In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election partly on the basis of his campaign’s false accusation that George H. W. Bush had overseen “the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.” Or so claimed Clinton’s running mate Al Gore.
James Carville, chief campaign adviser to Clinton/Gore, amplified that message with the constant refrain: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
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One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.
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In 2024, Hawkins County voters gave President Donald Trump a very clear mandate.
Voters there chose the president by giving him 84 percent of the vote, making it one the Volunteer State’s top 20 Trump supporting counties.
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There is a reality we must acknowledge to begin moving toward national fiscal solvency and sanity — resources are finite. Accepting this fundamental fact is our Vince Lombardi moment to zero-in on the basics, just as his Green Bay Packers team did after he delivered his famous line, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” They then went on to win the NFL Championship that year.
Getting back-to-basics with our country’s finances means we first must deal with our unsustainable practice of borrowing $2 trillion each year to fill in the gap between spending $7 trillion while only bringing in $5 trillion. Adding $2 trillion to our debt annually over the last decade has quickly doubled our liability from $20 trillion in 2017 to $40 trillion now.
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Six years ago, the rise of the “Bernie bros” supporting avowed socialist candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) raised the question of whether decades of soft indoctrination about the “horrors” of capitalism by the Democrat-media complex and the oft-promised but never delivered benefits of socialism had finally produced enough voters willing to elect their way out of free enterprise.
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This year’s PISA results show that the United States ranked 13th in reading and science and 27th in math. Reading scores fell by 14 points since the last test in 2022. It’s not just the U.S. that’s moving in the wrong direction. The decline is part of a broader global trend, with the OECD average across 23 countries down 16 points.
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I spent decades working with abused, abandoned, and neglected animals before I ever served in the Florida Legislature, and one thing became obvious very early: good intentions only get you so far.
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This past week, Democrats and the mainstream media had their daggers drawn at the Trump administration over high prices for new homes.
Unfortunately, their smear campaign is proving effective. Fewer than two months before the midterm elections, voters are telling pollsters that housing costs are among their top concerns. Voters also say that the administration is tone-deaf to their concerns because, as they put it, mortgages and rents continue to rise.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done many things in a year and a half in office. But perhaps none is more important than highlighting our man-made chronic disease crisis.
Modern life has brought countless blessings. Clean water, sewage systems, antibiotics, refrigeration, and more have tamed many deadly diseases. In the last two centuries, lifespans doubled. Doctors can now manage diseases that once killed our ancestors, so they become “chronic.” Better testing also finds problems earlier, while broader diagnostic rules can inflate the numbers, making things look worse than they are.
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U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune just put permitting reform on the Senate agenda before Election Day. This news comes as next week, America’s leading investors, policymakers and energy developers will fill Manhattan for Climate Week NYC to advance the technologies that can meet America’s surging power demand. American innovators are transforming nuclear energy, drilling geothermal wells faster and more efficiently, and bringing once-novel energy technologies closer to commercial reality. While American technology has rapidly improved, our permitting system has not. Fixing that should be at the top of everyone’s agenda.
There is a path there to do something that is long overdue for the country.
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When I was five years old, my family fled communist Cuba. We left behind a regime built on government decrees, central planning, and the false promise that state mandates could magically cure economic pain. I learned a lesson early in life that has stayed with me ever since: government can order a price to be lower on paper, but it cannot order a scientist to discover a cure, an entrepreneur to risk capital, or a business to survive in a broken or fixed market.
That history drives my work today. At Latinos for Tennessee, our advocacy is rooted in free enterprise and free-market principles—limited government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty. When we talk about healthcare affordability, we have to be careful. Well-intentioned policy ideas can easily destroy the very engine of scientific progress that makes American medicine the best in the world.
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Many narratives swirl around the U.S. war with Iran as the November 3 midterm elections loom.
The Left is giddy with confidence that Democrats may take control of Congress. It is therefore planning a circus of impeachments, lawfare, and investigations to neuter the last two years of the Trump administration.
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Energy deregulation is not simply about eliminating rules. It is about removing regulations that exceed statutory authority, impose overly burdensome costs, and make it harder for Americans to access affordable and reliable power, often with little or no environmental benefit.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s repeal of the 2024 greenhouse gas standards for power plants does exactly that, according to the EPA.
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In Philadelphia 235 years ago today, 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the U.S. Constitution. Eleven years had passed since the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and this historic event marked an important milestone for our remarkable experiment in self-government.
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.
So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the United States for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.
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In the course of these hebdomadal bulletins, I have often had occasion to mention Charles Mackay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title should be inscribed as a talisman somewhere in the homes of the credulous. Mackay’s account of various “moral epidemics”—the South Sea Bubble, Tulipomania, Witch Hunting, etc.—is amusing until one steps back and realizes that we modern sophisticates are just as susceptible to the sorts of “folly and delusion” Mackay anatomizes as was any seventeenth-century Dutchman who mortgaged his house to purchase a single tulip bulb.
Certain insects undergo periods of dormancy before suddenly erupting in a destructive swarm. So it seems to be with society’s appetite for panic. How long can we go without indulging in the catharsis of a panic? How many society-wide panics have we witnessed in the last few decades? There was the “global cooling” scare when we were warned that a new ice age was upon us. Then there was the “global warming” scare, which is still going strong. “Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.” Al Gore is going with fire. Chicken Little warned about a “population bomb” in which untold multitudes would precipitate mass starvation and lead governments to force sterilization upon their polyphiloprogenitive charges. Now we are being warned about a terrifying birth dearth. I can imagine that, should a new Charles Mackay arise, such episodes would be included in an updated edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
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Tennessee’s pension system is one of the best-funded in the nation, and that is no accident. Every session, my colleagues and I on the Finance, Ways, and Means Committee make hard choices, keep our commitments, and make sure the numbers pencil out because the people depending on Tennessee’s retirement system spent decades earning those benefits and deserve to know they’ll be there.
Our discipline has paid off. In fiscal year 2025, the K-12 teachers’ pension plans were funded at approximately 106%. We’ve made a secure retirement a top priority, and we need Washington to do the same.
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Whoever controls crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has already reversed some of the changes the Biden administration made to federal crime and gun data, including information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But politicization of data at the FBI and Justice Department still deserves attention.
Gun-control activists have long tried to “debunk” what they call the “good guy with a gun myth” as they push for stricter gun-control laws. The federal government and much of the media have reinforced that argument by downplaying evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens stop public attacks.
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Mark Twain famously published that “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Were Twain with us today he might add a fourth type of lie – political polling. Specifically, those polls released for public consumption.
Most campaign polling is internal, unpublicized, and genuinely used by campaigns to understand where a race stands. You will likely never hear about most of it, because that isn’t its purpose. These are legitimate benchmark and brushfire polls.
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Charlie Kirk “made the winning difference” in President Donald Trump’s 2024 mandate, sweeping the swing states and winning the popular vote, according to none other than White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
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The pervasive homegrown progressive forces, which emphasize politics, sex, and race—all from a radical perspective—have become entrenched in our education system in recent years. But growing evidence shows that foreign enemy influence has also become a factor in the indoctrination of our students.
A report by DefendingEd, released in August, reveals that for decades the Chinese government and its affiliates have been engaged in a global campaign called the ‘Belt and Road Initiative,’ designed to advance Red China’s political and cultural agenda. This ongoing effort includes programs intended to influence how young people in the U.S. view China, targeting K-12 and university students.
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As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Americans may blame Russian leader Vladimir Putin for starting “World War III.” It is correct that World War III has started, but its cause is the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not Russia.
The war did not start with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or with the appeasement of Russia in the years before Putin’s foolish aggression. It started with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP has been at war with the U.S. since coming to power in 1949 and has employed many fronts in this war to undermine America and the West. The CCP’s May 2019 declaration of “People’s War” against the U.S. was CCP leader Xi Jinping’s call for a maximal effort against America. Not coincidentally, the COVID-19 outbreak soon followed. The CCP lied about COVID’s origins, refused to share information with the world, and used Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), as its willing accomplice. Another front is CCP election interference.
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In 2022, politicians in Minneapolis and St. Paul voted for rent control.
I said that would lead to bigger problems.
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Pundits on cable news keep insisting that President Trump’s economic strangulation campaign against Iran cannot work. Sanctions, they say, have never brought down a regime. They note that Iran has survived decades of economic sanctions due to weak compliance and selling discounted oil through a shadow fleet, mostly to China.
That argument misses what is happening now. After the Iranian regime rejected President Trump’s diplomatic offers—including a generous Memorandum of Understanding and the substantial financial incentives that accompanied it—he turned to a different strategy. This is not another round of paper sanctions. It is a naval blockade, backed by asset seizures and targeted strikes. It does not merely ask governments and banks to comply. It stops tankers. That is why the campaign has a realistic chance of forcing a political rupture in Tehran that sanctions alone cannot produce.
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Labor Day is a U.S. national holiday held the first Monday every September. Unlike most U.S. holidays, it is a strange celebration without rituals, except for shopping and barbecuing. For most people it simply marks the last weekend of summer and the start of the school year.
The holiday’s founders in the late 1800s envisioned something very different from what the day has become. The founders were looking for two things: a means of unifying union workers and a reduction in work time.
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At first glance, the current American-Canadian trade “war” is absurd. We are neighbors with a long history of close friendship, speak the same language (for the most part), and spring from the same British civilization.
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I spent 21 years in the Army before I spent years representing Montgomery County, a district shaped by Fort Campbell. In that overlap, I sat with more veterans than I can count who told me some version of the same thing. The hardest part of coming home wasn’t the transition itself. It was learning to live without the people who understood them.
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“THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE!”
That was President Donald Trump on Truth Social on Aug. 30, suggesting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could be looking at television and radio over-the-air licenses for stations that publish what the President is calling “fake polls”.
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For most people, the story of the medieval world was one of cramped cities, constant violent crime, and episodic outbreaks of deadly plagues—the dividends of unclean urban conditions, rotting food, fouled water, open sewage, and unchecked rats, fleas, and lice. Most of each day was spent simply trying to survive until the next.
Castles and walls dotted the landscape to protect kingdoms from marauding tribes and foreign invaders. City gates were usually closed at dusk to keep out nocturnal marauders. Public executions drew massive crowds. And religious schisms and conflicts often turned deadly.
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The public exposure, resignation, and subsequent death of the British fabulist Jason Arday have reignited the longstanding (if not eternal) debate about the purpose of higher education in our society and whether it is fulfilling that purpose. On the one side, conservatives are frustrated because, to them, the Arday case is emblematic: universities today are overwhelmingly leftist; leftists dominate the humanities and liberal arts faculties, and leftists are rewarded for poor or even fraudulent scholarship simply because it reinforces the preexisting beliefs of their contemporaries and superiors. On the other side, progressives and other leftists insist that the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment is definitionally a left-leaning enterprise, at least in contemporary society. Of course, leftists are overrepresented in academia; leftists seek awareness and understanding, while conservatives are simply less inquisitive and less interested in attaining knowledge, both temperamentally and practically, the latter for fear of learning that what they perceive as fairness and equality is, in reality, prejudice and discrimination.
Ironically, the progressives’ explanation is itself bigoted, in addition to being trite and largely self-serving. At the same time, however, the conservative account is inadequate. It describes the problem within academia today reasonably well but fails to explain why that problem exists. Indeed, it fails even to acknowledge that the problem has an underlying cause and isn’t merely the result of choice or happenstance.
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For years, America’s biggest technology companies were the loudest corporate cheerleaders for wind and solar.
Microsoft pledged to match its electricity use with 100% renewable energy and to become carbon negative by 2030.
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President Donald Trump is considering a simple way to help America’s brutal housing market: Stop punishing people for selling their homes.
Trump administration officials recently floated cutting the capital gains tax on home sales, potentially removing one obstacle that keeps longtime homeowners from selling and younger families from buying.
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Tennessee just took Big Tech to task.
Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti negotiated a historic $17 billion settlement with Meta, delivering real money, real platform changes and real accountability. As a school board member in Williamson County, I’ve spent the past year immersed in the research and the reality of what these platforms are doing to our kids: the anxiety, the sleep deprivation, the self-worth tied to a Like count. Each one of the settlement’s painstaking concessions – platform curfews, screen time limits, non-personalized feeds, and disabled Like counts – are the kind of baseline protections I’ve been waiting years to see implemented.
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Every day, Americans walk into hospitals trusting that the machines keeping watch over their hearts are working for them. Most have no idea that some of those machines may be working for Communist China.
Last year, FDA and federal cybersecurity officials issued a warning about a patient monitor called the Contec CMS8000, a medical device used routinely in American hospitals to track heart rate, blood pressure, and electrocardiograms. Investigators found a back door built into the software. Not a simple glitch, but a highly technological avenue to siphon patient data out of our health care facilities and into outside remote servers. The company that manufactures the Contec monitor is based in China.
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I was born in communist Cuba, where the government believed it could manage the economy better than ordinary people. It set prices. It controlled markets. It decided what things should cost and, too often, who could get them.
That experience shaped the way I look at Washington’s new approach to prescription drugs.
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And private equity is making it even worse
A few years ago, Congress tried to address America’s healthcare crisis by passing the No Surprises Act. This was well-intended legislation designed to end the scourge of “surprise” medical billing. Prior to this law, patients who unknowingly received care from an out-of-network physician would often be stuck with crippling bills through no fault of their own. The No Surprises Act solved that problem, but unfortunately, as government intervention often does, it created a brand new one in the process that further exacerbated healthcare costs.
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The American left wants to stop the buildout of American technological infrastructure. And some Republicans are taking the bait.
From the far left to the Democrat establishment, they’re going full steam ahead with the ban hammer. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are trying to freeze new AI data center construction nationwide until Congress passes a crippling regulatory regime. They are but two of the top Democrats calling for a national moratorium. This week, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an order restricting data centers in his state.
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The recently released EdChoice “Schooling in America” survey finds that 56 percent of parents believe K-12 education is on the wrong track. Indeed, too many traditional American public schools are failing to fulfill their role.
Parental unhappiness is certainly understandable, given that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), aka the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that in 2024, 12th-grade students scored their lowest in reading and math in decades.
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An abused wife opens a credit card statement and discovers her abuser ran up $40,000 in her name. A soldier overseas finds out a predatory lender jacked his car-loan rate while he was deployed. A family buried under medical debt tries to negotiate a settlement with the help of a debt relief company. And a Washington lobby group spends millions making sure they can’t.
Meet the American Financial Services Association. AFSA says it’s fighting for consumers. Don’t buy it. AFSA is a creditor trade group that has gone to war against domestic violence survivors, military families, and working Americans drowning in debt.
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Bill Clinton holds the distinction of being the only elected president since World War II to lose both houses of Congress while leading a trifecta. Republicans swept the 1994 midterms by winning over the working class, which had formed the backbone of the Democratic Party since the Great Depression.
Democrats would have to make similar inroads among working-class voters who elected President Donald Trump to sweep this year’s November midterms. But that would require repairing the party’s brand, which cultural radicals have trashed with these voters, and Democrats’ own social progressivism simply won’t allow it.
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For many families in Knox County, the dream of homeownership feels further away today than it did just a few years ago. Rent has climbed drastically. Home prices remain high.
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The most important healthcare document released this year wasn’t another regulation, another Inspector General report, or another congressional hearing.
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America’s private fortunes are the economic engines that built the most prosperous economy in world history, and they are giving themselves away.
Since her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott has handed out $26 billion—much of it to racial equity, DEI, and “social justice” causes. Warren Buffett has pledged 99% of his roughly $170 billion. Bill Gates has given away more than $100 billion and vows to spend his foundation to zero by 2045. George Soros has poured $32 billion into his Open Society Foundations. Different fortunes, different causes—but the same destination, and the same motivating logic: The tax code has made nongovernmental organizations the most rational place for private fortunes to end up.
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The liberal media melted down last week as the Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, James Percival, criticized “the worst of the worst” activist judges who are blocking President Trump from securing our borders and our homeland.
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While the burgeoning democratic socialist movement is getting a lot of attention in advance of the 2026 midterm elections, a parallel dimension of wokeism quietly continues to advance. For now, the Trump administration has attenuated its most extreme threats, but its institutional support is unwavering, and its slow progress is unrelenting. The woke greens are pursuing their own long march.
The agenda of the woke greens is synergistic with democratic socialism. Its currency is fear and resentment. The Earth is dying; colonialist capitalism is to blame. Extraordinary measures are called for. Restrict growth, redistribute wealth. Sound familiar? Environmentalist extremism and socialism are two peas in a pod. But both are built on lies. Nothing has delivered more wealth and freedom to more people than authentic capitalism. Not crony, casino, or monopoly capitalism, but capitalism that rewards hard work, protects private property, and preserves the incentives that harness human nature and nurture human creativity. In contrast to capitalism, socialism is a nightmare that turns out the lights in nation after nation. The historical evidence is overwhelming. Strive to improve the mechanics of capitalism, and reject socialist demagoguery.
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Newly installed Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is experiencing a bout of policy reality. If you preserve the status quo, you’ll be attacked. If you challenge the status quo, you’ll be attacked even more.
Warsh knew this going in. He is upending the status quo.
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The Democratic Socialists of America have released a manifesto. It reeks of deeply dysfunctional infantilism.
Within the scope of that program, Abdul El-Sayed just won—narrowly (but a win is a win)—the right to run for the U.S. Senate as a DSA fellow traveler. And Donavan McKinney unseated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th District (Detroit), winning 51.9 percent–48.1 percent in a solidly blue seat.
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Knox County takes pride in creating a favorable environment for businesses. However, the housing market has been hampered by unnecessary red tape, resulting in a housing shortage. That’s why I am concerned that the Knox County Commission is considering adding more regulations that will not improve housing affordability.
Rather than encouraging the market to build more homes, county commissioners proposed a cap on the number of single-family rentals that larger housing providers can purchase. The real issue facing Knox County isn’t who owns homes; it’s that we don’t have enough of them. Working families need more housing options, not additional government restrictions.
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There’s no mystery in why Dr. Anthony Fauci strove to silence discussion about the origins of COVID-19 – he was in full CYA mode because the agency he led had helped fund the Wuhan lab that apparently created the deadly virus. It also seems clear that others in the government and many powerful business interests enabled this deception for fear that fingering China rather than a rabid bat might lead Americans to demand some accountability.
This makes President Biden’s decision to grant Fauci a “preemptive pardon” all the more troubling. Biden apparently believed that the doctor who equated himself with science itself needed to be shielded from prosecution “for any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon.”
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As a U.S. Army veteran who faced radical Islamic terrorists in combat, I have looked into the eyes of men taught from childhood – in madrassas and through propaganda – to hate Americans with a purity of purpose that left little room for doubt.
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