Tuesday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Academic freedom goes on trial
by George F. Will
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Tuesday Top Headlines
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Democrats build cynical political case against tax bill but don’t call for repeal so as to keep it as a divisive campaign issue (The Washington Post)
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Nearly 450,000 people fled these three deep blue states In 2017 (The Daily Caller)
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Trump: “Time for change” in Iran; “The U.S. is watching” (CNS News)
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How Islamic State’s caliphate crumbled (The Wall Street Journal)
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Haley: We cut almost $300 million from UN budget (Hot Air)
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Secret document reveals China covertly offering missiles, increased aid to North Korea (The Washington Free Beacon)
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Trump administration releases final 2017 report on incarcerated illegal immigrants (The Daily Signal)
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Five Colorado officers shot, one fatally, in “ambush-type” attack (Daily News)
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Baltimore breaks city record for killings per capita in 2017 (Associated Press)
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Appeals court rules bakers must pay $135,000 for not making wedding cake (The Daily Signal)
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Stock markets wrap up best year since 2013 (The Washington Post)
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Policy: What the U.S. should do as protests escalate in Iran (The Daily Signal)
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Policy: The Greatest Generation and the greatest illusion (City Journal ~The Patriot Post
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John Bolton Advises Trump On Policies,
Responses In N. Korea and Iran
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{rickwells.us} ~ Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton doesn’t responded to the rhetoric from Kim Jong-un... and his claims that he has a “nuclear button” on his desk. Bolton labels it as propaganda, saying, “This is his regular New Year’s speech and obviously he has seen the conversation in the United States that looks a possible preemptive military force, not as the most attractive option, but as an option that we definitely have to use if they don’t give up their nuclear weapons program.” He says we need a “very careful calibration of what the North’s capabilities are, I’ve think they’ve made incredible advances in the past year, they’re very close to crossing the finish line, but they haven’t done it yet.”...  https://rickwells.us/bolton-trump-korea-iran/
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Kim Jong Un Just Flipped The Script On Talks
With South Korea, And The Big Question Is Why
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by RYAN PICKRELL
{dailycaller.com} ~ North Korea has spent the past year largely ignoring its southern neighbor... but in his New Year’s address Monday, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un said he’s “open to dialogue” with South Korea. “When it comes to relations between the North and the South, we should lower the military tensions on the Korean Peninsula to create a peaceful environment,” the young despot said in his speech, adding, “Both the North and the South should make efforts.”  South Korean President Moon Jae-in has extended his hand several times for talks only to have it rejected by Pyongyang...  http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/01/kim-jong-un-just-flipped-the-script-on-talks-with-south-korea-and-the-big-question-is-why/?utm_medium=email
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Abedin Forwarded State Passwords To
Yahoo Before It Was Hacked By Foreign Agents
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by LUKE ROSIAK
{dailycaller.com} ~ Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems... to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows. Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State liar-Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in liar-Clinton’s State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches — at least one of which was perpetrated by a “state-sponsored actor.” The U.S. later charged Russian intelligence agent Igor Sushchin with hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. The initial hack occurred in 2014 and allowed his associates to access accounts into 2015 and 2016 by using forged cookies. Sushchin also worked for the Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital, which paid former President liar-Bill Clinton $500,000 for a June 2010 speech in Moscow...  http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/01/abedin-forwarded-state-passwords-to-yahoo-before-it-was-hacked-by-foreign-agents/
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German Political Leader Under Police Investigation
Over Tweets About Muslim Rape Gangs
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by JACK CROWE
{dailycaller.com} ~ A member of the far right German political party AfD is being investigated over an incendiary New Year’s Eve tweet... that cast Muslims as violent and rapacious. Beatrix von Storch, a member of the German parliament and deputy leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party, accused the Cologne police of pandering to “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men” after the department sent out a celebratory tweet in Arabic to ring in the new year. Von Storch’s twitter account was suspended for 12 hours Monday, saying her message violated their rules. She then posted the message to Facebook, where it was blocked...   http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/01/german-political-leader-under-police-investigation-over-tweets-about-muslim-rape-gangs/?utm_medium=email
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Trump, Dershowitz Support Iranians, Pope
Continues to Impose Globalist Caliphate
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{rickwells.us} ~ Alan Dershowitz is asked, in a Monday morning interview on the situation in Iran... if he believes President Trump’s tough stance helped lead to the protests. Dershowitz replied, “Well, one hopes so. I think ‘president’ liar-nObama made it clear that he was going to stand behind the Iranian regime, he was going to send them lots and lots of money, of course some of it was their own money, but still, they used it to foment terrorism, to export terrorism around the world. And I think President Trump has indicated that he will not stand behind the Iranian regime.” He continued, “Look, the Iranian regime is failing. The people there are hungry despite the infusion of cash. They want a change. We can’t do very much to bring about a change, at least overtly. One hopes that the CIA may be operating behind the scenes and lending some support, but this is something that will happen in Iran. The United States will only be able to have a limited role and hopefully will be a positive role.”...  https://rickwells.us/trump-dershowitz-iranians-pope/
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Academic freedom goes on trial
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by George F. Will
{washingtonpost.com} ~ Wisconsin’s Supreme Court can soon right a flagrant wrong stemming from events set in motion in 2014 at Milwaukee’s Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. Although just a graduate student, she already had a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness.

On Oct. 28, in an undergraduate course she was teaching on ethics, when the subject of same-sex marriage arose, there was no debate, because, a student said, Abbate insisted that there could be no defensible opposition to this. (Marquette is a Jesuit school.) After class, the student told her that he opposed same-sex marriage and her discouraging of debate about it. She replied he recorded their interaction that “there are some opinions that are not appropriate that are harmful. . . . Do you know whether anyone in the class is homosexual? . . . In this class homophobic comments . . . will not be tolerated.” The student’s appeals to Abbate’s superiors were unavailing the chairman of her philosophy department referred to the student as an “insulin [sic] little twerp”, so he gave John C. McAdams his recording of Abbate rebuffing him.

McAdams, a tenured professor then in his 41st year at Marquette and a conservative who blogs about the school’s news, emailed Abbate seeking her version of the episode. Without responding to him, she immediately forwarded his email to some professors. She has called McAdams “the ringleader” of “extreme white [sic] wing, hateful people,” a “moron,” “a flaming bigot, sexist and homophobic idiot” and a “creepy homophobic person with bad argumentation skills.” This aspiring philosopher’s argumentation skills can be inferred from her reliance on epithets.

Before McAdams had written a syllable, she claimed for herself the coveted status of victim, branding as “harassment” his request for her side of the story. Striking a pose of bravery, she accused him of trying “to scare me into silence.” When, on Nov. 9, 2014, McAdams blogged, his post took no position on same-sex marriage but said this should be a debatable issue. The next day, Abbate drafted a letter asking that McAdams be disciplined. He was.

After this matter earned national media attention, she received some critical emails, some of them vile, and Marquette rightly branded them “hate mail.” However, for these, and for the unspecified “harm” they supposedly caused Abbate, McAdams was held to be somehow blameworthy. Marquette, however, offered no evidence that he had anything to do with the emails. After a committee drawn from the university’s monochrome culture recommended suspending McAdams without pay for two semesters, Marquette’s president insisted that McAdams also express in writing “deep regret” and confess that his blog post was “reckless and incompatible” with Marquette’s mission and values. McAdams refused and has been unemployed ever since.

Being a private institution, Marquette had a right to be as hostile as it obviously is to the First Amendment — except for this: Its contract with tenured faculty says no one shall be disciplined for exercising “legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action” and that the threat of dismissal shall not be used to “restrain” constitutional rights. A circuit court, ignoring Marquette’s ignoring of a Wisconsin contract, refused to adjudicate this dispute. Deferring to Marquette, the court essentially held that a professor’s academic freedom exists only until some other professors and university administrators say it does not. So, the deferential court allowed Marquette an unconstrained right to settle a contract dispute in which it was an interested party.

Because there is almost no Wisconsin case law concerning academic freedom that could have guided the circuit court, McAdams is asking the state supreme court to bypass the appeals court and perform its function as the state’s “law-developing court.” He is also asking the court to be cognizant of the cultural context: Nationwide, colleges and universities “are under pressure” — all of it from within the institutions — “to enact or implement speech codes or otherwise restrict speech in various ways.”

This episode, now in its fourth year, began because McAdams tried to assist a student who suffered unprofessional behavior by a bullying instructor. Abbate has moved on. Now at the University of Colorado, she is still a perhaps career graduate student, writing a doctoral dissertation on the importance of the rights of . . . animals.

The wreckage she left in her wake illustrates how rights are imperiled when judicial deference becomes dereliction of judicial duty. Prospective Marquette students, and Marquette alumni, must decide whether this school, awash with the current academic hysteria and corruption, merits their confidence and support. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court must lay down the law that can stop some of the rot this case illustrates.
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