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President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands at the 2019 G20 summit in Oasaka, Japan.
Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images
Shameful Concessions Will Not End Putin’s Threat to World Peace
Jun 01, 2025
Our President has proposed a shameful give-away of Crimea and an additional chunk of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. This compounds President Obama’s shameful acquiescence in Putin’s seizing Crimea, and President Biden’s also failing to live up to the security assurances that the United States and Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 when Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal in the Budapest Memorandum.
From my experience as a litigation attorney who participated in numerous mediations before retiring, I have found that successful mediations require a realistic assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, wants, and needs of the parties, including their willingness to take a calculated risk. In court, one never knows what a judge or jury will do. The outcome of war is likewise uncertain. In negotiations, wants should not obscure a realistic assessment of one’s needs. A party’s unmet true nonnegotiable needs can justify the risk. What are the needs of Ukraine, Russia, and the West?
Ukraine’s nonnegotiable needs are its survival, sovereignty, and statehood.
Russia’s purported “core” needs are a hodgepodge of propaganda. Surprisingly, Putin has not cited the history of Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions of Russia to assert that Russia needs Ukraine as a buffer against Europe. Instead, he has claimed Russia needs to destroy neo-Nazis and drug addicts in Ukraine who somehow threaten Russia. His real motivation is his belief that the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union insulted 1,000 years of Russian history. In the tradition of past Soviet dictators and early Russian empire builders, he wants a new Russian Empire that reclaims Ukraine and the nations of Eastern Europe that were once under Soviet domination. These are not “needs” but “wants” of a megalomaniac. Putin’s hodgepodge of propaganda obscures his fear that Western democratic values in Ukraine will undermine his regime and his personal quest to reestablish a glorious Russian Empire.
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Russia’s real needs are to prevent its economy from collapsing, rid itself of its latest dictatorship, and obtain firm security guarantees from the West and Ukraine. Putin’s Soviet-style dictatorship is likely vulnerable to the same internal rot that collapsed the Soviet Union. Russia is sapped after three years of heavy war losses and increasingly severe economic weakness under Western sanctions. Despite Putin’s bluster, Russia is at serious risk for, if not on the cusp of, economic collapse. Rot in its military manifests in its shooting surrendering Ukrainians, repeatedly bombing innocent civilians, and needing troops from North Korea. Russian soldiers are wasted in waves against stout Ukrainian defenses.
The West’s need is to end Putin’s threat to world peace. His demands for a cease-fire would neuter Ukraine for Russia’s eventual takeover, allow Russia to dig out of its predicament, and allow Russia to rebuild itself to continue Putin’s quest. Ukraine and the West should firmly oppose Putin so that the Russian forces can be removed from Ukraine, the threat to Europe can end, America’s mineral investment in Ukraine can be protected, Putin can fall, and democracy can develop in Russia.
Here is how: (1) Impose the heaviest sanctions possible; (2) Adopt and supplement retired Admiral James Stavridis’ concept of a renewed Reforger by also threatening to, and being prepared to move American and European combat soldiers into Ukraine; (3) Ensure that these troops and the Ukrainians are well-supplied and armed for conventional war, and protected by air support and defenses; and (4) Forcefully meet Putin’s anticipated threat to use nuclear weapons with our own threat to do the same. This should bring a cease-fire, meaningful negotiations, and tend to Putin’s demise.
Putin masks his weakness by threatening the use of nuclear weapons. So far, he has cowed three presidents with these threats. The risk that Russia would start a nuclear war is no greater than the risk that we would. China and other Russian leaders will not let Putin and his circle go that far. Recent history demonstrates that Russia will back down when faced with a credible counter-threat of nuclear destruction. On October 25, 1973, the Soviet Union was about to intervene militarily on the side of the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. America initiated Defense Condition (DefCon) III, putting our nuclear-armed forces on high alert, just short of getting them ready for imminent use under DefCon II. Troops of the 82nd Airborne Division readied to board aircraft for deployment. U.S. aircraft carriers moved toward the Eastern Mediterranean. The Soviets stood down.
World peace requires that the full force of American and European power be brought against Putin.
Daniel O. Jamison is a retired attorney.
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Michael Rivera: The Importance of Getting Involved
Jun 01, 2025
Michael Rivera is the Berks County Commissioner. The Republican began serving in January of 2020.
"My number one priority is fiscal responsibility," Rivera said in describing the focus of his work as County Commissioner. "Counties generate their money primarily through property taxes. My commitment to the residents of Berks County is to be fiscally responsible with their money."
I spoke with Commissioner Rivera on a recent episode of the Fulcrum Democracy Forum (FDF). The program engages citizens in evolving government to better meet all people's needs. Consistent with the Fulcrum's mission, FDF strives to share many perspectives to widen our audience's viewpoints.
I met him while recording the first episode of The 50, a four-year multimedia project that visits with the public where they live across all 50 states to learn what motivated them to vote in the 2024 presidential election and see how the Donald Trump administration is meeting those concerns and hopes.
yuue https://youtu.be/fJmqgCIay64?si=oC4gnGnLqZEoQkDg expand=1 site_id=19309670] - YouTubeyoutu.be
Pennsylvania, with the largest electoral prize of all major swing states, was a highly coveted prize for Vice President Kamala Harris and then-President Donald Trump in the 2024 race for the White House. It was predicted that the winner of the Keystone State was highly likely to win the entire election.
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It was fitting for us to begin The 50 project by visiting Reading, PA. The majority Latino city inched a win for Harris, but ultimately Trump easily won Berks County, home to Reading, by 12 points and the state by more than 50% of the vote.
I spoke with Rivera about the aggressive moves coming from Washington, D.C., and their impact on people, particularly Reading's immigrant community. Rivera explained that many of his constituents aren't opposed to immigrants who come to the country legally and reacted favorably at the polls to Trump's closing-the-border campaign.
Rivera agrees that the broken immigration system must be fixed to make it easier for people to come to the U.S., as the economy depends on it. "There are more job openings than there are people that are able to fill those jobs," he said. "We're not going to birth our way out of that. The way we're going to do that is through people coming in through legal immigration. So, the laws here in the United States do need to be improved."
The Pew Research Center estimates that more than 8 million undocumented immigrants are working in the U.S., representing about 5% of all workers.
Rivera was born in Pottstown and lived there till the age of 6, when he and his family moved to Puerto Rico, where he grew up and got married. In 1996, he and his wife moved to Pennsylvania to start their real estate business. He is a Real Estate professional at Keller Williams Platinum Realty in Wyomissing.
Rivera also worked as Assistant Vice President of Business Services at the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce & Industry, where he assisted and guided entrepreneurs and business owners in obtaining the resources they needed to succeed. He developed and implemented programs to help small businesses grow and become sustainable.
He resides in Bern Township with his wife, Zylkia, and their children, Andre and Adriana.
SUGGESTIONS:
Gregg Amore: Faith in Democracy
Nate Gilliam: Love & Frustration
Leading With Passion and Purpose
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and a board member of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, the parent organization of The Fulcrum. He is the publisher of the Latino News Network and an accredited Solutions Journalism and Complicating the Narratives trainer with the Solutions Journalism Network.
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Republican Sen. Kim Hammer, left of center, answers questions about proposed laws that would alter the citizen-initiated ballot measure process during an Arkansas Senate committee hearing in February.
Credit:Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate
Red State Voters Approved Progressive Measures. GOP Lawmakers Are Trying to Undermine Them.
Jun 01, 2025
Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been working to undermine or altogether undo the will of the voters by making it harder to pass amendments and laws through citizen-led initiatives.
In Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before; one made abortion in the state legal again, while the other created an employee sick leave requirement.
GOP lawmakers in Alaska and Nebraska also have moved to roll back sick leave benefits that voters approved last year, while legislators in Arizona are pushing new restrictions on abortion access, despite voters six months ago approving protections.
At the same time, Republican leaders in Florida, Utah, Montana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, North Dakota and South Dakota have approved efforts to restrict citizen-led ballot initiatives or are considering measures to do so, essentially trying to make it harder for voters to change laws outside legislatures.
In some cases, legislators aren’t just responding to measures that voters approved; they’re acting shortly after citizen-led efforts failed but came too close for comfort, such as an abortion-rights initiative in Florida, which in November fell just short of the 60% of votes needed to pass and loosen the state’s ban on the procedure.
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Republican elected officials across these states make strikingly similar arguments: They say the initiative process is susceptible to fraud and unduly influenced by out-of-state money. What’s more, they say that they, as elected officials, represent the true will of the people more than ballot initiatives do.
In his opening speech on the first day of Utah’s legislative session in January, Senate President Stuart Adams urged lawmakers to push back against citizen-led ballot initiatives, warning that “unelected special interest groups outside of Utah” were using the process to “override our republic” and “cast aside those who are duly elected.”
Utah lawmakers then passed a law tightening the process. They required initiative sponsors to detail how their proposal would be funded and, if it makes the ballot, pay for costly publication of the ballot language in newspapers across the state — potentially adding $1.4 million in expenses. They also voted to put a 2026 measure before voters that would require a 60% supermajority for any tax-related initiatives.
The battle between direct democracy and representative government isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been the domain of just Republicans. Democrats have done the same thing, although perhaps not with the same frequency, when voters have taken steps they had campaigned against.
What’s different now, political observers say, is that the tension has reached a new level. State lawmakers, primarily Republicans the past few years, are routinely trying to undermine voter majorities.
“This is very much connected to the rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen across the country,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a nonprofit that tracks and supports ballot measures across the 26 states and the District of Columbia that allow some form of direct democracy. “They can’t win fairly, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules to get their way no matter what a majority of folks in their state wants.”
In Missouri, overturning the will of voters has almost become the legislature’s main business. Lawmakers wasted no time moving to undo a constitutional amendment that legalized abortion up to fetal viability, advancing a new measure to place another amendment on the ballot that would ban it again.
They also moved to repeal a sick leave requirement and portions of a minimum wage increase, which had also passed through the initiative process but which Republicans have said are harmful to businesses.
The bill has gone to Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has indicated that he will sign it.
In addition, Missouri lawmakers passed, and the governor signed, a new law that limits the ability of courts to intervene when the legislature writes ballot language for proposed constitutional amendments.
Critics say the law opens the door to misleading ballot language, giving politicians and partisan officials more power to frame initiatives in a way that could mislead voters. Kehoe said in a statement that the law “streamlines complex procedures while protecting the rights of every Missourian.”
State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, has supported multiple failed efforts to change the state’s initiative process — he’d prefer a 60% threshold rather than a simple majority, as it is now — and backed the sick leave repeal and the amendment to restore Missouri’s abortion ban.
“We’ve been elected in a representative republic to see to the needs of the people,” he said, “and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City and the House minority leader, recalled that one of her first fights as a lawmaker was over the expansion of Medicaid, which voters approved in 2020 but Republican lawmakers refused to fund the following year.
“They thought they were being clever — and of course, the courts told them they are not clever. They had to fund it,” Aune said. “But I’ve seen this nearly every year I’ve been here, and this year has been the absolute worst.”
In response to lawmakers’ efforts, a new campaign called Respect Missouri Voters is recruiting volunteers to collect signatures for a statewide ballot measure in November 2026. The measure would bar lawmakers from overturning voter-approved initiatives or undermining the citizens’ ability to use the initiative process.
In several states, Republican legislators are trying to change the initiative petition process by imposing stricter rules on who can collect signatures and how petitions are submitted and raising the threshold for passing amendments. They are also trying to limit out-of-state funding, shorten signature-gathering windows and give themselves more power to rewrite or block voter-approved measures.
Arkansas is one example of where this is playing out. Last year, abortion rights supporters turned in more than 100,000 signatures for a ballot measure that would have loosened the state’s near-total abortion ban. But the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the proposal from making the ballot, deciding that organizers had made a technical error in how they submitted paperwork for a portion of the signatures that had been collected by paid canvassers.
This year, state Sen. Kim Hammer, a Republican from Benton, led a push to pass a series of laws aimed at the ballot initiative process. They place requirements on petition circulators and signers, including mandates that the signer read the ballot title in the presence of a canvasser or have it read to them, that canvassers ask signers to show photo ID and that they inform signers that petition fraud is a crime. They also expand state oversight, giving officials more power to disqualify petitions.
The League of Women Voters of Arkansas has filed a lawsuit challenging some of the new laws, along with existing restrictions, arguing that they violate the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester said in a statement that they were “basic, commonsense protections, and we look forward to fighting for them.”
Hammer said he’s concerned that outside groups are using Arkansas as a testing ground for policy changes, and he wants to prevent that by keeping the ballot process “as pure as possible.”
“They drop the rock in the state, and it just ripples out from there,” he said in an interview. “So it’s to the benefit of abortionists and to the benefit of the marijuana industry and others to be able to do whatever they have to do to get a foothold.”
Dan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies direct democracy, said it wasn’t long ago that voters might punish a candidate for opposing a popular policy — like raising the minimum wage or expanding health care.
But that connection has largely been severed in the minds of voters, he said. Today, many voters experience a kind of cognitive dissonance: They support abortion rights or paid sick leave at the ballot box but continue voting for politicians who oppose those policies.
They don’t see the contradiction, he said, because partisanship has become more about team loyalty than policy.
Smith said the disconnect is reinforced by gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts, which are drawn to favor Republican candidates and help maintain their supermajority control. They can override or ignore voter-backed initiatives with little political risk.
Direct democracy in the United States took root during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in the West and Midwest, where newer states had less entrenched political structures and were more open to reform. These regions were often skeptical of centralized power, and reformers pushed for tools like the initiative and referendum to give citizens a way to bypass political machines and corporate influence.
The first state to adopt the initiative process into its constitution was South Dakota in 1898. Now it’s one of the states where legislators are trying to undermine it.
Most East Coast and Southern states never adopted initiative processes at all. Their constitutions didn’t allow for it, and lawmakers have shown little interest in surrendering power to voters through direct legislation. Some academics have argued the process is barred by Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires states to produce governments by electoral processes.
While efforts to override or undermine voter-approved initiatives are now almost exclusively driven by Republicans, Democratic-controlled legislatures have also tried to rein in direct democracy when it clashed with their priorities.
After California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 to limit property taxes — and later Proposition 209 in 1996 banning affirmative action — Democrats sought ways to blunt or undo their impact through legislation and legal challenges.
In the mid-2000s, Colorado Democrats began pushing to restrict the initiative process after a wave of conservative-backed measures passed at the ballot box. A key example was Amendment 43, a 2006 initiative placed on the ballot by citizen petition, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” It passed with 55% of the vote and effectively banned same-sex marriage in the state until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned such bans in 2015.
In 2008, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would have made it harder for people to petition to change the state constitution. The measure, also backed by some Republicans, failed at the polls. But in 2016, voters approved a citizen-initiated measure that raised the bar for constitutional amendments by requiring signatures from every state senate district and a 55% supermajority to pass. More recently, Democrats have sought to overturn Colorado’s “taxpayer bill of rights,” which voters enacted through initiative petition in 1992. The measure prohibits tax increases without voter approval. Democrats have argued the law may be unconstitutional because it strips the legislature of its budgetary authority.
But most of the states that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives are Republican-controlled, which means the fight over direct democracy is often playing out in red states. At the center of the GOP argument is the claim that voter initiatives are driven by outside influence and funding. Smith called it “hypocrisy.”
“If you ask lawmakers to not take any outside contributions when they are running for office, they would find every reason under the sun to oppose it,” he said.
Efforts to change the initiative process have themselves drawn heavy outside funding. In August 2023, Ohio voters decisively rejected Issue 1, a Republican-backed proposal to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. The measure also would have made it harder to place initiatives on the ballot by requiring signatures from at least 5% of voters in all 88 counties.
Backers claimed the changes were needed to protect the constitution from out-of-state special interests — but the campaign itself was funded mostly by $4 million from conservative Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein.
Just three months later, Ohio voters returned to the polls and approved a new Issue 1 — this time a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights up to fetal viability. It passed with nearly 57% of the vote.
In 2006, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to raise the threshold for future amendments to 60% — but the measure itself passed with just 57.8% of the vote, a margin that wouldn’t meet the standard it created.
That irony came into sharp focus in 2024, when a ballot measure to protect abortion rights received 57% of the vote — more support than a similar measure in Missouri, which passed with just under 52% — yet failed in Florida due to the supermajority rule.
After the election, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers began pushing for even tougher restrictions on the process, pointing to a report issued by the governor’s administration alleging “widespread petition fraud” in the push for the abortion rights measure. The governor signed a law prohibiting felons, non-U.S. citizens and non-Florida residents from serving as petition circulators; limiting the number of signed petitions a volunteer can collect before being required to register as an official canvasser and requiring signers to write either the last four numbers of their Social Security or driver’s license number on petitions.
In response, several groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the new restrictions. Florida Decides Healthcare, which is working to place a Medicaid expansion initiative on the 2026 ballot, has argued that the law imposes vague and punitive restrictions that chill political speech and civic engagement. The state has not yet responded to the lawsuit; the lead defendant, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I think that what happens here is being watched and copied,” Mitch Emerson, executive director of Florida Decides Healthcare, said in an interview. “And if these attacks on democracy work in Florida, they’ll spread.”
Red State Voters Approved Progressive Measures. GOP Lawmakers Are Trying to Undermine Them. was first published on ProPublica and republished with permission.
Jeremy Kohler is a St. Louis-based reporter covering Missouri and the Midwest.
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Populist podcasters love RFK Jr., and he took the same left-right turn toward Trump as they did
Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Tariffs, Vaccines & Chronic Disease: The Hidden Link
May 31, 2025
When public figures take actions that contradict both expert consensus and common sense, we’re left to wonder: What are they thinking?
Two recent examples—Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine rhetoric—illustrate the puzzling nature of such choices.
At the start of his second term, Trump imposed “reciprocal” tariffs on imports fromChina and 180 other countries, disregarding near-unanimous warnings from economists that such measures would raise prices, disrupt supply chains, and stoke inflation. Yet he insisted the tariffs were “the greatest,” and declared, “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
Similarly, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. has long clung to debunked theories linking vaccines to autism, a claim repeatedly disproven by large-scale studies. Under his leadership, vaccination rates have declined nationwide. In Texas, vaccine exemptions have surged, resulting in more than 700 measles cases this year, with 13% requiring hospitalization and two deaths—despite the disease being declared eliminated in the U.S. two decades ago.
Both leaders trusted their instincts, dismissing expert consensus even as the evidence—and human consequences—contradicted them
So, what explains their unshakable confidence in the face of overwhelming data to the contrary? Critics often assume ego, stubbornness, or simply stupidity. But psychological research presents a deeper explanation, one that doesn’t just apply to politicians and public figures, but to clinicians, as well.
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The Bias Behind Overconfidence
Psychologists refer to it as the Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their competence in areas where they lack sufficient expertise.
First described by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, the phenomenon is observed across various professions and fields of study. People in these circumstances not only perform poorly, but they also struggle to recognize their own shortcomings. Paradoxically, they rate their abilities higher than those with far more training and experience.
A striking example comes from a 2018 study in Science Advances, which shows that judges are less accurate than statistical algorithms in predicting recidivism. Despite years of legal experience, judges often miscalculate a defendant’s risk of committing another crime. In direct comparisons, AI risk-assessment tools outperformed judges—yet most continue to trust their guts over the data.
This is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action: individuals follow their intuition while objective evidence contradicts their personal judgment.
Even Medical Experts Get It Wrong
Physicians see themselves as champions of science and providers of well-reasoned, evidence-based care. They are among the most highly trained professionals and have beenquick to criticize the unscientific approaches of leaders like Trump and Kennedy.
Yet when it comes to their own medical practice, doctors are vulnerable to the same psychological trap. Research indicates that most individuals overestimate their effectiveness and tend to rely on intuition, particularly in the management of chronic diseases.
In the United States, conditions like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol are manageable. Yet they remain poorly controlled in one out of three patients. These illnesses may not be immediately fatal, but their consequences—heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, and cancer—are among the leading causes of death. According to CDC estimates, improved management of chronic conditions could reduce the incidence of these deadly complications by 30% to 50%.
In medical school and training, physicians learn about the dangers of failing to effectively control chronic diseases. Yet in their practice, most believe their outcomes are better than the national averages. The data suggests otherwise.
A review published in Medical Decision Making found thatexcessive confidence among physicians leads to treatment delays and missed opportunities for intervention. In chronic disease care, this is known asclinical inertia: the failure to adjust therapy when a condition remains uncontrolled. Doctors often blame patient nonadherence, but experts estimate that clinical inertia is the biggest factor, contributing to 80% of heart attacks and strokes (secondary to inadequately controlled chronic disease).
Too often, physicians overlook evidence-based protocols, thereby delaying necessary medication adjustments. Instead of acting promptly, they wait for the next visit, assuming there will be time to intervene. But when that opportunity slips by, delays compound, treatment never advances, and patients suffer the consequences
While doctors face many daunting obstacles—relentless productivity demands, inadequate reimbursement for preventive care, and patients who struggle to follow treatment plans—they also fail to see how cognitive bias contributes to the problem
Steps To Recognize, Reduce Bias In Care
Overcoming the Dunning-Kruger effect in medicine requires data, curiosity, and action. Here are three steps that healthcare professionals (and patients) can take to improve clinical outcomes and confront bias:
1. Evaluate your own data. Self-assessment begins with facts. Choose a sample of patients with hypertension, diabetes or heart failure. Estimate how many have their condition under control. Then compare your assumptions to the actual figures. Benchmark against national data. The gap is likely to be wider than you expect.
2. Investigate the gaps. For patients whose conditions remain uncontrolled, treat the problem like a diagnostic puzzle. Was the right medication prescribed? When was the last dose adjustment? Is the patient taking it (nearlya third of prescriptions go unfilled each year)? If adherence is in doubt, have you had that conversation with your patient?
3. Use generative AI as a shared tool for improvement. AI platforms can support both doctors and patients in managing chronic diseases more effectively. Clinicians can recommend generative AI tools to help patients better understand their conditions, explore lifestyle changes, and learn what constitutes adequate disease control. Likewise, patients can use generative AI to track their health data (e.g., blood pressure, glucose levels), assess whether their condition is on track, and, if not, raise the issue with their doctors.
The Dunning-Kruger effect affects everyone, including presidents, healthcare leaders, judges, and physicians. When clinicians fail to confront their own blind spots, thousands of people die prematurely, and medical costs soar. Overcoming cognitive bias is difficult, but when it comes to chronic disease, the price of inaction is far greater.
Robert Pearl, the author of “ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
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