DONALD TRUMP’S NEW HILLARY ATTACK AD suggests that he won’t be a pushover in a general election contest:

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

SEE, THIS MAKES MY IDEA OF GOING BACK TO PAPER RECORDS LOOK BETTER: 5 Major Hospital Hacks: Horror Stories from the Cybersecurity Frontlines.

HMM: Out-of-Work Chinese Government Hackers May Be Behind Sophisticated Ransomware Attacks.

YOU DON’T SAY: Belgium Says Algerian Killed in Raid May Have Had Links to Radical Islam.

HERE’S WHY FEDERAL BUREAUCRAT UNIONS LOVE BIG GOVERNMENT: Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports today that federal employee unions added 40,000 new members in 2015. That’s the biggest annual increase in eight years. But wait, there’s more!

“Due to the growth of the government’s workforce, however, the percentage of unionized federal employees dropped from 27.5 percent in 2014 to 27.3 percent in 2015. The federal government employed 3.59 million people in 2015, up from 3.41 million people in 2014,” according to Watson, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Bigger government means more union members, many of whom will contribute to the unions’ political action committees, which will enable more contributions to sympathetic congressmen who in turn vote for more government. Completing the Iron Triangle are the government contractors and special interests beneficiaries of government. Round and round they go, and can you guess who’s paying for it?

OUCH:

SPACE: All Of Our Probes In A Single Chart.

ONLY ONE? One of Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates may have to vote for her from jail.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Sea King helicopters sold off as ‘sheds and man caves.’

Earlier: The Case Against Man Caves.

DISPATCHES FROM THE DERRIERE GUARD: The New Old Masters — New Yorker Jacob Collins and his devoted students seek a radical reclamation of artistic tradition.

(Classical reference in headline.)

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Free market needs some ‘Sunshine:’ Private sector businesses like Twitter and Facebook far from models of transparency.

SUPREME COURT: Obama plays it safe, chooses Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia on Supreme Court.

IT’S COME TO THIS. Piers Morgan: Dear Harry, If you really are thinking about going to Yale, you must be nuts. You wouldn’t last five minutes against the politically correct sex police.

Speaking of the Education Apocalypse, when its self-appointed PC enforcers have lost Piers Farging Morgan…

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1042.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “The Real Scandal at Oberlin Is Much Bigger Than One Professor’s Anti-Semitism. What does it say about Oberlin’s hiring processes that it picked a bigot–who claims Israel did 9/11 and created ISIS–to teach social justice writing courses to undergraduates?”

Related: Anti-Semitism at Scripps College.

THIS IS LIKELY TRUE, AND DEFINITELY EMBARRASSING: CIA has ignored intelligence on ISIS since 2013 and could have halted its rise when it only had a handful of recruits, Syrian rebel spy chief claims.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers’ Union Attempts To Strangle Charters:

Teachers’ unions are using the same kind of approach to kill charter schools that abortion opponents use to shut abortion clinics down: pile up expensive regulations that make it increasingly difficult to operate. . . .

There are, however, other ways that school districts can address legitimate concerns about whether charter schools are serving hard to serve children. The unions may hate it because it isn’t punitive, but state and federal education should be topping up the reimbursement that charters get for enrolling kids with special needs or other problems, including poverty and home problems, that put them at risk. Increasing the value of the voucher that parents of such children get, or increasing the per-pupil payment that government pays charter schools will help ensure that charter operators will make special efforts to reach out to these communities.
The hostility between many teacher unions and the charter school and voucher movement is a tragedy of modern American life. What we really need is a proliferation of teacher-owned, teacher-managed cooperative educational ventures—operating either in public school buildings or in churches or in other community spaces. These coops should receive favorable regulatory and tax treatment, and give teachers the latitude to teach in an environment they control. Different coops would cater to different kinds of students, or different age groups, or offer different educational philosophies. Parents would be able to chose among many alternative programs, and teacher assessment could be something that the community would do in a much richer and holistic way—good coops would get good word of mouth.

Developing an education approach that offers more choice, that prioritizes the needs of poor students, that offers rewards for good teachers while setting them free to run their own programs rather than kowtow to administrators: this is something America can and ought to do.

In fact, of course, charter schools are the last hope for public schools to hang onto parents before they’re abandoned entirely — which abandonment, in the numbers in which it’s happening in a lot of systems, is enough to precipitate a death spiral of shrinking enrollment and declining public support.

THIS IS A BLACK MARK FOR THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: Another Defector Dead in Washington: A former member of Putin’s inner circle has died violently and mysteriously in our nation’s capital. I mean, if you can’t protect a defector from Russian assassins in Washington, DC, what exactly are you good for?

PROBABLY NOT, AT A GUESS: DEA Fails, But Can Jamie Hunt Be Trusted To Fix It?

CONTINUING THE SENIOR SQUEEZE: The Fed Holds Steady. So what would interest on the federal debt be if rates rose to historical averages? I suspect it would be unsustainable, and I suspect that’s why the Fed’s holding rates down — at least until there’s a Republican president to be the fall guy. Hey, Trump’s a bankruptcy expert . . .

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Free market needs some ‘Sunshine:’ Private sector businesses like Twitter and Facebook far from models of transparency.

THE WAR ON SENIORS AND SAVERS CONTINUES: Federal Reserve expected to leave key interest rate unchanged.

If we had a GOP President, we’d be hearing a lot about how senior citizens are suffering under this absurdly low interest rate regime.

BRENDAN O’NEILL ON FACEBOOK: “Unless you think Trump is an insanely powerful political maestro who in the space of six months has utterly altered the character of America, then you have to conclude that the current ugliness and division everyone is complaining about has been brewing over the past eight years of Obamaism and ‘politics of hope’. For liberals now to throw their hands in the air over the state of America, when they’ve been running America for nearly a decade, strikes me as a bit rich. How the so-called politics of hope nurtured what we have today — that’s the question we should be asking.”