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Trumps’s government efficiency staff went through Peace Corps offices recently. Trump tried to dismantle the Peace Corps in his first term. And he has already “eliminate[d] key pillars of America's soft power,” including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Voice of America and attacked the depth of knowledge and experience at the State Department. Let me draw on my Peace Corps experience to explain why I think Trump’s attack on America’s international agencies is very dangerous.
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Mr. Trump has blinked on the China tariffs without any confirmation that China blinked before he did which it turns out was false, based upon China’s statements completely denying that any discussions were underway. Is a fake blink better or worse than a real one?
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Now it's your turn. Here are this week's highlights from the WAMC Listener Comment Line. -
The difference between dictatorship and democracy is us! Are we willing to obey the dictator? It’s easy to pin the blame for dictatorship on a Hitler or a Trump but everything depends on our willingness to obey.
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Americans love their caps. Even folks who aren’t big baseball fans wear caps that signal their fandom of one product or another, or of a particular team. We like you to know right upfront, as soon as you face us, who we are.
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The President continues his unprecedented blizzard of executive orders (now numbering at least 129). One of interest last week was an executive order designed to reduce the cost of care for seniors.
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China has decided to halt critical earth metal exports as the trade war intensifies. These critical raw materials include minerals and magnets which could have an adverse effect on automakers, aerospace manufacturers, semiconductor companies, military contractors and others around the world. This could be a real pressure point and create significant issues for the United States.
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Finally, something that Donald Trump and I agree on. An executive order the President signed April 9th — propitiously titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads” — reverses a Biden era regulation that conserved water by restricting the number of gallons per minute that can flow from showerheads and other appliances. -
In my oral radio commentary for Friday, April 18, I decided NOT to make any comments on the craziness of Trump’s on again off again tariff war with the rest of the world.
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Here are this week's highlights from the WAMC Listener Comment Line. -
The constant refrain of waste, fraud and abuse from Republicans and particularly from DOGE has been ongoing since at least 2009 with the emergence of the Tea Party. It is essentially nonsense.
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When I first started working on today’s commentary, I was planning on talking about torpedo shaped baseball bats, which is this relatively new phenomenon of moving the sweet spot of the bat a few inches inward that this year is taking the historically unchanging world of baseball bats by relative storm.
