SO FAR ONE OF TRUMP’S BETTER HIRES: Kayleigh McEnany Swats Smug ‘Fake Doctor’ Joe Scarborough After Unhinged Rant on Trump and Hydroxychloroquine.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: CNN’s Cuomo Mocks Trump Over Hydroxychloroquine — A Version Of It Was Included In His Own COVID-19 Treatment.

DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM, DEPENDING ON THE RACE AND PARTY AFFILIATION OF THOSE DISSENTED AGAINST: University suspends professor for criticizing Barack Obama, Kamala Harris in tweets.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Best Selling Products – Updated Every Hour.

Also, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Finally Some Good News—Trump Is About to Flood the Economy With Deregulation. “This president has a been a breath of fresh air when it comes to regulations, gleefully chucking away hundreds of pages of them at a time. It’s really nice to see Republicans learning how to play the ‘never let a crisis go to waste’ game for once, but focusing the effort on something that’s actually good for the country, like a sweeping effort to wipe out business-crushing regulations.”

We can’t afford luxury regulations in a Wuhan Virus economy.

L.A.’S KAREN: Barbara Ferrer, Social Welfare Queen of Los Angeles County. Non-doctor health boss locks down the people, throws away the key.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Erik Prince Sues The Intercept for Alleging Proposed Alliance With Russians. “The Intercept accused Erik Prince of being a criminal and a traitor based on dishonest and biased anonymous sources that it made no effort to corroborate.”

AOC SHRUGGED: Biden Pledge to Dump Keystone Pipeline Would Kill Thousands of Jobs, Analysis Says.

I LIKE TED:

Plus, more seriously:

DECOUPLING: Made in the USA campaign to ‘Make China Pay.’

MICHAEL WALSH: ‘Madness of Crowds’ Shakes American Freedoms.

Back in 1841, the Scottish author Charles Mackay published his seminal study of mass lunacy, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” which included chapters on economic bubbles like the Tulip mania of 1637, the Crusades, witch hunts, and alchemy.

More recently, the British writer Douglas Murray treated the current “Madness of Crowds” concerning “gender,” race, and sexual identity that has driven society with constantly shifting definitions and demands.

In the current climate of unreasonable fear over the CCP virus, the cognitive dissonance of this not-so-fine madness cannot be overestimated.

With blue-state governors such as California’s Gavin Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, New York’s Andrew Cuomo, Illinois’ J. B. Pritzker, and Oregon’s Kate Brown acting like petty tyrants as they unconstitutionally restrict personal freedom, religious observance, and the right to free association—over what is essentially a nursing-home disease that strikes the very elderly—Americans are being driven mad by this sudden assault on our most basic freedoms, once thought unshakeable.

And yet here we are, two months into what increasingly appears to be a manufactured “crisis” whose cure will end up being far worse than the disease—one that will cost us a huge percentage of our formerly booming economy and the effective loss of our constitutional protections under the Bill of Rights—bovinely acquiescing in our own imprisonment and loss of livelihood. And being told it’s for our own good.

Read the whole thing. I hope everybody has enjoyed their 75 day free trial of “Democratic Socialism” in action.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN ON THE PARDON POWER: “The reality is that that ‘abuse’ of office or ‘abuse’ of powers, as it has been pitched to the public, amounts to an Orwellian thought crime—which seeks to overturn an election based on wrong think and mundane disagreements about policy, which, in normal times, would be the subject of elections, not impeachments.”

Yes, we’ve already seen abuse of Congress’s investigative and impeachment powers.

WAIT UNTIL AFTER THEY’VE ACTUALLY CHANGED: Trump Says Funding Cuts Will Be Permanent If WHO Doesn’t Commit To ‘Major’ Changes.

FLASHBACK: Across the country, rural communities want to secede from their states. Here’s why. I feel like the indiscriminate statewide application of blue-city lockdown culture has made that worse.

COVID-19 RELATED DEATHS THEY WON’T COUNT: Suicide Experts Seeing Worrying Signs During Pandemic.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Rice tried to protect Obama, blame Comey for withholding intelligence from Flynn and Trump team.

COVID SPEEDWAY: Massachusetts State Police report extreme driving during coronavirus pandemic.

That’s also the case in California: “Only one problematic trend has seen an uptick: speeding. Tickets for drivers going more than 100 miles per hour have climbed to 2,738 this year, an increase of more than 46 percent, the CHP said. ‘The open roads have led to a few brazen motorists testing the speed limit and eventually meeting up with a CHP officer for a citation,’ the agency said in a news release.”

WELL, CNN. The COVID ‘Spike’ in Reopened Texas: CNN Gets It Wrong.

On Sunday CNN ran a segment on the spread of COVID-19 in Texas. The news channel promoted it with the jarring tweet “Texas is seeing the highest number of new coronavirus cases and deaths just two weeks after it officially reopened.” The segment spotlighted 1,448 new cases and 58 new deaths, and noted the increased movement of people in the state according to cellphone data, illustrating that the public was increasingly out and about.

While technically true, this information is horribly misleading, and to the extent CNN is trying to establish a causal connection between Texas’ reopening and the increase in coronavirus diagnoses and deaths in the Lone Star State, it is simply wrong. It is so wrong that it is difficult to give the benefit of the doubt here.

Read the whole thing. Really shameful fearmongering on CNN’s part, assuming anyone there is capable of it.

Exit Question: How long has it been since a serious person gave the benefit of any doubt to CNN?

IRISH DEMOCRACY: Massachusetts gym owner ignores state ban amid coronavirus pandemic, tells gyms to join him.

OH: Leaked Audio of Joe Biden’s Ukraine ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Call Destroys MSM Narrative About Shokin’s Ouster.

IT’S TIME AND MORE THAN TIME. AS POLIS SAYS THAT RESTAURANTS MAY NEVER OPEN FOR IN-PLACE DINING, AND WHILE HE SAYS MUSEUMS AND THE BOTANIC GARDENS ARE BEST ENJOYED ON LINE INDEFINITELY, UCCS IS OPENING FOR IN PERSON CLASSES IN JUNE. NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE. AND THERE IS NO WAY THAT THE BOTANIC GARDENS ARE MORE DANGEROUS THAN WALMART, FOR THAT MATTER. IT’S ALL IRRATIONALITY AND POWER TRIPPING. TAKE THEIR HUGO BOSS UNIFORMS AWAY. HAND THEM PENITENT ROBES. BEFORE WE HAVE TO TO GET WAY MORE SERIOUS:  Open the States movement declares: “On Friday, the lockdowns end”.

Olly, Olly Oxen Free!

MORE ON “RESISTANCE JOURNALISM.”

Exactly the same journalism-destroying dynamic is driving the post-Russiagate media landscape. There is literally no accountability for the journalists and news outlets that spread falsehoods in their pages, on their airwaves, and through their viral social media postings. The Washington Post’s media columnist Erik Wemple has been one of the very few journalists devoted to holding these myth-peddlers accountable — recounting how one of the most reckless Russigate conspiracy maximialists, Natasha Bertrand, became an overnight social media and journalism star by peddling discredited conspiratorial trash (she was notably hired by Jeffrey Goldberg to cover Russigate for The Atlantic); MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spent three years hyping conspiratorial junk with no need even to retract any of it; and Mother Jones’ David Corn played a crucial, decisively un-journalistic role in mainstreaming the lies of the Steele dossier all with zero effect on his journalistic status, other than to enrich him through a predictably bestselling book that peddled those unhinged conspiracies further.

Wemple’s post-Russiagate series has established him as a commendable, often-lone voice trying — with futility — to bring some accountability to U.S. journalism for the systemic media failures of the past three years. The reason that’s futile is exactly what Smith described in his column on Farrow: In “resistance journalism,” facts and truth are completely dispensable — indeed, dispensing with them is rewarded — provided “reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices.”

That describes perfectly the journalists who were defined, and enriched, by years of Russiagate deceit masquerading as reporting. By far the easiest path to career success over the last three years — booming ratings, lucrative book sales, exploding social media followings, career rehabilitation even for the most discredited D.C. operatives — was to feed establishment liberals an endless diet of fearmongering and inflammatory conspiracies about Drumpf and his White House. Whether it was true or supported by basic journalistic standards was completely irrelevant. Responsible reporting was simply was not a metric used to assess its worth.

It was one thing for activists, charlatans, and con artists to exploit fears of Trump for material gain: that, by definition, is what such people do. But it was another thing entirely for journalists to succumb to all the low-hanging career rewards available to them by throwing all journalistic standards into the trash bin in exchange for a star turn as a #Resistance icon. That, as Smith aptly describes, is what “Resistance Journalism” is, and it’s hard to identify anything more toxic to our public discourse.

The media has become a deadly virus infecting our body politic, and so far there’s no vaccine, treatment, or lockdown.