Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Caleb O Brown, Amye L Bensenhaver, Kate Miller, & Heather Lemire
“Kentucky built its Open Records Act on a simple, powerful premise: that free and open examination of public records is in the public interest. For nearly 50 years, that premise provided a basic guarantee that Kentuckians could see what their government was doing in their name. That premise is now under a growing threat — from the legislature, and increasingly from the courts.” (06/09/26)
“Last week’s blockbuster jobs report, with more than 265,000 jobs added when including upward employment revisions, was very welcome news to almost all Americans. The exception would be the economists of the Left who throughout Donald Trump’s now-five-and-a-half years in the White House keep getting the economy dead wrong. Just a few months ago a gaggle of economists on the Left, led by Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, started warning of ‘stagflation,’ a witch’s brew of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. He wrote that ‘any statement that things aren’t as bad as they were in the 1970s should come with the caveat ‘so far.” … These are the same false claims made during Trump’s first term, when some critics warned his policies would cause ‘a second Great Depression.'” (06/09/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Even before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the ‘patsy,’ Lee Harvey Oswald, was a ‘Dead Man Walking.’ There was no way that the orchestrators of the assassination and the cover-up would have ever permitted him to come to trial. Silencing Oswald by killing him immediately after the assassination was always part and parcel of the assassination and its cover-up. How can we be certain of this? By examining the circumstances surrounding the fraudulent autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted on President Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination.” (06/09/26)
Source: CounterPunch
by Bruce Schneier & Jon Penney
“Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it. Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent. This silence comes in the wake of a relentless Trump administration war on campus speech that has involved lawsuits, arrests, deportations and expulsions. … It’s increasingly clear to us that these impacts are not incidental or ancillary to Trump administration policy. Rather, the chilling effects are the point. This is the closest thing to a consistent governing strategy in Trump’s second term.” (06/09/26)
“‘Strict construction’ is a taboo phrase, not just for judicial activists looking for unlimited government, but also for most originalists. Perhaps that is because the phrase can mean several different things; or perhaps it is a concession to the reality of the expansive national state in the twentieth century, as if to say Yes, I want to impose some limits, but I’m not one of those crazies. Or, as Antonin Scalia was often known to quip, ‘I am a textualist. I am an originalist. I am not a nut.’ It is therefore a daring endeavor to put forward an entire, clause-by-clause guide to the Constitution explicitly committed to strict construction. That is what William J. Watkins Jr. of the Independent Institute has done with The Independent Guide to the Constitution.” (06/09/26)
“Imagine Congress debating a bill to integrate Tunisia into the National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB). Shared military supply chains, joint research, and development, linked battlefield data, and a U.S. executive agent coordinating defense-technology cooperation between Washington with Tunis. Presented plainly, the proposal forces the reaction before the argument even begins. The instinctive question: Why Tunisia? Arrives uninvited. Yet that is precisely what Congress has already begun to normalize.” (06/09/26)
“Firms that grow large before going public raise questions about whether index membership rules shape market reality rather than merely reflect it.” (06/09/26)
“Market failure, which I am defining here as a market not reaching the equilibrium condition where quantity supplied equals quantity demanded, is ubiquitous. Every time we walk into stores, we see market failure happening: shelves and shelves of goods sit, waiting for buyers. This is excess supply (surplus), a market failure. If the market were in equilibrium and perfectly clearing, then when you (the marginal consumer) walk into a store, you should see only the good(s) in the precise quantity you want to buy at the price that precisely equals your willingness to pay for the marginal unit. Nothing else should remain. … Obviously, such an outcome does not exist. Some of the goods we want exist in surplus. Some exist in shortage. And, consequently, the market has failed. But this failure is vital to the workings of the market, broadly called the ‘market process.'” (06/09/26)
“The Republican revolt against President Donald Trump began over an issue that was never supposed to become a crisis: another war in the Middle East. In recent weeks, a group of Republican members of Congress has openly challenged the White House — not over taxes, immigration, or even the budget, but over the most fundamental power of any president: the authority to lead the country into war. When several Republicans chose to stand alongside Democrats and support efforts to limit the president’s war powers, something greater than a routine legislative vote took place. This was not merely a legal disagreement over the interpretation of the Constitution; it was a sign of a deeper fracture emerging at the core of a movement that was once united around Trump’s leadership.” (06/09/26)
“The Los Angeles Republican mayoral candidate was seen as a cutting-edge adopter of artificial intelligence, but it only cut down his chances of winning.” (06/09/26)
