Month: December 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Tom Homan is my hero.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

First, the update.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, on to Christmas. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas everybody!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect! 

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

Annnnndddd…she’s gone. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you listening, Australians?

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

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

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

Yes, you did.  And well done.

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

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

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

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So…bye bye, Wajjie!”

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HA! I kid because I love! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Size and Cost of State Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody believes that.      

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

Taxation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m saying we should have that conversation.  

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Checks and Balances, Part 3 (posted 12/8/25)

This is the last of three columns on checks and balances in our government.  And I want everybody to know how difficult it was to stick to this topic today, because I have got such a long line of knucklehead leftists and their recent idiotic shenanigans that I am just dying to mock.  So it’s taking every bit of mature and manly restraint for me to stay on subject.

And regular readers will know that “mature” and “restraint” are not exactly in my natural wheelhouse.  So let me get started before my baser nature kicks in.   (But next column…)

In my last column I discussed the two main ways in which I think the legislature has abdicated its job of checking the other branches. The congress’ fecklessness has empowered the other two branches, helping to create an “imperial presidency” and an “imperial judiciary.”  Because if congress weasels want to keep their offices by becoming gutless castrati, some other branch is going to have to (and usually want to) step into that power vacuum, and the executive and judiciary have done so. 

The Imperial Presidency

The Founders created a pretty strong president; they made him the head of both the civilian and military (as commander in chief) chain of command, and they placed no term limits on him.  (That only changed after FDR.)  He was given veto power over legislation, and a monarchical pardon power too.  But the Founders also created a way for the legislature to over-ride his vetoes, and to impeach him, if things came to that.   

As the government grew, and executive agencies were founded and grew, the presidency gained more power.  Over the years, some legislatures curtailed some of those powers; in addition to creating term limits, they imposed rules requiring him to go to Congress to get a declaration of war if he tried to use the military for too long after responding to an emergency situation.   (That last example suggests some dysfunction, because presidents have been undertaking many military actions while declaring few wars in recent decades.)

One oft-cited bit of evidence that presidents have become too powerful is the huge increase in the number of Executive Orders that have grown in recent years.  However, when I researched it, I was surprised to find that that’s not the case.  The undisputed champions of EO-issuing are FDR (both totally, and on a per-year basis) with 3728 (!), and Woodrow Wilson in a distant second with 1803.  By comparison, Obama’s 276 orders in 8 years, Biden’s 162 in 4 years, and Trump’s 220 in his first term seem modest. 

Of course the substance of the EOs should matter more than their frequency.  If FDR’s only EO  had been the one forcing Japanese-Americans into camps during WWII, it would have been one too many.  And no one would now object to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (which was an EO), nor to Truman’s desegregating the military or Ike’s desegregating public schools.

Of all three branches of government, I’m most sympathetic to the position that presidents find themselves in, and I see the frequent use of EOs as a necessary evil – with the emphasis more on “necessary” than on “evil.”  

As our congress has become more dysfunctional, a president usually finds himself slogging through mud to get anything done.  If the opposing party has even a slight majority in congress, he can be tied up in endless investigations, and cannot get any regular bill passed through congress at all.  If his party has a slim but not a super-majority, he still can’t break a filibuster to pass legislation, and can only do so through continuing resolutions, which are very limited.  

Thus the rash of EOs at the beginning of Trump’s second term, and the recent policy whiplashing at each change of administration.  Obama’s first EOs canceled Bush policies (closing Gitmo, stopping terrorist detention and interrogation policies, etc.); Trump’s first EOs countered Obama’s (trimming Obamacare damage, closing the border); Biden’s canceled Trump’s (killed the Keystone pipeline, opened the border, free fentanyl for all American kids, etc.).

One more factor that limits the president’s power: as the only one with term limits, the long-term seat-warmers in congress and the deep-state bureaucratic functionaries can just slow-walk and hamper everything he tries to do, and then just out-wait him.    

The Imperial Judiciary.

Just like the other two branches, the judiciary has stepped out of its lane too.  In one way, judges (especially on SCOTUS) are given more power than anyone else in gov’t, since they serve for life and are functionally impervious to any pressure or checks on their behavior.  (I know: technically, they can be impeached, but in reality, that almost never happens.) 

But in another way, judges are supposed to be more tightly checked than the other 2 branches, because they are supposed to keep their own political opinions ENTIRELY out of their rulings; their job is to interpret the laws, not to shape, slant or make them.  In the real world, no human can actually do that perfectly, but things have really fallen apart on this front, as more and more judges (local, appellate and SCOTUS) have IMHO been de facto legislating, by novel “interpretations” that coincidentally change the law to be more in line with their political priors.

Amy Coney-Barrett made this point recently, when she joined all 7 other judges in slapping down Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s “extreme” and nakedly partisan attacks on Trump, and on the other SCOTUS judges, including Kagan and Sotomayor, in an opinion that is “at odds with more than two centuries of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”  In her response to Brown-Jackson’s rant (read it and see!), Barrett pointed out that “Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.”

As a conservative, I see about 90% of the problems with an imperial judiciary coming from the left, and they all stem from the differing judicial philosophies.  Conservatives are supposed to be “originalists” or “strict constructionists,” who do their best to get back to the original meaning of the constitution, and rule based on that, even when – especially when! – the outcome goes against their own political preferences. 

Scalia provided a great example of that approach, when he declared that he hated flag burning and would outlaw it if he could…but that’s not what the constitution supported, so he ruled against his own desires. 

The lefty approach is the so-called “living document” view, in which the constitution’s meaning is continually in flux…and coincidentally enough, they always find that it is fluxing toward exactly their own political preferences.  This mindset results in what we conservatives call “activist judges” – robed partisans who continually give leftists their chosen policies through judicial rulings that they could never have achieved democratically and legislatively.

Two influential examples of this are Roe vs. Wade in 1973 and Obergefell in 2015.  For two hundred years, nobody had imagined that a right to abortion existed in the Constitution, but then 5 partisans in robes peered into the “emanations and penumbras” of that document and “discovered” that it had been there all along.  For nearly 250 years nobody had detected gay marriage in the constitution, but once again, 5 robed activists were shocked to find exactly what they hoped to find there. 

Unexpectedly!

To be fair, the division between judicial philosophies isn’t always so clear.  There are real challenges in ruling on issues that hadn’t existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, but affect our lives today.  And while conservative originalists place great weight on “stare decisis,” or following precedent, they necessarily overturn a precedent every time they reverse an earlier ruling that they find was unconstitutional.

Thus lefties screamed hypocrisy when the Roberts court overturned Roe, and again when they overturned Chevron. But of course those same lefties are huge hypocrites on the issue of stare decisis, citing it when it bolsters their political priors, and shredding it when it doesn’t.  (Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson were once precedents, and no one still argues that slavery and forced segregation should still exist.)   After all, Roe overturned 200 years of a precedent which every sentient judge – and person, for that matter – agreed on: the constitution is silent on abortion. 

And 38 seconds after Roe was issued, the left carved it on a stone tablet, proclaiming that it is and would always be inviolable precedent, until the end of time.   

The second Trump administration has brought the imperial judiciary issue into stark relief.  There are three levels of federal courts: district courts (with local jurisdiction), circuit courts (i.e. appeals courts) and SCOTUS.  There are 677 district court judges, and too many of them are hard partisan leftists, and they’ve been lodging TROs against virtually everything Trump has tried to do. 

Not all of the challenges are frivolous, and I expect that the administration will lose on some of them, including the way Trump’s done tariffs, and probably on stopping birth-right citizenship, too.  That last one is really a shame, because I’ve read enough on that topic to think that the Constitution didn’t require giving citizenship to those born to people who are in the country illegally.  But I don’t have enough confidence in the six supposedly originalist justices to stick to the law on that issue. 

Having said that, most of the TROs have been ridiculously, nakedly partisan.  Many local judges have said that Trump shouldn’t have control of executive agencies (whether in firing personnel, or shrinking or eliminating those agencies), shouldn’t be able to enforce our immigration laws, or to direct foreign policy.  Most of them have also declared that their local court judgement should automatically apply to the entire country.

Thankfully, Trump has been batting around .900 on reversing the TROs so far, because if he weren’t, our judicial system would be completely unworkable.  You obviously cannot have 677 local judges acting as de facto presidents, claiming for themselves the right to micromanage and reverse every action the president takes. 

Some of the lower courts’ more transparently egregious power grabs have been reversed by the circuit courts, but some haven’t, and if it weren’t for a mostly originalist SCOTUS, the tidal wave of lawfare and partisan rulings would have paralyzed the country.  

But that is a scary position to be in, both because this court isn’t consistent, and because the next time Dems gain control, they’ll change the makeup of the court, either legally (by replacing exiting justices) or corruptly (by packing the court). 

This SCOTUS was often a useful check on Obama and Biden, overruling Biden’s EO vax mandate and his attempt to force all Americans to pay the school loans of the students who took them out, among others.  Some quick research showed me that Obama’s win-loss rate at SCOTUS was the worst of any modern president – he won only 45% of the time, compared to Reagan’s 75%, HW Bush’s 70%, Clinton’s 63% and W Bush’s 60% — until Trump’s first term, when he won around 44%.  (I couldn’t find Biden’s final number yet, but it will likely be at or near the bottom.)   

At the same time, Roberts was able to twist himself in knots to find a way to preserve Obamacare, even though his own ruling suggested that it wasn’t constitutional, and this SCOTUS has not produced automatically originalist rulings.  Also the two best justices – Thomas (my hero!) and Alito – are the oldest, and we can’t afford to have either of them replaced by a Dem president.   

To top it all off, the army of terrible partisan local judges are in some sense winning, even as they keep being beaten in court.  Because every wave of lawfare rulings gums up the works and slows Trump down, limiting the amount he can get done.  

I know: this column has been pretty heavy on the “cautious” and light on the “optimistic.”       

I would like to hear your thoughts on this subject, because I’m not sure what we should do – other than making sure that JD, Rubio or DeSantis win the WH in the next couple of presidential cycles! – to rein in our imperial judiciary.     

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Checks and Balances, Part 2 (posted 12/5/25)

In my previous column, I laid out why I think the Founders created our system of checks and balances, and summarized the way that system provides for each of our three branches of government – legislative, executive and judicial – to check each other’s power. 

Today I’ll start with one other aspect of our government which allows checks and balances to work.  This is federalism, the idea that the federal government shouldn’t dominate states in all ways, such that they can’t make their own individual laws to reflect the democratically expressed will of their citizens.

The check on federalism is the Supremacy Clause in article 6 of the Constitution, which says that when it comes to a fairly short, enumerated list of federal prerogatives, federal law trumps state laws that would contradict it.  For example, once the Republicans whipped the Democrats, freed their slaves, and outlawed slavery, Democrat states could no longer have state laws that allowed slavery.  

When the Dems tried two of their most famous, racist work-arounds – creating the Klan, and Jim Crow laws – both of those were eventually ended thanks to our criminal laws and the federally-enforced Supremacy Clause, respectively. 

SCOTUS justice Brandeis summarized the idea of federalism in 1932 when he said that states can become “little laboratories of democracy” in which local policies and legislation can be tried without impacting the rest of the nation.  If those experiments prove successful, the nation can adopt them on a national level, if the people agree.

Such experiments have been going on in the states non-stop for the last century and more.  Two common examples relate to crime, and to taxes and regulation. 

Regarding crime, red states generally blame criminals more than society for criminals’ actions; they support the police, and they prosecute and incarcerate criminals (especially recidivists) for longer sentences.  Blue states generally blame society more than criminals; they are more critical of police and more likely to defund or decrease their funding; they are much more generous to criminals, releasing them on no bail pending trial, prosecuting them less, and giving them shorter sentences and letting them out early if they are convicted.

Regarding taxes and regulation, blue states and cities – operating from their preference for more and stronger government oversight of most aspects of life – have aggressively regulated and taxed.  They assiduously regulate (and from our conservative perspective, micro-manage) construction and business, and they heavily tax everything from income to sales to property.

Red states have generally done less regulation and taxing.  It’s easier to build a house, and to start and run a business in a red state, and you pay a lot less – or zero – in state income tax.  (All 7 states with no income tax are red; all 8 with a top tax rate of 9% or more are blue)  

In Brandeis’ terms, the little laboratories have been doing their experiments, and the results are now in.  In blue states, crime is generally worse, cost of living is much higher, unemployment is higher, and state services are worse.  In red states, the reverse is generally true.  (Exceptions come when stats from blue cities – regarding educational, social and political dysfunction, along with higher crime and poverty – are misleadingly attributed to the red states those cities are in.  Devious politicians then dishonestly label blue city problems as red state problems.) 

National migration patterns reflect the results of those “little laboratory” experiments:  productive people are fleeing blue states like CA, IL and NY (among others) and going to red states like FL, TX and TN (among others).  This kind of “voting with your feet” is an informal, yet very powerful form of checks and balances, since it gives all states incentives to treat citizens well, and disincentives for treating them poorly.

Having now sung the praises of our system, I must turn toward some problems with it.  I would point to three ways in which I think the original separation of powers and checks and balances have eroded over the last 40-50 years or so.

First, the legislative branch has largely abdicated its proper powers in favor of personal benefits/enrichment of congressmen.  Second, the powers of the presidency have grown toward an “imperial presidency” (a term which gained prominence in the 1960s, and got a boost from an influential 1973 Arthur Schlesinger book with that name).  Third, the powers of an imperial and overweening judiciary have similarly grown. 

Legislative abdication:

I think the Founders would be rolling in their graves to realize how wrong they’d been about one thing.  They thought that given the ambition of mankind, each branch would jealously guard their own power by continually pushing back against the other 2 branches, which is how it worked at first.  (Hence “setting ambition against ambition.”)

But it turns out that in recent years, most of our congressmen/women have deteriorated into self-serving cowards, without the spine to fight and take principled stances that might cost them personally.  We used to have a bunch of individual budget bills every year, and every congress-weasel would have to vote on all of them, and each vote would piss off somebody.  (Vote for a farm bill that farmers think disfavors their interests, and you’ll have some angry Midwesterners on your hands!) That necessarily involved checks and balances: auto-makers and heavy manufacturers would be vying with farmers and white collar business for support/perks/non-interference; east coast states would be trying to get a piece of the pie for their people and industries, as Midwesterners and west coasters would for theirs.

But since congress is now full of people who don’t care about anything but getting re-elected, and getting Imhotep Pelosi-level rich on insider stock trading (!) they avoid taking any tough stances.

Instead, we’ve now devolved to the point where each year there is one huge, bloated, omnibus bill which hits the House and Senate floor a day or so before the whole thing has to be passed, or the entire government closes down.  There’s not even enough time to read it, let alone debate any part of it – which gives every puss in congress the chance to sneak in billions of dollars of pork and dirty deals, knowing that the people likely won’t ever find out about most of them.

And if they do – if some whistle-blower reveals some of the sleazy, sweetheart deals that were in the omnibus bill – the congress weasels have given themselves perfect cover: “What was I supposed to do?  We didn’t get the bill until it had to be passed or the government collapsed.  If I’d known everything that was in it, I’d have fought it, but I didn’t, and I had no choice.  It’s a rotten system, and needs to be changed!”  

Annnnnddddd…it’s never changed.  Because it serves the interests of the self-interested politicians.

The legislature has also largely abdicated its power by giving it over to bureaucratic agencies, who are supposed to limit themselves to enforcing the laws that the congress passes.  But the congress often passes laws with ambiguous and/or platitudinous instructions.  One example involved the Clean Water Act, which tightened restrictions on polluting waterways, and empowered the EPA to enforce that requirement.  Because who could oppose clean water and unpolluted waterways?

What happened next could have been predicted by people who understand humans, and the natural tendency to behave in ways that increase your power and job security.   Agencies who regulate lightly require less employees and budget, and are less powerful.  So before you could say “power corrupts,” the EPA had decided that “waterways” means every mud puddle in the country. 

I exaggerate.  A little.

But quickly enough, examples such as this popped up: you own a little piece of land in an area with patterns of seasonal rains; it might have a small dry pond on it for most of the year, which then becomes filled with water only during the rainy season.  An activist bureaucrat could then declare that such occasional water constituted a “waterway,” and thus a protected “wetland,” and claim the right to regulate the landowner into bankruptcy by forcing him to pay for onerous government inspections and “mitigation” strategies.

I’m not claiming that regulations are always or even often wrong.  But the end result should not be that unelected bureaucrats can unilaterally and functionally “write” a law, with no recourse for the people who are harmed by their self-created interpretations.  That would open the door to extreme, undemocratic abuse on the part of unelected bureaucrats.  And that’s what was often happening. 

In the 1984 Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, SCOTUS first created the principle of “Chevron deference,” which meant that a government agency’s interpretation of a law should be given deference, rather than being overseen (and checked) by the judiciary.  Fortunately, in 2024, SCOTUS corrected that mistake, overruling Chevron, and curtailing Chevron deference.   

That was not a perfect solution, because it took power away from unelected bureaucrats, only to give it to unelected judges.  No longer could an activist EPA functionary declare your mud puddle the equivalent of the Mighty Mississippi… but an activist judge could!  However, at least that judge’s decision could be checked and reversed by a higher court. 

Obviously, the best solution would be for congress to start writing fewer and clearer laws, so that these kinds of power-grabs by unelected officials would be much less common.  But to paraphrase an old saying, wish for congressional courage and competence in one hand, and defecate in the other, and see which one fills up first.

I think Learned Hand said that.  Or maybe it was Maimonides.

To summarize, the legislative branch – between shrinking from their duties to actually write and pass legislation, and deferring to federal agencies to in effect write the laws that congress only hints at in gutlessly ambiguous bills – has abdicated its mission, and its ability to check the other branches.

In Part 3, I’ll discuss the problems with the other two branches: the imperial presidency, and the imperial judiciary.   

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

A Few Thoughts on all of the Exploding Drug-Running Boats Lately (posted 12/3/25)

I was going to post the second in my three-part series on checks and balances in our government today, but I’ve been watching the news, and I need to call an audible.

Because a top-shelf, five-star, chef’s kiss example of lefty hypocrisy – the Democrat outrage over Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan drug boats, and Hegseth’s alleged “kill the guys in the water, too!” order – demands a response.   

Spoiler alert: reports of that order are BS, as even a story in the New York Times admits. (It’s a Christmas miracle!)

First, I do think it’s a topic worth debating and scrutinizing, as we should do with all uses of government power.  Unfortunately, I think it’s a debate we’ll need to have amongst ourselves, because the Democrats have rendered themselves totally unable to be taken seriously on this kind of moral issue, and on this specific moral issue.

Who can maintain a straight face while listening to their concern about the ramifications of taking the life of a criminal bringing poison into our country when they’ve not shown a fraction of that concern over the death of law-abiding citizens here?  They didn’t care about the young woman lit on fire by a recidivist criminal in Chicago; they didn’t care about the dead Ukrainian woman stabbed to death by another recidivist on the bus in Charlotte.  Not only did they not care about Charlie Kirk getting murdered, many of them actually celebrated it.  I could go on and on.  (They didn’t care about raped and murdered Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, etc. and etc.)

But it’s even worse than that.  If you’ll just sit down and let them lecture to you about morality, they’ll explain about the important context in which the different types of violence occurred.  Because the drug smugglers were killed directly by the US government, you see.  Whereas the wave of violence they’ve unleashed on the country was only carried out by the millions of unvetted foreigners whom the US government allowed in with no oversight, or career-criminal US citizens whom Democrat governors and mayors repeatedly released to continue preying on innocent Americans.

Um… I don’t think that’s quite the persuasive justification that our leftist friends think it is.

But never mind that.  Because there IS a direct analogy to Trump’s attacks on drug dealers intent on killing Americans that seems to have slipped the Dems’ minds.  And conveniently enough, it was carried out by the most popular and highly respected Democrat of this century: Barack Obama.

You may remember him as the flawless Light Bringer™, who was definitely not an arrogant narcissist like the Bad Orange Man. 

No, no.  He was the kind of modest guy who would say the following quote, which I swear I am not making up.  On June third of 2008, when describing what his winning the Democrat primary would mean for the world, he said, “…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal….”

There was even more to that quote, nauseatingly enough. He also said that his rise would signal “the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless,” and on and on. 

And he was right.  Because on June second of 2008 – I remember it well – I walked to our local hospital and kicked the crutches out from under a one-legged man, and yanked the cannula out of the nose of an octogenarian lung cancer patient, before going to my job and firing a bunch of tutors who worked for me.  Because if there were two things I loved in life, it was keeping healthcare from the sick and making people jobless.

I mean, other than defecating in the ocean and urinating on the earth.  Because I hated them both so much.

But then, the very next day, Obama brought me to my senses with his announcement that the oceans and the earth were going to be just fine, and he was going to heal all the sick people.  And that’s when I realized that I had been foolishly worshipping Jesus, when I could have been devoting myself to the holy Community Organizer and his scowling outside linebacker of a wife.  (Go TCU! De-fense! De-fense!)

I had been blind, but now I saw!  

You probably see where I’m going with this: Barry droned the hell out of half the world, and the MSM must have been taking those 8 years off, because they had very little to say. 

And it was even worse than I remembered.  I knew that he’d taken out some people in some of the more terrorist-infested parts of the world, but if pressed, I would have guessed that he ordered maybe a dozen drone strikes.

But I just researched that, and came across a site called, “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism,” which bills itself as independent and non-profit, and looks reasonable, if clearly left-leaning.  And I found that Obama had actually ordered 563 drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen!  For comparison, that is almost 10 times the number of strikes (57) carried out by George W Bush during his 8 years as president.  

For those of you youngsters out there, W Bush was Hitler after Hitler had been Hitler, and before Trump became Hitler.  So you can imagine how terrible he was! 

And yet Obama left him in the dirt, when it came to drone strikes.  (And that dirt was gently drifting down to settle on and coat the ground.  Because of the explosions from all the drone strikes.)

But when some Americans criticized all the drone strikes, Obama’s administration insisted that “drone strikes are so ‘exceptionally surgical and precise’ that they pluck off terror suspects while not putting ‘innocent men, women and children in danger.’” (I didn’t make those quotes up either.)

Yet, when pressed to release data on how many civilians were killed in those strikes, it turned out that the number was not, in fact, zero.  As of the end of 2015, the administration put the number at between 64 and 116.  Various outside sources put the number at between 380 and 801.

But even taking Obama’s numbers at face value – which, shame on you if you fall for that – does 116 civilians sound like the result of “surgical strikes” to you? 

If so, I’d like to meet your surgeon. 

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Open scene, with a gowned doc standing over a patient on a table, with a nurse standing by:

Nurse: Would you like a scalpel, so you could make a surgical cut, doctor?

Surgeon: Nope. Just give me a meat cleaver and a butcher knife.  Ooh, and a DeWalt drill with a 2-inch spade bit!  Let’s DO THIS!  (Holding his fist toward the nurse.)  Fist bump.

Nurse: Uhhh…aren’t we supposed to be sterile? 

Surgeon (waving at her dismissively): Ok, Debby Downer.  Just hold this guy down.

Nurse (alarmed): He’s not even under anesthetic yet?

Patient: Wait!

Ten…seconds…layter…

Surgeon: Man, that is a lot of arterial spray!

Patient (shrieking):  Ahhh!  I’ve gone blind!!

Surgeon: Oh, man up.  That’s just the blood in your eyes.

Patient (thrashing): Is there supposed to be blood in my eyes?  Why is there blood in my eyes?!

Nurse: I think I see his cervical vertebrae!  What are you doing?!

And, scene.

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Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Barack the Drone-a-nator.  (Tag line: He’ll be bock…to strafe your Ramadan feast!)

At the time, I didn’t complain about Obama’s strikes, partly because I never heard about most of them.  (Thanks, objective reporters!)  But also because I don’t have double standards.  If he was going after terrorists in terrorist havens, I understand that to be part of war.  And another part of war is that civilians unlucky enough to be close to enemies when they are struck might become collateral damage.

See: Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and every other war since Nancy Pelosi’s dad led a chariot charge that flattened a bunch of Hittite “No Pharoahs!” protestors in the Valley of the Kings 3500 years ago.

You know who else didn’t get outraged about Obama’s darkening the skies with drones and airborne terrorist body parts?  Most Americans, and 99.9% of Democrats.

Now fast forward to the last month or so, and those same Democrats are gnashing their teeth and rending their garments and shaking their tiny fists in rage, because Trump is mowing through drug-running boats like Dirigible Pritzker mowing through a custom-made five-foot-long Subway sandwich.

And it’s not like we’re sinking Carnival cruise ships with a shoebox of meth and 1200 souls on board, or smugglers who are carrying some drugs and a handful of tourists on a deep-sea fishing excursion/drug run.

These boats are tiny, and their entire cargo is drugs, and their entire crews are cartel members!

Look, I don’t have my Masters in Drone-ology.  But I did complete all the coursework, before changing my career goal to English professor.  And when I was studying for the final drone exam, I came across this sample question:

Consider this hypothetical scenario: You have a visual lock on three evil enemies of your nation.  You can choose only one of them to engage with a warhead suppository, with the goal of killing the bad guy while minimizing the chances of injuring or killing nearby noncombatants.  Would you drone:

A. A terrorist driving in a car with one of his wives and a couple of his kids dressed as suicide bombers for Muslim Halloween.  (No treat!  Only trick!)

B. A terrorist sitting in a crowded café surrounded by civilians while watching Satan’s sport. (i.e. soccer.  Duh!)

Or

C. A cartel member all by himself – in a drug-filled boat on a large body of water, miles away from the closest civilian. 

(Rumors that Eric Swalwell – while taking and failing that test, and then settling for a career in Democrat politics – first chose “A,” then scratched that out and chose “B,” have not been confirmed.)

I wish somebody in the Trump administration would ask me to write a statement for Trump to deliver to the press, like the one he gave when we killed Anwar al-alwaki.  I’d have him walk down that red carpet, clear his throat, and read this off the teleprompter:

“As of now, my administration has conducted 14 strikes on cartel drug boats.  And they’ve all been just terrific, in terms of explosions, and when it comes to dead terrorists.  Nobody’s ever seen anything like these strikes!   People are saying to me, “Sir, you’ve saved millions of American lives already, just from the drugs you’ve already blown up.”  That’s what they’re saying. 

But I know that many of you in this room, and especially those of you who are stupid – you know who you are, and frankly, you’re very stupid people, let’s be honest – are saying that these strikes are unprecedented, and I should be more presidential, like some of the dwarves who held this office before me.

Like Sleepy, and Horny, and Grudgy.  You know who I’m talking about.

Well, even very stupid squirrels find an acorn once in a while, so maybe you’re right.  Maybe I should treat this threat like my predecessors have.   In fact, I’ve been told that Barack Obama set a fine example. 

So today, I pledge to you that I will follow in Obama’s footsteps, just to make the low-rated losers in the fake news media happy.  While I’ve carried out 14 drone strikes on terrorists, Obama carried out 563.

So after I launch 549 more drone strikes to kill terrorists, I’ll stop right there, and Barry and I will be tied.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Man, did that feel good to get off my chest!  Tomorrow or Friday I’ll post Part 2 on Checks and Balances, and update you with any CO site news if I have any. 

Thanks for checking in, and for subscribing!

A Discussion of Checks & Balances, Why they Used to Work, and Why They Seem to be Weakening, Part 1 (posted 12/1/25)

Before I get started today, I’d like to update you on what’s going on with the now-suspended Cautious Optimism Facebook page.

I’d like to do that…except that there’s not much to update you on.  I’m going to touch base with CO in the next day or two, but so far we’ve not gotten any feedback on what caused Facebook’s mysterious overlords to suspend the page.  Which makes it a little tough to figure out whether we’ll be back there or not.  I’ll post here as soon as I know anything more.

In the meantime, thanks again for all the comments and feedback!  Traffic on this page has jumped, and many of you have let us know that you’re willing to follow us to our eventual new home, and subscribed so that you can be kept in the loop.  Please continue to share the word with others you know, especially those from the CO site.

Today’s column is part one of three on the subject of checks and balances in American government.   I’ve been involved in an email exchange on this subject with an old friend of mine who is a good-hearted liberal, and it has proven to be more interesting than I had first expected.  Discussing that led me into a little bit of religion and philosophy, a consideration of some strengths of our system (and a lot that seems to be going wrong with it now), and a dusting of mockery of some people I believe are crying out to be mocked.  (Because: me!)

My lefty buddy asked me why I think the Founders created checks and balances in our government in the first place.  I’m pretty sure that he asked because he believes that Trump has been trying to wield way too much power.  (You won’t be surprised to hear that my friend has been very enthusiastic about the “No Kings” protests, for example.)  What follows is an edited version of my response to him:

I think that there is both a philosophical answer and a political answer to the question.

Philosophy first: I think the Founders created a series of checks and balances because they were geniuses, and they were steeped in the Judeo-Christian world view that (in large part) has made the West the most successful civilization in human history. 

At the heart of Christianity is the understanding that human beings are flawed and fallen; that’s why God gave us the Law in the Old Testament (to try to hem in and correct our fallen nature) and Christ in the New Testament (to do for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves, i.e. save us from our sins). 

Side bar: That conception differs radically from most other religions/world views that I’m aware of, especially the two major competitors to Judeo-Christianity now, Islam and communism/socialism.  Islam teaches that the way to paradise is by following the teachings of Muhammad: charity and good relations with other Muslims, but also spreading the faith by the sword, killing lots of infidels and gays, establishing sharia law with no allowance for a separation between mosque and state, etc. 

Marxist communism/socialism sees human nature as malleable and perfectible, and the source of all conflict as class-based and economic, which explains all the big talk about creating “the new Soviet Man” or some such, and pointing to the moment when socialism will blur into communism/nirvana when the dictatorial (socialist) government withers away into pure commune-ism. 

Of course, that can only happen when human nature has been completely changed, which Uncle Jesus and common sense tells me can and will never happen on this earth.  Hence the reason why the last century was filled with commie/socialist attempts at social re-engineering that resulted in poverty, oppression, environmental degradation and mass murder.  (Except when the socialism was heavily watered-down, half-capitalism, as in the Scandinavian countries, most of whom have now retreated from socialism, as I understand it.  They’ve still got market-suppressing over-regulation and high tax rates, but other than that…)

Now the politics:  The Founders’ understanding of Judeo-Christianity and flawed human nature led them to embrace and institute two great secular ideas with their roots in that tradition: free market capitalism, and a democratic republic (not a pure democracy, i.e. despotic mob rule) which incorporates checks and balances.

Another side bar: In a recent discussion with CO, he pointed out that “capitalism” is a derogatory term popularized by Marxists and socialists to denigrate and make a straw man out of free market economics.  I said that in debate, I try to use “free market capitalism” to stress that point, but he prefers the term “freedomism,” to more fully remove the straw-man denigration inherent in the term “capitalism.” 

For what it’s worth, Adam Smith – 18th century big brain and a hero of mine – also didn’t use the term capitalism, and preferred the phrasing, “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”  Am I saying that CO is smart like Adam Smith?

I’m saying we should have that conversation.

Anyway, free markets work because rather than trying to completely re-program basic human nature – as communism/socialism does – it turns the ubiquitous sin of greed toward a moral purpose.  You win in a free market by providing a good or service to another person which he is willing to voluntarily exchange money for, producing a win/win, or else the deal doesn’t happen. 

So you get what you want – whether that is out of a greedy desire, or a healthy ambition, or desire to provide for yourself and your family – by giving me what I want.  And the rising tide lifts all boats.  Hence Smith’s famous quote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Socialism fails, on the other hand, because it exacerbates the equally ubiquitous sin of envy.  It tells people who are less economically successful that successful people have wronged them, and fans the flames of their resentment into a falsely righteous anger and a sense of entitlement to the work and resources of others.

And before you know it, you’ve elected professional useless people like Bernie, AOC and Mamdani, and everything in states and cities they govern begins going to hell in an ever-increasing series of handbaskets.     

Checks and balances work because in addition to having good qualities – being charitable, willing to work for your bread, helping your neighbor – people are also power-hungry, greedy, lazy and all the rest.  The Founders knew that, and set up the system which Madison describes as one in which “ambition must be made to counter-act ambition.” 

Powerful senators are checked by powerful representatives, requiring them to compromise and horse-trade if they want to pass bicameral legislation.  Ambitious legislators, through the power of the purse or impeachment, can check presidents, and those presidents can check the legislature with the veto and the “bully pulpit.”  

The judicial branch checks the legislative and executive branches, and itself, as when higher courts slap down out-of-control lower courts.  (See the last 10 months!).  Those branches also check the judiciary, through passing new laws, amending the constitution or (more rarely, and more controversially and less settled) by defying SCOTUS rulings.  

Examples would be Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and instances when the free/Republican states defied the slave/Democrat-state-driven laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act, and SCOTUS rulings such as Dred Scott.  Such defiance is encapsulated in Andrew Jackson’s likely apocryphal comment that “[SCOTUS Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

As potentially destabilizing as open defiance of SCOTUS rulings could be, the fact that SCOTUS has no military or legislative agency to enforce its rulings provides a sober warning to the judiciary against drastically trampling the will of the citizenry.

That’s how the system of checks and balances has traditionally worked.  But in the last sixty years or so, that system has been fraying.

Coming up in Part 2: The boost to checks and balances provided by federalism, and the erosion of checks and balances by the abdication of the legislature, and the rise of a quasi-imperial Presidency and a quasi-imperial Judiciary.     

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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