Emma Richter writes for the DailyMail.com about questionable government spending in a major northeastern city.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is handing out $500 vouchers to migrants so they can enjoy haircuts, massages and other self-care benefits, despite the city’s budget plunging nearly $50 million short. 

Applicants who are ‘low-income, isolated queer and trans migrants, asylum seekers and refugees’ are prioritized for the ‘wellness allowance.’ 

The initiative, called ‘Boston Matters’, was created by OUTnewcomers, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ+ migrants in Boston alongside the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, Mass Daily News reported. 

Applicants get $250 to $500 toward ‘non-clinical care’ completely funded by the city agency, which is run by the Democrat’s administration.

They can participate in activities like meditation, yoga, peer support, creative healing, acupuncture and gym memberships, as detailed in the post.

It comes as the city faces a $48.4 million deficit and teachers are faced with possible staffing cuts due to a $53 million shortfall for Boston Public Schools, according to statistics for this fiscal year.

OUTnewcomers was founded by Sal Khan, a ‘queer activist’ and drag performer who is also the organization’s executive director, according to the group’s Facebook page. 

The 33-year-old, whose drag queen name is Miss Chilly Masala, also refers to himself as ‘angry brown queer,’ according to his Instagram. 

Khan launched a GoFundMe fundraiser in September 2022 to help him raise money to fight his ‘legal challenges,’ the page read. 

Khan explained that he left his home country of Pakistan in 2019 ‘to seek freedom and safety in Massachusetts.’ 

During his time in the state, Khan said he’s ‘built a life by volunteering with local organizations that support homeless women, LGBTQ+ rights, and immigrant justice.’ 

But on May 7, 2024, the activist said he ‘experienced a major relapse’ when he was taken into custody for resisting arrest and trespassing while riding an MBTA bus, and detained in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, he wrote. 

The post Boston mayor hands out $500 checks to migrants while city budget tanks appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Shawn Fleetwood writes for the Federalist about an interesting speech from the US Supreme Court’s newest member.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ran a not-so-subtle defense of leftists’ judicial coup against President Trump on Tuesday by downplaying the harms it poses to presidents’ executive power. The moment came during a lecture the junior justice gave at Yale Law School about the Supreme Court’s emergency (or “interim”) docket.

In her speech to attendees, Jackson openly criticized her colleagues for their handling of cases that come before the court’s emergency docket. She more specifically chastised SCOTUS for its granting of emergency applications that request a stay (“pause”) of lower court injunctions and for the lack of legal explanation that comes with such decisions.

Unlike the traditional merits docket, in which fully litigated cases are heard and decided by the justices on the merits of the issue(s), the emergency docket deals with cases that are still undergoing consideration in the lower judiciary. These interim decisions — which often come with little legal explanation to avoid a “lock-in effect” — are not final verdicts on the merits of the cases but are preliminary judgments that target specific lower court actions until these matters can be fully litigated.

Jackson’s criticism was clearly a jab at the court’s conservative majority, which has often approved applications filed by the Trump administration to stop overreaching injunctions by rogue lower court judges. And yet, such critiques were not even the most notable part of Jackson’s remarks.

During her post-speech interview, the Biden appointee was asked by Yale Law School Dean Cristina Rodríguez about the Trump administration’s arguments that there is a “concept of harm that the inability of the president to be able to utilize his power is itself a harm.” Put another way, the president will suffer irreparable harm to his constitutional authority if a given lower court injunction on one of his policies or orders is permitted to remain in place.

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Adam Kredo writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one way Republican senators want to limit taxpayer support for terrorist groups.

A coalition of Republican senators led by Rick Scott (Fla.) is pushing a bill that would prohibit the United States from funding a Hamas-tied U.N. agency, according to a copy of the bill obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Scott on Wednesday introduced the Stop Support for UNRWA Act of 2026 to completely ban U.S. taxpayer funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a body that employed several individuals found to have participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel. In addition to legally enshrining the Trump administration’s move to freeze U.S. support for UNRWA, the legislation would prevent the United States from funding any successor organization that may arise in UNRWA’s place.

The legislation, which has eight GOP cosponsors as of Wednesday afternoon, comes amid an investigation into the agency and other U.N. bodies that the Office of Inspector General in USAID—an investigative entity separate from USAID—has conducted over the past several months. Federal investigators have identified three current or former UNRWA employees who participated in the Oct. 7 attack and another 14 otherwise affiliated with Hamas.

Another provision in the Stop Support for UNRWA Act would strip the agency of its diplomatic immunity under U.S. law, clearing the path for lawsuits against the body to proceed. Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attack sued UNRWA in 2024, alleging that it ran “a billion-dollar money laundering operation that funded Hamas,” and the bill may prompt U.S. citizens affected by the Hamas attack to bring their own suits.

The bill would also stop the U.S. government from engaging with any U.N. agency, body, or commission run by a country known to support “acts of international terrorism.”

The post GOP senators want to block funding for Hamas-linked UN group appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Stanley Kurtz writes for National Review Online about strategies conservatives can employ to regain a foothold in public schools.

The most powerful steps we could take to wrest public schools from the hands of the woke would be for states to move school board elections “on-cycle” (to federal Election Day) and allow political parties to nominate the candidates.

A few states do this now, yet by far most school board elections remain off-cycle and “nonpartisan.” The result is that a great many conservative districts are run by progressive Democratic school boards. That’s because low-turnout, low-information, off-cycle school board elections are dominated by highly organized and self-interested teachers’ unions.

The current system also deprives the conservative half of the country of a farm team of education experts, administrators, and higher-office-holders-in-the-making, who could counterbalance products of the monolithically progressive ed schools. That ed school–produced progressive education establishment now dominates local, state, and national education bureaucracies, even in red districts and states.

You may have heard something about moving school board elections on-cycle and listing party affiliation, when the pushback against woke schooling began to catalyze several years ago. Yet even that tiny blip of publicity has by now fallen off the radar screen. The discrepancy between the significance of this proposed electoral shift and its near complete absence from public discussion is striking.

A big reason for the silence is that proposed changes to the structure of school board elections are easily lost track of when dispersed across 50 states and thousands of local districts. Yet there are plenty of issues — abortion, gun control, health care, immigration, climate/energy — where interest groups track, publicize, and discuss trends and developments at the state and local levels. When it comes to proposals to change our way of electing school boards, no one — at least on the conservative side — seems to be systematically following the issue.

The post Taking ‘stolen’ schools back from progressives appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Editors at National Review Online urge Congress to approve legislation that helps the federal government fight terrorism.

Here we go again: Congress is voting imminently on whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which President Trump supports. Without reauthorization, the program would expire on April 20, placing a key anti-terrorism tool in legal limbo. Congress should vote to keep it in place.

We have supported the executive branch surveillance powers that are governed by Section 702 since its enactment in 2008. Before that, we supported the predecessor surveillance programs since their origins after September 11 — powers with roots dating back to the dawn of the Republic. Section 702 surveillance is also used for counterintelligence and interdiction of drug trafficking and human trafficking. The threat of international terrorism may not be as visible and visceral to the public as it was 25 years ago, but with the United States currently at war with the leading state sponsor of terrorism, this would be an especially inopportune time to let the legal authority for this crucial function lapse.

To recap: Surveillance targeting Americans, or targeting foreign civilians within the United States, is covered by the protections of the Fourth Amendment. (This may not be the case for foreign diplomats, spies, and other foreign government agents.) It therefore requires either a warrant or the availability of a judicially recognized exception to the warrant requirement. Nothing in Section 702 deals with those areas of surveillance — it addresses only surveillance targeting foreigners outside the United States, who have no rights protected by our Constitution.

Prior to 2008, such surveillance was conducted — largely by the National Security Agency — on the basis of the president’s Article II national security powers. Section 702 did not create those powers, but it subjected them to periodic judicial review and other legal strictures.

The post National Review endorses ‘key anti-terrorism tool’ appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Ward Clark writes for RedState.com about interesting new polling data.

In recent decades, it has become an accepted feature of American national politics that the party in power will lose seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in mid-term elections. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that the party that is not in power has a wealth of adherents who are upset and therefore motivated to vote. 

There are other factors, but the one thing that always looms over every election like a huge, predatory bird is the economy. Now the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has provided to our sister site Townhall some polling numbers that have to have some grins on Republican faces in Washington right about now.

With the midterms approaching, Republicans are zeroing in on a targeted strategy to win back swing voters and Trump voters who don’t typically turn out in off-year elections. Those voters will be critical to maintaining a Republican majority in the Senate next year.

That message centers on the economy and cost of living, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) says new polling, exclusively provided to Townhall, shows a clear path to rebuilding a winning coalition after President Trump’s 2024 win.

That polling shows the cost of living is the overwhelming issue driving the midterms, with 92 percent of swing voters and 85 percent of infrequent Trump voters concerned about it. …

… Those are all areas where Democrats have suffered some significant failures in recent years, most notably when it comes to housing costs. In our major cities in particular, housing costs are spiraling out of control, and the Democrats who run things in those cities (I’m looking at you, Zohran Mamdani) seem determined to do everything they can to make things worse.

The post Kitchen-table issues could help GOP control Senate appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Chris Bray writes for the Federalist about another Golden State boondoggle.

In a much-discussed phenomenon, blue state government spending is soaring, and doing so against limited population growth. …

… The culture of progressive governance lights money on fire for symbolic performances that never produce the promised results, and it creates money-hungry projects that become impossible to shut down even when they obviously don’t work. The most infamous of these projects is California’s high-speed rail project, with a plan approved in 2008 to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco by bullet train. It hasn’t done that, it won’t do that anytime soon, and the budget keeps climbing for a project that keeps becoming significantly more modest in its promises.

But here’s another example of blue culture waste, and it’s maybe even easier to show how preposterous it is because the thing is actually working. And the end state, what it looks like when it’s up and running, is almost more absurd than you’ll be able to believe. …

… This story also starts in 2008, the year California voters approved a plan to build the bullet train. At the same time, Bay Area voters in suburban Sonoma and Marin counties approved a sales tax increase to partially fund a regional commuter train that would also get state and federal grants, the SMART train: Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit. The system, a single north-south line, is still under construction, but the parts that have been built are in service. …

… There’s a war of words, right now, over the success or failure of the SMART train, with critics calling it a hopeless waste and regional government officials attacking the critics as liars. … Advocates said that the trains would take people off the 101, the arterial freeway that connects these communities, reducing traffic congestion and preventing climate change. Yes, they really said the train would help to stabilize the climate. Critics said that an intra-suburban rail system would become a hobby train, not serving serious commuters and not having a real impact on traffic.

The post Exposing another ‘disastrous’ California rail project appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about new data exposing a major media outlet’s journalistic malpractice.

A new database of all the New York Times articles published in the past 25 years provides empirical evidence of some of the biases that many of the newspaper’s critics have long suspected.

The developer of the database, Ted Alcorn, is not a media critic but a former policy analyst for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He’s a freelance journalist who does some work for the Times and also teaches at Columbia and NYU. Alcorn this week launched “Below The Fold,” a dashboard that allows readers to parse and sort a database of 25 years’ worth of New York Times articles in ways that concretely quantify the paper’s quirks and record the way the coverage has changed over time.

For example, the dashboard allows for sorting coverage by country and sorting that by population, to get a Moneyball-style statistic called articles/million residents/year, or AMRY. The tiny Pacific island of Nauru is tops because of climate change coverage, but Gaza is next with an AMRY of 104.4, followed by Israel at 55.7 and the West Bank at 41.14. Countries that the Times is less obsessed with include Japan, with an AMRY of 1.32, Germany, with an AMRY of 2.78, and Singapore, with an AMRY of 2.33. In raw number of articles, the Times tagged 14,483 with coverage of “Israel” over the quarter century from 2000 to 2025. India, with a vastly larger population, generated 10,678 Times stories.

The dashboard also allows a similar sorting of states by how much attention they get from the Times, adjusted by population. The early presidential primary and caucus states of Iowa and New Hampshire attract a lot of Times coverage, as does the District of Columbia. Sparsely populated Times summer vacation destinations like Vermont and Maine also do well. The states that get the least attention from the Times relative to their populations include Alabama, Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey, and Arkansas.

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Editors at National Review Online explore one of today’s more bizarre political conflicts.

The war between the United States and Iran, now in its seventh week, has produced an extraordinary confrontation — not just between two nations, but between two Americans who each believe that God is on his side. One sits in the Oval Office. The other, until recently, was on a plane to Algeria.

The fight between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV broke into the open Sunday night, when Trump posted that “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” On Monday, Leo, who spent decades as a missionary in Peru and knows something about speaking truth to distant power, answered that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.” …

… [T]he president has made the pope’s job considerably easier. On April 7, Trump warned on social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The statement was connected to an ultimatum over the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump ultimately pulled back from its most apocalyptic implications when Pakistan brokered a two-week cease-fire. But words have consequences, and these words handed critics a loaded weapon.

The Catholic just war tradition requires, among other things, right intention and proportionality. Trump’s threat to target “every” Iranian bridge and power plant is precisely the kind of statement that gives the tradition’s critics grounds to say the criteria are not being met. It doesn’t matter that Trump is a brawler who talks bigger than he acts. In the domain of moral theology, you are judged by what you say as well as what you do.

The post Probing the feud between pope and president appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Editors at National Review Online assess a high-profile eastern European election result.

For a supposed despot, Viktor Orbán accepted his election shellacking gracefully. The scale of that defeat, ironically, was magnified by the way that Fidesz, Orbán’s party, had gerrymandered the electoral system. Fidesz won some 38 percent of the vote (more than Keir Starmer got in his election) but will only have 29 percent of the seats in the new parliament. A lesson for gerrymanderers everywhere: Be careful what you wish for. Péter Magyar’s Tisza will have a supermajority and, thus, a fairly free hand to do what it wants when it comes to undoing Orbán’s handiwork.

Magyar will become prime minister on, probably, May 5. The obvious question is, What then? Magyar, a former Fidesz stalwart, only broke with Orbán in 2024 over, he said, cronyism and corruption, of which there was plenty enough and which in the end helped, directly and indirectly, bring Orbán down. Directly, because voters grew exasperated with it; indirectly, because of the way that it was intimately connected to the statist policies that led to the economic underperformance that so angered Hungary’s voters. After 16 years in power, Orbán was hard-pressed to avoid the centrifugal forces of politics.

Fixing Hungary’s economy will have to be a major priority for Magyar, who appears to favor the free market economic approach of the younger Orbán. It served Hungary well at the time and should do so again. Right-populists everywhere should take note that their project requires prosperity. Meanwhile, Magyar is, quite rightly, committed to maintaining (and maybe even toughening) Orbán’s hard line on immigration, one of the areas that could well be a source of future conflict with the EU.

On the other hand, Brussels will welcome, as do we, Magyar’s wish to break with Orbán’s hostility to Ukraine.

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