Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to "Deniz Güneş”, [not really] the director of the Center for Public Information at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deniz posts for an admirable reason: The CDC Would Like to Get Ahead of RFK Junior’s Future Statements.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was blindsided by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement that the coronavirus vaccine would no longer be recommended for pregnant women and healthy children. Our entire agency was shocked: RFK, Jr. made the surprise statement on Twitter without consulting anyone at the CDC, and only provided us with confusing and contradictory guidance later that day. We have since had to contradict the Secretary and clarify that the shot is still recommended.
The surprise announcement and subsequent walkback caused confusion. People look to the CDC for information, and it’s not ideal to reverse our position twice in 48 hours. Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee that this won’t happen again; the Secretary is a highly idiosyncratic man who often acts on impulse.
With that in mind, we at the CDC would like to reduce the likelihood of mass confusion by clarifying some situations that RFK Jr. may comment on at some point in the future. We can only speculate about what he might say, but based on his past actions and interests, some topics seem likely to draw his attention. So, the CDC would like to clarify a few key positions, which will continue to be CDC policy regardless of any statements made by RFK Jr.
The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is safe. There has been extensive research into the vaccine’s effects, and the health benefits far outweigh the risks. No link between the vaccine and autism has been found. No link between the vaccine and epilepsy has been found. No link between the vaccine and vampirism has been found. The vaccine will not turn you into a leprechaun, nor will it cause what social media posts call “Benjamin Button Syndrome”. Any claims that the vaccine causes major transformations — possibly including super powers that a person may enjoy for a short time before realizing that the powers come at a tremendous cost — are unfounded.
And there's more. Much more. Deniz tries to cover the obvious bases, but with Junior, who knows?
Also of note:
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Gutting, slashing, cutting, … Reporters are working their thesauri overtime looking for description of budget decreases. Liz Wolfe goes with the G-word: The Gutting of the National Park Service.
Why should the National Park Service be funding so many sites? And what would happen if some of those properties were transferred to state or tribal management?
The Trump administration is asking those sensible questions, and is proposing to cut $1.2 billion from the agency's budget, "mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management" per Bloomberg. This is a pet issue of mine: It's always been unclear to me why we expect taxpayers across the country to pay for the upkeep and management of so many designated sites, including ones they will never visit and have never heard of. Do you really need to be paying for New York City's Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site? Or North Dakota's Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site?
I say this as a nature and history appreciator. My interest is not in having these places razed; it's in making sure the federal government is careful about where its money goes and what's actually in the national interest.
"The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not 'National Parks,' in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks," reads a federal memo on the matter. Hear, hear! "The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system." Though an official list of sites whose management will be shifted is not yet available, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (whom you may remember from the 2024 Republican presidential primary) says that only the 63 "crown jewel" national parks will remain under NPS control.
That link in the second paragraph goes to a story with the headline "Trump Plans to Offload National Park Sites, But States Don’t Want Them". Gee, that's a shame. Maybe auction them off to see if anybody wants them.
I know: the NPS is one of the more sacred of cows in the federal barnyard, and any discussion of budget cutting will automatically be characterized as putting a waterslide on El Capitan. So I'm not optimistic that's a fight that Burgum will win.
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The nation that controls drone batteries will control the world! Noah Smith sees cause for alarm in Ukraine's drone strike against Russian bombers: How Chinese drones could defeat America. And it quickly turns into a blame-Trumpfest:
The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV [First-Person Vision] drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.
Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.
In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.
Noah's plenty worried! And (aside from his TDS) he makes some good points. But I would hope that our military bases and warships already have decent defenses against FPV drones. (If not, it's probably time to fire some more generals.)
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Insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader. In Trump's eyes, that's enough to put the Federalist Society in the Crosshairs. Jonah Goldberg:
Last week, the Court of International Trade delivered a blow to Donald Trump’s global trade war. It found that the worldwide tariffs Trump unveiled on “Liberation Day” as well his earlier tariffs pretextually aimed at stopping fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada (as if) were beyond his authority. The three-judge panel was surely right about the Liberation Day tariffs and probably right about the fentanyl tariffs, but there’s a better case that, while bad policy, the fentanyl tariffs were not unlawful.
Please forgive a lengthy excerpt of Trump’s response on Truth Social, but it speaks volumes:
How is it possible for [the CIT judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be? I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. … In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own ‘thing.’ I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!
Let’s begin with the fact that Trump cannot conceive of a good explanation for an inconvenient court ruling other than Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s irrelevant that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 law the administration invoked to impose the relevant tariffs, does not even mention the word “tariff” or that Congress never envisioned the IEEPA as a tool for launching a trade war with every nation in the world, “Penguin Island” included. Also disregard the fact that the decision was unanimous and only one of the three judges was appointed by Trump (the other two were Reagan and Obama appointees).
Trump is the foremost practitioner of what I call Critical Trump Theory—anything bad for Trump is unfair, illegitimate, and proof that sinister forces are rigging the system against him. No wonder then that Trump thinks Leonard Leo, formerly a guiding light at the Federalist Society, the premier conservative legal organization, is a “sleazebag” and “bad person.” Note: Leo is neither of those things.
Uncoincidentally, the WSJ reported on Leonard Leo the other day, and found This Conservative Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You, After Getting Dumped by Trump (WSJ gifted link).
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To make it even more socialistic? Were it not for Jonathan Turley, I probably would not have known what Michael Moore was up to these days. As it turns out, it's baking Pie-Crust Patriotism: Michael Moore Rewrites the Pledge of Allegiance.
Rev. Francis Bellamy would not likely be won over by the Moore remake. (The phrase “under God” was incorporated later into the Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954). Here is the new version:
“I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America. And to the democracy for which we all stand: One person, one vote, one nation, part of one world, everyone! A seat at the table! Everyone! A slice of the pie! With liberty and justice, equality, and kindness and the pursuit of happiness for all.”
As an initial matter, I fail to see how the nation is embodied by a run-on sentence that has more exclamation marks than a pre-teen’s text to bffs.
In case you haven't heard my rant about Pledge: its original author, Francis Bellamy, was a Christian socialist, and inveighed against the evils of capitalism from his Baptist pulpit in Boston. I'm in agreement with Gene Healy's Cato essay What's Conservative about the Pledge of Allegiance?, in which he deemed it "a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people."
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