Paying more for Private Prisons than for Private Homes.

Don’t speak ill of the asshole.

Molly Burford, author of Moments to Hold Close, writes list poetry (is that a thing?) about the kinds of people that you want in your life. From Types Of People You Need To Hang On To:

The friend who helps you clean your room. Those who are kind to those who can do nothing for them. Messy folks who repeatedly get it wrong but never stop trying to get it right anyway. Kindred spirits. Loud laughers. Pals who make the grocery store fun. Loved ones who get as excited about your success as you do. The person you feel comfortable crying in front of. Sing-in-the-car friends. People who text you to look at the moon.

I am 100% the friend who will text you to look at the moon or the meteor shower or the aurora.

From Types Of People I Admire The Most:

Someone who isn’t afraid to just be human. The friend who commits to the bit, even if it is well past its expiration date. People who accept that their ducks will always be in a bit of a zig-zag formation. Relentlessly creative folks. Daydreamers. Awkward silence embracers.

From Types Of People Who Will Change Your Life:

Teachers who believed there was potential within you, even when you were convinced you would always be a lost cause. The internet friend who showed you that your art does matter, and it’s needed. The mentor who became the older sister you never had. The ex-partner who showed you there are some types of people you’re only meant to love from afar. The neighbors who became family. The family members who became friends.

More, more, more, more.

Tags: Molly Burford · poetry

It’s all about abortion.

It’s always been all about abortion.

The constitutional amendment calling for popular elections of Kansas Supreme Court justices has one central motivation: Allowing Republican officials to limit or ban abortion. And I will go out on a limb and predict that if the measure passes, elected justices will eventually sustain such limits or bans.

Yes, Kansans voted on abortion rights back in 2022. Yes, the subject has come up again, this time clothed in ever-more confusing language.

Kansas Reflector video

Both anti-abortion residents and abortion-right supporters should take a few minutes to understand how we got here, a mere four years after “Value Them Both” went down in flames. We all deserve straightforward truth about the amendment, not political spin. While I might not be the biggest fan of Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, at least he didn’t run for the office claiming to be Ben Affleck.

And this amendment, while claiming to revere democracy, could well lead to a total abortion ban in a state that just rejected such restrictions.

Abortion rights have been contested in Kansas for decades, but the origins of this particular push to remake the Supreme Court originate with its 2019 decision in Hodes and Nauser. The justices ruled that “Section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights affords protection of the right of personal autonomy. … This right allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life — decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy.”

The Value Them Both amendment push of 2022 sought to overturn that finding and allow legislators to pass abortion limits. Advocates claimed the measure didn’t mean a ban on the procedure, but Kansas Reflector editor Sherman Smith revealed that officials told supporters that was exactly their intention.

The amendment failed by a nearly 20-point margin on Aug. 2, 2022, less than two months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and unleashed a wave of draconian restrictions across the country.

Less than two months later, then-attorney general candidate Kobach said what anti-abortion advocates had whispered. It was time to change tactics. If voters wouldn’t agree to ban abortion, it was time to enable the selection of state Supreme Court justices who would. That is, they needed to change the rules to win.

The Wichita Eagle’s Chance Swaim and Katie Bernard covered Kobach’s speech to the Wichita Pachyderm Club, where he proclaimed: “This issue is not over. The fight for life is going to continue.”

The Hodes decision created a huge problem for the movement, Kobach said: “There are two paths. One is to come in with a state constitutional amendment that corrects the decision. That’s what we just tried to do, and it didn’t work out. But there’s another path.”

He said the Legislature should pass another constitutional amendment, one exactly like the amendment appearing on ballots next month. That, he said, would allow advocates to “slowly and quietly” place anti-abortion justices on the court through popular elections.

In 2025, the Republican supermajorities in the Kansas House and Senate followed Kobach’s advice.

They followed their exact tactics from the last go-round, putting the judicial selection amendment on the low-turnout Aug. 4 primary ballot. Their hope, I believe, was and is to keep our state’s hefty number of unaffiliated voters from showing up. For reference, Kansas has more unaffiliated voters than registered Democrats.

Also in 2025, another high-ranking Republican made clear what he hoped to accomplish with the amendment. That would be Senate President Ty Masterson, who told the Marion County Patriots for Liberty in November that reversing the Hodes decision required electing judges.

“The solution in Kansas is that Supreme Court election,” he said. “But you can’t go out there and say it because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.”

In other words, the Senate president and gubernatorial candidate said, you can’t tell the truth.

Neither Kobach nor Masterson have sought to deny or walk back their widely circulated statements, so I think we can take them as accurate representations of what top Kansas Republicans believe.

I’m not some wild-eyed alarmist out here (not to discourage the valuable work of other wild-eyed alarmists). The Kansas City Star’s Kacen Bayless reported last week about both the Kansas amendment and one in Missouri: “The two constitutional amendments could pave the way for Republicans to clamp down on abortion access for years to come. The votes illustrate a new playbook for abortion opponents after voters in both states recently protected the right to the procedure.”

The New York Times on Saturday reported similarly, under the headline: “Kansans Will Vote on an Elected Supreme Court. The Target: Abortion.”

If the amendment passes, any changes would all take time. The Legislature would have to create a framework for statewide judicial elections (the amendment itself offers few hard guidelines). The high court’s composition would shift gradually, as appointed justices departed and elected ones join.

Eventually, lawmakers could pass abortion restrictions with confidence that the court would find them constitutional. A ban would follow, soon as night follows day.

There’s more to it, of course. The amendment would affect many other issues and have broad implications for Kansas politics. As I wrote in May, it would fundamentally alter the state Supreme Court from a staid, merit-based body to one molded by out-of-control campaign spending and partisan rhetoric. School funding and LGBTQ+ rights could be shredded by a hostile new court.

But I keep coming back to abortion. Kansans wouldn’t be voting on the amendment next month otherwise.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

ICE has already been operating like a paramilitary kidnapping squad. Officers roam through neighborhoods, stake out hardware store parking lots, and even occasionally enjoy some ethnic food just so they can raid the source of hospitality later.

It’s nasty, disturbing, and definitely doesn’t resemble any of the things that have made America great. Now, the rot has spread. It’s not enough for ICE to engage in daylight snatchings on the regular. Now, its internal oversight office has abandoned any pretense of keeping ICE in line. In fact, it has completely gone in the opposite direction, turning this wing of ICE into another set of secret police, as this report from Wired makes clear:

Voting was already underway when the ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse, New York, during the state’s primaries in June. The agents were there to see Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker who says they were concerned about an Instagram post she had supposedly made in January “doxing” an ICE agent. The only post she could find was one she had made crediting the Minnesota Star Tribune for identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter, and calling for his indictment.

The agents at the poll site asked Gonyea to sign a warning notice that said it was unlawful to “threaten to assault, kidnap and/or murder” federal officials or their immediate family members in an effort to impede that federal official’s work. The form also requested that she remove her post “and/or discontinue” her behavior.

“My signature would have been an admission of guilt,” Gonyea says. “I refused to sign it.”

That’s just one person who’s been subjected to the OPR’s decision to stop investigating allegations against ICE officers to focus on allegations of external “threats” to ICE officers. There are more. Many more.

OPR was behind at least one of the flurry of administrative subpoenas sent to tech companies in recent months in an effort to unmask online critics.

[…]

In a court declaration filed in April, an ICE official said that between January 2025 and March 2026, OPR investigated 131 cases involving “incidents of doxing and threats directed towards ICE employees nationwide.”

That’s fucked up. This is definitely not what the Office of Professional Responsibility is supposed to be doing. According to the ICE OPR itself, its purview is limited to investigating ICE.

The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) upholds the agency’s professional standards through a multi-disciplinary approach of security, inspections and investigations to promote organizational health, integrity, and accountability across the agency. OPR promotes organizational integrity by vigilantly managing ICE’s security programs, conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations, and impartially investigating allegations of employee and contractor misconduct.

To promote integrity, mitigate risk and uphold the agency’s professional standards, the OPR-led Integrity Coordination Center receives and assesses information it receives and refers any allegations of employee misconduct to appropriate offices for investigation, if necessary. This process ensures that allegations of criminal or administrative misconduct against ICE personnel are properly assessed and thoroughly investigated. OPR’s role permits the agency to focus on its larger mission of promoting homeland security and public safety.

Nothing in this says the OPR is investigating ICE critics. Nothing in this even minimally suggests the OPR’s directives can be expanded to cover external investigations of US citizens over social media posts, etc.

You have to scroll down the page a bit and expand a few things before you find ICE OPR’s justifications for being America’s ICE-focused Gestapo:

OPR protects the agency by detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating internal and external threats against the agency, ICE senior leaders and ICE headquarters facilities by managing the ICE Insider Threat Program and counterintelligence functions involving ICE personnel. 

This is new language, specific to Trump’s version of ICE. It wasn’t there last year. There’s nothing in this December 2018 OIG report on ICE OPR operations that says anything at all about “detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating external threats.” There’s nothing in this 2008 OPR directive that says anything more than that the OPR is tasked with investigating allegations against ICE officers or personnel handling its detention facilities.

So, it’s reasonable to believe this language was added shortly after (March 2026) the OPR was rerouted to hunt down ICE critics, rather than focus on what must be thousands of complaints about ICE officers and/or detention facilities.

And despite these efforts apparently being well underway by April 2026, acting ICE director Todd Lyons made sure he didn’t bring up that part of OPR’s operations up when publicly testifying before Congress.

In written testimony for an April hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, which helps set the budget for DHS, Lyons touted OPR’s work inspecting detention facilities, vetting job applicants, and overseeing the agency’s 287(g) program, but didn’t mention the office’s work investigating online posters. ICE did not respond to questions about why Lyons didn’t discuss that work.

First off, the OPR should not be doing this, full stop. There are plenty of federal law enforcement resources available to be utilized in the rare case where an actual threat exists. Second, the OPR has never done this prior to being run by this administration. Third, this rerouting of OPR’s resources makes it clear the administration is more interested in punishing critics (First Amendment be damned) than engaging in any minimal oversight of ICE’s activities.

And this is bad news for the nation, obviously. If this OPR can be turned into literal speech police, the same can be expected from any other law enforcement agency with an in-house OPR. That’s tyranny. That’s fascism. That’s an entire administration treating Trump like a king and 325 million Americans subjects. It’s not only unacceptable, it’s antithetical to everything America once stood for. And all of this news arrives shortly Trump presided over the Republic’s wake on July 4th. We had a good run, but it’s probably time to stop pretending we don’t have a second King George that needs to be shown the door.