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Religion desk: Francis Wasn’t So Progressive
“Apparently, Pope Francis’s return to the arms of his Creator could no longer be postponed,” observes National Review’s Jim Geraghty following the pontiff’s death Monday.
His passing was “simultaneously expected and a surprise.” Indeed, “when you have an octogenarian pope, people are always going to fear that death is imminent.”
Francis likely “will be widely remembered as a man whom the US media desperately wanted to be a progressive ‘Buddy Christ.’ ”
Again and again, comments he made were “interpreted” as endorsements of lefty policies and “later walked back by the Vatican” as it “insisted the remarks had been misinterpreted or mistranslated.”
In fact, “Francis was not nearly as progressive as his cheerleaders on the left wanted to believe he was.”
From the right: Harvard Slow on Jew-hate
“It’s said that timing is everything,” snarks J.T. Young at the Wall Street Journal about Harvard’s response to the suspension of federal funding by the Trump administration over its “failures to address antisemitism.”
In side-stepping Harvard’s many incidents of Jew-hatred, President Alan Garber claimed “We do not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism.”
Yet it was only in January that Harvard settled two lawsuits accusing the school of tolerating just that.
And while it took Harvard more than a year to address antisemitic incidents on campus, “it took only days for Harvard to decide it had a moral duty to reject the Trump administration’s conditions for billions of dollars in federal funding.”
If only this fight had “inspired the same sense of urgency.”
Speech watch: Offensive Words Are No Crime
The United Kingdom’s “time-honored, liberty-enhancing principles are being supplanted by state authoritarianism,” warns Andrew Doyle at The Washington Post.
In Britain, “police are making at least 12,000 arrests per year” based mostly on “offensive social media posts” — which is “profoundly troubling.”
A “draconian” law in Scotland “empowers the state to prosecute citizens for words they utter in the privacy of their own homes.”
“The authoritarian speech-policing in Britain has been ramped up since rioting last summer after three young girls were stabbed to death” by a teen child of immigrants, reportedly inspired by al Qaeda.
“We have a long way to go to restore the liberal principles that were once seen as synonymous with the British way of life.”
Schools beat: Randi Hates Your Kids
American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten “is raging,” notes Mary Katherine Ham at Fox News.
But “not because American students just put in the worst performance on the national report card in decades.”
“Nah, it’s because some government employees might lose their jobs” due to President Trump’s cuts to the Department of Education.
For Weingarten & Co., “bureaucrats are always the No. 1 priority” — and their unions “use the majority of the money they bring in (your money!) to pay for political activism.”
And “to launch a raft of lawsuits against the administration, arguing — you guessed it — they can’t get fired.”
No wonder 70% of Americans “want public employee unions out of politics, and the record of this administration shows it won’t shy away from taming them.”
Eye on NY: Get Ready for Budget Cuts
“The State budget is nearly three weeks late,” thunders Patrick Orecki at Empire Report. “With agreement on policy issues close to the finish line, lawmakers should refocus on the budget.”
Policy issues have dominated the budget talks, but the “critical budget issues are how the State will prepare for potentially massive federal cuts and a possible recession,” how it will “raise and spend over $252 billion of taxpayer money” and how it can “improve New York’s affordability.”
Since fiscal year 2020, “the budget’s State operating funds. . . have increased $35 billion, a whopping 33%.”
State leaders should “restrain spending,” plus “set aside at least $2 billion in a federal cut contingency fund” and “prioritize services.”
Down the road, “New York needs to change its culture and stop using the budget to leverage hard policy decisions.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board