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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Big Law Gets Back to Business By Richard Porter

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/03/24/big_law_gets_back_to_business_152545.html
Frankly this sounds mean and vindictive to me….rsk

The top law firms in New York City gave Donald Trump the high hat for years, despite his wealth, fame, and standing. But Big Law is finally putting politics aside and getting back to business.

Last month, Sullivan & Cromwell agreed to handle President Trump’s appeal in the egregious criminal case brought by posing partisan prosecutor Alvin Bragg. Last week, Paul Weiss agreed to provide $40 million of legal work on “mutually agreeable matters” in support of the Trump administration’s policy initiatives, and agreed to boot DEI too, in exchange for Trump’s agreement to terminate his Executive Order “Addressing Risks from Paul Weiss.”

Some decry Paul Weiss’ agreement as craven – and one young associate at another firm threatened to quit unless her law firm fights with Trump to her satisfaction. She’s missing the point, as have most of Trump’s other critics in the legal profession.

Until relatively recently, Big Law is all about business – and avoiding political risks. Leading partners at the mega-firms are practical people who behave rationally, not ideologically. And that’s how it’s supposed to work.

So, when Democratic Party lawyers tried to overwhelm Trump with egregious and extra-legal lawfare, Americans rallied around him and helped him retake the presidency. Even then, Big Law refused to represent him because the risk-adjusted return of helping Donald Trump was less than shunning him. Nothing personal, just business – or so they thought.

It’s true that most lawyers, including those who pursue careers in the elite law firms, are Democrats. Two of the three law firms singled out by President Trump are among the most unbalanced of the largest 100 firms. And while Paul Weiss was closer to average, its partners donated more money to Democratic Party campaign committees in a recent cycle than any other large law firm – and one of its partners prepped Kamala Harris for her debate with Trump.

It’s also true that big law firms perceive left-wing activist groups as an outsize risk to their ability to recruit top talent, mostly from elite institutions that are also left. To mitigate that risk, firms have for many years catered to the groups’ requests for financial, policy, and legal support.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

An EdTech Tragedy:A groundbreaking UNESCO book on the damage wrought by ed-tech during COVID school closures around the globe Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/edtech-tragedy?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In The Anxious Generation, we focused on the emergence of the adolescent mental health crisis that began in the early 2010s. However, since the book’s publication one year ago, we have learned even more about worrisome trends in education that closely mirror those in mental health: after decades of stability or gradual improvement, test scores in the U.S. and around the world began declining notably in the 2010s.

While widespread attention to declining test scores intensified during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—with many experts attributing the downturn primarily to COVID restrictions and the rapid movement to full remote learning—the declines actually began much earlier. Evidence from The National Assessment of Student Progress (NAEP) clearly illustrates this earlier decline. As shown in Figure 1, after decades of slow and steady gains, American students started to give back those gains after 2012, particularly among students who were already performing at lower levels.

But as with the mental health crisis, it wasn’t just an American thing. In December 2023, Derek Thompson wrote an essay in The Atlantic titled, It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber.

Here’s a figure from that essay (re-graphed by us), showing that the decline is happening across the dozens of countries that participate in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). As with the mental health declines, these decline started after 2012, not 2020.

What could cause such an international decline in learning? One plausible explanation is the arrival of the phone-based childhood, which, as we showed, arrived between 2010 and 2015. However, there is a related hypothesis that is more proximal to the educational decline: the sudden appearance of a laptop or tablet on every student’s desk. To be clear, the intentions here were good. In 2010, for example, the U.S. Department of Education recommended that schools provide every student with “at least one Internet access device…Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and assessments that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes.” But the outcome seems to be bad for most students—especially students who were already struggling.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Aharon Barak’s protest gavel Ruthie Blum

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/aharon-baraks-protest-gavel/

In a slew of interviews on Thursday, former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak came out swinging his proverbial gavel. His target was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—this time around for firing Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and gearing up to get rid of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.

Since going after Netanyahu was what the left-wing press expected of the esteemed elder, the retired judge-turned-oracle didn’t disappoint. If anything, he went above and beyond the call of duty.

“The prime minister,” he told Channel 13, “needs to understand that the situation is very bad and that … we are heading toward bloodshed, toward a civil war.”

The schism among Israelis, he said to Ynet, “is getting worse and, in the end, I fear, it will be like a train that goes off the tracks and plunges in a chasm, causing a civil war.”

And this to Channel 12: “[T]he rift in the public is immense, and no effort is being made to heal it. … Today, there are demonstrations … but tomorrow there will be shootings, and the day after that there will be bloodshed.”

This is just a taste of Barak’s multi-media onslaught. Though described by his champions as a “warning” to the Netanyahu-led government that any moves against Bar and Baharav-Miara would rip apart the country and—ho hum—destroy Israeli democracy, his pontificating had two main motives.

The first was to threaten Netanyahu that if he proceeds with the ousters—the legality of which is indisputable—the demonstrations in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will turn violent. Implicit in the admonition was that such a dangerous spike in societal unrest would be both inevitable and justified.

The second aim of Barak’s sermonizing was to signal support for Bar’s refusal to exit his post and Baharav-Miara’s abuse of her role, while instructing the High Court to overrule the government in each of the cases. As though it needed any coaxing on that score.

Still, a nod from the father of Israel’s “constitutional revolution”—who justified his power grab for the bench more than 30 years ago on the grounds that “no areas in life are outside the law”—is a cherished commodity among the robed elites. Though he retired 18 years ago at the mandatory age of 70, he remains a jurisprudence giant in the eyes of the legal community, at home and abroad.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syria: Terrorists in Suits and Ties No Future for Christians or Other ‘Infidels’ by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21489/syria-terrorists-in-suits-and-ties

[Ahmed] Al-Sharaa, on taking power in Syria in December, originally professed to be a “moderate.” The Biden administration even lifted a $10 million bounty for his arrest, for previous terrorist activity linked to Al Qaeda, presumably in the hope of moderation actually being delivered. Since that time, however, al-Sharaa and his followers have appeared more as terrorists in suits and ties.

The country’s new constitution, published on March 14, stipulates that Islamic Sharia jurisprudence is the sole source of judicial decision-making. This constitution also asserts that Syria’s president must be a Muslim and that the executive branch has almost dictatorial powers. Moreover, the constitution includes no provision for protecting Syrian ethnic or religious minorities, which include Christians, Alawites, Kurds and Druze.

Sunni jihadist government forces are reportedly reveling in the massacre of the Alawites, and Turkey has already set up secret cells throughout Syria “to use as proxies abroad.” Christians throughout Syria are afraid that after the Alawites, they will be next. It is also possible that al-Sharaa’s HTS will be successful in uniting most of Syria under its control, then initiate a genocidal purge against Christians and the rest of the “infidels.”

Some of Syria’s minorities have been seeking help from nearby Israel. Some Druze community leaders even asked Israel officially to annex their villages. Israel has established a strategic “buffer zone” in areas of Syria adjacent to the countries’ shared border, to deter potential jihadist and Turkish attacks, and may yet again turn out to be threatened minorities’ greatest protector.

In December 2024, after an offensive lasting less than two weeks that swept through much of Syria, a Turkish-backed Sunni militia led by Ahmed al-Sharaa ousted the Assad regime, which had ruled the country for 54 years.

From March 6-9 – unchecked by al-Sharaa’s professedly “moderate” interim government – his jihadist troops slaughtered an estimated 1,080 Syrians in 72 hours, apparently mostly civilian members of the minority Alawite religion. The Alawite sect, which split off from Shia Islam in the ninth century, is regarded by other Shiites as heretical. To people who practice Sunni Islam — the religion of al-Sharaa and Turkey — all non-Sunnis are infidels. Alawites are estimated to be up to 10% of Syria’s population, and the deposed Assad family belong to the sect.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California and Its Collapsing Blue-State Democrat Model California’s high taxes, crime, and regulations are driving an exodus, shifting political power to red states as the once-prosperous blue-state model collapses under economic and social strain. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 24th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/24/california-and-its-collapsing-blue-state-democrat-model/

While the media and the new Democrat Party grow hysterical over the Trump counter-revolution, they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century.

Much has been written about the collapse of the old orthodox Democratic Party, along with the growing irrelevance and dysfunction of the legacy media, elite universities, and state and federal agencies. But their growing unattractiveness is all related and was not just the result of top-down development.

Rather, current Democrat Party radicalism, street theater, and violence were merely reflections of its own preexisting cultural antipathy toward the middle class. The party is now a pyramidal coalition of the very wealthy and professional classes comprising the capstone, resting atop a vast, expanding bottom of the subsidized and working poor, strapped pensioners and retirees, angry indebted students, 30s-something urban wannabees, impoverished immigrants—including perhaps 30 million here illegally—and, increasingly, trapped residents of a dystopian big-city America.

The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.

In response to this progressive implosion that accounts for Democrat Party unpopularity, under the radar are historic demographic shifts. They reflect two insidious phenomena.

One, the blue-state, urban/professional/college-educated profile has become antithetical to fertility.

No one knows exactly the contributory relative roles to childlessness played by the progressive embrace of abortion on demand or secularism and atheism. Certainly, the fixations on higher education certification, massive student loan debt, years of student limbo, prohibitive housing prices, and a cultural value system that places status, titles, careers, and degrees over children all further promote a declining birthrate.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump Administration to Revoke Legal Status for over 530,000 Immigrants Flown into U.S. under Biden James Lynch

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-administration-to-revoke-legal-status-for-over-530000-immigrants-flown-into-u-s-under-biden/

EXCERPTS:

“These are the 530,000 illegal immigrants that Joe Biden flew to the United States on the taxpayers [sic] dime. They’re welcome to self-deport using the newly repurposed CBP Home App!” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X, responding to a CBS News report on the notice. CBS News first reported in February about the Trump administration’s plan to terminate the legal status of aliens brought into the U.S. through CHNV.

The Trump administration’s CBP Home App provides resources to illegal immigrants seeking to self deport. It is a repurposed version of the Biden administration’s CBP One App that helped illegal immigrants get across the southern border.

CHNV allowed illegal immigrants to bypass the southern border on their way into the U.S. and receive two-year work permits that Biden allowed to expire in late 2024. An estimated 532,000 aliens entered the U.S. under the program, which was rife with fraud and poor vetting of participants. Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are all ruled by socialist dictators and Haiti is experiencing a long-standing domestic political crisis.

The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee said in a report last year that 3 million CHNV applications were filed, including 80,000 for aliens living outside of the countries CHNV covered. DHS temporarily suspended the program last year because of mounting instances of fraud after a watchdog organization released internal analysis showing widespread abuse of the application system.

The DHS analysis found that thousands of CHNV applications featured replicated Social Security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and text responses. Over 460 non-existent zip codes were used on over 2,800 applications and some electronically filed applications had the same IP addresses, with a high percentage of them female, potentially raising the issue of sex trafficking.

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

The President Can Act Unilaterally to Defend America Abroad By Julian Ku

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/the-president-can-act-unilaterally-to-defend-america-abroad/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The Trump administration’s actions against the Houthis are legally grounded in the U.S. Constitution and fully permissible under international law.

While President Trump has made many legally controversial decisions during his first two months as president, his recent decision to order large-scale attacks on Houthi forces in Yemen is not one of them. To be sure, critics such as former congressman Justin Amash have argued that this attack requires prior congressional approval, and Iran has already called it a violation of the U.N. Charter. But most of Trump’s opponents are focusing their attacks elsewhere.

While Trump might be tempted therefore to simply ignore those critics, the Yemen crisis is a golden opportunity for his administration to advance and strengthen an important precedent in U.S. constitutional and international law that fits comfortably with his America First agenda. Where a foreign state is unwilling or unable to take appropriate action to stop attacks on U.S. maritime commerce, the president of the United States has the authority to attack that state, or the bad actors in that state, in retaliation for their attacks and to destroy their ability to conduct future attacks. It is not impossible that President Trump will soon face similar threats to U.S. maritime commerce in other strategic waterways such as the Persian Gulf or the Taiwan Strait, so it is crucial for the Trump administration to explain why its actions are legally grounded in the U.S. Constitution and fully permissible under international law in case it needs to take similar action to defend U.S maritime commerce in those, or other, crucial waterways.

First, even the strongest defenders of congressional supremacy in war powers have long endorsed the president’s inherent authority to use force to defend America abroad, whether or not Congress has authorized it. At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison’s notes indicated that the president should have the power to “repel sudden attacks.” This defensive power has evolved over the centuries to embrace repelling attacks on Americans, and Americans’ maritime commerce, outside the U.S. as well.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘House of David’ Replaces Jews With Muslims Biblical Israel just wasn’t diverse enough. by Daniel Greenfield

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/house-of-david-replaces-jews-with-muslims/

The story of the rise of David, a shepherd boy, into a hero, a king and one of the great religious lyricists, is a phenomenal drama that Hollywood has fumbled again and again. For different reasons.

1951’s ‘David and Bathsheba’ was the typical clunky overdramatized spectacle of the era and the less said about Richard Gere as David the better. NBC’s Kings was an interesting, but baffling TV series, setting the struggle between Saul and David in a modern-day New York City ruled by kings.

Amazon Prime ‘House of David’ is more repugnant, but that has more to do with our own age than anything else. Our age is woke, Amazon Prime’s originals are particularly woke and ‘House of David’ starts out by jettisoning the Jewishness of the story in the most woke way possible by replacing both Saul and David with Arab Muslim actors.

David, traditionally seen as a redhead, becomes the latest ‘ginger’ to bite the dust and be replaced by what woke Hollywood decided is a more diverse appearance.

I recently wrote about a William Tell adaptation bringing in Muslim characters to show how diverse 14th-century Switzerland was. Biblical Israel was also apparently a very diverse place. But in typical woke DEI fashion, that diversity only goes one way, sidelining people who ‘look’ the wrong way and replacing them with more ‘diverse’ Arab Muslims who look the right way.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Hamas in America It’s not a protest movement; It’s an invading enemy.Daniel Greenfield

By on March 24th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-in-america/

Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Tim Kaine, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Sen. Peter Welch, Sen Dick Durbin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, and 103 House Democrats rallied in support of Mahmoud Khalil: an organizer in a Columbia University terrorist movement that called for “Death to America” and “the total eradication of Western civilization”

Half the House Democrat delegation, the party’s Senate minority leader, its former VP nominee in 2016, and two of its top 3 presidential candidates in 2020 now support the “rights” of this alien enemy to pursue its agendas of destroying Israel and exterminating its Jews, and destroying its indispensable ally America along with the rest of the civilized world.

That’s why David Horowitz’s message was that, “Mahmoud Khalil and his followers are self-declared enemies of America and should be treated as such.” And that’s also the message of the David Horowitz Freedom Center which has always been clear about who the enemy is.

That includes not just the Jihadist allies who terrorized Columbia, scrawling swastikas on its walls, taking janitors hostage and demanding the destruction of America and Israel, but all of their supporters from the street level to the highest levels of political power in Washington D.C.

“When the enemy is US imperialism, then absolutely anyone the US calls an enemy is my friend,” Momodou Taal, the latest foreign student to be targeted for deportation and defended by leftists, declared. That’s a coalition of America’s enemies that potentially includes China, Iran, Russia, Al Qaeda, ISIS, the American Left, and the top leadership of the Democrat Party.

‘Death to America’ is not just a protest slogan and the support of it by top Democrat leaders shows how the radicals who launched their 50-year assault on it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. From the days of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, the Weathermen and their bombs, what people used to call the ‘lunatic left’ is now in command and control of the Democrats.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Chaos Or The Gales Of Creative Destruction?

By on March 24th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/24/trump-chaos-or-the-gales-of-creative-destruction/

During President Donald Trump’s first term and again in his second, we have heard his critics indict him for the “chaos” he’s stirred up in Washington. They see disorder and confusion. But those not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome recognize this as the needed shake-up of a government that had grown out of control and become a threat to those it was intended to protect and serve.

The “chaos” label has not been used as often as “Nazi,” “fascist,” “dictator,” “tyrant” and “authoritarian” to try to vilify Trump. But it’s been part of the campaign to – let’s be frank – dehumanize the man in an effort to cripple his administration, chase him from the public square and rile the unbalanced who would do him harm.

A week into his second term, Senate Democrats wanted the country to know about the “lawlessness and chaos in America” brought by Trump. A day later, an overwrought Charles Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, said Trump “plunged the country into chaos” when he “announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country.”

On the same day, San Francisco Democrat and former House speaker – may she never hold that post again – made a similar accusation, wildly claiming that the “administration’s cruel decision to freeze federal funding for critical services across the country has unleashed chaos, confusion and fear for hardworking Americans.”

Sounds as if the pair and their staffs coordinated the attack. But give the Democrats credit. They know how to move in lockstep, even to the point of producing a political puppet show in which they posted “identical talking points to social media” that was widely ridiculed for its asininity. 

Even the Manchester Guardian, which daily cranks out copy scrawled by an assortment of cranks, has added its opinion, with its foreign affairs commentator whining about an “ensuing chaos” that “characterizes what may become the briefest honeymoon in White House history.” Le Monde, which bills itself as France’s “leading” newspaper, is also in the game, insisting that “Trump’s chaos” is the key to “revival” for the “unpopular and lost” Democrats.

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