YET ANOTHER REASON TO OPPOSE HILLARY:  Like her cohort Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton told a group of supporters on Thursday that she will have a “litmus test” for her Supreme Court nominees:  They must agree to overturn Citizens United.

How typical of the Scandal Queen:  Citizens United involved a documentary film critical of Hillary called Hillary: The Movie. In upholding the free speech rights of Citizens United to air the film, the Supreme Court defended the First Amendment rights of groups of people (rather than just individuals), including corporations, unions and associations.  But of course the Court also allowed (gasp!) a criticism of Hillary to be aired.

So now the Queen is vowing payback for such criticism, and ensure it cannot happen again. Because, you know, a civilized country cannot allow citizens to question its political leaders.  Nice.

WELL, YOU KNOW, IT’S VOX, SO. . . . Did Vox Just Report Iranian Propaganda as Truth?

LLOYD GROVE: A Weak Apology Won’t End George Stephanopoulos’ Clinton Problem. The Brian Williams comparison has got to hurt: “Willams wrapped himself in the flag; Stephanopoulos cloaked himself in charity.”

Plus:

It is hard to argue that asking tough questions of a charity’s critic on the air—as Stephanopoulos did last month with Schweizer, whose much-publicized book Clinton Cash has been the target of war room-level pushback from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—without bothering to mention that you’ve donated to that charity, is anything other than a serious breach of accepted journalistic standards. Or that letting viewers know about such a potential conflict of interest is “going the extra mile.”

Apparently Stephanopoulos still fails to grasp that there is nothing “extra” about what should have been a common-sense disclosure. What’s more, on GMA Friday morning, he didn’t see fit to mention the sheer size of his donations; no doubt many of his viewers would consider $75,000 real money, even for a television personality reportedly making double-digit millions.

Yes, it’s more than 150% of the average family inocme.

EPA’S BACK DOOR:  Only the green movement has the key.  Kimberley Strassel’s latest column documents the uber-cozy relationship between Obama’s EPA and environmentalists in the case over Pebble Mine in Alaska:

As Pebble summed it up in a letter to the agency’s inspector general this week: “EPA gave anti-mine activists an opportunity to review, comment, and shape the strategy EPA would pursue to block development of the mine. Then, having decided that it would proceed to block the mine using a [pre-emptive veto], EPA sought to cloak its actions by recruiting the very same anti mine activists to ‘petition’ EPA to initiate those [veto] proceedings. . . .

Pebble was bulldozed in a secret, ideologically driven collusion between greens and government. That is a scandal worthy of resignations.

Tar. Feathers. Sicilian Bull.   

LISTEN HERE, STARTING AT ABOUT 32 MINUTES, to hear George Stephanopoulos talk about Brian Williams. “You’re a newsman.”

JONATHAN MACEY: Injustice At The SEC.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 736.

THE UBIQUITOUS PROGRESSIVE SOLUTION:  Melissa Harris, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, has, in her infinite wisdom, the perfect solution to Illinois’ infamous pension problem:

There is a simple solution to Illinois’ pension mess that too few people are talking about: Tax retirement income.

Make it taxable just like any other income.

Why?

It is the largest tax loophole in the state, costing an estimated $2 billion per year.

Eureka–that’s it!   Of course, Illinois’ profligate pension system has racked up $104.6 billion in unfunded liabilities for the State’s taxpayers.  But hey, I’m sure there are other things to tax besides senior citizens’ retirement income.

LOSING THE ANTIBIOTIC ARMS RACE:

Antibiotics face a worthy, endlessly adaptive enemy: bacteria. The more we use each drug, the less effective it becomes. That means that we need a constant flow of new antibiotics. And we’re not getting them, in part because the market for developing these vital drugs is broken.

Here’s the basic process for a pharmaceutical company to develop and profit from a drug. First, you spend a bunch of money looking for compounds that might do what you want to do. Then you file a patent application, and register with the FDA and regulators in other countries. This allows you to start spending a boatload of money on clinical testing that will find out whether your new drug actually does something you want it to do, without killing or maiming the patient. At some point during the clinical trial process, your patent will be awarded. Then you finish clinical trials, and if the drug looks good to everyone, you can start selling it. You have from now until the patent runs out to recover the vast sums you have spent on developing this drug (plus some extra for your shareholders, and to cover the costs of all the R&D that did not lead to blockbuster drugs). After that, generic competition will enter the market and compete your margins down to almost nothing. That generally gives you a little over 10 years to make all of the money on a new drug. For example, Opdivo, the exciting and fantastically expensive new cancer treatment that was approved late last year, will probably be eligible for generic production in 2027.

Do you see why this is such a problem for antibiotic development? If a company develops an exciting new cancer treatment that does a great job, oncologists will start pumping the stuff into patients as fast as they can get permission from insurers. If a company develops an exciting new antibiotic, infectious disease specialists will hold onto it as long as possible, using older generics whenever possible and bringing out your new drug only when everything else has failed. By the time they’re ready to use it more broadly, the drug will be off patent, and the company that developed it won’t make any money off of it.

As health policy, this is absolutely the right thing to do; it stretches out the time we get to use an effective antibiotic, and saves costs to boot. But as drug development policy, it’s disastrous. Companies are less and less interested in creating new antibiotics, because it’s too hard to make money there.

I’m very concerned about this; we need to change the incentives. Also, we need more research into phages and other non-antibiotic approaches.

DON’T GET SICK IN JULY:  This is supposedly an “insider tip” proffered by nurses in this Politico article.  The reason seems logical:  July is the beginning month for medical school, and there’s a new batch of inexperienced interns and residents running around with new responsibilities.

The article also contains a shameless, progressive rant against “VIP” rooms and amenities in hospitals.  The writer opines, “VIP care becomes problematic when those patients unnecessarily take up resources that more critical patients need.”  But of course the article provides no actual evidence that this ever actually happens.  But, you know, like everybody should be, like, totally equal!  Karl Marx would be so proud.

IN COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL’S BLUE SKY BLOG: Maurice Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi: From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Computer Algorithms — The Evolution of Collusion.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Kid who got in to every Ivy League school is going to the University of Alabama — and it’s a brilliant decision. “While some people may see his decision to turn down schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford as ill considered or shortsighted, Nelson said he’s received a ton of support for choosing UA. One teacher, he told Business Insider, complimented him for ‘making such an informed decision’ about where to work towards his undergraduate degree.”

Research shows that people who get accepted to the Ivy League but don’t attend do just as well as people who do attend. They’re sorting for success, not contributing to it. The honors program at a good state university offers the most bang for your buck, I think — and I’ve put my money where my mouth is.

Say, I wonder how he researched this?

99 CENTS ON KINDLE: Chronicle of a Startup Town: Los Angeles.

THE STEPHANOPOULOS TRIFECTA, over at Ed Driscoll.com:

● More Stephanopoulos Conflicts of Interest Emerge.

● ABC and Stephanopoulos ‘Make Brian Williams Look Like An Eagle Scout.’

● ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Donated $50,000 to Clinton.

Yes, it’s now up to $75,000. But don’t miss the video featuring Stephanopoulos playing giggling straight man to Diane Sawyer as she attempts to explains media ethics and an “unexpectedly” incredulous public at the end of that last link. (Bumped).

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? FDA propose to lift ban on blood donation for gay, bisexual men.

AN INMATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE ASYLUM CRIES OUT FOR HELP:

The pressure to avoid criticizing current progressive practice is intense. More and more, though, people seem to acknowledge that we have a problem, a really deep problem that we seem to have no way to find our way out of. . . .

Manarchist, dudebro …. These are terms that are typically employed as a cudgel against the left by centrist Democrats. They argue for dismissing a particular political argument by presuming that a certain set of people makes that political argument. Which, whatever: a majority of the socialists I’ve known in my life have not been white men, and I’ve known thousands, but who cares, right. The bigger question at this point is what any of that has to do with a guy using Emmett Till’s memory to wage political warfare over a trade agreement. What does manarchism or brocialism or whatever have to do with that ugly comment? Who knows? It doesn’t matter: Bauer knows that those are magic words. He understands how today’s progressive internet works. He understands critique drift. He knows that whatever complaints about him can simply be filtered through third-hand appropriated feminism. Because that’s how we do things, now.

What all of this descended into, as was inevitable, was a White Off. A White Off is a peculiar 21st-century phenomenon where white progressives try to prove that the other white progressives they’re arguing with are The Real Whites. It’s a contest in shamelessness: who can be more brazen in reducing race to a pure argumentative cudgel? Who feels less guilt about using the fight against racism as a way to elevate oneself in a social hierarchy? Which white person will be the first to pull out “white” as a pejorative in a way that demonstrates the toothlessness of the concept? Within progressivism today, there is an absolute lack of shame or self-criticism about reducing racial discourse to a matter of straightforward personal branding and social signaling. It turns my stomach.

(If there’s one thing I know about today’s progressive white people, it’s that they are all sure other white people are the really white ones.)

So true. Plus:

And none of this is even to begin to ask what, exactly, any of this stuff accomplishes, how continuing to build this immense shibboleth White Dudes — made by white people, for the entertainment of white people — actually helps in the fight against racism or sexism. Set those basic questions of what we’re actually doing here aside. How do we separate good from bad when those conversations are inevitably preempted by the same tired-ass slogans, played-out memes, and exhausted insults? I don’t know how to ask people to do better work and have higher standards when they treat any criticism as a political betrayal.

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled.

Also true.

HOUSE VOTES TO STRIP GALLEGO LANGUAGE FROM NDAA REAUTHORIZATION:   In a 221-202 vote Thursday night, the House passed Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-AL) amendment to strip the Gallego language. As you may recall from previous posts, the Gallego amendment (named for its sponsor, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)) would have encouraged the Secretary of Defense to hire illegal aliens who’ve been granted amnesty by President Obama’s unilateral executive actions on immigration.

The bad news is that 20 Republicans voted with the Democrats to oppose Brooks’ amendment.  A list of the 20 can be found here.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi predictably called the Brooks’ amendment “xenophobic” and “un-American.”

RELATED:  Los Angeles Times reports on the House vote with the following headline: “Republicans Block Young Immigrant ‘Dreamers’ from Military.”  Not once does the Times acknowledge that these “immigrants” are in this country illegally.  

SPACE: House Science Committee Approves Four Commercial Space Bills. The Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act is a good bill. You might want to let your congresscritters know. And I have to say, I’ve read Joanne Gabrynowicz’s letter objecting to it and I’m not at all persuaded.

Here are some short pieces I’ve written on this in USA Today, Popular Mechanics, and USA Today again.

And here’s a longer law-review treatment.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: We’re hearing the “tuition results from subsidy cuts” line again, so a reminder:

ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth. . . .

In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.

Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college. While the college-age population has not increased since the tail end of the baby boom, the percentage of the population enrolled in college has risen significantly, especially in the last 20 years. Enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs has increased by almost 50 percent since 1995. As a consequence, while state legislative appropriations for higher education have risen much faster than inflation, total state appropriations per student are somewhat lower than they were at their peak in 1990. (Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today.)

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

For example, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1980, my parents were paying more than double the resident tuition that undergraduates had been charged in 1960, again in inflation-adjusted terms. And of course tuition has kept rising far faster than inflation in the years since: Resident tuition at Michigan this year is, in today’s dollars, nearly four times higher than it was in 1980.

State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.

It is disingenuous to call a large increase in public spending a “cut,” as some university administrators do, because a huge programmatic expansion features somewhat lower per capita subsidies. Suppose that since 1990 the government had doubled the number of military bases, while spending slightly less per base. A claim that funding for military bases was down, even though in fact such funding had nearly doubled, would properly be met with derision.

The real problem is that all colleges are competing with the Ivy League (schools that are funded COMPLETELY differently from most colleges…

Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

Yes. Federal funding should cap the percentage of administrators at 50% of full-time teaching faculty.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CHEATING & LYING EDITION: UT-Austin slapped down for withholding docs in admissions scandal.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: In Wake of 35% Enrollment Decline, Pace Law School Dean Cuts Faculty Pay 10%, Eliminates Research Stipends And Sabbaticals, And Warns Faculty Not To Speak To Press.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Clinton Connections Paid Off for Indonesian Tobacco Tycoon’s Group: Foundation donor hired Clinton supporters to successfully lobby for U.S. support.

WAR? WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? In the long run, wars make us safer and richer.

Related: Why Guns Are Better Than Butter.