“Townshend’s Revenue Act of 1767 imposed import duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea. Guess who the colonists typically had to buy these goods from? That’s right, good ol’ Great Britain. Still, all in all, American colonists paid about one to three percent of their income in taxes to the Crown. Yet this, along with other grievances, was enough to prompt the colonists to start shooting those damned redcoats. One would think that after defeating the British, those who established the new government might take a lesson. At first, they did.” (10/30/25)
“Improving the availability and affordability of childcare is a complex challenge. Childcare, unlike manufacturing, cannot achieve significant efficiency gains: No caregiver can change two diapers at once. Childcare faces an additional limitation: parents in need of childcare for their young children have limited purchasing power. They are likely more junior in their careers with lower savings reserves than when their children have aged out of expensive care. States have a modest ability to increase the supply of childcare and drive down prices by examining the risk-benefit tradeoffs of regulations.” (10/30/25)
“Not everyone likes Halloween decorations. I remember driving to the cider stand with a family member one crisp fall morning, passing the various ghoulies, ghosties, and goblins dotting neighbor’s gardens. With a gimlet eye, she stared down a plastic inflatable witch. ‘People like putting up these witch decorations,’ she said, ‘But witches are not funny.’ … For the most part, I myself love Halloween decorations. … But there is one case where I agree entirely with my relative’s sentiment. It’s the murder. I don’t like all the murder. I don’t like the body bags that are multiplying among the ghosts and goblins. I don’t like the police tape and the headless corpses.” (10/30/25)
“El Fasher’s fall exposes the failure of Washington’s reliance on regional power brokers — many who are directly involved — to end the conflict.” (10/30/25)
“On a cold October morning, heavy equipment commenced destruction of the 123-year-old East Wing of the White House. In place of rooms where presidents rehearsed the words that would steady the nation and First Ladies wrote to grieving families, we are offered glass and spectacle, a ballroom scaled to diminish the original house, a monument to appetite where once stood service. This is not modernization. This is erasure. The destruction matters because process matters, and process was murdered alongside memory. The 1942 shell that sheltered the nation’s continuity in crisis, the offices where Rosalynn Carter pioneered the modern First Lady’s role, the theater where words found their gravity before facing the nation: all of it stripped away while the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts were reduced to bystanders.” [editor’s note: Yet another “progressive” pundit who never reads history – SAT] (10/30/25)
“Ralph Raico was an American historian and libertarian public intellectual who devoted his life to recovering the liberal tradition and exposing the predatory nature of state power. Teaching European history at Buffalo State College and serving as a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he specialized in the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relation between war and the rise of the state. Raico combined classical erudition with polemical sharpness. He insisted that a genuine liberalism is rooted in private property and voluntary exchange, that society can organize itself without a tutelary state, and that war is the chief means by which governments expand their authority. These convictions shaped his scholarship and activism over five decades.” (10/30/25)
“A student at Kenwood High School in Baltimore County didn’t know what he was inviting when he munched on Doritos after football practice. ‘They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me,’ Taki Allen said of the police in about ‘eight cop cars’ who surged to his location. … The school’s security system is ‘AI-powered.’ It ‘saw’ a gun, not Doritos plus finger.” (10/30/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“I fully realize that the Republican-controlled Congress will do whatever President Trump orders it to do and, therefore, that the possibility of an impeachment and conviction of Trump is virtually non-existent. Nonetheless, I believe that it is essential that the truth be told openly and publicly: Trump deserves to be removed from office for the drug-war killings that he has orchestrated and carried out in the Caribbean. If such extrajudicial killings do not constitute ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ then that term in the Constitution has been rendered meaningless.” (10/30/25)
“The Arc de Triomphe, and its North Korean copy, are grand but ultimately unsatisfying for anyone with the slightest moral sense. The French celebrate serial aggression by an egotistical monster responsible for mass death and destruction across the European continent, reaching all the way to Moscow. Indeed, Napoleon’s sarcophagus enjoys a separate place of honor, surrounded by acclamations of his multiple victories. (Imagine a similar structure in Berlin for one or another 20th century German leader!) … Americans don’t need a new monument to glorify the many wars fought in their name but against their interest. Rather, Americans should celebrate what makes this nation worth defending. And that is best secured by staying out of other countries’ conflicts. How about building an Arch of Peace, listing the wars which the U.S. studiously avoided, and the resulting benefits for all Americans?” (10/30/25)
