You Vote: Judge Dr. Fauci's performance during the pandemic
https://twitter.com/jsolomonReports/status/1249898602601873411
Usually how it works with him, thinking there's a possibility he will "resign" maybe due to some unseen circumstance..
Pelosi, Schumer To GOP: ‘Quit the political posturing’ on COVID Economic Relief
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer sent a joint letter Monday to Republicans urging them “to quit the political posturing by proposing bills they know will not pass either chamber and get serious and work with us towards a solution.” Further, the two Democratic party leaders argued that the Republican lawmakers need to focus on giving small businesses, families, and workers additional funding. “While the Trump Administration struggles to figure out how to distribute the funds provided for in the CARES Act, it’s clear that those appropriated amounts will not be enough to cover the tremendous need,” Pelosi and Schumer wrote. They added, “Further changes must also be made to the SBA’s assistance initiative, as many eligible small businesses continue to be excluded from the Paycheck Protection Program by big banks with significant lending capacity. Funding for Covid-19 SBA disaster loans and grants must be significantly increased to satisfy the hundreds of billions in oversubscribed demand.” Schumer and Pelosi emphasized the need to expand SNAP nutrition assistance to Americans struggling to put food on the table. Moreover, the Democrats requested that the next spending package include additional funding for expanded coronavirus testing and for Personal Protective Equipment for medical workers on the frontlines of the epidemic. “The collection and publication of demographic data are also desperately needed, so that we can accurately determine the level of impact on under-served communities and communities of color and direct needed resources to them immediately,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote.
The two parties reached an impasse Thursday over their disagreements on funding priorities. In a joint letter Friday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy slammed the Democratic leadership for blocking additional funding for the Payment Protection Program that “may be depleted in just a few days.”
“Republicans did not ask to change any of the policy details that were negotiated by both parties and passed unanimously. All we want to do is put more money into a popular job-saving policy which both parties designed together.” the Republican leaders wrote, “Yesterday, Senate Democrats blocked this funding because Republicans would not open a sweeping renegotiation of the bipartisan CARES Act. Their unrelated demands included hundreds of billions of extra dollars for parts of the legislation which are still coming online and have not yet spent a single dollar.” They added, “Speaker Pelosi said yesterday she was aware of ‘no data as to why we need’ more funding for Americans’ paychecks. Anyone paying attention knows differently. The Administration reports the PPP has already burned through nearly half of its initial funding in just its first week. Yesterday, we learned that a staggering 10% of the entire American workforce has filed for unemployment in less than a month. This morning, we learned that small-business layoffs spiked by 1,000% last month alone.”
https://saraacarter.com/pelosi-schumer-to-gop-quit-the-political-posturing-on-covid-economic-relief/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social-pug
Fauci v. Fauci: How America’s infectious disease chief evolved his pandemic advice
Before he embraced social distancing, Fauci recommended cruises, and dismissed a ban on restaurants as ‘overkill,’ review of comments shows.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been one of the undoubted media stars of the pandemic, so much so that even President Trump has opined the nation’s infectious disease chief should consider running for political office. So when Fauci professed on Sunday that more lives could have been saved if aggressive social distancing had been enacted earlier in February, many in the media took it as a poke at the president and governors overseeing the pandemic, even suggesting Fauci may have been overruled in private. “If you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives," Fauci told CNN's Jake Tapper, suggesting “there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down” early in the pandemic. But a review of more than three dozen public and media appearances and writings by Fauci, however, shows the nation’s infectious disease chief didn’t embrace — at least not in public — firm social distancing, bans on flights or cruises, or other strict measures during many opportunities in February or March. In fact, during those two months he called the idea of banning restaurant eating “overkill,” urged healthy people to still go on cruises, and suggested there was no long-term benefit to shutting down domestic air travel, the review showed.
Fauci, for instance, specifically stated on Feb. 25 that it wasn’t “absolutely necessary” to impose social distancing yet. Then two weeks later, he declared he saw no problems with healthy Americans continuing to go on cruise ships, an activity that is hardly conducive to social distancing, as several outbreaks aboard ships have since proved. “If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship,” Fauci said during a March 8 news conference. “But the fact is that if you have an individual who has an underlying condition, particularly an elderly person who has an underlying condition, I would recommend strongly that they do not go on a cruise ship.” Fauci gave a similar answer a week later when asked about whether he would like to see a ban on domestic air travel, saying he himself wouldn’t travel for a “pleasure trip” but saw no reason to impose a ban on domestic travel and might travel himself if a serious need arose. “I can tell you that has not been seriously considered,” he said on a Sunday talk show March 15 when asked about a domestic flight ban.
A month earlier, Fauci said even if a pandemic became widespread, restrictions on airline travel would not be helpful, except to provide some temporary delays for hospitals to get ready. “If there is, and I hope it doesn’t happen, a broad pandemic throughout the world, travel restrictions are not going to help,” he said at a Feb. 7 news conference. “You can’t just travel-restrict everyone.” Fauci similarly declined on March 15 to urge Americans to stop going to restaurants, saying it would be “overkill,” though he added he himself was avoiding eateries to avoid coming in contact with someone who had the disease. “You don’t want to make a pronouncement that no one should ever go into a restaurant," he said. "I mean, I think that might be overkill right now, but everything is on the table. It may come to the situation where we strongly recommend — right now, myself, personally, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant. "I just wouldn’t, because I don’t want to be in a crowded place, I have an important job to do. I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m going to be all of a sudden self-isolating for 14 days."
Fauci also provided very different answers at different times about U.S. preparedness for the pandemic and the potential lethality of COVID-19. For instance, Fauci declared on MSNBC on Feb. 25 that “we are reasonably well prepared. We have had a pandemic preparedness plan that we put together years ago.” In that same interview, Fauci said the plan might eventually require mitigation strategies such as closing schools, teleworking, and imposing social distancing to slow the virus. “We need to start thinking about that now, even though it isn’t absolutely necessary to implement that now,” he said. By March 12, when he appeared for congressional testimony, Fauci had changed his tune on preparedness, at least when it came to widespread testing for the virus, which he said was a “failing” of the American system. “We’re not set up for that,” he said. "Do I think we should be? Yes. But we’re not."
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/fauci-v-fauci-how-americas-infectious-disease-chief-evolved-his
Wasteful Spending? State Department sends hip-hop stars to India for cultural understanding
$70,000 on the idea that American hip-hop will accurately bridge the cultural gap between the U.S. and India
The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s. This week, our award is being given to the State Department for funding a $70,000 program called “Bridging Cultures Through Hip-Hop.” The goal of the project is to “explore the commonalities and differences between India and the United States through this influential music genre,” according to a State Department grant description.
The conceit of the program is that, as hip-hop musicians in the United States have brought attention to socio-political issues, especially pertaining to youth and underserved minority communities, so too will the movement bring about an increased awareness of concepts including “freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance and inclusion” and an increased “sense of connection” between communities that normally do not interact. The recipient of the grant will organize a two-week tour of India for an American hip-hop artist to engage with audiences in four or five cities in India. According to the grant page, "Special consideration will be given to proposals that would assist in increasing community engagement and building linkages between Indian and U.S. institutions."
But should the U.S. government should be giving its imprimatur to the popular but very polarizing genre of American hip-hop and packaging it for export to India as an art form expressing this nation's most deeply-held cultural values? After all, for whatever socio-economic and racial truths hip-hop has shone a spotlight upon, it has also been widely condemned for often violent, misogynistic lyrics and a cultural ambience notoriously associated with violence, drugs, crime, hedonistic excess, and abuse of women. Whatever hip-hop's merits as cultural export, why should its penetration of the Indian cultural marketplace be subsidized by the American taxpayer? Hip-hop is by most measures the most popular genre in an American music industry with yearly grosses in the neighborhood of $20 billion. Whether bridging cultures or just expanding its presence in the lucrative Indian music market, American hip-hop can afford to pay its own way.
https://justthenews.com/accountability/waste-fraud-and-abuse/wasteful-spending-watch-state-dept-sends-hip-hop-stars-india
Indeed, been coordinated this way since almost day one..
The Rise of Karen-ism Means This Lockdown Nonsense Needs To End Soon
One of the least appealing aspects of the American character is the residual Puritanism that still compels a certain percentage of our countrymen, women and others, to nag, pester, and generally annoy the rest of us by trying to make us conform to their stick-up-the-Lieu vision of propriety. These people – these obnoxious Karens, for lack of a better FCC-compliant term – are delighted by the Chinese Bat Biter grippe and the opportunity it presents for them to try to impose their arbitrary will upon the rest of us. These mewling Mussolinis need to be slapped back, verbally if not physically, but as long as we are under this lockdown, they will not stop. They live for this, the chance to dictate to and control us, and the problem is some of them have positions of power. This is yet another reason – as if the failure of the “We’re all gonna die!” model and the mass economic devastation the Twitter blue checks ignore were not reasons enough – that we need to be focusing on coming out of this Wuhan flu funk. If would be a pity if pangolin licking not only killed thousands of our most vulnerable citizens but also our will to resist petty tyrants who presume to scold us for such crimes as worshipping our God, seeing our families, and buying tomato seeds. This is not to say that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic is fake or unserious, nor that we should ignore it and pretend that it’s just another flu. It is to say that there is more going on now than a respiratory ailment. There’s an economic ailment that most of us are painfully aware of, and there is a freedom ailment, where the Karens in everyday life and in the corridors or power are taking advantage of this crisis to let their fascist flag fly.
When you have some petty official commanding Christians not to gather together in worship, that’s a line that they don’t get to cross. No official gets to ban religious services. My church is doing its services by video, because that’s what we decided. Government officials don’t get to decide. The question of whether they can ban religious services got decided by the First Amendment, and while they may think it’s a really, really good idea to tell us what to do, they don’t get to. As federal judge Justin Walker put it in a powerful opinion that every American of any faith, or no faith, should read in its glorious entirety: On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter. That sentence is one that this Court never expected to see outside the pages of a dystopian novel, or perhaps the pages of The Onion. But two days ago, citing the need for social distancing during the current pandemic, Louisville’s Mayor Greg Fischer ordered Christians not to attend Sunday services, even if they remained in their cars to worship – and even though it’s Easter. The Mayor’s decision is stunning. And it is, “beyond all reason,” unconstitutional. By the way, Judge Walker was appointed by Donald Trump and his confirmation was shepherded by Cocaine Mitch. Don’t channels the Fredocons by pretending that judges do not matter because you know there would be plenty of Clinton and Obama judges eager to rubberstamp the banning of Christian or Orthodox Jewish services by liberal political Karens seeking to own the normals.
In Michigan, Governor Karen O’Karenheimer decided that buying non-essential stuff should be outlawed, and guess who decided what’s non-essential? Well, dope appears essential, but dope smokin’ morons make up a lot of the Democrat base (and the Libertarian base too), so off course hopheads get a pass. But gardening supplies and seeds? Nah. Why? Because, that’s why. You might think it was mind-bendingly stupid if you did not understand her real motivation – it’s the giddy joy of bossing you around. To paraphrase a great line from Heat, which everyone should do as often as possible, the fascism is the juice. The Karenists love this. Love it. And that’s why they are fighting tooth and nail to extend this lockdown in perpetuity. Oh, they have excuses and rationalizations to make it seem like this is for our own good as opposed for their jollies. “Safety.” “Lives at stake.” You know them all. And in theory, those are real considerations. But they are not the only considerations. Not for the Karens – they can want to save lives even as they gleefully get off on their own power – and not for us either. We need to balance all the considerations in deciding when this ends. Safety is an important thing, but not the only thing. If the standard is no life can ever be put at risk, say good-bye to cars, to steak, to swimming pools, to any kind of freedom to make choices. And to the Karens, that’s a feature, not a bug.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/04/13/the-rise-of-karenism-means-this-lockdown-nonsense-needs-to-end-soon-n2566769