Booze Everywhere Kash Goes

Plus: An OBama-Colbert rematch, our usual cartoons, and Chris Stapleton does Willie.

May 07, 2026

Yes, it’s still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. You can also show appreciation by pledging a small sum if we go partly “paid” one day.

Stephen in his final weeks….

Jimmy still at it:

Colbert returned for a rematch with Obama and their famous Wastepaper Basketball contest from years back. You may remember that Stephen trounced him the first time around. But this time?

A key thing to remember about Ted Turner: He liked hunting, and also wanted to protect the planet, so he bought more than a million acres of wilderness and ranch land, roughly enough to fill the state of Delaware, and set them aside as nature preserves. Read about how he revived ecosystems.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Sarah Fitzpatrick has published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Kash Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains: “Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”
In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.
Fitzpatrick notes that “[s]everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”
“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”

Meanwhile, David Rothkopf wrote yesterday in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

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Music Picks

Heavy on Colbert today, but here from last night Chris Stapleton covering Willie Nelson’s topical “Living in the Promiseland.” Plus they thanked Colbert for offering exposure to musicians over the years.