Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“The SAVE Act can pass today under existing procedure. The obstacle is not the filibuster. It is the habit of surrendering to a myth.”

– Alex Muse on X

Lunacy proceeds from crime. In case you wonder why half the country has gone crazy, seek no further than Susan Rice’s stark warning to the other half of the country that is not crazy.

Ms. Rice was Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor and then “Joe Biden’s” Domestic Policy Advisor. She did a podcast last week with Preet Bharaha, former US Attorney in the SDNY, now a private lawyer with the Beltway law firm WilmerHale. Her message to Trump supporters: We’re coming after you when we’re back in power. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

WEAPONIZATION: Susan Rice lays out her vision of a post-Trump America where supporters are rounded up and sent to reeducation camps or prisons. pic.twitter.com/IyEPXx4G9T

— @amuse (@amuse) February 20, 2026

It was an important signal and it got a lot of people’s attention. It telegraphed the fear running through the Lefty-left that their crimes against the country are being tallied, carefully catalogued, and presented to a grand jury in Florida.

The crimes are bundled as a multifaceted conspiracy to overthrow the US government.

Pretty serious.

Sedition and Treason.

Susan Rice knows what she (and others) did.

First, in the frantic days between Nov. 3, 2016 and January 20, 2017, Barack Obama’s White House cooked up the Russia collusion hoax with John Brennan’s CIA, James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ. Ms. Rice, who was in on it, notoriously wrote a CYA memo memorializing the meetings and planted it in her office desk to be easily discovered by the new Trump admin. The memo stated that “every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’.” Of course, that was exactly the opposite of what really happened. The mischief emanating from it has run for ten years, crime upon crime upon crime.

Secondly, and surely less-known to the American public, was Ms. Rice’s role as Domestic Policy Advisor under “Joe Biden.” Her actual job from 2021 to 2023 was to serve as a conduit for Barack Obama to run “Joe Biden’s” White House, along with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. During those years, the public rarely (if ever) saw Susan Rice. She avoided the news media and did not make public statements or appearances at White House events. The news media were happy to ignore her. They knew exactly what she was up to.

The prime concerns of this cabal were to protect the image (cover up the crimes) of Barack Obama and his associates, to cover up the criminal degeneracy of the Biden family, and to get the Democrat Party back in power by utterly destroying Donald Trump and the populist revolt he headed.

Everything done in “Joe Biden’s” name during those years was to guarantee his party’s return to power, especially the deluge of illegal aliens across the border to pad the census for congressional districts and provide millions of future voters indebted to the party for letting them in (and giving them tons of freebies when they got here. . . phones, housing, food, walking-around money).

Meanwhile, the Democrats erected an immense scaffold of NGOs to funnel taxpayer money into salaries for their corps of political activists — outfits such as Stacey Abrams’ empire of grift in Georgia, the national networks of Antifa and BLM street-fighters, and the matrix of Somali social service fraud in Minnesota and Maine.

This created a huge parasitical patronage class, basically a national racketeering operation.

Eventually all the NGO grift became an end in itself — the Democrats animating principle: grift for grift’s sake, power to just keep it all going and continue to cover up the crime behind it.

The vital component to all this was weapons-grade mind-fuckery to produce a fog of war that would keep the American public utterly bamboozled, unable to comprehend what was happening amid gales of hoaxes, ops, and scams. The Covid-19 caper was the doozy. We still don’t know definitively if the mRNA vaccine program was a deliberate depopulation project, but it kind of looked like it, while plenty of messaging from global institutions — from the Gates Foundation to the WEF to the UN — was pretty explicit about getting rid of useless eaters. On top of all that, throw in the trashing of Western Civ’s industrial economies with “green” trickery, adding another layer of anxiety onto a sore-beset citizenry.

Of course, despite their best efforts — and it was a mighty crusade of bad faith and ill will — the Democrats failed to vanquish Mr. Trump, a strange miracle itself suggesting some sort of divine intervention. The question now is, will Mr. Trump be able to vanquish them? It begins to look like he might, with plenty of help from the Democrats themselves, who have reached a pitch of madness rarely seen in human societies.

Their latest prank: a boycott of the State of the Union speech to Congress.

So far, seven senators and nine congresspersons have promised to bail on the speech, led ostensibly by Senator Adam Schiff of California, a liar so prodigious and fertile that it can be truly said he never uttered an honest word including “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” This faction will gather on the mall instead and hurl objurgations at the Capitol rotunda.

All that’s needed to finish them off, really, is passage of the SAVE Act so that voters will be required to prove their identity and citizenship, and absentee ballots will be restricted to the old rules about being too sick to get to the poling place, or else out of the country.

Last week, staffers behind the walking mummy, Mitch McConnell, prevented the bill from reaching the Senate floor with some procedural rigmarole.

Mr. Trump must call them out, and call out Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), too, for dragging his feet on whatever’s necessary to pass the SAVE Act.

The country demands honest elections, and one way or another they’ll get them.

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

Over the past week or so, many on the political Right have understandably enjoyed a laugh or two at the expense of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.). AOC went to the Munich Security Conference to provide “balance” to the Trump administration’s presence and to burnish her own credentials on the global stage. Instead, she mostly just made a fool of herself. Not only did she stutter, stammer, and offer a Kamala Harris-esque non-answer when asked about American interests in and obligations to Taiwan, but she also demonstrated a comically poor grasp of geography and a righteously ignorant understanding of history. In an effort to rebut and embarrass U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, AOC embarrassed only herself, showing that historical facts mean far less to her than identity-inspired fiction.

But while it’s inarguably fun to chuckle at and mock the ignorance of the smug congresswoman and presumed presidential aspirant, it is also important to acknowledge that her historical and political illiteracy extends beyond the superficial and touches on matters of real and critical importance. Notably, this purported champion of the working class does not know the history of working-class politics, does not understand the reasons for the collapse of the working-class-centered ideology, and, as a result, has never contemplated the dangers inherent in attempting to resuscitate that failed doctrine.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez has long emphasized her biography and working-class roots to enhance her political status—and justifiably so. Her childhood may not have been quite the struggle she pretends it was, but she nevertheless endured economic hardships—especially after her father’s death—and was unable to find employment commensurate with her education. She was, famously, a bartender and a cocktail waitress before her election to Congress and, as a result, has long fashioned herself a champion of the working class and its purported priorities.

Indeed, on her trip to Munich, AOC emphasized her affinity with the working class and admonished democratic nations to erect a bulwark against totalitarianism by focusing on workers, workers’ rights, and worker-centered politics. “It is of utmost urgent priority that we get our economic houses in order and deliver material gains for the working class,” the congresswoman said, “or else we will fall to a more isolated world governed by authoritarians that also do not deliver to working people.” She railed against large corporations and especially billionaires, insisting that they had to be stopped from “throwing their weight around” in domestic and international politics. In short, the good congresswoman used her trip to Munich to urge the workers of the world to unite, because, as she sees it, they have nothing to lose but their chains.

There’s only one little problem with AOC’s exhortation: it’s ridiculous. Indeed, it’s been tried . . . and tried . . . and tried. It doesn’t work. And when I say that, I don’t mean that socialism doesn’t work or that communism has been tried countless times before and failed every time. That much is obvious by now. Rather, what I mean is that the workers of the world don’t care about the rest of the workers of the world. They don’t like the idea of being divided into classes, and they don’t have any particular affection for their fellow laborers. They don’t dislike other workers necessarily, but they don’t see themselves as a monolithic federation sharing the same interests, needs, or political predilections. Truth be told—and this is the key to understanding the silliness of the whole “global proletariat” nonsense—even the Marxists long ago gave up on uniting the workers of the world. In fact, in the United States, the most prominent Marxist theorists actually gave up on workers altogether as allies in the fight against capitalism.

One of the most pervasive bits of common knowledge about World War I is the idea that the ruling classes of Europe did not expect it to last very long or to be particularly destructive. Kaiser Wilhelm infamously predicted that Germany’s troops would be home “before the leaves fall.” What is less well known is that this “short-war illusion” was shared and embraced even more unequivocally by the era’s Marxist agitators. They believed, as Engels in particular predicted, in the inevitability of a “new man,” who would evolve from the working classes and would never harm his fellow new men. Just two years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the Manifesto of the Second International Socialist Congress in Basel in 1912 declared that war between working men was a virtual impossibility:

It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.

Of course, things didn’t exactly go as planned—either for the ruling classes or the Marxists. World War I did many things to Europe, most of them awful and ugly and demoralizing. It did many of the same things to Marxism. Although the war did incite revolution in Russia, that was far less than the Marxists had hoped for. Russia’s revolution was led by the educated classes and animated by peasants. Proletarian “workers” were largely non-existent. In the industrialized parts of Europe, workers flat out rejected appeals to class unity, choosing instead to fight for God and country. German workers saw themselves not as workers but as Germans. French workers saw themselves not as workers but as Frenchmen. And so it went.

In the aftermath of the war, Marxists were forced to confront two massive and related problems: the workers’ refusal to unite and the rise of profound and entrenched nihilism. In order to save their ideology, these Marxists had to revise it and explain its failures. As any schoolboy knows, they did so by concluding that the workers of the world did not understand their own interests or even their own natures. Workers were dissociated from their interests by the institutions of society, especially the institutions of cultural transmission: the Church, the schools, the media, art, entertainment, and so on. Therefore, to enable workers to see their real interests, those institutions had to be taken over, destroyed, and rebuilt along ideological lines. And thus began the Gramsci, Lukács, and Frankfurt School-led “long march through the institutions,” which largely killed economic Marxist theory, creating what we know today as “cultural Marxism.”

In 1964, Herbert Marcuse—a latecomer to the Frankfurt School who became America’s most prominent Marxist theorist—essentially gave up on the workers as the stimulators of revolution. As I have noted before in these pages, “Marcuse conceded that the capitalist system was simply too good at providing goods and services that made the masses comfortable and happy. It therefore deprived them of ever knowing or caring about their true oppressed consciousness. Workers had become one-dimensional consumers, distracted from their fate by their egos and the creature comforts of capitalism.” In turn, Marcuse laid the foundations for “identity politics,” which would, he believed, enable the rise of a new revolutionary class, motivated by new perceptions of oppression.

Long story short (if that’s possible any longer), over the course of the last century, Marxists gave up on workers and even on economics, deciding instead to focus on culture and identity-based grievances.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t appear to know any of this, of course, which means that she also doesn’t know that appeals to working-class unity have tended to end in tragedy, followed by massive, civilization-destroying revisionism. Most notably, because she doesn’t know that revisionism was necessary in Marxism, she also doesn’t know that the other stream of post-World-War-I Marxist revisionism ran through Rome and Berlin and resulted in authoritarianism on a scale previously unimagined.

AOC’s ignorance isn’t just about cowboys, in other words. It’s also about the greatest and most profound tragedies in world history. Her ignorance is dangerous.

After disrupting countless Software/SaaS/finance/real estate/broker sectors, Anthropic’s Claude is now going after targeted companies. 

A little before 2pm ET, Bloomberg sent out a headline that Anthropic’s Claude has found yet another skillset:

• *ANTHROPIC SAYS CLAUDE CODE CAN AUTOMATE COBOL MODERNIZATION

A herd of panicked IBM longs flooded to the Claude blog to read more on what is happening. Here’s what it found (excerpted): 

COBOL is everywhere. It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government.

Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year.

The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them. Production code has been modified repeatedly over decades, but the documentation hasn’t kept up. Meanwhile, we aren’t exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter.

Given these roadblocks, how can organizations modernize their systems without losing the reliability, availability, and data they’ve accumulated over decades? And without breaking anything?

* * * 

How AI changes COBOL modernization

AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive. With it, your team can focus on strategy, risk assessment, and business logic while AI automates the code analysis and implementation.

* * * 

Start your COBOL modernization

The approach outlined above works for COBOL systems of any size. Tools like Claude Code can automate much of the exploration and analysis work described, giving your team the comprehensive understanding they need to plan and execute migrations confidently.

Start with a single component or workflow that has clear boundaries and moderate complexity. Use AI to analyze and document it thoroughly, plan the modernization with your engineers, implement incrementally with testing at each step, and validate carefully.  This will build organizational confidence and surface adjustments needed for your systems.

In kneejerk reaction, IBM stock, already down sharply on the day, and tumbling 20% from its all time highs just earlier this month, plunged $15 to the lowest level since Liberation Day, briefly dipping below $230…

… as the market realized that it is the latest target of the Claude disruption train. You see, Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL)  is a high-level, English-like compiled programming language developed specifically for business data processing, via IBM. As such, anything that disrupts this lucrative ecosystem created by IBM (code COBOL, then sell consultancy contracts to adjust the code which virtually nobody knows how to use), would immediately smash IBM stock… and that’s precisely what happened. 

Which begs the question: after various Claude updates caused hundreds of billions in market cap damage in the past 3 weeks, is the company’s strategy to keep rolling incremental disruption updates becoming Antrhopic’s self-funding strategy. After all, if Dario Amodei had bought puts on IBM, and the dozens of companies that have plunge dmore than double digits in recent weeks, he would have made billions, certainly enough to fund his company for months if not years. 

And if not Anthropic, when will OpenAI – which needs capital much more badly than its enterprise-focused peer – do the same? 

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to hear two cases on Feb. 23 about U.S. business assets that Cuba’s communist government seized decades ago.

Both cases focus on the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act that was created to pressure Cuba by penalizing foreign companies “trafficking” in property that the Cuban regime seized from U.S. interests.

Also known as the Helms-Burton Act, the law allows U.S. citizens and companies to sue any person who traffics in or uses confiscated property. Trafficking in the statute includes using or profiting from the confiscated property.

The law defines “person” to include “any agency or instrumentality of a foreign state,” and contemplates civil judgments being obtained against “an agency or instrumentality of the Cuban Government.”

Cuba’s late dictator Fidel Castro overthrew the then-government in 1959 and turned Cuba into a one-party state in which socialist policies were implemented, including the nationalization of the assets of foreign businesses operating in Cuba at the time.

In Exxon Mobil v. Corporacion Cimex, Exxon Mobil seeks compensation from three Cuban government-owned companies for energy assets seized in 1960 after the communists took power. The company was previously known an Standard Oil Co.

Until recently, parties like Exxon were unable to pursue claims against Cuban government-owned enterprises under the Helms-Burton Act because President Bill Clinton suspended Title III—the part of the law allowing compensation lawsuits to be filed.

In his first term, President Donald Trump revoked the suspension on May 2, 2019, and Exxon Mobil filed its lawsuit the same day.

The legal issue in the case is whether the Helms-Burton Act “abrogates foreign sovereign immunity” in cases against Cuban entities, the company said in its petition.

Foreign sovereign immunity is a legal doctrine that prevents governments from being sued unless they agree to be sued. Abrogation is the act of formally annulling a law or legal provision.

In 2024, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that a separate federal statute poses an additional hurdle for lawsuits against Cuban entities. That court held that Title III claims may only proceed against Cuban entities if the lawsuit falls under an exception in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generally forbids lawsuits against foreign governments but allows suits involving commercial activities or property seized in violation of international law.

The appeals court ruled that when the district court considered the case, it failed to properly analyze whether the commercial activities exception applied, and sent the case back to that court for further consideration.

Exxon Mobil argues the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act shouldn’t be interpreted to deprive the company of the judicial remedies promised by Helms-Burton.

Exxon is seeking compensation upwards of $1 billion for assets seized by the Cuban government in 1960. At the time of the confiscation of the assets, then belonging to subsidiaries owned by Standard Oil, they were worth $70 million. 

However, Exxon wants $1 billion in the current claim because interest has accrued and there is potential of enhanced damages. 

Cuban government-owned company Corporacion Cimex argued in a brief that if Exxon’s legal argument prevails, it could open U.S. courts to a flood of lawsuits against foreign entities like itself, despite the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act protections.

The other case, Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, involves U.S.-based company Havana Docks Corp., which, in its petition, described the case as “the most important case involving U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba to reach this Court in the past sixty years.”

Havana Docks Corp. built the port of Havana’s docks at its own expense in exchange for a concession to run those docks for 99 years. The Cuban government unilaterally ended the concession without compensation in 1960, which had 44 years left to run, along with the company’s property interest in the docks, according to the petition.

In October 2024, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned a more than $100 million judgment against various cruise lines for trafficking in confiscated property by using expropriated docks in Cuba.

The appeals court held that the cruise lines could not be held liable for using the port facilities because Havana Docks’s property interest “expired in 2004,” according to the provisions of the 99-year concession the company was originally granted.

The appeals court “effectively nullified” the right to sue under Title III, the company said in the petition.

The petition said the cruise lines used the confiscated docks even after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Foreign Claims Settlement Commission certified Havana Docks’s claim against Cuba for taking its property interest in the docks.

The cruise lines disembarked almost one million tourists on the docks from 2015 to 2019, paying Cuba at least $130 million and earning more than $1 billion from their Cuban cruises, the petition said.

The cruise lines argue that Havana Docks Corp. has no legal claim against them because even though that company once had permission to use the docks, it never actually owned the docks, which always remained the property of the Cuban government.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the two cases by the end of June.

By Benjamin Picton, senior market strategist at Rabobank

US stocks closed higher on Friday following news that the Supreme Court had ruled 6-3 to uphold a lower court decision that found Trump’s signature tariff policy to be illegal. The court found that Trump acted beyond his authority by imposing tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act with the majority holding that tariffs are a branch of taxation and that the Constitution grants powers over taxation to Congress, not to the President. Critically, the Court found that IEEPA makes no specific mention of delegating tariff powers to the Executive and that there exists no precedent of IEEPA being used to levy tariffs.

Precious metals are higher in early trade, the DXY is down, US equity futures are pointing lower and Brent crude is down by almost 1%. Aussie yields are now bull-flattening after initially moving higher, but Kiwi yields are holding at higher levels following idiosyncratic strong retail sales data. Aussie stocks have opened weaker, but the Hang Seng, TAIEX and KOSPI are catching a bid, highlighting the winners-and-losers effect of shifts in tariff policy that has just delivered a boost to countries who previously had a comparatively bad deal.

Unsurprisingly, the administration reacted with disappointment to the decision but then moved quickly to impose new baselines tariffs of 10% – later increased to the maximum rate of 15% – using powers granted by Section 122 of the Trade Act. As regular readers would know, we have been pointing out for some time that this and other avenues exist – on firmer legal ground – for the administration to continue to pursue its tariff strategy. Other potential avenues include:

• Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which allows the President to impose tariffs of indefinite duration and with no cap if imports threaten national security. This requires a Commerce Department investigation finding that such a threat exists and would typically be applied on a sectoral basis.

• Section 201 of the Trade Act, which allows tariffs up to 50% above existing rates for a duration of 4 years if imports cause or threaten serious harm to a domestic industry. This would require an International Trade Commission investigation, public hearings and would also likely be imposed sectorally.

• Section 301 of the Trade Act, which authorizes uncapped tariffs in response to unfair foreign trade practices. This requires a US Trade Representative investigation, public hearings and consultation with the affected foreign government.

• ŸSection 338 of the Tariff Act allows tariffs of up to 50% on goods from countries imposing unreasonable restrictions on US commerce. The President can make this determination directly, but it has never been applied and could be subject to legal challenge.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already indicated that the administration is preparing investigations under Section 232 and Section 301 to expand tariff coverage.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a big spanner in the works. The ruling immediately raises the prospect that US importers may seek refunds on the $160-175bn (estimated) paid in tariffs collected under the illegal IEEPA authority. That’s bad news bears for the US fiscal position, which was already in dire straits, and should only add to the pressure on the US Dollar index where the “sell America” meme has once again been a theme this year. Bessent was adamant over the weekend that the combination of Section 122, 232 and 301 tariffs will result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026, but presumably the 2025 revenues are now a write off. Equity traders will now be pricing in the positive effects of prospective refunds against negative effects of potentially higher term premia.

There are also broader implications. While the Supreme Court ruled that the President cannot use IEEPA to impose taxes (including tariffs), the ruling does not overturn the long-standing interpretation that IEEPA can be used for more direct intervention to impose direct trade restrictions, including import bans, embargoes, asset freezes, restriction of financial transactions and sanctions on individuals or entire sectors. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and the alternative methods may prove more brutal than the one that has just been struck down.

It should also be remembered that the current account (of which the trade balance is a major component) is the inverse of the capital account. Scott Bessent is on a mission to fix external imbalances vis-à-vis China, so capital controls is another lever that exists in the realm of policy tools to tackle the problem. Needless to say, the implications of employing that particular tool for US yields and the role of the dollar in the absence of a compliant Federal Reserve are potentially unacceptable (at least for now). This remains a low-delta trade for the time being, but perhaps the delta rises as the US gains traction with its stablecoin strategy.

US tariff policy will continue to be a source of uncertainty for markets as traders attempt to price in the implications of what is still a movable feast. There is still some fog of war over what happens once the Section 122 tariffs expire in 150 days’ time (can they be momentarily cancelled and then re-applied?), over the implications for the US fiscal position (will the $160bn be refunded? Fully? Partially? When?), over the differing relative impact on trade partners (the first will be last and the last will be first), over whether previous sectoral exemptions will still apply, and over whether bilateral trade deals negotiated to alleviate IEEPA tariffs are still a thing (the US says yes, a cancelled Modi visit says maybe not).

All of this is likely to add cost for businesses who need to understand the new rules, litigate to recover illegal import duties and potentially recalibrate their supply chains (again). Central bank DSGE models will reduce this into an assumption of lower business investment and therefore lower productivity growth, but the experience so far (in the US, at least) has been just the opposite.

US Q4 GDP figures released on Friday were a big miss, printing at 1.4% annualized vs a consensus estimate of double that rate and a much hotter Q3 result of 4.4% annualized. Most of the miss came from a contraction in government spending, which was impacted by government shutdowns and is likely to rebound in Q1 of 2026, while the contribution of fixed investment to growth tripled from Q3. December PCE inflation rose by 0.4% on both the core and headline readings, taking the year-on-year core figure up two-tenths to 3% even as the market remains priced for at least two more Fed cuts this year.

Of course, looming over everything else in markets this week is the extensive US military buildup around the Middle East. The USS Gerald R Ford has now arrived in the region, meaning that there are now two carrier strike groups within striking distance of Iran. A near continuous logistics airbridge has been operating for days and the US has reportedly forward deployed a large share of its AWACS theatre command aircraft and available airpower. Several analysts are noting that this is the most extensive military buildup since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which would be an awfully expensive negotiating tactic if Trump doesn’t intend to use it.

With tomorrow marking the 4th anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine, it’s worth recalling how many analysts were saying in late 2021 that the Russian buildup on the Ukrainian border was “probably nothing”. The efficient market hypothesis took a big bath back then as it failed to factor in realpolitik. Surely by now we must realize that if plan A fails, there is always plan B-2.

It was a historic moment for Team USA Hockey as Jack Hughes scored the game-winning goal in a dramatic overtime finish, defeating Canada for the gold medal in Milan. The last time USA won Olympic gold in hockey was during the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Now, the celebration heads to Washington, with President Trump inviting Hughes and his teammates to the White House.

The thrilling 2-1 victory ended Team USA’s nearly five-decade Olympic gold drought and marked one of the biggest moments in the US hockey program.

“I’ll tell you what. I just told my people two minutes ago, I didn’t know they’d be calling. I said we’re giving the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night,” President Trump told the players. “I can send a military plane or something, but if you would like to, it’s the coolest night. It’s the biggest speech …”

One player told Trump, “Sir, we’re in.”

🚨 EPIC! Kash Patel put PRESIDENT TRUMP on the phone in Team USA’s locker room so that 47 could PERSONALLY congratulate them

“Congratulations! That was an UNBELIEVABLE game! We love you guys!”

“You’re going to be proud of that game for FIFTY YEARS!”

“I can send a MILITARY… pic.twitter.com/GGCUOadySq

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) February 23, 2026

The New Jersey Devils star became the face of Team USA Hockey and ignited a sense of pride in being American, while the left-leaning outlet HuffPost wrote, “If waving the American flag or chanting ‘USA!’ turns you off right now, you’re not alone.”

Responding to the HuffPost post on X, a Maryland restaurant named Jimmy’s Famous Seafood went absolutely viral for calling out the publication, replying, “Go f**k yourself.”

Go fuck yourself

— Jimmy’s Famous Seafood (@JimmysSeafood) February 22, 2026

Jimmy’s Famous Seafood’s response on X went viral, with more than 9 million views. The restaurant, which also sells crab cakes online, saw such an explosion in website traffic that its backend crashed.

“Overwhelmed by the support! We are doing our best to get the website back up to full strength, and will work tirelessly to answer each tweet!” Jimmy’s Famous Seafood wrote on X.

Overwhelmed by the support! We are doing our best to get the website back up to full strength, and will work tirelessly to answer each tweet! 🇺🇸 🦀 pic.twitter.com/2swd3QuQQ3

— Jimmy’s Famous Seafood (@JimmysSeafood) February 23, 2026

We love to see it: an immigrant-owned business standing up to out-of-touch, unhinged left-wing reporters at a media outlet that is shockingly still around.

But HuffPost’s anti-American article shouldn’t come as a surprise because its readership target is deranged Democrats who increasingly hate America more and more. That data was visible in a recent 2025 Gallup poll…

Will Trump have Jimmy’s Famous Seafood’s crab cakes in the White House for Team USA Hockey?

While the fake news represents the worst, Main Street truly represents the BEST of America. Thank you to the great patriots of @JimmysSeafood! https://t.co/RaDXMrjCL1

— Kelly Loeffler (@SBA_Kelly) February 23, 2026

The Trump administration certainly has eyes on the Maryland crab shack. 

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

When Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor, he sold New Yorkers a vision of relief. Free childcare. Free buses. A rent freeze. A city that would finally tilt toward the struggling rather than the secure. What he did not campaign on was a nearly 10% property tax hike affecting more than three million residences and over 100,000 commercial properties. Yet, days after his election, here we are.

The proposal, floated as leverage in a standoff with Kathy Hochul, is being marketed as a reluctant last resort. But for a mayor elected on affordability, threatening one of the broadest tax increases available to City Hall is not just ironic—it’s revealing. When the numbers got tight and Albany didn’t comply, Mamdani’s idiotic grand promises collided with fiscal gravity. And instead of rethinking the scale of the agenda, the answer was to reach for the biggest local tax lever available.

Truly a courageous and brilliant new strategy from the left: raising taxes. How novel.

This is not some clever new framework. Property taxes are the most predictable, blunt instrument in municipal finance. They are also uniquely capable of rippling through the housing market in exactly the way Mamdani claims to oppose. Owners of small apartment buildings do not absorb cost increases out of civic virtue. Co-op boards don’t shrug off higher levies as symbolic gestures. Costs get passed along where they can be. Where they can’t, maintenance gets deferred. Either way, renters feel it.

It is a strange approach for a mayor who built his brand on a rent freeze. Even in regulated markets, rising operating costs create pressure. Insurance goes up. Taxes go up. Financing tightens. The idea that rents will somehow remain untouched while property taxes jump by nearly double digits requires a level of magical thinking that would make even this idiot’s campaign rally blush.

And the politics are riskier than they appear. Many of the people who voted for Mamdani also own property—brownstones in Brooklyn, co-ops in Queens, small multifamily homes in the Bronx. They may support progressive goals in theory. They are probably, however, less enthusiastic about writing materially larger checks to City Hall in practice. The coalition that cheers bold rhetoric can fracture quickly when the bill arrives.

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Meanwhile, the wealthiest residents—the ones progressives often argue should shoulder more of the burden—are the most mobile. Florida and Texas have spent years positioning themselves as lower-tax alternatives. Some migration has already occurred. More importantly, the perception has taken hold that New York’s reflex, when faced with a budget gap, is to tax what it can reach.

That perception matters. Capital is cautious. Businesses consider long-term operating costs. High earners with flexibility do the math. A city that signals fiscal instability or punitive tax swings makes those calculations easier. Wealth doesn’t leave overnight in caravans, but it leaves incrementally. A family here. A fund there. A company’s next expansion somewhere else.

None of this solves the structural problem Mamdani says he is fighting. A nearly 10 percent property tax hike does not reform the inequities in the property tax system. It does not fundamentally restructure spending. It does not magically close a multibillion-dollar gap without consequences. It simply shifts pressure onto homeowners, landlords, and—inevitably—renters.

It’s true that New York City has survived worse than one mayor’s budget gambit. It survived the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. It survived waves of out-migration before. It will survive this. The question is not whether the city endures, but what it looks like after years of governing by threat and tax hike. If the answer to every shortfall is to squeeze the remaining tax base harder, how many people with the means to leave will decide they’ve had enough?

And if that exodus accelerates, who exactly will be left to fund the next round of bullshit socialist promises?

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PayPal shares were briefly halted due to volatility and are now up 9% after a Bloomberg report said the digital payments firm is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers, as the stock slid to a decade low. The report, based on unnamed sources, has not been confirmed by PayPal.

Interest in a PayPal takeover is in the early stages, according to people familiar with the matter. They say the company has met with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors.

The sources described one of the suitors as a “large rival” looking to purchase the entire digital payments firm, while others are only interested in certain PayPal assets.

Before the news hit, PayPal shares in New York were at 2017 lows (with a market capitalization of around $37 billion) and down more than 85% from the 2021 high of $291.48. Year to date, shares are down 30%.

Wall Street analysts are largely neutral on the stock, with 12 “Buys,” 31 “Holds,” and six “Sells.” The average 12-month price target is $50.08. 

PayPal was one of the pioneers of digital payments, but has been losing market share as consumers shift to alternatives like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Bloomberg notes a leadership shakeup of the firm is underway, with board chair Enrique Lores set to become president and CEO on March 1, following the ouster of Alex Chriss earlier this month. The latest earnings have disappointed, with quarter four profit and revenue missing estimates and signs of a continued slowdown in payment volume.

In a Monday televised speech on the occasion of Russia’s “Defender of the Fatherland Day,” President Vladimir Putin declared that the development of the nuclear triad “remains an absolute priority” for Russia, coming soon on the heels of the collapse of the New START nuclear treaty with the United States.

The nuclear triad serves as the ultimate guarantee of Russia’s security and allows the effective maintenance of strategic deterrence and the balance of power in the world, explained Putin, calling it “our absolute priority”. Countries like Russia, which are seen by the US either as rivals or even ‘rogue’ – are busy taking note of Iran now being threatened with regime change given it does not possess a nuclear deterrent. 

Putin further emphasized in the context of strategic deterrence that Russia will enhance the potential of its armed forces and improve their combat readiness and mobility – as well as maintaining the ability to operate under the most complex conditions.

He further pledged to accelerate the pace of research and development of advanced weapons and equipment for the military to ensure that they are in reliable hands, according to state media translation.

“The development of the nuclear triad, which guarantees Russia’s security and enables us to effectively ensure strategic deterrence and balance of power in the world remains.” —Putin

As for the US-Russia New START Nuclear Treaty, it officially expired without renewal on February 4. Since then Moscow has declared it will in good faith stick to the nuclear limits outlined in the now-expired arms control treaty, provided Washington does the same.

And yet there’s been relative quiet from the White House on the issue. For now it doesn’t seem the US has made such a reciprocal pledge, leaving the world in uncertain and uncharted territory.

Russia has also made clear that it has no intention of being “the first to take steps towards escalation” and expanding its warheads.

In early February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave insight into why the White House has let New START expire, echoing a complaint that goes all the way back to the first Trump administration.

🚨🇷🇺 Nuclear triad remains an absolute priority: Putin

Vladimir Putin’s Defender of the Fatherland Day address dropped the roadmap for Russia’s military future:

◾️Combat experience is being baked into modernization.
◾️Industrial base is running hot.
◾️Strategic forces stay on… pic.twitter.com/Kt4OlmHOwM

— Sputnik India (@Sputnik_India) February 23, 2026

“Obviously, the president’s been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,” Rubio said.

Authored by Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times,

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said he does not support President Donald Trump’s decision to send a hospital ship to Greenland.

“It’s going to be a no thank you from here,” according to a translation of Nielsen’s Facebook post on Feb. 22.

“President Trump’s idea to send an American hospital ship here to Greenland is noted. But we have a public health system where treatment is free for citizens. It’s a deliberate choice. And a basic part of our society. It’s not like that in the United States, where it costs money to go to the doctor.”

Nielsen said Greenland is “always open to dialogue and collaboration” but requested Trump “talk to us now instead of just coming up with more or less random outbursts on social media.”

It’s not clear which ship was sent.

The rejection came one day after Trump said on Truth Social that a hospital ship was on its way to the country.

“We are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there,” Trump shared in a Truth Social post on Feb. 21.

Trump said he worked with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who serves as special envoy to Greenland, on making the trip a reality.

“It’s on the way!!!” Trump added.

Trump did not say when the ship would arrive or what health issues crews on board are going to help treat.

The announcement was made hours after Denmark’s military said its arctic command forces evacuated a crew member of a U.S. submarine for urgent medical treatment.

“The crew member needed urgent medical treatment and has been transferred to the Greenlandic health authorities and the hospital in Nuuk,” the Danish Joint Arctic Command shared on its Facebook page Feb. 21.

Trump did not say if the crew member’s medical issue inspired him to act and deploy the ship to Greenland, which is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark that Trump has long suggested should be under control of the United States for strategic and national and global security reasons.

The Epoch Times contacted the White House and Landry for additional information but did not hear back by time of publication.