President Donald Trump needed a win and he got one, adding one more presidential moment to the reel that will play in voters’ minds when they cast ballots a year from now.

Was this operation a great moment in America’s war on terror? Of course. All those who contributed to Baghdadi’s death deserve a tremendous amount of credit. But the President would have been well served by displaying the same level of dignity and restraint Barack Obama showed following bin Laden’s death.

The point is: The Islamists are not going to disappear or give up just because Baghdadi is gone. Indeed the very same vainglorious Donald Trump who took obscene personal credit for his death has put Isis back in business by his withdrawal of American forces from Syria and giving Erdogan the green light to beat the hell out of America’s Kurdish allies.

If and when ISIS regroups, it may target the oil fields that proved so lucrative in the past… Leaving some troops behind to help defend the oil fields while pulling others out elsewhere could be Trump’s way to try to achieve his isolationist goals while avoiding an ISIS renaissance, experts say.

Graham, Keane, and many others wanted to keep some U.S. troops in Syria. Trump did not. So they made up a phony argument to get him to change his mind. It worked. Now even Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is going along with the game. At some point, will Trump ask how the campaign to defend the oil fields is going? Esper, Graham, Keane, and the others probably assume he won’t. They know, from experience, that, ultimately, he doesn’t care.

Trump needs to think long and hard before putting American troops into a vulnerable position, especially in pursuit of an objective that is neither authorized nor necessary.

Research has shown that sanctions rarely achieve their desired goals. In the worst-case scenario, they hurt the people of a country — generally the very people we’re purporting to help — without making a dent in the country’s behavior. And in the case of human rights abusers, research suggests that more abuses typically occur with economic sanctions in place than without them.

Perhaps, one sharp journalist will have the gumption to ask Omar why the only Jewish state is deserving of a sanctions movement designed to destroy its existence, while generally speaking, sanctions are supposedly very, very bad—bad enough that a whole op-ed needed to be taken out in The Washington Post to underscore their evils.

Once again, Omar has made explicit something that usually goes unsaid: Activists on both sides of the aisle are quick to advocate for policies that reinforce their belief in their own righteousness, but rarely stop to question whether their goals are actually being met by the policies they suggest.

…if Anonymous is a coward for wearing a mask while spilling beans about the Trump White House, he has plenty of company… I’m no booster of anonymous sources, but even I recognize the distinguished, ancient pedigree they hold in American politics.

The author of A Warning is not really like the whistleblower who risked his career—and possibly more—in reporting Trump’s possibly criminal behavior through the proper channels. They are more like Michael Wolff or Bob Woodward, their book another gossipy tale of palace intrigue in which a cabal of heroic civil servants tries to save the republic from a norms-busting ogre.

Watergate did not end Richard Nixon because Deep Throat came forward out of the goodness of his heart. It happened in part because Mark Felt was hoping to use the scandal to advance his own career. One can praise the political courage of people like Yovanovitch or Cooper without rejecting what anonymous officials have to say in books. In a world in which GOP members of Congress are terrified of the base, even mild forms of dissent from the party line should be encouraged.

California is leading a rethink of what it means to be an employee in the digital age… The law lays the groundwork for workers to unionize, bargain for better pay and gain a greater voice at work. But that is a starting point, not a conclusion.

The new law is ultimately applying a blanket policy in hopes of protecting and creating more full-time writer positions. But it completely ignores the needs of freelancers who have many reasons for why they are working part-time.

Like many independent contractors, I prefer not to be hired as an employee. I don’t want to attend company picnics or sit through mandatory sensitivity training. Shouldn’t I have the ability to choose? Apparently not in California, a job-destroying wrecking ball.

None does not equal no religion, or no religious belief, and you should dismiss any media report that suggests otherwise. By any reasonable standard, in fact, American Nones are a surprisingly religious community. In 2012, a third of the unaffiliated said that religion was very important, or somewhat important, in their life…

Perhaps, whether you are among the nones or not, you think moving toward a more secular shared vocabulary is a good thing. But even if you’re right, the transition will be no less challenging.

The central issue is that faith is supposed to provide moral guidance — and many moralizing figures on the evangelical right don’t impress young people as moral at all.