Free Republic

Her Activities Are ‘Essential’ Through her chief of staff, Mayor Muriel Bowser claimed her trip to a political rally constituted ‘essential travel,’ which therefore exempted her and her staff from her own quarantine order. Talk about the D.C. Swamp: Mere days after issuing a revised order regarding quarantines after travel to coronavirus “hot spots,” the mayor of the nation’s capital openly ignored the rules she established.While many will decry Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) for violating the travel restrictions, they shouldn’t feel surprised by her double standards. After all, Bowser and the Washington City Council have compelled D.C. residents with...

Democrats are bitterly clinging to a myth that if only someone else had been president, the pandemic would have passed over the United States as if by some divine mark of virtue. On Sunday, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes accused the president of perpetuating an “extended mass slaughter” of the American people in his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that 2020 has been “the deadliest year in American history.” Republican staffers “all worked together on a project that just let our people be led to the slaughter for months and months. Dying alone with no one around. Day after day,” he...

March 28 – very early in the pandemic – an article that I felt at the time received far too little attention. “Drugs, Suicide, and Crime: Empirical Estimates of the Human Toll of the Shutdown” by economists Audrey and Thomas Duncan cited empirical literature on the human toll of economic devastation. This article forecasted more than 100,000 excess deaths due to drug overdoses, suicide, alcoholism, homicide, and untreated depression – all a result not of the virus but of policies of mandatory human separation, economic downturn, business and school closures, closed medical services, and general depression that comes with a...

San Francisco has managed to curb the virus slightly in its city – but at what cost? Those paying sky high taxes to live in the Bay Area may soon be wondering why they are paying to live in a shut down city that state and local government officials have refused to allow to reopen due to a virus with a CDC-predicted infection fatality rate of between 0.00002 and 0.093. The entire downtown area of the city, once vibrant with business and tourism, is now “empty” according to a new report by AP. Everything from food trucks to local workers...

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the stay-at-home measures and disruptions to daily life that aimed to slow the spread of the virus and save lives led many public health specialists to worry that the nation also could see an uptick in suicides, drug overdoses and domestic violence. Nine months later, those grim predictions look like they're coming true. "There is a mental health wave to this pandemic," Dr. Ken Duckworth, chief medical officer of the National Alliance for Mental Illness, told ABC News. "We as a species don't do well with uncertainty." The pandemic, for many Americans, has exacerbated already-stressful...

A far left group is vowing to “make sure Trump leaves” the White House after the election, even if he wins, with radicals preparing to storm and occupy DC. The Shut Down DC group says it will “be in the streets before the polls even close,” asserting that “Trump will not leave office without mass mobilization and direct action.” “On Election Day, when you’re done voting, doing election protection, or getting out the vote, come join us at Black Lives Matter Plaza,” states the group’s manifesto. “We’re inviting everybody who agrees with these organizing principles to work together to make...

Freaking out about ‘herd immunity’ looks like a smear campaign designed to prevent Americans, including the president, from hearing the scientific case against the lockdowns. Why is the press and officialdom suddenly shrieking about “herd immunity”? On Oct. 12, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said pursuing herd immunity is “unethical.” Within hours, most of the media broadcast the same message. It’s as though someone sent out a list of talking points. “Sweden’s experiment with herd immunity is unethical and undemocratic,” Australia’s ABC intoned, “and reveals an underlying political pathology.” According to Fortune, herd immunity against SARS-CoV2 is a...

the impact of mandated shutdowns ... In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, widespread lockdown restrictions were imposed, ostensibly to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed and medical resources from being consumed to exhaustion. Whether policymakers purposely or out of ignorance disregarded them, the tradeoffs of stay-at-home orders were immediate and severe: a massive spike in unemployment, rivaling the Great Depression ... Among Mideast states, New York’s GDP declined the most: 39.3%. .. long-lasting nature of lockdowns on New York City. Yet compared against all other U.S. states, Hawaii and Nevada’s GDP plummeted the most: both by 42.2%. ... artificial economic slowdown...

What makes Trump look worse before the election: trying to get a deal with no success, or pointing out that the other side doesn’t want a deal for political reasons and pulling out of talks? President Trump announced on Twitter that he was shutting down stimulus talks with Democrats until after the election because they were “not negotiating in good faith.” “Pelosi is asking for $2.4 Trillion Dollars to bailout poorly run, high crime, Democrat States, money that is in no way related to COVID-19,” wrote Trump.The president continued: “Immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill...

The political drama in Michigan reveals how essential it is in a republic that the citizens defy unconstitutional and illegal orders of their government. The news broke late on Oct. 2 that the Michigan Supreme Court had invalidated Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s authority to issue executive orders related to Covid-19 after April 30. This was a victory for the rule of law, for the separation of powers, and for the liberties of the American people (okay, maybe just the people of Michigan).Whitmer had declared a state of emergency on March 10 and extended it through a series of executive orders, on...

Without "much more aggressive shutdowns," a New York Times editorial warns, "well over a million" Americans "may ultimately die" from COVID-19. The paper does not cite a source for that estimate, which seems highly implausible based on the death toll so far, projections for the next few months, the gap between total infections and confirmed cases, and a crude case fatality rate that continues to fall. Independent data scientist Youyang Gu, who has a good track record of predicting COVID-19 fatalities, is currently projecting about 231,000 deaths in the United States by November 1. The University of Washington's Institute for...

Some travelers will be stopped in NYC. The interstate in Chicago has signs warning about quarantine requirements With the daily number of coronavirus cases in the United States still hovering at about 50,000 and American deaths from the disease approaching 160,000, cities across the country are taking increasingly severe measures to force the curve of the outbreak downward -- including power shutoffs, fines and more. * * * But cities' coronavirus measures go beyond that. Many places, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York City and others now have rules requiring people coming from coronavirus hotspots to self-quarantine for 14 days...

The governors of Texas and California, the nation’s two most populous states, recently reimposed coronavirus lockdowns despite falling death rates and health-care capacity far beyond hospitalization rates. Numerous other governors have delayed reopenings or reversed them in similar situations.Lockdowns are not necessary to prevent coronavirus deaths, since the current capacity for treating cases is far above what is needed and people are going to get this disease until there’s a cure. Further, lockdowns accelerate systemic weaknesses such as our national debt, poor education, large numbers of working-age men who do not work, failure to pay for decades of overspending at...

As COVID-19 cases rise, so does tyranny. States around the country are once again beginning to impose lockdown orders on law-abiding American citizens. The governors and mayors imposing the orders stayed silent as thousands of their citizens marched in Black Lives Matter rallies. But 4th of July celebrations? Different story. In Kansas, Governor Laura Kelly announced her intention to impose a mask-wearing requirement for all public spaces (including outside!). She'll sign the order one day before July 4th celebrations -- at 12:01am on Friday, July 3. It would be one thing if Governor Kelly and others had imposed similar restrictions...

Married parents were about 20 percent less likely to be depressed than unmarried parents, and they spent more time home-educating their kids, during coronavirus lockdowns. Worry and stress rose to a historic high during the Covid-19 panic, at least since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to recent survey evidence from Gallup. Parents of young children had an added responsibility of teaching their children while schools and daycare were closed.Compared with parents who handled these alone, married parents spent more time teaching their children at home, according to an early June survey from the Census Bureau that tracks Covid-19’s effects...

Prior studies have suggested a weak connection between the intrusive government measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 and the progression of the virus. Texas is in the news, and not in a good way, over an increase in COVID-19 cases over the past four weeks. There’s quite a bit of speculation over why the virus, which largely bypassed the Lone Star State until the end of May, suddenly seemed to become more pernicious.Some point to a lack of enforcement for social distancing measures and masks. Yet California, a state of similar size and demographics, where Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom...

By treating Black Lives Matters protests differently than other large gatherings, public officials and health experts have exposed themselves as hypocrites. We’re told a second wave of coronavirus infections is coming. As businesses open back up and states relax lockdown orders, the number of new cases is ticking up in a handful of states. We’ve heard warnings in recent days from the Centers for Disease Control and various public health experts and elected officials that a new series of lockdowns might be necessary.What these experts and officials don’t seem to realize is that Americans will never comply with their lockdown...

Starting life before there was a town as four walls and some dry goods for fur trappers, it served its first beer just 19 years after the town was founded and near-half a century before it was incorporated.The story below is the third in a series on America’s small businesses, their struggles under the shutdowns, and what they’re doing to survive. Over two weeks, The Federalist is traveling the country to tell more stories like this one.HUNTSVILLE, UTAH — Across the Wasatch mountains from the county seat of Ogden, in a tony country neighborhood by the Pineview Reservoir, and around...

The question is: What makes you think things are any better during the rest of the school year you don't see? Governors’ decisions to shut down schools may be the least science-informed of all the coronavirus impositions we’ve had to endure nationally over the past few months. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted: A recent study from Australia identified only 18 cases (nine children and nine staff) across 15 schools, and only two of the infected children’s 863 close contacts at the schools became ill. Another review last month, published by the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health,...

The weight to having a family business,' Raymond says while guiding me through massive walk-in freezers holding a fraction of their capacity, 'is you don't want to be the one who fails.'The story below is the second in a series on America’s small businesses, their struggles under the shutdowns, and what they’re doing to survive. Over two weeks, The Federalist is traveling the country to tell more stories like this one (and a few about the outlaws).SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH — Raymond and Jill Zaelit massively expanded their facilities in 2017. Their business is meat, or more specifically, carving, crafting...