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The Tale of Two Carts / The Sickness No Medical School Can Cure / Political Solutions Needed, Not Political Retribution / When the President’s Lawyer Becomes the People’s

The Tale of Two Carts / The Sickness No Medical School Can Cure / Political Solutions Needed, Not Political Retribution / When the President’s Lawyer Becomes the People’s

Aug 9, 2026 |

The Sickness No Medical
School Can Cure
A billion dollars to build healers, while others use
their offices to tear them down.
CHANGE MY MIND
In February 2024, a woman in her nineties stood before a room of medical students in the
Bronx and told them their tuition was gone. Ruth Gottesman had taught at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine since 1968, specializing in learning disabilities, and chaired its board of
trustees. The billion dollars came from her late husband, David, an early investor in Berkshire
Hathaway, who left it to her to spend as she saw fit. She saw fit to make Einstein tuition
free in perpetuity, the largest gift ever made to an American medical school.
Understand what she actually bought. Tuition ran nearly $59,000 a year, and roughly half
of Einstein’s graduates left owing more than $200,000. Debt of that size does not merely burden
a young doctor; it selects her specialty for her. It steers her away from pediatrics, from
primary care, from the clinic in the neighborhood that needs her most and pays her least.
Gottesman did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible and freed them to study,
to research, and to serve.
“She did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible.”
Set that beside the spectacle we now call oversight. Anthony Fauci spent five decades on
HIV, Ebola, and COVID and helped build a program credited with saving millions of lives
abroad. His reward in 2026 was a subpoena and a hearing room designed to produce a referral
rather than an answer.
One American spent a fortune expanding the nation’s capacity to heal. Others use their
offices, their subpoena power, and our money to attack the people who already did.
That is the contrast worth amplifying. A gift like Gottesman’s is not charity; it is infrastructure.
It will outlive every politician currently auditioning outrage for a fundraising list.
Medical school can teach anatomy. It cannot teach gratitude. It can teach pharmacology,
but there is no course in humility, and no prescription for a public official who mistakes
destruction for duty. That sickness is moral, not clinical, and the only known treatment is
administered at the ballot box.
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897),
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar The Tale of Two Carts
You work to fill yours. The President plays beside his.
ON AFFORDABILITY, PRIORITIES,
AND WHO SENDS THE INVOICE
Fifty-two weeks a year, Americans push a steel cart down an aisle and do arithmetic.
Ground beef runs about $6.75 a pound. Fresh vegetables are up 11.9 percent, tomatoes 32
percent, and lettuce nearly 25 percent. Groceries cost roughly 30 percent more than they did
before the pandemic. Households drop the roast, buy the chicken, and move on.
Notice what fills that cart. A shift. A double. Overtime that was supposed to go toward the
truck payment. Every item in it was purchased with somebody’s hours, hours traded away
and never returned. That is the honest arrangement most Americans live under: you work,
and then you eat.
THE PRESIDENT’S CARTS ARE PROCURED.
The ledger: $765,425 in Secret Service golf-cart rentals during his first term. $95,250 for a
single Bedminster season in 2019. Then, on June 3, 2025, came a contract with Associates Golf
Car Service worth up to $550,930, plus $80,385 for portable toilets, renewable to $333,801.
Behind him rolls “Golf Force One,” an armored Polaris Ranger that the General Services
Administration prices near $190,000. The unarmored version sells for about $20,000.
And in 2018, his own Turnberry resort billed the taxpayers $923 to rent carts to the agents
guarding him.
The larger tab: $151.5 million in term one. Nearly $115 million already in term two, on pace
for $300 million, with 112 days on his own courses, more than a quarter of his days in office.
“One cart is filled by labor.
The other is followed by an armored escort at $190,000 a copy.”
WHAT THIS IS NOT ABOUT
It is not about security. Agents must protect the President, and after two attempts on his
life, one of them on a golf course, the hardware is defensible on its face. That duty is not optional,
and this page will not pretend otherwise.
It is about venue and profit. He chooses to be protected at properties he owns, which
means the government rents, hauls, and staffs its way onto his balance sheet. Every fairway
is a cost center billed to people counting coupons at the register.
THE ARITHMETIC OF IT
A family that overspends on groceries eats less. A President who overspends on golf carts
sends the invoice to the family. One cart is earned. The other is expensed.
So ask your candidate, in public and on the record, to defend the invoice. Not the man.
The invoice. Political Solutions Needed,
Not Political Retribution
An endorsement used to be a recommendation.
It has become a loyalty oath.
There was a time when a party’s backing meant a candidate had been measured for
judgment, competence, and the ability to fix something. That standard is gone. Today the
“MAGA” or “Trump” endorsement certifies exactly one qualification: obedience. In my
opinion, it is a badge of dishonor, and a vote cast for it is a vote to enable conduct that in any
other American workplace would end a career.
Look at what the endorsement now guarantees. Not a health care plan. Not a budget. Not
a border solution written into law rather than announced from a podium. What it guarantees
is a candidate who will call every Democrat a communist, blame a predecessor who left
office years ago, insult a reporter, and go home having solved nothing. The vocabulary is
retribution. The vocabulary of governing, including appropriation, oversight, compromise,
and arithmetic, has been discarded as weakness.
This is not conservatism. Conservatism had a fiscal argument. It had a federalism argument.
It produced people who could read a balance sheet. What replaced it is a class of political
opportunists with no measurable ability, promoted for volume rather than skill, who
mistake grievance for a platform and cruelty for courage.
“A man who can only name an enemy is telling
you he cannot name a solution.”
And the tarnish runs from the top down. A convicted felon sits atop the ticket, and men
and women who once claimed to revere the rule of law now defend, excuse, and pardon on
command. Silence inside that line is not neutrality. It is participation. When you stand in a
party’s column, you accept its implied association, and you own what is done in your name.
I do not ask any reader to become a Democrat. I have never been one. I ask something
harder: demand a solution before you surrender a vote. Ask what they will build, not who
they will punish. Ask for the bill number. Ask for the math.
Retribution is not a policy. It is an admission that you have none. When the President’s Lawyer
Becomes the People’s
The Senate Judiciary Committee has sent Todd Blanche to the
floor. The only question left is whether fifty senators will pretend
the conflict of interest isn’t there.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 Tuesday to advance Todd Blanche, Donald
Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, toward confirmation as Attorney General.
Read that again. The man who sat beside the defendant is to become the lawyer for all of us.
Every first-year law student learns to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. What
Blanche has assembled is not an appearance. As acting Attorney General, he signed the
order declaring the IRS “forever barred” from pursuing prior tax claims against his former
client, that client’s family, and that client’s companies, resolving a $10 billion suit Trump
filed against his own government, in which Blanche’s Justice Department was nominally
the opposing party. A federal judge questioned whether the case had two genuine sides. It
didn’t. It had one man on both.
Then came the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”: $1.776 billion in Treasury money, overseen
by a board the acting Attorney General himself would appoint, to pay those who felt persecuted
by their government. Pardoned January 6 rioters were among the potential claimants.
“A nominee purchased his confirmation by giving back money
he should never have reached for, and the Senate accepted
the refund as a character reference.”
Facing lost votes, Blanche rescinded the fund Sunday night. Senators Cornyn and Tillis,
both leaving Congress and both driven out by Trump, pronounced themselves satisfied
and voted yes. Grasp that. A nominee purchased his confirmation by giving back money he
should never have reached for, and the Senate accepted the refund as a character reference.
Trump says he would revive it if Blanche is blocked. The audit shield remains. Scholars warn
that a later order could resurrect the fund overnight.
The obscenity is not the amendment. It is that one was needed at all. A serious chamber
haggled over the price instead of rejecting the nomination outright.
TWO REMEDIES, BOTH HELD BY CITIZENS
Citizens hold two remedies. Keep the roll call. Every senator who votes yes owns this, and
elections exist for exactly that. Ask them at town halls whether the Attorney General serves
the country or the client.
Then write the New York bar. Blanche’s license came from a state, not from Donald
Trump. Ask the grievance committee whether a lawyer may hand his client a federal absolution
paid out of the Treasury, and whether that license should survive the answer. A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway. My view is that the company and its agents
may themselves have been used by someone else who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.

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MAGA’s Worldwide Finance Plan Paid in Cocaine Poison: A convicted cocaine kingpin walks free — and the timing tells you everything.

MAGA’s Worldwide Finance Plan Paid in Cocaine Poison: A convicted cocaine kingpin walks free — and the timing tells you everything.

May 31, 2026 | ,

MAGA’s Worldwide Finance Plan Paid in Cocaine Poison
OPINION | May 31, 2026
THERE IS A WORD, for a government that frees a convicted drug trafficker and presses him into the service of its foreign policy. The word is not “conservative.” It is not “populist.” It is not even “corrupt,” though corruption is the least of it. The word is captured — and on December 1, 2025, the United States gave its clearest demonstration yet of what critics argue is a movement that no longer recognizes the difference between a statesman and a smuggler.
On that day, the President of the United States signed a full pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández. Eighteenmonths earlier, a jury of Americans had convicted him — not of jaywalking, but of conspiring to move more than 400 tons of cocaine into this country. The trial judge found that Hernández turned his country’s army and police into protection networks linked to the Sinaloa Cartel. “El Chapo” Guzmán himself, prosecutors alleged, funneled roughly a million dollars through Hernández’s associates. The sentence was forty-five years. He served barely one before Donald Trump set him free.
Ask the only question that matters: why?
Consider first what was set loose. Four hundred tons of cocaine is roughly 882,000 pounds — some 400 million grams. At a wholesale price near $28,000 a kilogram, that single conspiracy was worth more than$11 billion before a gram was ever cut; sold off by the gram on American streets at $100 to $150 apiece, the same load is worth $40 to $60 billion. The Justice Department called it “billions of individual doses” —roughly 4.5 billion of them — fed into a country where, in 2023 alone, nearly 30,000 Americans died in overdoses involving cocaine. There is no honest formula that turns tonnage into a body count, but hold those numbers beside each other: billions of doses on one side, tens of thousands of graves a year on the other. That is the record associated with the man Donald Trump set free.
Not for mercy — critics argue this movement has shown little mercy to the desperate. The same administration that freed the kingpin has authorized aggressive anti-narcotics operations in the
Caribbean and Pacific that critics argue have at times used overwhelming force against suspected smuggling vessels. Deaths have been reported in connection with those operations, raising serious questions among critics about proportionality, due process, and rules of engagement. A man who shipped 400 tons of cocaine gets a pardon and a TikTok thank-you note; a fisherman with an empty hold gets a missile.
LOOK AT THE TIMING,because the timing is a confession. The pardon was issued three days before Honduras went to the polls — while Hernández’s political allies were attempting to retain power. Critics immediately argued that the timing created the appearance of ideological
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
favoritism. Critics argued that the decision looked less like ordinary clemency and more like an overtly ideological intervention into a politically sensitive regional moment.
And it was not the work of one country. In Argentina, this administration dangled forty billion dollars before President Javier Milei — and Trump stood in the Oval Office and publicly emphasized the political importance of Milei’s continued electoral success while discussing the financial support. In Brazil, it sanctioned the very judge who prosecuted Jair Bolsonaro for attempting a coup. In Colombia, it has threatened President Gustavo Petro with military force. And when it staged its “Shield of the Americas” summit, it pointedly excluded the elected presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — the three largest democracies in Latin America — while seating its ideological clients in the front row.
String those beads together and a pattern begins to appear. A pardon here, a bailout there, a sanction, a threat, a snub — each one defensible in isolation, each one damning in sequence. Critics increasingly argue that this is not merely foreign policy, but the construction of an openly ideological sphere of influence across the hemisphere.
So here is the question Congress is duty-bound to ask and too cowardly to ask aloud:
Why was the pardon power of the United States used to restore to freedom a man federal prosecutors once described as a central figure in one of the largest cocaine-trafficking conspiracies ever prosecuted in the Americas?
Where is Hernández now? Whom does he meet? Which of the networks laid bare in open court remain operational? These are not the fevered questions of a conspiracy theorist. They are the obvious questions of any prosecutor who has read the transcript — and any senator who swore an oath to the Constitution rather than to a man. MAGA will call this hysteria. Let them. There is nothing hysterical about reading a verdict, a pardon, and a calendar and noticing they line up. The hysteria belongs to a political culture critics argue increasingly applies the law unevenly depending on who benefits politically.
The United States once prosecuted this man. Now it has chosen to restore him to freedom. If Congress cannot summon the spine to ask why — under oath, in public, with subpoenas — then the capture is complete, and the only thing separating the government from the cartel is the letterhead.
Ask the question. The country is owed an answer.
SOURCES & METHOD
Conviction, sentence & bribe: U.S. Attorney’s Office, S.D.N.Y., and U.S. Dept. of Justice, “Juan Orlando Hernández … Sentenced to 45 Years … for Conspiring to Distribute More Than 400 Tons of Cocaine, “June 26, 2024 (incl. ≈ $1M paid via his brother by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán). Pardon issued Dec. 1,2025 (Congressional Research Service, IN12621; FactCheck.org, Dec. 5, 2025).
Conversion & wholesale value: 400 metric tons = 400,000 kg = 881,849 lb = 14,109,585 oz =400,000,000 g. At a U.S. wholesale price of ≈ $28,000/kg — about $12,700/lb — (UN Office on
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of falling from hospital windows. Businessmen who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient ends on staircases and balconies across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing is what I believe to be a targeted, methodical IRS assault — not random, not routine, not coincidental. It follows my speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced. In Russia, they silence critics with gravity. In America, I think they are learning to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial ruin — stripping away everything a person has built until the cost of their voice becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi v. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument being wielded against me. I believe I have also been the victim of deliberate, government-sourced slander — lies spread to professional contacts who had no reason to doubt what they were told. I believe that honest, hardworking realtors employed by Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected real estate companies in America built on a foundation of integrity — were fed false information about me by government actors. These were decent professionals simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting vectors of what I think is a smear campaign designed to isolate me professionally, damage my reputation, and ensure that doors would close before I could even knock on them. This is not the free market. This is not the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction of a private citizen’s livelihood by government machinery set in motion to punish dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # DO1CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration. No broken glass. No headlines. Just a man — his savings under assault, his name poisoned in his own community — meant to serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching. The message is clear: speak up, and we will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.
PAID FOR BY BRENT LAMBI PO BOX 241028 OMAHA, NE 68124
WWW.HONEST-POLITICS.COM
BY THE NUMBERS
A convicted cocaine kingpin walks free — and the timing tells you everything.
Drugs& Crime), 400,000 × $28,000 = $11.2 billion.
Retail value: at a U.S. street price of $100–$150/g — about $2,835–$4,250 per ounce — (UNODC; DEA; Office of National Drug Control Policy), 400,000,000 g × $100–150 = $40–$60 billion. Wholesale and retail are alternative valuations of the same load, not additive.
Doses: DOJ characterized the load as “billions of individual doses”; ≈ 4.5 billion estimate, Al Jazeera, Dec. 2, 2025 (≈ 0.09 g per dose).
Overdose deaths: 29,449 U.S. cocaine-involved overdose deaths in 2023 — ≈ 28% of all overdose deaths (CDC WONDER; National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2025). No figure here estimates deaths caused by this specific shipment; tonnage cannot be converted to a death toll.
Maritime strikes: cumulative reported death toll from U.S. strikes on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, late 2025 (press reporting; administration statements).
Argentina: U.S. Treasury $20 billion currency-swap line plus a $20 billion private financing facility, October 2025 (U.S. Dept. of the Treasury; Financial Times). Brazil judicial sanctions, Colombia threats, and “Shield of the Americas” exclusions per contemporaneous press reporting.

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