House GOP ending Russia probe, says no collusion found The House Intelligence Committee is shutting down its contentious investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the top Republican leading the probe announced on Monday. The committee will interview no more witnesses and Republicans are in the process of preparing their final report, Rep. […]
The House Intelligence Committee has released findings from its upcoming report on the Trump-Russia affair — and its main conclusion is that it has discovered no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.
“We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians,” the committee said in a one-page summary of its findings released Monday afternoon.
In addition, the committee took issue with the intelligence community assessment of Russian motivations in the 2016 election. The committee agrees with the assessment that the Russians did, in fact, try to interfere — the findings cite “Russian cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions in 2015-2016 and their use of social media to sow discord.” But the committee disagrees with the intelligence community judgment that Russian President Vladimir Putin specifically tried to help President Trump win the election.
The committee’s findings say investigators came to “concurrence with the Intelligence Community Assessment’s judgments, except with respect to Putin’s supposed preference for candidate Trump.”
On the question of collusion, Republican Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas, who has formally run the committee’s probe, told reporters Monday that, “We found no evidence of collusion. We found perhaps bad judgment, inappropriate meetings, inappropriate judgment in taking meetings.”
When parents and teachers urge kids to go to college, they visualize the success stories: kids who graduate on time with marketable degrees. If every student fit this profile, college would be an outstanding personal investment. Unfortunately, most students don’t fit this profile, and their returns are mediocre or worse. Indeed, plenty would be better off skipping college in favor of full-time employment. What’s going wrong? BRYAN CAPLAN, professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money” (Princeton University Press), out now, outlines the five worst things about today’s college education.
1. A majority of college students don’t finish on time — and a large minority never finish at all.
Since the bulk of the payoff for college comes from graduation — not mere years of attendance — dropping out of school is like bankrupting a business. In both cases, you sacrifice years of savings and toil and walk away with scraps. And while under-achieving high-school students occasionally blossom into star college students, this is rare.
In school as in life, the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Think about high-school students in the bottom quartile of math scores. Nowadays, almost half try college; but when they do, only one in nine manages to graduate. College major is also a reliable predictor of student success. Degrees in engineering, computer science, finance and economics all pay well, boosting earnings by 60 to 70 percent. Degrees in fine arts, education, English, history and sociology do about half that.
Since all majors require four years of coursework and four years of tuition, the payoff for the average graduate with a low-earning major is unimpressive. And the payoff for below-average graduates in such fields is terrible; many end up working in jobs like waiter, cashier and cook that they could have easily done with no college at all.
2. Most of the curriculum is neither socially useful nor personally enjoyable.
Schools teach some skills almost every job requires — especially literacy and numeracy. But after the final exam, students never again need to know most of what they learn. Think about your years of coursework in history, social studies, foreign languages, higher mathematics, art and music. Colleges offer some majors — like engineering and computer science — that train students for well-paid careers.
Yet after graduation, plenty of students can safely forget their major; think about fields like history, literature, sociology and communications. Of course, every school subject leads to employment on occasion; at minimum, you could go on to teach the very subject you studied. But that’s a very low bar.
When confronted with these observations, defenders of college often protest, “The point of college isn’t to prepare students for jobs; it’s to enrich their lives.” But how often does this enrichment actually occur? Professors suspect — and researchers confirm — a dismal picture. In class, most students are bored, if they even bother to attend. As famed Harvard professor Steven Pinker confesses, “A few weeks into every semester, I face a lecture hall that is half-empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video-recorded and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam.” After graduation, few college graduates devote more than a tiny fraction of their leisure time to abstract ideas or high culture. School doesn’t have to be enjoyable. But if it is neither enjoyable nor useful, how can it be anything but wasteful?
1. https://youtu.be/A8E77TrxWDA – VIDEO – Mordechai Kedar – Only weak sue for peace
2. http://mordechaikedar.com/a-taste-of-my-debate-on-al-jazeera-about-jerusalem/ – Dr. Mordechai Kedar interview on al Jazeera
With special counsel Robert Mueller’s latest indictments of alleged Russian trolls, Facebook is facing heavy fire from prominent critics at the New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media for uncritically spreading Russian misinformation. But the probe’s newly lengthened chronology, stretching back well before the 2016 campaign, suggests social-media mischief was only part of a deeper Russian propaganda effort in which those same news organizations were also willing and paid participants.
In 2007, state-owned publisher Rossiyskaya Gazeta launched Russia Beyond the Headlines, a multi-page full-color broadsheet laid out just like a newspaper and distributed, typically monthly, as an insert by some of the most prestigious names in newspaper publishing, including London’s Daily Telegraph, Le Figaro in France and the Italian daily La Repubblica, reaching an audience estimated at nearly 6.5 million readers.
In the United States, the Russian-state media entity partnered with the Washington Post until 2015 and with the New York Times, which confirmed it still bundles the insert into its regular paper. Angela He, manager of corporate communications for the Times, sent an email “confirming that we do run these ads” and that they conform to Timesadvertising acceptability standards, but declined to elaborate.
Russia Beyond, as the insert was renamed in 2017, serves as a “gateway for all things Russia — from culture, travel, education, language, ways to do business, and much more.” Only a small disclaimer right below the masthead, in light typeface, explains that it’s an advertising feature.
What really lies behind progressives’ dalliance with Jihad and Sharia. http://jamieglazov.com/2018/03/13/glazov-moment-united-in-hate-the-lefts-romance-with-terror/
On this new edition of The Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Terror and unveils what really lies behind progressives’ dalliance with Jihad and Sharia.
Don’t miss it!
After weeks of outrage at the close ties between top Democrats and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of an anti-Semitic hate group, the media finally condemned anti-Semitism by a top political official.
President Trump and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney had referred to outgoing NEC Director Gary Cohn as a “globalist.” And “globalist,” according to Think Progress, the Huffington Post, Salon and Vox, is an “anti-Semitic slur.” Those are the same media outlets that had no problem using “globalist” as a slur when targeting Trump. HuffPo had published a piece tarring him as “Trump: The Globalist Plutocrat” and Vox had described Trump going to Davos, “the world’s biggest party for globalist elites.”
Both Trump and Mulvaney were praising Cohn and minimizing a globalist-nationalist split. That’s why President Trump said, “He may be a globalist, but I still like him. He’s seriously globalist, there’s no question, but you know what, in his own way he’s also a nationalist because he loves our country.”
And why Mulvaney wrote that, “I never expected that the coworker I would work closest, and best, with at the White House would be a “globalist.” Gary Cohn is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. Having the chance to collaborate with him will remain one of the highlights of my career in public service.”
Can’t you just spot the “anti-Semitic dogwhistles”?
There are some in the alt-right who use “globalist” as an anti-Semitic slur, just as there were those on the left who used neo-conservative as an anti-Semitic slur. But that’s not what those terms mean.
When Stephen Miller, a Jewish Trump adviser, told CNN’s Jim Acosta, a Cuban-American, that he was suffering from a “cosmopolitan bias,” Politico accused Miller of using an “anti-Semitic dog whistle.” While “cosmopolitan” was an anti-Semitic euphemism in the USSR, Miller isn’t a Russian Communist, he’s a Jewish conservative.
But a congressional Democrat recently did use an anti-Semitic dogwhistle.
A new biography explores the long-running rivalry between the Federalist chief justice John Marshall and his Democratic–Republican second cousin, President Thomas Jefferson.
In the American republic’s early days, a seat on the United States Supreme Court was not the coveted plum that it is today. The first three chief justices each served for an average of less than four years, and associate justices were also likely to leave the Court while still in the prime of their working lives. The reason? The Court had limited jurisdiction, heard few cases, and did not pay particularly well. For a talented lawyer, private practice or political office was usually preferable to a judicial backwater convened in an unused committee room in the basement of the Capitol.
In Without Precedent, law professor Joel Richard Paul tells the story of John Marshall, the man who changed all that. Appointed to the court by the last Federalist president in the waning days of his administration, Marshall was seated at a time of his Jeffersonian opponents’ ascendance. He would spend the next 34 years leading a Court that became much closer to a co-equal branch of government than any of the Founders had anticipated. In doing so, Marshall imposed a Federalist vision on often-reluctant Democratic–Republican political branches, cementing his own vision of what the United States should become: one nation, rather than a confederation of disparate sovereignties.
* * *
Paul frames his story as a long-running battle between Marshall and Thomas Jefferson. Both men were Virginians of the founding generation, and both were great-grandsons of William Randolph I, but there the similarities end. While Jefferson grew up rich, surrounded by slaves and powerful family members, Marshall grew up on the frontier, one of 15 children of a father who was a poor farmer, rather than a planter. (Marshall would also come to own slaves, which Paul attempts, without much success, to downplay in comparing him to Jefferson.)
An official investigation into the systemic abuse in Telford, U.K. wasn’t launched until roughly a decade after authorities first learned of it, according to the Sunday Mirror.
British authorities failed to meaningfully address an epidemic of child prostitution that claimed as many as 1,000 victims over the past three decades, according to a new report by the Sunday Mirror.
The report reveals that authorities in the town of Telford became aware of the scale of the problem in the 1990s, but failed to prevent the continued drugging, beating, and rape of hundreds of girls, some of whom were as young as eleven, until an official investigation was launched roughly a decade later.
The Sunday Mirror spoke with a dozen victims who named more than 70 abusers collectively. One victim explained that the police tried to prevent her from discovering why her abuser was not jailed because they feared she would share her story with the press. Another victim, just 14 years old, detailed the tactics her abusers employed to compel her cooperation.
“I hated what was happening and my abusers made my skin crawl but I was told that if I said a word to anyone they’d come for my little sisters and tell my mum I was a prostitute,” the second victim said. “I fell pregnant twice and had two abortions. Hours after my second termination, I was taken by one of my abusers to be raped by more men….The worst moment came just after my 16th birthday when I was drugged and gang raped by five men.”
In Oakland, the mayor warns illegal immigrants of an ICE raid, and a coffee shop refuses service to the police.
Move over, San Francisco. Oakland, the city of 420,000 people just ten miles away on the other side of the Bay Bridge, has shoved you aside for the title of Loony Left Capital of the country.
Hasta Muerte, an Oakland coffee shop whose name means “Toward Death” in Spanish, is refusing to serve police in uniform in order to show concern for the “physical and emotional safety of our customers and ourselves.” All over the country, coffee shops love to serve up coffee and doughnuts to cops knowing that customers appreciate the security their presence represents. But at Hasta Muerte Coffee, an employee-owned co-op, the message to the men and women in blue is: Take a hike.
Local liberals have been remarkably silent over Hasta Muerte’s policy. After all, California laws require businesses to serve the public without regard to race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. But they are silent about a “suspect” person such as Robert Trevino, a Hispanic sergeant, who was surprised to be refused service last month. Ironically, he happens to be the president of the Latino Police Officers Association of Alameda County.
For their part, Hasta Muerte’s owners are also mum, except for a post on their Instagram account that showed a photo with writing in Spanish that says, “Talk to your neighbors, not the police.” Accompanying the post was an X’d-out police badge.
“We need the support of the actual community to keep this place safe, not police. Especially in an area faced by drug sales and abuse, homelessness, and toxic masculinity as we see here on this block.”
