FUNNY HOW COMMON THAT TYPE OF THING IS:  Breaking News: Covid vaccine damage consultants paid more than victims.

YEAH, THAT’S THE WAY TO REVIVE THE PARTY:  Crockett Blasts Fetterman Over His Criticism of Fighter Video Most People Found ‘Bizarre’.

NONE. THEY WANT THE ABOLITION OF AMERICA:  What Are the Left’s Solutions for the Problems They Created?

OR THE RIGHT ONE:  The wrong constitutional crisis.

OUROBOROS:  Top Senate Democrat Schumer postpones book tour for security reasons.

FOLLOW THE MONEY:  SQT: Muhammed Khalil.

SO, WHY DOES HE WANT THEM UNREASONINGLY MAD?  SQT: Pardon Invalidation.

GETTING AHEAD OF POISONOUS GOSSIP:  I seldom respond to nasty headlines because I don’t like giving trash credibility, however, being that there is allegedly a book coming out with me named and attacking @POTUS , his marriage, our first lady, and frankly implying something distasteful about me, I am responding.

And this is for all the X-less.

THE BEST WAY TO PREVENT THE BASTILLE BEING STORMED IS TO OPEN THE DOORS WIDE AND LET EVERYONE POKE EVERY CORNER:  Not Storming The Bastille.

THIS IS A HIGHLY IMPROBABLE TIMELINE. BUT SO MUCH FUN:  47 is better than 45. This time he is a politician who dodged a bullet. Literally.

DRESDEN RULES SHOULD APPLY, BUT I DON’T THINK ISRAEL IS QUITE THERE YET: Israel Unleashes ‘Gates of Hell’ on Hamas.

They need to realize that all of Gaza is Hamas, and Hamas is all of Gaza.

HAHA:

Legit LOL at "Batonya Harding" https://t.co/wRjHGiyLWH

— Physics Geek (@physicsgeek) March 17, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Space National Guard debate reignited with bipartisan legislation.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Federal judges’ Trump hate is only harming the courts themselves.

ROGER KIMBALL: Vance Derangement Syndrome.

The most reliable prop in anti-Republican — and a fortiori anti-Trump — rhetoric is comparison with the diminutive but excitable Austrian with the funny mustache and a weakness for leather. I once looked it up, and yes, every Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan has been described as “literally Hitler.” I had thought the argumentum reductio ad Hitlerum had worn out its welcome, partly because it was so absurd. Ronald Reagan? Mitt Romney? The Bushes?

Yet [Bret] Stephens has once again demonstrated that the Hitler wheeze, though tired, still has a bit of mileage in it. Responding to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Stephens began with a little cadenza on everyone’s favorite Hitler proxy, Joseph Goebbels. Yes, that’s right. Stephens suggested that warning the crowd of European globalists that untrammeled illegal migration was a threat, that free speech was inseparable from the fortunes of liberal democracy, and that Europe would have to start taking more responsibility for its own security made Vance a malignant patsy on the model of Neville Chamberlain.*

One silver lining of Stephens’s columns is that they tend to possess the virtue of clarity. You know where he stands. In this case, the title reads “Vance’s Munich Disgrace” and goes on to talk about the Vice President as a disgrace. His concluding words about Vance and his talk are “a disgrace.” In any given paragraph, you know where you stand.

I’d make jokes about newfound respect on the left for the man with the funny mustache, given the many issues they have in common these days (not least of which is how lefties on college campuses behaved after October 7th, their hatred of the Second Amendment, and their shared love of the Gleichschaltung). But we’re in Orwellian territory in 2025: Elon Musk is seen as Hitler because he wants to shrink government. CBS’s Margaret Brennan believes the Holocaust happened because of too much free speech in the Third Reich.

* Wait, wasn’t Neville Chamberlain was the eight-dimensional chess playing good guy in WWII? At least, that’s what Netflix was telling me in 2022. Conversely, Obama hated Churchill so much during his three terms in office that he actually uttered Chamberlain’s signature phrase “peace in our time” during his second inaugural address.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: UK “Intelligence” Also Knew Covid-19 Was Manufactured in Fauci’s Wuhan Lab, and Also Lied to the World About It.

We just found out that Germany’s intelligence services concluded long ago with 80-95% confidence that covid-19 was cooked up in Fauci’s Wuhan branch.

Now it turns out that MI-6 always knew the truth, too.

Not only did they lie, but the “intelligence” services targeted people telling the truth for censorship, debanking, and reputation-destroying smears.

"It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in Wuhan Institute of Virology… [China] is now engaged in an information & influence operation (IO) to deflect responsibility….the Journal Nature was used to promulgate the narrative…"https://t.co/LqAoRoYfEm

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 16, 2025

Related: How Often Has the New York Times Been ‘Misled?’

Here in 2025 it’s nice that Ms. Tufekci and the Times are acknowledging that they were duped about Covid origin possibilities. But readers have to wonder how upset Timesfolk were to be used in this manner given the outrageous justification Ms. Tufekci offers for those who misled her and her colleagues:

It’s not hardto imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

Perhaps a few more acknowledgments are in order from the newspaper. In 2020 Times coverage was far too kind to lockdown promoters.

Five years to the day before Ms. Tufekci’s Sunday column, Katie Rogers and Emily Cochrane reported for the Times:

President Trump, under pressure to take more significant steps to slow the spreading coronavirus, recommended on Monday that Americans stop unnecessary travel and avoid bars, restaurants and groups of more than 10 people, as he warned that the outbreak could extend well into the summer.

The national guidelines, which also advise home-schooling and the curtailing of visits to nursing homes and long-term care facilities, are the most robust response so far from the Trump administration. But the guidelines, which officials described as a trial set, are not mandatory and fall short of a national quarantine and internal travel restrictions, which many health officials had urged.

Could Times readers have used some measured assessments of extreme recommendations? “On your next grocery run, don’t forget to sanitize your reusable bags,” was the headline on a Times dispatch from Jill Cowan two days later.

The same day, an opinion piece bore this headline:

Cancel. The. Olympics.

The Times described the author, Jules Boykoff, as “a political scientist who studies the Olympics,” so at least they weren’t pretending he had any relevant expertise.

Ms. Tufekci for her part was a mask enthusiast and by December of 2020 was still panicked enough about the virus to urge the postponement of Christmas gatherings.

But that advice seems downright reasonable compared to the assault on free speech she was advocating in August of 2020. The Times itself profiled her in a piece called “How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right.” Ben Smith wrote:

The probable answer to a media environment that amplifies false reports and hate speech, she believes, is the return of functional governments, along with the birth of a new framework, however imperfect, that will hold the digital platforms responsible for what they host.

“It’s charmed that I get to do this, it feels good,” she said. “But in the ideal world, people like me are kind of superfluous, and we have these faceless nameless experts and bureaucrats who tell us: This is what you have to do.”

Let’s hope she has another column this Sunday acknowledging more 2020 foolishness.

Good luck with that — It was foolishness all the way down for the Times in 2020.

CORN, POPPED: Trump strips Hunter and Ashley Biden of Secret Service protection ‘effective immediately.’

HMM: Donating Blood Changes Your Genes. “Recent research from the Francis Crick Institute has revealed intriguing genetic adaptations in the blood stem cells of frequent blood donors, supporting the production of new, non-cancerous cells without increasing cancer risk, as reported in the journal Blood.” Plus:

“Regular blood donation has been associated with several functional advantages for donors, beyond the genetic adaptations observed in blood stem cells. These benefits include cardiovascular improvements and potential metabolic effects.”

I donate two or three times a year. The health benefits aren’t really why I do it, but they’re certainly a plus.

ROGER KIMBALL: Ending America’s addiction to high debt, big government was never going to be easy: Stock markets may be panicking. But Trump and Musk are honest enough to admit that there’s no gain without some pain.

SHOCKER: “A new report is shedding more light on why UW-Madison’s director of Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement lost his job.” “The report, which was released Friday, details how former DDEEA chief LaVar Charleston spent millions of dollars, handed out bonuses and raises, and never fully communicated any of it to anyone else at the school…. But perhaps the most damning part of the report came from what Charleston spent on training, travel, and events. Which totals over $2.5 million last year alone…. The report does not detail where those trips or training took place, or who was allowed to go. UW-Madison removed Charleston from his job at the DDEEA in January, but did not fire him. He’s currently on leave from his $133,000 job as a professor. He made over $300,000 as DEI boss. The report also details how the university’s governance system allowed Charleston to spend so much money without anyone knowing until afterwards….”

THEY DO HAVE TO COME FROM THE PRESIDENT, THOUGH: Pardons and Autopen Signatures: A 2024 Appellate Decision Says Pardons Don’t Have to Be Signed (or Even Written) at All. “Of course, something is required, and that something is presumably a statement by the President that he is pardoning someone. If (and this is a very big if) a President actually didn’t make such a statement, and an assistant just affixed the President’s signature to a document purporting to be a pardon without the President’s authorization, then I don’t see how that would be a valid pardon (at least unless it’s somehow ratified by the relevant President). But that turns on a factual question about whether the President was actually involved in the creation of the pardons, not on a legal question about whether an autopen signature renders the pardon invalid.”

As I said below, it’s possible that Trump knows something about how things happened.

MINE, BABY, MINE: $8.4 Billion: Enormous Cache of Rare Earth Elements Discovered in America. We need legislation that will override burdensome environmental laws where necessary for self-sufficiency in strategic materials and energy.

HMM: Is This the Aide Behind Biden’s Controversial Autopen Signings? “Reports suggest Neera Tanden, Biden’s former White House Staff Secretary, may have used the autopen to sign pardons while President Biden was golfing in St. Croix in December 2022. The Oversight Project pointed out that six individuals received pardons during Biden’s vacation on December 30, 2022, raising concerns that the president may not have been present or fully aware that the pardons were being signed.”

If it happened once it could have happened again. And 2024 Biden was much farther gone mentally even than 2022 Biden.

Flashback to 2021 (From Ed): The Moral Equivalent of the War Room:

Every morning this week at 8:45, a newly established “war room” has convened at the White House, with about 20 staffers logging onto a Zoom call to coordinate messaging and deployment of critical resources.

The operation has nothing to do with the crisis in Afghanistan — it’s about keeping President Biden’s big infrastructure push on track. Even amid the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the frantic, last-minute military operation to rescue thousands of Americans and vulnerable Afghans, the White House has maintained its overarching focus on the domestic matters it has prioritized for the last eight months.

“The No. 1 priority for our cabinet overall, from our perspective here, is to build support throughout the [August] recess process for the legislative agenda,” said Neera Tanden*, a senior advisor to the president who oversees the war room. Tasked with building support for a $1.2-trillion bipartisan infrastructure measure and the Democrats’ $3.5-trillion budget proposal, Tanden is dispatching cabinet members to key states, monitoring lawmakers’ town halls and arranging hundreds of local TV interviews with administration officials.

As I wrote back then:

Not surprisingly, the party whose organizing method is “the moral equivalent of war” views American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. And as the last week has illustrated, they’re far more focused on fighting against the American people, rather than Middle Eastern terrorists.

* Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time — a long time: Neera Tanden lands in the White House, after all. “The White House confirmed on Friday that Biden had appointed Tanden to be a senior adviser. She will start on Monday. The move came two months after the veteran Democratic policy adviser, known for her combative Twitter feed and in-your-face politics, withdrew her bid to become Biden’s budget director — Biden’s first, and, to this point, only failed nominee and one of his few political setbacks thus far.”

Earlier:

● Biden’s OMB Pick, Neera Tanden, Is a Conspiracy Theorist Who Pushed False and Disputed Election Information on Twitter.
● Neera Tanden’s unremorseful bullying should disqualify her from Biden’s cabinet.
● Democratic Infighting over Biden’s Nomination of Neera Tanden.