☕️ SNOW STORM ☙ Tuesday, January 16, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump claims Iowa; invisible Lloyd Austin leaves hospital; snowy new cardiac danger; massive anti-establishment protests in Germany; Supreme Court's potentially deep-state destroying case; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your author was trapped in Atlanta yesterday by weather-related travel delays, so I am hotel-blogging whilst stitching creative travel alternatives together to get home timely amidst this year’s snowy polar vortex. So your ad-hoc travel roundup includes: Trump settles the Iowa question in snowy caucuses and attention shifts to New Hampshire; Pentagon snows everybody with latest senseless Lloyd Austin update; important health alert for anyone who owns a snow shovel; massive German protests provoke corporate media narrative avalanche; and the Supreme Court prepares to hear generation-defining case that could freeze out the deep state.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 The Financial Times published an article this morning headlined, “Donald Trump wins landslide in Iowa with Ron DeSantis a distant second.” The surprising final numbers beat all predictions: Trump—51%, DeSantis—21.3%, Haley—19%, Vivek—7.7%. Notably, not only did he perform more than twice as well as any other candidate, but President Trump also won every single one of Iowa’s 99 counties in what the Times fairly called a landslide.

CLIP: Trump’s surprisingly graceful, ‘unity’ speech after winning Iowa (22:39).

Trump’s victory speech began unexpectedly gracefully, with the President calling for everyone to come together. He started by thanking Melania, Kari Lake, and then … Vivek Ramaswamy. Late yesterday, after clearly placing fourth, Vivek officially ended his campaign by endorsing the former President. Trump praised the inexperienced, underdog candidate, 38, for running an “amazing” race.

It looks more than ever like Vivek is really running for Vice-President.

MSNBC’s deranged talking heads blamed the fascism slowly settling on our country on … you, the Republican voter, who are “pushing Trump to be more and more extreme:”

CLIP: MSNBC’s Karen warns democrats about dangerous things called Republicans (1:22).

You people are practically insurrectionists with all your crazy stolen-election conspiracy theories.

Somebody might want to have a word with MSNBC’s Joy Reid. She might be obsessed with race. On her turn, coining a new verb, Joy accused Trump of “birthering” Nikki Haley, a “brown lady” who only lost Iowa because of deeply anti-immigrant racism. I can’t even. Reid completely ignored Vivek, who is indubitably brown. She ended by predicting Ron DeSantis would stay in the race as the “token white man” who can get the white vote.

Both MSNBC and CNN refused to run Trump’s speech to protect viewers’ safety, the comfortable security of unchallenged thought. It could be journalistic incompetence. Quite easily, in fact. Or, it could be they’re worried Trump will, Kreskin-like, mesmerize their viewers.

It might not mean much. Iowa may go first, but it has a spotty record of picking the ultimate nominee, and the heart-stopping cold weather may have skewed the turnout. It’s also clear some democrats are boosting Trump by voting for him in the primaries as fake registered Republicans — illogically repeating their 2016 strategy, which completely backfired.

Understandably drafting behind Iowa’s spotty record, Governor DeSantis delivered a heartfelt speech to still-energized supporters in Iowa focusing on the positive, saying his campaign’s “ticket was punched” — a well-meaning reference to boarding a train, but alas, also having an unfortunate alternative meaning. There’s no reason for DeSantis to concede, he still has a clear possible path to victory, but his campaign must somehow grapple with the fact Governor DeSantis went “all in” in Iowa yet didn’t show significantly better than Governor Haley.

Nikki Haley performed surprisingly well, especially since she didn’t really try in Iowa. The former South Carolina Governor has famously focused her campaign’s efforts on New Hampshire, the second Republican primary, which is scheduled for January 23rd. Awkwardly, following her third-place finish, Governor Haley told supporters Iowa’s results “made this a two-person race.”

Um. Nikki placed third. Never mind.

There are no bad guys in the race; Republicans enjoy a deep bench. It’s a blessing to have multiple viable, competitive Republican candidates in the race, so that for as long as possible democrats can’t focus their attacks on a single candidate. And the bloody political hand-to-hand combat between primary candidates helps train the eventual winner to withstand the hell democrats will surely unleash after the nomination is locked.

🔥 Speaking of journalistic malpractice, ABC’s lying editors ran a pathetic story yesterday capped with the intentionally-deceptive headline, “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is released from hospital after prostate cancer surgery.”

The headline was both true and false. It was false because Austin was not in the hospital for prostate cancer surgery. That was back in December. He was actually in the hospital this time for a bacterial infection, presumably related to his surgery. But in another sense, it was true that he was just released after his prostate surgery, in the sense that everything that happens at this point in time is after his 2023 surgery, including his release from his separate — and subsequent — hospital visit.

Very tricky, ABC!

Lloyd wasn’t seen anywhere. And yesterday’s health update made just as much sense as everything else about this story. Remember they told us Lloyd was hospitalized for complications from an elective surgery — a voluntary election for eight weeks of recovery amidst three global, kinetic military conflicts. Then, they say, his recovery was complicated by a urinary tract infection. Here’s the report from Austin’s doctors at Walter Reed Hospital:

"He … received non-surgical care … resolving some lingering leg pains. He was discharged home with planned physical therapy and regular follow up. The Secretary is expected to make a full recovery," Dr. John Maddox and Dr. Gregory Chesnut said in the statement.

First I tried imagining what exercises Lloyd’s physical therapist was doing with him after a urinary tract infection, but then I had to stop, because I think that’s illegal. More interesting was his leg pain, which suggests a blood clot more than a UTI.

Now they say Secretary Austin is resting comfortably at home, and doing great, so well, and he should be back on the job before you know it. But they wisely refrained from guessing when he might be back. I wonder if, while he’s waiting for his physical therapy appointment, Lloyd is playing checkers with Marine Commandant Eric Smith, who also stepped back to recover after his heart attack, back in October, and is also expected to be back on the job running the Marine Corps any minute now. Someday.

Maybe Damar Hamlin can give the two generals some pointers about getting back to work.

We pray both critical military leaders make a full recovery and reassume their respective commands very soon. We can’t wait get back to criticizing Lloyd Austin for spending more time picking out his lip gloss than bombing the Houthis. Whoever the Houthis are.

💉 Health alert! Snow shoveling can be fatal. Canada saw a cluster of sudden and unexpected snow shoveling deaths. Two innocent shovelers suddenly and unexpectedly became the latest victims of the polar vortex. Definitively not the shots.

Bystanders in both cases immediately gave the ‘victims’ CPR and quickly called paramedics, but it was no use. The two people died in the hospital. Traditional treatments didn’t work.

For some reason! Be careful out there, all of you who live in places where the white stuff piles up right where you want to walk or drive. We’re now in the new normal, where snow can strike you dead right on the sidewalk. Ka-blam. Or as ze Germans would say, kaput.

🔥 CNN ran an narrative-bending story yesterday headlined “Protests sweep Germany as far-right spots an opening.” Whenever they label something “far right,” it always catches my eye, since they usually mean the conservative counter-revolution. I wasn’t disappointed. They’re bending the narrative to the breaking point.

According to CNN, the news is not the protests. The news is conservatives joining the protests. Accounts vary, but everyone seems to agree the protests began with German farmers, who are either unhappy about losing subsidies (corporate media) or about farm-destroying climate regulations (independent media). Then, according to yesterday’s reports, either regular folks or ‘far right extremist agitators’ joined the demonstrations.

Corporate media is hawking a narrative that the innocent farmers just want more socialism, but are being taken advantage of by deplorable German right-wingers who, clutching their guns and their Bibles, are trying to “co-opt” the farmers’ totally-justified socialist protests for their own inscrutable, nefarious purposes.

Just as we do here in the U.S. using the FBI, the Germans have deployed secret police against rabble-rousing right-wingers:

Stephan Kramer, head of the domestic intelligence agency in the eastern state of Thuringia, told CNN: “What we have certainly noticed is that extremists – primarily from the far-right – have used the completely legitimate farmers’ protests to either accompany these protests with corresponding calls on social media or to encourage their own personnel from the far-right to march with them or to be present on the side-lines.”

How dare they! Encouraging the protestors on social media? Have they, at long last, no shame? Hopefully the crack squads of domestic intelligence agency operatives will entrap a bunch of protesting citizens and use taxpayer-funded psychological manipulation techniques on everyone else to calm things down.

The truth seems that the nationwide protests are less about right-wing extremism and more about anti-establishmentarianism. What we are seeing is actually a massive anti-government sentiment that is uniting regular folks from both the left and the right, and corporate media is scrambling to hide what’s really going on in a nest of narrative nonsense.

👨‍⚖️ Courtwatch Alert! The New York Post ran a tantalizing story Sunday headlined, “Supreme Court poised to end ‘constitutional revolution’ that’s marred US governance for 40 years.” We can hope. Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear what might be the most important case in our generation related to paring back out-of-control government and draining the swamp.

It started when two New England fisheries sued the federal government a couple years ago after the feds forbade herring boats — usually as small as five crew — from going out fishing unless a nanny-like federal monitor went out fishing with them, to watch them every second. Adding insult to injury, Biden’s Fisheries agency also made the boat owners pay the monitor’s salary — an amount often exceeding the entire day’s profits.

Why? Because science, of course. So shut up.

The lawsuits challenged a 1984 Supreme Court precedent called “Chevron deference,” a judicially-excreted doctrine that fell out of the similarly-named case of Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council.  To give you an idea of how judicially-activist it was, respected legal scholar Gary Lawson called the decision “nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.” President Reagan’s lawyer called the case “the single most important reason the administrative state has continued to grow out of control.”

The doctrine itself gets a little wonky, which is one reason nobody’s heard of it, but essentially “Chevron deference” gives broad ‘rulemaking’ authority to thousands of executive agencies under the White House’s control, agencies like the CDC and the EPA. Many originalist legal scholars think the doctrine violates the Constitutional separation of powers, because there isn’t much difference between ‘rule making’ and lawmaking, which is reserved to Congress.

Put another way, the Chevron deference decision was the administrative state’s Roe v. Wade. Since the ‘administrative state’ is a synonym for the ‘deep state,’ the case threatens to drop napalm all over the deep state’s impenetrable bureaucratic jungle. If you want something to pray for, pray for the Supreme Court to take a bulldozer to the Chevron doctrine and not just a weed-whacker.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Stay warm and come back tomorrow morning for more plain-spoken, narrative-exposing Coffee & Covid.

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