The Dems are up to their Old Tricks: Another Phony ICE Story, and the Two Dan Sullivans (posted 11/2/26)

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms tomorrow.  If the polls are right, we’re going to get stomped.  Fortunately, the polls are rarely right, and they’re usually wrong in one direction.  My guess is that we lose the House, but my gut says that we narrowly hold the Senate. 

But who wants to listen to my guesses or my gut?

So rather than offering a lot of prognosticating that is worth what you’d pay for it, I’m going to overlook the manifest deficiencies on our side of things and focus on a very compelling reason to not sit this one out: the terribleness of our opponents. 

Specifically, I’ve got two stories to illustrate the kind of endemic corruption in the MSM and the Democrat party (but I repeat myself) that should motivate all of us to get out and vote against them: the latest “ICE-stapo brutally arrests husband/father/brain-surgeon/saint” story, and the fake Dan Sullivan election fraud scheme in Alaska.

By this time, we’ve all seen dozens of legacy media hagiographies of innocent people who left their wallet in their other pants, and thus were “undocumented” when the orcs from ICE descended on them and threw them into the back of a windowless panel van before they could finish their shift volunteering at the shelter that rescues golden retriever puppies suffering from canine scoliosis and renal failure.

So we know that when we hear about a “Maryland Dad,” the story is really about a human trafficking gang-banger with a colorful “El Diablo” tattoo stretching to cover both clavicles.  Just as we can be sure that a riot described as “a mostly peaceful protest” is going to leave more burned buildings than Dresden circa 1945.

And yet the legacy media can’t help themselves; they just keep lying.  Hence a Washington Post story from last Wednesday, with the headline, “ICE Detained a Middle-School Coach. His Players Say They Want Him Home.”

To be fair to the creepy sleazebags at WAPO, the Venezuelan referred to was actually a middle school coach.  But people can be more than one thing, and sometimes focusing on that one thing misses the main point by a country mile.

Which is why you don’t start a news story with, “John Wayne Gacy, adorable children’s-party clown…” or “Local vegetarian and proud German Shepherd owner Adolf Hitler…” or “Harvey Weinstein, movie buff,…”

Anyway, the Venezuelan name-hog in question is Amaury Jose Monsalve Figuera, but I’m going to call him Murray.  Because it amuses me, and because four names are too many. 

Murray may have originally come to the States legally, although “he did allegedly withhold information from immigration officials” and thus was in the middle of deportation proceedings when he recently ran a red light in DC.

No, we don’t deport people for running red lights, Dana Bash.  Let me finish.

After he was pulled over, the cops found “an unregistered handgun, ammunition, an open container of alcohol, and a bag of cocaine.”

Or as Hunter Biden calls it, “Tuesday.”  (If the pistol had been an illegal AK-47 and there had been three hookers of various nationalities in the back seat, that would have been “Saturday.”)

How does the WAPO handle these details?  Honestly, I don’t know, because the story is behind a pay wall, and it violates my personal ethics to pay a single penny to the trolls at the Washington Post.  But I saw the picture accompanying the story, which featured Mrs. Murray and the sainted Murray, who has a winsome smile and a sparkle in his eye. 

Although your eyes might sparkle too, if you were coked to the gills.

And the article begins this way: “To the young baseball players at D.C.’s Alice Deal Middle School, Amaury Monsalve is known as “Coach A,” a fixture of the local community who families say has brought championships, life lessons and joy….”

Yes!  Championships and joy! 

And booze, a pistol with no serial number but two bodies on it, and a bag of blow.  Hooray!

And how does congressman Rob Menendez, D-Corruptistan, start his tweet about good ol’ Murray?  “Kids playing little league should be focused on the game – not living in fear of ICE.”

It’s a cliché because it’s true: we don’t hate the media enough.

Meanwhile in Alaska, the Democrats – who you may have heard just LOVE our sacred democracy – have been caught trying to make a mockery out of democracy in a Senate race by running a phony Dan Sullivan to steal votes from the real GOP Dan Sullivan. 

The MSM hacks have beclowned themselves as they try to figure out how to react to the story.  Their first repeated talking point was that while the phony Sullivan ploy might be dishonest, it’s not illegal.  But that is as lame as it sounds, and not a great take for a party pretending to be more ethical than the opponents they’ve demonized as…dishonest.  (D’oh!)

Pitiable dimwit Ana Navarro tried to make the case that the GOP has done this kind of thing in the past too, pointing to a 2020 race in Florida.  In that case, a GOP pol named Frank Artiles recruited a schlub with the last name Rodriguez to run in a close house race against a Dem candidate with the last name of Rodriguez.  Around 3200 people voted for the fake Rodriguez, and the actual GOP candidate won the race by a few dozen votes.  Artiles was stupid enough to brag about what he’d done at an after-party, and he was charged with election fraud, along with the fake Rodriguez.  They were both convicted, and while Rodriguez did a year of house arrest and then probation due to a plea deal, Artiles did 60 days in jail, plus 5 years of probation and 500 hours of community service.

Ana is so thick that she admitted that Artiles was tried and convicted, without seeming to realize that she thereby destroyed the case she was trying to make.  “Republicans do it too!” doesn’t work if the Republicans charged, convicted and jailed their scammer, while Ana and the Dems are trying to defend and help theirs to succeed!

Hilariously enough, it turns out that the Democrats have used this same trick in the past.  The sainted JFK’s 1946 congressional campaign paid a janitor named Joseph Russo to enter a race against his opponent named Joe Russo to split the vote.  JFK won going away anyway, so the cheating turned out to be just an extra insurance policy against ethical democracy.  (Which leftists seem to disdain on general principal, IMHO.)  However, JFK faced a severe public and political backlash from Democrats nationwide after this transparently sleazy fraud.

HA!  I kid because I love. 

Of course JFK faced no blowback from his side.  Because: Democrats!  And spoiler alert, that cheater went on to eventually become the president of these United States.

Fun fact: his VP, the racist creep who succeeded him in the presidency – LBJ – launched HIS political career by stuffing a ballot box in his 1948 Texas Senate primary, a contest that he won by only 87 votes.  His fraud wasn’t particularly clever, either: one of his crooked minions (if not LBJ himself?) added 202 votes in one county after the polls had closed.  In a 50/50 contest, 200 of those 202 votes went for LBJ; they were also recorded in the same handwriting and in alphabetical order! 

The odds of that happening legitimately are the same as the odds of Ilhan Omar/Elmi telling the truth about her marital history under questioning from Brandon Gill.  “We have a DNA report here from Incestry.com that suggests…”

So the rich Democrat tradition of voting fraud – see Tammany Hall; Huey Long; every Chicago mayoral campaign since 1840; Frank “the Lout” Lautenberg’s senate campaign in NJ in 2002; every Chicago alderman campaign since 1840; JFK’s mafia chum Sam Giancana allegedly helping to steal Illinois’ presidential vote in 1960; Nithya Raman’s miraculous “comeback” to knock Spencer Pratt out of the run-off for LA mayor 20 minutes ago; the fake Dan Sullivan’s phony campaign right this minute, etc. – also led to two successive frauds becoming President. 

A third Dem prez (Bill Clinton) was also involved in a multiple-name scam that went on for several decades.  But in his case, it involved him banging a baker’s dozen of co-eds and interns named “Susan,” along with 10 Kates, Sarahs and Jennifers (each), plus 4 Candys (3 of them strippers) and at least one Monica.  Also, 4 Michelles.  (But not Michelle Obama.  Because that Arkansas horndog is only into chicks.) (Allegedly.)  

On the other hand, to be fair, Jimmy Carter was admirably faithful to Rosalynn, God bless him.  Unfortunately, that allowed him to devote 100% of his energy and focus to being a terrible, terrible president.  And boy did he knock that one out of the park.

In conclusion, c’mon!  Even if your GOP rep is no great shakes, get out there and vote.  Because the alternative is unutterably awful.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’ve never made a dime on the inspirational speaker circuit. 

Hamas – and the Dems – delenda est.

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Obama Has Not Grown on Me (posted 10/30/26)

To paraphrase the late great Norm MacDonald, the more I hear about this Obama guy, the more I don’t care for him.  Because he is a small, petty man, and also not terribly smart. 

And I’m not referring to the three major blunders of his presidency – doubling the national debt we had accumulated over 233 years in just 8 years; pushing through the ruinous Obamacare (which made health care even more expensive and is now requiring hundreds of billions in subsidies to postpone its inevitable collapse); and making race relations in America much worse (check out the polling on that).

Nor am I referring to his only real accomplishment as president, i.e. ushering in the Trump presidency, in repudiation of his own poor performance.

No, I’m talking about his post-presidency, which has been an (Adam) Schiff show.  He has been hypocritically piling up wealth and shamelessly cashing in on his “champion of the oppressed” persona for a decade now, compiling a net worth of $70 – $90 million. (Unless he’s hired Ilhan Omar/Elmi’s accountant, in which case he’s worth between $17 – $94.)

He formed a production company with his wife (Senior, Outside Linebacker, Northwestern), signing a rich deal with Netflix which has produced mostly unwatched pap, in addition to his $400K speeches and Michelle’s little-watched and terrible podcast.  He’s also bought various mansions, all of which are surrounded by walls and armed security (never mind, peons without guns or a southern border wall), and at least one of which sits on ocean-front property that he never would have bought if he believes that a rising ocean will engulf it by two years from this coming Thursday, as he claims.

He’s also given an endless stream of cringey, pandering speeches that have usually blown up in his face.  He stumped hard for the late Joe Biden – before the old codger stumbled onto a debate stage and then melted into the floorboards like The Wicked Witch of the Cerebral Cortex – and then for Que Mala Harris.  And don’t ask him how it went when he lectured and brow-beat black males for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about VP Word Salad.  (Spoiler alert: highest black voting numbers for a GOP candidate ever.)

My favorite recent Obama cringe-fest came when the Obnoxious O gave a late September speech at a Massachusetts college, during which he returned to one of his favorite themes from years past, to wit the idea that women would make much better political leaders than men.  “Even when I was president, I sometimes fantasized that if you put women in charge of every government for two years… things would be better.”  Cue wild applause from the clapping seals in the audience.

Never mind that he actually had the chance to step aside, and allow a certain thick-ankled non-male to clomp her way to [his] Democrat nomination in 2008, and what did he do?  He beat her like a rented mule of irrelevant gender, that’s what he did.

But like I said, never mind that.  Just consider his claim that women politicians would necessarily do a better job than male politicians.  

Many counter-examples come to mind.  Like Hillary Clinton.  Kamala Harris.  Maxine Waters.  Crazy Maize Hirono.  Karen “Large Mouth” Bass.  Did I mention Hillary Clinton?  Scary, corrupt ice-queen and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (a Bond-villain name if I ever heard one).  Winnie Mandela.  Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. 

I could go on and on.  So I will.

Hochul. Spanberger.  Omar/Elmi.  Also MTG, Bobert and Guilfoyle.  (Because: bipartisanship.)   And Hillary Clinton again.  (Because she’s just that terrible.) 

Hold on.  My crack research staff tells me that Ilsa was actually a fictional Nazi dominatrix in an exploitation film set in a women’s prison that came out when I was 13.  So…my bad on that one.  And it doesn’t matter why I thought of her, so mind your business.

Anyway.  Randi Weingarten.  Elisa Slotkin. Lizzie “Spreading Bull” Warren.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  Jasmine Crockett

And one could look farther afield, and consider lesbian bar ownership.  (I know.  Bear with me, and then behold, as I tie all of this together with a big, rhetorical bow.)

You may have missed the story of the Last Ditch bar, in Greenfield, MA.  A nice lesbian gal named Jackie opened the bar that she intended to welcome “lesbians, transexuals, gender freaks, workers and friends.”

“So what could go wrong?” you are not asking, because duh!

When Covid hit, Jackie and the other two owners (now both out of the picture) imposed a mask mandate.  But four years after sane people – not counting those with actual pulmonary problems – stopped wearing masks, Jackie tried to take a baby step toward rationality by declaring that Saturdays would henceforth be mask-optional. 

And because women are better people and more rational than men, all of the patrons at the Last Ditch agreed that that was a reasonable compromise, and happiness and profitability ensued.  The end.

HA!  I kid because I love.  What actually happened was that the totalitarian little Stalin-ette patrons got their flannel shirts over their heads in outrage, and became hysterical, urging a boycott and starting a social media campaign demonizing Jackie as an ableist who was endangering the lives of immunocompromised customers, the way a genocidal, straight male would do. 

(I added that last phrase.  But I think it is clearly implied.)

Annnnddddd…the bar closed down on October 26th.  Unexpectedly!

(I almost wrote that the bar “went under.”  But I’m a gentleman, and not up on lesbian slang, and so did not want to give offense.  You’re welcome.)

Even though I’m no lesbian-ologist (I finished college six credits short of my minor in lesbianology),  I’m pretty sure that 100% of the people involved in this story – founders, owner, workers and customers – were women.  And yet – despite the common belief that females are just dandy at everything, and definitely much better than those gross males – that business went down in flames.  (No offense meant.)

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  Barack Obama is a terrible, pandering hack who has to know that it is just as absurd to state that females would be universally better at running things than to state that males would. 

And that’s not even in the top three offensively dishonest things he’s said in his barnstorming speeches to support a wide variety of horrific far-left candidates in these midterms. 

I would rank those as follows:

3. His shot at Trump’s taste in the new White House ballroom.  The condescension to the proles who like the Cheesecake Factory was vintage Obama, but you have to shake your head at how he could criticize anybody’s taste after the Crime Against Architecture that is the Obama Flak Tower/Boondoggle-Library.  (Feel free to make your own Frank Lloyd Wrong jokes here.)

2.  After a solid decade of smearing conservatives as racist “bitter clingers” and demonizing Trump, he actually said this a few days ago: “I’m tired of being angry.  And I’m tired of being divided.  I want friendship, and neighborliness, and joy.”  Good lord!

1. But the crème de la crap came when Obama criticized Trump’s war on Iran, a subject on which valid criticisms can be made.  But not this way, and not by this guy:

“This happens to be something I know a little bit about…. I put in place a deal that EVERYBODY acknowledged kept [the Iranians] from getting nukes.  I didn’t have to fire any missiles.  I engaged in diplomacy.”

Yes.  Diplomacy.  Which involved giving the Ayatollahs (RIP) and the IRGC pallets of cash, which they used to fund terrorists all over the world, and also to build a robust underground nuclear program that EVERYBODY acknowledged was still around and racing toward a bomb, until we hit it last summer.

The smugnorance of this guy! 

Not that we needed it, but we now have one more reason to get out and vote: to hand this smarmy hypocrite one more defeat in a decade of popcorn-worthy defeats.

Hamas delenda est

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Great News: the old Cautious Optimism Site has been re-launched on Facebook! (posted 10/27/26)

It’s true — at long last, the Great and Powerful CO (the original Cautious Optimist) has created a new Facebook site!  Eleven months after the Cautious Optimism site was removed from Facebook, he has launched Cautious Intelligence.

I’m hoping that all of you who have been following me here will go over there and join the re-launched site, too.  You’ll still be able to come here and read all of my columns, as well as accessing my old ones, along with videos, short fiction and all the rest. 

But I know that many of you have missed the sense of community – I have too – that we’d created on the CO Facebook page, and I’m so glad that the new site is now up and running.

Please find Cautious Intelligence on FB, and tell any of your friends from the old site about it, and I look forward to interacting with all of you there, as well as here! 

France as our Potential Future, and the Importance of the Midterms (posted 10/26/26)

After the last 10 days or so, it feels like it may soon be time to perform the last rites over France.  Except that the churches there have been abandoned, and I don’t think the jihadis will allow the last rites to be performed in their mosques.

It was understandable when France was whipped by Henry V and the Brits after Agincourt, 611 years ago yesterday.  Because the English had those bad-ass long bows, and the French didn’t.  And it was understandable when the French surrendered to the Germans 86 years ago.  Because the Germans had disciplined officers, a strong military tradition, and the battle-hardened Wehrmacht, and the French had…the French army.

But surrendering to a bunch of spoiled French teenagers, cosplaying Marxists and cowardly jihadi street criminals?  C’mon, France!  You’ve got no excuse.

France is a good case study – sadly, England is too – of our future if we continue to slide further into anti-Western animus, a suicidally generous welfare state, open borders, and welcoming in those with hostile ideologies, whether Marxists or Muslims. 

The French leaders and policies are terrible, but the French voted for them, and continue to do so, no matter how bad things get.  Macron is a pathetic castrato of a leader, but no more so than Jacob Frey in Minneapolis, or Tampon Tim in Minneapolis, or Ilhan Final-Alias-to-Be-Chosen-Later, in Minneapolis. 

Not that Minneapolis is the problem.  (If only we could be so lucky!)  Because LA, Chicago, NYC, Seattle and Portland (the bad one) and other blue cities continue to exist, and to slowly putrefy and slide into dysfunction, too.  And incompetent, self-defeating dopes like Karen “large-mouth” Bass, Commie Mamdani and Brandon Johnson are no better than Macron. 

The European press is proving themselves as ridiculous as our own legacy media.  In fact, as French landmarks burn, the Louvre closes, and stores are looted by hordes of violent morons, they’ve revived the same old “most peaceful protests” meme that long ago became a source of mockery here.

With that in mind, I have no idea what will happen in our mid-terms, and see evidence pointing in both directions.  I recognize Trump’s loss of popularity among independents who decide all of our elections lately.  (I really wish he would have finished off the IRGC in the late spring instead of wasting months on pointless “negotiations” with those incorrigible liars.)  And I know that too many in the feckless GOP are indeed utterly lacking in feck. 

But I also recognize how deeply unpopular the DSA and the extremist Dem base are with people, and that nearly all of the Senate races are within the margin of error.  And it’s hard for me to believe that our middling candidates – Collins in Maine, Rogers in Michigan and Paxton in Texas – can lose to their horrific ones – Platner-lite in ME, Muhammad Jihad in MI, and the Vegan Twink in TX, respectively. 

With stakes this high, I’m hoping that enough voters will look past the temporarily higher gas prices, the inconsistencies of the tariffs, and Trump’s penchant for jackassery, and recognize the good things he has accomplished, most of which have been under-covered and downplayed by our egregious MSM.

To start with the big ones, Trump closed the border within about 15 minutes – putting the lie to the Democrats’ caterwauling about how that was impossible to do without major legislation – and has deported and/or initiated self-deportation of nearly 3 million illegals. (Yes that’s not enough when compared to the tens of millions Biden let in, but considering the obstacles put in his way by hundreds of leftist local judges and the leftist bureaucracy, it’s an impressive total.)  Locking in the tax cuts from his first term and defeating transactivists and the America-hating anti-Semites in academia and Washington also provided much-needed relief.

Using DOGE to highlight the issue of government waste, and to cut much of our self-defeating USAID pipeline to anti-American NGOs hasn’t gotten enough praise.  Neither has the Greenland deal, which locks out China and Russia and secures our long-term influence there when Greenland inevitably gains independence from Denmark.  Nor have the other foreign policy coups, large and small.

Snatching Maduro and bringing him to justice; gaining access to Venezuelan oil on favorable terms; crippling Iran’s nuclear and military power and killing their first and second string leaders; pressuring Hamas to release all of their hostages; elbowing China out of its nascent control of the Panama Canal; shepherding an amazing turnaround in Central and South America, where 7 or 8 leftist kleptocracies have new, conservative leadership.  And by getting rid of woke and DEI programs in the military, we’ve consistently hit recruiting goals for the first time in years.

On the crime front, all of the statistics are moving in the right direction, and especially so outside of deep blue cities.  For the first time in years, the FBI has arrested all 10 of the criminals on their 10 Most Wanted list, and red state cops and attorneys general have cooperated with ICE, reducing drug and human trafficking, along with crime in general.  We’ve also made a lot of progress on preventing election fraud – investigating and charging illegal voters, pushing for more election scrutiny – although there’s a lot left to do.

Things are far from perfect.  Our national debt continues to balloon, and we’re almost certain to lose the House, which will hamper more progress over the next two years. 

But the differences between the two parties are stark, and the gulf between the outcome if the Dems take control of both houses versus if they don’t is huge. 

I don’t understand the way that many people – including many on our side – are acting as if the choice in this election is as difficult to make as deciding whether to sit on the bride’s or the groom’s side of the church at Ilhan Omar’s incestuous wedding. (#wemustneverstopmockinghereither)

Look, the politicians on our side include some very good people trying to do the right thing, along with a bunch of lukewarm mopes whom we have to take by the hand and lead to the water, and then force their heads down into the trough of common sense to make them drink.

Plus some RINOs who need regular beatings to remind them who their base is.

By comparison, the other side is a dog’s breakfast of bad actors and those too stupid to know that they’re bad actors; a clot of mouth breathers whom I wouldn’t trust to run a lemonade stand; a wretched hive of scum and villainy who decrease the IQ and moral atmosphere of every room they enter.

Plus John Fetterman. 

That’s not a difficult choice, people.  If you haven’t voted yet, please do so now!

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It’s Schadenfreude Friday! (posted 10/23/26)

In my many years of observing politicians I’ve seen some pretty egregious liars, but this week a new champion stepped into the ring.  And as it happens, she was the subject of my last column this past Monday: Ilhan Omar.

Little Miss Mogadishu had one hell of a lousy week.  As the investigations against her ramped up, she disappeared temporarily.  The warrant used to search her house revealed that she has apparently been using an alias this whole time, possibly because her alleged real name is Ilhan Nur Said Elmi. 

Which you may recognize as being vaguely similar to the name of the dude she allegedly married, who is allegedly her brother: Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.

If by “vaguely similar” you mean “absolutely identical.”  And a little comical, in a “Who’s on First” kind of way.  Because it’s bound to cause a little confusion when your married name was also your maiden name, right?

I mean, I’m no incest-ologist, but…

Also, when some of her deleted social media posts were recovered, they showed that despite her claiming that she didn’t know a single member of his family, she appeared in pictures with him and his family.   Which, I guess, were also her family?  Yikes. 

When she re-appeared in an effort to put out the incest-y, illegal immigration-y media firestorm, it was on MSNOW with Chris Hayes, who looks like Rachel Maddow’s less masculine brother.  And it was in that interview that Ilhan made her case for being a first-ballot inductee into the Liars Hall of Fame.

Hayes first lobbed her a few softballs about the absurd rumors that she had married her brother, which she sweated through and laughed at, before blaming the usual suspects: an unnamed Somali blog, which she doesn’t think still exists, where an unnamed “somebody” vaguely claimed that Ahmed 2 “had to have been her brother, or something,” before it was picked up by “right-wing conspiracy theorists.”

Unexpectedly! 

For the record, the brother-marrying charge was first made by a Democrat primary opponent of hers. 

So if you’ve been keeping score at home on a big white board full of her lies… her name isn’t really her name, her age isn’t really her age, her family aren’t refugee victims but genocide perpetrators, and her Democrat opponent isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theorist.

Oh, and she didn’t NOT marry her brother. 

Where was I?  Oh yeah, smiling Chrissie Hayes.  Ilhan closed out her response to his friendly questions by claiming that the idea that she married her brother was “insane,” and that she did not know any of the unnamed people who supposedly made such a ridiculous claim. 

She was almost home free, safe in the hands of her low-T hack of a biased MSM “journalist,” until he tossed what he must have thought would be one last softball, laughingly saying, “So you’re not related to him at all…there’s not some weird kernel of truth that—”

To which she replied, and I am not making this up, “Not to my knowledge.” 

Good lord!  How could she more clearly confess that she definitely married her brother without saying the words, “I definitely married my brother?”  If someone asked her if she’d killed JFK, or had a torrid love affair with Donald Trump, or converted to Christianity, would she ever have responded, “Not to my knowledge?!”

This is going to be one fun mess of a story to follow in the coming months.

Speaking of disturbing stories that are going to have happy endings, I heard this week that jihadi a-hole Nidal Hasan is going to die by firing squad on December third for his traitorous 2009 murder of 13 American soldiers and injuring of 32 others at Fort Hood, Tx.  His victims were his fellow soldiers, who were unarmed when he attacked them, motivated by his adherence to the Religion of Peace™.

When I saw the headline, “Hasan to be executed on December 3rd,” I first thought the story was about Hasan Piker, the evil, America-hating nepo-baby who says that we deserved 9/11, and fantasizes about American capitalists being murdered in the streets.  But this other Hasan needs killing too, so I guess all’s well that ends ballistically.

(For any lefties who have mistakenly stumbled across this column and underwent the mandatory humor-ectomy when they joined the Party, that was a joke.   Because I would never actually celebrate the killing of people for disagreeing with my politics… unlike your political co-religionists who have made the Kirk-aversary a holiday on their calendars, and are praying for some thug to succeed where the previous three would-be Trump murderers failed.) 

By American standards, Hasan’s execution only 17 years after his execution-worthy crime is exceptionally speedy.  And I suppose we can be grateful that he’s being put down in Texas instead of Tennessee, where a team of Keystone Kops executioners managed to not kill a murderess in two attempts. 

Fortunately, the firing squad is not broken, and the riflemen will be motivated, seeing as Hasan killed their fellow soldiers.  And if they by chance should miss his heart and shoot him in the abdomen and groin instead, no one at Fort Hood is going to put a rush on an ambulance in an attempt to try to patch him up and get him well enough to shoot again.

Though now that I think about it…

As usual, the great Babylon Bee had the perfect take on the execution: they urged any leftists who might be upset by the killing of Hasan to just imagine that he’s a Healthcare CEO, so they can feel as good about his just punishment as other Americans will. 

Since we’re on the topic of evil people giving Islam a bad name, let’s go over to Gaza, where there are tons of those folks. 

You may remember that when the brave, women-and-children-murdering terrorists of Hamas struck on October 7th, one of their victims was Shani Louk, a 22-year-old German-Israeli hippie chick and peacenik who had been dancing at the Nova Music Festival.  She became famous in death, because her abused and partially clothed body was filmed as terrorists drove it through the streets of Gaza, where the salt-of-the-earth Gazans jeered, slapped and spat on her. 

In the intervening three years, the IDF has been diligently hunting down and eliminating the five scumbags who had paraded Shani’s body in the back of a Jeep.  And on Monday, they located the last of them, an ugly, micro-phallused charmer named Tamer Muhammad (surprise!) Ibrahim al-Sabbagh.  

Annnnnddddd…the IDF violently disassembled him with a precision air strike which also took out a senior Hamas officer named Akram Yassin.

Rumors that Sabbagh and Yassin were forcing themselves upon two goats who had been told they were going on a double date at the time of their transition to hell have not been confirmed.  But c’mon. 

Anyway, thoughts and prayers…to the families of the goats. 

In related news, it looks like the “Palestinians” have finally been given their own country. Unfortunately, that country is France.

Great job with the open borders, Macron!  As Jerry Seinfeld said, “Good luck with all that.”

Finally, Elon Musk demonstrated a flying car this week.  I thought that it must have been AI, but no, it was real.  While reading about it, I came across an article by Roger Kimble in American Greatness that pointed out that, “The response to this extraordinary feat divided neatly along ideological lines.  The left hated it; the right loved it.”

A commentator on X summed it up thusly: “Elon Musk’s companies built a sports car that does what science fiction promised for a century. The same man lands rockets on barges and builds the machines that carry our astronauts. That is what one free mind, and the thousands of minds he employs, can produce.

Bernie Sanders says billionaires should not exist. He looks at the man who makes cars fly and concludes the problem to solve is that such men keep too much of what they create. He has spent five decades in government producing nothing, yet he claims the moral authority to dispose of the men who produce everything.”

Kimble quotes the anonymous commentator’s conclusion.  “A flying car is what men do when they are free. A wealth tax is what politicians do to the men who built it. One of them needs the other to survive, and it isn’t Musk.”

Sounds about right.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

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Raiding Ilhan Omar’s House: Crime Against Humanity, or Proof that No One is Above the Law? (posted 10/19/26)

I’m back from my trip to Illinois and Wisconsin, having spent some time with extended family, and experienced my minimum yearly exposure to some fall colors.

As usual when I travel, I didn’t keep up with politics while on the road.  And as usual, that was a bit of a pleasure.  But I have one schadenfreude-tastic story that I’ve caught up on since I got home, and it’s just the latest entry in the Democrats’ “No One is Above the Law! … Unless They’re on Our Side” files: The DHS Raid on Ilhan Omar’s house.

To hear the Dems tell it, Ilhan is as pure as the driven snow, and this raid is part of a wide-ranging campaign to persecute her noble self.  And before you can ask, no, this doesn’t involve her wildly fluctuating net worth, which is a non-scandal that never happened, and also a totally understandable thing that happened but is not a scandal in any way.

Got that?  No?  Okay, here’s the summary.

In 2023 Ilhan and her hubby filed mandatory net worth forms disclosing that they had assets of between $40K – $250K.  (I know.  When you’re filing your taxes, the IRS doesn’t allow you to guesstimate your earnings to within plus or minus $200 grand.  But you’re not a congressman, so suck it.)

One year later, Ilhan submitted that form again, this time indicated that their assets had jumped approximately one jillion percent, to between $6 – $30 MILLION, mostly due to two of her husband’s businesses: a winery in CA, and a D.C. venture capital firm called “Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, LLC.

HA! I kid.  The suspicious firm is actually called Rose Lake Capital LLC.

Anyway, somebody noticed the big jump, and pointed out the obvious: nobody’s net worth jumps that much in one year, no matter how many shady Learing Centers they claim to own.

So Ilhan and hubby leapt into action and filed an amended 2024 report, basically claiming, “Did we say $30 million?  Oops.  We meant $18,000.  Sorry about the tiny mix-up, which could have happened to anybody.” 

Got that?  No?  Okay, I’ll put it in simple terms.  They claimed that a simple “accounting error” had caused them to claim that the winery and VC firm were worth up to $30 million, when they are actually worth zero.  And also, their 2023 form had listed their net worth as between $40-$250K, but in the next year that had somehow dropped to between $18-$95K.  Never mind why. 

Clearly, Omar has richly deserved a number of investigations for years, and it raises red flags about our system that that hasn’t happened before now.  In addition to her appearing and then vanishing fortune, she has been associated with some of the shady figures later indicted in the various Somali fraud schemes in Minnesota, for example.  Although in her defense, it seems like nearly every Somali in Minnesota has a Kevin-Bacon-esque several-degrees-of-separation link to at least a couple of Somali fraudsters. 

That might just be an indictment of the wide-spread fraud in the MN Somali community, without being an indictment of her.  But I wouldn’t bet on that.

There’s also the matter of her apparently lying about the circumstances of her own and her family’s immigration to America.  After her family came to the US in 1995, Omar is accused of lying about her age when she was granted American citizenship in 2000, by claiming to be under 18 at that time.  That age would allow her to apply for citizenship under her father, a quicker and easier process than starting a new application case for her as an adult. 

When she was first elected to congress in November of 2016, the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library listed Omar’s birthdate as October 4, 1981, which would have made her over 18 when she was granted citizenship.  And that fact would have invalidated her citizenship, since it had been granted based on a lie. 

In May of 2019, one of Omar’s Democrat primary opponents released a viral video alleging that she had lied about her age when she applied to get citizenship.  And then, suddenly, her congressional staff were said to have contacted the Minnesota Library, Wikipedia, and the US House to “correct” her birth date. 

Unexpectedly!

I haven’t been able to find out who initially reported that she was born in 1981.  But when asked about the “corrected” date of 10/4/82, an official at the Minnesota Library said that “we do not have any supporting documentation [of her birthdate], as the information was ‘self-reported’.” 

And who can you trust to accurately self-report potentially incriminating facts, if not a member of the Somali pirate-adjacent community?

Now you might be saying, “Martin, what difference does her age make?  She applied for citizenship under her father, so what’s the big deal?  He was a Somalian “educator” (according to Ilhan’s repeated public statement) who fled his country’s devastating civil war as a refugee, and thus deserved asylum in America.”

Except for one little detail.  During Somalia’s civil war, around 200,000 Somali civilians were murdered in the course of an actual attempted genocide.  (Not like the faux genocide in Gaza, in which Israel has done everything it can to minimize “Palestinian” civilian casualties. Or the faux “trans-genocide” in America, in which disturbed “trans” people murder school kids and others, and also commit suicide at abnormally higher rates, due to their disorder.) This atrocity was carried out by a communist dictator named Siad Barre, after he took power in a Soviet-backed coup in 1969.

Unfortunately, Ilhan’s dad – Nur Omar Mohamed – was not an “educator” at all.  Unless you count guys who taught classes like “Massacring Civilians 101,” “Poisoning Civilians’ Wells 201,” or “Laying Landmines on Civilian Grazing Lands 301” – all of which Ilhan’s employer did – as “educators.” 

Because Nur was actually … wait for it …a full colonel in Siad Barre’s brutal military regime.  And yes, he did flee Somalia.  But only after a civil war that over-threw the communist dictatorship he served in.

So Ilhan’s family was less like a group of innocent refugees seeking legitimate asylum, and more like a top Nazi leader’s family fleeing Germany in May of 1945 after their side had lost World War Eleven.  But thanks to our country’s half-arsed system of vetting foreigners trying to immigrate, Ilhan’s dad was wrongly granted citizenship.  He could now have his citizenship (and that of his family) revoked, if he hadn’t died from Covid in 2020.

If all of that wasn’t enough, Ilhan allegedly decided to defraud America through our immigration system once again, this time by marrying her brother, to allow him to get his American citizenship.  Because why should he feel left out, when everyone else in her family had already defrauded us to get their citizenship?

Anyway, the story of her marriages is a tangled one.  Her first “marriage” was “an unofficial, faith-based Islamic marriage” to Ahmed Hirsi in 2002.  They had two kids, and then got a Muslim “divorce” in 2008.  In 2009 she legally married a second Ahmed, this one Ahmed Elmi, who is allegedly her brother.  She allegedly did so to allow him to get access to a Green Card, student loans, and possibly American citizenship, though I couldn’t find any evidence that he did ultimately pursue citizenship. 

Thankfully, Ahmed 2 (the brother) probably didn’t consummate his marriage with Ilhan (because: gross!).  At any rate, they had no kids together, and they got an Islamic “divorce” in 2011.  Then Omar reconciled with Ahmed 2 just one month later, and they had a third kid in 2012, even though she was still legally married to Ahmed 2.  Finally, she and bro-Ahmed 2 got a legal divorce in 2017, and then she legally married non-bro Ahmed 1 in 2018.

You can’t tell Ilhan’s Ahmeds without a score card!

Anyway, one year later Ilhan and Ahmed 1 legally divorced, and she entered a third marriage – or a second legal marriage, but who’s counting? – to a white dude named Ahmed Mynett.

Just kidding!  His name is actually Tim.  (He’s the one with the businesses worth tens of millions, or possibly a few thousand, depending on which year it is.) 

Despite all of these legal marriages and pseudo-marriages and assorted Ahmeds, you don’t have to look at this marrying-her-brother story in great detail before you can smell a rat.  You only need to have even a passing knowledge of human nature.  Because that would allow you to picture your own reaction, if you were ever accused of marrying your brother or sister.

You would immediately say, “No, gross!” or “How dare you?” or “GTF out of here!”  Or something to that effect.  Then you’d offer to take a DNA test immediately, which would exonerate you, once and for all, and beyond all doubt. 

Unless, of course, you’d actually married your brother. 

Guess what course of action Ilhan chose?  Spoiler alert: NOT the DNA test. 

Instead, she riffled through the Democrats’ Big Book of Guilty Responses™, and picked all of them: “Racism!”  “Sexism!” “Islamophobia!” “But Trump!” “You’re a Nazi!” “I can’t recall.” Plus, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” (This last one is known as “the Hillary Gambit.”)

I’ve seen one report that the DHS investigators looked through Ilhan’s trash, which might mean that they’re looking for a sample of her DNA.  If so… YES!

So where does that leave us?  Here are the options as I see them:

1. If Ilhan Omar’s “corrected” birthdate is false, then her citizenship could be revoked and she could be deported for lying about being under 18 to gain that citizenship, and also for lying about it again in 2019 to falsely “correct” it.

2. If Ilhan Omar’s “corrected” birthdate is genuine, then her citizenship could be revoked because her father was a war criminal who falsely obtained his citizenship, which would invalidate the status of every family member who came in under him.

3. If we ignore both of those scenarios – pursuant to the Democrat policy of “All Leftists Are Above the Law™” – Omar’s citizenship could STILL be revoked in the near-certain event that DNA proves that she married her brother to aid in his following the family tradition of committing immigration fraud in America.

In the meantime, we can all entertain ourselves watching the Democrats beclown themselves in faux outrage over the constitutional crisis caused by a far-left judge signing off on a warrant to search Ilhan’s house. 

Oh, did I not mention that?  Yes, the judge who had to admit that there was plenty of evidence justifying that search is a leftist DC judge who clerked for Obama and donated to Hillary. 

So the corrupt leftists who celebrated when fellow Democrats raided Mar-a-Lago (with special attention paid to Melania’s underwear drawer, for some reason), and Rudy Giuliani’s house, and the house of a Catholic abortion protester, not to mention cooking up the fraudulent Crossfire Hurricane and Steele Dossier scandals, are now shocked – SHOCKED! I tells ya – at the thought of a crooked congresswoman being legally investigated. 

And the phony cherry on top of this enormous hypocrisy sundae?  None other than Barack Obama, who put out a laughably brazen tweet-lecture on the subject, which began with the following sentence, which I swear I’m not making up: “It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say.”

Good lord!

You might want to sit this one out, Barry.

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What Do Mortgage Loans and School Loans Have in Common, And How Can We Fix Them? (posted 10/8/26)

Note: Today I’m heading to Illinois for a family reunion, so I won’t be posting a column on Monday.   To make up for it, I’m giving you this longer-than-usual column, crammed full of wit and wisdom to get you through the coming Simpson-less Monday. 

I’ve been reading about Trump’s plan to restrict universities’ access to federal student loans if the programs are failing those students.  The definition of a failing program is an undergrad program whose graduates earn less than a typical high school graduate, and a grad program whose graduates earn less than a typical bachelor’s graduate.  Programs that fail in two out of three consecutive years would lose their loan eligibility for at least two years, and schools where more than half of the programs are failing these tests could lose all their Title IV aid, including Pell Grants.  The plan would also set total debt caps at $100K per person for non-professional degrees and $200K for professional degrees.

I love this idea, despite the fact that it gives partisan leftist media a golden opportunity to dishonestly spin the story.  Not that they need an excuse, as you might remember from last week’s reporting of the Fly Dubai story, in which a Muslim terrorist pilot stabbing his co-pilot and tried his best to dive the plane into the ground, killing as many Jews onboard and on the ground as possible.  The MSM described that as “an incident involving an altercation between two pilots.” 

“Hey Martin,” you are not asking, because you already know.  “Do we hate the media enough?”

Insert your own Dr. Evil-voiced, “How about NO!” here.

So of course various outlets called the plan an attempt to “ban students majoring in certain college degrees.”  A MSN headline referred to the plan as one “that could disrupt students’ degrees.” 

Inconveniently for the critics, the plan would not prevent students from getting beneficial loans; it would keep the schools from getting the loan money for programs that actually hurt the students involved.  In doing so, it will hold university programs accountable for giving their students a worthwhile education, while also helping students avoid the disaster of graduating with a mortgage-sized debt for a worthless degree.

First, the plan is far from draconian.  It allows a program to fail its students for one year, as long as it doesn’t do so in two out of three years.  And it also sets a ridiculously low bar for “failure.”  Common sense would tell you that a degree that takes years of your life and a big chunk of debt and leaves you no better off than if you had just graduated from high school would be a clear failure.

But a program that left you WORSE off than if you’d never gotten the degree in the first place!?  How is that even possible?  (I’ve got a few answers for you below.)   

No reasonable person could object to keeping taxpayer dollars flowing to any program as dysfunctional as that.  And no reasonable person does.  Only college administrators, government bureaucrats and Democrats.  (Boom!  It’s my “painting with too broad a brush” joke of the day!)

This situation raises an issue that perhaps more than any other, I wish I could get my lefty friends to understand: when the federal government gets involved in financial transactions – such as buying/borrowing for a home, or buying/borrowing for a college education – it inevitably leads to much worse results than if those transactions had remained in a free market.  The underlying reason is the differing incentives in both situations.

Incentives are clear in the free market: if you are going to lend money, your crucial incentives are to avoid losses, and to achieve profits.  Government bureaucrats, on the other hand, don’t have any skin in the game, so they don’t need to worry about financially disastrous programs and decisions.  On the contrary, they are often incentivized to grow their own department and programs, results be damned. 

Besides college loans, the best example is home loans.  When I was a young man, we rode horses to mortgage closings, and signed mortgages with quill pens dipped in ink.   But that’s not important right now.

What is important is that the vast majority of mortgage loans used to be made by banks, and if a borrower went belly-up, the bank was saddled with the bad loan they’d made.  So they had a strong incentive to make loans, but an even stronger incentive to make loans that the borrowers were very likely to pay back.  So the banks spent a lot of time doing credit checks and other due diligence, and they turned down a lot of credit-risky would-be borrowers.

As the federal government metastasized during the 20th century – er, I mean “grew” – the feds started taking over more mortgage lending.  They did so the same way a Hemingway character described the way he went broke: “Gradually and then suddenly.”  Two huge “government-sponsored enterprises” – and if you’re smart, that phrase should send a chill up your spine – were the main players.   

Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) started in 1938, and after toddling along for four decades, she was joined by Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) in 1970.  And together, they ended up taking over the vast majority of home loans in America, which resulted in a time-honored, formerly universal banking principle becoming a very rare practice.

That practice involved using “portfolio” as a verb: when banks used to portfolio their home loans, that meant keeping those loans on their books.  Nowadays, the vast majority of loans are immediately sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, so the banks do only enough credit checking to see if the loans they make are “conforming” (i.e. meet the government requirements to be sold to the feds). 

Of course that screws up the banks’ incentive structures.  They no longer have to worry about whether the borrowers can pay back their loans, since Uncle Sucker is going to buy the loans about 10 minutes after a bank makes them.  The bankers get all their fees and closing costs up front, and sell the risky loans (except for the ones they portfolio) to the feds, i.e. the taxpayers.

“But Martin,” you might be asking, “how long can a shady system like that last?”

Until roughly September of 2008, as it turns out, when the subprime mortgage crisis nearly destroyed the US housing market.  (Read the Michael Lewis book The Big Short or watch the movie of the same name for all of the gory details.)   

College loans have followed the same path as mortgage loans.  Banks (and rarely, colleges) used to make college loans.  Then the feds started to subsidize banks to make school loans through the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program in 1965.  In 2009, Obama finally killed the FFEL, taking over virtually all student loan lending through a grab-bag of federal programs (subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans, Parent PLUS loans, etc.)     

As per usual, the federal takeover upended all sane incentives.  When banks were making their own loans, they looked at a student’s ability to pay them back.  (Duh!)  Major parts of that calculation were the student’s academic record, and his/her planned major.  Straight A students with high test scores going into engineering, medicine or law were good risks, and got loans.  Middling students, less so.  Students majoring in art, theology or social work (no matter their ACT scores) were not good prospects, and usually had to pay their own way through college.

That last phrase probably sounds absurd to you.  Who can pay their way through college with no loans? 

The answer used to be “most people,” because college didn’t used to cost an arm and a leg.  So what changed?

See the “Barack Obama loan takeover” paragraph above.  But it wasn’t just Obama, of course.  Though he did make nearly everything he touched worse (“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!”), the issue was bigger than the bad actions of a few stupid politicians.  The feds took over college loans, and their incentives were to give loans to everyone, regardless of merit or choice of major.  So they did.

Annnndddd…now we’re in a mess, and college debt has skyrocketed.  Because colleges are in the same position the banks were in in 2008: when the feds started passing out “free” college money, the universities blew open their doors and jacked up their costs, and school debt exploded. Two commensurate problems quickly revealed themselves: too many kids who had no business going to college went to college, and too few of them could succeed in traditional majors.

In the year 1900, only 2% of Americans graduated from college.  After WWII many more Americans went to college, but by 1950, college graduates were still only around 5% of the population.  By around 2020, a majority of Americans had at least attended college, and around 40% were college graduates.

If you know anything about the quality and standards of our K-12 public education, you might suspect that 40% of our high school graduates are not prepared to walk straight into college and start kicking arse in rigorous subjects like advanced calculus, astrophysics, chemistry and biomechanical engineering.  Thus a long slide into eroding standards has only accelerated in recent decades. 

Even when we’ve managed to keep old fashioned majors, the standards have declined.  Back in the day, students of theology would be expected to know Hebrew, Greek and Latin.  And maybe Arabic or Sanskrit, if they were studying false religions. (HA!  I kid because I love.)  Today, the few theology students left can’t necessarily speak their first language fluently, and the curriculum is likely to involve Gaia worship and commie-infused “liberation theology.” 

English majors used to know Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton and the rest of the Western canon; today they’re as likely to study slam poetry, comic books, and trendy Marxist polemics.  We’ve gone from The Canterbury Tales to The Handmaid’s Tale, and from Jonathan Swift to the lyrics of Taylor Swift.

But even watering down the traditional curricula wasn’t enough to keep many students from flunking out – which our political sensibilities and the Education Industrial Complex couldn’t allow to happen.  So new majors had to be created, to provide a home for those who weren’t motivated or equipped to work hard, and for those who had planned to go to med school, until the first month of Organic Chemistry beat them senseless. 

Thus were born the popular studies and the grievance studies: media, film and pop culture majors, race and gender studies, sex and third world and colonialism studies.   These are fields in which the profs are partisans, the answers are simple (women good/men bad in Women’s Studies; non-whites good/whites bad in Race Studies; other countries good/America bad in Post-Colonial Studies), and everybody passes, and everybody graduates.         

But they graduate with six figures of debt. 

In olden days, when most students graduated with little or no debt, degrees didn’t necessarily have to have obvious monetary value.   If they produced graduates who were well-rounded and knowledgeable, and had been taught to understand, value and think about non-directly monetizable things like Western culture and history, ethics, logic, philosophy and literature, the theory was that such graduates would be able to successfully make their way in the world.  I love those things, and I studied those things, and feel bad for people who know nothing about them.

But now that universities saddle many graduates with six figures of debt, giving them a degree with no rational ROI is malpractice at best, and robbery at worst.

And now we come to the answers to the question posed above: How can getting an expensive four-year degree possibly make someone LESS valuable to the job market than if they had not gone to college at all? 

Part of the answer involves what reasonably smart high school graduates can do instead of going to college.  Most parents would let their kid live at home for at least a year or two after high school graduation, especially if the kid got some kind of a job.  And though those kids might not be thrilled with the amount of money they could make right out of high school, their expenses at home would be low, and without six figures of college debt, they could breathe.  

If you were one of those kids, you might typically bounce around through four or five entry-level jobs before you landed in one that you found you like – helping a plumber or electrician or HVAC guy maybe, or being a waiter – and then see where that took you.  If you found something that you liked, you could learn a lot on the job, make a good impression on the boss or owner, and four years after high school, you might have already taken a few steps up the ladder, increasing your pay as you increased your knowledge, experience and confidence.  At the same time, your buddy who went to college would just now be graduating, with no work experience, and a six-figure monkey on his back. 

But even more important than the financial disadvantage of debt is the psychological disadvantage of a college degree in a low-value degree in the various “studies” fields.  Many times you’ll come out with a chip on your shoulder – your women’s studies profs taught you that patriarchy is evil and men are the enemy, or your black studies profs taught you that whites are oppressors and you’re an oppressed victim, or your Marxist professors taught you that America is a capitalist hellhole, and that you’ll be betraying your class brethren if you go to work for some evil businessman or corporation.

But even if you’re a more positive person and don’t fall for any of that, it’s still hard to resist the message our society has taught about education for your entire life: getting an education is always worth it, because it raises your social status and prepares you for a lucrative professional career, thus guaranteeing you financial and societal success.  You spend four years going further into debt, and telling yourself that it’s okay, and that everything will work out all right once you’ve got that magic diploma in hand, all the while absorbing a subconscious belief that you’re a superior person who deserves a higher starting salary due to your educational achievements.

And then you get out, and find out that your grievance studies degree doesn’t equip you for any job.  If you started to write an honest resume, you’d have to include skills like “I’m able to point out sexism in any workplace,” “I can critique exploitative inequities in any corporation or franchise,” and “I can raise race-consciousness and suspicion in employee seminars on company time.”  Strangely, no employer seems to be looking for any of those skills. 

Some even see them as red flags. 

If by chance you’re able to land a few interviews and you get a tentative job offer, you are shocked at how little that entry level job pays.  If the employer asks why you should start at your proposed salary, you are dangerously close to telling him the truth: because you have a college degree, and because you need at least that much to make your minimum loan payments.  But you realize that neither of those answers has anything to do with the value of the work you’d be doing.    

Your education raised your expectations and made you arrogant, and thus made you unfit for the kind of starter jobs that non-college grads would traditionally have taken, and even been glad to get.  And if you should happen to meet up with your high school buddy who didn’t go to college, you might realize that he’s already started to move up in his job, and is poised to make several more steps, while you are scrambling to get a grip on the first rung of the ladder.

And if he’s got a big mortgage payment, it’s for a house.  Not a diploma. 

So I like the plan to start holding colleges (and students) accountable.  Tuition has only been able to far surpass inflation because the feds have been tossing school loans out of the back of a helicopter onto any students with a pulse.  And while that’s been great for universities’ bottom lines, it’s done a great disservice to students, not least because it’s allowed them to play pretend instead of acting like young adults.

A naïve 18 year old can now borrow six figures to pursue a degree in Gender Studies with an emphasis on Marxist complaining.  If a banker was on the other side of the table – instead of Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell, both of whom would be staring into the distance and drooling on said table – the banker would say something like, “Let me just check on the average income of Gender Studies grads doing a bunch of Marxist complaining…   Annnnddddd, half a Starbucks barista wage.  We could only loan you up to $17.50 for that.  You may see yourself out.” 

The wanna-be grievance studies major would be very disappointed in the moment.  But you know what she wouldn’t do next?  Waste four years of her life piling up debt while getting angrier and more resentful, and then get out as a financial cautionary tale.  And then immediately start agitating for taxpayers to be forced to pay her school loans. 

That’s a win-win-win, for the students, for the taxpayers, and for serious university programs that give all their students a quality education. 

More please!    

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When is An Execution Not an Execution? (posted 10/5/26)

I’ve been known to mock other nations – and many American states – when they prove themselves to be comically incompetent.  The USSR tried an economic system currently being proposed by dimwits in the DSA wing of the Democrat party…and they end up with mostly empty stores. 

“Welcome to State Shoe Store.  Would you like shoe?  Don’t bother to say size or color.  We have brown shoe, all size 13, and many pairs with only left shoe.”

Or they steal some nuke plant plans from us, then read them upside down, annnnnddddd… Chernobyl!

Or the Chicoms try to copy Amazon.   Annnnnnddddd…Temu!

Or Venezuela sits atop tons of oil, so their commies take over and nationalize it so that the Party can profit from it.  Annnnnddddddd…everything breaks, and no one knows how to fix it, because you ran off all the smart people.

It’s especially fun to mock our own home-grown incompetents. 

Hey, did you hear Mamdani is going to control rents and provide state-run grocery stores?  Annnnnnddddd… rents have gone through the roof, and each grocery store will cost $30 million.   And the closest thing they’ll have to fresh vegetables is brown shoes.   All size 13. 

Ooh, Gavin’s bringing magical high-speed rail to California!  Annnnnddddd…we’re $20 billion in, and the first rail of track is set to be laid when Gavin’s youngest grandchild graduates with a BA in Grievance Studies in the spring of 2045. 

But today is a sad day when I must mock the people in one of my favorite red states.  And you probably know what I’m going to say.

Tennessee, come on!  How hard is it to kill a sadistic, 50-year-old murderess?!

I mean, she’s not the armed, energetic 18-year-old she was when she slashed and stabbed and tortured her poor victim.  She’s 50, and she’s strapped to a table, and you’ve got her outnumbered.

Seriously!  You guys proved yourselves adept at killing Redcoats at Boyd’s Creek and King’s Mountain – and that was in the 1770s, and all you had was muskets!  And you were picking off Yankees from 200-300 yards… in the 1860s!  C’mon man.

Sure, maybe the problem was that we let a bunch of inexperienced female executioners do the job…A Sexist Would Say!  (And by the way, is there anything that DEI can not screw up?  Asking for a less p.c. friend.)

How did that work, exactly?  I’m guessing that women generally have the good sense not to volunteer to be executioners.  But then this murderer asked for an all-female death squad, so…what?  The prison officials looked around, realized that they have no female executioners, and then went to the local Job Corps office and asked if any women there wanted to give the chemicals a go? 

On the one hand, I’m not totally shocked they found a few takers.  If the women knew what this murderer did to end up on Death Row – lured a young girl into the woods with two creepy accomplices, and then spent a lot of time cutting and torturing her – I expect that some of them wouldn’t be opposed to a little sisterly justice.

On the other hand, are we really letting killers choose their own executioners now?   I’ve always thought letting them order their last meal was a weird ritual, but at least that seems to be a harmless, quasi-chivalrous gesture, like giving a condemned man a cigarette before putting the blindfold on him.  (Or giving him a blindfold, for that matter.)

But letting her pick her own executioner?  What did they expect?  She’s looking at Mike, the regular executioner – he’s a Marine with unit tattoos and a scar through one eyebrow, who did tours in Fallujah and Afghanistan, and has already done four previous executions (so this one will make him an ace!). 

Then she looks at near-sighted Janice from the cafeteria, Louise from HR, with carpal-tunnel and braces on both wrists, and Mildred, the short-timer with the trembling from Parkinson’s who’s about to retire from her supervisory job on disability at the end of the year.  So she rolls the dice, and comes up with a crew who couldn’t hit a vein if they had a basket full of needles in a room full of veins. 

The whole debacle reminds me of dark humor about the best kind of doctor to be: a coroner.  Because even if you completely screw up an autopsy, what’s the worst that can happen?  The guy comes back to life? 

Except in this case, the humor is even darker.  What’s the worst kind of botched execution?  The kind where the murderer survives…twice!     

This whole topic might make you feel queasy, and I wouldn’t blame you.  I can joke about it only because if I can’t laugh, I’d have to cry.  It’s obviously a morally fraught thing to execute someone, and I can respect some arguments on both sides.  But ultimately, the deciding factor for me is that giving our worst predators anything less than the death penalty undervalues the precious life they took. 

Add to that our society’s growing embrace of toxic empathy – wherein we care much more about the criminals than their victims, and are so lenient with criminals that they can eventually victimize more innocent people – and I think that capital punishment is a necessary response.

Unfortunately, the story of this botched execution is taking the attention away from the particularly gruesome and cruel murder that earned Christa Pike a date with the executioner.  (If you haven’t read the details and don’t have a strong stomach, don’t.)  And when marginalizing and even erasing her victim turns Pike into a sympathetic figure, it plays right into the hands of the left. 

They’ve already been making tons of bad-faith arguments against killing anyone – other than Trump, Charlie Kirk, Jews, or the unborn, of course – for the better part of a century.  They’ve objected to every method of capital punishment.  They said that hanging and firing squads were archaic and cruel, so we went to the new-fangled electric chair.  But a few of those went wrong – some knucklehead used the wrong kind of sponges, or didn’t make sure they were wet, or mixed up the black and white wires.  So we went to lethal injection – the killer goes gently to sleep, and then stops their bothersome breathing. 

Annnnddddd…Tennessee! 

You guys might have just given our opponents one more objection.  I’m afraid that the end result of this mess might be that we go back to our usual method of ushering our worst criminals to their eternal reward:

Death by old age.    

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Schadenfreude Friday (posted 10/2/26)

Today I’ve got three stories of schadenfreude, the great German word for “pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.”  That can be a supremely creepy thing, if the person suffering is innocent.  But if the suffering arrives as the just consequences of that person’s bad actions – sometimes identified by the acronym FAFO – then the freude (joy) can be sweet indeed.

First up we have a TDS-riddled bonehead named Kirk Bangstad, who owns a bar called the Minocqua Brewing Co in Madison, Wisconsin.  Bangstad really dislikes Trump, as is his right.  If you ask me – and as a general rule, you really should – I think most of our politicians have earned some scorn, and I have no problem with anyone expressing disdain for any politician, regardless of whether I agree with them.

But one crosses a line when one wishes death on a political opponent.  And little Kirkie B. has done that.  Back in January, he started advertising on his bar’s webpage, “Free beer, all day long the day he dies.  Show us this post when it happens in a few months and we’ll make good on that promise.” 

Hilariously enough, Trump has now outlived Bangstad’s bar.  Because the state of Wisconsin has yanked his liquor license, and the reason is chef’s kiss perfect: Bangstad had been bringing in beer from Illinois without the required permits and tax payments. 

So when it comes to leftist hypocrisy, this story gives us a two-fer.  Not only is Bangstad the kind of compassionate, big-hearted liberal who wishes death on anyone who disagrees with his hateful politics, he’s also the kind of pro-government regulation and taxation liberal who was doing everything possible to avoid complying with regulations and paying his taxes. 

This guy should be on the Democrat ticket in 2028!

The moral of the story, as the wise old proverb says: “The dildo of consequences seldom comes lubed.” 

The second story is about a business quite a bit bigger than Bangstad’s.  Although the way this company is going, it might soon be every bit as successful as his shuttered bar.

I’m talking about Nike, a former sportswear company who decided to turn themselves into a producer of virtue signaling and America hatred.  Since then, to paraphrase Brad Pitt in that Nazi movie, business has not been a’ boomin’.

In 2021, Nike had been on the S&P 100 for 13 years, and its stock price was $161 per share.  But that year was nearing the peak of woke, and Nike had already picked third-string QB – but All-Pro Whitey-Hater – Colin Kapernick as their spokes-toxin. 

Sorry, that should have been “spokesperson.”  

Or should it?  

Anyway, they followed up that brilliant move with an ad campaign based on the US women’s soccer team’s complaints that they weren’t paid as well as the male soccer team.  (Never mind that they were wildly over-paid, based on how much less money they brought in than the men’s team.  And also never mind that their unpopular cause was fronted by repellent little guy Megan Rapinoe, a scowling misanthrope with a giant chip on her frail little shoulder.)

Next up was a campaign to lecture Americans about what racist scumbags they were, in the wake of recidivist junkie George Floyd’s death.  Then they dropped a Betsy Ross-themed sneaker because racist Colin Kapernick delusionally found it to be…racist.  (Unexpectedly!)  Then they launched ANOTHER campaign about how racist and sexist Americans are, this time featuring LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe (again!). 

If you’re keeping score at home, that means that Nike chose to associate themselves with 4 charter members of the Whiny Athletes Hall of Fame.  Plus George Floyd.

Annnnnnddddd… Nike’s value has cratered, losing over $200 billion in five years, and dropping off of the S&P 100.  Today it’s down to $35 per share.

Proving once again the cliché, “Go woke, go broke.” 

(And also that thing about the un-lubed marital aid of consequences.)

Next up is everyone’s favorite airport-travelers-botherer, with a market value somewhere between Kirk Bangstad’s defunct bar and the imploding Nike:  CNN.     

This story comes in the wake of CNN’s being temporarily thrown out of the WH press room, after which they got their gender-non-binary onesies over their heads because the administration dared accuse them of being a purveyor of propaganda and conspiracy theories.  They ululated in outrage at the very idea of trying to denigrate a news network that way.

And then – because God exists, and He loves us – somebody grabbed and posted a CNN story from five short years ago, featuring a semi-telegenic hack named Brianna Keilar.  Her story begins by saying that “Fox in the era of President Joe Biden is a carousel of conspiracy theories and fear mongering.” 

I know.  She’s doing exactly what CNN is now saying must never, EVER be done. 

But it gets better.  Because she cites 4 examples of those wretched “conspiracy theories” that Fox was pushing.  The first is the contention that “Biden is essentially senile.”  The next is what she calls “the evidence-free conclusion” that Biden is “a puppet of a deep state.”  Next is the idea that in recent years, human sperm counts have been falling.  Last is Fox’s ridiculous contention that the border is actually open, and there is a “border crisis.”   

Her conclusion? “Fox is not news, no matter what it calls itself.”   

Got that?  As evidence that Fox is not a legitimate source because it lies all the time, she cites four examples of those lies.  Except that all four examples were true, and she lied about all of them.

Biden WAS senile, as all PWFE (people with functioning eyes) knew.  I guess you could quibble with what constitutes “a deep state,” but “unelected people behind the scenes producing talking points, writing legislation and signing pardons for a senile president” sums it up pretty well, don’t you think?  And dozens of medical studies have documented falling sperm counts.

Also, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to detect that 15-20 million illegals streaming in –with commensurate levels of crime, red ink and social disorder – suggests that our border was completely open, thus constituting a crisis.

Sadly, though, I don’t know whether this last story has as much “freude” to it as it should.  Because while Kirk Bangstad’s malicious business has gone under, and Nike’s assault on our culture has cost it $200 billion and counting, CNN is still broadcasting, and Brianna Keilar still has a job there.

Because: “journalism!”

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Fun With Hypocrites (posted 9/28/26)

I have come to realize that if I (or anybody else, for that matter) wanted to write a column every single day filled with nothing but stories about political hypocrisy, I (or anybody else) could easily do that. 

In fact, if I (or anybody else) restricted myself only to stories in which political hypocrisy blew up in people’s faces, writing a daily column-full would still be a cinch. 

To prove my point, I made a quick list of six such stories from the last 10 days, but as I wrote about them, I only had time for two.

First story: You may have noticed the elite Left rending their garments and gnashing their teeth last week over Trump’s latest crime against humanity: “banning” CNN, MSNOW and Politico from covering his presidency. 

Never mind that this “ban” is a “ban” only in the sense that books teaching grade schoolers how to be polymorphously sexual are “banned.”  (I.e. those books are available in tons of bookstores, public libraries and via Amazon, but cannot be purchased with taxpayer dollars and put into grade school libraries.)  Those three propaganda outlets can still make stuff up from 99.9% of the locations in the United States…except for the tiny bit of real estate that is the WH press room.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m against Trump’s pseudo-“ban.”  It’s a dumb move, and will certainly be overturned in short order.  It won’t do anything to make CNN less dishonest, and it creates terrible optics for Trump.  If he was more sneakily Machiavellian, he would follow the Dem playbook, and give one press conference every several months, taking pre-screened questions only from friendly outlets (on cue cards featuring pictures of the MSM talking head who is going to ask the question, so he doesn’t forget and call them “Jill”), and almost never call on any conservative outlet reporter in the room.     

But that being said, I still must shake my head at the top Dems who did exactly what they are hollering about Trump doing.  For example, Hillary just said that Trump’s “kicking out news organizations” means that “everything is at risk.”  “That’s what authoritarians do,” railed the Canklesaurus. 

But flash back to 2016, when she was trying to become our communist overlord, and this headline from the lefty Boston Globe: “Clinton Campaign Bans National Pool Reporter from N.H. Events.”  The author called her authoritarian move “a development that will make coverage for her trip spotty for some of the country’s largest print outlets.”  UNEXPECTEDLY!

And of course Barry O and the late Joe Biden were routinely doing the same and worse, as is their wont.  Many conservative outlets have tried for years to get a spot in the WH reporter pool, and no Dem prez has let them in, often pointing to their supposed bias, and/or their small audiences as justification.  But if biased coverage was objectionable, no major MSM outlet would be allowed within a country mile of the WH press room.  And if audience size was dispositive, the Daily Wire has a much wider reach than CNN, whose viewers (not counting those trapped in airports) could be fit into a mid-sized community college gym.  

The irony was especially thick when Obama gave a speech last week at Colgate, during which he dialed the condescension up to 11, wondering aloud what the nation would have done if he had ever told Fox News to get lost, for example.  “It’s unimaginable!” he smirked. 

Annnndddd…a flock of chickens tragically did not appear in the auditorium and descend on Obama, pecking at and defecating upon him until he was forced to flee the stage in shame.

But many receipts were dropped on him from the archives.  People pointed out that his minions regularly delegitimized Fox. Comms director Anita Dunn called Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news,” David Axelrod said that Fox was not a real news organization and that other outlets “ought not to treat them that way,” and etc.

Oh, and it turns out Obama himself did EXACTLY what Trump is doing now.  He said that his TARP “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg would be made available to every network except Fox.  His minions set up a pool interview that “banned” Fox, and his deputy press secretary Josh Earnest bragged that the admin had “demonstrated our willingness and ability to exclude Fox News from significant interviews.” 

Obama only relented when he got caught, and his stupid move proved too much even for the lickspittles in the MSM, so that they all refused to interview Feinberg if Fox was excluded.  (In fact, Fox is doing the same thing on their behalf now, refusing to participate if Trump excludes CNN et. al.) 

And we shouldn’t forget the other ways in which Obama was much worse on press freedom than Trump has been.  He routinely went after whistleblowers with prosecutions, lobbied hard to stop FOIA reform, and charged, prosecuted and jailed a record 8 people under the Espionage Act of 1917.   Compare that to the 3 total EA prosecutions from all of the previous administrations combined!  (For the record, if they leaked classified info to the press, I have no problem with going after them.  It’s the Left who virtue signals about that kind of thing constantly…except when they’re the ones doing it.)

And who can forget the James Rosen story?  (I mean, except Obama and the entire MSM!) In 2009, Fox reporter Rosen wrote a story about North Korea’s nuclear program.  An outraged Obama wanted to catch Rosen’s source, and so labeled Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator” during his leak investigation – this despite never charging Rosen with a crime.  But the designation allowed Obama’s co-conspirators to obtain a secret search warrant to track his movements, and monitor his emails and phone records.

Because freedom of the press is sacred to leftists, unlike a certain Orange Hitler!  Who, oddly enough, has never secretly monitored, charged and jailed any of the thousands of leftist propaganda hacks who have made a living and won Pulitzers based on lying and/or exaggerating about his bad actions 24/7 for ten years now.

Hey, speaking of creepy lefty liars, did you notice their outrage over how warmly Trump treated those leftists’ socialist co-religionist Xi Jinping during his state visit last week? 

This is another example of when I could find common ground with the left, because I am often disgusted by how Western leaders routinely treat despots and dictators nicely.  I’d like to think that if I were ever president – and what a glorious world this would be if I were! – I’d be constantly dissing foreign a-holes. 

I’d hold my hand out to Xi, and when he went to shake it, I’d yank it back and yell, “Psych!  How many Uyghurs have you murdered lately, you Winnie-the-Pooh lookin’ mfer?  Stop stealing our IP.  Now beat it!”  I think I could probably do a tight 3 minutes just on his stupid name alone.  I would also like to see us shut down the UN, to spare us the degradation of hosting the wretched hive of scum and villainy that regularly parades through the HQ in Manhattan. 

But I’m a big boy, and understand that in the real world, you have to conduct diplomacy with a bunch of scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells, and other people you rightly despise.  I just want to lose the double standard.  If we’re going to condemn presidents for being polite to scumbags, it has to apply to all presidents.

“Martin, are you implying that the Dems have not held themselves to that same standard?”

Stop it.  I’m insulted by such a naïve question.

Remember when Obama met with the leader of the Saudi corrupticrats, King Abdullah?  Barry bowed so deeply to the old goat that for a moment I feared I was about to witness an actual arse kissing.  Or something even worse!  (Think Don Lemon interviewing a spiffed-up Ken-Doll Newsom.) (Or don’t!) 

Remember when the Democrats and MSM railed against Obama over his obsequiousness to that dictator, and demanded that he be impeached?

Me neither.      

I’ll close with one more perfect example.  On Friday, David Axelrod posted a tweet condemning the way “an American POTUS give[s] the red carpet treatment to the authoritarian leaders of adversarial countries.” 

Got that?  Giving red carpet treatment to adversaries like Xi Pingpong is no bueno!

Cut to the internet, which just like my wife, never forgets.  And a picture from exactly 11 years earlier (9/25/15) of Barry and Michelle, standing, smiling and waving in front of the White House. 

On a red carpet. 

With Mr. and Mrs. Xi!

It’s a cliché because it’s true:  If it weren’t for double standards, the Left would have no standards at all.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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