Category Archives: politics

A Pseudo-Seminarian Candidate for Texas Senator

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That would be the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico. (That he was a shoo-in for the Party’s nomination is only because his opponent in Party’s primary election was the Extremist and part-time racist Jasmine Crockett.)

Here’s an example of Talarico’s own Leftist extremism:

God is nonbinary[.]

On which he expanded:

“Most Texans understand that God is beyond gender. The Apostle Paul says as much in his letter to the Galatians,” Talarico said. If Republicans have an issue with that, he added, “they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.”

This Texan non-seminarian went to the tape, or rather to the King James Version of Paul’s letter as recounted in Galatians, to see what the Apostle actually wrote. Paul opened his letter with this:

Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;)
And all the brethren which are with me, unto the churches of Galatia:
Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ,

God the Father—not once, but twice in those three paragraphs. Not God the Binary—or Nonbinary—or God the Transgender, or God the Gender Fluid, or…. God the Father, which is the male sex and one of the two human genders and sexes.

Paul had several additional references to God in his Letter, and every time he referenced God with a qualifier, it was universally God the Father.

It’s a mystery to me whence Talarico got his “nonbinary” characteristic. Except from the swamp of his mind.

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?

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.