Regardless of the details of crime statistics in the District of Columbia . . .
The national government re-asserting control over the District of Columbia is nothing more than re-establishing the original structural setup of the United States Constitution.
It is not an indication of interest by the national government in taking control over any other metropolitan area.
It is not “unprecedented.”
Letitia James, Rogue Prosecutor
New York AG Letitia James told the public, even before she was elected, that she was going to legally prosecute Donald Trump. She filed a civil lawsuit for fraud in 2022, and claimed that his “scheme” was to gain more favorable lending conditions and insurance deals.
Now James will be investigated by the Department of Justice for her actions:
The Department of Justice convened a grand jury to investigate New York Attorney General Letitia James, marking an escalation in President Donald Trump’s fight with New York’s top prosecutor.
Celebrate America250: Siege of Fort Stanwix
August 2-22, 1777. British forces under Gen. St. Leger unsuccessfully besieged the strategic American Fort Stanwix on the Mohawk River in western New York.
While much of Revolutionary War history focuses on the battles between British regulars and Continental forces along the Atlantic Seaboard, there were many important battles on the frontier. The Siege of Fort Stanwix is one of those.
In 1777 the British Colonial Secretary Lord Germain and Gen. William Howe conceived a plan whereby British forces under Gen. Burgoyne would march south from Canada while Howe would send forces north from New York. By seizing the strategic crossings of the Hudson River, they would cut the troublesome New England colonies off from the rest of America. This plan failed in September and October 1777, when Gen. Horatio Gates defeated Burgoyne at the Battles of Saratoga, keeping the colonies physically united. However, an important subsidiary battle was fought in the Siege of Fort Stanwix.
The Zumwalt Prairie
The Zumwalt Prairie, located in the northeast corner of Oregon, is the largest remaining grassland of its type in North America.
Zumwalt Prairie is a grassland area located in Wallowa County in northeast Oregon, United States. Measuring 330,000 acres, much of the land is used for agriculture, with some portions protected as the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve owned by The Nature Conservancy.
Part of that portion is designated as a National Natural Landmark. The high elevation prairie is along the west edge of Hells Canyon on the Oregon-Idaho border. – from Wikipedia
On That You Can R’lyeh
This relates to the true facts of the case of the old English castle that was damaged during the recent storms. Sensitive types and clergymen in nearby villages reported strange dreams that night. If these accounts weren’t all of a piece, it would have been easier to dismiss. They spoke of “horrors” which came from the sea. But it was a nasty storm, and nerves (and tempers) are bound to get frayed at such times. Signs of a pitched battle were likewise dismissed as storm damage. And nobody knew quite what to make of what appeared to be a bronze helmet (which later disappeared) found nearby. The following account appeared in an esoteric magazine, purporting to be a true description of events of that night:
It makes for a pretty picture, the maid in armour on the battlements, hair flying back in the roaring winds howling along the entire coast, as she peers out into the murksome night. Roiling seas churning at the beach and the sea walls as, offshore, an eerie glowing rift seems to open up in the air.
The girl in the armour does two things in response to this. She lifts an old battle horn to her lips and draws an old, old sword. The sound of the horn blows out across the bay with a fearful echo just as the first … things writhe out of the waves. Along the battlements, empty just a moment before, dim outlines begin to appear, faint at first, but then more definite. And the sounding notes of the battle horn coalesce into a continuing thrum of music even after the horn is lowered again.
Am I a Dinosaur?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve rebelled against being a person who has to have the latest thing—the latest anything. Fortunately, my husband is of the same mindset. I’m not sure if that’s because of our modest upbringing, our similar value systems, or hating the idea of being like everyone else, but there you are.
I first remember experiencing this attitude when it came to cars. Our first splurge was buying a used van for a trip across country (it was used, after all) that was outfitted with an icebox, table and a bed (of sorts). It also had a beautiful mural on the outside, and in Massachusetts, you might as well display a sign that says “steal me.”
They did.
CDLs and Illegals
I’m sure many of you have seen this news story: A trucker decided to use an emergency lane to turn around on a Florida highway. They turned from the right travel lane into the median and a car crashed into the trailer, killing three. There are videos online that show the impact – it’s pretty awful, as you can imagine. It turns out that “During the investigation, with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), authorities determined Singh had entered the United States illegally in 2018 after crossing the Mexican border. He later obtained a commercial driver’s license in California.”
So this event bears on several ongoing national issues. First, the massive number of illegal immigrants in the country. Second, some states choose to blithely ignore immigration status. Third, recent changes in the requirements for a commercial driver’s license, all directed by the federal government. It appears that the fed rules became so strict that cheating is rampant. There is an ongoing scandal in one state (Kentucky, IIRC) about DMV employees issuing CDLs for cash bribes, and a whistleblower being punished for reporting it. I follow one guy on Twitter (a trucker) who has been raging on the issue of immigrant truckers who can’t speak English.
This also bears on the notion of state reciprocity. Why should Florida honor California CDLs if California won’t properly vet CDL holders?
The intentional acceptance of massive illegal immigration by a combination of Democrats hungry for voters and cynical businessmen loving low-wage labor is destroying the social compact. Maybe it’s already destroyed it. I hope it’s not too late.
Celebrate America250: Boston Non-Importation Agreement
August 1, 1768. Sixty merchants of Boston signed a non-importation agreement to cease importing British goods, whether or not they were taxed by the Townshend Revenue Act.
After colonial opposition forced Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act of 1765, Parliament declared that it still had the right to tax the colonies. In June 1767, it passed the Townshend Revenue Act to place duties on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea as an effort to continue raising revenue from the colonies and to demonstrate that the Parliament would not be bullied by American colonists. Even worse, the revenue was designated to pay British officials in America so that they would be independent of American pressure.
John Dickinson published a persuasive series of “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” in 1767-1768, showing that Parliament had no right to tax Americans who were not represented in that body, and sent them to James Otis in Boston. On August 1, 1768, leading merchants of Boston signed and published a non-importation agreement that applied to all British goods, not just those that were subject to the new taxes. The merchants of the major ports of Philadelphia and New York City also signed the agreement. The merchants intended to pressure British merchants to force Parliament to repeal the Townshend Acts, and they were indeed effective for a few years.
When Reality and Cinema Blend
Between the 1890s and the 1920s the outlaw Wild West died away. During that same period the movie industry, Hollywood, was coming to life. Inevitably the two met.
The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again, by Mark Archuleta, relates one curious meeting between the industries of crime and Hollywood. It is a biography of Henry Starr, a bank robber who became a movie star before returning to bank robbery.
Henry Starr was born in the Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma) in the 1870s. He was part-Cherokee and enrolled in the tribe. He turned to crime in his teens after being arrested for crimes he claimed he did not commit. He decided he might as well go to jail for crimes he actually committed and began robbing banks.
Archuleta shows how Starr, after a spree as a “gentleman bandit,” was caught, sentenced to death in the 1890s, and eventually pardoned after disarming a prisoner attempting a jail break. Despite vowing to go straight, he returned to crime, getting caught during a double-bank robbery in Stroud, Oklahoma.
Whom the gods would destroy they first entice with faux cheesecake.
As should be obvious from the title, this post is about the Powerline blog and AI.
As many of you are aware, Powerline recently restricted comments to paying subscribers. Previously, anyone could comment on one of their blog posts after having gone through any of a variety of relatively easy third-party authentication processes.
I’m not a subscriber to Powerline. I enjoyed commenting occasionally, but not enough to pay fifty bucks for the privilege, especially since I can get everything else I want from the site for free. I don’t know what prompted the policy change, but I don’t begrudge them their right to make it, whatever their motivation.
Karma comes for Kohberger
Reports are that Idaho mass murderer Bryan Kohberger is finding his plea-bargained life sentence a wee bit less than what he hoped for:
Retired homicide detective Chris McDonough told Ashleigh Banfield on NewsNation Wednesday that while Kohberger has been placed in “J Block” for his own protection, his experience has been far from solitary. “The good news is the inmates apparently were waiting for him and when he got there,” he said. “They are now making his life absolutely miserable.”
It is not physical but rather mental torment that Kohberger is experiencing. “They’re utilizing the vent system, they’re kicking the doors, they’re taunting him, and they’re basically torturing him through using psychology,” McDonough explained.
Song of My Seventies
Ann is back with the Five Stories You May Have Missed!
DC Police In The News
The Free Beacon has details of a suit by a DC policewoman who kept pushing up the chain of command against a dubious practice of reclassifying crimes to reduce the reported serious crime numbers. It was a six-year struggle apparently. She sued in part because of retaliatory actions against her. (She even called one superior at 4:30 AM near the end of her shift to discuss the issue. I think I might have considered retaliatory measures if I were in his place after that being awoken for that lengthy call.)
I wore my shocked face as I read the story of the intransigence of the higher-ups. On a side note, one of the officers whose name appears in her lawsuit as one of those recharacterizing data was convicted and sentenced to 3-4 years for doing some ‘recharacterizing’ of the scene of a crime. His and a partner’s high-speed pursuit of a fool on a moped resulted in a fatal collision for the pursued as he roared out of an alley in front of an oncoming car. They told the driver to just leave and say nothing, readjusted the wreckage and filed a false report. How can anyone in DC not know that a cover-up is always worse than the crime?
Maybe it is the influence of TV and movies, or numerous local stories I read of and followed over the years, but my impression is that while line police officers are often admirable sorts, the upper echelons of police departments exist in an overly weasel-friendly environment that fosters the very worst kinds of bureaucratic political thinking.
The Rotten State Of Health Care In The USA: Or How Can We Pay So Much & Get So Little?
A few days ago, someone on social media recounted their experience at their local hospital emergency room.
The trip began when the individual realized they were feeling worse than lousy. He took out his home blood pressure device which confirmed that his blood pressure was through the roof. An ambulance came to their home and took the guy straight to the ER.
He was at the ER for a total of two hours. Numerous tests were done, and then, since his body had gone back to normal, he was sent home.
The Three Musketeers of the 3WHH are back with our typical end-of-week roundup, including what we think of the Trump-Putin summit (which will be over by the time everyone listens to this, so this is an exercise in sheer hubris); how to think about crime in the context of Trump’s move to take over Washington DC (where, amazingly, John manages to “out-Lucretia” Lucretia with a radical suggestion for what Trump really ought to do with DC); and speaking of Lucretia (this week’s show host, on her best behavior believe it or not!) vants about how much she wants to see some real accountability for hte Russia Hoaxters, about whose perfidy we received additional details this week.
We round out with a brief discussion of a variation of the “desert island book” idea, namely, what book would each of us recommend as the best introduction to conservative thought for someone who is seriously curious to read up on the subject. John again surprises by making the most impractical suggestion of all, while Steve and Lucretia go with some old standards (though not without some disagreement). We’ll attempt a sequel next week, anf by the way, we encourage listeners to send in questions they’d liek us to take up, and we’ll try to do that, too.
Noah Rothman returns ahead of Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin to give a foreign policy progress report of the president’s second term. He gets into the fraught history of US-Russia negotiations, applauds the latest maneuvers in the Middle East, and applies a big-picture framing of the geopolitical status quo in response to the charge that collapse is imminent.
Plus, Charlie, Steve, and James discuss the federalization of law enforcement in D.C. and the administration’s announcement of potential weed reform.
Slowly Strangling the Pharmaceutical Industry | Richard Epstein
The New York Sun recently ran an editorial that took to task the Second Circuit for its recent decision in Boehringer v. US Department of Health and Human Services that held that the Medicare Price Negotiation Program under the Biden’s Administration brainchild, The Inflation Reduction Act, passed constitutional muster. The court’s basis for this conclusion was that the price reduction, probably 90 percent plus price reduction—never ask for precise numbers in this business—that the HHS demanded from Boehringer for Jardiance was constitutional because the company had “voluntarily agreed” to the price decreases. The Sun was flabbergasted because it insisted that this scheme was just a euphemism for destructive price controls. That word never reached the Court, whose decision was written by Trump appointee William Nardini, joined by fellow Trump appointee Joseph Bianco, and one holdover from the Clinton administration, Pierre Leval.
Ironically, The Sun unwisely excused the Trump administration from its condemnation, but the case caption reveals a different story because HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., continued the case instead of backing off. But that is no random decision. Trump’s recent strong support for the draconian most-favored nation Executive Order of May 2025 makes it perfectly evident that, with patented pharmaceuticals, he is much more of a populist than a defender of free markets.
That same mindset dominates the Boehringer decision, which, for me, is especially annoying since I submitted an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the Women’s Independent Forum that explained why the “voluntary consent” argument used to justify the decision was wholly off point. The Sun editorial noted that the company faced a take it or leave it option, where if Boehringer left the deal, it would have to forfeit all of its sales for Medicare and Medicaid products. These are not some two-bit players, because they are the sole source of drugs for a huge fraction of the American population. Whatever Boehringer might lose to the prices set for Jardiance, it was peanuts compared to being cut off from all Medicare and Medicaid business.
Things Have Changed
One of our members has a blog with the same title as this post, and Bob Dylan’s song made the expression famous.
Articles about the upcoming Trump-Putin summit made me think of how things have changed over the course of my lifetime between the leaders in the specific relationship between Washington and Moscow. This includes: Roosevelt-Stalin, Kennedy-Khrushchev, Reagan-Gorbachev and now Trump-Putin. Things have changed.
I was just starting elementary school when we became unlikely allies with Moscow in the fight against Hitler’s Germany in WWII. I was in a US Army Strategic Army Corps unit stationed at Fort Bragg and on high alert for almost two weeks in October 1962 when Kennedy-Khrushchev settled that dispute over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. I was a senior career executive in the Treasury Department when Reagan told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in a speech written by a Ricochet founder and followed shortly after by the collapse of the USSR. Now we have Trump-Putin.
The Impact of Parents on Our Lives
Now and then I meet someone who tells me that they had nearly perfect parents. Those encounters are rare, and I tend to receive them with a great deal of skepticism. Instead, the experience of many of us regarding our parents was a mixed bag: some positive, some negative, and the net assessment depends on the individual. There are also people who grew up with brutal and angry parents, and they had to find their way out of that history.
In my case, I grew up with a mother who had issues, and I was not a forgiving child. She was impatient and a perfectionist, so when cleaning the house, we were held to a very high standard. She wasn’t violent, at least not toward me. She did other things that I found maddening, but I won’t dwell on them here. My father was nearly invisible, but I suspect he did the best he could.
I was determined not to turn out like my mother. I now realize that I had no idea what that meant, but mainly I didn’t want to be a demanding parent. So, I used my experience to remain childless with the consent of a tolerant husband.
This special episode marks the revival of the classic format edition with one-on-one conversations between Steve and a special guest, with the first in the series being author Michael Walsh, discussing his terrific new book, A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History.
One way to get a feel for the candor and bracing character of Michael’s book is this passage from the Afterword, reflecting on the ambivalent reaction to the 9/11 attack:
“The imperial Romans would have gone full delenda est on Saudi Arabia, razed its cities, destroyed the Kaaba, leveled the mosques, occupied the oil fields, seized its wealth, executed its leaders, and sold the populace into slavery; they knew an existential struggle when they were in one.”
Our conversation ranges far beyond the four corners of his book, into music, Ireland (Michael’s ancentral home and part-time residence today), the suicidal multiculturalism of Europe, and why the Chinese military threat is overrated.
The President moves to federalize policing in DC and Democrats around the country are freaking out. Plus an update on MMTLP and the economy as a whole.
In the B Block, radio personality Chris DeSimone joins us from Tucson, AZ where they’ve already tried many of NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s ideas with disasterous results.
All that and the Parting Shot.
A decade has passed since Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator to initiate a movement to make America great again, but conflicts within the coalition emerge like clockwork, proving that a definitive interpretation remains elusive. Is MAGA simply the net effect of Donald Trump’s musings and maneuvers? Or is there a core ideology that successors carry on when Trump exits and the realignment settles? Josh Hammer joins Henry today to answer these big-picture questions and to propose the essential intermediate-term considerations.
California Outmigration
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Not really. You can leave. And people are doing that in droves. U-Haul’s annual report on one-way interstate rentals is out, and California once again has the most one-way rentals leaving the state. South Carolina was the most popular destination. The top 10 destinations (and where they placed on last year’s report) were:
| 1. | SOUTH CAROLINA (4) |
| 2. | TEXAS (1) |
| 3. | NORTH CAROLINA (3) |
| 4. | FLORIDA (2) |
| 5. | TENNESSEE (5) |
| 6. | ARIZONA (8) |
| 7. | WASHINGTON (7) |
| 8. | INDIANA (27) |
| 9. | UTAH (13) |
| 10. | IDAHO (6) |
And the bottom 10:
