Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: the New York Times accidentally drops an orphan exposé proving Democrats planted not one but two fake candidates on Alaska’s Senate ballot, starring a Dan Sullivan who isn’t Dan Sullivan and a secret-ballot-maneuver specialist who’s suddenly gone dark; Brazil’s runoff loser pulls off a midnight escape involving a four-car decoy convoy, a border bridge, a borrowed Gulfstream, and the most-watched flight on Earth, while the Times can’t seem to find Marco Rubio’s fingerprints anywhere; and two armed Polk County shoppers end a knife-wielding Dollar General rampage before the only casualty, a soda bottle, can be avenged.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Occasionally, for one reason or another, the New York Times finds itself forced to run a story that it hates. Over the years, we’ve seen stories about covid vaccine injuries, about 26 years of wasted Alzheimer’s research, about the network of underground CIA bases in Ukraine, how Ukraine blew up the Nordstream pipeline, and even one on the uselessness of outdoor masking. These stories promptly become orphans; the Times abandons them on the doorstep and never looks back. Yesterday, we received the most recent delivery in this strange series: “Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Midterm Ballot With Another Dan Sullivan.”
Whatever her reason, yesterday the Grey Lady delivered an exposé alleging that Democrats pulled a fast one Alaska. Though the Times didn’t connect the next dots, it didn’t need to. This immediately validated a long series of things the Times normally opposes, including President Trump’s complaints. It fuels a DOJ lawsuit. And it proves that Democrats in Alaska have been telling things that aren’t true … five Pinocchios… and for some, might prove they lied under oath.
In short, the story is a disaster for Democrats broadly and especially for Alaskan Democrats. This October Surprise was most surprising because of where it came from.
Alert readers know about the Democrats’ dirty tricks in Alaska. But since we haven’t covered the story yet, let me quickly brief unfamiliar C&C family members. In 2020, Alaskan voters barely approved a citizen ballot initiative funded by out-of-state liberal activists that installed ranked-choice voting. The initiative passed by a razor-thin one percent— 50.5% to 49.5%. In November 2024, a repeal attempt failed by a few hundred votes, and the “keep it” campaign was again heavily funded by out-of-state groups. (One suspects that after this revolting spectacle, Alaskans might have finally learned their lesson. It’s back on next Tuesday’s ballot for repeal again. You know what to do.)
Dan S. Sullivan is one of Alaska’s two Republican Senators, and he is running for re-election this year against crunchy granola candidate Mary Peltola, who is running on a ‘radical transparency’ platform. On May 29th, a retired Petersburg schoolteacher named Dan Sullivan announced he was running for the U.S. Senate against Sen. Dan Sullivan. He had quietly lived in the tiny fishing town (accessible only by air and sea) for nearly 50 years. He’d never run for anything, and he filed as a Republican. In an extremely unlikely coincidence, Mary Peltola happened to be in insignificant Petersburg a few days before. He originally asked the state to list him as “Dan S. Sullivan.” S is the senator’s middle initial. This Dan’s middle initial is J.
From this point forward, purely for clarity, I shall refer to the two men as Senator Dan and Decoy Dan. I’m not implying anything. (I’m saying it.)
When asked whether he was a plant, Decoy Dan simply said: “It’s just a simple no. I have not been in contact with her (Peltola) or her campaign.” Later he would add: “Zero, none, zilch.” And what’s become his signature line: “My name is my name. The ballot belongs to the people and not to the incumbent.” Peltola’s campaign swore it “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.”
Senator Dan and the state GOP complained. So Lt. Governor Dahlstrom opened an investigation. She sent Decoy Dan questions and warned that false answers could mean perjury. He denied coordinating with anyone. He was so obviously fake that it gave everyone a headache just talking about it, but everyone had to go along and pretend like Decoy Dan was a real Republican candidate and not a Democrat dirty trick.
On June 15th, the state elections director removed Decoy Dan as a “sham candidate” for filing “with a purpose to confuse or mislead,” and added, “Indeed, you yourself appeared to be confused.” Everyone breathed a sigh of deep relief. But then, within two weeks, a judge reversed her, holding she had “invented” a “good-faith” test. The Alaska Supreme Court agreed in three hours, without giving reasons. So Decoy Dan survived the August primary and slid into the top four on Alaska’s ranked-choice ballot for November.
Last week, on October 22nd, the DOJ provoked national Democrats to kick like enraged mules about “election interference” by suing to block certification if Senator Dan loses by less than Decoy Dan’s vote total. Trump admitted, “I’m the one that said to do it.” Mary Peltola —note this for our upcoming irony alert— called the suit “the corruption AK is fed up with.” Corporate media framed it as a powerful incumbent bullying a humble, honest, retired schoolteacher who accidentally happens to share the same name.
That was the status quo prior to yesterday’s Times story, which launched all the fireworks.
🔥 “This article,” the Times reported, “is based on interviews over the past two months with 12 people who participated in or were told of the plan, would-be candidates that the team tried to recruit, dozens of text messages that provided updates on the progress of the effort, and extensive interviews with (former Peltola campaign manager) Ms. Rios, who shared details of the operation.”
There are four candidates for Senate on Alaska’s November ballot. Two are Senator Dan and Mary Peltola. The other two —Decoy Dan and an “independent” candidate, drywall contractor Gerald Heikes— were both recruited to run by the Peltola campaign, the Times said.
Most people would consider that cheating. The Times said there’s no law against it.
Now meet Jerid Kurtz, whom the Times described as a “veteran Democratic operative” and “a specialist in secret ballot maneuvers.” The Times cited Federal Election Commission records showing a Peltola super PAC paying Kurtz’s firm, Wingspan Strategies, $87,000. Then it drily noted that the PAC “said in a statement this week it had ‘never hired or paid Jerid Kurtz for performing any services.’” (Which was technically true. It paid Wingspan, Kurtz’s company.)
The story explained that the Peltola campaign and the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hired Kurtz a year ago last summer (2025) to begin looking for people to run against Senator Dan, including those with similar names to the Republican incumbent. The story said Kurtz “used pseudonyms and cover stories to keep his activities under wraps.”
Kurtz found Decoy Dan. He told the Peltola campaign that the new Mr. Sullivan “said he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary. He didn’t have any interest in being a politician, but if this could help.” Text messages viewed by The Times “show officials with the D.S.C.C. and the Peltola campaign communicating for months about the project.”
The Times found other Alaskans the team sought to recruit as spoilers. One, Matthew Salisbury —who once ran for Congress— was aggressively courted by a man using only the name “Zane.” (Salisbury later ID’d him as Kurtz from a photo.) ‘Zane’ promised to fund Salisbury’s campaign, but refused to say which party he was affiliated with or who would be paying. Salisbury eventually passed. “I’m not naïve,” he said.
In one eye-opening exchange from the text messages, the Times found Peltola campaign officials watching a focus group and mocking dumb voters who were likely to fall for their plot. After watching how easily focus group participants became confused by the identical names, one delighted advisor wrote, “Do we have a scheme for you.”
Meanwhile, the secret ballot maneuver specialist has gone to ground. “Mr. Kurtz,” the Times said, “did not respond to repeated requests for comment. “In recent days, he removed his LinkedIn profile from public view and made his X account private.”
The Times apparently enjoyed a treasure trove of internal messages to review. It found all sorts of Democrat dirty tricks, not just the Decoy Dan and Drywall Gerald fake candidates. In one series of messages, for example, which included the national Democrat party and the Marc Elias Law Group, the campaign strategized about creating a “MAGA Party” to split the Republican vote, a yearlong effort that “fizzled out in May.”
🔥 The response to all this has been swift and fierce. Yesterday, Fairbanks political writer Dermot Cole, a Peltola supporter, wrote online, “What Peltola and her backers did was juvenile and stupid. The Peltola campaign lied to Alaskans about this and should come clean. There’s no excuse for how Peltola has handled this.”
President Trump, of course, called for Mary Peltola to be criminally prosecuted.
Alert readers will recall that one of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s criminal charges against President Trump was “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” since Trump used “dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to “obstruct” the electoral process. He also charged a “conspiracy against Americans’ rights” to vote and have their votes counted.
People are mocking Peltola’s various campaign promises, and who can blame them? She ran as an “outsider” who would eschew politics-as-normal, promising voters she would “fix the rigged system in DC.” She vowed, “I’m focusing on ending their back room self-dealing.” She promised PBS she would “not get involved in partisan pettiness.” She lauded ranked-choice voting as enhancing “civility” and said “it shows that it’s not any kind of conspiracy.”
She is a big, fat liar. Petty. Partisan. And not very civil.
Yesterday, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy ordered a criminal investigation. Headline from this morning’s Juneau Independent:
On October 23, Peltola’s lawyers signed a federal pleading insisting that they had no idea why the other Dan Sullivan was running. Five days later, the Times reported that Peltola’s staff helped recruit him. Ruh roh! Most federal judges are not amused by that kind of clever wordplay. Rule 11 requires lawyers to tell the truth in anything they file, under penalty of harsh sanctions. The only escape is if the client lied to them.
But the Times said the Elias Law Group lawyers, who represent both the Peltola campaign and the DSCC, were on the calls.
Behold— the party that promises to “save democracy.” Terrific. Nothing says “saving democracy” like aliases and code names, secret ballot maneuver operatives, campaign officials mocking voters, and fake decoy candidates gaming ranked-choice ballots.
If the “blue wave” were real, why did the DSCC need a second Dan Sullivan?
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After Monday’s election debacle in Brazil, I told you Marco Rubio would have a lot to say. He just said it behind the scenes. Now we have a made-for-streaming-series story of international intrigue, governments in exile, and midnight flights across borders, and the New York Times —which had blanketed its home page with Brazil stories earlier this week— couldn’t make room on the website for the followup. Yesterday, Reuters reported, “Flavio Bolsonaro declares himself rightful president-elect of Brazil.”
Lula’s win was mathematically confirmed at 9:09 p.m. Sunday. Seven minutes later, at 9:16, Brazil’s Federal Police filed a 16-page request to seize the loser’s passports, which was plainly already drafted and waiting for the result. Demonic Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes granted it that same night, without even first consulting the prosecutor general’s office. He officiously canceled Senator Flávio Bolsonaro’s Brazilian passports and gave him 24 hours to surrender any foreign ones. Police cited the “risk of flight,” helped along by Flávio’s brother Eduardo, who had said on a podcast two days earlier, “If my brother doesn’t win, I’m in favor of him leaving the country.”
On Monday, Flávio posted a video promising to comply and waving off talk that he’d run. That same evening, according to the Wall Street Journal, he vanished into a convoy of four dark cars that pulled away from his Brasília home and split in four directions, leaving reporters and police guessing which one held the senator. By Tuesday afternoon, his allies were telling reporters he’d already landed in Florida. He hadn’t. He was still in Brazil, riding a van roughly a thousand miles to the Argentine border.
Then he ran. Tuesday’s 11 a.m. deadline came and went. His Brazilian passports were already canceled, but Flávio wisely kept his Italian one. At 10:50 that night, he, his wife Fernanda, and their two daughters crossed the Tancredo Neves Bridge into Argentina on foot. Argentina said they entered “without any legal impediment.” Argentine airport police escorted their car straight to immigration, and the Journal reports that President Milei’s top aide, Santiago Caputo, was monitoring things from Puerto Iguazú and coordinating directly with Eduardo.
Waiting on the runway was a private Gulfstream G400, tail number LV-JQW, which had flown in from Buenos Aires the day before. Trump adviser Jason Miller helped line up the charter. The flight manifest listed Flávio on his Italian passport.
Just after midnight, the jet took off, looped around Brazil through Paraguayan, Bolivian and Peruvian airspace, refueled in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and made for Miami. By then the secret escape was the most-watched flight on Earth: 927,367 people tracked it on FlightRadar24. Three TV news helicopters were circling Opa-locka Executive Airport before it touched down around 9:30 Wednesday morning. Flávio stepped off in a navy polo and a backpack, and uniformed officers tried to hide the family under umbrellas, which is a lot like holding a napkin over a parade float.
Washington had already thrown out the welcome mat. Hours before he landed, a senior State Department official said visas were waiting for the whole family. According to the Journal’s reporting, Trump personally approved the family’s entry on Tuesday, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio then moved to issue the visas. The family reportedly came in on one-year humanitarian parole. “We gave him a pass to come into the country,” Trump said. “I thought they were treated very unfairly… But I won’t get involved — it was a very strange election, that’s for sure.”
Who arranged it? Simón Levy, a Mexican lawyer and Trump ally, posted that “The mastermind behind this operation is U.S. Secretary of State @SecRubio,” and described “a US protective operation.” Folha’s sources say Marco Rubio “played an active role.” The State Department is still not commenting.
Once he was safely in Florida, Flávio declared himself the real winner. “I did not flee Brazil; I left for Brazil’s sake,” he said. He promised to lead the opposition from America, and his allies are already calling it a government in exile. President Lula, celebrating his 81st birthday, sneered: “A citizen who secretly flees his country does so because he must have something to hide.”
It’s becoming a family tradition. In December 2022, after losing to Lula and refusing to concede, Flávio’s father Jair flew to Orlando and stayed about three months. He went home and was later convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to 27 years.
Lula might be the one with something to hide. A judge extended voting a minute after the polls closed, the police filed 16 pre-written pages seven minutes after the result, and the loser’s passports were stripped before breakfast. Whether you think the charges are trumped up —an expression that now has fuller flavor— Flávio clearly didn’t believe he’d get a fair hearing, and I doubt the State Department did either. This story is far from over, and the corporate media have celebrated too early.
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Finally, a terrific story that will make our non-Florida readers jealous. Yesterday, Polk County’s storied sheriff, Grady Judd, posted one of his traditional and widely beloved arrest updates. A Colombian illegal immigrant held up a Dollar General with a knife, threatening shoppers and staff. Two alert Polk County residents pulled their concealed firearms and held her at gunpoint till police arrived.
CLIP: Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd describes citizen participation (2:17).
I am the type of person who goes into a Dollar General in an emergency for one thing —say, paper towels— and comes out 23 minutes later with a plastic pumpkin, two dented cans of off-brand beans, and a profound uncertainty about what happened to the paper towels. I have never, even at my most Dollar General-disoriented, considered stabbing the merchandise.
Colombian citizen Natalia Gaviria apparently had a different shopping plan.
Sheriff Grady Judd introduced her in his Wednesday morning briefing. Polk County’s caption for the whole episode was, “It doesn’t get much more Polk County than this” — and Judd, in the great Florida sheriff tradition, did not ease into the story.
Gaviria is 36, resides in Kissimmee. According to Judd, she got, in his words, really intoxicated, went into a Dollar General in Polk County, pulled out a knife, and started waving it around and threatening customers.
A manager, showing the kind of decisive retail leadership you cannot teach in a seminar, started running customers out the back door, because —and here the story leaves ordinary shoplifting behind and enters the Florida Woman record books— Gaviria stabbed a soda bottle with her knife, presumably to teach it a lesson.
We do not know the soda’s motive. We do not know whether the bottle provoked her, or was simply in the wrong aisle at the wrong time, next to the marked-down Halloween candy. We know only that the bottle, alone among the victims, actually took the blade, and that this one act would later blossom into its very own criminal charge: theft of the soda bottle that she stabbed.
That is perfect Polk County paperwork. Aggravated assault is serious; disorderly intoxication is also serious. Theft of the soda bottle that she stabbed sounds like a line item written by a deputy who had already used up all his patience and decided the report was going to be accurate down to the last carbonated detail.
Meanwhile, people were calling 911. Deal-seeking patrons were streaming out. Gaviria was still threatening people with a knife in a store where everything costs roughly a dollar and change, which means the entire inventory at risk in any given aisle is worth about $14.75.
And that’s when local shoppers intervened.
“Well, this is Polk County,” Sheriff Judd said, before explaining that two alert residents held her at gunpoint. Both, he said, had concealed firearms. One had a permit. The other, under Florida law, did not need one. They drew, they held her there, and they kept everybody safe until deputies arrived.
By the time cops got there, Judd said, the caper was over. The caper. As if this were a jewel heist in Monte Carlo, rather than a drunk woman declaring war on Pepsi products in a Dollar General. That, my friends, is how seriously we treat retail abuse in Florida. Don’t mess with us.
“Congratulations, citizens,” Judd told the two unnamed shoppers. “You did what was right.”
He added that they had intervened while a violent felony was occurring and kept everyone safe until the Sheriff’s Office could arrive. No injuries to customers were reported in the briefing. The only confirmed casualty remains the soda.
Gaviria was taken into custody and, per the Sheriff, charged with disorderly intoxication and theft of that doomed soda bottle. She was thrown in jail for two counts of aggravated assault. He explained Gaviria is here illegally from Colombia. He said “maybe you act that way in Colombia, but you don’t act that way in Florida, and you certainly don’t act that way in Polk County,” where the other shoppers will pull their guns on you. And he said that once Florida is done with her, she will be on her way back to Colombia.
You can already picture the coverage this would get in a different zip code. A woman waves a knife at terrified customers, a manager evacuates the store out the back like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon, and by tomorrow morning highly concerned ‘experts’ would be on CNN explaining the root causes of soda-bottle violence and why the armed citizens who stopped it without firing a shot raise troubling questions about community safety and a call for stricter gun control.
But in Polk County, the troubling question was much simpler: who is going to clean up Aisle 3?
Because that is the whole story in one store security photo Judd held up for the camera — two ordinary shoppers, outside a Dollar General, with firearms drawn, having ended a knife incident before it became a stabbing incident involving actual humans. No press release poetry. No task forces. Just two men who happened to be armed, happened to be there, and happened to decide that the Colombian woman with the knife did not get to run the store that morning.
We can learn three important lessons from this.
Florida’s permitless carry law is not an abstract debate topic in Polk County. It is two shoppers in a parking lot making sure the deputies have somebody left to arrest. Criminals should keep that in mind.
If you are going to commit crimes in a Dollar General, do not pick the one in the county where the sheriff does his own comedy briefing afterward, holding your photo, using the word “caper.”
People, please. Leave the soda alone. The soda has done nothing to anybody. The soda is $1.25, it is minding its own business, and stabbing it adds a theft charge while converting your arrest report into a story that a blogging lawyer in the next county over does not even need to exaggerate.
Sheriff Judd ended his update the way he always ends, as if he had just given the weather. “Have a good day.” Well, everyone except the bottle.
Have a terrific Thursday! Return tomorrow morning for your Friday edition roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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"... and before anyone says 'Come on, Jenna, nobody is going to accidentally vote for the wrong guy,' I’d like to introduce you to the American electorate. We put warning labels on hair dryers reminding consumers not to use them while sleeping. We tell toilet brush-buyers that these tools really shouldn’t be used for personal hygiene. We print “warning: may contain nuts” on NUTS. I’m not betting democracy on the same general public that necessitates caution labels like those in the first place." ;)
https://jennasside.rocks/p/dan-a-sullivan-endorses-dan-s-sullivan
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Therefore look carefully how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
— Ephesians 5:15-16 LSB
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