Thursday, October 9, 2025

Part I

Real Hope For Peace in Gaza: White House Announces Agreement from Israel and Hamas on First Stage of Peace Treaty

Well, late yesterday, the White House announced that the preliminary requirements for the peace deal between Israel and Hamas have been agreed to by both parties. President Trump made the statement himself. It was repeated on social media, it was announced in the mainstream media. It was also affirmed by Qatar, the Arab nation that has been serving something of an intermediary role.

What it all means right now, we don’t know, but it does appear that this very well could be an historic breakthrough. It’s going to be really crucial over the next few days, especially if President Trump does go to the Middle East, as he indicated. We’re going to have to hold off understanding exactly what’s going on here until the situation becomes more clear. But this is really big news and we can hope it’s really good news that’s going to last. We’ll not only think about that, we’ll pray about it.

Part II

Who Will Surrender in the Government Shutdown? What’s Behind the Ever-Expanding Government Debt? – Big Questions Raised 8 Days into the Shutdown

Well, the big headline news continues to be the government shutdown. And as I have said, this is partly non-story, but it becomes a story. And the reason is because when you have this kind of symbolic political circus of a supposed shutdown of the government, it does become a bigger story because under stress things are revealed that otherwise might be missed. And there’s another big thing very much as a factor here, and that is that the American people will put up with this until they don’t. They will put up with this until something hurts. Now, for some Americans, it might hurt already. Those who, for example, like air traffic controllers still have to work, but they’re not going to be paid until there is remedial pay at the end of this process.

So that can put stress on families. And when we had a shutdown years ago that went over a month, that really became problematic. But speaking of air traffic controllers, it might become quite problematic for a lot of Americans when it comes to delayed flights or even canceled flights because something’s going on here, we are told that there is already a shortage of a couple of thousand air traffic controllers. At the same time, we’re being told the system is safe, but several towers experienced a major difficulty in terms of staffing. And one, the Hollywood Burbank Airport actually shut down for a number of hours because there was no one in the tower.

Now, don’t panic. That didn’t mean that the planes are simply flying out there unidentified and unwatched. It did mean, however, that controllers at other airports had to take over that responsibility. And since there is a limit to what any single controller can handle, that meant that there are flights that aren’t allowed to take off. There are delays that can stretch into multiple hours. Let me just tell you, there’s one thing the flying public doesn’t like, predictably, understandably, it is canceled and late flights, big flight delays.

This leads to all kinds of economic after-effects, but it really is also attitudinal. And here’s something else to think about. The kinds of people who are affected most directly by this kind of problem, a delay in flights, happen also to be the kind of people who vote more regularly than others, which is to say there’s an outsize political influence when it comes to this segment of the voting public. And on a bipartisan basis and a bipartisan pattern, people who get angry about this kind of thing, they often at least intend to find a way to express their dissatisfaction. The problem for the American people is that they forget that dissatisfaction sometimes pretty quickly. The advantage for politicians is that they’re counting on that. 

But it is also true that it is harder to shut down the government. And again, it’s limited. So the FBI is on duty, air traffic controllers are on duty. The military fully on duty, the White House, Congress, the judiciary, they’re on duty, but support staff and the administrative staff in government agencies are largely not. And that can really grind things to a halt. What if you need a permit to do something? What if you’re trying to get a drug through the FDA? And this also gives the administrative state the bureaucracy an excuse later to say, “We were making progress on that, but then came the government shutdown and it shut us down. We’re behind. We’re not even sorry about it.”

It is just a political problem. And it is interesting that every time this comes up, you have both Democrats and Republicans who say, “The system’s broke. We shouldn’t have this kind of budgetary mechanism.” And you also will hear from fiscal conservatives that if this did not exist, the Congress would find a way just to increase spending far beyond the imagination of taxpayers.

All right, there’s another part of this story that turns out to be really interesting. What is the issue that Democrats are holding up? Remember the Republicans in the House and the Republicans in the Senate passed a clean continuing resolution that is to say, they said, “Let’s just fund the government as has been already authorized according to the existing budget for another few weeks and we’ll deal with political issues between here and there.”

That is traditionally a democratic posture. But given the leadership context right now with the White House and the House and the Senate, the Republicans are now using this argument. That very argument, having been made by Democrats so many times, has given the media the opportunity to just keep throwing up statements by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and so many other prominent Democrats that the only way to deal with this is a clean continuing resolution. The Republicans gave them a clean continuing resolution. This time they don’t want a clean continuing resolution. What do they want? Well, they want to score political points. The Democrats want to score political points, particularly Democrats in the Senate, by having a unified front to oppose a continuing resolution that does not continue Obamacare subsidies that were going to time out at the end of this calendar year.

So subsidies for Obamacare, that is, the decrease the cost of insurance to certain Americans, were going to expire. Why were they going to expire? Well, because they were supposed to be temporary in the first place. They were put in by the Biden administration in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. And under the Coronavirus pandemic, the claim was Americans are under stress, there’s a lot of unemployment, people are having a hard time meeting these bills, and so we need to subsidize health insurance. And remember, this is health insurance we’re talking about in the context of the pandemic. And so the argument was, “We have to do this, but we promise this is short-term.”

Okay, here’s the thing to watch. When a Democrat says, “I promise you the spending is short-term,” don’t believe a word of it. Second lesson, when a Republican says, “There is no way we would ever conceive of continuing the spending,” in general terms, don’t believe that either. Because the fact is what we have here is a reality of ever-expanding government and ever-expanding government spending, and this is a parable we need to watch. So let’s remind ourselves again, how did this happen?

The Biden administration put in these subsidies and they are largely for people who are above the poverty line. And so people who were not already receiving the subsidies, the argument was during the pandemic, we need to help some people who are above the poverty line, and in some cases, well beyond the poverty line, simply because of the difficulty of them, say, not having insurance during the pandemic.

The pandemic, let’s just say, is over. It has been over. Those subsidies were scheduled to expire December the 31st of this year. The Democrats see a great opportunity, and this is the bottom line. There are a lot of Americans, middle-class Americans, likely-to-vote Americans, who are going to see their insurance rates through the exchanges of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, go up January 1st rather significantly. And that’s because just think of how money works, just think about how money works.

Money, remember, has to be matched to time. The most obvious thing to say is that $7 in 1965 is worth a whole lot more than $7 in 2025. The cost of money over time means that, put it this way, if you come up with this plan in the pandemic and you say you’re going to temporarily give assistance and the rate was this and you’re going to cut it down to that, then when you go back to what was the previous, the previous is now higher because the costs are now higher.

And so this is one of the reasons why we have an ever-expanding federal budget, ever-expanding spending programs on social welfare and medical costs and all the rest. And this is why it is politically so difficult ever to gain or to achieve a real cut in government spending. It is not impossible, but on earth, it is one of the things closest to impossible. 

What would it cost to extend to the subsidies? Well, even the New York Times says it’s going to be costly, about 350 billion over the decade. $350 billion. Okay, now that’s in addition to the spending for the Obama Care Affordable Care Act program in the first place. And so what you’re talking about now is the fact that the Republicans say, “Look, this has been the Democratic plan all along. It is basically socialized medicine, put everyone on a national government plan.” And this, by the way, gives those who were covered by this supposedly temporary subsidy through tax credits, it gives them an advantage over people who might have the very same economic picture. They might have the very same salary, they might have the very same conditions, but they do not have the same access to these kinds of subsidies.

And it just shows you again how government works. And there have been those who, for hundreds of years, I would say 200-plus years, and in particular, over the last 100 years or so who have looked at how government works. You could go back even to Chancellor Bismarck’s expansion of the welfare state in Germany in the 19th century. You can look at the fact that people say, “We’re going to take this on as a government function and we’re going to create a certain welfare program, but don’t worry, we’re not going to ever let this become too big an expense.” Well, the next thing you know, it’s exactly what they said it wouldn’t become. But not only that, it becomes even more expensive, ever more expensive, more expensive here, more expensive there.

And then there are claims, “We need to include these people too, we need to change those conditions.” There are more people who have need. And of course, here’s the problem, there will always be, by someone’s definition, more people who have need. Now I also want to say there are people you and I undoubtedly know who would lose these subsidies, and given the way Obamacare works, the Affordable Care Act, the fact is they may truly face the fact that it’s going to be very difficult to get back into the market without these subsidies now.

That they might really be in a situation of financial peril, they might really honestly be in a situation in which they’re threatened with losing their medical health coverage. To state the matter clearly, as their friends and neighbors, we do not want that to happen. And this is exactly why those who want to advocate for increased government spending almost always win. Even if they don’t win what they demand, they win. Go back to the Reagan years. Go back to the 1980s when the Republican plan and the Republican claim is we’re going to cut government spending.

Net, they didn’t cut government spending. What they cut, at least they would claim, and to some degree there’s validity in this, what they actually cut was the amount of the increased federal spending that didn’t happen. But when you just look at the federal spending, let’s not fool ourselves. It just goes up and up and up and up. And we also need to be very candid to say that the legislation pushed by President Joe Biden in the context of the pandemic, it has radically increased the debt indebtedness and deficit condition of the United States of America.

And all of that just gets pushed further and further out into the future, which is saying, we’re encumbering our own grandchildren and great-grandchildren with costs. It’s going to be virtually impossible for them to meet. And so you have the situation in which the only hope… So how would American politicians living today, how do they hope that this problem might go away or be mitigated? It is the devaluation of money over time. So no one’s going to tell you that, honestly. I’m going to tell you that’s it. They are counting on, say, $100 trillion debt, let’s just make it up. Being worth less than $100 trillion dollars by the time you pay it off.

The very same reason why your $7 in 1965 is worth more than $7 now. They’re saying, “Look, this is where the growth in the economy is to our advantage. We will age out the debt.” The problem is you can get yourself in a situation in which it simply isn’t rational to think you can age your way out of the debt, not when you continue radically to expand the spending.

Michael Solon writing at the Wall Street Journal gets right to the point. He says, “The big expansion of health benefits to a family of four with incomes over $124,800 wasn’t in Obamacare, but a post-pandemic BidenCare add-on.” So let’s just go back to that again, these could be our friends and neighbors, they could be people in our church that we’re sharing a pew with, a family of four with incomes over $124,800. They weren’t supposed to be covered by a subsidy in Obamacare at all, but they have been since the pandemic, and they’ve adjusted to that.

And now if they have to buy their insurance and their insurance is going to be even measurably more than it was when the subsidy kicked in, well, that’s going to be a problem for them. And obviously we care for them. This is what the ever-expanding state counts on. So bringing this to a close, let’s just be honest about what’s at stake here. Let’s understand that this is a very real political dynamic and you already have a lot of Republicans who are beginning to say, “We are going to negotiate on this.”

Even the White House, even President Trump, who, by the way, is all for cutting spending except when he is not, even the White House is sending the signal, “This is negotiable. Just pass the continuing resolution and then we’ll negotiate.” The Democrats are saying, “No, we want the negotiation right now,” and they see it to their advantage to press that case. The fact is, we have no idea right now how this is going to end, when it’s going to end or who is going to cave to whom. But the reality is you just have a few more days of delayed flights and other issues and you’re going to discover that a lot of Americans who said, “Let’s just wait this thing out, they’re not going to be willing to wait it out any longer.”

Part III

There’s a New Editor in Chief at CBS: Bari Weiss, Great Enemy of Woke, Takes Over Important Role at CBS

Okay, next in world view terms, just really big story in the mainstream media, and this has to do with Bari Weiss, who was the founder of The Free Press, a columnist for the New York Times, who left noisily and colorfully left, basically decrying the mainstream media, and in particular, the woke bias at a newspaper like the New York Times. She went and started a newsletter and then she co-founded The Free Press with Nellie Bowles. More about that in just a moment.

And they have now basically sold The Free Press to Paramount, which owns CBS. And Bari Weiss, critic of the mainstream media, great enemy of woke, is now going to be the editor in chief of CBS News. This is really a big story, and frankly it’s a little more complicated than a lot of conservatives think, but nonetheless, this really is a big story. We’re talking about CBS News, we’re talking about the legacy news network that included Dan Rather. Dan Rather, was a symbol of the ideological leftism of the mainstream media over the course of the last several decades.

And by the way, somewhere on the internet, Dan Rather is still going at it, we’re told. But nevertheless, the big story here is that CBS itself radically diminished, like the other legacy television broadcast networks and where they were just a matter of decades ago when they were all there were when it came to news and entertainment, the mainstream television networks have a much diminished audience, ABC, NBC. But at the top of the heap, the very peak of the pyramid, CBS News, the Tiffany Network, as it was known, prestigious beyond prestige.

But CBS has also, not just with Dan Rather, but with many others, it’s been very unpopular with conservatives because it really has leaned left. And that’s across many of its programs, including not only the evening news program, but specials and 60 Minutes, which has been its long-standing, used to be called Television Magazine. But the big news is that CBS was basically acquired by Paramount, and Paramount is headed by David Ellison, that is the son of a financier and Silicon Valley figure, Larry Ellison.

And under David Ellison, the network is going to be taking a different direction. What kind of different direction? Well, time will tell, but hiring Bari Weiss, the great enemy of woke, has to be a very significant thing, and especially for conservative Christians looking at this, this means that the territory of broadcast news at CBS could really change. And something is going on here. I can detect differences even at a very liberal institution like the Washington Post where there clearly is a change of some sort.

I’m not saying it’s becoming a conservative paper, I don’t think there’s much risk of that, but it is less woke than it was a year ago, for sure. And that’s under Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is the publisher, and owner of the Washington Post. Ownership comes with consequences. David Ellison with his father’s wealth now being in control of Paramount and thus of CBS and being able to hire Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, that’s a new thing, and we’ll see.

But there’s something else going on here, and that is that even those with this kind of money and with this kind of power recognizing, regardless of their own political inclinations, that the mood in the country is going anti-woke. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s everyone going anti-woke, the woke are quite woke. But what’s disappearing, are people willing just to go along with woke. I think they’re seeing through it. The second thing is there are a lot of conservatives out there. As some of the most immediate respondents to the news about Bari Weiss, and The Free Press going to CBS and all the rest, and Paramount, one of the first responses is, “Well, more than half of the country in terms of the electorate voted for Donald Trump as president.”

And you wouldn’t know that in any of the legacy media, but now CBS, maybe it’s at least smelled the coffee to that extent. Now, will conservatives go to CBS News? Well, I think the bigger question is will anyone go to CBS News, simply because the broadcast news networks have been so significantly displaced? These days, even the cable news networks are not really cutting edge. That’s not where young people are increasingly going. But you know what? They are where very stable, predictable voters go.

So it is going to be very interesting. Bari Weiss herself is a very interesting person, clearly ideologically courageous, clearly anti-woke. When she left the New York Times, boy, she left with lots of smoke and lots of fire. She made very clear she wasn’t willing to work in a context that was so aggressively pervasively, reflexively woke, and it was a good wake-up for conservatives in the United States to have an insider like Bari Weiss say it is just lost, it’s gone. 

But no one really would’ve predicted then that Bari Weiss might show up within less than half a decade as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, this is one of those Rip Van Winkle things where if you went to sleep just a couple of years ago and woke up, you wouldn’t believe a headline like this. But it does make sense in 2025, and you’ll have a lot of conservatives who are saying this is a great conservative victory. Is it? 

Okay. Well, let’s put it this way. It cannot be bad for conservatives that someone with this kind of anti-woke mentality is going to be editor-in-chief of CBS News. But here’s where Christian conservatives need to think very carefully. Anti-woke is necessary. It is not sufficient. Anti-woke can include persons who are not genuinely conservative. Bari Weiss, as I said, was the co-founder of The Free Press along with Nellie Bowles, another woman to whom she is married. Now, that’s hardly shocking in terms of the elites, the cultural elites, but let’s just keep in mind that as Christians, we have fundamental commitments that also lead to a basic worldview commitment, that the recovery of a worldview that’s anti-woke is not enough.

But you know what? We find ourselves in a situation in which we do know that Bari Weiss, going as editor-in-chief of CBS News, is good news. It is just not, let’s just say, the answer we’ve been waiting for. There has to be more to it than this. I think it’s also fair to say that it’s going to be fun to watch what happens at CBS News. I think there are some who thought they bought Bari Weiss, the brand. I think what they’re going to end up with is Bari Weiss, the thinker. She’s very fast, very incisive, and one thing you can count on is that she will say what she thinks and she doesn’t think woke.

Part IV

A Parable of Islam’s Rise in Great Britain: ‘Yahya’ Makes the Biggest Jump in Popularity Amongst Boys’ Names in Great Britain in 2024

Finally, for today, a very ominous story about boys’ names in the United Kingdom in the year 2024. Dominic Green writing at the Washington Examiner says, when you look at the list of boys’ names by popularity, the big story is the fact that the name that jumped highest on the list by the greatest degree is the name Yahya. It’s spelled Y-A-H-Y-A. It made the greatest increase in terms of boy names in Great Britain in 2024. Why should you be troubled? Well, as Dominic Green writes, “There is or was only one world-famous Yahya, the late Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar. His name surged in the year bookended by Hamas’s rampage of murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping on October 7th, 2023, and his demise in the rubble of Rafah on October 16th, 2024.”

Okay, so you have a significant number of parents, obviously, Islamic Muslim parents in the United Kingdom, who have decided in honor of this horrifying terrorist to name their boys his name. No other famous Yahya known on the planet. It’s that Yahya. And the situation is that bad. The picture is that dark. Dominic Green goes on to write, “There are 583 little Brits whose parents thought it was a grand idea to name their newborn sons after one of the most evil men of our times. These infants are a living tribute to the mass murderer who offered his own people, the Arabs of Gaza, in mass sacrifice as a down payment on a caliphate. [That’s Islamic rule] They are a political tribute to Hamas, the killers who violate every precept of law and decency and train children as soldiers.”

Dominic Green goes on to say, “We could ask what kind of person names a baby after a monster such as Sinwar, but we already know. Britain has a serious Islamist problem, so serious that the government fears naming it.” Okay, now, that is a really big issue, and this is where you see a real problem in Western governments. The problem is so bad they won’t talk about it, they won’t acknowledge it, and you can already see that that point has been reached in Great Britain. And that is a very ominous sign, a society that has the biggest increase in boys’ names for a mass murderer as a terrorist leader of Hamas, that is a nation that has a huge, huge, huge problem.

And the fact that its political leaders, its political class will not even acknowledge or talk about it, is an indication of how big a problem it is. Okay, and now shifting gears, there was a number two. The number two name was Vinnie, the jump in terms of popularity in 2024. And this is where Dominic Green says, “Not the French-sounding, and therefore effete-sounding, Vincent, just Vinnie.” He then continues, “Just as there is only one Winston, there’s only one Vinnie.” He is Vinnie Jones, a hooligan soccer player, notorious for impeding and opposing player’s progress by grabbing his parts. “Jones is also famous for portraying onscreen gangsters and other cutters of legal coroners.” 

Dominic Green then just asked the good question, “What’s in a name?” He says, “In the case of these two names, for Britain, a world of trouble.” I also want to give it to Dominic Green for making that statement that what is seen in “this is a world of trouble.” And then he raises the issue, “How would Britain get out of it?” And with a very clever twist, he says, “That might require more than a Winston.” And you know who he’s talking about there.

And just when you think this situation can’t be worse, consider the fact that the most popular name for boys of all in 2024 was Mohammed. Once again, we have a problem. Our names do tell a lot about us, and in this case, it tells us something very troubling about the United Kingdom. But I think we know that similar things are afoot on both sides of the Atlantic, not to the same degree. But I would say to the same degree of concern, worldview matters. Names reflect worldview, sometimes horrifyingly so.