Pun Salad

As Democrats prepare to run themselves into a cinder-block wall at 103 mph in the midterm elections, progressives are desperately trying to grab the wheel and swerve. Because our policy-making class consists mainly of people who lack the moral imagination to consider anything very far beyond their own immediate parochial interests, progressives are once again turning to that supposed national emergency: college loans.

The case for college-loan forgiveness is not economic; the median borrower spends less than 4 percent of his income on payments. It is purely political. The relatively well-off urban and suburban professionals who are responsible for a disproportionate share of student debt have the Democrats’ ear, and people who are actually poor do not, in part because Democrats are confident that in poor communities votes can be secured through other means. And the people at the last stop on the college-loan money train — the university personnel whose jobs are funded by student debt — are a powerful constituency themselves.

Thousands of healthcare workers join the National Health Service Corps each year, pledging to work in places with too few medical providers in exchange for help repaying their student loans.

Job disruptions caused by the pandemic have shaken that bargain. Layoffs have put a growing number of these workers in violation of their contracts and exposed them to heavy penalties, sometimes many times the aid they received.

I’m gonna work like the devil to bring gas prices down which I’m gonna work into make sure that we keep strengthening the supply chain to bring the cost of energy and everything else and the goods that come to America… down… by helping the ports 24/7 by changing a whole range of things that, you know, what’s happened with COVID, COVID has caused significant increases in prices in the supply chain.

A first-class stamp costs more than ever, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) recently received a $10 billion loan from the federal government as part of a major pandemic relief package passed in 2020.

Now, Congress might force taxpayers to cover the cost of retired postal workers' health care—something for which the supposedly self-financing agency has always been responsible.

With little fanfare and broad bipartisan support, the House of Representatives voted earlier this week to pass the Postal Relief Act of 2022. The bill sweeps retired postal workers into the already strained Medicare system, whether they want to join or not, and excuses the USPS of having to self-fund health benefits for its retirees.

A sludge of ignorance and cowardice oozes so constantly through today’s campuses that institutions acquire immunity through recidivism: Progressivism’s totalitarian temptation is too commonplace to be newsworthy. Academia’s vindictive intolerance has become humdrum.

The University of Illinois at Chicago, however, is so repulsive that attention must be paid to Jason Kilborn’s ordeal. He is enduring, as the price of continuing as a tenured law professor, progressivism’s version of an ancient torment: the pillory. He has been sentenced to multiple debasements devised by UIC, which is wielding progressivism’s array of tools for mind-scrubbing and conformity-enforcing.

Kilborn’s troubles began in December 2020, when he used, in an exam concerning civil procedure, a hypothetical case about a Black female manager suing a former employer, charging that she had been fired because of her race and gender. She alleged that other managers had called her — this is how the slurs appeared in Kilborn’s hypothetical — a “n_____” and a “b_____.”