The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Monday, February 16, 2026
Welcome to the St. Patrick’s Day HFR!
We start our celebration with a depiction of Ireland’s Coat of Arms, on which is Ireland’s national symbol, Boru’s Harp, named for Ireland’s national hero Brian Boru (941-1016), which resides at Trinity College in Dublin and is on the label of every bottle of Guinness.
Take some time today to read about Brian Boru in TTP’s nutshell history of Ireland, Beyond the Pale (August 2006). It will give you a special appreciation of the heroism of the Irish people.
And take a moment to enjoy Ronald Reagan’s Favorite Irish Joke in the TTP Humor File today.
Oh, yes, many TTPers with Irish ancestry or wish they had have asked me if I would take them on a exploration of the coolest places in Ireland. How about sometime this summer? Let me know – jack@tothepointnews.com.
OK – time for a pint of Guinness as we delve into the week. Here we go…
I lived in Hawaii once for three years. Growing up in Southern California, I had never experienced racism before. Thus it was shock to me to be hated for the color of my skin. Really hated for being a haole (how-lee).
That was in 1971. Barack Obama was ten years old attending Punahou School in Honolulu, where he was born and raised. Other than the 2½ years he spent in Indonesia, he lived his formative years (until he was 18 and left for college) within and a part of the Hawaiian culture of haole-hatred.
As did Derrick Kahala Watson – born in Honolulu, went to Kamehameha School for ethnic Hawaiians, graduated from Harvard Law School in the same class (1991) as his friend Barack Obama. In 2012 he made local headlines: Native Hawaiian Selection Made for Federal Judge.
On Monday (3/14), Obama – who appointed his law school friend to that federal judgeship – was in Honolulu. On Wednesday (3/15), that friend, Derrick Kahala, issued the most outrageously lawless, unconstitutional ruling in the history of the federal judiciary. Did Obama ask Kahala to do this? Ask the NSA guys who tape their calls.
In any regard, Kahala seized his opportunity to act on the haole-hatred he grew up with by targeting America’s Chief Haole with his ruling. For as you’ve by now guessed, haole means someone with white skin.
Which brings us to Iowa Congressman Steve King and his now-infamous tweet (see above) on Saturday (3/11) that “prompted outrage” by libtards everywhere.
The revelation making the rounds again about Obama, how he sneaked through $221 million to his Palestinian terrorist friends during the last hours of his presidency, makes it elaborately clear that he was always in it for himself and for his pals.
For eight years Israel was betrayed and America was duped by a charmer.
There are movies about such men -- Tony Curtis in “The Great Impostor,” or Matt Damon in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” -- about men skilled in the art of deception. Through guile, a ready smile, a quick tongue, they charm their way up the ladder from one bamboozled household to the next.
Their papers are never in order, but they manage. They manage to reach the top. Both Curtis (whose film was based on a true story) and Damon did not know a thing about medicine or airplanes but they managed to run hospitals and to fake it as pilots. They got caught. But before that they had everybody fooled.
Sound familiar? Surely not to Progressives who wanted to be fooled or didn’t really care. So long as Obama was their choice he could do no wrong.
But to the rest of America, and the world, the damage bitterly lives on.
On three separate occasions since 2013, the US Federal Reserve sent shock waves through the global financial system when it tried to tighten monetary policy, and each time it was forced into partial retreat to halt the mayhem.
Over recent months the Federal Open Market Committee has been careful to take the global pulse before acting. It now hopes the coast is clear. Yesterday's (3/15) quarter point rise in the federal funds rate to 1% has been so loudly signaled in advance that investors have already adjusted.
Emerging markets seem better prepared, so far able to shrug it off. China has restored confidence in its exchange rate regime. Capital flight appears to be under control. Europe's shift towards bond tapering reduces the risk of a rocketing dollar. "We're not overly worried about downside shocks," said Janet Yellen, the Fed chairman.
Yet nobody really knows whether the world can handle a total of six rate rises over the course of 2017 and 2018 as sketched in the Fed's 'dot plots' scenario.
The recent (3/03) attack on a BBC television crew in Hunan province, China, reveals once again the Communist Party of China’s brazen thuggery and out-of-control bullying.
To physically attack a major foreign media crew, smashing their equipment, and then to force them to sign a confession is the most public example of what has been apparent for several years: Xi Jinping’s regime behaves more like gangsters than government.
Yet just as the assault on the BBC helps highlight China’s aggressively repressive behavior toward anyone, Chinese or foreigner, deemed to dissent or threaten the regime’s interests, it is only the tip of the iceberg.
If government-backed thugs can behave that way toward the international media, imagine how much worse it is for Chinese people?
Since he became president, Xi has presided over a dramatic deterioration in human rights over the past four years:
Are you shocked that the Russians might have had an interest in who won the U.S. presidential election?
Nations have always had an interest in who rules the nations they deal with — both opponents and friends — and that they often try to influence the outcomes should come as no surprise.
Mr. Putin had a clear-cut Russian national interest in discouraging oil and gas fracking in the United States and elsewhere. The Russian economy and budget are highly dependent on foreign oil and gas sales — and high oil prices. Increases in the world supply of oil and gas depress the prices of these commodities.
So it is completely rational for the Russians to do whatever they can to discourage production by others, including the U.S. If you follow the money they spent to do this, where do you think it leads to?
This just might be the most fun HFR ever. There’s also a part that could be the scariest. Might as well enjoy ourselves first.
Let’s start with the prediction in the Inaugural Day HFR of January 20: “Melania looked unbelievably stunning. She will now rapidly become the most glamorous and idolized woman on earth.”
This week we could see this becoming true, only far more so. Yesterday, Fox News reported: “Melania Trump’s Approval Ratings on the Rise.” They would be far larger except for the deranged Trump-hatred of Moonbat Democrats.
The poll was taken a week ago. On Wednesday (3/08), the First Lady hosted a White House luncheon in celebration of International Women’s Day. A quote of hers at the event has quickly gone viral across the planet:
“As an immigrant myself, having grown up in a communist society, I know all too well the value and importance of freedom and equal opportunity. Ideas upon which this great nation was founded and has continued to strive towards throughout its history.”
Her beauty and elegance are breathtaking. Yet that is only on the surface. There is something far deeper. Look at this picture of her taken at the luncheon. Look into her eyes.
Her eyes reveal the beauty of her soul. Her eyes proclaim a serene joyousness in being alive, in being human, in being a woman, in being who she is. There are no doubts or fears or qualms in those eyes. There is no anger – there is only love and happiness.
In those eyes you can see why First Lady Melania Trump will become genuinely beloved by the American people and by people all over the world.
Will her husband? That may seem impossible now, given that Democrats and their Fake News minions really are as wacko as depicted above. Yet that too began to change this week.
Here we go with the most fun, the most illuminating, and certainly the longest HFR ever.
Does President Trump read the HFR – and did he read what it said last Friday (03/03)?
“Indicting and prosecuting to the full extent of the law with the possibility of years in prison is the only way to stop Deep State-Democrat-Fake News Media Treason.
This needs to start at the top. And at the top is not Chuckie Schumer, the editors of the Washington Post, nor the CIA leakers known to the FBI. At the top is Former President Barack Obama.”
For at 5:30am Saturday morning (03/04) he tweeted just what the HFR advocated the day before. The response was hysterical. After all, no one – no one – has the huevos to take on the entire Deep State-Democrat-Media Complex, right? Exactly wrong – not with Donald J. Trump. Big mistake.
For no one but Trump would have the chromium-vanadium steel cojones to take on the Deep State by going straight for its jugular, right for the throat of its emperor. It’s like Alexander going straight for Darius at Gaugamela.
Was former secretary of labor and assistant attorney general Tom Perez’s victory over Cong. Keith Ellison in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democrat National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical anti-Semitic leftists in the party?
That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory. But how is that possible when Perez appointed the former Nation of Islam spokesman to serve as deputy DNC chairman as soon as his own victory was announced?
Perez is ready to cooperate with Ellison because the two men have the same ideological worldview and the same vision for the Democrat Party. As Mother Jones explained, “There’s truly not much ideological distance between the two.”
Far from being a victory for the centrist forces in the party, Perez’s win marks the solidification of the Far Left’s control over the party of Harry Truman.
The OPEC oil cartel – and Putin’s Russia – are waking up to an unpleasant surprise. Shale output from the Permian Basin in Texas is expanding faster than the world thought humanly possible.
The scale threatens to neutralize output cuts agreed by Saudi Arabia and a Russian-led bloc last November, and ultimately threatens break their strategic lockhold on the global crude market for a generation.
"People just don't seem to realize how big the Permian is. It will eventually pass the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, and that is the biggest in the world," said Scott Sheffield, founder of Pioneer Natural Resources and acclaimed 'King of the Permian'.
Fresh science broadly confirms the once-outlandish claims of Mr. Sheffield and the veteran wildcatters. Consultants IHS have tripled their estimate of ultimate recoverable resources in the Permian to 104bn barrels – recoverable now due to astonishingly rapid advances in American fracking technology.
Scientists at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, said last week that they had edited the genomes of pigs, rendering them immune to a dangerous virus. The announcement is extraordinary precisely because it sounds almost routine these days.
Gene editing is already starting to save the lives of human cancer patients and generate healthier crops. Yet the battle to ensure it gains favor with public opinion must be urgently addressed. The usual suspects are already trying to blacken its name.
With the new gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9, the Roslin scientists sliced out a short section from this gene in the fertilized egg of a pig. They then grew pigs from these eggs that turned out healthy and entirely normal in every way, including the functioning of the gene, but which denied the virus entry to the cell.
Cue an outbreak of horror about the risks of (cliché alert) designer babies. One newspaper has been blathering about “Frankenstein pigs.” But a similar technique is already being used to treat leukemia in children: are they Frankenstein kids?
What will be the public reaction to the release of gene-edited animals or plants? Bring it on and cure us, or how dare you try to poison us? We have been here before, twice.
What changes in government policy should be made to achieve an annual average of 4 percent economic growth?
That is the question President Trump and his team should be asking, if they are serious about achieving a lower deficit while increasing spending on defense and the infrastructure.
The Congressional Budget Office and many private economists are forecasting only a little over 2 percent growth (a bit higher than the recent past), and the president has said he hopes to achieve 3 percent — which is too little for the president to achieve his goals.
Is 4 percent growth per year achievable? An average of more than 4 percent growth was achieved during the last seven years of the Reagan administration and during the last term of the Clinton administration.
Like now, in both cases, many in the economic and political establishment claimed that such growth rates were not possible. They were wrong then and are now. Here is why 4 percent is possible and how to achieve it.
You just started work for an advertising agency and your boss has given you your first assignment: come up with an ad for Colgate dental floss.
“Show me what you’ve got,” he says. “I want something ingeniously clever,” he says. For dental floss??
You retreat to your desk in a panic, wondering how many fingers of Famous Grouse would it take to think of anything clever about dental floss. And all you’ve got is coffee and plain water, no FG. You stare at your computer screen.
After a while, you come up with three photos, each of a smiling couple. You entitle the ad What Do You See? At the bottom, the ad says, “Colgate Dental Floss – for if you don’t floss, it’s the only thing people will notice!”
You show it to your boss. He studies the three photos, puzzled. “What’s so clever about this?” he asks dismissively. “Three guys with food in their teeth, so what?” Quietly, you request he look at the pictures again:
I have a confessions after the Fake News Sessions Non-Scandal breaking yesterday (03/02). First, I was obviously wrong in Trump Triumphant the day before (03/01) for thinking there were grown-up adults among the Dems, in contrast to psychos like Maxine Waters, who would now abandon their delusions and recognize the reality of Trump’s Presidency.
No such luck. Chuck Schumer and all his ilk are just as treasonously insane as Maxine. The good news is that, by contrast to his Pub predecessor who never fought back, we have a president who will.
Indicting and prosecuting to the full extent of the law with the possibility of years in prison is the only way to stop Deep State-Democrat-Fake News Media Treason.
This needs to start at the top. And at the top is not Chuckie Schumer, the editors of the Washington Post, nor the CIA leakers known to the FBI. At the top is Former President Barack Obama.
