January 19, 2026

I CAN SEE THAT:

But the competition isn’t over yet:

Posted at 2:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S FRAUD ALL THE WAY DOWN: A third of federal agencies in audit lacked regular fraud monitoring or evaluation.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a technical appendix to its 2015 fraud risk management guidance this month, aimed at helping federal agencies strengthen how they prevent fraud in U.S. government programs. The reason? Many still lack basic safeguards.

Previous GAO reports have revealed the extent of fraud across the federal government.

A report from 2024 showed that the U.S. loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, based on data from 2018-2022.

“Fraud prevention, including deterrence, decreases the need to chase after and recover stolen funds,” read the latest report. “Demonstrating the value of fraud prevention can help inform antifraud resource allocation decisions.”

The new report builds on GAO’s 2015 Fraud Risk Framework, which outlines best practices for preventing, detecting and responding to fraud in federal programs.

The framework is organized into four components: establishing an antifraud culture; assessing fraud risks; designing and implementing control activities; and evaluating outcomes and adapting efforts.

GAO’s new technical appendix focuses specifically on the fourth component, which is how agencies can systematically evaluate the effectiveness of their fraud risk management activities and adapt them as needed.

Components five, six, and seven: Prosecute, prosecute, prosecute.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S COME TO THIS: Zohran Mamdani’s ‘aspirational hope’ for NYC mayor’s residence? Bidets.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an aspirational hope for his new home at the mayor’s centuries-old official residence.

When the new mayor was moving in to Gracie Mansion Jan. 12 with his wife Rama Duwaji, a reporter asked what he planned to change at the Manhattan residence built in 1799.

“One thing that we will change is we will be installing a few bidets into Gracie Mansion,” Mamdani, 34, told reporters. “That’s an aspirational hope. We’ll see if we can get it done.”

As Jonah Goldberg wrote at the start of the year, “‘We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,’ declared Zohran Mamdani in his inaugural address as mayor of New York City on Thursday. To paraphrase Theodore White’s quip about Barry Goldwater, it was a real ‘My God, he’s going to govern as Zohran Mamdani!’ moment.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS CNN: ‘You Have To Make People Uncomfortable:’ How Don Lemon Helped Anti-ICE Activists Storm a Minnesota Church.

Disgraced former CNN host Don Lemon colluded with anti-ICE activists now under investigation for storming a Minnesota church on Sunday—a “clandestine” operation that Lemon helped keep secret ahead of time before publicizing it once it began.

Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023 over mistreatment of female colleagues, accompanied Minneapolis lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong on “Operation Pull Up” at Cities Church in Saint Paul to protest the ICE shooting earlier this month of 37-year-old Renee Good. According to Armstrong, the operation targeted Cities Church because an associate pastor is allegedly the acting director of Saint Paul’s ICE office.

“We show up somewhere that is a key location,” Armstrong told Lemon in an interview prior to the event. “They don’t expect us to come there. And then we disrupt business as usual.”

Storming a church is never a good look:

Late last week, another former CNN employee was letting it all hang out during his appearance with leftist podcast host Jennifer Welch:

● Deranged: Acosta Floats Choking CBS’s Dokoupil, Welch Says ICE Is Like ISIS.

● Jim Acosta Helps Dems Make the Pivot to ‘JD Vance Is Worse Than Trump.’ (Plus: Get the TDS Straitjacket!)

In December of 2012, the Grauniad asked: Can Jeff Zucker fix what ails CNN?

Upon his departure a decade later, his fellow leftists at the New Republic concluded: Jeff Zucker Was the Most Craven TV Executive of the Trump Era. The CNN executive’s commitments to “The Trump Show” wrecked his network—and did lasting damage to the country.

Lemon and Acosta’s recent antics illustrate that the hangover from Zucker’s reign of error continues.

Minnesota’s DFL party will of course look the other way at Lemon’s stunt…

…But the Feds? Stay tuned:

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:10 pm by Ed Driscoll

SCREEN TIME: Teens are on phones for 70 minutes at school, 300 minutes a day overall.

Teenagers spend 70 minutes of the school day on their phones — nearly all on social media, video and gaming apps — according to a recent study, report Lauraine Langreo and Gina Tomko in Education Week. The average school day is 400 to 500 minutes.

The data came from teens who participated in the nationwide Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, and agreed to install a tracking app on their phones.

Students rarely used their smartphones for education or productivity apps, said lead researcher Jason Nagata, a University of California, San Francisco pediatrics professor. While some were on their phones during lunch or other breaks, rather than class time, that’s troubling too, he said. “It’s important that kids, during breaks, have time to rest, to have face-to-face social interactions with their peers, and also just be outdoors and physically active.”

Overall, teenagers spend about five hours a day — 300 minutes — on smartphones, with nearly two hours of that on social media, researchers concluded. That doesn’t leave much time for an after-school job, sports, a hobby or just hanging out with friends.

This is exactly what the phone’s parental controls are for. Kids hate them, but that’s the point.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Starfleet Academy — This Show Is Pure Torture.

The Drinker asks:

Oh, Star Trek, my old friend. What have they done to you? You know, I remember when Star Trek was a serious show made by serious people with a passion for science and technology and a desire to broaden human horizons. How times have changed after the indignities of Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds. I honestly thought we’d seen an end of the brain dead, cringe-inducing, hyper-identity politics-driven garbage wearing the Star Trek brand like a skin suit, but apparently not. Is this like some kind of humiliation ritual at this point? Do they hate their own franchise?

Yes, and like Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars, the producers hate the franchise’s core fans even more.

On the bright side though, Starfleet Academy is singlehandedly bringing together a divided nation — I was not expecting to see the words “I am so on the same page” with Trump advisor Stephen Miller coming from the X account of William Shatner, but that’s where we are at the beginning of 2026 AD:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOUNG MEN WHO WANT TO BE MUSCULAR: NPR warns about “Bigorexia.”

“For many people, the fact that boys and men have body image pressures is completely not on their radar,” Nagata said. “When we get referrals for boys and men with muscle dysmorphia, there’s often a long delay in referral and diagnosis.”

Those with the condition are more at risk of disordered eating, steroid use and suicidal ideation. When disordered eating becomes severe, patients can be hospitalized. And a growing share of those patients are now boys, according to a longitudinal study in Canada. The authors of that study say there’s a “pressing need” to educate clinicians about the trend.

Or they could just euthanize them, as one does in Canada.

Plus:

While researchers continue to debate this distinction, it’s clear that certain groups, like transgender men, are more at risk.

“Biologically, they may have appearance factors that are more feminine, and then they’re trying to change that so that they feel like they’re in a more masculine body,” Nagata said. “There’s added sort of hoops that they have to go through to get this sort of muscular build.”

Well, the dangers of becoming overly obsessed with progress are well known in the lifting community, even if NPR has just discovered them. On the other hand, like anorexia, this problem is dwarfed by the obesity problem.

Also, I kinda suspect a prank when the story about guys who don’t think they’re big enough is centered on a guy whose name is “Mycock.”

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SPENDING OF ALL KINDS, BUT YEAH: Colorado due for a reckoning over runaway Medicaid costs.

According to HCPF and the Governor’s office, General Fund spending on Medicaid increased at an average rate of 6 percent from fiscal year 2015-16 to fiscal year 2018-19. However, after the federal government windfall from COVID, General Fund spending blew up, growing at an average rate of 19 percent from fiscal year 2021-22 to fiscal year 2024-25.

Health care is rapidly crowding out most other spending, and is the primary driver of the state’s budget challenges, as those federal funds have since expired.

HCPF now accounts for nearly one-third of the General Fund and is also the fastest-growing department.

Add to that, Manatt suggests that “25 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending may be wasteful, due to overtreatment, low-value care, poor care coordination, pricing failures, fraud and abuse, and undue administrative complexities.”

Governor Polis and HCPF engaged Manatt to analyze Colorado’s Medicaid and CHP+ programs, identify cost-saving solutions, and propose policy recommendations.

I don’t trust them. State spending — adjusting for inflation — grew 31% per capita under my so-called “libertarian” governor since 2018-2019, and the only thing holding back his Democrats is the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), that they’ve steadily chipped away at over the last several years.

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

A TALE OF TWO CITIES:

Tweet continues, “Why is Minneapolis a different story?? Is it because the fraud and crimes happening there involved the elected government? Who is paying the rioters? I believe the rioters and the government officials protecting them and egging them on are both idiots.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

Posted at 12:26 pm by Stephen Green

YES:

Posted at 12:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“IF THEY TAX THE BILLIONAIRES WILL I GET TO KEEP MORE OF MY MONEY?” “ALSO NO.”

Posted at 12:08 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JOSH SHAPIRO: Team Kamala Asked If I Was an Israeli Double Agent.

“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”

“Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” the questioner, Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, continued, according to Mr. Shapiro, who recounted, “If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?”

Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that Ms. Remus was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

It certainly says something about Dana Remus. It also speaks volumes about former Attorney General Eric Holder, who ran the search committee to vet potential running mates for Kamala Harris. And that in turn speaks volumes about Holder’s former boss Barack Obama, who kept trying to cut deals with Iran and repeatedly involved Rob Malley in those efforts, who had to quit Obama’s initial campaign when his contacts with Hamas got exposed in early 2008.

It also has something to say about the progressives that control the Democrat Party of today. This query relies on an old and bigoted trope about Jews being inherently disloyal to their own countries, a claim that long predates the establishment of the state of Israel. In Germany, political leaders blamed Jews for the collapse in World War I that led to their defeat, using the same ugly claim, which got amplified and then industrialized by the Nazis. No one asks that question about being an Israeli double-agent out of the blue without having bought into that anti-Semitic mindset.

Jim Geraghty adds:

Occam’s razor would suggest that either A) the Harris campaign foresaw insurmountable obstacles from having a Jewish, pro-Israel running mate at a time when the Democratic grassroots were growing vehemently anti-Israel, and needed an excuse to conclude Shapiro had flunked the vetting process or B) the Harris campaign was full of paranoid antisemites who believed that every American Jew they encountered was secretly working for the Mossad.

Shapiro writes, “The fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

Our Audrey Fahlberg asked the very good question of how Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, up to his eyeballs in fraud scandals involving state spending, managed to come through the Harris campaign’s vetting with no red flags. The paranoia about Shapiro’s alleged dual loyalties are even more absurd in light of Walz’s 30 visits to China, one funded by the Chinese government, status as a visiting fellow at the Macao Polytechnic University, a Chinese state-run institution of higher education, and so on. And one of the few decisions of the Harris campaign that we can be 100 percent certain was made by the candidate was the selection of Walz over Shapiro. (Selecting Shapiro wouldn’t have won the race for Harris, but she might have at least kept Pennsylvania in the Democratic column.)

Geraghty’s post is aptly titled, “Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign Was Run by a Bunch of Lunatics.”

Agreed. Why is the Democratic Party such a cesspit of antisemitism?

Exit question:

Of course, perhaps Walz was similarly vetted, with the goal of taking the “Quality Learing Center” nationwide:

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll