“‘It just shouldn’t be this hard,’ Abdul El-Sayed, the insurgent candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, says to a packed Mumford High School auditorium in Detroit’s northwestern corner. ‘Shouldn’t be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries … to get your kid to a doctor or to pay your taxes and know that that money’s gonna be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on other people and their kids’. El-Sayed is here with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s passing through town on his ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ tour, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney. El-Sayed is locked in a tight three-way race with establishment picks for Michigan’s open seat, a must-win for Democrats hoping to reclaim the chamber, while McKinney is running to unseat incumbent Democratic Congressman Shri Thanedar (MI-13), one of the body’s richest members, whom McKinney has called a ‘cardboard cutout of a congressman.’ Sanders has endorsed both.” (05/13/26)
“As many are likely already aware, automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are high-speed cameras that can identify vehicles as they pass and record their time and location. Over the last decade, the technology has rapidly expanded across American roads and is found in nearly every major city. In a recent posting, I offered a rough estimate of how many ALPRs are deployed in California, suggesting the number is plausibly in the 9.3k–14.9k range, well above the 5k documented in the best records of the technology. However, there has been considerably less attention paid to whether or not the number of ALPRs changes the constitutional calculus. I argue that it does, and that it may render some elements of ALPRs unconstitutional.” (05/12/26)
“Recently several dozen articles defending homeschooling have crossed our desktop here at The Price of Liberty. Unfortunately, they are vastly outnumbered by articles and comments attacking homeschooling. And at the same time, we are seeing more and more State governments and local school districts and boards working very hard (for the bureaucrats and politicians, at least) to come up with more ways to regulate and restrict homeschooling and ‘ensure’ that parents and their families and friends are ‘properly educating’ their children.” (05/12/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Jamie Beran & Rabbi Jill Jacobs
“When thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents invaded Minneapolis this past January, Twin Cities residents, and people across the country, jumped into action, trailing these agents, organizing major protests, and dropping off food and supplies to those understandably afraid to leave their homes. Both of our organizations, too, took action. Bend the Arc: Jewish Action leadership traveled to join a clergy day of protest alongside close partners in Minneapolis, and T’ruah sent some 50 rabbis to support dozens of their colleagues who live and work there. Lay people and clergy alike similarly stepped up in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and other cities targeted by major Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Minnesotans successfully diminished the massive ICE takeover of their city. This is a testament to the power of citizen organizing and action.” (05/13/26)
“Behold a right-left mind-meld on the economy. For decades, the thinking goes, corporations have captured a larger share of national income at workers’ expense. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D‑Massachusetts) says this is because ‘American workers don’t have enough power.’ On the populist right, meanwhile, this lamentable trend has happened as companies have ‘fattened profit margins by outsourcing their workforces.’ It’s a tidy narrative but mostly wrong.” (05/12/26)
“Last week ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth insulted Americans by claiming that a 50 percent increase in the US military budget – from an incomprehensible one trillion dollars to an impossible one and a half trillion – was a ‘fiscally responsible investment.’ ‘Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business,’ he said last Thursday. In a way he was right, though. The huge increase is much more about ‘business’ than what is needed to protect the United States from potential invasion. But it isn’t the kind of ‘business’ that most supporters of free markets would applaud. On the contrary, this is the business of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to the well-connected Beltway elite based on lies and scare tactics.” (05/11/26)
“Senate Republicans, the Associated Press reports, plan to give the Secret Service $1 billion for ‘security upgrades’ to president Donald Trump’s (supposedly $400 million, supposedly donation-funded) White House ballroom project. After an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton ballroom hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Republicans began boosting the ballroom itself as a presidential safety solution. Every time the president ventures forth to environments inhabited or surrounded by the hoi polloi, they point out, the Secret Service has to create bespoke environments within otherwise open facilities to ensure that he’s not shot at, yelled at, glared at, or annoyed. Better to keep him in a facility that’s controlled 24/7 for his safety and convenience. That’s fair, and it occurs to me that, done rightly, adding a secure ballroom to the White House could benefit not just presidential security but public convenience.” (05/11/26)
Source: Politics, Philosophy & Economics
by Matt Zwolinski
“Are markets coercive? Contemporary debate is dominated by two answers. The first, longstanding among defenders of free markets, holds that voluntary exchange is non-coercive by definition: coercion enters the picture only when rights are violated. The second, revived from Robert Hale’s 1923 essay and embraced today by progressive legal scholars and post-liberal conservatives alike, holds that markets are pervasively coercive because property rights backed by state power constitute a system of mutual coercion. Both answers fail, but the Halean answer fails in the more interesting way.” (05/11/26)
“In the nearly two-and-a-half months since Donald Trump launched a war against Iran at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the iron grip that Christian Zionism has on Washington has become too obvious to ignore. Briefly, Christian Zionism is a theo-political ideological construct that posits a Christian duty to support the state of Israel, come what may, owing to a divine mandate for its existence that is said to derive from the Old Testament. … Anyone tempted to blame American Jews (2.4 percent of the US population) for Washington’s long and puzzling romance with Israel should look elsewhere. … The perhaps overused term ‘Israel Lobby’ might more accurately be referred to as the Christian Zionist Lobby, given the sheer size of its leading organizations. Christians United for Israel has over 10 million members.” (05/11/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“The Washington Post recently pointed out that ‘starting this year, the Social Security benefits formula gives the very-highest-income couples who retire at age 67 over $100,000’ per year. And the Post is very upset about it: ‘With the federal government $39 trillion in debt and running deficits larger than during the Great Depression, there’s no reason that the largest federal spending program should be sending six figures in annual benefits to rich people.’ But I thought that Social Security recipients were entitled to collect benefits because they paid into the system their whole working lives? Isn’t that what we are continually told?” (05/11/26)
