“Establishment politicians of all stripes constantly bemoan the ‘politicization’ of ‘public’ education, while constantly engaging in their own preferred ‘politicization.’ ‘Politicization’ is baked into the whole idea of ‘public’ education. It can’t be any other way. When schools are operated by appointed government bureaucrats who answer to elected government officials, schools will necessarily be expected to serve the goals of those bureaucrats and those officials. Electing different officials who appoint new bureaucrats doesn’t solve the problem, it just changes the direction the ‘politicization’ runs in. … The choices are: Complete separation of school and state, or political indoctrination of your kids by and for whoever won the most recent election.” (03/23/23)
“Let’s say you were a Republican member of Congress with a sincere desire to craft a federal budget that would achieve balance by the end of the decade. That’s a noble goal! Balancing the budget wouldn’t pay down the $31 trillion national debt, of course, but it would at least stop adding to it. There’s just one small issue, your advisers tell you. Well, three issues, actually. You can’t cut spending on the military (including veterans programs) or entitlement programs, and you can’t advocate for letting the 2017 Trump tax cuts expire. … You can’t pass a balanced budget if you’re not a member of Congress, so you agree. Those three things are off the table. Now, all you have to do is get a majority of Congress and President Joe Biden to agree to cut literally every dollar of discretionary spending out of the budget and you’ll have accomplished your goal. Almost.” (03/23/23)
“Many Republicans see Ron DeSantis as a welcome contrast to Donald Trump, DeSantis being disciplined, focused, knowledgeable and comparatively young. In style and appearance, they’re as different as two doughy white male Republican politicians could be. An optimist can hope that DeSantis is a more restrained and temperate politician whose experience in office has given him a grasp of the complexities of governing and the value of pragmatic compromise. But an optimist who starts out with such hopes will finish his new campaign book, The Courage To Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, in a slough of despond. DeSantis seems more intent on emulating Trump than on distinguishing himself from his onetime patron. What emerges in stark relief from these pages is their conspicuous similarities.” (03/23/23)
“Not many people know that 16 November 2022 was the day that freedom of speech died on the internet. This was the day the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) came into law. Under the DSA, very large online platforms (VLOPs) with more than 45million monthly active users — like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — will have to swiftly remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms. Or they will face fines of up to six per cent of their annual global revenue. Larger platforms must be DSA compliant by this summer, while smaller platforms will be obliged to tackle this content from 2024 onwards. The ramifications of this are immense. Not only will the DSA now enforce the regulation of content on the internet for the first time, but it is also set to become a global standard, not just a European one.” (03/23/23)
“With only slight exaggeration, I can say that when Obamacare was being challenged in the Supreme Court, knowing someone’s opinion on whether government should be more or less involved in health care predicted their belief about the constitutionality of Obamacare with a 100% success rate. Similarly, if I know someone believes the impact of private gun ownership is negative, I can make money all day long betting on what their view is about the meaning of the Second Amendment. In theory, it should be possible for someone to hold the belief that widespread gun ownership is bad, and should be curtailed by government, but also believe that such action is inconsistent with the Constitution, and therefore the Second Amendment should be repealed in order to permit such laws. In practice, I’ve had fewer encounters with such a person than I have with Bigfoot …” (03/23/23)
Source: Fox News Forum
by US Senator Roger Marshall, MD
“It’s not a regulatory issue. It’s a bailout. We’ve heard the spin from the White House and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that taxpayers won’t have to pay for Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, but it is inevitable. When the FDIC assesses an extra fee of $25K to $1M for community banks to bailout SVB, local banks will do everything possible to tighten their belts and absorb the additional costs. Still, eventually, those fees will trickle down to its consumers. Sadly, hard-working Americans in small towns across America will pay more to recover money for a bank they’ve never heard of in Silicon Valley, CA. But that is not the crux of this issue. The most dangerous part of this bailout is the message this administration is sending depositors, that your money is safer in big banks even when they fail.” (03/23/23)
Source: American Institute for Economic Research
by Alexander William Salter
“The Fed would have minimized the risk of moral hazard if it had acted as a classical lender of last resort. (And if my keyboard were a rocket ship, I could go to the moon.) The Fed has never behaved as a responsible last-resort lender. Instead, it lends indiscriminately, according to opaque criteria that it makes up as a crisis unfolds. We can castigate excessively risky behavior by private banks all we want. But given a 40-year record of bailouts, why wouldn’t bank executives load up on risk? ‘Heads,’ the risks pan out and they make a killing; ‘tails,’ the risks blow up and taxpayers (or other depository institutions) pick up the losses. The only silver lining is that bad bailout policy might leave the Fed free to pursue good inflation policy.” (03/23/23)
“As I wander, I finally run into one of my classmates, now ‘a skinny old man with bushy white hair, wearing a loose deer skin.’ And yes, whatever happened (that ‘great invasion’) while I was underground in, as anyone of that period would have known, a private nuclear-fallout shelter, is unclear. Still, in the world I find on emerging, all my former classmates, whom I meet one after another in joking fashion, now live in caves. In other words, it had obviously been devastated. … more than 60 years later, it strikes me that we kids who had learned to ‘duck and cover’ at school … in preparation for a Russian nuclear attack, already had a deep sense not of future promise but of doom to come.” (03/23/23)
“The Iraq War was spawned by a deadly combination of political depravity and media complicity. Unfortunately, on the twentieth anniversary of the war, both elements of that conspiracy are being whitewashed. Instead, politicians and their pundit accomplices are prattling as if the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, not a crime against humanity.” (03/23/23)
“The entire world has now had a taste of the Love Canal experience. Schools and businesses were shuttered. Livelihoods were lost. The threads that make up a happy, healthy life were torn apart; book clubs and happy hours and birthday parties all abandoned in favor of sanitizing groceries and worrying about how to stop an invisible killer. Worried mothers once again took to the streets with their children; masked preschoolers holding up signs about how they (or their parents) worried that death was imminent. Mental health services took a backseat. Preventative screenings at the doctor’s office took a backseat. Around the world, an invisible threat took salience over the thousand known threats.” (03/23/23)
