Category Archives: politics

No They Don’t

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I’ll be brief.

The lede lays out the question.

Companies say President Trump’s climate overhaul makes it tough to frame their future emissions plans and prepare for what they see as inevitable environmental restrictions—particularly as their goals extend beyond the president’s term.

No, they don’t.

Quit planning their future emissions. Quit distorting business decisions away from simple economics and away from what’s optimal for the business’ owners—the shareholders.

Easy peasy, once business managers get up out of their deep defensive crouches and stop cowering in front of climate funding industry pushers.

The hard work, while remaining straightforward, is to engage those duck and cover energies and their existing lobbying budgets to getting the current Congress to codify in statute those Trump moves. Therein lies business planning stability and lower costs for business’ customers.

Selected Results from Texas’ Primary Elections

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Via NPR, with 93% or more of the votes counted:

Texas Governor primary: 12,800 more Progressive-Democrats voted than Republicans

Senate: 110,518 more Progressive-Democrats

Via NBC News, with more than 91% of the votes counted:

Attorney General: 19,588 more Republicans than Progressive-Democrats

I have little information concerning how these results compare with the history of Texas primaries. These differences strike me as small—0.6% of the total vote in the Governor races, 2.5% in the Senate race, and 0.5% in the AG race.

For comparison, though, putting the current results into a measure of context, here are the 2022 primary results, via The Texas Tribune. Neither Texas Senate seat was up for election:

Governor: 841,244 more Republicans voted than did Progressive-Democrat voters, a difference of some 29% of the total vote.

Attorney General: 907,758 more Republicans voted, a difference of some 31%.

While more Republicans voted in the 2026 primaries, the large swing in those differences—30 percentage points—is from a doubling of Progressive-Democrat voter turnout in 2026 over 2022.

Republicans need to take this to heart and work hard, not only on getting the voters out to the polls, but especially on giving them a reason to come out. Republicans need to get out of their comfy offices and talk directly to their constituents, in person, as well as in local radio and television interviews and op-eds in their local news papers, addressing in specific, concrete terms, measurable by their constituents, what the candidates will do (not just what they have done) to make those voters’ lives better at the gas pump, with their utility bills, at the grocery stores—focusing here on what they actually eat, not some mythical basket of food—and on mortgage, rent, and house insurance costs.

If they don’t do that, Texas will turn blue. And that will be a disaster for our State and for our republic.

That’s One Spin

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The news writers over at The Wall Street Journal now are insisting that President Donald Trump (R) has reversed himself on the matter of regime change and Western intervention.

In front of a packed chamber of Arab leaders last May, President Trump declared that the era of American-led regime change was over.
“In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said in Riyadh, deriding the “Western interventionalists giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”
Nine months later, he launched the largest US military operation the region had seen in two decades and urged Iranians to “take over” their government, backed by US force.
It marked a jarring reversal….

Trump went on to say, in a variety of venues, that the Iranian people needed to be the ones to act, not outside forces. He added further, that the opportunity arises out of the US/Israeli attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities; its missile and drone production and launch facilities; and the nation’s chief terrorists, Khamenei and much of his syndicate. The opportunity for the Iranian people to take the fate of their government in their own hands arises as a side effect of these attacks, not as a regime change goal.

This further illustrates the…misapprehension:

[A] new conviction among the president and his top advisers after January’s operation in Venezuela that regime change didn’t have to mean another Iraq….

There’s been no regime change in Venezuela. The head man and his wife have been removed from the Venezuelan government, but the government he headed remains intact.

The news writers have their spin, and there are facts on the ground.

I Know Something You Don’t…

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….so trust me. Of course. That’s the self-important claim of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the ongoing US/Israeli campaign against Iran and its nuclear programs, missile and drone launching and production facilities, and the nation’s chief terrorists at the top of the Iranian government. His opening claim:

As a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, with access to ample classified information about threats from Iran and others, I can state plainly that there was no imminent threat from Iran to America sufficient to warrant committing our sons and daughters to another war in the Middle East….

Maybe, maybe not. It’s awfully convenient to cite “information” that’s hidden from us average Americans, almost as convenient as citing those childhood imaginary friends masqueraded as “officials familiar with the matter” of which news writers are so enamored. There’s no more reason to believe Kaine’s claims than those other claims.

He went on.

To be sure, Iran is a bad actor, oppressing its own citizens and fomenting violence outside its borders, including attacks against US troops in the region.

Of course, in his mind, attacking our forces and the civilians and militaries of our friends and allies presents no cause for kinetic response. Do diplomacy again. Continue those decades of failed diplomatic efforts. This time is different. He means it.

And this, from his claimed history that the rest of us, not nearly as learned as his august self, do not know:

The US and Iran were friends and allies until the US led a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

Yeah. We were such tight friends and close allies that we felt constrained to assist in tossing that government. The illogic here is awesome.

Then Kaine cited a list of Iranian-inspired if not -led attacks on our facilities and murders of our people throughout the Middle East. Our support for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war, though, is sufficient justification for us to ignore the mullahs’ terrorist attacks on us and on our friends and allies. Diplomacy is so effective with terrorists, you see.

Then he quoted—carefully cherry-picking—from the JCPOA, which his Party claimed to end Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations:

Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

That’s in the first paragraph of the Preface to the document. Throughout the body of the document, where the actual force of the agreement lies, are repeated agreements that sanctions would be lifted at 8, 15, or 25 years, depending on the sanctions involved (those at 25 years are trivial). Following the end of those sanctions, Iran would have been free to resume nuclear weapons development without consequence. Kaine so carefully withheld these tidbits from his op-ed.

And his “constitutional” pseudo-argument: he opened with this,

without the congressional debate and vote that the Constitution requires

and bookended that with this at the close of his piece:

How long will the Article I branch of America’s government remain silent against this wholesale repudiation of our basic constitutional order?

This is the carefully generalized, carefully unspecific claim of “it’s unconstitutional!” while just as carefully declining to cite the clause(s) of our Constitution that mandates all of this. What Article I—Section 8 for those of you following along more closely than Kaine is doing—says is that the power to declare war is reserved to the Congress. That’s all that our Constitution says about our involvement in the beginning of wars, and it’s a far cry from the Article II executive authority to fight for our safety.

Even the War Powers Act, grants the President—whoever he is—60 days of fighting before he must seek Congressional approval to continue. Congresses led by both parties have explored altering the Act, and each of them have explicitly declined to do so. At that, the Act is iffy itself; generations of Presidents since the Act’s passage in 1973 have called the Act an unconstitutional infringement of our Constitution’s separation of powers structure of government.

This kind of deliberately misleading foolishness by Kaine is why his Party can never be trusted with the reins (Party: reigns) of government.

What He Said

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Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, had a few words to say in response to Vermont’s nominally Independent Senator, Bernie Sanders, the latter whom wants a moratorium on building data centers to support AI development or any other uses. Reeves’ words, though, have much broader implication, and I’ve repeated them below in their entirety.

I understand individuals who would rather not have any industrial project in their backyard. We all choose where to live, whether it’s urban, suburban, agrarian, or industrial. I do not understand the impulse to prevent our country from advancing technologically—except as civilizational suicide.
This instinct seems to infect the far left across lots of domains: immigration, crime fighting, and the national debt to name a few. You can tell they’re just sort of yearning to submit our society to outside forces: mobs, international councils, or communist China. Maybe they’re exhausted and just want a few years of taxpayer-funded rest before they shuffle off.
I don’t want to go gently. I love this country, and want her to rise. That’s why Mississippi has become the home of the world’s most impressive supercomputers. We are committed to America and American power. We know that being the hub of the world’s most awesome technology will inevitably bring prosperity and authority to our state. There is nobody better than Mississippians to wield it.
I am tempted to sit back and let other states fritter away the generational chance to build. To laugh at their short-sightedness. But the best path for all of us would be to see America dominate, because our foes are not like us. They don’t believe in order, except brutal order under their heels. They don’t believe in prosperity, except for that gained through fraud and plunder. They don’t think or act in a way I can respect as an American.
So, let’s see Americans (and Mississippians) dominate this space—no matter how many leftists want us to roll over and die instead.

That last is especially important; I’ll say it again:

So, let’s see Americans (and Mississippians) dominate this space—no matter how many leftists want us to roll over and die instead.