Category Archives: Libertarian

Fox Business is shutting down Kennedy, the nightly program hosted by Lisa Kennedy Montgomery in the 7 p.m. time slot, and replacing it with reruns of Larry Kudlows namesake show.

Kennedy will air for the last time on Thursday. The show had a seven-month hiatus in 2020, with the network citing the demands of the evolving pandemic crisis coverage at the time.

Montgomery, a host since 2015, will remain with Fox, a spokesperson confirmed to TheWrap. The political libertarian has a background in pop culture that includes experience as an MTV VJ, is a frequent panelist on Fox News Outnumbered and guests on The Five, and also has a podcast, Kennedy Saves the World. She is currently on a comedy tour with Jimmy Failla of Fox News Radio.

Maria Bartiromos Wall Street fills the time slot on Fridays, which will also see Barrons Roundtable replace Wall Street Journal at Large with Gerry Baker, in the 7:30 p.m. slot, Broadcasting & Cable reported. Barrons Roundtable currently airs Saturdays at 10 a.m. Baker will continue to contribute to Fox News Media, the report said.

Kudlow, who served an economic policy advisor and director of the National Economic Council under President Donald Trump, joined the network in 2021 after his White House stint.

Infamously, Kudlow was caught in his debut show on a hot mic saying bulls multiple times while a clip of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris aired, leading to an on-air apology.

He previously was a senior contributor for CNBC, which he joined at its founding in 1989, and a host of The Larry Kudlow Show. He also hosted a talk radio show on politics and economics on WABC.

Prior to his media career, Kudlow worked in various capacities in politics, first as a Democrat and later switching parties. He worked in the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.

Also Read: James Van Der Beek Becomes Fox News Favorite Actor After Anti-Biden Rant (Video)

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Fox Business Shuts Down Kennedy, Will Replace With Kudlow Reruns - Yahoo Entertainment

Religious freedom is a staple of the American experiment. How religious freedom is practiced is another story. While many Christians, since the Moral Majority movement under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, have attempted to push Christian values into schools and the local and national laws, the aftermath has been a reversal of the desired outcome. Gay marriage is legal nationally. Marijuana is legal in many states. Singleness among young people is up. The country has moved less toward the right-wing Christian platform and more toward a liberal libertarian stance. People want to live their lives, and people want their neighbors to live their lives, too. In fact, despite the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, Gallups 2022 poll stated that eight out of 10 Americans want abortion legal in some capacity. Yet, this still doesnt mean the right-wing politicians have changed their offense in the arena of religious discourse. With Texas leading the charge in framing the 2024 platform, expect the GOP to out Christian each other, as it is the 11th commandment in GOP politics.

In late May, Republicans in Texas attempted to pass a bill that would require the Ten Commandments to hang in every classroom. CNN reported, Senate Bill 1515 was effectively killed early Wednesday morning after House lawmakers did not meet a midnight deadline for a vote that would have advanced the bill for a third and final passage. [A bill that would have required Texas public schools to display the Ten Commandments has failed, Ashley Killough and Tina Burnside, May 24, 2023.]

While this might be heartbreaking to many God-fearing citizens, the fact that it didnt pass in the end has a conspiracy cloud hovering over it. How could it get so far but not pass? Unless the bill was Republican virtue signaling to begin with.

CNN described the heart of the bill: The bill, authored by Republican state Sen. Phil King, requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed in a conspicuous place in each classroom in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.

While some might state this as a simple loss, I cannot help but wonder if the Ten Commandments debate was simply a way for Texas politicians to throw breadcrumbs to their constituents. Because while Im sure there are many authentic Christian men and women within the Texas Republican Senate, can anyone argue that Republicans are the party of religious values?

The Ten Commandments argue to have no god before the Jewish/Christian one, to not covet your neighbors wife or goods, to not steal, to not lie, etc. Is that really the face of Donald Trumps MAGA party? Are Gods commandments, passed on by Moses, really the values of capitalism and die-hard patriotism? One could argue the current GOP value system puts country before God like an idol. Heck, there was a literal golden statue of Trump at CPAC 2021. And for those who havent read their Old Testament lately, the Jewish people built a golden calf while Moses was being instructed by God on how the law should be lived out. Though I would argue Trump is more of a golden donkey.

This battle for the Ten Commandments in schools is an old one. I remember this fight in the 1990s when I was in school. So why bring it up again? Because the GOP has cloaked their awful anti-people policies in religious language for 40 years now. Youd think these Christians would step back from the Torah and look to Jesus words in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:11-12) to embrace mourning, mercy, meekness, purity, peace, persecution and the poor in spirit.

Just one problem. Those ideals dont fit in a party that fights against any that disagrees with them. But if the Texas lawmakers throw out an old battle and let it quietly go away, they can get their day in the papers but not actually have to abide by any of the commandments they want in plain sight. Are you really telling me they just let the vote slip past midnight after three previous votes? Smells about as fishy as the little boys sardine lunch Jesus used to feed 5,000 people.

As the 2024 election comes closer, expect more stunts like this. Just as President Joe Biden promised student loan forgiveness he knew would never pass as quickly as he attempted, each side throws out something to look like they care. Its the 11th commandment in politics: Thou shalt virtue signal to look like thy cares.

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The 11th commandment | News | vcreporter.com - Ventura County Reporter

In 2001, the libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist gave a memorable interview on NPR about his intentions. He said, I dont want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Everything about the line was designed to provoke: the selection of a bookish and easily horrified audience, the unapologetic violence of drag and drown, the porcelain specificity of bathtub.

As propaganda, it worked magnificently. When I arrived in Washington, two years later, as a novice political reporter, the image still reverberated; to many it seemed a helpfully blunt depiction of what conservatives in power must really want. Republicans were preparing to privatize Social Security andMedicare, the President had campaigned on expanding school choice, and, everywhere you looked, public services were being reimagined as for-profit ones. Norquist himselfan intense, gleeful, ideologicalfigure with the requisite libertarian beardhad managed to get more than two hundred members of Congress to sign a pledge never to raise taxes, for any reason at all. The Republicans of the George W. Bush era were generally smooth operators, having moved from a boom-time economy to the seat of an empire, confident, at every step, that they had the support of a popular majority. Their broader vision could be a little tricky for reporters to decode. Maybe Norquist was the one guy among them too weird to keep the plans for the revolution a secret.

But, as the Bush Administration unfolded, it became harder to see the Republicans as true believers. Government just didnt seem to be shrinking. On the contrary, all around us in Washingtonin the majestic agency buildings along the Mall and in the rooftop bars crowded with management consultants flown in to aid in outsourcing, and especially in the vast, mirrored, gated complexes along the highway to Dulles, from which the war on terror was being cordinated and suppliedthe government was very obviously growing.

However much the Republicans had wanted to downsize government, they turned out to want other things morelike operating an overseas empire and maintaining a winning political coalition. Bushs proposal for privatizing Medicare was watered down until, in 2003, it became an expensive drug benefit for seniors, evidently meant to help him win relection. After beating John Kerry, in 2004, Bush announced that Social Security reform would be one of his Administrations top priorities (Ive earned capital in this election, and Im going to spend it), but within just a few months that plan had run aground, too. House Republicans saw how terribly the policy was polling and lost their nerve. Meanwhile, more drones and private military contractors and Meals Ready-to-Eat flowed to Iraq and Afghanistan and points beyond. New programs offset cuts to old ones. Norquist was going to need a bigger bathtub.

Self-identified libertarians have always been tiny in numbera handful of economists, political activists, technologists, and true believers. But, in the decades after Ronald Reagan was elected President, they came to exert enormous political influence, in part because their prescription of prosperity through deregulation appeared to be working, and in part because they provided conservatism with a long-term agenda and a vision of a better future. To the usual right-wing mixture of social traditionalism and hierarchical nationalism, the libertarians had added an especially American sort of optimism: if the government would only step back and allow the market to organize society, we would truly flourish. When Bill Clinton pronounced the era of big government over, in his 1996 State of the Union address, it operated as an ideological concession: Democrats would not aggressively defend the welfare state; they would accept that an era of small government had already begun. It almost seemedas in the famous bathtub drowning scene in the movie Les Diaboliquesas if the Democrats and the Republicans had joined together in an effort to dispatch a shared problem.

Had you written a history of the libertarian movement fifteen years ago, it would have been a tale of improbable success. A small cadre of intellectually intense oddballs who inhabited a Manhattanish atmosphere of late-night living-room debates and barbed book reviews had somehow managed to impose their beliefs on a political party, then the country. A sympathetic historian might have emphasized the mass appeal of the ideals of free minds and free markets (as the libertarian writer Brian Doherty did in his comprehensive, still definitive work Radicals for Capitalism, published in 2007), and a skeptical one might have focussed on the convenient way that the ideology advanced the business interests of billionaire backers such as the Koch brothers. But the story would have concerned a thriving idea.

The situation is no longer so simple. At first, the Republican backlash against Bushs heresies (the expensive prescription-drug benefit, the lack of progress against the national debt) cohered into the Tea Party andonce the G.O.P. establishment made its peace with the movementinto Paul Ryans stint as Speaker, with its scolding fixation on debt reduction. But that period scarcely outlasted Ryans Speakership. It was brought to an end by Barack Obamas crafty (and somewhat under-celebrated) relection campaign, in 2012, in which he effectively cast Romney-Ryan libertarianism as a stalking horse for plutocracy, rather than a leg up for small business, as Republicans claimed.

Doctrinal libertarianism hasnt disappeared from the political scene: its easy enough to find right-of-center politicians insisting that government is too big. But, between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, libertarianism has given way to culture war as the rights dominant mode. To some libertariansand liberals friendly to the causethis is a development to lament, because it has stripped the American right of much of its idealism. Documenting the history of the libertarian movement now requires writing in the shadow of Trump, as two new books do. Together, they suggest that, since the end of the Cold War, libertarianism has remade American politics twicefirst through its success and then through its failure.

In The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (Princeton), Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi argue that things didnt have to turn out this way. Zwolinski, a philosopher at the University of San Diego, and Tomasi, a political theorist at Brown, are both committed libertarians who are appalled at the movements turn toward a harder-edged conservatism. (They are prominent figures in a faction called bleeding-heart libertarianism.) Their book is a deep plunge into the archives, in search of a primordial libertarianism that preceded the Cold War. They contend that the profound skepticism toward government and the political absolutism that characterize libertarians have animated movements across the political spectrum, and have, in the past, sometimes led adherents in progressive directions rather than conservative ones. (In the call to defund the police, for instance, the authors identify a healthy skepticism of too much centralized government.) As they see it, libertarianism once had a left-of-center valenceand could still reclaimit.

If this sounds a little optimistic, it does make for an interesting historical account. The first thinker to self-identify as libertarian, the authors point out, was the French anarcho-communist Joseph Djacque, who argued that private property and the state were simply two different ways in which social relationships could become infused with hierarchy and repression. Better to abolish both. The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer denounced imperialisms deeds of blood and rapine; the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner condemned slavery as an instance of the governments usurping natural rights. In the history of resistance to the modern state, Zwolinski and Tomasi see libertarians everywhere. This approach can sometimes come off as a land grab; my eyebrows went up when they claimed the abolitionist John Brown as a libertarian hero. Then again, Brown was a fiercely anti-government radical who sought to seize a federal armory to provision slaves for an uprising, so maybe its not much of a stretch.

All this genealogy can seem a little notional, but certain suggestive rhythms recur: Zwolinski and Tomasi show how many thinkers return to personal liberty and the right to private property as bedrocks. That isnt only an American grammarit comes from Locke and Mill, and, as The Individualists stresses, from some French sources, toobut its the one in which the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are written. Why do so many Americans own guns? Probably in part because gun ownership is protected in the Constitution. Such choices by the Founders dont make America a libertarian country, but they do insure that libertarians will be around for as long as the Constitution is.

Zwolinski and Tomasi emphasize the contingencies in libertarianisms history, but the most consequential contingency was the Cold War, which closely followed the publication, in 1944, of a core libertarian text, Friedrich Hayeks The Road to Serfdom. An austere Austrian economist who taught at the London School of Economics, Hayek had become alarmed that so many left-of-center English thinkers were convinced that economic central planning ought to outlast the Second World War, becoming a permanent feature of government. Back in Vienna, Hayek and his mentors had studied central planning, and he believed that the English were being hopelessly nave. His economic insight was that, when it came to information, no government planner, no matter how many studies he commissioned, could hope to match the markets efficiency in determining what people wanted. How much bread was needed, how many tires? Best to let the market work it out. The price system, Hayek wrote, enables entrepreneurs, by watching the movement of comparatively few prices, as an engineer watches the hands of a few dials, to adjust their activities to those of their fellows. He coupled this insight with a warning: Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.

The Road to Serfdom, a text that relied on Austro-Hungarian historical experience to make a point about wartime English policy, was initially rejected by American publishers. But once it saw print, and won a rave in the Times, Hayek became a phenomenon. Anxious and unprepared, he was pushed by his publisher onto the stage at Town Hall, in New York City, to address an eager audience of American industrialists who were sick to death of Roosevelt. An abridged version was published by the Readers Digest in the spring of 1945, and was then made available as a five-cent reprint through the Book-of-the-Month Club, which distributed more than half a million copies.

And heres what one of the worlds greatest songs sounds like when I sing it.

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Hayeks work more or less invented libertarianism in twentieth-century America. As the Cold War wore on, his warnings about the perils of central planning gained urgency. Small libertarian think tanks, newspapers, and philanthropies appeared across the country through the nineteen-fifties.

Hayeks mentor, Ludwig von Mises, arrived in America and began teaching a seminar in Austrian economics, at N.Y.U., underwritten by a businessmans fund. The movement was insular, fractious, New Yorkish. On West Eighty-eighth Street, a late-night salon convened in the apartment of Murray Rothbard, a student of von Misess who had become the chief propagandist of libertarianisms extreme wing. (Robert Nozick, who became libertarianisms most important philosopher, dropped by.) In Murray Hill, Ayn Rand held post-midnight sessions with her own circle, which, at different times, included Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, who would become a leading domestic-policy adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Even to ideological allies, the Rand circlein which everyone seemed to be in psychotherapy with the novelists lover, Nathaniel Brandenappeared to be a cult. What if, as so often happens, one didnt like, even couldnt stand, these people? Rothbard asked.

Libertarian thinkers, on the page, tend to be prickly, disputatious, and drawn to absolutes, which is why they make for good copy. Those traits were deepened by an isolation from real power; they lorded over some small-circulation journals and a couple of budding think tanks, but that was basically it. Von Mises, among the crankiest of the originals, was once summoned to a small conference in Switzerland with a handful of libertarian grandeesthe few other people on earth who actually agreed with himand stormed out because they didnt agree with him enough. Youre all a bunch of socialists, he said. When Milton Friedman, the most urbane of the libertarian greats, published a pamphlet, in 1946, denouncing rent control, Rand fumed that he didnt go far enough: Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners.

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The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism - The New Yorker

Hard-right lawmakers who have for years resisted increasing the nations borrowing limit did not mince words about how they thought Speaker Kevin McCarthy fared during negotiations with President Biden over averting a federal default.

Nobody could have done a worse job, said Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina, who said he was fed up with what he said were Mr. McCarthys lies about the deal he was going to get.

Representative Bob Good of Virginia openly marveled at how our own leadership caved to Democrats on major tenets of the debt limit bill that Republicans passed last month. Representative Chip Roy of Texas claimed the deal had torn the conference asunder and promised Republican leaders would face a reckoning.

But for all the fury about the deal by far the biggest test of Mr. McCarthys leadership since he became speaker in January few far-right Republicans have yet to seriously entertain the notion of ousting him over it.

A movement to depose Mr. McCarthy as speaker could still bubble up, particularly if he is forced to rely on Democrats to win a procedural vote to get the debt-limit deal to the floor or to lean more on Democratic votes than Republicans to pass the measure. So far, though, there has been little appetite for such a move among even the most conservative lawmakers in his conference.

Mr. McCarthy negotiated the compromise with that threat in mind, attempting to strike a careful balance: he could and likely would lose conservatives votes, but could not afford to reach a deal that so infuriated the far right that they would move to oust him. When asked on Tuesday by reporters if he was worried about whether the hard-right flank of his conference would try to remove him, Mr. McCarthy replied: No.

Under the rules House Republicans adopted at the beginning of the year that helped Mr. McCarthy become speaker, any single lawmaker could call for a snap vote to remove him from that role, something that would take a majority of the House.

One hard-right Republican so far Mr. Bishop has publicly said that he considered the debt and spending deal grounds for ousting Mr. McCarthy from his post.

Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said on NBCs Meet the Press Now that he had discussed the issue with the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania. Lets get through this battle and decide if we want another battle, Mr. Buck said was the response.

And in what has become a hallmark of his leadership style, Mr. McCarthy has rallied the support of an influential conservative whose opposition to the deal could have doomed the bill: Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, an influential libertarian who sits on the powerful Rules Committee.

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Can McCarthy Pass the Debt Deal and Keep His Job? - The New York Times

The debt limit deal negotiated by President Biden and Speaker McCarthy has cleared its first hurdle as Congress prepares to vote on the measure before the June 5 default date.

The House Rules Committee advanced the legislation to the House floor in a vote late Tuesday evening. All four Democrats and two Republicans voted against the measure, with seven other Republicans voting in the affirmative.

The two GOP dissenters Congressmen Chip Roy and Ralph Norman have called the legislation not a good deal with no substantive policy reforms and insanity respectively.

Congressman Thomas Massie a libertarian who often votes against key spending priorities of Congressional leadership kept his cards close to his chest as the hearing kicked off, but eventually offered his blessing to the legislation.

Im reluctant to disclose how I might vote on this rule at this moment because then all the cameras leave, Mr. Massie said, which elicited a laugh from the crowd.

Mr. Massie did support advancing the bill to the House floor so that every member could express their opinions on the legislation, though he himself did not commit to voting for the bill on final passage.

If we want to control the overall amount of spending and if there are policies or things that we dont see happening that need to happen, or things that shouldnt be happening in the administrative branch, then that is our opportunity, to cut spending Mr. Massie said of budget negotiations that will happen later this year. I dont like the process that led to this bill, Im not going to lie.

Mr. Massies equivocation is a reminder that Mr. McCarthy will likely have to rely on Democrats on the House floor if he hopes to pass the bill. A center-left caucus in the House, the New Democrat Coalition, publicly endorsed the bill Monday, buoying hopes that Mr. McCarthy can count on a substantial number of Democrats.

Messrs. Biden and McCarthy have achieved a bipartisan agreement that will save our country from default until 2025 and protect our nation from economic collapse, the group said in a statement. There are 94 members of the New Democrat Coalition serving in the House.

So far, there are dozens of Republicans who have denounced the legislation. The conservative Freedom Caucus has said they are trying to have less than half of the House Republican conference vote for the final measure.

That a deal had been reached in principle was announced by Messrs. Biden and McCarthy late Saturday evening. The Fiscal Responsibility Act, as it is known, is 99 pages long and includes a number of modest changes to federal spending and regulations.

The two men agreed that the debt limit must be pushed high enough so that this level of brinksmanship does not occur in the shadow of the 2024 elections. The bill will raise the debt limit by more than $2 trillion pushing the next debt limit fight to January 2025 at the current pace of spending.

The only two spending areas to see year-over-year increases are the Pentagon and veterans services. All other discretionary spending from healthcare, education and research to green energy investments will be capped at a level that will result in hundreds of billions of dollars in savings over the next six years.

Mr. McCarthys team also won a victory by slashing the budget of the Internal Revenue Service. In total, more than $20 billion will be cut from the agency responsible for collecting taxes a 25 percent cut to its total budget.

Republicans took aim at the IRS early in this Congress, passing a bill that would rescind funding for the more than 80,000 new IRS agents who were hired as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act last year.

The Biden administration agrees with the conservative House members that the deal does not represent a significant change in federal spending. Its flat, one White House source told NBC News of the deal. Its a difference of about $1 billion. In a divided government, were not going to get the spending levels Democrats want.

Appeasing his right flank is a key priority for Mr. McCarthy. Congressman Eli Crane a Freedom Caucus member who believed the original Republican debt limit proposal did not go far enough told CNN that he has had conversations with some of his Freedom Caucus colleagues about calling for a vote of no confidence in the speaker, which could lead to another seemingly endless voting process to either retain Mr. McCarthy or choose a new leader.

It does come up from time to time, Mr. Crane said of the possibility of removing Mr. McCarthy. We look at all of the alternatives and contingency plans that could play out over the next two years.

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McCarthy-Biden Debt Limit Deal Clears First Hurdle in Key House ... - The New York Sun

Ubet, WIWell be ready to give voters the best options in 2024, said the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin (LPWI) Press Office, following the state party convention in Milwaukee on Saturday, April 15th. Voters absolutely want a change from the bipartisan dysfunction currently in control of their government. To all Wisconsin citizens, we say, Lets go! Follow us!

Electing its new Executive Committee, under a new chair, Stephen Ecker of Iola, WI, the LPWI convention also passed several important resolutions. One resolution denounced attempts by any governmental body to stop, control, censor or punish public access to the freedom of information, to information platforms, or the natural right to free speech, if such information and speech does NOT harm anyone or steal from them.

The Free Speech Resolution responded to pending legislation in the US Congress, called the RESTRICT Act, that would allow government control or banning of any online platform or content deemed, in loosely defined protocols determined solely by the government, as dangerous. Notably written in regards to the Chinese-owned media app TikTok, the legislation has earned the nickname of the PATRIOT Act 2.0, referring to the governments covert surveillance and enforcement laws following the 9/11/01 terrorist acts.

Also at the LPWI convention, member Phil Anderson announced his Wisconsin campaign for the United States Senate in 2024. Anderson, a resident of Middleton, WI, said he believes that Libertarians need to keep ramming at the gates of the monopoly politics which controls the government. Noting his theme of Disrupt the Corruption, Anderson vowed to run a vigorous, funded effort, and will seek the party endorsement at its next annual convention in one years time.

For more on the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin, please visitwww.lpwi.org.

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Libertarian Party of Wisconsin: Libertarians to voters: Let's go ... - WisPolitics.com

This time three years ago, things were a bit different. The streets were quieter, our kitchens were filled with homemade baked goods, and for a reason not yet identified, toilet paper was nowhere to be found.

With lockdowns and masks being mandated by the government due to COVID-19, some groups more than others felt their rights infringed.

For example, libertarians. These are people with a political philosophy that emphasizes individual freedom and limited government involvement in economic and social affairs.

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This week on the Maxed Out podcast, host Max Fawcett gets into the pandemic and the issues that shaped our collective response to it. His guest is an education consultant and the co-founder of the Institute of Liberal Studies, Janet Bufton.

As you might have guessed, Max isnt a fan of libertarianism.

The libertarians in our midst are using [the pandemic] as an opportunity to resist being told what to do, which is kind of how I've always seen libertarianism. It's an ideology that is kind of elegant cover for saying, You can't make me do what I don't want to do, said Max.

But Bufton presents a case for libertarians with community spirit.

There's another kind of libertarian, and that is where I'd put myself, said Bufton. I believe that ordinary people living under the right institutions and rules can do really, really extraordinary things.

Want to relive some of the worst moments from the last few years while learning about a political stance that possibly enabled them? Listen to Episode 12, The Politics of Pandemics, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite listening app.

Maxed Out is made possible by listeners like you. If youve supported the podcast already, thank you. If you havent, click here to donate what you can to help us keep producing valuable journalism.

Got questions or comments? Email us at [emailprotected].

You can also follow us on Twitter @NatObserver.

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How the pandemic challenged libertarianism | Canada's National ... - Canada's National Observer

Transportation leaders have complained for years that the states highway system is woefully underfunded

Traffic on South Camino del Rio at 5 p.m. April 20, 2018, in Durango. The Colorado Department of Transportation hopes to eventually expand U.S. Highway 160 from Durango to Bayfield as well as U.S. Highway 550 from Durango to the New Mexico line. (Jerry McBride/Durango Herald file)

Colorado does not fare well in the Reason Foundations most recent ranking of each states highway system.

The libertarian think tank measures cost-effectiveness, pavement conditions, safety record and other metrics. Colorado fell from 37th to 43rd overall in this years report.

Colorado ranks 47th for rural interstate pavement condition and 40th in urban interstate pavement condition. Its rankings for pavement conditions on rural and urban arterial roads is better, but still middling: 26th and 31st, respectively. Its fatality rates and traffic congestion rates are in the 20s and 30s.

Theres nothing Colorado does extremely well, said Baruch Feigenbaum, Reasons senior managing director of transportation policy.

Colorados transportation leaders complained for years that the states highway system was woefully underfunded. In 2021, the Colorado Legislature approved a massive bill that will raise billions of dollars for transportation in the state.

Thanks to this sustained state funding in infrastructure, we are addressing critical stretches of interstate that need upgrades this year, with more to come in the next several construction seasons, Colorado Department of Transportation spokesman Matt Inzeo wrote in an email.

That new money and the projects it funds arent reflected in this report, which relies on data from 2020. That was the most recent data available, Feigenbaum said.

If theyre doing what they say theyre doing and spending those resources on pavement quality, I would expect that in future reports were going to see some better numbers, he said.

But the report also faults Colorado for the relatively high amount of money it spends on maintenance when compared to the number of lane-miles addressed, suggesting it should be getting more for its money.

Theres a lot of room for improvement, Feigenbaum said.

Colorados topography and climate both contribute to significant maintenance needs, Inzeo said. The agency, for example, will spend an extra $45 million this year on snow removal and road repairs after a particularly brutal winter. (And, Inzeo added, another big storm is coming later this week.)

CDOT's mission is to operate the state's transportation system to ensure every traveler can get where they are going safely, and we will maintain our system to meet that mission, he wrote in an email.

To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit http://www.cpr.org.

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Colorado falls to 43rd in national highway ranking - The Durango Herald

Sarah Dajani 26

Staff Writer

Formal organizations is a peculiar name for a unique minor that is offered at Trinity. What does it study and what makes it so unique? Trinitys website states that formal organizations is the arrangement of people into a social unit for the explicit purpose of achieving certain goals. The minor aims to explore and analyze the organizations in which people learn, work, socialize, and serve their communities. The formal organizations minor at Trinity is fully funded by the Shelby Cullom Davis Endowment and was directed by Professor Gerald Gunderson from 1982-2020. One of the qualities that make it unique is that it is totally independent from the colleges administration and other departments, as Gunderson himself stated in an Association for Private Enterprise Education Conference in 2016. He proudly stated that hisdonor insisted on not being a member of the Economics department. But why would Shelby Cullom Davis invest in Trinity yet ensure that his endowment remains separate from the College?

Higher education has been an integral part in shaping American ideals and public opinion. Actions like the formation of the National Americanization Committee in 1915, which aimed to bring American citizens, foreign-born and native-born alike, together, highlight the significance of higher education in the making of American society. So if you were to alter the countrys ethos, higher education is the place to start. Doing this, however, requires an effective strategy that is able to maneuver the norms around academic freedom, peer review and faculty governance. This piece examines the Shelby Davis Endowment as an attempt to enforce a single ideological view on Trinitys campus and is inspired by a rich literature that demonstrates the effort wealthy free-market fundamentalists place in higher education to construct a society in line with their ideological beliefs.

The Association for Private Enterprise Education is a self-described organization of teachers and scholars from colleges and universities, public policy institutes, and industry with a common interest in studying and supporting the system of private enterprise. In that same APEE conference in 2016, Gunderson shamelessly presented formal organizations at Trinity College as an example of successful models of programs in private enterprise. So, in the eyes of the plutocratic libertarian generous donor class, your education is their way of influencing American societies and imposing their libertarian fantasy. These attempts to privatize education and limit it to a single libertarian view defy what education is about and shatter its goals in the development of critical and rational thinking, and they are becoming increasingly popular throughout the campuses of the United States. Some of the wealthy donors at APEEs 2016 conference communicated an alarming vision of how they want education to look. Charlie Ruger of the Koch Foundationwhich is a part of a large network that funds the student groups that bring controversial speakers to college campuses, media outlets that amplify and inflame those controversies, and even careers for those controversial speakerscommunicated his desire to have college campuses apply these great ideas of the APEE network the way we think about it at least and to include arranging state legislative testimony to make sure that, you know, these kinds of ideas have a seat on the table in public policy.

The story of the Davis Endowment at Trinity is commemorated at APEE and other libertarian organizations because Gundersonthe Davis Endowed Chair for almost 40 yearslaunched, as he names it, a war at Trinity to get the full funds of the endowment and distribute them to other individuals and professors with his same ideology. Those individuals were, or ended up being, a part of the same libertarian donor network that aims to control and alter public opinion about free-market enterprise and eventually, enact laws that contribute to their increasingly growing wealth and power. So, why is this important and how does it affect you?

This donor integrated strategy aims to limit education and academia to what is seen fit to the donors political and ideological interests. It contributes to the increasing disparities of our world. The hostility and intolerance which guide this strategy send a message to everyone with different political and intellectual ideologies that they are unwelcome in this donor-privatized world. So, if you have different ideological beliefs to those networks you are, at best, unwelcome in their spaces and, much worse, attacked for your academic and scholarly criticism of their foundation.

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Are We Stuck In a Plutocratic Formal Organization? An Analysis of ... - Trincoll.edu

Fox News shook the very foundations of the Earth on Monday when the conservative cable giant announced that its top talent, Tucker Carlson, was finished.

"FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," said the network in a statement. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor."

This is an unexpected development, to say the least. Carlson is the biggest star in conservative media. He's one of the most influential voices in Republican Party politics. And most importantly, he was Fox's most popular host, drawing in over 3 million viewers for his 8 p.m. show each night. A rational person might have expected the network to approach a theoretical Carlson exit with extreme trepidation.

And yet, Fox is giving every indication that the decision to part ways was sudden and dramatic. Last Friday's installment will serve as the final hour of Tucker Carlson Tonight; much like former host Bill O'Reilly, who was pushed out over sexual misconduct allegations, Carlson was not given the opportunity to produce a goodbye episode. As of Monday morning, Fox was still promoting a forthcoming interview between Carlson and GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. This certainly looks like an unanticipated end.

The departure comes, of course, in the immediate aftermath of Fox's settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, which obligated the network to pay $787 million to avoid a defamation trial. It wasn't immediately clear whether the two things are related; Carlson privately expressed doubts about the stolen election claims and eventually denounced Sidney Powell on air for failing to produce any evidence to support her wild theories. If Fox is punishing its hosts for how they covered President Donald Trump's election conspiracy theories, Carlson is not the obvious place to start.

The Los Angeles Times,however, reported that Rupert Murdochhead of the Fox empirepersonally made the call to fire Carlson, in part because of his dissatisfaction with Carlson's coverage of January 6. There is little doubt that this decision would have to come from the very top; The Washington Postcontends that private messages uncovered during the Dominion discovery processin which Carlson disparaged his bossesupset network executives.

Some media reporters have pointed to a different potential source of trouble: Fox faces a lawsuit from Abby Grossberg, a former booker for Carlson's show, who has alleged sexual harassment. Perhaps, given all of the above, Murdoch abruptly decided now was the time.

For Carlson, there's little doubt that he can remain extremely relevant in conservative media circles if he so chooses. He has received an outpouring of support since the news brokeRep. Thomas Massie (RKy.) described Carlson's exit as a "huge loss" for Foxas well as a wave of offers to collaborate: Glenn Beck invited him to joinThe Blaze,and Jeremy Boreing asked him to come toThe Daily Wire. Carlson has reinvented himself many times before, from his Crossfire days to a gig at MSNBC to launchingThe Daily Caller. (Disclaimer: I worked for Carlson atThe Daily Callerbefore joiningReasonin 2014; I have also appeared regularly on Fox News, including on Carlson's show.)

Assuming that Murdoch is the one who pulled the trigger, it would appear Fox is confident that, ultimately, they can replace Carlson. Undoubtedly, they have many other stars waiting in the wings; Greg Gutfeld, who hosts the late-night show Gutfeld!, has pulled in killer ratings as well, and Fox's 5 p.m. panel show The Five (which also includes Gutfeld) is a juggernaut that actually beat Carlson's numbers last year. Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, who host the prime-time shows before and after Carlson's, are both highly rated. When compared with its rivals at MSNBC and CNN, Fox's overall performance is absolutely dominating, and this will be the case even if Carlson is no longer in the mix.

Replacing his idiosyncratic perspective is another matter.

There are several Fox News personalities with libertarian sensibilities: Gutfeld, Kat Timpf, and of course, Fox Business host Lisa Kennedy, who regularly features Reasonwriters on her show. Once upon a time, Carlson had called himself a libertarianhe was formerly a senior fellow at the Cato Institutebut by the age of Trump, he had decisively turned against libertarians on a host of social and economic issues: immigration, trade, tech, and so on. It was only on foreign policy where viewers could see traces of his former libertarianism: He remained a vocal opponent of neoconservatism, agreed with President Joe Biden on pulling out of Afghanistan, and bucked the bipartisan consensus on unending U.S. military support for Ukraine. (He remained somewhat hawkish on China, however.)

Carlson's exit was not the only high-profile media departure on Monday: CNN let go of Don Lemon, a long-time personality, in a move that apparently surprised the morning show host while feeling inevitable to anyone covering his recent string of controversies.

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Why Is Tucker Carlson Leaving Fox News? - Reason