Trump Takes the Lead

A flurry of polls this week have Trump taking a national lead, and larger leads in key swing states, even the GOP's unicorn state, Pennsylvania, as our pal, Ace, reports (http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=364751).

It's been a bad couple of weeks for Hillary Clinton.

First, her husband puts some very questionable optics on her upcoming email investigation and lobbies the AG for...well, something.

Next, the FBI Director offers up the most scathing non-indictment recommendation ever, describing Granma as everything from being too stupid (er... not sophisticated enough) to understand classified markings to being oblivious to national security concerns (reckless, anyone?).

Then, she blunders her way through the #BLM and Dallas shootings, and to top it off, Bernie Sanders spends 28 minutes explaining why he's awesome, but, vote for Hillary anyway.

Now we have all these very unfavorable poll numbers for Herself, then, the French terrorism massacre does nothing but highlight Dem's weakness on the security issue.

Maybe she's at her low water mark.  Larry Kudlow on the recent flagship Ricochet podcast thinks, she's a stock still seeking a bottom.  Could he be right?

This is an opportunity to see if Trump will do as I think he will, to turn this into all about his winning, and winning, and winning some more. That was the strategy in the GOP primary and now that he's turned this thing around (ok, she's in free fall, but doesn't matter)... 

The entire thing is about the inevitability of Trump winning and the bandwagon effect.

Free College!

Hillary Clinton continued her pandering to Bernie Sanders voters this week, unveiling a plan to make college tuition free to families (important note there) making less than $85k/year, eventually upping that to $125k/year.

If you don't yet have children in college, this probably sounds like an awesome idea and a real money saver.  Let me un-Voxsplain to you.

• The plan only covers tuition.  As anyone who looks hard at college bills knows, tuition is about 1/2 of the money it takes to take classes, as fees and services usually cover the other half of the non-room and board college costs.  
• The plan does not cover room and board.  At most colleges and universities, unless you live with your parents, this is going to be about 50% to 100% of tuition.  
• So, Hillary's plan would cover about 1/4 of the total cost of college.  You would still need parents or loans to cover the rest.
• It sounds great, but it's not going to eliminate the need for loans or sugar daddy's (i.e. "parents").

Continuing the economics lesson here, what is likely to happen when college is subsidized by the American taxpayer as it will have to be?  Well, as it has the last 30 or so years as more and more of college is paid for by someone else (in the form of guaranteed student loans, at remarkably low interest rates), it will become even more expensive.  And while those families making up to $125k may benefit from the taxpayers covering tuition, they'll still have those fees and room and board to cover.

Additionally, someone, besides the taxpayers, will have to make up the cost for those students having their tuition subsidized.  And that someone will be - families making over $125k/year.

Now, I don't need to tell you if you file a tax return, but a 2 earner household doesn't have to have 2 awesome jobs to get over that threshold.  So, before you crow about how fantastic this is, recognize that it is the middle class who is going to be footing the bill for this, in the form of higher tuition and fees, so that states can meet the requirement to offer "free" tuition to those others.

Ultimately, you need to consider who is the beneficiary of government mandates such as this?  Is it really students, or is it tenured professors and university administrators who gain from higher attendance figures, and for whom graduation rates are usually not important.

The academy is a linchpin of Democrat politics.  

Proposals such as this are corporate welfare for universities, not attempts to make college more affordable (at which they have failed miserably over time) or more available (it is private, online universities that offer the best chance to do this).

Daniel Hannan gets badgered by Christian Imapoorreporter, and fires back.

H/T to Andrew Klavan.

Christian Amanpour demonstrates why the Left, and the leftish media, is so disengaged from what is going on in the world, in this post-Brexit interview with British MEP Daniel Hannan.

To Amanpour and her friends on the Left, Brexit is, as is EVERYTHING with these people, about xenophobia and racism, and the Brits desire to keep the other (primarily Muslims) out of Britain.  It's all that they are able to comprehend.

Little concepts like national sovereignty, the desire for true self-rule mean little to the leftists.  They don't really care about democracy, after fighting for years to ensure everyone has the right to vote, they are angry when they don't vote as the elites desire.  We acknowledge that some who voted for leave were doing so on xenophobic and perhaps even racist grounds.  So what?  Last I checked, xenophobes and racists still had the right to vote in most western countries, and it's the one point I wish Hannan had made to Ms. Amanpour.  He might also have pointed out that with the remain camp drilling that home everyday in opposition, she shouldn't be surprised that so many people came out who might have felt this way.

Hannan, being badgered by Amanpour with her ridiculous, facile questions, and her snide facial expressions, still manages to take her to school to explain that Brexit is about much more than racism and xenophobia.

Neil Degrasse Tyson - Rationalia? More like Stupidia

Neil Degrasse Tyson, who fancies himself a reboot of Carl Sagan, and who really wants you to understand that he's really, really smart, tweeted the other day:

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016

He was rightly mocked on Twitter by all sorts of people who could see the errors in his wishful thinking, and many pointed out a little thing called the Reign of Terror that followed a particular revolution that embodied some of these ideas he's thinking of.  An example:

"It's been shown that those who disagree with State scientists are rabble rousers and henceforth will be jailed in work camps."@neiltyson

— David Walsh, Jr. (@jeffersonianguy) June 29, 2016

Alas, History and understanding the actual, um, human condition, are things lost on Tyson, who is the most insufferable of scientists - those who eschew Philosophy, but instead think governing our world (Rationalia?) under the guise of the primacy of science and the supreme intelligence of it's key practitioners (led, of course, by Mr Degrasse Tyson himself) is some kind of new, untried, and even smart, idea.

Kevin Williamson, writing in National Review, was quick to pick up on Tyson's stupidity and jot down a few thoughts in an essay, the bottom line of which comes in the closing (but do read the whole thing):

As men like him have done for ages, Tyson dreams of a world of self-evident choices, overseen by men of reason such as himself who occupy a position that we cannot help but notice is godlike. It’s nice to imagine ruling from an Olympus of Reason, with men and nations arrayed before one as on a chessboard. Down here on Earth, the view is rather different, and the lines of sight inside the epistemic horizon are not nearly so long as our would-be rulers imagine.