December 15, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Minnesota’s massive Medicaid fraud a warning for Colorado.

A natural question follows. Does Colorado have a similar program? Like birds of a feather flocking together, both Minnesota and Colorado have a bad habit of expanding Medicaid, dating to the first expansion allowed by ObamaCare and continuing on up through COVID.

It turns out we do. The story begins with House Bill 24-1322. While the bill doesn’t create a carbon copy of Minnesota’s Department of Housing Stabilization, it did start the ball rolling on something even bigger, tasking the Department of Healthcare Policy and Financing (HCPF) with studying the feasibility of creating a similar program subsidizing both housing and nutrition in Colorado.

From the bill: “If HCPF determines that providing these services is budget neutral to the General Fund due to offsetting reductions in medical services and other expenditures, the department must seek federal authorization to cover the services by July 1, 2025.”

I looked briefly through the study produced by HCPF, and sure enough they concluded that this Medicaid expansion could be done without spending any extra money. They also found that you could shuffle some existing services around, bundling them up for convenience.

If you’re wondering how more government-subsidized services could happen without spending more money, Senate Bill 25-308, which implements the changes into law, spells it out. In broad strokes it’s more Medicaid “money laundering” with Colorado convincing the feds to give us money for something and then shifting state dollars to other priorities.

From the bill’s fiscal note: “Under the approved waiver, the state can now draw down federal Medicaid matching funds, and redirect the freed-up state funds to expand and enhance the services.”

Why, it’s almost as though massive fraud were built into everything done in response to COVID.

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

JACOB SAVAGE: The Lost Generation.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DRONES ARE THE FUTURE OF WARFARE:

Posted at 12:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds

EDUCATION HIGH AND LOW IS A MONEY LAUNDRY AND ACTIVIST FARM FOR THE LEFT:

Posted at 12:02 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: FBI stops planned New Year’s Eve Los Angeles terror attack by pro-Palestinian cell.

The “credible” threat came from radical members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF), according to a law enforcement source.

Four were collared in Lucerne Valley in the Mojave Desert, where the extremists allegedly were testing improvised explosives, while a fifth was apprehended in New Orleans.

“After an intense investigation, the Department of Justice, working with our @FBI, prevented what would have been a massive and horrific terror plot in the Central District of California (Orange County and Los Angeles),” Attorney General Pam Bondi posted Monday on X.

“The Turtle Island Liberation Front—a far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group—was preparing to conduct a series of bombings against multiple targets in California beginning on New Year’s Eve,” Bondi said. “The group also planned to target ICE agents and vehicles.”

Where are the press demands for Democrats to denounce these murderous lefties?

Meanwhile, in France: Fearful French cancel NYE concert on Champs-Élysées as migrant violence grows.

“Migrant” is the wrong M-word.

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

HEH: Kristi Noem Fired by 17 Insiders and Counting. “There are times when the news out of Washington reminds me of ice fishing in Wisconsin. Everyone swears something just hit the line, even though nobody’s pulled a fish up all day, and the only real action comes from the guy spilling his coffee, swearing at the Packers.”

Posted at 11:09 am by Stephen Green

“GAZA DOCTOR” SAYS IT ALL: ‘Gaza doctor murdered Israeli hostage by injecting air into her veins… before her father received video of her dying and begging for her life.’

The father of an Israeli woman abducted on October 7 has revealed his daughter was murdered in Gaza by a civilian doctor – and that he was later sent a video showing the moment she was killed.

In the footage, Avi Marciano said a medical worker is seen injecting air into his 19-year-old daughter’s veins as she lies on a bed inside Shifa Hospital, begging for her life.

Marciano, who was speaking publicly to a small crowd for the first time, said that by the end of the clip ‘she was sweating and showing no signs of life’.

His daughter was later identified as Cpl Noa Marciano, who the IDF said had suffered injuries during heavy bombing and gunfire but none that were considered life-threatening.

As Israeli forces advanced towards where Noa was being held, her captors moved her to Gaza City, where she was later killed.

Marciano said the video was sent to him on Telegram and showed clearly how his daughter died while in Hamas captivity.

Not died, murdered — by a doctor.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM:

Lefties are less violent when they believe they’re winning, so at least we know where they think they stand.

But as the wise man once said, “Keep your powder dry — and keep lots of powder.”

Posted at 10:22 am by Stephen Green

CIVIL LIBERTIES AIN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE:

Posted at 9:51 am by Stephen Green

HMM: Oracle’s collapsing stock shows the AI boom is running into two hard limits: physics and debt markets.

Oracle’s rapid descent from market darling to market warning sign is revealing something deeper about the AI boom, experts say: no matter how euphoric investors became over the last two years, the industry can’t outrun the laws of physics—or the realities of debt financing.

Shares of Oracle have plunged 45% from their September high and lost 14% this week after a messy earnings report revealed it spent $12 billion in quarterly capital expenditures, higher than the $8.25 billion expected by analysts.

Earnings guidance was also weak, and the company raised its forecast for fiscal 2026 capex by another $15 billion. The bulk of that is going into data centers dedicated to OpenAI, Oracle’s $300 billion partner in the AI cycle.

“We have ambitious achievable goals for capacity delivery worldwide,” Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said on an earnings call this week.

Investors worry how Oracle will pay for these massive outlays as its underlying revenue streams, cloud revenue and cloud-infrastructure sales, also fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts have described its AI buildout as debt-fueled, even though the company does not explicitly link specific debt to specific capital projects in its filings.

Eventually, investors will expect to see returns on the industry’s massive cap-ex expenses — half a trillion dollars in 2024, another $550-$600 billion in 2025, and likely that much more again in 2026.

Oracle might have made the headlines in today’s papers, but industry leader OpenAI will lose anywhere from $10-$20 billion in 2025 alone, on an estimated $13 billion in revenues. Again, that’s due to massive capital expenditures that are warping the market for chips.

I’d sure love to know in advance who will survive the inevitable shakeout (wouldn’t we all?), but I’m reasonably certain it’ll be brutal.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Busy Weekend for the Worst of Humanity. “This week it was like getting hit with a firehose of evil. I was just reading about what happened at Brown University and in Australia when the news from Brentwood about Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, was breaking. I was hoping that I could find something that didn’t involve murder to write about, but that was my hint that murder was unavoidable.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

EVERYONE KNOWS THE REAL PROBLEM BUT POLITICIANS DON’T WANT TO SAY IT:

Posted at 9:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

RE-FUND THE POLICE: Los Angeles mayor urges hiring of over 400 police officers

In the Dec. 10 letter, Bass implored the council to approve $4.4 million in funding, without which the police department will no longer be able to hire incoming recruits.

“It will mean no new cadets in the police academy in January of 2026,” Bass wrote in the letter. “It will mean increasing overtime hours and costs as fewer officers will have greater workloads. It will mean that we strain officers’ health with longer shifts and more responsibility.”

Bass and the president of the Los Angeles City Council, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, did not respond to The Center Square for comment this week. The Los Angeles Police Department deferred questions to the city council and mayor’s office on Thursday and did not return calls and emails from The Center Square on Friday.

In her letter, Bass noted the nation’s second-largest city can’t have a police force that staffs at the same levels as 1995. She also noted Los Angeles doesn’t have enough police officers per 1,000 residents the way other large cities throughout the country do. The demands of the police department with the upcoming 2028 Olympics and 2026 FIFA World Cup, she wrote, would strain the LAPD.

Weird, the LA Times reported last summer that she’d reached a deal with the city council to restore hiring funds already.

Then there’s this from 2020:

She said police department budgets could be reduced if communities shift some of the burdens to other agencies.

“Police officers are the first ones to say they are law enforcement officers, they’re not social workers. What we have done in our country is, we have not invested in health, social and economic problems in communities. We leave the police to pick up the pieces,” said Bass, of Los Angeles. “In my city, for example, on any given night, we have over 40,000 people who are homeless. Why should the police be involved with that?”

Addressing substance abuse and similar issues, Bass asked why “police officers have to clean up society’s problems?”

She blamed it on the “lopsided” priorities of cities.

“Why doesn’t a city deal with its social problems so not so much money would have to go to law enforcement?” she questioned.

How’d that work out for you as mayor, Ms. Bass?

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green