Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen & Ryan Grim
“With Israel’s reputation reaching record lows among Democrats, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is resorting to ever more sophisticated methods to support its preferred candidates while cloaking its own involvement. The amount of money that the premier pro-Israel organization is able to spend in elections is extraordinarily valuable to candidates who would otherwise have little chance of winning. But it now comes with a catch: If voters know the money comes from an organization advocating on behalf of Israel, it can do more harm than good. AIPAC road-tested its stealth approach in a 2024 House primary in Oregon that pitted Susheela Jayapal, the sister of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), against physician Maxine Dexter. Dexter raised relatively little money throughout much of her campaign, then saw a last-minute deluge organized by AIPAC coupled with outside spending through super PACs, which themselves turned out to be funded by AIPAC.” (02/06/25)
“In the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the genetically engineered superhuman, Khan Noonien Singh, is discovered in his exile on Ceti Alpha V with a bookshelf populated by the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Melville’s Moby Dick. His last words in the film are taken straight out of the latter, as the revenge-obsessed Khan murmurs to his nemesis, Captain James T. Kirk: ‘From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.’ In the film Die Hard, the ruthless East German terrorist, Hans Gruber, also proclaims himself to be well read: ‘And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer,’ Gruber says, with the aside: ‘Benefits of a classical education.’ Reading great books does not necessarily make you a good person.” (02/06/26)
“One and a half million more young adults live with their parents today than a decade ago. They’re losers … economically. Since the pandemic, fair market rents have increased as much as 40% in Chicago, the cost of owning a car is up more than 40%, and car insurance and health care prices have spiked. Student loan debt has quadrupled since 2000, and entry-level wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. For young people without financial or family support, it’s an affordability crisis that feels insurmountable. Cost of living was Gen Z’s top political issue in 2024; they feel the ‘American Dream’ slipping farther away.” (02/06/26)
“The Trump administration has a problem when it comes to the Second Amendment. A large part of its base consists of people who firmly believe in the right to keep and bear arms. But that right, as protected by the Second Amendment, empowers the individual and stands as a challenge to the authority of the state. This creates an awkward situation for a president and his coterie who don’t like being challenged or even criticized. That’s why we see administration officials arguing in favor of self-defense rights one moment while challenging the right to keep and bear arms at another.” (02/06/26)
“The really socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the city’s new Handicapper General, wants to prevent the brightest children in the city’s school system from getting any extra training of their gifts and intelligence. So he’s trying to do what one of his predecessors, the pretty socialist Bill DeBlasio, failed to do: eliminate the public school system’s Gifted and Talented programs. What benefit could there be to students, their parents, and New Yorkers in general, in preventing gifted children from studying in schools and classrooms that give them the best chance of developing their gifts early in life? None whatsoever.” (02/06/26)
“Our lives are improved in all sorts of ways by courageous, risk-bearing entrepreneurs, who seek to change the world at a profit. For that reason alone, we should jealously safeguard an environment friendly to entrepreneurship. As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has shown through indefatigable research, when society is marred by envy of the richer and highly successful, we all suffer. Widespread prosperity soars, McCloskey demonstrates, when a culture in effect erects huge neon signs brightly flashing the message, ‘You think you have a great idea? Well, give it a go!’ That is not how people have felt through most of history. Envy that bred a fear of pioneers smothered innovation.” (02/06/26)
“The opening chords of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ wash over a drone shot of Mar-a-Lago. As the camera shifts to a set of black high heels and then tilts up to the once-and-future First Lady, Mick Jagger screams ‘War, children, It’s just a shot away. It’s just a shot away.’ This is not a typical moment in what’s come to pass for a documentary in 2025: an endless stream of brooding explanations of lefty issues or recreations of murders rubber stamped for Netflix with overwrought scores. … But it’s this naked, smug lefty do-gooderism that has eroded the documentary form for the last two decades …” (02/06/25)
“In my recent post on US manufacturing jobs and tariffs, I mentioned a Wall Street Journal article that pointed toward American tariffs having little impact on Chinese exports; the exports are simply being shifted to other countries. In the earlier post, I discussed what that fact meant for US manufacturing jobs. Here, I discuss what that shift means for who bears the burden of the tax.” (02/06/26)
“The Trump phenomenon was supposed to be a changing of the old Republican guard, however imperfectly, for a new foreign policy ethos that was closer to Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul than Bill Kristol and David Frum. That’s exactly why so many neoconservatives and War Party Republicans got behind the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. So seven years ago, when Bolton tried to redefine Donald Trump’s America First brand as a continuation of McCain-Bush interventionism, I laughed. Did Bolton really think the conservative base was this gullible? I’m not laughing anymore. Hawks, including old neoconservatives, now present pro-war interventionism as America First all the time.” (02/06/26)
