Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 31. Sunrise is 7:05 and sunset is 4:22 for 9 hours 17 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1782, in Paris, representatives from the United States and Great Britain complete preliminary peace articles (later formalized as the 1783 Treaty of Paris).
This libertarian blogger is no one’s idea of a drug warrior1, but I’ll extend my deepest sympathies to the drug warriors of Walworth County and beyond — they must be reeling from lightheadedness and vertigo2 upon learning of Mr. Trump’s latest proposed pardon:
He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.
At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.
Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.
But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardon Mr. Hernández, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate….
Prosecutors said Mr. Hernández was key to a scheme that lasted more than 20 years and brought more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
See Santul Nerkar, Annie Correal, and Colin Moynihan, The Ex-President Whom Trump Plans to Pardon Flooded America With Cocaine (‘Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Mr. Trump called a victim of persecution, helped orchestrate a decades-long trafficking conspiracy. It ravaged his Central American country’), New York Times, November 29, 2025.
Five hundred tons is a large amount3, isn’t it now? Perhaps someone in Elkhorn has a table of weights and measures to sort all this out for us.
In the end, Trump will betray the misplaced trust of everyone who ever supported him. That’s not recompense for the harm he’s caused to this country; it’s simply a small portion of collateral damage.
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I don’t use any illegal drugs, don’t even smoke tobacco, and would never encourage anyone to use cocaine, but I do think that for others marijuana should be regulated like wine. ↩︎
Drug warriors: drink water, lie down until your dizziness passes, and move slowly. Perhaps some warm milk. You’ll get through this with a generous helping of rationalizations and excuse-making. ↩︎
NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Jonny Kim, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui share their message of gratitude in the annual Thanksgiving message from the International Space Station.
