I was asked recently by a Facebook friend the following:

Updated: The Vote Failed 55-44

A bipartisan group of senators (Mike Lee, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Murphy) are forcing a vote on the US involvement in the Yemen conflict with a vote expected sometime today. The timing of the vote coincides with a visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, whose country has waged war again Yemen since 2015.

Media outlets from The Washington Post to CNN are now calling for changes in law that will allow children to vote. 

One of the hottest sectors in the U.S. today is energy. The shale revolution brought to you by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has produced a historic boom period in the oil and gas industry. Thousands of jobs are being created every month, regulations are coming down, the U.S. is not beholden to the Paris Accord any longer, and domestic output has topped 10 million barrels per day (bpd).

Every 10 years or so there is a banking crisis. We are due. However, the furthest thing from most people’s minds with the Trump boom is a banking/financial crisis, except for a few folks at the Brookings Institution, who just released a paper entitled “Liquidity Crisis in the Mortgage Market.”

In New Hampshire today, President Trump announced his plan for tackling the opioid crisis.  The main points from the plan, as reported by Axios, are:

More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings run so deep on both sides of the controversy that one would think that the Civil War ended just yesterday.

By many objective signs and indicators the world is becoming a far more materially comfortable place. Over the last thirty years, tens of millions of people have been raised out of poverty in various parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, new technologies have been transforming communications and conveniences of everyday life. Yet, present political trends in America and other places in the world seem to be suggesting a far different story.

Last week Matt Yglesias over at Vox tried his best to deflate the notion that America was becoming increasingly hostile to free speech. Unfortunately, as Daniel Bier over at Skeptical Libertarian noted, Yglesias’s own charts indicate that support for free speech among “Liberal” and “Slightly Liberal” Americans is at the lowest point in over 40 years.