The nation’s doctor!

Dr. Anthony Fauci has impressive credentials and a lengthy tenure as a top-level government health official dating back to 1984. But his performance during the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with politicized non-science-based edicts and frequently reversed “medical advice” that have confused and frightened Americans.

Oh?

Just a week ago, Fauci made what to some was a stunning admission: “We’ve done worse than most any country” in managing the outbreak, he said. We say “stunning” because Fauci, as head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the official most responsible for the U.S. response.

And it’s not on him? High-priced, anyhow:

His 2019 pay of $417,608 makes him the nation’s highest paid federal official. As a scientist, he’s held in very high esteem by many, particularly those on the left, who see his sweeping powers – lockdowns, masking, social distancing – as a nifty means of social control. It’s control of 330 million people via social isolation and nonstop browbeating of those who dare to diverge from the oppressive “new normal” we all now experience on a daily basis.

Now that’s what you call a takedown. Details?

The big problem has been Fauci’s pronunciamentos are often nonsensical, not supported by science or contradictory. “These are my principles,” Groucho Marx once said. “If you don’t like these, I have others.” That’s Fauci.

Oh my.

Take masking, for instance. The Daily Wire counted five different mask policies by Fauci as of Feb. 11. Oops! Make that six. After calling masking “largely symbolic” last spring and telling Americans “don’t wear masks,” he now suggests we need to “double mask” and that it might last into 2022.

Follow Fauci? Which one?

more more here . . .

Classic case of telling people, “Nothing to see here, move on.”

BIDEN TEAM IN FULL DENIAL MODE ABOUT BORDER CRISIS. During the campaign, candidate Joe Biden promised to undo President Trump’s border security policies. He pledged to halt all deportations for 100 days and allow asylum seekers who enter the United States illegally to stay in this country while their cases are considered, rather than wait in Mexico, as Trump required.

It was obvious that Biden’s changes would attract a flood of new illegal immigrants. So during the transition, the president-elect sounded a note of caution. In late December, Biden told reporters he would not throw out the Trump program immediately, lest the United States “end up with two million people on our border.” Instead, Biden said, he would take some time to set up “guardrails” to make sure his new system would work smoothly.

Blah and blah and blah. Read the rest.

This fellow gives a lot of data and graphs and argues well, is willing to offer this as his closing:

A careful look at the charts shows that mask mandates did nothing except make money for mask-manufacturers and Emmy Awards for petty tyrants pimping masks and lockdowns. COVID deaths rose, and then fell, without any effect from masking. And these are the data we should be looking at.

It’s worse than worthless to tell people that masks will filter out the virus when the data show that masks have no effect. It’s the same evil that rises when we frighten people about how “deadly” the bug is as we learn how to treat it and it resolves into part of the background. Schools get closed, and children are irreparably harmed. People die from multiple other causes related to poverty from lockdowns.

It’s time to lift the yoke of tyrants off our necks and take the diapers off our faces.

Oh, and this is you, or someone like you or like someone you know, but when you get down to it, none of these. But I guarantee you, if she reads and digests this article, she will thereafter, apart from getting into stores etc. without trouble, probably be neither mask-wearer nor -worrier. The trick is to FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!

There.

One of their “most glaring miscalculations happened before the looting started.”

In the days following Floyd’s killing, unrest swept through other cities across the U.S. Clashes between police and demonstrators erupted in New York, Denver, Phoenix, Columbus, Ohio, and other cities. Despite that, senior members of CPD told the inspector general’s office that “they saw no indication that there would be unrest in Chicago following the killing of George Floyd,” the report stated. One member of CPD’s command staff told Ferguson’s team that, leading up to the first weekend of protests, the department had become “complacent.”

They slept.

Once protests swelled on Friday, May 29, and into the weekend, oversight of CPD’s reaction was chaotic and poorly coordinated. Officers were deployed haphazardly, often without knowing what they were supposed to do or who they were taking orders from. There were no plans for making mass arrests; police lacked enough vehicles to transport people arrested, and at times found themselves using plastic “flex cuffs” left over from the city’s NATO summit in 2012 that were broken or decayed.

Case of the broken handcuffs.

The report laid out a long list of other problems: The department failed to adequately document instances of use of force by officers, logging just 30 reports of use of batons on demonstrators despite complaints that baton use was much more widespread. Many officers didn’t turn on their body cameras when making arrests or using force. Some officers obscured their names and badge numbers.

Summing up, Ferguson’s team said, “… the lack of preparedness at the outset crippled the effective implementation of mass arrest procedures, the ability to properly control the use of force and proper use of force reporting, and several critical accountability measures.”

But hardly a police riot, a la 1968.

In any case, the city’s two doughty leaders should learn from this report. Heh.

Voters are the ones who should learn, but they won’t either.

. . . as seen in the 60% “higher than the nationwide average,” rate, according the the U.S. Dept of Justice., for which the mayor fastens on the “incalculable” toll the coronavirus pandemic has had on mental health.

She neatly, or not so neatly, deflects blame from herself and her acquiescent, or quiescent, police chief, in our recent days of rage.

Only a few years ago, I would have railed on anyone saying that America is or is about to become a Totalitarian state. That was only a few years ago. But in 2021, I confess I was wrong and under the current administration, the Democrat-controlled Congress, and the Swamp-filled Supreme Court we are there. You […]

TOTALITARIAN AMERICA… — Roybeaird’s Blog

Sad, sad, sad. The face of the Democrat Party.

His very candidacy gives insight into the party culture, if you want to call it that.

Disgusting they would foist him on the American public.

Calm, cool, collected demo of a central truth of our time: None of the darn fixes made a darn bit of difference to the rises and declines of the currently defined COVID menace.

Lockdowns, shmockdowns. We went to all that trouble with killer effect on economies coast to coast. Gummint gone wild in blue states.

There’s a reason for it.

Lenin knew that part of establishing a one-party state was to control the media. One of the first things he did in 1917 was pushing a Decree on the Press in November 1917 that gave the government the emergency power “to close down any newspapers which supported counter revolution.”

Today, the word “disinformation” has replaced “counter revolutionary” but it’s really the same thing: a set of statements that the State (and its ideologues) deem “false” and “dangerous.” You’d think the media, which unabashedly leans left (which is their right) would be wary of such power. After all, today’s “lie” might be tomorrow’s “history.” Moreover, if the First Amendment — which they claim to love — mean’s anything, it is the notion that there must be room for error in public discourse, or as Justice Brennan put it:

“That erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate, and that it must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the “breathing space” that they need to survive.”

more more more if you’re interested . . .

Minutes later: What the heck, here’s the rest:

Post-Trump, we are witnessing a New McCarthyism, where lists are made, and commentators call for “detoxifying” or “cleansing” the public discourse and psyche of any remnants of the motive force behind the previous administration. Self-described “progressive” columnist Jason Sattler said in USA Today that:

“I want to believe that Biden will be able to achieve far more than just detoxing our body politic from Trump while minimizing the unpardonable harm that this wannabe dictator and his GOP co-conspirators did to this country.”

This sounds more like something from the Cheka than it does from genuine “progressivism.” The frightening part — and we should be frightened — is that lawmakers, supported by media outlets, are encouraging the purge. It’s a multi-pronged attack. Cancel culture is encouraged by the media every day, because at the end of the day the by-product of manufactured outrage is more readership. One of the other prongs is to use the power of the State to silence dissent, which can always so easily be labeled “disinformation.”

Mediaite reports that the movement of State control has begun. Democratic representatives Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney demanded that television providers including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Apple, and Amazon say whether they planned to continue providing Fox News on their platforms, in addition to Newsmax and One America News.

You’d think that any “progressive” publisher would recognize the dynamic here. But you’d be wrong. Vice News, one of the wokiest outlets on the web is ironically owned in part by The Walt Disney Company (16%); A&E Networks (20%); TPG Capital (44%); and (surprise, surprise!) Soros Fund Management (10%). And Vice is cheering on the Democratic lawmakers. In their story, the sub-head sets the tone and the narrative:

Lawmakers are demanding answers from Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cox, and other cable companies who have ‘done nothing’ to stop disinformation on OANN, Newsmax, and Fox News.

In what ought to labeled an Op/Ed, Vice goes on to “report” that:

“While “big tech” has received the lion’s share of criticism for doing too little to combat disinformation in recent years, less talked about has been the role traditional cable TV giants play in circulating dangerous, bad faith nonsense.” [Eshoo and McNerney wrote that] “Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm.” Eshoo and McNerney also noted that carrying conspiratorial channels not only helps foster radicalization among the “alternative facts” set, it poses a direct threat to public health.”

Even worse, Vice, cheerleading for State control of media, plants a meme we’re sure to see repeated elsewhere. The article gives a passing nod to (OMG!) free speech by saying that:

“Largely because any new laws or restrictions intended to prevent news networks from carrying dodgy purveyors of disinformation would likely run afoul of the First Amendment. As such most wouldn’t survive a legal challenge, especially given the Supreme Court’s rightward lurch in recent years.” (Emphasis added).

You get that? Those “dodgy purveyors of disinformation” are sadly, protected by the First Amendment, and wouldn’t you just know, the First Amendment is now a right-wing thing. It can be laughed off, but I don’t think it’s funny. Much like those with experience in the Second Amendment sphere, genuine defenders of the First Amendment are more and more going to be understood by the public as “right-wing nuts”, “insurrectionists” and “purveyors of disinformation.” Be advised that failure to condemn them will brand you a “fellow traveler.”

Disinformation, indeed. The ghosts of Peter Zenger,Eugene Debs, Lenny Bruce, Mario Savio and William Brennan are surely weeping, and the ghosts of Lenin, Mao and McCarthy are grinning.

Nice job here, by Charles Glasser.