This site uses screen captures from Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — to illustrate articles, because tweets which allow republication/retweets are automatically not copyright restricted, but as you can at least glimpse, some of these new houses have been painted awful, awful colors. Here are two hideous images of what’s being built.

These things are a true crime against aesthetics and architecture!

Some North Philly residents are getting new homes to keep them in their ‘heavily gentrified’ neighborhoods

The nonprofit Xiente provides subsidized rental housing and financial coaching to move low-income families into middle class through its Mi Casa program. It plans to develop 100 single-family rentals.

by Michaelle Bond | Earth Day, April 22, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

The call that changed Analicia Hernandez’s life came from an unexpected place — the local nonprofit that runs the Norris Square preschool her daughters attended.

Xiente was developing 10 new single-family rental homes for low-income families right in the neighborhood, and the nonprofit would help tenants pay the rent. Would she be interested in living in one of the properties?

Hernandez, who was staying with family, jumped at the chance for her own home.

In November 2024, Hernandez, 26, moved with her two daughters — now in kindergarten and first grade — into a two-bedroom house painted bright pink. The property was part of the first phase of Xiente’s Mi Casa initiative, which aims to keep longtime residents of the Norris Square area from getting priced out as home costs continue to rise, said Michelle Carrera Morales, chief executive officer of Xiente, formerly known as Norris Square Community Alliance.

This would seem to be an unambiguous good, but is it a silver lining on an otherwise dark cloud? If Xiente is subsidizing the rent, what happens when the non-profit runs low on money and can no longer do so? If Xiente is subsidizing the rent, does that not mean that they are trying to maintain an economic mix in a neighborhood which otherwise cannot support such? And if the rent is subsidized, keeping poorer people in the neighborhood, what does that do to economic development in neighborhoods which have otherwise been improving through gentrification?

But here’s the money line:

Mi Casa is a “housing stability initiative” that provides safe and dignified homes, Carrera Morales said. It’s “meant to serve as a bridge” to homeownership, the ultimate goal for Mi Casa clients, and help boost low-income families into the middle class. Mi Casa renters can stay in their homes for up to five years.

So, Miss Hernandez has to be out of her subsidized rental unit by 2031. What happens if she hasn’t been able to build enough money and expected income to find a better apartment or, most hopefully, buy a home?

I get it: the non-profit is trying to do a good thing, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. If Miss Hernandez doesn’t develop the savings and income to find a different place that isn’t some squalid, roach-ridden dump in Strawberry Mansion, will she be forcibly evicted? With idiots like Sheriff Rochelle Bilal being the ones in charge of enforcing evictions, it could take years.

There is a fundamental problem with welfare — and yes, this is just another form of welfare — that it was always meant to be a temporary helping hand to give recipients a chance to get back on their feet economically. That is what the well-off, well-intentioned people who designed what started as President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs always saw as the future, because they could never conceive of people who either could not or would not work to improve their economic situations, because they could not envision ever not doing so themselves. The existence of inter-generational welfare dependence disproves the ideas of the good and noble people who helped start our welfare programs. The temporary helping hand of welfare has too often become a permanent requirement of assistance.

We can have sympathy for Miss Hernandez and her two young daughters, and hope they really do make it out of the need for public assistance, but if Mi Casa’s anticipated 100 housing units are realized, there will be some of the aided tenants who will not.

That’s part of the problem with the ‘new’ journalistic writing, introducing a single person affected to represent the larger issue; Miss Hernandez and her daughters can be people for whom we have sympathy, yet the new form of journalistic writing is itself biased, trying to spread that sympathy to all of those similarly situated. Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here] like me to see what can and will happen.

My good friend Daniel Pearson — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him, but even though he’s mostly liberal, he’s a common sense and decent kind of guy, the kind of guy you’d be happy with whom to sit down and drink a cup of Wawa coffee — an editorial writer and columnist with The Philadelphia Inquirer gave his Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — followers a gift article from The Atlantic, on a subject that’s near and dear to his heart, public transportation, and the plague of fare-jumping which has cost the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, millions of dollars in lost revenue, something which puts it in real jeopardy.

San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism With One Neat Trick

The age of the fare-gate society is here.

By Henry Grabar | Monday, April 20, 2026 | 1:26 PM EDT

Vandals have done some senseless stuff on Bay Area Rapid Transit. They have removed the fire extinguishers from the station walls and sprayed them all over the place, for example. But what particularly vexed Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the train system that connects San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, was their destruction of map display cases at stations across the system: “You could not see the maps for years.”

I do not know if the embedded link will take readers to the gift article, but if you click on the illustration, it will take you to Mr Pearson’s tweet, which does have the gift article link.

Now you can. In August, BART completed the installation of new fare gates at station entrances and exits: Six-foot-tall saloon-style doors, made of plexiglass with metal frames, have replaced the waist-high barriers of the 1970s that were easy to duck or jump. The new gates have compelled more riders to pay their fare—revenue is projected to rise by $10 million a year. They have also led to an enormous drop in vandalism. Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year. Most fare beaters may be just trying to get a free ride, but most vandalism was apparently committed by fare beaters.

This is a success story with lessons for all types of public spaces. Call it “fare-gate theory”: To protect the shared rooms of communal life, human intervention isn’t always necessary, affordable, or desirable. Instead, physical and technological obstacles—an architecture of good behavior—can keep out bad actors and deter the worst impulses of everyone else.

It might seem obvious that addressing fare evasion is an important priority for mass-transit systems struggling with both revenue and a perception of disorder. But in San Francisco and other cities, the question of how riders access the subway—and how they behave on it—has been ensnared by vitriolic debates about fairness, poverty, mobility, social standards, and policing. One left-wing argument is that fare enforcement of any kind is a waste of money that instead could be spent improving commutes and helping low-income residents access the city. That’s part of the logic behind New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to make city buses free. Many transit officials, however, insist that fare enforcement is necessary not just to generate revenue but to maintain standards of decorum that make riders feel safe.

There’s considerably more at the original.

We noted, last July, an article about fare evasion on SEPTA in the Inquirer. The transit authority had significantly increased fare enforcement, but this was the real money line as far as I was concerned:

Transit Police Chief Charles Lawson said the agency has learned so far that the majority of fare evaders are everyday working residents — nurses, lawyers, even city employees with free passes, who, in a rush to catch the train, or out of habit after not paying in recent years, step over the turnstiles.

In other words, a whole lot of people who could pay — nurses in the City of Brotherly Love can easily make over $50 an hour — just didn’t. Some of them are now getting busted, charged with theft of services, which can cost them up to a $300 fine, all to beat a $2.90 fare. SEPTA riders could pay the fare for 100 trips, and it would be less than a $300 fine.

Translation: some “nurses, lawyers and city employees with free passes” are just plain stupid.

It does blow the argument about poverty being the problem out of the water, at least financial poverty. There is, however, a poverty of civility involved, a poverty which allowed the vandalism documented on BART to occur and be left to linger. I’m no one special, and like many other poor people, I grew up without a father after my eighth birthday, but I was still never drawn to graffiti — I noted my disgust to senseless graffiti in Athens here — or other senseless vandalism. I’ve had to take the subway or bus very infrequently in my life, almost always away from home when I did, but not only did I never try to bypass the fares, it never even occurred to me to try.

There was one very frustrating gate for the Paris Metro at the bottom of the Channel Tunnel station 🙁 , and while I might have said darn and heck and shoot at the time, I still paid the fare to get through, and finally the gate cooperated!

Mr Pearson wrote:

People can yell and stomp their feet as much as they want, but the data is extraordinarily clear. Enforce the fare and other forms of bad behavior also decline. Let it go and bad behavior explodes. Septa must avoid the urge to soften penalties in the future.

Think about this. SEPTA and BART, and other public transit agencies are adding fare gates which are harder to jump, to step over, because the earlier turnstile designs simply assumed that people were honest and wouldn’t try to evade fares. Previous lack of enforcement meant that the consequences of bad behavior were removed, but people ought to have some basic honesty in the first place. We shouldn’t have to build evasion-resistant fare gates; we should have people simply paying the fare automatically, because it’s the right thing to do.

How and when did we get away from that?

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain fisked an article from The New York Times, one which tried to make the case that American women postponing childbirth might still have children later in life.

“Fertility delayed is fertility denied” is one of the great maxims of demographics. As a matter of statistical average, postponing parenthood means reducing the total number of children. It requires a few more sentences to explain why this is true, but the fundamental fact is that every woman begins her fertile years at puberty (menarche) and concludes her fertility at menopause. Biology establishes a window of roughly 30 years (roughly ages 15 to 45) during which pregnancy can occur. Let us suppose that the reader is among those who feel a sense of horror about “teenage pregnancy.” While I could argue that this attitude is irrational, I’ll not belabor that point here. But in seeking to eradicate teenage motherhood, what you are attempting to do is to subtract five years from the potential baby-making years of the female population.

Stipulating, then, that no woman should ever give birth before age 20, you still have (in theory) a 25-year period during which births can occur. Ah, but biological fertility declines significantly after age 30, and the risk of birth defects (particularly Down syndrome) increases after age 35. The window for successful childbearing, you see, is actually narrower than the menarche-to-menopause span of 15-to-45 would suggest. That five-year delay you demanded to prevent teenage motherhood has consequences down the line, which is why in recent decades we have had so many 30-something women in crisis at the ticking of their “biological clock.” We cannot go back in time to take advantage of opportunities we have already passed up — fertility delayed is fertility denied.

Liberals don’t want to acknowledge this reality, and for many years have been selling false hope about egg-freezing, IVF and other advanced medical treatments as a panacea for the problems created by attempting to beat the biological clock. Even if you are buying what they’re selling — i.e., that becoming a mom at 45 is medically feasible — does it make sense that any large number of childless women would pursue these expensive procedures? You’ve gone childless for decades, and now at middle age, you’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars to make a baby? Do you want to be the only 50-year-old mom at your kindergartner’s PTA? And then you’ll be eligible for Social Security by the time this kid graduates high school. This kind of choice just doesn’t make sense, which is why very few women actually do it.

There’s a feminist attitude that strong, smart career women have to build their careers early, along with the accurate-enough problem that career women having children are sometimes “mommy tracked,” making getting that C-suite office unattainable. Of course, most men fail to gain that C-suite office as well.

The feminist attitude also ignores something rarely discussed: while women are now in the labor force just as much as are men, most women, like most men, have jobs, but not anything the feminists would see as careers. But the career-woman ideal, pushed by so many of our friends on the left, and the public school teachers creates another issue which stifles fertility.

In 1975, the age of first marriage for women was 21.1 years; in 2025, it was 28.4 years. Assuming (hah!) that most women want to wait until they’re married to get knocked up have children, that’s another 7.3 years out of fertility.

Then add the fact that in 1975, 66% of all households were headed by a married couple, while only 47% were in 2025, we have a huge population of unmarried single women, women who are (supposedly) less likely to procreate.

Then there’s this. A lady on Twitter styling herself skum wrote:

My boomer mom told me I spend too much on food.

“Just cook at home like we did.”

Mom: Your groceries in 1987 cost $180/mo.
Mine cost $420/mo.
Same items.
Same store brand.

Your kitchen was in a house you owned at 29.

Mine is in apartment I share with a roommate at 34.

I’m not eating out too much.
I’m eating in a different economy.

I passed the salad.
Said nothing.

Being the [insert slang term for the anus here] that I am, it’s unsurprising that I responded with the absolute truth:

“Your kitchen was in a house you owned at 29. Mine is in apartment I share with a roommate at 34.”

Translation: your mother was married by age 29, was being a grown-up, while you’re still playing a being a kid at 34. Marriage is greatest contributor to economic well-being.

Skum didn’t mention having a child, but that she was sharing an apartment with a roommate, so I assume no kids, at age 34. I suppose it’s great that she hasn’t got a bastard child, bastardy being one of the major contributors to poverty, but it also means that if she meets Mr Right, as opposed to Mr Right Now, tomorrow, and gets married, she is still unlikely to get knocked up have a child before age 36. That’s a major factor in the declining birthrate, because a first child at age 36, even if he’s healthy, is still unlikely to be followed by a second child.

Our demographic decline, other than seemingly by illegal immigrants, is a natural result of liberalism.

My good friend Daniel Pearson — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him, but I follow him on Twitter! — an editorial writer and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and someone about whom I’ve thrice asked if he could actually be a conservative had sadly missed the boat in his latest column:

The fairly dry proceedings at the Zoning Board of Adjustment are also worth paying attention to if you want to know how the city is and isn’t working. One case from November 2021 has stayed with me.

Padideh Moghaddam and Ramtin Saneekhatam were bringing Moghaddam’s parents over from Iran to live with them. To accommodate the move, they sought to turn their 2,700-square-foot East Kensington rowhouse into a triplex. Like many families, they wanted their parents close by, but also a bit of their own distinct space. The project would not have involved any new construction, just the remodeling of their interior. They would not be adding a car that would compete with neighbors for street parking.

The couple hired an attorney and an architect. After a local neighborhood association surprised them by voting 6-7 against the project, they knocked on doors to gather more support. Eleven neighbors signed their petition. The area is also zoned for mixed-use structures and hosts other, similar multifamily buildings. At the zoning board hearing, their lawyer described it as an easy case. It wasn’t.

One near neighbor called in to oppose the project, dismissing their desire for a small amount of distance and personal space, saying that “they should be able to figure out how to get along and share a kitchen.” Frankly, speculation about the internal dynamics of another household should never be a neighbor’s business, let alone aired at a public hearing. Still, the proposal was voted down unanimously.

Mr Pearson’s column was more about the approval of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, but that wasn’t the case in this instance; there was to be no external construction, just an interior remodeling. ADUs are controversial, but no ADU was planned. My question is: why would a homeowner need governmental permission for an interior remodel in the first place?

There was no issue here of an unsafe remodel, given that an architect was hired, a reasonably responsible thing to do. I’ve done a couple of remodel jobs myself, though none involved any potential structural issues, and the last thing I ever considered was asking for a stinking permit. Mr Pearson asked why the neighbors stuck their ugly noses in the family’s business: I ask why it was any of the government’s business.

This is where we have far, far, far too much government interference, and while Mr Pearson was annoyed by the decision taken, he expressed no disapproval of the cockamamie idea that it was any of the government’s business in the first place. There might be a place for requiring inspections of structural, electrical and plumbing changes in rowhomes, in homes that are physically attached to other people’s houses in ways which could damage someone else’s property, but the idea that government has any authority over actual interior remodeling is repugnant in itself.

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) are Republicans, but they are also two of the very few libertarians (not Libertarians) elected to Congress. Both have long opposed wars, and are definitely not neocons, and both sponsored concurrent resolutions to force President Trump to pull back military forces from any conflict in Iran.

Some conservatives regard them as squishes, but the Democrats don’t like them either! Mr Massie faces a primary challenge in this year’s elections, and the President doesn’t like him, but Senator Paul’s seat is not up for election this year.

Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (50 USC §1541-1550), the President has sixty days to remove American military forces from areas in which hostilities reasonably may occur unless specifically authorized by Congress to stay longer. The President has an additional thirty days to do so if he certifies that the extra time is needed to pull out forces in a safe and orderly manner.(§1544(a))

Mr Massie tweeted, after the concurrent resolution narrowly failed in the House, “(S)adly we’ve now abdicated that responsibility,” but that isn’t quite accurate; under the law, the troops still have to come home by 60 to 90 days after the beginning of the strikes against the Islamic Republic, without Congress having to do a single thing.

The War Powers Resolution was passed over President Nixon’s veto, when it hadn’t received a veto-proof margin on initial passage, because a few more Democrats, specifically including Representative Bella Abzug of New York, changed their votes as a means of increasing the pressure to impeach Mr Nixon; those additional Democrats had initially voted against the bill, claiming it gave the President expanded war powers, rather than restricting them.

The votes in the House and Senate were consistent with the law, which gave Congress the power to require an earlier exit(§1544(b) via a concurrent resolution, something the President cannot veto. The resolutions failed in both the House and Senate, meaning that unless they try another concurrent resolution, President Trump still has to withdraw military forces within the sixty (or ninety) day window, without any further action by Congress.

I agree with this! While I am very pleased that the mad mullahs and their henchmen have been sent to their 72 bacha bazi boys, I was not thrilled that the United States took military action; I would much rather have seen the Persian people overthrow the government on their own.

Vizzini once said, “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia’ – but only slightly less well-known is this: ‘Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line’!” It’s a good thing that the Iranian government has been shattered, but we now need to leave it up to the Persian people to set up a new one. Our military forces should go in and destroy every Iranian nuclear facility utterly, and that’s all.

Of course federal law enforcement is aggressive, and of course [insert slang term for the anus here] things happen; every arrest is an [insert slang term for the anus here] action, the taking of a suspected malefactor against his will, and if the suspect has a family, of course they’re going to be upset. Oddly enough, the American left weren’t too terribly upset when then-former President Trump was arrested as both state and federal persecutors prosecutors tried to throw him in jail, even though he had a son who was a minor at the time.

The very lovely Rachel Maddow linked this story in her skeet on Bluesky:

N.J. Girl, 6, Found Alone by Neighbors Crying ‘Where’s Papi?’ After Dad Was Detained by ICE While Picking Up Food, Mom Claims

Adonay Mancia Rodríguez was detained near his home in Morristown, N.J., by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Sunday, Jan. 11

By Janelle Griffith | Friday, January 16, 2026 | 1:56 PM EST

The mother of a 6-year-old girl in New Jersey says her daughter was found walking alone outside their apartment crying and asking for her father over the weekend after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while picking up food for himself and the child.

Gabby Rosa told NJ.com that her partner, Adonay Mancia Rodríguez, had been watching their daughter, Annabella, in their apartment in Morristown while she was at work at a nearby Walmart on Sunday, Jan. 11. According to Rosa, Rodríguez had left their apartment to pick up food from a nearby restaurant when he was detained by ICE agents.

Rosa recalled receiving phone calls from a concerned neighbor, whom she said had seen the girl wandering the streets looking for her father.

“She told me she’d seen my daughter, walking by herself on the street, crying, crying out for her dad, asking, ‘Where’s Papi? Where’s Papi?’ ” Rosa told the outlet.

She said she rushed home to care for Annabella and later that day, saw video on social media of Rodríguez and others being detained as part of an ICE raid.

I was careful to screen capture the blurb from the original to note that Mr Rodríguez had left his 6-year-old daughter alone in their home, not that she was out with him when he was picked up.

There’s more at the original, and you can follow the link if you are interested. What I found more interesting were the cosplaying revolutionaries on Bluesky. Captain West skeeted:

They don’t fucking care! These ICE agents are just animals on the prowl for victims. At what point do State and Local law enforcement start protecting the people they supposedly serve?

The left were overjoyed when the Supreme Court let stand the decision in Lozano v City of Hazleton, which held that the federal government held sole authority over immigration law. In that case, Hazleton PA was trying to restrict housing and employment of illegal immigrants in the city. The American Civil Liberties Union sued and won. Since the Bush Administration was not taking serious enforcement immigration law enforcement, the left were happy, and cities and states could do nothing. Now the Feds are enforcing immigration law, and it’s coming back to bite states helping the #illegals.

Harbinger of biscuits skeeted:

Nobody will save us. Americans with guns need to step up.

Of course, Americans with guns were much of President Trump’s base. Rural residents and hunters are the ones with the most guns, the ones who actually use their guns, know what they are doing with guns better than the spray-and-pray gangbangers of Philadelphia, and they are the ones who gave huge percentages of their votes to Mr Trump.

The left want to fight, fight, fight, but they’re cosplaying revolutionaries. As G Gordon Liddy used to say, they wouldn’t know out of which end the bullet comes if they had to fight!

Nina Bookout of The Victory Girls noted that Representative Ilhan Omar Mynett (D-Somalia) believes that all of the fraud investigations in Minnesota are just political public relations stunts:

Ilhan Omar Claims Fraud And ICE Investigations Are Just PR Stunts

by Nina Bookout | Monday, January 12, 2026

Ilhan Omar will do her absolute best to spin her way out of the fraud issues blanketing Minnesota. Yesterday she, with a straight face, asserted that all the fraud cases are just PR stunts by the Trump Administration.

The administration says the surge has been necessary to conduct both immigration enforcement and to investigate a growing fraud scandal in the state, the cost of which federal prosecutors estimate could top $9 billion. The scandal dates back to 2021, when Biden administration Justice Department investigators first honed in on an at least $250 million COVID-era scam revolving around the Feeding Our Future program, a case that now includes more than 75 defendants.

Most of the defendants are of Somali descent, leading President Trump and other Republican lawmakers to focus attention on the state’s large Somali community, while threatening to suspend federal funding to the state across a broad array of programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, and child care funding.

She’s super tired of all this guys. We need to drop the subject and quit the investigations.

There’s just one problem with the Mrs Mynett’s claims: it seems that people are actually being convicted of fraud!

Nonprofit’s Leader Convicted of Siphoning Off $240 Million in Federal Food Aid

Aimee Bock was accused of overseeing a scheme that exploited lax pandemic-era controls, and reaped millions with fake invoices for nonexistent meals.

By David A. Fahrenthold | March 19, 2025

Aimee Bock and Salim Said

The leader of a Minnesota anti-hunger nonprofit was convicted in U.S. District Court on Wednesday of masterminding a brazen scheme that reaped more than $240 million in pandemic relief funds with a network of bogus food kitchens that billed the government for 91 million meals.

The nonprofit’s leader, Aimee Bock, 44, was convicted by a jury of seven counts, including wire fraud and bribery. Another defendant, Salim Said — a 36-year-old who oversaw one of the bogus kitchens — was convicted of 20 counts, also including wire fraud and bribery.

When Ms. Bock was charged in 2022, federal prosecutors said her scheme was the largest known fraud against the government’s Covid-19 relief programs.

At least 70 people were charged in the scheme, and more than 40 have already pleaded guilty or been convicted. Last year, another case related to the same scandal made national news, when someone attempted to bribe a juror in a separate trial by leaving about $120,000 in cash at her home in a Hallmark gift bag. Five people were later charged with bribery in that case.

Wikipedia noted:

Although the state agency responsible for monitoring the school meal program repeatedly tried to cut off funds, the organization was not shut down until FBI raids and federal indictments in 2022. As of late 2025, out of 78 suspects indicted in the fraud, more than 50 had pled guilty. Another seven individuals were found guilty at trial, including the leader of the scheme, Aimee Bock, while many others awaited trial. As most perpetrators, excluding Bock, were Somali Americans, the scandal resulted in increased political attention on the community, including from the administration of Donald Trump.

Note that these fraud allegations, trials, and convictions were the result of investigations during the Biden Administration, not the evil President Trump. Apparently the lovely Mrs Mynett doesn’t believe that the Biden Administration was being fair to Somalis.

I guess that this isn’t much of a surprise: it seems that the state of Minnesota and city of Minneapolis are suing the federal government to stop enforcing our immigration laws as well.

In his Twitter biography, Harry Pettit describes himself as:

Academic researcher. Geographer: extraction and resistance in MENA. Author of The Labor of Hope. Opinions my own, repost not endorsement. Free Palestine

I’ll reserve judgement on what kind of “academic researcher” he is, but he’s all in on the “Free Palestine”, more accurately described as free barbarism, movement. He even said:

October 7th was a legitimate and successful resistance operation. ‘israel’ made up lies and killed their own because they wanted cover to commit a holocaust.

while retweeting this hysterically funny claim:

Hamas has published a 42-page report rejecting claims that civilians were targeted on October 7. The report says fighters were instructed to avoid civilians, hospitals, schools, & medics, and accuses Israel of spreading false information. It urges the ICC or an independent body to investigate civilian casualty claims.

Yeah, uh huh, right. Hamas were so proud of their “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack that they filmed some of it. And it takes a special kind of stupid to see the kidnapping of children as “avoid(ing) civilians.” Hamas must believe that Westerners are stupid, and there’s at least some evidence that they’re right about that, to judge by the number of Westerners who actually support the Palestinians.

But this latest bit is just as inane. Mr Pettit calls “Olax” an “absolute hero” for throwing a brick through a window of the British embassy in The Hague. Mr Ex-Lax, oops, sorry, Olax has tried to get himself arrested, so that he can begin a hunger strike in solidarity with the Palestina Action hunger strikers in British jails.

Perhaps he hadn’t hears tat four of the eight hunger strikers gave up their action, leaving only Heba Muraisi, 31, Teuta Hoxha, 29, Kamran Ahmed, 28, and Lewie Chiaramello, 22, who is refusing food every other day because he has diabetes, actually on strike. I’m not certain how Mr Chiaramello could be considered a true hunger striker if he’s eating every other day, but I don’t think that not being able to comprehend the logic of the left is a serious deficiency.

Ahhh, but Mr Olax said in his video, “I intend not to eat, to NOT drink, (and) will refuse all life prolonging medical care.” Human beings starting in decent physical condition can survive over a month without food, but the body starts to shut down after just three days without water. Depending upon conditions, and death can occur. Four or even five days survival is possible, but just barely. It looks like he’ll have a pretty short hunger strike if he refuses to drink, and refuses intravenous hydration.

I look at Mr Olax’s video, and my first thought is: how does he really intend to persuade anyone not already on his side while showing wholly messy and unkempt hair, a beard which looks like [insert slang term for feces here], or like a ‘Palestinian’ jihadi, and a belly which looks like he has very little experience in missing meals? Clearly Dress for Success” was not in his bookcase!

John Wayne supposedly once said, “Life is tough, but it’s tougher when you’re stupid.” In starting a war that they knew they could not win, Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ who supported and cheered them on proved that life is tougher because they’re stupid. And the people living in the luxury of Western civilization who support Islamist barbarism are even dumber than the ‘Palestinians.’

Our good friends on the left are doing everything that they can to express their disgust, and try to score political points with far-left voters, over the eight Senate Democrats who agreed to end the filibuster and allow the continuing resolution to reopen the government to be passed. Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) is trying to tell us that he’d have gotten a better deal to reopen the government, because he finally got the state budget passed, a mere 135 days late. 🙂

Gov. Josh Shapiro says national Democrats folded in the federal shutdown, while he stayed ‘at the table’ for Pa.’s late budget deal

As Shapiro portrays the outcome of Pennsylvania’s 2025 state budget as an across-the-board victory, the path to get there was harder, messier, and longer than anyone in Harrisburg would have liked.

by Julia Terruso and Gillian McGoldrick | Tuesday, November 18, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST | Updated: 10:08 AM EST

The turning point in Pennsylvania’s budget impasse, by Gov. Josh Shapiro’s telling, came just before Halloween, when he and leaders in Harrisburg gathered in his stately, wood-paneled office to meet twice daily to hash out a deal to end the bitter, monthslong stalemate.

The long grind eventually led to compromises 135 days in, and a deal Shapiro said he thinks is far better than what national Democrats, hoping to extend healthcare subsidies, got in Washington at the end of the federal shutdown.

“Sometimes you’ve got to show that you’re willing to stay at the table and fight and bring people together in order to deliver,” Shapiro told The Inquirer in an interview Friday, touting the state budget agreement finally signed that week.

“I think it’s a stark contrast, frankly, with what happened in D.C., where they didn’t stay at the table, they didn’t fight, and they got nothing,” he said.

Let’s tell the truth here: the Democrats in Washington weren’t “at the table” because Republicans wouldn’t negotiate with them, and that’s because Republicans had most of the power. Republicans control the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House in Washington, while they control only the Senate in the Keystone State.

As Shapiro portrays the outcome of Pennsylvania’s 2025 state budget as an across-the-board victory, the path to get there was harder and messier than he would have liked: a nearly five-month slog that strained his dealmaker image and forced concessions to get the deal across the line — including no new money for mass transit. The absence of a new funding stream in the budget marked a final blow in the saga to Southeastern Pennsylvania commuters who rely on SEPTA — and who are likely to be reminded of the beleaguered agency’s funding woes as delays, staffing issues, and needed repairs persist.

Critics are quick to note it took the self-proclaimed dealmaker so long to get a deal. Counties, school districts, and nonprofits struggled through four months without state payments while officials remained at loggerheads. Pennsylvania was the last state in the nation to pass a spending plan for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

The failure of the budget to include new money for SEPTA is the big bugaboo for Philadelphia-area Democrats. They certainly don’t like the apparently horrible idea of raising fares to have the people who use SEPTA pay more of SEPTA’s expenses.

At the federal level, all the Democrats had was the power to keep the Senate from voting on the Continuing Resolution via the filibuster . . . and the Republicans who control the Senate could have used the so-called “nuclear option” to end the filibuster rule, something the President urged them to do.

But things were worse for the Democrats at the federal level than Republicans in Pennsylvania. Sure, many “counties, school districts, and non-profits struggled,” but at the federal level the 42 million SNAP recipients were having to go without their ‘food stamps,’ their EBT cards being refilled. How much longer could the Democrats have held out?

We have previously reported on how Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch and the newspaper’s Editorial Board were just spittle-flecking mad that the Democrats ended the filibuster, and now the Working Families Party — which is a complete misnomer, since so much of their support comes from non working families and welfare recipients — have decided that they are “committed to recruiting and supporting a primary challenge to him in 2028.”

Earlier this year, Fetterman was the first Senate Democrat to support the Laken Riley Act, a Republican immigration bill that requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain and take into custody individuals who have been charged with theft-related offenses, even without a conviction. Critics of the law say it severely cracks down on due process for immigrants.

Fetterman was the sole Senate Democrat to vote to confirm Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was one of Trump’s attorneys when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

And he has been the Senate’s most outspoken defender of Israel during its war in Gaza, sponsoring a resolution with Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) against antisemitism and appearing for the first time since his fall at an event hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington on Monday.

He also received recognition from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called him the country’s “best friend” and gifted him a silver pager inspired by Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon that exploded pagers.

“He has repeatedly shown disregard for the rights of Palestinians,” the Working Families Party release said. “Refusing to support a two-state solution and breaking with the rest of the Democratic caucus on Israel’s illegal annexation of the West Bank.”

Translation: Senator Fetterman does not hate Jooooos enough.

You know who else do not “support a two-state solution” for the ‘Palestinians’? The ‘Palestinians’ themselves, along with their fellow travelers who chant “From the River To the Sea” in support of them.

The Pennsylvania (Non)Working Families Party hates things like law enforcement, rejoicing over the re-election of Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police hating District Attorney Larry Krasner, and of course they support the blood-thirsty ‘Palestinians’. Mr Fetterman is a surprisingly good Senator, a Democrat to be sure, but a moderate Democrat rather than a wild-eyed leftist.

So, apparently Senator Fetterman will have a challenger from the far-left in the 2028 primary, assuming that he even runs for re-election; he’s not in the best of health, despite being only 56 years old.