Wiles: He Wuz Robbed

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, speaking to the Independent Women’s Forum’s Awards Gala in Washington, DC, yesterday. She told of first meeting Donald Trump after the 2020 election.

We had a lovely dinner and at the end of it, he wanted to know why he won Florida but maybe struggled in some other states—that I think we’re going to find out he actually did win.  (emphasis added)

The 2020 election was hinky six ways from Sunday. Where did millions of extra voters - seen never before or since - come from and disappear to? It wouldn't surprise me if Wiles is correct.

An Emerging Trend?

Recent months have seen a lot of back and forth on Congressional redistricting but it is starting to look like Republicans are going to win the battle and come out with more seats. Don't expect any gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair at COTTonLINE over that outcome.

Honest evaluators have long felt the US is at heart a center-right country and its legislature should reflect our ideological balance. Obviously Congress hasn't always done so. Perhaps it will going forward.

I recognize more than a few of my acquaintances and neighbors will be unhappy with the expected policies that result. Reciprocally, I care as little about their new angst as they cared about my unhappiness in years past.

Onward....

Friday Meme Fest

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Reform Kicks Arse

Like it or not, I’m an Anglophile; some of my ancestors came from Britain almost 400 years ago and our culture is an outgrowth of theirs. The Brits just held what is kinda-sorta like our midterm elections and neither of the “establishment” parties - Labour and Conservative (Tory) - did at all well.

The big winners were Reform (their MAGA), and the Greens which is similar to our Democratic Socialists. Translation: the right went farther right and the left went farther left. Writing at Sp!ked, Brendan O'Neill concludes:

No one can look at England this morning and deny that the masses have executed a coup against a complacent regime by choosing Reform as the new vessel of their moral hopes.

And who are these people? They’re the Brexit people. They’re the people who, 10 years ago next month, defied virtually the entire political and cultural establishment and opted to seize back Britain’s destiny from the unelected suits of the European Union.

I am happy for our British cousins.

The Worm, Turning

The prolific Joel Kotkin chronicles the decline of California yet again, writing for Sp!ked about how tech billionaires have supported anti-industry and green initiatives. I like his conclusion.

Ultimately, the woke oligarchs may find that they have virtue-signalled their way to a confiscatory form of socialism. For years, the tech elites and their minions have served as key enablers of progressives and their programme. They fed this monster, and now the beast seems ready to devour them. 

Karmic outcomes like this one are deeply satisfying.

Hayward Reviews a DJT Speech

Steven F. Hayward, long time contributor to Power Line, writing for the Claremont Institute's The American Mind, considers President Trump's White House lawn speech welcoming King Charles. Hayward finds the speech both masterful and atypically subtle for Trump. Two Trump quotes I deem especially important.

The cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776…. Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed…. Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British code “that no man should be denied either justice or right.”

For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride.

After this fulsome pro-British praise, Trump finished up by lauding Churchill. The implied comparison with current Labour PM Starmer - a wuss and loser - couldn't be more stark.

Marriage and Politics

An interesting quote from the Institute of Family Studies located at the University of Virginia, posted at USAToday.

Today, a majority of conservative men and women are married, and a majority of liberals are not.

I think about our friends and relatives who are either conservative or liberal (we have both). Yep, it sure holds true for the circle of folks with whom we are in regular contact. 

Give it a try and see if it describes your circle of more-than-casual acquaintances. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.

Update

Weather here in the Mojave begins to swelter, not blistering yet but definitely hitting some 90s. Assuming our health holds out (never certain at our advanced ages), we will be in our summer place 500+ miles north within the month. 

There is always a fair amount of getting ready to migrate, and we've made a start. We begin a process we call "eating the refrigerator down" meaning planning to leave very little in the freezer and less in the cooler alongside. 

We make the trip with our newish full-size Ford F-150 hybrid pickup. The truck bed has a lockable hard cover, meaning we can transport quite a lot under cover (out of sight) and semi secure. Not precisely nimble around town, it cruises the interstates like a dream at a legal 80 mph.

It is a biannual process we have repeated with minor variations for the last 30+ years. We have a busy next few weeks.

Later ... Friday's high is predicted to go over 100℉.

An Error ... Corrected

Almost nobody teaches geography anymore. It is pathetic when journalists write about things of which they have little knowledge. 

For example, in a Just the News article author Eric J. Lyman writes about Haitians fleeing to the adjacent Dominican Republic; the two countries share the island of Hispaniola. He mistakenly writes:

The border between the two countries represents the only international land border in the Caribbean.

In truth, there is at least one other place in the Caribbean where an international border divides an island. The island is Saint Martin and it is divided between the French and the Dutch. The French part is called Saint-Martin and the Dutch part is Sint Maarten. I've been there, the two get along just fine.

You could also make the argument that the US enclave at Guantanamo Bay is not Cuba, but it is primarily a military base that does not traffic with the host nation.

Dental Detours

The President recently visited a dentist in Florida and the appointment was not on his official calendar. Those who wish him ill have speculated about various awful maladies. Probably all such are wildly off the  mark.

He and I are roughly the same age - we got our adult teeth pre-fluoride. If my mouth is any indication, he has several filled cavities and crowns. I have several and it is a rare year that one of them doesn't fall off - normally while eating - and need re-glueing.

It is no big deal, presuming you don't swallow the crown (I never have). The dentist cleans the crown and the tooth stump, applies glue, and puts it in place. You bite firmly on the crown topped with a cotton pledget for a couple of minutes till the glue sets, and are out of the office in a half hour. It doesn't hurt.

I have had this procedure done in coastal Croatia, in Kona, HI, and on Guam, as well as many less exotic stateside locations. The dentist in Croatia and I shared no language so we gestured and smiled a lot. He did a fine job, after which the cab took me back to my cruise ship at dockside. 

May the 4th Be With You

Those of us who like word play and enjoyed the earlier (pre-Disney) episodes of the Star Wars epic are inclined each year to celebrate this day. In spoken English, it comes out sounding verrrry close to "May the Force be with you," a benediction often uttered in the original canon. 

Luke Skywalker, Obi Wan Kenobe, Han Solo and Yoda burst on the scene nearly 50 years ago. We still celebrate the Mos Eisley Cantina, memorably limned by Kenobe as "a wretched hive of scum and villainy." 

Looking back, the Mos Eisley was the spaceport equivalent of a shady truck stop or a waterfront bar. I imagine a dockside bar in Singapore might have a similar ambiance, albeit with a narrower range of sofonts.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's

These Memes Go To 11.

Friday Memes

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

May Day

May Day is the international day of labor, celebrated mostly by Communists and fellow travelers. It is a good day to remember that more human beings have been killed by Communists than by any other single ideology or force, estimated to exceed 100 million deaths by murder and starvation.

Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the ruling dynasty in North Korea are leading Communist architects of mass murder, although certainly not its only practitioners. Hitler gets dishonorable mention and Political Islam is trying hard to catch up, in Africa and elsewhere.

There is a lot of ugly to ‘celebrate’ on a lovely spring day.

The Marriage Gap

Writing at Reason, columnist Veronique de Rugy writes about the importance of parental marriage in the lives of children.

In the mid-20th century, only one in 20 children were born out of wedlock. Now it's two in five. I also learned that America has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households: 23 percent in the U.S. against an international norm of 7 percent.

40 percent of millennials from intact, two-parent families graduated from college and 77 percent achieved middle-class incomes or higher. Among those who didn't grow up in intact families, only 17 percent graduated from college and just 57 percent reached middle-class incomes. The latter are also roughly twice as likely to be incarcerated, even after controlling for other socioeconomic factors.

Married parents regardless of race and education suffer significantly less poverty than unmarried mothers.

De Rugy also shows that well-intentioned government policies incentivize single parenthood with tax breaks and SNAP eligibility. 

Full disclosure: the DrsC recently celebrated our 55th wedding anniversary. We’re both children of intact, “till-death-do-us-part” marriages.

Two Approaches

When the British Empire was in full flower, colonial administrators didn't try to force the natives of their colonies to become British. Today when the citizens of those now-independent nations migrate to Britain, their behavior is often offensive to native Brits. Grooming (rape) gangs, cousin marriage, hijabs, etc. don't sit well with the English, Scots, and Welsh.

By contrast, US colonial administrators have largely imposed US laws and customs on our colonies and their natives. Those natives haven't always loved the experience, but when they move to the US they often fit in better here than the UK's ex-colonials do there. Simply, the culture shock is less.

Full disclosure: the DrsC lived and worked for a year as civilians in a US colony in Asia - Guam. We experienced the occasional awkwardness that resulted when Asian customs encountered US laws. However it worked reasonably well, many thousand from the Mariana Islands thrive here in "the States."

Martyrs Wanted

The Iran Embassy in the United Kingdom has posted on their Telegram account a call to Persians living in the UK.

A campaign called Jan Fada which translates to "devotion" or "sacrificing one's life." The message appeared to encourage expatriates to stand up for Iran and even become "martyrs" if needed.

In my eyes, that message constitutes grounds for breaking off diplomatic relations with Iran. PM Starmer is too timid to declare the embassy staff persona non grata, and close the UK embassy in Tehran.

Poll: Support for Trump Iran Policy

Red State reports the findings of a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll. The news about our involvement with Iran is good.

Seventy-four percent of voters say the U.S. is currently winning over Iran, while 54% believe the country has the advantage in negotiations.

According to the poll, conducted April 23-26, 2026, among 2,745 registered voters, 52% of respondents support U.S. military airstrikes on Iran, while 54% say those strikes were justified.

The survey found that 78% of voters believe Trump was right to agree to a temporary ceasefire with Iran. At the same time, 57% approve of the administration's decision to impose a blockade on ships heading to Iran, signaling majority support for combining military pressure with strategic restraint.

Apparently most Americans recognize the wisdom of this adage. "If a group or nation says they seek your death, believe them and act accordingly."

Weird Pharmacological Science

Science Alert reports research finding that individuals taking the most common medication for gout - allopurinol - have a reduced likelihood of heart disease and stroke.

The international team behind the new research studied 109,504 people who were just starting urate-lowering treatment, with allopurinol.

The data showed that those whose uric acid levels dropped below 6 mg/dL in the first 12 months also had a 9 percent lower risk of a significant cardiovascular event over the 5-year study period, compared with those who missed the target.

Why this should be true is as yet unknown. 

Acts of Folly

Stacy McCain posts a quote by author David Mamet that I like very much, perhaps you will like it too.

Our forebears struggled and fought and died to establish and to preserve and broaden those freedoms they bequeathed us, and which have made us the most prosperous country in history. To denigrate our culture and traditions, to turn our back on our place and duty in the world … is an act of folly like that of any thoughtless and weak (not to say ungrateful) inheritor of wealth.

Truly. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.