The cost of living is coming for Congress



I have spent more than two decades working in politics and have been involved in roughly 50 campaigns, from local races to presidential contests. If there is one lesson I have learned, it is this: Never tell voters that what they are experiencing isn’t real.

With the midterm elections eight weeks away, too many campaigns risk making that mistake. Washington wants to talk about foreign policy, economic indicators, and political strategy. Voters are looking at receipts, and those receipts tell a different story.

Voters can forgive difficult circumstances. What they will not forgive is being told those circumstances don’t exist.

In the week ending September 7, the national average for diesel reached a record $5.97 a gallon. That matters far beyond truck stops. Farmers, contractors, freight carriers, and delivery networks all depend on diesel.

When those costs rise, they move through the supply chain. Fuel becomes part of the grocery bill, the restaurant bill, the cost of construction, shipping, and nearly everything else Americans buy. The consumer ultimately pays.

The line between foreign policy and affordability is not always clean. Wars, sanctions, and instability abroad can raise oil prices and transportation costs at home. But voters experience those events through household economics: the price on the pump, the supermarket receipt, and the balance in the checking account.

Politicians love macroeconomics. Voters live in microeconomics.

A candidate can talk about GDP, job creation, or the stock market, but those figures do not erase what a family pays for groceries, housing, insurance, and energy. The voter's checking account gets the final vote.

As much as it pains me to admit it, Democrat strategist James Carville got at least one thing right. During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Carville drove home a simple message: “It’s the economy, stupid.” More than three decades later, Republicans would be wise to remember the lesson.

I have seen campaigns become consumed with the issue they want voters to care about rather than the issue voters actually care about. Those are not always the same thing.

The evidence this year is hard to miss. A July Pew Research Center survey found that voters most wanted congressional candidates to discuss economic issues, especially prices and affordability. In a companion survey, 66% said they were very concerned about food and consumer-goods prices, 64% about housing costs, and 56% about gasoline prices.

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Foreign policy and national security still matter. China, Russia, Iran, and America’s place in the world cannot be dismissed. No single issue will decide every race. But elections are personal, and voters usually encounter national policy through its effect on daily life.

A parent in a supermarket aisle is not conducting a geopolitical analysis while comparing grocery prices. A driver filling the family SUV is watching the numbers on the pump. Both are asking the same question: How much is this going to cost me?

They are thinking about the mortgage, electric bill, car payment, insurance, groceries, gas, child care, and credit cards. They are wondering why an income that once felt comfortable now seems barely sufficient. That is affordability, and it will decide November.

Economic frustration helped return Donald Trump to the White House. Republicans cannot assume that the issue automatically works in their favor now. They cannot tell families struggling with grocery and fuel bills that everything is fine or insist that distant events matter more than household finances.

That does not require Republicans to abandon foreign policy or the administration’s agenda. It requires candidates to acknowledge what voters are experiencing and explain what they intend to do about it. There is an enormous political difference between saying, “The economy is great,” and saying, “We’ve made progress, but prices are still too high, and here is what we’re doing next.”

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Democrats should not celebrate, either. Economic frustration does not automatically translate into support for Democratic policies. Voters will judge which candidates understand their financial situation and offer credible solutions. That gives both parties an opportunity, but neither a guaranteed victory.

Campaigns succeed when candidates understand what voters are feeling. They fail when consultants persuade candidates that voters should care about something else. After roughly 50 campaigns, I have found that voters can forgive difficult circumstances. What they will not forgive is being told those circumstances don’t exist.

The question in November will not be whether Washington can produce statistics showing that parts of the economy are strong. It will be whether Americans believe they can afford their lives.

When they enter the voting booth, they will not be carrying economic charts. They will be carrying their grocery receipts.

‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive



Some still remember when Google defined itself by a simple motto: “Don’t be evil.” When Google reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, the new parent company adopted the somehow less confidence-inspiring, “Do the right thing.” Another phrase with a lower bar also made the rounds — “to organize the world’s information” — but rest assured, that was never the motto. It was simply ... uh ... the mission statement.

Anyway ...

The AI doomers’ strange brand of apocalypticism is: Let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it.

It took until this week for some of the most powerful voices in tech policy to circle back explicitly to a prime directive: Avoid hellacious acts. For that, thank the AI doomers, whose strange brand of apocalypticism — let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it — finally breached technology insider-dom and splashed across the political timeline.

The high-stakes soap opera has, as usual, deeper currents than the news feed can convey. But the key development is that the White House and its allies moved at warp speed to establish a few basic touchstones that take us back to the good old days of not being evil.

Trump has received most of the attention for memeing his stern-looking self above the caption “Americanism, Not Effective Altruism!” But his vice president captured the matter in a single line that’s tough to beat. “If you’re building Frankenstein,” he said, “stop!"

Note the emphasis. Trying to build an evil god — for instance, one with a statistically nonzero chance of wiping out the human race — is fortunately still considered axiomatically evil. But JD Vance’s reference underscores that trying to build a "new man," even with the best of intentions, is also evil.

According to the doomers, the best way to save the world from evils they might create is for the rest of us to give them some form of planetary governing control. Vance endorsed a more commonsense approach: The best way to spare the world from evils you’re responsible for is to ... not do them in the first place.

RELATED: Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image

Gremlin/Getty Images

The vice president may, like every one of his predecessors in living memory, carry a pronounced partisan identity. But his folksy-clever line echoes in anti-doomer rhetoric now blaring from the industry’s rooftops. Microsoft, of all places, recently published its own rulebook for what not to build. On X, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman promoted the new “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which insists AI “is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness. It should,” Microsoft avows, “be engineered to avoid representing as though it has feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation.”

Microsoft also flatly states: “We reject the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.” No Frankensteins here!

Or rather, no Frankenstein’s monsters — which means no Dr. Frankensteins running amok in the lab.

At Palantir, outspoken CTO Shyam Sankar made a similar point in a 2025 interview. “I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI,” Sankar said.

“The people who have religion are the most skeptical” of the doomers’ build-a-god-and-save-the-world-from-it thesis — which, yes, does itself resemble an inverted religion. For “the people who are kind of transhumanists,” Sankar concluded, “it becomes what they wish were true.”

Even Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, not known for Bible-thumping, recently struck an economic note with more than a whiff of spirituality.

“If we’re not confident about the safety of the products, like all companies ... if you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it,” he said. "And so that’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”

RELATED: Poll: Most think AI could do this to humanity — but don't agree on what to do about it

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Translation: Hear a little voice in your head, or more likely, your heart? Whispering, “No, this product is bad”? Don’t take it to market.

Turns out, you can just not do things!

Of course, Huang’s logic is a bit deceptive. We would like to believe the market will punish bad people for taking bad things to market, but that is not always how it works. As we speak, present-day Dr. Frankensteins are transplanting human brain organoids into mice engineered to lack most of their cerebral cortex, allowing the human tissue to occupy much of the vacant space and wire into the animals’ nervous systems.

No, doctors! Bad! Evil! Don’t!

Except they are. In the end, it matters that people examine their own hearts for evil before looking elsewhere and pointing fingers. But spiritual insistence alone will not keep society on the rails. It is not enough to scowl at our mad doctors, however good their intentions, as their creations erode the boundaries around our sacred human bodies and being — supercomputers or no.

Trump Bans ‘Fake News’ CNN, MS NOW, Politico From White House

Each outlet is infamous for coverage that skews radically to the left.

Trump Admin To Pay Americans Back For Biden’s Obamacare Overcharges

The rebates will only go to unsubsidized enrollees in 30 states.
The Rick Burgess Show | LIVE | 9/14/26 | Ep. 412
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The Rick Burgess Show | LIVE | 9/14/26 | Ep. 412

Legendary video game company threatens the White House — and gets results



The Donald Trump administration is used to getting sued, but having a legal run-in with the makers of Tetris likely wasn't on anyone's bingo card.

It has become par for the course for musicians to lash out at the White House over the use of their music in promotional videos, but a recent release from the administration brought new challenges.

'Sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again.'

Before the Labor Day weekend, the White House officially unveiled a new website and a new way to promote its most prized legislative pillars.

"ARCADE.GOV," the administration posted on X, linking to a new batch of point-and-click games released on the official government website.

Among the five games was a parody of Flappy Bird and games about deportations and making America healthy again.

At the same time, the White House launched the game Build the Wall, which the Tetris Company was not too happy about. As one could imagine, users build a wall along the southern border in a game that looks, allegedly, strikingly similar to a classic game of Tetris.

Tetris posted on an image on social media on Friday that said, "At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them."

A caption for the post added, "P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of 'Build the Wall'. P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously."

At the time of this writing, Build the Wall no longer appeared on the White House arcade, but can still be seen in the administration's promotional video on YouTube.

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The remaining games included Flappy Bill, where gamers fly a bald eagle down the national mall.

Rio Run has users policing the southern border, instructing them to "patrol the line along the river. Pick up every crosser in the lot [and] never double back over the line."

Through either user error or the site not working, Blaze News could not get the controls to work; therefore, no one got deported.

Supply Line has users "sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again."

Punch seed oils, junk food, candy, artificial colors, and items that need to have their labels checked off the assembly line to save the children of the cafeteria.

Lastly, Trump Savings Tycoon has users filling their kids' Trump accounts by catching gold bars and money with a net. The first turn saved $150,500.

If only it were that easy in real life.

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While the website is not much more than a clever way to get people talking about the administration's core values — and there is a promise of more to come — the Trump White House may have more cease-and-desist letters coming in relation to the same project.

The administration's X post features a startup video that many may recognize as being similar to that of Microsoft's Xbox.

As well, the YouTube video features a similar boot-up to Sega's and the accompanying music of Sonic the Hedgehog. However, perhaps American Microsoft and Japan's Sega are a little less hostile toward the administration than the Russian creators of Tetris.

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Crypto won't lend. That's exactly the point.



Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) put his hesitation about the Clarity Act into one theory: "Crypto is not going to be loaning any money for small businesses."

He is exactly right. And that is why his objection misses the point entirely.

Washington's biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology.

A regulated stablecoin cannot lend. Federal law requires the issuer to hold a dollar of Treasury bills and cash for every digital dollar in circulation. That makes a stablecoin a payment instrument, a faster wire, not a bank. Lending, the hard local work of judging character, collateral, and cash flow, stays exactly where it has always lived: with bankers.

The digital dollar moves the money. The community banker still decides who deserves the credit. Those are different businesses, and the Clarity Act keeps them different on purpose.

If stablecoins were draining the deposits that fund small business loans, the damage would show up in the numbers. It does not. The FDIC has recorded seven consecutive quarters of domestic deposit growth, through the fastest stablecoin expansion in history. When the White House Council of Economic Advisers modeled the disputed yield provision this spring, it found a lending effect of two hundredths of one percent, largely because nearly nine of every 10 stablecoin dollars sits in Treasury bills that recirculate into the banking system as deposits.

The money is not leaving the system. It is running a lap and coming home.

Community banks are not waiting to be told any of this. Several are already live on stablecoin services through their digital banking providers, with early adopters reaching about 1,670 banks and credit unions nationally. A consortium model has been built specifically so that when money goes digital, the community bank keeps the deposit rather than surrendering it to an outside issuer. State banking associations across the country have backed this infrastructure for their members. The institutions closest to the small business customer are not running from this technology. They are installing it.

The institutions running from it, loudly, sit on Wall Street. And they are only running in public. Privately, the biggest banks are spending tens of billions of dollars a year building token networks of their own while their lobby campaigns work to keep everyone else out of the field. When the largest player in an industry warns that a new tool will hurt the small player, the useful move is to check what the large player is quietly building while it talks.

Washington's biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology. The cost falls on the small institutions the objection claims to protect.

Sen. Cornyn has spent a quarter-century on the unglamorous machinery that makes American law work: courts, procedure, institutions, the rules of the road. The Clarity Act is that kind of work. It draws jurisdictional lines between regulators, sets disclosure duties, and writes the market rules that let a community bank adopt a payment technology without betting the charter on a lawsuit.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

His own objection contains the answer: because crypto does not lend, it does not threaten the lenders. It threatens the wire transfer, the correspondent fee, and the three-day settlement delay, luxuries no American small business will miss.

The real threat to community banking is four decades of consolidation, compliance costs that fall hardest on the smallest charters, and a technology gap against Wall Street's $10 billion and $20 billion annual technology budgets. Killing the Clarity Act treats none of that. It keeps America's small banks in the waiting room while the biggest institutions operate on themselves.

American small business does not need Washington to ban a payment rail. It needs its hometown banks free to use one. September 15 is the vote that decides which it gets.

3 moments that will make you miss Karoline Leavitt



President Donald Trump announced on Aug. 12 that one of his "most trusted aides, Karoline Leavitt," was departing the role of White House press secretary after 19 months so that "she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family."

Leavitt, who gave birth to her second child on May 1, noted, "Serving as the White House Press Secretary over the past year and a half has been the honor and adventure of a lifetime."

'You’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You're posing in this room as a journalist.'

Unlike with her lesbian predecessor, Americans may soon come to miss Leavitt. After all, the unflappable Republican was responsible for a number of memorable moments. Three in particular stand out.

1. 'They are criminals'

Just days after Trump retook office, a reporter noted Immigration and Customs Enforcement had already made roughly 3,500 arrests, then asked, "How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally?"

Leavitt signaled right away that she wasn't going to join the liberal media in downplaying the crime of stealing into the United States.

"All of them," said Leavitt, "because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore they are criminals as far as this administration goes."

The former press secretary acknowledged that after four years of the Biden administration, "It's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that's exactly what they are."

2. 'Left-wing hack'

A year later, Niall Stanage, a White House columnist from The Hill, quoted then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as saying that ICE was doing "everything correctly." After noting that some Americans have been arrested by ICE and invoking the name of Renee Good — an anti-ICE radical who was fatally shot while driving her SUV into an ICE agent — Stanage asked, "How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?"

RELATED: Karoline Leavitt rips into WaPo for 'BS story' about Trump and Hegseth

Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

It didn't take long for Leavitt to suss out Stanage.

"Why was Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?" asked Leavitt.

Stanage replied, "Because an ICE agent reacted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably."

Leavitt delivered her diagnosis: "OK, so you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion. ... You’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You're posing in this room as a journalist, and it’s so clear by the premise of your question."

"You shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat," added Leavitt.

The former press secretary continued to castigate Stanage, suggesting that he had a blind spot for the Americans killed by the very illegal aliens whom ICE works to detain and deport.

3. Maternal selection

President Trump revealed in October 2025 that he was planning to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, Hungary, "to see if we can bring this 'inglorious' War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end."

The Huffington Post's S.V. Dáte pressed the White House on why the capital of a friendly NATO country that's a three-hour flight away from Moscow had been chosen as the destination for the meeting, writing, "Is the president aware of the significance of Budapest? In 1994, Russia promised, in Budapest, not to invade Ukraine if it gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited when the Soviet Union dissolved. Does he not see why Ukraine might object to that site? Who suggested Budapest?"

The tone of the query clearly rubbed Leavitt the wrong way. She answered, "Your mom did."

"Is this funny to you?" said Dáte, evidently unaware that it would soon be funny to a great many Americans.

Leavitt later noted, "For context, S.V. Dáte of the Huffington Post is not a journalist interested in the facts. He is a left-wing hack who has consistently attacked President Trump for years and constantly bombards my phone with Democrat talking points."

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Deadlines are fast approaching on Trump's mail-in ballot initiatives as election season begins



The first ballots of the midterm elections have left the building.

The Trump administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Thursday asking the court to remove a lower court’s stay on the administration's new postal ballot rules. North Carolina, one of the states suing the administration, sent out ballots on Friday.

‘The cheating on mail-in ballots is legendary.’

More than 46,000 North Carolina ballots have been sent out, though only to those who specifically requested them. Those shipments will continue until all requests for mail-in ballots made by October 20 are fulfilled.

Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told Blaze News that this was business as usual for the state.

“Regardless of a temporary restraining order or any kind of action there, every election year we do share our envelopes — absentee ballot envelopes — with the U.S. Postal Service,” Tyson said. “We did share our envelopes with the United States Postal Service about two or three weeks ago. They were approved. That’s very normal. Nothing that we’ve done just for this year.”

The NCSBE is currently controlled by Republicans.

Nineteen other states will begin mailing ballots by September 19. For the Trump administration's new rules to have a chance at taking effect before the midterms, the Supreme Court would need to issue an emergency judgment in the White House's favor quickly.

The administration is already making its case.

RELATED: Democrats are running from Kamala Harris' endorsements

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer.Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images

According to White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis, the problem boils down to "a single activist judge."

“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing common-sense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” Bis told Blaze News. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago, giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”

Bis did not mention any names, but Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani has certainly caused fits for the administration regarding mail-in ballots.

President Donald Trump kicked off the battle in March, when he issued anexecutive order overhauling the mailing system itself, requiring that every envelope be outfitted with a unique tracking barcode. According to the order, those ballots would then be issued to voters confirmed by a “Mail-in Ballot and Absentee Participation List” organized by each state.

“The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s gone on. It’s very clearly covered. … I think this will help a lot with elections,” Trump said when signing the order in March.

Talwani initially voided the envelope rules on June 25, barring them from applying to the midterms. The DOJ asked the Supreme Court for emergency intervention on July 27 to lift Talwani's injunction, which SCOTUS eventually granted without addressing the legality of the EO.

On August 11, Talwani issued a nationwide injunction preventing the USPS from implementing the executive order nationwide.

RELATED: Is the DSA about to scalp another establishment Democrat?

Alex Wong/Getty Images

On August 26, the USPS issued its final rule saying states must give the agency a list of mail-in ballot recipients and use-approved envelopes, but the following day, Talwani issued a 14-day injunction preventing the final rule from taking effect.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift that most recent injunction. Sauer called mail-in ballot fraud “a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters” in his emergency filing.

Sauer previously chastised Talwani, claiming she was “sowing confusion and chaos” as Election Day approaches.

As of now, it is unclear whether states will have to submit the list of mail-in ballot recipients to the federal government before the midterms or how they might go about doing so with so little time.

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Calls Grow For Trump To Appoint Director To Ensure ‘Accurate’ 2030 Census

A growing number of state lawmakers are urging President Trump to appoint a Census director to ensure an “accurate” 2030 Census, even as the White House remains mum on the subject. Last week, 142 state Republican officials signed an open letter organized by the State Freedom Caucus Network asking the president to nominate a full-time […]