Former President Barack Obama took to Instagram on Sunday to clarify remarks from an interview released the day before in which he told liberal media personality Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens "are real" — a two-word answer that, predictably, lit up the internet before anyone bothered to listen to the rest of the sentence.
In the Saturday interview, Cohen lobbed a softball during what Obama described as a "speed round" segment:
"Are aliens real?"
Obama's response:
"They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in — what is it —"
Cohen helpfully supplied "Area 51," and Obama ran with it:
"Area 51. There's no underground facility. Unless, there's this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States."
That last line — delivered with the kind of practiced ambiguity Obama has spent two decades perfecting — was enough to send the clip ricocheting across social media with all the nuance of a game of telephone.
By Sunday, Obama apparently realized that a former commander-in-chief casually affirming extraterrestrial life required a footnote. His Instagram clarification tried to thread the needle between cosmic wonder and bureaucratic sobriety:
"I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it's gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there."
Then the pivot:
"But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"
Note the exclamation point. When a former president feels the need to punctuate a denial about alien contact with "Really!" — you've entered a strange chapter of American public life.
Obama has flirted with this subject before, according to The Hill. Back in 2021, he appeared on CBS's "The Late Late Show" with James Corden and offered a similar routine — curiosity laced with just enough mystery to keep people talking:
"The truth is that when I came into office, I asked. I was like, 'All right, is there a lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens and spaceship?'"
"And they did a little bit of research, and the answer was no."
Same story, same delivery, same result: breathless headlines, followed by a mundane conclusion. The pattern is worth noticing. Obama has a gift for making the unremarkable sound tantalizing and then retreating to safe ground once the clip goes viral.
What's actually interesting here has nothing to do with extraterrestrial life. It's the machinery around it.
A former president sits down with a friendly interviewer for a rapid-fire segment designed to generate clips, not substance. He delivers an answer — "they're real" — that is technically defensible but functionally misleading in isolation. The clip travels. The clarification follows a day later, extending the news cycle. By the time it's over, Obama has dominated a weekend of coverage without saying anything of consequence.
This is a man who left the White House nearly a decade ago. He holds no office. He commands no policy. Yet he retains an extraordinary ability to absorb media oxygen — and a willing ecosystem of interviewers happy to supply it.
Meanwhile, Cohen's role here is instructive. The interview format — a "speed round" with questions like "Are aliens real?" — isn't journalism. It's content production. It's designed to extract quotable moments from a willing participant in a setting where follow-up questions are structurally impossible. You don't get accountability from a speed round. You get clips.
The cycle is well-worn by now:
It's not a conspiracy. It doesn't need to be. It's just how the incentive structure works when a figure with Obama's cultural footprint has access to platforms that reward ambiguity over precision.
The aliens aren't here. The spin cycle never left.
The FBI asked Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for DNA evidence and a black glove recovered in connection with the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie — the mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie — and he sent it to a private lab in Florida instead.
Not to the FBI's national crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, with its world-class forensic capabilities. To a private contractor in Florida that the sheriff's department regularly uses. As the investigation closed in on the two-week mark with no known proof of life, the sheriff with primary jurisdiction effectively cut the FBI out of the evidence chain.
An unnamed FBI source told Reuters the move has real consequences:
"It risks further slowing a case that grows more urgent by the minute."
The same source added:
"It's clear the fastest path to answers is leveraging federal resources and technology."
Pima County has reportedly spent about $200,000 sending evidence to the Florida lab. The FBI's Quantico facility — one of the most advanced forensic operations on the planet — would have processed it at no cost to the county. That's not a close call. That's a jurisdictional turf war dressed up as procedure.
Nancy Guthrie vanished in the early-morning hours of February 1 from her home in Pima County. Doorbell camera footage captured an armed, masked individual tampering with the camera around that time. Family members say she had a sound mind but suffered from limited mobility and needed daily medication to survive.
That last detail matters. Every day without resolution is a day closer to a point of no return.
DNA tests confirmed that traces of blood found on the front porch came from Nancy Guthrie. A black glove was recovered about a mile from the home. Several purported ransom notes have surfaced — delivered not to the family or law enforcement, but to news media outlets. The deadlines in those notes have lapsed. No proof of life has been provided, as The Daily Beast reports.
On Saturday, Savannah Guthrie posted a video alongside her siblings Annie and Camron, speaking directly to whoever took their mother:
"We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay."
That's a daughter on camera, offering money to her mother's captor, because the investigation hasn't given her family anything else to hold onto.
The FBI's Phoenix field office shared new details about the suspect on Thursday, describing the individual as approximately 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall with an average build, wearing a black 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Pack backpack. The bureau is offering up to $100,000 for information leading to Nancy Guthrie's location or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved.
The doorbell camera images took more than a week to recover from what Patel described on Wednesday as "residual data located in backend systems." A week — in a case where hours matter.
On Tuesday, a man identified only as "Carlos," who described himself as a delivery driver, was brought in for questioning, and his residence was searched. He was released eight hours later. He told reporters he had no idea why he was brought in. No charges were filed.
So the public ledger of this investigation reads: one detained-and-released man who says he knows nothing, doorbell footage that took a week to extract, ransom notes sent to media rather than investigators, and critical physical evidence routed away from the FBI's best forensic tools at the sheriff's discretion.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department holds primary jurisdiction over the case. No one disputes that. The department has accepted the FBI's offer to provide assistance, which decides to bypass the FBI's crime lab all the more puzzling.
You don't accept federal help and then redirect evidence away from federal labs. That's not maintaining jurisdiction. That's maintaining control at the expense of outcomes. A woman is missing. She needs medication to survive. The family is publicly begging for her return. And the sheriff's priority is routing forensic evidence through his department's preferred vendor.
The Daily Beast contacted both the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's Department for comment. Neither responded. Sheriff Nanos has offered no public explanation for the decision.
Silence, in a case like this, lands differently than it does in routine jurisdictional disputes. A family is waiting. The public is watching. And the man with the evidence won't say why he sent it to Florida instead of Quantico.
Federal investigators have the resources, the technology, and the capacity to process forensic evidence faster than a private lab contracting with a county sheriff's office. That's not opinion — it's infrastructure. The FBI built Quantico specifically for cases like this.
When a missing person case reaches the two-week mark with no arrest, no proof of life, and ransom notes whose deadlines have already expired, the window for a positive outcome narrows sharply. Every institutional friction point — every evidence delay, every jurisdictional standoff — costs time that Nancy Guthrie may not have.
The FBI offered $100,000, its Phoenix field office, and its crime lab. The sheriff took the first two and rejected the third. Somewhere in Florida, a private lab is processing the evidence that might bring a 54-year-old woman's mother home.
Savannah Guthrie and her siblings aren't waiting for jurisdiction to sort itself out. They're on camera, offering to pay a stranger for their mother's life. The least the people running this investigation can do is use the best tools available.
Donald T. Kinsella lasted less than a day as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York. Sworn in on Wednesday morning by a board of federal judges, he was out by Wednesday evening — removed by the White House without explanation.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the move on X with characteristic directness:
"Judges don't pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella"
Fox News reported that Morgan DeWitt Snow, the Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, delivered the formal notification to Kinsella. The court that appointed him pushed back the next day. The White House has not publicly commented further.
The Northern District of New York has been without a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney for some time, and the vacancy created a cascading series of legal disputes that set the stage for this week's confrontation.
In January, U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ruled that the Department of Justice had taken improper action to keep John Sarcone III in the acting U.S. Attorney role past the 120-day statutory limit for attorneys the Senate hasn't confirmed. The ruling, reported by NBC News, declared that Sarcone was serving illegally. He subsequently demoted himself to first assistant attorney while awaiting an appeal.
That left a vacancy — and the federal court moved to fill it. The judges turned to 28 U.S.C. § 546(d), which empowers a district court to appoint a U.S. Attorney "to serve until the vacancy is filled."
They selected Kinsella, whom the court described as "a qualified, experienced former prosecutor" with "years of distinguished work on behalf of the citizens of the Northern District of New York."
He didn't make it to sundown.
What makes this dispute genuinely interesting — and not just another Beltway turf war — is that both sides are pointing to the same section of the Constitution and arriving at opposite conclusions.
Blanche cited Article II for the proposition that the President picks U.S. Attorneys. The court cited Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 right back, noting that the Constitution "expressly provides" for Congress to vest the appointment of officials like U.S. Attorneys "in the Courts of Law." The court's Thursday statement laid this out in detail:
"The Court exercised its authority under 28 U.S.C. § 546(d), which empowers the district court to 'appoint a United States Attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled.' The United States Constitution expressly provides for this grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, which states in part: 'the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment' of officials such as United States Attorneys 'in the Courts of Law.' By the end of the day, Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, Morgan DeWitt Snow notified Mr. Kinsella that he was removed as the judicially-appointed United States Attorney, without explanation."
So both sides invoke Article II. Both claim the text supports their position. The question is whether the executive branch can unilaterally remove someone the judiciary appointed under a statute Congress wrote for exactly this scenario.
There's a principle worth watching here that transcends the particulars of a single U.S. Attorney vacancy in upstate New York.
The 120-day limit exists for a reason — it's supposed to prevent the executive branch from parking unconfirmed appointees in powerful roles indefinitely, avoiding the Senate confirmation process the Founders designed. Judge Schofield's January ruling enforced that limit. The court's appointment of Kinsella was the statutory mechanism kicking in after the executive branch failed to fill the seat through proper channels.
The administration's position — that the President's appointment power supersedes a judicial appointment made under a congressional statute — raises a structural question that federal courts may ultimately have to resolve. Whether Kinsella's removal triggers a legal challenge remains to be seen. As of Friday, the fact sheet records no indication of one.
What's clear is the administration's posture: executive appointment authority is not something it intends to share, even temporarily, even when the vacancy exists because the Senate confirmation process stalled.
Kinsella himself has said nothing publicly. The White House hasn't responded to Fox News Digital's inquiry. The only parties on record are Blanche — via a social media post — and the court, via a carefully worded statement that reads less like a press release and more like the opening brief in a separation-of-powers case.
The court's closing line was pointed:
"The Court thanks Donald T. Kinsella for his willingness to return to public service so that this vacancy could be filled with a qualified, experienced former prosecutor, and for his years of distinguished work on behalf of the citizens of the Northern District of New York."
That's not a thank-you note. That's a marker laid down — a federal court telling the executive branch, on the record, that the man it removed was qualified and that his appointment was lawful.
The Northern District of New York still doesn't have a U.S. Attorney. The vacancy that started this fight remains. And the constitutional question at the center of it — who fills the gap when the President doesn't — now sits in the open, waiting for someone to litigate it.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday that approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants with final deportation orders are currently living in the United States — and roughly half of them have criminal convictions.
That's 800,000 people whom an immigration judge already ordered removed from the country, who broke the law again after arriving here illegally, and who remained anyway. The orders weren't issued by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. They came from immigration judges within the Department of Justice — the judicial process that amnesty advocates constantly insist must be respected.
The process spoke. Nobody enforced it.
According to Fox News, Lyons broke the numbers down further during questioning from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., offering a state-level snapshot that sharpens the national picture. In Minnesota alone — a state that has become a flashpoint for clashes over immigration enforcement — Lyons testified that there are 16,840 individuals with final deportation orders at large.
"There's 16,840 final orders at large in the state of Minnesota."
Minnesota. One state. Nearly 17,000 people, a judge told to leave, who simply didn't. Multiply that pattern across fifty states, and you begin to understand how 1.6 million becomes not a statistic but a systemic failure — one that previous administrations chose to tolerate.
Lyons made clear that these deportation orders were issued through the legal system's own channels:
"Through an immigration judge with the Department of Justice separate from Immigration Customs Enforcement."
This distinction matters. Every time critics accuse the administration of acting unilaterally or bypassing due process, the answer is sitting in 1.6 million case files. These people received hearings. They received orders. The system rendered its judgment. What was missing — for years — was anyone willing to carry it out.
Lankford used his time to connect the current enforcement challenge to the open-border conditions that created it. The senator's testimony painted a picture of a border that functionally ceased to exist:
"Two years ago, we had 10,000 people a day illegally crossing into the country, two years ago, 10,000 people a day not vetted, had no idea who they were."
Ten thousand a day. That's not immigration — it's capitulation dressed up as compassion.
Lankford went further, citing the Biden administration's own estimates on one of the most alarming categories of border crossers:
"70,000 people were estimated by the Biden administration to come in in 2024 that were special interest aliens that had a locational connection to terrorism."
The Biden administration knew. Its own estimates flagged 70,000 individuals entering the country with ties to regions connected to terrorism — and the border remained open. Lankford drove the point home:
"But we had no idea who they were. They were allowed to be able to come into the country two years ago."
This is the inheritance. Not a policy disagreement. Not a difference in emphasis. A security catastrophe that the previous administration documented in its own data and then chose to ignore.
While ICE agents work to execute the deportation orders that judges issued — in some cases years ago — they face an increasingly hostile environment on the ground. Two activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, died in altercations with federal officers in Minnesota, incidents that have fueled protests against enforcement operations.
Lankford addressed the nature of those protests directly, describing a pattern that goes well beyond peaceful dissent:
"There are thousands of arrests that are happening in a day that are happening by the book. And what's happening is a group of protesters that are protesting and agitating, and some of them running into churches and disturbing church services and saying, 'It's my First Amendment right to shut down your church during a service.' And saying they're a peaceful protester while they throw rocks at agents, it just gets old."
There's a particular kind of audacity in invoking the First Amendment to disrupt someone else's worship — then throwing rocks at federal agents and calling it a peaceful protest. The contradiction doesn't need commentary. It speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, Democrats have threatened to defund DHS unless the agency changes its enforcement approach. The logic is remarkable: the judicial system issued 1.6 million deportation orders, agents are finally executing them, and the response from the left is to strip funding from the agency doing the work the courts demanded.
Lankford closed his remarks by acknowledging the men and women doing the actual work of enforcement — the agents operating under threat, executing lawful orders in communities where local politicians and activist groups treat them as the enemy.
"The work that the men and women that work around you have done have stopped that chaos."
He also offered a broader observation that deserves to echo beyond the committee room:
"We're losing perspective of what's really happened."
He's right. The national conversation has drifted so far from the underlying reality that enforcing a judge's order now gets treated as authoritarian overreach. A country that cannot remove people its own courts have ordered deported is not exercising compassion — it's advertising that its laws mean nothing.
There are 1.6 million tests of that proposition sitting in the United States right now. Eight hundred thousand of them have criminal records. The question was never whether enforcement would be difficult. The question is whether a nation that refuses to enforce its own judicial orders can still call itself a nation of laws.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent this week on a media tour — not to discuss the weighty constitutional questions sitting on her desk, but to defend her night out at the Grammy Awards and promote her memoir.
Jackson appeared on "CBS Mornings" on Feb. 10 and ABC's "The View" on Feb. 11, where she defended attending the Grammy ceremony this month as a nominee for the audio version of her 2025 book "Lovely One." She did not win. The Dalai Lama took the award for best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court still has not issued a ruling on President Trump's tariffs — a case argued back in November — and has decided only one of the other eight cases from that same oral arguments session. The court is currently in the middle of a four-week break from hearing arguments and issuing opinions.
The issue isn't that a Supreme Court justice attended an awards show. The issue is which awards show, and what happened there.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., laid it out plainly, according to USA Today: many attendees at the ceremony wore "ICE OUT" pins, and two award winners used their acceptance speeches to denounce the Trump administration's immigration enforcement. Blackburn called it:
"Such a brazenly political, anti-law enforcement event."
Jackson, seated in that audience, is part of the court currently deliberating a major case on presidential authority. The optics aren't complicated. A justice who will rule on the legality of the president's enforcement powers attended an event where enforcement of immigration law was treated as something to protest — accessorized with lapel pins, no less.
On "The View," Jackson waved it off. She described the evening in glowing terms:
"It was extraordinary. I'd never been to any kind of event like that before."
When pressed on the criticism, she framed attendance as part of her duties:
"Another part of the job, actually my job, is public outreach and education. I thought this is a great opportunity to highlight my work in this ways and to see what's happening at the Grammy's."
Public outreach. At the Grammys. While your pending caseload includes whether the president can use emergency powers to impose tariffs.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg rushed to Jackson's defense, arguing that the justice "had no way of knowing what anyone's speech was going to be." Jackson agreed:
"That's right."
Fine. She didn't know what the speeches would say. But she also didn't leave. She didn't issue any statement distancing herself from the politicized spectacle. She went on two talk shows afterward and described the evening as "extraordinary."
On "CBS Mornings," Jackson addressed the still-pending tariffs case with the kind of reassurance that sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than a few seconds:
"The court is going through its process of deliberation. The American people expect for us to be thorough and clear in our determinations and sometimes that takes time."
Thoroughness is a virtue. But the court heard oral arguments on these tariffs in November. It's now mid-February. They've managed to resolve exactly one of the nine cases argued that month. The tariffs — which function as a centerpiece of the president's economic agenda and a major foreign policy tool — remain in legal limbo.
During those November arguments, many justices sounded skeptical that the president can tap emergency powers to sidestep the standard tariffs process. That skepticism, combined with the glacial pace, has fueled speculation that the court is in no rush to invalidate a sitting president's signature economic policy — preferring to let the clock run rather than issue a politically explosive ruling.
That's a choice. And it's a choice that has consequences for American businesses, trading partners, and the broader economy every single day it goes unresolved.
There's a deeper pattern worth noting. Jackson is not the first justice to have a public life outside the court. Justices write books. They give speeches. They attend events. None of that is inherently problematic.
But the left spent years demanding that conservative justices recuse themselves from cases based on the flimsiest associations — a flag on a neighbor's lawn, attendance at a legal conference, a friendship with someone tangentially connected to a litigant. The standard they set was that even the appearance of bias was disqualifying.
Now, a liberal justice attends an event where performers and attendees openly protested federal law enforcement, where anti-ICE sentiment was literally pinned to people's chests — and the defense is that she couldn't have predicted the speeches. The recusal industrial complex that targeted conservative justices has gone remarkably quiet.
Jackson also used her Grammy loss to charm the talk show audience:
"If you're going to lose, I mean, you might as well lose to the Dalai Lama, for sure."
It's a good line. It's the kind of thing that plays well on daytime television. And that's precisely the concern — a sitting Supreme Court justice who seems more comfortable on a talk show couch than behind the bench, building a media persona while cases of national significance collect dust.
Jackson described her Grammy attendance and media appearances as "public outreach and education." She called the criticism itself just:
"Part of the job."
But there's a difference between public engagement and a publicity tour. Promoting a young adult version of your memoir on "The View" while the country waits for a ruling on presidential trade authority isn't outreach. It's branding.
The Supreme Court's authority rests on the perception that its members are above the political fray — that they deliberate with care, speak through opinions, and let their work product do the talking. Every appearance on a daytime talk show, every photo op at an awards ceremony dripping with partisan signaling, chips away at that perception.
Jackson has every right to attend the Grammys. She has every right to go on television. But rights and wisdom aren't the same thing. The American people waiting on a tariffs ruling might prefer their justices spent February working — not explaining why losing to the Dalai Lama was actually kind of fun.
Molly Wasow Park, the commissioner of New York City's Department of Social Services, resigned this week after learning she would not be retained by Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration. The departure — barely a month into Mamdani's tenure — signals that the new mayor's team has wasted little time finding fault with the agency tasked with managing the city's sprawling homelessness and social welfare apparatus.
Park acknowledged her exit on Monday, telling reporters the role she had hoped to keep simply wasn't going to materialize. Two people familiar with the circumstances confirmed she was told she would not be retained. A third anonymous source corroborated the account.
The timing is notable. Eighteen New Yorkers have died after exposure to the elements during a recent stretch of extreme cold, with the first death occurring on January 24. Park is still scheduled to testify before the City Council about those deaths — even as she packs her desk.
Mamdani and his senior aides had already begun reconsidering the direction and leadership of the Department of Social Services before the cold-weather deaths made headlines, the New York Times reported. First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan reportedly shared concerns about Park's stewardship, with the mayor's team concluding the agency was not adequately addressing the needs of what they described as an "economically unstable population."
That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting without saying much. New York City's homelessness problem is not new, not mysterious, and not the result of insufficient bureaucratic compassion. The city has spent billions on shelter systems, transitional housing, and social programs. The question isn't whether officials care enough. It's whether the machinery they've built actually works.
Park herself seemed to acknowledge the limits of what her agency accomplished. In an interview, she offered this:
"When the final evaluation happens, I'm sure there's going to be instances where we find instances where we could have done something different. I feel like in an awful lot of cases, we did what we needed to."
That's the kind of self-assessment that sounds reasonable in a conference room and hollow on a sidewalk where someone froze to death.
Park was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams in 2023, replacing Gary Jenkins, who resigned that same year over his handling of the city's homelessness situation. She inherited a department already buckling — at the time, the city was scrambling to shelter thousands of migrants arriving every week while still dealing with the economic and social wreckage of pandemic-era policies.
Now she's gone too, and the pattern is unmistakable. New York cycles through social services commissioners the way other cities cycle through school superintendents: a new face, a new set of promises, the same intractable problems, and an eventual resignation that gets framed as a mutual decision.
Mayor Mamdani's spokeswoman, Dora Pekec, issued the requisite diplomatic statement:
"We appreciate Commissioner Park's years of service to the city and the mayor looks forward to working with her through this transitional period."
City Hall added it would name a replacement "in the coming weeks."
Since the cold snap began, the city says it made more than 1,400 placements into shelters or other indoor sites and involuntarily removed 34 people from the streets. Those numbers tell two stories at once.
On one hand, 1,400 placements suggest the system was working at scale to get people indoors. On the other hand, 18 people still died. And the involuntary removal of just 34 people — out of a homeless population that numbers in the tens of thousands — raises an obvious question about whether the city's legal and political framework even allows officials to act decisively when lives are at stake.
Park, for her part, suggested the city should spend more time understanding why homeless individuals refuse shelter in the first place:
"We need to spend more time as a society asking what got people to this sense of trauma and dislocation, that they would rather stay on the street."
It's a sentiment that sounds compassionate. It's also the kind of open-ended inquiry that can justify inaction indefinitely. At some point, the question stops being "why won't they come inside?" and starts being "why won't the city bring them inside?" New York's progressive establishment has spent years insisting that individual autonomy — even the autonomy to freeze — trumps intervention. The 18 dead are the cost of that philosophy.
The deeper story here isn't one commissioner's departure. It's what Mamdani intends to do differently — and whether his instincts will run toward more of the same.
Park had pushed to use rental vouchers to help finance affordable housing developments, a policy direction that sounds innovative until you consider that New York has layered voucher program upon voucher program for decades without solving the underlying housing crisis. The city doesn't have a voucher shortage. It has a housing supply problem driven by zoning restrictions, regulatory burdens, and construction costs that make affordable development nearly impossible without massive public subsidy.
If Mamdani's team forced Park out because they want a commissioner who will pursue even more aggressive progressive interventions — more spending, more programs, more studies about "trauma and dislocation" — then the revolving door will keep spinning. The next commissioner will inherit the same broken system, face the same structural constraints, and eventually sit for the same exit interview.
Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, who chairs the Council's general welfare committee, praised Park as a partner in the work of getting people off the streets:
"[A] steadfast partner in the hard work of getting people off the streets and into permanent homes."
Steadfast, perhaps. But 18 people are dead, a commissioner is out, and the agency is leaderless heading into what remains of winter.
Park insisted the cold-snap deaths played no role in her decision to leave, and that she felt no pressure from City Hall. The anonymous sources tell a different story — that she was effectively told her time was up. Both versions may contain partial truth, but only one matters: the person responsible for the city's social services safety net during the deadliest cold stretch in recent memory is walking away, and no one in city government is willing to say plainly why.
That's the real failure. Not one commissioner's tenure, but a political culture where accountability gets laundered through anonymous sources and polite statements about "transitional periods." Eighteen New Yorkers froze. Someone should have to own that sentence out loud.
Instead, New York gets what it always gets — a new name on the door and the quiet expectation that next winter will somehow be different.
Ken Paxton is pulling ahead of John Cornyn in the race for Texas's open Senate seat — and the gap isn't shrinking.
A new survey from the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, conducted between Jan. 20 and Jan. 31, shows Paxton commanding 38% of likely Republican primary voters to Cornyn's 31%. U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston sits a distant third at 17%, with 12% of respondents still undecided. Early voting starts Feb. 17 — just over a week away.
On the Democratic side, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas leads state Rep. James Talarico by 8 points, 47% to 39%. The general election matchups, meanwhile, suggest the eventual Republican nominee won't matter much: both Paxton and Cornyn beat Crockett by 2 percentage points in head-to-head hypotheticals, and the survey found "little difference" in expected performance regardless of which candidates emerge.
Texas remains Texas.
What makes Paxton's lead notable isn't just the topline number. It's the breadth. According to the poll reported by the Texas Tribune, Paxton leads Cornyn across every key demographic group surveyed — with one exception. Cornyn edges Paxton among Latino voters by 7 percentage points in the Republican primary.
That's a real data point, but it's a narrow one. Paxton's advantage everywhere else — and the survey's indication that he'd hold a big advantage over both opponents in a potential runoff — paints the picture of a candidate whose base is locked in and whose ceiling hasn't been reached. Twelve percent undecided in a three-man race with early voting days away is real estate, and Paxton is positioned to claim it.
Previous polls had described this race as a dead heat. This one doesn't. A 7-point lead outside the margin of error — the poll carries a ±4.18-point margin — marks a genuine shift.
Crockett's 8-point lead over Talarico tracks with what you'd expect when one candidate simply owns the room. Ninety-two percent of respondents said they knew enough about Crockett to form an opinion, compared to 85% for Talarico. That 7-point awareness gap maps almost perfectly onto the 8-point vote gap. Democratic voters know Crockett, and they're picking her.
Talarico has his pockets. He leads among white voters and those with advanced degrees — the wine-track progressive coalition that runs strong in Austin and not many other places. But Crockett dominates among the voters Democrats need in a statewide Texas race. She carries 46% of likely Latino Democratic primary voters to Talarico's 37%, with 15% still unsure.
That's a problem for Talarico, who recently secured an endorsement from the state's largest Hispanic Democratic organization. Previous polls had shown him leading among Latino voters. The endorsement doesn't appear to be holding.
Here's the number that should keep Democratic strategists up at night: it doesn't matter who they nominate. Both Paxton and Cornyn beat Crockett by 2 points in hypothetical general election matchups. The survey even found Paxton could do slightly better than Cornyn against Talarico. Between 7% and 8% of likely general election voters remain unsure in those head-to-heads, but the structural reality of Texas hasn't moved.
Among the 1,502 likely general election voters polled — with a tighter ±2.53 margin of error — President Trump's approval sits at 49% to 50% disapproval. Majorities disapprove of his handling of foreign policy, the economy, international trade, and the cost of living. But 51% approve of his handling of immigration and border security, with 47% disapproving.
In Texas, immigration and the border aren't abstract policy debates. They're lived experience. That single issue keeps the floor firm under any Republican running statewide.
With early voting opening Feb. 17, the contours of both primaries are hardening fast. Twelve percent undecided on each side leaves room for movement but not transformation. Cornyn needs something to change the trajectory — and the poll offers him little to work with beyond his narrow advantage among Latino Republican voters. Hunt, at 17%, is running for a bronze medal or an exit ramp.
The real question isn't whether Paxton or Crockett wins their primaries. The polls — this one and the ones before it — have been trending in one direction for both. The real question is whether Democrats invest serious money in a Texas Senate race where their best candidate trails the Republican field by 2 points in a state that hasn't elected a Democrat statewide since 1994.
The answer to that question tells you more about the national party's resource discipline than any poll can.
Spencer Pratt — yes, that Spencer Pratt — filed to run for mayor of Los Angeles, and his opening salvo landed squarely on Karen Bass and the city's fire leadership. The former star of The Hills is demanding the firing of multiple L.A. Fire Department officials, including the fire chief and fire battalion chief, over what he describes as a deliberate cover-up of the catastrophic wildfire response in January 2025.
In a video captured by a FOXLA reporter, Pratt laid out his case plainly:
"We're going to find out what failures the mayor and LAFD and the state parks and everyone involved to those 12 people burning alive, 7,000 structures [destroyed]. There's no looking forward until we get the answers and the people that are responsible are fired. That includes the fire chief, the fire battalion chief, that includes the mayor, it includes anybody that had anything to do with [the failed fire response]."
The celebrity-turned-candidate isn't running on vibes. He's running on fury — and on a story that should enrage every Angeleno who watched their city burn.
At the center of Pratt's campaign launch is an allegation that Mayor Bass ordered the watering down of the LAFD's after-action report on the January 2025 wildfires. As Breitbart News reported in December, the report allegedly went through several revisions designed to delete negative aspects of the city's fire response — a response that left more than two dozen people dead and thousands of structures in ashes.
Think about what that means. A city government presided over one of the worst urban fire disasters in modern memory, and instead of conducting an honest accounting of what went wrong, allegedly took a red pen to the findings. Not to fix the failures. To hide them.
Mayor Bass has offered no public response to these allegations within the reporting. Neither has the LAFD. The silence from City Hall is doing a lot of work here — and none of it is reassuring.
Los Angeles has become a masterclass in how one-party governance handles failure: spend lavishly, deliver nothing, and when the bill comes due, edit the receipt.
Pratt also aimed to reduce the city's homelessness spending, promising to audit Los Angeles's budget. The city has poured billions of tax dollars into homelessness programs, and every year the problem metastasizes. The encampments grow. The streets deteriorate. The money vanishes into a bureaucracy that measures success by inputs — dollars spent, programs launched — rather than outcomes. Anyone who has walked through downtown L.A. in the last five years can see where those billions went. Which is to say, nowhere visible.
This is the environment Pratt is stepping into. A city where the political class spends without accountability, fails without consequence, and allegedly sanitizes the evidence when someone tries to document what happened.
The instinct is to dismiss Pratt's candidacy. He's a reality TV personality, not a policy wonk. The political establishment will treat him as a punchline.
But that dismissal misses the point entirely. Pratt lost his home in the Palisades fire. He's not theorizing about government failure from a distance — he lived it. And in a city where the professional political class has produced nothing but decline, the question voters should ask isn't whether Pratt has governing experience. It's whether the people with governing experience have actually governed.
Karen Bass came into office with every institutional advantage. She had the party infrastructure, the media goodwill, and the full backing of Sacramento. And when the fires came, the hydrants ran dry, the response faltered, and more than two dozen people died. The after-action report that was supposed to ensure it never happened again was allegedly gutted on her orders.
Pratt may or may not be the right person to run Los Angeles. But he's asking the right questions — questions the incumbent has refused to answer.
The mayoral race just acquired a candidate with name recognition, a personal connection to the disaster, and zero loyalty to the political machinery that produced it. Pratt has promised a full audit of city spending and a relentless pursuit of answers on the fire response. Whether he can build a campaign infrastructure to match the rhetoric remains to be seen.
But here's what's already clear: the political establishment in Los Angeles would prefer this story disappear. They'd prefer the after-action report stay scrubbed. They'd prefer voters move on, accept the losses, and keep electing the same people who produced them.
More than two dozen people are dead. Thousands lost everything. And the city's own accounting of what went wrong was allegedly rewritten to protect the people responsible.
Someone was going to run on that. Now someone is.
One week after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson, Arizona, the Pima County Sheriff's Office has not identified a single suspect, a single person of interest, or a single credible lead — at least none it's willing to share. What it has produced is a cascading series of investigative missteps that have left the Guthrie family desperate and the public questioning whether the department tasked with finding her is up to the job.
FBI agents returned to Nancy's home on Friday for what Fox News infrared footage confirmed was the third time agents combed the residence. It was the fourth time crime scene tape had been put up and torn down from the property. During this latest search, investigators seized a vehicle from the garage and recovered a camera from the roof — a camera that had seemingly been missed in every previous sweep.
Three searches of a house before you find the camera on the roof. Let that sit for a moment.
Sheriff Chris Nanos, who has led Pima County's law enforcement since 2020, has spent the week oscillating between overstatement and retreat. On Monday, he told NBC News that Nancy had been "abducted" and "taken from her bed." By Tuesday, he was walking it back, clarifying he'd been speaking figuratively and that no evidence supported the claim she was literally taken from her bed. His explanation landed somewhere between confession and complaint:
"Sometimes I'm speaking in generalities and ... and ... I'm not used to everybody hanging on to my words and then trying to hold me accountable for what I say. But I understand."
A county sheriff — the top law enforcement official in a jurisdiction investigating the disappearance of an elderly woman — is not used to people holding him accountable for what he says. During an active missing persons case. On national television, as Daily Mail reports.
By Thursday's press conference, Nanos had abandoned even the pretense of projecting competence. Asked about potential suspects and motives, he offered this:
"My guesswork is as good as yours."
The Tucson Sentinel published an op-ed on Wednesday that captured the local mood, describing Nanos's Tuesday press appearance as a performance whose answers could be summed up with:
"For the most part his answers were exasperated statements that could be summed up with a Scooby Doo 'Ruh ROH...'"
Nancy was reported missing shortly after noon on Sunday, February 1. Police arrived at her home by 12:15 PM. The department's fixed-wing Cessna aircraft — a basic tool for a search operation in a rural area — did not get airborne until around 5:00 PM. That's roughly five hours sitting on the tarmac while the trail went cold.
Matt Heinz, a member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, told the Daily Mail what anyone with common sense already understood:
"The initial few hours of any kind of search like this are absolutely crucial."
The failure to deploy the aircraft wasn't just a scheduling hiccup. Sergeant Aaron Cross, president of the Pima County Sheriff's Deputies Association, said trained aviators who could have crewed the Cessna had been transferred out of the Air Operations Unit in recent weeks. Kathleen Winn, the Pima County Republican Party Chairwoman, echoed that claim. Sources close to the department blamed Nanos directly for the staffing shortage that left no qualified pilots available when it mattered most.
So the plane existed. The need was obvious. The personnel had been moved. And an 84-year-old woman's best chance at a rapid aerial search evaporated on the tarmac.
The crime scene tape going up and down four times at the same residence in less than a week isn't just embarrassing optics — it raises real questions about the chain of custody and evidentiary integrity. When reporters pressed Nanos on whether the repeated sealing and unsealing could create problems in a future prosecution, his response was dismissive:
"I'll let the court worry about it. We follow the rules of law."
That's a remarkable posture for the lead agency on the case. Any competent defense attorney watching this investigation unfold is already taking notes. If a suspect is ever identified — a significant "if" at this point — the prosecution will have to explain why the primary crime scene was treated like a revolving door. Nanos is letting the court worry about it. The court may have plenty to worry about.
The Guthrie family has released multiple videos pleading for Nancy's safe return. Whoever is responsible for her disappearance has made no contact with the family — no ransom demand, no communication of any kind. Nancy's daughter, Savannah Guthrie, has been identified among the family members grappling with an investigation that produces more questions than answers with each passing day.
The circumstances of Nancy's disappearance remain stubbornly unclear. She vanished during the early morning hours of February 1 from her home in the Catalina Foothills, a rural stretch of Tucson. Who reported her missing has not been disclosed. How she was taken — or whether she left under other circumstances — is unknown. Nanos himself admitted his earlier characterization of an abduction from her bed was figurative, not factual.
Nanos acknowledged Thursday that he should have called in the FBI and regional teams sooner. That admission, while welcome, doesn't explain why basic investigative instincts failed in real time. Deploying aerial search assets in a rural area isn't an advanced technique — it's standard procedure. Securing a crime scene once and keeping it secured isn't a luxury — it's the baseline. Finding a camera mounted on the roof of the subject's home shouldn't require three separate searches.
Sources within Nanos's own department told the Daily Mail he made critical mistakes in the first hours of the investigation. That's not political opposition talking. That's his own people.
This case has drawn overwhelming national media attention, and Nanos conceded that the scrutiny is entirely new to him. That much is obvious. The question isn't whether the sheriff is uncomfortable with cameras. The question is whether his department can find an 84-year-old woman who vanished from her home a week ago.
As of Saturday afternoon, the answer remained no.
A wind turbine at the University of Minnesota's Eolos Wind Energy Research Field Station in Dakota County struck and killed a bald eagle, dismembering the bird into three pieces. The lower torso and tail were discovered first. The head and wings weren't found until over a month later.
Fox News reported that the U.S. Department of the Interior issued a violation notice in January, citing the university for breaking the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act by killing the eagle without an incidental take permit. The proposed civil penalty: $14,536. The turbine's construction was funded by a $7.9 million grant from the Obama Department of Energy, awarded in 2010.
The grant traces back to one of Barack Obama's first major legislative achievements — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which appropriated roughly $90 billion to, as a Center for Climate and Energy Solutions report put it, "lay the foundation for a clean energy economy of the future." The Department of Energy received $35.2 billion of that pot.
Some foundation.
DOI spokesperson Matthew Middleton made the administration's position clear in comments to Fox News Digital. Under President Trump and Secretary Burgum, he said, the department:
"is enforcing the law to protect these iconic birds and demand accountability from an industry that has jeopardized these protected species."
Middleton didn't mince words about what that eagle represented — or what the wind industry has treated it as:
"America's bald eagles are a national treasure, not collateral damage for costly wind experiments. Wind companies will no longer get a free pass as this administration safeguards bald eagles and advances energy policies that prioritize affordability and strengthen America's economy."
The University of Minnesota, for its part, offered all the urgency of a faculty senate subcommittee. A university spokesperson confirmed the school had received the DOI's notice and said it is "currently under review." No substantive response. No explanation. No accountability. Just bureaucratic stalling dressed up as process.
The DOI's violation notice also revealed that the university was in the process of testing its collision detection sensors when the incident occurred. The sensors were supposed to prevent exactly this. The eagle died anyway — torn apart by the very machine that was allegedly being calibrated to protect it.
The University of Minnesota isn't alone. In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized fines totaling $32,340 against Ørsted Onshore North America for two bald eagles killed by Ørsted turbines — one in Nebraska, one in Illinois.
Fox News Digital had reported on those proposed fines months earlier. The January notice of violation against the university does not indicate it has since obtained an incidental take permit, and the Fish and Wildlife Service sent a letter urging the school to reassess the turbine's danger to eagles and consider applying for a long-term permit.
That the federal government has to write a university suggesting it may think about whether its giant spinning blades pose a threat to birds tells you everything about how seriously the green energy sector has taken wildlife protections.
For years, the wind industry operated under a kind of moral immunity. If your energy source carried the "clean" label, regulators looked the other way. Eagles died. Enforcement languished.
The tradeoff was always implicit: the climate mission mattered more than the birds. Nobody in Washington wanted to be the person who slowed down a wind farm to save a raptor — not when there were press conferences to hold and subsidies to distribute.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been one of the most direct voices on the broader dysfunction behind projects like the Eolos facility. Appearing on Jesse Watters Primetime in June, Burgum called out the entire ideological apparatus propping up these ventures:
"When you think about the green new scam, it was pro-China, and it's anti-American, and it's also unaffordable and unreliable."
Burgum has also characterized solar and wind projects as "destabilizing our grid and driving up prices." That's not rhetoric — it's a description of what ratepayers across the country experience every time an unreliable energy source demands backup from the natural gas plants that were supposed to be retired.
The Eolos facility is a case study in how this works. Billions in taxpayer dollars flow through federal legislation into grants. Those grants fund research stations and experimental turbines. The turbines kill protected wildlife. The operators shrug. And the taxpayer foots the bill twice — once for the construction, and again when the fines come due at a public university funded by state dollars.
Nobody in the Obama administration's Department of Energy asked whether a $7.9 million wind turbine in Dakota County might pose a risk to bald eagles. Or if they did, the answer didn't matter enough to change the plan. The ARRA's $90 billion clean energy push was about speed and symbolism, not stewardship. Move fast. Build turbines. Claim credit. Let someone else deal with the carcasses.
What's changed is that the current administration treats the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act as something more than a suggestion. The combined enforcement actions against both the University of Minnesota and Ørsted signal a shift that the wind industry should study carefully. The days of treating eagle kills as an acceptable externality — a quiet cost of doing green business — are over.
A $14,536 fine won't bankrupt the University of Minnesota. But the principle it establishes carries real weight. If a research university running an experimental turbine funded by a federal grant can be held accountable, so can every commercial wind operation spinning blades across the Great Plains.
The wind industry spent years wrapping itself in moral authority. Clean energy. Carbon reduction. Saving the planet. But moral authority has a way of evaporating when your product shreds the national bird into three pieces and your best response is that the matter is "currently under review."
The Fish and Wildlife Service has urged the University of Minnesota to reassess and to pursue a long-term incidental take permit. Whether the university complies — or continues to stall behind vague statements about internal review — will test whether institutions that benefited from Obama-era green energy largesse are willing to meet even the most basic standards of environmental accountability.
The bald eagle that died at Eolos didn't have a lobby. It didn't have a press team or a federal grant. It had a law — one that existed long before the clean energy gold rush, and one that this administration has decided to enforce.
That eagle was torn apart by a machine the taxpayers built. The least anyone can do is hold someone responsible.