Hello, and welcome. Glad you’re here. Today is Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. I gather that New England is about to get hammered with a winter storm. Be careful up there, my friends, particularly tomorrow. Like one of those electric road signs on I-91 said this morning: BIG STORM'S A COMIN'. PARK YER CAH!!!
1173 Pope Alexander III canonizes Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.
1598 Boris Godunov crowned Tsar of Russia.
1782 U.S. Congress authorizes the establishment of a U.S. mint.
1804 The world’s first steam locomotive, which Richard Trevithick built, runs for the first time along the tramway of the Penydarren Ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales.
1842 John Greenough of Washington, D.C. patents the first known sewing machine.
1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto in London.
1874 Benjamin Disraeli succeeds William Gladstone as British prime minister.
1878 Telegraph manager George Coy of New Haven, Connecticut issues the world's first telephone directory, a single page containing information for 50 subscribers.
1925 The first issue of The New Yorker magazine is published.
1931 Alka-Seltzer is introduced.
1947 Edward Land demonstrates the first instant-developing camera, the Land Camera Model 95.
1965 Followers of the Nation of Islam shoot dead civil rights activist and Muslim minister Malcolm X.
1970 The Jackson 5 makes its TV debut on American Bandstand.
1972 Richard Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to visit China.
Birthdays Today include Santa Anna; publisher Charles Scribner; Robert Mugabe; director Sam Peckinpah; Erma Bombeck; Nina Simone; Rue McClanahan; David Geffen; Alan Rickman; actress Tyne Daly; Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison; Kelsey Grammer; Mary-Chapin Carpenter; and Tyrus.
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Is the SAVE act in trouble? It would seem so. This is the Never Trumpers in the GOP protecting their own cover.
SAVE Act: Rep Tim Burchett confirms rumor that McConnell’s Chief of Staff Terry Carmack won’t allow the election integrity bill out of committee to give Thune and Cornyn cover for not bringing the bill to the floor for debate. pic.twitter.com/xt69cPCun1
— @amuse (@amuse) February 20, 2026
Look, in all honesty, I’ve wanted to see the three of them, Senators John Thune (R-S.D.), John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), primaried out. Now that understated desire is a desperate need, for the future of our country.
Over 80% of the country wants the SAVE act passed. The opposition? McConnell, Thune and Cornyn, along with their fellow travelers in the Democrat party, are trying to block it. These three claim to be conservative, but their actions prove that to be a false claim.
Back in 2019, Seb Gorka said this at American Greatness, and said it well enough that it still applies:
Between America winning the Cold War and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the RINO-gravy-train had treated you well. Even if you were a former leftist, the “elite” of New York and Washington were happy to let you make a phony Damascene conversion to the side that won the ideological war of the 20th century, drop your questionable political past down the memory hole, and reinvent yourself as a lifelong Buckleyite.
You believed the rest of your life could consist of your collecting fat honoraria checks from both sides of the uniparty establishment. From AEI to Brookings, from CATO to the Council on Foreign Relations, you also milked a handful of gullible right-wing donors and bloviated your pedestrian “analysis” for the hosts of the cable shows you cared for the most—naturally, on CNN. This despite the fact that America really didn’t seem to care. At least not if we judge by the viewing statistics.
[...]
For decades they planted themselves at publications such as National Review and the Weekly Standard which lost their viability as market products but nevertheless chugged along, read by a smaller and smaller group of believers and fellow-travelers, funded as they were by the same handful of well-meaning but credulous sugar-daddies. You know their names: Bill Kristol, Stephen Hays, Jennifer Rubin, Tom Nichols, to name but a few. Then on November 8, 2016, America fired them all.
When the nation chose Donald Trump, the anti-neoconservative for her 45th president, it sent a politically revolutionary message to the self-anointed coastal elites. In choosing a non-politician who self-identified as conservative but who had absolutely nothing to do with the Establishment GOP, America flipped the bird not only at Hillary and her organized crime cartel on the Left, but it blew a massive raspberry at the pseudo-Right as well.
That message was sent even louder when America elected Trump for a second term... And I would argue they actually voted for him three times. (If you really believe that Biden ran a winning campaign from his basement, garnering 81 million votes, I've got a few gallons of Florida we should discuss adding to your real estate holdings.)
And the people whom the mainstream media considers to be the favorite GOP members are ignoring that message. And Why? To spite Trump. Now, McConnell in particular is on his last legs in office, and will be leaving the Senate... or at least so he announced recently. So it looks from here as if this is a parting shot at Trump.
M.D. Kittle at Hot Air:
“Oh, yeah, that’s what McConnell is doing. Personally speaking, I think it still stems from Jan. 6 (2021 Capitol riots),” a top congressional aide told The Federalist on Thursday afternoon, as the battle over the SAVE Act ground down to trench warfare.
“Of course, Trump hasn’t had nice things to say about McConnell, and vice versa, but I think it’s personal, no matter what (McConnell) says,” the aide added.
Look, you and I both know that if the SAVE act passes, the Democrats are done for the foreseeable future. The game is up for them. For the Never Trumpers in the GOP, it's personal, and for the reasons Seb Gorka listed in 2019. It's clear they're not about protecting the country, but rather about protecting their own power base.
Back in 2015, I gave the obvious answer on why they act the way they do:
Alas!, for the GOP establishment, that situation hasn’t changed. It’s to the point where many of the supposedly oh so “conservative” GOP establishment were actually announcing that they were voting for the socialist, and it is obvious they did so, simply because of their butthurt over Trump."
Butt hurt, indeed. What else could it be? If you claim to be a conservative, and yet are inexplicably so emotionally involved with the defeat of someone who has moved the conservative football further down the field than anyone since Reagan, it seems to me that the principles that you base that decision on are ill-defined, or at the very least misrepresented. It’s time for introspection in the GOP establishment. Based on previous experience, I doubt they will subject themselves to it.
Frankly, I can't recall a time when I've ever been so annoyed at having been proven correct.
Kentucky voters in particular need to put pressure on McConnell to push the SAVE act through.
Take care. See you tomorrow.
Thought for the day: “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” — George Burns
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