'I'm actually going to walk the walk'

one major victory

LEHIGH VALLEY, Penn—When Vice President JD Vance recalled his grandmother’s choice between putting food on their table and paying for her medications, he arose as the Republicans’ secret weapon on affordability messaging.  “I know what it’s like for a woman who’s trying to support a grandson but can’t afford her prescription drugs because pharmaceutical companies are taking advantage of the United States of America,” he said in Allentown, Pennsylvania Tuesday. “I remember what it’s like when you have to choose between putting food on the table or getting the prescription that you need to stay healthy. And that is not a life that Donald Trump or I want for the citizens in the greatest country in the world.”  Vance held a rally at Uline Shipping Supplies in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, as part of his and the president’s domestic tour touting the administration’s affordability agenda.  While President Donald Trump has repeatedly called affordability a Democrat “hoax,” Vance assured Pennsylvanians the administration understands the economic hardship many Americans are experiencing.  “This month, we are fighting for you every single day, and I don’t want you to think for one second that because Joe Biden gave us the worst economy in the world, that we forget it,” he said. “No, we know. We know exactly what we’re left with. We know exactly the consequences that it’s caused for so many of our great families all across Pennsylvania. And I promise you, there is no person more impatient to solve the affordability crisis than Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States.”  Vance related his own childhood growing up in poverty in Appalachia to the current affordability crisis.  “I never forget where I come from,” he said. “I never forget who I serve, and I know that there is so much more progress. I remember my grandmother in times like this during the holidays.”  “I was in a particularly hard math class in high school, and she said, ‘What do you need to do?’ Well, in this class, my grades weren’t so good, and she went out, even though she could not afford even the essentials in life, she went out and got me a calculator, a very expensive calculator so that I could do well in this math class,” he said. “I remember what it feels like for American families when you have the government take $3,000 out of your pocket through higher taxes and higher inflation.”  Vance is surprised when Democrats campaign on affordability because they are to blame, he said.  “Democrats say, you know, ‘Things aren’t affordable. This isn’t affordable. This has gotten more expensive. Drugs have gotten more expensive. Housing has gotten more expensive.’ And you know what? They’re right? And it was because of them,” he said. “It ain’t that hard. If you go back to the four years of the Biden administration, why did housing get so expensive? Double in price during the Biden administration? It’s because Joe Biden let in 20 million illegal immigrants who took homes that, all by right, go to American citizens and to the people of this great state.”  He said it’s impossible for Trump to instantly fix the economy, but change is coming.  “I hear these Democrats talk about this as if you were going to fix these problems in a single day,” he said.  “It takes a little bit of time to fix something that was so fundamentally broken, and so when I hear the Democrats talk about the affordability crisis that they created, it’s a little bit like, you know, Charles Manson criticizing violent crime. Look in the mirror, my friend, you are the cause of the problem, and Donald J. Trump’s administration is the solution to the problem that you created,” he continued.  When asked by The Daily Signal how he would like Congressional Republicans to address health care costs, he said, “Republicans and Democrats [will] have to figure out what can be passed together” on health care.  NEW: @VP tells @DailySignal “Republicans and Democrats [will] have to figure out what can be passed together” on healthcare. “Of course, the president is going to drive a lot of that process. We're still reviewing some of these legislative texts as they come up. We believe that… pic.twitter.com/TgHWKIxcfQ— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) December 16, 2025 “I’ve probably read a dozen different pieces of legislation that are floating out there,” he said. “Again, it’s going to come to the point where Republicans and Democrats have to figure out what can be passed together.” “Of course, the president is going to drive a lot of that process,” he continued. “We’re still reviewing some of these legislative texts as they come up. We believe that we can solve this problem. But again, the nature of our system, we’re going to work with Congress to make sure we get something that’s good for the American people through the Congress.”  Vance said the U.S. has the “weirdest health insurance system in the world, where we tax money from all these great Americans out here, and then we give boatloads of money to the insurance companies.” “Why don’t we give that money to the American people and let them buy insurance that works for them and their families?” he asked. “If you look at insurance company profits, they have been skyrocketing ever since Obamacare was passed. The insurance companies have done very well under Obamacare.” He said the administration is working to get to a health care policy that works for Americans.  “We don’t care if the insurance companies do well, great,” he said. “If they do poorly, that’s their problem. We are here to fight for the American worker and make health insurance affordable for them.” The post ‘I Know What It’s Like’: Vance Shines as Republican Messenger on Affordability appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Dr. Kevin Roberts, former university professor and current president of The Heritage Foundation, has launched a new docuseries in anticipation of America’s 250th anniversary titled “The Next Frontier.”  “Today, the Left doesn’t just forget history; they rewrite it,” Roberts says in the trailer that dropped this week. “This is our heritage. This is our fight. This is our America. Join us. Make America beautiful again, by honoring what made us great.”  Today, the Left doesn’t just forget history—they rewrite it. Monuments like @SabinHoward’s WWI memorial are more than bronze and stone; they are a visible reminder of our national heartbeat.Watch my full conversation with Sabin Howard on the first episode of The Next Frontier:…— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) December 15, 2025 The monthly episodes, roughly 25 minutes long, will be set in Washington, D.C. and sites across the country. Roberts will be on location where American history was made and where it is being made today.   The host will be joined by guests who are experts in their respective fields. From renowned artists to elected officials, they will be discussing what makes our country great and the biggest issues Americans face.    The first episode, “Make America Beautiful Again,” premiered Monday night. Roberts was joined by master sculptor Sabin Howard at the World War I Memorial in Washington, one of Sabin’s most famous works. Honoring the soldiers who fought in World War I, the two dove into the role monuments play in our modern lives and the importance of preserving our heritage.   “This project brought me back to the foundations of like, who am I in service of?” Howard said, explaining what creating the memorial meant to him. “And that’s what this is about, a soldier’s journey. We’re in service of something else way bigger than ourselves.”  Episode 1 of The Next Frontier with Kevin Roberts drops Monday, December 15! The first guest is @SabinHoward—the sculptor of “A Soldier’s Journey,” the sculpture at the heart of the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C. pic.twitter.com/c8c5sxlMKX— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) December 13, 2025 Upcoming episodes will find Roberts at locations across the country, like the recently closed U.S. border and a military production site. Episodes will launch once a month and can be found wherever you get your episodes of “The Kevin Roberts Show with Larry O’Conner”. They’ll also be available on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Ricochet, YouTube, and more.  The post Kevin Roberts Goes on ‘Offense’ With New Docuseries appeared first on The Daily Signal.

When the government, or anyone for that matter, spends $100 billion annually on information technology, you’d expect transformative results. Instead, we get a masterclass in institutional capture. It’s clear the federal government is serving the best interests of massive software companies, not taxpayers or federal workers. Instead, the federal IT landscape resembles a graveyard of ambitious projects. The Department of Veterans Affairs electronic health records modernization project has consumed $16 billion with projections reaching $50 billion. Yet, basic functions like appointment scheduling remain broken. The Pentagon abandoned multiple HR system overhauls after spending hundreds of millions of dollars and waiting over a decade. The Department of Homeland Security has been “modernizing” its HR infrastructure for 20 years. These failures reward systematic entrenchment, complexity and vendor relationships at the expense of innovation, functionality and public service. In other words, technology companies are eager to gobble up multibillion-dollar contracts, with little effort and no real reward for the federal government. The mechanics are straightforward. Legacy technology companies like Oracle, SAP and others have built business models that thrive on the government’s structural weaknesses. Software companies understand all federal agencies operate with extreme risk aversion, have limited technical expertise and that the procurement process is designed for buying commodities, not complex software systems. Take Oracle’s approach. After settling two False Claims Act cases for systematically overcharging federal agencies, the company evolved its strategy. Now, their approach involves intricate licensing agreements, making routine IT changes feel like navigating a legal minefield. Agencies therefore become paralyzed in fear of upgrading hardware or moving to cloud services, believing it might trigger audits demanding millions in unexpected fees. This creates a perverse incentive structure; clearly, such corporations are taking advantage of the federal agencies’ fear. Inevitably, vendors profit from prolonging dependencies. An agency locked into a complex ERP suite generates steady revenue through maintenance fees, support contracts and periodic “modernization” initiatives that often just migrate problems to newer platforms.  The Government Accountability Office designated federal IT management as “high risk” since 2015, and have documented a clear pattern: Agencies are spending 80% their IT budgets maintaining obsolete legacy systems. This leaves insufficient funding for critical modernization and innovation initiatives, resulting in agencies paying a premium price for stagnation rather than advancement. As a bonus, millions of taxpayers’ hard-earned money is wasted. Why does the federal government ignore their reports? The alternative, changing vendors and operational disruption, feels like the worse alternative. Adopting open-source alternatives requires building internal expertise. Pursuing cloud-native solutions demands rethinking decades of accumulated technical debt. So, agencies choose the devil they know. They sign another enterprise agreement, initiate another modernization project and hire another systems integrator. The cycle continues, even though agencies know their systems won’t ever improve and they are being taken advantage of.  Yet, pockets of progress illuminate a different path. Some agencies have successfully deployed enterprise-grade open-source databases including PostgreSQL, discovering that community-supported software can match commercial alternatives while eliminating licensing headaches. The Census Bureau built crucial 2020 infrastructure on open-source foundations, demonstrating that government can own its technical destiny. Fortunately, legislative solutions and efforts by the Trump administration are emerging. The proposed Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act, SAMOSA, would require comprehensive software inventories and independent license assessments, eliminating the information asymmetry vendors exploit. President Trump has mandated the consolidation of common procurement items under the General Services Administration to root out waste and duplication. The broader challenge transcends any single vendor or technology. It requires reconceptualizing government IT spending. Currently, technology is treated as overhead to minimize cost. This mindset guarantees mediocrity. Imagine if we approach digital systems like we approach interstate highways or power grids. They become foundational capabilities requiring sustained investment, careful planning and public accountability. Imagine if agencies could build and maintain technical expertise without losing talent to private sector salaries. Procurement could reward outcomes, innovation and public benefit, a win-win situation for federal workers and taxpayers. The private sector has undergone multiple technology revolutions while government systems calcify. Companies once dominant through proprietary lock-in have been disrupted by open standards, cloud platforms and agile development. Meanwhile, federal agencies remain trapped in contracts signed when flip phones were cutting-edge. Other nations have modernized government technology successfully. Estonia provides digital services that make American systems look prehistoric. The United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service transformed citizen interactions through a consolidated user-centered design and modern engineering practices. The path forward requires political will. It demands we acknowledge that current procurement systems, designed for an era of paper forms and mainframes, actively prevents modernization. We must accept short term risk for long-term capability and treating vendor lock-in as technical debt that compounds over time. Here’s what we refuse to admit: Every billion dollars we spend nursing dying systems, is a billion we don’t spend building the government citizens deserve. We’ve let critical infrastructure become someone else’s annuity. As a result, the world’s most powerful democracy runs on technology that would embarrass a suburban DMV. That should terrify us. The post The $100 Billion Question Nobody’s Asking: Why Are Taxpayers Funding Big Tech Contracts with Nothing to Show for It? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Can Liberalism Coexist With Islam?

EU Officially Scraps ICE Ban, Leaving Lots of Wiggle Room and Lucky Thing

On a recent episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” — which is hosted by the New York Times — California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) praised trans kids and fervently claimed that he’s signed more pro-transgender bills into law than any other governor.“I want to see trans kids,” Newsom said. “I have a trans godson. There’s no governor who has signed more pro-trans legislation than I have, and no one has been a stronger advocate for the LGBTQ community.”BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is disgusted.“Democrats ... they just continue pushing this trans propaganda, and they’re very proud of that,” Gonzales comments, pointing out that Newsom is going to push that propaganda even more considering he likely has 2028 presidential aspirations.“Obviously, he is the front-runner. He’s angling for that. I think he would have been very happy if he was the candidate this last go-around instead of Kamala. But he is bragging that he is the most pro-trans governor in the country,” she says.Newsom also dove into the topic of his previous stance on transgenders in women’s sports, telling Klein, “We didn’t get into trans sports.”“That’s an issue no one wants to hear about because 80% of the people listening disagree with my position on this. But it comes from my heart, not just my head. It wasn’t a political evolution,” he added.“It’s in his heart,” Gonzales mocks. “He just wants more trans kids. He just wants more kids being sterilized. He wants more kids being mutilated. He loves that truly, in his heart, in his heart of hearts.”Want more from Sara Gonzales?To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The White House released the document in November 2025, a season of sharp light and long shadows, when Washington typically settles into the low-grade fever of budget reconciliations and holiday receptions. The document was an executive order bearing a title that seemed designed to bypass the usual bureaucratic boilerplate and aim directly for the theological: The Genesis Mission.The name is striking. It is not the “National AI Research Initiative” or the “Federal Science Acceleration Program.” It is Genesis, the beginning, the act of creation. The administration was announcing our place in the cosmos. In the flat, confident language of the Federal Register, the administration told us we stand on the precipice of a new golden era, a time when the messy, human business of scientific discovery would be handed over, in no small part, to the machines.The animating spirit is the specter of geopolitical decline.The ambition is American in its scale. The Genesis Mission is explicitly compared to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, those two totems of American effectual will that we invoke to convince ourselves that we can still do big things. But where Manhattan was about a bomb and Apollo was about a rock, Genesis is about everything. The goal is to “double the productivity and impact of U.S. science and engineering within a decade.” The proposition suggests that the rate of human epiphany is a variable that can be adjusted, a dial that can be turned up if only we have enough compute power.The mechanism for this miracle will be something called the “American Science and Security Platform,” which is a “mega laboratory in the cloud,” a “closed-loop system.” The idea is to link the Department of Energy’s supercomputers, the fastest in the world, with vast troves of data from decades of federal research.A promised new golden age of human flourishing will dawn, but the flourishing seems to be based on a certain obsolescence of the human element. The work will be undertaken by “self-driving labs,” facilities where autonomous agents formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and execute them with robotic arms, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The scientist will no longer be the lonely figure in the lab coat waiting for the results of the experiment. Instead, he will be the pilot, the overseer who feeds the prompt into the machine and waits for the answer to be delivered.RELATED: Trump takes bold step to protect America's AI 'dominance' — but blue states may not like it Photo by Alex Wong/Getty ImagesThis effort is motivated by the unhappy “innovation paradox.” Each year, we spend more money on science, yet the breakthroughs seem to grow scarcer. New drugs are harder to find. Materials are harder to invent. Economists call it “Eroom’s law,” Moore’s law in reverse. The Genesis Mission is the administration’s bet that this stagnation is a failure of processing power, a bet that the answers are already there, hidden in the noise of the data, waiting for an intelligence fast enough to see them.Reading through the directives, the 60-day deadline to identify “national challenges,” the 90-day deadline to build the data core, the 270-day deadline to prove it all works, one is struck by the urgency of elites who feel something gaining on them. The executive order speaks of “security” as much as “science.” It speaks of a global race to be won. We are trying to “secure American technological leadership” before someone else does. The animating spirit is the specter of geopolitical decline.The man charged with orchestrating this creation is Dr. Darío Gil, the new mission director. He speaks of the platform as “a scientific instrument for the ages,” a phrase that carries a heavy burden of expectation. He is tasked with unifying the disparate, often territorial fiefdoms of the national laboratories into a single, humming engine of discovery. The task requires a profound faith in the system, a belief that if you connect enough processors, if you feed them enough data, if you remove enough friction, the truth will emerge.There is something attractive about this vision. Who wouldn’t want to see the cure for Alzheimer’s emerge from a server farm in Oak Ridge instead of waiting another 30 years for serendipity? The promise of Genesis is that we can engineer our way out of our own limitations. It offers a clean, efficient future in which the messiness of trial and error is replaced by certainty.One wonders what is lost in the translation. Science has always been a deeply human endeavor, driven as much by intuition and accident as by logic, by the mistake that turns out to be the answer, the anomaly that breaks the theory. The Genesis Mission proposes a science that is smoother, faster, and more predictable. It proposes a world where the “eureka” moment is a scheduled deliverable.The Genesis Mission reflects a belief about control, a belief that we can tame the complexity of the world if we just build big enough computers, that we can maintain our dominance, our prosperity, and our health by digitizing the very process of learning.As the winter settles over Washington, the work begins. The lists are being drawn up, the datasets tagged. The supercomputers are beginning to hum in their air-conditioned vaults, waiting to be fed. We have launched our new Genesis, and we must now wait to see what we have created. Whether we have built a new engine for human flourishing, or merely a very fast, very expensive mirror that reflects our own desperate need for answers, remains to be seen. The only certainty is that the machine is on, and it is hungry.

The mother of Andrew Wolfe said that he is making a "miraculous" recovery weeks after getting shot in the head in an alleged terror attack in Washington, D.C.Wolfe and Sarah Beckstrom were patrolling D.C. as West Virginia National Guard members on Nov. 26 when an armed man attacked them. Beckstrom died from her injuries, and Wolfe was grievously injured.'Everyone has said his recovery is miraculous and we all know why God is so good!'Wolfe was airlifted to MedStar Washington Hospital Center for treatment. On Saturday, MedStar neurosurgeon Dr. Jeffrey Mai released a statement about Wolfe's progress."He is now breathing on his own and can stand with assistance — important milestones that reflect his strength and determination," Mai said. "Based on these improvements, he is now ready to transition from acute care to inpatient rehabilitation as the next step in his recovery journey."His mother, Melody Wolfe, also released an update on his recovery progress."Andy is continuing to make HUGE improvements. He was sitting in a chair today for a few hours and was moving more of his right side. I asked if I could kiss him on his cheek, and he pulled me in close and let me give him a kiss, and then held me close with his arm around my neck," the statement reads."It was the most precious gift he could give me," she added."Then this evening he decided he was going to set the bar higher, and he started to smile and chuckle a little when his friends ... were there talking with him! They were sharing pictures of Andy and his silliness, and he smiled and would even shake his head a little. So many people were able to witness this tonight!"She went on to say that his communication abilities have greatly increased, although he is not able to communicate verbally yet."Everyone has said his recovery is miraculous, and we all know why God is so good!" she added. "He has worked through the hands of the knowledgeable and caring staff at the hospital, he has given our son the strength needed to heal, and he's made sure Andy has been surrounded by so much positivity and love!"RELATED: MS NOW reporter gets obliterated for unbelievable comment about National Guard attack Wolfe's family thanked everyone for their prayers on his behalf."We know he will continue to improve at a rapid pace and know your prayers are making the difference," the family said. "Please continue as God heals Andrew and gives him the strength to return to work, the West Virginia National Guard, and his new mission of being a light into this world. The support we've received from Andy's military family, his hometown community, and people across the nation has been extraordinary."The suspect in the attack was arrested and identified as 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghani who had fought in missions for the CIA and fled to the U.S. after the withdrawal from Afghanistan.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!