Some Real Clear Politics headlines the Saturday before Election 2026

 

Have Voters Forgotten What Trump Got Right Before Iran?

Nicole Russell, USA Today

 

This is the "Have voters forgotten what Trump got right before Covid?" dusted off for 2026. How come we have to keep doing this, and so soon too? Trump got nothing right before Covid except for the tax bill, which frankly any GOP president could have signed. And the same is true now. There was nothing right about the tariffs and ICE fanning out in the streets in 2025. And did he defeat the Houthis? No. And has everyone forgotten the lawless shooting gallery the Caribbean has become? Yeah, he got the previous tax bill made permanent, by deeming its cost to the Treasury at zero when the deficit for the year just concluded was nearly $2 TRILLION. Elon Musk was going to shrink government by $2 TRILLION lol.

 

Dems Tried To Rig the Ballot, and the Media Blamed Trump

Robert Malone, Substack

 

Well yeah. And it's working. Why does this keep happening in The Kingdom of Trump The Incompetent? Could it be because he's incompetent?

 

Alaska Senate (ASR): Peltola (D) 48, Sullivan (R) 46, Heikes (R) 3, Sullivan (R) 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obama Blasts High Premiums--After His Law Doubled Them

Shane Harris, AMAC

 

Democrat Socialists are pushing Medicare For All because Obamacare is a failure. What will they push for when Medicare For All is a failure? But there's Abdul on stage with Obama pretending the endorsement of a failed president is a good thing. And Trump's still so incompetent he can't repeal something that's FAILED.

  

Gore Could've Won in 2000 Without a Single Additional Vote

Keith Dougherty, RCP

 

If the South Woulda Won, We'd Have It Made

Hank Williams Jr. 1988

 

Seriously, this is about representation. You should read it. But we should wipe away all these apportionment difficulties by de-linking representation from population. The country has grown too large and unwieldy. 435 people can't possibly represent it fairly any longer. Give every county one representative in the U.S. House and be done with it: 3,244. The representative would have to live in the county, and run for office on contributions sourced only from the county. And let most of the work be done from the county by telecommuting to the House floor. Yes, this would necessitate a wee bit of a revolution in House rules.

 

HOW ABOUT THAT?!   

 

 

Is This Our Last Time Setting Our Clocks Back?

Cameron Peters, Vox

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Joe Biden's national policy director for his 2020 campaign is pissed off a health care CEO gets $20 million a year while the nation's employees aren't taxed on their health insurance compensation, depriving the federal government of $500 billion a year

 That's the single largest tax loss expenditure on the list of tax loss expenditures.

Adding health insurance benefits for employees was a WWII era work-around to FDR's anti-capitalist wage controls, instituted to curb inflation.

When too many were unavailable to do the work because they were off fighting the war, the price of work sky-rocketed. Adding untaxed health insurance benefits helped employers attract and keep workers during wartime.

The untaxed health insurance benefit was & remains tax-free compensation, estimated as today's single largest tax loss expenditure at $500 billion/year.

But Biden's national policy director for his 2020 campaign goes off on a $20m CEO because high compensation earners are the easy target she only pretends are the problem instead of the one you see in the mirror every morning not paying taxes on everything you make.

She needs your votes for the public option, and isn't going to get them by telling you the truth.

The public option, to be sure, would have been superior to the Obamacare Rube Goldberg machine, and is clearly preferable to Medicare For All because the latter would end employer-provided health insurance.

But as with FDR it's still not capitalism, and if you push here something is going to pop out over there and become a problem. The iron laws of supply and demand will always assert themselves, but with capitalism the consequences are immediate, severe, and self-correcting by the market.

If you tax health insurance benefits, you will simply get less health insurance of the kind we have, accompanied by more cries for options from the marketplace for the health insurance we don't have, which if free to provide them . . . will.

Meanwhile a comprehensive federal income tax reform taxing all income at high rates above $102,230 for a single filer and $136,306 for married filing jointly as of June 2026, and at 0% below, is the place to start to reimagine fairness in the United States.

84% of individual earners made less than $100,000 in 2023. The vast majority of them would not notice that an average of $9,500 of employer provided health insurance was being counted as income under the new threshold of $102,230 because they would owe zero taxes anyway. 

We need more reality in economics and less fiddling with it, and certainly none of what Abdul is selling, which will require taxing everybody, not just the rich, much more. He is selling "free at the point of care", but nothing is free. Nothing.

 

 

These were dogwhistles from Abdul El-Sayed to his base which thinks Jews and their money drive war with Iran, genocide in Gaza, and apartheid in Israel

 It's all so Michigan, amirite?

The U.S. Senate seat from Michigan is beside the point. It's merely a stepping stone.

He's running for president, on the Obama model, but with a higher purpose in mind.

It's a Jihad to remove America as Israel's protector. 

 

The current political moment was brought to you by Barack Hussein Obama and his esteemed pastor

 

When Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama said You Didn't Build That, they were channeling that arch communist Benjamin Franklin

 

 

All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention.

Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it.

All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of:

But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition.

He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages.

He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it. 

 

-- Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris, quoted here 

No good deed goes unpunished in the Democrat Party: Diana DeGette, House leader for the public option in 2009 instead of the Senate's Rube Goldberg Obamacare, defeated in primary after 15 terms

 

 It was Speaker Nancy Pelosi who abandoned the House progressives in 2009, bowing to the Senate plan.

DeGette was progressive before progressive was cool, but now you have to pass the anti-semitic litmus test, as her opponent has, to be a real progressive.

 

 DeGette loses reelection bid to DSA challenger in major upset for Denver-based House seat 

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) lost her reelection bid to former attorney and current Ph.D. student Melat Kiros, marking the third time a democratic socialist has scored an upset in a competitive House primary this cycle, according to Decision Desk HQ. 

Kiros, who studies at the University of Denver, defeated DeGette, who’s served in Congress since 1997 — delivering a major blow to the Democratic establishment despite the fact that DeGette herself was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. University of Colorado Regent Wanda James also ran in the Democratic primary.

... Kiros was fired from her law firm after she wrote a letter directed at U.S. law firms on her Substack in November 2023 in which she disputed the notion that it was antisemitic to call for the state of Israel to be eliminated or criticize Israel’s government.

The former lawyer has also received criticism for declining to say whether or not a 2025 firebombing in Boulder, where protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages by Hamas were injured, was an act of antisemitism, saying in a recent interview with 9News, “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator.” ... 

 

 

 

J. D. Vance channels his inner Barack Obama

 

Real Clear Politics puts a guy in its lineup this morning to whom the Obama presidential library denied access three times

 

A Tombstone for Obamaism

Ryan Zickgraf, UnHerd

 

"... the Obama Foundation denied my media credentials for the opening three times ..." 

 

Gee, why would Obama do that to someone who traffics in fabricated anti-gay slurs, even if they're about Trump?

 

 

 I carry no brief for Obama. I've been whaling on (look it up) the guy since 2009.

 

But criticizing Obama's so-called library because it's all about Obama, and Obama himself post-2016 for being apolitical, strike me as bizarre criticisms.

 

Isn't the latter what we want in an ex-president? In fact if the comparison is between George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama in their post-presidencies, it is Obama who has been far more political, most recently sealing the fate of Biden at the eleventh hour of the 2024 race. Bush merely fancies himself a painter.

 

That the Obama library isn't really a library only reminds us that the Affordable Care Act provided neither care nor affordability, just as America will not be great again when Trump leaves office and millions of illegal aliens will still be here.

 

To say that there isn't anything very tangible left of the Obama era can be said of all the presidents in our lifetimes to one degree or another.

 

Yes, it will be hard to ignore Obama's giant tombstone jutting up into the sky from Jackson Park, if you happen to be traveling there. Otherwise he'll be as forgettable as the next guy.

 

But to speak at this hour of Obama's excess of vanity when there has never been a more self-important and grandiose spectacle erupting daily from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than now in the person of Donald Trump is as batshit crazy as Trump is.

 

Trump is making us all nuts. 

This Donald Hussein Trump statement is willfully blind

 Trump: "A Little Perturbed" About Israel "Constantly Fighting With Lebanon... We've Got To Stop It"

As if Hezbollah doesn't exist in Lebanon.

Or Hamas in Gaza. 

Or Russia in Ukraine.

Who's side is he on, anyway?!

 

Hey look, a shot across his bow

 

Trump's Slush Fund Is No Better Than Obama's

Washington Examiner

 

President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion settlement with his own Justice Department, creating a fund that can be distributed to the president’s allies, stinks to high heaven. ... 

Attention all you weak dollar lunatics

 Nominal broad dollar index average values

Obama II, first year // 1Q second year // April 2014: 92.75 / 94.51 / 93.99

Trump II, first year // 1Q second year // April 2026: 122.75 / 119.01 / 119.03

Thank you for attention to this matter. 

Trump doesn't think about the American financial situation, kinda like Obama saying to the New York Times two days before the market bottom in March 2009 that everything was fine

 

The Democrats abandoning Eric Swalwell are the same Democrats who abandoned Joe Biden

 Allies yank support for Swalwell’s California governor run after sexual assault allegations

 

Trump's 2013 chickens come home to roost

 

Trump is setting records at Rasmussen Reports for record high disapproval at 57%, record low total approval at 41%, record high strong disapproval at 47%, and record low approval index at -20

I dunno, was it something he said lol?

To be entirely fair, these low numbers were already achieved on Feb 5, the day Trump posted the Obama ape video. The low numbers went up in the morning and reflect polling from the previous day(s).

The Obama ape video was just a coincidence. 

I think the low numbers are a reaction to Trump's Monday call for federal interference in the coming elections. 

 

 

Everybody thinks Trump can make gasoline cheap again, but under Obama in Jan 2016 it was 47-cents per gallon in Michigan

 

TACO Trump tells massacred Iranian anti-government movement that help is on its way, and now it's not

 Just like Obama abandoned the Green Movement in 2009.

The Uniparty. You can count on not counting on it.

Trump is reportedly weighing military options against Iran

Oil falls more than 4% as traders see Trump backing away from Iran strike threats

American Con Mag, voting for the enemy since 2008