☕️ INVISIBLE ☙ Thursday, October 8, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Talarico vanishes into a 10-day "flu" weeks before early voting; RFK opens a vaccine-injury clinic and proposes paying doctors to report; Bridgeport's ex-senator caught on a kitchen cam. More.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your author is back in the saddle at headquarters, and the latest spat of travel blogging is over for now. Your roundup today includes: Texas Democrats’ Senate savior goes missing for ten days with a “flu” that apparently spread to his lips, plus a historical tour of campaign sick days that weren’t; RFK opens an NIH clinic for vaccine injuries and proposes the radical idea of paying doctors to report them; and a former Connecticut state senator gets caught coaching a voter through ballot surgery on her own kitchen camera, in the city that Connecticut media is calling “a national poster child for absentee ballot fraud.”

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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James Talarico, running in Texas against Ken Paxton, is the Democrats’ most hoped-for candidate for wresting control of the Senate back from Republicans in November. There’s one problem. He’s gone missing. Nobody has seen the Senatorial candidate for ten days. Yesterday, USA Today reported, “Trump says ‘nobody knows’ where Talarico is. Here’s what we know.” Se perdió Talarico.

What have I always warned you about questions the media teases in its headlines, even implied ones like “here’s what we know”? It means the story never answers the question. What USA Today ‘knows’ could fill a rainbow-colored thimble. But there is a surprising amount of evidence in the record. Let’s walk through it.

Be on the lookout. Jimmie was last seen in person on September 28th, at a swanky $27K-per-plate fundraiser in New York City hosted by antique actor Robert De Niro. (The host committee was topped by Alexis Bittar, who called the US a “sh-thole” on July 3rd.) The last time anybody saw him at all was on a video call two days later, on Wednesday, September 30th, when he announced he had the flu. Apparently fine, he explained he’d been diagnosed at an urgent care center “in Dallas.” He said he was at his “most contagious” and “couldn’t live with myself” if he made a grandmother or a baby sick.

The CDC says flu patients are usually contagious for 5 to 7 days after getting sick. Just saying.

The candidate did not mention the clinic, doctor, or what kind of test. The campaign has not produced a sick note from a physician. The “diagnosis,” such as it is, is his own word.

Since last Wednesday, nobody in public has heard him speak. He hasn’t done a phone interview, a radio call-in, or even a Biden basement-style podcast. His personal TikTok (2M followers, used to post about every two days) has had nothing since Sept 27. His Threads and Bluesky stopped on Oct 2nd. He posted short tweets on October 5th and 8th, without mentioning the flu, the canceled events, or the increasingly bold Paxton ads asking “Have You Seen this Man?”

His campaign posts every day, but all the Talarico footage in the latest posts is stock footage.

Corporate media outlets (USA Today, WFAA, The Hill) described him as “taking a break” and “stepping off the trail.” No mainstream platform has questioned the increasingly doubtful flu story. Why can’t he do a phone interview? Is he in a coma? Is he recovering in Saddam Hussein’s spider hole? Is it Russian plague?

The campaign has not explained why Jimmie’s lips have the flu.

At a rally for Paxton this week, President Trump mocked the missing candidate and led the crowd in a chant of “Where is Talarico?” He had the easiest layup in political history. Just tweet, “here I am!” But nothing.

The schedule sports a widely publicized October 14th CNN Town Hall, and the campaign says Talarico plans to be there. We shall see. But at this point, even if he does show, it does nothing to answer for the mysterious absence.

The New York Times ran a poll story a couple days ago claiming Talarico is leading the race (though the poll dates helpfully ended on September 30th, the day he winked out.) Polymarket has his odds of winning at 68%. (But even Polymarket scare-quote-bracketed the excuse as “the flu.”)

In 2020, Biden won from the basement. Apparently, six years later, Democrats no longer even need a candidate.

🔥 Though Democrats have tried to sell him as a white, moderate, Christian candidate, James’ biggest problem is that he’s been branded the weird candidate. Over the years, he’s said a lot of kooky stuff about theology. On the record. In 2023, on the Texas House floor, he called god non-binary. “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between,” he insisted. (Portlanders: god doesn’t have sex with anybody.) From the pulpit, he’s called Jesus “a radical feminist” and “anti-Trump.” He explained, “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.” He claimed god sought Mary’s ‘consent’ to the Virgin Birth. (The angel told her to get ready.)

In 2021, at a committee hearing, Talarico claimed “modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.” (Even trans activists don’t claim six sexes; they focus on ‘gender.’) He even counted them out. Last month —five years later, without explanation— he walked that back on Fox: “I’ve missed the mark on some of my past statements… What I meant is that there are two sexes, and then there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities. Obviously, I didn’t say it correctly.” Obviously. “There are not six sexes,” he concluded lamely, throwing in the gender towel. “There are two.”

In 2020, Talarico claimed that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.” He called “white skin” a “virus” and claimed (presumably speaking only for himself), “we spread it wherever we go.” The same year, musing about women’s sports, he remarkably argued, “some things are more important than perfectly fair competition in sports.”

Do you remember how, in 2024, Democrats spent an entire summer calling JD Vance weird?

But Vance never said God is nonbinary, never counted six sexes before deciding he’d meant two all along, and never disappeared for eleven days a month before an election with a flu that can’t pick up a phone. Normal candidates get sick and post sympathy videos from the couch, upload chicken soup recipes, and ask supporters for flu remedies on Twitter.

You know what’s really weird? Completely disappearing for two weeks in the final month before the big election because of “the flu.” That, my friends, is weird.

None of the polls I could find measured the race since September 30th. How could they? Continuing to claim a Talarico lead would just make everybody laugh. Texas early voting starts on October 19th. Time’s running out.

🔥 If it’s not the flu, what else could it be? You know me, I am a stickler for facts, so I would hate to speculate. Let me instead point out a few historic examples.

Sometimes it’s something worse than flu. Hillary Clinton’s campaign called it overheating when she collapsed on 9/11 in 2016 and was tossed like a sack of dirty laundry into the back of a van, and only to later admit pneumonia after the video got out. Fetterman’s campaign spent months downplaying how bad his 2022 stroke was till he checked into six weeks of rehab at Walter Reed. In 1972, Thomas Eagleton dropped off McGovern’s ticket after reporters learned he’d been hospitalized for depression and given shock treatments.

Sometimes a campaign finds out an ‘October surprise’ is about to drop. In 2009, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s office said he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” but it turned out he was really in Argentina canoodling with his mistress. In 2012, Jesse Jackson Jr. disappeared for several months for “exhaustion.” It turned out to be bipolar disorder, plus a federal investigation that ended with him in prison.

While Mitch McConnell was out for 92 days for “mild pneumonia,” Governor Andy Bashear (D-KY) repeatedly demanded he provide proof of life or resign. Well?

If this is the flu, it must be a pretty bad one, since he can’t even complete a phone call ten days later. Whatever it is, expect riveting developments.

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On Monday, Bloomberg News reported, “RFK Jr. announces vaccine injury clinic, initiative at NIH.” Along with top health officials, HHS Secretary Kennedy “attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new NIH clinic to study and care for patients with vaccine injuries.” Forty years after passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the government is finally getting around to the injured. That’s good enough. But the news was so much better.

Also announced was a “modernization plan” for VAERS and new requirements for entering vaccine injuries in electronic health records. But Bloomberg smuggled the best part into a dense paragraph: “a proposal to reimburse doctors for reporting suspected vaccine injuries.”

It was as simple as proposing a new reimbursement code. In other words, they are finally going to start paying doctors to take the time to fill out VAERS reports. Regular readers will recall the famous 2010 Harvard Pilgrim study that estimated fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries ever show up in the tracking system.

For forty years, reporting a vaccine injury paid as well as reporting an unidentified aerial phenomenon.

Some say the arduous process of entering vaccine injury reports into VAERS —combined with the lack of compensation for doing that— was not a bug but an intentional design. Either way, that “feature” has allowed jab activists to claim shot safety by pointing at the absence of reported injuries. Needless to say, if we start capturing the true scale of damage from shots, the political landscape is likely to change.

The real question is: how did this take so long? It seems obvious even to the meanest intelligence that if the government deletes the right to sue manufacturers for product injuries, it has a moral and ethical duty to ensure everything goes swimmingly.

Doctors respond to incentives like everyone, including second-graders left alone with Oreos. For decades, doctors have been paid to push jabs. So jabs were pushed. If we now start paying them to report jab injuries, the incentive landscape changes. So the announcement of a new NIH clinic to study and treat vaccine injuries, along with new reimbursement codes, offers the possibility of real change, a fundamental transformation in how we view vaccines, rather than just more arguments over industry-funded safety studies.

“I can put the full weight of the federal government behind answering those questions,” Kennedy told reporters.

MAHA wanted Kennedy to do something. He’s doing stuff. Let the man work.

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How about another story about the thing that never happens? Yesterday, News-8 Bridgeport reported, “Second voter accuses former State Sen. Dennis Bradley of absentee ballot fraud.” Common sense confirms that a former Democrat State Senator is not out there procuring fraudulent absentee ballots because the numbers are so small that it doesn’t make any difference.

I reviewed a dozen stories, but still couldn’t tell whether Mr. Bradley was homegrown or a naturalized citizen. His bios say he’s of Dominican heritage, born around 1983, and that he grew up “nowhere and everywhere”— Florida, Germany, the Dominican Republic, Pennsylvania, New York City, and Massachusetts. Wherever he’s from, maybe outer space, he missed a few lessons the rest of us learned in kindergarten.

Regardless, Bradley, 42, a former Connecticut state senator, was arrested Tuesday by inspectors from the Office of the Chief State’s Attorney. He is accused of illegally opening a voter’s sealed absentee ballot and instructing her to change her vote in favor of Bradley’s brother, Mark, who was a candidate in this summer’s Democratic primary for Bridgeport probate judge.

“I did it because I was intimidated,” one of the victims told News 8 in August. “I just wanted to do what I had to do so they can get out my house.”

Here’s how the arrest warrant described it. On July 30th, Dennis Bradley knocked on Alesia Dennis’s apartment door in Bridgeport. He’s a former Democrat state senator —and a suspended lawyer— and he’s currently waiting to be sentenced on a separate 2021 federal wire-fraud conviction. His brother Mark was challenging the incumbent probate judge, Paul Ganim (the mayor’s brother), in the August 11th Democratic primary. Bradley asks whether she has her absentee ballot. She says she’s already voted. He comes inside anyway with a second man, who remains unidentified.

What Bradley didn’t know was that she had a security camera in her kitchen. Investigators reviewed five clips, including one she posted online. In them, Bradley picks at the corners of her sealed envelope until it comes open. He tells her, “We can fix it. You can fix it.” Then he walks her through it: “Circle the same thing here, then we’re gonna put just a cross right there.” She puts an X over Ganim and fills in Mark Bradley. He confidently reassured her, “That’s all right, as long as it’s your handwriting, it’s no big deal.”

Then the video shows Bradley coaching her on what to say if anyone asks questions. “They’re gonna’ be like, ‘who touched it, blah-blah-blah,’ you know. Say that you did it on your own and nobody touched it… You know the routine.” He stamps the envelope, helps tape it shut, and tells her to mail it herself.

Ms. Dennis called police on August 5th. A detective took the ballot and video as evidence, and the state elections commission sent the case to the Chief State’s Attorney. Bradley’s lawyer doesn’t deny what happened; he lamely insisted that it’s legal for people to change their votes. He said, “From what I understand, she wanted to vote for Mark Bradley and that was changed later on.”

Ms. Dennis disagrees. “He is calling me liar, and he’s the liar,” she told News-12.

The warrant described a second voter, Ray Newby, who told investigators that Bradley and another man showed up at his home and asked who he’d voted for. When he replied Paul Ganim, one of them said “No, no,” and Bradley took his sealed absentee ballot. Newby later picked Bradley out of a photo lineup.

Bradley is now charged with two counts of illegally possessing absentee ballots, being present when a voter filled out an absentee ballot, and unlawfully opening a ballot. He was released on a promise to appear and is due back in court October 21st. A judge had already cleared him to fly to the Dominican Republic this Saturday for a family wedding.

News-12 helpfully noted that another former Connecticut official out on bail, Kosta Diamantis, 70, also a Democrat and a dual U.S.-Greek citizen, fled to Greece two weeks ago. Greece does not cooperate with extradition. The U.S. jury gave him 7 years for bribery anyway, in absentia. In yet another curious pandemic wrinkle, I happen to know Diamantis’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, who defended Alex Jones. Small world.

Fortunately, the Dominican Republic does have an extradition treaty with the U.S. (admittedly, “fortunately” does some heavy lifting here, since it assumes Mr. Bradley does not flee further afield.) Unfortunately, Bradley was only caught because Ms. Dennis was so paranoid she was video-taping her own kitchen. (She was right to be paranoid.)

Now, before the regular suspects show up in the comments and sneer at me for reporting “ultra rare” absentee ballot fraud (you know who you are), please consider this remarkable sentence from News-12’s story. It deemed Bridgeport, Connecticut, the “national poster child for absentee ballot fraud.”

Got that? “A dozen campaign operatives, including three current or former city council members, have faced ballot tampering charges.” But I get it: according to skeptics, we still haven’t reached the undisclosed magic number at which ‘ultra-rare’ election fraud becomes ‘widespread.’

Listen guys, I can do this all day. There’s a new arrest, indictment, or conviction for election fraud every single day now. Almost always Democrats. Sooner or later you’re going to need to shift from “it never happens” to “maybe it happens, but it’s good.” In the meantime, I will keep on reporting them.

Invisible things. A Senate candidate nobody can find. Vaccine injuries nobody was ever paid to write down. And ballot fraud nobody ever catches, unless somebody happens to keep their kitchen under surveillance.

Have a terrific Thursday! We are thankful to be back in C&C’s Gainesville HQ, and appreciate your patience during travel blogging. Tomorrow we’ll deliver another educational and entertaining roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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