"There's an emerging conventional wisdom that the 2016 presidential race, once predicted to be mostly about economic issues, will instead be dominated by foreign policy. ...

"The argument is that the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an ongoing crisis in Syria, the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Russian aggression, and other international issues have elevated foreign policy and national security to a higher position in the presidential debate than seemed likely, say, a year ago. At the same time, with the unemployment rate down to 5.5 percent and job creation improving, economic concerns that dominated the 2008 and 2012 presidential races won't be as critical in 2016.

"At least, that's the idea. And maybe it will happen. (I've written about it myself.) But some newly released figures from the Labor Department are a reminder that economic anxieties underlie everything else -- and the economy will likely remain the biggest factor in the next presidential race."

"The most explosive story in Washington, D.C., this week isn't about Iran but about Iraq. It's about how a runaway special prosecutor wrecked America's chances of defeating the insurgency in the early days of the Iraq war, and left the region - and American foreign policy in the Middle East - in a shambles ever since.

"These revelations come from veteran New York Times reporter Judith Miller's new book, 'The Story: A Reporter's Journey'. It tells how special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald rigged the 2007 perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, in the Valerie Plame case, and inadvertently condemned thousands of Americans to be killed and maimed needlessly in Iraq.

"The Plame case has been shrouded in a fog of media-generated myth for almost a decade. The myth maintains that Cheney and Libby deliberately set out to blow the cover of CIA employee Valerie Plame in retaliation for an explosive op-ed that her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, published in the New York Times in July 2003. In that op-ed, Wilson contradicted the Bush administration's assertion that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain yellowcake uranium in Niger in order to build an atomic bomb. The leak of Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak - so goes the story - led special prosecutor Fitzgerald on a two-year investigation to find the culprit, culminating in the trial and conviction of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice.

"We now know - and not just from Miller's book - that virtually every element of that story is false."

www.nationalreview.com/article/416681/runaway-prosecutor-who-almost-lost-iraq-arthur-l-herman

"A federal judge denied the federal government's request to lift a hold on President Obama's controversial immigration actions in an opinion released Tuesday night.

"Judge Andrew Hanen wrote that the government misled the court by revealing last month it had granted expanded work permit renewals to 100,000 illegal immigrants before the court blocked the administration from implementing its new policies.

"He added a new hearing in March only 'reinforced' his February decision to issue a 'stay' to block those new policies, meant to delay deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants and provide them with the opportunity to apply for work permits.

"'It is obvious that there is no pressing, emergent need for this program,' he wrote as part of the rationale for not allowing the administration to immediately implement its new policies."

"There is nothing like a journalistic plane crash to inspire newsroom loudmouths to jump on their desks and lecture colleagues about the collapse of standards and crow that they're such exemplars of the craft that never in a trillion years could they or their publication be snookered by a fabulist, a hoaxer, a dissembler or a liar.

"Thanks to the release of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's authorized and comprehensive report on Rolling Stone's horribly flawed (and now officially retracted) expose 'A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,' this sort of posturing is clogging the Web today. I, too, would be doing a condemnation-dance on my desk to celebrate Rolling Stone's stupidity if I wasn't so certain that the lessons the Rolling Stone debacle teach us are fleeting. The time may soon come that the pontificators flop as miserably at the fundamentals of journalism as reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely and her Rolling Stone editors have. ...

"'The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust,' wrote Samuel Butler."

"We now have a definitive answer to the oft-asked but hardly challenging question of whether President Obama wanted a deal with Iran so badly he would accept a truly awful bargain. The answer: Of course he did.

"Iranian negotiators have triumphed on nearly every substantive point: They will get complete sanctions relief and U.N. legitimacy all at once, while keeping thousands of centrifuges, multiple nuclear sites, the right to develop new, more advanced enrichment equipment -- even permission to continue nuclear research at a highly reinforced underground facility that was kept secret from international inspectors for years. In exchange, the West got promises of a new, tough inspections regime, even though there is already a long record of Iran's developing nuclear facilities in secret. The White House says the deal pushes the time it would take Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon to a year, but widely respected arms-control experts have said, given the difficulty of performing good inspections and of building consensus around violations, that this is not enough. ...

"We hope the president and our allies will come to recognize the folly of the tentative deal before it is formally complete. If not, Congress must do everything it can to scuttle it, and show the world -- and our allies -- that U.S. policy has some adult supervision."

"Here is the fact. The intention behind a deal -- to stop Iran from developing, and in the end using, nuclear weapons -- could not be more serious and crucial. The Arab world has entered a war phase that may go for decades. Its special threat is that the struggle is not only an essential one -- Sunni vs. Shia, in a fight to the end -- but that it engenders and is marked by what British Prime Minister David Cameron has called 'the death cult.' Many in the fight have no particular fear of summoning the end of the world.

"Once Iran has what used to be called the bomb, there will be a race among nearby nations -- Persian Gulf states, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey -- to get their own. As each state builds its arsenal, there will be an increased chance that freelancers, non-states and sub-states will get their hands on parts of it."

"U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez now begins a fight for his political life that could last for years. New Jersey would be better off if he would resign and conduct that battle on his own time.

"The state needs a respected senator who is focused on his job, not a tarnished defendant who spends his days fending off credible charges of corruption and raising money for his legal defense.

"Menendez vows that he will not resign. He argues that he should be regarded as innocent until he is proven guilty, a claim that cannot be taken lightly. But that is the standard for imposing criminal sanctions like jail and fines. For senators, the bar should be much higher. ...

"Regardless of the outcome, it is hard to fathom Menendez's lack of judgment after a long career in a state that has been cursed by so much corruption. Why would he even dance close to this line?

"He has done good service to this state over the past 40 years. But that is now tarnished forever. His decision to stay and fight only compounds the damage."

"Recent statements from United Nations officials, that Iran is already blocking their existing efforts to keep track of what is going on in their nuclear program, should tell anyone who does not already know it that any agreement with Iran will be utterly worthless in practice. It doesn't matter what the terms of the agreement are, if Iran can cheat.

"It is amazing -- indeed, staggering -- that so few Americans are talking about what it would mean for the world's biggest sponsor of international terrorism, Iran, to have nuclear bombs, and to be developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond the Middle East. ...

"The road to World War II was strewn with arms control agreements on paper that aggressor nations ignored in practice. But those agreements lulled the democracies into a false sense of security that led them to cut back on military spending while their enemies were building up the military forces to attack them."

"Since President Obama took office, The Wall Street Journal reports, employees of Google 'have visited the White House for meetings with senior officials about 230 times, or an average of roughly once a week.' Google's top lobbyist had more than 60 meetings at the White House. That's more meetings than most of Mr. Obama's Cabinet members. ...

"Perhaps Google should just change its name to Obamoogle, but it wouldn't be the first time a corporation has curried the favor of an administration. Between lobbyists and political donations, and even long-standing relationships, Americans have seen how some companies manage to secure Most Favored Nation-type relationships with presidents and their administrations. ...

"This revelation about the intensity of the Obama-Google merger also helps explain the Federal Communications Commission'€™s determination to regulate the Internet using the pretext of 'net neutrality.' The biggest winners of that action? Obama supporters Google (through YouTube) and Netflix, which now consume at least 50 percent of Internet bandwidth."

"The tragedy of the discussion around 'school choice' in America is the hidden presumption that 'school choice' doesn't exist already. But it does -- for the privileged. This is not only a matter of the privileged being able to afford private schools, but also the fact that, through the public school catchment system, the real estate market is really the market for schools. Every family in America wants to buy a house in a place where there are good schools. Every commonwealth tries to boost real estate values by improving schools. That's how the system works. The rich get school choice, the poor get... whatever.

"The drive for school choice is not a drive to turn schools into a marketplace, it's only to give the poor a way to access the preexisting market, which is currently closed off to them."