I totally love this story by Stephen Neukam at Axios:

Top Senate Democrats on Friday accused Republicans of using a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals to “pay off” GOP lawmakers for their support of the “big, beautiful bill,” Axios has learned.

I have absolutely no doubt that the fund is and will be used as a “slush fund”. The rub in this is that one man’s slush fund is another man’s constituent service. It’s subjective. And a great example of why what we do at the federal level should be limited to the Constitutional enumerated powers. It’s as the late Ev Dirksen said: “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

There is no doubt in my mind whatever that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of such slush funds in the federal budget. Whether you think they’re the traditional waste, fraud, or abuse depends mostly on your point-of-view.

I don’t know whether to find this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a flicker of hope or deeply distressing. In the op-ed Yasser Abu Shabab writes:

While most of Gaza continues to suffer under the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel, things are very different for thousands living in eastern Rafah—for us, the war is already over.

The Popular Forces, an independent Palestinian group under my leadership, have secured several square kilometers of land that have been home to my Bedouin tribe, the Tarabin, for generations. We aren’t an ideological movement, but a pragmatic one. Our primary goal is to separate Palestinians who have nothing to do with Hamas from the fire of war.

For the past seven weeks, our neighborhood has become the only area in Gaza governed by a Palestinian administration not affiliated with Hamas since 2007. Our armed patrols have successfully kept Hamas and other militant groups out. As a result, life here no longer feels like life in Gaza. In eastern Rafah, people have access to shelter, food, water, and basic medical supplies—all without fear of Hamas stealing aid or being caught in the crossfire with the Israeli military.

The effect has been tremendous: no more airstrike casualties, no chaotic aid lines, no evacuation orders, and no fear of booby-trapped homes or children being used as human shields by Hamas. While there is still much to improve, people now sleep at night without fear of death.

Sounds hopeful, doesn’t it? He continues:

This should not be the exception in Gaza—it can be the model, the new norm. The vast majority of Gazans reject Hamas. They don’t want it to remain in power after the war ends. But though they hate Hamas, they still fear it. Since protests began earlier this year calling for the group’s removal, demonstrators have been killed, tortured or forced into hiding.

My own family didn’t take part in those protests, but when Hamas killed my brother, Fathi Abu Shabab, and my cousin, Ibrahim Abu Shabab, for trying to secure aid for our family—and when 52 civilians under our care were murdered in their homes—I realized that silence is no longer an option. If we remain quiet now, we will never be free, cease-fire or not.

This may be our only chance to secure a future that rejects violence and embraces reason. What has prevented most Gazans from expressing their true anger at Hamas is the lack of a viable alternative. Hamas still controls aid access and dominates institutions like the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or Unrwa. Hamas still turns aid centers into hubs for its own operations. In some areas, the only thing preventing people from fleeing is the presence of Israeli troops, which might withdraw as part of a cease-fire.

No one else has been willing to step up and risk publicly breaking with Hamas. Those fears lost their meaning for me after my brother and cousin were murdered. Hamas has labeled me a criminal and collaborator, but I am not intimidated by them. I won’t surrender.

As one of my college professors once said, pay no attention to an undergraduate paper until the first “however”.

We need only three things to make this vision a reality: financial support to prevent Hamas’s return, humanitarian aid to meet the population’s immediate needs for food and shelter, and safe corridors so people can move around. In a short time, we could transform most of Gaza from a war zone into functioning communities. When the rebuilding has begun, Hamas can negotiate with Israel for the release of hostages in exchange for safe passage out of Gaza. Let them go to Qatar, Turkey or wherever their enablers will have them. We don’t want them among us.

The hopeful aspects are that this militia is not Hamas, he at least claims to have driven Hamas from the territory they control and are maintaining the peace, and he says the Gazans hate Hamas. The less than hopeful aspects are that it’s a militia, it has no relevant previous experience in governing, and it only controls a few square kilometers of Gaza. Furthermore, I have no idea how the Israelis can distinguish between this particular militia, armed and wearing black hoods, from Hamas or any other militia. Also Israel goes unmentioned in the op-ed other than in the context of the IDF.

There’s a proverb for which I cannot testify as to the veracity, attributed to the Bedouins: “I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.” Is the Popular Forces the beginning of a new, brighter future for Gaza or one splinter of a thousand contending splinters, portending a chaotic and continuingly violent future for Gaza? I don’t know. I don’t even know who can know.

The ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine don’t seem to be going anywhere. President Trump continues to threaten harsh sanctions against Russia.

How do you sanction Russia without applying sanctions on Russia’s trading partners, especially China and India? How do you sanction China and India effectively without bringing the U. S. economy to its knees?

A couple of days ago Ray Dalio (or his social media assistant) had a impassioned post at LinkedIn on how urgently we need to balance the federal budget. I presume that was an indirect pitch for his new book.

I put a response there which has received a few approvals with a simple question: how? The only budget item that really could use cutting is healthcare spending and we can’t balance the budget by cutting taxes. Indeed, we need to raise the effective tax rate and that’s harder than it sounds. The effective tax rate on the top 1% of income earners has been remarkably steady since 1950 (2025 update here) despite a reduction in the top marginal tax rate from 94% to its present 37%.

As to cutting healthcare spending we’ve never been able to manage to do that. The most we’ve accomplished is slowing its rate of increase which is what was done in the last budget.

So, I’ll ask my questions here. How do you increase the effective tax rate; how do you decrease spending? I’m in favor of it. I just don’t know how.

I began assembling a chart of just how dependent the growth in the S&P 500 stock index was on just the “Magnificent Seven” stocks but, lo!, and behold the Visual Capitalist had already done it for me. What that chart tells me is that the index is very much dependent on those stocks and becoming more so.

Just seven stocks carrying such weight is a very narrow base. Their total global workforce is about 2.37 million people. Most of those are in the United States. They comprise less than 2% of total U. S. employment and all are technology stocks. I don’t think that’s healthy. Most of them are companies that didn’t exist 30 years ago and only one of them existed 50 years ago. Easy come, easy go.

At Liberal Patriot Ruy Teixeira takes note of something I’ve been pointing out for twenty years or more—today’s liberals don’t believe in liberty and our progressives don’t believe in progress:

American progressives used to embrace a number of universal values and aspirations that defined their political project. They sought to make life better for ordinary people by emphasizing their universal interests across racial, ethnic and cultural divisions, ensuring universal fair treatment in daily life and throughout society, promoting universal standards of merit, achievement and truth and providing universal access to the bounty from scientific achievement and economic growth. The core concept was that all Americans could prosper when treated in this fashion and that existing social and governmental arrangements should be pushed in that direction.

Making progress along these lines was what being a progressive was all about. Today’s progressives are different. They have rejected the universal approach for particularistic defense of professional class cultural priorities and policy preferences. In that sense they have lost the right to call themselves “progressives.” Instead they now stand in the way of progress as progressives used to define it—and progress as most ordinary voters would recognize it.

and

Some progressives have gone so far as to argue that our capitalist economy based on growth must be replaced with a “degrowth” economy focused on simple, healthy communities; efficient resource use; and the elimination of wasteful consumerism. If that means no or negative economic growth, so be it. Most progressives don’t quite go this far but the jaundiced view of growth—and the technological change that enables it—remains.

Indeed, today’s progressives are basically techno-pessimists. Progressives are now distinctly unenthusiastic about the potential of technology, tending to see it as a dark force to be contained rather than a force for good to be celebrated. This is very odd indeed. Almost everything people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in those advances.

I honestly have no idea what the political philosophy of today’s “progressives” is. Many claim to be “democratic socialists” whatever that means. The only observations I can make is that they like power and want to expand the scope and reach of government but much of that just means they want power.

How do you rationalize the positions of a founding member of the Congressional progressive caucus who has never voted for a nationalized healthcare system, worked ceaselessly to consolidate power in the hands of the Congressional leadership, and argued in favor of insider trading by members of Congress? They’re not socialists, they’re not progressives, they’re not liberals. What are they?

Once upon a time in the mists of the distant past, if you knew a web site’s numeric Internet protocol address, you could access the site. That was it. A bit later a tool was developed which indexed and archived File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. It was called “archie” (for archive). A little while later a more complex method of indexing and archiving web addresses was developed called “veronica”. Those were the distant ancestors of Google and other search engines.

As Google and then Microsoft’s Bing gained dominance in archiving and searching the Internet, a new specialized skill evolved called “search engine optimization” (SEO). That means just what it says—optimizing the contents and construction of a web site to encourage search engines to find and, presumably, navigate to your web site when users performed appropriate searches. It’s an ever-evolving skill since the strategy, rules, and priority that search engines use to produce and display their results are always changing.

Yesterday it occurred to me that SEO has entered a new phase. Today it must also mean strategies that encourage users to “click through” from search engine results to your site rather than merely review the summaries and excerpts of the contents produced by the artificial intelligence of search engines.

I suspect that Google and Microsoft and other search engines which, rather than their traditional activities of identifying, archiving, and listing web sites are summarizing them, are exposing themselves to a titanic class action suit. I have always thought that the business models of Google, etc. were iffy. They make money by acquiring and using information which does not belong to them. But there was always a sort of fair exchange involved: users produce content, Google analyzes the content and directs traffic to the users’ web sites. What happens when Google stops directing traffic to web sites?

Why even have a public web site? Under those circumstances wouldn’t it make more sense to make use of specialized aggregators like Amazon.com, Facebook, and to some extent Substack?

I want to bring a conversation between Yascha Mounk and Isaac Saul, published at Mr. Mounk’s Substack, to your attention. The link is to the transcript but you could listen to the conversation if you like.

The first section of the discussion is largely devoted to recent Supreme Court decisions and I think there’s one factor that they neglect to mention. Over the last 50 or more years there has been an ongoing conflict over how policy goals are realized. In the courts that conflict has been reflected in policy goals which could not or would not be reached by the legislature being realized by the Supreme Court without recourse to the written law, common law, or legal precedent. Those who admire that apparently prefer a civil code system over our common law system. The beneficiaries of that have largely been progressives or sexual libertarians and those groups are now horrified when their political opponents resort to the same tactics against them or, worse, reverse judgments arrived without recourse to written law, the common law, or legal precedent. Whatever happened to the “arc of the moral universe”? (My answer would be that whether the legislative, executive, or judicial branch or all three in combination the government is not the “arc of the moral universe”.)

The balance of the discussion is about executive overreach and I share Mssrs. Mounk’s and Saul’s concerns. WRT immigration I would remind them that every presidential administration, Democratic or Republican, since the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act has somehow managed to limit the number of asylum seekers annually to around 50,000. IMO the Biden Administration didn’t just drop the ball they own-goaled it.

Americans are soft-hearted so they are unhappy with the actions needed to restore the status quo ante. IMO the solution to a bad law is to enact a better law but once a law has been enacted it should be enforced. No winks and nods. That’s authoritarian and undermines the rule of law.

I wanted to share a couple of quotes from the group discussion among Washington Post columnists and editors with you. I think the first, from Chris Suellentrop, hits the nail right on the head:

For me, losing Stephen Colbert and the “Late Show” is a lot like losing the independent bookstore in your neighborhood that you never went to but were happy that it was there. By which I mean, I didn’t really watch the show. I loved “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, and I’ll watch (or listen to) whatever he does next. But I am not sure the departure of this CBS show in 2026 changes my media diet in any way.

As it turns out none of those in the discussion have made a regular practice of watching late night television since Jay Leno left The Tonight Show. I think that tells the whole story.

Here’s the other quote I wanted to share with you from Alyssa Rosenberg:

The question is: Can still you make enough money to put on an old-fashioned, heavily staffed late-night show? And the answer seems to be no. In 2009, David Letterman’s late-night show brought in $271 million in ad revenue, more than any other show in that format. Last year, all the network late-night shows combined brought in $220 million in ad revenue. So yes, I think this was a business decision, but one that was probably also convenient for a company trying to close an acquisition deal that needs approval from the FCC.

That’s an enormous decrease and note that her claim is incorrect. She didn’t provide a citation for the ad revenue claim so I can’t tell whether it includes Fox’s ad revenue as well. In my researches I did discover one thing: the viewership for ABC, NBC, and CBS late night appears to be shrinking fast than that for Fox which appears to be growing.

Said another way cancelling The Late Show was a business decision. Continuing to subsidize a partisan, money-losing program would have been a political decision against business interest. The editors and columnists regret the choice because they sympathize with the positions being staked out but not enough that they’d pay to keep it going.