Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: The Contrarian
by Jennifer Rubin

“Donald Trump’s Iran war is either ‘won’ and ‘complete’ or just ‘beginning,’ depending on which fragment of one of Trump’s incoherent run-on rants you focus on. If it is the latter, the Trump regime apparently will ask Congress for more money to support his unconstitutional, unpopular, and unending war. You can hear the panic rising in the voices of Republicans too cowardly to openly confront Trump. It is one thing to mumble about deference to the commander in chief in voting down a War Powers Act (WPA) resolution; it is quite another to go all in by rubber-stamping funds to continue a war that even many MAGA voters question.” (03/12/26)

https://www.contrariannews.org/p/not-a-dime-more-for-trumps-illegal

Source: CounterPunch
by Michael K Smith

“‘It’s not meant to be happening here.’ Louise Starkey, an Australian influencer in Dubai posted those words to the internet in response to Iranian missiles hitting the United Arab Emirates. The adverb says everything. Life is forever nice ‘here’ because all the crimes we commit ‘there’ are denied a response and whitewashed out of the news ‘here.’ The phrase, which Starkey erased in response to a tsunami of indignant criticism, aptly sums up the dominant attitude in the Global North, where misfortune is happenstance and the organized brutality undergirding economic life merely makes for an ‘interesting proposition’ in an academic seminar, if even that. The ‘here’ makes clear that there are places that can be bombarded, like Palestine and Venezuela, and other places no, like the United Arab Emirates, an oil and gas tax shelter for the fabulously wealthy.” (03/12/26)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/12/the-delusion-of-safety-here/

Source: Chasing Liberty
by Jeff Charles

“What happens when you take power from the people and put it in the hands of judges and prosecutors?” (03/12/26)

https://www.libertychasers.com/p/louisianas-tough-on-crime-bill-could

Source: The American Conservative
by George D O’Neill Jr.

“It is abundantly clear that most of the American people are against this latest Middle Eastern war, yet Congress is afraid to fulfill their constitutional duty to stop it. Congress is not even willing to debate our participation in that frenzy of death and destruction. Why? This decades-long pattern suggests there is some force or forces able to maintain an almost continual pro-war agenda. How does this happen in administration after administration without fail? It never seems to go the other way.” (03/12/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/gangster-foreign-policy/

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Damian Pudner

“Britain was once the workshop of the world. Later it became one of the most open and dynamic economies in Europe. When the post-war economic model began to falter in the 1970s the country eventually recognised that incremental tweaks would not suffice. Structural reform became unavoidable. What followed was neither cautious nor gradual. The reforms of the 1980s dismantled large parts of the existing economic model and replaced them with something far more competitive. Nowhere was that clearer than in the financial sector. The Big Bang of 1986 swept away restrictive practices, opened London’s markets and helped turn the City into one of the world’s dominant financial centres. Whether one applauds or criticises those reforms, their ambition is undeniable. That sense of ambition is strikingly absent from Britain’s economic debate today.” (03/12/26)

https://fee.org/articles/britain-once-led-the-world-what-happened/

Source: Show-Me Institute
by Patrick Tuohey

“In a series of sketches for Saturday Night Live, Billy Crystal played a fictionalized version of actor and director Fernando Lamas as host of the talk show ‘Fernando’s Hideaway.’ Crystal’s character would often say that it is better to look good than to feel good. This was on my mind as I reviewed recent evaluations of St. Louis’s guaranteed basic income pilot by Washington University’s Center for Social Development. The review’s claims will sound familiar to anyone who has followed these pilot programs around the country. … But as economists Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley note in a review of the universal basic income literature, the new wave of guaranteed-income pilots is ‘not well suited’ to answer the most important questions about the policy.” (03/12/26)

https://showmeinstitute.org/article/economy/economically-feeling-better-isnt-the-same-as-being-better/

Source: Persuasion
by Francis Fukuyama

“It is hard to overstate what a complete shambles American foreign policy has become since Donald Trump launched his war against Iran on February 28. Trump clearly believed that the initial decapitation strike would lead to the collapse of the Islamic regime and its replacement by a new leadership willing to work with the United States. He seems to have had Venezuela on his mind as a model, as he referred to it several times during the war’s first week. He and his associates failed to anticipate Iran’s capacity to strike back, as it launched rounds of missiles and drones at U.S. allies and bases in the region, disrupting Gulf economies and raising gasoline prices in the United States. What is particularly maddening about this is that anyone who has lived through the last quarter century of U.S. Middle East policy should have understood that war would produce multiple unintended and devastating consequences.” (03/12/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-not-to-do-regime-change