George Washington Plunkitt was born into poverty in 1842 but rose through the ranks of the Democratic Party machine of New York, the famed ‘Tammany Hall,’ to become a state representative and a state senator. He also became quite wealthy along the way.

Plunkitt always defended his machine and its methods — and the money they made him. Plunkitt would gladly defend the practices of Tammany, rebutting charges of corruption with the standard reply that ‘nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two.’

Plunkitt’s brazenness lives on in the modern-day machines of the left, found in the deep-blue jurisdictions of the country. With the focus on the bilking of Minnesota taxpayers by the Somali community of the Twin Cities (many citizens, many not), voters across the country are still in shock as the story has unfolded since 2022. The lights shone on the Gopher State should get much brighter now, and after that, I have a follow-up that will make the swamp of the Twin Cities seem like a puddle.

The Minnesota story has been hiding in plain sight, with superb reporters from one of the original blogs of more than 20 years ago, Powerline, poring over the scandal for years.

Powerline’s founders John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, and more recently their colleague Bill Glahn, have continued to dig and report, dig and report, dig and report on the ‘Somali connection.’

In recent weeks, the story caught fire with the help of reporting by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and by Fox News. That ‘Minnesota is drowning in fraud,’ as Thorpe and Rufo put it, has now become a national story. Pray that it is the first of many.

‘There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works,’ Boss Plunkitt would say. ‘I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.’

Turns out the defendants, the indicted and the convicted in the Gopher State saw their opportunities as well, and they put Tammany to shame when it came to scale and speed.

The conmen of Minnesota bilked the state out of vast piles of cash through a variety of plays, the most infamous of which is, for the moment, ‘Feeding Our Future.’ It took truly extraordinary efforts by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, to turn their eyes the other way to allow that scam and soon others to flourish. The possessed girl in ‘The Exorcist’ had nothing on Walz and Ellison when it came to turning their heads.

We have former Attorney General Eric Holder and former White House Counsel Dana Remus to thank for elevating the massive fraud ring run primarily out of the Somali American and Somali community in the Twin Cities to the nation’s attention.

Why? Because that pair made Walz much more than an obscure governor of a deep-blue state. That duo was primarily responsible for ‘vetting’ the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president as one of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ potential running mates. The dynamic duo of Holder and Remus either wholly missed the massive cons run on Walz’s watch or judged them not significant enough to derail his candidacy.

During ‘Brat Summer,’ the legacy media abandoned its past practices and joined in the effort to push the worst pair of candidates to the finish since Alf Landon and Frank Knox got blown out by FDR in the 1936 referendum on Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Holder blessed Walz, and Holder’s fans in the Manhattan–Beltway corridor followed suit. Media elites blessed Holder’s judgment in turn.

Big mistake.

Now Walz is part of the national Democratic Party’s brand and refuses to go away, choosing to concentrate his efforts on running for a third term as governor next year — and apparently hoping he might be the party’s standard-bearer in 2028. Instead, ‘Feeding Our Future’ broke out of the Minnesota news ghetto and onto the national stage.

‘Run Tim Run’ should be the GOP’s chant, alongside ‘Run Gavin Run,’ because just like Walz, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has some industrial-level explaining to do.

No, I’m not referring to the California governor’s French Laundry debacle. And no, not the devastating fires that tore through L.A. in January. Not even his indicted former chief of staff. No, the exact parallel to Walz’s woe is the Newsom administration’s handling of COVID-era relief for the unemployed — a statewide con run by political cons.

The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program (PUA), like the Lost Wages Assistance plan, was devised and funded by Congress to keep alive Americans left unemployed or with their businesses shuttered by COVID lockdowns. Like standard unemployment programs, these COVID-era programs were primarily run through state unemployment insurance offices and other state agencies.

The COVID lockdowns were unprecedented, and the public health ‘authorities’ responsible for advising and administering them should never be taken seriously again.

Many of those bureaucrats, drunk on new authority, stepped forward when elected officials sought guidance on what to do about the mysterious and deadly disease imported from China. (Their dismissal of the lab-leak theory speaks to their actual, as opposed to presumed, expertise.)

When lockdowns became the solution du jour, Congress rightly understood that they were shutting down the livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans and flooded the country with life-saving money — three times.

It was not just the Minnesota Somali community that had ‘seen their opportunities and took ‘em.’ So, too, did the cons of California: the real, honest-to-goodness cons of the California penal system — inmates for whom available time to scheme and scam is abundant.

Ask your favorite AI engine, ‘How much fraud was perpetrated against the California Employment Development Department during COVID?’ The answers will vary, but the floor on the cost of the fraud is $20 billion. The ceiling is more than $30 billion.

The Golden State’s EDD is ‘run’ by a director, and Gov. Newsom, who took office in 2018, has appointed two: Rita Saenz and Nancy Farias. COVID arrived on Newsom’s watch, and he and his appointees should own the fraud that followed. They make the Walz–Ellison team look like pikers when it comes to ignoring fraud.

In his first term, President Trump stood up Operation Warp Speed, and Congress rightly decided to (1) spend federal dollars to lessen the lockdown pain and (2) leave the payment of most public benefits to state agencies, while COVID business loans were handled by private-sector banks as the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department innovated in a variety of ways to prevent an economic crash.

The years following the mishap at the Wuhan lab demonstrated the vast incompetence of the American administrative state but also the necessity of a federal government to pick up the tab when ‘scientists’ lose their collective minds and, for example, counsel the closure of schools.

The official timeline has COVID appearing in Wuhan in December 2019 and reaching U.S. shores a month later. We may never know when the first cases were diagnosed by the Chinese Communist Party, and we are not in a position to investigate the horrific fraud and consequent disaster for which General Secretary Xi Jinping is responsible.

But President Trump could order a six-month deep dive into the financial fraud that followed in the U.S., not just in Minnesota and California — though those are the ‘patient zeroes’ for never allowing a crisis to pass without enriching the state’s worst actors.

Could President Trump stand up a time-limited panel to investigate fraud perpetrated on state agencies during COVID? Yes. Might that panel torch a few GOP reputations along the way? Inevitably.

But the interest in the Minnesota Somali shakedown should be a demand signal for accountability across the country.

President Trump often acts in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, who, like 45–47, was never afraid of a headline — provided he provoked it.

Now is the time for the president to ask a handful of the smartest, most respected people in the country to sort through the wreckage of the COVID era’s many state governments’ responsibilities and ‘initiatives’ and report in rapid fashion — and in clear English — the scale of fraud perpetrated upon state agencies.

Make your search-and-publicize team smart and fast. Putting Johnson and Hinderaker as co-chairs of a strike team devoted to compiling the facts as we know them today would ensure accuracy and fine writing.

And give them a deadline: Aug. 31, 2026. Voters deserve to know how their state governments worked during COVID — or didn’t — before they vote again.

‘The U.S. struggle with China is the single greatest competition the United States has ever faced,’ defense analyst Seth Jones writes in his new book The American Edge.

And in an interview with Fox News Digital, Jones warned that if war broke out over Taiwan, the United States could burn through key long-range missiles ‘after roughly a week or so of conflict’ — a shortfall he says exposes how far behind the U.S. industrial base remains as Beijing moves onto what he calls a wartime footing.

Jones is a former Pentagon official and president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He argues the United States isn’t dealing with a superpower like the Soviet Union, whose system was brittle and economically isolated. China’s economy, he noted, is roughly the size of the U.S. and deeply tied into global production. That economic weight is fueling a military buildup across every major domain, from fifth- and sixth-generation aircraft to an enormous shipbuilding sector he describes as ‘upwards of 230 times the size of the United States.’ The effect, he said, is unmistakable. ‘The gap is shrinking.’

In ‘The American Edge,’ Jones lays out how great powers historically win long wars through production, not just innovation — and that’s where he believes the U.S. has the most to worry about. China’s missile forces now field a wide range of weapons designed to hold U.S. ships and aircraft at risk far from Taiwan. That makes stockpiles and throughput central to any American strategy in the Indo-Pacific.

‘When you look at the numbers right now of those long-range munitions, we still right now would run out after roughly a week or so of conflict over Taiwan,’ he said. ‘That’s just not enough to sustain a protracted war.’

Jones stressed that China’s strengths often overshadow a major vulnerability: its limited ability to hunt submarines. He said Beijing ‘still can’t see that well undersea,’ a gap the U.S. could exploit in any fight over Taiwan. If China tried to ferry troops across the Strait or impose a blockade, American attack submarines — along with a larger fleet of unmanned underwater vehicles — would pose a serious threat. He called the undersea environment one of the few places where the U.S. retains a decisive advantage, and one where production should accelerate quickly.

China has other problems as well. Jones pointed to corruption inside the PLA, inefficiency across its state-owned defense firms, ongoing struggles with joint operations and command-and-control and the fact the Chinese military hasn’t fought a war since the late 1970s. Its ability to project power beyond the first island chain also remains limited. But none of those challenges, he said, change the broader trajectory: China is building weapons in mass and at high speed — and the U.S. is still trying to catch up.

That theme sits at the center of his book. Jones describes a U.S. defense industrial base constrained by long acquisition timelines, aging shipyards, complicated contracting rules and production lines that aren’t built for a modern great-power conflict. In his view, the United States must rediscover the industrial urgency that once allowed it to surge output in wartime.

That responsibility is now falling to the Trump administration, which has pushed the Pentagon and the services to move faster on drones, munitions and new maritime capabilities. Over the past year, the Army, Air Force and Navy have launched new rapid-acquisition offices and programs aimed at fielding systems more quickly and helping smaller companies survive the long, expensive path to production. Senior defense officials have started using the phrase ‘wartime footing’ to describe the moment — language Jones said is overdue.

‘That is exactly the right wording,’ he said. ‘The Chinese and the Russian industrial bases right now … are both on a wartime footing.’

He said identifying a set of priority munitions for multiyear procurement is a meaningful step, and early moves to streamline contracting are encouraging. But he cautioned that the scale of the problem is much larger than the reforms announced so far. ‘The Pentagon writ large is a massive bureaucracy,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take a lot to break that bureaucracy. There’s been some progress, but it’s trench warfare right now.’

Jones said parts of the new National Defense Authorization Act move the needle in the right direction — especially support for expanding shipbuilding and efforts to strengthen the defense workforce. He also pointed to growing interest in leveraging allied shipyards in Japan and South Korea to relieve America’s overburdened maritime industry. But he argued that Washington is still not investing at a level that matches the threat.

‘As a percentage of gross domestic product, [defense spending] is about three percent,’ he said. ‘It’s lower than at any time during the Cold War. I think we need to start getting closer to those numbers and increase the amount of that budget that goes into procurement and acquisition.’

Artificial intelligence is another area Jones believes will reshape the battlefield faster than Washington anticipates. He noted that missile and drone threats now move at a volume and speed no human operator can manually track. ‘You can’t do things like air defense now without an increasing role of artificial intelligence,’ he said. The same applies to intelligence and surveillance, where AI-driven systems are already sorting vast amounts of satellite and sensor data.

But Jones said the United States will fall behind unless the Pentagon brings commercial AI leaders — companies like Nvidia and Google — more directly into national security programs. He argued that the United States needs the opposite of the consolidation that collapsed the defense industry in the 1990s. ‘We’ve got to get to a first breakfast,’ he said, meaning more tech firms competing in the defense space, not fewer.

Despite his warnings, Jones said the United States still has time to rebuild its industrial advantage. But it must act quickly. The Trump administration is talking about a wartime footing. China, he warned, is already living it.

Senate Republicans appear to be closing in on a plan to counter Senate Democrats’ proposal to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies as a vote on credits at the end of the week draws closer.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, unveiled their proposal to tackle the Obamacare issue that would abandon the subsidies for Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSAs).

The lawmakers have been leading Senate Republicans’ planning for a counter-proposal to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Democrats’ legislation, which would extend the Biden-era subsidies for three years.

Cassidy and Crapo pitched the legislation as ‘an alternative to Democrats’ temporary COVID bonuses, which send billions of tax dollars to giant insurance companies without lowering insurance premiums.’

The long-awaited proposal would funnel the subsidy money directly to HSAs rather than to insurance companies, an idea that has the backing of President Donald Trump and is largely popular among Senate Republicans.

‘Instead of 100% of this money going to insurance companies, let’s give it to patients. By giving them an account that they control, we give them the power,’ Cassidy said in a statement. ‘We make health care affordable again.’

Crapo contended that the legislation would build off of Trump’s marquee legislative package, the ‘big beautiful bill,’ from earlier this year and would ‘help Americans manage the rising cost of health care without driving costs even higher.’

‘Giving billions of taxpayer dollars to insurers is not working to reduce health insurance premiums for patients,’ he said in a statement.

Whether the bill gets a vote in the upper chamber this week remains in the air, given the growing number of Obamacare subsidy plans floated by Senate Republicans. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., signaled that he thought their plan could work.

‘It represents an approach that actually does something on affordability and lowers costs,’ Thune said.

‘But there are other ideas out there, as you know, but I think if there is going to be some meeting of minds on this, it is going to require that Democrats sort of come off a position they know is an untenable one, and sit down in a serious way,’ he continued.

Cassidy and Crapo’s plan would seed HSAs with $1,000 for people ages 18 to 49 and $1,500 for those 50 to 65 for people earning up to 700% of the poverty level. In order to get the pre-funded HSA, people would have to buy a bronze or catastrophic plan on an Obamacare exchange.

The legislation also ticks off several demands from Senate Republicans in their back and forth with Senate Democrats over the subsidies that are unlikely to gain any favor from Schumer and his caucus.

Shortly after the legislation was unveiled, Schumer charged in a post on X that ‘Republicans are nowhere on healthcare, and the clock is ticking.’

Included in Cassidy and Crapo’s bill are provisions reducing federal Medicaid funding to states that cover undocumented immigrants, Requirements that states verify citizenship or eligible immigration status before someone can get Medicaid, a ban on federal Medicaid funding for gender transition services and nixing those services from ‘essential health benefits’ for ACA exchange plans, and inclusion Hyde Amendment provisions to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding abortions through the new HSAs.

Senate Republicans are expected to discuss the several options on the table, including newly-released plans from Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., respectively, during their closed-door conference meeting Tuesday afternoon.

When asked if there could be a compromise solution found among the proposals, Cassidy said, ‘That’s going to be the will of the conference, if you will.’

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia announced Tuesday that she intends to vote against the proposed fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, saying the legislation spends too much taxpayer money on foreign priorities. 

Greene said in a post on X that the NDAA is ‘filled with American’s hard earned tax dollars used to fund foreign aid and foreign country’s wars.’

Greene pointed to the rising national debt, which, according to fiscaldata.treasury.gov, is more than $38.39 trillion.

‘These American People are $38 Trillion in debt, suffering from an affordability crisis, on the verge of a healthcare crisis, and credit card debt is at an all time high. Funding foreign aid and foreign wars is America Last and is beyond excuse anymore. I would love to fund our military but refuse to support foreign aid and foreign militaries and foreign wars. I am here and will be voting NO,’ Greene declared in her post.

But House Speaker Mike Johnson has praised the proposed NDAA.

‘This year’s National Defense Authorization Act helps advance President Trump and Republicans’ Peace Through Strength Agenda by codifying 15 of President Trump’s executive orders, ending woke ideology at the Pentagon, securing the border, revitalizing the defense industrial base, and restoring the warrior ethos,’ Johnson said in part of a lengthy statement.

Greene plans to leave office early next month, in the middle of her two-year term.