As R. Reagan memorably said, scariest words in English language are “I’m from the government, here to help.”

Let us now hear it for relics.

Never a hesitation. It’s been the secret of his success within the party “Newly released Congressional testimony shows that Adam Schiff spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes.

Business leaders regret what they have done. Trump was right.

The Era of Offshoring U.S. Jobs Is Over “Some say crises don’t so much alter the course of history as accelerate changes already underway. That’s certainly the case when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic and the offshoring of American jobs,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer writes in The New York Times. “Every day I talk to business leaders who now acknowledge they underestimated the risk in decisions to move jobs overseas . . . The pandemic has vindicated the Trump trade policy in another way: It has revealed our overreliance on other countries as sources of critical medicines, medical devices and personal protective equipment.” Click here to read more.

Byron York today. The things we don’t know — but dammit, suspect. Sordid.

THE BIG THING WE STILL DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE MICHAEL FLYNN CASE: It’s really pretty simple. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to two FBI agents who interviewed him at the White House on January 24, 2017, four days into the Trump administration. In accordance with usual FBI practice, the interview was not recorded. The agents took notes and were supposed to return to the office to write up what was said. The writeup is an FBI form known as the FD-302. Bureau rules give agents five working days to finish the document.

If someone is going to be charged with lying to the FBI, it will be on the basis of what is in the 302. There’s no recording and no other witnesses in the room. If an interview subject claims not to have said something, the proof otherwise is the 302 and the agents’ word. So the 302 is obviously critical if the Justice Department chooses to charge someone for lying in an FBI interview.

That’s why it is important to know the tortured history of the Flynn 302. In the Flynn case, nothing worked as it should have. Nothing. It is believed that one of the two agents who interviewed Flynn, whose identity has, remarkably, never been publicly revealed but has been widely reported to be an agent named Joe Pientka, wrote a 302 shortly after the interview. That recollection, the freshest memory possible, is usually regarded as the most reliable version of what was said.

HERE IS THE AMAZING THING: Michael Flynn’s defense has never seen the original 302. Never. Flynn, under enormous pressure from Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI without ever reading what Pientka originally wrote about the interview.

Instead, the FBI almost immediately began editing the 302. Pientka’s partner in the interview, Peter Strzok — remembered as the agent dismissed from the Mueller team for his anti-Trump texts with extramarital lover (and senior FBI official) Lisa Page — took the lead. On February 10 — after the FBI’s five working days limit — Strzok did what was apparently a major editing job on it, and he also incorporated edits suggested by Page, who had not been present at the interview. In a text message, Strzok said, “I was trying not to completely re-write the thing so as to save [REDACTED] voice.” It’s thought that the redacted name was Pientka’s. The finished document was dated February 14, 2017, which just happened to be the day after Flynn was fired by the White House.

But wait! There’s more! At the time all this was happening, top FBI officials did not think Flynn would be charged. Then-director James Comey told Congress exactly that in March 2017. The Flynn case, apparently, was put on the shelf. But then, in May, Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed. The Flynn file came down off the shelf as Mueller’s team looked for a way to exert pressure on Flynn to spill whatever he knew about President Trump, especially if it fit some prosecutors’ preferred theories of collusion.

AND THEN — VOILA! CAME AN ALL-NEW 302. In December 2018, as part of Flynn’s sentencing, the public saw another document entirely. It was called the Flynn 302, but it was in fact a record of an interview of Strzok — not Flynn — conducted by another FBI official on July 19, 2017. Even after all the changes, it was hard to see the document as the basis of charges against Flynn.

“Throughout the interview, Flynn had a very ‘sure’ demeanor and did not give any indicators of deception,” the 302 read. “He did not parse his words or hesitate in any of his answers. He only hedged once, which they documented in the 302. Strzok and [Pientka] both had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying.”

So now, is it any wonder that Republicans have had questions about the Flynn prosecution? The whole ugly affair appears to have come to nothing with the Justice Department’s move to drop the case against Flynn. But even if Judge Emmet Sullivan, as expected, dismisses the charges, there are still things — important things — the public needs to know about the case. Like, what, precisely, was said during that fateful interview at the White House on January 24, 2017?

If I had all night to parse all this, I would. But it’s late and I have promises to keep, one of them to prepare for a night’s sleep in this time of virus. So later . . .

To your right on a crowded page, and there she is, worrying about the poor governors being pressured to shut down the lockdowns. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the site, there are lots of things about her, including this:

On June 24, 2017, Waters held a town hall meeting at the Nakaoka Community Center in Gardena, California, and did not permit anyone who lived outside of Waters’s 43rd Congressional District to be admitted inside the facility; such individuals were instead relegated to an outdoor “overflow space.”

In light of these facts, it is worth noting that Waters herself does not reside in her own 43rd Congressional District, which is one of the poorest districts in the state of California. She owns a $4.8 million mansion in the upscale Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, several miles outside of her District.

She’s a study, to be sure.

Trashing the new man in town.

Read all about it.

While yr at it, consider this passage and how it represents a common, maddening misuse of the eminently otherwise useful neither-nor construction:

However, the overall results are mixed. Some studies have reported that chewing gum does not affect appetite nor energyintake over the course of a day.

Pay attention. The first “not” does it all. Douse the “nor.”

Better yet, use neither-nor. Like this:

. . . chewing gum affects neither appetite nor energy intake . . .

If you do that sort (not, for the love of God, “those sorts”), of thing, you will get nods of approval in the best places.

There’s a story here.

It’s like that New Yorker cartoon series, prizes for the best caption. Do it here if you want. No skin off my back one way or the other.

Hint: It’s a Twitter picture for one Wilfred Reilly, who also runs a serious, interesting blog, Sp!ked.

Nicely said by El Rushbo:

Andrew Cuomo is one of the biggest empty suits running around in American politics today, benefiting, of course, from the pedigree of his father, Mario “The Pious,” another morally superior guy to everybody else. Sixty-six percent of New York state coronavirus hospitalizations are people who stayed at home. They were not essential workers. They did not leave their homes. They got sick in their homes. They were quarantined. They were locked down. They got sick in their homes and then went to the hospital.

So do lockdowns even work? Was the lockdown even necessary? If 66% of coronavirus hospitalizations in the epicenter are people who stayed at home and were not essential workers, what was the point? And Cuomo’s (imitation), “Oh, I was really surprised. I was shocked when I saw these numbers.” What do you mean, shocked? None of this ought to surprise anybody. Common sense is being stood upside down and on its head.

Gov C. (Pritzler of IL too, and many others) have put their faith in the almighty lockdown, both of them infected with the Democrat virus that says every problem is solvable by governmental officials, elected or not.

The matter is in doubt, though you wouldn’t know it from reporting and headlines of the news-dominating mediums, by whom a major, major issue is neglected, namely “What difference do lockdowns make?” The producer has passed on one answer,

There is no empirical evidence for these lockdowns –Comparing US states shows there is no relationship between lockdowns and lower Covid-19 deaths.

Opening ‘graph here:

Several weeks ago, one of the USA’s better quantitative scientists, John Ioannidis of Stanford, made a critically important point. During the coronavirus pandemic, ‘we are making decisions without reliable data’, he said.

Followed by:

As Ioannidis and others have pointed out, we do not even know the actual death rate for Covid-19. Terrifying and widely cited case-fatality rates like ‘three per cent’ come from comparing known fatalities to the small pool of people who have officially been tested. Those test cases are mostly made up of sick and symptomatic people or those who had direct contact with someone known to have had Covid-19 – rather than to the far larger pool of people who may have had a mild version of the disease. Because of the same denominator problem, we also don’t know the true infection rate. A recent German study indicates this could be as high as 15 per cent.

Is there room for the likes of Ioannidis in the thinking of these two governors?