Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“Vance is trying to spin U.S.-Israeli aggression as having been successful in delivering something that it absolutely did not deliver.” (06/18/26)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/vances-dishonest-diplomatic-spin
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“Don’t be fooled by campaign rhetoric. Here is how to evaluate voting records and hold Florida candidates accountable this election cycle.” (06/17/26)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/the-voters-audit-how-to-spot-a-true
Source: New York Post
by Miranda Devine
“‘I’m the boss,’ President Trump joked when he arrived a bit late to a meeting with G7 leaders in France Wednesday. He is. That’s what his detractors forget. America is ‘the boss’ again, the colossus. Iran doesn’t bully us. Israel doesn’t instruct us. Europe can sneer at Donald Trump all it likes, but it’s a supplicant. China respects us. Canada bows. Trump understands power, and it rests easy on his shoulders. He joked about it at the G7 in his relaxed American fashion, and European leaders now get it. They laughed along, but they understood. By the time he had emerged from a glittering dinner at Versailles to fly home, he had signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran that has the great and the good worked up into a symphony of hysterical catastrophizing.” [editor’s note: It’s sometimes hard to discern what percentages of Devine’s brain are “clueless” vs. “crazy,” but the total of other percentages is zero – TLK] (06/17/26)
Source: Show-Me Institute
by Susan Pendergrass
“Why do families need school choice? The answer is straightforward — a single, zip-code-assigned school cannot possibly be everything to every child. And when a school fails a student, that student needs a lifeline. A recent iteration of EdChoice’s long-running Public Opinion Tracker survey shows that roughly one in four parents indicate that they have had to switch their children’s school at some point. When you dig into why these families are switching, the reasons are straightforward. Parents pull their children out of schools because of unfortunate, everyday problems that directly impact a child’s well-being and future.” (06/17/26)
https://showmeinstitute.org/article/education/this-is-why-missouri-families-need-choice/
Source: The UnPopulist
by Andy Craig & Shikha Dalmia
“Trump’s authoritarian assault has decimated our institutions that ‘kitchen table’ issues won’t fix.” [editor’s note: The analogy to post-Civil-War “Reconstruction” sucks. The first time around, its whole point was to rebuild a bad former system minus only one bad feature (slavery), and the emergence of Jim Crow afterward marked even that subtraction at least partly a failure. Trying to “reconstruct” a crappy pre-Trump politics is a terrible idea, and the only good thing about it is that it won’t work either – TLK] (06/17/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/democrats-need-to-lead-the-second
Source: Expression
by Angel Eduardo
“Through her detailed reporting on lynching after the Civil War, Wells did more than most to demonstrate the power of using one’s voice in the pursuit of truth and justice.” (06/17/26)
https://expression.fire.org/p/ida-b-wells-journalist-activist-civil
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Thomas Renard and Colin P Clarke
“Terrorism is evolving, sometimes almost beyond recognition. The pace of radicalization is accelerating. Attacks have become increasingly basic, unsophisticated and cheap. For some, terrorism seems to be like a craving, a source of dopamine to satisfy carnal impulses. Quick preparation, convenience and mass production: Welcome to the age of fast-food terrorism.” (06/17/26)
Source: Liberalism.org
by Paul Dragos Aligica
“From time to time, we liberals must rethink the world. Deglobalization, the rise of economic decoupling, the return of tariffs, and the increasing salience of weaponized interdependence have come to define the current landscape. Where once the dominant terms were efficiency, integration, and mutual gains, now they are geoeconomics, resilience, chokepoints, and decoupling. The vocabulary shift is an indicator and a diagnostic. Rhetorical change of this order reflects structural change in how economic exchange and political power actually relate. A liberal position adequate to that new reality cannot be built by repeating arguments shaped by an earlier phase of globalization. We must rebuild — analytically and institutionally — for the world that integration, pushed to its limits, has actually produced.” (06/17/26)
https://www.liberalism.org/p/liberalism-in-the-age-of-weaponized-interdependence
Source: American Greatness
by Victor Davis Hanson
“The shooting portion of the Iran ‘War’ lasted about 40 days, far shorter than Barack Obama’s 2011 congressionally unauthorized seven-month bombing campaign against Libya. Bill Clinton’s unauthorized 78 days of bombing Serbia in 1999 hit bridges, schools, hospitals, monuments, and power plants—far more indiscriminate targeting than anything in the Iran War so far. No one yet knows the ultimate verdict on the war, given all the economic, military, political, and strategic variables still in play. A memorandum of understanding released this week might end the war, or result in further American strikes, depending on the degree of Iranian concessions and compliance. But in this confusing, ongoing drama, many fabrications and distortions still circulate.” (06/18/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“If a lab could create the perfect congressional candidate for a particular district at this political moment, it might spit out Alexis Goldstein. She was a federal worker who was fired amid the Trump administration’s push to cripple the administrative state, and she’s running in the Sixth Congressional District in Maryland, a state full of federal workers downsized in the DOGE push. Goldstein, a former program manager in the chief technologist’s office at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was fired, in fact, for confronting DOGE functionaries at the CFPB offices last February. Plus, Goldstein is a highly skilled financial analyst—she worked as a programmer on Wall Street before quitting to join Occupy Wall Street in 2010—at a time when one of the most operatic and unusual financial schemes of the century is playing out in the highly leveraged data center build-out.” (06/18/26)