Hi, Gang. Today's Monday, Aug. 3, 2026—watermelon, nuts, and hair gloss all sharing a calendar square, because that's apparently how August wants to start the week.
My calendar says it's Watermelon Day, Grab Some Nuts Day, Georgia Day, Hair Gloss Day, Black Women's Equal Pay Day, Night Out Day, Clean Your Floors Day, and Cloves Syndrome Awareness Day. Eat some watermelon, grab a handful of nuts, and mop your floors before your neighbors show up for Night Out—priorities, people.
Today In History:
1492: Christopher Columbus sets sail from Palos, Spain, with three ships and 90 men, hoping to find a western route to Asia.
1807: Former Vice President Aaron Burr goes on trial for treason in Richmond, Va.; he's acquitted less than a month later.
1863: The first thoroughbred horse races take place at what becomes Saratoga Race Course in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
1900: Harvey Firestone founds the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio.
1914: Germany declares war on France, two days after declaring war on Russia, dragging Europe fully into World War I.
1923: Vice President Calvin Coolidge is sworn in as the 30th president hours after Warren Harding's sudden death.
1936: Jesse Owens wins the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, taking the 100-meter sprint under Hitler's disapproving gaze.
1943: Gen. George S. Patton slaps a hospitalized private in Sicily, accusing him of cowardice—an episode that later forces Eisenhower to order him to apologize.
1946: The world's first theme park, Santa Claus Land, opens its doors in Santa Claus, Indiana.
1960: Niger gains independence from France, with Hamani Diori becoming its first president.
2004: The Statue of Liberty's pedestal reopens to visitors for the first time since being closed after the September 11 attacks.
2005: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes office as the sixth president of Iran.
Birthdays Today Include: Martin Sheen, actor (Apocalypse Now, The West Wing); Tom Brady, NFL quarterback; Martha Stewart, lifestyle entrepreneur; John Landis, director (Animal House, The Blues Brothers); James Hetfield, guitarist Metallica; Evangeline Lilly, actress (Lost); Isaiah Washington, actor (Grey's Anatomy); Ed Roland, singer from Collective Soul; Michael Ealy, actor (Barbershop).
If today's your birthday too, happy birthday!
Before we begin, I want to give a shout-out to Dennis Prager, whose birthday I neglected to mention; it was yesterday. I feel bad about that. Somehow it didn't end up in my calendar. God keep you, sir.
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My old online friend Ed Morrissey, writing at our sister publication TownHall back in 2008, is where we begin today. Alas, that particular column has long since rotated into the digital void, but does it lay it out better than most. From my archive:
Because, remember: it's selfish to think that you can distribute the wealth you earned more efficiently and intelligently than Obama and his small, elite group of policymakers. Why, look how well the government performed when it decided it knew better how to grant mortgages than the lenders themselves.
Here's the fun part: nothing has changed. Not one thing. Swap out the names, adjust for inflation, and you could run that paragraph today without touching a word. Every single policy Democrats propose still traces back to the same load-bearing delusion: some government committee, somewhere, knows what to do with your paycheck better than you do. Every. Single. Time.
Take retirement as an example: The conservative position, unchanged since forever: you and I can plan our own futures better than Washington can. The Democrat position, equally unchanged: government is the only acceptable vehicle, full stop, no privatization, no exceptions, no thank you for asking. They want you to trust Washington to guarantee your retirement income—which requires ignoring the minor detail that when government meddling tanks the economy, which it does with the reliability of a Swiss watch, the dollars sitting in that government account become as valuable as wet confetti. (See: inflation rates during the reign of Biden, still a fresh bruise for anyone who bought groceries during it.)
And here's where the argument collapses into farce: when Democrats want to torpedo privatized retirement accounts, they point at the Wall Street collapse like it's Exhibit A, proving you can't be trusted with your own money. Except (and this part never makes it into the talking points) they're the ones who caused that collapse, through precisely the kind of government meddling Morrissey just described. So strip away the sanctimony and what you're left with is: "Don't take your retirement out of our hands, because we might wreck the private economy again while buying your vote with it." Wow, huh? Really bold strategy, that.
The freshly rebranded "Democratic Socialists" want government-funded college for everyone, too. That’s a plan that conveniently bankrolls the very left-leaning academics who'll be cutting their checks. Buying votes twice with the same dollar. Efficient, if nothing else.
That instinct—government first, always, no exceptions—doesn't stop at economics. It eats charity alive too, and that's where we get into the crux of this column. George Orwell clocked this back in 1937, in The Road to Wigan Pier, decades before anyone thought to run the numbers:
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.
Turns out Orwell wasn't just being that magnificent lovable grump he's noted as being. The data eventually caught up and vindicated him completely. Right-leaning people report higher happiness, give more to charity, commit suicide less often, and yes, even hug their kids more. Peter Schweizer, in a piece that's also since vanished into the internet's memory hole, nailed the mechanism:
In the Sixties, we saw the beginning of a narcissism and self-absorption that gripped the Left and has not let go. The full-scale embrace of the importance of self-awareness, self-discovery and being "true" to oneself, along with the idea that the State should care for the less fortunate, has created a swathe of Left-wing people who want to outsource their obligations to others.
(An aside, before anyone asks: Yes, I keep old writing on file, several terabytes of it. Stuff I've written, stuff others have written, stuff I've been holding literally for decades and never got around to using. I call it my writer's digital junk drawer. It’s proven useful many times over. The recent development of AI on the desktop makes it much easier to search, too. Anyway.)
Outsourcing charity, is the tell. Outsource it to whom? Why, government, naturally. Write that check to Washington, feel the warm glow of moral superiority, and never once have to look a hungry person in the eye. Whether the bureaucracy you funded actually helps anyone other than the government wonks is somebody else's homework.
Studies have shown for years that people on the left volunteer less and give less—and why wouldn't they? There's a whole federal apparatus standing by to feel guilty on their behalf. Scrooge himself put it best, and I paraphrase him here: "Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses — are they still in operation? I pay enough in taxes to support their operation. Those who are badly off must go there." Different century, same logic.
John Stossel dug into exactly this, back in 2006—first for ABC, in a piece that (mercifully) still resolves, and then in what appears to be the same syndicated text over at Townhall, a link that has since joined the choir invisible. Here's the surviving version, from "Who Gives and Who Doesn't?" at ABC News:
It turns out that this idea that liberals give more…is a myth. Of the top 25 states where people give an above average percent of their income, 24 were red states in the last presidential election.
Arthur Brooks, the author of "Who Really Cares," says that "when you look at the data, it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more." He adds, "And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money."
And he says the differences in giving goes beyond money, pointing out that conservatives are 18 percent more likely to donate blood. He says this difference is not about politics, but about the different way conservatives and liberals view government.
"You find that people who believe it's the government's job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away," Brooks says. In fact, people who disagree with the statement, "The government has a basic responsibility to take care of the people who can't take care of themselves," are 27 percent more likely to give to charity.
So imagine my face—I mean really, picture it—when we started seeing the self-appointed moral custodians of the left inform us on social media that Jesus Christ personally objects to trimming a federal budget line. I had such an incident on Facebook just this morning and promptly ripped the author a new one. Thus, the column today.
Take notice of the pattern: Any time a government program gets so much as a haircut, or even just a smaller increase than requested, the response isn't "let's discuss this." It's "you're killing people," delivered at volume 11, every single time, like clockwork.
Here's how I'd explain the actual difference to anyone still confused: As a Christian, I see it this way: Charity is our job, individually—not the government's, not even the churches collectively. Ours. Personally. Where do I get that concept? Easy: Christ himself drew that line: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Nowhere in there does it say, "and unto the IRS that which you'd rather someone else worry about."
The truth is simple, even if it's inconvenient for people who'd rather feel virtuous than actually be useful: Charity belongs to God and to each person’s individual conscience and actions. Real charity means showing up, one on one, for someone who needs it—not writing a check to a bureaucracy and calling your soul squared away. It's a personal responsibility, not a responsibility you can shovel onto Washington with a stamp and a prayer that someone else handles the details. Government taking your money and handing a percentage of it to someone else after taking it's cut, even someone who genuinely needs it, isn’t charity. It's redistribution wearing charity's coat, and a poor fit at that.
Here's your tell, every time: the moment the conversation shifts from "funding necessary programs" to "tax fairness," you're not listening to fiscal policy anymore. You're listening to class-war rhetoric in a suit and tie, running the same playbook the far left's been running since long before anyone reading this column was born—and it hasn't gotten any more honest with age.
Thought for the Day: Columbus set sail not knowing what he'd find and changed the map anyway—proof that certainty was never the price of admission for doing something that matters.
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Take care today, Gang. Thanks for taking the time to check this column out today. It means a lot to me. See you tomorrow.
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