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I mentioned yesterday in several tweets that Dr. Fauci was too polite to quote Isaac Asimov to the optimistically ignorant Rand Paul:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

This, BTW is the root of our problem; the reason we have this unqualified, inept TV reality show host posing as POTUS and still adored by his ignorant cult base.

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Dr. Fauci is FAILING. I am done with him. I even wrote him a letter. You can't keep standing up there and saying, "I'm concerned." We need ACTION. We need clear, concise, consistent messaging. Recently UK's Royal Society put out a statement suggesting the message should be: "YOUR MASK PROTECTS ME, MY MASK PROTECTS YOU." This, plus hammering home the studies which show that we can CRUSH the virus if everyone complied. Then, we'd be back to opening up more quickly.

Instead, we have Fauci and the media shouting how bad the numbers are. This means NOTHING to people who think it's no worse than the flu and that they have a right to inflict others with a deadly virus. We also need more coverage of how ravaging this virus can be to the body, underlying conditions or not, from former patients and medical professional--and morticians.

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I agree. As much as I respect Fauci, I do think that need to focus more on what you said how this virus effects the body, etc. I was talking to a friend last night who thinks that the numbers are inflated and that this is overhyped (UGH!). She does wear a mask, so that's a plus. The problem is, our nation is so selfish that people don't think about others and see all of this as an inconvenience to themselves. That only changes when it directly impacts them or a member of their family. We are living through such frustrating times.

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Well, I can agree with this somewhat, although my only real response to this would be “don’t shoot the messenger”. That we have Dr. Fauci AT ALL is, to me, miraculous, given that this administrations’ knee-jerk reaction to anything or anyone critical (not to mention intelligent) is to show them the door.

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True, I also have felt this frustration from the start.

Yet, I shudder to think what we would have today if he had been fired last spring for facepalming. He is, indeed, only quoting facts and numbers, and not very strong on demanding action. But as we should be fully convinced by now, there is no short supply of sycophants lined up, waiting and willing to quote falsifications and practice amateur misdirection on the president's behalf, and one of these would be testifying to congress right now.

I don't think he's protecting his job - he has the look of a man ready to retire (I know because I see it each morning in my mirror). Rather, I think he interacts with that supply of sycophants each day, and it horrifies him into staying the course.

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I do not respect Fauci, because it is clear to me that he values retaining his job over doing what's right. The same is true to an even greater extreme for Dr. Deborah Birx, who utterly sold her soul the day she did and said absolutely nothing when Comrade 45 suggested we all inject bleach into our veins and open our bodies up to great blasts of UV light as a way to eliminate a covid-19 infection.

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Hear, hear. Well put Rob. The willful ignorance is just beyond the pale.... and when coupled with true deviance, makes for a horrid mixture of blind faith and phony “patriotism”.

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We have to take in to account that the willful ignorance is partly because of "The dumbing down of America."

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Oh, without a doubt! While it goes waaaay back, let’s just say “Betsy DeVos”. Nuff’ said....

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Yes.

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The constitution defines only one crime. ONE. and that crime is treason. It defines it as "...levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort,..." It goes on to say "No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."

Who wants to join me as a witness?

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Other than reading this letter, I'm taking a break from the news today. I've had enough, but the quotes from Susan Rice make me happy to know that someone is really pointing a damning finger at tRump and his band of thugs. Thank you, Heather, for giving me all the news I needed today in one letter.

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We are under the control right now of a traitor and a cabal of spineless scum whose crimes in allowing him to continue - as shown in the action of the Confederate scum in the Senate stripping out the warning to the traitor about committing more treason - are the equal of his. The Republican Party today is a far greater threat to this country than the Confederacy ever was.

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The Conservative Movement/Tea Party GOP is the successor of the Confederacy. They live and breath by the 1857 speech by Senator Hammond and they will fall in the same way...and the wheel turns once again as it has already done several times.

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Never forget that Donald Trump's take on thermonuclear weaponry boils down to we have it, and therefore we should consider its uses. It would seem that none of the generals have sat down and explained to him what mutually assured destruction is all about.

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I live in NE Florida and I don’t even have the words to describe what’s happening here. I’m losing all hope and joined this morning to try to restore that. Out of all the people I know, there are 2 that understand what is happening.

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I hear ya' Mel.

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I’m in the Tampa area, and share your pain! Welcome to the group.

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Mel, welcome to the group! As others have said, "This is a port in the storm." BTW, my mother grew up in Jacksonville. My grandmother taught in the Duval County school system for over 25 years.

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...and my husband wonders why I curse like a sailor these days. (Actually he knows and concurs.) Thank you, HCR, for somehow boiling the daily tsunami of news down to a brimming cup.

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As my wife put it this evening, it took Trump to show all of us the necessity of real patriotism.

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It's summer, we have no A/C. Our neighbor across the way hollered back: "That's right, F Trump, F that F'ng Ahole!" Our neighbors are very well aware that we cuss like sailors. lol

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LOL It's not just us! Preach, my sister!

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Nope not just you. Can you hear us cursing him and the GOP up here in Canada? Every bloody day!

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And we do appreciate the solidarity from our Canadian neighbors.

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Resisting with you!!

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When it comes to Russia, we MUST NOT forget the lengthy behind closed door, no record, conversation Donald Trump had with Vladmir Putin shortly after taking office.

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I’d still like to know why 8 congressional leaders went to Russia on the Fourth of July.

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Trump is a liar. Saying any conversation he had with Putin was not recorded should be regarded as probably a lie, too.

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As a Kentuckian, I find Rand Paul a total embarrassment. He thinks he is independent in his thinking and actions, but really is just trying to be loved. And please don't get me started on Mitch McConnell. This whole administration reminds me of cliques in high school with 45 (I don't even like to say his name) and McConnell as the mean girls and Paul pathetically trying to be part of the clique. But at some point high school ends and so does the importance of the clique.

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I live next door to you inTN, but my daughter and her family live in KY. Do you think McGrath has a good chance of defeating McConnell? It’s time for him to go.

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I would love to give a definite yes to Amy's chances. However, there is a large contingent of Kentuckians who buy into the GOP message and do not realize they are voting against their own interests. This includes some of my relatives which breaks my heart. A bit of trivia: I remember when McConnell first ran, he was for term limits.

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I think that McGrath should select Booker as her Lieutenant Governor running mate and then collect the votes from both groups. I’m worried that since she didn’t join the BLM protests she may not turn out the black vote there.

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Lovely idea. Sadly, McGrath is running for Senator, not Governor. Given that, here's hoping Booker gives her his full-throated endorsement and support, and that he helps her win against McConnell.

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Oops, you're right. My bad. My mind is reeling from all the recent events. Funny how I mentioned this to a few friends yesterday and nobody corrected me. This group is much more informed. Thanks!

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That's a really good way of putting it.

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It's a problem we all have. In France I would say that our government and parties have never left University Student Union politics.....no more sense than that.

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Trump doing nothing about the Russian bounty on American soldiers, by itself, is just terrible. Considered as part of the pattern of Russian-Trump collusion (yes, using the word intentionally) over the past 4 years, there’s little doubt that Trump is committing treason (yes, using the word intentionally). We all know the story - of Trump calling for the Russians to hack Hillary, and Russians doing the same (DNC), of coordination of email dumps with Wikileaks (for which, indirectly, Roger Stone is going to prison) of handing Trump’s polling info to Russians for the social media disinformation campaign (for which, indirectly, Manafort is in prison), of Flynn’s illegal meetings with the Russians (for which Flynn has pled guilty), of Junior’s meeting(s) with Russians at Trump tower, of Trump’s push to drop Russian sanctions for Ukraine, of Trump’s seizure of notes from his private meetings with Putin, of Trump hiding his financial information which is suspected to show evidence of Trump, Inc. loans from and money laundering for Russian oligarchs (for which Trump’s bank, Deutsche bank, has already been convicted and fined)...I haven’t even mentioned the dossier, or Trump’s Ukraine blackmail, or Lev Parnas and Rudy. With a pattern like this, it seems like there’s more than enough to prosecute and convict. This certainly would be if this was a Democratic president. It would be great to see HCR do a more detailed and documented version of the full case against the Manchurian Trump.

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I predict that when trump loses in November he will pardon Manafort, Flynn, Stone and any other convicted criminal he favors.

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I think we all know 45 is lying about being briefed. He knew and chose to do nothing. Does anybody want to speculate on what Putin has on him?

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What bothers me most is how weak and scared we have allowed ourselves, the populace, to become. "Independence Day" my eye. It needs to be changed to "Enslavement Day." We have allowed ourselves to become enslaved one spoonful at a time.

We are "this close" to a repeat of the French Revolution. What will be the tipping point? I mean damn... I just want to holler "Let's get this over and done with!" Because IMO that will be the only way to get their attention.

What do we do with a treasonous family (not just Trump himself) like that? I think we all have our own ideas. I wouldn't bother giving them their due process. They've already had it, in a very public way. They should be brought down in the same manner. Very publicly for the whole world to see. Then and only then will America get some of it's dignity back.

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The murder of George Floyd certainly put a major crack in the dam. Despite the horror of that brutality, its timing is fortuitous. With so many people not working and just having the time to show up and protest begins to show how many people are angry about the deeply unjust systems we live under. This is the real (normally) silent majority! It's starting to feel like enough people have been awakened and energized that this movement won't be easily swept under the rug. I hope so at least.

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Sen. Rad Paul is a physician. His response to Dr. Fauci seems to be strong evidence of what Dr. Richardson has been telling us about how ideology obscures reality.

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Rand Paul is a self-certified physician--which explains a lot.

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What exactly does this mean? I have not heard of this before. Is it a fact or a tongue-in-cheek statement?

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No--it is true. Rand Paul is not board certified. He doesn't believe in that, so he created his own certification. This is consistent with not believing in experts like Dr. Fauci.

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Maybe he failed the board certification, hence his denial of certification!

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I just looked it up on wiki. Rand Paul is a Medical Doctor who specialized in Opthalmology. He graduated from Duke. He is probably not board certified any more given he has been is the Senate since 2010.

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I assume he’s formally trained as an optometrist, and licensed?

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An Optician. Not an MD or DO.

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An ophthalmologist is a medical doctor who specializes in eye care. An optometrist is licensed to practice optometry which performs eye exams, vision tests, and can prescribe corrective lenses and medication for certain eye aliments. So Rand, an optometrist, is NOT a MD or DO

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Self-certifiable perhaps...but then he's currently working in a nut-house. How do you distinguish the doctors from the patients...other than by party label of course!

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Rand Paul is also the man who continued to use the senate gym and pool while awaiting the results of his coronavirus test after having been exposed. As it turned out, he had a mild case and by sheer dumb luck apparently did not infect anyone else.

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I forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder:)

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Rand, not Rad, of course.

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When repeated execution of The Broken Clock Theorem is all you've got, you have no choice but to have it define your foreign policy.

God preserve and save us all.

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Distraction, thy name is Trump. The White House knows they need more and better outrageous stories to knock COVID19 deaths and Russia's targeting of our troops out of the news. Defend the statues! Don't rename the military bases! It would be sad if it weren't so awful

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I know this could be asked of many Trump enablers but how can Kayleigh McEnany sleep at night when every day she has to twist herself in knots trying to defend the indefensible?

Is there a gene that people like that are missing or is it just “politics” and we should be used to it?

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It's called ideology and it replaces having to think for yourself.

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What makes you think she is twisting herself in knots?

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True. I guess only a person with a conscious would have to twist into knots to lie.

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Conscience, that is.

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She is a resurgence of those bad, old "Blonde Jokes."

I preferred Spicer's lying, he seemed to be tiptoeing thru a minefield trying to give credence to his lies. This cute, blonde child is just parroting whatever crap they feed her with conviction that only his ignorant cult base takes seriously.

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Poor Kayleigh. She probably thought she was signing up to be the person who tells the story of a capable but misunderstood man to the American public. She gets there and finds out that her job is to explain why Trump’s shoes are full of holes and leaking blood, while denying that Trump keeps shooting himself in both feet with assault rifles. As she’s at the podium trying to put things in the best possible light - “Donnie’s bone spurs make his feet sweat, so he buys shoes that are well-ventilated”, we hear in the background, “Blam! Blam! Ow, damn! Oh, my foot! Blam! Blam! Damn this stupid gun! Blam!”. Kayleigh doesn’t have an easy job.

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I'm sorry, Kayleigh is exactly where she wants to be.

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The deck of the Titanic?

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Considering that yet again, the Federal Elections Commission is without a quorum required to do business after the Republican chairperson resigned abruptly, is doesn't really matter that there's already a law that prevents foreign interference, considering that the FEC is disabled and essentially toothless at the best of times. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but this looks like yet another example of Republican officials deliberately stripping away our defenses so they can either underhandedly seize power for themselves or simply sell it to the highest bidder.

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I had wondered how Trump would handle this. I thought he was caught in a pincer, being shown as either traitorous or incompetent, with no easy way out. Fake News! Should have seen that one coming. This is the payoff (one of them anyway) of his deliberate strategy of attacking one of the pillars that makes our country strong, the free press. Frightening.

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That was predictable. What concerns me are the people believing it. “If Trump says only Fox News tells the truth, that’s the only thing I’m watching. Trump doesn’t lie.”-family member. So many people aren’t even getting quality information to make decisions on.

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