Joe Lancaster published a piece at Reason documenting the Trump administration’s handling of the War Powers Resolution’s sixty-day clock on the Iran strikes, and it is worth reading for the facts even though the analysis points in exactly the wrong direction.
The pundit consensus that gas prices will decide the midterms rests on a snapshot treated as a constant, ignoring history, geography, inflation, and every tool available to the actors involved.
Gas prices are up. This is true, visible, and felt at the pump by every American who drives. Since the onset of the Iran war on February 28, the national average has risen by roughly 35 cents per gallon. Crude oil, whether measured by WTI or Brent, has spiked well above its pre-war baseline. The political commentary has followed the price upward with a simple thesis: high gas prices are bad for the president’s party, and this will hurt Republicans in November.
Every midterm model assumes low presidential approval benefits the opposition. What happens when the opposition is even less popular than the president?
The standard midterm narrative runs like this: the president is unpopular, therefore his party will lose seats, therefore the opposition will gain them. The first two steps have modest historical support, as discussed in the previous article in this series. The third step is treated as automatic, a simple consequence of the first two. If voters are unhappy with the party in power, they vote for the other party.
Presidential approval ratings are the most-reported metric in political commentary. Their connection to political outcomes is among the weakest.
At some point today, a cable news chyron will display a number. It will be the president’s approval rating, updated to the decimal point, presented as though it were a vital sign on a hospital monitor. A pundit will interpret it. A headline will frame it. A donor will adjust a contribution based on it. And none of them will pause to ask whether the number they are reacting to has any meaningful connection to the political outcome they care about. For most of the uses to which approval ratings are put, it does not.
The Iran War polling consensus is built on questions nobody asked, answered by people who mostly don't care, averaged into a number that describes nothing real.
Every major news outlet has now reported some version of the same claim: the Iran War is unpopular. Nate Silver’s polling average tracks it daily, at roughly 40 percent support and 54 percent oppose, updated with decimal-point precision and rendered as a smooth curve. Pew, Quinnipiac, AP-NORC, Fox News, Reuters-Ipsos, and a dozen other outfits have produced their own numbers. The specifics vary. The conclusion is unanimous.
America's crude is now the most valuable on earth. The political press hasn't noticed.
On April 3, 2026, something happened in the oil markets that has occurred only a handful of times in modern history. West Texas Intermediate crude — the benchmark for North American oil — closed above Brent crude, the global benchmark. WTI at $111.54 per barrel, Brent at $109.24.
A companion essay to this one argued that the War Powers Resolution deserves repeal on constitutional grounds. That argument identified three directions the Republic might take after repeal: restore the constitutional architecture to align military posture with the original allocation of war powers, amend the Constitution to accommodate the standing military the nation has built, or accept the ambiguity and let each crisis resolve itself through political contest. The essay took no position on which direction to pursue, but this one does, because the question of what comes after repeal matters more than the repeal itself.
The United States has not declared war since June 5, 1942. In the eighty-four years since, American forces have fought in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and dozens of smaller engagements. Presidents of both parties ordered every one of these operations. Congress authorized some, funded most, and stopped none.
In Part One of this series, I discussed what a monorepo is, defined contextual repos, and covered a review of a couple articles which attempted to illustrate the benefits of a monorepo. In this part, I’m going to go a bit deeper into some of the assertions I made, and some claims often made “in defense of” monorepos.
There is a wave of argument growing among how to organize software repositories
; the god-repo (commonly known as a monorepo) and focused repositories. By
and large there is no one best way. Rather it is a question of which yaks you
want to shave. This is a meager attempt to explore them without a general
recommendation.