Uncategorized – Martin Simpson

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 19^th 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 18^th and 19^th 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!)

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 – 18^th 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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Update, plus the Continuing Imbecility of Jasmine Crockett (posted 11/21/25)

Update first:

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Below is my column that I posted last Friday at Cautious Optimism, but I just wanted to update you on the fate of the CO Facebook page. Unfortunately, there’s not much of an update, because CO still hasn’t heard anything else from Facebook, and the page is still down.

We’re still hoping that FB will reinstate the page at some point, and I suppose that if we don’t hear anything from them after another week or so, we’ll try to figure out a Plan B for another location of the site.

In the meantime, I got a great response from you all on Wednesday, and am very encouraged by how many of you want to keep the CO community going, and have written in to say that you’ll follow us to wherever we end up next. So thanks so much!

For now, I’m going to keep writing my usual columns and posting them here; the next one will be up on Monday morning. Once again, if you’ve haven’t done it yet, please click the “Subscribe” button on this page; it doesn’t cost anything, and it will mean that every time I post something new, you’ll get a notice.

And if you know any of the regulars from the Cautious Optimism Facebook page – or anyone who might enjoy the new page, whenever/ if ever we get it up and running – please point them to this page and ask them to subscribe.

So here’s the column I posted on November 21^st:

Barely 24 hours after I felt compelled to write about what a phony dope Jasmine Crockett is, I have to do so again. Because you can’t spell “Crockett” without “crock,” and she really stepped in it yesterday.

On Wednesday she read a rant on the House floor that was as Crocketty as can be. On the bright side, whoever wrote it for her didn’t include a lot of “he be doin’ this” and “she be doin’ that;” on the down side, she did say “y’all” a lot. Which made me wonder if her script literally said “y’all,” or whether it said “you” or “you all,” and she improvised.

You’ve probably already heard the key line: “Folks who also took money from somebody named Jeffrey Epstein, as I had my team dig in very quickly, Mitt Romney, the NRCC, Lee Zeldin” and etc.. Then she rambled a bit more, and you could see when she left the script, because she got even more incoherent, babbling until some House official said, “Time has expired.”

And a grateful nation was relieved.

You already know where this is going. Because Lee Zeldin quickly pointed out that the Jeffrey Epstein who contributed to him is a doctor, and a different person than the Democrat pedophile (who contributed way more heavily to Dems than he did to Rs) Jeffrey Epstein.

That mistake is bad enough, and if Crockett had even a modicum of honesty, she would have immediately apologized and slunk off in shame. But as she might say, she be Jasmine Crockett, and she ain’t havin’ none a dat honesty sh*t.

When even CNN’s benighted Katilin Collins was sheepish enough to raise her error and give her a chance to “correct the record,” Crockett saw her chance and a rake, and she jumped on both. To wit, “Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein. And while I’m at it, when I’ve been comparing Trump to Hitler, I meant Jerry Hitler, the accountant from Peoria.”

Okay, I made that last part up. But it was no dumber than what Crockett actually said. And now I’ve got a headache, just from writing something almost as dumb as Jasmine Crockett.

Fortunately, Knob Creek 9 with water back cures a headache. (Cue NBC music sting, “The more you know.”) Which means I am now fortified enough to repeat the rest of her stunningly stupid response.

“So, my team, what they did is they Googled, and that is specifically why I said ‘a’ Jeffrey Epstein, unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies, because it was not the same one, that’s fine.”

Don’t be distracted by the fact that that was a dog’s breakfast of an ungrammatical run-on sentence, like I was. (Because: English professor.) Focus on how dumb it was. She admits that she didn’t confirm the identity of the person she was smearing Zeldin for associating with, and then she BRAGS that she’s not telling lies!

But it gets worse: “So, at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people. Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is? I have not…. I literally had maybe 20 minutes before I had to do that debate.”

Yikes. I don’t think this beeyotch knows how excuses work!

Jasmine, you’re supposed to say something that exonerates you, or at least mitigates the mistake you made. Something like, “I was in the act of confirming Epstein’s identity when my grandma died, so I was distracted by grief.” Or “I was going to do my homework, but I lost myself in your eyes, Dr. Simpson, and realized that I’ve never really been in love before.”

Yes, I have heard both of those excuses many times in the course of my profession, and I never fell for them. Why do you ask?

Anyway, Crockett must have seen the pained expression on Collins’ face, because she tried to bring it home one more time: “Within 20 minutes, you could not find that out, not from just doing a quick search on FEC. So number one, I made sure that I was clear that it was a Jeffrey Epstein, but I never said that it was specifically that Jeffrey Epstein, because I knew that we would need more time to really dig in.”

Good lord. We’re all now dumber from having read that. And I had to type it, which is even worse. I feel like there had to be a better way for her to respond, if she didn’t have enough time to do a basic fact check.

So I just checked with my own adviser, Kinison Consulting, LLC, and this was his response: “Hey Jasmine, I think I’ve got an alternative for you. If you didn’t have time to do your homework before you spoke, you know what you might have tried? How about SHUTTING YOUR GIANT PIE HOLE?! OH! OHHHHH!! DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT, YOU EMPTY-HEADED MORON? How about you put your money where your mouth is, and KEEP IT CLOSED! OH! OHHHH!!”

The great Adam Carolla has a little game he sometimes plays called “Stupid or Liar.” As the name suggests, he focuses on a specific quote from a slimy politician – Gavin Newsom is a frequent contestant – and asks the titular question: is this guy stupid enough to believe what he said, or is he just a liar?

When it comes to Crockett, I feel like the game needs a third category, i.e. “Stupid, Lazy or Liar?” Because she’s claiming that she was smart enough to know that she could be impugning the wrong Epstein, which would be incredibly lazy. (Just nail it down before you talk!) And it would also be stupid, since she opened herself to being almost instantly exposed.

And she’s definitely a liar, since she claimed to not be trying to mislead people, when she obviously was.

Whatever else this next mid-term election brings, I hope the voters of Texas send phony Jasmine Crockett packing!

I hate to make an abrupt transition and end on a sad note, but I’ve got one other thing on my mind.

For the last several years I’ve been following the YouTube channel of Jonna Jinton, an artist and videographer who lives in the far north of Sweden. As an Illinois boy who has been in Florida for almost 40 years, I am very nostalgic for snow and winter scenery, and she uses her camera and a drone to capture a lot of both, including some gorgeous footage of the northern lights. (Seeing those is on my bucket list, and on my wife’s as well. She and our oldest daughter went to Iceland together a few years ago, but the lights didn’t show up when they were there.)

Jinton is an entrepreneur, and has rehabbed an art studio and house, and I’m a sucker for rehabbing houses. She also has a dog who looks enough like Cassie the Wonder Dog that he could be her twin. He’s named Nanook, which is about the most Scandinavian name for a dog that I could imagine.

After a while away, I just checked her site again, and discovered that she’s had a rough year. She and her husband went their separate ways, and she sold her art studio in order to buy her house after the marital split. Most poignantly (to me), it turns out that after a year or so of declining health, sweet old Nanook died at the end of May.

He was 15, and she’d had him since he was a puppy. Her site has a lot of footage of him walking in the snow with her, and curling up by the fire, and I can’t watch him without thinking of Cassie. She’s around 13 or 14 – we got her as a rescue 12 years ago, and she wasn’t a puppy then.

Nanook’s death hit Jonna very hard, and I know that the same is in store for me. Before I’d retired, I’d fantasized about someday taking Cassie with me on a trip to Illinois or Wisconsin in the dead of winter, and renting a cabin for a week. (My wife’s a true Florida girl, and dislikes the cold enough that she’s happy to allow me to take a winter trip each year, as long as I don’t ask her to come with!)

I’d take my laptop and a few good books – hopefully there’d be a good internet connection so I could have some Zoom calls with Karen and stay connected to CO nation – and Cassie would get to see snow for the first time. I pictured taking at least one snowy walk with her each day, and having a fire in a stone fireplace at night.

Sadly, that opportunity has passed. She’s moving slower now, and can’t make it up our steep staircase anymore. Her hearing is not what it was; I find myself inadvertently sneaking up on her and accidentally startling her fairly often.

But she’s still the same good girl, and she’s hanging in there. She’s lying beside my desk as I write this, as she has been for every column I’ve written since CO first asked me to write something for this site in December of 2016.

I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving, and I love the Christmas season, and between watching Nanook on a video from this past January, and listening to Cassie snoring softly by my feet, I’m feeling some kind of bittersweet pre-nostalgia. I know I’m going to miss her when she’s gone, but I’m savoring every day with her in the meantime.

As regular readers may remember from a recent column, I think Shakespeare had it right, at the end of Sonnet 73: “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

Have a good last weekend before Thanksgiving, everybody.

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Update on the (Temporary?) Suspension of the Cautious Optimism FB page (posted 11/26/25)

Hello All,

I’m feeling a little down as I write this, because as those of you have faithfully followed the Cautious Optimism Facebook page already know, Facebook suspended the CO site last Friday evening, 11/21/25.

In this post, I’ll update you on that situation, and ask all of you to follow/subscribe to this site – which will continue to be free, as always. If you do so, you’ll get an automatic notice every time I post a new column or update.

Since I think most of you originally came here from the Cautious Optimism FB page, clicking “follow” here is the best way to stay in touch and get updates on where the CO site is going to migrate to, if we can keep it going.

So thanks in advance for doing that!

I talked to the great and powerful CO over the weekend, and he told me that he’s been repeatedly contacting Facebook and trying to get answers from them, but so far with no luck. They haven’t told us why the site was suspended, or whether it was only taken down permanently, or only temporarily. He had hoped that the suspension might only be for 72 hours, but that would have ended on Monday evening, and that obviously has not happened.

So we’re not sure what the next step is going to be. CO would like to keep the site going, and since it had recently grown to more than 34,000 followers, I think many people feel the same way. I have really loved writing for the site for the last nine years, and have made many friends there, and would hate to see that end!

CO and I discussed several options, if FB doesn’t relent and un-suspend the site. One option would be to re-start the dormant, old Cautious Optimism site, but we’re not sure that that can happen. One advantage of re-starting that would be the continuity; followers of the newer site could move over to the old site with the same name, assuming we can find a way to let them know that that one is back. The downside of re-starting that site is that if FB won’t even tell us why they suspended the new site, who knows whether they might do the same to the old one, if we break some mysterious rule that they won’t even identify!

Another option might be to start a new site on a different platform, but neither CO nor I are tech savvy in the ways to do that. In fact, if any of you out there who have followed and enjoyed the Cautious Optimism page and who have the skill set to consider setting up and maybe even helping to manage a new one, let me know that, and I think CO might be willing to negotiate a deal with you to make that happen.

One regret that CO and I have is that neither of us thought to create some kind of an email list of CO site followers, so that we could reach all of them with updates about where the site might migrate to, in case something like this happened.

And now something like this has happened, and we have no way to contact the CO family!

The good news is that I have this WordPress site, and you’re here, and I’ll still be able to communicate with all of you who have been coming here regularly. The arrangement I had with CO was to post every new column on the CO site first, and then when I wrote a new one to post there, I’d post the former one here. So I am going to continue to write columns and post them here, as always.

I’ll post my next new column shortly, but in the meantime, please do hit “follow” on this page, so I can let you know what the plan is, as soon as we get one. And if you know some of the other regulars from the Cautious Optimism site who don’t know about this site, please send them here and ask them to subscribe, too.

And while you’re at it, I’d love to get some comments and feedback from you: How many of you would be willing (or even eager?) to follow us to a new home, if we can find a way to re-create the site elsewhere? I’m assuming that the lion’s share of you found this page because you found the CO Facebook page first, but if that’s not the case for you, please let me know how you found me.

Also, if you’re at all tech savvy and have any suggestions for where we could locate a new site, we’d love to hear that, too!

I’ll be back to update you soon, and thanks!

Martin

I’ve Got 3 Women on my Mind (posted 11/19/25)

In today’s column I’m going to focus on three women, one of whom I admire, and two of whom I don’t. In honor of a classic Clint Eastwood movie – which I just picked up from our library for a re-watch after many years – I’ll call this column the Good, the Bad, and… well… Michelle Obama.

First up is the Good, in the form of Tiffany Fong. I’d never heard of her before today, and after more research, she might turn out to be a weirdo. But for today at least, I’m a fan, because she had a great response to smelly Eric Swalwell.

Lately Swalwell has started doing these cringey short videos in which he pretends to be walking in public when he’s surprised by someone coming up and asking a political question. Then he gives an answer that shows the kind of brainpower that you might expect from someone who fell for a Chicom honeytrap.

In this case, his off-camera stooge asked him why Trump has now called on congress to release all of the Epstein files. Swalwell claims that Trump could have forcibly released the files on his own at any time, and then says, “Checkmate.”

He might as well have said “Coffee Mate” or “Ahoy, mate,” because that makes no sense. And of course it ignores the giant inconvenient fact that all Dems have been ignoring as they try to turn Epstein into a Trump problem: every day during the four years of the Biden nightmare, the Dems could have released the files in their entirety.

And now, because Trump hadn’t yet done what they never did, he’s an existential threat to democracy. Or something.

Enter Tiffany Fong, who I’m told is an attractive 20-something Asian-American gal. I can’t confirm that, because as regular readers know, ever since I first laid eyes on my smokeshow wife almost 40 years, all other women have become invisible to me. (Which reminds me: all of you who have been sending me all of those nude pics might as well cut it out. Though I do appreciate the thought.)

Fong’s response to Swalwell made me laugh out loud: “I feel like I could get you to some release some files.”

Yes! Fong played the Fang-Fang card. Well done!

I took a quick look at Fong’s X posts and found that she has an irreverent sense of humor. For example, “If your boyfriend is at a ‘No Kings” rally, that’s your girlfriend.”

She posted a pic of Grandpa Simpson storytelling in front of Bart and some kids, under the words, “Back in my day women had vaginas.”

She posted a Trump-esque troll-y painting of herself wearing vaguely colonial garb, only tighter. Behind her is a soft-focus American flag, she’s straddling a gatling gun, and a scowling, bad-ass eagle is perched on her left hand. The painting reads, “What the f*ck is a kilometer?”

After she posted that she’d voted for Trump, some hateful lefty group sarcastically awarded her “Chink of the Month,” and she responded snarkily: “Yay! I bring honor to my famiry!”

I like this gal.

Now onto the Bad, played today by Jasmine Crockett. (Unexpectedly!)

Everybody who knows anything about Crockett knows that she’s as phony as Liz Warren’s Cherokee heritage. (#wemustneverstopmockingher) She’s a spoiled rich kid who went to fancy private schools and used to speak grammatically correct English, but now she pretends to be a hood rat who can’t conjugate the verb “to be” correctly.

Don’t axe her why.

This week she was interviewed by a weirdo who calls himself “Larry the Fairy.” (Which rhymes, just like “nomen est omen.”) And he asks her, “So many MAGA women receive gender-affirming care such as lip fillers, breast augmentation, etc. Why do you think they are so against gender affirming care for trans people?”

She starts laughing, and literally stomping her hoof like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.

Sorry, “foot.” That should be “stomping her foot.”

Or should it?

As she is whinnying, the camera pans back, and we see that standing on the other side of her is a super-stable-looking drag queen dude – over 6 foot, giant pink wig and ridiculous caked-on makeup, wearing a dress that is struggling manfully to contain some serious flab-alanche-risk fat rolls. He’s probably there to make Jasmine look slim by comparison.

And he almost pulls it off.

So Jasmine waxes eloquent on the appearance of conservative women thusly: “So I have this thing where like, you know a MAGA woman, when you see one, they all have a look, right? Like they lips be like (gestures to her mouth), anyway, that’s a whole other issue.”

Yes. “They lips be all like this,” says the woman whose parents blew a quarter-million dollars on her education.

That’s one of the Democrats’ bright lights in the House, people. A black woman wearing a culturally-appropriating wig of straight hair, the fake fingernail talons of a Disney villainess, and fake eyelashes as thick as her skull, standing between Larry the Fairy and a drag version of Dick Butkus if he’d really let himself go.

And she wants to tell you about how conservative women look weird.

Sorry. I meant, “… about how MAGA women, they be lookin’ all weird and sh*t.”

Speaking of which, let’s turn to Michelle Obama, who has to be one of the most privileged and least happy people in the country. She famously said that she’d never been proud of the country until it elected her husband, and she’s spent most of her post-White House years complaining about the immense burden of being her.

This March she started a podcast with her brother; it’s called IMO (In My Opinion), but it should have been called “Festivus,” because it’s all about the airing of the grievances.

She complains about being in the fishbowl at the White House, the racism of America, and especially, about her husband. She didn’t want him to run for president, he’s always late for everything, she can’t stand the way he chews with his mouth open, and on and on.

Her podcast debuted with 338,000 views – not stellar numbers, considering her high profile and the big media promotional push it got – but then quickly dropped off to 66,000 within a month. As of September, it reportedly has only around 17,000 subscribers.

And now she’s come out with a book of pictures of herself, called The Look. The podcast and her book reveal Obama’s unfortunate combination of narcissism and racism. In an interview she said that she had to “conform to a white environment of appropriateness.”

“Let me explain something to white people! Our hair comes out of our head naturally in a curly pattern, so when we’re straightening it to follow your beauty standards, we are trapped by straightness.” (Rumors that her husband has not been “trapped by straightness” have not been confirmed.) She even complains that blacks don’t swim or go to the gym “because we’re trying to keep our hair straight for y’all. It is exhausting, and it’s so expensive, and it takes up so much time.”

There’s a lot wrong with that paragraph, starting with the fact that there’s no such thing as one universally accepted beauty standard, let alone a racially coded one. And contrary to Michelle’s self-martyrdom, most women aren’t thrilled with their natural hair, and tend to spend a ton of time on it, trying to get it to do what it doesn’t naturally want to.

Many women with straight hair want it curly, and those with naturally curly hair want it straight. Women with short hair want to grow it out, and women with long hair cut it short and then don’t like how it looks. Blondes darken their hair, brunettes lighten theirs, and leftist women dye it fluorescent colors to repel normal people.

When I was a young man, women would spray and tease their hair to within an inch of its life. Some white women got perms (resulting in a simulated Afro), and Bo Derek once got corn-rows, even though most men didn’t notice, because their eyes never made it up to her head.

And when Michelle whines about spending half of her waking life “trying to keep her hair straight” for us whiteys, I wish she would have asked me, because I could have told her that we couldn’t care less about how her hair looked. In fact, to the extent that I ever noticed her looks at all, it was because I was unnerved by her constant scowl, or freaked out because she’s built like a pass-rushing outside linebacker for TCU.

During her most recent interview for the book, Michelle incorporated three fundamental errors into one paragraph: “We have to start educating people about all kinds of beauty. And our beauty is so powerful and so unique that it is worthy of a conversation, and worthy of demanding the respect that we’re owed for who we are, and what we offer to the world.”

The first error is her belief that people can be “educated” to regard something as beautiful. That’s not how beauty works. When a beautiful woman walks into a room, the straight men there all recognize her beauty. (Even the gay guys notice. But they just say, “Meh.”)

Over the last half-dozen years, fashion magazines spent tons of money trying to “educate” men into seeing “transgender” dudes as beautiful women, and morbid obesity as attractive, and they convinced zero men.

The second error is that it’s demeaning to reduce someone’s value to their appearance, or to suggest that beauty is all they “offer to the world.” Has no one ever told her that beauty is only skin deep?

(I’m guessing she never had a dad like mine, who told me that I needed to look for a girl who, the more I got to know her, the prettier she got.)

The third error is that narcissism is ugly. There are few bigger turnoffs than someone insisting “my beauty is powerful, and unique, and worthy of a conversation. I demand the respect that I’m owed!”

If that’s your attitude, you’re going to get all the respect you are owed.

Which is to say, zero respect.

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!