Source: Brennan Center for Justice
by Michael Waldman
“One of the most potent midterm election slogans was offered by the Republicans in 1946: ‘HAD ENOUGH?’ The GOP swept into power after years of New Deal dominance. We like to say that what counts is not what you are against, but what you are for. Not always, though. Sometimes ‘Had enough?’ is enough. Midterm elections often are waged as a rebuke to the party in control of the White House. Political scientists call this a thermostatic election. Voters adjust the temperature by turning the dial away from perceived overreaches. Sometimes the floor just drops out from under a political party. This could be a year when ‘Had enough?’ is enough. But at times candidates have an agenda, detailed or implicit. Those are the years that produce the biggest change.” (10/07/26)
“An ordinary person can earn a paycheque, pay her taxes, cover living costs and mortgage payments, and perhaps even add to her savings — and at the end of the day she will still owe most of her mortgage. This is a normal state of affairs, and nobody finds it puzzling. Yet when a company reports profits alongside large amounts of debt, the reaction is often to question whether it’s really making money. After all, if a company is ‘truly’ profitable, why is it in debt? The short answer is that debt is not the opposite of profit. Loss is the opposite of profit. This imagined contradiction is easier to resolve once we recognize that profit is a flow and debt is a stock.” (10/07/26)
“After Tennessee unsuccessfully tried to execute Christa Pike last week, an ambulance whisked her to a Nashville hospital, where the condemned murderer became a patient in urgent need of lifesaving care. Should Pike recover from two botched administrations of pentobarbital, which left her unconscious and unable to breathe on her own, she might travel that road in reverse after she is well enough to be killed. That bizarre episode illustrates the perverse consequences of trying to disguise the brutal reality of capital punishment by dressing it in medical garb. Although most Americans say murderers like Pike should be executed, the method they prefer suggests they are squeamish about admitting what that entails.” (10/07/26)
“It turns out that Americans loathe inflation, which is pretty amusing for someone who spends a lot of time writing about parts of the world where a 20 percent inflation rate barely warrants comment. They delivered unified government to the Republicans in 2024 on inflation, and they seem primed to throw them out of Congress this year on the same grounds. (Although the residual classical monetarist in me would like to distinguish between supply shocks and inflation simpliciter.) At the same time, the Trump administration has an ambitious if not always coherent program that needs to be paid for and that only minimally involves the legislature’s oversight. … Something’s gotta give here. Either the American people will have to make their political peace with running the economy hot and the consequent inflation, or real austerity will come and wash all this spending off the streets. A debt crisis could force the issue.” (10/07/26)
“Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took aim at BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute, hauling them into federal court on antitrust charges. The theory was breathtaking in scope. She accused them of stealing the future. Nessel’s complaint claimed that the companies had colluded, in violation of federal antitrust law, to hold back wind, solar, and electric vehicles and that Michigan families had paid inflated energy bills as a result. Judge Jane M. Beckering of the U.S. Western District Court in Michigan dismissed the complaint, holding that the state lacked standing to pursue the claim at all. That was only the beginning of the court’s skepticism. As reported, Judge Beckering found that the alleged chain connecting a decades-long conspiracy to the state’s claimed overcharges stretched too thin to support most of the injuries Michigan tried to claim.” (10/07/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“On August 3, 1940, a mere six months into World War II, Ludwig von Mises arrived with his wife in New York City. The fifty-eight-year-old Austrian economist had narrowly escaped Europe as the continent was engulfed by war. Because air travel was not an option amid the escalating fighting, the couple had to cross by bus from their home in Geneva, Switzerland, across southern France, into Spain, and eventually to a port in Portugal, where a ship would take them across the Atlantic. The bus had to stop and reroute several times to narrowly avoid the advancing Nazi forces pushing into France. An invading army is dangerous to anyone attempting to flee in its path. But Mises was also a known Jewish intellectual opponent of the ideology fueling the German war effort.” (10/07/26)
“We cannot even be secure in our use of the word ‘terrorist’ any longer, given that so many are determined to abuse it. How else to explain the fact that comedian John Cleese, of Monty Python and ‘Fawlty Towers’ fame, has been reported to Prevent, the British government program designed to stop people from becoming terrorists? Are dead parrots, silly walks and disgruntled hoteliers now deemed early warning signs of radicalization? The complaint to Prevent against Cleese was made by a member of the public, and the details passed to 5Pillars, an Islamist media outlet based in London. In its report, 5Pillars characterized the complaint as alleging that Cleese’s social media jokes and comments ‘go beyond legitimate criticism of Islam and instead portray Muslims collectively as violent, criminal and morally depraved.'” (10/07/26)
“Incumbent AI firms may benefit from a regulatory regime in which machine consciousness is considered plausible but remains impossible to prove or disprove.” (10/07/26)
“Nithya Raman appears to think she is running for mayor of Antifa, not mayor of LA. There’s no other explanation for her latest attack on her opponent — and the police. As The California Post has reported, Raman’s campaign posted, then deleted, a video in which she appears to call Mayor Karen Bass and LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell ‘fascists’. The video also shows McDonnell with a red ‘X’ over his face. It’s reminiscent of the graffiti scrawled on local businesses and government buildings during the George Floyd riots of 2020, or the anti-ICE riots of 2025. The rioters are her constituency. That’s the message she’s sending by calling McDonnell a ‘fascist’. Does she even know what that means?” (10/07/26)
“Israel has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” took effect a year ago, more than the number of Israelis killed on October 7, 2023. The supposedly unlimited ‘right’ to genocidal retaliation invoked ever since has left at least 74,000 dead. This quotidian slaughter is not new. For years, it was normalized under the euphemism of ‘mowing the grass’, as Israel repeatedly brought its impunity and overwhelming military superiority to bear against a defenseless, besieged population: in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021. As a result, a generation of Palestinians in Gaza has been condemned to life and death under the deadly gaze of an Israeli panopticon.” (10/07/26)
