☕️ UNLEASHED ☙ Wednesday, November 11, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Kennedy says the Senate's leash is off and the kraken is loose; Republicans shelve Hegseth's impeachment; Florida subpoenas the DSA; California deputies rescue a kidnapped dinosaur; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: Bobby Kennedy explains why losing the Senate was the best news MAHA got all year, and promises to release the kraken; House Republicans shelve Thomas Massie’s Hegseth impeachment while eleven Democrats suffer a mysterious traffic incident; Florida’s freshly re-elected AG serves the DSA a subpoena exactly one week after its first Florida legislative win; and a stolen Sinclair dinosaur is found hooded in Stockton and rides home in style, plus more.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Most Republicans woke up after Election Day in mourning. Bobby Kennedy woke up and summoned a sea monster. Yesterday, Politico reported, “Stephen Miller’s appointment energizes RFK Jr. and his MAHA allies.” He blew the Kraken whistle again. The subheadline explained, “The health secretary says Miller’s ascension to Trump chief of staff will ‘unleash the Kraken.’” Kennedy basically called losing the Senate good news. He had his reasons.

CLIP: Kennedy says MAHA is now off the chain; i.e., unleashed. (1:47).

On Monday night, Health Secretary Bobby Kennedy rallied the troops at a MAHA Action summit in Washington. Standing before a forest-green MAHA backdrop and a roomful of supporters, with reporters in the room, he told the crowd what he’d been quietly enduring for nearly two years: every time he tried “something robust,” Senate Republicans called and threatened his nominees. Now, he said, with Democrats taking the Senate and Stephen Miller running the White House, “The Senate no longer has any leverage over me.”

This is a perfect example of one of the most frustrating but common features of politics: tough-talking candidates who suddenly seem to get squishy after being elected. Cries of “betrayal” inevitably follow.

Kennedy explained that’s what he’s been up against. The establishment is a pack of vested interests that rides with the status quo, lackadaisically herding sacred cows from one field to another without ever changing anything. “Most of them do not want change,” Kennedy said, apparently referring to Washington in general— not any single bad actor, lobby group, or lab coat. “A lot of people simplify it and say it was one person or one industry,” Kennedy explained. But that “is not what was happening. It was coming from everywhere.”

It might have been from everywhere, but he only fingered one group: the US Senate.

🔥 Until they get elected, inexperienced candidates are clueless about what constraints they’ll face. Constraints are sneaky. They are almost always hidden in the herd like wolves wearing sheep’s wool.

Some types of constraints are practical. Say a candidate makes fiery speeches against the status quo and promises change. He tells voters that, as his first act, he’ll get the residual Viagra out of our drinking water. But once elected, he discovers that nobody’s adding the wonder drug to the water; it’s getting peed out by prescription patients. Worse, say the only known chemical that can neutralize trace Viagra is not only crazy expensive but kills one in a 1,000. Oops.

So the candidate, now an elected official, faces an impossible choice: stopping spontaneous erections versus dozens of citizens stroking out.

Facing an intractable problem, the official just … shuts up about it. What are they supposed to say? I was dumb? People won’t believe it anyway; they’ll think Big Viagra got to him. Thus, a promise is broken; but it was always an impractical promise from the time the pills were put in the bottle.

Other times, hidden constraints are political. The newly elected candidate discovers that, while his city commission enjoys a 3-2 advantage, one of the Republicans is a little flaccid on the water-treatment issue but breeds pit bulls. So to get an ordinance passed, negotiations are required. The final Clean Water bill includes an exemption for doggie Viagra, which again leads to cries of betrayal!

🔥 Diplomatically avoiding naming names, Kennedy told the MAHA group that one of his biggest constraints has been Republican senators. “One of the places it was coming from was the Senate, and from Republicans on the Senate,” the Secretary said. “Every time I tried to do something robust, I would get calls saying, if you do that, we’re not going to confirm your appointees.”

It sounds outrageous and infuriating, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone. The parties traded places.

It’s one of the sharpest flips in modern politics. For decades, Democrats were the party that railed against Big Pharma. They went after price gouging, held hearings on the Vioxx scandal, blamed Purdue for the opioid crisis, and Bernie bused diabetic seniors to Canada for cheap insulin. Republicans were the party of the industry, tort reform and FDA deregulation. RFK Jr. himself was a Democrat hero for suing polluters and drug makers.

Covid flipped it. Once the vaccine became a loyalty test, defending Pfizer and the CDC became a Democratic identity marker, and doubting them became a MAGA one. Now the old Kennedy-family environmentalist is running HHS for a Republican, and Bernie is threatening to impeach him for being too hard on the drug companies’ flagship product.

The Republican party, bless it, picked up the mantle of medical freedom and ran with it. But old-school McConnell-era Republicans were always more pro-business than pro-health. And the last pool of holdout pro-pharma Republicans squatted in the Senate. Thanks to that chamber’s 6-year terms, it is always the slowest group to respond to evolving politics.

The 2026 blue wave washed some out, flipped the chamber, and left the holdouts powerless. “The Senate no longer has any leverage over me,” Kennedy said. “That’s a big deal. I don’t think anything is going to get in our way now.”

Behold, the first tangible blue wave benefit. This is why the sea monster rose stiffly from the Viagra-filled waters. “I said ‘release the kraken,’” the Secretary explained, “because that’s what we’re about to do.”

He offered a couple of other comments worth noting. Trump’s prior chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has recently been roundly criticized for holding back MAHA. But Kennedy didn’t seem to agree. He called Wiles “the author” of his White House support, and credited her with the wins they did get, like the new food pyramid.

I’m not defending Wiles, mind you; how would I know? I’m just reporting what Kennedy himself said. All we know for sure is that the Susie Wiles story is not completely clear. We do not, for instance, know what constraints Susie Wiles faced.

🔥 While I appreciate his enthusiasm, Secretary Kennedy will soon face some new constraints. At least three progressive Senators —Annie Andrews (D-SC), Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed (D-MI), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT)— have promised to pursue impeachment of the Health Secretary. Others vowed to investigate him till he pulls his remaining hair out. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), for instance, said, “Unless RFK Jr. is interested in spending the next two years in front of Congressional committees, he should go ahead and resign now.”

He won’t be battling alone. On November 7th, Trump said that he wants the Justice Department to investigate any Democrats threatening impeachment of any officials, calling it ‘extortion.’ And on a recent MAHA Action call, Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt said impeaching Kennedy would be a “colossal mistake” for Democrats.

If they do try to impeach him, Democrats will only prove they’ve learned nothing. They’ll enrage MAHA and cement their position as the pro-pharma party. Bernie wants to impeach the man —who spent forty years suing drug companies— for being insufficiently loyal to a drug company. Make it make sense.

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Speaking of impeachments, yesterday Republicans defeated Thomas Massie’s articles of impeachment against War Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Washington Post reported, “Hegseth impeachment effort is blocked by House Republicans.” The Secretary of War will fight on.

By a narrow 211-204 vote, House Republicans referred Massie’s impeachment articles to the Judiciary Committee for further study, effectively sidelining them. Otherwise, the final impeachment vote would have been today. Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote against the referral. Interestingly, eleven Democrats missed the vote, which would have been enough to flip the outcome (a “traffic incident” was blamed). Seven Republicans missed the vote.

Massie told reporters, “We put the question to Congress. What I found out tonight is they still haven’t broken from the spell of Donald Trump. He still controls this conference.”

How blaming Hegseth for the president’s policies makes sense is a mystery. President Trump posted, “The Democrats’ attempt to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has miserably FAILED! Every single Republican, except Thomas Massie, a major LOSER, voted in favor of Pete.”

To be fair, the vote was a political hot potato. One of the most persistent blue wave narratives is that voters were angry over the Iran War, because gas prices. The theory goes that voters would rather let the crazy mullahs have a nuclear bomb than pay thirty cents more than they did just before the previous midterms (less after inflation). This is magical thinking. I doubt one voter in six even knows we’re still bombing the strait.

Secretary Hegseth is one of the Democrats’ favorite targets in their impeachment chatter, and this story probably isn’t over. They’ll be back, they promised. Hakeem Jeffries, who’s expected to be the new Speaker come January, said, “This is not the end of it. It’s just the beginning.”

For better or worse, Republicans picked this fight in February 2024, when they impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over Biden’s border policy. Mayorkas was not removed, though, because the Senate dismissed it on a party-line vote 51-49 without holding a trial. Democrats then argued, successfully, that “impeachment should never, never, be used to settle policy disagreements.”

Let the games begin.

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Florida is the only big state to remain under full Republican control, what Governor DeSantis called the “last main anchor standing.” Still, last week, the first socialist in history was elected to the Sunshine State legislature. The Sunshine State’s political immune system responded. Yesterday, the Huffington Post reported, “Florida Probing Democratic Socialists of America Over Foreign Contributions.”

CLIP: Newly re-elected Florida Attorney General announces DSA investigation (1:23).

The rapid rise of the so-called Democratic Socialists of America reminds us of the destiny of other insurgent movements like the ill-fated Tea Party. Fringe political movements often do best while they operate at the margins, below the radar. Lifting their heads up into the mainstream can get them lopped off. The DSA is about to be tested, and their years of sloppy rule-bending might be their undoing. At minimum, it is going to give them collective heartburn.

The test is here. Last week, the DSA expanded its House caucus from two members to eight, added a Senate ally in Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, and bragged about “50 DSA victories” nationwide. Florida’s first socialist state legislator was elected in Hillsborough County.

Six days later (yesterday), Florida’s recently re-elected Attorney General James Uthmeier served the DSA with its own first— an investigative subpoena.

The Attorney General would like to know who paid for its comradely field trips to Havana and Beijing, including a 40-member delegation that met with Cuba’s deputy foreign minister last October. Florida law has banned nonprofits from taking money from Cuba, China, and other usual suspects since last year. The DSA’s collective response was “no comment at this time,” which is what socialists say when they discover private property, and is the noise an organization makes when it’s shredding its filing cabinets.

That’s the thing about the margins. Nobody audits fringe groups. When you’re 90,000 activists with tote bags and a newsletter printed on recycled paper, you can take a “solidarity” trip to meet Miguel Díaz-Canel and nobody cares who paid for the plane tickets. But once you have eight congressmen, people start asking hard-to-answer questions about obscure campaign-finance regulations.

Which brings us back to the Tea Party’s sad tale. In 2010, it delivered a historic wave for the GOP. Harvard and AEI economists later estimated it moved three to six million votes in House races. Then Obama’s IRS sat on its tax-exempt applications for two years, approving just four Tea Party groups while burying the rest in questions about their donors, their Facebook posts, and the content of their prayers. (Mostly they were praying their 501c status would be approved before 2050.)

And the Republican Party was not, let us say, enthusiastic in their defense. The Tea Partiers had too few allies, because they’d made too many enemies primarying rank-and-file Republicans. By 2014, Mitch McConnell was giving the New York Times quotes about Tea Party challengers, saying that “I think we are going to crush them everywhere.” It was the most bipartisan thing he ever did.

The DSA has made exactly the same kind of enemies. Its activists have spent years primarying Democrat incumbents and calling party moderates collaborators. Hakeem Jeffries hasn’t forgotten. So when Florida’s subpoena turns into Texas’s subpoena and then a congressional hearing, don’t expect a wall of establishment Democrats locking arms for the comrades. Expect them to encounter “traffic incidents.” Think any “moderate” Democrats will publicly defend the DSA? They don’t even have to attack it. They can just look the other way.

The contrary example proves the point. MAGA, also an insurgent newcomer, eventually captured the Republican Party. So you could argue that offers the DSA some hope. But MAGA had something the DSA lacks: President Trump. MAGA is a unicorn. The DSA’s biggest star, Zohran Mamdani, was born in Uganda and can’t run for president. AOC is already drifting toward the Democrat center, and in 2024 the national DSA un-endorsed her. Bernie was never a member and is 85 (though surprisingly spry for an octogenarian).

So the DSA looks a lot more like the Tea Party, except with government grocery stores and strange pronouns. They could soon learn the same lesson in bare-knuckle politics that the poor Tea Partiers did. It won’t be exactly the same, of course, since history never repeats itself. But it often memes.

I think it would be wonderful if AG Uthmeier’s investigation bears fruit and the DSA gets outlawed in Florida for taking money from foreign adversaries and terrorist groups. But that is almost beside the point. The brand-new investigation is a sign of an innate biological response starting up. The political antibodies of our two-party system are beginning to attack the invading virus.

A little transparency will do the DSA good. Collectively. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. And Florida’s chief export is sunshine. It’s right in the name.

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With the news cycle finally settling down some, we can get back to real dramatic and important news. On Monday, CBS News reported, “San Joaquin County deputies recover stolen Sinclair dinosaur in Stockton.”

On October 27, a scofflaw stole the big green dinosaur from a Sinclair gas station in San Joaquin County. Believe it or not, this was not the first dino-napping in modern history. But it is nevertheless tragic. The latest victim, four feet tall and eight feet long, was fiberglass and had offended nobody. It mainly minded its own business, always cheerfully smiling at out-of-sorts motorists while they grumbled and paid California’s ultra-high gas prices.

Alert San Joaquin County deputies treated it as no joke. They sprang into action. The Sheriff’s Office reported they “promptly responded and quickly determined this was no ordinary missing-person case.” Detectives quickly concluded Dino was taken by “less-than-evolved individuals.” That is a California government’s most accurate suspect description in decades. I am not making those quotes up. This is a serious story.

Vigilant deputies, fully aware they had to move quickly in a kidnapping case like this, promptly located and arrested a suspect. But the case was not closed. Dino (pronounced DYE-no) had already been fenced to an unwitting Stockton buyer who, deputies suggested, “apparently believed he had stumbled upon a genuine piece of history in the present day.” On the plus side, he was obviously a fan of the fossil record.

Deputies found the creature in Stockton “in distress, with a bag over its head.” A black bag, over the dinosaur’s head— as though poor Dino could identify anybody, or stand next to a sketch artist and say, “The tall one had a pickup and poor impulse control.”

“Without hesitation, a deputy came to the dinosaur’s rescue and freed it from its unfortunate predicament by removing the bag,” the office reported. A man-beast bond formed, strong enough “for the deputy to climb aboard and ride the dinosaur back to its rightful habitat, with a little help from our awesome STARS volunteers” (Sheriff’s Team of Active Retired Seniors).

“Thanks to the stellar investigative work of our B-Side patrol deputies, this theft of a prehistoric creature did not become unsolved history,” the office soberly announced. “Another case has officially gone extinct.” And a final public-service advisory: “If you see something, say something. Even if it’s a dinosaur.”

🔥 You might rightly wonder why anyone would steal the innocuous creature. Well, living in California helps, where progressive prosecutors and their pet ‘experts’ have explained since the Cretaceous period that stealing under $950 isn’t really stealing, just an unmet social need with a (stolen) shopping cart.

2014’s Proposition 47 downgraded most such theft to a misdemeanor. But after ten years of locked-up hair gel, voters rebelled in 2024, passing Proposition 36 with about 69% and restoring felony charges for repeat thieves. This is remarkable. California is a progressive state packed with low-information voters where you couldn’t get 69% of people to agree dinosaurs are extinct.

Sadly, Dino is not the first victim. Last year in Brentwood, Los Angeles, thieves cut loose Clair— spelled Clair without an ‘e’, not Claire. (This was a distinction the New York Times solemnly corrected in a spasm of pedantic accuracy for the important facts.) Clair, a dainty 50-pound dinosaur, stood unmolested for seven years outside John Fawcett’s San Vicente station. Surveillance video showed her unceremoniously dumped at 2:30 a.m. into a white pickup. The neighborhood held a memorial; Jamie Lee Curtis reposted the footage and shamed the thief.

Nine days later, Clair abruptly returned to status quo ante, again at night, wrapped in cloth, and with a note pinned to her red bowtie. It read: “I’m sorry for stealing Claire! Please do not press charges! Thank you!” Proprietor Fawcett, showing more mercy than a Stanford restorative-justice seminar, agreed. Clair, he told reporters, would need a spa day.

This week’s Dino has no name yet, nor any apology note. The Sheriff’s Office hasn’t released the suspect’s name or charges— a critical omission corporate media overlooked because the photos were cute. We don’t know what California prosecutors will do to the man arrested.

🔥 The Sinclair dinosaur enjoys a long and storied history. It’s practically an American icon. Sinclair adopted Dino in 1930 to sell lubricants from crude oil “mellowing in the ground during the Mesozoic era.” Trademarked in 1932, the huggable fiberglass lizard has starred at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, New York’s Dinoland in 1964, and Macy’s Parade in 1963, among many others.

Sinclair has (correctly) never claimed oil came from dinosaurs— defying “fossil fuel” experts, who’ve misinformed the public for 90 years. The truth is, experts cannot agree for sure exactly where oil comes from, which is a completely separate and nearly unbelievable story.

Dino also represents everything the credentialed classes hate most: American fossil fuels, sold for profit, used by free people to travel outside their 15-minute radius, and destroying the climate with carbon something-or-other. Under President Trump, that heresy is policy again: record crude output of 13.6 million barrels a day in 2025, and drivers on pace to spend $11 billion less on gasoline in 2026 as prices head downwards even as the Iran War continues. The FBI reports violent crime down 9.7% in 2025 and murder down 18.5%— the largest one-year drops since the agency began publishing estimates in 1936. (We don’t have the dino-napping figures yet.)

In San Joaquin, America held the line: a treasured national relic was stolen, deputies tracked it, arrested somebody, rescued the victim, and gently escorted it home (with a little riding, which Dino probably enjoyed), using retired volunteers to help transport the evidence. No consultant billed the county to study why people covet dinosaurs. Not yet, anyway. Give it time.

Dino —nearly as mythological as the Kraken— is now back at his post by the pumps, an Americana survivor of the Mesozoic, the World’s Fair, the war on fossil fuels, two World Wars, and even modern California, albeit barely. Guard him well. In California, anything standing still long enough will be stolen, and next time the bag could be over the head of your own beloved statuary.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Coffee & Covid shall resume tomorrow morning promptly, with a freshly brewed serving of essential news with caffeinated commentary. Be well.

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