Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #52 Written By Stephen Moore
1) The Media’s Latest Whopper: the Coronavirus Spike
We started this hotline three months ago because when it comes to coronavirus, and the left’s Operation Chaos campaign – sorry, that’s a redundancy – you can’t believe a word the media is “reporting” these days.
Three months later the lies keep rolling in. This weekend was classic with scary headlines across the country such as: “Coronavirus cases spike across Sun Belt,” as reported by the highly-reliable New York Times. The scare campaign has prompted Houston politicians to discuss reimposing a lockdown and ordering people back indoors. Good luck with that.
But as we have noted repeatedly on these pages, more confirmed cases don’t tell us anything except that more people are being tested and there is no evidence that the rate of infections is rising faster than the number of people being tested. (We might be able to cut the new cases to zero by just eliminating testing. And wasn’t it the left that obsessed for months about the need for more testing?)
Hospitalization is an important measure. A few areas are seeing more admittances. Yes, Miami-Dade County in Florida has seen an increase in positive virus tests, but the number of hospitalizations is dropping.
Aaron Ginn, the Silicon Valley analyst who has punctured many media exaggerations about the virus, has looked at all the numbers. He reports:
“The world is not ending because Houston has an additional 200 COVID-19 patients in the hospital. The Houston metro has over 2,700 beds available and has a population of seven million.
“For Arizona, COVID admissions and surveillance are rising, but the capacity issues are driven by the ‘second wave’ of prolonged treatment of elective surgeries and other conditions.
“There are an estimated 13,000 staffer hospital beds in Arizona. On the state’s COVID tracker, they assume 8,000 beds are available. How many are occupied by COVID patients? Twenty percent. This is an increase of 10 percent from last month. This increase is driven by admissions from Native American tribal lands who are 17 percent of all admissions but only 4.5 percent of the total population. Arizona’s COVID cases also skew younger with most infections occurring between those who are 20 to 44 years old.”
The big picture to pay attention to is national hospitalization, which continues its downward trend, per our friends at Strategas:
2) Don’t Unleash Big Government on Big Tech
An excerpt from Steve’s latest:
“High tech isn’t swallowing up small businesses, it is saving them. A new report from the Connected Commerce Council, which analyzed the impact of Internet platforms and digital tools on small businesses in the COVID-19 crisis found almost one of three (31 percent) business owners say that without digital tools, they would have had to close all or part of their business during the crisis. Nearly 70 percent say digital tools have been useful during the COVID crisis.
“Conservatives are rightly suspicious of big tech’s political power and liberal slant. The recent effort by Amazon to censor a conservative book on the coronavirus lockdown is just a recent example of how the tech world seems to go out of its way to placate the left and alienate and even silence the right.
“But the one thing free-market conservatives are even warier of is big government. When asked ‘Who do you think should regulate big tech companies like Google: the federal government or the free market?,’ almost two-thirds answered ‘the free market.’ We learned big time during the coronavirus crisis that tech isn’t broke. The last thing we need now is for Donald Trump or Congress to fix it.”
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/big-tech-small-businesses-trump-congress
3) Even Liberal Brits Are Singing The Lockdown Blues
When a columnist for the left-wing Guardian newspaper of Britain announces that lockdowns have been a failure you know they are a grand failure.
The Guardian’s Larry Elliott is brutal in his assessment:
“The past three months have been a global experiment to test whether modern economies built on social interaction are compatible with methods for tackling a pandemic that haven’t moved on much since the Black Death…. It has become clear that there is no such thing as ‘the science’ when it comes to Covid-19.”
“Evidence of the harmful side-effects of the lockdown have also emerged. The number of suicides is up. Domestic violence has increased. Mental health is suffering. Unemployment figures out this week will illustrate the human cost of a 20.4% drop in national output in just one month. The jobless total is heading for 3 million this summer despite the fact that the government is currently paying a third of the workforce.
“If they haven’t already done so, governments will conclude that the economic, social, health and educational costs of full lockdowns are too high.”
4) North Carolina Lockdown: The Sequel
What is wrong with the Roy Cooper administration? Making the lockdown mistake when the world was panicked and arguably didn’t know any better (though some of us did) was one thing. Doing it again now? With all we know? It’s Looney Tunes. But here it comes:
“If we need to go back to stay-at-home, we will,” Department of Health Secretary Mandy Cohen told NPR’s Morning Edition.
We wonder if the opportunity to blame President Trump has something to do with it. There certainly was no concern like this about the Black Lives Matter rallies:
“During the interview, Cohen was asked about President Trump’s recent announcement that he will begin holding campaign rallies across the country. Cohen noted that the state needs to remain cautious about mass gatherings such as a campaign rally.” Trump was very wise to move the GOP convention out of Carolina and into Florida.
According to its official data release, North Carolina has a grand total of just 322 COVID-19 deaths outside of congregate living settings.
5) First Order of Business in CHAZ; Raise Taxes
And now an update from our friends holed up in CHAZ, Seattle’s new “autonomous zone”. The ragtag group of left-wingers, anarchists, and street people who took over a four-block-by-four block section of Seattle and blocked vehicles and police from entering, say they are separate from the United States.
We are pleased to announce that just like all good leftists, Chaz’s government has wasted no time imposing and collecting revenue. Businesses inside the zone report they have been asked for “donations” to support CHAZ, a practice the local police call “extortion.”
Last Friday night, white attendees at a CHAZ rally were asked to give money to a black person before they left. One leader told the crowd:
“I want you to give ten dollars to one African American person from this autonomous zone. And if you find that’s difficult – if you find it’s hard for you to give ten dollars to people of color, to black people especially…White people, I see every one of you, and I remember your faces. You find that African American person and you give them ten dollars.”
Meanwhile, our editor John Fund reports that judging by a video tour of the new country, this is no worker’s paradise. He reports “armed CHAZ defense forces have blocked all vehicles and police from the area, and protesters have already participated in one case of ‘police’ brutality against someone spraying the wrong graffiti. Someone else has already been deported — apparently a pro-lifer who obviously didn’t meet community standards.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/seattle-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-no-christiania/#slide-1
6) Gandhi, Churchill. Who’s Next Villain?
In Britain, activists demand a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peaceful protest, be removed from the city of Leicester. A petition indicting Gandhi for “well-documented anti-black racism,” has nearly 5,000 signatures. “Gandhi too was an imperfect human being, [but] imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary compatriots,” Faisal Devji, a professor of Indian history at Oxford University, told the BBC. Maybe the left hates him now because be preached NON-violence.
https://nypost.com/2020/06/13/protesters-demand-removal-of-mahatma-gandhi-statue-in-england/
Then there is Winston Churchill. His granddaughter Emma Soames tells the BBC that the statue of him in London’s Parliament Square may have to be moved to a museum. Last week, it was smeared with graffiti claiming Churchill “was a racist.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53033550
7) Anti-Heroes of the Day
A tie for two of our frequent champions in this category.
Governor Andrew Cuomo played tough guy again by warning New York City officials: Cut down on overcrowding at bars and restaurants or the city will have to shut down again entirely.
“I understand it’s not popular,” Cuomo said. “You know what’s more unpopular? If that region closes because that local government did not do their job.”
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-de-blasio-cuomo-coronavirus-social-distancing-manhattan-threat
Cuomo actually cast de Blasio as the good guy! That’s hard to do!
A NYC spokesperson fired back:
“We must balance safety with people’s need to reopen their businesses. We don’t believe imprisoning people or taking away their livelihood is the answer.”
Across the Hudson, Governor Phil Murphy defended his shutting down of indoor dining at restaurants in Asbury Park:
“There’s no question this virus is more lethal inside than outside,” he added. “There’s a method to what we’re doing here, folks.”
This is the same guy who arrested anyone who dared set foot on a children’s playground or a state park for months. Incredible.
8) Hero of the Day
Democratic New York Assemblyman Joe Lentol, who got the Middleton Playground in Williamsburg, Brooklyn opened over the orders of Bill de Blasio, who had been maniacally obsessed with closing this small park used by Orthodox Jewish families while celebrating and participating in liberal mass street demonstrations. Yesterday de Blasio ordered the park gates welded shut, but Lentol got the state to intercede and keep it open.
