There is no California:
There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.
Yes. It needs to be split up.
It’s awful. Who is to blame?
And here we arrive at a way to thread this needle of collective criticism. The one thing that Deresiewicz, Lukianoff, Haidt and McArdle all agree on, surprisingly enough, is that higher education should be a non-market institution. The point of college is not merely to cater to consumer demands, whether one defines the consumers as “college students” or “the firms that will eventually hire those college students.” A vital function of universities is to convert young people into thinkers who can critically analyze the very society that they are about to join. But when people are ponying up vast sums of money to attend these places, it becomes more difficult for college administrations to ignore the whims of their students.
Cut off the spigot. If people were really spending their own money, and couldn’t borrow it foolishly at below-market rates, much of this problem would go away. Of course, so would many universities and university departments. But it’s not clear that would be a bad thing.
Do they all still exist?
The Denver based company that Hillary hired to watch over her server, Platte River Networks, says it is highly likely that a full backup of all of Hillary’s emails was made from her old server before it was wiped clean. This calls into question how truthful Hillary has been with the voters and law enforcement.
You don’t say.
Platte River networks is not a suspect in any crime and is cooperating fully with the FBI. Hillary must hate that.
Yes.
[Monday-morning update]
Just pardon Hillary now:
Not only would a pardon have legal consequences. It would have political ones. It would be a tacit endorsement of Clinton, a message to Biden not to run. Scrutiny of Clinton would fade. A few news outlets might continue to dig around—we at the Washington Free Beacon will never, ever stop—but most reporters, who’d rather not be writing about this scandal anyway, would turn elsewhere.
Obama would look magnanimous. The country would be spared years of Clinton drama it doesn’t want. A pardon would be a final display of Obama’s moral superiority to the woman he defeated long ago—exactly the sort of self-righteous gesture that most appeals to him.
As Elizabeth Price Foley notes, he’s not being serious, of course, but it is fun to tweak this gang of corrupt thieves and liars. As Nixon said, he gave his enemies the weapons they needed to destroy him. So has Hillary. And I suspect, at this point, one of those enemies is Barack Obama.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Former CIA operative: “You or I would be fired and maybe jailed for this.”
It’s almost as though, in these peoples’ minds, the greater the responsibility, the least the accountability.
[Update a while later]
Surprise! The discovery of thousands of emails that the State Department denied the existence of in 2013:
…this has to be either willful incompetence or a conscious effort to obstruct a court order. If they missed a few responsive e-mails, I’d chalk it up to incompetence; if they missed the most responsive e-mails in an avalanche of data, willful incompetence might still be a good explanation. This looks much more like obstruction of justice, and perhaps the judge in this case may be persuaded to haul State Department officials into court to testify under oath about it. The court can start with John Kerry and start working downward.
At least we still have a judicial branch. It doesn’t seem like we have a Justice Department any more.
If she’s not prosecuted for this, a lot of people who have been will have a good equal-protection case for clemency.
[Update a while later]
Who down-domained the information?
As noted, whoever it is should be questioned. Maybe with conditional immunity.
A beautiful, despairing photo essay from the only reporter to get inside the perimeter.
I’m hearing that The Donald is proposing putting an end to it. That’s too bad, because I think it’s a good idea that will now be tainted by the source. Here’s what I wrote about it almost exactly five years ago:
if it were my choice, I’d much rather grant citizenship to someone who was willing to brave a desert and river crossing to get to this nation, learn the language and the civics, and work for a living, than someone born here who takes the nation for granted and refused to accept those responsibilities. Who is more deserving of the vote — the immigrant who has worked for it, or the native who spurns its requirements and demands public largesse? Or worse yet, a native who gangs with others to prey on his own neighbors? Why should someone, regardless of their behavior and level of social responsibility, be a citizen of this great nation through the sheer luck of having been born here, when many other true Americans who weren’t born here but “got here as fast as they can” are not?
Note that this isn’t about civil rights, at least not the traditional negative rights as stated in the Bill of Rights. Both citizens and civilians would have rights to free speech, rights to fair trials, even rights to bear arms if they’re not felonious, but voting is not and should not be a right — it should be a privilege, because, as noted above, it’s one that many will otherwise abuse to the detriment of their fellow residents, should they not be responsible and willing to pull their own weight, choosing instead to rob them at the ballot box.
Immigrants in fact tend to be harder working and more grateful to be here, though the Latin-American influx may be different because they aren’t necessarily coming to stay.
[Update a while later]
This isn’t exactly the same, but it would have much the same effect: Tom Tancredo is once again proposing that voters pass the same test that one must to become a citizen.
Works for me. And I have become long-inured to falsely being called a racist.
Surprisingly to many (and dismayingly to OPEC), they haven’t shut down shale production. Many wells are more profitable at low prices than many predicted.
Dave O’Neill used to scoff at me when I said that $100/barrel oil was an unsustainable price. Of course, he used to stupidly scoff at a lot of things.
They are not an oxymoron.
There are libertarians on both sides of the issue, and always have been. It’s a philosophical issue of when one judges that a human has a right to life.
…yes, you get racist hate mongering.
What will it take to get the Jewish community to wake up?
[Afternoon update]
Israelis unite against the Iran “deal.”
Because it’s a lousy deal.
This isn’t really news — it’s been known for years, but it looks like someone’s finally seriously investigating Huma’s Muslim Brotherhood connections.
I’ve joked for years that I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, but someone should seriously do this to make their heads explode:
In the Perfect Storm scenario, the ex-boyfriend, when called before the tribunal, refuses to bow down. He does not beg for a lawyer. He does not offer pathetic, chauvinistic attacks against his victimized accuser. He does not beg for mercy.
Instead, the accused ex-boyfriend claims that the charge against him cannot possibly be true. The reality, he says, is that during the time he was dating his accuser, his gender identity was feminine. Not only was his gender identity feminine, it was also lesbian — and to the extent his appearance on campus was externally masculine, he behaved that way because he had discovered that he had much greater sexual success as a lesbian (with sexual success defined as encounters with other women) when those same women believed he was a man. He knew, however, at all relevant times, that he was a lesbian having sex with the woman now hiding behind a screen and accusing him of the heteronormative crime of rape.
Not only does the accused ex-lesbian boyfriend deny the charges against him, he counterattacks.
It would deliciously highlight the contradictions of the fascist SJWs.