Wanted to modernize the military

Dan Driscoll wanted to modernize the military. Hegseth forced him out

Story by Kevin Maurer

IT WAS JUST BEFORE 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, 2026.

Low-flying helicopters carrying Delta Force operators skimmed the Caribbean headed for the South American coast. The mission: Capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his compound in Caracas.

As the helicopters approached the Venezuelan capital, American cyberattacks blinded local radar systems around Caracas, and plunged the city of more than 3 million people into sudden darkness. Overhead, Navy and Air Force fighters bombed air defenses and key military command facilities.

At the compound, Delta Force operators slipped down ropes and breached the door with explosives. Under fire, the assault team rushed through the complex, killing more than 30 Cuban guards before capturing both Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. In less than 30 minutes, the Delta operators delivered Maduro to the waiting helicopters, which returned to the USS Iwo Jima in international waters without a single American fatality.

"If you look at the Venezuela raid, it is incredible what occurred there," former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll tells me with justifiable pride in his first interview since resigning in August. "In human history, there are very few militaries that could have pulled that off."

Unfortunately, the Venezuela raid also provided the wrong lessons for the Trump administration. Smooth, low-cost victories are hardly ever the norm for any military operation. Since that high point, the Pentagon has been stressed by the war with Iran. The Islamic Republic's use of inexpensive drones to smash American bases in the Middle East has depleted the nation's arsenal of interceptors. Rising fuel prices have compounded the costs. There are reports of low morale within the ranks, and the open-ended nature of the conflict has made the war extremely unpopular at home.

Driscoll foretold most of this before resigning. Special-operations-style strikes - which fit into the Pentagon's framework mastered in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan - Driscoll warns, are not the path to victory on modern battlefields dominated by cheap drones and AI.

"That kind of massive force and violence is a very different exercise than doing something exquisite," Driscoll says. "It doesn't mean you don't need a soldier who's tough, who's fit, who's capable of, in their scariest moment of their life, maintaining their cool and continuing to push forward to the objective and keep their colleagues safe. You need all of that, too, but that is not sufficient anymore."

Even in the face of the failures in the Iran war, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host who deployed twice to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, is instead obsessed with the military's window dressing. Physical fitness, grooming standards, and mandatory annual testosterone-deficiency screening instead of investing in leaders and technology suited for the evolving kind of battlefield that a former senior Ukrainian commander dubbed a "zone of continuous death."

"We're not going to talk about modernization or transformation or experimentation?" a former Army official who worked with both Driscoll and Hegseth says about the Pentagon's priorities. "We're going to talk about standards and fitness. Nobody disagrees that's important, but tell our guys on the ground when we don't have anything to intercept the next Shahed [Iranian drone] coming at them that we're going to launch some standards up at [it]. You know what I mean?"

"When you're an American soldier, you go to work every day, and step back like 20 or 30 years with tech."

In 2025, Driscoll came in as an innovator looking to rejigger the military. From the start, his doctrine of rapid innovation and real-time procurement aimed to build an Army for the 21st century by focusing on emerging technology, streamlining duties, and refining the budget to invest in weapons and programs that could handle a fight like the one in Ukraine. But the disconnect between Hegseth's juvenile fantasies and Driscoll's futuristic visions led to many of the generals leading the Army's modernization effort being replaced. The ousters prompted a showdown in the Oval Office in late August, when Driscoll informed the president that he had reached what he considered an untenable situation at the Pentagon and felt he needed to resign, according to news reports and a former Pentagon official briefed on the meeting. When the president asked why he was resigning, Driscoll explained that he had intended to modernize and transform the Army and that Hegseth had fired everyone working toward that goal.

I met Driscoll in September over Zoom. Only a few days after leaving his post, he was at a conference and set up in a cabin. Driscoll is earnest and affable with a bright smile and easygoing demeanor. He gets excited the more he talks about his modernization efforts and partnership with Gen. Randy George, the former chief of staff of the Army, but as we unpacked his tenure atop the Army, he showed keen political sense when pressed on his private conversations with his former boss or the Trump administration.

But what is clear is he saw what needed to be done. And it cost him his job.

‘The Amazon for War'

It was the Army's 250th Birthday Parade, a daylong event along Constitution Avenue commemorating the founding of the Continental Army on June 14, 1775. Roughly 6,600 active-duty soldiers came to Washington in June 2025 to march, beginning with colonial reenactors, progressing through the World War II and Vietnam eras, and culminating in modern hardware and robotics.

Together for much of the festivities, Driscoll and George watched the parade from the grandstand. "All that stuff rolling across the parade looks a lot like it did back in the Nineties," George recalls telling Driscoll.

Driscoll, who also remembers the conversation, says he had another revelation.

"When you're an American soldier, you would get to work every day, and you basically step back like 20 or 30 years with tech," Driscoll tells me. "President Trump came into his second term with a military that had been very poorl­y prepared for modern war."

"The way to fix the brokenness of the system is to allow market forces in," Driscoll says.

Like Hegseth, Driscoll was a combat veteran of the global war on terror who left the Army as a junior officer and moved into politics. He grew up outside of Boone, North Carolina, and earned a business degree from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2007. Driscoll was commissioned as an Armor officer that same year, and went on to lead a Cavalry Scout platoon in the 10th Mountain Division, deploying to Baghdad in 2009. He earned an Army Commendation Medal, a Ranger tab, and a Combat Action Badge, and left active duty as a first lieutenant in 2011.

From there, he went to Yale Law School - with Vice President JD Vance - graduating in 2014, then spent the next decade in investment banking and private equity. He launched an unsuccessful campaign for North Carolina's 11th Congressional District seat before joining Trump's 2024 presidential campaign as one of Vance's senior advisers. Following Trump's election, he was appointed, and the Senate confirmed him as the 26th secretary of the Army on Feb. 25, 2025 - the youngest person ever to hold the job.

"I was surprised at how talented the generals who were in positions of leadership were when I got there," Driscoll tells me when I ask him what he expected after being confirmed.

His first big effort was empowering the Army Transformation Initiative, or ATI, a modernization plan started by George focused on stripping away administrative bloat, investing in emerging technology, and purging outdated equipment. One of Driscoll's first wins was allowing soldiers to fix their own gear instead of relying on defense contractors. It earned him rare bipartisan support from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

"All that I had to do was basically come in and say this is worth the headache," Driscoll says. "What are the things that we need to start to buy, and what are the things that we need to start to scale?"

That question became Driscoll's North Star as he worked to fix a slow procurement system. By the time the Army got equipment, it was outdated or no longer needed, Driscoll tells me. A good example was Humvees, the workhorse utility truck. The Army figured it needed about 50,000 for the whole force, but they had more than double because Congress kept funding production lines past official military requests.

"You basically have a system that optimizes the things that don't actually have anything to do with soldier lethality," Driscoll tells me. "And instead you have entrenched players providing subpar technology and equipment."

"People don't sign up to do spreadsheets. They sign up to go do soldier things." 

The fix, as he describes it, was letting market forces decide what gets bought. The Army assembled experts and invited representatives from all 350 local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies the Army works with to describe their problems firsthand, then aggregated them into a single marketplace in August 2025. It was in effect an "Amazon for war," as Driscoll calls it.

"I desperately believe that the quickest way to fix a lot of the brokenness of the system is to allow classic capitalistic market forces in, where if you have a private business, you are forced to compete for each and every dollar from your customer, each and every day the business exists," Driscoll says. "And so what that does is that healthy competition makes the products better. In this instance, the customer is the American soldier who has to go fight for our nation, and the cost of inadequacy could be their lives."

Under Driscoll, the Army created a single marketplace for counter-drone systems. Think sensors, jammers, interceptors. Driscoll had plans to expand the marketplace to tents, boots, electronics - the unglamorous gear that used to take years to buy through legacy contracting. Driscoll also focused on scale. He championed opening the counter-drone marketplace to international allies - including the U.K., Australia, Poland, and South Korea.

ATI also focused on getting soldiers back to soldiering. Line companies and battalions spend only 13 percent of their time on training. The remaining 87 percent goes to what one defense official called "dumb admin." Under Driscoll, the Army built tools to handle the tasks of dull paperwork.

"People don't sign up to do spreadsheets," David Fitzgerald, a former undersecretary of the Army who spearheaded modernization efforts under Driscoll, tells me. "They sign up to go do soldier things."

From the start, Driscoll says, Trump and Hegseth backed his plans, giving him cover as he cut $48 billion over a five-year period from the budget. They never forced him to sacrifice the "warfighter" for a program because of politics.

"Not a single time," Driscoll tells me.

BUT CARING FOR the warfighter also meant preparing them for the new kind of war Driscoll witnessed in Ukraine.

The Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative (EFDI) - nicknamed "the Global Killing Machine" by Army officers - started taking shape in December 2024, the month Gen. Christopher Donahue took command of NATO's Allied Land Command. It gained momentum after Driscoll became Army secretary. EFDI integrates drones and interceptors, Patriot batteries, and satellite intelligence into a single AI-enabled network. The goal was to replicate it across NATO, the Pacific, and eventually the whole U.S. military. By 2026, it had moved from concept to being part of major multinational exercises in Germany, where the best Ukrainian drone pilots trained with and against American and NATO soldiers.

Pete Hegseth wanted an Instagram-ready Army instead of a modern one.

Witnessing Ukraine adapt while the U.S. lumbered was painful. "In some ways, it was humiliating seeing how quickly a nation could change when it needed to," Driscoll says. "When you would see what Ukraine's budget was and how small it was relative to ours and how, despite that, they had better weapons of war, it was a wake-up call."

Ukraine's advances in cheap, mass-produced drones were changing the modern battlefield. After 20 years of fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers were unprepared for drone swarms and electronic tracking. In May 2025, Driscoll created the Unmanned Assault Battalion - a "drones first" experimental unit made up of 600 soldiers. Based in Italy, the battalion ran its own drone labs, tested electronic-warfare tactics, and worked with Ukrainian advisers.

All of these efforts put the Army at the forefront of modernization, Fitzgerald tells me. At the Army level, Driscoll, George, and Donahue drove the innovation. All three men with combat experience recognized how war had changed, and forged a key and unique partnership inside the Pentagon.

With the Army's transition underway, George was set to retire in the summer of 2027. Driscoll wanted Donahue to take over when George stepped down in order to keep momentum and scale his EFDI vision to the whole force.

But Hegseth had other plans.

The Purge

Hegseth's stated goal was to restore the "warrior culture" to the Defense Department and refocus the Pentagon on lethality, meritocracy, and readiness. Under that mandate, Driscoll's tenure should have meshed. But from the very start, the two were at odds.

While Driscoll and his team went to work streamlining administrative overhead and modernizing the force to be more lethal, Hegseth's platform focused on physical-readiness standards, traditional discipline, and high-profile media engagements.

Hegseth wanted an Instagram-ready Army instead of a modern one.

An Army officer who served in the Pentagon and spoke under anonymity out of fear of retaliation traces the friction to the defense secretary's own confirmation. Hegseth barely squeaked through the Senate in 2025, in part over concerns about excessive drinking and a sexual-assault allegation. Nowhere on his résumé as a TV host and junior officer did he show the aptitude to lead an organization as vast as the Defense Department. Driscoll, by contrast, sailed through his hearing on Feb. 25 with no protest.

Soon after his confirmation, Driscoll went to Hegseth with what he thought was a gift: his friendship with the vice president and an offer to use his connections to help the Pentagon. But Hegseth blew up at him, according to two sources briefed on the incident, telling Driscoll that he needed to go through his office before reaching out to the White House, creating a tension between the two men.

"All the guys who had guts and were willing to speak the truth about what we needed to do, they got rid of."

In response to a detailed list of questions, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson, calls Rolling Stone "fake news" and claims this story is "riddled with made-up claims" about Hegseth's leadership. "Since day one, Secretary Hegseth has focused on modernization across every branch of our armed forces," says Parnell, who is Hegseth's pick to replace Driscoll. "Secretary Hegseth has been a generational secretary for the Pentagon."

From day one, though, multiple sources say, Hegseth has been more show than substance. He "produces" his day-to-day inside the Pentagon like a TV show, the Army officer who worked at the Pentagon under Driscoll and Hegseth tells me. His press conferences are timed to when the president is likely watching television, and he's created a social media operation - first reported by The Bulwark - built to manufacture the appearance of organic support for his policies and push back on his many scandals.

Since taking office, Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of roughly 10 percent of the military's top-ranking officers, with at least 20 senior military and civilian officials forced out, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the Army and Air Force chiefs of staff, the judge advocates general of both the Army and Air Force, the head of Southern Command, the NSA director, the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, and both the Army and Navy secretaries, according to reports by The New York Times, CBS News, and NBC News. Black and female officers have been removed from promotion lists at a disproportionate rate, according to news reports. The U.S. military currently has no active four-star women.

"All the guys who had guts and were willing to speak the truth about where we needed to go and what we needed to do, they got rid of, right?" a former senior Army officer tells me. "Because they want people that are compliant and loyal, not people who think. They're culture warriors. They care about culture. And it's only their culture, which is compliance and loyalty above your duty."

The Army was the last service Hegseth purged. Gen. Jim Mingus was forced into retirement in February. Then, in April, Hegseth called George and told him he was out.

George remembers his own firing the way people remember car accidents, mostly about how fast it happened.

"I was right down the hall," George tells me. "It was a 15-second call."

When I ask him why it happened, George says he still doesn't know. "I wasn't his guy," George tells me. "I don't really know - I was never really given a reason."

Hegseth's decision to force George into early retirement created a public rift. During an April Defense Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Driscoll praised George as an "amazing, transformative leader" and told lawmakers that he loved him, and even went to his home when he found out about the resignation to support him. Then, in June 2026, Donahue was forced into retirement. Another future-focused leader with combat experience sent packing.

"I think [Driscoll] sacrificed any potential he had [for] a good working relationship with Pete to try to protect those guys," the former Army official says, "because it was the right thing to do for the Army."

I ask Driscoll about the forced retirements and his relationship with Hegseth.

"Once he makes a decision, there's nothing I can do about it," Driscoll tells me. "I don't have to like it. But I think it's unfair to describe our relationship so flatly - that every interaction was bad, or that we disagreed on everything. If you polled us, we probably agreed on more than 50 percent of things. What's been reported is all the things we disagree on."

Forced into retirement in June, Donahue held a final ceremony in August at Fort Bragg, inside the Delta Force compound. Driscoll was there. So was George, and by multiple accounts, the mood ran somewhere between a wake and a quiet act of defiance, including attendees referring to Hegseth as "No Tab Pete" because he failed to earn his Ranger qualification during his time in the Army. (The derogatory nickname among service members and Pentagon insiders was made public by The Daily Beast.) Lost on no one present was the fact that Hegseth has none of the qualifications of the commanders he spent the year removing from their posts.

After Fort Bragg, Driscoll went directly to the White House, where he resigned. He wouldn't talk about the exact reasons he left, nor would he disclose what he said to Trump or Hegseth.

"I'll never talk about our private conversations," he tells me, "but we were both very passionate about our positions, and I would advocate as strongly as I possibly could - knowing I'm talking to my boss, and the final decision-maker."

The White House declined to comment on the meeting, but provided Rolling Stone with a statement praising Driscoll for "advancing President Trump's agenda to Make America Strong Again," and for "providing outstanding leadership during historic military operations."

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly adds that "President Trump has full confidence in Secretary Hegseth and the entire Department of War."

Underneath the insecurity and personal friction with Driscoll is Hegseth's mistrust of any general who had served under the previous administration's leadership - Gen. Mark Milley, in particular, the senior Army officer said. George had worked for Lloyd Austin. To Hegseth, that lineage was disqualifying.

"You're a one-trick pony, you kind of bang the DEI drum, and it makes good headlines," the former Army official says. "But the problem is, you're in an active-shooting war, and there's got to be a little more depth to it."

I asked the senior Army officer whether Hegseth's hostility toward men like Donahue, a former Delta Force commander; George, a Ranger-qualified infantry officer who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Driscoll, who'd earned his Ranger tab, unlike Hegseth, was really about insecurity.

"I think it's a combination of insecurity and fear," the senior Army official tells me.

Hegseth has never addressed George's firing or Donahue's forced retirement publicly. Pressed for comment, the Pentagon said that general officers serve at the discretion of civilian leadership. But it's one thing to fire an officer for a battlefield failure. It's another to fire the Army's best warfighters, offer no explanation beyond a stated wish to build a "warfighting culture," and expect the men and women serving under them not to notice the contradiction.

I put the contradiction to Driscoll. Hegseth argues the system doesn't produce forward-thinking leaders anymore, doesn't build tough warriors - but George exists. Donahue exists. It doesn't track that the system is so broken it requires firing the very men who prove it works.

"I viewed my role as to advocate as hard as I could for leaders who I thought were good," Driscoll tells me. "My job was to push as hard as I possibly could for people and then accept the results when it didn't go the way that I thought it should. And that's OK. That's the system functioning as it was designed."

Driscoll later adds that if he were tasked with solving the hardest problem in the world, he would get American soldiers to help. "The system creates our best leaders. Our responsibility is just to get out of their way," he says.

After Driscoll's departure, the U.S. Army announced plans to roll back many of his initiatives. Acting Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve ordered the Unmanned Assault Battalion to return to being a standard airborne infantry unit.

But the former senior Army officer who worked on the program tells me that, before his retirement, Donahue advocated not only for preserving the unit, but also expanding it to other brigade combat teams.

When I asked the former senior Army officer to explain the decision, he couldn't.

"Nobody can, and neither can they," he tells me. "And nobody believes them when they say it."

Speaking to hundreds of U.S. troops at Marine Corps Base Quantico in September, Hegseth unveiled six new initiatives, including the creation of a headquarters for autonomous and drone warfare that would overhaul the Pentagon's strategy and seems to mirror Driscoll's plans. Hegseth also doubled down on his culture-war rhetoric, declaring that "fatties, t--s, beardos, weirdos, wimps, [and] radicals" are not welcome in the U.S. Armed Forces.

For his part, Driscoll is doing his best to be a politician, and is careful when pressed on this pivot away from his vision. Army secretaries are temporary is his explanation.

"I was a custodian of the seat for 18 months," he says. "The average secretary of the Army serves about 27. In the 251-year history of the Army, you are but a speck."

Nevertheless, that speck was trying to drag the Army into the future. A future where Hegseth's focus on the culture war, instead of the modern battlefield, leaves the nation vulnerable.

"We will never really know until the next war," the Army officer who worked at the Pentagon warns, "but it's going to be measured in American lives - in our sons and daughters coming home in body bags."

Needs to go

Second Maine Senate debate takes testy turn: 3 takeaways

Story by Julia Mueller

Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson squared off Thursday in the second Maine Senate debate of the week, sparring over the Iran war and high prices as their battleground race barrels toward Election Day. 

The hourlong debate, hosted by WMTW, turned testy at times as the rivals defended their records and re-upped many of their night-one talking points about abortion, immigration and the economy. Collins stressed that she’s often at odds with her party, while Jackson highlighted her alignment with President Trump. 

The stakes were high for both candidates to avoid on-stage gaffes and snag strong clips that could move the needle of the close race. Decision Desk HQ’s polling averages show Jackson, who became the party’s pick after their initial nominee withdrew this summer, leading the five-term incumbent by just over a point in the blue-leaning Pine Tree State. 

Here are three takeaways from the latest debate, with two more showdowns scheduled later this month:

Senate hopefuls battle over Iran war: ‘You owe me an apology’

The rivals clashed over remarks on the Iran war and its economic impacts on Mainers struggling under high prices. 

As the candidates debated how to address record-high heating oil prices, moderator Jon Chrisos pressed Collins over her Senate votes on Trump’s military moves in Iran. 

She stressed that she has “voted nine times to end this war” under the War Powers Act. A live fact-check from PolitiFact, though, called her claim “selective counting,” pointing to five times Collins voted against such resolutions. 

“She could use her leverage to stop this war. But instead, they're making money,”  Jackson argued during the debate. “I mean, Senator Collins and her husband [are] making money, more, off of this war, and so is a whole bunch of other people, and that's why this doesn't, doesn't stop.” 

Collins hit back sharply. 

“That is absolutely outrageous, and you owe me an apology,” the senator said. 

“No, you owe me an apology,” Jackson replied. 

Jackson did not offer specific evidence for his claim that Collins was profiting from the war.

PolitiFact noted that the senator’s husband, Thomas Daffron, owns stock in Boeing and RTX, both defense contractors for the U.S. Military, according to reporting from The Maine Independent. A spokesperson told the outlet last month that Collins has “never bought, sold or owned” any individual stock shares as senator, and that her husband’s investments “are made exclusively by a third-party advisor without his consultation.” 

Jackson pointed to the war — which is deeply unpopular among midterm voters — at multiple points in the night, stressing that “we have to get out of Iran” to bring down fuel prices, and raising concerns that “people will freeze to death this winter because they can't afford to heat their home.”

Collins, though, cast doubt on the Iran war as the main driver of high electric rates in Maine, casting blame on moves from the state Legislature, where Jackson served as Senate president. 

“It's just not accurate to say that it's the Iran war that has caused Maine to have the fourth highest electric bills in the country. If it were the Iran War, why wouldn't New Hampshire and other states have the same level of electric bills that Maine has?” Collins asked. 

Collins defends seeking sixth term

Thirty years ago, Collins pledged she would only serve for two terms if elected to the Senate. Now, she’s going for a sixth six-year term. 

“What I learned is how much more effective I could be as the seventh ranked person in the Senate versus 99th, which is what I was when I first started out,” Collins said, when asked on the debate stage about what changed her mind.

Touting some of her more recent legislative achievements, including becoming the first Maine senator to chair the powerful Appropriations Committee, she said “I couldn’t have done this in the early years in the Senate.” 

Collins was reelected in 2014 by nearly 40 points, but won her 2020 bid by a comparatively slim 9 points. She’s now considered one of the most vulnerable senators in the 2026 cycle. 

But Jackson also faced questions about what was behind his bid. After running unsuccessfully for governor this cycle, the Democrat was named as his party’s replacement nominee after Graham Platner, a progressive oyster farmer who won the initial primary, withdrew amid sexual misconduct allegations. 

“Why should voters see this as your own campaign and not something that you inherited?” Chrisos asked. 

“Well, it isn't my own campaign. I mean, it's the people across Maine,” Jackson replied. “This is not about Troy Jackson. It's not about Graham Platner. What it is about is Donald Trump and Susan Collins and the band that are making life so much harder in the state.”

Collins, Jackson respond to controversial reports

Both candidates responded to recent reports that have raised questions about both candidates’ financial moves in the run-up to Election Day. 

Collins denied recent reporting that accused her of receiving illegal campaign contributions, calling the claims “absolutely false.” 

ProPublica reported in September that, after a former CEO of defense contractor Navatak made a 2019 donation to a Collins super PAC, Collins used her position on the Appropriations Committee to award military contracts to the company. 

Martin Kao pleaded guilty in 2022 to making illegal campaign contributions. The FBI at the time found nothing implicating Collins or her campaign — but Chrisos questioned what Collins would say to voters who think the report raises questions about her campaign financing. 

“Well, they don't, and these allegations are absolutely false, and they've been proven false. But Troy and Chuck Schumer keep running false ads to try to convince you otherwise,” Collins said. 

She said that the University of Maine had come to her with a proposal for research with Navatek, and that Kao is “in jail today, where he belongs.” 

Jackson, too, responded to new reporting about donations to a PAC he was involved in during his service in the Maine Legislature. 

The Washington Post reported that, up until two years ago, the Democrat used a PAC that accepted funds from tobacco, pharmaceutical and other big companies and affiliated PACs — though he openly rejects corporate PAC money in the Senate race.

Asked what he’d say to voters who think his role in the PAC raises questions, Jackson said that the PAC “is a group of people.”

“I didn’t make decisions on who or what, when we were going to take money,” he said. 

Legal cheat code....

Montana just found the legal cheat code to kill Citizens United

Story by Eric Wargotz

When political analysts look at Montana, they see a reliable stronghold of the modern Republican Party. This is a state that President Donald Trump carried by nearly 20 percentage points in 2024, a place where conservative populism runs deep in the soil. Yet, grassroots advocates are looking to the state's unique political heritage to advance proposals that could radically alter the political landscape. Under Initiative 194, also known as "The Montana Plan," voters will decide whether to completely bar corporations, labor unions, and other artificial legal entities from spending money on state elections, testing whether local frameworks can withstand national scrutiny.

The concept taps into a brewing, cross-partisan fury over the pervasiveness of so-called "dark money" — the untraceable millions flowing into political campaigns through opaque corporate structures. To outsiders, a red state leading the charge against corporate political speech might seem paradoxical. But to anyone familiar with Montana’s history, it makes perfect sense. This is a state where corporate "robber barons" once ran wild, buying judges and legislatures during the Copper King era of the early 20th century. Montanans have a long, proud history of fierce institutional skepticism toward money in politics. Now, they are using that history to pioneer a novel legal strategy that could trigger a national domino effect.

What makes this emerging framework revolutionary is its procedural maneuver around federal jurisprudence. For over a decade, traditional campaign finance reform has slammed into a legal brick wall: the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision. That ruling established that independent political spending is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment, effectively granting corporations the same political speech rights as living, breathing citizens.

Rather than challenging Citizens United head-on, a strategy doomed to fail before the current conservative supermajority, this new approach attacks the problem from the flank. It shifts the legal battlefield from corporate rights to corporate powers. Under the 10th Amendment, state governments possess the absolute authority to charter corporations and define the legal scope of what those "artificial persons" are allowed to do. Proponents argue that while a person has an inherent right to free speech, a corporation only has the powers granted to it by the state. By stripping political spending from the approved list of corporate powers, advocates are testing whether states can regulate the entity itself, rather than the speech.

Predictably, the establishment is terrified. A high-stakes Supreme Court challenge is virtually guaranteed if such measures are successfully enacted. Business groups and opponents have already denounced these strategies as flatly unconstitutional. Legal scholars are fiercely divided on how the nation’s highest court will react. Skeptics view the strategy as a transparent "end run" around Citizens United that a conservative court will eagerly strike down.

However, constitutional optimists note that the strategy forces the conservative block into an uncomfortable ideological corner. The justices will be forced to choose between two core conservative tenets: protecting corporate political expression or upholding federalism and a state's 10th Amendment right to govern its own corporate charters. If the court rules against such state regulations, it will have to explicitly declare that federal corporate speech rights override a state’s fundamental sovereignty over its own creation.

Montana is far from alone in this fight. The Big Sky strategy is the flagship of a coordinated, multistate assault on dark money. Movement organizers at the Transparent Election Initiative note that variations of this corporate charter-power strategy are active or under consideration in more than 30 states, creating a bipartisan populist front across the country.

Citizens looking to follow these developments can consult official state portals to verify the status of legislative proposals and charter-power frameworks across the country. On the opposite coast, the reform group Honest Elections Oregon filed a near-identical constitutional amendment for its state's November 2028 ballot. Meanwhile, states such as Michigan, California, and Alaska are independently advancing their own variations of campaign finance restrictions, targeting everything from utility company political contributions to foreign-influenced corporate spending.

This is no longer a localized grievance — it is a structural rebellion. The unusual coalitions forming around these measures prove that the fatigue over campaign finance has transcended traditional partisan boundaries. This broad, cross-partisan alliance features high-profile state leaders like former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot, standing alongside populist progressive figures. To track active campaign finance measures, petition filings, and upcoming ballot schedules in Montana, citizens can verify current initiatives and leadership details directly through the Montana secretary of state's office and official state voter portals. These movements are united by a simple, universal truth: When anonymous corporate entities can dump unlimited sums into an election, the voices of actual voters are completely drowned out.

Critics of such measures argue that barring corporations from political spending is an unfair restriction that prevents local businesses from defending themselves against harmful regulations. They contend that in a modern economy, policy decisions directly impact a company’s survival, and businesses must have a seat at the electoral table.

But this argument fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the crisis. This reform model does not prevent small business owners, corporate executives, or union members from spending their own hard-earned money to support candidates or causes. It simply demands that they do so transparently, under their own names, as citizens. What it stops is the practice of hiding behind a shell corporation or a generic LLC to drop half a million dollars into a local race without accountability. It restores a level playing field where human beings, not paper entities, decide elections.

When voters evaluate these innovative proposals, they are participating in a broader conversation that extends far beyond any single jurisdiction. If these measures gain traction, they will provide an immediate road map for dozens of other states waiting on the sidelines. It will force a definitive, historic reckoning at the Supreme Court over the limits of corporate power.

For decades, people have resigned themselves to the idea that nothing can be done about the corrupting influence of dark money in our democracy. By looking backward to populist roots, states such as Montana may have just found the legal key to unlocking a fairer political future for the entire nation.

Eric Wargotz is a practicing physician, clinical professor emeritus at the George Washington University, a judge, and a regular contributor to national policy debates. Views expressed are his own.

Another blonde airhead...

Trump selects Katie Zacharia as next White House press secretary

By Alayna Treene,  Kaitlan Collins, Kristen Holmes, Betsy Klein

President Donald Trump has selected Katie Zacharia, a conservative commentator who worked briefly at the Department of Homeland Security, as his new press secretary.

Zacharia thanked Trump in a social media post Friday, writing, “Serving President Trump and the American people at this critical 250-year mark is the honor of a lifetime.”

In announcing her selection earlier Friday, Trump highlighted her work for Truth Social, the Trump Media & Technology Group and her frequent appearances on Fox and Newsmax.

“She has an unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning,” he added.

Trump in recent days called a number of his close allies and advisers, including former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to seek their opinion of Zacharia, a person familiar with the discussions said. And the president sought Leavitt’s counsel before making a final decision and offering Zacharia the position, they said.

CNN has reached out to Zacharia, who was in the Oval Office with Trump earlier Friday morning, according to a person familiar.

Zacharia’s selection came about quickly. As of last week, she was not being considered for the role, another person familiar said.

Throughout the search to replace Leavitt, the White House struggled with higher-profile names, several of whom had previously criticized Trump. On multiple occasions, senior officials had narrowed down the list, only to find that candidates had said something negative about the president, disqualifying them from the position, according a White House official.

“The work ahead is to continue delivering strong results for our Country and communicating to the American people the major wins that this Administration is making every single day,” Zacharia wrote on X.

“I look forward to working with the White House press corps, and with reporters across the country, to get that record out,” she said, adding that “following the fabulous Karoline Leavitt is a high standard, and one worth meeting.”

Zacharia’s been a frequent guest on Fox, Newsmax and CNN.

“She’s a friend of most of you,” Trump told reporters while leaving the White House on Friday. “I know she likes people — she likes all of you. Actually, I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but we just hired a new press secretary, and she’s going to be, I think, terrific.”

Zacharia served as a senior communications adviser at the Trump Media and Technology Group and Truth Social since June, which followed a two-month stint as a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security — experiences that Trump also highlighted in his social media post, along with her work in his campaigns.

Zacharia, who has young children and lives in California, commuted back and forth to Washington when she was filling in at DHS. At the time, she told a friend the commute was not sustainable, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Zacharia has also served as a legal adviser for Fix California, a conservative group founded by Trump ally Richard Grenell.

She first came to Washington as an intern for the Republican National Committee during the George W. Bush administration in 2006.

Pa 30

No, this is not a firework display. This is Pa 30 — the likely remnant of the historic supernova witnessed in the year 1181, now captured here in unprecedented detail by the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab. This image was captured with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), and it shows that the remnant’s unmistakable firework-shaped ejecta take on a cascading knot-like structure.

GOP SHIT SHOW.....

GOP ads have yet to overwhelm voters, poll finds

More than 70% of poll respondents who had seen ads said they’d either seen more spots in support of Democrats or an equal amount between the parties over the past week, despite the GOP’s cash advantage.

Calen Razor

Republicans have a massive campaign cash advantage going into the final stretch before Election Day, but a new POLITICO poll shows they aren’t yet capturing voters’ attention.

More than 70% of poll respondents who had seen ads said they’d either seen more spots in support of Democrats or an equal amount between the parties over the past week — including ads on television, social media, or any other platform. Only 24% said they’d seen more ads for Republicans.

The numbers are striking considering Republican-aligned groups had triple the amount of cash on hand compared to their Democratic rivals going into the final months of the campaign. That figure includes the $400 million war chest that President Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC reported over the summer, for which Dems have no equivalent.

Republicans have been racing to saturate key battlegrounds — and even some deep-red districts and states — with GOP messages in the final weeks before the midterms to counterbalance the favorable political environment for Democrats.

One reason GOP ad dollars could be getting less bang for their buck may lie in ad rates: direct campaign accounts from prolific individual fundraisers — Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff or Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, for example — can buy ads at cheaper rates.

Timing may be another reason: Trump’s super PAC waited until recent weeks to start buying ads through affiliate groups, when rates were already high close to the election.

“It’s competition that drives [rates] up to these ridiculous amounts, and then when super PACs come in late with these reservations, it’s even more than a two times disadvantage,” Jeff Burton, GOP campaign strategist and president of Maven Advocacy Partners said in an interview.

Burton said Republican candidates will need to rethink spending strategies to catch voters’ attention in the final stretch. Still, having a cash advantage might only take some so far, he said, citing the massive outspending Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Texas’ Ken Paxton overcame in their respective primaries.

“I think you’ll see a lot of these campaigns diversifying, paying for grassroots, paying for different mediums to try to reach voters,” Burton said.

The poll was conducted by surveying U.S. adults online between Oct. 3-5 with PF Global.

Crack down on kratom

GOP senators urge Trump administration to crack down on kratom

Lawmakers seek permanent federal restrictions on kratom, citing rising overdose and safety concerns.

Amanda Friedman

Three Republican senators want the Trump administration to tighten federal limits on kratom, a plant with opioid-like effects that’s become a popular ingredient in pain-relief and mood booster products sold in gas stations nationwide.

Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Lee of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine urged Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terrance Cole and acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Kyle Diamantas to pursue permanent controls on kratom and its derivatives in a letter sent Wednesday.

“We encourage DEA, in consultation with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to consider scheduling the entire kratom plant,” they wrote.

The FDA and the DEA didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The senators pressed the DEA to finalize its July proposed emergency scheduling order for 7-hydroxymitragynine, a chemical compound found in the kratom plant that has been commonly found in the products. The Department of Health and Human Services has linked 7-OH-containing products to a rise in overdose risks and emergency room visits and has pushed for it to be classified as a controlled substance.

“It is imperative that the final emergency scheduling order for 7-OH be expeditiously promulgated,” the lawmakers said.

They also called for the permanent scheduling of MGM-15, MGM-16 and mitragynine pseudoindoxyl — semisynthetic derivatives related to compounds found in kratom that have been found in certain wellness products. The Justice Department temporarily moved the three substances to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act — the strictest drug classification — in August.

“Permanently placing all levels of these synthetic compounds into Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act is an essential and necessary action to ensure the safety of kratom consumers and to keep products with compounds even more dangerous than 7-OH from widespread availability,” they wrote.

The lawmakers cited increasing poison-center reports and thousands of suspected nonfatal overdoses involving kratom or related compounds plus testimonies from “constituents and concerned parents who have lost loved ones” in their letter.

The DEA pitched placing kratom on Schedule I in 2016 but withdrew the proposal after facing significant backlash from scientists and some lawmakers.

There’s been renewed attention to kratom after federal prosecutors announced criminal charges earlier this month against smoke shop employees following the suspected overdose deaths of two University of Mississippi students. Investigators reported finding pills that were either kratom or synthetic kratom at both crime scenes.

Although the Trump administration has sought to rein in 7-OH and other kratom-related compounds, reporting from media outlets has chronicled a supportive relationship between the kratom industry and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement.

This year, the kratom supplement company Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to MAHA PAC, a political action committee tied to the Kennedy-backed coalition.

The kratom industry quickly criticized the senators’ letter. Mac Haddow, a senior fellow on public policy at the American Kratom Association — an advocacy group seeking to preserve legal access to certain kratom products — told POLITICO on Wednesday that the letter should be “retracted and clarified.”

“We do have a big hill to climb here to educate Congress,” Haddow said. “This letter undermines accuracy, good science and the right public policy.”

The lawmakers requested a response by Oct. 15.

He will be able to spend more time watching gay porn...

Mike Johnson voices uncertainty about his future if GOP loses control

“If we lose this majority or whatever, I don’t know what my next chapter of life is,” the speaker said.

By Elleiana Green and Mia McCarthy

Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that he could leave Congress if Democrats regain control — the furthest he has gone in acknowledging what he would do in a GOP House minority.

“Heaven forbid, if we lose this majority or whatever, I don’t know what my next chapter of life is,” Johnson said in an interview with Fox News posted this week. “If God moves on our hearts and says we should, you know, go back to my hometown of Shreveport and start a lawn business, I’ll do that with equal fervor.”

In the past, the Louisiana Republican has steered clear of the hypothetical.

Johnson also did not rule out a run at minority leader, instead telling Fox News that House Republicans will hold onto the majority and he will stay speaker.

“I’m going to be the speaker in the next Congress,” Johnson said, when asked if he would run. “I’m not going to talk about the scenario where we don’t win the House, because I am laser-focused on winning the House.”

With the midterms less than a month away, Republicans are doing everything they can to salvage their chances of maintaining their majority in an unfavorable political environment.

As some Republicans privately worry about their chances of holding onto the House, many believe jockeying for a GOP minority leader race is already underway.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan are potential names floating around to take over. House Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) had also been named as an option, though he could also run to stay as whip.

All three House Republicans have been campaigning across the country in the lead-up to the election. If Republicans lose the House, GOP members will begin the race for minority leader almost immediately when they return to Washington.

Not funny

 

Mideast turmoil

Voters have ‘had enough’ of Mideast turmoil. But the Houthi conflict is just getting started.

One U.S. senator is calling the Yemen and Iran conflicts a “full blown regional war.”

By Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing and Nahal Toosi

Saudi Arabia has no plans to consider a ceasefire with the Houthis until it regains recently lost territory in Yemen — making it likely the fight will escalate ahead of midterm elections in which Middle East conflict and oil prices are on the ballot.

The Saudis don’t want to look weak, and they worry the Yemeni militant group would use any pause to seize more territory, according to half a dozen people tuned into Riyadh’s thinking, including regional officials. Some were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

The Iranian-backed Houthis have been in a fight with Yemen’s government for more than a decade and control a substantial part of the country, including the capital city of Sana’a. Though a 2022 ceasefire tamped down fighting, the conflict has intensified in recent months. The Houthis seized strategic land along the Red Sea in September, and the Yemen-aligned Saudis launched an offensive this week to reclaim that territory and wrest back control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — a key transit point for Saudi oil.

Continued fighting means it will be risky for ships to cross the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea for the foreseeable future — adding to the pressure on global oil and other commerce already strained from the U.S.-Iran standoff over the Strait of Hormuz. And that’s bad news for GOP candidates or anyone else hoping for economic turmoil to ease before November.

Even if U.S. voters don’t know the intricacies of the Houthi conflict, they will respond to the ensuing market reaction, said Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett. The Houthis had already instituted a naval blockade against Saudi ships and knocked a crucial Saudi oil pipeline offline before the latest round of strikes.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Whose side are we on here? I don’t care. I’ve had enough of it. I care about affordability and the price of gas,’” said Bartlett, a former appointee to the State Department in the first Trump administration. President Donald Trump’s popularity has nosedived as a result of his handling of the Iran war and the surging gasoline prices that have followed.

While the U.S. is aiding the Saudis behind the scenes, Trump has declined to order U.S. airstrikes against the Houthi rebels.

As long as the Houthis are “holding this territory along the Bab el-Mandeb, and they’re firing rockets and drones towards Saudi Arabia, I think the Saudis can’t even talk about deescalating,” Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said in an interview while in Riyadh this week.

A person familiar with United Nations negotiations on Yemen voiced the same sentiment: “It’s impossible to say when this is going to end.”

Even though the White House isn’t directly engaged, voters are likely to lump the Yemen conflict together with the unpopular Iran war, argued GOP strategist Alex Conant. And given years-old military ties between Iran and the Houthis, the odds are rising that the two wars will grow more entangled.

“They’re going to own it, whether they like it or not,” Conant said of Republicans going into the midterms. While Trump has tried to lower prices through other means, such as pressuring the G7 to release stockpiles of oil, there’s ultimately not much the White House can do to deflect, Conant added.

Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to pursue a quick diplomatic end to the conflict is all but guaranteed to worsen the global energy market, according to Brett Erickson, managing principal of the consulting firm Obsidian Risk Advisors.

It’s “a remarkably dangerous gamble” on the Saudi’s part, Erickson said, adding that “Saudi Arabia has demonstrated remarkably little ability to prevent the Houthis from striking critical energy infrastructure across the kingdom.”

Riyadh’s oil exports have already taken a hit because of the naval blockade the Houthis declared against Saudi Arabia in July. According to maritime intelligence firm Windward, Saudi-flagged ships have stopped crossing the strait almost entirely since July, and tanker transits dropped by more than a quarter.

But the Houthis have used prior ceasefires to rebuild their arsenal.

A regional official, granted anonymity to disclose sensitive thinking, said “negotiations that merely give the Houthis time to regroup, rearm and prepare their next escalation are not peace.”

Any future peace agreement must include “credible guarantees,” “clear obligations” and effective enforcement mechanisms, the official added. Even if Riyadh were inclined to take a diplomatic route, those goals could be hard to achieve quickly.

A Houthi official did not reply to a request for comment. The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

The United States is providing intelligence to the Saudis, including targeting information on Houthi locations, and air refueling for Saudi planes on defensive patrols, two U.S. officials familiar with the situation confirmed. More than 200 U.S. intelligence and military analysts are part of the effort.

But the U.S. has not carried out its own strikes against the Houthis. Trump appears wary of breaking a truce with the Houthis that he reached last year after a major U.S. military operation against the group had limited impact. The Houthis have promised not to fire on American ships in the region amid their latest offensive against Saudi Arabia.

Still, Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted this week that the U.S. “has a defense and security agreement with Saudi Arabia and we intend to live by it.”

The White House declined to comment on its plans on the Houthi conflict.

It’s an awkward balance for Washington, which must weigh its defense commitments to Saudi allies against the repercussions of getting dragged into yet another military conflict — especially while the Iran war remains unresolved.

The Saudis have, in the meantime, activated a recently formed defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey known as the Mecca Alliance. In a vague joint statement on Monday, the group suggested that Turkish and Pakistani troops might join the Saudi effort, though it was not clear in exactly what capacity.

The Houthis claim they abandoned the 2022 truce because Saudi Arabia did not live up to its agreement to lift a blockade on Yemen. The rebel movement, inspired by the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam, also says it is angry over Saudi airstrikes against the Sana’a airport in July, which came as an Iranian plane was about to land.

But current and former U.S. and foreign officials dismiss some of the Houthi grievances, saying, for instance, that the Saudis had significantly eased the blockade in recent years. The big difference today is that the Iran war has badly damaged Saudi ability to export oil, making the kingdom appear vulnerable and the Houthis believing they had leverage.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a vocal critic of Trump’s foreign policy, met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh this week. He told reporters afterward that not only is Riyadh trying to take back territory the Houthis snatched, but the Saudis could be looking to push farther.

“It just creates a risk that this is going to be another long military engagement inside Yemen with massive consequences,” Murphy said. In a social media post Tuesday, Murphy called the overall situation a “full blown regional war.”

Murphy — alongside Senate Democrats more generally — has opposed adding U.S. airstrikes to the Saudi campaign against the Houthis, but several other lawmakers have said they’re at least open to the idea.

“I don’t think you rule out options,” Republican North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven told POLITICO last week. “We don’t want them choking off trade in the Red Sea,” he said of the Houthis.

The person familiar with the U.N. negotiations on Yemen said the Saudis had wanted to wait for the Iran conflict to stabilize or come to a resolution before pursuing more in-depth talks with the Houthis about the future of Yemen. But the Houthis escalated instead.

Kristin Smith Diwan, a Middle East analyst who is in regular touch with Gulf Arab officials, said even if there are no negotiations anytime soon, there are almost always backchannel contacts between the various players in the Yemen conflict.

“It’s a bit of a continuum,” Diwan said. But overall, the situation is “dangerous because these things can always escalate in unpredictable ways.”

Among those most in danger are millions of Yemeni civilians. They have endured brutal hardships, including widespread displacement and hunger, since the war’s origins in 2014. According to U.N. humanitarian officials, cases of cholera are on the rise and 21,000 people have been displaced in the past week alone.