☕️ GENERIC VEGETABLE ☙ Friday, July 12, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Biden's big-boy presser fails to grip; possible historical comparisons; Senate rejects confused Biden judicial appointee; the most impressive and encouraging NEJM study so far this year; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Already. Next week begins the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at which President Trump is expected to finally announce his vice-presidential pick. So prepare for a big news week. This morning’s essential news roundup includes: Biden big-boy press conference fails to cure political problems but doesn’t quite make the case for removal, either; historical footnotes; Senate rejects a Biden judicial nominee for the first time; and astonishing New England Journal of Medicine study signals sea change in vaccine politics.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Blogging can be harder than you think. On the one hand, you have your superfans, who are just fine with whatever vegetable name you pick to caption the demented commander in chief. “Call him President Cauliflower for all we care!” they supportively say. But other readers, insisting on the highest vocabularic standards, are prone to pick nits. “Stop calling him President Kale,” they scold, “because kale is a superfood and he’s not a super president.”

You can see how the rhetorical garden of presidential nicknames can become quite thorny at times. No matter which flabby flora or lackadaisical legume you pick, somebody or other who decorates their daily breakfast with that particular herb is bound to object.

So that’s why I am kicking off today’s update with President GENERIC VEGETABLE. Yesterday, President Generic Vegetable held what the White House disastrously called a “big boy” press conference — I am not making that up — and gaslighting corporate media mostly rated his performance at a six-point-five out of ten. But Joe’s regular-as-clockwork gaffes are now part of the entreé.

We begin with this fantastic headline and cover pic from the rollicking crew at the UK Daily Mail:

The headline “Faces of Despair” was a bold choice, a nod to the 1978 mondo cult horror film Faces of Death. I remember being at a party once when someone slipped that hideous movie into the VCR. It took less than five minutes to convince me I never wanted to see anymore “true life” death scenes, and studiously avoided the film’s 1981 sequel, “More Reasons to Vomit II.”

My reaction to the 1979 movie is exactly what the Mail’s editors were going for.

Biden’s “big boy” press conference might be remembered better not for Joe’s malapropisms, but rather for the crowd’s reaction to them. Shortly before the press conference, Joe awkwardly introduced Ukraine’s former President Zelensky as “President Putin,” and the poor Eastern European bureaucrat’s facial expression was a mixture of sudden alarm and panic. One felt nothing but sympathy at Zelensky’s palpable relief when Biden, reminded by alert reporters, swiveled back to weakly correct himself:

Continuing the theme, later in the presser Biden labeled Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump.” The camera panned to his frozen cabinet, doing their best impressions of gothic statuary, but — their eyes. Their eyes gave it away. They clearly all wished they were anywhere else, willing their souls to leave their bodies and join Lloyd Austin’s unannounced visit to the hospital quiet room back in December, or perhaps mentally rehearsing their parole release appeal speeches.

Only Jake Sullivan stirred, desperately grabbing his chin in sudden despair:

In a related story last night headlined, “Angry and stunned Democrats blame Biden’s closest advisers for shielding public from full extent of president’s decline,” CNN advised readers to expect a “drip, drip, drip” of continuing bad Biden news:

True to form, the next drip dropped yesterday in a widely reported story that showed up in The Hill, headlined “Milwaukee radio station edited Biden interview before air, at campaign’s request.” The gist was that Biden’s handlers requested removal of two short segments of President Vegetable yammering semi-coherently about black folks, and the station obliged.

But the delayed disclosure of the deleted tapes was even worse for Biden than just airing the awkward segments would have been. Now, the two gaffes are getting even more attention than they would have otherwise, what with the Administration’s failed, Nixonian coverup.

According to numerous sources, the Biden Administration has been desperately encouraging democrats and media allies to refocus the conversation away from Joe and back to President Trump. And they’re trying; this morning the New York Times published a giant Editorial Board op-ed arguing Trump will “destroy democracy,” and so forth.

But it’s not working.

Here’s exhibit A. Nobody is a bigger Trump enemy than Matt Drudge, and Drudge would like nothing better than to refocus on the Orange Man. But here’s the current Drudge Report main page:

One struggles to find historical parallels. Crazy King George III’s maniacal mental condition was so severe that it provoked Britain’s Regency Crisis of 1788-1789, a fierce political struggle over whether to appoint his son, the Prince of Wales, as regent. The King’s mental health continued declining, and by 1810, he was deemed unfit to rule, leading to the Regency Act of 1811, which officially installed the Prince Regent.

In October 1919, while on a national tour to promote the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke. The stroke left him partially paralyzed on his left side and significantly impaired his cognitive functions. Wilson's condition was concealed from the public, the press, and most of his government.

Wilson’s wife Edith, and his doctor, Dr. Cary T. Grayson, carefully controlled access to the President. For the remaining 17 months of his presidency, Wilson was largely incapacitated. Edith Wilson and a few close aides managed his workload, a situation some historians call a "stewardship presidency" and a "petticoat government."

I’m not saying Joe’s situation is like King George III’s, or implying that Jill Biden and Dr. Canard are drafting on Edith Wilson’s petticoats. I’m just saying.

🔥 Reuters reported a story yesterday headlined, “In a first, US Senate panel rejects Biden judicial nominee in New York.”

Yesterday, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) joined Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans in a 10-11 vote to reject advancing U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn's nomination to become a life-tenured district court judge.

It marked the first time during Biden's term that the Committee has ever voted to reject one of President Cucumber’s nominees.

The trouble arose because New York Magistrate Judge Neturn had ruled a 6’2” serial rapist, who was also convicted of distributing child pornography, and who “transitioned” in prison at age 51, must be housed in women’s prison. The rapist then had a grand time repeatedly exposing himself to the female inmates.

In her decision to approve moving him in with the ladies, judge Netburn had written he was “sober and entirely a female,” and noted that it was past time for some new “caged heat.” But the rapist was not, after all, “entirely” a female, since although he discarded the wrapper, he kept the pickle.

CLIP: Senator Cruz harangues judicial nominee over transgender ruling (9:51).

In the hearing, Netburn kept using the politically correct pronoun “she” to describe the wily repeat offender, who apparently enjoys the super-power of changing genders at will, like certain species of mollusk. (Or so experts tell us. How experts figure out the mollusks’ preferred genders remains a state secret.)

Sadly, judge Netburn has lost her cushy lifetime appointment to the federal bench, and only because she bravely encouraged the career of a new superhero for our times, Mollusk Man.

Nevertheless, Netburn’s historic judicial denial is welcome news. One wonders whether, absent Joe’s current problems, Democrat Senator Ossoff would have felt politically secure enough to help Republicans keep Netburn, who is deeply confused about human biology, off the federal bench. Dividends of dementia.

💉🔬 Sometimes, small developments signal massive changes. One such signal unexpectedly appeared last week in a ‘study’ (a “Perspective”) that popped up in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, succinctly titled “Funding Postauthorization Vaccine-Safety Science.”

The Perspective’s unremarkable premise was that governments should not only require minimal safety testing from vaccine manufacturers for initial approval, but agencies should also continue tracking vaccines’ real-life performance after approval. The authors strongly argued we need to figure out the real-world, long-term risks from vaccines, however rare they might (or might not) be, and which for whatever reason might not have shown up in the drugs’ initial approval studies.

In other words, they argued we should keep checking vaccines after authorizing them, instead of drinking a few more espresso martinis and singing “safe and effective” at the karaoke booth until the bar closes.

While you might think that is just common sense, you are not an expert. Experts, unlike you dummies, have no need for common sense. They have grants.

Even though that infuriating admission was ultimately unsurprising, there were two quite remarkable things about the Perspective. The first was that the vaccine-tracking suggestion appeared in a mainstream medical journal at all, causing pharma sales reps to start polishing their resumes. The concept wasn’t new, but it was new that the NEJM agreed to publish what until ten minutes ago was an ugly anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory.

But second, and even more remarkable, is who joined the Perspective. One of the main authors was Dr. Stanley Plotkin, M.D..

Dr. Plotkin has, over the course of his long career, been so influential in expanding the vaccine industry that he is called, and I am not making this up, the “Godfather of Vaccines.” He’ll make you a vaccine offer you can’t refuse.

Like other bureaucratic cockroaches of our acquaintance, Plotkin has worked inside and outside government, won any number of jab awards, published innumerable supportive papers and books on vaccine science, and “pioneered” the use of fetal cells in vaccine development. So.

But now, suddenly and unexpectedly, for the first time in his long and storied career, Dr. Plotkin is calling for more research into vaccine injuries. Why? Why now? You may not be surprised to learn the article offered the pandemic as an explanation:

“The widespread vaccine hesitancy observed during the Covid-19 pandemic suggests that the public is no longer satisfied with the traditional safety goal of simply detecting and quantifying the associated risks after a vaccine has been authorized for use.”

You don’t say. Before we continue, chalk up yet another unpredicted pandemic win for the anti-vaccine movement. Anyway, Plotkin and his co-authors admitted that times have changed:

“The public also wants public health authorities to mitigate and prevent rare but serious adverse events – which no longer seem rare when vaccines are given to millions or billions of people.”

In other words, people are getting completely fed up with the philosophy of “you have to break a few people to make a vaccine omelet.” Saving five million people from “serious covid”* cannot justify killing one million people with heart attacks, blood clots, strokes, and turbo cancers. (* allegely.)

Doctors like Stanley Plotkin love utilitarian ethics. But sane people reject trading lives for outcomes if you can make the numbers work.

Even more surprising, Dr. Plotkin has apparently had an epiphany: it is now critical to track vaccine injuries and figure out whether and how vaccines are hurting people:

“It is critical to examine adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) that have not been detected in clinical trials, to ascertain whether they are causally or coincidentally related to vaccination. When they are caused by vaccines (vaccine adverse reactions), the risk attributable to vaccination and the biologic mechanism must be ascertained.”

Touching on my PREP Act lawsuit, the authors recognized that people with jab injuries are being gaslit and get no help from anybody. Pushing aside, for the moment, the sacred goal of selling more vaccines, Plotkin and his confederates admitted that injured people need compensation for their injuries.

“Identifying the biologic mechanisms of adverse reactions — how and in whom they occur — is critical for developing safer vaccines, preventing adverse reactions by expanding contraindications, and equitably compensating vaccinees for true adverse reactions.”

It would be hard to understate the importance of achieving true compensation for vaccine injuries. After all, compensation for injuries is the bedrock of our tort system, which does a pretty good job keeping unsafe products off the market, for the simple reason that paying for people’s injuries cuts into profits.

For too long, vaccine manufacturers have hidden behind the “unavoidably unsafe” banner. But if victims start being fairly compensated —even by the government, as Plotkin suggested— we will immediately get vastly improved visibility into vaccine injuries.

If you give people financial incentives to report their injuries, they will do it in droves. And if you give lawyers incentives to prove how vaccines injured their clients, the lawyers will do the work the scientists have been unable to perform. It would amount to a level of visibility into vaccine injuries that we’ve always needed but never had.

In other words, Plotkin’s new Perspective signals a massive schism opening between medical science and big pharma. That growing gulf arose only because of the pandemic’s unaccountable excesses. I guess the vaccine scientists don’t want to be left holding the bag.

(I’m grateful to Aaron Siri, Esq., for alerting me to Plotkin’s Perspective via his post about the paywalled NEJM article.)

Have a fabulous Friday! I’m heading back down to a very interesting and encouraging conference now and I hope to be able to tell you about some of it. In the meantime, get back here tomorrow morning for your Weekend Edition roundup.

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