You may ask which member of the Trump administration I’m talking about, because they are all compulsive liars. I’m referring to the guy with the brainworm, the barely literate incompetent who has fundamentally shut down science research in this country, the fraud who has been vomiting up medical misinformation, the one, the only, RFK jr, the man who has poisoned the Kennedy name for all time.

In attempting to rewrite the history of the US Covid-19 response, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday pinned the blame for pandemic lockdowns on Dr. Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously reviving a string of debunked assertions about vaccines, RSV and measles.

Kennedy’s appearance came in the wake of a congressional hearing with Fauci last week, when the infections disease expert invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 100 times, as Republicans lambasted him for his role in handling the pandemic.

In his frantic attempt to claim that Fauci was a murderous monster directly at fault for COVID, he made an exaggerated claim of special American victimhood, asserting that we were number one in deaths.

“We had the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth,” Kennedy said. When host Dana Bash challenged him, Kennedy doubled down: “What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID.”

It was not accurate.

But during the pandemic’s height, 2020 to 2023, the U.S. did not lead the world in its overall rate of death from the illness. Peru did.

In its tracking of global COVID-19 cases and deaths through March 2023, Johns Hopkins University found that Peru’s population was hit hardest with a rate of 665.84 deaths per 100,000 people.

The U.S.’s per capita death rate was nearly half that with 341.11 deaths per 100,000 people. That is the 14th highest rate. Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania were a few of the countries with higher per capita death rates than the U.S.

He does not care about the numbers. Details schmetails. He’s just stirring up hatred in the mob. He did go on to lie about the origins of COVID, the growing measles epidemic, and vaccines and autism, and food policy, all debunked here. This is nothing new. Do you remember that he volleyed a similar barrage of lies a year ago? This is what he does, all the time, every time.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made myriad false and misleading claims on Thursday as he fielded questions examining his seven-month tenure leading the nation’s health agencies at a contentious three-hour hearing.

Kennedy ignored government data, twisted legislation and pointed to unsubstantiated treatments while addressing topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, rural hospitals and school shootings.

He was still allowed to hold office last year. I predict that he’ll cling to power like a tick after this year. There will be no consequences for him…just for the scientists he torments, and for the children who will die.

Crime is down. It’s so down, that the local prison in Appleton was shut down several years ago.

Now it’s being re-opened to serve the needs of ICE.

The city of Appleton built the prison, but CoreCivic purchased it in 1997 to hold state prisoners, then shut it down in 2010 because of decreased demand. It was once the largest employer in the Swift County city.

Now it will hold up to 1,600 immigrant detainees.

No one should be pleased to see the prison-industrial complex expanding…but my Republican state representative and evil servant of Satan is thrilled.

Rep. Michelle Fischbach, who represents the 7th Congressional District where Appleton is located, told MinnPost at Farmfest on Tuesday that she was happy to hear the prison was reopening.

“I know that the community has been very supportive of making sure that we can open that up, and it makes sense,” she said. “There’s an existing facility there, and so there doesn’t have to be anything new built.”

We gotta get her out of office, I can’t stand her and her wicked policies. Her opponent is more in line with my opinions.

Her opponent, Democrat Erik Osberg, tied the prison announcement to last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” saying he’s against the reopening and wants to repeal the legislation that enabled it.

“There’s a $180 billion detention center and deportation-industrial complex in that legislation,” he said. “That’s what this is about, and guess who gets to build and run them? Private companies.”

You’ve got my vote, Erik. You didn’t have to say a word, but you’ve got it.

The conservatives are eating their own! And it’s all over food prices.

It started when a college student involved with Turning Point USA complained that a burrito costs $20, NJ.com reported. Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet shared the complaint online, saying the “lived experience is the same: it just feels like basic things cost too much.”

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen dismissed the gripe. “Cry me a river,” Thiessen wrote. “The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”

That drew a sharp response from Vice President JD Vance, who wrote that Thiessen had “never missed a burrito,” according to NJ.com.

Crenshaw weighed in later on Thursday with an attack on food insecurity.

“Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates,” Crenshaw sneered on X, wading into the fight.

He went further, asking whether critics of rising food prices were “a communist” or “an American adult male capable of handling his own s—.”

The backlash from the right was swift.

“The Republican Party is still dominated by traitors who got rich off of insider trading but mock you for thinking that you should be able to eat meat in a first world country,” conservative commentator Auron MacIntyre wrote on X.

They’ve all got guns. Maybe they should use them on each other?

I do have to mention that having a meal plan is expensive — you’re not getting free burritos in college. Also, our students are on a budget, living in small dorm rooms and getting by on the high-starch diets they’re fed in the cafeteria, and occasionally splurging by going out to Taco John’s, where a burrito will set you back about $8, which is still overpriced, but I think the TPUSA goon was probably getting a fancy high-end burrito in California.

Now I’m craving a burrito, but this week we’re getting by with a big pot of bean soup. You know, beans and rice are still the economical way to get a healthy diet, and tossing them onto a tortilla with a little cheese, some spices, and a splash of hot sauce is a tasty way to survive. But beans and rice are also going up in price. Telling people to consume a less expensive version of what they want while even the cheap stuff is more expensive than it was last week does not address the problem.

Hey, I’ve got tortillas, I got beans, I got hot sauce, I got cheese. I think I’ll fix something to snack on while watching the spectacle of conservatives snarling at each other.

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Michigan primary!

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination in the US Senate seat in Michigan, beating Haley Stevens in a bitter competition that became a referendum on the changing face of the Democratic party.

El-Sayed won the race by a single point, fewer than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press. He will now face Republican nominee Mike Rogers – who ran unopposed – for a key battleground seat that is vital for Democrats to retain in order to achieve their lofty goal of reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber of Congress.

It was close, but I’m glad that Stevens is out (she was a weird shrill Zionist), and seeing a progressive candidate emerge in the Democratic party suggests that maybe the party will eventually shift.

Also, the late Ed Brayton, co-founder of Freethoughtblogs and Michigander, would no doubt be pleased by this outcome.

I live in a rural farm community, although I’m not really part of it. I don’t want to farm, I couldn’t do the work, but I respect it. Last night, we attended a meeting about farming anyway, because there are plans afoot that could dramatically affect everyone‘s way of life, and it has to do with water and massive amounts of cow manure. Riverview Dairy, already the largest dairy operation in the state (and busily expanding into the Dakotas), wants to massively increase the number of cows they raise, and they want to create the single largest dairy farm in the whole damn state, right here in little ol’ Stevens County, population 10,000.

Riverview’s proposed expansion would add 15,400 animal units, require 250 million gallons of liquid manure storage, and consume 319 million gallons of water every single year. The scale of this project — if it goes forward, it will be the largest concentrated animal feeding operation in the state — is exactly why Stevens County must not rubber-stamp this permit. We need to pack the room and show local officials that we do not want this mega-operation in Minnesota.

So pack the room we did last night. Unfortunately, Riverview also packed the room with their employees and advocates, and the Stevens County Planning Commission didn’t know how to do their job. This was a session where residents were invited to express their opinion, which meant we had a long line of people coming up to microphones to say what they think, and at the end, the commissioners were visibly befuddled and had no plan for what they would do, and were sitting up at the front of the room asking each other what to do next. It was kind of a fiasco.

The issue at hand was that Riverview wants to do a huge expansion of their business, and somehow managed to convince the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to not require an environmental impact statement. The side I was on was primarily arguing for caution, that we need to address potential impacts, while the other side was mainly a horde of dairy workers urging Riverview to go full steam ahead right now. The community fell into two camps with some interesting conflicts.

One side would just say jobs, jobs, jobs, and growth, growth, growth. Riverview Dairy is a great company that contributes so much to the community, and this expansion will help so many businesses. One unexpected twist on a traditional Republican position is that a lot of the speakers on this side had Hispanic accents, and told stories of how they migrated to the USA to take advantage of what Riverview offered, and had become American citizens. Fascinating stories: we don’t often hear about the benefits of immigration on the news. I only heard one person say that they wanted jobs for real American citizens, not Mexicans, and I don’t want that person on my side. One argument I heard was that having this mega-dairy will help grow church congregations, which I didn’t consider a positive effect.

The other side was concerned that draining several hundred million gallons of water per year from our aquifers could lead to long term consequences. Spraying a few hundred million gallons of cow poop into large fields could pollute an already polluted region, and wreak havoc on our rivers. There were concerns about the ongoing consolidation of small farms into this one mega-farm. The question on my mind was “who benefits?” and why do we need to produce so much milk; one person did ask what the need for all this output was. The debate wasn’t on whether Riverview was a good company that would benefit the community, but why we’re foregoing investigating deeply into what the long-term consequences were.

In the end, a small group of old white men, the planning commission, will retreat into a meeting room and make the decision, and I predict that they will decide that Riverview doesn’t need any more studies of their environmental impact. The county has a total population of 10,000, and this one dairy operation will be pumping out waste equivalent to the output of a city of 750,00 people, but we’ll just let them do their thing and then find out the consequences. Short-sightedness will win again.