Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“Anyone who thought Donald Trump was a fiscal conservative may want to reassess after his most recent promise he made during his Dallas trip earlier this week. At the September 9, 2026 Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, President Trump offered $5,000 to every adult American citizen if the Republicans keep power in the U.S. House and Senate from the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s promise, like many, lacks reality. He’s like every other politician buying votes, something Republicans accuse Democrats of doing frequently. And the math of his promise should scare all Americans, as Trump exposed his disdain for financial conservatism. With around 240 million adult American citizens, Trump’s ‘dividend’ would amount to around $1.2 trillion, when we are already running a deficit of TWO TRILLION DOLLARS a year.” (09/10/26)
“What just happened? As the Monitor’s Mark Sappenfield reported Tuesday, that’s what Germans are asking themselves after a far-right party won nearly 44% of the vote in a state election this week. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been viewed as an extremist threat to democracy by the government in Berlin, and a tacit ‘firewall’ among centrist parties has excluded it from local or regional governing coalitions. Yet, with its euroskeptic, anti-immigration platform, the AfD is now just three seats short of a governing majority in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, and has 28% support among German voters nationally. The follow-up question for Germany, and Europe more broadly, is: What happens next? Or perhaps, what should happen next? The continued rise of right-wing populism across the 27-member European Union is placing new demands on traditional centrist and liberal political leaders.” (09/09/26)
“Many of the free speech fights today rest on the question: How do we protect kids online? But some of the battles over what can be said or shared on the internet are about protecting a remarkably less vulnerable — and significantly more powerful — group from so-called harm: public officials. One such case is in Australia, where top bureaucrat body the Secretaries Board is asking Parliament to cap politicians’ and parties’ ability to share and criticize clips of testimony from the very officials the board represents.” (09/10/26)
“Will Rogers once observed that ‘Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else’ No one ever personified Rogers’ rule as much as University of California, Irvine instructor Matt Goldman, who cracked everyone up this week by joking about celebrating the anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk by alluding to the possible assassination of independent journalist Nick Shirley. Today is the anniversary of the murder of Kirk. In anticipation, Goldman posted a picture of Shirley with the line ‘Someone can do the funniest thing just before the Kirkiversary’. It was a response to an Instagram post by the Harvard Republican Club promoting a speech by Shirley. Goldman reportedly has long found the deaths of disfavored people to be a real knee-slapper, allegedly mocking the deaths of Henry Kissinger and others. Indeed, Goldman takes Gallows humor to a particularly dark place in American politics.” (09/10/26)
“Everyone with a plan to fix Congress wants to help it legislate again by making it easier for lawmakers to compromise. Some call for electing more moderates to serve in the House and Senate. And others want to empower party leaders to impose deadlines, block amendments, and limit debate. But they all share the same underlying goal: produce consensus before the conflict begins. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work. Agreement in the legislative process is not an input that lawmakers supply in advance. It is an output. And the process that makes it possible generates the conflict this approach tries to engineer away. Moderates are the driving force behind shutting deliberation down precisely because they don’t want to take votes/positions.” (09/10/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory. The first two come from a Haaretz article titled ‘Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs’, which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza. Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources.” (09/10/26)
“Article III, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution says that ‘the judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.’ The document says nothing about how many justices should actually sit on the Supreme Court, leaving that rather important decision entirely in the hands of Congress. For advocates of court packing, or court expansion, or whatever other label the idea of adding new justices to the Court might happen to be going by nowadays, this constitutional language is a very handy ally to call upon and legal authority to cite. Whether you are in favor of court packing, opposed to it, or simply agnostic about the concept, there is no doubt about its constitutionality.” (09/10/26)
“Few who lived through the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, could have imagined that the next 25 years would pass without another large-scale attack on American soil. What was far more predictable and harmful, though, is the damage we’ve inflicted on ourselves and on the constitutional system of checks and balances meant to protect us and our democracy.” (09/10/26)
“Chalk another one up for the ethno-nationalists! That’s right, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the Alternativ für Deutschland party (AfD) won an election last Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, one of Germany’s sixteen federal states …. Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency has designated them a ‘confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor,’ and the mainstream media have been calling them ‘Nazis.’ Which they are, kind of … or, okay, not literally. … People tend to refer to them as ‘Nazis’ … well, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, many of them are former neo-Nazis, or they attend meetings held by neo-Nazi groups, or they are otherwise friendly with actual neo-Nazis. Also, some of them spout Nazi slogans at their political rallies, or embed Nazi symbols in their campaign artwork … which, of course, is all in good fun.” (09/10/26)
