The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
In the news this week:
*To the consternation of Democrats, Never Trumpers and the Lying Swine, President Trump did NOT order a military strike against Iran, but at the same time scared the mullahs (spitless).
*The president formally announced his campaign for re-election before by far the largest crowd in the history of American politics.
The overflow for the event Tuesday (6/18) was larger than all the “crowds” to date for all the Dem presidential candidates combined.
*The head of a sex cult tied to prominent Democrats was convicted on charges likely to put him away for life.
*On the eve of the first Democrat “debates,” Gaffetastic Sleepy Creepy Joe Biden stepped in it yet again.
There’s more news, mostly good news. Let’s get to it.
For some time now, I have been watching with growing concern the increasing viciousness of the Left attacking any conservative website that attracts their attention and ire.
Once that happens, not only is the site ruined but those who run the site are personally demonized, with the Left determined to ruin their lives. This is only going to get worse and more demented as we approach and enter the coming election campaign. Any pro-Trump site will be targeted and diabolically so.
So we are going to be proactive and preempt this before it happens to us. Here is what we are going to do.
*Close down the TTP Facebook and Twitter pages. These are the two primary culprits in conservative demonization via social media. We’re out. We will closing them by June 30.
*Discontinue the Free List. There are thousands there, so many with made-up spam names I can’t count them. Our article alerts are going out to far too many people we don’t know, and it’s now too dangerous to do so.
I will be sending out an email alert to the Free List to notify them that if they want to get TTP they are welcome to subscribe. However, the Free List will terminate on June 30.
*Discontinue article sharing. There are members who are sending out our articles, even the HFR, to hundreds of people who are on their mailing list each week. This again is now too dangerous to continue. TTP will now be Members Only as it was intended to be.
*Put a Login Page in front of the Home Page for Members to enter their username/password, with an automatic Password Reset and Contact Us (i.e., Miko) links if there is a problem. Once Members do this, up comes the real home page as usual for them – without having to login again, so the Member Menu will show them logged in.
This will take effect on Sunday June 30 so everyone will have had adequate notice. After that date, no one will be able to access the TTP Home Page without logging in as a Member first.Hope this is all clear. We must do this proactively to protect TTP and its Members. Thanks…. Jack
Welcome to the Door to Hell. Otherwise known as the Darvaza Gas Crater in the Kara Kum Desert of Turkmenistan.
Possessing one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, when Turkmenistan was part of the Soviet Union in 1971, Soviet engineers discovered a massive gas pocket in the Kara Kum. The drilling rig collapsed into a huge cavern 230 feet wide, releasing gas into the air. The engineers ignited it, expecting the gas to burn off in a matter of days.
The gas in the crater is still burning to this day, 48 years later – as you can see. I took the picture above earlier this month.
It’s a memorable experience, driving for hours across an empty desert wasteland after crossing the border from Uzbekistan, and suddenly there it is.
The twenty thousand people in the arena, along with the thousands of people outside watching on jumbo screens were all on the same page: He has been a great President these past two and a half years and they want more of the same.
The crowd was excited, happy, and phenomenally supportive of the President, much to the chagrin of the Angry Left. And boy are they angry.
Their anger is why Trump's rally last night in Orlando, if they deigned to watch, will have left them quivering in their boots with shock. Most probably did not watch, like the scene in Rocky when Apollo Creed is too busy to look at the video of Rocky in the meat locker when his trainer tries to get him to pay attention.
Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention.
Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.
Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.
One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying porcelain shards.
But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,” but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be heretical and deserving of censure and worse.
The media outrage is itself outrageous.
President Trump’s renewed pledge to deport huge numbers of illegal aliens is inspiring anger, but it's hardly righteous.
If, as a Homeland Security adviser has explained, the targets of Trump’s deportation plans will be those illegal aliens who have failed to show for their assigned court hearings, then Trump is morally, ethically, and legally justified in deporting them.
The tut-tutting chorus might as well spare us their faux moral histrionics.
The aliens Trump is targeting are people who have broken American law not once but twice.
I left Los Angeles for Nashville slightly over a year ago. When I call friends back in my former home (for 50 years), most of them tell me I got out just in time.
Actually, they're wrong. I should have gotten out ten or even fifteen years before. The handwriting was on the wall. "California dreamin'," pace Mama Cass, "was no longer a ray-al-it-tee." It hasn't been for a long time.
Now everybody knows about the 36,000 homeless on the streets of LA, over 60,000 in the county, replete with human feces and syringes littering the sidewalks, along with rats, typhus and even rumors of bubonic plague.
And those figures are what we're told. The real numbers could be three or four times the number. Why are they here?
The saga of Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has lurched from one embarrassing episode to another.
The vessel (technically classified as a “heavy aircraft cruiser” to be able to adhere to Montreux Convention restrictions on aircraft carriers passing through the Turkish Straits) is currently undergoing repairs and retrofitting .It will not be replaced with a more modern carrier for at least another 15 years—and quite possibly never.
The situation brings to mind Richard Hough’s classic 1958 study, The Fleet That Had to Die, about the failure and destruction of the Russian naval fleet in 1905 at the hands of the Japanese. Like that long-ago event, which culminated in the disaster at the Tsushima Straits, the current history is replete with bold promises of breakthroughs but marred by malfeasance, corruption and incompetence.
Not only does all this highlight Russia’s decline as a naval power, it also underscores the problematic natures of the Russian defense establishment and political system.
Mankind’s penchant for hoaxes goes back at least as far as recorded history. Some hoaxes are harmless and funny, but others do great damage, including causing massive loss of life.
Among the harmless and funny was the “Naked Came the Stranger” hoax back in 1969. The book spent 13 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The hoax was soon revealed. The nation got a good laugh, and no harm was done.
This is in contrast to the two-year “Russian collusion hoax,” which has been very costly to the country. This hoax was to get rid of the nation’s duly elected president, by whatever means necessary. The details of who did what will be revealed by prosecutors over the next few months.
Yet even that pales in comparison to the biggest hoax of all time.
Our POTUS started his birthday off right this morning on Fox and Friends, by applying the F word to Nervous Nancy Pelosi – the F word that she and the Democrat Party need to be described with at every opportunity: Fascist.
Responding to Pelosi’s latest unhinged rant against him last night, accusing him of a “criminal cover-up” with no evidence whatever, the President said Pelosi “ought to be ashamed of herself – it’s a disgrace… it’s a fascist statement.”
Exactly. Inside “Democrat” Pelosi is a fascist screaming to get out. Inside every Democrat mediocrity running for president in 2020 is a fascist screaming to get out. It’s not hidden on the inside for ilk like Occasional-Cortex or Ilhan Omar – they’re full frontal fascist in open daylight.
While they claim to be “democratic socialists,” we need to demand ubiquitously they be labeled “democratic fascists” – while reminding everyone what that means: you can vote your way into fascism, but you have to shoot your way out.
Okay, we’re off on another chock-full HFR. We start with what’s called The Trump Curse, and it struck last night in Oakland, California, providing the President with an early birthday present.
If it’s true that “natural right is dynamite,” as political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote, then Justice Clarence Thomas just went nuclear on the abortion debate.
While Thomas’s concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood (5/28)has received considerable commentary, his deepening of the judicial and, hence, the political debate over abortion demands further elaboration. His reply to the leading threat to the principles of the Declaration of Independence is his latest attempt in a career of restoring its authority.
The ugly nakedness of the eugenics dogma, with its attendant euphemisms, stands exposed in Thomas’s explanation of Roe. No longer can credible critics of the court turn away from the monstrosity and focus on federalism and substantive due process clause interpretation issues.
The new, politicized abortion goes to the core of American political principles and the abiding integrity of the Declaration of Independence. Here’s how deeply the Thomas charge cuts:
One of the media and beltway orthodoxies we constantly hear is that just a few bad apples under James Comey at the FBI explain why so many FBI elites have been fired, resigned, reassigned, demoted, or retired — or just left for unexplained reasons.
In short, in about every growing scandal of the past two years — FISA, illegal leaking, spying on a presidential candidate, lying under oath, obstructing justice — someone in the FBI is involved.
In sum, why did so many top FBI officials, some with long experience in the FBI, exhibit such bad judgment and display such unethical behavior, characterized by arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that they were above both the law and the Constitution itself?
Were they really just rogue agents, lawyers, and administrators -- or are they emblematic of an FBI culture sorely gone wrong?
Mark Levin appeared at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California last Saturday night (6/08).
The event was a celebration of his new, bestselling book, Unfreedom of the Press. It was a glorious evening. The auditorium was packed with several thousand fans with an overflow crowd in another room. Levin delivered not a speech but a conversation.
John Heubusch, the director of the Reagan Library introduced Levin then the two of them sat down. Heubusch asked questions and Levin answered in his usual inimitable fashion. The crowd loved it.
But as we were all sitting in that spectacular library in California, the state of our state was the initial topic of discussion. How did this state, once the envy of all others, become the pathetic, indebted Third World loser state it is today? The answer is simple, single-party Democrat rule.
