May 14, 2026

AT REALCLEARBOOKS, a powerful review of Roger Simon’s new novel, Emet. “Although the tale starts in Nashville, it soon shifts to Cyprus and then Israel, and it has plenty of action with scenes of danger and suspense. The settings are ones Simon is familiar with, and he describes them with great specificity. This assists in making a boldly imaginative story more believable.”

I read it and liked it. The book — with my blurb — is here.

Posted at 9:55 am by Glenn Reynolds

THEY’RE STILL ADDICTED: To earmarks, that is, the Gateway Drug to Federal Spending Addiction, as Dr. No, aka Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), famously said years ago as he exposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) unveils the 2026 edition of its Pigbook, documenting the thousands of earmarks Democrats and Republicans pigged out on in the current federal budget.

Posted at 9:48 am by Mark Tapscott

CDR SALAMANDER: Carriers: Not Dead Yet, and Unquestionably not Unloved.

Ethan Gossrow over at Naval News did a detailed look at the carrier portion of the 30-year shipbuilding plan that gives some texture for those who, like myself, are concerned about the slow approach to bringing new carriers online.

Even though today is no different from any other day over the last half decade, there are those who will continue to try to explain why the USN’s CVNs are “obsolete” and not worth the investment. However, reality continues to get in their way, as he quotes from the Plan:

“Underpinning Expanded Maritime Maneuver (EMM) the CVN serves as a persistent, survivable, mobile sea base that enables the Navy to dominate contested environments and deliver decisive effects at ranges that outpace adversary anti- access/area-denial (A2/AD) envelopes without the need for Access, Basing, and Overflight.”

There is no other way to project national will anywhere on the planet like a CVN. There just isn’t.

Even though we are an 11-carrier navy in a 15-carrier world…we’re not growing.

Read the whole thing. I’d just add that if I had a dime for every time the carrier had been pronounced obsolete, I could almost buy one.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

THIS IS MY STATE ON DEMOCRATS:

Exit quote: “HB26-1430 is basically lawmakers looking voters dead in the eyes and saying: ‘Aw that’s cute. You thought ballot initiatives still controlled government.'”

Not one more word about “democracy,” Democrats. Not one more word.

Posted at 9:23 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I’m California Dreaming About Karen Bass Losing Her Job. “The wild card in the Los Angeles mayoral race is the unmitigated awfulness of Karen Bass. It’s nigh on impossible to put lipstick on the pig that is her legacy as mayor. Pratt has the money to keep attacking Bass for the duration. He may very well be able to inspire a flood of independent voters to propel him to victory. He’s so good at staying on message that some Democrats could shed their blinders. His potential path to a win is loaded with ifs, but the fact that he’s in the conversation at all is miraculous.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

THE MANAGERIAL GOVERNING CLASS’S WORST NIGHTMARE IS FOR THE VOTERS TO GET WHAT THEY WANT: Why the European Right Keeps Rising.

What is rising across Europe, in Germany, in Austria, in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, is not a single party but a recognition by an every growing number of citizens: That elections, in the form they have taken since the 1990s, have stopped producing the changes voters keep asking for. The British political scientist Colin Crouch described this condition twenty years ago in a book called Post-Democracy. Although the formal rituals continue – people going to the polls, watching the debates, not studying the party manifestos – all the substantive decisions most people see as existential priorities like migration and energy, are made elsewhere: At the European level, in supranational bodies, in NGO networks supported by public money, and in administrative organs accountable to nobody the voter can remove. The state, whose representatives often speak about “saving democracy” these days, actually likes this pattern.

Something similar obtains here, and our managerial class is brutally resisting the loss of its unaccountable power, and has been for a decade.

Posted at 9:06 am by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, GOOD: Overdose deaths fall for 3rd straight year amid a changing drug supply and funding cuts.

About 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year — about 14% fewer than the previous year, according to preliminary government data.

It was the third straight annual drop, making it the longest decline in decades, according to federal data released Wednesday. The 2025 total is about the same as the tally in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Declines were seen across a number of drug types, including fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine.

Overdose deaths fell in the vast majority of states, although seven saw at least slight increases, including jumps of 10% or more in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, the preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that this represents really a fundamental change in the arc of the overdose crisis,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends.

It might be, like the crack epidemic of the ’80s and early ’90s, fentanyl is beginning to run out of victims.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

THE REAL LEWIS & CLARK: School children used to learn about the incredibly courageous expedition undertaken beginning in 1804 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the vast lands acquired by President Thomas Jefferson with the Louisiana Purchase. Today, if they hear about it at all, it’s likely in the false context of the White Man stealing the frontier from the “Indigenous Peoples.”

In fact, as Rod Martin lays it out this morning, the Lewis & Clark Expedition was a crucial event in the establishment of the young American republic as a continental power. Without it, the North American continent likely would today look like Europe, an assemblage of disparate, feuding dominions. Lewis & Clark expanded America and not just geographically.

“Together they left behind an incalculable contribution to science, to exploration, and to the advance of the American Republic. Their expedition was not merely an adventure but an assertion: that America would not be a coastal power clinging to the ocean’s edge, but a continental one, willing to push into the unknown, to master it, and to make it a civilization and a home,” is how Martin puts it. This one ought to be essential reading for every American, beginning in elementary school.

Posted at 8:34 am by Mark Tapscott

ANOTHER TARGET OF TRUMP’S ANACONDA STRATEGY:

If you wonder why the Pope is attacking Trump, this is why.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

EUROPE WILL NEVER FORGIVE THE JEWS FOR THE HOLOCAUST:

Exit quote: “By finding a way to stain the Jews and Israel with those same moral evils they themselves feel the weight of, but for imaginary instead of genuine reasons, Europeans can not only remove but reverse the mark of the evil they inflicted on Jews over their entire history, not remotely least during the Holocaust.”

Earlier: Brendan O’Neill on Holocaust Envy.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THAT’S A TELL:

Posted at 8:21 am by Stephen Green

WALTER DURANTY SMILES:

To be fair though, if it wasn’t the dogs, Israel apparently has a whole menagerie of expertly-trained beasts waging war in the Middle East…:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

YES: House Judiciary Chairman urges DOJ to permanently dismiss all Trump cases after bombshell report.

“It’s probably time that this all just ended,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Wednesday night after Just the News reported new documents it obtained revealed the FBI at the end of the Biden presidency secretly took the rare step of preserving evidence from a dismissed January 6 prosecution until 2030, raising alarm the bureau could revive its prosecution after Trump leaves office.

The agents in the controversial Arctic Frost case also wrote a new memo insisting they believed Trump violated laws, creating a fresh roadmap for prosecution after Trump’s presidential immunity from prosecution ends in 2029.

Jordan, who played a crucial role in debunking Russia collusion allegations against Trump and chronicling FBI abuses in the targeting of conservative figures since 2016, reacted to the report by saying Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should declare “this thing is done, over with. A-B see you later.”

He said DOJ asking the courts to discard all prior prosecutions with prejudice — meaning they couldn’t be re-filed — was “the right approach.”

More at the link.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

OWN GOAL:

Tweet concludes, “You decide to intentionally fumble the football on the goal line because you are afraid of negative PR from people who already hate you It’s outrageous that Republicans in South Carolina and Louisiana intentionally want our own side to lose because they think winning is a violation of principle. We don’t have time for this bullsh*t any longer.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

FROM MARY CATELLI:  Enchantments And Dragons.

#CommissionEarned

A wizard must produce justice enough to satisfy a dragon.

A young man tries to rob a tiger’s lair.

An enchantress tries to keep a court safe while they ignore the perils of misusing her magic.

A lady finds that court intrigues can spread even to the countryside.

And more tales.

Includes “Over the Sea To Me,” “Dragonfire and Time”, “The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn”, “The White Menagerie”, “The Dragon’s Cottage,” “Jewel of the Tiger,” and “The Sword Breaks.”

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

JEEZ:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds