If the PBS television special, “Deadlock: An Election Story” really wanted to have a conversation about how politically polarized Americans can find common ground, it should have had more political diversity on its panel.

“The current climate of American discourse finds us deeply entrenched and overconfident in our own beliefs,” said moderator Aaron Tang, a left-leaning law professor at the University of California-Davis said in a statement promoting the show. “Deadlock aims to illuminate how, for many of the difficult challenges facing our nation, the honest answers are nuanced and complex. Our goal is to spark open-mindedness and help people find the middle ground instead of retreating to our usual corners.”

But the show retreated the usual corners for two reasons: the premise of the discussion had a left-leaning tone, and the discussion featured mostly Democrats or left-leaning panelists, including:

Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic political strategist;  Adrian Fontes, the Democrat Arizona secretary of state;  left-leaning Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the James S. McDonnell professor of African American studies at Princeton University;  left-leaning Astead Herndon, a national politics reporter at The New York Times; Democrat Jeh C. Johnson, former secretary of Homeland Security and former general counsel to the Department of Defense;  Elise Jordan, of NBC/MSNBC, an anti-Trump political analyst; Katie Harbath, a Republican who has said she never voted for Trump and a former Facebook executive who supported the decision to ban Trump from the platform; Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today and well-known author of

The old aphorism calls a picture worth 1,000 words. But in at least one case, a series of pictures can be worth more than $1 trillion.

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides helpful charts showing the many problems associated with the current federally subsidized loan program. As with many crises caused by government, the problem with student debt has many causes, and Democrats’ proposed “solution” — making all taxpayers responsible via massive “loan forgiveness” — would only make the problem worse.

Students Not Repaying ‘Loans‘

The CBO analysis examined federal student loans that began repayment from July 2009 to June 2013, tracking those loans through 2019. The period analyzed came after the worst of the Great Recession and before the Covid pandemic scrambled the economy and led to a massive student loan amnesty in 2020.

Over the four years examined, the percentage of borrowers who chose income-driven repayment (IDR) more than tripled, from 10 percent in the first year to 33 percent in the fourth year:

As CBO explained, while fixed payments remain constant throughout the entire repayment period, the IDR process “allow[s] repayment over a longer period — typically 20 or 25 years instead of the usual 10 — after which any remaining balance is forgiven,” and can require “payments” of as little as $0, which “still count towards the total number of payments required for forgiveness.”

Unsurprisingly, the number of debtors choosing this option has grown “as plans with smaller expected payments and

As if parenting with calm and sanity weren’t hard enough these days, there is a new internet trend aimed at congratulating each other for packing junk food in kids’ lunches.

Viral social media posts have garnered widespread attention and started a debate about so-called food shaming and “safe foods.” The social support for poor nutrition is a sad reflection of the lack of agency parents feel. It is possible to make changes in meaningful areas of your child’s development, such as nutrition. Understanding how and why kids eat is important. But believing we can choose to take action is the first and most important step.

Lauding Mediocrity: It’s ‘Perfectly Normal’

One post from a mom displays a “normal” lunch for an American schoolchild who brings food from home. The photo includes Oreos, marshmallows, Doritos, Kool-Aid, and a yogurt tube alongside a sandwich that appears to have lunch meat and cheese. 

Aside from the inside of the sandwich, protein is scarce in this lunch while high fructose corn syrup and food dye abound, but the mother defended her choices, writing in the caption, “Not all kids eat cucumbers or carrots. I don’t pack new things for school lunches, new foods can be introduced at home and taught how to enjoy not wasting my money to go in trash at school.” 

One father attracted attention on TikTok by writing notes in his daughter’s lunchbox explaining that he wants her to eat the junk food he packs for her and accusing the daycare of