- G. Elliot Morris at Strength in Numbers: New poll: Percent saying America on the “wrong track” hits new high.
- Via The Guardian: Oklahoma Republicans propose all state colleges must have Charlie Kirk statue. Recognizing that “legislative proposal” is a loooong way from the law, I am nonetheless struck by the ongoing attempted beatification of Charlie Kirk.
- Via NOTUS: Billions in Taxpayer Dollars Have Become Virtually Untraceable.
- Via Politico: Musk, Bannon and Thiel named in new Epstein estate documents.
- Via Politico: ‘They will pay a huge price for this’: Shutdown-ready Trump expects Democrats to blink.
- Via Politico: White House to agencies: Prepare mass firing plans for a potential shutdown.
- Via Politico: Inflation remains elevated. That won’t keep the Fed from cutting rates.
- By Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The Trump Murder Policy.
- Via The Atlantic: Fentanyl Doesn’t Come Through the Caribbean.
Last month, the U.S. cutter Hamilton returned to Florida with what the agency called “the largest quantity of drugs offloaded in Coast Guard history”: 61,740 pounds of cocaine and 14,400 pounds of marijuana (that’s the weight of about three city buses). The haul, gathered by multiple federal agencies during 19 seizure incidents in the Caribbean as well as the Pacific, had an estimated street value of $473 million. But there wasn’t any fentanyl on the boat.
Steve Roth, a Coast Guard lieutenant commander and spokesperson for the agency, wrote to me that Coast Guard crews confiscated a “historic amount of cocaine” during the 2025 fiscal year that ends this month, but no fentanyl.
By the way, record hauls like this fit directly into the kind of deja vu I mentioned in my post on the drug war. If year after year, decade after decade, you keep breaking seizure records, that is not, as it may sound at first, like a victory. It is just a sign that year after year, decade after decade, the indictment efforts aren’t working. Put another way: how impressive is a record if it keeps getting broken?
But the point about fentanyl is important, since it is a major rationale for Trump executing people without due process.
- More mafia-boss-like threats:
- It’s grifts all the way down.
