“Just when you thought that the hare-brained schemes of the Democrats who run our beleaguered big cities couldn’t get goofier, Chicago has passed a new doozy. The Windy City is raising hotel taxes to, get this, increase tourism. Ordinance 2026-0022544 will raise the tax on hotel rooms within that district to 19% from the rate of 17.5%, with the proceeds going to an organization called Choose Chicago, which will use the cash for tourism marketing campaigns. The top target on Choose Chicago’s wish list of events is the 2028 Democratic National Convention, and now, everyone who books a room in Second City gets to chip in a bit on the effort. It’s quite a thing: Only a leftist Democrat could possibly think that making it more expensive to visit Chicago will increase tourism. Maybe they should throw in a complimentary mugging to sweeten the deal.” (03/21/26)
“Sudan’s army has denied it carried out a deadly attack on a major hospital on Friday night in a city in the west of the country held by its rivals, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said 64 people – including 13 children, two nurses and a doctor – had died in the strike on el-Daein Teaching Hospital and 89 others had been wounded. ‘Enough blood has been spilled,’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on X, urging the warring parties to end the conflict, which started nearly three years ago. The RSF said an army drone had hit the hospital in el-Daein, the capital of East Darfur state, on the day Muslims were marking the festival of Eid. (03/22/26)
“A California sheriff running for governor has seized more than half a million ballots cast in a November special election from county election officials, saying he’s investigating a ballot count discrepancy. County elections officials have disputed the claims by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called Bianco’s move unprecedented and says it is designed to sow distrust in elections. Bianco held a news conference Friday saying his office had launched the investigation after receiving a complaint from a local citizens group about the ballot count from a November 2025 special election on redistricting. In the special election, voters approved a measure to redraw congressional district lines to favor Democrats in the upcoming midterm election. The measure passed in the county by a margin of more than 80,000 votes.” (03/22/26)
“Since the inauguration of Donald Trump for a second presidential term, a student loan borrower has fallen into default every nine seconds. A federal appeals court wants to accelerate that process. Last week, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit (which includes two Trump appointees and one appointed by George W. Bush) nullified the Biden administration’s income-driven repayment (IDR) program, versions of which have been in place under presidents of both parties for over three decades. The specific Biden-era version, known as Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE), which nearly seven million borrowers have opted into, was authorized through 2028 by Congress and President Trump in the fiscal mega-bill passed just last year. Yet without any hearing on the merits, the Eighth Circuit unilaterally tossed out the program.” (03/20/26)
“Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and we have just seen the start of a new war in the Middle East over one more nation supposedly trying to acquire them. While we consider the dangers of such weapons and their capacity to cause massive destruction, we often overlook the risks associated with what still passes for ‘peaceful’ nuclear power. With that in mind, let me revisit a moment when that reality should have become far clearer. I had crawled into bed on March 10, 2011, opened my phone, and scrolled through my Instagram feed. The app was still fairly new then, and I was only following a dozen or so accounts, several from Japan. One amateur photographer there had posted photos minutes earlier of a fractured sidewalk and a toppled bookshelf. A massive earthquake had just rattled Tokyo.” [editor’s note: The fearmongerers continue to ignore the advances in “safe” nukes as a viable power source – SAT] (03/19/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Westerners are about to start paying a lot more attention to the war in Iran as massive US-Israeli escalations point to a coming energy crisis set to impact the whole world. Israel has bombed the world’s largest natural gas field in southwestern Iran, reportedly in coordination with the United States. Now that a major red line for Tehran has been crossed, retaliatory strikes have already begun pummeling the energy infrastructure of US allies in the region, with Qatar reporting that its primary gas facility has sustained ‘significant damage’ from an attack after Iran issued evacuation warnings for energy facilities in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Fuel prices are already surging.” (03/19/26)
“I try to be fair to people I disagree with. Emmanuel Saez (the famous UC Berkeley economist who’s considered an architect of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax) is someone I read carefully, even when I find his income-inequality work unconvincing. So, when I say that his arguments for the wealth tax are not just biased or misleading but egregiously wrong, I’m not being careless. I mean it. In a recent debate at Stanford University, Saez offered his central justification (apart from, you know, ‘billionaires are unfairly rich’): California’s hospitals need it because the federal government cut Medicaid through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As Economic Policy Innovation Center researchers have repeatedly documented, under the Biden administration, Medicaid spending expanded by almost 60 percent, going from roughly $409 billion before the pandemic to $656 billion by 2025.” (03/19/26)
“Israel has been a junior partner of the US empire’s Middle East policy since its military success in the 1967 Six Day War. While there are instances of Israel pushing the US into conflict, most directly in the US-Israel war against Iran in June 2025, the current war in Iran was driven by the US empire’s perceived interests plus the Trump factor. Israel has long been pressuring the US to fight Iran, but the empire did not find it worthwhile to initiate a full-scale war against the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress during the Obama era warned of an impending Iranian nuclear weapon. But, instead, President Barack Obama continued the diplomatic route through establishing the Iran Deal, ensuring Iran would not develop nuclear arms.” (03/19/26)
“Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, news about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs has vacillated between two four-letter words: fear and hype. As a result, about two-thirds of Americans believe AI will lead to fewer jobs, while the overpromising of AI’s potential has helped lead to a similar proportion of Americans not using AI much or at all in their jobs. By last year, however, surveys of AI’s actual impact in the workplace had started to roll in. And many indicate a move toward enhancing the application of reason, analytical judgment, and other skills of humans – and redefining intelligence to levels beyond the limits of a machine or the brain. One federal survey in the New York-northern New Jersey area found that a large share of businesses using AI are retraining workers to utilize the technology with no significant reductions in employment.” (03/18/26)
“Iran executed a 19-year-old champion wrestler in a public hanging Thursday along with two other people who were arrested during the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters in January. Saleh Mohammadi, a rising star from Qom, was allegedly tortured to confess to the capital crime of waging war against God, with the teen executed without a fair trial, according to human rights groups. ‘His execution was a blatant political murder, part of the Islamic Republic’s pattern of targeting athletes to crush dissent and terrorize society,’ Nima Far, a human rights activist and Iranian combat athlete, told Fox News. Mohammadi, along with fellow protesters Mehdi Ghasemi and Saeed Davoudi, were accused of killing two police officers ‘with knives and swords’ during the January protests, according to Iranian state media. Mohammadi was arrested during the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters in January.” (03/19/26)
