Let's Go Fauci!

The photo above appeared on one of the aggregators with the caption Cruella de Fauci. What's actually been on my mind for some weeks, as an Aristotelian who looks for causes, is why Dr Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health and Dr Fauci's boss, chose to announce his retirement when he did.

The news cycle at the time had been relatively benign as regarded Fauci, Dr Walensky, and Collins himself, but my guess is Collins was fully aware of FOIA and similar requests for records regarding US funding of Wuhan gain of function research. as well as the Tunisian puppy experiments.

The White Coat Waste Project, the nonprofit organization that first pointed out that U.S. taxpayers were being used to fund the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology, have now turned its sights on Anthony Fauci on another animal-testing-related matter — infecting dozens of beagles with disease-causing parasites to test an experimental drug on them.

. . . According to the White Coat Waste Project, the Food and Drug Administration does not require drugs to be tested on dogs, so the group is asking why the need for such testing.

White Coat Waste claims that 44 beagle puppies were used in a Tunisia, North Africa, laboratory, and some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed, allegedly so scientists could work without incessant barking.

This dubious research was funded by Fauci's NIAID, and the agency had a responsibility to monitor the grant, as it did the Wuhan gain of function research. There seems little question that Fauci lied to congress about the Wuhan matter, but now it looks like his agency has been outsourcing puppy torture to the Tunisians as well. Not only that, but Fauci's wife, Dr. Christine Grady, is currently Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. A web search on Dr Grady brought up this link, a fact check from Reuters:

Fact check: Dr. Christine Grady, Anthony Fauci’s wife, is not Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister.

Well, that's a relief. Reuters is on the case! Dr Fauci can ask his wife for impeccable bioethical advice whenever he needs it now! I guess the possibility that she was Ghislaine Maxwell's sister kept him from asking her about the puppies before this.

I have a feeling Dr Collins knew he'd be in the line of fire over the puppies, Wuhan, and likely other cases we still don't know about, and decided to duck out while the ducking was good. There's no question that Fauci should have been fired well before now; he's been the chief spokesman and public enabler for a public health and public policy catastrophe that's had worldwide effects that are still playing themselves out. A key step, long overdue, would be to replace US public health leadership with capable people who aren't connected to the current group, if any such can be found.

In fact, I would think a key step President Biden could take to arrest his current decline in the polls would be to announce some version of a firing for Fauci, and maybe other key deputies, like today. There are few public figures more unpopular with the plebs than Fauci at this point, except of course the president, the vice president, and the speaker. But a public skewering of Fauci would mark a start in clearing the atmosphere.

Fauci could avert this by preemptively announcing his own retirement, which Hugh Hewitt, a second-string Salem Radio host, has already suggested to him. Indeed, the White House should be strongly suggesting this course as we speak, but of course, it won't.

Let's Go Fauci!

They're Working All Weekend!

Via ABC News:

A deal within reach, President Joe Biden and Congress’ top Democrats edged close to sealing their giant domestic legislation, though the informal deadline appeared to slip as they worked to scale back the measure and determine how to pay for it.

Negotiations were expected to continue into the weekend, all sides indicating just a few issues remained unsettled in the sweeping package of social services and climate change strategies.

No agreement was announced by Friday's self-imposed deadline to at least agree on a basic outline. Biden wants a deal before he leaves next week for global summits in Europe.

Biden met at the White House on Friday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer joined by video call from from New York, trying to shore up details.

. . . Pelosi hoped the House could start voting as soon as next week, but no schedule was set.

President Biden will be in Rome to meet with the pope on Friday, October 29, so I assume he's leaving October 28. If this were a realistic estimate, the leaders should have a package for him by Wednesday. But anyhow, the president is on the case!

At the White House, the president has "rolled up his sleeves and is deep in the details of spreadsheets and numbers,” press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Biden was to spend the weekend at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

Well, that should tell you just how urgent this matter is! The problem is that, as the story I cited yesterday says, the one who actually controls the deal is Sen Manchin. His view is that he's comfortable with no deal, and things ought to wait at least six months. ABC News didn't seem to want to contact him about that. As yesterday's story quoted him,

"This is not gonna happen anytime soon, guys," he said Thursday afternoon.

“I don’t see that happening," he also told reporters.

Don Lemon Didn't Get The Memo

But he's begun to see that there is one. According to Fox News:

CNN host Don Lemon flipped out on Democrats Wednesday, slamming his fist on his desk as he ranted that they weren't doing enough to sell their agenda to the American people and rescue democracy.

. . . "Democrats get your butts in gear and get passionate about saving this damn country! You’re not doing it. You’re weak. You are weak. You are weak," Lemon said as he beat his hand on his desk.

Lemon claimed the massive Democrat-backed multi-trillion dollar social spending package included items that Americans wanted but weren't being advocated for in the right way.

I've been saying since last month that something's hinky about this whole BBB-Bernie $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. The bosses have been saying they're gonna work all weekend to get it done, but as I learned in my tech days, if you actually go in to the office over that weekend, nobody's there. But deadline after deadline comes and goes, and there's no sense of urgency in Washington, either. Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer have had nothing to say all week, and Biden has been reminiscing about Amtrak again.

Clearly something else is up. I got a sense of it here:

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) squabbled behind closed doors Wednesday, with Manchin using a raised-fist goose egg to tell his colleague he can live without any of President Biden's social spending plan, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The disagreement, recounted to Axios by two senators in the room, underscores how far apart two key members remain as the Democratic Party tries to meet its deadline for reaching an agreement on a budget reconciliation framework by Friday.

The politely mislabeled "disagreement" between Manchin and Sanders is nothing new, but all of a sudden we learn of a "deadline for reaching an agreement on a budget reconciliation framework by Friday," which is today, and which is clearly not going to happen. But yet again, this is oh by the way, and there's no urgency, at least for anyone but Don Lemon. But the story has more:

Manchin's comfort level with zero as a final number — and his willingness to threaten Sanders with it publicly at Wednesday's lunch for Senate committee chairs — reveals a stark reality for Democratic negotiators: Manchin can control the final dollar amount.

But how is this public? The story gives the context as a "behind closed doors" meeting of Democrat committee chairs. Except that two Deomocrat committee chairs promptly leaked what went on.

Another witness, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said, "There was a vigorous, 10-minute discussion. Bernie said, '$6 trillion.'" . . . Overall, Coons said, there was "significant progress" in the meeting about identifying the core issues remaining.

He said the parties also forged ahead with "figuring out which of our different committee chairs and caucus leaders have a role in getting those issues closed, and trying to get people to be to be direct."

So wait a moment. According to this story, they've missed yet another deadline for coming up with a "framework", but that's OK, they've made significant "progress" on identifing "core issues". Now, the next announced deadline is October 31, with four legislative days remaining before then. And both Pelosi and Manchin have already said the October 31 deadline is nowhere near set in stone.

But there was another story that gives away another part of the deal:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in an exclusive interview with The Hill on Thursday said he has no plans to leave the Democratic Party and has not threatened to do so.

. . . “What is true,” Manchin told The Hill, “is that I have told the president, Chuck Schumer, and even the whole caucus that if it is ‘embarrassing’ to them to have a moderate, centrist Democrat in the mix and if it would help them publicly, I could become an Independent — like Bernie — and then they could explain some of this to the public saying it’s complicated to corral these two Independents, Bernie and me.”

Not only that, but Manchin has been trolling Sanders all week, and it sounds more and more as if this is to the tacit amusement of his colleagues. In other words, this whole idea of Manchin holding up the show is, yet again, kabuki. Manchin is still in the club, still a good ol' boy. There's an amusing food fight between Manchin and Sanders (who I suspect is not in the club) at the closed-door luncheon, but in the background is a very clear sense that the Democrat insiders are slow-walking this whole process. It isn't going to get done by October 31 or any other date.

There's another ingredient to the kabuki, the debt ceiling, which must be extended by December 3. Sen McConnell has told Schumer he must pass it via reconciliation, with no Republican help. Since November will be an effective total loss, Schumer should be setting up for this now, right? Instead, crickets.

There's been a deal. The memo has likely been out for months. The BBB-Bernie thing goes quietly away, and McConnell delivers the Republican votes on the debt ceiling. They're throwing Biden under the bus, but he's served his purpose. Actually, I wonder if Biden was ever more than a wannabe with the club. Obama knew this as well.

More Thoughts On The Ordinariate Missal

I've moved on from studying Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes and have started Anthony Esolen's The Beauty of the Word: A Running Commentary on the Roman Missal. This is described as "A comprehensive, step-by-step commentary on the changes in the Order of Mass (including Prefaces), the Proper of Time, and the Proper of Saints" for the 2011 revision of the Roman Missal.

Looking back on my various confirmation classes, including Evangelium and the RCIA course, but going even farther back to my Episcopalian confirmation class, almost nothing covered in the Vatican II constitutions, and none of the key insights Esolen brings to the liturgy, was in any of those classes, which is unfortunate, but I'm at least glad to have been able to catch up. For instance, it was only after researching the subject several years ago that I discovered the three-year lectionary, now adopted by most US Anglicans as well as something like 200 other Protestant denominations, was an innovation stemming from Vatican II.

In fact, the lectionary, which I admire tremendously, seems nevertheless to be at the basis of objections in the US to The Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer. But so little time was spent on this in my Episcopalian confirmation class that I assumed it came from the Church Fathers or something -- only someone like St Augustine could have had the comprehensive understanding of scripture to put something like that together. At least, that's what I thought. Instead, I discover it was developed much more recently by people who were nearly as smart.

I haven't followed critiques of the ordinariates' Divine Worship missal very closely, except that in light of reading Esolen, I'm beginning to see that in comparison to the 2011 Roman Missal, the DW missal is looking more and more like a slapdash job. My regular correspondent from the old blog brings me up to date:

Presumably most ordinariate members/attendees outside the UK are quite happy with Divine Worship:The Missal. But it has many detractors, although from inconsistent points of view. Christian Campbell from time to time lobs an acid comment onto one or other of the two main Ordinariate-themed Facebook pages regarding DW’s debt to the Ordinary Form mass, a very Bad Thing in his opinion. Presumably he and those who “Like” his comments want the Ordinariates to uphold English standards of church decor, choral music, liturgical taste and tone, etc but are really Traditional Latin Mass supporters at heart.

On the other side we have Christopher Mahon and the “Anglican” contingent, who lament DW’s every departure from the Book of Common Prayer: the three-year lectionary and the consequent disharmony between the Collects and the readings, the Cranmerised Roman Canon, the general cut-and-paste nature of DW. Naturally there is overlap in their specific complaints about the Ordinariate liturgy, although they come from opposite perspectives.

I think the problem is summed up by Bp Lopes’s decision regarding the celebrations of Ascension Day and Epiphany. The Anglican tradition is to celebrate these on the fortieth day after Easter and January 6, respectively; the USCCB has moved both to Sundays. Bp Lopes stated that the OSCP could not differ from the USCCB on both celebrations, and after consultation left Ascension Day on a Thursday and moved Epiphany to the Sunday. A foot in both camps, in other words.

My impression is that anyone who is genuinely knowledgeable about liturgy finds much to deprecate about DW, however satisfactory it is to those who simply enjoy its Olde English Bulldogge/TLM-lite aesthetic. Consequently it’s hard to imagine how Bp Lopes could be regarded as qualified to chair a liturgical committee, but then Bp Rozanski also would also seem an odd choice.

BTW, one of the announcements at the recent annual meeting of all active OCSP clergy is that there will be an external audit of every community’s finances this coming year. Not a minute too soon, I would imagine. Presumably an attempt to avoid a repetition of the debacle at St Barnabas, Omaha.

So what I'm seeing is that there's a cult of traditionalists who not only object to mass in the vernacular, but who also object to the three-year lectionary. I've run into this now and then, but the specific issues remain unclear to me -- the reasoning seems to be that if Catholics were less reverent after 1970, it was due not only to the departure from Latin, but also the new lectionary. And this is also related to traditionalist Anglican objections to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

The question I would raise is that the only ordinariate that's doing well at all, the one in North America, is still functioning at a C-minus level, to the point that the chancery seems now to be worrying about where such money as the communities have is being spent. (Let's not think for now about the priest who beat his wife before the altar, or the one who got the hospital sisters upset by celebrating OF daily mass ad orientem.) Well, maybe if they could clean up the collects, the prefaces, and the readings, things would get better. Yeah.

The problem I have with that is as I read Esolen, I discover that the people who put the 2011 missal together had all the potential discrepancies worked out. And they did a good job with it. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?

Two Incongruous Bishops

This morning, the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Given all that isn't happening with the BBB, the BIF, and the debt ceiling, yesterday's big news was the elevation of Dr Rachel Levine to the rank of four star admiral, a breakthrough for transgenders. The crack journalists at the RedState blog posted a word salad headline: Democrat Counter to Glenn Youngkin Enthusiasm Enters Into the Pathetic.

But with everyone else on virtual vacation, I can at least fall back on the Roman Catholic ordinariates for recovering, or maybe not, Anglicans. Let's take the case of The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali:

{T}he former Anglican bishop of Rochester, England, was received into the church Sept. 29 by Msgr. Keith Newton, head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, which was established in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI for the corporate reception of Anglican communities.

I'd noticed Bp Nazir-Ali on occasion when he was still in Rochester as a conservative voice in the Church of England, but his course since then strikes me as erratic. The story continues,

The married father of two retired from Rochester, England, in 2009 and, since 2010, has served as the visiting bishop of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina.

A "visiting bishop", at least in The Episcopal Church, is a largely honorary position awarded to retired bishops. Their chief duty is to "visit" parishes for confirmations and other ceremonial "episcopal visits", mainly to relieve the schedules of the diocesan and suffragan bishops. However, Bp Nazir-Ali held this position in the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, which is part of the Anglican Church in North America, a breakaway body from The Episcopal Church that is not in communion with it, the Church of England, or the rest of the Anglican Communion.

As a result, the Catholic reporting on Nazir-Ali neglects the point that by this time, he's an Anglican-with-an-asterisk and had already left the Anglican Communion. In fact, from what I hear of the screening process for former Anglican priests seeking ordination in one of the ordinariates, a reasonable question for the bishop would be why he chose to go to the more-Protestant-than-the-Protestants ACNA rather than simply to convert to Catholicism once his dissatisfaction with Anglicanism became clear to him.

In fact, the ACNA is known for being "low church", that is, leaning toward the side of Anglicanism that takes the XXXIX Articles seriously. These, among other things, denounce the pope and transsubstantiation. Was he not serious in going to the ACNA? If not, how do we know he's serious in now converting to Catholicism?

Another question that Msgr Newton might not ask him is why he chose to be received via the UK ordinariate, which is moribund. Few of its parishes own their property, and few use the Divine Worship missal that is used mainly in the US. Beyond that, Nazir-Ali is 72, retired first as a bishop and now as a "visiting bishop". It would seem his ordination is a purely political gesture, actually not much different from the elevation of Admiral Levine to flag rank.

A visitor sent me a link to this piece in California Catholic Daily, The strange race for chair of the USCCB liturgy committee with the remark that Bp Steven Lopes of the North American ordinariate, who was left indisposed for many months last year after a mysterious fall from an attic ladder, may simply have been practicing to climb another ladder. The article says,

But this year, the race to chair the bishops’ liturgy committee features an interesting pair of choices, Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis and Bishop Stephen Lopes of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. Neither appears an obvious selection for the job, which might suggest that some potential candidates have steered clear of running for a seat on the third rail of American ecclesiastical life.

. . . Lopes was made a bishop in 2016, making him relatively young in the conference for a senior committee chair. Like Rozanski, he possesses no advanced degrees in liturgical studies, though he has studied sacramental theology. But perhaps most interesting is that Lopes doesn’t even lead an ordinary Latin rite diocese at all.

As ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, Lopes is responsible for shepherding former Anglicans who came into communion with the Church after Benedict XVI’s 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.

Lopes's version of the liturgy, whose approval he facilitated while at the Vatican, is an overlong and clumsy merger of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer with a translation of the Tridentine Roman Canon, larded with archaisms and normally celebrated ad orientem. The ordinariate over which he presides has been dogged with repeated scandals and infelicitous ordinations. It numbers about 40 communities and has membership in the mid four digits, though with that, it's far more successful than those in the UK and Australia.

I ran this by my regular correspondent from the old blog, who reported on the consensus in the blogosphere:

Some support for the point of view in this article — ie nobody wants the job, but there is also the suggestion that Bp Rozanski does want the job and has made a deal with Cdl Cupich in return for supporting something or other. In any event, Bp Lopes seen as a no-hoper, but along with his Prayer Breakfast gig and some other appearances does suggest to me that he is trying to raise his profile and get away from narrow identification with the North American ordinariate, which is going nowhere.

How Is This "Negotiation" Anything But A Charade?

Media reports from both ends of the spectrum on what's being hyped as "negotiations" on the BBB and BIF bills are in a strange never-never land. I noted yesterday that the Washington Examiner says the BBB is "still unwritten", but this doesn't stop CBS News from referring to a 2,465 page bill and listing a series of line items. So how does Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent for the Examiner, who wrote that piece, still have a job if someone from CBS can give a page count?

CBS calls it the standard $3.5 trillion in that piece, but this story by Sean Moran, who happens to be a a congressional reporter for Breitbart News, calls it "the $3.1 trillion reconciliation bill, or the Build Back Better Act". This is just one of the many discrepancies over the actual numbers for both the BBB and BIF that I've seen in recent weeks.

The only conclusion I can draw is that none of these people is working real hard. Sean Moran goes on to say,

Since Senate Democrats only have a one-member majority, either Manchin or Sinema could tank the Build Back Better Act by withdrawing their support.

A promising middle school student who follows current events knows this is incorrect: the Senate is tied, nobody has a majority, but the vice president, currently a Democrat, casts the deciding vote in a tie. How does a professional journalist anywhere on the spectrum get this so wrong? The whole press corps, with only a few exceptions, is lazy and ignorant, and they get away with it. People like me have to spend some amount of time and energy every morning double checking these paid and prestigious experts.

But we're basically getting the same happy talk about "progress" that we got last month. The Hill has this story:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) met separately Monday with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) as liberals and centrists in the party struggle to cut a deal on President Biden's sweeping spending plan.

Except it isn't "President Biden's sweeping spending plan"; reports are that Sanders is the author. Biden has been detached at best. The story goes on,

"I would hope that we're going to see some real action within the next week or so," Sanders told reporters. "We discussed the way forward."

But NBC News reports,

As the clock ticks with few signs of progress, the White House is holding a series of meetings this week to pressure Democrats to resolve their differences and reach a deal on President Joe Biden's sweeping economic policy bill.

. . . "The president is certainly feeling an urgency to move things forward, to get things done. I think you've seen that urgency echoed by members on the Hill who agree that time is not unending here and we're eager to move forward with a unified path," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a key centrist holdout who has rejected the proposed $3.5 trillion level, expressed doubt that a deal could be reached by the end of the month.

"There's an awful lot that's going on. I don't know how that would happen," he told reporters Monday.

For now, I think what's happening is that Pelosi is quietly dropping the Götterdämmerung strategy the Democrats adopted after the 2020 election: if the world is going to end, the thing to do is run up your credit cards just before it does so you don't have to pay them back. Conservative Treehouse, a blog on the Kraken right, summarizes this strategy:

Joe Biden is an appointed figurehead for a background agenda driven by Obama’s Chicago Marxists. The Biden far-left policy agenda is strategically a massive throw everything at the legislative process in an effort to create major change in a short period of time. Biden is the disposable front man for this operation, and Pelosi is the facilitating legislative cohort.

. . . Everything you would normally consider to be a concern that would limit the extremes of any legislative effort has been removed. They plan to lose next year, so they have nothing to lose right now.

I question that this anything like a strictly Marxist agenda -- Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, for instance -- but it's correct to see it as an attempt to run up the credit cards before the world ends.

The problem is that Visa is already declining charges well before you've bought the yacht. The actual strategy for now is to transition to "never mind" without seeming to. So just as we did last month, we're goinng to see happy talk about we're gonna work all weekend until something else comes up and the whole thing drops off the screen. The point now is exclusively to save face.

I suspect the press knows this and isn't putting much effort into the story.

Is Obama Pulling The Strings?

Back in August, I was frustrated that nothing was happening in the news, but at least I could justify it, because it was August. But as of this morning's headlines, still nothing. The big event is the death of fully vaxxed Colin Powell from COVID. But right after that, a major aggregator has Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus getting trolled for mask-shaming some dude in an elevator. Nothing's happening.

So this may be one reason for a steady stream of speculation about who's pulling President Biden's strings, mostly focusing on Barack Obama. Most recently, commentators have noted that Obama is campaigning for McAuliffe in Virginia when Biden would probably be a net negative there.

The problem is that if Obama were in fact pulling Biden's strings, it's hard to imagine that Biden would be doing as disastrously as he is. But Obama himself reportedly said, “You know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” Obama may be campaigning for McAuliffe, but as far as trying to negotiate the BBB deal among the feuding Democrats, he's nowhere to be found. Other people have the leverage there.

Respectable media is finally starting to notice that nothing's happening. The Washington Examiner has begun to catch up:

The House and Senate return to session next week and will have only 10 legislative days [actually eight] to meet an Oct. 31 deadline set to pass both the social welfare spending package and a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The two measures, which make up the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, are in doubt.

. . . In an interview Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t commit to the Oct. 31 date she set just weeks ago.

“We’ll bring the bill to the floor when we have the votes to bring the bill to the floor,” the California Democrat told reporters at a San Francisco event touting the still-unwritten legislation.

In addition to getting the number of legislative days wrong, this story also illustrates the obtusenss of reporters on either end of the spectrum. The BBB is hardly "still unwritten". In 2009, the late Rush Limbaugh made an important point about Obamacare: he said that bill must have been drafted years earlier in think tanks, and the draft had long been circulating. The BBB agenda is the same. It's described, as it is above, as "the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda", but stories also say now and then that Sen Sanders, the self-described socialist, is the one who drafted it.

And likely Sanders himself had little to do with its actual content, except to endorse what other well-placed loonies had put into the draft, which a Limbaugh in health would be asserting now is likely a years-old pipe dream that Sanders and his allies could finally bring to the floor due to Pelosi's and Biden's weakness. But the pipe dream was something concocted in a time when the Democrats had bigger majorities. Their current control of congress is so thin that in both houses, tiny groups of recalcitrants in the low single digits can stall a putative juggernaut.

Right now, if anyone is pulling the strings, it's Sen Sinema. Everyone else is in a fantasy.