SCIENTISTS FLIP SWITCH ON GENES with a magnet.

THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY: This All-Metal Self-Loading T-Shirt Cannon Looks and Sounds Incredible.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Germany: Green energy policies bring power giant to €7 billion loss.

PAUL RAHE: Donald Trump and the Twenty-Four-Year Itch.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, THEY TEND NOT TO APPRECIATE THE ROLE OF COMPETITIVE MARKETS ANYWHERE: A Lesson from Spotlight That Newspaper Folk Don’t Get: Competition Makes Them Better.

HIS APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE: Bill Clinton cancels on small crowd due to “bad weather.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1035.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Luxurious College Apartments, Built on Debt.

The lazy rivers. The dining-hall steakhouse. The hot tubs. The dazzling fitness centers. Journalists who cover higher education love these lists of amenities in student housing, and readers love to hate them.

Take the latest trend in college housing: luxury off-campus apartment buildings that rent only to students. This is, on the face of it, somewhat mysterious. Students are not known for their fantastic credit. Nor for taking excellent care of their surroundings. I myself recall moving into a rather standard off-campus rental that first had to be cleared of the 57 bags of garbage that the previous occupants left behind. Everything you would infer from that fact about the condition of the house is correct.

Yet apparently today’s students have a rather more inviting option: student-only apartment buildings considerably nicer than those occupied by, say, many successful journalists of my acquaintance. This naturally raises the question: Where are the students getting the money for this?

In some cases, from their parents. I cannot explain why those parents should want to spend sizable sums procuring top-flight housing for their progeny, and why they differ in this so much from the parents of my generation, who were generally willing to approve off-campus living only on the condition that it cost less than a year in the dormitories.

But in other cases, the students choosing these luxury options are almost certainly financing that lifestyle with money lent, at below-market rates, by you the taxpayer.

BECAUSE WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS HAVE BEEN SCREWED: Ron Fournier: Why Michigan Is Hungry For Change.

Drive farther north on I-75, past Flint and Saginaw and into the scenic woods of northern Michigan, and you’ll find people who remember when the area was thriving. For generations, blue-collar workers poured out of city factories on Friday afternoons and headed to their cottages, which, along with defined pensions and new cars they helped build, were emblems of the 20th-century American middle class.

That era is gone—and along with it, for many Michigan residents, went the family cottages. What’s left is a core of hard-bitten residents who couldn’t be more disconnected from the political system.

In December 2014, I stopped by northern Michigan diner for breakfast. It smelled like bacon and wet socks. I sat at one table, scrolling through Twitter as news broke from Washington that the economy is on a supposed upswing. At four other tables sat five regular customers sharing a single conversation.

“I leave my Christmas lights on for two hours—tops,” said the waitress, flitting between regulars with a pot of off-brand coffee.

“An hour for me,” said the local cop. The farmer at the next table nodded his head, “That’s about all I can afford, too.”

In Washington and New York, people celebrate economic numbers. In Michigan, people number the minutes they can afford Christmas lights.

Omitted from Fournier’s reporting: “Under my plan. . . electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket.”

UPDATE: From the comments:

Let’s be very direct here. These are exactly the people that Obama was promising to help out 8 years ago, and their lives have gotten worse, not better. This necessarily has to mean some combination of the following three premises are true:
1. Obama was disingenuous in his pledges to help the working class
2. Obama is ineffective/incompetent at accomplishing his promises
3. Obama’s policies themselves are the wrong policies to help the working class
A pretty unflattering picture even before we “embrace the healing power of ‘and.'”

Indeed.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES:

Shot: Second Wachowski Sibling Comes Out as Transgender.

Chaser: What Life As A Transgender Woman Taught Me About Progressives.

Hangover: MSNBC.com Befuddled That Caitlyn Jenner Is a Cruz-Backing Conservative.

MORE PROOF THAT JFK NEVER SHOULD HAVE ALLOWED FEDERAL WORKERS TO UNIONIZE: Defense Department and Veterans Affairs officials merged two facilities to create the Lovell Health Care Center to serve veterans and active duty personnel in the Chicago region. The hope was military spit-and-polish would provide a model for fixing VA’s scandalously incompetent facilities across the country.

Lovell now approaches the end of its five-year demonstration project tenure and the results have been disappointing. But Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, says two factors explain the dismal outcome: First, Lovell’s military personnel say too many VA employees are hopelessly incompetent, apathetic and inefficient. Second, the American Federation of Government Employees, the bureaucrats’ union, successfully demanded that nobody lose their job in the merger. After all, saving jobs – and union dues – is far more important than caring for veterans, right?

OH, FINE, NOW THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT IT: Tyrant-Proof the White House—Before It’s Too Late. “Under current precedent, the commander in chief can give a secret order to kill an American citizen with a drone strike without charges or trial.”

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ERIC WANG: Liberals should thank Scalia for right to blast GOP on Supreme Court: Conservative justice would smile at ads targeting Republican senators sponsored by groups that would ban their own ads.

DOCTORS, HOSPITALS GETTING STIFFED FOR MILLIONS OF DOLLARS BY OBAMACARE CO-OPS: A dozen of the 24 Obamacare health insurance co-ops established at a cost of $2.5 billion in 2012 have failed (and more are expected to do so). Now, hundreds of doctors, hospitals and other health care providers who served co-op policyholders are being muscled aside by federal bureaucrats claiming the government should be the first creditor in the bankruptcy line.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports the “Medical Society of New York estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars are owed to doctors and hospitals due to collapse of Health Republic of New York, the largest Obamacare co-op.” That’s just one state. Expect the total losses to be in the billions when all the accounting is completed.

MICHELLE MALKIN TO PJM: I WOULD PICK TRUMP OVER RUBIO.

BLOOMBERG: The “War On Men” In The Workplace. But note a piece of advice that would be problematic if aimed at other minorities: “One obvious bit of advice to men here is: Don’t commit so many crimes!”

AND HE’S RIGHT: Georgia lawmaker calls on Georgia Tech president to resign.

A Georgia legislator who has fiercely defended due process rights for college students accused of sexual assault is calling for the resignation of Georgia Tech’s president. State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, who in January held a hearing on the lack of due process provided by Georgia Tech and other state universities, called on Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson to resign over the concerns.

“He’s up for his contract renewal come April,” Ehrhart said. “The Regents, I think they’re frustrated with him. The alumni, I think they’re massively frustrated with him. He’s costing them [the school’s reputation], he’s costing their sons and daughters a safe environment on that campus, and they’re fed up with it, I think. We need somebody like a Mitch Daniels at Purdue to come in and have the guts to stand up to these activists in their cabinets, sweep them out of there and do the right thing, and they just won’t do that at Tech.”

Ehrhart called the lack of due process rights afforded to accused students “outrageous,” and discussed the tragedy of the situation.

“It’s such a great school. But the president and the administration are just clueless when it comes to due process on that campus and protecting all those kids,” Ehrhart said. “If I have to talk to another brokenhearted mother about their fine son where any allegation is a conviction and they toss these kids out of school after three and a half years, sometimes just before graduation, it’s just tragic.”

Ehrhart said whoever replaces Peterson will need to “clean house” at Georgia Tech in order to start giving students a fair process, or else the school needs to bring in someone with a “backbone.”

At a hearing in January, Ehrhart heard from the mother of a male student accused of sexual misconduct. The young man let his female friend stay in his apartment while she waited for her roommate to return to their dorm because she had lost her keys. Instead of sending the drunk young woman to wait alone in the cold and dark early morning hours, the young man kept her safe at his apartment. Sometime later, a friend of the young woman accused the young man of holding the alleged victim against her will.

Text messages from the young woman thanking the young man for allowing her to stay at his place while she waited were disallowed in the young man’s hearing. The young woman didn’t even believe she was a victim, yet because of the accusation of the third party, the young man was suspended.

Another male student was expelled after he rebuffed the advances of another male student. That student was eventually reinstated by the school’s Board of Regents after the student filed a lawsuit.

When the Insta-Daughter was a freshman at Georgia Tech, I wrote Peterson personally because armed gangs were staging “dorm invasions,” breaking into dorms and robbing students at gunpoint. I was concerned about her safety, but I didn’t even get a reply. That makes me wonder if one reason why the Tech administration is targeting its own students is its inability to deal with the actual, serious crime on and around its campus. I also felt that they really lied to us about the campus security situation when we were looking at the place, and would advise future applicants — and parents of applicants — to take whatever they say with a grain of salt.

REALLY, DID ANYONE EXPECT HER TO GO QUIETLY? Mizzou prof Melissa Click, who refused to accept reporter’s presence on campus, also refuses to accept her firing; says University of Missouri using her as “scapegoat.”

MARCO’S LAST STAND.

I REALLY DON’T THINK SCHOOL LUNCHES SHOULD BE A NATIONAL ISSUE: What’s On the Menu for the School Lunch Program?

Several hundred school food managers visited Senate offices this week pushing for floor action on a bipartisan draft child nutrition reauthorization bill that reflects a deal on school meal standards brokered with the White House and a key Senate panel.

The School Nutrition Association, which represents school cafeteria and food service managers as well as their food suppliers and helped broker that deal, say it would give members certainty and mend a rift between the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.

Sigh.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Arkansas Law School Dean Worried About ‘Harm’ From Professor’s FOIA Suit For Access To Admissions Data. They’re acting like they have something to hide, which suggests that they probably do.

TELL US SOMETHING WE DIDN’T KNOW: U.S. Commander in Africa Says Libya Is a Failed State.

In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. David Rodriguez said the recent agreement to form a unity government in Tripoli is an important step. Yet even with strong international support, the new government will struggle for the “foreseeable future” to establish its authority and secure Libya’s people and borders, he said.

Rodriguez estimated that it would take “10 years or so” to achieve long-term stability in Libya. He cited a “fractured society” and the lack of government institutions as major hurdles to overcome.

“The continued absence of central government control will continue to perpetuate violence, instability and allow the conditions for violent extremist organizations to flourish until the (government) and appropriate security forces are operational within Libya,” Rodriguez told the committee.

You’d think questions about Hillary Clinton’s reckless war of choice would hound her all along the campaign trail.