Here I am, tab you like a hurricane ...
🚨 JUST IN: Actor Robert Duvall, who starred in The Godfather, dies aged 95 pic.twitter.com/rIrMcN8Tzy
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) February 16, 2026
Ed: Oh man, this one hurts. Duvall was one of my favorite actors of all time. He worked in film and TV for over 60 years, with his first film role being Boo Radley in 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck. I'm not sure I can pick a favorite Duvall role because he had so many great performances. 1993's Geronimo: An American Legend put him to great use as Al Sieber, but he was also at the top of his game in 2005's Thank You For Smoking. Duvall also did a great job in Jack Reacher, which is a better film than it seems. RIP and thank you for all the great memories.
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WSJ: In the early 1960s, when Robert Duvall was struggling to make it in New York City, he palled around with a couple of fellow actors also trying to find their way in the business. One was married, but the other was single, so the bachelors lived together.
As the three looked for work together, they lent each other money and talked about Marlon Brando. “If we mentioned Brando’s name once, we’d mention it 25 times in a day,” Duvall told NPR in 2010. “He was kind of like our guy that we looked to.” To get by, they worked jobs washing dishes, delivering messages and moving furniture.
“If we had been at a party with a bunch of unemployed actors and somebody had said, ‘See those three? They’re going to be Hollywood stars,’” Duvall’s roommate told Vanity Fair in 2013, “the whole place would have erupted, and we would have been part of the laughter.”
The roommate was Dustin Hoffman. The married friend was Gene Hackman.
Ed: This is a very good retrospective on Duvall's life, but I love this anecdote. It gets even better a few paragraphs later, with linoleum being a kind of punchline.
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REALITY CZECH: Hillary Clinton clashes with Czech Deputy PM Petr Macinka after he says President Trump reacted to policies that went "too far."
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 15, 2026
MACINKA: "We saw the woke revolution. I don't agree with the gender revolution, the climate alarmism..."
CLINTON: "Which gender? Women… pic.twitter.com/bCCYKXqvWa
CLINTON: "Which gender? Women having their rights?"
...
MACINKA: "I think there are two genders..."
CLINTON: "How about half of us, can we have our rights?"
...
MACINKA: "I think there is male and female and the rest, probably, is a social construct. This is something that went too far."
CLINTON: "But does that justify selling out the people of Ukraine, who are on the front lines, dying to save their freedom — and their two genders if that's what you're worried about."
MACINKA: "Can I please finish my point? I'm sorry that it makes you nervous."
Ed: Just in case anyone thinks AOC held the monopoly on leftist idiocy in Munich. The woke establishment probably hits harder in former Iron Curtain countries, where speech policing were the norm for decades.
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Mediaite: “There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well,” said Levine during an interview with the Hollywood Reporter on Saturday. “We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate.”
Addressing his performance as the crossdressing serial killer Buffalo Bill – who kills women so that he can wear their skin – Levine said that he had come to regret the role since “having gotten aware and worked with trans folks, and understanding a bit more about the culture and the reality of the meaning of gender.”
“It’s unfortunate that the film vilified that, and it’s fucking wrong. And you can quote me on that,” he told the magazine. “I didn’t play him as being gay or trans. I think he was just a fucked-up heterosexual man. That’s what I was doing.”
Ed: I'll be discussing this with Christian Toto on our podcast tomorrow. Levine is a terrific actor, but he has his head up his nether regions with this nonsense. It comes at a very strange moment too, when a string of mass shootings have involved trans perps. This is why Hollywood doesn't have interesting antagonists any longer; only white heterosexual men can be villains. (And technically speaking, Buffalo Bill was not transgender but just fantasizing about it, at least as depicted in the film.)
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Over 330,000 Federal employees have been fired, resigned, or retired last year and were not replaced.
— Christian Heiens 🏛 (@ChristianHeiens) February 15, 2026
The Federal workforce is now at its lowest level since 1966. pic.twitter.com/cRu6x8XAS4
Ed: This reminds me of a well-known joke about lawyers at the bottom of the ocean. It's a good start.
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CNBC: Warner Bros. Discovery’s board is considering reopening sales talks with Paramount Skydance after recently receiving an amended offer with sweetened deal terms, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday, citing unnamed sources.
Warner Bros. in December agreed to sell both its film studio and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix for $27.75 per share. Paramount, which owns CBS and MTV, in December launched a hostile bid for Warner Bros., promising its shareholders $30 per share in an all-cash deal.
Last week, Paramount upped the ante, saying it would add a ticking fee of 25 cents a share to its offer for any delay in regulatory approval of the deal.
Ed: They don't have much choice. One of their big shareholders threatened last week to force the sale to WBD or take the board to court if they didn't reopen negotiations with Paramount. The Paramount offer is objectively better than Netflix's. They just don't want David Ellison to take over – and probably don't like the idea of Bari Weiss taking over CNN, too.
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Germany’s FM Johann Wadephul on Europe:
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) February 16, 2026
We are only capable of defending ourselves together with the USA, not alone.
Without the nuclear umbrella of the USA, without the secret service information from the USA, we are not capable of defending ourselves here.
That is the pure… pic.twitter.com/RiZ212gnY9
That is the pure reality.
Ed: Fact check -- true. I'm actually impressed that they are realizing it now. Of course, they have to work with Trump for the next three years, too.
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NY Post: Iran is prepared to “discuss” its nuclear program if the US is ready to lift some of its crippling sanctions on the regime in exchange, the country’s deputy foreign minister said over the weekend.
Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Tehran’s deputy foreign minister, argued that the ball is “in America’s court to prove that they want to do a deal” and predicted the two sides will make progress if the US is sincere.
“We are ready to discuss this and other issues related to our program if they are ready to talk about sanctions,” Takht-Ravanchi told the BBC Sunday.
Ed: They want us to agree to a new JCPOA. And they wouldn't comply with it even if we agreed to one. As I have written multiple times, any agreement that doesn't address the most acute threats to our allies and interests in the region – ballistic missiles and proxy terror networks – is not worth the bother.
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BREAKING - It’s been revealed that Dylan Bryan Adams, the Minnesota DHS employee who keyed six Teslas in Minneapolis in response to Elon’s role in DOGE, was a financial policy compliance lead, one of the individuals responsible for reviewing the state’s Medicaid fraud cases. pic.twitter.com/XHQi0kdXQS
— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) February 16, 2026
Ed: Quelle surprise. After the last few weeks, is anyone surprised by this?
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The Bulwark: This slogan—[X] is not truly a red state; it’s *really* a nonvoting state—is plastered all over the Instagram and Facebook pages of local chapters of the Democratic party down in the South. It’s repeated like gospel among the party’s dedicated base voters. And it’s often used to justify why candidates running in these states don’t need to move to the center but instead spend their time trying to activate base voters depressed by years of Democratic moderation.
But is it true? ...
Democrats have become the party of educated elites. And increasingly they’re harmed, not helped, by high-turnout elections.
Indeed, there’s been ample evidence that the more voters show up, the worse it is for the party. Democratic data guru David Shor found in his post-2024 election analysis that, had everyone in the country voted, Donald Trump would have won by an even wider margin. In their own analysis of the 2024 electorate, Nate Cohn and colleagues at the New York Times wrote that “the least frequent voters are the most Republican.” The elections analyst David Wasserman likewise argued that the “defining data point of the 2020s” was that Trump performed “the best with the most peripherally-engaged voters” while Democrats made gains with “the most civic-minded voters who not only show up in presidential years, but reliably vote in midterms, primaries and special elections as well.”
Ed: Yes, I know, it's The Bulwark, but this is a good analysis and explanation for the firm belief by Democrats that every cycle is the one that turns Texas blue. Via Kurt Schlichter on X/Twitter, who advised everyone to keep this quiet.
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Breaking: Nancy Guthrie's family CLEARED in her disappearance.
— Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs (@NickAtNews) February 16, 2026
It's the first time the sheriff has ruled anyone out. He says her whole family, including her three children and their spouses, are cleared, calling them "victims plain and simple."
Latest: https://t.co/j9trRgn8ji
Ed: This should embarrass a number of people spreading conspiracy theories about the family over the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately, it won't. I'm not writing about this story because there's nothing to add with analysis in absence of evidence and facts. Just keep praying for Nancy Guthrie and her family in this crisis.
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WSJ: Hotel magnate Thomas Pritzker is retiring as executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels, saying he wanted to protect the company after new documents were released detailing the extent of his association with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
“I exercised terrible judgment in maintaining contact with them, and there is no excuse for failing to distance myself sooner,” Pritzker said in a statement released Monday. “I condemn the actions and the harm caused by Epstein and Maxwell and I feel deep sorrow for the pain they inflicted on their victims.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that Pritzker was a frequent guest at Epstein’s townhouse. Documents released recently by the Justice Department show meetings and email correspondence between Pritzker and Epstein spanning multiple years, including references to multiple meetings scheduled throughout 2018, as well as communication between Pritzker and Maxwell.
Ed: Yes, this is the same Pritzker family as Gov. J.B Pritzker of Illinois, who supposedly has some presidential ambitions in 2028. Good luck with that.
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Trump's DOJ just released 3.5 MILLION Epstein docs. Many Dems now face tough questions:
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) February 16, 2026
-Bill Clinton
-Obama’s WH Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler
-Reid Hoffman
-Hakeem Jeffries
-Stacey Plaskett
Right again 👇 pic.twitter.com/3hVJMDoHkq
Ed: And now the Pritzkers, too.
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