“Until recently, the American-funded Israeli genocide of Palestinians unsurprisingly continued without a stop in sight. On January 13, 2025, Israeli attacks assassinated at least 45 Gazans. Shortly after these attacks, however, a cease-fire and hostage deal (reportedly split into three phases) was confirmed on January 15, 2025. Importantly, Steven Witkoff, selected by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to be his special envoy in the Middle East, has forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a cease-fire and hostage plan in two months, existing in stark contrast with the Biden administration’s incompetent (and frankly cruel) inability to pressure Netanyahu into accepting a plan over the past year. Nevertheless, even though the incoming Trump administration secured a cease-fire and hostage deal, it’s impossible to truly know what will come next. Trump is notoriously unpredictable. According to recent estimates from Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 45,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October 7, 2023.” (01/16/25)
“Despite a recent CBC poll that showed Canadians are increasingly less inclined to feel ‘very proud to be Canadians,’ nevertheless this is irrelevant to the Canadian love-hate relationship with the United States. It can be explained partly by the fact that Canadians are not jingoistic nationalists. Canadians are inherently modest. Proud but not excessively so. … But there are other reasons why Canada will not become the 51st state. One is that polling during the American election showed a strong preference among Canadians for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. 64% to 21% with 15% undecided. So if Canada became a state it would be a blue state, something that would come as a rude awakening to the Trumpanistas. Canada would be the largest state by both territory and population. So Canada as a state would have at least as many representatives as California — 52, with the majority of them Democratic.” (01/16/25)
“Given my own frustration with the country’s major political parties, I too wish that we could dislodge the two-party system. But sadly, the arguments for proportional representation ignore how dysfunctional the politics of many countries that have adopted the system are. Worse, they never grapple with the fact that its introduction into the United States would at most be piecemeal, importing all of the system’s dangers while foregoing most of its advantages. The idea that proportional representation can fix American politics, in short, is a dangerous delusion.” (01/16/25)
“The solution to not enough houses is not to ban — a 100% tax is a ban, obviously — buyers from the market, it’s to increase supply. So, build more houses and sell some of those more to foreigners. But it’s also necessary to go a little deeper. A foreigner buying a house is an export. True, it turns up on the capital account not the current but still. It’s not possible to package up a house or building — well, unless it’s some Arizona town looking for a London bridge as a talking point — and send it off. But the money flows into the country for the building so that is, indeed, the export of a house to those foreigners.” (01/16/25)
“Jonathan Gienapp’s Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique does not come to praise originalism but to bury it. Far from a polemic or a screed, however, Gienapp has produced a profoundly considerate, sustained, and critical attack upon the methodology of public meaning originalism. The result is arguably the most important book written against originalist methodology. Originalists in the academy have little choice but to pay attention to it and respond to its charges.” (01/16/25)
“‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ So declared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ah, if only it had proved to be so. Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history’s actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it’s downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing). Let’s consider a specific, very recent segment of the past. I’m thinking of the period stretching from my birth year of 1947 to this very moment.” (01/16/25)
Source: The Hill
by Brandon L Garrett, Kate Evans, & Elana Fogel
“Last week, the U.S. House passed its first bill, the Laken Riley Act, beginning the new year with a law named for a nursing student killed by a non-citizen who had recently been cited for shoplifting but was not detained. Non-citizens convicted of crimes like robbery, theft and shoplifting are already subject to mandatory immigration detention under existing laws. This new law would expand mandatory detention to people simply arrested for or charged with such crimes, regardless of whether they actually committed them. The law thus raises serious due process issues that should concern us all, including the senators who will consider the bill soon.” (01/16/25)
“More truth-telling progressive media would be great, but experience is full of disastrous efforts to create liberal outlets that can reach and influence voters.” (01/16/25)
“Well, at least the cease-fire came while there are some structures still standing in Gaza. As for the war itself, the official death toll of Palestinians killed in the war—not counting those who starved or froze or otherwise died due to Israel’s 15-month war to destroy Gaza but not from military action per se—now comes to just over 46,000. Coincidentally, a report that appeared last week in The Lancet by some British epidemiologists concluded that the Palestinian authorities’ official death tally through last June undercounted Palestinian war-caused deaths by 41 percent. If the undercount has remained at that level, that means the actual death toll is more like 65,000. The Lancet also calculated that 59 percent of the deaths have been those of women, children, and the elderly.” (01/16/25)
