Last month I wrote a letter to the Town of Chatham. The new policy promised it would be shared. In writing. “The Town announces that all correspondence submitted to the Town Board will now be considered public record and included as part of the official Town Board agenda packet.”

It wasn’t.

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I said so. I also wasn’t surprised. And the moment I posted on the Chatham Community Board, Tammy Shaw was quicker to draw than Doc Holliday. The town has “procedures on correspondence.” “There has to be a cut off date to be added to each agenda or they would be revising agenda repeatedly.”

You’d think she was drowning in a million emails. There were six. Six missives, dribbled in over a month. And we all know what the agenda actually requires. Someone scans it. Someone posts it. Nobody is putting a paper to bed. There is no running into the pressroom screaming to stop the presses. The revising-agenda-repeatedly crisis exists only in Tammy’s telling. Besides, it’s not like people have to discuss the letters. They just have to provide them.

This month there’s more emails. Eighteen pieces of correspondence. Eight of them about transparency and ethics. 44%. I’ve read several. People share them. People still don’t believe they’ve gotten an honest word about Bashford Road, or the conflicts stapled to it. Be a Donal Collins loyalist if you like. Pretend there’s no there there. The transparency problem doesn’t care what you pretend.

Here’s the sketchy part. The policy says the correspondence goes in the packet. The town wrote the rule and then broke it in the same breath.

What we got instead is a grid. Names and subjects. A menu with no meal. The letters sit in town hall and in the senders’ outboxes, right where they can’t do any damage. Hand them to the public before the meeting and the public comment portion turns into something real. An open, frank reckoning between citizens and the people who work for them.

But Fox Hill Vineyards was built in the dark. Donal’s hand was on the switch the whole way. Now that the thing is nearly done, don’t hold your breath waiting for him to flip on the lights. Besides, there’s more pressing business. Hudson Valley Homets Youth Softball Program Resolution is far more important than ethics and transparency.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Before the swashbuckling, western-riding Dr. Bilinski opened Waldorf Farm, it was known as Dutch Acres. It was then, as it is now, a farm. What many don't know is that the previous owners had a side hustle. They raised ring-necked pheasants. This was the 1970s and there were little to no turkeys to hunt, so bird hunters managed with squabs and these beautiful birds. The problem with pheasants is twofold: they are not native and don't have any real skill at keeping away from native predators, and second, they don't really blend in, thus compounding the first issue. Point being, pheasants didn't belong in North Chatham any more than a commercial wine venue on Bashford Road. Well, they learned that pheasants didn't take; it was no harm, no fowl. I know, bad pun. Sadly, the residents surrounding Fox Hill Estate and Vineyard will not get such a break as a pretty bird. Nope. This "farm's" folly will be more permanent.

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New York State has issued E.F. Williams L.L.C., trading as Fox Hill Estate & Vineyards, a farm winery license, effective that day and good through July 31, 2029. Edwin F. Williams and Cherie R. Williams are named as the principals. And here is the detail the neighbors may not yet have absorbed over their morning coffee: the state did not hand these two a coupon to sell a bottle of wine. It handed them a trousseau.

A farm winery license, under New York’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, is not permission. It is a portfolio. Manufacturing, retail, tasting, tourism, all of it bundled and beribboned and delivered at once. Albany rarely does anything by halves once it has decided to do it at all.

Begin with the manufacturing, because it sets the scale of the ambition. The license lets the winery produce wine, New York State-labeled mead, and New York State-labeled cider on the premises, somewhere between a statutory floor of fifty gallons a year (a spirited weekend, where no doubt daughter Riley will be warbling) and a ceiling of 250,000 finished gallons (a serious industrial concern with a serious industrial payroll). Which is to say that 509 Bashford Road is now, in the eyes of the state, a factory dressed in the gingham of a farm.

Then come the tastings, which is where the parties unfold. The statute expressly authorizes them on the licensed premises, for consumption on or off the property, of whatever the Williamses make and of whatever their fellow qualifying New York farm wineries make. And it does not stop at wine. It waves in qualifying New York beer, cider, mead, liquor, and, in a flourish no lawyer could have invented, braggot, that honeyed medieval ale out of Chaucer’s world, exhumed and rebottled to grace a Columbia County flight. The Liquor Authority’s own guidance confirms the arrangement: the house may sell its own bottles to go, and it may sell the neighbors’ labels too.

The retail reach is wider still. Bottles of the estate’s wine, cider, and mead may go out the door for consumption elsewhere. Cases may go wholesale to the trade, to other wineries and breweries and cideries and meaderies and distillers and wholesalers and retailers, a guest list of the entire licensed alcohol economy. The wine may even be trucked to market without the bother of a separate trucking permit, in the circumstances the statute allows. And because a farm winery may retail the New York-labeled wine, beer, cider, mead, braggot, and liquor of other licensed producers, the vineyard can moonlight, quite legally, as a boutique bottle shop of the whole Empire State.

None of it need be free. The law lets a farm winery charge for its tastings and charge for its tours, monetizing the swirl and the stroll alike. And it may run the gift shop of one’s imagination: food to flatter the wine, local farm products, accessories, souvenirs, artwork, crafts, and clothing. The vineyard as lifestyle brand, tote bags optional but inevitable for the White Coat Entrepreneur.

Then, for the finale, the clause that turns a winery into a destination. New York’s farm winery statute permits the licensee to operate a restaurant, a hotel, a catering establishment, or another food-and-drinking establishment in or adjacent to the premises, subject to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, and to pour its qualifying wine, cider, and mead there. Albany has, in effect, sketched the whole enchanting weekend: arrive, taste, dine, perhaps stay the night.

Now a liquor license is not a zoning permit. The State Liquor Authority governs the bottle. The Town governs the ground beneath it. The two do not merge, however much a licensee might wish they would. So the state’s blessing settles remarkably little of what actually matters on the single acre of Valatie’s premire vineyard. Whether that building may be a tasting room under local zoning. Whether the use wants site-plan approval, or a special-use permit, or a certificate of occupancy that fits the plan. Whether there may be seating on the lawn, concerts in the evening, amplified music drifting over the property line. How many bodies may lawfully be inside. Where their cars will go. Whether the restaurant of the imagination complies with the land-use code of the reality. Albany answered none of it.

That is precisely the front on which the Fox Hill fight has been waged, in the unglamorous language of tasting-room and accessory-use approvals. A state license does not settle a syllable of it.

And here the plot, which looked for a moment like a tidy comedy of couple versus zoning board, acquires its third act and its most powerful character. Because the ground at Fox Hill sits inside a state-certified agricultural district, and that is not decorative. Under Section 305-a of the Agriculture and Markets Law, a town may not unreasonably restrict or regulate a farm operation, and it is not the town that decides what “unreasonable” means. It is the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, an agency in Albany that most Valatie residents have never had cause to think about and are about to.

The Department reviews local zoning as applied to the farm. It renders opinions. Its Commissioner can bring an action to enforce them. And the courts have sided with the Department when it found a town’s restrictions unreasonable, siding with it even against zoning that predated the district, deferring to the state’s reading over the town’s. So the drama is not, in the end, a two-hander. There is a third seat at the table, and it belongs to the party that can tell the Town its no does not count. In quarrels over farm operations, Agriculture and Markets can override the Zoning Board of Appeals and the Planning Board, and it frequently does.

There is also, for the connoisseurs of process, the review that never happened. No environmental study attended the enrollment. The State Environmental Quality Review, SEQR, the state’s look at what a project does to the land around it before an agency signs off, was waived by the county. The paperwork simply glided through.

So the open questions now belong to three parties rather than two: to Fox Hill, to the Town, and to the Albany agency that can outrank them both. What the Town has actually authorized at 509 Bashford Road. Whether that authorization stretches to cover everything the shimmering new license permits. And whether, should the Town summon the nerve to say no, the agricultural district lets that no survive contact with the state.

Collins will have his defenders; he always does. Which makes it worth recalling the last time this column took the measure of one of his most devoted: Prew, better known on the public record as Jeanne Veillette Bowerman, the “Democrat” in Trump’s clothing. She recites, at tender length, the legend of her “lifelong Democrat” father, a man whose checkbook somehow found only Republican causes, and of a mother cut from the very same bolt of cloth. It is a seamless performance. It is also, like the vineyard’s paperwork, a costume.

So set down the tasting notes. Strip away the flights and the tote bags and the resurrected medieval braggot. What is left at 509 Bashford Road is a corrupt farce of a “farm,” waved through by a public official who knew everything told no one and chose to feather his nest. Let’s not forget the Williamses will need a farmer. I think we all know who that is going to be. The cork is out, and the guest list was settled in a back room. Donal Collins’s conduct in this affair should not, and will not, be forgotten.

Tomorrow’s town board meeting is going to be interesting.

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©2026 The Powell House Press | All Rights Reserved | Josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Karoline Leavitt leaves the White House at the end of the month, and the Trumpian accolades have already started to swirl in like a turd in the bowl. Youngest press secretary in history; twenty-seven when she took the job, and a mother of two who briefed the republic between deliveries. All true, sort of. Certainly the stuff she’ll put on her résumé because the unvarnished truth wouldn’t get her a job in a prison.

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The job of a press secretary is simple. You stand between the public and the government and tell the truth about what the government is doing. That is the entire gig. Imagine if you can that in Trump 2.0 the job required someone more vile than Spicer, Huckabee-Sanders or Barbi McEnany. Ergo, Karoline with a K.: a woman with daddy issues, a knack for lying and a diamond cross.

This is the kind of person Donald Trump hired, watched work, and did not fire. He adored her and that’s telling on a variety of levels. She is a liar in service to Trump. She has aided and abetted him lying to America and the world as he has caused calamity and mayhem.

She told us the One Big Beautiful Bill “does not add to the deficit.” The Congressional Budget Office said it added trillions. Every independent analysis agreed. FactCheck.org did the arithmetic. It was a number. She was handed the number, she stood at the most authoritative lectern in the country, and she lied with the serene confidence of a serial killer.

She announced that “tariffs are a tax cut for the American people.” A tariff is a tax by definition. It is a tax on imports, paid by importers, with the bill handed to you at the register. Calling it a tax cut is not spin, not framing, not the honest exaggeration of an advocate. It’s a lie. PolitiFact rated it false, which was courtly of them.

She pushed a story that the administration had stopped fifty million dollars in condoms bound for Gaza. A lie. Snopes took it apart. There was the lie about thirty-two thousand USAID dollars for a transgender comic book in Peru. Snopes took that apart too. She blamed an egg shortage on the previous administration “directing the mass killing” of a hundred million chickens, a construction PolitiFact rated Half True. After a man tried to force his way into the Correspondents’ dinner, she stood up and read a list of Democratic quotes she said were inciting violence. FactCheck.org found she had used several of them out of context. She read them anyway.

The list is endless.

And here is the part that should embarrass her defenders more than it does. A great deal of what circulates about her is fake. She never said the Iran war would end if Trump “had better intelligence.” She never told anyone to avoid “woke things like math.” Parody accounts built those and readers swallowed them whole. A serious critic throws every last forgery in the bin, and the remarkable thing, the genuinely damning thing, is that it does not matter. The authentic record stands without the counterfeits.

Now the load-bearing hypocrisy.

Leavitt is “Catholic.” Not privately, of course. In Trump’s orbit the new Christianity is the oldest one. Rubio, Vance, all of them “devout.” In the case of Trump women, the tell is the diamond cross. Central Catholic High School. Scripture posted to three million followers. Motherhood billed as the closest thing to Heaven on Earth. Faith invoked as the bedrock of her life, the thing that supposedly makes her different from the rest. She turned her Catholicism into a credential.

The Eighth Commandment is not fine print. “You shall not bear false witness.” Her brand of Catholic seems to have a loophole where the commandment lapses the moment the camera clicks on. The church is not vague about this. Truth is not a vibe. It is a debt you owe to God and to the person in front of you, and it does not get smaller because Trump says something’s true or the falsehood polls well.

The defense is threadbare and she is welcome to it. A press secretary advocates. Spin is the job. She believed what she said. Fine. Then she believed the deficit numbers against the CBO and every economist alive, which is not faith, it is stupidity.

There exists a demanding version of Catholic life. You tell the truth when the truth costs. You lose honestly rather than win dirty. It has real practitioners and a few genuine martyrs. Leavitt knows she lies and that is all you need to know about her claim to faith. It is a prop, pure and simple. The irony that the most corrupt, self-dealing presidential inner circle all claim this tremendous faith would be hysterical if it didn’t actually work on people.

The tributes will keep pouring in. She was disciplined. She was quick. She was, in the airless professional sense, good. The trouble is the noun. What she was good at was lying to the American people, delivering them in the cadence of the devout, and never once flinching, because flinching requires a conscience she does not have. She is leaving to spend more time with her two children. Please. How much you want to bet we’ll be seeing her on Fox or Newsmax? And how much do you want to bet that the next blond mouth of Trump will be Natalie Harp?

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©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | Josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Every mafia boss keeps one guy close. Not the smartest man in the room. Not the strategist. The one who will do whatever needs doing. He wants to be useful so badly that he mistakes obedience for competence.

Todd Blanche is that guy. He’s Trump’s Christopher Moltisanti.

The newly confirmed Attorney General spent Sunday morning on national television explaining how independent he is from the White House. He demonstrated the opposite. This will be his undoing.

Kristen Welker asked him on Meet the Press for the easiest assurance an attorney general can give: that he would operate independently of the president.

Blanche wouldn’t make that promise.

His explanation was that no attorney general should ever pledge independence from the president. He presented it as principle. The effect was to explain, at length, why he could not give the one assurance that would have made him look independent.

Then he went further.

“There is this extraordinarily false narrative,” Blanche said, meaning the idea that Trump calls him up and orders him to prosecute particular people.

According to Blanche, that isn’t how it works. Trump doesn’t wake up and say, “Todd, go prosecute X or Y.” He has never done that. He will never do that.

The problem with three emphatic denials is that people tend to remember the record. Again, his undoing.

In September, Trump publicly demanded the prosecution of a list of political enemies, including the predecessor Blanche replaced. Whatever Blanche wants the public to believe, the president has already made his wishes clear.

The pattern runs through everything he says. He defends the independence of the Justice Department while explaining why the president is entitled to be furious at the people who work there.

Take Jeanine Pirro, the red-wined U.S. Attorney in Washington.

Pirro dropped a vandalism case involving the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and blamed problems with the renovation. Trump, who has known Pirro for years (FYI, her back story, the real one, I’ve got to tell soon), reacted angrily and wondered publicly whether she should be fired.

Blanche’s response was an exercise in Mormon marriage, or in the art of having it both ways.

He said he fully supported Pirro, “as does President Trump.” Then he acknowledged that Trump was “extraordinarily frustrated” and said he did not “in any way fault him” for being angry. He also reminded viewers that the department was still investigating.

It was less a position than an attempt to hold two at once.

Then came the most revealing moment.

On Friday, on Long Island, Blanche stood beside Trump and Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County Executive (who, yes, started his own militia against transgender athletes) and Republican candidate for governor, and declared that anyone who lays an inappropriate hand on a federal law enforcement officer would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

That sounds tough. Not really. Sounds more S.E. Hinton: “That Was Then, This Is Now.”

Let’s not forget Trump’s first day in office the second time began by granting sweeping clemency to people convicted of crimes against federal officers during the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Asked to reconcile the two, Blanche fell back on the obvious answer: the president has the constitutional authority to pardon.

Of course he does. But that is not the answer to the question. But it raises an issue for Blanche, and that is just what his promises are worth. He says the law will reach anyone who lays a hand on a federal officer. The president has already decided that some of them walk free.

Then there is the $1.776 billion settlement fund that nearly derailed Blanche’s confirmation.

Blanche helped put together the fund to compensate people who claimed they had been victimized by the previous administration. He also arranged broad protections from tax scrutiny involving Trump, his sons and their businesses. Imagine that. Immunity to Donny Boy and Lil’ Eric. Sounds kind of westward in terms of settlements and justice. Though I’m touched by the rare sight of paternalism. More likely the boys had some sort of “tape” on Fat Daddy.

When the confirmation fight became difficult, Blanche put his retreat in writing.

On Sunday, he said the fund was dead.

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Then he added that people who believe they are owed compensation (including Capitol rioters who were convicted and later pardoned) could still pursue their claims in court.

So the fund is dead. But the claims aren’t.

Even when Blanche shuts a door, he leaves it cracked open. And to think, when he proclaimed his love to Trump, many of us thought it was just plain ol’ sycophantry. Turns out it was real live pederasty or something pretty much like it.

Embarrassment is survivable. His past is not.

People are already keeping track.

In July, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams called the IRS settlement self-dealing undertaken for an improper purpose and referred Blanche to the state bars of New York and Washington.

The judge said she was “extremely troubled” by Blanche’s testimony before Congress in May and described his account of the deal as “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.”

There is also the plain conflict: Blanche went directly from representing Donald Trump as his personal defense lawyer to becoming the country’s top federal law-enforcement official.

That is not a small transition.

The bar referral did not come out of nowhere. Blanche already faces an ethics complaint before the New York State Bar, backed by more than 100 former federal and state judges.

There is a history here, too, and Blanche knows it.

Michael Cohen was Trump’s fixer. He was disbarred in New York after pleading guilty to federal crimes.

Rudy Giuliani was once America’s Mayor, never mine. He’s a bigot. He was later disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C., over false statements he made while trying to keep Trump in office.

John Eastman, who helped develop the strategy for having the vice president interfere with the electoral count, was disbarred in California. He should be committed everywhere else.

Kenneth Chesebro, one of the architects of the fake-elector scheme, was disbarred in New York. His polished exterior was not heavy enough to hide his greed, nor his past.

Jenna Ellis was suspended from practicing law in Colorado for three years, giving Coloradans a breather, but she’ll be back.

Lin Wood surrendered his law license rather than face disciplinary proceedings. I think it was cheaper.

Jeffrey Clark has been recommended for disbarment in Washington and is still waiting for the final outcome.

They all had a job to do. Which was to do the right thing. They all believed they were doing it for their client. And one by one, they discovered that being useful to Donald Trump was not a defense against the consequences of being useful to Donald Trump.

That may be the lesson Blanche is missing.

The person at the top has the power to pardon. The people carrying out the orders have the exposure.

And the lawyer who believes he can protect himself by being the most loyal man in the room may discover that loyalty is not a legal defense.

Blanche said Trump will never call him and tell him to prosecute someone. We all know that is not true.

The black-eyed Blanche will land where they all do. Disbarred. Maybe in prison. Could be worse. Look at Pam Bondi, a joke of a lawyer from traffic court to The People’s Court. And we still don’t know where she’s landing.

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©2026 | All Rights Reserved The Powell House Press | Josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Rand Paul has been chasing Anthony Fauci for so long, and with such squinting, monomaniacal devotion, that you half expect the senator to turn up on the Senate floor one afternoon dragging the old man’s carcass, harpoon in fist, sputtering about the whiteness of the whale.

On Thursday, Kentucky’s junior senator, an ophthalmologist by trade and an Ahab by disposition, finally landed the thing he has spent years publicly praying for. His committee voted, 8 to 5 and straight down party lines, to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. Paul has said it out loud, in that flat affronted drawl, that he wants Fauci in prison. The hearing that produced the charge was pure theater, in what is now becoming a republican ritual: delivering a verdict before the witness was sworn in.

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And what was Fauci’s crime? He invoked his right against self incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. Paul, who went to medical school not law school, ruled that the Fifth didn’t apply, because a Biden pardon had su…

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In New York’s Columbia County, the reliably red landscape has been turning purple, and the old Republican guard wants no part of it. Its answer is not to run better candidates or bring in new blood. The answer is on the ballot, dressed up as alternative, nonpartisan parties. Behind the new names and the more genteel branding sit the same candidates, backed by the same cast of small-town characters.

It is called fusion voting, and it lets a candidate appear on the ballot more than once. Same name, two rows, and the votes from both get added into one total. Only a handful of states still allow it, and only New York and Connecticut use it with any regularity. Usually it runs like this: a minor party nominates whoever the major party has already nominated. The Working Families Party lines up behind the Democrat, the Conservative Party behind the Republican. The candidate ends up holding two lines, and every vote on either one lands in the same pile.

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Now and then that second line is what act…

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Last night I watched “Becoming Katharine Graham.” It’s worth a watch for a couple of reasons. One is that she was a remarkable woman with a great life story of achievement on a personal level. Another is understanding the role of the press in our nation. And circling back to the personal side of Graham’s story are her ethics and understanding around being a publisher. I read her autobiography years ago, Personal History. She is not a new figure in my life, but watching this last night was yet another lens to examine Trump and the Republican Party through. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Nixon was the start of rot. Ford’s greatest mistake was pardoning Nixon. It gave a template for this party to achieve so much that has been so destructive, often through illegal channels, be it Iran-Contra, the Iraq War, or so many of Trump’s horrific grifts. But Graham and The Washington Post, unlike Fox News and NewsMax, did its job putting pressure on power, the way it is supposed to wo…

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena yesterday and said almost nothing.

In his opening statement, he announced he would invoke the Fifth Amendment. Then he did it again. And again. By the end of the morning, he had declined to answer more than fifty times, reading the same sentence on the advice of counsel.

It was good legal advice. The junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, himself a physician, has been on a mission, not merely to persecute Fauci, but to prosecute him.

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Paul opened the week by releasing more than 1,100 pages of what he called “Tony’s Diary,” near-daily notes he says Fauci kept from late 2019 through 2022. A 465-page “prequel” of older records and emails came with it. Paul’s theory, which he has maintained for years without evidence, is that Fauci greenlit dangerous research in a Wuhan lab, watched it escape, and lied …

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Writing about Chatham started as a one-off. I wrote about a vineyard going up on Bashford Road (Fox Hill Estate) and assumed I was done. Then a reader reached out about a conflict of interest between the land owner and Supervisor Collins. Another wrote to me about a white supremacy group planning a Memorial Day visit to the cemetery on Shaker Museum Road. And yesterday, of all things, it became Mitch McConnell's daughter, Claire McConnell, and the tender mercies she is said to have visited on children at Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School in Ghent. Every piece brings more tips, more readers and more requests to cover stories that no one is writing about.

Which brings us to Chatham For All.

Chatham For All is not a movement. It is not a groundswell. It was and is a con. After January 6th many Republicans were turned off, either not showing up to vote or voting blue. This was the genesis of Chatham For All. It gives these voters a Republican without supporting the party that tried its damned…

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McConnell, the turtled octogenarian, if he is actually alive and has a future, might be worth looking at through his past. Not just the horrifying damage he did to the United States and the Supreme Court, but closer to home.

While many of us look at him and think when he dies the evil will go with him, it won’t. Even if he is already gone, the monster will live on in his spawn. Yikes! I know the mind’s eye is hurting just imagining Mitch getting some. But he did breed and whatever that rogue gene is that controlled him, it made it to his offspring, specifically, his daughter Claire. And like most virulent diseases she carried the McConnell culture far past the Mason-Dixon Line all the way up to Ghent, New York.

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For those of you who read my local reporting on Columbia County and the town of Chatham, Ghent is the immediately adjacent town. It was in the capacity of my local writing that a reader asked me to look into Mitch’s daughter Claire. I was shocked at what I read.

The Waldorf Schools

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From the moment RFK Jr. was confirmed by the Senate to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I have written about the dangers Americans would be exposed to under his stewardship. Not because I have the ability to see the future, but because I know science and he has a history of denying it. He is not trained in it. He lies. We’ve seen him capture a segment of the population around vaccine safety, claiming, for example, that vaccines cause autism. We’ve seen him attack the safety of acetaminophen in pregnant women, also suggesting it causes autism. None of which is true. And now we’ve seen rates of measles explode. Children are dying, and the mechanism is not complicated. The vitamin K shot has been given to newborns since the 1960s. It is not a vaccine. It is a nutrient that lets an infant’s blood clot, and without it a baby can bleed into the brain and die. It is standard care. It works. But refusal rates have climbed for years, more than doubling at some hospitals since 202…

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Well, it has been another horrible week in America. RFK Jr. is now competing with Dr. Oz on pushing snake oil medicine: peptides. How America will survive these times is becoming more and more tenuous. Oz at least sold his nonsense from a daytime TV show that we all knew was a scam after Oprah stopped showing up. Kennedy sells his from a cabinet position.

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Trump has not only amped up the rhetoric, he is actively bombing Iran again. Still no congressional approval for a war, but Hegseth is up on the Hill with his hand out for more cash to fund this idiot battle that plunged the world into financial chaos. And if that has not been destabilizing enough, Trump is now adding nuclear fuel to the Middle East, supplying Saudi Arabia with technology so they can literally go nuclear.

Back home there is still no proof of life around McConnell, which at this point a person really does have to look at with a real eye on GOP trickery. It seems profoundly strange that he can take a photo reading a pape…

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This week a friend told me he had a cold. We spent a couple of minutes agreeing that summer colds are the worst kind, which is one of those things people say to each other every July and probably isn’t true.

Then he mentioned the aches. And the sore throat. That is not a cold, I told him. It sounded more like the flu or COVID.

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It was COVID. Day two, which meant he had two days left to do something about it. Paxlovid only helps if you start it inside five days of symptoms. Go to urgent care, I told him. Ask for it by name.

The nurse practitioner declined. Her explanation, as my friend relayed it me, was that COVID is basically a cold now.

She reccomended a prescription cough suppressant and a course of steroids.

Nobody gives narcotics and steroids for a cold. Whatever she believed about the virus, her own prescription pad disagreed with her. I was a frontline worker in 2020 and so I got the vaccine first. I was fine. In 2024, after the vaccine efficacy had dropped, I did get COVID and ended…

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Kentucky’s governor picked up the phone. Twice. And twice, a voice on the other end informed him that Mitch McConnell, the most surgically disciplined operator the Senate has produced in a generation, was dead.

Not gossip from the Hart Building elevator bank. Not some overheated Twitter account. Agencies. “Not state agencies,” Andy Beshear specified, with the practiced pause of a man who knows exactly how much a raised eyebrow can do. Which leaves, delightfully, only one branch of government to squint at.

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He let this drop, with beautiful timing, in a Katie Couric sit-down published Wednesday, the interview format built for precisely this kind of controlled detonation. He’d spent early July publicly badgering McConnell’s people for a statement, any statement, and now we knew why. “It had been a month before anything had been put out,” he said, practically savoring it. “I’d gotten two calls from different agencies, not state agencies, suggesting he’s passed.”

Which agencies. Which day. He …

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Nobody watched. That’s the story nobody in the White House wants told. There was better television on. There is always better television on now, which is the real humiliation, the one that only amps up the crazy. Rants about a stolen election he didn’t win have gone from spectacle to wallpaper. America has seen the routine enough times to know every beat, and the terrible thing about routine is that it stops being frightening and starts being weather, something you stop checking for and just dress around.

Here is the part that should terrify his handlers: his malignant narcissism has become so boring people are not paying attention. And not getting the attention, in this particular man, is not a relief. It is an accelerant. A grievance ignored is a grievance that metastasizes. The less the room looks at him, the more he needs the room to burn, and a man whose sense of self depends entirely on the size of the audience does not take a shrinking one quietly.

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Consider, as evidence of a mind…

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There is a that flavor of Washington honesty that only surfaces when the polling gets ugly. Mike Lawler just gave us a master class in it.

The congressman from New York’s 17th, the seat Democrats have circled as the one they most want back, sat down with a local news crew and confessed. Twelve years ago, on St. Patrick’s Day, he was pulled over on the Palisades Parkway and charged with drunk driving. He’d had a few. He’d just learned his father was gravely ill. He pleaded down to a violation, quietly, in Rockland County, then said nothing about it through two campaigns for Congress and one for the State Legislature. Silence, it turns out, was a strategy. It just had an expiration date.

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Now Cait Conley, combat veteran, national security professional, freshly minted Red to Blue star, is closing in and hauling in $1.6 million a quarter. Suddenly Mr. Lawler finds candor. Candor with an expiration date is not candor. It’s messaging.

We’ve all watched enough contrite politicians to know the ch…

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Well, they tried. Or did they. It’s the eternal question in Chatham governance, isn’t it: the gesture toward openness, followed swiftly by the retreat into fog. That’s the entire issue behind Bashford Road. Not being in the know.

Last month Chatham’s own website makes the promise, in a reassuring bureaucratic prose: Agenda packets, it says, are made available to the public prior to Town Board meetings, intended to help residents stay informed about matters before the Board. A lovely sentiment. The kind you’d frame or needlepoint onto a pillow.

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Except here we are, the morning of the meeting, and the packets are nowhere to be found. Not a whisper. One begins to wonder what “prior to” means in Chatham. An hour before the gavel drops? Like church bulletin you get as you walk into mass?

Correction Note: The incomplete packet was posted under “agenda” on the calendar at some point late in the day 7.15.26

There is something almost quaint about a town in 2026 unable to manage what any mid-size PT…

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The other day I read an article here on Substack about raw milk. (You can read it by clicking here) I had a very polite exchange with the author, so none of this is meant as a shot at her personally. Two things in her piece did bothered me. One was the wrong information about the risks and benefits of raw milk. The other was the claim that the science community operates on “groupthink.”

Groupthink is a real psychological phenomenon. A group prioritizes agreement and harmony over critical thinking and independent judgment. Members get reluctant to question ideas, voice doubts, or propose alternatives. The group makes worse decisions than the individuals in it would have made alone.

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That accusation has gotten a lot of traction in the age of MAHA and RFK Jr. Sadly, plenty of people in both camps (and they overlap more than either side admits) aren’t trained scientists. They’ve mistaken the scientific method for groupthink. I’ll get to that. First, raw milk versus pasteurized, on the actual…

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He spent a career auditioning for power. When his conscience died in 2018, he simply auditioned for a new director.

Nobody is composing an ode to Lindsey Graham this week, and if some brave soul tries, somebody should confiscate the pen, snap it in half, and salt the earth where the lyre stood. What we owe him is not a eulogy. It is an autopsy, without much hope of finding anything inside, because the man was, before he was anything else, an act. A very long-running theatrical equivalent of a dinner-theater Hamlet who forgot the soliloquies but kept the tights, surviving season after season only because nobody in the front row wanted to be the first to boo a man who might cry.

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He played the good son who raised his orphaned sister without complaint. He played the earnest young lawyer, then the Air Force JAG officer, then the senator with the twang and the twinkle, the one who could make you laugh in a Senate hearing room, which is its own small magic trick and the only real talent he had…

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This is not a partisan piece. Trump appears in it, but that’s a function of age and behavior, and the second follows from the first. Biden appears in it too. So does a Republican senator from Kentucky, a Democrat from California who died in office, a retired Supreme Court justice who spent her last years publicly disintegrating, and a sitting federal appeals judge who is currently suing her own colleagues to keep hearing patent cases at 96. The pattern doesn’t sort by party registration. It sorts by the number of years since someone graduated college.

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We are living in a gerontocracy, and it is not simply a cultural complaint about out-of-touch elders. It is a physiological one, and the two compound each other in ways that rarely get discussed in the same paragraph. An electorate fed a diet of social media and opinion dressed up as news, poorly schooled in civics, history, and what the press is even supposed to do, has lost some of its capacity to notice when a leader has stayed past th…

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