Politics – Page 2 – Martin Simpson

Great News on Many Fronts! (posted 5/1/26)

The last 48 hours have been full of more good political news than I know what to do with. In fact, so many good things are happening that I’m going to divide them into different categories, just to try to keep them all straight. I already know that I won’t be able to cover them all in this column, so I’m going to have more good news stories again on Monday.

My three categories are good judicial rulings, bad people reaping the consequences of their bad actions, and foolish leftist policies crashing and burning in hilariously entertaining ways.

*Today I’ll focus on the good judicial rulings.

Most of the solid rulings involve gerrymandering, as you might guess. I wrote a column on gerrymandering last week, and if you haven’t seen that one, please check it out. In it, I mentioned that gerrymandering is open to abuse, that both sides do it, and that while it always looks a little fishy, it might be the least unfair way to deal with delineating congressional districts.

Natural population shifts require that House district borders be re-drawn after every census, and the task of adjusting those borders has traditionally been controlled by the party that holds a majority in a state legislature. Asking that any party draw completely neutral borders – and in so doing, give up their legitimate advantage by virtue of their having won a majority –

“elections have consequences” has to be one of the oldest truisms in politics – is unrealistic, to say the least.

I proposed that a rough way to assess how close a party comes to a fair redistricting is to compare the percentage of the presidential vote the minority party got, compared to the percentage of the House seats they hold. I chose 5 red states and 5 blue states to compare, and showed that in the blue states the Dems gave themselves an average advantage of 22%, while in the average red states the GOP gave themselves an average advantage of 11%.

So while both parties give themselves an advantage when they control redistricting, the Dems are twice as bad about that as the GOP. Unexpectedly!

Which is why the Virginia redistricting vote two weeks ago was so obnoxious. About four years ago, purple-state Virginia voters had set up a largely non-partisan body to take redistricting out of one party’s hands, and the result was one of the fairest House district border maps in the country. The state went for Que Mala by about 5%, and their holding 6 out of 11 House seats mirrored that percentage.

Then, of course, after campaigning on a promise not to gerrymander, creepy Abigail Spanberger immediately proposed a ballot measure to gerrymander, and produced a very biased change to 10 Dem House seats to only 1 GOP seat. And then she and Hakeem “Dollar-Store Obama” Jeffries and many other House Dems gloated and taunted the GOP about their underhanded victory.

Annnnndddd…the first great judicial move of the week was made by a VA state judge, who declared the ballot issue unconstitutional. The Democrat VA state Supreme Court immediately took up the case, and in their questioning of the lawyers, seemed to indicate that they will likely reject the new, gerrymandered VA House map.

Sure, it was an obvious and easy call. There were two obvious legal requirements that the Dems violated, involving the timing and the method by which they rammed the matter through. But how many times have we seen partisan leftist judges and courts blatantly disregard the law in order to achieve their desired political outcome?

(Off the top of my head, in Roe v Wade SCOTUS “discovered” a constitutional right to abortion that nobody had seen in the previous 200 hundred years, and did the same thing re: gay marriage in Obergefell. Not to mention the 100 Obama or Biden judges who have ruled that Trump isn’t allowed to make executive decisions just because he’s the Chief Executive, and that

Biden could reverse all of Trump’s previous executive orders, but that Trump can’t reverse any of Biden’s or Obama’s executive orders, etc.)

So if the VA Supreme Court does reject the illegal Democrat gerrymander, they will have proved that a Democrat court can follow the law, even when it goes against the wishes of Democrat politicians. But even better, they will have set the table for Spanberger, Jeffries and the Dems to receive an epic, hilarious, karmic arse-whipping.

Because Ron DeSantis responded by LEGALLY achieving an equally lopsided gerrymander in Florida. But since he’s been the best damn governor in these United States, and has turned Florida from purple to deep red, he had already set the table with GOP majorities dominant enough that he could move quickly to put forward a redestricting bill, have it debated and passed by both houses, and then sign it into law himself.

All completely by the book, and in the span of four days!

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

But wait. There’s more! On Wednesday, SCOTUS handed down a long-awaited judgment on a case involving the Dems’ long-standing perversion of one aspect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Sidebar: I think my view of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are typical of most conservatives’ views: they were good and necessary pieces of legislation. (They were passed with a higher percentage of GOP votes (80ish percent) than Dem votes (70ish), and only after the GOP could break a 70+ day filibuster by Democrats, by the way.) They ended the racist legal schemes of the Democrats’ Jim Crow laws.

Annndddd…then they were transformed by those same Democrats into an anti-white and anti-Asian discriminatory racial spoils system that inflamed racial tensions, and resulted in Dems winning more House seats than they legitimately would have, had that racial grift not been in place for the last 60 years.

And SCOTUS ended all of that on Wednesday! By ruling that two racially gerrymandered House districts in Louisiana had violated the non-discrimination rules in the Constitution, SCOTUS opened the door to other red states redrawing non-racist district borders. Initial analyses suggests that this ruling could possibly result in the GOP picking up 10-12 House seats.

It’s important to note that these gains would come NOT from the GOP reversing the anti-white racism of the Dems and beating them at their own racist game. The gains would arise from our finally stopping the Dems from cheating, and would thus require that all candidates more fairly and effectively appeal to all voters, regardless of race, if they want to win elections. Which is as it should be.

So of course the shameless Dems who were gloating about their gains from gerrymandering just one week ago, are now protesting about their losses from gerrymandering. Hilariously enough, they have fewer House seats to gain from their own

additional gerrymandering attempts, since they had already drastically gerrymandered CA, IL and other blue states years ago. Sweet, sweet irony!

In other good news, SCOTUS also slapped down a power-abusing Dem state official in deep-blue New Jersey for having illegitimately gone after prolife centers. NJ Attorney General Matthew Platkin had issued subpoenas in 2023 to pregnancy centers, trying to force them to turn over to the state all information about everybody who had ever donated to or supported their efforts – a clear attempt to bully those groups and intimidate and prevent citizens from supporting them.

Shockingly enough, that was too much even for the three leftist SCOTUS justices, and the court unanimously rejected Platkin’s heavy handed tactics!

In purple Pennsylvania, their own state Supreme Court has ruled that devious Dem election officials have to make voting records public.

Observant readers may have noticed that the elite left has been doing everything possible to enable voting fraud, and hinder attempts to uncover it, stop it. and punish those responsible. Whether its through ballot harvesting, massive mail-in voting or fighting all attempts to mandate voter ID, the left loves itself some shady voting practices.

So it should be no surprise that for five years, Democrat officials have been resisting efforts by election integrity groups to get access to the records that document the votes cast in the 2020 election. (You may remember that election as The Most Honest and Legitimate Election in the History of Elections Ever™.)

In Pennsylvania, the state system retains Cast Vote Records (CVR), which are basically the receipts of votes cast at each election location and voting machine. These records would allow citizens to verify the legitimacy of elections. So the PA Democrat machine would prefer that citizens be prevented from seeing those records.

Unexpectedly!

Once again, the court ruling against the Democrats and for transparency (but I repeat myself) was unanimous!

Finally, and at the risk of counting my chickens before they are hatched, there are yet more encouraging signs coming out of SCOTUS, this time during their questioning of lawyers in a group of cases involving leftist lower court judges’ rulings that Trump shouldn’t be allowed to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians.

Theoretically, in such cases a president grants many thousands of foreigners the right to stay in America temporarily, because some natural disaster or dire event in their home countries makes it unsafe for them to remain there. In reality, in such cases a (usually Democrat) president grants many thousands of foreigners who would likely vote Democrat the right to come here “temporarily,” and then repeatedly extends the deadline for them to leave, until they are eventually granted citizenship and become a part of a permanent Democrat voting majority.

And America as we know it ends, with both a bang and a whimper.

In the current cases, Obama granted Haitians TPS in 2010 due to an earthquake, and he granted Syrians TPS in 2012, due to a civil war in Syria. The Haitians were supposed to go back home in 18 months, and the Syrians in a year. If you’ll check your calendar, you’ll find that it is now 2026, and they’re all still here. And a bunch of Democrat lawyers and judges are arguing that it would be a crime against humanity for Trump to end their TPS and force them to do what Obama promised he’d force them to do over a decade ago.

Look, I don’t blame anybody for wanting to come to America, which is the greatest country in the world. (Though I don’t understand why any leftists would want to allow that, since they constantly insist that America is a corrupt and evil fascist state, full of racist and sexist theocratic homophobes and transphobes. How could they subject the poor Haitians and Syrians to that kind of nightmare?!)

But saying that you’re giving someone the chance to stay here temporarily when everybody knows that you intend for them to stay here permanently is a lie. (See: The 10 Commandments.)

Speaking of lies, it’s obvious what the Democratic politicians and judges are doing here. They say that it’s perfectly fine for Obama to unilaterally – without any legislation, or approval from the Congress or the people – grant millions of people “temporary” status with the stroke of a pen. But it would be an unconstitutional crime against our sacred democracy for Trump to revoke that “temporary” status with an identical stroke of his pen.

Those judges and politicians are hypocrites, and it will be another great result if SCOTUS hands them yet one more humiliating defeat.

Have a great weekend, and brace yourself for even more good news on Monday.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Get the Popcorn: The Southern Poverty Law Center is Going Down Like the Hindenburg! (posted 4/29/26)

Before yet another assassination attempt on the president, I had been planning to write about the Southern Poverty Law Center scandal, which is a gift that I had already thought was going to keep on giving for quite some time. But as more details have come out about the latest would-be assassin, it looks like he is yet one more example of a leftist who chose violence after believing the kind of creepy poison put out by the SPLC and its dishonest brethren.

The SPLC is a great example of how deeply corrupt and infuriatingly influential the leftist propaganda ecosystem has become in America. It’s a travesty that such a such a transparently abusive and dishonest operation should have maintained its undeserved “credibility” for as long as it did. Billing itself as a sort of moral and political fact-checker, the SPLC claimed to investigate and identify dangerously hateful groups and individuals.

But somehow, those dangerous groups always seemed to be associated with right-wing conservatism. (Or, as nearly every Dem and MSM talking head calls it, “right-wing extremism.”)

Unexpectedly!

For decades, their lists of dangerous hate mongers have routinely included mainstream, non-violent and non-hateful conservatives groups and individuals – Dr. Ben Carson, various Christian and pro-life groups, respected center-right and conservative media figures, etc. At the same time, they have bent over backwards to studiously ignore and NOT list much more extreme leftist radicals like antifa, pro-trans or anti-white groups.

A record like that is self-refuting on its face. Yet even now, if you use the most common search engines, while you’ll find admissions that the overwhelming majority of SPLC targets are right wing, you’ll also be given the most ridiculous claims to justify that bias.

For example, “This [political imbalance] reflects SPLC’s focus on hate‑based ideologies, which in the U.S. are predominantly right‑wing.” After you do a spit-take from that factoid, you’ll read that, “Hate‑based ideologies in the U.S. historically emerge from white supremacist, nativist, and religious‑nationalist movements—each right‑aligned.” Before you can say, “What about antifa or BLM?” you’ll be lectured that, “Left‑wing movements in the U.S. rarely organize around racial or religious hatred, which is SPLC’s primary criterion for inclusion.”

All of which is obviously a toxic mix of Adam Schiff, horse Schiff and bull Schiff. BLM is chock full of vicious whitey haters, and the jihadi-adjacent members of the Squad and many of the Muslim politicos in Dearborn, Minneapolis and elsewhere hate Jews as much as BLM hates whites and La Raza hates gringos.

And in spite of Marxism/socialism/communism’s nominal atheism, that ideology clearly functions as a religion for those without a traditional religion. So the claim that leftist hate groups don’t “organize around racial or religious hatred” is as baseless as the rest of the SPLC’s silly assertions.

But what the evil grifters at SPLC lack in truth, logic and integrity, they more than make up for in political cunning. Because they’ve always known that the institutional left didn’t want an accurate taxonomy of political hate in our nation. They wanted a biased fact-checker whose phony “reports” they could hide behind and use as justification for stigmatizing and censoring conservatives.

And that’s what they’ve clearly been doing, for decades. Much of the big tech censorship of conservative voices was based on such dishonest reports. Search engines and social media shadow-banned conservative podcasts and news outlets, and stories that were harmful to the left – that the Steele report was a Dem-funded fraud cooked up to hamper Trump’s first term; that the Muller report was going to be full of damning findings that would land Trump in prison; that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian hoax, etc.

As an optimist, I see a huge silver lining in the fact that the SPLC had to manufacture and/or pay for supposed right-wing hate groups and their activities. The left needs cartoon villains on the right, both to justify their own hatreds, and to agitate and fund raise off of their supporters. And because there isn’t enough actual hate and racism in the country to justify their wild claims, they had to make up or exaggerate most of the reported racism.

Recidivist criminals who died in the process of committing multiple crimes — like Michael Brown and George Floyd — had to be reinvented as martyrs to racial injustice. Trayvon Martin had to be re-written from a violent, petty criminal who was bashing a man’s head into concrete when he was justifiably shot, into a saintly figure; his Hispanic would-be victim had to be transformed into a “white-Hispanic” “attacker.” Normal, mainstream conservatives had to be turned into raving fascists, so that the thuggish cosplayers in antifa could valorize their own fascist violence.

In fact, the two most significant attempts in the last decade to re-write history — through a combination of exaggerations, omissions and outright lying – were Charlottesville and January 6^th. And the former – deliciously! — turns out to have been largely a creation of the SPLC, and its perverse funding of the KKK in a phony attempt to pretend that a tiny band of fringe whackos was actually a gigantic gathering of an ominous, racist conservative force.

How hilarious is it to consider that a leftist propaganda boiler-room operation named a faux grass-roots gathering “Unite the Right!?” Especially when it featured the Klan – which was always a creation of (and wholly owned subsidiary of) the Democrat left from its inception – and which was funded by the leftists at the SPLC.

Again, when I’ve argued with lefty friends over Charlottesville – they generally bought the SPLC hype about an earth-shaking attack on America by the “greatest threat to democracy” (i.e. “white supremacists”) ever – I’ve pointed out that even after many months of nationwide white nationalist hyping of what was billed as the largest gathering of right-wing bigots in decades, they were only able to draw a few hundred sad sacks.

In a nation of around a third of a billion people!

And that’s before accounting for the fact that at least half of that tiny band was only there because they were being secretly paid to attend by the SPLC!

At the risk of sounding like the lefties who have never heard a Nazi-to-GOP comparison they didn’t love, I did actually think of one authentic National Socialist connection when I first heard that the SLPC had been paying some sad little “Grand Wizard” Klan leaders to rally in Charlottesville.

If you’re not really into World War Eleven history (HA! That Ilhan Omar is a genius, isn’t she?), you might not be familiar with this story. But as a straight white guy over 40, I am contractually obligated to think about WWII – along with the Roman Empire and college and pro football – at least once per day. So I learned about this incident years ago:

On September 1^st, 1939, the Nazis officially kicked off WWII by invading Poland. But they didn’t want to look like they were just aggressors invading Poland. So on the last night of August, they fabricated a precipitating cause.

At around two dozen spots along Poland’s border with Germany, small teams of SS operatives “assaulted” small German outposts including a radio station, a forestry station and a customs house. They dressed the bodies of concentration camp victims in Polish uniforms, and left them at the attack sites.

Then, the next morning, German troops rolled across the border, as the official German press announced that they were only responding to the grave threat posed by the Polish aggressors.

Sound familiar?

Hopefully, as the dishonest conniving of the SPLC is brought to light in coming months, many well-intentioned lefties will reluctantly begin to contemplate the same question confronted by some good Germans, as WWII gained momentum:

“Is it possible that we’re the baddies?”

Spoiler alert: YEP!

Am I betting that this will, at long last, cause most lefties to see the light? Sadly, no.

But hope springs eternal, in the breast of a cautious optimist!

And in the meantime, we’ll all get some sweet schadenfreude from watching SPLC con artists squirming through a trial in which they have to explain why they steered their donors’ cash to the Grand Kleagle of the KKK, Local 231.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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The Democrat Elite Hate Democracy (posted 4/24/26)

If you’re like me – and what a great world this would be if everybody was – you were very irritated throughout 2024 by two constantly repeated talking points from Democrats and media talking heads (but I repeat myself): “no one is above the law,” and “we are fighting for democracy!”

Both phrases, of course, were false. Because: elite Democrat talking points.

By “no one is above the law,” Dems meant, “No Republicans – and especially Trump — are above the law.” And by “the law” they meant, “whatever we can falsely claim that the law is.”

On the other hand, the Dems created an immense scaffolding of double standards to exempt themselves and their minions from being subject to our laws. They’ve shamefully done everything possible to ensure that EVERYONE on their side is above the law.

Did Hunter Biden film himself breaking many laws against the use of drugs and prostitutes? Did he also launder millions of dollars from the Chicoms and corrupt Ukranian oligarchs – not to mention from “selling” those execrable paintings of his – in violation of various laws? Did “president” Biden accept at least 10% of those illegal funds? Did various Biden family +

members also illegally profit from their political connections to the Cadaver in Chief?

Obviously, in all cases. And rather than insisting that any of those lawbreakers face legal consequences, Joey Gaffes gave them all pardons on his way out the door. Just to be doubly sure that all of them remained above the law.

Of course the most glaring examples of this creepy double standard is the 15-20 million illegals whom the Biden administration illegally welcomed in! All Dem elites constantly argue that illegals should be above the law. They shouldn’t be held responsible for the crime of sneaking in, of working illegally, of driving illegally, of receiving all forms of welfare (except emergency medical services) illegally, or of committing additional violent crimes.

ALL of them should be above the law, and you’re a xenophobic racist if you disagree.

For a long time, “no one is above the law” was the most infuriating Democrat lie to me. But in recent weeks, the “we are the defenders of democracy” has taken top honors. Or, I guess, top dishonors.

The Democrats are obviously doing their best to routinely thwart the democratically expressed will of the people. How could they not, when they’ve consistently taken the “20” end of so many 80-20 issues?

The vast majority of Americans want biological males to be kept out of female bathrooms and locker rooms, and prevented from competing against females in sports. Similarly large majorities want to require voter IDs in elections, and for our border to be closed, and for all violent illegals to be deported. In all of those cases, though, the Dems have done everything possible to oppose the democratic process.

For decades, the Dems have happily used the courts to give them by judicial dictat what they could not win at the ballot box, from school busing to gay marriage to over-regulation to governmentally-approved racial discrimination against Asians and whites. They’re doing the same thing now, cheering every partisan local judge who tries to stop Trump from carrying out the duties of the executive, on whatever flimsy legal reasoning those hacks can find.

Trump’s stunning second election should have given the Dems pause. He won a lopsided victory in the electoral college, and even won the popular vote. If the left actually revered “democracy,” they wouldn’t have immediately tried to delegitimize his victory and oppose every single Trump action. Yet that is exactly what they’ve done.

But the most outrageously dishonest example of recent Democrat hypocrisy has come from the way they’ve handled the issue of gerrymandering congressional voting districts.

To grant the obvious point, gerrymandering is not illegal, and the practice has been around for centuries. Part of the reward of holding an electoral majority when reapportionment happens is to be able to draw borders that will help your party’s prospects in future elections. But that power is obviously open to abuse, and in our messy democratic system, there has usually been an unwritten, gentleman’s agreement that both parties will not abuse the system completely, giving themselves electoral advantages far out of proportion to the partisan breakdown of their state’s citizenry.

But you may have noticed that there are few gentlemen – or gentle-ladies, or gentle-he-shes – left in congress these days. And thus we find the Democrats in blue states doing everything they can to corruptly gerrymander the GOP voters’ voices out of existence.

Before any lefties in the audience can argue that both parties do it, I’ll point you to some actual facts. I’ve chosen 5 of the most prominent Democrat states, and 5 of the most prominent GOP states (some because they are contemplating gerrymandering now).

Here are the GOP states:

Texas – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 64%-34%; House seat percentages are 66% GOP to 34% Dem

Tennessee – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 64%-34%; House seat percentages are 89% GOP to 11% Dem (8 of 9)

Ohio – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 55%-44%; House seat percentages are 66% GOP to 33% Dem

Missouri – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 59%-40%; House seat percentages are 75% GOP to 25% Dem

Florida – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 56%-43%; House seat percentages are 71% GOP to 29% Dem

You can detect the bias toward the party in power by considering how much their opponents’ House seat percentage under-represents the opposition party’s share of the presidential vote. 40% of Missouri voters were Democrats, yet Dems only held 25% of Missouri House seats, a deficit of 15%. In Florida, 43% of voters were Dems, but only 29% of the House seats, a deficit of 14%. Ohio was closer, with a 11% Dem deficit (44% of the voters, but only 33% of the House seats). TN is trickier, because with only 1 of 9 House seats going to Dems, the deficit is 23% (34% of the vote to just 11% of House seats). Texas had actually zero bias, as 34% of both the vote and House seats belonging to Dems.

Here are the Dem states:

NY – went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 54%-43%; House seat percentages are 73% Dem to 27% GOP

IL – went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 55%-43%; House seat percentages are 82% Dem to 18% GOP

CA — went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 62%-38%; House seat percentages are 74% Dem to 26% GOP

MA — went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 61%-36%; House seat percentages are 100% Dem to 0% GOP (9 of 9)

NJ — went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 52%-46%; House seat percentages are 75% Dem to 25% GOP

Of these 5 Dem states, MA repeats the TN anomaly: with only 9 House seats, the 100% Dem seats creates a 36% GOP deficit. The other four states produce GOP deficits of 16% (NY); 12% (CA); 21% (NJ), and, with the worst bias (25%), Illinois.

The math is clear: the 5 Dem states were around twice as biased against the GOP (averaging 22%) than the GOP states were against the Dems (12%). And that doesn’t count the recent, corrupt CA gerrymander, which added a double-digit increase in the existing GOP representational deficit in CA.

To top that off, the Dems’ ridiculous lies about evil White Witch Spanberger’s gerrymander proposal for Virginia are even clearer, given these numbers. When confronted about the transparent corruption in VA, Dems claimed that they were only redrawing their districts because Texas did their gerrymander – which they called “an illegitimate, partisan power-grab” –first.

But consider the numbers. Before the recent gerrymanders, both Texas and VA had basically evenly matched House seats and presidential vote parity. But when Texas’ gerrymander was done, the TX GOP was expected to gain 2 House seats, for a 5% advantage over the Dems. By contrast, the VA Dems were set to cut the 5 GOP House seats to only 1, creating a 36% advantage over the GOP.

So if gerrymandering for partisan advantage is corrupt, the Virginia Democrats are 7 times as corrupt as the Texas GOP, just as the 5 Dem states are twice as corrupt as the GOP.

The Dems may not get away with their attempted disenfranchising of Virginia voters, since a state judge declared it unconstitutional, citing several illegal aspects of that stunt. Hopefully a few judges in VA will be more honest than the national Democrats are.

But regardless, the gerrymandering debate shows that the Democrats are lying about their respect for democracy as much as they were lying when they pretended to believe that “no one is above the law.”

And it reinforces another constant in Democrat politics:

Whenever Dems are accusing the GOP of some form of corruption, you can bet your last dollar that they are actually more guilty of it themselves.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Good News From Marco, and Iran, and Our Airports (posted 4/6/2)

In keeping with the Cautious Optimism tradition, I thought I’d start this week with some positive, feel-good stories.

I’ll open with one of my favorite members of the Trump administration — Marco Rubio – on one of my favorite topics – deporting foreign bad actors.

In this case, the bad actors are numerous children or other relatives of the murderous mullah-acracy who has been running Iran and oppressing Iranians for almost half a century. In many cases, these people have been allowed in legally, but don’t have American citizenship; in other cases, they are naturalized citizens. Marco is heading up an effort to require the former group to leave the USA, and to denaturalize (where possible) the later group, and send them packing as well.

When many leftists hear this, their first instinct is to rend their garments and take the side of the foreigners, just as they did in the case of the wife-beating human smuggler with a final deportation order, Kilmar.

But when conservatives — or others with the common sense God gave most members of the animal kingdom – hear this, they are happy about it. Because they (and we) can easily go back to first principles: no foreigner has a right to come to America.

American citizens have total control over who enters our country and under what circumstances. And though we may allow foreigners who have been properly vetted to temporarily come as tourists or on business trips, or possibly to study, we are under no obligation to let them in, and they cannot force us to admit them, or give them a path to citizenship if we determine that that is not in our interests.

Just as we were under no obligation in the 1940s to allow entry to Hitler’s nephew Johnny Hitler (or Bob Himmler, Tucker Heydrich, or Candace Goering), we don’t have to welcome the children or relatives of the mullahs, ayatollahs or jihadis from Iran.

You may remember General Qasem “Scowlin’” Soleimani, the murderous Iranian big shot who led the Quds Force. (Or, as the NYT, WAPO and PBS probably called him, “an avuncular Teddy Bear of a man with an easy smile and a heart as big as the great outdoors.”) Trump transitioned him from “terrorist mastermind” to “goop in a smoking car” via one well-aimed missile in 2020.

Well it turns out his niece Hamideh and grand-niece Sarinasadat have been living it up in America, while still celebrating attacks against US soldiers, denouncing America as the “Great Satan,” and supporting the designated terror organization IRGC. And their immigration history makes them poster-wenches for the Democrats’ suicidal disdain for America.

They both came here in 2015 – Hamideh on a tourist visa and Sarinasadat on a student visa. A judge granted them asylum in 2019. While I’m no immigration lawyer, I don’t think any tourist visas allow you to stay here for 4 years, and a student visa would normally expire after the four years it takes to get a college degree. And asylum claims are supposed to be very difficult to prove, requiring that you are being persecuted by your country’s government and would be in great danger if you went back.

But Joey “Gaffes” Biden granted them both green cards in 2021 anyway.

Because of course he did.

When Hamideh applied for citizenship last year, she had to disclose that she’d been back to Iran at least 4 times in recent years. Now, if I can turn on my Sam Kinison filter, I’ll explain what a legitimate asylum seeker would never do…

“SHE’D NEVER GO BACK TO HER HOME COUNTRY FOUR FREAKING TIMES! OH!! OOOOOHHHHHHH!!!”

Aaannnnnddddd… last Friday Marco had both Soleimanis arrested, and prepared to send them back to Iran. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “I hope your boat doesn’t run into any Iranian mines when you sail back through the Straits of Hormuz, ladies!”

Speaking of ungrateful foreigners, a federal judge just delivered some more good news to Marco (and us) when he dismissed a lawsuit by a German citizen against Rubio, filed because he thought his visa application was taking too long to be granted.

But this is no traditional German citizen, whom you might expect to be named something like Hans, or Franz, or Tucker Heydrich. No, this guy was named Raheel Sadiq.

Of the Munich Sadiqs, no doubt.

Raheel was upset that his visa application was 9 months old, and still hadn’t been acted on. He demanded that the US government be forced to make a final decision, claiming that the wait “inflicts ongoing human and economic harm.”

I would refer to the aforementioned first principle: no foreigner is owed the opportunity to enter America. But I would also agree with Raheel; he should get a quick and final decision.

And that decision is, “How about NO?” And you’re welcome, because we’re stopping you from “the ongoing human and economic harm” you have been suffering while you wait.

While we’re discussing Iran, I couldn’t forget the main good news story of this past week, which is our military’s heroic rescue of the downed American airman whom the Iranian IRGC were trying desperately to capture.

Thanks to his badassery (despite his injuries, he climbed several thousand feet into rugged hills and hid himself in some kind of crevasse) and that of the American military and Israeli intelligence, the bad guys were held at bay while our guys located and exfiltrated him to safety.

Shot down on Good Friday and rescued on Easter — I love it when the good guys win!

Finally, there was also good news stateside last week.

You can usually identify stories that are good for the country by how little MSM coverage they get, and that proved true about Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports to address the long lines and delays caused by the Democrats shutting down the TSA.

Leftists whined about how terrible that was going to be, yet it proved to be a great success. ICE agents actually succeeding in greatly shortening the lines, and an ICE agent saved a choking baby in one airport. They also made a mockery out of hysterical leftist warnings about how ICE would be “kidnapping” innocent American citizens because they had brown skins, etc.

One Dem congressman actually predicted that ICE would be killing people in airports. Another one noted that these ICE agents – helpful, friendly, accepting thanks from travelers – weren’t the same kind of ICE agents who killed the protesters in MN.

Sane people might point out the subtle difference between those who have had negative encounters with ICE – i.e. illegals who were legally detained because of their crimes, and violent leftists and vehicular homicide enthusiasts who justifiably lost a game of FOFA with law enforcement – and law-abiding Americans who behaved themselves and got along just fine with ICE.

My favorite illustrative “ICE in the airports” story took place at LaGuardia, when a self-beclowning, leftist, beta-male white guy confronted three black ICE agents. (Another statistic that the MSM will not report: ICE agents are much more likely to be brown or black than the general population, just as the violent anti-ICE weasels are disproportionately white and far left. Unexpectedly!)

The male Karen had his phone out and recording as he sallied forth on what he must have believed would be an incident memorializing his brave heroism. In his best theater-kid form, he walked up to the agents and started peppering them with questions in an effort to rile them up. As they ignored him, he persisted, finally saying, “I see you are walking in a group. What’s up?”

I know. You’ll be shocked to hear that the ICE agents somehow managed to resist rising to that brilliant bit of rhetorical bait. So then Soy Boy brought out the big guns, asking,“You guys are the foot soldiers of a fascist regime, right? Is that not what it is?”

At that moment, the agents who had been trying to keep straight faces finally broke. A guy in the front smiled, but the guy behind him couldn’t help it, and covered his mouth and started to laugh as all three of them grinned at each other.

That did not please the social justice warrior, who kept demanding, “Is that funny? Do you think that’s funny?” After a few more feeble attempts, he finally gave up.

But he went straight to social media, where he failed spectacularly at trying to save face by cosplaying as a revolutionary tough guy. (And both “tough” and “guy” are doing a lot of work in that sentence.)

Here’s his post, which I promise I am not making up: “They say speak truth to power, so I did just that. Confronted a fascist to his face today at LaGuardia. His reaction? A smirk. This is what we’re up against—but we aren’t staying silent.”

Good lord! How can that possibly be the flex that he clearly thinks it is? First, I’m pretty sure that an actual fascist, when “confronted to his face,” could probably come up with a response more forceful than a smirk. (Like maybe a rifle butt in the stomach, or a bullet in the head.)

Second, when you’re trying to demonstrate the evil menace of your opponent, whatever precedes “That’s what we’re up against!” has got to be a hell of a lot more daunting than “a smirk.”

Here, I’ll give you a few examples:

“As we manned our positions far below the American planes, they dropped thermonuclear bombs that melted two cities and instantly killed hundreds of thousands of our citizens. That’s what we’re up against!”

“We had barely gotten into our foxholes in Bastogne when we faced a ferocious bombardment and frontal assault by the most battle-hardened and experienced armored divisions in the entire European theater. That’s what we’re up against!”

No matter how hard he tried, the best that that poor, deluded fool could do was to get three cool brothers to laugh in his face.

Because I know my Thomas More, I already knew that, “The devil, the prowde spirite, cannot endure to be mocked.”

But until last week, I didn’t know that the same was true for ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, low-T leftist Donna Quixotes.

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While I Suffer, the MSM Continues Their Idiocy (posted 4/3/26)

This has been a disorienting month for me. My pinched nerve has gotten me out of all of my normal routines, and replaced them with new ones that I really look forward to discontinuing soon!

Thankfully, my PT has decreased the amount and persistence of pain I was experiencing in the first 2-3 weeks of March, but juggling even milder pain meds has resulted in inconsistent sleep and a lot of fuzzy head syndrome. (Or, as it’s known in medical textbooks, “Democrat Cognition Syndrome.”)

For the first time since I was probably 5 years old, I’ve gone a little over a month without reading a book! I’ve also missed pretty much all church services in the five weeks leading up to Easter, which doesn’t feel great.

On the other hand, I’ve been keeping up with some sporadic reading on current events and politics, and I’m really glad to have been able to keep writing columns here, even if at a slower pace. I’ve also had the chance to watch some old movies and new-to-me tv series. I discovered Mr. In-Between, a dark comedy/crime series set in Australia, which shares the kind of admirable/repugnant, morally compromised protagonist that made Breaking Bad and the Sopranos so compelling.

Seeing clips of the dead-on-arrival, virtue-signalling Oscars spurred me to revisit some movies from when movies were worth watching. (I know: I’ve achieved peak old guy vibes. Get off my lawn!) I watched The Searchers, starring a young John Wayne, a Monument Valley setting, and John Ford’s directing; The Man Who Shot Liberty Vally Valance (If Jimmy Stewart ever made a bad movie, I can’t remember it); and Rio Bravo, starring an older John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and a young Angie Dickinson. (If anybody was ever cooler than Dean Martin – dressed in black, his cowboy hat down over his eyes while he crooned away with Ricky Nelson as they waited for a shootout – I don’t know who that would be.)

But amidst all of the jarring changes I’ve experienced the last month, there has been one comfortingly consistent aspect of our national life. And that is the egregious dishonesty of our legacy media, advanced in no small part by a ubiquitous double standard.

I’ll just hit two recent examples among many: the third No Kings protest, and the coverage of our month-long, one-sided war against the violent dictatorship of the mullahs in Iran.

The No Kings street theater protests actually do follow in the American tradition of the rowdy airing of grievances against our politicians. Unfortunately, the grievances in this case do not seem to be tightly tethered to reality. (Which is the most polite way I can say that.)

For example, senator Crazy Mazie Hirono accidentally said the accurate part out loud, when she claimed that, “Donald Trump is not, never will be, and has never been a king.”

Ummmm… yes. Exactly. So what is the purpose of this expensive, tedious, time-consuming third iteration of a protest? To prevent from happening what you’ve admitted has never happened, is not happening, and will never happen?

Okay. Well done then, I guess?

Of course we didn’t need an emotionally dysregulated, low-IQ, elected garden gnome to tell us that. Because anybody who knows anything about the history of kings and fascist dictators knows that none of these protests could have ever taken place if there were actually a king or dictator in America.

If you want to test that, quickly rattle off a list of all of the people in human history who ever marched in the streets insulting their king or dictator – even if only once or twice, let alone thrice! — and suffered no consequences whatsoever.

I know. That list is as short as the “days of honest work done” on Bernie Sanders’ resume.

Also, you know how reluctant I am to raise the issue of double standards. But do you remember when Obama proclaimed a dozen times that our immigration laws would not allow him to just declare that illegals now have legal status, because that would be unconstitutional, and that he’s not a king? And then…one month lay-tair… when he declared that all the DACA kids are now legally in the country?

Or remember when Joe Biden dictated that he could use OSHA to force millions of Americans to take an experimental vaccine, and that he could declare that American citizens with no school loans could be forced to pay back billions in school loans taken out by students, who would no longer need to pay them back themselves?

In fact, remember when Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment – which had been rejected decades before – was now the 28^th Amendment to the constitution, because he said so?

Obama and Biden both behaved much more like kings than Trump ever has, and the Left cheered them on. But now that Trump is trying to use much more modest Executive Orders to do what the voters elected him to do, it’s time to break out the frog costumes and ugly papier mache heads, and rail against imaginary monarchs.

Speaking of ugly heads, many hypocrites on both sides of the aisle have raised theirs to criticize every aspect of the Iran war, out of motivations ranging from reasonable to flimsy to hysterical.

For the record, I think there are aspects of our actions in Iran that are worthy of questioning and criticism. But those are being swallowed up and dwarfed by the number of specious bleatings on the subject.

We opened the war with a strategic master stroke, killing around 40 of the top power players in Iranian politics on a Saturday. The first leftist complaint I saw claiming that Iran had turned into a “forever war” appeared on the following Monday. Because if this war could drag on for 72 long hours, who knows how many decades it might last!

A few days later, the IDF took out the Iranian second string as they gathered to elect the next ayatollah.

From those first few days, many on the left were joined by a handful of sad sacks on the right (I’m looking at you, Tucker and Candace!) in a doom scrolling cacaphony of epic proportions. Despite Trump’s insistence that this would be a very short action – and his track record of just that kind of strike – critics started extrapolating the worst-case scenario of a near-eternal quagmire.

“What if Iran rebuilds its nuclear weapons program during the next 172 months of constant warfare?” “How many millions of American soldiers will die after we put 8 million boots on the ground for the rest of the Trump presidency?” “What about $10 a gallon gas? Won’t somebody think of the $10 gallons of gas?!!”

By the way, and speaking of double standards, check out this head-to-head comparison of headlines when gas under Biden finally got down to $4 per gallon, vs. when it just reached $4 under Trump, as presented on the site Twitchy:

CBS headline yesterday: “With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it now costs almost $145 to fill up a Ford F-150 pickup truck.” A user pointed out that even this factual stat was deployed to put the worst possible spin on it, by using (but not mentioning) that the F-150 in question was the extended range version, which has the biggest gas tank, and that the fill-up cost would depend on that F-150 being absolutely bone-dry beforehand.

Meanwhile, a CBS story from July of 2022 was headlined thusly: “Gas prices could soon drop to $4 a gallon, Biden energy adviser says. After hitting a record high in June, prices at the pump have fallen for more than 30 straight days.”

Got that? The article hides the fact that gas is still MORE than $4 per gallon, and it doesn’t even predict that gas WILL drop in the future to $4, saying only that gas “could” drop to that level. (Yes. And Joe Biden COULD step agilely over a sand bag on stage. But the smart money is on him tripping over it, falling, and snapping one of his fragile, bird-like leg bones.) And did you notice the source for this weak prediction? Not an unbiased expert or analyst, but a “Biden energy advisor.”

Obviously, the latter article is intended to give Biden political cover for the increased gas prices caused by his policies, while the former article is intended to do maximum damage to Trump.

Consider these more accurate phrasings of the two headlines:

“Biden employee claims that Biden-caused high gas prices might drop to $4 a gallon at some undetermined point in the future.” vs

“Analysis finds that gas prices have temporarily risen to Biden-era levels, predicts they will drop again when the Iran conflict ends, possibly later this month.”

But my favorite bit of laughably biased “journalism” comes from the Bulwark this week. (You may remember those TDS sufferers from early election night, when they were crowing that Que Mala would defeat the Orange, Hitler-esque convicted felon in a landslide. Or from several hours later, when they wept openly and blamed sexism and racism and American stupidity for the thrashing of the Cackler.)

(Cue the sad trombone, and distribute the word salad of defeat, garnished with the sour vinaigrette d’ regret.)

This article, which I swear I am not making up, was written by Jonathan V. Last. (The “V” is not for “victory,” and “Last” is where he ranks on a list of insightful commentators.) The title is, “America Lost. Iran Won. Trump Shat the Bed.”

Did I mention that I did not make that up?

Here’s the opening of the article: “It is true, as the president said last night, that the Iranian navy and air force have been almost eliminated. It is also beside the point. The Islamic Republic has never been – and — never wanted to be – a naval power. They have never made extensive use of air power.”

Then why did they spend billions on all of those ships and planes, J. Last? Just to give the IDF and America a few hours of target practice?

Good lord. The double standard question writes itself:

Can you imagine if the roles had been reversed? If Iran had hit us with a first strike that killed Trump, Vance, half of our chiefs of staff and cabinet members, and our congressional leadership? And then if another strike a few days later killed the remainder of our military leadership, the cabinet, and most of congress, while also sinking most of our navy and destroying all of our air force?

And then, for the next 30 days, Iran systematically destroyed our 5000 most crucial military and infrastructure targets, and then blew up the Golden Gate Bridge as an afterthought?

Do you think that after all of that, little Johnny Last would be writing about how, “Iran Lost. America Won. The Ayatollahs Shat the Barn They Share with their Most Attractive Goats?”

Remember that, the next time Tucker or some other MSM empty head brings you latest update from Iran.

Have a good Easter!

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Two Dem Governors Demonstrate Leftist Folly (posted 3/27/26)

Today I‘ve got two stories to kick off your weekend. I started drafting them last week, but between the pain meds and the PT and the necessity to write about the passing of creepy Paul Ehrlch, I‘ve been slow to post on these two tales. I hope they don’t seem like old news now.

The common theme in these two stories is that they both illustrate the seemingly intractable wrong-headedness of the left as embodied by the governors of the two biggest blue states, NY and CA.

First, NY governor Kathy “I’ll get you and your little dog too” Hochul’s latest move doesn’t just say the quiet part out loud. It screams the quiet part through a bullhorn.

In 2022, in the first year of her malevolent governership, she displayed the kind of supremely confident ignorance that one only achieves by living in a leftist bubble for her entre life. Fully caught up in the TDS that has swept through her party like STDs through a party thrown by Slick Willy and Hunter Biden, she was full of urine and vinegar as she threw down the gauntlet to any non-leftists who lived in her blue state domain.

To wit: “We’re fighting to bring government back to the people and out of the hands of dictators. And we’re here to say that the era of Trump… is over. Just jump on a bus and head down to Florda where you belong okay? Get out of town! Get out of town!”

And the applause of a dim-witted crowd filled the air.

Then, as the Sponge Bob meme would have it… Four… Years…Lay-tare…

The Margaret Hamilton (look her up) of the Empire State is reaping what she sowed. And it is hilarious.

A couple of weeks ago she gave an interview in which she came crawling back with her broom tucked between her legs and pleaded with the rich New Yorkers she had scorned way back in ‘22.

Sorry, “tail.” I meant with her tail tucked between her legs.

Or did I?

When discussing the giant pile of money she wants to spend on useless and counter-productive social programs — Because: New York liberal – here’s what she had to say:

“I’m being conscious of the fact that I need people who are high net worth to support the generous soical programs we want to have in our state. There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks, if you want to be supportive… but maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home. Because our tax base has been eroded.”

“I have to look at the fact that we are in competition with other states who have less of a burden on their corporations and individuals. Remote work changed everything. There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan and in NY state, and they were captives to our state, and they were going to stay. We saw that that’s not the case on Wall Street, businesses looking at Texas, they’re not going there because they have a nicer governor, that’s for sure. They’re going there for the tax rate. We have to be smart about this.”

Let’s savor the key details, shall we?

Her definition of “patriotic” is being willing to allow greedy politicians who hate you to confiscate more and more of your earnings so that they can be “generous” (aka “wasteful”) with those earnings.

She apparently thinks that financially successful people who were smart enough to follow her snotty commands to “jump a bus out of town” are dumb enough to succumb to the equivalent of an obnoxious solicitor at your front door, entreating you to leave the Free State and go back to New York so that you can once agan be treated like a pimp treats his hookers.

The strangest part is that she actually gets the most important parts right. She correctly realizes that NY State’s tax base has eroded. (Unexpectedly!) She correctly points out that NY is in a competition with other states, and that high taxes are a burden.

She even admits that New York prefers to treat rich people like their slaves. (She uses the term “captives.” But you say “potato,” I say “Gulag Archipelago.”)

She comes to the right conclusion – “They’re going there for the tax rate” – and even clearly states the logical next step: “We have to be smart about this.”

Annnddd… then she falls at the last hurdle. Because if leftists could accept reality, follow logic, and be smart, they’d be conservatives.

Meanwhile her co-religionist commie Mamdani is stepping on the same reality rakes as Hochul. He’s been in office for 20 minutes, and already the combination of his extravagant promises and NYC’s existing ocean of red ink are pummeling him with the groin kicks of financial reality.

Consider: last year NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person, and they’re due to cross into six figures per vagrant this year. And the result?

More hobos than you can shake a crack pipe at. If you could shake a crack pipe. Which you can’t. Because one of the expensive schizophrenic junkies has already pushed you into the path of a subway train, squashing you as flat as the line on Joe Biden’s latest brain scan.

So suck it, Nepo Baby Jihadi and Wicked Witch of Botaxia!

Speaking of spending tons of taxpayer money on eye-wateringly stupid boondoggles, how about that West Coast, featureless, plastic-crotched Ken Doll, Gavin Newsom?

Sure, for pure wastefulness he can’t top the multibillion-dollar high-speed railroad to nowhere, or the gusher of red ink devoted to phony hospice care centers tucked away in every strip mall, P.O. box and mop closet in the greater Los Angeles area. But his latest brainstorm might take the Tinfoil Medal – because there’s no gold left in the Golden State to make medals anymore – for the staggering stupidity of its conception and execution.

I‘m talking about the now-infamous “Wildlife Crossing” (i.e. highway overpass) that is supposed to allow cougars and butterflies to safely transit over the 10 lanes of the 101 in southern Cal.

I know. When I woke up one day last week thinking about this story, I suspected that it was the product of last night’s Oxycodone-created dream. But no. This thing is real. And it’s spectacular.

Let’s start with the details. Haircut launched the project with great fanfare in 2022, saying that the taxpayers had already committed $52 million for the project, and that another $10 million would complete it in 2025. It had the grand name of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC).

Why does a highway overpass require a fancy name and an acronym, you might ask?

Because you’d have to be an absolute moron to pay $62 million for a freaking overpass! Fortunately for Gav, absolute morons are thick on the ground in deep blue California.

Annnndddd… so far the state has spent $114 million of the original $62 million budget, and the overpass is still not finished.

If you’ve got a calendar handy you can confirm that it is 2026. And if you’ve got a calculator handy, you can confirm that 2026 comes after 2025. And also that $114 million is almost twice as much as $62 million.

If you’ve never seen lefty government at work, and if you’ve never read my columns before, you might think that this is some kind of elaborate joke. But you probably have done both, and thus you know that it is no joke.

Let’s consider how many layers of graft and insanity it takes to explain this story.

First, we’ve all seen thousands of overpasses in our lives, and none of them are an engineering feat to compare wth the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or AOC’s juicy booty (her words not mine). (I had to throw a gratuitous reference to AOC in here, because I haven’t taken a shot at her in too long.) It’s a slab with a ramp at both ends, some concrete and some rebar and maybe a railing on both sides if you want to get fancy.

So what’s so special about this overpass? Does it have a climate-controlled bubble over it, made of space-age materials and featuring elaborate lighting and sound systems calculated to attract and relax cougars and butterflies? Are the railings coated in gold and encrusted in diamonds?

Nope. It’s just an overpass. The only thing that sets it apart from every other overpass in Christendom is that it’s got some dirt and a few plants dumped onto the concrete slab of the overpass. Because everyone knows how cougars and butterflies hate to burn their sensitive feet walking on concrete.

And before you can ask, yes, butterflies can fly. It’s right there in their freaking name! So why on earth would they tramp across an overpass when they’ve been given the gift of flight and could easily flutter safely above the cars and U-hauls streaming along the 101 on their way out of the failed state of California, bound for a sane red state?

Obviously they wouldn’t, and they don’t. And CA Dems are idiots for saying such a thing. But this isn’t the first time they have made such an imbecilic claim. If you look back to one of my very first columns – archived on this site in late 2016 or early 2017 – you’ll find me reporting on one of the Democrats’ absurd objections to Trump’s proposed border wall. They said that it would interfere with the migration of hundreds of species…including many bird species.

As I mentioned at the time, the Dems were actually asking us to believe that long lines of birds – who could easily fly right over the wall – would instead clomp across the scorching desert before bonking into the wall, falling over, and starving to death. All because of the Orange Man’s Satanic hatred of all creatures avian.

If Eric Swallwell were here, this is when he’d say, “What about cougars? I’m pretty sure they don’t have wings. And if they don’t, that means they can’t fly over the highway safely! Why do you want to kill cougars?!”

And I’d say, “Very good, Eric. Now can you go away while the grown-ups are talking?” And I‘d look around to find the closest Asian cutie in the area and point to her and say, “Ooh, look at her! I‘ve heard that she has a crush on you despite her being a 9 and you being a 3, and that her turn-ons are low IQs and flatulence, and that she has no ties at all to the CCP. Go get her boy!”

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Cougars.

It turns out that a study of local fauna – because you can’t build an overpass without paying a fauna-ologist six figures for a comprehensive local fauna study – suggested that there were around a dozen endangered cougars in the area around the overpass.

Whch means that you could much more easily build a top-notch cougar brothel, capture the local cougars, teach the females to wear French maid outfits and lap dance, then put them together and let nature take its course. Or – hear me out – you could just dose their food with cougar viagra, and in a year or four you’d have enough new cougars to release the original dozen back into the wild, and trust them to look both ways before crossing the road, while knowing that the species was safe.

(Full disclosure: I flunked my class in cougar mating, gestation and litter size – my majoring in English and minoring in chasing girls and playing sports really cut into my time spent on cougar fertility studies — so that’s only a rough guess. And I’m not sure whether male cougars technically have laps. So that lap-dancing cougar brothel might need to be Plan B.)

One other hilarious detail which I am not making up is that one side of the overpass where the cougars are is a wilderness area. Not far from the other side of the overpass is a bunch of subdivisions. Right now the people living in those subdivisions only have to worry about their neighborhoods being plagued by illegal gangbangers, mounds of trash and syringes, and recidivist criminals and junkies who keep getting re-released there. Oh, and earthquakes and preventable fires that will definitely not be prevented.

So look at the bright side, blue voters. Once that wildlife crossing is completed, you and your children will likely be mauled or eaten by cougars long before God’s wrath or the lesbian DEI-hire Fire Chief can kill you by earthquake or fire, respectively.

And that’s why the story I read about this was headlined, “The Most Gavin Newsom Story Ever.”

Yes, the whole thing is absurd, and Californians who keep voting Dem deserve to have leftist politicians confiscate their money, pile it up in giant mounds, and then set it on fire. This ridiculous uncompleted overpass has been under construction for 4 and a half years, and will likely cost $200 million, assumng it is ever finished.

By comparison, there was another overpass in CA that took 4.5 years to complete, and for only $35 million. Of course, that was in 1930s dollars. But then again, it wasn’t just an ugly, squat overpass. It was a full-sized bridge, and it was quite attractive compared to the ugly AWAC.

It’s called The Golden Gate Bridge.

Great job, California!

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Remembering an Obnoxious Academic (posted 3/23/26)

I originally meant this column to be about three very foolish ideas of three very foolish leftists: Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and Paul Ehrlich. But as I started writing about Ehrlich, I realized that the column would be too long. So I’m saving the two blue-state governors for next time.

Paul Ehrlich died at 93 on March 13^th. He may have been the most pure distillation of a leftist academic in the world, except that (as far as I know) he wasn’t obsessed with racism and sexism. But he covered pretty much the rest of the leftist catechism. He was arrogant and sure of his superior knowledge, no matter how many times over how many decades his ideas were decisively (and humiliatingly) proved wrong.

He hated humanity and was the kind of “environmentalist” — I use the scare quotes to distinguish moral and legitimate environmentalism from the ignoble politicized variant of it – who saw human beings as a cancer on the planet. His leftist politics immunized him from suffering any damage to his reputation even as he was continually proven wrong; in fact he continued to receive plaudits and awards throughout his career.

Ehrlich was a biologist, but his career was marked by politicized “science.” His most famous and influential work, “The Population Bomb (1968), was full of pessimistic predictions, beginning with its opening sentences: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Among other things, Ehrlich predicted that, “England will not exist in the year 2000; the US would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980; smog in LA and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year,” and that Americans born after WWII wouldn’t live past 50.

Think of him as Al Gore with an academic credential: often wrong, but never in doubt.

Ehrlich made one mistake that most academics never make: he actually tested his ideas in a high-profile way in the real world. In 1980, economist Julian Simon offered a public, $10,000 bet: Ehrlich’s leftist theories said that all natural resources were going to become scarcer, and therefore more expensive. Simon was a conservative and therefore a generally (some might say cautiously) optimistic capitalist: he predicted that human ingenuity and a free market would make the price of commodities go down.

So Simon offered to let Ehrlich choose any five resources that he wanted, and Ehrlich could bet that in ten years, those would be more expensive. Ehrlich took the bait, and after insulting Simon’s simplistic ideology, chose five metals as the resources he was most certain about: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.

Annnnnddddd… Simon won the bet in 1990, when all five metals were cheaper.

The way Ehrlich handled his loss was straight out of the leftist handbook: he lied like crazy, insisted that his ideas were still correct, and insulted Simon’s intelligence for years afterward. Simon, enjoying his victory and happy to needle his arrogant opponent, offered to renew the bet, double or nothing, for another 10 years, on any other resource of Ehrlich’s choosing.

Ehrlich was at least smart enough to turn down that offer, and he did actually pay the bet off. Luckily for Ehrlich, though, he could easily pay the bet off, because he had just received a “genius” grant for $450K.

Because: of course he did. Despite, again, being wrong about everything!

When I was still a professor, this kind of thing drove me crazy. No matter how many times lefty theories and predictions failed, the lefties were not deterred, and persisted in their folly. There’s a conservative joke about this, which has a leftist condescending to a conservative, saying, “I know your ideas work in the real world. But do they work in theory?”

Examples abound. The lefty religion of Marxism had massive appeal before it was first put into real-world practice in the USSR in 1917. In the following century it was tried over and over again, all over the world. And failed every time, producing poverty, famine, environmental devastation, brutal police states and at least 100 million deaths.

So naturally, you can look at any course list in liberal arts departments all over the country and find hundreds of courses touting Marxism. And you can find old nitwits like Bernie Sanders and young nitwits like AOC and hundreds of politicians like them, all confidently vowing that THIS time their lefty schemes will work perfectly.

People have been fleeing socialist/communist countries for freer market countries for over a century. Productive Americans have been leaving leftist blue cities and states for red states for several decades.

And still, like Paul Ehrlich, the Dems are convinced that their theories are right.

To the day he died he never admitted any errors in his work, and if you read a legacy media obituary of him, you’ll be slogging through a miasma of covering up and intentional point missing to lionize a lefty co-religionist.

For example, the subhead of his New York Times’ obituary says, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

Got that? “Premature!” For 60 years he confidently predicted the opposite of what actually happened. But the NYT asks us to just give it another century or two, and he’ll be proven right.

Ehrlich was sure that even in the first world, life spans would get drastically shorter, and millions would starve. Annnnddd… we’re living longer than ever, and one of our big problems isn’t starvation, it’s obesity.

He was a huge fan of abortion, and left the door open for coerced sterilization and abortion, because he was sure that our skyrocketing birthrates would bring disaster. Annnnddddd… almost all first-world nations have a below-replacement birthrate.

It would be harder to be more wrong, more often than Paul Ehrlich was.

But the left is giving it their best shot.

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Everybody’s an Expert on Iran Now (posted 3/20/26)

After another week of dealing with the painful pinched nerve – my MRI showed that it wasn’t a bulged disc and I have my first PT session scheduled on Monday – I’ve been keeping up with the news, if only in a distracted way.

It’s been fascinating to watch the polarized reactions to the war in Iran. First because on all sides the talking heads are doing what they always do when a big international story happens: pretending that they are experts on an area that they couldn’t have found on a map a week ago.

It happened during Iraq and Afghanistan – when blow-dried morons who didn’t know Sunnis from sushi, and couldn’t tell the Taliban from either – lectured us on how popular Saddam was because of all of the giant murals of himself all over Baghdad. It happened again in Ukraine when everybody started plastering blue and yellow flags on their social media to show how dedicated they were to a country they knew nothing about.

And now it’s Iran’s turn. Democrats who have screamed for years that the Ayatollah must be deposed and Iran kept from gaining nukes are suddenly bemoaning a “forever war” (which they declared on Day 3!) and raving that Trump has no plan to deal with the IRGC. Or is it the RICG? Or possibly the GRIC?

I‘m no better than most. I knew what the Strait of Hormuz was, but if pressed I‘d have guessed that Kharg Island was the capital city of the Klingon Empire. But I can’t get too down on myself after watching Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar criticizing Trump’s military strategy, when you know that those crones don’t know the Strait of Hormuz from the Gay of Juarez. (Who could be the most popular rent boy south of the border, for all they know.)

Even I know enough to know that the critics who are wailing that we’re losing the war are full of it. We took out forty of their top leadership in the opening minutes of the action, and then blew up another three or four dozen of the “Council of Experts” several days later, when they were in the act of the choosing the next ayatollah, who was atomized before he could take the oath of office.

We took out their air force last year, we sank their navy in 10 days, and about 90% of their missiles and drones have been used or blown up. The IDF lit up their top three remaining military leaders in the last several days. Can you imagine how far down the depth chart they have to be right now?

Well, you don’t have to. Because some guy who was in The Teheran School of Cosmetology a month ago is now writing threatening press releases claiming to be from the newest Ayatollah, who – I Schiff you not – is made out of cardboard. Literally.

How am I supposed to write satire when the Supreme Leader of Iran is indistinguishable from something out of a South Park episode?

I don’t want us to end up in a drawn-out war in Iran either, but I think that even with all of his flaws, Trump is not going to let that happen. After his foreign policy successes – taking out Soleimani and al-Baghdadi; ending a half-dozen wars and getting the Israeli hostages released; taking out Iran’s nuke sites in an evening; snatching Maduro out of Venezuela in two hours; getting Rosie O’Donnell to leave the country – I think he’s earned enough trust for us to let him cook.

If this war lasts for over 4-5 weeks, we can always get our dresses over our heads and run around shrieking like hysterical Democrats then.

One bit of good news that the MSM didn’t cover – unexpectedly! — was that lots of everyday Iranians are calling in the locations of IRCG road blocks and gatherings, which then get a quick drone strike. The story suggested that the calls were to some Israelis, which sounds like just the kind of thing those bad-asses are known to handle well.

In that same vein were reports that some Iranian Kurds were positioning themselves just over the border, ready to go in and start killing some Ayatollah fans. The Kurds have always been known as tough fighters; I think of them as the Rooftop Koreans of the Middle East.

Would the subsequent movie about the adventures of the Kurds wreaking havoc behind Iranian lines be called “Inglorious Bas-Kurds?” It will if I can get the financing together.

I do hope that we have a plan to get lots of small arms to a lot of motivated Persians who would happily use them to secure their own freedom the good old-fashioned Second Amendment way.

Our military is doing such a great job devastating the regime and destroying their ability to project power outside of their own borders, but we don’t want to get stuck trying to install a new regime or get involved in their internal politics. (Other than teaching them the one indispensable rule that we have already taught them: don’t follow in the footsteps of the ayatollahs and make us come back in and level your whole government again.)

The best way to avoid that seems to be to give the Persian non-jihadist majority the ability to win their freedom and establish their own non-genocidal government.

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Strategic RINO-ism vs. Satanic RINO-ism, & the SAVE Act (posted 3/11/26)

Sadly, all conservatives are familiar with RINOs – those Republicans in Name Only who pretend to be conservatives when they’re running, only to betray their conservative voting base by voting like (and with) leftists.

I actually prefer the term CINOs – Conservatives in Name Only – since the GOP has often been a home for mushy centrist and center-left pols. That being the case, a liberal Republican can’t fairly be called a RINO, since the “in name only” part suggests that a left-leaning Republican is necessarily an oxymoron. Which, tragically, it is not.

But I’ll use “RINO” in the commonly accepted meaning, since I can’t change our language single-handedly. (If I could, I’d start with the phrases “my truth” and “sex assigned at birth,” the use of which would be capital offenses in an Edenic world in which I was King Martin the First.)

(And what a glorious world that would be!)

Though RINOs are often the bane of our existence, I’ve argued elsewhere that in our political system, they are sometimes necessary. If, for example, a Republican candidate tries to get elected in a purple or even blue state, he or she will necessarily have to run and govern as a moderate or centrist – i.e. a RINO. The kind of rock-ribbed conservatives that I prefer would have no chance of getting elected in a purple or blue-leaning state.

So our real-world choice is usually between a frustratingly centrist RINO type – a Susan Collins in Maine or Mitt Romney in Massachusetts – and a far-left loon. And if a Collins or Romney would vote with us more often than not, they are a better option than the leftist alternative we’d get if we ran a ruby-red conservative who was sure to be defeated there.

As the famous dictum of William F. Buckley (Peace Be Upon Him) says, we should vote for the most conservative electable candidate in every race.

What I’ve been describing so far is strategic RINOism, i.e. the pragmatic decision to support mushy moderates with an R beside their name in districts where such candidates are the least bad options, given an electorate that runs the gamut from deep blue to faintly red.

By Satanic RINOism – and I’ll grant you that the adjective may be a tad harsh – I mean mushy candidates pretending to be conservative when running in a deep red district. In such districts, there is no reason for a conservative base to settle for anything less than a consistently conservative candidate; thus, any stealth RINOs in such areas should be run out of town on a rail, forthwith.

Mitt Romney might be the archetypal example. He was a great GOP choice for MA governor, since he was competent, and the most conservative governor anyone could hope to get in that benighted, midnight-blue state. But he was a terrible choice for Utah senator, where he was a Satanic RINO, i.e. a faux conservative who could have governed extremely conservatively, and yet he governed like a strategic RINO centrist, unnecessarily.

Which brings me to the most infuriating current example of an issue on which Satanic RINOs seem to be hell-bound and determined to torture me, personally: the SAVE Act.

This act is a tailor-made, perfect-for-a-mid-year-election issue. By calling for the most common sense, unobjectionable method to preserve the integrity of our sacred democracy – requiring proof of citizenship and proof of identity to vote – it creates the ultimate trap for dishonest, leftist hacks. There are no legitimate grounds on which to oppose it, which is why the pathetic Democrat arguments against it are so transparently corrupt and false.

Their real argument is that the SAVE Act would drastically reduce the amount of fraudulent votes that could be cast. Because the Democrat party depends on those votes – either from illegals, or from imaginary or dead voters – they need to preserve the fraud at all costs. But they can’t say that out loud.

So they are reduced to bald faced lying (the native language of the Left) – “Nobody ever votes illegally in this country!” – or racist and sexist smears against their own voting base – “You can’t expect women and minorities, with their tiny brains and their pathetic ineptitude, to be able to secure a photo ID just like grown-up, intelligent white guys can do!”

Both of those strategies are ballot box poison, as the aggregate of all polling indicates. Overall, Americans favor the SAVE Act by approximately 84-16%! As many as 70% of Democrats are for it, and the numbers among Independents and Republicans are much higher.

This is not a controversial issue like abortion, or a complicated and potentially confusing issue like health care or tax rate policy. It’s simple, easy-to-explain and understand, and a lopsided winner for conservatives. As such, even the most basic, Politics 101 level of competence makes the proper response obvious:

Run on this! Make it the front-and-center, number one issue in your public campaigning. If you’ve got a majority, force votes on this early and often. Use the filibuster – the real one, where you force your opponents to get up and talk for hours and hours – to publicize the debate. Force them to make their ridiculous arguments in public, which will get them on the record, and provide you with hours of invaluable material for honest, devastating future ads.

The ads write themselves. Show Senator X talking to the point of exhaustion in a transparent attempt to block this popular legislation.

Even if you can’t break the filibuster – and everything I’ve read about this issue suggests that we can – you can still get your opponents on the record as voting against this great legislation over and over again. (The ad Voice-Over: “Senator Jackass took 135 votes in the last 3 months. 14 of those votes were to name bridges after himself; 5 were to support Hamas fans in our colleges; 3 were to dedicate post offices. The other 113 were to ensure that illegals and fraudsters can continue to vote in our elections!”)

The issue will even be useful against the treacherous RINOs in your own party, too. Force the spineless wimps representing red states and districts to either vote as conservatively as they’d promised to, or to betray their base, and thus ensure that they’ll be primaried and forced out at the first opportunity. And you’ll also get the ancillary benefit of providing a useful lesson to everyone else in the party: don’t even think about betraying conservatives or you’ll be dispatched just like Thom Tillis or Liz Cheney!

So what is the GOP doing with this golden, election year opportunity? They’re only tepidly supporting it, like feckless weasels.

Unexpectedly!

John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader, representing deep red South Dakota, which last voted Democrat in a presidential election 62 years ago! He’s not up for re-election until 2028. He’s voted mostly conservative – over 90% with Trump during his first term – but not as conservative as he could or should have – voting around 30% with Biden during his posthumous term.

Even given those RINO-esque tendencies, it should be a no-brainer for him to support and push the SAVE Act. But he’s making idiotic excuses not to. He says he doesn’t have the votes to defeat a filibuster, or to pass it in the Senate.

Again, that kind of wussiness might make sense in an election year if it were a controversial issue – a hard-line anti-abortion bill, or a necessary-but-unpopular budget austerity measure. But this is a 90-10 issue with your base, so even if it did actually fail to beat the filibuster, it would then become a great election issue to beat your opponents with!

Even if Thune were just a craven self-preservationist, it would STILL make sense for him to force a vote. Because that would take the pressure off of him (“You can’t blame me, because I supported it and got it to a vote!”) and put it on the posers in his own party and the dishonest creeps in the opposition. Force them to take a stand on it, and then face the consequences if they vote it down.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the week-kneed GOPers — who are whispering that it can’t pass and hoping that they don’t have to vote on it – actually voted for it, if push came to shove.

And dammit, this is one time that push should definitely come to shove!

Even if it means – correction: ESPECIALLY if it means – that some Satanic RINOs are shoved right out of congress if they won’t do the right thing.

Everybody, call your House members and senators about this!

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Tag: Politics

Great News on Many Fronts! (posted 5/1/26)

Get the Popcorn: The Southern Poverty Law Center is Going Down Like the Hindenburg! (posted 4/29/26)

The Democrat Elite Hate Democracy (posted 4/24/26)

More Feel-Good Stories (posted 4/10/26)

Good News From Marco, and Iran, and Our Airports (posted 4/6/2)

While I Suffer, the MSM Continues Their Idiocy (posted 4/3/26)

Two Dem Governors Demonstrate Leftist Folly (posted 3/27/26)

Remembering an Obnoxious Academic (posted 3/23/26)

Everybody’s an Expert on Iran Now (posted 3/20/26)

Strategic RINO-ism vs. Satanic RINO-ism, & the SAVE Act (posted 3/11/26)