The good news is the FDA has approved the use of two forms of chloroquin for treating the coronavirus. The bad news is when: for "hospitalized" patients. This may be better than nothing, but the best ways to use the drug appears to be as early as possible after the infection is identified. Apparently the drug, or combination (some studies recommend use combined with another drug), stops replication of the virus but does not kill existing virus. Taking it after the patient is already dying is much less helpful than starting before the virus has taken over.

Just The News

But in a little-noted passage in a recent order, U.S. District Judge James A. Boasberg, the new chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took direct aim at the excuses and blame-shifting of these senior Obama administration FBI and DOJ officials.

In just 21 words, Boasberg provided the first judicial declaration the FBI had misled the court, not just committed process errors. "There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications," Boasberg wrote...

"The frequency and seriousness of these errors in a case that, given its sensitive nature, had an unusually high level of review at both DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have called into question the reliability of the information proffered in other FBI applications," Boasberg wrote.

"The errors the OIG pointed out cannot be solved through procedures alone," he wrote. "DOJ and the FBI, including all personnel involved in the FISA process, must fully understand and embrace the heightened duties of probity and transparency that apply in ex parte proceedings."

Strong words. But just words.

If there are no prosecutions, it will happen. Again, and again, and again.

And no, this was not the first time it happened. Remember the 2012 IRS scandal?

Judicial Watch

On May 16, 2017, U.S. Attorney John Huber wrote to Rosenstein: “Rod, We’re proud of you.” Later that year, Huber was chosen by then-Attorney General Sessions to head up the Clinton Foundation investigation.

(On May 17, 2017, Robert Mueller was appointed by Rosenstein as special counsel.)

This neatly explains why Huber found nothing and wasn't even looking very hard. Lots of additional moral support for "Rod" from Obama and his team.

There is a coordinated plan here to prevent Trump accomplishing anything by keeping the Senate tied up with impeachments instead of judicial nominations and treaties. They are simply trying to keep him threatened and under investigation to hamstring policy initiatives... particularly his own investigations into their illegal conduct.

Two women have accused Biden of behavior that is arguably criminal. Others have reported things like swimming naked with female Secret Service agents around on duty. And of course there are lots of creepy hair-sniffing photos.

I don't have any idea if these accusations are true or not, but the accusers are not anonymous.

The Dems in power seem to be going a little bit nuts. Recently, the Governor of Nevada bans use of chloroquine on coronavirus, saying he wants to reserve it for use on those patients normally prescribed it. And maybe also stop people from taking fish tank cleaner because one molecule has the same name.

If the treatment works on coronavirus, banning prescriptions will be seen as a deadly mistake. If it doesn't, patients who have other conditions treated by the drug will be thankful. How many people are in the latter category compared to the number of people who will get coronavirus?

I don't see this as a political winner for anyone smart enough not to eat fish tank cleaner.

Then, the Mayor of LA threatens to shut down water and power for businesses that continue to operate against his shutdown order.

So, in other words, if they defy his stay-at-home quarantine order, he will make it impossible for them to run their business. Someone isn't thinking clearly. Any idea how long that will take to undo once the economy opens again?

Several cities, and even some states, have tried to shut down gun stores, running afoul of the 2nd Amendment right when people might need a firearm to protect themselves because the police won't.

They should not be making the decisions about what opinions are allowed. And that's all that this is. Silencing their political opponents.

I'm not sure I agree that COVID-19 is a "hoax". I do think the panic is overblown and may been a narrative engineering exercise designed to wreck the economy before the election. We won't likely find out whether the panic was justified or not until years in the future, if ever...

But I am absolutely for damn sure that Twitter shouldn't be deciding whether or not you can express that idea.

Yes, it's their platform, and they have the technical and legal power to do that.

It's the moral authority they lack.

Real Clear Investigations

The Department of Justice OIG does not keep complete public records on the number of prosecutions that result from its investigations. But the office does keep track of certain cases – those involving wrongdoing by senior DoJ managers and officials that Justice declines to prosecute.

In 2019 the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office issued 27 such reports of alleged wrongdoing by senior Justice Department officials and employees that went unprosecuted – everything from nepotism in hiring, to making false claims on mortgage documents, to “lack of candor” with federal investigators, to sexual assault. RealClearInvestigations reviewed the OIG’s summaries of its investigations and found that in at least a dozen of those cases the inspector general determined that the wrongdoing was serious enough to be criminal. Even so, the Department of Justice declined to bring criminal charges. The sticky-fingered FBI attorney was one of the more strictly treated – she had to agree to 125 hours of community service to avoid prosecution.

The FBI doesn't seem to bother prosecuting the criminals within their own ranks. Does this really surprise anyone?

Just like California and New York, and many other states, the moment the left gains control of all the levers of power, they move to open the electoral system to massive voter fraud. To vote, all you need is a driver's license and a current registration. When you apply for the driver's license, they ask you if you want to register to vote.

American Thinker

In essence, security protections in software (operated on voting machines throughout the country) had been purposely disabled or ‘un-activated’; penetration of the machines was possible via online access methods widely understood among reasonably sophisticated IT people; and mismatches in time-stamped dataflows suggest votes were changed.

To repeat, the enabling of access by which all of this manipulation is possible, appears to the investigators -- and apparently would appear to anyone with a reasonable amount of relevant IT knowledge -- to have been purposeful.

I believe 2018 was a test run. Between "vote harvesting" on an unprecedented scale, possible voting machine hacks, voting by hordes of illegal aliens, and previously-barred felons in some states, the Democrats pulled out all the stops to win by fraud what they could not win in a fair election. And it worked. They won the House.

In 2020, with Trump as the target and continued investigations into their corruption and abuses of power on the table, they will go all out to bring Trump down. The impeachment frenzy itself is evidence of that.

I've been concerned about the security of voting machines for some time. It now appears we have solid evidence that some were compromised.

SayUncle's wife passed away. Sad news, and the whole family has my sympathy.

Breitbart

Former Vice President Joe Biden threatened Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for launching an investigation into his activities with Ukraine while in the Obama White House, stating the Republican will “regret” the move his “whole life.”

On Thursday, Graham sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo requesting documents to aid in determining whether Biden pushed for the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to squash a sweeping probe into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy giant where his son, Hunter Biden, served as a board member. The younger Biden was compensated generously, making up to $83,000 a month for several years while on the Burisma’s board.

“Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he’s going to regret his whole life,” Biden told CNN host Don Lemon in a Friday interview in South Carolina. “I say Lindsey, I just — I’m just embarrassed by what you’re doing, for you. I mean, my Lord.”

So, Joe... if anything happens to Graham, you know you put yourself at the top of the suspect list, right?

That said, I'll believe Graham has launched an investigation when he starts calling witnesses. Until then, this is just a drama school exercise.

This would be wise, especially as DOJ seems reluctant to clear up this mess despite AG Barr's appointment of a special counsel to look into the matter.

And, humiliatingly for those who believed in the Russia hoax, the prosecutors backed out. This was the only case brought by Mueller that had anything to do with Russia.

There is legislation in the House. This is basically an official version of "Operation Chokepoint", with authorizing legislation to impose new reporting requirements on credit card companies to detect (and presumably try to prevent) buying guns with credit cards. The theory is that mass shooters spend a lot of money on guns with their credit cards right before the event. This is certainly false in the general sense; all you need is one gun, or a few gallons of gasoline and some wits. This proposal will be absolutely ineffective unless it can stop people from buying just one gun on a credit card -- so inevitably that's how it will eventually be applied.

I don't like the implications of the term "wrap up", especially not with a summer timeframe. If it's wrapped up by summer that leaves basically zero time for prosecutions. Unless the idea is that prosecutions are started and continued after "wrapping up".

Obama used them for H1N1 and did not replenish the supply.

Conservative Review

It should be the crime story of the year, or even the century. An illegal alien who wound up getting a green card was convicted of a crime that should have gotten him deported. But among the millions of criminal aliens who are allowed to remain in the country, Billy Chemirmir was not removed. He is now accused of smothering to death at least 22 women in their 80s and 90s in the Dallas metro area – all after he could have been deported. These murders were 100 percent preventable. Where are the outrage, congressional hearings, or even news reports on this case?

For those 22 people and their families, this illegal immigrant cost a lot more than merely $6500.

Daily Mail

Google is secretly blacklisting certain sites to prevent them appearing in search results - despite publicly denying doing so - according to an investigation.

The Wall Street Journal report claims that the search giant has been blacklisting certain spam sites since the early 2000s, as well as those featuring child abuse or copyright infringement, to prevent them appearing in search results.

The newspaper also reported that conservative publications have been blacklisted in Google News, and said that it had seen documents to support this claim, fueling cries of political bias.

This doesn't surprise me. But it might surprise Congress, who were told otherwise.

... because if they do not, they will grow up to be Nazis. These are the modern brownshirts.

Judicial Watch has obtained some emails showing Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were involved in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane. This appears to contradict the Horowitz report, which says the decision was made by Bill Priestap (technically, may still be true, but Strzok drafted it) without Lisa Page being involved (she contributed edits).

The production schedule is such that the last (and presumably worst) of the emails won't be released until 2021.

Mysterious financial activity from a dead man who didn't kill himself.

Now that impeachment is over, we can investigate Hunter Biden. They already got Hunter Biden's financial records.

Power Line

One of the rules is the Calendar Year (CY) 2020 Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) & Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) Price Transparency Requirements for Hospitals to Make Standard Charges Public Final Rule. The second rule is the Transparency in Coverage Proposed Rule. Both the final and proposed rules require that pricing information be made publicly available.

But wait, you say -- how does making pricing information publicly available make health care more affordable?

Competition on price. Doctors can no longer hide their prices from you, or engage in complex negotiations with different insurance companies. This will help patients choose their service providers based on price and value.

Spectator

All of that — and all the election news we’ll be surrounded by — is less important than trying to repair the damage to our system of government created by the FB–CIA “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of Trump and his campaign in 2016–17. As this column has said repeatedly (see here and here and here), it was the worst abuse of power by federal employees in the history of our nation.

Some of those repairs have already been accomplished. Last week, Attorney General William Barr announced a change in Justice Department policy that will require the signatures of both the attorney general and the director of the FBI in order for the FBI to begin a counterintelligence investigation on any presidential campaign.

Barr’s action could, of course, be reversed by a Democratic attorney general and doesn’t affect the CIA. But it is entirely the right thing to do.

As far as reforms go, this is worse than useless. Yes, any Democrat AG could and would reverse this prior to opening such an investigation. But more pertinantly, the people involved in Crossfire Hurricane will likely insist to their last day that they weren't targeting Trump or his campaign. They will claim they were targeting Carter Page, who just happened to be on Trump's campaign.

This transparent lie will nonetheless be sufficient to get around the policy change Barr announced.