Good morning! It's Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. Hump day, and the coffee knows it.
My calendar says it's Dessert Day, Emergency Nurses Day, Take Your Parents to Lunch Day, Stop Bullying Day, Curves Day, and World Standards Day. Take Mom and Dad to lunch, skip straight to dessert, and if the sugar crash knocks you flat, an emergency nurse has your back.
I'll be headed home on Sunday. This has been a much-needed break, the reasons only a few of you will understand. Not that the trip was without any issues. One of them was working the bugs out of my link to the Florack Word Ranch. It's awesome now that I've got it going. I can now bore you to sleep from about anywhere in the world.
Today in History:
1066: William of Normandy defeats King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings and launches the Norman conquest of England.
1774: The First Continental Congress adopts the Declaration and Resolves, protesting Britain's Intolerable Acts.
1908: The Chicago Cubs beat the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series, then waited 108 years to do it again.
1912: A would-be assassin shoots Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee, and Roosevelt delivers his campaign speech anyway with the bullet still in his chest.
1926: Methuen publishes A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, launching literature's most famous honey addict.
1933: Adolf Hitler pulls Germany out of the League of Nations.
1944: Nazi officials force Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to take poison over his suspected role in the plot against Hitler.
1947: Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the Bell X-1.
1962: A U-2 spy plane photographs Soviet missile sites in Cuba and sets off the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1964: The Nobel committee names Martin Luther King Jr. the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
1964: The Kremlin rivals oust Nikita Khrushchev from power.
1968: Apollo 7 astronauts beam down the first live TV broadcast from a crewed NASA spacecraft.
1987: Eighteen-month-old Jessica McClure falls into a backyard well in Midland, Texas, and rescuers pull her out 58 hours later.
1994: Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction opens in theaters.
2012: Felix Baumgartner leaps from a balloon 24 miles up and breaks the sound barrier in free fall, 65 years to the day after Yeager.
Birthdays Today include: William Penn, Pennsylvania founder; Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president and World War II supreme Allied commander; Lillian Gish, actress (The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance); e.e. Cummings, poet (Tulips and Chimneys); Hannah Arendt, political theorist (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem); Roger Moore, actor (Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Saint); John Dean, Watergate-era White House counsel; Ralph Lauren, fashion designer; Cliff Richard, singer ("Living Doll," "Devil Woman"); Justin Hayward, singer-songwriter (The Moody Blues, "Nights in White Satin"); Harry Anderson, actor-magician (Night Court); Greg Evigan, actor (B.J. and the Bear, My Two Dads); Lori Petty, actress (A League of Their Own, Point Break); Steve Coogan, actor-comedian (Philomena, The Trip). If today's your birthday too, have an extra slice, since it's Dessert Day after all.
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Funny how the left's stomach for violent footage depends entirely on who ends up bleeding on the ground.
When the victim is a conservative activist, a health insurance executive, or Donald Trump, the left hits replay for about a week (not including the promo slugs) for the story on CNN/NBC/ABC.CBS/ MS-NOW. When the man facing death is a jihadist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, the left reaches for the smelling salts and the thesaurus, and lands on "barbaric."
Let's review the tape. The left certainly did — and on repeat.
On July 13, 2024, a gunman in Butler, Pa., put a bullet through Trump's ear and killed volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore. Two months later, a second would-be assassin waited in the shrubbery at Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach. Corners of the Left treated both events less as near-tragedies than as near-misses. We all sat and watched with shaking heads as social media filled with people disappointed by the shooter's aim.
In December 2024, a masked gunman shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk. The surveillance video ran everywhere, on every network and every feed, for days. Accused killer Luigi Mangione didn't get condemnation from the Left. He got fan clubs, fundraisers, and thirst posts.
Then on Sept. 10, 2025, an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in front of a crowd at Utah Valley University. The video spread across the internet within minutes, and nobody on the Left demanded a content warning. Instead, teachers, nurses, and public employees across the country posted their delight so openly that many of them lost their jobs over it.
So I don't want to hear that the Left can't stomach watching someone die. It watched. It shared. Some of it celebrated.
Now look at what has the Left clutching its pearls. On Oct. 2, Trump approved the death sentence of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The Army set the execution for Dec. 3, by firing squad, at Fort Hood, the same post where Hasan opened fire on unarmed soldiers preparing to deploy in 2009. A military jury convicted him on all counts in 2013. He didn't deny the killings. He called no witnesses. The Supreme Court turned away his last appeal in 2025. Hasan has received 17 years of due process, which is 17 years more than he gave Pfc. Kham Xiong or any of the other 12 people he slaughtered.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon will livestream the execution. "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it," he said.
Cue the fainting couch.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) called the broadcast "a barbaric spectacle." Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called it "disgusting." Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) compared it to something "Iran and the Taliban do." The United Nations, never one to miss a chance to lecture America, declared that a livestream would amount to torture. Amnesty International warned that the broadcast would "only compound the cruelty." Cruelty, apparently, means letting Americans see the sentence their justice system handed down, as opposed to the cruelty of gunning down soldiers in a medical processing line.
Notice the pattern. Footage of innocent people dying served the Left's narrative, so the Left had no objection to it. Footage of a guilty man meeting lawful justice serves a different narrative, so the left suddenly needs to protect our delicate sensibilities.
That's the whole game. It always comes down to whose ox is being gored. Or perhaps more correctly, whose message is being sent. I mean, consider this from the standpoint of the messages being sent. Are you a conservative? The message they send is that you deserve to be treated in the way that Charlie Kirk was. That's the whole deal right there.
Now, of course, the Left doesn't have this objection to itself. Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) supports executing Hasan but said that "livestreaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that." Vice President JD Vance said he won't watch. The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops objected too.
I respect Scott's position, even where I disagree with it, for one simple reason: it's consistent. Scott didn't spend September 2025 sharing Kirk's death video with a laughing emoji. The bishops didn't sell Mangione merch. When a conservative says a public execution coarsens the country, he applies that standard to everyone, every time. When Murphy says it, he applies it to the one man in this story who actually and richly earned his fate, not that he'll ever admit the difference.
And Scott has it backward on one point. Jihadists do in fact livestream the murders of innocents: journalists, aid workers, prisoners in cages. America would broadcast the execution of a convicted mass murderer, after a public trial and a decade of appeals, carried out by the soldiers of the institution he betrayed.
The message of these executions of Charlie Kirk and Brian Thompson, for example, as well as the attempts on Trump's life, are remarkably similar The upcoming execution of Nidal Malik Hasan is of a slightly different message, but still remarkably similar. They each ostensibly are in support of a particular brand of morality. Also, the coverage is aimed at different audiences. The former is aimed at you and me, and the latter is aimed at terrorists supporting radical Islam.
One is terrorism. The other is accountability. If we can't tell those two apart on camera, the problem isn't the camera. This comes down, in the end, to whose morality we should support
Look, people: Watch or don't. That's your call, and nobody will force you to tune in. But spare me the lectures about barbarism from people who watched Charlie Kirk bleed out on their phones and their flat screens and called it justice.
Despite what they'll claim, the left didn't discover a conscience. It discovered murderers it didn't hate and now leaps to defend them. Oh, two more words on that subject: Lindsay Clancy. I think most of you can figure the connection there without my help.
Thought for the Day: A principle you only apply to your enemies isn’t a principle; it’s a weapon.
VIP members: Your voice matters. Let's hear yours.
Take care. gang. You only get one shot at today. Join us tomorrow, would you?