FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.S. Airstrikes on Syria Divide Middle East Saudi Arabia and Israel cheer the missile strikes; Iran condemns them By Rory Jones and Margherita Stancati

Posted By on April 7th, 2017

Syria’s staunchest foes in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia and Israel—cheered the U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian air base early Friday, saying they sent a clear message that the international community wouldn’t tolerate chemical weapons.

However, Iran, which is a key military and financial backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, condemned the attack as a move that would deepen the chaos in Syria and strengthen armed opposition groups.

“Tehran considers using this excuse to take unilateral measures dangerous, destructive and a violation of international laws,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

The U.S. military launched dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles overnight against the Shayrat air base near the city of Homs in Syria, following this week’s suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town. The U.S. strikes were intended to cripple the base’s airfield and other infrastructure, and to indicate that the chemical attack was unacceptable to the U.S.

Saudi Arabia, which an important ally of the Syrian anti-government opposition, declared its full support for Washington’s operation.

“The Syrian regime brought this military operation upon itself,” said a statement attributed to a foreign ministry official and carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. “The brave decision taken by the U.S. president in response to these crimes should be hailed at a time when the international community has been unable to put a stop to such actions by the Syrian regime.”

Riyadh and other Gulf monarchies have long pushed for more decisive U.S. action against forces loyal to Mr. Assad, who is backed by Tehran—Saudi Arabia’s rival for regional influence.

“Everyone was waiting for the U.S. to act against Bashar al-Assad,” said Ibrahim al-Marie, a retired Saudi colonel and security analyst based in Riyadh. “The Trump administration is also saying: we will be a big player in Syria, not like the Obama administration.” CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Conflicts of J. Edgar Comey The FBI chief refuses to tell Congress who requested to ‘unmask’ Mike Flynn’s name. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on April 7th, 2017

We interrupt the Russia-scandal program to ask two simple questions of one of the nation’s top law-enforcement officers: What exactly is FBI Director Jim Comey doing about the only crime that has so far been revealed in this Russia probe? And is he too conflicted even to be doing it?

That crime is of course the leaking that toppled Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The media and Democrats have done their best to avoid covering this, for the simple reason that some of them were complicit. Yet in the entire speculative drama over Russian interference in American elections, so far this is the only crime that is beyond any doubt.

It’s a serious crime, too. Someone in the U.S. government obtained highly classified information about a conversation between an incoming presidential adviser and a foreign official. Someone then leaked Mr. Flynn’s name and the contents of that conversation to the press, resulting in his resignation. As even Mr. Comey recently confirmed, the leaking of such material is an “extraordinarily unusual event.” It is also a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.

Why? Because such leaks expose American intelligence sources and methods, putting national security at risk. Moreover, leaking the names of private citizens under surveillance (with the express intent to cause harm) is among the grossest violations of civil liberties. It is what police states do.

The Washington Post story about Mr. Flynn’s conversation cited as its sources “nine current and former officials” who “had access to reports from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” That means at least nine current or former Obama administration officials or bureaucrats should be looking at criminal charges.

Which brings us to Mr. Comey. Leaks are in the FBI’s purview, and this case ought to be a slam dunk. Unlike in some leak investigations, Mr. Comey has a trail of bread loaves to follow. Someone in the U.S. government had to take the first step of “unmasking”—requesting the identity of—Mr. Flynn. There are records of such requests, easily accessible by the FBI. CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION Comments turned off

An Anti-Koch Meltdown at Wake Forest Professors are attacking the billionaires and undermining academic freedom. By Naomi Schaefer Riley

Posted By on April 7th, 2017

Denizens of the ivory tower are rarely nuanced in their statements about Charles and David Koch. But the professorial ruminations published last month at Wake Forest University break new ground by showing that disdain for conservatives weighs more heavily on faculty minds than academic freedom.

About two years ago, Wake Forest professor James Otteson came to the administration with an idea: a new center devoted to the study of happiness. Such programs are all the rage in psychology departments, but Mr. Otteson, a scholar of classical philosophy who has written books on Adam Smith, offered a unique interdisciplinary approach. Planning began for a center that draws scholars from across the university to study the political, economic, moral and cultural institutions that encourage human happiness. It was named the Eudaimonia Institute, after Aristotle’s term for flourishing.

None of this elicited objections from the faculty until last September, when the university announced it had accepted $3.7 million from the Charles Koch Foundation to support the institute over five years. The faculty senate then formed two committees to investigate Eudaimonia: one to report on the institute itself and another to study Wake Forest’s policies related to Koch Foundation funding.

The first committee, in a report published last month, urged Wake Forest to “SEVER ALL CONNECTIONS TO THE CHARLES KOCH FOUNDATION.” The original text, which went on at some length, was also in boldface and underlined. Where, one wonders, were the exclamation points and angry emojis?

The other committee concluded that the foundation’s “parasitical” behavior threatened Wake Forest’s “academic integrity, financial autonomy, and institutional governance.” The faculty worrying about the Kochs’ fortune seem to have forgotten that their campus exists in large part thanks to donations from the family behind R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

The situation was deemed so grave that the latter committee recommended canceling the Eudaimonia Institute’s April conference, freezing all hiring, and requiring that its publications and presentations be reviewed by another group of faculty ahead of time. Earlier this year the faculty announced they would not give credit to students taking a business class taught by Mr. Otteson—even though the course had nothing to do with Eudaimonia or the Koch Foundation. According to Daniel Hammond, a Wake Forest economics professor, the course would have earned students credit only if they remained business majors. If they changed their major, it would not count for graduation. Under pressure, the business school dropped the class as a prerequisite for majors. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Shows He Is Willing to Act Forcefully, Quickly President demonstrates comfort with military action in ordering missile strikes in Syria By Carol E. Lee and Louise Radnofsky

Posted By on April 7th, 2017

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—President Donald Trump’s decision to order military strikes in Syria sets his presidency on a new and unpredictable course that is likely to shape his time in office.

Faced with his first major foreign-policy test—a moment that confronts every new president—Mr. Trump demonstrated a comfort with military action and a flexibility in approach that saw him change course not only on comments he made in the campaign but also on his policy toward Syria in just 48 hours after seeing gruesome photographic evidence from the Asssad regime’s chemical-weapons attack Tuesday.

His decision drew support from Republican and Democratic lawmakers who have long called for stronger U.S. action in Syria.

But with his message delivered both in missiles and in a presidential address from behind a podium at his private resort in Florida, Mr. Trump faces the difficult choice his predecessor and other world leaders have grappled with for years: Now what? It’s the question that repeatedly led President Barack Obama to decide against deeper military involvement in Syria.

Just three months into his presidency Mr. Trump will have to find his own answer. He has to confront a litany of risky unknowns.

It is unclear how the Assad regime, or its allies Russia and Iran, will react. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump intends to move the U.S. more forcefully into the Syrian conflict—committing the U.S. military to greater engagement in the Middle East—or whether he plans to hold back beyond sending a signal that the use of chemical weapons won’t be tolerated by the White House.

One message was clear: Mr. Trump is willing to use force and to make decisions swiftly when he is moved to act.

“Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children. It was a slow, brutal death for so many,” Mr. Trump said in a national address. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

French Presidential Campaign: Part 2 Nidra Poller

Posted By on April 6th, 2017

Part 1 can be found here – click.

The Interior Minister sniffles, Valls gives Macron a peck on the cheek, France 2 throws Fillon into the lion’s den, a book spills the beans on Hollande… And: whither the Jewish vote

Sniffles

The last time we saw acting Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux he was at Orly airport, solemnly declaring the “suspect had tried but failed” to get the soldier’s gun. This was followed shortly by a photo in the Figaro of the dead suspect lying on the floor with the Famas assault rifle still slung across his chest. Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/french-presidential-campaign-part-1#ixzz4cpgeSljr Deliberately misleading? Honestly misinformed? No one seemed to care publicly. But LeRoux was forced to resign last week…for a different reason.

How, in the absence of any discernible competence, did the deputy get to be Interior Minister? Musical chairs. François Hollande waited to the last minute to announce he would not be running for re-election, Prime Minister Manuel Valls could finally resign and throw his hat into the Primary ring, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve was bumped up to the PM slot, and Le Roux became a low-key Interior Minister in the twilight Hollande government.

Last week Le Roux went out in a sniffle. Looking like the fall guy meant to knock over François Fillon. Deputy Le Roux hired his teenage daughters as parliamentary assistants over a 7-year period with 24 different temporary contracts for a total salary of €55,000. Cross-checkers produced damning evidence. Not only were the teenies overpaid, they were apparently moonlighting for their father while simultaneously holding other jobs, studying, traveling, etc. Of course le Roux was allowed to deny any wrongdoing before resigning. The Greek chorus media chanted “Le Roux resigned why not Fillon?”

Valls pecks Macron on the cheek.

Defeated in the primaries, the former PM, who has shown integrity and valor in some of the worst moments of jihad violence, had nowhere to go. He could not decently respect the good sport promise to defend the victor, Benoît Hamon, one of the “frondeurs,” an informal caucus of far Left deputies that persistently hounded the Hollande-Valls government. Hamon’s last ditch socialism is outplayed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s eloquent extravagance. The centerpiece of Hamon’s primary campaign was a shiny universal salary promise, based on a post-employment theory: in our modern economy, jobs don’t need people, people don’t need jobs, so the government will give them salaries and their purchasing power will boost the economy. No one ever asked him why a small businessman or a CEO would work days, nights and weekends to produce the wealth that would be distributed like Care packages.

Hamon had gadflied the socialist party; Mélenchon opted out years ago and created a far Left conglomerate that repeatedly splinters and regroups. Today he runs on his personal ticket -La France Insoumise. The “insoumise [= that does not submit] has nothing to do with the Islamic concept of submission; it’s about the 99% not submitting to the 1%. Reeking of authenticity, dressed in corduroy casual, the earthy showman makes outworn class struggle rhetoric seem new. But pollsters say he gets only 13% of the working class vote, with 51% going to Marine Le Pen. Mélenchon delights in punishing the privileged classes. Under his regime, doctors won’t be allowed to apply surcharges (paid, it should be noted, by the patient). The GP that takes €50 for a consultation today would have to be satisfied with the health system rate of €25. (

Mélenchon’s solution for world peace is to exit NATO and the “logic of war.” The people’s army he intends to create by reestablishing the draft is more a public works project than a defense measure. Awkward attempts by Hamon to create a united Left by swallowing up Mélenchon’s candidacy have failed miserably, as Mélenchon’s fortunes rise and Hamon’s sink

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Harvard Students Launch ‘Resistance School’ By Tom Knighton

Posted By on April 6th, 2017

My, how times change.

Remember when — of course you do, it was just three months ago — opposing the president was considered racist and unpatriotic? Back then, anything President Obama said or did was holy writ, and anyone taking issue with it was told, one way or another, to shut up.

Today, however, resistance to the president isn’t just a natural part of the American process, but something that students at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University think everyone should be taught how to do:

President Donald Trump has a new enemy in town, and thy name is Harvard student.

Specifically, it’s students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who’ve just launched a “Resistance School” to fight all things Trump. Guess the name “Propaganda School” was already taken.

The group makes clear it’s student-run, and not officially affiliated with Harvard. But this is what our best and brightest have to offer the country?

Anyhow, the school’s not really a school, but rather a free four-week online course that bills itself as a means for participants to “sharpen the tools we need to fight back at the federal, state and local levels” with an overall goal of keeping “the embers of resistance alive through concrete learning, community engagement and forward-looking action.”

That’s a mouthful.

So let’s break it down into what’s really going on here: Democrats, or more to truth progressives and socialists-in-training, are just ticked to high heaven their beloved Hillary Clinton lost the White House. And Barack Obama, through his Obama Foundation, has created “a living, working start-up for citizenship — an ongoing project for us to shape, together, what it means to be a good citizen in the 21st century.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Did the Obama White House Collude with a Politically Motivated Scientist? A former scientist at the NOAA has exposed a shoddy report on global warming. Judicial Watch is suing to learn more. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on April 6th, 2017

Following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking “all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement.”

The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.

Holdren’s buddy, Tom Karl, authored a report in 2015 attempting to disprove the hiatus in global warming that had been widely acknowledged by many scientific groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The warming pause threatened to undermine the justification for a costly climate-change pact that was being negotiated at the time: How could world leaders commit trillions in tax dollars to stop global warming if it wasn’t actually happening?

Karl’s report came to the rescue just months before the Paris Climate Conference. In announcing his findings, Karl said the “new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.” How convenient. His analysis was eagerly accepted by the international science community, but others were leery about its timing; the House Science Committee has been leading an inquiry into the report for nearly two years.

But a retired top official at NOAA has now confirmed suspicions about the veracity of Karl’s research and about whether politics — not science — were at play. In February, John Bates, the former head of NOAA’s climate-data archive, wrote a lengthy exposé detailing misconduct at NOAA related to the report. The allegations included using inappropriately “corrected” datasets, violating agency protocol on data review, and failing to archive the data. In the most damning allegation, Bates said: “In every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation.” (You can read more about Bates’s allegations here and a subsequent smear campaign by the scientific establishment here.)

“It was more of a political document than a scientific document,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told me. “People need to know how the [climate] alarmists have taken over agencies like NOAA and NASA. This is about trying to get the truth out.” Judicial Watch also filed a separate lawsuit against NOAA in 2015 attempting to get the datasets used in Karl’s paper.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Be Very Careful Before Beating the War Drums in Syria Russia’s involvement in the conflict raises the stakes of any U.S. action. By David French

Posted By on April 6th, 2017

War has consequences. Callous incompetence has consequences. The world is watching those consequences unfold in Syria today. No one can look at images of children dead from gas attacks and not be moved.

Let’s stipulate two things: First, there were never any easy American choices in Syria. Second, the Obama administration got virtually every hard choice wrong. Or, to be more precise, the choices it did make did nothing to either stop the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the new century or block our enemies and rivals, Iran and Russia, from exerting their will in Syria.

The result is the Syria we have today, a patchwork quilt of competing zones of control that in some ways looks more complicated than it is. Let’s make sense of the map below:
syria-battle-map.jpg

The red, government-controlled areas represent the most populated and economically consequential sections of the country. This is where Russia and Iran have asserted their will, and this is where Assad is spilling the blood of innocents to expand and maintain his grip on power. Yes, he’s still opposed by rebel groups, but they’ve been decimated, and many of the groups that remain are dominated by jihadists.

In the north, our Kurdish allies are on the move, but not against the regime — against ISIS. In other words, Assad has beaten his main foe and is leaving the United States, the Kurds, and assorted other allies to deal with our main foe, ISIS. After the battle for Raqqa, Syria is likely to be effectively partitioned, with American-backed forces controlling the north, the Russian-backed regime controlling the west, and some small forces still battling it out on the borders.

As we confront the Assad regime’s gas attack — which is just one of its countless violations of the law of war, and hardly its most deadly — we also have to confront this core reality: Our leading geopolitical rival — a traditional great power and a nuclear superpower — has quite obviously decided that the survival of a friendly regime in Damascus is a core national interest. It acted decisively while we dithered, and it has boots on the ground.

Thus, we now face a quandary. Retaliate against Syria so strongly that it truly punishes and weakens Assad, and you risk threatening Russia’s vital interests. Respond with a pinprick strike that Russia effectively “permits,” and you do nothing important. Assad has demonstrated that he cares little about his own casualties and may (like many other American enemies before him) actually feel emboldened after “surviving” an American strike.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Told-You-So Moment The Israeli leader could be opportunistic and vulgar in pressing his case against the Iran deal. He was also right. By Sohrab Ahmari

Posted By on April 6th, 2017

Benjamin Netanyahu will never be popular in America’s major newsrooms. Or among most of the think-tankers who set the tone and parameters of foreign-policy debate. His name is a curse on college campuses. So it’s worth asking whose vision of the Middle East has held up better under the press of recent events.

His or theirs?

The question comes to mind as Western governments confront this week’s chemical atrocity in Syria, and as footage of children’s bodies convulsing in agony once more unsettles the world’s conscience. Even President Trump, who generally lacks a moral language, was moved, though whether he will act remains to be seen.

His predecessor had a rich moral vocabulary and a coterie of award-winning moralizers like Samantha Power on staff. But President Obama refused to act when Bashar Assad crossed his chemical red line. He wanted to extricate Washington from the region, and he saw a nuclear deal with Mr. Assad’s Iranian patrons as the exit ramp.

Such a deal came within grasp when Hassan Rouhani launched his presidential campaign in Iran four years ago this month. The smiling, self-proclaimed “moderate” was the Iranian interlocutor the Obamaians had been waiting for. Mr. Netanyahu posed the main obstacle.

The Israeli prime minister warned that Mr. Rouhani didn’t have the power to moderate the regime even if he had the will. He reminded the world of Mr. Rouhani’s role in Iran’s repressive apparatus and his history of anti-American rhetoric. He insisted that Iranian regional aggression wouldn’t relent if sanctions were removed. Iran, he predicted, would pocket the financial concessions, then press ahead in Syria and elsewhere.

The Israeli could be opportunistic, given to hyperbole and not a little vulgar in pressing his case. He was also right.

It’s instructive now to compare his account of the regime with the baseless euphoria in the Western media that greeted Mr. Rouhani’s election in June 2013 and marked coverage of the nuclear deal over the next four years.

Start with Iran’s role in Syria. Writing in September 2013, the New York Times editorial board suggested that Iran’s intentions “could be tested by inviting its new government to join the United States and Russia in carrying out the recent agreement to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons. It seems like a natural convergence: Iranians know well the scourge of poison gas.”

Well, apparently they didn’t know the scourge well enough to restrain their chief Arab client from systematically gassing his own people, even after the Russian-brokered chemical deal. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate Eliminates Filibuster for Supreme Court Nominees GOP-led effort paves way for Neil Gorsuch to be confirmed Friday By Byron Tau and Siobhan Hughes

Posted By on April 6th, 2017

WASHINGTON—Senate Republicans voted to end the filibuster of Supreme Court nominations Thursday, setting the stage for the rapid elevation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the high court and removing a pillar of the minority party’s power to exert influence in the chamber.

Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation by the Senate, expected Friday, would return the Supreme Court to full strength for the first time in 14 months, since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of last year. It means Judge Gorsuch could be a key vote on coming cases, including the high court’s possible consideration of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order on immigration and visas.
The confirmation would also give the president a much-needed win, after setbacks in recent weeks on a health-care bill and the immigration order, as well as shake-ups and dissension among the White House staff. It would allow Mr. Trump to quickly put his stamp on the high court, replacing one conservative justice with another and keeping a promise to conservative activists that he made during the presidential campaign.

The battle’s aftermath appears less positive for the Senate, where it became unusually personal.