☕️ SCHRÖDINGER’S AYATOLLAH ☙ Tuesday, March 10, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Thune blames 'paid influencers' for SAVE Act woes; Hirono says married women can't vote. United Airlines faces the biggest religious freedom class action ever; Iran's new Ayatollah is MIA. More.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I slept late, which almost never happens. I’d like to say I slept late this morning since it’s my birthday, but the truth is, it was DST battering my biorhythms. Michelle baked me a peanut-butter pie, but I was too groggy to notice. I hope the extra hour is worth it for everybody. I am not bitter. Just groggy. Post is a little shorter today. Your roundup includes: In today’s SAVE America Act update, Senate Majority Leader John Thune blames ‘paid influencers’ for the pressure to pass voter ID — while Hawaiian Senator Mazie Hirono argues married women can’t navigate a registration form. (Wait till you hear her logic.) Then, the Fifth Circuit just handed United Airlines employees their biggest win yet in the vaccine mandate religious freedom fight — and corporate media ignored it. Finally, Iran’s brand-new Supreme Leader is Schrödinger’s Ayatollah: he might be alive, he might be dead, and definitely didn’t show up to his own inauguration. The New York Times claims he’s tougher than his dad. We have questions.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

In today’s SAVE America Act update, NBC ran a story yesterday mendaciously headlined, “Senate Republicans splinter over SAVE America Act’s path as Trump calls for more revisions.” Splinter. Some billionaire should buy NBC and put me in charge of the newsroom. For starters, I’d fix these retarded headlines.

South Dakota Senator John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader. He took over last year from Mitch “the Turtle” McConnell, after Mitch stroked out twice during press conferences and kept falling down the stairs. I won’t call him a ‘RINO,’ since I don’t punch right here on C&C, but let’s say he represents the stubborn pre-Trump old guard in the Senate.

After the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, Senator Thune opposed overturning the Electoral College results and supported certifying the election. Trump reacted sharply, and threatened to back a primary challenger against him. That moment cemented Thune’s reputation among MAGA as part of the “institutional” or Turtle Wing of the Senate.

He’s come part of the way around. Thune endorsed Trump in 2024. He did work with President Trump’s legislative agenda last year— a year that turned out to be the least productive year in modern legislative history. Thune did get the OBBBA passed, for example. And Trump pragmatically supported Thune as the replacement Majority Leader. Commenters call their relationship tepid and transactional.

And, to be fair, the Senate is not supposed to be a rubber stamp for the president. Rather, it has a long institutional history of being a thorn in every president’s side. It kind of relishes that reputation. The Senate holds the terrible power of approving the president’s nominees and judges— or holding them up. (Just ask Brett Kavanaugh.) Senators cannot be easily threatened, such as via primary challenges, since senators’ six-year terms allow up to two-thirds of them to simply wait out any president.

If it weren’t for two things, it wouldn’t be entirely fair to complain about the Senate having its own opinion about the SAVE America Act. First, we aren’t in a normal time. President Trump is trying to drain the Swamp in one term and reset the board. That’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. Second, the SAVE Act is an 80/20 voter issue— and support is highest among Republicans. Thune and the other Republican senators should do whatever they can to pass it. Assuming we actually live in a democratic republic, of course.

But what really soured my coffee this morning was Thune’s whiny complaint yesterday. According to NBC, a reporter asked him whether pressure to act was mounting, and Thune stammered, “A lot of that is, it’s in that kind of, you know, paid influencer ecosystem.”

Now, wait just a minute, John. That is an offensive slander. I feel this doesn’t need to be said, but: I have never been paid by anyone to say anything. Nobody has ever offered to pay for my opinion, so I have never faced the temptation, and I hope that if and when that day ever does come, I will do the right thing anyway.

If John really believes that pressure over an issue that polls in the 90% range with Republicans —including his own South Dakotans— needs paid influencer support, he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. He’s badly out of touch. His judgment is impaired. Moses, wake up and smell the roses.

Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) put it brilliantly, and didn’t even have to invoke pieces of documents: “This isn’t complicated. If you want to vote, prove you’re a citizen.” Period, full stop.

I think the truth is that John’s feelings are hurt, because every time he posts something to X, his comments swell with critics calling him names for not advancing the SAVE Act. Those aren’t paid influencers, John. That’s vox populi. I sure hope he doesn’t think SAVE is Jim Crow 2.0, or believe the even dumber theory advanced by Hawaiian Senator Mazie Hirono.

🔥 Yesterday, midwit Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) posted a selfie arguing against the SAVE America Act that was so ridiculous and moronic that I briefly lost confidence in our constitutional system of government itself. Her argument —and I wish I were making this up— was that married women won’t be able to navigate an ID requirement to vote.

CLIP: The low-IQ wing of the Senate makes a surprise appearance (0:30).

“This is not about voter ID, oh stop that,” Hirono, 78, gushed, channeling her inner Valley Girl. “That’s like a total bullsh-t description of the SAVE Act.” She explained it in simple language, so you married gals could understand: “To register to vote, you’re going to have to show different pieces of documents. So if you’re, let’s say, a woman who got married, changed your last name, and if your last name doesn’t match the name on your birth certificate, you’re not going to be able to register to vote.”

Feeling quite self-satisfied about her ironclad “pieces of documents” argument, Hirono smugly finished, “That I call stealing our votes.”

Let me get this straight. Married women can: make breakfast, pack three lunches, get the kids ready and deliver them to school, arrive at work on time, file a motion in federal court, perform open-heart surgery, land a 737 in a crosswind, run a Fortune 500 company, and negotiate hostage releases in three languages —and then get home in time to cook dinner— but they can’t figure out how to update their name on a voter registration form?

Wait, it gets better. It is a well-known fact that married women lean Republican; single women lean strongly Democrat and toward incandescent hair colors. If the SAVE Act actually suppressed married women’s votes, Democrats would be throwing a parade, not a tantrum. The only women they need at the polls are the ones with a nose ring, a Palestinian studies degree, and a narcissistic Twitter bio longer than Harry Potter Book VII featuring at least six different pronouns.

Hirono should have gone with married trans women. At least then, she’d have a talking point. She was so close to the progressive jackpot and didn’t even know it. Probably too much poi, or maybe her lei is too tight.

Senator Thune— this is not the group you want to attach yourself to. Don’t go into the light, John! Come back to us before it’s too late!

💉💉💉

Like I keep telling you, this isn’t over by a long shot. Yesterday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Sambrano v. United Airlines, affirming class certification for United Airlines pilots and flight attendants who refused the jab on religious grounds and got “accommodated” right out of a paycheck. Corporate media has completely ignored this terrific story. You’re hearing it here first.

You may recall that, back during the pandemic panic, United Airlines was the most aggressive airline in the country on vaccine mandates. Get the shot or get out. No ifs, ands, or spiritual buts. In all, 5,885 employees requested religious or medical accommodations, and —in a very cowardly fashion— 4,070 were technically “granted” and the employees were “accommodated.”

It was just rhetorical sleight of hand. Guess what “accommodated” meant?

Yep. You know. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion explained that United planned to place all exempted employees “on unpaid leave beginning on October 2, 2021, and ending whenever the ‘pandemic meaningfully receded.’” In other words: Sure, you can practice your faith. You just can’t practice your profession. Or eat. Eventually, United let non-customer-facing employees come back with masks and testing. But pilots and flight attendants stayed parked on the tarmac — 2,221 employees stranded on indefinite, unpaid leave.

According to United, “indefinite, unpaid leave” is nothing like being fired. True, you have no job, and no prospects of a job in the near future. And you got no paycheck or benefits. But you still had to follow company policy, like not defaming the company. Obviously, as everyone knows who was there, “unpaid leave” was a sham and a fraud, designed to force the employees to quit so United didn’t have to fire them.

The courageous pilots sued, alleging United “forced them to choose between taking the vaccine in violation of their faiths or at the expense of their health and their livelihoods.” The district court certified the class. United appealed. And yesterday, a three-judge panel — Judges Higginson, Willett, and Engelhardt — essentially said, Nice try, United. In legal language: “We AFFIRM.”

As one X commenter who identified herself as a United employee put it: “We are the largest class ever certified against a private employer for religious discrimination. Almost 2,000 were put on indefinite, unpaid leave or terminated.”

Now they all get discovery. Depositions. Damages. All the things corporate lawyers scare their clients about. And plaintiffs have been winning these cases all over the country. This is just the biggest one yet. It’ll be the most expensive.

Four years ago, United’s CEO bragged about having the toughest mandate in the airline industry and “leading the way.” Now his airline is leading the way into the largest religious discrimination class action ever certified against a private employer — in the jab-hostile Fifth Circuit, no less. It’s accountability. It’s consequences for treating employees’ religious beliefs and personal medical freedom like minor turbulence.

Fasten your seat belts, United, and please keep them fastened for the duration of the lawsuit. Do not get up and move about the courtroom. And keep your damnable seatbacks in the full and upright position, folded like a bologna sandwich, you nincompoops.

🚀🚀🚀

The New York Times led for the second day in a row with multiple stories about Iran’s new and improved Supreme Leader, scion of the Royal Family of Ayatollahs, Mojtaba Khamenei. Today’s headline reported, “New Supreme Leader Inherits Sprawling, Secretive Office That Dominates Iran.” The Times is clearly pushing an ugly, anti-American narrative that the new Ayatollah is even tougher and even more shadowy —i.e., harder to kill— than the old one. In other words: killing the old one was a mistake!

“He’s fine, he’s just resting. He’s very tired from all the supreme leading.”

There’s just one tiny fly in the tahini. Nobody’s seen Mojtaba since the air strike that slew his father and most of the IRGC command.

One sharp X commenter observed, “The Supreme Leader should be speaking. Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed on 8 March. He holds the constitutional title. He has sole authority over the armed forces under Article 110. He has not spoken. He has not appeared. He has issued no statement, no video, no directive. The most powerful office in the Islamic Republic is silent on the twelfth day of the most devastating war in its history.”

In other words, Mojtaba Khamenei is Schrödinger’s Ayatollah. He’s the Persian cat in the lead box. He might be alive, he might be dead, he might be wounded— and nobody can know until somebody opens the lid. That’s no way to rally a nation around a new wartime leader. He’s a quantum enigma. Science.

What we do know is tantalizing. Iranian state TV referred to Mojtaba on Monday as a “janbaz” — which means “wounded by the enemy”— in the “Ramadan War,” which is what Iranian state media are calling the current conflict. The Times of Israel reported yesterday that “the hardliner, whose election was hailed by Iran’s proxy forces throughout the Middle East, has not been seen in public since the start of the war.”

Meanwhile, Israel also ran headlines yesterday claiming Mojtaba was either wounded or killed in the same airstrike that took out the last Ayatollah. But, for all we know, that could be an Israeli psy-op designed to force him to give proof of life— so they can find and kill him. The Israelis have promised exactly that. Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon told reporters: “Anyone who will promote those radical ideas against us, we will target them, we will find them.”

Even prior to Mojtaba’s appointment, Israel said it would target whoever succeeded the elder Khamenei. So it would make sense for him to keep a low profile. Maybe it should be super low. Like, ant-level.

But none of it is good for the IRGC. Put yourself in the IRGC’s combat boots. Your new Supreme Leader —the deeply unpopular one you picked over more acceptable candidates— is either too wounded to appear, too scared to appear, or possibly no longer drawing breath. Fake hospital photos are already circulating on social media and getting debunked. It doesn’t help that the IRGC has a long, distinguished track record of propaganda claims that later turn out to be spectacularly false.

And yet, somehow, despite (at best) cravenly hiding in a hole and shamefully appearing for his own inauguration as a cardboard cutout, the NYT is pushing a story that this man is tougher than his father? (Can you imagine the Times’s mocking headlines if Trump started doing rallies using a cardboard cutout for security?) And the Times editors still won’t acknowledge how little he’s liked or that hereditary succession is antithetical to the principles of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Today, for the first time, the NYT finally reported that Mojtaba earned his reputation “operating in the shadows, using the power of his father’s office to manipulate events.” Um, leaders don’t operate well from the shadows, which is even less effective than Obama’s technique of leading from behind.

So this is the man the IRGC chose to become its quantum-state dictator: an unseen shadow operator with mid theological credentials, no public following, and now, apparently, some kind of war wound. His father’s office was a “shadowy national security juggernaut,” according to the NYT. But even juggernauts need to show up for work at some point.

A wartime leader who can’t —or won’t— appear before his own people isn’t projecting strength. He’s projecting a power vacuum. And nature abhors a power vacuum. Especially while under bombardment in a war where nobody can surface without getting the chop.

This story isn’t really about Mojtaba, because who knows? It’s about how the New York Times is trying to transform the IRGC’s weakest possible choice into a strongman, even though the strongman is literally made of paper. They are doing the IRGC’s propaganda lifting for them. The Times is, truly, the enemy of the people.

John Thune! Ignore the Times! Get out of the television! Come back to planet Earth, John, and pass the SAVE America Act.

Hey— at least we know John Thune is alive and not made out of cardboard. So, that’s something.

Have a terrific Tuesday! We’ll return tomorrow, slightly less Savings Time-lagged, with another terrific roundup of fun, essential news, and sarcastic commentary. Now, where is that peanut-butter pie?

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