Better in their words…

Walz implodes, quits Minn. race; media panics over defenestration timing; RFK Jr. slashes CDC child vax schedule; SNAP junk-food bans, wage hikes; J6 spin flops; PBS pulls plug; Kelly faces censure.

Source: DING DONG ☙ Tuesday, January 6, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Ding dong, the witch is dead! Calling Tim Walz a ‘witch’ is like calling Nicolás Maduro a ‘tourist,’ but never mind— the DNC’s house fell on him. The New York Times excreted a hasty damage-control piece headlined, “Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Abandons Re-election Bid, and Amy Klobuchar May Run Instead.” In a single headline, the Times stitched together a hard fact —the scandal-driven collapse of Walz’s career— with a soft, unverified rumor about Amy Klobuchar, presumably to keep reeling, dispirited Democrats upright.

The rumor —that popular four-term Senator Amy Klobuchar might fly in to save the day like Glinda the Good Witch— was sourced to two anonymous people “briefed on conversations.” Briefed on. Meaning: they didn’t hear the conversations. Lawyers call that double hearsay. The paper then added that Klobuchar “did not respond” to requests for comment. I’m calling BS.

Klobuchar, 65, currently infests a safe, low-effort Senate seat not up again until 2029. She could ride it until she’s 106. Why would she abandon the safe 6-year Senatorial term for a four-year, accountability-heavy, scandal-soaked governorship that Walz just turned into a furious Superfund site? That would be like trading the Wizard’s suite in the Emerald City for the old farmhouse that just crushed the witch— to help “stabilize” it. Not to mention that, historically, Democrats elevate senators to the presidency, not governors. (Curiously, the Times skipped all that analysis.)

A far more plausible explanation is that Klobuchar’s Sunday meeting with Walz was not exploratory— it was terminal. The Obama-Pelosi-Biden treatment. The Times offhandedly admitted that “Democrats in the state had voiced concern in recent weeks that Mr. Walz’s presence on the ticket might hurt other Democrats in November.” Translation: top donors and party leadership decided Walz had become a down-ballot liability. So they voted him off the flying monkey team.

I will eat my ruby slippers if Klobuchar runs. She wasn’t there to discuss running for governor, give me a break. She was there to tell Tim he was melting. Libs and their corporate media allies are now flooding the zone with zero-calorie “Democrats thrilled” stories about Klobuchar as savior, in a vain attempt to reframe the narrative from collapse to orderly succession.

Walz didn’t even bother with the old more time with my family gag. Instead, the article admitted that “a widening scandal over fraud in social services programs in Minnesota had persuaded him to drop out.” Notice the grammatical sleight of hand: had persuaded him. Persuaded by whom? Like the Wizard’s illusory floating head, the Times deployed its tried-and-true rhetorical sleight-of-hand —the passive voice and past-perfect tense— to protect Democrats.

Timmy has melted down to a damp spot with the microbial profile of a septic leak. “For Mr. Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president in the 2024 election,” the Times conceded with raw understatement, “the departure capsa brief rise in national politics.” In other words, it’s all over and everybody knows it.

Tim Walz, the vice presidential candidate one year ago, is now a political corpse, a stain on the party, and a spent force— in other words, a hissing and a byword.

Now consider the timing. The underlying fraud scandal is nearly a decade old. It reappeared in the national crystal ball only last month, followed by a relentless social-media exposé campaign. Conservative outlets (like Powerline blog) have been documenting it for years. But only now did it erupt—suddenly, violently, and at Trumpian speed. Democrats panicked and yanked the plug now —with time for damage control before the midterms— not to save the governorship (likely lost anyway), but to protect the rest of Minnesota’s ticket by sealing the witch and the farmhouse under a concrete containment dome.

It has been a very bad week for Trump’s adversaries.

🍿 One more point. If Republicans truly orchestrated Walz’s downfall —and the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming— it reflects remarkable discipline. They held fire on the scandals through the entire 2024 election, then deployed them now for maximum midterm leverage. Walz became the American Maduro: seemingly secure and defiant one day, suddenly finished the next. Best of all, Democrats did the dirty work themselves, leaving no GOP fingerprints.

As congressional hearings, DOJ investigations, and media coverage continue tightening around Minnesota’s fraud ecosystem, Walz becomes Exhibit A for Trump’s broader argument: his opponents weren’t merely wrong— they were corrupt or catastrophically incompetent. And that opens new fronts in the political war.

Think Minnesota is unique? I’m looking straight at you, Gavin.

California under Gavin Newsom is sitting on a fraud and mismanagement record that makes Minnesota look like a pilot project by comparison. Across unemployment, homelessness, housing subsidies, food aid, and public health coverage, California’s auditor now has eight Newsom‑era agencies on the high‑risk list for “waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement,” explicitly warning of systemic control failures, not isolated “mistakes.”

That profile makes Minnesota look less like an outlier and more like the first big test case for a broader political argument about blue‑state administrative collapse and wide-scale welfare abuse.

🍿 As a litigator, when I have a fraud case with multiple potential defendants, I sue the weakest defendant first. Clients always want to swing at the biggest target immediately. That’s a mistake.

Weak defendants have thinner legal defenses, fewer resources, and looser controls. Discovery is easier. Cooperation is more likely. You build precedent, develop the record, and extract documents you’d never get from a well-lawyered institutional defendant. If you tackle them all at once, the tall-building lawyers for the well-heeled defendants run interference for the rest.

That’s exactly what this looks like. Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future network —small nonprofits and shell entities without serious defensive capacities— went first. They yielded a lurid record of fake invoices, kickbacks, and luxury spending. Then came the governor.

They went after the weakest governor first. Now they have a scalp and a narrative. From here, you move up the food chain. If Democrats were willing to sacrifice Walz, who’s next under the bus to save the larger blue-state machine?

Get your popcorn ready. I’m serious. You should probably pick one with your favorite flavor.

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Landing like a C-17 Globemaster amidst the chaos of all the other Trump triumphs this week came a story that otherwise would have earned wall-to-wall media wrath. Yesterday, the New York Times pinched off an awful article headlined, “RFK Jr. Scales Back the Number of Vaccines Recommended for Children.” The Times said simply, “Public health experts expressed outrage at the sweeping revisions.”

Unsurprisingly, the article buried the lede. It couldn’t make up its mind. It schizophrenically tried to tiptoe across a narrow line between calling the changes revolutionary and describing them as minimal tweaks. It began with the former frame. “Federal health officials on Monday announced dramaticrevisions to the slate of vaccines recommended for American children,” the story started, “reducing the number of … routine shots to 11 from 17.”

In this context, “recommended” is equivalent to “mandated,” thanks to a cascade of state and federal laws triggered by the CDC schedule.

The removed vaccines include covid, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal ACWY, meningococcal B, rotavirus, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Those jabs will now be recommended only to high-risk groups or with a doctor’s specific agreement.

Anyone reading the article would conclude that HHS only removed 6 out of 17 shots from the recommended schedule, leaving them up to doctors. Ho hum. The article invested three long paragraphs reassuring readers that insurance would still fully cover the now-optional shots, so don’t worry (because making people pay anything for their “life-saving” vaccines is just a bridge too far).

But the three big things the Times didn’t say were the real news.

💉 Firstly, this was the biggest rollback in the ever-expanding childhood vaccine schedule since Jonas Salk accidentally stuck himself and, in a fit of mad delirium, decided everyone else should be stuck, too. Yesterday’s partial pruning of the recommended schedule reduced the total number of childhood doses from ~88 to thirty. For readers in Portland, the schedule was just pruned by fifty-five doses— around two-thirds of the total.

Second, the Times (and the other corporate media outlets) also reassured readers that the American Pediatric Association and a bunch of blue states will still mandate the shots even if the CDC has taken them off the list.

But I’m not so sure that’s going to work. There’s a fly in the vaccine serum.

The hiccup is that the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Act, which protects vaccine makers from legal liability for injuries, tracks the CDC-recommended schedule. If a shot isn’t recommended, it isn’t covered, and injured folks can sue vaccine makers directly. That is a game-changer. If there’s one thing vaccine makers hate more than accountability, it’s having to share their profits with their injured customers.

And don’t forget— in July, HHS announced it was “reviewing and revising” the 1986 Act. Those changes remain in the pipeline, ready to be deployed at the right moment. So even for the remaining jabs, the Act itself will be changing.

Third, in explaining the changes, HHS published a fulsome 33-page reportthat contained some extremely noteworthy statements. For one, it included full-throated endorsements of the long-forgotten medical values of personal autonomy, self-determination, and informed consent:

“Among the fundamental principles of public health are respect for personal autonomy and self-determination, and informed consent is a cornerstone of medical care … vaccine decisions should never involve coercion, but instead should always be the result of informed consent and with the final decision resting with the patient/parents. Coercion renders informed consent invalid and undermines this basic right.”

You might think that didn’t need to be said. But it needed to be said.

The report also —maybe for the first time in any public CDC document— confirmed the potential existence of hard-to-prove long-term vaccine injuries:

“Vaccines may cause adverse reactions that occur or are diagnosed months or years after vaccination … Scientifically valid rates of adverse events are rarely available to determine the relationship, if any, between our country’s immunization schedule and the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases in American children.”

And, in a sentence that must freeze medical fetishists’ veins with icy terror, it hinted at a direct assault on all remaining vaccines by way of double-blinded, placebo-controlled randomized trials:

“Given the growing distrust that the American people have in the current childhood vaccine schedule, there is a need for more and better science, including gold standard placebo-controlled randomized trials … approvals of new vaccines designed for mass uptake should be based on double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trials.”

Much has been said about this. The short version is that nobody thinks most vaccines can survive these rigorous types of trials. Pharma shills avoid them like Tim Walz avoiding a process server.

That wasn’t all, by a long shot. The otherwise dry, technical brief was thoroughly salted with the language of medical freedom, and the promise of larger changes to come.

💉 There remains plenty of work to be done, and more shots to remove (maybe all of them). But just because some shots survived this round, let’s not throw the baby out with the bucket of vaccine vials. If we’ve learned anything about how Kennedy is approaching the revolution in public health, it’s that he’s applying the death by a thousand cuts method. Every time they turn around, Kennedy’s team is back there whacking a few more chips off the vaccine edifice. Sooner or later, there won’t be much left.

One also notices that the media keeps recycling two tired and familiar names in these stories as the voices of criticism: aging jab salesman Paul Offit and an actual satanic leather fetishist— Biden’s Monkeypox Czar Demetre Daskalakis. Without spending time on those two ne’er-do-wells, the impressive part is how corporate media is forced to keep quoting these particular two rancid wells of controversy.

Put another way, other mainstream public health voices —voices that might be much less biased and controversial than Offit and Daskalakis— have largely stopped publicly criticizing HHS. It’s not yet clear why —maybe fear of losing grants?— but it suggests Kennedy is getting a handle on the whole industry.

In short, there is a palpable shift in momentum. History is being made. The vaccine-industrial complex is being dismantled piece-by-piece.

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There’s simply too much great news! Here is a lightning roundup. Don’t skim; savor each win:

• The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Why Democrats Aren’t Threatening Another Shutdown This Time.” Haha. The current continuing resolution expires at the end of this month, and a new battle looms. Bottom line: Democrats are still smarting from the spanking Trump gave them during the previous shutdown.
• In the “Never Mind” category, say goodbye to the ugly progressive doctrine of body positivity. Gone with the wind! A Journal op-ed —penned by a credentialed mental health expert— bore the headline, “Ozempic Melted Away Weight—and the Idea of ‘Body Positivity.’” The Journal’s experts admitted that ‘body positivity’ was never actually any real psychological advancement or even based on science; it was just good intentions, which we don’t need anymore, since we now have fat drugs. I am not making that up.
• In related news, CBS reported, “18 states set to ban SNAP recipients from using benefits for some junk food in 2026.” Secretary Kennedy pointed out that SNAP is about nutrition, but ultra-processed junk food, soda, and candy offer no nutrition. One of the most remarkable pivots this year is the way Democrats turned on a dime from “let’s ban soda” to “SNAPpers should be able to buy whatever they want.”
• “Sweeping Minimum-Wage Hikes Take Hold Across the Country.” Nineteen states —both red and blue— will increase minimum wages to at least $15 an hour starting this month. I’m not a fan of minimum wages, but I can’t argue that these bumps arrive at a particularly good time for Republicans, given the Democrats’ affordability narrative. They’ll regret picking that issue soon. Increasing real wages while holding down inflation is the answer.
• To celebrate today’s historic date, the New York Times ran its latest psyop story yesterday, headlined, “For Many Jan. 6 Rioters, a Pardon From Trump Wasn’t Enough.” It was a long-form, magazine-style explainer designed to invert the pardon win into a loss, by pressing on the nerves of conservatives who think Kash Patel’s FBI hasn’t done enough to prove the Capitol Police were the real pipe bombers, or who are frustrated that J6ers haven’t been compensated for their persecutions. Nobody believes the Times gives a fig about how conservatives feel about January 6th. It’s just more “MAGA fractures” nonsense. Don’t take the bait.
• I guess listener donations weren’t actually enough. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Corporation for Public Broadcasting Votes to Shut Down.” Last July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut all $500 million in ‘aid’ to the CPB. The CPB previously funnelled federal funds to NPR and PBS stations. Now it is even more gone than ex-President Maduro, having died a lonely corporate death. It’s another scalp for President Trump, and $500 million less progressive propaganda for the midterm season.
• CNN ran a story headlined, “Pentagon cuts Sen. Mark Kelly’s military retirement pay as punishment over ‘illegal orders’ video.” The headline was deceptive. The punishment is Senator Kelly’s demotion in rank, which will in turn reduce his retirement pay. Kelly’s letter of censure explained that his demotion was “for conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline in the armed forces and conduct unbecoming an officer.” Even some Republicans had either opposed or refused to take a position on Kelly’s censure, but War Secretary Hegseth maintained order and discipline anyway.

🔥 I promised this month would be huge. We’re not even through the first week yet, and just look. In six days —days usually subsumed by holiday distractions— the long list of Trump adversaries who’ve been vanquished (or suffered a serious setback) includes: former president Nicolás Maduro (gone), former vice-president Tim Walz (gone), Senator Mark Kelly (demoted), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (gone), and two-thirds of the CDC’s vaccine schedule (gone).

I can see that it will be challenging to keep up with the news this month, but we are up to the challenge. Onwards.

Have a terrific January 6th Tuesday! Haul yourself back here tomorrow morning, for more delicious and intellectually nutritious Coffee & Covid, with an all-new roundup of essential news and commentary.

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