Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Andre Pagliarini
“[T]here’s a reason Washington’s tariffs and the Brazilian presidential race have become inseparable. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the convicted former president and Lula’s likely opponent in the October election, visited Trump, Rubio, and other senior officials in Washington in May. He returned to lobby USTR directly again in July, this time asking for a 180-day delay so the tariffs wouldn’t land before Brazilians voted. His argument was candid about the politics involved: imposing the tariffs now, he told American officials, would hand Lula ‘precisely the political victory’ the president’s campaign has been ‘engineering.’ Lula, for his part, has accused the senator, whose brother advocated for Trump’s trade war against Brazil last year, of committing ‘yet another act of treason against the Fatherland.'” (07/20/26)
“Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has been absent from Congress, hospitalized for weeks — first with no comment on his medical condition, still with very little information divulged. There should be an ethic in public service that when one is incapacitated, one hands the trust given back to the public to fill anew. Sadly, this tradition has fallen victim to … take your pick: incumbency, partisanship, lack of electoral competition, Cicero’s times/mores. History’s third-oldest U.S. Congress ‘boasts’ 23 members of the House and Senate now eighty years old or older.” (07/20/26)
“Marx looms over the American political landscape. Victor Marx, that is. As Democrats continue to embrace anti-white socialists, Colorado Republicans nominate a strange outsider for governor. … Marx claims to be a high-risk humanitarian who rescues women from dangerous circumstances. He told an interviewer he helped kill a man when he was seven. He frequently talks about engaging in exorcisms and battling demons. These comments and others would make him a hit on the podcast circuit, but aren’t ideal for a gubernatorial candidate. … DSA candidates have a discernible ideology. Marx and other ‘Insane Clown Party’ figures do not. … The DSA can actually take power and implement a radical agenda. The ICP can only lose races and create headlines for liberal reporters.” (07/20/26)
“Fifty years ago, liberals were attacking what today is called the deep state—that is, the unelected members of the federal government. At the center of this liberal coalition was Idaho Sen. Frank Church, who in 1975 and 1976 headed high-profile hearings into the national security apparatus that had been created at the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s, but which seemed to be pursuing interests very different from what elected officials were telling voters.” (07/20/26)
“The economic case for data centers is indisputable: A single hyperscale facility brings in billions in capital investment, creates a slew of high-paying jobs from construction to engineering and ensures local governments are flush with tax revenue. Big Tech bogeymen such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta upgrade local infrastructure and create secondary economies, often in struggling areas. Long term, these companies offer self-sustaining economic activity that the magical ‘green’ industry never did or could.” (07/19/26)
“Perhaps the most telling aspect of Trump’s address wasn’t what he said. It was what he didn’t say. At no point did he identify a single state where vote totals were changed. He didn’t claim that a voting machine actually switched votes. He didn’t allege that tabulation reports were manipulated or that election databases were corrupted. He didn’t present evidence that any jurisdiction reported vote totals it knew to be false. He relied on the viewer to infer those claims without stating them explicitly. Instead, the speech relied on familiar patterns, such as discussions of foreign cyber capabilities, intelligence reporting, and potential vulnerabilities. Each of these was presented as proof that the election itself had been manipulated.” (07/19/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Richard K Vedder & Nicholas Jadwisienczak
“Republicans disheartened by growing fears of electoral losses at the federal level this fall can take some solace in evidence from a new, soon-to-be-released study that we coauthored for Unleash Prosperity, a group focused on promoting pro-growth policies. The graph below shows the results from that study, revealing that in this century economic growth has been substantially greater in the Republican Red states. The new study focuses on the more recent years 2020-2024, using modern statistical techniques to show that even after other factors impacting economic change—like climate, the proportion of the population working in manufacturing or producing oil, or the degree of urbanization—are taken into account, Republican-dominated states grew sharply faster than Democratic oriented ones.” (07/19/26)
