“The Republican Party’s victory lap over no tax on tips and no tax on overtime rings hollow, considering persistent public frustration with the cost of living. It doesn’t help that Trump’s tariff war and the war in Iran are further fueling rising prices. And voter frustration isn’t just about recent price changes. It’s also about the lasting damage from the inflation surge of 2021–2022, which pushed the overall price level permanently higher. There’s one cure, however, that Washington continues to miss. Inflation is increasingly driven by unsustainable budget policy, and politicians on both sides of the aisle keep pouring gasoline on the fiscal fire.” (04/28/26)
“A federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s bid to lock up the majority of people it is seeking to deport without an opportunity for release on bond — even if they have no criminal records and have resided in the country for decades. In a 3-0 ruling, a panel of the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found that ICE’s policy was based on a flawed, implausible and unprecedented interpretation of decades-old laws. But more fundamentally, the panel said the Trump administration’s position would raise acute constitutional concerns by instituting ‘the broadest mass detention-without-bond mandate in our Nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.'” (04/28/26)
“Predicting Donald Trump’s political demise has typically been a fool’s errand. Some of my smartest friends have declared his definitive fall from grace again and again, only to be proven wrong each and every time. … And yet, I have come to the tentative conclusion that this time may, finally, be different. For the past decade, Trump has dominated American politics like no other president in living memory; now, signs of that era coming to a close are suddenly multiplying. It is, as Saturday’s appalling assassination attempt on the president reminds us, impossible to see around the next historical corner. But it sure seems as though Trump’s hold over the country is finally slipping. This, to misquote Winston Churchill, no longer feels like the end of the beginning; it may be the beginning of the end.” (04/28/26)
“A long-running investigation of fraud involving federal funding in Minnesota entered a new, highly visible phase Tuesday morning as uniformed law enforcement agents executed search warrants in the Minneapolis area. Twenty-two federal search warrants were executed in Minnesota, a federal official told CNN. Most of the locations were businesses that are recipients of Medicaid funding, including child care facilities, according to CNN affiliate KARE, citing unnamed sources. The raids dealt with allegations of fraud, the Department of Homeland Security said.” (04/28/26)
“‘Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by an LLM are speech.’ With that curious line, one of the first judges to confront the question suggested, in the teeth of law and logic, that AI outputs might not be protected by the First Amendment. Consider what that would mean. If the outputs of large language models were not treated as protected expression, the government would have sweeping power to dictate what they can and cannot say — even what they must say. Already, sixty percent of Americans, and nearly three-quarters of those under thirty, use AI to find information. Those numbers will only grow. AI is fast becoming a medium through which hundreds of millions of people form opinions and make sense of the world. A government with control over AI outputs could twist that pursuit of truth — rewriting the past, shading the present, and warping the future.” (04/28/26)
“I [David Beckworth] recently sat down with Izabella Kaminska for a Substack Live to unpack the renewed interest in dollar swap lines, particularly the possibility of extending them to countries like the UAE. What might seem like a technical plumbing issue in global finance is, in fact, a window into something much bigger: the evolving role of the dollar system as a tool of financial statecraft.” (04/28/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“It is the attempted political transformation of foreign countries, especially in the Middle East, that leads inevitably to American failure. George W. Bush wasn’t unsuccessful at overthrowing Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. He was unable to quickly replace them with anything better (or in the case of the Taliban, after 20 years in Afghanistan, really to replace them at all). Trump of course doesn’t want to devote much time or resources to a political transformation of Iran …. He is perfectly happy to stroll into Pottery Barn, smash everything on the shelf, and then leave someone else with the bill. The problem is that means you have to either leave behind a political vacuum or do business with the remnants of the regime you went to war with in the first place.” (04/28/26)
“In normal fraud cases, it is the defrauded who feel the most aggrieved. But here it is their political enemies who express the outrage that the defrauded should be feeling.” (04/28/27)
