Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #37 Written By Stephen Moore
1) Russia Collusion Story Was Media Corruption – Sound Familiar?
Regular readers of the Hotline now know that much of what has been reported by the media about coronavirus has been misleading. Whether this scare campaign has been deliberate or not, it has frightened Americans into tolerating policy decisions that have nearly bankrupted our country.
This is not the first media misadventure of the Trump era.
Two of the editors of this newsletter (John Fund and Steve Moore) worked for many years at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of our esteemed colleagues was the great Holman Jenkins.
If you missed it, we urge you to read Holman’s brilliant column in the weekend WSJ called “Media Cowardice and the Russian Collusion Hoax.” It is priceless. It is a concise explanation of what we are up against in the media’s anti-Trump derangement and their two year obsession with a story that was built on a pyramid of lies.
Here is his conclusion:
“Fools become liars when they knowingly persist in their misrepresentations to preserve personal dignity and professional standing. By rights, the rectification should begin with the dismissal, on competence grounds, of the leadership in many newsrooms. It won’t. But at least register in your own mind how routinely and sometimes completely press behavior is at odds with values the press claims to represent.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-cowardice-and-the-collusion-hoax-11590186850
2) Study: Patients No Longer Infectious After 11 Days
Even though they still test positive, a new study of 73 COVID patients in Singapore found that none of them still had live, infectious virus 11 days after infection.
If the study’s findings are confirmed it would mean shorter quarantine times and a quicker return to work for people who catch the virus.
3) Trump Gets It Right on Schools
There is now strong evidence that children are at extremely low risk from coronavirus — far less risk of hospitalization or death than seasonal flu — and are also unlikely to infect other children or adults. We now have evidence from many countries, which we summarized in this article:
Unfortunately the media obsessed over one shoddy study by a German virologist named Christian Drosten, which claims that children have viral loads equal to adults and therefore are equally infectious. But Drosten’s own data actually showed children have up to 86% lower viral loads. Leading to this headline from one of Europe’s major papers yesterday:
BILD is the largest circulation newspaper in Europe.
Will any American media stop citing another discredited “scientific expert”?
4) Teacher Unions want Higher Pay for Working Less
The Colorado Education Association is demanding all of its members be paid for the entire school year while at the same time agitating for no budget cuts.
It’s not as if the existing education budgets have yielded results. Less than half of kids in Colorado can read, write or do math at their grade level. Among minority children it’s less than a quarter.
Steve Schuck, a Colorado Springs businessman who had long been an advocate of school reform, has had enough. “Why doesn’t the union provide a valuable, significant service by dropping the nonsense and instead tap the expertise of its members to help parents with this brave, complex new world of digital and distance learning” he asked in a new op-ed in the Colorado Gazette-Telegraph.
5) Social Distancing for Dummies
All over the world, a great debate over how much social distancing will be required when businesses and schools open up is about to rage. If some nations keep their current restrictions, many establishments are likely to fold and many schools never reopen.
“The U.K. and U.S. rule is based on a fair amount of educated guesswork about a virus whose behavior isn’t entirely understood,” writes Therese Raphael of Bloomberg News. “It is a matter not of decided science but political choice.”
Professor Robert Dingwall, a key advisor on the virus to the British government, told the Daily Telegraph that the authorities believed that the proper social distance was one meter. But the official told him “we doubled it to two (meters) because we did not think the British population would understand what one meter was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side.” And this is how the big decisions in government that will affect millions of businesses get decided. 
6) Cuomo’s Confession: “We Were All Wrong”
We almost fell out of our chair while we watched Governor Andrew Cuomo’s news briefing on Monday.
First, Cuomo said he wouldn’t even guess when the New York City area could end its lockdown. “People can speculate, people can guess, I think next week, I think two weeks, I think a month,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo then explained why he wouldn’t guess: “I’m out of that business, because we all failed at that business. All the early national experts, here’s my projection, here’s my projection model, they were all wrong; they were all wrong.”
And often not just wrong, but from another planet. Two months ago, the best-case model published for Central New York had 2,000 people dying there over the next year. There have been 115 deaths so far.
“We didn’t know what social distancing would actually amount to, I get it. But we were all wrong. So I’m sort of out of the guessing business,” Cuomo continued.
But having confessed his errors, the governor insisted that no New York region is allowed to reopen unless it meets seven key virus metrics from the exact same modelers who got everything wrong. Go figure.
7) Lockdowns Kill
“The numbers are unprecedented,” Dr. Michael deBoisblanc of John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California, told ABC 7 News about the increase of deaths by suicide, adding that he’s seen a “year’s worth of suicides” in the last four weeks alone.
There’s also this. People hear elective and think plastic surgery. But no, the astonishing hysteria that shut down nearly all medical procedures that weren’t immediate emergencies, bankrupting hospitals, and driving huge layoffs gutting our health system capacity dramatically cut cancer surgeries. And as the map shows, this was a global phenomenon. The cancer deaths from lockdown could easily exceed coronavirus deaths.
8) Heroes of the Day – South Bay United Pentecostal Church
This church took on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s lockdown ban on church services and lost in the infamous 9th Circuit, but the stinging dissent from Trump-appointed Judge Daniel Collins and the church’s immediate appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States showed Newsom the writing on the wall; last night he withdrew his statewide ban on church services and replaced it with a set of guidelines for social distancing and capacity limits:
https://covid19.ca.gov/pdf/guidance-places-of-worship.pdf
South Bay United will fight on – one of their lawyers immediately tweeted: “Still unconstitutional. Still arbitrary. Still proceeding” — but they have already won a major victory.
9) Anti-Hero of the Day — Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot
For her armed raid on a black church in Chicago.
“Lightfoot, mounted a raid on a black South Side church for holding services in defiance of her coronavirus lockdown orders.
“Lightfoot reportedly sent three marked squad cars and two unmarked cars full of officers to the Chicago Cornerstone Baptist Church in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/24/chicago-mayor-launches-police-raid-shut-down-black-church/
Doesn’t Chicago with nearly the highest murder rates in the country, of all cities, have more important things for the police to be doing?
10) Quote of the Day
Give the NYT credit for running a great op-ed from bar owner Toby Cecchini, which includes this quote:
“The onerous payroll, sales and other taxes still being drawn out of our accounts, despite the bars being now over two months closed, would also have to be eased. When we pay out $16,000 of payroll to the staff, I’m adding another $8,500 in payroll taxes. Combined with state and local sales taxes among the highest in the country, and our typical share of building taxes, this surpasses the rent we pay.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/opinion/nyc-bars-restaurants-coronavirus.html
