Source: The Daily Economy
by Stefan Bartl
“Washington blocked the merger that might have saved Spirit Airlines—then stood by as it collapsed. The result: fewer flights, higher prices, and a textbook case of policy backfiring on the consumers it aimed to protect.” (05/06/26)
Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman
“Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier …” (05/06/26)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-will-kill-many-americans
Source: Fox News
“The FBI has raided the office of a powerful Virginia Democratic lawmaker and ally of Gov. Abigail Spanberger as part of a federal corruption and illegal marijuana sale probe, Fox News has learned. Longtime state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, a major power broker in Virginia politics who stumped for Spanberger on the campaign trail in 2025, is now at the center of a major FBI corruption probe, according to federal law enforcement sources. Agents executed court-authorized criminal search warrants at Lucas’ office in Portsmouth, Virginia, Wednesday, according to federal law enforcement sources. The FBI simultaneously carried out a SWAT-team search of a nearby cannabis dispensary co-owned by Lucas. At least three people were detained during the raids. The state senator arrived at her office as the raids were being conducted. She told Fox News that she had no idea what the FBI agents were doing at her office.” (05/06/26)
Source: The Volokh Conspiracy
by Jacob Mchangama & Jeff Kosseff
“While governments around the world have imposed speech restrictions to fight misinformation and hate speech, they also have attempted to curb free speech for a less controversial reason: protecting children. But many of these restrictions stem from vague, unspecified, or speculative harms and corral wide swaths of speech that do not harm children. Censoring speech in the name of protecting children is not a terribly new phenomenon, especially in authoritarian countries. In 2012, for instance, Russia’s parliament passed a law allowing the country’s media censorship agency to unilaterally blacklist websites and take them offline, without any court approval. The lawmakers’ justification was protecting children from online harm, but civil liberties groups correctly predicted that the government would use these powers to curb far more speech. In recent years, such efforts have moved beyond authoritarian countries and taken hold in Western democracies.” (05/06/26)
https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/06/restricting-speech-by-purportedly-protecting-children/
Source: Common Dreams
by Jeffrey C Isaac
“On May 6, 1866, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago today, Thaddeus Stevens, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and the leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, rose to introduce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution on the floor of the. Stevens, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was also co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction set up by Congress, in late 1865, to promote a radical Reconstruction, a program advanced over the consistent objections of President Andrew Johnson. … The Amendment passed in the House on June 13, by a vote of 138 in favor and 36 opposed, having passed in the Senate five days earlier, on June 8, by a vote of 33 in favor and 11 opposed. In other words, roughly a quarter of US Representatives and Senators, serving in houses of Congress that did not include representatives from the seceded Confederate states, voted against the amendment.” (05/06/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/history-of-14th-amendment
Source: Variety
“Ted Turner, the charismatic, larger-than-life figure who conquered the world of media, sports and philanthropy, has died, according to a release by Turner Enterprises obtained by CNN. He was 87. Turner disclosed in September 2018 that he was suffering from Lewy body dementia, a brain disorder that affects memory and other cognitive functions. Turner, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1991, transformed the world of television, inventing 24-hour news with CNN and pioneering national basic cable. To feed his ‘superstation,’ he made deals that rewrote the rules of sports broadcasting. He was also a sports figure himself, winning the America’s Cup and owning the Atlanta Braves when they won the World Series.” (05/06/26)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/ted-turner-dead-tv-mogul-philanthropist-1236739318/
Source: The New Republic
“Trump Ballroom Saga Takes Brutal Turn for GOP as Midterm Panic Worsens.” (05/06/26)
Source: Foreign Policy
by Will Walldorf
“Is the U.S.-Iran conflict becoming a forever war? At first glance, it doesn’t look that way. Rising oil and gas prices, growing congressional pressure around the War Powers Resolution, and scant public support are putting pressure on U.S. President Donald Trump to end the conflict soon. But if history is any guide, there’s a real chance the war continues to drag on. Why? Because a few core elements that have turned past conflicts into forever wars are present in this one, too. Those three components are high resolve by the weak, erosion of cost-benefit thinking by the strong, and weak institutional constraints to warfighting on at least one side. Combined, they mean resisting the expansion of the Iran conflict into a forever war won’t be easy.” (05/06/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“In the midst of massive death and destruction inflicted by the U.S. government in Iran, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and here economically in the United States — and, before that, in Iraq and Afghanistan — and, before that, in Vietnam and Korea, it is easy to forget that the U.S. government is still inflicting economic destruction here at home with its immigration police state. There are, of course, countless horror stories of human suffering that the Trump administration has inflicted on people with its ruthless and brutal immigration police state, especially with ICE and Border Patrol raids, masked kidnappings, squalid detention centers, and forced deportations.” (05/06/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/05/06/the-immigration-police-states-infliction-of-harm/
Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“Police have raided around 50 homes and other locations, targeting people suspected of involvement in far-right criminal youth groups that have recently emerged in Germany. Prosecutors said the suspects were believed to be part of two groups, ‘Jung & Stark’ (JS), or Young and Strong, and ‘Deutsche Jugend Voran’ (DJV), which means Forwards German Youth. No arrests were made in Wednesday’s raids, which took place in 12 states, mainly in the east and south of Germany, including Bavaria, Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony. In a statement, federal prosecutors said the raids targeted individuals suspected of organising violence through social media and forming nationwide networks. ‘Some of the accused are said to have attacked members of the left-wing scene or people they believed to be paedophiles. In each case, the victims were beaten by several attackers and sustained significant injuries,’ prosecutors said.” (05/06/26)