June 28, 2026
Mel Brooks at 100
Timothy Birdnow
A century of Mel Brooks.
He's given so much joy to so many over the years. Who can forget Young Frankenstein, or Blazing Saddles, or Spaceballs, or the musical version of The Producers? Brooks is an American institution.
Happy birthday Mel! Wish we had another hundred years with you!
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The Winepress of the Wrath of Newsom
Timothy Birdnow
Know how you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start with a large one.
Know how you go completely bankrupt in the wine business? Start a winery in California.
California is going to squeeze the wine industry worse than those wineries squeeze grapes in a press.
Hair gel Newsom has a scheme that will bankrupt many of the smaller wineries, which are always marginally profitable at best.
FTA:
Under a new law coming into effect later this summer, wineries will have to pay just under $99 per acre per year on land they irrigate as part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s sustainable water initiative.
[...]
Beckstoffer Vineyards, one of Napa Valley’s largest and most respected grape growers, estimates the new fee will cost the company about $25,000 a year for its 12,000 acres in the Napa region.
"Right now we’re looking at these extra costs at a time where all of our clients are asking for price reductions and less fruit due to the downturn in the market,” General Manager Jim Lincoln told The California Post.
His company supplies grapes to about 120 wineries producing Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc.
These are farmers, not playboy wine makers. Grapes are a very labor-intensive and demanding crop to grow, and to grow grapes that will make great as opposed to bad wine requires a huge amount of attention and effort. I know; I used to grow grapes in my backyard and make wine. Grapes are notoriously fussy. To do it right requires a lot of costs and if the price of irrigation goes up these farmers will find it more profitable to grow olives or some other crop that needs less effort - and perhaps less water (not sure if olives do either but certainly there are other crops that need less of both).
And while California has been America's vineyard that may well change as new techniques have made it possible to grow the Vitis Vinifera grape (wine grapes from Europe) in other states, where the deadly Phylloxera Vastatrix bug lies in wait to feast on the roots of the defenseless plants. Actually Phylloxera was vanquished long ago by the grafting of Vinifera plants onto native American rootstocks - mainly from my home state of Missouri, but often by way of France which imported Missouri rootstocks - but there are other things that make Vinifera suffer in the middle of the country - fungi, swings in temperature, etc. Most of these have been addressed and now it's possible to grow Vinifera in most states. Constantine Frank, a guy from Russia, has grown great Pinot Noir and other Vinifera in upstate New York despite the bitter cold that hits the state. We grow some in Missouri although we prefer the French-American hybrids here. (They don't get a fair shake because of pure snobbery, but what can you do? I'd stack Chardonel or Traminette or Seyval up against Chardonnay or Gewurztraminer or Sauvignon Blanc any day, and as for reds Chambourcin gives many Pinots a run for their money. Oh, and Stark Starr or Cynthiana makes port style wines that can compete with the very best Portuguese.)
At any rate other places can and will work when California pushes a lot of winemakers out. In The Heartbreak Grape the owner of Calera, the winery that pioneered great Pinot Noir in the Central Coast, said he strongly considered opening his winery in Texas. Texas might be too warm for Pinot but I rather doubt Iowa would be. He might well wind up moving to Texas in the end or some other state. (Pinot likes hot days and cool nights.)
At any rate the cheaper wines will go up, making wine drinking less affordable for all Americans. So will the price of better wines, but the well-to-do can absorb the price spike. We've been in a golden age for wine; you can buy some very good cheap stuff. Heck, Charles Shaw's "two buck Chuck" wine is couch-cushion change price and gives a decent, palatable wine. Those days are going to be over. Shaw's cost for wine grapes will rise.
So perhaps Kentucky Bourbon will be the next big thing; there's plenty of it and it's prices aren't going up any time soon. And while microbreweries are struggling now as the younger folk drink cocktails they may see a resurgence as people buy good beer rather than good wine. And heck, some of 'em might even decide to try Missouri wine, or Texas wine, or Ohio wine. We all make some pretty good stuff here.
I assure you it ain't no Thunderbird.
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Let Us Pray
Timothy Birdnow
Please pray for the People of Venezuela, especially those suffering fromm the recent earthquakes. Many are trapped under rubble. Many families have loved ones who are just disappeared and are desperately worried as they may well be dead.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is i Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us
and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Amen
Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee
blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen.
Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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NYC Rent Freeze to Hollow Out Big Apple
Timothy Birdnow
O.K. so what happens when a rent-stabilized apartment needs major repairs?
A landlord cannot absorb the costs of major repairs if he can't raise rents, nor any other rising costs. Remember, the cost of living rises for the landlord as well as the tenant, and the landlord has the increased burden of having to take care of his property, pay taxes, etc. He has to be able to build those costs into his rent or he is losing money, and losing money is not why he bought property to begin with. Property ownership is a business. If it is unprofitable the landlord will cut his loses and dump it.
What that means is a lot of properties will start declining as maintenance is deferred and the landlord will prefer an empty building to tenants who don't pay. He'll try to sell if he can, and who is going to buy? You get into a downward spiral, with properties decaying and sub-par tenants coming in under government funded programs which guarantee the rent is paid but do not guarantee the quality of the tenants. Or the building empties out and sits vacant - a playground for criminals and scumbags.
I've seen it happen many times when I worked in real estate.
Raising rents is one of the prime tools used to control the quality of your tenants. Without that you have to accept people who may tear the place up or ruin the neighborhood since you can't discriminate based on anything other than what is on paper; if someone has the money they can get the property. High rents is how you keep out the riff-raff.
Now it's impossible and New York is going to go into decline. Mark my words.
If you put your thumb on the scale the other side moves. It's how it works in real estate. Freeze rent by law and you wind up with a declining market. It's as simple as that.
By the time Momdani is done New York is going to look like it did in the Kurt Russell movie Escape from New York. They'll have to put a wall around it to keep people in.
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Don't Want to be a Fat Man
Timothy Birdnow
Yes, but I had a belly fat problem since I was a kid...
Scientists Discover What Triggers Belly Fat as We Age
In honor of this great breakthrough I give you the Jethro Tull classic Fat Man.
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"Reefer Madness" wasn't Wrong After All
Timothy Birdnow
We who opposed the legalization of marijuana always knew this was true.
Massive Study Links Teen Marijuana Use to Double the Risk of Serious Mental Illness
I've known some potheads very well and most of them have mental health issues, from moderate to severe. They did NOT have those issues prior to inhaling the Devil's lettuce.
Source:
Public Health Institute
Summary:
Teens who use cannabis may face a substantially greater risk of developing serious mental health conditions, including psychotic and bipolar disorders, according to a study of more than 463,000 adolescents. Researchers found cannabis use often preceded these diagnoses by nearly two years, strengthening concerns about its long-term effects on developing brains.
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Have Conservatives Ever Seen a Culture War Battle They Couldn’t Lose?
Selwyn Duke explains why we on the right (not "conservatives" as he points out) struggle so much and why the Left always seems to win. I add my own comments after:
more...
Timothy Birdnow
By Selwyn Duke
"Republicans are conservatives,” said author and CEO Kenin Spivak recently. "Conservatives are conservative.” This tautology was uttered to answer a question: Why do Republicans lose social and cultural wars despite winning elections?
The topic was raised on the Wednesday edition of Bill Martinez Live. (Note: Bill, on whose show I’ve appeared numerous times, is one of the really good guys in media.) Spivak, who’s also a financier, attorney, and consultant, addressed a line he penned in a June 15 RealClear Politics article. He’d written that
despite an edge in winning elections and appointing 60% of Supreme Court justices confirmed over the last 65 years, since the 1960s conservatives have been on the losing end of nearly every social and cultural battle and most policy disputes.
Explaining how this happened (and is happening) on Martinez’s program, he stated:
The Democrats, and progressives in particular, have spent 75 years advancing themselves…throughout all of our major institutions: education, federal government, state government, the media. And they’ve really gotten a hammerlock on those institutions. And they’ve used their control to pass regulations, not laws, where someone else in another institution has to comply with a rule they issue for a benefit to accrue. And then in the other institution they pass that rule, and it goes back and forth. …And that’s what’s given them their victory on all of these cultural and other policies.
How does this work? Grok artificial intelligence provided the following example and explanation (which I evaluated for accuracy):
Government Pressure on Social Media Platforms (Media/Tech/Information Flow)
Mechanism: White House officials, the Surgeon General, CDC, and FBI engaged in repeated communications, meetings, and demands with platforms (Twitter, Facebook/Meta, YouTube, etc.) to censor or suppress content on topics like COVID-19 origins/treatments/vaccines, the Hunter Biden laptop story, election integrity, and certain conservative viewpoints. This was often framed as combating "misinformation” or "disinformation,” backed by implicit or explicit threats of regulatory consequences (e.g., changes to Section 230 liability protections or antitrust scrutiny).
Cross-institution cycle: Platforms modified content moderation policies, algorithms (visibility filtering/shadowbanning), and enforcement to align with government priorities to maintain access to officials, avoid penalties, or preserve "partnerships.” This affected what millions saw, influencing public opinion, elections, and trust in institutions. Documented extensively in the Twitter Files and related congressional investigations/court cases (e.g., Missouri v. Biden).
Outcome: Reduced visibility or outright removal of dissenting views on major cultural/political issues, effectively shaping the information environment in ways aligned with progressive priorities — without new laws from Congress.
The above is especially egregious because, since it inhibited people’s ability to discuss cultural issues, it could affect the culture. Speaking of which…
Win the Culture, Own the Future
Spivak is singing my tune, and his point about regulatory institutional cross-infection is a good one. Yet there’s still more to it.
Spivak’s line "Conservatives are conservative” is a legitimate warning. It’s why I long ago ceased identifying as conservative. And no one explained the issue better than philosopher G.K. Chesterton.
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives,” he wrote in 1924. "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
Yes, I’ve often quoted the above (and will continue doing so until everyone gets it!) It relates, too, to conservatism’s and liberalism’s true natures.
These two isms are not ideologies so much, but processes. This is why the actual positions each term represents vary with time and place. (For example, conservatives in Sweden largely accept the "LGBTQ+” agenda; American conservatives largely reject it.) Liberalism is the process of ever trying to change the status quo. Conservatism is the process of ever trying to maintain it. The upshot:
As the status quo changes, so will the positions the conservatives are trying to conserve. Of course, the liberals are the change agents, the catalysts for status-quo alteration. Conclusion?
Conservatives are simply defending yesterday’s liberals’ social and cultural victories insofar as today’s status quo reflects them.
"The Best Defense is a Good Offense”
Imagine this as a lib-con war for cultural territory — except, only one side ever takes the offense. The libs come and attack the cons’ land. The latter resist, of course, but there’s pressure to be "reasonable,” to "compromise.” Oh, the cons may not relinquish their entire territory immediately, perhaps not even half. But whether ceding 10 percent, three percent, or one, the ultimate outcome is identical.
The libs capture 95 acres today, 505 the next year, 387 later, etc. As the process continues, the libs will have eventually conned the cons out of Traditionland entirely. It will still be called Traditionland, though, and the cons will still defend it, oblivious to how it’s not their ancestors’ realm anymore except in name.
A real-world example: Leftists demanded same-sex "marriage’s” official recognition. Conservatives eventually softened (in the head) on the issue and capitulated. True warriors for tradition would’ve proceeded differently. They wouldn’t have merely rejected the marriage attack.
They would’ve also demanded we remove government from marriage entirely and restore it as a solely religious institution. They’d have been, too as passionate about their restoration as the Left was about their degradation. And that’s what you call taking the offense.
Another factor I’ll mention, briefly, was addressed by ancient Chinese sage Confucius. "I have never seen one [person],” he said in The Analects, "who loves virtue as much as he loves sex.” (Ergo, China’s 1.4 billion population.) The left is marketing vice — a much easier sell than virtue.
And that’s why conservatives always lose cultural and social battles. Remember here that if the Founding Fathers had been conservatives they wouldn’t have been founders or fathers (of a nation). They would’ve been Loyalists, faithful to the crown.
So when pondering whether you’re conservative, always ask a question:
What, exactly, would I be conserving?
This article was originally published at The New American.
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June 27, 2026
Echoes of Ferguson
Timothy Birdnow
This is exactly what happened in Ferguson Mo. with Mike Brown.
This is in Peoria, Ilinois.
I've spoken with cops who tell me this was what was happening when Officer Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown in Ferguson; people flooded out of the apartments there and began scuffling with the police, who were forced to withdraw. They had to send the coroner's wagon away because the couldn't guarantee it's safety and had to leave Mike Brown's body in the street. The media made a huge deal of that but it was a scene much like this one. If they had tried to take the body they likely would have had to shoot someone else.
We have created our own barbarians in America, and we are allowing them to run wild. In times past the cops would have shown up with billyclubs and that would have been that. But now the police are terrified to use force. That way leads to things like this.
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Have a Corporate Day
Timothy Birdnow
Here is an article in the somewhat unreliable Natural News about a small town in Delaware (the state that gave us Joe Biden) granting voting rights to, drumroll please! Corporations.
The town is named Fenwick, which I find rather suspicious in that that is the name of the tiny principality in the classic Peter sellers movie The Mouse that Roared.
So I did a Duckduckgo search and found that, yes indeed, there is a beach town named Fenwick and it did indeed pass an ordinance allowing corporations to vote - and a judge upheld this in court.
Corporations are legal entities that are treated as individuals under law, but only for tax and regulatory purposes. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled they have free speech rights. This is a next logical step I fear, but it is way over the line.
The Constitution limits voting to citizens and it cannot be argued that corporations are citizens. (Neither are robots, which the article worries is the next step.) This law gets around it by only being applicable to local elections but it's the nose of the camel in the tent; in time it will be applied more and more.
Corporate voting simply dilutes the votes of the People and is thus something neither desirable nor practical.
The Natural News article frets about the implications:
Once you grant voting rights to fictional constructs, the next logical step is extending them to robots. Saudi Arabia already granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot, in 2017 [2]. Susan Liautaud, in her book "The Power of Ethics," describes Sophia's reception as a "social humanoid robot" that travels the world for speaking engagements [3]. And European officials have been exploring granting robots legal status to "guarantee a standard level of safety and security" [4]. Fenwick is not an isolated oddity -- it's part of a coordinated global push to normalize non-human voting.
One could, I suppose, argue AI's are persons and as such entitled to vote. What would happen if this were to be implemented? There would be AI's everywhere voting as their human masters program them to and the vote would hence become meaningless.
I would add Spain has also granted "personhood" to apes, so in time our planet might be ruled by "damned dirty apes".
The NN article is right; this is the coming thing. And it will, in time, make elections a mere show.
BTW I suspect with Fenwick being a beach town there are more businesses there than residents and they were complaining about being cut out of the policy-making process. But it sets a bad precedent and if it can be done here it can be done anywhere.
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Merkel a Stasi?
Timothy Birdnow
Was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel a Stasi? There is considerable evidence that she was.
It would explain why she took so many steps to screw over her own country, including opening the floodgates to massive immigration from Islamic countries.
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More Alien Fraud
Timothy Birdnow
More foreign daycare fraud this time in New York and run by Pakistanis.
No wonder the Democrats don't want to end illegal immigration; the fraud is massive and I have no doubt a lot of the money finds it's way into Democratic coffers.
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Shut Up or Leave
Timothy Birdnow
Well, I'm embarrassed to have them as Americans with us!
BTW I'd hate to see her barr assed.
If you think America is so bad why not leave? Canada is right there after all. And since you love illegal aliens so much why not ask yourself why they all want to come here? If this country sucks so much why are millions upon millions seeking to find a way in?
When did loving your country and being proud of her become an embarrassment to people with great jobs and happy lives? How ungrateful do you have to be to think this way.
Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld - has really suffered in Trump's America too. I mean, he's rich, famous, and well loved. Gee, it must really stink! And he made all his money with a show about nothing.
The Canadians would probably welcome him with open arms. I hear Montreal is beautiful this time of year!
If America is embarrassing to your elite dispositions why would you stay? Either shut up or leave.
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The Long March to a Socialist Democrat Party
imothy BIrdnow
Don't kid yourself; this move to the extreme Left began long ago, as far back as Eugene McCarthy and probably before that.
But Reagan's success began the slow process of radicalizing the Democrats, and the election of 2000 galvanized some in the party. I remember Nancy Pelosi arguing the party needed to make a sharp left turn before she was elevated to House Minority Leader (and later Speaker) and she pitched her leadership based on "being proudly Progressive" at a time when conservative values were ascendant.
This has been coming a long time.
But why now? I suspect if we look at it we'll find the funding was there for a radical takeover. Now who do you suppose was funing the radicals? Why don't we know? We know George Soros does it with his many shell operations but who else?
Money is the lifeblood of politics and the radicals seem to have plenty of it, enough to grease the skids if nothing else. Democrats who think it political suicide are much more amenable when they see a big pile of cash.
I also suspect U.S. taxpayers have been funding them through things like USAID and other such schemes, laundering that tax money back to the radicals in the Democratic Party.
At any rate this article purports to show how the extreme left has taken over the Democratic Party.
It states:
The rise of socialism inside the Democrat Party didn't happen overnight. It happened because Democrat leadership stopped delivering for the people they claim to represent. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries spent years doing nothing but hating Trump. That became their only policy. Now they're watching their own base replace them with people even further to the left.
Perhaps but that is just a symptom and not the cause. It's rather like saying the patient is ill because he has boubons on his skin and we need to treat it with a topical cream; the guy's about to die.
The reality is the Democrats are consumed with their lust for power and they have no original ideas or enthusiasm, and the radical leftists - mostly young people taught socialism in their schools - have the enthusiasm and unoriginal ideas that they think are uniquely their own and the exhausted Democrat Party embraced them as the only way to stay alive. I agree the party leadership was stale and predictable; the only weapon they had in their arsenal was "Orange Man Bad" and it did nothing for anyone. But the party had long since been moving leftward and the radicals just moved into a power vacuum. It would have happened had Schumer and Jeffries been pushing actual solid ideas or not. The Party was dying and, like an old rundown house an urban pioneer picked up for peanuts to rehab, the radicals are at work remaking the Democrats from a left/center coalition into America's preeminent socialist party.
At the moment they are rather like the Mensheviks in revolutionary Russia. In time the Bolsheviks - the violent socialists who thought the Mensheviks too squishy - will take over. That's how revolutionary parties work.
Democrats have been leftists certainly since Woodrow Wilson but they metastasized with Eugene McCarthy then George McGovern. The young kids who worked for McGovern were disillusioned and vowed to change the Democrats, who had offered rather luke warm support for McGovern. That was the beginning of the radicalization of the Democrats. People like Hillary Clinton got in the game after that, all part of an ideological crusade. Their revolution has been ongoing ever since and this is the final stage, where they display their true colors.
As Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle put it think of it as evolution in action.
We have to learn to stop thinking in terms of months and years and look at the longer picture. As Mitch McConnell liked to say (he's an ass but he was right here) we must play the long game. Or at least think in terms of long term strategy and context.
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The Eloi Elites
Timothy Birdnow
This is exactly how the Morlocks separated from the Eloi:
dank@cptdankkk
Dave Chappelle says no one needs to think anymore because of AI: "Thinking is for poor people”
"I was talking to a friend of mine and we were laughing about how no one really would know what to teach a kid now. What skill sets are going to matter 10 or 20 years from now as the world becomes automated”
"We decided your character is your destiny. If you’re a good person that’s all you can ask from anybody and hope for the best”
"I don’t know if anyone needs to think anymore. It’s AI, quantum computing, it seems like thinking is for poor people”
In H.G. Wells' famous novel The Time Machine the time traveler found that humanity had split into two separate species - the passive, beautiful, and completely stupid Eloi who lived on the surface of the Earth in a veritable Garden of Eden and the Morlocks, underground dwellers who had vast machines and industry. Turns out the Morlocks bred the Eloi as cattle for their dinner tables.
Wells believed that the wealthy elites would find life increasingly easy and would no longer have to think, eventually atrophying their mental capacity while the Morlocks, the laboring class who had to think to survive, would become the dominant species, living underground as they had been forced to do and laboring on the machines which made the surface a paradise.
Wells hinted at this in other works as well. He believed this was humanity's fate.
At any rate if Chappelle is correct and thinking is going to be just for poor people Wells' dystopic vision may yet come to pass.
What separates us from the animals? Our ability to think. Animals think in their own way but not even remotely as do we. And the wealthy elites are increasingly stupid thanks to a life of ease and the increasing stupidity of what passes for education these days. Their parents were smart, people who were bright enough to make a lot of money, but as time goes by and the universities teach inane nonsense the intelligence of the progeny will keep dropping. Now with AI there is no longer any need to actually think and the wealthy may well wind up with ever-dropping I.Q.'s while the working class is forced to solve problems. In the end MAGA will win just as it did in Wells' dystopian future. In his future the Morlocks ate the Eloi (a cautionary tale since Wells was a socialist) but the reality is more mundane; they will simply supplant them. Like the Bourgouis in Europe supplanted the old aristocracy so too the modern Morlocks will eventually supplant the Ruling Class in this world. It might take a long time but it will eventually happen. The Eloi are slowly but surely losing the very thing that gave them the hubris to think they could fundamentally transform the world in the first place.
No dining on them - they probably would taste bad anyway. But certainly they can meet the fate of the House of Lords in Britain - obscurity and irrelevance.
AI may well accelerate that process. I sure do hope so.
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Thomistic Wisdom
Timothy Birdnow
Clarence Thomas cuts to the quick:
"Even assuming jurisdiction, the equal protection claim fails for the additional reason that aliens have no equal protection rights against the federal government."
And that, boys and girls, is why illegal aliens can't petition to stay in America and force President Trump to extend protected status to them.
This is crystal clarity of thought. We are going to sorely miss Justice Thomas when he retires (or passes away in office).
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Moreno Joins Fauxcohontas in Calling for Tax Increase
Timothy Birdnow
Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) join forces to push the biggest tax increase in history.
The Senators write that instead of reducing the benefits, the government should adopt what they call a common-sense solution: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap.
Warren and Moreno say that this is one way to make the payroll tax and solve the Social Security funding crisis for "another generation.”
More From the New York Times:
For 2026, the payroll tax cap, or taxable maximum, is $184,500. Workers and their employers each pay 6.2 percent on wages up to that amount. (Self-employed individuals pay 12.4 percent.) Today, the maximum Social Security withholding for one worker is $22,878, or 12.4 percent of $184,500. Not a penny more, even if an individual’s salary far exceeds $184,500.
Since the vast majority of Americans make less than that, most people are paying Social Security taxes on 100 percent of their earnings, while the highest earners are paying on only part of theirs.
Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer? This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.
According to one estimate, eliminating the payroll tax cap would inject around $3 trillion into the program over the next 10 years. Lifting the cap so that all income is treated the same would generate substantial revenue that would extend the solvency of Social Security for another generation.
But what Warren and Moreno do not tell readers is that lifting the payroll tax cap would result in the largest tax increase in more than four decades.
What is the point of electing Republicans if they are going to play footsie with fake Indians and socialists? If Big Smelly Sqaw is on board you know you are on the wrong side.
Just another Republican who needs to be primaried, it seems to me.
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June 26, 2026
Don't Let 'em Call it "Democratic Socialism"
Timothy Birdnow
This article is correct if rather mundane, bordering on cliche'. The reason I'm linking it is just to complain about how so many on our side have allowed the misconception of "Democratic Socialism" to become conventional wisdom in recent years. There is no such thing.
Socialism is usually voted in, not seized by force as in the Russian Revolution. All of the Eastern Block elected Communists shortly after the Soviets came in following WWII. Now there was duress, certainly, but the Communists in Poland or Czechoslovakia were elected, by hook or by crook, and that was that.
"Democratic socialism" is often portrayed as Scandinavia and Greece and other such places, but those places are in no way socialist. Yes, they have big welfare systems, funded by their not having to pay for any sort of national defense (the U.S. has done that for them for decades) but they are in many cases MORE capitalistic than the U.S., with fewer regulations on businesses and lower corporate taxes. They are big on inviting foreign investment. Likewise they have protectionist legislation and tariffs on foreign imports to encourage their own industries.
Socialism is the ownership or control of the means of production, that is the definition. I've had this argument with many liberals, and eventually they have to concede they are in error by promoting "democratic socialism" insofar as they cannot justify it based on historical evidence. In point of fact the Fascist economies - Italy and Nazi Germany - were socialist and after a few years they began winding down in their abilities to produce wealth as the loss of competition stagnated them. Both Italy and Germany tried to keep a permanent wartime economy running to keep production and consumption up but all that did was make life harder for the citizenry. We know how it ended.
But other types of countries experimented with this and failed. Sweden tried it during the seventies and gave up on it as a terrible idea, one that was ruining their economy. The government sold off the industries and companies it owned.
"Democratic socialism" is just a nice-sounding phrase but what does it mean? It means socialism in it's infancy in a society. Socialism is always soft words and velvet gloves until it stops working and the iron boots and war hammers come out. MOST socialist countries started out with the velvet glove and then wound up with gulags.
Yet we on the right have allowed the Left to co-opt the language yet again, tricking young people into thinking "democratic socialism" is somehow inherently different and untried and workable. They know the record of socialism otherwise - poverty, despair, gulags, medical abuse of people based on "insanity" claims, etc. They know the Little Black Book of Communism. So they repackaged the damned evil thing and called it "democratic socialism" - and everyone has forgotten that the most Communist countries called themselves democratic and it was even in their names. One of the most evil, tyrannical states to ever exist was called the German Democratic Republic, for instance. Many more use "Peoples Republic" in theirs, such as the People's Republic of China. But the People have no say in how the country is run. Democratic socialist states do neither as the governments suppress free speech and free assembly and other things that may remove the boot from the economic throat of the producers.
You can't have socialism without that boot. It is not in the nature of human beings to give away the fruits of their labor for free. That fruit must be plucked from the hands of those who tended the trees by force, and that is in no way a free system.
It is democratic only insofar as the old idea of democracy devoid of any moral restrictions is implemented. We know that Plato said pure democracy is the last stage before tyranny and history has born him out.
We've got to take back the language and to do that we've got to stop acquiescing to these sorts of linguistic tricks. Whenever someone starts blathering about democratic socialism we need to come down on them like a ton of bricks (which, if you are lucky, the government will pay you with in a democratic socialist state - you can at least barter that. We need to drag the language back, stop this Overton Window crap where they slowly but steadily erode our understanding of words. Sociallism is about power, the use and abuse of power to steal from the productive and give to thos e politically connected or politically expedient. It is a slow poison, but in the end it will kill you. Think Madam Curie and radium.
We need to "true the language" as Confucious said was necessary in ancient China to restore a nation. As long as they can gloss over what htey actually are doing and will do they can trick the maleducated. And of course most people who attended public schooling are maleducated.
"Democratic socialism" is nothing but Venus fly trap for human insects. It smells goods and you fly into the maw and then that's it - a slow, horrible death and eventual digestation by the horrid weed.
Every time someone uses the phrase we need to say "there is no such thing". There isn't after all. All socialism is inherently non-democratic. It requires force to compel.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:20 AM
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Texas Two Step: Dallas Board of Education Eliminates American Revolution in Favor of Oprah Winfrey's Biography
Timothy Birdnow
And the Left continues to erase America and her history, this time in Dallas as the Lone Star State (is that single star about their flag or their intelligence level?) just saw the Dallas Board of Education vote to remove all mention of the American revolution from history classes for high school sophomores.
Insted they are replacing it with discussions about Oprah Winfrey.
I kid you not.
Three Republicans on the board joined all the Democrats in voting to remove any discussion of the American Revolution in favor of a biography of Oprah Winfrey, a successful woman, surely, but hardly on a par with Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklyn, John Adams etc. Her television show hardly competes with Lexington and Concord or or Saratoga or Yorktown.
In Texas American history is not taught until high school; the state prefers to teach children Texas history first. Eighth graders know more about William Travis or Sam Houston than about George Washington or Alexander Hamilton. So it is vital this segment of history be taught in high school, but apparently this BOA thinks otherwise.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
The state legislature needs to step in, and that means that Gov. Abbott needs to push against this.
This is how the Left hijacks countries; they first erase their history, downplay their successes and their strengths and rebuilds the nation along internationalist and socialist lines. Getting us to forget who we are is the key to any successful socialist revolution.
And Texas, the cornerstone of Americanism these days, needs to know who we are. If Texas falls to the Left it's all over. Leftists can take other states but if Texas goes the whole thing crumbles and the Left obtains eternal power. They know it too. And Texas, despite being known as a right wing stronghold, is actually full of liberals and they are out of political power but not by much. The balance could shift quite easily. Maleducate children and in a decade the state could become the next California.
This is something truly disgraceful and I am not sure why the conservative media isn't all over this. This needs to be a national story.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
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SCOTUS Knocks the Legs Out from Under Left on Immigration
Timothy Birdnow
How the two latest Supreme Court rulings have demolished the Left's schemes to keep the immigration pipeline flowing.
By declaring Temporary Protected Status (TPS) unreviewable by the courts and by denying due process privileges to "refugees" who never enter the U.S. the Supreme Court has knocked the legs out of the Left's primary tool in stopping the Trump immigration agenda.
Read all about it at Revolver.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
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Yes, 2020 was Stolen
Timothy Birdnow
This post from X shows how the 2020 election was stolen. He includes the documentation, which I cannot reproduce here:
user avatar
The SCIF
@TheSCIF
Significant findings from the NEW 799-page DOMINION documents and the STOLEN 2020 Election.
Ballots Exceed Voters in 3 Decisive States in the 2020 Election.
Michigan: 499,850 more ballots than voters.
Margin: 154,188.
Pennsylvania: 155,053 more ballots than voters Margin: 80,555.
Georgia, Fulton County alone: 22,534 more ballots than voters.
Margin: 11,779.
Each discrepancy independently exceeds its state's margin of victory.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation documented that Pennsylvania distributed approximately 3.1 million mail ballots in 2020 and that 440,781 of those ballots were classified "unknown," meaning election officials had no record of what happened to them, whether they were returned, not returned, counted, or discarded.
Pennsylvania's certified presidential margin of victory was 81,660 votes. The number of mail ballots whose chain of custody could not be reconstructed exceeded the certified margin by more than five to one.
In Delaware County specifically, officials destroyed election-night paper tapes, ordered the Blue Crest ballot sorter wiped of all November 3, 2020, data immediately before open-records production, and failed to produce required return sheets from more than half the county’s precincts.
The Digital Records, Logs, Images, Cryptographic Hashes, were Wiped:
Antrim County's Election Management System had all 2020 adjudication logs manually removed while prior-year logs remained intact; the 68.05% tabulator-log error rate that triggered mass adjudication cannot be audited because there is no record of who adjudicated what. Maricopa County's EMS database and Windows security event logs were deleted or overwritten, and 284,412 ballot images were found corrupt or missing.
In Mesa County, Colorado, a state-supervised Dominion "trusted build" deleted 28,989 files from the EMS server, including at least 695 log and event-log files required by federal and state law to be retained for 22 months.
In Fulton County, Georgia, SHA authentication files for 132,286 of 148,318 absentee ballot images were intentionally removed, 17,852 ballot images were missing from the official recount, and the county admitted in federal court it did not preserve the majority of in-person ballot images for the November 3 original count.
These findings describe not isolated mismanagement but a layered collapse of election record integrity in precisely the jurisdictions that decide national power.
Inflated rolls create capacity for fraudulent ballots; broken poll-books and voter histories sever the voter-to-ballot link, ballot custody gaps and mass adjudication obscure which ballots are real and how they were interpreted, manipulated or opaque tally systems convert those ballots into unprovable totals, and targeted destruction of logs and images eliminates the forensic trail that could expose or disprove manipulation.
From a national security perspective, this means U.S. election infrastructure, formally designated as critical infrastructure, is currently a high-value, low-risk target for foreign intelligence services and aligned domestic networks, and that the United States lacks both the evidentiary resilience and the deterrent posture expected of a system that allocates sovereign authority.
Fictitious Ballots & Ineligible Registrants were Injected at Scale:
6,691 fictitious ballots identified in at least one state; thousands of ineligible registrants entered via a "1/1/1900" placeholder birthdate; private NGOs obtained real-time API access to statewide voter files without public contracting or security vetting.
Systematic Destruction of Ballot Images and Cryptographic Authentication Files:
315,000+ advance vote ballot images destroyed in one state, 132,286 SHA cryptographic authentication files intentionally deleted in one county, permanently eliminating ballot-image integrity verification. Machine tally tapes physically destroyed before a records request, with a sworn admission they "wouldn't match the election results."
Targeted Deletion of All 2020 Adjudication Logs, Prior Years Intact:
Every adjudication log for 2020 was absent in one county while prior-year logs on the identical system remained intact, consistent only with targeted deletion. 37,000 database queries were run against one county's Election Management System following a legislative subpoena.
Vendor-Directed Log Destruction & Selective Prosecution of the Whistleblower:
"Trusted build" updates approved by state officials deleted tens of thousands of legally mandated log files across multiple jurisdictions. The official who preserved forensic images was criminally prosecuted, no official who ordered destruction in any jurisdiction has been charged.
This is just a slice and a fraction of how the 2020 election was stolen, facts, examples, figures, etc. There is so much more, but one thing is for sure.
The 2020 Election was STOLEN.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
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