This isn’t spin. It’s seasoned analysis.
The Dumbest Front in the Trade War
Let me tell you about my friend up in Canada. She’s not some corporate shark gaming loopholes in trade law. She’s an artisan—sews intricate patterns into a quilt. Her friend paints mugs with flowers so delicate they’d make your grandma’s china blush, and sells them on...
Aluminum Tariffs Spark a Borderline Farce
Let me tell you a little story about what happens when politicians who don’t understand the real world try to fix it with a sledgehammer. A while back, President Donald Trump slapped a 50% tariff—that’s a fancy word for tax—on aluminum coming into the U.S. from other...
Rakes and Rifles: Trump’s Banana Republic Beautification Corps
There they were — the sons and daughters of America, dressed in uniform, sent from Mississippi and Louisiana and God knows where else — raking mulch in D.C. like overpaid gardeners in camo. That sound you heard wasn’t a cherry blossom rustling in the breeze. It was...
Operation Muscle Flex: Trump’s Floating Armada Aims at Venezuela
Well, now, if it isn’t the Trump Doctrine back in motion — this time not with a tweet or tariff, but with the USS Lake Erie, a couple of amphibious bruisers, and enough firepower to remind Caracas how close Florida really is. In the southern Caribbean, it’s usually...
How the States Are Rewriting the Map with 2020’s Ink
So here we are again, folks—watching the political map get redrawn not because we counted new people, but because some folks in expensive suits counted new opportunities. Texas fired the opening salvo, no surprise there. The Lone Star State, ever the ambitious...
Lagging Behind the Fight: When the U.S. Military Learns While Others Kill
While Ukraine engineers battlefield drones in garages and China advances AI-controlled naval fleets, America’s Army and Navy are still learning the basics. Literally. This past month, two stories landed back-to-back, each quietly underscoring a larger and more...
Catholic School and the Party That Forgot Its Soul
Back in the day, before motorcades and scandal headlines, before Bill Clinton played sax and Newt Gingrich decided to choke the soul out of public service, Henry Cisneros and I went to the same Catholic school on the West Side of San Antonio. He was in fourth grade. I...
I Had Dinner with Willie Brown—Don’t Tell Me I Don’t Know California Politics
Back in the early ’90s, I was chasing California politics the way a hungry dog chases a meat truck—press pass in one pocket, notebook in the other, and always with a half-empty tank of gas and a deadline that didn’t care about traffic on the 5. One particular night in...
Submarines, Showboating, and the Ghosts of August
Well, hell. Here we go again—dancing on the nuclear tripwire with the grace of a rhinoceros in a tutu. Today, Donald Trump—commander of all that he surveys, including apparently basic naval doctrine—announced with great fanfare that he’s sending two nuclear submarines...

Isaac Cubillos
This isn’t journalism for the polite table.
This is truth with grit under its nails and dirt on its boots.