Source: Reason
by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Burdensome food labeling mandates were once the province of Democrats, who pushed for calorie count requirements on restaurant menus and insisted packaged food must feature warnings about genetically modified ingredients and trans fats. Now it’s Republicans leading the charge — with equally foolish results. … Seed oils have become a major target of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, whose figurehead is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘Seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic,’ according to Kennedy, who has accused fast-food restaurants that use seed oils of poisoning Americans. But among nutrition experts, opinions about seed oils and health are much more mixed, with plenty suggesting they’re fine in moderation, are better than alternatives, or are unwisely treated as a unit despite the fact that different seed oils have different properties and effects on health.” (12/22/25)

https://reason.com/2025/12/22/maha-mandates-food-labels/

Source: New York Post
by Wai Wah Chin

“Attention high-school seniors: Deadlines are coming up! Polish your dream-college applications, hit send, and hope the admissions game isn’t rigged with ‘race proxies’! To stay ahead of the curve, consider including your ‘subjective social status’ — what’s good enough for the governor of California should be good enough for admissions officers. Education gatekeepers are always hunting for fresh metrics to cherry-pick students, especially after the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling banned racial preferences in college admissions. Some elite schools produced expected racial shifts post-SFFA, others amazingly kept racial proportions similar to pre-SFFA. Was this by feigning compliance using stealthier ‘socioeconomic status’ preferences? ‘Socioeconomic’ is deceptive. It sneaks in the term ‘economic’ to win over generous Americans who support helping those with genuine financial need. Then ‘socio’ takes over, shunting aside tax returns and bank statements apparently to favor racial outcomes.” (12/22/25)

https://nypost.com/2025/12/22/opinion/race-bait-to-skirt-the-law-colleges-incentivize-applicants-to-write-identity-essays/

Source: The Realist Review
by James W Carden

“Recently, the New York Times relayed Tucker Carlson’s view that, ‘The most depressing thing about the United States in 2025 is that we’re led not just by bad people, but by unimpressive, dumb, totally noncreative people.’ This is unarguable — and the Times made no attempt to counter the point. Indeed, this judgement applies doubly to the team of grifters and double-digit IQ Machiavellians who staff upper echelons of the Trump administration. Yet, a fascinating new book by the scholars (and brothers) William and Philip Taubman shows that even smart and impressive peopple can, if they lack vision, character and empathy, lead the country to disaster.” (12/22/25)

https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/mcnamaras-ghost

Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker

“The government shutdown made the November jobs report especially hard to read. There was not just the problem of missing a month of jobs data for the first time in many decades, but also the difficulty in trying to determine how much impact the shutdown had on the data. In principle, the shutdown should have had little direct impact on either the household or the establishment survey. In the household survey, people who had been furloughed should have been back at work during the reference period and therefore answered that they were employed. With the establishment survey, government employees were always on the payroll, so should have been listed as employed. But there are indirect ways in which the shutdown could have affected the data.” (12/22/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/22/trump-economy-one-doll-multiple-dolls/

Source: Washington Monthly
by Anne Kim

“President Donald Trump is a singular — and solitary — figure. ‘I alone can fix it,’ he solipstically declared in 2016, before his first presidential run. Now in his second term, he’s been a one-man tsunami, destroying decades-long global alliances, creating chaos in the global economy with his unilateral tariffs, and unleashing bitter partisanship domestically. … We can blame our national habit of venerating iconoclasts, a tendency Trump exploited to leverage himself into office. We like to lionize the man who speaks out — the brave rebel who defies the establishment. … But for every iconoclast, there’s a crank. For every visionary, a conspiracist. For every genius, a madman.” (12/21/25)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/12/21/trump-individualism-collective-institutions-aca/

Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Snider

“A key reason that Russia went to war in Ukraine was to prevent Ukraine from ever joining NATO; a key reason that Ukraine went to war with Russia was to defend their right to join NATO. On December 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave up Ukraine’s right to join NATO. He presented the concession as a compromise. But it is not really a compromise. Zelensky may intend the non-compromise to leverage concessions from Russia, but it may not really change anything.” [editor’s note: There was never any chance that Ukraine would join NATO … and Putin knew that. A manufactured excuse is not a real reason – TLK] (12/22/25)

https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2025/12/21/volodymyr-zelenskys-non-compromise-nato-compromise/