Opinion
By Jeff Childers
02-01-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! And it’s February, ALREADY. The news is coming at us through a firehose. Your jam-packed roundup today includes: chainsaw guy winning in Argentina and globalists getting on board; updates from the Trump cases; more problems for fancy Fani; odd allegations against the judge in the Carroll suit; Trump’s Florida judge set to look over the government’s classified documents to decide whether to release them or not; Illinois rejects democrats’ pro-democracy bid to keep Trump off the Republican primary ballot; another Florida public university ditches DEI; DeSantis pledges more support to Texas; and Dr. McCullough explains why jabs are one of the election season’s most important political issues.
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🔥 I’m not sure what to make of this story. Barron’s covered it in an article yesterday headlined, “IMF Authorizes $4.7 Billion For Argentina After Milei’s ‘Bold’ Reforms.”
In a statement, the International Monetary Fund’s chief Kristalina Georgieva, if that’s her real name, praised Javier Milei’s “bold actions to restore macroeconomic stability and… address long-standing impediments to growth.” Accordingly, the IMF approved a $4.7 billion “aid program,” which is probably an onerous loan with tons of strings attached, but it signals official approval of Milei’s anti-socialist reforms.
Argentina’s new president Javier Milei, 53, an economist and self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” who often calls “socialists” a scatological name I can’t repeat in this family blog, even in the original Spanish, has used a literal chainsaw as a political metaphor, and who scolded the WEF’s audience last month from the podium explaining they are the problem, has been a very busy boy. Since taking office two months ago, the colorful politician has devalued the peso by over 50%, cut state fuel and transportation subsidies, fired half his government’s ministries, and shredded hundreds of rules to deregulate the economy.
Encouragingly, Argentina’s labor unions have been on the protest march nonstop since Milei first grasped his signing pen, complaining that the president’s austerity program hurts the everyday unionized man the worst. To their point, Milei has often argued that economic “shock” treatment is the only way to de-socialize the South American country, and has warned Argentinians that things will get worse before they get better.
I was surprised at the news of the IMF loan, since I expected global organizations like the IMF would oppose Milei’s anarcho-capitalist reforms. But something in the zeitgeist seems to have changed. Maybe, revealed by the harsh light of potential post-pandemic financial collapse, socialism is finally looking unaffordable.
Just for fun, here’s a short AI-generated song celebrating the anarcho-capitalist. Prepare to be shocked if you didn’t know A.I. could do this. Notice the app even creates the album art for your A.I.-generated tunes. Enjoy playing around with it. I’m curious to see what our creative C&Cers can do. Post your best topical work in the comments. And spare a moment’s thought for everything the app implies for the music industry.
🔥 In case you somehow missed it, James O’Keefe — now on his own after being jettisoned from Project Veritas right after breaking the Pfizer gain-of-function story — released a new undercover exposé yesterday. In the thirteen-minute video, we watch a barely-disguised James on a ‘date’ with Charlie Kraiger, a cybersecurity professional who works in the office of the President of the United States and who managed cybersecurity for top-level agencies like the State Department.
Mr. Kraiger, whose picture now decorates the dictionary entry for “gullible,” apparently credulously consumed O’Keefe’s fake Tinder profile, hook, sinker, and worm. The poor cyber expert was just hoping for a little D.C. romance. Instead, right now he is probably sitting alone in the cargo bay of a military aircraft somewhere over the North Atlantic en route to a lonely I.T. outpost somewhere below the Arctic Circle that doesn’t even show up on Google Maps.
Charlie immediately purged all his social media, but alas O’Keefe had already saved it and posted it all right back up on Twitter.
While the video doesn’t include any truly explosive disclosures nor, to be fair, did Charlie leak any national security secrets, he did get pretty gossipy about the White House staff. Charlie cattily described Kamala Harris as a sort of diversity hire, and dished that everyone knows Joe Biden is basically non compos mentis. Maybe most significantly, Charlie described watching Michelle Obama insist there was no way she’d ever consider running for President.
Hopefully she still feels that way. On hearing that part of Charlie’s rambling, it shocked me that somebody seriously asked Michelle to consider running for the Nation’s hardest job. And then I suddenly felt surprised that there was anything left democrats could do that could still shock me. It was a weird feeling.
Back to poor Charlie. In the video, Charlie seems earnest and well intentioned, with a whiff of “lost puppy,” even though he seemed a little too smug. Pride goeth before the fall. He seems hopelessly naive, which is jarring, when you consider this romantically-deprived young man is in charge of protecting the State Department’s deepest secrets. While one feels some degree sympathy for the gay Lothario, the viewer cannot escape a dull conclusion that we really have some fantastically unqualified folks with their Tinder-swiping hands on the most important levers of government.
I’m not saying the gay techie was a DEI hire. I was shocked he was white. I’m just saying.
If nothing else, the exposé explains a lot. With this crack squad of highly-motivated personnel protecting our country’s most important computer systems, and trading online dating tips, it’s no wonder that part-time Massachusetts National Guard kid was able to hack all the intelligence agencies last year so he could leak the top-secret bad news about Ukraine that the media was hiding. He leaked it on a video game bulletin board.
Texiera, 13 years old at the time he hacked the entire United States Government using his Nintendo Switch Lite.
Seriously, though, if James O’Keefe — disguised only with some reading glasses — could compromise one of our top cybersecurity officials this easily, what do you think the Chinese or the Russians could do? I sure hope the Chinese and Russians haven’t caught on to this romantic vulnerability at the top of our govern… oh wait.
Left, Chinese Spy Christine Fang, who compromised moronic Rep. Eric Swalwell (D), and Right, Russian Spymistress Anna Chapman, a very busy girl before her arrest and deportation. Granted, they’re both better looking than James. But still.
Oh well. The country, as we’ve observed time and again, is in the very best of hands. Wrinkled hands that tremble all the time and that caress unrelated, underage girls’ hair way more than they ever should, but still. Okay, maybe they’re not the best hands. But they’re hands.
Finally, whatever the lasting significance of this ‘scoop’, which should at minimum raise serious questions about the White House’s security procedures, and immediately terminate Mr. Kraiger’s security access, with almost no effort James O’Keefe just disproved the most vicious slander against him by his compromised board: that Project Veritas staff really did all the work and James just jumped in at the last minute to take the credit.
Apparently that was propaganda. James obviously did a lot of work for this story. Work that, frankly, I could not bring myself to do. I suppose that’s why I’m a blogging lawyer and not an undercover journalist. But this video settles the argument over who and what Project Veritas “really was.”
🔥 As promised, here are some great updates on the various Trump Cases. Don’t get my optimism wrong, what the President is enduring is indescribable. I represent people in lawsuits and I can assure you that even one lawsuit is overwhelming for many folks. It’s a thousand times worse when the lawsuit is unfair. I can’t imagine what Trump is going through.
But this week delivered good incremental developments in nearly every pending case.
In the Georgia prosecution, the news got even worse for beleaguered prosecutor Fani Willis, who still hasn’t resigned yet, for some reason. In the latest development, the Free Beacon “obtained” a two-minute whistleblower audio evidencing even more financial impropriety in Ms. Willis’ office in 2021:
One wonders who might’ve “leaked” the audio, and one muses about how it was kept on ice for two years until just the right moment. The evidence against Willis is now repugnant to any realistic notion she can keep her job. How she’s kept it this long is some kind of demonic miracle.
That wasn’t all. Yesterday Fox ran a story reporting the formation of another state committee to investigate fancy Fani’s follies:
The oversight panel was proposed last year, but the state’s Supreme Court shot it down since it would have required the Court to “oversee” executive-branch prosecutors. The newly-revised and re-submitted bill solves the problem by cutting the Court out of the loop.
Fox’s story quoted John Malcolm, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who explained that Fani Willis “ought to be looked into, (since she) has certainly imperiled this prosecution and given a black mark, not only to Fulton County, but potentially to the entire state, so I can understand why the Georgia legislature is up in arms about this.” So.
A new wrinkle briefly appeared and then just as quickly disappeared this week in the $83 million-dollar-verdict case featuring colorful plaintiff E. Jean Carroll. Early in the week, Trump’s lawyers filed a bombshell motion based on facts reported in an old New York Post story, facts alleging that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan had mentored Jean Carroll’s lawyer while in private practice but had failed to disclose the relationship.
After Carroll’s lawyer denied even knowing Kaplan, Trump’s lawyer promptly and prudently withdrew the motion to avoid serious sanctions. Lawyers can’t make serious allegations against judges and survive unless they can prove it.
But what’s left sitting on the table like an uneaten meal is the question of how the New York Post’s article originally got it wrong about the mentoring relationship, and why no one bothered to complain about the error when it was published. So we can assume the story isn’t completely over yet.
Down in Florida, in the “Mar-a-Lago raid” classified documents case, the New York Sun ran a story this week headlined, “Jack Smith Is Set To Meet Secretly With Judge Cannon Over What Documents Trump Will See.” Despite widespread media confusion over exactly what’s going on, it’s pretty simple. The government — via special prosecutor Jack Smith — refused to provide Trump’s lawyers with the alleged classified documents, probably (as far as we can tell) related to the CIA’s secret report on the Democrats’ Russia Collusion hoax.
Trump’s lawyers then complained to Federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been skeptical of the government’s position in the past. Judge Cannon said fine, on February 12th I’ll take a look at the documents myself at a ‘SCIF’ — a secured government facility for viewing classified documents — and decide whether or not they are truly “critical to national security” and therefore should be kept secret.
If Judge Cannon does order the documents to be turned over, then Prosecutor Smith will have to immediately appeal her ruling to the 11th Circuit, and if he lost, appeal to the Supreme Court, whose docket is starting to clog up with Trump cases. Media legal analysts suggest an appeal would inconveniently move Trump’s trial out past the elections, a delay Prosecutor Smith apparently wants to avoid, which is an observation that completely gives away the political nature of what is really going on in these cases.
Anyway, what’s significant is that, even if Trump’s team never gets the documents, Judge Cannon will have seen them. She will soon know what this case is all really about, which will influence her future decisions in the case. So this could be an inflection point for the case regardless of whether the documents are released.
Finally, in Illinois, the state Elections Board voted unanimously this week to allow Trump on the primary ballot despite objections from democracy-loving democrats to keep Trump off the Republican primary ballot on the theory that Trump is an insurrectionist. Headline from the Guardian:
So far the democrats’ 14th Amendment argument doesn’t seem to be gripping in very many places. Meanwhile Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot is amidst an frenzied, expedited briefing phase before oral arguments next week on February 8th.
🔥 Thanks to a newly-enacted law last year, Florida’s public universities are slowly healing themselves of their racist Distractions, Errors, and Incompetence (DEI) departments. The latest this week was announced by Miami’s Florida International University which, Javier Milei-like, eliminated its DEI department:
I guess it’s spreading.
🔥 Yesterday, back on the stage, looking fit and well-rested, boots lifted or not, in this five-minute clip Governor DeSantis suggested this week he’d authorize the newly-formed Florida State Guard to go to Texas to help secure the border, especially since Biden cannot federalize the State Guard like with the Florida National Guard.
“If we have Florida State Guard [then] that’s not something that Biden could just simply federalize,” DeSantis explained in the clip. You’ll also enjoy the Governor’s brief description of how the Florida State Guard came to exist thanks to federal military vaccine mandates. Another surprising pandemic benefit.
PS — Texans, don’t be vexed by DeSantis’ comment about the “weak underbelly” of the country. He meant the border, not Texans. Just so we’re straight.
🔥 Finally, enjoy this minute-long clip of Dr. Peter McCullough. The good doctor used to be a democrat voter, although he wasn’t particularly involved in politics. In this recent clip, McCullough argues forcefully and rationally that the jab issue is one of the most important political topics this election season.
Granted, like me, Dr. McCullough is biased about the vaccine issue, since we are both political survivors of the pandemic wars. But his characteristically-logical analysis based on surveys and numbers, holds water. Candidates should take notice. And I loved the way the clip ended. Tell me in the comments if you agree.
Have a terrific Thursday! You won’t need to swipe, either way, to get back here tomorrow morning for more delicious Coffee & Covid.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
