Welcome to Friday, February 13, 2026. Yep, you got that right: it’s Friday the 13th, and you’d best stay in bed. You can nibble on cheese, though, as it’s National Cheddar Day. English cheddar is better than American, and my favorite is an English farmhouse cheddar like Keen’s, preferably aged to the point where a bit of mold is growing on it. Here’s how that kind of cheese is made:
It’s also Galentine’s Day, celebrating female friendship, Kiss Day, National Crab Rangoon Day, National Italian Food Day, National Tortellini Day, and Skeptics Day International. And tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so be sure to get some flowers or See’s chocolates for your squeeze.
There’s an Olympics Google Doodle today featuring ice skating. Click on it to see the skating medals count (Men’s figure skating is today):
Here is the overall medals count; the host country is winning (from NBC):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The ruckus is over in Minnesota: the Trump administration announced that it’s ending its efforts in Minnesota to find and detail immigrants.
Minnesota officials said the nearly six-week surge of immigration enforcement in the state would leave deep economic and psychological scars that last long after the drawdown of federal agents, which President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced on Thursday.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the announcement and would now turn his attention to the state’s economic recovery. “They left us with deep damage, generational trauma,” he said. “They left us with economic ruin, in some cases.”
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis praised city residents for challenging the conduct of federal agents, who killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during the crackdown, and protecting immigrants in the city.
“They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” he said in a statement, adding that it was time for a “great comeback” for Minneapolis families and businesses that suffered under the ICE crackdown.
Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, said he doubted whether the announcement by Mr. Homan could be trusted.
“I’m going to continue patrolling,” Mr. Payne said, referring to the practice of keeping watch for immigration agents, blowing whistles to warn residents and recording their operations. “I’m going to continue to ask my community to patrol and keep eyes on them,” he added.
I’m not sure whether this means that there will be a complete halt to find immigrants who are either here illegally or have committed crimes in addition to that, but it will surely quell the uproar for a bit. However, one shouldn’t forget the remaining major scandals many involving Somalis (either citizens or immigrants) that cost taxpayers a lot of money. It is for that reason that Walz decided not to run for governor again.
*Yesterday Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and it was a heated exchange. I’ve never seen a Cabinet member get so nasty in a Congressional hearing.
In exchange after exchange, Bondi lobbed brash insults when Democratic lawmakers questioned her decisions and repeatedly portrayed the expansive Justice Department as unfairly maligned by Democrats and those who dislike Trump.
In her opening remarks before the House Judiciary Committee, Bondi — highlighting her allegiance to the president — thanked Trump for his investment in fighting violent crime and said the Justice Department is working to advance the president’s priorities. The attorney general blamed the Biden administration for politicizing the department and, echoing claims from conservative activists, said it is fighting against “liberal activist judges” working to stymie the president’s agenda.“America has never seen this level of coordinated judicial opposition to a presidential administration,” Bondi said.
The attorney general did not buckle in her defense of the department and frequently attempted to shift attention to its efforts to reduce violent crime, a topic that earned her praise from Republicans.
Bondi came armed with scripted insults for Democrats.
“I’m not going to get in the gutter with these people,” Bondi said repeatedly in response to pointed questions. She lashed out when the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, directed her to respond to the panel’s inquiries.
“You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer,” she said. “You’re not even a lawyer.”
Good Lord, that is lacking in respect! You can hear Bondi say that in the video below. But the committee was nasty, too:
Raskin, a lawmaker from Maryland, denounced Bondi for her handling of the Epstein files, the department’s response to deadly shootings by federal personnel in Minneapolis and her oversight of cases involving people whom Trump has publicly called to prosecute.
“Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time,” Raskin said. “You replace real prosecutors with counterfeit stooges. Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement.”
Bondi did miss a chance to have bridged the rifts a bit: when a Representative asked her to turn around and face the Epstein sex-trafficking survivors who were standing up—survivors who haven’t been able to talk to the Administration—and apologize to them. Bondi wouldn’t even turn around. She had nothing to lose, and something to gain, by apologizing. In the end, Bondi, the personification of the word “insouciance,” accomplished nothing save defend the administration in an impolite way. It was an interesting show, though.
Get a load of he here:
*The House of Representatives, which has a narrow Republican majority, actually voted yesterday to repudiate the tariffs Trump has placed on Canada. That’s a first! However, even if the Senate does the same thing, Trump can simply veto the move, and he won’t be overriden.
The GOP-led House passed a resolution Wednesday designed to roll back President Trump’s tariffs on Canada, as a half-dozen Republicans joined Democrats in rebuking the administration’s signature economic policy.
The House voted 219-211 to approve a Democratic resolution that would invalidate the emergency declaration that underpins Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Six Republicans broke ranks with their party in voting for the measure, another setback for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who couldn’t keep his conference united in support of the president.
Passage of the antitariff resolution sends it to the Senate, which must vote on the issue again despite approving a similar one on a narrow, bipartisan basis last year. If it passes the Senate—where it can advance on a simple majority vote, not the 60 usually required—the measure would move to Trump, who would almost certainly veto it.
The Republicans who voted with most Democrats to end the tariffs were Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Jeff Hurd of Colorado. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, a centrist, sided with most Republicans.
Immediately after the vote, Trump said that Republicans who broke rank will face electoral backlash.
“Any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
Of course Trump, who never forgets, will take retribution. To overturn the inevitable veto if the bill passes the Senate, it would take two-thirds of both Senators and Representatives to vote again on repudiating tariffs, and that ain’t gonna happen. The Republicans who voted with the Democrats will, in the end, suffer for having espoused their principles.
*Several readers quailed when I said the other day that I thought having voters show identification was reasonable. But Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, defends the policy in an op-ed called “Voter ID is reasonable. It’s also popular.” There are in facts good reasons to require it, he says.
President Trump says that “Republicans” should “nationalize the election” or at least take over voting in up to 15 places where he says voting is corrupt. His evidence of fraudulent voting is that he lost in such places in 2020, and since it is axiomatic that he won everywhere, the reported results are proof of the fraud.
This is all delusional, narcissistic nonsense. But at this point, if you still claim it’s an open question whether Trump actually lost the 2020 election (he did), you’re immune to the facts or just lying—either about not having made up your mind or about what actually happened. So, I don’t see much point in relitigating an issue that was literally litigated in more than 60 courtrooms.
But Republicans’ inability simply to tell the truth about Trump’s lies makes talking about elections and election integrity infuriatingly difficult. One tactic is to assert that Trump didn’t say what he plainly said. “What I assume he meant by it is that we ought to pass—Congress ought to pass the SAVE Act, which I’m co-sponsor of,” is how Sen. Josh Hawley responded to questions about Trump’s remarks.
Before later correcting himself, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy insisted the president never said he wanted to “nationalize” the elections. “Those are your words, not his,” he told reporters.
But Democrats are wrong to suggest that all of the difficulty is generated by Trump’s lies and the Republicans’ inability to reject them.
Here are Goldberg’s reasons to favor IDs:
. . . .Now there are reasonable objections to proof-of-citizenship requirements in the SAVE Act, but the framing of both the question and the answer is flawed.
Americans—including large majorities of Democrats—have favored voter ID for decades. Since long before anyone dreamed Donald Trump would run for president, never mind get elected, the idea has been wildly popular. In 2006, 80 percent of Americans favored showing proof of ID when voting. The lowest support over the last two decades, according to Pew, was in 2012 when a mere 77 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Democrats, favored voter ID. Last August, Pew found that 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats favored having to provide government-issued ID when voting.
Two things have bothered me about Democratic opposition to voter ID. First is the claim that millions upon millions of Americans lack adequate ID. While it’s true that the SAVE Act’s provisions for providing proof of citizenship creates novel challenges—lots of people don’t have their birth certificates, and many forms of ID don’t specify citizenship—Democrats were making this argument years before the citizenship issue ripened. (To be clear, evidence of noncitizens voting in significant numbers is scant to nonexistent.)
Regardless, if the problem is that huge numbers of “marginalized” people don’t have sufficient ID to vote, that also means they don’t have good enough ID for all manner of things. Indeed, I can think of few things more likely to marginalize someone than not having ID. You can’t get a credit card, buy or rent a home, apply for welfare benefits, travel by plane, or open a bank account without identification. That’s some serious marginalization.
Second, if you want people to trust the integrity of elections and the sanctity of “our democracy,” waxing indignant over the idea of presenting ID when democratic majorities favor it is an odd choice. It arouses the suspicion that there’s a reason for opposing such measures. Mostly thanks to Democratic initiatives, America has made it wildly easier to vote over the last three decades. Why is it so preposterous that new safeguards be put in place amid all of the mail-in and early voting?
My theory is that at some deep level there is a dysfunctional bipartisan consensus that lax voting rules benefit Democrats. That’s why Republicans want to tighten the rules and Democrats favor loosening them.
*From the UPI’s “Odd News” section, a big YUCK! A huge “fatball”—a conglomeration of fat, oil, and grease (not to mention human waste), has been found under a Sydney, Australia wastewater plant, and is thought to be the source of huge “greaseballs” that wash up on Australian beaches.
Australia’s Sydney Water confirmed there is a massive fatberg estimated to be “the size of four buses” in a difficult-to-reach position under a wastewater plant.
The supersized fatberg — a collection of fats, oils and greases — under the Malabar wastewater treatment plant is now believed to be the source of black balls that have periodically been washing up on Sydney-area beaches since 2024.
The balls were originally thought to be tar from a possible oil spill, but an analysis at the University of New South Wales discovered they contained human feces.
Sydney Water managing director Darren Cleary said officials are now aware of a giant-sized fatberg in the tunnels underneath the Malabar plant.
“We don’t know exactly how big the fatberg is,” Cleary told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “The size of four buses, that would be the maximum potential extent of it. It may be that, it may be slightly smaller. We don’t exactly know.”
He said the blockage is located in an “inaccessible dead zone.”
“There’s a component of that tunnel which we can’t safely access,” Cleary said.
He said the balls that have been washing up on beaches are likely caused by water flows in the tunnels skimming across the surface of the fatberg and breaking off small pieces.
Here’s a short ABC video about the fatballs and greaseballs:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s messing with Andrzej:
Hili: You did something you had never done before.
Andrzej: What was that?
Hili: You didn’t listen to what I was saying to you.
Andrzej: And what were you saying?
Hili: Nothing important.
In Polish:
Hili: Zrobiłeś coś, czego nie robiłeś nigdy wcześniej.
Ja: Co takiego?
Hili: Nie słuchałeś co do ciebie mówię.
Ja: A co mówiłaś?
Hili: Nic ważnego.
*******************
From This Cat is Guilty. I hope the steak is rare!
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From CinEmma:
From the New Yorker via Masih; the medical workers of Iran strike back at the regime, which had targeted doctors and nurses for helping wounded protestors:
The Iranian regime has targeted wounded protesters seeking help. In response, medical workers throughout the country have forged secret units to treat those injured in the uprising. https://t.co/ZYA12KWwdn
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 12, 2026
The point of this tweet is clear given that it’s from Maya Forstater:
Oat Milk not Milk (who knew?)
You can bet that 9 months from now (or even tomorrow) Oatly is not going to be wringing its hands and pretending not to understand what the Supreme Court said. https://t.co/yQbhuuma36
— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) February 11, 2026
Larry the Cat speaks for the American people:
She speaks for Trump, not the people. https://t.co/TwzUIcZvGA
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) February 10, 2026
From Simon, who says, “Please let this be true”:
— Eric Alper 🎧 (@ThatEricAlper) February 11, 2026
From Bryan; this is “slopestyle” skiing, and it’s pretty amazing:
Eileen Gu delivers a scorching 86.58 in the Women’s Slopestyle final to top the leaderboard after her first run. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/FvYIjppSM9
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) February 9, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she got to Auschwitz. She was eight years old, and would have been 91 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-02-13T11:04:52.188Z
. . and two from Dr. Cobb. First, an Olympic d*g. Matthew says “It’s from 2022, but still , ,., , , ” He just wants a medal!
🥇🥇🥇
— George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T13:06:41.752Z
Yes, Darwin was not all sweetness and light; he seemed to be quite dysthymic:
happy birthday Charles Darwin!He was a happy soul…
The quotation in the Pam Bondi article identifies Jamie Raskin as “a lawmaker from Maryland”. While I expect U.S. readers know him as more than just a lawmaker from Maryland, knowing his educational pedigree, family history, political leadership history, particularly in the Trump impeachment, our international audience may not be as familiar with Congressman Raskin. The Wikipedia bio is pretty good for a quick look at who he is at url
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Raskin
I came across the skiing clip and I have to share my thought process, in order:
• Exhilarating! Esp. when it opens up on the big mountain view with the spin, the amazing drone-chase, the thrilling and precise athleticism! PCC(E) and the WEIT readers might like this, I gotta send it right away!
• SEND
• … uh-oh, I hope there’s no political baggage with this
• [ hazmat suit-up up for the comment section ]
• ☹️ but why?! 😭
But I won’t let that drag it down – amazing clip, amazing run!
There’s lots more, e.g. “Big Air”, and exciting drone camera views – I’m loving these clips because I haven’t been able to go full 🛋️🥔 (yet) 😁
My understanding of the situation in Minnesota is that local law enforcement is now assisting regular ICE activity, thus removing the need for a huge additional presence. I saw a piece yesterday suggesting that the removal of extaordinary ICE resources is a prelude to their deployment to California.
You could vote without showing ID? How did that work?
Up in Canada we have voter rolls, we send voters voter cards in the mail that basically say where to vote, but you have to show ID when you vote. No one has every for one second thought showing ID to vote is odd. Don’t drive? Then get a provincial ID, or bring your passport.
Also a non-partisan electoral agency (and one for each province and territory) responsible to parliament, not government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_Canada
We (mostly) south of you are a bunch of federated states, each with their own rules. Some states do have voter IDs, some don’t. The problem with the solutions you have; driver’s ID, state IDs or passports, is that not everyone has them. I know people with no drivers’ license or state IDs. I know there are many people without passports, too. Especially the elderly. There are other IDs we could use, social security is one, though again there are people who are eligible to vote but don’t have social security numbers.
There are no uniform rules across the states. To get that means politics at the national level. We’d be more successful, with far fewer injuries, trying to give a cat a bath.
It would be interesting to know what proportion of the voting age population in the U.S. really has no ID that can serve as validation for purposes of voting. Opponents talk about the terrible burden but what, in fact, are the numbers? And, if we know the numbers. why can’t we provide those people with ID’s so that they can vote? Surely the actual number is manageable.
It seems to me that the voter ID matter can be solved, but that neither party really wants it to be solved. The right uses it as a bludgeon against Democrats who supposedly want undesirables to vote, and the left uses it against Republicans who are supposedly racist. The fact that such a high proportion of actual voters on both sides of the aisle have long been in favor of voter ID confirms (to me) that lawmakers are keeping this issue alive for their own benefit.
I suspect the number is low. As the article suggested you need some form of ID to get things like welfare, loans, credit cards, etc and who doesn’t have those? There are certainly some, though I think it is quite a small number in relative terms.
You’re right; the real problem isn’t that we can’t come up with some kind of ID that can be used for voting. The problem is, as always, politics. The Republicans will try to limit what can qualify as an ID in ways to exclude as many people as possible who might vote for the Democrats. The Democrats, for their part, will object to IDs mostly because the Republicans want them, but they’ll also make up a bunch of reasons, some reflecting real issues but most will be to pander to this or that constituency.
Voter IDs are a good idea and politics will make the fight for it deeply ugly and unworkable. We’ll be burdened with this crap for a very long time. C’est la vie.
Some states, like Colorado, have it figured in out. There is next to zero votes cast by non-citizens, or dead people 😄. The few cases of fraud in our state have been primarily by Republicans.
And Washington! And 4 other states + D.C.
Indeed!!
Just a quick google search away. Of course it’s Google so verify at your leisure
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/millions-americans-dont-have-documents-proving-their-citizenship-readily
https://cdce.umd.edu/sites/cdce.umd.edu/files/pubs/Voter%20ID%202023%20survey%20Key%20Results%20Jan%202024%20%281%29.pdf
I don’t think you need to prove your citizenship, as you do that when you’re registered to vote. All you have to do is have something to prove who you are, like a driver’s license. I think you have to prove you’re a citizen when you register. At any rate, only citizens should be allowed to vote, so you tell me how you document that?
One thing about the MN ICE-capades is it is my impression ICE agents simply aren’t trained for riots and the kind of push back they’re dealing with.
The job of an ICE agent – heretofore – isn’t very James Bond: most of it is accompanying, supervising (to court, jail, holding etc) fairly compliant individuals, maybe a solitary or a few “runners” once in awhile.
Could be they’re simply untrained and out of their depth.
D.A.
NYC/CT
Question for the high IQ biologists, bird watchers, etc at WEIT.
I’m currently in western CT, semi rural with houses every few acres, snow, some wooded areas about. I see deer sometimes and there is a hawk (?) flying about and watching often.
I use a leash but I’m afraid the hawk might try and grab my new puppy (about 5lbs) as I teach him “leash skills” and outdoor stuff. I’m a city guy, no idea how aggressive hawks are. (I remember predatory magpies in Australia immiserating my cat’s life…)
Should I be worried? Thanks,
D.A.
NYC/CT
No. Hawks in rural areas are more frightened of people than tempted by dogs.
Larry the cat is correct, as usual.
Pam Bondi was also performing for an audience of one. She’s also afraid of getting fired, which only adds to the faux outrage. There is no Respect or Truth in the Trump administration. It’s ass-licking corruption all the way down.
The dog at the 2022 Olympics made me laugh. They should have given him/her a metal!
In Swedish, Crazy (nuts) is Galen. So the typo in the 2nd para is quite humorous.