Tex's Place

WELCOME to The Corral! This is an open chat forum like REVEILLE, but for Sat and Sun.  Have a wonderful weekend, and please be civil! TEX

By Tim O'Brien This time of year, it’s not unusual for parents of younger elementary school kids to start having discussions of when their son or daughter will get wise to the reality of Santa Claus. At some point, one parent may say to another, “How old were you when you quit believing?”  That brings me to the same question, different myth. How old were you when you quit believing in man-made climate change? Or man-made global warming? Or man-made global cooling?  Before going any further, since we do have our share of lib readers, I want to make one thing absolutely clear to them before the fake misinterpretations happen. Conservatives don’t dispute that the client shifts day to day. That’s called “the weather.” And we don’t dispute that the planet’s climate isn’t constantly evolving. We are not Ice Age deniers.  But when you come out every presidential cycle and predict the end of the world in the next ten years (conveniently the time it takes for a run-up campaign...

By NAOMI NUSSBAUM Even as Israel faces the aftermath of a seven-front war, rising global antisemitism, and ongoing breaches of ceasefire agreements, we enter Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, a holiday built on the belief that miracles can rise from despair. At OneFamily, we have been witnesses to these miracles since 2001. We began nearly 25 years ago out of response to the Sbarro Restaurant bombing in Jerusalem on Aug. 9, 2001. Terrorists killed 16, including seven children and a pregnant woman, Shoshana Greenbaum from Passaic, N.J. The 31-year-old expectant mom was about to begin teaching at Yeshiva of North Jersey. Then came Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Families were torn apart, communities destroyed, and the sense of safety Israelis had spent generations building was shattered. The cruelty, torture, and terror of the hostage crisis — both for those murdered and for those who returned traumatized — will take decades to ...

By Hannah Nightingale A historical preservation group has sued President Donald Trump and other administration officials and agencies in an attempt to stop the  building  of the new, larger East Wing  ballroom  that has been planned. The demolition of the old East Wing has already taken place. The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, a nonprofit corporation that was chartered by Congress in 1949, filed the lawsuit on Friday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against Trump, the National Park Service (NPS), NPS Acting Director Jessica Bowron, White House and President’s Park Superintendent John Stanwich, the Department of the Interior, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, The General Services Administration (GSA), and GSA Acting Administrator Michael Rigas. The National Trust claimed that the administration demolished the old East Wing "without seeking approval from Congress; without requesting review and approval ...

By Ward Clark The Middle East has been a mess for over a thousand years now, and it sure doesn't look like things are getting any better. It's still one of the most unstable spots in the world. The latest illustration of this comes to us from Syria, where the nasty regime of the Assads is finally over - but things are still uncertain, and of course, the United States is involved in trying to hold a lid on the Islamic State terrorists operating in that country. On Saturday, we learned that a joint U.S./Syrian patrol, on a mission to counter Islamic State terrorists, was ambushed near the town of Palmyra. Several were wounded, some reportedly seriously, although  details are still sketchy . A senior U.S. official confirmed to Fox News there have been multiple injuries after American service members were ambushed  in Syria  on Saturday. The official added that some of the injuries were serious. Two local Syrian officials earlier told Reuters that a convoy of U.S. and Syr...

Allie Beth Stuckey explains why her family chose to ditch the man in the big, red hat. By BLAZETV STAFF Jesus is the reason for the season, but more often than not, it’s Santa who takes front and center stage. A 2,000-year-old baby offering an intangible gift just can’t compete with the big, red-suited, jolly man and his sleigh full of toys in the mind of a child. That’s one of several reasons  Allie Beth Stuckey  doesn’t do Santa with her three kids. On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie presents a compelling case for ditching the man in the red hat and putting Jesus back on the throne of Christmas where He belongs. Santa invites confusion While Allie acknowledges that Santa is a “Christian liberty issue,” meaning “we have freedom as Christians to disagree,” she feels personally convicted to forgo the tradition to avoid confusing her children. Santa “is a form of deceit,” she says. “We want our kids to trust us ... and it can cause this kind of dissona...

By Andrew McCarthy It is hard to fathom how much the media environment – especially the social media environment – has altered the coverage and public understanding of big legal cases over the past 30 years. The case of Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson, is a powerful illustration. In 1993, I ran the terrorism prosecution against Omar Abdel Rahman ("the Blind Sheikh") and members of his jihadist cell. They had bombed the World Trade Center then, in the aftermath, plotted what they anticipated would be simultaneous bombings of New York City landmarks – the UN complex, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters. Abdel Rahman himself was particularly interested in strikes against U.S. military installations. Naturally, some conspiracy theories were peddled about our case. Maybe it was an inside job by the FBI – a pretext to harass Muslims. Or maybe Saddam Hussein’s regime had orchestrated it. Maybe the Egyptian intelligence ...

By Alex Ashe In the whimsical yet cautionary world of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Veruca Salt storms through Willy Wonka’s factory like a spoiled brat on steroids, demanding golden geese, trained squirrels, and every shiny trinket that catches her eye. “I want it  now !” she screeches, her petulance sealing her fate down the garbage chute. Fast-forward to 2025 Washington, and one can’t help but see echoes of Veruca in Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG)—once the bleach-blonde firebrand of MAGA, now morphing into the “Blonde AOC,” trading principled conservatism for performative tantrums because President Trump didn’t hand her a Senate endorsement on a silver platter. Greene’s descent began in earnest this fall, when her ambitions for higher office collided with cold political reality. Polling at a dismal 12% for a Georgia Senate or gubernatorial run, she beseeched Trump for his golden touch. But Trump, ever the pragmatist, saw the writing...

Kids waste no time finding workarounds. Meanwhile Reddit is suing in hopes of overturning the ban. By JOSEPH MACKINNON The liberal-dominated Australian parliament passed an  amendment  to its online safety legislation last year, imposing age restrictions for certain social media platforms. As of Dec. 10, minors in the former penal colony are prohibited from using various platforms, including Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and YouTube — platforms that face potential fines exceeding $32 million should they fail to prevent kids from creating new accounts or from maintaining old accounts. Australian kids were quick, however, to find a workaround: distorting their faces to appear older. Numerous minors  revealed  to the Telegraph that within minutes of the ban going into effect, they were able to get past their country's new age-verification  technology  by frowning at the camera. Noah Jones, a 15-year-old boy from Sydney, indicated that he used his b...

By Matt Margolis For years, conservatives who dared question the safety of mRNA COVID vaccines found themselves silenced, censored, and mocked. Now, fresh research confirms what they've been saying all along: These shots can trigger severe heart damage. “Covid mRNA vaccines can cause heart damage by triggering immune cells to go on the attack, scientists have found,”  reports  The Telegraph. “More than 2,000 people in Britain suffered inflammation of the heart [myocarditis] or heart lining [pericarditis] following vaccination, with young men particularly vulnerable.” The majority of cardiac problems were caused by mRNA jabs, such as Pfizer and Moderna, which delivered a blueprint of the Covid spike protein to cells. Now Stanford University has found that the immune system can lock on to the foreign RNA from the vaccine, which triggers a fierce response and in some cases can inflame heart cells. It is likely to be a problem with other mRNA jabs, they warn. The Biden adminis...

By Rusty Weiss Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a stern warning to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) following a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration audit that uncovered over half of the state's non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses (CDLs) were improperly issued to illegal aliens. We repeat - over  half of them  went to people in this country illegally. Duffy made no bones about it, suggesting the audit's findings indicate a level of corruption beyond any simple mistake and accusing officials in the Empire State of "routinely" issuing CDLs to illegals. “When more than half of the licenses reviewed were issued illegally, it isn’t just a mistake — it is a dereliction of duty by state leadership,” Duffy said at a press conference on Friday. He gave Hochul an ultimatum—strip the illegal immigrant truckers of their licenses or lose millions in federal funding. Tens of millions. “Gov. [Kathy] Hochul must immediately revoke these illegally issued ...