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Welcome to the official home and wonderful world of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, daily editorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Review Journal |
Whiskey Politicswith Dave SussmanDemocrats block progress at their peril
Liz Peek, Opinion Contributor MSN Democrats simply cannot help themselves. They always go overboard, even though time after time they get stung for their extremism. Impeaching the president - spending months on a fruitless and unfair proceeding that was bound to fail - is only one of the most notable recent examples. All that bought Democrats was higher approval and record fund-raising for the president. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's proposed $3 trillion liberal grab-bag masquerading as pandemic relief is another. Nobody takes that bill seriously; it only serves to outrage sensible Americans, who don't think we should be casually letting criminals out of prison or spending millions studying the diversity of the cannabis industry. But few crusades seem more idiotic and self-defeating than trying to keep the economy under wraps, which Democratic officials and their media allies are trying to do. We get it; soaring unemployment and continuing misery hurts President Trump's reelection prospects. read more |
How Many COVID-19 Deaths Are There?
John Fund and Phil Kerpen National Review May 17, 2020, 5:45 PM Deborah Birx, the physician advising the White House’s coronavirus task force, gave voice to a real concern earlier this month. She told officials from the Centers for Disease Control that some of its numbers on mortality and case count could be inflated by up to 25 percent. “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust,” the Washington Post reported Birx saying. We now know more about what she was talking about, since Colorado has become the first state to publish two different numbers. One number is derived using a definition mandated by the CDC, which issued guidelines on March 24 specifying that “COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.” (Emphasis in original.) The second is a narrower category called “deaths due to COVID-19,” which is limited to people who actually died of the disease. Counting in this way results in a decline of 23 percent in reported COVID-19 deaths. What’s going on here? There have been many outlandish examples of people dying of things bearing not the slightest connection to COVID-19, but, having tested positive for the coronavirus, they were added to the official COVID-19 death tally anyway. There was the Lehigh Valley, Penn., man who slipped and fell at home. The coroner said, according to LehighValleyLive.com: “The primary cause of the man’s death was a head injury from a fall at home, but that the virus was listed as a contributing factor to his death.” In April a 37-year old California man “died as a result of a drug overdose while infected with COVID-19, a significant contributing condition, according to county spokeswoman Ashley Bautista, per the Ventura County Star. Last week, there was the entry in the Cook County, Ill., medical-examiner ledger: “Complications of opiate (probably heroin) toxicity. Novel corona (COVID-19) virus, end stage renal disease, hypertension, ACCIDENT.” Oddities, all, we were told. “Aberrations.” Insignificant to the overall count. Except we know they were not. Republican State Representative Mark Baisley accused the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) of fraudulently altering death certificates in cases in which coronavirus-positive individuals died but the medical examiner did not list COVID-19 on the death certificate. Baisley, in his request for an investigation, cited a letter from the Someren Glen nursing home to staff, residents, and their families saying that CDPHE had overruled physicians and added COVID-19 to seven death certificates. CDPHE came under more fire when they added the death of a 35-year-old man who died of alcohol poisoning, who happened to be coronavirus-positive, to their official tally. Their defense was simple: They said they were just following the CDC definition. “We classify a death as confirmed when there was a case who had a positive SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) laboratory test and then died,” CDPHE said in statement. Democratic governor Jared Polis could have circled the wagons. But to his enormous credit, he ordered the state to publish the two different numbers. He told Fox News Sunday that the new approach is “a better way to inspire confidence” in the data on the total number of virus victims. The numbers differ considerably. At the time of Colorado’s announcement on Friday, the CDC-definition tally, used in CNN’s “dashboard” and all the other media reports, stood at 1,150 statewide. But only 878 of those, more than 23 percent less, are identified as deaths due to COVID-19. read the rest Whiskey Politics with Dave Sussman
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