Does anyone in the Trump Admin understand that even if the Iranian regime crumbles, there will be little to no bump for POTUS or the GOP heading into the midterms?
No one outside of Fox News will care. It’s about the economy, stupid. Wages are down, jobs are non-existent, homes are at their most unaffordable level in history, foreign workers are still being granted visas and replacing domestic workers, mass deportations never happened, and prices are still out of control.
Trump wasn’t elected to defeat Iran. He was elected because he specifically promised to focus on domestic reforms instead of world policing.
It’s astonishing how out of touch this administration and its cheerleaders have become in less than two full years.
@WeTheBrandon Canada taking US oil offline isn’t real. The pipelines from Alberta to Ontario run through the US. If they try to disrupt flow, they will cut off the majority of their population from their own oil.
Your first two points are valid.
@newtgingrich That’s weird, so are all the republicans. It’s almost like everyone in DC is part of the same uniparty that unflinchingly supports massive spending and power grabs that benefit them 🤷♂️
@michaelokishoff@RealCandaceO It’s not uncommon for non-totaled cars to be run thru auctions. Both co-part and IAA will allow you to run a car through their auctions. Rental companies are also often their own insurer, many have a dollar amount of damage that they automatically auction a car out fleet.
I’m dusting off “I, Pencil” because some of you boomers are losing the plot.
Nobody can plan a pencil.
And certainly, nobody can plan an economy.
The cedar gets cut with steel saws by loggers who have never seen a pencil factory. The graphite, the metal ferrule, the eraser, and the yellow paint all come from separate mines and plants in different countries.
None of those workers set out to produce a pencil, they just chase their own paychecks.
If no one can coordinate the making of a simple pencil with a central plan, no one can coordinate an entire economy.
Nobody in America got sicker on the morning of 4 June 1998. Twenty-nine million of them went to bed a healthy weight and woke up overweight, because the NIH had moved the BMI line from 27.8 to 25 overnight.
That is the whole business model. Here is the headcount.
1994: a WHO panel invents osteopenia. Bone thinner than a young woman's, nowhere near thin enough to break. Half of all postmenopausal women qualify on the spot.
1998: the overweight threshold drops to 25. Twenty-nine million new patients. Not one of them gained a pound.
2001: the cholesterol panel publishes ATP III. Americans recommended a statin go from 13 million to 36 million. Twenty-three million new customers in one afternoon.
2003: the blood pressure committee invents prehypertension. A diagnosis for people whose blood pressure is normal. Forty-five million qualify on day one.
2013: the statin guideline is rewritten. Another 12.8 million eligible, almost all over sixty, none with heart disease. Eight of the nine men who wrote it were on the payroll of statin manufacturers, disclosed only when they were forced to.
2017: hypertension moves from 140 over 90 to 130 over 80. The share of American adults labelled hypertensive jumps from 32 per cent to 46. Thirty-one million people, before lunch.
2026: the new cholesterol guideline lands in March. Another 21.5 million eligible, total now 87.5 million. The people it just added carry an average ten-year risk of 3.1 per cent. Which is to say, almost none.
Not one of those was a discovery about the human body. Every one was a decision about where to draw a line on a chart, taken in a room, by a show of hands.
And note the direction. Thirty years, four organ systems, and the line has never once moved back. No panel has ever sat down, reviewed the last panel's work, and handed several million people their health back.
Over 140 million reclassifications in a single country. A woman of sixty-eight can sit on four of those lines at once and be four kinds of ill without a single symptom, on five tablets, for a body that is doing exactly what a sixty-eight-year-old body does.
A cure is capped by the number of people who have the disease.
A threshold is capped by the population.
Your local farmer raises a healthy cow on grass, butchers it cleanly on the farm, and wants to sell you the steaks.
Federal law says no.
The same government that lets industrial meat packers process thousands of animals a day under “inspection” makes it illegal for that farmer to sell you a single pound of beef unless it goes through a USDA inspected plant first.
The workaround? You have to buy the live animal (or a share of it), then pay a custom butcher who stamps every package “NOT FOR SALE.”
Because apparently once the cow is dead and cut up, suddenly it’s too dangerous for free adults to trade.
This isn’t about food safety. It’s about control and protecting the big processors who love the regulatory moat. Small farms get locked out, local meat gets scarce and expensive, and you’re left buying from the same four companies that run the system.
A free country would let a farmer sell you the cow he raised.
We don’t live in one.
Andrew Wilson’s performance in the debate with Candace Owens offered a striking teachable moment about American criminal law. So insouciant was he about the validity of the state’s case against Tyler Robinson that he could not even name the seven charges the prosecution had filed. That casual confidence treated the evidence as already settled rather than as material still required to survive rigorous testing. Yet the law demands precisely the opposite posture. A defendant—or any critic of the state’s narrative—need never prove an alternative theory. The sole burden rests on the prosecution to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Had Lee Harvey Oswald reached trial, his lawyers would not have been obliged to convince a jury that a cabal of Texas oilmen and federal agencies assassinated President Kennedy. They would simply have presented evidence that, at the moment the shots were fired, Oswald was sitting in the Texas School Book Depository lunchroom with fried chicken and a Coke, thereby creating reasonable doubt about his presence at the sixth-floor window.The O.J. Simpson defense followed the same path. It systematically dismantled the reliability of DNA handling, the gloves, and detective credibility without ever having to identify the “real” killers. Reasonable doubt alone was sufficient. Wilson’s failure to master even the formal charges revealed a broader public unfamiliarity with these elementary principles. When citizens forget that the state alone must prove its case, skepticism itself begins to look illegitimate. The debate therefore becomes more than a partisan contest; it is a reminder that the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof remain the indispensable safeguards of a free society.