• FEMA luxury fraud exposed and corrected: Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency got some results on behalf of American taxpayers yesterday, exposing a FEMA payment last week of $59 million to house asylum-seekers in luxury New York City hotels — a city that has already spent a mind-boggling $7 billion since 2023 on the illegal immigrants in its midst. A recent payment “violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order,” Musk said. “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” In more good news, there’s been some accountability, too: A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Services has confirmed the firings of four FEMA employees who were responsible for the $59 million payment.

• Schumer’s “abuse of power” tipline backfires: “I’m launching a new portal for anyone who wants to expose corruption, abuses of power, and threats to public safety with the legal protections of being a whistleblower,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced in a social media post on Monday. Included was a link to a new hotline that Senate Democrats created in response to Donald Trump’s actions to drain The Swamp. Schumer’s announcement was soon inundated with commenters noting that Trump was already engaged in cleaning up Washington’s corruption. Comedian and commentator Tim Young quipped, “We already have that… it’s called DOGE.” Senator Ted Cruz added, “Great! I wanna report: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer. And the entire corrupt Democrat party that weaponized & abused the federal government for the past four years.” It appears that the Democrats can’t get out of their own way.

• Trump sets a firm hostage deadline: Donald Trump doubled down Monday night, issuing a stern warning to the Hamas barbarians. “As far as I’m concerned,” said Trump from the Oval Office, “if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o'clock — I think it’s an appropriate time — I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out.” Military force is a particularly tough task, of course, because Hamas is holding hostages. Asked the beginnings of a question about possible retaliation, Trump cut the reporter off and said, “You’ll find out. And they’ll find out, too. Hamas will find out. They’re gonna find out what I mean. These are sick people. And they’ll find out what I mean Saturday at 12.”

• Migrants turn around: A “new trend” has started since Donald Trump took office; instead of heading north, migrants are turning around and going south. Thanks to the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, a growing number of migrants are “turning back from Mexico,” states Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks. “These individuals cited the heavy security posture along the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexico’s containment efforts as key reasons for reversing course. Families in these groups made a life-saving decision, avoiding the dangers of cartel-controlled territory, where extortion and violence are rampant.” Banks added, “Our enforcement efforts are working.” On Sunday, the number of migrant encounters on the Texas border was 303, which is down significantly from an average of 8,000 a day back in December. Go figure; simply enforcing the law is actually solving much of the problem.

• NY Dems back off special election delay gambit: With Republicans holding a razor-thin majority in the House, New York Democrats sought to ensure that the margin remained as small as possible by introducing a bill to delay a special election to fill the seat soon to be vacated by Representative Elise Stefanik, who was nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. State and national Republican leadership cried foul over the obvious politically motivated move. Stefanik is exiting a safe red district, which is why the state Democrats tried to undermine democracy. However, following the negative press and Republican objection, Democrats have backed off. Republican Assembly Leader Will Barclay observed, “It was a terrible piece of legislation in policy and principle.”

• Google nixes DEI calendar markers: No longer will Google Calendar mark woke observances such as Black History Month, Pride Month, Women’s History Month, or Indigenous Peoples Month. Google explained that its decision to nix these DEI-motivated acknowledgments was months in the making and had more to do with the incessant demand for recognizing everything. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” explained a Google spokesman. Going forward, Google Calendar will show “only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.”

• DAR fights to keep the trannies out: Just as the Boy Scouts officially rebranded themselves as “Scouting America” in a milquetoast attempt to “meet the evolving needs of young people,” the nation’s oldest female-only genealogical society appears to be fighting a losing battle to maintain its age-old brand integrity. The national governing board of the Daughters of the American Revolution rejected a proposed amendment from a Texas-based chapter that would’ve reinforced the organization’s female-only admission standards. “Daughters,” after all, ought to mean “daughters,” don’t you think? The amendment would’ve defined a woman as “a biological female at conception, having only naturally occurring X chromosomes, exclusive of Y chromosomes, and certified as female or girl on the original birth certificate.” Sounds like common sense to us, but apparently not to the DAR governing board. We wonder: What would George Washington think?

• Grenell to temporarily head Kennedy Center: Only a handful of senior-level Trump staff have been carried over from his first administration, but one of them is his highly competent former acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell. Recently returned from a successful mission to the socialist dictatorship of Venezuela, where he secured the release of six American prisoners, Grenell has since been appointed by Trump as temporary head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “Ric shares my vision for a golden age of American arts and culture,” posted Trump. “No more drag shows, or other anti-American propaganda — only the best.” Grenell is a shrewd choice — not only because he’s tough, but also because, right or wrong, his status as a gay Republican might make him a bit more bullet-proof from the Left than just any other awful hideous terrible abominable right-wing Trump hack.

Headlines

• Senate advances Gabbard’s nomination to become DNI (Roll Call)

• Trump administration ordered by judge to unfreeze federal spending (Newsweek)

• Trump pardons Rod Blagojevich (NY Post)

• Trump signs EO “to end … forced use of paper straws” (Daily Wire)

• Bannon pleads guilty in border wall fraud case, avoids jail time (Just the News)

• Elon Musk’s group makes leading $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI (Just the News)

• Humor: Nation asks if that security guy can please just follow Congress around and keep them from doing anything ever (Babylon Bee)

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