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Kevin Williamson posts on growing student loan defaults and the leftist politicians like Liz Warren who make excuses for deadbeats.
… American households have been getting their act together on debt, at least a little bit, since the financial crisis and the subsequent recession. Credit-card defaults, after spiking around 2009, have been in decline, as have mortgage defaults and car-loan defaults. Home-equity loans took a little longer to get straightened out, but defaults on those are in decline, too, and have been for some time. (Much more on all that from the New York Fed here.) But one kind of debt default remains stubbornly on the rise: student loans, which in total add up to more than all U.S. credit-card debt and are much more likely to be in default than any other major debt category, far outstripping credit cards in the No. 2 default position.
On Monday, The New Yorker offered a sympathetic report (“A student-loan debt revolt begins”) about 15 former students of Corinthian Colleges, a dodgy and now largely defunct operator of for-profit schools, who intend to stop repaying their student loans as a matter of principle. “They believe that they have both ethical and legal grounds for what appears to be an unprecedented collective action against the debt charged to students who attended Corinthian schools,” writes Vauhini Vara, “and they are also making a broader statement about the trillion dollars of student debt owed throughout the country.” Senator Warren has called on the federal government to simply discharge the debts of former Corinthian students. An Occupy-affiliated organization called Debt Collective is pressing a similar agenda.
What does not seem to have occurred to Senator Warren, to Debt Collective, to the Corinthian 15, or to Vauhini Vara and the editors of The New Yorker is this: The students in question do not owe money to Corinthian Colleges. They owe money to third parties, those being private lenders and the federal government. As an instrument of protest, they might as well stop making their car payments, skip their rent, or boost mocacchinos from Starbucks — the people who lent them money are no more responsible for Corinthian’s woes than are their landlords and baristas.
This is classic leftist misdirection. …
Politico says another member of the left media has to apologize for a Scott Walker hit piece.
Another major media outlet has apologized after getting a story about Scott Walker wrong. Last week, it was the New York Times; now, it’s The Daily Beast.
The Daily Beast has retracted an article from one of its college columnists that claimed that the Wisconsin governor’s budget would cut sexual assault reporting from the state’s universities.
The post, published Friday, cited a report from Jezebel that wrongly interpreted a section of the state budget to mean that all assault reporting requirements were to get cut altogether.
In fact, the University of Wisconsin system requested the deletion of the requirements to get rid of redundancy, as it already provides similar information to the federal government, UW System spokesman Alex Hummel told The Associated Press on Friday. …
Politico also has the story of behind the scenes chaos at the Clinton Foundation. It is beginning to look like the Clinton’s did not raise a brass knuckled street-fighter like themselves. This is a tad long, but an interesting look at the Clinton Foundation scam.
In December, the board of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation approved a salary of more than $395,000, plus bonus, for its Yale-educated CEO, Eric Braverman, while voting to extend his board term through 2017, according to sources familiar with the arrangement. Braverman, who had worked with Chelsea Clinton at the prestigious McKinsey & Company consultancy, had been brought in with the former first daughter’s support to help impose McKinsey-like management rigor to a foundation that had grown into a $2 billion charitable powerhouse.
But last month, only weeks after the board’s show of support and just a year-and-a-half after Braverman arrived, he abruptly resigned, and sources tell Politico his exit stemmed partly from a power struggle inside the foundation between and among the coterie of Clinton loyalists who have surrounded the former president for decades and who helped start and run the foundation. Some, including the president’s old Arkansas lawyer Bruce Lindsey, who preceded Braverman as CEO, raised concerns directly to Bill Clinton about the reforms implemented by Braverman, according to sources, and felt themselves marginalized by the growing influence of Chelsea Clinton and the new CEO she had helped recruit.
The previously untold saga of Braverman’s brief, and occasionally fraught tenure trying to navigate the Clintons’ insular world highlights the challenges the family has faced trying to impose rigorous oversight onto a vast global foundation that relies on some of the same loyal mega-donors Hillary Clinton will need for the presidential run sources have said she is all but certain to launch later this year.
Already, a spate of recent news stories in Politico and elsewhere have highlighted questions about the foundation’s aggressive fundraising both before and during Braverman’s tenure, including the news that the foundation had been accepting contributions from foreign governments with lax oversight from the State Department when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state; the foundation has been Clinton’s main public platform since she left State in February 2013.
The hiring a few months later of Braverman, who had been a partner in McKinsey’s Washington office, was seen as validation of Chelsea Clinton’s view that the foundation needed to address recommendations from a 2011 audit for tighter governance and budgeting, as well as more comprehensive policies to vet donors and avoid conflicts of interest. …
… Chelsea Clinton’s rise at times has seemed to threaten some veteran Clinton aides who had carved out influential – and lucrative – positions after long service with her parents. She is blamed in some quarters for marginalizing both Lindsey and Doug Band, who rose from the president’s body man to build and help run the foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative. A third Clinton veteran, Ira Magaziner, saw his portfolio at the foundation diminished during Braverman’s tenure, and sources say Magaziner’s role remains under scrutiny.
Magaziner, who was a Rhodes Scholar with Bill Clinton in the late 1960s and spearheaded Hillary Clinton’s botched healthcare reform push in the 1990s, was paid $415,000 in foundation salary and consulting fees in 2013 to help run two programs, the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Magaziner left the climate project late last year after Braverman brought in new leadership, but he remains as CEO of the health initiative. The health group’s board – which includes Magaziner – at the end of last year voted unanimously to initiate an internal governance review by the New York law firm Simpson Thacher, according to foundation officials.
Sources say the review was expected to recommend management improvements. But in a statement sent on behalf of Magaziner, the initiative’s spokeswoman Maura Daley said the review found good fiscal health and “significant programmatic success over the years” and that the initiative’s board, in receiving the report at its last meeting, “expressed strong support for the successful leadership of CHAI.” …
In what has turned into another Hillary day, Jennifer Rubin posts on HRC’s bore-a-thon.
There is only one presidential contender who has nothing to say, at least nothing new or that hasn’t been said for years by others. Speaking to a bunch of privileged, wealthy women in Silicon Valley, Hillary Clinton proclaimed her concern for gender equality and the middle class (generally not defined as people making six figures with stock options). The Post quotes her as saying: “We have to restore economic growth with rising wages for the vast majority of Americans, and we have to restore trust and cooperation within our political system so that we can act like the great country we are.” No — really?! …
And Michael Goodwin says Hillary’s blundering is threatening her chances.
A popular theme on Planet Clinton is that poor Hillary is always in mortal danger of being undone by her charming cad of a hubby. “She can’t control him” is how insiders express their fear that Bubba will have a bimbo eruption and crash the coronation.
On a long list of possibilities, that scenario must be included. But my reading of the Clinton Chronicles points to a much bigger threat to the restoration of the family monarchy.
That would be the stumbling performance of the lady herself.
On top of the tactical blunders, there was an overarching reason why sure victory eluded Hillary Clinton in 2008. She simply was not a very appealing candidate, offering neither charisma nor a compelling message. She ran with a sense of entitlement that the Oval Office was owed to her.
If anything has changed, it’s a well-kept secret. Already, her run this time is marked by mistakes, gaffes and reports of ethical corner-cutting, which adds up to watching the same bad movie twice. …
JenRub also posts on the Dems “bizarre” faith in Hillary.
… If Jeb Bush’s last name was Smith, he might be the hands down leader for the GOP nomination, but if her last name wasn’t Clinton, would she be a lock for the nomination or even the favorite? This is where the Democrats’ attachment to her becomes mystifying. If they want a woman nominee, they have qualified women out there. If they want someone more reliably liberal and more adept on the trail, they could find those candidates also. And yet they cling to Clinton for dear life. Why?
One explanation is that they think she is disingenuous and once in office will show her true liberal stripes. Maybe, but it sure would be safer to find someone who admits to being liberal, has a liberal record and isn’t in league with the left’s economic villains. Alternatively, they might think she is a political behemoth, able to roll over whatever Republican comes her way. Anything to keep the White House, right? But if you look at the items above plus her age and political skills isn’t she a weak candidate? Frankly, Democrats are acting like Republicans — resigned to give the nomination to the next in line and clueless about her inability to connect with voters. The GOP hopes they don’t figure this out until it’s too late. So if anyone asks, she’s a fabulous candidate, the most qualified person ever!
Ignoring the climate change dreck in this article from BBC News, it is interesting to read about the 5 inch higher sea level north of New York that was caused by a series of storms five years ago. As an example of how wind can push the ocean around remember the “perfect storm” of the fall of 1991. Over a period of four to five days a monster storm sat off the Canadian Maritime provinces. At that time, Pickerhead was spending a lot of time traveling to Aruba for windsurfing off the northwest leeward coast where the trade winds blew across a narrow part of the island creating a windblown flat water paradise. At the time of the perfect storm a friend in Aruba told of incoming surf and three foot above normal tides. This was happening, because the storm off the Canadian coast was blowing the water to Aruba which is just off the coast of Venezuela. That is a distance of almost 2,500 miles. So it is not an earth shattering global warming event to have a series of storms push a lot of water against the New EnglandCoast.
Sea levels north of New York City rose by 128mm in two years, according to a report in the journal, Nature Communications.
Coastal areas will need to prepare for short term and extreme sea level events, say US scientists.
Climate models suggest extreme sea level rises will become more common this century.
“The extreme sea level rise event during 2009-10 along the northeast coast of North America is unprecedented during the past century,” Prof Jianjun Yin of the University of Arizona told BBC News.
“Statistical analysis indicates that it is a 1-in-850 year event.” …