Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The Constitution grants Congress the sole power of the purse. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. If Congress passes a law saying jump, it’s the president’s job to jump. And if Congress passes a law that says spend, it’s the president’s job to spend.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/03/what-if-the-president-doesnt-want-to-spend-money/
“When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Venezuelan makeup artist Andry Hernandez Romero in 2024, it suspected he belonged to the Tren de Aragua gang. Yet ICE provided no “official records, media reports, and correspondence,” “intelligence information received from other agencies,” or “validation” or “confirmation” by “law enforcement, Corrections, or sending jurisdiction,” to prove that Hernandez Romero was tied to the gang.
Instead, ICE officials flagged Hernandez Romero as a potential Tren de Aragua associate based on two of his tattoos: the words mom and dad, topped with crowns, on each wrist.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/05/deported-for-tattoos/
“President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he’s ordered the federal government to rebuild and reopen the infamous Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. However, that plan will likely require a massive investment in a dysfunctional federal prison system that can barely staff the prisons it currently operates.”
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“”The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE,” the president continued later in the post.”
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“The federal penitentiary on San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island opened in 1934 as a last stop for the federal prison system’s most troublesome and violent inmates. But it lasted less than three decades due to the exorbitant costs of operating an island prison. It closed in 1963.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/05/reopening-alcatraz-is-an-expensive-unnecessary-pipe-dream/
“In the new school year, thousands of Oklahoma students will be required to learn about 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories as part of a new curriculum developed by the state’s controversial superintendent, Ryan Walters. Walters, who has come under fire in recent months for an effort to require Oklahoma classrooms to stock Bibles and display the Ten Commandments, has said that the addition “empowers students to investigate and understand the electoral process.”
Under the state’s new curriculum, high school students will be taught to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”
While it’s not necessarily unreasonable to want students to learn about the dispute over the 2020 election, the standards’ framing of the controversy (which turned up no evidence of election interference) and Walters’ comments about it make it clear that teachers are meant to shed doubt on the veracity of the election.”
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“The standards also contain passages directing teachers to ensure that students can “identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab,” and “explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts.””
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“The curriculum change is just one of a battery of recent attempts to inject partisan politics into public school curricula. While blue states have faced criticism from the right for injecting critical race theory into the classroom, many red states have engaged in far more galling efforts to politicize classroom instruction.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/06/new-oklahoma-curriculum-requires-students-to-learn-2020-election-fraud-conspiracies/
“Tariffs on movies produced overseas might drive Hollywood to film more intensively in the United States, but it also makes it more difficult and expensive for American audiences to see movies made by foreign companies. Films from South Korea, India, Europe, and elsewhere compete with the U.S. film industry in terms of culture, ideas, and sometimes politics. Tariffs on overseas productions could effectively trap us with the products of Hollywood and reduce its need to adjust to the tastes of the viewing public.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/07/trumps-foreign-film-tariffs-could-stick-us-with-nothing-but-disney-movies/
“Americans produce a lot and consume a lot. We have among the highest average incomes and we buy a lot of stuff. We derive pleasure from acquiring and using material things, whether they’re toys, clothes, video games, or cars. If 37 dolls make you happy, and you have the means, then go out and buy 37 dolls. It is not a question of whether we need them or not.
Trump’s comments are an explicit rejection of materialism, abundance, and capitalism itself. I much prefer the Trump who was obsessively tweeting about stocks going up in his first term. Not only is Trump not tweeting about stocks, but he seems entirely indifferent to the prospect of a recession.
In other comments, Trump has said that prosperity can be achieved through tariffs—which is obviously untrue—so it seems likely that he’s willing to trade off some short-term economic pain for potential long-term gain. But as any student of economics will tell you, the tariffs are all pain, and even if the president doesn’t expect a recession, we are probably going to get one.”
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“There doesn’t seem to be as much visceral outrage at Trump’s assertion that American girls can make do with less. Yet, if there is a greater good here, Trump has been unable to articulate it. If the tariffs are in place simply because Trump romanticizes the late 1800s and thinks we can finance government spending with tariff revenue, then we are doomed.
This rhetoric from Trump has a great deal in common with Bernie Sanders’ anti-capitalist worldview. Between the tariffs, the increasingly progressive income taxes, the incompetent attempt to cut government spending, and the explicit anti-materialism, Trump is off to a bad start with capitalists.
In the past, those with a desire for free-ish markets would generally vote Republican. At least in the past, the Republicans were pro-growth. What does it mean when both major political parties are anti-growth and anti-materialism? What does it mean when the political apparatus of a country is wholly aligned for it to fail?”
https://reason.com/2025/05/07/trumps-they-can-have-5-moment-is-an-attack-on-capitalism/
“Last month, there was a terrorist attack in India-controlled Kashmir that killed 26 tourists. Yesterday, India conducted several airstrikes on Pakistan, saying the strikes were retribution for the attack.
The strikes may not have been as successful as the Indian military had hoped. “At least two aircraft were said to have gone down in India and the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, according to three officials, local news reports, and accounts of witnesses who had seen the debris of two,” reports The New York Times. “Pakistani military officials said that more than 20 people had been killed and dozens injured after six places were hit on the Pakistani side of Kashmir and in Punjab Province. Residents of the Indian side of Kashmir said at least 10 people had been killed in shelling from the Pakistani side since India carried out its strikes.””
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“”The scale of the strikes went far beyond New Delhi’s response to previous attacks in Kashmir it has blamed on Pakistan, including in 2019 and 2016, which some analysts said meant the risk of escalation was higher,” reports Reuters. But “the last time India and Pakistan faced off in a military confrontation, in 2019, U.S. officials detected enough movement in the nuclear arsenals of both nations to be alarmed,” reports The New York Times.
There’s also, of course, the China factor: Pakistan now gets lots of its weapons from China, whereas India is more reliant on the West; relations between India and China have soured in recent years, while China and Pakistan have gotten much closer.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/07/india-vs-pakistan-and-china/
“the Houthi movement, one of the two rival governments in Yemen, has not attacked commercial ships since the beginning of Trump’s term, when Trump brokered a ceasefire in Gaza. (The Houthis had started the attacks in November 2023, demanding such a ceasefire.) Trump began an air campaign in Yemen three days before the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire broke down. The new Yemeni ceasefire is simply a return to the status quo ante bellum, at least with regard to shipping.
Although no American troops have died during Trump’s war in Yemen, the campaign has been incredibly costly for U.S. military preparedness. The military spent $1 billion in just the first three weeks, a U.S. official told CNN. Last week, the U.S. Navy accidentally dropped a $64 million fighter jet into the sea. It lost another one to a landing accident on Wednesday; the jet was returning to its carrier after the ceasefire was announced. And it’s not just about the financial price tag. The Department of Defense warned Congress behind closed doors that it was “risking real operational problems” due to being stretched thin by the Middle Eastern war.
Significantly, Trump seems to be extracting the U.S. from Israel’s war. Asked whether the deal included a Houthi-Israeli truce, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters that “this is about the Red Sea, the attacking of ships.” Israel was reportedly not even informed of the deal beforehand. After the deal was announced, Houthi leader Mahdi al-Mashat said that the attacks on Israel would continue and warned Israelis to “stay in your shelters.” Trump told reporters at the White House that he “will discuss that if something happens with Israel and the Houthis.”
Just three days ago, Houthi forces hit the international airport in Tel Aviv with a ballistic missile, wounding six people and shutting down all of Israel’s international air traffic.””
https://reason.com/2025/05/07/trump-gets-bored-with-the-war-in-yemen/
“India launched military strikes on targets in Pakistan, both countries said on Wednesday and Pakistan claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets, in an escalation that has pushed the two nations to the brink of wider conflict.
India’s missile strikes early Wednesday morning targeted “terrorist infrastructure” across nine sites in Pakistan’s densely populated Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, it said. They came in response to a massacre by militants of tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir two weeks ago, that New Delhi blamed on its neighbor.
Pakistan said at least 26 people were killed in Wednesday’s strikes – including women and a three-year-old girl – and 46 wounded. The country’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described the strikes as “an act of war” and Islamabad has vowed to retaliate.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/india-launches-strikes-deep-inside-011639841.html
Republicans and Democrats are hurtling the U.S. toward a debt crisis. The trade deficit cannot be fixed by bullying foreign countries. To fix the country’s economic woes, the U.S. needs to lower spending to reduce or eliminate the budget deficit. The U.S. depends on the world to buy U.S. debt. If they buy less, interest rates will destroy the U.S. economy. The U.S. needs to fix the budget deficit to prevent this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lixA8SuJf2E