MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Donald & Bernie Show: When party outsiders feel ignored, a champion appears to take their interests to heart.

WHEN HILLARY TALKS ABOUT THE MIDDLE CLASS TOMORROW, I’LL BET SHE WON’T MENTION THIS: California’s war against the middle class: Massive income inequality pushes a growth in crowded rental households and lack of income growth.

But you know who did talk about it today? Carly Fiorina:

I think income inequality is a huge problem. And let’s look to the state of California where I lived for 12 years, liberal policies have been in place for decades, and yet 111 billionaires, good for them, the highest poverty rates in the nation, the exodus of the middle class, the destruction of industry after industry. Now they’re destroying agriculture in California.

The truth is, Hillary Clinton’s ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you’ve got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code. So, she made to cry income inequality, what I will continue to point out is the fact that every policy she is pursuing will make income inequality worse, not better, crony capitalism even worse, not better. And meanwhile, we will continue to crush the businesses that create jobs and middle class families.

Indeed. Because economic freedom offers insufficient opportunities for graft.

SOCIALISM ALWAYS STARTS WITH THE SAME GAUZY PROMISES, AND ENDS WITH THE SAME GRIM REALITIES: Greeks resigned to a hard, bitter future whatever deal is reached with Europe.

Greece has become so gloomy that even escapism no longer sells, the editor of the celebrity magazine OK! admits. “All celebrity magazines have to pretend everything is great, everyone is happy and relaxed, on holiday. But it is not,” says Nikos Georgiadis.

Advertising has collapsed by three-quarters, the rich and famous are in hiding because no one wants to be snapped enjoying themselves – and even if OK! did have stories, a ban on spending money abroad means it is running out of the glossy Italian paper that the magazine is printed on.

Bad luck, that.

JONATHAN KEILER: D.C Metro Murder Undermines Liberal Talking Points. It’s too bad nobody on the train had a gun.

TRUMP HAS THE LEFT QUAKING: Case in point is Carl Hiaasen’s oped for the Miami Herald, “There will never be a President Trump“:

The man has absolutely no chance of winning.

Zero. Nada.

Write it down. Take it to the bank. Bet the farm.

This preening self-parody of an egomaniac will never, ever be elected president of the United States. He has more baggage than all the Kardashians put together, and less class.

Gosh, I can’t imagine an egomaniac being elected President. That has never happened before! I mean, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton and Obama have all just been meek, self-effacing sweethearts.  Besides, politicians have their jobs because they want to serve the public, not their own narcissistic sense of grandeur, right?  And a President with baggage–impossible! Again, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton come to mind, with their notorious philandering, and let’s not forget President Obama’s Marxist mother, father, pastor and mentor, and his infamous Choom Gang.

But wait, perhaps sensing the ridiculousness of this argument, Hiaasen offers another theory:

Anyone who manages to defame an entire Hispanic nationality on his first day of campaigning will, inevitably, offend practically everybody . The early Republican polls showing Trump in second position behind Jeb Bush are hilarious — and meaningless.

Trump wears thin fast on voters. He isn’t the sharpest tack in the corkboard, but he has brains enough to know he can’t possibly capture his party’s nomination, much less the White House.

Methinks this is just wishful thinking and projection on the part of Hiaasen: that somehow the fact that he is offended by Trump’s recent statements about illegal immigration means that everyone else must be offended, too. But the size and enthusiasm of recent crowds for Trump’s speeches in Phoenix and Nevada suggest otherwise. And this seems to have the political left very nervous that the silent majority may have finally found a voice.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: After 6-Year Tenure Not Prosecuting Banks, Eric Holder Returns ‘Home’ to Defend Them.

Another argument for my revolving-door surtax.

GOOD QUESTION: Why is Bernie Sanders, who purports to be an Independent Socialist, running for the Democratic nomination?

WHY IS THE LEFT SO FULL OF HATE? Twitter Users Call for Donald Trump’s Murder Following Mexican Drug Lord’s Prison Escape.

NONSENSE. ONLY FOR-PROFIT BUSINESSES CAN BEHAVE IMMORALLY. U.S. Universities — Not So Innocent Abroad? But the real problem isn’t what they’re doing abroad, but what they’re doing at home.

SOCIALISM REQUIRES HYPOCRISY: Bernie Sanders boldly declares ‘money cannot be the God of life’ while raising money on Martha’s Vineyard.

CARLY FIORINA ON DONALD TRUMP:

Well, you know, it’s interesting. I have been in New Hampshire now for six days. And I have not been asked a single question about Donald Trump.

On the other hand, I think Donald Trump taps into an anger that I hear every day. People are angry that a commonsense thing like securing the border or ending sanctuary cities is somehow considered extreme. It’s not extreme, it’s commonsense. We need to secure the border.

People are also angry at a professional political class of both parties that talks a good game, gives good speeches, but somehow nothing ever really changes. And people are angry as well at a double standard in the media.

Indeed.

THE REVENGE OF THE LOST BOYS.

AT CLEMSON, A New Plan For Higher Education.

THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Squad level large wheeled robot, robot helicopter bot and combat lasers.

AT AMAZON, Summer Deals in Outdoor Toys & Games.

Plus, Summer Essentials in Men’s Clothing.

DO DOCTORS need a dress code? “Patients really like white coats.”

SPACE: Six Space Questions the Senate Asked Gen. James Dunford.

READER BOOK PLUG: Reader Tom Thurlow requests a plug for his daughter’s book, Tammy’s Story: A Young Slave Girl’s Escape To Freedom. He writes: “The book came from a homeschool writing assignment that kept getting longer and longer, so we published it as a book.” It’s $2.99 on Kindle, or free to read on Kindle Unlimited.

HEALTHCARE: I Spent Thousands to Keep My Sick Cat Alive. I Don’t Think I’d Do It Again.

THE RIGHT WAY TO REMEMBER THE CONFEDERACY:

Today, the Confederate battle flag may be going down again, perhaps for good, but it is worth considering what we allow to sink with it.

On Friday morning at 10 a.m., a vestige of a sad epoch faded when that flag was finally taken down from a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House.  . .  .

This is an old debate electrified by the June 17 massacre of nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., a mass shooting that authorities call a racially motivated hate crime. . . .

Symbols matter. They say at a glimpse what words cannot, encapsulating beliefs and aspirations, prejudices and fears. Having no intrinsic value, they take meaning from the way we use them, changing over time along with our actions. The most obvious example is the ancient “gammadion,” which in early Eastern cultures meant “god,” “good luck,” “eternity” and other benign conjurations. We know it today as the swastika, and a quarter-century of usage by the Nazis forever poisoned it in Western culture.

Southern “heritage” groups who oppose removing the battle flag are reluctant to acknowledge that this same dynamic has tainted their cherished emblem. But it has.

Whatever the flag meant from 1865 to 1940, the flag’s misuse by a white minority of outspokenly bigoted and often violent people has indelibly shifted that meaning. . . .

That inevitably raises a question. Our landscape is peppered with monuments, parks, counties, towns, streets and private businesses named for Confederate leaders—not to mention the myriad road signs and markers commemorating the Confederate story. Are all of these to be purged? Where do we stop?

Guess this guy didn’t get the memo: Where do we stop? We stop when we stop offending liberals/progressives, of course. The fact that there is no stopping point with these microaggression-paranoid, politically correct totalitarians doesn’t matter. We don’t stop altering our “offensive” ways of life and accoutrements until they say so. You want to keep Confederate statues?  Forget about it.

Besides, statues are small potatoes. Think big. Time to take a stick of dynamite and blow up Stone Mountain, so the delicate flowers don’t have to cast their eyes on Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

Or better yet, as with the movement to alter Mount Rushmore, get someone to re-carve it into our Dear Leader’s visage and maybe some other equally politically correct historical figures, such as Martin Luther King, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks and Al Sharpton.

JOE PAPPALARDO: The Rebirth of Cape Canaveral: How NASA became a spaceport landlord to companies like Boeing and SpaceX, and saved its iconic Kennedy Space Center in the process. “By reorganizing itself from the ground up, KSC is positioning itself for a commercial spaceflight industry that is still embryonic but increasingly hopeful.”

EXTREMISM: The Democrats Turn Left.

During the 2012 election, Barack Obama memorably attacked the Republicans’ rightward shift, saying that Ronald Reagan could not win a modern Republican presidential nomination. That may be true, but it’s also true that Bill Clinton could not win a modern Democratic presidential nomination—as evidenced by the fact that Hillary Clinton has had to renounce the majority of her husband’s positions in order to be competitive.

This left-populist resurgence comes even as the nation might be poised to drift rightward, for two reasons. The big challenge—and opportunity—facing America today is the decline of the postwar welfare and managerial state beginning in the 1970s (what we call the “blue model”). The Democratic party’s orthodox response to this trend is to try to shore up what’s left of that model, and rebuild some of what’s been lost. But as Walter Russell Mead has documented at length, the blue decline traces, at least in part, to economic and demographic factors like globalization, technological change, and the aging of the population that simply can’t be put back in the genie’s bottle.

And it’s not clear that the majority of the American public wants policies aimed at reviving the blue model anyway.

But none of the alternatives offer sufficient opportunities for graft.

OOPS: Fish oil pills: A $1.2 billion industry built, so far, on empty promises.