DL Open Thread: Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026
Why Not Colbert For President?:
Stephen Colbert addressed the fervor around Monday’s “Late Show” on Tuesday, remarking that he’d said his piece after CBS wouldn’t air his interview with James Talarico, a Democratic Texas state representative.
“We made some jokes — that’s what they pay me for — and I was ready to let it go, until a few hours ago, when my group chat blowed up because, without ever talking to me, the corporation put out this press release,” Colbert said. He pulled out a statement issued by CBS on Tuesday, which he called “a surprisingly small piece of paper considering how many butts it’s trying to cover.”
“Now, clearly, this statement was written by and, I’m guessing, for lawyers. Now, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs. But since they seem intent on telling me how to do mine, here we go.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“Fellas, fellas, I am well aware that we can book other guests. I didn’t need to be presented with that option. I’ve had Jasmine Crockett on my show twice. I could prove that to you — I could prove that to you, but the network won’t let me show you her picture without including her opponents. So I guess just … I’ll have to show you this picture of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein instead. They made me do it! I didn’t want to.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“So, we obeyed our network and put the interview on YouTube, where it’s gotten millions of views. And I can see why. Talarico is an interesting guy. I don’t know if he should be the senator, but it was a good discussion. I wish we could have put it on the show, where no one would’ve watched it.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
I’m serious. He’d win if he ran.
Noem Replaces Liar With Another Liar:
One of the Trump administration’s most vocal defenders of its aggressive immigration crackdown is leaving as public opinion sours against the hardline approach.
Tricia McLaughlin, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s spokesperson, informed colleagues Tuesday about her plans, according to two DHS officials familiar with the move. She’s leaving DHS next week.
A former top communications aide to Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2024 presidential campaign and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, McLaughlin started planning to leave in December but delayed her departure amid the aftermath of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti shootings, according to the people briefed on her exit. (They were granted anonymity to speak about internal personnel matters.) In the instance of Good, McLaughlin was quick to characterize her actions as an example of “domestic terrorism.”
McLaughlin became an avatar of the Trump administration’s communications campaign defending its immigration enforcement effort. In doing so, she assumed a level of prominence — and withering criticism — garnered not even by some Trump Cabinet officials.
Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called her a “pathological liar.” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) accused her of “gaslighting the American people.”
Her replacement, Lauren Bis, has been described as ‘…the young, Texas, Christian version of Stephen Miller. Nicer on the surface, but just as sociopathic’.
I can hardly wait…
A standing-room-only crowd jammed recently into the only courtroom in Comanche County, Kan. Residents came on their lunch breaks, trekked in from their ranches and even closed down a hardware store so they could watch.
They were there for the man at the defendant’s table, Joe Ceballos, who just weeks before had been re-elected mayor of Coldwater in a small-town landslide, with 101 votes to his opponent’s 20. There had been no time to celebrate. Hours before the votes were tallied, Mr. Ceballos, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was charged in state court with voting illegally as a noncitizen.
Now Mr. Ceballos, 55, sat in the high-ceilinged courtroom, glancing downward as a prosecutor from the Kansas attorney general’s office rattled off a list of felony charges that could lead to years in prison: three counts of election perjury, three counts of voting without being qualified.
“This alien committed a felony by voting in American elections,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a news release that included a photo of Mr. Ceballos and of his signature on a voter registration form.
Yet inside Coldwater — home to 700 people, zero stoplights and vanishingly few Democrats — the prosecution was widely seen as a personal attack on a pillar of the town. Most of them, Mr. Ceballos included, had voted for President Trump, and some said they supported his immigration policies. But they knew Joe, a fixture in Coldwater since he was a teenager. And they wanted the government to back off.
He said he did not follow national politics closely, but agreed with much of what the president had said about energy policy and illegal immigration. Mr. Ceballos said he voted for Mr. Trump in the last three presidential elections.
“I still strongly believe in Trump’s immigration laws about, ‘Let’s get the bad guys out of here.’ You know, they’re murderers, they killed people, they molested people, let’s get them out of here,” Mr. Ceballos said in an interview. “But I feel like I don’t fit that category. And I feel like that’s how they’re treating me.”
Uh, Joe, you’re not the only one…
Narco-Terrorist Former President Given VIP Treatment By Trump:
For months, President Donald Trump has railed against Latin American narcoterrorists flooding the United States with “lethal poison.” He has used the scourge of drug trafficking as a rationale for dozens of military strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, which have left more than 140 people dead.
Last month, Trump cheered a military assault by U.S. forces that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and brought them to the U.S. to face charges related to cocaine trafficking. Maduro, Trump said, led a “vicious cartel” that “flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans.”
But when it comes to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was tried and convicted in the U.S. in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in prison for taking bribes and allowing traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., Trump has taken a decidedly softer tone.
Hernández, he said, has been “treated very harshly and unfairly” — so unfairly that on Dec. 1, Trump pardoned the former president after he served less than four of those 45 years.
But the federal government’s magnanimity did not end there. On the day he was to be released, records show, Hernández had an immigration detainer — a request for law enforcement agencies to hold noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — in place.
Here, too, the Trump’s administration’s treatment of Hernández differed from its public objectives. Other noncitizens caught up in recent immigration sweeps — the vast majority of whom do not have criminal records — have faced swift efforts to deport them, even to countries where they may face threats. But in Hernández’s case, the Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to get his detainer removed so he could walk free.
And Hernández did not just walk out of the prison. Despite persistent budget and staffing shortages, prison officials paid a specialized tactical team overtime to drive Hernández from a high-security facility in West Virginia to the famed five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, according to records and three people familiar with the situation. Before he left, Hernández was allowed to use the captain’s government phone to talk to the federal prison system’s deputy director, Joshua Smith, who was convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy before Trump pardoned him in 2021.
“The [prisons bureau] administration rolled out the red carpet for him,” said Joe Rojas, a retired prison worker and former union leader who has been speaking to the media on behalf of staff who fear reprisals for doing so since bureau leaders stopped recognizing the union last year. “The staff are disgusted.”
Y’know, on any given day, Trump and his fellow criminals do so much terrible stuff that ‘flooding the zone’ really works. This is but one example of a story that deserves more attention.
What do you want to talk about?
Interesting story in Spotlight Delaware today on the Lawson race. Knowing very little about that district I am curious how it all shakes out. My gut tells me that it’s a long shot D takeover but others would know better. Both candidates seem capable, though the D isn’t particularly inspirational at first glance. My eyes rolled when I saw “listening tour”, which is such a lazy and worthless thing for a campaign to promise. And she said her priorities are “ education, health care, small business, and making agriculture a “top priority.” Which is to say she really doesn’t have priorities, she has the little headlines you put on a doorknocker. It appears she has no project she is there to work on… and then this:
“And woven throughout all of that,” Lodhavia said, “is affordability.”
Curious what a state senator from Delaware will be doing about “affordability” but I know every politician in the country is saying it, so it must poll well. I’d love to see her ideas otherwise it seems very shallow and almost insulting.
The R on the other hand has two priorities (Ed and ag) and a resume that actually shows some level of long term commitment or relationship to those priorities. She’s probably wrong on the policy (I’d guess), but she seems relatively authentic.
A D is better than an R, especially in today’s world, but I’d have to see a lot more than high level bromides to get excited about this one. There’s no one else there that can run?
yMMV.
I really liked that article, planned to feature it in the Friday Political Weekly.
I’ll say this–bromides aside, they both seem preferable to Lawson.
As to affordability, the General Assembly (and the Governor) seem serious on capping energy rates.
“Lodhavia [the Democrat], a member of the University of Delaware’s Board of Trustees”
So I doubt opening UD’s book would be on her agenda.