| Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #57 1) COVID Death Rates Are Falling Put this in the not-reported by the New York Times file: Yesterday the COVID Tracking Project, which adds up all reported state and territorial totals, showed the lowest national COVID death total (285) for a Monday since March 23. The seven-day average fell to 579.  We’ll have a Tuesday jump today as usual (and sometime this week we’re expecting a big true-up of old deaths from New Jersey) but the death trend is very encouraging and consistent. It’s true hospitalizations are rising in the southwest, and Governor Abbott acknowledged that yesterday, calling for Texans in areas with more virus activity to be cautious — but importantly reiterating that he had no intention of reimposing lockdown except in a true last resort scenario. Given the much younger age profile of recently captured cases, it is possible they will resolve without a significant deflection in the death curve. It’s fine to report bad news, but the media needs to stop ignoring the good news! 2) Even the Hapless CDC Finally Worries About Lockdown Deaths We were on this from the beginning… and we don’t even have billions of taxpayer dollars. But CDC finally has got something right about untreated health conditions due to hospital shutdowns.  3) How To Argue With A Leftist Over Lockdowns Phil Shannon has as left-wing a pedigree as you can. A trade union activist for over 40 years he has been a member of the Communist Party of Australia. But he’s now written a fine rant on the utter stupidity of “the contemporary left’s support for an economically devastating, authoritarian lockdown, which doesn’t even achieve its limited public health aims….With its support for extreme ‘social distancing’, the left has reached a new nadir in the ‘political distancing’ between it and its traditional working class constituency.” Shannon makes a good case for how much lockdowns have hurt the vulnerable the most, but he hits his real stride in addressing the threat to civil liberties. “With precious little opposition, lockdown has ushered in: · ‘Police-state’ powers conferred by emergency decree · Suspension of democratic accountability – both parliamentary democracy, and the democracy of the streets (unless it’s for an approved, i.e. woke, cause such as #BLM – that’s allowed!) · Fettering the rights to free speech · State surveillance (there’s an app for that!) · Tech giant censorship · Nauseous government propaganda” Read the whole thing: https://lockdownsceptics.org/why-the-left-should-oppose-lockdown/ 4) The Real Reason The New York US Attorney Was Fired Ever since Attorney General Bill Barr removed Geoffrey Berman as the Manhattan U.S. Attorney reports have circulated that it was done to end pending investigations that might touch President Trump and his family. Anyone who knows how the career attorneys in such an office work would find that theory laughable. It now appears the explanation is much more prosaic. Barr’s Justice Department wanted Berman to sign a letter criticizing New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for citing lockdown rules to block religious gatherings but not recent street protests. Berman refused to sign the letter condemning de Blasio’s hypocrisy. The letter was eventually sent bearing the signature of the head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, Eric Dreiband. Berman’s refusal irritated Barr, who already viewed him as obstinate and difficult to work with. Berman and Barr met in New York last Friday, and Barr offered him the job of chairing the Securities and Exchange Commission or leading the Justice Department’s civil division. Berman rejected both positions and initially refused to leave his job until fired directly by the White House. He promptly achieved martyr status in the media’s eyes. The Deep State strikes again. https://www.wsj.com/articles/attorney-general-barr-berman-at-odds-over-letter-criticizingnew-york-city-mayor-11592841560 5) Somebody Guard Mount Rushmore We’re not the biggest fans of Theodore Roosevelt but he is an iconic American figure in our nation’s history. New York’s history is particularly interwoven with the story of the Rough Rider. TR was its police commissioner, governor of New York State and then President of the United States. But now Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio are having a statue of TR removed from the front of the Natural History Museum. In the 2014 movie “Night At The Museum,” the late Robin Williams had a memorable role bringing TR’s statue to life and then saving the museum’s contents from thieves. https://nypost.com/2020/06/22/gov-cuomo-de-blasio-support-removal-of-teddy-roosevelt-statue/ But now new thieves want to steal the statue and throw it down the memory hole of history. Why? The tribute statue depicts Roosevelt on horseback, with a Native American and Black man standing on either side. Da Mayor concludes the statue “explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.” Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, doesn’t think so. “I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt. But then my hermeneutical antennae have not been trained to discern the whole world through the scrim of endless racial and ethnic outrage.“ Ironically, TR was considered the leading progressive of his day. (Do the “progressives” know enough history to be aware of this?) He was instrumental and unforgivably so in giving us the federal income tax, busted up trusts and invited African-American leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House – the first president to issue such an invitation. But for liberals, Roosevelt is now a “deplorable” who said un-PC things like: “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” Wow was he ever right about that! 6) I Guess that’s Why They Call it the Blues How do we make sense of the defacement of this Stevie Ray Vaughan statue in Austin, Texas? (We thought FTP stood for File Transfer Protocol, but we have been informed it now means F— The Police.) It’s hard to think of many famous white Americans who did more to honor Black culture than the legendary blues guitarist. Maybe they just hate statues?  7) Andrew Cuomo: The Buck Doesn’t Stop Here Andrew Cuomo is still desperately flailing away, trying to explain why he allowed thousands of New Yorkers die in nursing homes. “Yes, we had more people die in nursing homes than anywhere else,” he now admits. The new excuse? “Because the federal government missed the boat and never told us this virus was coming from Europe and not from China.” Huh? This after Cuomo previously claimed his policy was NOT to force infectious patients into nursing homes, then admitted it was but said he knew nothing about it, then said he did it because Trump made him. That last one even got rated mostly false by the hard-left website Politifact, which is the Democrat equivalent of gasoline-doused flaming pants on fire. And through it all New York has only reported what we’re sure is a fraction of its real death toll among long-term care residents, via a footnote indicating they only count deaths physically on the premises of the facility – even though most residents were likely hospitalized prior to death. Last night CTUP president Phil Kerpen hammered Cuomo again on the Ingraham Angle: This Cuomo-gate scandal won’t go away, and we are doing all we can to make sure it doesn’t. 8) OK, this one made us laugh:  |
