RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/12-questions-the-justice-department-and-fbi-need-to-answer-about-january-6/

There is a good chance Republicans can take control of both houses of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. There is an even better chance they will wimp out and betray their supporters . . . again. This open letter is addressed to one especially disappointing group. 

—The Editors

Dear Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans:

Happy New Year! Hope you are ready and rested for the big political fights ahead in 2022. Republicans across the country are counting on you to stand tough against the Biden regime and your Democratic counterparts in advance of a potentially power-shifting election this November.

Just kidding.

Alas, informed Republicans know that even with all the uncertainties in the world, we can be certain that the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will always disappoint us. Even when you controlled this important committee for four years under a Republican president, you failed to fulfill one empty promise after another.

Remember all the promises to “get to the bottom” of Russiagate, the biggest political scandal and abuse of government power in history? (Well, until January 6.) 

Remember how you let Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Democratic activists hijack the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, which led to a humiliating and divisive showdown between the Supreme Court nominee and his half-baked accuser? 

Oh, and remember that lengthy investigative report you issued a few months later that accused people of lying to Congress and referred them to the Justice Department (which you purportedly oversee) on criminal charges but nothing ever happened?

Good times.

During the first year of the Biden Administration, you made nary a peep as Biden filled his cabinet with Obama loyalists and left-wing radicals. My favorite moment was when every member of the committee voted to advance the nomination of Lisa Monaco—Barack Obama’s hyperpartisan homeland security advisor, Russiagate architect, and former chief of staff to FBI Director Robert Mueller—to serve as deputy attorney general. She is what Andrew Weissmann was to Mueller when he was special counsel; the vengeful, Republican-hating prosecutor calling the shots behind the grandfatherly veneer of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

But don’t feel bad. Every Republican senator, except two, voted to confirm Monaco last April. As I wrote after her confirmation, “rather than act as any sort of barrier to protect America from the arsonist-in-chief hellbent on burning down every tradition, constitutional guardrail, and notion of common decency owed to fellow Americans, Senate Republicans are handing Joe Biden the matches.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/winsome-sears-education-key-black-success-virginia-governor-charter-school-choice-crt-critical-race-theory-11641574129?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

You don’t need a doctorate in futurology to be convinced that when Republican Glenn Youngkin is sworn in as governor of Virginia next Saturday, he’ll take his oath alongside someone who could likely be, four years hence, the first black woman elected chief executive of an American state.

The woman in question is Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect and Mr. Youngkin’s running mate in the Republican sweep of the state’s highest offices in November. (A third Republican, Jason Miyares, won election as attorney general.) Virginia’s Constitution bars consecutive gubernatorial terms, and should Mr. Youngkin prove a success in office, Ms. Sears would be nearly certain to secure the Republican nomination for 2025. Mr. Miyares would also be a contender to succeed Mr. Youngkin as governor, but he’s a decade younger than Ms. Sears and will likely have to wait his turn.

Born in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, some months after her father emigrated to New York in 1963, Ms. Sears is quick to acknowledge a political debt to her native island, from which she, too, emigrated as a child. She claims descent from Nanny of the Maroons, an 18th-century leader of runaway slaves who fought Jamaica’s British rulers in a guerrilla war. “Nanny was an African princess, and my mother comes from those people,” Ms. Sears tells me from her home outside Winchester, Va. Less dramatically, she ascribes her own political confidence—and her belief that there are “no limits to what black people can achieve”—to her quotidian experience of Jamaica, where “the generals are black, the lawyers are black, the doctors are black, the Rhodes scholars are black.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-race-based-covid-treatment-white-hispanic-inequity-monoclonal-antibodies-antiviral-pfizer-omicron-11641573991?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New York state recently published guidelines for dispensing potentially life-saving monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals like Paxlovid to people suffering from mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. These treatments are in short supply, and they must be allocated to those most in need.

According to these guidelines, sick people who have tested positive for Covid should be eligible to receive these drugs if they have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.” These include standard criteria like age and comorbidities like cancer, diabetes and heart disease—but, startlingly, they also include simply being of “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity,” which “should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”

Consider the following cases: A middle-aged investment banker born in Colombia shows up at a physician’s office in Manhattan; a laid-off middle-aged worker of Italian ancestry shows up at a doctor’s office in Rochester, N.Y. Neither has medical risk factors, but both have mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. The wealthy Colombian-American could be given Paxlovid; the laid-off auto worker would be turned away. You can construct thousands of these comparative cases using well-off Hispanics, Asians or blacks and working-class whites.

This is unfair and possibly illegal. With these kinds of regulations, the Democrats who control New York reinforce the racial and ethnic divisions that grew during Donald Trump’s presidency. These state officials have been abetted by social scientists who collect survey data in a manner that, intentionally or not, confirms their presuppositions.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/new_study_of_pfizers_covid_vaccine_has_some_disturbing_findings.html

I just read a disturbing study of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy by the Canadian COVID Care Alliance.  This organization comprises over 500 independent Canadian doctors, scientists, and health care practitioners.  The title of the article, “The Pfizer Inoculations for COVID-19: More Harm Than Good,” is disturbing. The article itself, which discusses the many nuances of this study, is even more distressing.

You may recall the much-reported “95% efficacy” of the vaccine against COVID-19.  We all assumed that if we were vaccinated, we would then only have a 5% chance of becoming infected.  Sounds great, but the statement is misleading.  In the Pfizer study, only 8 out of 18,198, or 0.043% of participants who received the vaccine, contracted COVID, while 162 out of 18,325, 0.884% in the control group who received injections of saline became infected.  Therefore, while there was a Relative Risk Reduction of 95%, the Actual Risk Reduction was a mere 0.84%.

This disparity certainly changes one’s perspective on just how effective the vaccine is.  Everyone in the study, including the control group, had a less than 1% chance of infection.  Of course, as the virus spread throughout the population, a higher percentage of people became infected.  The conclusions of the study remain the same insofar as the likelihood of the vaccine preventing infection in any given controlled group of persons.

The article also asserts, among other things, that the study was conducted on relatively young and healthy persons but was then recommended to be used first on old, less healthy individuals.  The trials did not follow scientific protocols, owing to the desire for rapid deployment.  Follow-up studies were made virtually impossible because as subjects were unblinded — made aware of whether they had received the vaccine or the placebo.  The unvaccinated largely chose to receive the vaccine.  Thus, there is no control group remaining to study

The most damning findings concerned lack of disclosure of possible, or even likely long-term health risks on vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals.  These findings revealed significant increases for the vaccinated.  It also pointed out that for adolescents and children, the vaccine posed all risk with virtually no benefit, since those young individuals, even if they became infected, had a near universal good outcome.  Myocarditis and other afflictions are a substantial health hazard facing vaccinated young people.

https://www.city-journal.org/defund-progressive-prosecutors

Mayors and city councils are increasingly exasperated with “progressive prosecutors,” but they have little leverage to control them. It may be time to exercise a traditional check on underperforming public agencies: the power of the purse.

Displeasure with progressive prosecutors has been simmering for a while but is starting to boil over. San Francisco mayor London Breed, seeing the chaos unleashed by District Attorney Chesa Boudin, recently said, “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it come to an end.” Philadelphia’s city council president and mayor took turns bashing the lack of leadership and cooperation from District Attorney Larry Krasner, even as the city set a new record for homicides. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot traded barbs with Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx over Foxx’s decision not to charge violent criminals, in a year when Chicago topped 800 homicides.

But very few tools exist to stop a rogue prosecutor. A prosecutor seeking convictions must get through an arrest, preliminary hearing, pre-trial motions, trial, and appeals. A prosecutor who doesn’t want to prosecute criminals can simply announce that he or she is not prosecuting. The criminals will then walk free; there is no oversight and no appeal. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the United States saw a tremendous surge in violent crime, legislators and prosecutors worked together to figure out solutions. Today, certain prosecutors seem intent on fueling the violence rather than trying to stop it.

How, then, can these radical prosecutors be curbed? Voters may eventually catch on and send them packing, of course, though both Foxx and Krasner were recently reelected handily in low-turnout elections. But officials could also cut funding. Local prosecutors’ offices, like other agencies, get funded from municipal and state coffers. The progressive prosecutor movement has made much about arresting less, prosecuting less, incarcerating less: in short, doing less work than traditional prosecutors. District attorneys’ offices can accordingly see their budgets adjusted to reflect that diminished role. Progressive candidates in the Manhattan district attorney’s race explicitly promised to cut the size of the office in half because the office would be doing less prosecuting under their leadership. If Chesa Boudin is only prosecuting or convicting half as many people in San Francisco, then shouldn’t his budget be cut by half? The remaining funds could be repurposed to provide other city services.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-data-out-of-new-york-differentiates-between-patients-hospitalized-as-a-result-of-covid-19-and-those-who-later-tested-positive/

New York released data on Friday differentiating between those hospitalized with coronavirus and those hospitalized with other maladies who tested positive for it after being admitted for the first time.

While there are 11,548 New Yorkers hospitalized who have tested positive for Covid, only 6,620 were admitted as a result of Covid or complications from the disease. That means that 43 percent of those counted were admitted for reasons believed to be unrelated to the coronavirus.

In New York City, 51 percent of those considered to be hospitalized with Covid were for reasons other than the virus itself.

This marks the first time that the state has counted and reported these numbers as separate groups. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which shows hospitalization data for all fifty states, does not presently make that distinction. It reports a 41.1 percent increase in its seven-day average of hospitalizations.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/who-bears-the-costs-of-progressive

One of the ironies of progressive criminal justice and education policies is that their costs are often borne by the very people they claim to help. And I don’t mean the financial costs. What I’m talking about is, I think, more consequential than money. Living in an under-policed high-crime area could cost you your life. Living in a school district full of dysfunctional schools could set your child behind in ways they may never recover from. And yet progressives who wave the banner of equity and inclusion continue to defund the police, to decline to prosecute potentially dangerous criminal offenders, and to stand in the way of school choice.

Of course, progressive politicians rarely bear those costs themselves. They often live in safe neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools their constituents could never afford. In this excerpt from my recent conversation with the great Robert Woodson, we discuss the ironies (maybe “hypocrisies” is a better word) and costs of progressive policies that continue to disadvantage the already disadvantaged while giving a boost to the careers of the politicians that advocate for them. These are perennial concerns here at The Glenn Show, and I’m pleased to add Bob’s on-the-ground experience to the mix.

GLENN LOURY: As I’m sure you are aware, Bob, Philadelphia is a basket case now, in terms of crime. They’ve exceeded 500 homicides in a year for the first time in, I don’t know, 35 years. You’ve got this open argument between former mayor Michael Nutter and District Attorney Krasner, self-consciously progressive D.A. who’s been elected as a Democrat in Philadelphia to transform policing—not policing. He’s not chief of police, he’s the D.A. But to transform criminal justice policy in the city, get rid of cash bail, not bring all of these cases for low-level property crimes.

And Philadelphia is only one of a dozen cities about which a similar story could be told. Baltimore, close to you in D.C., also having trouble with the mayor and the police commissioner and the district attorney, all self-consciously progressive black women, if I’m not mistaken, who are presiding over a disaster. Chicago, my hometown, carjackings are through the roof, homicides are through the roof, assaults are through the roof, guns are everywhere, et cetera. St. Louis. I mean, we could go on for a long time,

ROBERT WOODSON: But it makes the class issue. But let me tell you what, it’s even gotten worse. And I just read that in Seattle there is a ballot initiative that will reduce the enhancements of people who engage in drive-by shootings, because of racial equity, because a higher number of black gang members are guilty of drive-by shootings. And therefore, since it adversely affects them, they’re going to try to reduce the penalties in the name of racial equity.

Yeah.

But trust me, the people advocating this do not live in those neighborhoods suffering the problem. That’s the point. 80 percent of blacks living in those communities are against defund the police. And so that makes my class argument.

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/01/07/preserve-the-narrative-the-public-rejects-the-insurrection-claim-in-new-polling/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

In the day long events commemorating January 6th, Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a telling statement to her fellow members and the public at large. Pelosi declared “It is essential that we preserve the narrative of January 6th.” Part of that narrative is that this was not a riot but an “insurrection,” an actual “rebellion” against our country. Pelosi’s concern over the viability of that narrative is well-based as shown by a recent CBS News poll. The majority of the public does not believe that this was an “insurrection” despite the mantra-like repetition of members of Congress and the media. The public saw that terrible day unfold a year ago and saw it for what it was: a protest that became a riot. (For full disclosure, I previously worked as a legal analyst for CBS News).

Not surprisingly, the poll received little comparative coverage on a day when reporters and commentators spoke of “the insurrection” as an undeniable fact. Yet, when CBS asked Americans, they received an answer that likely did not please many. Indeed, CBS did not highlight the answer to the question of whether the day was really a “protest that went too far.”   The answer was overwhelming and nonpartisan.  Some 76% believe that this was a protest that went too far.

That, however, was not one of the four options to the matinee question featured by CBS. It did not allow the public to call this a riot when it asked them to describe “What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021?” Why? There was the ever present “insurrection” and “trying to overthrow government.” However, the other two options were “patriotism” or “defending freedom.” That is perfectly bizarre. The most obvious alternatives to an actual rebellion in a violent clash would be a protest or a riot. However, the public was simply not given those options.

The result was predictable. Some 85% of Democrats dutifully checked “an insurrection” or “trying to overthrow government” while only 21% and 18% of Republicans agreed respectively.  For those who did not see the riot as an act of patriotism or defending freedom, they were simply left without a choice.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/01/07/another-disastrous-jobs-report-lands-on-bidens-desk-n2601550

Another disastrous job report dropped on Friday morning with predictions of new growth missing by hundreds of thousands. Economists predicted 442,000 positions would be created. The number came in at just 199,000. 

“Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 199,000 in December, and the unemployment rate declined to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in leisure and hospitality, in professional and business services, in manufacturing, in construction, and in transportation and warehousing,” the Department of Labor released Friday morning. “The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.9 percent in December but remains 1.5 percentage points lower than in February 2020. The employment-population ratio increased by 0.2 percentage point to 59.5 percent in December but is 1.7 percentage points below its February 2020 level. Over the year, these measures have increased by 0.4  percentage point and 2.1 percentage points, respectively.”