Analysis

A Primary Means to Focus Minds

Texas Tremors: Primaries Reshaping GOP Procedural Boldness In the shadowed halls of the United States Senate, where procedural intricacies often eclipse substantive debate, the current impasse over the SAVE America Act serves as a stark reminder of institutional inertia. Drawing from the legacy of Senate gridlock under leaders like Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell—an era that diminished hands-on floor expertise among establishment figures and elevated conservatives as the adept tacticians—we find ourselves at a crossroads. The SAVE Act, with its mandates for proof of citizenship in voter registration and photo ID requirements at the polls, passed the House with bipartisan backing…

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The Finest Use of the Bully Pulpit

How Trump’s 2026 SOTU Was Stage-Managed to Perfection I. Introduction: Turning a Long Speech into a Command Performance Let’s be honest: when a State of the Union clocks in at nearly 1 hour 48 minutes—the longest on record—you expect viewers to start checking their phones halfway through. Yet President Trump’s 2026 address never felt like a slog. The pacing was crisp, the energy never dipped, and the mix of victory-lap confidence, sharp humor, and genuine showmanship kept the room—and the country—locked in from the opening line to the final word. This wasn’t accidental. Every beat, every pause, every camera angle, every…

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The Chief Justice Herds the Cats

A Narrow Check on Emergency Tariffs I. The Core Ruling and Its Significance At its heart, Learning Resources v. Trump reaffirms a foundational principle: Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress can lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises. The Framers, scarred by British monarchs’ arbitrary levies like the Stamp Act of 1765, deliberately vested this "power of the purse" in the legislative branch to prevent executive overreach. As James Madison warned in his speech delivered to the Virginia Ratifying Convention on June 6, 1788, diluting that authority risks "the gradual and silent encroachments of those in…

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Egg-Face Economists

Inflation Dips, Private Jobs Surge in Trump's Resilient Economy In my previous column, “The BLS Affordability Boost,” I laid out how the January 2026 jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave working families a tangible win. Private-sector payrolls jumped 172,000-far exceeding the consensus forecast of 55,000 to 80,000-while unemployment edged down to 4.3% and average hourly earnings rose 3.7% year-over-year. For the first time in a while, wage growth outpaced the prior month's inflation reading, putting real dollars back in pockets here in Plano and across Texas. Barely three days later, the February 13 CPI release for January served…

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It Was Breyer

The Dobbs Leak: A Preponderance of Evidence Points to Justice Stephen Breyer In the annals of Supreme Court scandals, few events have cast as long a shadow as the unprecedented leak of Justice Samuel Alito's draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. On May 2, 2022, Politico dropped the bombshell, publishing the full text of Alito's February 10 draft that would ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The fallout was immediate and seismic: protests erupted outside justices' homes, an assassination attempt targeted Justice Brett Kavanaugh, vandalism hit crisis pregnancy centers and…

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The Immigration Wedge

Democrats' Fatal Misstep Handing Us 2026 Folks, earlier today we delivered the reality check: off-year Democrat flips like SD9 in Texas, Virginia's trifecta grab, and New Jersey's supermajority push aren't a blue wave-they're GOP complacency in low-turnout specials. Temporary seat-warmers with zero legislative teeth, but perfect wake-up calls. When we snooze, they sneak wins; when we mobilize, we reclaim what's ours. Chill, strategize, vote. Today the data drops the hammer that turns that wake-up into a decisive advantage. Cygnal's fresh nationwide survey of midterm voters (1,004 likely 2026 participants, Jan 27–28) exposes the single biggest electoral blind spot in American politics…

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Republican Reality Check

Unpacking SD9's Flip and the Path to November Victory Folks, let's dispense with the illusions from the start: the Democratic squeaker in Texas Senate District 9's January runoff isn't a harbinger of doom-it's a textbook case of Republican complacency meeting Democratic opportunism, and it's as temporary as a January cold snap in Tarrant County. As a veteran Republican operative who's called more than a few shots in the Lone Star State, I've watched these off-cycle flips play out like clockwork, and the pattern holds: when Republicans assume a red district will hand them victory on a silver platter, Democrats swoop in…

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From Branches to Booms

A Bold Vision for Capital Gains Tax Reform The past week delivered a stark reminder that markets are still groping for solid ground. Gold, after climbing toward $5,300 an ounce in a frenzy of inflation-hedge buying, cratered to around $4,890-a 10% wipeout in a matter of days. Silver suffered far worse, plunging roughly 35% from peaks above $130. Bitcoin tested $78,000 after teasing six figures, Ethereum followed suit, and equities took their lumps too: the Russell 2000 shed more than 7%, Nasdaq proxies dropped 4–5%, and the broader indices followed in lockstep. One widely shared thread on X captured the carnage…

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The Squeeze on American Workers

Why Americans Lose Jobs to Foreign Workers Let’s dispense with the illusions from the start. The immigration debate is drowning in deliberately soft, misleading language-“undocumented immigrants,” “common-sense solutions,” “path to citizenship,” “comprehensive reform”-all crafted to mask what is really happening. Peel those euphemisms away and the raw truth stands exposed: we are dealing with large-scale amnesty disguised as humanitarianism and unchecked mass importation of foreign labor disguised as economic necessity. The combined effect is to convert the American labor market into a worldwide commodity pool where U.S. citizens are routinely outbid, displaced, and marginalized in the very economy their forebears built.…

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Shepherding Order

From Empathy to Exploitation: The Cycles of Weakness and Renewal In a past that is now lost forever, There was a time when the land was sacred, And the Ancient Ones were as one with it. A time when only the children of the Great Spirit were here To light their fires in these places with no boundaries. When the forests were as thick as the fur of the winter bear, When a warrior could walk from horizon to horizon on the backs of the buffalo. When the deserts were in bloom, and the streams pure as freshly fallen snow. In…

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