FEDERAL JUDGE RECOMMENDS BUDDHISM TO TEXAS SOLONS OVER 10 COMMANDMENTS: U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery issued a preliminary injunction preventing Texas officials from implementing a new law requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public schools.

But don’t accuse Biery of being anti-religion! No, he won’t let the state display the laws God gave Moses on tablets of stone, but he’s just fine with three alternatives, including this one: “Multiple versions of lessons of behavior from many cultures melded into the American motto of ‘E pluribus unum,’ a concept currently in decline. For example, the Five Moral Precepts of Buddhism: Abstain from killing, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct, lying and intoxicants …”

Biery’s other two alternatives are worth perusing as well, which you can do here, via The Washington Stand.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN GETS THE MESSAGE: All it took for the fabled Madison-based center for left-wing campus activism to fold was a letter from the First Liberty Institute reminding University of Wisconsin officials that the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious freedom of practice and expression are not optional mandates. The letter is a superb presentation of both the law requiring religious accommodations and the rank hypocrisy of college administrators on the issue.

YOU UP FOR ‘GOBLINOID’ SHOES? The Washington Stand’s S.A. McCarthy clearly is not, nor is he for what he calls “hideous sneaker-dress shoe hybrids,” so you can imagine how he views Ukrainian chief Zelensky’s lack of sartorial elegance. It’s not merely that dressing like a slob has become acceptable; doing so, McCarthy argues, is evidence of how we’ve lost sight of order, justice and dignity.

NO WONDER NPR IS BEING DEFUNDED: Three key Hill Democrats are silent after their claim was discredited that DOGE appointees are “embedding” into the federal career civil service. Also silent are two NPR reporters whose artful use of language didn’t quite conceal a serious factual deficit.

VIOLENT DC CRIME IS THE SYMPTOM, NOT THE CAUSE: Even with the widely-ballyhooed reduction in crime in the District of Columbia since 2023, the violent crime rate remains so high that the nation’s capital is a seriously dangerous place for residents and tourists alike, according to Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins, himself a former police officer.

“Even after the recent drop, D.C. residents still face a one in 19 probability of being a crime victim each year. That’s 5.3 percent — double the 2.5 percent risk in Chicago. By any objective measure, our nation’s capital remains one of the riskiest cities in America.

“President Trump’s move was neither arbitrary nor unnecessary. But here’s the reality: taking control of a police department that city leaders have pressured to coddle criminals rather than enforce the law may address the symptoms — but it won’t cure the underlying disease,” Perkins writes in The Washington Stand.

The underlying disease is the destruction of the traditional, father-headed family. More than half of D.C.’s children grow up in single-parent households and it’s virtually always the father who isn’t there, at double the national average. Social Science research has for decades documented the terrible impact on children and American society of absent fathers.

HILL AIDES ON BOTH SIDES BACK FOOD REFORMS: Multiple recent surveys find strong bipartisan support among congressional aides for food reforms. RFK Jr. has certainly tapped into a previously unheralded vein of political support.

OPM INTRODUCES SEN. WARREN TO THE FACTS: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), joined by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), ripped the Trump administration for “embedding” legions of DOGE political appointees into the career civil service. Their complaints were carried in a 10-page, single-spaced letter to U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor.

There is a process for political appointees to “career-in,” but it can be time-consuming and laborious, so few are those who pursue it. But Warren, et. al. cite multiple media reports that make it sound as if legions of Elon Musk robots are burrowing into the bureaucracy, including an NPR story with two specific names.

But according to an OPM spokesman responding to The Washington Stand, neither of the two former DOGErs is on the career civil service payroll. And, according to Kupor, there simply aren’t any such embedders: “No DOGE-affiliated individuals have ‘unlawfully burrowed’ into career roles. We welcome oversight grounded in facts.”

88% OF COLLEGE STUDENTS SELF-CENSOR NON-LIBERAL VIEWS: A new survey of more than 1,400 students at Northwestern and University of Michigan finds a pervasive culture of self-censorship that silences non-progressive views and is “driven by fear of social ostracism and academic penalty.”

The Washington Stand’s Sarah Holliday dug deeper into the survey results and found not even a sliver of a silver lining:

“According to the research, 78 percent self-censor on gender identity, 77 percent on politics, and 68 percent on family values. Alarmingly, 80 percent admit to submitting classwork that misrepresents their beliefs to align with professors’ expectations — a practice so ingrained it’s become ‘second nature’ for many.

“And unfortunately, this ‘fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door.’ Seventy-three percent of respondents confessed they don’t even trust having ‘conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout.’ The authors described this as ‘identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized.’”

MUST READ – HOW AID GROUPS FUND TERRORISTS: Richard Pollock digs into the latest report from the Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — remember them? — who documents how Hamas in Gaza and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

This report provides the fact-based counterpoint to every left-wing objection to the DOGE-led fundamental re-evaluation and re-structuring of all U.S. foreign aid programs, especially those run by USAID.

“The report focused on the Taliban. But it also shows how Islamic terror groups and hostile governments throughout the Middle East and Africa have no intention of aiding their poor or their children. They use the aid system to finance their wars and repression,” Pollock writes.

AMERICANS SEPARATED: First Amendment Freedom of Speech is poised to gain a win if a federal issues a Consent Decree agreement among the IRS, the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) and a couple of Texas churches.

Under the UC, the tax agency would no longer enforce the Johnson Amendment against the churches. Not familiar with LBJ’s amendment? Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) certainly is and AU is asking the federal district court in Tyler, Texas, to allow it to intervene against the CD. This one could get really interesting.

JESSICA TARLOV’S OKIE CITY FLUB: As President Ronald Reagan once said, the problem with liberals is they know so many things that just aren’t true. Check out my latest news analysis on The Washington Stand. PROMOTED FROM LAST NIGHT.

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ INDEED: Odds are, the New York Times and Washington Post won’t tell you about this, but there is growing evidence of a significant spiritual upheaval among Gen Zers, as well as healthy changes regarding the nation’s divorce and illegitimate birth rates.

FACTS EXPOSE BLS INCOMPETENCE: Leave it to Issues & Insights (I&I) to dig deep into the historical data to compile an accurate long-term picture of the record of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It turns out that BLS incompetence is no new thing.

“In the 199 months we examined, the BLS’s initial estimate of jobs gained or lost missed the mark by an average of 49.6 percent! Only 15 times did its initial estimate come within 3 percent of being right. (Given the huge sample size, you’d think its margin of error would consistently be tiny.)

“Some months, the miss was staggering. In August 2011, to cite one example, the BLS said no new jobs had been created. Zero. Turns out, 132,000 were created that month. In September 2017, it first said that the economy lost 33,000 jobs – which made big news because, as Politico put it at the time, it was ‘the first time in seven years’ that had happened.

“In fact, the economy had created 88,000 jobs that month. In January 2021 – the last month of Trump’s first term – the BLS initially reported that the economy had added a mere 49,000 jobs. The actual number was 365,000.”

President Donald Trump has named Heritage Foundation Chief Economist E.J. Antoni to be the new BLS Director. He’s going to be one very busy man.

PARROTS AND SPEECH: Wintery Knight loves birds, especially Parrots, so you can imagine his enthusiasm when he first encountered a hugely important article in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.  The article reports new research that identified the place in the Parrot’s brain that enables it to learn speech.

The implications of the findings are significant in the context of the Intelligent Design and Materialist Evolutionary theories. Regardless where you are on that question, this piece is a fascinating probe into the amazing working of the natural world.

CHINA ON THE ROMAN ROAD: Rod Martin hosts guest author Yi Fuxian who looks at the fertility rates and measures being implemented in China in the wake of the deadly One-Child Policy (1980-2020), and sees striking parallels with failed measures taken in Imperial Rome to address the same problems.

LBJ WOULD BE SHOCKED BY TODAY’S DEMS: A Senate floor speech by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) commemorating Medicare’s 60th anniversary prompts me in a Tapscott’s Copy Desk Substack column to check the record with LBJ’s 1964 State of the Union. Re-reading that long ago speech shows how Democrats like Van Hollen rewrite history to conform to their present-day rages.

DEMS HEADING TO THE WILDERNESS: Anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian views are becoming the Democratic mainstream and that reality almost certainly will put the increasingly radical Left party at a fundamental disadvantage for years to come, according to Richard Pollock.

WHAT THE LEFT DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: About the back story to the screaming reaction on the Left to that American Eagle spot featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. Two words they keep forgetting — “Margaret Sanger.”

AMAZING SPIDERS: Bet you didn’t know a spider’s web silk is stronger than steel of the same size. Trust me, I am no fan of spiders, but this beautiful new production on HillFaith will give you a fresh appreciation for these creatures as engineering marvels.

HOW BIDEN CAUSED TEXAS REDISTRICTING CRISIS: Unless you are unfortunately plagued with an addiction for reading federal court cases prompted by redistricting issues, odds are you don’t know that it was the Biden Justice Department that set in motion the process now unfolding in Texas (and Illinois!).

You won’t get this from the New York Times or the Washington Post, but you will from The Washington Stand where this morning Senior Writer Joshua Arnold posts the definitive explanation for how this whole thing was set in motion long before Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office.

SCHUMER, JEFFRIES, BIPARTISANSHIP AND THE BIG MEDICAID LIE: The two top Democratic congressional leaders today challenged their GOP counterparts to a bipartisan Big Four meeting about the forthcoming budget showdown in September.

They also threw in a big, heaping helping of the long-running Democratic standard claim that anything Republicans propose for Medicaid will deprive millions of Americans of their healthcare coverage. The Washington Stand has the counter-facts that make clear who’s talking truth and who isn’t.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYSTEM IS POISONING THE SYSTEM: Senate Democrats are opposing every Trump nominee requiring confirmation simply because Trump nominated them, therefore they must be evil, incompetent or both. The first-order effects of this strategy are terrible, but check out the second and third order results in my latest Substack column.

THIS CHART KILLS THE MEDICAID LIE: The one, that is, about how Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) includes massive cuts in Medicaid will result in thousands of deaths across America. The chart is the work of the guys at Issues & Insights who also include a small compilation of major media repeating the lie.

If the Multiverse Theory is correct, there must be a universe somewhere in which every journalist who reports the Medicaid lie as fact is confronted with this chart, then made to write in long-hand 500 times every day for all eternity “I will never again lie in my reporting to my readers.”

OK, 500 times a day every day might be a tad excessive, so how about 500 times every other day for eternity?

MARRIAGE JUST A PIECE OF PAPER: In a culture fleeing at warp speed away from individual responsibility, marriage between a man and a woman for life becomes a memory. But, as the latest of Colson Center’s “What Would You Say?” videos on HillFaith points out, there’s far more to traditional marriage than its critics conceive.

And when you finish that brief video, check out the massive majorities among Republican aides working on Capitol Hill when asked by CNCT Capitol Pulse whether they think those ubiquitous District of Columbia speed cameras ought to be abolished. Can’t happen too soon, says this unreformed Formula Ford racer.

NOSE OFF/FACE SPITED UPDATED II: Three profoundly serious but heretofore unspoken questions about the power and prerogatives of Congress on federal spending and how federal departments and agencies do it are raised by the GAO/CBO drama. It’s my latest PJ Media column and it might be one to send to your senators and representative.