Source: Independent Institute
by Craig Eyermann
“There was a way the 2025 shutdown could have been avoided. Congress could pass a temporary spending bill to fund government operations while continuing to hammer out regular spending bills. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives drafted a straightforward Continuing Resolution to do just that, sending the bill to the Senate, well before the government would shut down. That’s when things went wrong.” (11/18/25)
https://www.independent.org/article/2025/11/18/postmortem-2025-government-shutdown/
Source: National Public Radio [US state media]
“An Israeli airstrike on a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon on Tuesday killed 13 people and wounded several others, state media and government officials said. It was the deadliest strike on Lebanon since a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war a year ago. … The Israeli military said it struck a Hamas training compound that was being used to prepare an attack against Israel and its army.” (11/19/25)
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/19/g-s1-98349/israeli-airstrike-palestinian-refugee-camp-lebanon
Source: Orange County Register
by the editorial board
“Justin Raimondo tried to warn us. The co-founder of Antiwar.com devoted his life to warning Americans and particularly the American right against the relentless pull of the military-industrial complex and the bipartisan-established warfare-welfare state. Raimondo would’ve turned 74 today. He passed away on June 27, 2019 in Sebastopol, California at the age of 67 after battling lung cancer. But his legacy lives on and his message is as necessary as ever.” (11/18/25)
https://archive.is/BlTN3
Source: Cato Institute
“The Shutdown That Solved Nothing.” (11/18/25)
https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-podcast/shutdown-solved-nothing
Source: Axios
“The Senate on Tuesday unanimously passed a bill to compel the Justice Department to release all files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, sending it to President Trump’s desk. Trump said Monday he would sign the bill, but the files still may not be released any time soon. The Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent Monday evening, just hours after it cleared the House via a nearly unanimous vote — and before the bill had even technically been sent over. In a stunning reversal, Trump this week supported the legislation after opposing the effort for months. But his recent directive of DOJ to investigate Epstein’s ties to former President Bill Clinton, officials at JP Morgan Chase and others may cause the files to never see the light of day.” (11/18/25)
https://archive.is/D4yox
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“For the government to send out more than it’s raking in AND ‘begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT’ is mathematically impossible. … But more than the fiscal infeasibility of the proposal, I’m interested in Trump’s claim that those checks would constitute a ‘dividend.’ A dividend on what, precisely? Dividends are payments to shareholders in a business enterprise, distributed as a share of profits. As a ‘business enterprise,’ the last time the US government turned a “profit” by spending less than it received in tax payments was 2001. More importantly, none of us are shareholders in the US government.” (11/18/25)
https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20152
Source: CNN
“NATO scrambled fighter jets in Polish and Romanian airspace as Russia carried out a massive and deadly attack using ballistic and cruise missiles and hundreds of drones across Ukraine into Wednesday. Romania defense ministry claimed a Russian drone entered its airspace during the attack. It comes as Russia said it shot down four US-made ATACMS long-range missiles ‘deep within’ its territory yesterday, that Ukraine claimed it fired. … Many regions of Ukraine were left without power Wednesday after strikes on the country’s energy infrastructure.” (11/19/25)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/18/europe/poland-fighter-jets-russia-ukraine-intl-hnk
Source: The Daily Economy
by Saul Zimet
“In recent decades, and especially since the release of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence use has rapidly spread into almost every industry. And as AI proliferates, so do fears that a wave of mass unemployment will follow. Concerns are widespread that AI will be deployed to accomplish an ever-greater share of the labor needed throughout the economy, leaving fewer and fewer jobs available for human workers. This fear led Dario Amodei, one of the world’s leading AI technologists, to sound the alarm earlier this year about an impending ‘white-collar bloodbath.’ The Anthropic CEO told Axios that one very possible scenario within the next one to five years is that, ‘Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs.'” (11/18/25)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/are-the-benefits-of-ai-worth-the-risk-of-white-collar-bloodbath/
Source: Reuters
“The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits stood at a two-month high in mid-October at the time when the Labor Department would have been conducting its survey of U.S. households for the monthly employment report that has been held up by the recently ended government shutdown. Continued claims for jobless benefits — those receiving benefits beyond an initial week of relief — rose to 1.957 million in the week ended October 18, updated figures posted to a Labor Department website showed on Tuesday. That was up 10,000 from the prior week and was the highest since early August. It was up notably from the 1.916 million level in the week ended September 13, the last week of data to have been reported prior to the start of the shutdown on October 1.” (11/18/25)
https://archive.is/C6251
Source: The UnPopulist
by Anthony Sanders
“In recent weeks, the Trump administration has ordered members of the military and the National Guard onto the streets of American cities, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. The purported reasons for these decisions have been to protect federal agents and federal property, but the threat of using the troops for general domestic law enforcement looms large, with President Trump repeatedly threatening to do just that. … Under American law, when members of the military violate citizens’ rights in law enforcement, it is much harder, if not impossible, for those victims to receive monetary compensation for the harms they suffer than it is when they suffer wrongs by state or local police — though it’s already hard enough in those cases. Indeed, using the military in domestic law is entirely incompatible with our nation’s current remedial legal architecture.” (11/18/25)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/if-soldiers-become-cops-americans
