☕️ LOST MEMORIES ☙ Monday, November 9, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Brownstone's supper clubs, the miraculous Georgia memory card that flipped a state House race back to Republicans, and a bruised GOP Congress splinters into 3 camps before tomorrow's votes; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your author is back at C&C Headquarters in the free state of Florida, and things will soon return to normal here at the blog. Today’s terrific roundup includes: a report on Brownstone, its supper clubs, and the “small Texas think tank” KFF says is “running US health policy”; a missing memory card in deep-red Seminole County, Georgia, flips a state House race back to Republicans, and the New York Times suddenly finds a local election story worth printing; and a bruised lame-duck GOP Congress splinters into sprinters, finger pointers, and blamey Bettys ahead of tomorrow’s leadership votes, plus more.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

Thanks to all for your patience while I was traveling this weekend. Based on feedback, my Saturday morning panel with the wonderful Bobbi Ann Cox (the New York lawyer who fought Hochul’s quarantine camps) and Jeffrey Tucker was popular and helped spread the C&C message. I also learned a lot more about Brownstone, and I think you’ll enjoy hearing about it.

After the mandates ended, the lockdown skeptics went to supper together. A response to pandemic overreach, the Brownstone Institute was founded in 2021 by Jeffrey Tucker, a wickedly smart human dynamo with just enough goofiness to make him completely relatable. (I admire his bowtie flourish; I can’t pull it off.) Brownstone publishes daily essays, books, and research, funds fellowships for writers and scientists who got canceled for being right too soon, and just held its sixth annual conference and gala in Chattanooga.

Brownstone’s anti-collectivist philosophy fits neatly in one sentence: be deeply skeptical of government “interventions,” especially the ones supposedly for our own good.

The group has been surprisingly influential. Medical industry rag KFF Health News recently fretted that “a small Texas think tank” is now “running US health policy,” counting at least eight people with Brownstone ties who either hold or recently held senior federal health posts, including terrific NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who is a former Brownstone senior scholar.

You can’t buy that kind of affirmation. KFF sneeringly described Brownstone members as “covid contrarians,” as if it were a negative. Right before smearing Tucker as an antivaxxing lunatic who supposedly pushes child labor, it unintentionally praised him. It all sounded pretty good to me:

I’d describe the Brownstone crowd as excited, optimistic, and a smidge on the intellectual side, without any pretension. More MAHA than MAGA, hanging out with them reminded me of some of the best parts of the pandemic heyday, like the feeling of being in one of the resistance groups. Going to meetings always felt so wonderfully freeing.

You were with your people. You could speak plainly, without self-censoring or worrying about triggering anyone. You could take your mask off (figuratively and literally). It was kind of like being on a long overseas trip and stumbling across a big group of Americans on college football Saturday at a raucous bar. Finally! Everybody speaks the right language.

That’s Brownstone. If it sounds like it might be your thing, then you might be especially interested in the group’s growing list of local supper clubs. They hold monthly meetups in various cities around the country, usually for an hour of mingling, then dining, a speaker and Q&A, in local groups of anywhere from 15 to 115 people. They’re built for community first and speakers second. This month’s lineup runs from Austin, Charlotte, and Chicago’s North Shore to Utah, Phoenix, Puget Sound, and Boston. To see if there’s one near you, check Brownstone’s events page. If there isn’t one nearby, Brownstone’s supper club page explains how to start one.

I’d like to thank the Brownstone folks for their generous speaking invitation, for their enduring hospitality, and for providing the platform.

Now, on to today’s roundup.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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That didn’t take long. Today’s “weird” midterm election story is a classic whodunit, like a Game of Clue. Except in this real-life version, the characters have cartoonish silly names based on colors. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “The Memory Card That Could Upend a State House Race in Georgia.” The Times finally found a local election shenanigans story worthy of reporting. Can you guess what was different about this one?

Seminole County, Georgia, sits wedged into the far southwestern corner of the state like a cork. It’s the only Georgia county that borders both Alabama and Florida, so you can practically skip a stone into two other states. About 9,160 people live there, and according to the Census, exactly zero percent of them live in an urban area. Not “nearly zero.” Zero.

About 2,800 residents live in the county seat of Donalsonville, which calls itself the “Gateway to Lake Seminole.” The “lake” is a 37,500-acre bass-fishing paradise the Army Corps of Engineers constructed in 1957 by damming the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers and drowning a swamp, an anti-environmental enterprise that was the original blue wave. The county is known for being the legendary birthplace of the infamous Seminole chief Osceola, but omits any land acknowledgments on its official web page.

From that description, you can probably guess Seminole’s political makeup. Seminole residents voted for Trump over Kamala 70/30 in the 2024 election. It’s about +40 points more crimson than Georgia overall.

Tuesday’s blue wave flooded deep red Seminole County, making the whole thing a bass fishing pond, except for votes. Republicans turned out, and the big races went red. Republican Collins beat Ossoff 65% to 35% in the Senate race, and Jackson beat Bottoms 68% to 33% for governor. (This was largely insignificant; the county’s small numbers meant those wins made no difference— the Democrats still won at the state level.)

But in the race for Seminole’s state representative, confounding all previous political math, Seminole residents apparently voted the other way. And so the blue wave drowned Republican Gerald Greene like a duck that swallowed a bass fishing weight.

Though residents voted for state-level Republicans in huge margins, Greene, a 44-year incumbent, apparently lost by —get this— fifty-eight votes. (They keep telling us a little bit of election fraud is fine, nothing to get conspiratorial about.) Like our other election miracle examples, Greene’s filings showed he raised $175,000. Whereas his Democrat opponent’s filings report $0 raised. That’s zero with a ‘Z.’

They were also lopsided in political skill and connections. Greene defended his seat for 44 years. His opponent, Harry James, had much less experience. He once served on the county commission for a two-year stretch back in 2012, and that’s it. It’s the same miraculous template we keep seeing: an inexperienced and unfunded Democrat beating a Republican who actually campaigned in a red county.

This small-county loss was particularly poignant. Georgia Democrats are just over the cusp of control of the Georgia House— by only two seats. So this race mattered beyond Seminole County. On Tuesday, Seminole’s local officials provided their preliminary totals to the Secretary of State and prepared to certify the results for Democrat James, a colorful local businessman known for his trademark white cowboy hat.

The morning after the elections, the Albany Herald deliriously exclaimed, “Blue Wave! Democrats prevail in national, state, local elections.” I did not add the exclamation mark; that’s the Herald’s work. Here’s how the paper enthusiastically described the surprising White-over-Greene upset in an all-red county:

That’s when all the problems started.

🔥 Someone —we’ll get back to who in a minute— figured out that 388 Republicans votes, enough to swing the election back to Greene, had been, er, misplaced. Overlooked. Set aside. (On accident, of course). James hadn’t won. He’d actually lost, by hundreds of votes. Greene had hung onto his seat, after all.

Fury erupted on all sides.

The Times deployed another classic media trick: the garbled timeline. The Times told the story of the discovered votes backwards. In its version, county officials were described as discovering an unuploaded memory card right after the vote, initially making the episode sound like ordinary local self-correction. No harm, no foul.

See the word, “then?” That’s the trick. Then makes it sound like the locals “determined” that some Republican votes hadn’t been “uploaded.” But three paragraphs later, the story —out of order— disclosed that the secretary of state’s office had first flagged the mismatch between voter check-ins and the county’s reported totals. Only then did the locals “determine” a memory card was missing.

The facts were all in the story, but their jumbled order obscured who initially detected the discrepancy. A skeptic might say the locals sent in their preliminary results and then waited to see whether the state would miss the mismatch in the blue wave’s foamy chaos. Only after the state caught them did they cough up the extra votes.

That remains speculative. Either way, after being questioned, local officials quickly “located” the memory card and uploaded the results. It flipped the seat back into the red column and shaved Democrats’ control of the state house down to a delicate one-seat margin. Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called the oversight “unacceptable,” and on Friday opened an investigation into the delayed vote upload.

Now, apparently, sleepy Seminole County has become national news and graced the pages of the nation’s biggest paper.

Who knew? All it takes to get the Times interested in a local election fraud story is when the missing memory stick changes the outcome to Republican. I’d bet Michelle’s Tahoe that, had it been the other way ‘round, and a late-discovered USB card flipped a small Georgia race to Democrats, the Grey Lady would not have found the news fit to print.

I’d thought that my “news of the weird election” series was done, but apparently not. Let me know in the comments whether you also have questions about the missing memory stick.

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Having been rebuked by voters, the Republican lame-duck Congress is arguing with itself about what to do next. This is not a great sign. This morning, the Times reported, “Congress Returns to a Reordered Washington With a Hazy Agenda.” Hazy is one way of putting it. I could think of other words, but I cannot include them in a family blog.

Republican officials’ mood is not good. It could be described as bruised, disgruntled, and downright cranky. Three main groups are forming.

The first group is the sprinters. According to this morning’s Washington Post, some Republicans in both chambers want to work weekends and holidays to confirm as many Trump nominees and pass as much legislation as they can. This seems smart. Last night, President Trump pushed them to pass a permitting bill, S. 5653.

The second group is the finger pointers. The BBC quoted some Republicans calling Tuesday “a disaster” and blaming President Trump for focusing too much on his legacy, like building an East Wing ballroom, or lining the reflecting pool. One finger-pointer told the BBC that the party took a “huge f—king thumping,” and another operative “conspicuously shared” Trump’s low-approval charts.

In third place are the blamey Bettys. In The Hill, some Republicans pointed at the Iran war and high gas prices, and they’re debating how much to help Democrats push back on Trump from the minority. This is the wrong lesson. Ironically, none are mentioning how they supported the Iran War until just now. This kind of thing virtually invites mockery, and Axios pounced on blamey Betty Republican Senator John Curtis after he blamed the President for “unpredictable” tariffs, the debt, and the war. Axios shot back:

CBS called the fracas the start of a “blame game” ahead of 2028, with Vance versus DeSantis coming into frame. Vance is leaning toward the Blamey Bettys. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance “candidly” tweeted.

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was, as far as I could find, the only member of Congress who pointed the finger of blame right where it belongs: aimed at the do-nothing Congress. He’d already lost to a Trump-backed primary challenger, which in hindsight might have been a clue. Cassidy told Fox News, “our brand suffered terribly because… it was perceived we were not serving the people,” and he called for “real policy solutions, not messaging bills, not entertainment on YouTube.”

Cassidy gets it. He learned the hard way that Republican voters were feeling their oats. It’s undeniable that many Republicans were furious with the Senate for failing to pass the SAVE Act. You can find plenty of folks making this precise point throughout the C&C comments section over the last year. (I tried to prop them up. At least that thankless chore is finished.)

Off the Hill, Conservatives were less confused than Senators. The Federalist flatly said Senate Republicans “didn’t give their base a reason to show up” and called for John Thune’s team to resign. Strategist Tom Del Beccaro noted that Congress sat back, let President Trump take all the criticism, and ran no forward-looking platform: “You didn’t give a reason to vote for you. So they just went with the against.”

Becarro has a point. Even now, nobody knows Congress’s plan for what they would have done had they won. Looking back, this is an unforgivable oversight by leadership.

🔥 Speaking of Republican leadership, it is doing its best to heal the divides, build bridges, and unite a fractured GOP— by bum-rushing leadership elections to cling to power in the minority. A handful of dissident senators are trying to slow things down a little. They say they want time for alternative candidates to emerge and build support. Yesterday, Semafor wrote, “Exclusive: Senate’s post-election drama escalates quickly.” Drama!

Senate Republican leadership elections are scheduled for 9 am tomorrow. House Speaker Mike Johnson gracefully stepped out of the running, so the House race is between Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, also scheduled for tomorrow. Both men are campaigning hard.

Not so in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader John Thune confirmed last week he’s still running for Minority Leader, and so far no one has officially challenged him. On Friday, Trump declined to take sides, saying, “It’s gonna be up to the Republicans. They choose. I don’t choose. I mean, I get involved, but they choose.”

The Senatorial drama is that Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is delivering a letter today to conference chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) with the five signatures needed to force a special closed-door meeting of all senators to debate the vote’s timing, or at least to negotiate terms for supporting Thune. Ron Johnson told the Washington Examiner that rushing the vote after a “stunning defeat” would be “political malpractice,” which was a polite way of saying we just got our heads handed to us, and you want to re-elect the same guys before the bodies are cold?

The counter-argument is that there is no time to waste. The lame-duck session clock is ticking, and whatever is going to happen needs to happen fast. Republicans faced a similar argument in 2022, and a move like Ron Johnson’s was squashed. Since nobody’s come forward to run against Thune, why wait? (It’s possible the pushback is purely performative.)

Personally, I am in the work 24x7 camp. Pull out all the stops. Work in shifts. As Governor DeSantis pointed out, Republicans should confirm every single judge.

I’d also suggest they could pass a giant reconciliation bill, which isn’t subject to filibustering. They could pass the SAVE Act, even without ending the filibuster, just by making Senators debate out loud. Or, if they don’t want to work that hard, they could just declare a real recess and finally let Trump make all his recess appointments. Super easy.

Congressional Republicans are about to face their first big test. Think they’ll pass the test? Let me know in the comments.

Have a magnificent Monday! Get back here tomorrow for more delicious Coffee & Covid, with an all-new roundup of essential news and 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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