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I saw Mitch at the MAGA shooting range today.  He was using the Undocumented Immigrant targets.  

Senate panel votes to hold Fauci in contempt And there ya have it.   A completely partisan witch hunt.    It's telling that Paul doesn't want to go through the full Senate.  Because he knows he doesn't have the 60 votes.  A full Senate vote would also probably give Susan Collins one of her moments to show how she finds certain Trump behaviors "disturbing."     I timestamped that interview with Rand Paul to 8:00 because I think Rand Paul answers a question Piers Morgan asks in a way that really illustrates why Paul is on a witch hunt. Morgan asks Paul why he doesn't do something that 85 % of Americans support (in a clearly unscientific poll):  offer Fauci full immunity in return for telling Americans "the truth."  That 85 % is an interesting number.  I'd guess about half or more of Americans, including me, believe Fauci did tell us "the truth" as best he could, given the ambiguities of a deadly and evolving virus that experts disagreed about.  But I'd guess a lot of the MAGA hardcore, who no doubt think Fauci lied to them, are pragmatic enough to say let's just focus on getting "the truth." Paul will have none of it.  He says Fauci is not capable of telling the truth.  Rand Paul is clear in his mind that Fauci is a criminal.  So the only way he's willing to think about this is how do I take the criminal down.  That unscientific poll suggests most Americans just disagree.  They are more focused on "the truth" than branding Fauci a criminal, and taking him down.  There are no scientific polls to prove that.  Yet.  But I don't think Paul is winning either the political or legal argument. What's fascinating is that if the goal is to get "the truth", both Morgan and Paul say things is this interview that I think are clearly untrue. Morgan, who says he is or at least was mostly supportive of Fauci, says that science flip flopped.  First they said getting vaccinated meant you could not spread the virus.  Then they said "it makes no difference," to quote Morgan.  Neither are true.  I don't think Fauci or Birx ever said that this is simple and black and white.  The science now says that getting vaccinated reduced viral load and the chances that you would infect someone else.  But that became less true as the virus mutated into Omnicron, and itself because less fatal.   Paul definitely wants to take all kinds of shades of gray things, assign them a "truth" as he sees it, and brand Fauci a criminal because he does not agree with Paul.  The one thing I like about this is that Paul is beating a drum about the dangers of "gain of function" research.  But he completely lies about the past, as far as I can tell.  Fauci did fund some scientist from the Netherlands to do gain of function research a decade ago that many scientists thought was dangerous when the findings were publicized.  It seems clear that Fauci himself built a consensus that we should pause this research while we evaluate its value.  The research Fauci did fund years later that  subcontracted with Wuhan studied a virus that, according to scientists, was simply different than the COVID virus.  Rand Paul has never disputed this fact.  So to allege that Fauci "may" have been culpable for unleashing the COVID virus, you just have to make a lot of shit up.   The saddest thing about this is it confirms that we are not at a point where we can do what Dr. Birx wants:  evaluate the science, and what we could have done better.  To me, personally, she was one of the best people.  But she made an emotional and personal plea that turned out to be at least politically wrong.  I cited the story about her grandmother's guilt for basically unintentionally "killing" her own young Mom by bringing the Spanish flu home from school.   When Birx said that, I took away this bumper sticker:  "CLOSE SCHOOLS NOW."  Turns out, as we now know, COVID was thankfully not as lethal as the Spanish flu.  In 1918 the average life span dropped by almost a decade for one year because so many young men and women died..  Nothing like that happened during COVID.  The average life span is now longer than it was during COVID.  Birx, like Fauci, seems to be the kind of scientist that is open to having an honest discussion about what we can learn, and how we can do better.  Fauci has done that, publicly, again and again. I don't think that is what Rand Paul wants.  I think he has proven, in his own words, he is a zealot on a partisan witch hunt. 

Cartagena is a great place to visit. Lots of places to visit in the day and night.  The local beaches aren't too good - but there are plenty of day trips to better beaches you can book. Most involve a boat ride to them. Easy to arrange in town by taking recommendations from your host or visiting the port. If travelling alone I wouldn't arrange an overnight stay at a beach resort as you'd likely miss the nightlife of Cartagena. Pretty easy to meet locals in bars and grindr etc - and I found many Colombians liked older guys.

Yesterday Xbar posted on social media they have a new address: Jsme zpátky na jiné lokaci v Praze

As we get closer to the midterm elections, and if trump's approval continues to nosedive, what's he gonna do? As crazy as he's been before, we ain't seen nothin, yet.