For those familiar with him but might need a reminder, and for those who do not know or just aren’t sure, Edward Gorey was an illustrator known for his macabre black and white illustrations and quirky books, posters, and prints. Most people know his work, although they may not know they do, if they are familiar with the animated opening of Masterpiece Mystery on PBS.

Along with his illustrations and other print works, Gorey also wrote, produced, and acted in his own theatrical productions, won a Tony for his set, costume, and prop design for Dracula on Broadway, and for his “Entertainments”, puppet shows he gave most often as part of a larger event performed with puppets whose bodies he sewed himself.

While watching television, his three favorite shows being X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Golden Girls, he would sew soft sculpture creatures he named “Figbash”.

These stubby bodied creatures with a 12 inch arm span were hand sewn, filled with Uncle Ben’s Rice, because during Gorey’s life-time the rice came in boxes with a convenient pour spout, and could be twisted in such a way that between the arms, the torso, and stubby legs the Figbash could form every letter of the alphabet. Only so many of these could be made, and Edward Gorey would give them to friends, or would donate them, along with his illustration of the letters of the alphabet formed with them, for auctions at charitable events where they went for very high donations. Because they are limited in number and handmade, they have a great value to anyone who owns one.

Edward Gorey was an avid reader who fell in love with books by age four, and when he died he had accumulated 26,000 books in his Yarmouth Port home, having probably given away other books over his lifetime, so owning a Figbash that for a child who would love, cuddle, “feed”, take to bed, and use as a security blanket just as with a teddy bear, it might be an effective means for a child to learn the alphabet through an object that would have an emotional attachment with a good chance of passing on to a child Gorey’s love of reading.

During his lifetime he refused to have the Figbash mass produced because being able to buy one at a place like Walmart would reduce the value of the ones bought at a charity auction or given to someone by Gorey himself. He chose the intrinsic value for the sake of their owners over the millions of dollars he could have made for himself and for the organizations that are now supported in part by his charitable trust.

Whenever the board of directors of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust are approached about manufacturing the Figbash for use in preschool settings where the children could fall in love with it and by extension reading, and where each year the school would have to buy news ones since you certainly would not collect them at the end of the year and redistribute the used, dirty, slobbered on items to the next class, but would purchase new ones which means more money for the charitable trust, the objection is that any existing Figbash was hand sewn by Gorey, is filled with rice, and has value based on charity and/or a connection with Edward Gorey, a value it would lose if anyone could buy one anywhere.

However, when the simple solution is suggested, i.e. machine sewn vs hand sewn, the difference is noticeable, filling them with a similar stuffing like, but not, rice, using specific colors whereas Gorey used whatever cloth he had, and stamping Edward Gorey Charitable Trust on one of the creatures stubby legs making the differences obvious, the objection becomes weaker with a mumbled, “Edward wouldn’t go along with it.”

Gorey has been dead for over 18 years. If there is an afterlife, he is certainly more involved in taking in the beatific vision of God than interested in what is being sold in the Edward Gorey House Museum gift shop, and if there is no afterlife, he is unaware of everything, even his having ever existed.

It becomes obvious that there is no real acceptable objection, but more reasons to make the Figbash available to anyone who wants one, especially children who might learn to love reading, but, rather, a refusal based on the simple premise that they realize they had not thought of alternatives that would have removed any objections to manufacturing, and the board just does not want to admit that their original decision was based on tunnel vision and a lack of imagination on their part.

The objection is no longer based on preserving something sacred, but on not having to admit their insistence on their original objection was a bad decision.

Hence my use of “figbashing”,  the insistence on staying with a bad decision even after being shown it was a bad decision and could be replaced with a more effective one based on new, or previously unknown alternatives, solely to avoid the admission by changing that the original decision or course of action, although seeming to have been the only course at the time, may have been the least effective one.

People who figbash annoy me especially if they sacrifice the goal they have been attempting to reach with one approach by willingly losing it by insisting on rejecting the more effective one. They sacrifice the end in protecting the means to it that they had chosen.

While people in Massachusetts want various towns and the whole state to be a Safe Community and state, and are promoting a new piece of legislation to that end, when presented with the law passed in 1843 that has already done that, rather than consider insisting we follow that law, they push it aside because of all the work they have already done on the new law, and don’t want to, at this point, admit they already have what they want in favor of seeing their fight for redundancy completed.

With the opening line,

“ All persons within the commonwealth, regardless of sex, race, color, creed or national origin, shall have, except as is otherwise provided or permitted by law, the same rights enjoyed by white male citizens”
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women in Massachusetts had the right to vote in the state 77 years before “women got the vote”.

The GLBT community should not have had to fight for any rights and have their lives discussed and politically demonized by some.

Women should have been able to get bank loans and mortgages without having it cosigned by a male relative.

And the Irish could have always applied.

Instead of fighting to get what was already theirs, women, the GLBT community, and every person or group that thought they had to fight to get the rights they already had should have been suing those who denied them the rights a white man had that they were being denied.

Recently I attended a presentation whose subject was local abolition history, and the topic of Sanctuary Cities was brought up by one of the people on the panel of historians and attorneys. The panelist, an attorney, related what progress was being made in that regard and what opposition was being encountered, and when I brought up the 1843 law, she admitted that she was not familiar with it, but then authoritatively stated that because it was written in 1843 and was followed by the Civil War, it was no longer in effect as the Fourteenth Amendment replaced the state need to protect fugitive slaves, totally dismissing that while the Massachusetts law made no reference to slaves, fugitive or otherwise, it did address “All persons within the commonwealth, regardless of sex, race, color, creed or national origin”.

And without so much as expressing a desire to discuss it more, or even acknowledging the need to give it more thought, she returned to her explanation of what her organization was doing and their hopes for its success.

This is “figbashing”, and in my over forty plus years of political, labor. and GLBT Rights activism, I have seen unnecessary battles lost and rights assumed dead, when they actually weren’t.

Worse, I have seen activists regroup to renew their fight for something which too often meant modifying the original failed approach while ignoring the different approach of which they had been made aware.

The battle seems of more value than the objective.

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Bullying takes many forms, from the physically visible to the more subtle comments made and spread among peers that often leads to the shunning by the bullies and the loneliness of the bullied.

In seeking the reasons why that quiet, seemingly harmless kid who hardly spoke to anyone could show up at school one day ,his own or some other, and shoot faculty, staff, and fellow students, we put together the picture of someone bullied by those he encountered every day whether or not they were active participants or tacit enablers.

Bullying is a pattern of deliberately and repeatedly harming and humiliating others, especially people who are in some way smaller, weaker, younger, and less powerful.

Although their favored tactic is to victimize those who are just outside the preferred normal or are not the members of the homogeneous majority, it is the bully who lacks proper ease with social behavior and lacks the understanding of the feelings of others. Bullies have easy access to prey and often employ others surreptitiously, unaware that they are the instruments of someone who enjoys what is being done to the victim without their direct involvement. They often start the rumor that others spread and the victim has to deal with. They pull the strings and watch the show.

When the victims have reached their limit after repeated and unaddressed bullying, they become a victimizer when their pent up anger reaches the breaking point, and they use whatever means seems the best release of it.

The outlets can be as mild as a tongue-lashing harangue that to onlookers appears to be totally unprovoked, or as extreme as a gun, but the victim who has been pushed to the edge will need to, and will find a way to get release.

Rationality, although preferred, is not a given.

Schools bring the bully, the unknowing allies, and the victim together in one location for the majority of their day, and the majority of a year. For students, school is the world they live in and have to navigate.

But bullying is not limited to school.

It happens at the workplace and it happens in society, the world that people live in and have to navigate, a world where those of the majority race and the majority religion find it easier to tear others down rather than take the time and exert the energy to understand others, and to get others to join in. Those who are threatened by some unknown thing are glad for someone to point out to them a target for their anger.

The bully’s stature is bolstered by someone else’s reduction.

They find a smaller vulnerable group, and spread disinformation so that others blindly bully people, convinced they are doing the right thing without examining the motivations of the person who is firing them up.

The best defender of the threatened is the person who invents the threat.

Utter humiliation levitra no prescription and shock eat away your mind. Some men buy cialis have no erectile dysfunction condition. It is also said that one can never get rid of erectile find out over here order levitra dysfunction completely from their life but you can get erection whenever you want to in those 6 hours for sure. A surprising number of men believe that pumps are levitra viagra price even better than other methods of enlargement including pills, creams, oils and extenders. Although many victims have previously felt that they were alone without the alliances enjoyed by the bullies, with the internet they can discover by research or by accident other victims, ways to deal with the bullying, whether rational or irrational, and the encouragement to either deal with the bullying quietly, or removing it completely to end it.

Consider a religion unknown to most people but explained by those who are not members, who have, perhaps, had no real involvement with it, and who pass on biased information they received from someone else just as disconnected.

Toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and in the first third of the Twentieth during the hay day of immigration when the various cultural and ethnics groups had little contact with those outside their communities, one group’s understanding of another was based largely on what they were told as opposed what they experienced, yet each thought they knew the other well and correctly. In reality they knew only what the person who informed them thought was the reality. Basically, it was not so much that one group disliked who another actually was, but, rather, they disliked the stereotype no matter how far it was from reality.

When someone most like us commits a heinous crime, like a mass killing or school shooting, we view them as loners who acted out after years of bullying, something we equate with the cause of some form of mental illness and something that may produce a degree of empathy. When they are not like us, we look for reasons beyond ourselves for their having been radicalized.

This instantaneous response is too often expressed by politicians in sound bites and tweets.

With the “others” we have continually demonized their religions or differences, and this has opened them to bullying by the general public that calls them names, shuns them, or acts around them in subtle yet discernible ways that convey distrust and rejection. They may have done nothing beyond simply been somewhere, and people feel free to condemn them as stereotypes with hurtful and pseudo-patriotic words.

In the minds of some, patriotism is easiest to prove by yelling at someone in a Hijab, or someone speaking a foreign language even if that foreign language is Choctaw, loud enough for others to hear.

We think only children bully their peers, when in reality adults bully their peers, but in different ways and in adult places.

Those committing school shootings are in the majority male, white, conservative, and loners with poor social skills, the cause of which we look for after the fact, who have found encouragement from people of like mind with similar experience to take revenge on their world that has rejected them and whose bully has recruited allies to aid in the bullying. It is radicalization without the Hijab.

Those committing mass killings by gun, vehicle, or bomb are in the majority members of a cultural group or religion who have found encouragement from people of like mind with similar experience to take revenge on their world that has rejected them and whose bully has recruited allies to aid in the bullying by sound bites, political speech, or tweets.

We are adults, so we don’t bully people.

Except we do, and the result is the bullied adults resolve the problem by means accessible to adults.

The simple response to someone’s objection to being bullied is to tell them to either suck it up or to do something about it. The naivete is to assume that the way they deal with it will be more rational than the bullying.

While bullying causes a student to lash out and harm peers, we seem unaware that it works the same way with adults.

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Your family is threatened in your home country; you have to get out; you are told there is a place where you can be safe,;you believe this promise; you head north (because no one crosses the Northern border illegally), and upon arrival the children whose safety you seek are taken from you.

The Trump administration is increasing criminal prosecutions of parents entering the United States illegally, whereas in the past people apprehended crossing the border illegally were deported without being criminally charged, and will place their children in protective custody.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the policy was not new, the government was just expanding procedures already in place.

Thomas Homan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) explained,

“We have always separated families under two situations, one when we can’t establish them as a parent and that child is being trafficked.The second situation when we separate is when we prosecute. People are dying trying to enter this country. There is a right way to do and a wrong way to do it.”

Back in April, Sessions announced the “zero tolerance” policy in which illegal entrants to the United States would be prosecuted in federal court.

People will be stopped by the border patrol, taken to jail by the U.S. Marshals Service, and referred to a federal court to face charges. Meanwhile, their children will be placed in government custody, with the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“If we do our duty to prosecute most cases, then children inevitably for a period of time might be held,” Sessions said.

In spite of taking credit for a low number of people attempting to cross the border, all that tough talk was supposed to be working, apprehensions are at the levels seen during the Obama administration.  “Illegal immigration must end!” Trump tweeted on Friday.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that there have been about 30,000 prosecution referrals since the start of the 2018 fiscal year. That’s up from 18,642 prosecutions for the entire 2017 fiscal year.

Trump, of course, not being too up on history or facts, assuming no one else is either, explained things to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during the roundtable on immigration policy in California held in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Wednesday,

“I know what you’re going through right now with families is very tough but those are the bad laws that the Democrats gave us. We have to break up families. The Democrats gave us that law. It’s a horrible thing where you have to break up families. The Democrats gave us that law and they don’t want to do anything about it. They’ll leave it like that ’cause they don’t want to make any changes. And now you’re breaking up families because of the Democrats. It’s terrible.”

But the reality is separating families was made by the Trump administration. There is no law that “the Democrats gave us”.

He seems to have no only confused the2008 law designed to combat child trafficking, which says a child traveling alone from countries other than Mexico or Canada must be released in the “least restrictive setting” while the case winds through immigration court, with a “catch-and-release” policy.

As president, George W. Bush signed that bill, passed unanimously by both houses of Congress, into law, and it says nothing about taking children from parents.

Since October, 700 children have been separated from their parents.

Move over children of Flint and you Navajos dealing with bad water. You have to make room for a whole other group getting the same treatment.

Earlier this year a federal health study showed a nation-wide water contamination problem that poses a particular risk near military bases, but the EPA and White House tried to block it because they saw it as a public relations nightmare”.

The Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported that a class of toxic chemicals has contaminated drinking water supplies “near military bases, chemical plants and other sites from New York to Michigan to West Virginia.”

In an email forwarded by a White House aide referred to one from James Herz, a political appointee who oversees environmental issues at the OMB, saying,

“The public, media, and Congressional reaction to these numbers is going to be huge. The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful. We (DoD and EPA) cannot seem to get ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be.”

That was at the end of January, and there is still no scheduled date for publication.
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The chemicals, which are used in products like Teflon and firefighting foam, and are linked to thyroid defects, problems in pregnancy and certain cancers, are contaminating water systems around the country.

Although dangerous exposure had been originally set at 70 parts per million, the hidden study found that one-sixth that level could pose a danger especially to infants and breastfeeding mothers.

Defense Department has used foam containing the chemicals in exercises at bases across the country, and has found that at 126 facilities the substances exceeded the current safety guidelines in nearby water supplies.

It turns out that the chemicals are more dangerous than previously thought, and cleanup costs at military bases will be high and neighboring communities will need to pour money into treating their drinking water supplies.

Pruitt and President Donald Trump should release the report.

So it was mothers’ Day, and Trump spoke from the heart about the important mother in his life.

“I learned so much from my mother. She was just incredible — warm, loving, really smart, could be tough if she had to be, but basically she was a really nice person.”

Or put another way, “My mom. Meh.”

A piece of chocolate cake is the best chocolate cake in the whole wide world ever, but his mother was basically nice.
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Meanwhile, Melania, the mother of his youngest son, goes unmentioned. Not even a “Meh”.

Now it was bad enough that he celebrated Mothers’ Day by leaving his wife, the mother of his son, and that very son to play golf, but as we were to find out the next day, this was the day before Melania was going to Walter Reed for a medical procedure.

What a loving husband and father.

What a role model for the kid.

Trump needed to win over working Americans to get their votes in his bid to be president. He couldn’t come up with real facts, so, just as he did with Mexicans, Muslims, Transgender people, he needed to present the middleclass with something that threatened them.

He chose China.

 “I beat the people from China. I win against China. You can win against China if you’re smart. But our people don’t have a clue. We give state dinners to the heads of China. I said why are you doing state dinners for them? They’re ripping us left and right. Just take them to McDonald’s and go back to the negotiating table.”

It wasn’t a state dinner, but he did have the President fo China at Mar a Lago for some of the world’s best chocolate cake ever while telling him about bombing Syria and showing stuff about it on his cell phone.

 “China’s upset because of the way Donald Trump is talking about trade with China. They’re ripping us off, folks, it’s time. I’m so happy they’re upset.”

“There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy. But that’s exactly what they are. They have destroyed entire industries by utilizing low-wage workers, cost us tens of thousands of jobs, spied on our businesses, stolen our technology, and have manipulated and devalued their currency, which makes importing our goods more expensive – and sometimes, impossible.”

 “Because it’s an economic enemy, because they have taken advantage of us like nobody in history. They have; it’s the greatest theft in the history of the world what they’ve done to the United States. They’ve taken our jobs.”

 “China is the biggest environmental polluter in the World, by far. They do nothing to clean up

“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country and that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

 “China is neither an ally or a friend — they want to beat us and own our country.”

 “The single biggest weapon used against us and to destroy our companies is devaluation of currencies, and the greatest ever at that is China. Very smart, they are like grand chess masters. And we are like checkers players. But bad ones.”

 “No surprise that China was caught cheating in the Olympics. That’s the Chinese M.O. – Lie, Cheat & Steal in all international dealings.”

“But when you see China, these are fierce people in terms of negotiation. They want to take your throat out, they want to cut you apart. These are tough people. I’ve dealt with them all my life.”

“We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of any more,” Mr Trump told CEOs at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) conference.
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“I am always going to put America first.”

The president believed China’s trade surplus was unacceptable.

He has condemned “the audacious theft of intellectual property,” the ”massive subsidizing of industries through colossal state-owned enterprises,” and American companies being targeted by “state-affiliated actors for economic gain”.

But then, 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put a half-billion dollars into an Indonesian project that will personally enrich him, Trump ordered a bailout for a Chinese-government-owned cellphone maker ZTE

“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

Remember, he promised American workers he would create jobs, he just didn’t tell them where.

The developer of a theme park resort outside of Jakarta received as much as $500 million in Chinese government loans and another $500 million from Chinese banks, and the Trump Organization has a deal to license the Trump name to the resort, which includes a golf course and hotels.

U.S. military and intelligence community have already deemed ZTE phones a security risk and banned their use on bases for fear they could be used to track the locations of service members.

The company had been fined $1.2 billion last year because it was violating sanctions against Iran and North Korea and had lied about that, so last month the U.S. government last month banned it from purchasing U.S. components for seven years. This caused the company to shut down and workers to lose their jobs.

This week, after the money from the loan and Chinese bank, Trump tweeted,

“ZTE, the large Chinese phone company, buys a big percentage of individual parts from U.S. companies. This is also reflective of the larger trade deal we are negotiating with China and my personal relationship with President Xi.”

Trump has basically intervened in a law enforcement matter to satisfy a foreign government.

China needed to get out of the sanctions, and it seems to have found a way- offer Trump money.

Joining Flint Michigan and Navajo tainted water on the back shelf of the country’s attention, Puerto Rico is still a mess after it was hit by the hurricane. We have moved on, and something needs to be done to get the country’s attention so the island can be brought back.

The conditions in North Korea are bad. Food is scarce, as unbelievable as it may sound, people in North Korea are shorter than those in the South, and the 2017 per-capita gross domestic product for South Korea was $39,400 against North Korea’s $1,700 in 2015, the most recent figure available. Out of 228 countries, North Korea’s per-capita GDP ranks 214.

The country is going to need some help if it is going to be able to keep up with the South, and it appears that if North Korea agrees to denuclearize, the United States will be willing to help them.
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According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, once that agreement is made and sanctions lifted, “Private-sector Americans, not the U.S. taxpayer” would go into North Korea to “help build out the energy grid. To work with them to develop infrastructure. All the things that the North Korean people need.”

There are business opportunities waiting for those companies that can get in on the ground floor and benefit from what Trump and Kim can agree to, and that includes hotels, casinos, and golf courses brought to you by the Trump Organization with a Kim family partnership all done in the name of the people of North Korea.

Puerto needs to nuclearize and fast.

In April 2010, Rand Paul was asked if he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he answered,

“I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I’m all in favor of that.”

But,

“I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners — I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant — but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I think there should be absolutely no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about to my mind.”

A few weeks later he clarified,

“I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form. I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. … But I think what’s important about this debate is not written into any specific ‘gotcha’ on this, but asking the question: What about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking? I don’t want to be associated with those people, but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires is that we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized, but that doesn’t mean we approve of it.

Had I been there, there would have been some discussion over one of the titles of the Civil Rights Act, and I think that’s a valid point and still a valid discussion, because the thing is, if we want to harbor in on private businesses and their policies, then you have to have the discussion about, do you want to abridge the First Amendment as well?”

So he might have, depending on the discussion. But a yes vote was not a sure thing.

His final statement on it, which left out the discussion he would have had, was,

“I would have voted yes.”

Of course, perhaps, of course.

Commitment

Four years later when he was asked by MSNBC about his flip flopping on the Civil Rights Act question, he rewrote what was clearly on video and told MSNBC,

“I’ve been attacked by half a dozen people on your network trying to say I’m opposed to the Civil Rights Act and somehow now I’ve changed. So I’m not really willing to engage with people who are misrepresenting my viewpoint on this. I have never been against the Civil Rights Act.”

Perhaps, of course, perhaps.

In 2011 Paul said the United States should stop offering federal aid to Israel, a position he held and defended when he first became a senator, but then later said he had never supported.

Paul claimed he was a believer in restraint on military matters, and when it came to Syria said,

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As a result of the backlash to his isolationism, his attitude shifted to,

 “While my predisposition is to less intervention, I do support intervention when our vital interests are threatened. If I had been in President Obama’s shoes, I would have acted more decisively and strongly against ISIS. I would have called Congress back into session — even during recess. This is what President Obama should have done. He should have been prepared with a strategic vision, a plan for victory and extricating ourselves. He should have asked for authorization for military action and would have, no doubt, received it.”

In 2014 Rand Paul was against any bombing in Syria until he decided he was for it.

When it came to the biggest, bestest, never before seen in history Trump tax cuts, Paul had tweeted,

“I cannot in good conscience vote to add more to the already massive $20 trillion debt. I promised Kentucky to vote against reckless, deficit spending and I will do just that.”

But, yep, he voted for it.

When it came to Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State, Paul said,

“You really want a diplomat to be in charge of the State Department, not someone who is advocating for war. I frankly think that Pompeo’s positions are too much of an advocate for regime change, really everywhere. I don’t think our policy ought to be for regime change, so I think Pompeo really isn’t a good fit to be a diplomat.”

He held off til the last minute, getting a lot of attention and television time, and then changed his mind.

“President Trump believes that Iraq was a mistake, that regime change has destabilized the region, and that we must end our involvement with Afghanistan. Having received assurances from President Trump and Director Pompeo that he agrees with the president on these important issues, I have decided to support his nomination to be our next Secretary of State.”

And now Rand Paul opposes Gina Haspel for head of the CIA.

“She oversaw an illegal black ops operation in Thailand that included torture.  I don’t think torture is what America is about.”

“I’ll do whatever it takes [to stop her], and that includes filibuster.”

“I don’t have the power to stop her nomination. There’s enough votes she’ll eventually win. Few things in life . . . [are] worth standing up saying ‘enough is enough.'”

“We are not a people that should be so fearful or vengeful that we think that torture is somehow acceptable. On what level could torture ever be acceptable? We should make a stand on this. She should never lead the CIA.”

So that will be a “yes” vote.