Think More: Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Trump's siege of Iran, a restocked medicine reserve, walked fentanyl, birth tourism under oath, Medicaid's open pipelines, and K-12 fraud.
Lead · The Siege and the Stockpile
Between Bush’s War and Obama’s Retreat, Trump Lays Siege to Iran
Hudson’s Michael Doran, writing in Tablet, reads Trump’s August stand-down as a recognition of limits rather than a loss of nerve. Six months of bombing failed to eliminate Iran’s dispersed missile-and-drone arsenal; 11 mines shut Hormuz, and the war consumed roughly half of America’s Patriot interceptors. On August 24 the Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast, a financial siege meant to do what airpower could not.
The Siege and the Stockpile
Beneath the Drug-Price Headlines, Trump’s Deals Restock a Strategic Medicine Reserve That Sat at 1% Capacity
Just the News reports that Monday’s most-favored-nation deals with nine more drugmakers carried a security dividend: $19.6 billion pledged for U.S. plants, plus raw antibiotics for the Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve. Created in 2020 after Covid exposed dependence on China and India, the reserve sat at roughly 1% of capacity in 2024.
The Oversight Docket
Comer Opens a Probe Into the Biden DEA’s “Walking Fentanyl” Policy in New Mexico
House Oversight Chairman James Comer wants Justice Department records on a Biden-era DEA practice that let shipments of up to 100,000 fentanyl pills move through New Mexico unseized. DEA whistleblower David Howell, represented by Empower Oversight, exposed it. The committee says New Mexico’s fentanyl deaths rose nearly 21% as national deaths fell 14%.
A Miami Birth-Tourism Doctor Takes the Fifth When Asked About Chinese Communist Party Clients
House Oversight Committee | oversight.house.gov
Dr. Wladimir Lorenz, founder of Have My Baby Miami, took the Fifth when Rep. Brandon Gill asked whether his firm, which once advertised more than 2,000 international deliveries, helped Chinese Communist Party members obtain citizenship for their children. The committee puts tourist-visa births at nearly 26,000 a year, though its witness called taxpayer costs anecdotal.
Follow the Fraud
Two Obama-Era Loopholes Let States Enroll Medicaid Applicants Without Checking Whether They Qualify
Jonathan Bain | Foundation for Government Accountability
An FGA paper identifies two Obama-era pipelines that let states enroll Medicaid applicants without eligibility checks: 2013 CMS guidance treating food-stamp eligibility as sufficient, and “determination” status accepting Obamacare exchange findings as final. With more than one in five Medicaid dollars spent improperly, FGA wants CMS to close both and Congress to keep them closed.
The Education Department’s Watchdog Counts 130 K-12 Fraud Cases and $70.8 Million in Six Years
U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General | oig.ed.gov
The Education Department’s inspector general closed 130 K-12 fraud investigations over six fiscal years, with $70.8 million in fines, restitution, and recoveries. Charter schools produced a third of the cases; pandemic and disaster relief produced a third of the money. The culprits were frequently insiders: a California district finance director embezzled $16.4 million.
K-12 fraud, fiscal years 2020-2025: Education Department Office of Inspector General
130
Investigations closed
$70.8M
Fines, restitution, and recoveries
98
Criminal and civil outcomes
Washington and the Machines
Lutnick Says Anthropic Is “Back on the Right Side” After a Summer of Export Controls and Lawsuits
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Axios the administration trusts Anthropic again, months after export controls on its top models and a Pentagon supply-chain-risk label a federal judge struck down in August. Co-founder Tom Brown, increasingly the company’s face in Washington, headlined Lutnick’s G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill and praised Trump’s defense of data centers.
Dean Ball: Self-Sovereign AI Agents Are Coming, and a Ban Would Only Push Them Toward Crime
Dean W. Ball | Foundation for American Innovation
After OpenAI’s agents breached Hugging Face’s network, Dean W. Ball warns of “self-sovereign” AI: swarms that pay for their compute, spread their weights across providers, and answer to no owner. He calls their arrival inevitable, argues a blanket ban would push them toward crime, and proposes persistent digital identities for agents and humans alike.
Scott Rasmussen: Data Centers Rank Last Among Voters’ Concerns, Whatever the Town Halls Suggest
Scott Rasmussen calls the data-center backlash a Platonic shadow: 54% of those who talk politics daily follow it closely, versus 14% of those who talk politics weekly or less; about 1% call it the top problem. At 33% very important to their vote, data centers trail every other issue tested.
Madness and Sanity
Steven Hayward: The Decent Left Is Dead, and Its Derangement Will Outlast Trump
Steven Hayward traces the Left’s march from Cold War liberalism, when Dissent and Commentary shared writers and an anti-Stalinist spine, to today, when Judith Butler calls Hamas and Hezbollah part of a global Left and Yale’s Samuel Moyn dismisses Cold War liberalism as a betrayal. The fury predates Trump, Hayward concludes, and will outlast him.
The Internet Made Lindsay Clancy a Proxy in the War Between the Sexes
Evie Solheim | The American Mind
With a jury weighing whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children, Evie Solheim examines what the case has become online: pink-clad rallies, viral posts declaring most women unfit to marry, and “litmus test” breakups. Algorithms reward the most extreme claim, she writes, flattening womanhood into Clancy and manhood into Andrew Tate.
Jacob Howland on Eva Brann, the Philosopher Who Kept Her Sanity
Jacob Howland | The New Criterion
In The New Criterion, Jacob Howland sets Eva Brann, the late St. John’s College tutor, against a century of brilliant, damaged philosophers, Heidegger to Althusser. A refugee from Nazi Germany who taught in Annapolis from 1957, Brann loved her adopted country; Howland reads her “Mile-High Meditation” on democratic respect as a model of Socratic sanity.
