Archive for 2020
May 8, 2020
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Betsy DeVos Brings Back Due Process and Libs Lose It. “Liberals are aghast that DeVos has brought fairness to a previously nightmarish situation. Rather than objectively assess the new rules, they’re miffed that their least favorite Cabinet member dared touch something that The Lightbringer instituted. “
REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: New Red Flags Emerging From FBI’s Handling of Michael Flynn’s Case. “FBI supervisors, however, are not supposed to rewrite other agents’ 302 forms. Nor are 302 forms supposed to be edited by FBI personnel who were not present at the interview, and both of these things happened in the Flynn case.”
UPDATE: Is it still “conspiracy theory” when there’s an actual conspiracy?
Related: Barr: FBI set Flynn up in an illegitimate “perjury trap” — directed by top brass.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Also related:
TREAT THE NEWS WITH SKEPTICISM: Walla Walla County retracts claim about ‘coronavirus parties,’ says they never occurred. “Officials in Walla Walla County are retracting their claim that some people held parties in which they intentionally exposed themselves to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Meghan DeBolt, the director of the southeast Washington county’s Department of Community Health, issued a statement late Wednesday saying her earlier remarks were incorrect.”
DON’T JUST CUT ‘EM, SLASH ‘EM: ‘Sober look’ at public payrolls urged as bailouts tax system.
The warning comes after Boston’s public payroll was posted by the Herald showing 8,000 employees who earned $100,000 or more last year. While first responders are on the front lines of the pandemic, others in Boston have not been furloughed.
“We are faced with a crisis. By necessity, the state and City of Boston must find places to tighten the belt. They have an obligation to do it now,” said Greg Sullivan of the Pioneer Institute, who once was the state inspector general. . . .
Out of the 8,000 city employees who took home six-figure pay last year, 31 recorded gross pay of $300,000 or more and another 700 workers clocked in at $200,000 and up, records show. There were also two large workers’ compensation settlements in 2019 for $772,000, to a school employee, and $401,000, to a council worker. . . .
The budget-tightening talk comes jobless numbers show one in four in Massachusetts are unemployed.
“This is the emergency we’ve talked about that would prod reductions,” he added. “What Congress is looking to provide states and cities is mind-numbing. We need to start now to get serious.”
It’s also why lockdowns can’t continue much longer, even in hard-hit states.
WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS, AMERICA: Record gun sales for second month, over 7M this year. We can make it 8.
HARD TRUTHS: Rand Paul Has a Frightening Reality Check for States Keeping Their Residents in Lockdown.
“We have no money, we have no rainy day account, we have no savings account. The three trillion that we’ve already passed out is imaginary money,” said Paul.
“It’s being borrowed, basically, from China. So the irony is we got the virus from China and now we’re going to be more dependent by borrowing more money from China,” continued Paul.
“The only thing that recovers our economy is opening the economy,” said Paul. “It’s not a lack of money, it’s a lack of commerce. If you let people have commerce, if you let them trade, if you take them out from forcible home arrest, our economy will recover. But if you keep everybody under home arrest and say you cannot practice your business, you cannot sell your goods, there will continue to be economic calamity.”
Let’s get back to work.
WHAT’S THE MANDARIN FOR GLEICHSCHALTUNG? EU envoy says removal of phrase in op-ed in China newspaper ‘regrettable.’
The European Union ambassador to China said on Thursday it was “regrettable” that part of an opinion piece co-authored by 27 European ambassadors and published in the official China Daily had been removed before publication.
A comparison between the original op-ed uploaded onto the EU embassy website and the one published on Tuesday by the China Daily showed that in a sentence beginning, “But the outbreak of the coronavirus”, the words that followed – “in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world over the past three months” – were removed.
“It is regrettable that part of the sentence about the spread of the virus has been edited,” EU Ambassador to China Nicolas Chapuis told reporters at a briefing.
Predictable, too.
NEIMAN MARCUS BECOMES 2ND MAJOR RETAILER TO SEEK CHAPTER 11 BANKRUPTCY:
The move by the 112-year-old storied luxury department store chain was announced Thursday and follows the bankruptcy filing by J.Crew on Monday. Experts believe there will be more to come even as businesses start to reopen in parts of the country like Texas and Florida.
Related: Nordstrom permanently closing Sacramento mall store as COVID-19 hammers economy.
Sadly, Websites such as DeadMalls.com are going to have plenty of opportunities for updates in the next couple of years, as shopping malls lose their anchor stores and restaurants.
GET WOKE, GO MORALLY BROKE: Inside Nike: Sources share claims of sexism, cheating, abuse at the world’s wokest brand.
ANDREW CUOMO’S MORALLY GROTESQUE. Andrew Cuomo’s Morally Grotesque Rationale for Maintaining COVID-19 Lockdowns.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo continues to show that he cannot be trusted to properly weigh the costs and benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns. While conceding the unavoidable tradeoff between lives and livelihoods, he insists that preventing even one death is worth any amount of economic pain.
“The faster we reopen,” Cuomo told reporters this week, “the lower the economic cost, but the higher the human cost, because the more lives lost. That, my friends, is the decision we are really making.”
Cuomo misleadingly implies that the economic burden of lockdowns—lost jobs, shuttered businesses, a precipitous drop in spending and output, unemployment at a level not seen since the Great Depression, tens of millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills and feed their children—is not a “human cost.” Who is hurt by this suppression of economic activity? Robots?
Given Cuomo’s cavalier treatment of nursing home patients, it’s not clear that he’s really that interested in preventing deaths.
GO AHEAD, BITE THE BIG APPLE. DON’T MIND THE MAGGOTS. Call it DeBLOVID-19: Mayor Urged NYCers to ‘Go On With Your Lives’ as City Became Cesspool of Infection.
What, you thought I could only do Steely Dan references?
JOEL KOTKIN: One Nation, Under Lockdown, Divided By Pandemic.
The last thing this polarized Republic needs is, well, more polarization, but that is what we are contracting from the pandemic. Americans, irrespective of region, broadly want the same things, such as safety, a return to normalcy, and an end to dependence on China for medical supplies, but they differ in the depth of their experiences with the pandemic.
Rather than rallying the nation, COVID-19 has amplified every fissure in this society from class to race, but perhaps most of all regarding geography. This reflects, in large part, the different experiences felt in various localities and the differences in how economies function from region to region.
On one hand there is the New York City urban area, which has suffered roughly 40 percent of fatalities, and bore the brunt of the crisis. Places outside New York with the most deaths have been central cities such as New Orleans and Detroit, where the vast majority of deaths have been endured by African Americans living in crowded, low income districts. . . .
To the political divide, add a major geographic one. Huge parts of the country have been barely impacted by the virus but almost everywhere has been hit by the lockdowns and social distancing policies. Not surprisingly, extending lockdown orders seems far less compelling in places where the pandemic’s impact has, so far, been minimal.
Read the whole thing.
TIM CARNEY: If you want people to keep being okay with lockdowns, don’t make them feel lied to.
Those of us outside of the New York area have done exactly what we were told we had to do. We “flattened the curve,” and now we’re being told that this flattened curve is a sign of our failure and a reason we need to stay in lockdown.
Unless you want to demolish all faith in public health authorities, don’t make them into liars by moving the goalposts and declaring that a flattened curve is a sign of failure. It would be even worse to poison this with partisan politics by asserting that the government leaders who totally failed to flatten the curve, and then who spread the virus to the rest of the country, are success stories.
It reeks of culture-war politics against Middle America.
This chart at Axios seems to make the point that New York state and the Europeans have turned their ship around, while the rest of America hasn’t. . . .
The data actually suggest, however, that the rest of the United States has succeeded at the assigned task, while New York has failed. That is, the U.S. minus New York has flattened the curve.
Both of those above charts mislead by not adjusting for population. The rest of the U.S. (not every single part, but the country, in aggregate, minus New York) has had a much slower rise. We may or may not have hit a peak. The peak will be later than in New York, Italy, or Spain, precisely because we flattened it. . . . Even if you assume that the rest of the U.S. is really on the rise, it still looks like New York is what happens when you don’t mitigate the spread, and that the rest of the country is a flattened curve.
Read the whole thing. And remember that the biggest public health resource is trust.
FROM SAM SCHALL: Risen from Ashes.
As a Marine, Ashlyn Shaw knows the day might come when she would not return from a mission. As an officer in the Fuerconese Marine Corps, she’s faced the difficult duty of sending the men and women under her command to their deaths. Both are nightmares she, and so many like her, live with. War is a cruel and costly endeavor, but one well worth the cost if it means keeping their homeworld free.
What Ash wasn’t prepared for was betrayal. Betrayal by members of her own government. Betrayal by certain members of the military. Betrayal by supposed allies. Betrayals that cost the lives of too many she cared for.
Unluckily for her enemies, that betrayal has cut too deeply to be allowed to go unpunished. Her enemies will soon learn how foolish they were to push her too far.
I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING: Astronomers find closest black hole to Earth.
RESPONSIBLE, PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS HYPING A FOREIGN-ORIGINATED DANGER? UNPOSSIBLE! Bug experts dismiss worry about US ‘murder hornets’ as hype.
Well, you see, people are starting to question the lethality and danger of Winnie the Flu, so now they need something else to scare us with.
GEE, GOVERNOR CUOMO WENT ANTI-ABORTION SO FAST I ALMOST MISSED IT: ‘How much is a human life worth?’ Gov. Cuomo outlines pitfalls of reopening too quickly.
Projection models have doubled the number of expected deaths in the United States due to COVID-19 because of reopening acceleration in many states.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during his daily briefing that the projection made by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation jumped from 60,000 to 135,000, which “reflects increased human mobility and the easing of social distancing measures in many U.S. states.”
“The faster we reopen, the lower the economic cost, but the more lives will be lost,” he said. He called every human life “priceless.”
Projections…. which have been wrong every time. But I’m sure Cuomo’s corrupt “health” machinery will find those deaths sure enough.