Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jennifer Kavanagh
“US force posture in Europe needed a strategic trim, but some lawmakers want these soldiers to go closer to Russia. They should come home.” (05/06/26)
Source: Niskanen Center
by Jia-Shen Tsai
“Tax season is a useful reminder that how we organize financial information matters just as much as the numbers themselves. Taxpayers file returns, but the underlying numbers come from employers, who report wages directly to the government. Without that upstream reporting, the total simply would be error-prone. That’s true, too, of carbon accounting: There are several ways to measure emissions, each targeting a different node in the supply chain.” (05/06/26)
https://www.niskanencenter.org/accounting-burden-in-carbon-tax-cap-and-trade-cbam
Source: The Daily Economy
by Peter C Earle
“The notion that artificial intelligence at full bloom might eliminate the need for money reflects a deep confusion about what money is and does. Money is not merely a barter-avoiding convenience layered onto an otherwise frictionless world. It is a solution to fundamental problems of exchange, profound difficulties in coordination, and comparison of alternatives under scarcity. Even in a hypothetical future defined by extraordinary productivity gains and broadly collapsing prices, those underlying problems do not disappear. Instead they change form, and for as long as scarcity, tradeoffs, and uncertainty persist in any domain, so too will the need for money.” (05/06/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/no-ai-wont-make-money-obsolete/
Source: The American Prospect
by Ryan Cooper
“Is Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) going to switch parties? That’s the scuttlebutt in Washington, D.C., according to Politico. He has been one of Trump’s loudest supporters among congressional Democrats, and with the GOP looking down the barrel of a catastrophic loss in the upcoming midterms, they are hoping to buy themselves a Senate seat—literally. It seems Sens. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Katie Britt (R-AL) have been assiduously working on Fetterman. Donald Trump as usual cut to the chase and offered a huge sack of cash by way of a message delivered through Fox News contributor Sean Hannity: ‘Your job is to tell him,’ as Hannity recalled the conversation, ‘‘He’s gonna run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big.’'” (05/06/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/05/06/will-john-fetterman-go-full-benedict-arnold/
Source: Antiwar.com
by John J. Duncan, Jr.
“I think Trump realizes that both the U.S. economy and the world economy will be greatly damaged and possibly go in to a major recession if the war is not ended very soon. JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said it ‘will be worse than people think.’ The President seems to be trying very hard to reach an agreement, but he knows Israel wants to go in the other direction and escalate the war even further. And he knows the Israel Lobby has almost total control of the Congress and will go along with Netanyahu no matter what.” (05/06/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Kevin Frazier
“The AI you have today is the worst you’ll ever use.” (05/06/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by David Gordon & Roger E. Bissell
“Libertarianism has no ‘fixed philosophical essence,’ [Matt] Zwolinski says, or you wouldn’t have seen the drastic swings in how the term was applied between Déjacque’s anarcho-communism of the 1850s and Leonard Read’s free markets and limited government of the 1950s, let alone the present-day. There simply has never been a permanent, stable paradigm of liberty. Yes, an apparent consensus was arrived at in the 1970s in the ‘rights-based free-market’ views of Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard — which Zwolinski also tellingly labels as rationalist and absolutist. (Code-word alert: he means unempirical and dogmatic, which are bad things, unlike the empirical and flexible approach he favors.) But this was more of a historical accident, or perhaps a breathing spell, before society in general and libertarian theory in particular began a steady unraveling and loss of cohesion.” (05/05/26)
Source: Fox News
by Sara Carter
“During President Trump’s first year in office, the United States reduced drug overdose deaths by over 13,000, compared to the previous 12 months. That is more than a statistic: it is thousands of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends and neighbors who are alive today because of the decisive actions taken under his leadership. Now, drug overdose deaths are lower than at any point under the Biden administration and nearly 40,000 lower than the previous Administration’s peak of almost 108,000. This result is historic, but it is not enough. We must continue fighting every day to save lives from the chemical war being waged on the American people by cartel terrorists. This week, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) will continue our work to save lives with the release of President Trump’s 2026 National Drug Control Strategy.” [editor’s note: I assume this was ghost-written, as no one with the brains to write it has the lack of brains to believe it – TLK] (05/06/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Craig Eyermann
“No matter how you slice it, the U.S. government has a major fraud problem. The federal government’s watchdog agency, the General Accounting Office (GAO), estimates that about half a trillion dollars will be lost to fraud this year. Let’s put that number a little differently. In February 2026, just three months ago, the Congressional Budget Office projected the U.S. government would spend a net total of $7.448 trillion this year. Half a trillion dollars is about 1 out of every 15 dollars the federal government will spend in 2026. The GAO says Washington, D.C.’s politicians and bureaucrats might as well just flush that money down a bottomless sewer. Why not? If they did, they would have just as much to show for it.” (05/05/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/05/steps-solve-massive-problems-fraud/
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jonah Goldberg
“Trump’s famous claim that he could ‘shoot somebody’ on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, may have been hyperbole. But it’s not crazy to think he wouldn’t lose as many voters as he should. In the film [A Face in the Crowd, Lonesome Rhodes implodes when Americans encounter his off-air persona. The key to Trump’s success is that he ran as his off-air persona. Why people love that persona is a complicated question. Among the many complementary explanations is that he comes across as authentic, and some people value authenticity more than they value good character, honesty or competence. This is not just a problem for Republicans.” (05/05/26)