Tag: Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So…bye bye, Wajjie!”

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HA! I kid because I love! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Size and Cost of State Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody believes that.      

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

Taxation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m saying we should have that conversation.  

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

The Imperial Presidency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imperial Judiciary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legislative abdication:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I exaggerate.  A little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m saying we should have that conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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History Corner: Why We aren’t Nazis, and Trump isn’t Hitler (posted 11/12/25)

I hope you all had a meaningful and contemplative Veteran’s Day, and that you’re getting into a Thanksgiving mood.  Here in north Florida it has dropped below 40 degrees, so many locals have broken out the parkas, and are still shivering anyway. 

I’ve been paying at least minimal attention to the current kerfuffles in Washington, and am glad that this pointless shutdown is finally ending.  And it’s fun to watch the blue-on-blue sniping over that, with the most extreme lefties raging at the Senate Dems who voted to break the filibuster and end the shutdown, while those lefties try in vain to reason with Those Who Can’t Be Reasoned With. 

Note to self: Pick up another bag of popcorn at Publix tomorrow, because you’re out.

Amidst all that, I saw a few new stories of more violent attacks on ICE agents doing their jobs, and yet another rash of Dems comparing them to the Gestapo.  And this on the heels of a lefty friend of mine asking what I think of “the Right’s Nazi problem.” 

If it was anybody but him, I would have let my sarcastic freak flag fly – I keep it in my temperature-controlled flag wardrobe, along with my Stars and Stripes, my Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and my Gator flag (the latter will remain in storage until we can find a coach who can distinguish between his fundament and a hole in the ground). 

But because I love that guy, I didn’t say, “Do you mean the problem we have with the left calling us Nazis all the time for no rational reason?”

Instead, I wrote a thoughtful reply pointing out that with the exception of a handful of whackos who have no mainstream support in conservative circles, American conservatives have no connection to Nazis whatsoever.  Because we hate Nazis as much as we hate communists.

But that got me thinking that perhaps some of you would like a quick primer to summarize why the Nazi-GOP and Hitler-Trump comparisons are ridiculous, which you can share with any lefty relatives or acquaintances who raise the subject.  (Because if you just punch them in the face, then YOU’LL be the bad guy.)

So, before you can say, “We don’t deserve you, Martin!” here it is: 

First, for most leftists, “Nazi” has become an almost meaningless term of utter derision, to be applied to nearly every conservative they disagree with.  In that way, Nazi is just like “fascist” – it basically means very, very bad, and has been divorced from all historical meaning and context.

It is taken as axiomatic in academia and the mainstream left that Naziism and fascism are both right-wing ideologies.  But as with so much that is axiomatic in academia, that is at best a distortion, and at worst just false.  Because there is plenty of evidence that Naziism and fascism are more leftist than rightist ideologies.

A great book on the subject is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” (2008).  Even though Jonah has sadly contracted a severe case of TDS, he’s a very good writer, and he lays out the ideological and historical connections in great detail.    

Mussolini was a committed socialist for years, and started the fascist party only when the mainstream socialists rejected Italian nationalism.  But he didn’t reject socialism/leftism, as much as combine it with nationalism. He named his party after the “fasces” – a Latin word for a bundle of bound wooden rods/sticks that the Romans had used as a symbol of authority. 

That branding combined his love of Italy and the Roman Empire, authoritarianism, and his leftist devotion to collectivism.  (The explicit symbolism was that the weak individual sticks become unbreakable when combined into a collective.) 

A common definition of fascism starts by calling it “far right” (because of course it does), but then says that it is characterized by, “a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”

Look at that the description, and tell me what parts do NOT also apply to communism or the various “socialist republics” (USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, every nation behind the Iron Curtain, etc.).

“Ultranationalist” doesn’t apply, because good commies are internationalists (workers of THE WORLD unite, and all that), and possibly “natural social hierarchy” (though that is the defacto situation in communist countries, where party members are always an elite class above the peasants).

But all the rest of that definition applies 100% to communist governments.  1. Dictatorial leader (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu et al)  2. Centralized autocracy (check) 3. Militarism (yep) 4. Forcible suppression of opposition (yep)  5. Subordination of individual interests for the nation/collective (yep).  6. Strong regimentation of society and the economy (hell yeah!)

Hitler and the Nazis, on the other hand, were such eccentric weirdos that their political DNA is tough to fit as neatly into a left/right spectrum. The Jew hatred was apolitical, and made them almost unique, in that they were fanatically devoted to winning the war…but simultaneously crippled their own war effort by devoting tons of badly needed resources – men and materiel – to killing Jews.  And Hitler’s personal pathologies and enthusiasms made his government’s policies volatile and erratic. 

Just like Mussolini, Hitler was a nationalist, and didn’t reject socialism – just international socialism.  That’s why he named his party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. (If the Nazis truly were wholly right-wing, they would be the first and only rightist party in the history of the world with “socialist” and “workers” in its name!)  But since nationalism is (correctly) usually associated with the right, and because Hitler’s most hated enemy (after the Jews) was the communists, it became easy to see the Germany/Russia conflict as right vs. left, rather than the fratricidal battle among socialists (national vs. international) that it was. 

That’s not to say that Naziism was purely a leftist ideology.   Only that it was a weird goulash of multiple, sometimes contradictory influences: right-wing nationalism; virulent anti-Semitism; Master Race/perverted Darwinist racism; and authoritarian leftism. 

What has always aggravated me is that our country (and the West writ large) has rightly come to terms with and utterly rejected Naziism, but we’ve never done the same with socialism/communism.  (I join those because Marx and most of his orthodox descendants see them as inexorably joined: socialism is the interim step in which the workers take control of the means of production, and communism is the second step in which the State withers away.  Step 2 has never happened, of course, because the theory is fatally flawed and disregards human nature.)       

It’s socially acceptable (and even chic) for college kids to wear Che Guevara t-shirts and commie iconography (hammer and sickle jewelry or pins, etc.) in a way it would never be for them to wear a Himmler or Hitler t-shirt or swastika pins. In colleges, whole fields can call themselves “Marxist” without any stigma, and I’ll bet that only a tiny minority of college kids know that Stalin almost certainly killed more people than Hitler, and Mao slaughtered more than the two of them combined, or that communism/socialism killed well over 100 million people in only a little more than a century.

I think that that’s what makes communism/socialism so dangerous: it has never been held to account and rejected, the way Naziism (rightly!) has been.  Too many people still attribute good motivations to the commies/socialists – they supposedly wanted a more egalitarian and economically fair society (some surely did, but many clearly didn’t!) – and completely gloss over the fact that that system inevitably descended into dictatorship, oppression, poverty, environmental degradation and mass murder. 

This terrible, dishonest distortion – Hitler’s crimes and 15-20 million killed are the epitome of human evil, but the gulags and 100+ million communist murders are just well-intentioned tragedies along the path paved by collectivized farming, 5-year plans and the Great Leap Forward, etc.  You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as Lenin said – is in large part the result of the dishonest and inaccurate way history is taught in America.

Finally we come to the idiotic Trump = Hitler comparison.

Hitler took power at the end of January, 1933.  Within his first SIX MONTHS, he banned other political parties and labor unions, pushed through the Enabling Act which allowed him to make laws without even consulting the Reichstag (congress), and in 18 months he’d executed over 150 leaders of a rival element in the Nazi party in the Night of the Long Knives, and taken total control of the judiciary.  Within his first 5 years, he’d invaded and subsumed another country, forced all young boys to join the Hitler Youth, murdered an estimated 70K-100,000 disabled or gay Germans, and started throwing dissidents into proto-concentration camps.

By comparison, Trump has been in office for a little less than 5 years over his two terms, and unlike Hitler in his first 5 years, he has not tried to ban the Democrat party or unions. (In fact, a near or actual majority of private sector union members likely voted for him last year).  He has not tried to abolish congress, and they’ve hampered him at every turn, tying him up in hoax investigations that took years before he was vindicated.  The oppositional judiciary has buried him in a blizzard of bogus TROs, which he’s appealed but abided by.   

He hasn’t murdered a single Republican (not even the RINOs!), Democrat, gay guy or anybody else.  He’s got Jewish grandchildren and has appointed many Jews to his administration, and he’s a national hero in Israel, after having spearheaded a peace treaty and the release of Jewish hostages. 

You know, just like Hitler did, with the Jews putting an honorary kippah on his head and carrying him out of the Reichstag on their shoulders, chanting, “Hit-ler! Hit-ler!” and “We love you, Adolf!”  

So remember: If some leftist asks you why conservatives love Nazis so much, don’t punch him.  Instead, print out this column and give him a copy.  Then say, “Good day, sir,” and turn on your heel.

If he tries to speak again, say, “I said GOOD DAY!” 

If he insists on continuing to bother you after that… commence to punching.   

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Causes for Celebration and Regret (posted 11/10/25)

Tomorrow is Veterans’ Day, and since I won’t have a column tomorrow, I’ll say thank you to all veterans a day early.  Of course we should all be thanking veterans every day, but we’re humans and fallen, and we often take veterans, like many good things – good health, forgiveness, living in a great country in a good time – for granted.   

But as someone who never served, I’ve always been a little in awe of those who have.  So thanks, all of you.

I also want to give a quick shout-out to Frederick Beal Jr., who is an exemplary American.  And not just because he has been hitting my Tip Jar regularly and hard.  Thanks!

It’s especially good to remind ourselves of some of the best among us, when much of the political news tends toward the depressing, even among those of us who are wired for optimism, whether cautious or otherwise.   

Trump’s re-election and first 9 months back in office have been invigorating.  But how can you not be given pause by Tuesday’s results, with people like bloodthirsty Jay Jones, flat-affect Spanberger, and Comrade Mamdani winning with ease?

In fact, I also may have spoken too soon about Jacob “Low-T” Frey being the lesser of two evils after he won the Minneapolis mayor race over Somali Omar Fateh.  Because when Frey gave his acceptance speech, he opened by speaking Somali for almost a minute.

On the one hand, it’s impressive to learn a foreign language.  On the other hand, for those of us who like the traditional “e pluribus unum” American ideal, pandering to every immigrant group in ways that ultimately encourage fragmented tribal identities over assimilation to an American identity is troubling.

If by “troubling” I mean “a terrible step in the wrong direction.”  Which I do.

Exhibit A in that trend would be to represent a city that is 80-90% native-born American and English-speaking, and to engage in a significant political address in a foreign tongue that none of those citizens understands.    

The same debilitating trend can be seen in many blue cities – where the push for mass migration, illegal and legal – is clearly intended to import a voting base that will keep leftists in power forever.  Bo-Zo(hran) Mamdani got around 32% of the votes from those born in New York, but over 60% of those born outside of America, and Democrat politicians in NYC brag that their public schools teach students in over 100 different languages.

That’s not something to brag about!  Because it’s not xenophobic to say that the language of the United States is English.  You can speak another language as a second language – my wife and I are working on Norwegian and German right now, respectively – but a country can’t function if its citizens can’t speak with and understand each other.

And a city’s politics can’t be healthy when its elected officials engage in clan-based appeals that most of its citizens literally cannot understand! 

Add that to the “List of Things I Never Thought Anyone Would Ever Have to Say Out Loud,” right below, “Men and Women are Different,” and just above, “You Shouldn’t Cheer When Someone You Agree With Murders Someone For Disagreeing With Him.”   

Turning to more positive news, Nancy Pelosi announced that she’s retiring from Congress (finally!) next year, even though she’s only 2149 years young. 

The only questions now are: 1. How many mummy and/or mummy-adjacent jokes can I cram into this column before she trails her burial wrappings out the door?  and 2. Now who will represent the Nile River Valley in 2026?

One good bet: Just like Nancy, the winning candidate next time will probably put out half of his/her campaign ads in hieroglyphs.  (I don’t have a “hieroglyph” button in my software, so I’ll have to translate the winning message: “Bird. Sun. Two guys with coyote heads.  Cat. Tut head. Baboon. Two women with gold headdresses facing each other.  2026!”)

In other good news – I guess – it looks like as I write this that the government shutdown might be over.  And while I wouldn’t bet on it, I hope that this 40-day detour to Pointless-ville will get some Republicans to focus on three issues the shutdown brought to the fore:

1. Why on earth are over 40 million people in America on SNAP?  There has been no multi-year drought or natural disaster, and clouds of locusts have not ravaged all of our crops. However, a plague has struck our land that is worse than either of those: big government leftists have descended upon us with an idea to help the poorest among us, which then ballooned out of control.

FDR started food stamps in 1939 but it ended four years later, when WWII had done what FDR couldn’t do: ended the Great Depression.  And immediately, bodies of the starved dead piled up like cordwood all over the continent.

HA! I kid.  Actually, Americans sailed along for 20 years without food stamps OR mass starvation.  Unexpectedly!

Until another leftist genius, LBJ, got into office and said, “Our food supply isn’t broken. Let me spend a few trillion dollars to fix it, thereby creating armies of morbidly obese dependents who will have to vote for us, because they will literally die if we’re not there to pour Count Chocula down their gullets 24/7.” 

Or words to that effect.

And 60 years later, we have managed to NOT learn the lesson that everyone who lives in heavily wooded bear country already knows: if you continually feed the bears, they’ll lose the ability to feed themselves.  And then they’ll tear hell out of your community.

I know what you’re thinking.  “Martin, I can’t believe you got screwed out of People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive award AGAIN!  You were robbed!  Also, don’t you think it’s very demeaning to compare human beings to big dumb animals like bears?”

First, I was as shocked as you are, and I don’t want to talk about People Magazine ever again. 

Second, before you say that it’s not fair to compare people to bears, did you see any of the MSM propaganda “news” stories highlighting vulnerable SNAP recipients?

They featured one sad character after another, complaining that they won’t have anything to eat starting on November first, and how will they survive without SNAP?  You know that the media were trying to depict a life-threatening crisis by putting on the most sympathetic, tear-jerking “victims” of SNAPlessness they could find.

And yet.  I hesitate to criticize people’s appearance, so how can I put this? 

Those stories were full of people from light heavyweight to cruiserweight to heavyweight… and then grizzly, and Kodiak.  These folks could burn their foodstamps for heat and then go into a cave and hibernate, and when they came out in April, they would be in the best shape of their lives.

And we’d have saved $50 billion.   

But seriously, the “S” in “SNAP” stands for “supplemental.”  And the program began as an attempt to provide a few essentials – bread, beans, rice, milk, butter, potatoes, meat – to a few people who really needed it.  And like every other federal program, it metastasized into a corrupt, harmful cluster-chuck (schumer).

The GOP should carry out a common-sense campaign to reign in SNAP spending: limit it to essential food only (no more junk food or expensive stuff); root out the fraud and abuse (prosecute re-sellers of SNAP benefits/vouchers); stop it from going to any illegals (feed them all, right until they’re put on a plane, boat or bus back to their home countries).

2. All of the Dem screaming about necessary health insurance subsidies only prove that Obamacare is a total disaster.  The GOP needs to broadcast that message everywhere and constantly: the Dems promised you a solution in their ironically and cruelly named “Affordable Health Care  Act.”  Conservatives told you that it would only make healthcare more expensive, and it absolutely has. 

Now the GOP needs to highlight its worst failings – many of the subsidies are going to people making between 100% to 400% of the federal poverty level, and there are readily available charts and graphs that show the steep increase in healthcare costs following the passage of Obamacare.  Get those out there!

It’s going to be tough to fix that broken program with everything else on our plate – thanks, Democrats! – but we need to highlight the nature of the problem, and propose an alternative that undoes what Obamacare screwed up. 

3. One common theme in both the SNAP and Obamacare debacles also helps shore up the necessity for continued deportation of illegals: even if many of them are otherwise not criminals or bad people, millions of them are using resources (SNAP and “free” health care among them) that are intended for American citizens. 

We should be using the left’s inflammatory, angry rhetoric against them.  Every time they hold a press conference or release a TikTok or stage a virtue-signaling protest about how poor and working-class Americans are suffering, we need to fire right back:

Yes! Because you’re giving the resources that should be going to them – billions in food, housing, education and health care — to illegal immigrants!  

We need to shout that into every microphone, camera and social media post we can.

And for God’s sake, don’t shout it in Somali!

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

I’ve Returned, With a Few Election Thoughts (posted 11/5/25)

I’m back from Maine, just in time for a horrible election showing.

I’m speaking, of course, of my incomprehensible loss – again! – in yet another People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive competition.  This time I was runner-up to some British actor nobody’s ever heard of, in another instance of “always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” 

Or in my case, “always the People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive Runner-Up, never People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.”  And I’m getting pretty darn sick of it.

Sure, it’s some consolation that my smokeshow wife tells me that even as an elderly gentleman, I still have the kind of smoldering good looks that, when I’m out in public and make momentary eye contact with a member of the fairer sex, swooning and an arousal-based loss of consciousness regularly ensues.

Okay, she’s never said that in so many words. 

Or in any words even approaching those. 

But after many decades of marriage, I can read her thoughts flawlessly at all times.  (Because you know husbands are GREAT at that.) And I’m pretty sure that that’s what she thinks.

Anyway, by now the main point here is clear: the sexiest man jury at People magazine is composed solely of members of the LGBTQ+ community and those with late-stage macular degeneration.  So don’t bother nominating me again next year, because I’m out!

Okay, enough tomfoolery.  This election really sucked.

Not because blue candidates won in blue states.  Like the Good Book says, “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a blue-state voter returns to his folly.”  So despite our hopes that it would be otherwise, this isn’t a surprise.

But the depressing part is who won, and by how much. 

Spanberger is a cowardly, robotic husk who couldn’t even look Winsome Earle-Sears in the eye when called to give a defense for her terrible policies.  Jay Jones fantasized about murdering his political opponent, and about watching that man’s children die in their mother’s arms.  And Mamdani is a nepo baby neophyte who combines the most deadly ideologies of the last century, communism and jihad.  Mikie Sherrill lied about her bad behavior in the service, and is lying about it still.

Plus she’s a woman called “Mikie,” for which there is no excuse. 

And yet they all won, going away.  Jones, at least, was supposed to be in some trouble, as you might expect for a bloodthirsty scumbag running in an election less than 2 months after his similarly violence-loving political co-religionist murdered Charlie Kirk.  But it looks like Jones still won by 4 or 5 points. 

To make things worse, three Dem judges in purple PA were up for retention votes, and the voters kept all three, even though that same electorate voted for Trump last year.  And in California – see the dogs and their vomit reference above – went through with Ken-Doll Newsom’s  crooked gerrymandering scheme.

Unexpectedly!

I haven’t had time to think through much of this, having just been traveling, but my initial thoughts are:

1. I hope Democrat voters get what they are asking for – good, hard, and sans lubrication.

2. I wish the damage they’re about to do – especially in NYC – could be contained to themselves.  But as always, there will be a lot of collateral damage, including the fact that Florida is about to get more crowded.

3. We need to make Mamdani the face of the Democrat party.  Because thanks to a benevolent God, the rest of America isn’t New York City, politically speaking.  And we should hang that smirking, incompetent, anti-Semitic commie around the DNC’s neck, as the city descends into an ever-more dysfunctional, Dinkins-ian morass of filth, crime and red ink.

4. We need to gerrymander every red state in the country, ASAP.  The Dems have mastered that strategy, and we need to fight fire with fire, or surrender the midterms before they’ve even begun. 

I’ll be back with a regular column in the next day or two.  In the meantime, and as always…

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Road Trip, One of Charlie Kirk’s Antagonists Gets Some Karma, and the Wilks Family Deserves Praise (posted 10/24/25)

It’s good to be back home, and back in the friendly environs of CO Nation.

My trip north went well.  Since I wanted to stop and see my mom and sister in Tennessee, and to go up and hang out with the cousins in Illinois, I drove for the nearly 2500-mile round trip. 

That gave me time to catch up on some podcasts and listen to a few books on cd along the way.  I’m listening to CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength for the first time in a long time, and it’s as gripping and weird as I remembered. 

And I was able to make the entire trip without being killed by an intoxicated illegal behind the wheel of a semi who bought his CDL for 5,000 rupees from Ken-Doll Newsom in California.  So I’ve got that going for me. 

Regular readers will remember that my mom has Alzheimer’s, and in August my sister and I finally had to move her into a memory care place in TN, near Rhonda’s home.  After a rough transition and a lot of struggles all around, we checked out a couple of more places, and have arranged to move her into a place that we think will be a better fit for her shortly.  Those of you who have gone through this know how fraught the process can be, and we have learned some hard lessons.

When I got to Illinois, the cousins and I drove up into Wisconsin, and enjoyed some cool weather and beautiful fall foliage.  On my way back south I stopped by Ottawa, Illinois to spend a contemplative hour at my maternal grandparents’ grave, which is beneath a maple in a pretty cemetery beside the Illinois river.  

Since we don’t have much of a fall here in Florida, I really appreciate October up north, which always evokes nostalgia and childhood memories of Halloween, diving into piles of leaves, and hayrack rides, followed by hot apple cider and maybe some roasted marshmallows.

Of course I didn’t have the chance for all that on this trip.  But I felt lucky to be able to spend some time on a cool, sunny autumn afternoon talking to my grandparents.  (I don’t know whether they can hear me, but I know where they are, and I suspect that they do.)

As usual during travel, I only caught bits and pieces of the news, but it seemed to be a continuation of the foolishness and absurdity that we’ve gotten used to. 

I saw that the usual suspects got together for the second annual “No Kings” extravaganza, and that they’re now 2-for-2.  Last year and this year they loudly and self-strokingly demanded that we not have a king.  And for the second year in a row, we don’t have a king.  So…mission accomplished!

(Please don’t anybody tell them that the reigns of Emperor Haile Selassi Obama and Sir Auto Pen are the closest we’ve come to having a king in nearly 250 years. They are so satisfied with themselves, and they can’t maintain that if outside reality intrudes into their bubble.)

I also saw that the big blue cities are still hell-bent on self-destruction.  Commie Mamdani appears to be on a glide path into the mayoralty of NYC, with his campaign slogan of, “Flee Now, Productive Citizens, Inshallah!” 

And another lefty with more than a dusting of Somali “Allahu akbar” is set to edge out Jacob “Wussy McPussington” Frey as mayor of Minneapolis.  Poor Minnesota!  Jazz Hands is their Governor, brother-marrying jihadi Ilhan Omar is one of their House reps, and Amy Klobuchar is one of their senators.

And now Mogadishu-St.Paul is going to be stumbling toward sharia law.  Well done, Gopher Staters!

But elsewhere, there’s a lot of good news happening.  Red states continue to do pretty well, and Trump continues to troll the eminently troll-able.  Especially entertaining were AI presentations of Trump and Melania in royal robes and crowns on “No Kings” day, as well as Trump in a Top Gun situation, dropping a few metric tons of fecal matter on the kind of protestors who have been spewing the same at us for many years now. 

I also have two other heartening stories.  The first comes from Oxford, England, where regular readers may remember that a Nigerian-Brit creep named George Abaraonye (whose name is not worth spelling correctly again) was elected the president of the Oxford Union back in June.  Because: DEI.

He had been one of the students Charlie Kirk debated there in the spring.  Charlie had been polite and respectful, and mopped the floor with Georgie, intellectually speaking.  Alabastard, on the other hand, acted like a total douche.  His conduct and arguments were as unsightly as his appearance.  (He wore slippers, sweatpants and a black t-shirt to an Oxford debate!) 

So when Charlie got murdered by a leftist spouting mainstream leftist talking points, Abalone checked all the boxes to establish himself as the quintessential leftist a-hole. 

First he posted a tweet celebrating the assassination.  (Check.)

Then, when he began to get blowback over his egregious behavior, he lied like a coward, claiming that he had posted one terrible tweet “in a moment of shock.”  (Check). 

It then turned out that he had posted other similarly awful tweets a bit later.  Because of course he did. (Check.)

In subsequent weeks, more and more influential figures began to protest Abhorrent’s hateful behavior.  Prominent speakers who had been scheduled to debate at the Oxford Union began cancelling.  Members of Parliament began criticizing Oxford, and the university finally published a condemnation of George, with the weak-sauce “his views don’t represent us” ploy.

So G. Abominable played the victim, claiming that his hateful remarks were “shaped by the context of Mr. Kirk’s own rhetoric” and whining that he had now become the target of “racist comments and threats.”   (Check.)

Finally, on October 18th, the Oxford Union took a no-confidence vote on Acrimonious.  They needed a two-thirds vote to oust him as president, and they got 5% more than that.

After checking another leftist box – Abysmal smeared his opponents, claiming that a vote against his hateful arse was “a victory for hate” – he completed the leftist Bingo card by…wait for it…becoming an election denier.

Check and mate!

His supporters pitched a fit, accusing the voters of “procedural sabotage and intimidation,” after which Appalling then did what we in the States call “pulling a Stacy Abrams.”  He defiantly declared that he was “still president-elect.” 

Okay, Georgie. 

Thank God Biden’s ghost is not still president, or George would come here illegally, the Dems would declare him a citizen, and he’d be their next nominee for President. 

Finally, I want to give a shout-out to an unlikely group: the family members of a black criminal shot dead by a white cop. 

On October 9th, Elijah Wilks, 26, was shot by a plainclothes cop who had been on his way to work.  The police told the Wilks family that Elijah had driven recklessly, cut off the cop and caused a minor collision, then stopped his car, got out and pistol-whipped the cop once with a handgun, after which he pointed the gun at the cop. The cop shot him, killing him.

The Wilks family initially said they didn’t believe the cops’ narrative, and demanded to see the dash-cam footage from the cop’s car.  The police showed them the video, which corroborated the police account.

Now this is a story we see every day in America, and it always seems to unfold the same way.  The family cries racism, proclaims their family member a saint who was brutally killed for no reason, and engages a racial arsonist like Al Sharpton. 

Sometimes they do this because they’ve imbibed the racial hatred of leftist propaganda.  Sometimes they see a big payday that can be gained from spineless authorities who are terrified of racism charges, bogus or not.  And sometimes, I’m sure, they do it because they honestly think their family member was innocent.

But in this case, the Wilks family rose above all that.  After they watched the dash cam video, they gave a press conference.  They had hired an attorney named “B’Ivory LaMarr,” who violated the Simpson Rule of Odd Apostrophes, to wit, “Never Trust a Man with an Odd Apostrophe in his First Name.”

But B’Ivory is B’atting .1000, because he announced, “I don’t think I’ve ever given a press conference and said this, but we will acknowledge that we do believe that this officer-involved shooting is justified.”

Elijah’s aunt said that her nephew “made a decision that he should not have made, and that’s just something we have to live with.”

And LaMarr concluded with, “Our hearts and our prayers go out to the off-duty officer.  I’m sure that he’s going through a healing process.”

Seriously, I nearly teared up when I read those words.  I can only imagine how painful it is to lose a family member like that.  And I’d guess that your grief is made even worse when mixed with anger at him, when you discover that his death is entirely his own fault, and the result of his own stupidly reckless behavior. 

At a terrible moment like that, and despite all of the toxic anti-whitey and anti-cop hatred you’ve been immersed in, I admire your ability to tell the hard truth, and to extend your sympathy to the man who was forced to kill your loved one. 

B’eautiful job, B’Ivory, and good on you, Wilks family!  You’ve earned some peace, after Elijah’s death.

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!