Michigan faces $415M bill for botched benefit errors
Michigan will repay around $415 million to the federal government because the state’s largest agency struggles to disburse benefits accurately, Rep. Jason Woolford, R-Howell, told Michigan Capitol Confidential in a phone interview.
Woolford, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, pressed Elizabeth Hertel, the director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, in a hearing on Sept 12.
Woolford pointed to systemic problems with how the department administers safety net programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps); Medicaid; Medicare Savings Program, Women Infants and Children, and the Family Independence Program. In fiscal 2024 alone, Michigan spent more than $35 Billion on health and human services, or more than half its budget. Click here to read more.
Elon Musk Leads Mass Netflix Membership Cancellations After Company’s Children’s Cartoon Creator Smears Charlie Kirk as a ‘Nazi’
Billionaire Elon Musk has added his name to the mushrooming number of consumers cancelling their Netflix membership after the streaming giant’s children’s cartoon show creator Hamish Steele smeared slain conservative icon Charlie Kirk as a “Nazi.”
Steele, an animator credited with creating the Netflix cartoon series Dead End: Paranormal Park, took to BlueSky after Kirk was assassinated and defamed the conservative firebrand in a vile tirade.
“Why the fuck are you even commenting on this, dickhead?” Steele said on the social media platform on September 11. “You sympathy for any of the families being slaughtered by your weapons. but a random nazi gets shot and its a public statement. You’re such a fucking evil shit.”
Netflix canceled Dead End: Paranormal Park in 2023 after two seasons. Click here to read more.
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The Supreme Court begins a new term next week. In the coming months, the justices will consider cases touching nearly every corner of American life. Among the cases the Court is being asked to take up is one presenting an important question about digital privacy: can the government demand access to your location data from companies like Google without a warrant based on probable cause?
That question is at the heart of Chatrie v. United States. The case arises from a “geofence warrant” which let law enforcement sweep up information about everyone near the scene of a robbery—including many innocent bystanders. Pacific Legal Foundation filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of an amicus brief urging the Court to hear the case and restore crucial Fourth Amendment protections for the digital age.
To investigate the robbery, law enforcement obtained a geofence warrant covering a 150-meter radius around the bank during a one-hour window. To comply, Google had to query its entire “Sensorvault,” a database storing the location histories of between 500 and 600 million users. Click here to read more.
Cartel Member Tells CNN Trump Has Made His Criminal Activity ‘More Difficult’
A leader of the Sinaloa Cartel told CNN that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on criminal activity at the southern border has made their lives “more difficult” in footage released on Tuesday.
CNN senior national correspondent David Culver sat inside a vehicle with a member of the cartel, who wore a mask and sunglasses to cover his face, during his six-month coverage of the Mexican cartels and how they recruit young Americans. The cartel member told Culver that Trump’s aggressive crackdown on the cartels has made his job “tougher” and “more difficult.”
“Do you think what President Trump has been doing has been making your job tougher?” Culver asked.
“Oh yeah. Yeah,” the cartel member said.
“Yes? But it’s becoming more difficult you think?” Culver asked. Click here to read more.
Feds predict major blackout risk from switch to renewables
America’s power grids are increasingly at risk, hobbled by power plant closings, unreliable and insufficient replacements, and increased demand for new power. “If these shadows remain unaltered by the future,” as Charles Dickens put it, then by 2030 the nation’s risk of blackouts will be 100 times worse.
That is the distressing finding from a recent Resource Adequacy Report from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), “Evaluating the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid.”
According to the report, what is endangering reliable energy across America is “the accelerated retirement of existing generation capacity and the insufficient pace of firm, dispatchable generation additions (partly due to a recent focus on intermittent rather than dispatchable sources of energy).” This “status quo” is unsustainable, the report finds, given the expected load growth by 2030, driven especially by “manufacturing, re-industrialization, and data centers driving artificial intelligence (AI) innovation.” Click here to read more.
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