Geoff Earle, New York Post

Iranian and Middle East diplomats held crisis talks in Oman Saturday to respond to the US demand that Tehran issue a public pledge to keep the Strait of Hormuz open – while reportedly weighing whether to propose a new travel route along the critical waterway.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was meeting with Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi in Muscat to discuss “safe navigation through the Strait of Hormuz,” according to state media in Tehran.

There were no indications top US officials were involved in the negotiations.

Qatari officials, who have sometimes served in a mediating role between the warring countries, are taking part in the discussions that included the possibility of creating a “median lane” through the strait, Axios reported.

The plan could represent a compromise – but it is unclear if it would satisfy the Trump administration.

The US wants shipping to travel through a southern route along the Omani coast, while Tehran wants vessels to hug the coast and go through areas it can control.

The US is demanding the Iranian regime issue a public statement acknowledging the waterway is open for business and pledge not to fire on any more ships – following a series of Iranian attacks in the strait that have drawn withering responses from the US military.

“They’re either going to give us that statement, or we’re not going to have a good outcome,” a US official told reporters Friday.

The developer of a sagging Midtown Manhattan skyscraper has been accused of carrying out unauthorized construction after two columns buckled and several floors collapsed.

The owner of the the 37-story office building on East 42nd Street performed construction that went beyond previously approved plans, according to a complaint filed by the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) on Tuesday.

Specifics of the complaint against the owner, listed as 235 Fee Owner LLC, are not yet publicly available but the DOB’s portal stated that ‘no support of excavation has been approved.’

Construction crews evacuated the skyscraper just after 8am Tuesday after they discovered that two columns had begun to buckle.

The 21st to 26th floors of the building near Grand Central Terminal caved in under stress, officials say. Multiple cracks and sagging floors have been reported throughout the high-rise.

Footage filmed by workers showed the massive silver beams on the 21st and 22nd floors buckling and bending just moments before the floor started to crumble.

The building remains unstable, but experts insist that any collapse would be localized and that, due to its steel supports, the high-rise won’t come toppling down.

The skyscraper, which once housed pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, has been under renovation since 2024 and is being converted into a 1,500-unit luxury apartment complex.

The DOB has issued 22 violations at the address, dating back to 2022, according to the agency’s public portal. A majority of the violations stemmed from failing to file elevator inspection and testing reports.

Thirteen complaints remain active, with 235 Fee Owner LLC owing the city $39,000 in penalties.

Daily Mail

One of the biggest prosecutions to come out of January 6 is now permanently closed.

U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly granted the Justice Department’s unopposed motion to dismiss the case against Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola with prejudice.

That last phrase matters. No pause, no delay, and no future administration gets another shot at this prosecution.

The case is over.

The ruling came after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated the four men’s judgments on May 21. The appeals court sent the matter back so the trial court could consider the government’s request for permanent dismissal.

Three of the defendants, Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl, had been convicted of seditious conspiracy and other offenses. Pezzola was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted on several other counts.

The first wave of reporting captured the sheer size of what just happened.

The legal mechanics are laid out in Judge Kelly’s seven-page memorandum.

The Justice Department moved on April 14 to have the appeals court vacate the judgments. Prosecutors said continuing the cases was not in the interests of justice and pointed to President Trump’s January 2025 clemency order.

The appeals court granted that request before briefing in the defendants’ appeals had even begun. Once the case returned to Kelly, the Justice Department asked him to dismiss it with prejudice under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Kelly explained that charging and dismissal decisions sit at the core of the Executive Branch’s constitutional authority. A judge may guard against harassment of a defendant, but he cannot force prosecutors to keep a case alive simply because he disagrees with their decision.

There was no harassment concern here. The defendants did not oppose dismissal, and the government asked for the strongest possible finality.

The judge also rejected the idea of dismissing without prejudice. Leaving the door cracked for a future president to revive the prosecution years from now would collide with the very protection Rule 48(a) is supposed to provide.

That is the constitutional point Democrats cannot wave away.

Courts decide cases the Executive prosecutes. They do not get to commandeer the Justice Department and become prosecutors themselves.

Kelly was equally clear about something else: he did not personally agree with the administration’s decision.

His memorandum called the events at the Capitol perilous and said nobody should mistake his ruling for an endorsement of abandoning the prosecution.

But a judge’s personal view is not the law. The separation of powers is.

The path to Friday’s ruling began the day President Trump returned to office.

President Trump pardoned former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio and commuted the sentences of Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, and Pezzola. His proclamation also directed the attorney general to pursue dismissal with prejudice of pending January 6 indictments.

That distinction is important. Tarrio received a pardon, while the other four initially received commutations that ended their prison terms but did not erase their convictions.

The court process that followed went further. The judgments were vacated, and now the underlying case has been dismissed permanently.

Tarrio posted the newly filed order and celebrated the outcome.

The Associated Press confirmed that Friday’s order applies to the four defendants whose sentences were commuted rather than Tarrio, whose conviction was handled through the president’s pardon.

The report traced the different legal paths taken by the five men after President Trump returned to office. Tarrio, who received the longest sentence in the case, left prison under a full pardon, while Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, and Pezzola initially had their sentences commuted.

AP also noted that the related Oath Keepers matter remains before a different federal judge. The Justice Department has asked for those judgments to be vacated and the cases dismissed too, but that judge has not yet ruled.

That unresolved companion case makes Kelly’s order the clearest final marker yet in the administration’s effort to unwind the most prominent January 6 prosecutions.

Fox News reported in April that the Justice Department filed appeals-court motions covering major Proud Boys and Oath Keepers convictions, many of them involving the rarely used seditious conspiracy statute.

Prosecutors told the court that the Executive Branch no longer believed continued prosecution served the interests of justice. The filings tied that position directly to the clemency and dismissal policy President Trump announced on his first day back in office.

Those motions mattered because commutation alone ended prison terms without removing the judgments underneath them. Vacatur by the appeals court was the necessary next step before a district judge could permanently dismiss the prosecution.

For the four Proud Boys defendants, every one of those steps is now complete. The parallel Oath Keepers request remains unfinished.

This order does not declare the defendants innocent, rewrite the jury’s factual findings, or pretend the trial never occurred.

It does something the left may find even harder to accept. It recognizes that the Constitution does not let a federal judge keep prosecuting people after the Executive Branch has lawfully decided to stop.

The judgments are vacated. The case is dismissed with prejudice.

One of the Biden-era Justice Department’s biggest January 6 showpieces has reached a permanent end.

John Taylor argued that government-created privilege would enrich favored interests while weakening republican self-government.

Jeffery L. Degner

July 2, 2026

Many of our founding fathers are familiar names, but a few others’ contributions are largely unnoticed and underappreciated. John Taylor of Caroline is one such man.

Modern critics often dismiss the founders’ contributions because they were also slaveholders, which was true of Taylor, though he wrote of it negatively. His goals of freeing and “re-exporting” slaves to Africa to avoid violent revolt might strike modern readers as objectionable, but were fairly progressive for the time. With this context understood, it is most accurate to view Taylor as producing a defense of agrarian democracy.

Joseph Stromberg called Taylor “the philosopher and statesman of agrarianism” and “the most systematic thinker” among Virginia’s planter intellectuals. Jefferson likewise admired his work. Yet Taylor was more than an agrarian spokesman. Taylor developed a sophisticated critique of institutional arrangements and political privileges that encouraged cronyism — a critique that remains surprisingly modern.

Long before Buchanan and Tullock fully articulated the Public Choice school of thought and state capture had its name, Taylor warned that political power would attract organized interests seeking special privileges. Furthermore, in An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, he argued that “faction” was not primarily caused by differences among people. Instead, it came from government-created opportunities for favored groups to profit through legislation. He also articulated how conflicts are fomented by government-granted economic privileges. These were the result of “mercantilist economic interference.” 

Taylor distinguished between wealth earned through production and wealth obtained through political favoritism. One of his most powerful ideas is his distinction between productive and political wealth. This foreshadows Franz Oppenheimer’s observation that there are only two ways of producing wealth: the political and the economic. The former relies on coercion, the latter on value creation. Both Oppenheimer and Taylor would oppose subsidized capital, privileged banks, and government-backed financial interests on moral grounds. But Taylor was ultimately concerned about the fate that would befall the rural, agrarian culture he so loved.

Taylor’s solution to these forms of political gain was not better rulers but less concentrated power. One of the most striking parts of the essay is his assertion that liberty depends on the fragmentation of authority. His views on federalism were clear: power should be divided so thoroughly that no institution could dominate society. Least of all a central bank and a debt-ridden treasury.

Taylor believed public debt was not merely a fiscal issue but a mechanism for creating a politically dependent class. He articulated grave concerns over debt-financed standing armies, which would encourage imperial sentiments, raise tax burdens, and lead to a “paper aristocracy” that grew wealthy through these processes, and that they represented a distinct faction or class, separate from productive agricultural citizens. Once established, he wrote, “it can as easily deprive nations of the right of self-government as it can rob individuals of their property.”

Many believe that class conflict is strictly a Marxist construct. But a long tradition of classical liberals has sounded the alarm over societal rifts that emerge through the processes that Taylor and Oppenheimer warned against. Taylor believed class conflict was generated less by markets than by political privilege. But contrary to Karl Marx, he blamed state privilege, whereas Marx blamed private ownership of the means of production. 

While Taylor’s agrarian concerns may belong to a bygone era, his distinction and warning about politically versus productively generated wealth still ring true. The modern administrative state has grown tremendously since the Progressive era and has given rise to numerous politically backed privileges within the American economic landscape. From certificate-of-need regulations in healthcare to protectionist tariffs, Taylor’s warnings have gone largely unheeded.

America’s 250th anniversary is an opportunity to recover forgotten founders and the stories of their lives. The greater opportunity, however, is to rediscover the ideas that made them revolutionary: that commerce and agriculture should be free from government-granted privilege. 

If the Founders were willing to pledge to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, then we, as their heirs, should summon the political will to dismantle the institutions and policies that have fostered the very kind of cronyism John Taylor warned against. 

Even at 250 years old, it is not too late to do so.

With good reason, AR-15 style rifles remain America’s most popular firearm.

While most Americans probably remain unaware, that very popularity protects it against infringement under the Second Amendment.

In welcome recent news, the United States Supreme Court now appears poised to do just that in its next term.

By agreeing to review state and local prohibitions on AR-15 platform rifles, the Court possesses the perfect opportunity to reaffirm a Second Amendment principle that should’ve been clear all along: Government cannot ban an entire class of firearms that tens of millions of law-abiding Americans own for self-defense and other lawful purposes.

The constitutional question for the Court to resolve is surprisingly straightforward. The Second Amendment obviously protects the right of the people to keep and bear “Arms,” which the Supreme Court has already defined to include firearms “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”

That principle wasn’t some afterthought or passing dicta — it was central to the Court’s landmark Second Amendment jurisprudence.

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority that the Second Amendment protects weapons “in common use at the time,” contrasting “dangerous and unusual weapons.” He explained that historical tradition permits restrictions only on weapons that fall outside ordinary civilian ownership, specifically emphasizing that the Amendment protects those arms “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”

Fourteen years later, Justice Clarence Thomas amplified and clarified that pivotal concept in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022).

Rejecting amorphous “balancing tests” that courts have employed to uphold countless infringements on the Bill of Rights over the decades, Justice Thomas wrote for the majority that “the Second Amendment protects the possession and use of weapons that are ‘in common use at the time.’” Rather than allowing judges to weigh constitutional rights against specious policy preferences, the Court thus required governments going forward to demonstrate that firearm regulations are consistent with America’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

That “common use” standard is especially significant in the context of AR-15 rifles because the factual record is overwhelming.

Specifically, estimates consistently place civilian ownership of AR-15 style rifles at well over 20 million nationwide. They are used every single day across the U.S. for home defense, target shooting, recreational competition, predator control, ranch work and hunting. Indeed, in a prior opinion respecting denial of certiorari review in another case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh had observed that Americans possess an estimated 20 to 30 million AR-15s, and that they are legal in the overwhelming majority of states. That naturally suggests an upcoming legal conclusion that they’re thus “in common use” under the operative question in Heller.

Obviously, that reality presents Second Amendment restrictionists with a constitutional problem of their own making.

Namely, gun control advocates spent years insisting that AR-15s are excessively common in America, while arguing that they must therefore be prohibited. Supreme Court precedent, however, points in the opposite direction: Widespread lawful ownership offers a defining characteristic separating constitutionally protected arms from those that may historically be prohibited.

Indeed, the label “assault weapon” itself illustrates the weakness of restrictionists’ argument. It’s a political term rather than a technical one, typically applied to semiautomatic rifles based on cosmetic features rather than differences in fundamental operation. An AR-15 fires one round per trigger pull, but so do countless other semiautomatic firearms and even pistols. It’s not some sort of “machine gun,” and federal law has long restricted automatic weapons.

Second Amendment opponents will predictably argue that public safety concerns justify prohibitions on these firearms. The opposite, however, is actually true. Specifically, firearms are used far more often to deter crime than to commit murder, and it’s not even close.

In any event, constitutional rights simply aren’t contingent upon shifting political opinions about what government officials believe is in our best interest. First Amendment speech protections don’t disappear because politicians believe that someone might be offended, nor does the Fourth Amendment vanish because wholesale warrantless searches might improve public safety.

Bruen rejected that sort of biased interest-balancing, because constitutional guarantees shouldn’t be subject to arbitrary cost-benefit analysis. Governments must instead demonstrate that proposed restrictions are grounded in this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, and broad prohibitions on the nation’s most popular rifle plainly fail that test.

The Court thus possesses an opportunity to provide much-needed clarity after years of resistance by lower courts that have struggled to reconcile modern “assault weapon” bans with Heller and Bruen. The answer shouldn’t be difficult. America’s most popular rifle is popular because millions of responsible, law-abiding citizens have freely chosen it for lawful purposes.

Under the Supreme Court’s own precedents, that widespread ownership is not a constitutional defect, as gun control advocates assert. It’s precisely why the Second Amendment protects it against infringement.

Timothy H. Lee

As RedState’s Ward Clark reported Friday, Donald Trump has instructed the U.S. military to basically wipe out the Islamic Republic of Iran should they succeed in assassinating him.

His statements come on the heels of a Thursday Wall Street Journal report alleging that Israel had informed the U.S. that Iran was mulling a new plot to kill him in retaliation for his 2020 decision to remove bloodthirsty IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani from the earth. Well, that and Operation Epic Fury, which sent former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the freezer.

On Friday night, the president got even more specific in a social media post describing exactly what the still-breathing mullahs can expect if they succeed in their murderous fantasy. The United States is “locked and loaded,” he warned:

1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME! Orders have already been given, and the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran – PRAISE BE TO ALLAH! President DONALD J. TRUMP

‘#1 on the Kill List’ — Is That Why Trump Ditched the Brand-New $400M AF1 for NATO Departure?

Pro-regime mourners at the very dead Khamenei’s funeral have been anything but shy about their dreams of inflicting pain on the United States:

Banners vowing revenge against Trump were on full display in Tehran this week as Iranians prepared to bury late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war.

One placard, held by dozens of Khamenei’s sycophants during a burial ceremony Thursday, read, “WE WILL KILL TRUMP.”

Elsewhere, crowds shouted, “I swear by the blood of the Supreme ‌Leader, Trump, ⁠we will kill you!”

“WE WILL KILL TRUMP.”

That message has been displayed on massive banners and signs as thousands gather for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s burial ceremony in Iran.

The crowd repeatedly vowed revenge for Khamenei’s death, with signs also threatening Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The threats and calls to avenge Khamenei come after he was killed in Israeli strikes in February, which also reportedly killed several family members and wounded his son, Iran’s current leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.

The Iranian Islamic government is known for its bellicose rhetoric that often isn’t matched by its ability to carry out its threats. That being said, we’ve seen at least three assassination attempts against Trump since 2024, so complacency is not an option.

Trump is well aware of the danger, as he noted at the recently concluded NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey:

“They had leaders, they’re gone. Then they had another set of leaders, they’re gone. Now they have another set of leaders — they may be gone, who knows?” Trump said at the summit. “And you know what? I may be gone too. Because I’m their No. 1 target — it’s out all over the place. Because they’re scum.”

“That’s the way they act and that’s the way they’ve done it for 47 years,” he added.

“PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!” the president wrote at the end of his Friday night post in a clear troll aimed at Iran’s embattled leadership. Whoever is in control over there right now, though, doesn’t seem to be listening to threats, and they keep violating the terms of the “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) and heightening tensions with their continued attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

Hopefully, it won’t take 1,000 missiles — with “thousands of more to immediately follow” — to convince them that their days of terrorizing the world are over. But if that’s what’s needed in the end, that’s exactly what Trump is vowing to deliver.

Bob Hoge, Red State

PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — A 30-year-old woman is accused of biting two people and punching a security guard during a violent altercation at a Northwest Portland bar.

For the third time in recent months, Portland police have made an arrest at the River Pig Saloon. The latest incident happened on July 2, when police were contacted about a woman who had been detained by security at the bar.

According to court documents, a woman told officers she was dancing with friends when the suspect bumped into one of them and pulled her by the hair.

When the suspect, later identified as 30-year-old Kayla Wiebe, was confronted, she allegedly tried to pull another woman’s shirt down to expose her breasts.

Wiebe then allegedly pulled the woman to the ground and bit her in the face.

When security tried to detain Wiebe, she punched a security guard in the face and bit him on the hand, according to court documents.

Police say that after she was arrested, Wiebe allegedly kicked the patrol car door more than 100 times.

Wiebe pleaded not guilty at her arraignment Monday to two counts of assault, three counts of harassment, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct. She was released on her own recognizance and is due back in court July 24.

Court records show Wiebe was convicted in Washington County in 2024 of assaulting a public safety officer and criminal mischief. She was sentenced to probation.

Earlier this year, a woman sued River Pig, alleging inadequate security after she was stabbed at the bar last December.

Court records also show Wiebe was convicted in Yamhill County in 2022 of harassment and fourth-degree assault. She was sentenced to probation and one day in jail.

In 2020, Wiebe was convicted in Washington County of DUII and reckless endangerment. She was sentenced to probation, and her driver’s license was suspended for one year.

Jeffrey Kirsch

President Trump just put Iran on a very short clock.

By Saturday, the regime is expected to publicly acknowledge that the Strait of Hormuz is open and pledge that commercial ships will not be attacked.

Washington is demanding more than another foggy diplomatic promise. Tehran must say the words in public, where the entire world can hold the regime to them.

Axios reported that the demand was delivered both directly to Tehran and through regional mediators, according to three U.S. officials who briefed reporters Friday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is expected to meet Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi in Muscat on Saturday. U.S. officials expect a public statement from Iran after that meeting.

That makes Saturday more than another round of diplomatic theater. It is the first hard test of whether Tehran can control its own armed factions and honor even the most basic part of the agreement it signed only weeks ago.

Axios also reported that Iranian representatives reached out after two days of clashes and sought to resume talks. One U.S. official said Tehran’s message was essentially an admission that it had made a mistake.

In plain English: Iran wants negotiations to continue, but Washington wants proof that Iranian promises mean something.

The Associated Press independently reported that President Trump has given U.S. negotiators only a limited window to reach a deal and that the administration has a wide range of options if the talks collapse.

The same report described the battle at the heart of the dispute. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations insisted that opening, demining, and managing the Strait rests exclusively with Iran.

The AP noted that roughly one-fifth of all traded oil and natural gas passed through the waterway before the war. Iran’s effort to dictate passage has already contributed to an energy crisis, even though oil prices have fallen from their wartime highs.

U.S. officials also said there will be no final nuclear agreement while Iran refuses to honor the simpler ceasefire terms. Any nuclear deal would require Tehran to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

Iran’s exclusive-control claim is one the United States flatly rejects.

CENTCOM said Iran does not control the Strait and noted that U.S. forces have helped facilitate more than 800 successful ship transits since early May.

The distinction matters. Iran is trying to turn an international waterway into a tollbooth backed by missiles and drones.

The Trump administration is demanding that Tehran publicly abandon that claim.

Before the war, roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil and natural gas moved through the Strait. Any regime that believes it can decide which ships pass and which ships get fired upon is holding far more than the Gulf hostage.

CBS News reported earlier this week that the administration revoked a waiver allowing Iranian oil sales after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked three tankers in the Strait.

The waiver had been issued only two weeks earlier under the 60-day U.S.-Iran memorandum. Treasury replaced it with a narrower license that bars new Iranian oil sales while allowing already pending transactions to wind down through July 17.

The original arrangement tied every benefit to Iranian performance. It required safe passage for commercial ships, paused the fighting while nuclear talks continued, and allowed Iran to sell oil only while it kept its side of the bargain.

The tanker attacks broke that bargain. CENTCOM answered with retaliatory strikes, the administration shut down new oil sales, and President Trump declared the ceasefire over.

CBS also reported that the dispute immediately moved energy markets. Brent crude rose to $75 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate reached $71 after the waiver was revoked.

The stakes were already familiar to American drivers. Gasoline had climbed above $4.50 a gallon in May when shipping through the Strait was effectively choked off.

Now even Iranian officials reportedly admit that their side blew it.

If that account is true, Tehran’s next move should be easy.

Say publicly that the Strait is open. Promise that commercial vessels will not be attacked.

Then rein in the hardliners who tried to wreck the deal.

If Iran refuses, nobody should pretend the problem is a misunderstanding. It will be a choice.

Saturday is the deadline. The world is about to find out whether Iran wants a deal or another round with President Trump.

100% Fed Up

Issues & Insights ^ | July 10, 2026 | I & I Editorial Board

“Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” — Hyman Roth, “The Godfather Part II“

======================================================================================

The mobsters in “The Godfather” set their sights way too low. If they really wanted to make it big time, they should have targeted federal entitlement programs instead of gamblers and drug addicts. Not only does it pay better, but you can count on one political party to look the other way.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) figures that fraudsters make off with more than $500 billion of federal taxpayer money a year, plus another $184 billion in “improper payments.”

That isn’t just bigger than U.S. Steel. That’s five times as big as the entire steel industry.

Every day, it seems, there are reports of fraud, most of it involving federal entitlement programs. Everyone knows about the massive fraud uncovered in Minnesota, Ohio, and California. But the stories just keep trickling in.

* Just last month, the Justice Department charged 455 defendants for what amounts to $6.5 billion in alleged false medical claims.

* Around the same time, Herbert Leon Kimble was arrested in the Philippines on charges that he ran a $1.2 billion Medicare fraud conspiracy.

* Investigators in Alaska charged 15 people with close to $2 million in Medicaid fraud.

* A Brooklyn, N.Y., retailer has been charged with stealing more than $640,000 in food-stamp benefits from people in Ohio.

The truth is, we have no idea how much fraud there is. The GAO estimate is more of a guesstimate than a reliable figure, and the top number on its range is probably too low, given the lackadaisical efforts states put into fighting fraud. In New Mexico, for example, a state with the highest share of people on food stamps, a legislative report found that the state followed up only 3% of the tips it received about fraud.

But even if the GAO is right, the amount of fraud rivals the output of several major U.S. industries, as a new paper from the Advancing American Freedom Foundation shows in an eye-opening chart.

Given that more than $4 trillion of the federal government’s $7.4 trillion budget is in the form of transfer payments, the scale of fraud shouldn’t be surprising.

What is surprising is how determined Democrats are to keep the fraud going.

When evidence of widespread fraud emerged in California and Minnesota, for example, the governors of both states attacked the Trump administration for pointing it out, while pretending that they are dealing with the issue.

When Trump moved to deny Medicaid funds to states rife with fraud, “Democrats slammed the crusade as a smokescreen for … Trump’s war against blue states, and an attempt to divert attention from GOP cuts to healthcare programs.”

When Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked states to turn over food stamp enrollment data and offered to partner with them to root out fraud, 21 Democrat-controlled states refused to do so on spurious privacy grounds.

When Republicans in New Mexico pointed out that the Democrat-controlled state “rarely verifies, seldom audits, and barely investigates fraud” in its food stamp program, Democrats responded that fighting fraud threatened to “restrict eligibility.”

And, as we noted back in December, Democrats attacked DOGE — which was a modest attempt to find waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies — with such ferocity that it sparked violent protests.

The problem is that, even without opposition from Democrats, the government’s anti-fraud efforts are like bailing out a sinking ship with a spoon. There’s too much money available to fraudsters. There are way too many holes in the programs that make them easy to rip off. And catching the thieves takes time and effort.

Rachel Greszler, who authored the Advancing American Freedom report, says that Congress has the opportunity this year to seal the gaps by including several provisions in a new reconciliation bill.

“A comprehensive package built around full benefit reporting, eligibility verification, accurate measurement, mandatory cooperation, and skin-in-the-game accountability would help protect taxpayers, preserve benefits for those truly in need, and reduce the hundreds of billions of dollars currently lost to waste, fraud, and abuse each year.”

The only people who could be opposed to these commonsense reforms are the criminals and their patrons in the Democratic Party.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

Taliban authorities in Afghanistan have ordered government employees, judges, police and members of the military to stop using smartphones under a directive that took effect June 16. The order threatens violators with confiscation, destruction of their devices and punishment (which are not specified).

The use of what are known as feature phones — with calling and texting options but no touch screen and no photo or recording capabilities — is permitted.

The ban does not yet apply to private phone ownership by ordinary Afghan civilians. But in some provinces, restrictions have already moved beyond government offices and into hospitals, schools and universities, raising fears that the policy could become an early test for broader limits on public smartphone use.

The restrictions began as a verbal order from Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and were later formalized in a military court directive circulated to court heads, police commanders and intelligence chiefs across the country’s eight administrative zones. The directive says anyone caught using a smartphone will have the device smashed and face “legal and sharia punishment.” Exemptions require a written decree from Akhundzada himself. A separate court order covers “all officials of the military and civilian institutions, including judges.”

The Taliban have also created monitoring lists recording employees’ names, positions, workplaces, mobile carriers and phone numbers. Security officials have instructed members to destroy their own smartphones and submit proof on a designated form.

At Kabul University, the leadership council ordered a complete smartphone ban for professors, staff and students effective June 21. The decision was announced at an academic council meeting where members were not permitted to ask questions. At Herat University, notices posted at the entrance warn that no one may enter with a smartphone, and the restriction extends into student dormitories, where Wi-Fi service has also been suspended. In Baghlan province, students carrying smartphones have been turned away at the university gate.

In Kandahar, the provincial Education Department said its own ban on students and teachers was rooted in a “sharia perspective” and warned that smartphones risked “the destruction of the future generation.” The Taliban’s higher education minister has called smartphones “one of the three main enemies of Muslims” and last October restricted their use on university premises to only the most senior administrators.

The timing of the order followed protests in Herat in early June, after Taliban forces arrested women and girls accused of “improper hijab” — not meeting the dress code of covering the face and body in the prescribed manner and not wearing makeup. Witnesses said Taliban forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing at least one person. Video of the shooting spread online before the Taliban could contain it.

The Taliban administration did not respond to a request for comment.

Fatima Faizi, NPR