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The Litigious — and Bullying — Mr. Trump By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Tim O’Brien did not set out to write a conclusive assessment of Donald Trump’s wealth. But it was those three pages in a 275-page book that occasioned what is, even in the annals of frivolous Trump lawsuits, a special display of petty, thin-skinned litigiousness.

In October 2005, O’Brien, then a business reporter for the New York Times, published a book about Donald Trump, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. The book was not a hatchet job. Not only did O’Brien interview friends and employees and business associates and political rivals and much of the rest of the Who’s Who of the World of Donald, he also chatted with the man himself — repeatedly. They met for formal interviews in Trump’s various homes and offices. Trump drove O’Brien around in his Ferrari and in his Mercedes. They watched Pulp Fiction together on Trump’s gold-laden private jet. It all went into the book, from which emerges a portrait of a complex, fickle, charming, self-obsessed, cinematic American original.

Of course, no book about Trump can avoid the quasi-impenetrable question of his wealth. In 2004, O’Brien had co-authored a piece for the Times detailing Trump’s financial woes — he had recently filed for the third of what would be four Chapter 11 bankruptcies — and quoted anonymous sources who reported that Trump’s wealth was not nearly what he claimed; in fact, it was in the hundreds of millions, they said. (Contemporaneous reports in the Washington Post and Time magazine suggested the same.) Trump, meanwhile, notoriously unreliable in his own estimates, offered figures ranging from $1.7 billion to $9.5 billion. In TrumpNation, O’Brien cited those numbers, alongside “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated his wealth was “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” Trump denied it, in his usual colorful fashion: “You can go ahead and speak to guys who have four-hundred-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.”

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Brown Students Whine: My Homework Is Interfering With My Social-Justice Activism We have to do schoolwork at school? That’s not fair! By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Brown University students are whining that classes and homework are interfering with their social-justice activism — and it’s, like, totally unfair for sensitive, forward-thinking minds like theirs to be expected to do so much schoolwork at school.

Yes, you read that right . . . expectations to do schoolwork at school are oppressive, and it is a very, very serious problem:

“There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” one anonymous student, referred to as “David,” told the Brown Daily Herald.

“My grades dropped dramatically. My health completely changed. I lost weight. I’m on antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills right now. [Counseling and Psychological Services] counselors called me. I had deans calling me to make sure I was okay,” he said.

Now, David did add that he was able to get the deans to give him notes for extensions for his deadlines . . . but said that those were just “bandages” and definitely not enough to make up for those mean old racist professors wanting him to do his homework.

Another activist student, Justice Gaines — “who uses the pronouns xe, xem and xyr,” according to the Herald — explained that the notes should be “more accessible” and “more serious, so that professors will be more inclined to follow them,” because as it stands, it’s ultimately up to the professors to make the final decision on whether to do so.

Hm. Well, David was able to get a note, so clearly, they’re not all that unaccessible. And in terms of making professors honor the notes? Assistant Dean of Student Support Services Ashley Ferranti told the Herald that she estimates they’re accepted more than 90 percent of the time.

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John Kerry’s Ridiculous Trip to Hollywood By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Oh, to have been at John Kerry’s meeting Tuesday with a dozen Hollywood executives at Universal Studios. To have sat in one of the cushy leather chairs beneath a vintage poster for The Phantom of the Opera, sipping bottled water, relaxing in the Mediterranean climate of southern California, and been solicited by the U.S. secretary of state for advice on how to defeat radical Islam. What a confirmation of one’s status in the film industry, of one’s place in the global economy, of one’s importance to the Democratic party. “Great convo w studio execs in LA,” Kerry tweeted after the discussion, “Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative.”

If there is one thing we know about Hollywood executives, it is that they are full of perspectives, have plenty of ideas. You need to tell our story, Mr. Secretary. Fix the plot point in Act Two. The tweets we are sending to convince young Muslim men not to join the Caliphate — do they have character arcs? Are they bankable? We can work with the Chinese on this; they keep telling Jeffrey about their problem with the Uighurs. Perhaps we could enlist actors to speak out against ISIS. A public service announcement, with Hillary Swank gazing sadly into the camera — that might make Ahad al Islam think twice about taking a Yazidi sex slave. Or have Steven Spielberg direct a short film on American efforts to combat Islamophobia. We can get Kushner to write it: “Allah in America”! It won’t be anything big, just 10 or 20 minutes long. A cost effective plan, if we can leverage viral propagation. I know George Clooney will be interested. When we stopped by the villa after Cannes last year Amal said something about how terrible it is, the killing. And it is terrible, awful. And the refugees: We can partner with Go Pro. Give them cameras to tell their stories. We’ll edit them here, in one of our studio bays, and release them via Youtube. They’ll become memes. And the memes can link back to the State Department homepage about all you and the president are doing to show that ISIS has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. No we missed Davos this year because we were getting ready for Sundance. But anyway we have to be sure not to offend anyone. That would be the worst. That would just play into ISIS’s hands. Can you believe what Donald Trump said? Terrible. Sets us back. By the way Mr. Secretary my nephew is a junior at Tufts and is just soooo interested in foreign policy. He wants to write his thesis on the Israel Lobby and would just die if he could intern in your office this summer. Yes, Sam, that is his name — you met him windsurfing in Nantucket last summer — you remember him! Well, he’s just so proud of you. We are all just so proud of you. Of course that’s a brilliant idea: a movie about a government official standing up for diplomacy in the face of bitter opposition from the warmongers at home and abroad. About a man who’s been trying to do the right thing ever since he went to war and saw America lose her sense of morality, and who’s been trying to get it back for her. That’s, well, that’s beautiful. We could get James Cromwell to star. Who wrote it? You? Sure, I’d love to take a look.

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Milbank Changes Course on $1M Harvard Law School Gift after Pro-Palestine Event Nell Gluckman, *****

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

A student group at Harvard Law School claimed this week that its stance on free speech and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drove Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy to withdraw generous annual funding for student-run activities at the school.

Harvard said that Milbank had not rescinded its $1 million-dollar gift—$200,000 a year spread over five years—but the funds would now be administered differently.

The student group, HLS Justice for Palestine, said Milbank decided to pull its funding after $500 in firm-donated money was used to buy pizza for an event advocating free speech for pro-Palestine advocates. Milbank was recognized as a sponsor of the event, sparking a “flood of angry phone calls and emails” from “Milbank executives” and others, according to the group.

The students made their claims in an unsigned letter published by the Harvard Law Record. The letter was later publicized by pro-Palestinian media organizations and on Twitter by journalist Glenn Greenwald and others.

The group had purchased pizza for the event with money from the Milbank Tweed Student Conference Fund, according to the letter. The fund is endowed by Milbank and administered by the law school, which instructed student groups that receive money to recognize the firm as a sponsor in materials that promote Milbank-funded events, the letter said.

The day after the event, Justice for Palestine was contacted by the Dean of Students office and asked to remove Milbank’s name from a Facebook page promoting the lunchtime discussion, according to the letter. The group says it then asked the school to guarantee that it would not be barred from receiving money from the Milbank fund in the future.

The letter claims that Milbank asked that its funding for Justice for Palestine “be rescinded completely.” When the law school did not honor that demand, the firm pulled its funding from all student events, the letter asserted.

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Adam Falk, President of Williams College, Joins the Fight Against Free Speech By Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Yesterday, Adam Falk, the president of Williams College, disgraced himself, the college that he leads, and the institution of free speech that he has claimed to support. He did this by disinviting John Derbyshire, the mathematician and commentator, from speaking at Williams for a student-run program called “Uncomfortable Learning,” a series specifically designed to bring serious but alternative points of view to the expensive (this year’s tab: $63,290) and coddled purlieus of Williamstown, Massachusetts, where nearly all the faculty are left-leaning and the students, with rare exceptions, are timid if irritable politically correct babies.

This is not the first time someone scheduled to speak for the Uncomfortable Learning series has been disinvited. Last fall, the author Suzanne Venker was first invited and then disinvited by the organizers themselves. Her tort? Harboring unacceptable opinions about feminism. Imagine, she even had the temerity to publish books with such inflammatory titles as The Flipside of Feminism and The War on Men. Everyone knows that feminism is a wild success and that the only social war in town is the supposed “war on women,” punctuated every now and then by a “war on blacks.”

Ms. Venker was disinvited by the crybullies who could not bear to contemplate the presence of someone with a different perspective on feminism present in the same geographical space as themselves. But the invitation to John Derbyshire required bigger ammunition. It couldn’t be left to the students themselves to disinvited him. No, Adam Falk had to dust off his lofty horse, trot into the public square, and discharge a smug, emetic proclamation designed first of all to highlight his own greater virtue while also castigating John Derbyshire as the author of “hate speech.”

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Rutger Students Melt Down After Listening to a Conservative Speaker on Campus Delicate flowers need group therapy after being exposed to alternative viewpoint.By Rick Moran

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos made an appearance at Rutgers University, and his ideas and rhetoric so traumatized the delicate flowers who heard him that many of them attended a “group therapy” session afterward.

You are not going to believe what happened next:

According to the paper, students and faculty members held a wound-licking gathering at a cultural center on campus, where students described “feeling scared, hurt, and discriminated against.”

“A variety of different organizations and departments were present to listen, answer questions and show support” to the apparently weak and vulnerable students, who just a few days prior had disrupted Yiannopoulos’ event by smearing fake blood on their faces and chanting protest slogans.

One student at the event told the Targum that they “broke down crying” after the event, while another reported that he felt “scared to walk around campus the next day.” According to the report, “many others” said they felt “unsafe” at the event and on campus afterwards.

“It is upsetting that my mental health is not cared about by the University,” said one student at the event. “I do not know what else to do for us to be heard for us to be cared about. I deserve an apology, everyone in this room deserves an apology.”

A number of organizations were at the event to offer support to the poor, traumatised students. These included Psychiatric Services, the Office for Violence Prevention and Victim Assistance, and the Rutgers University Police. However, as far as we know, none of the protesting students were institutionalized, arrested for vandalism, or for assaulting the peaceful attendees of Milo’s talk with red paint.

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The Witch – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Never has an “art film” been so mismatched with its Manhattan venues as “The Witch” at the two popular multiplexes where it can be seen. This is a very small movie, dark both literally and metaphorically, difficult to hear and even more difficult to comprehend both literally and metaphorically. Most of the scenes are shot in obscure and candle-lit interiors; most of the dialogue is either muffled, whispered or foreign-sounding enough for American audiences to have benefited greatly had there been sub-titles. We are in the 17th century with a Puritan family that has been banished from the community plantation for the father’s sin of being prideful and apparently holier than thou. The father is determined to create his own farm at the edge of the woods and since we have already been told that this is a New England folk tale, we know what that portends.

The best scene in the movie occurs very soon after as the blossoming teenage daughter cares for her infant brother; it is genuinely moving, startling and very well done. It sets into motion the rest of the plot which involves calamitous events leading to the mother’s breakdown, the father’s well-intentioned duplicity, the older son’s precipitous coming of age, the younger twins’ taunting of their older sister leading to serious accusations with forseeable and hallucinatory consequences. One reviewer compared this movie to ”The White Ribbon” where the authoritarian nature of German family life and education become a stand-in and precursor for the larger societal implications of obedience to Nazism. In that movie, the metaphoric stretch is clear. What comes through most aggressively in this movie is the zero tolerance that the director shows for religious “fanaticism” which is mostly evident in the family praying together or having a fast day. The children are not lashed for their misdeeds nor does the father seem unmindful of their needs or those of his increasingly grief-stricken wife. His major sin seems to be his abiding belief in God and the devil. The most disturbing scenes in this “horror movie” are filmed so that we have trouble understanding what we’re seeing initially and once the action does come into focus, it’s abruptly over. Both involve pagan rituals with mutilation of children and animals, lots of blood and naked bodies – the work of the devil.

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GABRIEL SCHOENFELD : A REVIEW OF “POWER WARS” BY CHARLES SAVAGE

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Obama’s War Promises have been easier to make than to keep.

Striking the right balance between justice and security remains the most neuralgic point in American politics. Campaigning for the White House in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had gotten it badly wrong: They were trampling on civil liberties with torture, warrantless surveillance, and blanket secrecy, while at the same time violating duly enacted statutes, even the Constitution. Obama was determined to set things right.

How well has he succeeded? That is the question the New York Times reporter Charlie Savage attempts to answer in this comprehensive account of the fierce legal battles within the Obama administration over counterterrorism policy and matters of war and peace. As Savage tells the story, Obama began his presidential tenure with grand promises: He vowed to end two wars, ban torture, close Guantánamo within a year, and run the most transparent administration in American history. But as the new president was soon to discover, talking about change was easier than bringing it about.

Within weeks of assuming office, writes Savage, Obama “had already started to assemble an ambiguous record” in dismantling policies of his predecessor that he had declared illegal, immoral, and unwise. Though he banned torture, his new CIA chief was defending the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” shipping captives off to countries where, despite diplomatic assurances, they might be subjected to less-than-tender methods of interrogation. He retained military commissions for trying terror suspects, promising only to review their rules. His Justice Department was invoking the state secrets privilege to toss lawsuits out of court, including those involving torture and warrantless surveillance.

Writing for the Times early in Obama’s first term, Savage reported that “the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for .  .  . major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting al Qaeda.” Thanks to that story and a flurry of others like it, civil libertarians and liberal pundits began to squawk about backsliding and betrayal. On the other side of the political divide, supporters of George W. Bush’s counter-terrorism measures began to crow, charging hypocrisy and claiming vindication. Whether the incoming fire was launched from left or right, it plainly hit its target in the White House: “We are charting a new way forward,” insisted a top Obama aide to Savage. But the reality suggested otherwise.

A foiled terror attack on Christmas Day 2009 made jettisoning Bush’s counter-terrorism toolkit a dangerous proposition. Flying aboard an airliner into Detroit, a Nigerian follower of al Qaeda attempted to set off a bomb hidden in his underwear. When it fizzled instead of detonating, passengers were spared a calamity—but the White House was not. Janet Napolitano, in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, elicited derision with her nonreassuring assurance to the public that the “system worked.” It plainly had not worked; only dumb luck and the quick action of Abdulmutallab’s seatmates had saved the day. But Obama did not allow the episode to interrupt his Hawaii vacation. Instead of heading back to Washington, he set off to the Kaneohe oceanfront to play golf. Conservatives were outraged. The public was alarmed.

Under the pressure of politics at home and terror threats abroad, writes Savage, “the reformist side of Obama’s national security legal policy was starting to crack.” Out was transparency about counterterrorism surveillance. Out was the plan to try 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Manhattan courtroom. Out was the promised closure of Guantánamo within a year. In was intensified drone warfare. In were more secrets about key decisions. In were leak prosecutions when state secrets got out.

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The Palestinian issue erroneously perceived Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger,

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Common sense suggests that simplistic and erroneous assumptions produce simplistic and erroneous policies, as has been the case of all US initiatives towards the Palestinian issue, which has been erroneously perceived – by the US foreign policy establishment – to be the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Hence, the initial US opposition to the 1977 Israel-Egypt peace initiative and the attempt to inject the Palestinian issue on the eve of the 1979 signing ceremony; the 1987 US recognition of the PLO, which rewarded a role-model of – and provided significant tailwind to – international terrorism; the passive US role in the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace initiative; the US endorsement of Arafat as a Nobel Laureate and the embrace of the self-destruct 1993 Oslo Accords; the failure to punish the Palestinian Authority for its hate-education and other systematic violations of the Oslo Accords; and the resounding failure of President Obama’s initiatives, which have highlighted the Palestinian issue.

In contrast to the US foreign policy establishment’s worldview, the first 1948/49 Arab-Israeli War was not launched, by Arab countries, on behalf of Palestinian aspirations. The Arabs launched the war in order to advance their own particular – not Palestinian – interests through the occupation of the strategic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the Palestinians blame Arab leaders for what they term “the 1948 debacle.”

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Merck, Weizmann Institute sign strategic deal on cancer research David Shamah

Posted By on February 20th, 2016

Quietly, the German pharmaceutical and tech firm has emerged as a major international player in Israel

With more than 300 employees at four sites throughout Israel, Merck KgaA, a multifaceted chemical and technology company, has quietly emerged as one of the major multinational firms with a significant presence in Israel.

The company announced this week that it was furthering its stake in Israeli tech by signing a new framework agreement with the Weizmann Institute to research new solutions in the area of biotechnology and cancer research.

“We have focused our healthcare research activities on the highly promising fields of immuno-oncology, immunology and oncology, as we’re striving to deliver new solutions to respond to unmet medical needs,” said Stefan Oschmann, deputy CEO and vice chairman of the executive board of Merck. “We’re excited that the new framework agreement will cover the first two of these three areas, and we are already looking forward to the proposals of the distinguished Weizmann scientists.”

As part of the new framework agreement, Merck will fund each of the two research areas with up to € 1 million per year over the initial three-year period.

Merck (there are actually two separate companies called Merck; Merck KgaA, which operates everywhere except the US and Canada, where an independent company called Merck and Co. operates) is no stranger to the Weizmann Institute. Merck is best known for its drugs, but less well known is the strong connection the company — established in 1688 — has with Israel, where it has been active since 1978.

On a recent visit to Israel, Karl-Ludwig Kley, CEO of Merck KgaA, said that “15 percent of our products have an Israeli background, many of them researched at the Weizmann Institute. We have strong working relationships to develop products with all of Israel’s research institutes.