Opinion
By Jeff Childers
06-25-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your essential news roundup includes: why the Supreme Court dissed three chances to stop vaccine mandates; Team Biden flirts with nuclear war in its effort to get revenge on Russia; DeSantis aims for bears but protects left-hand lane hogs; and Wikileaker finally goes free, perhaps benefiting from the bad Russia news.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 USA Today ran a regrettable story yesterday headlined, “Supreme Court rejects COVID-vaccine cases, including two brought by group founded by RFK Jr.”
I can always tell when a news item is particularly distressing, since I start getting texts like “Jeff, did you see this!!” and “Mr. Childers, are you ever going to come pick up your dry cleaning?”
It was like that yesterday. It was the Supreme Court’s version of a St. Valentine’s Day massacre, except featuring vaccine cases instead of dead gangsters. Nor was it actually St. Valentine’s Day. Nor did anybody get any confections, not even one of those weird, medicine-tasting, heart-shaped candies with the slap-happy slogans printed on them.
The trio of D.O.A. cases included two filed by terrific Children’s Health Defense, which is Kennedy’s vaccine safety outfit. CHD’s cases were dismissed by lower courts on procedural grounds, like standing and mootness. In other words, the cases were not about the merits, not about whether vaccines ‘work,’ or whether it would be safer to inject Tide pods.
So the stakes were just about whether those cases could continue, rather than anything significant about the vaccines.
The decision not to take up these controversial vaccine cases should be viewed in light of the fact the Court is already squatting on a giant powder keg of controversial cases, likely planning to launch its biggest legal MOABS at 4:59 pm on Friday afternoon. Justices and staff will probably be out the door, running down the street, chucking decisions over their shoulders like confetti as the final moving van peels out around the corner.
So the last thing the Court probably wants to do right now is take up any new controversies. They first need to push out the current crop and wait for all the protests to die down. In other words, it was just bad timing for CHD.
The third case the Court declined was a little more troubling, but not earth-shattering. The Court refused to hear a challenge to Connecticut’s recent law banning religious exemptions against school vaccine requirements (already-exempted K-12 students are grandfathered in).
Since the Supremes said nothing in turning down the case, the Court made no new law. So there remains room for a competing decision from another circuit, or even a new case with different facts and legal theories from the same circuit.
Brian Festa, co-founder of We The Patriots USA Inc., the Connecticut case’s lead plaintiff, said the decision was disappointing. But Brian remains optimistic and vowed to fight on, saying it’s “not the end of the road for us in our fight to win back religious exemptions for schoolchildren.”
All in all, it was a mildly disappointing day, a minor lost battle in the bigger war. It’s not time to sell everything and buy Bitcoin. I wouldn’t even call these cases setbacks; yesterday’s news was mostly about lack of progress. We’re still in the game’s first quarter.
The right to bodily autonomy has, suddenly and unexpectedly, become our generation’s most important fight. We’ll never quit, not ever, until we’re completely free from medical mandates.
And, before jumping to any conclusions, let’s wait and see what else the Supremes have got up their long black sleeves this week.
🚀🚀 NBC ran a troubling story yesterday headlined, “Russia blames U.S. for ‘barbaric’ Ukrainian attack on Crimea, summons ambassador.” The sub-headline explained, “The Kremlin vowed retaliation Monday after the deadly strike on the Russian-occupied peninsula.”
Russia’s ambassador soberly informed the U.N Security Council yesterday that “The fact the U.S. is involved in this crime is beyond any doubt.” He warned darkly, “The involvement of the United States, the direct involvement, as a result of which Russian civilians are killed, cannot be without consequences.”
Pursuant to Biden’s new policy allowing Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied weapons into Russian territory, on Sunday Ukraine fired U.S. ATACMS missiles at the Crimean city of Sevastopol. The missiles were equipped with cluster bombs, which are designed only to kill unarmored personnel, meaning people, not tanks or planes or bases or anything.
Just about every country on Earth, except a very few like North Korea and the United States, believes using cluster bombs is a war crime.
Most of Ukraine’s missiles aimed at the Russian city were intercepted by Russia’s air defenses. But one exploded over a crowded beach, causing scores of deaths and hundreds of injuries, including dozens of children.
The pictures are awful.
Ukraine fanatics will argue whataboutism, or say it’s only fair since Russia attacked them first, or something similarly myopic. The main difference is Russia is a near-peer, first world, nuclear armed adversary. As much as Ukrainian die-hards would love to see the U.S. and Russia trade nukes, that will teach them!, the rest of us would prefer not to have to start building bunkers and stocking bugout bags.
Make no mistake. We will pay a price for this. According to the UK Daily Mail, Russia summoned the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, Lynne Tracy, and warned her that the attack would “not go unpunished. Retaliatory measures will definitely follow.” Americans will likely die so that the Ukrainians can temporarily enjoy a little Schadenfreudey, Pyrrhic victory against unarmed non-combatants on a beach in Russia.
It’s been nearly 48 hours. But Biden, Blinken, and Nod, I mean Jake Sullivan, have been unaccountably silent, all while the furious Russians accused the U.S. at the United Nations. More bizarrely, none of corporate media’s articles about the story quoted U.S. officials.
The reporters aren’t even asking questions.
The reason the Russians blame us is not only because they were U.S. missiles, or because Biden authorized Ukraine to launch them into Russian territory. Russia more blames us because the high-tech missiles launched by the Ukrainians were guided to their target by U.S. satellites. The missiles can only be programmed with GPS targeting data using our computers, and can only be launched electronically by U.S. technicians located outside Ukraine, maybe even inside the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
There is a rumor, which sounds like a joke, that there is a lonely Ukrainian soldier at the Pentagon who doesn’t speak English but is trained to click the final button to launch the missiles, so that the U.S. can claim it technically wasn’t us. The Russians don’t seem to appreciate the nuance.
I keep asking, where is Congress? Those chickenhawks should either officially declare war, or else shut this down before things get any hotter. Whatever game Biden thinks he’s playing, maybe tic-tac-toe, it isn’t worth it.
🔥🔥 No matter what he does, Florida’s Governor can’t stay out of controversy. This time its the wildlife. Yesterday, Newsweek ran an outraged headline about Florida’s bearish new law:
Liberals were badly triggered yesterday when DeSantis signed a new law de-criminalizing the shooting of bears whenever the ursine animals pose an immediate threat to people, pets, or property. It’s not open season; the law requires people to notify the state within 24 hours when it happens, bans the use of bear bait, and forbids taking bear pelts, teeth, claws, or any other part of the animals.
Apparently, we’ve done such a good job of protecting bears that encounters are on the rise, and the bears are having boundary issues:
Knock, knock:
Before yesterday, the law already allowed people to shoot bears in self-defense. The new law only clarified the scope of that self-defense right. As far as I can tell, the anxious, bear-loving critics aren’t pointing to any particularly problematic part of the bill. They just feel that, in general, it is mean to bears, and they worry it will make everyone go crazy and start shooting the furry woodland creatures right and left, like they are clay targets at the county fair.
Leave bears alone, they say, the bears don’t mean any harm. Bears’ rights activists have vowed to sue, so stay tuned for further developments. Fozzie Bear could not be reached for comment.
In related news, yesterday DeSantis did not sign, but rather vetoed a different bill, which would have banned driving in the left-hand lane. Apparently the Legislators have had it with the left-hand driving.
Under the proposed law, the left-hand lane would be reserved only for passing, turning, and for catching up to other drivers to communicate road rage using colorful hand signals, as necessary. Okay, I’m kidding about the last one. You can’t do that. But you can still express road rage without going into the left lane, by tailgating within nanometer distance. Or so I am told.
Kudos to DeSantis for protecting us from a slightly out-of-control Legislature that was getting a little too law-happy this week. We don’t need to criminalize left-hand lane driving, however annoying it can be when a timid driver hogs the left lane at 27 miles per hour, while towing a barely-functional, homemade trailer full of loosely contained yard trash.
Let Florida Man be free.
🔥🔥 Wikileaker Julian Assange’s long, strange trip is unexpectedly over. The New York Times reported the sudden story yesterday under the headline, “Assange Agrees to Plead Guilty in Exchange for Release, Ending Standoff With U.S.” Assange, the only known survivor of Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome, agreed to plead guilty to a single count of espionage yesterday, in exchange for credit for his five years of time served in solitary confinement in a high-security British prison.
Now, suddenly, inexplicably, Julian is free. Assange, now 52 and quite pale, requested sentencing at a remote U.S. outpost in the Marianas Islands, a U.S. Pacific island commonwealth where it turns out we have a United States Federal Courthouse attached to a Tiki bar.
After that, Julian hopes to return to his native Australia, as far from anybody named ‘Clinton’ as he can get.
The deal seems to have developed last month after a British High Court appallingly denied Assange’s extradition to the U.S., ironically and embarrassingly holding that U.S. officials had not satisfied them that America could protect Mr. Assange’s Constitutional rights. At that time, just a couple months ago, the U.S. sought to lock Assange up for 170 years.
Cynics speculated the Assange deal was a news nugget tossed out to distract everyone from what is going on in the Proxy War.
Whatever the explanation, it is good news, the long-overdue conclusion to a painful, sordid chapter of U.S. history, where the constellation of government hyper-classification was briefly exposed to a naive public who always thought government secrets were rare and were only invoked when absolutely necessary. Assange showed the world that U.S. bureaucrats are likely to classify anything that could even potentially be embarrassing, or if it’s a day ending in a ‘—y’.
Maybe the closing of the books on the government’s vindictive prosecution of Julian Assange will be a trigger, or maybe a metaphor, for a new and better phase to our judicial system.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Coffee & Covid will be right here tomorrow, same time, serving up a new mug of essential news and commentary.
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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
