“‘Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. ‘They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.’ Nonpartisan election experts emphasize that this is a completely inaccurate and misleading interpretation of the US Constitution and the decentralized, state-controlled election model it describes.” (09/02/25)
Source: Brennan Center for Justice
by Michael Waldman
“US President Donald Trump has threatened to send troops to Chicago to ‘straighten that one out’. New York City, he says, might be next. Already, armed National Guard regiments are patrolling the streets of Washington, DC. All this on top of the deployment of troops to Los Angeles earlier in the summer. President Trump has threatened to send troops to Chicago ‘to straighten that one out’. New York City, he says, might be next. Already, armed National Guard regiments are patrolling the streets of Washington, DC. All this on top of the deployment of troops to Los Angeles earlier in the summer. The deployment of out-of-state troops to occupy cities cannot plausibly promote public order. It’s blunt force, a brutal power grab. It runs afoul of the Constitution and the proper role for states.” (09/02/25)
“The Federal Reserve, along with the other CBs, has spent the past 8 years desperately trying to create inflation. This is because the thing that scares the hell out of them is deflation. Deflation is the ‘monster’ because in a debt based monetary system new debt has to be constantly created to keep asset values expanding. When asset values shrink, the debt acquired to ‘buy’ them doesn’t – revealing what was hidden all along – insolvency – which leads to contagion – which leads to bailouts – and the process starts all over again. Except that this time the CBs are afraid the monster will be too big to bail out. For once they are right.” (09/02/25)
“Donald Trump has figured out the cheat code for authoritarianism: Fake emergencies bring real power. The president has invoked emergency authority in three distinct contexts — declaring a public-safety emergency to defend his takeover of the District of Columbia; claiming an ‘invasion’ to justify an immigration crackdown, including sending the National Guard to Los Angeles; and invoking ‘extraordinary’ factors to support his tariff war. Although Trump is not the first president to grab greater powers behind the cloak of emergency authority, he is the first to have done so in such an extreme way. Worse yet, the lack of resistance from Congress or the courts suggests that there is little, if anything, to prevent Trump from expanding his use of ’emergency’ authority even further as he accumulates power.” (09/02/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Jake Scott
“Britain was once a giant of car manufacturing. In the 1950s, we were the second-largest producer in the world and the biggest exporter. Coventry, Birmingham, and Oxford built not just cars, but the reputation of an industrial nation; to this day, it is a source of great pride that Jaguar-Land Rover, a global automotive icon, still stands between Coventry and Birmingham. By the 1970s, we were producing more than 1.6 million vehicles a year. Today? We have fallen back to 1950s levels. Last year, Britain built fewer than half our peak output—800,000 cars, and the lowest outside the pandemic since 1954. Half a year later, by mid-2025, production has slumped a further 12%. The country that once led the automotive revolution is now struggling to stay afloat, and fighting to remain relevant.” (09/02/25)
“So, Labor Day morning, I decided to get out of the house for a little bit – a chance to clear my head from all the crap happening – and check out refrigerators on sale at Lowe’s. On the way there, I drive through one intersection with a group of about 15 leftists holding signs about ‘Fight Trump’ and ‘End Oligarchy!’ I doubt any of them could define oligarchy, but they’re ready to fight it! A few more intersections, a few more mutant gatherings, and one thing became clear: Democrats are miserable people. Imagine having a day off work – a federal holiday – and you choose not to spend it with family and friends, but to … wave signs with slogans as stale as their hairdos at cars full of people who are going about their lives in a way you don’t seem capable of doing.” (09/02/25)
“Why do wages for some jobs go up while others go down? Why do some jobs pay a lot more than others? The barstool answers you get to those questions tend to emphasize factors such as how difficult, dangerous, or important a job is, how much education is necessary, etc. You tend to get moralistic answers in a lot of cases, answers that attempt to explain why highly paid people deserve to be highly paid. But none of those answers is true. Anybody who thinks about it for 10 seconds knows that education, merit, social value, and other factors of that kind have nothing at all to do with earnings. … Wages are a price — the price of labor — and prices are determined by supply and demand. That’s it.” (09/02/25)
“The unipolar moment is over, and the U.S. must adapt its foreign policy to an increasingly multipolar world. The old overly ambitious strategy of liberal hegemony is ill-suited to the new realities of the 21st century. Moreover, the U.S. is badly overstretched with too many commitments around the world, and it needs to chart a different course if it is to prosper in the decades to come. To meet that need, Emma Ashford — a senior fellow at the Stimson Center — lays out the case for a new pragmatic grand strategy of realist internationalism in her valuable new book, ‘First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World.’ … Ashford makes a good case that this multipolarity is real and that the U.S. will have to change how it operates in the world to flourish in these new conditions.” (09/02/25)
“I have been obsessing on fast food since the days when the pundits told us to ignore the data showing rising real wages, people can’t make ends meet. The reason for focusing on fast food is that eating out is pretty much the ultimate discretionary spending item. If people are feeling stretched financially, reducing the number of times they eat out is about the simplest possible way to save money. … things seemed to look pretty good for the first three years of the Biden administration. Spending on fast-food restaurants grew rapidly in 2021 and through 2022 and most of 2023. … While people might have been telling pollsters they couldn’t make ends meet, and news reporters kept highlighting tales of economic hardship, they were spending as though things were pretty good. That is no longer the case. Spending in fast-food restaurants pretty much stagnated in 2024 and has trended downward this year.” (09/02/25)
“Socialism is alive and well, and it is growing, though maybe not in the way you expect. The federal government provides more than $700 billion in contracts to private sector corporations. It also forgoes approximately $1.5 trillion in tax receipts to provide tax breaks for corporations to encourage job-creating investments, or so we are told. The net result is that corporations avoid paying their fair share [sic] while we, the taxpaying public, make up the difference. As if that public support for private enterprise isn’t enough, now President Trump is taking it to the next level by acquiring 10 percent of Intel’s stock in exchange for the $8.9 billion the government is providing the company via the Chips and Science Act. From one angle, this certainly is an improvement over the big bank bailouts …” (09/02/25)
