February 11, 2026

PUSH HARDER: GOP lawmakers pushing 3 federal election security bills.

All three pieces of legislation being considered – the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, and the MEGA Act – would mandate that states require photo ID and verify the citizenship status of potential voters.

“I think we can trust the outcome of the election, but what I will tell you is that there is still a great concern that in certain pockets of the country, that there’s not strict enforcement of the laws,” U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Tuesday.

He praised the SAVE America Act, a bill mirroring the House-passed SAVE Act which requires Americans to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote, necessitates in-person voter registration for federal elections, and requires states to remove all noncitizens from their voter rolls.

Since the Senate still hasn’t taken up the SAVE Act after 300 days – despite Republican pressure to do so – House members will vote on the SAVE America Act on Wednesday. The bills are identical except that the latter would also require people to display a valid ID to vote in federal elections.

With valid ID necessary for everything from applying for a job to renting a hotel room, the legislation is “common sense,” Johnson argued.

“There’s only one logical reason that Democrats are opposed to this – they want the people to participate in elections who are not supposed to,” he added. “So the fact that they’re so vehemently opposing this is very telling about their agenda and their motivation.”

So why is the GOP-held Senate effectively opposed, too?

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Paramount Skydance Says It Will Pay Warner Bros. Discovery an Extra $650 Million per Quarter if Its WBD Takeover Isn’t Completed by End of 2026.

David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is adding some additional financial promises to its hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery as it continues to try to kill Netflix’s deal for WB.

Paramount on Tuesday said it will add an “incremental cash consideration” to WBD shareholders of 25 cents per share, equivalent to approximately $650 million cash value each quarter, for every quarter the proposed Paramount acquisition is not closed beyond Dec. 31, 2026.

That extra “ticking fee” reflects the confidence of Ellison and his team that a Paramount-WBD deal will have a smoother path to regulatory approval than Netflix’s merger with Warner Bros. Paramount (and others) have alleged that Netflix, if it owns HBO Max, would have a virtual monopoly on subscription streaming in multiple markets; Netflix has dismissed this, claiming that even with HBO Max its share of U.S. TV viewing would be 10%, still behind YouTube.

In addition, as part of Paramount’s sweetened deal terms for Warner Bros. Discovery, the company said it would pay the $2.8 billion breakup fee due to Netflix with the termination of the Netflix agreement if WBD shareholders accept Paramount’s $30-per-share offer for Warner Bros. Discovery in its entirety.

I’d much rather see Warner Bros. in Ellison’s hands than the wokesters’ at Netflix, but either way, it’s likely the end of Warner as it’s been known for more than a century.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

RIP, JOHN EKDAHL:

Flashbacks: Ekdahl tweeted in 2019, “The left, and I’m not trying to be funny or snarky, takes gun ignorance as a source of pride. They absolutely refuse to learn or educate themselves on what they seek to deny their fellow citizens.”

Ekdahl on Bud Light’s implosion in 2023, “The biggest problem isn’t even the boycott; it’s that they’ve become a cultural punchline. This is now like having an AOL email address or driving a minivan. People avoid it so their buddies don’t rip them. Not sure how you fix that as a brand.”

Ekdahl in October of 2024: “My theory on the great liberal McDonalds freakout is this: Donald Trump is not allowed to have fun. Remember, he is the physical avatar of humanity’s cruelty, evil, and malice. The left has also spent a large amount of time, money, and energy though both media and legal campaigns, targeting his livelihood and even his personal freedom all to ensure that the man can never crack a smile again for the rest of his life. And then he did. While donning an apron and serving fries. They can’t handle it.”

And speaking of the DNC-MSM not being able to handle people having fun, from 2017: Watch A Bunch Of Journalists Freak Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck. “Which brings us to the simple question about truck ownership from John Ekdahl that drove Acela corridor progressive political journalists into a frenzy on Tuesday night: ‘The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?’ Rather than answer with a simple ‘no,’ the esteemed members of the most cloistered and provincial class in America–political journalists who live in New York City or Washington, D.C.–reacted by doing their best impersonation of a vampire who had just been dragged into the sunshine and presented with a garlic-adorned crucifix.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

DOMINIC GREEN: Say His Name: Rupert Pupkin.

Scorsese’s prince is a pert pup, a quipster on the up and up, but he’s also a triple-plosive time bomb like Travis Bickle (or Jake LaMotta, another human detonator in another Scorsese–De Niro collaboration,1980’s Raging Bull). Scorsese habitually counterpoints the threat of violence with the discharge of humor. The Goodfellas tracking shot through the kitchens of the nightclub leads to a stage-side table and Henny Youngman in full “Take my wife” flow. In Casino, Don Rickles plays a Rickles-like Borscht Belter called Billy Sherbert. In Raging Bull, LaMotta watches real-life straight man Bernie Allen cracking jokes at the Copacabana. LaMotta himself ends up as a small-time comic. His routines resemble the black-and-white futilities of Dustin Hoffman’s reenactment of Lenny Bruce’s monologues in the biopic Lenny (1974).

Like Travis Bickle and Lenny Bruce, Rupert Pupkin is scorched by confusing his transgressive desires with social reality. Thwarted, he reacts by forcing himself onto the screen in the hope that he will impress a young woman and make his mark on the world; in Schopenhauer’s terms, he tries to impose his will on its representation in the world. Scorsese is a lifelong admirer of the dreamlike set pieces in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Archers productions, where, he has said, “the fantasy is more real than the reality.” In The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer’s shoes possess her and dance her to death. In The King of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin is possessed by fame. Our last sight is of the red suit that marks his departure from the real world and his entry into the inverted dreamland where the anonymous becomes famous and the loser becomes king.

Pauline Kael missed the point in her review for the New Yorker in 1983. She complained that De Niro inverted the “bravura” extravagance of his characterizations in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York to make the polite and frustrated Pupkin “a nothing.” Slapstick reminds us that the core of comedy is inversion—of power, of status, of reality. We think fame and money will free us, but Johnny Boy (Mean Streets) and Travis Bickle get shot in the neck. Jimmy Doyle (New York, New York) gets stood up. Jerry Langford eats his TV dinners alone with three TVs and a lap dog. Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, Scorsese has said, are the same “isolated person”: a “nothing” and a “nobody” who dreams big.

But this is not nothing. It is everything. America had always sifted the winners from the losers and called it justice. The modern status economy of images plays the results back in everyone’s face. And the postindustrial economy that took off in the 1980s replicated the fame economy that sorted Americans into a small population of stars and immortals and a mass of ticket-buying “nothings.” When Rupert Pupkin inverts dreams and reality, he performs the loyal American act of chasing his dreams, of getting what you want, at any cost, even if for one night only, like James Cagney at the “top of the world” in White Heat.

Naturally, The King of Comedy bombed at the box office. The critics eventually caught up—two plosive hard k sounds and two cheers for getting it right in the end. Rupert Pupkin’s triumph of delusion previews our culture of self-reflective entertainment, in which show business incites and rewards performative psychosis. Like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, The King of Comedy told the truth about America. But who goes to the movies for the truth?

Rupert Pupkin, that’s who. And all of us, too—pursuing enlightenment in the dark. When we perceive Pupkin perceiving himself under the TV studio lights, we see ourselves. Our laughter confirms German gagmeister Artie Schopenhauer’s analysis that humor erupts when we realize our ideals do not match our perception. As the FBI waits for him in the shadows, the Hamlet of humor tells the truth in his kiss-off to his first and last audience: “I figure it this way: Better to be a king for a day than a schmuck for a lifetime.”

You might as well laugh.

Jussie Smollett certainly did: The King of MAGA Country.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DON’T LEAVE JUST YET, NANCY: Mark Alexander at Patriot Post has a suitable retirement gift for the former Speaker of the House and with Joe Biden no longer controlling the Justice Department, Pelosi just might find herself opening an official envelope containing the gift.

Posted at 2:11 pm by Mark Tapscott

GOOD QUESTION: Commonly Owned: Why Do Media Outlets Understate the Number of AR-15s Americans Own?

If you ran a simple Google search of “how many Americans own AR-15s?”, the results would be woefully lacking. The Google AI tool gives an immediate answer of “approximately 16 million to 24.6 million” Americans who own an AR-15 or similarly styled semiautomatic rifle. Google’s high-end estimate is more than 20 percent off from the most current industry estimates.

The top articles referenced and provided as citation are all far out-of-date. The top article provided, from Georgetown University, is a republish of The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard writing about AR-15 popularity — from 2022 — also pegged at 24 million.

The second-highest-placed article — from Stephen Gutowski’s The Reload — is also from 2022 and puts MSR ownership at 24.4 million.

Next is a Washington Post article from 2023, suggesting there are only “20 million AR-15s in circulation.”

NBC News included the figure 24.4 million as well in 2020 in an article titled, “What makes the AR-15 so beloved and so reviled.”

All these publications could use a refresh on their research if they’re going to cover the popularity of the MSR and state legislation being proposed to ban their possession, use and sale.

Maybe the thinking is that it’s easier to get the majority to go along with persecuting an even tinier minority.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Knife Horror — Ex-pupil ‘sprayed classmate with substance before knifing two teens in school horror attack.’

A former pupil sprayed a 13-year-old classmate with a substance then stabbed two boys in a school horror attack, police said.

Cops arrested a boy, 13, on suspicion of two attempted murders after he fled the scene at Kingsbury High School in Brent, north west London.

Great moments in hard-hitting tabloid journalism: This London Sun article was written with very short one or two sentence paragraphs, but even so, it takes eight paragraphs before the word “mosque” is mentioned, and over 50 paragraphs before this detail: “Unconfirmed reports suggested the suspect yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ – God is great – as he launched the attack. However, sources stressed that youngsters carrying out such attacks often have a variety of potential motives.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY:

 

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

LIBERAL AMNESIA IS A SUPERPOWER:

We are all familiar with the liberal tap dance whenever we point out that some awful thing, such as chopping the genitals off of children, is happening.

It’s commonly described as a four-step process:

Step 1: It is not happening.

Step 2: Yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal

Step 3: It’s a good thing, actually,

Step 4: People freaking out about it are the real problem.

But actually, it is a five-step process, culminating with the claim that liberals never supported it in the first place. We are approaching that stage among center-left people regarding alphabet ideology, and we are well into step five in the COVID saga. I know many people now arguing that nobody wanted to keep kids out of school, nobody was forced to take the jab, and that nobody was censored for disagreeing with The Science™.

Never happened.

For some reason, I have run across several posts recently arguing that the “fat acceptance” movement was fringe, with nobody in the mainstream fronting for the idea that people could be “healthy at any size,” or that “fatphobia” was the real problem people suffering from obesity faced.

As Daniel Hannan wrote in 2014, “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact:”

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

Back in the early 2000s, a similar pivot could be seen on the left’s 180-degree turn on the removal of Saddam Hussain. (George Clooney starred in a 1999 movie excoriating Bush #41 for failing to oust Saddam from power):

After (P)resident Biden set a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head and after months of “No Kings” protests, the left once again pivoted on a dime over his ouster, including members of the (p)resident’s own administration: Kamala Harris Humiliates Herself Condemning Capture of Maduro.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll