Source: Washington Post
by George F Will

“Some of the damage done by ‘campaign finance reforms’ has been reversed. And Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that likely will continue the court’s dismantling of measures the political class has enacted to control political speech about itself. This case can extinguish an absurdity: a campaign regulation supposedly intended to prevent parties from corrupting their own candidates. The multiplication of, and subsequent unraveling of, reformers’ laws to ration political speech is a decades-long lesson about cynicism in the guise of idealism.” (12/05/25)

https://archive.is/GGjwC

Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp

“Americans, the Associated Press reports, spent a record $11.8 billion online on ‘Black Friday’ (the day after Thanksgiving) this year … and another record, $6.4 billion on Thanksgiving itself. Physical in-store traffic for Black Friday also ticked up versus the previous week, although shopping for deals has strongly moved online in recent years. What caught my eye about the story, though, was the headline, which suggests the record sales occurred ‘despite wider economic uncertainty.’ ‘Despite?’ More likely, in my opinion, ‘because.’ With inflation still running at about 3% annually, prices subject to Donald Trump’s seemingly random tariff policies, the job situation looking more uncertain and unpredictable than it has since the COVID-19 panic, etc., what have American consumers been up to? I can tell you what they’ve been up to, because I’ve been up to it myself. What we’ve all been up to is ‘waiting for the best deal if the purchase isn’t an emergency.'” (12/04/25)

https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20184

Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“Every military servicemember’s oath is a pledge to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is not an oath to a politician. It is not an oath to a party. And it is not an oath to the police state. Yet what happens when those same men and women are being told—by their own government—that obedience to power and loyalty to a political leader come before allegiance to the Constitution they swore to uphold? That question isn’t hypothetical. It is the moral line now being tested in real time, and it goes to the heart of what kind of country we are: do we live in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, or in a militarized police state where ‘legality’ is whatever the person with the most power and the biggest army say it is?” (12/04/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/04/the-constitution-vs-the-commander-in-chief-the-duty-to-disobey-unlawful-orders/

Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander

“Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass. Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.” (12/04/25)

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted

Source: Reason
by Veronique de Rugy

“The populist poles of the left and right are now linked in what political scientists call the ‘horseshoe.’ As each gets further from the center, it bends closer toward its counterpart on the other side. Both distrust markets, both want to micromanage industry, both are protectionist, both romanticize manufacturing work and resent the disruptions that come from open global competition. Both, in other words, are hostile to the core tenets of the liberal economic order that made America prosperous. Each side blames a different villain. For the left, it’s corporations and rich people; for the right, it’s immigrants and trade. But both sides insist that a brighter future is possible only through top-down political control, and neither wants to confront the real risk: a government already too large, spending money it doesn’t have and drifting toward fiscal crisis.” (12/04/25)

https://reason.com/2025/12/04/the-horseshoe-of-doom-populists-left-and-right-say-america-is-failing-the-facts-dont/