"American armed forces consistently perform so well that their effectiveness is taken for granted. Complaints about military spending cuts during the Obama years are such a cliche that they have been yawned at by our political leaders and completely ignored by the media.

But those years have taken us from cliche to crisis. Three factors have combined to create an emergency in airpower. First is the wear and tear imposed by nearly 16 years of combat. Second are with the massive, reckless cuts in defense spending imposed by President Obama which, under the Budget Control Act of 2011, are scheduled to continue for at least four years. Third is the near-criminal neglect of our forces by Mr. Obama's generals and admirals. As a result, so many of our combat aircraft are incapable of flying combat missions that the president is deprived of options that may be critical to any war, large or small. ...

The president should view this as an 'all hands on deck' emergency. Mr. Trump should call in the military leaders -- the Obama-era generals who have let our forces decay to their current perilous state -- and read them the riot act. Those who supported the decay in readiness by action or inaction should be fired.

The president should send to Congress a request for an immediate supplemental appropriations to return our forces to readiness. It will take at least two years -- the time it takes for manufacturers to supply repair parts and build new aircraft -- to fix the problem. It will take even longer to make up for the shortage of pilots in both the Air Force and the Navy.

There is no excuse for the military or Congress to let our Air Force and Navy airpower to continue to fail the readiness test. Our forces need the ability to fight anywhere, anytime. Right now, they can't."

"Senator McConnell's success in getting Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court is a reminder that there's no limit to what can be accomplished in Washington if conservatives don't waste their time worrying about what the liberal press says about them.

"Speaker Ryan may want to pay attention. Senator McConnell's Supreme Court success offers a potentially useful template for Republicans to handle health care and tax reform. ...

"The Garland-Gorsuch episode is an argument for not letting the left-wing outrage factory drive the Congressional agenda. Mr. McConnell's basic message about the Supreme Court vacancy was that we're going to have an election and then do what the voters wanted us to do, no matter how unpopular it is with PBS or the New York Times editorial board. The approach worked out so well with the court nomination that perhaps it will embolden Republicans to experiment with a similar strategy on other issues."

"Even Hillary Clinton hopped aboard the Trump Train for bombing Syria. Her only complaint seemed to be that Mr. Trump may not have gone far enough.

"'I believe that we should have, and still should, take out his airfields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them,' she said.

"This is the same Hillary Clinton who warned us in the most alarming terms during the campaign that under no circumstances should Mr.Trump be trusted with America's war-making arsenal.

"'This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes,' she said last summer. 'It's not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.'

"Well, apparently Syrian dictator Bashar Assad got under Mr. Trump's very thin skin, and Mrs. Clinton's only complaint now is he didn't go far enough."

"Ah, science. If you're even loosely engaged in the wild and dark art that is politics these days, you know by now that 'science,' as a word, has taken on an almost mystical meaning. 'Science,' in many of its modern incantations, now serves as a form of code, as vague and fuzzy as a Wiccan chant. For a growing number of political activists, the meaning is simple: Science, you see, is a lively mix of standard progressive hobbyhorses, tossed wild-eyed and cranky into one cantankerous bag.

"Witness the upcoming March for Science, scheduled for Saturday, April 22. This also happens to be Earth Day, which is nice enough -- and hey, who could object to a good old-fashioned rah-rah session for science? I, for one, always welcome a refresher on string theory, or the confounding conflict between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, or that long, troubling episode in our planet's history when a few impertinent continents apparently traipsed all the way over to the other side of the globe and no one was there to panic about it.

"Alas, this March for Science does not appear to be largely about science, or about people who know a great deal about science, or even about people who want to know a great deal about science. (It would be kind of fun, in fact, to quiz earnest potential attendees about the details of the scientific method, or whether Johannes Kepler should finally win that well-deserved Oscar.) Keeping up with today's hottest trends, the March for Science has wrapped itself in identity politics, cranked up the oven to 'scorch,' and potentially set things on track to unceremoniously collapse into one giant intersectional souffle."

"At this point, it's safe to say that Nimrata Randhawa has a far, far better chance to be the first female president of the United States than Hillary Clinton. But here's the question: When or if Nimrata (she goes by 'Nikki') -- a conservative, Indian-American daughter of immigrants who married Michael Haley, became governor of South Carolina, and is now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations -- wins a presidential election, will Hillary's friends and supporters hail Haley's ascension to the White House as a tremendous achievement for women? Will the fans of intersectional feminism laud the ultimate success of a woman of color?

"Not likely. At this point, we all know the drill. There is one way and one way only for women -- especially black or brown women -- to take a true step forward, and that's through progressive politics. Identity politics works like this: Progressives do everything in their power to explicitly and unequivocally stoke race-and gender-related resentments and grievances. Any pushback against identity politics is labeled denialism at best and racism or sexism at worst. Progressive ideas are so self-evidently superior that opposition is best explained as grounded in misogyny or the always-reliable 'fear of change.' Opposition, even from women and even from people of color, is proof of the awful and enduring power of sexism and white supremacy.

"It's a poisonous ideology, it's straining our national unity, and this week Hillary once again did her best to push its narrative right back in our national face."

"Last week's missile strike on a Syrian airfield in retaliation for a vicious chemical weapons attack will not make it any easier to solve the Syrian quagmire, but it was the right thing to do.

"Dictator Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly attacked his own people over the past six years of that three-sided civil war. Last week's attack on a rebel-held town, reportedly with sarin gas, killed at least 86 civilians.

"It also made a mockery of the Obama administration's boasts that Assad has surrendered his chemical weapons stockpiles.

"President Donald Trump's decision that the use of chemical weapons presents a clear threat to American interests provided the legal justification for the attack, which is sufficient given the degree to which Congress has surrendered its war powers over the past half century."

Read entire article here

"To be sure, there are reasoned arguments to be offered on both sides of the filibuster question. It is true that the need for a supermajority does encourage compromise and coalition building. But given the contemporary state of hyperpolarization -- the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats of 40 years ago are long gone -- the supermajority requirement today merely guarantees inaction, which, in turn, amplifies the current popular disgust with politics in general and Congress in particular. In my view, that makes paring back the vastly overused filibuster, on balance, a good thing.

"Moreover, killing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations (the so-called nuclear option) yields two gratifications: It allows a superb young conservative jurist to ascend to the seat once held by Antonin Scalia. And it constitutes condign punishment for the reckless arrogance of Reid and his erstwhile Democratic majority. ...

"The Gorsuch nomination is a bitter setback to the liberal project of using the courts to ratchet leftward the law and society. However, Gorsuch's appointment simply preserves the Court's ideological balance of power. Wait for the next nomination. Having gratuitously forfeited the filibuster, Democrats will be facing the loss of the Court for a generation.

"Condign punishment indeed."

"Remember the date: April 4, 2017. That's when nerve-gas bombs fell on a Syrian town, killing dozens -- including children, women and the elderly -- with no effort to disguise the crime. And the world did nothing. ...

"If we do not respond forcefully, chemical weapons will be used against our military in the future, by one rogue state or another. Worse, if the ban on chemical weapons is allowed to crumble, the taboos on biological weapons (germ warfare) and nuclear use will be the next to dissolve.

"Those agonized deaths in Syria weren't far away. They happened next door. ...

"What should we do? As with the president's rhetoric, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley's heartfelt address to the Security Council on Wednesday was no substitute for applying force. We know which Syrian air base those attack planes flew from. We should destroy every aircraft in every bunkered hangar in that facility. Call Vladimir Putin's bluff. Let the empty rhetoric be Putin's this time around.

"Why us? Who else? Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are the three horsemen of Assad's apocalypse. Strike Assad even if those nerve-gas victims mean nothing to you. Do it in our own interests, for the benefit of the living. Those who use chemical weapons must pay an exemplary price."

"Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities -- an intelligence need based on American interests -- the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.

"The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president's staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests."

Read entire article here

"The Judiciary Committee sent Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate Monday on an 11-9 'party-line vote,' as the press likes to say. What a shame. All nine committee Democrats lined up like the Rockettes to oppose the nominee whose qualifications and temperament are universally hailed.

"At least 41 Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have also committed to filibuster Judge Gorsuch on the Senate floor, so he will need 60 votes to be confirmed. This will force Republicans to change Senate rules to break what would be the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in history. Democrats and their media friends want to portray Republicans as the radicals in this case, but Democrats are the precedent-busters.

"Mr. Schumer is howling that Republicans stole this Court seat because they didn't give a vote to Merrick Garland last year. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared before Barack Obama nominated Judge Garland that there would be no vote on any nominee in the election year. He was merely echoing the standard that Mr. Schumer had set when he declared in 2007 that Democrats would block any nominee that George W. Bush would send up in his final year as President."