HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Arizona State Law School Opens New $129 Million Building Today In Downtown Phoenix.
Well, to be fair, their old building — where I spent a fair amount of time some years ago — was a 1970s relic that looked like a UFO. On the other hand, while the downtown location may be better for getting students part-time employment, the ASU campus is really nice.
OUTLAW AIR CONDITIONERS, AND ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE THEM! Why does the New York Times Consider Air Conditioning Vital for Prisoners, Bad for Planet?
MEGAN MCARDLE: Aetna’s Retreat From Obamacare Is More Than It Seems.
The question is: What matters to regulators more? Blocking the mergers, or keeping the exchanges healthy? That’s not an easy question. As of this writing, it looks as if Aetna’s withdrawal will leave at least one county — Pinal, in Arizona — with no insurers at all selling exchange policies. And it seems unlikely that Pinal County will be the last to lose all its insurers unless something pretty drastic changes in these markets.
The state regulator has made hopeful noises about persuading someone to pick up the business. (Remember the regulatory goodwill we mentioned above?) But regulators in relatively small states don’t necessarily have that much clout with big insurers who can afford to keep taking these losses for years. California can plausibly say “Play ball with us or get ready to lose our nearly 40 million citizens as potential customers,” but a big corporation probably does not tremble in fear of the mighty market-shaking powers of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation. And more locally concentrated firms cannot simply keep eating large losses for an indefinite period. It is obviously a problem — for politicians, as well as customers — if a growing number of people have a theoretical right to buy health insurance but cannot actually buy any.
People no longer have a “right” to buy health insurance; we have a legal obligation to do so. That’s going to be an increasingly difficult obligation to fulfill as insurers abandon one ObamaCare market after another.
SOME PEOPLE CERTAINLY SEEM HAPPY ABOUT IT: Michael Barone: Is the end of white Christian America a good thing? “Sides’s questions and Jones’s answers are pretty much neutral in tone, but many readers will detect a tone of triumphalism in the book’s title and in the thrust of its argument. You white Christians have been the majority for a long time, but it’s not going to be your country any more — or so they seem to be saying.”
TRANSPARENCY: Congress receives FBI material on Hillary Clinton emails.
In a statement, the FBI said the materials were provided to Congress consistent with the agency’s “commitment to transparency” in the Clinton case. The material contains classified information and was provided “with the expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed” without the FBI’s agreement, the agency said Tuesday.
Furious the FBI didn’t press charges against their political rival, House Republicans pressed the agency to release notes from its agents’ July interview with Clinton. They claim the FBI notes, which are typically kept confidential after an investigation is closed, may show Clinton provided inconsistent answers to questions about her handling of emails containing classified information during testimony last year before the House Benghazi panel.
Republicans are also demanding that the Justice Department open a new investigation into whether Clinton lied to Congress.
That doesn’t really require an investigation, does it?
FILE IT AWAY: “Remember in the olden days when the campaigns didn’t really start until after Labor Day and pundits told us not to pay attention to anything that happened before then?,” Betsy Newmark asks. “That changed when opponents succeeded in defining candidates with advertising in the summer. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did that with Kerry and Obama did that with Romney in 2012. So now, in August, we can basically see how the campaign is going to be going forward. Barring some black swan sort of event, we’re looking at a Trump loss with the possibility of losing some of the states that McCain and Romney won. It only makes sense for the GOP to focus on keeping the House and Senate and the state legislatures and governorships.”
PRIORITIES: Turkey to Free 38,000 Prisoners as Coup Arrests Crowd Jails.
A government decree published in the Official Gazette on Wednesday allows the conditional release of prisoners with less than two years to parole. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said about 38,000 people will be set free “initially.”
As of last week, Turkey had formally arrested more than 17,000 people and was holding about 6,000 others suspected of links to the botched takeover.
It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.
Prisoners not being released include “those convicted of terrorist acts, sexual offenses and murder.”
BREAKING NEWS FROM 1933: Berlin goes vegan.
I’m sure it all work out fine this time around.
CHANGE: Trump shakes up campaign, demotes top adviser.
Stephen Bannon, a former banker who runs the influential conservative outlet Breitbart News and is known for his fiercely anti-establishment politics, has been named the Trump campaign’s chief executive. Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster who has been close to Trump for years, will assume the role of campaign manager.
Two Trump campaign aides confirmed the staff’s reshuffle early Wednesday, requesting anonymity to discuss personnel changes without permission.
The campaign also announced that “the first major TV ad buy of the general election [is] slated to start later this week.”
ESCAPE: Senior North Korean Diplomat Defects In London.
South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported on Tuesday that a high-profile diplomat in the UK defected with his wife and son to a “third country”. The BBC named the defector as veteran diplomat Thae Yong Ho, a counselor at the North Korean embassy and deputy to the ambassador.
Quoting an unnamed source, JoongAng Ilbo said the diplomat embarked on a defection journey “following a scrupulous plan” and was in the process of “landing in a third country as an asylum seeker.”
It was not clear from the newspaper report whether the third country was the UK. The term is usually used in South Korean media to refer to a country which is neither North nor South Korea.
An official at the North Korean embassy in London would not confirm the defection, describing reports of the event as “quite sudden”.
Predicting the end of the Kim regime has been a fool’s game since 1950, but this has been a bad year for Kim Jong-un.
EXCUSE ME, ALL I WANT TO KNOW IS “IS THERE A TOWN WHO IS KNOWN FOR THESE THINGS?”: Tiny Insjön in central Sweden isn’t known for pig mask-wearing couples shooting lasers at Pokémon hunters before having sex by a waterwheel. But that could be about to change.
UNTHINKING IS CRAZY UNCLE JOE’S SPECIALTY! Biden Does The UNTHINKABLE With Nuke Codes At Hillary Rally.
OF COURSE HE DID: ISIS fighter received welfare in Maine while being radicalized.
IT WAS ALWAYS A CON GAME: Why the Democrats Don’t Mind Obamacare’s Collapse.
THESE DAYS CHARACTER IS CONFLATED WITH PARTY AFFILIATION: Why Character No Longer Counts in Presidential Biographies for Children.
GETTING PAID IS THE BEST ACCOLADE: I dreamed of being Hemingway, but ended up a pulp fiction writer.
USING TRUMP TO TAR US: There’s Nothing Wrong with Carefully Screening Immigrants.
WE COULD JUST BAN SELFIES. ALSO, GET OFF MY LAWN: Those ballot selfies could get you in major legal trouble.
NOTHING SURPRISING HERE: Writing instruction in our schools is terrible. We need to fix it.
WHY THE SHUTTLE WAS A MISTAKE: A Few Observations on Reusable Space Hardware,
or Why the Space Shuttle was an engineering masterpiece and a logistical nightmare.
ANN ALTHOUSE FORCES CORRECTION FROM THE NEW YORKER.
AT AMAZON, $15 off the Amazon Tap, and take $20 off the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle.
I CAN SEE GOG AND MAGOG FROM MY HOUSE! Russia uses Iran as base to bomb Syrian militants for first time.
MORE SUPPORT FOR MICKEY KAUS’S TERRORISM-WELFARE HYPOTHESIS, BUT IS ANYBODY PAYING ATTENTION? ISIS fighter received welfare in Maine while being radicalized.
Make ’em work for a living and they’ll have less time for that crap. I mean, Kaus was writing about this in 2001, but has the lesson sunk in? No. Wrote Mickey:
In fact, there’s a good argument that “welfare benefits + ethnic antagonism” is the universal recipe for an underclass with an angry, oppositional culture. The social logic is simple: Ethnic differences make it easy for those outside of, for example, French Arab neighborhoods to discriminate against those inside, and easy for those inside to resent the mainstream culture around them. Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine. (And if you work all day, there’s less time to dream up ways and reasons to kill infidels.)
Still true, still an important consideration for policy. Still ignored.
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