Live from Music Row Tuesday 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 Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles in the studio to talk about his recent email to the Biden administration stating that he will not comply with OSHA which is mandating vaccines on his government employees.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by our very good friend, the mayor of Maury County. (Chuckles) That bastion of freedom, that turbocharged engine of economic growth. Good morning, Andy Ogles.
Ogles: Good morning. How are you?
Leahy: Well, I’m pretty good. (Ogles chuckles) The question is, how are you and where will you be? Andy sent a shot across the bow to the Biden maladministration yesterday. He sent out an email to all Maury County employees.
Why don’t you tell our listing audience? This is all over the news, by the way. Tell our listening audience exactly what you said in that email.
Ogles: If you’ve not been paying attention, there’s the OSHA mandate. If you’re an employer, you have 100 or more employees. There’s a vaccine mandate out there and a lot of concern about that. In Maury County.
We have almost 500 employees, so that would include us. So a lot of folks were worried about and what does that mean for them. So on this past Friday, the Supreme Court heard arguments to do away with that OSHA mandate.
Leahy: Which is, by the way, both illegal and unconstitutional. We’ve gone through that in great detail. But go ahead.
Ogles: So I just reassured employees that the Maury County government will not comply with any OSHA mandate that requires someone to be vaccinated against their will. And then I took it a step further and said that I would go to jail before I force anyone to get the vaccine.
Leahy: Should we get The Tennessee Star bail Andy out of jail fund going here?
Ogles: Maybe. (Laughter) I don’t know. Who would have thought in the United States that churches would be shuttered? Businesses would be deemed nonessential. Lives would be ruined. But because as a small business owner, you couldn’t do your business.
I mean, we’re in a crazy time. But I think courage is contagious. My hope is that other mayors or governors will come out. The governor of Iowa, came out yesterday and said, I don’t think she said she’d be willing to volunteer to go to jail.
Leahy: No, you’re not volunteering.
Ogles: I would rather not go to jail. I’m going to take Glen Jacobs with me. He’ll be on the show later.
Leahy: Glenn Jacobs, the mayor of Knox County. He’s about six foot nine. Do you think he could be your bodyguard?
Ogles: I’ll need one, apparently, if this goes through. (Leahy chuckles) But I’m a fairly tall guy. And when I’m around Mayor Jacobs, I feel short, but he’s a nice guy, a fighter.
And I look forward to having him on the show here shortly. But no, I mean, it’s important that people take a stand. Look, I’m not anti-vaccine. If you want to get it, take it.
Leahy: You have said that innumerable times on this program, you’re not an anti-vaccine guy.
Ogles: I have family members who are high risk who I said, hey, look, hey, go talk to your doctor. Turn off the news. Don’t listen to politicians, but, hey, maybe you should go talk to your doctor and consider getting it because you’re high risk. But that’s between you and your doctor and so if you want it, go get it and then shut up about it. That’s it. I don’t need to know.
Leahy: Yeah, that makes sense now. So the Supreme Court. And by the way, did you hear the ridiculous anti-factual assertions made by Sonya Sotomayor one of the nine Supreme Court justices? She’s one of the liberals.
She’s got to be one of the dumbest Supreme Court justices in modern American history. It seems to me she makes assertions that are just factually bad. She said 100,000 children are now in the hospital with COVID. That’s not true at all.
The current rate was, like, 780, and maybe cumulatively has been 3,500 with Omicron variant over a period of time. But she makes these bold assertions that are factually wrong. Somebody said if she were on Twitter, she would be banned for misinformation.
Ogles: I mean, it just goes to show that some of these folks and look, we all have our own biases and agendas, if you will. But she’s totally driven by an agenda and not her oath to uphold justice. And that’s a problem.
And I think part of Trump’s legacy is the Supreme Court and the federal judges 2022 in elections can’t get here soon enough so that the Republicans are back in control and can block further poor appointments from the Biden administration.
But the CDC, there’s a headline in The Tennessee Star that says CDC says the majority of COVID deaths among people who were unhealthy to begin with. So we have this misinformation out there that if you catch it, you’re just going to fall down and die.
And now we see two and a half years later that oh, by the way, the majority of the deaths are those that cohort that we identified early on that you had a comorbidity one or more. And in some cases, the majority of them had four comorbidities. They were unhealthy.
Leahy: Here’s the situation. The Supreme Court momentarily is going to issue a ruling on the OSHA mandate. My guess is it will be five, four or six, three, probably six, three calling it unconstitutional, right? That’s my guess.
Ogles: I think so.
Leahy: So if that happens…
Ogles: Then I don’t have to go to jail.
Leahy: You don’t have to go to jail. But now let’s just play a scenario. What happens if it’s I don’t think it will be this way. But what if the Supreme Court were to make a mistake and uphold that mandate?
Do the feds come knocking on your door and say, Andy, you didn’t demand that all Maury County employees get vaccinated. We’re about to take you into custody. Is that how it would work?
Ogles: No. I think the whole OSHA mandate in and of itself is ridiculous because they don’t have the capacity, the ability to truly enforce it. And so they’re looking for businesses to do their dirty work. They’re looking for businesses to push an agenda on the vaccine.
Leahy: That’s a good point. That’s a good point.
Ogles: They can’t enforce this.
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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.
