The relentless criminal and civil prosecution of former president Donald Trump is an unprecedented weaponization of our legal system to attack a political opponent. The goal is to re-elect Joe Biden by any means, without regard to the rule of law Democrat prosecutors and officials pretend to be enforcing. Beyond E. Jean Carroll's so far successful defamation cases funded by billionaire Reid Hoffman, and failed efforts in 36 states to take Trump off the ballot for purportedly engaging in insurrection, Trump is a defendant in five active criminal or civil actions, and an unindicted co-conspirator in two additional criminal cases, all brought by partisan progressive Democrat prosecutors seeking hundreds of millions of dollars of fines and more than 100 years of prison time. The timing of these cases was coordinated to inflict maximum inconvenience and cost on Trump, and to make it impossible for him to campaign actively.
Under Trump, college kids accused of sexual assault were given the right to defend themselves. With his update of Title IX, Biden has taken it away. Last Friday, the Biden administration followed through on a promise: to roll back civil rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct. The new regulations come under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Set to go into effect in August, they will restore some of the worst excesses introduced when Biden was vice president under Obama. One of the most concerning is the return of the "single-investigator" model that was barred under Trump. This means "one administrator can act as detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury on a Title IX complaint."
Anyone who reads the Cass Review, and who then reads most recent mainstream American media coverage of youth gender medicine, will be gobsmacked. The review, spearheaded by the respected British pediatrician Hilary Cass (and ably summed up in The Morning Dispatch last week), explains that youth gender medicine "is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress."
About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts. After listening to Monday's opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the Manhattan D.A. has made a historic mistake.
The terrorist Iranian regime's unprecedented recent attack on Israel, which included 185 drones, 36 cruise missiles and 110 surface-to-surface missiles, is an unambiguous casus belli -- an act of war -- under international law. Of course, Iranian proxies spread across the Middle East, such as Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Yemen-based Houthis, have committed countless previous acts of war against Israel. But last weekend was something different entirely: For the very first time since fanatical Islamists overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and took power in 1979, Iran launched such attacks directly from its own soil.
I'm not suggesting that bombing the ---- out of them is the best choice.
Look at what happened to the Axis a couple of short decades after forced surrender. Japan did well and West Germany did well. Communism engulfed East Germany for about 4 decades and then that section of the country recovered remarkably well.