Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Levi Anderson & Caleb O Brown
“Kentucky can continue down the path of silent tax increases, temporary relief measures and growing taxpayer frustration or it can adopt a property tax system that works for everyone.” (01/26/26)
https://www.bluegrassinstitute.org/kys-flawed-property-tax-system-allows-silent-increases/
Source: The Intercept
by Alain Stephens
“With Minneapolis, the Trump administration is creating an existential threat for legal gun owners and Second Amendment advocates.” (01/25/26)
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/25/alex-pretti-minneapolis-trump-guns-second-amendment/
Source: exile in happy valley
by Nicky Reid
“America is in the grips of an epic gang war the likes of which it has never seen before. Masked and heavily armed thugs stock the streets of some of America’s biggest cities with total impunity, thousands of them, tossing houses door to door, dragging unarmed civilians screaming from their vehicles before shoving them into unmarked vans, lighting up anyone who dares to resist and straight up murdering people on camera before sauntering off from the scene of the crime like swaggering cowboys and daring shocked bystanders to do something about it … The gangs I’m talking about are not the Crips or the Bloods or MS-13. The gangs I’m talking about are far worse.” (01/25/26)
https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/01/radically-confronting-americas-federal.html
Source: New York Post
by James Bovard
“The Trump administration may soon reduce highway robbery by 95% in Washington, DC. The Big Apple needs the same silver bullet because the city’s drivers could speedily be victimized by the biggest bureaucratic looting spree of the century. Trump’s Transportation Department proposes to ‘prohibit the operation of automated traffic camera enforcement in the District of Columbia,’ which would ban red-light, speed and stop-sign cameras. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) is attaching a similar provision to congressional transportation legislation. The dispute over red-light and speed cameras goes to the heart of the question of how much harm politicians are entitled to inflict while they shake money out of citizens’ pockets.” (01/26/26)
Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Rauch
“Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.” (01/25/26)
Source: Orange County Register
by Abigail R Hall & Patrick S Ward
“Minneapolis is reeling as masked, heavily armed ICE agents flood immigrant neighborhoods, pulling people from cars, entering homes, and clashing with protesters and observers. Businesses have shuttered, school districts have shifted online, and candlelight memorials mark civilians killed during federal operations. Now President Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy federal troops, framing the unrest as an ‘insurrection’ led by ‘professional agitators.’ The message is clear: escalating force is being cast as governance. But we have been here before.” (01/25/26)
Source: The Reframe
by AR Moxon
“Death squads will sure enough murder civilians; it’s what they were formed to do and trained to do, and death squads are what we very clearly have now, as ICE has summarily executed another U.S. civilian on the streets of Minneapolis. Powerful Republican Nazis like top presidential advisor Stephen Miller are already lying about this good man …. Alex Pretti was a nurse and a helper, a friend and a son, and many other things beside; he was a human being, and an irreplaceable and unique work of art, and now he is a corpse, because corpses are the only thing Nazis can create, and Republicans aren’t different from Nazis in that respect any more than they differ from Nazis in most other respects.” (01/25/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Louis Rouanet
“On January 9, President Donald Trump called for a 10% cap on credit card interest rates — a drop from the 2025 average of 19.7%. This reflects growing political support within the fringes of both the Republican and Democratic Parties for such anti-market policies. In February 2025, Senators Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley also introduced legislation mirroring Trump’s proposal. Supporters of price controls like to blame ‘greedy’ corporations. Trump told reporters that credit card companies ‘really abused the public.’ Unfortunately, his proposal treats symptoms while ignoring the disease, and that will ultimately harm the very consumers it claims to protect.” (01/25/26)
Source: The Dispatch
by Michael Reneau & Kevin Brown
“Disagreement is seldom about the presenting argument. Beneath our disputes lie animating commitments, values, and a mental map of the world. Arguments cannot be separated from belief, and belief, at its core, is a matter of faith. In recent years, stories of fractured discourse and division have dominated the headlines, but the problem of pluralism — people with different visions of the good life living among each other—has bedeviled the Western landscape for centuries.” (01/25/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Reed Lindsay
“For decades, Washington’s economic war on Cuba has weakened a government that has arguably been our most reliable security partner in the Caribbean. Instead of increasing America’s leverage, tougher sanctions have made Cuba less stable—and the United States less secure—by destabilizing the island’s economy, accelerating unprecedented migration to the U.S. border, undermining counternarcotics efforts, hurting U.S. companies, and incentivizing closer relations with Russia and China. A truly failed Cuban state just 90 miles from our coast would probably generate even greater blowback. Current Cuba policy is rooted not in our core national interests, but in Cold War nostalgia and Florida politics.” (01/25/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/an-america-first-case-for-ending-the-cuban-embargo/