July 8, 2026

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

Well, I guess that makes me a cynic.

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

DO AMERICANS KNOW WHO WE ARE? Lots of survey results in recent days prompted by the 250th July 4 celebration and, based on typical media reporting, it’s easy to conclude Americans, especially those in younger age brackets, have lost faith in the nation’s founding principles. Well, I say hold on there because that’s not the whole story. Check it out on The Washington Stand.

Posted at 2:25 pm by Mark Tapscott

“RIGHT NOW,” MEGAN, REALLY? PROGRESSIVISM FROM THE START WAS A TOP-DOWN IDEOLOGY OF EXPERTS TELLING THE MASSES WHAT TO DO:

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Amazon Floats $25 Billion Debt Sale to Fund AI.

Amazon is preparing to borrow $25 billion or more in the U.S. bond market, adding to a wave of jumbo debt financing as the world’s largest technology companies race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, Bloomberg reports.

The e-commerce and cloud computing giant has already raised more than $82 billion in investment-grade bonds across several currencies since the start of 2025.

The deal would lift Big Tech’s global AI-related debt issuance to about $335 billion in 2026, more than double the amount issued in 2025, according to Bloomberg data.

Amazon is expected to invest nearly $200 billion this year, largely to expand data centers and computing capacity for its AI operations and Amazon Web Services customers.

Amazon last tapped the U.S. dollar debt markets in March, when it raised $37 billion. That was the fourth-largest U.S. corporate bond sale on record.

There are some very smart people arguing we aren’t necessarily in a bubble, but that’s an awful lot of spending and debt in pursuit of profits that have yet to materialize.

If they do come, great. But even then, expect a vicious shakeout along the way.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

GRAHAM PLATNER: The Left’s Caricature of the American Everyman.

This is the basket-of-deplorables strategy in reverse. Progressives have long viewed Middle American men through a lens of condescension, seeing us as racist, sexist, gun-clinging, beer-drinking relics who need saving from their own vices. Rather than engage their real concerns about economic stagnation, cultural displacement or family breakdown, far Left operatives bet on manufacturing a proxy: a flawed but “relatable” everyman who mouths the right policy lines. Platner was elevated as the vessel with veteran credentials for patriotism points, manual labor for blue-collar credibility and veteran struggles with PTSD and alcohol repurposed as humanizing rather than disqualifying. The hope? That this caricature would lure disaffected working-class voters away from populists on the right, delivering Senate seats without conceding ground on core cultural issues.

Flashback:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SUICIDAL EMPATHY, INDEED:

More:

Asked by @Ben_Scallan whether there should be culture and language requirements to gain citizenship, Social Protection Minister Dara Calleary rejected the idea, saying “Don’t isolate one case, Ben – don’t do that”, arguing that “citizenship is a much broader thing than just language” and that “contribution to the economy” mattered as well.

I wasn’t aware that stabbings contributed to the economy. Good to know.

Posted at 1:31 pm by Stephen Green

SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: 13,000-year-old bones found near SoCal coast could rewrite human history. “Evidence found on the Channel Islands suggests humans could have arrived via boat instead of crossing an inland ice corridor. If true, it would overturn the conventional thinking that Americans crossed a land bridge from modern-day Siberia and traveled south.”

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BELMONT CLUB: The Utility of Civilization. “By and large, the world needs the skills of the developed world. The vaccine example illustrates that, in the grand scheme of things, the West, despite the hatred directed at it by progressives, is the workshop of the global south. It invents medicine, cell phones, computers, airplanes, high-yielding crops, transportation, long shelf-life food, etc., that even the pirates use, and without which the lives of people in the Third World could not be lengthened to historically unheard-of heights. Life expectancy at birth in Africa has risen to approximately 64.2 years, marking an increase of almost two decades since the 1970s. Lifespan on the continent has improved dramatically from historic lows of 26 to 37 years in the mid-20th century, driven largely by successful public health measures. Absent these underpinnings, the stage collapses.”

Posted at 1:15 pm by Stephen Green

WHAT PUBLIC POLICY SCHOOL SHOULD TEACH. As the article points out, maybe the Trump Administration would be a little less, er, exciting if right-leaning students didn’t have every reason to avoid public policy schools. Heck, I knew to avoid them back in the year 2000. I can only imagine what 20+ more years of that trend has wrought.

Posted at 1:12 pm by Robert Shibley

ISLAMIFICATION:

More:

Political parties. State-sponsored NGOs. Schools. Childcare facilities. Associations. Umbrella organisations. Educational institutions. Not mosques. Political structures.

The document is precise about the method:

“Islamization from below.” Train individuals ideologically. Insert them into civic life. Let them work their way into the institutions that shape how a society thinks and governs itself.

Austria’s parliament has simultaneously submitted a formal question asking whether intelligence chiefs were ordered by ministers to suppress surveillance results on political Islam.

Read that again. MPs are asking whether the government was told to look away.

Austria is further ahead than any other European country in naming this. It has banned Brotherhood symbols, closed radical mosques, expelled imams and now published a comprehensive counter-strategy naming specific institutional targets.

The EU designation question has been sitting unanswered since January.

Brussels knows what’s coming yet refuses to act.

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

YEP, THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP:

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

I’M HAVING WAY TOO MUCH FUN WITH THIS: Platner Down but Not Out. “Every second Platner clings to his nomination like Hitler in his bunker is another second his replacement won’t have to run against Collins, and he knows it.”

Posted at 11:11 am by Stephen Green

THE BOB PACKWOOD YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Sen. Robert Packwood (R-ORE) passed away recently. The prototypical Senate GOP RINO, Packwood is probably most remembered these days, if he is recalled at all, for sleeping with certain female staffers. But there was much more to the man.

Former Reagan White House official Chuck Donovan, writing in The Washington Stand, tells about Packwood’s devotion to advancing the cause of population control (remember Erhlich’s “The Population Bomb”?). and the closely related issue of legalizing abortion. Packwood played a huge role in blocking Reagan’s major pro-life initiative:

Packwood “was a key force within the GOP in blocking progress on life. In 1982, the Reagan administration endorsed a measure called the Human Life Bill, which, less than a decade after Roe v. Wade, would have made clear that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applied to all human beings from conception, freeing the states and, by implication, the federal government to protect human life from abortion. Packwood joined fellow Republican Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey and many Democrats in opposing the HLB, as it was dubbed. The Senate failed to break a filibuster against the bill, and it was ultimately tabled,” Donovan writes. There is much more like this, courtesy of Donovan’s careful re-telling.

Posted at 10:58 am by Mark Tapscott