Sunday night’s episode of The Weekend: Primetime on MS NOW launched a predictable attack on Nebraska’s new Medicaid work requirements. Equally predictable was the "expert" MS NOW chose: NYU professor Sherry Glied — a former top Obama HHS official deeply involved in rolling out Obamacare. Glied spent most of the segment warning about coverage losses and hardship. Only toward the end did Glied let the liberal cat out of the bag: “It’s not a great idea, in my opinion, to have work requirements for anything.” That said it all. Glied rejects the very concept that able-bodied adults receiving taxpayer-funded assistance — of any sort — should work, train, or volunteer in return. WATCH: MS NOW's Medicaid 'Expert' Opposes Work Requirements 'For Anything!' pic.twitter.com/nmcrFkWLnl — Mark Finkelstein (@markfinkelstein) May 4, 2026 Co-host Catherine Rampell kicked things off by claiming Nebraska’s move would “strip" coverage from around twenty-five thousand residents. RAMPELL: I think we actually have a chart showing, this is from KFF [formerly Kaiser Family Foundation]. The vast majority of people who are on Medicaid… are either already working or have one of these exemptions. 44% are working full time. Another 20% are working part time. It’s a very tiny fraction of Medicaid recipients who are not working and would be, in theory, supposed to be the [air quotes--see screencap] undeserving — the undeserving poor as opposed to the deserving poor. Notice what wasn’t mentioned: the actual percentage—8%—of those in the “not working due to retirement, inability to find work, or other reason” category. And viewers weren’t told that self-reporting “retirement” for people under 65 and “inability to find work” are not valid exemptions under Nebraska’s policy or the federal rules. Those categories are exactly whom the work requirements are designed to reach. Nationally, that 8% represents over two million people, and countless billions in undeserved Medicaid payments. Meanwhile, improper Medicaid spending has exploded, with federal improper payments hitting $37.39 billion in FY 2025. Fraud is rampant, especially on the provider side. California’s Medi-Cal has seen huge hospice and home health scams — with one $267 million hospice ring alone, using stolen identities. Work requirements would shrink the pool of enrollees available for these volume-billing schemes. Fewer people on the rolls means fewer phony claims. Past experiments like Arkansas's did have paperwork problems. But the solution is smarter design (automatic data checks, clear exemptions), not Glied’s absolutist “no work for anything” position. No surprises here. MS NOW shopped for an expert and found one wired to oppose these reforms from the jump. Taxpayers footing the bill for an ever-growing, fraud-plagued entitlement deserve better than this kind of one-sided alarmism--but don't expect it from MS NOW. Here's the transcript. MS NOW The Weekend: Primetime 5/3/26 7:28 pm EDT CATHERINE RAMPELL: States across the country have just eight months left until they need to implement the Medicaid work requirements mandated by President Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. But one Republican state decided to eagerly beat that deadline. On Friday, Nebraska became the first state to enact Medicaid work requirements. The move is expected to strip coverage from around twenty-five thousand residents who qualified for the program under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. An estimated seventy-two thousand Nebraskans will be subject to the policy, which applies to able-bodied adults ages nineteen to sixty-four. Joining us now is Sherry Glied, professor of public service at NYU, and former Obama administration health official. Sherry, thanks so much for joining us. Could you talk to us a little bit about what the practical effects may be of these work requirements in Nebraska? SHERRY GLIED: So, the way the work requirements are gonna work, or are supposed to work, is that people who are eligible for Medicaid on the basis of their incomes will have to prove that they’ve worked enough over the past month, two months, three months, depending on how a state sets it up, in order to retain their Medicaid coverage. They’ll have to give proof that they’ve either worked eighty hours in the past month, or that they’ve met an earnings threshold, or that they meet one of a host of different exemptions.  The consequence of this actually is gonna be that there’s a lot of paperwork that people are gonna have to do over and over and over again in order to keep their Medicaid. RAMPELL: Yeah, I think we actually have a chart showing, this is from KFF, showing that most people who are on — the vast majority of people who are on Medicaid — I don’t know if you can read this — are either already working or have one of these exemptions.  So, you know, forty-four percent are working full time, uh, another twenty percent are working part time, and then the most of the remainder are people who have one of these qualifying exemptions. They’re in school, they have illness or disability, they’re caregiving, et cetera.  Um, it’s a very tiny fraction of Medicaid recipients who are not working and would be, in theory, are supposed to be the [air quotes] undeserving — uh, the undeserving poor as opposed to the deserving poor. . . .  You are a trained economist, right? GLIED: Right. RAMPELL: Uh, is there any mechanism by which, like, dangling the prospect of taking away someone’s healthcare or giving them healthcare will actually encourage them to work. GLIED: It is really hard to imagine that there are a lot of people who are only on Medicaid, who are not working because they are on Medicaid. It’s just such an odd thing to think about. It’s Medicaid, you don’t even need it unless you’re sick, right?  Like, it's not like, it’s not a great idea, in my opinion, to have work requirements for anything. But in the case of health insurance, it’s a particularly odd rationale to imagine that people are staying away from work so that they can have their health insurance.  RAMPELL: And some people need their medications in order to work. GLIED: Absolutely.

In 2022 the New York Times ran an enormous three-part series eviscerating conservative host Tucker Carlson for nationalism and racism and being “Trump’s heir.” But now that he’s rejected his Trump birthright over the Iran War, Carlson can be rehabilitated by the paper as an anti-war, anti-Trump voice, with Times interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro recognizing Carlson as “an object of a lot of fascination, continuing interest....the center of a lot of our cultural conversations.” And a convenient way for the Times to facilitate and widen the current conservative crackup over Iran and Israel. The transcript of the two-part, nearly two-hour interview by Garcia-Navarro appeared under the surprisingly friendly headline “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe? I Went to Maine to Find Out.” Garcia-Navarro set up the talk: Tucker Carlson has been at the center of our political conversation and conservative media for a decade now. Few media figures are more closely identified with the Trump era. His hugely popular Fox News show started just after the 2016 election, and despite being fired by that network in 2023, Carlson has remained a Trumpworld fixture, launching his own network, boosting Donald Trump on his podcast and at campaign rallies, sitting in Trump’s box during the Republican National Convention and attending his inauguration. Then, in February, President Trump made the call to attack Iran alongside Israel, a decision that Carlson is completely opposed to. He now says he regrets supporting Trump and has become a vocal and influential critic of the administration on his show. He also blames Israel for making Trump a “slave” by, as he characterizes it, pushing the president into war. Because of this focus on Israel, and his high-profile interview of the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, critics have accused him of antisemitism. To understand this break with the president and more, I traveled to Maine to sit down with Carlson, and then we spoke again remotely a few days later... Her next sentence betrays the reason for this interview: Hanging over our whole two-part discussion was one central question: Will Carlson’s anti-Trump conversion last — and portend a wider cracking of the MAGA movement? Even though Carlson had been accused by some of a right-wing form of anti-semitism (the only kind the media finds relevant) Garcia-Navarro nonetheless greeted him respectfully and eagerly sought out details about the private talks between Trump and Carlson on Iran. A selection of the questions are in bold below, with Carlson’s relevant answers following. I want to get your perspective on this moment, on your evolution, your worldview. You recently made quite a dramatic break with President Trump over the war in Iran, and I’d love to hear about that. I want to start, though, in the lead-up to the conflict. You said that you spoke to the president several times about the plan to attack Iran before it actually happened on February 28. I'd love to hear a little about that. Was it just you and the president in those meetings? Can you give me a sense of what was going on there? Now the @nytimes podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro finds Tucker absolutely fascinating, since they looooove the idea of breaking 'MAGA' into tiny little pieces. Tell us more about how you disagreed with Trump on many phone calls! pic.twitter.com/g8wY4MtyVL — Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) May 4, 2026 Asked if Trump may have “underestimated the Iranians and what they might do in response to an attack, Carlson gave the provocative response the paper was likely looking for: “….this was not a normal decision-making process. And my strong impression was that Trump was more a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker in this.” Navarro pounced with follow-ups: Tell me what you’re getting at when you say the president of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, had no choice.....You said he’s a hostage just now. You told the BBC he’s a “slave” to foreign interests....I just want you to be explicit. Trump is being held hostage by whom? By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States. And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he couldn’t get out of it. He declares we’re having a cease-fire. Carlson engaged in more colorful commentary, insisting he finds Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) more “morally repulsive” than Nick Fuentes. It took a while for the interviewer to turn the conversation to race, the centerpiece of the paper’s hit pieces four short years ago. ....You’ve denigrated immigrants, saying that they make our country “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” You’ve long warned that immigrants are going to replace what you call “legacy Americans.” It’s quite the switch from May 2022, when the same paper ran its series “Tucker Carlson, American Nationalist,” from a ten-person research/reporting crew led by Times reporter and then-MSNBC contributor Nicholas Confessore. In Part 1 he called Carlson’s former Fox News Channel show “the most racist show in the history of cable news,” a story given Sunday front-page play. In Part 2, “How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News -- and Became Trump’s Heir,” Confessore said his target's "turn to flagrantly racist ideas has baffled and saddened some longtime associates [at FNC]….” Adding to the hypocrisy, Confessore used Carlson’s anti-war stand to say Carlson "was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader.” Today he's greeted respectfully for being anti-war, at least in Iran.

It just happened. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Somehow Cuba was once a land of plenty,  which in 1958 it had one of the highest GDPs in the Americas. But it has since fallen to such an abject level that it's ration books have shrunk to the level of a national joke. What happened in the interim? Most people are well aware of exactly what happened namely Communism but the Associated Press in a story about Cuban ration book shortages dares not speak that taboo C-word. This absurdity happened on Sunday when AP reporter Danica Coto very noticeably  to once mention you-know-what in "Cubans struggle to survive on pocket-size government ration books as products dwindle." The closest that Coto comes to mentioning the C-word is when she quickly invokes "socialist" in passing while reviewing the collapse of the Cuban ration system due to the utterly unmentioned communism. HAVANA (AP) — José Luis Amate López hasn’t had a customer in almost two weeks, not counting the scrawny brown kitten that slinks around the bodega where he works in central Havana. The shelves once laden with goods during his childhood sat nearly empty in late April, with barely anything to offer the 5,000 clients who depend on the state-run store for subsidized food. Government ration books that once provided for a healthy diet and kept families fully fed for a month are now shrinking. As the economy collapses and prices soar, a growing number of Cubans find themselves unable to afford alternatives to state-run stores and struggle to subsist on meager salaries in a socialist country of nearly 10 million where basic goods increasingly are sold in U.S. dollars. Yes, once upon a time when the new Communist regime was still grifting off the recently expropriated capitalist companies, there were many more goods available for ration books until they ran out of stolen goods to distribute. Amate López recalled that his assigned bodega was so full decades ago “you could barely walk.” It’s now an empty room with dusty old posters detailing the prices and amounts of nearly two dozen goods no longer available, including yogurt, pasta and bars of soap. Two industrial freezers once packed with meat and chicken serve only to keep Amate López’s water bottle cold. In April, the only items he had available to sell were rice, sugar and split chickpeas. Coto is apparently too embarrassed to mention that sugar, once Cuba's major export, now has to be imported due to a certain governmental system ridiculously lacking in her article. Cuban comedians have spoofed the ration book, creating a character named “Pánfilo” who sings a rhyming chorus in a recent video posted online: “Place the notebook in a cemetery, because it’s ready to be buried.” Perhaps those Cuban comedians should add a stanza about the AP refusing to mention the reason why those ration books are ready to be buried.

Liberal podcaster Keith Olbermann once called for him to be murdered, but now he only wants him to be fired – and that’s a movement in the “right direction,” conservative commentator Scott Jennings said in an interview Monday. “Suddenly, everybody wants you to get fired, for that moment. How do you respond to them, like Jim Acosta and Keith Olbermann?” nationally-syndicated radio Host Larry O’Connor asked Jennings. Violent rhetoric targeting him from liberal firebrands is nothing new – but, at least in Olbermann’s case – their relationship is moving in the right direction, Jennings mused: “Look, it’s not the first time Jim Acosta and Keith – Keith Olbermann said I should be murdered one day, now he only says I should be fired, so I guess I’m moving in the right direction. So, there you go: we’re headed in the right direction with Keith.” Olbermann did, indeed, appear to call for Jennings to be assassinated last year in a now-deleted X.com post on September 22. When Jennings published a post about ABC late-night Host Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension for a hateful comment about the assassination of conservative Charlie Kirk, Olbermann replied with an apparent threat: “You’re next, motherf***er.” On Friday, however, a post by Olbermann simply called for Jennings to be fired, after Jennings dropped the F-bomb on liberal commentator Adam Mockler, who was waving his hand in Jennings’ face on CNN. “It's the morning after and @cnn has still not fired @ScottJenningsKY for threatening, in another burst of paranoid rage, @adammocklerr,” Olbermann wrote. “This event needs to be reported to the New York DA - and if CNN has not fired Jennings by Monday it MUST be just boycotted.” “There’s sort of a cottage industry on the left; it’s been going on for years,” Jennings told O’Connor Monday, noting the liberal media’s pervasive intolerance of free speech with which they disagree: “They don’t think conservatives should be allowed to speak. I mean, they don’t think any conservative should be allowed to speak, on CNN or, frankly, anywhere else.” “A little more civil debate would be a good thing,” Jennings said. “Debates are good,” – but, just “Keep your hands to yourself,” Jennings added. BOOM: @ScottJenningsKY takes down Keith Olbermann and Jim Acosta for demanding CNN fire him... "It's not the first time...Keith Olbermann said I should be murdered...Now he only says I should be fired!" "With Jim...He sounds like a bitter person...They don't think any… pic.twitter.com/p4d4LUVSeh — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 4, 2026  

Thursday saw an end to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, with the House passing a bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), capping 76 days of tumult for government employees in agencies such as the Coast Guard, TSA, and Secret Service. But on the lead network evening newscasts, a Media Research Center analysis found only five percent of their shutdown coverage blamed Democrats for opposing any further funding of deportations. MRC analysts scanned every mention of the partial government shutdown and the public consequences between February 14 and April 30 on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News. Only 21 out of the 76 days included at least one newscast mentioning Democrat demands. Most concerning and glaring was the fact that, in the five days following the April 25 attempted assassination of President Trump and members of his cabinet at the White House Correspondents Dinner, there was not a single mention of the fact that Secret Services, TSA, and other agencies involved were there under financial duress. CBS saw the biggest plummet from the first study on March 16, going from 10 percent of its coverage blaming Democrats to its final tally of about four percent, or two minutes out of 53 minutes and 24 seconds. Here’s a video of the five new mentions: In my latest NewsBusters study, I tallied up the network evening news coverage of the DHS shutdown that finally ended on April 30 and what percentage mentioned Democrats were the cause of it by refusing to fund President Trump’s deportation agenda. The ‘CBS Evening News’ spent… pic.twitter.com/9MRInqaAek — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 4, 2026 “Democrats are refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security unless Republicans agree to changes in immigration enforcement. Guess who is caught in the middle? 50,000 TSA officers,” CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil declared off the top of the March 17 Evening News. Even though correspondent Skyler Henry correctly noted on March 22 the shutdown was “triggered by Democrat outrage at ICE tactics in Minneapolis” and demands that “officers unmask and wear IDs,” fellow correspondent Cristian Benavides painted President Trump’s rhetoric as an obstacle to funding because he was “using social media to call the Democrats ‘lunatics’ and ‘unreasonable.’” CBS’s final mention of Democrats being to blame came way back on March 29 as correspondent Jason Allen declared: “Democrats are saying they’re not going to agree to any proposal that doesn’t also include significant reforms to ICE.” Here was how the CBS Evening News told its viewers on April 30 the impasse ended following a month of silence about the issue, one of 13 instances when the word “Democrats” never came up in their shutdown coverage (click “expand”): DOKOUPIL: And Ed, the homeland security shutdown is over after nearly 80 days. What was the breakthrough? ED O’KEEFE: That’s right. Most of it is over. The White House essentially told House Republicans to pass the bill the Senate had passed five weeks ago, and with paychecks running out this week, they did. The pressure was building because the Coast Guard commandant had warned in an interview with CBS News his agency’s funding was set to run out tomorrow. The TSA was losing officers. More than 1,100 quit during the shutdown, so now most of DHS is fully reopened, but the underlying disagreements about immigration policy remain unsolved and funding is still cut to immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Customs and Border Protection agencies. Tony, Republicans say they will sort that out in the coming weeks. ABC’s World News Tonight also saw a precipitous decline as it went from nine percent of coverage tagging Democrats to seven percent — or three minutes and four seconds out of 46 minutes and eight seconds overall — in this final tally. Between our first study on the morning of March 16 and the evening of April 30, ABC mentioned Democrats nine times, but sought to blame both parties. For example, here was senior national correspondent Steve Osunsami on March 19: “The deadlock in Washington started 34 days ago and this week the White House and Democrats in Congress traded offers to end it, but so far no deal...But with the workers telling us what they need is for Democrats and Republicans to get it together and start paying them again.” White House correspondent Selina Wang seemed to not only admit two days later Democrats were the cause of the chaos, but stood by them as she boasted “Democrats [are] holding firm, saying any deal needs reforms to Trump’s immigration enforcement policy” and that the President deploying ICE agents to airports “only hardens their resolve[.]” Congressional Jay O’Brien struck a similar tone a day later on March 22: “Remember, Democrats are holding firm. They’re refusing to vote to fund DHS without reforms to ICE. And Democrats have tried to numerous, piecemeal attempts fund agencies[.]” On March 27’s World News Tonight, senior political correspondent Rachel Scott gave away the game: “Democrats hoped the partial government shutdown would pressure Republicans to reform immigration enforcement after federal officers killed protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. That didn’t happen. The Senate deal left the door open for more negotiation.” ABC was radio silent on the plight of government workers from March 30 until April 30 when anchor David Muir tucked in 19-second brief the shutdown was suddenly over: Tonight, House lawmakers voting to fund the Department of Homeland Security, ending the 76 day partial government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history. The House passing the Senate-approved bill funding most of Homeland Security's operations, including the Secret Service, FEMA and TSA. The bill does not give additional funding to ice. President Trump is expected to sign the bill. Going finally to NBC Nightly News, their tally inched up a single percentage point from three percent in our first study to four percent, which translated to 101 seconds out of 38 minutes and five seconds of shutdown coverage (and was also the lowest of the networks). Senior correspondent Tom Costello shifted blame to Republicans instead of Democrats, arguing on March 16 the GOP wouldn’t acquiesce to “changes to ICE procedures after two Americans were killed in Minneapolis.” One day later, he huffed “both” parties “want to fund Homeland Security,” yet “Republicans object to Democratic demands[.]” On March 21, correspondent Valerie Castro also painted Democrats as the good guys: “An attempt by Senate Democrats to advance a bill funding just TSA...failing to secure enough votes today.” In contrast, correspondent Julie Tsirkin went in a different direction on the March 22 Nightly News: “For 37 days, Democrats have blocked funding to the Department of Homeland Security because of the administration’s immigration crackdown.” Her Capitol Hill colleague Ryan Nobles similarly went down this road, pointing out “Democrats have said no” to GOP proposals and even pressing Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) in a hallway about her party’s refusal to reopen the government. But in the last Democrat mention on March 30, correspondent Priscilla Thompson placed Democrats in the right: “House Republicans on Friday rejected a bipartisan Senate deal to fund all of DHS except for ICE and Customs and Border Protection.” NBC had last mentioned the shutdown on April 4 before anchor Tom Llamas announced the end on April 30 in a two-sentence news brief: “We have more news out of Washington tonight. President Trump signing a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security after a surprise breakthrough on Capitol Hill, bringing an end to the record-long partial government shutdown.” When Americans are polled on which party is to blame for government shutdowns, Republicans have consistently been identified as the culprit, regardless of whether they occupy the White House or have a congressional majority. But when the elite media spent such an infinitesimal amount of time during this most recent shutdown highlighting the basic facts of why hundreds of thousands of American workers went months without pay, it’s easy to see why Americans resort to an answer the press have molded and shaped for decades: It’s the GOP’s fault.