THE LONGEST FOUR YEARS IN HISTORY: If you think Americans are unhappy now, Christopher Buckley warns, wait until Hillary becomes president:

Mrs Clinton is many things — intelligent, accomplished, hard-working, quisquis — but she is not herself interesting, except as a historical phenomenon — an American Evita, minus the charisma and the balcony. This is likely to make four years of her feel interminable. One year into her presidency, Stephen Hawking may have to revise his theory of time and posit that it is now slowing down. Or has stopped altogether.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I postulate that Mrs Clinton is not an exciting persona. If she were, it would be her, not a 74-year-old rumpled lefty with Paleo-Marxist cuckoo ideas, attracting massive crowds of young people.

Comrade Sanders’s message may be flawed (rich people bad; government control of the economy good), but it is at least a message. Mrs Clinton has no message other than ‘I am so owed.’

GAWKER’S GOT A FEVAH, AND THE ONLY PRESCRIPTION IS SHOVING FEMINIST GHOSTBUSTERS OVER THE FINISH LINE:

Shot: The New Ghostbusters Trailer is Here, and Everything Looks Perfect.

—Headline, Gawker-owned i09, March 3, 2016.

Chaser: The New Much-Improved Ghostbusters Trailer Amps Up the Ghostly Action.

—Headline, Gawker-owned i09, yesterday.

Huh — I thought it was perfect the first time. But the new Lady Ghostbusters will be more perfect than perfection itself. Yuuuuge in its perfection. Such perfection like you’ve never seen before, let me tell you.

(Juxtaposition suggested by an Insta-reader, who knew who he was gonna call.)

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1106.

THE ELITES ARE DISCOVERING THAT THEY ARE NOT ONLY AT THE TABLE, BUT ALSO ON THE MENU, Richard Fernandez writes at the Belmont Club:

[It’s not just that] the elite cheat; but they are not above cheating each other. He complains that Harvard has proved willing to take donations ripped off of unwitting investors.  Drug companies like Theranos are suspected of marketing faked treatments to the public.  Hillary Clinton may have possibly provided “off-the-record favors for foreign governments”. But why not when Chelsea’s hedge fund husband lost 90% of the value of his bet on Greek stocks? Somebody had to lose the money so that someone could gain it.  The elites are discovering that they are not only at the table, but also on the menu.

People who actually matter are starting to become victims. That’s the shock. Just as Caesar was soon to discover that he was the prince for whom the heavens mourned, the Millenials may be surprised learn that the perma-renter  trend may eventually become the perma-tenter trap.  “Just outside of Seattle sits a small cluster of tents in what resembles an overcrowded camping ground.” See those Hoovervilles? They’re for you.

As Richard goes on to note, lots of the people — maybe a majority of them — wasting away again in an Obamaville are those who voted for him.

I THINK BERNIE SHOULD CARRY HIS MESSAGE ALL THE WAY TO NOVEMBER: Ed Morrissey: Get Ready For A Bernie Sanders Third Party Run.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Northern Kentucky University to cut 105 jobs to help fill $8 million budget gap. “The university’s payments into the state pension system have skyrocketed from $3.9 million in 2010 to $15.3 million this year. The projected cost for 2018 is $19.4 million. Mearns, who laid out the budget situation in a presentation here, said 2 percent of NKU’s operating budget went into pension costs in 2010 and that nearly 10 percent of the budget will be dedicated to the pension fund by 2018.”

NYC HITS PEAK GENDER IDIOCY:

Eugene Volokh reports that in NYC, the Human Rights Commission advises that you can be fined if you don’t refer to someone by the name and crackpot pronoun (“ze,” “hir”) that they prefer.

* * * * * * * *

Could you imagine being a business owner in NYC under this fanaticism? “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue,” said Robespierre. So it is with the Gender Robespierres. First they make us all lose our minds and our integrity by acquiescing in their bizarre fantasies, and then, if we don’t, they make us lose our livelihoods. (But not our heads; be thankful for small mercies.)

Volokh points out that this is not likely to remain in New York City, either. Think about that. Three of the scariest words in the English language are “Human Rights Commission.”

You know, liberal friends, next time you want to complain about how conservatives are the ones waging culture war, I want you to think about this.

Related: This juxtaposition by one of Ace’s co-bloggers sums up the left’s war on school bathrooms remarkably well:

Quote of the day I

“Leave ‘corporate America’ and get a non-job as a diversity enforcement officer: that’s where the big bucks are.”
― Mark Steyn, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.

Quote of the day II

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”
― H.L. Mencken.

Indeed™.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Self-Sabotage Of The Teachers’ Unions.

What is the biggest obstacle to giving teachers a raise? It’s not, as many Democrats and teachers’ unions suggest, Republican plutocrats looking to cut funding for schools and children. (Per-student spending on K-12 has risen steadily over the last two decades). The real challenge is one of the unions and their political allies’ own making: The debt accumulated by mismanaged public sector pension funds. . . .

The findings represent a typical example of the way outdated blue model governance all-too-often hurts the people it was designed to protect. State legislatures have over-promised pension benefits, and politicized union-backed investment funds have mismanaged the money they do have. The result is that there aren’t enough funds set aside to cover the pensions guaranteed to retired teachers, so states need to dig deep into younger teachers’ pay to cover them. If pensions had been accounted for accurately and managed competently all along, teachers could be making an average of 15 percent more money today.
Meanwhile, teachers’ unions are resistant to any kind of reform that would change the way teachers save for retirement. This means that teachers’ wages will stay low (discouraging talented young people from entering the profession) to the benefit of those few veteran retired-teachers who can collect generous payouts—at least, until the whole Ponzi scheme goes bust.

Needless to say, the current system does not serve the public interest.

To be fair, it was never actually meant to, except in passing. And, yeah, all is proceeding as I have foretold.

SPENGLER: “Bill Kristol Isn’t a ‘Renegade Jew.’ Just a Sore Loser Throwing a Tantrum,” David P. Goldman writes:

It is a shame, really. As I wrote in this space last year (“Two Cheers for the Neo-Conservatives“), the movement that Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz incubated at Public Interest and Commentary during the 1970s provided the bulk of the ideas and the cadre for the Reagan Revolution, most importantly supply-side economics. They got heady with success. As I wrote then:

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the neo-conservatives, every country looks like Poland, whose democracy movement in the 1980s was the thin end of the wedge that ruptured the Iron Curtain.

I come from the neocon movement. As chief economist for Jude Wanniski’s consulting firm Polyconomics, I was a card-carrying member of the Kristol Kindergarten back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But a stint of consulting for the governments of Nicaragua and Russia persuaded me that American democracy couldn’t be exported, and I went my own way.

Read the whole thing.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: PC feminists misfire again, as fearful elite media can’t touch Donald Trump.

Feminists and SJW-types generally are — as the “Shirtstorm Experiment” demonstrates — a tiny, unimportant minority except for the bullhorn they are given by the media. Ordinary people don’t like them, or care about what they think. If Trump’s candidacy does nothing more than make that clear, it will have made a significant contribution.

Excerpt:

Blame for this fiasco falls squarely upon the New York Times editors who delegated to two far too young journalists, Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, the complex task of probing the glitzy, exhibitionistic world of late-twentieth-century beauty pageants, gambling casinos, strip clubs, and luxury resorts. Neither Barbaro, a 2002 graduate of Yale, nor Twohey, a 1998 graduate of Georgetown University, had any frame of reference for sexual analysis aside from the rote political correctness that has saturated elite American campuses for nearly 40 years. Their prim, priggish formulations in this awkwardly disconnected article demonstrate the embarrassing lack of sophistication that passes for theoretical expertise among their over-paid and under-educated professors.

When I saw the reporters’ defensive interview on Monday with CNN anchors Kate Bolduan and John Berman, I felt sorry for the earnest, owlish Barbaro, who seems like a nice fellow who has simply wandered out of his depth. But Twohey, with her snippy, bright and shiny careerism, took a page from the slippery Hillary playbook in the way she blatheringly evaded any direct answer to a pointed question about how Rowanne Brewer Lane’s pleasantly flirtatious first meeting with Trump at a crowded 1990 pool party at Mar-a-Lago ended up being called “a debasing face-to-face encounter” in the Times. The hidden agenda of advocacy journalism has rarely been caught so red-handed.

The supreme irony of the Times’ vacuous coverage is that the early 1990s banquet-hall photograph of the unmarried Rowanne Brewer and Donald Trump illustrating it is the sexiest picture published in the mainstream media in years. . . . Yes, here is all the sizzling glory of hormonal sex differentiation, which the grim commissars of campus gender studies will never wipe out!

Well, that alone is intolerable to the prigs and fussbudgets who make up today’s media.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Private Colleges Offering Record Tuition Discounts to Lure Students.

All is proceeding as I have foretold.

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CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Panama Papers Reveal Clinton’s Kremlin Connection.

Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO is Tony Podesta, one of the best-connected Democratic machers in the country. He founded the firm in 1998 with his brother John, formerly chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, then counselor to President Barack Obama, Mr. Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider. Outsiders engage the Podestas and their well-connected lobbying firm to improve their image and get access to Democratic bigwigs.

Which is exactly what Sberbank, Russia’s biggest financial institution, did this spring. As reported at the end of March, the Podesta Group registered with the U.S. Government as a lobbyist for Sberbank, as required by law, naming three Podesta Group staffers: Tony Podesta plus Stephen Rademaker and David Adams, the last two former assistant secretaries of state. It should be noted that Tony Podesta is a big-money bundler for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign while his brother John is the chairman of that campaign, the chief architect of her plans to take the White House this November.

That’s from John Schindler who also notes that “Sberbank has blown off the Panama Papers revelations as nothing of consequence, but the fact that they are an arm of the Kremlin and they do plenty of shady things in many countries is a matter of record.”

Sberbank — and by extension, the Kremlin — would have a friendly ear in a Hillary Clinton White House.

But that’s hardly news, is it?

GIANT LEAPS FOR MANKIND, YOU’RE DOING THEM WRONG, BARRY: Texas Gov: JFK Wanted To Send Man To Moon — Obama Wants To Send Man To Ladies Room.

RASMUSSEN: Trump 42, Clinton 37.

FORMER PA GOVERNOR/BIG DEMOCRAT MACHER ED RENDELL: Donald Trump’s Comments About Women’s Looks Will Hurt Him, Because, You Know, There Are a Lot More Ugly Women in America Than Attractive Ones.

ASHE SCHOW REPORTS ON THE AMERICAN LAW INSTITUTE: ‘A mess’: Law group rejects affirmative consent.

The American public was spared — for now — the possibility of being labeled rapists overnight thanks to a new definition of what is and isn’t consent.

The American Law Institute was expected to vote Tuesday during its annual meeting on adopting a draft model penal code that would radically alter the way sex crimes are handled. But due to rigorous dissent and discussion by members, the vote didn’t happen. Instead, members voted on amending the current tentative draft’s definition of consent.

Two-and-a-half hours were allotted to discuss the amendment, introduced by Washington, D.C.-based attorney Margaret Love, as well as another amendment and, some were led to believe, the draft itself. But two hours and 20 minutes in, only the Love amendment had been discussed.

The amendment set to remove “affirmative consent” language from the draft proposal. The writers of the draft had already attempted to conceal the standard by renaming it “communicated willingness,” but ALI members weren’t fooled.

“A mess,” one attorney called the entire draft, even as he supported the Love amendment. “A mess,” is how I — an outsider — would have categorized the day’s event.

Member after member stood up to express their support or opposition to the Love amendment. Most supporting the amendment noted how it moved the draft, thankfully, away from the affirmative consent standard. A female attorney from New Haven, Connecticut warned the audience that “criminal law should not be at the vanguard of social change.”

No, it shouldn’t.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER GETS SERIOUS: U.S. ‘Actively Targeting’ ISIS Chemical Weapons Threat.

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: The Little Sisters of the Poor just beat Obama in court, so why don’t the media want you to know anything about them?

CHANGE: Trump soothes the right with list of Supreme Court picks.

Related: Trump beats Clinton by 3 points in new poll.

Also: Don’t Blink! Trump Delivers Actual Good News for Conservatives!

MEANWHILE, IN BILL DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK: NYPD officers shoot dead ‘crazed’ knifeman and injure an innocent female bystander in Midtown Manhattan during morning rush hour.

Paul Kersey, call your office.

AP EXPLAINS: Standoff, dying economy drive Venezuelan crisis.

Venezuela is being wracked by an increasingly belligerent standoff between the government and opposition, while many Venezuelans are becoming fed up with a floundering economy marked by long lines for food and the world’s highest inflation. President Nicolas Maduro has declared a state of emergency to let him deal with the economy by decree, but the opposition is vowing to push ahead with its campaign to force a recall referendum seeking his ouster.

A political “standoff” didn’t create breadlines and brownouts, destroy the value of the Bolivar, or cripple Venezuela’s oil industry — socialism did.

THE REVOLUTION EVENTUALLY DEVOURS ITSELF: Pop the popcorn: Liberal pundits eating their own.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: As Law School Enrollments Drop, Decline In Legal Jobs Keeps Law Grads Struggling To Find Work.