March 31, 2026

WORSE, THEY AREN’T EVEN LOYAL TO THEIR OWN INTERESTS…:

…although that’s been increasingly true for two decades or more.

Posted at 1:58 pm by Stephen Green

SAVE GIRLS’ SPORTS: DOJ sues Minnesota, state high school league for allowing boys to compete in girls’ sports.

According to the DOJ, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) have engaged “in sex-based discrimination by requiring girls to compete against boys in athletic competitions that are designated exclusively for girls and allowing boys to invade intimate spaces designated exclusively for girls.”

In doing so, MDE and MSHSL have openly defied Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal funding, the DOJ said in a press release.

“The Justice Department cannot ignore a state’s brazen defiance of federal antidiscrimination law,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “In service of radical gender ideology, Minnesota’s actions violate Title IX and deny female athletes their hard-earned trophies, records, dignity, and safety.”

The lawsuit highlights the story of Marissa Rothenberger, a biological male who pitched for the girls’ varsity softball team as a junior at Champlin Park High School.

Rothenberger threw multiple shutouts, including a complete-game shutout in the Class 4A state championship game, leading the Rebels to the 2025 title.

Previously: “Never been hit so hard in my life”: Angela Carini Quits Boxing Bout After Punch By Male Opponent.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

HMMM: Trump “is priming the the public (and world) with a new mental frame: the Strait of Hormuz is not Iranian sovereign territory anymore:”

And at the moment, it seems to be moving again:

Related: In other aquatic news:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE REALLY IS SPACEX VS. THE WORLD:

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

“IT’S REALLY HARD TO OVERSTATE JUST HOW BADLY CHINA’S MILITARY INDUSTRY HAS BEEN HUMILIATED IN THE PAST YEAR:”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALL THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TO DO IS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THAT:

 

Posted at 12:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

4-D CHESS:

Left unsaid: Dragging Venezuela (and perhaps even Iran) away from the China-Russia Axis undercuts their efforts to undermine the petrodollar system that underwrites the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

So there’s more to it than just making Beijing pay the global market price for oil.

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green

ACCOUNTABILITY: The Unlikely Ensemble Leading Trump’s Hunt for 2020 Election Fraud: Senior officials are pursuing theories the Trump campaign had earlier dismissed.

In Atlanta, FBI agents have sifted through thousands of paper ballots confiscated from the main election office there. Federal officials have also seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, locking them in a basement of an intelligence campus in Bethesda, Md., at the behest of the office of Trump’s intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

At the center of many of the efforts is Kurt Olsen, a campaign lawyer who was heavily involved in Trump’s failed “Stop the Steal” fight in 2020 and was tapped to lead the new push at the White House last fall. In recent weeks, Olsen has briefed Trump on a range of allegations, pushed the president to declassify a swath of documents, and asked for up to $10 million in funding to pursue his mandate, administration officials familiar with the efforts said. He has traveled to Florida to meet with Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami.

The probes into alleged improprieties in the 2020 election range from foreign interference to duplicate, fraudulent and missing ballots in states Trump lost. Olsen spends much of his time at the Justice Department, according to administration officials, as prosecutors pursue criminal investigations on the topic in Atlanta, Phoenix and elsewhere, according to people familiar with the matter.

The biggest news here is that the WSJ is treating election fraud as a serious story, instead of just dismissing it out of hand.

Posted at 12:24 pm by Glenn Reynolds

A BRIGHT NEW DAY IS COMING:

Posted at 12:09 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ED MORRISSEY: Hegseth: ‘Decisive’ Days Ahead for Iran; Regime ‘Fractured?’

Trump sounds like he wants to abruptly leave; Hegseth wants to go the full Curtis LeMay; Rubio wants to talk with rational alternatives. Either this is the most incoherent winning side of a war in human history, or there’s a strategy in place.

Eli Lake argues vociferously for the latter. Trump and his team are waging “psychological warfare” against the Iranian regime, Lake declares, and it’s working:

Trump is waging psychological warfare with the remnants of a battered regime. Israel has killed 16 top regime leaders since the fighting began on February 28. These include Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, national security adviser Ali Larijani, and minister of intelligence Esmaeil Khatib. Then there are the lower-level commanders in the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij state militia who have perished in drone and missile strikes. The current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in public since he ascended to the post held by his father.

“If you are sitting in Tehran, you are underground if you are in the leadership tier,” Joel Rayburn, former U.S. Army colonel and senior diplomat in Trump’s first term, told me. “You know if you can be located you will be killed. Your command and control is severely disrupted, and now you see the United States is a few days away from having a half a division worth of ground forces in the Gulf region and you can offer no resistance. Your leverage is waning.”

In such an environment, who wants to be the leader of a “new and more reasonable regime”? For the true believers left, like the recently promoted Ahmad Vahidi, who now heads Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps after the former chief was killed, negotiations with Trump are tantamount to capitulation. For the unlucky Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who is stuck with managing an economy that’s ground to a halt, Vahidi’s escalations are national suicide.

As Ed concludes, “Stay tuned.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE ENEMY WITHIN: She uncovered a terrifying lab hidden in California, with alleged ties to China.

Inside the sprawling building on I Street in Reedley, code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper found vials filled with liquid — some marked in English or Chinese, others with just a code — that bore frightening labels such as “Malaria,” “COVID-19” and “HIV.” Refrigerators, lined up in columns along a wall, had labels that read “blood” and “Ebola.”

As she walked deeper into the warehouse, passing lab workers filling pregnancy test kits, she located the source of the smell that had brought her there — droppings from 1,000 lab-tested mice, she told The Times during a recent interview. The workers were nice enough, she said, but when she started asking questions she could feel the mood change.

“I realized I’m in trouble, and I need to get out of this building without tipping them off that I’m scared,” Harper said.

Her discovery blew open an elaborate criminal case with ties to California, Las Vegas and China. The investigation in Reedley found that the lab was part of an elaborate scheme to import COVID tests from China and pass them off as American-made.

But there are some who fear the operation was much more complex than that. A congressional committee uncovered payments topping $1 million made to the operator of the Reedley business from banks in the People’s Republic of China.

The defendant in the case, Jia Bei Zhu, a Chinese national, has not been charged with running an illicit biolab and his attorney has denied it. The vials discovered in Reedley were never tested.

Well, why weren’t they tested?

One clue might be that this story broke last week, but has gone largely ignored.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

TO BE FAIR, SHE ISN’T A BIOLOGIST:

Brutal:

More to come, I’m sure.

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

TERM LIMITS NOW: Fifty-seven Members of the House of Representatives are either not seeking re-election in November or leaving Congress to pursue another elective office. That’s the highest total for departing representatives in recent memory (as I report in The Washington Stand).

The average tenure of the 36 Republicans is 9 nine years (four terms plus a year), while the average tenure of the 21 Democrats is 14 years (seven terms). The re-election rate for the current Congress is 95 percent. The average tenure of a representative prior to the Civil War was less than two terms.

Posted at 11:20 am by Mark Tapscott

BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, IT WOULD MEAN THE WAR WAS ALREADY LOST — FOR THE ALLIES:

Posted at 10:54 am by Stephen Green