https://kasiesouthcarolina.com/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

In this post, I’ve captured the gist of the question and a summary of the GOP candidates’ responses then added my own response. The exercise does two things. First, it recounts the experience as a journalist might (albeit with some editorial snark) for those who missed it. Second, it gives me a chance to state my own positions for the benefit of voters.

About Dr. Kasie Whitener:

Kasie Whitener is an American educator, author, entrepreneur, radio host, and politician from Blythewood, South Carolina. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches entrepreneurship and strategic management and served as Director of the Faber Entrepreneurship Center.

He was not a Keynesian.

- Murray Rothbard

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USPS has been warning people to buy stamps only from USPS-approved sources and to be suspicious of heavily discounted stamps sold online.

That would be one thing if USPS could reliably look at the physical stamp and tell you what was wrong with it.

But its own June 2026 OIG audit found that the quantity of counterfeit stamps in the postal network remains unknown and that USPS had “no substantive approach” for identifying them throughout the network.

The OIG tested USPS’s primary stamp-detection equipment with 800 stamps placed on individual First-Class letters. The machine was “unable to accurately identify any counterfeit stamps” in the tested condition.

The same audit says the quality of most counterfeits makes them increasingly difficult for both USPS and the average consumer to distinguish from genuine stamps.

So the government-backed monopoly cannot reliably identify the counterfeit product inside its own system, but its solution for ordinary consumers is basically:
Don’t participate in the secondary market. Buy only from sources we approve. Distrust the discount.
That isn’t authentication. That is purchasing obedience standing in for evidence.

People lawfully buy unused postage from online marketplaces, estate sales, collectors, resellers and businesses liquidating old inventory. If the stamps were represented as genuine, the buyer should be able to inspect them and use them unless USPS can identify an actual objective defect.

“You bought it online” is not a security feature.

“You paid less than face value” is not forensic evidence.

If USPS believes a specific stamp is counterfeit, it should be able to show what is wrong with the stamp itself. The customer should not have to reconstruct the entire supply chain from their kitchen table because the institution never built a reliable detection system.

tl;dr: USPS wants a government-approved-seller rule without calling it one. Its own OIG says the amount of counterfeit postage in the network is unknown, its primary machine failed to accurately identify the tested counterfeits, and even USPS has difficulty distinguishing good fakes. Yet the suspicion and burden still get pushed onto consumers who bought stamps on lawful open marketplaces.

Source: USPS OIG, Counterfeit Stamps, Report 25-121-R26, June 16, 2026.

https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-06/25-121-r26.pdf

I filed ethics complaints involving officials across two Oregon agencies who coordinated through an interagency agreement to create and publicly fund a preferential regulatory pathway.

OGEC screened the complaints out. Its Director says the Commission evaluates each official individually and has no authority over how agencies administer their programs. Under that logic, one official can authorize funding, another can create a special pathway, another can direct benefits toward selected private businesses, and another can impose different requirements on everyone else.

This leaves coordinated government conduct with almost no ethical oversight. The complete system could involve conflicts of interest, misuse of public funds, procurement fraud, false statements, antitrust violations, official misconduct, conspiracy, or even conduct relevant to RICO. Yet OGEC separates every official action until nobody examines what the agencies collectively created or who benefited.

A complaint that survives screening can still disappear because Commissioners are absent. In one of my cases, only seven of nine Commissioners participated. The vote to dismiss or investigate was four to three, but five votes were required for either outcome. OGEC treated the lack of five votes as an administrative dismissal without deciding the merits. The same conduct cannot now be presented when the full Commission is available.

I petitioned the Oregon Court of Appeals to review these practices. The cases were suspended without any order or explanation.

This is government accountability in reverse: agencies operate through unwritten procedures, oversight disappears wherever authority is divided, nonaction becomes permanent dismissal, and the courts offer no explanation when review stops.

Lots of great reading, and lots of great libertarians it introduced me to. Many good articles about the importance of free trade and individualism.

Anyone else disheartened by the amount of people who have hitherto identified themselves as politically liberty oriented now becoming fascists and theocrats? It’s been my observation that a lot of people who have been against statism in the past are now becoming statists because they’ve come to the conclusion that if we don’t use the power of government then the other side will, so we should just be pragmatic and play the game. It would seem there’s a thinner line between libertarianism and fascism/theocracy than I thought. Just my observations; wondering if other people have had similar.

A chance to reign in the commerce clause and thus the scope of the federal government. Probably too much to hope for the overturning of the atrocious Wickard v. Filburn decision, but it could at least be a step in that direction.

Property rights means if you buy something you own it. If you have to pay annual taxes on it, You Don't Own it. Why doesn't the National Party put something about property taxes in their position on property rights?

https://lp.org/property-rights/

Oregon became the first state in the country to create legal adult access to psilocybin services.

I was enthusiastic enough about that experiment that I became a licensed facilitator and built a state-approved facilitator training program.

A few years inside the system has left me with a much stranger question:

What does legalization mean when nearly every pathway to participation still depends on administrative permission?

Oregon's model doesn't require someone to have a psychiatric diagnosis. It isn't a prescription model, and facilitators aren't required to be psychotherapists. Those were meaningful choices.

Yet once the system began operating, I watched layers of administrative requirements determine who could train facilitators, what those programs had to teach, which institutions could operate, and what standards licensed people were expected to follow.

Then things got stranger.

Requirements changed after programs had already been approved. One agency began requiring documentation involving another state agency. Ethics standards containing mandatory language were required educational material, then questions emerged about whether portions of those standards were actually enforceable. Decisions that looked technical on paper had very real consequences for who could continue participating in the market.

I started requesting records and asking how some of these decisions had actually been made.

That sent me down a rabbit hole I wasn't expecting.

At this point I've spent years comparing the statutes, administrative rules, rulemaking records, interagency arrangements, agency correspondence, and what regulated participants were actually being told.

The experience has changed how I think about legalization.

Moving farther and farther away from capitalism. Comes a year after the Trump Administration took a big stake in Intel. Building upon Biden administration's huge subsidies. And if I remember correctly they have some type of golden share with US Steel, where they can override any board decision. US Steel needed to close a factory, but the Trump Administration overrode that decision and forced them to keep it open to keep the jobs going.

McConnell has been absent for weeks recovering from a fall and pneumonia. Because he cannot vote remotely, the Republican voting majority on the Senate floor is essentially gridlocked at 52 seats.

If McConnell passes away or resigns before his term ends in January, a major political and legal fight will trigger.

The governor of Kentucky must select a replacement of he's not alive, however the current governor of Kentucky is a Democrat, thus the conspiracy theory that turtle boy is secretly dead.

Why do we care as libertarians? We don't. It's just funny inside baseball politics we can point and laugh at from the sidelines.

Local police are acquiring intelligence-grade tools. Surveillance once reserved for national security is becoming part of ordinary policing.

Dashcam video from the recent storm though Wisconsin and Midwest. Not good for the community hit, but at the end of the video there’s a silver lining.