Failing Morals, Escalated Airstrikes, and a Kids Drop Dead Approach

Failing Morals
With Harvard rescinding its fellowship for whistle-blower Chelsea Manning -- and with former Trump aides Sean Spicer and Corey Lewandowski starting theirs -- here's a brief who's who of the controversial former government officials now employed by elite universities:

Harold Koh returned to his professorship at Yale in 2013 after spending nearly four years as the legal adviser to the State Department, where he provided the rationale for President Obama's use of drone strikes and for U.S. support of anti-Gadhafi forces in the Libyan civil war.

John Brennan, former CIA director, became a distinguished fellow at Fordham University in 2017 after developing the U.S. government's targeted-killing program and supporting the torture policies of the George W. Bush era.

John Yoo went back to his professorship at UC Berkley after co-authoring the so-called torture memos, which sought to justify the Bush administration's use of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

John Negroponte continues as the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale, despite the fact that, as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, he coordinated support for the Nicaraguan death squads known as contras. (Source: The Nation, October 16, 2017.)

Air Strikes
The American airstrikes against ISIS in Libya in late December marked a milestone for Donald Trump in eight months as president: he has attacked all seven countries that Barack Obama had bombed over the previous eight years. Here's a look at how President Trump ramped up America's wars in 2017:

2,566 - Air strikes in Afghanistan are more than double the total in Obama's last two years.

7,817 - Air strikes in Syria are more than double the number in 2016.

105 - Air strikes in Yemen are two-thirds of the total from 2002 to 2016.

16 - Air strikes in Somalia are more than any previous year. (Source: The Nation, November 6, 2017.)

GOP to Poor Kids: Drop Dead
Now that Congress has missed the December 30 deadline to renew funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, kids across the country stand to lose coverage as states burn through their remaining money. CHIP, a 20-year-old program, currently provides health insurance to about 9 million children from low-and middle-income families.

The Senate bill to fix the problem has sailed through committee and is expected to pass. The House effort has hit a roadblock, since the Democrats want to extend CHIP but object to the GOP's attempt to fund the program by raising premiums on higher-income Medicare recipients and by siphoning money from the Affordable Care Act.

Earlier this year, a nonpartisan report estimated that unless Congress renews CHIP funding, three states and the District of Columbia will exhaust their funds by the end of 2017. Minnesota, which was projected to run out earliest, received $3.6 million in emergency funding while Congress hemmed and hawed; however, this infusion is only about 2 percent of the state's annual CHIP budget. Another 27 states will run out by March 2018, and every state but Wyoming will be dry by the end of June. The absence of federal funding will make it incumbent on individual states to figure out how to cover the needs of these children. (Source: The Nation, November 6, 2017.)