Better in their words…

Source: A LOT OF TWINKIES ☙ Thursday, September 14, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥 Yesterday, evidently just as tired as the rest of us of hearing “there’s no evidence for impeachment!,” the House Oversight Committee published an informative explainer on its website titled, “Evidence of Joe Biden’s Involvement in His Family’s Influence Peddling Schemes.”

So there.

The new site doesn’t offer any new revelations but it is a good, comprehensive list of twenty-two items of evidence, just of the Biden Bribery deals. I’d like to suggest the Committee keep a standing list on its website, moving items on (or off) the list as the case develops.

For transparency, and so forth.

Here’s the link to the newest list of Biden Bribery evidence.

🔥 Meanwhile, facing an existential threat to the Biden gravy train’s integrity, Biden’s handlers did not stay idle, even if Joe himself was sleeping. Yesterday CNN ran a story headlined, “White House sends letter to news execs urging outlets to ‘ramp up’ scrutiny of GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry ‘based on lies’.”

The article was deliciously ironic and possibly even a self-parody.

The article’s “news” was that the White House sent all major media executives a letter directing, I mean encouraging, them to ignore the Republican’s “baseless process story.” The letter strongly advocated that the media has a responsibility “to the truth,” meaning the lie, in the form of taking Biden’s side against the Republicans.

That’s where it got hilarious. See how CNN repeatedly characterized the Republican’s impeachment inquiry as “baseless,” as if that were fact, and note how they continually obscured the definition of “evidence,” like we discussed yesterday:

The White House sent a letter to top US news executives on Wednesday, urging them to intensify their scrutiny of House Republicans after Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, despite having found no evidence of a crime…

McCarthy launched the impeachment inquiry Tuesday without a formal House vote in a bid to appease Republicans on his far-right… House Republicans, most of whom have denied that disgraced former President Donald Trump committed any wrongdoing, have long sought to baselessly portray Biden as a corrupt, crime-ridden politicianengaged in sinister activities…

The Republican House-led investigations into Biden have yet to provide any direct evidence that the president financially benefited from Hunter Biden’s career overseas.

Haha, that’s Establishment Media even-handed news reporting for ya.  And, “Hunter Biden’s career overseas?” His career? Really? What, pray tell, was that “career?” Exactly?

Basically the news was the White House has enlisted the media onto its impeachment-response team and CNN is 100% on board. What else is new?

My suggestion is for the House Oversight Committee to send its own letter to all the media executives, listing the evidence, and calling on them — in the noble Spirit of Watergate, of course — to hold the White House’s muddy feet to the political fire.

🔥 Great news! It’s finally almost over. The Washington Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Mitt Romney says he will not seek a second term in the Senate.”

Romney, 76, blamed Republican voters for his decision. Romney says cattle-like conservative voters have lost their minds, being magnetically drawn like, say, Senators to a sweet insider stock deal, to a “populist demagogue message.”

Thus Romney, no populist, said he feels like a second term would be a waste of his time, much “less productive and less satisfying” than was his first term, when he twice got to vote to impeach President Trump. He even got to be the only Republican to vote to impeach during the democrats’ first go-around, which allowed the democrats to call it “bipartisan.”

As if.

Most of the other Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in the second round have vanished from the political landscape, their careers torched in a bonfire of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Now you may add the name “Romney” to that disgraceful list of republican reprobates.

Evidently the WaPo’s reporters decided not to kick the Mormon Senator in his ample behind on the way out. The WaPo’s piece was a graceful litany of Romney’s political accomplishments and his wise words of wisdom. Forty years or so and it sounds like a lot when you put them all in one article.

Romney still has a year to go, though, and one suspects (but hopes to be wrong) that Romney will be much more obsequiously open-minded and much less passionately principled when it comes to President Peters’ impeachment proceedings than Romney was during President Trump’s.

One suspects that Romney’s decision has more to do with facing his deluded voters’ wrath, and reminds us of the musings of murderous, corrupt king Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

“O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t, A brother’s murder.”

Buh bye, Mitt.

🔥 This might be the best news of the month, and not just for New Mexico’s citizens.

It began earlier this month, when New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan had a feverish dream after dining at an authentic Mexican food truck — by “authentic,” I mean it had just driven across the border from Mexico that nightfully stocked with alien border-jumpers and a fresh batch of tamales — and when the governor finally collapsed into bed following her dinner’s sordid sequel, she drifted off into a difficult slumber.

During the trying wee hours of the night, while she tossed and turned, Governor Lujan’s jalapeño-tortured subconscious mind excreted an idea, a runny sort of an idea anyway, an idea that dumped into her somnolent consciousness like a plop of salsa into the middle of the sour cream bowl. A quiet little voice in her head (with a Mexican accent) told her what to do. Here’s how to do it, Shelly: just declare a health emergency and ban ALL the guns! It will be great, you’ll see. The people will love you.

She never should have listened to that voice.

On Monday, the gun ban’s very first day, democrat Bernalilllo County Sheriff John Allen, who Governor Lujan appointed to office, held a press conference and called her gun ban “unconstitutional,” vowing his office would not enforce the order. “The temporary ban challenges the foundations of our constitution,” he explained, “and I take my oath seriously.”

https://x.com/beauhightowerdn/status/1701288668554731646

Displaying dangerous levels of hubris, especially considering what would happen shortly, Governor Lujan clapped back at Sheriff Allen, sarcastically but ironically telling reporters “I don’t need lessons in the constitution from the police.”

Yes, Governor. Yes, you do. You need those lessons.

Next up, in the face of multiple lawsuits challenging the order, on Tuesday New Mexico’s Attorney General sent Lujan a letter saying his office was refusing to defend her in the lawsuits over her unconstitutional gun ban, because his “duty to uphold and defend the constitutional rights of every citizen takes precedence” and he did “not believe  passes constitutional muster”:

That didn’t give Michelle very much time to find replacement counsel to defend her gun ban in court, since the first emergency hearing was the next day. And, haha, how do you suppose the judge viewed the fact that the state’s own attorney general refused to defend the gun ban order?

I can promise you it didn’t help the ban. We can easily imagine how badly it went. JUDGE: “Good morning, staff attorney. Are we expecting the attorney general today?”  STAFF COUNSEL: “Um, no judge. He withdrew.” JUDGE: “Ah. I see. I don’t blame him. Well, let’s begin. This shouldn’t take long.”

(*Note: in reality, under the rules, the AG would have been required to notify the court, including stating the reason for his withdrawal, which is even worse, but you get the idea.)

So then yesterday, quite predictably given the Attorney General’s ejecting himself from Lujan’s crashing political tamale truck, only three days into her burrito-induced gun ban, an Albuquerque federal judge pulled the plug by issuing a temporary injunction pending a full hearing, and all the chaos caused by Lujan’s poorly-considered spicy hallucination was finally over.

Lujan bravely delivered the bad news herself, personally, in a tweet that vowed she would “never stop fighting” — with reality, or with the Constitution, or with common sense, or with something, she wasn’t specific:

It’s more likely that the Governor will never stop fighting with the mutant strain of e-coli now flourishing in her small intestine, and she’ll never stop fighting to find a bathroom at awkward moments.

Let us count all the ways this story is monumentally terrific news.

Using the pandemic as a model, Governor Lujan (D-NM) tested out using her broad executive powers to declare a public health emergency to short-circuit the state’s legislative branch and unilaterally invoke a hypothetical “public health exception” to the Constitution.

But it failed, and it failed badly and quickly.

How badly? Even though Lujan’s odious order was carefully limited to only thirty days and one county, frontline democrat officials promptly and publicly publicly disavowed the ban. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Governor Lujan was the only customer at the food truck of authoritarianism.

It remains to be seen how badly damaged the Governor will be, politically. But it’s bad. She basically just got a vote of “no confidence” from her own party officials in a story that’s getting international scrutiny. And it demonstrates a kind of profound political ineptness, because she failed to get political consensus from her own people before attempting her spicy plan.

The bigger significance of this story is that nobody — even democrats — seems to have an appetite for the “public health exception” notion anymore. If this was a Chinese trial balloon, it burned up, Hindenburg-style, right on the airstrip. Oh, the humanity!

💉 But wait, there’s more! Last Friday, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced a new ban on covid mandates for state employees, and said the state’s health department will “publicize the potential risks related to the covid-19 vaccine.”

https://x.com/SarahHuckabee/status/1700281341021995099

Arkansas still has a ways to go to catch up to Florida, but it’s a start. A greatstart. Let’s go, Arkansans!

💉 And there’s even more! Yesterday, Governor DeSantis of Florida — following The Science™  — held a roundtable of medical-scientific experts discussing the FDA’s rubber-stamp approval of the new Covid booster shot. The conference, hilariously titled “No Way FDA,” is a little on the long side (45 minutes), but the whole thing was terrific.

I’ll summarize the high points if you don’t have time to watch it now.

Link to clip.

All the panel experts agreed that the FDA rushed booster approval through without having a scrap of evidence of safety or efficacy.

At 24:30 in the clip, standout Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya opined that the old FDA would never have approved the shots:

A small trial, with a biomarker? Where you’re recommending it at scale to the entire population? No. I mean, I think that it is an absolutely irresponsible move by the FDA to approve this product, and of the CDC to recommend that everyone take it.

The European agencies are doing something very, very different with this. They’re being much more careful given the paucity of data. Much more responsible.

We need more data… How is a doctor supposed to advise a patient…? There’s no answer they can give that’s backed by actual data.

The FDA in historical times would — no chance would they have approved this, Governor, no way.

And I don’t understand what’s going on at the FDA right now that they would, and the CDC would, recommend it at scale.

At 20:00, Traci Beth Hoeg, MD, PhD, told Governor DeSantis the pre-clinical data supplied by the manufacturers to the FDA showed an unacceptably-high level of serious adverse events:

[Serious adverse events occurred in the preclinical trials in] one out of 50, so it was two percent. So, no, that’s very concerning. It was a medically-attended adverse event. I’ve had a number of people look, as well as myself, and we cannot figure out what that adverse event was. It doesn’t appear that it was reported.

But obviously, if you need a medical professional to attend to that event, and the study authors deemed that it was related to the vaccine, they  had other adverse events in the trial as well that they found were unrelated to the vaccine.

The fact they found this was actually related to the vaccine, that’s very concerning. When we look at the harms side of the ledger, we know there was this — it’s two percent out of this 50 people who got it — that’s a high rate of adverse events.

At 16:45, Patrick Whelan, MD, PhD, calculated the risk of a serious adverse event from the jabs was at least one in 800 people who took the shot:

We found that there were significant adverse events in about one in 800 people who were vaccinated, which is a pretty high level of serious adverse events. It would have been even higher if it weren’t for the fact that the Moderna placebo group had a very high adverse events rate.

The new boosters have not been tested for safety and effectiveness at all, and certainly not in children at this point.

I take care of many children who have a neurobehavioral condition called Panda’s syndrome, and I take care of a lot of teenagers who have long-covid kind of symptoms. There are real concerns about the role the coronavirus and the vaccines have played in triggering these under-studied disorders.

It seems to me that, in the best of all worlds, we would be demanding now that the vaccine makers release patient-level data to researchers in order to balance the real risks against the probable benefits in selected populations.

In England, Mexico, and countries across Europe, they’re only asking people over 65, and people who are immuno-deficient, to be vaccinated with the new boosters.

Dr. Whelan also noted that the federal government isn’t even really trying to figure out the risks of the shots:

There is no robust follow-up now with regards to the side-effects of the older vaccines. I would think we’d want to create a means by which the parents of every covid-vaccinated child would be called at a one-week, one-month, six-month interval to ask how they’re doing, rather than making people navigate the vicissitudes of the VAERS system.

I had a patient, a 7-year-old, who died in our hospital after he received a covid vaccine, and VAERS would not allow me to update my initial VAERS report to indicate the child had actually died subsequently.

Even with the VAERS database, we’re under-appreciating how grave the risks of the vaccine might be.

Following the discussion, Florida’s outstanding Harvard-trained Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced the state health department will soon issue guidance to Florida doctors that: (1) the shots are not recommended for anyone under 65 who is not in a high-risk group, and (2) doctors mustdiscuss the absence of safety and efficacy data with all patients when discussing the boosters, as part of informed consent.

I checked Florida’s current covid dashboard, which reports that, in the most recent weekly update (August 25-31), only seven people got vaccinated in my county of Alachua. In Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade (pop. 3 million), only 188 people were vaccinated.

Now that’s progress! It’s a good thing the federal government just bought 20 million doses of the shots destined for the landfill.

Here’s my suggestion to Florida: two can play the scientific study game. Using some of its budget surplus, Florida’s Department of Health should fund a bunch of grants for studies of shot harms, including followup surveys of parents whose children got the jabs. How about that idea?

🔥 Finally, on Monday CNBC ran a sickly-sweet story headlined, “Smucker agrees to buy Twinkies maker Hostess Brands for $5.6 billion.”

That’s a LOT of Twinkies. Smucker’s stock fell 7.5% on the news, for some odd reason. The Wall Street Journal ran a much more delicious headline than CNBC about the deal:

Twinkie fans, do not worry. Smucker’s has no plans to change the recipe, or formula, or however the eternal snacks are made. Your gas-station snacking habits will be preserved. With loads of preservatives.

That’s a wrap! Have a terrific Thursday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow for a fresh new roundup.

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