“It is a random Tuesday night, and you are relaxing on your living room couch scrolling through your social media feed. … You make fun of a politician you don’t like, share a clip from an interview with your favorite political talking head, crack a joke about a pressing social issue, or make a plug for the blog post that you just finished writing. Then, you head to bed without giving it a second thought. This is America, after all, and the First Amendment is always there to protect you from the government. Well, to protect you from our government. Under the First Amendment, the United States cannot retaliate against you for constitutionally protected speech and expression. But the First Amendment does not necessarily protect you from a bureaucrat in Brussels, a judge in Brazil, or a police force in Hong Kong.” (10/26/26)
“I want the internet to be better. There’s of course always the risk of nostalgia building an unearned sense that it in fact used to be, in every way. That the era before, say, Facebook was idyllic, or the time of Blogger and Movable Type a paradise of thoughtful and thought-elevating discourse. We tend not to remember the warts, and so think a return to the old ways is invariably a return to better ways. But I do think there are ways it has declined. The rise of platforms and the centralization that came with them has tipped the balance away from small and weird and obsessive and towards big and bland and optimized. … a lot of ‘making things better’ will entail making things smaller. Giving people communities they control the boundaries of, and letting them exist in multiple communities at once.” (10/26/26)
“Voter ID is the only way to fix California’s broken election system. That’s the only reasonable conclusion from Sunday’s extraordinary hearing at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A three-judge panel heard the Trump administration’s case against non-citizen voting in California. Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) gave California a thumb drive with 20,000 names on it, ostensibly containing the names of suspected non-citizens who had registered to vote in the state. State and county officials, who had already sent ballots out by mail, refused to open it. So the DOJ sued in district court, hoping to force California to set aside those 20,000 ballots if and when they came in. Time is of the essence: ballots are already being mailed back, and counted. And once they are in, it’s almost impossible to fish them out again.” (10/25/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Bill Kauffman
“Must all change always be for the worst? In classic ‘arsenic or cyanide, sir?’ fashion, New Yorkers are given the Hobson’s choice between a Democratic Party that has lost any connection to rural and working-class Americans and a Republican Party that is running this year on the Iran War and building more data centers. Whoopee! Ever Pollyanna, I tease out the silver lining in this assault on democracy by scribbling write-in votes, so on November 3, 2026, I’ll be doing just that. And y’know, it’s kinda fun.” (10/26/26)
“The Michigan Senate race between the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, and his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, is this year’s most important election. It’s significant, on a number of levels, not the least of which is that El-Sayed is an Arab American Muslim of Egyptian descent. Prior to this, we’ve had four Arab Americans elected to the US Senate (former Majority Leader George Mitchell [D-ME], James Abourezk [D-SD], James Abdnor [R-SD], and John Sununu [R-NH]), none of them Muslim. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim in the Senate. This is a breakthrough that hasn’t been lost on Republicans and President Trump, who have made a determined effort to exploit it at every turn. They’ve done TV ads alleging that El-Sayed’s mother was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s.” [editor’s note: The headline is likely correct, but maybe not for the reasons given here – SAT] (10/26/26)
