Opinion
By Jeff Childers
09-19-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup today includes: Florida Representative Gaetz opens new can of even more mystery surrounding second Trump shooter Ryan Routh; more or less clarity on the exploding-pagers-mystery, as second day of Middle East attacks invades walkie-talkies; US scores last on health outcomes and experts recommend doing it harder; and in good news, the Teamsters defy polls in wild turnaround non-endorsement.
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🔥🔥 Like all these cases, the Ryan Routh story is getting more convoluted by the minute. Wait till you get a load of this. Yesterday, outstanding Florida Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) interviewed Homeland Security Investigations Chief Katrina W. Berger. Some fascinating new information about foiled shooter Ryan Routh emerged.
CLIP: Rep. Matt Gaetz questions HomeSec Investigations Director Berger on Ryan Routh (5:08).
Director Berger first confirmed the fact that last year, Customs and Border Patrol had found Routh suspicious when he re-entered the country, and referred Routh’s file to Homeland Security as a suspect. But then, as always, the trail went cold. In the clip, Representative Gaetz reads from the CBP memo on Routh:
“They (CBP) say in their memo, ‘the suspect is a US citizen who traveled to Kiev, Ukraine, for three months to help recruit soldiers from Afghanistan, Moldova, and Taiwan, to fight in the Ukrainian war against Russia. Subject stated he does not get paid for his recruiting efforts, and all his work for the Ukrainian government is strictly volunteer work. Subject stated that he obtains money from his wife to help fund his trips to Ukraine.’”
What’s that? His wife! We hadn’t heard of this person before. She’s been completely scrubbed from corporate media. How is it that corporate media has failed not only to interview this person but even to mention her?
Pasting lots of pieces together, Routh apparently has recently remarried, to a woman named Kathleen Shaffer. In addition to the CBP report, Shaffer’s name pops up in a few key places. She evidently helped edit Routh’s book, and she ran a small GoFundMe for his Ukrainian adventures. Social media citizen journalists connected Shaffer to the LinkedIn page to a same-named person who fit her profile and lives in Hawaii.
If it’s her, Kathleen works for a giant, international, publicly traded company you never heard of called Maximus.
According to its LinkedIn profile, Maximus Corporation —just wait, you can’t make this stuff up— is headquartered at 1600 Tysons Blvd, McLean, Virginia. Just six miles to the Northwest of Maximus HQ lies Langley, Virginia, where the United States Central Intelligence Agency is located:
It gets even better.
Maximus’s sparse profile on LinkedIn claims the company employs “10,000+”. The company’s website, Maximus.com, describes the company’s services like this:
I defy you to explain exactly what the heck this company does from that description. But I bet it involves tons of money previously owned by taxpayers. Fortunately, Maximus has a YouTube explainer video linked right on its home page. I’ll give you one guess what is most heavily featured in its short promo video. Covid vaccines. I told you that you can’t make this stuff up. And wait till you see what else they say, like about helping relocate ‘desperate asylum seekers’ into the US:
CLIP: Maximus — Performing at the speed of government need (1:37).
In the clip, Maximum brags about training twenty thousand CDC workers, training them about the covid shots within the first 60 days. So it was in the covid shot deal right out of the gate, up to its corporate neck. That’s who trained the CDC. In another, more recent video, Maximus describes helping the Department of Defense “modernize” its technology systems.
ChatGPT said “Maximus Corporation has significant connections to the U.S. security state.”
It is difficult to imagine what unemployed ex-contractor Ryan Routh and Ms. Shaffer might have in common. But love is a mysterious thing. Assuming we have the correct Kathleen Shaffer in Hawaii who funded Ryan Routh’s Ukrainian adventures, it is very weird she works for a murky, security state-connected, multinational corporation located just down the street from the Central Intelligence Agency.
It takes longer to drop the kids off at school than drive from Maximus to CIA HQ. I’m just saying.
But nevermind! It’s probably just a coincidence. Matt Gaetz’s interview of Director Berger ended with his question why, like the FBI before it, Homeland Security also declined to follow up with investigating Ryan Routh. Director Berger didn’t know, but promised to find out.
🔥🔥 Paging Dr. Abdul! Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Yesterday, Lebanon’s mysterious erupting electronics encounters expanded, when thousands of walkie-talkies also became infected and blew up. The Wall Street Journal ran a querulous article headlined, “How Did Thousands of Pagers Used by Hezbollah Explode at the Same Time?” As we’ve learned, whenever a headline poses a question, that question will not be answered. And it wasn’t.
For some reason, maybe because their batteries were bigger, Hezbollah’s handheld radios were more explosive than the pagers, causing a lot more damage, killing more militants, and making the rest of the squad nervous as cats around a new puppy.
Yesterday, corporate media irresponsibly speculated that Israel’s military, the IDF, sneakily injected liquid explosives into Hezbollah’s pagers which somehow merged into the little pager computer or something. They’re just guessing.
Then the question was how. The bursting pagers were initially traced to a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo. The Journal doesn’t say how it found that out, attributing that fact only to “early reports.”
That began a game of international hot potato. Or hot pager. Very hot.
Gold Apollo has put up a public service note on its home page, in large font, saying please don’t murder them, they only licensed the brand name; the pagers were actually made by a subcontractor called BAC Consulting Kft, registered in Budapest, Hungary in 2022.
The Journal checked and reported nobody is answering the phone over at BAC, for some reason. But the paper quoted Hungarian officials who deny the pagers were ever in Hungary. Then it got even murkier. The Journal next reported that Gold Apollo’s records show it has exported around 260,000 pagers since 2022, but none of those were shipped to anyone in Lebanon.
In other words, if Hezbollah —a designated terror organization— did buy the pagers, it was through a disguised middleman somewhere outside Lebanon. Hezbollah doesn’t just phone up suppliers and say, “Hi, this is Hezbollah calling! Can we get some electronics, please?”
This circled us right back to the corporate media beginning—were the exploding pagers even Gold Apollo pagers in the first place? Even if the company was in on it, cooperating with the IDF, how would Gold Apollo know which middleman to send the explosive pagers to? Worse for the struggling narrative, yesterday’s wave of attacks struck walkie-talkies, which the Journal said all had recently gotten new batteries. Batteries that were neither made by Gold Apollo or BAC Consulting.
If your head is spinning, you are on the right track. The Journal’s suggested rigged pager explanation has only moved the mystery one square over.
The article ended lamely, trying to reassure us but failing. How could they reassure anybody, since they still don’t know how it was done? Check out the generous sprinkling of weasel words in this paragraph:
We’re still in the hot takes phase. But most commenters concluded that the nature of modern warfare may have changed forever this week. Others, looking just a tiny bit further ahead, are asking whether these electronic attacks are intended to soften Hezbollah up for the real attack to follow.
Meanwhile, the Journal mentioned the Biden Administration still remains hopeful the CIA can deliver that endless peace deal with Hamas in Gaza, any day now. I’m not making that up. They can be quite optimistic when they want to.
💉💉 The UK Guardian ran a story yesterday headlined, “US health system ranks last compared with peer nations, report finds.” The sub-headline admitted, “Despite Americans paying nearly double that of other nations, the US fares poorly in list of 10 countries.”
Don’t you dare say it: It is NOT Obamacare. It’s probably our own fault somehow.
While health outcomes are all anyone except partisan political types really cares about, the Guardian’s article unsurprisingly focused on health equity, largely in the form of high drug co-pay prices, which Democrats have been promising to fix since the Spanish Land Grant. The witless Guardian’s proposed solution, also unsurprisingly, was more government and less competition.
I’m confident some good people still work at the CDC. (A few provided me inside intel during the pandemic.) But the good ones aren’t in charge, and they are busy struggling to stay above water in a tsunami of woke, virtue-signaling diversity nonsense. You might assume, wrongly, that some of our tax dollars funding the behemoth health agency would be allocated to figuring out why Americans pay the most but get the worst health outcomes.
The out-of-pocket cost of healthcare is a red herring. That is not the problem. The unaffordable cost of drugs and insurance are a symptom of the problem. Upstream from the fact of Americans are paying so much for their drugs is the earlier question the CDC stubbornly refuses to address: why do so many Americans NEED so many drugs and so much institutional medical care?
In 2023, U.S. pharmacies filled orders for 4.83 billion prescriptions. For Portlanders, that comes to fifteen prescriptions for every man, woman, and child in the country. The data on our collective health is devilishly hard to get, since pharma isn’t saying and the CDC fails to collect and publish those figures, for some reason. But most estimates suggest that the average American takes four chronic medications, and elder Americans (80+) on average gobble up twenty-two.
The bottom line was that, based on a Commonwealth Study cited in the article, the U.S. placed dead last or next to last in every single health category, often ‘far below’ the next best country:
If only we could afford to fund some giant government healthcare agency to look into this problem. Some national institute of health or something. Oh well.
📈📈 In the most poll-defying story of the week, CNN ran an very encouraging article two days ago headlined, “Teamsters won’t endorse in presidential race after releasing internal polling showing most members support Trump.”
CLIP: Teamsters president Sean O’Brien says members support President Trump (1:19).
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) is one of the largest labor unions in the country. Originally established in 1903, it first represented teams of drivers who shipped goods on horse-drawn wagons; hence the name. The union gradually expanded to encompass a broad range of industries like freight, warehouse, construction, airlines, public services, and so on.
The Teamsters is one of America’s most powerful and politically active unions, known for its ability to organize large-scale strikes and negotiate for labor rights, higher wages, job security, and improved working conditions. Needless to say, since the New Deal era the Teamsters have historically aligned with Democrats.
On Monday, the IBT’s leaders created history by splitting the baby, announcing the union will not endorse either candidate this year. The reason for the historic non-endorsement is that most of its Democrat-leaning members (60%) supported Trump. Why not endorse Trump? The Teamsters are probably fearful of crossing easily-offended and revenge-minded Democrats.
If the Teamster’s own internal poll of reliably liberal, politically active membership breaks 60%/34% in Trump’s favor, what are we to make of corporate media’s polling showing the candidates neck-and-neck? Something isn’t adding up.
If the Teamsters supports Trump 60% to 34%, I’m thinking the corporate media polls are completely fake. What do you think?
Have a terrific Thursday! Coffee & Covid shall return tomorrow morning with more hot, delicious essential news and commentary. See you then!
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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
