4/26/23
Village of Lancaster Harold Place Sanitary Sewer Line Replacement Invests over $212,000 in ARP Funding for Sewer/Water Infrastructure
CDBG Investments of over $960,000 spur the transformation of West Main Street Business District; fund Smart Growth projects on Central Avenue in the Village, improvements at West Drullard playground
The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial board issued a stark warning to President Donald Trump on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve voted to lower interest rates by 0.25%.
The vote happened after Trump applied months of public pressure on the central bank to lower interest rates. The president has moved to install multiple new governors who would vote to reduce rates, with the newest Trump-aligned governor, Stephen Miran, joining the board this week.
"President Trump wants lower interest rates, and on Wednesday, he got his wish as the Federal Open Market Committee cut the overnight rate by a quarter point," the editors argued in a new op-ed. "The FOMC also delivered an implicit warning about what this might mean for the economy. Mr. Trump now owns that, too."
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that there are still some risks the U.S. economy needs to navigate. For instance, inflation and unemployment have trickled upwards. Powell said those factors have the central bank torn between two mandates: stabilizing prices and maximizing employment.
The Journal's editorial board also wished Trump "good luck" as his administration addresses these economic conditions.
"It may be that everything works out fine: inflation drifts downward after a brief price bump from tariffs, the economy booms despite tariffs and a looming labor shortage, the housing market enters a new golden age, and financial markets gallop happily off into the artificial-intelligence sunset," the editors wrote.
"But if Mr. Trump is wrong, voters will notice sustained inflation and the lack of gains in real wages. Having staked so much on his political assault on the Fed, Mr. Trump owns the outcome now for good or ill," they added.
A Democratic US senator over the weekend issued an ominous warning about Republicans using the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to clamp down on political speech.
In a lengthy social media post on Sunday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) outlined how President Donald Trump and his allies look set to wage a campaign of retribution against political adversaries by framing them as accomplices in Kirk’s murder.
“Pay attention,” he began. “Something dark might be coming. The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.”
Murphy then contrasted the recent statements by Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who accurately stated that political violence is not confined to a single political ideology, with those of Trump and his allies, who have said such violence is only a problem on the left.
Murphy highlighted a statement from Trump ally and informal adviser Laura Loomer, who said that she wanted “Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the left thinks he is” and that she wanted “the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are.”
He then pointed to Trump, saying that progressive billionaire financier George Soros should face racketeering charges even though there is no evidence linking Soros to Kirk’s murder or any other kind of political violence.
“The Trump/Loomer/Miller narrative that Dems are cheering Kirk’s murder or that left groups are fomenting violence is also made up,” he added. “There are always going to be online trolls, but Dem leaders are united (as opposed to Trump who continues to cheer the January 6 violence).”
Murphy claimed that the president and his allies have long been seeking a “pretext to destroy their opposition” and that Kirk’s murder gave them an opening.
“That’s why it was so important for Trump sycophants to take over the DoJ and FBI, so that if a pretext arose, Trump could orchestrate a dizzying campaign to shut down political opposition groups and lock up or harass its leaders,” he said. “This is what could be coming—now.”
Early in his second term, the president fired FBI prosecutors who were involved in an earlier political violence case—the prosecution of people involved in the violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 by Trump supporters who aimed to stop the certification of the 2020 election.
A top ethics official and a lawyer who spoke out against the president’s anti-immigration policy are among those who have been fired from the DOJ.
Murphy ended his post with a call for action from supporters.
“I hope I’m wrong. But we need to be prepared if I’m right,” he said. “That means everyone who cares about democracy has to join the fight—right now. Join a mobilization or protest group. Start showing up to actions more. Write a check to a progressive media operation.”
One day after Murphy’s warning, columnist Karen Attiah announced that she had been fired from The Washington Post over social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s death that were critical of his legacy but in no way endorsed or celebrated any form of political violence.
“The Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable,’ ‘gross misconduct,’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues—charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false,” she explained. “They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
Attiah only directly referenced Kirk once in her posts and said she had condemned the deadly attack on him “without engaging in excessive, false mourning for a man who routinely attacked Black women as a group, put academics in danger by putting them on watch lists, claimed falsely that Black people were better off in the era of Jim Crow, said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and favorably reviewed a book that called liberals ‘Unhumans.‘”
