Martin Simpson

Good News From Marco, and Iran, and Our Airports (posted 4/6/2)

In keeping with the Cautious Optimism tradition, I thought I’d start this week with some positive, feel-good stories.

I’ll open with one of my favorite members of the Trump administration — Marco Rubio – on one of my favorite topics – deporting foreign bad actors.

In this case, the bad actors are numerous children or other relatives of the murderous mullah-acracy who has been running Iran and oppressing Iranians for almost half a century. In many cases, these people have been allowed in legally, but don’t have American citizenship; in other cases, they are naturalized citizens. Marco is heading up an effort to require the former group to leave the USA, and to denaturalize (where possible) the later group, and send them packing as well.

When many leftists hear this, their first instinct is to rend their garments and take the side of the foreigners, just as they did in the case of the wife-beating human smuggler with a final deportation order, Kilmar.

But when conservatives — or others with the common sense God gave most members of the animal kingdom – hear this, they are happy about it. Because they (and we) can easily go back to first principles: no foreigner has a right to come to America.

American citizens have total control over who enters our country and under what circumstances. And though we may allow foreigners who have been properly vetted to temporarily come as tourists or on business trips, or possibly to study, we are under no obligation to let them in, and they cannot force us to admit them, or give them a path to citizenship if we determine that that is not in our interests.

Just as we were under no obligation in the 1940s to allow entry to Hitler’s nephew Johnny Hitler (or Bob Himmler, Tucker Heydrich, or Candace Goering), we don’t have to welcome the children or relatives of the mullahs, ayatollahs or jihadis from Iran.

You may remember General Qasem “Scowlin’” Soleimani, the murderous Iranian big shot who led the Quds Force. (Or, as the NYT, WAPO and PBS probably called him, “an avuncular Teddy Bear of a man with an easy smile and a heart as big as the great outdoors.”) Trump transitioned him from “terrorist mastermind” to “goop in a smoking car” via one well-aimed missile in 2020.

Well it turns out his niece Hamideh and grand-niece Sarinasadat have been living it up in America, while still celebrating attacks against US soldiers, denouncing America as the “Great Satan,” and supporting the designated terror organization IRGC. And their immigration history makes them poster-wenches for the Democrats’ suicidal disdain for America.

They both came here in 2015 – Hamideh on a tourist visa and Sarinasadat on a student visa. A judge granted them asylum in 2019. While I’m no immigration lawyer, I don’t think any tourist visas allow you to stay here for 4 years, and a student visa would normally expire after the four years it takes to get a college degree. And asylum claims are supposed to be very difficult to prove, requiring that you are being persecuted by your country’s government and would be in great danger if you went back.

But Joey “Gaffes” Biden granted them both green cards in 2021 anyway.

Because of course he did.

When Hamideh applied for citizenship last year, she had to disclose that she’d been back to Iran at least 4 times in recent years. Now, if I can turn on my Sam Kinison filter, I’ll explain what a legitimate asylum seeker would never do…

“SHE’D NEVER GO BACK TO HER HOME COUNTRY FOUR FREAKING TIMES! OH!! OOOOOHHHHHHH!!!”

Aaannnnnddddd… last Friday Marco had both Soleimanis arrested, and prepared to send them back to Iran. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “I hope your boat doesn’t run into any Iranian mines when you sail back through the Straits of Hormuz, ladies!”

Speaking of ungrateful foreigners, a federal judge just delivered some more good news to Marco (and us) when he dismissed a lawsuit by a German citizen against Rubio, filed because he thought his visa application was taking too long to be granted.

But this is no traditional German citizen, whom you might expect to be named something like Hans, or Franz, or Tucker Heydrich. No, this guy was named Raheel Sadiq.

Of the Munich Sadiqs, no doubt.

Raheel was upset that his visa application was 9 months old, and still hadn’t been acted on. He demanded that the US government be forced to make a final decision, claiming that the wait “inflicts ongoing human and economic harm.”

I would refer to the aforementioned first principle: no foreigner is owed the opportunity to enter America. But I would also agree with Raheel; he should get a quick and final decision.

And that decision is, “How about NO?” And you’re welcome, because we’re stopping you from “the ongoing human and economic harm” you have been suffering while you wait.

While we’re discussing Iran, I couldn’t forget the main good news story of this past week, which is our military’s heroic rescue of the downed American airman whom the Iranian IRGC were trying desperately to capture.

Thanks to his badassery (despite his injuries, he climbed several thousand feet into rugged hills and hid himself in some kind of crevasse) and that of the American military and Israeli intelligence, the bad guys were held at bay while our guys located and exfiltrated him to safety.

Shot down on Good Friday and rescued on Easter — I love it when the good guys win!

Finally, there was also good news stateside last week.

You can usually identify stories that are good for the country by how little MSM coverage they get, and that proved true about Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports to address the long lines and delays caused by the Democrats shutting down the TSA.

Leftists whined about how terrible that was going to be, yet it proved to be a great success. ICE agents actually succeeding in greatly shortening the lines, and an ICE agent saved a choking baby in one airport. They also made a mockery out of hysterical leftist warnings about how ICE would be “kidnapping” innocent American citizens because they had brown skins, etc.

One Dem congressman actually predicted that ICE would be killing people in airports. Another one noted that these ICE agents – helpful, friendly, accepting thanks from travelers – weren’t the same kind of ICE agents who killed the protesters in MN.

Sane people might point out the subtle difference between those who have had negative encounters with ICE – i.e. illegals who were legally detained because of their crimes, and violent leftists and vehicular homicide enthusiasts who justifiably lost a game of FOFA with law enforcement – and law-abiding Americans who behaved themselves and got along just fine with ICE.

My favorite illustrative “ICE in the airports” story took place at LaGuardia, when a self-beclowning, leftist, beta-male white guy confronted three black ICE agents. (Another statistic that the MSM will not report: ICE agents are much more likely to be brown or black than the general population, just as the violent anti-ICE weasels are disproportionately white and far left. Unexpectedly!)

The male Karen had his phone out and recording as he sallied forth on what he must have believed would be an incident memorializing his brave heroism. In his best theater-kid form, he walked up to the agents and started peppering them with questions in an effort to rile them up. As they ignored him, he persisted, finally saying, “I see you are walking in a group. What’s up?”

I know. You’ll be shocked to hear that the ICE agents somehow managed to resist rising to that brilliant bit of rhetorical bait. So then Soy Boy brought out the big guns, asking,“You guys are the foot soldiers of a fascist regime, right? Is that not what it is?”

At that moment, the agents who had been trying to keep straight faces finally broke. A guy in the front smiled, but the guy behind him couldn’t help it, and covered his mouth and started to laugh as all three of them grinned at each other.

That did not please the social justice warrior, who kept demanding, “Is that funny? Do you think that’s funny?” After a few more feeble attempts, he finally gave up.

But he went straight to social media, where he failed spectacularly at trying to save face by cosplaying as a revolutionary tough guy. (And both “tough” and “guy” are doing a lot of work in that sentence.)

Here’s his post, which I promise I am not making up: “They say speak truth to power, so I did just that. Confronted a fascist to his face today at LaGuardia. His reaction? A smirk. This is what we’re up against—but we aren’t staying silent.”

Good lord! How can that possibly be the flex that he clearly thinks it is? First, I’m pretty sure that an actual fascist, when “confronted to his face,” could probably come up with a response more forceful than a smirk. (Like maybe a rifle butt in the stomach, or a bullet in the head.)

Second, when you’re trying to demonstrate the evil menace of your opponent, whatever precedes “That’s what we’re up against!” has got to be a hell of a lot more daunting than “a smirk.”

Here, I’ll give you a few examples:

“As we manned our positions far below the American planes, they dropped thermonuclear bombs that melted two cities and instantly killed hundreds of thousands of our citizens. That’s what we’re up against!”

“We had barely gotten into our foxholes in Bastogne when we faced a ferocious bombardment and frontal assault by the most battle-hardened and experienced armored divisions in the entire European theater. That’s what we’re up against!”

No matter how hard he tried, the best that that poor, deluded fool could do was to get three cool brothers to laugh in his face.

Because I know my Thomas More, I already knew that, “The devil, the prowde spirite, cannot endure to be mocked.”

But until last week, I didn’t know that the same was true for ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, low-T leftist Donna Quixotes.

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While I Suffer, the MSM Continues Their Idiocy (posted 4/3/26)

This has been a disorienting month for me. My pinched nerve has gotten me out of all of my normal routines, and replaced them with new ones that I really look forward to discontinuing soon!

Thankfully, my PT has decreased the amount and persistence of pain I was experiencing in the first 2-3 weeks of March, but juggling even milder pain meds has resulted in inconsistent sleep and a lot of fuzzy head syndrome. (Or, as it’s known in medical textbooks, “Democrat Cognition Syndrome.”)

For the first time since I was probably 5 years old, I’ve gone a little over a month without reading a book! I’ve also missed pretty much all church services in the five weeks leading up to Easter, which doesn’t feel great.

On the other hand, I’ve been keeping up with some sporadic reading on current events and politics, and I’m really glad to have been able to keep writing columns here, even if at a slower pace. I’ve also had the chance to watch some old movies and new-to-me tv series. I discovered Mr. In-Between, a dark comedy/crime series set in Australia, which shares the kind of admirable/repugnant, morally compromised protagonist that made Breaking Bad and the Sopranos so compelling.

Seeing clips of the dead-on-arrival, virtue-signalling Oscars spurred me to revisit some movies from when movies were worth watching. (I know: I’ve achieved peak old guy vibes. Get off my lawn!) I watched The Searchers, starring a young John Wayne, a Monument Valley setting, and John Ford’s directing; The Man Who Shot Liberty Vally Valance (If Jimmy Stewart ever made a bad movie, I can’t remember it); and Rio Bravo, starring an older John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and a young Angie Dickinson. (If anybody was ever cooler than Dean Martin – dressed in black, his cowboy hat down over his eyes while he crooned away with Ricky Nelson as they waited for a shootout – I don’t know who that would be.)

But amidst all of the jarring changes I’ve experienced the last month, there has been one comfortingly consistent aspect of our national life. And that is the egregious dishonesty of our legacy media, advanced in no small part by a ubiquitous double standard.

I’ll just hit two recent examples among many: the third No Kings protest, and the coverage of our month-long, one-sided war against the violent dictatorship of the mullahs in Iran.

The No Kings street theater protests actually do follow in the American tradition of the rowdy airing of grievances against our politicians. Unfortunately, the grievances in this case do not seem to be tightly tethered to reality. (Which is the most polite way I can say that.)

For example, senator Crazy Mazie Hirono accidentally said the accurate part out loud, when she claimed that, “Donald Trump is not, never will be, and has never been a king.”

Ummmm… yes. Exactly. So what is the purpose of this expensive, tedious, time-consuming third iteration of a protest? To prevent from happening what you’ve admitted has never happened, is not happening, and will never happen?

Okay. Well done then, I guess?

Of course we didn’t need an emotionally dysregulated, low-IQ, elected garden gnome to tell us that. Because anybody who knows anything about the history of kings and fascist dictators knows that none of these protests could have ever taken place if there were actually a king or dictator in America.

If you want to test that, quickly rattle off a list of all of the people in human history who ever marched in the streets insulting their king or dictator – even if only once or twice, let alone thrice! — and suffered no consequences whatsoever.

I know. That list is as short as the “days of honest work done” on Bernie Sanders’ resume.

Also, you know how reluctant I am to raise the issue of double standards. But do you remember when Obama proclaimed a dozen times that our immigration laws would not allow him to just declare that illegals now have legal status, because that would be unconstitutional, and that he’s not a king? And then…one month lay-tair… when he declared that all the DACA kids are now legally in the country?

Or remember when Joe Biden dictated that he could use OSHA to force millions of Americans to take an experimental vaccine, and that he could declare that American citizens with no school loans could be forced to pay back billions in school loans taken out by students, who would no longer need to pay them back themselves?

In fact, remember when Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment – which had been rejected decades before – was now the 28^th Amendment to the constitution, because he said so?

Obama and Biden both behaved much more like kings than Trump ever has, and the Left cheered them on. But now that Trump is trying to use much more modest Executive Orders to do what the voters elected him to do, it’s time to break out the frog costumes and ugly papier mache heads, and rail against imaginary monarchs.

Speaking of ugly heads, many hypocrites on both sides of the aisle have raised theirs to criticize every aspect of the Iran war, out of motivations ranging from reasonable to flimsy to hysterical.

For the record, I think there are aspects of our actions in Iran that are worthy of questioning and criticism. But those are being swallowed up and dwarfed by the number of specious bleatings on the subject.

We opened the war with a strategic master stroke, killing around 40 of the top power players in Iranian politics on a Saturday. The first leftist complaint I saw claiming that Iran had turned into a “forever war” appeared on the following Monday. Because if this war could drag on for 72 long hours, who knows how many decades it might last!

A few days later, the IDF took out the Iranian second string as they gathered to elect the next ayatollah.

From those first few days, many on the left were joined by a handful of sad sacks on the right (I’m looking at you, Tucker and Candace!) in a doom scrolling cacaphony of epic proportions. Despite Trump’s insistence that this would be a very short action – and his track record of just that kind of strike – critics started extrapolating the worst-case scenario of a near-eternal quagmire.

“What if Iran rebuilds its nuclear weapons program during the next 172 months of constant warfare?” “How many millions of American soldiers will die after we put 8 million boots on the ground for the rest of the Trump presidency?” “What about $10 a gallon gas? Won’t somebody think of the $10 gallons of gas?!!”

By the way, and speaking of double standards, check out this head-to-head comparison of headlines when gas under Biden finally got down to $4 per gallon, vs. when it just reached $4 under Trump, as presented on the site Twitchy:

CBS headline yesterday: “With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it now costs almost $145 to fill up a Ford F-150 pickup truck.” A user pointed out that even this factual stat was deployed to put the worst possible spin on it, by using (but not mentioning) that the F-150 in question was the extended range version, which has the biggest gas tank, and that the fill-up cost would depend on that F-150 being absolutely bone-dry beforehand.

Meanwhile, a CBS story from July of 2022 was headlined thusly: “Gas prices could soon drop to $4 a gallon, Biden energy adviser says. After hitting a record high in June, prices at the pump have fallen for more than 30 straight days.”

Got that? The article hides the fact that gas is still MORE than $4 per gallon, and it doesn’t even predict that gas WILL drop in the future to $4, saying only that gas “could” drop to that level. (Yes. And Joe Biden COULD step agilely over a sand bag on stage. But the smart money is on him tripping over it, falling, and snapping one of his fragile, bird-like leg bones.) And did you notice the source for this weak prediction? Not an unbiased expert or analyst, but a “Biden energy advisor.”

Obviously, the latter article is intended to give Biden political cover for the increased gas prices caused by his policies, while the former article is intended to do maximum damage to Trump.

Consider these more accurate phrasings of the two headlines:

“Biden employee claims that Biden-caused high gas prices might drop to $4 a gallon at some undetermined point in the future.” vs

“Analysis finds that gas prices have temporarily risen to Biden-era levels, predicts they will drop again when the Iran conflict ends, possibly later this month.”

But my favorite bit of laughably biased “journalism” comes from the Bulwark this week. (You may remember those TDS sufferers from early election night, when they were crowing that Que Mala would defeat the Orange, Hitler-esque convicted felon in a landslide. Or from several hours later, when they wept openly and blamed sexism and racism and American stupidity for the thrashing of the Cackler.)

(Cue the sad trombone, and distribute the word salad of defeat, garnished with the sour vinaigrette d’ regret.)

This article, which I swear I am not making up, was written by Jonathan V. Last. (The “V” is not for “victory,” and “Last” is where he ranks on a list of insightful commentators.) The title is, “America Lost. Iran Won. Trump Shat the Bed.”

Did I mention that I did not make that up?

Here’s the opening of the article: “It is true, as the president said last night, that the Iranian navy and air force have been almost eliminated. It is also beside the point. The Islamic Republic has never been – and — never wanted to be – a naval power. They have never made extensive use of air power.”

Then why did they spend billions on all of those ships and planes, J. Last? Just to give the IDF and America a few hours of target practice?

Good lord. The double standard question writes itself:

Can you imagine if the roles had been reversed? If Iran had hit us with a first strike that killed Trump, Vance, half of our chiefs of staff and cabinet members, and our congressional leadership? And then if another strike a few days later killed the remainder of our military leadership, the cabinet, and most of congress, while also sinking most of our navy and destroying all of our air force?

And then, for the next 30 days, Iran systematically destroyed our 5000 most crucial military and infrastructure targets, and then blew up the Golden Gate Bridge as an afterthought?

Do you think that after all of that, little Johnny Last would be writing about how, “Iran Lost. America Won. The Ayatollahs Shat the Barn They Share with their Most Attractive Goats?”

Remember that, the next time Tucker or some other MSM empty head brings you latest update from Iran.

Have a good Easter!

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Feel Good Terrorism Story to Start Your Week Off Right (posted 3/30/26)

What better time to share a feel-good story than a Monday morning?

Today’s tale takes place in the charming country of Italy, which has had a long-standing problem with leftist anarchist groups who are always looking for ways to make life in their country worse.

Sound familiar?

No story about Italy would be complete without some great Italian names. So buckle up for some sweet ones that steer directly into maximum Italian-ness. And if you can read this list aloud without instinctively raising your right hand and bobbing it in the air, palm up, while touching all four fingers to your thumb, you’re no paisan of mine:

Retired judge Otello Lupacchini. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi. Deputy Minister Antonio Tajani. Jailed anarchist figurehead Alfredo Cospito.

The anarchist Cospito is doing 20 years for a series of bombings aimed at companies and government officials. His group and others like it have kept the judge and the ministers busy trying to prevent mass casualty attacks. During the recent Winter Olympics, anarchists were tied to three sabotage incidents, including a railway fire.

Similar to our home-grown leftist bad actors, the Italian anarchists have indulged themselves in dishonest sloganeering. A spate of graffiti on the theme of “war against the oppressors” plastered in a Rome metro station in mid-March had counter-terrorism police on edge.

An Italian couple named Alessandro Mercogliano (53) and Sara Ardizzone (36) – with those names they should have been a tenor singing Nessun Dorma and a painter in Venice, respectively –were instead fans of anarchist Alfredo Cospito, with a kind of Bonnie and Clyde flair.

Mercogliano had once been convicted on terrorist-adjacent charges, but was later acquitted. Ardizzone had been investigated too, and connected to charges of incitement. At a preliminary hearing, she had proclaimed herself an enemy of the Italian state.

Unlike the many AWFLs in Minneapolis, Portland and other lefty enclaves, she was attractive. But like them, she was a narcissist, and romanticized her bad cause with self-aggrandizing flattery. During her trial, she described herself and Mercogliano as “partners in life and in the struggle,”

She also displayed the same double standards and hypocrisy as antifa, defending violent protest. She excused her own side’s violence to the court, claiming that, “There’s an enormous difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressors: the former follows an ethical code, the latter, none.”

Sure they do, sweetheart. And when ICE enforces our laws they are the Gestapo disappearing American citizens, and when violent thug protesters act like fascists they are anti-fascists.

Anyway, as this romantic couple were pursuing their wholesome dream of being enemies of their own country, they got the fantastic idea to build some bombs. They wanted to use them against the police and a defense contractor.

Annndddd… it turns out that they were as good at making bombs as they were at thinking about politics. So on March 22^nd, as they were working away in a cottage on the outskirts of Rome, they must have touched the red wire to the green wire or something, because they blew themselves (and the cottage) into fettucini with thatched roof garnish.

Unexpectedly! But hilariously!

At least some good came out of their idiotic and well-deserved deaths though, because the explosion caused their anarchist cell (or clot, or coven, or whatever collective noun applies to anarchists) to engage in some serious self-reflection about whether they should turn away from their violently nihilistic leftism.

HA! I kid.

Leftists’ political radicalism is always blowing up in their faces, and they never seem to learn from it. And they didn’t in this case, either.

Their supporters put out a press statement praising them as martyrs and calling them “a shining example,” according to Italian media. “Sara and Sandro died in action, they died fighting,” the statement said.

If by “fighting” you mean “sudden onset molecular disassembly.”

We should create a Go Fund Me to buy a bunch of dynamite to send to their anarchist collective, and then just sit back and watch as entertaining explosions go off in romantic cottages all over the Italian countryside.

In the meantime, Rest in Pieces, Sara and Sandro.

Thoughts and prayers…for the cottage.

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Two Dem Governors Demonstrate Leftist Folly (posted 3/27/26)

Today I‘ve got two stories to kick off your weekend. I started drafting them last week, but between the pain meds and the PT and the necessity to write about the passing of creepy Paul Ehrlch, I‘ve been slow to post on these two tales. I hope they don’t seem like old news now.

The common theme in these two stories is that they both illustrate the seemingly intractable wrong-headedness of the left as embodied by the governors of the two biggest blue states, NY and CA.

First, NY governor Kathy “I’ll get you and your little dog too” Hochul’s latest move doesn’t just say the quiet part out loud. It screams the quiet part through a bullhorn.

In 2022, in the first year of her malevolent governership, she displayed the kind of supremely confident ignorance that one only achieves by living in a leftist bubble for her entre life. Fully caught up in the TDS that has swept through her party like STDs through a party thrown by Slick Willy and Hunter Biden, she was full of urine and vinegar as she threw down the gauntlet to any non-leftists who lived in her blue state domain.

To wit: “We’re fighting to bring government back to the people and out of the hands of dictators. And we’re here to say that the era of Trump… is over. Just jump on a bus and head down to Florda where you belong okay? Get out of town! Get out of town!”

And the applause of a dim-witted crowd filled the air.

Then, as the Sponge Bob meme would have it… Four… Years…Lay-tare…

The Margaret Hamilton (look her up) of the Empire State is reaping what she sowed. And it is hilarious.

A couple of weeks ago she gave an interview in which she came crawling back with her broom tucked between her legs and pleaded with the rich New Yorkers she had scorned way back in ‘22.

Sorry, “tail.” I meant with her tail tucked between her legs.

Or did I?

When discussing the giant pile of money she wants to spend on useless and counter-productive social programs — Because: New York liberal – here’s what she had to say:

“I’m being conscious of the fact that I need people who are high net worth to support the generous soical programs we want to have in our state. There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks, if you want to be supportive… but maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home. Because our tax base has been eroded.”

“I have to look at the fact that we are in competition with other states who have less of a burden on their corporations and individuals. Remote work changed everything. There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan and in NY state, and they were captives to our state, and they were going to stay. We saw that that’s not the case on Wall Street, businesses looking at Texas, they’re not going there because they have a nicer governor, that’s for sure. They’re going there for the tax rate. We have to be smart about this.”

Let’s savor the key details, shall we?

Her definition of “patriotic” is being willing to allow greedy politicians who hate you to confiscate more and more of your earnings so that they can be “generous” (aka “wasteful”) with those earnings.

She apparently thinks that financially successful people who were smart enough to follow her snotty commands to “jump a bus out of town” are dumb enough to succumb to the equivalent of an obnoxious solicitor at your front door, entreating you to leave the Free State and go back to New York so that you can once agan be treated like a pimp treats his hookers.

The strangest part is that she actually gets the most important parts right. She correctly realizes that NY State’s tax base has eroded. (Unexpectedly!) She correctly points out that NY is in a competition with other states, and that high taxes are a burden.

She even admits that New York prefers to treat rich people like their slaves. (She uses the term “captives.” But you say “potato,” I say “Gulag Archipelago.”)

She comes to the right conclusion – “They’re going there for the tax rate” – and even clearly states the logical next step: “We have to be smart about this.”

Annnddd… then she falls at the last hurdle. Because if leftists could accept reality, follow logic, and be smart, they’d be conservatives.

Meanwhile her co-religionist commie Mamdani is stepping on the same reality rakes as Hochul. He’s been in office for 20 minutes, and already the combination of his extravagant promises and NYC’s existing ocean of red ink are pummeling him with the groin kicks of financial reality.

Consider: last year NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person, and they’re due to cross into six figures per vagrant this year. And the result?

More hobos than you can shake a crack pipe at. If you could shake a crack pipe. Which you can’t. Because one of the expensive schizophrenic junkies has already pushed you into the path of a subway train, squashing you as flat as the line on Joe Biden’s latest brain scan.

So suck it, Nepo Baby Jihadi and Wicked Witch of Botaxia!

Speaking of spending tons of taxpayer money on eye-wateringly stupid boondoggles, how about that West Coast, featureless, plastic-crotched Ken Doll, Gavin Newsom?

Sure, for pure wastefulness he can’t top the multibillion-dollar high-speed railroad to nowhere, or the gusher of red ink devoted to phony hospice care centers tucked away in every strip mall, P.O. box and mop closet in the greater Los Angeles area. But his latest brainstorm might take the Tinfoil Medal – because there’s no gold left in the Golden State to make medals anymore – for the staggering stupidity of its conception and execution.

I‘m talking about the now-infamous “Wildlife Crossing” (i.e. highway overpass) that is supposed to allow cougars and butterflies to safely transit over the 10 lanes of the 101 in southern Cal.

I know. When I woke up one day last week thinking about this story, I suspected that it was the product of last night’s Oxycodone-created dream. But no. This thing is real. And it’s spectacular.

Let’s start with the details. Haircut launched the project with great fanfare in 2022, saying that the taxpayers had already committed $52 million for the project, and that another $10 million would complete it in 2025. It had the grand name of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC).

Why does a highway overpass require a fancy name and an acronym, you might ask?

Because you’d have to be an absolute moron to pay $62 million for a freaking overpass! Fortunately for Gav, absolute morons are thick on the ground in deep blue California.

Annnndddd… so far the state has spent $114 million of the original $62 million budget, and the overpass is still not finished.

If you’ve got a calendar handy you can confirm that it is 2026. And if you’ve got a calculator handy, you can confirm that 2026 comes after 2025. And also that $114 million is almost twice as much as $62 million.

If you’ve never seen lefty government at work, and if you’ve never read my columns before, you might think that this is some kind of elaborate joke. But you probably have done both, and thus you know that it is no joke.

Let’s consider how many layers of graft and insanity it takes to explain this story.

First, we’ve all seen thousands of overpasses in our lives, and none of them are an engineering feat to compare wth the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or AOC’s juicy booty (her words not mine). (I had to throw a gratuitous reference to AOC in here, because I haven’t taken a shot at her in too long.) It’s a slab with a ramp at both ends, some concrete and some rebar and maybe a railing on both sides if you want to get fancy.

So what’s so special about this overpass? Does it have a climate-controlled bubble over it, made of space-age materials and featuring elaborate lighting and sound systems calculated to attract and relax cougars and butterflies? Are the railings coated in gold and encrusted in diamonds?

Nope. It’s just an overpass. The only thing that sets it apart from every other overpass in Christendom is that it’s got some dirt and a few plants dumped onto the concrete slab of the overpass. Because everyone knows how cougars and butterflies hate to burn their sensitive feet walking on concrete.

And before you can ask, yes, butterflies can fly. It’s right there in their freaking name! So why on earth would they tramp across an overpass when they’ve been given the gift of flight and could easily flutter safely above the cars and U-hauls streaming along the 101 on their way out of the failed state of California, bound for a sane red state?

Obviously they wouldn’t, and they don’t. And CA Dems are idiots for saying such a thing. But this isn’t the first time they have made such an imbecilic claim. If you look back to one of my very first columns – archived on this site in late 2016 or early 2017 – you’ll find me reporting on one of the Democrats’ absurd objections to Trump’s proposed border wall. They said that it would interfere with the migration of hundreds of species…including many bird species.

As I mentioned at the time, the Dems were actually asking us to believe that long lines of birds – who could easily fly right over the wall – would instead clomp across the scorching desert before bonking into the wall, falling over, and starving to death. All because of the Orange Man’s Satanic hatred of all creatures avian.

If Eric Swallwell were here, this is when he’d say, “What about cougars? I’m pretty sure they don’t have wings. And if they don’t, that means they can’t fly over the highway safely! Why do you want to kill cougars?!”

And I’d say, “Very good, Eric. Now can you go away while the grown-ups are talking?” And I‘d look around to find the closest Asian cutie in the area and point to her and say, “Ooh, look at her! I‘ve heard that she has a crush on you despite her being a 9 and you being a 3, and that her turn-ons are low IQs and flatulence, and that she has no ties at all to the CCP. Go get her boy!”

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Cougars.

It turns out that a study of local fauna – because you can’t build an overpass without paying a fauna-ologist six figures for a comprehensive local fauna study – suggested that there were around a dozen endangered cougars in the area around the overpass.

Whch means that you could much more easily build a top-notch cougar brothel, capture the local cougars, teach the females to wear French maid outfits and lap dance, then put them together and let nature take its course. Or – hear me out – you could just dose their food with cougar viagra, and in a year or four you’d have enough new cougars to release the original dozen back into the wild, and trust them to look both ways before crossing the road, while knowing that the species was safe.

(Full disclosure: I flunked my class in cougar mating, gestation and litter size – my majoring in English and minoring in chasing girls and playing sports really cut into my time spent on cougar fertility studies — so that’s only a rough guess. And I’m not sure whether male cougars technically have laps. So that lap-dancing cougar brothel might need to be Plan B.)

One other hilarious detail which I am not making up is that one side of the overpass where the cougars are is a wilderness area. Not far from the other side of the overpass is a bunch of subdivisions. Right now the people living in those subdivisions only have to worry about their neighborhoods being plagued by illegal gangbangers, mounds of trash and syringes, and recidivist criminals and junkies who keep getting re-released there. Oh, and earthquakes and preventable fires that will definitely not be prevented.

So look at the bright side, blue voters. Once that wildlife crossing is completed, you and your children will likely be mauled or eaten by cougars long before God’s wrath or the lesbian DEI-hire Fire Chief can kill you by earthquake or fire, respectively.

And that’s why the story I read about this was headlined, “The Most Gavin Newsom Story Ever.”

Yes, the whole thing is absurd, and Californians who keep voting Dem deserve to have leftist politicians confiscate their money, pile it up in giant mounds, and then set it on fire. This ridiculous uncompleted overpass has been under construction for 4 and a half years, and will likely cost $200 million, assumng it is ever finished.

By comparison, there was another overpass in CA that took 4.5 years to complete, and for only $35 million. Of course, that was in 1930s dollars. But then again, it wasn’t just an ugly, squat overpass. It was a full-sized bridge, and it was quite attractive compared to the ugly AWAC.

It’s called The Golden Gate Bridge.

Great job, California!

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Remembering an Obnoxious Academic (posted 3/23/26)

I originally meant this column to be about three very foolish ideas of three very foolish leftists: Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and Paul Ehrlich. But as I started writing about Ehrlich, I realized that the column would be too long. So I’m saving the two blue-state governors for next time.

Paul Ehrlich died at 93 on March 13^th. He may have been the most pure distillation of a leftist academic in the world, except that (as far as I know) he wasn’t obsessed with racism and sexism. But he covered pretty much the rest of the leftist catechism. He was arrogant and sure of his superior knowledge, no matter how many times over how many decades his ideas were decisively (and humiliatingly) proved wrong.

He hated humanity and was the kind of “environmentalist” — I use the scare quotes to distinguish moral and legitimate environmentalism from the ignoble politicized variant of it – who saw human beings as a cancer on the planet. His leftist politics immunized him from suffering any damage to his reputation even as he was continually proven wrong; in fact he continued to receive plaudits and awards throughout his career.

Ehrlich was a biologist, but his career was marked by politicized “science.” His most famous and influential work, “The Population Bomb (1968), was full of pessimistic predictions, beginning with its opening sentences: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Among other things, Ehrlich predicted that, “England will not exist in the year 2000; the US would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980; smog in LA and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year,” and that Americans born after WWII wouldn’t live past 50.

Think of him as Al Gore with an academic credential: often wrong, but never in doubt.

Ehrlich made one mistake that most academics never make: he actually tested his ideas in a high-profile way in the real world. In 1980, economist Julian Simon offered a public, $10,000 bet: Ehrlich’s leftist theories said that all natural resources were going to become scarcer, and therefore more expensive. Simon was a conservative and therefore a generally (some might say cautiously) optimistic capitalist: he predicted that human ingenuity and a free market would make the price of commodities go down.

So Simon offered to let Ehrlich choose any five resources that he wanted, and Ehrlich could bet that in ten years, those would be more expensive. Ehrlich took the bait, and after insulting Simon’s simplistic ideology, chose five metals as the resources he was most certain about: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.

Annnnnddddd… Simon won the bet in 1990, when all five metals were cheaper.

The way Ehrlich handled his loss was straight out of the leftist handbook: he lied like crazy, insisted that his ideas were still correct, and insulted Simon’s intelligence for years afterward. Simon, enjoying his victory and happy to needle his arrogant opponent, offered to renew the bet, double or nothing, for another 10 years, on any other resource of Ehrlich’s choosing.

Ehrlich was at least smart enough to turn down that offer, and he did actually pay the bet off. Luckily for Ehrlich, though, he could easily pay the bet off, because he had just received a “genius” grant for $450K.

Because: of course he did. Despite, again, being wrong about everything!

When I was still a professor, this kind of thing drove me crazy. No matter how many times lefty theories and predictions failed, the lefties were not deterred, and persisted in their folly. There’s a conservative joke about this, which has a leftist condescending to a conservative, saying, “I know your ideas work in the real world. But do they work in theory?”

Examples abound. The lefty religion of Marxism had massive appeal before it was first put into real-world practice in the USSR in 1917. In the following century it was tried over and over again, all over the world. And failed every time, producing poverty, famine, environmental devastation, brutal police states and at least 100 million deaths.

So naturally, you can look at any course list in liberal arts departments all over the country and find hundreds of courses touting Marxism. And you can find old nitwits like Bernie Sanders and young nitwits like AOC and hundreds of politicians like them, all confidently vowing that THIS time their lefty schemes will work perfectly.

People have been fleeing socialist/communist countries for freer market countries for over a century. Productive Americans have been leaving leftist blue cities and states for red states for several decades.

And still, like Paul Ehrlich, the Dems are convinced that their theories are right.

To the day he died he never admitted any errors in his work, and if you read a legacy media obituary of him, you’ll be slogging through a miasma of covering up and intentional point missing to lionize a lefty co-religionist.

For example, the subhead of his New York Times’ obituary says, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

Got that? “Premature!” For 60 years he confidently predicted the opposite of what actually happened. But the NYT asks us to just give it another century or two, and he’ll be proven right.

Ehrlich was sure that even in the first world, life spans would get drastically shorter, and millions would starve. Annnnddd… we’re living longer than ever, and one of our big problems isn’t starvation, it’s obesity.

He was a huge fan of abortion, and left the door open for coerced sterilization and abortion, because he was sure that our skyrocketing birthrates would bring disaster. Annnnddddd… almost all first-world nations have a below-replacement birthrate.

It would be harder to be more wrong, more often than Paul Ehrlich was.

But the left is giving it their best shot.

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Everybody’s an Expert on Iran Now (posted 3/20/26)

After another week of dealing with the painful pinched nerve – my MRI showed that it wasn’t a bulged disc and I have my first PT session scheduled on Monday – I’ve been keeping up with the news, if only in a distracted way.

It’s been fascinating to watch the polarized reactions to the war in Iran. First because on all sides the talking heads are doing what they always do when a big international story happens: pretending that they are experts on an area that they couldn’t have found on a map a week ago.

It happened during Iraq and Afghanistan – when blow-dried morons who didn’t know Sunnis from sushi, and couldn’t tell the Taliban from either – lectured us on how popular Saddam was because of all of the giant murals of himself all over Baghdad. It happened again in Ukraine when everybody started plastering blue and yellow flags on their social media to show how dedicated they were to a country they knew nothing about.

And now it’s Iran’s turn. Democrats who have screamed for years that the Ayatollah must be deposed and Iran kept from gaining nukes are suddenly bemoaning a “forever war” (which they declared on Day 3!) and raving that Trump has no plan to deal with the IRGC. Or is it the RICG? Or possibly the GRIC?

I‘m no better than most. I knew what the Strait of Hormuz was, but if pressed I‘d have guessed that Kharg Island was the capital city of the Klingon Empire. But I can’t get too down on myself after watching Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar criticizing Trump’s military strategy, when you know that those crones don’t know the Strait of Hormuz from the Gay of Juarez. (Who could be the most popular rent boy south of the border, for all they know.)

Even I know enough to know that the critics who are wailing that we’re losing the war are full of it. We took out forty of their top leadership in the opening minutes of the action, and then blew up another three or four dozen of the “Council of Experts” several days later, when they were in the act of the choosing the next ayatollah, who was atomized before he could take the oath of office.

We took out their air force last year, we sank their navy in 10 days, and about 90% of their missiles and drones have been used or blown up. The IDF lit up their top three remaining military leaders in the last several days. Can you imagine how far down the depth chart they have to be right now?

Well, you don’t have to. Because some guy who was in The Teheran School of Cosmetology a month ago is now writing threatening press releases claiming to be from the newest Ayatollah, who – I Schiff you not – is made out of cardboard. Literally.

How am I supposed to write satire when the Supreme Leader of Iran is indistinguishable from something out of a South Park episode?

I don’t want us to end up in a drawn-out war in Iran either, but I think that even with all of his flaws, Trump is not going to let that happen. After his foreign policy successes – taking out Soleimani and al-Baghdadi; ending a half-dozen wars and getting the Israeli hostages released; taking out Iran’s nuke sites in an evening; snatching Maduro out of Venezuela in two hours; getting Rosie O’Donnell to leave the country – I think he’s earned enough trust for us to let him cook.

If this war lasts for over 4-5 weeks, we can always get our dresses over our heads and run around shrieking like hysterical Democrats then.

One bit of good news that the MSM didn’t cover – unexpectedly! — was that lots of everyday Iranians are calling in the locations of IRCG road blocks and gatherings, which then get a quick drone strike. The story suggested that the calls were to some Israelis, which sounds like just the kind of thing those bad-asses are known to handle well.

In that same vein were reports that some Iranian Kurds were positioning themselves just over the border, ready to go in and start killing some Ayatollah fans. The Kurds have always been known as tough fighters; I think of them as the Rooftop Koreans of the Middle East.

Would the subsequent movie about the adventures of the Kurds wreaking havoc behind Iranian lines be called “Inglorious Bas-Kurds?” It will if I can get the financing together.

I do hope that we have a plan to get lots of small arms to a lot of motivated Persians who would happily use them to secure their own freedom the good old-fashioned Second Amendment way.

Our military is doing such a great job devastating the regime and destroying their ability to project power outside of their own borders, but we don’t want to get stuck trying to install a new regime or get involved in their internal politics. (Other than teaching them the one indispensable rule that we have already taught them: don’t follow in the footsteps of the ayatollahs and make us come back in and level your whole government again.)

The best way to avoid that seems to be to give the Persian non-jihadist majority the ability to win their freedom and establish their own non-genocidal government.

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Good News & Bad News Stories (posted 3/16/26)

It’s Monday, so let’s get through the Bad News first:

You may have noticed that last Friday was bland tending toward grim, since I didn’t write a column that day.

Though I am loath to mention this – since it goes against my stoic disposition and my “tough as a two-dollar steak” nature – I am still plagued by the pinched nerve that has affected the left side of my neck and my left shoulder, and rendered my left arm largely useless, except that it is setting me up to never again take a functioning and pain-free left arm for granted again, once I get past this.

How weak is my left arm right now? So weak that I’m not sure I could win a fist fight with Imhotep Pelosi, if she was disciplined, and kept jabbing and moving to my left. (Not that I’m not willing to try it, if anybody happens to known her trainer, and would like to set-up a pay-per-view. I have the feeling that if I could catch her with just one right jab, she’d go down like a laundry basket full of burial wrappings. And even if she managed to catch me with a shot to my jaw, I think there’s an even chance that her desiccated mummy fist might crumble into powder. Then it wouldn’t be long until the announcer called out, “Down goes Botox! Down goes Botox!”)

Whenever anyone gets sick for more than a few days, time seems to slow down. Right now, it feels to me like that last time I was pain-free, both of my girls were toddling around the house being adorable little prodigies, and Cassie the Wonder Dog was still Cassie the Wonder Pup. But who’s counting?

Okay, I am. And today is day 18 with not much relief. But the good news is that I’ve got an MRI scheduled this afternoon. I’ve already had an x-ray and CT scan, but we just need to confirm that it’s not a bulged disc, and then I’ll start getting PT that will hopefully do the trick.

In the meantime, I’ve been juggling steroids, muscle relaxants, Gabapentin, tylenol, lydocaine patches and Oxycodone. I’ve been careful to use as little as possible of the latter, since I have a healthy fear of addiction. Because my nightmare scenario would be to start down the slippery slope that ends in me becoming a noxious Hunter Biden figure, using the fortune I gain from crooked deals with Chicom corrupticrats to buy duffle bags full of coke which I would then sniff off of the bare behinds of Eastern European hookers.

And I’ve checked, and my smokeshow wife is pretty strongly opposed to me doing that. So…yeah.

Anyway, while I’ve been struggling through a personal situation that would kill a lesser man, our country has also been going through some rough spots, too.

For example, while it’s still early, it still looks like the GOP will almost certainly lose the House in November. We shouldn’t give up, but by the same token, we should be moving forward with urgency on every front, to get as much done in the next 10 months as is humanly possible.

So far the GOP isn’t acting as urgently as it should. After a lot of pressure, Jon Thune is apparently going to put the SAVE Act up for a vote, which I was hollering about in my last column.

Unfortunately, he seems to be doing so half-heartedly, and he’s not going to use the so called “talking filibuster,” i.e. forcing the Dems to stand up and blab on the Senate floor, which would force them into terrible optics, and produce the raw material for many GOP ads at the least.

Also, I’m frustrated that we’re getting ourselves into a familiar situation with weaker than necessary candidates, this time in Texas. John Cornyn has been too much of a RINO, but instead of a disciplined conservative candidate, Texas voters have chosen Ken Paxton to go into an expensive run-off with Cornyn.

I’m not a Texan and don’t know Paxton well. From what I’ve read, he talks a good game and is something of a Trumpy figure, but I’ve also read that he’s been embroiled in several scandals that will hurt him in a general election. I’m hoping that the MSM may have exaggerated those scandals. Maybe any readers here who are from Texas can enlighten the rest of us re: Paxton?

Turning to good news, whichever GOP candidate wins the Texas primary will be facing James Tallerico, who – hard though this may be to believe – might be a worse candidate than Jazzy Crockett! He’s apparently created hours of great videos that expound his idiosyncratic theology. (How’s that for a polite adjective?)

He believes that God is non-binary, that Jesus is a big fan of abortion, and that we should leave our borders wide open to any and all illegals. I can’t see that playing very well in 2026, especially in Texas. Also, he’s got a SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index) of 96, and the more he talks, the higher his SFPI goes.

In other good news, I’m optimistic that our destruction of Iran’s mullahcracy is going to end pretty well, and pretty soon. While even a shortish conflict this close to a mid-term muddies the political waters, I think we’ve struck when the opportunity was there to decapitate Iranian leadership and then destroy their ability to keep the Mideast destabilized and on the verge of war.

It’s been great to see our military work in tandem with the Israelis, and to see our enemies make all the wrong moves. By striking every other country in the Middle East, the Iranian jihadist loons have invited a united front against them, and by having their proxies in Hezbollah get involved and attack Israel, they’ve invited the Hebrew hammer that is now pounding the already weakened Hezbies in their own territory.

This feels like the time to go all in, and take out an evil force that has worked against us and against a stable Middle East for almost 50 years. I’m hoping this ends similarly to the first Godfather, when Michael confronts Carlo: “Barzini’s dead. So is Phillip Tattaglia. Moe Green. Stracci. Cuneo. Today I settle all family business.”

I envision Trump sitting down with the 17^th Ayatollah in line. “Khamenei’s dead. So are his top 47 commanders. The Council of Experts. Khamenei’s half-wit son. Today I settle all American business. I’ve got a plane ticket to Russia right here. You can fly up there, and Putin will set you up in your own dacha, with all of the goat-mistresses you want. But don’t tell me you don’t know where the rest of your drone factories and missile batteries are.”

Then, five minutes later, as the top weird beard is driven toward the airport, a special forces guy in the back seat loops a garrotte around his neck and he kicks the windshield out during his death throes.

And some anti-jihadi Persian guy becomes interim leader, knowing that the Americans will be back if he ever starts getting an itchy nuclear trigger finger.

Plus, how can you not love the ridiculousness of the cardboard Ayatollah?! We basically had the same thing with Biden, so it’s nice to see an enemy have to suffer what we’ve already gone through.

Perhaps the best news of the last few days was the conviction of 9 violent antifa criminals for their attack on an ICE installation and shooting of a cop last July in Texas. They were all found guilty on a raft of terrorism-related charges. The leader of the group will get a minimum of 20 years to life in prison, and the rest of them will serve a minimum of 10 years, and a maximum of 60 years.

Another 16 or so defendants are facing charges in Texas, and this is great news. I’ve already seen a video montage of Democrat politicians and media talking heads insisting that antifa doesn’t exist, or that it’s just a bunch of disorganized, well-intentioned protestors. By the fall, we should have a lot more convictions to tout, and those mid-term ads will write themselves.

Another silver lining is the way the corrupt legacy media has been providing tons of new examples of their own dishonesty. Of course, they barely gave 10 seconds of coverage to the big, organized antifa convictions in Texas, and they’ve also continued their fine tradition of pretending to not understand what is behind the recent attacks on the Old Dominion ROTC class, or the attack on the synagogue in Michigan.

Happily, both attackers were quickly killed. In Virginia, an ROTC cadet rushed the murderer and stabbed him to death. (Yes, an ROTC stud can get away with bringing a knife to a gunfight, and win!) In Michigan, the jihadi creep rammed his truck into the building, then jumped out with a gun, ready to commit mass murder, when a security guard shot him immediately.

As both stories of attackers screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” unfolded – and also in NYC, when two jihadis threw IEDs at people protesting Mamdani — the MSM went with their usual playbook, with the old, “We don’t know, and may never know, the motive in this attack.”

Sure, Jan. It’s yet one more attack on a synagogue, or on anti-Muslim protesters. How can we ever guess who the perp is?

I know that one of the principles of real journalism – as distinguished from the dishonest propagandistic narrative creation of the MSM – is to not report anything before you can verify it.

But since they don’t do that, I’ll bet that I – a humble, hilarious genius with no journalistic training – could out-scoop/guess them on a regular basis. I will modestly estimate that about 92% of the time, my initial reports would be more accurate than any big, expensively funded legacy media source staffed to the gills with the cream of the crop of our leftist J-schools.

Because they guess in one direction without any supporting facts – “Who knows who could have motivated this attack on a Jewish school, or a pro-choice pregnancy center, or an ICE facility? We suspect white supremacists in all cases.”

Whereas my guesses in the aforementioned examples would be, “hateful jihadists in alliance with violent leftists; hateful pro-abortion leftists; and hateful leftist antifa members, with a dusting of gender dysmorphic trantifa-ists, respectively.”

In fact, before the first details of crimes in the latter two categories came out, I could posit a predicted demographic categorical breakdown of the law-breakers that you could safely bet your mortgage on:

Gender: 67 % AWFLs; 23% low-T beta males; 10% trans-adjacent.

Sexual preference: Who Cares/Not Interested 97%; Your Guess is as Good as Mine 3%

“F”-able breakdown: Totally Un-F-able, 90%; “F”able only after 5 drinks, 3%; “F”able only after 5 drinks and hallucinogens 7%

Ethnicity: 85% white; 2% super-duper Liz Warren white (#wemustneverstopmockingher); 5% black (with an over-representation of Somalis); 7% Hispanic (85% of which are here illegally) and 1% Canadian (which fall between white and super-duper white, racially speaking)

Hair color: blonde 7%; dirty-blonde 16%; brunette 31%; color not found in nature 46%

College degree holders: 87%

Percentage of those degrees in social work, education, nursing, psychology or grievance studies: 98%

Facial piercings over/under: 3.5

IQ: under 80 IQ, 82%; 81-100 IQ, 16%; above 100 IQ, 2%.

Those are my predictions, and I’ll stake my crystal brain against the legacy media’s J-school crystal ball any day.

And now… on to my MRI!

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Strategic RINO-ism vs. Satanic RINO-ism, & the SAVE Act (posted 3/11/26)

Sadly, all conservatives are familiar with RINOs – those Republicans in Name Only who pretend to be conservatives when they’re running, only to betray their conservative voting base by voting like (and with) leftists.

I actually prefer the term CINOs – Conservatives in Name Only – since the GOP has often been a home for mushy centrist and center-left pols. That being the case, a liberal Republican can’t fairly be called a RINO, since the “in name only” part suggests that a left-leaning Republican is necessarily an oxymoron. Which, tragically, it is not.

But I’ll use “RINO” in the commonly accepted meaning, since I can’t change our language single-handedly. (If I could, I’d start with the phrases “my truth” and “sex assigned at birth,” the use of which would be capital offenses in an Edenic world in which I was King Martin the First.)

(And what a glorious world that would be!)

Though RINOs are often the bane of our existence, I’ve argued elsewhere that in our political system, they are sometimes necessary. If, for example, a Republican candidate tries to get elected in a purple or even blue state, he or she will necessarily have to run and govern as a moderate or centrist – i.e. a RINO. The kind of rock-ribbed conservatives that I prefer would have no chance of getting elected in a purple or blue-leaning state.

So our real-world choice is usually between a frustratingly centrist RINO type – a Susan Collins in Maine or Mitt Romney in Massachusetts – and a far-left loon. And if a Collins or Romney would vote with us more often than not, they are a better option than the leftist alternative we’d get if we ran a ruby-red conservative who was sure to be defeated there.

As the famous dictum of William F. Buckley (Peace Be Upon Him) says, we should vote for the most conservative electable candidate in every race.

What I’ve been describing so far is strategic RINOism, i.e. the pragmatic decision to support mushy moderates with an R beside their name in districts where such candidates are the least bad options, given an electorate that runs the gamut from deep blue to faintly red.

By Satanic RINOism – and I’ll grant you that the adjective may be a tad harsh – I mean mushy candidates pretending to be conservative when running in a deep red district. In such districts, there is no reason for a conservative base to settle for anything less than a consistently conservative candidate; thus, any stealth RINOs in such areas should be run out of town on a rail, forthwith.

Mitt Romney might be the archetypal example. He was a great GOP choice for MA governor, since he was competent, and the most conservative governor anyone could hope to get in that benighted, midnight-blue state. But he was a terrible choice for Utah senator, where he was a Satanic RINO, i.e. a faux conservative who could have governed extremely conservatively, and yet he governed like a strategic RINO centrist, unnecessarily.

Which brings me to the most infuriating current example of an issue on which Satanic RINOs seem to be hell-bound and determined to torture me, personally: the SAVE Act.

This act is a tailor-made, perfect-for-a-mid-year-election issue. By calling for the most common sense, unobjectionable method to preserve the integrity of our sacred democracy – requiring proof of citizenship and proof of identity to vote – it creates the ultimate trap for dishonest, leftist hacks. There are no legitimate grounds on which to oppose it, which is why the pathetic Democrat arguments against it are so transparently corrupt and false.

Their real argument is that the SAVE Act would drastically reduce the amount of fraudulent votes that could be cast. Because the Democrat party depends on those votes – either from illegals, or from imaginary or dead voters – they need to preserve the fraud at all costs. But they can’t say that out loud.

So they are reduced to bald faced lying (the native language of the Left) – “Nobody ever votes illegally in this country!” – or racist and sexist smears against their own voting base – “You can’t expect women and minorities, with their tiny brains and their pathetic ineptitude, to be able to secure a photo ID just like grown-up, intelligent white guys can do!”

Both of those strategies are ballot box poison, as the aggregate of all polling indicates. Overall, Americans favor the SAVE Act by approximately 84-16%! As many as 70% of Democrats are for it, and the numbers among Independents and Republicans are much higher.

This is not a controversial issue like abortion, or a complicated and potentially confusing issue like health care or tax rate policy. It’s simple, easy-to-explain and understand, and a lopsided winner for conservatives. As such, even the most basic, Politics 101 level of competence makes the proper response obvious:

Run on this! Make it the front-and-center, number one issue in your public campaigning. If you’ve got a majority, force votes on this early and often. Use the filibuster – the real one, where you force your opponents to get up and talk for hours and hours – to publicize the debate. Force them to make their ridiculous arguments in public, which will get them on the record, and provide you with hours of invaluable material for honest, devastating future ads.

The ads write themselves. Show Senator X talking to the point of exhaustion in a transparent attempt to block this popular legislation.

Even if you can’t break the filibuster – and everything I’ve read about this issue suggests that we can – you can still get your opponents on the record as voting against this great legislation over and over again. (The ad Voice-Over: “Senator Jackass took 135 votes in the last 3 months. 14 of those votes were to name bridges after himself; 5 were to support Hamas fans in our colleges; 3 were to dedicate post offices. The other 113 were to ensure that illegals and fraudsters can continue to vote in our elections!”)

The issue will even be useful against the treacherous RINOs in your own party, too. Force the spineless wimps representing red states and districts to either vote as conservatively as they’d promised to, or to betray their base, and thus ensure that they’ll be primaried and forced out at the first opportunity. And you’ll also get the ancillary benefit of providing a useful lesson to everyone else in the party: don’t even think about betraying conservatives or you’ll be dispatched just like Thom Tillis or Liz Cheney!

So what is the GOP doing with this golden, election year opportunity? They’re only tepidly supporting it, like feckless weasels.

Unexpectedly!

John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader, representing deep red South Dakota, which last voted Democrat in a presidential election 62 years ago! He’s not up for re-election until 2028. He’s voted mostly conservative – over 90% with Trump during his first term – but not as conservative as he could or should have – voting around 30% with Biden during his posthumous term.

Even given those RINO-esque tendencies, it should be a no-brainer for him to support and push the SAVE Act. But he’s making idiotic excuses not to. He says he doesn’t have the votes to defeat a filibuster, or to pass it in the Senate.

Again, that kind of wussiness might make sense in an election year if it were a controversial issue – a hard-line anti-abortion bill, or a necessary-but-unpopular budget austerity measure. But this is a 90-10 issue with your base, so even if it did actually fail to beat the filibuster, it would then become a great election issue to beat your opponents with!

Even if Thune were just a craven self-preservationist, it would STILL make sense for him to force a vote. Because that would take the pressure off of him (“You can’t blame me, because I supported it and got it to a vote!”) and put it on the posers in his own party and the dishonest creeps in the opposition. Force them to take a stand on it, and then face the consequences if they vote it down.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the week-kneed GOPers — who are whispering that it can’t pass and hoping that they don’t have to vote on it – actually voted for it, if push came to shove.

And dammit, this is one time that push should definitely come to shove!

Even if it means – correction: ESPECIALLY if it means – that some Satanic RINOs are shoved right out of congress if they won’t do the right thing.

Everybody, call your House members and senators about this!

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NYC Leftists Lie About Jihadi Would-Be Bombers (posted 3/9/26)

Here’s a few questions you’ll never have to ask me, because you already know the answers:

Should we ever stop mocking Elizabeth Warren for launching her academic and political careers by being a pretendian?

Isn’t the fact that billions of people worldwide love soccer proof that it’s a great sport?

Do we hate the media enough?

(For any thinking- impaired folks who have somehow stumbled upon this column, the answers are, “No. NO! And AW HELL no!”)

Because Lizzie is obviously as white as a curling competition in Helsinki in a snowstorm. And no “sport” where grown men who allegedly identify as men throw themselves on the ground and feign injury from the slightest physical contact, and half the games end in a scoreless tie, can be considered “great.”

And for yet another example of how we don’t hate the media enough, one need go no further than this past weekend’s coverage of two Muslim jihadists trying to murder dozens of innocent spectators with IEDs in the caliphate of New York City.

What actually happened is that a small group of citizens gathered outside Gracie mansion (where communist jihadi mayor Zohran Mamdani lives) exercised their First Amendment rights to free speech to protest. Their protest was called, “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City.” Leftists organized their own counter protest, called “Run the Nazis out of New York City.”

Sane observers might notice that there is actually an ongoing Islamic effort to take over NYC, whereas there are no Nazis in NYC trying to do the same. Despite having reality on their side, the protesters were outnumbered by the counter-protesters by around 5-to-1.

Because: big, blue Sanctuary City!

The anti-jihadi protesters were actually peaceful. The pro-jihadi protesters, not so much. Two of them – Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi – brought IEDs to their peaceful protest (as one does). They lit the devices, which were filled with nuts, bolts and screws, and threw them at the conservative protesters, screaming “Allahu Akbar!”

Fortunately, the jihadists’ brains are apparently as tiny and dysfunctional as their phalli, and their improvised bombs failed to detonate.

An honest journalist’s headline for this story would be something like, “Islamists demonstrate how peaceful Islam is by trying to murder unarmed protesters with bombs.”

The NBC news headline? “Multiple arrests made after ‘suspicious devices’ found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.”

Anyone dumb and gullible enough to be getting their news from NBC would think that those evil conservative anti-Islam protestors had tried to kill peaceful Islamists.

And Mayor Jihadi did his best to reinforce that lie, putting out the following statement: “Yesterday, white supremacist Jake Lang organized a protest outside Gracie Mansion rooted in bigotry and racism. Such hate has no place in New York City. It is an affront to our city’s values and the unity that defines who we are.What followed was even more disturbing. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.”

Not content to be out-lied by Mamdani, a NY congressional candidate named Brad Lander (from guess which party?) doubled down on the smear: “Happy to know that our Mayor and First Lady are safe, but horrified that there was such a disturbing threat of violence outside their residence. Vile displays of Islamophobia will never be tolerated in our city.”

Ugh. It’s the same story, time and time again: Violent Islamists try to murder peaceful protesters. The leftist media lie about it, and leftist politicians repeat the lie and amplify it, until the “heroic victims” become the violent Islamists, and the real evil is Islamophobia.

We don’t hate them enough, people.

In happier news, a violent leftist in Portland reaped what he sowed this weekend, and hilarity ensued.

You might have figured that after so many months of futile protests against ICE in Portland, the surly insurrectionists have probably given up, and gone back to their jobs. (HA! Get it?) But no, they’re still at it. This weekend, one of those geniuses tried to light an American flag on fire.

Because of course he did.

Annnndddd… he ended up temporarily in flames.

Sadly, he was able to dislodge himself from the burning flag before he suffered more than superficial burns. Someone recording the incompetent arsonist narrated the action by saying, “What an idiot!”

Ouch! When even other antifa mouth-breathers are calling you an idiot, that’s got to sting.

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