Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10/21/24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! We are now fifteen days till the election. Today’s roundup includes: Trump’s adventures in fast food opportunities trigger leftists and excite fans—but will it sway fence-sitters?; media and government agencies target world’s most productive man for destruction; GOP sues over overseas ballots and Democrats bitterly complain; and it’s covid season again! Or is it? Who knows.
🗞 C&C ARMY POST—FLORIDA VOTER GUIDE 🗞
🪖🪖 I’m getting lots of questions from early Florida voters about judges and Amendments. Here are my suggestions as an informed lawyer.
Judges! Judges are constant ballot confounders, vexing folks and tempting them to Christmas Tree the judicial picks, or maybe reflexively reject every judge. But it’s not hard to figure out, once you learn one simple trick. Judicial retention votes vary by county and by judicial district, so you must do some quick homework. The quick trick, which is 90%+ accurate is to Google “Who appointed Florida judge [NAME]?” If it was DeSantis, Scott, or Bush, vote to retain.
This time, both balloted Supreme Court judges are ‘retain.’ Here in my First District Court of Appeal region, all the judges were appointed by conservative governors, and are ‘retain.’
Florida Constitutional Amendments. I’m voting as follows on the proposed Amendments (and here is a link to the Alachua Chronicle’s more detailed guide):
- Amendment 1 – Yes
- Amendment 2 – No
- Amendment 3 – No
- Amendment 4 – No
- Amendment 5 – Yes (weakly)
- Amendment 6 – Yes
Here in my home county, Alachua, I’m voting ‘No’ for both the County Charter Amendment and the School District Referendum.
Readers from other states: post your preferred local voter guides in today’s comments.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 There was only one possible story with which to start today’s post. How many times has President Trump been called a marketing genius? This weekend he proved it beyond any argument. Behold, this morning’s liberal-triggering headline from the Associated Press: “Trump works the fry station and holds a drive-thru news conference at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.” President Trump was anointed the real working-class champion. And the Burger King.
If President Trump is the Burger King, then Kamala Harris must be the Hamburglar. The whole thing started after, as part of her carefully-manicured middle-class persona, Kamala often claimed to have worked a summer college job at McDonald’s. Trump called her a big, fat, Indian-Jamaican liar, which should have given Kalama the ability to destroy the Donald with a single W-2 form.
But Kamala has never produced any evidence of her McDonald’s job. Not a single witness. No coworkers or dorm roommates who remember. Not even a college acquaintance who stopped by the restaurant.
Instead, perhaps sensing the Cackler’s weakness, corporate media has covered the story by carping how Trump never produced any evidence. He’s somehow supposed to deliver conclusive proof that Kamala never worked at McDonald’s.
But what evidence would suffice to prove something never happened?
Would he need to get an affidavit from everybody who worked at McDonald’s 40 years ago? Regardless, it seems President Trump got sick of playing the media’s ‘no evidence’ game. So yesterday, as you’ve almost certainly already heard, the Don donned an apron, salted potatoes at the french fry station, and served Pennsylvanian supporters through the drive-thru window.
“I’ve now worked at McDonald’s fifteen minutes longer than Kamala,” Trump informed reporters, fifteen minutes into his shift.
It was a simple political stunt —nobody except joyless partisan Democrats think Trump actually worked at McDonald’s— but it went over like two tons of political fireworks all exploding at once. Conservatives, who already loved President Trump, loved him even harder:
Conservative influencers were so enthused that … well, it’s hard to describe. See for yourself (adult language alert):
CLIP: Philip Anderson calmly describes Trump’s drive-through shift (1:46).
Media exploded. It didn’t want to cover the story, but it was unavoidable. There’s something fascinating and wholly unusual, if not historic, about a billionaire working a minimum-wage job at the french fry station. Nearly every corporate media platform ran some sort of story about Trump’s fast food affair. Within just four hours, the TikTok of Trump serving regular folks from the drive-thru got 9 million views and 1.6 million likes.
What’s not to like about Trump’s day of entry-level labor? For leftists, plenty. Partisan democrats complained that Trump wasn’t actually working there. Like, he didn’t go through the application process, fill out a W-4 form, and get a paycheck. It was fake!
Liberal influencers labeled Trump’s stint as “humiliating,” confusing Trump with President Cabbage:
Trump’s stint seemed “humiliating” to the left because they despise working-class folks. (Also remember that this anti-Trump influencer is probably being paid, per-tweet, by the Harris campaign.)
Finally, while President Trump delighted fans working at a Pennsylvania drive-thru, Senator JD Vance served beers to Packers fans before the game yesterday.
The “weirdness” competition is over. Trump and Vance own normalcy. Kamala the Hamburglar and Coach Grimace are the weird ones.
🔥🔥 Elon Musk, on the other hand, now sits squarely in the deep state’s crosshairs. They’re literally trying to get him killed. Fox ran the story yesterday headlined, “Elon Musk to upgrade security after left-wing magazine labels him ‘Public Enemy No. 2’.” Check out this astonishing headline, from the far-left Der Spiegel:
See? They’re just alike! Fascists. At his final town hall in Pennsylvania yesterday, Elon commented on that Der Speigel cover. “I’m like, enemy number 2 of what? Uh, democracy? I’m literally trying to uphold the Constitution and ensure we have a free and fair election,” Musk said.
“I’m definitely upgrading my security,” he added, quite intelligently. “Guess I better cancel that open-car parade,” the world’s richest man joked. Elon has noticed the red dot hovering over his chest:
But Der Spiegel’s inelegant “public enemy” cover was just a warm-up to the New York Times’s much more sophisticated, long-form, magazine-style, multimedia article headlined, “U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them.”
If Der Speigel’s article was a club, the New York Times’ story was poison.
The Times’ article began by noting that, as NASA and the Pentagon’s only reliable provider, Elon Musk currently enjoys rocket insurance. In other words, some departments (mostly the military) need SpaceX, and to a lesser extent, Starlink. Which explains why Elon Musk is still around at all.
But his rocket insurance won’t be enough to save him from being swarmed, Gulliver-like, by thousands of tiny federal agency Lilliputians. The government’s web of investigations, lawsuits, and bureaucratic warfare is so vast and complex the New York Times had to create a multimedia infographic:
From all corners of the government. While invocations of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged are nearly as popular these days as mentioning George Orwell and 1984, Elon Musk is increasingly filling the bill as Rand’s main character, John Galt. Elon’s self-preserving decision to go ‘all in’ with Trump is comparable to Galt’s decision to abandon society.
If Trump wins, Elon wins. If Trump loses, Elon’s goose gets cooked for Christmas dinner.
Some folks harbor reservations about Elon Musk. They don’t like his brain chips, or they find his conservative conversion a little too convenient. But it is undeniable that, in a healthy society, transformative entrepreneurs like Musk would be held up as role models, and the government would be working full-time to help, not hinder, him.
We clearly do not have a healthy society.
🔥🔥 Yesterday, the Hill ran an encouraging election integrity story headlined, “Republicans head to court in expanding battle about overseas ballots.”
The latest frontline in the election integrity war revolves around overseas ballots. For some reason, Republicans object to the existing rules. Currently, to obtain mail-in ballots, U.S. citizens living abroad must navigate a stressful, hyper-rigorous identity verification process by legibly printing their name in all caps on a postcard.
Actually, applicants may use lowercase letters. Even so, it’s not easy or anything. They still have to spell their name right. Mostly right. Well, at least pretty close.
Also oddly, Republicans have noticed that, over the past couple election cycles, the numbers of overseas voters has exploded, and they almost all vote Democrat. This explains why they call the group Military and Overseas Voters, even though the military portion is a tiny fraction of the whole.
The GOP has sued in at least three tossup states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina. Democrats responded with four clever arguments, none of which deny the massive opportunity for voter fraud when invisible folks in foreign countries can get ballots without verifying their ID. First, Democrats argued that while the rules may not be perfect, they are still the rules, and Republicans have no evidence that fraud occurred.
Second, they complained that Republicans have filed at the wrong time: before the election. Third, Democrats argued Republicans are just trying to tee up post-election challenges, by filing now so those future cases won’t get dismissed like last time in 2020, for filing at the wrong time: after the election.
Fourth, Democrats argued that, without at least a little flexibility around the mail-in ballot rules, they can’t ever win. Okay, I added that one, they didn’t actually say it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
All in all, these lawsuits challenging unverifiable foreign ballots are great news. It’s ironic how Democrats always complain about the timing. File the case too early, and they will say it’s not yet ripe, because there’s no imminent harm. Democrats may, however, be right that the Republicans are using the lawsuits to set up their post-election challenges.
As you well remember, many judges dismissed Republicans’ elections cases in 2020, holding that evidence of fraud was irrelevant since the procedural lawsuits could have been brought before the election, so that procedural changes could have been made before voters relied on the challenged rules. In other words, sorry, but you should have brought this to me before the election.
Now, four years later, judges must wrestle with their own rules. They must rule now, before the vote, and before there can be any evidence of voting fraud. These judges want to say “come back after the election with your evidence of fraud,” but they can’t, since they sagely opined the precise opposite last time.
In essence, judges invited these pre-election challenges. Now the judicial chickens have come home to roost.
💉💉 It’s covid variant time again! Yesterday, the UK Independent ran a terrifying article headlined, “Covid XEC: What are the symptoms of new virus strain?” They didn’t name it, but this eve-of-Halloween variant needs a scariant name. How about Frankenweenie?
Stop ignoring covid! Frankenweenie is a terrifying new variant demanding your attention. They’re not kidding this time. This hideous variant includes horrifying symptoms such as: mild fever, aches, fatigue, cough, and even potentially a sore throat!
It could happen to you. Or grandma!
Haha, okay, you get it. My favorite headline about this current Frakenweenie variant came in just this morning. Behold, the unintentional hilarity, or maybe even a secret sarcastic rebellion, dished out by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s headline editor:
There’s less covid, so get more shots! It actually makes perfect sense applying pandemic logic.
Adding more hilarity, the article admitted that (a) covid cases are down, (b) current variants are less severe than ever, and (c) vaccine-induced immunity doesn’t last long and won’t stop infections. But still, get the shot! Why? Because, explained the Post-Dispatch, the shot temporarily reduces “severe” covid and temporarily stops long covid. (Author’s note: years later, there remains no agreed-upon definition of ‘long covid,’ and there is not one diagnostic test for the disease. Just saying.)
I realize this isn’t logical to medical fetishists, mask mavens, and distancing dullards. But to me, less covid means even less shots, and I was already at zero.
Have a magnificent Monday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow for another hot and delicious, spicy serving of C&C-style 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
