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March 2025

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Dems Cheered Obama’s DOGE-Like Initiative, But Cry ‘Fascism’ When Trump Does the Same Sarah Arnold (includes Obama Video)

By on March 17th, 2025

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2025/03/16/obama-tried-doge-n2653882

A resurfaced 2011 video reveals former President Barack Obama launching a “Campaign to Cut Waste,” strikingly similar to the current Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative to eliminate government inefficiency. In the video, Obama emphasizes the need to reduce wasteful spending, highlighting the appointment of former President Joe Biden to lead the effort, saying that “nobody messes with Joe.” This initiative aimed to increase government accountability, reduce unnecessary costs, and promote fiscal responsibility echoes what the Trump administration is currently trying to do.

Elon Musk recently shared a 2011 video featuring Obama promoting his initiative, “Campaign to Cut Waste,” which closely resembles the efforts Musk’s DOGE program is currently undertaking. In the video, Obama highlights his efforts to eliminate government waste, pointing out unnecessary federal programs and absurd taxpayer-funded projects, such as an online fan page for a folk music group composed of Forest Rangers.

“Everyone knows that getting rid of the deficit requires some tough decision. And that includes cutting back on billions of dollars in programs that a lot of people care about. But what should be easy is getting rid of the pointless waste and stupid spending that doesn’t benefit anybody,” Obama said in the resurfaced video.

“Obama sounds exactly like DOGE!!” Musk wrote on X. 

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Zeynep Tufekci We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

By on March 17th, 2025

https://archive.is/CQzbl#selection-723.0-731.59

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Moral Hazard Of Illegal Immigration

By on March 17th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/17/the-moral-hazard-of-illegal-immigration/

The U.S. border was illicitly crossed fewer times last month than in any February in the country’s history. There were 28,654 encounters and apprehensions of illegals reported nationwide. For those who might see border security, and deportations, as cruel acts against the poor and hopeless who want only to escape to a land of plenty, we offer another way of looking at illegal immigration.

Because the February number is actually good news.

The phrase “moral hazard” comes to us from the insurance industry. It refers, says Law & Liberty, “to the possibility that insuring against costly outcomes actually increases the reckless behavior creating the need for insurance in the first place.”

We often hear about the moral hazard of foreign aid. As long as we send money to struggling nations, their “leaders” will never liberalize their economies and root out the corruption that wrecks their societies. They don’t have to deal with the consequences of their policies.

It takes no leap of logic to apply the tag to an open-border policy, much like the one the Biden administration oversaw for four years. When unfettered entry into the U.S. is a pressure release valve for countries where millions are mired in perpetual poverty, those nations’ leaders, who are more often than not grifters and authoritarians, have no incentive to free their economies and purge their governments of the mobsters and entrenched insiders whose misfeasance limits prosperity to only a select few.

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