☕️ ODORS OF MENDACITY ☙ Friday, December 20, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

More Congressional drama as Republicans reject clean bill they asked for; media retconning Biden cabbage brain; Fani Willis sinks under appeal; Alex Berenson teases mRNA-killer study; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Really, this time. Your roundup today includes: drama in Congress after clean budget bill dies just like the Porkenstein bill did; unapologetic Wall Street Journal fesses up they knew Biden was mentally checked out from the beginning; Fani Willis’ big adventure shudders to inglorious end, probably doomed; and shock study teased by Alex Berenson threatens to blow off the covid jab lid.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a surprisingly helpful story predicting the current Congressional crisis and attendant drama, headlined “Trump Tossed a Debt Limit Grenade Into Spending Talks. Here’s Why.” The article helpfully explained yesterday’s surprising failure of House Republicans to pass the much improved ‘clean’ continuing resolution. The new deal failed when 30 Republicans voted against it, and probably not for the reason you think.

Amidst the hot takes on social media, keep these two deadlines in mind: Today, Friday, is the last day of federal funding under the last continuing resolution. Lawmakers have all day to convince the thirty holdout Republicans to come around, otherwise the federal government “shuts down,” which those of us who’ve been through this before know really means “keeps going,” except that a bunch of federal workers will get an extra paid vacation conveniently right around the holidays.

Second, and much more significant, the debt limit expires on January 1st. As ever in U.S. politics, the name is deceptive and backwards. It’s not so much of a debt limit as it is an automatic borrowing authorization up to a point. Since the Constitution requires Congress to approve any borrowing, without this automatic approval mechanism, the Treasury Department (an Executive branch agency) cannot sell bonds or incur debt to fund the government without asking Congress for permission every single time, constantly interrupting Congress and preventing them from debating really important bills, like funding studies of the sexual habits of Nigerian head lice.

So you can see how if the expiring debt limit problem is not addressed, it could lead to a real crisis in the form of a real shutdown, not the pretend kind. Treasury can muddle along under emergency powers for a few months, but a reckoning would be right around the corner holding a two-by-four.

Therefore, the expiring debt limit cannot be ignored and must be addressed. It can either happen now or after the Inauguration. Trump is intimately familiar with this conundrum. This very crisis hamstrung him during his first term. He lost almost a year fighting over the debt limit, and was finally forced to make a deal with Democrats to bypass mulish Republican debt hawks in the House.

Trump does not want to go through that again:

The deal in 2017 was lose-lose-lose. True, Trump lifted the debt limit, but it was really a loss, since he expended vast amounts of political capital on what to him was a non-priority political obstacle. Republicans lost, because Trump’s deal gave Democrats significant progressive wins while Republicans saw their legislative priorities ignored (since they refused to play). We citizens lost, because it set the Trump agenda back a year and cost about as much as ten Ukraine Proxy Wars.

Yesterday, a small group of debt-hawkish Republicans (around 30) vowed never to raise the debt limit at all and voted against the clean CR. They want spending cuts, and they skeptically view any debt increase as a band-aid. Yesterday’s pared-down bill actually included $500 billion in legitimate spending cuts, but because it also lifted the debt ceiling by $5 trillion dollars, they balked. No dice.

For his part, Trump wants to avoid spending his first year in office fighting about debt. Trump actually doesn’t care about the debt limit at all, because he sees it for what it is: a fake fig leaf that never actually limits anything, much less spending. All the debt limit does is, every few years, create a Congressional fight club that somehow always produces another massive spending spree in the deal to get the damned thing passed.

Republicans are as guilty at playing budget games as anyone, maybe more so. Democrats have long called for the fake debt limit to be abolished. Just now, of course, Democrats say it’s more American than motherhood (sorry, womb-bearer-hood):

Mucking things up even more, the inevitable increase in the debt limit will be historically huge. It will somehow have to swallow around $5 trillion dollars of Biden’s profligate emergency spending. Trump knows that, and that if this unavoidable increase happens during his presidency, he’ll be blamed for mushrooming the debt even though it was really Biden’s fault.

So Trump wants the Republicans to clean up Biden’s mess before he takes office.

This is only a guess; I have no special connections or sources. But if I had to guess, I suspect that first monstrosity of a bill, a Porkulus of a Festivus gift to Democrats, was negotiated to handle this problem. I suspect Trump negotiated with Democrats —like he was forced to do in 2017— and the deal included a secret provision that they would help him increase the debt limit before the end of Biden’s term.

But this time, Democrats got too greedy, and the bill blew up on social media’s launchpad yesterday. At some point in the late morning, Trump saw which way the winds were blowing, threw in with the MAGA base, and the deal with outraged Democrats collapsed. That is why they keep saying “we had a deal.”

Now it’s Plan B. Republicans are trying to do it the hard way: passing a clean, transparent deal with only Republicans, which means they will somehow have to both increase the structural debt limit and also appease the Republican debt hawks in the House. They’ll need most of them, because zero Democrats will help this time.

This at least gives you a sense of the complex issues in play. The Christmas drama in Congress will almost certainly continue all day today.

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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran the most astonishing bit of self-serving, limited -hangout-slash-gaslighting we’ve seen in months headlined, “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge.” The answer, of course, is because corporate media covered for him. But the sub-headline described the Journal’s blame-shifting narrative: “Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.”

“The president’s slide,” the Journal unironically reported, “has been hard to overlook.”

Has it? Wall Street Journal, when did you first notice the hard-to-overlook slide? Because, up until Biden’s debate disaster, corporate media monolithically reported Joe was sharp as a tack. (Maybe that phrase is some kind of euphemism; maybe it means something else to reporters?)

Well, not anymore. The history of Biden reporting has been reconned. Now, the media always knew about Joe’s sundowning. “At events,” the Journal eagerly confided, “aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person.” The Journal added juicy details, like when the campaign hired Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg to give Biden, 82, voice coaching lessons to conceal “the president’s fading warble.” Or how they lyingly used pandemic protection protocols, like six-foot distancing and remote meetings, to help hide Biden’s blunders.

“The shell constructed for the pandemic,” the Journal explained, “was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.” If Joe’s advanced age was the egg, was the media the chicken?

The Journal reported to readers that Biden quickly tired. He was no good in the mornings. So all his meetings were kept short, scheduled later in the day, late but not too late, and strictly kept to the point. Whenever Biden was having a bad day, his aides would cancel his meetings and clear his calendar. Once, right before the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, Representative Adam Smith (D-Wa.), who chaired the Armed Services Committee, tried to meet with Biden to warn him about the calamitous withdrawal strategy. But Smith’s meeting was abruptly canceled.

Apparently, Biden had more bad days than good days. Over his four years, Biden has held only nine complete cabinet meetings—three in 2021, two in 2022, three in 2023, and only one this year. By comparison, Obama held 19 during his first term and Trump held 25.

We are only just hearing about this lopsided cabinet meeting issue now, when nobody cares.

What should we make of the Journal’s too-late, after-the-fact admissions, which just add insult to the informational injury? Now that Trump has been re-elected anyway, is the Journal trying to apply a narrative tourniquet to the injury of all its lost trust with readers? Why not throw Biden under the bus now, since his political career is long dead?

Despite those difficult admissions of Biden’s incompetence, the article was still acted as carefully as a drunk hobo trying to play “Operation” with a fresh fifth of Jack Daniels at stake. The Journal carefully avoided speculating about any of the evident harms that Biden’s incompetence obviously inflicted on the country. It got rapid-onset snow blindness about the ethics of propping up a demented old man. It never invoked obvious connected concepts like “lies,” “deceptions,” “Manchurian Candidate,” the “Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” or the “nuclear football,” nor speculated about precisely which unaccountable bureaucrats might have been pulling Biden’s strings. Or Jill Biden’s or Obama’s roles in the Great Charade, for that matter.

The Journal also elided any discussion of how for years, anyone who ever questioned Biden’s competence was instantly savaged by the media and its barbaric hordes of citizen volunteers and its grant-funded affiliated social media influencers.

But what was most missing from the article, painfully conspicuous by its absence, was media’s role in perpetuating the most grotesque and egregious lie in American history. So much for the media's watchguard role. Hang up your spurs. And please, get out of here with your “president’s slide has been hard to overlook” nonsense. This “exclusive” was rubbish.

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Womp womp. The New York Times ran an intensely gratifying story yesterday headlined, “Appeals Court Disqualifies Fani Willis From Prosecuting Georgia Trump Case.” The sub-headline deceptively explained, “The panel overruled the trial judge, who had allowed Fani T. Willis to keep the case despite a romantic relationship that defendants said created a conflict of interest.” It wasn’t just the romantic relationship.

Yesterday, in what the Times called “a surprise move that threw the entire case into disarray,” Georgia’s Court of Appeals disqualified Atlanta prosecutor Fani “Gimme a G” Willis and the entire Fulton County DA’s office. That means that, for the case to continue, the Governor must assign it to a different county’s DA, or let it die. And even if it is reassigned, the replacement DA could decide to dismiss the whole thing.

Willis immediately noticed her appeal to Georgia’s conservative Supreme Court. Good luck. Expecting help from the Supreme Court is a very long shot.

The Times’ crossword today probably features a clue for 7-Across, FaniWillis: “It spells doom.”

CNN said “It’s over.” Headline: “‘It’s over’: Honig on why Georgia case prosecuting Trump will likely not happen.”

Well. The Appeals Court’s move wasn’t as “surprising” to some of us. As I’ve discussed before, Judge McAfee carefully created a record that practically screamed for Fani’s disqualification. He said “an odor of mendacity” hung over DA Willis’s testimony. He said Willis’ public comments about the case were legally improper. But he protected his seat by letting Fani continue, but stayed the entire prosecution and then let the Court of Appeals handle the heavy lift. The case was always headed for an appeal anyway.

As a lawyer, I do not think McAffee’s move was cowardly in any way. I think he played it very smart, just right. Sometimes you must sacrifice a pawn to capture the pudgy, grifting queen.

There’s much to say about this welcome development. First of all, my goodness, the turnaround story. Trump’s enemies have completely failed and are in disarray. The only case remaining on life support is the worst case of all, the “you called payments to your lawyer legal expenses” case, in which Trump remains technically un-convicted, because he has not yet been sentenced, and sentencing has been indefinitely continued.

CLIP: CNN says the Georgia Case is ‘dead in the water’ (2:21).

Next, I think we are about to learn the reason why no former president has ever been prosecuted. You may have noticed the bizarre cast of characters in the now-failed Trump prosecutions. Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, and so on. Why didn’t we see the Democrats’ best and brightest? Consider this possibility: Willis, Wade, Bragg, and Smith were always expendable. They are now ruined. They didn’t know it when they eagerly accepted their assignments, but they were always meant to be used and thrown away.

Multiple investigations of Fani Willis and her office continue, for everything from her legal ethics to potential financial impropriety. Her problems are only just starting.

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Alex Berenson, an author, former New York Times reporter, and the first major journalist to question the covid narrative during the pandemic, published a new Substack this week making a remarkable claim. It was headlined, “URGENT: Yale researchers have found Covid spike protein in the blood of people never infected with Covid - years after they got mRNA jabs.”

A whistleblower told Alex about an unpublished study floating around because the major journals won’t touch it. The study authors say they’re preparing to release it on a “pre-print” server (i.e., without peer review or a journal backer).

Nothing about the study’s main conclusions will surprise regular readers. The authors studied long covid and people who think they’ve been vaccine-injured. Collecting various biosamples, they were stunned to find folks still making active antibodies to spike protein years after their last vaccine injection. Including in people who’d never had covid, and whose bodies did not also show antibodies to the full covid virus, only the spike, which only comes from jabs.

In other words, they identified what I believe is the biggest problem with the jabs, which is that the mRNA has no off switch. I am convinced they are perfectly aware of this problem and are trying to figure out how to turn it off, and how to make new types of mRNA shots without that defect or that, at least, make harmless fragments of virus and not the most dangerous and harmful part like the spike protein.

As I said, that much was unsurprising for those of us who’ve been paying attention. What was more surprising is who organized the study. It was conducted by a group of Yale researchers over several years in a highly visible, public project called LISTEN, which started as early as 2022. A New Yorker article published early this year about the project described the study organizers as “two renowned Yale researchers.”

The project leader, Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale vaccine scientist with impeccable credentials, was a past president of the American Association of Immunologists. She was a strong and public advocate for the jabs. Dr. Iwasaki is unimpeachable as a vaccine critic. So, assuming the published study says what Berenson’s whistleblower claims, this could be another inflection point in the war against mRNA technology.

Berenson devoted about half his article to speculating about how the mRNA persists for so long, whether it was integrated into folks DNA or whether the artificial coating used to slide mRNA into human cells is too robust. Those are intellectually interesting questions, but for most people that is less important than the question of what will happen to people whose spike protein never shuts off?

Normally, I wouldn’t publish a story like this, based solely on anonymous sources, but Alex Berenson has a history of reliability. I suspect he is right; we’ll see whether the researchers have the courage to publish what would be the first major study to identify a significant defect with the covid jabs and with lucrative mRNA tech in general.

Berenson’s story is exciting, and as he rightly labeled it, urgent. Hopefully, the publicity will encourage researchers to publish, rather than backfire and chill their enthusiasm. But the say is quickly approaching when the last, biggest lie —the lie of vaccine safety and efficacy— will fall, just as all the other pandemic lies have relentlessly fallen, one by one, one after another.

As for me, I can’t wait. Progress.

Have a fantastic Friday! Come back tomorrow morning for the Weekend Edition roundup.

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