Opinion
By Jeff Childers
09-18-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Today’s exciting roundup of essential news includes: nation’s best Governor signs executive order initiating Ryan Routh investigation and prosecution; dramatic DeSantis press conference; feds dangle limited hangouts all over the place and it all adds up to pre-Halloween spooks; more astonishing details about Routh’s excellent sniper timing; unreal Israeli attack raises questions about where the world goes from here; International Monetary Fund becomes a Putin-loving Ukraine hater; and two alert California teenagers do citizen journalism on their school’s corrupt charitable foundation.
🗞 C&C ARMY POST | MORNING MONOLOGUE 🗞
🪖🪖 Home Front Update: The Childers family has been learning the rewarding but doctor-visit-intensive life of caring for an elderly relative. Whatever happened to the house call? Anyway, we’ve been out of the hospital now for over a week, and it’s past time for me to compliment the team at North Florida Regional Hospital, especially the nurses, doctors, and staff on its third-floor renal/vascular team.
Look, it was the hospital. Just saying. You know what I mean. But apart from that unavoidable fact, from what I could tell, North Florida’s team consistently treated its patients (including some loud and difficult ones) like customers. There were no covid nazis. The doctors were smart, helpful, accessible, and open to considering alternatives when we suggested them. Staff was responsive, kind, and supportive. The coffee shop on the first floor was legit. The food was, well, hospital food.
Thanks to all the hardworking healthcare professionals at North Florida for helping us through a difficult time. That said, I hope we don’t see you again soon. No criticism intended.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 Yesterday, Governor DeSantis signed an executive order opening Florida’s independent investigation into Ryan Routh’s attempted assassination. The Governor then held a well-attended press conference announcing the investigation, without a single federal official, and it knocked corporate media right off its rocking chair. Some platforms played the story straight, like the AP, which described it as a humdrum ‘parallel’ investigation, under the headline “Florida will launch criminal probe into apparent assassination attempt of Trump, governor says.”
In the brainless New York Times story, Florida’s independent investigation is painted as a conspiracy to embarrass Joe Biden between Governor DeSantis and Republicans in Congress. The Times’ story is headlined, “Why the Story of the Golf Course Shooting Will Be Told Twice.”
The Times’s headline was right, but for the wrong reason. The only reason we’ll get the feds’ side of the story is because they don’t want to be embarrassed by Florida. It’s already started, with the FBI admitting yesterday it once investigated and abandoned Routh in 2019.
A few of the Governor’s comments triggered the Times. The Governor, himself a lawyer, argued the feds have a conflict of interest in investigating Ryan Routh for attempting to kill Trump, since the feds are also simultaneously trying to drag Trump to jail, and are being directed by an Administration seeking to politically castrate the former President.
DeSantis also said the investigation should be open, transparent, and not smothered in inky bureaucratic blackness, like the Las Vegas shooting case has been. DeSantis observed, “I don’t think anyone can honestly claim that the federal government has been forthright and transparent about its past investigations. That’s just the reality. That’s just how these guys operate.”
But those comments, however politically incorrect to the Times, were not the reason why DeSantis said he opened an investigation. The undebatable reason for Florida’s involvement is the feds only charged Routh with two low-level firearms violations: possessing a weapon with a felony conviction and with an obliterated serial number. Together, the two charges amount only to a maximum of 15 years.
“To say you’re going to do a couple gun charges, that is not sufficient,” DeSantis icily declared.
Instead, Florida intends to charge Routh with attempted murder, a state-law crime carrying up to life in prison. Florida need only prove four things: Routh’s intent, preparation, a single act taken in furtherance of the plot, and that it would have succeeded if not interrupted. Those four required elements seem self-evident in the facts already known about Routh’s case.
The DOJ cannot charge Routh with attempted murder, since it’s a state crime. They can’t even charge him with attempted assassination, since candidate Trump doesn’t fit the statutory definition of a political target under federal law, because he hasn’t yet been elected and past officials don’t count. Florida has access to even more crimes, including grand theft auto,* a stolen license plate, and analogous state-level weapons violations.
(* DeSantis’ executive order described Routh’s car, the black Nissan, as ‘stolen,’ which is another state-level crime.)
🔥 I suspect that as facts continue tumbling out, we will discover that Routh’s attempted murder operation was very skilled and very well organized. Among other talents, we already know the failed, broke, tiny-home contractor could: effortlessly raise money, get hold of foreign weapons with serial numbers filed off, buy fake passports in Pakistan, travel hither and thither, in and out of war zones, steal black Nissans, finagle stolen license plates for his stolen cars, build sniper’s nests, evade detection by Secret Service sweeps for over twelve hours, and so on, and so forth, and you get the idea.
Oh —haha!— I almost forgot. Silly me. In an exclusive Wall Street Journal story headlined “U.S. Authorities Were Warned About Suspected Trump Gunman”, the Journal casually mentioned that Routh worked with at least one ‘former’ CIA officer:
Lest we forget, in another limited-hangout story (never followed up on), the New York Times already told us how Ukraine was swarming with CIA agents, a dozen secret underground CIA bases, and a private army of Ukrainian saboteurs trained by CIA. Ukraine was (or is) practically the CIA’s world headquarters.
In fact, the CIA is so deep up Ukraine’s backside that one could robustly argue that the Russians aren’t fighting the Zelensky regime in Ukraine so much as they are fighting the CIA in Ukraine. As Joe Biden would say, not a joke.
Anyway, I won’t describe the Journal’s Routh story in detail since this topic is already running long. But believe me that it has all the hallmarks of a deep-state dump and a limited hangout. For just one example, the Journal somehow got hold of half a dozen people who worked with Routh in Ukraine, including the aforementioned former CIA officer, who all described the skinny ex-construction worker as sketchy, dangerous, and kind of crazy.
Now they tell us.
But … how did the Wall Street Journal so quickly round up all these Routh-connected sources to interview? It didn’t say. I guess there must be a hotline or something. 1-800-ROUTH-TIPS, maybe. Or they just called Langley, Virginia. But that is a side issue.
In addition to his many chameleon-like spy powers, like stealing cars and license plates and setting up sniper nests, Routh also somehow successfully made himself a ubiquitous propaganda mouthpiece for the Proxy War effort, and somehow managed to score interviews with all the major media platforms. It’s almost like Routh had a handler of some kind. And it was all very un-failure-like.
Definitely sketchy. Obviously dangerous. But more importantly, Routh clearly has skillz. With a ‘z’. Routh looks more like John Wick than a failed “fraudster” or a psychotic “whack job.”
I’m not saying it’s obvious somebody must have trained the walking scarecrow, just because he failed at everything evident in his public-facing life. The Journal even called it, “his tumultuous life full of failures and brushes with the law.” So okay, maybe, late in life, he finally stumbled across the one thing he’s good at: international assassin. He could have learned all that spooky spy stuff on YouTube. You never know.
That seems possible but highly unlikely. Isn’t the more parsimonious explanation that somebody trained Routh in spook skills? Somebody, perhaps, who works in an agency in love with three-letter acronyms?
Regardless, setting all that aside, the bottom line, and the thing to remember, is DeSantis’s central point: the DOJ should hand the case over to Florida since Routh’s crimes were committed in Florida, and since Florida can get a life sentence under state law, as opposed to just a maximum of 15 years on low-level federal gun charges.
Even setting aside the issue of transparency and trust, the feds should get out of the way until and unless they can charge Routh with something better than two commonplace weapons violations. And that is a fact.
🔥 One final quick update. We’ve wondered how Routh knew Trump would be on the golf course, since the trip arose right after a last-minute schedule change. But Routh’s timing is even more astonishing than that. Since Trump often plays golf on this course, it is true Routh could’ve just made a lucky guess.
But yesterday, I learned that Trump International has not yet opened for the season. In other words, the course was closed. So Routh would’ve had to know Trump was playing there even though nobody else was, and even though if Routh checked the course’s website, it would’ve said no golfing was going on.
In other words, not only was it even more remarkable Routh guessed Trump would be there, it was also the perfect time to get Trump, since the course was closed and pesky public players wouldn’t be around to interfere.
Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice (so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
🔥🔥 It is perfectly impossible to exaggerate the off-the-charts freakishness of this next fantastic, over-the-top, literally explosive 2024 story. Yesterday, Israel’s spy agencies apparently killed, maimed, or wounded up to five thousand Hezbollah enemies without firing a shot, using exploding pagers. The Wall Street Journal covered the story under its headline, “Hezbollah Pagers Explode in Apparent Attack Across Lebanon.”
Iranian-connected, Lebanon-based Hezbollah is a well-equipped Muslim militia and U.S.-designated terror group that has been skirmishing with Israel since last year’s October 7th Hamas atrocity. Recently, following Israel’s assassination of a high-profile Hezbollah leader, the group switched from using high-tech smartphones to lower-tech pagers for communication.
They switched for safety.
Yesterday, up to 5,000 Hezbollah militants all simultaneously received a highly unwelcome message on their pagers. Seconds later, the tiny devices spontaneously detonated, seriously injuring the users, blowing off their hands, violently severing even more delicate body parts, and overwhelming Lebanese hospitals with the wounded. So far, a dozen Hezbollah fighters have died from the trauma and that number will probably increase.
Nobody knows how the mass-assasination was done. Israel hasn’t even confirmed it was involved (but hasn’t denied it, either). Speculation is running rampant, with corporate media doing its best to cover and reassure everyone that all our devices are perfectly safe, this is not an undocumented feature of lithium battery technology, and don’t worry, it cannot be deployed against any inconvenient personage, like you.
Theories abound. Maybe Israeli operatives somehow intercepted all the pager shipments, and cunningly injected explosives that were then somehow triggered by a single pager message. Or maybe the Taiwanese pager manufacturer cooperated or was infiltrated by Israeli spies. Or maybe the Israelis figured out how to blow up lithium batteries in certain devices on command.
We don’t know. And it’s likely we will never know.
One thing is certain though. Now, every intelligence agency in the world has learned a nifty new trick. Not just for one-off assassinations, like the CIA’s infamous exploding cigar, but for mass-marketed, high-precision weapons of mass destruction. We have indeed raced down the rabbit hole.
Ready to retire your smartphone yet?
🔥🔥 Follow the money! Last week, Politico ran a whiny story headlined, “European governments criticize IMF trip to Russia as ‘propaganda win’ for Putin.”
If there is one kind of win that corporate media hates more than any other kind of victory or success, it is a propaganda win. They just can’t stand it. Please, they always cry, anything but a propaganda win. Not that. Not for Putin.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a Washington-based international finance agency formed in 1994. Since then, its octopus-like tendrils have spread worldwide, making massive “development loans” and dishing out “financial advice” to other countries with more strings attached than a concert hall harp section.
Although the IMF is ostensibly neutral, its strings always benefit U.S. interests.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022, the IMF’s tendrils shrank away from that country, as part of Joe Biden’s backfiring sanctions regime. But last week, the IMF announced it was sending a delegation to Moscow to renew relationships. Although the announcement was light on details, looney Ukraine supporters did not fail to detect the obvious message. Politico:
Haha, unprovoked. The point is, the wheels are coming off the Ukraine bus. First, it was the Ryan Routh attack, which has done and will do more to tank Ukraine’s prospects than any other single event. Routh’s unhinged Ukraine support mingles with his assassination attempt, to create a politically unpalatable narrative stew.
The IMF’s new mission to Russia is the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff that says more than a hundred headlines. Follow the money, and the money is going to see President Putin.
Russia’s economy has done terrific in the last two years, breaking all previous records, in the absence of any IMF “help.” They’d be crazier than the CIA wants you to think Ryan Routh is, if they got back in bed with the grasping financial agency. The IMF has a lot of selling to do.
🔥 Our last story is heaped with hope for future generations. Yesterday, the San Diego Union Tribune ran a super encouraging citizen-journalist story headlined, “Two San Diego teens investigated their high school foundation’s finances. Then one got called in to the principal.” The sub-headline skeptically added, “The school principal and foundation blasted the report as untrue but didn’t identify anything specifically wrong in the students’ findings.”
Alert student Kevin Wang, 17, a Canyon Crest High School senior, became annoyed after twenty-five percent of his robotics club’s fund-raising was ‘taxed’ to the school’s foundation. Even worse, at the end of each school year, the foundation further taxed the club thirty-four percent of its total annual revenue.
So Kevin and his classmate Litong Tian, 17, decided to question authority. The duo dug through public records, including the foundation’s Forms 990 disclosures, combed its annual audited financial statements, reviewed its website and bylaws, as flyspecked robotics club’s financial spreadsheets. The pair interviewed Canyon Crest students and coaches, and compared everything to other schools in the school district.
“What I found was, like, really shocking, and it just kept building up,” Kevin concluded.
Last week, the two sleuthing students published their results in a 15-page report, on a website titled “Ravens for Transparency.” Among other things, they found that the so-called charitable foundation failed to disclose its executive director salaries —required by law— and buried substantial costs ($3.5 million over 12 years) in a murky “other expenses” category.
According to Kevin’s report, for some unknown reason, administrative expenses for his school’s foundation run over twice as high as all other schools in the district. And they also found a former foundation president who agreed with them:
In their rebuttal to the foundation’s hyperbolic objections, the students described a recent school board meeting, in which nearly all parent commenters supported their work and requested reforms—except for one deranged parent who called them ‘fascists.’
For the record, Kevin and Litong deny being fascists.
These so-called charitable tax-exempt organizations, like all the D.E.I. NGO’s and the ‘get out the vote’ groups, are where you find all the graft and corruption these days. I believe that government should be banned from giving grants to nonprofits. Let taxpayers donate to nonprofits voluntarily, if they like what the nonprofits are doing.
What do you think?
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Leave your pagers behind, please, and climb back down the C&C rabbit hole tomorrow morning, for a refreshed roundup of essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
