In the first story ICE murdered a U.S. citizen in March 2025, a woman's son, in the second story a drunk illegal alien murdered a U.S. citizen in late 2024, a man's daughter

In both cases our incompetent government is ultimately to blame, Joe, but only in your case will someone pay any price.

 

My Son Was Killed by ICE. I Want Accountability

Rachel Reyes, New York Times

 

The Moral Test of Self Government

Joe Abraham, RealClearPolitics

 

 

 

Recent absentee ballot rejection rates according to Ballotpedia are lower than expected

 

Recent absentee ballot rejection rates according to Ballotpedia: 

2024: 1.2%

2022: 1.5%

2020: 0.8%

2018: 1.4%

2016: 1.0%.

Discussed here and here.

The New York Times indicated in October 2012 that rejection rates for absentee ballots are typically closer to 2.0%, double what they are for in-person voting. The closest we recently got to 2.0% was in 2022, but still lower than 2.0% by half a point, and the massive mail-in vote in 2020 arguably should have produced a rejection rate higher than 2.0%. Instead we got the lowest rejection rate yet, 0.8%.

That doesn't make any sense.

 

Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises 

... Nationwide, the use of absentee ballots and other forms of voting by mail has more than tripled since 1980 and now accounts for almost 20 percent of all votes.

Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.

“The more people you force to vote by mail,” Mr. Sancho said, “the more invalid ballots you will generate.” ...

 

Still can't spell it

MAMDAMI-MANIA: Socialists Took City Hall. Now They're Aiming at Congress...

No new wars

Says He Never Promised No New Wars...

Trump: "I Didn't Guarantee No War," "This Is Not An Endless War"

C-SPAN

The Times of Israel 

 

 

 

Update:

Trump storms out of interview after being challenged about election fraud claims, DOJ fund 

The communist New York Times favors State of Massachusetts dictation of minimum lot sizes, the very same idea bipartisan legislators are keen to impose on Michigan residents

 ... For decades, the state government has ceded control over housing policy to its 351 cities and towns. When it comes to housing policy, the state of Massachusetts is often a bystander, allowing town governments to impose classic “not in my backyard” policies. ... The initiative would prevent many towns from setting needlessly large minimums for lot sizes and effectively blocking the construction of middle-class homes. The campaign, Legalize Starter Homes, is now trying to gather the nearly 12,500 signatures it needs before June 17 to place the measure on the ballot. We endorse the initiative. ... The initiative would create a statewide minimum of 5,000 square feet, which is about the size of a basketball court, and bar towns from setting their own standards. ...

That's less than 1/8 acre lol.

The editorial is here. 

Yuri Zhivago once had his "too big" house taken away from him by the communists, too, to make room for thirteen families:

 

 

Trump cabinet keeps on sucking until it does succeed

 

 

Cabinet Devotes 1 Out of Every 6 Sentences Sucking Up to The Don...

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

 

Elusive full-time jobs which fell off a cliff in the Great Recession hold back couple from having the children they want

52% had a full time job on average in 2007, just 49% in 2025

 

 ... Clare Zakowski, a 28-year-old who works part time as a manager at a therapy practice, says she would welcome a federal paid family leave program, not that Congress is offering. She has always loved children; as a high schooler in Green Bay, Wis., she babysat and ran the activities for a summer camp. “I love their naïveté and innocence,” she told me. “I just think kids rock.” Ms. Zakowski has been with her boyfriend for over seven years, and children have been part of the discussion since the two first got together. But lately, she has been appalled by the manosphere, and worries about how A.I. will affect society. “The news every day is crazy, and it’s been that way for a while,” she said. “It just feels like we’re living in a really, really weird time.” Beyond paid leave (or universal health insurance, for that matter), she yearns for something deeper: a sense of security, something that she has yet to experience in America in her adult lifetime. “I feel like there’d have to be, I want to say a revolution, but basically big political change, like a moral awakening from everyone,” she said.

She had been looking for a full-time, higher-paying job to set herself up for parenthood, but found the search to be so stressful that she gave up. “I know there can be negatives to not planning ahead,” she told me, but “who even knows what the future holds?” ...

More. 

 

Birth dearth blamed on chaos and uncertainty produced by the Great Recession

 ... In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies. 

... What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.

... The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad. ...

More. 

Christopher Caldwell for The New York Times thinks the American Empire has met its match in the Persian Gulf when it already met it a year ago in the Red Sea

... the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time. ...

Here.

Caldwell is just as blind as Trump.

Neither one gets it that the lowly Houthis already beat us to a draw last year in the Red Sea.

Nothing is moving out of the Persian Gulf today, and tanker traffic through the Red Sea is less than half what it used to be in 2022, even under the new conditions of a world desperately thirsty for the Middle East oil no longer coming out of the former.

And neither one gets it that you can't have an American Empire without paying for it. 

We're $39 trillion in debt and can no longer impose our will in the world's vital choke-points because elites have pretended since Reagan that low marginal income tax rates are sufficient to maintain American Empire when what those rates have done is impoverish us and enrich our adversaries.

1,135 billionaires are the symbol of our lost empire. 

Caldwell steers well clear of naming the obvious remedy, and Trump's Big Ugly Bill will  do nothing but put America $62 trillion in debt by the end of 2032.

Taxes must be raised . . . a lot.

Here we go again, plunging into more stupidity

 

 Trump Administration Secures New Indictment Against Comey

The new case stems from a photograph of seashells on a North Carolina beach.

... The charge stems from an incident nearly a year ago, when Mr. Comey, vacationing on the North Carolina coast, posted a photograph on social media showing seashells arranged to say “86 47,” combining the slang term “86” often used to mean dismiss or remove with an apparent reference to Mr. Trump, the country’s 47th president. ...

When Mr. Comey learned of the uproar, he deleted the post, saying that he did not know that it had a violent connotation and that he opposed violence of any kind. The Secret Service interviewed him by phone that evening, and Mr. Comey said he had no intent to cause the president harm. The next day, he sat for an in-person interview. The Justice Department eventually dropped the matter, but it was revived in recent months. ...

 

The MAGA tariff unwind begins lol

HUMILIATION: Administration to Begin Refunding $166 Billion in Tariffs...

 

Businesses can claim refunds for Trump tariffs ruled unconstitutional starting Monday

 

Tariff refunds begin today. These retailers are due big paydays 

 

Inflation, whether pandemic induced or war induced, has been berry berry good for hiding price increases to boost corporate profits

 

Corporate America Aims to Preserve Profit Streak During War in Iran:  Higher inflation is leading companies to raise prices without sacrificing margins

 

... Sonu Varghese, the global macro strategist at the Carson Group, a financial firm, said many of the companies he tracked viewed inflation pressures from “outside shocks,” such as this war, “as an opportunity to raise prices and boosts margins,” which can, in turn, raise profits.

“I think we’re actually going to get some margin expansion,” Mr. Varghese added. ...

 

If the world had any brains it would skip the Semite wars in the Middle East over oil and switch back to coal while transitioning to nuclear and renewables

Known coal reserves are all over the place and can power the world three times longer than known oil reserves at current consumption rates.

 

South Korea, Japan, China, and India can more easily switch right now to coal from the LNG lost due to the Iran war, Taiwan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines not so much.

 

This Is What Happens When the Gas Runs Out...

  

... India is another major importer of Middle Eastern L.N.G. that is likely to pivot significantly to coal, according to Wood Mackenzie. It has vast domestic reserves, and since the outbreak of the war, New Delhi has issued directives to maximize coal-fired output, ordering coal plants to operate at full capacity for three months starting in April. 

 

China likewise possesses huge domestic coal reserves, which, alongside gas piped in from Russia and a world-leading wind and solar fleet tied to the world’s largest energy storage network, have shielded the country from the worst of the L.N.G. supply shocks. ...

 

 

The panic-mongers on X are out in full force this morning saying Trump must do something about oil this week, all ignoring that Trump said on day one the Iran operation would take four to five weeks

It's been one week.

Oil is currently trading at $93, falling from above $115. NASDAQ is in the green. 

 

 

New York firewood supplier sold face cord equivalents, 8'x4'x16", for $493 during recent winter cold snap

 Shivering Americans Snap Up Firewood as Winter Grinds On...

 ... On Jan. 24, the day before a winter storm buried much of the Northeast in snow, Woodbourne Firewood had its highest-grossing sales day in the history of the company, which was started in New York in 2022, said Mr. Heby, 35, the owner. He said the company sold seven full cords of wood, units that are eight feet long, four feet tall and four feet deep, enough to fill a tractor-trailer and generating $10,356 in revenue in one day. ... Grahm Leitner, 48, a logging contractor and forester from Waterbury, Vt., said the number of days spent logging in a given year is about half of what it was in the 1980s, especially because of climate change. ...

 

The New York Times on the global economy had me and then it lost me

Because it, like too many commentators, uses an obsolete dollar index in DXY, which measures dollar strength or weakness relative to just SIX currencies: EUR, JPY (!), GBP (!), CAD (!), SEK (!), CHF (!).

 

The Federal Reserve has developed broader indices weighted to the countries the U.S. trades with the most.

 

U.S. GDP is $31.1 trillion. 

EURO ZONE GDP: $16.5 trillion.

Japan: $4.3 trillion.

Great Britain: $3.6 trillion.

Canada: $2.3 trillion.

Sweden: $0.6 trillion.

Switzerland: $1 trillion.

Global GDP: $117 trillion.

 

 The Global Economy’s Warning Signals Are Broken

 

 ... It’s as if cars, instead of slowing down at a flashing yellow light as expected, started speeding up. ...

 

The traditional connection between the American economy’s performance and the value of the dollar has also been snapped. Uncertainty tends to increase the dollar’s value compared with other currencies as investors seek a safe haven in risky times. But the dollar has sunk to its lowest level in years. ...

 

Analysts backed down on their predictions that Mr. Trump’s tariff blitz last spring would cause higher prices ... 

 

Even by DXY standards, the dollar is not weak at 97, well within its long term average range between 95 and 105.

 

And The New York Times is ignoring that wholesale prices increased at a higher rate in 2025 than in either 2024 or 2023. 

 

Anyway, you know what happens when people ignore the flashing yellow:

 

Traffic fatalities surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research highlights the fact that disadvantaged communities bore the brunt of the increase and calls for holistic solutions to promote equitable access to safe transportation.

 

 

Despite his denials last year, Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was friendly with Jeffrey Epstein in 2012 even though he claimed to have shunned him since 2005

 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/howard-lutnick-epstein-island.html

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Planned Trip to Epstein’s Island

 

Net tons through the Suez Canal in 2025 came to 0.52 billion vs. 1.41 billion in 2022, down 63%

 Trump's 7-week Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis was a total, and expensive, failure, compounding Biden's.

The pirates and terrorists won in the Red Sea.

... The first month alone of Trump’s bombing campaign cost more than $1 billion in weapons and munitions. ... 

 

 

 

ICE agent Ross backed up to get out of the way of Good and shoot her

 Watch here.