Commentary: Electric Transmission Buildout Could Cost Americans Trillions of Dollars

Electric Grid

Though windmills and solar panels get the headlines, the big energy topic in Washington is electric transmission. Whether it is Congress’s newfound interest in permitting reform, the U.S. Department of Energy’s new Grid Deployment Office, or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) upcoming final rule on transmission planning and cost allocation, how to build and pay for long-range transmission to connect generators to customers is considered the final piece in the quest to meet net-zero goals.   

Like so many issues in Washington, the need for more transmission lines is accepted without question and the costs are not considered. But for American consumers, especially low-income and elderly, as well as small businesses and energy intense manufacturers, building new transmission lines could result in much higher monthly bills and leave them on the hook for stranded assets.

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Commentary: Trump Says No More ‘Free Milk’ for NATO Free Loaders

The mainstream media and political establishment are outraged over Donald Trump’s latest comments about NATO. Instead of all the dramatic pearl-clutching, they should be embracing his position.

Trump recently issued a stern warning to America’s NATO allies, specifically those who are still failing to uphold their commitment to spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. Recounting a conversation he had with the leader of a delinquent NATO member who sought reassurance that America would defend their country from Russian attack, Trump declared that he would let Russia do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that refuse to make minimum expenditures toward their own defense.

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Commentary: When Classical Learning Meets Public Education, the Dialogue Isn’t Always Socratic

School Work

The future of the controversial classical education movement will be showcased later this month when Columbia University senior lecturer Roosevelt Montás is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a national symposium hosted by Great Hearts, the biggest classical charter network.

The views of Montás, author of the widely praised memoir “Rescuing Socrates,” are well to the left of many in the classical charter movement, which is rooted in Christian conservatism. What makes Montás’ upcoming speech so notable, then, is the signal it sends about the movement’s effort to diversify its brand and project a welcoming attitude as it seeks to expand beyond conservative strongholds and suburbs where it began.

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Commentary: Trump Tightens Grasp over GOP

Trump Crowd

Former President Trump continued his romp through the Republican primary, easily winning all but one Super Tuesday contest and demonstrating a dominance so absolute that his stacked victories now seem nearly routine.

“We want to have unity,” Trump told a crowd gathered at Mar-a-Lago, “and we’re going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly.” On the eve of perhaps the greatest political comeback in modern American history, his remarks were relatively subdued by his standards. He never mentioned his former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, almost as if the competition did not exist and a third nomination was guaranteed all along.

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Commentary: Technology Changes and Bipartisanship are Causing Journalism’s Woes

Journalists Press

by Carl M. Cannon   For the American media, 2024 has been a fiasco. And it’s still only February. Nine days into the new year, highly respected Los Angeles Times editor Kevin Merida resigned rather than tolerate another round of layoffs and the meddlesome ways of a billionaire publisher and his…

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Commentary: Obama’s CIA Asked Foreign Intel Agencies to Spy on Trump Campaign

Obama CIA

The revelation that the U.S. intelligence community, under the Obama administration, sought the assistance of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Donald Trump’s associates before the 2016 election is a chilling reminder of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to protect its interests and challenge its adversaries. (The Five Eyes countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) This bombshell, reported by a team of independent journalists, exposes a dark chapter in American political history, where foreign intelligence services were reportedly mobilized against a presidential candidate.

The alleged operation against Trump and his associates, which predates the official start of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, is a stark example of political weaponization of intelligence. The involvement of foreign allies in surveilling American citizens under the pretext of national security raises serious questions about the integrity of our democratic processes and the autonomy of our nation’s intelligence operations.

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Commentary: The Pipe Bombs Before January 6 Is a Capital Mystery That Doesn’t Add Up

The newly disclosed video shows a dark SUV pulling up to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., at 9:44 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021. It sits for several minutes until a uniformed man with a bomb-sniffing dog enters from the right and steps up to the vehicle. The driver complies with his command, the dog sniffs inside and outside the car which is soon allowed to enter the parking garage. The man and his dog exit back to the right.

This scene is unremarkable except for one detail: The uniformed man and his trained canine came within a few feet of where a plainclothes Capitol Police officer would soon discover a pipe bomb that had been planted there the night before. The bomb, which the FBI has described as viable and capable of inflicting serious injury, along with a similar one found at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, would appear to be the most overt act of violence perpetrated on Jan. 6.

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Commentary: For Electricity, Americans Deserve More Choices

Electric Grid

Amid a polarizing presidential election, areas of common ground are rare, especially around energy. President Joe Biden has labeled climate change as “the only existential threat humanity faces,” and outlined an agenda to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Meanwhile, his would-be Republican challengers have pledged a different course, with the frontrunning campaign of former President Donald Trump pledging to “maximize fossil fuel production” and roll back funding for Biden’s landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. 

A step back from the daily partisan back-and-forth reveals an idea with something for everyone to support: increasing choice when it comes to where consumers get their energy. A commitment to freedom and creating our own destinies is quintessentially American. Yet most of our citizens have zero control over their power provider and the cost of their energy, and very few politicians on either side of the aisle say anything about it. 

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Commentary: States Must Act Now to Save Rural Lives from Fentanyl Crisis

Heidi Heitkamp

Across rural America, the expanding crisis of fentanyl-fueled overdoses is ravaging a generation. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl deaths in the U.S. have tripled since 2016, and initial data from 2022 indicates that synthetic opioids cause about 90% of all opioid overdose deaths – which translates to nearly 75,000 Americans killed in that year alone. Rural communities, where hundreds of hospitals have already closed and more are on the chopping block, are bearing the additional weight of overdoses. We need states to do more to protect Americans and ensure access to all overdose reversal agents that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Hidden in counterfeit prescription pharmaceuticals like Adderall, Xanax, and Oxycontin, it’s so lethal that just two milligrams, the size of a pencil tip, can kill. 

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Commentary: The Pandemic Treaty That Won’t Prevent a Pandemic

World Health Organization

If a “pandemic treaty” fails to account for the dismal international response to COVID-19 and isn’t focused on preventing future pandemics, is it really a “pandemic treaty”? Yet that’s the current state of the draft “pandemic treaty” being negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The failures of the international health system’s response to COVID are well-established. The People’s Republic of China failed to inform the international community of the outbreak in a timely manner as required by the International Health Regulations – a provision established because of Beijing’s cover-up of the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). China mischaracterized COVID-19 saying that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission—a deadly lie that the WHO parroted unquestioningly.

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Commentary: Biden Staffer Who Mishandled China, Iran Secrets Retains High-Security Pentagon Job

While Special Counsel Robert K. Hur has raised the issue of mental deterioration in explaining why he declined to prosecute 81-year-old Joe Biden for illegal retention and sharing of classified documents, the president chose another rationale to declare himself not culpable: He shifted the blame to the staffers who boxed up his records as he left the vice president’s office in 2017.

At a press conference hastily assembled after the report’s release, Biden said he assumed his aides had shipped “all” the documents to the National Archives in College Park, Md. “I wish I had paid more attention to how the documents were being moved and where,” he said. “I thought they were being moved to the Archives. I thought all of it was being moved [there].”

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Commentary: The Establishment Still Doesn’t Get Trump

Trump Speaking

A few weeks ago, a “Morning Joe” panel concluded that if Donald Trump were to become the Republican nominee (spoiler alert: he will), Republicans will lose in the fall. This is by no means a unique sentiment – former House Speaker Paul Ryan expressing this idea here, journalist Bernard Goldberg wondering if Trump is trying to lose here, and so forth.

As I read these analyses, I wonder if I’ve somehow been transported back to 2016, when such takes were de rigueur. Here in 2024, we know that Donald Trump won in 2016 and came close to winning in 2020. He carried Republican senators across the finish line in both years, and the GOP gained House seats in 2020, much to the surprise of most election analysts. And, at a comparable time in the campaign cycle when he trailed Hillary Clinton by 4.5 points in the RCP Average and Joe Biden by 5.6 points, Trump actually leads Biden by 1.9 points in national polling.

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Commentary: Medicine Now Diagnoses the Non-White ‘Oppressed’ with an Oppressive Case of ‘Weathering’

Doctor Patient

In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While activist minister Jesse Jackson and health care leaders were decrying the crisis of “babies having babies” as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.

Although Geronimus’ claims gained little traction at the time, the concept she pioneered – “weathering” – eventually became a foundation for the social justice ideology that is now upending medicine and social policy. She has stated in interviews and in her writings that the term “weathering” was intended to evoke the idea of erosion and resilience.

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Commentary: Republicans Should Ally with the American People – Not Washington Democrats

Congress Spending

No one should be surprised that conservatives are not supporting the U.S. Senate’s supposedly bipartisan border bill.

Every time Republicans reach out to Democrats to write a bipartisan bill, they inevitably sell out conservative values and accept liberal poison pills to get Democrats’ votes.

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Commentary: Special Counsel Hur Says Biden ‘Elderly Man with Poor Memory’

Biden Meeting

The same week Joe Biden publicly confused two European leaders with their deceased predecessors and passed on the traditional softball Super Bowl Sunday interview, a new report from Special Counsel Robert Hur described the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The confluence of events raised further questions about the mental acuity of the 81-year-old executive, doubts that Biden did little to dispel in a defiant session with the press at the White House Thursday evening. Biden took particular umbrage with what he described as “extraneous commentary” contained in the report.

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Commentary: Inflation Is the Reason Joe Biden Is So Unpopular

Joe Biden

We’ve paid much attention to President Biden’s flagging job approval here, in part because it tends to be a strong predictor of how an election will turn out. Biden is marching into this election season as likely the least popular president to face the voters since Herbert Hoover. While he may yet be saved by the fact that he is facing off against Donald Trump, who brings his own baggage to the table, it’s an ominous indicator.

At the same time, the economy is running hot. Growth is over 3%, unemployment is under 4%, and inflation has fallen from its peak. So why the seeming paradox of an unpopular president in a time of strong economic growth, especially when the strength of the economy is itself a traditional predictor of presidential job approval?

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Commentary: Ban TikTok or Let Beijing Control Our Broadcast Networks, Too

Tiktok User

In the dynamic landscape of global entertainment, the influence of Beijing over Hollywood has long been a topic of heated discussion. While the box office power of the Chinese market has waned, giving a breath of creative freedom back to our filmmakers, there looms a new and more pervasive form of influence on Hollywood and well beyond: TikTok.

Beijing may have lost theatrical market leverage, but it has more than made up for that with an overpowering social media presence that has become an epidemic, not just in Hollywood but throughout the United States. In fact, the Chairman of Congress’s Select Committee on China, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), accurately labels TikTok as “digital fentanyl” and has been aggressively campaigning to ban the social media app.

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Commentary: The Beltway Judge Hearing Trump Cases and Her Anti-Trump, Anti-Kavanaugh Husband

Washington glitterati assembled at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in October to celebrate federal employees making a difference in government. Hosted by CNN anchor Kate Bolduan, the black-tie affair featured in-person appearances by top Biden White House officials including Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack.

Midway through the evening’s festivities, Max Stier, president of the group sponsoring the event – the Partnership for Public Service, a $24 million nonprofit based in Washington that recruits individuals to work in the civil service – took the stage to thank his high-profile guests. “Great leaders are the heart and soul of effective organizations,” Stier said, “which is why I am so thankful to see so many of our government’s amazing leaders here tonight.”

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Commentary: Logically.AI of Britain and the Expanding Global Reach of Censorship

Computer Keyboard

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board – the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”

In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”

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Commentary: Big Labor State Politicians’ ‘Wall of Denial’ Is Starting to Crumble

California Illinois

For decades, cold, hard data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have shown that states like New Jersey, Illinois and California are paying a high price for allowing dues-hungry union bosses to continue getting workers fired for refusal to bankroll their organizations.

Year after year, far more taxpayers have been leaving forced-unionism states than moving into them.  And the average tax filer moving out of a forced-unionism state has reported having an adjusted gross income (AGI) on his or her IRS form that is substantially higher than the average for a tax filer moving into a forced-unionism state.

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Commentary: Public Education’s Alarming Reversal of Learning Trend

School Work

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.

The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.

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Commentary: DEI Destroys Excellence, Military Cohesion at Service Academies

Military

Applicants who self-identified as a member of a race the Academy wished to privilege—at the time I was on the Admissions Board it was African American, Hispanic, and Native American—were briefed separately to the committee not by a white member but by a minority Navy lieutenant. Briefings (a minute and forty seconds per applicant, no more) ran through a number of factors quite quickly and offered a recommendation that we had been told was appropriate: “qualified” for USNA if grades A/B for white applicants (but not minorities, who needed only C grades), 600 score in each part of the SAT for white applicants (but about 550 for minorities who come to USNA without remediation), and Whole Person Multiple (points given for grades/tests, school leadership positions, and sports) of at least 55,000 for whites, no bottom for minorities.

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Commentary: Only Trump Can Save America

I believed that Republican voters were ready for a new post-Trump chapter of the America First movement. I now believe I was wrong. Those of us who backed Ron DeSantis – or the other Republican candidates – should read the room. Former President Trump winnowed the field effortlessly and then crushed the remaining three candidates in Iowa. He leads in the polls everywhere else. It is time to coalesce and unite behind the clear preference of the GOP grassroots, Donald John Trump.

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Commentary: Moderna Came Up with a Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent

Moderna Vaccine

Finances at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen, as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID booster shot. The pharmaceutical company, whose pioneering mRNA vaccine had turned it from small startup to biotech giant worth more than $100 billion in just a few years, reported a third-quarter loss last year of $3.6 billion, as most Americans refused to get another COVID booster shot.

In a September call aimed at shoring up investors, Moderna’s then-chief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, attributed some of the hesitancy pummeling Moderna’s numbers to uninformed vaccine skeptics. “Despite some misinformation,” Garay said, COVID-19 still drove significant hospitalizations. “It really is a vaccine that’s relevant across all age groups,” she insisted.

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Commentary: Americans Embrace Religion, Reject Religious Bigotry

People Praying

More than half a century ago, Time magazine famously asked, “Is God Dead?” The black and red cover, the magazine’s first to include only text, sparked countless angry sermons and thousands of letters from readers accusing Time of engaging in tasteless nihilism, Marxist pandering, and outright blasphemy.

The question, which typified the counter-culture movement and the intellectual radicalism of the 1960s, was far off the mark both then and now. The United States has always been and remains a very religious nation despite steep declines in attendance at churches, synagogues, and mosques – trends that have captured far more headlines in recent years than the nation’s enduring faith. America is also a majority Christian nation, though other religious groups and affiliations and those identifying as non-believers are growing.

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Commentary: Enemies of the Administrative State

DOJ Logo

Amid allegations from conservative lawmakers and activists that Washington, D.C.’s most powerful agencies have been weaponized against their critics, one organization has not only played a key role in helping marshal evidence of such malfeasance, but found itself at the center of an emerging government targeting scandal that would seem to only further substantiate the claims of administrative state critics.

That organization is Empower Oversight Whistleblowers & Research. It has represented whistleblowers at the heart of some of the most consequential and contentious congressional investigations in recent years, touching on matters ranging from the impeachment inquiry into President Biden, to alleged FBI inflation of the domestic terror threat.

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Commentary: A Clean Future Does Not Exist Without Nuclear Energy

On the heels of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, it’s clear that nuclear energy’s role in achieving a clean energy future cannot be overlooked or understated. 

At COP28, we heard from dozens of top minds in-person and from afar who echoed the same message: Transitioning to cleaner energy sources cannot come at the price of an unreliable power supply, and that is where nuclear energy comes in. Not only is it a reliable, proven technology, but it is also clean, producing zero carbon emissions. Already, the United States’ 94 nuclear power reactors generate around 18% of all U.S. electricity.  

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Commentary: Politicized, Progressive Big Philanthropy

Harvard Money

Steve Miller’s December 12 RealClearInvestigations article, “How Tax-Exempt Nonprofits Skirt U.S. Law to Turn Out the Democrat Base in Elections,” is both jarring and informative and helps frame many important questions facing philanthropy, conservatism, and conservative philanthropy.

Miller describes the general size and scope of activities being conducted a progressive nonprofit infrastructure that has “taken on an outsized part of the Democratic Party’s election strategy” and, specifically, how they “work around legal restrictions on nonprofits that accept tax-deductible donations by selectively engaging in nonpartisan efforts including boosting voter education and participation.”

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Commentary: The FBI-Tainted Whitmer ‘Kidnap Plot’ People Have Heard Next to Nothing About

Gretchen Whitmer

In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was “no evidence” to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly “lied” to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.

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Commentary: Like It or Not, 2024 Is the Year of Trump

Trump Speaking

Ladies and gentlemen, start your election engines.

Ready or not 2024 is here, and that means you are in for the ride of your life! The all-important Iowa caucuses are here in just two weeks, and by the end of the month New Hampshire voters may have slammed shut the door for any candidate other than Donald Trump to grab the Republican Party presidential nomination.

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Commentary: American Achilles in the War on Terror

Military Soldiers

Professor Emily Wilson has achieved celebrity status … for translating Homer.

University students use her work, and it draws leisure readers as well. Beginning with her translation of the Odyssey in 2018 and continuing with the Iliad earlier this year, Wilson has presented as fresh and vivid material that is, admittedly, old and foreign.

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Commentary: Biden’s Sliding Poll Numbers

Joe Biden Miguel Cardona

President Biden’s sliding poll numbers have set off alarm signals among Democrats who are beginning to see that he might lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Those polls have also gotten the attention of pundits who have confidently said for three years now that Trump could never again win a national election. The polling results published over the past few months suggest otherwise: Trump is currently the favorite to win next year’s election.

The most recent RealClearPolitics Average has Trump leading Biden by 2.6 percentage points, a switch of about four points since late summer when Biden led 45%-43%, and in a long-running decline of seven points for Biden since he won the 2020 election with 51% percent of the popular vote.

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Commentary: The Battle for Higher Education

College Student

Higher education is making news these days.  In Congressional testimony, the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn couldn’t tell whether calling for the genocide of the Jews constituted harassment without knowing the context.  The effects of their testimony reverberate.

Days later, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a lengthy report condemning “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.”  Prominently featured was a detailed complaint about New College of Florida, where I serve as admissions director.

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Commentary: Illegal Immigration’s Impact on Public Health

Illegal Immigrants

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

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Commentary: After Telework Surge, Federal Buildings Remain Largely Empty

Empty Office

More than two years after the Biden administration called on all federal agencies to create plans to bring employees who teleworked during the COVID pandemic back to the office, the vast majority of Washington, D.C.’s federal buildings are still sprawling expanses of empty, echoing hallways and offices. 

In fact, 17 of 24 federal agencies use an estimated 25% or less of their headquarters’ office capacity, according to an updated survey by the General Accounting Office, a government agency that provides auditing and investigative services for Congress. 

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Commentary: President Trump’s Plan to Save America’s Cities

Trump NYC

With all the devastating news about urban crime, drug overdoses, illegal immigration, rampant homelessness, out-of-control budgets, and educational failures, it is encouraging that President Donald Trump has committed his next administration to a saving America’s cities.

As Just the News reported, “With the nation’s first primary state as a backdrop, former President Donald Trump took aim Saturday at Democrats’ urban strongholds, vowing to both secure and revitalize blue cities weary from years of violence and economic decay.”

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Commentary: Advent and Christmas at the Vatican

The Vatican

When I was a child, my parents and I would attend Christmas Eve Mass at St. John’s Catholic Church in Whitehall, Wisconsin. When we got home, my father and I would watch the replay of Christmas Eve Mass at the Vatican on television. After watching the beautiful Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, we would say to each other, “One day, we’ll go there together!”

Sadly, my father and mother were never able to make the trip to the Vatican. However, as the former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, I was blessed to attend Christmas Eve Mass at St. Peter’s on several occasions. And each time, I brought the memory of my parents with me.

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Commentary: Trump Should Love the Colorado Ruling

Trump Colorado Supreme Court

The Colorado Supreme Court, acting as supplicants for the enemies of Donald Trump seeking the most extreme remedy for driving the former president into the ditch, may have just unwittingly gifted the former president a Rocky Mountain high – in the polls. 

This time, four left-wing Colorado justices attempting to kneecap Trump were not even going to wait on due process – the very foundation of law – to effectively declare Trump guilty of insurrection, a crime for which he has not, repeat not, even been charged. After believing their attempts to wipe Trump off the ballot would be a knockout punch, it is the left that is about to get walloped to the canvas with a right hook. 

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Commentary: Straw Poll Shows Young Trump Voters Want Carlson or Vivek as VP

Tucker Vivek

Young Republican voters overwhelmingly want Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee in 2024, and they only disagree on whether he should choose Tucker Carlson or Vivek Ramaswamy as his running mate, according to a straw poll of participants who attended Turning Point Action’s annual AmericaFest.

Obtained exclusively by RealClearPolitics, the results provide a snapshot of the youth vote just weeks before the Iowa caucuses. The online poll was conducted by Turning Point Action Dec. 17-18 and surveyed 1,113 attendees at the TPUSA conference in Phoenix, Ariz.

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Commentary: Public Sector Unions Are a Growing Threat to Taxpayers

Following the resolution of the six-week United Auto Workers strike last month and the ensuing glut of news coverage, one could be forgiven for believing that private sector unions were experiencing a generational comeback the likes of which haven’t been seen since their halcyon days of the 1950s.

The reality, however, couldn’t be further from the truth: union participation in the private sector is now a tiny sliver of the overall employment picture in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unionization rate of private-sector workers currently sits below 6% at just under 7 million workers nationwide – down from 17 million in 1950.

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Commentary: The U.S. Defense Industrial Base

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with increased tensions in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific region, has generated many debates. Debates about the stability of the international order, the cohesion of NATO, and many others. But for the United States, one significant debate regards the size and expansibility of the American defense industrial base. It’s a discussion that is well past due.

Last year, Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl testified to Congress that, “What the Ukraine conflict showed is that, frankly, our defense industrial base was not at the level that we needed it to be to generate munitions.” But the challenge with ammunition is more symptom than cause, in economic terms something of a “leading indicator.”

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Commentary: Government Cannot Become Big Brother

Anyone who lived through 2020 observed that some messages received treatment online that stood in stark contrast to other messages. Conservative voices and messages were censored and banned, while progressive voices and messages flowed freely. If a person spoke against COVID-19 lockdowns—and later vaccines—there was a good chance that a social media platform would take down the post. If one were to suggest that suspicious activities occurred surrounding the 2020 election, the label “misinformation” might appear.

The primary vehicle to censor internet speech is to label disfavored messages as dis-, mis-, or mal-information. While the category of malinformation is seemingly the most offensive – true information that government censors believe lacks sufficient “context” – the other categories can be just as malignant. Mis- and disinformation require someone to determine what is true and what is not.

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Commentary: Tax-Exempt Nonprofits Skirt U.S. Law to Turn Out the Democrat Base in Elections

Even as Democrats such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse warn of “right-wing dark-money network seeking to undermine the future of democratic elections in the United States,” progressives have far-outstripped Republicans in harnessing the power of putatively non-partisan, nonprofit organizations that push the boundaries to win elections.

More than 150 progressive nonprofits spent $1.35 billion on political activities in 2021 and 2022, according to data compiled by Restoration of America, a conservative political action committee. Although there are no readily available estimates of comparable conservative efforts, observers say they are overmatched.

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Commentary: Farmers are Turning to an Ancient Practice to Improve Agriculture

From ancient Egypt to medieval England, cultivating one or more crops in the same field was common practice among many farmers for thousands of years. However, in the last century, food producers largely stopped ‘intercropping’ and moved towards an industrial type of agriculture – a shift that contributed to 34% of the world’s farmland being degraded today. 

“Interest is growing in intercropping [again] because farmers increasingly understand it improves their soil health,” said Jerry Allford, an organic farmer and advisor from the Soil Association, a UK charity promoting sustainable agriculture. Jerry thinks this renewed focus can “open up a whole new way of farming” because it can bridge profitability with regenerative agriculture practices. 

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Commentary: The ‘Jan. 6 Jurisprudence’ About to Be Unleashed on Trump

Defense attorneys have coined the term “January 6 Jurisprudence” to describe the treatment received by the more than 1,200 defendants arrested so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. This carve-out legal system involves the unprecedented and possibly unlawful use of a corporate evidence-tampering statute; excessive prison sentences and indefinite periods of pretrial incarceration; and the designation of nonviolent offenses as federal crimes of terrorism.

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Commentary: The Biden Family Grift and Hunter’s Fake Offer to Testify

Hunter Biden’s offer to testify before the House Oversight Committee is a clever evasion, nothing more. The president’s son says he will testify only if the hearing is publicly televised. Nice try. Subpoenaed witnesses don’t get to set the terms. The committee does.

Why make an offer that is bound to be rejected? For two reasons. The PR goal is for Hunter to appear willing to testify, when he actually wants desperately to avoid it. The legal goal is to prevent, or at least delay, the committee from enforcing its subpoena. Hunter and his hardball attorney, Abbe Lowell, probably figure the Biden administration’s Department of Justice won’t go to court and demand compliance. That’s not a bad bet. If the DOJ does refuse, the House will go to court itself, but that will take time and may not succeed.

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Commentary: Not Only Can Trump Win, Right Now He’s the Favorite to Win

There’s a strange disjunction in the discourse about the 2024 elections. On the one hand, when presented with the proposition “Trump can win,” people will nod their heads sagely and say something along the lines of: “Of course he can; only a fool would believe to the contrary.”

At the same time, whenever polling emerges showing that Donald Trump is performing well in 2024 matchups, a deluge of panicked articles, tweets (or is it “X”s?), social media posts, and the like emerge, reassuring readers that polls aren’t predictive and providing a variety of reasons that things will improve for President Biden.

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Commentary: John F. Kennedy – A Remembrance

Sixty autumns have passed since the assassination of John F. Kennedy that Friday, Nov. 22, a day that traumatized a generation of children and revealed the impermanence of their innocence. For many, it was their first rendezvous with death. It endured as a vivid remembrance even as other memories lapsed with the passage of age. Many of those children are now grandparents, having lived past the average American life expectancy in 1963. Others, like my father, are not here for the somber milestone. But until his own twilight, my father – like any Irish-Catholic child of that period – remained haunted by that afternoon, transfixed by what Kennedy meant at that time, and committed to imparting those reminiscences unto his three sons.

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