The Last Time I Saw My Dad
Posted By: Boomer in the Basement, 12/29/2025 4:52:33 PM
Some Goodbyes Don’t Announce Themselves. Forty-nine years ago tonight, I had plans to meet up with friends—people I barely know anymore. Before leaving the house, I stopped by my dad’s room to say goodnight. He was lying in bed, recovering from hip surgery he’d had a couple of weeks earlier — after having slipped off a ladder. He was watching television to pass the time. Everyone who knew him admired him.
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The Last Time I Saw My Dad
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Some Goodbyes Don’t Announce Themselves. Forty-nine years ago tonight, I had plans to meet up with friends—people I barely know anymore. Before leaving the house, I stopped by my dad’s room to say goodnight. He was lying in bed, recovering from hip surgery he’d had a couple of weeks earlier — after having slipped off a ladder. He was watching television to pass the time. Everyone who knew him admired him.
Written on Christmas Eve, 2025. A personal reflection on faith, loss, ancestry, and finding my way home. This Christmas, life is really different for me. Since September, I’ve been attending RCIA, or Catechism, with the aim of converting to Catholicism and joining the church. Presently, I’m about 40% of the way through, and to say it’s been eye-opening would be the boldest understatement I’ve ever made.
When I was a kid, my middle sister’s birthday was December 10th. As part of her celebration, the family went out to buy a live Christmas tree. Not because we were virtuous. Not because of tradition. Because that’s when the tree lots opened.
There were no pre-lit artificial trees waiting in plastic coffins in the attic. You didn’t unbox Christmas. You went outside and found it, standing upright in the cold, guarded by a man with twine and cold hands in a worn corduroy jacket.
Writing this in December as I am you might be tempted to think I’m something of a money-grubbing Scrooge, but let me assure you in this first sentence I’m nothing of the sort. In fact, when it comes to tipping good service, I’m renowned for being generous, and was going twenty percent years before it was standard.
My formula for a tip is this. When I enter an establishment, the wait staff is at twenty percent, perhaps even a little more. The tip is built into my tipping psyche. At that point, it’s up to the wait staff to begin working their way down.
Talk Radio Tuneout
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Now that we’re firmly in December, I can comfortably drive around in the truck with Jimmy Durante’s gravelly crooning of Frosty the Snowman for the eighteen-millionth time in my life, rather than tune into what passes for talk radio these days. To be sure, I’ll even turn up The Chipmunks—poor old Alvin being screamed at by Dave—before I switch over to the local AM station carrying Clay and Buck, or, God help me, Sean Hannity.
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Iran’s president declared they were in a “total war” with the US, Israel and Europe, just as Tehran looks to rebuild its nuclear capabilities and strengthen ties with Hamas.
Masoud Pezeshkian made the bold statement in an interview published in state media Saturday, Barron’s reported.
“In my opinion, we are at total war with the United States, Israel and Europe. They want to bring our country to its knees,” Pezeshkian said. This war is worse than the one launched against us by Iraq. On closer inspection, it is far more complex and difficult,” he said, in reference to the 1980-88 war with Iran’s western neighbor.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said she’s bullish on Zohran Mamdani and strongly hinted that she plans to make a big splash in 2026 by pushing to enact a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded universal child care program — a priority for the incoming socialist mayor. “I think he [Mamdani] is going to surprise a lot of people,” Democrat Hochul said Sunday on 77 WABC the “Cats Roundtable” radio program. “Everybody — let’s give him a chance,” she said.
In 1988, if you had told anyone that the Soviet Union would cease to exist just four years later, you would have been dismissed as a crank. The institutions looked solid, the bureaucracy entrenched, and the power absolute. Yet by 1992, it was history.
Today, European politicians in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris suffer from the same dangerous optimism. They believe they are so safely ensconced in their institutional frameworks that public anger can never truly throw them out of the saddle. But looking at the trajectory of the European Union, I believe we are closer to a revolutionary moment than the elites dare to imagine.
We often hear comparisons to the 1930s,
In a move that has shocked conservatives across social media, a niqab-wearing Muslim woman named Lakeshia M. Alston has filed to run as a Republican for North Carolina State Senate District 22 in the 2026 election.
Alston is the only Republican in the race so far, and her history screams lifelong Democrat.
The shocking move has led many to question if this is an infiltration tactic from the left, designed to disrupt GOP primaries and hand victories to Democrats in the general election. Alston’s photo and registration went viral on X when conservative commentator Eric Daugherty posted a screenshot of her official filing and an image of her
Embattled Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband’s venture capital firm quietly scrubbed key officer details — including former Obama officials — as scrutiny grows over the family’s skyrocketing wealth, The Post has learned.
Omar (D-MN) went from nearly broke to being worth up to $30 million in just a year — as a massive, up to $9 billion fraud scheme involving the Somali community in her district unfolded right under her nose in Minnesota.
Close to 90 people have been charged so far, including at least three with direct ties to the lefty Squad member, though she has not been charged.
‘Mental Health’ or ‘Evil’?
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With the arrest of Nick Reiner for the alleged murder of his parents, Rob Reiner and Michelle Singer, commentators have taken to simultaneously pitying the accused for his mental illness while condemning him for his evil actions.
This is logically contradictory.
On the one hand, if it is illness that explains why Nick Reiner committed a crime, then he cannot be held morally responsible for his actions. It is just to hold him morally responsible for his actions only if he could have chosen, on the basis of reasons, not impulses or compulsions, to have done other than what he allegedly did.
If, on the other hand, we insist
Nick Shirley’s 42-minute YouTube video on daycare fraud in Minnesota is shocking not just because of the scale of abuse he uncovered in a day. It’s shocking because it took a young kid to expose this years-long scheme. Where was the mainstream media all this time?
In the must-see video, Shirley teams up with a citizen investigator and goes door-to-door visiting various “daycare” facilities in Minneapolis that got millions in taxpayer money through a Child Care Assistance Program.
The first two “daycare centers” are both located at the same address in an industrial park,
Christmas Ends the Right’s Messy Week
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Charlie Kirk was a one-off, it seems. His assassination and the turning over of TPUSA to his wife Erika may prove that his legacy handoff is more than she is able to effectively manage. So much of what I saw at this week’s Am Fest triggered by Tucker Carlson (and Jack Posobiec’s cosplaying Jesus Christ Superstar while posting with a disgusting anti-Semite) undercuts -- indeed denigrates -- what Charlie and TPUSA once stood for. While Vice President J.D. Vance used his opportunity there to respond to groyper Nick Fuentes’ attacks on his charming wife Usha,
Journalist Nick Shirley Shreds Tim Walz’s
Desperate Bid to Sound Competent As Scandal Implodes 15 replies
Desperate Bid to Sound Competent As Scandal Implodes 15 replies
Independent journalist Nick Shirley lit up the internet with his video this past week on Minnesota day care centers, where he alleged that he didn't find children, but he did find people who didn't want to talk or answer questions. The full video is now approaching 100 million views, an amazing number. He even found one "learing center" that had a misspelled nameWhat that number of views shows,I think, is how disturbed Americans are by the subject and how much they want it to be addressed.The national attention may even have forced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to act in a defensive way, because he made this post on Sunday,
Far-left billionaire powerbroker George Soros and his family have lavished more than $71,000 into New York Attorney General Letitia James campaign coffers since 2019, including a robust $31,000 to help the longtime adversary of President Donald Trump get re-elected next year, according to a report Sunday by the New York Post.
Citing Board of Elections records, the Post reported that campaign donations included $18,000 from Soros in July 2024 and another $13,000 from his daughter-in-law, Jennifer Soros, in May. Soros and his family also gave James another $40,000 dating back to 2019 for previous campaigns.
2025 Man of the Year: Christiane Amanpour
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It’s not easy to put a positive spin on a mass-murdering terrorist group. But CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour found a way.
While most of the world celebrated the release of the last Israeli hostages this October—and listened in horror to the victims’ stories of torment in Gaza’s underground tunnels—Amanpour took a moment to give Hamas kudos for its treatment of the captives.
"They are probably being treated better than the average Gazan because they are the pawns and the chips that Hamas had," she mused. "Now Hamas has given up all its leverage by giving them all up."
That is the sort of "fearless and uncompromising"
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pushed back against the ever-growing fraud allegations levied against him in the disastrous aftermath of a viral video where an independent journalist cracked open a crucial part of the alleged Somali aid scheme.
A spokesperson for Walz, a Democrat who frequently provokes President Trump’s ire, addressed a bombshell video posted by conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley.
“The governor has worked for years to crack down on fraud and ask the state legislature for more authority to take aggressive action. He has strengthened oversight — including launching investigations into these specific facilities, one of which was already closed,” the spokesperson told Fox News.