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Camille Paglia lets loose on Hillary. Done there, she lays waste to higher education. Given her milieu we’ll have to overlook her Bernie flirtation.
Despite Bernie Sanders being tied with her for pledged delegates after last weekend’s Nevada caucuses, the media herd has anointed Hillary Clinton yet again as the inevitable Democratic nominee. Superdelegates, those undemocratic figureheads and goons of the party establishment, are by definition unpledged and fluid and should never be added to the official column of any candidate until the national convention. To do so is an amoral tactic of intimidation that affects momentum and gives backstage wheeling and dealing primacy over the will of the electorate. Why are the media so servilely complicit with Clinton-campaign propaganda and trickery?
Democrats face a stark choice this year. A vote for the scandal-plagued Hillary is a resounding ratification of business as usual–the corrupt marriage of big money and machine politics, practiced by the Clintons with the zest of Boss Tweed, the gluttonous czar of New York’s ruthless Tammany Hall in the 1870s. What you also get with Hillary is a confused hawkish interventionism that has already dangerously destabilized North Africa and the Mideast. This is someone who declared her candidacy on April 12, 2015 via an email and slick video and then dragged her feet on making a formal statement of her presidential policies and goals until her pollsters had slapped together a crib list of what would push the right buttons. This isn’t leadership; it’s pandering.
Thanks to several years of the Democratic party establishment strong-arming younger candidates off the field for Hillary, the only agent for fundamental change remains Bernie Sanders, …
… It is an intolerable scandal that college costs, even at public universities, have been permitted to skyrocket in the U.S., burdening a generation of young adults with enormous debt for what in many cases are worthless degrees. The role played by the colleges themselves in luring applicants to take crippling, unsecured loans has never received focused scrutiny. Perhaps a series of punitive, class-action lawsuits might wake the education industry up. Until the colleges themselves pay a penalty for their part in this institutionalized extortion, things are unlikely to change.
As college became accessible to a wider and less privileged demographic following World War II, many state legislatures were initially generous in their funding. But that support rapidly diminished after the recession and oil embargo of the 1970s. Instead of prudently retrenching and economizing, public universities charged ahead and began raising tuition, in tandem with increasingly expensive private schools. Colleges became overtly commercialized and consumerist in their pursuit of paying customers. The annual college ranking by U.S. News & World Report, which began in 1983, triggered a brand-name hysteria among upwardly mobile parents and turned high school into the nightmarish, gerbil-wheel obsession with college applications that it remains today.
The steady rise in college tuition, leading to today’s stratospheric costs, began in the 1980s and was worsened by a malign development of the 1990s: the rapid swelling of a self-replicating campus bureaucracy, whose salaries exceeded those of most faculty. The new administrators, with their corporate and technocratic orientation, had an insular master race mentality and viewed faculty as subordinate employees. The flagrant corporatization of the university was outrageously ignored by the faux Leftists of academe, trendy careerist professors who sat twiddling their thumbs, as they played their puerile poststructuralist and deconstructionist word games. As a consequence, faculties nationwide have fatally lost power and are barraged by dictatorial directives from tin-eared campus bureaucrats enforcing a labyrinth of intrusive government regulations. …
While we’re on the subject of higher ed, Red Alert tells us the average of college prez pay is more than twice the average of the hated CEO’s.
High pay for CEOs attracts annual attention and recitations about the immorality of capitalism, but when the focus is on average CEO pay, they make less than half the annual earnings of college presidents, according to CBS News.
The average CEO earns $176,840 annually, an amount that would make a university president into a pauper. In academia, college presidents earn $377,261 annually.
Americans outraged and indebted by high college costs will be quick to draw the parallel between college president pay and their tuition bill. Correlation, though, doesn’t imply causation. Often, college presidents aren’t even the highest-paid college employees; athletic coaches earn more.
Regardless, college presidents “are well into the 99th percentile of compensation for wage earners in the United States,” Peter L. Hinrichs and Anne Chen noted for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
The median cost of presidential salaries per student is $138.85. Slashing presidential pay could free up some money for student scholarships or additional staff hiring, but students aren’t over-burdened by presidential salaries, as easy a scapegoat as it might be.
Overall staff salaries, however, might be a different story. …
Back to Hildebeast with a post from Craig Pirrong on her emails.
Hillary’s email excuses get more lame by the day. For months her story–and she has stuck to it–is that none of the emails were marked as classified. Yesterday, when (miracle of miracles!) George Stephenopolous called her on this, her excuse became even lamer. And if I were Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, or Jake Sullivan, I would be afraid, very afraid, after hearing it.
Specifically Stephenopolous asked about a non-disclosure agreement Clinton signed before becoming Secretary of State, which states: “classified information is marked or unmarked … including oral communications.” That is, marking is a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for establishing whether something is classified. The mention of “oral communications” points out the obvious issue: if marking was necessary, verbal information could never be an official secret, which is obviously absurd.
Hillary’s response? Here’s to you, Cheryl, Huma, and Jake!:
Clinton pointed to her aides, saying: “When you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain had thought that this was classified and that was not the case.”
Someone down the chain is apparently responsible for establishing whether something sent up the chain should be classified.
There’s only one little problem with this. …
And Nat Hentoff writes on her failure to protect boys from conscription in third world totalitarian states.
If there is one policy issue that most Americans can agree upon, even in our hyperpartisan political times, it is that child slavery should not be tolerated. President Barack Obama gave voice to this principle in a 2012 speech before the Clinton Global Initiative.
“When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery,” Obama told the audience, which included his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.”
Later that week, Clinton’s State Department implemented “national interest” sanction waivers that authorized millions in military assistance, training and arms sales to countries that allow the use of child soldiers in their armed forces or allied militias. It was the third year in a row that the administration had waived sanctions imposed by the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 (CSPA). …
How corrupt is the media? Read this article from WaPo by Erik Wemple about what was revealed by a FOIA request.
… Though Ambinder will bear most of the smirch from this Beltway bucket of slime, the episode speaks to the inadvisability of encouraging journalists to flout the SPJ code of ethics. Sure, Reines secured a bit of positive coverage for the speech and perhaps deepened his relationship with a prominent journalist or two. The term “muscular” scooted around the web in connection with Clinton, as Gawker pointed out. And perhaps the secretary came away satisfied with what Reines had orchestrated.
The boost, however, was just as transitory as the Ambinder article itself. And the risk of insisting on conditions with ball-playing journalists is now emerging: The Clinton camp was so desperate for praise that it went to extremes to place a single positive adjective in coverage. Also, Reines’s insistence on secrecy about the “blackmail” was a reckless bet against the very industry he dealt with each day; via the FOIA process, journalism outed his part in rancid sausage-making.
Erik Wemple has more; this time focusing on the egregious bias of CNN as they shill for Hillary.
… Here’s an example CNN’s disclosure approach in practice. On Feb. 17, during his daytime program, CNN lead political anchor Wolf Blitzer turned, as he often does, to the 2016 race. Hillary Clinton, noted Blitzer, was engaged in a tight race against Bernie Sanders, as polling indicated a “dead heat” in Nevada (which Clinton eventually won). The esteemed anchor introduced a pair of commentators to hash things out: “Let’s bring in our CNN political commentators, Democratic strategist, Maria Cardona, and Republican strategist, Tara Setmayer.”
The “Democratic strategist” contributed this comment when asked what had happened to Clinton’s vanishing lead in Nevada. It must be quoted in full:
I think what happened is we have a real primary on our hands. I’ve been saying from the beginning is actually great for the Democratic Party. Look, her campaign absolutely needs to focus on the fact that she needs to continue underscoring her message of lifting barriers for everybody, of making sure that this economy works for all communities of color. The speech she gave in Harlem yesterday was fantastic.
And those, I think, are the themes that will resonate in communities like Nevada, which has a lot of Latino voters there. Latinos have traditionally been backing her, and I think will continue to back her. And is she needs to continue to focus on this message of economic prosperity for everybody. That’s where I think she’ll start to get the younger voters and also focusing on how to it actually get things done as opposed to just talking about what everybody likes and sounds good. But how are you going to deliver for everyday Americans. That’s where I think her strength is.
It’s right there that Blitzer might have said, Viewers should know that you and your colleagues, Maria, have various financial ties to the Clinton campaign and groups seeking to assist it. Instead, Blitzer passed the baton on to Setmayer, and the context-deprived discussion continued.
The minimalist disclosure is ho-hum outrageous — which is to say that it’s an outrage made routine by prevailing TV industry practices. …
Turning our attention to a couple of blowhards, Kyle Smith compares Cam and Donald.
Cam Newton may be the best player in football, but as a man he has a lot of learning to do. He needs to study the virtue called humility.
Newton is a braggart, a showboat and a clown. He says things like, “Hear me out. I’m just saying that so much of my talents have not been seen in one person.” (“Just”!) He does elaborate end-zone dances right in the faces of opposing players. (“If you don’t like it, keep me out of the end zone,” he later said.) Even getting a simple first down inspires him to strike a pose. He named his son “Chosen,” he says, because he didn’t want the kid to carry the awful burden of being known as Cam Newton Jr. Apparently those were the only two options. “Saint” was already taken. …
… Rudeness goes with selfishness and obliviousness: Football is very much a team sport, so no one person should act like he made a play on his own, but so is life. Donald Trump’s boasting about his wealth is off-putting not only because it seems intended to remind us that we’re relatively poor compared to him but because he’s delusional to attribute his fortune to his own hard-nosed business acumen. The source of his wealth is simple: He inherited a New York real-estate empire just as New York real estate was about to go on a dizzying upward climb.
He should thank not only his father but Wall Street, “Seinfeld” and Rudy Giuliani for driving up New York real-estate values.
As Trump made clear in his comical attempts to make himself sound like a student of the Bible while campaigning in Iowa, the only altar at which he bends the knee is his own tacky, brass-lined headquarters. …
John Tierney in Instapundit contrasts the two quarterbacks in the Superbowl.
The vaunted Cam-Peyton quarterback match-up in the Super Bowl didn’t amount to much on the field (the game was all defense), but the contrast was clear after the game. Cam Newton made headlines by abruptly walking out of a press conference after uttering a total of 18 words. Yes, it’s tough to lose, but Peyton Manning endured a much worse defeat in the Super Bowl two years ago (a 43-8 shellacking by the Seattle Seahawks), and look at how he performed after that game (the press conference starts at 2:24). Manning put on a suit and tie, looked reporters in the eye, answered questions and graciously gave credit to the victors. Earlier this season, when Newton’s team was winning, he too appeared at post-game press conferences in a coat and tie and happily answered questions, but when the going got tough, he showed up in a hoodie and sulked — a performance that one former fan described as Pig Newton.