Links: No required vaccines at CUA and debates about 'tax and spend'

Right here at NCR, I want to call attention to an article that has been updated, and the update is really important. Alexander Thompson wrote about the fact that many of the nation's best colleges and universities, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, are requiring that their students get vaccinated in order to return to campus in the fall. The update regards my alma mater, the Catholic University of America, where President John Garvey has declined to issue a requirement. Hard not to wonder if his reluctance has anything to do with the fact that one of the university's star conservative professors, Catherine Pakaluk, is a leader in the effort to refuse the vaccine because its development involved stem cell lines originally derived from an aborted fetus.

In The Washington Post, a profile of Russell Ramsland Jr., one of the key players in the effort to convince Americans that the 2020 election was stolen. Ramsland used to deploy his marketing expertise to sell Tex-Mex food, and we can all wish he had stuck to the burritos. The key takeaway: Never forget that this was orchestrated.

At Politico, David Siders on what stands behind the Democrats' newly found willingness to embrace "tax-and-spend" policies. The short answer: The passage of time combined with the pandemic. Or as Ruy Texeira puts it: "What's the constituency now for deficit phobia?" What is interesting, too, is that the GOP is divided by the prospect of higher taxes: The working class, non-college whites, who are now part of the GOP base, benefit from government programs and support the rich paying higher taxes, while the small businesspeople of all races and ethnicities, who constitute the other part of the GOP base, remain opposed to higher taxes and bigger government. That is why Fox News only focuses on the culture war issues, which is the sole unifying theme of the GOP today.

Speaking of culture wars, in the San Francisco Chronicle Miki Kaneda asks why operas that traffic in racist stereotypes like "Madama Butterfly" are still performed. "To earn my living as a professor of music, I find myself in the absurd position of having to teach this material," she complains. I have a solution: Quit, and give the job to someone who, when writing about Puccini and Verdi and Berlioz will care to note that the music is beautiful. When a music professor does not recognize the power of music to transcend the self, our culture needs a bit of help.