“Sometime during the Trump administration’s fast and furious spending cuts and cancellations, the Rocky Mountain Institute lost millions in Biden-era federal climate-nonsense grants — cut not by DOGE but by the Department of Energy under Secretary Chris Wright. Tears have been shed, garments rent: $5.3 million would have been used to retrofit a building to make it more green; $1.5 million would have funded research on the practicality of ‘electric vehicle carshare programs’ and the ‘resilience’ and ‘equity’ of U.S. business models. These initiatives are just the tip of the spear. RMI is also a good buddy of the Chinese government. RMI even has an office in Beijing.” (04/18/25)
“Nearly three months into the second Trump administration, a few things have become clear. For one thing, the president aims to push executive power to its absolute limit, with Congress responding passively to the power-grabs and the judiciary standing alone in attempting to prevent the thoroughgoing breakdown of the separation of powers and its replacement by unitary, dictatorial rule by Donald Trump. For another, Trump himself has established an unprecedented level of personal control over policy.” (04/18/25)
“Last week in the New York Times, Emory professor Mark Bauerlein made a surprising pitch to President Trump: don’t kill the National Endowments for Humanities and the Arts — hijack them. Bauerlein argues that, rather than axing these bureaucracies that advance left-wing cultural activity, conservatives should seize their grantmaking abilities to instead champion MAGA‑friendly canon. Bauerlein admits the agencies’ budgets tilt progressive, but thinks eliminating them would miss an opportunity for conservatives to advance in the culture war. … This impulse is a prime example of how public funding for art inevitably ends up politicizing it.” (04/18/25)
“I think we all realize now that radical, godless Marxist Leftism has taken control of the Democratic Party. This really shouldn’t surprise us. It took over in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other Leftist hellholes. They are trying to turn America into a similar slime pit. Only time will tell if they will succeed or not. The radical Left are the Bolsheviks in the Democratic Party, not the Mensheviks. To explain the history, Vladimir Lenin’s Marxist movement in Russia, in the early 20th century, split into ‘Bolsheviks’ (Russian for ‘majority’), and ‘Mensheviks’ (minority). Lenin’s party, the Bolsheviks, were not actually the majority in the party, but they won. And the Bolsheviks were never the majority in Russia, not even close; in the only semi-free election in Russia before Lenin took dictatorial power, they received relatively few votes.” [editor’s note: I doubt that many “realize” Lewis’s fantasy that the center-right Democratic Party represents leftism of any kind – TLK] (04/19/25)
“On March 29, The New York Times published an article that ‘reveal[ed] that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.’ Its undeclared thesis was that the U.S. has done everything possible for Ukraine to win the war. Ukraine would not trust them and listen. Now the war is lost, and there is no choice but to negotiate. The article was the first major attempt to prepare the public for defeat in Ukraine.” [editor’s note: Snider is one of those who’ve been proclaiming that Ukraine has “lost” the war for more than three years now, apparently in hope that repeating it over and over will make it come true – TLK] (04/18/25)
Source: Orange County Register
by Veronique de Rugy
“The federal budget remains a disaster, and for all the splashy talk of cost-cutting and tariff-driven revenue, Americans know it. Especially galling is that the latest fiscal wreckage is being overseen by an administration that promised business acumen and conservative restraint. Republicans are delivering the opposite: a self-inflicted destruction of wealth, rising interest rates, creeping inflation fears and an abandonment of even their usual pretense of fiscal discipline.” (04/18/25)
“Even when a line on a map separates two individuals, trade is still trade — that is, mutually beneficial cooperation. Whether the line separates towns, cities, counties, states, or countries, it does not matter. The transactions are win-win. We could do quite well without the categories of exports and imports. Adam Smith wisely said almost 250 years ago that the balance-of-trade doctrine was ‘absurd.’ In a sense, only two kinds of goods and services exist as far as I’m concerned: those that I produce and those that everyone else produces. That is true for you too. Countries don’t trade. Individual people do. Where governments don’t permit this, they should get out of the way. Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics, eloquently described trade in his pioneering work, Principles of Economics (1871, pp. 175ff).” (04/18/25)
“Last week, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) membership voted overwhelmingly to approve a new contract following nearly a year of negotiations that were at times contentious with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The four-year contract represents a direct rebuke to the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom and immigrants, enshrining protections that the union began fighting for months before President Trump was elected. The agreement is also a prime example of the labor strategy of bargaining for ‘the ‘common good’, with provisions that help not only specific union members in the workplace but the broader community as a whole, at a time when such measures are especially crucial. Union members voted by 97% to approve the contract, and the months-long negotiations showcased an impasse between the union and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. Martinez was ultimately fired by the school board in December but remains in office with a legal challenge pending.” (04/18/25)
“Many of my friends and acquaintances disagree with Donald Trump’s ‘trade war’ antics. His constant, inexplicable flip-flops and 180-degree turns make them nervous, and they can see that his unconstitutional tariff policy (the US Constitution gives only Congress the power to tax) is already costing them money. But many of my friends, including those on the putative ‘left,’ also support tariffs and ‘protectionism’ in general. They dislike the constant uncertainty that comes with having Trump in charge of the matter, but they’ve spent decades complaining about how ‘free trade’ has ‘hollowed out the middle class’ and ‘sent American manufacturing abroad’ ever since the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).” (04/17/25)
