Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your weekend edition roundup includes: Jimmy Talarico is found safe and sound at an Austin music festival after a flu that lasted somewhere between nine and fourteen days, depending on whom you ask, and the Times debuts a sneaky, passive-aggressive way to spread a rumor while denying it is spreading rumors; Vance pulls Microsoft and seven other firms out of the green-card line, and India’s own commerce minister says thanks; the DOJ quietly ends ninety-two years of federal silencer registration; and Kamala’s husband may have just saved the Democrat Party from itself.
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Jimmy’s back! Call off the search party. As of around 11am yesterday morning, he remained missing, and Fox reported, “Talarico disappearance has Dem volunteers worrying and Trump asking, ‘What is going on?’” Then, to everyone’s great relief, we found the little guy. Several hours later, the New York Times rushed to reassure readers with, “James Talarico Returns to Senate Campaign Trail in Texas After 10-Day Absence.” Whew! Like me, you are probably just feeling grateful he is okay.
Talarico, having somehow avoided the manhunt, appeared without warning yesterday at a music festival in Austin, Texas. He wandered around, shook hands with surprised supporters, hugged fans in photo ops, and … that was it. No interviews. No donor calls. No barbecue. Even as of this morning, nothing on the campaign’s X feed announced any new appearances, podcasts, shows, or anything. (He was previously tentatively scheduled to appear at a Dallas fundraiser tomorrow night, but without any venue or time, and then on CNN on the 14th.)
So … still weird. We shall see.
A fierce and distracting debate broke out yesterday over whether the Senate candidate was missing for ten days, twelve days, or even, in the case of the Daily Mail, thirteen days. So far as I can tell, the variance has something to do with whether or not you count or exclude the half day he first went missing, or the part of yesterday before he suddenly popped up at the music festival like a deranged Jack-in-the-Box. This is proper. Accuracy counts.
Which is why teams of corporate media fact-checkers are, even as I write this, working around the clock to ensure that all media reports hew to the shorter, 10-day calculation. The Times complied.
How a 10-day absence is less weird than a 13-day absence may be something that the psyops teams understand, but it is beyond me. It seems to me both are in double digits. Look— in 2016, Hillary took off just four days to recover from pneumonia, and CNN said she’d returned in the nick of time— “not a moment too soon.” After just four days.
Hillary was 68 at the time. Talarico is 37. So what difference does it make whether he was AWOL for ten days or thirteen days? The point is, are we supposed to believe he took two to three times longer to recover from a less serious illness than someone twice his age?
Hilariously, the Times clearly felt petulant about being forced to shore up the campaign’s pitiful flu excuse for whatever really happened. “On Friday,” the Times primly reported, shoving the dagger in while smiling coyly, “Mr. Talarico said there was no truth to any rumors that were spreading on the internet about his absence, including one that he had been receiving some sort of mental health treatment.”
Haha! That passive-aggressive sentence could have stopped with “…rumors that were spreading on the internet about his absence.” That would have been professional, so as not to reproduce the very internet rumors the Times was pretending to dismiss as baseless. But the Times deliberately tacked on “…for some sort of mental health treatment”— proving its annoyance at being forced to report the campaign’s ridiculous talking points as truth.
This, by the way, is a classic journalistic assassination technique that I call rumor laundering, where the reporter manufactures a reportable fact about an unreportable rumor by asking for the denial. It works like this. A reporter sticks a microphone in a candidate’s face. The following ensues:
REPORTER: “Mr. Soandso, what do you say about rumors that you had a sexual encounter with a group of specially abled entertainment workers?”
CANDIDATE: “What? Who is saying that? That’s insane. Of course that never happened!”
HEADLINE: “Soandso Denies Midget Wrestling Orgy.”
So, first, the Times laundered the mental breakdown internet rumor. Then it basically described Talarico as dainty and maybe even a little fussy: “Mr. Talarico dabbed his face with a handkerchief in the heat of the Austin afternoon.” The Times knows full well that, despite his claims to have had “lots of girlfriends,” everyone thinks the trim and neatly dressed candidate is queer as a three-dollar bill.
Regardless, the article settled for the silly flu story, leaving it wholly unchallenged and unquestioned. One could fairly ask when, exactly, did Talarico suddenly recover, if it wasn’t just a few hours before the festival? If he’s been slowly on the mend, why hasn’t the candidate been seen before now in a bathrobe and slippers, at least? Why, if he’s recently recovered from a very serious flu infection, does he now seem completely fine, as though the Presbyterian seminarian sprang from his sickbed after being anointed with holy water?
Oh well. It’s all unanswerable nonsense, of course, and online sleuths are hot on Flu-gate’s trail, having even supposedly identified the private flight that may have rushed Talarico from a looney bin in Ohio back to Austin for his dramatic festival appearance.
A music festival in liberal Austin was, as the Times noted, one of the safest places for the candidate to be reintroduced to the public after his, well, whatever it was. “Mr. Talarico picked a favorable place to return to the campaign trail,” the article said. His opponent, Texas’s terrific Attorney General Ken Paxton, tweeted that, “He doesn’t get to reappear like nothing happened after ghosting the 31 million Texans he wants to represent for two weeks.”
Well, Ken, in a fair world, you would be right. He wouldn’t get away with it. But don’t expect any help from the New York Times except for a few passive-aggressive needles.
Let’s focus on the good news. The good news is Jimmy is okay. He’s back. According to reports, the reunion with staff was emotional. His campaign manager hugged him tightly and said, “We’ve talked about this. You have to stay where we can see you.”
All’s well that ends well.
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Right around the time Microsoft’s CEO was being honored at the Golden Age Summit, which I reported yesterday, this happened. The Associated Press reported, “The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program, alleging fraud.” Not just Microsoft. It was eight big tech companies (including four Indian ones).
Vance complained that big tech companies, including heavyweights Microsoft and Adobe, have been manipulating the immigration system by “complying” with federal requirements to search diligently for American workers before hiring H1Bs, such as by diligently running two-day ads in the Des Moines Weekly Shopper’s help wanted section under the heading “Selling My Used Underwear.”
“They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it,’” the Vice President explained. “And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance added. Last year, for instance, Microsoft fired 6,000 Americans and hired 6,300 foreigners under H1Bs and applied for nearly 3,000 more green cards for permanent US residence.
Once again, we see a most peculiar inversion, where MAGA conservatism has become the workers’ rights party, and Democrats are exposed as the real party of big business. “Trump supporters argue (the visas) undercut American students and workers,” AP reported. But Democrats “say they allow the U.S. to attract the best talent from around the world and fill important hiring gaps.”
According to Democrat supporters, the ‘best talent’ often includes highly trained workers from India with fake diplomas. Headline from the Financial Express, June:
“Authorities say they have seized nearly 100,000 fake certificates and other forged academic documents,” the story reported, “including engineering, medicine and nursing.” Because what America truly needs are more Indian doctors who never actually attended medical school, a time-saving shortcut that provides a fairly strong competitive advantage over Americans who need to pay for ten years of college and grueling internships.
It makes sense, in a way. Look at it like this. Fake Indian doctors can recite the CDC guidance as easily as American doctors with real degrees can. Plus, the best talent knows that it is cheaper, faster, and easier to just buy a degree from “a network of at least 28 universities in India,” where “a fake degree reportedly costs as little as $1,400.”
Americans, it seems, are suckers. Or at least, that has been the status quo until now.
The Vice President announced Thursday that Microsoft, Adobe, and six more tech companies may no longer apply for green cards for their H1B workers. Doug Rand, a former Biden senior adviser at USCIS, called Vance’s announcement “incoherent.” (If you think about it, an accusation of “incoherence” is pretty rich coming from a Biden-era official, but never mind.)
Anyone with half a brain can see the obvious problem. But the truth is submerged in Democrats’ various -isms: racialism, globalism, and credentialism. Racialism says you can’t criticize countries like India for having academic standards of a Somalian daycare center. Globalism says it’s a good thing if US companies rely on workers from parts of the world where degrees are cheapest. Credentialism says any degree gets you in the club.
The buried lede in these stories is that the Indians are finally cracking down on their own fraudulent degree programs. How did this happen? It is not a happy coincidence, or because the Indian government suddenly developed a conscience or ethical North Star. Thank the tariff dashboard.
This week, India’s commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, said that he never complained about the H-1B and green-card issue in recent trade talks, and that “not getting more H-1B visas is absolutely good for the Indian economy.” He added, unnecessarily, “I have never ever raised the issue of H-1B visas or green cards in all my talks with the US.” I bet he hasn’t.
President Trump’s tariff dashboard might be the greatest foreign policy tool in world history.
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In great news for Second Amendment fans, a quiet gun-control revolution is underway. Yesterday, ABC reported, “Justice Department won’t enforce registration rules on silencers and certain guns after court ruling.” A hundred years of mandatory federal registration just came to a peaceful end.
The DOJ moved Friday to let more people buy firearm suppressors (silencers), short-barreled rifles and ‘sawed-off’ shotguns, and other guns— without registering them. The change in policy followed a narrow court ruling striking down certain provisions of an antique 1930s law. The Texas judge’s ruling was limited to just the plaintiffs in the case, but the DOJ said it would cease enforcing the rules for everyone.
Instead, the DOJ announced it would stop policing law-abiding citizens and focus on criminals— a mind-blowing concept that caused progressives to swoon in horrified disbelief. ATF, the department said, would “continue to ensure we remain focused where we are needed the most: combating violent crime in American communities.”
The road to this Constitutionalist win was paved by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which quietly dropped a $200 “permit tax” required for these same types of “special interest” weapons. The article explained that some DOJ officials wanted to appeal the decision that overturned parts of the 94-year-old law, but the Trump Administration told them to back down and expand it to everybody.
The OBBBA move was strategic. Without getting in the legal weeds, eliminating the $200 permit tax made the law vulnerable, since it was no longer protected by the Constitutional taxing power. In other words, somebody thought this through from early last year.
Finally, don’t worry that this turns the gun shop into a free-for-all. The registration process continues for machine guns and similar firearms considered “destructive devices” under federal law, and people still have to pass a background check and fill out the standard form confirming they are legally eligible.
Ninety-two years later, the silencer is finally quiet, and men will no longer be asked to complete embarrassing questionnaires about their short barrels.
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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Exclusive — Kamala Harris’s Husband Privately Says He Doesn’t Want Her to Run for President Again.” Because nothing says “privately” like a headline in the Wall Street Journal.
“I have not decided if I’m going to run again,” Harris said at an NAACP event in Michigan last month. But, the Journal reported, she “has taken steps that could be a precursor to such a bid, including speaking with major donors, hiring staff and traveling to battleground states to boost Democratic candidates in the November midterm elections.”
But the patriarchy could be standing in her way. Her husband doesn’t want her to do it, says the Journal, citing anonymous “people familiar with the conversations.” Thus, all may not be restful in the Harris home. Which is more important? Marital harmony or saving democracy? Has Kamala crashed into a glass ceiling called Doug Emhoff? Is it divorce?
“The expected large field of Democratic hopefuls could soon begin formally announcing their bids after the midterms,” the Journal reported, surprising no one. But “Harris leads the hypothetical Democratic field in most 2028 national primary polls.” Ruh-roh. That is true. Yesterday, the New York Times updated its Democrat tracker of 15 polls:
In the best of times, polls are about as useful as those little plastic buttons that are supposed to make smoke alarms stop chirping. But two years from a presidential election, they are worse than useless. The Democrats’ best strategy —used by both parties— will be to conceal their real candidate among a giant field of babbling cacklers for as long as possible, so as to stymie the opposition researchers.
Regardless, Democrats generally have an easier job of picking presidential candidates, since their voters don’t really care who it is. Just look at last time. If Kamala and Tim can do it, anybody can. And if I were forced to guess, I’d speculate that this carefully leaked Kamala husband story is actually an elegant retreat by a candidate possessing the unparalleled grace of an inebriated homeless woman propping herself up on a shopping cart. (Joyfully.)
This way, Harris can be applauded for choosing her marriage over her political ambitions, defusing otherwise inevitable progressive debates about moving over for a straight white guy like Governor Oily Hairdo, who trails Harris in every poll. A story like this probably means that re-running the “black woman” for president in 2028 is a cross-eyed non-starter.
The comments seemed to agree. “On behalf of Democrats everywhere,” commenter Jonathan Perrin quipped, “absolutely nobody wants Kamala Harris to run. That would be a gift to republicans in 2028.” Sam Baird chimed in, “Losing against Trump should be an automatic disqualification against running again.” Judy Neuwirth nodded, “Even Hillary figured that one out.”
A grateful nation becomes unburdened by what might have been. As Ms. Harris herself once observed (about covid, naturally), “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.”
Continue continuing!
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Before politicians open their mouths about gun control and restrictions they should really take a gun course, fire a weapon a couple of times, get some knowledge before they write a bill restricting law abiding citizens and make themselves look insanely stupid.
I wanted to share an analogy between the style and color of a car and the style and color of a gun.
Does a bullet or a rifle decide what it shoots? Does the shape of a gun, which has a trigger, firing pin, chamber and barrel decide who or what it shoots? Does it make a difference to a victim of gun violence what color or style the gun is? Is the hole it leaves in a person different depending on the color or style? Maybe it’s the name?
There were 2 people that lived in the same neighborhood and worked at the same company. One drove a green car and the other a red car. Both left the neighborhood to go to work about the same time. The green car made it to work on time no problem. The red car hit a kid at the school zone killing the boy. So in a gun banners mind (the democrats) you should definitely outlaw red cars. If red cars had been outlawed the boy would still be alive. You see this is the mindset of the left. It’s not the person that’s willing to shoot someone it’s the color of the gun, or that the stock has a handle. It’s the look of the gun, makes total sense.
How many more Mr. Speaker, how many more have to be killed by red cars before this legislature takes action?
You see it’s not the person behind the gun, or how the fbi time after time miss the obvious posts put on social media, it’s restricting the vehicle that killed by its make, model or color that makes us so much safer. Is this not the brilliance of the left’s policy placing restrictions on our 2nd amendment based on the color and the style of a gun, Brilliant?
A few years back I heard a female Democrat House of Representative member stand on the house floor to introduce her bill that would stop allowing the manufacturing of the AR-15 magazines. She said with this bill once the magazines are emptied the gun will become unusable. Do you see the absolute ignorance of the people that lord over us! These morons that make laws restricting our God given rights have no idea what they speak of, but yet we allow them to create laws when they have no f’n clue what they are restricting. AR-15 magazines, as I’m sure most of you know, can be refilled with bullets, over and over again. In principle this is like giving a community organizer the power to rewrite and take control of our entire healthcare system and expect success, (how’s that been working for us).
When will we learn that “Those that are willing to give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety (by idiots) deserve neither liberty nor safety”. (Ben Franklin 1755).
I seem to remember G.W. Bush signing into law the Patriot Act giving the FBI unconstitutional powers to spy on citizens without warrants. This they promised would be the magic “bullet” that would stop terrorism and keep us safe here at home. The whole time they knew they’d use it against us the citizen, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. J.Goodrich
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He keeps the feet of His holy ones,
But the wicked ones are silenced in darkness,
For not by power shall a man prevail.
— 1 Samuel 2:9 LSB
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