“Sorry, I give up. In past elections, I’ve covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all. But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It’s too many. I can’t disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I’m not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each.” (05/19/26)
“When Donald Trump was about to miss an interest payment for his dying Trump Castle casino in 1990, his father Fred bought nearly $5 million worth of poker chips to save him from default. When Trump was indicted for inciting the January 6 insurrection, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be charged …. As inflation spikes, gas prices surge, and the world teeters on the brink of a recession, congressional Republicans are demanding a billion dollars to build the gilded ballroom after Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House without collecting enough corporate bribes to cover the project. For nearly 80 years, someone has always saved Trump from himself. With the Strait of Hormuz, the president has finally created a mess so big that no one can save him. No one is coming to the rescue. NATO can’t and China won’t.” (05/18/26)
“Seven states hold their primaries on Tuesday, including two — Alabama and Georgia — where Republicans are working to change electoral maps as soon as possible. Polls will start closing before dusk in eastern Kentucky. The night will end with the year’s first West Coast primaries, in Oregon. Here’s an hour-by-hour guide with what to watch, and close looks at what’s at play in each state.” (05/19/26)
“Still concentrated in Southern states that ban abortion, Black women disproportionately rely on telehealth, which the Supreme Court has allowed — provisionally — to continue.” (05/19/26)
“The relationship between poverty and crime has been a longtime policy debate. A common narrative — particularly on the left — is that poverty drives people to crime, positing that those who live in tough neighborhoods have little choice but to survive through lawbreaking. This treats crime as a passive outcome of economic hardship — almost like a disease — rather than a choice. But a deeper look at the data, and differences across communities, suggests the opposite: that crime instead causes poverty. Irrespective of the causation order one accepts, there is certainly a relationship between the two.” (05/18/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by James Bovard
“Trump constantly blusters as if he deserves the Nobel Prize for Economic Triumphs, just like he supposedly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. In a January speech in Iowa, he doubled down on his triumphs by referring to himself in the third person: ‘Just after one year of President Trump, our economy is booming …. Incomes are rising. Investment is soaring. Inflation has been defeated.’ Unfortunately, Trump’s record on the economy is as shaky as his claims that he ended eight wars. The core wholesale inflation rate rose in January at an annual rate of 9 percent. ‘Howl louder’ has been the president’s response. Beginning late last year, the affordability issue made Trump schizophrenic.” (05/18/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man
“Israel is officially entering election season, and with it comes the perennial and inescapable excitement among some progressives in the United States who are eager to see Israeli voters send Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu packing. That excitement, however, is an illusion. It is built on a belief, long clung to by American supporters of Israel, that Israel without Netanyahu would somehow become a liberal democracy that aligns more with their own values. That illusion is based on a false view of Israeli policy in the decades before Netanyahu’s reign.” (05/18/26)
Source: Kent’s “Hooligan Libertarian” Blog
by Kent McManigal
“In a discussion about the effect of self-driving cars on cops and their DWI grift, someone said, ‘Self driving cars are a fantasy. They do not have the ability. They can assist but cannot drive themselves.’ Now, this is objectively not true. Someone else pointed out. ‘I’ve seen them driving around downtown, sans human driver.’ The Luddite’s response. ‘They are not reliable. Several have ran over pedestrians and they have been the cause of accidents.’ I pointed out, ‘Humans are even less reliable, unfortunately.’ So, he responded, ‘If that is true then why is it required for a person to be at the wheel and paying attention while the vehicle is driving itself?’ … That ‘laws’ require something dumb isn’t an argument. It proves nothing.” (05/18/26)
“Russia entered the war at maximum sustainable capacity without general mobilization. After years of attrition, it has burned through most of its Soviet-era equipment stocks. Given Russia’s weakened state, a conventional confrontation with NATO is not only unlikely now, but it has become almost impossible — prohibitively expensive and demographically unsustainable. The real strategic risk is not a confident Russia launching a conventional assault on the Baltics. It is the behavior of a cornered, nuclear-armed state that perceives itself in terminal decline. A leadership facing military failure and domestic crisis may calculate that tactical nuclear signaling or hybrid escalation offers its best chance to reset the board.” (05/18/26)
“With gasoline averaging about $4.50 per gallon — over six bucks if you’re unlucky enough to live in California — President Donald Trump proposes a gas tax holiday to give American consumers a bit of relief. A reprieve from taxes is always welcome, but the real bite isn’t the federal 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents on each gallon of diesel fuel. States charge far more, and that’s especially true if you rent a car, with gas taxes the least of the problem. In some places, more than half the tab for car rentals comes from taxes and government-mandated fees.” (05/18/26)
