Hello, all, and welcome to Saturday, Oct. 3, 2026 — the weekend has arrived, and with luck, so has the coffee.
My calendar says it's Boyfriend Day, Play Outside Day, Techies Day, Global Smoothie Day, World Card Making Day, World Temperance Day, and Mean Girls Day. So take your boyfriend outside to play, bribe your family techie with a smoothie and a homemade card, and keep it dry for Temperance Day — Mean Girls Day will have to cope without you.
Today in History:
1849: Baltimore residents find Edgar Allan Poe delirious in the street; the poet dies a few days later.
1863: President Abraham Lincoln proclaims the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.
1873: Authorities hang Modoc leader Kintpuash at Fort Klamath, Ore., for his role in the deaths of peace negotiators.
1935: Italy invades Abyssinia, now Ethiopia.
1944: Army troops crack the Siegfried Line north of Aachen, Germany.
1951: Bobby Thomson hits a three-run homer off Ralph Branca to win the pennant for the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers, the "Shot Heard 'Round the World."
1952: Britain detonates its first atomic bomb off Australia's Monte Bello Islands, becoming the world's third nuclear power.
1955: Captain Kangaroo debuts on CBS, and The Mickey Mouse Club on ABC.
1985: The space shuttle Atlantis makes its maiden flight.
1990: The walls came down: East and West Germany reunify after 45 years of postwar division.
1993: The Battle of Mogadishu kills 18 soldiers and roughly 1,000 Somalis during an attempt to capture lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
1995: A Los Angeles jury acquits O.J. Simpson of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
2008: President George W. Bush signs the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, authorizing the Treasury to buy distressed assets from banks.
2023: The House votes Kevin McCarthy out as speaker, the first removal of a speaker in history.
Birthdays Today include: Thomas Wolfe, novelist (Look Homeward, Angel, You Can't Go Home Again); Stevie Ray Vaughan, blues guitarist; Al Sharpton, civil rights activist; Kathryn Sullivan, astronaut; Chubby Checker, singer ("The Twist"); Gwen Stefani, singer (No Doubt, "Hollaback Girl"); Neve Campbell, actress (Scream).
If today's your birthday, too, you're sharing it with a novelist who warned you can't go home again and the man who taught the country to twist. Enjoy it.
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I’m going to start out this morning’s commentary with something unusual. Usually, when bringing in text from X, I’ll simply embed the post. This one runs a bit longer, and it requires a bit more space than the usual embed. And by the way, this comes to us by way of Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. Long experience has shown me you can’t go wrong with a IP post as column fodder. Anyway, the author is one Daniel Foubert.
I'm French. I was born in Paris. I spent 25 years there.
But now: I don't even want to know what happens in that hellhole Not “troubled.” Not “declining.” Not “going through a difficult period.” No. A HELLHOLE.A country where everything is dirty, expensive, hostile, bureaucratic and permanently dysfunctional.
You pay absurd taxes for public services that increasingly behave as if providing a service were an unreasonable personal request. Paris is noise, aggression, filth, traffic, strikes, scaffolding, sirens, queues, broken infrastructure and the constant sensation that every basic task has been deliberately redesigned to waste your time.
Nothing works without friction. Nothing happens without paperwork. Nothing can be fixed without a committee, a consultation, a union dispute, three administrative layers and somebody explaining why expecting normality is politically problematic.
The state takes more, delivers less, and compensates for the difference with lectures.
I see our Rick Moran is noting the happenings in France, too. So:
Highly Recommended: Rioting at French Schools Explodes Nationwide as the Government Is Running Scared
Now, let’s try an experiment. I've been playing heavy on what I call "thought experiments" of late, and this one seems a natural. Let’s pull Paris out of that rant, and drop in Chicago, Philly, New York City, Los Angeles, or any other big American city that Democrats have run since time out of mind, and see how much editing it needs.
The conclusion is almost none, really. The far-left party in France is, according to some, stoking the riots, the buildings burning and so on. I see Rick Moran has also noted this in his newer piece just this morning. Gee, sound familiar? Minneapolis, by chance? Ferguson?
The sad truth is that Foubert's X post reads like a Yelp review of any big city the left has run for a generation: dirty, expensive, hostile, bureaucratic, and permanently broken. His sharpest line is the tax swindle, absurd bills for public services that act as if serving you were an imposition. Americans know that one by heart, nowadays, don't they?
Let's take Chicago as the textbook case. The place has been under Democrat control since Al Capone. 1931, specifically. So it seems to be an appropriate example.
Between 2014 and 2024, according to a Chicago civic group's tally that Fox News cited, the city raised property taxes 53.3%, while inflation ran 35%. That's $2.7 billion in extra taxes, and residents got the same lectures in return.
Then there's Portland, where the mayor, Keith Wilson, ran on fixing hundreds of millions in deferred road maintenance and a broken funding model, and streets there are going "back to gravel." Paris has scaffolding and strikes. Portland has potholes the city can't afford to fill. New York City… well, you know that story already, don’t you?
In every case, the residents have noticed, and they cut bait, and voted with their moving vans. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia all still had fewer residents than in 2020, according to that same Fox analysis of census estimates. You can’t get a one way U-Haul out of LA for love or money.
Foubert spent 25 years in Paris before he left. Plenty of Americans spent longer than that in cities that treated their taxpayers as the problem.
The one line on Foubert's list that no longer sticks to some American cities is crime. Homicides fell 17.7% across 67 big-city agencies in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. San Francisco says crime is down 30%, and homeless encampments are at a 15-year low. Notice what's driving the turnaround. That's right; Donald J. Trump and his push on law enforcement, particularly as regards immigration and drug enforcement. San Francisco's mayor is apparently following along, promises to arrest and prosecute people who commit crimes. That is the same policy the left spent a decade calling cruel. Thing is, it works.
That's the real lesson. These cities didn't fail because cities are doomed, per se. They failed because voters kept electing the people who decided the customer was the problem. And the voters in large part are still under the illusion that the Democrats who are responsible for that failure are worth reelecting. No, it doesn't make sense to me, either, but with the evidence to the contrary piled as high as the piles of trash around them, they still believe Democrats are the only option.
I’ve pointed at the sudden influx of immigration in the UK making them the coal mine canary for us here in the states, for a long time now. Perhaps I should have been including France in that assessment.
Most of recent immigrants to France from Islamic countries, for example, seem to be settling into the larger French towns, such as Paris. About 40% of France's recent immigrants live in the Paris region, so any pressure on housing, schools, social services, and public order, and particularly on the welfare state, is concentrated there. Restrictionists argue those local effects are real, and that national averages hide them.
Now, yes, Foubert in his rant blames the state, not immigration, but who is responsible for that larger immigration along with all the rest of the numbers, but the state? The French people are now seeing that letting people into the country who have no intention of assimilating to the culture wasn’t the best of ideas. Rather like us, here, stateside. What the government believes is rather obviously out of step with that conclusion.
So yes, Foubert's description applies directly. He fled a government that answers every complaint with a lecture, as Americans have been doing for years.
I find it interesting that the Europeans who keep electing the leftist parties despise Donald Trump. These are the same ones who never quite make the connection between their situation and the people and the parties they’ve elected, much the same as the city dwellers here in the states.
The result of leftist policy in each case is almost exactly the same. France's debt is about 119% of GDP, against 88.9% for the euro area as a whole. The UK's is 93.8%, and its productivity has been weak since the 2008 crash. Housing is scarce and expensive in Paris, London, San Francisco, and yes, American cities. Voters in all of the areas we’ve discussed describe the same gap, with high taxes and visibly poor service. This is the consequence of electing the leftists. Mind you, these are the same leftists whom Iran's thugs want you to vote for, as I mentioned yesterday.
That’s a serious consideration in the upcoming mid-term elections.
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Thought for the Day: People rarely leave a place all at once — they leave one ignored pothole, one broken promise, and one tax bill at a time.
VIP members: Let's hear from you. You know what to do. Your voice matters.
Take care today, gang. It means a lot that you're here today. I hope to see you again tomorrow.