Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10-19-23
Good morning, C&C family, it’s Thursday! Your roundup today includes: Biden poll numbers keep sliding despite Israel boosterism; RFK getting focus from conservatives; FDA study finds a second safety signal in kids’ jab data; democrats restless over Israel support; jews for peace insurrect the Capitol; Biden to ask for lots of billions for everything; Hamas General Hospital story debunked; and oil prices suggest more dark clouds for Biden (and the rest of us).
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
📉 It was more bad news for Biden yesterday. His public show of Israel “support” doesn’t seem to be helping his numbers any. CNBC ran the latest in a string of similar polling stories yesterday headlined “Biden would lose in matchup vs. Trump, according to CNBC survey; Israel funding has strong support.”
In the presidential matchup part of its poll, responses showed Trump enjoying a +4% lead over Biden (46% to 42%). But there was more bad news in the poll, like Biden’s miniscule job approval rating, now mired in the low thirties.
Not good
The muddy water is swirling out of the bribery bathtub. Biden’s shocking 32% approval rating on the economy is the lowest since he infested the White House, while his 63% economic rating is tied for highest disapproval.
And just wait till gas prices skyrocket because of the war.
It’s not just Republicans who are unhappy with Biden. “You don’t get sub-40 approval ratings without losing large chunks of your base. And that’s what’s happening here,″ explained Micah Roberts, partner at Public Opinion Strategies, which ran the survey. He called the data “distressing numbers for a president facing reelection.”
Yes, but is he facing re-election?
In another part of the poll, Republicans and independents prioritized securing the border with Mexico followed by military funding for Israel. Democrats prioritized military funding for Ukraine, if you can believe that, followed by foreign humanitarian aid. Which tees Biden up nicely for a massively unaffordable, budget-busting, inflation-inflaming Congressional authorization request for aid to all four parts: Israel, Ukraine, Gaza, and a little for our own border. Expect Biden to ask for all that at his national address tonight.
I would give a lot to understand the mind of a democrat voter who thinks the country’s biggest problem right now is low Ukraine funding. I’d also like to sell them some carbon credits.
🔥 Conservatives are discovering RFK’s less well-known policies now that he’s running as an independent. For example, the New York Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “RFK Jr. comes out in favor of reparations, carving out lane to Biden’s left.”
According to the Post, RFK’s campaign website pretty clearly advocates for reparations, which are deeply unpopular with Republicans and sane people. RFK’s website explained:
“During Jim Crow, Black banks, businesses, hospitals, schools, and farms were targeted for destruction. Racists knew that without these, the Black community had no chance of building wealth. We must set federal dollars aside to rebuild Black infrastructure.
These programs complement direct redress payments or tax credits to the descendants of the victims of Jim Crow and other victims of persecution. RFK Jr. will find ways to offer this redress that are legal, fair, and win the approval of Americans of all races.”
RFK is amazing on vaccines and medical freedom. Can conservatives can overlook his far-left policy positions? For me, I’m just glad RFK is in the race so the vaccine issue stays on the table.
🔬 A new preprint study published this week titled “Safety of Monovalent BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech), mRNA-1273 (Moderna), and NVX-CoV2373 (Novavax) COVID-19 Vaccines in US Children Aged 6 months to 17 years.” It had twenty-one authors, including six FDA researchers.
8,000,000 doses given to 4,000,000 kids. That’s 8 million parents who chose to jab their children.
First of all, this stud is essentially a government publication. The FDA paid for and managed it from start to end. It even disclosed that “The US Food and Drug Administration provided funding for this study and contributed as follows: led the design of the study, interpretation of the results, writing of the manuscript, decision to submit, and made contributions to the coordination of data collection and analysis of the data.”
Apart from the six FDA scientists who directly work for the government, several other researchers disclosed receiving Pfizer and other pharma grants. A half dozen more work for (or with) CVS, which made so much money from the jabs it even embarrassed Scrooge McDuck.
The conflicts are significant: they mean this study would never have published if the FDA didn’t want it out there. I hate to sound cynical, but it feels like a limited hangout. I’ll just note that my healthy skepticism of medical literature is shared by the NEJM’s former chief editor and other insiders.
On to the study. They looked at the medical records of over 4 million kids jabbed with the original ‘monovalent’ vaccine, using data they got from three private health insurers. So the data is out there, if the government wants it. They looked for fifteen different adverse health conditions — “signals” — in the immediate period after vaccination (days) and found two: a myocarditis or pericarditis signal within five days after Pfizer (12-17 years), which they already knew about, and they found a brand new signal for “seizures and convulsions” within three days after Pfizer (2-4 years) and Moderna shots (2-5 years).
The study noted that kids who died during the study were not counted. It didn’t even say how many there were.
To say the researchers soft-pedaled their findings would be an understatement. The authors criticized their own study every way they could think of, and said all it ultimately amounted to was a prompt for more intensive research, which will never get funded. “The new seizures/convulsions signal observed in our study should be interpreted with caution and further investigated in a more robust epidemiological study,” they explained.
They detected the seizure signals by comparing 2022 claims data to “adjusted background rates” from 2019 and 2020. The “adjustments” were not completely clear, so who knows what kinds of statistical games may have been played.
Finally, I always check these studies for the obligatory pro-vaccine statement, as a barometer of how the rules are evolving. Curiously, in this study, neither the words “safe” nor “effective” were used anywhere to describe the jabs. Neither did it claim that side effects are rare. Here is the pitifully weak claim the study made for the jabs: “FDA concludes that the known and potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks of COVID-19 infection.”
Wow. I could spend three paragraphs dissecting that limited endorsement. “Known and potential” benefits? They had to include “potential” benefits to outweigh the risks! “Potential benefits” can mean anything they want, and has no real quantifiable value. And, note they ascribed the statement to the FDA — meaning the non-FDA researchers didn’t join the jab endorsement. Don’t blame us; we’re just telling you what the FDA said.
Oh how I long to see a re-analysis of the raw, unadjusted claims data performed by independent researchers lacking all the conflicts with the FDA (which approved the shots), Pfizer, and CVS. But it will never happen, because the claims data is “private health information” and it would take a court order to get it.
Why would the FDA publish this now? One fondly recalls the brief life and sudden death of the FDA study in early 2022 hinting at a stroke signal in jab victims, sorry, I mean jab recipients.
We’ll keep an eye on this story.
🚀 Day 12: Middle East War Briefing.
💣 Biden will address the nation tonight at 8pm to explain “our response to Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel and Russia’s ongoing brutal war against Ukraine.” Ukraine is back! Maybe. So he’ll be asking for billions more for Israel and Ukraine.
The New York Times suggested Biden would also suggest dropping some cash on U.S. border problems, showing they know perfectly well how dumb seeking aid to defend other countries’ borders sounds when our own border is wide open.
Whee! Free money for everyone! Including Palestinians!
Well. Free aid money for Palestinians except for East Palestinians, of course. Nor for Lahainians either.
They didn’t say whether Biden would use the red Nazi uplighting again or maybe wear sunglasses and a crisp khaki flak jacket with medals on it. I’ll brief you tomorrow, no need to watch the horrifying spectacle.
💣 It turns out that despite some predictions, Israel did not start its ground war in Gaza after Biden left Israel. Something or someone is restraining the IDF. Let’s call that person or thing, “the Restrainer.” Until the Restrainer is removed, there will be no ground war in Gaza.
💣 The Wall Street Journal ran a followup to the Hamas General Hospital story yesterday headlined “U.S., Experts Say Evidence Suggests Palestinian Militants’ Rocket Hit Gaza Hospital..” After all that hoopla, it was just a friendly-fire casualty, with some cheap European cars hardest hit.
As the Hamas Hospital story continued cratering yesterday, two facts emerged from the acrid fog of war. One: surprise! The hospital was not, in fact, destroyed. Photos showed the parking lot was pretty torn up, and the hospital may have some blown-out windows. Fact Number Two: credulous Western media accepted as 100% true all the fake photos and propaganda that Hamas pumped out in the minutes and hours after the unfortunate friendly-fire accident.
The rush to believe Hamas suggested the fake war propaganda fit some kind of predetermined media narrative or something.
Maybe this kind of thing has been going on for a long time, but ever since covid, media’s constant lying has become especially obvious and irritating. Remember all the Italian covid hospital pictures with the hallways clogged by bloody gurneys that turned out to be from a 2006 soap opera or something? Corporate Media is so unreliable it’s truly a miracle — mirabilia dei — that anyone still believes anything corporate media says.
For exhibit A, as if you needed any more evidence, behold the original breathless New York Times front-page story about the allegedly-bombed Hamas General Hospital (which is still standing, see WSJ photo, above) and the evil IDF that couldn’t wait to genocide babies and dialysis patients instead of actual terrorists, who are much slipperier and harder to catch.
Look carefully at the Times’ front-page photo. Pretty impressive-looking destruction! But the problem was: that’s not the hospital. It’s not even a building resembling the hospital. It’s some other random building in southern Gaza where Hamas terrorists were hiding out, and not containing any babies or dialysis patients at all. Not even a band-aid.
The Times’ sneaky little disclaimer in the fine print did NOT make it better. It made it worse. They knew exactly what they were doing. What liars.
💣 Speaking of the “mostly-unreliable” New York Times, it ran a story yesterday suggesting Biden may be in for some turbulence if he keeps up all this public boosterism for Israel. It was headlined, “Biden Walks a Tightrope on Israel-Gaza as Democratic Tensions Smolder.”
Robert L. Peters approaches the short stairs. Can he make it?
Things are not perfect in democrat-land. They aren’t sure if they can openly oppose Israel or not and survive politically. The Times reported that “Democratic rifts over the conflict were beginning to tear open, leaving (Biden) presiding over a party struggling to resolve where it stands.”
Biden? “Presiding” over the party? Is he?
Perhaps trying to appease certain elements in his party less friendly to Israel, Biden announced a giant $100 million bribe, I mean payoff, I mean aid package for Hamas. Technically it’s for “Gaza,” but since Hamas runs the government that receives the money, Hamas decides what to do with the cash. The hundred million will not even be contingent on releasing any hostages. Biden also ordered Netanyahu to reopen the “aid corridor” from Egypt into Gaza and definitely not to occupy Gaza — or else. But all that was not enough for many democrats.
After meeting with Netanyahu, Biden was then supposed to meet with other regional leaders, but Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority all canceled their meetings and Biden went home. So.
The Times article cited the Hamas General Hospital controversy — a fake controversy which it helped falsely create — as the trigger for lots of woke but uninformed U.S. democrats to decamp from the Israel support team and march squarely into pro-Hamas territory. Along those lines, outraged pro-Palestine Jewish “protestors” occupied and held the U.S. Capitol Rotunda yesterday.
Mostly peaceful insurrectionists.
CLIP: Andy Ngo — protestors occupy the US Capitol Building (0:39).
So-called ‘Jews for Peace’ militantly infested the Capitol Rotunda trying to interrupt Congress’ official proceedings for several hours. Ultimately, Capitol Police removed them and three mostly-hysterical people were arrested and quickly released.
I know what you’re thinking! You’re wondering whether the FBI is going to track the all these insurrectionists down using advanced image analysis, send stormtroopers to raid all their houses in the wee hours, perp walk them in front of their kids, interrogate their employers, charge them with criminal trespassing and interference, and try them before DC juries before locking them up for one to ten years.
Nope! It will never happen. What a silly question. They vote democrat. They’re not worried about it at all.
💣 In stark contrast to the Sleepy-Joe-in-Chief, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said “no mo’ money for Hamas” — explaining he opposes Biden’s indefensible Hamas bribe.
CLIP: Governor DeSantis reacts to Biden’s $100M aid package for Gaza (0:47).
💣 Yahoo Finance ran a telling story yesterday headlined, “Oil jumps as Iran increases rhetoric against Israel, US stockpiles drop.” Today’s Brent Crude oil price chart:
Nobody could’ve seen this coming! With Arabic oil-producing countries lining up against the U.S.-Israel axis and several Middle Eastern countries shifting into “no travel” status, the supply of oil to our strategically-depleted country is beginning to signal imminent price increases.
When (if) gas prices jump, Biden’s polling figures are going to get a lot worse. Since he’s practically drained the strategic oil reserve — which should be called the strategic political cookie jar — Biden doesn’t have many remaining options except appeasement.
Of course, higher gas prices would also not be great news for us.
Still, it’s not abundantly clear yet what OPEC will do in response to the conflict. My guess is we will find out promptly once Israel’s Restrainer has been removed. The question is, when will that be?
Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll see you guys back here tomorrow for more Coffee & Covid.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
