Source: Law & Liberty
by Richard Samuelson

“The effort to return American government to republican principles is daunting — but the Founders’ wisdom can serve as a guide.” (03/04/25)

https://lawliberty.org/james-madison-and-the-crisis-of-the-new-order/

Source: New York Post
by Michael Oren

“On May 20, 2011, inside the Oval Office and before the cameras, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured President Barack Obama. The incident was the closest the two countries came to a total breakdown. I was then Israel’s ambassador to the United States and had a ringside seat to the clash. It left a deep impression on me, underscoring the importance of interpersonal relationships in the shaping of foreign policy. Those lessons proved especially applicable last week in the wake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Oval Office meltdown with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. By repeatedly interrupting and finally lecturing his hosts, the feisty Ukrainian leader supplied a textbook example of how not to handle a foreign leader of formidable pride and breakaway policies. To understand how he might get out of this mess, it’s worth going back to the Netanyahu-Obama collision.” (03/03/25)

https://nypost.com/2025/03/03/opinion/what-zelensky-can-learn-from-netanyahus-oval-office-meltdown/

Source: CounterPunch
by Phil Mattera

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk keep claiming that their scorched-earth approach to remaking the federal government is made necessary by the prevalence of fraud and waste. Musk’s DOGE attack-squad tabulates its progress on a Wall of Receipts that currently purports to have saved Uncle Sam $65 billion. That number appears to have been plucked out of thin air. The savings for the 2,300 individual contracts listed on the site add up to only $9.6 billion, and even that amount is shaky. For example, the single biggest savings, $1.9 billion, is attached to a Treasury Department contract that is reported to have ended during the Biden Administration. DOGE gives no details of any fraud it may have found in the contracts. That is not surprising, since it is impossible to have done a careful examination of that many contracts in such a short amount of time.” (03/04/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/04/the-doge-charade/

Source: The American Conservative
by Trita Parsi

“Punishing Iran was not on Donald Trump’s mind when he entered the White House in January. Rather, he had gone out of his way to declare his desire for a deal by avoiding insulting rhetoric, disavowing regime change and declaring nuclear weapons as his only red line. Similar signals came from Iran. Direct talks with Trump was Tehran’s new line. Yet this unique window of opportunity is closing fast, mainly because Trump isn’t paying attention. Iran policy is once again falling into the hands of the neocons who sabotaged Trump’s hope to reach a deal with Iran during his first term — with war lurking around the corner.” [editor’s note: Trump entered his first term with a deal — a really GOOD deal — and broke that deal for “maximum pressure.” That was him, not “the neocons” – TLK] (03/04/25)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trumps-narrow-iran-window-is-closing/

Source: Persuasion
by Joseph Heath

“The efforts of the Trump administration to purge DEI (‘diversity, equity and inclusion’) programs from the federal government bureaucracy have revealed an enormous amount of confusion about what DEI actually is (or was). In part this is due to the way it was sold by its practitioners, who often presented it as a straightforward extension of the ideas and principles that animated the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In reality, many of their claims were a lot more controversial. If there is any hope for resisting the full-fledged assault that is taking place, it should begin with a re-examination of these claims, with an eye to producing a more defensible body of doctrine.” (03/04/25)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-five-dogmas-of-dei