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(This post will be "sticky" for a while.) It's that time of year when we ask readers to help keep us doing what we do. For those of you who are relatively new here, our 7th Anniversary post has a pretty good history of Legal Insurrection. In our 8th Anniversary post, a month before the 2016 election, I got all philosophical about the potential threats to our liberty regardless of who won.

If you're wondering why President Trump's Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos needs millions of dollars in security, this is one of the reasons. DeVos is trying to make improvements in her department but is being predictably cast as someone who doesn't care about civil rights. Erica L. Green writes at the New York Times:
Education Dept. Says It Will Scale Back Civil Rights Investigations The Department of Education is scaling back investigations into civil rights violations at the nation’s public schools and universities, easing off mandates imposed by the Obama administration that the new leadership says have bogged down the agency.

A U. S. Navy fighter jet shot down a Syrian Su-22 fighter-bomber following an attack on U. S.-led coalition forces in Syria. This story is just breaking, so we will have more as it becomes known. Fox News reports:
U.S. Navy fighter jet shot down a Syrian government warplane after it attacked Washington-backed fighters near ISIS' de facto capital of Raqqa, the U.S.-led coalition said Sunday. In a statement, the coalition said its aircraft "conducted a show of force" to turn back an attack by Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's forces on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the town of Ja'Din, south of Tabqah.

As we approach the 150 day mark for President Donald Trump's first term, I thought in might be useful to have a retrospective post about how the American press has presented his record, outside of Twitter, Russia and Comey hearings...and highlight some of his underreported victories. Professor Jacobson so noted, the news cycle is essentially over for the assassination attempt on the Republican congressional baseball team. To be sure, if the Democratic congressional representatives had been targeted (and the assassin found with a list of Democratic targets in his pocket), this would have been "top of the fold" for many more weeks to come.

In the wake of the Scalise shooting, Fareed Zakaria hosted a segment on his CNN show this morning devoted to addressing how Republicans and Democrats can stop their "internecine struggle" and "reconcile." Two of the guests bought into the premise, discussing the challenges involved and possible approaches to reconciliation. But the third guest, Jill Abramson, who was fired in 2014 as executive editor of the New York Times, was having none of the kumbaya. To the contrary, she decried a supposed "false equivalency" between Democrats and Republicans. Abramson put the blame on Republicans for the divisive political climate and accused them of "benefiting from a kind of rage machine that operates in this country."

Public outrage has forced the leading German broadcaster ARD to air the Antisemitism documentary that had previously been censored. The 90-minute documentary, commissioned by the French-German TV network ARTE and Germany’s WDR -- both funded by the German government, had previously been shelved. The film highlights the prevailing Antisemitism in Europe’s growing Muslim population and exposes European and Germany government's financing of antisemitic and anti-Israel groups posing as charities and NGOs.

Flounder has died. CNN reports:
Stephen Furst, the actor who played the hapless, beanie-wearing frat boy Flounder in the 1978 movie "Animal House," has died at age 63, his son, Nathan Furst, told CNN on Saturday. "It was from complications from diabetes," Nathan Furst said. "Over the last several years it was getting worse a little bit. Sort of the typical things that tend to happen when you have diabetes a long time."

You may recall the horrifying murder of Israeli mother Dafna Meir in front of her children. We first reported on January 17, 2016, Reports: Palestinian stabs Israeli woman to death at home in front of children:
This has eerie resemblance to the stabbing to death of the Fogel family in 2011, including 6 month old Hadas as she slept in her crib. Reports indicated that a Palestinian man entered a home in a settlement near Hebron, and stabbed to death a mother in front of her three children. One of the children, 15 years old, gave a description of the man to the police, and he was caught on security cameras leaving the the settlement heading towards an Arab village.

By now you hopefully are familiar with the plight of Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein. You can follow our prior coverage at the Evergreen State College Tag. The short version of the story is that for the sin of objecting to a racist proposal that white students and faculty leave campus for a day, Weinstein has been subjected to well-documented harassment, threats and abuse by a coalition of "social justice" students and faculty on campus. The administration further enabled the attacks on Weinstein through cowardly capitulation to student demands. I addressed the distressing racist aspect of the "social justice" agenda at Evergreen in The Campus Inquisition at Evergreen State College:
Students are being steeped in an ideology and attitude in which racism in the name of social justice is accepted. That’s a dangerous situation for the nation.

The Navy destroyer the USS Fitzgerald collided with a much larger container ship off the coast of Japan.  Seven U. S. sailors are missing, and three sailors were medically evacuated due to injuries sustained in the collision. Reuters reports:
Search and rescue efforts went on after dark for seven U.S. sailors missing after the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald collided with a Philippine-flagged container ship more than three times its size off eastern Japan early on Saturday.

Although Seattle's gun tax was supposed to bring in $300,000 to $500,000, it's brought in less than $200,000.  The money was supposed to be used to "study" gun violence and to somehow lower the cost to taxpayers for gun violence. It didn't turn out that way, and Seattle ended up forking out taxpayer money from the general fund for the "study."  Meanwhile, small business owners have shuttered their Seattle gun shops, causing employees to lose their jobs.  Furthermore, Seattle police report that gun violence has sharply increased.

On Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning, Democrat operative Scott Dworkin, after saying that Jared Kushner is "lucky that he's not in jail at the moment," flatly claims that Kushner is "guilty of a crime." Dworkin said, "if I had done that when I was working for Obama, I would have been fired, I would have been locked up, and there would have been no doubt about it, nobody would have asked any questions about it."

Shakespeare in the Park's horrific and offensive rendition of Julius Caesar with Caesar as President Trump being killed has created a lot of controversy, and some advertisers have pulled their sponsorship as a result. Last night, Laura Loomer of The Rebel media, opted not to stand outside and protest but instead entered the venue and rushed the stage to decry the "normalization" of violence against the right. Jack Posobiec, also of Rebel Media, was in the audience screaming about Goebbels and the "blood of Steve Scalise" being on their hands.