No postings until I return on April 10
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21525/government-funding-to-universities
Many left-wing university faculty members… are making the absolutist claim that it is always a denial of academic freedom for governments to pressure universities with a cut-off of funding.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to hypothesize the following variation on the current situation: it’s the 1950s and 1960s in the Deep South; a formerly segregated university is allowing masked KKK racists to harass Black students, blocking some from attending classes; buildings are occupied by Klansmen demanding a return to segregation; the university is doing nothing to protect the Black students, citing academic freedom and freedom of speech.
None of these purported factual distinctions justifies the allegedly principled opposition to the Trump administration’s employment of pressure to stop anti-Jewish discrimination at Columbia from those who would praise the employment of similar pressure to prevent discrimination against Blacks, gays or other groups favored by intersectionality. It is double standard bigotry against Jews, plain and simple.
The pressure on Columbia may produce positive results — if it keeps its promises — including more academic freedom and free speech for students who were victimized by Columbia’s inaction until it was pressured to act by the threat of defunding. That would be a good thing, just as federal pressure on some southern universities that reduced discrimination against Blacks in the 1950s and 1960s was a good thing.
Many left-wing university faculty members (a redundancy if there ever was one) are rebelling against the Trump administration’s threat to cut federal funding to universities that tolerate antisemitic actions against their Jewish students. They condemned the acting president of Columbia for accepting some of the administration’s conditions for restoring the $400 million that it threatened to cut, and she was forced to resign.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/democrats-demand-accountability-for-signal-leak-after-giving-a-pass-to-biden-clinton-administrations/
Signalgate Critics Overlook Democrats’ Own Failures
After Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly included in a Signal chat of top Trump administration officials discussing an upcoming attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Politico Playbook boldly claimed that there is “no administration in the world” where a “blunder of these proportions happens and nobody gets fired or resigns.”
“Not in London. Not in Moscow. Not in Tokyo. Not in Pyongyang. Nowhere,” the outlet underscored.
Playbook’s author missed at least one glaring example: President Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cost the lives of 13 service members but did not result in a single firing.
CNBC host Joe Kernen brought up the Biden administration’s abysmal withdrawal during an interview with Senator Mark Warner (D., Va.), who actually laughed off the comparison.
During an appearance on Squawk Box, Warner dismissed those who voiced concerns about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and former President Joe Biden’s “incompetence,” saying the Trump administration was no better.
But Kernan noted the air strikes against the Houthis were a success, while Biden failed disastrously in Afghanistan.
“You remember the Biden administration started with the biggest f-up in history with Afghanistan and 13 dead Americans,” Kernen said. “Let’s not get too sanctimonious and high and mighty about screwing up.”
Warner laughed and said, “Should we go back to even to—”
“That’s only four years [ago], senator!” Kernen interrupted.
Fox News also reported on Warner’s hypocrisy on the issue, with the senator having used the Signal app himself to work with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to connect with the disgraced Steele dossier author.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/31/banning-le-pen-playing-with-fire/
An insurgent politician, spoiling to cause an upset and topple the establishment, removed from the ballot paper following corruption charges. No, I’m not talking about Erdogan’s Turkey, or some other faraway autocracy, but nominally democratic France, where a court has just upended the next presidential election.
Marine Le Pen – leader of the right-wing National Rally (RN), preparing for a fourth tilt at the French presidency in 2027 – has been banned from standing for election for five years. She’s been found guilty for her role in siphoning off millions of euros in European Parliament funds and using it to fund RN’s domestic political activities. She’s also been fined €100,000 and sentenced to four years in prison – though she would only serve half of that, under house arrest.
It might not come to that – Le Pen will immediately appeal her sentence, a process that could take years. But the five-year ban on her running for president, or any other form of elected office, will take effect immediately, making another bid for the Élysée in two years’ time incredibly unlikely, if not totally impossible.
On the embezzlement charges themselves, Le Pen may well be bang to rights – even if a little creative accounting has long been par for the course among the Brussels set. The judge said National Rally staff had signed ‘fictional contracts’, establishing that ‘all these people were in reality working for the party and not for the MEP to which they were theoretically attached’. Le Pen refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing throughout, leading to a harsher sentence.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-jasmine-crocketts-comments-on-abbott-among-other-things-says-about-democrats/
Rep. Jasmine Crockett seems to be trying to compete with AOC for the title of dumbest Democrat in the House of Representatives. I didn’t think I’d live to see the day that AOC would find someone she could win when comparing intelligence with someone else outside of a special needs classroom, but here we are.
And really, the last few days haven’t been great for the Texas Democrat.
It wasn’t made any better by her referring to Gov. Greg Abbott, who is in a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels.” Her backpeddling explanation for what she supposedly meant didn’t make a lot of sense, of course. It also seems like BS since she’d supported its use previously to describe Abbott.
Then there was the videoed assault on a reporter trying to ask her questions in a hallway open to the public. She’s tried “explaining” that away, too. She’s never at fault, of course, and why would she be?
See, what we need to understand about Crockett and many of her fellow leftists is that, quite simply, they can do whatever they want to anyone on the right.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/state-percent-plans-college-admissions-race-affirmative-action
In her 2024 State of the State address, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the “Top 10% Promise.” The policy guarantees New York high school seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their class direct admission to the State University of New York system.
The initiative, introduced in response to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action in college admissions, is hardly novel. Since 1996, several states have adopted similar “percent plans”—policies that grant automatic admission to public universities based on class rank rather than test scores—in response to bans on racial preferences. But as I show in a new Manhattan Institute issue brief, these plans often fall short, both in advancing racial diversity and in boosting academic outcomes for the students they aim to help.
Consider Texas, which pioneered the “percent plan” model. In 1992, a white woman named Cheryl Hopwood was denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law. At the time, the school based admissions primarily on the “Texas Index,” a composite score combining undergraduate GPA and LSAT results. That year, black and Hispanic applicants needed a TI of at least 189 for admission, while white and “non-preferred minority” applicants needed a minimum score of 199. Hopwood, who earned a TI of 199, sued the law school for racial discrimination.
The United States District Court for the Western District of Texas heard the case and sided with the law school. But Hopwood appealed, and in 1996, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision. “The law school presented no compelling justification, under the Fourteenth Amendment or Supreme Court precedent, that allows it to continue to elevate some races over others,” it held. At the time, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling was binding, and it invalidated the use of affirmative action in Texas’s public universities.
Texas Democrats feared that, without racial preferences, the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled in the state university system would plummet. So, led by state representative Irma Rangel, they proposed a supposedly race-neutral alternative to affirmative action: the “Top 10% Plan.” Rangel’s plan guaranteed all Texas seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class direct admission to the state university of their choice, regardless of race or ethnicity. For this reason, Democratic lawmakers understood the policy to be an alternative to affirmative action.
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/03/31/musk-demolishes-medias-trump-dictator-fantasy-n4938443
Elon Musk headlined a town hall in Green Bay, Wisc., on Sunday evening, just days before Wisconsin voters decide a pivotal state Supreme Court race. During the event, Musk underscored his opposition to activist judges by signing two $1 million checks to supporters of an online petition against judicial overreach. Wearing a Wisconsin cheesehead, which he later autographed and tossed into the crowd, Musk used the event to highlight the stakes in the election between conservative candidate Brad Schimel and Democrat-backed Susan Crawford.
During his speech, he also sharply criticized the media’s treatment of President Trump, calling out the absurdity of comparisons between Trump and some of history’s most notorious dictators. Musk argued that such hyperbole reveals both a political agenda and a fundamental failure in historical education.
“They’ve called President Trump every name in the book,” Musk said. “I think there was one article that called the president worse than Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin combined.”
Musk dismissed such comparisons as not only ridiculous but also factually indefensible. “Uh, actually, President Trump has not killed anyone,” he said. “In fact, he’s very good at stopping wars — not starting them.”
Musk’s comments reflect a growing frustration with the left-wing media’s efforts to demonize Trump, often with exaggerated and unfounded claims. The idea that leftists could equate Trump with mass-murdering dictators, Musk suggested, exposes a serious lack of historical knowledge among those making these arguments.
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/03/31/trump-delivers-deadly-eitheror-to-houthi-terrorists-n4938466
President Donald Trump, after a series of successful strikes against Houthi jihadis, is offering the Houthis a choice between ceasing their terror operations or being destroyed.
The Houthi jihadis have been attacking shipping in the key Red Sea passage, damaging trade for America, Israel, and other nations, since before Trump took office. But now Trump, unlike Joe Biden, is tired of Islamic terrorists pushing America around. So the president just warned the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors: “the real pain is yet to come.”
On his Truth Social platform Monday, Donald Trump posted in his usual confident style, “The Iran-backed Houthi Terrorists have been decimated by the relentless strikes over the past two weeks. Many of their Fighters and Leaders are no longer with us. We hit them every day and night — Harder and harder. Their capabilities that threaten Shipping and the Region are rapidly being destroyed.”
Nor will the strikes cease until the Houthis stop attacking U.S. shipping in the area, Trump added. “Our attacks will continue until they are no longer a threat to Freedom of Navigation. The choice for the Houthis is clear: Stop shooting at U.S. ships, and we will stop shooting at you. Otherwise, we have only just begun, and the real pain is yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran,” the president ended threateningly.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/canada_embraces_european_suicide.html\
Installed Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will likely retain his office following the country’s snap election on April 28. His Liberal Party is riding a wave of anti-Trump, anti-American mania ignited by the U.S. president’s imposition of tariffs and emasculation of boy-band-backup-singer Justin Trudeau. Given that Carney is a globalist central banker who will use the “global warming” hoax to further diminish Canadians’ national sovereignty and private property rights, it is dreadfully ironic that the Liberal Party is benefiting from recent patriotic fervor up north.
As a patriotic American who despises the federal government’s encroachment on the individual states’ sovereignties and Americans’ individual rights here at home, I can certainly appreciate Canadians’ love for country and regional pride. I just think Mark Carney and the Liberal Party are incapable of providing true patriotic stewardship when they openly push for the abolition of national borders and the advancement of global government.
Such is politics. Populations often get caught up in the emotions of the moment and make poor choices that echo discordantly for decades. After 9/11, I wanted payback at any cost. Had I been wise enough to realize that those costs would include the Patriot Act, the abrogation of the Fourth Amendment, airport pat-downs, Homeland Security censorship, twenty years of war, chaos in the Middle East, mass migration into the United States, trillions in debt, thousands of servicemembers killed or wounded in action, and two generations of veterans struggling with PTSD, perhaps I would have better appreciated the price of vengeance.
Sometimes what we think we want isn’t what we want at all. I have a feeling a fair number of Canadians will relearn that lesson once Carney is empowered to claim a globalist mandate that only weakens Canada more severely.
https://www.jns.org/methinks-the-left-doth-protest-too-much/
In a letter obtained last week by Israel Insider, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Brian Mast (R-Fla.)—the chairs of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, respectively—requested of the Jewish Communal Fund, Middle East Dialogue Network, Movement for Quality Government in Israel, PEF Israel Endowment Funds, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and Blue and White Future that they “produce all documents and information” about dubious practices vis-à-vis Israel.
The March 26 missive to the heads of the above organizations got right to the point in the first paragraph.
“According to reports, the Biden-Harris administration funneled U.S. taxpayer money to certain Israeli entities with the effect of attempting to undermine Israel’s democratically elected government,” it began, with a footnote referencing two JNS articles—one by Caroline Glick and the other by David Isaac.
The former, published Feb. 17, 2023, showed that the left-wing Israeli NGO, the Movement for Quality Government (MQG), had been receiving money from the U.S. State Department. And it was using the cash, among other things, for “democracy education” in Israeli high schools.
As Glick noted, “Since MQG’s primary activity is subverting democracy in Israel by waging lawfare and sowing chaos in a bid to block democratically elected right-wing governments from fulfilling their pledges to voters, it’s fairly clear that when MQG refers to ‘democracy education,’ it doesn’t mean majority rule.”
Isaac’s piece, which appeared on Feb. 18 this year, showed how Elon Musk’s efforts to “expose waste and misuse of funds” by “America’s administrative state” led to the emergence of reports that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had been heavily funding the anti-government judicial-reform protests in Israel.
