Ad Orientem

Report: US has largely exhausted its stockpile of long range missiles in Iran War

2026-08-04T22:19:13.048-04:00

Washington — The U.S. has used nearly all of its global stockpile of long-range precision missiles during the war with Iran, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell CBS News.

Specifically, the U.S. has used virtually all of its Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS, and Precision Strike Missiles, the sources said. Reuters was first to report that the U.S. had used "virtually all" of its long-range precision missiles during Operation Epic Fury.

CBS News has previously reported that the U.S. has dwindling stockpiles of defensive interceptors and long-range missiles, which has become a pressure point within the administration, and that the U.S. cannot sustain the rate at which it expended precision munitions early in the war with Iran.

U.S. officials said there are limited inventories of the ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles, and that the most pressing concern involves the number of Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, which have been used faster than the industry can replace them.

Read the rest here.

What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right

2026-08-03T23:31:44.460-04:00

“You can never institutionalize the gut instincts of a great, heroic populist like Donald Trump, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Andrew Jackson,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, told me this spring. “But the point is that, moving forward, on the evening of Jan. 20, 2029, President Trump will have left the stage. We as conservatives have to answer the question, Where is this movement going? And what it can’t do — what it must not do — is go back to 20 years ago.”

The Heritage Foundation currently finds itself engulfed in an internal struggle that mirrors the one roiling the Republican Party: how to harness the energy unleashed by Trumpism without being completely overrun by its conspiracy- and nativist-minded elements, particularly among the rising generation that has known little else. Long accustomed to placing its experts in key positions in Republican administrations, as it did in Trump’s first term, Heritage presented its Project 2025 as just the kind of master plan an uncompromising second Trump administration would need to implement its agenda.

But once Trump took office, Heritage was instead pushed to the side. As it tried to work its way back into the center of power, the foundation was consumed by a vicious in-house conflict. An old guard of establishment experts saw themselves swamped by an influx of more radical, often younger conservatives eager to remake the institution for the post-Trump right in their image: terminally online, ruthless in fighting the culture wars and vehement in rejecting the dogmas of postwar conservatism.

A watershed moment came last October, when Roberts posted a video to X in support of Tucker Carlson, who had been widely criticized for inviting the 27-year-old white nationalist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes onto his show. Condemnations flooded in from across the right, with several of Carlson’s closest allies breaking with him over his decision to turn his show into what one of them, the Israeli American philosopher Yoram Hazony, recently called “the leading clearinghouse for virulent antisemitism on the political right.” Roberts leapt to Carlson’s defense, denouncing the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and arguing that conservatives should “feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class” and the “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts later apologized to Heritage staff for his choice of words, which some had criticized as playing into antisemitic tropes, and for having “let down this institution.” But when I asked him about the video, he insisted that it was Heritage’s job to figure out how to bring together a coalition that can win elections and exercise power effectively. Roberts, who is 52, projects a friendly, confident energy. He was wearing a fitted blue suit along with alligator-style cowboy boots, in keeping with his years as president of Wyoming Catholic College. Before taking over at Heritage in 2021, his pitch to the board of trustees, according to The Dispatch, was that he could marry the conservative movement’s new populist ethos with a traditional institution like Heritage. “You can’t have a governing coalition if you’re saying, I’m not even going to talk to people who occasionally listen to a podcast by someone who’s a total goofball,” he went on, referring to Fuentes. “That doesn’t mean that we endorse what that person says. We endorse trying to convince these people of what’s right, and what isn’t right.”

Many employees and experts at Heritage appeared to disagree with the premise that such people belonged in their coalition, and especially that anyone was trying to set them right. Longtime Heritage employees told me that the people they usually collaborated with in congressional offices, circuit courts, foreign embassies and other institutions no longer wanted to be publicly associated with Heritage and what they perceived as its fidelity to Carlson. In a resignation letter later made public, Josh Blackman, a legal scholar who had for years been working on a new edition of “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” said the volume’s contributors pulled out of an event promoting the book and refused to sign copies. Judges who had spoken at the foundation, Blackman wrote, said “they would no longer affiliate with Heritage.”

Read the rest here.

The DSA Envisions a ‘World Without Prisons,’ but Not One Without Camps

2026-07-31T02:03:48.336-04:00

The list of things the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish is long: federal immigration enforcement agencies and the borders they police, the Pentagon, the Senate, the Electoral College, the two-party system, and the Constitution’s separation of powers among them. But it’s the existence of America’s prisons, and the justice system that consigns convicts to incarceration, that seems to irritate the DSA’s vanguard most.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for “prison abolition” designed to “abolish our carceral system.” The Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district, Darializa Avila Chevalier, couldn’t agree more. “I am an abolitionist and oppose reform that entrenches the expansion of the carceral state,” she wrote. CNN described Zohran Mamdani as “evasive” when the New York City mayor was asked whether he sought the end of incarceration as we know it. “There are prisons,” he replied with remarkable obtuseness when asked if there “should be” prisons. Mamdani skeptics were probably not persuaded that he had abandoned his longtime confusion over the “purpose” of prisons.

Of course, defunding the police is part and parcel of this campaign. “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for Wisconsin governor, Francesca Hong, once insisted. Such reforms are a sine qua non if we are to realize her “perfect world,” which “would be a world without prisons.”

The press rather gently describes these views as “ambitious” or even “aspirational,” but the DSA’s most notable agitators are not dealing in metaphors. It would be foolish, however, to expect DSA candidates to “explain the nuances of prison abolition in a hostile media environment,” the Maoist influencer Hasan Piker brooded. “We need far more political education, power [and] credibility before we get there.”

Some of the DSA’s candidates appear to struggle with the concept of criminality itself. For her part, Chevalier agonized over the impossible moral conundrum presented by murder, and whether punishing the murderer renders us complicit in some cosmic injustice. And yet, for all the DSA’s hostility toward the conventional methods for punishing criminals, most of them can still summon passion for prosecuting crime as they define it.

Read the rest here.

Why Trump is Afraid of International Law

2026-07-30T17:45:46.321-04:00

President Donald Trump and his aides rarely go easy on their perceived enemies. But their attacks on the International Criminal Court — describing it as, among other things, filled with “lunatics” and pledging to destroy it — are hyperbolic enough that you have to wonder:

Are they afraid the court will prosecute them?

That’s the conclusion many former government officials and legal scholars are reaching. They point not only to Trump’s anti-ICC campaign but also his administration’s broader efforts to defund, abandon or otherwise damage a range of global mechanisms that enforce human rights laws, from treaties to United Nations organizations.

Those moves come as the Trump administration is accused of a series of abuses, from killing Iranian schoolchildren to deporting asylum-seekers. At the same time, Trump is going to great lengths to protect his backers from domestic justice, including through his extensive use of pardons.

“They’re doing everything they can to evade accountability as they attack the very institutions and advocates charged with holding rights abusers to account,” said Uzra Zeya, a former Biden administration official who is now president of Human Rights First.

Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department deny such assertions. In statements to me, they reiterated complaints that the ICC threatens U.S. sovereignty and cast their campaign against it as squarely within Trump’s America First agenda.

“All of the administration’s actions are lawful and in line with the agenda that President Trump was elected to implement,” stressed Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House.

But when it comes to the ICC in particular, Shakespeare might say the administration “doth protest too much.” By wildly overstating the court’s power, it is feeding the notion that it is genuinely worried.

Read the rest here.

New York City's Loyal Opposition

2026-07-29T11:43:52.507-04:00

Reihan Salam has a lot in common with the man he is trying to stop.

They went to rival New York City public high schools. Both are South Asian Muslim men with a talent for remembering faces and names. Mr. Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, and his democratic socialist foil, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both favor merch embroidered with the same 1970s cursive City of New York insignia.

They share something else. They are convinced that their beloved city is in crisis. For the mayor, the crisis is affordability. For Mr. Salam, the crisis is Mr. Mamdani.

“You have a couple of decades of prosperity that are slipping away,” said Mr. Salam, 46, who lives with his family in a Brooklyn neighborhood that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Mamdani. “We are squandering this incredible opportunity to show that urban life can work.”

He fears that many of his fellow New Yorkers have been seduced by what he sees as the mayor’s vilification of the city’s wealthiest residents and misled by Mr. Mamdani’s vision of free buses, free child care and frozen rent. He believes the mayor’s big plans to subsidize the costs of city life for even well-off New Yorkers (“unlimited welfarism for the near-rich,” Mr. Salam calls it) could steer New York City into a financial tailspin reminiscent of the dark days of the 1970s.

To counter all that, Mr. Salam is trying to make the Manhattan Institute, a think tank with a roster of New York City obsessives, the intellectual engine of the resistance.

Slowing down the mayor and his popular movement will be no easy task, as others have discovered. The city’s vaunted business elite spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade voters that Mr. Mamdani’s ideas about capitalism and Israel were too radical for New York, without success. The Democratic establishment has largely been cowed by the mayor’s political strength. Elected Republicans are so outnumbered in New York that they have no real power to stop him.

Neither does the Manhattan Institute. Over a half-century, the organization has lobbied constantly for shrinking the city’s sprawling bureaucracy and letting private industry work its magic. The election of a democratic socialist marks a low point for the institute in New York, where its project has never been further from the halls of power.

But Mr. Salam, its president since 2019, sees an opportunity. Mr. Mamdani’s electric campaign has created unusual interest in big ideas about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to administering government in the city.

Where some right-wing critics have caricatured the mayor as a communist, a jihadist and a candidate for deportation, Mr. Salam and his fellow conservative urbanists are testing a less hyperbolic approach. They have taken direct aim at Mr. Mamdani’s policy agenda, deploying deep knowledge of city history and policy expertise to try to serve as a voice of skepticism whispering in the city’s collective ear.

Do people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year really need free child care?

Read the rest here.

The DSA is the political equivalent to the Flat Earth Society. They are not serious people. The MI on the other hand is a refreshingly sober group of people offering cogent alternatives to the fringe platform of the DSA and its followers.

Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him

2026-07-24T14:49:52.306-04:00

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The stunning admission offered an unvarnished glimpse into the way President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

Read the rest here.

The Problem With Middle Class Socialism

2026-07-24T08:35:01.494-04:00

Have you heard the news? The socialists are winning. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, having won their respective Democratic primaries in deep-blue congressional districts, are set to become members of the U.S. House. So is 29-year-old Melat Kiros, who recently stunned the party by knocking out 15-term Colorado Representative Diana DeGette by 13 points.

All of them are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The group, which went from obscurity in the 1980s to a Beltway punchline in the 2010s, now holds more than 250 offices in 40 states. Say what you will about DSA, but it’s is no longer a fringe organization.

I mention all this not to relitigate the merits of rent freezes, Medicare for All, abolishing the police, or government-run grocery stores. I agree with many of the group’s positions and with the underlying conviction that American society needs to be rebuilt from the foundation up. Which is exactly why DSA’s rise worries me. For it to truly succeed, and become a nationwide movement that transforms American politics, it will have to do more than fight on behalf the “working class” and actually start resembling the working class.

Appeals to the working class are rampant in the DSA. Mamdani, who acknowledges his “privileged upbringing,” is fond of saying, “I fight for working people.” Valdez, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who left a program assistant job at Columbia University to join the New York State Assembly, declared on the night of her primary victory that she would be “a fighting force for the entire working class.” Chevalier, who had a poor upbringing but went on to become a Columbia graduate and now a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CUNY, describes herself as a “working-class Dominican New Yorker.”

But here’s the problem: They don’t fit the part. Their finances may or may not equate with the working class, but they’re not working class. Sure, they might “work to pay … bills,” which Mamdani, rather squirrelly, has said is “one definition of being a part of the working class.” But that expansive definition won’t fly with most observers—especially not those whom we commonly think of as working class, which is to say non-college-educated workers who rely on an hourly wage. Rather, these DSA politicians are part, as their hipster glasses convey all too well, of the college-educated creative class. And that’s true of the DSA broadly. It simply is not a working-class organization.

If history is any indication, that’s cause for concern. George Orwell diagnosed the problem nearly a century ago. In 1936, with socialism in retreat amid fascist takeovers in Europe, he was sent north by the Left Book Club to document working-class life in industrial England. He came back not with the tidy indictment of capitalism his publisher was expecting but with The Road to Wigan Pier, half of which presented a devastating account of English coal-mining poverty, and the other half a lengthy, still-controversial essay about why working people, the miners themselves, didn’t like socialists.

It wasn’t that the miners disagreed with socialist principles, Orwell said. Instead, he pointed to the obvious fact of the class divide, diagnosing the problem of “middle-class” socialism: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

It remains one of the great insults in English political writing, and it still gets at the heart of the matter today, as it relates to the question of class solidarity. “I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists,” Orwell added, a little more soberly, “and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.”

Read the rest here.

Call the Veep, Agent Mulder!

2026-07-21T20:31:23.388-04:00

Somewhere around the two-hour mark in JD Vance’s nearly three-hour podcast interview last week with Joe Rogan, the pair got into a serious conversation about supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena. By serious, I mean it in the sense that Rogan seemed to take the subject seriously while Vance cynically, or cretinously, or cravenly, or credulously or conspiratorially — or perhaps it’s all of the above — played along with him.

It contained the following insights from the vice president of the United States:

“If we’re talking about an extraterrestrial being that is humanlike, but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want, but I think there’s a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.”

And:

“If you’re looking for me to concede the point that there is something different or could be something different between an angel, a demon, a space alien, a supernatural but non-any-of-those-other-things beings, yes, I concede that.”

And:

“I got two-and-a-half more years as V.P., and I swear to you, if there are little green men, like body remains, I’m not going to text you. I’m going to try to smuggle a camera in and get a photo of these things.”

Call the veep, Agent Mulder!

By this point, the two men had already propounded one conspiracy theory — that the Los Angeles mayoral election had been rigged (a claim previously debunked by a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor); followed by Vance’s accusation that Joe Biden’s staff got him to eat ice cream “in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable” (a remarkable way of turning naked mendacity into adolescent prurience into another conspiracy theory); followed by an exchange about eating corn dogs in public (because, you know); followed by an argument about whether the Ten Commandments should be mandated in Texas public schools, in which neither man appeared to be aware that the commandments are not originally Christian.

Read the rest here.

Russia Halts Bond Auctions

2026-07-21T17:54:01.126-04:00

Russia's Finance Ministry has suspended federal government bond auctions indefinitely as borrowing costs climb and investor demand weakens, complicating efforts to finance a widening wartime budget deficit.

The ministry said on Monday it was halting its regular weekly auctions of government bonds, known as OFZs, "to facilitate the stabilization of market conditions." It did not say when sales would resume, saying only that it would announce their restart at a later date.

OFZs are ruble-denominated government bonds that underpin Russia's financial system. They are the government's primary source of domestic borrowing to cover budget deficits, while banks hold them to manage daily cash needs and foreign investors buy them for returns.

The Finance Ministry has relied heavily on domestic borrowing to help finance a budget deficit that reached 5.7 trillion rubles ($72.39 billion) at the end of June, while military spending continues to outpace initial government plans.

Prices of OFZs have fallen sharply since mid-June. The RGBI government bond index has dropped from around 119 points to about 110, its lowest level this year, while yields on bonds with maturities longer than 10 years have climbed above 16.5%.

Read the rest here.

Nuns Challenge NY Assisted Suicide Counseling Mandate

2026-07-21T11:05:34.755-04:00

Last week, four Orders of Catholic Sisters along with the Catholic Diocese and Bishop of Rockville Centre, New York, filed suit in a New York federal district court challenging, at least as applied to them, the constitutionality of New York's Medical Aid in Dying Act as it interacts with the state's Palliative Care Information Act. Labelling these a "Suicide Counseling Mandate", the 102-page complaint (full text) in Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, Inc. v. James, (ND NY, filed 7/17/2026) alleges in part:

Read the rest here.

Nicaragua's Dictator Danial Ortega: “There won’t be anymore elections..."

2026-07-20T20:37:39.603-04:00

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega said his country won’t be holding elections anytime soon, a statement underscoring the strongman’s efforts to extend his nearly 20-year rule and dashing hopes by the opposition that he might heed their demands for a democratic vote.

The announcement effectively canceled Nicaragua’s next elections, originally scheduled for November 2027 after the government-controlled Congress voted in January 2025 to extend the five-year presidential term by one year.

Ortega spoke on Sunday at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution that toppled the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and first brought him to power. He returned to the presidency in 2007 and has since rewritten the constitution, crushed political opposition and solidified his control over virtually all branches of the Nicaraguan government.

Since mass protests in 2018, which led to a bloody government crackdown that killed hundreds, Ortega and his wife and co-President Rosario Murillo have been holding on to power.

Ortega declared himself the winner of the 2021 election — a vote widely viewed as illegitimate by the international community — after jailing all the candidates who could have possibly beaten him. The U.S. does not recognize Ortega’s presidency.

“There won’t be anymore elections,” Ortega said in a speech railing on his longtime adversary, the United States. “Parties put in place by the Yankees, put in place by the Somoza regime, coming back to power — that story is over.”

Read the rest here

The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History, by the Numbers

2026-07-18T22:16:04.937-04:00

Ask historians or laymen to name the most blatantly corrupt pardon over the first 230 years or so of American presidenting, and most will likely arrive at the same answer: Marc Rich.

Rich, a multiple-passport-holding, proudly amoral oil trader who specialized in sanctions-circumventing commerce with the likes of Nicolae Ceaușescu and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fled to Switzerland in 1983 rather than face a potential life sentence and $1.6 million in fines on 65 counts of wire fraud, trading with the enemy, and tax evasion. (It was the biggest tax evasion case to date in U.S. history, at $48 million—around $150 million today.) Yet Bill Clinton, in the final minutes of his presidency, gifted Rich a midnight pardon.

All normal pardon protocols had been circumvented. The Justice Department was blindsided, and the longtime fugitive—a veteran of the FBI's Most Wanted List—had never expressed the customary remorse. Reporting soon revealed that Rich's ex-wife, the songwriter Denise Rich, had donated $1.1 million (roughly $2.3 million in 2026 dollars) to Democratic causes during the Clinton presidency, including (in nominal dollars) $450,000 to the Clinton Library, $120,000 for Hillary Clinton's Senate race, and $25,000 to Al Gore's Florida recount effort. "Not just a large donor," Sen. Russell Feingold (D–Wisc.) noted at the time, but "a huge donor."

Rich's last-ditch clemency drew widespread bipartisan condemnation. "Disgraceful," judged former President Jimmy Carter. Added New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The fact that Bill Clinton and Eric Holder engineered a pardon for him—without input from me, as the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted him, or Janet Reno, as Attorney General, will forever be a blemish on our justice system."

You have likely never heard the name Trevor Milton, yet in a couple of key respects his 2025 pardon by President Donald Trump was worse. The founding CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola Corporation, Milton in 2022 was convicted on three counts of investor fraud that could have brought him four years in prison and a staggering $676 million worth of mandated restitution to shareholders. Among his more notorious stunts was a 2018 promotional video of a supposedly functional prototype Nikola truck that was not in fact operational but had instead been rolled down a desert hill. Milton, represented in court by the brother of then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, was still awaiting final sentencing when he got the call from Trump announcing an unconditional pardon, no restitution (or remorse) required. When asked about the clemency, the president said: "They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president….He supported Trump. He liked Trump." Milton and his wife, The Wall Street Journal reported, had donated "at least $3.2 million to Trump's 2024 election and to political groups and people in Trump's orbit." The couple had not previously demonstrated a financial interest in politics.

Milton's family paid more in political donations than Rich's. He had exponentially more in fines and restitutions taken off the table, and he has spent his post-clemency life not in humiliated exile but in lavish Washington excess, hobnobbing with the president and Cabinet members at investment conferences and black-tie events to gin up interest in his latest schemes. Such is the rule, not the exception: When it comes to plausibly pay-for-play pardons, Trump in his second term makes Bill Clinton and every other president look like pikers.

Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who'd pled guilty to spending his employees' federal tax withholdings on such baubles as a $2 million yacht, was in May 2025 on the verge of commencing an 18-month sentence and paying $4.4 million in fines when Trump issued his get-out-of-jail-free card. On his pardon application, Walczak made the explicit pitch that his mother, Elizabeth Fago, had raised millions of dollars for Trump and the GOP in 2024 campaigns, and additionally assisted the president by publicizing embarrassing revelations from the diary of President Joe Biden's daughter Ashley. Less than three weeks before the pardon, Fago accepted an invitation to attend a million-dollar-per-head fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, crowned by a one-on-one with the president.

Trump's second-term pardons and sentence commutations have wiped away more than $2 billion in fines and restitutions. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2025 that the president's forgiveness spree "has spawned a pardon-shopping industry where lobbyists say their going rate is $1 million." The Atlantic in June 2026 set the updated price at $2 million. Whereas Bill Clinton conceded within 15 months that the Marc Rich clemency had been a mistake (even while hotly denying that political donations had anything to do with it; he claims to have been persuaded by testimony from high-profile Israelis such as Ehud Barak), the always-unapologetic Trump barely feigns interest in the process, even while his family and Cabinet members forge business deals with the ex-cons and their companies.

Queried by 60 Minutes in October 2025 as to why he had just pardoned Changpeng Zhao—the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who had already served four months in prison and had his company pay $4.3 billion for money laundering—Trump said: "I have no idea who he is." The president might have asked his son Don Jr., who had recently introduced his dad to Zhao's pardon lobbyist and in the preceding months had contracted Binance to exclusively host and build the blockchain technology for the Trump family crypto trading platform World Liberty Financial. (That company's stablecoin, USD1, was used in May 2025 as the currency for a $2 billion investment into Binance by the United Arab Emirates company MGX, a transaction that, according to The Wall Street Journal, "rocketed USD1 up the rankings of largest stablecoins," thereby "pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.") When asked about the controversial clemency, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a one-size-fits-all denial: "Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest."

Read the rest here.

Trump calls for revocation of ABC, NBC licenses over speech snub

2026-07-17T08:14:48.909-04:00

President Donald Trump said TV networks that did not feature live coverage of his primetime address on election security should have their broadcast licenses revoked.

CNN, ABC and NBC opted against live coverage of the speech in which Trump claimed China illegally accessed millions of voter files as part of a broader effort to manipulate U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020.

Other outlets, including CBS, MS NOW and Fox News, chose to broadcast the speech at least in part. NBC and ABC aired Trump’s remarks on their streaming channels.

Trump called out NBC and ABC during his remarks, accusing the networks of covering up what he labeled election fraud.

“In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about,” he said. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”

TV networks are not required to air presidential remarks in primetime. Past presidents have traditionally reserved such major addresses for national crises or critical moments. Outlets have traditionally provided live coverage, but there have been exceptions.

Multiple networks declined in 2022 to broadcast President Joe Biden’s address on threats to democracy. ABC, CBS and NBC did not air President Barack Obama’s 2014 primetime speech on immigration.

Read the rest here.

Prince of Lichtenstein Will Veto Bill Legalizing Abortion

2026-07-17T08:08:04.008-04:00

(ZENIT News / Guadalajara, Mexico, 07.09.2026).- In a Europe where monarchies generally retain a strictly ceremonial role, the small Principality of Liechtenstein serves as an exception. Its Prince Regent and heir, Alois of Liechtenstein, recently announced that he will veto the proposed abortion law reform if it successfully clears the parliamentary process.

This move reignites a debate the country experienced fifteen years ago. The proposed initiative seeks to introduce a law allowing abortion within a specific timeframe, specifically, during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Currently, Liechtenstein’s legislation permits exceptions only when there is a serious threat to the pregnant woman’s life or health, or when the pregnancy is the result of a sexual crime. In an interview with the newspaper Liechtensteiner Vaterland, Prince Alois, a practicing Catholic, recently announced that he would not sanction the proposed reform. «The protection of unborn life represents a fundamental social and ethical value,» he stated, adding that the proposal did not sufficiently guarantee «the fundamental legal interest of protecting life.»

This is not the first time the heir to the throne has intervened so directly in this debate. In 2011, a similar initiative proposed legalizing abortion during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy and included provisions for cases involving severe fetal disabilities. Even before the public vote took place, Prince Alois announced that he would exercise his right of veto if the reform were to pass. Ultimately, this proved unnecessary. In the referendum held in September of that year, 52.3% of voters rejected the proposal; consequently, the Prince did not have to resort to one of the prerogatives that distinguish the Liechtenstein monarchy from other European Royal Houses.Liechtenstein’s Constitution grants significant powers to the country’s Monarch, following a 2003 referendum initiated by Prince Alois’s father, Prince Hans-Adam II. These powers include the authority to veto laws passed by Parliament, dismiss the elected government, and appoint judges; consequently, although it is a constitutional monarchy in practice, it is often described as a unique absolute monarchy within Europe. This power is held by Prince Alois, who has served as Regent since 2004.

Read the rest here.

Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement'

2026-07-17T07:40:44.366-04:00

"I'm his lawyer," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: "Was his lawyer," he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche's nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump's personal interests?

Probably the latter, judging from Blanche's central role in Trump's brazenly corrupt "settlement agreement" with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the "improper" product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers' expense.

One of those favors was a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund," which was designed to reward the president's allies and supporters by compensating them for their alleged persecution by the Biden administration. Blanche approved that scheme and repeatedly defended it. But it provoked an intense bipartisan backlash that persuaded him to ditch the plan two weeks after announcing it.

Read the rest here.

Nearly Half of House Democrats Vote to End Aid to Israel

2026-07-15T18:11:34.103-04:00

Nearly half of House Democrats voted to cut off aid to Israel Wednesday, underscoring a seismic shift in political support for the longtime U.S. ally.

The amendment to a State Department spending bill would have eliminated $3.3 billion in funding, and thanks to strong Republican support for the Jewish state, it failed 314-104. But the vote served as a moment of reckoning for House Democrats who have had to confront years of voter outrage about Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza.

Read the rest here.

Is Russia Actually Losing?

2026-07-11T12:43:30.971-04:00

Quote of the day...

2026-07-10T23:35:41.938-04:00

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.--We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them--they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their's was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How then shall we perform it?--At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide...

Read the rest here.

-Abraham Lincoln

The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:

Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois

January 27, 1838

CATO: A Familiar Pattern: White House Self-Dealing in US Trade & Investment Policy

2026-07-08T20:43:16.050-04:00

President Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure landed last week showing more than $2 billion in income, roughly triple 2024’s figure. Cryptocurrency alone accounted for $1.4 billion, most from meme-coin royalties and token sales tied to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial. Read against the deals cataloged below, the filing paints a sordid picture of self-dealing within the upper echelons of the White House—or at the very least, the appearance of such.

Read the rest here.

ISW: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 7, 2026

2026-07-08T19:16:10.714-04:00

Ukraine’s intermediate-range strike campaign against a multitude of diverse targets, including Russian air defenses, petroleum product transport, other logistics, and electrical substations, is collapsing logistics in occupied Crimea. Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) Commander Major Robert “Magyar” Brovdi reported on July 7 that Ukrainian forces struck eight Russian shadow fleet tankers, including the Venera-3, Sanar-1, Sanar-17, Klimena, Teti, Alexei Savrasov, Ivan Cheremisinov, and Penelopa tankers; one dry cargo ship; and one ferry in the Sea of Azov transporting gasoline to occupied Crimea on the night of July 6 to 7.[1] Brovdi implied that the strikes against the shadow fleet vessels will inhibit Russian efforts to transport gasoline to occupied Crimea, and a local Crimea-based Telegram also reported that the tankers were ferrying gasoline to Crimea.[2] NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) data shows two heat anomalies in the Sea of Azov north of the Kerch Strait on July 7.[3] Brovdi reported on July 7 that Ukrainian forces also struck 44 electrical facilities in occupied Crimea and occupied southern Ukraine between July 1 and 7.[4] Adviser to the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Serhii Sternenko, reported on July 7 that there are fires near the Saky 110 kV and Zakhidno-Krymska 330 kV substations, near the Saky railway station, and near a known S-400 air defense system position in occupied Crimea.[5] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on July 7 that Ukrainian forces also struck two railway bridges near occupied Rozdolne (either 110 or 214 kilometers from the frontline) and Ichki (roughly 257 kilometers from the frontline) that Russian forces used for logistics.[6]

Ukrainian Presidential Office in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea provided a summary on July 6 of Ukrainian strikes against occupied Crimea in June 2026, including on over 15 Russian air defense systems and radar stations; oil terminals in occupied Feodosia; oil tanks at the Kamysh-Burun Combined Heating and Power Plan in occupied Kerch; substations and the Tavriisk Thermal Power Plant in occupied Sevastopol; the Hlibiv underground gas storage facility in occupied Tarkhankhut; the Simferopol gas distribution station; transport and bridge infrastructure, particularly along the A-291 Kerch – Simferopol – Sevastopol – Tavrida and M-14 Rostov-Crimea highways; the Crimean Titan plant in occupied Armyansk; and Russian naval targets.[7] Advisor to the Crimean occupation head Oleg Kryuchkov stated on July 7 that Ukrainian strikes caused power outages in 18 raions in northern, central, western, and eastern occupied Crimea.[8] Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo stated on July 6 that the entirety of occupied Kherson Oblast is suffering from partial or complete power outages and declared a state of emergency on July 7.[9] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky similarly stated on July 6 that Ukrainian strikes caused some power outages in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[10] Crimea-based Russian telecommunications operators introduced emergency roaming in occupied Crimea as of July 7 so subscribers can connect to other operators’ networks in the event of a complete power outage.[11] Ukrainian forces have been recently intensifying their intermediate-range strike campaign against energy infrastructure, Russian military assets, and logistics in and to occupied Crimea in recent weeks, causing Russian officials to suspend railway service and limit road traffic. These strikes are degrading Russia’s air defense umbrella, impeding its ability to defend against strikes that are increasingly interdicting logistics, depriving Russia of the ability to transport fuel to occupied Crimea, exacerbating fuel shortages, and making it difficult to live and operate in the peninsula.[12]

Read the rest here.

Liturgy for the Feast of St. John of San Francisco

2026-07-04T20:27:28.259-04:00

Happy 4th of July

2026-07-04T11:35:29.041-04:00

The SSPX: When negotiations are one sided

2026-07-03T13:21:52.597-04:00

Rorate Caeli has an excellent post on this history of the dialogue and relationship between Rome and the Society of St. Pius X. It closely aligns with my own view and I strongly recommend it. See also my own post a couple spots down on the blog. Obviously I am not Catholic and so have no dog in this fight. But it would seem to me that if Rome is serious about desiring some sort of reproachment with Orthodoxy, they could start by backing off the alarming claim that the pope has the authority to unilaterally suppress the 1500 year old liturgical patrimony of the Christian West. If such power is claimed over the Latin Rite, why would this super bishop with claimed universal jurisdiction not be able to do the same thing to the liturgical rites of the Christian East? To say that said claim would be a show stopper for any kind of serious dialogue aimed at restoration of communion should be so obvious as not to require further explanation.

Bloodier than Stalingrad: Number of casualties in Russo-Ukrainian war reaches 2 million

2026-07-02T20:49:48.273-04:00

Russia’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine has now cost the country some 450,000 lives, according to a new study that estimates the war’s total casualty numbers to have surpassed 2 million.

The research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates Russia has suffered 1.4 million casualties, including killed, wounded and missing soldiers – a stunning number that amounts to roughly 1% of the country’s population.

The losses are not spread evenly across Russia, with poorer areas and ethnic minorities suffering significantly higher casualty rates. Stories of male populations of small remote villages being virtually wiped out are becoming more common in Russian opposition media. And according to the study, Russia is currently unable to recruit new troops at the same rate as it is losing them.

“These rates are astounding,” Seth G. Jones and Riley McCabe, the authors of the study, said. “Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all US fatalities in all wars combined since World War II, and more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine is estimated to have endured between 525,000 and 625,000 casualties, including 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine release official casualty data, but the latest CSIS figures are broadly in line with western estimates.

Read the rest here.

Vatican Declares SSPX Schismatic

2026-07-02T09:51:34.295-04:00

No surprise. They consecrated bishops without permission and essentially dared Leo to do something about it. Making matters worse, this is a flagrant second offense after the SSPX asked Benedict XVI to lift the original excommunications. Which he did. The Holy See has made quite a few concessions to a group that since its inception has basically set itself up in judgement over the pope and hierarchy of their own church. So yeah, I think Leo basically saw this as a slap in the face and decided that it was time to, in his own words, "move on." Rome is clearly not inclined to leniency at this point. The entire society including its lay followers are subject to the excommunication. And Rome has issued fairly stringent conditions for their readmission to communion, on an individual and case by case basis. Reading between the lines, this suggests that the Vatican has given up on a corporate return of the Society.