Source: Grist
by Jake Bittle

“On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump declared that the United States was experiencing a ‘national energy emergency.’ The ‘harmful and shortsighted policies of the previous administration,’ he wrote in an executive order, had left the nation’s energy resources ‘far too inadequate,’ a situation that ’causes and makes worse the high energy prices that devastate Americans.’ … Almost two years later, as Trump stares down a midterm election, his claim of an emergency has an ironic ring. The United States is experiencing a kind of energy emergency characterized by high fuel prices, but it is not the one he described when he took office. Not only that, but the executive powers he unlocked with his emergency order have proven useless for mitigating the current crisis and for lowering the high prices he decried upon taking office.” (10/20/26)

https://grist.org/energy/trump-energy-emergency-declaration-prices-oil-coal-gasoline-diesel/

Source: The Daily Economy
by Thomas L Hogan

“The stock market crash may have started the trouble, but Federal Reserve failures and New Deal interventions transformed a downturn into the Great Depression.” (10/20/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/what-turned-a-stock-market-crash-into-the-great-depression/

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Adam Schwartz

“Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are mass surveillance. They photograph every passing car and log where and when it was captured, building a searchable record of where nearly everyone drives. Cities should not buy them, and cities that already have them should shut them down. Where these systems still operate, courts and state legislatures must reduce their harms by (among other things) requiring police to get a warrant before searching stored ALPR data. A warrant requirement would not make mass surveillance acceptable, but it would require police to justify a search to a judge before accessing records of people’s movements.” (10/19/26)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/require-police-get-warrant-search-alpr-data

Source: New York Post
by staff

“With Saturday’s mid-day murder in the tourist-packed 7th Avenue subway station at 53rd Street, the city has now seen seven transit killings since January — almost double the number over the same period last year — and the politicians plainly won’t do what’s needed to seriously reverse the trend. That grim milestone indicts Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his movement’s anti-public-safety policies — as he all but acknowledged Monday with a long, ugly silence before claiming to be ‘heartbroken’ over the death of Darrel Rodriguez and vague noises about addressing gun violence. Progressives have been on a ‘criminal justice reform’ roll for over a decade now — starting with the disastrous ‘success’ of getting city district attorneys to quit prosecuting fare-beating, even though such perps are regularly wanted for more serious offenses.” (10/20/26)

https://nypost.com/2026/10/20/opinion/why-mamdani-wont-act-to-reverse-soaring-subway-violence/