“US President Donald Trump and Republicans face a daunting challenge: How to preserve power in the wake of their wildly unpopular policies? Their strategy is to intensify the GOP’s decades-long quest to limit voter participation. Selecting the voters likely to cast ballots for them is far better than letting all voters select their leaders. Trump has taken the strategy to a whole new level. And he’s doing it out of fear and desperation. During midterm elections, the president’s party loses seats in Congress. In Trump’s first term, Republicans lost 40 seats in the House in 2018. In 2010, President Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 63. The exceptions are few and far between. In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush’s GOP gained eight House seats in 2002, but then lost 30 in 2006. In 1998, President Bill Clinton’s Democrats gained five seats, but that didn’t offset the 52 seats that they had lost in 1994.” (08/19/25)
“While adding more police officers to a peaceful society won’t likely decrease crime much, a violent community is another story. People in these communities need greater safety to live their lives. Without becoming a statistic. Law enforcement that is visible on the street can surely help. But rethinking the meaning of ‘safety’ won’t. So what’s burning? Democratic hopes, maybe. We’ll see how Trump’s move to clean up the capital goes. Yet, if he tries to use the National Guard in other cities without constitutional warrant, that’d go beyond mere policing, into police-state territory.” (08/19/25)
“When U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15, Putin was greeted by a flyover of an American B-2 strategic bomber. Such flyovers can be a show of respect for a visiting statesperson, but Putin’s reptilian brain likely also registered fear as the stealthy aircraft roared overhead. He knows better than anyone that the world’s most advanced nuclear bomber could end his life within seconds. This show of nuclear force followed closely on the heels of Trump’s order to reposition nuclear submarines to the ‘appropriate regions’ in response to threats against the United States made by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Some analysts have criticized Trump’s nuclear saber-rattling as dangerous. But in fact, Trump can and should ramp up nuclear threats as part of a successful negotiation strategy to bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to an end.” (08/18/25)
“President Donald Trump declared Monday a success, posting that he’d ‘had a very good meeting with distinguished guests,’ then ‘a further meeting in the Oval Office.’ After which he phoned Russia’s Vladimir Putin to start arranging a Putin sitdown with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, then ‘we will have a Trilat, which would be the two Presidents, plus myself.’ Crucially, he was caught on a hot mic earlier saying he believes Putin truly wants to reach a peace deal: ‘I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.’ The day sure offered grounds for hope, starting with an Oval Office love-in as Trump, Zelensky and a pack of European leaders cooed at each other.” (08/18/25)
“As Putin was clearly building an authoritarian state, silencing the media, rigging elections, persecuting his opponents, Western leaders continued with business as usual. American presidents of both parties looked into Putin’s soul and pushed reset buttons. European leaders rolled out royal red carpets, signed lucrative deals, launched new gas pipelines all the while, I suppose, hoping to maintain some sort of a modus operandi with Mr. Putin in the international arena, at the price of ignoring and enabling his abuses inside of Russia — an immoral policy, if there ever was one. But also, a very impractical one. Because one other clear lesson from Russian history is that internal repression and external aggression are always two sides of one coin — because a government that tramples on the rights of its own people will never respect the borders of its neighbors.” (08/18/25)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Rindala Alajaji & Jason Kelley
“HB0043 is a ‘bounty’ law that deputizes any resident with a child to file civil lawsuits against websites they believe are in violation, effectively turning anyone into a potential content cop. There is no central agency, no regulatory oversight, and no clear standard. Instead, the law invites parents in Wyoming to take enforcement for the entire state — every resident, and everyone else’s children — into their own hands by suing websites that contain a single example of objectionable content. … This is a textbook example of a ‘heckler’s veto,’ where a single person can unilaterally decide what content the public is allowed to access.” (08/18/25)
“The infrastructure is now visible to those willing to see it. The systematic replacement of natural systems with artificial ones has reached into every domain — money, food, health, education, information. What began as isolated changes has revealed itself as a coordinated operation: the complete substitution of reality with decree, ownership with access, competence with credentials. … As more people realize everything is bullshit and start looking for genuine answers, something interesting happens: many of the solutions are found in the past. Not because we should abandon technology or retreat from modernity, but because we discarded methods and attitudes toward life, humanity, and time itself that actually worked.” (08/18/25)
“The Trump administration’s war on reality will make it meaningfully difficult to understand the health of the economy in the coming months. If data is either not being collected or is no longer reliable, now that Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as punishment for weak jobs numbers, it’s hard not to succumb to bias or motivated reasoning, on either side of the political divide. So before we get murkier radio signals, we need to assess the numbers we have now, to inform the trends for the future. Most of this picture is mixed and influenced by a bunch of different factors. But we can say one thing definitively: Hiring has been relatively dormant since Trump took the oath of office.” (08/19/25)
