Yesterday's News

Yesterday’s News 2026-07-24

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curated news excerpts & citations
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Eisenhower-speaking-to-the-nation-October-22-1953

Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – July 23, 2026

… In early March 1953, soon after Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, giving the president a chance to reset the rising militarization of the United States. In mid-April, in a speech to newspaper editors that he insisted on delivering although he was suffering acutely from inflammatory bowel disease, Eisenhower warned of diverting the nation’s tax dollars to war at the expense of the people.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Eisenhower’s speech has been on my mind as the Trump administration slashes Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, foreign aid, scientific and medical research, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and yet is demanding more money for the Defense Department, bled out by Trump’s foreign adventures in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)

Omar Abdel-Baqui, Stephen Kalin, Saleh al-Batati @ WSJ: The Houthis Have Opened a New Front in the U.S.-Iran War

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Sam Sifton @ NY Times: Photographic Evidence

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