Saturday Covfefe: Why Does ICE Want Your Voting History?

Missiles are running low. Putin is watching. RFK Jr. has some explaining to do.

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Happy Pumpkin Spice Latte season to all who celebrate. 🎃☕️ (It’s too early in my opinion, but I digress.)

Grab your coffee. No foam, no filter—let’s go.

1. ICE Wants Your Voting History. Seriously.

If you had ICE collecting voter data from all 50 states on your 2026 bingo card, congratulations.

This week, ICE sought a contractor capable of acquiring voter-registration and voter-history files from every state, D.C., and U.S. territory for what it calls "fraud detection and data segmentation." To be clear: voting history doesn’t tell the government who you voted for, but it can show whether you voted and include other information contained in voter files.

But here’s where this gets even more concerning.

In Wyoming, two Department of Justice (DOJ) officials showed up during the Republican primary to monitor polling places. According to Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee, they wanted to interview voters, questioned officials about poll-worker training, requested training materials, and asked to examine election tabulators. She refused some of their requests. Republican Gov. Mark Gordon called their behavior "aggressive" and "irregular" and has asked the state attorney general to investigate. DOJ says they were there to ensure compliance with federal voting-rights laws.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is fighting in court to impose new federal requirements on mail voting just weeks before ballots go out. A federal judge temporarily blocked the rules Thursday, and the administration is already appealing.

I’ve worked at DHS. ICE collecting nationwide voter data while DOJ officials are showing up at polling places asking about voting machines is not something I shrug off. Neither should you. This isn’t normal, and we shouldn’t get used to it.

🗳️ ICE Seeks Nationwide Voter Data (Courthouse News Service)

Speaking of technology knowing a little too much about us…

I stumbled across What We Tell AI, a project asking strangers what they actually tell AI about work, relationships, decisions, and the things they might not tell another person.

The most 2026 project imaginable: humans telling humans what they tell the robots. 🤖 Take a look

2. We’re Running Out of the Missiles NATO Needs

While Washington ricochets from one outrage to another, here’s something that should be setting off alarm bells: U.S. Patriot missile interceptor stocks in Europe have reportedly fallen to “beyond critical” levels. The six-month war with Iran has consumed an estimated 65% of the U.S. Patriot inventory. The Pentagon disputes that there’s a critical shortage, but our adversaries are watching.

Fresh U.S. intelligence reportedly indicates that Putin sees America as weakened by the Iran war and may see an opportunity to escalate against U.S. interests and allies in Europe. Russia has already been threatening NATO countries while intensifying missile and drone attacks against Ukraine. Then came an extraordinary development: CIA Director John Ratcliffe quietly flew to Moscow this week to apparently warn Russian officials not to escalate against NATO allies, particularly Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and pressed Moscow to reduce its military and economic support for Iran. Trump, meanwhile, downplayed the concern, saying Putin isn’t going to attack NATO territory.

I spent years working on national-security crises. Readiness means planning for the threat in front of you and the one that comes next. We’re burning through critical air-defense weapons in one war while Russia is reportedly assessing whether America is too depleted and distracted to respond somewhere else.

Putin is watching, and apparently, he’s doing the math.

🚀 U.S. Patriot Stocks Fall to “Beyond Critical” Levels (AP)

3. RFK Jr. Said It Wasn’t About Vaccines, His Letter Says Otherwise

During his confirmation hearings last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was repeatedly questioned about a 2019 trip he made to Samoa, months before a devastating measles outbreak killed 83 people, most of them young children.

Kennedy was emphatic that his trip had "nothing to do with vaccines," he told senators. He said it again the next day: "My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines."

There’s just one problem: a letter Kennedy himself sent before the trip.

New documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Guardian show Kennedy wrote Samoa’s prime minister proposing that his team conduct a "detailed health informatics assessment" of what happened with the country’s MMR vaccines. In that letter, he used the words vaccine or vaccination eight times.

Kennedy ultimately got confirmed after reassuring skeptical senators about his vaccine positions. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician, has since said Kennedy violated commitments he made to secure that support.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) insists the Samoa trip was unrelated to vaccines and calls allegations that Kennedy lied to Congress false and defamatory. Kennedy was not under oath during the hearings, although knowingly making materially false statements to Congress can still be a crime.

This isn’t ancient history. This is the man currently running America’s health department.

💉 RFK Jr.’s Samoa Story Unravels (AP)

4. Fired Over Climate Science

Dr. Adam Kalkstein spent 17 years teaching at West Point. He was the academy’s only climate scientist. Now he’s out of a job, and suing.

Kalkstein says West Point ordered him to remove information about the human causes of climate change from his curriculum. He refused, saying doing so would force him to “defy science.” Six months later, the tenured professor was told his contract would not be renewed.

And here’s a detail worth knowing: Kalkstein is a conservative Republican. His argument wasn’t about politics or “social justice.” He told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that understanding climate change is a national-security issue, from competing with Russia in a melting Arctic to preparing future officers for the world they’ll actually have to operate in.

This also comes as Hegseth pushes to remake America’s service academies. A draft Pentagon memo reportedly criticized “civilian academic norms,” proposed scaling back civilian professors, and called for reviewing courses for their “operational relevance.”

Think about the irony. If you’re serious about military lethality, wouldn’t you want future commanders to understand why the physical environment they’re going to fight in is changing? The enemy doesn’t care about our culture wars. Neither does melting sea ice.

🌡️ West Point’s Climate Science Fight (NY Times)

5. Your Tax Dollars at Work…on the Ranch

Remember all that talk about government waste? Apparently there may be an exception when the government official owns 480 acres nearby.

Senators are seeking an investigation into Michael Boren, a senior Trump administration official overseeing the U.S. Forest Service, after current and former officials raised questions about the firefighting response to a July blaze near his Idaho ranch. The fire reportedly burned only about seven acres, but officials described an unusually robust deployment of federal firefighting resources. Boren reportedly contacted Forest Service officials repeatedly as the fire approached the area surrounding his property. The Agriculture Department says his communications were appropriate for his position, and it has made no finding of wrongdoing. However, the allegations are serious enough that senators now want answers about who got those federal firefighting resources and why.

Government efficiency gets complicated when the smoke is visible from your own backyard.

🔥 Firefight at the Ranch (The Guardian)

🐾 One Thing For Your Soul

Milo Bear, a golden retriever, disappeared into the snowy mountains near Lake Tahoe on Christmas Day. For 72 days, his family searched. They put up thousands of flyers, followed sightings and snowshoed through drifts as deep as 20 feet. They never stopped looking.

Then came the call every dog owner dreams about: Milo had been found alive. A shelter scanned his microchip and reunited him with his family. He’d lost a lot of weight, but remarkably, had no major injuries.

Now Milo has been named the winner of Nationwide’s 2026 Hambone Award for the year’s most unusual pet insurance claim.

For 72 days, his family refused to give up on him and Milo wasn’t giving up on finding his way back to them either.

Good boy, Milo!

🐶 Milo’s 72-Day Journey Home

And before I go, I can’t end this week without saying goodbye to Dolly Parton. I was raised on Dolly. Her music was part of the soundtrack of my childhood and a reminder that you can go out into the world, become larger than life, and never forget where you came from.

Rest easy, Dolly. We will always love you.❤️

More soon,

Olivia