Source: The American Conservative
by Bill Kauffman
“Must all change always be for the worst? In classic ‘arsenic or cyanide, sir?’ fashion, New Yorkers are given the Hobson’s choice between a Democratic Party that has lost any connection to rural and working-class Americans and a Republican Party that is running this year on the Iran War and building more data centers. Whoopee! Ever Pollyanna, I tease out the silver lining in this assault on democracy by scribbling write-in votes, so on November 3, 2026, I’ll be doing just that. And y’know, it’s kinda fun.” (10/26/26)
“The Michigan Senate race between the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, and his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, is this year’s most important election. It’s significant, on a number of levels, not the least of which is that El-Sayed is an Arab American Muslim of Egyptian descent. Prior to this, we’ve had four Arab Americans elected to the US Senate (former Majority Leader George Mitchell [D-ME], James Abourezk [D-SD], James Abdnor [R-SD], and John Sununu [R-NH]), none of them Muslim. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim in the Senate. This is a breakthrough that hasn’t been lost on Republicans and President Trump, who have made a determined effort to exploit it at every turn. They’ve done TV ads alleging that El-Sayed’s mother was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s.” [editor’s note: The headline is likely correct, but maybe not for the reasons given here – SAT] (10/26/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Ella Dawson
“The rich always have more resources at their disposal than do the poor, albeit with much more risk. But, AI, like many other inventions, gives the ordinary person the resources that previously may have been only available to the rich.” (10/26/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“Willie Sutton reportedly said he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. Willie would’ve made a good politician. Governments became friends with banks for the same reason Willie robbed them. If a sufficiently important bank issued more receipts for money than it had locked up in its vaults, people would get suspicious and start to pull their money out. The monetary contagion could spread to other banks, and government, which kept its loot in banks, would be in trouble. Using its status as an agency of coercion, government intervened to stop the redemption while keeping the banks in business.” (10/26/26)
“We need to get better at describing our goals in these terms. My instinct, even now, is to say that the goal of liberalism is to produce an open society, to encourage mutual enrichment and mutual support under conditions of freedom. But we need to be able to paint a picture like the above, to say what these abstractions mean for the people who live where the factory opens, what it means to the local kids when a library opens up where there wasn’t one before.” (10/26/26)
“Under international humanitarian law, as most noticeably enshrined in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, ‘Civilian journalists engaged in professional missions in areas of armed conflict must be respected and protected as long as they are not taking a direct part in hostilities.’ (emphasis added). The State of Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for international humanitarian law. As far as they are concerned, everyone who works for a media outlet that is, in any way, aligned with the military wing of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other militant faction in Gaza, is a terrorist, and can be targeted and killed, and anyone who works as a journalist but has previously had any suspected involvement with any of these military factions in any kind of capacity can also be targeted and killed.” (10/26/26)
“Philadelphia parents noticed troubling signs in their children’s social studies curriculum and asked to see all the materials. They couldn’t get them. Now those materials have been brought to light in a congressional investigation. A new majority staff report from the House Education and Workforce Committee documents how a small group of school personnel turned Philadelphia’s social studies curriculum into a political platform for extremist causes. When those parents approached my organization, the North American Values Institute (NAVI), asking for help, we tried to find out what the district was teaching but we also hit a wall. Eventually, a teacher shared the curriculum with us with considerable trepidation. She asked that we protect her anonymity. That alone should give us pause: A teacher feared sharing public school instructional materials with people seeking to understand what children were learning.” (10/26/26)
“In addition to illegally usurping congressional power over taxation, the Trump trade war against Canada damages our economy and poisons relations with a key ally. Courts should strike it down, just as they did with the IEEPA tariffs and the more recent Section 122 tariffs. They should also invalidated the massive Section 301 ‘forced labor’ tariffs, which have been challenged in three cases currently before the US Court of International Trade.” (10/25/26)
“Asked at the White House whether he would sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit in Shenzhen, Donald Trump steered the conversation from Ukraine to warheads. ‘We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,’ he said. Russia, he added, ‘has been fine on Ukraine.’ In the same exchange he suggested it was time for someone other than Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate for Kyiv. Two proposals now ride on one invitation.” (10/26/26)
