Easter Tidings

Unlike King Charles, by oath Defender of the Faith (Anglican), who skipped that thought this year, I do wish a Happy Easter to all who celebrate. I hope by the time you read this on Sunday, we will have even more good news to celebrate.

In Iran, an F-15E was downed in a remote part of the country. The pilot was quickly rescued, but despite conflicting accounts, as I write this, it appears that the Weapons Systems Officer is still missing, and a significant search is ongoing to find and rescue him. (An A-10 was also shot down, and the pilot was rescued.) Every effort is being made in the rescue operation, including the presence of specialized aircraft designed for such purposes, and I have every reason to believe in its success. (The officer's rescue by courageous Special Forces troops has just been verified. A great piece of news to begin Easter morning.)

(Note from Andrea: Clarice was right to keep the faith.)

Since the Iranian government, or what smatterings of it still exist on the lowest levels of power, cannot negotiate an end, the IAF and U.S. forces have now escalated to destroying its power-generating facilities, petro storage, and processing units. Friday night, most of Tehran was in total blackout. More tankers are moving freely through the Strait of Hormuz, seemingly because Iran has lost the possibility to destroy or interdict them. The fat lady’s not sung yet, but she’s offstage warming up her tonsils.

Iranians are cheering and celebrating. Residents of Tehran received a message that Pahlavi’s Immortal Guards are beginning their ground operations, and the people can now rise up.

Because of security constraints and news blackouts, we are better able to see the progress of the Administration’s domestic agenda than the progress in Iran. The President’s payment to TSA workers and the deployment of National Guard troops to airports worked. Lines have pretty much disappeared, and travel is no longer disrupted. The Democrats hoped to use travel delays as blackmail on DHS funding and failed. Travelers were only briefly impeded. The President is reportedly considering how to ensure this threat never occurs again by privatizing security checks altogether,  which, as a bonus, will probably save a lot of money.

The roundup of illegal aliens and those not entitled otherwise to remain continues.

“Last night, the niece and grand niece of deceased Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Qasem Soleimani were arrested by federal agents following Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s termination of their lawful permanent resident (LPR) status.  

Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter are now in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As identified by both press reporting and her own social media commentary, Soleimani Afshar is an outspoken supporter of the totalitarian, terrorist regime in Iran.

 In addition to the termination of Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter’s LPR status, Afshar’s husband has also been barred from entering the United States.”

Who admitted them? Who permitted them to remain? 

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As efforts to prosecute and end the Somalian fraudarama in Minnesota continue, the government’s efforts to deal with even more outrageous welfare fraud in California are now underway. Vice President JD Vance is heading a fraud task force. HHS’s CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) is revving up, and the DoJ is rounding up the perps.

Two hundred twenty-one fake hospice outfits in Los Angeles alone have been shuttered. Dr. Oz hopes to shut down 900 of them. The extent of the fraud -- billions, maybe trillions, of dollars by reasonable estimates -- is unbelievable.

If you believe that fraudsters skew heavily Democratic, and that some not insubstantial amount of the money finds its way back into Democratic campaign coffers (one way or another), then big problems loom.

Ponder these questions. How many local, state, and federal officials on the left will be forced to retreat into defense mode instead of launching into campaign mode? How many must now be quiet little mice trying to stay out of the Task Force’s crosshairs? How much untracked money -- the mother’s milk of politics -- will be cut off and unavailable to the DNC?

I think the simplest way to understand Trump’s strategy is that he doesn’t believe in nipping at ankles. He aims higher up. In politics, that means cutting the supply of funds.

The attack on welfare fraud is important in itself and in what it means for the continued solvency of these programs, but when we consider the cutoff of funds funneled from these scams to Democrats and add them to the blocked funneling from USAID and the NGOs, it adds up.

Moreover, the Democrats already have a lot less money in their war chests for the midterms than usual. As of the latest FEC filings, the RNC has almost a 7-to-1 advantage over the DNC. It has an available account of about $109 million to the DNC’s almost $16 million. Worse for the Democrats, the RNC is debt-free, while the DNC is in the red for $17.4 million.

And then there’s the recently announced criminal investigation of yet another source of Democrat campaign funding -- ActBlue, which has been the Democrats’ main online fundraising vehicle. For some time now, independent investigators have documented major fraudulent transactions through ActBlue. So significant has been the disappearance of safeguards against fraud that it is difficult to deny that the system was designed and operated for the very purpose of abolishing normal and rational safeguards. Substantial documentation was made of illegal contributions from both straw donors and foreign donors. This week, it was reported by the New York Times that the organization’s own Democratic counsel, Covington and Burling, warned them that officials’ congressional testimony about foreign donations made through the outfit may have been false.

In a congressional hearing in 2023, ActBlue was asked to describe what steps it took to prevent illegal foreign political contributions.

ActBlue, in response, wrote a letter to Congress stating that its approach to combating such improper contributions was “multilayered, with checks and confirmations occurring throughout the donation process to verify donors and donor information.”

ActBlue’s own lawyers, however, felt that characterization was inaccurate. 

“This presents a substantial risk for ActBlue,” Covington & Burling wrote in a memo to the payment processor. The memo laid out how individuals who made contributions through third-party platforms such as Apple Pay, PayPal, and Venmo were, at the time of the letter, not required by ActBlue to submit documentation proving they could legally donate to U.S. political committees -- potentially contradicting its letter to Congress.

Lying to Congress is illegal. Federal law also prohibits individuals who are not citizens or permanent residents from making donations to U.S. political committees.

Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a member of ActBlue’s board of directors, attempted to downplay the criticism by telling the New York Times that “less than 1%” of the transactions it processed during the 2024 election cycle had signs that they originated in foreign countries. ActBlue processed over $3.8 billion in contributions during the most recent presidential election, according to OpenSecrets, meaning that nearly $38 million in donations fit that description.

Originating in a foreign country isn’t itself an indication of foul play, as some Americans do live abroad. That said, one of Covington & Burling’s memos to ActBlue stated that its procedures created “a substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals.”

Another memo Covington produced for ActBlue explicitly outlined the “potential legal risks associated with statements to Congress that may be alleged to be false or misleading.”

I imagine from now until the midterms, we will be seeing lifting of veils more absorbing and consequential than the seven Salome discarded in her dance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/easter_tidings.html