Opinion
By Jeff Childers
07-19-23
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup today includes: Jason Aldean update; the appalling Michigan electors prosecution, explained; the Biden Administration finally suspends the Wuhan lab from getting any more federal grants; Biden sleeps through meeting with Israeli president on camera; Ukraine buys Twitter ads to promote propaganda; another de-transitioning teen sues her doctors; What is a Woman star shows how to handle a hostile interview; and a warning clip for our canine friends.
🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞
🪖 UPDATE: Last week, I reported on the latest mid-performance, celebrity mystery illness suffered by Country music superstar Jason Aldean, when he abruptly stopped in mid-song and fled the stage traveling about 90 m.p.h., which ended his Hartford concert.
To be fair, Jason’s was the mildest mystery illness in a long string of mid-performance disasters; after all, when Jason departed he was moving quite well. And not in a bodybag. But the video was dramatic, unique, got a ton of media coverage, and featured the usual “dehydration” excuse, so I jammed it on the list.
I have been informed by several C&C readers who are either connected to Jason or to the band that the hit performer is a deplorable anti-vaxxer like us and is fortunately doing just fine after his … whatever it was. The specific cause of his rapid exit remains a little fuzzy — the official explanation is still ‘dehydration’ — so maybe we can chalk it up to sudden and unexpected jungle tummy requiring immediate access to a porcelain facility, or possibly he was being chased by bees.
Bees genetically engineered by Bill Gates!
Anyway, apart from currently being in the woke media’s cancellation crosshairs for making a popular song about how small towns don’t put up with woke rioters, Jason is doing just fine.
The takeaway is that we have a few new criteria for evaluating celebrity mystery illnesses: #1, whether their bodies hit the floor, #2, whether they had to be dragged off the stage, and #3, whether hospitals or morticians were involved. Since Jason’s “medical incident” fits none of those criteria, I’m officially removing him from the “sketchy circumstances” list.
Jason’s situation highlights the different ways celebrities respond to mysterious dehydration incidents: if they aren’t jabbed, they run around the stage before exiting and don’t have to go to the hospital. But if they’re in the jabbed category, someone else has to take them away. Like fully-jabbed comedian Heather McDonald, who also explained she was dehydrated when she suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed mid-performance in 2022:
Hit the floor, check. Dragged off stage, check. Hospital, check! See how easy it is?
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 In the latest gruesome example of unbridled political prosecution, the New York Times reported a story yesterday headlined, “Michigan Charges 16 in False Elector Scheme to Overturn Trump’s 2020 Loss.”
Yesterday, Michigan’s democrat attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced felony charges against 16 elderly Republican electors, some of whom are top GOP officials in Michigan, charging each with eight felony counts, including forgery, conspiracy, and “uttering” (an antiquated common-law term for fraud), for allegedly falsely signing documents attesting that they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors” for president and vice president in 2020.
If convicted on all charges, the 16 Republicans (average ages of 70) will face up to 94 years in prison and tens of thousands in fines. The defendants were given a week to turn themselves in or face arrest.
According to the attorney general’s office, the accused Republicans tried to present copies of documents showing they were electors to the Michigan legislature, the U.S. Congress, and the National Archives, as an alternative pro-Trump slate of electors at a meeting of the Electoral College later that month.
But … they were never recognized by anyone as valid electors.
Admittedly, I’m not familiar with the ins-and-outs of Michigan law, but under common law fraud and these facts, no one could possibly have been defrauded. Fraud requires an element of “reliance,” meaning someone must have relied on a defendant’s false representation. No reliance, no fraud.
Uttering is a little different though, and in some jurisdictions only requires an intent to defraud. But you never heard of the weird charge because, like other recent democrat prosecutions, was pried out of a 19th-century time capsule. It is normally charged when people try to pass forged checks, although most states now have statutes covering that situation.
On that line, it is also curious that the Attorney General is relying on murky common-law charges rather than anything specific under Michigan’s election statutes, which suggests that the alternative electors’ actions were not explicitly illegal. In fact, the complaint against them describes in great detail all the efforts they made to comply with Michigan election statutes so that they would be recognized as being valid.
The Michigan electors may have gotten the idea from when democrats hurriedly assembled a slate of alternate electors in Hawaii during the 1960 Nixon – JFK election amidst a controversial recount. Nobody was charged with anything back then, and no laws were passed banning the practice. But of course, it’s TOTALLY different when democrats do it. That was in Hawaii, not Michigan, dummy.
In the wild flurry of post-election activity in 2020, Republicans attempted the same tactic in six other states, in varying degrees: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According the Wall Street Journal’s report, charges are also “being considered” in those other states. Folks involved in that effort might want to start lawyering up.
🔥 Narrative alert! Bloomberg ran a narrative-baking story yesterday deceptively headlined, “US Suspends Wuhan Institute Funds Over Covid Stonewalling.”
The headline makes it sound like the lab was suspended for not cooperating with covid investigations. But the article described an HHS action to deauthorize the Wuhan lab for federal grants because it won’t even cooperate with providing its basic safety and security procedures — nothing to do with covid, not specifically.
This HHS action is completely separate from any intelligence agency investigations that are presumably ongoing.
The narrative shift is interesting, but the article also obliquely confirmed some controversial conspiracy facts. First, Bloomberg reported “The lab hasn’t received money from the ] since July 2020.” Flipping that around, it confirmed that the previously forbidden claim that the NIH was still sending money to Wuhan as late as July, 2020.
Bloomberg also reported that HHS’s Office of Inspector General conducted an audit earlier this year that determined the NIH failed to effectively monitor its awards and subawards, harming the agency’s “ability to understand the nature of research conducted and identify problem areas.” In other words, Bloomberg is setting up an excuse for NIH to “not know” what was going on with the money it gave Wuhan.
See? The NIH wasn’t deliberately funding gain-of-function research. They just trusted the Wuhan lab and forgot to check what it was using the money for.
In other words, the NIH is admitting to the lesser crime of negligence, rather than of being up to its filthy neck in gain-of-function research and being nabbed in a Chinese biolab bathroom with its pants down.
This was a narrative-crafting article. Bloomberg is helping stitch together a fairytale about how the virus leaked from a shoddily-run lab. It was negligence all around, just one of those things. The conclusion will be that we need to tighten up the procedures and fund the agencies even more so that they can do their jobs properly.
🔥 At an enervated meeting with Israel’s president Isaac Herzog at the White House yesterday, Joe Biden imitated the Energizer Bunny running out of batteries. After about the first minute, Biden’s chin met his chest and he started incoherently mumbling. The problem seems to be that since he read the entire two-minute greeting off a paper in his lap, it put his head dangerously close to the napping position.
I’d write out the good parts for you, but it’s literally un-transcribable. You’ll see. Here’s the clip where Joe almost nods off:
The funniest part might be the look of utter disbelief Herzog gives to someone in the room while Joe’s brain was resetting, right before the Israeli president obviously decided to just play along. The official White House transcript even used the word ‘indiscernible’ five times during Joe’s sub-two-minute speech:
The real purpose for the meeting was for Biden — or more likely his team — to pressure Israel to stop implementing conservative reforms to reign in an ultra-liberal Israeli Supreme Court. From yesterday’s New York Times:
In the op-ed, Tom Friedman explained that Biden personally briefed him at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. In other words, Biden was threatening the Israelis. As Friedman explained:
message to the Israeli prime minister and president could not have been clearer: Please stop now. Don’t pass anything this important without a broad consensus, or you are going to break something with Israel’s democracy and with your relationship with America’s democracy, and you may never be able to get it back… Biden, as Israel’s friend, felt he cannot be silent.
So another way to look at Biden’s exhausted performance was that it was intentional. It could have signaled to Herzog the utterly-absent enthusiasm for the positive diplomatic words of welcome Biden was reading off the page. The real message was: “I’m only going through the motions here, and I’m not even trying very hard.” Biden — beyond embarrassment himself — may have meant to humiliate Herzog.
But I might be giving Joe too much credit, which is an ever-present danger over which one must be constantly vigilant.
🚀 This is new. At least some unsolicited propaganda on Twitter is being properly labeled now. This delightful ad, disguised as news, appeared in my feed today:
I don’t mind this at all. Twitter has to make money, and it’s a way to bring home some of those taxpayer dollars, now used to propagandize Americans. I appreciated the “promotion” disclosure that the Ukrainians are paying cash to push their point of view across the pond.
🔥 The latest black eye to the medical-industrial complex is the string of lawsuits against doctors who prescribed and performed transitioning surgeries on teenagers. Yesterday the UK Daily Mail reported on the latest one:
According to the Daily Mail, Prisha Mosley, 24, says she was confused and battling mental health problems when doctors suggested cross-sex hormones and a double breast removal after several brief consultations, one lasting only minutes. She was 17 at the time.
In her 53-page complaint, Prisha alleges her doctors ‘lied’, including by saying testosterone jabs would solve all her problems and even make her ‘grow a penis.’ She has since decided to ‘detransition’ and live as a woman, and claims financial damages, since the treatments left irreversible scars, a deep voice, body and facial hair, pain in her neck and shoulders, a damaged vagina, she will not be able to breastfeed, and may be infertile.
I have long observed that many teenaged girls “go crazy” around age 17, and don’t become normal human beings again until around age 22, giving their unfortunate parents some very difficult interim years. But apparently that fact is too obscure for the baffled medical community to notice.
🔥 I couldn’t track down where this interview ran, but it is a perfect example of how to handle a hostile interviewer on live TV. Scott Newgent, a trans biological female, who now campaigns against gender “affirmation” of kids and was the accidental star of Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman?”, posted this clip yesterday.
Scott faced a disgracefully hostile interviewer and handled it perfectly.
🔥 Having run a series of clips celebrating courageous canines in action, it is time — for balance — to now include a warning. Canine friends, this is how to earn the permanent label of “bad dog.”
Don’t be that dog.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! And tune back in tomorrow morning, for another informative and stimulating Coffee & Covid roundup.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
