Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
“Comparisons to potential action in Venezuela fall apart and furthermore, we took the wrong lessons from 35 years ago anyway.” (11/10/25)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/panama-invasion-venezuela/
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“My colleague Bob Kuttner has ably explained the particulars and the political dynamics of the sudden surrender on the government shutdown from eight Senate Democrats (with Chuck Schumer’s tacit support), what I’m calling the Cave Caucus. Senators dissatisfied with this deal are going to deny unanimous consent to draw out the conclusion, in part to let the situation sink in for the House, where the reaction has been sharply negative. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) only needs his own party members to get the bill passed, and he has delivered tough votes throughout the year. I don’t think House Republicans will rescue the Cave Caucus. I share a lot of the frustrations expressed all over social media. But the biggest one for me comes on page 12 of the continuing resolution that advanced in the Senate last night.” (11/10/25)
https://prospect.org/2025/11/10/most-frustrating-thing-about-shutdown-cave/
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“Talk about a blowout: a few days ago, Texans overwhelmingly supported Proposition 16 to amend their state constitution to clarify that noncitizens of U.S. cannot vote in state and local elections in Texas. The vote: Yes, 72%; No, 28%. Not everybody is happy. Jeff Forrester, who happens to be running against Rep. Candy Noble, a major sponsor of this very amendment — just a coincidence I’m sure — professes confusion about why anybody would care about this question. He asserts that the state constitution already prohibits noncitizen voting and has flung himself into a major Twitter‑X tussle over the matter with the group I lead, Americans for Citizen Voting.” (11/10/25)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2025/11/10/a-puzzling-protest/
Source: The American Conservative
by Joseph Addington
“[T]he risks inherent to any kind of ‘regime collapse’ approach are numerous and severe, and far outweigh any potential benefits. Most pertinently, when any government collapses, the resulting power vacuum is necessarily unpredictable and chaotic, and leaves room for all kinds of actors, state and nonstate, bad and good, to exert their will. Such a situation is not generally conducive to an orderly transition of power of any kind, let alone a transition to democracy. Here the expected comparison is usually Libya, after the bombing campaign that destroyed the Gaddafi regime, but Venezuelan society is not comparable to that of Libya; it is not characterized by a fractured, tribal society and fundamentalist revolutionaries. Instead the major danger is that Venezuela becomes a mid-20th century Colombia: a weak state inundated by brutal organized crime, incapable of defending itself or of disrupting the conflicts between cartels and narcorevolutionary groups fighting over disputed territory.” (11/10/25)
Source: Orange County Register
by Sal Rodriguez
“Once upon a time, a real estate developer named Donald Trump understood the folly of the war on drugs. ‘We’re losing badly the war on drugs,’ he said at a luncheon held by the Miami Herald in April 1990. ‘You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.’ … If President Trump had any guts, he would be channeling the Trump of 1990 and pushing for a complete overhaul of American drug policy prioritizing treatment and reducing the harms of drug abuse. Instead, he is going all-in on an illegal policy of executing people who happen to be on boats in the Caribbean and declaring that he’s saving tens of thousands of lives each time.” (11/09/25)
Source: Town Hall
by William Marshall
“Those of us grossly disappointed in Kash Patel’s performance as FBI director, despite our high hopes at his appointment, now have an objective test case by which he might be judged fairly. It seems that dogged citizen sleuths were able to do what vaunted FBI investigators had been unable – or unwilling – to do after nearly five years of work and millions of dollars spent: Identify the elusive individual who planted the pipe bombs outside RNC and DNC headquarters on January 6, 2021. Many of us on the right supporting the President’s agenda, me included, had suspected from the jump that the pipe bomb suspect was a government operative. And that his or her goal was to create a distraction on January 6 that would divert police attention during the giant Deep State influence operation that was the January 6 ‘insurrection’.” (11/10/25)
Source: exile in happy valley
by Nicky Reid
“As long as there is a system in place that offers one class of people a monopoly on the use of force, the government will always be a den for despotism regardless of whether the scam is dressed up in the trappings of socialism, capitalism, democracy or nationalism. Just so long as the sanctity of the state is left intact, the results will always ultimately be the same. This was the painful revelation that ultimately led a Bolivarian-Guevarist like me to embrace free market anti-capitalism and post-left anarchism, but some things never change, and this includes my solidarity with what’s left of the Bolivarian Revolution as it faces down the barrels of total war at the hands of an empire that it had humiliated one too many times.” (11/09/25)
https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/11/you-dont-have-to-be-commie-to-stand.html
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“Government meddling spikes home prices via zoning and inflation. Skip the interest gouge. Build more houses instead.” (11/09/25)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/trumps-50-year-mortgage-debt-trap
Source: JimBovard.com
by James Bovard
“The plight of 42 million food-stamp recipients is the federal-government shutdown’s most inflammatory issue. Federal judges ordered the Trump administration to pay food-stamp benefits regardless. Team Trump first offered to pay 50% of this month’s benefits, then raised its bid to 65% and now says it will pay 100% while appealing the court case. Democrats and their media allies claim President Trump is ‘weaponizing hunger.’ Full benefits will likely be paid in the coming weeks as Congress and Trump end their standoff. Federal spending on food stamps — also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — has soared from $17 billion in 2000 to $100 billion last year. How did so many Americans come to rely on Washington for their next meal?” (11/09/25)
https://jimbovard.com/blog/2025/11/09/n-y-post-hunger-games/
Source: In These Times
by Alberto Toscano
“President Donald Trump on September 5 signed the 200th executive order of his second term, bypassing the congressional approval constitutionally required for a full renaming of the Department of Defense by introducing the ‘“Department of War’ as a ’secondary’ designation. Ever preoccupied with names (remember the ‘Gulf of America’?), Trump’s order aims to advertise ’our willingness and availability to wage war to secure what is ours.’ At the public signing, Trump presented the 1947 name change as the end of a century and a half of American military victories: ’And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.’ The millions of casualties of U.S. wars since, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan — wars replete with racist justifications for mass murder — would no doubt be surprised to know they were victims of ’woke’.” (11/10/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/secretary-of-all-wars-pete-hegseth-trump-military