☕️ BASKET WEAVERS ☙ Monday, July 20, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A new rule asks colleges to prove a degree beats no degree; the Sinaloa cartel's last founder faces sentencing as Trump completes the decapitation; and Newsom's "competitive" diaper deal wasn't.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The week’s first carafe of essential news includes: new federal "do no harm" rule that finally asks colleges to prove a degree beats no degree at all — while the arts establishment clutches its pearls at the vulgar idea of measuring success in money; the last founder of the Sinaloa cartel facing a life sentence and a historic $15 billion forfeiture today, the final piece of Trump's quiet decapitation of the entire cartel leadership; and Gavin Newsom's "first-in-the-nation" free-diaper program, which turns out to be a $6.2 million no-bid handout to a charity cozy with the First Partner's nonprofit — one the state's own database stamped, in all caps, NON-COMPETITIVELY BID.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Earlier this month, NPR quietly reported some more very encouraging education news, headlined, “Under a new federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid.” I’d bet you never heard of this terrific and common-sense development, even though last year, this kind of thing would have provoked a rage hurricane of progressive wrath. Now, the most we get are liberal sunshowers of ennui.

According to PBS, what’s left of the Department of Education is rolling out a new accountability test for colleges called, simply, the “do no harm” test. The concept is so straightforward it probably gave several university administrators a spontaneous eye-twitch: If graduates from an undergraduate program don’t earn more money than people who never went to college at all, that program gets cut off from federal student loans.

You, a sane person, are probably wondering right now why this wasn’t already the rule. (Don’t be dense. You know why.) The Trump Administration is finally forcing educational bureaucrats to admit that maybe, just maybe, borrowing $150,000 to get a degree in 14th-Century Early Transgenderism doesn’t make financial sense if your post-graduation career plan involves asking people if they want you to leave room for cream.

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said, “If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers.”

Notice that phrase: federal taxpayers. Not “free college.” Because there is no such thing as “free college.” There is only “college paid for by other people who didn’t get to go to college, because they were busy working to pay for your college.” Every time a politician promises “free college,” what they actually mean is, “We are going to take money from the guy who fixes your plumbing and give it to the university so they can build a new diversity center with its own rock-climbing wall.”

Naturally, the administrators paid to run the programs that produce unemployable graduates are furious. (Sadly, it’s not bigger news, because progressives writ large have too many problems right now, and will have to call their educational brethren back.) In what can only be described as a ‘This is Fine Dog’ defense, the angry administrators argued that earnings aren’t everything.

NPR interviewed quadruple-namer Lee Ann Scotto Adams, the executive director of the NGO Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which apparently is a real organization and not a secret evil society from a James Bond movie. (Honestly, we aren’t sure yet.) She said, and I quote, “Earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle.”

A very small piece, apparently. Basically microscopic.

Remember: The new DOE rule isn’t about education grants. They’re not charitable gifts funding fun, artsy, explorative degrees that even Lee Ann Scotto Adams admitted lack practical value. No, this is about loans for a degree. A loan repaid over 30 years at about triple the original face value. A loan from private investors, guaranteed by taxpayers— who, with the investors, presumably agreed to this arrangement expecting the degrees to generate enough income to pay off the loans.

Lee Ann Scotto Adams continued, still misunderstanding the problem. She expanded on her thesis that taxpayers should fund economically non-viable degrees anyway, arguing, “Yes, you need to earn money to make a living, but we see our creative workers want the ability to have independence in their work. They want jobs that are socially conscious. They want to make an impact culturally. These are all metrics that fall outside of just straightforward earnings metrics.”

Translation: We know our graduates are broke, but they feel really good about themselves while they are broke. Or in plainer English: young skulls full of mush who don’t know anything are easily tricked into taking out vast loans for an education that sounds good in the course catalog and is rumored on campus to feature an easy-A, which accommodates a weeknight partying schedule.

But understanding any of that reality would end the grift.

🔥 NPR also platformed Cindy Flores, a mariachi teacher who (still) owes $55,000 in federal student loan debt. Ms. Flores explained her life choices (ungrammatically). “It is never about the money. I realized I wanted to have a career in music when I was in the eighth grade, because every music teacher I had were such good role models in my life and I wanted to be part of that community.”

(A few more English grammar classes might also have been helpful and arguably more valuable.)

I bet you didn’t even know you could get a degree in mariachi, much less that there were people dumb enough to pay $55,000 for that ‘degree.’ Portland readers: this famous ethnic musical style features a dense repertoire of about four songs with memorable names like “La Cucaracha,” and a lively but repetitive beat— which usually accompanies one or more flour tortillas stuffed with rice and either chicken or beef. It’s not the chords of the gods or anything. It’s not Beethoven.

Ms. Flores’s poignant desire to emulate her anonymous childhood music teachers is a lovely sentiment. It really, truly is. But here is the thing: if it’s “never about the money,” then … why should the taxpayers be on the hook, or even involved at all? If you want to study mariachi music, somatic body work (which NPR noted has one of the highest predicted failure rates), or interpretive bi-curious dance theory, you should absolutely do that. But pay for it yourself.

The Department of Education estimated that about 18% of undergraduate certificate programs would fail the earnings test, with cosmetology and the previously mentioned somatic body work (which doesn’t even produce a massage license) leading the pack. Among more traditional four-year degrees, degrees with failing marks include theater, music, and studio art. Even prestigious schools like The Juilliard School and the New England Conservatory have programs predicted to fail.

The media frame here is predictable: Trump is destroying the arts. But the reframing stat is right there in the open. The test follows basic conservative principles. And the threshold for passing this test is incredibly low. In many states, graduates would only need to earn between $30,000 and $41,000 a year to pass.

Let that sink in. If a college program cannot produce graduates who make at least $31,000 a year —about $15 an hour— it loses federal funding. Even Christopher Madaio, director of TICAS, a left-leaning consumer group, admitted, “This is really a very low floor; high school earnings is not an exceedingly high metric.”

Still, the reaction gap is staggering. Instead of asking, “Why are we charging students tens of thousands of dollars for degrees that don’t even qualify them for a position at Buc-ee’s brisket counter?”, the overpaid academic establishment is asking, “How dare you measure our success with money?”

Simple. Because it’s not your money. It’s ours.

The “do no harm” rule is a massive paradigm shift. It exposes the higher-education grift for what it is: a system designed to transfer wealth from the working class to the academic class, while leaving the goofy students themselves saddled with debt they can never repay.

Democrats want taxpayers to forgive student loans. The DOE just showed everyone why the programs shouldn’t even exist in the first place.

More like this, please. Faster.

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In the ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ news bucket, yesterday the Financial Times reported, “Sinaloa cartel founder set for $15bn forfeiture order and life sentence.” Ho, hum.

The Sinaloa cartel is a sprawling, decentralized drug and human trafficking consortium based in northwest Mexico. It has dominated the U.S.–Mexico drug trade for decades and is one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the Western hemisphere. It moves huge volumes of cocaine, meth, heroin and fentanyl, and orchestrates large‑scale bribery of local politicians, law enforcement, and Mexican military officials.

Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18–44 and accounts for about two‑thirds of all U.S. overdose deaths. Just saying.

FT explained the cartel is known for its “gruesome assassinations and kidnappings” and its “novel distribution techniques” like running trains through tunnels under the US border. It is famous as one of the core engines of the overdose crisis, a major driver of cross‑border violence and corruption, and a long-standing national‑security problem.

Which brings us to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, 76, who co-founded the Sinaloa Cartel in the late 1980s with his partner in crime, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Zambada was the brains, and Guzmán was the muscle. FT called Zambada an “almost mythical figure in Mexico,” largely for his ability to evade consequences and operate with impunity. Till now. “This guy, El Mayo, was living like a king. Now he’s living like a criminal for the rest of his life,” Pam Bondi said last August.

“It would be difficult to overstate,” federal prosecutors wrote in court filings, “the magnitude of the defendant’s crimes and the scale of the corruption, violence, and other harm Zambada spread throughout Mexico, the United States, and the world.”

Though you’d have to read FT’s awfully written story three times to figure this out, four related cartel leaders are now in US custody. Zambada is the final one. Last August, he pleaded guilty, and this week he was sentenced to a fine of a historic $15 billion and got life in prison.

During Trump 1.0 in 2019, Zambada’s partner and co-founder, Guzmán, was sentenced to life plus 30, plus a forfeiture fine of $12.6 billion. He is now buried deep in Florence SuperMax prison. He was the first.

Making the story even more bizarre and impossible to script, in the summer of 2024, Guzman’s son Joaquin (let’s call him “Guzman Jr.”) surrendered to US authorities— after kidnapping and drugging his father’s old partner and the cartel’s co-founder, Zambada. Guzman Jr. flew Zambada across the border in a private Beechcraft, giving himself up and handing the groggy, “uncatchable” cartel leader to waiting US authorities like a late Christmas present.

It should have been bigger news. The FBI even donated the plane, a Beechcraft King Air, to a museum.

Guzmán Jr. has pleaded guilty to racketeering and kidnapping (irony alert) and is still cooperating. As of now, he has not yet been sentenced; he remains in U.S. custody awaiting that hearing. No sentencing date has been set. Various outlets speculate he will “avoid a life sentence” for cooperating. He’s been very helpful.

But wait. There’s one more. Another Guzman son, Ovidio, was turned over by Mexico to the US and pleaded guilty last summer, too.

Only two Chapitos (Guzman’s only other living sons) remain at large. “Two down, two to go,” said US Attorney Adam Gordon.

Given more time, I would describe just how awful the FT’s article was. It reads like a local crime write-up. You would never know that the US under President Trump decapitated the Sinaloa cartel. You can’t tell that the four highest Sinaloa leaders are now behind bars. The effect of this roundup, and that three of the four are apparently cooperating, is profound. Their cooperation is key, because the cartel is heavily decentralized; it’s like a liver fluke— the parts keep moving after being cut apart.

But never mind about the awful reporting. This quadruple capture is a historic accomplishment in its own right, a mortal blow to the cartel as a cohesive group, and completely on brand with Trump’s modified Monroe Doctrine. More importantly, the two forfeiture orders —$12.6 billion plus $15 billion— hand the DOJ vast additional threats against the remaining elements of the cartel. The judgments allow the DOJ to pursue assets traceable to Zambada or Guzman, and the assets’ proceeds— cash, real estate, shell companies, planes, accounts, gold chains, and a lifetime supply of open-necked shirts.

Most importantly: The myth has been deconstructed. The “legendary fugitive” narrative —the undisturbed story for fifty years before Trump, the legend that cartel patriarchs were untouchable— has now ended, not in a blaze of narco glory, but with three generations of the same organization scattered through the Bureau of Prisons, bargaining over prison conditions.

CDC’s provisional data show 69,973 overdose deaths in 2025, down from over 110,000 at the 2023 peak. We don’t have this year’s figures yet, but we expect even lower numbers. So.

More progress. Let’s tack Sinaloa leadership decapitation onto the running TAW list.

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The political noose is tightening around California’s oleaginous Governor Hairdo and his Empire of Fraud. On Saturday, CBS reported, “Newsom’s ‘competitive bid’ diaper deal wasn’t. California’s budget includes dozens of similar no-bid exemptions.” It is just the latest example of progressive wordplay, NGO grifting, and poopy diapers gone horribly wrong.

In what can only be described as an elite level of confident wrongness, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been caught red-handed in a scandal that is being affectionately dubbed in local media as “Diapergate.” I am not making that up.

It all started back in May, when Governor Hair Gel triumphantly announced a “first-in-the-nation” program to provide ‘free’ (note: not free; taxpayer-funded) California co-branded diapers to every new parent. During his grand announcement, Newsom proudly proclaimed that the partnership with the totally unrelated and unconflicted Los Angeles-based charity Baby2Baby —connected to his wife, Jennifer— “went through a competitive bidding process.”

He spoke those words out loud, into a microphone, where people could hear him.

But, as it happens, the Governor uses a slightly more flexible definition of “competitive” than the rest of the English-speaking world. According to the state’s own official contract database, the $6.2 million deal with Baby2Baby was classified as — wait for it — “NON-COMPETITIVELY BID.” (All-caps in original.)

That’s right. The state literally stamped “NON-COMPETITIVELY BID” right next to the $6.2 million price tag for a no-bid contract Newsom claimed “went through a competitive bidding process.”

When pressed by CBS to explain how a “non-competitively bid” contract could possibly be described as “competitive,” the governor’s spokeslady offered an explanation that would make George Orwell weep. Progressive wordplay! It IS a vaccine. The spokesperson claimed the term competitive “referred to the competitive nature” of the state’s no-bid Request for Information (RFI).

Ah, yes. The nature of the process was competitive. It wasn’t an actual competition, you understand. It was more of a spiritual competition. A rhetorical competition of the mind.

🔥 But wait. Before you get too excited and start calling for arrests, it’s not just that Newsom lied about the bidding process. Lying to the public, unfortunately, remains legal. It’s about how they got away with it, using Calvinball. Changing the rules in the middle of the game.

State law normally requires competitive bids, with only a few legal exemptions for things like actual emergencies. True, diapers are important. And the call of nature might be urgent, but diapers aren’t exactly urgent. For example, there is no sign of a terrifying diaper shortage. But, despite the lack of any emergency, this particularly absorbent contract still didn’t go through the normal exemption process.

Instead, the bidding exemption was quietly soaked up by the 893-page state budget.

According to CBS, the massive state budget contained a single provision exempting the diaper contracts from competitive bidding laws, from public advertising requirements, and even from “the review or approval of any division of the Department of General Services”— the state’s contract watchdog agency. Because, of course it did.

No bid required. No watchdog review. No entry in the public no-bid database. Just a cool $6.2 million handed over to a charity with deep ties to the Newsom family.

And those ties are where this story goes from merely corrupt to Alice, we’re all the way down the grifting rabbit hole.

You see, Baby2Baby isn’t just any charity. Its co-CEO, Norah Weinstein, sits on the board of the California Partners Project. And who founded the California Partners Project?

None other than California’s “First Partner,” Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

What a remarkable coincidence!

It gets better. This isn’t the first time the Newsom family’s non-profit network has found itself under the microscope. Trump-era federal investigators have reportedly spent the past year examining finances tied to Newsom and his wife, including millions of dollars in “behested payments” routed to her non-profits.

Behested payments are a neat little trick where elected officials ‘ask’ donors to give money to a specific charity. It’s completely legal under current California law, but as Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton noted, it’s “literally corruption in plain sight.” One Native American tribe, for example, made two separate $500,000 donations to Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s California Partners Project — after being asked to contribute by the Governor himself, and right before getting a competitor’s casino deal blocked. Indian giving.

So, to summarize: The Governor announces a massive, state-funded diaper program. He claims it was ‘competitively’ bid. State records show it wasn’t. The contract is quietly exempted from all oversight via a hidden line in the 893-page state budget. The money goes to a charity whose CEO sits on the board of the Governor’s wife’s non-profit. And that non-profit is currently the subject of a federal corruption investigation.

Oh— and CBS also found that this is at least Baby2Baby’s third no-bid state contract, dating back to 2022. The scheme was only discovered because Newsom bragged about it at a press conference. Had he kept his mouth shut, the “NON-COMPETITIVELY BID” stamp would still be buried in a state database that, in the CBS reporter’s words, “most Californians have never heard of.”

The state’s own department chief deputy director explained what the budget exemption actually does: it “allows you to essentially engage in negotiated contracting outside of state rules,” not because of urgent diaper emergencies, but because the formal bid process “can be cumbersome and time consuming.”

Cumbersome and time-consuming. That’s the technical term for “inconvenient when you’ve already decided who’s getting the money.”

CBS also found more than two dozen other similar exemptions buried in the 2026 state budget, totaling over an eye-watering $1 billion in similar sneaky appropriations — every one of them exempt from competitive bidding and public oversight. A few of the new exemptions that compliant state Democrats passed in last year’s budget will expire in 2031. Two-thirds of those exemptions will never expire.

That’s not a bug. It’s a feature. It’s the circle of life, California style. It’s all for the children. And all arguably legal, thanks to California’s one-party system.

Gov. Newsom is feeling the heat. As you might recall, he recently pushed out an over-hasty denial video, criticizing President Trump for “going after my wife.” In his video, he forgot to include three elements typical of such productions: any denial of wrongdoing, any promise to “cooperate fully with authorities,” or any confident prediction that he’ll “be vindicated in the courts.”

Potato, potAHto. Competitive, non-competitive. This is how the progressive game is played. Tick, tock, governor. The French Laundry is calling.

Have a magnificent Monday! Then return here, mug at the ready, for tomorrow’s carafe of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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