Category: The Washington Free Beacon
Trump admin drops hammer on SNAP scammers after finding 186K dead people collecting benefits
The Trump administration has plans to root out fraud in the country’s food stamp program.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program provides benefits to approximately 42 million Americans, costing about $100 billion in the fiscal year 2024.
‘Secretary Rollins wants to ensure the fraud, waste, and incessant abuse of SNAP ends.’
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Thursday that the administration will require Americans receiving food stamps through SNAP to reapply.
Rollins told Newsmax that this effort would “make sure that everyone that’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit … that they literally are vulnerable and they can’t survive without it.”
Rollins explained that she sent letters to every state, requesting data on SNAP benefits. She noted that 29 states, primarily those led by Republicans, responded to the request.
She stated that “186,000 deceased men and women and children in this country are receiving a check.”
RELATED: Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump administration to extend pause in SNAP funding
Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
“That is what we’re really going to start clamping down on. Half a million are getting two [payments],” Rollins said, noting that this included data from only 29 states.
“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue-state data what we’re gonna find?” she added.
“It’s going to give us a platform and a trajectory to fundamentally rebuild this program,” Rollins continued.
The secretary described one instance in which an individual used the same Social Security number to obtain EBT cards in six states.
Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
She noted that President Donald Trump has made cracking down on SNAP fraud a priority, adding that 120 arrests have already been made.
It is not yet clear when beneficiaries will be required to reapply for the benefits.
“Secretary Rollins wants to ensure the fraud, waste, and incessant abuse of SNAP ends,” a USDA spokesperson told The Hill. “Rates of fraud were only previously assumed, and President Trump is doing something about it. Using standard recertification processes for households is a part of that work. As well as ongoing analysis of State data, further regulatory work, and improved collaboration with States.”
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Do We Really Need to Slash the Debt?
John Tamny, the free-market economics commentator who edits RealClearMarkets, comes out swinging in The Deficit Delusion: Why Everything Left, Right, and Supply-Side Tells You About the National Debt Is Wrong. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given the book’s title. It can feel like Tamny is a kid walking through the elementary-school playground, randomly shoving other kids—some of whom are bigger than he—as he attacks one op-ed writer after another for, allegedly, misunderstanding the national debt.
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In the Mind of McNamara
One of the few aspects of the Vietnam war about which most historians agree is that Robert McNamara horribly mismanaged it as secretary of defense. There is no agreement, however, on how McNamara did the nation such a disservice. For those who view American intervention in Vietnam as unnecessary and inherently futile, McNamara is condemned for getting the United States into the war and then for refusing to get it out once he himself became disillusioned. For those who view the intervention as a noble cause that could have ended victoriously, McNamara’s principal failing was his imposition of severe restraints on the military.
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Courage Under Fire
First came the water pouring down the slopes of Japan’s Mount Fuji on October 19, 1979. Then on top of the torrents came the fire that killed 13 U.S. Marines and burned dozens more. Though investigators afterward may not have consulted the Bible, they ended up attributing the unusual mix of elements involved to the same force that, per the Book of Exodus, enveloped ancient Egypt in hail and fire. “It was an act of God,” investigators concluded.
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Democratic lawmaker texted Epstein during hearing — appeared to use his tips to grill Trump’s ex-lawyer
A Democratic lawmaker admitted to texting with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing, seeking his advice on how to question President Donald Trump’s so-called “fixer,” Michael Cohen.
Cohen has claimed that Trump tried to conceal a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to hide an alleged extramarital affair. Trump has denied these claims, stating that the funds were sent directly to Cohen, his then-personal attorney, for legal expenses. Cohen testified against the president in the case led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), in which Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump has filed an appeal seeking to reverse the criminal conviction.
‘During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein.’
Documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee revealed that a member of Congress, whose name was redacted, had been exchanging text messages with Epstein during a February 2019 hearing where lawmakers heard testimony from Cohen.
Epstein’s messages to the lawmaker appeared to indicate that he was watching the hearing live. Although the name of the congressperson was redacted from the committee’s documents, the timing of the messages indicated that the convicted sex predator was texting Democratic Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Washington Post reported.
Plaskett’s office released a statement on Friday, admitting that she had been texting with Epstein.
Plaskett reportedly sent a message to Epstein before the hearing. When the hearing began and the live feed started, Epstein complimented the delegate’s outfit.
RELATED: Trump felony conviction in doubt? President files appeal to clear his name
Stacey Plaskett. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“Are you chewing,” read Epstein’s message to the lawmaker moments after the camera cut to Plaskett, who was seen moving her mouth in a chewing motion.
“Not any more,” Plaskett responded, according to the documents. “Chewing interior of my mouth. Bad habit from middle school.”
“Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets,” Epstein wrote at 11:24 a.m. His message seemed to reference Rhona Graff, Trump’s former executive assistant and former vice president of the Trump Organization, although Plaskett did not immediately grasp the reference.
“RONA??” the lawmaker replied.
“Quick I’m up next is that an acronym,” Plaskett asked, appearing to indicate that it would soon be her turn to question Cohen.
RELATED: Sorry, liberals — the Epstein emails don’t nail Trump
Michael Cohen. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
At 12:25 p.m., Epstein suggested the lawmaker ask Cohen about other individuals close to Trump.
“Hes (sic) opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” he wrote.
When it was Plaskett’s turn to question Cohen, she inquired about Trump’s associates, as Epstein had recommended.
“During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein,” the statement from Plaskett’s office read. “As a former prosecutor she welcomes information that helps her get at the truth and took on the GOP that was trying to bury the truth. The congresswoman has previously made clear her long record combating sexual assault and human trafficking, her disgust over Epstein’s deviant behavior and her support for his victims.”
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‘Nuremberg’: Russell Crowe’s haunting portrayal of Nazi evil
Say what you will about Russell Crowe, but he has never been a run-of-the-mill actor.
At his best, he surrenders to the role. This is an artist capable of channeling the full range of human contradictions. From the haunted integrity of “The Insider” to the brute nobility of “Gladiator,” Crowe once seemed to contain both sinner and saint, pugilist and philosopher.
In a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.
Then, sometime after “A Beautiful Mind,” the light dimmed. The roles got smaller, the scandals bigger.
There were still flashes of brilliance — “American Gangster” with Denzel Washington, “The Nice Guys” with Ryan Gosling — proof that Crowe could still command attention when the script was worth it. But for every film that landed, two missed the mark: clumsy thrillers, lazy comedies, and a string of forgettable parts that left him without anchor or aim. His career drifted between prestige and paycheck, part self-sabotage, part Hollywood forgetting its own.
Exploring the abyss
But now the grizzled sexagenarian returns with “Nuremberg” — not as a comeback cliché, but as a reminder that the finest actors are explorers of the human abyss. And Crowe, to his credit, has never been afraid to go deep.
In James Vanderbilt’s new film, the combative Kiwi plays Hermann Goering, the Nazi Reichsmarschall standing trial for his part in history’s darkest chapter. The movie centers on Goering’s psychological chess match with U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who becomes both fascinated and repulsed by the man before him. Goering, with his vanity, intelligence, and theatrical self-pity, is a criminal rehearsing for immortality.
The film unfolds as a dark study of guilt and self-deception. Kelley, played with that familiar, hollow-eyed tension of Rami Malek, sets out to dissect the anatomy of evil through Goering’s mind. Yet the deeper he digs, the more he feels the ground give way beneath him — the line between witness and accomplice blurring with every exchange.
Disturbingly human
Crowe’s Goering is not the slobbering villain of old war films. He’s disturbingly human, even likeable. He jokes, he reasons, he charms. He’s a man who knows how to disarm his enemy by appearing civil — and therein lies the horror. It’s a performance steeped in Hannah Arendt’s famous concept of the “banality of evil”: the idea that great atrocities are rarely committed by psychopathic monsters but by ordinary people made monstrous — individuals who justify cruelty through bureaucracy, obedience, or ideology.
Arendt wrote those words after watching Adolf Eichmann, another Nazi functionary, defend his role in the Holocaust. She was struck not by his madness but his mildness — his desire to be seen as merely following orders. Crowe’s Goering embodies that same terrifying normalcy. He doesn’t see himself as a villain at all, but as a patriot — wronged, misunderstood, and unfairly judged. It’s his charm, not his cruelty, that unsettles.
The brilliance of Crowe’s performance is that he resists caricature. He reminds us that evil doesn’t always wear jackboots. Sometimes it smiles, smokes, and quotes Shakespeare. It’s the kind of role only a mature actor can pull off — one who has met his own demons and understands that evil seldom announces itself.
It is also, perhaps, the perfect role for a man who has spent decades wrestling with his own legend. Crowe was once Hollywood’s golden boy — rugged, brooding, every inch the leading man — but the climb was steep and the fall steeper. Fame, like empire, demands endless victories, and Crowe, ever restless, grew weary of the war.
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Getty Images
A bygone breed
With “Nuremberg,” he hasn’t returned to chase stardom but to confront something larger — the unease that hides beneath every civilized surface. Goering, after all, was no brute. He was cultured, eloquent, even magnetic — proof that wisdom offers no wall against wickedness. And in a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.
At one point in the film, Goering throws America’s own hypocrisies back at Kelley: the atomic bomb, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the collective punishment of nations. It’s a rhetorical trick, but it lands. Crowe delivers those lines with the oily confidence of a man who knows that moral purity is a myth and that self-righteousness is often evil’s most convenient disguise.
The film may not be perfect. Its pacing lags at times, and its historical framing flirts with melodrama. But Crowe’s performance cuts through the pretense like a scalpel. There’s even a dark humor in how he toys with his captors — the court jester of genocide, smirking as the world tries to comprehend him.
Crowe’s Goering is, in the end, a mirror. Not just for the psychiatrist across the table, but for us all. The machinery of horror is rarely built by fanatics, but by functionaries convinced they’re simply doing their jobs.
Crowe’s performance reminds us why acting, when done with conviction, can still rattle the soul. His Goering is maddening and mesmeric. He captures the human talent for self-delusion, the ease with which conscience can be out-argued by ambition or fear. “Nuremberg” refuses to let the audience look away. It reminds us that every civilization carries the seed of its own undoing and every human heart holds a shadow it would rather not confront.
Russell Crowe is back, tipped for another Oscar — and in an age when Hollywood produces so few films worthy of our time or our money, I, for one, hope he gets it.
MTG Claims Trump’s Criticisms Of Her Provoked ‘Hot Bed Of Threats’
‘The man I supported and helped get elected’
Fetterman shares photo of face injuries after fall, hospitalization
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on Saturday shared pictures of his face after being hospitalized for injuries tied to a fall. “20 stitches later and a full recovery, I’m back home with @giselefetterman and the kids. I’m overwhelmed + profoundly grateful for all the well-wishes. Truly,” the lawmaker wrote in a statement on X. “Grateful for…
