🚨 A Pope and A President Walk Into A Bar… – April 30 2025

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Lead: Is Syria Next?

Photo credit: Reuters

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said this in a speech this week: “With God’s help and the valor of your comrades-in-arms who continue to fight even now, we will end this campaign when Syria is dismantled.”

The U.S. would prefer Syria and Israel to be peaceful neighbors. The Trump administration recently sent Syria a list of demands including destroying its chemical weapon stockpiles, banning certain Palestinian groups and searching for missing Americans. In a letter, the Syrian government says that it is willing to work towards those demands and that it will “not become a threat to Israel.”

Would Israel really accept Syria as a peaceful ally if the U.S. issued assurances?

The full context of Smotrich’s speech does not exactly show a desire for peace in the region. Here is the full quote: “With God’s help and the valor of your comrades-in-arms who continue to fight even now, we will end this campaign when Syria is dismantled, Hezbollah is severely beaten, Iran is stripped of its nuclear threat, Gaza is cleansed of Hamas and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on their way out of it to other countries, our hostages are returned, some to their homes and some to the graves of Israel, and the State of Israel is stronger and more prosperous.”

The new government of Syria is trying to tell the world that it is no threat to Israel. Why would they say that? Because Syria is on Israel’s list and they don’t want to be the next Gaza.

Student Loan Overhaul

credit: EdTrust

The House Education and Workforce Committee passed a draft bill to overhaul student loans.

The bill would force colleges to repay student loans if a borrower cannot so that taxpayers are not on the line for federal loans that go unpaid. That’s interesting! If students cannot pay back their debt, and they can prove that they did realize “a return on investment [for] the degree provided,” the university will pay back the loan, not the taxpayer.

If universities had to pay for failed market value of their degrees, how many of them would continue to let young students to rack up debt for a degree in “Renaissance Sexualities“?

The bill also prevents any future president from “any future attempts at loan ‘forgiveness’ and repeals a range of burdensome and costly Biden-era regulations.”

The bill also makes changes to Pell grants so that they can be used for shorter term vocational schools. It also sets borrowing limits for students so that they don’t just rack up debt so early in their career. It seems like a really good bill meant to fix what was so obviously broken.

It will move through one more committee before going to the House floor for a vote.

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Don’t Mess With Texas Foreign Aid

Photo credit: NextCity

A town in Texas discovered that over $4 million of its local tax dollars were being sent to Israel. The town of San Marcos decided to stop that aid and Governor Greg Abbott does not want to let them do it.

Israel receives billions of dollars in Federal tax money. Why shouldn’t a local government decide not to send its own allocated local tax dollars abroad? Because Governor Abbott calls that “antisemitism.”

“In Texas, no governmental entity may enter into a contract worth $100,000 or more unless it includes a ‘written verification’ that the contracting entity ‘does not boycott Israel’ and ‘will not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,'” the Governor wrote in a letter.

The town is not trying to boycott Israel. They are trying to re-allocate their own money “towards essential domestic priorities” and the Governor is somehow mandating that supporting Israel is a local priority. It is absolutely insane. Does the town have to donate to every foreign ally?

This has got to go to court. How can a Governor disallow a municipality from stopping foreign aid?

News By The Numbers

Photo Credit: Getty Images

20,000. That is how many jobs UPS says it will lay off to cut costs due to the company’s own decision to deliver fewer Amazon packages.

132. That is how many Big Lots discount stores will reopen in May.

31,000. That is how many Australian passwords were sold on the dark web recently.

Trans Kids To Be Tested For Autism

Photo credit: Kansas Reflector

The National Health Service in the U.K. will now test all transgender children for neurodevelopmental conditions, according to The Telegraph.

All serious data about transgender youth shows that gender dysphoria is correlated with autism, ADHD, anxiety and other conditions but physicians have ignored that and treated the gender dysphoria primarily through medicalization and surgery. Since the publication of the Cass Report, physicians can no longer ignore this and push children into gender transition without treating underlying conditions.

The new NHS policy is to “evaluate each child’s mental health, their relationship with their family and their sexual development, including whether they are experiencing same-sex attraction.” Transgender children will have a “multidisciplinary team” of experts to this end. It’s about time!

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