RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/regenerons-antibody-miracle-for-covid-19-11611270897?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Three weeks ago my wife and I were toasting the New Year and giving blessings for the last. It was a year in which we welcomed our first grandchild, reason enough to be thankful. It was also a year during which we maintained our health, despite living, shopping, working and commuting in the heart of the city with the world’s worst Covid-19 death record. It appeared we were going to skate through the pandemic into the post-pandemic era without getting sick.

Then the coughing began.

After a long day at work, I went to bed early and kept waking up with a hacking cough. I rose the next morning feeling dizzy and achy with a cold sweat. I called my doctor, who got right to the point: “You probably have Covid; that’s the only thing getting through masks these days.”

Since I had a fever, I went directly to NYU Hospital’s emergency Covid ward. Although it was overcrowded, an unexpected calm prevailed. Several of the nurses and aides told me they’d already had Covid. Others had been vaccinated. More important, they said, they now have powerful weapons to use against the virus.

The weapon that interested me most was the antibody cocktail by Regeneron that has emerged from this crisis as a giant-killer. Once my test came back positive, I asked the nurses whether I could get the casirivimab and imdevimab drugs that night. They said it’s only given the day after you’re diagnosed. I also learned that despite Operation Warp Speed’s remarkable achievements in bringing drugs like this to the market quickly, there were still regulatory barriers to its distribution that seemed needlessly bureaucratic.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/justice-department-asks-supreme-court-to-reverse-trump-twitter-decision_3666557.html

The Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that found that former President Donald Trump’s blocking of critics on the microblogging website Twitter violated the First Amendment, saying the ruling was “deeply problematic.”

President Joe Biden, as well as future presidents and government officials, should not be bound by the decision the high court may well have overturned had the question not become moot by Trump completing his term of office, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall argued in a supplemental brief filed on Jan. 19 in Trump v. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Wall had previously argued that Trump’s ability “to use the features of his personal Twitter account … are independent of his presidential office,” adding that “blocking third-party accounts … is a purely personal action that does not involve any ‘right or privilege created by the State,’” he wrote, referencing a previous precedent.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled unanimously in 2019  that Trump’s use of his personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, created “an official channel of communication.”

The feed for that account had been constantly filled with replies from users who taunted and insulted the president, often using expletives, and Trump had locked horns with Twitter management on many occasions.

President Biden
Biden to Seek Five-Year Extension of Nuclear Arms Treaty With Russia

Will Keep Wray as FBI Director

Rejoins Paris Climate Accord

Issues Pause on Deportations

Extends Student Loan Payments Pause, Moratorium on Evictions

Revokes Trump’s 1776 Report

Dismisses U.S. Ambassador to Israel to replace with Ambassador to Israel,West Bank and Gaza

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/21/inauguration-violence-erupts-from-antifa/

As Washington, D.C., and federal officials around the country geared up for what many wrongly predicted would be an insurrection by Trump supporters on Inauguration Day, Antifa members rioted and denounced Joe Biden’s presidency in cities across the nation.

In Portland, hundreds of violent Antifa rioters took to the streets to protest Biden’s inauguration, with some vandalizing the Oregon Democratic Party headquarters, smashing windows, graffitiing the walls, and lighting dumpsters on fire.

Another group marched to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the city, chanting, “F-ck Joe Biden.” Shortly after they arrived, federal law enforcement declared an unlawful assembly as the crowd lobbed objects at the officers and the building.

Police eventually arrested and charged multiple people in connection to the destruction, but during other rowdy gatherings in the area, some demonstrators called for “revenge” against “police murders, imperialist wars, and fascist massacres,” carrying a banner painted with “We don’t want Biden.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/what_happened_to_all_the_protrump_violence_that_was_supposed_to_mar_inauguration_day.html

Joe Biden was sworn in  with a supporting cast of about 24,000 National Guard troops deployed from all over the country to Washington, D.C., at enormous, wasted cost in money and disruption to the lives of the troops.  But the media and other Democrats got what they wanted: great visuals portraying an atmosphere of fear, an expectation of dread that violent, white supremacist, scary people bent on insurrection were a threat to the Republic.

That fear is a precious commodity to those who want to silence their political opponents — because an argument on the merits of political policy does not favor the left.  Demonization of conservatives, Trump-supporters, and Caucasian males (and those females and other races who fail to toe the identity politics/socialist line) is a conscious, perverse strategy that has the almost total support of the mainstream media and most of the education industry.

The idea that 74 million Trump voters are bent on overthrow of the U.S. government was always a crock, but thanks to the violent incursion on the U.S. Capitol (not the first such event) on January 6, there was a seed of violence that could be, and was, exploited.  Don’t forget that election integrity was and is the aim of those who question the result that led to Biden’s inauguration, not an insistence that a revolutionary vanguard would be justified in acting to seize power.  Every single Trump-supporter I know was horrified at the incursion, and many suspect, with some evidence, that agents provocateurs led the way, and mob hysteria led others to follow, dupes.

The inauguration visuals of armed troops were insurrection theatre, with a cast of thousands (literally).

https://www.city-journal.org/bidens-inaugural-speech-words-of-division

It’s an odd way to seek national unity: call a significant portion of the American public white supremacists, racists, and nativists. Welcome to the Biden presidency.

Joe Biden’s inaugural speech as 46th president is predictably being hailed for its “unifying” message. And just as predictably, his invocations of the divisive bromides of the identitarian Left are being swept under the rug.

According to Biden, we are a “great nation” and a “good people.” But we also oppress minorities with an ever-rising fervor. “Growing inequity” is among the greatest challenges facing the country, according to Biden, along with the “sting of systemic racism” and encroaching “white supremacy.” Only now are we confronting “a cry for racial justice, some four hundred years in the making.”

One might have thought that more than 50 years of civil rights legislation; the banishing of Jim Crow segregation; the ubiquity of racial preferences throughout corporate America, higher education, and government; trillions of dollars of tax dollars attempting to close the academic achievement gap; and the election of black politicians by white voting districts would have reduced inequity, not increased it. But to Biden’s speechwriters, steeped in academic victimology, racial inequity is always with us, requiring constant remediation from government.

Biden rattled off a litany of white America’s sins: the “harsh, ugly reality” of “racism, nativism, fear, [and] demonization”; “anger, resentment, hatred, [and] extremism.” He did not name white Americans as such, but he did not need to. That qualifier is inherent in the language he chose to adopt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/trump-trial-puts-fundamental-question-to-chief-justice-roberts/

It’s a murky situation that could see none other than Vice President Harris preside.

B efore the Senate holds an impeachment trial, as many conservative and liberal writers advise, it should understand the serious constitutional issues at stake. Chief among them is whether the Senate can try a defendant who has left office. Another one, less noticed, is who would serve as the trial judge. Carefully read, the constitutional text may even allow the chief justice of the Supreme Court to scuttle the whole affair, or at the very least open up a political minefield that could cripple the new administration. The Senate would better serve the national interest simply by allowing Donald Trump to depart — which, after all, is the main objective of impeachment — rather than holding a long trial solely to disqualify him from future office.

We have written before about the constitutional challenges to impeaching Trump. He was involved in the odious attack on the Capitol during the January 6 counting of the Electoral College votes. But the current rush to impeach and try Trump may imperil multiple constitutional values.

First, the House carried out a hasty impeachment — two days — that charged Trump with the wrong crime. Convicting Donald Trump of “incitement” to insurrection will debase both the crime of incitement — which our courts have long read narrowly to protect vital free-speech values — and the meaning of insurrection. We would not give the criminals and miscreants who attacked the Capitol the higher status of insurrectionists who had ideological goals in mind.