Politics

Homelessness is increasingly caused by soaring rents and low wages, not laziness or personal failures. The solution is strong government intervention to house everyone and to end landlords’ control over our lives.

Senator Ted Cruz is many things: a constitutional originalist, a spineless coward, and most recently, a podcaster. His weekly show Verdict with Ted Cruz has raised some uncomfortable questions—not just about how many hours a sitting U.S. Senator should be allowed to whine about cancel-culture into a Shure mic, but about the ethics of monetizing a podcast while in office.

In 2023, watchdog groups filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging Cruz was illegally soliciting donations via the podcast. Although Cruz apparently receives no salary from the show, the iHeartRadio network has contributed nearly $1 million in ad revenue to a super PAC supporting Cruz’s reelection bid. The FEC, in its infinite wisdom, dismissed the complaint in early 2025. And while that may clear him legally, it raises a deeper, more philosophical question: Should politicians have podcasts at all?

In an effort to answer that question, I stumbled across something nearly as horrifying as Cruz’s beard: a page on the official House GOP website titled “Member Podcasts.” It turns out Ted Cruz is just the tip of a much darker iceberg. Republicans in Congress are podcasting in numbers that feel unsafe for democracy.

So I did the only heroic thing one can do in such a moment. I listened to at least three episodes of each available podcast and wrote a review of every single one, so that you, dear reader, never have to. The results were often incomprehensible and almost universally boring. Please enjoy the fruits of my labor, because I know I didn’t.

Deportations will eliminate millions of jobs held by immigrant and U.S.-born workers according to research on increased immigration enforcement.

Key findings

• The number of deportations will skyrocket once the Trump administration fully rolls out its agenda. This will curtail business operations and reduce employer demand for immigrant and U.S.-born labor.
• If the administration follows through on its goals of deporting 4 million people over four years:

1. There will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed U.S.-born workers at the end of that period.
2. Employment in the construction sector will drop sharply: U.S.-born construction employment will fall by 861,000, and immigrant employment will fall by 1.4 million.
3. The deportations will eliminate half a million child care jobs.

• California, Florida, New York, and Texas will have the highest number of job losses due to larger immigrant populations in these states.

Why this matters

Deporting vast numbers of immigrants from the United States is a major goal of the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. However, immigrants are an integral part of the U.S. labor market, and an increase in deportations will result in fewer jobs for both immigrant and U.S.-born workers.

How to fix it

To limit damage to the labor market, policymakers should stop the tactics that are vastly increasing immigration enforcement like the arrest, detention, and deportation of immigrants, and reinstate temporary immigration protections like parole and Temporary Protected Status. Instead of providing additional funds for an increase in aggressive and indiscriminate immigration enforcement, Congress should focus on policies that will improve wages and working conditions like providing work permits and green cards to those who lack a regular immigration status, as well as providing adequate resources for the enforcement of labor standards.

Deportations will lead to job losses

Nineteen White House officials own between $875,000 and $2.35 million in the crypto assets President Trump proposed holding in a national reserve, according to CREW’s analysis of nearly 120 executive branch financial disclosures.

While cryptocurrencies can be extremely volatile, the government holding these assets in reserve could legitimize what is currently viewed as a risky asset class. In a scenario where increased institutional buy-in results in rising values, White House officials who own the assets in question could profit from the impacts of the reserve plan.

In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile. Days before issuing the order, President Trump described his plans for the digital asset stockpile in a series of posts on Truth Social, announcing his intention to create a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” that includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), XRP (the native cryptocurrency on the Ripple blockchain) and Cardano (ADA). The final order created two separate reserve bodies, one that holds Bitcoin and a second for other tokens.

Notably, Trump himself has a business relationship with Solana, having launched the $TRUMP memecoin on the Solana blockchain prior to his inauguration in January 2025. According to data from blockchain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence, he also holds a small amount of Ethereum valued at about $15,000, though that is not included in this analysis. Overall, Trump’s crypto projects are thought to have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family since election day in 2024.

Nineteen White House employees reported holding at least one of the crypto assets proposed by President Trump to be included in the government’s digital asset holdings. Sixteen staffers held Bitcoin, making it the most popular crypto asset among those found in CREW’s analysis. Three staffers also disclosed ownership of shares in Bitcoin ETFs, which allow investors to gain exposure to fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin without holding the token itself. Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs make up between $818,019 and $2,020,000, the bulk of the total holdings. Other tokens, including Ethereum, account for an additional $578,0156 to $33045,000 in assets held by White House staff. One staffer, Special Assistant to the President for Communications Ian Kelley, owned each of the assets named by President Trump in his Truth Social posts.

The Self-Proclaimed “Most Transparent” Administration in History is Withholding Information From the Public on Trump’s Corrupt Actions

The Trump Administration is attacking federal support for thousands of community libraries, museums, and other nonprofits that support the arts, humanities, and learning, diminishing programs and services provided daily to families across every U.S. state and territory.

The Administration has targeted federal agencies directly responsible for supporting local libraries, museums, arts, and humanities for wholesale dismantlement, while canceling existing support previously committed to communities and, at least in some cases, illegally impounding funds. While court orders have paused some of these actions, harm is being felt nationwide.

The long-standing federal role in community arts, humanities, and afterschool and informal learning provides essential support for library and museum programming, digital resources for families, librarian and museum-professional training, and local opportunities in the arts and humanities that many communities cannot otherwise access from state, local, or philanthropic sources. If the Trump Administration succeeds in eliminating or even just destabilizing that support, families across the country, particularly in small, rural, and low-income communities, will experience the resulting harm for years to come.

BREAKING: Documents filed in court today assert that officials from El Salvador told the United Nations that it "facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure" by the U.S. but that "the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the" U.S.

• Full PDF Document.
• Source.

Source.

What distinguishes Zohran Mamdani’s socialism is not its aims. It’s his willingness to take seriously the problem of how to get there.

They rejected kings and were sincerely concerned about the possibility of a dictatorship. But we need to move past founder-worship and focus on justice.

The lawmakers argue that only Congress has authority to create, restructure, and abolish federal departments and agencies by constitutional mandate and through a long-established legal precedent.

The Department of Education is statutorily mandated and cannot be unilaterally abolished by the President.

• Projections by the researchers show that if USAID cuts continue, more than 14 million additional deaths could occur by 2030, including over 4.5 million among children under 5, or about 700,000 extra child deaths per year.
• The figures reflect the projected consequences of halting funding not only for health services but also for critical sectors such as nutrition, education, water and sanitation and humanitarian relief.
• The study warns that the impact of USAID cuts could extend beyond the agency’s own programs: international donors may also reduce their commitments, further weakening service delivery in countries already dependent on external support.