It's overwhelming

I sat down tonight to write a column that I was going to call something like, “Trump’s bad faith pardons.” The New York Times reported today that Trump just pardoned a woman, Adriana Camberos, whom he had pardoned before, in 2021. The first time she was convicted of fraud, it was for selling counterfeit bottles of Five Hour Energy drink, small shot-size bottles that typically are sold next to the cash register at convenience stores for $3 or $4. Her second conviction was for buying consumer goods at discounted prices on the basis that they would be exported to Mexico, and then she and her brother, who was also convicted, sold them in the United States and covered up the scheme with bank and mail fraud. In both pardons, Camberos was represented by lawyers close to Trump.

Trump also pardoned a former governor of Puerto Rico and two others who were convicted of bribery. One of the co-conspirators got his daughter to donate a total of $3.5 million to a Trump superPAC called MAGA Inc. The pardons were handled by one of Trump’s personal lawyers, Chris Kise, who had represented him in the stolen top secret documents case.

In the cases of these pardons and others, Trump and his minions have used the excuse that the people they pardoned had been subjected to unfair prosecution by Biden’s “weaponized” Department of Justice. Trump’s pardons assume a tit-for-tat system of justice, whereby every incoming administration goes after people allied with the last administration in political retribution. What he’s really doing is selling pardons and lining his own pockets.

Then I took a look at the rest of my newsfeed for today. It was just as bad.

Trump’s DOJ opened a criminal investigation of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for statements they made which have been critical of the tactics of ICE agents who have surged into Minneapolis allegedly to conduct sweeps of undocumented immigrants. Subpoenas issued to Walz and Frey indicate that they are being investigated for criminally interfering with federal law enforcement officers.

Walz and Frey have done nothing more than criticize the deployment of thousands of ICE agents to their city and state. They have called on the DOJ and FBI to cooperate with Minnesota law enforcement officials in the investigation of the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent several days ago. In other words, what the mayor and governor have done is their jobs.

Not according to DOJ attack dog Todd Blanche. He posted on X, “Walz and Frey - I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.” He and FBI Director Kash Patel visited Minneapolis today in a show of force to support ICE, which has been pulling U.S. citizens violently from their cars and arresting them when they are unable or unwilling to produce papers such as Passports or Real ID cards to verify that they are citizens.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin appeared on CNN to defend the practice of demanding citizenship papers from U.S. citizens. CNN host Pamela Brown showed a video of a woman being violently removed from the driver’s seat of her car and arrested by ICE agents after they had demanded that she “validate her identity” with proof of citizenship. Brown asked McLaughlin by what authority citizens can be asked to produce proof of citizenship and what crime the woman had committed that justified her being yanked from her car and arrested.

Here is McLaughlin’s answer: “We have incredibly targeted immigration enforcement operations, so what’s happening there is there is reasonable suspicion if somebody is in the vicinity of this operation of this target, then they could be asked for their identification.” She went on to cite Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s invention of the so-called “Kavanaugh stop,” justifying stopping a person and asking them for identification if the law enforcement officer has “reasonable suspicion” that they are not citizens, based on where they are and what they look like.

Brown asked again what was the basis for arresting the woman and forcibly removing her from her car. This is, incredibly, McLaughlin’s answer: “Either this is a targeted operation and she’s around the vicinity of it, around the target. There’s reasonable suspicion because there might be a descriptor or she could be 5’6 and they’re looking for somebody who’s 5’6.”

The woman who was arrested was seated in her car. There is no way her height could have been determined by an ICE agent standing outside the driver’s door.

McLaughlin, caught off guard, shifted gears and started attacking the media for “fearmongering.” She said the media was using the words “police state.” That was the problem. “What we’re seeing is rampant violence against our law enforcement, highly coordinated. We have our legal authorities, when individuals see videos like that, you have to ask the question, was this individual obstructing law enforcement, which is a federal crime? Were they assaulting law enforcement, which is a felony, or any of those instances occurring before this video was cut, because you saw a very short cut? And that’s what I’m talking about. The media, there is not a lot of context that’s being [left] out there.”

The video showed ICE officers stopping the woman as she drove down a street where ICE was operating. The video showed ICE officers demanding that she show ID that certified she was a citizen. When she didn’t provide it fast enough for them, they arrested her. She was released from custody hours later with no explanation why she had been arrested and no apology.

Right below the story about Walz and Frey being criminally investigated for obstructing law enforcement was a Rolling Stone story about a fly-by-night pair of vaccine “researchers” in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau being given a $1.6 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, overseen by rabid anti-vaccine madman Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to conduct a randomized control trial of the Hepatitis B vaccine. The trial would break with all vaccine trials of the past by giving the Hepatitis B vaccine to half of 14,000 newborns, but not to the other 7,000. According to Rolling Stone, the trial will “study whether the birth dose had potentially negative health effects such as skin ailments or neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The grant was approved the same month that Kennedy was leaning on his CDC vaccine panel to drop its recommendation that infants be vaccinated against Hepatitis B at birth. The panel went along with Kennedy’s demand and announced that the CDC would no longer recommend that the Hepatitis B vaccine be given to all American children. Two days later, the $1.6 million grant to the vaccine skeptic “researchers” in Africa was announced.

When Kennedy was running Children’s Health Defense, his anti-vax lobbying outfit, he repeatedly praised the two “researchers” in Africa for studies of vaccines that had been widely criticized by health professionals. He went on Joe Rogan’s show to praise them and called one of the researchers a “hero” in his virulently anti-vax book, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.

Kennedy has been critical of vaccines over the years in a very specific way: He claims that vaccines are the only medical treatments that are not subject to randomized control tests. Vaccines are tested for efficacy and safety in other ways, but it is generally true that they are not tested that way because of the danger that the children who do not receive vaccines in such a test are likely to some degree to get sick with the disease the vaccine is designed to prevent. The Salk vaccine against polio was not subjected to randomized control tests because polio was in epidemic spread at the time Salk developed the vaccine. I was among the first children in the U.S. to receive the Salk vaccine in 1955 because 80 children in the grade school I attended at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, contracted polio in a matter of months in late 1954 and early 1955. Children who received the Salk vaccine did not get polio. It was never tested in such a way that children were not given the vaccine after it was shown to be effective.

Just to put this into perspective, the 14,000 children who will be subjected to the randomized control test of the Hepatitis B vaccine live in a country where more than one-fifth of adults and 11 percent of children already have Hepatitis B. Rolling Stone reports that one-fourth of children who contract Hepatitis B “are likely to die from cirrhosis, liver cancer, and other outcomes.”

A spokesman for Kennedy’s HHS told Rolling Stone that the vaccine test in Africa “will answer important questions” and “fill existing evidence gaps.”

There are no important questions left to be answered about the Hepatitis B vaccine other than why Secretary Kennedy wants to endanger the health of 7,000 children in Africa if not to fulfill his own life-long desire to do away with vaccines in general and kill as many children as necessary in the process.

We haven’t even gotten into Trump’s order that one of our aircraft carrier strike groups be moved to the Middle East from its current position in the South China Sea, obviously in preparation for another attack on Iran.

Even without that grim bit of news, that’s why I feel overwhelmed tonight. We are living in dark times, and I don’t see the sun coming up anytime soon.