“The latest U.S. strikes on Iran have put one of Donald Trump’s defining promises under pressure. He returned to the White House insisting that America could no longer keep paying for other countries’ wars. During the campaign, he pointed to trillions spent in Iraq and Afghanistan while roads, factories, and communities at home were neglected. A long conflict with Iran would make that promise difficult to keep. The question is not whether the United States can defeat Iran conventionally. It can. The harder question is whether Washington can contain the fallout, absorb the cost, and keep a limited operation from widening. Presidents rarely stumble because their forces cannot win a battle. Trouble begins when war grows, bills rise, and its purpose becomes harder to explain.” (07/15/26)
“When I left the Army in 2013 I had a terrible experience with the VA. Despite having a simple profile and a graduate degree, it took me years to navigate the system after a comedy of administrative errors. I lived the dysfunction that was in all the headlines in 2014. Yet years later, whenever I re-engage, it’s a transformed experience for the better. Things just seem to work and I go back about my life. When government services work, they stop feeling remarkable.” (07/15/26)
“A new report from Unleash Prosperity, a free-market policy group, makes a bold and welcome claim: reforming the FDA could unlock trillions of dollars. The authors’ biggest target isn’t safety testing. It’s the years the FDA spends proving a drug actually works. Trim one year off that process, they estimate, and we generate more than $10 trillion in value to patients and producers. Trim six years, and the figure climbs past $60 trillion. … It takes roughly a decade for a new drug to clear the agency. Most of that time isn’t spent proving the drug is safe. It’s spent proving it works. Developing one now costs nearly $880 million on average, closer to $1.2 billion for cancer and eye treatments, and about 90 percent of trials fail. Meanwhile, the report notes, China has cut its lab-to-trial timelines by 50 to 70 percent and runs clinical trials 50 to 60 percent cheaper than we do.” (07/14/26)
“Zohran Mamdani wants to be a knight in shining armor, coming to save New Yorkers from … their streaming subscriptions. The mayor’s office has announced a new city rule that promises to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up for one. Do New Yorkers seriously need the government to step in and save them from their streaming subscription after a free trial renews? Let’s be adults here. This new rule, touted by the administration as a pillar of ‘Mayor Mamdani’s affordability agenda,’ is part of the larger phenomenon that propelled him into office: pandering to the entitled. For too many Mamdani supporters, the affordability crisis isn’t about the price of eggs. It’s about their inability to exercise the most basic requirements of fiscal responsibility without the government swooping in to hold their hand through the process.” (07/14/26)
“The most consequential thing that the war between the United States and Iran revealed has nothing to do with missiles or centrifuges. The war has shown just how much of the world’s economy now turns on the unchecked decisions of individual men: an American president who could start the war without asking Congress, and a Tehran regime that could respond by putting a fifth of the world’s oil beyond anyone’s reach. … The largest oil and gas supply disruption in history is far from over, but its strongest legacy might well end the dominance of fossil fuels.” (07/14/26)
“Last week, on the sidelines of the NATO summit, Volodymyr Zelensky repeated his demand that Ukraine be invited to join NATO, which was bold, considering that Ukraine’s president wasn’t even invited to the NATO summit. Zelensky attended a leaders dinner but was not invited to speak at, or even attend, the summit’s meetings. This year, Zelensky’s argument for NATO membership took a new direction. While the Ankara Summit Declaration, released at the end of the summit, renewed NATO’s ‘unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity,’ it did not repeat the pledge made at earlier summits that Ukraine would become a member of NATO.” (07/14/26)
“Yesterday the president of the United States made an announcement that changed the face of the world order. He declared that, starting immediately, the United States would charge a 20 percent toll on the shipping of all goods through the Strait of Hormuz. We should be clear: This was never going to happen. The U.S. Navy will not keep a fleet of ships in the region permanently. Neither China, India, Japan, Australia, nor any other country will pay 20 percent tariffs to the United States on cargo moving through the strait. This was make-believe. The president of the United States was issuing proclamations utterly detached from reality, like a late-stage Saddam Hussein. You can tell that Trump’s plan is make-believe because of the non-reaction from the rest of the world.” (07/15/26)
“The network of ALPRs that is expanding across the country is rife with abuse and raises serious concerns about grand promises of greater security at the expense of serious encroachments on Americans’ civil liberties. The explosion of ALPRs along American roadways has given law enforcement considerable access to data on American motorists and their behavior. That these tools are marketed to agencies in heavily populated areas and constructed along our busiest roads is no coincidence.” (07/14/26)
“There’s a long history of federal government intervention in the internal affairs of unions. The grounds for such interventions have usually run the gamut from ideology and politics (e.g., the Taft-Hartley Act’s purge of Communists from the ranks of union leaders) to corruption (the control of various unions by organized crime, e.g., much of the Teamsters until roughly 1990). But the personal pique of a government official was never really the reason behind any such intervention—until today. In the past three weeks, the federal monitor charged with overseeing the United Auto Workers has become, in effect, the most significant supporter of UAW Vice President Rich Boyer’s campaign to unseat UAW President Shawn Fain in the union’s upcoming quadrennial election, to be decided by a vote of the rank and file in the next few months.” (07/14/26)
