RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/return-of-the-swamp-creatures-11613690674?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Washington doesn’t usually make it easy to pinpoint the moment when things went wrong. So thanks to Rep. Rosa DeLauro for publicly heralding the return of the swamp.

The announcement actually came from a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, which the Connecticut Democrat oversees. “Chair DeLauro supports Member-directed funding for community projects,” Evan Hollander told HuffPost this week. For those uninitiated in Washington doublespeak, earmarks are back.

A few other English words to describe what’s returning: Pork. Logrolling. Sleaze. Bridges to nowhere. Republicans banned earmarks in February 2011 after the term became synonymous with Congress’s embarrassing habit. The late Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had led a yearslong campaign to expose earmarks as a “gateway drug” to greater spending and corruption. In the face of a tea-party revolt, his colleagues finally chose wisdom.

Democrats are choosing power. According to reports, Ms. DeLauro and Senate Appropriations Chairman Patrick Leahy will soon announce that earmarks are welcome in annual spending bills. Why would Democrats risk such a move? Politico explains that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has reassured his party that it won’t suffer, since the effort will be “bipartisan.” Democrats are banking on spend-thirsty Republicans to provide cover.

The question is whether the GOP will succumb, handing the Democratic leadership a uniquely powerful tool in today’s narrowly divided Congress. Republicans may botch their first opportunity to draw a stark contrast in governance, wield some real power, and energize their base.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, chief medical adviser to Sesame Care, and author of “The Price We Pay.”

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-tweaks-legal-position-in-arizona-voting-case_3702650.html

The Biden administration changed its position on an upcoming Supreme Court appeal dealing with Arizona’s electoral integrity laws, disavowing the previous administration’s interpretation of anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Although the Biden administration won’t present oral arguments in the case or update a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Trump administration, it signaled to the justices and the public that it’s leaving the door open to adopting a more aggressive interpretation of the statute in the future.

Section 2 of the law forbids voting practices that result “in a denial or abridgment of the right … to vote on account of race or color [or language-minority status],” and provides that such a result “is established” if a jurisdiction’s “political processes … are not equally open” to members of such a group “in that [they] have less opportunity … to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

“That text must be construed in light of Section 2’s constitutional context, as an exercise of Congress’s authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on intentional discrimination,” the Trump administration’s brief filed last year stated.

The filing comes as the litigants prepare to present oral arguments to the Supreme Court in the case on March 2.

The case is two cases that the court consolidated. The first is Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (DNC). The second is Arizona Republican Party v. DNC. The reach of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is at issue.

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-with-no-mask-mandate-and-schools-open-florida-ranks-11th-lowest-in-excess-deaths-among-seniors

There’s a reason why the Biden regime is trying to attack Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and create an illusion of a disproportionate viral crisis in the state. With no declared emergency restrictions in place at the state level since last September, the fact that Florida is doing better than the national average completely exposes the lie of lockdown and masks having any effect whatsoever on the fixed natural progression of the virus.

Dr. Fauci is suggesting a novel scientific principle – that schools can’t reopen until Congress passes yet another “stimulus” bill. Yet in Florida, schools have been open all year, and the state’s excess deaths for 2020 rank the 16th lowest in the nation, according to a new analysis. What’s more, the Sunshine State, which is regarded as God’s waiting room for seniors, experienced the 11th lowest per capita rate of COVID deaths for seniors in 2020.

A new analysis conducted by RationalGround.com and exclusively obtained by TheBlaze collated CDC excess death data for 49 states (excluding North Carolina, which has incomplete data) and ranked the states from smallest to largest increase in excess deaths from 2019 to 2020. As we have seen in study after study, there is absolutely zero correlation between non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as business and school closures or mask mandates, and a lower rate of excess deaths.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/02/18/u-s-will-pay-who-200-million-in-dues-after-trump-cut-funding-n1426476

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has informed the United Nations that the U.S. will pay the World Health Organization $200 million in dues. The money is owed to WHO after the Trump administration cut funding to the group.

The cash certainly isn’t for a job well done. As of today, more than 2.5 million people have died in a pandemic that the WHO knew about early on and after the organization failed to take steps against China to mitigate the disaster. In fact, the organization has been a Chinese toady throughout the pandemic, running interference for China and keeping a lid on Chinese incompetence, mismanagement, and perhaps even negligence in handling a dangerous pathogen.

The WHO hasn’t saved a single life and probably cost lives with their contradictory and confusing directives on how to stay healthy. Why give them anything?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/02/18/unity-watch-democrats-introduce-a-bill-to-punish-trump-when-he-dies-n1426572

Democrats want to make Donald Trump’s death as miserable as they tried to make his life in office.

The Democrats began trying to politically kill off Donald Trump before he took office and now they want to kill off his memory up to and after he leaves this mortal coil.

California Democrat Congresswoman Linda Sanchez has introduced a bill to deprive President Trump of the typical honors of every former president.

Her bill, HR 484, is called the “No Glory for Hate Act,” and seeks to deprive the former president from being buried in Arlington National Cemetery or to have any kind of memorials erected in his honor.

Attorney and GOP activist Harmeet Dhillon has a question for Sanchez and her co-sponsors.

This is pathetic, even for you, House Democrats. I heard some of you went to law school. Ever heard of a bill of attainder?