“We all have embarrassing fantasies, I imagine, and most of us keep them to themselves. I have a bad habit of sharing mine with other people. One of these, one I’ve shared before and will share again now, is of an American Senate that works more like the way it was intended to, which is to say: not as a partisan body. Could that fantasy actually become reality? To make it so, you would need a Senate that was closely divided between Democrats and Republicans, and for a small group of senators to refuse to caucus with either party. If they thereby deprived either party of a majority, they would have the leverage to shape the Senate’s rules and agenda, since essentially the only ways the body could get anything done would be either for Democrats and Republicans to work together against them, or for either or both parties to negotiate with them.” (04/30/26)
“A casual exchange with a chatbot can help someone understand a lease, think through a medical question, or navigate a personal issue. It can become specific and personal, even though people understand it isn’t a licensed professional. Yet even basic, exploratory conversations risk being labeled professional advice under a New York bill introduced this session. Senate Bill 7263 would prevent AI chatbots — defined broadly as any system that simulates ‘human-like conversation’ and provides information or services — from generating responses that would amount to the unlicensed practice of a profession like law, medicine, finance, or mental health, if that profession is normally provided by a human.” (04/30/26)
“Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., much like his mentor and predecessor, Sen. Mitch McConnell [R-KY] is a creature of that austere and august upper body of Congress who has completely forgotten his duty to Republican voters. It’s simple math. The Senate issue that the GOP electorate cares most about is passing the Save America Act, with its voter ID requirements and other election security measures, even if it means blowing up the filibuster. But GOP leadership insists that ending the 60-vote threshold and pushing this hyper-popular legislation through is simply impossible. Thune’s dilemma is whether his duty in this situation is to the institution of the Senate, whose rules and customs he seeks to preserve, or to the 95% of Republican voters shouting from the mountaintop to just pass the bill.” (04/30/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Dan M Ford & Joseph Brennan
“But the UN and US never seem to learn. There have been numerous cycles of peacekeeping and police missions there. Here’s why they don’t work.” (04/30/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson
“Although the original DOGE program by all measures failed to cut government spending in any significant way, its influence was strongly felt by one agency: the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Donald Trump administration slashed the agency’s budget and laid off most of its workers in both the US and abroad. At the same time, the agency also stopped payment to numerous non-profits whose employees worked with USAID employees to promote and establish programs. Whether the evisceration of USAID was good or bad depended upon one’s viewpoint, ideological leanings, and what one is willing to believe in support of ‘the cause.'” (04/30/26)
“For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged ‘forces of darkness’ in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.” (04/30/26)
“On April 30, 1956, the commander of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Moshe Dayan, spoke at the funeral of Roi Rotberg. A young man in charge of security at the Gaza border settlement of Nahal Oz, Rotberg had been murdered and mutilated by Palestinian fedayeen. Dayan, who had met Rotberg a few days earlier and was impressed by his youth and courage, quickly drafted a eulogy that, in the original Hebrew, runs just 285 words. Nearly the same length of Abraham Lincoln’s 272-word address at Gettysburg, Dayan’s speech has assumed nearly the same foundational role in his own nation’s self-understanding.” (04/30/26)
“Constraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules (‘deontological bars). For example, you shouldn’t assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn’t it be for the greater good? Because there’s always one gun-owner who thinks any given leader’s policies are bad, so without the rule, every leader would face constant assassination attempts, probably some of them would succeed, and the nation would either crumble or degenerate into a security state.” (04/30/26)
“In one sense, the debate about abundance is about the future of the left in America. That is the political agenda underlying many of the economic ideas promoted by the journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their 2025 book Abundance. Right now, the center-left in America is fixated on regulating everything to realize greater social justice in the economy. Abundance liberals like Klein and Thompson, however, want to shift the left’s attention towards the matter of how we can diminish many of the blockages that create artificial scarcities throughout the United States. The fight about abundance on the left, however, has great import for the right as well. The lurch toward economic nationalism and populist economics on the part of large segments of the right has made the possibility of deeper conversations and even possible alliances with abundanistas a live topic among classical liberals and fiscal conservatives.” (04/30/26)
