“In a 2023 New York Times column, Ezra Klein coined the term ‘everything-bagel liberalism’ to describe the phenomenon of projects that liberals favor getting weighed down by seemingly ancillary requirements liberals impose on them. He noted, for instance, that in California, strict labor and environmental standards embedded in various pieces of legislation passed by the Democratic legislature over the years have made it too costly and time-consuming to build subsidized housing for the homeless. This same problem, he warned, would imperil one of the centerpieces of the Biden administration’s economic policy: the CHIPS and Science Act. Klein praised the aims of this flagship legislation to reshore semiconductor manufacturing with a $39 billion fund to attract companies to the United States.” (04/24/25)
“Nations prone to split over ethnic or religious divides often find ways to bond by embracing a higher civic identity. Ethiopia just set a small example of that. Two top leaders – from different ethnic groups – found a way to avert a renewal of a vicious war that ended two years ago. Peace prevails for now in Ethiopia’s restive state of Tigray, as does a desire for unity around national ideals. Less than a month ago, most observers of East African politics widely expected that simmering tensions in Tigray would boil over into conflict again. Their concerns were heightened when disgruntled members of Tigray’s security forces seized key government buildings in an intra-Tigrayan dispute over jobs. Three officers had been suspended by the state’s interim administration. The then-head of Tigray called for direct federal intervention after he fled in March to the nation’s capital.” (04/23/25)
“It was typical of Joe Biden’s presidency that, when faced with a difficult problem, he would take the cynical approach of finding a scapegoat to blame while making a promise he never intended to keep. His response to the housing affordability crisis last year was a textbook case: Blame ‘rent-gouging’ landlords and greedy realtors, make the false promise that his administration would build 2 million new homes via more deficit spending, and hope nobody asks questions — a safe bet, considering the incurious media that surrounded him. ‘Folks are tired of being played for suckers and I’m tired of letting them be played for suckers,’ Biden said in a campaign speech hammering his scapegoats last year. Having promised to lower housing costs during his State of the Union address earlier in the spring, Biden’s fiery rhetoric showed he had not the faintest idea of how to solve the problem.” (04/23/25)
“Amid Harvard’s battle with the Trump administration, which has already pulled billions in federal funding from the university and floated taking even more, fiscal watchdog OpenTheBooks decided to take a peek at how much money the top-tier Ivy League school actually stands to lose. Harvard has received at least $4.4 billion in federal funding through grants, contracts, sub-grants and subcontracts since the first Trump administration in 2017, the watchdog found through open-source analysis of government spending records and other publicly available data. Meanwhile, based on these numbers, Harvard collected more in federal grants and contracts than they stood to gain through tuition, room and board in any given year. OpenTheBooks also unearthed that Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment has grown by $14 billion, or $2 billion annually, since 2018. In total, the top-tier Ivy League school has more than $7 million per undergraduate student, the watchdog’s report indicated.” (04/24/25)
Source: TomDispatch
by Mattea Kramer & Sean Fogler
“The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows.” (04/24/25)
“Sen. John Fetterman [D-PA] is continuing to advocate for the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. ‘Waste that s—,’ the lawmaker declared to the Washington Free Beacon. ‘You’re never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. Years ago, I completely understood why Trump withdrew from the Obama deal. Today, I can’t understand why Trump would negotiate with this diseased regime. The negotiations should be comprised of 30,000-pound bombs and the IDF.’ The IDF is the Israel Defense Forces.” (04/24/25)
“In his historic speech in Munich this year, Vice President JD Vance confronted the Europeans over their attacks on free speech, declaring ‘If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.’ That is manifestly true, but it appears that there is something that certain Americans can still do for Europe. As the European Union ramps up its long-standing campaign against free speech, it is increasingly calling upon Americans to make the case against both free speech and the United States. Europeans and globalists see the Trump administration as a threat to efforts to create transnational governance systems.” (04/24/25)
“A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s guidance forbidding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in K-12 public schools. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, which accused the Republican administration of violating teachers’ due process and First Amendment rights. In February, the U.S. Education Department told schools and colleges they needed to end any practice that differentiates people based on their race or they would risk losing their federal funding. Earlier this month, the department ordered states to gather signatures from local school systems certifying compliance with civil rights laws, including the rejection of what the federal government calls ‘illegal DEI practices’. The directive does not carry the force of law but threatens to use civil rights enforcement to rid schools of DEI practices.” (04/24/25)
“XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey slammed Nike over its alleged funding of a study on puberty blockers for children and how it would affect their athletic and training performance. … The first notion [?] that Nike was allegedly funding was in a New York Times article published over the weekend about the plight of Blaire Fleming – the San Jose State Spartans transgender female volleyball player who played a controversial role in the 2024-25 NCAA women’s volleyball season. OutKick pointed out that the piece mentions Joanna Harper, a trans woman who studies transgender athletes, is ‘currently helping to lead an ambitious study of trans adolescents that measures their results on a 10-step fitness test before they start hormone therapy and then, after they have begun to medically transition, every six months for five years.'” (04/24/25)
“The time has come. The crisis intensifies, and the struggle is being joined. Abraham Lincoln’s warning of 1862 (‘We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth’) speaks ever more directly to us. But keep listening. Lincoln did not merely issue a warning to his fellow citizens. Believing they already essentially knew what he was to say, he reminded them of who they were and made it perfectly clear to them what they had to do to overcome the crisis and prevail against the enemy they confronted. He told them that winning the war and sustaining the Union required not simply defeating the Confederacy, but also making America’s revolutionary promise all the more real for all the more Americans. He told them that to truly secure the United States they had to end slavery.” (04/24/25)
