☕️ YELLING ☙ Friday, March 8, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A quick but hard-hitting roundup including topics from Biden's State of the Union to vaccine liability bills to bank runs with Bernie. The dead one.

Good morning C&C, it’s Friday! It’s a short but punchy roundup for you today, since the final day at the Covid Litigation Conference in Las Vegas kicks off promptly this morning at 8am West Coast time with my keynote address. So I just hit the high points for you, but there’ll be plenty to catch up on tomorrow.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Last night, Joe Biden yelled at Congress for an hour straight. In a sort of furious, manic reverie, Joe Biden ‘delivered’ his divisive, angry, overcooked State of the Union speech on fast mode. It wasn’t so much a coherent speech, per se, as it was a long litany of loud one-liners. Joe was outraged about everything. Especially Trump. He shouted every single sentence in all-caps at the top of his lungs in his scratchy old-man voice, and then speared it to death with a double exclamation point. Every line sounded like a made-for-media punchline to a bad, overly elaborate, political inside joke.

Distractingly, Biden often stressed the wrong parts of his sentences and slightly slurred his words, eliding each syllable like an annoyed chronic drunk weaving a super complicated story explaining how that open bottle of vodka got there to the cop who pulled him over. One wonders whether Biden’s slurring, missed syllables, and other uncharacteristic speech issues could have been side effects from the powerful cocktail of downers offsetting the twenty Adderall Biden obviously gobbled up right before the speech.

Overall, Joe reminded viewers of an overly caffeinated wind-up monkey, feverishly clanging its cymbals over and over so fast and hard it falls over and then keeps flipping around and falling off the table, banging its furry arms together the whole time.

If last night’s goal was to fend off a last-ditch challenge from Gavin Newsom and beat everyone’s pitlike expectations, and if shouting stamina counts, then Joe got the job done. In its non-paywalled article, the New York Times’ headline concluded, “In-Your-Face Biden Takes on Trump and His Own Doubters.” This description from the Times’ article seemed pretty accurate:

(Biden) exhibited his stamina, his vitality, his capacity and, yes, his umbrage. Defiant and feisty, he dispensed with the conventions of the format to directly take on former President Donald J. Trump and attempted to make the election a referendum on his predecessor rather than himself. Mr. Biden shouted his lines, clearly intending to use volume to demonstrate vigor. The prepared text had 80 exclamation points in it and he surely added more on his own as he went along.

While Joe’s Big Speech was a lot of elderly sturm und drang, it symbolized nothing. Joe’s loud remarks fit into five emphatic but insubstantial categories: false claims about his record (thanks to me, seniors can now afford their prescription drugs forschwearingden!), false claims about the state of the country (the FBI says violent crime is at record lows!), demands for Republicans to do stuff (send me a damn border bill!), slams on President Trump (my predecessor…), and somehow speechwriters crammed in the entire laundry list of longstanding, loony, liberal policy dog treats (it’s time for big corporations and billionaires to pay their fair share!).  Politico noticed that Joe talked a LOT about CIA-riddled Ukraine and his mortal enemy, Putin, but not so much about an Israeli cease fire, Yemen, Iran, China, Taiwan, or any other foreign policy hotspot.

Surprisingly, CNN ran a pretty fair fact check, which found most everything Biden said to be either an outright lie, a lie by omission, or misleading.

Vexed Republicans often booed Biden. Marjorie Taylor Greene, no wallflower, heckled Biden throughout, while Mike Johnson sat behind Joe, shaking his head and looking especially sour whenever Joe fired off a particularly mendacious rhetorical cannonade. But afterwards, the social media battlefield was oddly muted; Joe doesn’t seem to have said anything particularly memorable apart from simply surviving what must have been a painful, demanding and expensive physical effort.

And so the drama continues.

🚀 Speaking of Ukraine, the New York Times ran a hilarious but symbolic headline yesterday: Mutual Frustrations Arise in U.S.-Ukraine Alliance.

Call Dear Abbey! According to The New York Times, the Proxy War planners are having trouble keeping the spark in their two-year-old romance. In other words, it’s a relationship issue:

More than two years into their wartime alliance, the bond between the United States and Ukraine is showing signs of wear and tear, giving way to mutual frustration and a feeling that the relationship might be stuck in a bit of a rut.

It is the stuff that often strains relationships — finances, different priorities and complaints about not being heard.

What would we do without the Times’ hard-cutting, detailed geopolitical expertise and deep analysis! The Times’ article strongly suggested that Ukraine and America just need to communicate better.

The article’s final paragraph finally got around to the real point, which was to create a predicate to blame parsimonious Republicans and stick a memory flag in the ground so the Times cannot later be accused of missing the major signs Ukraine was crumbling:

Western officials and military experts have warned that without U.S. assistance, a cascading collapse along the front is a real possibility this year.

A cascading collapse is a real possibility! That sounds bad. Now they tell us.

🔥 The deep state struck back this week, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in its article headlined, “Civil rights attorney to challenge Scott McAfee, judge in Fulton Trump case.”

Many states, including Florida and Georgia, elect trial judges. In those states, perhaps the most well-known way to punish a sitting judge is to gin up a candidate to run against them in the next election. Many, if not most established judges usually run unopposed. The reason is, the pool of lawyer candidates is already small, and most lawyers are reluctant to make an enemy of a well-established judge by running against them and losing.

Even if a judge occupies a safe seat, the addition of any candidate means the judge now has to run. That means expense, in time and money. He needs money to fund the campaign; either the judge must fund his campaign out of his own pocket, or he must fire up a campaign committee and commence fund-raising. Fund-raising is already a painful chore for most candidates, but it’s even harder for judges, who must avoid even the appearance of bias, and must endure electoral and ethics-rules restrictions that other types of candidates don’t.

And local-race judges normally enjoy anonymity. Voters who don’t know anything else about them tend to vote for the sitting judge by default.

But all that flies out the window whenever there’s a contentious media case during election season, like Judge MaCafee’s Fani Willis decision. Running a competitive candidate pours gasoline on the race and if the competing candidate shows up right before a major, high-visibility decision is made, it is clearly designed to send the judge a message.

The message here is, if white Judge MaCafee makes a decision unpopular with the majority of black Atlantans — if Fani’s unhinged racial bias claims stick —  then Judge MaCafee will be facing an angry electorate and will likely lose. So, if he likes his job, Judge MaCafee better decide right, which means not angering a large, well-funded, highly-motivated group of opponents.

But on the other hand, if the judge rubber-stamps Fani’s reprehensible conduct, then conservatives and Trump supporters won’t forget it either.

Judge MaCafee now finds himself in Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru scenario; in other words, he holds an untenable, no-win position.

If I could advise Judge MaCafee, if somehow he were to read this, I’d recommend he just focus on doing the right thing. That advice may seem overly simplistic, but the complex legal and political pot of radioactive spaghetti he faces will not yield to analysis. He simply won’t be able to think his way out of this; he should trust Providence and do whatever he believes is right.

Finally, I would tell him the Coffee & Covid Army has got your back.

💉 On Tuesday, Fox News (and only Fox News) ran an encouraging story headlined, “Chip Roy unveils bill to let Americans sue COVID-19 vaccine makers over injury, negative effects.”

This week, Chip Roy filed maybe the most important bill in American history, which would delete the PREP Act’s liability protection for covid vaccine makers and allow injured citizens to sue the pharma companies directly.

As you well know, Roy’s bill has a snowball’s chance. It’s going nowhere, and rapidly. But bless Chip for filing it. His bill is not without consequence, it is critical to continue the conversation. Let’s keep filing bills like Chip’s, over and over, until the exact right political moment appears and then we will pass it.

🔥  At first I thought this story was about Biden’s State of the Union speech, when I saw Local Fox affiliate Fox 8’s story yesterday headlined, Women take dead man to bank for withdrawal: Police. That headline was updated this morning, and now features the even more descriptive and alliterative headline, “Prison time possible after corpse used to withdraw cash.”

But it turned out to be a real-life Weekend at Bernie’s story. Instead of Biden, it was an actual corpse. Two morally-compromised caretakers of an elderly man found him deceased and decided to make one more bank run. The local branch bank would let the ladies make cash withdrawals on his behalf at the drive-through, but only if the man was in the car with them.

So what do you expect them to do? They propped the old guy’s body up between them and hit the drive through, withdrawing a cool $900. Someone alert bank teller must have noticed the old man was even less spry than usual (those details weren’t available), but the cops cottoned on and arrests and mugshots ensued. So.

It’s 2024! It’s starting to feel like anything could happen this year.

Have a fabulous Friday! I’ll be back tomorrow morning with a regular-sized roundup for you. Wish me luck on my keynote! It’s titled, “What is an Expert?”

We can’t do it without you. Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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