February 17, 2026

WHAT A MESS: Trump says FEMA will play ‘key role’ in coordinating response to Potomac sewage spill.

The collapse of a sewer line in Montgomery County, Maryland, last month spilled more than 200 million gallons of wastewater into the river. DC Water recently completed a bypass to temporarily reroute wastewater back into the sewer system, although local officials say it could take another 10 months to repair the pipe.

In a Monday afternoon social media post, Trump accused Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — a Democrat — of “gross mismanagement,” calling the spill “a result of incompetent Local and State Management of Essential Waste Management Systems.” He also attacked Moore for his role overseeing the rebuilding of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which collapsed in March 2024.

“While State and Local Authorities have failed to request needed Emergency Help, I cannot allow incompetent Local ‘Leadership’ to turn the River in the Heart of Washington into a Disaster Zone,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding: “The Federal Government has no choice, but to step in.”

A spill this size would’ve been much bigger news in a red state.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: “One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter.”

The New Hotness?

Amazing how Bezos setting $100 million or so alight every year to keep the doors open at the Washington Post is considered “sitting on his wealth.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS:

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

AND NOT JUST IN THE STATE CAPITOL BUILDING: Colorado bill would fully legalize prostitution. “Senate Bill 26-097 would require the entire state to decriminalize ‘commercial sexual activity among consenting adults,’ both for people who buy sex and who would sell it. This would be unique in the U.S., as the only other states with any form of legal prostitution, Maine and Nevada, still have certain rules around it.”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

REV. JESSE JACKSON DEAD AT 84:

A protégé of Martin Luther King, lifelong champion of civil rights and a mesmerising public speaker, Jackson had himself run for president in 1984 and 1988 and gone far further than anyone at that time believed a black man could. He had shown that an African-American politician could win white votes and aspire to the presidency.

He had “won a solid place in history”, The New York Times declared. “For the first time in American history, a black made a serious bid for the White House and was taken seriously by the electorate.” A Washington Post columnist wrote that he had “advanced the prospects of black politicians by a good 25 years. He may never be president of the United States, but some black American will. And whoever it is will owe a tremendous debt to Jackson.”

Jackson said he wept in that Chicago park because he was thinking of “all the martyrs and murdered whose blood made that night possible”, and because he knew “people in the villages of Kenya and Haiti, and mansions and palaces of Europe and China, were all watching this young Africa-American male assume the leadership to take our nation out of the pit to a higher place”.

But he would have been inhuman not to have felt a little envious of his fellow Chicagoan that night. He must have reflected on what might have been. And if he was honest with himself he would have acknowledged that Obama — calm, measured and reassuring — was the better candidate.

Jackson’s strengths were also his weaknesses. He was driven, ambitious, a powerful orator and brilliant at garnering publicity, but he was also impulsive, attention-grabbing, and endlessly controversial. He met Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and the like and famously once referring to Jews as “hymies” and New York as “hymietown”. His relentless fight against injustice, poverty and discrimination carried him far, and did much to highlight the plight of black, poor and marginalised Americans, but he was too divisive to go all the way.

At PJ Media, Rick Moran asks: Race Hustler or Civil Rights Icon? Jesse Jackson Dead at 84.

He was a con artist and a “race pimp.” He was an opportunist, a race hustler, and a corporate shakedown expert who enriched himself by using funds earmarked for “the cause” for his own personal gain. He was an admirer of notorious racist and virulent antisemite Louis Farrakhan.

Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, was all of that. He was also one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, a groundbreaking political figure, one of the best political strategists in American history, and a towering figure in local Chicago Democratic politics.

You can’t look at Jesse Jackson as a one-dimensional stick figure. Like all humans, especially those who have left their mark on history, he was a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can’t simplify his sins or his enormous contributions to American politics. He was a force whose impact will be felt for generations.

There is no doubting Jesse Jackson’s impact on American history. He was the first “serious” black candidate for president in that he energized the base of the Democratic Party in a multi-racial coalition that forced the party to swing hard left. His grassroots coalition, known as “Operation Push,” was the most dynamic organization in the U.S. until a scandal brought it down.

He was given the opportunity to speak in prime time in the 1984 and 1988 conventions despite finishing far behind Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in the nomination race. Both speeches are considered among the finest convention speeches in American history.

At NRO, Dan McLaughlin adds: On the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Charity toward the departed suggests leaving off further discussion of Jackson’s public career here, but not without noting the man’s abundant gifts as a public speaker in his prime. As P. J. O’Rourke described Jackson’s convention speech in 1988: “I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram — to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.”

Presumably, O’Rourke was referring to an event from the previous year, when Jackson wanted everyone to be excluded from Western culture: “On January 15, 1987, Jesse Jackson and around 500 protesters marched down Palm Drive, Stanford University’s grand main entrance, chanting ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.’”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

LAUGHING WOLF ON THE END OF NON-PROLIFERATION AND POLISH NUKES: The Only Surprise Is…

I suspect Iran is not the only country working hard to become a member of the nuclear club. You don’t have to go through the Manhattan Project to get to be a member, and you don’t have to be as unsubtle as Iran in creating a viable nuclear weapons program.

The fact that Poland has stepped out in the open like this is interesting, and a bit amusing. If you go back and read this post and the linked posts, I got called some names for suggesting that Poland be made a nuclear power and be the northern anchor for a new, non-military, ‘nato’ (lower case deliberate) that can stand as a bulwark against anything from the East as well as against a Muslim/Islamist West. While I think there is still a chance to prevent an effective European Caliphate (England is starting to wake up, but…), I also still very much think we need a Christian bulwark in the East if Western Civilization is to survive.

I also think some open and honest conversations on what is likely to happen when nuclear non-proliferation efforts are fully dead.

Beijing seems uninterested in either arms control or reasserting non-proliferation, making both largely moot points.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

HMM: New anti-government chants reported across Iran after major rallies abroad.

While the street protests have petered out in the face of the brutal crackdown, last week, residents of Tehran and other cities began shouting slogans against the leadership from the relative safety of their own homes inside vast apartment blocks.

In a new night of chants, residents of the eastern Tehran district of Ekbatan on Sunday shouted “death to Khamenei,” “death to the Islamic Republic” and “long live the shah,” according to the Shahrak Ekbatan social media account, which monitors the area.

They need guns.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When Bigger Isn’t Better.

A few weeks ago there was a leak out of the Marvel camp that the opening sequence of the new “Avengers” movie promises to be the biggest action sequence of all time and that it will “blow people’s minds.” This is an entirely logical next step in the ongoing arms race that the studio blockbuster business has become, and I suppose we are all supposed to be duly excited by the prospect. But Hollywood would do well to remember that every arms race eventually metastasizes into self-parody.

* * * * * * * *

And though it occurs during a different sequence I want to point out one more fantastic stunt from “For Your Eyes Only” because it’s too good not to. Later in the film Bond and his Greek Ally Milos (Topol) raid a warehouse which is rigged to explode. At the end of the sequence (3:55), Bond’s stuntman emerges from the warehouse seconds before it blows up, the pressure wave knocking him flat and leaving us with the certainly that the poor bastard was hit by flying debris.

That’s real filmmaking, my friends, the kind you only get to try once… And it absolutely cannot be duplicated inside a computer.

“For Your Eyes Only” was released in 1981, the beginning of a decade full of movies that shot real action with real actors on, in and around real physical locations. Commando, Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra, Tango and Cash, 48 Hours, Top Gun, Predator, Rambo, Bloodsport, Terminator, Aliens, Above the Law, Lethal Weapon… we could name them by the dozens. What all these movies had in common was constrained budgets that did not allow for the kind of spectacle that can only be achieved through expensive special effects. The people who brought us the great action programmers of the 80’s operated more like Spielberg with his busted shark… they did the best they could with what they had available to them in the real world.

For Your Eyes Only is a perfect example of temporarily downsizing a franchise, a movie that worked surprisingly well as a contrast from the previous Bond outing, the bloated and campy Moonraker.  Wanting to compete with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Hollywood’s then-burgeoning sci-fi obsession, Cubby Broccoli had Bond in a spacesuit, armed with a laser, sending him up to a giant zero-gravity space station on one of a fleet of Space Shuttles (a few years before the real NASA Space Shuttle first went into orbit), in a particularly silly mess. In contrast, Leonard Marltin gave For Your Eyes Only three stars, and wrote in his long-running TV Movies and Video Guide:

After years of space-age gadgetry, cartoon villains, female mannequins, and giants with steel teeth came this one-shot return to the old days of Ian Fleming minimalism. No other James Bond film has provoked so much debate among 007 fans (even us); judge for yourself. The chases and stuntwork are spectacular; debuting helmer Glen directed 2nd-unit on some earlier Bonds.

Will Hollywood get the message? Alas, probably not, now that it has the opportunity to incorporate cheap AI-driven special effects with paid screenwriters and the most expensive actors on the planet:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

ENDORSED: Nancy Mace proposes bill to make aliens deportable, inadmissible for animal cruelty.

The measure is called the “Illegal Alien Animal Abuser Removal Act of 2026.”

“If you come here illegally, you’re already a criminal. Add animal cruelty to the list and you’re on the next flight back to where you came from,” Mace said, according to a press release.

“We have a duty to protect the voiceless from torture and abuse. Animal cruelty is a proven red flag for violence against people. These criminals escalate. Our bill makes it crystal clear: commit these sick acts and you’re deported. Immediately. No second chances,” she added.

Previously: “John Wick is the moderate position on this issue.“

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: GOP Will Hit the Lottery if AOC Is Dems’ 2028 Nominee. “Gavin Newsom has essentially been running for president for a year already, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been uncharacteristically coy thus far. Or maybe we’ve just been distracted because Jasmine Crockett didn’t shut up once during the first 10 1/2 months of 2025. AOC finally stepping out and dipping her pedicured toes in the test waters, and it’s not going well.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green