☕️ MOMENTUM ☙ Tuesday, October 22, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Musk baffles legal experts; Politico losing its journalistic mind; headlines show momentum shifting; Ken Paxton presses ActBlue; Nathan Wade forgets it all; F-16 stories; Fetterman delivers; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Fourteen days left, and counting. Your roundup today includes: legal experts slowly back away from claiming Elon Musk broke elections laws in Pennsylvania; Politico loses its dang mind and writes a horror movie script about Trump stealing the election; headlines suggest growing Democrat anxiety for the election; Texas AG Paxton rachets up the pressure on ActBlue’s smurfing operation; Nathan Wade testifies in the Senate and delivers fascinating admissions; headlines tell the sad story of Ukraine’s game-changing F-16 wonder weapons; and John Fetterman says the most rational and commonsense thing any democrat has said in years.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Axios ran the most honest story yet about Elon Musk’s generous incentives and lotteries for registered Pennsylvania voters, headlined “Elon Musk's million-dollar voter giveaways baffle experts. “ Oh, words cannot describe the soaring oceans of joy welling from my heart whenever I see corporate media headlines combining the words “baffled” and “experts.” Leave those words together forever! But I digress.

I guess Elon is off the hook. It’s not like Axios suddenly discovered journalistic ethics or anything. Now that Musk’s million-dollar giveaway is over, corporate media can stop running headlines like “Experts: Musks’ Voter Incentives Probably Criminal.” Today’s was a transition article, designed to segue away from hysterical experts warning people not to participate, toward a more high-minded take, “there are bigger issues than this particular stunt.”

But don’t worry, if Pennsylvania goes strong for Trump, you can bet they’ll remember all about what Elon was doing there.

🔥🔥 On Sunday, Politico ran the longest and most hyperbolic corporate media news story I have ever seen. It was a monumental joint effort by four Politico reporters (and apparently no editors), headlined “The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway.” It was ten times worse than you can possible imagine, and I bet at this point you can imagine a lot.

Just in time for Halloween, horror novelist Steven King could not have written a more hair-raising story than did Politico’s terrified reporters, who clearly believe that Donald Trump enjoys vast, unstoppable supervillain powers. He can wrap public opinion around his little finger, order Republican officials across the land to do his bidding, unleash hundreds of lawsuits with a whispered command, and leap Trump Tower in a single bound. Or something.

They didn’t forget Trump’s False Prophet Elon Musk, whose name was often mentioned in the story, but always with the sinister epithet “misinformation” lurking just around the rhetorical corner.

Civil unrest and the prospect of violence hung darkly over the piece, just like that cloud of chlorine gas hanging over Conyers, Georgia. More post-apocalyptic novel than news, the writers fantastically imagined innocent, well-meaning Democrat officials heroically holding back the orc-like forces of Republican darkness but, in the end, succumbing to an anarchical mob. No wait, a fascistic mob.

The fact that only two assassination attempts were made against President Trump by rabid, Trump-deranged Democrats was mentioned only once in the short novel, and even then, only parenthetically. (“Political violence,” the reporters primly informed us betwixt their delicate parenthesis, “can cut both ways.” Then it went right back to rooting out all the vile prospects of violence on the right.)

The tediously overstretched article’s hysterical conclusion betrayed the real object of the authors’ anxiety: the prospect of Republicans doing well at the polls:

What will happen to these reporters’ delicate emotions if Trump does win conclusively?  Over the last eight years, for their entire adult lives, they’ve dined only at the Trump Derangement dinner table. A Trump victory would, to them, be impossible, unacceptable, and unendurable, occupying the same hopeless category as their apocalyptic fears of Earth’s final destruction by climate change, always lurking just over the horizon, always about four years off.

The idea of Trump back in the White House is simply too much for them to bear. Articles like Politico’s political horror movie script evidence a swelling sense of foreboding. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s causing it.

📈📈 Is it my imagination? Or was a subdued but perceptible trend sprouting like dawn mushrooms from this morning’s headlines? I’ll report; you decide. First, Aljazeera discovered another formerly-Democrat demographic trending Trump:

The far-left Atlanta Journal-Constitution shocked by Trump’s Peachtree momentum:

Remember — the polls have always oversampled Democrats. Fox found other traditional Democrat demos sliding toward the Orange Man:

Forbes found bad news for Harris in key tossup Arizona:

Vox woke up and found Trump standing in its front yard:

New York Magazine saw warning signs for the Cackler:

The Hill noticed the one-way momentum in two more tossup states:

Newsweek’s election story buried the lede this morning, running a neutral headline, but wait till you see how the story started:

Behold, the story’s first full paragraph:

For Portland readers: Notice how Newsweek reported in the story that Trump is now for the very first time favored to win in two major polling aggregators. But that record-breaking fact somehow wasn’t significant enough to mention in the headline. Okay, Newsweek.

There’s clearly a momentum shift underway, and there’s not much time left, with exactly two weeks left before election day, and record numbers of early voters already casting their ballots.

🔥🔥 In another encouraging election integrity development, yesterday Texas’ terrific Attorney General Ken Paxton announced completing the first part of its investigation into Democrat fundraising platform ‘ActBlue.’ The press release was headlined, “Investigation Into ActBlue Uncovers Large Number of Suspicious Donations Through Obscured Identities and Untraceable Means; OAG Demands FEC Action.”

You may recall this summer’s news about James O’Keefe and his OMG citizen journalists who broke the ActBlue “smurfing” story.  Apparently, ActBlue has been —knowingly or negligently— serving as a sort of money-laundering clearinghouse. Large donations, which could easily be foreign, were (are still?) being divided up into hundreds or thousands of small individual donations, made in random low-income people’s names.

The absurd results included cases like a 92-year-old woman living in an Alabama trailer who was apparently making dozens of daily donations, totaling nearly ten thousand dollars per day, to dozens of Democrat candidates and causes. When O’Keefe visited folks who were willing to talk, the donors denied making all those donations, logically insisting they couldn’t afford to do it even if they had that kind of time.

ActBlue responded in August by adding a requirement for the CVC code for credit card donations. Think about that. They weren’t even requiring a security code before then. When was the last time you used your credit card without that code?

The fact is, someone has obviously made vast amounts of illegal donations. There are for sure one or more rotten actors out there. If caught, they’d probably get life in prison, or worse. But Grandma Garland has never even held one of his DOJ press conferences or rambled about saving democracy by finding and convicting these fraudulent election interferers. Oddly.

AG Paxton announced that his office opened the investigation back in December of last year. Yesterday, he sent a formal demand to the FEC —including proposed new rules— to cut off ActBlue (or anyone else’s) ability to illegally launder money this way.

Bless James O’Keefe, for blowing up this story about the little blue smurfers.

🔥🔥 Only conservative media reported this big news yesterday. Fox ran its Love Bunny story headlined, “Nathan Wade admitted to multiple White House meetings during Trump Georgia probe, transcript suggests.”

Remember Nathan Wade? He’s the Atlanta lawyer who ‘worked’ under Fulton County’s Trump-prosecuting State Attorney Fani Willis. He earned every dollar, too. Anyway, yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee questioned Nathan in a close-door session, so we only have the transcript of what happened (no video).

For one thing, Nathan admitted that when Fani hired him to lead the Trump RICO case, he’d never had a RICO case before. He had to take an online class to learn what it was all about. Because when prosecuting the previous President of the United States, they wanted a first-timer leading the case. Of course they did.

Next, Wade also admitted he met with White House lawyers at least twice, once for a full-day meeting, to discuss the Trump prosecution. Of course, we already knew that much, since Wade, who is no black Albert Einstein, billed Fulton County for those meetings which he clearly identified on his bills, and the invoices are now Georgia public records.

If the Judiciary Committee hoped to fill in some gaps by asking Nathan questions nicely, it must have been disappointed. From his answers on the transcript, Nathan decided to go with amnesia. He remembers nothing about any White House lawyers. He can’t recall who he met with. He doesn’t remember where the meeting was. He has no idea what they talked about.

Nathan admitted he can see the meetings listed on his invoices, right there, but that’s it. Apart from that, he’s drawing a blank. Coming up empty. Zip, zero, zilch, nada.

Before you jump to conclusions, I think it’s possible. It’s not like Nathan started off as some kind of mental giant or anything. And I mean, look what poor Nathan has been through. Just imagine the sordid acts of self-humiliation the man was forced to undertake to score a ‘G’ or two off Fani. He probably has PTSD, which can interfere with people’s memory.

So.

🚀🚀 A story in three headlines! It’s the sad tale of Ukraine and it’s F-16 saga. And of corporate media propaganda. Back in early 2023, Zelensky demanded F-16s be given to Ukraine, so of course Biden “reluctantly” agreed, like he always does. Critics whined that, you can’t just dump high-tech jet fighters on a corrupt Eastern European country and expect Top Gun.  But Lindsay Graham said, oh yeah? Watch this.

This morning’s first jet-fighting headline came from CNN, from July, 2023, with a promising start:

There you go, the latest wonder weapon that would teach those sinister Russians a thing or two. Then, two months ago, in August, after a year of training pilots, the UK Sun reported Ukraine’s very first F-16 mission, an easy initial mission, no combat, just shooting down some Russian drones and missiles:

Sadly and ominously, during that first giddy mission, one of the F-16s tragically crashed and burned. It had just been flying around, and wasn’t even close to combat. The pilot died and the plane was destroyed. The crash remains “under investigation.”

Which brings us to the current headline: Uh-oh! Two days ago, behold this disappointing headline from the Eurasian Times:

It’s a tough time to be starting all over with training pilots to fly the “game changing” F-16s. I mean, what with Ukraine on the verge of losing the war any second now. Second try is the charm?

🔥🔥 At least Nathan Wade dresses for work and puts on a business suit. On the other hand, Pennsylvania Senator and vaccine injury poster-boy John Fetterman is still rocking his track suit and apparently broadcasting from a bunker in Kabul, Afghanistan.

CLIP: Fetterman disjointedly explains to CNN how Elon Musk appeals to Pennsylvania voters because of his accomplishments, not his money (1:57).

It turns out either that John Fetterman is an Elon Musk fan, or he’s reading the room in Pennsylvania.

Late last week, Fetterman advised CNN that Elon Musk “has a brand that’s attractive to a demographic we need to win in Pennsylvania, and it’s not even about his checkbook.” Uncle Fester, sorry, I mean Uncle Fetterman, John, said the space billionaire has basically been living in Pennsylvania and working tirelessly to help elect Trump.

Fetterman’s comments were remarkable not for their content —he didn’t say anything controversial— but for his rational, commonsense thinking.

Fetterman didn’t call Elon a Nazi or a fascist or dismiss him as a rightwing nut job. The jab-injured Senator calmly discussed real political considerations and showed proper respect to the world’s richest man. In other words, despite his stroke-induced brain injury, Fetterman is smarter and more rational than most other career Democrats these days.

Maybe they should put Senator Fetterman in charge. It couldn’t be any worse than what they’re doing right now. Why not give him a chance? What do you think?

Have a terrific Tuesday! Let us know in the comments how early voting went if you do that today. And circle back here tomorrow for more 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 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com