Jan
8
2026

Thanks to "Western Lensman"

He was alert enough to find and tweet this:

The "Lensman" (an E.E. "Doc" Smith fan?) paraphrases Senator Kelly's wordy response to Jake Tapper's simple questions, perhaps unfairly. Somewhat more convincingly, Matt Margolis at PJMedia ("Jake Tapper Accidentally Exposed Mark Kelly’s ‘Illegal Orders’ Hypocrisy") is a little more substantive:

Kelly's answer was a mess of semantic gymnastics. "So what we were talking about in the video is about a service member being given a specific order and having to make a decision about whether this is lawful or not," Kelly stammered. "And this is like the reasonable person theory. What you're getting at is constitutional questions. Can a president try to do a law enforcement action on a head of state, but use 150 airplanes and the full force of the U.S. military to do that? So these are two different things."

No, they’re not, actually. Kelly is trying to have it both ways. He participated in a video telling troops that they could refuse orders they deemed illegal, yet when Tapper asked point-blank about an operation his fellow Democrats are literally calling illegal, he suddenly discovered a buttload of nuance.

If Senator Kelly, who claims to have given much thought to these questions, can't give a straightforward answer, how does he expect some lowly grunt in the trenches to do any better, probably at risk of his career and freedom?

Also of note:

  • A handy guide. Charles C.W. Cooke offers advice on How Not to Think About the ICE Shooting in Minnesota. (archive.today link)

    I am not entirely sure what I think about what happened in Minnesota yesterday. On balance, I think that the ICE officer was likely legally justified in his actions, even if I wish that it had turned out differently, but I am always open to counter-arguments, as well as to the emergence of new evidence. These cases are always difficult, and they usually revolve around minutiae. That the crucial details of the event have immediately been swallowed up by maximalist sloganeering is unhelpful in the extreme.

    Charlie lays out seven (!) possible psychological traps to avoid. I have one simple guideline, furnished by Yeats:

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    So don't be like those guys.

  • Not so fast, I still have cousins there! But (on the other hand) I can understand Jeffrey Blehar's attitude, even if it seems to be "full of passionate intensity": To Hell with Minnesota. (archive.today link)

    It is late and I am tired. Specifically, I am tired of Minnesota.

    Others, both here at National Review and across the media, are currently talking and writing about today’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE officer. Was it a “good shoot,” or a blatant crime? Will the city burn once more? Are these the inevitable results of federal intervention? What’s the Somali angle in all this? These are good and important questions, and everyone here — and I hope at least a few elsewhere — will have smart and informed takes. Not me, though. Me? I don’t care.

    … or maybe he lacks all conviction. I can see that too.

  • Letting the door hit them in the ass on the way out. Issues&Insights has thoughts on U-Haul data: The Great Divorce Continues.

    When U-Haul released its latest “Growth Index” this week, it made us wonder if blue states will ever get a clue.

    Once again, the index found a strong migration out of blue states and into red states.

    “Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee follow Texas as prime destinations. It’s the same top five from 2024 and 2023, although in a different order,” the company said.

    The biggest losers: California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.

    Of the top 10 growth states, nine voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 and seven currently have Republican governors.

    Disappointing: New Hampshire is closer to the "wrong" end of the list (32nd place). Even though Massachusetts is even closer to the bottom (46th place), it appears Bay State emigrés mostly aren't coming here, apparently preferring Vermont (24th place) or Maine (15th place).

  • The official diagnosis of the National Review editors: Mamdani Housing Official Cea Weaver Is a Lunatic.

    If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States. She believes that “rent control is a perfect solution to everything” — not least because it is an “effective way to shrink the value of real estate.” She considers that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy,” she believes that “homeownership is racist,” and she holds that the highest aim of government ought to be to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” And they say that ambition is dead in America!

    And that's not all the symptoms they found! I hate beating up on the mentally ill, but is she really the best choice even a commie like the Zohran could make?

  • OK, let's beat up on Cea just one more time. Or we can let the WSJ editorialists do it: Cea Weaver and the Socialist Crybullies. (WSJ gifted link)

    It’s been a tough week for Cea Weaver, the socialist activist appointed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to lead his Office to Protect Tenants. First her old tweets began to recirculate, including previous assertions that “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy” and calls to “seize private property.”

    Then on Wednesday news reporters confronted Ms. Weaver on the street and asked if she wanted to comment on her mother’s ownership of a home in Nashville that the Daily Mail said is valued at $1.4 million. “The 37-year-old began running down the street,” the paper’s Natasha Anderson wrote, “then said ‘No’ through tears.”

    Tina Fey would have been a better choice, I think. She wouldn't run away or cry, anyway.

  • Best of luck in your future endeavors! Dominic Pino, from his Washington Post perch bids farewell and… Good riddance, Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (WaPo gifted link)

    If an organization cannot survive without federal funding, it isn’t really private. This truth is lost on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which saw its taxpayer funding eliminated by Congress in 2025 and said on Monday that it had formally disbanded.

    Despite being established by Congress, receiving its funds from taxpayers and having the word “public” in its name, the CPB says it is a “private corporation funded by the American people.” Its statement announcing the decision to dissolve the organization called the CPB a “private, nonprofit corporation.”

    It’s true that the CPB was not a government agency. But it only existed as a conduit for government money to flow to PBS and NPR stations. When Congress rescinded that money, the CPB began to wind down. Now, that process is complete.

    Dominic makes a pretty standard libertarian argument against the CPB. What's really amusing is the continuing freakout among the readers in the Comments section. As I type, the top "Recommended" comment (picked from the 1691 entered as I type, with 987 upvotes) begins:

    Dominic Pino's association with the National Review tells you everything you need to know about his worldview, and the hard-right turn the Washington Post has taken in the past year. Bezos and his minions are presiding over the destruction of a once-great American institution.

    That's everything you need to know, readers! Don't bother with understanding, let alone rebutting his argument!

    Yet another favorite Pun Salad quote, this one from Comrade Vladimir Lenin:

    Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.