Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Sarah McLaughlin
“Free speech advocates have long warned that the laws and regulations passed at the state, federal, and international level are chipping away at our ability to speak anonymously online. Now, Türkiye is threatening to gut that right directly — and asserting that social media platforms are playing along. According to Justice Minister Akın Gürlek, the Turkish government is submitting a proposal to parliament that would require people to provide a national ID number to use social media. Unregistered accounts will be removed by platforms. Gürlek also claims platforms have agreed to implement these terms — though which platforms, and which exact terms, are not entirely clear yet. … Make no mistake: These kinds of regulations are like a bad cold — they spread fast and are hard to shake.” (04/07/26)
“For years, bureaucrats and the chattering class in Washington have tried to justify innocent people’s suffering from war and sanctions. America’s enemies hide among civilians and weaponize civilian infrastructure, they argued. Military strategy and sanctions policy were designed to leave civilians alone, they claimed. Wars and sieges would actually liberate people suffering under evil regimes, they asserted. Trump keeps making their job harder by speaking frankly about what his goals actually are.” (04/07/26)
“As a new analysis by Johan Norberg shows, the regime many MAGA Republicans see as a model to emulate has repressed civil liberties, undermined the free market, destroyed the rule of law, and made Hungary the poorest nation in the European Union.” (04/07/26)
“If I asked you to name the most unpopular Supreme Court justice, you might choose the venal Clarence Thomas or the perpetually enraged Samuel Alito. In either event, you’d be wrong. Americans’ least popular member of the high tribunal is Brett ‘I like beer’ Kavanaugh. Poll after poll has shown Kavanaugh taking the honor since his nomination in 2018. Kavanaugh also holds the honor of being President Donald Trump’s favorite justice, an accolade he earned with his dissenting opinion from the court’s February invalidation of Trump’s worldwide ‘reciprocal tariffs.’ Kavanaugh is now poised to deliberate on pending voting rights cases and a ruling on birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. It’s frightening but indisputable: The future of American law may rest in his ideological, incompetent hands.” (04/08/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish
“Late last year, the godfather of supply-side economics dropped in on a Georgia state Senate special committee hearing. He spoke of the urgent need to dump their income tax, a ‘killer, killer, killer,’ akin to ‘a nuclear weapon,’ that has destroyed the 11 states that have instituted it as of 1960: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. ‘Each and every one of those states in population has had a cataclysmic decline relative to the rest of the nation. It’s just amazing,’ said Arthur Laffer, inventor of the ‘Laffer curve,’ the discredited [sic] theory [sic] that claims lowering taxes raises tax revenue.” [editor’s note: The Laffer Curve is neither “discredited” nor a “theory.” It’s an observation of fact — the fact that there’s a point when increased tax rates decrease, and decreased tax rates increase, tax revenues – TLK] (04/08/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Much of what schools are spend money on has at most a tenuous connection to the quality of education. That left me wondering whether there are any schools for smart cheapskates, schools that provide a good education in the company of smart people at the lowest practical cost — which I would expect to be less half the cost of the elite schools I looked at when my children were choosing where to apply. I went online to look.” (04/07/26)
“There’s a big difference between a man who hits on 1,000 women and finds only two who are interested, and another man who asks two women out and they both respond positively. Both men have gotten two dates over that same time period, but they’ve adopted very different approaches and built very different reputations. The latter is likely respectful, charismatic, and creates an environment where the women he interacts with feel good. The former’s a loser. In the same way, when the Libertarian Party fields thousands of candidates to win dozens of offices, they sacrifice their success rate on the altar of raw numbers. Like pickup artists, they, too, have adopted in advance the narratives necessary to reinforce this approach even in the face of repeated failures.” (04/07/26)
“Bill Gates owes much of his fortune to emulating Apple. The video game Halo was first showcased at MacWorld by Jobs before it became an exclusive killer app for Microsoft’s Xbox. Gates’s Windows operating system tapped the talent of Macintosh’s iconic icon designer Susan Kare. And yet the broader impact of Apple’s innovations is hardly confined to such sheerly financial windfalls. This is not just because Apple efforts like the HyperCard which made creating and viewing multimedia straightforward, the Pippin which brought built-in Internet access to a video game console, and the Newton which pioneered the personal digital assistant were influential on later developments without managing to become profitable products for them or anyone else. Indeed, much of the creativity that spread from Apple’s roots in Cupertino, California to cyberspace is closer in spirit to Wozniak than Jobs.” (04/07/26)
“Trump is capable of declaring victory and walking away but he is equally capable of unleashing the worst violence we have seen in decades. How does one read the mind of a madman? A desperate madman for that matter. … Iran didn’t put Trump in this position, he did it himself with the help of Netanyahu and his other enablers who I mentioned above. So all bets are off. Trump is capable of anything. The world is holding its collective breath and hoping that saner individuals intervene to put Trump out to pasture or that the military refuses to obey illegal and immoral orders.” (04/07/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Commentators are pointing out that if Trump follows through with his vow, he and the Pentagon will be committing a war crime because they will be attacking the civilian population rather than military targets. But why should Trump worry about that? He knows full well that he can commit any act he wants, including criminal acts, and will not be held to account for it. The same, of course, holds true for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the national-security establishment. There are two entities about which Trump would ordinarily have to be concerned. One is Congress …. Trump has nothing to fear because he controls both houses of Congress though his loyal and deferential Republican toadies. … The other entity is the federal judicial system, which has the power of indicting people for crimes. But Trump controls the Justice Department …” (04/07/26)
