“On multiple occasions, Donald Trump has expressed support for term limits on members of Congress. Will it happen this time around? After all, it is the one thing that many on the left and the right could come together and agree on — the trouble is, will members of Congress acquiesce? Not likely, but we can be hopeful. … Since Congress will not do it themselves, we would need a constitutional amendment for term limits to ensure that politicians serve the nation’s interests rather than their own.” [editor’s note: Any constitutional amendment would have to make it past super-majorities of pols who, being pols, don’t want to be term-limited (especially above and beyond the current term limit mechanism, known as “election” – TLK] (01/07/25)
“Trump sounded different from post-Cold War presidents, but his sentiments echoed Richard Nixon, who also liked to get mad in both meanings of the word. Indeed, according to his staffer H.R. Haldeman, Nixon coined the term ‘madman theory,’ explaining that he wanted the North Vietnamese to believe he was capable of doing anything to bring the Vietnam War to an end — up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. The madman theory posits that a leader who behaves as if he could do just about anything has a better chance of persuading other global actors to make concessions they otherwise would not make. … Could Trump’s madman theory be so crazy that it just might work?” (01/07/25)
“When Katharine Tito approached the vintage typewriter at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey, skepticism was written across her face. Though she’d spotted typewriters in thrift stores, she’d never actually used one. As a graphic design student immersed in digital tools, the mechanical contraption before her seemed like a relic. But as she began typing people’s messages to the President of the United States for my ‘I Wish to Say’ project, something shifted. Her fingers found their rhythm on the keys, and her expression transformed. ‘It’s different from anything I’ve experienced,’ she told me. ‘Each keystroke feels weighty, permanent. You can’t just delete and start over. You have to think about every word. Sometimes people would talk too fast, and I’d have to tell them, ‘You’ve got to slow down because I can only go so quickly.”” (01/07/25)
“Last month, a mega-monstrous ‘continuing resolution’ (CR) — allowing federal deficit spending over the set debt limit — was killed by public outcry, helped along by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others with megaphones or MAGAphones. This CR was chucked to the great annoyance of champions of runaway spending and runaway violations of individual rights. They babbled about the autocratic interference of one ‘President Musk.’ As if his complaints alone would have sufficed to kill it had nobody else in America cared. The mega-monstrous CR was replaced by a mini-monstrous CR. The replacement sported many fewer pages, things like a pay raise for congressmen having been left out. Also deleted? A part of the State Department devoted to censoring Americans.” (01/07/25)
“The upcoming House of Representatives Rules Committee Package is sure to include a section requiring the consideration of a bill that would sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC), therefore shielding [sic] Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu from arrest. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, as well as former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri in November 2024 for their actions in Gaza, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity. … A House Resolution introduced by over a dozen House Republicans, titled the ‘Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act’ is meant ‘to impose sanctions with respect to the International Criminal Court engaged in any effort to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.'” (01/06/25)
“I was watching MSNBC the other day – I know, but it is fun to look into a parallel universe where progressive ideals appeal to the vast majority of Americans, it makes me appreciate reality all the more – and I had to check my phone to make sure I had the right year. You wouldn’t know it was 2024 if you’d just gone by the rhetoric belching its way over the airwaves. Donald Trump is a Russian stooge (a tool of Putin) who is only interested in … well, you know the rest of that song. In fact, you know the rest of all the songs, as the political left has morphed into a cover band playing all their hits that were never really hits in the first place. They learned nothing from the election.” (01/07/25)
“‘If their duty, their honor, and their oaths will not bind them, let us not put into their hands our liberty and all our other great interests.’ These are the powerful words of Gouverneur Morris, the ‘Penman of the Constitution’ and author of its preamble. Morris did not mince words during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, and his warning remains essential today. Politicians across the spectrum routinely violate their oaths to the Constitution, and rarely, if ever, face accountability. Why? Perhaps the answer lies in ignorance, fear, or a lack of self-respect among the people who tolerate these transgressions. Let’s explore the original understanding of the oath to the Constitution, its foundational importance, and the dire consequences of its neglect.” (01/06/25)
“An economic approach to Homer’s Odyssey is most definitely not about ‘what Homer really meant.’ Instead, the economic approach views Homer through a lens that Homer himself probably never entertained, namely a series of relatively simple models about preferences and constraints. The economic approach is thus a distortion, but perhaps a useful or interesting distortion. It is taking the richness of ideas, presentation, and narrative in Homer and remixing it. For all the complexity lost, this process induces us to engage in a certain kind of reductive prioritization as to how Homer wrote about human nature and politics, and thus it will bring out some elements of the story more than others.” (01/06/25)
“As Inauguration Day approaches, President-elect Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportation at an unprecedented scale and the infighting within his own movement over H-1B visas have understandably taken center stage. But it’s also worth focusing on what is perhaps his most brazenly unconstitutional proposal of all: ending birthright citizenship, the legal principle that confers automatic citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. … if the president-elect believes he will be able to unilaterally undo this policy by executive fiat, he is sorely mistaken: birthright citizenship is clearly established in the U.S. Constitution, which means a presidential order cannot abolish it.” (01/06/25)
“The American Medical Association is the professional association and political lobby of the nation’s physicians. Ever since President Harry Truman proposed national health insurance in 1945, the AMA has been an implacable enemy of a single-payer system, though today many harried doctors wish we had it. It turns out that the AMA is also a prime driver of the gross imbalance between primary care doctors, who tend to be overworked and underpaid, and specialists who make a fine living and have more control over their schedules. The AMA does this via a secretive panel called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC). The relative value scale was legislated by Congress in 1989 as a way to assign values to thousands of medical procedures and restrain Medicare costs. The RUC was created by the AMA in 1991 to make sure that that the AMA would dominate the process.” (01/07/25)
