Today is the first weekday since Friday night’s government shutdown, and pundits claim this is when it will start hurting (it was also shut just last Monday for Martin Luther King Day, and I don’t recall feeling any pain, but never mind.)

Side note on the government shutdown: in letting funding for the CHIP insurance program for poor children run out in favor of trying to force a DACA deal, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to draw a false equivalency by accusing Republicans of “pitting children against children.”

Democrats are holding up funding because they want to include legalizing the children of illegal immigrants who are on the DACA program without including the border security measures President Trump is demanding.

The Daily Caller reports that a California man suspected of being caught on video stabbing another man in the neck seven times at a supermarket is an illegal immigrant from Mexico with multiple criminal convictions including felony drug and weapons charges, and that he has been deported back to Mexico seven times since 2007.

The Labor Department just reported that last week’s unemployment claims dropped to the lowest level since 1973.

With his petulant tweetstorms and seemingly capricious changes of mind, President Trump makes his political foes suspect that he’s crazy. Even his political allies are kept perpetually off-balance by a leader who can seem not just mercurial but perplexingly incapable of maintaining a “presidential” approach to the most important job in the world.

Apple just became the latest (and biggest) company of many to react to the GOP tax cut bill.

To listen to the media, we might as well just save money by calling off the November elections and handing Congress to the Democrats, because they’ve already got it won (if they’ve forgotten how badly they misread the last election, YouTube is filling with compilations of their Election Night shock and grief that Republicans love to rewatch over and over.)

Over the weekend, a claim made headlines that polls show that this November, Democrats will definitely recapture the House and that Nancy Pelosi is a “lock” to become Speaker again. I assume this comes with the same 95% certainty guarantee as the prediction that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency.

There were four state-level special elections Tuesday, and the results carried some ominous warnings for Republicans not to take their majorities in the House and Senate for granted this November.

A movement is gaining steam in non-coastal counties of California to break away from the ultra-liberal strip that’s dominating (some say ruining) the Golden State and form a 51st state called New California.

It was 20 years ago today...Sgt. Pepper taught his band to play.

With the economy finally igniting after eight years of slow-to-no growth, Democrats are trying to give credit to Barack Obama’s policies (just as in the case of Jimmy Carter, the wonderful effects of Democrats’ policies only kick in a year or so after they are voted out of office, forever denying them the credit they deserve.)

Under intense questioning by Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Richard Blumenthal, a frustrated Secretary of Homeland Defense Kirstjen Nielsen testified under oath that she never heard President Trump use that offensive term...

You know those bad “Saturday Night Live” sketches that are so dumb and repetitive that they seem to drag on for nearly an hour? Well...

Over the weekend, the media continued their “bleep-storm” of outrage over what President Trump allegedly said about some nations from which we accept a lot of immigrants not exactly being paradises on Earth.

Sen. Jeff Flake is reportedly preparing a speech to the Senate that will compare President Trump’s “attacks” on the press, such as calling them an “enemy of the people,” to the actions of bloody Russian communist dictator Joseph Stalin. So I thought I’d pitch in and give him a little help with his research.

In an interview this week, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards touted the group’s outreach to teens via text chat services, promotional merchandise sold on Etsy.com, and training teens to be public speakers and pro-choice advocates.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi isn’t backing down from her claim that the Republican tax cut is “Armageddon” and “the worst bill Congress ever passed.”

One of the most effective ways of preventing illegal immigration has always been to target the employers – people are less likely to come here illegally if there aren’t ready jobs for them.

Say what you like about President Trump, but he doesn’t let anyone get too comfortable in their assumptions. For instance, just as his critics were settling into a nice liberal-bubble bath to read that ludicrous new book that confirms all their cherished fantasies about him being a dementia-stricken, moronic grandpa who can’t understand simple concepts or remember his friends’ names, he dumped a big load of freezing cognitive dissonance in their bath water.

It’s been said that one of the greatest tools of tax-and-spend politicians is withholding, because they get to take your money out of your paycheck before you see it, so you don’t realize how much taxes are costing you.

The next big battle over immigration looks to be not illegal immigration but sending back foreign nationals who are in America on the TPS program (“temporary protected status”).

I don’t want to waste too much time on the nonsensical TDS fantasy novel “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff (or as writer Judi McLeod dubbed him, “Wolfman Hack.”) But the media can’t stop talking about it. For instance, George Stephanopoulos kept asking our UN Ambassador Nikki Haley about that book instead of Iran, even after she said she hadn’t read it and had no intention of doing so and called it a “new low” for lying to obtain money and power.

NBC, Hollywood and some liberals already have Oprah Winfrey elected President in their heads, but Oprah might already be feeling some reservations after getting a taste of what it’s like to stick your neck out in the political arena. Like the photos at this link that were already circulating before the final credits even ran at the Golden Globes.