HILL AIDES SNAP OUT OF IT? New survey by CNCT Capitol Pulse finds 80 percent of congressional aides responding “No” when asked if Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) beneficiaries should be able to use the benefit to purchase sodas.

FEMINIST REACHES FEMINISM’S DEADEND: Wintery Knight updates on a feminist advocate he first featured more than a decade ago, and who now, at age 63, has realized she ruined her life by living the values of the feminist movement. This is a profoundly sad but instructive portrait of the emptiness that so characterizes post-modern materialism.

IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED: Speaking of the Issues & Insights (I&I) crew, a critical comment from one of their many readers prompted a lengthy explanation of why they don’t like the Democratic Party. The explanation is full of interesting insights, including these two:

“The Democratic Party’s intersectional politics are why Greta Thunberg can shift from climate warrior to a Hamasnik wearing an Arafat keffiyeh (also known as the ‘hipster swastika’) and no one on the left blinks. They furnished the stage for Barack Obama to promise that if elected, he’d get busy ‘fundamentally transforming the United States of America,’ and be cheered as if he were a deliverer having descended from Olympus.

“The revolution that the Democratic Party has been pressing for at least six decades would abolish capitalism and free markets, seize the means of production, destroy the nuclear family, erase Christianity and Judaism, defund law enforcement, reopen the borders, censor speech, pack the Supreme Court, ration energy and health care, overturn our civil order and uproot Western civilization.”

There’s more, much more, worth your perusal.

YOU THINK ICE IS BAD NOW? The Issues & Insights guys provide a lengthy list of reminders about the conduct of ICE agents when Barack Obama was in the Oval Office.

IS SCHUMER SHUTDOWN PAYBACK TO THE HEALTHCARE INSURERS? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and legions of Democratic incumbents, challengers and committees get millions of dollars in campaign donations from healthcare insurance firms.

Is it coincidental that those same firms are the main beneficiaries of those “temporary” Covid-related Obamacare tax credits? No, it’s gotta be coincidental no matter what this article in The Washington Stand reports.

DR OZ BLOWS HOLE IN SCHUMER SHUTDOWN NARRATIVE: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) repeats it over and over and over: It’s against the law for illegal immigrants to get federal healthcare and other benefits, so GOP charges that they are getting billions in such aid cannot be true.

Well, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), dispatched investigators to get to the facts on this issue and their earliest results show more than $1 billion in confirmed Medicaid benefits going to illegals.

Neither Schumer nor House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to my request for comment on the Oz probe to The Washington Stand.

BUREAUCRACY AND REPUBLIC: Rod Martin and Jeffrey Tucker make the most  succinct case I’ve read in eons on why you can have a ruling administrative state or you can have a democratic republic, but the two cannot coincide on an equal basis. And the “No Kings” hypocrisy gets its due, too.

NO MORE CANCEL CULTURE: Pastor Luke Ash was fired earlier this year from his second job at the Baton Rouge Parish Library after he refused to use a transgendered co-worker’s “preferred pronouns.” It wasn’t that long ago that such an incident would be a one-day story and the world would move on, in part due to fear of the consequences of fighting back.

Pastor Ash is fighting back, with help from attorneys at the Florida-based Liberty Counsel civil liberties defense outfit, according to the Washington Stand’s S.A. McCarthy.

“Liberty Counsel charges that the library board and supervisors violated Ash’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religious liberty and Fourteenth Amendment rights, in addition to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Louisiana’s constitutional religious liberty protections, and the state’s Preservation of Religious Freedom Act,” McCarthy reports.

Ash’s attorneys informed the Louisiana parish authorities that the bottom line on their actions in firing the pastor “is this: there is no compelling government interest in requiring Mr. Ash (or other employees) to lie; or to affirmatively use false pronouns that do not accurately reflect biological sex, particularly outside the hearing of the person who dislikes accurate, sex-based pronouns. The Library has acted unlawfully in firing Mr. Ash.”

More to come on this case. Like Trump said, “fight! fight! fight!”

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE PUZZLING: Of the latest trends in American church attendance — young men outnumber young women — plus a bit of a progress report on HillFaith.org. As I contend in my latest Substack column, you don’t have to be a Bible-thumper to appreciate the public policy differences in perspectives represented by the Sermon on the Mount and Critical Race Theory.

NEW CIVIL WAR IN GAZA: Multiple Palestinian clans or gangs are fighting against Hamas and it seems quite possible a final internal convulsion is at hand. Richard Pollock has details on Substack.

THE SKUNK SHUTDOWN DEMS ARE STUCK WITH: Capitol Hill Democrats insist millions of Americans will lose health insurance if those “temporary” Obamacare Pandemic tax credit subsidies aren’t made permanent; otherwise, they will keep the government shutdown.

But, as even The Washington Post editorial board has come to see, the fundamental problem is not the Obamacare subsidies but Obamacare itself, which, as I detail this morning on The Washington Stand, has been a catastrophe for American healthcare.

MORE MEN THAN WOMEN IN CHURCH NOW: For as long as memory serves, women have been more active than men in churches, but, as Amanda Hughes reports on HillFaith this morning, a new data analysis by Barna Group finds the reverse is now true in America.

“Patterns in church participation showed a reversal over the past 25 years in attendance where women led the household in spiritual growth and church activity. Now, research tells a different story where more men, 43 percent, and fewer women, 36 percent, reported attending church on a weekly basis,” according to Hughes.

COLUMBUS, YES OR NO: Was Christopher Columbus the genocidal European maniac who sought out the New World in order to exploit its riches, commit genocide among its peoples and spread incurable plagues to finish them off? Or was he rather closer to the traditional understanding of the significance of his discovery of the New World?

Thank goodness for Prager U to provide a superb 5:30 video hosted by Michael Knowles that lays out the good, the bad and the mythical about the Italian explorer who launched the age of exploration that ultimately led to the founding of America. As explained on HillFaith this morning, the bottom-line issue here is how you view western civilization.

JAY JONES’ TOP DONOR AREN’T TALKING: The Washington Stand asked each of the Virginia Democratic Attorney General candidate’s top 10 donors if they are requesting refunds of their cumulative $5.2 million in contributions. Not one responded

EVERY 21ST CENTURY DEM PREZ DOES IT: Revelations about “Artic Frost” — the Biden era FBI’s spying on eight Republican senators and one GOP House member — quickly prompted comparisons with Watergate. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) called it “arguably worse than Watergate.”

But, as I document in today’s The Washington Stand, nobody should be surprised by Artic Frost or any of the numerous other illustrations of Biden weaponizing the federal government against political opponents.

Starting with Bill Clinton, continuing with Barack Obama and then hugely expanding under Biden, political weaponization has been Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Democratic Chief Executives.

ISRAEL SHOWS CAPITALISM WORKS: Ignorance here in America of domestic Israeli politics and policy has long been the norm because the MSM either ignores it or subjects it to the tiring Netanyahu-Bad-Man narrative.

The reality is, as Rod Martin explains in great and enlightening detail, that Israel is in the midst of demonstrating the multiple economic miracles made possible when entrepreneurial courage, hard work and individual liberty are encouraged. The fact is Israel is a growing economic miracle with potential that could entirely change the Middle Eastern dynamic at all levels.

When you understand Netanyahu’s central role in bringing this about, long before he first became Prime Minister when he was watching and learning in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, you get why the American MSM, so much of the Democratic Party and the academic establishment can’t stand the man. He actually believes in individual freedom.

$2 TRILLION IN SHUTDOWN SAVINGS: Sen. Joni Ernst, the retiring Iowa Republican who is head of the Senate DOGE Caucus, handed OMB Director Russ Vought an eight-page, single-spaced list of documented waste and fraud problems whose elimination could save as much as $2 Trillion.

FACTS EXPOSE SCHUMER’S ‘MEDICAID CUTS’ MYTH: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claims Trump and Hill GOPers are imposing “the largest cut to Medicaid in history.” Oops, that’s not what the facts say.

GALLUP FINDS MSM TRUST AT HISTORIC LOW: The divide is along generational and partisan lines, but the depth of distrust overall just keeps getting deeper and deeper. S.A. McCarthy lays out the details for The Washington Stand.

JANE GOODALL RIP: Her trail-blazing observations in 1960 on the shared traits of humans and chimpanzees became the “we’re 99 percent alike” conventional evolutionary wisdom in the 1970s. Now, in the year of her passing, new research blows a huge hole in the familiar narrative.

PRO-PALESTINIANS’ MUTED RESPONSE TO TRUMP CEASEFIRE: Israel and the major Middle Eastern Arab/Muslim nations accepted President Donald Trump’s 20-point ceasefire proposal. But did you catch the silence among the Pro-Palestinian radicals here in the states? Richard Pollock certainly did.

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HORRIBLE: The “Red Market,” where human organs are bought and sold, that is. Dr. Jon Spiers, writing in The Washington Stand, brings the most disturbing facts to the fore about the harvesting, trading and transplanting of human organs.

FOR THOSE WHO NEVER HEARD: Dr. Voddie Baucham’s passing last week went mostly unnoticed in the secular Right media, but, even for those who don’t share his faith, his was a hugely significant life.

One need not be a Jesus follower on the Right to appreciate the immense significance of  Baucham’s incisive analysis, for example, of the cultural and political impact of the Left’s debilitating shift to personal identity (i.e. group, sexual preference, etc.) as the basis of one’s persuasiveness rather than reasoned logic and verifiable fact in public policy discussion. That begins at the 32:45 mark.

HillFaith normally doesn’t post videos stretching to 55 minutes, but Baucham’s last lecture, delivered September 17 at New Saint Andrews College, is both typical of his scholarship and persona, and worth remembering for years to come,

HOW MUCH YOU WANNA BET ON THAT: You almost never hear about it in the Mainstream Media, but then the MSM makes billions on advertising paid for by sports gambling interests. Maybe that’s why so little is said about the growing economic and social toll of sports gambling?

LOOK WHO SAYS KIMMEL ISN’T FUNNY: Jimmy Kimmel is back on air, thanks to Disney CEO Bob Iger, but a new survey of a segment of a key age group suggests his return may not last very long.