Tex's Place

By Scott Pinsker At least it’s colorful:  The Gray Lady just gave us the green light to wave the white flag. Running in the April 7 edition of The New York Times: “ The Iran War Is Turning Iran Into a Major World Power .” The author,  Professor Robert Pape  of the University of Chicago, offers the following thesis: Iran will keep control of the Strait of Hormuz for “months or years,” and there’s nothing militarily we can do about it. (Sorry, guys.) The U.S. and Europe are now in decline — and the axis of China, Russia, and Iran is ascending. Iran will emerge as a “new major world power” and the “fourth center of global power” (the other three: America, China, Russia).  But before we pulverize Professor Pape’s preposterously pessimistic proposal, here’s an earlier example of The New York Times’ piercing wisdom, courtesy of author  Hans Mahncke : The story behind the New York Times’ 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is eve...

By Matt Margolis Freshly confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has wasted no time making his presence felt. Just days into the job, he sat down with Fox News host Bret Baier Monday night and floated an idea so simple and so devastating that it's a wonder nobody tried it sooner: Pull Customs and Border Protection officers out of international airports in sanctuary cities.  Remember, without CBP, there can be no customs clearance. Without customs clearance, you can’t accept international arrivals. The math isn't complicated. If Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, Newark, and New Orleans want to play sanctuary politics, they can explain to thousands of stranded international travelers why their city's ideological grandstanding just shut down their airport. I love it. I knew Mullin was onto something huge when I watched the interview. "If they are a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their ...

By Ben Smith A Boston mental health  crisis  call turned violent Saturday when a sword-wielding man attacked a clinician and stabbed a police officer during a co-response call, part of Boston’s  shift  toward sending mental health workers into situations traditionally handled by police, where responders spent nearly 40 minutes trying to defuse the situation before the door opened. Boston uses a co-response model that pairs police with mental health clinicians on certain 911 calls and routes some cases away from a police-only  response . That model was in place when officers responded to Hemenway Street around 10:45 a.m. after a man called 911 claiming four armed people were trying to  harm  him outside his apartment and needed immediate help. Officers did not find anyone outside and instead spoke with the caller through the closed door, trying to assess what was happening inside the apartment and determine whether there was any  immediate ...

By Tyler Durden Europe has been dancing on the edge of a knife, flirting with notions of war with a battle hardened Russia over the conflict in Ukraine.  As these tensions escalate, questions are being raised about the actual combat readiness and capabilities of countries that have relied on the US for their security for so long. The primary division between the Trump Administration and NATO countries, the thing that started it all, was the initial refusal of so many of them to pay their fair share for defense.  Currently, most NATO members budget around 2% of their GDP to defense under the NATO treaty.  When asked to budget 5%, European governments became indignant, only agreeing to meet the target in a decade. In an interesting recent admission  from The Telegraph , Tom Tugendhat, a British MP and former security minister, argues that the UK simply lacks the independent military capabilities needed to pull off a rescue operation of one of their own airman ...

By Catherine Salgado The Trump administration is once again restoring sanity to government regulation and saving trillions of dollars by taking on one of the most preposterous of climate regulations. Perhaps Barack Obama’s most egregious power grab and most preposterous set of regulations regarded so-called greenhouse gases, which are simply the gases emitted by nearly all things, especially living things, including humans. For instance, climate alarmists consider carbon, which is the  chemical basis for all life  on earth, a greenhouse gas. In a sense, Obama was trying to regulate life itself and indeed the entire physical world when he claimed that the government could regulate greenhouse gases under an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) endangerment finding and the Clean Air Act. It is absolutely impossible, practically speaking, to regulate greenhouse gases, nor is it even desirable to do so. That is one major piece of nonsense the Trump administration is now a...

By Bob Hoge Remember former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan? She was accused of helping an illegal alien from Mexico — Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who was looking at state domestic violence charges — slip out a side door of the courthouse in April 2025 to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Although the moment was infamously caught on video, she claimed she was “immune” from prosecution because of her lofty position. That argument didn’t go so well, and a federal jury convicted her of felony obstruction in December of that same year. She had been  temporarily suspended  by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April '25 and retired in January of '26 following the conviction. Her situation didn’t improve on Monday as a federal judge  denied her request  to have the conviction tossed out: U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman on April 6 issued a  39-page order , denying an appeal by Dugan's legal team and also rejecting the claim that she is immun...

Good morning!     This is your daily forum to share what you've heard, what you've learned, and what you know, and just shoot the breeze.   Have a wonderful day my friends.   -Tex

This feed will provide continuous coverage of Artemis II mission activities with live commentary, beginning with tanking of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and concluding with the recovery of the Orion Integrity spacecraft after splashdown. Live coverage of Artemis II's launch and lunar flyby, as well as daily mission briefings, will also stream on this feed. These events will additionally be carried as standalone streams on NASA's YouTube channel and elsewhere. Four astronauts — three from NASA and one from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) — make up the Artemis II crew: - NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, Artemis II commander - NASA astronaut Victor Glover, Artemis II pilot - NASA astronaut Christina Koch, Artemis II mission specialist - Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Artemis II mission specialist After launching into space atop SLS, the crew will journey around the Moon and back in their Orion spacecraft on an approx...

The interpretive philosophy of originalism, properly understood, is not a perfect method. Yet its value of originalism lies not in its perfection but in its constraint.   By Gregory Lyakhov Conservatives rarely criticize originalism, and that restraint is largely strategic. The dominant constitutional debate today remains a contest between originalism and  living constitutionalism . In that environment, internal disputes are often set aside to maintain a unified front. The argument over whether the Constitution has a fixed meaning or evolves with societal values remains unsettled, and originalists, at least for now, are not clearly winning the broader fight. That reality, however, should not prevent a more precise discussion within originalism itself. The modern originalist movement, often associated with figures such as Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, revived a framework that had long been underdeveloped. Originalism, properly understood, is not a perfect method. No interpret...