☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Wednesday, September 14, 2022 ☙ MADNESS! 🦠
Contractor mandate falls; Biden wants to program us like robots; a spectacular legal opportunity for Trump in the Biden Raid case; good news for SEALs; bad news for Germans; and more...
Happy Wednesday, C&C! It’s a short but sweet roundup this morning, including some keen legal analysis from yours truly that you’re going to love. The gist: Biden backs down from the federal contractor mandate; thoughts about timing; Biden’s sweeping new executive order wants to turn us all into programmable robots, and basically even say that; the Trump Raid case is boiling down to the essence and Trump has a spectacular opportunity; good news for Navy SEALs; and just when you thought things couldn’t get crazier in Germany, it’s madness.
🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞
💉 Even though the 11th Circuit partially vacated the injunction on the federal contractor mandate last month, effectively limiting its scope to just the plaintiff states, the Biden Administration’s GSA issued new guidance yesterday stripping the mandate from federal purchasing requirements. The government now says it will take no action to enforce the mandate “absent further written notice from the agency.”
Ding, dong. Another jab mandate is dead.
🔥 One of the dreariest but most rewarding parts of a litigating lawyer’s job is reviewing bank statements. There’s a lot I could say about it, but for this morning, that often mind-numbing task is not just about WHAT people did with their money but it’s also about the TIMING. You can learn so much about people by looking at what they do with their money and especially, WHEN.
For example, say you have a guy who is a defendant in a lawsuit that went to trial on January 1st. He wound up losing big and owing a lot of money. That guy’s December bank statement is going to be EXTREMELY interesting, as would the entire last half of the year before trial while he was fretting about what would happen. You’re looking for large transfers to relatives or foreign jurisdictions that suggest he was trying to get ready to be judgment proof.
Once, I looked into a guy who only used his Venmo account when he traveled, and it was always to give $200 or $300 dollars to individuals, usually female names, suggesting he was always lonely when he was away from the comforts of home. By the way, you can always tell when someone was traveling, because the charges on their statements are from out-of-state or out-of-country gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and shops.
On the other hand, cash transactions are not so helpful. Sure, you can point to cash withdrawals and say “aha! Look, judge, he took out $10,000 cash out of the account every time he went to Vegas!” But it doesn’t PROVE anything. The witness will just say, “I needed it for something else; I can’t remember. I definitely didn’t gamble with it, are you insane?” Sure, it makes them look bad, and the judge might help you out, but it can’t prove where the money WENT. You still need the casino receipts.
Many people think this is part of reason governments are suddenly pushing for digital currencies; because it’s so easy to know everything worth knowing about someone by their account records.
But I digress. The point is about the TIMING. When you’re trying to figure out what another person is up to, the WHY of something they’re doing, you should consider whatever they did in the context of what ELSE is happening around the same time.
Right now, we have to consider everything Joe Biden does in the context of the mid-term elections.
🔥 Biden issued a massive new executive order yesterday that sweeps through every agency in the U.S. government, with the awkward title, “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy.”
It’s the E.O. on A.B.B.I.S.S.S.A.B!
The order sets the driving policy of the Biden Administration to massively increase investment in bioengineering and manufacturing, because “[t]he COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the vital role of biotechnology and biomanufacturing in developing and producing life-saving diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines that protect Americans and the world.”
Stop laughing! He’s serious, pay attention.
Biden’s latest mega-order claims that the government has a CRITICAL NEED; a need to re-program people like robots. I’m not making that up. Here’s exactly what the E.O. says:
We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers[.]
Haha! “Predictably program biology.” In case you missed the memo in second grade, YOU are biology, partner. Biden wants you to be predictable. Like a computer program. No pesky software bugs. No garbage in, garbage out. No MAGA extremism.
Haha, this is so over the top I’m starting to think they’re deliberately trolling us. I’m also sensing that the robot program must be struggling, since Biden seems to think it’ll be easier to re-program US than our metallic assistants.
Anyway, within the next two months, the order requires the Secretaries of HHS, Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce, plus the Director of the National Science Foundation, to come up with recommended programs to incorporate biotechnology and biomanufacturing into nearly every aspect of American government, “in order to further societal goals.”
Sounds legit, right?
After the agency heads turn in their proposals, the E.O. gives the OMB and other agencies about 3 months to “develop a plan (implementation plan) to implement the recommendations in the reports. “ They have to “solicit input” from “experts” on ethics, environmental sustainability and environmental justice, whatever that is, and however it is different from regular “justice.”
Soliciting input is not the same as following input.
Then, within two years, the agencies will have to report on how well they’ve implemented the bioengineering plans.
The two words of greatest interest are so broadly defined in the E.O. that they aren’t particularly helpful:
(b) The term “biotechnology” means technology that applies to or is enabled by life sciences innovation or product development.
(c) The term “biomanufacturing” means the use of biological systems to develop products, tools, and processes at commercial scale.
Now. I know what you’re thinking. You want to talk about the awful dystopian implications of predictably reprogramming everybody’s cells, but that’s bait.
Think about the timing. Right before mid-terms.
The real story is, the gold rush is on! Aside from anything else this order might actually accomplish, it will positively be a HUGE cash grab. Nearly every federal agency is going to be wanting to buy new products with the “bioengineered!” label on them. Every federal agency is going to be soliciting grants for products and services that help achieve the new bio-plans. Every federal agency will be handing out lucrative low-accountability bio-contracts to its special friends, like candy at Halloween. Some for you, some for you, and some for YOU!
It might be even bigger than the Covid Gold Rush.
So here we are, less than 60 days out from the midterms, and Biden is offering a brand-new gold rush, a massive across-the-board federal purchasing program that depends on a cooperative Congress to fund it. It’s an offer to corporate America — forget about the supply chain! Forget about mandates! Forget about CRT!
Because, if the right people get elected, we’ll shower you all with crisp, newly printed cash. And remember, you’ll only get the money if you play ball. They’ll remember who their friends were — and weren’t — during the elections.
And as a side benefit, the E.O. is bioengineered to spin up MAGA extremists and the medical freedom lobby, who are expected to decry and condemn the E.O., which will turn MAGA into a threat to anybody who stands to make oodles of money from all the proposed new programs.
Don’t take that bait! I’m not saying you should relax into this, just wait till the day after the elections, and then be smart about it.
Now we know why Joe Biden has been on vacation for the entire summer. They were resting him up for all this stuff he’s doing now, from his Great Big Hate Speech to his stump speeches and executive orders. It’s all about the midterms.
🔥 Trump’s lawyers and the DOJ have now traded feisty briefs on whether the judge should stay her order requiring a special master until the DOJ’s appeal runs its course. Which of course will be well after the FBI finishes doing whatever it is planning to do. But a spectacular opportunity is shaping up for President Trump, and if he planned it this way, he’s a genius.
There’s a lot of great stuff in the briefs. President Trump’s brief persuasively argued that the president has sole authority to declassify whatever he wants; it even cited a very helpful Obama executive order reinforcing that authority. But I’m detecting a momentum, a momentum pushing toward a single legal issue, and that issue was neatly summarized by the DOJ in its reply brief, filed yesterday, which made this perfectly legitimate point:
[Former President Trump’s] attempts to change the subject by holding out the possibility that he could have declassified some of the seized records and-or that he could have designated them as “personal” records fare no better. As already noted, Plaintiff [Trump] has now filed multiple lengthy submissions with the Court that stop short of asserting that he in fact took any of these actions with respect to any of the seized records, including those at issue in the stay motion.
The DOJ is right. If President Trump wants to argue that the classified records he was keeping at Mar-a-Lago were declassified, he needs to say so, and say it clearly. At present, Trump is playing coy, one of his usual strategies, and is trolling the government by saying that he’s NOT saying he did declassify or didn’t declassify, but as far as the government knows, he DID.
That kind of fence-sitting won’t hold up forever. In fact, it’s probably not going to hold up for very much longer at all, now that the DOJ has explicitly called him out. The judge can see this issue looming on the judicial horizon just like I can. It’s the key to the entire case. I wouldn’t be surprised if the judge sets a special trial just to determine whether the records are or are not declassified.
So so this could quickly and finally produce a miraculous victory for Trump, not just in the case but against the entire Deep State, a definitive victory once again snatched right out of the jagged jaws of defeat. We know that, shortly before he left office, Trump had proposed to declassify a bunch of records relating to Russiagate and other FBI corruption. He sent those records to the FBI so they could offer redactions of anything that would harm U.S. interests. But the FBI slow-walked their response until Trump was out of office.
Sorry!
It is not unreasonable to assume the records snatched by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago were the very same ones Trump proposed to declassify: the evidence of FBI corruption (and maybe a lot more) in the Russiagate papers, at least.
So Trump has been trapped in a weird middle ground. Were the records declassified even though the FBI never completed its redactions? Was Trump’s act of requesting the redactions merely a courtesy, and not a requirement for redaction? These are unsettled questions. Trump can’t — shouldn’t — release those documents until a court says they’re declassified, or they COULD lock him up.
But to get a judge to issue a “declaration” of a party’s rights — like the rights of a former president to publish declassified records — there must a REAL and PRESENT dispute over those rights, not just a hypothetical dispute. This may not make sense to non-lawyers, but judges may not give pure ‘advisory opinions.’
In other words, the only way Trump could have gotten this issue in front of a judge, the issue of whether the records ARE IN FACT declassified, was to pick a fight with someone over it. I have no idea whether the Trump team planned it this way, but it could not have possibly played out any better than it has. If Trump had been the one to instigate a dispute, it would have almost certainly been heard in D.C., where all the agencies are located, and where the deck is completely stacked against the 45th president.
To get the issue into an unbiased jurisdiction, Trump had to get someone ELSE to start the fight, in a place where he could fight on neutral ground. Where better than Florida?
Because the FBI raided Trump in Florida, starting a case there, and because the DOJ has now called the issue out, the decision over the records’ classified status will be heard in Florida, the inevitable appeal will travel to the 11th Circuit, and then it will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I will skinny out onto a thin branch and predict Trump is likely to win in all three courts. If he’d started in D.C., he would’ve lost twice — at the D.C. federal court and then the D.C. appeals court — and then the Supreme Court would’ve had the odious and unwanted duty of overturning both lower courts. If it had played out this way, the corporate media would have trumpeted the Supreme Court decision as more evidence of out-of-control judicial activism, and the whole thing would have looked illegitimate.
All that noise would have distracted from the real story, which is the Deep State’s corruption, exposed by the declassified records.
Trump’s lawyers know a lot more than I do. I might be missing something. But the strategy now looks crystal clear to me. All Trump has to do now is say the magic words, “I DID declassify those records,” and the judge can set the matter for a showdown in Florida.
I know it sounds weird, but this could be the best thing that ever happened to Trump. Thanks, DOJ!
💉 Fox ran an uplifting story yesterday headlined, “Navy Quietly Rolled Back Punishments for SEALs Seeking Religious Exemptions to the COVID Vaccine.” The article explains that the Navy’s jab order, issued a year ago, was titled “Trident Order #12,” and medically disqualified any SEALs who asked for religious jab exemptions, precluding them from training, traveling for deployments, and other standard business.
In other words, making them unemployable.
Fox reported that the Navy just filed a brief in the case that attached a May 2022 order rescinding Trident Order #12. The new order plainly states, “This order rescinds reference A [Trident Order #12] on COVID-19 Vaccinations.”
Even the SEALs were surprised to see the order. It’s not clear whether the Navy might’ve replaced Trident Order #12 with a new jab order, but the lawyers in the case don’t think so.
So. Progress!
🚀 Reuters ran an article Sunday headlined, “Germans Switch to Costly Fan Heaters as Gas Shortage Fears Bite.” The headline tells you the whole story; Germans aren’t stupid. They’re buying up every electric heater they can get their hands on and German grid operators are freaking out. Electric heaters place HUGE demand on the grid. But it’s better than freezing.
So as you can see, the Russia Sanctions are really working out great. The GERMANS are starting to feel the pain. Russians, not so much. Maybe Germany will surrender soon?
And it’s a good thing Germany’s best and brightest are in charge. Guess what they’re up to now?
Last week, the Guardian UK ran a story headlined, “German Chancellor Rejects Calls to Reverse Nuclear Power Plant Closures.” Hahaha! That’s right, suckers! You Germans think you can warm yourselves with electricity, with your cute little heaters? Think again!
The Guardian reported that German chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected calls to extend the life of the country’s three nuclear power plants, insisting that Europe’s largest economy will have plenty of energy to get through the winter, don’t worry.
If you think that sounds crazy, you’re not alone. The Guardian said the opposition conservative alliance and at least one leading economist described the decision to close one reactor and place the country’s last two remaining reactors on standby status, in case of an emergency, instead of letting them produce electricity, as “madness.”
Madness!
I wonder what “emergency” they’re waiting for.
It gets better. After taking criticism for his decision, Scholz blamed German conservatives for the country’s power problems. “You were incapable of bringing about the expansion of renewable energies. You led defensive battles against every single wind turbine,” Scholz whined.
Hahaha! Wind turbines! These guys kill me. It’s even funnier that corporate media takes that kind of kooky talk seriously.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! I’m flying this morning to meet with some state politicians about proposed parents’ rights legislation, so I have to cut it short. But don’t worry! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with another great roundup. See you then.
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"Many people think this is part of reason governments are suddenly pushing for digital currencies; because it’s so easy to know everything worth knowing about someone by their account records." That is absolutely true, but the most important reason is that it's very difficult to tax the cash economy. The federal government wants EVERYONE to be a W2 employee - automatic tax withholdings, W2s get reported to the IRS by the employer, a taxpayer cannot hide when they are a W2 employee. And this brings me to my next thought: this new "public-private partnership" paradigm is escalating and really, the impetus (excuse) that has propelled it forward was the pandemic, but I digress. Anyhoo, government loves large corporations because it's an easier span of control for a government to manage a relatively small number of large corporations that employ millions of (W2) employees nationwide rather than millions of small businesses, entrepreneurs, gig workers, etc. And big corporations LOVE big government because (despite what they may give lip service to), they LOVE onerous and burdensome regulations - because large corporations can AFFORD to comply with onerous regulations - they have the money to hire entire compliance departments. But guess who CANNOT afford compliance? Those nasty and pesky competitors and roadblocks to complete monopolies, small businesses. And thus we have the perfect marriage of the corporate/government state. This is not conspiracy theory, this is firsthand knowledge from my former career.
Jeff….thanks so much for using plain English to report on the doings of the DOJ/ FBI antics. It’s very confusing to most of us!
And the humor with it is so welcome!!