FA, MEET FO: Joliet Mom With an Infant Puts and End to a Serial Criminal’s Career. “Don’t mess with a mama bear. That’s a lesson that one of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s early parolees learned the hard way in Joliet. Serial bad guy Shelby Hurd has had a long history of burglaries and other criminal activity. After an early release thanks to ‘good credits’ he went right back to his old ways. Fortunately for America, during his latest burglary, he brought a screwdriver to a gunfight with a mom who knew how to handle her pistola.”

DOG BITES MAN: Terror-Funding Palestinian Authority Promotes Curse on Jews, Christians.

WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE:

Wikipedia is already trying to erase it pic.twitter.com/QK8OFpKn2b

— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) September 7, 2025

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: ‘Toxic Empathy’ and the End of the Progressive Project.

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE:

🇬🇧 New work by street artist Banksy has appeared on the wall of the Royal Courts of Justice in London – showing a judge attacking a protester, lying on the ground, with a gavel. pic.twitter.com/kJKFycVrZY

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 8, 2025

I’VE WAITED FOR THIS MOMENT SINCE I BOUGHT MY FIRST CONDO IN THE LAST CENTURY: A property tax revolt is spreading — with help from key conservatives.

For decades, property taxes have underwritten the basic functions of local government — schools, parks, roads, police and fire departments, trash collection. But as home values have surged, tax bills have ballooned in tandem, fueling what David Schleicher, a Yale professor of local government, described as a “property tax revolt” shaking cities and states alike.

“This is a really big trend that is below the radar because it doesn’t involve President Trump,” Schleicher said. “But it doesn’t need fireworks to announce itself. It’s already changing our relationship with government and how schools work and property markets.”

The frustration is cutting across partisan lines. Last year, voters in nine states approved referendums to cap or curb rising assessments, from tying bills to inflation in Georgia to New Mexico and Colorado expanding tax exemptions for veterans who own homes there. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Texas, Indiana, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere have approved tens of billions of dollars in property tax relief over the past 18 months.

To some, though, such measures fall short. Grassroots campaigns in Michigan and Ohio are now gathering signatures for ballot initiatives that would abolish property taxes altogether. In Texas, Republican state Rep. Brian Harrison has proposed a state constitutional amendment to end them there by 2031.

“Never-ending property taxes are unethical, immoral and incompatible with private property rights,” Harrison said, “and need to be thrown to the ash heap of history.”

Whose property is it, anyway?

CHANGE: PBS Cuts 100 Jobs After Funding Slashed by Trump Administration and Congress.

TEMU ECONOMICS: Postal traffic to U.S. sank 80% after Trump administration ended exemption on low-value parcels.

Eighty-eight postal operators have told the UPU that they have suspended some or all postal services to the United States until a solution is implemented with regard to U.S.-bound parcels valued at $800 or less, which had been the cutoff for imported goods to escape customs charges.

“The global network saw postal traffic to the U.S. come to a near-halt after the implementation of the new rules on Aug. 29, 2025, which for the first time placed the burden of customs duty collection and remittance on transportation carriers or U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency-approved qualified parties,” the UPU said in a statement.

The UPU said information exchanged between postal operators through its electronic network showed traffic from its 192 member countries — nearly all the world countries — had fallen 81 percent on Aug. 29, compared to a week earlier.

The Bern, Switzerland-based agency said the “major operational disruptions” have occurred because airlines and other carriers indicated they weren’t willing or able to collect such duties, and foreign postal operators had not established a link to CBP-qualified companies.

Last week I bought a sub-$100 watch strap online, not realizing it would ship from the UK. About 48 hours later I got a followup email with a link to pay an import duty of just under $5.

It didn’t seem like a big deal, but maybe it is for companies like Temu and Shein that specialize in virtually zero-margin items.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Media Blackout Regarding Charlotte Murder Is Pure Evil. “There is a lot of darkness out there. I’ve been wrestling with what to say to kick this off; something deep and insightful. Really all I want to do is punch something. The nightmarish video from Charlotte, N.C. of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska being murdered by a psychopath who was roaming freely thanks to the Democrats’ violent felon fetish is sickening and infuriating.”

THEY’RE ONLY HERE DOING THE JOBS AMERICANS WOULD LOVE TO DO: 475 Illegal Aliens Busted At Hyundai Battery Plant. “Back in the dim mists of time, under one of the Bush Administrations, I remember reading a National Review or Weekly Standard piece on immigration enforcement that threw in the line ‘Obviously we’re not going to be raiding job sites anymore,’ and I remember doing a double-take. ‘Why not? They’re illegal aliens. Deport them and fine the company illegally hiring them, and then start arresting them if they do it again.’ This was my first inkling that there were Republicans who though that illegal aliens entering the country was no big deal as long as they could get consumer goods a few cents cheaper.”

HMM: Trump Hints at Escalation in Venezuela as Maduro Scrambles.

CDR SALAMANDER: So, we Now Have the ‘War’ in ‘Drug War.’

If this is not a one-off strike and we no kidding want to go kinetic against drug smugglers at sea, we can’t do it in an effective way with armed drones. We are not always going to have land bases nearby because we can’t cover all that sea with what few overworked and under-maintained ships we have.

Almost all our allies get itchy when we start making things go boom from their territory—so that leaves GTMO and Puerto Rico.

Problem is, we no longer have the proper set of tools to do the job. The Cult of Efficiency under-armed the P-8A, so it is not as effective as it should be. As such, a multi-platform kludge would have to be put together if this becomes an ongoing mission…a highly inefficient kludge that makes the mission less efficient and more costly than it needs to be. Again.

Over to you NAVAIR, again.

Speaking of costs going up, for the bad guys, the cost of doing drug business just went up too. How will the drug producers try to regain access to our markets?

Will they fight back? We’ve impacted the people smuggling business by closing our borders. That pissed off one set of cartels. Now we are blowing up product coming out of South America, pissing off another set of cartels.

Will they take this sitting down? We’ll see.

Exit Quote: “I am quite comfortable putting this in the same category as a truck carrying arms to Al-Qaeda west of the Khyber Pass, or a group of people planting an IED in Al-Anbar.”

Yes.

ATHENA THORNE: The Image That Killed the Democrats in 2026 and Beyond. “Right now, they’re trying to ignore it, the way they tried to pretend Hunter Biden’s laptop didn’t exist back in 2020. They were successful enough that time to push their vote machine over the finish line in Biden/Harris’s favor, but that won’t happen this time. This story, this image, is already out there.”

THAT THING THAT NEVER HAPPENS GOT SWEPT UNDER THE RUG AGAIN:

Georgia: The 2020 Election was over four and a half years ago and these 140K+ paper election ballots are apparently so radioactively counterfeit that the state judiciary would rather be seen as completely corrupt than to order them finally brought out of that warehouse. https://t.co/8xv1LeyA2L

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) September 7, 2025

FIVE FOR FIGHTING’S JOHN ONDRASIK: My Tour-Bus Pharmacy Went on a Health Kick.

I had to smile at Kyle Smith’s op-ed about the ability of aging rock stars to keep on keeping on (“Classic Rock of the 70s and Older,” op-ed, Aug. 21). Though I didn’t partake in much of the flagrant drug use of the ’70s and ’80s, it was certainly readily available. We knew the passwords to get into the post-gig speakeasies, and the band’s daily hangovers were as biting as their solos.

But times, like the body and mind, change. The tour-bus pharmacy has evolved. Pot has been replaced with probiotics, cigarettes are now Celexa, and Jose Cuervo is lost somewhere behind the Omega 3s, Vitamin Bs and beta blockers. If that looks like cocaine, feel free to sample our low-carb protein powder.

The delightful after-show pizzas have graduated to yogurt and granola. Our rider now includes multivitamins and Maalox to go with the nuts, fruit and dark chocolate (a healthy alternative!). Motrin now dulls the arthritis to keep the joints going for one more gig. On off days, I tend to see the boys more often on a run, or in the gym, than in the bar. Each bunk has a heating pad.

The times, they have a-changed.

CHANGE (IT BACK): Federal workers bowing to Trump’s order to show up for work.

President Trump’s effort to get federal employees back into their offices for work is proving to be stunningly effective, with the number of full-time in-office employees nearly tripling over the past six months.

Data compiled by Gallup show that 46% of feds were working on-site as of the second quarter of this year. That’s up from 17% in late 2024 under President Biden, and more than double the national average for all workers, at 21%.

The big change has been in hybrid workers — those who spend some time in the office and some time at home. They comprised 61% of the federal workforce last year, but are now just 28%. The rest are fully remote.
“In Washington, the hybrid era is over,” Gallup proclaimed.

The change is all the more staggering given how easy it appears to have been achieved.

Just like the border.

HMM: Outlet Claims That Over a Third of School Shooters Since 2020 Were Trans.

THE HIGH PRICE OF OVERREGULATION: A look at the regulatory burden on Colorado childcare providers.

While the problem childcare operators face might not be new, I can tell you something that is: regulatory bloat. Since CDEC officially began in 2022, the agency added 27 new rules and regulations to the state’s already voluminous rulebook. By this point, the page count is up in the 500’s. From a purely pragmatic point of view, who can manage this complexity? How on earth are they supposed to do so fairly?

As things stand now, CDEC contracts with several agencies and nonprofits around the state to do their regulatory compliance and licensing checks. Per a CDEC spokesperson, this list has included Goodwill of Colorado, The Institute for Racial Equity and Excellence, Mesa County Public Health, and Red Rocks Community College.

Dawn Alexander of the Early Childhood Education Association of Colorado, a trade group, used to work for Red Rocks Community College as one of their inspectors. She told me that her training was partially done by the state, but Red Rocks did the bulk of it, with a few months of job shadowing (with her first following, then leading). Another contractor, who didn’t want to go on record, told me of a similar process; the state providing some training, with additional in-house training/mentoring prior to hitting the field alone.

Ms. Alexander, as well as the other contractor, also told me about meetings designed to make sure rules were consistently applied across the state and within an organization. This varied from a monthly in-house meeting in one case to a giant, virtual free for all in another.

In the grand tradition of rulemaking bodies, CDEC also puts out what they term administrative guides which don’t hold the legal force of rules, but they are intended to help inspectors and providers to understand and apply the rules in a consistent manner. I pawed through them too quickly to count pages, but I doubt they’d be much less than the rules themselves.

The likely “solution” will involve more subsidies. And with subsidies come… more regulations.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems Are Lying Idiots and JD Vance Is Not Amused. “Trump had to fight a lot during that first term, against both Democrats and Republicans. There wasn’t a lot of support from within. His all-too-gentlemanly vice president just hung in the background and did the polite Republican thing.”

HEH:

Oh my God he’s done it. This beautiful man has done it.

He’s gonna make the left come out with a full throated fever pitch defense of gun rights. https://t.co/wHNVhJIsG8

— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) September 4, 2025

It does always seem to work out that way, doesn’t it?

Related:

He's got them defending drug cartels … lol https://t.co/Rv8eEQJako

— The🐰FOO (@PolitiBunny) September 4, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: The Party With No Name: Jeremy Corbyn’s Latest Misadventure.

RUY TEIXEIRA: Redistricting Isn’t the Democrats’ Problem. “Put all this together and the incentive structure for today’s Democratic politicians comes into focus. They are far more likely to be rewarded by their voters for no-holds-barred liberalism than to be punished for their lack of moderation or willingness to compromise. This has left the Democrats in poor shape to course correct against the loss of moderate-to-conservative working-class voters in the age of Trump. Even if individual Democratic politicians wish to do so, the pressures to stay within the bounds of Democratic orthodoxy are enormous. Sticking with the true faith generates adulation from activists, favorable media coverage, and gushers of donations. Breaking ranks risks unhinged attacks on social media and accusations of helping the Right and undermining ‘democracy.’ Not too many Democratic politicians want to take that risk.”

So long as the Democrats’ distraction from their real problems keep them in the minority and out of the White House, I really don’t have much reason to complain.

THE TOM CLANCY VERSION DIDN’T GO WELL, BUT AT LEAST THIS ONE IS BEING FOUGHT OUT IN THE OPEN: Trump, Rubio Expand War on Narco-Terrorists Into Ecuador.

BREAKING: Court Halts Closure of Alligator Alcatraz.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Hollywood Must Speak Out Against England’s Free Speech Assault. “The stars have been raging against President Trump for months, calling him a dictator who will snuff out free speech. Certainly, they’ll rise up en masse to decry Linehan’s arrest.”

Heh, no. But do read the whole thing.