INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama To Unions Unhappy With ObamaCare: You’re All A Bunch Of GOP Dupes!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Government Programs Blowing Air into Debt Bubble.

Over the past few years, the college cost crisis has evolved from merely an important issue facing parents and students into a serious national problem that could impact the future of the country. Moreover, most government programs designed to address the problem have only made it worse, inflating the bubble by encouraging students to borrow and giving colleges few incentives to lower prices. Federal student loans are the biggest offenders in this regard, but even other, more targeted programs have had this effect.

One of these programs is the public service loan forgiveness program, long touted by President Obama and others as a way for students to reduce their debt through good deeds. In the program, students who work in specially designated public service jobs, usually in the government or nonprofit sectors, can have a portion of their loans forgiven. Students who qualify need only make 120 monthly payments—based on their income, not on the size of the loan—and the balance will be forgiven, no matter how large.

On the surface, this seems like a relatively solid proposal that could seriously lower the debt burden for many grads, but as the San Francisco Chronicle notes, it has actually created a perverse incentive for students to take out large loans they have no intention of paying back in full. This is particularly true for graduate students, who have no limits on the size of the loans they can take out. As a result, the program has gone from “a safety net for undergraduates [to] a very large tuition assistance program for graduate students.”

There are a few serious problems here. First, students who plan on using this program but graduate (or drop out) and are unable to land a “public service” job will be left with a massive debt burden which will not be forgiven and is not dischargeable through bankruptcy. Second, even when everything works as it should, this amounts to a taxpayer-funded subsidy of expensive graduate programs, which is exactly the opposite of [the] kinds of policies we need. But the biggest problem is that it takes the heat off of expensive schools to lower their prices.

Indeed.

WASHINGTON POST: Syria crisis reveals uneasy relationship between Obama, nation’s military leaders.

RAND PAUL: “I am here to ask that we begin the end of mandatory minimum sentencing.”

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INSTAVISION: I talk with Texas Tea Party fave Katrina Pierson about her run for Congress. Could she be the female Ted Cruz?

Her website is KatrinaForCongress.com.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Growing IRS Scandal Requires A Special Prosecutor. “This scandal reeks of criminality and, at the very least, constitutes an attempt by a government agency to sway the 2012 election.”

JAMES TARANTO: Tired Guns: This time the “debate” is desultory and meta.

A few days after last year’s massacre at Newtown, Conn., we observed: “Every time one of these horrible shooting sprees occurs, countless voices in the media declaim that (1) we need a debate on gun control, and (2) the other side’s views are despicable, stupid and unworthy of consideration.” It’s happening again, in reaction to Monday’s murders at the Washington Navy Yard. But it’s strikingly muted by comparison with the post-Newtown frenzy. . . .

Antigun extremists are exhausted and demoralized. Newtown filled them with rage, which was understandable, but the direction in which they turned it–against lawful gun owners and defenders of the Second Amendment–was not. The effort to incite a moral panic was largely a failure, and nobody seems to have the energy to try it again.

They could try presenting reasoned arguments instead of emotional bullying, if they had any to present. The real problem is that the country is closer to the NRA than to Obama.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Washington Post: GOP lawmaker: IRS continued to target conservative groups after granting tax-exempt status. “The IRS acknowledged in May that agents had improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups for additional, sometimes burdensome scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. But the revelation that groups were singled out for even more scrutiny after receiving tax-exempt status will broaden the committee’s investigation, said Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., who chairs the panel’s oversight subcommittee.”

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: DOJ Lawyer Karla Dobinski’s Misconduct Sends Police Officers to Prison. “What does it take for an employee to get fired in Eric Holder’s Justice Department Civil Rights Division?”

ROGER SIMON: The Dictator WILL Be Televised.

ED DRISCOLL: When Cognitive Dissonance Strikes the True Believers.

ROLL CALL: Review Team Will Probe Capitol Police Navy Yard ‘Stand Down’ Controversy.

Capitol Police officers stationed around Capitol Hill reacted with shock to a BBC report that Capitol Police commanders told a team of their heavily armed officers to stand down when they arrived on the scene of Monday’s deadly Navy Yard shooting.

“Stunned” and “embarrassed” were among the reactions overheard from officers posted around the Capitol complex discussing the allegations that one of the best-trained tactical units in the city was ordered to leave the scene of a mass shooting.

In response to the revelations, the Capitol Police Board — Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer, House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, Architect of the Capitol Stephen Ayers and Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine — on Wednesday established at Dine’s request a “Fact Review Team led by Michael Stenger, Assistant Sergeant at Arms for Protective Services and Continuity and former Assistant Director of the U.S. Secret Service” to get to the bottom of the questions, according to a release from the board.

“The review team will conduct its work and report its findings and recommendations to the Capitol Police Board and Chief Dine no later than October 21, 2013,” the release said.

Well, that’s a quicker investigation than we’ve gotten on the Benghazi stand-down order.

ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, NEVER OUTGUNNED: Dr. Sommers on MSNBC About Boys’ Education, Mocked & Slammed by Feminist Hosts.

WAPO FACT CHECKER: Obama’s claim that non-budget items have ‘never’ been attached to the debt ceiling: Four Pinocchios.

THE HILL: GOP brings focus back to IRS controversy.

The IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups burst back into view Wednesday, as top Republicans accused the agency of using audits to disproportionately scrutinize conservative outfits.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee stressed that new information showed that the IRS flagged mostly conservative groups for extra surveillance, even after those groups received their tax-exempt status. . . . Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) and other GOP lawmakers also repeatedly cited the role of Lois Lerner – the IRS official at the heart of the controversy – in singling out Tea Party groups.

Boustany charged that only conservative groups were audited after receiving the extra scrutiny that followed tax-exempt approval. He added that 90 percent of the groups that received extra surveillance falling short of an audit were conservative.

“Four months after Lois Lerner’s apology for the targeting, there are many questions outstanding,” Boustany said at a hearing of the panel’s oversight subcommittee. “And frankly, there are not nearly enough answers.”

The hearing breathed new energy into a controversy that has been overshadowed for weeks by issues ranging from Syria to the current fiscal fights.

Still, the GOP charges also show that the congressional investigation into the IRS is only growing in scope, even after some two dozen interviews with agency staffers and the vetting of roughly 300,000 documents.

Growing, indeed.

FORBES: Give Back? Yes, It’s Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Price of Politics: Debt and deficits impoverish us in ways we can only begin to measure.

NICK GILLESPIE: Now Is Not the Time for New Gun Laws. “In the wake of the D.C. shooting, some lawmakers are pushing for new regulations on firearms. But legislation should never be passed in the heat of a crisis.”

OVERSIGHT: Republicans ‘dead serious’ about bringing Hillary Clinton back to face MORE grilling as they slam State Department over Benghazi.

THE INSTADAUGHTER UPGRADED TO IOS7. VERDICT: “It’s terrible. Everything’s flat and ugly.”

MAYBE THE GOP IS PLAYING INTO OBAMA’S HANDS BY STOPPING THIS TRAINWRECK. A longtime reader emails:

Through serendipity I’ve ended up working in HIT (health information technology). I take 50 calls a day with independent insurance agents/brokers to navigate the hoops to qualify to sell on the FFM (Federal Facilitated Marketplaces). The Government websites they need to access to register are riddled with random error messages, and simply attempting to log in to complete this process routinely fails. The agents/brokers are, to a person, terrified. If they cannot complete this process by October 1st (the deadline) they are hosed. Nobody knows what to do, and this will only get worse when millions of consumers join the fray of the marketplace. It appears nobody scaled the back end to accommodate this exponential growth. And now?, It’s too late. It’s like the owner of the White Star line getting a telegram about the Titanic sinking and saying “We need to order more lifeboats.” And these are the smartest guys in the room? #soscrewed. For obvious reasons, don’t use my name please..

Some journalism on this subject would be nice.

UNEXPECTEDLY! August Housing Starts Weaker Than Anticipated.

SPYING HYPOCRISY: I think the Brazilian President is not so much upset that we spy, but that we spy better than her spies spy.

I have warned repeatedly that the NSA disclosures by Edward Snowden via Glenn Greenwald and others serve a dual purpose.

Part is to expose genuine breaches of privacy about which we should be concerned; part is to disrupt U.S. foreign intelligence activities and relations with other countries. The former provides excellent cover for the latter.

The leaks and disclosures are all one sided — as if other countries don’t spy on the U.S. and their own citizens. It would be nice to see “whistleblowers” defecting from the Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies spilling their secrets to newspapers, but they know better for the safety of themselves and their families.

The latest outrage is exhibited the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, who canceled a state dinner in her honor in Washington, D.C., because of revelations by Glenn Greenwald that the NSA spies on her, Brazil, and the Brazilian state oil company.

The hyprocrisy is dripping. The Brazilian intelligence agencies are quite expansive and have a long history (post-junta) of spying abuses.

Yes, this gets pointed out a lot on twitter, but not so much in conventional media.

#DOOM: East Coast mantle hotspot could explain massive Missouri quakes.

Examining all the data from the Virginia earthquake, Risheng Chu and several of his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology think they’ve identified an interesting feature beneath the seismically active region on the border between Missouri and Tennessee—a trail of hot rock left by a mantle hot spot.

Mantle hotspots are behind many island chains, like Hawaii, as well as continental volcanism, such as the Snake River Plain leading to Yellowstone. It’s not the hotspots that move. Rather, it’s the tectonic plate that moves over the hotspot, with the resulting linear scar recording past plate motion.

The New Madrid Seismic Zone is unusual in that it’s far from any plate boundary. While most earthquakes there are small, there have been some massive ones in the past, including several devastating quakes witnessed in 1811-1812. The earthquakes occur along faults created by a failed rift, where volcanic activity nearly split North America apart more than 500 million years ago.

There are other failed rifts without the same unruly earthquake behavior today, so what’s different here? One idea is that a mantle hotspot could have weakened this rift zone more recently (geologically speaking), creating the conditions for seismic activity.

Hmm.