Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss President Trump’s success with Operation Warp Speed acknowledging how the president was able to find a way around all the bureaucracy that is normally a part of the FDA process.
Leahy: We are joined in the studio now by the original all-star panelist and our very good friend for 30 years Crom Carmichael. Good morning Crom.
Carmichael: Michael. Good morning sir.
Leahy: It is the last show for The Tennessee Star Report in 2020 today.
Carmichael: Well, we’ll try to make it very good.
Leahy: We’ll make it great.
Carmichael: It’s a very very exciting thing.
Leahy: So we’re off and we get to sleep in.
Carmichael: You get to sleep in. I get up early for the radio show. But not like you. Nothing like you.
Leahy: No 3:30 a.m. for Crom. (Chuckles) I don’t blame you. We’ll be back here on Monday, January 4, 2021 and we’ll see how that all plays out Crom.
Carmichael: I have a prediction by the way for the Georgia Senate races on Monday the fourth because we’re going to be running prediction markets with a company called consensus point.
Leahy: We will wait. I’ll be very interested in your prediction.
Carmichael: We will be running essentially two panels. One is a national panel and then within the national panel, we’ll have a Georgia panel. So we’ll know what the national panel says and we’ll know what the Georgia panel says within that national panel and we’ll see if there is a meaningful difference.
Leahy: That’s going to be very interesting and I look forward to hearing what the prediction panel says on it. Well, you know when Donald Trump announced in March that he was going to establish Operation Warp Speed…
Carmichael: No. That’s not accurate. I want to be clear. Based on Joe Biden’s history he says he coined the term Operation Warp Speed.
Leahy: Oh really?
Carmichael: He says he’s going to put it in place. In fact, he already has. Biden already has.
Leahy: A revisionist history. Anyway, when Donald Trump began the process of getting a vaccine ready in less than a year the left-wing critics said, oh, he’s just blowing smoke. It’ll never happen. It’s happened.
Carmichael: Now, here’s what’s interesting about that. One is they said it would never happen because they assumed that the FDA would continue to operate the way it has historically. And that is things moving at a glacial pace. And I think I’ve talked about this before Michael that the reason the FDA is slow in approving drugs is that Big Pharma likes it that way.
Big Pharma likes it to be expensive so that little companies that might be creating drugs before they get to the phase three trials are forced to sell out to Big Pharma. So Big Pharma lets little companies go through phase one and go through phase two. Now, in this case, the reason that Big Pharma jumped in the first of all, they put a person in charge of Operation Warp Speed who was not part of the FDA.
And so he was able to circumvent completely. He had the authority to circumvent all the bureaucrats at the FDA. And he did. But the other thing is that the federal government funded Operation Warp Speed and took the risk out of it. So it shows you how quickly a drug can be created if the bureaucrats get out of the way. Now the FDA still exists. All this did was show what is possible. But now that it is done, we now have Joe Biden taking his vaccine. Now, this is a person who six weeks ago said he wouldn’t take it because he didn’t trust Trump.
Leahy: That’s right. He did say that.
Carmichael: Yes, he did and so did Kamala Harris. By the way, nothing has changed in that six weeks period in terms of Trump being president of the United States. He is still president. Operation Warp Speed, contrary to what Joe Biden might say is something Trump did not Biden. But what’s interesting is that he took it and then an hour after that candidate Biden claimed that the president had no plan for addressing the virus.
And warned that Americans, this is from The Wall Street Journal, and warned that Americans couldn’t trust Mr. Trump to oversee a quick and safe vaccine. With today’s vaccination Biden essentially is admitting that he didn’t have a clue what he was saying or didn’t believe it. But what’s interesting is that Biden now says that there’s still much work to be done.
And here’s the greatest concern now. And that is if Biden will actually stop Operation Warp Speed before it’s finished and then claim that something else has to be done, I think that’s entirely possible. All Biden has to do is do nothing. Just do nothing and Operation Warp Speed will be completed and the population will be vaccinated by sometime in the spring. But it’ll be interesting to see if he will do that. Then you have this relief bill of 5,593 pages, which is a lot like the Obamacare bill.
Leahy: Exactly.
Carmichael: Because a lot of congressmen and women voted against it simply because they didn’t know what was in it.
Leahy: They had at least six hours to read over 5,593 pages.
Carmichael: This is no way to pass a $2 trillion bill. It was over two trillion by the time you added it all up. But here’s what’s really interesting about that. For those people who do know the big chunks of it, it really reveals what is important to the Democrat Party. One is a lot of funding for state and local government. A lot of funding for government-run schools
Leahy: They’ve claimed not. They claimed that not to be the case. I heard a report that said no money for state and local schools. And I thought that can’t be true.
Carmichael: That’s false.
Leahy: Thank you.
Carmichael: That’s false. What we should be doing Michael we should be holding journalist full-time journalists to account in the same way the police are held to account. Police have a job to do and when they break the law of their job, then they should be held accountable. And journalists have a job to do. It’s not like a law that’s written, it’s a law of their industry, and that is, to tell the truth.
To seek the truth and then to tell the truth. And so the the the equivalent of somebody who is too lazy to seek the truth, but just repeats what they’ve heard from somebody else who then turns out to have not told the truth that is to me similar to a policeman who is engaged in some kind of abusive behavior.
Leahy: Well, you’re just describing The New York Times‘s false attack on the 10th on The Georgia Star News yesterday.
Carmichael: Tell us a bit about that. What we’re some of the things that they said in their article that were just flat out wrong. Give us a few examples.
Leahy: Well they mischaracterized one of our stories. They said that we claimed that an audit showed that there was a changing of the votes. We didn’t claim that in the article at all. We simply said that a Trump supporter alleged that. They got that totally wrong. They dedicated four paragraphs of their article to us. Every one of those four paragraphs had false statements in it. We sent them a correction.
They saw it and they corrected half of them. They haven’t corrected the other half. They also claimed that we were a misinformation super spreader. And they conflated our verifiable, accurate, and fact-based news stories with something like Diamond and Silk did. Totally different. Totally different. But what’s interesting about this Crom is you look at the interplay of The New York Times false reporting with a couple of other things.
There was a report done by a group I’d never heard of before. It’s a progressive nongovernmental organization. It’s a 501-c4 that was founded by the Moveon.org and SEIU employee union guys. They get 25 million bucks a year. We don’t know exactly where it comes from. Supposedly it comes from donations around the world under a hundred bucks.
I’m not quite buying it. They do things like, you know, save the rainforest etc. They’ve decided now the disinformation in Georgia is the number one priority and they released a study that said that there are 20 “super spreaders” out there that have an outsized impact on the Georgia election. The George Star News according to them is one of those 20.
Carmichael: Well congratulations. You could be added to the list of influential publications.
Leahy: I know. I know. I know. The New York Times had so many errors in their four paragraphs. But they have corrected half of them but they haven’t corrected all of them. But they’re lumping us in with “false and misinformation.” They didn’t lay a glove on us and we’re punching back.
Carmichael: Well Lin Wood I know has filed a lawsuit claiming that the ballots for the Senate race and must follow the laws passed by the legislature and not the consent decree.
Leahy: They should! He’s right.
Carmichael: So what he’s done is he has now filed a suit before the election so he can file a suit after the election and they can’t claim he should have filed it before the election.
Leahy: Which is what they’ve done in many other cases.
Carmichael: Which they’ve done in other cases. So he’s done the wise thing from a legal standpoint. It’s a little bit like what Jim Roberts is doing by having to kind of make sure that he now comports with a ruling so that the next time he has his referendum he passes scrutiny.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.Â
