Category: government transparency

A Bazooka to Congress

It is “like bringing a bazooka to a sword fight,” complains an anonymous long-serving Democratic congressional aide.

“Democratic leaders are hammering Republicans,” Mike Lillis explains in The Hill.

At issue? The House Republican caucus is “considering term limits,” Punchbowl News was first to report, “on committee leaders of both parties if the GOP flips control of the House next year.”

Republicans, since taking Congress back in the 1994 term limits wave, have mostly imposed a three-term limit on committee chairmanships, when in the majority, and on a committee’s ranking opposition member, when in the opposition. What may be different in the next Congress is that Republicans are looking to impose term-limits on committee leaders of both parties.

Democrats, too. By House rule.

Though Democratic Party bigwigs won’t like it . . . especially current committee chairs who would get the heave-ho next year, such as Representatives Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) now in his 34th year in Congress; Bobby Scott (D-Va.), in his 30th year; Adam Smith (D-Wash.) in his 26th year; Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), in his 26th year; and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), in her 32nd year.*

Some younger congressional Democrats, on the other hand, see term limits . . . as an opportunity.

“High functioning organizations become so by building strong benches and limiting the tenure of leaders,” tweeted Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), now in his 4th year. “No matter which party controls Congress in ’23, we should adopt term limits for committee chairs & get serious about developing a new generation of leaders.”

Lillis calls it “a recurring predicament for Democratic leaders.”

But no fuss at all for the rest of us: we’re for term limits. On committee leadership as well as Congress membership.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Even without this change, these Democrats would lose their chairmanships in the next Congress, should the GOP gain a majority in this November’s elections. But with this change they would also be denied the position of ranking member and thus would lose their hold on the chairmanship if Democrats won back the majority in 2024.

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Tags Congress, House of Representatives, leadership, Senate, term limits

government transparency international affairs

No Reason?

“Are we ever going to find out the truth of where COVID-19 came from?” Sophie Raworth, host of the BBC’s Sunday Morning, asked Dr. Anthony Fauci recently.

“Given the fact that there are such restrictions on ability to really investigate it,” the chief medical adviser to the president admitted, “I’m not sure.” Still, Fauci argued, “the data are accumulating over the last few months much more heavily weighted that this was a natural occurrence from an animal species.”

“However,” he added, “we must keep an open mind.”

Is Fauci’s mind open? His “data” argument is ridiculous bull.

Raworth then pointed out that World Health Organization “investigators” who traveled to Wuhan “were prevented from seeing key details and from speaking to key people. Why do you think the Chinese government did that?”

“You know,” replied Fauci, “I don’t want to create any or mention any disparaging remarks about that.”

No?

“But the Chinese are very closed, in a way of being very reluctant, particularly when you have a disease that evolves in their country,” he went on, “they become extremely secretive — even though there is no reason to be secretive.”

No reason? How does Dr. Fauci know that the genocidal totalitarian Chinese Communist Party has no motive behind their opaque response to the origin of COVID-19 (about which, remember, he has a completely open mind)?

“So, when they see something evolving in their own country,” Fauci explained, “they tend to have a natural reflex of not necessarily covering things up but of not being very open and transparent.”

Get that? A completely innate thing, totally unavoidable.

Fauci himself has long seemed “closed, in a way very reluctant” on the subject. Why? Not because “the disease” “evolved” in his labs, but because he and his colleagues outsourced work on bat coronaviruses to China.

Both parties have every reason to be . . . less than transparent.

With no Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom government transparency too much government

The Allure of the Mask

Early on in the pandemic, I promoted mask-wearing as something we could do to protect ourselves, loved ones, and our communities.

But as the pandemic progressed, we learned some things.

Over time, I became more skeptical of much good coming from mask-wearing.

Now that the panic portion of the pandemic is mostly over — and what a long panic it was! — we should be able to more calmly review.

Two months ago, Vinay Prasad, an actual epidemiologist, looked carefully at the CDC’s study allegedly showing a high medical efficacy in universal mask-wearing during a major contagion. The study, he argued, was plagued with “very poor quality data, insufficient to support community masking, particularly for years on end. Cloth masks had especially bad data. Data to support masking kids was absolutely absent.” And the CDC’s own reporting of what its study actually found was unreliable and . . . well, dishonest.

Take the case of Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Pre-pandemic, community masking was discouraged because the pre-existing evidence was negative,” explained Prasad. “This is why Fauci was critical of it in early March 2020 on 60 minutes.”

But many of us were perhaps unduly pro-mask because Fauci appeared to be protecting the supply of masks used by medical professionals, thus, lying for a strategic reason. It was hard not to learn a . . . dubious . . . lesson: Fauci lied to protect professional mask use, so masks for the masses likely worked well.

Then he changed tune. And went off the deep end, ignoring his previous statements and advocating double- and triple-masking!

Still, the most ominous issue about mask mandates is how it became “a marker of politics. Good liberals wear them and bad conservatives don’t.”

Prasad does not go where Matthias Desmet and others have: showing how mask mandates became a means to induce panic and the politicization of medicine.

Voluntary masking without mandates — as has been commonly the case in Japan, for example — provides important signals about infection rates, and allows people to negotiate their own physical distancing. Universal mask mandates spoil the informative aspect and instead serve tyrants and mass hysteria.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags covid, Dr. Fauci, masks, pandemic, panic

government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

Pucker Up

“Never have so few applied so much lipstick to such a pig.”

That’s what term limits activist Kurt O’Keefe told the Michigan Board of Canvassers last week, as it considered the official title for a citizen initiative that he argues is anything but.

The Detroit attorney points out that the proposed ballot measure — sponsored by a group named Voters for Transparency and Term Limits — actually comes from “current and future politicians” and “current and future lobbyists.”

These insiders, who’ve “never been in favor” of term limits, seek to replace the 6- and 8-year cap now in place in the House and Senate, respectively, with a 12-year overall limit in both houses. At the hearing, proponents argued that the ballot title should declare simply that their measure reduces the current term limits — even though it would double terms in the House and up the Senate cap by 50 percent.

The initiative would also allow former Speakers and previously termed-out legislators to return like the undead to their former capitol haunts.

“This is a trick,” warned U.S. Term Limits National Field Director Scott Tillman. “We know it is a trick. They know it is a trick. They had to sweeten it up with transparency.”

That’s the lipstick.

Yet, the transparency fix, instead of simply enacting a financial disclosure system, orders the legislature to do so. Of course, the legislature cannot be forced to legislate, so the measure encourages endless lawsuits against the legislature.

As if to further show just how sincere these politicians are, their “voters” front-group has raked in $5 million from “unknown sources,” according to the Michigan Information & Research Service.

They are transparent only in their self-serving insincerity.

Oink oink.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Lab Leak Not Disproved

A Wuhan wet market is ground zero of the pandemic;
COVID-19 could not have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

At least, so say many “science reporters” commenting on recent research about the origin of the virus. Former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade begs to differ.

Wade (whom we’ve cited before) says it’s possible that the virus jumped from an animal host or that it originated in a Wuhan lab. Although both can’t be true, “so far, no direct evidence exists for either.”*

He expounds:

The cited research papers, still un-peer-reviewed, do not contradict circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.
Nor do they show that the virus originated in the wet market. Even if the earliest known case were of a person attending the market, one can’t know whether he got infected there or brought the infection with him from a lab.
One paper looks only at data from December 2019 and later. Yet the epidemic had been underway for weeks.
The same paper claims that the distribution of cases with no overt connection to the wet market is so similar to that of the market-related cases that the former cases must also be connected to the market.

But the outside-the-market cases selected for study by Chinese authorities — by Xi Jinping himself for all we know — were not randomly selected. One criterion was proximity to the wet market.

So: massive selection bias.

And a pandemic of unscientific reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Wade does not consider some of the smoking-gun type evidence for gain-of-function we’ve mentioned in the past, like the Moderna patent.

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bat!

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government transparency international affairs

U.S. Patent 9,587,003 B2

“Study finds genetic code in Covid’s spike protein linked to Moderna patent,” reads the headline in the Daily Mail. The story is another in a long chain of revelations linking American researchers and funding to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, that likely created the novel coronavirus.

But wait! some readers will shout. Isn’t the big COVID Origin story right now the new studies strongly pushing the Bat Soup (wet market) origin?

No. Those studies are slapdash — perhaps designed to balance against the continuing scientific revelations pointing to SARS-CoV-2 as a gain-of-function job funded in part by American taxpayers.

The far more important story tells us that an “international team of researchers” discovered a tell-tale string of genetic code “in SARS-CoV-2’s unique furin cleavage site, the part that makes it so good at infecting people and separates it from other coronaviruses.” It’s a key part of the infamous “spiked protein.” The Daily Mail piece by Connor Boyd explains that this “structure has been one of the focal points of debate about the virus’s origin, with some scientists claiming it could not have been acquired naturally.”

The research team claims that “there is a one-in-three-trillion chance Moderna’s sequence randomly appeared through natural evolution.”

And by “Moderna’s sequence” the scientists mean a genetic product that the company patented in its cancer research projects.

This is all still controversial, of course, but it is worth noting that much of past controversy consisted of desperate attempts by the Dr. Fauci/Peter Daszak faction to avoid any responsibility for what may be history’s greatest medical malpractice case.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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