February 6, 2026

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

LATEST LEFTIST MONOMANIA ACHIEVED:

Tweet continues:

No matter how many times the Democratic Party goes back to its same old dirty tricks, they can always count on the same gullible, impressionable, low-info fools to keep falling for it.

QED: Team GB skier urinates ‘F— ICE’ in snow at Winter Olympics.

A Team GB athlete has launched a stinging attack on the ICE agency ahead of the opening ceremony at the Winter Games, urinating the words “F— ICE” into the snow.

Gus Kenworthy, a British-American model and actor, who has come out of retirement to appear for Team GB in freestyle skiing, posted the message on his Instagram account on Wednesday before confirming his methodology with a follow-up message. “My last post was pee so it only felt appropriate to follow it up with a lil’ dump… of photos from January. Yes, I’m a child,” he told his 1.2 million followers.

Well, yes. So why should anyone follow your advice on ignoring illegal immigration in either nation?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

UGH: Houston doctor indicted on charges he falsified records to block patients’ liver transplants. “Bynon is accused of making false statements in his role as director of abdominal organ transplantation and surgical director for liver transplantation at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston. Of the five patients detailed in an indictment made public on Thursday, three died and two others were able to get liver transplants at different hospitals.”

Nothing as to why he would have done that.

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT:

Posted at 12:53 pm by Stephen Green

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: It Was Inevitable: Virginia Bill to Ban and Confiscate ‘High Capacity’ Magazines Advances.

On January 27, the Senate Courts of Justice Committee advanced a substitute version of SB749, banning commonly-owned firearms and their magazines. This substitute version defines a “large capacity ammunition feeding device” to include standard capacity magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The bill then provides,

B. Any person who imports, sells, barters, transfers, purchases, or possesses a large capacity ammunition feeding device is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

The legislation doesn’t grandfather magazines possessed prior to the ban. The legislation is magazine confiscation, as current owners would be forced to dispossess themselves of their lawfully acquired property or face a Class 1 misdemeanor. A Class 1 misdemeanor is punishable by up to a year in prison and up to a $2,500 fine.

I’d add a “gooder and harder,” but by and large, the people who voted for this are not the ones who will suffer under it.

But that’s just how Dems wield power.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

CHARLES COOKE: Why the Outrage Over the Cuts at the Washington Post Is So Annoying.

I have been trying to put my finger on exactly why I have found the outrage over the cuts at the Washington Post so annoying, and in searching for that answer, I have instead found a whole fist. So here goes: The outrage over the cuts at the Washington Post is annoying because the gap between the self-regard of those who were fired and the contributions of those who were fired is so enormous as to beggar belief. On days such as yesterday, Twitter is filled to the brim with “I was just laid off” posts, as though one had stumbled upon a battlefield strewn with the wounded — except, unlike on a battlefield, the wounded are all talking to one another in cloying, self-congratulatory tones. The result is a veritable web of grotesque and sycophantic encomia that does not stand up to even the slightest evaluation.

Don’t believe me? Click through on one of those posts, scroll past the pinned advertisement for the newspaper’s union, and look up the user’s name in the Post’s archive. If you do, you’ll typically learn that the person who is being praised as a “brilliant” and “talented” journalist who did “great work” has a job description like “sits at the intersection of civil rights and cooking,” that they wrote four things in the last two months, and that two of them were about how alligators are racist.

To get a sense of why the Post failed with its intended audience of leftists, that reference flew right past the head of the “New York-based journalist covering media for Semafor:” 

Miller’s tweet continues, “Now do you see you and the media’s problem?”

But then, as T. Becket Adams wrote last November: When crazy is too crazy even for the base.

It’s one thing for Democrats to live in a bubble where they don’t know or understand what Republicans believe. But how can they not know what’s happening in their own backyard? How have they insulated themselves so well that their first reaction to learning about what Democratic politicians are doing is to assume it’s some kind of Republican dirty trick?

This phenomenon goes far beyond too-online comedians and sloppy journalists. In fact, GOP pollsters say the disconnect between what Democratic legislators support and what Democratic voters know of their own party has made it much more difficult to collect accurate survey data.

“When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” a Republican source told Park MacDougald for Tablet magazine in 2024, before the election. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”

But it is.

But reality catches up eventually. Or as Scott McKay writes at the American Spectator: You Can’t Go on Destroying Wealth Forever, You Know. Ultimately, There Are Consequences.

Here’s hoping the Post employees can find gainful employment. But along the way, let’s also hope they learn a lesson from the decline of their former employer — which is that serving an ideology, rather than the public good or the needs of the market, ultimately isn’t a sustainable pursuit.

As for Billie Eilish, one surmises she’ll be fine — whether the tribesmen of the Tongva repossess her house or not. Thought we do wish the best of luck to her in expanding her audience beyond mentally deranged Gen Z females. She’ll need it.

By the way, the excesses of the Clinton-obsessed American Spectator of the 1990s and its spectacular crash and burn after he left office were a warning the Washington Post should have headed when it went full-bore TDS a decade ago: The Life and Death ofThe American Spectator.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

INCENTIVES MATTER: How Trump’s MAHA movement unexpectedly took a bite out of food price inflation.

Any diet conversation in the Trump administration held over the last year inevitably included a conversation about removing processed and sugary foods from federal welfare programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).

Since then, the USDA has approved state-level waivers allowing individual states to restrict or ban SNAP purchases of specific “junk food” items—primarily soda, candy, energy drinks, sugary snacks, and certain prepared desserts—starting in batches throughout 2025 and taking effect mostly on January 1 of this year, or shortly thereafter.

Thus far, 18 states (including Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Louisiana, West Virginia, Colorado, and others) have implemented these targeted restrictions, aiming to curb chronic disease by shifting subsidies away from ultra-processed items toward healthier foods, though broader processed foods remain eligible in states without waivers.

Well, good.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

ROBERT SPENCER: In Virginia, You Must Love Islam — Or Else. “In one sense, Saddam Azlan Salim is a classic immigrant success story. Born in Bangladesh, he grew up in northern Virginia and quickly demonstrated an aptitude for the political rough-and-tumble of his adoptive land. Now he is 36 years old, a Virginia state senator, and a rising star in that state’s now-dominant Democrat Party establishment. In another sense, however, Saddam Azlan Salim clearly retains at least some of the sensibilities of the land of his birth, and he wants to bring them to his new land: He has just introduced a bill to criminalize ‘Islamophobia’ in Virginia.”

Posted at 10:11 am by Stephen Green