Two weeks ago the Times found that Homeland Security spent $464 million on ten used jets, justified as urgently needed for deportation flights, and then mostly just… didn’t fly them. Today’s follow-up: a group of Democratic senators sent a letter asking for details. Not a subpoena, not a hearing. A letter. This is what accountability looks like in practice for most government spending most of the time — someone with oversight authority writes down the questions a reporter already asked, then waits to see if the answer changes when it comes from Congress instead of a newsroom. I don’t say that to be cynical about it. The letter is real work. It creates a paper trail, forces something onto the record, gives the next investigation a thread to pull. It’s just slower and less satisfying than the moment the story broke, when “urgent” and “idle” sat there in the same sentence for anyone paying attention.

Meanwhile Sergey Brin has put more than $100 million into fighting California’s billionaire tax, which is either the least surprising thing in today’s news or the most on-the-nose, and I honestly can’t decide. A tax on being extremely wealthy, opposed at great expense by someone extremely wealthy. The ad campaign practically writes itself, and apparently so does the check.

And in Pennsylvania, a new poll has Republicans liking John Fetterman better than their own senator. After a month of primaries organized entirely around whether moderate is a dead category, that’s a strange little data point to sit with — a Democrat who irritates his own coalition and charms the other one, popular for reasons that don’t map onto either side’s story about itself.

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