Independent News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Sunday, August 2. I'm Keli, with Hast.

KELI We start with a 4-to-3 ruling out of Michigan's Supreme Court. The court cleared the state's attorney general to proceed with a probe into Eli Lilly's insulin pricing. The investigation began four years ago under AG Dana Nessel, who cited state consumer protection laws. The specific allegation: Lilly artificially inflated prices on three insulin products — Lispro, Humalog, and Basaglar — to the point that patients were rationing doses, restricting diets, or switching to less effective alternatives. A lower court had blocked the probe. The Supreme Court reversed that.

HAST The structural fact most coverage glossed over: this is a state-level action, not federal. The attorney general is using consumer protection statutes, not drug pricing law specifically. That's significant because it means the legal pathway here is about deceptive trade practices, not pharmaceutical regulation. If it succeeds, it's a template other state AGs could follow on drug pricing without waiting for Congress.

KELI Still on the cost of necessities, but shifting from pharmaceutical pricing to how the government measures prices broadly. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is pushing for a rethink of how inflation is measured. The U.S. currently uses multiple indexes — CPI, PCE, and others — and the argument for consolidating or clarifying them is that the current system creates confusion about when and why the Fed acts.

HAST The honest framing here is that inflation measurement isn't just technical, it's political in a procedural sense. Different indexes weight housing, food, and energy differently. Which one the Fed formally targets determines when interest rates move and who feels the consequences first. Warsh's push isn't neutral. It's a choice about whose experience of inflation counts as the official one.

KELI On the Ukraine sanctions bill in the Senate: Democratic objections to tariff authority language in the bill are stalling what supporters hoped would be a unanimous vote. The bill would impose new sanctions on Russia. The holdup is a provision that would expand President Trump's tariff powers. Democrats say they won't hand that authority to the executive alongside the sanctions package. Republicans say Democrats are blocking Ukraine support.

HAST Both characterizations are partially accurate, which is the point. This is a real procedural conflict. The tariff provision is not incidental — it's either a dealmaker Republicans need or a poison pill Democrats believe it is. Unanimous Senate votes on Ukraine have carried symbolic weight internationally. Losing that unanimity has meaning beyond the chamber.

KELI To Washington and a domestic political story that is generating more heat than resolution. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana appeared on Meet the Press Sunday and was asked about the controversy surrounding Trump's renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the subsequent decision by U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro to drop criminal charges against a man accused of vandalizing it. Kennedy called it, quote, a multiple vehicle pile-up.

HAST What's notable is what Kennedy did not do — he did not defend the DOJ's reversal. The host's question was specifically about public faith in the Justice Department. Kennedy described the situation as a mess without attributing blame clearly in any direction. That kind of answer from a Republican senator about a DOJ action under a Republican president is itself a data point, even if it stops well short of criticism.

KELI RFK Jr. appeared on CNN's State of the Union Sunday for a 22-minute interview with anchor Dana Bash. The subjects included autism, measles, and pandemic planning. Kennedy accused Bash of, quote, saying nonsense when she pushed back. CNN published a fact-check article immediately after the interview concluded, saying Kennedy pushed medical misinformation and attributed pandemic lockdown decisions to Dr. Anthony Fauci while repeating what the network called debunked claims about vaccines, RSV, and measles.

HAST Two things can be noted here without taking a side on the substance. First, a news organization publishing a fact-check on its own interview segment in real time is an editorial choice with its own implications — it signals the network considers the interview adversarial in a specific direction. Second, Kennedy holds a cabinet position. He is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. What he says about vaccines and public health carries institutional weight regardless of whether a network fact-checks him afterward.

KELI Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, a Republican, broke sharply from his earlier public silence Sunday and posted on social media calling for his son-in-law, Congressman Max Miller, to resign from Congress. Moreno's daughter Emily has accused Miller of abuse against her and their two-year-old daughter. Moreno wrote that the past two years had been, in his words, pure hell, and said Miller needs, quote, serious psychological help.

HAST Moreno had previously said only that he did not know if Miller was fit for reelection. The escalation to a public resignation call is significant. This is a sitting U.S. senator calling on a sitting member of the House to quit — and the senator is the congressman's father-in-law. The political and personal dimensions here are not separable, but the institutional one is: a Republican senator has now publicly removed his support from a Republican congressman in the same state.

KELI A 10-foot golden trophy mocking President Trump for the Iran war has appeared in New York City. The installation is unsigned. It references the conflict using the framing of a sports participation award.

HAST No additional context is needed there. It happened.

KELI Two crew members were killed and two others survived after a midair collision between firefighting helicopters in Greece. One of the dead was a Danish national, the other Greek. A British pilot and a second Greek crew member survived. The aircraft were operating on wildfire suppression missions.

KELI In India, at least two people have been killed and eight injured after torrential rain triggered flooding and a landslide in Kerala.

HAST Kerala is a state with a documented and recurring pattern of monsoon-season flood disasters. That context matters when coverage treats each event as isolated. The compounding nature of these events — infrastructure strain, displacement, loss of life over successive years — is the story the headline count tends to miss.

KELI In Berlin, a Pride event was attacked last week. Right-wing parties in Germany and commentators in the United States moved quickly to use the attack in political messaging. The Intercept reported on that response while noting that the same political actors have supported or enacted policies that restrict LGBTQ rights.

HAST The framing tension here is real and worth naming plainly. Condemning a violent attack and holding a political position that restricts rights are not mutually exclusive in legal terms, but press coverage that treats the political response to the attack as straightforward advocacy misses the contradiction. That contradiction is the story.

KELI We close on something that happened Saturday night in professional sports. The Women's Professional Baseball League played a game between the New York Heights and the Los Angeles Queens. Heights player Denae Benites hit what appears to be the league's first recorded home run. Japan national team pitcher Ayami Sato was on the mound.

HAST The league is new. The game was played in the rain. That's the whole fact pattern, and it's enough.

KELI That's the drop for Sunday, August 2. From Inkwell, I'm Keli.

HAST And I'm Hast. We'll be back tomorrow.

KELI Before we close, a word from Inkwell. There's an essay at Gil's Intelligent Version on what actually happened in 1914 — and how a real historical instinct curdled into false certainty the moment someone tried to measure it to the inch.

HAST It's called The Witness and the Ruler. At inkwell dot wiki, slash giv.