Author Archives: eehines

Biden’s Pick to Run the CDC

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With the current CDC honcho leaving the position at the end of the week, President Joe Biden (D) has picked Mandy Cohen, ex-North Carolina Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to run the agency. This is the woman who, while in the NC government,

  • acceded to Anthony Fauci’s words and directions unquestioningly throughout the Wuhan Virus Situation
  • idolized Fauci with a mask featuring his image
  • imposed harsh restrictions that disrupted everyday life with no medical—or any other—benefit
  • bragged about enforcing mass shutdowns

Nominees to the CDC Directorship aren’t subject to Senate Advice and Consent, so Biden can just appoint her.

However.

The Congress can have an impact on her appointment: the House can decline, through the appropriate appropriations bill, to fund the position of CDC Director and the Immediate Office of the Director, with the latter’s 10 Offices and Chief of Staff, until a suitable Director is appointed. The House can decline to fund the CDC as a whole. The Senate can pass the House’s bill and send the relevant appropriations bill to the President.

All that would take is the political will of the Republican majority in the House along with unified Senate Republicans in conjunction with the House declining to pass any sort of budget item via reconciliation.

What are Biden and Austin Up To?

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US military retirees living in Turkey are about to lose access to the US base at Incirlik and to all other American bases in the country. The loss will take effect 1 October of this year. Among other things, this will mean our veterans will lose access to

  • base commissaries, which sell American groceries
  • Army and Air Force Exchange Service stores—Base Exchanges—which3 sell American goods
  • US post office services, including PO Boxes through which our veterans
    • receive and send back their absentee ballots for American elections
    • receive American medicines

The commander of the US presence on Incirlik, USAF Colonel Calvin Powell, has said the ban is related to a changing Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Turkey, but this is hard to credit. Similar bans are being contemplated at US presences around the world: Aviano Air Base in Italy and the US presences in the Philippines, for instance.

Hence my question: what are SecDef Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden (D) up to now?

No, She Wasn’t

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College volleyball player Macy Petty reacted favorably on Fox News @ Night to the House passing a bill banning biological males from competing in college sports. She also asked ChatGPT to help her shorten a tweet she wanted to transmit as part of an ongoing Twitter debate regarding transgenders and women’s sports. She was attempting to explain

that I’m an NCAA athlete, and that it’s important to champion the voice of female athletes and to stand up against this ideological war that’s going on that’s putting women in danger and taking away the opportunities for scholarships[.]

“ChatGPT” proceeded to berate her for her position instead of doing the task she’d asked the software to do, and Petty objected. She’s right to object to ChatGPT’s bigoted “correction” and “suggested” better tweet, but her opprobrium is misaimed. It wasn’t ChatGPT that berated her; it was the programmers and their supervisors who berated her via their software.

AIs, including ChatGPT, are not free agents; they cannot act independently. Like all software, they only do what they’ve been programed to do by their human programmers, and those programmers write only what their human supervisors permit them to write.

Petty was scolded by the Leftist programmer staff who wrote the AI software and programed it with Leftist biases and, in the present case, the exclusionism of allowing women only to play along in their own sports, but not actually to compete.

Full stop.

Channeling Fauci

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Anthony Fauci, late of the Federal government, infamously claimed that an attack on him was an attack on science.

Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science[.]

Now Attorney General Merrick Garland is echoing that self-important, arrogant sentiment and broadening it to include all of the Department of Justice, and not just him personally.

Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department… This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy.

Because DoJ and every part of it are above criticism.

In the clip at the second link above, the question put to Garland concerned impeachment considerations regarding FBI Director Chris Wray and other men and women in leadership positions in the FBI and elsewhere in DoJ. Garland cynically talked, instead, about the quality of performance of the line agents in the FBI and elsewhere in DoJ.

That government attitude—that we’re above criticism, and government men don’t have to answer your questions—is what is an attack on American democracy.

Censured

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Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA) was censured by the House of Representatives last Wednesday. The question now is, What’s next? Mechanically, what’s next is referring Schiff to the House Ethics Committee

for investigation over his “falsehoods, misrepresentations, and abuse of sensitive information[.]”

The question, though, carries a related one on its back: So what? Censure and standing in the well of the House while the rebuke is read out to him by the Speaker are supposed to be shaming and an embarrassment for the Congressman being censured. But what happens if the censuree feels no shame, if his fellows celebrate his censure?

That puts a premium on actual and firm sanctions commensurate with the severity of the behavior that led to the Censure. That puts a premium on the Ethics Committee to take Schiff’s misbehaviors seriously.

I’m not sanguine that the Ethics Committee will do anything meaningful, especially after six members of the House Republican Caucus voted “Present,” not believing Schiff’s misbehavior important enough for an affirmative vote for Censure. I’m not surprised, though, at the uniform “No” vote from Schiff’s Party colleagues. Such misbehaviors are core inventory for the Progressive-Democratic Party.