Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish

“America’s two biggest private prison companies have made even more money from Trump’s mass deportation campaign than executives’ wildest hopes. In second-quarter earnings calls this week, executives at both GEO Group and CoreCivic announced revenue increases of over 100 percent compared to the same period last year, described buybacks of millions of dollars’ worth of stock, and outlined plans for the day after Trump achieves his goal of deporting one million immigrants this year, which they paradoxically expect will net even bigger piles of cash. Both revised their outlook for the rest of the year upwards. At GEO Group, the largest contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), executives reported total revenue for the period of $636.2 million, about a 5 percent increase from the second quarter of 2024. Net income was $29.1 million for the period, compared to a net loss of $32.5 million last year.” (08/08/25)

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-08-08-private-prisons-cash-in-trumps-mass-deportations/

Source: Washington Post
by George F Will

“Successful democracies endanger their success because of the complacency success breeds. They solve problems only when lashed by necessity: Britain considered Winston Churchill a Cassandra — until the German army reached the English Channel ports. In the 1960s, Americans realized they could not have domestic tranquility without new civil rights laws. Today’s crisis of the nation’s fiscal trajectory elicits a peculiar optimism: Necessity, in the form of the exhaustion of the Social Security trust fund, will lash Congress into reforming two entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare) that are driving the nation’s indebtedness. This optimism is delusional.” (08/08/25)

https://archive.is/O942S

Source: Cato Institute
by Ryan Bourne & Nathan Miller

“Given the composition of the federal budget, and without a legislative strategy to work with Congress to cut entitlement programs and defense spending, it was simply impossible for DOGE to ever eke out $1–2 trillion of financial savings from cancelling DEI grants, laying off federal employees, shuttering minor departments and agencies, and delivering various software and anti-fraud upgrades to federal services. Indeed, making such wild promises on spending arguably undermined focus on what it did help achieve: a significant reduction in federal headcount, scrapping wasteful economic development aid, and zeroing near-term public broadcasting subsidies (since codified in the rescissions package). Would DOGE 2.0 heed the lesson not to overpromise again? It appears not.” (08/08/25)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/doge-overpromising-deregulation

Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille

“DIY firearms aren’t just an end-run around the law; they represent a libertarian political movement.” (08/06/25)

https://reason.com/2025/08/08/making-the-world-freer-with-homemade-guns/

Source: New York Post
by Rich Lowry

“President Donald Trump wants a new census. If by this he means a snap-census before the scheduled 2030 survey, he’s demanding that the federal government undertake a gargantuan task with minimal planning and no discernible source of funding. In statistical terms, it’d be like launching D-Day with a month’s lead time. If the White Queen believes six impossible things before breakfast, that the Census Bureau could pull this off would qualify as one of them. The agency couldn’t even competently conduct the last, regularly scheduled census in 2020. Given that conducting the census is a core function of the federal government — indeed, mandated by the Constitution — it is outrageous that the last survey missed so badly. It undercounted Florida and other red states (as well as Illinois) and overcounted New York and a number of blue states (plus, Ohio and Utah).” (08/08/25)

https://nypost.com/2025/08/08/opinion/trumps-right-about-the-census-but-rushing-one-is-worse/