Source: National Review
by Charles CW Cooke

“Two days ago, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump ‘has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.’ In response, many figures on the right inserted their fingers into their ears and started screaming about fake news. Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. … Just how far out there is Trump’s theory? Consider that, even if it were true that the 2020 election had been stolen — which it is absolutely not — his belief would still be absurd. It could be confirmed tomorrow that agents working for a combination of al-Qaeda, Venezuela, and George Soros had hacked into every single voting machine in the country and altered the totals by tens of millions, and it would remain the case there is no mechanism within the American legal order for a do-over of any sort.” (06/03/21)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/maggie-haberman-is-right/

Source: Commentary
by John Steele Gordon

“Inflation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What drives it is the expectation of inflation. If people see prices rising, they begin to demand pay raises. As payroll costs go up, so do the prices of the products the company produces, and inflation spirals upward. But it is Wall Street’s expectations that are the most important. Inflation erodes the value of debts that have fixed interest rates, such as most home mortgages. And so, creditors increase interest rates to protect themselves. The beneficiaries of inflation, of course, are those in debt. Just consider the biggest debtor of all, the federal government.” (06/03/21)

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/john-steele-gordon/fear-the-inflationary-sprial/

Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle

“The United States used to be the only big, rich nation to have above-replacement fertility. That stopped being true during the Great Recession, and our birthrates keep slipping. The latest data put expected lifetime fertility at about 1.6 births per woman, a record low — and this was the trend before the pandemic. Nor does this reflect a delay as women settle down later: Birthrates declined for women ages 15 to 44. Yet President Biden’s new budget, which proposes massive deficits for the rest of the decade, is a proposition for a young country whose best growth years are still ahead. … Running up debt like this signals one of two things: desperation in the face of an existential threat, such as a pandemic or world war, or a bet that incomes will grow even faster than the debt, so that over time it gets easier to service obligations.” (06/03/21)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/03/declining-us-birthrate-has-implications-beyond-social-security/

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff

“Young people in Iraq, whose protests in 2019 brought a democratic reformer to power, are holding their breath. On May 26, for the first time the Iraqi government arrested a senior commander of a pro-Iran militia and (here is the breath-holding part) he has not been released more than a week later. In addition, an attempt by the commander’s militia to besiege the capital and pressure his release was repelled by elite Iraqi forces. While the arrest of Qasim Muslih on terrorism charges is small on a global scale, it represents a significant advancement in rule of law and accountability in a country pivotal to the growth of democracy in the Middle East. No senior member of the many Iran-backed militias that reject government control has been held accountable for the killing of pro-democracy activists over the past two years.” (06/03/21)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2021/0602/Iraq-crosses-a-democratic-threshold