The Most Dangerous Man In America

It's not Donald Trump.

It's his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose tenure in that post shows him to be incapable of delivering either.

You might have heard about the brouhaha in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, which is out of control.   The director of the CDC was forced out over a dispute over medical science - namely, her recognition of its existence.  This led to mass resignations at the CDC, and HHS employees back in Washington are calling for their boss to resign.

The chaos comes from Kennedy's vaccine recommendations, which themselves are chaotic.  On the particular question of COVID vaccines, Kennedy has declared that priority will be given to Americans 65 and over and those under 65 with underlying conditions.  And, as feared, it appears that any Americans who do not qualify for a free COVID shot under the guidelines will not be allowed to get one even if they're willing to pay out of pocket.  They are not available to anyone who doesn't qualify.  You'll have more luck trying to buy the bones of John Merrick, the Elephant Man, from the London Hospital Medical College, as Michael Jackson (a psychopath like RFK Jr.) had tried to do, even doubling his bid for them.  But, as he found out then and as those of us who want COVID shots but don't qualify under RFK Jr.'s rules are likely to find out, some things don't have a price.  (Ironically, Trump believes otherwise.)   

I have it on good authority that even now, if you try to make an online appointment for a COVID shot at certain pharmacy chains and are under 65 and have no underlying medical conditions, you'll be turned down automatically.  Kennedy, meanwhile, is likely to - just as automatically - fill his recently depleted vaccine advisory board with anti-vax wackos like himself.  This could mean no vaccines for anything being readily available (if available at all) in 2026.  Meanwhile, in Florida, state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who is black and is thus clearly a DEI hire, is ending vaccine mandates for children, comparing mandatory vaccinations to slavery.

But Dr. Ladapo, slavery taught American Negroes vital work skills!  Just ask the Caucasian who gave you your job, Florida governor Ron DeSantis - who has been trying to make that part of the state's standard school curriculum!  (Sarcasm.)

You know, that's another reason for me to hope that the 2028 Olympics get moved out of the U.S.  The war on medical science, which medical science is clearly losing, is going to lead to a lot of Americans with severe respiratory diseases, some of whom could possibly attend Olympic events in Los Angeles while being asymptomatic and cause a mass contagion among foreign athletes and spectators.  The Super Bowl, the most insufferably American of all sporting events, which takes place in the middle of winter, could also be an annual super-spreader event for COVID, the flu, and other nasty diseases.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been dismissed for his lack of medical expertise - he is, after all, an environmental lawyer.  But that alone is not a detriment in running the Department of Health and Human Services.  Xavier Becerra, his predecessor under President Biden, is also a lawyer, and he used his legal knowledge to cut through red tape and get COVID vaccines out as quickly as possible.  If anything, being an environmental lawyer is an asset; who better than an environmental lawyer to understand how toxins and pollutants in the air and in our soil affects our health?  But while Kennedy is best known for being an environmental lawyer, his reputation in the field of environmental law is based largely on easy-peasy cases he merely signed his name to, including cases that any shyster with a law degree from a correspondence course could have won. RFK Jr., who has campaigned for years against injecting kids with drugs, is, ironically, best known for something else; he's a recovered heroin addict.   And he's a recovered heroin addict who ignores the basics of medical science and whose anti-medical-science policies are going to get us all sick and cause a lot of us to die needless deaths. 

As far as getting a COVID shot is concerned, I propose that if you are under 65 and you want one badly enough - and who with a brain wouldn't?  - the safest course of action is to tell your local pharmacist that you do in fact have an underlying condition.  And trust me, you won't be lying.

The underlying condition we Americans have, whether or not we're 65 or older, is that Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. is the nation's Health and Human Services Secretary.    

The OTHER Unholy Trinity

The three riders of the apocalypse in the regime of Der Amerikanischer Führer are in place.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is Secretary of Health and Human Services . . . 

Tulsi Gabbard is now Director of National Intelligence . . .

. . . and, as of today, February 20, 2025, Kashyap Patel is director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Helter skelter.

So, if you hope to survive Trump, good luck.  Because of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you may have to deal with a disease that makes COVID look like the common cold.  If you survive that, Tulsi Gabbard may let a Russian operative poison you for having insulted Putin when Biden was President, or maybe there'll be a contract on your life for insulting Elon Musk that escapes her watch.  And if you end having to deal with Patel . . .

. . . you'll wish you'd been done in by one of the other threats.

They're coming down fast . . . yes, they are . . . yes, they are.

(Correction:  The above photo is not of Kashyap Patel.  The above photo is of James David Vance.  I regret the error.)

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I GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!

Trump's Nominees

I haven't been able to keep up with all of the revealing moments in the hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and Kash Patel to be director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  So I can't tell you what happened.

I have to show you. 😟

This is really embarrassing for America . . .. 

Pardon the commercial announcement that Ben Meiselas includes in this video . . .. 

WHO Are We Now?

Trump pulled us out of an international agreement as expected, continuing an American tradition of refusing to join the rest of the world in interdependent global endeavors that are perceived to threaten U.S. sovereignty and American big business.

No, I'm not talking about pulling us out of the agreement on fighting climate change, which he did to the sound of cheering supporters who no longer have to worry about giving up their F-150 pickup trucks.  I'm talking about the executive order Trump signed that pulls us out of the World Health Organization.

Trump originally did that in the final year of his first term - 2020, the year of the COVID pandemic - insisting that China was paying too little to support the World Health Organization based on its population and that the United States was paying too much, and that the World Health Organization is in need of serious reform.  (Biden canceled the pullout.)  He's done it again for the same reasons.  Now, I don't know how much of that is true, but it was quite obvious that the organization bungled the response to COVID and let the Chinese hoodwink everyone - including Trump himself - into thinking they were on top of it, as this BBC report explains, and so some sort of reform at the organization (I'm not referring to it as "the WHO," it sounds like I'm talking about a rock band, though Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus's capitulation to Chinese President Xi Jinping in the early days of the COVID crisis could be punningly described as  "The WHO Sell Out") is needed.  So, by that criterion, Trump's order makes sense.

Or it would if he hadn't chosen someone to lead the Department of Health and Human Services whose main qualification for the job was living through birth. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not a doctor but an environmental lawyer who should only be in Trump's White House to handle oil spills.  He opposes vaccines and is too skeptical toward pharmaceuticals without being skeptical enough toward pharmaceutical companies.  I sincerely hope that Senate Democrats oppose Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s confirmation to be Secretary of Health and Human Services with every fiber of their beings, but the lack of fiber Democrats have shown so far toward Trump Mark Two suggests that they tend to have too much Fruity Pebbles for breakfast and not enough Grape-Nuts.  In fact, kind of perversely, some Democratic U.S. Senators are interested in RFK Jr.'s attacks on Big Pharma and Big Agribusiness, and Cory Booker, New Jersey's senior senator, wants to learn more about Kennedy's ideas on improving the food supply.

Even if Kennedy gets us eating heathier food and has the Food and Drug Administration, an HHS agency, do something about additives like high fructose corn syrup, diseases still happen.  Eating wholly organic and natural foods didn't prevent the Black Plague in the Middle Ages.  By pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, Trump is incapacitating the international effort to control diseases and viruses - including the current bird flu wave - and making it more possible for another pandemic as bad as COVID to emerge. 

And then Kennedy will be fired.  Not for bungling the pandemic response, but for objecting to Trump's proposal to inject ourselves with cyanide or whatever.

Two Victories For American Women

I guess you have to take your victories where you can find them. The Republicans may be winning the war against the middle class - the current stage of this war is comparable to the siege at Petersburg in the final conflict of the Civil War that brought Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to its knees - but the far right had some serious setbacks in the war against women. After fighting increased protections for women in federal health care policy and after trying to defund Planned Parenthood, the right was dealt a blow when the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will adopt expert recommendations to require health insurers to cover contraception and several other women's preventive health services without charging anyone co-payments. So health care in these United States just became a little more humane - more healthy and caring, in fact.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, Planned Parenthood won a major victory - for now - when U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten blocked the state from denying funding to the state's Planned Parenthood chapter, dealing Republican lawmakers in the Sunflower State their second major legal setback to their recent moves against women's clinics associated with abortion. Planned Parenthood is suing to overturn the Kansas law that blocks funding to Planned Parenthood in order to prevent state funding of abortion services, even though only one Planned Parenthood clinic in Kansas - a clinic in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park - provides abortion services and does not use government funds for that purpose. The clinics in Wichita and the town of Hays use funding for health care services, nothing more.

The law, which requires federal family planning money granted to Kansas by the federal government to go first to public health departments and hospitals without any Planned Parenthood funding left over, is still on the books. But now two judges have blocked its implementation while the Planned Parenthood lawsuit against the legislature in Topeka works its way through the courts. This allows federal money to continue to reach the clinics for the time being. With the law on their side in the processing of the case, Planned Parenthood may have a leg up in the final ruling.

To be continued . . .