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"Widow's Bay" swept, "The Pitt" won big, but not as big as expected, and Mariska Hargitay was an over-the-top host of the 2026 Emmys.

"Widow's Bay" swept, "The Pitt" won big, but not as big as expected, and Mariska Hargitay was an over-the-top host of the 2026 Emmys.

Environmental testing officially went underway in a wealthy Southern California community on Sunday after six cases of a rare cancer disease sparked massive concerns.

See the moments you missed during TV's glitziest night.

See the moments you missed during TV's glitziest night.

The trio made an appearance to mark the 50th anniversary of the iconic series.

The trio made an appearance to mark the 50th anniversary of the iconic series.

When War Comes Home: A Constitutional Warning

Authored by Andrew P. Napolitano via Ron Paul Institute,

A failed war does not end when the drones stop flying. It creates a new danger: A government that refuses to admit defeat and a president who, having failed abroad, seeks muscular victories elsewhere.

The war against Iran is a case study in the limits of military power, the dangers of presidential overreach and the enduring wisdom of the Constitution's separation of powers. It was unauthorized, unconstitutional, illegal, strategically incoherent and - by the standards by which wars must be judged - a geopolitical failure.

The American people were told that force would achieve clear objectives. Iran would be compelled to surrender. Somehow, American security would be enhanced. The region would become more stable.

Instead, the United States expended enormous resources, consumed scarce munitions, deepened regional instability and failed to produce the political outcome President Donald Trump promised. Senior military officials just last week warned him that extending large-scale operations risked exhausting critical military capabilities and weakening America's ability to respond elsewhere.

The United States can destroy buildings, eliminate targets, deploy aircraft, ships, missiles, drones and troops anywhere on the planet. But war is not a video game in which the destruction of enemy assets automatically produces political surrender. War is a contest of wills, societies, culture and endurance.

And here is the constitutional question that should have been asked before the first bomb was dropped: Who gave the president the authority to begin this war? The Constitution did not.

Article I, Section 8 gives Congress - not the president - the power to declare war. The framers deliberately rejected the British model in which kings could drag nations into conflicts based upon personal judgment, ambition or political convenience. James Madison warned that the executive branch was "the branch of power most interested in war," and therefore the Constitution placed the decision to enter war outside the president's constitutional reach.

The president is commander in chief. He commands forces after lawful congressional decisions have been made. He does not possess the power to transform his title into a personal authority to begin wars.

That principle has been repeatedly recognized by the Supreme Court. In cases such as Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Court rejected the idea that President Harry Truman had unlimited power simply because he claimed national security. Justice Robert Jackson's famous concurrence warned that executive power is most dangerous when it operates in a "zone of twilight" where presidents attempt to expand authority beyond constitutional boundaries and without congressional concurrence.

The Iran war belongs precisely in that twilight - where executive ambition collides with constitutional restraint.

The administration may argue that modern threats require flexibility. That argument has been made by presidents of both parties for decades. But flexibility is not the same as unlimited authority. The Constitution was written for difficult moments, not easy ones. It was designed to restrain presidents even when they believe they have compelling reasons to act.

The military failure abroad has created a political dilemma at home. A president who promised victory must now confront the reality that victory was never achieved.

The danger is what happens next.

History teaches that political leaders who suffer public humiliation abroad often seek demonstrations of strength elsewhere. Foreign-policy failure can produce domestic overreach. Leaders who cannot achieve the desired result overseas may attempt to prove their power through actions at home.

That is where the war comes home.

The president, frustrated by military limitations, may turn toward radical immigration enforcement, Supreme Court-prohibited tariffs, statutorily prohibited domestic deployments of military forces, stealing foreign-owned oil, and assertions of executive authority that collide with free speech and free association.

But the Constitution does not permit a president to substitute disappointment for law.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person - not just Americans - shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The Sixth Amendment guarantees all persons - not just Americans - from whom the government seeks life, liberty or property the right to a public trial before an impartial jury, and other constitutional protections. These protections apply not because accused persons are necessarily innocent but because government power is too dangerous to operate without restraints.

Evidence is not conviction. Accusation is not guilt. Presidential assertion is not judicial judgment.

The executive branch cannot simply identify alleged criminals in speedboats or elsewhere, declare them enemies and impose punishment without trial. That is a system the American Revolution rejected.

The same principle applies to the use of military force inside the United States. The founders were deeply suspicious of standing armies being used for law enforcement. That suspicion produced constitutional protections and later statutes prohibiting the military's role in civilian law enforcement.

The military exists to defend the nation from foreign threats. It is not a presidential police force.

Likewise, Congress - not the president - defines crimes and establishes punishments. A president cannot create new categories of enemies and decide their fate by executive command. The Constitution does not authorize a monarchy with aircraft carriers.

Every generation faces a temptation to exchange freedom for security. Every generation is told that normal rules cannot apply because a crisis is too serious, an enemy too dangerous and a moment too urgent.

The founders knew that argument well and they rejected it.

The Constitution was written precisely because government officials would sometimes believe that their objectives justified employing extraordinary power. The separation of powers, congressional war authority, judicial review and due process protections are not obstacles to effective government. They are safeguards against government becoming the threat it was created to prevent.

The ultimate question is not whether a president is strong enough to exercise power. The question is whether the president is restrained enough to obey the laws he has sworn to uphold.

That is the fear of a republic when the war comes home. To paraphrase the author Herman Melville, beware the president weeping when he bares an iron hand.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 23:25

Noah Kahan performed Simon & Garfunkel's 1970 song "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" during the heartbreaking montage.

Noah Kahan performed Simon & Garfunkel's 1970 song "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" during the heartbreaking montage.

She’s back on her “Vigilante S***.” Taylor Swift shocked the Emmys audience when she made a surprise cameo at the 2026 Emmys. The pop star appeared in a “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” skit with her real-life cat, Olivia Benson, named after Emmys host Mariska Hargitay’s iconic character in the long-running crime show. In the skit, the “SVU” cast...

She’s back on her “Vigilante S***.” Taylor Swift shocked the Emmys audience when she made a surprise cameo at the 2026 Emmys. The pop star appeared in a “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” skit with her real-life cat, Olivia Benson, named after Emmys host Mariska Hargitay’s iconic character in the long-running crime show. In the skit, the “SVU” cast...

The Emmys 2026 crowned “Widow’s Bay” as the night’s top comedy winner and “The Pitt” as the top drama winner, with both shows taking home several major awards. Jean Smart made history by winning her fifth consecutive Lead Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy for “Hacks,” while Matthew Rhys became a rare two-time acting winner...

The Emmys 2026 crowned “Widow’s Bay” as the night’s top comedy winner and “The Pitt” as the top drama winner, with both shows taking home several major awards. Jean Smart made history by winning her fifth consecutive Lead Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy for “Hacks,” while Matthew Rhys became a rare two-time acting winner...

The Toronto Raptors have welcomed Kawhi Leonard back with open arms despite a near year-long investigation by the NBA. After it was announced on Monday afternoon that Leonard had officially been traded back to Toronto, the Raptors released a statement sharing their excitement. “We’re thrilled to welcome Kawhi back to Toronto. His impact on our...

The Santa Fe Police Motors, the Bicycle Officers, Animal Service, UAS Drone Operators and a few cowboys worked together to get the horse safely off of the road.

California voters have said, again and again, that universities and colleges in California should not be able to use race in admissions. So why do these institutions continue to discriminate?

In what long seemed like a formality, even as they went through some rough summer stretches without Aaron Judge, the Yankees clinched a playoff berth Monday with an 8-3 comeback win over the Twins at rainy and cool Target Field.

Arch Manning answered honestly — maybe too honestly — when asked if he saw any AI edits of Steve Sarkisian and Holly Rowe after Texas’ thrilling comeback win over No. 1 Ohio State.

The Deep State's Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

Authored by Jay Rogers via American Greatness,

Last Wednesday, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent FBI Director Kash Patel a letter demanding every document connected to an operation codenamed Round River.

If you haven't heard of it, that's understandable; it's the sequel nobody promoted, and I'll get to it. I've spent part of my career testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, the branch of law that punishes people for betraying the trust placed in them.

Measured by that standard, Round River isn't merely disinformation; it's a breach of duty so complete that in my industry it would end a career and trigger a bar complaint.

In Washington, it's earned a strongly worded letter.

That's the whole scandal in one sentence: the deep state keeps getting caught, and nobody ever pays for it.

Start with what most people half remember. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the election, the New York Post published emails from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. Within 48 hours, 51 former intelligence officials, including two former CIA directors, signed an open letter declaring the story had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." Twitter locked the Post out of its own account. Facebook throttled the link. The letter did exactly what it was built to do. By 2022, the Washington Post's own hired cryptography experts had authenticated thousands of the laptop's emails using the same digital signatures banks use to verify a wire transfer. Real disinformation, corrected two years too late to matter.

Here's the detail that should bother you more than the letter itself: the man who organized it told Congress, under oath, exactly why he did it. Michael Morell, former acting CIA director, testified that a call from Antony Blinken, then a senior Biden campaign adviser, "triggered" his decision to draft the statement. Asked why he wanted to help the vice president win, Morell didn't dress it up: "Because I wanted him to win the election," he said. He had no evidence of Russian involvement, he testified. Four of the 51 signers, including Morell, were active CIA contractors at the time, with badges granting access most Americans never get. They used their old authority to help a friend's campaign and called it a national security judgment. My brother spent his career in Army Special Forces guarding secrets that get people killed and signed papers promising decades of silence. These 51 men signed a letter to swing a presidential election and called it patriotism.

The paper trail keeps growing. In February, former senior intelligence officer Thomas Kuhns, who spent his career on the intelligence community's analytic standards committee under Obama, filed a formal complaint with the intelligence community's inspector general. His conclusion, built on line-by-line tradecraft analysis rather than partisan grievance, was that the letter's "planning, drafting, and dissemination" showed characteristics consistent with coordinated intelligence deception operations. Kuhns noted that none of the 51 signers, despite decades of FBI contacts, ever asked whether the laptop was real before declaring it Russian bait. In May, the inspector general referred his complaint to the Justice Department, and nobody there has said a word about it publicly since. A career analyst accusing his own former colleagues of running a deception operation against the electorate should be front-page news. It barely registered.

The FBI, we now know, was running a parallel operation of its own. Documents declassified this August show analysts on the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force launched it around December 2019, sorting more than 70 Americans and organizations by political utility. Democrats, including Joe and Hunter Biden, were filed as "targets" of Russian disinformation; Republicans, including Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, were filed as "conduits" spreading it. Of 53 confidential sources touching the case, at least 14 fed the bureau derogatory information on the Bidens dating to 2015. The FBI never investigated a single tip; it labeled them as disinformation anyway, then warned Congress that asking about Burisma made members unwitting tools of Moscow. Patel says he's disbanded the unit and opened a review, and that the bureau has identified "tens of thousands of responsive pages" and is "preparing... for disclosure." Six years later, we're still waiting on someone to flip the switch.

None of this worked without help. Newsrooms that spent 2020 calling the laptop Russian disinformation spent the next three years waving off Joe Biden's visible decline the same way, right up until special counsel Robert Hur described the sitting president as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," too frail to stand trial for mishandling documents. Then came the June 2024 debate, and the collective editorial memory of the press corps improved overnight. Convenient. The pattern repeats because it works: dismiss the inconvenient fact, discredit whoever raises it, and admit the truth once it's too late to change the outcome.

Defenders of the letter's signers claim these were private citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, not the CIA acting as an institution. But Morell asked the agency's own Publication Review Board to clear his draft the same week he recruited signatories, which means he leaned on his active clearance and his institutional relationship to lend the letter a credibility no private citizen carries on their own. You don't get to borrow the flag when it helps and hand it back once the subpoenas start.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The public reads Round River against a backdrop it already distrusts. A federal special counsel indicted Trump on 37 felony counts for retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago; a different special counsel investigated Biden's parallel documents problem and charged him with nothing because prosecutors doubted a jury would convict a man they called too forgetful to be culpable. Hunter Biden was convicted on gun and tax charges, then pardoned by his father before sentencing. The Durham report found the FBI opened a full investigation into the Trump campaign on raw, uncorroborated intelligence and never opened so much as an inquiry into similar intelligence about a Clinton campaign scheme to do the same in reverse. None of that proves coordination. It's enough to explain why voters call the asymmetry two-tiered before Round River even enters the conversation.

Here's the accountability scoreboard six years in: 51 security clearances revoked by executive order, a couple of internal reviews, one inspector general referral sitting at Justice since May, and not one indictment, deposition, or dollar of restitution from anyone who ran either operation. Compare that to a broker who mismarks risk tolerance: license gone, career over. The deep state gets a strongly worded congressional letter and a press release about an "ongoing review." Small wonder trust in the federal government sits near a five-decade low, with barely one in five Americans saying Washington does the right thing most of the time. That's not apathy. It's a verdict.

Congress can fix this without rewriting the Constitution: criminal exposure for clearance holders who abuse them and inspectors general free to act on their own timeline.

Until one of those 51 names sees the inside of a courtroom, the lesson every future intelligence officer will draw is the only one that matters: lie for the right team, and the worst that happens is you lose a parking pass at Langley.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 22:35