America’s most prolific ad man.

Harley Warrick was a WW2 vet who returned home looking for work. He joined the Mail Pouch crew after seeing men painting his father's barn. He would paint over 20,000 Mail Pouch Barns and began every one with 'HEW' - his initials.

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core. The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old. It had fewer than 50 employees. And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it. Here is the part the administration tried to bury. Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast. One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done. Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion. A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son. This is public money. Your money. Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for. And there is more coming. A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review. This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer. propublica.org/article/donal…

🇺🇸🧐“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…” Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share. This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating: “Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive. A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy. A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages. You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re simply too poor to afford bail. Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends. Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years. Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you. And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster. And you call Greenland badly governed? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment. ‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’ When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years. And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess. You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy. So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan. The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth. And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

Spot a pattern?

And since then? Every Republican president from Reagan to Trump has added massive deficits while still branding themselves the “party of fiscal responsibility.” Reagan: deficits. Bush Sr.: deficits. Bush Jr.: deficits after inheriting a surplus. Trump: deficits BEFORE COVID, then trillions more after. Meanwhile, the last president to actually balance the damn budget and produce a surplus was Bill Clinton. Republicans are not the party of fiscal responsibility. They are the party of tax cuts, military spending, billionaire giveaways, and pretending the credit card bill magically disappears if you wrap it in a flag and scream about freedom hard enough.

In 1998, the United States achieved its first federal budget surplus in 29 years, effectively ending a streak of deficits that had lasted since 1969. ⁠ ⁠ This milestone was achieved under President Bill Clinton, following the passage of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which resulted in a fiscal surplus of approximately $69 billion for that year.⁠ ⁠

I have two stacks on my desk. The left stack is financial disclosure forms from members of Congress. The right stack is waivers for members who filed their financial disclosures late. The right stack is always taller. On Wednesday morning, I watched a soldier get arrested on CNN. I am a Disclosure Analyst for the House Ethics Committee. I have held this position for eleven years. My job is to receive the forms, verify their completeness, and file them. I do not investigate. I do not flag. I do not refer. I file. I have a lanyard. The lanyard says ETHICS. The soldier's name is Gannon Ken Van Dyke. He is thirty-eight years old. He was stationed at Fort Bragg. He was Special Forces. In December, he created an account on a prediction market called Polymarket. On January 2nd, he bet $32,500 that the president of Venezuela would be removed from power. On January 3rd, he helped remove the president of Venezuela from power. He collected $409,881. He has been charged with five federal crimes. Commodities fraud. Wire fraud. Unlawful use of confidential government information. Theft of nonpublic government information. Unlawful monetary transaction. The Department of Justice called it "the first-ever insider trading prosecution on event contracts." I watched this on the television in our break room. Then I walked back to my desk and processed a late financial disclosure from a member of the House Financial Services Committee who purchased $250,000 in bank stocks eleven days before his subcommittee held a closed-door hearing on proposed capital reserve changes. The filing was forty-seven days late. The STOCK Act requires disclosure within forty-five days. The penalty for late filing is $200. I waived it. I waive most of them. In 2021, fifty-four members of Congress and senior staff violated the reporting rules. The fines were minimal. Most were waived. I have a form for the waiver. The form has a box that says "Reason." I write "administrative delay." In ethics, "administrative delay" means the member's office forgot and then remembered when a reporter called. My approval rate is one hundred percent. In any other field, that number would trigger an audit. In mine, it is called thoroughness. Let me show you what I processed this year. January. A senator on the Armed Services Committee sold defense contractor shares worth $1.2 million. Three days later, his committee received a classified briefing that the Iran campaign had exceeded its projected cost by 340%. The stock dropped 8%. He filed the disclosure sixty-one days late. I calculated the fine. $200. His chief of staff asked if it could be waived. He did not ask what the senator traded on. Nobody asks that. The form does not have a field for it. I waived the fine. The senator's portfolio returned 23.4% in 2025. The S&P 500 returned 16.8%. February. A representative on the Energy and Commerce Committee bought pharmaceutical stocks worth $400,000. Two weeks later, her committee advanced a bill that would extend patent exclusivity for the exact drug class she purchased. The stocks rose 14%. She filed on time. There was no fine. There was no investigation. There was nothing to investigate because buying stocks in companies regulated by your own committee is not illegal. It is legal. The STOCK Act made it legal by making it disclosed. In Congress, disclosed means legal. In my office, legal means filed. March. A member whose spouse manages a portfolio worth $9.2 million reported forty-three separate transactions in a single quarter. Twelve of them were in sectors directly affected by legislation the member co-sponsored. The timing on eight of those twelve was within a two-week window of committee action. I logged all forty-three. None were flagged. We do not flag. We file. I asked my supervisor once what would happen if I flagged a filing. She said we do not have a form for that. I never asked again. In 2020, I processed 847 disclosures. In 2023, 1,211. In 2025, 1,614. The number of enforcement actions in each of those years was zero. The numerator changes. The denominator does not. I want to tell you about the soldier again. He made $409,881. He tried to delete his Polymarket account by calling customer service and saying he lost access to his email. He moved his profits into a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He used his real identity. He placed thirteen bets. Every single one was connected to an operation he personally participated in. In my eleven years, I have processed disclosures from members of Congress who traded on: Pending FDA approvals they learned about in committee. Defense appropriations they voted on. Trade policy they negotiated. Pandemic response measures they drafted. Interest rate decisions they were briefed on before the public. None of them have been charged. None of them have been investigated by the Department of Justice. None of them have been referred to the SEC. The STOCK Act has produced zero prosecutions since it was signed on April 4th, 2012. Fourteen years. Five hundred and thirty-five members. $635 million in trades last year alone. Zero cases. My daughter asked me once what happens when someone breaks the rules. I told her we write it down. She asked what happens after that. I said it depends. She was nine. She is twenty now. It does not depend. Nothing happens after that. The soldier made $409,881 and faces decades in prison. Nancy Pelosi entered Congress in 1987 with a portfolio worth approximately $785,000. It is now worth $133.7 million. That is a return of 16,930%. The Dow Jones returned 2,300% over the same period. Professional fund managers who beat the market for three consecutive years are considered exceptional. She has beaten it for thirty-seven. If a hedge fund produced those returns, the SEC would subpoena the records on a Thursday. She produced them from a building with a chapel and a gift shop. She announced her retirement last year. No investigation was opened. No disclosure was flagged. Her filings were on time. In my office, on time means compliant. Compliant means closed. I want to tell you about the fine. $200. That is the maximum penalty for violating the STOCK Act's disclosure requirements. $200 for a member of Congress whose portfolio gained $4.7 million in a single quarter. I calculated what $200 represents as a percentage of $4.7 million. It is 0.004%. I could not find a comparison that made it meaningful. It is less than the price of the parking pass in the Rayburn garage. It is less than lunch at the members' dining room if you order the crab cakes, which I am told are excellent though I eat at my desk. Since 2012, thirty-one bills have been introduced to restrict congressional trading. I keep a list. The list is longer than the STOCK Act itself. On March 5th, 2026, a representative from Michigan introduced the thirty-second. He called it the "No Getting Rich in Congress Act." The bill would prohibit the President, Vice President, members of Congress, and their spouses from trading individual stocks, cryptocurrency, futures, and commodities while in office. The bill was referred to committee. The committee has not scheduled a hearing. The committee is chaired by a member whose spouse executed $2.1 million in trades last year. The bill will be reviewed. In my office, reviewed means read. Read means acknowledged. Acknowledged means a status has been assigned. A status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. The soldier used classified information to make $409,881 on a prediction market. He has been charged with five federal crimes. The Department of Justice announced the case on the same day I processed three disclosures from members who traded on committee knowledge worth a combined $3.8 million. The difference between the soldier and the members is not what they did. It is the building they did it in. He did it from Fort Bragg. They did it from the Capitol. He used a prediction market. They used the New York Stock Exchange. He bet on a military operation. They bet on the legislation they write. He did not write the law. They did. They wrote the STOCK Act. Then they funded its enforcement at zero dollars. Then they set its maximum penalty at $200. Then they gave my office the authority to waive it. Then they traded $635 million. The soldier flew to Caracas. He breached a compound. He put his body between a mission and a bullet. The people who ordered the operation were in a building with a credenza and sparkling water. They did not go to Caracas. They went to their brokerage accounts. The soldier made $409,881 and is now in federal custody. The people who knew what he was going to do before he did it made more and filed less. His prosecution is not a failure of the system. It is the system. One conviction per decade, at the lowest level, so the briefing slides can say enforcement exists. The $409,881 is not the crime. It is the cost of making $635 million look supervised. In my field, we call this self-regulation. The soldier's Polymarket account has been frozen. His military career is over. He will spend years in federal prison. My office will process every congressional disclosure filed this year. Every trade logged. Every $200 fine calculated and waived. The system is immaculate. Fourteen years. Zero prosecutions. $635 million a year. A 16,930% return. I have not leaked a document. I have not filed a complaint. I have not deviated from the process one single time. The process was written by the people whose forms I process. As long as the disclosures go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. My lanyard still says ETHICS. In eleven years, nobody has asked me to define the word.

Tucson made a simple change to 20,000 streetlights. Light pollution dropped 7%, energy bills dropped $2.16 million a year, and many songbirds were saved. Most LEDs have made light pollution worse. The cool-white lights most cities chose scatter into the sky at higher rates than the old sodium lamps. That scatter pulls migrating songbirds off course and drops them into lit buildings by the hundreds of millions each year. Tucson decided to do it differently. They used warm-white 3,000K LEDs instead of the standard 4,000K. They added full shielding so light points down, not sideways or up, and adaptive dimming. Lights run at 90% from sunset to midnight, then drop to 60% until dawn. Drivers and pedestrians reported no loss of visibility. Migrating birds passing over the city had a darker corridor to navigate than they'd had in decades. Most cities still haven't figured this out. Philadelphia, LA, and Phoenix have all run into problems with retrofits that increased sky glow despite using LEDs. The tech is solved. The implementation is a choice. Ask your city council what color temperature your streetlights are. Ask if they dim after midnight. Ask if they're shielded. Most people have never thought about it. Most elected officials haven't either. Never forget that the night sky is also habitat.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how Lake Lure and the surrounding areas look. Lake Lure looks beautiful, y’all! It is about 8-10 feet below its pre-Helene water level. But the main road is perfect and businesses are open. A lot of work has been done, and it shows! Chimney Rock? Businesses are open there too! It’s like a miracle—especially amidst all the damage that can still be seen. Please visit! This section of the foothills was devastated by Hurricane Helene, and they depend on our tourism. This is one vacation you can take that will actually make a difference. 🙏🏼❤️

I love people who are paying attention and tell it like it is.

They won't tell you how good was Stevie Ray Vaughan but I will. This is your reminder. A 1980 clip of SRV, his raw, distorted, and extremely loud stratocaster, at the 1st Tornado Jam in Lubbock.

The real shortage is of companies willing to hire and take part in apprenticeships. “We have a shortage.” Ok, pay guys to learn a trade and see them through an apprenticeship. “No not like that, costs too much.” Repeat ad nauseam.

A microphone appears and the machine calls it revelation. One man in a chair, one camera, one studio pretending to be a tribunal while the feed pretends the confession matters. The ritual is ancient. Put a voice in front of a lens, wrap the accusation in numbers, and watch the timeline treat theater like evidence. Thirty-seven hours, they say. The stopwatch of outrage. A sacred timestamp so the audience feels history unfolding instead of narrative being edited. But the machine doesn’t broadcast truth. It broadcasts escalation. Every claim sharpened, every sentence designed to divide the room before the evidence even exists. One tribe cheers the exposure. One tribe denies the crime. Both believe they escaped the script while the feed quietly counts the engagement. That is the architecture. A revelation that reveals nothing yet resets the outrage cycle perfectly. Another interview. Another accusation. Another loop of believers and debunkers spinning inside the same comment thread. Because the system doesn’t fear truth. It fears the moment the audience stops reacting to the actors performing it. And until that moment arrives the stage lights stay on and the script keeps writing itself.

I wanna see the CEO of Verizon call in for customer service

Permanent DST will never work.. It did not work in 1974 and is not going to work now We need to keep Standard Time year-round for safety and health and a better life!!! Start advocating to your lawmakers that standard time is the way to go! youtu.be/Gk5voE0OS60?si=Nfzi…

There is no need to go through the stupidest ritual of modern life next weekend. More daylight is coming this month without the foolishness of changing our clocks. @SaveStandard Time!