Source: Orange County Register
by David Bier
“Amid ongoing congressional debates—culminating, of course, in a partial shutdown—over Trump’s mass deportation agenda, one fact in particular should capture both Democrats’ and Republicans’ attention: immigrants provide an enormous boost to the country’s long-term economic and fiscal health, reducing our massive deficit by a third.” (03/08/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Congress or a state legislature wants a law that it expects the Supreme Court to rule against. They pass the law anyway. Lower level judges that share the legislature’s view rule in favor of the law but eventually the case reaches one who does not. The state appeals, exhausts its options for appeals, stops enforcing the law. It passes another law doing the same thing in an arguably different way. This looks like a tactic by which a legislature can avoid control by the courts for an indefinite, perhaps unlimited, length of time. Gun control opponents claim states where gun control is popular, such as New Jersey, have employed it successfully to get around the 2nd Amendment. An example from the other side of the political spectrum could be Trump’s tariffs.” (03/08/26)
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-exploitation-of-legal-delay
Source: The UnPopulist
by Tom G Palmer
“That the Trump administration is targeting ‘enemies within’ instead of Putin shows how much America has already succumbed to it.” (03/08/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/russia-resurrected-and-exported-a
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Watching Amazon Prime while the Iranians burn. / Stuffing our mouths with cheesysugarbacon / while the sky turns black over Tehran. / Laughing without smiling. / Laughing with full mouths and empty eyes / while their water mixes with oil and blood. / ‘Hoho this will hurt Trump in the midterms’ / the liberal chortles, masturbating furiously / while ruined parents pull ruined schoolbags / out of ruined schools. / Frolicking on lawns with hamburgers in both fists / doing patchouli tai chi / in clothes made by slaves / as black rain waters gardens / of severed limbs and blown-out eyeballs. / This is our culture. / This is our religion. / Praying to Pornhub while children scream, / telling ourselves it will all be worth it / when Iranian women can do OnlyFans / to pay for boob jobs and butt lifts / and go to Capitalist Heaven when they die….” (03/09/26)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/03/09/watching-amazon-prime-while-the-iranians-burn/
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Yerevan Saaed
“As a tactic, arming the Kurds has real operational merit. But the question is whether the United States intends to convert Kurdish wartime service into a lasting institutional and political commitment after regime change. In Iraq, Washington largely followed through: Kurds secured constitutional recognition, a federal region, and their own Peshmerga forces. In Syria, the outcome was the opposite. When the U.S. withdrew political and military support, the Kurds were left exposed to the new regime in Damascus. Arms can flow, but whether a binding alliance follows is the only question that determines if this venture ends in some form of Kurdish self-determination or another cycle of mobilization, abandonment, and reprisal.” (03/08/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Walter Block
“Ordinarily, in the absence of such market interferences, free trade would be the policy most conducive to prosperity. We produce the products for which we have a comparative advantage, and interfere with the international division of labor as little as possible. However, matters change with marketing boards. Is it possible that a second economically illiterate regulation may benefit us by (partially) reducing the impact of the first? Yes, without marketing boards, free trade is the ticket to economic well-being. But with them, is there a case for tariffs on grounds of economic development? Here is the argument in favor of such a paradoxical hypothesis.” (03/08/26)
Source: Notablog
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“This war with Iran is an extension of the dynamics that have always driven US foreign policy. And nothing will stop this President from the path of destruction he has chosen — certainly not the Congress, which has long been ceding its constitutional responsibilities to the executive branch. Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson denies that the US is even involved in a ‘war.’ And Senate Republicans have blocked any war power limits to this operation, giving Trump a rubberstamp to do whatever the hell he wants. The warmongers among us serve the administration by labeling as ‘traitors’ those who oppose US intervention abroad. This has become a virtual rite of passage for critics in times of war.” (03/07/26)
https://notablog.net/2026/03/07/the-operation-was-a-success-but-the-patient-died/
Source: Garrison Center
by Joel Schlosberg
“A New York Times columnist offering pointers for ‘Pitchfork Pat’ Buchanan-type populists on ‘the isolationist right who thought Trump shared his views’ might seem akin to a mad scientist named Frankenstein offering a road map to a pitchforks-and-torches peasant mob. Yet Michelle Goldberg does just that in ‘The President Was Never Antiwar’ (March 2). While maintaining that Donald Trump was indeed the embodiment through which ‘the once marginalized politics of Patrick Buchanan became a dominant force in the Republican Party,’ Goldberg insists that ‘Trump was never Buchanan’s heir when it came to foreign policy.’ … While ‘it is true that he broke with key elements of neoconservative ideology,’ he hasn’t distanced himself from even ‘the most fanatical of neoconservatives,’ preferring instead to discard the ideology’s ‘notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism.'” (03/07/26)
Source: Orange County Register
by Steven Greenhut
“MAGA’s philosophical twists and turns are hard to follow given that whenever Donald Trump changes his mind his supporters have three go-to approaches. First, they claim his latest notion is part of a 3D chess game even if, by all appearances, Trump would struggle to play one-level tic-tac-toe. Second, they distract our attention: Didn’t Barack Obama do this, too? Third, they get with the program and shamelessly back whatever the president is doing. Sometimes MAGA-supporting influencers with their own agendas and philosophies take issue with some Trump policy. But rank-and-file MAGA always follows the Dear Leader even if it means contradicting some Deeply Held Principle they espoused weeks ago.” (03/06/26)
Source: The Weekly Dish
by Andrew Sullivan
“For me and many others, the Iraq War of 2003 was a life-altering lesson in humility. In the wake of 9/11, with trauma warping my frontal cortex, I backed a pre-meditated, pre-emptive war for regime change in the Middle East — something stupid and immoral I soon realized, however well intentioned. It changed me. But at least in those tense, polarized months of 2002 and 2003, we had hashed out the case for war thoroughly beforehand, as democracies do. … Come with me a little further back in time to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. That was a war started by Saddam Hussein, not us. How did we go about a new war in the Middle East back then? Well, we had another big public debate, another trip to the UN, and then another vote in the Congress. It was closer than we remember: just 52-47 in the Senate (with one abstention). … Seems like another planet, doesn’t it?” (03/06/26)
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-war-hes-always-wanted-c47