It’s been a while since I checked this site. Heartfelt word salad nonsense like this is the reason.
[AlAhram] Egypt should adopt a range of policies designed to confront the increasing Israeli penetration of the Red Sea region and bolster Egyptian influence across the African continent.
I have chosen to write not only from the perspective of a former diplomat but, and more importantly, as an Egyptian citizen who fully appreciates the magnitude of the challenges and pressures confronting Egypt from multiple directions and who holds the deepest respect for the political leadership and its measured positions aimed at safeguarding Egypt’s national interests across every domain.
What has prompted me to write at this particular moment is the unprecedented escalation of the dangers surrounding Egypt, most notably Israel’s decision to recognise the self-proclaimed entity of Somaliland followed by the opening of its diplomatic mission in Jerusalem.
Very clear thus far…
These developments unmistakably confirm the trajectory of Israel’s strategic design – a comprehensive penetration of Africa and direct access to the Red Sea region. This is a threat whose implications for freedom of navigation through the Suez Canal and the Bab Al-Mandeb cannot be underestimated and which also involves the militarisation of the southern Red Sea and the disruption of global trade and energy routes.
Such developments would pose both direct and indirect threats to the national security of Egypt and the littoral states, while also undermining Arab-Arab relations, disturbing the balance of Arab-African interests, and transforming vital maritime corridors into another arena for geopolitical competition in the Middle East.
Translation: This is our clubhouse. No icky Jooos allowed! ‘Cause they ruin everything with their icky cooties!!!
I wish to present several ideas, some of which may be considered unconventional, for confronting and containing these dangers. I do so with full awareness that statements of condemnation or denunciations of regional and international decisions are no longer sufficient by themselves to deter the current Israeli government from pursuing its strategic objectives and hostile policies towards us.
See? Icky. But at least they’re calling it Israel, not the Jewish entity.
Egypt must therefore adopt policies commensurate with the scale of this challenge and capable of protecting its strategic interests without undue concern over possible objections or reservations from external parties while simultaneously impeding these aggressive Israeli practices. My assessment may be summarised through the following considerations.
Remember when we thought President General al Sisi would be relatively liberal and enlightened?
First, Egypt’s presence in Africa has become increasingly tangible, particularly since President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi assumed the chairmanship of the African Union (AU) in 2019. This has been reflected in the intensification of his meetings with African leaders, Egypt’s sustained commitment to hosting African summits and conferences, and, perhaps most notably, the hosting of the UN COP27 Climate Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh on behalf of Africa in 2022. That event embodied an Egyptian policy founded on shared interests rather than rhetorical slogans.
The shared interest being the world including Egypt in Important Meetings and giving them money for various pointless projects, whose funding will mostly slip into the right pockets.
Second, I am confident that the political leadership’s efforts to maximise Egypt’s national interests aspire to a broader and deeper framework that transcends the current model of cooperation. Although this model has produced important successes, it remains largely confined to individual achievements and scattered projects that fall well short of the vast opportunities available for cooperation with Africa, a continent endowed with immense industrial, mineral, and energy resources, as well as exceptional investment opportunities.
That paragraph was all roughage, no nutrition. Skipping down to the dismount:
Under such circumstances, it may seek cooperation with a capable African partner, foremost among such partners Egypt, to achieve broader access by combining the comparative advantages of all the participating parties and creating greater capacity to address Africa’s mutual developmental needs in a manner that advances the interests of everyone involved. If consensus can be reached on this innovative approach, it could later be extended to partnerships with other major actors such as Russia, India, Brazil, and others.
Finally, while an African strategy of this nature promises considerable gains and substantial mutual interests for both Egypt and Africa, its success ultimately depends upon prudent and carefully planned management capable of consolidating a strong Egyptian presence within African states and societies. This should be pursued through the effective and well-considered participation of the private sector and a diverse range of national civil society organisations, while adopting a gradual strategy of constraining, containing, and ultimately limiting Israel’s expanding footprint across the African continent.
And there we have it. Egypt is Important, Israel somehow needs to be shoved down.
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Egypt should adopt a range of policies designed to confront the increasing Israeli penetration of the Red Sea region and bolster Egyptian influence across the African continent.
[Townhall] Nancy San Fran Nan Pelosi Congresswoman-for-Life from the San Francisco Bay Area, born into a family of professional politicians. On-again-off-again Speaker of the House. It's not her fault when they lose, but it's her accomplishment when they win. Noted for her heavily botoxed grimace and occasional senior... uhhh... moments... told us in 2010 that we'd have to pass the bill to find out what was in it. Sixteen years later, we're still finding out, and the answer keeps getting worse.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced this month that more than 1 million people enrolled in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans have no Social Security number on file. Kennedy called it a "glaring warning sign for fraud." He's not wrong. But he's also not telling the whole story, and neither is anyone shouting past him on cable news.
I spend my working life underwriting risk: private credit, factoring, litigation finance, the kind of lending where you learn fast that an unverified identity is the first flag, not the last. In my world, a portfolio built on a million unverifiable counterparties gets shut down before lunch. In Washington, it got expanded for five years and called a policy win.
HHS says it has already pulled 2.9 million improper enrollments off the rolls, with another 2.6 million still under review, down from a peak of 5.6 million phantom, improper, and fraudulent enrollees in 2025. That's real progress.
Here's the shape of it. HHS says it has already pulled 2.9 million improper enrollments off the rolls, with another 2.6 million still under review, down from a peak of 5.6 million phantom, improper, and fraudulent enrollees in 2025. That's real progress, and credit belongs where it's due. But the honest caveat matters, too: a missing Social Security number isn't proof of fraud on its own. Some enrollees are lawfully present immigrants colonists who qualify under other documentation. HHS itself hasn't said all 1 million cases are fraudulent, a distinction the "massive fraud" headlines tend to skip.
Where the picture turns from suspicious to damning is the Government Accountability Office's own testing. GAO built twenty fictitious identities, fake people who don't exist, and submitted them for subsidized coverage. All four of its 2024 test applicants got approved, drawing roughly $2,350 a month in advance premium tax credits. Of twenty submitted for 2025, eighteen were still actively enrolled as of last September, pulling down more than $10,000 a month combined. GAO called the results "generally consistent" with the identical test it ran a decade earlier. A decade of warnings, and the marketplace still can't tell a real person from a Social Security number typed into a form.
Obamacare was written to drive the nation to Medicaid for all. The impressive thing is that it didn’t happen. That there were no guardrails against fraud is unsurprising.
Then there's the reconciliation gap, which is where the real money sits. Every enrollee who draws an advance premium tax credit is supposed to file a tax return reconciling the subsidy against actual income. GAO couldn't find evidence that happened for more than $21 billion in credits tied to 2023 alone, roughly a third of everything paid to identifiable Social Security numbers that year. One number was used across more than 125 policies for a combined 71 years of coverage. Another 58,000 numbers matched Social Security's own death records, with $94 million sent out on behalf of people who were already gone. CMS didn't enforce reconciliation at all from 2021 through 2024.
2021-2024 were the Biden-Harris Politburo years.
None of this happened by accident. The American Rescue Plan's zero-premium plans handed brokers a commission for every enrollee they could stack onto the rolls, whether that person consented or even knew about it. CMS logged 275,000 complaints in eight months from Americans who discovered they'd been signed up without asking. A brokerage president and a marketing executive were just convicted in a $233 million enrollment fraud scheme, with insurers collecting $180 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies along the way. That's not a fringe case. That's the incentive structure working exactly as designed.
I'll grant the other side its strongest point, because a fair fight requires it: undocumented immigrants colonists are not the driver of health care's cost problem. The most credible estimates put their share of total U.S. health spending at a percent or two, nowhere near the sum Washington now spends propping up a subsidy system too porous to verify who's cashing the check. If Congress wants to extend the enhanced subsidies set to lapse at year's end, fine. That's a legitimate debate to have. But extending a program without fixing the verification holes GAO just spent a year documenting isn't compassion. It's negligence with better branding.
Tort reform, pharmacy middleman transparency, tighter eligibility enforcement: none of it is a silver bullet, and I won't pretend otherwise. Liability reforms in the states that have tried them trimmed premiums by a few points, not by half. But every one of those reforms shares a common thread with fixing the ACA's fraud problem. Washington must acknowledge that the current system fails to deliver, something neither this administration nor the previous one has been willing to do.
Fraud in a $124 billion-a-year program isn't a rounding error. It's the bill coming due for a decade of pass-it-first, ask-questions-later governance. Kennedy and Oz are finally asking the questions. The rest of Washington should stop pretending the answers don't matter.
[Mises Inst.] The US Supreme Court ruled this week that the twentieth-century interpretation of so-called "birthright citizenship"—i.e., the idea that virtually anyone born inside the territory of the United States is an automatic citizen—is to be upheld. This further solidifies into US law the idea that children born on US soil to visiting foreign nationals—among many other non-citizens—are granted citizenship automatically.
Those who think that this decision will "settle" anything politically, however, are mistaken. Indeed, this decision—as with birthright citizenship in general—will increase political conflict over the presence of foreign nationals—both legal and illegal—within the United States. This is because birthright citizenship takes two separate phenomena—immigration and citizenship—and fuses them together. By combining the two, the imposition of birthright citizenship takes foreign nationals—who may be in the United States for non-political economic reasons such as employment—and turns those foreign nationals into political actors.
That is, the granting of citizenship turns private, non-political persons into participants in US political institutions. This is because the granting of citizenship is not primarily about legal residency or access to the legal system. It is not necessary to be a citizen, after all, to reside legally in the United States, or to file lawsuits, or to defend one’s self in court. It is already well established that the Bill of Rights applies to "persons" and not simply to "citizens." In modern times, citizenship is really about the legal prerogative to participate in politics. Citizenship is about voting.
CITIZENSHIP VS. IMMIGRATION
Contrary to what some self-proclaimed libertarians might say, support for private-property rights does not require support of the widespread granting of citizenship. After all, citizenship, is not any sort of natural right at all, as it does not stem from property ownership of self-ownership. Unlike private property, citizenship as a concept does not exist outside state institutions. One cannot homestead citizenship or privately contract for citizenship. The "right" to citizenship is very much unlike, say, a right to own a gun, or a right to be secure in one’s papers. Both of these are simply rights to purchase, own, and control one’s own property.
Some libertarians have made some anemic and unconvincing attempts to claim that citizenship—by which is really meant the right to vote—is inseparable from one’s position on immigration. The claim is that citizenship is a critical procedural legal prerogative because voting supposedly is a tool for the protection of property rights. There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever that this empirical claim is true. If anything, the expansion of the franchise has led to immense growth in the size and scope of government, and its ability to steal property and violate property rights at will. The idea that a single citizen’s vote, out of the 150 million votes cast in a national election, will somehow protect that voter’s property rights, rests on little more than pro-democracy propaganda. This is partly why most eighteenth-century classical liberals, like John Locke and the Levellers, and the authors of America’s early constitutions, opposed universal suffrage.
Widespread suffrage has never been shown to increase freedom or lessen state power. Rather, citizenship is an administrative act of states, and has nothing to do with anything we might call "laissez-faire." The spread of the idea of citizenship is more closely associated with state building and with the centralization of state power.
Rather than join together the issues of immigration and citizenship, experience shows it is entirely possible to be generally laissez-faire toward immigration while also refusing to push for the promiscuous granting of citizenship.
When we consider this great difference between immigration and citizenship, it is clear that, if we wish to simply respect the basic property rights of travelers, workers, and other foreign nationals within the United States, it is not necessary—either legally, logically, or conceptually—that every person who visits or resides within the United States for a time be granted the legal prerogative to vote. It is not necessary to have access to the ballot box in order for such persons—virtually all of whom are foreign nationals who are already citizens somewhere else—to hold a job, live in peace with one’s family, or own property in the United States. The same is true for their children, most of whom become citizens—via jus sanguinis—where their parents are citizens.1
EFFECT ON IMMIGRATION POLITICS
In contrast to this scheme for expanding ever more citizenship to foreign nationals, it would be more prudent to adopt a legal environment where the granting of citizenship is rare and limited to longtime taxpayers and residents with "skin in the game," and to their family members.
This more-prudent position is likely to defuse much of the more vociferous opposition to immigration. After all, most people are accepting of the idea that it is not a problem to grant citizenship to a 20-year resident who is economically self-supporting, is not a net drain on taxpayer funds, and is integrated into the community. Many of us often peacefully engage with such people as business associates and community members.
The alternative to this gradual and fiscally conservative approach is to grant citizenship—i.e., voting rights—to persons who may have only the most superficial attachment to any community within the United States. The modern application of citizenship laws—especially in the form of birthright citizenship—means there are few legal impediments to granting voting rights to foreign nationals who are drains on the public fisc, who are only temporarily domiciled within the US, or otherwise not contributing to the polities in which they live. One can draw upon countless cases of foreign nationals abusing the birthright citizenship regime to exploit US net taxpayers. The case of Chinese "birth tourism" is just one example.
Indeed, the implications of unrestricted birthright citizenship are so absurd, that Justice Clarence Thomas points out this week that under the birthright-citizenship doctrine, the US could not even deny citizenship to US-born children who are "raised in foreign countries, join foreign armies, and fight wars against the United States."
This is also why, historically, virtually no polity or political community—outside of places with perennial severe labor shortages like in the Americas in the nineteenth century—has contemplated birthright citizenship. Rather, polities have historically tied legal membership within a polity to those who are born to parents and into families that are already citizens and have well established social or economic connections to the community.
Now that the Court has indefinitely guaranteed a "right" of citizenship to children of foreign nationals in the United States, this greatly raises the stakes for immigration controls— controls that would not be nearly as attractive without the courts telling us that voting rights must be made readily available to millions of babies born to foreign nationals, and even raised in foreign countries.
The political effect is similar to that which results from granting US welfare benefits to foreign nationals. This has been apparent in increasingly prolific federal spending on alleged "refugees" and through the expansion of taxpayer funded programs: free emergency healthcare, free government schooling, free housing for "asylum seekers," and more. Not surprisingly, the response has been rising opposition to immigration overall. The same has resulted from the federal government’s relentless drive to grant citizenship to rising numbers of immigrants, many of whom have been legal residents for only five years, and many others who skim off taxpayer-funded services. Birthright citizenship can specifically be used to increase welfare spending on immigrant households. Children born in the US to foreign nationals provide a legal loophole through which foreign-national heads-of-household receive welfare dollars with the stipulation that the money be spent on the citizen children. The result, of course, is that substantial amounts of taxpayer-funded benefits are doled out to foreign nationals. This further politicizes immigration.
Unfortunately, there is no end in sight to the current federal drive to expand government spending and voting rights for foreign nationals. Birthright citizenship is an important part of this scheme because it creates an easy way for foreign nationals to execute an end-run around limits on citizenship for their children. When those children are then used to access more welfare dollars and increase citizenship for family members through the "anchor-baby" strategy, the tax burden for many of these falls on the legacy taxpayers. Many of these longtime taxpayers know they are being exploited, so look to the only legal solution left to them: to greatly limit immigration as a means of limiting further citizenship for foreign nationals with little to no skin the game. Thanks to this week’s Supreme Court ruling, the political stakes are only growing.
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One has to wonder where the collective head of SCOTUS is. This should have been an no-brainer and solved a problem instead of creating a bigger problem for years to come.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Congresswoman-for-Life from the San Francisco Bay Area, born into a family of professional politicians. On-again-off-again Speaker of the House. It's not her fault when they lose, but it's her accomplishment when they win. Noted for her heavily botoxed grimace and occasional senior... uhhh... moments...
