BAN EXPERTS ☙ Wednesday, September 25, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS
Tropical storm shows more smashed records; new charges against shooter Routh; Routh son legal problems; Cali bag ban; Trump vow to smash sanctuary cities; great Trump Train news; more. Attorney JEFF CHILDERS
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Due to a personal emergency, today’s post is rushed, but there’s plenty of great stuff in there. Enjoy! Hopefully, things will get back to normal tomorrow.
C&C ARMY POST 🪖🪖 We got a call this morning asking for Dad to be returned to the emergency room after some bad lab reports. We’re assessing. Meanwhile I am rushing out a partially-completed post this morning, with apologies for typos, grammar, and its unpolished nature. And prayers welcome.
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 
Yesterday the local news intersected with our weird weather news. Tropical Storm Helene is bearing down on Florida. Or it’s about to bear down on Florida, or something. The storm is widely predicted to quickly become a major hurricane, and it is driving up battery sales like crazy. Both federal and state governments have declared states of emergency, even while the tropical storm lingers south of Cuba. CBS ran its storm story this morning headlined, “Tropical Storm Helene, a potential hurricane, forecast to rapidly intensify on path to Florida's Gulf Coast.”The unusual predictions of a snap major hurricane are based on record high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. The water temps aren’t just a little higher than previous records. We’ve never recorded anything like it. The readings are rocketing off the charts:
Since hurricanes gain energy over hot water, meteorologists predict tropical storm Helene will supercharge and slam into Florida as a Category 3 storm by tomorrow. In other words: they are predicting another turbo hurricane.
National Hurricane Center forecasters also said the predicted hurricane would be morbidly obese, up in the 90th percentile of storm girth. In other words, an “exceptionally large area” will see flooding rain, storm surge, and high winds.
We’ll see. As a native Floridian and card-carrying Florida Man, I believe in hurricanes when I can see them. (But yesterday, we still canceled some late-week travel. Just in case.)
CBS’s article dismissively blamed the off-the-charts, record-high ocean temperatures on, you guessed it, manmade carbon dioxide. They can’t help themselves! It’s like acid reflux. <Gurgle> climate change! Burp!
The explanation of precisely how cow methane in the air heats up the ocean water so much —something that requires indescribably huge amounts of energy— is so convoluted it defies description. CBS unsurprisingly and hubristically ignored the Sun and all the undersea volcanic activity. It can only be man.
It’s too soon to advise you prepare for C&C delivery disruptions from the turbo hurricane. Fortunately, the Childers homestead is well positioned near a major power substation, and right along the main line. So even if the tropical storm becomes a turbo hurricane and arrives as predicted, we are in good shape.
Mere days after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis publicly begged the federal government to let Florida prosecute Ryan Routh, arguing that the feds had only charged the failed shooter with weapons violations, yesterday the federal government re-indicted Roth, increasing the charges. And the Southern District of Florida assigned Routh’s permanent judge. Axios ran the story under the headline, “Ryan Routh charged with attempted assassination of Trump.”Routh’s case was assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who famously dismissed Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Raid prosecution last month. Flustered far-left outlets (like Politico) dripped with overheated frustration about Canon’s assignment, seeming deeply skeptical but unable to put their finger on the problem, like they smelled a dead rat, but no matter how hard they searched they couldn’t find the corpse.
Routh’s new indictment began, not with any weapons charge this time, but now with much more appropriate attempted assassination under 18 USC § 351, which covers attempts to kill any Presidential candidate enjoying Secret Service protection, such as President Trump.
Those were both encouraging developments. But there is an unfortunate hitch. Section 351 is a great fit for Routh’s prosecution, but it also includes an unwelcome provision pre-empting State investigations of assassination attempts:
Thus, Florida’s freshly-launched investigation has been put on ice before it ever got the chance to warm up. It was just two days ago on Monday that Trump just said he preferred Florida lead the investigation, since the feds are conflicted, both trying to put him in jail while also trying to investigate his attackers.
But yesterday, DOJ Chief Merrick “Grandma” Garland primly said the feds would not turn over the case, but would, of course, cooperate with Florida “as appropriate.”
Translated from Bureaucratese, “as appropriate” in lay English means, “never!”
But in another unbelievable 2024-style twist yesterday, another member of the Routh family was criminally charged. I am not making this up.
The Associated Press ran a most remarkable story yesterday headlined, “FBI: Son of suspect in Trump assassination attempt arrested on child sexual abuse images charges.” What are the odds?Oran Routh is Ryan Routh’s son. Oran was just in the news last week, defiantly defending his father, explaining that Ryan Routh hates President Trump like any reasonable person would. It’s fair to say Oran is no Trump fan. Oran also told reporters, “if my father wants to be a martyr to how broken and disassociated the process has become … then that's his choice.”
It’s a choice. Some kind of a choice.
But when the FBI searched Oran’s house this week, presumably related to his father’s Assassination Attempt, they alleged finding two Samsung Galaxy phones with SIM cards holding a large amount of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), including minors as young as six. The indictment also described a chat log between Oran and someone buying CSAM from him.
Coincidentally, back in October 2017, it was widely reported that “the Las Vegas shooter's brother was arrested for possessing CSAM.” If the claims against Paddock were even close to true, he is a very sick puppy. In July, 2018, prosecutors dropped the charges against Bruce Paddock after a key witness became unavailable.
So … another twisted deviant. Do you detect any pattern?
The Associated Press ran a hilariously ironic headline yesterday: “California governor signs law banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores.” Even more stuff you can’t make up! We just switched from paper bags to plastic — to save the trees. So, now what? Trees be damned?Correct. It’s back to paper. On Sunday, Governor Newsom signed a law banning plastic bags in the Golden State starting in 2026. The only option is bring-your-own-bag or paper, that’s it. Sorry, trees.
California tried this before, ten years ago, by banning thin plastic bags. The notion was that, if the bags were thicker, people would probably reuse them over and over, cutting down on waste bags. But that didn’t work, either. State Senator Cathy Blakespear, who supported the bill, said people were just not reusing or recycling any plastic bags, it didn’t matter how thick the bags were.
“We are literally choking our planet with plastic waste,” Blakespeare told the AP. (Actually, NOT literally. Despite what many people believe, the planet is made of inorganic material and isn’t literally alive. Thus it cannot literally choke. Just saying.)
Personally, I blame meat juice. It magically seeps out of the chicken breast plastic wrap and gets all over the plastic grocery bag, regardless of how tightly packaged. And then what are you supposed to do? It’s been drilled into all our heads that death by salmonella lies just one unwashed utensil away.
How chickens catch a salmon disease is something I will never understand.
An even greater mystery than how salmon infect chickens is the puzzle of why we listen to experts in the first place. At first, everything was going just fine. But then the experts informed us we had to stop using paper bags to save the planet. So California passed laws requiring grocery stores to first offer plastic bags, creating a whole new plastic bag industry overnight.
See, nobody even wanted the stupid plastic bags. People don’t like them. We were happier with paper. It required government regulation to create the plastic bag market. After which, a whole lot of petroleum-adjacent companies earned generational wealth supplying government-mandated plastic bags to grocery stores.
But then the plastic bags began choking the oceans (not literally) —a whole new problem we never had back in the paper bag days, and one that the experts somehow failed to foresee— and now the very same experts soberly tell us we have to just stop it with all these plastic bags, which we never wanted in the first place until the government mandated them.
The experts are worse than useless. They are dangerous madmen. They, not the plastic bags, are the ones who are really choking the planet (Id.). The bags are just symptoms of our expert infection. It’s possible we caught the expert infection from the salmon, too. We don’t know yet.
But it’s clear. There’s only one logical thing to do. We should ban experts.
Over the weekend, the New York Post ran a hope-filled story headlined, “Trump vows to ‘end all sanctuary cities in America,’ boost law enforcement in regions that don’t cooperate with ICE.” You would think a Trump threat to punish sanctuary cities would make corporate media headlines, but no. They are terrified of this issue.At a weekend rally in North Carolina, President Trump promised to end the migrant crisis. He told the large crowd of supporters that:
“Today, I am announcing a new plan to end all sanctuary cities in North Carolina and all across our country,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd of 10,000 at Aero Center Wilmington in North Carolina.
“I will ask Congress to pass a law outlawing sanctuary cities nationwide, and we will bring down the full weight of the federal government on any jurisdiction that refuses to cooperate” with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, he added.
“As soon as I take office I will surge federal law enforcement to every city that is failing — which is a lot of them — to turn over criminal aliens, and we will hunt down and capture every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer and migrant criminal that is being illegally harbored,” vowed Trump.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented. During the Great Depression, the U.S. deported vast numbers of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries in a campaign often called the “Mexican Repatriation.” It was not so much a formal policy as a series of mass deportations and ‘repatriation drives’ between 1929 and 1939, encouraged by economic hardship and stubbornly high levels of unemployment.
The stated goal was to reduce job competition for U.S. citizens by removing foreign-born laborers (mostly Mexican immigrants). Around 1 to 2 million people were sent back to Mexico. Although there is debate over this point, some historians estimate that up to 40% were naturalized citizens. The collection of programs were carried out by local, state, and federal governments through a combination of both coercive and voluntary incentives.
So it can be done.
In great news, the Associated Press ran a story yesterday headlined, “Texas jury clears most 'Trump Train’ drivers in civil trial over 2020 Biden-Harris bus encounter.”Six Trump supporters stood trial this week for “voter intimidation” after a Trump Train of vehicles escorted a Biden/Harris campaign bus down a Texas highway in 2020. Failed gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis and two co-passengers sued the Trump drivers for emotional damages, after Texas police failed to take any interest in any criminal charges.
Yesterday, the jury found five of the six not liable at all. The one driver they did find liable had collided (gently) with the Biden Bus, and the jury awarded $40,000 against him. That driver said he would appeal.
Overall, the jury appears to basically have treated it like a garden-variety collision case, in essence dismissing all the drivers who didn’t collide with anyone.
Crybaby Wendy Davis declared victory. It’s hard to understand how. Four years of litigation to get a $40,000 verdict? A verdict which is yet to be appealed, meaning it will require even more attorneys and even more legal bills before Wendy can collect anything?
It was a common sense verdict from a common sense jury.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Lord willing, and tropical storm diverting, I’ll return tomorrow morning with another roundup of essential news and commentary.
