“In progressive circles, there is a great fear about the consolidation of Hollywood and the broader media into the hands of allies of MAGA. ABC’s capitulation to Trump is well documented. Larry Ellison’s son David bought Paramount: Stephen Colbert was suddenly off the air, and Bari Weiss was running CBS News. Oracle, Ellison’s company, is the main benefactor of the still-pending TikTok acquisition from its Chinese parent. And Paramount made several overtures to Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) to buy the company, consolidate its TV and film studios along with its array of cable channels under one roof, and put a conservative oligarch family in charge of CBS, CNN, and a large segment of American entertainment and media. But WBD decided to look at other offers. And today, they chose the higher-value bid: an $82.7 billion merger with Netflix.” (12/05/25)
“Most people see America as an experiment in classical liberalism, whereby the founders created a system of limited government, religious pluralism and liberty. Religious leaders are free to spread their message through the culture — but not to take control of the levers of power and base lawmaking on their sectarian Bible interpretations. The Constitution protects everyone’s natural rights, with its main purpose limiting the sphere of government — not implementing rules to assure proper religious observance. There really is no other way to seriously read our Constitution, but many religious people still argue the founders were Christians who envisioned a Christian nation.” (12/05/25)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alexander William Salter
“Markets want predictable interest rates. However, that isn’t the Fed’s job. Officially, the Fed has a three-part mandate: full employment, price stability, and moderate interest rates. An unspoken agreement between politicians and central bankers has made this a de facto dual mandate focusing on labor markets and price levels. Managing the money supply addresses both concerns. We need to change how we think about monetary policy, however, or else we’re setting ourselves up to get repeatedly fooled. Adjusting interest rate targets is a means to an end. The interest rate is not the price of money, but rather the price of time. When you borrow, you’re renting capital. Interest rates reflect the value we place on having capital right now, as opposed to later.” (12/05/25)
“There is no ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, even though an agreement reached on October 9 supposedly established one. The Israeli assault on the Strip continues, albeit at a reduced pace from what it was for most of the past two years. By one count, Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement 591 times between October 10 and December 2 with a combination of air and artillery attacks and direct shootings. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that during this period, 347 Palestinians have been killed and 889 injured. The pattern of casualties including women and children as well as journalists continues. Meanwhile, it is hard to find any documented Israeli casualties in the Gaza Strip during the same period, beyond an early shooting incident at Rafah in which Israel says a soldier was killed and Hamas says it had nothing to do with it.” (12/05/25)
“Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement — in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged. I no longer look at it that way. … taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly — one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.” (12/05/25)
“Although much has already been said, I can’t not comment on Sarah Hurwitz, the former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter, who faults young people (especially young Jews) for applying their power of abstraction in thinking about the Holocaust. What do I mean by that? Hurwitz thinks (or says she does) that the TikTok generation makes a big mistake by drawing general lessons from the National Socialist regime’s mass murder of European Jews last century. She is dismayed that young people have concluded that powerful bad people, no matter who they are, should not harm weak people, no matter who they are. So what’s the problem? According to Hurwitz, they were supposed to learn that killing weak people of a particular ethnicity or religion is horrible only when the victims are Jewish.” (12/05/25)
“Some of the damage done by ‘campaign finance reforms’ has been reversed. And Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that likely will continue the court’s dismantling of measures the political class has enacted to control political speech about itself. This case can extinguish an absurdity: a campaign regulation supposedly intended to prevent parties from corrupting their own candidates. The multiplication of, and subsequent unraveling of, reformers’ laws to ration political speech is a decades-long lesson about cynicism in the guise of idealism.” (12/05/25)
“Americans, the Associated Press reports, spent a record $11.8 billion online on ‘Black Friday’ (the day after Thanksgiving) this year … and another record, $6.4 billion on Thanksgiving itself. Physical in-store traffic for Black Friday also ticked up versus the previous week, although shopping for deals has strongly moved online in recent years. What caught my eye about the story, though, was the headline, which suggests the record sales occurred ‘despite wider economic uncertainty.’ ‘Despite?’ More likely, in my opinion, ‘because.’ With inflation still running at about 3% annually, prices subject to Donald Trump’s seemingly random tariff policies, the job situation looking more uncertain and unpredictable than it has since the COVID-19 panic, etc., what have American consumers been up to? I can tell you what they’ve been up to, because I’ve been up to it myself. What we’ve all been up to is ‘waiting for the best deal if the purchase isn’t an emergency.'” (12/04/25)
Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Every military servicemember’s oath is a pledge to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is not an oath to a politician. It is not an oath to a party. And it is not an oath to the police state. Yet what happens when those same men and women are being told—by their own government—that obedience to power and loyalty to a political leader come before allegiance to the Constitution they swore to uphold? That question isn’t hypothetical. It is the moral line now being tested in real time, and it goes to the heart of what kind of country we are: do we live in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, or in a militarized police state where ‘legality’ is whatever the person with the most power and the biggest army say it is?” (12/04/25)
“Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass. Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.” (12/04/25)
