You might’ve forgot the journey ends, you’ve closed your tabs and you’ve made your friends …
NEW: Congress has until the end of Friday to reach a deal on DHS funding, and Republicans are calling some Dem demands non-starters. Now, some Dems are worried that ICE bodycams would be used to surveil anti-ICE protesters, and they want restrictions on how the cams can be used. pic.twitter.com/KnF4TnDd20
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 9, 2026
Ed: I wondered when Democrats would regret the body-cam demand. Amusingly, this demand more or less backfired on progressives after the wide adoption that took place in response to the Ferguson shooting. It makes false narratives like “hands up don’t shoot” more difficult to maintain. David will have more on this in the morning, so stay tuned.
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Mediaite: Bad Bunny has inexplicably scrubbed all of his Instagram posts in the hours since his Super Bowl Halftime Show performance in California on Sunday evening.
Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, deleted his profile picture, the people he follows, and all his content on the Meta platform sometime after the game.
His reasons for doing so has not yet been revealed, but People magazine has speculated it could be related to a “big” announcement, or in response to backlash from the MAGA crowd — including President Donald Trump himself — over his performance.
Ed: I’m sure it’s not the criticism from Trump. Martinez Ocasio probably would repost those as badges of honor. I wonder if there are legal issues with the show unrelated to the criticisms. Or perhaps something else is happening. Let’s see if the NFL suddenly needs some distance. Or maybe it’s just this …
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lol cooked rabbit pic.twitter.com/kYvuTv51vj
— 𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑜𝑖𝑠 (@chiIIum) February 9, 2026
Ed: That was early in the Twitter voting. By 3 pm ET, with six hours left to go, Kid Rock was still ahead 65/35. To be honest, though, how could anyone tell? Is there anyone who watched enough of both to discern the question? Still, it’s interesting to see the (highly unscientific) results on X/Twitter.
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Free Beacon: More alarmingly, in his new book, the writer Chuck Klosterman predicts the Reaper will soon come for all of football, despite its wild popularity. “Football is doomed,” writes Klosterman, a self-described huge fan of the sport, and, in the future, people “are going to misunderstand why it once mattered as much as it did.” So as you mash your guacamole, ice your beers, and broil your wings in preparation for the big event, be forewarned: America’s favorite game is in trouble. …
But the crux of the matter remains the game’s future, or lack thereof. Klosterman surveys the data on CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to the micro-concussions football players suffer, and discerns therein the roots of the game’s undoing. “Should strangers be allowed to do very dangerous, very popular things?” he wonders. And while he answers the question in the affirmative, he’s uncertain suburban moms in the future will feel the same when it comes to their own kids. Coupling the withering of Pop Warner and high school football with the rapid deterioration of the college game—the proliferation of name, image, and likeness contracts; the destruction of traditional conferences; a transfer portal undermining team integrity—Klosterman foresees a sport whose future talent pool will soon be circling the drain, sinking the game’s culture along with it. “It will become obvious,” he predicts, “that football’s century of supremacy, originally built off the game’s ability to reflect and simulate society, had sustained itself through illusory means.”
Ed: The NFL already sees the risk. They are setting up the monkeybranch to flag football, right now by using it for their Pro Bowl competitions. The tell on this is that the game itself is so risky that the Pro Bowl participants don’t want to risk the serious injuries that come from an additional game in a season, even when being chosen for it as an All Star. The Los Angeles Olympics will also have flag football as a medal sport, the first time American football has been part of the quadrennial competitions. I’d bet within a decade that the league itself will begin a transition to the lower-impact version of the sport as a means to keep recruitment in place.
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This is so mean I wish I typed it. https://t.co/m1myaRQiAG
— alexandriabrown (@alexthechick) February 9, 2026
Ed: This is hilarious, but also unfair. The game was competitive almost to the end. People are complaining about the lack of offense in the first half, but that’s because both defenses were so effective. Seattle’s talent advantages finally broke through in the second half, but the Pats never quit. (It’s still funny, though!)
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Power Line: Democrats in Minnesota have gone all-in on an illegal-immigrant-based economy. The more people (legal or otherwise) present in the state who are dependent on government benefits means bigger budgets for governments and more power to the Democrats who control those budgets.
To that end, public schools in Minnesota have sued the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security in an effort to kick ICE out of the state (File No. 26-cv-1023). It’s one of many such lawsuits filed by Democrats and Democrat-controlled institutions.
The Star Tribune reports,
Because the money to pay teachers, counselors, bus drivers and principals is tied to attendance, officials fear prolonged absences by students in hiding will lead to declining state funding for schools.
I hate to tell the schools, but many of those students are not “in hiding,” but have departed back to their home countries, never to return. A rude awakening awaits the new school year in the autumn.
Ed: That’s only one of the economic incentives. The cheaper, gray-market labor force helps keep wage growth down, boosting key industries (and, on the flip side, keeping consumer prices down to a degree). Landlords can charge higher rents while demand soars; those rent prices will begin retreating soon, and that will ruin some investors who got into that market at peak demand.
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🚨 HOLY CRAP! The Trump admin just seized ANOTHER Russian shadow fleet tanker trying to evade our blockade
“It ran, and we followed…You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us.”
Welcome, adversaries — to the TRUMP DOCTRINE 🇺🇸🔥 pic.twitter.com/HBZZL14BqX
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) February 9, 2026
Ed: This time, it’s the Aquila II, which is ‘affiliated’ with the company Sunne Co Ltd, which has helped traffic Russian oil exports in evasion of US sanctions. This appears to be the first seizure in the past month, but it’s at least the 16th tanker seized by the US. This time, the US chased the tanker into the Indian Ocean before finally capturing it, after it left Venezuela when Nicolas Maduro was taken by the US.
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University of Houston, Hobby School of Public Affairs: In the March 2026 Republican Texas U.S. Senate primary, 38% of likely voters intend to vote for KenPaxton, 31% for John Cornyn, 17% for Wesley Hunt and 2% for other candidates, with 12% undecided. In three hypothetical May 2026 primary runoffs featuring different pairs of these three candidates, Paxton holds a 51% to 40% advantage over Cornyn and a 56% to 33% advantage over Hunt, whileCornyn holds a 46% to 39% lead over Hunt, with 9%, 11% and 15% of the likely voters undecided, respectively. …
In the March 2026 Democratic Texas U.S. Senate primary, 47% of likely voters intend to vote forJasmine Crockett, 39% for James Talarico and 2% for Ahmad Hassan, with 12% undecided. …
Overall, the size of the Republican lead in these six hypothetical races ranges very narrowly from a highof 4% (Hunt vs. Talarico) to a low of 1% (Cornyn vs. Talarico), suggesting that, at least at the presenttime (and prior to the fall campaign), there is little difference between the respective Republican andDemocratic candidates in regard to their performance in November.
Ed: The general-election head-to-head numbers are way off. Still, it shows that pretty much any Republican can beat Crockett or Talarico. The GOP primary numbers are more interesting, as Cornyn seems to be in real trouble. That also is the impression left by RCP’s aggregate polling numbers, which shows a much closer three-way race.
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Top Zohran Mamdani advisor Drashti Brahmbhatt has been a longtime and ferocious critic of Israel and Jewish people — with a trail of deleted X posts a mile long as well
Including some of the most notable here for the record: pic.twitter.com/EiGJQ8BnSI
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 9, 2026
Ed: Just remember that the mainstream establishment of the Democrat Party endorsed Mamdani and helped propel him into power. Follow Levine’s whole thread. (Via Twitchy)
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Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO: I love Peggy Noonan. I love her writing. I love the speeches she wrote for Ronald Reagan and others. I met her once — she won’t remember! — and she was lovely in person, too. But I’m going to have to disagree with her on this one. “Something bad” has already happened. Lots of something bads, in fact. In the last decade alone, we have had the Brett Kavanaugh witch hunt, Russiagate, Covid, the insanity of the summer of George Floyd, and the coverup of President Biden’s senility, and in each of those cases, the media — including the Washington Post — have disgraced themselves.
Noonan gestures at this early on, writing:
I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself.
This, precisely, is where I dissent. The press — and the Post specifically — did not “wobble” during Covid or George Floyd. It proved itself completely unfit for purpose. It did not provide “reliable information”; it became an organ of propaganda. It did not check the hysterics among us; it amplified them. It did not question the transient judgments of the establishment; it set them on a pedestal and declared them to be synonymous with Science and Democracy. If journalism is “getting the information,” then, during those crucial episodes at least, the Washington Post was not journalism.
Ed: Part of the reason for America’s dysfunctional polarization is that the Protection Racket Media sold out to the progressive elite and have been acting as their propaganda organ for decades.
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If you can’t represent your country with pride because you’re too ashamed of your fellow citizens, those condemned to suffer the consequences of your elitist pieties, maybe stay home.
My latest: America’s Olympic athletes are ashamed of their fellow citizens. Well, it’s mutual. pic.twitter.com/0CWXGVnxPe
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) February 9, 2026
Ed: Same with the NFL.
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