RABBAI MICHAEL BARCLAY: Is Tucker Carlson Suffering from a Clinical Mental Illness?

STRENGTH:

The sad thing is, pretty much all of the people ripping on this have NO IDEA just how much respect the troops have for this.

No idea.

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) February 23, 2026

Much more at X, if you feel like clicking over.

CHANGE: Cuban security forces exit Venezuela as US pressure mounts.

Venezuela’s Interim President Delcy Rodriguez has entrusted her protection to Venezuelan bodyguards, according to four of the sources, unlike deposed president Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, the late president Hugo Chavez, who both relied on elite Cuban forces.

Thirty-two Cubans were killed in the U.S. military attack that captured Maduro on January 3, according to the Cuban government. These soldiers and bodyguards were part of a deep security agreement between Caracas and Havana that began in the late 2000s in which Cuban intelligence agents embedded throughout the military and Venezuela’s formidable DGCIM counterintelligence unit, which was fundamental to weeding out domestic opposition.

“The Cuban influence was absolutely essential” to the survival of the Chavista government, said Alejandro Velasco, an associate professor of history at New York University and an expert on Venezuela.

Inside DGCIM, some Cuban advisers have been removed from their posts, according to a former Venezuela intelligence official. Some of the Cuban medical workers and security advisers have travelled from Venezuela to Cuba on flights in recent weeks, two of the sources said.

The Axis of Resistance’s western hemisphere outposts aren’t in such great shape these days.

CONSTITUENT SERVICE: Dem Congressional Candidate Refuses to Say He’d Deport a Single Illegal Alien.

Dems know who their voters are.

AND FLORIDA’S ROADS ARE CLEANER AND IN BETTER SHAPE:

Note that the $150 billion *increase* in California's annual budget in 6 years is larger than the *entire budget* of Florida. https://t.co/t8iDjLZbth

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 20, 2026

PLAYING WITH FIRE:

Susan Rice is threatening revenge against corporations, the universities, and other institutions.

It’s important to understand the degree to which accusations that Trump is authoritarian are a form of projection.

It’s also important for these entities, before they get their… https://t.co/LkVWuUSGA9

— Coddled Affluent Professional (@feelsdesperate) February 21, 2026

BREAKING: Trump Responds to Supreme Court’s Decision on Tariffs.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Trump has already maxxmogged by finding multiple alternate bases for the tariffs, thereby reclaiming aura and rugging premature celebration by jestergooning Democrats. https://t.co/VzANtlpamB

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) February 20, 2026

I NEVER HONESTLY CARED, BUT GOOD TO KNOW! Think chicken is healthier than beef? New study says not so fast.

Red meat has long been blamed for raising blood sugar and diabetes risk, while chicken is widely seen as the healthier option — but a new study challenges that age-old advice.

Researchers at the Indiana University School of Public Health–Bloomington and the Illinois Institute of Technology put a common dietary recommendation for people with prediabetes to the test.

They found that blood sugar levels, insulin sensitivity, cholesterol and inflammation markers did not change in any meaningful way when participants ate lean beef versus chicken, according to the research, which was published in Current Developments in Nutrition in December.

Light the charcoal — it’s flank steak again tonight.

GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY: How Canada became poorer than Alabama.

For eons, Canadians have viewed Alabama as a small state that, save for a few pockets, is dirt poor. All anybody seems to know about Alabama is that Montgomery and Birmingham were the centre of the civil rights movement. In 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he called Birmingham “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”

So, it was a shock when Canadian economist Trevor Tombe and the International Monetary Fund ran the numbers in 2023 and 2024 and concluded that Canada had, in fact, become poorer than Alabama.

To measure this, they calculated gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. In simple terms, it’s the size of the Canadian economy in a given year divided by the population. The same was done for Alabama. After adjusting for foreign exchange and some cost differences in both countries, the average for Canada’s 10 provinces was estimated at at US$55,000 in 2022, the same as Alabama. Shortly after, the IMF found Canada had actually fallen behind the southern state. (Canada has since edged ever-so-slightly higher than Alabama; the numbers are volatile from year to year.)

The timing was terrible for the Canadian psyche.

I don’t think Alabama made Canadians vote Liberal again and again — the damaged psyche is all on themselves.

Also, I doubt the Globe and Mail meant to do this, but this report makes Canadians seen awfully bigoted and ignorant. I think the paper was just trying to play to its Canadian audience.

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Pot Tax Was Supposed to Help Kids, but Look Where It’s Going Instead “Welcome to your weekly West Coast, Messed Coast™ report, covering the tidbits, outrages, and whoppers of Washington, Oregon, and California. And hoo boy, have we got some specimens for you this week. It’s a jump ball, however. Shall we lead with the pot tax to help 🎶 The Children 🎶 or do we begin with duplicitous Democrats who swore they’d never raise taxes? “

REVERSE COLONIZATION UPDATE: EPIC City Update: More Lawsuits! “I’d sort of stopped paying attention to the Muslim EPIC City land development northeast of Dallas because it no longer seemed even a dead horse, but merely a moist red spot in the road. It’s looking less and less like a speartip of jihad and more like a classic speculative land swindle. But this week brought not one, but two entirely new sets of legal scrutiny for EPIC City.”

HMM: Trump Weighs ‘Limited’ Iran Strike to Convince Tehran to Sign a Nuclear Deal.

Other reports claim Trump is considering a weeks-long air campaign. Both could be true, but the idea is probably to keep the mullahs guessing — and worried.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Oakland Mayor’s SUV Allegedly Stolen From City Hall

The Oakland Police Officers’ Association (OPOA) confirmed that someone had tampered with the door to Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee’s office and seized the keys to the city-owned car, according to KRON 4. The vehicle was allegedly stolen from a garage close to City Hall and retrieved in the nearby city of Vallejo, California a day after the incident occurred, KTVU Fox 2 reported.

“The Oakland Police Department is investigating the theft of a city-owned vehicle. On February 17, 2026, OPD was notified that the vehicle was stolen from Oakland City Hall,” an Oakland Police Department (OPD) spokesperson told the California Post. “The vehicle was recovered within hours. OPD is following up on potential leads.”

Lee is frequently guarded by a mix of private security personnel and Oakland cops, KRON 4 reported. Sources said her security unit mostly uses the black SUV.

You can’t make this stuff up. And in Democrat-run big cities, you don’t have to.

LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE: ‘Epidemic of Sexual Abuse’ in California Schools, Attorney Claims.

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Bodycam Footage Shows Anti-Trump Lunatic Beating Woman With Flagpole.

WOEING: ‘We almost did have a really terrible day.’ NASA now says Boeing’s 1st Starliner astronaut flight was a ‘Type A mishap.’

The agency announced today (Feb. 19) that it has reclassified Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) as a “Type A mishap” — the most serious kind, in the same category as the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia tragedies.

“This was a really challenging event in our recent history,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said during a press conference today, which highlighted the findings of a report into CFT and its issues. “We almost did have a really terrible day.”

Starliner reached the orbiting lab safely. On the way, however, the spacecraft suffered multiple thruster failures and temporarily lost “six degree of freedom” control — the ability to precisely maintain its desired orientation and trajectory.

“Flight rules were appropriately challenged, control was recovered and docking was achieved,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during today’s press conference, reading from a letter that he said he had just sent to all NASA employees.

But, he added, “it is worth restating what should be obvious: At that moment, had different decisions been made, had thrusters not been recovered, or had docking been unsuccessful, the outcome of this mission could have been very, very different.”

What a mess.

AS IT SHOULD BE: Florida… Where Non-Dangerous Felons Really Can Recover Their Gun Rights.

THEY KNOW NOBODY WATCHES THE RESPONSE, BUT THEY CAN STILL BOAST A WOMAN DELIVERED IT: Really? This Is Who Democrats Chose to Deliver Their State of the Union Response?

CASEY HANDMER: Just to be clear here, NASA declared its recent test a ‘successful wet dress rehearsal’ despite missing its T-30s target by almost five minutes, botching the dreaded Orion hatch close out procedure, and managing to achieve up to 16% H2 due to copious leakage at the fueling interface.

The “wet dress” was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a “(no) confidence test” on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.

The SLS ground support budget runs at $650m per year, and they’ve had 1173 days since the last test to get this right.

Coincidentally it also took 1173 days for Hyman Rickover and his team to ship the world’s first nuclear power reactor, wrapped in a fully functional submarine, for about a third of the total cost of the SLS’s botched ground support equipment, in the 1950s. What a difference a serious team makes!

Read the whole thing.

Despite rosier initial reports about yesterday’s WDR, Artemis II has a bad feel to it.

IT TAKES A TRULY ENERGETIC SOCIALIST TO RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY THIS QUICKLY:

🚨 New Yorkers waking up FAST buyer’s remorse is REAL after voting for socialist Zohran Mamdani.

He campaigned on “tax the rich, not you” now he’s threatening a 9.5% property tax hike on EVERYONE to cover his massive budget hole.

NYC got played
pic.twitter.com/cPbrvlGIW4

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) February 20, 2026

MIDDLE EAST: Trump is considering ‘weeks-long campaign’ in Iran that would look ‘like full-fledged war’ and be ‘existential for the regime’, with ‘dramatic influence on the entire region.’

Fears are mounting that the US could be on the brink of a major military confrontation with Iran, with sources warning that any operation would be much larger in scale than recent interventions and could begin sooner than many expect.

Insiders say a potential US strike would not resemble a limited or targeted mission but instead unfold as a sustained, weeks-long campaign that would look ‘like full-fledged war.’

The operation is expected to be coordinated with Israel and would be broader in scope than last year’s 12-day conflict, which escalated when the US joined Israeli efforts to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.

Such a campaign is described as potentially ‘existential for the regime’ in Tehran, with the capacity to reshape the balance of power across the Middle East.

Stay tuned…

MARK JUDGE: The Washington Post Has No Swagger.

Taking things particularly hard has been sportswriter Sally Jenkins, publishing a piece called “You Can’t Kill Swagger” in The Atlantic. “The Post Sports section is, was, no ordinary section, in heritage or in coverage,” Jenkins wrote. “It was habitually young, because it required hiring people with no sense of off-the-clockness. We moved in a close group… We came from all over, competed desperately to outwrite one another, teased one another mercilessly, loved one another.” The Post’s sportswriters were trained “to grab the pen and go, and to regard sportswriting as merely another portal through which to report on the broadest subjects: labor issues, performance enhancement, domestic violence, racism, sexism, terrorism, global corruptions such as vote-buying in the Olympics.”

Jenkins then went over Jeff Bezos and Matt Murray, the owner and editor of the Post: “Usually, when people in an office distrust feckless leaders, when they are subjected to corporate verbiage that bounces off the face and leaves a rage headache behind, they will subtly gear down their efforts,” Jenkins writes. “But my former colleagues do the opposite. For every half-wit decision by a poseur in a 42-long, slim-fit suit, they report even harder. This ethic has been especially true in the renowned Sports section, which was killed in a Zoom announcement.”

Jenkins is puffing herself up for doing the job of any journalist. She makes reporting sound like some kind of brutal triathlon. Swagger? Most of the Posties rending their garments on social media over getting kicked out couldn’t do a push-up.

Heh. Read the whole thing.

HE ALMOST ALWAYS SEEMS TO BE HAVING A GREAT TIME: Firing Rubio? Trump’s Got Jokes, and He’s Having a Darn Good Time.

END-OF-REPUBLIC ERA BEHAVIOR:

The impulse for retribution.

There’s a tone you hear right before a civilization ages out. It isn’t the sound of defeat. It’s the sound of score settling.

When leaders talk about what they’ll do to their enemies once they “come back,” you’re not listening to governance. You’re… https://t.co/hHBBeQ8Ffq

— InfantryDort (@infantrydort) February 20, 2026

IT’S NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE: Colorado’s imported wolf scheme a ballot box biology bust.

What did Colorado voters who decided to import wolves expect? That the animals would grow lettuce in secret gardens, safeguard the bunnies, frolic in old-growth forests, and perform moon-howling concerts for the enjoyment of the townspeople?

In fact, wild animals will do what they must to survive, as wolves have done for centuries. They hunt, kill, eat, and repeat. If not, they die. Sadly, those are the choices for Colorado’s wolves: trapped, harassed, tranquilized, flown in noisy airplanes or driven for 17 hours in a steel cage, collared, vaccinated, and thrown into strange surroundings in front of photographers and politicians. They have done their best; running fast, migrating amazing distances, at least one pair raising a litter, and steering clear of people when possible. But they still must eat, which means hunting and killing. They are highly evolved, clever, and efficient at it.

To date, the imported wolves and their offspring are known to have killed 6 ewes, 6 lambs, 6 cows, 12 calves, 6 yearlings, and at least one dog. A total of 37 have fallen victim and state government is on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. The program has cost millions more than voters were promised, and some legislators are unhappy. But it has been no picnic for the wolves, either. In fact, more than half those kidnapped (from Oregon and British Columbia) and brought to Colorado since 2023 have died.

It is not an inspiring story.

Fear not: the wolf importations will continue until morale improves.