Your Ballot Is Not Local / Both Hands On The Scale / Name Calling Is Not a Denial / The Crazed Librarian / A PERSONAL NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

HONEST POLITICS
Brent Lambi
The Strait is Not The Border
Forty thousand people looked at the world as it is and
decided to swim. The rest of us should ask what they were
swimming away from and who built it.
Last week, tens of thousands of young Moroccans walked into the sea. French reporting
put the figure near 40,000; Ceuta’s own leader estimated 60,000, with Madrid counting roughly
8,000 children among them. They swam around a breakwater toward a beach in Africa that
happens to belong to Spain. Dozens drowned doing it.
Ask why, honestly. The answer is not recklessness. It is arithmetic. From Fnideq, a young
man can see, five kilometers across open water, a life he cannot reach in forty years of labor
on his own side. He priced the swim against the wait and took the swim. Meanwhile, Ukrainians
die defending a border, Gazans die trapped inside one, and half the world lives beyond
the reach of a physician.
He priced the swim against the wait and took the swim.
We are told some nations simply do things right. Norway educates its children, insures its
sick, and pensions its elderly. But Norway also sits atop North Sea oil and had the rare discipline
to bank the proceeds for the unborn instead of spending them on itself. Afghanistan
has been an empire’s chessboard for a century and a half, with British, Soviet, and American
powers each arriving with a theory and departing with a body count. Institutions matter
enormously. So does whether the world ever permitted you to build any.
That distinction should trouble us, because it decides who gets to be born lucky.
So here are the questions we should ask aloud and answer on the record:
If prosperity is largely an accident of geology, geography, and who invaded whom, on what
moral ground do we call it earned?
Is a border a legitimate line of governance, or a fence around a lifeboat?
We spent $113 billion on 145 days of war in Iran. What would that sum have purchased in
clinics, wells, and classrooms, and which purchase would have produced fewer swimmers?
If a stranger’s child drowns within sight of your shore, does distance excuse you, or only
comfort you?
And the hardest one: do we hold these gifts in trust, or in fee simple?
A man born on the lucky side of the water will tell you
it was his swimming that got him there.
The Compliment You Didn’t Ask For
On being diagnosed by people who have never opened a chart
Congratulations. You have been diagnosed.
Not by a physician, not after an examination, and not on the basis of anything you actually
said. You were diagnosed the instant you produced a fact your opponent could not answer.
The condition is called Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the only known symptom is
winning.
Consider how the diagnosis is made. You cite a dollar figure. You cite a court ruling. You
ask a question with a documentary answer. Your opponent, finding no fact of his own, reaches
past the argument and reaches for you. He does not say the number is wrong. He says you
are unwell.
In debate, this maneuver has a name older than the republic. It is the ad hominem, and it
is not a rebuttal but a surrender delivered in the tone of an insult. A man with better evidence
produces the evidence. A man without it produces a label. When the label arrives, the scoring
is over; only the volume is still in dispute.
A man with better evidence produces the evidence.
A man without it produces a label.
Notice what the phrase concedes. To call criticism deranged is to admit that criticism exists
in quantity and that ordinary people, given the record, keep arriving at the same unflattering
conclusion. That is not a syndrome. That is a consensus.
Honesty requires a word for the other side. Some criticism is unhinged. There are people
who read a grocery receipt as a coup and who would be no better company under any other
president. Say so when you see it. But the cure for a bad argument is a better one, not a nickname,
and the man who cannot tell the difference has told you which he lacks.
So accept the honor. When someone informs you that you are deranged, he has told you
three things: he heard you, he could not answer you, and he would rather discuss your mind
than his candidate’s record.
Take the trophy. It was awarded under protest, which is the only kind worth having.
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
What the Pool Reflects
Sixteen million dollars, a friend with a contract awarded without
bidding, and a mirror the President refuses to look into.
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar (1894)
A reflecting pool has exactly one job. It shows you what is standing in front of it.
For roughly $16 million of the public’s money, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
has performed that job with a fidelity no one in this administration intended. It reflected a
rushed vanity project. It reflected a contract handed to a friend. It reflected a government
that, confronted with its own failure, went looking for a citizen to punish.
THE MONEY
A $14.7 million contract awarded without competitive bidding went to Atlantic Industrial
Coatings of Virginia to spread blue waterproofing across the pool’s concrete floor, justified
by urgent need. The Park Service bypassed competitive bidding by invoking an urgency exemption
tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary. A second contract, worth $1.7 million, went
to Green Water Solutions, an Ohio firm whose owner keeps a home in Palm Beach less than a
mile from the President’s Palm Beach residence. Its controlling figure, John J. Cafaro, has two
felony convictions: a 2001 guilty plea for conspiring to bribe a congressman and a 2010 plea
for a campaign finance violation. A deadline became a license. The license became a favor.
The work failed within days. The coating peeled. The water turned green. And the President
of the United States went on social media to announce, without evidence, that saboteurs had
cut a gash measuring 250 feet into the facade and poured corrosive chemicals into the water.
THE BLAME
Then came the arrests. A person who was 17 years old was cited over a piece of paint. And
David “Davey” Hearn, who competed in the Olympics three times, was indicted on a felony
charge carrying a sentence of up to ten years, accused of pulling up roughly two square feet
of liner. The U.S. Attorney announced “tremendous evidence.”
On July 31, that case collapsed. Prosecutors told the court the damage resulted from
flawed installation by the contractor, not vandalism. More damningly, they said that if the
Interior Department had been forthcoming with information already in its possession, no
indictment would ever have been sought.
A man who cannot look at a mirror without
demanding it show him someone else.
Credit where it is owed: Jeanine Pirro corrected the record against her own interest. Days
earlier, the Interior secretary had told the country the contractor did a fantastic job and would
be rehired for the repairs. And the President? On Saturday he answered the confession of his
own Justice Department by insisting the major damage was still the work of vandals.
WHAT HISTORY RECORDS
Here is the part worth remembering. History reflects well on the public servant who owns
a mistake. It always has. Voters forgive error; they do not forgive the official who insists the
mirror is lying. Pirro will be remembered for the harder filing, not the easier one. An honest
correction is not weakness; it is the whole reason an office is worth holding.
An Olympian’s name was put on a federal felony indictment to cover a contractor’s failure.
That is not a paint problem. That is the machinery of federal prosecution turned into a
drop cloth.
THE RIPPLE
“We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going,
and then go with the drove.” Twain wrote that of the American
habit of borrowing an opinion rather than forming one.
But a reflecting pool does more than mirror. It ripples. Whatever is thrown into it travels
outward to the edges, which is to say, to us. A political party is an implied association. When
a voter stands inside a party line and says nothing about a contract awarded without bidding
and steered to a neighbor, or an innocent citizen charged to protect an official story, that
silence becomes part of the reflection. It is not only the President in that water. It is everyone
standing behind him who declined to speak.
Congress has the bidding under review. Voters hold something stronger: a ballot and the
standing to demand honesty before they spend it. Demand it out loud and demand it of your
own side first. History reflects favorably on those who did and keeps a clear record of those
who did not.

ON THE POLITICS OF POSTHUMOUS HONOR
We the People, Not We
the Vindictive
The nation’s highest civic tributes have become
spoils of a partisan war that ought to end at the grave.
It is time to bind them in statute.
When Lindsey Graham lies in state beneath the Capitol dome on July 28, the Rotunda
will do what it too often does. It will confer the republic’s highest civic honor
by the oldest and least honorable of standards: who had the votes.
There is no statute that governs this. None. Lying in state requires only a concurrent
resolution of Congress, and the criteria are whatever the majority happens to
feel that week. That is precisely why the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a man who marched
from Selma, ran twice for president, and carried the moral weight of a movement,
was denied the Capitol Rotunda his supporters requested and sent home to a state
capitol instead.
Honor flows to friends․ Insult flows to rivals․
The dead deserve better than a scorecard․
It is why John McCain, a genuine war hero, was saluted with the flag grudgingly
lowered to half staff. A sitting president raised it and lowered it again only after veterans’
groups shamed him into decency.
The pattern is unmistakable. The dead are ranked not by service to the country
but by their standing with whoever holds the gavel and the flagpole. And so the
machinery of national mourning, including the Rotunda, the flag at half staff, and
commemorative coins and stamps, becomes one more prize in a feud that should
have no place beside a casket.
This is a disgrace, and it is fixable. Congress should establish clear, neutral criteria
in federal law for who receives these honors, considering the length and character
of national service and measuring it by law rather than by grudge. It should take
the decision out of the hands of small men who treat a funeral as a ballot.
The Rotunda belongs to the nation, not to a faction. The flag at half staff should
salute the citizen, not flatter the powerful. Let these honors be dispensed by We the
People, not We the Vindictive.

The Wanted Poster
and the Parade
Picture your own town. Then look at what we’ve become.
Picture the sheriff’s office in your own town. On the wall hangs a poster: WANTED.
The charge is stealing children by carrying them off from a neighboring county
in the middle of a fight. Everyone who walks in sees that face. Everyone knows what
he is accused of. Now picture the Fourth of July. The mayor doesn’t just let that man
into town. He gives him the lead float. He seats him up front where the children can
wave. He rides beside him down Main Street, smiling for the cameras, while the
band plays and the flags snap in the wind. Nobody mentions the poster. It is still on
the wall, three blocks away, gathering dust.
“The poster is still on the wall․ We just handed him the float․”
That parade was real. It happened on August 15, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. The
man on the float was Vladimir Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court
since March 2023 for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. The lead float
was a red carpet and a shared limousine. The mayor was the President of the United
States. And the poster, the warrant, is still on the wall, gathering dust.
There is a second float in this parade. Israel’s prime minister rides it while under
his own ICC warrant for the conduct of the war in Gaza. He is welcomed to the
reviewing stand more often than any other guest in town. When someone asks the
mayor why, the answer is always the same: these are good men to do business with.
As if a warrant were a credit rating. As if the poster on the wall were a suggestion.
And here is the part that should turn a decent stomach. There is one poster that
can never be printed in this town: the mayor’s own. We built the sheriff’s office so
that no outside court could ever hang our leaders on that wall. A rule that binds
only the strangers you dislike, and never the friends you profit from, is not the law.
It is a parade permit.
You can tell what a town honors by whom it puts on the lead float. Right now, we
are saving that seat for wanted men while asking the children to wave.

The Chickenhawk’s Ledger
They declare the wars. Someone else’s children pay for them.
They send the young to die, then call it honor.
Consider the arithmetic no one in power wants totaled. The average American
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was about 26 years old. He earned a junior enlisted
wage, often $25,000 to $40,000 a year, and his net worth, after a truck payment and
some debt, hovered near zero. He left behind a spouse who will raise his children
on the memory of a folded flag.
Now consider those who signed his orders. The President draws $400,000 a year.
A member of Congress draws $174,000, and the median lawmaker is worth roughly
$1 million. In the House, the average member is worth some $8 million. They vote
for war from marble chambers, confident that their own sons will never have to
trade civilian life for a Humvee.
“The powerful discover their courage precisely when
the bleeding will be done by someone else․”
The pattern is bipartisan and shameless. Donald Trump, who as commander
in chief ordered strikes and deployments, sat out Vietnam through a string of deferments,
capped by a convenient diagnosis of heel spurs. Bill Clinton, who fired
cruise missiles from the Oval Office, maneuvered clear of that same war through
his own tangle of deferments. Two men, two parties, one privilege: the wars are
always for other people’s children.
This is the oldest swindle in the republic. The powerful discover their courage
precisely when the bleeding will be done by someone poorer, younger, and more
decent than themselves. The soldier believes he is defending a democracy. Too often
he is defending the fortunes and reputations of men who arranged, when it was
their turn, to be somewhere safe.
We are told to honor the fallen. Fine. But honor is cheap when it costs a wreath
and a speech. Real honor would mean this: no one who dodged a war should vote
to start one, and no lecture on sacrifice from a millionaire who never risked a dime
or a son.
The ultimate price is paid by the few: the young, the broke, and the loyal, all
on behalf of the many who profit and preen. Until that ledger is read aloud, the
speeches are only noise over fresh graves.

Selling Tickets to Insider Information
on a Platform Called “Truth Social”?
Consider the branding. A company named for truth, running a platform named
for truth, now proposes to sell truth itself by the millisecond to the highest bidder.
Beginning August 1, Trump Media & Technology Group’s “Truth API” will pipe the
president’s posts that move markets to banks and trading firms milliseconds before
the public sees them, for a reported monthly fee in the six figures. The name promises
information for the people; the product delivers it to the auction winner.
Recall Joseph Kennedy’s shoeshine boy, trading on the same tip as the tycoon.
At least he shared the tycoon’s information. Today, the White House teleprompter
operator reads the words that move markets before they are even spoken and is
better informed than Kennedy’s bootblack ever was, while the public learns them
last. Proximity to the podium is now an asset for rent.
One set of rules for you․ No rules for him․
Strip the euphemism and it is plain: tickets to insider information, sold at the
door. Speed, when the merchandise is government policy, is no convenience. It is
a head start on the Treasury, marketed by a company largely owned by the president’s
own trust. The SEC exists to forbid exactly this asymmetry. That presidents
were exempted from conflict of interest statutes decades ago does not bless the arrangement;
it exposes the loophole. Every prior occupant treated policy as public
property and released it to everyone at the same time. This one meters the tap and
pockets the meter.
Retire the pretense: “Truth Social” is a turnstile, and truth is the commodity behind
it, sold first to the few and delayed for the many. Veritas pro populo? Not at
these prices. “Markets already move on our posts,” the company boasts. Precisely.
That is the confession, not the defense.

The Wrong Kind of Strength
When the Pentagon starts measuring its people by their
hormones instead of their heads, the Republic should worry.
The Secretary of Defense has apparently concluded that the gravest threat to
American arms is not incompetence, not poor judgment, not the slow erosion of
merit, but low testosterone. Last week, Pete Hegseth ordered mandatory annual
hormone screening for every service member over thirty, wrapping the order in
swaggering rhetoric about high testosterone and a “Department of War.” Physicians
reacted with something close to disbelief; one kinesiologist dismissed the idea
of blanket screening of everyone over thirty as a ridiculous notion. They are right.
Consider what actually won the Second World War. It was not the biggest biceps
in the barracks. It was radar, the codebreakers, the Manhattan Project, penicillin,
and an industrial machine no adversary on earth could match. America triumphed
because it out-thought its enemies, not because it looked more menacing. The decisive
weapon was the disciplined human mind, marshaled by leaders who understood
that victory is counted in objectives achieved, not in blood spilled.
Our finest commanders earned their laurels the same way. Washington’s patient
retreats and Eisenhower’s meticulous planning avoided needless slaughter rather
than chasing it. Strategic restraint is not weakness. It is the highest form of strength,
and it requires a clear head, not a chemically inflated one.
That is precisely why this fixation alarms. We are telling the men and women
who guard the most fearsome arsenal ever assembled, an arsenal capable of ending
civilizations, that aggression is a virtue to be maximized. Roid rage and the nuclear
codes are not a pairing any sane republic should court.
And beneath the hormone charts lies the real rot: a merit system built on competence,
character, and candor is being quietly swapped for a loyalty system built on
flattery. Advancement now flows to those who echo the boss, not to those who tell
him hard truths. Ability is out; adoration is in.
Has all sanity left Washington? The nation’s defense demands both the best
minds we can find and the spine to promote them.
When the Bank Robber
Lectures You on Vault Security
A convicted felon’s crusade against “election fraud”
collapses the moment you read the record.
When Donald Trump warns America about “election fraud,” listen closely. It is
the bank robber lecturing the tellers on vault security. No public figure alive has a
thinner claim to the language of law and honesty, and the case against him is not
opinion or partisan spin. It consists of docket entries, signed memos, and pardon
paperwork. Together, they form a record any citizen can read.
Trump is a convicted felon, found guilty by a Manhattan jury in 2024 on thirty
four counts of falsifying business records. It was the first such verdict against a
former president in our history. Not an accusation. A verdict. He lectures us on
“rigged” systems from the far side of a conviction he could not talk his way out of.
Then recall 2020. He swore the election was stolen and marched into court
roughly sixty times to prove it, appearing before judges he appointed. Even his own
attorney general found no fraud that could have changed the result. He lost nearly
every case because he had no evidence. A man who cannot win a single fraud case
has no standing to cry fraud forever.
Consider whom he has freed. On his first day back in office, he pardoned or commuted
some 1,500 January 6 defendants, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys
convicted of seditious conspiracy and rioters who beat the officers defending the
Capitol. The party of “back the blue” now cheers the very men who bloodied them.
Then, in December 2025, he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former
Honduran president whom a U.S. jury convicted of moving over 400 tons of cocaine
toward American streets in one of the largest and most violent trafficking
conspiracies in the world. He bombs fishing boats in the name of a drug war while
unlocking a convicted kingpin’s cell.
One set of rules for you․ No rules for him․
Consider whom he shields. He signed a law to release the Epstein files, then let
his own Justice Department blow past the deadline and keep the record buried.
His deputy attorney general, his former personal lawyer, interviewed Ghislaine
Maxwell, a convicted trafficker of underage girls. She was quietly moved to a softer
prison. The victims wait. Maxwell gets comfort.
And consider whom he exempts. In 2026, a Justice Department memo declared
the IRS “forever barred” from auditing Trump, his family, his trusts, and his businesses.
A possible $100 million penalty simply evaporated. One set of rules for you.
No rules for him.
This is not conservatism. It is not law and order. It is a man rewriting history in
real time, betting you won’t check the record. In November, check it. And if you can
cheer every line above, you have earned the red face to match the red hat.
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. It is not random,
routine, or 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 speaking becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi v. United States of America, et al., Case No. 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 and lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason to doubt what they were told. I believe
that honest, hardworking real estate agents employed by Berkshire Hathaway were
fed false information about me by government actors. Berkshire Hathaway is one
of the most respected real estate companies in America and was built on a foundation
of integrity. 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 a victim of this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, pro se v. Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, et al.,
Case No. D01CI260001752, Nebraska District Court, Douglas County.
I am still standing.
This is the American version of defenestration. No broken glass. No headlines.
Just a man with his savings under assault and his name poisoned in his own community,
all of it 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.Sell Alaska. Take the money. Run.
Two broke empires once sold us a continent.
It is time we returned the favor.
America has a long and honorable tradition of buying continents from broke
warmongers. It is time we returned the favor.
Consider the pattern. In 1803, Napoleon needed cash after bleeding out in Haiti
and preparing to bleed out across Europe. He sold us 828,000 square miles for
$15 million, roughly three cents an acre, because empires with expensive hobbies
eventually need a garage sale. In 1867, Tsar Alexander II, still nursing the hangover
of the Crimean War, sold us Alaska for $7.2 million. Two cents an acre. Seward’s
Folly, the papers sneered. The folly, of course, belonged to the man who had spent
his treasury on artillery instead of infrastructure. We are now that man.
“Every nation that ever sold a continent said the same
things right up until the invoices arrived.”
Our national debt has sailed past $37 trillion, propelled by a foreign policy that
treats the Pentagon budget like a bar tab we will settle in the next life. Venezuela.
Iraq, twice, in case the first one did not take. And now serious people in serious
rooms are discussing the acquisition of Greenland, apparently on the theory that
what this country really needs is more frozen real estate we cannot afford to heat.
So sell the frozen real estate we already have.
Alaska is, geographically speaking, Canadian. It sits atop British Columbia and
the Yukon like a hat. It is separated from the contiguous United States by an entire
foreign country, a fact we handle by pretending the map is not doing what the map
is obviously doing. Alaskans drive to the rest of America by driving through Canada.
Let us stop the charade.
The price? Alaska’s proven oil and gas reserves, mineral deposits, fisheries, timber,
and 365 million acres of land plausibly run into the low trillions. Call it $3 trillion,
at a friendly neighbor rate, with financing available. That is eight percent of the
debt erased in a single afternoon, plus we stop paying for statehood’s upkeep and
gain a permanent excuse to blame Ottawa for the price of salmon.
The objections write themselves. National security. Sovereignty. Sentiment.
Fine. But note that every nation that ever sold a continent said the same things,
right up until the invoices arrived.
History’s lesson is not that great powers fall. It is that they get billed. Russia and
France learned it. We are about to.
Two cents an acre bought it. Let us see what we can get.
This satire is offered in the spirit of Swift and in earnest about the arithmetic