Conservative: Life in America Beats Every Alternative

Reflecting on news of “left-leaning American ex-pats who fled to Europe to escape Trump 2.0” only to find life there “dramatically different” than expected and plot “a move back home,” The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessey points out the “shocking factual reality” that the United Kingdom, “suffocating under the weight of its bloated welfare state,” is “poorer than every American state” — and the rest of Europe is no better. Americans who “have convinced themselves they are living in a stagnant, unjust hellhole” should “stop complaining and thank your lucky stars,” because life here “beats every alternative by a wide measure”: We “have more, give more, can do more, and live better than anyone in history.”

Debt patrol: Stop the All-Consuming Fraud Blob

Our “monstrous national debt” has turned into a “quickly growing blob [that] is consuming everything in its path and will destroy America” unless government overspending is curbed, warns Deborah Collier at The Hill. The $41 trillion federal debt is “a collective failure by the executive and legislative branches to root out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.” “Every dollar spent servicing yesterday’s borrowing is a dollar unavailable for any other purpose.” Good news: “The debt blob can be stopped.” Congress should target “corporate welfare” and costly “zombie” programs. The feds can “keep covering their eyes and hope the fiscal blob oozes away, or they can finally wake up” and start slashing the vast “waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement.”

Elex desk: Look Who Trusted Fake Polls

Yet another “fraudulent entity” just got “outed for releasing fictitious numbers in hotly contested midterm election campaigns,” notes Carl Cannon at RealClearPolitics: Wedgwood Polling. RCP never trusted Wedgwood data, as it lacked the clear bona fides of “an actual, legitimate polling firm,” but others “did take the bait, notably The New York Times. The fake polls’ impact was most obvious in Michigan, where Wedgewood “fabricated a poll” showing Senate contender Mallory McMorrow’s support collapsing to 9% in the Democratic primary. “McMorrow says it devastated the morale of the campaign” and “dried up donations” — prompting her to drop out, with radical Abdul El-Sayed ultimately coming in first.

Health beat: RFK Jr.’s Not Radical Enough

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s new Kidney Care National Plan rightly aims to lift “barriers to entry in dialysis care” and even “identified the need for reform regarding kidney donations,” but “leaves the government’s outsize role in kidney care largely untouched, fumes Reason’s Reem Ibrahim. E.g., why “stop short of allowing kidney donors to receive direct compensation”? Consider “America’s plasma market,” which “allows plasma donors to be compensated” – such that the United States, with just 4% of the world population “supplies approximately 68 percent of the plasma collected globally for manufacturing medicines.” We need reforms like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’ End Kidney Deaths Act, which “would offer living kidney donors a $50,000 refundable tax credit.”

SCOTUS watch: Kagan’s Partisan Hypocrisy

Justice Elena Kagan, “while posing as a critic of partisan gerrymandering, is herself in favor of gerrymandering so long as it benefits the Democratic Party,” scoffs James Piereson at The New Criterion. She slams Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 decision ruling that “federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims” after “Supreme Court had wrestled with gerrymandering cases for decades without coming up with neutral standards for legislators to use in drawing district maps.” Yet she also bashes the 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which ended mandates for states “to create legislative and congressional districts with black majorities wherever possible.” Why must the court intervene in some gerrymanders but leave them untouched in others? Because “black voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly in favor of Democratic candidates.” “It is Justice Kagan, not her conservative colleagues, who is guilty of double standards and hypocrisy.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board