June 23, 2026

WHAT IF VIOLATING FOIA MEANT JAIL TIME? The landmark Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) became law on July 4, 1966, and in the six decades since, not one federal employee has ever gone to jail for violating the statute. Maybe that has something to do with the routine way the FOIA is ignored, abused and outright trashed by federal workers. I don’t know, I’m from out of town and all, but maybe it’s time to amend the law to make jail the consequence of serious infractions?

Posted at 6:42 pm by Mark Tapscott

YOU’RE GONNA NEED SOME ICE FOR THAT BURN:

Posted at 6:42 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMS BACK TO FUTURE CIRCA 1911: They just think they’re peddling something new. Actually, as Issues & Insights points out, we’ve seen this act before and it was short-lived, for very good reasons.

Posted at 5:42 pm by Mark Tapscott

HOW IT STARTED:

How it’s going:

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ALAN GREENSPAN ON THE SAXOPHONE: “Let me say that as a saxophone player, Alan did one hell of a payroll…He did do the payroll for us and we always got paid on time.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM: Liberals see promise in tax-credit scholarships; conservatives see dangers.

“If policymakers are making their decision strictly on the merits, they will see it’s a no-brainer,” says Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform.

“Students will be eligible for scholarships as long as their family income is 300% of their area’s median income or lower,” writes Stone. “That threshold encompasses most U.S. students, including families earning more than $500,000 in Westchester County, N.Y., on the high end and $114,000 in Wolfe County, Ky., on the low end.”

Tax-credit scholarships could create a “slush fund for public schools” and a way for government regulators to control private schools, warns Daniel Buck of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. It “could be an utter disaster.”

“Ideally, this program will create a funding stream to allow struggling Catholic and Lutheran schools to prosper, homeschools and microschools to flourish, and public schools to offer a litany of new, supplemental services,” he writes.

More likely, he predicts, school districts could send out mass emails to encourage donations to their preferred SGO, one that would fund the district but not homeschooling co-ops.”

“In time this program will become a stick that the federal government can wield to thwack private schools into submission,” he writes. Once their budgets become dependent on federal scholarships, they’ll lose their academic independence. Administrations change.

I’ve said for years that the modern administrative state turns the old adage on its head: Once you take the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

FA, MEET FO:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

COFFEE AND CLICHES: Lefty owner of anti-Israel NYC coffee shop calls US ally ‘Nazi Germany of our time’ in hateful online outburst.

The radical leftist owner of a woke Brooklyn coffee shop that boasts about discriminating against pro-Israel Jewish customers on social media has a history of deranged anti-Israel LinkedIn posts — including accusing the Jewish state of genocide and comparing it to Nazi Germany.

Parviz Mukhamadkulov, founder of Poetica Coffee in Park Slope, regularly engages in comment threads under posts about Israel or the horrors committed by Hamas, in which he justifies the terror group’s atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.

“Israel is the Nazi Germany of current time,” he wrote in response to a video posted by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Curiously though, Tucker Carlson is no fan of Israel, and neither is world’s biggest Totenkopf stan:

UPDATE:

Jim Treacher writes that “Poetica Coffee has now taken down their Facebook page and all their other social media:”

They’re getting clobbered on Yelp. Oh, and they’re being investigated by the Department of Justice. So that was a big Sunday for them.

I’m not a big fan of Dan Goldman, but it’s not because he’s a Jew who believes Jews have the right to exist. I’m with him on this one.

Fortunately for Poetica Coffee, the press — most of the press — will go easy on him because they’re left-wing antisemites.

Not at the Washington Free Beacon, though. They’re reporting that:

The coffee shop is owned by Parviz Mukhamadkulov [I hope I’m pronouncing that wrong], an immigrant from Uzbekistan who is a donor to far-left Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner…

On its website, Poetica incongruously touts its “radical hospitality” and proudly notes that guests are “sacred” and “the door is open to everyone…”

They also owe the state of New York almost $400,000 in unpaid sales tax. So that’s something. And I guess they’ve had a bunch of sanitation problems. Go figure.

Now, a lot of people on both sides of the aisle seem to agree with these bigots at this coffee shop. I’m not one of them. I hope you’re not either.

Exit quote: “Do you want Nazis? Because this is how you get Nazis.”

 

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 2:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CAPITALISM, THE UNKNOWN IDEAL:

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reports:

Offer not valid for OnlyFans stars:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll