Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille
“The president’s protectionism has constituted the largest tax increase since 1993.” (07/31/26)
https://reason.com/2026/07/31/trumps-tariffs-will-cost-each-american-household-900-in-2026/
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson
“Donald Trump is cheap in every sense of the word: cheap in that he is an infamous deadbeat who cheated his creditors; cheap in the sense of tacky; cheap in that he is the sort of man whose virtue, such as it is, can be overcome at no great expense — a cheap date. Trump is a $40 fake Rolex made copious flesh. … the CEO of Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, bought the whole Swiss watch industry a better deal on tariffs with a desk clock that was not even solid gold but merely gold plated, along with a 1-kg bar of gold engraved with the word ‘PRESIDENT’—in case Trump, who seems to believe that there is something called the Islamic Republic of Japan and who conflates Vladimir Putin with Volodymyr Zelensky, finally forgets which office it is he holds.” (07/31/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/trump-moral-bribes-diamonds/
Source: Law & Liberty
by Miles Smith IV
“Faulkner provides a grave Augustinian understanding of the human capacity for self-delusion and self-aggrandizement.” (07/31/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Naomi Bethune
“Understanding history is tricky. Classes in grade school are generally uneven and whitewashed, if not outright sanitized. Fewer and fewer students are studying it in college at all. Textbooks focus on a select few figures who are painted as defining social movements, particularly those who are looked back on as favorable, or even palatable. In many cases, the more revolutionary commitments of America’s greatest trailblazers are often reduced to a footnote, if not omitted completely. I myself encountered this phenomenon recently when I was working on my contribution to the Prospect Patriots issue, a profile of Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), one of the country’s first muckrakers and a courageous civil rights activist.” (08/01/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/08/01/hubert-harrison-civil-rights-activist-brian-kwoba/
Source: Antiwar.com
by Peter Rodgers
“Somewhere in the thousand-plus pages of America’s annual National Defense Authorization Act sits a provision that started out as Section 224 and later became Section 219 in the House version. On paper it looks straightforward: expand technological and defense cooperation between the United States and Israel. In practice it has turned into one of the more revealing fights in current U.S. politics. The reactions on both sides make clear that this is not really about joint research projects or sharing a few more technical papers. It has become a proxy for bigger arguments about how far American security commitments should go, what role Israel should play in Washington’s strategy, and where the Republican Party is headed on foreign policy.” (07/31/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jack Hunter
‘Numerous polls can’t all be wrong. At some point there will be a reckoning with the out-of-touch Republican establishment in Washington.” (07/31/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/republican-support-war-iran/
Source: Washington Monthly
by Bill Scher
“Democratic voters, long partial to candidates who show a capacity for bipartisan compromise over ideological purity, may be changing.” (07/31/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/07/31/democratic-primary-2028-2026/
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman
“The long-run trend has been this: necessities and an array of luxuries (which have become necessities) are spectacularly cheap by historical standards. This is seen clearly in terms of the time price of goods. Governments, of course, have kept the trendline from being smooth. In a thousand ways, politicians and bureaucrats impede the general fall in prices.” (07/31/26)
Source: American Greatness
by Thaddeus G McCotter
“It seems like a lifetime ago, and in many ways it was. Now called to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci’s craven charade of invoking his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent lest he incriminate himself (even after he had been preemptively pardoned by President Biden) the baleful memories of the COVID-19 pandemic flooded back: the insanity, misery, hubris, and hypocrisy of the ‘trust the science’ mob; and the crushing of dissenting voices and the canceling of the unvaccinated by the lockdown Left. I vividly recollected my disgust when the ‘medical community’s experts’ told us it was acceptable, if not imperative, in the midst of a readily communicable and lethal pandemic to pause the lockdowns and go protest against systemic racism, which, while an abstraction was supposedly more dangerous than COVID-19.” (08/01/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/01/the-fifth-for-fauci-and-the-administrative-state/
Source: Independent Institute
by Scott Beyer
“The first time I realized how disruptive artificial intelligence could become wasn’t from reading an academic paper or watching a keynote speech. It was while working on a home design for our family construction business. In the past, we’ve paid architects thousands and waited weeks for them to produce CAD renderings. But I found while experimenting with AI that renderings of near-equal quality could be generated in minutes for free. … it’s easy to conclude that AI will put numerous architects out of work. Might it bring the same widespread unemployment to other white-collar professions? I don’t think so. AI will likely follow the same historical pattern as every revolutionary technology. Rather than destroying labor, it will reallocate it through “creative destruction.'” (07/31/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/07/31/ai-wont-destroy-work-it-will-just-change-it/