Prison Warden (retired); reduce government by 67%, federalism, 1A, 2A, dogs & outdoors
Tennessee, USA
Joined January 2018
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It seems to me that all Conservatives & Libertarians can agree with the following basic Conservative principles:
Pro Life
Unfettered 1st & 2nd Amendments
Small government less wasteful
Strong Law Enforcement and fair Criminal Justice
Strong military
Strong borders 1/3
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
Not selling hopium here. But the truth bolt about polling from the Washington Post should give every analyst pause. There isn’t great data, but there is history.
The possibility of a 2006 “thumpin’” —W’s term for the beat down of the GOP that year— is a clear and present danger for Republicans.
But there are some significant differences between this year and 2006 when the GOP lost a net 5 Senate seats and 31 House seats.
GDP in Q3 of 2006 was reported at 1.6% in October of that year. (It was revised up to 2% later.) It is more than twice that this year, clocking in at a very healthy 3.4%.
Inflation in 2006 was at 2.1% and it’s at 3.7% now. Gas was $2.25 a gallon then and $4.20 today. (National average in both cases.)
In October 2006, the average U.S. interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was approximately 6.36%. It’s 7.25% today.
The rational voter knows the gas hike is b/c President Trump is finally taking on our enemy of 47 years, that Iran is responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 Americans since the Islamic revolution of 1979, and is the greatest state sponsor of terror on the planet. If that regime can be cowed or collapsed, it will be President Trump’s greatest accomplishment.
The biggest difference from 20 years ago? The U.S. had been at war for five years in Iraq and Afghanistan. October, 2006 saw more than 100 U.S. military killed in Iraq and 10 in Afghanistan. Contemporary reporting described it as one of the deadliest months of the war.
The U.S. and its warriors and its military families were paying a very high price in 2006 and it did not seem that we were winning. We are winning in the present conflict in Iran. Only partisans of the left deny the blockade is bringing Iran to its knees. 23 service members have paid the ultimate price since February. The cancer in the region for 47 years is being ripped out and the cost is high.
Those are the statistical comparisons for two Republican presidents in their sixth year in office though of course President Trump’s terms are non-consecutive. And while President Bush’s second term got off to a terrible start with the controversy over Terri Schiavo, Hurricane Katrina and the failed effort to reform Social Security, President Trump’s first 22 months back saw the wide open border shuttered, a massive tax hike averted, additional tax cuts made for tips and overtime and long overdue hikes in defense spending. Crime is down as Feds crack down and the war on police is over. DEI is DOA and Dems continue to pursue the transgender craziness in sports for kids.
Democratic Senate winners in 2006 included James Webb (USMC war hero), a young Sherrod Brown in a still blue Ohio and John Tester who was authentically Montana.
This year they are running DSA’s Troy Jackson in Maine, extremist Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and cheater Mary Talarico in Alaska. Not sure what to call James Talarico but he’s a very different candidate than, say, Bob Casey Jr. who beat Rick Santorum in PA in 2006. (Sherrod Brown is 20 years older and trying a comeback looking like Joe Biden in 2022.)
The world is completely different and the public polls are not trustworthy as no one you or I know takes calls from numbers they don’t know and they all are very wary of texts because…well, who wants to be hacked?
On the spending front: Dems and GOP each spent about $130 million in 2006. The numbers are not in yet for this cycle but the estimates are that approximately $4 billion will be spent and that the GOP has a significant advantage.
President Bush made 16 campaign appearances in October, 2006. President Trump will top 30 by COB tomorrow.
GOPers should prep for another 2006 but won’t be surprised if it’s not that bad. Senators Collins, Husted, Marshall and Sullivan have run great races. Challengers Mike Rogers in MI and Michele Tafoya in MN are five star candidates running against 0 star Ds.
Redistricting is the last wrinkle. Late night ahead.
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
After warning about fascism, the Left proposes seizing private corporations
notthebee.com/takes/after-wa…
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
NEW: Yesterday, @CalMatters published a sympathetic profile on a “Fresno father” who was “suddenly” deported by ICE to MX. He told the outlet he’s not a criminal & doesn’t know why he was targeted.
However, I’m told by federal sources that he has been deported from the U.S. five times before, he has an active deportation order, he has pending felony aggravated assault charges from November 2025, he has decades old convictions for DUI w/ bodily injury & negligent discharge of a firearm that resulted in prison sentences, and he admitted in a consensual interview w/ ICE that he’s been a member of the Fresno Bulldogs street gang.
I’m told his real name is LUIS ALBERTO ARREGUIN-VILLA, and he was previously deported from the US in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2003, and 2005, and that he admitted in an interview that he last crossed illegally into the U.S. in 2005 near San Ysidro, CA.
Under federal law, illegal re-entry after deportation is a felony via 8 USC 1326. He has illegally re-entered at least five times.
None of this context appears in the Cal Matters report.
calmatters.org/justice/2026/…
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
RIP Patrick Stewart. What an actor. I still can’t believe he agreed to do this scene. And he didn’t even mind when I ruined every take. Legend.
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
PHILADELPHIA — What stuck with Sen. Dave McCormick was the binders.
On the campaign trail, the Pittsburgh Republican kept asking small-business owners the same question: What’s standing in the way of your growth? If you have 10 employees, what would it take to get to 20?
At a cosmetology school in Lancaster, the owner answered by reaching under her desk. She pulled out a binder, then another, then another. There were eight or 10 in all, every one of them filled with the regulations and compliance work she had to keep up with to run a school that teaches people how to cut hair.
“She said, ‘This is one of the biggest problems I have, and it’s getting worse,'” McCormick said. “So I was like, ‘What can we do?'”
His answer was the Pennsylvania Red Tape Dialogues, held at Temple University on Oct. 15. For a full day, about 100 business leaders, most of them CEOs and many from small firms, sat in the same room as the federal, state, and local officials who write and enforce the rules they live under.
The problem isn’t limited to one level of government, @SenMcCormickPA said. “It’s not just a federal problem, it’s the state problem and the local problem.”
washingtonexaminer.com/opini…
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
.@a_chrisbray's story on the criminal case against the SPLC is amazing. thefederalist.com/2026/10/30…
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
Generals? What Generals?
The bar for becoming a general officer is in the fucking basement. You can see a trend in my posts as of late. I've gone full bluntness on this topic since nothing else seems to work.
We spent twenty years losing wars while rewarding the people who learned how to survive the system that was losing them. Strategic failure became “complexity.” No victory became “persistent engagement.” Nobody got fired, everyone got another star, and the bureaucracy learned the oldest trick in Washington: rename failure until it sounds like expertise.
Then came the cultural surrender.
The same generals who couldn't produce victory abroad stood almost mute while the formation was carved up at home by race, sex, identity, extremism stand downs, demographic targets, and an expanding DEI bureaucracy. They watched warfighting institutions absorb the language and priorities of academia and HR, then called the corrosion “leadership.”
That's the stunning indictment nobody wants to touch: a general is supposed to protect the formation from threats outside it and rot inside it. Too many did neither.
We promoted custodians of decline and called them strategic leaders. I'm sick and tired of having to pretend the system isn't absolutely cracked in half by people who serve themselves over the nation.
No more.
A good AND important column @JohnPuri2026 @NRO. Please read:
From me @NRO, with a frightening warning to voters:
A List of Things Democrats Might Do If They Retake Power
nationalreview.com/corner/a-…
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
Do not read this if you passionately believe in the case for reparations
There were five slave trades. You were taught about only one. 🏴🇬🇧
One. The Atlantic. Twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas. Britain banned it in 1807, then hunted it for sixty years.
Two. The Barbary trade. A million Europeans taken to North Africa. Britain bombarded Algiers in 1816.
Three. The Saharan trade. A thousand years of caravans north across the desert. Britain had its northern end banned. Tripoli, 1857.
Four. The East African trade. Twenty thousand people a year through one customs house. Britain forced the market shut. 5 June 1873.
Five. The Ottoman trade. Raiders sold Eastern Europeans south for three hundred years. Britain made the Sultan ban it in 1854.
It cost sixty years and two thousand sailors. Nobody else fought all five. 🙏🇬🇧
It isn't over. Mauritania only made it a crime in 2007. Fifty million people are in slavery today.
Someone has to remember who started the fight. ⚓🇬🇧💪
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
The Steady State: 450 ex-spooks who snoozed through Biden’s student-loan power grab, social-media censorship pressure, vaccine mandates, and cognitive decline—then bolted upright the day Trump won to warn us about authoritarianism.
Nonpartisan redefined: myopic until the other guys win!
We are former CIA officers, FBI agents, diplomats, and military leaders who spent our careers defending America from global threats. But protecting our constitutional democracy isn't something we can do alone, defending democracy requires all of us.
Stand firm, get organized, and make your voice heard on November 3rd. VOTE for democracy. VOTE for freedom. VOTE for our future. Tap the link in our bio to check your registration, access essential resources, and build your voting plan today! #HoldFast #Vote
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified and certified in July of 1868. The Supreme Court was permanently set at nine justices by the Judiciary Act of 1869, enacted in the near immediate aftermath of the Fourteenth Amendment on April 10, 1869. The amendment guaranteed that “due process of law” was enshrined —-again— in the Constitution and the Judiciary Act broke with the history of expanding court as country expanded and settled the number of justices permanently at nine.
“Packing the Court” is the antithesis of “due process” and should be a non-starter. @ElonMusk spends a lot in defense of freedom. He ought to invest in the best lawyers in the country like Paul Clement to organize the defense of the rule of law against inevitable challenges to it such as court packing and statehood for D.C.
The focus on #SCOTUS by @elonmusk is correct. There is an excellent argument though that the Court cannot constitutionally be expanded beyond 9 and that D.C. cannot be a state. Both would require an amendment to the Constitution. That’s very obvious re: D.C. and also true but less obvious regarding the Court. But rather than engage in the legal knife fight, just keep the Senate in GOP hands.
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
I made a meme out of it.
It’s too brilliant not to😂
This is just so true and brilliant, I had to share it when I saw it:
"500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even manage to defeat 40 million Ukrainians while failing to realize that they themselves are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim to be persecuted by 9 million Israelis”
Wonderful post @SamuraiShibaJP:
My wife's brother spent six years at a Japanese car plant in Kentucky. He was sent to teach the Americans our way of working.
He came home with a notebook. On the cover, in Japanese: "Things I Learned Instead."
Some pages:
"The first day of deer season, half the line takes vacation. HR plans for it every year. Nobody pretends to be sick. They just say 'deer season.'"
"They name the machines. The welding robot on Line 2 is Darlene. Darlene gets a birthday cake."
"When someone's wife has a baby, the whole line signs a card. The card is bigger than the baby."
"A man with thirty years on the line showed me a better way to do my own job. Then he said, 'Don't tell your boss I told you that, boss.'"
"Every Friday, someone brings doughnuts. Nobody is assigned. Somebody always does."
"They thank the janitor by name. Every day. His name is Curtis."
The last page is from his final day.
In our system, anyone can stop the line, but only for a problem. Stopping it is serious.
"On my last day, the line stopped for one minute. There was no problem. They stopped it to shake my hand."
He says it's the only time in six years he was happy to see the line stop.
Accurate as stated:
Some miscellaneous end-of-the-week observations:
- of course the Democratic Party and the Peltola campaign were behind the second Dan Sullivan campaign in Alaska. Anybody who thought about it for a moment knew this. Still, credit to the NYT for finding the smoking gun and publishing it before the election.
- for a country committed to genocide, Israel sure does allow a lot of Arabs to vote, and hold >15% of the seats in the Knesset.
- the economy grew 3.4% clip in 3rd quarter. Real wages up.
- I hear a number of Republicans who are tired of Trump promising to vote against perfectly traditional Rs such as Mike Rogers in Michigan or Roger Marshall in Kansas, until, to quote one, “the party is rid of the stench of Trump.” You hear this from time to time—for example, I heard it from some British conservatives before their 2024 vote. Rarely does politics work that way. When a group of voters abandons a party, for whatever reason, the party is less like to move toward those voters than it is to look for new voters somewhere else—often amongst the very people who epitomize what the “abandoners” claim to hate.
- October is the best month of the year. But I do not understand why communities declare that “trick-or-treat” night will happen on some night other than October 31.
- social security would be in much better shape had George W Bush’s reform proposal of 2005, or Paul Ryan’s from 2011-12, been adopted. They were scuttled on the claim that they were “pushing Granny off the cliff.” In fact, they were trying to stop granny’s wheelchair from continuing to roll downhill toward the cliff.
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
This is undeniably true.
Vote your principles in primaries.
Vote Republican in general elections.
Otherwise, you are voting for radical Marxists and Islamists to fundamentally change our constitution.
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
The ANC has governed South Africa since 1994.
Shit now flows in our streets; we faced years of rolling blackouts, and taps now make children sick. In Bronkhorstspruit, east of Pretoria, more than 800 people have fallen ill since early October, most of them under four years old, from water sent out by the state's own treatment works, full of E. coli. Apparently, some official forgot to order chlorine.
Somehow this party still expects to win the November 4 local elections, which tells you what state capture does to a voter base.
Municipalities across Limpopo and the Eastern Cape now pipe sewage into the streets. ANC officials built the system this way, because a dependent electorate is a captive electorate.
Central to this is cadre deployment, the practice of placing party loyalists inside every state institution regardless of competence. The result is predictable: Transnet collapsed, SAA burns through bailouts, and water treatment works poison the towns they serve. Potholes in our roads are often so large that entire cars fall into them.
The state is a machine for moving wealth upward to politically connected insiders while public services rot.
The latest Social Research Foundation poll puts the ANC at 32 percent nationally and 22 percent in Johannesburg, behind the DA in the city it ran for most of the past thirty years. Thirty years of dependency grants, captured media, and patronage networks still make rational exit costly for millions of South Africans.
The question remains: How is it possible that people walking through their own shit to collect buckets of drinking water are still voting for this party of criminals? That 32% should be 0%.
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
This dirtbag journovermin Dilanian blocks me, so I have to go the screenshot route.
He is actively assisting in the "Narrative" phase of a color revolution.
To create the "crisis of legitimacy" that is necessary to attempt to justify the impending coup, it is imperative that in the days and weeks before the trigger event (i.e., the midterms) a constant narrative of illegitimate action by the sitting President be perpetrated by media outlets sympathetic to the color revolutionaries.
That is all this is. There is literally zero actual evidence to support what he alleges. However, no evidence is necessary, just the message.
These people are despicable human filth.
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
The electorate aren’t goldfish. Our memories are long enough to recall June 2024, when you declared that trans-identified men with penises should be able to use women’s public bathrooms. It took a Supreme Court ruling to force you to uphold women’s rights, and now you pose as our bold champion? Please.
The time for talk has long passed. This government is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to supporting women and girls.
We'll back practical action to confine misogyny to the history books - in public services, workplaces, and online.
theguardian.com/society/2026…
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
A British government minister should be fired immediately for saying this
It means that most of us cannot trust the government any more
Rural TN #2 A Mark retweeted
It wasn’t a hazing incident.
They killed him because he figured out how they were stealing money from OPFUND and informant programs.
Logan was a friend. Trained operators don’t “accidentally” asphyxiate someone from a choke hold.
Please help me honor US Army Green Beret Staff Sergeant Logan Melgar.
On June 4, 2017, the 34-year-old engineer sergeant was killed in Mali during a hazing incident by fellow special operators who broke into his room, restrained him, and applied a chokehold that led to his death by asphyxiation.
From Lubbock, Texas, he served with the 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) after enlisting in 2012, completed Special Forces training, and deploying twice to Afghanistan.
Survived by his wife Michelle and their two sons, Melgar was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, leaving a legacy of service and a case that exposed serious issues of accountability within elite military units.
Never forgotten.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Death ruled homicide by asphyxiation. Two SEALs and two Raiders charged with felony murder for chokehold in planned hazing to film sexual assault. Convicted of manslaughter/hazing; sentences 6mo-18mo after reductions. Theft cover-up motive alleged, denied.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of…
news.usni.org/2021/01/24/sea…