Prickly City by Scott Stantis for May 22, 2020

“It’s all so depressingly familiar.”

Sad to say, but you’re probably right Winslow.

Not to worry. Task force leader Pence has proclaimed we will be past it by Memorial Day.

And The Messiah has proclaimed many times that one day it will all be over, like a miracle — and he has very special insight which allows him to utter the word hydroxychloroquine with only two or three pauses to check the phonetic spelling.

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Unfortunately, his insight still does not enable him to develop any coordinated response to the pandemic. No reason to worry though. A hundred thousand have died, but by July we’ll be rocking!

Day 29 of the Georgia Economic Recovery. As more data comes in, the folly of the total lock down is becoming apparent. While far more infectious than the average flu, the death rate is much lower, especially for people under 70 and with no co-morbidities. We destroyed the greatest economy in the history of the world due to the best advice of uninformed experts.

The odd thing about reporting on the coronavirus is that the nonexperts are supremely confident in their predictions, while epidemiologists keep telling me that they don’t really know much at all.

“This is a novel virus, new to humanity, and nobody knows what will happen,” said Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at U.C.L.A.

Some conservatives scoffed that the coronavirus was like the flu, which was utterly wrong. Some liberals foresaw a disastrous outbreak when Jerry Falwell Jr. kept Liberty University open this spring, and that never happened. Viruses are complicated.

It has now been more than three weeks since Georgia started reopening, and there hasn’t been the abrupt statewide surge of infections that many had feared. That’s a good sign for reopening. But it’s early, and it’s in part because people in Georgia are still distancing to some degree on their own.

Texas opened up and lately has reported a spike of new infections, which is bad news. But that’s in part because Texas increased testing, and if you do more testing you find more infections.

We know that social distancing works, for China, Italy, Spain, Iran and New York all were hard-hit and eventually squelched horrifying outbreaks by imposing tough restrictions.

Governors of Washington and California acted early and avoided such catastrophic outbreaks. One study reported in Health Affairs found that government restrictions collectively averted some 35 million infections in the United States by the end of April; if that’s true, those restrictions also saved an enormous number of lives.

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Random luck shapes outcomes along with biology; some officials took reckless risks this year and got away with them, but that doesn’t make the actions prudent.

“You’ve got to have a lot of humility with these viruses,” Professor Osterholm said. “I know less about viruses than I did 10 years ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opinion/us-coronavirus-reopening.html

Remember…

Doctors were put on TV to say that smoking cigarettes was good for you.

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Republican political operatives are recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

CNP Action is part of the Save Our Country Coalition, an alliance of conservative think tanks and political committees formed in late April to end state lockdowns implemented in response to the pandemic.

Other members of the coalition include the FreedomWorks Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Tea Party Patriots.

“Anybody who joins one of our coalitions is vetted,” Murtaugh said Monday. "And so quite obviously, all of our coalitions espouse policies and say things that are, of course, exactly simpatico with what the president believes …

The president has been outspoken about the fact that he wants to get the country back open as soon as possible."

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“I find it totally irresponsible to have physicians who are touting some information that’s not anchored in evidence and not anchored in science,” El-Sadr said.

“What often creates confusion is the many voices that are out there, and many of those voices do have a political interest, which is the hugely dangerous situation we are at now.”

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Murtaugh said the campaign is not concerned about contradicting government experts.

“Our job at the campaign is to reflect President Trump’s point of view,” Murtaugh said. “We are his campaign. There is no difference between us and him.”

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The CDC now forecasts the U.S. will exceed 100,000 deaths by June 1, a grim milestone that previously was not predicted to occur until late in the summer.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/20/trump-allies-doctors-opposed-cornavirus-restrictions/5227160002/

Employees of the Fox Corporation, which includes Fox News, were told their offices would remain closed until June 15 at the earliest, according to CNN.

Fox News hosts have been calling on the president and state leaders to relax stay-at-home orders for weeks, arguing non-essential businesses should be permitted to reopen.

Like most networks, Fox has been operating in a way that allows most to work from home with only essential personnel to report to offices to keep the network on the air amid the pandemic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-closed-while-on-air-talent-push-reopen-2020-5

America can unite around much common ground. Freedom, self reliance, personal responsibility, limited government, equal justice and a recgnition that a higher authorty exists than man.

How Long Will It Take for the Economy to Recover? Paul Krugman thinks it could be quick. But he also thinks Paul Krugman could be wrong. Basically, it depends on effective policy from the administration, so… Times editorial page is unusually good today.

Suspect our leftist friends are in mourning with the revelation in today’s WSJ, that President Obama apparently directed the spying on the Trump campaign.

Scotty fails to understand that not all dysfunctional behavior is the same.

Two things…

An intelligence ‘consumer’ does not know who they are unmasking when they make the request.

That is the whole point of the masking.

The requests can only be based on the other substance of the intercept.

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But in the FBI report about the communications between the two men, Flynn’s name was never redacted, former U.S. officials said.

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Flynn’s Dec. 29 phone calls with Kislyak became a major controversy. The Washington Post revealed their existence and then that he had misled the vice president about the nature of his discussions with the Russian diplomat.

He resigned as President Trump’s national security adviser shortly after the revelations and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the call, though the Justice Department is now seeking to drop the case.

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Unmasking is a routine practice used to identify U.S. individuals who are referred to anonymously in an intelligence document, and it is meant to help government officials better understand what they are reading.

But conservatives have long seized on Flynn’s unmasking to imply that he was treated unfairly by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials.

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“When the FBI circulated [the report], they included Flynn’s name from the beginning” because it was essential to understanding its significance, said a former senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence. “There were therefore no requests for the unmasking of that information.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/michael-flynns-name-was-never-masked-in-fbi-document-on-his-communications-with-russian-ambassador/2020/05/20/e94ee050-9a0b-11ea-ac72-3841fcc9b35f_story.html

dontfeedthetroll dontfeedthetroll dontfeedthetroll … 10 deep breaths … dontfeedthetroll