Source: TomDispatch
by Mattea Kramer & Sean Fogler
“The federal takeover of Washington, D.C., rightfully attracted extensive media coverage, but an executive order called ‘Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,’ quietly issued on July 24th, received remarkably little attention. Perhaps it didn’t make a splash because it wasn’t specifically about policing (or, for that matter, National Guarding), but more generally about how we should treat people who already exist on the outermost fringes of society, human beings who have long been reduced to labels like ‘addict’ or ‘homeless.’ Indeed, the Trump administration is counting on us to renounce those living on the streets, while struggling with their mental health or the cost of housing (or both). And if history is any guide, that may be exactly what most of us do.” (09/11/25)
“At times like this it is worth considering and reflecting upon the history and principles of religious toleration. We often lost sight of just how demanding and challenging calls for religious toleration were in prior times. Religious toleration was not about being nice to people with different customs or holidays, let alone approving or affirming them, but something far more profound.” (09/11/25)
Source: Washington Monthly
by Richard D Kahlenberg
“In a moment when the President of the United States is trying to use the power of the state to intimidate critics in academia and the media (not to mention his political opponents), some may think that a new book like Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent, which focuses mainly on the illiberalism of the left, is terribly timed. They will fault the author for ‘not meeting the moment,’ or worse, for ‘enabling’ an autocrat by articulating ‘right-wing talking points.’ Liberal critics have already panned the volume …. In fact, the book by Williams, an iconoclastic writer for The Atlantic, could not have come at a better moment. It is precisely because Donald Trump is wreaking havoc daily that it’s crucial to comprehend why so many of our fellow Americans came to dislike the Democrats even more than the unlikable and chaotic man they elected president.” (09/11/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Allen Mendenhall
“My son, age 13, knew Charlie better than I did, if it can be called knowing to watch a man through a screen. Thirteen is an age suspended between innocence and experience: old enough to see that ideas have consequences, young enough to hope those consequences need not include death. He would watch Charlie debate, and what he learned was not any particular doctrine but something more fundamental: that it is possible to believe strongly enough to defend those beliefs in public, to submit one’s convictions to the test of argument and counterargument. When he got out of school yesterday, I had to tell him that the man whose clarity of thought he admired had been murdered for, it seems, the crime of thinking aloud.” (09/11/25)
“Each year, few developments in healthcare policy are more consequential than the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) payment updates. These rules determine how much doctors and hospitals are paid by Medicare—decisions that ripple across the entire healthcare system, shaping the supply of medical care and influencing the rates private insurers pay. This summer, CMS released the new administration’s first proposal for adjusting Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals. The proposed 2026 rule begins to rebalance reimbursements by shifting spending away from hospital-owned settings for care and toward primary care and other freestanding outpatient clinics.” (09/11/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“A liberal in the 19th century was a believer in small government, free markets, and individual freedom, roughly what we now call a libertarian. ‘Libertarian’ had earlier been used for left anarchists, still earlier for believers in the doctrine of free will. In the mid-20th Century, after opponents of liberalism stole its name, believers in classical liberalism started calling themselves libertarians. While ‘libertarian’ can still mean a left anarchist, ‘left libertarian’ usually means a libertarian in the newer sense who supports ideas or policies usually identified with the left.” (09/11/25)
“I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me. As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame. The United States cannot keep living in that shrug.” (09/11/25)
“These self-employed prisoners earned more than inmates in traditional prison jobs and were more likely than other inmates to be rehabilitated.” (for publication 10/25)
