Most people talk themselves into trouble at checkpoints. Not because they’re guilty. Because they think cooperating means answering every question. It doesn’t. Cooperating means following lawful orders. That’s it.
P.S. The case is Michigan v. Sitz. The Supreme Court ruled checkpoints are legal, but your right against self-incrimination doesn’t disappear because there’s a cone in the road. Provide your documents. Be polite. Say nothing else.
Officer leans into my window: “Have you been drinking tonight?” Me: “No.” Officer: “Where are you coming from?” Me: “I’d rather not say.” Officer: “Step out of the vehicle, please.” Me: “Am I being detained or am I free to go?”
He paused. Looked at me. Looked at my car. Looked back at me.
Officer: “You’re making this difficult.” Me: “I’m not trying to. I’m just asking a question.”
Here’s what most people don’t realize about DUI checkpoints.
He handed my license back and waved me through.
Most people talk themselves into trouble at checkpoints. Not because they’re guilty. Because they think cooperating means answering every question. It doesn’t. Cooperating means following lawful orders. That’s it.
P.S. The case is Michigan v. Sitz. The Supreme Court ruled checkpoints are legal, but your right against self-incrimination doesn’t disappear because there’s a cone in the road. Provide your documents. Be polite. Say nothing else.
We know that DUI and traffic cases can be complex, affected by a wide variety of circumstances.
We also know that even a conviction for a minor offense can carry consequences for years, affecting your finances, your insurance premiums, your driving privileges, and even your employment opportunities for years to come.
We will work with you to formulate a strategy to guide you through the process and work with you to accomplish your goals.
During the American colonial period, lobsters were not valued as food and were mainly eaten by the poor, prisoners, and indentured servants.
Native tribes near the coasts used lobsters as fertilizer or bait rather than food.
People even hid lobster shells to avoid the stigma of poverty. In Massachusetts, indentured servants sued to limit their lobster meals to three times a week, winning the case. Lobsters were abundant, easy to collect from the shore, and considered bottom feeders. 🦞
They were often consumed as a paste or stew. In the early 19th century, lobsters were cheaper than Boston baked beans, sometimes even fed to cats. 🐈 🫘
However, by the late 19th century, as railroads spread and lobsters were served on trains 🚂, people who were unfamiliar with them found them delicious 😋.
This led to increased demand and the start of lobster canning. By the 1920s, with lobsters becoming less plentiful but demand growing, lobsters transitioned to a delicacy 🦞, popular among celebrities and the wealthy by the 1950s. 🌟
For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why the stock market was going up during times when traditionally, under identical conditions in the past, the stock market had gone down. It was during the Obama administration when I discovered that even though the market was going up, the truth of the matter was that the dollar’s devaluation was outpacing the market increases.
Even though the market was showing minor daily gains, the buying power of the dollar was going down faster creating a net loss.
It finally made sense why the FED was printing so much extra money. By printing more dollars this increased the devaluation of the dollar which created the appearance of small gains in the stock market, which were actually losses disguised by the lower buying power of the dollar.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (2), $100 in 2026 has the same purchasing power as just $12.25 did in 1971. Every dollar the fed prints steals from the dollars you’ve worked for. Inflation is a silent tax based into every monetary policy, supported by our government. Why do we allow it? Inflation doesn’t send you a bill or ask permission, it simply makes every dollar you’ve already earned buy a little less.
Whether you blame excessive money creation, government spending, supply shocks, or a combination of all three, the result is the same. The value of your savings declines while the cost of nearly everything else rises. Who benefits? And politicians get to spend that money first, so by the time those extra dollars have entered the economy, they’re already worth less by the time normal people get them. When new money is created, it doesn’t enter the economy everywhere at once. The first recipients of the new money, typically governments, banks, large financial institutions, or entities receiving government spending, can spend it before prices have fully adjusted. As that money circulates, demand increases and prices begin to rise.
By the time the new money reaches wage earners, retirees, or people on fixed incomes, many goods and services are already more expensive, so their purchasing power has declined.
Before leaving office, President Joe Biden gave Dr. Anthony Fauci a sweeping pardon. It covered any federal offenses Fauci may have committed or participated in from January 1, 2014, through January 20, 2025, arising from his service as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House coronavirus response, or as the President’s chief medical adviser.
It was broad enough to cover the waterfront.
Then Fauci was summoned before the United States Senate and asked questions about the government’s response to COVID-19, the origins of the virus, federally funded research, and the decisions made behind closed doors while Americans were being ordered to close their businesses, shutter their churches, mask their children and trust the experts.
Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.
The Senate committee has now voted to hold him in contempt.
Now, I’m a lawyer, and I believe in the Fifth Amendment.
It isn’t a technicality. It isn’t a loophole. It’s one of the great protections of the English-speaking legal tradition and a shield between the individual and the enormous power of government.
But there’s a question here that no amount of legal jargon can entirely conceal:
If Fauci has already been pardoned for the federal offenses connected to his public service, what federal crime is he afraid of admitting?
His lawyers will say the pardon doesn’t protect him from every imaginable danger. A president can’t pardon state crimes. The pardon doesn’t reach conduct occurring after January 20, 2025. There may be arguments over whether some particular act falls within the pardon’s language.
Those are legitimate legal points.
But they don’t answer the larger question.
The American people weren’t asking Fauci to confess to some unrelated state offense. They wanted answers about COVID. They wanted to know what the government knew, when it knew it, what research it funded, what risks were concealed, and whether public officials told Congress and the country the truth.
Those are precisely the subjects the pardon appears designed to cover.
And that’s where the story begins to smell wrong.
For years, Fauci was presented to America as the calm, unquestionable voice of science. We were told to trust him. We were told that disagreement was dangerous. We were told that skepticism was ignorance and inquiry was misinformation.
Businesses were ruined. Children lost irreplaceable years in classrooms. Families were separated from dying parents and grandparents. Churches were closed while other gatherings were tolerated. Americans who asked hard questions were mocked, censored or dismissed.
And now, when Congress finally asks questions under oath, the man who told an entire nation to trust him says, in effect, that his answers might incriminate him.
Maybe his lawyers can construct a theoretical legal danger somewhere beyond the edges of the pardon. Lawyers are trained to imagine every storm cloud on the horizon. But the Fifth Amendment requires more than embarrassment, political discomfort or fear that the public won’t like the answers.
It protects against self-incrimination.
And a pardon is supposed to remove the danger of prosecution for the conduct it covers.
That’s why the contradiction matters.
The pardon says: You cannot be federally prosecuted for the covered conduct.
The Fifth Amendment plea says: My truthful answers about that conduct may expose me to prosecution.
Both propositions cannot comfortably occupy the same ground.
Perhaps Fauci had a valid basis for refusing to answer certain carefully identified questions. But invoking the Fifth more than 100 times begins to look less like a precise constitutional safeguard and more like a wall built to keep the public from seeing what lies behind it.
And after all we endured, the American people are entitled to look behind that wall.
A pardon may protect a man from prison.
But it doesn’t pardon arrogance. And It doesn’t erase history.
It doesn’t relieve a public servant of the moral obligation to tell the truth to the people whose lives he helped govern.
Chuck Schumer claims that “Medicare and Medicaid” are the “backbone of our healthcare system for tens of millions of Americans,” and “Donald Trump and Republicans are trying to rip it all away.”
IN FACT, Medicare and Medicaid have become costly and inefficient, and Republicans are attempting to make these programs sustainable while Democrats run up their costs and taxes. Here are the specifics:
Medicare and Medicaid spend $1.6 trillion per year, consuming about 29% of all federal tax revenues and costing every household in the U.S. an average of $11,744 per year. These figures don’t include state taxes that are allocated to Medicaid and fund about 36% of the program’s total spending.
Medicare and Medicaid wasted $831 billion on overpayments from 2015 to 2024, amounting to 56% of all known federal overpayments and costing every household in the nation an average of $6,450.
When Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed the Medicare hospital insurance program in his 1964 State of the Union speech, he promised that it would cost “no more than $1 a month” per worker, which adjusted for inflation, is less than $11 in 2026.
Due to laws primarily enacted by Democrats, the Medicare hospital insurance payroll tax is now unlimited and costs workers 2.9% of their wages up $200,000/year and 3.8% thereafter. Thus, workers who earn $100,000 now pay $242 per month for this tax, and workers who earn $1,000,000 pay about $3,000 per month.
Medicare’s hospital insurance payroll taxes now fund only 35% of Medicare’s total spending, and other federal revenues finance the rest of the program.
Since the time that Medicare was established in 1965, the general eligibility age for benefits has stayed at 65 years old, while increases in life expectancy have extended the average time that people receive Medicare benefits by about 35%.
Under current law, Medicare has amassed $60.8 trillion in unfunded obligations, which is about 50% more than the national debt, or an average of $226,000 from all current participants in the program, including both taxpayers and beneficiaries.
Due to future cuts in Medicare payment rates implemented by Democrats in Obamacare, the current law likely understates the unfunded obligations of Medicare by about 24%.
Federal law requires all nonprofit hospitals to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients, while Medicare pays hospitals an average of 17% below their costs of caring for Medicare patients, and Medicare pays hospitals 12% below their costs of caring for Medicaid patients, thus forcing hospitals to shift these expenses to other patients.
In 2022, 100% of Democrats voted for and 100% of Republicans voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, which capped Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 per year, which significantly raised the average Medicare drug premium and forced seniors who don’t use a lot of drugs to pick up the tab for those who do.
In 2025, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that federal spending on Medicare drug benefits could be “about $500 billion more than CBO previously projected” largely due to the Inflation Reduction Act, which has led to “large increases in spending on specialty drugs,” insurers “building higher profit margins and higher administrative costs into their plan bids,” and drug companies reducing their “patient assistance programs” and thereby “increasing the volume of prescriptions financed by the government.”
From 1975 to 2024, the portion of the U.S. population receiving Medicaid for “certain low-income persons” rose from 9% to 26% while the poverty rate stayed roughly level at 13% ± 2 points.
Gold standard randomized controlled trials published by the journal Science and the New England Journal of Medicine found that no-copay Medicaid coverage increases expensive visits to emergency rooms for “conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings,” contrary to Barack Obama’s claim that the opposite would occur.
A gold standard randomized controlled trial of Medicaid in Oregon published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.”
In 2025, 98% of Republicans voted for and 100% of Democrats voted against the Big Beautiful Bill, which reduces Medicaid spending through the following provisions.
To receive Medicaid, the BBB requires “nonpregnant, nondisabled adults, aged 19 through 64” who don’t have a “dependent child under the age of 14” to “complete a minimum of 80 hours” per “month” of “work,” “community service, or enrollment in an education program.”
The BBB prevents illegal immigrants and other aliens from receiving Medicaid under executive fiats that make them “lawfully present” for the purpose of receiving government benefits even though they don’t have “legal status” to be in the United States.
The BBB contains a range of fraud prevention measures like “address verification” and “ensuring deceased individuals do not remain enrolled” in Medicaid, which has the second-highest level of improper payments among all federal programs.
The BBB stops states like California from using a tax kickback scheme to obtain more federal money for Medicaid, which is fungible and can be used to fund comprehensive Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants, as California does for 1.7 million aliens.
The BBB lowers the max copay for Medicaid recipients who are not poor from $100 to $35 and requires states that charge them no copays to at least charge them something, in accord with gold standard studies which found that no-copay Medicaid coverage increases expensive visits to emergency rooms for “conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings.”
Beyond Schumer, politicians like Bernie Sanders, Jon Ossoff, and Elizabeth Warren have characterized the measures above as “savage cuts to Medicaid,” “gutting Medicaid,” and taking healthcare away from “little babies.”
Remember when Mayor Brandon Johnson welcomed thousands of migrants to Chicago and promoted the city as a welcoming destination?
Then came the public health concerns at the Pilsen shelter, where a 5-year-old migrant child died after developing sepsis associated with a Group A strep infection. The shelter also experienced a measles outbreak that required emergency response measures.
At the same time, Chicago taxpayers were expected to cover the costs of shelter, healthcare, and educating newly arrived students while many longtime residents were already struggling with rising taxes, crime, housing costs, and underperforming city services.
On the federal level ( Biden & Harris Administration) , Americans were told COVID-19 vaccines were essential, yet millions of migrants entered the country during that period without a nationwide COVID-19 vaccination requirement.
Chicagoans have every right to ask why these decisions were made, who benefited, and whether the priorities of City Hall reflected the needs of the people already living here.
The Democrat running for Governor of Wisconsin was diagnosed as bipolar, had a mental breakdown, was put in psychiatric hospitalization, did self-harm by cutting, and had a lithium overdose
Wisconsin
Francesca Hong admitted all of this in a 2023 interview.
“I had a mental breakdown.:
“I had been hospitalized for a week… I just felt like nothing had meaning anymore.”
“It was a numbness that took over, and a pain that I couldn’t describe. I couldn’t feel anymore, and that scared the hell out of me. And I found myself self-harming to feel something.”
When asked if she was cutting herself, Hong said “It was cutting. I was diagnosed with bipolar disease. I was taking SSRIs and I’d overdosed on lithium.”
She said didn’t walk in her high school graduation because of the breakdown.
Hong is currently the frontrunner in the Gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – which she is trying to distance herself from now, but still holds the core beliefs of the party.
Recent polls put her ahead of rivals including Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley among Democratic primary voters.
The winner faces likely Republican nominee U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany in the November general election in the battleground state.
Hong has previously said she supports defunding the police and abolishing ICE and higher taxes.
Should a candidate’s documented history of serious mental health issues and self-harm exclude them from being in charge the population of an entire state?
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