Conservative critics of potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg complain that the former New York mayor loved skyscrapers, hated cigarettes, trans fats, and Big Gulp sodas, and supported such liberal causes as gun control and battling climate change. But New Yorkers—and other Americans who paid attention to his three terms as mayor—also know that he never lost a political race, and that, during his 12 years in City Hall, New York's crime rates plunged, schools improved, tourism soared, racial tensions eased, and city revenues swelled. His achievements—and failures—for New York are clear.

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What could Iran's ayatollahs be thinking? On November 5th, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani announced that his government was planning to restart sensitive nuclear work prohibited under the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). (The regime has since done so, injecting uranium gas into its centrifuges at its nuclear enrichment facility at Fordow.) The step marks the most concrete Iranian move to date to pull out of the JCPOA, which President Trump abandoned last year but which the remaining P5+1 nations (France, Great Britain, Russia, China and Germany) are desperate to see continue. It also reflects an Iranian effort to prompt those countries to put pressure on the United States to roll back its "maximum pressure" campaign against the Iranian regime. But Iran's decision could turn out to be a tremendously costly one for Tehran, for a couple of key reasons.

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At a rally for Bernie Sanders in Minneapolis on Sunday, Rep. Ilhan Omar told a cheering crowd that she was excited to campaign for a presidential candidate who "will fight against Western imperialism and fight for a just world."

What do you suppose she has in mind? Last I looked, Italian Somaliland and the Belgian Congo were long gone. Is she outraged that America is preventing Kim Jong-un from uniting the Korean peninsula?

I haven't the foggiest. What I do know: Right now, people in Hong Kong, Iraq and Lebanon are putting their lives on the line in struggles against oppressive empire builders. Ms. Omar, Mr. Sanders and others who fancy themselves anti-imperialists show not the slightest concern for them.

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WHEN BOSTON police officers declared an illegal strike in September 1919, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge condemned the men for "desertion of duty," and upheld the decision of the commissioner of police to fire the strikers and hire replacements. "There is no right to strike against the public safety," he declared, "by anybody, anywhere, any time."

Coolidge's resolute stand made him a national hero overnight. In November he was reelected in a landslide. A year later he was Warren Harding's running mate on the GOP national ticket, and won election to the White House in his own right in 1924.

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A Portuguese populist party called Chega! — Enough! — has secured a seat in Parliament, after winning more than 65,000 votes in legislative elections held on October 6. It is the first time that an anti-establishment party has entered Parliament since Portugal became a democracy in 1974.

Chega leader André Ventura, a 36-year-old law professor and television sports personality, campaigned on a theme of law and order and opposition to both political correctness and the imposition of cultural Marxism. He rode a wave of discontent with traditional center-right parties, which in recent years have drifted to the left on domestic and foreign policy issues.

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In what may well have been the shortest duration of sanctions in modern history, President Trump on Oct. 23 lifted all of the sanctions he had imposed on Turkey just nine days earlier for "escalating violence, endangering innocent civilians, and destabilizing the region" with its military incursion into northeast Syria.

In his statement, Trump referred to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as "a man I've gotten to know very well, and a man who loves his country." Trump then added, "In his mind, he's doing the right thing for his country." And now, Trump says, the two men "may be meeting in the very near future."

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Part 1 in a series

Much of modern environmental activism, which owes more to zealotry than evidence, has spawned a nasty perversion — let's call it the Pseudo-Scientific Method. As employed by environmental campaigners and the activist scientists who enable them, it has little to do with scientific discovery or the accumulation of knowledge; rather, it is "advocacy research" that creates "evidence" to support a pre-determined public policy — usually, inappropriate regulation or even bans.

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"Trump has betrayed the Syrian Kurds" — so goes a popular refrain regarding the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the areas of northeast Syria held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The events that have followed — namely, a Turkish invasion of parts of SDF territory along the border and the deployment of Syrian government forces in some SDF areas — have been characterized as a strategic disaster for American interests, with some commentators even proclaiming the withdrawal as indicative of a U.S. imperial decline and U.S. disengagement from the Middle East.

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