Politics

Last week, Bashar al-Assad celebrated one of the most significant (at least from a symbolic perspective) military victories in the history of his government’s campaign against opposition groups battling for control of Syria.

With the help of Russia and Hezbollah, Assad’s army liberated the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State. Palmyra is a UNESCO world heritage site and over the course of the last nine or so months, ISIS has obliterated a number of priceless artifacts on the grounds that they are monuments to paganism.

I agree with Alan Jacobs and Michael Brendan Dougherty that the GOP will be remarkably unchanged by having Trump as its nominee. If there is one rule that seems to govern the modern Republican Party, it is that its leaders learn little or nothing from disaster and reliably draw the wrong conclusions from their defeats. We saw that in the wake of the 2012 election, when party leaders and donors concluded that the only significant fix needed for the party’s problems was to embrace immigration legislation opposed by most Republicans.

In a strong column, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that “there are reasons to believe this moment is unsustainable and the basic status quo of the Republican Party will eventually emerge triumphant.”

The U.S. military have launched Jade Helm 16 – otherwise known as UWEX 16 – a military exercise to prepare troops for an American civil war.  These latest exercises follow last year’s Jade Helm 15 exercises which some feared were being used as a means to introduce martial law in America. According to an anonymous tip off, Jade Helm 16 appears to be about controlling the nation’s food supply. Thecommonsenseshow.com reports: I have learned from reliable sources that Jade Helm 16 is also about controlling the shipment of all food.

French President François Hollande has reluctantly agreed to allow dissidents to remain French citizens for the time being, amid protests from parliament and the public.  Hollande had originally proposed a bill that would have revoked the citizenship for anybody he deems to be a ‘terrorist’ under the country’s strict new state of emergency laws which some have labelled as Orwellian. Cbc.ca reports: In a rare address to reporters following the weekly cabinet meeting, Hollande said Wednesday he had no choice.