I was tabbing down the street, do-wah do-wah, when this troll started following me ...
President Trump says his administration is considering suspending the GAS TAX nationwide.
— Salem News Channel (@WatchSalemNews) October 6, 2026
“We’re thinking about that.”
The comments come less than 24 hours after Trump signed an executive order expanding access to red-dyed diesel and providing temporary federal tax relief…
Ed: The order on red-dyed diesel is overdue under the circumstances. A tax holiday will only provide short-term benefits, and those come at a cost. If prices dip, that will encourage more usage, and the benefits of a price drop will be short-lived while the structural issues remain. When the gas tax kicks back in, it will feel like a price hike, unless prices fall by a lot in the meantime organically. It's an election strategy, but that's all.
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Greg Salsbury at RealClearPolitics: Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence. Consider a recent interview in which Representative Jim Jordan explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “Just stupid” and “one of the dumbest policies I’ve ever heard of,” and in a later interview, adding, “just about every single position today’s left adopts is crazy.”
So we are told that leftists are shrewd, long-term planners who are simultaneously stupid and crazy. Which is it? The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not. ...
To be clear, there are certainly some dim bulbs among the left – both in leadership and rank and file. Showcase examples include Vice President Kamala Harris, who frequently struggles to articulate coherent sentences; Rep. Hank Johnson, who worried during a congressional hearing that Guam might “tip over and capsize” if it became too populated; Rep. Shelia Jackson, who once referred to herself as a “freed slave” and spoke of “two Vietnams side by side, North and South”; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told us that America with defunded police would look just like the wealthy white suburbs. On a broader scale, consider millions of California voters who knowingly continue to vote for politicians whose policies have devastated the Golden State.
But these examples aside, the overarching leftist agenda – and the people who genuinely understand, subscribe to, and orchestrate it – cannot simply be dismissed as stupid. Doing so is dangerous.
Ed: Read it all. I agree with Salsbury that it's dangerous to just assume your opponents are either dumb or crazy. We have to grasp what they seek and determine their strategy for achieving it. AOC and Kamala may provide us endless clips for ridicule, but other leftists are using them to push a very deliberate strategy of radicalization, and they have largely succeeded in that mission by corrupting our educational system.
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🚨 BREAKING: Keith Ellison was just EXPOSED by CNN for taking lavish overseas trips paid for by corporate lobbyists. - Five-star hotels - First-class flights - African safari tours - AND MORE Ellison appears visibly upset that they’re even asking about the trips. He abruptly ends the interview while staring down the reporter. Earlier this week, he attacked Ron Schutz for simply owning stocks. Meanwhile, Ellison is accepting lavish trips funded by the very companies he’s suing. WOW!
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) October 5, 2026
Ellison appears visibly upset that they’re even asking about the trips. He abruptly ends the interview while staring down the reporter.
Earlier this week, he attacked Ron Schutz for simply owning stocks. Meanwhile, Ellison is accepting lavish trips funded by the very companies he’s suing.
WOW!
Ed: Ellison is not stupid. He's radical and corrupt. Big difference. He may be the first Democrat to lose a statewide race in Minnesota since 2006 because he's radical and corrupt, not because he's dumb. Schutz understands this too, and understands that Ellison's ties to fraudsters make him desperate to avoid the kind of scrutiny that even CNN is now bringing. That's not to say that there is zero stupidity in politics at the moment, though ...
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Axios: California leaders blasted President Trump after he said during a Monday rally about Iran, "Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego."
The big picture: The backlash — and the White House's insistence that Trump was misunderstood — underscored the ambiguity of his meandering speech: An argument that the war was worth enduring to protect Americans came out sounding like an invitation to attack two U.S. cities. ...
Faced with an unpopular war and stubbornly high gas prices, Trump seemingly argued that the current economic pain is "a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe" during his Nebraska rally.
"It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe," he said. "They can take out a city. Let them take, let it — let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That's — this is a very small price to pay, and it's gonna be over very soon."
Ed: Trump often says controversial things, but this isn't one of them. His point was clear in the context of the remarks, which is that people complaining about gas prices in the war would be singing a very different tune if Iran had a nuclear device and detonated it in or over an American city. Attempts to paint this as an "invitation" are so intellectually dishonest as to beggar belief. The stupidity is not on those making that argument – demagogues who certainly know better – but the idiots who parrot them.
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Black Michiganders feel abandoned by Abdul El-Sayed: “He’s taking advantage that we, as black people, are Democratic - and he thinks we’re gonna vote for him anyway, and I’m like, NO!” https://t.co/IZ9zwkZKfb
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 6, 2026
Ed: El-Sayed will have trouble again in Detroit, and James Talarico will have trouble in Houston. Black voters are liberals and light progressives, but they are not socialists, and they do not like it when other identity groups take precedence over their interests. It may not be a big change, but neither candidate can afford to have black voters sitting out their races.
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Maya Regev in the NY Post: On Wednesday night, I visited the University of Texas at Austin to address students there — and so did notorious Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
I, a female survivor of Hamas’ brutal terror, came to share my story at the campus’ Chabad student center.
On an auditorium stage half a mile away stood Piker, who once said about the day I was shot and taken: “It doesn’t matter if rapes f–king happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much.”
This man sold out the 460-seat venue where he spoke within 20 minutes, and another 2,500 people joined a waiting list.
Ed: Not stupid – just evil. And note that this took place at the same time that the Left sent itself into paroxysms of outrage over at-best questionable allegations of a gang rape at a fraternity party at Cornell from two years earlier. No one's calling out the radical Islamists who raped and murdered young women at a music festival during their massacre of over 1200 people three years ago.
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Here are a few stories of horrific, violent crimes committed against women from just the last month or so. While the Cornell case is plastered wall-to-wall across legacy media, these crimes and their victims garner zero attention, and zero outrage. You can see why. https://t.co/NV1PJW4kos
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) October 6, 2026
Ed: Only the useful narratives about the patriarchy will be considered.
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Joe Chalfant at Townhall: With just 28 days remaining until he faces off against Republican candidate Ken Paxton, Democrat James Talarico is nowhere to be found.
Talarico has not been seen publicly in Texas in over a week, with his last appearance occurring on Saturday, September 26, before he took a fundraising trip to New York City. There, he was treated to a VIP fundraising dinner where attendees, like a filmmaker who labeled America a “shithole” and a group that advocates for child sex change surgeries, were charged $27,000 a plate.
On Wednesday, September 30 Talarico was slated to speak with the U.S. Hispanic Business Council in the Rio Grande Valley, but instead joined virtually from a hotel because “his staff says he’s ill and was unable to travel.” During the appearance, Talarico claimed that he was forced to seek care at an urgent care clinic in Dallas, but social media users have disputed the timeline offered by the candidate.
Ed: Well, this is a curious time to go missing on the campaign trail. Be sure to click through to read the whole thing, because Team Talarico has apparently attempted to mislead people about Talarico's whereabouts. That raises a number of questions, not just about his health, but also what else may be going on.
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So, basically, imagine it's 1960 and Michigan is about to elect the son of Hitler's personal assistant as senator because after WWII we relocated hundreds of thousands of practicing Nazis to Dearborn. I exaggerate only slightly.
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) October 6, 2026
Ed: It's not an exaggeration.
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Tony Blair at The Free Press: This weekend, the Green Party of England and Wales crossed a line. A dangerous line. One that it is unacceptable to cross. It passed a resolution which effectively denounced the State of Israel’s right to exist.
By a vote of 1,022 to 813, the party passed a motion entitled “Zionism Is Racism,” which commits the party to a single Palestinian state covering all of historic Palestine—which is to say, to a world in which Israel, the state which contains the largest population of Jews on Earth, does not exist.
To understand the full depth of this shift, consider what the motion says. It defines Zionism not as the movement for Jewish self-determination in the historic Jewish homeland, but as an ideology demanding “an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population.” It instructs that Zionism will be “treated as any other form of racism” and rejects any attempt “to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.”
Since at least two-thirds of British Jews call themselves Zionists, the party has, in effect, branded the majority of the country’s Jews racists, while declaring that doing so cannot be antisemitic.
Ed: Is Labour any different? It was when Blair was PM and the party leader, but Jeremy Corbyn brought this same approach when he succeeded Blair, and it's far from clear that Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham differ much from the Greens on this point. Labour is the party of mass immigration that has corrupted British politics into Islamist sympathies, if not outright Islamist ideology. The Greens had nothing to do with that.
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This citizen from Edina said in less than four minutes last night all that needed to be said on the subject of youth/gun/gang violence in suburban Hennepin County. Let's have this go viral! https://t.co/SBvo5bkU7k
— Bill Glahn (@billglahn) October 6, 2026
Ed: You have to know Edina to understand the dynamic. It's a higher-income suburb of Minneapolis, whose name has long been jokingly claimed to be an acronym for Every Day I Need Attention. The people of Edina have not had gang problems, and they are not happy to be getting one from Minneapolis. This is a blue district, but that may change after this shooting at the high-school football game.
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Smadar Perry at Ynet Global: The man suspected of trying to turn a Flydubai passenger jet into a weapon is expected to face the death penalty in the United Arab Emirates once the investigation is completed, according to a senior Emirati source. But before that happens, investigators in Abu Dhabi will have to answer a far more uncomfortable question: How was Hamam al-Hammami allowed anywhere near a cockpit?
UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi is overseeing the investigation. One of the emirate’s most senior officials confirmed to me that Mossad personnel and Israeli aviation experts had arrived secretly in Abu Dhabi to take part, alongside senior Saudi and Omani intelligence officials and at least two representatives of U.S. intelligence agencies. It is not yet clear whether all will enter the interrogation room. The Israelis will. ...
And in Abu Dhabi, the ending already appears to be taking shape. The senior source said al-Hamami is expected to receive the death penalty once the investigation and legal proceedings are completed. No passengers were killed, but Emirati authorities appear determined to impose the harshest punishment available, both as a deterrent and as a message to whoever may have helped radicalize or encourage him.
Ed: And possibly to prevent al-Hammami from revealing too much about how he got assigned to the Tel Aviv route in the first place.
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An unambiguous case of consensual sex. The aftermath of the Cornell group sex episode is a peerless example of the hypocrisy of the feminist movement, which proclaims the oppressiveness of any remaining traces the chivalric code. Females deliberately drink themselves blotto in order to lower their sexual inhibitions, voluntarily participate in sex, and then, after the regrets set in, deny their agency and put exclusive responsibility for their drunken encounter on their male partner, on the grounds that they are helpless to take care of themselves. I've written about the campus rape myth in @CityJournal: https://t.co/AJNchaogWT From my interview on @realDailyWire's Wired in Live with @cabot_phillips ⬇️
— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) October 5, 2026
Females deliberately drink themselves blotto in order to lower their sexual inhibitions, voluntarily participate in sex, and then, after the regrets set in, deny their agency and put exclusive responsibility for their drunken encounter on their male partner, on the grounds that they are helpless to take care of themselves.
Ed: Perhaps. If we had a reliable investigator looking into the case, we might find out for sure. Instead, both the state of New York and Cornell are picking activists to head up their parallel probes. That tells me that Mac Donald may be on the right track, and that young men should avoid Cornell in the future.
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Did a single protester here cry out about the Oct. 7 rapes??
— Christian Toto (@HollywoodInToto) October 6, 2026
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impossible. I heard on CNN last night from a very serious Democrat that all the Jews in Michigan were excited to vote for el Sayed.
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) October 6, 2026
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Last night's lyric: "Heart of Glass" by Blondie.
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