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He wasn’t exactly a product of “white privilege.” He was born an Irish-Scot in Appalachia to a woman who was an alcoholic and drug user. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. He was abused, neglected, and impoverished. He was raised mainly by his grandparents. Against the odds, he survived childhood. He enlisted in the Marines right out of high school. He served in Iraq, and was medaled and promoted.He came home to enroll in the local landmark, Ohio State University. He graduated with a dual major in Philosophy and Political Science.

First, there were Marxists. The Marxists got a bad reputation for destroying economies. Seems the approach of taking from people in accordance with their ability to give, and giving to people in accordance with their ability to take, sounded nice but didn’t work well. So, they rebranded to “communists,” as in community-ists. Everyone likes a community, right? Same result, this time at the point of a gun. And murdering 100 million people in the “community” didn’t help their reputation.

Back in 1992, the citizens of Colorado passed an amendment to the state constitution to limit tax increases. They called it the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR. TABOR did not eliminate taxes, nor did it prohibit tax increases. Instead, it merely limited tax increases to the rate of inflation plus the population growth of the state. Even those limits can be exceeded by a mere majority of the voters of the jurisdiction seeking to exceed it. If the voters of Colorado want to raise the state income tax rate, for example, they can do so with a simple majority vote in the next election.

Democrats think Americans pay too little in taxes. More specifically, they think “rich” Americans fail to pay their “fair share.” They play fast and loose with those terms “rich” and “fair share.” Their unstated definition of “rich” is people who make more than the Democrat hurling the allegation. And they never do define “fair share.” It’s always just more, more, more on the rich, rich, rich. Never mind that the top 1% of earners pay 40% of federal income taxes, the top 5% pay 61%, and the bottom 50% pay only 3%.

Dishonest media-alligators undermined President Trump’s first Presidency with bogus charges of Russian collusion. Corrupt deep state-alligators fabricated allegations to defeat his re-election in 2020. Partisan prosecutor-alligators in New York and Georgia brought bogus charges in trying to derail his election last year. Overreaching judge-alligators in some of the federal district courts now seek to undermine his national security policies – an area that the Constitution largely reserves to the President.

Moms are wonderful creatures. They soothe, and they smooth. They resolve conflict with milk and cookies. Without moms, we wouldn’t be here. Not all women are moms. Joan of Arc was not a soother or a smoother, and was never a mom. Nor was Amelia Earhart or Queen Elizabeth I. Even among strong women who were mothers, not all were moms. Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher had children but, to the public at least, they were not moms. Some women can change from a skirt into pants and back again, depending on the setting, and maybe Meir and Thatcher did. Others can’t.

Executive orders and administrative agency rules going back to the 1960s required businesses contracting with the U.S. Government to engage in “affirmative action.” That was the euphemism of the day for racial discrimination. They couldn’t just call it “racial discrimination” because that term had, naturally and appropriately, developed a negative connotation. It suggested a world where people were judged not by the content of their character, but the color of their skin. Over the ensuing decades, that euphemism “affirmative action” developed a similar negative connotation.

I won’t leave you in suspense. I’m a lawyer, so the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. If you’re in the tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is wrong, or the opposite tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is right, then read no further. Just skip the analysis and instead warm up your cheers or your jeers for the Comments below, as your tribe dictates. But if you’re in neither tribe, but are just a political partisan (which is different than being in a tribe) or a political neutral (are there any these days?) then read on.

Tesla electric cars were cool a few years ago. They signaled all the virtue of a Toyota Prius, but without the ugly body shape and C-O-E-X-I-S-T bumper sticker. And they were a lot faster. Electric vehicle devotees – you probably know some – hailed the immigrant behind Tesla as an engineering genius and good green guy. His immigration to the United States was not illegal, but even that wasn’t held against him. He was the liberals’ favorite African-American since the Hawaiian dude. That’s all so 2023.

The Republican-appointed Justices on the Supreme Court are now six of the nine. Unsurprisingly, the ideological tilt of the Court is more conservative than it’s been in two or three generations. It shows. Last year, the Court took the conservative side in reducing deference to administrative agencies; deciding expansively in favor of presidential immunity (which of course benefits both liberal presidents and conservative ones, but the particular case that was decided benefited a conservative one, namely Donald Trump);

One summer day in 1924, a train stopped at a station on Long Island. A man carrying a harmless-looking package ran to catch it. He struggled to board the train as it departed. One of the train employees on board reached for his hand as another on the platform gave him a boost from behind. The package fell onto the tracks. It turned out to be a package of fireworks. The fireworks exploded. So, the exploding fireworks injured someone, right? Not exactly.

Have you seen the Denver restaurant scene? Me neither. It’s dead and gone. In a one-year period, the number of restaurants in Denver declined by 183. Of all the restaurant closures in Colorado last year, 82% were in Denver – a place that has only about 12% of the population of Colorado. Average profits at the few surviving Denver restaurants are only 3-5%. Anyone who dines out knows that this isn’t because prices are down. It’s because costs are up. Restaurant wages in Denver are up 89% since 2019. The main reason is Denver’s minimum wage of $18.81/hour for ordinary workers and $15.79 for tipped workers. For comparison, in New York City