

According to a new report from the university, Epstein, the disgraced financier who killed himself in jail last year while awaiting sex crimes charges, visited Harvard more than 40 times after his 2008 conviction and unveiled deep ties between him and the university, with which he had no official affiliation.  

University President Lawrence Bacow said in a letter to the Harvard community that Harvard accepted $9.1 million from Epstein between 1998 and 2008 to support research and faculty activities. He also said the university donated $200,937 in unspent contributions from Epstein to organizations supporting human trafficking and sexual assault victims. 

While the hallowed institution did not accept donations from Epstein after 2008, the financier was allowed to make 40 visits between 2010 and 2018 to Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which Epstein helped create with a $6.5 million donation. He was also granted access to the program’s office and given his own office space.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-indecency-of-joe-biden.html?

Quick, when I say “Joe Biden”, you say, “decency”.
“Vote for decency, vote for dignity,” Senator Amy Klobuchar said in her endorsement of Biden.
Biden, Senator Kamala Harris, claimed in her endorsement, would, “restore truth, honor, and decency.”
Michael Bloomberg endorsed Biden, arguing that he possesses, “decency, honesty and commitment.”
Pete Buttigieg hailed Biden’s, “fundamental decency”, which he mentioned three times on MSNBC.
“Joe Biden is decent. He’s kind. He’s caring. He’s empathetic,” insisted Beto O’Rourke.

These were obviously coincidences. There’s no reason to think that Tom Perez had been working Amy, Beto, Pete, Kamala, and Michael over with a wet towel and talking points in the basement of the DNC.

If you doubt that, here’s more of the decency parade.

Susan Rice, a woman who once had decency droned, endorsed Biden’s “compassion and decency”. As did her former colleague, Samantha Power, praising Biden’s, “empathy and decency”. As did James Comey, “restore decency, dignity to the office”, John Kerry, “his ability to persevere, his decency”, and David Axelrod, “character, empathy, decency”. And David Axelrod, a sleazebag who dragged Obama to the White House by exposing his political opponent’s private divorce records, knows all about decency.

“Biden is one of the most honest, decent, practical, & experienced individuals with whom I have ever worked,” gushed John Brennan.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/28/coronavirus-hype-biggest-political-hoax-in-history/?

The new coronavirus is real.

The response to the coronavirus is hyped. And in time, this hype will be revealed as politically hoaxed.

In fact, COVID-19 will go down as one of the political world’s biggest, most shamefully overblown, overhyped, overly and irrationally inflated and outright deceptively flawed responses to a health matter in American history, one that was carried largely on the lips of medical professionals who have no business running a national economy or government.

The facts are this: COVID-19 is a real disease that sickens some, proves fatal to others, mostly the elderly — and does nothing to the vast majority.

That’s it.

Or, in the words of Dan Erickson and Artin Massih, doctors and co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, California: Let’s get the country reopened — and now.

“Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no. Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no. … [T]he data is showing it’s time to lift,” Erickson said, in a recent interview.

He’s right. They’re right.

https://www.tothepointnews.com/2020/04/an-egregious-statistical-horror-story/  

With the latest reports of plummeting death rates from all causes, this crisis is over.

The pandemic of doom erupted as a panic of pols and is now a comedy of Mash-minded med admins and stooges, covering their ifs ands and butts with ever more morbid and distorted statistics.

The crisis now will hit the politicians and political Doctor Fauci who gullibly accepted and trumpeted what statistician William Briggs calls “the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time.”

An egregious statistical horror story of millions of projected deaths, suffused with incense and lugubrious accents from Imperial College of London to Harvard School of Public Health, prompted the pols to impose a vandalistic lockdown on the economy. It would have been an outrage even if the assumptions were not wildly astronomically wrong.

Flattening the curve was always a fool’s errand that widened the damage.

President Trump had better take notice. He will soon own this gigantic botch of policy and leadership. No one will notice that his opponents urged even more panicky blunders.

As Briggs shows (see link), the latest figures on overall death rates from all causes show no increase at all. Deaths are lower than in 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015, slightly higher than in 2016. Any upward bias is imparted by population growth.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/25/coronavirus-models-deal-another-blow-to-faith-of-americans-devine/

The random antibody testing of 3,000 people across the state of New York has delivered yet another blow to the faith we placed in the computer models that Governor Cuomo and President Trump used to shut down the economy and place all of America under virtual home detention.

The tests show 2.7 million in New York state have developed antibodies through exposure. Meaning, with 16,000 COVID-19 deaths, the state’s mortality rate is a little less than 0.6 percent. Nowhere near as lethal as the dire 3.4 percent death rate the World Health Organization was billing early last month, and these figures will keep changing as more data comes to hand.

And it wasn’t all because we are perfect practitioners of self-isolation and hand washing.

The President’s coronavirus task force took into account those mitigation measures when it used an amalgam of models to predict that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans likely would die.

A model from the University of Washington has since revised the projected death toll to 60,000 down from an initial 162,000.

As of Friday, 51,000 Americans had lost their lives, and now the updated models are edging closer to grim reality.