90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, March 21, 2022

Visage à trois #130

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

New Hampshire may become the first state to allow the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to be obtained without a prescription. A Republican-sponsored ivermectin bill (HB 1022) passed in the N.H. State House Wednesday on a vote of 183-159 and has been sent to the State Senate for review.

“Ivermectin is available over the counter in 79 countries,” State Representative Jim Kofalt, R-Hillsborough noted during a legislative hearing in January. “And it has a good safety profile.”

Republicans argue that granting easy access to ivermectin will allow individuals to make medical choices that are prohibited by the medical establishment.

“We still have patients who don’t know how to find the doctors who will write prescriptions for ivermectin,” said Rep. Leah Cushman, who is also a nurse. “It’s safer than having to go to the farm store.”

On Monday, the Republican-led committee voted on several other bills related to the pandemic, including a bill barring the state from enforcing any federal vaccine mandate, which passed on partisan lines.

The committee also rejected a Democrat bid to undo a law passed last year that enshrined medical freedom regarding vaccine mandates.

N.H. lawmakers unanimously rejected a bill to add the COVID vaccine to the list required to attend public schools.

The Portsmouth Herald made its disapproval of Ivermectin clear in its report on the bill’s passage, describing promoters of the potentially life-saving drug as “anti-vaccine activists,” and claiming that there is “no evidence to support” that it can treat the coronavirus.

“During the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine activists have latched onto ivermectin, though it has not been approved by the FDA as a treatment for COVID-19, nor is there evidence to support that it can treat the virus,” wrote Herald reporter Josh Rogers in the paper’s website Seacoastline.com.

In truth, there have been numerous studies that show evidence of large reductions of mortality in COVID patients treated with ivermectin.

The paper linked to another Herald report titled: ‘Misinformation can be deadly’: Doctors say Ivermectin does not work to treat COVID-19.

That article quotes several doctors who don’t recommend Ivermectin because it can have harmful side effects if taken in large doses.

Dr. Neil Meehan, chief physician executive and an emergency room doctor at Exeter Hospital, testified during the Jan. hearing that “poison control lines are saying that almost 100% of their toxicity calls right now are about Ivermectin.”

Also, the docs argued that randomized trials show that it doesn’t work to treat COVID. However, at least some of these studies appear to have been designed to fail.

In Oxford’s Principle trial on Ivermectin, for instance, researchers treated late stage COVID patients with Ivermectin, but the drug works best as a preventative, and as an early treatment to COVID, doctors like...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #304

Read the Letter Biden’s SCOTUS Pick Wrote Calling a Journalist ‘Irredeemably Evil’

While clerking for a federal judge, Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson denounced a Boston Herald columnist as "irredeemably evil" for criticizing unrestricted immigration.

Jackson wrote a letter to the editor of the Herald in response to a piece from columnist Don Feder that noted that the population of white people in America could decrease steeply as a result of open borders immigration policy. The text of both 1997 writings were obtained by the Free Beacon through a news archive.

"To my mind, he's also like the liberal's purported view of American history—irredeemably evil," Jackson wrote of Feder, whose column also attacked black civic leaders such as Louis Farrakhan. The judge disclosed the letter in a questionnaire for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Law clerks seldom share political opinions in a public forum during their terms of service. Clerkships run one or two years in the federal courts and are highly coveted by law students. Clerks are expected to reflect their judge's neutrality in public and avoid overt political participation or expression to protect public perception of the courts as nonpolitical entities. Today, clerks often go dark on social media—or delete online accounts altogether—for the extent of their clerkships.

"The Code of Judicial Conduct that prohibits federal judges from engaging in any activity that would undermine their independence or impartiality likewise binds their law clerks, so it is troubling that Jackson would write such a letter while serving as a clerk," said Carrie Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network. "It shows a lack of awareness on her part regarding the role of the judiciary."

The Herald letter is a mixed blessing for Republicans as they prepare for Jackson's confirmation hearings. Probing the judge's departure from normal law clerk practices is a legitimate avenue for lawmakers to assess her impartiality. But the Herald exchange broaches deep racial divides that Republican lawmakers might be wary of approaching, particularly since Democrats would like nothing more than to paint Judiciary Committee Republicans as racially obtuse throughout the proceedings.

Feder's column argued that race remains salient in America because of "race hustlers intent on exploitation" and Democratic coalition politics. He wrote the column to defend himself from allegations of racism arising from a prior piece, in which he expressed concern that an open border immigration policy will diminish the population of white people in America.

"I'd sleep a bit easier if Louis Farrakhan wasn't the most admired man in the black community," Feder wrote. "I wish minority voters didn't feel compelled to elect a gonif (the late Harold Washington), a total incompetent (David Dinkins), or a coke-head (Marion Barry) to high public office because he's a brother."

Jackson specifically takes issue in her letter with Feder for "denouncing black voters for selecting incompetent, incorrigible, or inebriated leaders."

"For someone who claims not to consider certain groups morally or intellectually inferior to his own," Jackson writes, "Don Feder spends much of his column spewing out disagreeable facts about the high-crime rate in the black community and denouncing black voters for selecting incompetent, incorrigible, or inebriated leaders," Jackson wrote.

"By his own definition, Feder is a racist," she added before calling him "irredeemably evil."

Efforts to reach Feder were unsuccessful. He left the Herald staff in June 2002 after almost two decades with the paper.

Though the fact of Jackson's intervention is striking, asking questions about it could be risky for the GOP.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) who chairs the Judiciary Committee, is already signaling he will hold Republican feet to the fire on tone. He accused Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) of disrespecting the nominee after Hawley aired concerns about Jackson's record on child pornography cases.

"I'm troubled by it because it's so outrageous," Durbin said in...

In text messages, Neil Stewart talked explicitly about his interest in sex involving minors while setting up what he thought was a meeting at the National Zoo with a man and his 9-year-old daughter, according to a prosecutor’s memo.

“What a bday gift that would be,” Stewart said, referring to the meeting happening on his 31st birthday in October 2015, if the 9-year-old girl “would like to play.”

In February 2017, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced Stewart to 57 months in prison, or just under five years, after his conviction for possessing and distributing child pornography.

That punishment, far less than the 97 to 121 months prescribed by federal sentencing guidelines, is likely to come up Monday during Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearing on her appointment to the Supreme Court.

In another text, Stewart “provided advice” on how to begin convincing a child to have sexual intercourse, which then could be captured on video.

“The trick,” he wrote, “is starting with really small toys and gradually moving up until something is the same size. And vibration.”

Prosecutors quoted obscene and graphic language in Stewart’s texts for Jackson’s consideration in sentencing that can’t be repeated in a family publication.

In her presentence mitigation report on the case, Jackson wrote that “the conviction alone is devastating to Mr. Stewart,” later adding that his “risk of recidivism is exceedingly low.”

But on Jan. 5, 2020, the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland arrested Stewart, then 35, on four counts of possessing a controlled dangerous substance other than marijuana, as well as drug paraphernalia.

Stewart’s case is one of seven sex offender cases highlighted by Senate Judiciary Committee member Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in the days leading up to the confirmation hearing for Jackson, 51, President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

Since June, Jackson, the mother of two daughters, has been a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. From 2013 to 2021, she was a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Stewart referred explicitly and crudely to sexual activity in his text exchanges about child porn and meeting “willing” children in late 2015. In one text, he said he liked children ages “5-11,” according to the court document from federal prosecutors.

Anticipating meeting the 9-year-old at the National Zoo on his birthday, he wrote: “That’s so hot, god I hope this is real.”

It wasn’t real.

Stewart didn’t know he actually was communicating with an undercover D.C. police detective.

The detective delayed the meeting past Stewart’s birthday. During that time, Stewart unknowingly relayed to the detective that he had large amounts of child porn on his computer, asserting he had “many flash drives” and “can bring it all” to the meeting.

The FBI was able to track Stewart’s email addresses and gained a search warrant, with which investigators found more than 600 images and videos of child pornography on various...