MORE HOLIDAY TERRORIST ATTACKS COMING: Intel experts are still saying they see abundant evidence pointing to the likelihood that more terrorist attacks are coming in the U.S. over the holidays. Richard Pollock updates.

TRUMP’S HARANGUE: Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated in the past decade that he hears the American people more accurately than any other major national political figure. So how to explain that tone-deaf 17-minute Oval Office diatribe? Bob Maistros, one of the sharp pens at the Issues & Insights shop, offers some on-point suggestions.

UPDATE: For the record, people, my problem with Trump’s speech was definitely not the factual content, but rather the delivery. He’s had an extraordinary first year of a second term and my view is the roaring economy in 2026 will make the mid-terms a GOP win, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

UPDATE II: 🏳️🏳️🏳️! 

CHRISTMAS IS A PAGAN HOLIDAY? It’s that time of year when you hear such claims, but as the latest “What Would You Say?” video from the Colson Center on HillFaith, the historical facts just don’t add up to such a conclusion.

PUBLIC LIBRARY DECLINE: Roughly two of every three public libraries in America have major facility maintenance problems that Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigators say will cost beaucoup bucks to fix. And the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) — the nation’s Report Card on how its public schools are performing — produced the worst reading scores ever among graduating high school seniors.

HILL GOPERS DEMAND FEHBP STOP FUNDING ABORTION: Members of Congress and their staffers are covered by the same Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) that covers executive branch civil servants. Congress has passed laws barring FEHBP from paying for abortions, but a couple dozen GOP senators and representatives say the bureaucrats found a sneaky way around the ban. And they want it stopped, now.

WHEN FRAUD IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: Issues & Insights (I&I) points to a former investigator in the Minnesota Attorney General’s office as highlighting the underlying truth about how Democrats in the Land of 10,000 Lakes view defrauding public benefit programs.

“We’re not just talking about Democrats ripping off government programs for their personal benefit – examples of which are legion – but the opportunities for fraud built into the programs they create,” I&I notes.

“Take the federal food stamp program, which now goes by the euphemism SNAP and is riddled with fraud. Instead of trying to protect taxpayers, Democrats are actively thwarting a Trump administration effort to eliminate it.

“Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that ‘We asked for all the states for the first time to turn over their data to the federal government to let the USDA partner with them to root out this fraud, to make sure that those who really need food stamps are getting them, but also to ensure that the American taxpayer is protected.'”

Can you guess how many Democrat-controlled states refused to comply?

COMMON SENSE COONS: The Delaware senator offers some hard-headed, reality-based advice to his fellow Democrats. Interesting that two Democrats from adjoining states are looming as significant voices of reason in their party.

Obviously, there is much in the Coons analysis with which to disagree, but statements like this could be tremendously encouraging signs of an openness to a genuine policy debate about where the country is headed:

“Democrats need to stop telling Americans how to be and what to feel and believe. Instead, we need to listen. Then we need to solve the problems they’ve shared with us. In the last few years, it’s not just our message that was wrong—it was some of our policies, too.

People didn’t recognize the impacts of the bills we wrote and the votes we took. That’s why Americans don’t believe us when we preach at them from auditorium stages, cable news desks, and social media posts. We have to get back to the values and ideas that draw people to be Democrats to begin with.”

Let’s see where this goes.

HERE COMES DOGE II: Trump administration launches new cross-government recruitment effort to put Silicon Valle technologist/AI stars in key positions to help solve feds’ biggest, most complex digital problems.

18,000 TERRORISTS LOOSE IN THE U.S.: Did you catch the disclosure over the weekend by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard that there could be as many as 18,000 trained, focused, fanatical terrorists in this country? Richard Pollock puts that figure in context following the Brown University and Sydney beach slaughters.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK AND HOW: There are gotcha questions, silly questions, rhetorical questions and pointed questions. That’s just for starters. Michael Foster, an Ohio pastor handed a Sunday bullhorn by Rod Martin, uses that momentous question posed by Satan to Eve to launch an incisive analysis of the modern weaponization of the question.

MORE ON THE SOMALI SCANDAL: Open the Books maintains the largest government spending database ever assembled, and it is proving its immense value on nearly a daily basis. Today, an initial assessment of federal social welfare spending going to the Minnesota Somali community provides a glance into what will undoubtedly prove to be much bigger.

GUMMINT IS AMERICA’S BIGGEST AFFORDABILITY CRISIS: What Reagan told America in 1981 is even more true in 2025. But will Dems or the MSM ever level with American people on this issue? I’m back up on Substack.

HOW TDS BLINDS DEMS TO REALITY: A Senate SBA hearing earlier this week gave a host of uniquely vivid illustrations of how Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) blinds its victims like Democratic senators Ed Markey and Mazie Hirono to the reality of chronic, deeply rooted, and horrendously costly waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending.

SENATE DEMS HEAR NO FRAUD, SEE NO FRAUD, SAY NO FRAUD: A combative Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee hearing Wednesday documented multi-billions of fraudulently awarded Section (8)a-set-side contracts, but Democrats insisted the crook in the White House is the real villain. Haven’t we heard this somewhere before?

NEW U.S. NUKES ARE COMING: Now, hot off the presses comes news the Department of Energy will kickstart funding for construction of 10 new nuclear power plants, according to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in an exclusive interview with the Washington Free Beacon.

Wright told WFB’s Thomas Catenacci that “we want things built by and risk capital coming from the private marketplace, and most everything we’re doing is dominantly going to be funded by private capitalBut the government smothered the nuclear industry for 40-plus years. We’ve got to get it back up on its feet again.”

To do so, Wright said the Department of Energy would back well-funded equity investments with low-interest government loans:

“We are going to use our loan program office at the Department of Energy for credit-worthy hyperscalers that are putting equity capital in front of us. We’re going to back that up with low-interest loans. We’ll supply it to maybe the first 10 reactors that get built. That’ll incentivize people to move fast.”

(VIP Digital-Age FYI: “Hot off the presses” refers to the days long, long ago of what is now known, if it is known at all, as “Old-School Journalism” when a reporter would get a VIP news story before his competitors and his editors rushed it into print. Ok, by “print,” I mean in the old days before the Internet, people actually paid for what were called “newspapers” that were printed on giant rolling ink applicators known as “presses.” Since it was an important story, the presses would be run at high speed, meaning they heated up more quickly. Thus, a big story was called “hot off the presses.”)

SBA BUCKS TO ‘MOM-AND-POP’ STORES LIKE WALMART: The Senate’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee will get an earful today about waste, fraud and mismanagement at the Small Business Administration (SBA), including hundreds of millions meant for Main Street shops going instead to Fortune 500 Giants like Walmart.

HOLIDAY SEASON OF TERRORISM IN U.S.: American intelligence experts are overwhelmed with incoming evidence pointing to multiple holiday season terrorist attacks here in the U.S., according to Richard Pollock. He’s talking to level-headed, non-alarmists with long records of being right, one of whom says:

“Our detection and enforcement systems are overwhelmed. We’re not just talking about individual terrorists and jihadists, but organized terror networks and their legal support systems, and state-sponsored covert intelligence networks whose cadres are professionally trained and strategically deployed.”

This is a must-read.

BORDER IS CLOSED, NOW THE REAL WORK RESUMES: Saving America will be won or lost in the home. More hard truths from Virgil Walker.

FORGET IT, CHUCK: Fully 93 percent of congressional aides responding to the survey say the proposal to extend those Obamacare tax subsidies that send billions of tax dollars directly to healthcare insurers will not be approved by Congress and signed into law by the President. That’s virtually all of them not just those representing one party.

WOULD KING DAVID KILL THE DRUG BOAT SURVIVORS? Now there’s an interesting question because David was the King of Israel after God’s own heart. As The Washington Stand’s Joshua Arnold points out, David had his own “no survivors” controversy but the context in which occurred makes it doubtful as a precedent.

HOW MANY FAKE OBAMACARE RECIPIENTS ARE THERE? Government Accounting Office (GAO) investigators planted two dozen fake Obamacare beneficiaries two years ago and as of yesterday’s report, the feds running the program have only uncovered two.

But wait! There’s more. A lot more. Like 190,000 cases in which it appeared somebody — bureaucrats, brokers, agents? — made unauthorized changes to individuals’ healthcare insurance policies. And then there’s the 97,000 cases in which individual beneficiaries’ Social Security numbers (SSNs) and tax filings don’t lineup, suggesting fake SSNs.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: Everywhere you look every day there seems to be a new political scandal and if only half of them are based on fact, then the country is in deep trouble.

Writing in the American Spectator, Republican strategist and former U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Donald Devine argues the scandal-ridden political scene reflects the more general relativization of ethics.

Along with the corruption has come the parallel explosion of the unaccountable super-regulatory federal bureaucracy and political uniparty that knows nothing about limited government, as the Founders understood the term:

“The real solution today is to go back to the Founders and limit what the national government does. Government today basically influences every major business and social act. As long as this is so, there will be deals and favoritism and power.

“The only solution is the Founders’ one, for the government to do less, which will result in better decentralized government decisions and their greater moral consistency. One might start with the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8.”

Leader Thune, Speaker Johnson, are you listening?

‘SUE-AND-SETTLE’ HONEYPOT FOR LEFT LAWYERS EXPOSED: Such a deal! Sue EPA on behalf of the Sierra Club or one of its radical enviro competitors, EPA agrees to do whatever policy or regulatory change Sierra Club demands in return for settlement, Congress has nothing to say in the process, and, oh yes, taxpayers cover your legal fees.

ABOUT THAT ‘JUNK DNA’ ISSUE: Odds are good you have been told or taught that 98 percent of the DNA in your body is useless because it doesn’t appear to have any discernible function.

But, as the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture contends, the latest research points to a conclusion that at least 80 percent and maybe the whole bunch of it is anything but junk. Even if you don’t agree with it, the video’s graphics are entertaining and the evidence is anything but insubstantial.

THANK THE LORD: Virgil Walker delivers the welcome news that Rap/Hip-Hop is dying, if not already dead, at least among guys.