COLORADO: Vacancy tax gimmick won’t make housing ‘affordable.’

Leave it to government to try to improve quality of life by proposing a law that would actually degrade it. Democrats don’t have a monopoly on this sort of legislation, but their philosophy of scarcity, especially artificial scarcity, makes them especially susceptible to its charms.

Rep. Brianna Titone (D-Arvada) and Rep. Elizabeth Velasco (D-New Castle) are seeking to extract money from out-of-town property owners to subsidize “affordable” housing with House Bill 26-1036. The bill would allow municipalities to tax residential properties that they define as vacant, based on the number of days of physical occupancy by their owners. Short-term rentals would be excluded.

The bill would also allow local governments to band together to form special taxing districts for this purpose, even if they were in different counties, as long as they had shared or contiguous boundaries.

How awful is this bill? Let us count the ways.

First, it’s an assault on property rights. Yes, according to the US Census, a couple of Colorado counties – Summit and Eagle – have a substantial number of vacant dwellings. But this isn’t the Soviet Union during Dr. Zhivago. You can’t simply tell people that their houses are nice, but they could be used for so many more people.

I dunno about that because you can’t tell a Colorado Democrat anything.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: FCC Chair to Newsom: Hey, Where’d the $450 Million Go?

360° Rotating Toenail Clippers. #CommissionEarned

K-12 IMPROVEMENT UPDATE: These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling.

Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the country in recovery from pandemic losses in reading, while Alabama ranks No. 1 in math recovery.

The state with the lowest chronic absenteeism in schools is Alabama, according to a tracker with data from 40 states.

Once an educational laughingstock, Mississippi now ranks ninth in the country in fourth-grade reading levels — and after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks No. 1, while Louisiana ranks No. 2, according to calculations by the Urban Institute. Using the same demographic adjustment, Mississippi also ranks No. 1 in America in both fourth-grade and eighth-grade math.

Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).

How is this possible when southern states are governed by racist Republicans, and Massachusetts is run by enlightened progressives?

MASSIVE RESISTANCE: U. Kentucky staff say DEI, ‘antiracism’ are still ‘important’ in undercover videos.

MAKE CONQUISTADORS GREAT AGAIN:

Spanish is not a language of resistance.

It's literally the language of your European colonizers who colonized you so hard you forgot what you were speaking before them.

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) February 10, 2026

Who am I kidding? Conquistadors were always great.

HOW ARE THOSE MATH SCORES COMING ALONG? Los Angeles Teachers’ Union Caught Implementing Anti-ICE ‘Resistance.’

AT AMAZON: Shop 3 hour delivery. #CommissionEarned

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Among the events scheduled for this month is a closed ‘live demo’ instructing students on the use of a chest-binding product known as ‘TransTape.’

JAPAN VS BRITAIN: A Japanese Lesson for Troubled Britain.

The contrast between America’s great island allies on opposite ends of the world couldn’t be more drastic.

Japan has just given its commonsense conservative prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, a two-thirds supermajority in the national legislature’s Lower House; her Liberal Democratic Party took the highest proportion of seats of any party since World War II.

It’s an enormous vote of confidence not only in Takaichi’s economic agenda but also for her willingness to get tough with China.

Beijing’s mouthpieces have called Takaichi an “evil witch,” with China’s consul general in Osaka threatening, “the dirty neck that sticks itself in must be cut off” in response to Takaichi’s indication Japan would aid Taiwan against an invasion.

Such incendiary language didn’t intimidate Takaichi — nor, it turns out, Japan’s voters.

Yet even as Japan was rallying to its courageous prime minister, China was inflicting humiliation on America’s closest European ally.

Read the whole thing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Find Someone Who Looks at You the Way Dems Look at Violent Criminals. “As we head towards the all-important midterm elections, the Democrats are putting all of their efforts into being the champions of murderers, rapists, and thieves who are in this country illegally. OK, that’s not fair — they are also doing what they can to help out violent criminals who are U.S. citizens.”

FOR THE CHILDREN™:

They’re intentionally housing these migrants close to schools. https://t.co/a1ILNv95Bb pic.twitter.com/a9LJdYed0T

— Amelia (@AmeliajakSolana) February 11, 2026

DON’T FAIRFAX THE REST OF VIRGINIA: A Virginia Commonwealth University professor warns the state’s Democrats that they are headed down a seriously wrong path on the redistricting issue. The X post is from the Fairfax GOP, but Professor Alex Keena is not a Republican activist.

When I lived in Northern Virginia during the Reagan/Bush 1 era, you often saw bumper stickers in surrounding counties warning “Don’t Fairfax _____ County.” Now the whole state is being Fairfaxed.

DID ANCIENT CHINESE ASTRONOMERS KNOW OF JESUS? Yes, that’s an unexpected question, but the answer is yes, they did indeed, though not by the same name known in the West, according to a Catholic research and advocacy group.

The evidence comes from close readings in the archives of the pre-polytheistic era dynasties of Chinese history when the Far Eastern giant followed a monotheistic religion very much analogous to what we today call Christianity. I’m cautiously fascinated. What do you think?

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: What if AIs set out to conquer the world . . . with love?

IT ISN’T JUST THE KIDS GETTING PARTICIPATION TROPHIES: I won ‘Teacher of the Year’ for enthusiasm, but kids weren’t learning.

Luke Morin won “teacher of the year” when he was a young, energetic, engaging — and ineffective — teacher, he writes on Holly Korbey’s BellRinger. He got flowers from the superintendent and his picture in the paper. But his sixth-grade English students weren’t learning very much.

Years later, after visiting effective schools and studying what make them work, he was “the highest-performing teacher in Colorado.” Nobody noticed.

In her “Learning from Greatness newsletter, Korbey asked why school leaders don’t investigate and emulate what’s working elsewhere. Why is there so little curiosity about success?

Maybe because there’s little interest in promoting it.

DON SURBER: Macron’s confrontation with Trump is a real life Bambi Versus Godzilla.

ACADEMIC ‘FREEDOM’ ON LEFT CAMPUS: Powerline’s John Hinderaker points to a special ed teacher in a California school who lost her job after expressing support for the deportation of illegal aliens. And asks the next logical questions:

“How did we get to this pass? And what is the path forward? Honestly, I think it is hard to see how those of us who support the rule of law can continue to share a country with those who do not–a group that now numbers close to half of our population. What possible basis for a common citizenship is there, between us and them? I don’t think there is one.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Vance vs. Rubio.

#JOURNALISM: Laid-off WaPo journos shocked to be locked out of employer’s accounts. The replies are brutal.

EXITING NIRVANA: Forensic Experts Say Kurt Cobain Was Murdered.

DATA SAYS GOING TO CHURCH KEY TO MARITAL BLISS: In fact, according to the joint analysis of the Institute for Family Studies and UVA and the Wheatley Institute at BYU, men are 3x as likely to be happily married if they regularly attend worship services with their wives and kids. So, if healthy families are the key building block for civilization …

SADLY, THIS IS PROBABLY CORRECT:

It's a simple answer:

The Iranian uprising is anti-islam in nature.

London is a fanatical islamic enclave.

Hope this helps. pic.twitter.com/oUqMGdQFFP

— 𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) February 10, 2026

They’ve had their fill of Islamic rule in Iran, but London is just really getting going.

BARACK OBAMA ASSURED ME THAT THESE THINGS DON’T HAPPEN IN OTHER COUNTRIES: B.C. community of Tumbler Ridge in mourning after mass shooting kills 9, including 6 inside school.

Another "trans" psychopath.https://t.co/2OzPF7GXQ8

— Aurora Blaze 2.0 (@MxPotHead) February 11, 2026

ICYMI: Hollywood Is Sick — but It’s L.A. That’s Dying.