Posts on Monday, October 6, 2025

Hold on to your britches because you’re not going to believe this one. The Washington Post Editorial Board just admitted that the so-called "Affordable Care Act," one the most notorious pieces of Obama-era legislation foisted upon consumers by legislators and the liberal media as the saving grace of American health care, turned out to be an expensive mess. The Post tried to play both sides of the fence in the ongoing government shutdown stand off with Republicans and Democrats, the latter of which demanded “Republicans agree to extend the Covid-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it.” Then The Post ran one of the biggest plot twists ever

In New Jersey, the GOP is sensing a rare opening in the gubernatorial race, a state long considered a Democratic stronghold. Democratic candidate Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, is under renewed scrutiny for her role in a 1994 Naval Academy cheating scandal, an episode she had previously downplayed. Republican congressmen are now demanding the release of her military records to shed light on the full extent of her involvement.That controversy has quickly cast a shadow over Sherrill’s campaign, and recent polling reflects a tightening race with Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

The Democrat candidate for Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones fantasized about murdering Republicans in newly released text messages. Despite the egregious messages — Democrats are doubling down on their support for Jones. In a 2022 exchange with Republican House Delegate Carrie Coyner, Jones said it would be a “good thing” if the children of his former colleague, Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert, would die.“Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head. Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time,”

Everytown for Gun Safety, the country’s largest gun control group, has contributed $200,000 to Jay Jones’s campaign for Virginia attorney general and hailed the Democrat as an "advocate for safer communities." But now, as Jones is embroiled in scandal over text messages in which he fantasized about shooting a Republican state leader, Everytown is sitting on the sidelines. Everytown, which donated to Jones’s campaign on Aug. 26 and named him one of its "Gun Sense Candidates," has not weighed in on revelations that Jones, a former Virginia house delegate, said in a series of text messages in 2022 that then-Virginia house speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican, deserved "two bullets

Shut it down. Shut it all down! Not the government. I’m talking about the fake news that spent the past two weeks trying to scare average Americans into thinking that the Trump administration was coming after them – in particular by stripping them of their Obamacare subsidies. At random, here’s a quote to demonstrate, this one from John Berman on CNN: “This morning with the government shutdown, there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on. Democrats want to include an extension of Obamacare subsidies that expire at the end of the year. Republicans have refused to negotiate on subsidies unless Democrats first agree to a short-term resolution that would fund

CBS’s parent company, Paramount, has purchased Bari Weiss’s digital media outlet The Free Press and is installing Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. “As of today, I am editor-in-chief of CBS News, working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations—shows like 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning—and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and, most importantly, understand the news in the 21st century,” Weiss said in an announcement of the deal on Oct. 6. “Bari is a proven champion of independent, principled journalism, and I am confident her entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News,”

Maybe money can’t buy happiness or wisdom, but it can help buy power. JB Pritzker knows this better than most. Over the years, he has spent some $347 million of his own, largely inherited, wealth to acquire and hold on to the governorship of Illinois, the perch from which he aspires to national glory. The Pritzker Project proves the wisdom of the cynical parody of the Golden Rule: (“Whoever has the gold, makes the rules!”) Pritzker’s only rule when it comes to wielding his powerful purse is whether doing so serves his personal ambition. He’s shameless

Friend of the Treehouse John Spiropoulos has put together a series of videos explaining how President Obama, FBI Director James Comey and CIA Director John Brennan constructed a coverup to hide their political surveillance operation. Today there are two video segments that deserve focus. (snip) Pay particular attention to the person who actually triggered the cancellation of the December 9, 2016, Presidential Daily Brief. It wasn’t Obama, it was James Comey. From a risk management perspective, initially the surveillance and spying operation was a low-risk endeavor.m(snip)Donald Trump was not expected to win the election. When he did, all of the participants were suddenly at risk

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said. (Snip) In the past, I’ve talked about the left's deliberate shift of language, but I’ve never mentioned the foundational shift I’m going to talk about now. This one is different. It doesn’t just twist one word or one idea — it changes the ground we stand on. This shift attacks logic itself. It strikes at the roots of reasoning, the process by which we decide what is true. It happened quietly and almost no one saw it occur. The term critical thinking has been redefined. For decades, parents were told schools would teach their children to “think critically.”

A food aid program that helps more than 6 million low-income mothers and young children will run out of federal money within two weeks unless the government shutdown ends, forcing states to use their own money to keep it afloat or risk it shutting down, experts say. The $8 billion Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, also known as WIC, provides vouchers to buy infant formula as well as fresh fruits and vegetables, low-fat milk and other healthy staples that are often out of financial reach for low-income households. The shutdown, which began Wednesday, coincided with the beginning of a new fiscal year, meaning programs like WIC,

Pope Leo XIV continues to make thinly veiled jibes against the Trump administration’s stance against illegal immigration. Speaking in front of thousands of pilgrims at St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Leo warned that migrants must not be treated with “the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination.” Without singling out any country in particular, Leo said that Catholics should “open our arms and hearts to them, welcoming them as brothers and sisters, and being for them a presence of consolation and hope.” Leo explained that the church was living through a “new missionary age” that tasked its members with providing “hospitality and welcome, compassion and solidarity” to migrants coming to the West.

Despite nonstop media controversies swirling about his administration and continued criticism from his political foes, President Donald Trump’s favorability remained rock solid in early October, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. September’s news-filled month — which included the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, renewed efforts to end the Israel-Hamas conflict, and U.S. attacks on South American cartels’ drug boats — failed to diminish Trump’s overall poll readings. Every month, I&I/TIPP asks Americans the following question: “Overall, is your opinion of Donald Trump generally favorable, generally unfavorable,

Chinese illegal immigrants are obtaining commercial driver’s licenses (CDL) and landing jobs in the U.S. trucking industry with support from a Chinese government-linked network, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation discovered. The Chinese American Trucker Organization USA Inc. (CATOU) is a New York-based nonprofit trade organization registered as a 501(c)6 that has allegedly helped over 1,000 Chinese students obtain CDLs and has a 100% pass rate, according to its business filings, social media posts and website. Videos posted on social media by an individual who crossed the U.S. southern border illegally shows they were able to rapidly obtain California CDLs after taking courses taught by CATOU instructors.

Environmental activist Greta Thunberg has reportedly told officials from her native Sweden that she is being held in a bug-infested cell with little food or water and is being made to hold Israeli flags for photos. Thunberg, 22, was one of 437 activists, parliamentarians and lawyers who set out from Europe to deliver aid to Gaza by breaching Israel's 16-year maritime blockade of the enclave as part of the Freedom Flotilla, comprised of more than 40 vessels. Between Wednesday and Friday, Israel's navy intercepted all the boats and arrested every person onboard while in international waters. Most of them are being held in the Ansar III prison, a high-security facility

United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages—raw material to be transformed into intelligence for deportation raids and arrests. Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED show that the agency is seeking private vendors to run a multiyear surveillance program out of two of its little-known targeting centers. The program envisions stationing nearly 30 private analysts at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Vermont and Southern California. Their job: Scour Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, converting posts and profiles into fresh leads for enforcement

In blue cities across America—Portland, Oregon, especially—often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens. Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Biden years—illegally and thus without criminal or health checks. Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.

One of the things that constantly stuns me about the American left is the cognitive dissonance. We live in the most affluent, safe, healthy, well-fed, well-lit, comfortable society in the world, but for leftists, it’s always the year 536 AD for the comforts of life, and the 1950s when it comes to race and abortion. It’s not the “best of times and the worst of times.” It’s just the worst of times, especially in America and especially if you’re black. America abolished slavery in 1865. America began the process of culturally eradicating Jim Crow in the 1950s and politically eradicated it in 1964.

With the government shutdown, Democrat politicians are in rare form these days. The talking points of the Left this week are that the shutdown fight is necessary, or 50,000 people will die, and 15 million people will lose health coverage, and 20 million will see their health insurance premiums double. Politicians always like using superlatives; it makes them feel important. And there’s no time like a government shutdown for speaking in superlatives. Even without exaggerating, the numbers they have to work with are enormous. The federal government employs about 3 million people, making it the nation’s largest employer, almost double the size of Walmart’s 1.5 million,

he Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Virginia worked for a Saudi government-controlled school just after 9/11, at a time when the Islamic academy was already controversial for being controlled by the Saudi royal family and for its extremist textbooks which taught hatred of non-Muslims. Abigail Spanberger, a former Democratic congresswoman from Virginia, is currently the favorite to be the state’s next governor, according to polling averages. When it was revealed during her first congressional run in 2018 that she had worked for the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia during the 2002-2003 school year, Spanberger said that she was “proud” and “not ashamed” of her work history, despite the fact that,

I think I am going to form a hip-hop group with some of my retired officer friends that we will call the Phat Generalzzz – dibs on being the human beatbox! That is, of course, a ridiculous idea, but you know how it differs from the nonsense the Dems keep trying to sell us? The difference is that I don’t mean it. I am not actually going to form a hip-hop group with some of my retired officer friends that we will call the Phat Generalzzz, though if I did, I would call dibs on being the human beatbox. But the Dems are serious about the ridiculous stuff

As the government shutdown continues, the media seems fixated on one Republican talking point: That the Democrats want health- care benefits for illegal immigrants. Of course they do. Part of the way Democrats try to claim otherwise is semantics. For example, President Joe Biden ballooned the number of illegal immigrants with Temporary Protected Status from 400,000 to 1.2 million during his term. TPS-holders have no legal right to live here, but the government has promised not to deport them until their home country resolves what is supposed to be a major destabilizing condition — a natural disaster, for example, although past administrations have tended to grant and renew TPS for far less.

When Zohran Mamdani was a 24-year-old amateur rapper living rent-free in his parents’ Upper West Side apartment, he was interviewed on a podcast celebrating his alma mater, the prestigious and selective Bronx HS of Science, where he made clear that he was too good for a mainstream New York City public school. Only the best would do for this privileged, Uganda-born son of a tenured Columbia professor and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. In 2016, he told the oral history podcast “Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories” that, in eighth grade, while he was deciding which tony private school would have the pleasure of his enrollment for the next four years,

President Trump is deploying 400 Texas National Guard troops to Illinois, Oregon, and other states as swarms of anti-ICE protesters continue to clash with federal agents, Gov. JB Pritzker said Sunday night. The Illinois Democrat blasted Trump’s “invasion” hours after the president mobilized 300 California National Guard members to Portland, where unrest has raged for over 100 consecutive days outside an immigration detention center — a scene that has been playing out in Chicago since September. Pritzker said the plan defies his wishes, adding that federal officials haven’t reached out to coordinate or discuss the deployment.

Fusion energy skeptics consistently scoff at the notion that the technology required to create unlimited pollution-free power by superheating hydrogen atoms in a pressurized containment vessel is always "ten years away." There is no question that the requirements to create a sustained fusion reaction are daunting – and expensive. Yet the nation that solves the challenge will have access to infinite power that will allow it to dominate the globe, and apply it cleanly and limitlessly to literally everything and anything that requires electricity. The fusion skeptics are not only short-sighted but may also be absent an appreciation of how successful, strategic investments are made.

Remember how many Democrats called in vain for the resignation of former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam when his penchant for performing in blackface was discovered in 2019? Among the most vocal was Abigail Spanberger, who then represented the Commonwealth’s 7th District in Congress. Now, as the Democratic candidate in Virginia’s 2025 gubernatorial contest, Spanberger is oddly reluctant to call for the withdrawal of her party’s vile nominee for Attorney General — Jay Jones. Evidently, musing about the murder of a GOP lawmaker is not as disturbing as a Halloween get up.

Even NBC’s Meet the Press couldn’t ignore the Democrats’ stunning hypocrisy over the government shutdown fight—and Hakeem Jeffries found himself on the defensive when Kristen Welker pressed him about it. On Sunday morning, Welker challenged the House minority leader over his repeated claims that the current standoff is a “Republican shutdown,” pointing out that it’s Democratic senators—not Republicans—who are holding up the vote on a clean continuing resolution that would keep the government open. “But let me ask you,” Welker began, “because you say this is a Republican shutdown. But it’s Democratic senators who are withholding their votes on what is called a clean resolution.

A federal judge on Sunday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying any National Guard units to Oregon, including the California National Guard. California and Oregon sought the temporary restraining order after the president sent guard members from California to Oregon earlier in the day. On Saturday, the same judge temporarily blocked the administration from deploying Oregon National Guard troops to Portland. A Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement that about 200 federalized members of the California National Guard who had been on duty around Los Angeles were being reassigned to Portland. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said about 100 arrived Saturday and around 100 more were en route Sunday.