“Political organizer Denise Powell has won the Democratic nomination in Nebraska’s 2nd District, NBC News projects, emerging from a tough primary fight in one of her party’s top opportunities to flip a swing seat this year. Powell narrowly defeated state Sen. John Cavanaugh in a race that featured five other Democratic candidates on the ballot. Powell had 39% to Cavanaugh’s 37% in the primary with about 90% of the expected vote tallied. She will advance to a general election matchup against Omaha City Council member Brinker Harding, who ran unopposed for the Republican nomination. … Nebraska’s 2nd District has been a top target for Democrats for several election cycles, but GOP Rep. Don Bacon’s decision to retire at the end of his term has renewed enthusiasm among Democrats hoping to win his seat.” (05/13/26)
“We sit down with Nick Cleveland-Stout of the Quincy Institute (and a writer at Drop Site News) to track a sweeping Israeli influence campaign in the United States that goes far beyond the usual Capitol Hill lobbying.” (05/13/26)
“A ship anchored off the east coast of the United Arab Emirates has been seized and is heading toward Iranian territorial waters, the British military said Thursday. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said it received reports that the vessel was taken by unauthorized personnel while anchored 38 nautical miles (70 kilometers, 44 miles) northeast of the UAE port of Fujairah, near the Strait of Hormuz. … UKMTO did not name the ship and said it is investigating. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the seizure.” (05/14/26)
“Whenever a new technology comes down the pike, some people identify themselves as agents who can benefit from it, and others see themselves as victims who will be harmed by it. Agents get excited about how AI will enable them to get work done more easily and quickly. They can generate code, whip out targeted ad campaigns, analyze data, cheat on quizzes, respond to customer inquiries, or eliminate military targets. Victims fear that AI will empower the systems that already constrain or oppress them. They will suffer from software bugs or security vulnerabilities, be inundated with AI slop, get surveilled by governments and corporations, have their relationships infected by mistrust, get lost in labyrinthine bureaucracies, or be eliminated (perhaps erroneously) by an autonomous drone. This distinction helps make sense of the wildly varying responses to AI technologies: Agents generate utopian hype narratives while victims succumb to doomer fears.” (05/13/26)
“At the state and local level, police officers (and government employees in general) are protected from lawsuits by a policy called qualified immunity. The policy isn’t in the Constitution, nor was it ever enacted by Congress. It’s a legal fiction that the U.S. Supreme Court invented from whole cloth. In fact, qualified immunity’s very existence cuts against the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. … We commonly hear that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ — you can’t defend yourself from criminal charges by claiming that you didn’t know that what you did was illegal. Qualified immunity not only provides an excuse for law enforcement officers when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, it’s an incentive for police agencies to keep their officers ignorant of how courts expect officers to treat members of the public.” (04/13/26)
“People find many reasons to reject liberty. Fear. Envy. Ignorance. Tradition. In fact, there are probably as many reasons to reject liberty as there are people on this planet. Those whose careers depend on violating liberty will use any excuse they are handed. If they use envy, they can impose socialism and raise taxes on the rich. They can make people believe they have a ‘right’ to things that others must work to provide them. It can never be your right to enslave others! Using ignorance, political criminals lie and hope that too few notice to do anything about it. It’s how we get things like ‘assault weapon’ rules, carbon credits, and the war on (some) drugs. They also combine ignorance with envy, so those cheated in the brain department will demand to be coddled to dumb down society so that no one feels stupid.” (05/13/26)
