YES: It’s High Time We Restore Martha Stewart’s Gun Rights. “It makes little sense to deny Martha Stewart, who has the financial means to employ armed private security for her safety, the right to personally possess a firearm,” the Grassroots NC brief says. “Even more questionable is why Donald Trump cannot possess a gun when he currently commands the most powerful military in the world.”
August 5, 2026
THIS:
Now that the Democrat Party has been officially commandeered by Communists, the “America First” folks who claim they’ll stay home in November are in a real pickle. Because no one claiming to be America First would willingly turn over their county to the cretins in the DSA.
As…
— The Drunk Republican (@DrunkRepub) August 5, 2026
“There’s always a choice!” the wise man once said. “This one is a choice between ‘bad’ and ‘worse’ — which is a difference much more poignant than that between ‘good’ and ‘better.'”
JOEL KOTKIN: The Democrats are a menace to America’s Jews. “Many are headed to the South which, once seen as inhospitable, is emerging as the new place of refuge for Jews. Today, the key Jewish growth states, notes one study, include South Carolina, West Virginia and Florida, while those declining are New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Connecticut and California.”
Flashback: In red America, standing up for Israel isn’t controversial.
ONE OF TRUMP’S BEST PICKS: NASA’s Jared Isaacman Wants America Back on the Moon — and Beyond.
HAS ABDUL EL-SAYED JUST SAVED TRUMP?
Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan last night, he told me that he was going to “beat the shit” out of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the November general election. His tactic, he explained in a Detroit farmers’ market yesterday, would be to “staple his [Rogers’s] sins to his forehead.” What those sins were, El-Sayed wouldn’t say. He has in the past criticized Rogers as a “corporate shill” who prioritized pharmaceutical and corporate interests over Michiganders while in Congress.
In truth, although he did scrape to victory last night, it was El-Sayed who almost had the shit beaten out of him by Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat. Going into the contest, polls gave El-Sayed a 20-point lead. NBC have declared him the winner, but the vote is close. Ballots are still being counted and, at the time of writing, Associated Press has him on 48.6 percent versus Stevens’s 47.3. Stevens, it seems, couldn’t quite “stick it to ’em” as she vowed to do in a viral video.
El-Sayed inspired such little enthusiasm for his progressive agenda that it seems unlikely he can beat Rogers in November. Confidence is also falling in the much-predicted midterm “blue wave.” With so many Democratic candidates standing on a Democratic Socialists of America platform, the fear is that voters will view the party as too radical and it will miss the golden opportunity of slumping Republican poll numbers.
Don’t get cocky.
THE RED-BLUE PLANET: ‘Significant areas of Mars may have once been covered by water’: Scientists find hidden clue in Spirit rover data.
Researchers reanalyzed measurements collected by Spirit between 2004 and 2010, revealing widespread traces of crystalline hematite and altered magnetite in ordinary Martian soil — iron-bearing minerals that point to ancient chemical changes consistent with interactions between water and rock. The findings suggest liquid water may have been more widespread across Mars than scientists previously thought, according to a statement from Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia.
The team combined hundreds of individual measurements from 32 undisturbed soil sites inside Gusev Crater, where Spirit landed in January 2004, creating the most detailed iron-mineral profile yet assembled for typical Martian soil, according to the statement.
“One of the most important discoveries was finding crystalline hematite in ordinary Martian soil,” Paulo de Souza, lead author of the study and an ECU professor, said in the statement. “This mineral’s widespread presence suggests not only that water was present, but that significant areas of Mars may have once been covered by water.”
How much of it remains as ice is the big question.
THEN THEY’LL PACK THE COURT TO GET IT:
If the California billionaire wealth tax passes, it will be a nationwide policy for 2028.
Every Democrat on the primary stage will raise their hand to support it federally. Tech guys think they can just run to Texas now after funding the far-left for years. https://t.co/rNfLxkmdB4
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) August 3, 2026
Among other things.
KRUISER: Of Commies, Purple States, and the Elusive Undecided Voter. “All of the above means that the Democrats should be looking at bright skies and clear sailing to victory in November, especially in the House. That’s what those wacky historical trends tell us, anyway. Oddly, the hive mind party has chosen this year to have a full-on family feud. The fight is between the young commies who proudly let their hammer and sickle freak flags fly, and the Dem elders who agree with all of the commie stuff, but would prefer to be more coy about it so that they can dupe undecided voters.”
KEEP YOUR TEETH CLEAN: Plaque Remover for Teeth. #CommissionEarned
YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO GO EASY ON COMMIES…:
This actually takes it too easy on the fucking commie.
We need to make these people radioactive. https://t.co/VEa9wjjRad
— RBe (@RBPundit) August 5, 2026
…because they’ll never go easy on you.
IMPRESSIVE: Caterpillar lifts 2026 sales growth target on strong data center demand after quarterly profit beat. “Caterpillar’s results are often seen as a bellwether for the industrial economy. Its quarterly earnings beat and raised forecast signal that the AI-led demand boom for ancillary equipment is sustainable.”
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Faculty Tenure Decisions Disadvantage White Males.
DECLINE IS A CHOICE:
Our ancestors fought some of the most fearsome enemies in the war against entropy. Worthy of mighty song and story.
We get communist jihadi welfare tourists with weaponized EBT cards and TikTok.
Unlucky.
— InfantryDort (@infantrydort) August 5, 2026
And a mindset, too.
THIS WILL END WELL:
We can now be quite certain that, yes, in fact, the DSA move within the Democratic Party is a power consolidation move modeled after the Bolshevik takeover of the Social Democrat Party and expulsion of the Mensheviks. Not the revolution itself but its immediate political… https://t.co/pnbwo50uow
— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) August 4, 2026
BECAUSE OF COURSE: Bill Gates Was Embedded in U.S. Agencies During COVID Era.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: His Side: Men Speak Out on Dating, Marriage, and Life in America. #CommissionEarned
THE SUPREME COURT IS SUPPOSED TO CHECK POWER, NOT JOIN THE TEAM: Sarah Isgur and Melissa Murray debate executive overreach, birthright citizenship, originalism, gun rights, and whether the justices defended the constitutional order or expanded their own authority.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Russia Wants to Quadruple Military Space Rocket Production. It’s Counting on Chinese Machinery.
Russia’s plans to sharply expand production of the Angara launch vehicle depend on large-scale imports of advanced industrial machinery, internal documents from Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, Russia’s leading manufacturer of space launch vehicles, show. A significant share of that equipment is supplied by Chinese manufacturers that also operate in the US and European markets, while the true origins of some brands may be deliberately obscured.
Russia is investing tens of billions of roubles to sharply expand production of the Angara family of launch vehicles, which are used exclusively for missions commissioned by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Its existing manufacturing base is incapable of supporting that expansion, prompting the construction of a new production complex in Omsk equipped with hundreds of new machines.
Internal documents show that a significant part of the project’s technological core will rely on Chinese-made machine tools.
I’m so old, I remember when Russia had a leading space program — and China had hardly any at all.
RESIST:
Montezuma County Sheriff Steven Nowlin said he won't enforce the state's new gun eligibility card law — citing his oath to the Constitution and zero funding from the state to actually carry it out.https://t.co/xhLrzFxMvC
— Rocky Mountain Voice (@TheRMVoice) August 4, 2026
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Soy Boy Talarico’s Macho Cosplay Might Be Working. “This is a frustrating one for the GOP. Talarico keeps reinventing himself seemingly by the hour. After months of having his masculinity called into question, Talarico’s campaign people have had him on a ‘butch it up’ photo-op jag of late. They’ve got video of him driving a truck. They’ve got pictures of Talarico chowing down on meat like a man going to the electric chair. That was after he told voters that we shouldn’t do that because it’s killing poor Mother Earth.”
Yes, but…:
Democrats will not recover from this. pic.twitter.com/FhfHpd1dKx
— Bo French (@bofrench) August 4, 2026
SURELY.
This will help him in the general election. Surely. https://t.co/n7g7eoTPev
— Amy Curtis (@RantyAmyCurtis) August 5, 2026
ABOUT THOSE PAYMENTS TO DEAD PEOPLE: Readers may recall my news story in The Washington Stand last week on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent going forward with a requirement that all payments submitted to his department for issuance be pre-screened for deceased recipients. I noted that such computer database matching is not new and in fact one of President Ronald Reagan’s “junkyard dogs” started it in 1981.
That story also posed the question of why has it taken nearly five decades for the federal government to do what common sense requires, that being stop sending tax-funded checks to deceased recipients? Well, here’s the heart of the answer today on The Washington Stand.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: California scrubs political conflicts of interest from its donation portal.
California’s ethics agency oversees an unlimited, blank-check system of payments solicited by elected officials — including the $347 million Gov. Gavin Newsom has steered through California politics. An investigation by The Center Square has found the state’s “transparency” portal shows the money, but it omits the conflicts of interest.
Voters using the database have no way to search whether donors had business before the government at the time of their donations, even though that information is collected by the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).
The omission matters because California caps campaign checks. It does not cap “behested payments.” State law allows elected officials to solicit unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, tribes, foundations and other special interest groups — so long as the money goes to a third party instead of a campaign account.
That means a donor who would otherwise be limited to $39,200 per election for a governor’s campaign can give millions more to a nonprofit, public project, or outside cause if the money is solicited by that same official and reported as a behested payment.
“It’s another way of trying to influence government,” explained Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor and campaign finance expert.
You don’t say.
Exit quote: “California’s FPPC was born from a demand for transparency. Voters created the agency in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal to shine light on political money and government ethics.”
Light’s off.
