HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Amidst 23% Enrollment Decline, West Virginia Law School Cuts Tuition 44% For Certain Non-Residents.

LOUISE MENSCH: Botox And Filler Are Awesome – Let’s Hear It For Science.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Would Trump nominate Peter Thiel to the Supreme Court?

HEH:

REPORTED H.W. BUSH VOTE FOR HILLARY IS EXACTLY WHY MANY REPUBLICANS SUPPORT TRUMP, Ben Shapiro writes:

The Bush family isn’t put off so much by Trump’s policy proposals – except for immigration and free trade, the Bush family likely agrees with much of Trump’s left-leaning policy. They’re mostly put off by Trump’s attitude – his boorishness, his ignorance, his general sense of know-nothingism. To be fair, Trump clubbed Jeb! like a baby seal and the Bush family specifically during the debates; that had to draw some ire from the family. But for George H.W. Bush, the deciding factor was likely attitudinal: Trump just doesn’t belong. The Clintons, by dint of two decades in the White House spotlight, do.

This is one of the objections to Trump that many Trump supporters have a right to be angry about. It’s one thing to object to Trump based on policy differences and a general belief that he toxifies the conservative message. It’s another thing to do it because he doesn’t belong in the toney company of the blue bloods. The Bush Family feels like American royalty, and they appear to see Trump as a nouveau riche blowhard. That feels elitist rather than principled. Nobody was surprised that the person who reported H.W. Bush’s voting choice was a Kennedy. That’s how the Bushes roll.

And that feeling of Republican elitism helped drive Trump to new heights. Trump wasn’t merely a reaction to the “neocons” or the “Republican establishment.” He was a reaction to the Bush family in particular: their genteel sensibilities, their family heritage, their general chumminess with the Clintons. Republican primary voters reveled in the Trump-Jeb! piledrivers, because they felt that Trump was willing to hit people hard, unlike the Bush family.

If the reports are true, the story seems like Stockholm syndrome. During his 1992 run for the White House, Bill Clinton’s campaign used George H.W. Bush’s breaking of his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge — which the Democrat-majority Congress demanded of Papa Bush in 1990, who was far more interested in foreign policy than budget negations — as a cudgel against him in a viciously partisan advertisement designed to make Bubba appear to be running to Bush’s right. Much the same would happen over a decade later during Dubya’s administration, when many of the same leftists who supported regime change in Iraq during the Clinton years in the mid to late 1990s would adopt a similar “you f***ed up, you trusted us” stance and toss their former support down the memory hole (not least of which, Hillary Clinton).

And now Bush #41 is returning the favor by supporting his wife and once again sticking the shiv into Republicans?

MY LATEST NEW YORK OBSERVER ESSAY: Hillary is a one woman War On Honesty. (bumped)

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1230.

THE US NAVY’S TROUBLED LITTORAL COMBAT SHIP (LCS): StrategyPage’s Jim Dunnigan says the obvious. The USN has decided to turn the LCS into something it was supposed to replace: the frigate. The post reviews the entire program.

THEY’RE NOT JOURNALISTS, THEY’RE ERRAND BOYS EAGERLY AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS FROM GROCERY CLERKS: Clinton gets too much media buy-in for her anti-accountability efforts.

We’ve known this in Yglesias’ case ever since, as Mickey Kaus noted, Jeniffer Palmieri publicly emasculated him back in 2008.

A COMING CHINA BANKING CRISIS?

This is hardly the first time economists and investors have raised the alarm about China’s growing debt pile, but it’s nevertheless an alarming piece of analysis. The report estimates that China’s debt stood at 255 percent of GDP at the end of last year. And given that China has continued to borrow to prop up its shaky economy, that figure is almost certainly even higher today.

It is a huge amount of debt, but it’s not unprecedented. Niall Ferguson estimates in The Cash Nexus that Britain’s debt-to-GDP ratio reached 268 percent in 1822. As students of history know, the sun didn’t set on the British Empire for over one hundred years after that. Indeed, as Walter Russell Mead explains in God and Gold, the ability to maintain so much debt helped Britain defeat its European challengers (Spain and France, primarily) and grow its empire. (U.S. debt-to-GDP, for the record, stands at around 105 percent according to the IMF).

The British sustained high levels of debt by being exceptionally good and (for the time) highly sophisticated bankers. But they also taxed their citizens far more than, say, the French did. France struggled under a much smaller debt load for nearly two centuries because it wasn’t able to squeeze its citizens as much as London could.

China will likely have to find a different formula to finance its way through the hard times ahead. Britain survived because its citizens continued to have faith that their government would pay them back, and so British debt became a valuable asset. It’s not clear that things are the same in China.

Nor that they should be.

ACCUSED DOMESTIC TERRORIST: That’s what Ahmad Khan Rahami is called in this report. If investigators discover Rahami has operational connections to international terrorist organizations will that make him an international terrorist?

The article quotes John D. Cohen, a “professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and former counterterrorism official at the federal Department of Homeland Security”:

In the past, when a tip came in or we conducted a terrorism investigation, one of the elements was to find some operational connection to a terrorist organization…(Now) we have an increasing number of individuals in this country who become inspired by terrorist and extremist ideas based on social media and what they see on the internet.”

If investigators discover –just by chance– that Rahami was influenced by Islamist supremacists who seek to create a global caliphate and proceeded to commit an act of terror in order to help said Islamist supremacists achieve that goal, does that make him an international terrorist? Or a traitor? Or both?

On the internet, ISIS and Al Qaeda provide tactical and operational guidance for conducting “distributed” terror attacks in order to obtain their ideological goals. Immediately after an attack like Rahami’s, ISIS propagandists launch a media blitz in order to magnify its political impact. The ideological encouragement to launch a terror attack, the “how to” guidance for conducting the strike and the terror group’s quick and global use of the strike as war waging propaganda are international connections. However, Barack Obama is very relucant to publicly concede their existence and relevance.

NOTE: Clarified the last paragraph.

IT’S NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA, IT’S MUGGERIDGE’S LAW: Eric Cartman, and Amy Schumer’s Vagina Help Prove Parody Is Impossible.

(Classical reference in headline.)

ROGER SIMON: TRUMP WILL HAVE TO WIN 2 AGAINST 1 IN THE DEBATES.

As Roger notes, he’ll be fighting both Hillary and her DNC-MSM enablers during the debates.

WHEN WE HAD A BETTER CLASS OF REFUGEES? When America Was More Welcoming for Refugees.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Would Trump nominate Peter Thiel to the Supreme Court? He’d offer diversity! “Thiel would bring diversity to the Court — Thiel, a graduate of Stanford Law School, would be the only member of the Court not from Harvard or Yale, and he’d also be the only openly gay member of the Court. More significantly, he’s a libertarian — there was lots of support for the idea of a Thiel appointment from the Cato crowd, which is also libertarian — and, unlike other justices, he would come to the Court with a degree of real-world experience unmatched by any appointee in my lifetime.”

ALL THE QUEEN’S HORSES AND ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN COULD BARELY HUMPTY HER UP AND DUMPTY HER OFF, AGAIN: Then her bodyguard of liars utterly failed to patch a convincing tall tale together from the pieces of her shattered stories. (bumped)

PAUL MIRENGOFF AT POWERLINE: Two hours of rural driving, not one Hillary sign. She is a very bad candidate.

THE HUFFINGTON POST QUEUES UP A PREMATURE OBIT FOR HILLARY.

Based on the current polls, such an pre-postmortem may or may not be necessary (how’s that for going out on a limb?), but in any case, perhaps those voters shunning Hillary this year are simply taking the Huffington Post’s advice from 2008 about not voting for her.

AND NOW, A FEW WORDS FROM MICHELLE OBAMA ON HILLARY CLINTON:

Remember that time Michelle Obama used Bill Clinton’s cheating to say Hillary shouldn’t be President? I do. pic.twitter.com/zi6DywEHtF

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) September 18, 2016

MAYBE SHE’S HANGING OUT WITH OMAR MATEEN’S MISSING WIFE: CNN: “The wife of bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami left the US a few days before the NY, NJ bombings, an official says.”

Say, whatever happened to Mrs. Mateen (Noor Salman), anyway? Haven’t heard anything since the FBI “lost” her.

THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS: Obama claims sexism is the reason Hillary Clinton isn’t doing well.

Last week, Nancy Pelosi blamed Hillary Clinton’s disappointing performance in the polls to the fact that third-party candidates like Gary Johnson are siphoning off her vote. This week, President Barack Obama is getting in to the act of preparing Dems for Hillary Clinton’s defeat by trotting out the tired old excuse that sexism is weighing her down in the polls.

Obama, speaking at an event in New York City on Sunday, suggested Americans are biased against “powerful women,” which is why Clinton isn’t running away with this election.

“There’s a reason why we haven’t had a woman president,” Obama said at the fundraiser for Clinton. “We as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful women and it still troubles us in a lot of ways, unfairly.”

Obama added later: “This should not be a close election but it will be, and the reason it will be is not because of Hillary’s flaws.”

Actually, it is because of Hillary’s flaws. But this is more proof that in a Hillary administration, all criticism will be dismissed as sexism, just as under Obama it is all dismissed as racism. Which is yet another reason why, if you want honest government, you need to elect a straight, white, male Republican who won’t have such excuses to fall back on.

WORLD’S OLDEST ROCK: Earth’s crust formed a little over four billion years ago. “Scientists at the University of Alberta have precisely dated the world’s oldest rock unit at 4.02 billion years old. The ancient rock’s composition is different than scientists expected, suggesting the planet’s earliest continental crust was oceanic in structure and composition.”

BUT THAT WAS A LONG, LONG TIME AGO: “I Used to Be a Human Being,” Andrew Sullivan, whose CV includes his phase as America’s foremost uterus detective, now confesses.

How long has it been since Andrew was human? So long ago, it was prior to the Weimar Era.

Related: “Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.”