“The world learned this week that Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat all but set to win his party’s Senate primary next month, has been sexting up to 12 women in the past few years while married. For Platner, this just added to his Cadillac Mountain of scandals. You are likely familiar with the fact that the so-called oyster farmer has a Nazi tattoo that he covered up only after lying about knowing its meaning. He also has a long history off-color Reddit posts, including remarks blaming women for being raped. What was most telling about these sordid new sexting revelations wasn’t that it exposed Platner as a creep. We already knew that. It was that the leak came from a fellow Democrat. The party may be starting to realize they have created a Marxist monster they can’t control.” (05/31/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“‘California’s ‘Trump Tax Loophole’ is a billionaire-friendly tax break that lets the wealthiest commercial property owners avoid paying taxes based on what their properties are actually worth,’ proclaims Tom Steyer, candidate for governor of California, on his website. Steyer has described this ‘loophole’ in debates as if it is a special benefit for corporations, a ‘corporate real estate tax loophole.’ In the gubernatorial debate on CNN, for example, he declared: ‘I will on the first day [in office] call a special election to close a corporate real estate tax loophole that’s worth over $20 billion. … California government needs more money.’ But Steyer’s website admits: The ‘loophole’ is actually Proposition 13, the popular constitutional amendment that protects ordinary homeowners across the Golden State.” (06/01/26)
“The rollout of the DOJ’s ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ may have been botched, but the fund remains a good idea, and the hysteria from Democrats like the hypocritical Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and allied media is absurd. It’s not unprecedented or corrupt or President Trump’s personal ‘slush fund,’ no matter how loudly they shriek. It’s just a rebranding of an existing legal settlement fund Congress authorized decades ago, as Washington lawyer and veteran Senate oversight investigator Jason Foster points out. Administrations of both parties have repeatedly used the DOJ’s Judgment Fund to settle legal claims against the federal government, and Democratic administrations have used it for far more questionable payouts than the Trump administration’s proposal to compensate genuine victims of lawfare.” (05/31/26)
“Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name — ‘opportunism’ — is an integral component of capitalism. Liberalism ameliorates capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms blunt resistance, but later, when things grow quiet, are revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study of Luxemburg’s observation.” (06/01/26)
“For most of this century, the U.S. has run roughly one-fifth of its electricity on fuel it must import. Russia has long been the single largest foreign supplier of enriched uranium to U.S. nuclear plants. Remarkably, it still held that position as recently as last year, providing 20 percent of the enriched uranium in America’s commercial reactors even after a U.S. import ban became law. We have spent years scrambling to unwind that dependence — a chokepoint that constrains today’s reactors and the pending advanced ones. And this month, the Department of Energy took a step toward loosening that chokepoint. … The real choice is not between a risky program and a safe, free status quo. It is between spending $20 billion to bury energy-dense material, or having private companies pay to turn that same material into electricity.” (06/01/26)
“This is my last article for TomDispatch. For over a decade, Tom Engelhardt has given me a platform to write about pretty much anything that grabs my — I’ll admit it, easily attracted — attention. It’s been a wonderful partnership for me, offering not just a place to publish, but a chance to think, talk, and often argue with the best editor I’ve ever worked with. A rarity in the age of Internet insta-publishing, TomDispatch subjects every article to the scrutiny of three separate proofreaders. Not for Tom the misplaced apostrophe or the confusion between ‘their’ and ‘they’re.’ Unlike the New York Times in a May 12, 2026 headline, no article appearing in TomDispatch would ever go rogue and ask the question, ‘Did the Fifth Circuit Go Rouge With Its Abortion Pills Ruling?'” (05/31/26)
“With inflation rising more than incomes, many Americans have suffered a loss of purchasing power even though their nominal income increased. The erosion of Americans’ purchasing power has led to a debt-based economy. This has created a number of bubbles that likely will soon burst. According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by economist Mike Shedlock, total car, credit card, and student loan debts are now higher, measured in real dollars, than nearly 20 years ago during the Great Recession. Of course, the greatest debtor is the US government. The Federal Reserve’s practice of buying government debt in order to pump more money into the economy enables maintaining the largest government in history.” (06/01/26)
“When the Commerce Department released April data on consumption, the uptick in reported inflation got most of the attention. While that is big news, there were several other items that were noteworthy. First, consumption growth was very weak in April, increasing by just 0.1%. That is not necessarily a big deal since it followed two months of rapid growth, and the falloff was mostly attributable to a drop in car purchases after two months of large purchases. Still, consumption is most of the economy, and if it’s not growing at a decent pace, the economy is not growing at a decent pace. The second point is that fast-food spending is in the doldrums.” (06/01/26)
“Media once played an important role in the management of modern democracies. The Digital Revolution, however, left it divided and confused.” (06/01/26)
“Modernity is a work of intellectual justice. By ‘a work of intellectual justice,’ I mean something more than a search for meaning. Beyond this noble search or quest, which has been symbolized throughout world literature, modernity entails a specifically human response to a kind of plague, in that modern thinkers strive for an interpretation of the world that brings relief from the intellectual burden of living amidst illusions and the constant buzzing of flies. This relief is afforded by the appearance of a unifying point of view that, in comparison with its rivals, is richer in knowledge and experience, more real in its perceptions, and more in touch with the permanent conditions of human life. This gain in perspective cannot be achieved without study of the past.” (06/01/26)
