"The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.

"And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency.

"The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers.

"Over all, American 15-year-olds who took the PISA test scored slightly above students from peer nations in reading but below the middle of the pack in math.

"Low-performing students have been the focus of decades of bipartisan education reform efforts, costing many billions of dollars, that have resulted in a string of national programs -- No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, the Every Student Succeeds Act -- but uneven results."

"House Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., is gearing up for his committee's role in the impeachment inquiry of President Trump, and the first witness he plans on calling is the man who led the first phase in the process, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

"Schiff is in the middle of preparing a report on his committee's findings after conducting closed-door interviews and public hearings featuring a number of current and former Trump administration officials connected to the administration's policies and relationship with Ukraine. Republicans have questioned Schiff's credibility due to contact that an anonymous whistleblower had with his staff before filing a complaint which led to the impeachment inquiry, and now they want to question him before the Judiciary Committee.

"'My first and foremost witness is Adam Schiff,' Collins told 'Fox News Sunday.' He claimed that if Schiff does not make himself available for questioning, it will reflect poorly on his credibility and the work he has done so far.

"'If he chooses not to, then I really question his veracity and what he's putting in his report. I question the motive of why he's doing it,' Collins said. Collins specifically said he wants Schiff to discuss what he and his staff knew about the whistleblower's complaint, and Schiff's own interactions with Ukraine.

"He also claimed that Schiff has withheld documents relevant to the inquiry."

Read entire article here.

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."

"A House vote to impeach President Trump could put a critical faction of moderate Democrats at risk in 2020.

"Two weeks of public impeachment hearings have failed to ramp up support for ejecting Trump, polls show, and it has raised questions about the political risks of voting to impeach him.

"'I'll have to see,' Rep. Donna Shalala, who represents a Miami swing district, told the Washington Examiner. 'Whether it will shift their minds one way or the other, I don't know that.' ...

"A survey published by Emerson Polling found independent voters opposed to impeachment, 49% to 34%. The numbers represent a reversal from an October poll that found independents backing impeachment, 48% to 39%.

"Overall voter support for impeachment also flipped, Emerson found, and more voters, 45%, oppose impeachment compared to 43% who support it. ...

"The stagnant poll numbers have left House Democrats at a crossroads with the impeachment proceedings."

"HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong's leader pledged to listen to public opinion on Monday and referred to deep-seated problems in society after a landslide election victory by opponents of Chinese rule amid months of sometimes violent pro-democracy unrest.

"Democratic candidates secured almost 90% of 452 district council seats in Sunday's poll, held during a rare weekend lull in clashes with police, despite a strongly resourced and mobilized pro-establishment opposition. ...

"The elections saw record turnout after six months of protests and brought upset wins for democrats against heavyweight pro-Beijing opponents, greeted in some voting centers by chants of 'Liberate Hong Kong' and 'Revolution Now'."

"There is nothing illogical in believing both that Russia hacked the Democrats and that Ukraine supported the Democrats.

"Hill's testimony aimed at obfuscating this viable theory of Ukrainian collusion, implying that it had been debunked and that to consider it is to lend aid and comfort to Russia, notwithstanding that many people who credit the Ukrainian collusion theory are more reliably hawkish on Russia than Democrats have been over the last 30 years -- I included.

"Hill even suggested that talk of Ukrainian collusion is the cause of the bitter divisiveness in American politics. Nonsense. The divisiveness is mostly attributable to an obsessively pursued but never credible and now-debunked theory that Trump conspired with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election.

"Critics of the Trump-Russia 'collusion' theory don't believe, and have never contended, that Ukraine hacked the Democrats. But that hardly means Ukrainian officials didn't try to put their thumbs on the scale for Clinton."

Read entire article here.

"President Trump personally informed Sondland: 'I want nothing, I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.'

"The ambassador confirmed this exculpatory statement Wednesday. It was nearly identical to what he said in his earlier deposition when he testified that the president told him: 'I want nothing. I don't want to give them anything and I don't want anything from them.' Sondland then elaborated by stating: 'He (President Trump) kept repeating no quid pro quo over and over again.'

"Yet, throughout his testimony Sondland seemed to oscillate wildly from contradiction to confusion to vacillation. He conspicuously omitted from his lengthy opening statement what proved to be the most stunning revelation of all. He told the committee: 'I never heard from President Trump that aid was conditioned on an announcement' of investigations."

"If coup-coup Nancy Pelosi has a panic button, now would be a good time to lean on it. With signs that Americans are tuning out the impeachment hearings, the clock is ticking on Democrats' chance to make their case.

"Pelosi is clearly worried, telling fellow Dems it's a 'weak response' to 'let the election decide' whether President Trump should be removed.

"'That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action, because POTUS is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections,' the speaker wrote in a 'Dear Colleague' letter to her House members.

"The letter seemed strange enough when it became public Monday, but Tuesday's hearing more than justified her fear and desperation. With her party now having failed to hit anything close to pay dirt after three long days of public testimony, she is trying to keep her members on board the impeachment train, lest the whole effort crash in failure and disgrace.

"Alas, Tuesday wasn't much help. As they did in the first hearings last week, Dems again failed to make the Ukraine issue the crime of the century or even of the Trump presidency. Their hyperbolic descriptions are not even close to the pedestrian evidence they're producing."

Read entire article here.

"The clear loser of the Democratic primary is 'Medicare for All.'

"First, it demonstrated the unreliability of Kamala Harris out of the gate, when she endorsed it before quickly backing off. Now, it has blunted the momentum of Elizabeth Warren, made a mockery of her claim to be an uber-wonk and shredded her implicit appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters as an equally committed left-winger without the baggage.

"Under pressure for weeks to cough up details related to her version of the proposal, Warren has now backed all the way down to promising to pass Medicare for All by the end of the third year of her presidency.

"This is an implicit concession that she won't do it at all. No presidential candidate ever pledges to do something important in Year 3. That's when, if history is any guide, a president has suffered a midterm drubbing and lost all legislative momentum. Warren wants us to believe that this would be the opportune time for her to pass perhaps the most sweepingly intrusive government measure in American history."

"One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this President constantly accuse this Administration of 'shredding' constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law. When I ask my friends on the other side, what exactly are you referring to? I get vacuous stares, followed by sputtering about the Travel Ban or some such thing. While the President has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook, he was upfront about that beforehand, and the people voted for him. What I am talking about today are fundamental constitutional precepts. The fact is that this Administration's policy initiatives and proposed rules, including the Travel Ban, have transgressed neither constitutional, nor traditional, norms, and have been amply supported by the law and patiently litigated through the Court system to vindication.

"Indeed, measures undertaken by this Administration seem a bit tame when compared to some of the unprecedented steps taken by the Obama Administration's aggressive exercises of Executive power -- such as, under its DACA program, refusing to enforce broad swathes of immigration law.

"The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of 'Resistance' against this Administration, it is the Left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law. This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have always had in contesting the political issues of the day."

Read entire speech here.