Better in their words…

Lots of good news. Requirements on jabs getting tougher. (Shorting vax makers may still pay out.) Even DC Appeals Court agrees with Trump. Good movement on Ukraine front. mrossol

Source: HISTORY AND MYSTERY ☙ Sunday, May 18, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

🪖 C&C ARMY POST 🪖

Two bits of breaking news from the law office: This week, we filed a blockbuster 100+ page complaint against the federal government on behalf of the long-maligned Disinformation Dozen. Well, eight of them, anyway. Stand by for updates.

On Tuesday afternoon, I will argue in federal court on behalf of vaccine-injured plaintiffs in Moms of America, et al v. HHS. We are seeking to overturn the PREP Act, which is the insane statute that immunizes vaccine manufacturers (and others) during pandemics. In my view, it’s unconstitutionally broad, denies injured Americans due process, deletes citizens’ rights to jury trials, and destroys the separation of powers. Prayers welcome! We’re only up against the biggest and most well-funded opponent in history.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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More interesting news emerged yesterday from the rumbling bowels of our overfunded public health mega-bureaucracy. The New York Times ran the story with a headline so intriguing I screengrabbed it for you:

The Times seemed just as unsure how to feel about it as you probably are. But what’s happening is that the FDA is tightening a noose and vaccine gunslingers know their free-range days are numbered.

For some reason, Novavax decided to name its new, fully authorized shot, and I promise I am not making this up, “Nuvaxovid.” Say that three times fast. I suspect a below-average middle school class could’ve coined a better name, especially if they started before lunch.

Regardless of the quirky moniker, kiss goodbye the fast, frenetic days of popping champagne corks and manically clicking “buy now” on yacht orders whenever the FDA rubber-stamps a new covid jab. Novavax’s application came back with conditions: it can only be given on-label to adults 65+, or some kids 12+ who have one or more pre-existing health issues creating a “high risk” for a covid infection.

That, dear reader, is a much smaller market than Novavax hoped for. Honey, I shrunk the profit margin!

Maybe even worse, the FDA also required Novavax to complete several “post-marketing” studies. One requires them to track various heart conditions. But the big one, the one the Times complained loudest about, is that Nova must study results against a placebo group. The Times speculated that the placebo “study could cost tens of millions of dollars, at least.”

The study requirement is a Stay Puft-sized problem. If the studies don’t go well, the shots could be de-authorized, meaning … no profits at all. Just costs. Talk about a disincentive.

The Novavax shot (I refuse to type “Nuvaxovid”) required this authorization because its shot, the only available non-mRNA covid jab, was sold under a soon-expiring emergency use authorization. By contrast, Pfizer and Moderna were formally approved in 2022, but they aren’t off the chopping block. Both mRNA drugs are soon due to release their updated shots for the fall flu/covid season.

The Times thinks Pfizer and Moderna jabs will be tied down, too: “the new restrictions on the Novavax shot portend a more restrictive approach from the F.D.A.”

In fact, the Times smelled a whiff of bad news for all vaccines. “The F.D.A.’s new restrictions,” it speculated, “also appeared to reflect the high degree of skepticism about vaccines from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the other leaders he has appointed at health agencies.” Probably true.

Displaying its typical journalistic malpractice, the Times apparently couldn’t find anyone who agreed with the FDA’s safety conditions. But the paper’s reporters easily found people like chatty Kathy and vaccine salesman Dr. Paul Offit, who darkly opined, “I think the goal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is to make vaccines less available, more expensive and more feared.” Dr. Offit is currently in competitive trials to become the new Tony Fauci.

But at bottom, the Time complained loudest about … norms! The Gray Lady got the vapors because, though the FDA is doing its statutory job, “approval of the Novavax Covid shot also bucks norms that have been in place since the vaccines were first approved.” It was norm-bucking like a jackass with a blowfly up its nose because, the Times explained, “this is the first time that the F.D.A. has ever included health criteria for Covid shots.”

It was, perhaps, one of the most witless arguments the Times has ever made, which is saying a lot. We’ve never required safety studies for covid shots before! It’s not fair!

The most moronic part of the Times’ “norms” argument is that, if you surveyed them, you would find that ordinary folks expect it’s “normal” for the FDA to make drugmakers prove their shots are safe and effective, not waive them through without peeking. Well, get ready, Times, even more of this is coming. On Thursday, new FDA Director Dr. Marty Makary announced the agency will soon “release a new framework for evaluating Covid shots.”

A Whole. New. Framework. I bet they can’t wait.

It seems the FDA plans to let the vaccines disqualify themselves, which is politically brilliant, and they will make the drugmakers pay for it— even brillianter. I can’t wait to see what conditions the new Pfizer/Moderna shots receive.

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The Great Coverup Retcon continued in force yesterday, as the nerve-wracked Times ran a Maureen Dowd op-ed dramatically titled, “The Tragedy of Joe Biden.” Well, it’s some kind of tragedy. Anyway, sure enough, by the fifth graf, Dowd had mentioned Jake Tapper’s upcoming new book Original Sin. And the aging columnist flat wore out her thesaurus. I’ve never read a wordier op-ed.

Cutely calling the vegetable-like, mouth-breathing former president “bubble wrapped,” Dowd grandiosely labeled his downfall as “Shakespearan.” The blame-shifting narrative appeared almost instantly. “Biden and his inner circle,” she dowdishly accused, “created an alternate universe that they tried to sell to the media and the public, a corrosive mirage of unreality.”

But Down went beyond the safe ground where most of the flurry of recent stories have dared to go. She actually starting naming Biden’s handlers, and calling them out, the so-called “palace guard,” or Biden’s coterie of greedy co-conspirators:

Neither was Dowd shy about naming the ultra-high stakes. She accused the Bidens and their advisors of concealing critical facts that all Americans, get this, had a right to know:

Though carefully sprinkling in plenty of Trump slams for political cover, Dowd alliteratively drew a sharp line of blame directly to Democrat leaders as well. “It took the Democrats far too long,” she mused, “to acknowledge and push back against what Americans could see with their own eyes. Democratic pooh-bahs and lawmakers were silent when they should have been screaming.”

Now she tells us.

Despite chucking handfuls of blame at the Bidens, their “palace guards,” Democrat “pooh-bahs and lawmakers,” and even President Trump (don’t ask), Maureen conspicuously let one group skip the line where she was dishing out cupfuls of culpability: The media.

Dowd uttered not one word of blame for the media anywhere in her multisyllabic blame brief.

In the comments, Times readers seemed most willing to blame geriatric Democrat leaders more than anyone else. Despite scrolling for ages, I couldn’t find any comment mentioning media at all. (But recall that the Times’ comments are moderated, so maybe we can’t read too much into that.)

🔥 Meanwhile, earlier this week the Times ran an unintentionally ironic story headlined, “D.N.C. Takes Step to Void Election of Hogg and Kenyatta as Vice Chairs.” You may recall David Hogg, the Parkland school shooting survivor who made himself a progressive darling after publicly politicizing his harrowing experience into a raft of liberal delight. Last year, following sharp controversy over Hogg’s whiteness, he floated his celebrity raft right to the DNC’s board, as its new joint-vice-chair. (To achieve diversity and settle the controversy, the vice-chairmanship was split between two skin colors).

At the time, the media swooned over Hogg’s election, straining all rhetorical bounds of decency by obsequiously labeling him as “fresh blood” and lavishly declaring him to be “the young face of the new Democrat party.”

The love affair lasted about ten minutes until Hogg started oinking.

Since his election, the salty young survivor, now 25, has aimed his fresh blood’s sights at the very same people Maureen Dowd criticized: the octogenarian Democrat “pooh-bahs” who run the party. Hogg impishly pledged to help primary antique incumbents in favor of younger candidates. That quickly made him a persona non grata, got him disinvited from the swanky DNC cocktail circuit, and caused the party of saving democracy to respond the way it always does, by deleting their stupid voters’ uneducated preferences.

Behold: “The credentials committee of the Democratic National Committee voted on Monday,” the Times reported, “to void the results of the internal party vote that made David Hogg a party vice chair, ruling that the election had not followed proper parliamentary procedures.” The matter must now go back before the full DNC membership for another election.

It’s the classic Democrat strategy. Keep voting till you get the result you want, and then stop.

Hilariously, the “parliamentary procedures” the party pooh-bahs alleged were defective weren’t even Hogg’s fault. “The party,” the Times explained, “wrongly combined two separate questions into a single vote, putting at a disadvantage the female candidates because of the party’s gender-parity rules.”

So on top of the Original Sin problem, the DEI-obsessed DNC now faces what will almost certainly be a noisy, contentious battle for leadership, exposing to public scrutiny the wokest parts of its kooky governing rules. I’m not the only one who noticed. Headline from yesterday’s West Orlando News:

The article quoted no less a liberal luminary than Nikki Fried, Florida’s notorious, pot-smoking former Agriculture Commissioner, who now serves as the Chairperson of the Florida Democrat Party (FDP). Of course she does. Nikki is not happy about Hogg’s electoral assassination. Drawing the battle lines into the public square, she hotly said, “The results of the DNC Vice Chair elections were clear, and the will of the voters should be respected.”

The story also reported that FDP members “emphasized how divided Democrats still are as Republicans maintain total control.”

The party’s problems are piling up. Between now and next November’s midterms, they must not only resolve their Original Sin problem, but they must also secure stable party leadership without shattering the DNC into angry regional cliques with grudges.

And don’t forget: they also have a nagging little ActBlue fraud problem to deal with.

ActBlue is now the subject of DOJ and Congressional investigations and several state lawsuits. This week, House Democrats tried to fight back, firing off a stinker of a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanding “suspicious activity reports” linked to WinRed. Sadly for them, over the last four years, Democrats set the standard for defying exactly those sorts of requests.

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Enjoy this latest well-deserved Trump win in the wake of yesterday’s confounding Supreme Court news. On Friday, Politico ran its latest encouraging legal story headlined, “Appeals court lifts block on Trump executive order targeting federal worker unions.” It wasn’t just any old appeals court that handed Trump a win, either. It was the far-left DC Circuit.

Last month, District Court Judge Paul Ferryman granted a preliminary injunction stopping one of President Trump’s most significant personnel orders, which terminated automatic union dues deductions for many employees considered critical for national security. On Friday, the Court of Appeals overturned Judge Ferryman’s stay.

They cited two basic reasons. Both were plain common sense, and a relief to folks frustrated by rogue judges. Alert readers will recall my explanation of how injunctions work, and this is a textbook example. The appellate judges first said Judge Ferryman had failed to properly identify irreparable harm from the union’s claims it would suffer catastrophic financial damage.

The appellate judges disagreed with Ferryman’s weak analysis. “Nothing prevents Union members covered by the Executive Order from voluntarily paying the dues they owe,” they wrote. They snarkily explained, “That is, after all, how most other voluntary membership organizations collect dues.”

But an even better sign appeared in the form of judicial restraint. The appellate judges flipped the script, finding that Judge Ferryman’s injunction irreparably harmed President Trump. “The district court’s preliminary injunction,” they opined, “inflicts irreparable harm on the President by impeding his national-security prerogatives, which were explicitly recognized by Congress.”

Their explanation was the best news of all— It’s not the courts’ business: “Preserving the President’s autonomy under a statute that expressly recognizes his national-security expertise is within the public interest. To hold otherwise would give to the courts what the Constitution gave to Congress and the President.”

Boom.

As I told you when all this started, liberal District Court judges would try to enjoin everything they could, but many, if not most, of those injunctions would be shot down on appellate review, because of the ultra-high standards for such injunctions. That is exactly what’s happening.

⚖️ Finally, the judges added a delicious layer of icing onto the anti-injunction cake. In a footnote, they criticized Judge Ferryman’s denial of the government’s request that the union pay a bond for its injunction. “Bonds” are up-front money required to cover the government’s potential costs and damages in case the injunction later turns out to have been wrong, when the case is finally decided.

Judge Ferryman had ordered a bond of $0.

But in footnote 4, the Court of Appeals sniped, “Separately, we clarify that injunction bonds are generally required. The district court’s logic would apply any time a district court grants a preliminary injunction — an exception that swallows the rule. Accordingly, we doubt that $0 was the ‘appropriate bond’ in this case.”

We clarify. Is that clear enough?

Trump’s lawyers are now requesting bonds for all these injunction cases. If judges start granting them, forcing activist lawyers to pony up cost bonds whenever they seek injunctions, it will massively decelerate the manic pace of litigation.

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Let’s check in on the Proxy War. The NYT ran a story late yesterday headlined, “As Trump Prepares to Speak With Putin, Here’s Where Ukraine Cease-Fire Talks Stand.”

The story begins with a report on President Trump’s Saturday Truth Social post announcing his Monday morning call with President Putin of Russia. Of course, the Times didn’t include the full post in the story, so here it is:

Trump’s greatest achievement in the Proxy War was pulling the conflict back from the precipice of nuclear war. We haven’t heard any stories about nuclear threats in months. That alone was the single most important improvement in European security in years, maybe decades, even if the dandified French won’t admit it.

As far as I’m concerned, I am completely satisfied with that progress.

Last week, Trump achieved another, more modest, victory by badgering the two sides —Ukraine, reluctantly— into meeting for face-to-face talks in Turkey. It was the first time they’ve met at all since just after the war started, and it happened against long odds: the green-sweatshirted money launderer-in-chief not only churlishly swore he would never ever talk to the Russians, he even passed a law in October 2022 banning any Ukrainian from negotiating with their adversary so long as Putin remains in office.

Apparently, nothing significant happened at this week’s meeting, details of which remain murky and undisclosed. Nor would any sane person expectanything to happen at the first such meeting. Historically, it has often taken years of dickering to conclude peace deals and end wars.

For example, in Korea, armistice talks began in July 1951 and only concluded two years later in July 1953. Even at that, no formal peace treaty was ever signed. Technically, the two countries remain at war to this day.

In Vietnam, preliminary peace talks began in May, 1968, and the Paris Peace Accords were signed five years later in 1973. Once again, the war didn’t really end; the North Vietnamese steamrolled South Vietnam by 1975. Tellingly, South Vietnam’s president refused to negotiate, so the U.S. finally signed its own deal with the Viet Cong.

Next, after 20 years of failing to win the “war” in Afghanistan, the Trump 1.0 Administration began direct talks with the Taliban sometime in 2018. Neocon darling and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani refused to negotiate. The Doha Agreement wrapped up two and a half years later in February, 2020, but it was just between the US and the Taliban. Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal followed a year later in 2021, and the Taliban rolled into Kabul as President Ghani fled with suitcases of cash. They never even had to fire a shot.

You never read of any of this history in any of the countless corporate media stories calling for “ceasefires.” It’s not hard to understand why. Unconditional ceasefires don’t happen by magic, moral pressure, or financial sanctions. And they never happen while the adversary is winning, as Russia is doing right now.

Second, peace negotiations have always taken years. If Trump somehow manages to broker a deal in his first year in office, he will make history. Again.

But maybe the biggest reason they never mention all this obvious history —including Trump’s last proxy war— is because history teaches us that U.S. proxy leaders like Ashraf Ghani (now, Zelensky) almost never want peace talks— because peace ends the gravy train: weapons, aid packages, pallets of cash, photo ops, meetings with the Pope, and all the sycophantic media coverage.

Again, I’m fully satisfied, now that we’ve stopped sending countless billions to Ukraine and the nuclear brinksmanship has ended. As far as I’m concerned, Ukraine can keep on fighting as long as it wants to, just without U.S. support. At some point, Trump will probably make a deal directly with Putin to get America out of it, just like he did with the Taliban. Then Zelensky will flee Kiev with his own suitcases of cash, and that will be that.

Maybe it will happen on Monday. Who knows? Remember, Trump’s been through this rigamarole before, with the Afghan proxy war. He would probably prefer a more organized withdrawal, but this time there aren’t any US forces in Ukraine to withdraw. So why wouldn’t he pursue a similar type of peace, if Zelensky remains mulish?

To be clear: I care deeply about all the Ukrainian civilians caught in the crossfire. But these geopolitics have nothing to do with them. They are just as powerless as we are. The best and fastest way to help them is to either force a peace —even if Ukraine loses a lot of land— or let the Russians win as quickly and bloodlessly as possible.

The real criminals are the people who claim to care about hapless Ukrainian civilians, but constantly urge the war to continue because they think it hurts Putin.

Wrapping this up, in its proper historical context, I don’t expect any major developments tomorrow or even anytime soon. Whenever Trump does plan an Afghan-style exit, it will probably be telegraphed well in advance. That said, it could still happen any day, and the corporate media knows it.

They know exactly how this movie ends, because they’ve watched it before. They’re just not reminding readers about it. But that’s why we have Substack.

Have a blessed Sunday! And thank you for all your continuing loyal support. Meet you back here tomorrow morning for a fresh roundup.

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