“Trump’s interest in the Insurrection Act is hardly new. He toyed with invoking the law in his first term. He was itching to use it to send in the military to crush the 2020 George Floyd uprisings but faced opposition at the time from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper. No such problem for the president with loyalist goon Pete Hegseth in the so-called secretary of war position. And Trump allies called on the president to invoke the law to illegally hold onto power after the 2020 election. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to use the Insurrection Act to suppress unrest and dissent. … In the Trumpist imagination — committed to the lie and/or delusion of a well-funded network of criminal leftists — no real pretext is required for a further collapsing of the police and military state.” (10/07/25)
“A great but unheralded feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed in July was an authorization for the Federal Communications Commission to raise $88 billion to $100 billion through electronic spectrum auctions. Selling this additional 600 to 800 megahertz of bandwidth to the private sector will enable the U.S. to expand 5G and even 6G technology, ensuring American dominance in internet, artificial intelligence and satellite technologies. President Donald Trump gets this …. Sen. Ted Cruz had proposed a spectrum deal twice as large: raising as much as $200 billion and creating a wireless ‘pipeline’ that would provide 5G reception and services to nearly all households and businesses.” (10/07/25)
“Especially during dark times, it is important to be a realist about politics without succumbing to knee-jerk cynicism. A realistic view of free speech predicts that many people who invoke this principle when it serves their interests will abandon it as soon as it hampers their power. But the cynical conclusion that this makes it impossible for anybody to have a principled commitment to free speech is not nearly as clever as it seems.” (10/07/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Everything before October 7 explains why October 7 happened, and so does everything that’s happened since. Look at what happened before October 7 and you’ll see year after year of murder, oppression and abuse. Look at everything that’s happened since October 7 and you’ll understand the kind of sadistic, psychopathic regime the Palestinians have been living under this entire time. Israel supporters don’t want you looking at what happened before October 7, and they don’t want you looking at anything that’s happened since. They just want you to pretend history began and ended with a bunch of Hitlerite savages attacking innocent Jews for no reason. And they don’t even want you looking at the day of October 7 too closely, either.” (10/07/25)
“Unlike other philosophers who intellectually accept determinism, Searle admits that free will seems to be an obvious fact. After all of his philosophizing, he continues to act on the assumption of free will. In a rather disheartened admission Searle tells us, ‘the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behavior. For that reason, I believe, neither this discussion nor any other will ever convince us that our behavior is unfree.’ At the end of his reflections, Searle finds himself driven to pragmatism: he cannot see how free will is consistent with everything he knows, but he continues to believe that he is free all the same.” (10/07/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Katrina Gulliver
“A case has been slowly making its way to the Supreme Court hinging on one question: Can the government take this guy’s plane? The story began in 2012, when Ken Jouppi, a pilot in Alaska, was taking a passenger from the city of Fairbanks to the town of Beaver (population: 48). … Among the passenger’s groceries were 3 cases of beer, intended as a gift for her husband. Unfortunately, Beaver is a dry town; thus Ken and his passenger were breaking the law by bringing in alcohol. State troopers searched the plane, and found the beer. But rather than just seizing the Budweiser, and hitting Ken and his passenger with a fine or a citation (they did that too: Ken paid a $1,500 penalty and spent 3 days in jail), prosecutors also decided to seize the whole plane, a 1969 Cessna U206D. A $95,000 aircraft, over 3 cases of beer.” (10/07/25)
“The public’s vibes are turning against sports betting. But if you’re an avid sports bettor, I wouldn’t worry too much about it getting banned again. … Consider the politics of this, and why I don’t think bettors or sportsbooks should be all that worried: 43 percent of the country thinks something is bad, 7 percent think it’s good, and 50 percent don’t have strong feelings about it. I’m guessing the 43 percent who think sports betting is bad for society have many other political priorities, and the 7 percent who think it’s good are probably bettors who feel quite strongly about that. Politicians are going to hear a lot from the strong-opinioned 7 percent. They’re going to hear a lot from the sportsbooks that want to keep betting legal. In most states, there’s not an organized or well-funded interest group in favor of undoing legalization.” (10/07/25)
“President Donald Trump is threatening significant layoffs of federal workers unless talks aimed at ending the ‘Schumer shutdown’ show some progress. They’re not even close; as Senator John Kennedy posted on X: ‘You’d need an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all the Senate Democrats’ demands for re-opening the government.’ After all, Team Trump has been encouraging the downsizing of federal agencies since it took office. Just eight days after the president was inaugurated, the Office of Personnel Management sent an email inviting almost the entire federal workforce to resign. As of today, some 150,000 federal employees have taken advantage of the offer; most will be leaving their positions in coming weeks.” [editor’s note: The Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House. The government is “shut down” because the Republicans want it “shut down” – TLK] (10/07/25)
“Let’s lay aside the somewhat dubious legal reasoning behind ‘determining’ that the U.S. is at ‘war’ with non-state actors, and the specious claim that such non-state actors are under the direct control of the Caracas regime, all of which seems like a clumsy and even embarrassing effort to get around Congress’s residual war powers. … Venezuelan aliens entering the country illegally have fallen to negligible numbers, so it seems unlikely that this is about the administration’s immigration policy, either. Chinese, Russian, and Iranian cooperation with Venezuela has been on the rocks these past few years, due to the Venezuelan regime being a terrible business partner on pretty much every metric …. So if it’s not about drugs, and it’s not about immigration, and it’s not about cooperation with American adversaries, what’s it about?” (10/07/25)
“While the media focus on the political and policy implications of the recent federal appellate court decision upholding in-part (and remanding in-part) a lower court summary judgment against President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, there are both legal and judicial aspects of the case that merit attention as the case wends its way to expedited consideration by the Supreme Court. (The tariffs remain in place pending the Supreme Court’s decision; oral arguments are scheduled for early November.) First, it bears underscoring that while the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals endorsed the substantive aspects of the lower court’s decision, it nonetheless remanded the court’s remedy in the case — a permanent injunction — back to the court to apply the subsequently released Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Casa, Inc. regarding the authority of lower courts to issue ‘universal injunctions.'” (10/07/25)
