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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, under fire for failing to prevent a massive welfare fraud scheme in his state, was in Seattle on Tuesday as the special guest at Gov. Bob Ferguson’s fundraising luncheon, telling those in attendance Somalis were being “demonized” and vowing to bring more into his state.
“These folks better not ever mistake our kindness for our weakness because we are going to defend our neighbors. These guys bring out the worst in me. I hate it when I get to that point where it’s petty and I hate it when that sense of anger comes up on you,” Walz said. “But the antidote to that is positive actions to improve lives that go against what they are trying to do. So instead of demonizing our Somali community, we’re going to do more to welcome more in.”
The event at the Washington State Convention Center drew more than a thousand supporters, including table sponsors who paid upwards of $2,500 to attend.
Walz drew a standing ovation upon his introduction, despite the fact he’s been under intense scrutiny and a federal investigation concerning massive fraud involving the Somali community in state social services programs under his watch, with allegations his administration enabled cover-ups and ignored whistleblower warnings for years.
“You came here for your governor, for someone who is super effective at improving lives,” Walz said in taking the stage while donors enjoyed lunch in the convention center’s large sixth-floor ballroom. “But you also came here because you love this state and you love the country and at this moment in time, gathering together with people who are willing to stand up and speak out for what’s right and stand behind leaders who put themselves out there to defend democracy and those without a voice; there’s probably nothing more important you could be doing, so thank you all.”
Walz wasted no time bashing President Donald Trump within two minutes of taking the stage.
“There’s just some people that really rub Donald Trump the wrong way and I’m guessing it’s people who are smart,” said Walz, referencing the fact Ferguson was a state chess champion.
The line drew applause and laughter from those in attendance.
Walz then jumped into the controversy he’s facing in Minnesota, by doubling down on his support for immigrants.
“We have in Minnesota per capita wise, more refugees than any other state,” he said once again eliciting cheers from the crowd. “Right now our neighbors are being demonized. Our neighbors are being terrorized and literally picked up off the streets.”
Walz then criticized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from Texas who were assigned to conduct raids on illegal immigrants in Minnesota.
“It was a good thing that it was really cold because there was a plus side that they sent these agents in from Texas and they were too cold to get out of their car,” Walz said. “The Minnesotans knew who they were and were standing out there without coats on taunting them.”
Before Ferguson took the stage, freshman Democratic Rep. Osman Salahuddin of Redmond then urged the crowd to take out their phones and scan a QR code to make immediate donations to Ferguson’s reelection campaign, reminding donors that in three days, the temporary halt to campaign contributions would take effect due to the coming legislative session.
Ferguson then took the podium to a standing ovation, touting his accomplishments as attorney general and the dozens of successful lawsuits against the Trump administration.
“We were the first state to take on Trump in 2017 and win, and the first state to take on Donald Trump in 2025 and win was Washington state,” said Ferguson, who urged a round of applause for his office staff and for the office of Attorney General Nick Brown.
Ferguson urged donors to support his continued efforts to resist the Trump administration, suggesting many of Washington’s budget troubles are the fault of the federal administration.
Among the many current and former state lawmakers in attendance were Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson, newly sworn in King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, former State Sen. Mark Mullet, and dozens of other state and local politicians.
The Center Square spoke with several supporters ahead of the event and inquired if they had an opinion about Walz speaking at the luncheon given the fraud scandal is facing.
Nina Carter of Olympia who said she and her husband have hosted Ferguson in their home said they have no problem with Walz.
“We saw that on the news and I think that singling out some people in Minnesota who happen to be Somali and who happen to be connected with what would be a mafia, why aren’t we singling out the Italian mafia, or the Florida mafia or whatever? I think was just a way to portray a whole community and a whole culture from one country as being bad and there are criminal syndicates all over the world, so why are we singling out that one?” asked Carter who added that she’s Walz will be get the situation under control.
Another couple began to initially respond to the question about Walz, but then grew uncomfortable saying they “have learned not to trust reporters asking questions like that.”
This is a developing story.

Paramount Skydance has made a hostile bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.
The bid is for $77.9 billion in equity value and has an enterprise value of $108.4 billion.
Paramount’s offer is the latest battle in a bidding war that appeared to end Friday when Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery announced Netflix was buying Warner Bros., the iconic movie and TV studio in Burbank near Los Angeles.
The Netflix deal, which included Warner Bros.’ assets such as HBO, HBO Max, DC Comics and DC Studios, had an equity value of $72 billion and a total enterprise value of $82.7 billion. It involved Warner Bros. Discovery spinning off Discovery Global networks, including CNN, HGTV, Food Network and TNT, into a separate, publicly traded company.
Stockholders would receive nearly $28 in cash and stock per Warner Bros. Discovery share under the Netflix purchase.
Unlike Netflix, Paramount, which merged with Skydance in an $8 billion merger in August, is offering to purchase all of Warner Bros. Discovery for an all-cash offer of $30 per share in a “hostile bid.” The term means Paramount is making its pitch directly to stockholders with an offer that doesn’t require the approval of the Warner Bros. Discovery board.
Warner Bros. Discovery Monday said it plans to advise stockholders about Paramount Skydance’s offer within 10 business days.
Shareholders would have until Jan. 8 to vote on Paramount’s offer, according to media reports.
Paramount Skydance, which announced its offer Monday, did not respond Tuesday to The Center Square’s request for comment. But David Ellison, chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance, said in an earlier statement that Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders deserve a chance to consider his company’s “superior all-cash-offer for their shares in the entire company.” He added Paramount Skydance believes its proposal is a “more certain and quicker path to completion.”
Paramount Skydance said its offer is more likely to clear regulatory hurdles.
The Center Square reached out Tuesday to Netflix with a request for an interview. A Netflix spokesperson responded by emailing comments made by Netflix’s co-CEOs.
“This deal makes strategic sense for Netflix, for Warner Bros. and all the stakeholders that we serve,” Co-CEO Greg Peters said. He noted Warner Bros.’ extensive library of movies and TV shows means “more bang for their buck” for Netflix subscribers.
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the deal would mean Netflix picking up three businesses that the streaming service has never operated: a major movie studio, a TV studio and the HBO brand.
Under Netflix, Warner Bros. would continue to release movies in theaters as it has in the past, Sarandos said.
Allowing stockholders to make the decision of Netflix or Paramount is a good direction to go as Hollywood grapples with the new world of streaming and entertainment, economist Wayne Winegarden told The Center Square Tuesday. He said federal regulators shouldn’t interfere.
“If we allow the shareholders to decide, we’re allowing a larger segment of people to put their brains around it,” said Winegarden, a senior business fellow at Pasadena-based Pacific Research Institute. “Perhaps it’ll be wrong. But allowing more people to make that decision allows us a better chance to get to the right place.”
Winegarden said the Netflix deal may prove to be better for stockholders because they could make money off Warner Bros. Discovery spinning off its cable networks such as CNN.
But Ellison of Paramount Skydance argued the Netflix deal involves “an uncertain future trading value” of Discovery’s Global Networks “and a challenging regulatory process.”
“We take our offer directly to shareholders to give them the opportunity to act in their best interests and maximize the value of their shares,” Ellison said.
Netflix said it will take 12 to 18 months for its deal, which requires approval by the Federal Trade Commission, to close.
Whoever loses in the attempt to buy Warner Bros. could decide to go to court, Winegarden said. “I think there’s a very good chance this gets ugly. To the extent it does, that’s not good for shareholders, not good for anyone. I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
The economist noted the Netflix deal may also be better for Warner Bros. employees because there wouldn’t be the redundancies that would exist if Paramount Skydance purchased Warner Bros. Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which both operate major TV and movie studios, are more alike than Warner Bros. and Netflix.
Redundancies could make layoffs more likely if Paramount Skydance buys Warner Bros., Winegarden said.
“A good friend of mine works for MTV,” Winegarden said, referring to one of Paramount Skydance’s networks. “For her sake, I’m hoping for Netflix.”

Amid a national housing crisis, the Biden administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development produced guidelines encouraging property owners to forgo some fair housing practices to favor Afghan refugees, the Trump administration argues in a new directive terminating previous guidelines.
The Center Square obtained a HUD directive from the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity rescinding the guidance document, “Operation Allies Welcome: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Fair Housing Issues” and withdrawing from a FHEO guidance document “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Renting to Refugees and Eligible Newcomers,” which the agency claims violates the Fair Housing Act.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner argues the Biden-era guidelines prioritized nearly 200,000 Afghan refugees who were admitted following the 2021 pullout of American forces from Afghanistan by encouraging landlords and property owners to forgo credit checks, occupancy limitations, and engage in targeted marketing toward Afghans.
“After President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, his administration made a bad situation worse by prioritizing housing assistance for Afghan refugees, who we now know were unvetted and unchecked,” Turner told The Center Square. “Since day one, our mission has been clear: to serve the American people and end the misuse and abuse of American taxpayer-funded resources. That is why we rescinded this Operation Allies Welcome guidance, which encouraged landlords and property owners to violate federal civil rights law to protect Afghan refugees. Under President Trump’s leadership, the days of putting Americans last is over.”
The Biden-era guidance supported landlords and property managers to “forgo credit checks for Afghan refugees,” creating an exemption due to their immigration status. The guidelines noted “verification of ability to pay would appear unnecessary since the purpose of the credit check would be to provide a reasonable basis for believing that a tenant’s rent will be paid” in cases where a refugee agency would “provide full rent payments.”
Through the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), most Afghan refugees and parolees were eligible to receive housing vouchers for HUD Public Housing and Section 8 programs.
When asked if those individuals are still receiving housing benefits, a HUD official told The Center Square that the department “is working in coordination with appropriate agencies to align the Department’s guidance related to immigration status to ensure taxpayer-funded benefits are not used for any unintended purpose.”
In addition to forgoing credit checks, the guidance allowed for landlords and property managers to make exceptions to occupancy standards or limits to allow “larger refugee or parolee families, or connected kinship groups to reside together.”
“Unreasonable occupancy limits on the number of persons who may occupy a unit may violate the Act’s prohibition on discrimination against families with children. HUD guidance advises that as a general rule, an occupancy policy of two persons per bedroom is reasonable under the Act, but that the reasonableness of such a policy may depend on specific facts and circumstances, including the size and configuration of the unit and sleeping areas. The guidance describes the factors that are used to determine whether a housing provider’s occupancy limits may discriminate because of familial status,” according to the Biden-era guidance.
The document also encouraged targeted marketing toward Afghan populations, arguing they may be among the “least likely to apply for housing without special outreach efforts.” The targeted advertising could include marketing materials in Dari and Pashto (prominent Afghan languages); however, “marketing to the Afghan population should be part of a larger non-selective advertising campaign to persons with a range of protected characteristics.” In areas with other large immigrant communities, such as Somali or Hmong, they should advertise in all languages “as part of a larger non-selective advertising campaign,” the guidance added.
The latest directive issued by Craig Trainor, assistant secretary of HUD’s FHEO office, claims the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome Guidance invited “landlords and property managers to unlawfully favor Afghan refugees over native-born American rental applicants,” underscoring the credit check exemption for all immigrants.
Trainor argues the Biden-era guidance “emboldens housing providers to discriminate on the basis of national origin – namely, by giving preferential treatment to Afghan refugees over American citizens.”
“Interagency FAQ contains interpretations and conclusions of law inconsistent with the Fair Housing Act and Title VI. Accordingly, those documents never should have been issued,” Trainor concluded.

Government unions across the country spent more than $900 million during the 2023-2024 election cycle, according to a new report.
The Commonwealth Foundation’s most recent report found the top four public sector unions: the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees spent over $915 million on politics during the 2023-2024 cycle.
The unions spent $755 million on federal elections and policies while their state affiliates spent $160 million on state races and policies. California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington saw the highest amount spent on state races with a total of $105 million of union spending.
Almost $650 million came from union members’ dues, which makes up more than 85% of what the unions spent on national politics. The remaining amount of money came from the unions’ political action committees.
“Union executives appear more willing than ever to use members’ dues money – not just voluntary PAC dollars – to get their friends elected and progressive causes funded,” said David Osborne, senior director of Labor Policy for the Commonwealth Foundation.
The report found that 95.8% of donations for state-level candidates went toward Democrats. On the federal level, 98.8% of union donations went to Democrats.
The four unions donated $5 million to President Joe Biden’s campaign, according to the report. Biden was eventually replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris.
When looking at the state breakdown, Illinois’ public sector union officials spent $29.9 million, more than what union officials spent in any other state. In 2023, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson received more than $5.5 million from the government employee unions, according to the report.
Followed by the spending in Illinois, union officials spent $25.8 million on political initiatives in California; $18.6 million in Washington; $17.9 million in Massachusetts; and $12.8 million in Pennsylvania.
“Workers deserve to know how their hard-earned money is spent by their union leaders. Union influence across the nation should be earned through member participation, not by shady back-door money shuffling through PACs and affiliated group contributions,” Osborne said.
The report also analyzed union spending toward causes and organizations not directly involved with elections. The unions donated $18 million to the For our Future Action Fund; $935,150 to the NAACP; and $100,000 to Protect Constitutional Abortion Rights.
“Now, union members are unwittingly propping up left-leaning candidates and progressive causes like abortion, critical race theory, and defunding the police,” Osborne said.
The Commonwealth Foundation used publicly available data, including federal and state finance reporting and union filings to compile the report.
“It’s due time that government unions’ hidden agendas face much-needed accountability as they try to win states through the wallets of unsuspecting workers,” Osborne said.

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide on Friday whether to consider a case allowing state and local governments to sue fossil fuel companies for alleged damages related to climate change.
The court will decide whether to hear arguments in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The case, originating in Colorado, centers around a City of Boulder and Boulder County lawsuit in state court against Suncor Energy claiming it misled the public in its activities that led to climate change effects.
Lawyers for Suncor Energy argue that allowing a case like this one to play out goes against protections in the Clean Air Act that prevent lawsuits from occurring against emitters from across state lines.
“Seeking injury in the form of physical harms allegedly caused by global emissions, as petitioners do, is just an indirect method of regulating interstate and international emissions,” lawyers for the oil company wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court.
Christopher Mills, founder of Spero Law, said the lawsuit relies heavily on “nuisance laws” which are used to charge a neighbor who is doing something to lower the value of an individual’s property.
“They’re trying to use state and local tort law to affect policy change about climate change,” Mills said.
Mills said Congress should be regulating issues related to climate change and causing policy shifts instead of the court system.
“The reason these cases have been brought, other than just money, is because some people are frustrated that Congress hasn’t done something on climate change,” Mills said. “The goal here is to affect national policy rather than actually provide any sort of traditional remedy for a local nuisance.”
“Through their advertising, [petitioners] have for decades intentionally misled the public about the impacts of climate change and the role that [petitioners’] fossil fuel products have played in exacerbating those impacts,” a filing to the Supreme Court reads.
Lawyers for Boulder County and the City of Boulder argued that states and municipalities should be allowed to address harms caused by activities which exacerbated climate change.
“There is no constitutional bar to states addressing in-state harms caused by out-of-state conduct, be it the negligent design of an automobile or sale of asbestos,” the filing to the Supreme Court reads.
Cases against fossil fuel companies for alleged impacts of climate change have popped up across the country with varying results.
A South Carolina judge tossed a lawsuit the city of Charleston filed against two dozen oil and gas companies.
In October, justices on the Maryland Supreme Court appeared skeptical of a similar lawsuit seeking to go after fossil fuel companies.
The court considered three separate cases from the Baltimore, Annapolis and Anne Arundel counties against fossil fuel companies, including the British oil and gas company BP. The cases claim fossil fuel companies concealed information about their products’ contributions to climate change.
“It seems like your theory of injury and relief are all tied and necessary for relief on international emissions,” said Justice Brynja Booth.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Friday over whether to hear this case could have far reaching implications for various pieces of litigation across the country.
“I think the problem’s especially severe because courts would be asked to put a price tag on the cost of one energy company’s contributions to global climate change,” Mills said.

Some U.S. lawmakers are already taking issue with the final negotiated version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, the must-pass annual funding bill for the Pentagon that the House will vote on this week.
The $901 billion compromise legislation is $8 billion more than the White House requested, but $24 billion less than the Senate’s version of the bill. Some Republican House members still aren’t satisfied with the high price tag; and appropriators still have to approve the topline number.
“Funding foreign aid and foreign wars is America Last and is beyond excuse anymore,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted on social media. “I would love to fund our military but refuse to support foreign aid and foreign militaries and foreign wars. I am here and will be voting NO.”
The bill includes comparatively little spending on foreign conflicts, authorizing $120 million to support Israel and extending Ukraine aid by $400 million. It also repeals the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force for Iraq.
A significant portion, $142 billion, goes toward research and development of new technologies, including biotechnology, hypersonic weapons and artificial intelligence.
The NDAA also invests $38 billion for aircraft, $34 billion for nuclear defense, $26 billion for shipbuilding, $25 billion for munitions and $900 million to combat drug trafficking.
Military members would receive a 3.8% pay raise and $1.4 billion is set aside for the construction of barracks and family housing, while hundreds of millions are allocated for new childcare centers and schools. About $577 million will go towards renovating military hospitals and building new medical facilities.
Most of the NDAA’s content is bipartisan. In fact, some provisions — such as cutting $1.6 billion in climate change-related spending and directing the intelligence community to review, and if possible declassify, intelligence about the origins of COVID-19 — are explicitly Republican asks.
But three more Republicans have already come out against the bill because it fails to include a ban on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which they worry would give the federal government too much power over the spending and finances of Americans.
“Deeds not words. CBDC inserts the government between you and your money then sets conditions on your access to it to corrupt money into a tool for surveillance, coercion, and control,” Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, posted on social media Tuesday. “[W]e need and were promised a law.”
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, reposted a statement from fellow Texan Republican Rep. Keith Self calling for GOP leadership to “fix this bill IMMEDIATELY.”
Self also submitted an amendment Tuesday to add a CBDC ban to the bill, which he says he will not vote for otherwise.
“Promises were broken to include this language in the NDAA,” Self announced on X. “My amendment would fix the bill. The House Rules Committee meets later TODAY to decide if it gets a floor vote. I hope they do the right thing.”

Wisconsin schools spent 41% of the $1.49 billion in pandemic recovery federal funding on permanent salaries rather than temporary learning recovery solutions while allocating the funding slowly and without transparency, according to a new report.
The funding came as the state’s public schools added 2,141 staff while losing 47,092 students from 2019-2020 to 2024-2025, according to the in-depth spending analysis from the Institute for Reforming Government.
“It was a lack of guidance issue,” IRG Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon told TCS. “… It was a free-for-all, you could do mostly what you wanted to do and, as a result, districts backfilled expenses they wanted to have that they couldn’t afford with all the students leaving and that’s how we ended up with this situation.”
The result is that Wisconsin public schools had the most employees in state history in 2024-2025 while educating the fewest students it had since 1991-1992.
The IRG report analyzed 17,830 school district allocations from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund to evaluate the areas the additional pandemic funding was spent because the state and the Department of Public Instruction did not provide that information in a dashboard like many other states did, instead updating the spending in a long series of PDFs that were not meaningfully categorized, the analysis showed.
“Some states had very transparent live dashboards where every month they update the numbers and here’s a pie chart showing what we did on our website,” Klabon said. “DPI did not do that. They created just a webpage with 450 PDFs. They didn’t say which one was updated, so you wouldn’t know if it was updated if you didn’t know what to look for. There were over 18,000 line items of allocations that district had.”
The IRG numbers are available in a searchable district-based report.
The state’s schools had two years to allocate the funding, with districts accepting an extra $1,745.98 per public-school student over two years. Districts had allocated just 34% of the funding in the first six months of the program and 79% through the first 17 months in a program intended to combat pandemic learning loss.
A Harvard study showed Wisconsin schools ranked 30th in reading recovery and 16th in math.
Specific allocation examples included Milwaukee spending $193 million on construction projects, including athletics facilities and renovations at schools likely to close.
IRG said that the funding should have been used for one-time needs such as curriculum purchases, technology upgrades, deferred renovations and short-burst tutoring rather than spending it on permanent staffing increases.
“I think, when you add an employee or two every year and it adds up to 10 or 20 over the decade or, when you lose students and you don’t realize you have more adults per student than you’ve ever had in Wisconsin history, by a long shot, I just don’t think they think of that historical understanding,” Klabon said. “So they look at their budgets and they’re running out of money … A lot more districts need to understand that this is the result of choices that have added up over the years.”

Lawsuit abuse and judicial bias are two of the main reasons why Los Angeles was identified as the worst “judicial hellhole” in the country, according to a national report released Tuesday by the American Tort Reform Foundation.
The report is issued every year by the foundation to analyze personal injury and wrongful death lawsuit verdicts, causes of those verdicts and real-world implications.
Report author Tiger Joyce found three civil lawsuits pushed Los Angeles to the top of the judicial hellholes list. One of those involved the family of an 88-year-old woman who was diagnosed with mesothelioma before her death. That family was awarded $1 billion by the defendant, Johnson & Johnson, after the court issued a decision that held the company liable for manufacturing a baby powder that the woman had used since the 1930s.
“We believe the award was certainly excessive, but beyond that, it was driven by what we call ‘junk science,’ ” Joyce told The Center Square Tuesday. “That award really jumped out at us.”
Other cases that resulted in excessive amounts of money being awarded to plaintiffs, which the ATR Foundation called “nuclear verdicts,” were also detailed in the report that puts Los Angeles at the top of the “judicial hellhole” list. “Nuclear verdicts,” or verdicts in lawsuits where the plaintiffs are awarded $10 million or more, included one case where a plaintiff was awarded $50 million after he was said to have spilled coffee on his lap when picking up an order at a Starbucks drive-through window.
According to the ATR Foundation, Starbucks will likely pay that plaintiff closer to $61 million once prejudgement interest and other costs are included. That plaintiff will be paid $1 million a year for the rest of his life, the foundation said on the report’s website.
Another case between Ford Motor Co. and Knight Law Firm alleged fraud on the part of the law firm. Officials with Ford in that case accused lawyers at Knight Law Firm of falsifying time sheets, according to the ATR Foundation.
The foundation’s annual report is important, Joyce said, because court problems affects affordability both nationally and in communities with a judicial hellhole.
“So there’s a variety of matters building on a significant number of broader issues that were violated over the years, but that’s what drove us to put Los Angeles at the top of the hellhole list this year,” Joyce told The Center Square. “It’s not just an academic or legal issue. Lawsuit abuse is something that affects the cost of everyday activity for all Americans, but particularly in a judicial hellhole.”
The report also noted California and Florida together are tied for producing the most nuclear verdicts in the country between 2013 and 2022. The two states are followed in the report by New York and Texas.