IT’S ACTUALLY WORSE THAN DOGE: Rachel Greszler and Brian Blase of the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) dug into the Medicaid data, put that data into the historical policy context over the past decade and concluded the improper payments are actually double the official estimates. Check out my latest Substack column.

WHY THE ALAMO ENABLED LIBERTY’S SURVIVAL: This may come as a shock to more than a few Instapunditeers, but Rod Martin makes a strong case for the proposition that the Texas Revolution kept the cause of liberty alive in the New World.

IF THEY CAN’T EVEN AGREE ON WHAT IS A SANCTUARY CITY: Then there may well be little hope that House Democrats and Republicans will ever be able to concur on comprehensive immigration reforms. Wednesday’s sanctuary cities congressional hearing offered little reason for optimism.

REMEMBER THE BORG? Just in case anybody forgot about the Borg, Democrats in Congress opted to use President Donald Trump’s Tuesday address to a joint session of Congress to remind the world what mindless vacuity looks like on national television, according to Issues & Insights.

“We have never seen a spectacle like we saw last night. Democratic women wearing pink (pink?) as a sign of protest. Various members holding up little placards as though they were at an auction bidding on who would come away the biggest loser.

“Others carried canes to, what, signify that the party is old and decrepit? The Democrats’ show-runner for the night deserves to be DOGED by his or her own party,” the I&I crew observes.

Apparently, the Democratic strategists behind Tuesday evening’s demonstration of mindlessness forgot that resistance to the Borg is anything but futile.

WHO’S BEHIND THE LAWFARE ASSAULT ON DOGE: Nobody on the Right in the nation’s capital does a better job of tracking who’s who on the Left than the Capital Research Center (CRC).

Exhibit 1 is senior investigator Ken Braun’s multi-part series tracking who is behind the blizzard of lawsuits seeking to stop DOGE and pretty much everything else President Donald Trump is seeking to accomplish.

HOW BIDEN-HARRIS IGNORED CONGRESS: Next time you hear a Democrat decrying the destruction of democracy by the Trump administration, remind them of how the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly and systematically ignored, delayed, diverted and outright refused constitutionally mandated congressional oversight by the people’s branch of the government.

The Heritage Foundation’s Dr. Robert Moffit lays it out in undeniable detail. This particular post is the fifth in an eight-part series on Restoring Public Trust in Public Health, published by The Daily Signal.

SPEAKING OF ROD MARTIN: Given his Silicon Valley background, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but he’s the first social media influencer I’ve seen to point out this hugely significant implication of Elon Musk’s retrievable Starship:

“There’s no need for rockets to go to space. Now that rockets can land, they can just as easily take off from one place and land at another. Airplanes do this. ICBMs do too, albeit one-way.

“What SpaceX is building is more than just a rocket. Starship is a strategic weapon, not as a one-off but as a fleet. A fully reusable heavy-lift system capable of hauling 200 tons per launch per rocket is not just an engineering marvel: it’s a military revolution.

“Why? Because a fleet of Starships could land an entire armored division anywhere on Earth in under an hour and keep it supplied in the field.  Just as the speed of tanks revolutionized warfare between the World Wars, this development changes everything. Forget C-17s and cargo ships: you might as well use horses and wagons.

“A fleet of Starships is not just an incremental improvement in logistics: it’s a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare. The ability to almost instantaneously create and reinforce a whole combat theater anywhere on Earth will give the United States overwhelming power, unlike anything heretofore seen outside of science fiction.”

Read on here.

HAS RUSSIA LOST THE UKRAINE WAR? Substacker Rod Martin provides a forum for George Friedman to make a detailed case for the idea that Putin is indeed the loser and the consequences for him could be lethal back in the Motherland.

SCOTLAND COUNTY, NC: Is a microcosm of the unprecedented impact of Donald Trump post-2020 on the American political structure, according to this perceptive (though far from unflawed) WSJ analysis. Bottom line: How long does it take for Trump’s economic policies to produce down-home impacts.

STIFFENING AMERICA’S SPINE: There is a fundamental connection between the Constitution’s 10th Amendment and the status of individual liberty in America. And the failure of American public education, as described today on Substack by EKO, is a key to understanding why individual liberty is in such peril.

MARTIAL ARTS CHAMP PUT THE PISTOL IN HIS MOUTH: But the firing pin failed and that’s when the U.S. Martial Arts Hall of Fame coach’s life took a radical turn. His name is Jamie Vaughn and his testimony is on HillFaith today.

Dismiss it if you will, but there is an undeniable change in the man’s life. I don’t normally link here on Instapundit these testimonies that appear every Monday on HillFaith, but this one is such a remarkable story that I’m making an exception.

CHRISTIANITY’S DECLINE HAS STOPPED: That’s the message from a massive new survey by Pew. Silicon Valley pioneer investor and Southern Baptist social media influencer Rod Martin digs deep into the Pew data and finds all kind of encouraging indicators of returning health.

MORE TO THAT NSA CULT THAN SEX: The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson digs into the back story and finds the pro-DEI/pro-Marxist roots of a bunch of now-former Intelligence Community paycheck recipients.

MORE LIGHT ON BIDEN’S BORDER LIES: You probably don’t remember this statement from early in Joe Biden’s Oval Office tenure, but the trouble-makers at Issue & Insights (I&I) certainly do:

“At his first press conference in March 2021 – after claiming that nothing had changed at the border (despite repealing every Trump executive order securing the border on day one) – he said the surge of illegals then underway ‘happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year … happens all the time.’”

It was transparently a lie then and was followed by many more for the next nearly four years. Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office in great part because of Biden’s constant lying about the border and much else. This graph courtesy of I&I makes crystal clear that border invasions like that of the Biden era do not happen “all the time:”

America will be paying the price of Biden’s border lies for years to come, I&I observes.

BILLIONS FOR TERRORISTS, INSULTS FOR MUSK: The contrast between GOP and Democrat members of the House DOGE Subcommittee could not have been more abrupt during yesterday’s hearing on how foreign aid has undermined legitimate U.S. overseas interest.

From the opening statements by Chairman Rep. Marjorie Tayler Greene (R-Ga.) and Ranking Member Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), the pattern was set: A Republican would describe a grant that resulted in U.S. tax dollars going to Hamas or Hezbollah or another of the Islamic terrorist outfits, and a Democrat would follow with variations on “What About Evil Musk?” First it was TDS, now there is MDS.

USAID FUNDING UKRAINE FASHION DESIGN JUNKETS: Yes, you read that correctly. Go here for more details on the secret slush funds Sen. Joni Ernst’s staff investigators found despite more than a year of lies and stalling by USAID officials.

HOUSE DOGE PANEL TO GET SCOOP ON USAID $ TO TERRORIST GROUPS: Gregg Roman of the Middle East Forum will testify tomorrow before Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) DOGE subcommittee with details on how $122 million in USAID funds ended up in the bank accounts of terrorist-linked groups.

TRUMP PUTS FEDS TOP CAREER EXECS ON NOTICE ABOUT PERFORMANCE: The happy days when 80-90 percent of the more than 7,000 members of the career civil service’s Senior Executive Service (SES) could be rated “Outstanding” or “Exceeds Fully Successful” are about to end. Check out my exclusive report today for the Epoch Times.

CAN TRUMP BE PRO DOGE AND EARMARKS BOTH? Little remembered fact about President Donald Trump’s first term: It was then that both political parties in both chambers of Congress reopened the door to earmarks that Sen. Tom “Bridge to Nowhere” Coburn (R-Okla.) killed in 2011.

For whatever reason, Trump did not then make an issue of the return of earmarks, which is particularly surprising now considering the success he’s having with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

John Hart, CEO of OpenTheBooks, was Coburn’s communications wizard and he wonders in an important Substack column today why killing earmarks for good is nowhere to be seen on the DOGE agenda. Why is it important? Because:

“In the 11 years before the ban was instituted, from 2000 to 2010, Congress spent an average of $20.4 billion per year on earmarks. In the 11 years the ban was in place, from 2011 to 2021, the average dropped to $7.6 billion — a 61 percent decrease,” Hart writes.

“The earmark ban created savings far beyond earmarks. Coburn often argued that ‘earmarks are the gateway drug to Washington’s spending addiction,’ and history proved him right. Getting rid of earmarks helped Congress sober up and reduce overall spending for the first time since the end of the Korean War shortly after the ban went into effect,” he said.

NO, DOGE IS NOT RADICAL: Lydia Mashburn Newman, writing for The Daily Economy, published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), lays out in terms even a Washington bureaucrat or career Member of Congress can understand on why what the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is no mystery – it’s introducing to the federal bureaucracy what are in the real world widely accepted “best practices.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related thoughts here.

I'm concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.…

— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) February 23, 2025

IS CHINA WARNING TRUMP: Three events, beginning with Trump’s decisive November 2024 election triumph, followed by the latest Yale LISTEN study, and the revelation of another Wuhan virus in the making, make sense in such a context. Check out my latest Substack column.

HOW THE LEFT REVERSES ‘ORDO AMORIS:’ There is a traditional Christian doctrine, Ordo Amoris or Ordered Loves, that prioritizes the objects of an individual’s loves. It begins with one’s own family, then one’s neighbors, one’s community, the state, the nation and then those beyond the nation. If you see a parallel in that order with federalism, you’re on target.

But, as Dr. Steve Turley and Rod Martin explore in a well-spent 20 minute video discussion,  the Left has focused a great part of its resources for a century on reversing the traditional Ordo Amoris.

Among the many destructive results they focus on are seen in the growing hate among younger Americans who view this nation as inherently evil from its founding, to say nothing of the insistence that America is obligated to open its borders to all comers and then give them preference over citizens.

TAIBBI HAS A GREAT IDEA: If you aren’t reading Matt Taibbi’s Substack column (ditto Glenn’s on Substack) on a regular basis, you are missing all kinds of important analyses, information, rebuttals and resources. And today, Taibbi offers up a great reference source that has the potential to spark a revolution in digital news tools. Here’s how he describes it:

“This morning, I sent out an article titled: ‘The Library: Timeline of Foreign Censorship Laws.’ It’s neither a news article, nor a finished product. It’s simply a chronological list of primary source documents around the theme of foreign speech laws. Twitter Files and/or FOIA documents may appear in these collections.

“The idea will be to create similar reference homes for emerging news stories: about USAID contracts, the EPA ‘gold bars’ scandal, court challenges to the Trump administration, whistleblower complaints, declassified information about controversies like Covid, and anything else that comes up.

“We’re living through a period of revolutionary change and are awash in revelations and document releases, yet few outlets are making an effort to show core materials. As these stories come out, I’m encouraging readers who work in relevant fields, follow these narratives, or who simply want to pitch in, to write to: , especially if they know of documents that should be added.”

This is an idea that ought to catch on quickly.

WHAT’S THE NEW YORK TIMES’ PROBLEM WITH JEWS? Did you hear about the violent night-time riot against Jewish residents in a Brooklyn neighborhood earlier this week? Not if you depend upon The New York Times for your news. It happened but the editors of the NYT simply ignored the latest eruption of anti-semitic extremism of pro-Hamas/pro-Palestinian radicals.

Richard Pollock explains in his latest Substack column why it should come as no surprise that a calculated mob attack one of America’s neighborhoods with a high concentration of Orthodox Jews was ignored by the NYT. After all, the NYT had some major problems with the Holocaust.

ANOTHER WIN FOR TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT: My goodness, the great news just keeps coming on the transparency and accountability front. Check out the latest Citizen Auditor product from OpenTheBooks in my latest PJ Media column.