Politics

Losin’ Texas

The Preacher Texas Will Not Hire He’s losin’ Texas, I can tell. Gen X already knows the face. Isaac. Black hat. The child preacher whose sermon did not belong to the town. James Talarico gives off the same vibe. Soft voice. Still smile. Holy language in a room that is not holy. That flinch is not a movie joke. It is how a lot of people get to the real word before they get to the tape. Inauthentic. Texas has hired preacher candidates. It has not hired this one and thought ours. I wrote in March that he would not win…

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They Needed an Issue

Watch the Diner, Watch the Memo N.B. This morning: Watch the Diner. I wrote this morning that you watch the diner. The chain wants a smoking ban and a living wage. Six months later the independent shop is a parking lot and nobody passed a bill titled Kill the Diner. They passed public health. What Washington did today is name the chain. Over one weekend the frontier labs asked the country to slow down. Monday morning Chuck Schumer demanded a classified briefing for every senator on “unchecked AI.” Before nightfall Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris were speaking from the…

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Here’s to Better Ideas

Repeal the Surtax A $5,000 check is a rally line. Killing the 3.8 percent investment tax is a statute. Dallas, Wednesday night. The line was built for the hall. “If the Republicans win,” the president said, “you win with us and you get $5,000.” He called it a Trump Dividend. Spend it in America. Pretend he is on the ballot one more time. I have a counter-proposal. It is not a check. It is not conditioned on an election night. It does not require the Treasury to invent a mailing list of a quarter-billion adults and then police where they shop.…

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Carry the Water

The Rant and the Invoices Rick Santelli leaves the floor on October 2. The question he asked in 2009 is the fraud docket since May. February 19, 2009. Chicago Merc. CNBC had Santelli on the floor for a housing plan that would refinance the people who could not carry the note. He did not file a memo. He pointed at the traders and asked the country a question it still has not answered. Why don't you put up a website and let people vote on whether we subsidize the losers' mortgages, or reward the people who can carry the water instead…

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Expand the Child Tax Credit

Tax Parents Less. Do Not Put Them on the Dole. N.B. This follows "A Parent is Not a Vendor." If policy can pay a parent for being a parent, it can pay a person for being a person. That is the sentence the Vance draft cannot survive. A future Democratic administration will not need to love stay-at-home marriage. It will keep the payee and delete the adjectives. It will call the marriage gate discriminatory, relax the hours test, raise the income cap, and tell Congress the Child Care and Development Fund is oversubscribed, which it will be. Ro Khanna already wrote…

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A Parent is Not a Vendor

Do Not Put Parents on the CCDF Ledger A stay-at-home parent is not a vendor. A Clinton-era work pot is not a family stipend. Do the family work in the tax code. The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let some married stay-at-home parents collect money from the Child Care and Development Fund. Vice President JD Vance has made the idea a priority. The draft invents a new category called "parent-based child care." One spouse works at least thirty-five hours a week. The other stays home with the child. The family meets the income test. The check, about nine…

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Positive Labor Day Numbers

Labor Day, and the Slope Changed The official story finally faces the same direction as the policy. Labor Day is the weekend America sets aside to praise work and then talk about anything else. This year the holiday has a plot. The government spent Friday morning describing a country that no longer looks like the one it described from 2021 to 2024. The border is not a monthly spectacle. The foreign-born population is not still climbing like a flood gauge. The job market did not fall through the floor when the inflow stopped. That is not atmosphere. That is the official…

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Why the Midterm Polls Are Already Broken

The Pressure Line the Polls Refuse to Measure The numbers lied in Michigan. They lied in Wisconsin. They will lie again. In Michigan, the final wave of public polls showed Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Haley Stevens by double digits. Some had him up fourteen, eighteen, even twenty points in the closing days. The actual result was a one-point race. Stevens conceded, but the margin told the real story. In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, the DSA-aligned state representative, led late surveys by twenty points and more. Marquette and others had her comfortably ahead. She lost by a fraction of a point to David…

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A Contrast for America

One Hundred Days. One Decision. One hundred days from the midterms, Speaker Mike Johnson draws the line with the clarity the moment demands: common sense or crazy. America or communism. The choice is yours. In 100 days, the people of this country have a critical choice: common sense or crazy.As the Democrat Party surrenders to the extreme far Left, Republicans continue to deliver for the American people. But we aren't finished yet.It's time to choose between our country and… pic.twitter.com/U3IncYxp0P— Mike Johnson (@MikeJohnson) July 26, 2026 It's time to choose between our country and communism. It's a contrast for America, and…

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Thune’s Failure

Thune’s Weakness on the SAVE America Act The base already knows. Sean Spicer said it out loud on The Huddle: enthusiasm is soft, and the failure to pass the SAVE America Act is a primary reason. I am in that base. I work Texas Republican politics. I hear what people say when the cameras are off. Spicer is right. When voters who delivered unified government watch the House pass a core election-integrity bill repeatedly while the Senate finds reasons not to finish the job, the energy drains. That is not complicated. It is cause and effect. The underlying problem is concrete.…

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