The Mona Charen Show, 05/30/26
Source: The Bulwark
“Trump’s Staggering Corruption Is Finally Catching Up to Him (w/ Jonathan Chait).” (05/30/26)
In politics after Trump, nothing is disqualifying
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Matt K Lewis
“Under old ‘pre-Trump’ rules, [Graham] Platner’s campaign would have withered instantly after revelations that he once had a Totenkopf SS tattoo, previously identified himself as a communist, said Black people were poor tippers, and wrote that white people ‘actually are’ as racist and stupid as Trump thinks they are. Instead, after all this surfaced, Platner actually rose in the polls. … Maybe Maine Dems have concluded that moral purity tests are politically suicidal after years of watching heterodox figures like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk drift away from the party. … Or maybe Maine Democrats have absorbed the same lesson Republicans adopted in 2016: Once voters stop treating scandal as disqualifying, policing your own side for off-the-field behavior starts to look like unilateral disarmament.” (05/29/26)
Acton’s Case for Federalism
Source: Law & Liberty
by Max Skjönsberg
“The French Revolution remains one of the pivotal events that still shape historical thinking and writing and is commonly seen as one of the watersheds of modernity. For Edmund Burke, it meant that “the glory of Europe [was] extinguished forever”; for Hegel, the climax of world revolutions; for Tocqueville, the triumph of centralization; for Marx and Marxists, the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal class. Marxism dominated history writing for much of the twentieth century until the French historian François Furet in 1978 presented a radical interpretation that shifted focus to the ideas of the revolution. But Furet had been anticipated by one of the great English historians and liberals, Lord Acton.” (05/29/26)
ME: Platner’s wife “angry, disappointed” her past disclosures of his extramarital sexting were made public
Source: NBC News
“The wife of Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, said she is ‘really angry’ about reports that she had previously told her husband’s campaign he had exchanged sexually explicit texts with other women. ‘It makes me really angry, disappointed,’ Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, said in a direct-to-camera video released by Platner’s campaign on Saturday night. ‘And I find it really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on.’ Gertner’s remarks came after The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Gertner had told Platner’s campaign about the sexually explicit texts last year, near the start of his Senate bid.” (05/31/26)
The Good Fight, 05/30/26
Source: Yascha Mounk
“Kathryn Paige Harden on How Genetics Shapes Human Behavior.” (05/29/26)
Of Course We’re Fighting on the Lawn
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson
“It does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or a brick ranch house or something more grand and getting grander, it is all the same: Tornado bait is tornado bait. When the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I knew what I was seeing. It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch Style Beans on cornbread …. I know my people. My people know what they like. And they will have what they like even if it harelips the pope — especially if it harelips the pope. It took 250 years, but you got here. All the way down here. From Greatest Generation to White Trash Nation in the space of one lifetime.” (05/29/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/ufc-fight-white-house-american-decline/
There Is No Right Way for the State to Kill People
Source: OtherWords
by Furonda Brasfield
“As a long-time death penalty abolitionist, I’ve often compared the death penalty in America to a train with no brakes: Once the machinery starts moving, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to stop. But the real problem is that the train should never have been built. Today, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are experimenting with nitrogen gas executions, a method officials claim is more humane. But from noose to needle to nitrogen, our constant search for a more acceptable way to kill is a story of failure, not moral progress. There’s no acceptable way to practice a form of state killing that, for Black Americans especially, has long been intertwined with terror. History should make us skeptical whenever governments begin searching for new technologies to make killing appear more acceptable.” (05/31/26)
WA: Eleven confirmed dead in chemical accident
Source: CBC News [Canadian state media]
“The death toll from a chemical tank rupture in the U.S. state of Washington climbed to 11 as crews recovered the bodies of all nine missing people, authorities said on Saturday. Two fatalities had been confirmed after the tank containing ‘white liquor’ — a chemical solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide used in making paper pulp — imploded at a Nippon Dynawave Packaging facility on Tuesday. … The ruptured tank contained about 3.4 million litres of white liquor, and tests confirmed that contamination entered the nearby Columbia River, officials have said, although no ‘negative health impacts’ had been detected on air quality or the city of Longview’s drinking water.” (05/31/26)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/washington-state-chemical-accident-9.7218298
The Inner Life of Liberalism, episode 2
Source: The Inner Life of Liberalism
“The Virtues of Honesty — with Christian Miller.” (05/29/26)
Patents: The Damage of Coerced Intellectual Monopoly
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Jorge Besada
“One of the reasons why we fall for the erroneous idea that patents are good for society is because we greatly overestimate the importance of the specific individual or company making a discovery while being unaware of how the market process — via its various mechanisms like prices, the profit motive, and economic competition — plays a key role in innovation.” (05/29/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/patents-damage-coerced-intellectual-monopoly