Sick

It was Donald Trump who let Anthony Fauci run the COVID response when the pandemic hit.  It was Dr. Fauci who saved millions of people despite the fact that the very administration he worked for got in his way.  While Dr. Fauci led the effort to stop the spread of le covíde, Trump gave his administration the blessing to look for a COVID vaccine in Operation Warp Speed.  The vaccine saved millions more lives.

Now, because Dr. Fauci's pushback against Trump in 2020 has put him on his Trump's enemies list, the Republican Senate is prosecuting and persecuting him over how he handled COVID.

Dr. Fauci did make mistakes in handling COVID.  Because he was dealing with a novel virus.  That's the whole point about a novel virus - you're going to make mistakes in dealing with it because no one knows a twit about it!  

Aware that the Senate committee who subpoenaed him to testify on the pandemic, Dr. Fauci pleaded the Fifth Amendment in response to questions from the committee's GOP members - especially Kentucky's Rand Paul, who put his libertarian values in a blind trust before the committee hearing began.   Dr. Fauci has since been held in contempt.

This has all happened at a time when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is in charge of America's public health and is voicing skepticism about vaccines.  And in the wake of Dr. Fauci's inquisition, leading virologists - may of whom the same Debbie Downers who kept shooting down our optimism like clay targets whenever it seemed that the pandemic was abating (and of course, it wasn't) - are warning that those of us who lived through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic might live to see another pandemic of such magnitude.  Some of them aren't saying "might" - they're saying "will!"  And an anti-vaccine, anti-science administration is in charge. 

If Hakeem Jeffries becomes Speaker of the House in January, we should hope that Trump and Vance are taking medical advice from RFK Jr.  Then maybe Jeffries will become President by February. 

Profile In Dis-Courage

Trump's big ugly, blister-faced, goateed creature of a budget bill is going through a marathon of amendments to be voted on in the Senate as Democrats try to slow the bill down enough to prevent Trump from signing the bill into law on July 4 (when this blogger will be in Montreal for an extended weekend to get out of the country during a holiday this blogger no longer believes in, hence expect a new Music Video Of the Week a day early).  The bill, which cuts spending on renewable energy and health-care access and will likely cause people to die in order to give Jeff Bezos and is new wife (yuck!) a tax cut as a wedding gift.  One Senate Republican announced his opposition to it due to Medicaid cuts that will disproportionally hurt his state - Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Tillis had been against the Affordable Care Act because he was not convinced that people could keep their coverage and their doctors if they so chose.  He was right, and he considered that a broken promise from President Obama.  That got Tillis elected to the Senate in 2014.  Now he is lashing out at Trump because the protections to Medicaid Trump promised just aren't there, which Tillis considers yet another broken promise on health care from the executive branch - only this time it's Trump, not Obama, he's angry at.     

And Trump is angry at Tillis.  After more or less threatening him with supporting a primary challenger in the 2026 U.S. Senate campaign in North Carolina, Tillis, fearing naught for his career but likely fearing for his life, prudently decided not to seek re-election after two terms.  He'll be 65 at the end of 2025, which dovetails nicely with his impending retirement.  Progressives are loath to give Tillis any credit for standing up to Trump, since he gave up his political career rather than continue fighting, even as he voted 95 percent of the time with Trump beforehand.  But it's never too late to do the right thing.

That is, until this godawful bill passes.  Tillis's only definite company in his own party in opposition to the bill is Rand Paul of Kentucky, who loathes the exorbitant spending on the tax cuts and finds the bill distasteful and fiscally irresponsible.  Like Tillis on health care, Paul is completely consistent here.  But currently there's no sign that the two extra Republicans that the Democrats need to derail the bill in the Senate are ready to step up.  Meanwhile, Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine continues to express her "concern." 

Right now, alas, I'm afraid that passage of this budget bill is inevitable.  But then again, people said that about a Hillary Clinton Presidency, and look how that turned out.

Paul and Paul

Hey, Paul!

Am I referring to Mr. Paul of the Senate or Mr. Ryan, Speaker of the House?  Both, actually.  The Senate worked out a bipartisan deal to keep the government running, spending more money on the military and on vital domestic programs, but the Kentucky senator doesn't want to commit the government to more spending (and so is blocking a Senate vote on the deal), and the Speaker can't muster the votes for it in the House.  And even if he could, Democrats don't want to vote on anything that doesn't fix the DACA immigration issue.

"Yes, I want a strong national defense," Rand Paul wrote on his Twitter account.  "I believe it's actually the most important thing the federal government does. But you have to ask yourself whether a $20 trillion debt makes us a stronger country or a weaker country."

I have to ask myself whether another shutdown - which will happen less than fifteen minutes after I post this - will make us weaker.   

Oh well, at least the Democrats won't be blamed for a shutdown this time.  Not that they had any power to stop it.

Nancy Pelosi's floor stunt?  I'll get to that . . ..

I'm glad the Winter Olympics are starting.  I'll get to talk about that instead.

Pauline Perils

It's hard to figure out who is the most offensive of the Republican new faces that will appear in Washington in January, but right now I would guess Rand Paul by a wide margin. He's not named for Ayn Rand - his name is actually short for Randal - but he shares the selfishness-oriented and self-centered socioeconomic philosophy of Alan Greenspan's former mentor. He's actually been quoted as saying the rich should be "left alone" in any tax policy that the 112th Congress devises, and we depend on the wealthy to maintain a prosperous society. And remember, Paul has come out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a point of fact that would have likely brought out enough black voters elsewhere but not in Kentucky, one of the whitest states south of the Ohio River.

Runners-up in the new Senate for loathsomeness Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, who has forwarded arguments against helping to rebuild his state's beleaguered steel industry; Ohio's Rob Portman, who was George Walker Bush's trade representative and is therefore in part responsible for Ohio's current industrial malaise; and Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, who says global warming is caused by "sunspots" and has refused to answer questions on specific issues, like veterans' affairs.

But we can take comfort that Carly Fiorina, Linda McMahon, Christine O'Donnell, and the spectacularly insufferable Sharron Angle - without question the scariest ladies' auxiliary in Republican politics in recent memory (although Sarah Palin is scarier than all of them put together) - won't be in that august chamber.

The House is less august, and so that chamber can take a few crackpots. The only problem is that those crackpots - including the incoherent and personally horrible Ben Quayle - are part of the new Republican majority.

Oh, and though the mainstream media aren't likely to make a big deal out of it, only 31 percent of Republican candidates for Congress associated with the Tea Party won on Tuesday.

As for Rand Paul, who now has the power to stop legislation by himself, he can now follow the Randian (as in Ayn) philosophy of one individual against the collective body.

Led in part by Mitch McConnell.

I don't know how President Obama is going to react, but I was anything but re-assured by his lame press conference yesterday.

No Way To Treat a Lady

Eighteen months ago, I watched with horror as CNN reporter Susan Roesgen was roughed up by demonstrators at a Tea Party rally in downtown Chicago while trying to get legitimate answers to legitimate questions about their views. Almost as soon as that report aired on CNN, conservative groups complained about her conduct and demeanor as a journalist, challenging her professionalism.

CNN, hoping to avoid trouble with the Tea Party, announced in July 2009 that Roesgen's contract with the news channel would not be renewed. Apparently plenty of people found Roesgen's questions rather objectionable. Me? I find their objections highly questionable.

Well, it turns out that the pushing and shoving Susan Roesgen faced in Chicago was hardly an isolated incident but in fact the first attack against anyone the Tea Party finds intimidating ,be it a reporter or a political opponent. How else could you explain a supporter of Sharron Angle in Nevada punching a female Harry Reid supporter? Or Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller having security officers detaining a journalist for nearly half an hour for . . . asking tough questions!

Now Tea Partiers in Kentucky supporting U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul have taken the violence beyond the pale. A MoveOn.org volunteer named Lauren Valle hoped to walk up to near Rand Paul was standing and hold up a placard from a mock corporation thanking Paul for everything he's done to help companies over people. Valle was accosted by Paul supporters, who promptly wrestled her to the ground and stomped on her head. The attacker, Timothy Profitt, was fired by the Paul campaign. The candidate himself, however, issued a mealy-mouthed press release stating regret about the incident and implying that activists on both sides (but especially MoveOn.org) are responsible for the increasingly violent climate in the election campaigns, and that activists shouldn't encourage violent behavior.

In other words, Lauren Valle was asking for trouble. So was Susan Roesgen. So is any woman who stirs things up against the Tea Party.

Sure - blame the victim!

This is the Tea Party at its truest, folks. These are the angry, intolerant people who hope to take over this country. In one week, they could do just that. Unless those of us bullied by these extremists stand up to them.

Oh yeah, I'd like to add an endorsement, for U.S. Senate from Kentucky: This blog endorses Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway. If you have to ask why, you haven't been paying attention.

Kentucky Fried Politics

The loss of Trey Grayson to Tea Party darling Rand Paul in Tuesday's U.S. Senate Republican primary in Kentucky was a personal blow to the state's senior senator, Mitch McConnell, who had backed Grayson and may have hurt him by making him appear to be the establishment candidate. To have your man rebuffed in your own state is embarrassing enough. But Rand Paul's recent and previous statements about civil rights has given McConnell more reason to be red-faced. The news that Paul apparently opposes the law that protects those with faces of other colors from discrimination has spread like wildfire across a bluegrass meadow.

Paul opposes the title in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bars people who own businesses from refusing to serve blacks not because he is racist - oh, no, of course he isn't! - but because he opposes laws that infringe on the right of business owners to choose whom to serve and associate with and whom not to. It's an extension of Paul's and his father Ron Paul's loopy argument that government should not intervene with the rights of private businesses. never mind discrimination against minorities - if we followed the Paul family's logic to the letter in every circumstance, there'd be even less regulation against oil companies like BP than there is now (if that's possible).

Hardly surprisingly, at last one Fox commentator has come out in Paul's defense - specifically, noted misogynist John Stossel (formerly of ABC's "20/20") who said that restaurant owners, hoteliers and the like should have the right to refuse service to anyone they wish, even men with moustaches like Stossel, if they so choose. Well, if I owned a restaurant, I know of one mustachioed man I wouldn't serve! Not because of Stossel's moustache per se, mind you, but because of the cheesiness of it.

The Republican party may not distance themselves from Rush Limbaugh, but they should distance themselves from Rand Paul. His comments fan the flames of racism, whether he personally has any tolerance for black people or not. Mitch McConnell should be the first person in the Republican party to do so. Because he's from Kentucky? No, because his wife is former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, a Chinese-American woman. Without the 1964 civil rights law, hotel managers could refuse to give rooms to interracial couples.

This story certainly made everyone forget Richard Blumenthal. :-O