Family violence needs cop response, get feds out of food programs and other commentary

Crime beat: Family Violence Needs Cop Response

The case where “19-year-old Damien Hurstel of Staten Island [is charged with having] murdered and decapitated his mother’s boyfriend” is “just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to family violence,” thunders Naomi Schaefer Riley at City Journal. “Intimate partner violence: rose 29% in NYC last year”; it’s made up nearly 40% “of felony assault cases in the Big Apple” since 2020. The activist campaign to “decriminalize domestic violence” complicates efforts to prosecute offenders. Family violence is a key indicator for “child abuse, and for violence outside the home.” The next mayor must “stay committed” to the NYPD’s “new domestic-violence division.”

Welfare watch: Get Feds Out of Food Programs

“The best way to ensure healthy outcomes” for low-income kids “and protect them from the partisan crossfire of D.C. politicking is to break the federal grip on nutrition programs,” Romina Boccia & Tyler Turman contend at Reason. “Federal food aid has routinely failed to deliver healthy diets for low-income families,” as SNAP participants “have higher rates of obesity and poorer nutrition than nonparticipants.” Post-1996, states used the flexibility of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants to shift welfare funds “from pure cash assistance to targeted supports,” helping parents “overcome employment barriers and increase their income,” lifting “more than 1.6 million children” out of poverty within a decade. “SNAP is outdated. Congress should devolve funding and administration to the states,” so they can “pursue more effective nutrition policies for low-income families.”

Conservative: KJP’s Book Is So Bad . . .

Karine Jean-Pierre has produced “the worst political memoir ever written in the history of the English language,” a book “so bad it could shame Democrats and liberals into second-guessing their cult-like devotion to DEI,” chuckles The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles. “Many liberals” now have “to embrace the possibility that Jean-Pierre was utterly unqualified” foe her 2022 “promotion to White House press secretary.” She now “claims she never noticed Biden’s cognitive decline” despite daily meetings. “Democrats are so annoyed” by Jean-Pierre as “she has no useful suggestions to offer” except to leave their party, with no destination in mind except, in her words, “leaning into our own truth.”

Scholar: ‘Christian Zionism’ Dates to the Pilgrims

Tucker Carlson misses the truth about “Christian Zionism,” explains Samuel Goldman at Compact: It goes back at least to “the so-called Geneva Bible of 1560,” where a marginal “note on Isaiah speaks of a time when Israel ‘shuld buylde again the ruines of Jerusalem and Judea.’ ” The Puritans in America favored that Bible, and “some Puritan leaders looked forward to the re-gathering of the Jews in what was then Ottoman Palestine and the establishment of some kind of state there” — “centuries before the emergence of the organized Zionist movement in Europe.” The idea lasted: “In 1819, former president John Adams . . . wrote to the Jewish American politician Mordecai Manuel Noah that ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.’ Twenty five years later, Noah delivered lectures on the restoration of the Jews with American assistance to large audiences in New York City.”

Final frontier: Isaacman’s the Man for NASA

In the “weeks-long ‘Game of Thrones’ struggle for control of NASA,” the case for “billionaire private space traveler Jared Isaacman” over Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is “overwhelming,” argues Mark R. Whittington at The Hill — and “the sooner the better.” “Having built two multibillion-dollar companies and privately financed two space flights,” Isaacson “has a proven record of making the near impossible happen.” His “vision for NASA and the Artemis [lunar] program” is “at once awesome and doable.” President Trump’s “withdrawal of Isaacman’s nomination was a serious mistake. It has caused months of uncertainty and turmoil at NASA that it can ill afford with China surging ahead in the new race for the moon.” Renominating him “will go a long way toward rectifying that mistake.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board