Greetings! Today is Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025. The weather in these parts got big time nasty last night: snowing sideways, high winds, lots of fun.
Today In History:
1879: Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance premieres in Paignton, England and at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City the next day
1905: Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow premieres at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, Austria.
1911: Wanamaker’s Store in Philly was dedicated. It is still very much a part of Philly’s Market Street.
1922: The formation of the USSR
1924: Edwin Hubble announces the existence of other galaxies.
1939: The movie Of Mice and Men was released.
1950: Patti Page hits number one with “Tennessee Waltz.”
1967: “Hello Goodbye” goes number one for the Beatles and stays there for three weeks.
1972. Nixon announces Peace talks in Vietnam.
Birthdays today include: Rudyard Kipling, New York Gov. Al Smith, Japan’s Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, Bert Parks, Jack Lord, Bo Diddley, Skeeter Davis, Del Shannon, Sandy Koufax, Paul Stookey, Felix Pappalardi, Michael Nesmith, and oddly, Davy Jones, too.
* * *
I’m diving into the topic of healthcare and childcare fraud once again today, a little reluctantly. Half my brain is screaming that there’s already a small mountain of info on the subject posted here. The other half of my brain tells me the subject is exploding so fast that no one person can keep up with it. I did remark yesterday in one of our Slack channels here at PJ Media that this story is growing so quickly that one person simply cannot cover all of it. Then again, that’s one thing that was always great about the blogosphere: Everybody piled in. To that point, as I was researching this last night, there were no fewer than ten articles on PJ Media’s front page, not including my own.
I’ll warn you up front: Under these conditions, I have no intention of being gentle about this.
Anyway, let’s start with yesterday. I’m a bit annoyed at myself for an omission in my column from yesterday, on the topic of Somali/Democrat fraud in Minnesota. What I failed to mention, and I think should have, is the idea that this discovery of the massive fraud that’s been going on there for years comes directly on the heels of the Democrats shutting down the federal government in their attempts to keep the federal subsidies for those programs in place. The question is: Will the voters remember this come November? It seems to me that the GOP is foolish if it fails to latch onto this mess as a talking point.
Elsewhere, Doug Ross points out one reason why this has been going on as long as it has.
Shirley deserves all of the fame he’s currently getting, but hopefully he’ll be joined in short succession in covering Minnesota’s Somali Pirates by many other new media types. Because otherwise, it becomes a repeat of when Matt Drudge ran Newsweek’s* spiked story on Clinton’s affair with Monaca Lewinsky, and the DNC-MSM trained all of their guns on Drudge in response for having to be shamed into reporting something bad about their idol. Because this was still the early days of the World Wide Web, and blogs were still mostly used as daily diaries rather than new media platforms, Drudge was absolutely crucified by the legacy media, in a classic case of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Well, look, about that: It’s not an accident that this fraud centered around kids. What was Hillary Clinton’s punchline? “It’s for the Children.” If you want to limit government spending on these “Feed our Future”-type projects, it’s because you hate kids being fed. If we don’t give up our Second Amendment rights, it’s because we like school shootings. If we think government education wastes money, it’s because we hate education as a whole.
That environment was created specifically because it gives Democrats some non-existent kids to hide behind. Nobody wants to identify the problem as centering on Somalis, similarly, because nobody wants the left to start chanting “racism,” as Walz has already done in fine Democrat knee-jerk fashion. (Thank God Nick Shirley jumped on that one, essentially saying “that nonsense doesn’t work anymore, Timmy.”)
Glenn Reynolds has an op-ed at the New York Post, and he makes an excellent point:
Government at all levels is basically broke, especially in blue states.
Government leaders’ chief solution to this poverty seems generally to involve extracting more money from the citizenry.But where does the money they’ve already extracted go?
Based on what’s turning up in Minnesota, much of it is going to political cronies — who then recycle cash back to the same politicians who got it for them.
Glenn goes on to point out:
These institutions were supposedly visited by state inspectors — who sometimes noted violations, but didn’t note that the whole thing was a scam. (One of these “educational” facilities even misspelled “learning” on its signage.)
Yeah, about that. I want to know more about those state inspectors. How can they have signed off on this mess? Why are they still not in jail as we speak? Glenn goes on from there:
John Hinderaker, whose Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment think tank has been on top of this fraud story for years, explains this scandal isn’t exactly new.
A decade ago the FBI investigated Somali child-care fraudsters for opening daycare centers with no kids and collecting state money for fictitious children.
“A number of Somalis went to prison, but it didn’t deter others from carrying out similar frauds, on a grander scale,” Hinderaker wrote on his PowerLine blog.
Walz, who was in Congress when the last batch of Somali scam artists faced charges, can’t be ignorant of this history.
Does this mean Tim Walz is going to jail? Unlikely.
“Did Tim Walz know the frauds were going on?” Hinderaker asks. “Of course. Even Walz isn’t that stupid.
“But absent taking bribes, of which there is zero evidence, he has not committed a crime.”
I’m not so sure, there. Is misfeasance in office no longer a thing? If it is, I think an argument can be made that nine billion dollars’ worth of fraud, all on programs he signed off on that occurred on his watch, easily qualifies. If we can level charges against state DMV systems that issue driver’s licenses to illegals resulting in a fatal crash, then how is it even arguable that we can’t level charges against Walz?
As an aside, I should mention that John Hinderaker has been doing fabulous work on these matters. (Yes, I do read the comments. IYKYK)
I see that Kash Patel is going great guns on this stuff already. And check out what Liz Collin of Alpha News says here about the school districts. Watch.
As Glenn says, Walz doesn’t have enough smarts to pull this stuff off by himself. Still, he knew. He HAD to know. Certainly, there are a lot of people who need jail time over this, at both the state and the federal level, too. (Ilhan Omar, I’m looking directly at YOU.)
But first, I want to see Walz himself frog-marched off to the federal pen in Waseca, Minn. Then, let’s see the same thing in the other states where this is happening, as I mentioned yesterday.
Meanwhile, if I’m Nick Shirley, I’m seeking security. Consider the fate of Melissa Hartman, the Democrat who was also speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was killed shortly after voting against a healthcare bill that Walz wanted. You can guess what happened to her and her husband. If these events are of any indication, we are dealing with some seriously vindictive people. Be careful, Nick.
Thought for today: Drop the idea of becoming someone. You already are. The question is what you’ll do with that person.
I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Right now until the new year, you can get 74% off PJ Media VIP with the code MERRY74—and yes, that same deal works if you want to give VIP as a gift to someone who appreciates the unique offings here. Honest reporting, Honest straightforward commentary.
