Stuff We're Looking At Right Now

16 Stories that Are Percolating as Santa Packs His Sleigh

Ricochet Cafe is sadly not a news organization with teams of reporters who can fly hither and yon to get stories. But we do follow the news and render observations. Here is what we’re observing now … but these are all stories where the final results are still out.

1. Don’t be fooled by the histrionics about the government shut-down. Since 1976, we’ve had over 20 government shutdowns. They happen all of the time. And they’re predictable. Congress is supposed to work on the budget all year and have it done by October. Do they ever do that? NO! And they’re supposed to chunk up the budget into digestible reasonable sections, with many coming out in spring, summer, and the last part by October. Do they ever do that? NO! The real hard deadline for the knuckleheads in the Capitol is before they break for Christmas, so naturally, they wait till about 24 hours before the drop-deadline and dump a massive pile of paper on lawmakers who are eager to go home for Christmas. Let the government shut down. If you’re 50 years old or older, you’ve surived dozens of government shut-downs already and you probably didn’t even notice.

2. We still have no explanation for the drones, but it looks like we have more drones. What’s going on? Our money is on PSYOP, but we don’t know for sure.

3. Speaking of PSYOPs, Gavin Newsom over in Commiefornia has just declared a state of emergency over Avian Flu, also known as bird flu. To date, there are no known cases anywhere on earth of human-to-human transmission of avian flu. The few people who have gotten it got it from infected birds. So stay away from infected birds. And get ready for a potential new PSYOP.

4. Today is December 20, 2024. President Biden was in Delaware on one of his constant vacations. Party Girl VP Kamala Harris was heading home to California.Both Biden and Harris abruptly returned to the White House. Getting Biden out of vacay and getting Kamala to do actual work is like wrestling a chicken wing from Chris Christie. So what’s going on? Is this some kind of big deal emergency?

   Some have suggested Biden was going to resign and let Kamala take the reins. I think that’s unlikely. Others have said it could be World War III. Now that’s credible.

5. Russia is firing missiles at Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. That’s right, Zelensky’s capital city is under pretty aggressive attack by Russia. This is the sort of thing countries go to war over. The Doomsday clock has never been closer to Doomsday, thanks to the Biden-Harris regime. If you want to worry about something, worry about World War III and forget the government shutdown.

6. The United States has 2,000 of our soldiers in Syria. Why on earth would we have such a large military presence in Syria? Syria just had a civil war, but it really did not involve us. However, my guess is the Deep State critters are sniffing around and figure they can make some money if we launch another war. (Just for context, when Biden withdrew from Afghanistan in that debacle, we had 2,500 troops there.)

7. Fani Willis is in serious hot water. It’s not just that she got disqualified off of the Trump RICO case. The real problem involves her and gal-pal Kamala Harris. The two of them had a five-hour meeting in Washington, D.C., in advance of the Trump RICO case. Believe it or not, some are saying that this can all be tied to the January 6 event at the Capitol—in other words that the federal government planned a bunch of activities including lawfare against Trump.

8. Liz Cheney is going to prison. Well, I’m not sure about that, but she should be heading there. Remember the January 6 Select Committee that “investigated” the January 6 event at the Capitol? It has come out that Cheney very likely suborned perjury by communicating improperly with a certain witness named Cassidy Hutchinson. Cassidy used to work for Trump and she testified under oath in front of the January 6 Select Committee (of which Liz was a member) and said that Donald Trump tried to overpower his Secret Service driver on January 6, 2021 in order to force the vehicle to drive to the Capitol so Trump could stir up trouble. Several problems occur in this report, foremost of which is that it did not happen. (Cassidy said she heard about the wrestling match between the president and the Secret Service agent from a person who heard it from anothe person who was there—but the driver that day has said it never happend. Liz wouldn’t let him testify to refute Cassidy’s testimony.) Witness tampering is a pretty serious crime. This probably explains why Liz Cheney campaigned for Kamala—it was her best chance of not going to the Gray Bar Hotel.

9. The mainstream media (MSM) has been saying for years that Trump is a would-be dictator, the reincarnation of Hitler, and a power-mad despot who is only in politics to enrich himself. Now the MSM says that Trump is subservient to Elon Musk and does as his master Elon asks. That doesn’t sound all that Hitleresque to me. So which is it, MSM, is Trump orange Hitler or is Trump some beta-male who bends to the will of Elon Musk?

10. Vatican goes broke. Yes, that’s the craziest thing we ever heard. The Vatican has for centuries been one of the richest organizations in the world. Now, under Pope Francis, it announces it is “on the verge of bankruptcy.” The Vatican is allegedly in debt by about 83M Euros. ($88M.) Shoot, Joe Biden probably spent that much this morning paying off student loans for ungrateful rich kids who didn’t even ask for help.

11. Nancy Pelosi breaks her hip. This story seems weird to me. It was first reported that the 84-year-old insider trading icon fell down a flight of stairs in Europe because she wears these four-inch stiletto heels. This is deeply suspicious. Nancy is a scrawny old lady who is as sure-footed as a Grand Canyon mule. I am pretty sure that if you put a million bucks on the top of Mount Everest and handed her a puffer jacket, she could summit Mount Everest in those stilettos and be back in time for happy hour. It turns out she stumbled on just one step—the last one—but managed to stand up for a photo opp before getting an emergency hip replacement. She is apparently back in the United States.

12. AOC loses Oversight Committee role. AOC has long positioned herself as a rebel, an outsider, a progressive firebrand who wants no part of the political establishment. She spends more time on social media than at work—she’s never introduced a bill. But she is photogenic. In an abrupt about-face, AOC wanted to be on the Oversight Committee, which is the sort of job that is held by the most insiderish of insider politicians. This is not where you put progressives or firebrands. It seemed a bit out of character that she should be vying for this job (she wanted to be the “ranking” Democrat member which means the top dog Democrat on that particular powerful commitee). The current guy in that position is Jerry Nadler who is stepping down at the age of 74 to make way for younger blood. AOC is trying to grab the chair from a guy nobody’s heard of. His name is Gerry Connolly. He’s a Democrat from Virginia. He’s also 74 years old. And he has cancer. Despite all of this, AOC lost to him in a landslide. This flies in the face of a lot of social media buzz, which are positing that AOC will make a Presidential bid in 2028. She has no legislative achievements and is not particularly well versed in world affairs, so she’d be the perfect Democrat candidate because she is a Hispanic woman. Some say that Nancy Pelosi (you know, the one in a hospital bed following hip replacement) put the kaibosh on AOC’s ambitions.

13. The MSM is in freefall. ABC News has to shell out $16M to Trump for defamation. The View has issued corrections and apologies nonstop for weeks. Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow got massive pay cuts. Fox News is winning the ratings war against MSNBC and CNN. Podcasters like Dan Bongino routinely beat out cable news shows even though Bongino is podcasting from a tiny studio with a production staff of about three interns. Joe and Mika went to Mar-A-Lago to see if they couldn’t restore their once-positive relationship with Donald Trump, while Mika admits she has anger issues. It’s been estimated that 61% of the people who used to watch MSNBC and/or CNN have turned those networks off after the election. I wonder if all the happy-happy-joy-joy assurances of Kamala’s victory in the election might have made them seek their news elsewhere?

14. The J6 pipe bomber is going to be revealed. The whole January 6 fed-surrection is going to be exposed and we’re going to find out who planted the pipe bomb at the Democrat National Convention center in Washington, D.C., near Kamala Harris. What I have heard unofficially from online sources is that a major “kaboom” is going to be felt all over the country. It’s not so much who planted the bomb, it’s who arranged for the bomb to be planted.

15. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Biden’s cognitive decline was observed for years by the people around him, even in the first year of his term. Now that he’s got one foot out of the door, his staff and politicians tell us what we already knew. The guy wasn’t all there. My question: if Kamala and the Cabinet knew Biden was not cognitively able to do the job of President, is it treason that they did not invoke the 25th amendment? There is a mechanism in our Constitution to remove a President who is physically and/or mentally unfit to stay in office. Why didn’t we pull the rip cord? Can they be held accountable that they did not? And why didn’t Kamala invoke the 25th amendment that would have made her President?

16. Prince Andrew is snubbed at royal Christmas. Randy Andy grew up his mother’s favorite son, but the third child of the late Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip is criminally insane. He’s been involved in all sorts of sketchy business deals for years. He has overt ties to pedophiles, including being a regular at Epstein island. He was such good friends with Ghislaine Maxwell that she could freely enter and exit Buckingham Palace at will, without a security check. Well after bribery, corruption, and pedophilia did not tarnish his image much, he’s finally done it. He’s gotten chummy with a Chinese spy and may have taken some major-league bribes. (Think how much money it would take to bribe a prince!) King Charles III has banished Prince Andrew from the Christmas events of the royal family this year, which sounds like no big deal to us, but is a major public humiliation and a signal that the worst is yet to come for Andy. It has been reported that his brother Charles, the king, wants Andrew to remove himself from royal life entirely. Maybe Prince Andrew can go live with Meghan and Harry? Of course, Mrs. and Mrs. Markel are caught up in a couple of internet scandals themselves (namely their impending divorce and the biological origins of their children) but at least they aren’t taking bribes from Chinese spies.