“Even Americans who loathe President Donald Trump should be capable of seeing that the United States and the world are safer without a nuclear-capable Iran. But Trump derangement is blinding them. On Saturday, the president and the US military executed a ‘spectacularly successful’ precision bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, with no American casualties and minimal impact on Iran’s people. Yet now Trump is being bombarded with attacks here at home. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Trump’s strike ‘grossly unconstitutional,’ a claim repeated by Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has sparred with Trump on other issues. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a chorus of other Democrats are calling for Trump’s impeachment. New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates — for whom Trump-hatred is a litmus test — are piling on. … These claims are crazy.” [editor’s note: Yes, it’s crazy to expect Trump to follow the law, or McCaughey to admit he doesn’t – TLK] (06/23/25)
“In February 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin condemning online voices and public gatherings attacking such government Covid policies as mask and vaccine mandates. Those spreading ‘misinformation’ about the pandemic, DHS warned, were undermining ‘public trust in the U.S. government institutions’ and could be considered a ‘domestic threat actor’ or a ‘primary terrorism-related threat.’ How did government vigilance against lethal attacks like 9/11 culminate in the claim that critics of public health measures were terrorists? The bulletin ignored the possibility that one reason trust in our governing institutions had been undermined was not denunciations of our pandemic policies but the policies themselves, along with the government’s manipulative public messaging about them.” (06/23/25)
Source: Freedom and Flourishing
by Dr. Theodore N (Ted) Pauls
“Flourishing individualism is a philosophical vision that places the rational, morally responsible individual at the center of ethics, politics, and human life. It is an ideal that affirms the dignity of the person, the objectivity of value, and the necessity of freedom — not merely as a constraint on power, but as the essential condition for human excellence.” (06/23/25)
“As of Thursday evening, the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) is no longer as big, and it never was all that beautiful. But the biggest decision, worth $3.76 trillion, could come as soon as today. The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend. How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly wipe out all of the costs! The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline.” (06/24/25)
“The U.S. launched an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iran on Saturday. The president had no authority to order this attack, and in ordering this act of criminal aggression against another country he has violated both the Constitution and the UN Charter. Trump followed through on his insane threat to bomb a country whose government had been trying to negotiate a reasonable compromise on the nuclear issue. Whatever else happens, Trump’s decision to attack will live in infamy. … The region is now much worse off than it was just a few weeks ago, and that is entirely the fault of the U.S. and Israeli governments. U.S. interests have been damaged, and the only question is how bad the damage will be. As if that weren’t bad enough, the president has done all this to benefit a reckless client state at the same time that it commits a genocide in Gaza.” (06/23/25)
“Expectations for a restrained foreign policy by a Trump administration were naïve. We now have strong evidence. Even before President Donald Trump ordered B-2 bombers to attack Iran’s nuclear sites and plunge the United States into another Middle East war, it should have been apparent that he has never been committed to a foreign policy of realism and restraint.” (06/23/25)
