Tag: Rand Paul

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national politics & policies regulation subsidy

The Great De-Platforming?

Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, AM radio, technology, regulations, mandates

“There is a certain amount of irony in seeing Republicans come to the floor proposing mandates on business,” said Senator Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) in the U.S. Senate, yesterday. Kentucky’s junior senator objected “to Republicans picking winners and losers.”

At issue is a bill pushed by Senator Ted Cruz (R‑Tx.), the AM For Every Vehicle Act. Automobile manufacturers are phasing out amplitude modulation (AM) on radio receivers, and Cruz objects primarily on two rationales: 

  1. emergency roadway communications rely upon AM frequencies, and 
  2. since conservatives dominate AM talk radio, the move looks suspiciously like a sneaky way to decrease conservative and Republican political influence. 

“AM radio is where a lot of talk radio is found,” argues Cruz, “and talk radio is overwhelmingly conservative. And let’s be clear: Big business doesn’t like things that are overwhelmingly conservative.”

Technology and media change all the time, and as ostensible advocates for free markets, it’s no business of Republicans so much as to nudge the market in one direction or the other. Perhaps AM’s days are numbered. 

Shed a tear and move on.

Cruz characterizes the issue as one of free speech. Paul expresses incredulity: “The debate over free speech, as listed in the First Amendment, is that government shall pass no law. It has nothing to do with forcing your manufacturer to have AM radio.”

It gets messier: electric car manufacturers say that the AM band interferes with their batteries, and the technology to shield the batteries is expensive. So Cruz’s law would forbid companies from charging more for this tech.

If you ask me, the batteries being harmed by AM radio indicates a glaring defect not in a radio platform but in the platform of electric cars.

So it’s great that Rand Paul’s amendment to undermine Cruz’s mandate would also nix the electric car tax credit. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

COVID Cover-​Up Criminal

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Covid, Rand Paul

On February 11, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci participated in a conference call with about a dozen scientists. The nation’s highest paid government bureaucrat was told that the quickly spreading COVID might have leaked from and even been created in the Wuhan lab, which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, which Fauci heads) was funding, in part, through EcoHealth Alliance. 

What did Fauci do?

He worked mightily to discredit the idea.

That is, he engaged in a cover-up.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci about all this. Indeed, he posed a number of very specific questions, and got — for his trouble — generalities and counter-​assertions from Fauci. 

The trail of evidence linking Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Anthony Fauci of NIAID to the gain of function research (along with a Chinese plan to release “novel chimeric spike proteins” into Chinese air with the alleged aim of infecting bats) has been confirmed on the Pentagon end — Senator Paul referenced work by Project Veritas that performed this service. 

There’s really little question that gain-​of-​function was developed in Wuhan at the instigation of the Daszak-​Fauci team. And that it was done despite DARPA’s reluctance, despite U.S. law. 

Let’s hope that Fauci’s cover-​up was merely of a dangerous policy that would end in disaster and death, and the ruination of his reputation, not a genocidal conspiracy worthy of taking to The Hague for prosecution as a crime against humanity.

But everyone knows that cover-​ups imply criminality. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Death By Definition?

Rand Paul

“What we’re alleging is that gain-​of-​function research was going on in that [Wuhan] lab and NIH funded it,” Sen. Rand Paul told Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 37 years and the chief medical advisor to the president, at a Senate hearing last week.

Paul contended that Fauci had lied to Congress by claiming “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” when NIH did indeed finance such activity in that lab.

But Fauci denied that research met the official definition of “gain of function.”*

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?” the senator asked incredulously.

“That is correct,” replied Fauci, before adding, “And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Many scientists,” writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, “think Paul actually does know what he’s talking about. One of them is Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert Richard Ebright, whom Paul quoted as saying this research ‘matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research.’”

The dispute pits Kentucky’s junior senator, concerned over what actually happened, against the bureaucrat, wiggling out from the bad odor of a terrible policy by, apparently, redefining terms. 

Mere logomachy.

“What everyone can now see clearly,” suggests Rogin, “is that NIH was collaborating on risky research with a Chinese lab that has zero transparency and zero accountability during a crisis — and no one in a position of power addressed that risk.”**

“Fauci is arguing the system worked,” the columnist maintains. “It didn’t.”

The senator has officially referred the matter of Fauci’s fibbing to Congress to the Justice Department for possible (but unlikely) prosecution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Any kind of animal virus that occurs in nature, that infects animals only, if you recombine it or mutate it or adapt it in the lab with other viruses so it has characteristics that change it from being an animal-​only virus to being a virus that now can infect humans, that you’ve gained in function, you’ve gained pathogenesis or you’ve gained virulence — you’ve made it more dangerous,” Sen. Paul explained to Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. “Without question this is what happened in the Wuhan lab.”

** “According to an intelligence fact sheet released by the Trump administration and partially confirmed by the Biden administration,” Rogin also points out, “the WIV took our help and used it to build another, secret part of the lab, where they worked with the Chinese military.”

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Accountability insider corruption local leaders national politics & policies Voting

Bring the Bozos Home

telecommute, Rand Paul, Congress, Senate, Coronavirus, Corona Virus, computer, laptop,

“Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) announced Sunday he has covid-​19,” The Washington Post reports, “and four other GOP senators are quarantined. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D‑Minn.) disclosed Monday that her husband, too, is infected with the virus.”

Social media was not uniformly brimming with support for the Kentucky senator, of course, and some folks noted, in earnest horror, that the Republican who had been shot at by a Bernie Bro and blindsided by his deranged Democrat neighbor had dared work six days in the Senate after being tested but before receiving his diagnosis.

He should have been sequestered!

To let the big “stimulus” packages sail through Congress?

But there are work-arounds.

“We should not be physically present on this floor at this moment,” argued Sen. Richard Durbin (D‑Ill.) yesterday, urging the Senate to facilitate social distancing by allowing remote voting. Asked about it at his Sunday news conference, President Trump gave thumbs up: “I would be totally in favor of it on a temporary basis.”

I say, let’s take this a step further: do it permanently. 

Remote voting makes sense in an emergency. Sure. But it also makes sense all the time, because legislators voting from their home states and districts rather than within the Washington swamp would hear more from constituents than special interest lobbyists and, therefore, likely represent us better. 

Plus, not tethered to life in Washington, or the confines of the capitol, we might reduce the size of congressional districts from over 700,000 people to more like 70,000 and see real representation return to our land. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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telecommute, Rand Paul, Congress, Senate, Coronavirus, Corona Virus,

Original photo by Manuel Bahamondez H

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people Snowden

The Whistleblower Who Shall Not Be Named

Rand Paul

“YouTube — Google, one of the largest, most powerful companies on the planet — has just censored political discourse from a U.S. senator on the Senate floor,” reports independent, online journalist Tim Pool. 

The case refers to the alleged “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, around whom hangs a sort of hush-​hush infamy regarding the Ukraine phone call that became the centerpiece of the Democrat’s impeachment of Donald Trump. YouTube, under a self-​imposed/​tribe-​imposed gag order not to mention the man’s name, takes down all videos that dare breach this rule. YouTube just took down a C‑Span video featuring Senator Rand Paul discussing Mr. Ciaramella on the Senate floor — in which he defended whistleblower protections, but notes that they do not enforce anonymity.*

“Think about how dangerous that will be.”

“It is a chilling and disturbing day in America when giant web companies such as YouTube decide to censure [sic] speech,” the senator was quoted in The Washington Examiner after YouTube removed the clip. “Now, even protected speech, such as that of a senator on the Senate floor, can be blocked from getting to the American people.”

Rand Paul has been demanding full disclosure of possible conspiracy on the part of Ciaramella — working with Representative Adam Schiff, who led the impeachment push — but has not been getting very far. During the Senate impeachment trial, presiding officer Chief Justice Roberts declined to read a question (“as written”) by the senator that had specified the Unnamable Name without identifying him as the “whistleblower.”

Google is free to play censor, of course, but who wants an information age without the information?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The senator also expressed some incredulity about the near-​universal proclamations in support of whistleblower laws, calling Edward Snowden “the greatest whistleblower of all-​time” but noting that half the Senate wanted Snowden put to death and the other half to plunk him “in jail forever. So it depends on what you blow the whistle on whether or not they’re for the whistleblower statute.”

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Rand Paul

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Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Working for Whom?

Rand Paul, John McCain, Vladimir Putin, balanced budget, spending cap

Two articles on Sen. Rand Paul appeared in my Reason feed the other day. Up top. 

So it was hard not to look. 

They were “John McCain: It ‘Wasn’t Incorrect’ to Say Rand Paul Was ‘Working for Vladimir Putin’” and “Rand Paul’s Plan to Balance the Budget by 2023 Will Get a Senate Vote This Week.”

The latter story is the bigger one, of course. In it, Eric Boehm asked, “Do Republicans have the guts to impose strict spending caps?”

His answer was “probably not.” Good guess.

“Passing the Kentucky Republican’s so-​called ‘Penny Plan’ would be a dramatic reversal for Congress,” Boehm wrote, “which earlier this year approved enormous spending hikes that busted Obama-​era spending caps and threaten to put the country on pace for a $1 trillion annual deficits.… Paul tells Politico that it will be a ‘litmus test for Republicans who claim to be conservative, but are only too happy to grow the federal government and increase our debt.’”

I am afraid the litmus paper has turned … red. As in red ink. As in accumulating debt till we drop.

Yesterday Paul’s plan was voted down, 21 – 76.

In the other Reason piece, Matt Welch noted that Arizona’s senior senator stands by his calumny, last year, against Kentucky’s junior senator. Paul had delayed “ratification of Montenegro’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).” McCain, a gung-​ho NATO expansion proponent, accused Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.”

If Putin really seethes with ill will towards America, wouldn’t he want to see the country burdened with debt? 

So, on this vote, those 76 senators who didn’t “stand with Rand” are undoubtedly working for Putin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo of Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore | Photo of John McCain from Wikimedia Commons