Tag: Politics

Two Local Stories: How to Handle Protestors, & Foolish Criminals (posted 5/1/24)

Today I’ve got two quick stories for you, both from my hometown.  The first offers a case study in how to respond to law-breaking campus protestors, and the second one fits in two of my regular column categories: “Stupid Criminals” stories, and “You Don’t Hate the Media Enough” stories.

One of the many reasons that it’s great to be a Florida Gator is that our governing officials don’t suffer from CCRIS (Congenital Cranial-Rectal Inversion Syndrome), a condition tragically affecting many university administrations across the country.

(For your generous gift of only $10 per month, our team of dedicated, caring surgeons can give Claudine Gay and other Ivy League college administrators the desperately needed operations to remove their heads from their arses, before it’s too late.  Won’t you please think of the children?  The gullible, low-IQ, Jew-hating children?  Our operators are standing by.)

In recent weeks, as many universities spiraled into paroxysms of pro-Hamas idiocy, UF issued  clear guidelines delineating free speech on the one hand, and various forms of unacceptable and illegal a-holery on the other. 

Among the latter, they identified “protests inside buildings… blocking egress, camping, building structures,” and they warned that student violators would face “a 3-year trespass and suspension,” and that non-compliant employees “will be trespassed and separated from employment.”    

When 9 knuckleheads tested those rules a few days ago, they were all quickly arrested.  You can see pictures of them online, and they are exactly what you’d expect.  The breakdown: 3 males and 6 females; 5 are UF students; 2 have multiple hair colors not found in nature, and all 9 are absolutely un-“friend”-able, if you get my meaning.

All are charged with multiple misdemeanors, and one – Allen Frasheri – got an additional battery-on-an-officer charge for spitting on a cop.  (Rumors that he has been tested for rabies so that the officer doesn’t have to go through a preventative series of painful shots have not been confirmed.)  And surprise!  He was the president of a student chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America in 2022.

So I’d advise that officer to take the shots, just to be on the safe side.

My favorite part of the info about the protestors is that the UF students are listed as “expecting to graduate” in 2025 or 2026.  But given the three-year suspension mentioned above, I wouldn’t count on that now, kiddos!

After the arrests, UF spokesman Steve Orlando put out a statement that should be carved into a stone tablet and placed in front of the statues of the three UF Heisman trophy winners (Spurrier, Wuerffel and Tebow), so that parents who care about the important things in life can bring their children there, and train them well.

The statement began, “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”

Sweetness and light! 

Unlike at USC and many other schools, UF’s graduation is going to go on this Saturday, as scheduled.  NOT unexpectedly!

My second local story is very different. It involves the death of four black males between the ages of 14 and 16 in a terrible car crash two days ago.

Most media reports had headlines that varied only slightly from this one: “Four Teenage Boys Dead after High-Speed Chase with Florida Highway Patrol, Who Performed Pit Maneuver to Stop Them.”

Most of the stories concentrated on how young the boys were, and the fact that one was a football star at a local high school, before providing a few details.  A cop had initially pulled them over, but then they sped away, reaching speeds of over 100 mph, before a trooper intervened.  It’s not clear how fast they were going when he pitted them (i.e. bumped the rear of their car to one side, in order to make it spin out).  But the car ran into a cement pole, killing everyone inside.

If I were one to trust MSM crime stories, I would have been intrigued.  At first I might think that maybe they were speeding because they were late for Bible Study.  (I hate it when you get in there late, and you missed the first prayer and the reading of the Gospel text!)  But a few paragraphs in, the story mentioned that the SUV they were in had been reported stolen. 

So okay, they weren’t making great choices.  But still, I’m sure that at the tender age of 16, these were just dumb kids, out for a harmless joyride. 

Because who amongst us hasn’t driven a little too fast, and possibly slid our dad’s 1972 Gran Torino (white with a blue stripe, and that super-cool hood scoop on it) into a ditch off of a gravel road about half a mile north of El Paso, Illinois?

I mean, just speaking hypothetically, and not at all from personal experience.   

Anyway, I’m sure these high-spirited rascals were just—

What’s that?  Two of the four of them were wearing ankle monitors?  And at least some of them were wearing ski masks?  In Florida, on a 72-degree night, as one does?

Well, maybe they’ve got one of those really strict youth pastors, who makes you wear an ankle monitor if you’ve showed up late to at least two Bible Study sessions in the past.  Those guys can get pretty Old Testament with—

What?  Three of the four of them had active warrants?  C’mon, man!

What do you have to do to have active warrants and an ankle monitor when you’re 14 or 16 years old?!  And if someone in law enforcement is actually monitoring the ankle monitors, did they not find it strange that two of their ankle monitors were flying through east Gainesville at 110 miles per hour? 

It’s obviously a tragic story, if only because the kids were so young, and may have had the chance to overcome their CCRIS if they’d survived their stupidity for a little longer.

And even though I’ve never had a warrant – active or otherwise – and never needed an ankle monitor, I do know that a 1972 Torino’s speedometer goes up to 120 mph, and what it feels like to bury the needle on a two-lane Illinois country road.

Nothing but the grace of God can explain why most of us males are still here at all. 

And I wish those boys would have had fathers who put the fear of God in them before they ever got to the ankle-monitor and fleeing-in-a-stolen-car stage. 

Hamas delenda est!

I Get a Personal Flamethrower, & Disney and Newsom Continue to Blunder (posted 4/29/24

Everyone here knows that I am not one to brag. 

Sure, I may have mentioned in passing that my oldest daughter is busy saving the lives of children in a pediatric hospital, or that my youngest daughter is a budding astrophysicist whose mentoring professor just submitted an article with her on which she’s going to be first author.

And yes, if you held a gun to my head, I’d confess that when Sheila Jackson Lee once saw my wife, she said, “I thought that the sun was a powerful heat, but THIS woman is HOT!”  And that my Aussie shepherd Cassie (“the Wonder Dog” is an honorific, but I can’t really type her name without it) is the apotheosis of canine cool.

But yesterday I was able to check off another bucket list item. Because I am now the proud owner of a… wait for it…flamethrower!

No, tragically, it is not a flamethrowing robot dog.  (My wife somehow doesn’t agree that that would be the best $10,000 [with shipping] that we ever spent.  Because she’s apparently not the financial visionary that I am.) (See my Friday column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com for background.)

This is a small, personal flamethrower to be used for burning weeds or grass, among other things.  And by “other things,” I don’t mean pro-Hamas protestors’ tents, because in Florida, we don’t have any of those on our campuses.  Because we are not governed by terrorist sympathizers or sniveling cowards. 

But I do already have a few other “flame-thrower-target” ideas.  I’m going to see what happens if I turn her on the first “Co-exist” bumper sticker I see, and there’s a house a few blocks over with one of those, “In this house we believe… chromosomes don’t exist, etc.” yard signs that intrigue me…

If you have any suggestions about other possible uses for Sparky (yes, I’ve already given her a name, and yes, it’s a name that works for a personal flamethrower OR the electric chair that we used on Ted Bundy) (Because: Florida!), please leave them in the comments.

And yes, Sparky’s pronouns are she/her.  Because guys always think of their favorite physical possessions as female.  I refer you to sailors always calling their ships “her,” and to every Beach Boys song about a beloved car. (“She’s real fine, my 409.”  “She’s my little deuce coupe, you don’t know what I got.” Etc.)   

Not to mention the fact that when the Japanese fooled around with us at Pearl Harbor, they “found out” on the receiving end of a big ol’ fissile middle finger dropped from a plane that was named after the pilot’s mom, the Enola Gay.

And if by some freak coincidence, I should pass away in a flame-thrower-related accident this week (my wife is not totally discounting the possibility), I am asking here and now that the great and powerful CO will give my eulogy, at a service to which I trust you will all travel to attend.  

And the only requests I have are that “I’ll Fly Away” be played, that the flag at the CO Compound be flown at half-mast for a respectful interval, and that CO’s first sentence be, “The world without Martin Simpson is now a dark and dismal place, but we can all be comforted knowing that he died doing what he loved: throwing flames.”

Yes, I have been hitting the celebratory bourbon this evening, thanks for asking.  Because did I mention that today I received my own personal FLAMETHROWER!?

Now where was I? 

Oh yeah, Disney is still reeling after having been beaten like a rented mule by Ron DeSantis; campus protestors are continuing to illustrate their own idiocy AND the difference between how blue states and red states react to said idiocy; and Gavin Newsom continues to step on rakes.    

You’d think that Disney would be busily engaged in trying to win back their audience and staunch the flow of red ink they’ve been experiencing lately.  But nope!

Their latest blunder happened last month, when a family of four were staying at a Disney Resort at Disney World, and during a meal, paid an extra fee for a visit from a character, the Evil Queen from Snow White and the 7 Dwarves (currently Snow Brown, One Dwarf and Six Normally Proportioned People). 

And they did get an “evil queen,” sort of.  It was a dude in a costume and make-up! 

“This is some Bibbidi Bobbidi Bullschiff right here!” said the dad.

Well, I don’t know if he said that.  But he should have.  He did say that his whole family have been huge Disney fans before this.  He also said that he spent $8000 on his current trip.

Obviously the family were bait-and-switched.  It would be like paying to meet a living president at the Hall of Presidents, and getting the mortal remains of the late Joe Biden.  Or paying to meet Geronimo or Sitting Bull, and getting Grandma Squanto (#wemustneverstopmockingher).  Or paying to meet Universal Studio’s classic movie monster the Mummy, and getting Imhotep Pelosi.

Okay, that last one would be getting exactly what you paid for.  But I think the other examples make my point.

I can’t believe Disney is still pulling stuff like this, and I feel this guy’s pain.  But if this guy was going to drop $8K on entertainment, he could have just come up with another $2 large and got himself a FRD instead! (“Flamethrowing Robot Dog,” of course).

And then, if he’s ever confronted with a hulking dude in a robe and tiara, it’s Evil Queen versus Flamethrowing Robot Dog!  And that has pay-per-view written ALL over it!  C’mon, man.

Meanwhile, pro-Hamas asshats continue to illustrate why you should never send your kid to a college run by leftist wokesters.  On one campus after another, they continued to set up squatter camps and then virtue signal and “negotiate” with feckless administrators.

But I see several silver linings coming out of this mortifying debacle:

1.The GOP should be cutting ads of these idiots to run – interspersed with border chaos scenes – 24/7 in October and early November.  (Though I’ve got a feeling that we’ll already have plenty of great footage from the Dem convention in Chicago in August.  I’m going to have a 50-gallon drum of popcorn delivered to my house for that!)

2. The contrast we’re seeing between red state campuses and blue state ones are both educational and edifying.  Texas troopers immediately arresting lawbreakers on their campuses are just one example. 

At Florida State, 5 minutes after protestors started setting up tents on the quad, campus officials made them pack it up.  When protestors’ chants got boisterous, a number of university grounds people suddenly appeared on loud riding mowers to keep the campus tidy.  Then sprinklers mysteriously went off, dampening the brave freedom fighters.

One beta male protestor accused the school of intentionally trying to discourage them, saying, “Waah!  How am I going to impress my mouth-breathing simpleton friends, and maybe even get a chance at the most dispiriting, low-quality hippie-chick tail ever, with all of this lawn mowing and lawn watering going on?” (I’m paraphrasing, slightly.)

An unnamed university spokesman (and as of this moment, a hero of mine) said – and I swear I am not making this up – “Work on our grounds happens throughout the day.”

I’m not crying.  I’m just allergic to newly mown grass and moist Marxists.

My favorite visual of the week came from Emory U in Atlanta, where a bunch of Hamas-loving, cop-hating protestors set up an illegal encampment on campus.  After too many warnings, some Georgia state troopers descended on them with the wrath of an angry Old Testament God.

Or at least with the enthusiasm of a well-coached outside linebacker trying to make the first string at an SEC school!  You probably saw the video.  One particular moron tried to run away, a checkered terrorist tablecloth on his head.  (You say “keffiyeh,” I say “terrorist version of a MAGA hat.”) (Hat-tip to CO for that one!)

The dope was run down from behind by a trooper in full gear, including what I first thought was a looped length of rope on his belt, but later realized were just plastic zip ties.  (Man, if that had been rope, and the cop had dropped the perp and quickly hog-tied his legs with a rope, that would have been the most awesome trifecta of toxic masculinity – cop, football player and rodeo roper – ever!)

The cop demonstrated perfect form: knees bent, weight going forward, then the lowered shoulder and exploding through the tackle.  He even put his head to one side of the target right before impact, to avoid the 15-yard penalty for spearing!

I tell ya, those protestors were dropping like Moanin’ Megan Rapinoe walking into a particularly tall blade of grass!

More, please.

Finally, Gavin Newsom is back in the news, and for a hilarious reason.

(By the way, I realize that today’s column would make a good round on Family Feud: “Name three people or groups that Ron DeSantis has totally owned in the last year!  Survey says: Disney, pro-Hamas campus protestors, and Gavin Newsom.”)

Newsom got the brilliant idea of commissioning a $1 coin to honor innovation in the late great Golden state, and tweeted out a call for suggestions of what should appear on the coin.  And the people of the internet unleashed a torrent of swift kicks to the smooth, featureless groin of the Ken Doll.

Dozens of proposed designs featured some variation on the tent city: a single filthy tent surrounded by garbage; a few dozen tents with whacked-out meth heads lounging around; an endless vista of tents in the foreground, with the LA skyline in the background.

One suggestion featured a gas-station sign with innovatively high $6+ gas prices.  One proposed a wagon train of U-hauls heading east, while another contemplated how to indicate in an image the turning a budget surplus into a $73 billion dollar deficit in two years.        

But the leader in the clubhouse seems to be a glowing, golden image of the Golden Gate Bridge, one of its iconic towers partially obscured by a ginormous poop emoji. 

It’s a perfect image for California currency under Democrat rule: not a bitcoin, but a sh*tcoin. 

Well done, Gavin! Hamas delenda est!

Tossing a Speaker (?) and Biden Warns Israel not to Hit… Israel? (posted 4/22/24)

Okay, I’m going to risk some of the goodwill I’ve hopefully got banked here at the CO site by discussing an issue that is toxic on our side right now, and that will likely make many of you mad.  But if you’ll hang with me through the first part of the column, I’ve got a few stories to celebrate, too.

(You’ve heard the old cliché “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”  Today’s column is going to be medicine first, and a little bit of sugar afterwards.)   

To the medicine: I think it would be politically suicidal to try to oust Mike Johnson from the Speakership right now.

No, he’s not conservative enough for me.  Neither is Kevin McCarthy, or roughly 97% of Republican office holders. Or Donald Trump, for that matter.

So I not only empathize with those amongst us who were dissatisfied with McCarthy, and now with Johnson – I am one of those!  But at the same time, many on our side don’t seem to recognize the most basic political reality: we have 51% of one house of congress, and the Dems have the White House and the Senate.

It’s especially aggravating to read conservatives on other sites blasting Johnson for not closing our border, or saying, “We need to secure our border before we do anything else!”

If we were living on a planet where Mike Johnson had the ability to close our border, and he sided with the Dems and refused to do it, I’d be with those conservatives: “He’s a traitor, and should be run out of town!”

But we do not live on that planet.  And Mike Johnson – or Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump, or even the great and powerful CO – can do absolutely nothing to close our border right now.  If Johnson pushed a “close the border” bill through the House it would win by one vote.  Then the Senate would toss it aside the way they did with the Mayorkas impeachment. 

But hey, we’re optimists, right?  What if it turned out that Fetterman’s recent brain damage was caused by a virus, and half the Senate caught it, and their recovery was super-fast, so that half of them became marginally sane, and they passed the Johnson border bill?

Then the earthly remains of Joe Biden would veto it, and we would accomplish nothing.

Having said that, I’d still like Johnson to push and pass such a bill, purely to gain some justified political advantage.  In general, I think we should force the Dems to take every unpopular vote we can, and then bludgeon them with those votes in November. 

(Pass an “at least prohibit abortion in the last trimester” bill, and a “don’t allow warped Munchausen parents to sexually mutilate their sexually confused kids” bill, and a “don’t release serial murderers so they can immediately murder again” bill.  And force the Dems to vote for aborting babies half-way down the birth canal, castrating kids, and facilitating the murder of more Americans.)  

But let’s not pretend that Johnson is fumbling away a non-existent potential victory.   

The latest exaggerated Breitbart headline I saw said that by garnering Dem votes for the Ukraine bill (along with 185 GOP votes, which aren’t mentioned), Johnson “has allowed the Dems to seize congress.” (I’m not discussing the wisdom of the Ukraine bill here, which I think has only gray options, and is all Biden’s fault.)

Really?  If that’s true, then by that standard, Matt Gaetz and his small band collaborated with the Dems to oust McCarthy, despite nearly all Republican votes.  And if MTG and another tiny group decide to toss Johnson out, they’ll be siding with the Dems again. 

But forget all that emotional sturm und drang.  Just out of Machiavellian self-interest, it is incredibly stupid and self-destructive to overthrow your own speaker when you have no one better to take his place!

Not only will it cause a ballistic circle jerk of Republicans shooting at each other, it will also turn off the independents who are desperately looking for an alternative to the late Joe Biden, and will make a loss in November more likely.  (Then everybody who hated McCarthy and Johnson can happily settle in to the final six months before the election under Speaker Jeffries, and total Dem control of congress and the WH!)

So what should we do?  1. If any Republican is speaker when the dust clears, we must immediately get rid of the new rule that a tiny number of GOP pols can overthrow a speaker.  If you can’t get a majority of your party to agree that a speaker has to go, suck it up. 

The Dems would never cripple themselves with such a rule, which is part of the reason that – despite having the most idiotic and dysfunctional agenda since the Trojans tugged that big horse within their city walls – they’ve managed to push through their terrible legislation with very thin margins in the house, while the GOP’s much more rational legislation has languished.

Seriously.  At any given moment, at least several dozen House Dems are not just opposed to their party leadership’s agenda, they are certifiably bat guano crazy.  Hank Johnson thinks Guam is in danger of capsizing, Sheila Jackson Lee thinks that the moon is made of gas and the sun is “a very strong heat” on which human life would be difficult.  (Just think of how much sun screen you’d have to use every single day you were living on the sun, people!)  The squad is a bunch of mouth-breathing anti-Semites, and etc. and etc. 

And yet Imhotep Pelosi was able to either whip her stupidest colleagues into line, or else ignore and marginalize them.  Even though her brains were pulled out of her skull through her nose when she was first mummified several millenia ago, she would never have been stupid enough to give a group of 3-5 of her most volatile members the chance to scuttle her agenda any time they got their burkas in a bunch.

2. Win the WH and Senate in November!   

3. Win a large enough majority in the House so that you can let your camera-hogging marginal characters (I think MTG, Boebert and Gaetz – and sadly for me, Massie – are amongst those, but your mileage may vary) say and do what they want, without the power of the whip hand to paralyze all action in the House.

Okay, if any of you are still with me, and aren’t already typing your comments (“Dear Jackass, You are neither hilarious nor a genius!  Good day sir!”), let’s move on to other news.  (By the way, the last video I made – it’s called “Buckley and CS Lewis on this election” – touches on similar issues, i.e. a call for us to have grace with each other and our imperfect leaders as we head into this election season.  You can see it at my website – Martinsimpsonwriting.com – under “Videos.”)

One bit of very good news came on Friday, when the Trump campaign and the RNC unveiled a “massive election integrity program, involving more than 100,000 volunteers and attorneys working in each battleground state, and overseeing voting and ballot handling and counting. 

Yes!  Many people have been begging for this sort of effort (I mentioned it in my March 8th column), and if it is as robust as it sounds, it might go a long way toward making up for the inexplicable decision to support Ronna Romney for at least two election cycles and 4 years too many!  My gut tells me that the single biggest threat to a Trump victory is the left possibly rigging the election and 2020-style ballot shenanigans, so this new effort is just what Dr. Simpson ordered.   

(Now if we can just get Trump to stop telling his base to NOT vote early or by mail!)

There’s even a bit of good news involving Joey Gaffes this week. He was feeling a little down because five times he had said, “Don’t!” as a stern warning for Iran not to attack Israel. 

Annnndddd… they attacked Israel with 320 drones and missiles. 

But he said, “Don’t!” one more time, this time directed at Israel, along with this admonishment: “Don’t move on Haifa.”  And to their great credit – and Biden’s relief – Israel took his advice and did not attack Haifa.

Which is… a city in Israel.  

(I think he might have meant “Rafah,” which is a terrorist-infested city in Gaza.  And which, come to think of it, sounds like the kind of burg that Biden would like to protect, since his ululating base voters in Dearborn MI are quite fond of those gang-raping jihadists in Rafah… and much less fond of the peace-loving Israelis in Haifa.)  

But hey, Biden called on the IDF not to hit their own cities, and they didn’t, and that’s the closest thing to a win Biden has had for a while.

Ooh, except that while his favorite uncle was definitely shot out of the sky and then eaten by cannibals, Joe has been unmolested by cannibals for all 124 years he’s been on this planet.

Rumors that the cannibals took one look at him and said, “Too stringy.  Plus that brain thing he’s got might be catching, like Mad Cow Disease,” have not been confirmed.  

Hamas delenda est!

Law and Order, Part 2 (posted 4/17/24)

On Monday I discussed some typical crimes in big blue cities: Dexter Reed earning himself a 21-gun-salute by shooting at Chicago cops; St. Louis mayor Tishaura the Terrible (move over, Ivan!) blaming store owners for being robbed by thugs she allows to roam free; and San Fran’s brilliant plan to force bankrupt businesses to continue operating, because shoplifters need to exercise their constitutional right to loot.

Today I’d like to talk about a different kind of crime, one involving two of my favorite things: stupid high-status criminals, and sweet, sweet schadenfreude.  And I’ve got two great examples.

The first one comes from Scotland, sadly enough.  I hate to say it, but the Scots are now giving the Scandinavians some stiff competition in the race to see who can make their ancestors roll over in their graves the fastest.

Just a scant 1000 years ago – when Imhotep Pelosi was a dewy ingenue celebrating her 700th birthday – Norsemen were legendary warriors, and the Scots were the hillbillies of Europe (in the best possible way), having forced the Romans to give up their incursions and build Hadrian’s Wall.

Today, too many descendants of Vikings are beta males who embrace the EU and take orders from the Hague, and the once-proud Scots are castigating themselves for being too white (in Scotland!) and adopting insulting “hate crimes” speech codes into law.

They’ve somehow wound up with a goofball named Humza Yousaf as First Minister.  (Because apparently somebody challenged them to find a minister more hateful than Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, and they said, “Hold my haggis, and watch this!”)

Yousaf – yes, of Clan Yousaf, from the highlands – led the push to pass the “Hate Crime and Public Order Act,” which became law on April Fool’s Day, fittingly enough.  As with all such laws, it was passed on the promise that it would be used to stop hatred and bigotry, and never to quash free expression.

But as with all such laws everywhere, “hate speech” always boils down to “speech that those in power don’t like.”  As soon as I read about the law, I figured that it would likely be wielded as a weapon against whoever is the Scottish equivalent of people wearing MAGA hats.  (Maybe lads in William Wallace Windbreakers, or Don’t Tread on Me Kilts?)

(If those don’t exist yet, I’d like to copyright them right now.) 

And indeed, the law has gone terribly wrong, right out of the gate.  But what I didn’t anticipate – and what restores a little of my faith in the Scots – is in what schadenfreude-tastic ways it would go hilariously wrong!

In the first 48 hours after the law took effect, Scottish police were swamped with 4,000 official complaints!  Obviously, the cops have no time or resources to deal with this deluge of whining, as opposed to doing, you know, actual police work.  Instead, as a story in The Guardian put it (and that’s the last time you’ll see me citing that lefty rag with approval), “It has resulted in an almighty omnishambles.”

As a language nerd, I LOVE that phrase, and am determined to work it into future columns on a semi-regular basis.  (Ex: “The mob of Biden-voting looters began with some garden-variety tumultuous conduct, but then escalated to the point of creating an almighty omnishambles!”)

Many of the first 4000 complaints apparently dealt with J.K. Rowling (about which more in a minute), but another big chunk had to do with the malicious minister himself, Hamza Yousaf! 

Because it turns out that the Ham-ster went on a rant in 2020 about how racist Scotland is, citing as his evidence the vast majority of government positions that are held by whites. (In Scotland!) (Unexpectedly!)  

The culmination of his speech featured him spitting out “white” after each position’s title with visceral disgust.  (“The lord president, white!  The chief constable, white!  Every high court judge, white!”)

Since the hate crime law was passed to supposedly fight racial hatred, I love that the minute that the law took effect, many Scots trolled Hamza by aiming complaints at him for his own racial animus, hoisting him on his own petard.

I mentioned J.K. Rowling, who has now officially become a hero of mine.  She’s taken all sorts of abuse from the usual suspects for displaying the best kind of Scottish stubbornness on the issue of “transgender women” – who, as everyone knows, are dudes.

I hold her in similarly high regard as I hold my third-favorite African-American (after Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell): Elon Musk.  Both Musk and Rowling achieved great wealth, and could have continued to bask in public approval if they had just acquiesced to the elite censors and kept their mouths shut. 

We’ve all heard the cliché that someone is wealthy when she has “f**k you” money, but Adam Carolla has pointed out that REAL wealth is having “f**k me” money.  I.e. you can afford to lose $20 billion by overpaying for Twitter, just because you value free speech. 

Or you can afford to sacrifice the social capital represented by Harry Potter money by refusing to repeat the lie that men can be women.

When she heard about the new law, Rowling went before cameras and threw down the gauntlet, saying that she would never bend the knee and lie about gender, and daring Hamza and his army of woke bullies to charge her and jail her.

I’m not sure how many of the initial complaints filed about her were authentic whining from the leftist thought police, and how many of them were trolling from liberty-loving Scots, but either way, it worked out great.  Hamza’s government backpedaled furiously, putting out hapless spokes-weasels to insist that they would never apply the new law to people like Rowling or honest disagreements like hers.  (And all throughout the land, there were spit-takes of Scotch in every pub.)

I’m looking forward to watching the Scottish government squirm and suffer in the coming months, until they will hopefully be forced into an ignominious repeal of the law, just like Portlanders had to re-criminalize hard drugs, and Dem pols have had to scramble to re-fund the police.    

Speaking of spineless acquiescence to leftist bullies, it’s been maddening to watch one blue city after another allow pro-Hamas idiots to block major roads – the Golden Gate bridge, a major road leading to O’Hare in Chicago – while the cops are forced to stand by and let the madness go on.

That’s why counter-examples are so refreshing.  I probably don’t have to tell you that DeSantis sent in the cops and quickly dragged off and arrested a bunch of protestors in Florida last week.  (Man, I hope we can someday have that guy as our president!)

But you might not have heard of little Pomona college in CA, where a mob of pro-terror Hamas supporters were arrested after they took over a campus building on April 5th.  Nineteen of them were suspended and charged with crimes.  Sure, the charges are only misdemeanors, but for California, that’s a great start.    

As always with this kind of protest, their chants were pedestrian at best.  Along with the usual tired ones (“From the river to the sea…”), their only even half-decent one was, “Stop the killing, stop the slaughter, Gaza has no food or water.”  You’d think that such a large group of losers with no prospects for gainful employment and a lot of time on their hands could do better.

In fact, here’s one off the top of my head, just to challenge them: “We find Israel’s actions heinous, See? our thoughts come from our anus!” 

You’re welcome, keffiyeh-wearing morons! 

But the greatest recent example is the one you’ve probably already seen: Riddhi Patel, the toxic little firebrand who went on an epic rant aimed at the city council in Bakersfield.  After a slow start, she dialed it up to 11, and what she lacked in basic logic, she more than made up for in 180-proof bile.

By her second sentence, she had already achieved lift-off: “I don’t have faith that you will do this.  You guys are all horrible human beings, and Jesus probably would have killed you himself.”  

(Um.  I’m no Thomas Aquinas, but I think you may have missed a few of the subtleties of Jesus’ main idea there, Riddhi.)

Within a minute, she was up to, “I hope one day somebody brings a guillotine and kills all of you motherfrienders!”

For the toxic icing on her genocide cake, she expressed outrage that the council recently installed metal detectors and extra police.  “You guys want to criminalize us with metal detectors, we’ll see you at your house.  We’ll murder you!”

Got that?  “How dare you unfairly suggest that we might be dangerous in any way?  Just for that, we’re going to break into your houses and slaughter you!”

Well done! 

Miraculously, Riddhi was arrested right after her speech, and charged with 18 felony accounts involving threats to terrorize, and given a bail of $1 million!  When she appeared in court two days later, she was crying like a baby.

Three quick notes:  1. After watching her getting cuffed and hauled away, her fellow protestors “have since distanced themselves from Patel’s desire to kill.” I’ll bet they have!

2. Nearly all of her young fellow protestors were wearing covid masks. In April of 2024! (Virtue signaling has turned into “low IQ signaling.”)

3. The issue she was so outraged about was that the Bakersfield city council wouldn’t pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

As if the villains running Hamas would be sitting around a long table in their lair, planning their next mass murder, when a messenger enters with a note.  After reading it, the head terrorist would announce mournfully, “We were just about to gang rape more hippie chicks and burn more Jewish babies alive, but I’ve just learned that we’ve lost the Bakersfield city council!  That’s it, pack up the tents.  The jihad is over!”   

I see two kinds of protestors in these mobs.  First are the dead-eyed sociopaths who aren’t kidding around – they’d throw their “Queers for Palestine” co-losers off a rooftop in Gaza so fast it’d make your drag-queen tiara spin.  Thankfully, this type seems to be in the minority.

The majority are cosplaying narcissists like Riddhi.  And as we have seen in Bakersfield, Pomona, and Vanderbilt – and in most of the red states – they are cowards, and most fold and flee at the first sign of serious pushback.

If we had met her type with a little taser therapy, a set of cuffs and a night spent in a county jail starting with the first George Floyd riot, how much of the chaos and destruction of the last 4 years could have been avoided?

By the way, a California judge – citing among other things that Riddhi Patel doesn’t appear to own any firearms – has cut her bail in half.

D’oh!  This is why you can’t have nice things, California.  Hamas delenda est!

I See Dumb People Everywhere, Including Judges and WH Officials (posted 4/8/24)

Once again I’ve got an embarrassment of riches in terms of stories about people who are too shameless or stupid – or both (a condition which I call “the Schumer gambit”) – to be embarrassed when they should be.  

Let’s start where we almost always could: in New York.  Where District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis (yes, his name can form two anagrams that somehow feel appropriate: “causal hiring oafs” and “fracas liaison ugh.”) is a notorious leftist in robes. 

Among his more prominent rulings were throwing out a non-racist firefighter exam because too many blacks and Hispanics failed it, and finding that DACA – a policy unilaterally created by hulking tough guy Janet Napolitano and later declared illegal by federal courts – is fine and dandy.

When I saw a headline about Garaufis saying, “Judge says FDNY firefighters booing Letitia James reveals systemic problem,” I was momentarily taken aback.  Could it be?  Could even a jerk like the oaf hirer admit that Letitia James’ biased and unprofessional performance as DA – which is more than deserving of lusty booing, if not thrown vegetables and a vigorous application of both tar and feathers – is evidence of a systemic problem?

Alas, no.  The systemic problem that Garaufis sees is that the firefighters booed a horrible boss that deserved to be booed… because…wait for it… racism! Of course.

We are facing a really serious dilemma in this country: what are we to do when a pathetically incompetent, biased, mean-spirited jackass gets into a powerful position and behaves terribly… and happens to be black?

Are we not allowed to point out that Kim Foxx has been a disaster in Chicago, or that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are the most self-destructive couple since Thelma and Louise went off that cliff in the convertible?   Or that former Harvard president Claudine Gay is a plagiarizing, anti-Semitic mediocrity.  Or that Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Reid are racist nut jobs?

I mean, we can openly say that all red-heads are mortified that Jen “circle back” Psaki is one of them, and that all women with allegedly juicy booties are embarrassed to be associated in any way with AOC, and that Indian tribes from coast to coast are proud that Liz Warren is NOT one of them (#wemustneverstopmockingher)? 

But we can’t point out that Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know what either a woman or the first amendment is? 

C’mon, man!  That’s a bunch of malarkey.  Not a joke.  Anyway…

But what can we expect of corrupt and dimwitted DAs and judges, when the best and brightest around the White House come up with the ideas reported last week in a Breitbart story titled, “Dem Strategists Gripe WH Not Pushing Back on Biden Frailty Concerns.” 

The story – which I cannot stress enough that I am not making up – featured various Dem apparatchiks expressing ire that Biden’s handlers aren’t doing enough to “counter the narrative” that Biden is too frail to be president for four more years.

Um, guys?  He’s too frail to be president for the LAST four years!

Brad Bannon says that Biden’s minions should do “everything they can” to dispute what everyone with functioning eyes sees every day.  An unnamed weasel agrees.  “If you have a president who is being portrayed as old and frail, why wouldn’t you punch back and show him active?”

Is that a serious rhetorical question?  He’s not “being portrayed” as old and frail – he IS super old and frighteningly frail!  And there aren’t enough CGI effects in all of Hollywood to “show him active.” 

The anonymous dope went on, and again, I swear I am not making this quote up: “Don’t just show a hyped-up Biden during the SOTU.  Show how active he is every f—ing day of the week.”

He wasn’t “hyped up” during the SOTU; he was doped up, you moron.  And do you remember how he laid face-down on the stage after he fell over a sandbag, and before a secret service guy picked him up?  THAT IS how active he is every f—king day of the week!

But the article got even worse.  Bannon suggested that the campaign should show Biden “lifting weights” and “on the treadmill.”  (Did I mention that I am not making this up?)

The guy couldn’t lift a paper clip at this point, let alone a weight.   And seriously.  You think his people should film him walking on a treadmill, a device which is slightly inclined, and moving!

Have you seen him try to walk across a perfectly level lawn, which is lying there perfectly still?  They’ve got him wearing those ridiculous waffle-soled shoes that are as big as a tennis-racket-style snowshoe, and he still manages to look like a Wallenda trying to make it across a thin tightrope stretched over the yawning mouth of an active volcano! 

My favorite quote is from a fitness expert “who has studied fitness through a social justice context.”  (Good lord! I’m not even going to ask what that means.)  This genius finds it “curious” that Biden has not shared more about his “exercise regimen” and his “workout routine.”

Words fail me.  Anybody who has watched Biden for five minutes knows that the only cardio he gets is when they put those paddles on him and shock his heart into re-starting, three to five times each week. 

One professor they quote manages to almost, just barely, tangentially get a glimpse of reality.  “It does occur to me that… [the Biden team] must take care not to produce a Dukakis-like image that people will poke fun at.”

Really?  That thought occurred to you, did it? 

You mean an image like Biden taking one step onto a moving treadmill and immediately being fired backwards into a wall, whereupon he’d explode in a crackling of dry bones and dust, with a fluttering cloud of hairplugs settling slowly onto the dessicated remains of his beef-jerky-looking carcass?   

After that story, this next one – the latest in my well-received “Stupid Criminals” series, doesn’t really seem that stupid.  Which tells you a lot about the quality of both our presidential advisers and our criminals.  (And that’s a Venn diagram that has more than a little overlap.)

Anyway, Jonathan Gagen (31) – proud owner of two pending aggravated battery charges – went to a stranger’s home in southern Illinois and tried to break in.  The homeowner met Gagen at the door, showing the criminal his gun and making “numerous requests for Gagen to leave.”

But Gagen – rumors that he “has studied B&E through a social justice context” have not yet been confirmed – ignored commands not to enter.  Instead, he told the homeowner that he would “have to shoot me,” and then opened the storm door.

Whereupon the homeowner shot him.

Unexpectedly!

Medical help arrived in time to confirm that Gagen had shuffled off this mortal coil. 

Rumors that his last words were, “Ouch! In retrospect, telling that guy with the gun that he was gonna have to shoot me wasn’t a good decision.  But at least it wasn’t as stupid as saying that Biden’s staff should try to set up a photo op with him on a treadmill,” have not been confirmed.

Okay, I’ll have another mid-week column on Wednesday, because a whiny kid got expelled from Vandy in the most hilarious way possible, and that’s too good to not celebrate.

In the meantime…

Hamas delenda est!

Reasons to be Optimistic, + DeSantis Dunks on MSM Smear Attempts. Again. (posted 4/5/24)

Hey kids, let’s start today with a quiz.  Here’s a description of the social decay in a prominent big city: 

“This is no longer a capital, it is a cesspit.  No one works; the streets are filthy; there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards. It hurts me to see how bad it has become. There is growing idleness and cowardice in the people and all of those base and criminal instincts…it seems are destroying [the country].”

Was that written about:

A. San Francisco

B. Chicago

C. New York City or

D. Washington D.C.

Many of you picked up on the reference to a capital, and might have chosen D.C.  Others may have noticed the slightly archaic language, and suspected a trick.

And despite the fact that I am usually the most reliable of narrators, the suspicious among you were right.  Even though the above quote could be aptly applied to any of our current sanctuary cesspits – er, cities – the passage was written by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1917.

He was describing St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), not too long before Lenin’s Bolsheviks launched their murderous revolution.  In the previous months, attacks on the social order had been encouraged and carried out by the party’s foot soldiers, and the deterioration of everyday life was accelerating. 

It’s a sobering red flag (no pun intended) when you read a withering account of a doomed country’s downhill slide right before a historic tragedy and think, “Hey, I recognize that place!  Which one of our major cities is it?”

Fortunately for us, we’ve got a chance this November to avoid the damage that befell Russia.  The vocal, far-left fringe – then as now – represents a small minority, without as much widespread support as our egregious MSM would have us think. 

And as a cautious optimist, I see plenty of encouraging signs for the country, despite the Petrograd-esque decay in the Dem-run cities.   

For example, it was only a couple of years ago that a wave of “defund the police” measures were enacted all over the country.  Democrat pols at every level staked their reputations on removing cops, and trumpeted the dawning of a new day, in which economic justice would reign and cities would thrive. 

Annnnnddddd… Petrograd, 2024!  Crime skyrocketed, businesses closed, no one was working, and there were piles of stinking rubbish in every courtyard.

Unexpectedly!

Now those Democrats’ faces are as red as Liz Warren imagines hers to be (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and nearly all jurisdictions who cut cops are scrambling to reverse course. 

Similarly, the drive to decriminalize hard drugs has created growing pushback.  When a decriminalization law was passed in deep-blue Oregon and went into effect in 2021, supporters smugly pointed to parallels to getting rid of prohibition, and confidently predicted the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, man!

Annnnddddd… Meth Mania, 2021!

How disastrous was that plan?  It took America 13 years to reverse prohibition, but the results of this law were so horrific that even the imbecilic socialist dullards of Oregon managed to wise up and reverse it in only 3 years! 

I am not making that up.  A Democrat governor in Oregon – yes, she is female and gay (lucky guess on your part!) – signed a law criminalizing drugs last month. With the support of spineless Democrat Portland beta-mayor Ted Wheeler. And a headline the next day admitted, “Oregon Forced to Recriminalize Drugs After Disastrous Decriminalization Experiment.”

If I live to be as old as Joe Biden (RIP), I would never expect to read the sequence of words in my previous paragraph.  It’s a Transgender Day of Visibility miracle!

Even in areas where Dems are stubbornly persisting in their terrible policies, public resistance is building, increasing the chances of a Trump victory in November. 

The attempts to force Americans to buy EVs is looking more unrealistic and unpopular every day.  The open border is now a nationwide disaster that can’t be hidden, and national Dems are sweating like a meretrix in church.  The term “Bidenomics” became such a punchline that it has disappeared from the media. 

The ghoulish and outrageous mania to push transgender policies, including mutilating surgeries on kids and allowing dudes to beat the crap out of women in various sports, has gotten as ugly as “Admiral” “Rachel” Levine joining the gals of the View for a group photo.  Many states and some sporting organizations have passed rules recognizing biological reality, and the first of what should be a flood of lawsuits have been filed against doctors on behalf of kids whom they sexually mutilated or injured.       

And then there’s John Fetterman. 

Before his stroke, he was the worst mayor of the worst-run small town in PA.  During his campaign, he was less mentally agile than AOC, and less articulate than Joe Biden.  But as he’s recovered, he’s started saying sane, true things almost half the time.  Which gets him over the very low bar of “best Democrat senator in the country.”  

In fact, while I’m in a happy, post-Easter mood, let me send you into the weekend with a story that combines two of my column’s regular categories: “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough” and “Celebration of Excellence.”

The latest chapter of this story is happening in the polar opposite of 1917 Petrograd: Florida.

My state has its problems, as every place does.  Our summers are brutally hot and humid, recent hurricanes are playing havoc with insurance prices, and we’re facing the kinds of challenges caused by success (rising prices, more crowding).  

But we’ve got a great governor who has been under sustained attack by the MSM since the day he took office.  They smeared him over covid, they lost their Schiff when he sent illegals to Martha’s Vineyard, and they mocked him when it looked like Disney had put one over on him.

But then it turned out that he was right about covid, and right about illegals.  And then he beat Disney like Caitlin Clark beat LSU.  (That’s right, folks: my first and last ever reference to women’s basketball.  But that game last week was actually great.)

So last week NBC took another shot, in an article that explained why everybody who thinks Florida is succeeding is wrong.  In a state with 23 million people, they found a handful of gripers who fit their narrative, and let them gripe.  And after mentioning that “hundreds of thousands” of people have moved here, they ominously noted that 500,000 left in 2022.

Which doesn’t sound good, until you notice that in another paragraph they mention in passing that more than 700,000 people moved in in 2022.  And while I’m no mathmetologist, it seems like 700K is larger than 500K.

NBC was roundly mocked for that story – commenters noted that “NBC News apparently has no idea how net migration works,” and even lefty election analyst Nate Silver said, “Sorry, but Florida is popular. 

But then the Palm Beach Post told NBC to hold their beer, and ran a column with the headline, “DeSantis blames undocumented immigrants for health care costs.  His report costs taxpayers more.”

The story told about the “online dashboard” that DeSantis created to collect and publicize the data about how much illegals cost Florida taxpayers, then reported that while the state spent $566 million on uncompensated health care for illegals, DeSantis spent $577 million on the dashboard!

Ooh, they had him now!  It’s an outrage!  How the hell does anybody spend half a billion dollars on an online dashboard??

Except that when the story ran, it took about 30 seconds for hundreds of readers to fact check it.  And it turned out that the online dashboard had cost $5K to set up, and that the entire budget request for the data collection (which included another state agency as well) was $567,882. 

Not $577 million.  $567 thousand. 

Which is considerably less than the $566 MILLION that Florida has been stuck with because of Biden’s flood of illegals.

Of course, when the paper and the reporter discovered their error, they apologized profusely and ran a Page-1 correction of their laughable mistake.

HA! I kid. 

They actually “stealth edited” the column to remove the accusation, without acknowledging their mistake, or the change.  Which gave DeSantis the opportunity to spend a couple of minutes justifiably pummeling them for their unprofessional and dishonest behavior.

Man, I hope we someday have the chance to have that guy as our president!

Seriously though, I hope somebody from the Trump campaign has seen the story about Florida’s online dashboard, and is working on a national version.  Several columns ago, I called for something like that, only to find out now that it already exists.

I could see a national “dashboard” displaying updated and transparent totals of all of the costs of Biden’s illegally opened border.  One category could be “crime,” with breakdowns of the numbers of car accidents, thefts, assaults, rapes, murders, etc. 

Another could break down the enormous costs by type: medical costs, food assistance, housing assistance, education assistance, processing costs, costs to arrest, try and imprison, etc.

And then every time any Democrat complains about not having enough to spend on anything – infrastructure, social programs, increased pay for inert government workers, fresh burial wrappings for Imhotep Pelosi – we could call up the dashboard and say, “Well, if we hadn’t spent $65 billion on Biden’s illegals, maybe we could do some of that.  Oh wait, now it’s $66 billion.” 

If anybody knows any big shots in the GOP, please pass this along!

Hamas delenda est!

A Little Schadenfreude, 3 “Unexpectedly” Stories, DeSantis Whips Disney Again, & Bragging on My Daughter (posted 3/29/24)

After introducing several different categories to write about in recent columns, today I’ve got one schadenfreude story, and three “Unexpectedly” stories. 

Today’s Schadenfreude Corner tale arises when two axiomatic lefty principles come into unresolvable conflict. 

I remember an example of this from a campus debate years ago: Many cultures (most of them in Africa and the Middle East) practice female genital mutilation (FGM), a bloody ritual of removing part of the female anatomy associated with sexual pleasure.  Feminists of all political stripes strongly object.

But multiculturalists – another trendy leftist constituency – reflexively see indigenous and non-Western cultures as superior to Western (Euro-centric, Judeo-Christian, free-market) culture.  (American Indians, for example, were environmentalist pacifists living in Eden, until evil white guys showed up and taught them how to fight and scalp, or something.)

So African and Middle Eastern cultures are morally superior to the West. Except when they violate women’s rights by practicing FGM…which is a part of their culture…which is morally unassailable…but evil, if it is misogynist.  But who are WE to impose our Western anti-FGM standards on the noble, indigenous…misogynists?

You could see blue hair and nose-rings being blown off of heads all over campus during that debate. 

(Conversely, conservatives had a much simpler take on that topic: “What are you, nuts? FGM is barbaric.  Stop it immediately.”  End of debate.)

Well, progressives in Chicago now have a similar dilemma. Because last month a “trans-woman” was standing on a street corner at 4:30 a.m. – as one does, in a super-safe city like Chicago – when a car pulled up.  An armed guy in the car said, “bad gay,” and fired three times, hitting the poor guy twice in the legs and once in the groin.

Sidebar: One way you know that being a trans-woman isn’t a thing is that getting shot in the groin hurts more and in very different way if you’re a “trans-woman” and not an actual woman.

“But Martin, Illinois has very strict laws that stop people from owning and carrying guns, so how could that guy possibly use a gun to shoot the confused dude?” none of you are asking, because you have an IQ much higher than AOC’s.  Bless her heart, and her juicy booty. (Her words, not mine.)

Anyway, the lefties in Chicago immediately sprang into action and began making signs condemning transphobia and preparing for mass protests.  Until some learned that the shooter had actually said, “bad gay” in Spanish.

Okay, they said.  Not great.  We were hoping for a white guy.  But Hispanics – sorry, Latinx-es – shouldn’t be transphobic either, so we can still condemn him—

Then it turns out that the shooter was a Venezuelan.  Here illegally.  With criminal ties to drug cartels. 

D’oh!  Three strikes! What to do?

Anyone who attacks a trans guy is evil…except if he’s a brown newcomer…or undocumented citizen?  Or is it now non-papered American?  Anyway, no human is illegal!  

Except maybe when he points at a guy in a dress and yells, “That’s a MAN, baby!” in Spanish, like a Guatemalan Austin Powers?

We feel your pain, Chicago Democrats.  If by “feel your pain” you mean “laugh at your self-inflicted stupidity.”

Now on to a trifecta of “Unexpectedly” stories.  (For newcomers to the column, these are tales in which leftist policies are put in place and produce predictably terrible consequences, to the shock of those who pushed those policies.)

First up is a story from the lefty rag The Guardian (UK), about a great labor “victory” in the leftist sanctuary city of Minneapolis.   Dissatisfied Uber and Lyft drivers there persuaded the city council to pass a minimum pay ordinance which would force the companies to give them what they called a substantial raise.

When the lefty mayor vetoed the ordinance (which is shocking in and of itself!), the council over-rode the veto.  Of course I like to see workers get paid as much as they can earn in a free market, and I trust that market – drivers, customers and ride services – to hash out what a fair wage is, rather than having that dictated by a bunch of bureaucrats.

The Guardian’s headline is hilarious in its cluelessness.  The first half reads, “Minneapolis drivers protested wages – and won.”  But then, the second half of the headline tells the rest of the story, “Lyft and Uber are choosing to leave the city rather than pay up.” 

UNEXPECTEDLY!

“Yay!” say the drivers, “Victory is ours!”

Annnndddd… the drivers are out of work, and more citizens are stranded without rides. 

Spoiler alert, people: the real minimum wage – always and everywhere – is zero.  And you’ll be earning exactly that!

Speaking of minimum wages and dopes who haven’t learned their lesson, how about that California?  Next week a new law goes into effect that raises fast food workers’ pay in Cali from $16 an hour to $20.

Yay!  Power to the people!  It’s about time that pimply-faced teenagers at McDonalds are able to afford a cliff-top mansion next to Babs Streisand in Santa Barbara!

Annnnndddd…

Well, you know.  McDonalds and Chipotle have already said menu price hikes are coming.  Pollo Loco will be automating salsa-making, and Jack in the Box is testing fryer robots.  Pizza Hut is laying off all in-house delivery drivers, and a smaller chain is cutting 73 driver positions by mid-April.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Thousands of fast-food workers who were starving at $16 an hour will now be thriving at $0 an hour.  Congratulations everybody!  Well done, Gavin!

Meanwhile, 6600 households in New York City – which should be known as “California East” or “Minneapolis South” – were recently polled about how satisfied they are with the way things have been going in their city. 

Since 76% of them voted for Biden in 2020 and 66% of them voted for Eric Adams for mayor in 2021, and they have voted heavily for the one-party Democrat control that they now have, they all reported that everything is both hunky dory and tickety-boo in the Big Apple.  The end.

HA!  I kid, because I love.

Actually, a sizable majority of New Yorkers have recognized that their city has gone to shite in ways various and sundry, and half of them say they are planning to leave.

The numbers are grim.   “Only 37 percent are happy with the level of public safety in their neighborhood, and only 34 percent are satisfied with their neighborhood’s cleanliness.” When asked to rate the quality of life in NYC overall, only 29.8% said “excellent” or “good.” 

And that’s down from 51.2% in 2017!   

Breitbart sums it up well: “The same Democrats complaining about this voted for this. They voted to end stop-and-frisk. They voted for politicians who declared New York a sanctuary for illegal aliens. They voted to release violent criminals. And now they are all, ‘Oh no, our city sucks. How could this have happened?’”

We can tell them how…

UNEXPECTEDLY!

And now, for a quick little “celebration of excellence” from right here at home…

Ron DeSantis just whipped the Mau’s House again!  Disney finally gave up their big, year-long lawsuit, with the only condition being that Florida drops their counter-suit.

Which is the equivalent of a trash-talking boxer preening and mouthing off before a fight, and then, five rounds later, begging the other fighter, “Please stop hitting me.  No mas.  Let me crawl around the canvas and try to find my mouthpiece, which I’m hoping has at least some of my teeth in it!”

The DeSantis team took a victory lap online, re-posting some of the MSM headlines from when Disney first filed their self-humiliating lawsuit, which came after DeSantis challenged their last-minute, dirty-trick appointment of an all-new board to the Reedy Creek Development District.

At the time, lefty outlets crowed, “RDS’ Board Rages Against Disney after Legal Humiliation!” and “Out-negotiated by Mickey Mouse: How Disney just Beat Ron DeSantis!”

And now, after having their first “free-speech” lawsuit against RDS tossed in January, they’ve lost the final round to him.

Man I hope we can someday have that guy as our president!

One final note: we’ve enjoyed having our youngest – or as I like to call her, my tech support – at home with us during her spring break this week.  She was able to fix a problem I’ve had with my website.

Regular readers know that whenever I post a new column on the CO site, I post my previous one on my page (Martinsimpsonwriting.com).  I’ve also recorded a couple of videos of my rambling on various topics, but I’ve had to house them on Youtube.  My last one – titled “CS Lewis & William F. Buckley on our Current Election” – had a glitch that kept people from seeing it.

My daughter spent two minutes doing some kind of sorcery over the keyboard, and my three videos can now all be found on my site, under “Videos” on the main page, and I’ll be recording and posting another one shortly.  If you’re interested, and don’t mind watching a guy with a face made for radio, please check them out.

Also, if I wasn’t so proud of her I wouldn’t mention this, but my youngest just accepted a 10-week, paid research fellowship in astro-physics this summer at UC-Boulder.  If that’s a good experience, she wants to apply to start a PhD there next fall.  Which would mean that both of my daughters would be living within about 40 miles of each other, in a gorgeous place that we love to visit! 

I know.  I’m a simple hillbilly English major, and all I know about planets is that Men are from mars, women are from Venus, and all other made-up genders are pulled from Uranus. (Dad joke!)  And my daughter is double-majoring in astro-physics and planetary science!

Honestly, I sometimes feel like I’m being pranked.  I’ve got a smoke-show wife with a heart of gold, two amazing daughters, a paragon of canine excellence in Cassie the Wonder Dog, and the amazing CO nation to rant to instead of paying for therapy! 

And Easter is coming! 

Have a great weekend everybody, and don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!

Dems Create a Bloodbath, a Racist Movie Bombs, Planet Fitness Implodes, & Tim Tebow Rules (posted 3/22/24)

We’ve got a full line-up of stories, so let’s start with a new category, with a hat tip to Red State for the title:

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough

One of the most despicable traits of our mainstream media is the bad faith way that they take a quote wildly out of context, and then pull their dresses over their heads and launch into a performance art piece of faux outrage. 

One example would be when Sarah Palin referred to “targeting” vulnerable Democrat candidates for House and Senate seats, and the MSM pretended to believe that she was soliciting hitmen to kill Dem candidates, or something.  

Maybe the most famous example was when Trump joked in a 2016 speech that maybe the Russians could find and turn over Hillary’s lost emails.  It is still hard to believe that the Democrats were mendacious enough to pretend that he was collaborating with the Russians, and to use that obviously humorous quip as the basis for a presidential impeachment!

They were at it again this week, this time pretending that when Trump used the word “bloodbath,” he wasn’t discussing dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.  Even though the quote came from the middle of a speech about… wait for it… the dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.

No, the Dems cried havoc, and let slip the whores of war. 

Wait, that’s not right.  I meant the dogs of war.  Or was it the dog-faced pony soldiers of the presstitues of the MSM?

Anyway, everyone from Imhotep Pelosi (Aiiii! The mummy walks among us!) to every Dem pol and media talking head in sight started ranting about how Trump was calling for a genocide, or something.

Of course multiple conservative web sites immediately cited Merriam Webster’s definition of “bloodbath,” one meaning of which is “a major economic disaster.”

(Like, for example, the dire ramifications of allowing Chicoms to attack our car market.)

And they also quickly produced a series of news clips featuring dozens of Democrats and MSM “journalists” (but I repeat myself) using the word in exactly the same way Trump did.

Ugh!  As this category suggests, whenever we think we might really hate the lying media, we must remember that we STILL don’t hate them enough.

But I’m not a hater.

A mocker and a sarcastic critic, sure.  Guilty as charged.  But I’m no hater.

Therefore, I’m going to give our leftist opposition a fantastic tip to make their “journalism” less pathetic:  If you’re going to insist that the word “bloodbath” be taken literally – which is incredibly stupid, but hey, you do you – then it must be used only when there is literally blood involved. 

Here are a couple of examples:

“Democrats defund police; bloodbaths ensue in major blue cities.”

“Democrats open our borders to hordes of foreign criminals; bloodbaths ensue.”

“Taxpayer money is used to fund Planned Parenthood abortuaries all over the country; it’s a bloodbath every day!”

You’re welcome, Democrats.  Now please re-think your life choices.

Today in Schadenfreude Corner, I’ve got a quick bit of movie news.

If you’re not a low-down whitey-hating racist – and I know that you aren’t – you probably missed the promotional push leading up to the opening last Friday of the movie, “The American Society of Magical Negroes.”

And your mental health is better for it.  Unfortunately for me, part of my heroic role here at Cautious Optimism is to subject myself to various political assaults on the American project so that you don’t have to. 

I won’t lie though: I did not watch this movie.  But I did read two reviews, and then I watched the trailer. (On an unrelated note, if there are any opthalmologists in CO Nation, can you tell me how long the burning and blurred vision that comes after splashing bleach in one’s eyes usually lasts?  Asking for a friend.)

The premise is that white people are so maliciously racist that they are a constant threat to innocent black people, requiring blacks to condescend to their white fragility.  The mentor to the protagonist sets the table in the first minute of the trailer, when he asks his protégé, “What’s the most dangerous animal on the planet?”

Just as the kid starts to answer, “Sharks,” the mentor interrupts him with, “White people…when they feel uncomfortable.”

Get it?  It’s not a racist screed played ironically as a horror film, or an acerbic social critique. 

It’s a comedy!

(I’m reminded of an old Gilbert Gottfried routine in which he imagined the pitch meeting to persuade tv executives to greenlight “Hogan’s Heroes”: “It’s about a bunch of allied prisoners in a concentration camp during the holocaust.  And it’s a comedy!”)

So this insulting mess of a film opened in 1,146 theaters nationwide on March 15th… annnddd… it bombed!  It brought in a pathetic $1.3 million on its opening weekend, and that total included a huge drop from its first day to its second.    

Even more shockingly, it only got 31% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, even though the critics famously give virtue-signaling extra points for woke themes in movies.  Any film focusing on a transgender handi-capable person of color fighting the patriarchal forces of white, straight America is usually spotted 60% right off the bat (10 points for each of those checked boxes). 

So for even lefty critics to only give this mess 31% speaks to what a horrible abomination it is.  (For comparison, the critics gave Rob “Meathead” Reiner’s Christophobic “documentary” “God and Country” 88%!)    

To put it another way, if you added the earnings from the Meathead movie and this racist trash together, you wouldn’t even have enough cash to hire renowned Ukrainian energy expert Hunter Biden to lobby his dear departed daddy for one single month!  

Speaking of financially disastrous decision-making, I’ve got a new entry in the “Unexpectedly” category:

The Planet Fitness chain of gyms recently started coercing their employees and customers to cater to the desires of sexually confused “transgender” people. 

The business produced an operational manual that required employees to use “names, titles and pronouns” of strange sexual narcissists, and threatened to fire them if they wouldn’t do so. 

The manual also acknowledged that some customers might “feel uncomfortable” with people of the opposite sex sharing showers and bathrooms with them, but insisted that, “This discomfort is not a reason to deny access to a transgender member.” 

And just to demonstrate the company’s Orwellian bona fides, the manual said that this deranged coercion was meant “to foster a climate of understanding consistent with the Judgement Free character of Planet Fitness.”

Got that?  “Judgment Free.” 

But if a normal woman and her teenage daughter undress and head for the showers after a workout, and they notice some naked dude with heavy mascara and a beehive hairdo sitting in the locker room staring at them while he’s trying to make balloon animals with his phallus? 

If they object, you know that the “understanding” commissars at Planet Fitness are going to judge the hell out of them for being transphobic bigots!

Anyway, late last week the Planet Fitness manual hit social media.

Annnndddd… their stock price plummeted 8% immediately, shaving $400 million off the company’s value.

UNEXPECTEDLY!  (Also: more please.)

In Stupid Criminal news, I’ll take you to the big open space where our southern border used to be for the story of a guy who might be the dumbest criminal I’ve ever written about.  (And I’ve written about the Biden crime family!)

This charmer is a 22-year old Lebanese named Basel Bassel Ebbadi.  (He’s the terrorist so nice, they named him twice!) He was caught by the US Border Patrol in Texas on March 9th. 

And even though I’m wary of disclosing sensitive tactics involving our national security, I’m going to disclose one clever forensic technique our border agents used to trip up ol’ double-Basel:  They asked him – and this is a quote – “What are you doing in the US?”

And he said, “I’m going to try to make a bomb.”

(Rumors that he then slapped his forehead, said “D’oh!  I mean, I’m here to seek political asylum,” have not been confirmed.)

Further fiendishly ingenious questioning tricked Basel-squared into admitting that he had “trained with Hezbollah for seven years… and guarded weapons locations for another four years.”  And also that he planned to set off his bomb in New York City. 

So a Hezbollah terrorist came through our porous border with plans to blow up part of New York, and the only reason he was caught was that he was dumb enough to confess when he was asked one question.  (This guy is so dumb that he’s been called “the AOC of Jihadis.”) (By me, just now.)

And ABC and CBS did not even mention this story on their flagship morning and evening news shows on Sunday and Monday, while NBC did give it 45 seconds on Monday night.  (Remember: we don’t hate them enough!)

Let’s end with a new and inspiring example of the Celebration of Excellence.

Thirty-seven years ago, a married missionary couple serving in the Philippines were pregnant with their fifth child when the mother suffered a life-threatening infection that required strong drugs which threatened her pregnancy. Doctors advised her to abort the baby because he likely had birth defects because of her severe illness, but she chose to have the child.

That baby was Tim Tebow, who would grow up to become the greatest college football quarterback ever, in my unbiased opinion (Go Gators!), winning two national championships and a Heisman trophy. 

But as good of a player as he was (did I mention he went 4-0 against FSU?), he’s a better man.  He’s been a fine example of Christian faith, raising money for various charities, including the pediatric cancer center at our home-town hospital where my daughter got her first nursing job.

(“Hey Martin,” you might be asking, “was she nominated last week for a state-wide nursing award in Colorado?”  Yes she was, in fact.  Thanks for asking.)  

Ten years ago Tebow started a foundation that puts on an annual “Night to Shine,” a coordinated

series of world-wide “proms” for kids with Down Syndrome and a variety of other disabilities.  (Watch a few of their videos online if you don’t mind getting choked up.)

In the cynical and debased world we live in, it’s hard for me to watch even Tebow without wondering in the back of my mind whether he’s too good to be true and authentic.  But I was glad to see him speak in front of our congress earlier this month (I know: talk about “pearls before swine!”) in support of a bill to fund rescue teams to identify and rescue child sexual abuse victims.

I know that the government can screw up everything it touches, but this is a truly good cause, and I’m going to look into this bill, and I hope that it does what its sponsors want it to.

And I’m glad that his parents brought Tim Tebow into this world.             

Hamas delenda est!

Hur Wrecks Biden, Fani & a Subway Criminal Wreck Themselves, & I Celebrate My Anniversary (posted 3/18/24)

I’m tempted to open today with some comments on Hur’s testimony last week about Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.  And if I were to do so, I’d mention how many of the Democrats made complete fools out of themselves during the hearings, blatantly lying about what Hur said in his report… while he was sitting right there to refute them!

I might hypothetically call special attention to Pramila Jayapal (and not just because an anagram of her name is “liar pajama play,” because that is obvious to everyone) who read from a prepared stack of lies.  When she said that Hur’s “investigation resulted in a complete exoneration” of the late Joe Biden, Hur interrupted to contradict her. 

She immediately started talking over him, repeating that, “I’m going to continue with my questions.” (Of course, she wasn’t asking any questions.)  Irritated when Hur insisted on making his point, Jayapal repeated, “You exonerated him.”

And Hur corrected her, mid-lie, again: “I did not exonerate him.”

That’s when Jayapal gave the most obnoxious smirking glare and insisted, “Mr. Hur, it’s my time. Thank you.

If I were commenting on the hearing, I would have to momentarily return to a fixture of my past columns – the Simpson Face Punchability Index (SFPI) – to note that normally Jayapal has a SFPI of 78 (in the middle of the “resting Hillary-face” zone), but during her pathetic “it’s my time” comment, her SFPI spiked to 94. 

Which equates, as regular readers may remember, to a situation in which even Mother Theresa would be unable to stop herself from instinctively slapping the dishonest smirk off her face.  

And I would probably – if I were to comment on the hearing – point out that my favorite part of Hur’s interviews was when Biden went off on a long, rambling tangent about his Corvette (I swear I am not making this up) and – in the words of an actual, official document of the United States – “made car noises.” 

But I’ve decided not to comment on those hearings.  Because we need to do everything we can to be sure that Biden remains on the ticket until election day.  So I think he’s doing a great job!

And by the way, I missed the Hur testimony, which I’m sure was not worth watching.  Instead, because it’s pollen season in north Florida, I washed our cars that afternoon. 

And you should have seen the strange look my wife gave me when she came out and caught me in the driver’s seat of her car, yanking the steering wheel back and forth and going, “Vroom!  Vroom!  Look at me, I’m the leader of the free world!”  

I will instead start my column with a few observations about the judge’s bizarre ruling in the Fani Willis case on Friday. 

The judge read his findings, pointing out the long list of damning facts proving that Willis and Nathan Wade broke every legal rule except coveting thy neighbor’s oxen… before explaining that if Wade left the case, Fani could remain!

Lots of people are already pointing out the logical inconsistency of finding that Willis and Wade both behaved unethically, but then ousting Wade and allowing Willis to stay.  (And by the way, where is the old-school, oppressive patriarchy when you need it?  Shouldn’t the system have condemned the adulteress and let the dimwitted man-wh*re stay on the case?  It’s almost like we don’t live under the yoke of misogynistic oppression after all.)

This decision fits a troubling pattern of bias, in which judges admit to finding clear evidence of guilt and misconduct – as when Comer basically said that Hillary was guilty in the illegal server and secret documents case, or when Hur found that Biden clearly stole and mishandled secret docs for decades – but still allows the leftist in question to escape consequences. 

But this might be one of those “God works in mysterious ways” situations.  Obviously, if the outcome had been that Willis got tossed out on her Fani and no other corrupt leftist prosecutors could have been found to take up the case, that would have been better.

But if the case is to go forward, the best-case scenario is that Fani stays in the seat (HA!), since she is so thoroughly discredited.  And judging from her terrible performance so far, I’m sure that she’ll be be-clowning herself even more.  She has already shown the emotional stability and maturity of a conceited junior-high girl, and that was BEFORE she got publicly and rightly humiliated for a solid month. 

There’s no one more angry and incapable of rational behavior than a mean girl who got pantsed in front of the whole school.  So her future mis-steps should provide plenty of entertainment.

In today’s Stupid Criminal Story, I give you the tragic tale of Dajuan Robinson, 36, who got onto the NYC subway last week with a bad attitude and a gun in his backpack.  (I don’t watch MSNBC, but I’m assuming that they’ve already reported that “Dajuan” is a very common name among White Christian nationalists.) 

Anyway, Dajuan goaded a 32-year-old man to fight, and then lunged at him, pushing him down and punching him several times.  When a woman on the train pulled out a knife and stabbed Dujuan twice in the back, he interrupted his attack to pull a gun from his backpack.  Then the other guy fought with him, got the gun away from him, and shot him with it.   

This is obviously a happy-ending story, but not just because a violent creep got shot with his own gun.  How about the average New Yorker who jumped in and stabbed the guy first?  Most observers in such situations usually either cower, or pull out their cell phones and narrate the action like low-IQ ghouls. 

Even better, a Brooklyn DA has said that the shooter won’t face charges!  I know: pick up your jaw and read that again.  A DA in Brooklyn said that somebody who defended himself against a violent perp won’t be prosecuted!  Now if someone can just tell that DA about the Daniel Penny case! 

In fact, the great Babylon Bee had a hilarious Penny story on 3/6, with the headline “With Daniel Penny Arrested, NYC Forced to Deploy National Guard to Protect Subway.”  The best lines in the story are faux-attributed to Governor Hochul: “We desperately need the Guard to come do exactly what we arrested Daniel Penny for doing.  Civilians have become too afraid to confront violence on the subway, for reasons we cannot determine.”

Unfortunately for Dajuan Robinson, that might be changing.

In other news, I’ve considered adding a few new categories to some of my future columns, one on stories about our horrific mainstream media (I’m thinking of a title phrase I saw on another conservative website: “No matter how much you think you hate the MSM, it’s not enough.”)

The other new category will be offering nominees for “Jackass of the Month.” And because I love you all, I’m going to write a short column on Wednesday with my first nominee for that award.

I know: I spoil you.  And you’re welcome.

Finally, I leave you with a self-indulgent choice for my latest “celebration of excellence” category.  And the subject for this one is… drumroll please…

Me!

Because 38 years ago I sold my motorcycle and my shirt, and moved to Florida to get a PhD in English.  A week later, I met a blonde smoke-show of a Norwegian goddess who was so out of my league it was ridiculous.  She was charming and witty and kind… and did I mention her incandescent hotness?  

I mean, I couldn’t even look directly at her.  I had to poke a hole in a shoebox and look at her through that, like an eclipse!

That night I went home and took a self-inventory. 

I look like I look (i.e. nothing to write home about), and my net worth was a used black Mazda GLC with no AC (in Florida!), a “Most Improved Player” high school football trophy, and a couple of particle-board bookcases full of cheap paperbacks.  Not only that, I was starting a degree that within 5 years’ time offered the possibility of earning well in excess of $18,000 a year!   

Sure, I had a razor-sharp wit and the strength of ten men (because my heart was pure), but most people were not overly impressed by that. 

I cannot describe the unlikeliness of me landing her!  “Drawing to an inside straight” doesn’t begin to touch it.  “Outkicking my coverage,” is inadequate.  Winning the lottery is closer.

As it happened, 30 years later Randy Newman wrote a lovely song that describes my situation perfectly.  It’s called “She Chose Me,” and you should go listen to it right now. 

It’s got strings and a piano and a French horn, and it starts with these lines: “I’m not much to talk to, and I know how I look/ What I know about life, comes out of a book/ But of all of the people, there are in the world/ She chose me.” 

And 35 years ago today, in the First Lutheran Church in Gainesville, FL, in perhaps the greatest feat of marrying-up in human history, I got Karen Ludwigsen to be my wife. 

Happy anniversary, sweetheart!

Also, as always, Hamas delenda est

Deadspin Dies, Stupid Criminals, & Celebrations of Excellence (posted 3/15/24)

First up today is Schadenfreude Corner:

You might remember the leftist sports site Deadspin because of its senior writer Carron “Karen” Phillips.  He’s a lovely little whitey-hater who managed to work race into many of his stories over the years, culminating five months ago when he smeared a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan as a racist for wearing “black face” at a game.

Of course the kid wasn’t wearing black face; he was wearing the team colors, both red and black.  He was also wearing an Indian headdress, which allowed Phillips to go for the vaunted “racial arsonist two-fer,” accusing the kid of “[finding] a way to hate black people and Native Americans at the same time.” 

You don’t have to search Phillips’ entire oeuvre to see if he has ever expressed outrage at a certain albino-adjacent Massachusetts Senator who has parlayed the actual use of “red face” into a lucrative academic and then political career.   (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Because of course he hasn’t.  Besides, he doesn’t think that kid was “hating” Indians any more than he was “hating” blacks.

The idiotic leftist fixation about Indian sports mascots has always driven me crazy.  Everybody knows that you pick sports mascots because of their positive qualities. 

That’s why teams with animal mascots pick animals admired for their strength or ferociousness; you’ll see tons of lions, tigers and bears, but no weasels or skunks.  Bird mascots include eagles, hawks and ravens, but no pigeons or vultures.

And the same goes for human mascots, obviously.  Minnesota didn’t pick the Vikings because they hate big, blond white guys.  Towns didn’t pick Oilers, Packers or Steelers because they despise working stiffs.  And the “Pittsburgh Pedophiles” didn’t narrowly edge out “steelers” in a naming competition!

So the many Braves, Chiefs and Indians in sports are compliments, not insults.  And even though I can see that “Redskins” may have been a little much, I think Washington screwed up by not just re-naming the team the Warriors.  They already had an iconic helmet with a big “W” on it, for crying out loud. 

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Carron/Karen Phillips is a racist jerk, and Deadspin is a woke enough outfit that they hired and supported a jerk like Phillips. 

Aaannnndddd… this week Deadspin was sold, and every staff member there was immediately fired.

HA!  I can only hope that there is a factory that makes racist dog whistles and is looking to hire a tester, because Carron/Karen would love that job.

Except that he’d get fired within a week, since every single sound he ever hears sounds like racism to him.

So learn to code, Carron!         

In the “Stupid Criminals” category, I bring you the tale of New Yorker Sheldon Johnson, a career criminal and drug dealer who was sentenced 25 years ago to 50 years in prison, for what news reports coyly describe as “attempted murder and assorted other offenses.”  

Because Johnson committed his crimes in New York, where the Democrats in charge spend most of their crime-fighting energy on trying to send Republican presidential candidates to the electric chair for taking out giant real estate loans and then paying them back with interest, he appealed to Alvin Bragg and Governor Hochul for clemency.

In his letter to Bragg, his first paragraph demonstrated how he has taken full responsibility for his crimes: “I am a product of systemic racism; intergenerational incarceration.  A product of trauma, the school-to-prison pipeline and crack-era Reaganomics.”

Got that?  His grandpa went to Alcatraz in the 1930s, and then when Johnson was a freshman he took a left out of the cafeteria and instead of heading to Biology he got into the prison pipeline, plus Reagan got elected. So what chance did poor, young Sheldon have?

Naturally, Hochul gave him clemency and let him out last May.  He got a job as a counselor for at-risk teens in the Queens public defender’s office, and received fawning attention from the usual leftist suspects, who touted him as a great success story. 

Aaannnnndddd… a week ago police responded to a wellness check call at the Bronx apartment of Collin Small.  The cops found Johnson in Small’s apartment.  They also found Small’s torso and feet in a garbage bin, and his legs, arms and head in the freezer.

They took Small to a hospital, where he’s listed in stable condition.

HA!  I kid.  He’s dead. 

The cops arrested Johnson and started an investigation that found, and I quote, “Smalls and Johnson were in Sing Sing prison at the same time, and it is believed that there was animosity between them.”

Good lord, I hope so!  Because if Johnson murdered and dismembered Small and they were besties, I don’t want to know what Johnson would do to someone he felt animosity for!

“Okay, Martin,” you may be saying to yourself, “you’ve established that Johnson is a criminal. But is he a truly stupid criminal, as your entertaining new column feature suggests?”

Oh ye of little faith.  I hadn’t gotten to the part about how Johnson got caught yet:

First, Johnson killed Smalls in an apartment building, with a gun.  And no, the gun was not equipped with a silencer.

In fact, several neighbors reported hearing two gun shots, followed by a man saying, “Please don’t, I have a family!” followed by several more shots.

The building superintendent then checked security camera footage and saw a man walking in and out of the apartment multiple times, and changing clothes each time.  For one trip he wore a plaid golf cap and pushed a plastic, wheeled storage bin. 

For the next trip he wore a different jacket and a fisherman’s hat – because nothing is more common than a guy in the Bronx following his golf outing with a fishing trip – and carrying two bags.  (News reports don’t specifically describe them as “foot-sized bags,” but I think we know.) (And ditto on the “torso-sized storage bin.”)

On the third trip he wore a puffy coat, sunglasses and a blonde wig.  (I hope Bragg has added a second-degree cultural appropriation charge for that wig!)

Yet even though he’s a master of disguise, the superintendent somehow figured out that something was up, and called the cops.

So great job, New York Democrats!  If you’d kept Johnson inside, Small would be alive today.

I mean, unless he was foolish enough to take the subway, in which case he probably would have been shoved onto the tracks by a violent psychopath and dismembered anyway. 

So just never mind.

Finally, I have two entries for my “Celebrating Excellence” category:

Two weeks ago, a Senate Bill signed by Ron DeSantis last year went into effect at my alma mater, and UF ended all contracts with DEI vendors, closed its DEI department and fired all staffers who were employed in DEI positions. 

As a liberal arts professor for 30 years, I cannot tell you how difficult that is to believe.  As far as I know, it’s the first time a university DEI department has been shut down anywhere in the country. 

I know that many schools will continue to fight this, especially after DeSantis is out of office, and he is certainly hated by many academics all over the state right now.  But if you can judge a man’s character by the nature of his enemies, DeSantis has given conservatives one more reason to admire him.

Man, I hope we can have that guy as our president some day!

But we don’t just find excellence in humans like the best governor in the nation.  We also find it in our animal friends.  And no, I’m not referring to Cassie the Wonder Dog and her much-deserved place in the Canine Hall of Fame.

I’m referring to the site of a Scottish shepherd, “Seanthesheepman,” which I recommend you all check out.  Regular readers will remember that one of the highlights of our trip to Scotland last summer was a highlands visit with a shepherd and his amazing border collies.  Sean is not the same guy we saw, but his site is great. 

It features his great Scottish accent, lovely highlands scenery, and a lot of cool Scottish sheep.  But the stars are the collies, and they are gorgeous and brilliant.  Some of my favorite videos feature a dog-cam – a camera mounted on the dog’s shoulder to give a dog’s eye view as he trots and sprints around the countryside. 

If I ever need a quick pick-me-up, there are several videos that will always do the trick.  There’s the edited coverage showing Hillary supporters going from ecstasy to agony on election night in 2016, and videos of great music, and ones showing servicemen and women homecomings, and surprise twin birth announcements.

But there’s nothing quite like watching a dedicated dog sitting stock-still on an ATV seat one second, and then on a signal, leaping off and tearing across a field in a graceful blur.  They’re obviously doing what God made them for and men trained them for, and I’m convinced that watching them is good for your spirit and your blood pressure. 

Have a great weekend everybody!  

Hamas delenda est!