“We’d like to believe that the negative coverage of the Iran war so rampant in the media is simply more Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s plainly also about how the president’s firm actions expose how pathetically the same elites applauded President Barack Obama’s misbegotten Middle East policies, and not just his sad nuclear deal with Tehran. To simplify things, consider The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the dean of elite liberal political analysis, who’s actively sneering at the joint US-Israeli effort to defang an entity that for five decades has called them ‘The Great Satan’ and ‘The Little Satan.’ … the two nations took out Tehran’s nuclear program last year, as it was weeks from producing usable weapons, and they’ve acted before it could rebuild its defenses and offensive conventional forces to shield it as it recovered that capability.” [editor’s note: Are unlimited hallucinogens a formally codified office benefit at the Post, or is their use during work hours merely tolerated? … – TLK] (03/13/26)
“Boys will be boys. Just ask the president. At a gathering of Republicans a few days ago, Donald Trump talked nonchalantly about the recent sinking of an apparently unarmed Iranian frigate by the US Navy — in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from the Persian Gulf. A total of 104 crew members were killed and 32 more were injured. The president proceeded to make this more than merely another brutal, pointless act of war. He turned it into a glaring (shocking) revelation of truth … about the American-Israeli war on Iran and, quite possibly about all wars: about war itself.” [editor’s note: “That enemy warship, headed toward the theater of operations, was ‘apparently unarmed,’ may be the dumbest claim I’ve seen from either side of the debate over this conflict – TLK] (03/14/26)
“The poet Robert Frost once said that ‘good fences make good neighbors.’ He apparently never met Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is being sued by his neighbors for effectively squatting on their land and then seizing it to install a fence along his $830,500 private residence in suburban Philadelphia. The litigation is likely to put Shapiro in a much different light for many who think of him as a 2028 contender. The irony of the case is crushing. Shapiro opposed Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern border, declaring that he would sue before a dime of Pennsylvania money would go to pay for it. He apparently adopted a similar approach to his neighbors in Pennsylvania. The difference is that he built the wall, but without giving his neighbors a dime.” (03/14/26)
“As my colleague Bob Kuttner explains, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Scott (R-SC) have moved through a bipartisan housing bill supported by President Trump that if signed would represent the most (only?) progress of the second Trump term. The bill passed 89-10, reflecting awareness that housing affordability is a critical subject to loosen public anger over an economy that doesn’t work for most of them. The bill mostly adds funding to build housing, tackles land use rules, and lifts restrictions on manufactured housing that could lower costs of construction. But on Wednesday, there was apparently only one provision worth talking about on the shambling mound that used to be Twitter: a requirement that investment companies that build single-family homes in order to rent them out (a strategy that has advanced over the past decade known as ‘build-to-rent’) and have over 350 properties sell them after seven years of rent collection.” (03/13/26)
“There is a long tradition in political philosophy holding that public policy should reflect certain moral principles. Not everyone agrees, of course. Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes, for example, came close to saying that ‘might makes right.’ But the political thinkers who shaped the American form of government believed that legitimate government exists for moral purposes. How does that idea apply to taxation? The Biblical commandment is clear enough: ‘Thou shall not steal.’ Since taxation is clearly a ‘taking’ under threat of coercion, we can ask, where does it cross the line from ‘legitimacy’ to ‘theft?’ That there is such a line is implicit in almost all modern political discourse.” (03/14/26)
“Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, Carlon Augustus remembers reading the newspapers his grandparents bought daily. Now 32, he says he turns to social media for the latest news. For him, it’s about getting news in real time. ‘Everything is on social media now. Whatever happens today, you don’t have to wait to get the papers tomorrow,’ he said. Media owners point to shifting reading habits like Augustus’ as the primary reason two legacy newspapers have folded in the Caribbean so far this year: Guyana’s Stabroek News and Trinidad and Tobago’s Newsday. Stabroek News printed its final edition on Sunday and halted its online publication. It was established in November 1986, a year after its founder asked Guyana’s then-president if he would accept the creation of an independent newspaper. At the time, Guyana was six years away from its first free and fair elections in nearly 30 years.” (03/15/26)
“Talia Rose can see the FedEx planes. ‘They’re directly across the tarmac from me,’ they told me. Rose works the overnight shift at the UPS air hub. Most days, they clock in before dawn, when much of Oakland is asleep. Metal containers — ULDs — are rolled off the aircraft and pulled into the building. Rose unloads them, sending boxes down conveyor belts to be sorted and routed. Sometimes they’re on the other side, throwing freight toward outbound trucks. It’s physical work, repetitive and precise. Around six months ago, during a weekly organizing meeting at the Oakland Liberation Center, they learned that military cargo bound for Israel had been moving through the airport. Activists had just released research documenting hundreds of such shipments passing through OAK.” (03/12/26)
“Britain’s parliamentary democracy, one of the oldest in the world, has its quirks. For more than 1,000 years, its kings and queens have presided atop a pyramid of lords, earls, viscounts, and other layers of nobility. Alongside elected members of the House of Commons, these titled (and often wealthy) peers have held hundreds of hereditary seats in Parliament’s upper House of Lords for centuries. ‘Undemocratic, overcrowded, dominated by silly archaic practices and unrepresentative of the British population,’ is how one reform-minded member has described the chamber. But all that is about to change: On Tuesday, Parliament adopted a bill abolishing the remaining quota of 92 seats that can be automatically filled by the heirs of titled peers. The act fulfills one of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s election pledges, completing a process started by his predecessor Tony Blair, who removed more than 600 seats in 1999.” (03/11/26)
“Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of White nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as ‘White’, while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power. Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct ‘civilizational decline’ because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that ‘Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product] — down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today.'” (03/12/26)
“Former President Barack Obama long ago surpassed the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton as America’s most influential race hustler. The country got a reminder when Obama spoke at Jackson’s funeral, even though Jackson’s son urged the speakers ‘not to bring their politics’ to the service. Obama said, ‘Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible. Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other, and to turn on each other. And that some Americans count more than others.’ Same old Obama. In his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, he famously declared, ‘There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.’ It was the line that launched him and made millions across party lines believe he could bridge divides.” (03/12/26)
