Bernie Quits Before Drug Companies Find a Cure
Bernie quit just as things were finally going his way. Thanks to Covid-19 the government is spending like crazy, we have fee health care and fracking is dead. So he’s dropped out of the race.
Smart move. Drug companies big and small are working on treatments and vaccines. And before you know it, we’ll right back where we started.
Authoritarian Itch Gets Scratched During Pandemic
If you have an authoritarian itch, the Covid-19 pandemic provides a great opportunity to scratch it.
Andrew McCarthy and David Harsanyi write in National Review about authoritarian overreach.
A father in Colorado was briefly handcuffed for playing t-ball with his 6-year old daughter. Meanwhile, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer shut down the sale of fruit and vegetables at garden stores. And NYC Mayor de Blasio threatened to seize churches.
Shutting down church services was a big theme:
Two days before Easter, Louisville, Ky., mayor Greg Fischer attempted to unilaterally ban drive-in church services for the most holy day in Christianity.
David Harsanyi
But U.S. District Judge Justin Walker overruled the mayor. And maybe the judge was scratching that itch himself when he claimed, “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter.”
But, it’s still best to be king. As President Trump says:
When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.
Theodore Roosevelt Hit Hard by Covid-19 Virus
The Covid-19 virus hit the USS Theodore Roosevelt hard. Over 150 of the aircraft carrier’s crew of 4,800 tested positive. And the symptoms were strange.
The ship’s captain, Brett Crozier, ignored the chain of command and instead blasted out an unsecured email warning to 20 or 30 people. As you might expect, it leaked.
USS Theodore Roosevelt Change of Command
So, at that point, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modley relieved Capt. Crozier of his command.
But Modley didn’t leave it at that. He boarded the ship and ripped the captain in a profanity laced tirade calling the him “naive or too stupid.“
The tongue lashing was apparently too much for Modley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. So the next day Secretary Modley kind of apologized, saying he really meant to say the captain was “smart and passionate.”
And then he resigned.
World Health Organization Kissing up to China
You may have heard that President Trump has credibility issues. Yesterday he called the WSJ fake news. The reason being that the editorial board suggested his briefings might benefit from a little more focus.
But he had a point on Tuesday when he ripped the World Health Organization for kissing up to China. Here’s Rich Lowry writing in Politico:
China committed unforgivable sins of commission, affirmatively lying about the outbreak and punishing doctors and disappearing journalists who told the truth, whereas the WHO committed sins of omission—it lacked independence and courage at a moment of great consequence.
In effect, China and the WHO worked together to expose the rest of the world to the virus, at the same time they downplayed its dangers
And, in mid-January, the World Health Organization claimed there was no proof of human to human transmission of the virus.
Plenty of FBI Abuse to go Around In IG Report
Eli Lake at Bloomberg thinks the FBI is lucky, in a weird sort of way. That’s because the IG report shows the FBI abuse wasn’t just aimed at the Trump Campaign. The IG also found 39 other defective FISA applications.
In the twisted politics of the Trump Era, some of bureau’s defenders might actually view this report as good news: It shows that the investigation of the Trump campaign was not necessarily politically motivated. The bureau made the same kinds of mistakes with suspects who were not connected to the Trump campaign.
