Posted on February 20, 2026
Cranial Tumbleweeds
Trump Accounts, Mamdani, junk food,
etc.
by
Daniel Clark
* So that's
Bad Bunny? You mean the big controversy was
not about his being the mascot for a naughty ultra-processed breakfast cereal?
* How many
different ways does the NFL have to say that it hates its viewers before they
stop being its viewers?
* If you
want to understand the liberal media's treatment of the WNBA and other women's
sports, just look at their reaction to the layoffs at The Washington Post. They think that because owner Jeff Bezos is
still very successful in other ventures, he ought to be willing to absorb the Post's
losses indefinitely and without condition.
* So the "Liberation
Day" tariffs have been struck down by the Supreme Court. How will the Trump administration explain the
fact that we don't have to repay tens of billions of dollars to foreign
countries?
* When you
hear how much revenue had been raised by these tariffs, keep in mind their role
in suppressing businesses from expanding and hiring. That official number of $287 billion has been
mitigated to some degree by revenue losses from corporate income taxes, payroll
taxes and personal income taxes.
* What
kind of Republican brags about how much revenue he's generated by imposing new
taxes, anyway?
*
President Trump says he raised tariffs on goods from Switzerland last year for
purely personal reasons. "I couldn't get
[Swiss president Karin Keller-Sutter] off the phone, so it was at 30 percent,
and I really didn't like the way she talked to us, and so instead of giving her
a reduction I raised it to 39 percent."
This behavior is reminiscent of President Rufus T. Firefly, played by
Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, who took his country to war just because a
visiting ambassador called him an "upstart."
As long as Trump is willing to make policy decisions based on perceived
personal slights, we should not be accepting his vague, inconsistent, and often
implausible explanations for his actions around the world.
* Mind
you, this was one of those "emergency" tariffs.
He just had to do something to shut that woman up.
* How can
it possibly be a good thing for a nation that's $38 trillion in debt to create
a new entitlement, as we have now done with Trump Accounts? It will teach America's youth about
investing, we are told. The value of the
program would be dubious even if that were true, but it isn't, because the
youth are not investing anything. Each
of their accounts will receive $1,000 in seed money from the taxpayers, plus
contributions of up to $5,000 a year from their parents and $2,500 a year from
their parents' employers, in addition to unspecified donations from corporate
benefactors. Rather than teaching
children about the virtues of capitalism, it will only teach them that a big
bag of money is waiting for them, which they need not do anything to earn.
* Before
they have even been implemented, Trump Accounts have become a "public-private
partnership," which is a two-way corruption.
Federal bureaucrats can now put the squeeze on businesses to "do their
part," while participating corporations have been given leverage with which to
affect government policy.
* Not all
parents can contribute to these accounts, nor do they all have employers who
will participate. Next time the
Democrats are in control, they are bound to address this "inequity" with more
taxpayer funds. Thus, the socialist
ambition of providing a "universal basic income" will be realized, and it will
be thanks to a Republican president, his congressional toadies, and their One
Big Beautiful Bill.
* It seems
like only yesterday that Republicans hated omnibus bills that Congress passes
before even knowing what's in them. In
reality, it was a whole year ago. How
time flies.
* Kind of
makes you wonder what President Trump talked about with Zohran Mamdani, that
they got along so well when they met.
* Yakov
Smirnoff said that as a boy in the Soviet Union, he once asked his father to
tell him the facts of life, and his father said, "You stand in line for food
all day." New Yorkers won't find that
very funny once they're reliant on Mamdani's government-run grocery stores.
* Facing
opposition to state-level tax hikes from New York Governor Kathy Hochul,
Mamdani has proposed a 9.5 percent increase in property taxes, which he calls a
"last resort." Only a month into his
term as mayor, and he has already reached his last resort? Is that a promise?
*
"Mamdani" is an anagram for "I, Madman."
* Judging
from the homeless deaths in New York this winter, that "warmth of collectivism"
Mamdani spoke about was really just the whiskey in the paper bag.
* "Don't
vote for the guy with the beard" would make a popular bumper sticker.
* It's
easy to dismiss socialism when its standard-bearer is an elderly scarecrow like
Bernie Sanders, with a mussy coconut head and a voice like a cartoon aardvark,
but even he has an alarmingly large and dedicated following. Now, we're being introduced to younger, more
slickly packaged versions of him, and we don't have an ideologically committed
party to oppose them. Just yelling
"socialist," without explaining what that means and what is so bad about it,
isn't going to be good enough.
* Trump
Accounts are even more concerning when taken in tandem with the anti-cash
movement, which is encouraging younger people to view money not as property,
but only as a resource to which they have access.
* By the
way, President Trump has ended the production of pennies, on the basis that
they cost too much to make in comparison to their monetary value. Nevertheless, his Treasury Department is
still planning to mint those illegal Trumpy dollars, whose monetary value will be
literally zero.
* Let's
play the Paul Harvey "If I were the Devil" game for a minute: If I were the Devil and I wanted to become
president of the United States, I would not compete for the nomination of the
Evil Party. Instead, I would pose as the
arch enemy of evil, so that I could infiltrate the opposition party and destroy
it from within.
* I didn't
say it was going to be fun. I only said "let's
play."
* Puerto
Rico has passed a law recognizing that a baby in the womb is a human
being. Are the Democrats sure
they want to make that place a state?
* You
never hear that kind of plain language from pollsters or debate
moderators. What's wrong with asking a
very basic question like, "Do people exist before birth?" Apart from the questioner being afraid of the
answer, that is.
* Former
president Barack Obama says space aliens exist, even though there is no
evidence of them. Not coincidentally, he
also believes in stimulating the economy by taking $787 billion out of it and
spending it on superfluous crap.
* Since
the Democrats were sworn in as the majority party in Virginia last month, they
have proposed more than 50 tax increases in that state, including an increase
in property taxes, an event tax, taxes on guns and ammunition, a vehicle repair
tax, a home repair tax, a delivery tax, to be assessed on deliveries from
Amazon, DoorDash, and the like, and even a dog walking tax. The punch line is that their Republican
predecessors, led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, left them with a $2.7 billion budget
surplus. So why did the voters put the
Dems back in charge? "Affordability!"
* Robert
Kennedy Jr. is determined to save us from ultra-processed foods. If you try to look up a specific definition
of "ultra-processed foods," however, you won't find one. It pretty much boils down to his knowing them
when he sees them. Furthermore, he
confidently blames them for a variety of specific health risks, even though
they cannot even be studied as long as they remain undefined. This is junk science.
* When RFK
Jr. says he doesn't want to regulate our eating habits, but only wants to
enable us to make informed choices, he's lying.
Whenever he imagines that Froot Loops are good for you in Canada and
Europe, he is implicitly attributing it to the onerous regulations those
governments impose. Besides, he claims
food producers are poisoning us, and we willingly consume the poison because we
are addicted. Surely he doesn't think we
are competent to make up our own minds, then.
If you saw somebody who was about to voluntarily consume poison, you
would stop him. You would not say, "Let
me tell you how that poison will affect you, knowing that you are powerless to
stop yourself from drinking it anyway.
Then do whatever you feel is best."
* Nobody
really believes we need to be better informed that Lucky Charms, Skittles,
Funyuns and Mountain Dew are not good for you.
Seriously, we already call these things "junk food." Is that too subtle?
* Kennedy
has repeatedly claimed that Canadian Froot Loops have only three
ingredients. Sure enough, you can find
them right there on the box.
"INGREDIENTS: BEER, FROOT, BEER."
* Among
the things that Kennedy has told us about himself are that he has snorted
cocaine off toilet seats, he once picked up a dead bear cub off the road and
put it in the middle of Central Park just for yuks, and his brain has been
partially eaten by a parasitic worm.
This is evidently what Trump had in mind when he said, "I'm going to
surround myself with only the best and most serious people."
* Kennedy
is in great shape, especially for his age, and he has put chemicals in his body
that were infinitely worse than anything Kellogg's has to offer. People are more resilient than leftist
megalomaniacs think.
* Just as
Al Gore predicted 20 years ago, the ocean levels have risen up and devoured
Manhattan. Or else the waters around
Greenland have become somewhat more navigable.
Whichever.
* One of
the most annoying new media cliches is "high-stakes." Any meeting or negotiation between any two
people or entities is automatically deemed to be "high-stakes," even though
most of them are not. The phrase seemed
to catch on when Vladimir Putin went to Alaska to meet President Trump, when
there was no hope of it yielding anything constructive. There was actually nothing at stake, but it
became obligatory to call it a "high-stakes summit."
* In fact,
one might say that "high-stakes" has become an "iconic" media cliche, if one
were determined to be as irritating as possible.
* One San
Diego-area school district has been giving the children reading assignments
that say, "Eating insects is good for the environment," and, "Many insects
taste delicious." Even if these things
were true, they would be of little if any educational value. The least the teachers could do is formulate
them into a math word problem. "Caleb
had ten scorpions in a bag. He ate seven
of them. How much exoskeleton had to be
pumped from Caleb's stomach?"
* In an
article from last September, the BBC called it a "conspiracy theory" that
"global elites" want to compel us to eat bugs.
Sure, you can easily find literature online in which the United Nations,
the World Bank and the World Economic Forum advocate the eating of insects to
combat "climate change," but what kind of a kook thinks they actually mean it?
* If they
were to start suggesting that we eat our own waste matter, that would come as
no surprise. The debasement of humanity
is integral to the "green" movement.
* And if
you think that's a conspiracy theory, do a keyword search for "humanity
is a cancer on the planet," and see how many people are out there seriously
discussing it.
* A
leading proponent of this point of view is Dr. Warren Hern, a third-trimester
abortion specialist from Colorado. His
motivation for believing this could hardly be more obvious. The way he chooses to see things, he's not
slaughtering babies in the most grisly manner imaginable; he's curing
cancer! He's saving the earth from those
malignant growths that the less educated among us call "children."
* That is,
he was doing that, until last April, when the 87-year-old finally
retired and closed his clinic. Try
finding a news article that presented that as anything but a tragedy.
* Media
portrayals of Hern as a hero, a victim, or even a moral authority stand in
stark contrast to his own words. In a
1978 essay, he wrote about late-term abortions that "there is no possibility of
denying an act of destruction. It is
before one's eyes. The sensations of
dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current." If there is anyone should not derive that kind
of enjoyment from his work, it's an abortionist.
* One of
the most effective ways of proliferating conspiracy theories is for people in
positions of power to yell "conspiracy theory" whenever somebody questions what
they are obviously doing.
* The
fatal flaw in most conspiracy theories is that they assign a superhuman degree
of competence to the conspirators, who in reality are flawed human beings like
the rest of us. No group of people large
enough to fabricate a moon landing would be competent to pull it off, let alone
within the federal government, during the Nixon years.
* Liberals
tend to be very judgmental about conspiracy theories, except for the ones they
like. Any illogical and factually deficient
assertion about the JFK assassination has got to be tolerated, if not
promoted. Otherwise, people might think
the last great anti-Communist of the Democratic Party was assassinated by a
Communist, and we can't have that.
* The idea
that the wrong candidate was elected because of machines switching votes was
the subject of two awful movies: Man of the Year (2006) and The
Campaign (2012). As you can tell by
the years they were released, these were not figments of a Trumpian
imagination. Claiming, based on
absolutely nothing, that sinister forces rigged the 2004 election for George W.
Bush was considered fair game. Who needs
a loonbucket like Sidney Powell when you've got Robin
Williams and Will Farrell on your side?
* The 2024
election was the first one in which the Democrats accepted their nominee's
defeat since 1988, and the only reason they did was because they don't want
Kamala Harris to ever run again. Next
time they lose one, we can be confident that they'll say it was
illegitimate. And that's what they'll
teach America's children about it for decades to come.
* There
are a lot of good reasons to wish we had a president like George W. Bush again,
but he said a lot of mushy-headed things that made conservatives cringe. Arguably, the all-time worst was, "There's no
need to defend myself. I did what I did
and ultimately history will judge."
Exactly who does he think writes history, anyway? Has he never heard of Howard Zinn? Noam Chomsky?
Ward Churchill? Students are
being taught their pinko revisionist twaddle, which is reinforced by the
liberal news and pop media. This process
is never going to give Bush a fair judgment, no matter how statesmanlike he
thinks it sounds to pretend that it will.
* Luckily
for Bush, almost nobody saw the unintentionally comical Oliver Stone movie W,
because people tend to accept historically based films as if they were factual
accounts. Perhaps the only true thing in
the whole movie was that, yes, he really did choke on a pretzel. But is there really room for that in a
two-hour story about a president's life?
* The southern
states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are reportedly achieving
surprising success in education, in part by returning to the teaching of
phonics and multiplication tables. It
hasn't come without a cost, however.
Those poor kids don't even know the difference between trans and
intersex.
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