Wednesday, February 18, 2026
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tates don't come much bluer than Maryland. My father-in-law, who lived much of his adult life in Maryland, was heavily involved in local politics there, as a conservative Democrat - there were some then, and in Maryland, even in the '60s and '70s, you registered Democrat, or you were shut out of the process. He has told me on numerous occasions that there wasn't an elected official in Maryland who had two IQ points to rub together.
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Case in point: Governor Wes Moore, who on Wednesday was eviscerated by Press Secretary Karolyn Leavitt for his action prohibiting local law enforcement from working with Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is becoming the new acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH head, will also serve as acting CDC director, a Trump administration official told The Epoch Times on Feb. 18. Bhattacharya, 58, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He was approved by the Senate as the NIH director in early 2025 in a 53–47 party-line vote.
Jim O'Neill, who had been serving as the acting CDC director in addition to his Senate-confirmed role of deputy health secretary, departed the administration on Feb. 13. The reason for O'Neill’s exit, and Bhattacharya’s expanded responsibilities, has not been provided.
Eight people are confirmed dead, with one more skier still missing in the horrific avalanche that happened just outside of Lake Tahoe. Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon provided the grim update on Wednesday, 24 hours after the avalanche was first reported. Moon stated four travel guides and 11 guests were caught in the avalanche. Among those 15, 6 had been rescued — one man and five women from ages 30-55. Moon said eight of the remaining nine are confirmed dead, and one is still missing.
At least a dozen House and Senate Democrats will skip President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address next week to instead attend a rally on the National Mall organized to protest the first year of his second term.
Several progressive leaders will use the “People’s State of the Union,” hosted by MoveOn and liberal media outlet MeidasTouch, to present an alternate vision for the country as Trump takes the podium for his second address before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. That list includes Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), considered a 2028 presidential hopeful, as well as Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Germany's first political party, are struggling to muster their optimism in a year when five of Germany's 16 federal states are set to elect new parliaments. According to the latest opinion polls, the SPD could be voted out of power in two states that is has governed for decades. In two others, the SPD is polling in the single digits.
To understand what went wrong, we need to look back: The SPD was founded as a traditional workers party in 1863, which makes it the country's oldest political party. In that period, it aimed to be the political representative of factory workers, whose precarious lives
A lot of people are outraged over this case of an elderly woman who killed a family of four while driving on the wrong side of the road and far above the limit, got away clean, and then moved her property around to avoid civil liability.
A woman who prosecutors said killed a family of four while speeding down a residential San Francisco street will likely face no jail time or community service mandates after pleading no contest to four felony counts of gross vehicular manslaughter.
Mary Fong Lau, 80, changed her plea from not guilty to no contest Friday afternoon and
The Department of State revoked the visas of a record 100,000 foreign nationals with criminal backgrounds during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, pursuant to the administration’s goal of enhancing national security and public safety.
The figure is an all-time record, marking a 150 percent increase from 2024 under Joe Biden’s administration. "The United States has no obligation to host criminals who endanger the American people. A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right,” the DOS wrote Tuesday on X.
The U.S. Air Force is repainting Air Force One and other aircraft in the executive fleet with President Donald Trump’s preferred color red, white, and dark blue color scheme.
The repainting of the executive of the executive fleet marks the first rebranding in more than six decades, marking a shift from the John F. Kennedy-era paint scheme.
“The Air Force is implementing a new paint scheme requirement (red, white and dark blue) for VC-25B as well as the additional executive airlift fleet, which will include the new 747-8i and four C-32 aircraft,” an Air Force spokesperson said in a statement.
This change would do away with the Kennedy-era light blue and white
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has never been one to show good judgement. When he’s not getting caught conducting “personal business” on a staff Zoom call, he’s accidentally admitting that there’s an ongoing leftist-led judicial coup designed to stymie President Trump’s agenda.
The serial self-pleasurer let the proverbial cat out of the bag in his Monday opinion column for The New York Times. Titled, “The Plan for a Radically Different Supreme Court Is Here,” the article purports to roll out a blueprint for countering conservative appointments of originalist judges to the bench but inadvertently discloses the existence of leftists’ efforts to weaponize the judicial system against Trump.
DENVER (KDVR) — Palantir Technologies announced Tuesday that it is moving its headquarters from near downtown Denver to Miami. Palantir Technologies is a data analytics company that specializes in building software that gathers and analyzes large amounts of data to provide “AI-driven decisions in critical government and commercial enterprises in the West,” according to the website. The company moved its headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Denver in August 2020, and on Tuesday the company announced in a post on X, “We have moved our headquarters to Miami, Florida.”
To me, it was the most undignified moment in modern American politics, and not surprisingly, it came from the divisive and bitter “Speaker Emerita,” Nancy Pelosi (CA-11). Serving as Speaker of the House at the time — February 2020 — the San Franciscan tore up her copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech (Snip) Of course, since they are not in control of the Oval Office, the Senate, or the House, Democrats now rely on obstruction, protests, and endless whining over imagined existential threats posed by the president. Will they stay classy, though, for a time-honored tradition, the State of the Union address, scheduled for February 24?
FORT WORTH, Texas — A mistrial has been declared on the first day of the historic first federal Antifa terrorism trial after a woke lawyer for one of the defendants engaged in misconduct.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman halted the jury selection process after noticing that MarQuetta Clayton, a BLM-activist attorney for one of the defendants, was wearing a politically-charged t-shirt with images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and messaging about civil rights.
Judge Pittman found her clothing could prejudice jurors. His ruling came on the first day of jury selection in Fort Worth, weeks after nine federal defendants were indicted on charges stemming from a July 4, 2025
The Obama Presidential Center has taken plenty of heat, mostly because it’s one of the ugliest buildings humanity has ever produced. Soviet architects would be in awe of the brutalist, menacing design of the $850 million ode to the 44th president.
But what some have termed a “Klingon prison” just got weirder and, if possible, less attractive with the addition of a colossal display on its sides with words from the former president’s 2015 speech in Selma, Alabama. It might be inspiring — if you could actually read it: (X) “Not the ideal design.” Well, that’s certainly a contestant for understatement of the year. “I gave up after developing a headache
Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison says he plans to "terminate" two officers after they contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection during two separate traffic stops, adding that their actions were against the department's policy. In a Board of Police Commissioners' meeting on Thursday, Feb. 12, Bettison says that under policy, officers are prohibited from contacting federal agents for translation services. Bettison says the calls resulted in the individuals being detained by federal agents.
California’s Gasoline Prices Aren’t
a Jones Act Problem — They’re a California
Policy Problem replies
a Jones Act Problem — They’re a California
Policy Problem replies
When gasoline prices spike in California, commentators reflexively search for a villain that can be blamed without confronting the state’s own policy failures. The latest example is a Fortune article suggesting that recent supply disruptions — and California’s chronically high gas prices — are meaningfully driven by Jones Act compliance and shipping constraints. That claim is not merely misleading. It is wrong.
California’s gasoline prices have been higher than the national average for decades, long predating the current shipping disruptions cited in the article. The Jones Act, by contrast, has been federal law since 1920.
While the government of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has inked a trade agreement with China to accept cheap imported vehicles in exchange for Beijing purchasing some agricultural products, President Trump has promised those cheap Chinese EVs will never cross the border into the USA.
The Canadian polling on the issue has done a remarkable chang in the past few years. Now, the majority of Canadians are willing to purchase cheap Chinese EVs. As outlined by Bloomberg, “More than half of Canadians, or 53%, say that knowing an EV was made in China would have no effect on their purchasing decision, according to a new poll by Nanos Research Group
It is “not fair” that U.S. President Donald Trump more often calls on Ukraine to compromise to achieve peace than Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky said amid “difficult” two-day peace talks in Switzerland.
Two-day Ukraine War peace talks broke abruptly and apparently early on Wednesday morning, the second day’s session having lasted just two hours, amid remarks from both sides about how arduous progress had been so far. And even as the Ukrainian leader observed that he saw what could be a “final stage” in talks, he decried Russia for trying to further “drag out” progress and the United States for what he was was unfairly
Democratic politicians have found themselves indirectly defending Islam’s 7th-century hatred of man’s best friend, dogs.
Several Democrats have instinctively accused Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) of racism after he reacted to a New York-based Muslim advocate, Nerdeen Kiswani — who said house pet dogs will not be welcome in a non-secular, Islamic New York.
“NYC is coming to Islam,” said a February 12 tweet from Kiswani, referring to the November electoral victory of Zohran Mamdani, the Ugandan-born, Indian-origin, immigrant, populist, and Muslim Mayor of New York. [snip] Fine responded three days later, on February 15: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
Democrat Wes Moore's presidential ambitions imploded over the past 10 weeks, but you'd have to be a pretty close student of the Maryland governor to know it, since most of the mainstream press is in cahoots with the aspiring 2028 Democratic presidential cohort.
Our Andrew Kerr has published two blockbuster investigative reports about Moore that undercut key elements of his life story—first, his boasts about being some kind of a "foremost expert" on radical Islam, based on an Oxford University graduate thesis that he can't produce and that the school doesn't have on file in its library, and second, his oft-repeated tale that his great-grandfather was chased out of the country
Keep Firing Federal Freeloaders
replies
Federal employment is at its lowest since the mid-1960s. Has the country fallen apart without the Washington bureaucracy holding it all together? Hardly.
Donald Trump was elected to accomplish a number of objectives. One of them was to cut, and hard, the federal administrative state. The mission has not been accomplished, but after a year, the federal workforce has fallen from more than 3 million to about 2.7 million, roughly where it was six decades ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Like a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it’s a good start. But
"Late Show" host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night called CBS's denial of his claim that it blocked the broadcast of his interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico "c--p" -- and urged the network and its parent, Paramount Skydance, to stand up to the "bullies" in the Trump administration. Colbert's broadcast came hours after CBS issued a statement on the controversy. (Snip) He then pulled a plastic doggy bag from behind his desk, picked up the statement, tied a knot, and mimed throwing it away before cutting to commercial.
The Kansas House has drawn a clear line with House Bill 2448. The measure would require every driver's license in the state to list the holder’s citizenship status, with a different design for noncitizens, and it has passed the House over loud objections from Democrats and advocacy groups. Supporters say it is about election integrity and basic clarity in government records, and they are right.
This is not some sweeping crackdown on people who are here legally. Kansas already verifies legal presence when it issues licenses, and noncitizens can receive temporary licenses under current law. What the bill does is close a real administrative gap.
President Joe Biden not only allowed 6 million to 10 million illegal aliens to walk across the border during his term — he also granted a “quiet amnesty” to nearly 1 million.
We’re only learning this now, as the Department of Justice revealed Biden officials improperly “terminated,” “dismissed” or “closed” that many cases before the nation’s immigration tribunals.
The tool for this deception was the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review — “EOIR,” pronounced like Winnie the Pooh’s sad donkey friend — which oversees deportation cases.
The trip that former President Ronald Reagan took to Europe in June of 1987 culminated in one of the greatest speeches of the last century -- but its first major moment was a visit to the Vatican.
On June 3, 1987, Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan flew to Venice, Italy. Shortly before midnight, they arrived at the Villa Condulmer, where they would stay for several days.
"Finished evening with old John Wayne movie," Reagan wrote the next day in his diary.
The day after that, he delivered a television address broadcast in Western Europe by the U.S. Information Agency on its WORLDNET satellite television channels.