Tag: immigration

Yes, faithful readers, your eyes are not deceiving you: you are reading my fifth consecutive daily column.

I know: a five-column week is an impressive achievement.  It’s like shooting under 60 in one round of a golf tournament, or throwing back-to-back no-hitters in the MLB.  Or the Bears drafting a quarterback who doesn’t rip the hearts out of Bears fans and stomp on them with inexplicably sharp cleats by the time Halloween rolls around and we’re eliminated from the playoffs.

Would I be able to do this if I weren’t semi-retired?  No. 

Would I be able to do it without your faithful readership, which I might even describe as verging on adoration, if my instinctive modesty didn’t restrain me?  No. 

Would I be able to do it if I didn’t have the strength of ten men, because my heart is pure?  No way.

Okay, enough of that.  It’s Friday, baby, so where my narwhals at?

Today I’m focusing on some escalating bad behavior from mainstream Dems in the congress and the MSM that is not going to end well for them.  I’m talking about their increasingly unhinged and violent rhetoric aimed at ICE agents who are just doing their jobs and enforcing our immigration laws.

The Dems are in such an impenetrable bubble that they really do seem to think that the public is on their side, and that the Cuddly Kilmar doll is going to be a big seller this Christmas.  (You pull a string on his back, and he says, “MS-13 forever, homes!” and “My old lady had that beating coming, your honor.”)  (Unregistered car filled with illegals he was caught trafficking sold separately.)

Many Democrats are in the throes of anger, and convinced that it’s the righteous kind.  Axios interviewed a dozen Democrat House members who anonymously reported that their voters are getting more and more heated.  One said that, “our own base is telling us that there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.” 

Another reported that his constituents are saying that “civility isn’t working” and to prepare for “violence…to fight to protect our democracy.”  A third said that “people online have sent me crazy sh*t, told me to storm the White House and stuff like that.” 

(Because insurrection is (D)ifferent when they do it.)  

Of course, this is the predictable result of Democrat elites ramping up hatred on their side in recent years.  By last November, their supporters didn’t think Trump could ever win, or that if he did, it would be through some illegitimate trickery.  So when he swept the swing states, won the popular vote, and beat Que Mala in the electoral college like Kilmar tuning up his wife because she looked at him wrong, they didn’t know what to do.  

The same boneheads telling them to “fight for democracy” – until democracy worked, and swept Trump into a second presidential term – have now gone back to the Extremist Handbook of Inflammatory Slogans and recycled “Conservatives are Nazis and ICE is the Gestapo!” 

They have no idea that they’re racing down F**k-Around Street with the pedal to the metal, and they’re fast approaching Find-Out Avenue.  And that intersection is strewn with spike strips and Jersey barriers, and both sides of the cross street are lined with empty prison buses.  The seat belts in those buses come with complementary handcuffs, and in front of each bus is a squad of Homan’s Heroes®.  And those guys are there to do calligraphy and jail rioters.

And they’re all out of fountain pens.

Okay, that got a little weird at the end.  Annnndddd…I’m pushing away the glass of Knob Creek 9 until I finish this column.

Anyway, the lefty activists have been asking for trouble, and now they’re starting to get it.  More and more stories are coming out about imbeciles interfering with ICE and getting arrested or worse.     

On Tuesday four morons were caught after they put out devices that spiked the tires of ICE vehicles.  Their mugshots send the clear, non-verbal message we’ve all come to expect in these situations: “My prospects for ever having sexual congress with a decent woman are slim and none, and slim has left the building.”

A day earlier, at a Border Patrol station in McAllen, TX, an idiot armed himself and dressed up in tactical gear and attacked border patrol agents and local police.  He managed to wound one of them before they shot him a lot, and he quickly took the pavement temperature challenge.  Because: Texas.

Or, as a Breitbart story put it, “Cops Neutralize Attacker.” 

I love the use of the term “neutralized” here.  You almost never hear it outside of thriller novels or movies, or IDF after-action reports, which regular readers know are my favorites.   “We neutralized that Hezbollah leader’s eyes and hands in our pager attack three weeks ago.  And we just neutralized the rest of him with a missile strike on a goat pen where he was having a conjugal visit.  Shalom, and thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Ten radical freaks ambushed an ICE facility on the Fourth of July, wounding one agent before escaping, frustratingly un-shot.  But they were soon arrested, and their chances of being home in time to find a Cuddly Kilmar under their Christmas tree are not good.

Just yesterday a Texas Constable arrested a 22-year-old Mensa member named Serio Olivares (tragically, an American citizen), whose dad owns a business where ICE agents arrested some illegals.  As the agents were about to leave, Serio arrived and confronted them, damaging one of their cars.  When they left, he pursued them, driving recklessly, until they stopped and arrested him. 

The local “liberal Democrat district attorney’s office” would not press any more serious charges than misdemeanor traffic violations, so the constable is contacting the Feds to bring more serious interference with federal agents charges. 

My favorite part of the story is that Serio is a serial offender.  Unexpectedly! 

Because last November, he was charged with interfering with an officer’s public duties – sound familiar? – but that charge was later dismissed, in a deal in which he pled to one felony charge.  In March he was given diversion after cocaine possession and unlawful carrying of a gun – C’mon, Texas!  You’re letting me down here – on the condition that he not commit another crime within one year.

Right now Serio is staring intently at a calendar, trying to do some basic calculations.  I’d love to be there when he figures out that from March to July is four months.  And I’d REALLY love to be there 10 minutes later, when he realizes that four months is less than one year.  

Which means that he can still serve two years on the earlier coke charge, in addition to whatever sentence the Feds are going to give him for his latest stunt.

To paraphrase the Captain in Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to cogitate.”    

If the Dems keep this up, one of their unstable foot-soldiers is eventually going to kill an ICE agent, and they are not going to enjoy what comes next.

In the meantime, I’m praying for our cops, border patrol and ICE agents, and bracing for more winning, and the lefty activist tantrums that come with it.

Hamas delenda est!

Since the Trumpkrieg™ started on January 20^th, the Democrats have taken the short end of one 80/20 issue after another, but none more important than the issue of illegal immigration. They’ve made so many illogical, specious arguments on the topic that I’ve found myself muttering to myself about this issue more than any others. 

And regular readers know that it’s never a very big jump from “muttering to myself” to “sharing with CO nation.”  So here goes.

The two most annoying leftist immigration fallacies are: acting as if there is no difference between legal and illegal immigration, and acting as if immigrating to America in the 18^th century was just like immigrating here recently, or today.

The first point is too obvious to require much debunking.  To equate immigrating legally to doing so illegally is as stupid as equating having a loving relationship with your spouse to rape.  And yet if you were to watch 8 hours of MSNBC or CNN each day – God help you – you would see dozens of boneheads saying, “Except for Native Americans, all Americans are descendants of immigrants!”

Yes, Rachel Maddow.  But you can also say, “Thousands of people go into banks every week, and they leave with money.” 

But most of them go in with a photo ID, and leave with money from their own accounts.  And some of them go in with pistols and ski masks, and leave with other people’s money. 

That’s different!

The second point relies on the listener being ignorant of history.  Which – conveniently for the leftists – most people who went to leftist-run public schools are.

But just like illegal immigration is very different from the legal kind, immigrating to the US before around 1850 was very different than coming in the last hundred years or so.    

That earlier period was marked by a largely empty continent offering immigrants more danger and challenges than tempting opportunities. 

Yes, I said “a largely empty continent.”  And before you can bring up the native Lizzie Warrens living here then – #wemustneverstopmockingher – estimates are that around 4-7 million Indians lived in all of today’s US and Canada around 1492.  That comes out to between 2 and 4 humans per square mile.  And that’s before epidemics thinned that number considerably by the time Europeans got a toehold on the eastern seaboard. 

Back then, there was very little government and absolutely no social safety net.  Nor even any literal safety nets, for that matter.  (Nor seat belts, nor “no smoking” signs, nor labels on the top of a ladder warning that you shouldn’t use it as a step.)  The fledgling nation needed all of the hearty pioneers with grit, ambition and work ethic that it could get.  So it largely welcomed all comers.

And when many of them suffered gruesome deaths – from scalping-involved Warren-cide (#neverstop), being thrown from seatbelt-less saddles in multi-horse collisions, or neck-breaking falls from the top steps of ladders – the rest of the citizenry just went about their business.

Because immigrating wasn’t for whiny wusses.

By the 20th century, and especially with the growth of governmental and other financial support, the situation was very different.  The country could still benefit from hard-working immigrants, but with many areas getting more crowded and the number of would-be immigrants exploding – not to mention the powerful draw of ever-more-generous welfare programs, and newcomers who no longer wanted to assimilate – the risk-reward ratio of large-scale immigration shifted toward more caution, limits and careful vetting. 

You can discern the nation’s developing thinking about immigration by tracking the amount of legislation on the topic during the 19^th century.  The Steerage Act of 1819 required that arriving boats have a manifest of immigrants on board, and that those aliens be inspected and given a medical exam before even preliminarily being allowed entry.  Multiple acts in the 1870s and 1880s banned entry to forced laborers, prostitutes and Chinese people.

The two major laws regulating immigration in that century – the Immigration Acts of 1882 and 1891, respectively – enacted increasingly more stringent restrictions on would-be immigrants.

Consider the first paragraph of the Immigration Act of 1891: 

“The following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States, in according with the existing acts regulating immigration other than those concerning Chinese laborers: All idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists, and also any person whose ticket or passages if paid for with money of another or who is assisted by others to come.”

Let’s break that down.  The list starts and ends with what I think are less relevant points.  I can only guess that the concern about Chinese laborers arose from fear that they would make the rest of us look lazy in comparison, and possibly that they would screw up the grading curve in all of our classes?

The part at the end about immigrants whose passage is paid for by others seems to depend on the context.  If they had family members or solid citizens paying their way in, we should probably consider them.  But if they were funded by some shadowy character – likely named “Soros” – send them packing.

But consider the middle of that passage, which is so relevant that it could have been ripped from today’s headlines.  It lists 5 groups of people – with old-fashioned descriptions that can be easily translated to their modern equivalents – who should not be allowed into the US:

1. Stupid people – “Idiot” later had a specific, IQ-defined meaning, but the modern “stupid” is a suitable umbrella term. 

Fun fact: Psychologists once classified those with an IQ between 0-25 as “idiots,” those between 26-50 as “imbeciles,” and those between 51-70 as “morons.” 

Those groupings are still relevant today, especially if you are trying to analyze members of congress, or answer questions such as, “Is Hank Johnson a low-range or mid-range idiot?” or  “Is AOC capable of achieving imbecility?” or “Have Jasmine Crockett’s remarks about the Texas governor dropped her from moron status all the way to idiocy, or just to imbecility with a dusting of sociopathy?”

2. The mentally ill.  (See: sufferers of gender dysmorphia or auto-gynophilia; watchers of CNN, or The View; Robert DeNiro) 

3. Welfare recipients and those willing to go on the dole.  “Pauper” can just mean “broke” – a temporary state that many (even certain hilarious geniuses) of us have experienced.  And a broke person may even take welfare for a very short time.  But “a public charge” is someone who can’t or won’t support himself, and “likely to become a public charge” is a common fixture in modern America: a habitual and/or multi-generational welfare recipient.  

4. Health risks.   Remember when covid was so threatening that American citizens couldn’t leave their houses…but millions of unvetted third-worlders with hacking coughs were waved through the border like leftist celebrities being welcomed to Pedo Island by Jeffrey Epstein?  And who can read “loathsome, contagious disease” and not think of the plague, TB or the woke mind virus?  

5. Criminals.  These are commonplace, today as in the past.  If you aren’t familiar with “moral turpitude,” think “Hunter Biden.”  And we don’t have many polygamists (i.e. married to more than one person at a time) anymore, having replaced them with never-married baby mommas and dead-beat dads.

Look at that list one more time, and apply it to a sane immigration policy going forward.

Denying entry to group 4 (the health risks) should be uncontroversial to even the far-leftists among us.  If you’re still wearing a covid mask in 2025 and looking forward to your 13^th covid booster… zip it, Karen!

Groups 1 and 2 – the stupid and the insane – make up at least a large plurality if not an outright majority of our current Congress.  Annnnddd… we definitely don’t need any more of those. 

And groups 3 and 5 – welfare recipients and criminals – make up the lion’s share of the Democratic base.  So that’s a hard pass. 

Coming Friday: Part 2, in which I apply the lessons above to our current deportation debates.

Hamas delenda est!

Well, it feels like a year’s worth of action has been packed into the last seven days.  This might have to be another three-column week for me, since I can barely stay on my feet against the pressure of the firehose of good news coming out of the White House!  

But I’m going to try, so let’s start in Hollywood.

In another example of lefty artists making it hard to appreciate their art once they’ve opened their mouths to share their deep political thoughts, Ron Howard has “pulled a DeNiro.”  (I love DeNiro’s acting, Bruce Springsteen’s music, and many of Stephen King’s books, but they’ve all revealed themselves to be malevolent morons when it comes to politics, thus making it tougher to watch, listen to or read them.)

Howard was an adorable child actor, and directed a lot of good movies as an adult.  But this weekend he tweeted out a suggestion that if Trump wants to improve the Fed’s disaster responses, he should pick Chef Jose Andres to head up those efforts. 

I didn’t know much about Andres – a Venn diagram of hungry hillbilly Simpsons and a chef who serves dinners-for-two in the $1000 range would be two separate circles, a mile away from each other – but Howard notes that the chef is “not a supporter” of Trump’s.

A quick search shows that Andres was much angrier when some Palestinians were accidentally killed by Israel strikes than he was at the genocidal Hamas terrorists who intentionally murdered  Israelis.  Also, he is a hero among Democrats.  (Unexpectedly!) And he took a smiling picture with the whack job who tried to assassinate Trump at the golf course. 

To be fair to Andres, I’m assuming he took that pic before the whack job tried to murder Trump.  On the other hand, one should be able to spot that loon from a mile away, because he’s got “whack job” written all over him.

Anyway, Howard’s suggestion has all the earmarks of low-IQ Hollywood celebrity ideas: after four years of extreme-left Trump haters screwing up everything they touch, Trump really should consider appointing an extreme-left Trump hater to continue that tradition.

To quote Dr. Evil, “How about NO!”  And Ron, how about you focus on skipping rocks on a pond in Mayberry, and on making a good movie?  Because as soon as you turn to politics, you inevitably go from Opie to Dopey. 

Also, I find the first sentence of Howard’s tweet to be ironic: “Here’s a thought.”

Nope.  Here is most definitely NOT a thought.

Speaking of people for whom clear thinking is not a strong suit, how about Illinois governor J.B. “you can’t spell ‘Jumbo’ without ‘J.B.’” Pritzker, D-irigible?

His mouth is proportionately large enough for the rest of him (too bad about the brain, though), and he’s been regularly shooting it off on the subject of how he’s not going to cooperate with Trump’s enforcement of our immigration laws.  However, even he has started to tone it down a bit, now that Trump is in office.

He announced on Sunday that he has no problem with Trump deporting violent criminals, going so far as to say, “We hope they do get deported.” Which is rich, coming from him.  He’s done nothing to protect Illinois citizens from those scumbags for four years, and he’s not pledging to take action himself.  But now he’s “hoping” that the Deportation Fairy will come during the night and flit away with the predators, I guess.

But he’s not on board with deporting regular ol’ salt-of-the-earth illegal immigrants.  And this is where the Left’s mastery of dishonest language does some heavy lifting.

Because he tells sour Dana Bash that he finds it “quite disturbing” that Trump is also “going after people who are law-abiding, who are holding down jobs….”  A reasonable person might be aware that legitimate jobs require that the employee either has citizenship or legal working status (a green card or working visa).  

If the left can convince people to think of illegals as “undocumented,” their lying becomes easier to get away with.

But if we insist on using accurate language, Pritzker (#putdownthatcomicallyoversizedturkeyleg) is actually saying that we should not interfere with “law-abiding people who are here illegally and working illegally.”

Even someone with a weak and misfiring, Grandma-Squanto-level brain (#wemustneverstopmockingher) can tell that that sounds a little off. 

My favorite story of the weekend is probably yours too: the hilarious tale of the Colombia two-step. 

Since the election, I’ve been having a friendly disagreement with an extended family member about Trump’s use of tariffs.  He is afraid they will be rigid impositions that will severely damage our economy, while I am one of those nutty conservatives who thinks they are negotiating tools that Trump will use to get various foreign miscalculators’ minds right.

After Sunday, I hate to say, “I told you so.”  But how can I not?  When Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro forgot that Biden is not in office anymore, he talked tough about not taking his criminals back.  So Trump responded with immediate retaliatory tariffs, travel restrictions, and the like.

Of course, many lefties jumped on the story in a bunch of posts that aged like milk, immediately beclowning themselves in the most ridiculous ways. 

Ana Navarro panicked, “We won’t have any flowers for Valentines Day!” (To paraphrase Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, “I’ve never seen so many people worried that they won’t be able to receive roses on a romantic holiday for purely hypothetical purposes.”) 

AOC got her juicy booty (her words, not mine) spanked for shrieking that, “Trump is about to make every American pay even more for coffee,” and that, “WE pay the tariffs, not Colombia.”

These were variations on the usual Dem argument against deporting otherwise “law-abiding” illegals, because without them, we’ll have to clean our own buildings and toilets, and do our own landscaping, and pay more for strawberries. 

Because, “I don’t care if my country gets invaded, and crime increases, and our schools and emergency rooms and jails are filled with foreign criminals, and I get hit by unlicensed and uninsured foreign drivers, and my daughters get raped and killed like Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, as long as I get indentured servants to mow my lawn and feed me cheaper strawberries.”

SAID. NOBODY. EVER!

But as the Sponge Bob transition goes,

One… hour… lay-tair…

Petro said, “Oh, you were talking about THOSE criminals?  Sure, I’ll take them back.”  And then Trump silently gave him the “mug shot look” for an uncomfortably long minute.  And Petro began sweating, and said, “Um… and… I- I- I’ll pick them up… i- i- in my own presidential plane!”

And Trump gave him a small smile, and held out his hand to allow Petro to kiss his ring and swear fealty.   

I didn’t think that Trump would win so quickly, but I knew that he would win eventually.  Because common sense tells me that a small country needs trade with America a lot more than America needs that trade. 

I don’t think that means we should therefore bully small countries, just because we can.  But when they are trying to bully US?  Get out of here with that.

Even though I thought that the tariffs on Colombia would take much longer to work, I was still a fan, because of the message it would send to other nations, i.e. “pour encourager les autres” (for the encouragement of others). 

The phrase is Voltaire’s, and French, but it has a Sicilian feel to me.  And I’m here for it!      

Finally, on a more somber note, I never thought of God as a kind of Michael Corleone figure, working on a, “Today we settle all family business” kind of agenda.   And yet, it wasn’t tough to see some of those overtones on inauguration day.  (For starters, “God” is right there in “Godfather,” so how didn’t I see that coming?) 

Trump stood in the secular/civil version of a sacred space (the Capitol Rotunda) taking his vows, just like Michael took his in a church at a christening.  And while the vows were being recited, treacherous DEI bureaucrats and deep state saboteurs were getting whacked all over the countryside.  Executive orders were dropping like shotgun pellets blasting into elevators, and bullets into Moe Green’s glasses.

And on that very day, Cecile Richards – the ghoul who proudly oversaw 4 million lives cut short through her network of Planned Parenthood abortuaries – died. 

Normally, death is an event worth mourning, and one week is way too soon to discuss any silver lining in somebody’s passing.  But I think we owe it to Richards to take her worldview seriously, and assess her death in terms that someone in her line of work would wholeheartedly endorse. And none of her co-religionists who are enthusiastically carrying on her bloody work should be offended if we use their language to commemorate the event.  Therefore… 

“On January 20th, 2025, during their 271st trimester, the clump of cells known as Cecile Richards received a final act of women’s reproductive healthcare, which converted them into medical waste.  Anyone saddened by this news is probably a theocratic fascist, and certainly a misogynist, and should mind their own business.” 

Now if you’ll excuse him, Trump has to talk to Merrick Garland, whom he calls “Carlo,” for some reason. 

“You have to answer for Daniel Penny, Carlo….  Milley is out. So is Jack Smith.  Liz Cheney.  Kinzinger.  Today I settle all DOJ business.”  Garland’s lip starts quivering.  Trump puts his hand on his shoulder. 

“Don’t be afraid. (gestures over Garland’s shoulder) J.D., get him a drink.”  J.D. does, and Garland drinks it down.  Trump says, “Come on, I’m not going to make the wife of an ex-AG a widow.  No, your punishment is you never get to be on the Supreme Court.   But don’t tell me you’re innocent!”

Meanwhile, a car sits and idles outside the White House, with Tom Homan sitting in the back, behind the empty, passenger-side front seat.

And, scene.   

It’s the first weekend of the new Trump era, and I’m in the mood to start out in Schadenfreude corner.

Tom Homan has been in charge of ICE for 4 days, and has already arrested 1400 illegals.  The vast majority of those had committed other crimes or else had had asylum requests rejected, and the remainder of them were “collateral arrests,” i.e. just plain illegals who were hanging around with the worst of the illegals when the hammer dropped.

Lefties call unintentionally catching those folks collateral damage, but normal people call it collateral benefits. 

You’ve probably seen the video of the handcuffed Haitian gang member with 17 prior convictions screaming out of a cop car, “F— Trump!  Biden forever, bro!  Thank Obama for everything he’s done for me!” 

He seems nice.

Man, if Trump was still running, he could slap an, “I’m Donald Trump, and I approve this message,” on the end of that and he’d have another world-class campaign ad. 

When asked about that criminal yelling, “I’m not going back to Haiti,” Homan said, “Well, he’s wrong.  He’s going back to Haiti.”  He also said that now that Trump’s in office, ICE agents have had the handcuffs taken off of them, and put onto the bad guys.

In an unrelated story, I spent the last hour looking at satellite photos of Mt. Rushmore, and I think I’ve found a good spot to begin blasting, to make room for adding Tom Homan’s big ol’ head up there. 

By the way, remember when Imhotep Pelosi – right after she tossed Biden’s desiccated corpse under the bus – said that she thought Joey Gaffes belonged on Mt. Rushmore?  HA!

Meanwhile, Scott Jennings continues to go through leftist CNN talking heads like Sherman through Georgia, leaving a scorched moonscape of ridiculous talking points and grievously wounded low IQ narcissists in his wake.

I know CNN brought him on in a desperate attempt to have at least one conservative voice on their failing network.  But I think the bubble they are in prevented them from appreciating what a bloodbath would ensue.  They probably thought, “Hey, he’ll be in a 5-against-1 situation on every segment, so how bad could it be?”

To which I would reply, “Do you know why nobody ever entered Mike Tyson at the height of his powers into a boxing tournament against an entire class of kindergartners?  Because it wouldn’t matter if there were 20 of them!  That would just increase the number of knocked-out baby teeth rattling across the floor like chiclets, you idiots!” 

Sorry for the graphic image.  But seriously.  Watch Scott Jennings taking on a panel of beta-males and sapphic scowlers, and try to keep the smile off of your face.  It can’t be done.

Speaking of CNN, you may remember their pollster, Harry Enten, who throughout the fall used lots of polls – and circled many numbers on many screens – to argue that Que Mala was likely to win in November.  He also polled Californians in the wake of the LA fires, and seemed shocked to find that the amount of computer searches for “wildfires” had soared something like 2400%, while searches for “climate change” had barely budged.

He really did that.  While Los Angelenos were surrounded by empty reservoirs, century-old power lines that were actively casting off sparks, and armies of homeless people making campfires in the midst of environmentally protected Dry Brush Sanctuaries (thanks, Gavin!), Enten couldn’t figure out why everybody wasn’t jumping on the “climate change caused the fires” bandwagon. 

Because you can’t spell “Einstein” without “Enten.” 

Well now, Harry is breathlessly reporting the shocking finding that there has been a “massive shift” among Americans in support for deporting illegals.  The bottom line is that 4 big polls found that between 55% and 64% of Americans want illegals forcibly vamoosed. 

While Harry is struggling to understand exactly why so many Americans believe that illegals contributed to climate change, I’ve got to say that those numbers seem too low.  I’ve seen a lot of polls in the last several years suggesting that over 70% of Americans want less LEGAL immigration.  If that’s true (and it seems logical), then these poll numbers today suggest that there’s less resistance to illegal immigration than there is to legal immigration!

Regardless, it’s a little surprising that even the mouth-breathers at CNN would be shocked and confused by these polls.  Regular people don’t approve of millions of people breaking our laws. DUH!

In other news, the lefties running The Daily Show might be feeling the consequences of their TDS-induced failures of late.  But instead of hiring Scott Jennings to serially pants their unfunny correspondents, they recently sent Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to mock the poor dead-enders attending the “People’s March” in Washington on Inauguration Day. 

If you haven’t seen it, you should, because it was very funny.  Highlights were when Triumph suggested that the left needs more conspiracy theories, and suggested a good one: “Jimmy Carter was doing just fine until Trump was re-elected.  Coincidence?”  Then he handed out hand-drawn “No Carter Killers!” signs.   He even came up with a chant: “GOP, stop the lies!  How did Jimmy Carter die?”

Most of the insults were silly, but a few of the shots hit closer to home.  As when he noted that nobody in this crowd was going to be breaking any windows at the capital, because “that would require upper body strength.”  And, “Looking around here, I’ve never seen so many people worried about losing the right to contraceptives for purely hypothetical reasons.”

I found the bit strangely heartening, because many of the leftists played along and laughed at the jokes at their expense.  And if the first step toward recovery is acknowledging that you have a problem, the second step has to be regaining your sense of humor.  It looks like some of them might be achieving step 2.

Now if they can just get working on that first step…

Finally, one more sobering note. 

Many people get furious when we suggest that making DEI hiring or election choices is foolish.  To counter their anger, serious conservatives can advance the hypothesis that the issue is often a simple math problem.

For example, when a terribly incompetent president – hypothetically – says that his vice presidential pick and his Supreme Court pick are both going to be black women, he has made a mistake.  Because black people are 13% of the population, and half of that number are women.  So he’s starting with an arbitrarily restricted applicant pool of only 6.5% of the population from whom he could otherwise choose.

Or, we could make a more succinct yet equally convincing argument, by showing a video of African-American female Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker leading excited residents in a cheer for the city’s football team, which has advanced to the NFC championship game.

Shouteth the mayor, “E-L-G-S-E-S!  Let’s go birds!” 

Oof!  “Eagles” is only two syllables.  It’s got six letters, and the mayor missed two of them.  Some wise guy immediately started making t-shirts with a Philly team motto printed on it: “Fly, ELGSES, Fly!”    

It’s not like the Philly mascot has an especially obscure or complicated name.  They’re not the Philadelphia Phainopepla, or the Philadelphia Common Paraque.  (Look ‘em up!)  I’m beginning to be grateful that she didn’t try to spell out “Philadelphia,” because you know she would have started with an “F.”    

And if any of you out there think that my extensive research doesn’t pay off, you’re wrong.  Because when I was looking up tough-to-spell bird names to make my hilarious point about the bonehead Philly mayor, I came across the Plain Chachalaca (rhymes with “Boom Shakalaka!”).  Which I’m sure Parker couldn’t spell, but could definitely chant. 

And no one in their right mind would prefer, “Eagles! Eagles! Let’s go birds!” to “Philly, Philly!  Plain Chachalaca!!”

By the way, the last Republican mayor of Philadelphia left office 73 years ago. Democrat voters outnumber Republicans 7-to-1, and they elected brainiac Cherelle Parker to lead them. 

UNEXPECTEDLY!

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!  Ours was guaranteed to be good, since we didn’t have to travel.  Karen’s brothers and their spouses came over, and Emily was home from college.  And even though Katie and her husband are in Denver and my sister and mom are in Tennessee, we’ll be seeing all of them shortly. 

Katie is flying in for Emily’s graduation and an early Christmas celebration in a couple of weeks, and we’ll be going up to spend some time with mom and sis for an early Christmas in Tennessee after that, before returning home for Christmas.  So we’ll have three Christmas celebrations this year!

As my favorite month begins, I’m still basking in the continuous waves of good news that are washing over our country since the election.  In fact, as an homage to our instinctive optimism here in the CO nation, I’d like to coin a new term to reflect our sunny outlook: “green flag.”

Everybody knows the term “red flag” – an ominous sign indicating that things are going wrong.  For example, when San Francisco deteriorated to the point that some tech-savvy resident made a “poop map” app so that people could try to avoid the most heavily fecal areas of the once-great city, that was a red flag.

Or as Adam Carolla has said, when LA started to encase some of their highway signs in barbed wire to discourage vandalism, that was a red flag.  Or when hulking dudes in makeup and dresses reading to toddlers became part of public-school curricula, that was a red flag.  I could go on and on.

In fact, if Gavin Newsom actually does run for president in 2028, I’ve already got his campaign slogan: “Drag Queens, Barbed Wire, and Mounds of Human Waste – Newsom ’28!”

But I’d like to point out the opposite of red flags, which I am drawing from the traffic light system – hence, green flags.  (But not in the environmentalist sense.  Because the Green New Deal was a huge red flag, ironically enough.)  By “green flags” I mean positive and encouraging signs that things are heading in the right direction.

Over the last three weeks, I’ve seen a ton of green flags.  And as CO often says, everything is better when turned into a list:

1. I absolutely love the idea that’s been floated of changing the seating arrangement of the press corps in the White House briefing room.  The existing arrangement has always given the best seats up front to the corrupt dinosaurs of the legacy media: the New York Times and WAPO, and the main tv networks.  But that arrangement is anachronistic now.  The big newspapers have been bleeding subscribers for decades, and the network news talking heads are preaching to an ever-diminishing choir.

But in addition to their declining influence, they’ve also shown themselves to be little more than dishonest leftist propagandists, so it makes no sense to continue rewarding them with prime locations and the first chance to launch their sleazy attacks thinly disguised as legitimate questions.

Independent and conservative podcasters have much larger audiences and are driving more of the mainstream cultural conversation lately, and influential conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire, The Blaze and Breitbart have done more honest – though transparently partisan – reporting and commentary than the MSM has done.

So let the far lefties sit in the back near the bathrooms – like the few conservatives in the room have been doing for decades – and learn from their time in the media wilderness to which they’ve been deservedly banished. 

2.  I also love the way the Trumpsters are maneuvering various bad actors into some form of self-deportation.  Of course, the best example is those who have illegally come into the country.  Lefty critics are always saying, “What are you going to do, deport 10 million people?”

But we won’t have to do that.  We can get a lot of easy wins at first, by focusing on those who have already received deportation orders after their asylum claims were denied, and those who have committed other crimes in addition to their illegal entry. 

Catching and deporting several hundred thousand of those will send a clear message, and between doing that and shutting down all of the incentives to try to stay (free housing, food, travel and phones, plus easy access to jobs) we’ll help many illegals see that returning home is their best option.

In fact, Breitbart reported last week that many Haitians who had gone to Springfield, Ohio are already “self-deporting… fleeing to sanctuary jurisdictions such as Chicago and NYC.”  That’s a good first step. 

And after Trump shuts off some federal funding and otherwise pressures sanctuary cities, and they spend a few months with reduced income to deal with illegals – and more and growing unrest from citizens, because these cities are almost all economic basket cases already – those cities will be increasingly undesirable options for illegals.   

I’ll bet that after six months or a year of mass deportations, if we start offering free flights back to their home countries, many people will voluntarily go, especially when the alternative is to go to detention centers from which they are likely to be deported after a relatively short time anyway.   

3. But pressures to self-deport in a different way are also building.  Many of the corrupt bureaucrats in DC – especially in the FBI, intelligence agencies and DOJ – are already scrubbing websites, shredding records and preparing resumes or resignation papers, and good riddance to them.

Additionally, tons of federal employees are still using the pandemic as an excuse to work from home, and requiring them to come back to the office full-time will undoubtedly result in many more resignations. 

Trump is also talking about relocating many DC-centric federal agencies out into fly-over country, which I think is brilliant.  Many employees will voluntarily quit rather than move, some doing so for family or other legitimate personal reasons.  But some will quit because they are snobby coastal elites who look down on the garbage voters who just kicked their arses in November, and we’ll all be well rid of them.

Those who move will generally be those more dedicated to doing their jobs, which will improve the average quality of federal employees.  And for those who are open-minded enough to learn from experience, they’ll discover that the quality of many people and communities in flyover country compares quite well to those they’d been surrounded by in DC. 

Okay, I’ll have more encouraging “green flags” in my column on Wednesday. But I wanted to comment on one other enjoyable mistake the Dems are making as they sift through the ashes of November 5^th and try to figure out what went wrong.  

Many Dem and MSM elites have settled on the idea that Kamala was severely handicapped by the fact that Biden got out so late, leaving her so little time to get her campaign up and running.  “Considering that she only had 107 days, I think she did incredibly well,” they say.

Which I find to be comically wrong, for two reasons.  (Besides the obvious: if THAT was “incredibly well done,” what would “terribly done” look like?!)  

First, it blames only Biden for his staying in way too long.  Obviously that was a problem…but it was a problem entirely within the control of the Dem elites, who didn’t just allow it, but aided and abetted it. 

I’m reminded of the dilemma in many families when grandpa is obviously diminished to the point that he’s not safe driving anymore.  Although it makes for an ugly scene, even marginally functional families go through the uncomfortable confrontation of explaining to gramps that they’re taking the keys, because he’s a danger to himself and others on the road.

Only the most severely dysfunctional, social train-wrecks of families LET GRANDPA KEEP DRIVING!  OH!! OHHHH!!!  (There’s your little dose of Sam Kinison for a Monday morning.)

 “Sure, he’s run over a dozen curbs, two pets and a fire hydrant.  And he did rear-end that daycare van full of toddlers yesterday.  But hey, that’s just lovable, avuncular gramps.  In fact, he’s the best gramps he’s ever been.  Sharp as a tack!  How dare you suggest that within the next fortnight he’s going to plow through the front window of a café, killing a dozen customers, because he doesn’t remember the difference between the gas and the brake?!”

Well, that’s what the Dems did.  It was obvious to everybody with functioning eyes that Biden should have been checked into Shady Acres Retirement Village and put on an all-broth diet several years ago.  But they lied to themselves and us, right up until he crumbled on the debate stage.

But the second reason is even more self-flattering Democrat nonsense, because it proposes that Kamala just needed more time on the big stage, when the truth was exactly the opposite. 

We knew from the Dem primaries in 2019 that scrutiny was Que Mala’s kryptonite.  Because when Tulsi lobbed a couple of fair questions at her, she melted into the floor and became the first contender to drop out.

Which was why she was at her “best” for the first 45 days or so of her campaign this time, when she hid out and gave zero interviews.  Far from being hurt by only running for 107 days, she would have had a much better chance if she’d had only about two weeks to campaign! 

The leftist MSM and Dem machine could have filled the air with clouds of BS about joy and a totally phony biography: she’s a tough law-and-order prosecutor who was raised in the middle class, and she’ll be the first half Indian-American and half African-American – but somehow still mostly black – president. 

Not to mention that she’ll be the first woman president!  That’s right, she’ll be the epoch-defining vagician who would break the previously unbreakable glass ceiling, and usher in a glorious new age of female empowerment! 

I’m encouraged by watching the Dem post-mortem election analysis, because almost all of it seems to be shot-through with delusion and denial of their real problems. 

Trump isn’t the demon they think he is.

They’re not the righteous social justice warriors they think they are.

And the American public aren’t the deplorable garbage they think they are. 

So if they can keep this up, continuing to learn the wrong lessons and doubling down on what cost them this election, they should be wandering in the political wilderness for a long time to come.

And we are all here for it.  Come on, January!

Hamas delenda est!

I’m not going to spend this entire column making fun of all of the lefties who are entertainingly distraught in this blessed post-election period, even though I definitely could.  Because there are so many of them. 

But I will start it that way!

Megan Rapinoe – the scowling, whining, America-hating, soccer player – is so upset that Trump won that she has sworn off heterosexual sex forever!  Which is pretty easy for her, since she is a lesbian. 

(It may also be pretty easy for her since all of the straight males on the planet – plus that guy who’s stuck on the space station until Elon can rescue him – had already told her, “NOPE!” before she went down Sapphic Street.)

(Worst children’s television program ever, by the way!) 

You may remember Rapinoe from that time when she was walking through soft grass in an unoccupied part of a soccer field, and somehow tore her ACL, ending her professional career, and simultaneously causing me to spit-take a mouthful of coffee all over my Wonder Dog when I read about it online. 

(Cassie was upset with me until I showed her the story.  But when she read it – yes, she’s a literate Aussie Shepherd – she snickered like Muttley in those old cartoons, and all was forgiven.)

Moanin’ Megan rationalized Trump’s victory by saying that it’s not surprising that Americans voted for him, since America “was founded on slavery and inequality.” 

Oooookay, Megan. But it could have been worse — at least we weren’t founded on soccer.

Speaking of unhappy white ladies, Grandma Squanto Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) is red in the face over Pete Hegseth’s being nominated for Sec Def.  She ignored his military experience and sneered that he is “a Fox & Friends weekend co-host.”  She also established her own military bona fides by claiming that, “All three of my brothers served in uniform.” 

First, knowing people who wore the uniform doesn’t make you a military expert.  Second, I wouldn’t brag that your brothers wore a loincloth, moccasins and a feathered head-dress, because while that may have been a “uniform,” it’s the one your people wore when they fought AGAINST our country, Liz!

The Translucent Tecumseh also trashed Trump’s other picks, including Elon and Vivek.  Hopefully someone from the transition team has told her that since our red wave trumps her (non) red skin, she can take her complaints, cram them in her powder horn and smoke them!

The election results continue to ripple through elitist lefty circles, causing financial as well as emotional distress.  Ratings throughout the legacy media are in free-fall, with waves of layoffs on the horizon at CNN, MSNBC and the networks. (“What will become of our heroic ‘truth to power speakers’?” cry their literally dozens of remaining viewers.)  

The upper echelons at the FBI are running around like headless chickens fearing the axe that they richly deserve, and the Pentagon is full of woke, armchair generals frantically trying to scrub their official media of all references to the DEI and CRT priorities that they’ve used to warp and weaken our military. 

Many despondent lefties have announced that they’re leaving X, including Don Lemon and Stephen King, while at the same time, some major advertisers are starting to return.

Speaking of trades that benefit our side, we really crushed it in the political cross-overs portal this time around!  We picked up Joe Rogan, Elon, Tulsi and RFK Jr., and we were able to dump Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger, Bill Kristol, David French, and several Cheney draft choices to be named later. 

In my evaluation of Trump’s early picks last week, I mentioned that Matt Gaetz is the only one I didn’t like.  But then I heard that when his AG nomination was announced, people in the CNN hallways were crying and hugging each other — which makes me wonder whether I’ve been too hasty.  But even if he doesn’t make it through confirmation, we’ll always have blubbering CNN staffers to thank him for!

Okay, let’s move on from lefties reaping the whirlwind – which makes me happy – to signals about Trump’s next moves, which make me even happier.  I’m so glad that Trump is actually going to try to use DOGE to eliminate government departments.  As a career academic, I LOVE that the Department of Education seems to be first on the chopping block.   

I know that there will be a lot of push-back, though.  Too many people have been conditioned to believe that cutting a department or its budget means harming whatever that department supposedly protects: cutting the EPA means our environment will be harmed; cutting OSHA will mean workers getting mangled; cutting Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms means that our children will be packing heat while chain-smoking and binge drinking.

Similarly, too many people will hear, “cut the Department of Education” and will think, “they’re cutting education!”  We will need a smart, disciplined educational push (ironically) to ease low-info voters’ minds about it. 

We can start by laying out the history – the Ed department wasn’t set up by George Washington in 1776, but by Jimmy Carter in 1979 – and then roll out the statistics.  I just did a little bit of research (it’s a cliché because it’s true: Simpsons are working dogs, not show dogs) and found the following info, which I suggest we use in a video presentation.

It should start with a slow, circling drone shot of a gigantic building, with a voice-over from Clint Eastwood: “This is the LBJ Department of Education Headquarters in Washington, DC.  It is 7 stories tall, and contains 643,000 square feet, but zero classrooms.  Of the 4,147 departmental employees, 2900 work in this building. None of them are classroom teachers.” 

“The average salary in the department is $137,881, which is almost 200% higher than the average American worker’s salary.  So the total salaries of those employees are over half a billion dollars a year, not counting benefits and pensions.  The tax dollars paid to the bureaucrats in this one building alone totals almost $400 million.”

Then we could go into the bigger picture.  Every state already has its own educational authority that is responsible to the state’s citizens.  The public has input and control over budgets, and what books can be bought and used, and whether there are charter, magnet or private schools, and homeschooling.  There are also county and local boards of education.  

If the parents in San Francisco want to spend CA taxpayers’ money on gay porn in the library and drag queen story hour, they can. If taxpayers in NYC want to take money away from standard English instruction and redirect it to teaching in Hmong and Urdu and 37 other languages, they can.  But if you live in a rational state, they shouldn’t dictate that to you.  And they don’t. 

So if we already have 50 states with state- and locally controlled schools, why do we need another layer of bureaucrats at the federal level?

The presentation could end with a variation on the excellent, “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?” gambit:

“Before Jimmy Carter, there was no federal department of education.  Back then, X percent of American kids could do math or read at grade level.  Now we spend 5X as much money as we did then, but X-minus-47% of American kids are performing at grade level.  Back then American kids ranked in the top 10 of all nations’ children.  Today we are 126^th.  Our kids do worse than the Micronesians, the Macronesians, the Javanese, and the Guam-bats, all of whom spend an average of two chickens and a bag of brown rice per capita per annum on their children’s education.”

“Can we honestly say that our kids are getting a better education today than they were 50 years ago, or that we’re getting a good ROI for the billions we are spending?”

Then the lights could come up in a House conference room, where Jim Jordan and Josh Hawley would face a line-up of five edu-crats whose attendance was compelled by subpoenas.  You know what they’d look like: sweaty and shifty, with unnatural hair colors and multiple piercings, sitting behind name plates listing their worthless degrees, inflated titles, and idiotic pronouns (including “Huh?” and a shrug emoji).

None of them could make a cogent defense, and they’d all end up babbling about patriarchy and systemic racism and white nationalism.  And 89% of the public would approve the elimination of the federal Department of Education the following week.    

Finally, I’d love to see the new administration move on the following three ideas, and I am seriously requesting anybody in CO nation with legal or governmental experience to comment on whether and/or how these might be accomplished:

1. I’d like to see a strong push for national voting standards – for elections of president, senators and House members — including mandatory voter ID and election integrity safeguards, much more limited mail-in ballots, no more ballot harvesting or unsupervised drop boxes, etc.   Could that be done, and if so, would it require a constitutional amendment, or what?

2. I’d also like to see Trump use the power of the purse or federal law to end the practice of creating sanctuary cities or states.  Many blue states/cities are pledging to resist deportation efforts by ICE, and to shelter illegals.  Can they legally do that?  If so, could Trump and Congress impose financial sanctions on them – cutting off federal funds of various types (social services, education, welfare, etc.) until and unless the cities comply?  Could Congress go through the courts (up to the SCOTUS) to force compliance, or would it take a constitutional amendment?

3. I’d also love to see birthright citizenship ended.  I know that this one is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be popular, especially after the last 4 years of outrageously open borders. 

My understanding is that automatic birthright citizenship was pretty much assumed in our country’s first century, for logical reasons: we occupied an enormous continent, and growing our small population was an important goal, so anyone born here was automatically granted citizenship. 

After the Civil War, the 14^th amendment formally granted birthright citizenship to those born here as a way to ensure that former slaves would automatically be citizens.  But there were always exceptions, such as that children born on US soil to diplomats from other countries were not given citizenship. 

Especially in the last 50 years or so, as we’ve had a growing number of illegal immigrants – and a profligate welfare system that incentivizes them – it seems increasingly stupid for us to continue to grant birthright citizenship to anyone born to people who are here illegally.  That’s obviously drawn pregnant illegals to cross the border and give birth to “anchor babies,” who are then used to bring over whole families through chain migration. 

That practice also gives the opportunity to bad-faith lefties like AOC et. al. to wail about “family separation” that would result if we deported the illegal parents while allowing the citizen/infants to stay.  Common sense would suggest that we end the practice, thus removing a huge incentive for illegals to risk coming here during late pregnancy.

Does anyone in CO nation know whether or how we could attempt to end birthright citizenship? 

Even though I’m only a lowly Roving Correspondent, can I suggest that CO could put up a post on these last 3 topics to start the discussion for anyone who is interested?     

Hamas delenda est!