“I have had enough. I can no longer sit still while the Deep State does its very best to smear Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and have him removed from his post via lies, rumors, propaganda, and innuendo. It feels exactly like version 2.0 of the ‘Trump/Russia Collusion’ disinformation campaign, and it needs to be called out for what it is. Enough. I am here to defend the best Secretary of War/Defense since Caspar Weinberger. What we have seen in the last few weeks is clearly an orchestrated, carefully constructed character assassination campaign against Hegseth. The campaign began in the early days of November when the leaders of the Sedition 6 introduced legislation known as the ‘No Troops in Our Streets Act,’ legislation clearly designed to undermine the roles of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth in the military chain of command.” [editor’s note: I learned some Latin today — “Publius,” in English, obviously means “idiot” – TLK] (12/05/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“If there is a threat to democracy in Spain, it’s not from the ‘far right,’ that mysterious force to which Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez wants to attribute all the country’s problems. Recent developments have highlighted two issues that are causing much more damage to public trust in democratic institutions—namely, the politicization of the judiciary, or ‘lawfare,’ and financial corruption. Lawfare is alleged to be the reason for an unprecedented ruling against Spain’s former attorney general; while a massive fraud case centered on 95-year-old Jordi Pujol, president of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003, has tarnished the reputation of a once-revered politician.” (12/05/25)
“Fifty-sixty years ago, no one had ever heard of home schooling here in the States. It wasn’t necessarily nonexistent, but incredibly rare. You might find the occasional rancher or forest ranger or other remote family teaching their own children, but truancy (mandatory attendance) laws, tradition, and above all, public perception looked upon such things as horrible and totally unacceptable. Even parochial (Catholic) and other private (religious or not) schools were seen by the mainstream and general public as tolerated but weird. And rare. Many State constitutions enshrined the idea of ‘free tuition’ – that is, public schools. Then came a combination of measures and events which started gradually to change that. Indeed, to create the modern-day homeschooling movement.” (12/05/25)
“If there’s one thing we can count on in America, it’s that our elected officials will see an affordability crisis and respond to it by stimulating the demand side of the market. Today, we’re seeing this in the case of the housing industry, with Administration officials floating both a new (and improved!) 50-year mortgage and a portable mortgage. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that both of these will help break the ‘logjam’ of owners who are stuck with their 3% mortgages and are reluctant to move, which will help with the affordability ‘crisis’ in the American housing market. After all, if more houses come on the market for sale, won’t that push prices down? This statement belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between supply and quantity supplied.” (12/05/25)
“In progressive circles, there is a great fear about the consolidation of Hollywood and the broader media into the hands of allies of MAGA. ABC’s capitulation to Trump is well documented. Larry Ellison’s son David bought Paramount: Stephen Colbert was suddenly off the air, and Bari Weiss was running CBS News. Oracle, Ellison’s company, is the main benefactor of the still-pending TikTok acquisition from its Chinese parent. And Paramount made several overtures to Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) to buy the company, consolidate its TV and film studios along with its array of cable channels under one roof, and put a conservative oligarch family in charge of CBS, CNN, and a large segment of American entertainment and media. But WBD decided to look at other offers. And today, they chose the higher-value bid: an $82.7 billion merger with Netflix.” (12/05/25)
“Most people see America as an experiment in classical liberalism, whereby the founders created a system of limited government, religious pluralism and liberty. Religious leaders are free to spread their message through the culture — but not to take control of the levers of power and base lawmaking on their sectarian Bible interpretations. The Constitution protects everyone’s natural rights, with its main purpose limiting the sphere of government — not implementing rules to assure proper religious observance. There really is no other way to seriously read our Constitution, but many religious people still argue the founders were Christians who envisioned a Christian nation.” (12/05/25)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alexander William Salter
“Markets want predictable interest rates. However, that isn’t the Fed’s job. Officially, the Fed has a three-part mandate: full employment, price stability, and moderate interest rates. An unspoken agreement between politicians and central bankers has made this a de facto dual mandate focusing on labor markets and price levels. Managing the money supply addresses both concerns. We need to change how we think about monetary policy, however, or else we’re setting ourselves up to get repeatedly fooled. Adjusting interest rate targets is a means to an end. The interest rate is not the price of money, but rather the price of time. When you borrow, you’re renting capital. Interest rates reflect the value we place on having capital right now, as opposed to later.” (12/05/25)
“There is no ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, even though an agreement reached on October 9 supposedly established one. The Israeli assault on the Strip continues, albeit at a reduced pace from what it was for most of the past two years. By one count, Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement 591 times between October 10 and December 2 with a combination of air and artillery attacks and direct shootings. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that during this period, 347 Palestinians have been killed and 889 injured. The pattern of casualties including women and children as well as journalists continues. Meanwhile, it is hard to find any documented Israeli casualties in the Gaza Strip during the same period, beyond an early shooting incident at Rafah in which Israel says a soldier was killed and Hamas says it had nothing to do with it.” (12/05/25)
“Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement — in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged. I no longer look at it that way. … taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly — one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.” (12/05/25)
“Although much has already been said, I can’t not comment on Sarah Hurwitz, the former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter, who faults young people (especially young Jews) for applying their power of abstraction in thinking about the Holocaust. What do I mean by that? Hurwitz thinks (or says she does) that the TikTok generation makes a big mistake by drawing general lessons from the National Socialist regime’s mass murder of European Jews last century. She is dismayed that young people have concluded that powerful bad people, no matter who they are, should not harm weak people, no matter who they are. So what’s the problem? According to Hurwitz, they were supposed to learn that killing weak people of a particular ethnicity or religion is horrible only when the victims are Jewish.” (12/05/25)
