Bodegas are what they call little corner stores in New York City. They are mostly owned by foreign-born immigrants who use it as a means to achieve middle-class status

Puerto Ricans gave them the name in the 1940s. They gave way to Dominicans after the original owners moved on up (moved on up). Then Mexico and other Latin American groups came along, as well as many Yemenis. The bodegas are the boots that immigrants use to bootstrap.

Chinese, Koreans and Egyptians moved in and are moving on up (moving on up).

Before bodegas, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Irish and Germans owned many small groceries in earlier waves of immigration but largely moved on or sold to later arrivals.

Mamdani promised a string of city-owned grocery stores to compete with bodegas, which would put them out of business because bodegas have to pay taxes and rent, something a city-owned bodega would not have to do.

Despite this, the United Bodegas of America endorsed him.

That helped drive his support and turnout was the highest in a mayoral race in 50 years.

Most of his support came from foreigners, especially in the Democrat primary, which really decides elections in New York. If you think Governor Chatty Kathy Hochul won’t be re-elected, I have this trestle in Poca, West Virginia, that may interest you.

You get what you vote for, in this case bodega owners voted for a competitor that bodegas will finance through taxes that they pay.

Mamdani argued that grocery costs in the NYC metro area rose 56% from 2012–13 to 2022–23. Nationally, the rise was 46%, but don’t blame the grocers. Blame the system.

• Higher labor, real estate, transportation, and distribution costs in a dense urban area.

• Supply chain vulnerabilities and higher baseline prices.

• Stronger wage pressures and demand.

The war on bodegas is not about groceries. The mayor and his communist masters want to eliminate any means for the poor to rise out of poverty.

Communists and other tyrannies hate middle class people—the bourgeois—because they are not dependent upon government. What made the American Revolution unique was the wealthy led it as a fight for independence. Washington was not seeking to rule as president but to serve.

250 years later, 70% to 80% of Americans are middle class—using European standards.

60% to 70% of Europeans are middle class, again by European standards.

Interestingly, in the USA, 10% to 15% are lower class and 15% to 20% are upper class—by European standards. So we ave more wealty people than we ave poor people.

25% to 30% of Europeans are lower class and only 5% to 10% are upper class—by European standards.

But they beat the heck out of us in income equality.

Big deal. Nominal GDP per capita in current U.S. dollars here is $85,000 to $94,000.

In Europe it is $42,000 to $45,000.

I Grokked those numbers so you don’t have to. I won’t say that being poor in America is the equivalent of being middle class in Europe, but I will note that the income numbers do not include food stamps, rent subsidies, Medicaid or Medicare. The latter dropped the poverty rate for us old people from 30% in the 1960s (the worst age group) to 10% or so today (the least impoverished age group).

How can I call Mamdani communist? An interview by Martha McCollum proved it. Se interviewed Gustavo Gordillo, the architect of the election of the mayor.

Gordillo: “Landlords in New York have been making a 12% return on their investment.”

MacCallum: “How much should they make? What’s fair for the landlord to make?”

Gordillo: “We don’t think that anyone should have a constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment.”

MacCallum: “What are you talking about?”

And later Gordillo said, “If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

Gordillo does not believe his economic nonsense as shown by this exchange.

MacCallum: “Your family came here from Peru really in the middle of the heat of the Shining Path. They were Maoist communist guerrillas in Peru. So why did your family come to America?”

Gordillo: “The economic situation in South America and Peru was in a really bad place much of what we could say was responsible for that actually was the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism. In many cases, it is actually what brings immigrants to the U.S. coming out of Latin America.”

MacCallum: “They come here because they don’t like the imposition of American imperialism in the country that they’re in.”

Gordillo: “Yes.”

Martha MacCallum: “That doesn’t make much sense.”

Oh but it makes plenty of sense. His parents escaped once Peru finally caught Shining Path’s leaders. Now their son wants to create in America a shining path to the hell of communism.

Instead of opening a bodega, his family opened a can of worms and crawled out.

You can bet your biscuits he ain’t middle class.

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ITEM 1: Realtor.com reported, “Kim Kardashian Gives Glimpse Inside Her Custom Idaho Retreat as Lewis Hamilton Joins Family Vacation.”

She moved to Idaho because she thought they named the state after her.

She thought it was called Kardashia.

ITEM 2: Millions of Americans protested against Major League Baseball’s decision to have Netflix broadcast the All-Star Home Run Derby. They said they refused to pay for it and want it shown for free.

And we wonder why DSA communists are gaining traction.

ITEM 3: Hey, Graham Platner, have I found a girl for you.

The Telegraph reported, “Transgender Neo-Nazi sent to women’s prison in Germany.”

ITEM 4: Eric Daugherty tweeted, “Iran is REELING after President Trump ordered CENTCOM to begin targeting infrastructure targets, causing power outages and destruction of bridges.”

Hegseth is destroying infrastructure in Iran like Gavin Newsom is in California.

Call it Operation Snail Darter.

ITEM 5: D. Scott tweeted, “AG Todd Blanche INFURATED Senate Democrats by doubling down and targeting leakers who exposed national security information about President Trump and Air Force One in Turkey.”

Democrats don’t want reporters subpoenaed over national security leaks but were perfectly fine with raiding a president’s home in the name of national security.

ITEM 6: NBC complained, “President Trump sharply reduces the size of two national monuments in Utah, undoing protections established by former presidents on public lands that are sacred among many Native Americans.”

Sacred lands? Good to see Trump enforcing separation of church and state. Liberals like that.

ITEM 7: Inflation in June was 3.5%. Republicans rejoiced because it wasn’t the 3.8% Democrats predicted.

It’s still 3.5%.

GOOD NEWS:

DC’s unemployment rate is 6.1%.

National rate is 4.2%.

ITEM 8: Tampon Tim pardoned Tou Lue Vang, who was convicted of the first-degree sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl, to keep ICE from deporting him.

Walz told reporters, “I can find no reason how Minnesota will be safer or better if Mr. Vang is deported to a country he has not been to since he was a child. I do not see how it would serve his family, nor the economic interest where we have a taxpaying citizen who is creating job growth and living a life free from any criminal activity.”

Yes, and look at all the good things John Wayne Gacy did. As a clown, he cheered many a child before raping and murdering them.

ITEM 9: Canadian forest fires are smoking Americans as far away as Long Island.

Who pays the carbon tax for Canada's fires?

ITEM 10: BBC reported, “Tracking the origin of an outbreak in the US that causes explosive diarrhoea has proved a challenge for public health experts searching for answers about how it started—and how it’s spreading.”

I learned two things in that sentence. 1. BBCs doesn’t know how to spell diarrhea. 2. BBC reporters never ate at Taco Bell. Clearly BBC doesn’t know shit.

ITEM 11: AOL reported, “Syphilis cases in expectant mothers have dramatically risen since the pandemic.”

American Indians gave syphilis to Europeans, so isn’t this cultural appropriation?

ITEM 12: CNN reported, “New York Times fights Trump administration subpoenas for reporters’ testimony.”

The First Amendment is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card for reporters.

ITEM 13: Canadian Kaitlyn Tracey slapped a teenage girl on a beach in New Jersey for wearing pro-Trump garb on Independence Day.

Homeland Security tweeted, “She entered the United States on April 14, 2024, on a visa set to expire on September 6, 2024. In violation of our nation’s laws, she overstayed her visa and failed to depart.”

Question: When we annex Canada, do we get to deport her again?

ITEM 14:

Keep bomb, bomb, bombing Iran. Ironic that this was John McCain’s plan.

ITEM 15: The New York Post reported, “Middle East allies rushing new pipelines, port to bypass Iran’s grip on Strait of Hormuz.”

Let’s hope there are no ancient Indian burial grounds to stop the project.

ITEM 16: Iraq’s new Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi visited the White House. Trump highlighted Iraq’s “tremendous potential” in oil and stated the U.S. would do “a lot of deals,” create jobs for both countries, and take “a lot of oil” out—mostly via American companies.

George Walker Bush was right. A world without Saddam and his sadistic sons is a better place indeed.

ITEM 17: Congresswoman Summer Lee said, “They say we should only rely on so called ‘objective standards’ for medical competence but objective according to who? Having all white male doctors is just as bad as having all white male congressmen.”

An all white male Congress? Sounds good to me because all white male congresses gave us the U.S. and the first 15 amendments to the Constitution.

Also the national debt was equal to 7% of GDP when we had our final all white male Congress in 1916. Today the national debt is equal to 124% of GDP.

ITEM 18: Congresswoman Jahana Hayes told medical school deans, “I am incredibly disappointed that as academic deans you could not immediately answer the question about teaching colonialism in healthcare.”

Yes, how dare we replace witch doctors with real ones. Oo-ee oo-ah-ah that was a ting tang walla walla bing bang mistake.

ITEM 19: Congressman Ro Khanna claimed Israel detained him for 90 minutes on a trip because he is brown. Israel said he was going into restricted areas.

Jussie Khanna.

ITEM 20: The Washington Post panicked and asked, “Cigarettes are back in vogue. How did this happen?”

It’s all those Joe Camel commercials on TV.

ITEM 21: Politico reported, “Former special counsel Jack Smith obtained text messages that 44 members of Congress sent to senior White House officials during the final weeks of President Donald Trump’s first term, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley revealed Tuesday.”

And Democrats thought their Lavrentiy Beria was going to go only after the Orange Man.

(Beria headed Stalin’s secret police.)

ITEM 22: Seeking re-election, Governor Kathy Hochul said, “We’re waiting for the Trump administration to hopefully green-light us on my massive expansion of nuclear. I want to build more nuclear in New York than the entire country has in 30 years.”

New York closed the Indian Point nuke plant 5 years ago. The plant supplied 25% of NYC’s power for years. She has no plans to re-open it. A new nuke plant that size would cost $40 billion to build.

New Yorkers voted for her. The majority deserves to sweat in darkness each summer.

ITEM 23: PJ Media reported, “Chess Is Cool Again, and I’m ‘Young and Hip’ Now!”

They finally figured out how the little horsies move.

ITEM 24: An illegal alien ran from ICE agents right into traffic and was struck and killed in St. Augustine, Florida.

Self-deportation beats suicide.

ITEM 25: The U.S. Mint announced it will issue gold $1 coins featuring President Trump.

Also, the Mint will issue wooden nickels featuring Not Your President Hillary Clinton.

ITEM 26: CBS News reported, “The mothers of black newborns are more likely than those of white newborns to be referred to law enforcement over allegations of substance use during pregnancy, according to The Marshall Project’s new analysis of child welfare data from eight states.”

Must mean black mothers are more likely to use drugs than white mothers.

ITEM 27: Ken Shepherd tweeted, “We all have a person who shares your first name that you think is the worst [first name] in the world. Who’s yours? Mine’s Ken Rosenthal.”

I replied Don We Now Our Gay Apparel.

I hate that guy. I really do.

ITEM 28: Eric Daugherty tweeted, “President Trump has placed his speech teleprompter operator on LEAVE WITHOUT PAY while they’re being investigated for making allegedly $90K on Kalshi by betting on Trump’s speeches.”

Biden would have just split the money with him. 10% to the big guy.

ITEM 29: Collin Rugg tweeted, “Senator Josh Hawley absolutely obliterated the woman who encouraged Biden to grant clemency to Dylann Roof, who murdered 9 black people at church, because he had anxiety.”

Give him a case of Xanax, a Holy Bible and last rites.

ITEM 30: Olive Garden tweeted, “The Never-Ending Pasta Pass is only for use by the Passholder whose name is printed on the Pass. Passes are personalized and non-transferable. Passholders must present a valid photo I.D. along with the Pass at the time of ordering.”

Only in America is pasta protected better than the ballot box. You don’t lead the Western world in obesity without setting your priorities.

ITEM 31: The Patriarch Tree reported, “Wisconsin Backstory: Incumbent Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the mainstream front runner for Governor in the Democratic primary, had to drop out because her campaign manager bungled the fundraising. Now the primary field is a bunch of fringe weirdos and losers.”

Nazis and commies and trans, oh my! Nazis and commies and trans, oh my! Nazis and commies and trans, oh my!

They’ll all drop out and Obama will appoint Biden again.

ITEM 32: Eric Daugherty tweeted, War Consigliere “Pete Hegseth just WON in court: US Appeals Court OVERTURNS lower ruling and allows the Pentagon to block fake news like the New York Times from freely roaming the halls of the Pentagon, which could jeopardize national security information.”

And he did it without using a horse head.

THE BEST OF TWITTER:

Hire him.

Why baseball fans love Bartolo Colon.

Life’s a drag.

The kissing bandit.

Time out.

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The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun!

Just what time that sun’ll come out is up to Congress.

Having balanced the budget, passed the SAVE Act and restricted insider trading by congressmen and congressional staffers, members of the House and the Senate are debating time itself. The issue is whether we should go to year-round daylight savings time, year-round standard time or just leave the whole thing alone and keep changing our clocks twice a year.

Yes, we are slaves to the clockmeisters in Washington who now force us to figure out how to set the time in our cars again. Every six months every driver in America re-discovers that he doesn’t know how to change the clock in his car.

Will we ever get relief from this twice-a-year agony?

This week, the House passed a bill to make daylight savings time permanent. Senator Tom Cotton, using those archaic Senate rules designed to make it more difficult to pass foolish but popular legislation, is clock-blocking adoption of a permanent daylight saving time.

Josh Barro tweeted, “This is exactly what happened in 1974—we have tried permanent daylight saving time before, and the House repealed it after a few months by a vote of 383-16 because it was widely hated. But some people refuse to learn history.”

But it wasn’t REAL clockunism.

Opponents of permanent DST say children will go to school in the dark. The idea of simply opening schools at 9 AM never occurs to them.

Can you tell that I am retired and don’t really care if the sun rises at 4 AM or 9 PM? I post my newsletters at 7 AM Eastern regardless of the position of the sun.

DST or Standard, the Early Bird specials at Golden Corral start at 2 PM pronto. The AARP generation will not abide any delays. Canes can hurt. Don’t make us prove it, young man.

We inherited this mess from those robber barons who ran the railroads in the 19th century—the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Huntingtons. There may have even been a Rothschild or two involved. You cannot have a good conspiracy theory without throwing in a Rothschild.

Life was simpler before those noisy infernal machines—Iron Horses—took over with their iron tracks and unsightly trestles. Noon was when the sun was at its highest in your town. Americans got along swell with more than 300 local times.

But then that darned Lincoln stuck his nose in and pushed for a transcontinental railroad. You would think that he had enough on his hands with civil war. But no.

The railroads discovered that running trains through 300 different local times is a nightmare. This directly contributed to collisions. A notable early example was the 1853 Providence & Worcester Railroad crash in Rhode Island, where a conductor misread time (due to local variations) led to a head-on collision killing 14 and injuring dozens. That year saw 11 major accidents killing 121 people.

The Brits—who had the first railway—had already done away with local times by adopting Greenwich Mean Time.

Cleveland Abbe, a noted astronomer and father of the National Weather Service, was among the scientists who suggested four time zones across the land. Time would make the railroads run on.

In April 1883, railroad executives met in St. Louis to discuss it. They met again that October, this time in Chicago, and decided that at noon on November 18, 1883, we would adopt Standard Time. In some cities, it became the Day With Two Noons as people had to set their clocks back to noon. Others had to go forward.

Some mourned the change. The Indianapolis Sentinel opined:

Railroad time is to the time of the future. The Sun is no longer to boss the job. People—all 55,000,000 of them—must eat, sleep and work as well as travel by railroad time. It is a revolt, a rebellion. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange. People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time—banks will open and close by railroad time—in fact, the Railroad Convention has taken charge of the time business, and the people may as well set about adjusting their affairs in accordance with its decree… . We presume the sun, moon and stars will make an attempt to ignore the orders of the Railroad Convention, but they, too, will have to give in at last.

The Indianapolis Sentinel’s time was up on February 25, 1906, when it ceased publication.

But most of those 55 million Americans really did not give it much thought. Standard Time was convenient and if there is one thing Americans agree on, it is convenience is a very convenient thing to have.

This was all done in the marketplace—a problem solved without a federal bureaucracy’s decree and without any congressional hearings.

All went swell for nearly 35 years until Congress stuck its nose in, using the excuse of entering the Great War, which we now call World War One. The Standard Time Act of 1918 formally adopted on March 15, 1918, the time everyone already was using—and replaced Standard Time with Daylight Saving Time.

That’s how government gets its kicks, by taking something that works perfectly well and fixing it. The people rebelled and Congress repealed it the next year. When World War Two began, Congress seized the opportunity to impose DST on us again.

By the way, Ben Franklin did not invent DST. He mocked it.

Franklin wrote a satirical essay in 1784 while in Paris, titled “An Economical Project,” published in the Journal de Paris. In it, he jokingly suggested that Parisians rise earlier with the sun to save on candle costs, proposing measures like taxing shutters or firing cannons at sunrise to wake people. He was poking fun at late risers and highlighting the value of natural light, not proposing a modern clock adjustment system.

It is rather difficult to adjust a sundial.

The sun will come out on Christmas Day in Poca, West Virginia. Whether the time is 7:38 AM or 8:38 AM is up to Congress. If only they invested as much time and effort into saving Social Security as they do in saving daylight.

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Destroying Iran’s military threat to the world bounced President Trump’s approval back to 49% in the latest Rasmussen Poll. That’s his maximum just as it was for Lincoln. While the media claims the world has turned against him, the fact is he and America are on the top of the world, looking down on creation.

His Shield of the Americas group (officially known as Americas Counter Cartel Coalition) designed to battle drug cartels now has 17 members: the United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Colombia elected a new president who says he’ll join. Trump likely will pressure Venezuela to join.

In recent decades, the banana republics became drug cartel republics. Bukele’s election changed that by putting the soldiers of the drug cartels in prison—a very hard and harsh prison worthy of their terrorism. Other countries are following and we are giving him some of our trash that Biden brought in.

Trump taking out Maduro sent a strong message to the world and the Western Hemisphere. (If, as I believe he is doing, Maduro starts singing that will explain the presence of 32 Cuban guards protecting him; they were prison guards, not bodyguards.)

The Donroe Doctrine means Latin America will stop abusing the United States and that extends to Red China. In January, the Panama Supreme Court ruled that Red China’s control of the Panama Canal was unconstitutional. The USA does not control it (thanks a pantsload, Jimmy Carter) but now neither does the Chinese Communist Party.

As for Carter, sure our lease would have been up in 2006 but certainly Clinton or Bush could have gotten an extension.

Trump has changed the world’s attitude toward the USA—for the better.

Don’t take my word for it. Victor Davis Hanson said:

The world that we’re looking at today is radically different than that of just five years ago, radically different in the sense that it is much more in the interest of the United States. And I know that seems controversial because Trump is written off as someone who is too fluid and volatile.

His tweets, his verbiage, can put people off, but that’s the art-of-the-deal unpredictability of his nature. Some of it can be a drawback, some of it an advantage, but overall, it doesn’t help analysis to just look at what he says. It’s more important to see what he’s done.

I’m not a professor so I will just say action speaks louder than words.

What about Canada and Europe, you may ask.

Both are a mess.

If we adopted Canada as our 51st state, it would rank 50th in GDP per capita behind West Virginia. We would have to update the saying to, “Thank God for Mississippi and Canada.”

Basically, Canada is a mooch with most Canadians living along the American border. Their vaunted universal health care now includes killing patients in the name of medically assisted suicide. Its acronym is MAiD in Canadianese.

5% of the deaths in Canada are courtesy of MAiD. Killing people with severe depression is humane but executing murderers is barbarian.

The average wait to see a cardiologist is 18 days in the USA and 18 weeks (126 days) in Canada.

Oops. That 18 weeks is in the UK. Canada’s average wait is 28 weeks. 196 days? May as well make the wait until Canada wins another Stanley Cup.

The wait for MAiD is zero for people except the mentally ill. They have to wait 8 months.

As for Europe, VDH said, “Five years ago, Europe had been jawboned by Donald Trump in his first term to at least spend 2% [on defense]. Only six nations did so. He jawboned them, he threatened them. Six [more] nations did so.

“Now, almost 30 of 32 nations have agreed to spend 2% of GDP. But more importantly, they have now all agreed to spend 5%.”

Canada and Spain are the NATO holdouts.

What about Red China, you may ask.

Well, it is sitting on a $1.2 trillion annual trade surplus so it is doing all right. We narrowed our trade deficit considerably last year but the rest of the world is hooked on cheap labor.

But boy is Red China taking it in the cheeks when it comes to oil. Last year, it imported 11.6 million barrels per day. It paid $73 to $89 a barrel.

This year imports are down to 11.1 million BPD at $96 to $116 per barrel.

Iran, Iraq and Venezuela supplied 17% to 19% of the oil Red China used last year. Trump now controls two of them and Iraq’s new prime minister dropped by the White House to discuss having American companies invest in Iraq’s oil.

Why not just have Russia make up the difference, you may ask.

The answer is because Chairman Xi is dealing with Russia, which is not the most efficient oil producer in the world. More importantly, its pipelines and freight railways to Red China are maxxed out.

Ontop of that, its production has fallen by 30% as Ukrainian drones take out its refineries.

So while some complain that the Strait of Hormuz problems help Russia by raising prices (and shame on Europe for becoming dependent on Russia), the situation is hurting Red China.

Actually, the U.S. military is taking care of the problem.

VDH pointed out that the CCP’s Belt and Road plan to turn Latin America into a dependent has failed as voters elect more Trump friendly leaders. He also pointed out Operation Absolute Resolve and Operation Epic Fury proved the worthlessness of Red China’s and Russia’s air defenses, which does not bode well for an invasion of Taiwan.

Hanson also picked up on something I have mentioned since Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in 2017 (back when I was blogging). Trump brought the Arabs and Israel together. Both bombed Iran this time! Israel is selling the Arabs air defense systems.

VDH said:

Did anybody ever believe that Israel would be supplying missile defense to Arab countries in the Gulf?

Did any person ever believe that the supposedly indomitable, scary, terrifying, formidable Iran—93 million people with an unpredictable theocratic terrorist regime that had killed more Americans through terrorism than anyone since 9/11—would be dealt with and that its military, nuclear, and industrial complex would be neutered?

And that’s where it is today. After it broke many of its protocols, I think we now are seeing the correct U.S. policy. What Trump is going to do is, the first time they continue to hit us, he hits them back disproportionately—10 times more damage on them than they inflict.

The time is running out for them.

Kissinger said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

America is flexing and using its power.

Yep, Trump is on top of the world, but I caution readers that the gangster movie White Heat ended with Jimmy Cagney saying, “Made it, ma! Top of the world.”

Then they gunned him down.

But I prefer the optimism of The Carpenters who were on top of the world, looking down on creation.

Praise the Lord.

Donald Trump certainly has.

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On June 24, 2026, two earthquakes hit Venezuela back-to-back. They registered 7.2 and 7.5, numbers that are pretty high on the Richter scale. The military sent in the Marines (and other branches). The State Department worked with charities such as Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision and Catholic Relief Services to avoid the confusion that occurred in the successful response to the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti.

Trump put Marco Rubio in charge. He initially pledged $100 million in support. That’s since been upped to $386 million.

On July 2, the military’s Southern Command reported:

Marking the first visit by a U.S. Navy vessel to Venezuela in decades, Fort Lauderdale safely arrived pierside in La Guaira on the evening of June 28. The historic port call, executed at the direct request of the Venezuelan government, was preceded by U.S. Sailors and Marines delivering critically needed disaster relief supplies to the port via landing craft.

“Being directed at a moment’s notice to transit into Venezuela presented a vast number of unknowns, but the one absolute certainty was the unmatched professionalism and work ethic of the Fort Lauderdale team,” said Capt. Jiwan Mack, commanding officer of USS Fort Lauderdale. “We were able to safely arrive pierside and deliver immediate assistance to the Venezuelan people because of the incredible dedication of our crew.”

The presence of embarked Sailors and Marines is strictly humanitarian. As a highly capable and self-sustaining platform designed for extended expeditionary operations, Fort Lauderdale requires minimal local security, logistical support or port resources while pierside. This minimal footprint ensures that all local Venezuelan assets can remain entirely focused on domestic recovery efforts.

Beyond cargo transport, Fort Lauderdale brings advanced onboard medical facilities, heavy-lift capabilities and robust command-and-control infrastructure. Functioning as a primary coordination hub, the ship recently hosted the Venezuelan chargé d’affaires and serves as a vital communications node. This enables SOUTHCOM to work seamlessly with the State Department, interagency partners and interim Venezuelan authorities to direct rapid relief operations across the affected areas.

A month earlier, the U.S. military carried out a strike that killed the leader of Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua.

In this mission, the Pentagon sent in 900 servicemen. At its peak in Haiti, the USA had 22,000 servicemen in country.

But the two events were different and lessons from Haiti were applied in Venezuela. One of the lessons was less is more when it comes to sending in military personnel. Another was better coordination with charities.

The Christian Post gave a shout out to the State Department working with various charities to get relief to the Venezuelans.

As part of the logistics strategy, the State Department announced the creation of a humanitarian air bridge to facilitate the entry of supplies into the South American country.

Amazon will provide weekly flights from Miami, Florida, to Maiquetía, Venezuela, covering the transportation costs. Cargo management and flight planning are handled by Airlink, a non-governmental organization specializing in connecting aviation with humanitarian efforts.

Once the supplies arrive in Venezuelan territory, the logistics cluster led by the World Food Program is responsible for coordinating the delivery to the organizations operating on the ground.

The operation includes the participation of the Department of War to address logistical challenges in coastal areas. The USS Fort Lauderdale is positioned off the coast of La Guaira state. Sailors and Marine Corps personnel are using amphibious and landing craft to transport supplies directly to hard-to-reach areas.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Southern Command is supporting operations at Simón Bolívar International Airport, where repairs were made to a runway to enable the arrival of humanitarian flights.

Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 killed more than 300,000 people. Estimates are 4,490 died from the earthquakes in Venezuela. The placement of an earthquake matters more than the Richter scale. Haiti’s was closer to a population center.

Also, Haiti is a shithole with no building codes. Little thought was given to the possibility of an earthquake.

Shithole is an objective assessment. It was a deadlier disaster but did at best $8.5 billion in damage. Early estimates in Venezuela are $10 billion to $37 billion because Venezuela is a land worthy of investment and building codes.

Buildings can be replaced. People cannot.

Rather than praising the administration’s efforts, the New York Times reported, “U.S. Mobilizes for Venezuela Despite Trump’s Disdain for Foreign Aid.”

Helping out a devastated nation indeed is foreign aid, but throwing billions to Democrat Party NGOs and overseas dictators is graft and corruption.

The story tried to do a gotcha, NYT got itself.

The most urgent priority after an earthquake is the deployment of search-and-rescue teams able to find survivors, who have just hours to live if trapped in rubble. The State Department has sent three such teams totaling 300 people. The teams are from Los Angeles, the Miami area and Fairfax, Va.

The size and speed of the U.S. deployment to Venezuela were on par with previous efforts, said Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a director of disaster response at USAID during the Obama administration.

So ending USAID did not lead to catastrophe.

Instead, the disaster response proved that ending USAID had no effect on the world.

Well, except for the grifters going penniless.

Oh and there’s one last difference between Haiti and Venezuela. This time our Secretary of State does NOT have a fake charity to launder foreign donations in the name of earthquake relief.

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128 days after the IDF Cremation Services un-alived the ayatollah, Iran finally got to give their Supreme Leader a funeral. Israel and the United States agreed not to bomb the ceremony because that is the decent thing to do especially when millions of innocent civilians are weeping for him.

Do not fall for media claims that Iranians want to overthrow their government. Sure, some opposition voices (and exile media) are already predicting the regime’s collapse. There are like the pundits here who claim Texas will turn blue or New York will turn red.

For 70 million Iranians under 50, this is the only system they’ve known. For those under 40, Khamenei was the only Supreme Leader they ever had. They felt his death.

Some real Americans saw the funeral as an opportunity to kill the enemy. They believed Trump was showing weakness.

Doing the decent thing was good PR and excellent strategy. Trump knew Iran would take this as a signal to start throwing bombs at the Strait of Hormuz and our Arab allies in the Middle East.

Big mistake as our rockets red glare, mullahs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our military was still there.

That Memorandum of Understanding Iran agreed to a month ago allowed Trump to retaliate and he has and he will continue doing so. Those who said Iran would reload under the MOU overlooked that we were reloading as well.

How wrong his critics were about the MOU were. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute wrote, “Trump’s chief accomplishment, unfortunately, has been to make Neville Chamberlain look like Winston Churchill.”

Jonah Goldberg wrote, “The three objectives he cited: ‘ending the current conflict,’ ‘reopening the Strait of Hormuz,’ and ‘preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.’ So by his own accounting a goal of the war he started was to end the war he started. Another was to open a waterway that was open until he started it. And to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon, which he has not done.”

David Frum—who once called Iran part of an Axis of Evil—said, “The United States lost the war. It’s now struck a very disadvantageous peace. The interim agreement is bad enough because it gives Iran all.”

All of what? A taste of all our types of bombs and missiles as well as practice for our pilots?

Yes, we lost our navy, our air force and our air defense. Oh wait. That was Iran, the clear victor. Ri-i-i-i-ight.

What part of Never Bet Against Donald Trump do these geniuses not understand?

Plenty. Mike Pence, still ticked for being kept off the 2024 ticket, said of the MOU, “It smacks of appeasement.”

Bill Cassidy, fresh from being primaried by MAGA, said, “Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

I guess the 13 service members who died in FJB’s actual surrender of Afghanistan and the loss of billions in military equipment were a success in the mind of Hop Along To Get Along Cassidy.

Yes, the Memorandum of Understanding said Iran could get this or that—Trump never ever offered $300 billion in U.S. aid to the (pick your profanity) Muslims—but those incentives were possible only if Iran behaved itself.

Iranians could no more behave themselves than dogs can stop sniffing each other’s butts. Why not because everyone not on the first row on those prayer rugs bends to the row ahead of them. Five times a day. I wonder if they rotate that front row.

The IRGC, which runs Iran, suffers the same delusion too many world leaders do. They keep believing they can outlast President Trump because he will leave office in January 2029. They bet that a Democrat will replace him and it will be the third Obama presidency with its usual mix of Marxism, anti-Semitism and looting of the treasury.

They refuse to recognize that Democrats have no candidate—not even dimwitted and senile FJB. The best they can do is Kamala. Maybe they will go with a more feminine version—Ro Khanna.

Back to the forecasters of failure.

Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies—superhawks—said, “The actual MOU is deeply flawed. The administration needs to stop defending it beyond stating the truth: It’s a stopgap measure to resupply energy markets, lower gas prices, and help Republicans in the midterms.”

That’s not a terrible take. Trump learned from Israel how to handle Iran. After October 7, Israel relentlessly leveled Gaza City and the underground military base it shielded. The world turned against Israel.

Trump decided to go Dave Brubeck and Take Five.

Iran fooled around and fell in FAFO. The Iranians resumed bombing after the funeral.

Big mistake as the Air Force and the Navy unloaded again. The world could not begrudge the man. He had an MOU. They failed to keep their word. As Admiral Dewey said more than a century ago, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.”

On Monday, as the smoke cleared from the guns of Trump’s Gridley, Pete Hegseth, President Trump went on Fox News and said:

We’re taking over the strait. They [the leaders of the Iranian regime] have nothing.

Yesterday, they had an 11-hour meeting. Everything’s 11 hours with these guys. Everything was agreed to yesterday. And they leave the room and they call back and they say, ‘We had to make a couple of changes.’ I said, ‘Changes? They’re going to make changes? We’re not going to make changes.’

For 47 years, they’ve been tapping presidents along. Every president got tapped along, didn’t do anything, and they became more and more powerful. This should have been done 47 years ago. It shouldn’t have been allowed to start.

The Memo Of Understanding was a ruse—a way to show the world that Iran wants war, not peace. Iran was the dope he roped. Now he is free to get the job done. The MOU showed once again, Trump is crazy like a fox.

Those who doubted him may wish to re-assess how they came to that conclusion.

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Senator Lindsey Graham died this weekend from a heart attack, two days after his 71st birthday. He left behind no wife, no children and not much of a fortune—at best $3 million after 33 years in Congress.

But he bequeathed to the American people a fair and impartial Supreme Court that had the boldness to take on the powers of the federal bureaucracy (West Virginia v. EPA) and return to the states powers previous courts and Congress had stolen (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization).

Jack Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage, a collection of brief profiles of 8 past senators who stood up for what they believed was right.

For example, JFK cited Robert Taft for criticizing the Nuremberg Trials for trying Nazi war criminals under ex post facto laws. It cost Taft—Mr. Republican—his party’s presidential nomination in 1948. I don’t know if that was a good thing or not given that a Taft victory would have given him the nomination in 1952, blocking Eisenhower from ever becoming president.

But I do know that it was a good thing for the nation that the good people of South Carolina entrusted one of their two Senate seats in Lindsey Graham.

His parents ran the Sanitary Café in Central, South Carolina, a combination bar, restaurant, liquor store and pool room. At a very young age, he ran the pool room. For years, they lived in a single room behind the café until they had enough money to buy a trailer, which sat out back.

Graham’s parents died when he was in college, leaving him a sister to care for. He adopted her and she lived with an aunt and uncle. He graduated from college and law school before joining the Air Force, where he served as a JAG officer.

60 Minutes did a story on his defense of an airman charged with using marijuana. This led to the Air Force correcting its drug testing.

After 6 years of active duty, Graham joined the South Carolina Air National Guard and retired as a colonel.

Graham rose through the ranks in the House and later the Senate, rising to chairman of the judiciary committee, which screens judicial nominations.

His sense of decency and his collegiality served the nation well at a crucial moment when a false accusation of sexual harassment threatened the Supreme Court for a second time.

In the summer of 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired. Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh as his successor. The American Bar Association unanimously endorsed Kavanaugh as Well Qualified, its highest rating. Later, the ABA gave the same unanimous endorsement to Ketanji Brown-Jackson.

Because without Kennedy, the court was divided evenly between conservatives and liberals, Democrats wanted to block the nomination, believing they could win back the Senate and block any Trump nominee for two years until they would cheat and elect Joe “Of All People” Biden. Obama already planned the 2020 steal.

Democrats decided to use their Acme Anita Hill Ray Gun once again, even though it failed to stop Clarence Thomas in 1991.

This time the liar was a psychology professor from California—Christine Blasey Ford—who claimed that Kavanaugh threw her on a bed drunk and groped her at a party somewhere in Bethesda, Maryland, sometime in the summer of 1982 when she was 15 and he was 17.

She had no witnesses. Three people she claimed were at the party did not recall the party. Kavanaugh produced his calendar from 1982 which showed no such party.

Nevertheless, Republican senators were reluctant to endorse him.

Graham rose to the occasion and used his interview time to make Kavanaugh’s case.

GRAHAM: Are you aware that at 9:23 on the night of July the 9th, the day you were nominated to the Supreme Court by President Trump, Senator Schumer said 23-minutes after your nomination, “I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have, I have (sic) a bipartisan—and I hope a bipartisan majority will do the same. The stakes are simply too high for anything less.” Well, if you weren’t aware of it, you are now. Did you meet with Senator Dianne Feinstein on August 20th?

KAVANAUGH: I did meet with Senator Feinstein.

GRAHAM: Did you know that her staff had already recommended a lawyer to Dr. Ford?

KAVANAUGH: I did not know that.

GRAHAM: Did you know that her and her staff had this—allegations for over 20 days?

KAVANAUGH: I did not know that at the time.

GRAHAM: If you wanted a FBI investigation, you could have come to us. What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020. You’ve said that, not me. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.

When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello because I voted for them. I would never do to them what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics. And if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy.

Are you a gang rapist?

KAVANAUGH: No.

GRAHAM: I cannot imagine what you and your family have gone through.

Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham. That you knew about it and you held it. You had no intention of protecting Dr. Ford; none. She’s as much of a victim as you are. God, I hate to say it because these have been my friends. But let me tell you, when it comes to this, you’re looking for a fair process? You came to the wrong town at the wrong time, my friend.

Do you consider this a job interview?

KAVANAUGH: If the advise and consent role is like a job interview.

GRAHAM: Do you consider that you’ve been through a job interview?

KAVANAUGH: I’ve been through a process of advice and consent under the Constitution, which...

GRAHAM: Would you say you’ve been through hell?

KAVANAUGH: I’ve been through hell and then some.

GRAHAM: This is not a job interview.

KAVANAUGH: Yes.

GRAHAM: This is hell. This is going to destroy the ability of good people to come forward because of this crap. Your high school yearbook—you have interacted with professional women all your life, not one accusation. You’re supposed to be Bill Cosby when you’re a junior and senior in high school. And all of a sudden, you got over it. It’s been my understanding that if you drug women and rape them for two years in high school, you probably don’t stop.

Here’s my understanding, if you lived a good life people would recognize it, like the American Bar Association has, the gold standard. His integrity is absolutely unquestioned. He is the very circumspect in his personal conduct, harbors no biases or prejudices. He’s entirely ethical, is a really decent person. He is warm, friendly, unassuming. He’s the nicest person—the ABA.

The one thing I can tell you should be proud of Ashley, you should be proud of this—that you raised a daughter who had the good character to pray for Dr. Ford.

To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics. You want this seat? I hope you never get it.

I hope you’re on the Supreme Court, that’s exactly where you should be. And I hope that the American people will see through this charade. And I wish you well. And I intend to vote for you and I hope everybody who’s fair-minded will.

The vote for Kavanaugh was 50-48—the narrowest margin for a Supreme Court Justice. Clarence Thomas held the previous record, 52-48.

I apologize for delaying today’s newsletter but I don’t write on Sunday. I seldom do obituaries but Senator Graham rose to the occasion. He saved the Supreme Court, which was the pinnacle of a career of true public service.

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UPDATE: 4 hours after the newsletter posted, President Trump voted for Sister Darline.

ITEM 1: It used to be all about the Benjamins. Thanks to Bidenflation, the $1,000 bill, which features President Cleveland, has replaced the $100 bill.

Now it is all about the Grovers.

OK, I used the line in a previous newsletter but a reader sent this image and it was too good to throw away.

ITEM 2: In a segment on Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization, CNN quoted a tweet from non-existent Congressman Jack Kimball.

Senators Anita Mann, Mike Hunt and Ben Dover must have been unavailable for comment.

ITEM 3: Democrats struggled to find a replacement for Graham “Cracker” Platner for the Senate in Maine.

Hard to nominate a normal person when your party has none.

ITEM 4: CNN tweeted:

The 2026 Dem insurgency is a new tea party on steroids

Approval of Own Party

🔵 Democrats 2026: 47%

🔴 Republicans 2010: 52%

House Members that have lost primaries:

🔵 Democrats 2026: 5

🔴 Republicans 2010: 2

Judging by what happened to the Tea Party, expect massive disappointment within the Vodka Party next year.

ITEM 5: France beat Morocco in that World Cup thingy. Moroccans tried to burn down the Eiffel Tower.

So I thank the USA team for tanking to Belgium because I would not want to have my Belgian waffles burnt.

The Moroccan moles also vandalized London, which was a relief to all the children they didn’t defile that night.

ITEM 6: The Patriot Front photo-bombed the celebration of America’s 250th.

They pose such a danger that no reporters interviewed them and CNN did not doxx any of them.

Did I spell “psyop” correctly?

ITEM 7: After Iranians reneged on the previous Memorandum of Understanding, the USA delivered a new one called Ka-Boom.

Welcome back to FAFO.

ITEM 8: Housing prices have fallen in Red China’s 70 major cities from a peak in September 2021 to a low that wipes out 20 years of gains.

They must have communist mayors like Chicago, LA and NYC do.

ITEM 9: Secretary Marco Rubio tweeted, “Laotian national Tou Lue Vang was convicted of sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl in Minnesota.

“He was set to be deported until GovernorWalz issued him a pardon.

“Then, I revoked his legal status. ICE has removed him from the U.S. and he will never endanger another American.”

Too bad we couldn’t send Tampon Tim with him.

ITEM 10: For the last time, liberalism is NOT a mental illeness.

NYT reported, “Democrats at every level of the party assumed that women who had supported Mr. Platner would be thrilled that he was being pushed out of the race. Instead, some women in this independent-minded slice of the country who powered the progressive upstart’s meteoric rise are angry and grieving.”

Never mind.

ITEM 11: Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed legislation permanently eliminating the state’s requirement that high school students demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math to earn a diploma.

Keep them dumb and ignorant and Democrat.

ITEM 12: Alabama police arrested Democrat Andrew Gillum for driving with meth, bongs and pot. He was on Hillary’s short list for VP in 2016 and Obama campaigned hard for him for governor of Florida in 2018.

Well, at least this time Gillum wasn’t found wasted in a motel room with gay prostitutes.

He’d make a good chef for the Obamas.

ITEM 13: An ICE agent shot and killed an illegal alien who rammed a federal vehicle.

The media says he’s a father of 3 who has lived in the country for 35 years. That means he had 35 years and 10 federal programs to get legal.

ITEM 14: Mitch McConnell has been in the hospital for a month and had a heart attack on Friday. Matt Drudge asked, “Cover up to avoid election?”

He was faking it only if he clutched his chest and hollered, “This is the big one, Elizabeth! I’m coming to join you, honey!”

ITEM 15: Charles Schwab held a half-billion bucks in escrow for Donald Trump until last August when judges defenestrated Tish James’s bogus lawsuit. Schwab used an automated trading program, which made 21,000 trades in 11 months and made a pile of money for Trump.

The president should thank New York’s attorney general for making all this possible.

ITEM 16: The Daily Mail reported, “Britney Spears horrifies drivers as she CLIMBS OUT of car roof on busy freeway months after DUI arrest.”

Remember when the New York Times campaigned to “Free Britney”?

ITEM 17: The U.S. House is expected to vote on abolishing the seasonal time changes. under the Sunshine Protection Act.

Eric Daugherty tweeted, “Get it done! This would mean no more changing the clock.”

Finally, voters will catch a break from Congress. Never mind the SAVE Act and passing a nation concealed carry law. Changing the clock twice a year will save the public two minutes each year.

ITEM 18: Mossad tweeted, “Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif says he spoke with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian about the ongoing conflict, reaffirming Islamabad’s willingness to mediate.”

A ceasefire depends on whether the USA needs to reload.

There’s an old Persian saying—trust but obliterate.

ITEM 19: President Trump fired the remaining Democrat members of the independent Election Assistance Commission on Thursday.

I haven’t been this upset since my bank fired Willie Sutton from its board of directors.

ITEM 20: An official in Mayor Mamdani’s office tried meeting with Iran, but the State Department reminded her of the Logan Act.

Send this Juanita Valdez back to Colombia where she can pick coffee beans.

ITEM 21: Palm Beach’s airport officially became Donald J. Trump International Airport and Casino.

OK, I added the casino part.

ITEM 22: This week’s reason for hating Mark Zuckerberg: Meta’s data center in Wyoming contaminated Cheyenne’s water supply.

Hear me out. We build a human-sized hamster wheel and have Zuckerberg generate all the electricity Meta needs.

Ever notice that when the crowd that pushes solar power and windmills suddenly want coal, which generates 60% of the electricity used in Wyoming, which is the No. 1 coal state in the nation—by far.

ITEM 23: Media-ite reported, “Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is reportedly divorcing husband Bryon in the wake of a bombshell report he was involved in the online cross-dressing scene.”

She’s just mad because he looks better in heels.

ITEM 24: Palantir’s Chief Tech Officer said, “For $10 billion, Elon Musk put 300 rockets in orbit. For $11 billion, the state of California has built 1,600 feet of elevated rail—with no rail.”

To be fair, Musk didn’t have to pay off any stooges, inspectors and regulators.

ITEM 25: The low-budget movie Young Washington opened and topped Supergirl at the box office. 294 years old and GW is still kicking butt.

But I was surprised that it wasn’t a Mel Brooks production like Young Frankenstein. Come on. They could have at least included a musical number with Dancing Hessians.

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The globalist Wall Street Journal published a two-part series on European resentment of Trump and hence, America. It was pretty good stuff.

The first part began:

It was almost midnight in Brussels and the leaders of Europe were locked in their fifth hour of an emergency meeting with a single theme for discussion: how to manage a breakup with America.

The new year was only three weeks old and President Trump, after removing Venezuela’s autocratic strongman, had briefly threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark. Around a circular table in the European Council headquarters known as “The Space Egg,” heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.” There were no cameras or recordings and each of the presidents and prime ministers was told to come alone, no phones allowed, for a moment to speak candidly.

Why would removing Maduro—a narco-terrorist whom no one recognized as a legitimate president—cause such hyperventilating by our European allies?

They should be glad that Superamerica removed another threat to world peace. Instead, our friends held a five-hour therapy session.

The story said:

“We are drawing a line here,” began Emmanuel Macron, president of France, according to several leaders present and their most senior aides. For a year, America’s closest allies had tried to placate Trump with a mix of flattery and concessions on mutual-defense and trade issues, hoping to buy time. Now, French soldiers were in Greenland, alongside Danish special forces equipped for a shooting war with America. The French president repeated an argument he’d been pressing for years, with mounting urgency: that Europe’s overreliance on America was a security risk. “There is no going back,” he said.

Ah yes, Greenland.

We cannot invade Greenland because we already are there. U.S. military forces have been there longer than Denmark’s because we went in after the Danes surrendered to the Germans, exhausted from 6 hours of fighting in 1940.

The WSJ piece propped up a former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney.

Several participants mentioned a man who wasn’t in the room. Mark Carney, the new Canadian prime minister, had been regularly messaging Europe’s major leaders using a British phone number from his time in London, trying to persuade them that “the old America isn’t coming back.” Now, on the heels of a blistering speech at the annual Davos gathering, his arguments were gaining ground. “Canada,” said the prime minister of Spain, “is openly saying what we should do.”

In the months to come, the January crisis meeting would be remembered by Europe’s most powerful figures as the moment that countries bound together by blood and a sense of shared destiny since the aftermath of World War II began to explore separate paths.

The Wall Street Journal series framed its narrative as a wrestling match with the heroic Carney leading Europe to rally against the evil Trump with NATO chief Mark Rutte, former prime minister of Netherlands, as the referee.

Why are they miffed?

In his first presidency, Trump pushed NATO allies to fulfill their obligation—their vow—their promise—their sacred oath to dedicate 2% of their GDPs to defending themselves.

Like Americans, Europeans, too. question why they should pay to defend Europe.

The average NATO ally was spending 1.4% of GDP on its military when he took office on January 20, 2017.

Nine years later, it is 2.3%. Rutte calls the increase in spending the Trump Trillion.

We still lead the league in both dollars and percents as we spend more than Europe on the military. Way more.

Our government also spends more on health care. Europe spends ~€1.25 trillion a year on universal health care for 420 million people.

The U.S. government spends ~€2.19 trillion on Medicaid, Medicare and other health programs. That figure includes ~€300 billion from the states for Medicaid.

The difference in medicine is the United States does not consider assisted suicide health care. Rodney Dangerfield used to joke, “I don’t get no respect. I called Suicide Prevention. They tried to talk me into it.”

That’s now policy in Canada where medically assisted suicide accounts for 5% of its deaths.

Trump wants NATO allies to increase their military spending 3.5% so he called for a 5% minimum as he opened negotiations. Europe balked. They held a meeting last June. WSJ recalled it a year later:

On June 24, Trump landed in The Hague, Rutte’s hometown, where the NATO secretary-general handed him a huge foreign-policy win. The alliance, Trump said, was no longer a rip-off for the U.S. One after the next, the West’s most powerful politicians took turns praising Trump in a closed-door session for strengthening the alliance he had threatened to leave. But Carney was more restrained—Trump would see through the praise, his aides reasoned, and think less of them for it.

Some leaders tried to lighten the mood. The Slovenian prime minister congratulated Trump for pressuring his country to raise defense spending, saying that if anybody knew how stubborn Slovenians could be, it was the husband of Melania Trump. Trump smiled at the joke. Bulgaria’s prime minister couldn’t help but notice how forced the whole performance felt.

“There was laughter in the room, but it masked deep anxiety,” said Rosen Zhelyazkov, the then-prime minister. “European leaders still clung to the belief that they could manage Donald Trump through diplomatic flattery and personal charm.”

The Wall Street Journal failed to state exactly why 29 assumed allies want to manage the president of the United States.

Part two of this epic journalism was all about praising Carney as the savior of Europe. Part two said:

As Carney took charge in early 2025, he commissioned a sensitive review that he would discuss one-on-one with his closest aides, in his office or aboard the jet officially call-signed CanForce 1: How dependent was Canada on one particular country for its data storage, military hardware, payments processing and even food?

It was Carney’s first crack at a riddle that would come to bedevil governments on both sides of the Atlantic. What to do when your closest ally turns into a threat?

His prescription in large part would lay in Europe, where Carney, a former Bank of England governor, had made his past and now saw Canada’s future. The Canadian banker who never before held elected office would emerge as an unexpected central figure in a high-stakes project to reshape the economic and military community known as the West.

Since World War II the alliance had worked like a wheel: The U.S. as the indispensable hub and the rest as spokes. Carney argued that Canada and Europe would have to build an alternative model, a “dense web of connections” that wouldn’t overly depend on any single country. His approach contrasted to that of another influential leader, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who was encouraging Europe to double down on its relationship with Trump—whatever it took to keep America from abandoning the alliance.

So the first action of the newly elect head of an ally was to cut off ties with its neighbor and top trading partner.

That tells you who is his boss. He went from Governor of the Bank of Canada to the same job at the Bank of England. That’s 14 years of running a central bank.

After his term ended, he ran for Parliament?

He did not take presidency at some private financial institution that would easily pay 10 times what he made at the bank?

Instead he ran for a seat in Parliament. Amazingly, he became prime minister just five years later. The wheels were greased. As I said, his first act was to go after the United States.

He negotiated a trade agreement with Trump and then at the last moment announced he would slap a $1.4 billion-a-year digital tax on American Internet companies.

Trump walked away. This cost Canada an $11 billion drop in exports to the USA. I don’t believe Carney cares because even for a passive-aggressive despot, governance is is all about power.

WSJ said:

The first prime minister born in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Carney was an unlikely radical, a picture of the global elite Trump campaigned against. An alumnus of Harvard, Oxford and Goldman Sachs who became the first foreigner to run the Bank of England, he kept two cellphones, even as prime minister: one Canadian and another with a British number, and list of contacts, from his time in London.

Steering the British pound after the European debt crisis delivered a lasting lesson in how a global economy engineered for efficiency had grown dangerously dependent on a single fragile point: America and its greenback. As bank governor, he proposed a “synthetic hegemonic currency” that middle-sized economies could use as a dollar alternative. The IMF’s chief economist in Washington called the idea “intriguing,” but “improbable,” saying the U.S. dollar’s strength flowed from America’s “institutions, the rule of law.”

Globalists hate the institutions and they are knocking them one by one. Tony the Beagle Beater Fauci destroyed America’s trust in public health. Boasberg and his fellow kangaroo jurists are destroying faith in the judiciary. Teachers destroyed public schools. Obama destroyed the rule of law by letting Hillary walk while coordinating a rule-busting lawfare campaign against Trump.

The Europeans are after America. Trump is just in their way. WSJ reported:

The allies began accelerating investment in space, defense, quantum computing and payments systems—to build cloud networks, data centers and defense systems that could function without U.S. technology. On nearly every count, Europe was far behind.

Elon Musk’s 10,000 Starlink satellites were handling some of Europe’s most sensitive governmental conversations, and data their weapons used in Ukraine. The EU sped up its schedule to launch several hundred European satellites for governments to communicate securely over non-American networks.

Europe was going to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars replicating systems America traditionally supplied. Carney, in another lunch with Macron at the Élysée Palace and during a jog through London’s Hyde Park with Finland’s Stubb, was discussing how Canada could better integrate into—and augment—those systems. In February, Canada joined a new €150 billion EU defense fund and launched the Sovereign Technology Alliance with Germany, to deepen collaboration on AI security and compute capacity.

Canadian and European officials began to meet more frequently for discussions that would have once included their American counterparts. During preparations for the G-7, officials met in the French city of Toulouse in March, discussing quantum computing, food security and AI between conversations on how Canada would join Europe’s student-exchange program, Erasmus, or its song contest, Eurovision.

Ahead of it, some of Carney’s top national security officials stopped using Starlink.

France meanwhile ordered its 2.5 million civil servants to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with Visio, a domestically built videoconference platform. Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium started rolling out their own homegrown texting services—discouraging civil servants from conducting official business on Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp. German officials complained about the clunkiness of the non-American software they were now expected to use. Germany’s parliament passed an act favoring European suppliers for its defense needs.

Well, good for them. It is about time they got off their davenports and did something to defend themselves, but unless they encourage capitalists, European leaders are doomed to mediocrity.

Elon Musk found a way to recycle rockets, not NASA or the European Space Agency. The idea of minimizing costs does not enter the picture when you are on the government dole.

Not every NATO leader ids nuts. The former Warsaw Pact nations mainly stand pretty tall with Trump. And German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at this week’s NATO Summit in Ankara:

Trump often applies pressure through a very forceful approach. The last American presidents politely asked us, “Please, finally do a little more for your own defense,” but across Europe those requests largely fell on deaf ears. Now there is an American president who says, rather bluntly, “Enough is enough.” And I cannot blame him. Just look at the numbers: the United States spends around 80% of NATO’s defense resources, while Europe accounts for only about 20%. That is unacceptable. It has always been unacceptable.

In his second presidency, Trump grabbed Europe by the eyeteeth and shook real hard. We’ll see how the wussies handle it.

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A month ago, Democrats in Maine nominated Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo (now covered up) as their Senate candidate. The party hoped that they could dress up as a working class hero someone expelled from a private school as a teen who grew up to be a ne’er-do-well.

Megan McCardle tweeted:

Platner is a private school screwup, of a type familiar to people who went to private school. The fact that he was cast as a man of the people by elites, while the working class rejected him, seems kind of emblematic of the whole progressive project right now.

She also said:

People in NYC used to say that Trump was “a poor person’s idea of a rich person”—which was supposed to be a dunk and actually described his political appeal. Dems trying to tap that same populist energy instead selected a rich person’s idea of a poor person.

Spot on. Graham Platner is who Democrats believe a working class man is—a Nazi in a wife-beater T-shirt with tattoos.

They cast him as a Marine combat veteran who raises oysters, which is true but they left out the good part of the story—mocking a soldier being shot, a plausible claim of assault, and disparaging blacks, women and fellow veterans online.

After Democrats nominated him, the rest of the story resurfaced like a log you cannot flush down. They knew they had a problem as Republicans held back their oppo research until October.

The New York Times tried to inoculate him with a story about Lyndsey Fifield, one of his alleged assault victims—a story in which the newspaper tried to smear the woman as a Republican operative.

All that was missing was James Carville saying, drag a thousand-dollar bill through a cul de sac and there’s no telling what you get. Inflation has Grover Cleveland replacing Ben Franklin. It’s all about the Grovers now.

But as Platner slid in the polls like a snake in the grass, DC Democrats planted their own oppo research story in Politico that featured a liberal woman (Jenny Racicot) who made a claim of sexual assault. The message was clear: Surrender Dumbass.

Days later, ahead of a Monday deadline for replacing him on November’s ballot, Graham Platner dropped out.

To call it a fiasco is to say the Titanic took on a little water. Democrats hope voters will see this as a one-off story and will congratulate themselves for cleaning up their nest.

Maybe it works. Maybe not.

Sean Spicer tweeted:

Graham Platner didn’t “end” his campaign -- DC Democrats forced him out

They knew he was a Nazi sympathizer
They knew he disparaged Black Americans
They knew he disparged veterans
They knew he disparaged women who dealt with sexual assault
They knew he was credibly charged w/ sexual assault

They finally realized he could not win

This has ALWAYS been about POWER

He was elected the nominee of the Democrat party knowing ALL of this

This is RIGGED

The party knows this. Does the public?

If so, does the public care?

Guy Benson tweeted:

From Biden to Platner, it’s been astounding to discover how many officials within the self-appointed “Party of Democracy” view their own *elections* as mere exhibition games — which don’t really count & can simply be nullified once outcomes become politically inconvenient.

Does the public care?

When it mattered most, the media didn’t care.

CNN’s favorite conservative, Scott Jennings, took a victory lap:

Well, that’s great question, because something that Alyssa said, I agree, by the way, with everything Alyssa said, she raised all the correct issues and said this is what they had signed on to. The only thing I disagree with is when she said that he hadn’t been vetted. No, he had been vetted. All of the things that have been stated, it was all out in the public and people like Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Walz, “The Bulwark,” “Pod Save America,” all of these people came together to overlook it all, to explain it all, to rationalize it all.

He was vetted. People knew all these things and a whole bunch of Democrats in Maine showed up and voted for him anyway. And a bunch of from around the country sent him money anyway. I agree with Alyssa’s question. What changed? Why are you bailing on Graham Platner now? You already signed off on Nazi tattoo, a self-described communist somebody who’s had rape fantasies, somebody who has been on a social media platform known as a playground for predators, and on, and on, and on, and on and on.

And the difference between this accuser and the previous one is simply this, she’s a liberal. It’s okay, I guess, for Democrats that their candidates assault conservatives. But he broke into someone’s house. And apparently, according to her, raped her. And because her politics are correct, they can now believe it.

All of this whole thing is disgusting but to say that they hadn’t vetted him, or that they didn’t know about all this is totally false. They knew it and they signed up for it and I don’t know why they’re backing away from this scumbag today when they had already signed off on all that other crazy behavior.

The media’s reaction is gee, we didn’t know. We should have, but golly we didn’t.

Pulitzers aren’t awarded for hard truths. They are awarded for lies like the Russian hoax.

Tea Party Barbie tweeted:

“Mistakes were made.”
Uh-huh.

Biden was sharp as a tack.
Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.
Trump got peed on by Russian hookers.
COVID-19 started in a wet market.
Ivermectin is just horse paste.
And on and on and on.

MAGA has the receipts but whether we get a refund is up to the manager—the rest of the American people.

The DC Establishment blames the openly communist wing of their communist party for their imbroglio. To be sure Bernie, Pocahontas and the rest (save AOC) promoted the Nazi.

But while the DC insiders initially endorsed Governor Janet Mills in the primary, they also forced her out because Platner was raising more money than she.

Democrats get a do-over. I would love to see Republicans challenge in court the replacement of Platner but that might upset Chuck Schumer.

No matter whom Democrats choose as the replacement, it is up to Mainers to decide whether nominating a Nazi is OK. Louisiana had no problem saying no to a klansman when David Duke won a Republican nomination for governor of Louisiana.

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A few Brits on Twitter congratulated us on our 250th birthday as a nation by reminding us that this Sunday they will celebrate the 1,099th anniversary of their nationhood.

Well, cheers to them as well.

On July 12, 927, King Æthelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, and the kings of Scotland, Deheubarth (Wales), Strathclyde and northern Northumbria met at Eamont Bridge near Penrith in Cumbria and agreed to form the Kingdom of England with Æthelstan as the king. Wales and Scotland remained independent.

Æthelstan got the job because he had just kicked the Vikings out of York, their last stronghold on the island. Plus he was a nepo.

Oh, the Nordic wars would resume. On September 28, 1066, the Normans invaded and 16 days later, on October 14, William the Conqueror lived up to his name at the Battle of Hastings. King Harold died in defeat.

The real celebration for Brits is the signing of the Magna Carte on June 15, 1215, when 25 barons forced King John (hiss, boo) to agree to the rule of law under the Ankerwycke Yew, a massive tree in Berkshire, England. The tree is 2,500 years old.

I expect the Muslims eventually will chop the yew down to make skewers for shish kebab. King Chuck the Cuck will praise them.

The Magna Carte agreement lasted a few months until the barons rebelled because neither side kept its promise. The barons brought in Prince Louis of France to be crowned king, but King John died of dysentery a month later. The barons turned on Louis and made John’s son Henry king.

Years later, Louis became King Louis the Eighth of France. Was it a reward or punishment?

Under the same tree three centuries later, King Henry VIII swore his love to Anne Boleyn. He, too, reneged on the deal and had her beheaded on May 19, 1536. If you trust a British king under a famous tree, yew’ll be sorry.

But through trial and error over 5 centuries after the Magna Carta, the Brits developed a civilized approach to government that included the rule of law, contract law, presumption of innocence, freedom of speech and representation in parliament.

The Brits then spread the word to the world, civilizing India, much of Africa, some of China and the Caribbean.

What communists today condemn as colonization was actually civilizing savage tribes. Sub-Saharan Africa failed because its populace was divided among warring tribes. Few tribes had written languages. They did not use the wheel.

The Brits had 13 colonies in North America plus Canada. Lord North, King George III’s prime minister, made the mistake of treating them like Ireland or Scotland. America was much tougher to rule an ocean away.

And while today, we gloat about beating the Brits and their greatest military in the world, we also must respect and appreciate the gift our Mother Country gave us. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness spring from her—as does the right to property.

In all the recent celebration of our Bicentennial +50, no one mentions the most important thing shared by the 56 signers of that Declaration of Independence. Yes, 50 were wealthy. Yes, 55 were Protestant.

But all 56 were Englishmen.

They rebelled not because they hated the British system. What they hated was being ruled by disinterested Members of Parliament and an otherwise engaged king an ocean away.

The revolution did not result in something insanely different from the norm for these Englishmen who became Americans. The U.S. Constitution, which would become the basis of the American government 13 years later with the election of President Washington, was an American adaptation of British system of governance.

Oh the differences were more than them calling a cookie a biscuit (or to be accurate, what they call a biscuit, we call a cookie). But James Madison and the boys wanted was something similar but without a king.

This was the polar opposite of the French Revolution in which the peasants overthrew the monarchy and the Catholic church. We joke that the last country the French defeated was France. But the guillotine’s reign of terror and the Iranian-level slaughter of protesters was a violence not visited to that extent in our country.

Slaves in the French colony of Haiti rebelled and established a shithole thanks to a series of dictatorships because the first thing the rebels did upon seizing power was to kill all the white people.

Spain did better with its colonies but the lack of respect for private property has haunted Mexico throughout its history.

America was not the only benefactor of British rule. The Anglosphere was dominated by successful countries for decades in the post-colonial era.

We joke about Britain “creating” independence days for 60 nations.

Given the foundation the British laid down for us, we should thank them for the rule of law, trial by jury, presumption of innocence, contract law, civil rights and the rest of the British parliamentary system.

Sadly, Britain gradually is allowing what made it great disappear in a mad rush toward sharia law. Maybe we can get together with India, Canada and other alums to colonize England and restore those traditions.

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As the British would say, the Democrat Party is about to give Graham Platner the Spanish archer, aka, the El-Bow. The Nazi-tattooed misogynist mess who raises oysters for his mommy’s restaurant has begun to slip in the polls made public—an indication that Democrats are horrified by the results of their more accurate internal polling.

On Monday, he suspended his campaign, which paves the way for replacing him before the weekend deadline.

The party was cool with his Nazi affiliation when he was ahead in the polls. Party officials promoted his excuse that he got plastered one night while overseas as a Marine and got a tattoo that he did not know was about the SS who ran the concentration camps. For 18 years he didn’t know it until he decided to run for the Senate.

Communists rallied behind him.

Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said, “This guy is an authentic man. I’m supporting Democrats. We need Democrats in office. And more importantly, we need to win elections.”

He said Platner could win crossover votes. This shows you what Democrats think Trump supporters are: deplorable Nazis.

On Monday, realizing Platner cannot win, Gallego announced, “The allegations against Graham Platner are troubling and deeply serious. I am rescinding my endorsement.”

Also on Monday, Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland said, “I don’t know [Graham Platner] but I’m supporting Democrats. We need Democrats in office. We need Democrats in office to fight back against Donald Trump.”

What a refreshingly honest answer about Democrat ethics. They have none. It is all about power.

Elizabeth Warren was less than candid when she campaigned for him in Portland, Maine. She said:

There are those who moderate, who go along to get along, who have ideas at the margins, who want to think it all through and make just maybe a little change here, a little change there and then there are people who realize that when the system is this broken, when there are this many billionaires who have this much control over our nation, it’s no longer time to make little changes at the margins. It is time for big structural change. We need Graham Platner to come in and get rid of the corruption in Washington.

Pocahontas has been there a dozen years and all she has done is oppose Trump’s efforts to end the corruption.

Congressman and communist leader Ro Khanna endorsed Platner early and said, “I endorsed him because of his clear stance on genocide, clear stance against foreign wars, a military veteran willing to speak out against war.”

Nothing clarifies one’s position on genocide quite like a Nazi tattoo.

After Platner won the primary rumors floated that he was a domestic abuser. Khanna backed away from full support saying, “I’m still supporting him but I want to go through some of what we’re referring to here in specifics.”

Khanna also said, “If there was any evidence that comes out that there is actual domestic violence or assault, I have zero tolerance for that.”

Amid allegations of sexual abuse by Platner, Khanna dumped him on Monday.

What are the allegations? The party’s mouthpiece, Politico, reported, “Woman who dated Graham Platner says he sexually assaulted her.”

The subheadline read, “The Maine Democrat denied the allegations and said, ‘Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.’”

Do I believe her? Well, she could be a Paula Jones or an Anita Hill. All I know is Politico reported:

The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to Politico in three interviews over the past two weeks. Politico also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.

Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democrat Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.

She is not the first woman to cry sex fiend. The story said:

Racicot said she later felt compelled to go public about her experience because the reaction to the Times story was dominated by controversy about another woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who alleged Platner mistreated her and faced attacks because of her ties to the Republican Party. (Contacted by Politico, Fifield stood by the allegations she made to the Times and declined to comment further.)

As Pocahontas once said, “that’s my kinda man.”

She’s weird.

The two stories of abusing women contradict the stereotype of Nazis having only one testicle or being closet gays (or both). Then again, Platner did say if a man broke into his house, he would rape him.

He’s weird,

I doubt Democrats will replace Platner with Governor Janet Mills, his opposition in the Maine primary. Maybe they’ll find a nice black lesbian lumberjack and settle down.

Democrats invested $16 million (and counting) in his campaign funneling it mostly through small, less transparent donations. We will see if they invest another $16 million on the race or simply concede the election to Republican Susan Collins.

In Michigan, Democrats face a Senate primary next month between an establishment supported candidate and a Muslim Marxist connected to CAIR. He’s pro-Palestinian and accuses Israel of genocide.

On Monday, Khanna tweeted, “The attacks on Abdul El Sayed pale in comparison to the horrific electability attacks Obama faced from the Dem establishment in 08. Then post Obama, the establishment went 1 for 3 against Trump. So their lectures on ‘electability’ are now falling on deaf ears.”

Yes, Khanna and the commies did so much better in Maine.

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Roger Kimball wrote, “Why socialism will fail,” a pretty nifty if overly intellectualized piece that encapsulates the common smug capitalist prediction of doom because “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

Hahaha, right?

Really? Well, Congress ran out of other people’s money in the 1980s. We have a national debt approaching $40 trillion—$40 million million. Maybe we’re the socialists but we just won’t admit it.

Kimball wrote of Democrats in New York nominating three more communists to join Bernie and the Squaw Squad in Congress:

For those impervious to the siren call of socialism, its activities in the world seem like the truth according to Hegel, “a bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunk.” The sitting New York Democrats that Mamdani’s new squad just defeated are pretty far left. But they are the soul of moderation compared to the newcomers.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who will be the Democratic candidate for New York’s 13th district, wants to abolish prisons, abolish ICE, abolish borders and defund the police. She thinks “all deportations are wrong” and has called the United States an “effing disgrace.” “I forgot to get napkins,” she wrote online, “so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”

Claire Valdez (NY-7) and Brad Lander (NY-10) are cut from the same cloth. Grant citizenship and voting rights to illegal aliens? Yep. Seize the property of “bad landlords”? You betcha. Eliminate private health insurance and make taxpayers pony up for all transgender procedures? But of course. Abolish ICE, forgive the $2 trillion of student-loan debt, pack the Supreme Court? Can you doubt it?

A standard option in all current models of socialism is a ferocious anti-Israel sentiment fed, although you are not supposed to notice this, through a noxious current of apparent anti-Semitism. “Israel doesn’t exist,” Chevalier tells her followers, while all three support Hamas and think that Israel’s actions to defend itself in Gaza count as “genocide.”

What will be the upshot or outcome of these political perturbations? The disclaimer found on many financial statements offers a useful reminder: past results are no guarantee of future performance. A persistent gremlin affecting our prognostications is the temptation to extrapolate simply from current trends to future realities. It is easy to discount the presence of countervailing forces.

Kimball does not understand that communism is not about economics. It is about power. Communism is campaign rhetoric stuffed with promises—Free Health Care, Free Buses, Free Rent, Free Grocery Stores—that are emptier than Kamala’s brain.

Communism appeals to vagabonds, vagrants and very lazy people.

Nearly a century ago, in 1928, Harry McClintock wrote the hobo’s dream song The Big Rock Candy Mountains:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
There's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

McClintock knew none of that would happen. So do communists. When they say free rent, they simply mean the government is your landlord. Nothing in life is free and the price paid for communist gifts is your freedom.

Communism works quite well in North Korea. Oh, sure, occasionally people have to eat grass to survive and the average height of a North Korean is 3 inches shorter than his cousin in South Korean, but that is irrelevant. None of that matters.

The purpose of communism is power for the communists. Thus, communism is a success in North Korea because the Kim Dynasty is still in power and this Kim is grooming his daughter to take over when he croaks.

Cuba is so poor that the anti-communist Trump felt sorry for the people and allowed Russia to deliver a tanker of oil to tide them over.

But after 67 years of communism, Cubans are happy as dung beetles in a dung heap because most citizens were born into this failure and they don’t remember the good old days when Cuba had casinos and high-rollers. As we learned in The Godfather II, Castro kicked the Mafia out so they went and created Las Vegas as the replacement Havana.

Islamism is a cousin of communism and Iran is just like Cuba and North Korea.

President Trump ditched regime change because he realized 70 million of the 92 million Iranians were born after the revolution. Misery is the only life they know.

What the three nations share in common is the people rely on the government. When your life is in the hands of the government, whoever controls the government controls you. People don’t care. If they did, they would revolt.

How do I know that I am on the right track? Jonah Goldberg is in the opposite direction writing, “Mamdani Is Ignoring 40 Centuries of Economic Lessons.”

There is a reason he ignores those lessons—communism is not about economics.

Goldberg wrote:

Economists are famous for arguing “on one hand” this and “on the other hand” that. This is why President Truman famously wanted to hire a one-handed economist.

Nonetheless, there are few issues that enjoy a broader consensus among economists than the conclusion that rent control is counterproductive. Surveys of leading economists going back nearly four decades confirm this. A 1990 poll of 464 economists found that 93% of American respondents agreed that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available”—95% of Canadian economists had a similar opinion. And another survey in 2012 had a similar result.

As Jason Furman, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it, “Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit.” The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck—a socialist, mind you—was pithier: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

In response to the controversy over Mamdani’s rent control scheme, which applies to roughly 1 million of the city’s rent stabilized apartments, progressive writer Jill Filipovic posted on X, “Am I the only person who has no strong feeling about the rent freeze other than ‘cool to try out a policy like this on a short-term basis so we can test if it actually works?’ My only hope is we all learn some important information from this experiment and are honest about the results, whatever it brings.”

Mamdani’s plan is not about controlling rent. Just like gun control, rent control is about control. If the landlords leave, the city will gladly take over maintenance, which will never be done because the worse things get, the more the people will need the government and the more control Mayor for Life Mamdani will have.

Poor people are easier to control.

Communists are mean to their subjects. Mamdani not only shut down escalators like they were the Indian Point Nuclear power station, but he blocked them so people could not use them as stairs.

Romans analyzed political actions by asking cui bono? Who benefits? Certainly not the people but as long as Mamdani benefits, what does he care? He gets the courtside tickets to the Knicks games.

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ITEM 1: Matt Whitlock said of Britain’s universal health care, “In the UK, between 9/2024 and 8/2025, roughly 79,130 names were removed from healthcare waiting lists because patients died before getting care.”

It is healthcare to die for.

Yep, we got out in the nick of time.

ITEM 2: The city of Buffalo, New York, raised the Somali flag on Wednesday to celebrate Somali Independence Day.

But there will be no fireworks today for Independence Day because Mayor Sean Ryan is concerned about safety. Sure, the Somalis might be triggered to bring another Black Hawk down.

ITEM 3: Vandals later cut the Somali Flag down.

Tut, tut.

ITEM 4: The New York Post reported, “The FBI had a mole inside Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political orbit before the agency’s corruption probe expanded into the governor and his wife, The Post has learned.”

Do federal prisons stock Brylcreem in their commissaries?

ITEM 5: Shooting News Weekly reported, “The Army Wants More Lasers—They’ve Ordered 8,936 DAGIR-V1 Multi-Platform Systems From B.E. Meyers.”

Will they get 8,936 sharks to go with those lasers?

ITEM 6: FIFA continues to dominate sports television. As Judy Carne once said, “It may be football to Europeans, but it’s soccer to me.”

And then someone threw a bucket of water on her.

ITEM 7: East Brook Middle School in New Jersey handed out yearbooks this week, which included baby photos of some students. One was Baby Hitler.

He had a 1.939 grade point average and was really bummed about getting only a C+ in art class.

ITEM 8: President Trump visited the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, where TR had a ranch in the 1880s. The official opening of the library is today.

It cost $450 million and doesn’t look like a demented Dumpster.

Former president William Howard Taft was not invited to the ceremony.

ITEM 9: Legal Insurrection reported, “Paris Official Says U.S. Bears ‘Significant Responsibility’ for Europe’s Deadly Heat Wave.”

Grok: “China has roughly 430–450 million residential (home) air conditioners, while the USA has around 240 million.”

Curses. We have to close the AC gap or we will lose this Cold War. Remember every time you buy an AC, Europe’s temperature rises another millimeter.

ITEM 10: It was hot this week in Poca, West Virginia.

“How hot was it, Donnie?”

It was so hot that my air conditioner wants an air conditioner.

ITEM 11: Ron DeSantis signed his fourth consecutive budget that was smaller than the previous budget.

Good thing he is term limited or that budget would be down to zero in a few years.

ITEM 12: Another communist knocked off a Democrat congressional lifer in the Democrat primary in Denver.

Melat “Starvin’ Marvin” Kiros was imported from Ethiopia. What? Home grown America-hating commies aren’t good enough for Colorado? Well, la-de-dah, aren’t they special.

ITEM 13: News 6 in Florida reported, “Seminole County assistant principal accused of DUI on e-bike, deputies say.”

Amateur. George Jones did a beer run with a lawnmower.

ITEM 14: Newsmax reported, “Idaho has become the first state to make the firing squad its primary execution method after completing a new execution chamber at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution southwest of Boise.”

The murder rate in Idaho will go down in a bang.

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ITEM 15: AP reported, “President Donald Trump announced that the Republican Party will host its first-ever national midterm convention in Dallas on September 9 and 10.”

J.R. Ewing says howdy.

ITEM 16: The story also said, “The Democratic National Committee considered hosting a similar midterm convention but ultimately rejected the idea. An expensive soiree could have strained the DNC’s finances, which are struggling with lackluster fundraising and millions in debt.”

Cutting USAID hit hard, didn’t it?

ITEM 17: NBC reported, “Trump refuses to renew USMCA trade pact, toppling one of the last pillars of stability in global trade.”

Strange way to compliment the deal he made in his first presidency.

ITEM 18: Mamdani turned off escalators because of the strain on electric power as the annual heatwave season begins.

Maybe shutting down the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station which supplied 25% of the town’s power wasn’t such a bright idea.

Even dumber, they blocked off the escalators so you could not use them as stairs.

ITEM 19: 124 days after a Blue Swallow missile killed him, Iran finally was able to hold a funeral for the ayatollah.

Nothing quite says you won the war by being able finally to bury your supreme leader without fear of a missile attack.

For now.

ITEM 20: Chris Cuomo to Tucker Carlson: “I’m a journalist. I’m not allowed into Russia. Why are you allowed in?

Qatar money. Don’t leave home without it.

ITEM 21: News Max reported, “Hormuz Ship Transits Quadruple as Trump Plan Works.”

Oh, goody. Does this mean the New York Times will offer cruises to Iran again?

ITEM 22: Trump disclosed this week that he made, oh, about $2 billion last year.

Britt Hume said, “The fact is, he’s a rich guy. And when you hold the kind of holdings he has, you do get richer. The people that don’t like Trump won’t like this. The people who do like Trump won’t care very much.”

Actually, we kinda like him more for that.

ITEM 23: Lulu Navarro of NYT complained, “Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC? Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.”

Wake me when you see four horsemen in the sky.

ITEM 24: In upholding birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court pissed off conservatives.

In upholding states that ban boys from girls sports, the justices pissed off liberals.

Chief Justice John Roberts is the opposite of Sara Lee. Nobody likes him. He may as well be one of my tweets.

ITEM 25: Breitbart reported, “Ohio Sen. Moreno to Reintroduce Former Sen. Harry Reid’s ‘Exact Bill’ Eliminating Birthright Citizenship for Illegal Aliens.”

It will be bill number FU-CJJR.

ITEM 26: John Hinderaker asked, “Can Europe Be Saved?”

The real question is do any of my readers care?

ITEM 27: Tricia McLaughlin tweeted with video from CNN, “Very disturbing that ‘how Jewish someone reads’ is being discussed as a liability for the Democrat Party in the year 2026.”

Well what do you expect of the party that nominated a Nazi? Senator Golda Meir?

ITEM 28: Rep. Pramila Jayapal announced, “Cuba has shown us what a universal health care system actually looks like. Until this happened and despite all the challenges, Cuba had done an amazing job of preventing maternal mortality and neonatal mortality, cancer, all of the things that we strive to do in the United States.”

So move to Cuba.

FINALLY, DC will celebrate the Fourth today not with tanks on parade but flyovers. 9 hours of flyovers, which may include a sneak peek at the B-21, which will replace the B-2 beginning next year.

BEST OF TWITTER:

The good cousin.

Deductive reasoning.

Nostalgia bites back.

How to get AC in Paris.

At least it is a good tee time.

Coincidence.

Pickup line of the week.

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On July 17, 1980, Ronald Reagan accepted the Republican nomination for president. In his acceptance speech, he said, “For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!”

Make America great again! He said it at a time when President Carter declared a national malaise and Muslims in Iran held 51 Americans hostage. The nation was hung over from Lyndon Johnson’s misadventure in Vietnam and the failure of his Great Society programs to deliver on their promises.

It took Jimmah but 4 years to kill the buzz we got from the bicentennial. Reagan brought it back with a smile, sharp wit and an optimism worthy of our Founding fathers. He replaced Carter’s mourning with Morning in America.

Reagan defined American greatness as its people, not its government. We the People are the country.

In his re-election campaign, he said, “The greatness of America doesn’t begin in Washington; it begins with each of you—in the mighty spirit of free people under God, in the bedrock values you live by each day in your families, neighborhoods, and workplaces.”

In 1983, in his speech calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, Reagan said, “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

25 years later, Obama’s election proved Reagan was right about ceasing greatness.

In his farewell address, Reagan said, “A tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

The problem today is millions of those newcomers just absolutely hate America because even with control of the schools and the media, Democrats cannot generate enough self-loathing to keep them in power.

You cannot reconcile Christianity with Islamism.

Reagan’s words echo those of Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who became president and was so good he wound up on Mount Rushmore. He finally got a presidential library, which opens this weekend in Medora, North Dakota, where he once had a ranch. The Badlands were chosen because even though he was born in New York, he was a cowboy at heart.

In 1886, in one of his first public speeches, TR said, “We all of us feel, most rightly and properly, that we belong to the greatest nation that has ever existed on the earth.”

He developed that theme as he stormed through life. Years later he said, “A nation’s greatness lies in its possibility of achievement in the present, and nothing helps it more than the consciousness of achievement in the past.”

On December 17, 1903, amid his presidency, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, achieved something mankind had sought for thousands of year—heavier than air flight.

66 years later, America landed a man on the moon who planted the Stars and Stripes there.

57 years after that, an American is capturing rockets to reuse as he plans to plant an American flag on Mars. David Bowie asked Is There Life on Mars? Elon Musk plans to make the answer yes some day soon.

Can’t? Americans see that word as a challenge.

Ike, too, believed in American greatness, saying, “The freedom of the individual and his willingness to follow real leadership are at the core of America’s strength.”

He also said, “America is exactly as strong as the initiative, courage, understanding, and loyalty of the individual citizen.”

Loyalty matters. Obama refused to honor the flag by covering his heart with his hand and Democrats nominated him.

On December 1, 1862, as the Civil War dragged on, Lincoln said, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

The last best hope on Earth. It’s the perfect encapsulation of America’s place in the world. God did not put us here to fail. Like the Blues Brothers, we are on a mission from God.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address was a magnificent summary of the nation’s political purpose:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Conceived in liberty.

Let’s fact check that, please. What did the Father of Our Country say in his Farewell Address as he left the presidency?

In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that for the efficient management of your common interests, in a country so extensive as ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.

His words echo Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant preamble to the Declaration of Independence whose adoption we celebrate on Saturday—and every day of the year, really.

You may have noticed that I managed to quote every man on Mount Rushmore plus Eisenhower and Reagan. Their greatness lies in fighting for the right of Americans—real Americans—to make America great again.

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Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom posted the above picture of one of the girls she represents in court.

Waggoner tweeted:

Today you will read many sympathetic media stories about B.P.J., the male athlete who challenged WV’s law and lost at SCOTUS.

I’m guessing none will mention that B.P.J. defeated 470+ girls 1,400+ times (including a state title) and sexually harassed our client Adaleia (pictured) in the girls’ locker room. Sadly, Adaleia stopped playing the school sports she loved due to B.P.J.’s ongoing presence in girls’ sports and spaces.

But we’ll probably be lucky if those girls get even a passing mention—let alone a front-page photo.

This has been the pattern on this issue from far too many institutions of power. Boys’ feelings are the focus. Girls’ safety, fairness, and opportunity take a back seat.

I’m so thankful today that the Supreme Court reversed that pattern, acknowledged the reality of biological sex, and remembered the girls.

She’s right of course. The press ignores women and girls who are victims of illegal aliens, felons released too early, and boys who pretend to be girls.

On Wednesday, I knocked Nina Totenberg, NPR’s doddering doyenne of Supreme Court coverage, for falsely reporting gossip. She said, “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday.”

No such announcement was made. Her excuse someone said something and she immediately reported it—without bothering to call the justice and ask, “Hey judge, you retiring?”

Maybe Anita Hill was her tipster.

In yesterday’s poll on who should replace the 82-year-old Totenberg, a reader pointed out I should have offered Emily Litella as a choice. I erred. As Edith Ann would say, and that’s the truth.

Enough about Nina the Ninny.

Not really because she also reported on Tuesday:

The Supreme Court once again leaped into the culture wars on Tuesday, ruling that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has long coached his daughters’ and other girls’ basketball teams at school, wrote the court’s majority opinion.

What is she talking about? The court never left the culture wars. Roe v. Wade struck down 46 state bans on abortion. Oberkfell legalized gay marriage in all 50 states without any support from the people. Even Californians had voted to ban gay marriage.

The distinction is this court did not ban T-girls from girls sports in all 50 states. No, this conservative court left it up to the states to decide—just as four years ago, it handed back to the states the right to set policies on abortion.

Say what you may about the chief justice but the Roberts Court is remarkable in how determined it is to cede power back to the 50 states.

What a sharp contrast to Griswold v. Connecticut in which justices used the power of the central government to strike down a law banning artificial contraception. In dissent, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “I think this is an uncommonly silly law, but we are not asked to say whether we think this law is unwise. We are asked to hold that it violates the United States Constitution. And that I cannot do.”

Such restraint has returned to the majority on the high court, hasn’t it?

Reporters fail to grasp that restraint is the sea change on the court.

Totenberg peppered her story with the vapid vocabulary of communism, calling the trannies “she” and saying they were “assigned at birth.” She meandered into politics:

27 states have barred trans women and girls from participating in girls’ sports. The issue has become the newest flashpoint in both politics and law—especially after 2024 when the Trump presidential campaign aired attack ads on the subject more than 15,000 times, putting Democrats on the defensive.

What she didn’t report was that it was a 9-0 decision that banning boys from girls sports does not disqualify a state from Title IX money from the federal government, which has spent its way to a $39 trillion national debt.

The vote was 6-3 on whether the state bans violate the 14th Amendment. Need I name the trio of dingbats who dissented? Hint: One of them doesn’t know what a woman is.

The court decision is important because the justices made a distinction about the difference between men and women, stating, “Consistent with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that the States may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females. They may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex.”

Men and women have the same rights, but they are not the same. As they say in France, viva la de-Frànce in zee oui-oui. (As they say in Nevada, Viva Las Vegas.)

The decision covered two cases, one in Idaho involving a tranny banned from women’s sports in college and the other in West Virginia, when a middle school boy sued the state over its ban on boys in girls sports. The style of the case is West Virginia v. BPJ because he is a minor but everyone knows it is Becky Pepper-Jackson.

He won an injunction from the Fourth Circuit Court, and days later on April 18, 2024, he entered a tournament as a girls shot putter at a Harrison County Middle School track meet.

Emmy Salerno led four other girls from her team in a protest as they stepped into the throwing circle but then stepped out without competing. The team forfeited.

Well, the school decided to punish the girls. She spoke out as did Riley Gaines and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, whose office was defending the state. Voters have since promoted him to governor.

The transgender fad is fading. Money talked and the closet queen president flooded the market with federal money and required health insurers to do the same in an effort to promote transsexual surgery.

This isn’t about politics. He really is evil because he is pushing God out of our lives by promoting nonsense such as your sex is “assigned at birth.” The doctor didn’t make a mistake because the doctor didn’t make you. The Lord did and He does not make mistakes. If your pastor tells you otherwise, change churches.

Giving estrogen to a kid who may be low on testosterone is dangerous, likewise giving testosterone to a girl.

Where are the kids now?

Salerno now is in Lincoln High School, still shot putting and playing goalkeeper on the girls soccer team. She is the sophomore class president.

As for BPJ, he’s enrolled at Bridgeport High School. He’s a victim of transmania, Obamacare and atheist liberal policies.

But the face of Adaleia haunts me because it evokes the four saddest words in the English language—what might have been.

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Bummed by the news reports about the Supreme Court as it flooded the end of June with key decisions? Don’t be because the headlines are as misleading as a date with a tranny without being told she is a he.

Reporters cover the courts about as well as they cover the White House, election polls and war.

Consider Niña Totenberg of NPR, the doyenne of Supreme Court coverage, and winner of multiple duPont-Columbia, Peabody and other major journalism honors. She is in the Radio Hall of Fame.

At 82 with 51 years of experience at NPR, she sets the standard for covering the Supreme Court. Moments after the final decisions became public, she reported, “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday.”

It didn’t happen—just like Clarence Thomas harassing Anita Hill didn’t happen, another Totenberg Tall Tale.

NPR pulled the story after 10 minutes and issued a rare apology.

What should be done to her? Don’t fire—retire.

Now that we have established the quality of the media covering the Supreme Court, let’s look at the coverage of the final decisions of the 2025-2026 season.

Let’s start with NBC’s “Supreme Court rules Trump can’t fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.”

Except he can.

Two paragraphs underneath the headline, the story said, “In a 5-4 vote, the high court said Trump does not have the constitutional authority to fire a Fed governor without cause. While the landmark ruling limits a president’s authority over the central bank, a majority of the justices separately ruled Trump has free rein to fire agency heads at will.”

The president can still fire her because the ruling held that Trump can fire Cook for cause, after providing her with due process and with the approval of a district court judge. Obviously, the case would be appealed no matter what the district judge decides. It is a lengthy process that applies only to the Federal Reserve. Money talks, after all.

But everyone else in the political appointee sphere can be fired for any reason now because in Trump v. Slaughter, justices said he indeed could fire Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission because she is a will-and-pleasure appointee.

Or was.

The justices struck down an earlier Supreme Court ruling called Humphrey’s Executor, which prevented a president from removing FTC board members. The Roberts Court tossed it into the waste basket of history.

His is a monumental decision that allows the president to be the chief of the executive branch of government, just as the Constitution says he is. Presidents can fire FTC board members and the rest of the bigshots of the bureaucracy with or without cause.

William Ewart Humphrey is the Humphrey in Humphrey’s Executor.

He was a Republican congressman from Washington state who ran for the Senate and lost. He stayed in DC as any good grifter will do. Coolidge later appointed him to the FTC and Hoover re-appointed him. FDR fired him. Humphrey fought it in court but died before the case was concluded.

Samuel Rathbun handled his estate and sued the U.S. government for back pay. The justices were mad at FDR over his socialist policies so they voted 9-0 in 1935 to pay the estate. This tied presidential hands for 91 years.

Not anymore, Fenimore.

In 1935, justices acted as if the FTC board was a group of experts. Far from it. Woodrow Wilson appointed Samuel Huston “Shy” Thompson, whose main claim to fame was being the first University of Texas coach to coach the Longhorns team for two consecutive seasons. He became chairman of the FTC, which shows how expert the rest of the FTC team was.

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Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision overturning Humphrey’s Executor because Roberts has wanted to dump the decision for decades As a young lawyer in Reagan’s White House, he wrote, “the time is ripe to reconsider the constitutional anomaly of independent agencies.”

Despite having stayed in DC too long, Roberts is still the biggest threat to the bureaucracy in America.

When it comes to the Supreme Court, don’t fall for the headlines.

The National News Desk reported, “Supreme Court rejects Trump-backed challenge to late-arriving mail ballots.”

Did it?

Mail-in ballots must be postmarked by Election Day and received within 5 days of the election. In 2020, Democrats sent in ballots without a postmark and counted them until they had enough votes to make slow, dumb, crooked Joe Biden president. Stopping that sounds like a win to me, but what do I know?

President Trump took the news poorly—flopping on Truth Social like LeBron James after someone brushed him on the basketball court—but the decision is an improvement over the status quo.

Then there is the birthright citizenship ruling, in which the justices decided the 14th Amendment doesn’t really mean what it says.

Yes, the birthright citizenship ruling disappointed but what does the decision change? Nothing. The song remains the same. It was not a victory, of course, but there was no loss. Trump gave it a shot.

JD Vance said:

The fact that this case was a 5-4 decision effectively means that the concept of birthright citizenship, which is an absurdity to the 14th amendment, that concept is hanging by a thread.

And so what I take from that is, yes, we’ve got to fix the immigration system even more. We have to be even more aware of who’s coming into our country to make sure that they’re not benefiting from this atrocious Supreme Court ruling, but it also means that we have to keep fighting!

Because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision just as we reverse so many bad decisions throughout the generations.

The case is a reminder that Trump is an entrepreneur—a risk taker—a man unafraid of failure. Early in Elon Musk’s career, his first three SpaceX launches ended with the rocket blowing up. He put everything he had on a fourth launch. Tell me again how no man is worth a trillion dollars.

Rockets blowing up reveal how to make better rockets. Eventually, birthright citizenship will be gone.

The big win was dumping Humphrey’s Executor.

Newsweek gets what is going on, reporting:

Despite the divergent outcomes, Trump remarked that the “most consequential Decision issued by the Court, by far,” had been in his favor—the Trump v. Slaughter case.

“This whole concept of “Power” has been fought over for nearly 100 years, going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where a large slice of his Power was taken away,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday. “He fought to regain it, even wanting to “pack the Court,” but was unsuccessful in doing so. This Decision gives tremendous additional Power back to the Presidency, where it belongs.

“It is an Honor to be the sitting President who, after all these years, WON this very important, and hard fought, Case. We had other good Victories, too, and we also had the Birthright Citizenship loss, which we will work to correct in Congress, but the big SLAUGHTER, was SLAUGHTER.”

The president is correct. Slaughter means the deep state can no longer slow-walk a president and otherwise undermine him because the deep staters can be fired. The age-old cliché about “I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go” is gone. Just as Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon, presidents will run the federal government.

If that is too much power, then dial down the power of the federal government. Maybe we can sign a document that says the government cannot spy on you, FBI, or lie to you, CIA, or force you to take medications, Center for Disease Control.

Oh wait. We already said that—or thought we did—in the Constitution. How about a new amendment: Congress should respect the right of the people to be left the hell alone.

Don’t let the Nina Totenberg crowd get you down because they are just propagandists posing as reporters.

Frankly, they are not very good at it.

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Donald John Trump’s magical powers include the ability to make people reveal who they truly are. For example, a decade ago, John Kasich was billed as a conservative governor from Ohio.

He was no more conservative than Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. This weekend, Kasich said:

The SCOTUS decision said Haitians are going to have to be removed from Springfield, Ohio. Things in Haiti are deteriorating. Sending people back to Haiti to me is crazy. I wish Congress would extend TPS for Haitians.

On January 15, 2010, Obama granted Haitians Temporary Protected Status after an earthquake. That was 197 months ago. The law says TPS lasts 18 months.

My arithmetic skills are not what they used to be but I still know 197 is more than 10 times 18.

USAID spent $2.3 billion on Haiti following the disaster and the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Haiti Action Network generated over $500 million in commitments and pledges from members for long-term development projects.

If Haiti has not recovered by now, it never will.

Trump let Kasich reveal himself 10 years ago when, instead of trying to unify Republicans behind their nominee, he stomped his little feet and refused to endorse Trump. 4 years later, he endorsed Biden. In 2024, he refused to endorse anyone.

Nevertheless, Trump carried Ohio by 8 points, 8 points and 11 points in those elections, respectively. A pebble thrown into the sea has more effect.

Need I wade through the conservative Fox News All-Stars who unmasked themselves as frauds who misled everyone? They are not worth the pixels to name them.

The biggest phony baloney was Barack Obama. On October 25, 2016, he got so mad at Trump that he went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show to mock him.

Trump had tweeted, “President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”

Obama replied, “Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president.”

He then dramatically dropped the phone like a mic drop.

Embarrassed by Trump’s election, four years later, Obama once again thought he had the last laugh when Jack Dorsey banished Trump from Twitter in January 2021, but that just led Elon Musk to buy Twitter and rename it X.

The thin-skinned Obama was the first communist president. No one cared that he was black. What mattered was he was red.

On July 13, 2012, Obama delivered a campaign speech in Roanoke, Virginia, saying:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me—because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t—look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Obama to us peons: You didn’t build this.

Reality to Obama: No, YOU didn’t build this.

Those roads? Private contractors built more than 46,000 miles of interstate highways and are conducting major road renovations and repairs. Taxpayers paid for it. The politicians took the credit.

The Hoover Dam? The federal government didn’t built it. A private consortium called Six Companies, Inc., built the engineering marvel that made possible the Las Vegas we know it today. Taxpayers paid for it.

Putting a man on the moon? NASA didn’t build the rocket or the engine or the capsule or the lunar module. Private companies did. NASA trained the astronauts and used the rocket to get there, which was a magnificent achievement, but without capitalism, they could not get there without a big, huge slingshot.

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the planet, said, “As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind—every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.”

Those schools? Now we are getting somewhere. The state mandated that children attend classes and had the schools built (by private contractors paid by taxpayers. The government runs them so well that children who attend private or parochial do far better. Homeschooling has taken off and again, students do better.

Imagine, people are turning down something they can get free.

Obama ushered in the communist era. Oh wait, I misgendered them. They are Democrat Socialists of America. French poet Charles Baudelaire once said, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

So it goes with communists.

Communist Melat Kiros is the leading candidate for Congress in Denver’s primary today. She said:

“We have socialism already. It’s in the roads we drive on, the schools we send our kids to, the fire stations we call upon. I’m just asking that we extend that security to our healthcare, to our housing, to our nutritional food, to our higher education so that we’re actually meeting the basic needs of everyday working families in this country.”

Her family escaped the communism that starved Ethiopia in the Starvin’ Marvin days. She wants to Make America Ethiopia.

As Spencer Pratt, the Palisades fire victim who ran for mayor of LA said, “Sure, if we ignore the fire engines, PPE, hoses, gated wyes, tankers, retardant, copters, chainsaws, and everything they use to save lives are created by private industry and only made possible through capitalist private sector supply chains.

“Let’s not forget, while the rest of the Palisades burned to the ground because our socialist government leaders slashed the LAFD budget by $17 million, Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to successfully save all of his assets in the Village.”

Benjamin Franklin started the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia—thus VFDs are older than the nation itself. Most fire departments are VFDs. I doubt many volunteers are commies.

The Ethiopian is not the worst candidate Democrats have. Brianna Lyman tweeted:

In 7 months Democrats have elected/nominated:

-A man who fantasized about murdering Republicans/their children

-A man with a NAZI tattoo

-An Al Qaeda volunteer

-A woman who said the US is an “effing disgrace”

-A woman who said 9/11 was our fault

This is who the party is

The reality in LA is the city drained the 117 million gallon reservoir ahead of fire season.

The DEI mayor visited Ghana, an amusing destination for well-off black Americans. I guess they want to see the place where the African king sold their ancestors as slaves to Europeans.

The DEI fire chief delayed response to the fire.

The government destroyed 37 square miles of valuable (well, once valuable) real estate. Thousands were left homeless as they lost $25 billion in homes, business, cars and the rest.

Newsom used the disaster to raise money and the legislature dedicated $2.5 billion to recovery.

As of April, 34 homes were rebuilt. In his defense, it is going faster than his high-speed rail system, which has cost $15 billion in the past 11 years. Newsom’s built 81 miles of track.

The first transcontinental railroad too a little over 6 years to build. It was 1,911 miles—all by private railroads. Instead of subsidies, taxpayers loaned the companies $55 million, which was repaid with interest.

The government gave the railroads 129 million acres of land as the country was land rich, cash poor. The land would be useless without the railroad—almost as useless as Newsom, Obama and Kasich.

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On Saturday, the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary in this Year of the Bicentennial+50. The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Two days later, they debated and edited the Declaration of Independence. On July 8, 1776, Colonel John Nixon publicly read the Declaration aloud in Philadelphia’s State House yard (now Independence Square). This was accompanied by bell ringing (including the Liberty Bell), cheers, and some military displays.

Up to 90% of white men could read—without any teachers unions.

History caricatures John Adams as a prude and a stiff, but he was all for celebrating the anniversary of the declaration every year. In a letter to his wife, he said:

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.

It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.

Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

In a hold-my-beer world we need guys like him who actually hold the beer. He was the uncle who would slip you the hundred dollar bill to buy fireworks. (I wrote about Adams and the 4th in a newsletter 3 years ago.)

But there is another side to the story.

While I have pointed out that the five richest men in America signed the declaration (No. 6 was too busy being General Washington), other men with money did not want independence because they liked being rich Englishmen.

They were men like Lord Frederick Philipse III (1720–1786) who according to the Philipse Manor Hall Historical Society was a fourth generation descendant of Frederick Philipse (1626-1702) who was born 400 years ago as Vrederick Flypsen in Bolswaert, Friesland in 1626. At 21, he headed to New Amsterdam in America. He became the “Official Carpenter” of the Dutch West India Company.

Apparently carpenters back then made a lot of more money because he became quite wealthy. Well, he did more than that.

The Philipse Manor Hall Historical Society noted:

Philipse married the widow Margariet Hardenbroek De Vries 1662. He immediately adopted her two-year-old daughter Maria and renamed her Eva Philipse. The couple had ten children together and amassed a fortune through international trade and real estate. Along with exports of furs and tobacco, Frederick Philipse was one of the first traders to begin exporting wheat. With the establishment of the Manor of Philipsborough by Royal proclamation in 1693, and the introduction of tenant farmers, wheat became the family’s chief export item. Philipse’s ships traveled the world with a variety of items, both luxury and practical, including fine textiles, pots, shoe buckles, paper, spices and enslaved Africans.

Shoe buckles?

He became the wealthiest man in the Dutch colony. Sure, the British took over the town in 1664 and renamed it New York, but he continued to thrive under British rule, so much so that a century later, his great-grandson, Frederick the Third, didn’t have to mind the business. It was 4 generations, not 3. Took me a while to figure out the Dutch count about as well as they spell.

The historical society noted:

Unlike his predecessors, Frederick Philipse III seemed less interested in politics or trade and focused his attention on developing his Yonkers home, Philipse Manor Hall, and the surrounding landscape into a gentrified country estate worthy of a man of his wealth. He married the widow Elizabeth Williams Rutgers in 1756 and they had nine children.

Well, you can see where all this talk about breaking with England upset Philipse. After all, while he was a Knickerbocker (colonials whose roots were Dutch), he also was a British lord.

Four months after the original Independence Day, a group of men met at the Sign of Queen Charlotte across from city hall. They became Loyalists and drafted and signed a letter to “To the Right Honorable Richard Viscount Howe, of the Kingdom of Ireland, and His Excellency The Honorable William Howe, Esquire, General of His Majesty’s Forces in America, the Kings’ Commissioners for restoring Peace in His Majesty’s Colonies and Plantations in North America &c. &c. &c.”

Well, Governor Gates did bring peace I suppose by surrendering Boston and the rest of New England to the Patriots, who would later draft Tom Brady and win a lot of Super Bowls

More likely the 557 signees (some sources say 547) referred to Gates retreating to New York City and repelling the rebels. This demoralized the continental army. However, Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas became the nation’s best recruiting ad until Pearl Harbor.

The Declaration of Dependence was about what one would expect—long and sycophantic.

May it please your excellencies.

Impressed with the most grateful sense of the Royal Clemency, manifested In your Proclamation of the 14th. Of July last, whereby His Majesty hath been graciously pleased to declare, “That he is desirous to deliver His American subjects from the calamities of War, and other oppressions, which they now undergo:” and equally affected with sentiments of gratitude for the generous and humane attention to the disposition “to confer with His Majesty’s well affected subjects, upon the means of restoring the public Tranquility, and establishing a permanent union with every Colony as a part of the British Empire.”

We whose names are hereunto subscribed, Inhabitants of the City and County of New-York, beg leave to inform your Excellencies: that altho most of us have subscribed a general Representation with many other of the Inhabitants; yet we wish that our conduct, in maintaining inviolate our loyalty to our Sovereign, against the strong tide of oppression and tyranny, which has almost overwhelmed this Land, may be marked by some line of distinction, which cannot well be drawn from the mode of Representation that has been adopted for the Inhabitants in general.

Influenced by this Principle, and from a regard to our peculiar Situation, we have humbly presumed to trouble your Excellencies with the second application; in which, we flatter ourselves, none participate but those who have ever, with unshaken fidelity, borne true Allegiance to His Majesty, and the most warm and affectionate attachment to his Person and Government. That, notwithstanding the tumult of the times, and the extreme difficulties and losses to which many of us have been exposed, we have always expressed, and do now give this Testimony of our Zeal to preserve and support the Constitutional Supremacy of Great Britain over the Colonies; and do most ardently wish for a speedy restoration of that union between them, which, while it subsisted, proved the unfailing source of their mutual happiness and prosperity.

We cannot help lamenting that the number of Subscribers to this Address is necessarily lessened, by the unhappy circumstance that many of our Fellow-Citizens, who have firmly adhered their loyalty, have been driven from their Habitations, and others sent Prisoners into some of the neighbouring Colonies: and tho’ it would have afforded us the highest satisfaction, could they have been present upon this occasion: yet we conceive it to be the duty we owe to ourselves and our prosperity, whilst this testimony of our Allegiance can be supported by known and recent facts, to declare to your Excellencies; that so far from having given the last countenance or encouragement, to the most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion, that ever disgraced the annuls of Time; we have on the contrary, steadily and uniformly opposed it, in every stage of its rise and progress, at the risk of our Lives and Fortunes.

In all fairness, they indeed risked their lives and fortunes. Many fled to England to escape retribution. After the war, some were so desperate, they moved to Canada.

But New York City was a safe haven as the British stayed and protected them until November 25, 1783—two years after the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. For many years, the city celebrated Evacuation Day until Thanksgiving overwhelmed the celebration.

And you wonder how Mamdani became mayor? Not a lot of MAGA in the city that never sleeps.

Boston still celebrates its Evacuation Day—March 17, 1776—as a legal holiday. The town keeps the bars open because it is also St. Patrick’s Day.

Yes, one city kicked the British out before Independence Day. The other’s E Day came only after the war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. No wonder New York is run by communists today.

As we celebrate our independence from England, let us also be glad that the Loyalists left and took Benedict Arnold with them.

We are American, without apology.

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ITEM 1: Sam Stein whined, “SCOTUS just sided with the administration’s desire to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. 350k of them now at risk of immediate deportation.”

The cat “pawsed” long enough from poll-writing duties to meow a sigh of relief.

ITEM 2: AP reported:

The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Tuesday in an immigration case dealing with the government’s power over green card holders accused of crimes.

The 6-3 decision centers on an immigration officer’s 2012 decision to put lawful permanent resident Muk Choi Lau on immigration parole when he returned from a short trip to China because he had been accused of a counterfeiting crime.

Lau argued that overstepped the officer’s authority, and the decision wrongly allowed the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly begin deportation proceedings after he pleaded guilty to selling counterfeit clothes in New Jersey.

In the Three Stoogettes dissent, KBJ said this put Muk Choi Lau in “immigration limbo.” I agree. He shouldn’t be in immigration limbo. He should be in prison in his home country.

ITEM 3: Prices for SpaceX fell to normal after the sugar rush of its IPO. This means Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire.

I am setting up a GoFundMe to get him back to that status. Oh, the money won’t go to him. That would be charity and he would never accept. Instead, I will use the money to buy SpaceX shares to get the price back up and Make Elon A Trillionaire Again because I’m such a swell guy.

ITEM 4: The New York Post reported, “Acting AG Todd Blanche announces 455 people charged for $6.5 billion in health care fraud schemes.”

Comment from Lucianne.com: “Pam Bondi was unavailable for comment—something about a nail parlor appointment.”

ITEM 5: JPMorgan Chase fired Angie Báez, 40, as its $350,000 Executive Director of Community and Industry Engagement for Card and Connected Commerce, for stealing a New York Knicks trash can following the team’s NBA championship victory.

Before you trash her, remember she was smart enough to snag a $350,000-a-year gig with just a two-year degree from a community college.

DEI Card. Don’t leave home without it.

ITEM 6: Liberals are upset by (spins wheel) Trump administration women are having babies.

Abortion. Anti-natalism. We haven’t had governors this opposed to childbirth since Herod.

ITEM 7: Via Power Line, “Air conditioning torn from homes under net zero clampdown.”

Hard to sell global warming to people with AC.

ITEM 8: A federal judge handed out sentences of 30 years to 100 years in prison to 8 Antifa members who attacked an ICE facility in Prairieland, Texas.

Apparently George Soros doesn’t provide legal aid to his employees.

ITEM 9: Basil the Great tweeted:

A French woman was given a six month suspended sentence and a €3,000 fine after her home was invaded by a Tunisian migrant who sexually assaulted her.

She appeared on national television to discuss her ordeal and said “the main danger for women in France is Black African and Arab immigrant men.”

The Police then charged her with “incitement to racial hatred.”

I suggest she spend another €3,000 and buy a pet pig to protect her. Name it Hal L.

ITEM 10: Pocahontas tweeted, “If Elon Musk paid my ultra-millionaire wealth tax, we could pay for child care for all three and four year olds in America.”

If federal tax and import policy supported more high-paying jobs for fathers, child care for most 3- and 4-year-olds would be called Mommy again.

ITEM 11: France played Iraq in the FIFA games.

Of course the Muslim team won. I just don’t know which one.

ITEM 12: Kevin Sorbo tweeted, “A Muslim woman in a hijab just said that ‘America deserved 9/11’ and won her primary in NY. That’s what the Democrat Party has become.”

Which is the bigger crime today: being patriotic or islamophobic?

ITEM 13: Collin Rugg tweeted:

Louisiana pastor beats up a man who allegedly threatened to r*pe and kill his wife and grandchildren.

Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church says he was working on a church bus when the neighbor’s son started shouting at him.

Spell said that it is his job as the natural protector to protect his church and family.

Police arrested the preacher. Should have made a whip of cords.

ITEM 14: REPORTER: “A new UK Prime Minister will be installed soon. Do you want to be the first person on his list to visit the country?”

TRUMP: “No.”

Just as well. The new prime minister undoubtedly will be more comfortable in Tehran or some other Muslim city.

Like London.

ITEM 15: From England:

We gotta stop that kid.

(Alternative) He’ll outgrow it and become a kindergartener who shoots someone each week.

ITEM 16: Patriot Pulse reported, “MLB Warned Christian Players for Writing Bible Verses and Harmeet Dhillon Just Made Them Regret It.”

If Black Lives Matter, then Bible Verses Matter too.

ITEM 17: The Washington Free Beacon reported, “‘We Could Make Prisons Obsolete’: James Talarico Called To Slash Police Budgets and Spend the Money on Social Programs.”

Good idea but executions are better and cheaper. Hang a few shoplifters, shoplifting drops.

ITEM 18: President Trump had a closed door luncheon with Senate Republicans.

Unlike Al Capone, he did not need a baseball bat to get his point across. The next day, Bill Cassidy and Rand Paul meekly changed their votes against Iran, flipping the vote on a resolution denouncing the Iranian war.

ITEM 19: Brandon Gill v. Food Stamps Advocate:

GILL: “Is your organization funded by organizations that make money from food stamps?”

WITNESS: *Silence*

GILL: “Do organizations who profit off food stamps fund your organization?”

WITNESS: “I can’t comment to that.”

GILL: “Does General Mills fund your organization?”

WITNESS: “I don’t have access to that information.”

GILL: “I do. It’s right here. They do fund your organization. Do they profit off food stamps?”

WITNESS: “Retailers are the major beneficiaries.”

GILL: “Do you think that’s a conflict of interest? They’re profiting off your advocacy. Do you think that’s a conflict of interest?”

Also a foolish federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot stop the use of food stamps to buy soda pop. Coca-Cola and Pepsi must be a food group alongside Cheeto’s, candy corn and bourbon.

One outa three ain’t bad.

ITEM 20: The Athletic—which serves as the sports section for the New York Times—reported, “Caitlin Clark leaves Indiana Fever game with back issue.”

The back issue was Alyssa Thomas, who knocked her down punched her in the throat while Clark was on her back.

Nearly 63 years ago, the NYT reported that JFK left a parade in Dallas after a splitting headache.

ITEM 21: Fox News tweeted:

A 6-year-old boy was found floating unconscious in a Florida pool. Seconds later, an ICE officer jumped in to save him.

ICE law enforcement officer Gregory Simmonds spotted the child in distress in Pasco County on May 16 and immediately pulled him from the water.

The child wasn’t breathing, and Simmonds began life-saving CPR at the scene until the boy regained consciousness.

Simmonds then arrested the boy’s parents and deported them. Heart-warming story.

I went too far, didn’t I? I apologize and blame the cat.

ITEM 22: John Bolton copped a plea, forfeited his pension, agreed to a $2,250,000 fine and still faces up to 5 years in prison (likely zero) because he did not want to risk losing his moustache.

The Trumpenfreude is strong with this one.

ITEM 23: Experts predicted the FIFA World Cup would be a disaster because of Trump and the tougher scrutiny of foreign visitors. The tournament just set an attendance record—breaking the record set in 1994 when the USA last hosted it.

Maybe Democcrats can throw some algae blossoms in the stadiums to distract attention.

BEST OF TWITTER:

One word.

Smart kid.

What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

Slappy Robot.

Faith.

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