History opens this week with a story from the Vosges Mountains, 1944, where an Apache scout named Joe Tall Mountain saved an entire platoon — not with a rifle, but by reading the forest. The G.I.s mocked his methods for three days straight. Then he stopped them thirty yards from a German observer hidden in the fog. Audie Murphy, who grew up hunting to feed his family after his mother died, was the one man who recognized what Joe was doing. He stepped between the platoon and their own arrogance and told them to lower their rifles. Murphy would go on to become the most decorated American soldier of World War II. He credited men like Joe Tall Mountain for teaching him that the bravest thing he ever did was trust someone the others refused to understand. Joe never lost a man. Not one.
Old Man is off his meds and leads his dispatch from Islamabad. Iran blinked. With their supreme leader dead since February, their air defenses scrap metal, and their proxies bleeding out across the region, Tehran sent a ten-point peace proposal to talks in Islamabad less than two hours before Trump’s April 7 deadline expired. Old Man reads the posture plainly: that is not a country negotiating from strength. We hold the leverage, and he says we are under no obligation to grant Tehran anything on their wish list — not sanctions relief, not Strait of Hormuz control, not Hezbollah folded into a deal with one hand still on the knife. He reserves his sharpest words for the Democrats who spent the week trying to trip the President who put Iran on the mat for the first time in forty-six years. Then, without losing stride, he turns to property tax, income tax, and what he calls “tenancy with extra steps” — a man pays off his house and keeps paying rent on it forever, to the county instead of the bank. He wants the whole tangled mess replaced with a single consumption tax. Tax work and you get less of it. Tax what people buy and you get people who think before they spend. He calls that a virtue worth recovering.
Curmudgeon is in fine spirits as he runs two pieces this week off the same spine. In The Sky Never Fell, he logs every doomsday promise Democrats made about a second Trump term — the nationwide abortion ban, Social Security stripped, a dictator installed by lunch on January 21 — and notes that fifteen months later elections are still on the calendar and nobody is goose-stepping down Main Street. The fear was the product, not the warning. No corrections ran on page one. In Why Recycle Bad Ideas, he turns to the No Kings protesters marching through Salida and asks what exactly they are proposing. The answer, he says, is the same rejected menu from November 2024: catch-and-release borders, climate mandates, and school policy that shut parents out. Showing up is still a constitutional right. It is not the same as offering better ideas.
The High Plains Grifter closes the week in Salida, where a 1971 state noise law and a unanimous Colorado Supreme Court ruling have killed live music permits downtown. Sales tax is down 17 percent year over year. The attorney who sued moved away the moment he won. A bill to fix it, SB26-098, is moving in Denver. Until it passes, the bars are libraries and spring break weekend tips are going somewhere quieter.
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