Source: SFGate
“The Rev. Al Sharpton’s staff and advisers stood around him just outside the doors of a cozy theater, where some of his most fervent supporters waited to greet him in the newly renovated headquarters of the National Action Network. When doors flung open, Sharpton entered to a standing ovation that continued until he was perched behind a lectern, on a stage decorated with a floor-to-ceiling video screen. The audience was not anticipating a call for justice. Instead, the rabble-rousing youth minister turned go-to national advocate was there to declare his organization was officially an owner, no longer a renter, in the historically [b]lack Harlem neighborhood it has called home for more than two decades. ‘I want to make something permanent,’ Sharpton said recently to the gathered crowd of NAN board members, local clergy and other allies. ‘When people see that you’ve bought a building, they say, ‘Wait a minute, they’re not going nowhere.’’ (06/23/26)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/from-renter-to-owner-sharpton-locks-in-national-22316653.php
Source: The Dispatch
“Will Trump Interfere with the 2026 Midterms?” (06/23/26)
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/dispatch-podcast/will-trump-interfere-with-the-2026-midterms/
Source: Antiwar.com
by Graham Markiewicz
“The pattern is obvious. In an overworked House office, whoever has time and capacity to produce a clean draft often decides what gets written. On defense portfolios, that is increasingly a uniformed fellow on detail from the Department of Defense. In practice, executive-branch detailees do not supplement staff capacity; they replace it on key tasks, shaping agendas, drafting text, and gatekeeping information that will later govern their own departments. About ninety military fellows cycle through the Hill each year, with roughly two dozen each from the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and a dozen more from the Marine Corps. Their credentials are strong and intentions usually public-spirited. The problem is institutional. A congressional staffer owes undivided loyalty to Article I. An officer owes loyalty to a chain of command that runs to Article II. When workloads are crushing, that conflict is resolved by inertia rather than deliberation.” (06/23/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/graham_markiewicz/2026/06/22/when-military-fellows-replace-hill-staff
Source: Reason
by Reem Ibrahim
“If Boston can trust adults to ‘sip and stroll’ during the World Cup, it can trust them all year round.” (06/22/26)
https://reason.com/2026/06/22/boston-is-temporarily-legalizing-outdoor-drinking-for-the-world-cup-why-not-make-it-permanent/
Source: Politico
“A federal judge on Monday scrapped a set of state pilot programs intended to restrict the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program money to purchase unhealthy foods. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, wrote in her decision that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who oversees the SNAP program, misapplied federal law in approving requests from states to allow them to impose limits on what participants can buy with funds from the nation’s largest food aid program. Her ruling applies to Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia. ‘With her solicitation and approval of the pilot projects in this case, the Secretary purports to waive not just a mere administrative or technical obstacle, but the very definition of ‘food’ as it was laid down by Congress,’ Berman wrote.” (06/22/26)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/22/judge-snap-junk-food-rules-maha-00970700
Source: Antiwar.com
“US Issues Waivers for Iranian Oil Sales, US and Iran Establish Lebanon Deconfliction Cell, and More.” (06/22/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3eTAZ2MhU
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Suppose we come up with really good pleasure drugs, drugs that give us lots of pleasure without negative side effects such as hangovers or cirhosis of the liver. If we accept the economist’s model of the rational actor, their invention is clearly a good thing. It expands our choice set, provides us one more and possibly better way of getting what we want. To people skeptical of the rational model, that conclusion is less clear. To see the problem, consider an extreme version. Larry Niven, in some of his stories, describes wireheads, people who have had a wire inserted into the pleasure center of their brain and stimulate it with a mild electric current. The intense pleasure that results dominates all other concern, making it possible for a wirehead to die of hunger and thirst because getting food or drink is simply more trouble than it is worth.” (06/22/26)
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/obesity-wireheads-and-the-case-for
Source: New York Sun
by Larry Kudlow
“America’s most powerful central banker and an apostle of freedom and free enterprise, Alan Greenspan, passed away at age 100 early this morning. May he rest in peace. He served as Federal Reserve chairman between 1987 and 2006. Nearly 20 years. He was a great man. And a friend and mentor to myself and many other conservative economists. And during his period as Federal Reserve chairman, he prosperously piloted our economy through 3.2 percent annualized real GDP growth per year and an average of 2.5 percent inflation, even as he successfully navigated us through a number of crises. Meanwhile, job creation boomed during his tenure, stock markets soared, real incomes rose. Greenspan was at heart an old-fashioned conservative business economist with a strong belief in limited government, lower taxes, and minimal regulation.” (06/23/26)
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/06/23/greenspans_philosophy_of_freedom_and_free_enterprise_prosperity_154252.html
Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“Oracle shed about 21,000 roles globally in the last year as the US technology giant reshapes its business around artificial intelligence (AI), the firm’s latest annual report shows. The software and cloud computing firm says it had around 141,000 full-time employees as of 31 May 2026, down from about 162,000 workers at the same time last year. The ‘deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce’, the report says. The cuts, which amount to about 13% of Oracle’s workforce, are part of a wider trend among tech firms as they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building AI infrastructure like data centres. Amazon and Facebook-owner Meta have cut thousands of job in recent months as they invest heavily in AI.” (06/23/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gy0x0j5deo
Source: National Public Radio [US state media]
“What’s Trump’s beef with Senate Republicans?” (06/22/26)
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/22/nx-s1-5863503/whats-trumps-beef-with-senate-republicans
