“Whoever posted a video on President Trump’s social media containing a racist animation of the Obamas as apes committed an own goal that overshadowed what otherwise would have been a great week for the administration. It shouldn’t have needed the GOP’s only black senator, Tim Scott, to decry the clip as racist for the post to be deleted and an apology issued by the White House. The one-minute video reposted late Thursday on Trump’s Truth Social account was about voter fraud in the 2020 election, one of the president’s favorite subjects. At the end, the video flashed for a split second to a clip of the Obamas from an old ‘Lion King’ meme depicting Democrats as animals, and Trump as a lion. It was obviously a mistake.” [editor’s note: So it’s not the person who posted the video “stirring up racial division,” it’s anyone who noticed and mentioned it? How … Clintonesque – TLK] (02/08/25)
“The fallout from the latest release of files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is being called the biggest political scandal so far this century. Newspapers and television news are splashing fresh revelations daily. High-profile careers are crashing. The police are investigating. There are even whispers of ‘borrowed time’ for the country’s leader. Not in the United States, but in Britain. The enormous tranche of more than 3 million emails and other documents, photos and videos released by the Justice Department on Jan. 30 have created a minor headache in the White House and a major crisis in Whitehall.” (02/08/26)
“The people of Greenland have been fighting for their sovereignty from both Europe and their NATO-American overlords for generations, finally achieving home rule in 1979, voting to withdraw from the EU in 1985, and expanding home rule to a self-government agreement with a window to complete independence in 2009. This is what the actual people of Greenland overwhelmingly support; to be free of pompous white assholes from both sides of the Atlantic along with their toxic waste and petty pissing matches. But Denmark, dear tolerant socialist Denmark, continues to hold Greenland’s local government hostage with a 5 billion Kroner block grant that funds nearly all of their public services with the unspoken threat being that full independence would mean economic devastation.” (02/08/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Joe Tabor
“More than five years after the failure of the so-called Fair Tax Amendment, Illinois politicians are still trying to eliminate the state constitution’s flat income tax protection and make it easier to raise state income taxes.” (02/08/26)
“There is an irony to the undying Jeffrey Epstein scandal: It may never be more than an annoyance for President Trump, who knew Epstein well, but it could topple British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who never met the sex-offender financier. Starmer has a 71 percent disapproval rating and leads the least popular British government since World War II. The reasons for the Labour Party leader’s deepening plight are moral, because decency and shame still matter in British politics. But they are also institutional. An American president is less democratically accountable than the British prime minister, because partisanship has disabled the checks that the Founders placed on the chief executive.” (02/08/26)
“Trumpism is a movement [Lionel] Trilling would still recognize as one that expresses itself ‘only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ Memes and AI slop, in current parlance. Or in mass deportations and state-sanctioned street violence and murder. If those ‘gestures’ appear garbled, it is because the ‘the high priests of MAGA ideology,’ Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, are not driven not by coherent ideas. What drives them is visceral rage at cultural change that fails to center men as base as themselves. And by the congenital insecurity of Donald Trump himself.” (02/08/26)
‘More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato predicted ICE’s tactics. He knew, even then, that the character of a certain type of man or woman was corrupt and that anonymity would enable brutality. In short, he knew that ICE agents would want to wear masks not to protect themselves from danger, but rather to enable their immoral conduct. Plato’s prescient understanding of ICE agents arose during a discussion of the parable of the ring of Gyges. The debate occurred during Socrates’s inquiry into human virtue, recounted in Plato’s Republic.” (02/08/26)
“As details about President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace and its plans for the reconstruction of Gaza trickle out, two things become increasingly clear: Palestinians have barely, if at all, been consulted in these plans; and the people in Trump’s orbit stand to benefit from the project the most. The U.N. Security Council approved the Board of Peace as a mechanism for implementing Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Israel and Gaza back in November, though its mandate now appears much broader. The BoP itself consists of high-level representatives from Gulf nations, Israel, Serbia, Albania, and Argentina, among others, with Trump himself as the chair and ultimate decision-maker. Absent from the Board of Peace are representatives from almost every EU country except Bulgaria and Hungary, and anyone representing Palestine.” (02/09/25)
“Donald Trump has chosen Kevin Warsh, a harsh critic of the Federal Reserve who has called for ‘breaking some heads,’ as the next Fed chair. Last week I wrote about what the Fed is and what it does. Today I’ll talk about the Fed’s policy record, with emphasis on the criticisms offered by Warsh and others.” (02/08/26)
“The harsh reality is that denuclearizing North Korea has become unrealistic. Pyongyang is known to already possess at least 50—possibly over a hundred—nuclear warheads and enough fissile material to build many more, while rapidly enhancing missile capabilities to credibly threaten nuclear use against South Korea, Japan, and even the American mainland. Meanwhile, the threshold of North Korean nuclear use has also gone down. Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine has become markedly more aggressive in recent years, declaring possible preemptive use to deter perceived imminent threats on the horizon against the regime. In the event of a crisis on the Korean Peninsula, one can only hope that the North Korean leadership will exercise rational judgment to avoid nuclear escalation.” (02/08/26)
