Orange Meltdown, Finally, Maybe Edition

Alvin Bragg's grand jury is meeting today, and word is that they will make a final decision on charging Donald Trump. Rupert Murdoch's squad is reporting that the indictment could come as soon as today's grand jury meeting, with arraignment next week.

 

Donald Trump will likely be indicted on Wednesday but won't appear before a judge in New York until next week, DailyMail.com has learned.

'There will be no arraignment this week,' a source familiar with the proceedings told DailyMail.com exclusively on Tuesday.

The former president, who is currently in Florida, is expected to be formally charged tomorrow, after which the Manhattan District Attorney's office will reach out to Trump and his Secret Service detail to make arrangements for his surrender, according to the insider.

He will then fly to New York where he will be arraigned, finger printed, and pose for his mug shot.

Meanwhile, it's all-hands-on-deck for the New York Police Department and Metro Police Department as all officers on Tuesday are expected to be in uniform, ready for anything in the wake of the potential indictment.

Officials in New York City and Washington, D.C., are preparing for possible unrest and demonstrations following the former president's plea to his supporters to 'protest, protest, protest' in response to a potential indictment handed down by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump, 76, said last week that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday, but a law enforcement official told DailyMail.com that an indictment would likely happen on Wednesday at the earliest.

An NYPD internal memo obtained by CNN shows that all officers are to be in uniform and prepared for deployment on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Daniels' is also beefing up her security after her attorney said she received concerning messages, including some threatening her life.

Law enforcement officials tell CNN there are currently no credible threats in New York even though Tuesday is a 'high alert day.'

Washington Metro police are also preparing for protests, but the U.S. Capitol Police 'is not currently tracking any direct or credible threats to the US Capitol,' a department intelligence assessment obtained by CNN notes.

 

Republicans are still mostly huddling in wait and see mode, because they are cowards for the most part. They don't want to be held responsible for another January 6th stochastic terrorism event. At the same time, none of them can turn their backs on Trump or their careers will end in days. They have to defend him now, no matter how things get.

Of course, some Republicans are more eager to defend Trump and encourage violence than others.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said the Manhattan district attorney leading the investigation into former President Donald Trump's alleged hush-money payments should "be put in jail."

Paul's comments came in a tweet Tuesday and follows the former president's prediction that he would be indicted for his alleged role in making a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election to silence her about a previous affair.

"A Trump indictment would be a disgusting abuse of power," Paul said in the tweet.

Regardless of the Manhattan proceedings and this "law-enforcement insider", the federal investigations into Trump under Special Counsel Jack Smith are grinding on...

Prosecutors in the special counsel's office have presented compelling preliminary evidence that former President Donald Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified materials after leaving office, a former top federal judge wrote Friday in a sealed filing, according to sources who described its contents to ABC News.

U.S. Judge Beryl Howell, who on Friday stepped down as the D.C. district court's chief judge, wrote last week that prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith's office had made a "prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations," according to the sources, and that attorney-client privileges invoked by two of his lawyers could therefore be pierced.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his handling of classified documents.

MORE: Trump lawyer ordered to testify in classified documents case in landmark ruling, sources say

In her sealed filing, Howell ordered that Evan Corcoran, an attorney for Trump, should comply with a grand jury subpoena for testimony on six separate lines of inquiry over which he had previously asserted attorney-client privilege.

Sources added that Howell also ordered Corcoran to hand over a number of records tied to what Howell described as Trump's alleged "criminal scheme," echoing prosecutors. Those records include handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal audio recordings.

In reaching the so-called prima facie standard to pierce Corcoran's privilege, Howell agreed prosecutors made a sufficient showing that on its face would appear to show Trump committed crimes. The judge made it clear that prosecutors would still need to meet a higher standard of evidence in order to seek charges against Trump, and more still to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

"It is a lower hurdle, but it is an indication that the government had presented some evidence and allegation that they had evidence that met the elements of a crime," Brandon Van Grack, a former top national security official in the Justice Department who is now in private practice, told ABC News.

 

Maybe it's nothing but more smoke and mirrors...or maybe Bragg bringing charges will open the floodgates in the weeks ahead.  If this is true, if Smith and the DoJ have enough evidence to convince a federal judge that Trump committed crimes and that his legal team was misled, then Trump is going to find out that Alvin Bragg is the least of his problems. If it's really criminal intent with his classified document theft, well, we're in a very dangerous game here.

We'll see where history takes us, but things will get deadly serious from here on out.

 

Be careful, folks.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Six months after Dobbs and the death of Roe v Wade, anti-abortion lunatics are furious that tens of thousands of women, medical staff, and abortion advocates and activists haven't been put in state prisons yet, and they are doing everything in their power to change that even as Republicans realize that abortion cost them dozens of races across the country last month.

The largest anti abortion organization in Texas has created a team of advocates assigned to investigate citizens who might be distributing abortion pills illegally.

Students for Life of America, a leading national antiabortion group, is making plans to systematically test the water Erin Brockovich-style in several large U.S. cities, searching for contaminants they say result from medication abortion.

And Republican lawmakers in Texas are preparing to introduce legislation that would require internet providers to block abortion pill websites in the same way they can censor child pornography.

Nearly six months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering abortion bans in more than a dozen states, many antiabortion advocates fear that the growing availability of illegal abortion pills has undercut their landmark victory. Now they are grasping for new ways to crack down on those breaking the law.

Antiabortion advocates had hoped the June decision would significantly decrease the number of abortions in the United States. But abortion rights activists have ramped up efforts to funnel abortion pills — a two-step regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that is widely regarded as safe — into states with strict new bans, working with rapidly expanding international suppliers as well as U.S.-based distributors to meet demand.

Now many conservatives are complaining that the abortion bans are not being sufficiently enforced, even though much of the illegal activity is happening in plain sight, as abortion rights advocates seek to reach women in need. Leaders interviewed on both sides of the debate had not heard of any examples of people charged for violating abortion bans since Roe fell, a crime punishable by at least several years in prison across much of the South and Midwest.

“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who has started to speak with Republican governors about the prevalence of illegal abortion pill networks. “It hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

Abortion bans include penalties only for people involved in facilitating illegal abortions, not for the pregnant women themselves.

The push on the right for enforcement reflects the extent to which both sides of the abortion battle are recalibrating after a tumultuous year that has challenged many long-held assumptions about the politics of the issue — and left the state of abortion access in the United States hard to assess. Interviews with more than 30 of the most influential advocacy group leaders, policymakers and litigators on the abortion issue found that far from settling the decades-old abortion question, the fall of Roe has triggered a major new phase of combat set to play out over the next few years in courtrooms, state capitals and the next presidential election.

 

The real issue is that at some point, any Republican 2024 hopeful is going to have to come out and say they are going to ban abortion medication nationwide, and that's going to get them destroyed in the general election.

The best example of the disconnect is here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul easily won reelection by smashing Charles Booker by 20+ points, but the state's constitutional amendment eliminating the right to an abortion lost by almost 5 points.

Republicans finally caught the car they were chasing, and they are getting dragged all over the road now. And don't believe them when they say they won't criminalize women getting abortions, because they are absolutely going to and they have lied about every other aspect of this.

Politics aside, abortion restriction states are killing women and children anyway.

New research released Wednesday adds to a growing body of evidence showing a link between more restrictive abortion policies and higher rates of maternal and infant mortality.

The analysis comes from the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research organization focused on health policy. It found that strict restrictions on abortion are associated with poorer access to health care for pregnant people and infants, which in turn raises the risk of negative outcomes such as mental health challenges and death.

According to the report, states that heavily restricted abortion access in 2020 had maternal death rates that were 62% higher than they were in states where abortion was more easily accessible.

The disparity may be aggravated by state-level changes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the report says.

People of color, those who are uninsured and those who live on low incomes or in underserved areas already face additional risks that threaten their lives during pregnancy, such as difficulty accessing consistent pre- and post-natal care, said Dr. Laurie Zephyrin, the senior vice president for advancing health equity at the Commonwealth Fund.

"Then, on top of all that, you're adding this variation in abortion services, reproductive health services, by states," Zephyrin said. "We're just adding on to an already fractured system."

62% higher rates of infant and mother mortality, and that was before Dobbs. And of course, the people suffering the most are Black women.

The cruelty is the point.

The Big Lie, Local Edition

Here in Kentucky, Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams is under heavy fire for not being part of The Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

 

Months ahead of the midterm election in Kentucky, Secretary of State Michael Adams continues to find himself combating election conspiracy fallout from the 2020 election and the primary in May.

That is some of what he shared with an audience Wednesday as guest speaker at Paducah Rotary Club's weekly meeting at the Carson Center.

Over recent weeks, Adams has been vocal on social media to shut down false claims of violations to voter integrity in Kentucky.

"I am really concerned about these conspiracy theorists making it harder for us to get poll workers. I don't want poll workers to feel like they're having to sit there, it's a long day as it is, and then have angry people come up and accuse them of fraud. It's ridiculous," Adams said.

Adams himself has been the target of baseless claims accusing him of overseeing voter fraud. Just last week he reported another death threat he had received to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Adams also voiced concern at an up-tick in demands for a recount following an election.

"What I don't want to have is abusive process for people who lost by a landslides demand recounts. Recounts are far more demanding on our county clerks and our election officials. They put a great strain on our process. They mean that we can't use the machines for voting because they're locked down. We've had five county clerks in the state resign in the last month alone, because, it's not just one thing, but in part it's the abuse they're getting from people and the absurd demands that they're getting from people," Adams said.

He said one of the ways he can thwart disinformation about alleged election irregularities is by traveling the state and talking with people one on one.

"All I can do is handle Kentucky. All I can do is talk to Kentuckians about what Kentucky does right. We've got a great record. We've made enormous strides improving our process that last few years making it more accessible, making it more secure, banning practices that have led to fraud in our state and other states, requiring an ID to vote, but also expanding access for our voters so they can go vote more easily. Not just having one arbitrary day but multiple days to pick to go vote," Adams said.

 

Which is true. 

Despite the famous quote attributed to Mark Twain about "When the end of the world comes, I'd rather be in Kentucky because it's 20 years behind" (which, by the way, Twain never actually said) it really does seem like the Commonwealth really is 20 years behind, back in the 2002 era of merely evil, greedy Republicans like McConnell instead of the full-on fascist election deniers like we're seeing in several other Secretary of State races in 2022.

To his credit, Adams is merely an evil, enabling Republican in a state where Republicans win by 15-20 points.

But I expect Adams is going to face a fierce primary challenge from a Trumpian election denier next year.

And as far as 2022 elections go, well, expect the goofballs in the state legislature to interfere with more "voter integrity" legislation should any Democrats actually win in November.

 

Last Call For The Booker Of History

Kentucky state Sen. Charles Booker is the Democratic candidate running against GOP Sen. Rand Paul here in Kentucky this November, and Booker's new campaign ad is a hard strike against Paul.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker stands with a noose around his neck in a new campaign ad criticizing his opponent, Republican incumbent Rand Paul, for holding up legislation in 2020 that would have made lynching a federal hate crime in America.

The certain-to-be-controversial ad, which Booker's campaign released Wednesday morning, includes a content warning for "strong imagery."

It does not mention that Paul went on to co-sponsor a new (and bipartisan) version of that legislation. The Senate unanimously voted this March to pass the updated Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which is now law.

"The pain of our past persists to this day," Booker says in a voiceover as his ad begins, showing a historic lynching photo and a noose hanging from the limb of a tree. "In Kentucky, like many states throughout the South, lynching was a tool of terror. It was used to kill hopes for freedom.

"It was used to kill my ancestors," Booker says as he appears onscreen, standing next to a tree with a noose looped around his neck.

"Now, in a historic victory for our commonwealth, I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate."

"My opponent?" he says as an image of Paul appears. "The very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The person who singlehandedly blocked an antilynching act from being federal law."

"The choice couldn't be clearer," Booker continues over the resounding creak of a rope, shown in close-up, before he appears onscreen with his hands gripping the noose. "Do we move forward together? Or do we let politicians like Rand Paul forever hold us back and drive us apart?

 

Now, having lived in this state for 16 years, I can tell you two things: One, that Booker is right about Rand Paul's history as Senator, and two, that doesn't change the fact that Kentucky is 88% white. The backlash on this ad is going to be incredible and nationalized. FOX is going to have a field day with this here for weeks, if not months.

This is going to be framed as the Worst Thing Black Democrats Have Ever Done™. Expect Black Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott and Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears dragged out to denounce Booker and demand he drop out of the race.

Oh, and part of me feels like Booker just put a target on the backs of every Black person here in the Commonwealth.  He's still right about the state's history of lynching. He just threw it in the face of Rand Paul and white Kentucky. Booker needed to get national attention to change the trajectory of an assured double-digit loss.

But I don't know if this is going to help here. I really don't.

We'll see.

Last Call For Rand's Way

As President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law today, understand that while this is a huge win for us Black folk, as we've been fighting for centuries in otrder to get lynching classified as a federal crime, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul is also claiming victory by limiting the bill's additions to federal hate crimes to just lynching, as Paul has blocked the legislation like this for his entire Senate career until now. Earlier this month, Morgan Watkins at the Louisville Courier-Journal explained why.

Nearly two years after he received intense criticism for pumping the brakes on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, Sen. Rand Paul is co-sponsoring a new version of that legislation and told The Courier Journal he expects the Senate will unanimously pass it.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., introduced the bipartisan legislation this week. Paul, R-Ky., said he’ll be cosponsoring it, too.

The bill would classify lynching as a federal hate crime and is named in honor of Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and whose horrific death catalyzed the civil rights movement.

"I think it's great to have the legislation, you know, to remember Emmett Till but also to remember a terrible time in our history and to know that we're a better place and a better people now," Paul told The Courier Journal in an exclusive interview Monday.

After a year or so of impasse over the legislation, Paul said staff from his office and Booker's started negotiating closely a couple of weeks ago about how to get a compromise done. He also said he was pleased to have worked with both Booker and Scott on strengthening this proposal.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed its own updated version of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, sponsored by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, Monday night. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., was one of just three lawmakers who voted against it.

Massie, who also voted against the original Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2020, tweeted Monday about his reasons for doing so again, including concerns about expanding federal hate crime laws.

"A crime is a crime, and all victims deserve equal justice. Adding enhanced penalties for “hate” tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech," Massie said.

Paul noted he got a lot of grief in the summer of 2020 for his handling of the initial anti-lynching bill, as racial justice protests emerged across the nation after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.

"It wasn't a popular stand to slow this bill down, but I wanted to do it because, you know, I thought it was the right thing to do," he told The Courier Journal. "And in the end, I think the compromise language will hopefully keep us from incarcerating somebody for some kind of crime that's not lynching.

"We just wanted to make sure that the punishment was proportional to the crime, and I guess it's just good news that it finally worked out," he added.

The new bill would add lynching to the federal hate crimes statute and would subject someone to up to 30 years in prison if their actions result in the death or serious bodily harm of another person or result in the attempted or actual kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse or killing of another person because of that individual's race or another protected characteristic.

The 2020 version of the bill also would have classified lynching as a federal hate crime, but it would have included certain crimes under that classification that involved defacing religious property or preventing someone from exercising their religious beliefs or engaging in other federally protected activities, such as voting.

 

And that's the thing that Paul objected to: causing grievous bodily harm to somebody for being Black is a hate crime (and even that took years to talk him into) but defacing a Black church or stopping someone Black from engaging in voting for being Black is too much and we can't punish that as a hate crime.

Better than Thomas Massie, who wants hate crimes done away with completely because it's free speech to shoot a ni-CLANG.

NKY is the most racist area in the country at times, I swear.

Rand-Dumb Roadblocks

The House overwhelmingly passed legislation to remove Russia from Most Favored Nation trade status, but in the Senate, Rand Paul is doing everything to block it, and as usual, it's human rights language in the bill that Paul is objecting to, in this case, applying Magnitsky Act reauthorization to Moscow, something Paul has been trying to scuttle for a long time now.

The original Magnitsky bill targeted “gross” violations of human rights. The language in the Russia trade bill would expand that to target “serious” human rights violations, codifying language used in a Trump-era executive order.

But Paul wants language put into the bill that would reinsert “gross” violation of human rights and define that as dealing with torture, cruel and inhumane treatment and indefinite detention, though Paul said he was open to including other actions in the definition.

Paul argued that language as written in the House-passed could be used to sanction individuals who deny access to abortions, a concern echoed by a group of House Republicans.

“It has to be in the body of it. I’m not voting on it. It has to be in the body” of the bill, Paul said about the change.

Senate leadership tried to offer him a vote on his proposal if he would, in exchange, agree to speed up both the trade bill and the energy ban. Schumer said that Paul “appears to be the lone senator demanding this” and that he thought all other 99 senators would approve the deal to let the trade and energy package move quickly.

"The question before Sen. Paul is … is he going to tank PNTR because his interpretation is not forced into his bill? Can Sen. Paul take yes for an answer?" Schumer asked.

Paul, however, rejected that offer.

Paul’s demand has infuriated senators who worked on the sanctions language.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) argued that Paul was trying to relitigate a fight that he had already had, and lost, in the Foreign Relations Committee. Cardin also argued that Paul’s amendment would undercut sanction efforts.

“The substance of it is that it would not allow us to do what we need to do in regards to Mr. Putin and Russia,” Cardin added.

Senate leadership has started the process of putting both bills on the calendar, which will make them available for a vote. But the Senate is also facing a time crunch that absent a deal with Paul could delay the Russia bills for weeks.

 

Or, you know, never. Paul has blocked legislation for years in some cases, winning concessions. Other times, he has folded. We'll see what happens here, but the bigger question is why would Rand Paul care about Russia denying abortions? 

I mean, it's not like he's a white supremacist misogynist who wants more "correct" white babies to be born, right?

Oh, wait.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Republicans in both the House and the Senate keep promising retaliation for Democrats should they get control in 2023, and the targets are clearly already being marked.

 

Hunter Biden. Anthony Fauci. Afghanistan. The border.

As Senate Republicans feel increasingly bullish about November, when they are fighting to regain control of Congress, they are floating using a new majority to dig into President Biden and his administration starting in 2023.

The potential probes underscore both the headaches awaiting Democrats if the House or Senate flips heading into 2024 but also the shifting power dynamics within the Senate GOP conference, where a stream of retirements of more pragmatic-minded senators is elevating newer, more combative Republicans.

“I’m sure there will be plenty of ingenious individuals thinking about what to do on those committees,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.).

Braun, while noting he didn’t have a pet investigation, pointed to Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) as two examples of GOP senators who could have “some real interest in looking into stuff that has not been attended to.”

Johnson, if he wins his reelection bid in November, is poised to chair the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Johnson is prevented because of term limits from chairing the full committee again, but the subcommittee gavel comes with a crucial element: subpoena authority.

Asked if there were overlooked issues that he would want to probe, Johnson appeared eager to dig in.

“Like everything?” he told The Hill. “It’s like a mosquito in a nudist colony. It’s a target-rich environment.”

Johnson pointed to the administration’s handling of the coronavirus as one area ripe for investigation. Johnson himself has caught flak, and fed Democratic campaign attacks, as one of the most vocal skeptics within the Senate GOP conference of public health measures amid the pandemic, which has killed more than 970,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

“There’s so much more in terms of what happened with our federal health agencies that we need to explore,” Johnson said

Johnson views himself as having broad jurisdictional boundaries, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s boundary lines are more amorphous than those of other panels because it combines homeland security with a much broader category of government oversight.

Johnson isn’t alone in wanting to dig into the coronavirus response.

Paul, a libertarian-leaning GOP senator who at times is a gnat for Senate GOP leadership, is in line to become the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee if Republicans win the majority.

Paul atop the committee would be a significant shift. Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), currently the top Republican on the panel, is retiring after this year and has broken with Paul on a number of key issues. Former Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), who preceded Burr as the top Republican on the committee but retired after 2020, was a close ally of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and was known for his ability to cut bipartisan deals.

Paul has had high-profile tangles with Fauci during committee hearings and promised to investigate and subpoena Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, if he finds himself with a gavel next year.

“If we win in November, if I'm chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we'll go after every one of [Fauci's] records,” Paul said earlier this year.

 

Republicans are promising another 1996, 2010 and 2014 era of gridlock, endless investigations, and impeachment attempts.  Imagine BENGHAZI!!!1!! only times ten, and you get the picture. Surely nothing will be done to help Americans in 2023 and 2024, only daily updates on the half-dozen GOP probes into Democrats.

 

And they'll need it, with abortion illegal in half or more of states, civil rights and LGBTQ+ equality all but gutted, they'll need the TV circus on hearings, not white "christian" nationalism cementing permanent control over America as Gilead.

Half of America is happy to do that, too.

Better vote or else.

Last Call For Climate Of Disaster, Con't

As the death toll from Saturday's massive tornado outbreak here in Kentucky continues to mount, with entire towns "gone" according to Dem Gov. Any Beshear, Republican members of Congress are quick to say that President Biden needs to give the state millions now in emergency aid before more perish in the cold without power, nevermind the fact that people like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie repeatedly voted against such aid for anyone other than their own constituents, calling it a "waste".

Throughout his two terms in the U.S. Senate, Paul has prided himself as a Tea Party fiscal conservative willing to say no to the most milquetoast causes if federal spending is involved. Opposing federal disaster relief is one of his pastimes.

In 2017, Paul was one of just 17 senators to oppose an emergency $15.3 billion federal relief bill for victims of Hurricane Harvey. It had wreaked havoc similar to Friday’s tornado, but not in Kentucky.

In 2013, Paul was one of 31 Republican senators who voted against a $50.5 billion relief aid package for Hurricane Sandy -- “after previously disaster aid for their home states,” as reported by ThinkProgress.org.

In 2011, Paul’s first year in the Senate, he was among 38 Republicans voting against a major FEMA funding package despite the fact -- not lost upon publicintegrity.org -- that his own state of Kentucky had been the nation’s largest recipient of FEMA funding ($293 million), mostly because of a 2009 ice storm.

A decade later, Paul wrote to Biden like the two were old liberal spendthrift friends.

“Last night and early this morning devastating storms swept across multiple states, including Kentucky. A single tornado from that system may have been on the ground for over 200 miles, and a large swath of the Commonwealth has been severely hit.

“As the sun comes up this morning we will begin to understand the true scope of the devastation, but we already know of loss of life and severe property damage.

“The governor of the Commonwealth has requested federal assistance this morning, and certainly further requests will be coming as the situation is assessed. I fully support those requests and ask that you move expeditiously to approve the appropriate resources for our state.”

Paul’s stinginess with federal aid to people outside of Kentucky has hardly been limited to aid responding to physical disasters.

In the very first coronavirus Senate aid package -- a mere $8 billion passed on March 5, 2020 -- Paul stood out as the lone Senator to vote no.

His complaint: Congress never cuts other spending as the direct offset he insists upon having for federal aid not earmarked for Kentucky:

“This isn't the first time we've had emergency money,” Paul complained after the first COVID-19 spending passed. “This is probably the tenth time we've done emergency money in the past two or three years. So everything is an emergency."

 

As for Massie, all he is willing to offer is "thoughts and prayers". 

Stop voting for Republicans who want you dead.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Donald Trump and Republican politicians in the House spent nearly a million bucks with digital advertising firm Event Strategies to advertise the January 6th terrorist attack, and used right-wing social media propaganda platforms like Gab and Parler to do it.

 

When then-President Donald Trump held his “Stop the Steal” protest on Jan. 6, he turned to a firm called Event Strategies to set up the rally. And while the violent results of that protest may give other politicians pause about using that firm again, Event Strategies has instead become Trump’s preferred staging group—as well as a new go-to for other GOP committees in the months after the riot.

A review of public financial disclosures shows that multiple entities involved in the Jan. 6 rallies have continued to rake it in after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, with various Republicans and GOP groups continuing to give these entities business even as investigators look into their roles with the insurrection.

Public records also show a number of curious payments on and around Jan. 6—including more than $25,000 in advertising that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) paid to right-wing social media platform Parler, with one transaction on the day of the riot.

In total, Trump’s fundraising apparatus has paid Event Strategies roughly $800,000 since Jan. 6, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, with the latest payment coming on Aug. 13. That $31,358 expense was for “event staging,” and footed by Make America Great Again Action—the Trump-endorsed super PAC run by former top aide Corey Lewandowski which was shuttered earlier this month amid allegations that Lewandowski had sexually assaulted a donor.

None of the other top event management firms on Trump’s payroll between October 2020 and the riot have worked for him since Jan. 6.

But Trump is hardly the only Republican to pay Event Strategies this year.

In April, the National Republican Congressional Committee—the official national committee for House Republicans—reported spending about $3,675 with the firm for “facility rental,” and dropped another $6,000 for “audio visual/staging” expenses on June 29. And in late August, the Alabama Republican Party and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), a key player in efforts to overturn the election, shelled out $200,000 and $7,038 to the company, respectively, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

In the 2020 cycle, Trump’s groups paid more than $4.3 million to people and companies involved in organizing the Jan. 6 rally, OpenSecrets reported this week. Of that amount, about $2.8 million went to Event Strategies, records show. But the only 2020 payments other committees made to the firm came after the election, in connection to the Georgia Senate runoffs.

FEC data shows that the NRCC had not paid Event Strategies since 2009, and neither Brooks nor the Alabama GOP previously contracted the company.

Bluebonnet Fundraising, the firm run by rally organizer and former Trump campaign adviser Caroline Wren—who last month was subpoenaed by House investigators—raked in tens of thousands of dollars after the riot.

Some of that cash came from the leadership PAC belonging to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who paid Bluebonnet $1,280 in fundraising fees six days after the attack, per FEC records. Lynda Blanchard, a Republican challenging Brooks in the 2022 Alabama Senate race, also forked over $22,000 in consulting fees to Bluebonnet in May. And in late January, Bluebonnet also got an $86,800 boost from Save the US Senate PAC, a group founded last year by associates of Donald Trump Jr.

 

Trump's propagandists of choice are more than glad to take GOP dollars to drum up hatred and division, and they're making millions doing it. Maybe they should actually pay a price.

Last Call For Cruz Control, Con't

Part of the "Biden's incompetence!11!!" argument is the fact that the Biden administration has yet to fill hundreds of executive agency nominations that require Senate approval. But Republican senators like Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, and especially Ted Cruz have been blocking nominations for months over petty stupidity.

The U.S. Treasury is being held hostage by Republican Senator Ted Cruz's efforts to halt a Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline, blocking critical appointments when the federal debt limit remains a pressing issue, White House officials and Democrats in Congress say.

Only four confirmed nominees are in place in the top ranks of the Treasury, of about 20 slots for presidential picks, officials say. More than eight months after Democratic President Joe Biden took office, his nominees across the government are being approved at a slower rate than the past three presidents, federal data shows.

In addition to the toll that Cruz's actions are taking on the Treasury's ability to tackle the federal debt limit, they are hurting the Biden administration's ability to address other big problems, senior officials say, including a global minimum tax, terrorism and financial intelligence.

Cruz has wielded power by being a lone holdout on a fast-track confirmation process that requires consent by all 100 senators for non-controversial nominees - a description the White House says fits many of the Treasury picks as well as others awaiting Senate confirmation, including numerous ambassadors.

Cruz wants Biden to impose sanctions that would halt Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Biden, despite his opposition to the pipeline, has said he waived sanctions because the project was nearly complete and he wanted to rebuild strained ties with Germany, a key U.S. ally.

As far as Cruz is concerned, a spokesman for the senator said, the solution is simple: he will remove the holds if the Biden administration sanctions the company behind the pipeline project, something he insists is required under U.S. law.

Failure to do so "hands Vladimir Putin a geostrategic victory" and "entrenches corrupt Russian influence in Europe" Cruz said in a letter on Sept. 13, referring to the Russian president.

 

Suddenly, Ted Cruz cares about punishing Russia over a gas pipeline, but that's strictly because he thinks it would hurt US energy companies in Texas. Otherwise, Cruz is happy to give Putin a pass. 

 

But it also gives Cruz the excuse he needs to block Biden nominations in the Senate, and he's been blocking them for more than six months. 

In fact, multiple Republican senators are currently blocking Biden nominations.

But somehow, this is Joe Biden's fault.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The big COVID story here in Cincy right now is that a judge in suburban Butler County (a.k.a Boehner Country) ordered West Chester Hospital to treat a COVID patient with Ivermectin, a horse dewormer with no known real benefits to treating COVID patients, but the judge ordered it anyway because...freedom or something.

A Butler County judge ruled in favor of a woman last week who sought to force a hospital to administer Ivermectin — an animal dewormer that federal regulators have warned against using in COVID-19 patients — to her husband after several weeks in the ICU with the disease.

Butler County Common Pleas Judge Gregory Howard ordered West Chester Hospital, part of the University of Cincinnati network, to treat Jeffrey Smith, 51, with Ivermectin. The order, filed Aug. 23, compels the hospital to provide Smith with 30mg of Ivermectin daily for three weeks.

The drug was originally developed to deworm livestock animals before doctors began using it against parasitic diseases among humans. Several researchers won a Nobel Prize in 2015 for establishing its efficacy in humans. It’s used to treat head lice, onchocerciasis (river blindness) and others.

Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned Americans against the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19, a viral disease. It’s unproven as a treatment, they say, and large doses of it can be dangerous and cause serious harm. A review of available literature conducted earlier this month by the journal Nature found there’s no certainty in the available data on potential benefits of Ivermectin.

The drug has grown in popularity among conservatives, fueled by endorsements from allies of former President Donald Trump like U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc. or Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. The CDC warned reports of poisoning related to use of Ivermectin have increased threefold this year, spiking in July.

Julie Smith filed the lawsuit on behalf of her husband of 24 years. He tested positive for COVID-19 July 9, was hospitalized and admitted to the ICU July 15, and was sedated and intubated and placed on a ventilator Aug. 1. He later developed a secondary infection he’s still wrestling with as of Aug. 23, court records say.

The lawsuit doesn’t mention whether Jeffrey Smith is vaccinated against COVID-19. However, overwhelming majorities of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated — data from the Ohio Department of Health shows of roughly 21,000 Ohioans hospitalized with COVID-19 since Jan. 1, only about 500 were vaccinated.

Julie Smith found Ivermectin on her own and connected with Dr. Fred Wagshul, an Ohio physician who her lawsuit identifies as “one of the foremost experts on using Ivermectin in treating COVID-19.” He prescribed the drug, and the hospital refused to administer it.

A hospital spokeswoman said she can’t comment on litigation and federal patient privacy laws prevent her from commenting on any specifics of patient care.

Smith is represented by New York attorney Ralph Lorigo, the chairman of New York’s Erie County Conservative Party, who has successfully filed one similar case against a Chicago area hospital and two more in Buffalo. He did not respond to an email or phone call.

The Ohio lawsuit makes reference to the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, a nonprofit of which Wagshul is listed as a founding physician. The organization touts Ivermectin as both a preventative and treatment for COVID-19. Its “How To Get Ivermectin” section includes prices and locations of pharmacies that will supply it, from Afghanistan to Fort Lauderdale to Pennsylvania to Sao Paulo, Brazil.

 

Rather than take the vaccine, now approved by the FDA, these pathetic losers are turning to a livestock dewormer to treat a virus because hey it's "like" a parasite and it should work, right, only people are ending up in the ER with poisoning issues, ER's filled with COVID patients by the way.

On top of that there's now an international network of ambulance chasers getting judges to force doctors to treat COVID patients with quackery.

This should be of national concern, but apparently there's literally so much garbage out there going on that we don't have time to address this nationally, and frankly doing so would set off multiple armed bloody insurrections across the United States because millions are willing to literally die in order to avoid the vaccine.

You can't reason with anyone willing to give their own life for a cause as ludicrous as this. It's well past the time we cut these assholes free and let brutal Darwinian consequences scour the playing field.

But here across the river in Kentucky, Sen. Rand Paul is gleefully blaming Democrats for COVID victims, saying that "Trump hatred" is preventing the FDA from taking Ivermectin "seriously" as a treatment.

Hatred of former President Donald Trump has kept researchers from looking into the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin and other drugs to treat COVID-19, Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told constituents on Friday.

The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control have warned people using ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic worm infections in humans and livestock, is dangerous. The FDA went as far as tweeting out a reminder on August 21, "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it."

But Paul encouraged more research.

"The hatred for Trump deranged these people so much, that they're unwilling to objectively study it," Paul said to the 60 people squeezed into the Cold Spring City Council chambers in this Northern Kentucky suburb just south of Cincinnati. "So someone like me that's in the middle on it, I can't tell you because they will not study ivermectin. They will not study hydroxychloroquine without the taint of their hatred for Donald Trump."

It's also why they don't research hydroxychloroquine, he said, an anti-malarial drug touted by Trump as a treatment.

The World Health Organization in April found based on six clinical trials that hydroxychloroquine "had little or no effect on preventing illness, hospitalization or death from COVID-19."

A woman in the audience had asked Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist, why ivermectin wasn't more available. The woman said she had some ivermectin stashed away "just in case."

Paul told her he didn't know if it works because there isn't enough research. When asked by The Enquirer after the meetings about the FDA and CDC warnings on ivermectin, Paul reiterated what he said in the town hall

"I don't know if it works, but I keep an open mind," Paul said.

 

There isn't enough research on whether or not wearing a necklace of geodes prevents COVID-19 infections either, and it's because it's ludicrous to waste time doing it. Even if there was a million pages of research, Rand Paul and his ilk would dismiss it anyway and just boot the goalposts into space.

The entire point here is for more people to die from COVID under Biden's term than under Trump's, so that the GOP "wins" the "competence argument", so Republicans are going to just continue to disinform the public until enough die from it.

So they can "win", thanks to a corrupt judicial that orders what doctors have to prescribe now, based on disinformation. That's frightening.

 

That's what matters to them. Winning, and you're the one who loses.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

Here in Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has ordered a school mask mandate and Republicans are vowing to overturn it as the court fight over powers stripped from the Governor's office drags on, but the Lexington Herald-Leader has consigned Beshear to the dustbin of history already saying that he went down doing the right thing.

 

For thousands of Kentucky children, the first day of school started with excitement, trepidation . . . and masks.

Yes, another start to school amid a flaring pandemic, only this time caused by many grown-ups’ willful disregard of the science. It’s not hard — if people won’t get vaccinated against COVID-19, and many Kentuckians won’t, then we must wear masks indoors.

Gov. Andy Beshear may have just signed away his chance to win re-election, but he did the right thing. The Delta variant is making more people and more children sick. Voluntary masking, as adopted by roughly two-thirds of Kentucky school districts, will not work. Universal masking, as Kentucky did last spring for a successful end to the school year, will.

His decision was bolstered by a new study out of North Carolina of 100 school districts — and nearly 1 million students —by two pediatric specialists at Duke University.

“Although vaccination is the best way to prevent Covid-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection,” the authors wrote.

Children under 12 cannot be vaccinated yet. So we have to find a way to protect them, and masks are the best way. To Kentucky adults who are not vaccinated and protest masks: You can’t have it both ways. Our children must bear the brunt of our selfishness, and masks are a relatively painless way to do that. The places where masks will not be required? Places that have high vaccination rates, where hospitals are not filling back up with COVID patients.

Yes, our children are anxious. But not because of masks. Because they are living in a pandemic that has been far too deadly, and all they can see and hear are adults screaming about freedom rather than doing all they can to stop the disease.

We know this. We did it last year. Fayette County did a tremendous job of keeping kids safe, healthy and learning, which is, in the end, the real goal.

That COVID-19 has become so politicized, and thus continues its reign is a huge disappointment and frustration.

 

Amen to that.

Honestly, I expect Beshear to lose by double digits in 2023, almost certainly replaced by GOP AG Daniel Cameron. Beshear will be vilified and hated and will probably lose his court battles, but hopefully by then COVID delta will be under control here.  The fatalism I'm seeing here is astounding: "We're all going to get COVID, the faster you accept that the faster this will be over" from the state's GOP and Rand Paul and Thomas Massie.

We can do better, but Republicans are stopping us.

Oh, and Rand Paul should be ejected from the Senate.

 

Sen. Rand Paul revealed Wednesday that his wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences — which makes an antiviral drug used to treat covid-19 — on Feb. 26, 2020, before the threat from the coronavirus was fully understood by the public and before it was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

The disclosure, in a filing with the Senate, came 16 months after the 45-day reporting deadline set forth in the Stock Act, which is designed to combat insider trading.

Experts in corporate and securities law said the investment, and especially the delayed reporting of it, undermined trust in government and raised questions about whether the Kentucky Republican’s family had sought to profit from nonpublic information about the looming health emergency and plans by the U.S. government to combat it. Several senators sold large amounts of stocks in January or February of last year, prompting a handful of insider-trading probes. Most of those investigations concluded in the spring of 2020, according to notifications from the Justice Department to lawmakers under scrutiny.

“The senator ought to have an explanation for the trade and, more importantly, why it took him almost a year and a half to discover it from his wife,” said James D. Cox, a professor of law at Duke University.

Kelsey Cooper, a spokeswoman for Paul, said the senator completed a reporting form for his wife’s investment last year but learned only recently, while preparing an annual disclosure, that the form had not been transmitted. He sought guidance from the Senate Ethics Committee, she said, and filed the supplemental report along with an annual disclosure Wednesday.

She also said Paul’s wife, Kelley, an author and former communications consultant, lost money on the investment, which she made with her own earnings. The purchase was of between $1,000 and $15,000 of stock in Gilead, which makes the antiviral drug known as remdesivir.

The drug was initially invented as a hepatitis C drug a decade ago and tested for possible use against other infectious diseases, such as Ebola. Remdesivir gained emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in May of last year and was administered to then-President Donald Trump when he was sick with covid-19 in October, before it gained full approval. Results of a WHO-sponsored study released later that month raised doubts about the drug’s effectiveness, prompting the agency to reverse itself and recommend against its use as a treatment for covid-19. The drug brought in $2.8 billion for Gilead last year.

Remdesivir was backed on Feb. 24, 2020 — two days before Kelley Paul’s purchase — by a WHO assistant director general, who described it as the only known drug that “may have real efficacy” in treating the novel virus.

The existence of public information causing Gilead’s stock to rise, said Joshua Mitts, an expert in securities law at Columbia University, doesn’t rule out the possibility that the senator gained additional knowledge in private. Paul is a member of the Senate health committee, which in January hosted Trump administration officials for a briefing on the coronavirus.

“Not everything about the product was necessarily clear from existing announcements,” Mitts said. “There could have been information about interest that certain individuals within administration may have had in the product, or that hospitals here in the U.S. were already loading up.”

Cooper said the senator attended no briefings on covid-19. Eight days after his wife invested in the company behind the antiviral drug thought to be effective against covid-19, Paul cast the lone vote in the Senate against $8.3 billion in emergency spending to combat the emerging outbreak.

 

And people will die as a result in Kentucky and across the country.

Rand Paul's Race To The Bottom, Con't

 GOP Sen. Rand Paul is a prat, as Zandardad will be the first to tell you.

Not for the first time this week, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul took his criticisms of newly inaugurated President Joe Biden to Fox News.

Speaking with conservative personality Sean Hannity Friday night, the Republican congressman repeated his claim that Biden's goal of increasing the national minimum wage to $15 would cause 4 million people to lose their jobs.

"And the people who lose their jobs first when you hike up the minimum wage are Black teenagers," Paul said. "So, you know, 'why does Joe Biden hate Black teenagers' should be the question. Why does Joe Biden want to destroy all these jobs?"

Paul's claim about job loss is a distortion of the Congressional Budget Office's median estimate, according to FactCheck.org at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Paul said Friday "even the government says that nearly 4 million people will lose their jobs" after the minimum wage hike, but the claim is a reference to the high end of the budget office's range of potential outcomes, according to FactCheck.org. The low end of the range was “about zero” jobs lost.

To support his claims, Paul's office sent the fact checking site a link to a July 2019 report from the budget office that did not say more than doubling the federal minimum wage would definitely result in about 4 million fewer people working.

 

To recap the spectacularly racist argument:

 

1. Black teenagers are primarily minimum wage workers, which is wrong. 42% of all American workers, three out of seven, make less than $15 an hour.
   
2. Raising the minimum wage would cost millions of jobs, again, wrong, for the reasons' listed above in the story.
3. Since one and two are both wrong, three, which is "job loss from raising the minimum wage would disproportionately cost Black folks jobs" is wrong, and even if it was higher, that highlights the problem of racist employers firing their Black workers.
4. Therefore, "Joe Biden is a racist" is stupid and wrong.

 

I'm not sure if Paul thinks Black Kentuckians are really stupid enough to fall for this, because if he's actually right, the racism against Black minimum wage employees is a structural racist reality that needs to be torn down immediately.

So in a way, I'm glad that Sen. Paul agrees that capitalism is racist.

Thanks for playing.

 

Shutdown Countdown: The Shutdownening

It wouldn't be December without Rand Paul's usual idiotic grandstanding against funding the government, with the added bonus of being during a lethal pandemic that has already killed almost 300,000 Americans. And even though the Senate passed the Defense Bill on Friday, Rand Paul is still a jackass.

Rand Paul is at it again. And his moves could force another brief government shutdown.

The Kentucky Republican is objecting to swift passage of the annual defense policy bill, effectively forcing senators to remain in Washington for an extra day as he filibusters the $740 billion legislation. But the government needs to be funded past Friday — and the short one-week spending bill can't be passed before then without agreement from all 100 senators to vote.

Paul, no stranger to filibusters, said in an interview Thursday that he opposes a provision in the bill that would hamstring the president’s ability to draw down American troops from Afghanistan.

“That amendment alone is enough to make me object to it, as well as the amount of spending,” he said. Removing a provision from a conference report would destroy a massive agreement on defense spending.

Paul said he would drop his objection if GOP leaders allowed a final vote on the National Defense Authorization Act on Monday, which would require the Senate to go through the procedural motions. But Republicans are eager to finish work on it this week, in addition to a one-week government funding bill to avoid a shutdown. Paul offered to allow swift passage of the stopgap funding bill if GOP leaders punt a final NDAA vote to Monday.

“It’s really just a function at this point of letting the clock run and seeing if we can get cooperation. Some of it’s our side, some of it’s their side,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). “If people come together we could probably wrap a couple of things up this week and then work on the big stuff — the spending bill and Covid package — next week.”

Drama on the floor ahead of a deadline is nothing new to Paul, who exerts major leverage over the Senate by seizing on imminent deadlines and pushing his priorities. Paul forced a brief shutdown in 2018 over his moves to cut spending, and using the shutdown deadline to try and get extra concessions on the defense bill is vintage Paul.

Republicans are hopeful that Paul will, at most, stretch things out right up to the Friday shutdown deadline. Asked how the Senate will deal with the logjam, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) replied: "I don't know the answer to that but I'm hopeful that it's just a short-term thing. We'll probably be here tomorrow. But I don't know how much longer. I can't imagine anybody wants [a shutdown]."

Other senators are also seeking to use the shutdown deadline to push their priorities. Conservatives want votes on legislation to prevent government shutdowns and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants a vote on new stimulus checks, Thune told reporters on Thursday afternoon.

"It is absolutely imperative that we provide $1,200 for every working-class adult and $500 for each of their children. This is what we did, unanimously, in the CARES package passed in March. This is what we must do now. Congress cannot go home until we address this crisis," Sanders said in a statement to POLITICO, before threatening to hold up the funding bill over his demand for stimulus checks.

The defense bill, which Trump has threatened to veto, passed on a veto-proof majority in the House earlier this week and is expected to win similar support in the Senate, though some Republicans may ultimately side with the president on a veto-override question.

 

Just ridiculous nonsense, but it's what Rand Paul does,folks. If he can't scuttle the entire Defense bill, he'll force a shutdown right at Christmastime to just remind people how broken Rand Paul can make government,and he'll easily win reelection for his stupidity in a few years.

I wonder how many Kentuckians here realize how much damage he's doing to them personally along with Mitch, but it's clear voters here are going to reelect them for as long as they want.

The Return Of The Revenge Of The Son Of Shutdown Countdown, Again

Government shutdown happens on September 30, and even in a Presidential election year, the Trump regime may still be incompetent enough to hand Joe Biden a guaranteed victory.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have tentatively agreed to use a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September, according to Capitol Hill aides.

The agreement on government funding comes even as the White House and top Democratic officials have been unable to reach a compromise on a new Covid relief package. Pelosi and Mnuchin spoke for more than 30 minutes earlier this week but remain hundreds of billions of dollars apart on additional stimulus efforts to help the slumping U.S. economy.

Yet separating the issue of government funding from coronavirus relief talks removes at least one nightmare scenario from the political landscape two months before Election Day — a stalemate on more economic stimulus coupled with federal agencies shut down and vital services halted in the middle of a pandemic.

“House Democrats are for a clean continuing resolution," Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for Pelosi, said in a statement.

Mnuchin may be confident, but I smell trouble in the Senate.

There is no consensus for how long the stopgap would extend government funding past Sept. 30, Hill aides said. House and Senate Democratic leaders haven't formally discussed the issue yet, although a mid-December deadline would be the traditional practice during an election year.

The Senate returns to session next week, while the House is not back from its summer recess until midmonth. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other top Senate Republicans are trying to gather support for a narrow coronavirus relief package that can get at least 51 GOP votes. Democrats will oppose the plan, so it's unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to advance.

The new Senate Republican proposal — costing as much as $1 trillion — is expected to include $300 in weekly federal unemployment benefits through the end of December, another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses, $105 billion for education, and liability protections for companies, schools and health care providers amid the pandemic, according to a draft proposal. The bill would also provide billions to the U.S. Postal Service by converting an existing loan into a grant. The House has passed legislation calling for $25 billion in new funding for the Postal Service, but the White House has supported only $10 billion.

This territory is ripe for a Rand Paul special, or maybe even a Lindsey Graham special if the polls are any indication.  I just don't see a continuing resolution pass without something going wrong thanks to the Senate GOP, Mitch's election and Trump's both be damned.

And hey, Trump could just blow everything up himself.

Might want to pull up a chair for this one.

Last Call For The Rand Grandstand

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a man I am utterly disgusted by to have representing me in the US Senate, was out last night confronting protesters with a phalanx of armed police, trying to provoke a violent event. Since it didn't happen, he's calling for all the protesters to be arrested by the FBI anyway.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul is calling for the FBI to arrest the few dozens protestors who hassled him after he left President Donald Trump’s RNC speech Thursday night. The Kentucky Libertarian Republican’s claims don’t appear to match the reality of what happened, based on multiple videos.

Sen. Paul says he and his wife left the White House and at some point instead of taking a shuttle they decided to walk several blocks to their hotel.

At 1:39 AM he posted this tweet:

Just got attacked by an angry mob of over 100, one block away from the White House. Thank you to @DCPoliceDept for literally saving our lives from a crazed mob.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 28, 2020

Later, he went on “Fox & Friends,” which told viewers based on the videos it was more like about 30 people, not 100.

Paul, who all by himself for months has been holding up Senate passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act – which already passed the House almost unanimously, 410-4 on February 26 – claims he and his wife could have been killed.

“They were inciting a riot and they would have killed us had the police not been there,” Paul told Fox News. 

“I truly believe this with every fiber of my being, had they gotten at us they would have gotten us to the ground, we might not have been killed, might just have been injured by being kicked in the head, or kicked in the stomach until we were senseless,” he added.

And he’s pushing a literal conspiracy theory.

“I believe there are going to be people who are involved with the attack on us that actually were paid to come here, are not from Washington, D.C., and are sort of paid to be anarchists,” Paul says. “This is disturbing because really, if you’re inciting a riot that’s a crime, but if you’re paying someone to incite a riot that person needs to go to jail as well.”

Fox News adds, “the senator is still calling on the FBI to make arrests and conduct an investigation into the ‘interstate criminal traffic being paid for across state lines’ because people have already been killed in other cities.”

It does not appear Paul offered any evidence of “interstate criminal traffic being paid for across state lines.”

Let's frame this correctly from the word go here: Paul did this on purpose.  Like every US Senator, he has a car service.  He could have gone to his hotel in minutes.  But he chose to confront a crowd, with a phalanx of Capitol police protection mind you, and provoked them. This was planned.

They yelled back at him like I would have if I had been there.  And Paul is trying to turn this literally into a federal case against the people who hurt his feelings.

Snowflake.

Rand Paul was in more danger from his Neo-Praetorian Guard than he was from the protesters. But the greater issue is that not only is he trying to impress Dear Leader, he's trying to get people arrested like the fascist he is.

It's what he is, and what he does. The Libertarian, small government act is just that, an act, an affectation. What he really wants is government power used ruthlessly against his enemies and against them alone.

That's fascism, folks.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Never forget that Rand Paul is just as much of a hateful old Southern racist as Mitch McConnell is.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) acknowledged Wednesday that he is holding up a bill with broad bipartisan support that would make lynching a federal hate crime, saying he fears it could allow enhanced penalties for altercations that result in only “minor bruising.”

Paul’s objection halted a measure that appeared on the verge of getting to the president’s desk earlier this year after more than a century of stymied attempts by Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation. And it comes amid a nationwide convulsion over the treatment of black Americans by law enforcement officers.

“We think that lynching is an awful thing that should be roundly condemned, that should be universally condemned,” Paul told reporters at the Capitol.

But he claimed that the bill might “conflate lesser crimes with lynching,” which he said would be a “disservice to those who were lynched in our history” and result in “a new 10-year penalty for people who have minor bruising.”

“We don’t think that’s appropriate, and someone has to read these bills and make sure they do what they say they’re going to do rather than it be just a big PR effort, and then everybody gets up in arms and wants to beat up anybody who wants to read the bill, and actually make the bill strong,” he said.

Paul’s office did not immediately respond to a request for elaboration on how the bill could apply to altercations that result in “minor bruising.”
The hold on the legislation was reported Tuesday night by the National Journal.

In late February, during Black History Month, the House passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act on a 410-to-4 vote after oftentimes emotional floor debate.

Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), who sponsored the legislation, said the bill will “send a strong message that violence, and race-based violence in particular, has no place in American society.”

Supporters had hoped that the Senate would quickly take up the bill and pass it by unanimous consent — a procedure that would demonstrate widespread support but one that can be derailed by the objections of a single senator.

A separate version of the measure, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, passed the Senate last year. It was introduced by the chamber’s three black senators: Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). But it did not pass in the House.

Asked Wednesday what the status of the latest bill is, Paul said he is continuing to talk to its authors but said reporters should inquire with them as to where it stands.

Rand Paul's been blocking federal hate crime legislation against lynching for months now, because he's more worried about the rights of people who hang black people by a rope. Legislation that was passed by the House and held up by...Rand Paul.

Because he's a racist asshole.

Never forget that.

Last Call For The GOP Goes Viral, Con't

As the Trump Depression becomes more apparent by the day and Trump needs a steady stream of villains to blame for it all, some Republican governors and senators are starting to get, well, pretty sick, of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Anthony Fauci came to the Senate, virtually, to issue a dire warning against reopening the country too soon amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic. But his message fell flat with some of his intended audience. 

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, are eager to revive the flailing economy. And resuming commerce at some level this spring and summer is central to the GOP’s message that it can turn around the economy before November. They’re also aiming to do so without adopting House Democrats’ plans for more multi-trillion-dollar stimulus bills. 

But Fauci’s Tuesday testimony clashes with the GOP’s vision, and it’s fueling growing fatigue among Republicans with one of the government’s most trusted public health leaders at a critical moment.

“There’s a spectrum of everything. And I think he’s on the overly cautious end of the spectrum,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said after parrying with Fauci at the hearing. “I don’t think he’s doing it because he’s a bad person, but if we’re overly cautious and we wait until all infectious disease goes away… we’ll wait forever and the country is going to be destroyed.” 

Sen. Mike Braun said Paul's view will be vindicated. 

“When we get this in the rearview mirror and do the dispassionate debrief, Sen. Paul’s going to be closer to right than Fauci,” said the Indiana Republican, who also attended the hearing. “I never did like the idea that you treated the entirety of the country, and even counties within a state, the same way.” 

The nation’s top infectious disease expert testified to the Republican-controlled Senate that there could be “serious” consequences if states open up too early, and he urged them to follow federal guidelines to prevent a second wave of outbreaks. Fauci also downplayed the prospects of a quick vaccine or treatment for the disease this fall. 

Meanwhile, GOP senators and governors in both parties say that lifting stay-at-home orders can be done safely and have begun to crack open a diverse array of states before meeting federal benchmarks. 

Fauci’s testimony comes as House Democrats are preparing to pass a $3 trillion relief bill later this week. But rather than plunge immediately into talks with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his members are banking on the idea that as states reopen, less money will need to come from Washington.

Asked whether Americans should be listening to Fauci’s caution or Trump’s economic-focused optimism, McConnell said they can do both. 

“We can’t spend enough money to prop this economy up forever. People need to be able to begin to be productive again,” McConnell told reporters. 

Fauci has served six presidents and knows how to offer advice in Washington without being thrown overboard. And aside from Paul, few senators took direct shots at him in interviews with a wide array of lawmakers on Tuesday afternoon. 

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been viewed by both parties as a plain-spoken, commonsense guide during the frightening coronavirus crisis even as Trump himself has oscillated between urging a quick reopening to adopting Fauci’s approach. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Fauci “the gold standard” and said he will “continue to listen to him.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Fauci and other public experts have “spoken truth to power as best they can, obviously with some degree of diplomacy and qualification.” 

Yet as Americans grow weary of isolation, with some states’ shutdowns entering their third month, Paul showed that sentiment is extending toward Fauci himself in some parts of the GOP. 

At one point, Paul questioned Fauci’s methodology on coronavirus’ effects on children and said that he is not “the end all" of decison-making. Fauci responded that he has “never made myself out to be the end all and only voice on this.” 

“He has a very valuable voice in this discussion. He’s got a field of expertise that’s important to hear from,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). “But it’s only one of many considerations we have to make as a society. Because we have to make trade-offs.”

Senate Republicans and governors don't want to go down with the SS Trumptanic in November, but they are starting to look at maybe Fauci as being a possible fall guy.  At the very least, Fauci still has support of most of DC, but some Senate Republicans are openly signaling that they won't be sad to see him go should Trump cut him loose.

We'll see how long he lasts.  My guess is much like Alex Azar, he won't be around much longer.  Azar has survived one storm at least, but again, Trump will need a constant stream of scapegoats, and November is a long, long way off as far as daily news cycles to be controlled.