“Condoleeza Rice confirmed once again this week that she has learned absolutely nothing: ‘When I hear, ‘Well, it wasn’t imminent,’ I think, ‘Do you really want to wait until it’s imminent, or do you want to try to degrade it earlier?’’ she continued. As George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor, Rice was one of the chief architects of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq. Decades later, she is still spouting the same nonsense to support Trump’s criminal war against Iran. It isn’t surprising that Rice falls back on the same arguments to defend the Iran war that she used when she was selling the invasion of Iraq almost a quarter of a century ago.” (07/16/26)
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“Here is the point that gets lost in the partisan scorekeeping. It does not matter whether each arrangement is technically legal. The swamp was never a legal problem; it was a trust problem. When the party that promised to end influence-peddling instead perfects it — when access to the president can be bought with a memecoin and a black-tie ticket — the lesson every ambitious operator learns is that the spoils go to whoever holds power, and restraint is for suckers. That is the real cost.” (07/16/26)
“You don’t have to like the outcome of the election to accept the fact that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020. What this address to the nation appears to be about is sowing more division and casting more doubt on elections in the United States. Trump can’t accept that his approval rating is underwater because a) he’s not focusing on key economic issues that Americans care about, b) he started a war with Iran that drove up oil and gas prices, and c) he seems to be more concerned about vanity projects in the District of Columbia than anything else.” (07/16/26)
“President Donald Trump failed in his efforts to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court into upholding his executive order on birthright citizenship, which would have stripped that constitutional guarantee from millions of babies born on U.S. soil. Now a Republican lawmaker is hoping to effectively overrule that Supreme Court decision with a proposed bill that would resurrect Trump’s unlawful order and place it in the federal statute books. As The Hill reports, ‘Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks on Monday introduced a bill that would codify President Trump’s Day 1 executive order reshaping the definition of birthright citizenship in the U.S.’ There’s just one problem with Banks'[s] scheme: Trump lost the birthright citizenship case Trump v. Barbara on constitutional grounds, which means that any federal law repeating Trump’s already rejected position would be equally unconstitutional under the very Supreme Court precedent that Banks is now hoping to evade.” (07/16/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Anthony J Constantini
“Some have also argued that America’s presence in Europe allows for power projection into the Middle East. Leaving aside the question of whether facilitating our involvement in that region’s interminable conflicts is itself desirable, the recent kerfuffle with Italy over the use of our bases for Operation Epic Fury suggests that even this is not guaranteed. By appearing to condition U.S. commitments on European defense spending, Trump is ultimately giving our allies a measure of control over our foreign policy. They themselves recognize this: during the summit, one NATO diplomat said NATO leaders increasingly viewed Trump as ‘the boy who cried wolf.’ Indeed, the playbook for future NATO summits—if the alliance keeps up the practice—has already been written.” (07/16/26)
“Samuel Adams and James Otis Jr. -.along with the rest of the founders and old revolutionaries – knew that freedom cannot exist with a government that doesn’t have strict rules. A clear line in the sand that it’s not allowed to cross. In other words – when government determines the extent of its own power. The lessons they learned in the American Revolution gave birth to the written constitution. But what they told us are the reasons for it – are completely ignored by the government-run ‘education’ system.” (07/16/26)
“A new nation needs many things. A way of ordering its political life. A way of protecting itself. A way of sustaining its population. But a nation also needs something far less practical. It needs a story to tell itself about itself. These kinds of origin stories have often been told in the form of poetry. … One of the most prolific—but now most forgotten—poetic mythmakers was the editor of Philadelphia’s National Gazette, friend of James Madison, critic of the Federalists, sea captain, and abolitionist Philip Freneau (1752–1832). One could pull nearly any poem from his list of works and find something interesting to say about American identity and the revolutionary era.” (07/15/26)
“The Department of Justice recently charged 455 defendants with $6.5 billion in healthcare fraud, one of a spate of recent revelations of fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) tied to government programs. The insight of Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker, the experience of America’s Framers, and the wisdom of an ancient guru from India reveal that the route forward entails a combination of tighter auditing and greater punishment. People, even the most virtuous ones, drawn to public service, respond to incentives. Good governance recognizes that universal truth and deliberately constructs incentive systems designed to catch and punish wrongdoers. The mere establishment of well-designed incentive systems stops most FWA in its tracks by creating an expectation that crime will not pay.” (07/15/26)
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by the Monitor’s Editorial Board
“Individual and institutional confidence in the credibility of official data from the United States, the world’s largest economy, is the grease that helps keep the engines of global productivity and commerce humming. And, as with most engines, a timely tuneup helps ensure smooth and predictable functioning, avoiding hiccups or holdups.” (07/15/26)
