Source: The Hill
by Kim A Snyder & Audrey Wilson-Youngblood
“Political strategists and commentators are looking at Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s stunning special election victory in Texas state Senate District 9 to forecast electoral shifts ahead of 2026’s midterms. But those trying to understand this election’s surprise outcome also need to consider the local politics at play. Rehmet’s opponent was Republican Leigh Wambsganss, chief communications officer of conservative media company Patriot Mobile. She has been a primary architect behind the movement to populate North Texas school boards with candidates willing to orchestrate an extreme, right-wing takeover of public schools. These school board takeovers resulted in unprecedented book bans and attacks on residents’ right to read.” (02/11/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Olivia Webb Kosloff & Emma Freer
“During back-to-back congressional hearings last month, lawmakers grilled the CEOs of five major health insurers about their vertically integrated business models. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called for breakup legislation modeled on the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which structurally separated commercial and investment banking. The idea of bank-style regulation for health insurers isn’t as far off as it sounds. As Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-OR) pointed out, insurance companies take in premiums and invest that money (known as ‘float’) before having to pay it out in claims. ‘That, of course, is what leads to people calling insurers banks, doing a side business as health care,’ Bentz explained. ‘[Y]ou charge the premium, you collect the money, you put the money in the bank, it earns interest, and then you pay it out.'” (02/11/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“In what can be called an act of grand-jury nullification, a federal grand jury has rebuffed an effort by the U.S. Justice Department to seek criminal indictments of six members of Congress for having the audacity to remind American military personnel of their duty to refuse to obey unlawful orders of their superiors, including the president, who serves as commander in chief of the military. The grand-jury rebuff is shocking if for no other reason than a criminal indictment is one of the easiest things that a prosecutor can get.” (02/11/26)
“Trump officials, sagging under the weight of relentless bad headlines, must be breathing a sigh of relief as the January job numbers came in much higher than expected, with 130,000 jobs added. But if you look a bit under the surface, you find a reality that’s a little more difficult for them to brag about. 2025 had some of the weakest job growth on record outside of an official recession. And most of the job growth in that year and this January has been in care work: healthcare and social services; 60 percent of all jobs in last month’s spike are in those fields. That’s important work, but it betokens an aging and ailing population.” (02/11/26)
“Can you imagine any American leader agreeing to gutting the country’s defensive capabilities because a foreign government and its client demanded that we give it up or face an attack? Even if the governments threatening us were much more powerful and had already proven their willingness to attack us without cause, our leaders would rightly refuse to give in. They would understand that making concessions on these issues would just invite further aggression. The U.S. should not attack Iran, and it certainly shouldn’t do it to serve Netanyahu’s aggressive agenda.” (02/11/26)
“As the Trump economy begins to boom even as inflation moderates, Democrats and the anti-Trump media are desperate for a spin that might discredit Trumponomics. Their latest Hail Mary: pushing a counterfactual narrative that President Trump’s tariffs are hurting, rather than stimulating, a manufacturing revival for blue-collar America. The latest manufacturing data obliterates that lie. In January, the ISM Manufacturing Index jumped 4.7 points to 52.6. That wasn’t just an estimate beat; it was a blowout, and an important one. The ISM Manufacturing Index is the most widely followed survey of factory activity worldwide. When it moves above 50, the manufacturing economy is expanding. When it jumps nearly 5 points in a single month to decisively push past 50, something fundamental has changed. That ‘something’ is Trumponomics finally overpowering the wreckage left behind by Bidenomics.” [editor’s note: Hooray! It’s only five points lower than it was a year into Biden’s term — and smidge higher than it was three years into Trump’s first term! Outside of COVID lows, it’s about average for the last five years – TLK] (02/10/25)
“The nomination of Kevin Warsh to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Chair has many people wondering: What makes a good Fed chair? The answer, it turns out, depends on the environment in which the chair will operate. The characteristics that matter most for running an independent central bank differ from those for a central bank under pressure from political actors. Understanding this distinction is important for evaluating the president’s nominee.” (02/11/26)
“There’s a longstanding tradition in American politics of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style – a way of thinking that sees conspiracies lurking everywhere. MAGA-world is particularly riddled with conspiracy thinking – from George Soros and Jewish space lasers, QAnon and the Great Replacement Theory, to Italian satellites hacking into voting machines to deliver the 2020 election to Joe Biden. But these are far-fetched fantasies. The truth is far more banal and shocking. There are people in positions of great power in the U.S. government engaged in evil conspiracies against everything that is good and decent. Their conspiracies are far more extensive and damaging than almost anyone imagined. But there are no evil masterminds behind this. Only amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick.” (02/11/26)
“On February 4, former FOX News host Tucker Carlson delivered what, in other times, would be a shocking assessment: that the future of the Republican Party is a 31-year-old, long-shot candidate in Florida’s gubernatorial race with a string of financial and sexual misconduct allegations but a marked talent for attention-getting provocations. Over the course of James Fishback’s still-young candidacy, he has ostentatiously courted the followers of extreme far-right commentator Nick Fuentes and referred to his Black primary opponent, frontrunner Rep. Byron Donalds, as a ’slave’ (to his donors) who would make Florida ‘a Section 8 ghetto.’ He called for raising tuition for foreign university students to $1 million per year, pledged to expel ‘“every illegal immigrant child’ from the state’s K-12 schools and told a white supremacist social media influencer that ’the great replacement and white genocide’ were the most important political issues other Republicans ignore.” (02/10/25)
