RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/economy/jobs-report.html?emc=edit_

For the second month in a row, the economy churned out a blockbuster number of jobs, the government reported Friday, an impressive performance in an era of slow-and-steady employment growth.

With the coronavirus outbreak shaking economic confidence, the solid showing in February may not be a harbinger of continued strength.

Still, the report from the Department of Labor offered a refreshing breath of positive economic news. Employers expanded payrolls by 273,000 jobs in February, while revisions to data from previous months added 85,000 more jobs to the tally. The jobless rate ticked down to 3.5 percent.

“It’s certainly a relief that we had a strong tailwind,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. “Service, leisure and hospitality, these are all very vulnerable. The good news is that these workers had some cushion ahead of time. It helps blunt the blow.”

https://worldisraelnews.com/us-house-democrats-block-anti-bds-bill/?utm_source=M

Lawmakers defeated consideration of the bill by a tally of 219-194.

By JNS

Democrats blocked a bill on Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives that would have prohibited U.S. support for the anti-Israel BDS movement.

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), would have expanded the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to include prohibiting U.S. support for foreign boycotts of Israel from groups including the European Union and the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“We cannot be quiet when it comes to combating anti-Semitism and anti-Israel mentalities,” said Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) on the House floor. “We need to work together in Congress and pass common-sense legislation on this issue. H.R. 5595 does just that.”

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/why-it-bad-threaten-supreme-court-justices

The bipartisan shredding of America’s established constitutional norms continues apace. The latest culprit is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, he issued a chilling, direct threat to two sitting justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. He deserves broad condemnation. He received it only from Republicans. Save for some prominent lawyers, Democrats remained silent.

Schumer told a cheering crowd, “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price!” The crowd was rallying for abortion rights as the Supreme Court heard a case on that issue. The minority leader was there to support them, a perfectly legitimate political act. What’s illegitimate is his call to arms, his over-the-top threats. Schumer concluded by saying the two justices “won’t know what hit them” if they decide the wrong way.

Could a US politician’s behavior get much worse? Actually, it could. Schumer doubled down when he was rebuked. It took him a full day, some tongue-lashing on the Senate floor, and doubtless some phone calls behind the scenes for him to admit he was wrong.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/schumer-the-supreme-court-and-the-mob/The senator treats the Court like a political body — which it is.

Should Chuck Schumer be censured? Of course he should, in the sense that the rule of law, were it actually our cynosure, would cry out for it.

On Wednesday morning, the Democrats’ Senate minority leader stirred up the mob outside the Supreme Court, unabashedly threatening Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” Schumer inveighed. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Inside, the justices were then hearing argument on what ought to be a straightforward abortion case (i.e., one in which the “right” invented in Roe v. Wade is not up for consideration). When called on his menacing remarks, rather than apologize, Schumer brazenly lied about what he had done. This morning, he was still lying — a tepid apology, offered under pressure while insisting that “in no way was I making a threat.”

In a rule-of-law society, that should rate censure. Case closed.

Except it’s not closed, because we are not a rule-of-law society. We just pretend to be. In a rule-of-law society, a mob would not gather on the steps of the courthouse in the first place.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/05/morning-greatness-trump-admin-reverses-obama-era-regulation-blocking-coronavirus-testing/

The House passed an $8.3B measure for emergency funding to combat coronavirus and now it will go to the Senate. Meanwhile, we have some more cruise ship trouble.

Two shiploads of passengers may have been exposed. State and federal officials are scurrying to contact 2,500-plus passengers who disembarked Feb. 21 from the San Francisco-Mexico cruise at the same time as the man who died, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

California is also keeping Grand Princess passengers on the current San Francisco-Hawaii trip in the Pacific Ocean indefinitely until state and federal officials can assess how many passengers and crew have coronavirus or have been exposed.

Twenty-one people on the Grand Princess are showing signs of possible infection.

The Trump Administration has rolled back an Obama FDA rule that required “state-run laboratories to only run medical tests pre-approved by the F.D.A.”

“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing, and we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place at a much more accurate and rapid fashion,” Trump stated. “That was a decision we disagreed with. I don’t think we would have made it, but for some reason it was made. But we’ve undone that decision.”

Keep calm, wash your hands and don’t panic. People are freaking out that they can’t get tested for the virus, but does it matter if you aren’t showing life threatening symptoms in this time of crisis? If you go to the ER, and you aren’t sick you will be when you leave because that is where the sick people are. If you do have the virus but aren’t dangerously sick, they are going to send you home to self-quarantine, you won’t be admitted because hospitals are saving space for really sick people like the elderly and immuno-compromised.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/05/without-consequences-or-penalties-fisa-should-expire/

Most Americans no longer have faith in the government and political apparatus that fortifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Republican lawmakers shouldn’t either.

Two years ago, a controversial memo first alerted the public to the politicized use of a secret court to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At the time, most Americans—myself included—knew next to nothing about the clandestine workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Most Americans trusted that the law enforcement, intelligence, and judicial “experts” involved in the process took the utmost care with their duties and sought a diligent application of the law to protect cherished constitutional rights while keeping us safe.

After all, most Americans had defended these surveillance tools as necessary weapons in the war on terror after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The notion that such a powerful, intrusive means of collecting information from suspected foreign terrorists instead would be weaponized against a volunteer for the wrong political campaign—a private U.S. citizen—was so far fetched that it would have bordered on tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense conceived by the deepest corners of the far Left or Right had anyone said it out loud.

That’s why, when then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued his February 2018 memo detailing how Barack Obama’s Justice Department presented unproven political opposition research—the “Steele dossier”—as evidence to the FISA court in order to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, many detractors accused Nunes of acting as a “deep state” conspiracy theorist. (The FBI, by the way, objected to the memo’s release.)

Journalists and pundits on the Left howled that Nunes was promoting a Fox News-manufactured conspiracy theory lacking veracity. “Instead of evidence, the memo engages in the same dark and misleading conspiracy theories that have characterized other efforts by President Trump’s allies to discredit the Russia investigation,” wrote New York Times columnist David Leonhardt in January 2018.

Nunes’s intelligence committee counterpart, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), prepared his own memo to denounce the majority’s work, an official congressional document filled with distortions and outright lies. Schiff, too, accused his colleague of peddling right-wing quackery.