Actor Mark Hamill made big news this week when he posted an AI generated image of President Trump laying in a shallow grave. The caption began “If only…” The White House was quick to respond, calling him “one sick individual.”

Hamill, who still does work as a voice actor, seems to have thought better of wishing President Trump was dead and deleted the post. He then posted another one in which he vaguely apologized and claimed people had misunderstood his point.

Others didn’t even pretend to be sorry. One response read, “Your post made it to the White House and you got called out. Congratulations, well done.”

I saw all of this Thursday when it happened and thought it was sad to see an actor who played one of my childhood favorite characters behaving like this. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that Hamill’s outburst is actually part of a trend on the left.

Today the Washington Post reports that there is a whole world of videos on TikTok where young progressives try to come as close as possible to calling for Trump’s death without actually saying anything that might get them a visit from the Secret Service.

Peyton Vanest was fuming about President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know?”

“If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it.”

Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views.

“Crazy how we all know exactly what you’re talking about,” one of thousands of commenters replied.

That was posted just 18 days before Cole Allen attempted to storm the White House Correspondent’s Dinner with the goal of killing President Trump. Interest in the “Somebody should do it” trend spiked after Allen’s attack.

This trend didn’t start a few weeks ago. It seems to taken off last February, about a month after Trump took office. A Brooklyn comedian went viral with another clip vaguely suggesting someone should kill Trump.

As I said, I wasn’t really aware this was part of a trend, but apparently younger people who spend time on TikTok are very aware of it.

Tim Weninger, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies how social media is wielded to dehumanize enemies, first encountered the trend last fall when a teenage family member happened to scroll upon it. This week, he said, he asked a few students on campus whether they’d seen “Somebody should do it” appeals, too. Every single one, he said, knew what that meant.

In retrospect, I think this is exactly what James Comey was doing when he posted his image of shells he claims he found on the beach. And, as I’ve argued before, while I think Comey very much intended that to have two meanings, charging him for it is never going to succeed. He can easily claim he had no ill intent and create all the reasonable doubt needed. Unless there’s some email where he joked about mocking Trump’s assassination, he’ll never be convicted.

And that’s what this whole trend is really about. Can you say it without saying it in a way that would result in consequences. In short, leftists on TikTok (and elsewhere) have normalized assassination talk.

Do they really mean it? The Post interviewed six people about the trend and most of them said it was just a way to vent, but at least one said she hoped someone would really do it.

Grace, a 26-year-old university employee in Louisiana, said it felt like writing in her diary when she logged onto X and typed “somebody should do it” to her few hundred followers…

“I don’t have a violent bone in my body,” she said. “I’d never do it myself.”

But Grace would be happy, she said, if someone happened to kill Trump.

“Literally,” she said.

I suspect that’s a lot more common on the left than this 6-person survey suggests. The whole point is to say it without saying it. If you admit you really mean it, you’ve failed to play the game properly.

Most of remember how many people seemed eager to celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the weeks after his death. Kirk was well known but nothing compared to Trump. If Trump were assassinated, I suspect there would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the left celebrating, led by a lot of very well-known celebrities.

Do the memes have any impact on real life? That’s harder to say, but we can say that there have been three assassination attempts so far and the number of threats is striking. Here’s a list of some recent ones that resulted in a law enforcement response.

– Dean DelleChiaie – An FAA worker from New Hampshire threatened to kill Trump last month. He had previously done searches on how to get a gun into a federal facility.

– Nathaniel Sanders – Out of Florida. The FBI got a tip which led them to threats to bomb the White House and also to kill Melania Trump and Sec. Marco Rubio.

– Michael Kovco – Chicago man threatened to kill Trump and his son Barron. He sent a message to the WH website saying it came from “Mr. I’m going to f***ing kill your child Kovco”

– Andrew D. Emerald – From Massachusetts, he repeatedly threatened to kill Trump on Facebook. When the FBI showed up, he brandished a sword.

– Shawn Monper – From Butler, PA. He pleaded guilty last month to threatening to murder Trump. He called himself Mr. Satan on YouTube and got a firearm permit not long after Trump’s 2nd inauguration.

All of those cases are fairly recent, and there are more if you keep going back to last year. Again, you can’t directly connect the death threats to the memes about killing Trump. These individuals may or may not have seen those memes. But what you can say for sure is there is a lot of assassination talk and thoughts circulating out there. It’s not hard to find at this point. It’s everywhere out in the open.

Failed regimes are faltering while political and military reality is asserting itself with unmistakable force.

For more than 20 years, Robert J. Lurtsema (1931–2000) hosted a classical music radio show on the Boston station WGBH. He typically began the show with a bit of birdsong. He followed that soothing introit with a brief recap of the news, which he wrote up himself and delivered in his unmistakable, sonorous baritone (like “warm fudge,” said one admirer). I liked the timbre of his voice, at once calming and authoritative. I also liked Lurtsema’s good humor. Occasionally, when a paucity of noteworthy events warranted, he would declare that there really wasn’t any news that day and go straight to the music.

Those were good days. I wish other news outlets would follow Lurtsema’s lead and indulge us with an occasional moratorium on their blather masquerading as news.

That said, honesty requires that I point out that recent days are not good candidates for such studied omissions. A lot is happening. Here are just a few of many noteworthy items from the last few days.

In England, the Labour Party all but ceased to exist. “Shock By-Election Result Sends Political Shockwaves Across The UK” screamed one headline. As of this writing, the vote is still being counted. But it looks as if Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s party lost as many as 2,000 council seats (out of a total of 5,000) in the local elections on May 8. Congratulations, Keir! That’s a record. Labour also lost Wales for the first time in a century. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said one news commentator. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party picked up more than 1,400 seats.

Stepping out of this bloodbath, Starmer tried to look defiant. I am “not going to walk away,” he said. The novelist J. K. Rowling spoke for many when she observed that “sprinting away would also be acceptable.” Starmer is not required to call a general election until August 2029. I suspect he will be hustled out of office by autumn.

There is some recent election news in the US as well. In last week’s primaries, Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates trounced their RINO opponents. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy took some 85 percent of the vote, winning in every single county. “Oh, but that’s just the primary,” quote the brethren. “Just wait for the midterms. MAGA will be soundly beaten.” Want to bet? The Democrats thought that redistricting chicanery such as that practiced by Gov. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia would save the day. The thinking was, “If I can’t win honestly, I can at least squeeze into victory via geometrical gaslighting, aka that old chap Gerry Mander.”

Not so fast. In Virginia, the State Supreme Court said, “Nope. Your ‘redistricting’ wheeze won’t fly.” The ruling was, as NPR reported, tears in its eyes, a “major setback for Democrats.

Not as big as the setback just delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States, though. On April 29, the court ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais that the states may no longer use race to draw congressional and state legislative districts. The decision will have plenty of penumbras and emanations. Among other things, as James Piereson notes, the decision “signals the end of a six-decade experiment, going back to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, during which judicial and administrative doctrines enforced racial and other preferences in nearly every area of national life.” I agree with those many commentators who reckon that the decision will net Republicans some 8–12 additional House seats in the midterms. In other words, Republicans will not only hold the House; they will also expand their majority.

What else? One tidbit from the lexicon of rhetorical subterfuge, division of politicized euphemism. CBS reported that a Frontier Airlines plane “fatally” hit a “pedestrian” on the runway of the Denver, Colorado, airport. “Pedestrian”? The comments were brutal about that, since the fellow in question was a trespasser, not a pedestrian in any normal sense of the word. CBS deployed the word in order to suggest that he was just an innocent bystander. In fact, the fellow had climbed the perimeter fence at the airport and then made for the runway. Not your common or garden variety “pedestrian” out for a stroll. The CBS story then went on to say that there was no news on the condition of said “pedestrian.” Since CBS also said that interaction with the airplane was of the “fatal” variety—some reports said that he had been sucked into an engine, making a mess—one didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to pronounce confidently about his condition. It was terminal, and I am not talking about the airport building.

Then there is Iran. I have several times echoed President Trump: The war is over. Janitorial work is tidying up the debris. Operation Epic Fury gave way to Project Freedom, which gave way to the cat-and-mouse game we see unfolding now. Donald Trump, for those keeping score, is the cat. The Iranian regime is fielding the mice. CENTCOM just reaffirmed that the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz “continues to be fully enforced.” “As of today [May 9],” their bulletin reports, “CENTCOM forces have redirected 58 commercial vessels and disabled 4 since April 13 to prevent the ships from entering or leaving Iranian ports.”

The cat is there, but the mice don’t care. They send speed boats, drones, and missiles to harass shipping and US vessels. In so doing, they expose a panoply of military assets from IRGC-linked positions on shore to drone and fast attack boat staging sites. ”For years,” one commentator observed, “the Islamic Republic relied on concealment, deniability, underground infrastructure, dispersed launch systems, and swarm tactics designed to complicate retaliation and avoid direct conventional confrontation.” This time, however, their attacks

exposed elements of that network in real time and allowed the U.S. to rapidly strike supporting infrastructure behind it without a prolonged escalation cycle.

This is modern military strategy at its most effective: force the enemy to reveal hidden systems through aggression, map operational networks instantly, and destroy critical nodes before they can reposition or disappear.

The cat has responded as cats and responsible dramatists always do. “If Iranian boats threaten Americans,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday, “they’re going to get blown up.”

The apparent hiatus in hostilities may seem like limbo. If you are part of the Iranian regime, it will seem like hell. The U.S.S. Missouri is anchored in Tokyo Bay. The surrender papers are laid out on the desk. The Iranians just need to find someone with authority to sign. “Is the ceasefire with Iran still on?” a reporter asked President Trump after the US Navy sunk several Iranian “fast boats” attacking them. “Yes,” he replied, “They trifled with us today. We blew ’em away.” Should the ceasefire end, POTUS continued, you won’t have to ask. “You’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran. They better sign their agreement fast.” Good advice.

Anticipation of a forthcoming U.S. government “disclosure” on alien life is everywhere in the media.

President Trump has ordered a full release of files on UFOs. This week, FBI director Kash Patel said, “You’re going to start seeing those releases literally happening in the very near future. We just met on it.” 

Where do language-based code, computer-like information processing, or machines come from? In our experience, they have only one known cause: intelligence. The existence of ET life wouldn’t prove unguided, purposeless naturalistic evolution—it would provide another example to doubt it.

Some, including Dawkins himself, have speculated that life on Earth could have been seeded here by aliens. But then, where did the aliens come from? Ultimately, life requires a transcendent intelligent designer.

And there’s something much bigger that aliens can’t explain.

Modern astrophysics shows the universe had a beginning—long ago it expanded from an infinitely small, infinitely dense “singularity.” If the universe began, then it requires a First Cause. But no ETs, inside the universe, could fill that role. The only way to explain the universe is to invoke a superpowerful, supernatural First Cause. We call that entity God.

There’s more that aliens cannot explain. The origin of the universe at the Big Bang was no random explosion but a carefully orchestrated expansion event. The laws of nature are finely tuned for life. If they were just slightly different, we could not exist.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose calculated that a habitable universe would require that just one such parameter, the initial entropy at the Big Bang, be fine-tuned to one part in (get ready for a very, very large number) 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. 

We lack the words to describe such an incredible mathematical degree of fine-tuning. This is why another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Charles Townes, said “intelligent design … seems to be quite real,” observing that “if the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here.”

Aliens would owe their existence to a designer outside the physical universe, just as we do.

Alien life, if it exists, wouldn’t overturn anything about God. He made the universe, and could have made other intelligences than ours—be they “extraterrestrials,” spiritual beings, or anything else.

Following a credible government disclosure, figuring out where ETs fit into that spectrum would be our next task. Whatever the answer, the science of alien life would only increase our wonder at God’s creation.

Casey Luskin is a PhD geologist and associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

Just when the Democrats seem to be finished, Gavin swoops in with truckloads of diapers.

Clarice Feldman | May 10, 2026

The Democrat party is facing such a host of seemingly intractable problems — structural, financial, legal, and ideological — that it will be close to a miracle if it survives after this year’s midterms. The below-deck shuffles — encouraging illegal alien votes, manipulating the census, making crooked voting almost impossible to check, and stuffing their pockets with illegal contributions through ActBlue and pay-to-play schemes of USAID and NGOs — are all suddenly being exposed and blocked.

Empty Pockets

Jeff Childers has done a thorough job explaining the party’s terminal crisis. Being short of funds is a good start.

The Laundromat is Closed

Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”

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The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.

The RNC has no debt and, as of March, has almost $117 million in cash on hand. The DNC has about $13.9 million cash on hand, but with $18.4 million in debts/loans owed. (By my arithmetic, that means the DNC is broke and faces a significant disadvantage in November.)

An Honest Census

The 2020 Census seriously miscounted the population. The Obama administration “scrambled real population data and distorted political representation.”

@StephenM: “The combination of illegal alien apportionment, flawed censuses, and unconstitutional racially gerrymandered districts created an artificial 40-plus House seats for Democrats.” and the overthrow of the U.S. government in 2020. 

Meaning: Unless Democrats can segregate congressional districts based on race, count illegal aliens in the census, and end requirements to show an ID to vote, they are obsolete — dead and gone.

By the way, they admitted it because they got caught.

Add to an honest accounting the fact that blue states are hemorrhaging residents who are fleeing to red states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, and you can see where the power shift leads.

Structural Problems: A Gerontocracy and an Odd Assemblage of Disparate Factions

The party’s leaders are increasingly old and clinging to ideas that have proven unworkable and unpopular. The party’s central theme is opposition to Trump in everything, even the privately financed, long-needed ballroom. Sure, some of their fans and consultants have warned them to become more values-oriented — and given the president’s continued victories across the board, that’s sage advice. But they can’t take it, as Childers details.

They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.

Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half. [snip] Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.

Sensible voters want secure borders, effective policing, and men kept out of women’s bathrooms. The party can advocate for none of these without losing the fringe 11% essential to their present hodge-podge of support. And don’t even hint that they should support what the vast majority want — honest, accountable election systems — because for decades their viability depends on chaotic, crookedly run ones.

The Virginia and U.S. Supreme Courts this week just compounded the Party’s problems.

Briefly, Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, in clear contradiction to her campaign promises, tried to put over a lobster-shaped gerrymander of the state to turn her party’s 6-5 district advantage into a ten-seat one. In doing so, she bypassed the independent redistricting commission, rushed a dishonestly worded constitutional amendment after over a million Virginians had already voted, and established procedures in clear violation of the state’s constitution. In doing so and defending their action in court, the Virginia Democrats blew in the neighborhood of $70 million dollars at a time when, as I have explained above, the party coffers were quite bare. The state court threw out the redistricting. The Virginia Supreme Court decision is not subject to U.S. Supreme Court review as Bill Shipley so clearly explains. 

In the meantime, some Republican states, inspired by this attempted grab, decided they’d redistrict before the midterms, too.

In a sloppy pleading that misspelled both “Attorney” and “Virginia,” the state seeks to undo the state court ruling. I can’t imagine they will succeed in that.

Adding to the Democrats’ troubles, the Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act did not compel the creation of majority-minority districts and, in fact, the Constitution banned creating districts based on race. The combination of Spanberger’s aggressive and illegal play and the clarification of the VRA spurred more Republican states to redistrict, and Republicans may enter November with an eight-seat advantage. (The Cook Report projects Republicans will net +8 House seats from redistricting alone. To win in November, the Democrats will need to flip 11 or more seats, which seems very unlikely.)

Pollster Frank Lutz seems to concede the Democrats have lost any usual midterm advantage. 

The Republican wins may be locked in for 2026, but 2028 is another story. Democrats are already laying the groundwork to go scorched-earth. Republicans who so far haven’t budged over the last year may also hop in, especially the Southern states that don’t seem likely to redraw before November, like Georgia.

“It’s not over until it’s over,” said Adam Kincaid, the president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust who drew Texas’ map last summer.

On the horizon, the Democrats’ disadvantages may grow even more than they have already. The drive for voter IDs and restrictions on mail-in voting, as well as increased scrutiny of voter rolls and prosecution for election malfeasance, continues. Further, the Biden administration turned off the fraud detection switch for four years, and we are promised that the billions of dollars fraudulently disbursed are being tracked down and the results made public.

Gavin Newsom’s Brilliant Strategy

Of course, in arguing that the Democrats are in something of a death spiral, I may have overlooked the genius of California’s governor. You’ve heard of the Roman plan to keep the populace on your side — give them bread and circuses. Gavin’s shrewd plan is to give them disposable diapers. 

He plans to spend $20 million in taxpayer dollars to give 400 diapers to each of the 100,000 families with newborns. Math is always very hard for Democrats. The state will be paying 8-10 times more by giving out diapers instead of giving people cash to buy the diapers themselves. On the other hand, doing it this way means Gavin’s and his wife’s friends will get their “beaks in,” as Tony Soprano would say. Give it to an NGO and pay its officers munificently for distributing the diapers — otherwise these friends of the Newsoms could profit only by arming themselves and holding up the 100,000 families buying diapers at Costco.

Related Topics: Voting Rights Act, Virginia, Democrats, Gavin Newsom, Abigail Spanberger, 2026 Elections

Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton

Medicaid is the joint federal/state program that provides free medical care to the poor and near-poor in the U.S. Who could be against that?

A website called Statista collects data on various subjects of interest and presents them in useful charts. One subject is the total federal plus state spending on the Medicaid program by year since inception of the program back in the 1960s through the latest year of 2024. Here is that chart:

Looking at the chart, a few things leap out. One is rapid and unbroken growth year after year from the beginning up to the most recent year. Another is two particularly rapid periods of growth, first in the 1990s (Bill Clinton was President), and then again in the most recent period of 2020-2024. That last five-year period began in the last year of Trump’s first term (the pandemic year), but then continued throughout the four years of the Biden term. Between the end of 2019 through 2024 the program grew from $627 billion to $949 billion. That’s more than a 50% increase in 5 years, and more than an 8% compound annual rate of growth. The word “unsustainable” doesn’t begin to describe it.

When you think of medical care for the poor, you likely have a mental picture of what all this money is paying for. Probably, your mental picture involves hospitals, doctors, nurses, injuries, diseases, treatments and pharmaceuticals. But how much of the Medicaid spending — and particularly of the recent explosion in Medicaid spending — falls in those categories?

We are recently learning that much or even most of the recent cost explosion falls into other categories that have come under the Medicaid spending umbrella by reason of various “waivers,” and that do not involve hospitals or doctors or medical professionals or medical treatments. Major examples include: in-home assistance, often provided by family members, for things like cooking and housekeeping; transportation to medical appointments; palliative end-of-life care, again often provided in the home (sometimes called “hospice”); autism counseling; and more.

Any of these services could well be legitimate in many cases. But as people have started to look at and publicize exploding expenditures in these categories over the past several years, we learn of one situation after another where the spending appears to exceed anything that could possibly be legitimate. And almost all of the provision of these services is supposedly taking place in homes or other personal spaces where it is difficult to impossible to check if the service is actually being provided.

For today I’ll provide just a few examples recently in the news.

In about 2023 initial news reports indicated that somehow there were some 1800 hospices operating in the Los Angeles area, constituting approximately 6 times the per capita level of such businesses elsewhere in the country. In March, CBS News investigated what they called “ground zero for hospice fraud” in Los Angeles. Excerpt:

Three years ago, California’s state auditor sounded the alarm that Los Angeles County had seen a 1,500% increase in hospice companies since 2010 – more than six times the national average relative to its elderly population. . . . The state says it proceeded to investigate and revoke the licenses of 280 hospices. But since then, the problem has continued to fester. CBS News examined the business and financial records of every hospice currently operating in LA County, applying the same indicators identified by the state. Indications of fraud have not stopped. In fact, they’ve grown.

(Note that the hospice fraud issue involves the Medicare program, as well as Medicaid.)

In the area of in-home personal services, a reporter named Luke Rosiak at the Daily Wire is just out with a three-part series involving what appears to be widespread fraud in the Columbus, Ohio area. Here are links to Part 1 (May 4), Part 2 (May 5), and Part 3 (May 7). This alleged fraud, like the Minnesota free-meals scandal, involves a large community of almost entirely Somali-Americans. The entire series is well worth your attention. Besides revealing specific instances of fraud, the series goes into how the level of spending is completely implausible given the population to be served. Here is an indicative excerpt from Part 2:

The seven buildings along East Dublin Granville Road in Columbus, Ohio, are filled with hundreds of office suites, all owned by a company named Cordoba Real Estate. A large majority of the tenants in the buildings bill Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded medical program for the impoverished, as a “home health care” business that provides low-skilled, usually non-medical care to elderly or disabled people. The Daily Wire has spent weeks analyzing Medicaid data released by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in an effort to weed out wasteful government spending. The buildings owned by Cordoba stuck out, each housing dozens of businesses that bill Medicaid. In all, the Cordoba-owned buildings in Columbus housed 288 businesses registered with Medicaid, The Daily Wire investigation found. Together, they charged taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars between 2018 and 2024. That’s in a city where only 6,273 people 75 or older are on Medicaid.

And don’t get the idea that explosive growth of Medicaid spending on home health aides is confined to a few Somali communities in the Midwest. New York State has one of the most out-of-control Medicaid-funded home health aide programs. Here is an April 2025 report on the issue from the Empire Center. Excerpt:

New York’s home health employment is continuing to soar, growing by 57,000 jobs or 10 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to newly released data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state’s workforce of home health and personal care aides grew to an estimated 623,000 as of May 2024, according to BLS’s Occupational and Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, an annual survey posted Tuesday. That equated to 171 aides per 1,000 residents aged 65 or older, which was the highest rate in the U.S. – 153 percent higher than the national average and 24 percent ahead of the No. 2 state, California.

New York State has only about 10 million jobs total, so 623,000 of these home health aide jobs is more than 6% of all jobs in the state. Are all these people doing legitimate work, or are they just taking advantage of the taxpayers to get paid for hanging out at home with mom? How could you tell?

Autism counseling is another big area. Autism is something without any clear definition, or any good metric for determining if counseling does any good. As one example among many, here is a January 2026 report from the HHS Inspector General about improper payments in the small state of Maine. Excerpt:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) has released an audit report revealing that Maine made at least $45.6 million in improper fee-for-service Medicaid payments for rehabilitative and community support (RCS) services provided to children diagnosed with autism. . . . In the span of five years, Medicaid payments for RCS services in Maine grew significantly, from $52.2 million in 2019 to $80.6 million in 2023.

While we have barely been looking, the Medicaid program has morphed from medical care to widespread payments for aides and personal services provided by non-professionals. Cooking? Housecleaning? No problem, the taxpayers will pick that up.

The Supreme Court’s chief justice seems to have something other than the Constitution as his top priority.

J.B. Shurk | May 10, 2026

I do not like Chief Justice John Roberts.  I think his loyalties lie more with defending the entrenched powers of the political Establishment than with defending the Constitution of the United States.  I find his jurisprudence squishy.  Although his decisions could be described as advancing, more often than not, conservative viewpoints, Roberts does not seem to have a consistent philosophy guiding his opinions.  

Roberts is a pragmatist.  He surveys the mood of the country and considers how the rest of the members of the Court will vote on any case, and he chooses a position that he feels will best preserve the institutional longevity of the Judicial Branch.  Roberts is, in other words, more interested in maintaining the power of the branch that he embodies than in making tough, but correct, decisions.  

None of Roberts’ rulings better exemplifies this pragmatic, amoral approach to jurisprudence than his 2012 decision to save Obamacare by redefining the individual insurance mandate as a tax, rather than as a penalty.  During oral arguments, the Obama administration barely addressed the possibility that the mandate could be seen as a tax.  Democrats did not want to admit that nationalizing health insurance would increase costs for Americans, and the word “tax” certainly implies that prices will rise (which they did).  

President Obama had been haranguing the Court for over a year that should it strike down his signature welfare legislation putting the federal government in control of American medicine, the decision would be disastrous for the American people and render the Court illegitimate.  Roberts lives in the D.C. bubble.  All his friends live in the D.C. bubble.  The Democrat-controlled corporate news media reflect the prevailing opinions of those who live within the D.C. bubble.  So Chief Justice Roberts chose to avoid leftist backlash (and to protect the Establishment’s sizable financial investments in government-controlled, socialized medicine) by aligning himself with Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  

Obama celebrated Roberts’ valuable assist: “The highest court in the land has now spoken,” the president gloated.  It is worth noting that similarly squishy jurist Justice Anthony Kennedy (a man whom Democrats succeeded in elevating to the Court after scuttling President Reagan’s original nomination of Robert Bork and then his replacement nomination of Douglas Ginsburg) actually joined the conservative members of the Court in a dissent that would have invalidated Obamacare in its entirety.  Because Roberts joined the four leftist members of the Court in protecting Obama’s government takeover of the medical profession, healthcare is substantially more expensive and provides substantially worse treatment today.  

Roberts’ constitutionally illiterate and philosophically unsound Obamacare opinion permitted a nefarious government-corporate power axis to take hold that has killed private practices across the country, made every medical doctor a de facto government employee, replaced medical science with government-regulated treatments, and inserted a government bureaucrat inside every examination room.  But Roberts did preserve his standing in the D.C. bubble, maximize the profits of large insurance companies, bankrupt rural hospitals, increase the investment portfolio-generated wealth of insider-trading members of Congress, eliminate small practices that prioritized patient care, and let labor unions off the hook for healthcare obligations that they owed to their members.  Furthermore, an entire generation of young leftists — too ignorant to know that President Obama and his fellow Democrats are responsible for the horrible state of healthcare in the United States today — openly celebrate the assassination of health insurance company executives walking down the street. 

When the issue of Obamacare’s unconstitutionality came before the Roberts Court, the chief justice could have saved the country from all the harm that has come from forcing another illegitimate government power grab upon the American people.  But that would have taken guts, wisdom, and principle.  Roberts has none of those virtues.  He’s a judicial pimp who pragmatically defends the Establishment’s bottom line.  The medical profession in America is worse off and American patients are poorer and less healthy because of Roberts’ cowardice.

What I find particularly galling about the chief justice, however, is that he demands to be respected as some kind of impartial and inherently righteous judicial priest.  If he could admit that he lacks a jurisprudential backbone and primarily represents the interests of the Establishment Blob in D.C., I would grant him some small measure of respect for being self-aware enough to understand that he is little more than a swampy, Leviathan-controlled, gelatinous judge whose opinions can be molded into whatever D.C.’s “elites” need.  But Roberts is not honest enough to do that.  Instead, he pretends to be above venal politics and struts around in his priestly robes as if he represents a branch of government too holy to be tainted by the inherently corrupting influence of power.

Although Roberts never said anything when Obama and his Democrat goons were threatening the Court before its damaging Obamacare decision, the chief justice jumped into action in 2018 to reprimand President Trump during his first term.  Trump had publicly excoriated a 9th Circuit judge for usurping constitutional powers vested to the president of the United States.  In doing so, Trump called the judicial tyrant “an Obama judge.”  Well, that rather anodyne remark threw Chief Justice Roberts into a “Why, I never” tizzy, and the Judicial Branch’s limp caretaker found his way to a member of the Democrat-controlled press in order to correct the president’s errant thinking: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.  What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Uhhh…sure, Chief Justice Gumby.  Why would a grown man feel compelled to tell such a blatant lie?  The whole country knows that judges come with certain ideological proclivities that influence their decisions on the bench.  While Republican presidents have repeatedly stumbled into nominating raging leftists (among them, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice David Souter) to the Supreme Court, nobody has any doubt that federal judges are chosen for their perceived philosophical bent.  

This problem exists only because federal judges have proved incapable of performing their jobs with self-restraint.  In the past, Roberts has correctly defined the Judiciary’s obligations: “Our role is very clear.  We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States and ensure that the political branches act within them.”  But that’s not how most judges act!  Instead of interpreting the Constitution, federal judges rewrite the Constitution.  Instead of interpreting laws written by Congress, federal judges rewrite those laws into laws of their own.  For Roberts to pretend that federal judges have not spent the last century imposing their will upon the American people makes him richly deserving of Queen Gertrude’s quip: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Eight years later, Lady Roberts is still protesting!  In a speech last week in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the chief justice claimed that judges are not “political actors.”  (Tell that to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose opinions sound as if they were written by teenaged Marxists with dog-eared copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals!)  Roberts lamented how too many Americans “think we’re making policy decisions.”  (Perhaps that’s because too many judges are, in fact, making policy decisions!)  The chief justice also insisted that it is “not appropriate” for Americans to criticize individual judges.  

Well, perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should convince his federal judges to stop behaving as partisan hacks!  Rather than permitting, through his silence, individual judges to usurp the powers of the president of the United States, perhaps Roberts should call those tyrannical judges out by name.  If he wants the Judicial Branch to be perceived as “independent” and “nonpartisan,” then he should insist that judges exercise constitutional self-restraint!  

But he won’t do that.  Because Roberts has opinions but no spine.

Image: Chief Justice John Roberts.  Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Related Topics: Supreme Court

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When my new book, “The Case for America,” was launched this month, the first thing I wanted to do was hear from my listeners and readers about how they would make the case. So, I published an invitation on my website asking people to record short videos, and I’ve been playing some of them on air during “Special Report.” 

I’ve been happy with the diverse contributions from across the country. The optimism and pride are like a tonic in a time often characterized by disagreement. Here are the voices of our fellow Americans making the case. I hope you are as inspired by them as I have been.

In the book, I write about the immigrant success story that continues to stand as proof of our special nature. Charlie C. is an example of the immigrant success story. “I believe the U.S. is unique because it’s a place where immigrants can rise from the lower middle class to the top 3% in just one generation,” Charlie said, describing his own experience. “My family moved here when I was 10, and we started in suburban Philadelphia with very humble means. McDonald’s was a luxury. My English was very limited, but through hard work, I went on to attend an Ivy League school and earn a PhD. Now I’m one of the top engineers at a Fortune 500 company, surrounded by 18,000 colleagues. I’m grateful for a wife of 24 years and three wonderful kids. I believe my achievements would not be possible anywhere else, as this country is the only one founded on a belief in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.”

Well said.

“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.”

This silly bartender would make a great professor for Communism 101.

AOC will never be anything more than an airheaded bartender with dung for brains. It doesn’t matter if other dung-for-brains morons with the power of the vote were to ever elect her as president; she is, and always will be, a preeminent example of a failed education system and the worst that America has to offer: [X post at source article]

Sure, someone with a mind like AOC literally can’t earn a billion dollars, but some people can. Ignoring government cronyism and the fake free market (we have too much government intervention for a true free market), earned billionaires are the innovators and the risk-takers, either bringing a highly desired product to market or making good investments that bring great rewards.

This is all aside from one of the greatest political ironies I’ve ever heard of: AOC is actually living on stolen wealth, 100%. My wealth and your wealth, to be clear. And she’s not just eking by on a small civil servant’s compensation, she’s raking in almost three times the average American salary—definitely so when you consider all her added non-paycheck perks.

AOC has so much stolen wealth in her bank that she can afford to attend Met Galas wearing designer gowns about taxing the rich, and afford to rent a luxury apartment in the richest neighborhoods in the U.S. I don’t consent to being taxed so AOC can have a job (I do so at the threat of government violence), but I do consent to all the ways I spend my money that winds up in the billionaires’ wallets.

Sure, someone with a mind like AOC literally can’t earn a billion dollars, but some people can. Ignoring government cronyism and the fake free market (we have too much government intervention for a true free market), earned billionaires are the innovators and the risk-takers, either bringing a highly desired product to market or making good investments that bring great rewards.

This is all aside from one of the greatest political ironies I’ve ever heard of: AOC is actually living on stolen wealth, 100%. My wealth and your wealth, to be clear. And she’s not just eking by on a small civil servant’s compensation, she’s raking in almost three times the average American salary—definitely so when you consider all her added non-paycheck perks.

AOC has so much stolen wealth in her bank that she can afford to attend Met Galas wearing designer gowns about taxing the rich, and afford to rent a luxury apartment in the richest neighborhoods in the U.S. I don’t consent to being taxed so AOC can have a job (I do so at the threat of government violence), but I do consent to all the ways I spend my money that winds up in the billionaires’ wallets.

AOC rants about paying people “less than what they’re worth,” but what about paying people infinitely more than they’re worth? Especially when you’re paying them with…stolen wealth.

I recently had a conversation with someone who argued that the solution to essentially all political problems in the U.S. would be solved if we just “killed all the billionaires.” Mind you, this is someone who voluntarily and happily shops on Amazon for the convenience (Bezos), routinely buys Apple products (Tim Cook), consentingly takes vaccines (Big Pharma billionaires), and purchases groceries from Whole Foods (again, Bezos)—choosing to enrich the billionaires out of his own free will. As he said, they have too much money, and therefore too much power. He’s not wrong that billionaire cash is presenting a problem in politics, but of course, his “solution” is psychotic, and obviously, hypocritical.

But, for the sake of the argument, let’s play along, though not kill these people, who, as far as I know, haven’t done anything that warrants the death penalty (maybe with the exception of Bill Gates), let’s just confiscate all the wealth, as a good communist would do, and as AOC advocates. Let’s “tax the rich,” 100%, and then let’s seize all their property—“every home, property, business, investment, car, and yacht, right down to their kids’ teddy bears”—and sell it for “full market value,” which of course, is entirely unrealistic. What do we get?

That would raise enough revenue to finance the federal government for 9 months. Not 9 months out of every year: 9 months one time. Then, with no billionaires left to pillage, it’s gone—as is your 401(k), because most of that wealth would’ve been liquidated out of the stock market.

Not to mention the industries and jobs that would disappear.)

Now what AOC? Where do we get the money now? I can’t imagine she’s going to suggest “the millionaires,” since she is one. This silly bartender would make a great professor for Communism 101. (The only places retarded people can make tons of money: academia and government.)

And that’s where we’re at—we’ve got the absolute stupidest people in America’s history standing on the shoulders of brilliant and courageous minds like Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and Davy Crockett, acting as if they’re worth anything, by virtue of the office, voting on our futures. God help us.

American Thinker

Named around 71 times in Scripture, Lebanon is both a biblical landscape and a living homeland now marked by war and fragile hope.

Southern Lebanon is not often the first place Christians think of when reading Scripture. Yet both the Bible and long-standing tradition place this region quietly within the story of salvation.

Two cities anchor that connection: Tyre and Sidon.

Both are named multiple times in the Hebrew Bible as centers of trade and power. In the Gospels, they appear again when Jesus travels to the region, encountering the Syrophoenician woman who asks for her daughter’s healing (Mark 7:24–30). This brief episode places southern Lebanon within the lived geography of Christ’s ministry.

Christians in Lebanon

Christians make up about 30% of Lebanon’s population (some estimates suggest even more), the largest share in the Middle East. The Maronite Church is the biggest community, alongside Greek Orthodox and Melkite Catholics.

Southern Lebanon includes historic Christian villages, though many families have been displaced by ongoing conflict.

In Maghdouche, local tradition holds that the Virgin Mary waited while Jesus preached in nearby Tyre and Sidon. Today, the shrine of Our Lady of Mantara keeps that memory alive, not as a scriptural claim, but as a testimony to how early Christians understood the movements of Christ and His mother. (Photo above and below show that shrine.)

Further south, the village of Qana is identified by some local traditions as the site of the wedding feast where Jesus turned water into wine. The Gospel of John specifies Cana of Galilee, and scholars continue to debate the precise location. Still, for many believers in Lebanon, Qana remains a place of devotion tied to Christ’s first public sign.

Traditions regarding Biblical locations do not all carry the same historical certainty. But together they reveal something important: southern Lebanon has long been received by Christians not as a distant land, but as part of a sacred landscape — one touched directly or indirectly by the Gospel story.

That sense of belonging makes the present moment more difficult to accept.

A region under strain

A new phase of conflict is reshaping life in southern Lebanon. According to recent reporting, Israel plans to establish a large buffer zone in the region, with troops taking control of areas south of the Litani River.

Bridges across the Litani have been destroyed, and more than one million people have been displaced, according to BBC. Over 1,000 people have been killed, including children and medical workers. Many residents have been told they will not be allowed to return to their homes until security conditions change.

While southern Lebanon is often described as a stronghold of Hezbollah, it is also home to diverse communities, including Christians whose presence stretches back centuries. For them, this is not only a geopolitical crisis. It is a question of continuity — whether families, parishes, and traditions rooted in this land can endure another period of upheaval.

The Bible’s references to Lebanon often speak of strength: cedars that rise high and endure. Christian tradition, too, has treated this land as a place marked by grace and memory. Today, that same land is marked by uncertainty. Yet its history — biblical and lived — suggests that even under pressure, it remains more than a battlefield.