Minnesota, Mamdani and Maduro, Oh My!(posted 1/9/26)

 We’re not even 10 days into the new year, and the elite lefties have already given us enough material to mock them about until Arbor Day, 2028.  Consider just the three examples of the cascading lawlessness in Minnesota, Mamdani’s horrific start as NYC mayor, and the Democrats’ towering hypocrisy about our incredible capture of Maduro and Mrs. Maduro.

By this time, you would have thought we’d be aware of all of the possible scandals that could come out of Minnesota.  However, as the third Wise Man said when he arrived late to the manger, “But wait! There’s myrrh!”   (Terrible dad joke?  Check.  Still hanging on to Christmas? Check.)

I am so happy to see the White House sending a whole team of fraud investigators from the DOJ to Minnesota.  Not just because it’s always satisfying to see some bad actors get what’s coming to them, but because as the revelations of systemic waste and criminality grow, there will be an impetus to apply the same scrutiny to the vast corruption throughout our federal and state governments. 

And that process has the potential to do a world of good.

It’s hard to believe how easy it was for Nick Shirley to pull out one or two pieces from the Somali scammer Jenga tower, which then immediately caused the accelerating collapse of the whole rotten mess.  And as a former English prof and recovering grammar nerd, I still can’t get over the beautifully evocative symbol of the multi-billion dollar fraud: the sign for the “Learing Center.”

I’m not immune to the occasional typo myself; regular readers will have spotted one or two in my columns from time to time.  (It’s no excuse that I do most of my writing after midnight, nor that medicinal bourbon is sometimes involved.) (Or is it?)  But still, a mistake in an email or an internet post is one thing.

A glaring error in a professionally printed sign is another.  Some Somali had to get hold of a computer – probably provided by a corrupt NGO called “Empowering our Neighbors, LLC” at the low, low cost of $1.2 million to taxpayers.  Then he had to try out several different names, finally landing on the generic-sounding “Quality Learning Center.”

Except that he wrote it as, “Kwalitee Learing Centaur.” 

Fortunately for him, he was able to hire a copy-editing service – probably provided by a corrupt NGO called “Literacy for our Neighbors, LLC” (that’s another $1.2 mil from the taxpayers).  And they cleaned up “Quality” and “Center,” but missed “Learing.”

When he took that verbiage to a sign-making business – “Empowering Signs for our Neighbors, LLC – which is located in a 180 -square-foot store-front in a six-business strip mall across from the railroad tracks.  (Amount billed to the taxpayers from those six businesses in 2025? $214 million.)

And because the workers there have been in this country for 10 years but still speak only in the series of clicks, whistles and glottal pops of Somali, nobody caught the missing “n.” 

Annnddddd…a multi-billion dollar fraud ring collapses, and leftist, race-hustling crooks in Minnesota get to lear a hard lesson!    

And that’s not to mention the latest disaster, with the foolish woman losing her life trying to run down the ICE agent.  Which was the predictable outcome of unhinged leftist media, politicians, and activists brainwashing gullible people by screaming, “ICE is the Gestapo! Enforcing our laws is fascist!” for the last several years.

What did they think was going to happen?

But just when you thought no leftists could be crazier than the Minnesota leftists, Zorro Mamdani took the oath of office in NYC and said, “Hold my Koran and watch this.”

And he hired a recidivist criminal to advise him on crime, and a raging anti-Semite (I know: which one?) to take charge of choosing personnel, and he started an initiative to allow disgruntled tenants on welfare to go after landlords whom they don’t think are giving them their money’s worth for the zero dollars they are paying for rent-controlled apartments. 

And for the leader of this “fix housing problems” unit, he chose a loon named Cea Weaver, who has more red flags than a May Day parade marching past Lenin’s tomb in Moscow.      

First are her eyes.  Look up “crazy eyes” in a dictionary, and right there is a picture of Cea Weaver.

Second, right before she got appointed, she started deleting all of her past social media with both translucently white, bony hands.  (This gal is so white she makes Liz Warren look like Idi Amin.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Third, because that’s not the way the internet works, some of her old posts and videos starting coming out.  And…yikes!

Turns out she really hates white people, which makes her as self-hating as those secular Jews carrying pro-Hamas signs at Ivy League protests.  She said that home ownership is racist and white supremacist.  She said that she wanted to “impoverish the white middle class” and that her goal is to “decrease the value of real estate.”  (Finally, a leftist political promise you can believe!) 

My favorite quote of hers is a juicy morsel of malignant misanthropy encased in a thick crust of academic-speak: “For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good,” and in the future we will transition to treating it as a collective good under a model of ‘shared equity.’  [That] will mean that families, especially white families, are going to have a different relationship to property.”

Translation: Your “different relationship to property” means that you won’t have any of it anymore.

Usually, this kind of zealot has fire in her belly, and can’t wait to get into power so she can immediately start grinding her capitalist enemies to dust beneath her.  But not Cea.

Because when a reporter stopped her and posed a few questions to her outside of her Brooklyn brownstone – in an area that white interlopers like herself have gentrified, by the way – she cried and ran back into her home.

I’m not making that up.  She literally burst into tears and fled into her house. 

But the star of the show – make that the sh*t show – is Mamdani himself, who gave what had to be the creepiest inaugural address ever.  He doubled down on all of his socialist rhetoric, and produced the chilling sound bite about how he is going to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” 

That sound you hear is George Orwell – and 100 million victims of communist “warmth” – rolling in their graves.

Which brings us to Trump’s theatrical raid on another purveyor of collectivist warmth, the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.  The raid itself was so spectacular – script by Shane Black, directed by Michael Bay, with the working title, “Mission Impossible 12: Grabbing Maduro!” – that even the most partisan Dem couldn’t criticize it.

So they immediately moved on to throwing every possible criticism at the wall, to see what sticks.  “It’s illegal.  It’s a kidnapping.  Maduro is the legitimate president.  What’s going to happen next?  Why didn’t the raiders capture the 47 people below Maduro on the commie flow-chart?” Etc.

There are actually legitimate questions and a lot of uncertainty about what the aftermath will be.  But rather than be serious statemen and raise those objections, the Dems couldn’t help but act like clowns, and reveal their own double-standards and hypocrisy.

Like Cryin’ Cea Weaver, they don’t seem to recognize that the internet and videotape exists, and you can’t run away from past statements you’ve made. 

Statements like Joe Biden’s (RIP) tweet from June of 2020: “Trump talks tough on Venezuela, but admires thugs and dictators like Nicolas Maduro.  As President, I will stand with the Venezuelan people and for democracy.”

That one aged like milk, didn’t it?

Or how about the fact that the Biden administration removed sanctions on Venezuela in 2023 in exchange for Maduro’s promise that Venezuela would hold free and fair elections.  Annnndddd… nope!  After Maduro lost in 2024, he just stayed in power and started persecuting Venezuelan opponents.

Thwarted by the real world as they so often are, on Biden’s way out the door last year, he and the Dems put out a $25 million bounty for info leading to the arrest or conviction or Maduro.  

So they were hoping that some mercenaries, or possible Jason Bourne or Reacher, would raid Maduro’s base, capture him, and spirit him away to the US to stand trial.  But when Trump did just that, the left raced to begin the caterwauling.

Which was hilarious, because just like in the raid on the Iranian nuke sites, the action was over before the usual suspects could even make their signs, hit the streets, and start with the chanting.

Still, it was fun to watch unemployed leftist ne’er-do-wells (When will they do well?  Ne’er!) put down their anime furry porn and stop in the middle of their latest piercing to rally on the streets against the evil, genocidal bombing of Venezuela. 

Annnndddd…the bombing is over!

It was also very entertaining to watch AWFLs and other nonbinary white guys protesting and weeping for the poor Venezuelans, on a split screen with scenes of thousands of wildly celebrating Venezuelans in city streets all over the world. 

It’s a cliché because it’s true: Trump’s superpower is getting his opponents to take the “20” side of every 80-20 issue, and to defend the indefensible.

So to recap, here are the groups and individuals the Democrats have rallied on behalf of since Trump has returned to office: human-smuggling, wife-beating gang member Kilmar; narco-terrorists in Miami Vice boats speeding toward America to profit from poisoning and murdering Americans; judges who blatantly violate laws to help illegals evade our law enforcement; a trust-fund puss who shot a CEO in the back like a coward; leftist trans-adjacent mentally ill or evil people who murdered Charlie Kirk and Christian school kids in two separate massacres; comically transparent Somali land-pirates; and a vicious leftist dictator who they were vociferously condemning 28 minutes ago. 

Great job, lefties!

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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We Don’t Hate the Media, or Tim Walz, Enough (posted 1/8/26)

First note: I am going to have an announcement about the possible return of some version of the Cautious Optimism site soon, so stay tuned.

Second note: I drafted most of this column Wednesday morning, before the ICE agent in Minneapolis fired on the woman who interfered with an ICE raid and hit him with her car, in the aftermath of which Tim Walz added a new, pathetic chapter to the story of his terrible behavior during his entire political career.

I’m filing this column under one of my recurring categories: We Don’t Hate the Media Enough.

Consider this: the Somalian fraudsters in Minnesota haven’t come up with any new scams that we know of over the last couple of years.  They’ve just continued doing the industrial-scale fraud that they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades, since they gave up ocean-going piracy for land-based piracy. 

And Tim Walz isn’t any more implicated in the utter incompetence and negligence – or more likely,  blatant corruption, with all of the billion$ of fraudulent taxpayer ripoffs – than he was 18 months ago, or 16 months ago, or 13 months ago.     

But 18 months ago he became Que Mala’s nominee to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.  And 16 months ago he was campaigning hard for that office.  And 13 months ago he was on the presidential election ballot in all 50 states, and ended up getting the votes of tens of millions of Americans.  (Addled, unwise Americans, sure.  But still.  Americans.)

And for all of that time, the nationwide legacy media and journalists – the vaunted Fourth Estate; the guardians of our liberty; the crucial and necessary speakers of capital “T” Truth to capital “P” Power; the beneficiaries (along with all of us) of the cherished first amendment to our Constitution – did not write or speak one word about the tsunami of fraud that surrounded and enveloped Tim Walz, from his twinkle toes to the fingertips of his jazz hands.

And then one 20-something kid with a Mr. Microphone and a $100 video camera from Best Buy spent one afternoon walking around and showing Somalian fraud-atoria in grimy buildings with misspelled signs, and asking dead-eyed scammers where the kids were, and getting only a series of clicks and whistles, followed by, “No habla ingles.  You go now!” 

And before he could say, “That’s Spanish, not Somalian,” the doors to the fraud parlors were shut in his face.

And that kid, with his budget of 12 dollars and a bus pass, did what our finest J-school grads and the billion-dollar institutions propping them up could not and would not do: he told the truth about the corrupt leftist machine running Minnesota, and by implication, the truth about Tim Walz.

“But maybe the MSM just focused on more important stories, in their rigorous vetting of Walz?” you’re not asking, because you’re not as dumb as Jasmine Crockett.

Because: nope. 

Do you remember what the MSM told us about him, and his background?  He was a regular guy, a man’s man who coached football, and hunted, and bravely served our country in the National Guard, where he gained valuable combat experience. 

Except… when he tried to do a photo-op in his new hunting vest and Elmer Fudd hat, he struggled with his shotgun like AOC struggled with the SAT.   He looked like he had never even seen a shotgun before, let alone fired one.

And when he talked about football, he sounded like…I don’t know, Pete Buttigieg talking about football.  (Remember when Walz mentioned “calling a pick-six?”) 

And as a regular guy raised correctly in the Midwest, I can tell you that none of my regular guy friends ever flounced around like…how can I put this delicately?… an over-eager, leotard-wearing cast member in a huge Bob Fosse dance number.

And his time in the National Guard – where he did serve, and God bless him for it – did NOT involve any front-line combat.  Or even rear-echelon proximity to combat.  Or even being within the penumbras or emanations of the nearest theatre of war wherein combat might conceivably have broken out. 

In fact, after decades in the Guard, when it actually came time for the unit he was supposed to lead to go into combat, Terrible Timmy immediately retired from the Guard, leaving his troops to be led by someone else. 

But of course, we learned none of this from the legacy media, because they did everything they could to portray him as the exact opposite of what he really was, and is.  And the only possible defense they have is that by August of 2024 they were absolutely exhausted.

After all, they’d spent years covering for Joe Biden: ignoring his corruption; hiding his son’s status as a crack aficionado and bagman who funneled Chicom and Ukrainian oligarch cash to the Big Guy; pretending “Dr.” Jill was a doctor, and 9% inflation was hunky dory, and that all of us regularly trip over sandbags and fall up staircases and poop on the Pope. 

Then they had to turn on a dime and start pretending that Que Mala was erudite, and smart, and competent.  And that was no easy task. 

Then she drops Tampon Tim in their laps, and gives them their marching orders: Take this lunatic weirdo and make him look like a normal, Midwestern dude’s dude, so we don’t get completely wiped out among male voters.

The rest was history, and the corrupt, soulless, existentially dishonest MSM came dangerously close to lying Jazz Hands and the Cackler into the White House only 14 months ago. 

For that, we can never hate them enough.     

And so, I suggest that we say to Tim Walz, and the armies of over-paid, moral homunculi in the mainstream media – in the words of thousands of Somali scammers who have now gone to ground all over the Mogadishu-St. Paul area…

“You go now!” 

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Dems Get out of the Gate Quickly in 2026 (posted 1/5/26)

Well, the elite Democrats are starting off 2026 the same way they ended 2025: as condescending, creepy hypocrites. 

Under “condescending,” behold the wonder that is Larry Sabato.  You may remember Sabato because he’s the University of Virginia politics professor who founded the Center for Politics, which is laughably described as “nonpartisan.” 

But you probably don’t.  Because who cares? 

On the other hand, he is a near-perfect representative of our arrogant, educated, elite pundit class.  He’s highly educated, and even though he has nothing but disdain for regular people, he touts his Center as “work[ing] to promote civic engagement and participation.”  But I would argue that he’s no smarter than I am.

He has a lot political opinions, and is happy to yammer on about them.  So do I.  He has a BA, an MA and a PhD.  So do I.  He was Phi Beta Kappa.  So was I.  He was a Rhodes Scholar.  I…wasn’t.  He got his PhD from Oxford.  I…didn’t.  He has a earned a ton of money and a very high media profile by writing about politics.  I…

Look, let’s not get hung up on these meaningless comparisons.  Because everybody is different, and I have other, more impressive qualifications in my CV than he does.  For example, was Larry Sabato a four-time runner-up for People magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year?  (Screw you, Patrick Dempsey, Chris Evans, Idris Alba and George Clooney!) 

My wife is hotter, my kids are better, and my Wonder Dog outclasses his low-IQ little stripper dog like the ones that several of the Kardashians probably carry around in their purses. 

Ok sure, I don’t know anything about his wife or kids, or if he even has a dog.  But I said what I said, and I stand by it 100%.

Anyway, Larry Sabato couldn’t even get 48 hours into 2026 without proving that he is a condescending jerk.  The proof came in his response to a statement by the new anchor of the CBS Evening News, someone named Tony Dokoupil.  

On New Year’s Day, Dokoupil started his tenure with an on-air mea culpa, acknowledging that most Americans don’t trust the legacy media any more. “On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” 

To which all reasonably perceptive Americans said, “Duh!” 

Even though CBS has a lot to atone for, and the only rational response to Dokoupil’s message is, “We’ll believe it when we see it,” we should still allow ourselves to be pleasantly surprised when CBS makes even a baby step in the direction of doing the right thing.  Acknowledging reality and admitting fault is a good way for them to start a new year. 

But Sir Lawrence of Sabato begs to differ.  Because he immediately pushed his metaphorical glasses to the end of his nose and dialed the snoot factor up to 11 in a tweeted response to Dokoupil: “Absolutely! You wouldn’t want ‘academics and elites’ who have actually studied a subject to outweigh the off-the-cuff opinions of village idiots.”

[Sidebar: In this one response, Sabato showed himself to be the polar opposite of the late great William F. Buckley (peace be upon him), who famously said, “I’d rather be governed by 300 names drawn randomly from the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.”]

Got that?  If you disagree with Larry Sabato and his ilk, you’re a village idiot!

In case you’ve forgotten the lofty goal of Larry’s Center at UVA, I’ll repeat it: “working to promote civic engagement and participation.” 

And obviously, the best way to accomplish that is to smear any dissenters as pitchfork-wielding mouth-breathers. “Listen up, morons!  You’re all idiots, and your uninformed opinions are crap.  So ‘engage with civics’ by bowing down to me as I lecture you on your wrongness, and then get out there and ‘participate,’ by voting exactly the way we experts tell you to!”  

That level of clueless narcissism is hard to comprehend.  Sabato’s job for decades has been to eat, drink and breathe politics.  And yet, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, he can still unselfconsciously and unironically tout the opinions of “academics and elites who have actually studied a subject,” as if we’ve all just woken up from a deep, decades-long, magical sleep.

After all, medical elitists like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Scarf – I don’t remember her name and won’t waste the time to look it up, but you know who I’m talking about – “actually studied” communicable diseases for years.

Annnnddddd…they said covid came from delicious pangolins that untermenschen ChiComs gobbled like circus geeks devouring live chickens; and that masks would stop the spread; and that the vax would keep you from getting it; no, the vax and then 18 more boosters; and that six feet of distance would keep you safe; and that you could attend screaming mob protests of St. George Floyd’s death safely, but going to church would kill you. 

And intelligence elites spent a lifetime actually studying intel and disinformation. 

Annnnddddd… 51 of them swore that Hunter Biden’s laptop – which contained hours of video of Hunter Biden snorting crack off of the behinds of hookers of many nations, along with Hunter Biden’s emails proving that he was a bagman for ChiCom apparatchiks and Ukrainian oligarchs, and that he kicked up 10% of his illegal bribes to “the big man” – was actually a Russian fabrication.  And that the non-existent Trump pee tape existed, and was proof that he was a Moscow-ian Candidate.

And our leftist policy experts assured us that the border couldn’t be closed without radical new legislation, and that illegals weren’t getting SNAP benefits or Medicaid, and that the Somali Learing Center was a world-class educational institution, well worth the $8 million per student cost.

And our leftist media experts assured us that Jen “Circle Back” Psaki and KJP were geniuses, and that the act of a male declaring himself a female magically turns all of his Y chromosomes to Xs.  And that Joe Biden was mentally sharp, with the physical vigor of an Olympic triathlete gold medalist whose strongest events were stair climbing and long-jumping over sandbags.    

But you don’t have to look to the army of lefty elite “experts” who have been relentlessly wrong or lying about everything all the time.  You can just look at the King of Elite Academics: Larry Sabato.

In addition to all of his academic credentials, Sabato started a website to make political predictions, and he modestly named it, “Sabato’s Crystal Ball.” 

Because of course he did.

Annnnddd… Sabato’s Crystal Ball has been about as accurate as a Magic Eight Ball. 

Unexpectedly!

In 2016, Sabato predicted a Cankles McPantsuit blowout win against Trump by an electoral vote count of 322-216, almost the exact opposite of what happened.  He also missed the House and Senate majorities. 

He got 2020 “right,” when Joey Gaffes won in the Most Legitimate Election Ever™.  (That was the one that hinged on 11 million Democrat voters who had never been seen before November of 2020, and who have never been seen since.)

But you’ll be shocked to know that he wrongly predicted that Que Mala would win the Electoral College (and the presidency) by 14 EC votes, when as we all know, she got wiped out by nearly 100 EC votes. 

Because God exists, and He loves us.

So if I’m reading the record correctly, the Village Idiots went 2-1, while Sabato went 1-2, with a big asterisk in front of the 1.

Accordingly, if it’s all the same to you, Larry, you can keep your Crystal Ball, and I’ll rely on my Crystal Brain, along with my Magic Eight Ball.

Which I just asked three questions: 

1. Is Larry Sabato half as smart as he thinks he is? 

2. Can a randomly chosen village idiot out-think Larry Sabato? 

3. Can Larry Sabato distinguish his fundament from a hole in the ground?

And I got, “My sources say no,” “You may rely on it,” and, “Reply hazy, try again,” respectively.   

Would you look at that?  The column’s already over, and I only got to “condescending elite Dems.”

So “creepy” and “hypocritical” Dems will be my topics next time. 

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Looking Forward to the New Year (posted 1/1/26)

I love New Year’s Day.  It comes in the middle of the 12 days of Christmas, during a long break spent with family; there is good football to watch; and I savor the chance to look back at the past year, and forward to the new one.   

In my last column I looked back at some highlights and lowlights of 2025, but the year certainly ended with all kinds of stupid.  Consider those cheese-eating surrender monkeys the French, for example.   They have a famed national celebration every New Years Eve in Paris, with huge crowds on the Champs-Elysees and a gigantic concert, followed by fireworks at the Arc de Triomphe at midnight.

Except for this year.  Because it is now too dangerous.  The French government no longer feels it can keep its own citizens safe in its capital on a national holiday.  A police statement alluded to “unpredictable crowd movements” as one cause for worry. 

You know, like when the church parking lot gets crowded on a Sunday at noon, or when lots of Gator fans descend on the stadium an hour before kickoff.  You can never be too careful when you’ve got crowds.  Especially the kind which are prone to moving around.    

So the French canceled their concert, and replaced it with a pre-recorded video broadcast.  Because nothing says, “Let’s celebrate this significant moment!” like… reruns. 

There will still be fireworks, but officials “urged people to watch from home.”  Because there is no better way to appreciate the visceral experience of immense colorful explosions filling the sky and cacophonous blasts you can feel in your chest than…to watch it on a tv screen. 

The evasive banality of these official French government pronouncements demonstrate that they believe that some things are better left unsaid. Especially when those things involve mobs of violent practitioners of a certain Religion of Peace™ whom the French have been allowing into their country for decades now.

Annnnddddd…no more celebrations, Frenchie!  Watch it on tv.

Meanwhile, here at home we have geniuses like Eric Swalwell, who is now running for California governor.    And if California Dems vote him into office, they’ll deserve the reign of error, flatulence and unguarded pillow talk with ChiCom honey traps that will ensue.

Swalwell’s latest campaign promise is a doozy.  He is pledging to arrest ICE agents and take away their driver’s licenses. 

You read that right.  ICE agents – the rare federal employees who actually have a proper constitutional job to do and are actually doing it correctly – will not get away with enforcing our laws on Swalwell’s watch.  Following in the footsteps of the seditious six – who told our military that they shouldn’t follow illegal orders, and then couldn’t point to any such orders they’ve been given, because those orders don’t exist – Swalwell tried to cover himself by using the weaseliest of weasel words.

To wit, “And if they commit crimes then they’re going to be charged with crimes, if it’s falsely imprisoning people, if it’s kidnapping, if it’s assault and battery, they’re going to be held accountable.” 

That kind of vacuous statement might work for the motley collection of AWFLs, sufferers from blunt force head trauma and CTEs, and non-English speakers who make up the Democrat voting base in California.

But the rest of us know that of course ICE agents committing those crimes would be charged with those crimes.  We also know that they are NOT committing those crimes.  Because detaining and then arresting people who broke our immigration laws isn’t “falsely imprisoning” them, and taking them off the street and legally holding them prior to deportation isn’t “kidnapping” them. 

And “assault and battery” is what happens to my ears and brain when Eric Swalwell starts talking on tv when my remote is not within arm’s reach.       

The driver’s license threat is especially rich.  When normal Americans think “problems with driver’s licenses in California,” they think about foreigners who just got here two weeks ago, and were issued voter’s registration paperwork and a CDL, despite the fact that they don’t know enough English to read road signs, or spell “CDL.”

Maybe Swalwell thinks that the total number of driver’s licenses is a fixed amount, and he needs to start confiscating licenses from American citizens who are enforcing our laws and keeping us safe, so that he can give those licenses to every Juan, Achmed and Apu with a hankerin’ to climb up behind the wheel of a 15-ton 18-wheeler and start flattening sedans and SUVs like JB Pritzker trampling people between him and a buffet.   

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  Looking forward to the new year.

I don’t do hard-and-fast resolutions, but I do like to set goals, and I’ve got a lot of items on my own personal bucket list that still need to be checked off:

First, of course, I’d like to get the CO website up and running again.

I’d like to fast-rope down from a helicopter just in time to prevent a crime from happening, or stop a useful idiot from talking a naïve young person into voting Democrat.

I’d like to dive into a body of water with a knife clenched between my teeth.

After being a four-time runner up, I’d like to finally win a People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year award.

I’d like to win a Nobel Prize, just so that in my speech I could work in a Pelosi mummy joke, a Cherokee Liz Warren joke (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and a Pritzker dirigible joke. 

I’d like a law enforcement agency to require me to register my hands as lethal weapons. 

I’d like to be at a public event where I could interrupt an idiot making a land acknowledgment by standing up and yelling, “Either give the land back or shut your yap, you insufferable, virtue-signaling D-bag!” 

But enough about me and my personal goals. 

Politically, my over-arching resolution would be for us conservatives to wield the power the voters gave us as aggressively as the Democrats always do when they are in power.  Even if we don’t lose the House in November, time is fleeting and there is a ton of work to do, so we need to make hay while the sun shines, on many fronts:

1.Do everything possible to speed up deportations, and encourage illegals to self-deport.  Crack down on all benefits that serve as magnets for illegals: stop them from getting Medicaid funds, food stamps, illegal employment and college funding.  Defund the NGOs who have been conduits for money for themselves, and to enable illegals to get here and stay here.    

2. Use the power of federal money to incentivize insurrectionist “sanctuary” blue cities and states to obey federal law or suffer the consequences.  Take highway funds away from states who illegally issue any drivers’ licenses to illegals; take federal matching funding away from states who have been using those funds on boondoggles like the CA bullet train.  Withdraw funding wherever it can be legally withdrawn to stop taxpayers from unwillingly subsidizing wind and solar farms that produce expensive electricity that must then be subsidized again when it shows up in electric bills.

3. Use the power of every law and regulation – not as dishonest lawfare, but as aggressive enforcement of laws that have long been ignored or thwarted.  Arrest and prosecute every person who interferes with or attacks ICE, border patrol or the national guard.  Make examples of judges who break the law or rule frivolously; impeach a handful of them where you can, and arrest and prosecute those like the WI judge who was just convicted for helping an illegal escape ICE officers.   

4. Use conservative media to highlight the truth – and counter the MSM – on every story they distort or lie about, i.e. all of the stories.  Make the really bad actors famous – violent illegals, Somali scammers, brother-marrying anti-Semites in Congress – and highlight our wins (lower crime rates and unemployment, an improving economy, etc.).  Build on our recent successes in social media, and keep the spotlight on Dem malfeasance          

5. In a perfect world, I’d like us to keep the filibuster.  But in the real world, I’m afraid it’s time to get rid of it, both because the Dems will certainly do so the minute they get back in power (they already did, with judges), and because they’ve repeatedly demonstrated that they aren’t good-faith negotiators.  We can’t continue to fight with one arm tied behind our back, and we can’t continue to bring strongly worded letters to a knife fight.  If we don’t, the Dems will prevent us from making health-care reforms, and then will profit by blaming us for the failed Obamacare that they are 100% responsible for.     

We made some very good progress in 2025, but we need to keep the pedal to the metal in 2026.

I hope you all had a great holiday season, and are looking forward to the new year as much as I am!

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Looking Back at 2025 (posted 12/29/25)

 I hope everybody had a great Christmas.  We had a peaceful and quiet one.  In recent years I’ve gotten into the 12 Days of Christmas liturgical tradition, which was not a part of my Baptist upbringing, but which is appealing for several reasons.  I’ve always loved Christmas, and any chance to extend that holy/holiday feeling for longer seems intrinsically good.  (I know that Hanukkah is not a major Jewish holiday, but I’ve always like the idea of 8 days of celebration…so you know I’d be up for 12!)

And because I own a few rental houses in a college town, I really appreciate the feeling of a temporarily emptier town, and the opportunity that brings to do some maintenance work without having to work around tenants’ schedules, traffic, etc.  On the agenda this week is some yard clean-up – I’ve already removed three pickup loads of leaves and limbs – some minor carpentry, repairing and painting a picket fence, and repairing and painting some wooden window screens.    

I also appreciate the chance to look back at the year that has passed, and to look forward to the new year, too.  In this column I’ll look back at some highlights and lowlights of 2025, and in the next column – the last one for this year – I’ll look forward to some of my hopes and fears for 2026.

Obviously, Trump taking office was a huge deal, and a great relief after the four benighted years of the Cadaver and the Cackler and their horrible policies and personnel.  Trump’s most dramatic accomplishment was completely closing the border after 16 minutes in office – and after years of Biden and the Dems feigning an inability to close the border without “comprehensive immigration reform” legislation. 

(By which they meant opening the borders to millions of unvetted immigrants to ensure a leftist voting majority forever.)    

The deportations, though frustratingly slow, have been great too.  The relatively slow pace of deportations has not been because of lack of trying, and it’s been infuriating to watch the same Dems who allowed millions to stampede in – with NO due process to protect American citizens – now insist that every obviously deportable alien be given full, years-long due-process hearings.

Still, Trump’s move to offer cash and a plane ticket to those who will self-deport is smart, and has been paying dividends; I think around twice as many have self-deported as have been caught and forcibly deported.  And as long as Homan and Trump keep pushing aggressively, I would guess that more and more will self-deport, as the realization sinks in that Hulk Homan means business, and they’re going to be caught and tossed eventually.

I think another high point has been the improvements in the first year of Trump’s second term compared to his first.  The first time around, his win came as a surprise to many, and with no previous governing experience, Trump had to fumble his way up a very steep learning curve.  He left way too many oppositional deep-state bureaucrats in place, and his appointments were a mixed bag, with a lot of misses. 

And I’m not just talking about Amarosa and the Mooch.  (Terrible drive-time FM radio shock-jock duo, terrible political appointments.) Pence was a good man but an empty suit as VP; I can’t remember a thing about Rex Tillerson as Sec State.  I actually liked Mattis as Sec Def and Jeff Sessions as AG, but they both had some self-inflicted wounds. 

With the possible exception of Pam Bondi, I can’t think of an appointment this time around that hasn’t been at least as strong, and usually a marked improvement over their counterparts in the first term.  JD is a boss; Mario is doing half a dozen jobs and all of them well; Stephen Miller and Hegseth have taken everything the sleazy MSM could throw at them and spit right back in their eye.

And Tom Homan is my hero.   

Trump clearly put together a team during his four years in the wilderness, and he hit the ground running.  In a functional nation with sane Democrats in it, Trump could have passed much of his agenda through congress.  In the dysfunctional mess Trump inherited, he has had to sign a boatload of EOs and push through the imperfect omnibus Big Beautiful Bill, and those have been vast improvements over the last four years, and clear improvements over the first year of his first term. 

He’s also laid the groundwork for good things to happen in the near- and mid-term future.  The regulation cuts and tax cuts that kick in next month will help the economy, as will the trade deals that are bringing tons of investment into our country.  The appellate courts and SCOTUS are likely to grind along and keep knocking down the partisan lower-court judges’ attempts to stop every good thing that is happening, from immigration enforcement to the economy to pushing back on the discrimination and trans lunacy embodied in DEI ideology.

That’s not to say that everything is going great.  The DOGE effort was noble and much-needed, but has lost a lot of momentum with Elon’s departure.  While Trump’s tariffs push has provided some useful leverage in trade negotiations in some cases, and they have not produced the disastrous results predicted by many conservatives, their indiscriminate and impulsive deployments have hurt some of our allies, and caused some economic uncertainty and problems for many Americans. 

I think that SCOTUS is likely to trim Trump’s sails a bit with some forthcoming tariff opinions, and as a strict constructionist, I think that probably should happen.  I think it will be good for the economy, and it might also provide an opportunity to Trump to recalibrate, and hopefully make more congenial trade deals with our allies, while saving the punitive tariffs for our enemies, especially China and Russia.      

But highlights aren’t just instances when we do well.  Highlights also happen when our opponents shoot themselves in the foot, and defecate on their shoes, and step on rakes, and many other metaphors of hilarious self-injury that I cannot think of right now.

And boy, have the Dems been on a self-injury tear this year!  The TDS has settled over the deep blue areas of the country like the plague hitting Europe in the 14th century, and the results are likely to be just about as devastating.  The insane, insurrectionist and violent resistance to ICE enforcing our immigration laws are already starting to bear fruit.  That hag of a judge in Wisconsin who helped an illegal felon temporarily evade ICE has just been convicted, and is providing a good example for the rest of the left-wing partisans in robes.

The flight of American citizens from blue states and cities to red ones is only accelerating, as the horrific results of leftist governance – high taxes, high crime, insufferable micro-managing Karens of both genders – are destroying the quality of life in those blue areas.  Ken Doll Newsom and Brandon Johnson and J(um)B(o) Pritzker continue to afflict the citizens of CA and IL respectively, and Mamdani’s incipient carnival of stupid is about to give NYC voters what they asked for – good, hard and sans lubrication.

As sick as I am of feckless RINO GOPers – thanks for not redistricting, Indiana Republicans! –Congressional Dems have reached new record lows of approval, around 18%!  And they’re still steering into the skid of stupidity.  They’re championing felon illegals, scamming Somalians, and drug-running Venezuelans.  And now they’ve set the Epstein files to blow up in their faces, too.  After four years of having total control over those files and doing nothing with them, they now look like morons as they clamber onto their high horses and accusing Republicans of doing slowly and bumblingly (fact check: true) what they themselves refused to do at all!

And as the newest tranches of Epstein material comes out, it turns out that there is no new damage done to Trump, while Bill Clinton is turning up in a whole photo album of hot tub and pool pics with every female who is not his Clydesdale-ankled harridan of a wife.

Or, as a Babylon Bee headline put it, “A Surprising Amount of Epstein Photos are Turning up in the Bill Clinton Files.” 

Of course the saddest political event of the year was the murder of Charlie Kirk and its aftermath.  It’s fitting that that is the clearest dividing point of 2025, because it became a focus of wildly different reactions that showed the essential nature of so many on both the right and the left.  For the vast majority on the right – and most independents too, I think – the brutal and evil nature of Charlie’s death was rightly repulsive.  So far, at least, it has produced a groundswell of support for Turning Point USA among young people, and a spur for many to turn to (or return to) Christian faith.  

For a tiny sliver of the right, including creepy racist Nick Fuentes and newly creepy anti-Semitic dunce Candace Owens and sadly deteriorating Tucker Carlson, Kirk’s death has provided a jumping-off point for conspiracy theories and mean-spirited attacks on innocent friends and associates of Charlie.

And for the left, his murder unleashed a tidal wave of shockingly ghoulish glee.  They have revealed the ugly reality of their political hatreds in a way that will hopefully inoculate many citizens from wanting to vote for them in the near future, at least.

Coming up next: my hopes – and a few worries – for 2026.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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An Update, and some Christmas Recommendations (posted 12/23/25)

I wanted to post one more column before Christmas, both to update everyone on the CO Facebook page and to make a few recommendations. 

First, the update.

I spoke with CO last week, and he reminded me that FB suspended the CO site on November 21st, which means that this past Sunday marked one month since that particular day that will live in infamy.  He was hoping that the suspension would be temporary, and if so, that a one-month suspension would be a nice, round number, and that the site might be back up on December 21st or 22nd. 

Since it is now December 23rd and the page is not back up, we all know that that didn’t work.

So we’ve now got two options, which I first mentioned a month ago: either re-create a new Facebook site and hope as many followers from the original site manage to find us there, or create a new site somewhere else. 

Right now, the “somewhere else” option is looking better, if only because the fecklessness of Facebook doesn’t seem fixable.  If we manage to launch another FB site, what’s to say that they won’t shut us down again in another week, or month, or year?  They still have not even responded to CO’s many questions.

Questions like, “Why were we suspended?” and “How long will the suspension last?” and “Specifically how can we avoid getting suspended again in the future?” and “What the hell?”

So CO asked me to do two things:  1. Talk to my whiz kid youngest daughter about alternative options for a new site.  And 2. Ask those of you who followed us here from the CO FB site if you are someone — or know someone — who could assist us in launching a new site. 

What we’re looking for is a kind of quasi-news aggregation site like our original FB page, where CO and a regular cast of characters can link to stories of interest and also put up regular columns, posts, and discussion topics, which all of CO nation can then carry on lively discussions about in the comments.

As opposed to a personal site like my WordPress page that you are now reading – thank you, by the way! – we’re looking to recreate the sense of community that CO inadvertently created on the old FB page, rather than just one person’s site featuring only his own idiosyncratic thoughts, no matter how much of a lovable, hilarious curmudgeon/genius he may be.   (I’m just reporting what I’ve heard, people.)

CO mentioned the Instapundit.com page as one model of what he’s thinking of, and we’re also considering a Substack page, too.  I’ve asked my daughter to look at those models, and she and I will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of those – and any other options she can think of – right after Christmas.    

In the meantime, if any of you have the knowledge to help us set up a site like that, please contact me and let me know that you are willing, and I may reach out to you when we have a plan.  When my brother-in-law saw that the page was suspended, he quickly found and bought the rights to CautiousOptimism.org. So we have a domain name.  (Someone is apparently squatting on the name “CautiousOptimism.com” and wanted $6800 for it!  So that was a hard and quick pass.)

One way or another, our goal is to get a new home for Cautious Optimism up and running in 2026!

Now, on to Christmas. 

I hope you all are either planning to hunker down for a quiet and cozy Christmas at home, or else that your travel plans are made and will come off smoothly.   We’re staying at home for Christmas, and my two brothers-in-law and their wives are coming to us.  Our youngest is home on break after her first semester at Exeter, and our oldest and her husband will be at their home in Denver for the holiday, though they’ll be coming to see us in early January. 

As a Christian, this is always a joyous time of year for me, but it’s always tinged with a little melancholy, as I know it is for others.

My dad died 11 Decembers ago, and that’s always in my mind.  Regular readers know that my mom’s Alzheimer’s has progressed to the point that we had to put her in a memory care home in August.  I was up to see her for an early Christmas last week, and will be up again in a few weeks, and while the disease is robbing her of a little more of herself each week, she still recognizes us, and her default setting of “pretty happy” is still holding.  We’ve been able to focus on the moments with her, and she has been content in the present. 

Which works out, since all she has now is the present, along with a lot of disjointed memories, which are almost all happy ones.  But knowing that last Christmas was the last one she’ll ever spend at home is tougher on us than on her, I think.   

I’ve been listening to a mix of old carols, and some newer versions, too.   You can’t go wrong with brass quartets or quintets doing the former, and a quirky prodigy named Sufjan Stevens has a lot of eccentric but well-done versions that have become favorites – O Come O Come Emmanuel, Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming, Once in Royal David’s City, etc.

I’ll also watch It’s a Wonderful Life, though I’ve seen it so many times that I’ll probably just fast forward to a few specific scenes.  (I can’t get enough Jimmy Stewart, and Donna Reed at the height of her powers approaches the wholesome yet giggity-inducing beauty of my smokeshow wife.) 

And it wouldn’t be Christmas for me with at least one or two versions of A Christmas Carol.  There’ll always be a place in my heart for the two old classics I saw as a kid – the 1938 version with Reginald Owen as Scrooge, and the 1951 with Alistair Sim.  The George C. Scott one is good too, but I grew up with the oldies, and they formed the template for me.  But don’t sleep on the 1999 version, in which Patrick Stewart nailed it. 

And while I know that everyone has seen the movie versions, if you haven’t ever read the Dickens novel, you owe it to yourself.  If you’re going to be traveling and would like the audio version, the late, great Frank Muller did a great reading of it, which you can find anywhere for free. 

Finally, this last month without the CO Facebook page has made me more aware than ever of how much that site has meant to me.  I’ve made friendships there, and found a rare place where good faith debate and civil behavior still actually exists online.  And the chance to write columns has allowed me to mock some idiots, share some thoughts and lower my blood pressure and achieve catharsis on a regular basis.

I can’t thank you all enough for reading and responding, and I am really looking forward to finding a way to launch a new version of Cautious Optimism in the new year!

And I can’t think of a better way to end than with part of the toast that the Charles Dickens character gives at the end of the movie about his writing of A Christmas Carol (called “The Man Who Invented Christmas”):

“I wish you all many, many happy Christmases, and friendships, and great accumulation of cheerful recollections… and heaven at last for all of us!”

Merry Christmas everybody!

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The World can be a Pretty Predictable Place, When it Comes to Mamdani & Aussie Jihadis (posted 12/22/25)

As strange as the news often is, the world usually makes sense to me. 

When a crime is committed, it’s usually by someone you most expect.  If it’s a crime of violence, the perp is usually a young male with a long list of prior arrests.  If an arrest involves a female who is throwing a cringe-inducing fit and making a scene, she’s going to turn out to be someone who hates her dad, would never vote conservative, and whose hair is not the color God made it. 

If you tell me you saw a guy walking down the street with prominent face tattoos, I’ll have two initial questions.  “Was he Jelly Roll?” and “Was he Mike Tyson?”  If the answers are no, that guy is in a gang, or has done time in prison, or has a very low IQ.  Often, it’s all three.

If you tell me that there was a high-profile, violent crime and that the perp reportedly screamed something right before all hell broke loose, I’m going to tell you what he did NOT scream: “Jesus loves me, THIS I KNOW!”  or “That government is best which governs LEAST!”  or “This is MAGA COUNTRY!”

I am too respectful to all groups to say what the person was almost certainly screaming.  But it’s exactly what you are thinking right now.  And it rhymes with, “Ballahu Bakbar!” 

That is just a round-about way of saying that I have not been surprised by the start Mamdani is getting off to in NYC, or by the evil shooting on Bondi beach in Australia last week.

A few weeks ago Mamdani was looking to appoint someone “to advise him on the criminal justice system.”  And he picked… wait for it… a convicted criminal! 

Because of course he did.  After all he really doesn’t like cops, and one of the first goals he articulated was to release as many criminals from New York jails as possible.  In September, he criticized Eric Adams for putting more criminals in jail, and said that he’d like to release enough criminals to get down to 4000, or maybe 3700 people in jail.  He didn’t say anything about releasing innocent people, or those wrongly incarcerated; he just wants more of them out and on the streets.

And if that’s your goal, why not pick a criminal to advise you on crime? 

The convict in question is named Mysonne “Dirty” Linen.  (Okay, I gave him the middle name.  But it was sitting right there, and it would take a more mature man than me to not swing at that slow pitch over the middle.)  And he did 7 years in prison in the early 90s for armed robbery. 

I know what you’re thinking.  Even though it was thirty years ago, and NYC hadn’t descended into the extreme soft-on-crime insanity in which it is now wallowing (and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!), how many robberies would a criminal have to commit to end up doing 7 years?

The answer, according to the reports I read, is “a string.” 

Perfect! 

But after getting some blowback about that call, Mamdani realized he needed to get his act together, appointment-wise.  So he did an extensive search, and on December 17th he announced with great fanfare his pick of Catherine Almonte Da Costa for Director of Appointments.  Because as he said on that day, this is a “new era,” and Da Costa is “joining us…to bring top talent into this administration.”

Annnnndddd…she’s gone. 

That’s right, the New Era lasted ONE DAY!  Because when he did his extensive vetting, Mamdani missed something that the Anti-Defamation League came up with in 27 seconds, i.e. a bunch of 2011-12 social media posts from Da Costa opining on “rich Jewish peeps,” and “money hungry Jews smh.”  (For those who don’t know social media abbreviations, “smh” doesn’t mean “stupid moronic hater,” but “shaking my head.”)  She also pointed out that “the Far Rockaway Train is the Jew train.”

Gee, who could imagine that a guy who tied himself in knots to avoid rejecting the Jew-hating genocidal credo “globalize the intifada” would pick an anti-Semite to put in charge of picking his appointees?

Buckle up, NYC, because you’re about to get what you voted for – good, and hard, and glazed with incompetence, and served with a side of anti-Semitism and whitey hatred.

Even less surprising than the motley crew of miscreants and boneheads with whom Mamdani is staffing his administration, is the story behind the vicious attack on the unarmed Jews celebrating the first day of Hanukkah on Bondi beach in Australia.

Let’s connect the obvious dots.  First, think through your rolodex of religions – start with Amish and go all the way through to Zoroastrians – and I think I can guess which letter you’re going to stop on.  (I worked my way through college as a mentalist, billed as the “Mysterious Martini.”  You may have seen me with Johnny Carson, when I was telling audience members the name of their first childhood pet, and which card was theirs.)

So I’m going to say…the letter “M.”  And no, I’m not talking Methodist, or Maronite. 

Another detail that makes sense: in a country that prides itself on not letting citizens have guns to protect themselves:

1. One of the few guys in the country who was allowed to have guns – and he had 6 of them, enough for him and his evil son to split the murdering duties! – was a Muslim immigrant whose son had earlier been investigated for ties to ISIS, and who had an ISIS flag in his car when he went out to kill Jews.

(Just for comparison, when my dad and I went out to do some father-and-son stuff, it was to fish, or to have a catch, or to go to a pancake breakfast at our church.  But not the jihadi family.  They bonded over their hatred for the Juden.)   

2. It took forever for someone to show up and stop the killing.  Reports I’ve read say that the shooting went on for at least 10 minutes, and possibly for 15.  Just sit and look at a clock for 15 minutes.  Maybe you could start the timer when the first boat hits Normandy Beach at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, and try to get a rough count of the number of American soldiers the national socialist soldiers shot during that 10-15 minutes.  That’s an unimaginably long time.

For one more comparison, a year or two ago some jackass went into a Church of Christ in Texas on a Sunday morning and started shooting worshipers.  His kill count was not 15, with more than 40 injured – as was the case in “gun free” Australia – but 2.  That’s a result of the killer in America opening fire in a decidedly NOT gun free zone, where the first return shot was sent his way in…I am not making this up…6 SECONDS!   

Jack Wilson was in church that day, and he was strapped, as they apparently say in Church of Christ circles.  He fired just one warning shot into the murderer’s head, and it was very effective.  The killer fell to the floor and quickly stopped breathing, presumably so that Jack Wilson wouldn’t shoot him anymore.

Another detail: “at least 2” church members drew weapons, but Jack was the first guy on target.  And that was enough. 

Are you listening, Australians?

On the bright side, many people have pointed out that the guy who jumped the second terrorist and took his gun was also a Muslim, and we should appreciate that.  And I agree.  It’s good to remember that many Muslims are good people, even as we can acknowledge that Islam is not compatible with a Western democracy. 

But we also shouldn’t fool ourselves, because no sooner than we start singing the praises of the Muslim hero who jumped the gunman, we are reminded of a larger problem: all those Muslims back in jihadi-land, and how they reacted.

The Daily Mail reported that the story of his heroism was printed in the Ramallah News, which is apparently one of the most popular news outlets in “Palestine.” 

Annnnnddddd…the majority of “Palestinian” Arabs “overwhelmingly condemned him for saving Jewish lives.” 

Unexpectedly!

And before the soft-headed amongst us think that it was just one or two idiots in the comments section, NOPE!  Of the thousand comments on the article, 75% condemned the hero, with lots of wishes that the bullets had killed him, and promises that Allah would “chop [him] to pieces.”  They basically sounded like a bunch of malevolent Democrats after Charlie Kirk was murdered.   (And before, too!)    

In their defense, they were following their religious worldview, which commands them to make war against unbelievers, teaches that Jews are the worst enemies of their faith, and etc.

And you don’t have to be the Mysterious Martini to predict their actions, which are consistent with that worldview.  And it’s a worldview very different from Jack Wilson’s, who said that the killer who came to his church “put me in a position that I would hope no one would have to be in.  But evil exists, and I had to take out an active shooter in church.” 

Yes, you did.  And well done.

As for the Aussies, I think they might be too far gone.  After watching their police cower and do nothing for a very long time while jihadi murderers shot into a crowd of helpless, unarmed people, their prime minister immediately vowed to…toughen their gun laws even more, to ensure that the next time some law breaker attacks, the law-abiding citizens will remain defenseless. 

I’d suggest he look at the areas in America where the gun laws are the strictest – like Chicago, and DC, and Baltimore – and look at the death toll in those open-air firing ranges, except that he’s obviously allergic to facts and logic.   

How bad is it?  Cassie the Wonder Dog – my great Aussie shepherd – has asked me to file paperwork to renounce her breed.  From now on, she is going to identify as an American shepherd.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Ilhan Omar & Wajahat Ali are both Terrible (posted 12/16/25)

I’m posting two days in a row because I’m making a quick trip up to Tennessee to see my mom and sister, and wanted to get a mid-week column in before I leave. 

Today I’d like to point out two of my least favorite, most ungrateful immigrants. The first is Ilhan Omar.  If you’ve been following the news, you already know that she’s pretty terrible.  She hates the Jews (unexpectedly!), and she’s not too fond of Americans; she often refers to Somalis and Somalia as “my people” and “our country” in her speeches, which are often delivered in Somali.  (Yay, assimilation!)

She also pretty clearly married her brother in order to facilitate his fraudulently immigrating to this country, which has been an open “secret” in Minnesota for many years, and is now well known throughout America.  So can someone explain to me why she has not yet been charged with that crime? 

I’m no law-talkin’ guy (Lionel Hutz reference for $100, Alex), but I think that she and her brother would be pretty easy to convict on that charge.  Especially since her only valid defense might be to insist that no, no, she really did want to bang her brother, conjugally speaking.  And once such a conviction was secured, couldn’t she and her brother both be denaturalized, and then deported back to the land toward which she apparently has the kind of patriotic feelings that she clearly doesn’t have toward America?

If any of my regular readers are lawyers, please comment on whether denaturalization would be an option in her case.

The latest infuriating Ilhan-ian news involves the massive Somali-immigrant-driven billion-dollar fraud against American taxpayers that is only starting to be investigated.  This scandal has everything: scamming housing funds; scamming Medicaid funds; scamming food program funds; making up fake autism claims that are then treated by fake therapists during non-existent therapy sessions. 

And the rancid cherry on this malfeasance sundae is that at least some of the stolen funds were sent overseas to fund the barbaric Somali terror group Al-Shabaab.  It’s a perfect storm of terribleness all the way around.  And Omar was up to her neck in the scandal.  Because of course she was.  

She’s been in smiling photographs with many of the bad actors who had prominent roles in the fraud, and she held multiple parties at a restaurant owned by one of the lead scammers, who has since been convicted for stealing millions.  As has one of her own staffers.  In fact, she introduced the bill that led to $250 million of the $1 billion (and counting) fraud.

Her specific bill set up a program to provide meals – phantom meals, as it turned out – to schoolchildren during covid, and which has continued since.  (Is there ANYTHING that went wrong in America in the last 5 years that didn’t owe at least some debt to the blossoming scams involved in covid?)

Imagine her surprise when, during an interview with normally-Democrat-boot-licking Jake Tapper, Tapper stumbled into a moment of accidental journalism.  He actually asked a straightforward question: “Why did fraud in Minnesota get so out of control?”

Poor Ilhan must have been struck in the cranium with a 2-by-4 shortly before the interview, because she gave an answer that was half Que Mala Harris and half Karl Childers (the slow main character from Sling Blade):   “I think what happened, um, is that, you know, when you have these, kind of, new programs that are, um, designed to, uh, help people you are often times relying on third parties to be able to facilitate, and I just think that a lot of the COVID programs…were set up so quickly that a lot of the guardrails did not get created.”

Got that?  “The guardrails” were not created, because Omar’s cronies were in such a big hurry to start turning fake meals into real cash that could be used to buy machetes for Al-Kabong, or whatever those Somali jihadists call themselves.

If you’ll allow me to engage my Sam Kinison filter… [begin Kinison] “Gee, Ilhan, you know who probably should have created some guardrails before proposing a bill?  YOU!   YOU WROTE A DEFECTIVE, GUARD-RAIL-LESS BILL, YOU BROTHER-BANGING FRAUDSTER!!  OH! OHHHH!!”  [end Kinison]

Good lord!  If Tapper had more than one good question per year in him, he could have followed up by asking why we didn’t see that scale of fraud in any other state, perpetrated by any other group.  But alas, Tapper tapped out.

But it’s not like we can’t see through her lame answer.  She is basically victim-blaming the taxpayers of Minnesota for being too gullible, and too easy for crooked Somalis like Ilhan and her friends to rip-off.  The Feds better put Omar on the hot seat in their investigation of this massive fraud, and they better charge her with her own immigration fraud, at least!

Speaking of hateful ingrates in America, you’ve probably never even heard of Wajahat Ali before.  And if that’s the case, lucky you. 

He’s a Pakistani-American leftist Muslim, and he really hates white people, America, and American culture. 

Unexpectedly! 

Ali is sort of a male, Muslim version of Joy(less) Reid.  In fact, it was on Ali’s Substack podcast that Joy Reid famously said that white folks, “Made this country into a slave hell.   They can’t originally invent anything more than they were ever able to invent good music.”   (Shhhh, don’t tell Joy this, but every slave brought into this country was bought from a black slave trader in the slave hell of Africa.  Or that Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, Bach, the Beatles and Tom Petty are all as white as Liz Warren.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But that’s Joy; she’s room-temperature-IQ stupid.  She’s stupid enough that even the other mouth-breathers at MSNBC finally said, “Wow!  She is too stupid for this network.”

And it turns out that ol’ Wajahat is not a lot smarter.  I mean, he’s smart enough to have an evil plan, but not smart enough to keep his evil mouth shut about it.  He’s dumb enough to say the racist part out loud!  In a recent podcast, it was as if he were trying to embody very ugly stereotype of hateful, racist, entitled immigrants, even though his parents were the immigrants – and criminals convicted of fraud, it turns out – and he was born in California. 

Lest you think I am exaggerating, here are some excerpts from his podcast, none of which I am making up: “You [white people] lost.  The mistake that you made is you let us [brown people] in in the first place [in 1965].  There’s a bunch of us, and we breed.  We’re a breeding people.” 

He brags about chain migration, and returns to the theme that when America let people like his parents in, we lost, because we are culturally inferior.  “Your story is a sh*tty story filled with misery….Your music sucks.. All your culture sucks.”

As creepy as Wajahat is, we can still learn something from him. Because as the old saying goes, “even an evil moron is right twice a day.” 

No, wait.  That’s supposed to be a broken clock.  Because even a broken clock can be an ungrateful, hate-filled moron.

Oh never mind.  The point is, Wajahat is not completely wrong.  Because it was a mistake to invite in millions of people like his parents starting in the mid-1960s, and an even bigger mistake to elect the late Joe Biden to let in many millions more in just 4 years. 

Not for the racist reasons that Ali cites. Because he’s a racist a-hole.  But for cultural, political, and economic reasons.  By now the folly of opening our borders (and our welfare system) to millions of people who don’t want to assimilate, and who bring with them the dysfunction and incompatible cultures of their home countries is abundantly clear. 

And though we shouldn’t need a brainless hater like Ali to broadcast this folly far and wide, we should make sure his message gets out there, to the revulsion of average American voters. 

And if you travel in our country a lot, and if you should ever meet Ali in person, and he says, “I’m Wajahat,” you should ignore him. 

Because if he is honestly trying to start a conversation with you, you should snub him because of what an awful racist troll he is.

If, on the other hand, he is trying to indicate that he is choking on something – probably his own bile – you should not intervene. 

Instead, kneel down in front of him, while he continues to choke out “wajahat…wajahat” and say, “I would do the Heimlich on you and save your life, except that I want to respect your political and religious hatreds.  And since Henry Heimlich was an American, and a white guy, and Jewish, I know you despise him, and wouldn’t want to be saved by any of our sucky white American culture.” 

“So…bye bye, Wajjie!”

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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RIP Rob Reiner, and (hopefully) Gavin Newsom’s Political Career (posted 12/15/25)

I missed writing my Friday column due to a combination of seasonal busy-ness and a computer crash.  But I’ll try to make up for it this week.

However, just as I was finishing this column, the news came out that Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death in their home, with their troubled son as the prime suspect right now.  That is such a tragic way to go, and they and their surviving family members should be in our prayers.  He was 78 and she was 68.

Although younger people might not know it now, since Reiner’s career had been quieter in recent years, he was a very talented director.  Consider this consecutive string of 7 films: Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985) (with John Cusack, one of my favorites until his hateful politics made him unwatchable for me), Stand by Me (1986), the Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Misery (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992). 

There are directors who made more great films, but has any director had a better 8-year run than that, with no interrupting duds?

Yes, his politics were atrocious IMHO, but that amounts to nothing now.  A couple is dead, and their son is in some ways worse than dead, and I hope that no conservatives will dance on Reiner’s grave the way so many leftists danced on Charlie Kirk’s.   RIP, Rob and Michele Reiner.     

Having said that, please allow me to make an awkward transition to my previously written musings about one of my favorite lefty foils…

Gavin Newsom has long been a slick and soulless politician about whom the mockery almost writes itself, and if current polls are correct, we’re likely to have to see a lot of him over the next three years, at least. 

His flaws run the gamut from the ridiculously phony and trivial to the deadly serious.  Among the former are his ability to be transparently shameless.  Who can forget the time two years ago when – after years during which every Dem pol in California had claimed that the homeless problem was complicated, and intractable, not to mention intractably complicated – Xi Jinping was due to come to San Francisco for a meeting with Biden.  

Annnndddd…Newsom bulldozed the homeless and their smelly tents into the bay, and pressure-washed the whole place in one day.

And in a press conference, Ken Doll said the imbecilic part out loud: “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.’  That’s true…because it’s true.”

Thanks for explaining that for us, Hair Gel!  In a sane city in a sane state, proving that you had let your city devolve into a hellscape of dirty syringes and feces, peopled by hordes of dope-sick vagrants deemed “too crazy” for the Manson family – when you could have cleaned it up anytime you wanted! – would be enough to get you run out of town on a rail.

But this was San Francisco, California.  So…keep up the good work, Cap’n!

Speaking of “Ken Doll,” you all probably saw the recent pic of Newsom being interviewed, during which his legs were very oddly crossed.  Even the MSM commented on it, referring to “what some observers called a ‘testicle-crushing’ position.”   Of all the things to criticize Newsom for, that can’t be in the top 1000!

But it’s still funny.  In his party, which can’t tell the difference between men and women, and testicles seem to be purely hypothetical, it probably wouldn’t hurt his chances.  (By the way, I saw Hypothetical Testicles open for Phish a few years back.  Killer show!) But if he wants to win a presidential election – in a country where half of the population can pretty easily define both “man” and “woman?”  

If I were his lawyer defending him and his “testicle crushing” posture, I’d cite a hoary old law school cliché: “Assumes testicles not in evidence.  I call for summary judgment.” 

In the “more serious” category of Newsom’s sins is one that he shares with the leftist elite all over America: the bedrock belief that they are entitled to as much of your money as they can get their greedy hands on, by any means necessary.

When Newsom became governor in 2019, California had a $21.4 billion budget surplus. (Actually, it was $14.8 billion, but Gav “projected” less growth in Medi-Cal health spending on the poor to inflate that number.  Spoiler alert: Nope!) After five years of spending like a meth-head with a trust fund, Newsom had produced a $45 billion DEFICIT.

So he admitted the error of his ways, and forced austerity on California’s finances.

HA! I kid because I love! 

He actually raised taxes on the most productive and rich Californians to keep the good (i.e. insolvent) times rolling.  And financially successful people immediately started to leave the state. 

So he said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake!  I have to reverse course before all the rich people are gone and the state’s finances collapse!”

HA!  I’m like Lucy with the football with these outlandishly false claims.

What Newsom actually did in late 2023 was to try to add to his “wealth tax” an “exit tax” that would hit rich Californians who tried to leave.  Anyone with a “worldwide net worth” over $50 million would have to give 1% of that to California, if they moved out.  But Newsom’s commie cronies were very thoughtful; if a wealthy guy fleeing CA had assets that weren’t easily converted into cash, he could pay in increments over many, many years.      

When many Dems in congress have attempted to push a similar national wealth tax, it has always been shut down on the grounds that such taxes are blatantly unconstitutional.  But states have their own constitutions, and several big-spending blue states have been toying with the idea of wealth taxes.

Fortunately, there were still enough sane people in California that Gavin’s first try didn’t work; his exit tax bill died on 2/1/24.  But Comrade Hair Gel was not deterred, and now that smart people have kept fleeing his state and his deficits have kept ballooning, he has proposed the “2026 Billionaires Tax Act,” which would impose a one-time 5% tax on individual wealth exceeding $1 billion. 

The painful new twist – not unlike the one that Newsom would feel if he had testicles and sat like that – is that this tax would be retroactive!  Though it mentions 2026 and uses 2026 net worth numbers, it would apply to billionaires who had foolishly lived in California at any time in 2025. 

Jonathan Turley summed it up thusly: “So you cannot hope to flee…at least with your wealth intact.  It is a penalty for those who stayed too long hoping that rational minds would prevail in California.”

It’s hard to imagine that there are many super-rich Californians who are foolish enough to still be holding out on that particular vain hope.  But if there are, I’m guessing they are the types who were either Democrats themselves, or else were hoping to be able to feed the commi-gators so that they’d be eaten last.  In which case, they deserve what they’ve got coming.

As for the rest of us, it’s pretty obvious that a retroactive law – whether about taxes or anything else – is immoral.   So I hope that Gavin’s not expecting any help from red states when it comes to collecting his exit tax.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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A Salute to Federalism, from the Free State of Florida (posted 12/9/25)

Well, it’s Hump Day everybody, and you know what that means.

No, Bill Clinton, THAT’s not what it means!  It’s just Wednesday.

But this Wednesday, I’ve got a transitional column for you.  My last three columns were a departure from my usual juvenile humor and mockery of imbeciles in the news, as I discussed checks and balances in our government, almost like a reasonable adult would.

This Friday, I’ll be back within my wheelhouse, snarking away at some Dems who have really out-done themselves in dumb-assery lately. 

But today I’m going to celebrate one aspect of checks and balances – federalism – based partly on my own experiences. 

Regular readers may remember that I was born in Illinois in the 19th century.  (Small-town north-central Illinois in the 1970s was essentially the same as in the 1870s, but with cars instead of horses, and Cheap Trick on an 8-track in my ’72 Gran Torino.) I spent my first 24 years in Illinois, before I moved to Florida to get my PhD in English, and meet and close on my smokeshow wife.  Since then, I’ve lived in the Free State of Florida. 

So I can compare my beloved (but tragically blue) home state of Illinois to my adopted (red) home state of Florida.  (I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could.)  I will also include another blue state – New York – for a more apples-to-apples comparison to Florida.  And I’ll consider these three states in two areas – taxation, and size and cost of state government – starting with the latter.  

Size and Cost of State Government

One of the core tenets of conservatism is a preference for a smaller government.  One famous saying that encapsulates the idea – variously attributed to Locke, Jefferson and Thoreau – is “that government is best which governs least.”  Accordingly, red states tend to have smaller state governments, while blue states have much larger ones.  That tendency certainly applies to Florida, Illinois and New York. 

There are different ways to calculate state government employment, which can be affected by issues such as how full-time vs part-time workers are counted, how seasonal variations and seasonal workers are counted, etc.   But for an apples-to-apples comparison, the following stats all come from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank:

Florida’s population is 23.4 million residents, and it employs 117,300 government workers.    

New York state’s population is 19.9 million, and it employs 262,700 government workers.

Illinois’ population is 12.7 million, and it employs 143,000 government workers.   

Those numbers work out to a stark difference in per capita government workers: Illinois has 89 workers per 1000 residents, New York state has 76, and Florida has only 20!

The three states’ respective budgets naturally reflect the size of their work force.  This year, Illinois’ budget is $55.2 billion, New York’s is $245 billion, and Florida’s is $117 billion.

So Florida has only about a quarter of the per capita government employees that New York has, and only about a fifth of those that Illinois has, and thus needs to spend way less to maintain its government services.

It would be one thing if the citizens of Illinois and New York could point to a superior quality of life that they’re getting for all of the extra money they’re spending on their government.  Are  their streets safer, cleaner, and better maintained, and their kids better educated, and their public services more responsive and better-performing than those in Florida? 

Nobody believes that.      

Florida and New York are the third and fourth most populous states respectively, and thus provide the closest comparison.  And New York, despite having 20% less population, has 44% more state employees, and a 48% higher budget than Florida!

Taxation

The leaner and more efficient state government in Florida makes itself felt in its much smaller tax burden.  Florida has no state income tax.  Illinois has a flat 4.95% income tax rate.  New York’s income tax ranges between 4% and 10.9%; the level for middle income earners (between $89-215K per year) is 6%. 

Those varying tax rates make a huge difference over an average working life!  As an example, take someone who earns an average of $50K per year (inflation adjusted) for 40 years.  In that time, she would have earned $2 million, and if she lived in Illinois (with a 5% state income tax rate), would have paid $100,000 in state income tax that a Floridian would have been able to keep and invest.   

It’s hard to calculate the value of that extra $100K of earnings after those 40 years.  At least it is for me, as an English major.  (I’m sure it would be a snap for big brains in CO nation like CO, Chris Silber, and others.)  But I do know that money invested pre-tax in an investment that makes around 10% — just a little over the average of the S&P these last 40 years – doubles every 7 years.  Of course, that $100K wouldn’t have been received in a lump sum 40 years ago, but parceled out in yearly increments.

Like I said, I can’t figure it out exactly.  But I think it’s a safe conservative guess that if that money had been mostly invested in a decent mutual fund over 40 years, it would at least amount to around $250,000 now, and probably a lot more.  And that is just one economic consequence of living in a no-income tax red state vs. Illinois for an average working life: a quarter-million extra dollars of net worth!

Other economic disparities are just as consequential.  Property taxes are usually higher in blue states, as well as the costs of starting a business, or building a home.  I know that the amount of property taxes my relatives in Illinois pay – adjusted for the value of the house – are nearly 4 times what I pay in Florida.  I was able to buy fixer-upper rental houses with less red tape and cost, and they’ve appreciated way more than the same places in Illinois would have.  When it came to college for our kids, we’ve been able to pay less for a higher quality education than we would have in Illinois. 

Of course, money isn’t everything.  Crime rates, homelessness and illegal immigration also impact quality of life.  And red states generally perform better in those areas, too.  We support our police, and they tend to catch more criminals, who spend more time in prison for their crimes.  Unexpectedly!   

Results

Migration patterns demonstrate the utility of federalism, which allows Americans to “vote with their feet” by moving from states who have favored higher taxes, larger government, and consequence-free crime, and to states who have taken the opposite approach.

The experiments have been going on in the little laboratories of our states all over the country, and the results are in.  And once again, New York and Florida provide instructive examples. 

In the year 2000, Florida’s population was around 16 million.  By 2015 it had grown to just over 20 million, and now it is around 24 million.  By comparison, in that same quarter-century, New York state has grown by less than a million, and Florida overtook it as the third largest state.  And the trends are diverging even more, with Florida gaining momentum, and New York actually losing 300,000 people over the last 5 years!

I’m not arguing that population growth is always and everywhere an unalloyed benefit.  If you ask most long-term Florida residents, they would probably tell you that our quality of life wouldn’t suffer if we had a few million new residents, at least.  

Especially when they bring with them the voting patterns that produced the results that made them flee New York, Illinois or California in the first place!

But voluntary, net population growth is by definition a metric of perceived success.  People move to places they think are better than where they are moving from, and they flee places they think are worse.   

That’s been going on for a very long time on the national level, with immigrants flooding into America from all over the world.  And now it has been going on for a while within our country. 

Am I saying that we should build a wall around our red states and start vetting refugees from blue states as thoroughly as we should have been vetting refugees from Somalia, Venezuela, and Jihadistan? 

I’m saying we should have that conversation.  

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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