Reason Roundtable, 11/02/26
Source: Reason
“What Do Libertarians Have To Gain From the Midterms?” (11/02/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/11/02/what-do-libertarians-have-to-gain-from-the-midterms/
SCOTUS rejects Trump regime’s scheme to set aside 20,000 California mail ballots
Source: The Hill
“The Supreme Court on Monday quickly rejected the Trump administration’s effort to force California officials to set aside 20,000 ballots it claims belong to likely noncitizens and must be investigated. The court’s one-sentence order contained no explanation and had no noted dissents. California and immigration rights groups question the veracity of the administration’s list and say its lawsuit is an attempt to disenfranchise legal voters. The administration raced its claims to the Supreme Court earlier on Monday after California persuaded lower courts that the administration has no legal right to push the state to comply. The administration warned that the clock was running out. All sides agree that ballots can’t be separated once they’re processed, and election officials have already received hundreds of thousands of mail ballots ahead of polls opening on Tuesday.” (11/02/26)
Repugnant Markets
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“Conservatives are well known for launching moral crusades. Because they think they have an ally in the White House, some of them are now openly calling for the federal government to ban pornography. But instead of advocating for new legislation to combat pornography, they maintain that obscenity laws still exist on the federal and state levels and should therefore be used against pornography. The question here is not whether viewing pornography is acceptable, good, useful, or beneficial, or whether viewing pornography is bad, immoral, harmful, or sinful. The question at issue is simply this: Should government at some level, for whatever reason, seek to ban some or all pornography?” (11/02/26)
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/repugnant-markets/
Ukraine: Russian attack on aid hub kills 29 as US regime announces new peace talks
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“Russian forces have bombed an aid centre in Ukraine, killing at least 29 people, according to Ukrainian officials, as the United States announced plans for new peace talks on November 10 and 11. The aid centre, at a school in the village of Komyshuvakha in the Zaporizhzhia region, had been closed to students because the village sits too close to the front line, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday. Instead, it served as a shelter and as a weekly distribution point for aid packages, which residents who remain in the village collected every Monday. … Hours after the attack, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that delegations from Ukraine and Russia would meet in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, on November 10 and 11.” (11/02/26)
AI, Empathy, and Entrepreneurship: Could Robot Labor Make the Economy More Human?
Source: The Daily Economy
by Per Bylund
“As machines take over routine tasks, work might actually become less robotic. When production is cheap, people can be much more entrepreneurial — and more personal.” (11/02/26)
New York Times, other publications sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping
Source: Yahoo! Finance
“The New York Times sued Brave, the 11-year-old, privacy-focused browser company, on Monday, alleging it scraped the outlet’s copyrighted content and unlawfully distributed it to customers the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Separately on Monday, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit. Both were brought in federal court in Manhattan. The New York Times, which has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, likens Brave to a ‘supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen [sic] copyrighted content’ for AI companies.” (11/02/26)
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/york-times-other-outlets-sue-191917731.html
The Next Congress Must Punish Trump’s Attempted Election Steal to Avert a Failed Republic
Source: The UnPopulist
by Andy Craig
“In 2020, Trump tried to steal a presidential election. This year, he is trying to steal Congress. Once again, it won’t work. Despite his best efforts, he does not have a sufficiently consolidated authoritarian regime, centralized federal control, or enough practical political support to pull it off. But the ineptitude of the attempt should not excuse the gravity of the crime. The president of the United States is attempting, in plain public view and with every power at his disposal, to destroy our democratic republic. He has said as much all year. … When the danger passes, there will be a strong pull to file this away with everything else he tried that didn’t pan out. The courts held, the counties did their jobs, the voters showed up. The country moves on. But the law does not treat failure as an excuse.” (11/02/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-next-congress-must-punish-trumps
Poland: Constitutional crisis deepens as Tusk faces accusations of power grab
Source: Fox News
“Friday’s late-night confrontation at Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, which drew riot police and protesters and prompted President Karol Nawrocki to turn his plane around and return to Warsaw, has reignited a bitter debate over whether Prime Minister Donald Tusk is restoring the rule of law or overstepping constitutional limits. The dispute erupted after the tribunal announced the suspension of its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, a move that supporters of Tusk’s government described as necessary to restore judicial independence, while critics denounced it as an unconstitutional power grab. Marcin Przydacz, the head of the International Policy Bureau in Nawrocki’s office, took to European TV Monday morning denouncing Tusk’s actions, saying, ‘Even lawyers who are close to the Tusk government say that there’s absolutely no legal basis for such behavior.’ The dispute is also triggering diplomatic fallout, with at least three Polish ambassadors resigning in protest.” (11/02/26)
The Trump Administration Continues to Meddle in the Election
Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye
“The federal government has a legitimate interest in preventing unlawful voting. Noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections, and allegations of deliberate election fraud should be investigated. Nobody should have to abandon those principles to recognize the serious problems with what the administration is doing. Investigations require evidence, and removing voters or refusing to count their ballots requires considerably more than an allegation generated by matching names against government databases. The administration’s actions have repeatedly failed to satisfy those requirements. Worse, some of its demands would have imposed consequences on eligible voters before anyone could determine whether they had done anything wrong.” (11/02/26)
https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-continues
The five words that explain this election better than any commercial
Source: Fox News
by Lee Hartley Carter
“Eleven billion dollars…. Actually, more than that. Political advertising spending and reservations have now exceeded $11.6 billion, making this the most expensive election cycle for political advertising in American history. For that kind of money, you’d think somebody might have figured out how to make groceries cheaper. Instead, Americans have endured months of attack ads, apocalyptic warnings and politicians insisting that civilization itself is on the ballot. Again. As a researcher, I’ve spent much of this year studying what Americans believe, what frustrates them and, perhaps most importantly, what might motivate them to vote. And I’ve become convinced that five words explain this election better than a thousand campaign commercials. Affordability. Socialism. Corruption. Trump. Turnout. Each tells us something about the American electorate. Together, they reveal something neither party should find particularly comforting. Americans may be less interested in voting for somebody than in voting against something.” (11/02/26)