New York Times.

There simply aren’t enough places to live, a crisis decades in the making and one that poses a threat to the city’s continuing recovery.

I must confess that the difficulty of finding an affordable apartment in New York City doesn’t loom large in my life.

The Dallas metro area, by contrast, has plenty of ‘affordable’ apartments at New York price levels, although certainly fewer than there used to be before the Pandemic Panic.

Read it.

On the other hand, maybe they’re right … at least about the ‘disorder’ part.

Read it.

I guess Muqtada al-Sadr is the New Trump. Or maybe the New Putin? It’s hard to keep track.

Read it.

Tomorrow I’m facing off against John Gibbs in the Republican primary for Michigan’s Third Congressional District. The race is close. Internal polling has us within single digits of one another. But Gibbs and I couldn’t be more different.

I am a staunch defender of the Constitution and the rule of law. Accordingly, I became the first incoming freshman to recognize former Vice President Biden’s presidential victory. Then, three days after I was sworn into office in January 2021, I was in the House chamber when rioters overran the Capitol. A week later, I joined nine other Republicans, including Liz Cheney, to impeach then-President Donald Trump with a heavy but resolute conscience. I am the only freshman in history to impeach a president of his own party.

He says that like it was a good thing.

Read it.

For the second time since 2014 the United States is supporting efforts that help Russians to bypass government censorship to reach the outside world and search for information that will clarify what is going on in Ukraine. The official Russian version about what is going on in Ukraine is contradicted by what surviving Russian veterans of the fighting are reporting. The information provided by soldiers who have been there, or parents seeking to find out what happened to their sons in the army, has caused growing reluctance to support the Russian operations in Ukraine. More Russians are refusing to report when they receive a conscription notice. Calls for volunteers to serve in Ukraine are being ignored, even at higher pay, as in three to ten times the average monthly income of civilians. The government refuses to provide any clarification, pointing out that such information is a state secret.

Remember when Democrat meant somebody in favor of democracy?

Read it.

Under normal circumstances, it would be perfectly appropriate for the Supreme Pontiff to express shame for the persecution of pupils at the Residential Schools operated by the Church in Canada between the 1870s and 1990s. Last year, it was reported that the graves of 200 children had been found near one of these schools in British Columbia. That may be fake news. Some experts believe that the “graves” were soil disturbances and point out that they have not been excavated. No one disputes, however, that children suffered monstrously. Former pupils have talked of savage beatings and being forbidden to speak their native languages. Hundreds of sexual predators were protected.

But this pope has little moral authority to apologise for anyone else’s crimes. To understand why, we need to travel 6,500 miles from the scene of Francis’s meticulously staged expression of remorse in Edmonton to a dusty city in the subtropical north-west of Argentina. Although Orán has only 73,000 inhabitants, it does have a cathedral — a spiky concrete tent that embarrasses even the local tourist board.

Read it.

For many conservatives who for years looked forward to the arrival of William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, expecting to devour cover-to-cover the excellent articles, analysis, and commentary, Kristol’s descent into near-fatal Trump Derangement Syndrome has been distressing, to say the least.

The rabid anti-Trump posture adopted by the Weekly Standard proved to be its undoing (I cancelled my subscription in December, 2016), but the cadre of NeverTrumpers doubled-down on their failure. Some still pretended to be conservatives, wanting to “save” the Republican Party and conservatism from Trump; others, like Kristol, aligned themselves clearly with the left in opposition not only to Trump but to any conservative so misguided and corrupt as to continue to support Trump populism or the Republican Party Trump dominates.

Kristol nowadays calls himself a well-wisher of the Democratic Party despite the “sub-optimal performances of it leaders,” writes a wistful column in the laughable, “no tribal prejudices” Bulwark. The Democratic Party faces challenges: the party needs to defend (urgently!) democracy, moderation, and the rule of law; and the party needs to advance (urgently!) major reforms in our broken or damaged institutions.