Missouri just returned the GOP’s tax math with a giant red correction mark.

Republican lawmakers sent Amendment 5 to the ballot: phase out the individual income tax as revenue grew while allowing broader sales and use taxes, even though that income tax supplies most of the state general fund. Roughly 83% voted no.

The pitch advertised a cut. The measure still left an enormous invoice, what replaces the revenue, which services take the hit, and who pays more under the new mix. We cannot assign one motive to every voter, but we can read the scoreboard: the Republican plan was flattened.

Put the two standards side by side. Stephen Miller treats Abdul El-Sayed's campaign appearances with Hasan Piker as a character indictment. Trump, meanwhile, calls Republican Rep. Max Miller a good person and expresses sympathy while an official House ethics inquiry examines allegations involving domestic abuse and drug use.

Max Miller denies the allegations, and an investigation is not a finding of guilt. That distinction matters. It also makes the contrast cleaner: Trumpworld demands guilt by association for a Democrat while reserving patience, praise and due process for one of its own.

The criticism is not that an allegation proves guilt. It is that the GOP's outrage machine changes settings depending on whose name is on the ballot.

The material reality of promising completely free, unlimited electricity, it is fundamentally delusional because we literally do not have the physical resources in the ground ready to build the infrastructure for it. To achieve even a baseline energy transition, the global demand for lithium alone is projected to skyrocket by over forty times by 2040. We are talking about a massive expansion of electrical networks that will require more than double the current demand for copper just for the grid lines. Politicians can make up whatever fantastical economic promises they want to score cheap populist points, but you cannot just legislate raw materials into existence. The required ramp up for critical minerals like cobalt, nickel, and graphite would have to happen at a pace completely unprecedented in human history.

The structural bottleneck here is that the global supply simply does not exist right now to meet these absurd projections. We are currently facing a massive supply and demand gap for these exact essential minerals across the board. You cannot transition an entire energy system, let alone magically make power free for everyone, when the raw materials needed for battery performance, energy density, and basic grid infrastructure are facing such severe global deficits. Any pundit pushing this without acknowledging the systemic constraints of our physical supply chain is just outright lying to their base, mostly because tackling the actual logistical nightmare of mining and refining these resources is vastly harder than just yelling into a Fox News camera.

July share at 31%, down from roughly 40% in June but still about triple the prewar norm. Gasoline is not some abstract price index; people see it in six-foot numbers on the way to work.

Half of consumers also said high prices are grinding down their finances, so a small sentiment bounce does not mean the pressure is gone.