“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)
“Moral panic — defined on Wikipedia as ‘a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society’ — has become our chief political currency. It’s in the driver’s seat. It has the wheel. And it manifests as a form of puritanism, also conveniently defined by Mencken: ‘The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’ We can’t have that! Something must be done! There oughtta be a law! And the laws always come down less to prohibition than to permission.” (02/08/26)
“Whether one thinks protesting in the streets of Minneapolis is a wise action or not, it remains the case that Americans have a right to vigorously protest the actions of the state, and not fear being killed for it. In fact, it was Justice Douglas’s opinion that ‘the right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs,’ is ‘one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.’ To believe, whether implicitly or explicitly, that public protests are only justified when complainants protest quietly, or when the government deems the protests appropriate, or when the victims are lionized by the administration and its backers, is to give far too much credit to the state.” (02/07/26)
“For my entire adult life, I’ve listened to self-described ‘constitutional’ conservatives strut around like God’s gift to the nation’s conscience, as they lecture everyone on the importance of upholding the original intent of America’s founding document. They’ve been oddly silent as Donald Trump’s administration directly assaults the Constitution. He’s not the first one to do it, but he is doing so more brazenly than others. Even if some ‘whataboutism’ is appropriate, wouldn’t it be more consistent for conservatives to criticize these assaults just as they criticized previous assaults under Joe Biden and Barack Obama? Cheering — or remaining silent — as ICE agents arrest those who photograph them (First Amendment), carry out warrantless searches (Fourth Amendment), and ignore the directives of governors (10th Amendment) is the definition of hypocrisy.” (02/06/26)
“The recent expansion of the drug war into military action underscores a deeper problem: a longstanding policy with costs that are concrete, immense and well documented, while its benefits remain vague and modest.” (02/06/26)
“Formally, the United States still has a Constitution. We still have the three branches of government. Congress still has the House of Representatives and the Senate. The president is still elected by the Electoral College. The courts still function to resolve disputes and to define what the laws mean and what the Constitution means. Yet, thanks in large measure to the public fear and mania in the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, the war on terror in the 2000s and 2010s, and now the war on immigrants, functionally, Congress found it easy to cut constitutional corners and to look the other way as one crisis after another has led to the expansion of executive powers and the erosion of personal freedoms.” (02/06/26)
“There is an unbridgeable gap in the United States right now between two people with polar opposite views of the world, its purpose, man’s place in it, and what the country should be in the future. And nobody can sit on the fence; you are on one side or another. ‘You are either for me or against me,’ Jesus said, and that is the situation every American faces right now, regarding the future and destiny of the nation. The Left isn’t going to change, folks. They are, for the foreseeable and indefinite future, rooted in their beliefs and ideology, and they aren’t going to be converted.” [editor’s note: Nor, I suspect, will Mark Lewis turn his life around, start rejecting the glamour of evil, and refuse to be further mastered by sin – TLK] (02/07/25)
“Are you sitting down? There’s big news from the Democratic Party. No, they haven’t developed a coherent plan to address ICE shooting civilians on American streets. Nor have they much to say about Trump’s foreign policy, which is so disruptive that it forced European nations to remember they have armies and deploy troops to Greenland. No, this is much more important for the country. Kamala Harris has released a video. … Harris is right that Democrats have struggled to keep momentum going after 2024. But the solution isn’t to pretend that a glossy website counts as a genuine gameplan. As the Democrats’ cringey YouTube channel showed us, the issue isn’t a lack of content. It’s a lack of substance.” (02/07/26)
