February 6, 2026

WINNING:

Posted at 5:32 pm by Stephen Green

KRUISER: This Awful Thing That the Super Bowl Has Become Belongs on the Hallmark Channel. “Real sports fans loathe commercials. In fact, if there were an Olympic event that involved racing to grab a remote and mute an ad while we’re watching a game, we would all be contending for gold medals. Heaven help the person who gets between me and the remote as a football broadcast goes to a commercial about medication for leaping chlamydia.”

Posted at 5:25 pm by Stephen Green

THAT WOULD BE TRULY AWFL:

Posted at 5:21 pm by Stephen Green

VIDEO REVIEW: Precision Armament’s TiTrex .30 Cal Suppressor Sets a New Bar. “3D-printed from Grade 5 titanium, the TiTrex is one of the smaller, lighter .30 cal cans on the market at just 6.2 inches long and weighing only 9.2 ounces including the mount and front cap (5.9 in and 7.2 oz for the body alone). Inch-for-inch, it just might be the quietest .30 cal suppressor available. Even when paired up against longer, fatter, heavier cans, it beats out nearly all of them.”

It’s nice-looking, too.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

SHE’S BACK! Douglas Murray: Kamala Harris returning to the political landscape can be best described by Gen Z as ‘cringe.’

If you´re still not clear on what is going on, well, at least Kamala and her team have given us a couple of clues. One is that they have decided to adopt the X-label of “@headquarters_67.”

This is a reference to an online meme briefly popular with some youths some while ago.

The meme — which, like a lot of online memes, is too complicated and unimportant to go into here — signals a desire to be down with the kids.

Unfortunately, the meme was already long dead and buried even before Kamala and her social media geniuses decided to dig it up and batter its corpse one final time.

Even CNN has admitted that this attempt to look cool is almost the epitome of what the kids might call “cringe.”

Kamala couldn’t have looked more out of sync if she’d started talking about Pepe the Frog.

Which is why her clueless social media team decided it was time for a quick re-rebrand:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

‘VERY REVEALING!’ One Short Word in AOC’s WaPo Layoffs Take Gives Away How Dems View the Media.

The left have viewed the Post as “our media” for quite some time. In the fall of 2006, Bill Clinton told a Washington Post interviewer, that “There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies — and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.”

That’s a pretty mild way to describe what the media would shortly morph into a year later, as Obama worship went into overdrive, followed by everything we’ve seen over the last decade to attack the Bad Orange Man.

Posted at 4:15 pm by Ed Driscoll

UNEXPECTEDLY: More WA businesses considering leaving the state due to high taxes.

The latest Association of Washington Business quarterly survey shows bad news on the economic front, with 44% of business leaders saying they are considering moving their personal residence out of state and businesses indicating they are now more than twice as likely – 30% to 14% – to expand outside the state than within it.

The results of AWB’s winter survey are based on 429 responses collected by email from business owners and operators across the state between Jan. 12 and Feb. 2.

“Washington employers signaled a continuing collapse in confidence in the state economy in this quarterly survey, with significant year-over-year deterioration across multiple metrics driven largely by the state’s growing tax burden,” according to the survey’s executive summary.

I wonder if part of the “no hire, no fire” economy is due to uncertainty created by ham-fisted blue-state governance.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: She Drove the Rental Like She Rented It. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn how not to get your rental car out of an impound lot, the very worst time to cop a feel, and the stupidest reason to impersonate an FBI agent.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

BLUE CITY BLUES: 5 largest U.S. cities don’t have enough money to pay bills.

At the end of fiscal 2024, all five cities didn’t have enough money to pay their bills despite having balanced budget requirements. In order “to claim their budgets were balanced, as is required by law in the five cities, elected officials” didn’t include “the full cost of government in their budget calculations and shifted costs onto future taxpayers,” TIA said.

Combined, the five cities had $144 billion in assets; their combined debt, including unfunded pension and other post-employment benefits (OPEB), totaled $384 billion. Their combined shortfall was $240 billion, according to the analysis. This included $92 billion in pension debt and $112 billion in OPEB, mainly retiree health care, debt.

A “common and pressing challenge persists” in all five cities, the report notes: “long-term costs of pensions and retiree health care benefits continue to strain their financial health despite short-term improvements or varying circumstances.”

“While investment gains have temporarily eased pension liabilities in cities like New York City and Houston, these gains remain unrealized and uncertain,” it says. New York City’s growing retiree health care obligations “remain vastly underfunded,” as do the other cities’ it notes.

“Chicago exemplifies the consequences of chronic pension underfunding, with liabilities exceeding assets and recurring budget shortfalls,” it adds.

“Los Angeles and Philadelphia, which have made progress in funding, face limitations in financial flexibility due to increased capital investments and rising expenses,” it adds.

The report also grades each city based on its taxpayer burden. New York City and Chicago received F grades; Philadelphia received a D; Houston and Los Angeles received C grades for fiscal health.

Aside from bad finances, guess what else all five cities have in common.

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

LET’S RETURN TO TEACHING STUDENTS HOW TO ARGUE. In the sense of “we are discussing the crux of the issue” rather than “I am (X identity) so I feel (Y feeling) and you can’t challenge that.” An idea so crazy it just might work (and that is also thousands of years old).

Posted at 2:25 pm by Robert Shibley

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ Where Trump Makes Life More, What’s That Word Again? Oh Yes, Affordable. “Welcome to the West Coast, Messed Coast™, where the most extraordinary thing has happened in one of the most expensive areas of the country since Donald Trump came back to the Oval Office: Things are getting — what’s that word again? — Oh, yes, more affordable. This help comes despite howling leftists who haven’t been able to repeal the law of supply and demand — yet.”

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green

HMM: The “No Hire, No Fire” Economy.

Job seekers are discouraged by a plague of ghost job listings intended to provide the illusion of growth, with no intention of anyone ever being hired.

Inflation is low, yet consumer confidence is at the lowest level in more than a decade. Stocks are booming, yet no one seems to be hiring. (This seems to be my personal experience as well.) Trump and congressional Republicans have managed to lower taxes, yet the “animal spirits” of the American economy do not seem like they’re been unleashed.

Is AI eliminating jobs? Maybe, especially in the service sector (those AI agents everyone hates have probably replaced some humans on support lines). But tech has been a job growth driver for much of this century, and an AI infrastructure build-out seems to be sucking up all available venture capital (and then some) with very little to show for it in the way of actual profits thus far.

It’s a weird time, to be sure — but at least we have “no fire” to go along with the “no fire,” and perhaps more importantly, wages are up.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED IS LOWERING SUPER BOWL EXPECTATIONS: Why Super Bowl TV Ratings Will Be Down This Year.

Last year’s Super Bowl between the Eagles and Chiefs drew 127.7 million viewers for Fox. It set a new record for the most watched telecast in television history.

My guess is that NBC won’t come close to topping this on Sunday, despite Nielsen using a new viewership measurement system that has seen big increases across the board for most sporting events in recent months.

For one reason, last year’s Super Bowl aired on Fox’s free streaming service, Tubi. This year’s Super Bowl will air on Peacock, which is a paid service. Tubi has 97 million active users. Peacock has 44 million subscribers.

Another big reason why this Super Bowl won’t be watched by as many people as last year’s is because of who is here and who isn’t here.

Travis Kelce’s fiancée is not part of this Super Bowl. That eliminates a large portion of people who watched last year’s Super Bowl despite not caring even one bit about football. Patrick Mahomes has also reached that level where the non-NFL fan may tune in to see him play. Sam Darnold and Drake Maye will not bring in one of those fans.

Okay, so the Chiefs didn’t even make it to the playoffs this year. But why couldn’t “Travis Kelce’s fiancée” perform at the Super Bowl halftime? As alluded to above, she has a rather substantial fan base, and they might have tuned in just to see her.

Flashback: Why is an anti-American crossdresser being chosen to headline the most American event ever?

That’s why:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

“LEARN TO CODE.”

Related:

Also:

UPDATE:

Posted at 1:27 pm by Glenn Reynolds