THE HILL: Netanyahu speech divides Dems.

The fiery takedown of one of Obama’s top foreign policy priorities split leading Democrats, with some hailing the speech as a thoughtful warning from America’s closest ally in the Middle East and others condemning it as an underhanded attack on the White House.

More than 50 Democrats boycotted the speech to protest both Netanyahu’s censure of Obama’s policies and Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) decision to invite the prime minister without first consulting the White House or Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who attended the speech, issued a scathing statement afterward.

“I was near tears throughout the Prime Minister’s speech — saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States as part of the [negotiating] nations, and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation,” Pelosi said.

That view wasn’t shared by other top Democrats, who praised Netanyahu’s message as both powerful and necessary amid a time of rising terrorist threats in the Middle East.

Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said it was “a very strong speech” in defense of Israel’s position.

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, called it a “powerful, strong, factual, inspiring” address that “sent a very strong message to the entire world.”

And Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, said it was “a brilliant speech” that did “a very effective job” warning Congress of the risks surrounding Obama’s Iran negotiations.

“I was skeptical about the deal going in, I’m just as skeptical after the speech, and I think a significant number of my colleagues are where I am,” Rep. Israel said. “He changed minds. The question is: How many minds did he change?”

I’m not sure it’s just about changed minds. It’s also about stiffened spines.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Latest Scott Walker Scandal: His Spokeswomen Are WAY TOO HOT.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Sweet Briar College, Citing ‘Financial Challenges,’ Will Close Its Doors in August. “The Richmond Times-Dispatch notes that the college is the state’s third liberal-arts institution in two years to close, joining Saint Paul’s College and Virginia Intermont College. Founded in 1901, Sweet Briar has 328 employees, including 72 full-time faculty members. It enrolled 700 students this year.”

Who could have seen this coming?

IT’S COME TO THIS: ObamaCare Opponents Face Death Threats In The New York Times.

MOTHERHOOD AND FEMINISM: “Having a Baby Is Not Unlike Dealing With a Death.”

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, FRANCIS SEJERSTED? Nobel Peace committee demotes controversial head.

Norway’s Nobel Peace Prize committee on Tuesday demoted its controversial chairman Thorbjoern Jagland in a move unprecedented in the long history of the award.

The organisation, which said the former Norwegian prime minister would remain as a committee member, gave no reason for its decision.

However the renowned diplomat had drawn sharp criticism shortly after becoming chairman in 2009 for awarding the prestigious Nobel to newly elected US President Barack Obama.

Yeah, that’s worked out badly. And it’ll be worse yet for peace before it’s all over. But forget what I said about Sejersted, as he chaired the committee the year they awarded the Prize to Yasser Arafat, instead of my nomination that year, Arthur C. Clarke.

UPDATE: From the comments:

For failing to stand for freedom and prematurely withdrawing from Iraq (though declaring the U.S. operation a ‘success’), Obama invited the Syrian Civil War that’s killed about as many people as the Iraq war. That withdrawal also invited bloodthirsty ISIS to fill the void in Syria and Iraq, and left Israel alone in the neighborhood as Iran finishes building its bomb.

How many old wars did the Nobel Peace laureate reignite and how many new wars did he set the stage for? He’s even brought back a war that six years ago seemed impossible to re-create: the Cold War with Moscow.

And let’s not pretend east Asia is any more peaceful since Obama sent up the white flag. North Korea is re-invigorated and threatening war. And an enormously wealthy totalitarian China is preparing to steal islands it never owned, from Taiwan to Hawaii.

What did you celebrate with that 2009 prize, Thorbjoern Jagland? You celebrated war.

Si vis pacem, para bellum. This saying can be read two ways. The traditional reading is that if you want peace, you’re more likely to get it by being prepared for war. But it may have a second meaning — that wanting peace too much makes war more likely. Experience certainly supports that.

A UT FACULTY MEMBER ON THE WHOLE “DE-TENURING” THING: Hey, what about those swarms of administrators eating up our substance and producing nothing?

At the same time, the number of administrators, most of them much more highly paid than any faculty member, has blossomed in an era of better “business models” for universities. The organizational charts from the three main divisions of UT (the President’s staff, the Chancellor’s staff, and the Provost’s staff) are dizzying in their complexity and do not fully represent the number of associate deans and other administrators for each of the Colleges and other units. The same Board meeting that broached the removal of tenure as a cost-saving measure began (after the invocation) with Di Pietro putting forward a statement about a new Vice President of Development and Alumni Affairs (actually, a promotion) at a salary of $307,000, before benefits, moving expenses, and an additional “non-accountable expense allowance.” That figure would hire 5-6 assistant professors or 8-9 lecturers in English, depending on how you do the math, probably with change left over. Development folks are supposed to raise funds, I understand, but I have my concerns about how much of the university’s resources now go to them and the effectiveness of their approach, which actually cost the English department money (another story for another day). My main point is that higher administrators make great salaries, usually 3 or 4 times what tenured faculty members make and 8 to 10 times what full-time lecturers make, and their numbers and roles seem to be growing with more calls for “review,” “accountability,” “making hard decisions,” and “better management.” Call it the spread of Vice. New initiatives justify new administrators, who usually create more work (and anxiety) for teaching faculty already struggling to find the time to see to their increased responsibilities, take care of more students, and stay on top of new developments in the field. These administrators are also no longer (as they once were) subject to any faculty oversight or review, though we do get the occasional survey about whether we “like” what they’re doing. The teaching faculty carry on, like Orwell’s Boxer from Animal Farm, determined to work harder, while we await the withering away of the state. That’s why listing the removal of tenure in the context of a list of money-saving and revenue-generating proposals sounded so ominous to many of us. Even if “de-tenure” was truly a typo, it was a revealing one.

As I note elsewhere at some length, the explosion of academic administrators is a major cause — probably the single biggest cause — of runaway higher education costs, but administrators never seem to want to cut administration. We’ve replaced loads of full-time teaching faculty with adjuncts, but nobody’s talking about “adjunct administrators.” Why not?

EVEN THE GUARDIAN IS TURNING ON HER: Why the Hillary Clinton email revelations are a significant problem: The former secretary of state and likely 2016 candidate’s supporters have rallied to her defense, but the revelations leave Clinton vulnerable to serious criticism.

DON’T GIVE UP NOW: Brian Cates: We’re Almost There In Taking Over The GOP From Bottom To The Very Top.

A STATE WITHIN A STATE: Source: Top Clinton Aides Used Secret Email Accounts at State Dept.

Hillary Clinton is defending her use of a private email address, hosted at ClintonEmail.com, to conduct official State Department business by claiming that her emails were captured by official @state.gov accounts that other agency employees were instructed to use to contact her. But according to a knowledgeable source, at least two other top Clinton aides also used private email accounts to conduct government business—placing their official communications outside the scope of federal record-keeping regulations.

“Her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses” at the agency, said the source, who has worked with Clinton in the past. The source named two staffers in particular, Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, who are said to have used private email addresses in the course of their agency duties. Reines served as deputy assistant secretary of state, and Abedin as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. Both rank among Clinton’s most loyal confidantes, in and out of the State Department.

We were able to independently verify that Abedin used a ClintonEmail.com address at some point in time. There are several email addresses associated with Abedin’s name in records maintained by Lexis-Nexis; one of them is . An email sent to that address today went through without bouncing.

Hmm. Related: Oh the irony: Jay Carney, top Clinton advisor eluded to importance of Records Act. Well, for Republicans.

FROM ED DRISCOLL: More thoughts on academia and the Right.

MODERN TIMES: Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts. Our ruling class doesn’t like the idea of moral facts because that might limit their flexibility, which reduces opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement.

THE NEEDS OF DRAMA vs. the needs of culture. “The needs of drama are quite different from those of culture. They are ruled by the desire to entertain. Whatever enthralls the audience most, that is what drama requires. Unfortunately for those who would use stories to teach cultural mores, what makes a story entertaining is often directly at odds with what is good or virtuous or politically correct.”

CONFESSIONS OF an angry beige nerd.

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WHAT WITH THE SNOW AND VARIOUS CRISES AT HOME, BY THE TIME I HEARD OF THIS IT WAS OVER: ‘De-Tenure’ Do-Over. I suspect that the assault on tenure, however, is only beginning to gather steam. Personally, I’ve felt a lot freer to speak and write about what I believe than I would without tenure, though that doesn’t answer the question of whether tenure is, on balance, for good or ill.

Plus, from the comments: “The only thing he left off of his “6 point plan” is something like, ‘review and restructure bloated administrative structures including but not limited to excessive numbers of assistant, associate, and deputy deans, restore transparency to governance and involve community in decisions.’ Administration always skates in these things. They never admit they are part of the problem.”

Yes. Administrative bloat is the biggest driver of higher costs in higher education; shockingly, administrators don’t want to deal with that.

ROGER SIMON: Bibi’s Speech: The Real Fallout.

Related: Obama Has The Problem, Not Netanyahu. “The administration would desperately like to talk about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech. . . . It is bizarre for the administration to concede the point that the concessions described are dangerous and in fact being offered. It is even more bizarre to suggest after saying sanctions worked to bring them to the table and then say sanctions would chase Iran away and that we have no option other than war. Bizarre but not unexpected. Either by design or ineptitude, the president has put himself and the world in a tight spot.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: When Do Caribbean Immigrants Become Black? Well, immigrants from the Caribbean do better because they don’t have a legacy of slavery and poverty.

SO IT’S NOT JUST ROTHERHAM. THESE MUSLIM RAPE RINGS SEEM TO BE A GENERAL PROBLEM IN BRITAIN: Police investigating grooming and sexual abuse of teenage girls as young as 13 in Rochdale charge 10 men. Good thing Labour instigated a mass-immigration program to make Britain less British. Mission Accomplished!

Related: Reversing the procedure: Norway deports 824 extremist Muslim immigrants, violent crime drops 30%.

UPDATE: The Norway item appears to be bogus.

SOCIALISM ALWAYS BEGINS WITH THE SAME PROMISES, AND ALWAYS ENDS WITH THE SAME EXCUSES AND ACCUSATIONS: The Delusions of Venezuela and Argentina.

For about a decade, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and, to a lesser extent, Argentina under the Kirchners were popular models for leftists seeking an alternative to the neoliberal consensus. The Chavez program of dramatically expanding social spending and the Kirchner refusal to kowtow to foreign investors finally offered alternatives you could point to when the neoliberals started chattering about market confidence and budget balances.

Those neoliberals frequently pointed out the problems with those policies. Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, diverted oil-investment funds into social spending, causing Venezuela’s oil production to fall; the only thing propping up the economy was the rapidly rising price of oil. Argentina cut itself off from world capital markets, and over the years it had to resort to increasingly desperate fiscal strategies; the only thing propping up its economy was a big commodities boom, driven by the same Chinese demand that was causing oil prices to soar. But these arguments failed to convince those who were gaga for Chavismo; all that free-market cant was just theory, and the Chavez acolytes could point to real, tangible advances in reducing poverty and boosting economic growth.

All that ended a few years ago, of course. Both countries are in recession and suffering import shortages, including tampons in Argentina and condoms in Venezuela. Latin America’s social progress has stopped, thanks partly to a sharp uptick in Venezuelan poverty. The question of whether government redistribution or a commodities boom was responsible for Venezuela’s advances against poverty now seems to be resolved in favor of the commodities boom. If oil prices don’t recover, Venezuela’s government is headed for fiscal crisis very soon.

Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. The later it is, the worse for everyone.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Should Pregnant Women Eat More Tuna?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Advances in information technology that would have seemed like pure magic in colonial times mean we can now create a 21st Century National University that will help millions of students get a high-quality, low-cost college education — without hiring any professors, building any buildings or costing the taxpayers a dime.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Internet of Anything: A Shortcut to Your Drone License.

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IS THERE ANYTHING HE CAN’T DO? Homer Simpson predicted the mass of the Higgs boson particle 14 years before it was discovered.