Category: Update

Last Wednesday, Paul Jacob wrote, in “Maddened in Michigan,” of a group he chairs, Americans for Citizen Voting – Michigan, and its problems with that state’s Board of State Canvassers. The board consists of “two appointed Democrats and two appointed Republicans.” The four members “deadlocked repeatedly, 2-2” — on partisan grounds — “on counting petition signatures even when they agreed that the signer was a registered Michigan voter, and then, on whether to certify the issue” for the November ballot.

What was going on in Michigan was an attempt to throw out perfectly acceptable petition signatures. Why? Apparently to make sure that a ballot measure would not be voted on by Michigan voters. The measure would require that only citizens vote in elections.

“Two unelected members of an obscure state board,” [Sen. Ruth Johnson] concluded, “cannot be allowed to strip away the constitutional rights of nearly one in 10 adults in our state who signed a petition to place this issue before voters.”

That’s why we and the 700,000 Michiganders who signed our petition want our day in court. Left without any response at all from Michigan’s Democrat-dominated Supreme Court, on Monday we filed an emergency petition with the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Paul closed his report by noting that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had “ordered the Michigan Secretary of State, Bureau of Elections and Board of State Canvassers to respond to our appeal by noon today.”

Were the corrupt decisions of Michigan countered with by Justice Kavanaugh? He did review them to some extent.

But no.

What happened next is explained by Joseph Lord in an Epoch Times article from yesterday:

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant an emergency request from a group seeking to put a proof-of-citizenship measure on Michigan’s November ballot.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday rejected the request from Americans for Citizen Voting. The group has been pushing for a state vote on a constitutional amendment requiring state officials to confirm that voters in the state are U.S. citizens.

Kavanaugh provided no explanation of the decision.

A few hours later, the Michigan Supreme Court also rejected a bid from the group to place the measure on the November ballot.

The required date for Michigan election officials to finalize the ballot in the state is Sept. 4, leaving the petitioners with little hope of getting judicial approval before the deadline.

Americans for Citizen Voting claimed in its emergency petition that it was making the request because state officials refused to certify that the measure had received enough signatures to move forward.

“The Michigan Board of State Canvassers refused to certify a petition for Michigan’s November 3, 2026 election despite the petition garnering more than 700,000 signatures and needing only 446,198,” the group wrote.

The group has concentrated its effort against instances of noncitizens voting in municipal and school board elections. These elections, with the agreement of local legislators, allow voting by some noncitizens—often requiring a green card or lawful residency.

Note that two-thirds of the 24 cities that allow noncitizens to vote do not require the noncitizen to be legally present in the United States.

The article then makes a dutiful nod to the official story about non-citizen voting: “Outside of these exceptional elections, outcome-altering voting by noncitizens is practically nonexistent in the United States, according to the American Immigration Council.”

Wait, should people wait until enough noncitizens are voting to alter the outcome of the election before making reforms?

The Michigan campaign for requiring citizenship for voting and checking the voter list for noncitizens and requiring voter ID has never claimed that noncitizens are voting in massive numbers.

The idea that precautions should be taken to prevent such influences on elections — you might call it “election integrity” — never seem to be accepted among the ruling class.

Relevant VIDEOS on Facebook:

Holding Voters Hostage

Board Member Refuses to Read

Bureau Admits Another Error in Invalidating Signatures

Board Ignores Sworn Notarized Voter Affidavit 

A Fair Process?

Handwriting Expert Ignored & Unqualified Bureau Staff Invalidates

“Enforcement actions carried out by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have stopped over $1.6 billion in potentially improper Medicare lab payments so far under the Trump administration,” an Epoch Times report authored by Naveen Athrappully begins.

The CMS says that “$732 million was saved by revoking 157 fraudulent lab providers from the Medicare program. . . .”

That seems not insignificant.

In March last year, CMS launched its Fraud Defense Operations Center (FDOC), which has become a key tool to combat fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare, according to the agency.

FDOC assembles investigators, data analysts, health policy experts, law enforcement, and legal advisors to crack down on fraud. It uses data-driven intelligence to detect threats in real time and shut down inappropriate Medicare billing, CMS said.

In its latest statement, CMS attributed the savings generated from the crackdown on fraudulent Medicare payments to advanced tools, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. These tools look for indicators such as unusual billing patterns to identify potential fraud, abuse, and waste.

Hotbeds of fraud are the states of Minnesota and California — something readers of this website already knew: Paul Jacob has reported on several major cases in the past year.

Further, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz objects to the money not sent to his state because of the patterns of fraud detected.

Make of that what you will.

The Wall Street Journal published a Free Expression column by James B. Meigs this week, entitled “Our UFO Obsession Is a Distraction From National-Security Reality.” The title says it all, really, along with the tagline: “The skies are full of drones, not flying saucers.”

The key passage, really, is this:

I’m a skeptic about UFOs. I think the chances that we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials are infinitesimally remote. But for that very reason, I strongly support opening the government books. As Journal columnist Holman Jenkins argues, the U.S. military and intelligence establishments have long sidestepped legitimate questions about unexplained sightings and sometimes deliberately fomented “UFO hysteria.” That kind of gamesmanship simply invites more conspiracy theories. And if one of these UAPs turns out to be something truly out of this world, well, they ought to tell us that too.

This deflates the whole thesis. Most thoughtful folk marshal some doubt when presented with claims about things with which they have no experience. But the conclusion of this passage does show that transparency on the subject is an area of broad agreement — at least among people who know next to nothing.

But bringing “extraterrestrial” aliens into the conversation about UFOs is itself a standard distraction. While it is true that most people who have seen something bizarre in the skies or coming out of (and going into) bodies of water leap to the ET hypothesis, it is not the sole conjecture to explain the phenomena, and even among ufologists it appears to be decreasing in popularity. Other explanations? They include:

1. Plasmoids (“life-like” systems of plasma, the fourth state of matter) 
2. Cryptoterrestrials (they’re from here, are much older than us, and probably reside in the oceans)
3. Ultraterrestrials (they’re from “other dimensions”)
4. Breakaway civilizations (human tech but far more advanced than our civilization’s drones)

So having a theory about how difficult it would be for “aliens” to get here — as Mr. Meigs floats — border on the disingenuous. Besides, such Difficulty Objections are based on our currently rickety physics.

Meigs, who is associated with the Manhattan Institute, also observes that the War Department’s tranches of released historical UFO files “have yet to include any bombshells supporting the claims made by retired intelligence officer David Grusch in his explosive 2023 congressional testimony.” Well, yes. No evidence has been disclosed of crashed UFO retrievals or “biologics” (both staples of science fiction). But it has been widely observed that elements in the Pentagon and the information agencies have worked mightily to pooh-pooh UFO talk — even while also using disinformation to encourage belief in UFOs among targeted individuals and groups. (What if the actual psy-op is planned confusion and a divided-and-conquered populace?)  Also, it may be worthwhile to note a fact about the files so far released: they’ve been mostly stripped of telemetry and investigative reports, consisting mostly of raw data unadorned by context, seeming more designed to appease disclosure advocates than actually disclose anything.

This is a widely noted judgment of the files even among their enthusiasts.

More importantly, the files do show behavior of flying objects that is far beyond what our civilization has yet publicly produced. Many of these sightings are outré enough not to warrant being classified as mere “drones.”

But there are drones out there. One reason to disclose all aspects of the files is to allow the Navy (which appears to encounter UAP with the most frequency) to distinguish enemy reconnaissance objects from whatever the truly outré UFOs are.

Interestingly, UFO historian Richard Dolan has commented on the op-ed.

Let’s end this by taking the above-mentioned Plasmoid theory seriously: The Navy, which has been studying plasmas for sixty years, has used lasers to create and control “plasma ‘UFOs.’” It has been written up in reputable sources, including Forbes.

---

Feature image taken from “Observations of Ball-Lightning-Like Plasmoids Ejected from Silicon by Localized Microwaves (2013).”

Ivermectin was one of the drugs medically deprecated during the pandemic (sometimes called the “plannedscamdemic”) that had to be repudiated because, by U.S. law, if a traditional drug could treat a new contagion, no new drug could be rushed through the regulatory system. So a huge psychological operation went underway to repudiate the promising alternatives, such as HCQ and, yes, Ivermectin.

Paul Jacob has covered this at ThisIsCommonSense.org — this very website. In September 2021, for example, the “horse dewormer” propaganda was discussed in “Ingested Invective Rejected.” One of this site’s “Thought” features quoted from The War on Ivermectin (2024):

In 2022, Paul wrote about Dr. John Campbell’s reporting on Ivermectin, in “This Is Just Huge.” In that spirit, consult Dr. Campbell after that:

John takes Ivermectin (nine months ago):

“New positive Ivermectin evidence” (eight months ago):

“Ivermectin and mebendazole, 84% benefit in cancer” (four months ago):

And, three weeks ago, Dr. Campbell laid out the damage done by suppressing Ivermectin during the pandemic:

And Campbell is not alone in noticing the researched benefits of the drug:

The ongoing Fauci story keeps going on, and some elements of it are being solidified into Accepted Fact. What element? Conspiracy.

“Former Fauci adviser pleads guilty in US to conspiring to conceal COVID records,” is the Reuters title. The plea occurred last Tuesday, when “former adviser to infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci” formally admitted guilt for “conspiring to evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The confessed criminal is named David Morens. “The 78-year-old had been indicted in April on charges related to what prosecutors said was a ⁠scheme to thwart public records requests received by the agency beginning in April 2020 related to COVID-19 ​research grants.

He faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on November 12.

“By pleading guilty today, ​Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did, and he will continue to do so,” Timothy Belevetz, his lawyer, said in a statement.

The plea came after Fauci, who led the NIAID for 38 years and became the face of the U.S. pandemic ​response, appeared before a Senate panel last month and repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination.

Dr. John Campbell reported on this two days ago:

The white fibrous clots, previously mentioned in these pages, has received scholarly attention at last: “Self-Reported Observations of Unusual White Fibrous Structures in Embalmed Corpses: Multi-Year Survey Results from Embalmers in Five Countries, 2022–
2025.” The paper, written by Thomas F. Haviland, Laura Kasner, and Daniel Santiago, has appeared in International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science (IJIRMS).

Dr. John Campbell discusses it here:

This is one of the several controversial topics irregularly updated on this website.

In “Uh & Other Naughty Words,” this week, Paul Jacob considered the apparent meteoric success of Francesca Hong, on Election Day expected to win the Democratic primary in her state.

She did not succeed.

Major media blames the polls. Forbes, for example. The polls were wrong. “Socialist Francesca Hong was heavily favored to win the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary Tuesday in betting odds and among politicos, but the few polls taken proved unreliable in a primary with several major last-minute developments that changed the dynamics in the race.”

But really, why did she lose? Some say it is the result of the alleged fact that “progressives don’t vote.” Karlyn Borsenko has a different opinion:

The ongoing unraveling of fraud in the federal government’s welfare system, particularly involving medical subsidies, has gotten politically even more interesting. The egregious Ilhan Omar, Somalian America-hater and U.S. Representative from Minnesota, is now implicated.

Well, at least one member of her family is under investigation.

In Kevin Haggerty’s “Minnesota fraud scandal hits close to home for Ilhan Omar after probe implicates sister,” we learn that the “Squad member has herself been dodging probes related to billions of dollars in fraud in her adopted home state, especially involving her own Somali community. Now, public records have raised serious questions about Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, and her link to an address shared by at least three Feeding Our Future convicts.

“It was at that Hyacinth Ave. address the incorporation records detailed, ‘Afraa opened a company called Sunrise Business Center, Inc. alongside Hanna Marekegn. Marekegn is directly involved in the fraud scandal, pleading guilty in 2022 to wire fraud for stealing $7 million. Marekegn claimed to be feeding 4,000 poor children a day. Instead she bought a mansion for herself, claiming she embodied the “American Dream.” Marekegn testified under oath that she falsely alleged racism to manipulate Minnesota bureaucrats to look the other way at red flags.’”

According to Benny Johnson, on X, “BREAKING: Ilhan Omar’s SISTER Has Been Linked to The ‘Feeding Our Future’ Fraud Scandal

Sahra Noor runs a business that received a $2 million earmark while her sister, Ilhan, was a state representative and she founded a USAID-backed consulting group that “has secured more than $20 million in funding for health initiatives”

Her company was registered at the same address used by key figures charged in the scheme.

70 have been convicted in the scandal.

This story, though not exactly new, has not become well known. It turns out that the Somali subsidy scam culture is a much bigger story than is widely recognized. For partisan reasons, no doubt, major news media outlets have not made much of it.

As is becoming clear, in this story and others, fear of being accused of racism is a good cover for all sorts of crimes and sins, not least of which is massive fraud.

The rise of “democratic socialism” in these United States has been of some concern here at ThisIsCommonSense.org. But it is not just in New York where this is happening. In Washington State, the socialists are on a legislative march, aiming to hobble markets with the ostensible goal of helping low-wage workers — but as noted by Paul Jacob last month, things are not going well.

That is, workers are taking the hit.

In addition to minimum wage hikes, there has been the imposition of a seemingly unconstitutional (or somewhat disguised) income tax.

Washington’s constitution, amended in 1930, requires that property be taxed uniformly and at no more than 1 percent of value. In 1933’s Culliton v. Chase, the Washington Supreme Court held that “income is property” under this provision — meaning any income tax is treated as a property tax and must be flat (uniform rate), not graduated. This effectively made a progressive income tax unconstitutional. 

So a legislature-introduced graduated income tax has long been considered unconstitutional. Even when 70 percent of voters approved one in a 1932 referendum, the court struck it down in 1933.

The Democrats’ first major crack at the barrier was a 7 percent capital gains tax on profits over $262,000 (later indexed), enacted in 2021. Critics argued it was just an income tax by another name. But in March 2023, the Washington Supreme Court upheld it 7–2, ruling it was an excise tax (a tax on the transaction of selling), not a property tax. This opened a narrow door: certain taxes on income could survive if framed as excise taxes.

On March 30, 2026, Governor Bob Ferguson signed into law a 9.9 percent personal income tax on household earnings above $1 million per year. Since it leaves the first $1 million untouched, only earnings beyond that threshold would be taxed. Projected to raise over $3 billion annually, it is set to take effect January 1, 2028, first payments due in 2029.

Democrats argue that the 2023 capital gains ruling shows the current state Supreme Court is willing to revisit — and potentially overturn — the 1933 Culliton precedent. Their hope? The court will either distinguish the millionaires’ tax as an excise tax (like the capital gains tax) or simply overturn Culliton outright and allow a graduated income tax.

A lawsuit was filed almost immediately after the law was signed, led by former state Attorney General Rob McKenna, arguing the tax “flies in the face of the constitution, of precedent and of voter will.” Opponents also point out that Washington voters have repeatedly rejected income tax ballot measures.

Constitutional or not, the predictable capital flight is now well under way:

Washington’s anti-wealth, anti-capitalist resurgence is almost certainly going to receive further coverage in these pages. Just as it continues to destroy the prosperity of the state’s citizens. Socialism is a destroyer. It doesn’t work doing anything else.

“Mamdani’s City Run Grocery Stores And Their Potential Market Impact” — Nathan Goldman | Forbes | July 28, 2026 11:00 AM

As part of Mamdani’s $124.7 billion budget, starting this year, New York City will build and open five stores, one per borough. The first will open in the Bronx by the end of 2027, and a second is planned for East Harlem’s La Marqueta market by 2029.

The main feature of these stores is that a core basket of goods — including produce, dairy, bread, select meat and seafood products and about 20 other staples — will be priced 30% below typical retail values. According to The New York Times, these prices will stay locked in for a month, and non-core items will sell at a designated fair market value.

These stores can offer prices at this level because they operate with a lower cost structure. Unlike bodegas, the city-run grocery stores will not pay rent or property taxes. Government-owned property is typically tax-exempt in the same way libraries, courthouses and DMVs do not pay property tax.

This foregone tax revenue creates an inherent cost advantage relative to other grocery providers. Still, the effect on the city’s bottom line is real: The city must make up forgone revenue elsewhere or absorbed it as a cost.

“Mamdani announces 30% discount on core set of goods at NYC-owned grocery stores” — Jen Maxfield and NBC New York TV Staff | NBC New York | July 27, 2026 8:32 PM

The first NYC-owned grocery store will be open by the end of 2027. Opening stores owned by the city was one of the mayor’s signature campaign pledges. The goal is to have at least one of these city-owned grocery stores in each borough.

The city also announced they are issuing an Request for Proposal as they look for third-party grocery store operators to manage the five city-run supermarkets.

“Our vision of affordable, well-run, city-owned grocery stores can only be accomplished with experienced operators who know how to source products, stock the shelves and help answer shoppers’ questions,” Mamdani said. “Today, we are also issuing an RFP for private operators to help us with the day-to-day management of the five city-run grocery stores.”

Some local politicians say the city’s $70 million project doesn’t address the root cause of higher food prices.

“I can tell you that I could give somebody $1,000 and that’ll change them being broke for the day, but it’s not gonna change how they got broke,” said Paul Muhammad, of Community Board Five.

“Who’s Paying for the Discounts in Mamdani’s City-Run Grocery Stores?” — Meagan O’Rourke | Reason | 7.28.2026 5:27 PM

Mamdani has said that government intervention for food distribution is nothing new. On Monday, he explained that former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was inspired to create municipally owned markets after witnessing food riots several years earlier.

“He did so because he believed in a simple definition of the task of government to make people’s lives better,” Mamdani said.

La Guardia may have been partially motivated to create municipally owned markets to make goods affordable, but Mamdani conveniently left out another part of the story. La Guardia wanted to create municipal markets (like Essex Market in the Lower East Side) to get pushcarts off the streets.

“What Mamdani Can Learn From Hugo Chávez’s Government-Run Grocery Store Debacle” — César Báez | Reason | 7.31.2026 1:40 PM

[L]ike Chávez, Mamdani will find that he can’t escape the laws of supply and demand. His evasive response to the reporter’s question suggests that he hasn’t given much thought to how the city would manage high demand for cheap groceries. One way or another, the program will require quotas. The alternative is to tolerate price-sensitive shoppers lining up outside stores to buy discount plantains.

“Zohran Mamdani Tells Jon Stewart Socialism Is Just Having a Library” — Robby Soave | Reason | 7.23.2026 4:15 PM

Now that democratic socialism is having a moment, political figures who adhere to the ideology or belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are fielding questions about it. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who self-identifies as a socialist, is a savvy politician, and so he quite deliberately misrepresents the definition of socialism in order to make it seem benign and unobjectionable. He is doing this frequently enough — and consistently enough — that he may be succeeding in tricking a great number of people into accepting a nonsensical, discredited, and dangerous ideology.