HMM: FBI probe of Bernie Sanders’ wife based on ‘facts and figures,’ Vermont GOP official says.

The FBI is looking at allegations Jane Sanders fraudulently obtained a loan to purchase 33 acres of land for the expansion of Burlington College in 2010.

Brady Toensing, who also chaired President Donald Trump’s campaign in Vermont, told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that Jane Sanders, the school’s president at the time, had sought a $6.5 million bank loan to buy the property from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington.

“In order to get those loans, she had to confirm guaranteed donations of $2.6 million,” Toensing alleged. “Of that $2.6 million, the school was only able to collect about 25 percent … and of the confirmed donations, three of the donors have come forward to say that the school overstated their pledge amounts.”

Sanders, the college’s president at the time, left her post the following year and the college ceased operations this past May.

The kicker:

“If you look at who was harmed by this whole financial debacle, the Catholic Church lost almost $2 million, the taxpayers of Vermont lost almost $150,000, the bank lost untold amounts of money and the school went bankrupt,” he said. “But [Jane and Bernie Sanders], they were not financially harmed.”

The nomenklatura never are, comrade.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Trustees Are Largely to Blame for Today’s Campus Madness. “Unfortunately, most trustees are wealthy businessmen who are busy and aren’t interested in spending time on university matters. They become trustees for the prestige it brings, and as such, they are little more than yes men for the university president and provost. If trustees want better knowledge about university goings-on, they should hire a campus ombudsman who is independent of the administration and accountable only to the board of trustees.”

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LITTLE JIHADIS: ISIS Video Shows French, Russian Kids Beheading Prisoners.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Southern Mississippi Slashing Faculty, Staff.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Vox Lectures CNN on Journalistic Ethics.

A plain reading of CNN’s article, however, contradicts what the network and Kaczynski are saying. If CNN really intended to withhold HanAssholeSolo’s information regardless of what he did, then why didn’t the news organization say it was withholding his private information simply because he’s a private citizen? Why did it go on to add all the conditions about his behavior? And why did it say it could release the private information with an explicit condition tied to his behavior?

Personally, if I reported this story, it would have been pretty straightforward: “CNN is not publishing ‘HanAssholeSolo’s’ name because he is a private citizen.” Period. The rest of the information in that paragraph is unnecessary, because a media organization simply shouldn’t release a private citizen’s personal information. He shouldn’t have his private information threatened just because the president picked up one of his Reddit shitposts, which he made with the expectation that he would be kept anonymous. (Though it is a truly bizarre turn of events that it’s even possible to write this sentence.)

In journalism, there is a clear line between public and private figures. Public figures are held to a higher standard — since they represent not just themselves but their offices, their industries, and so on. But private figures are given a veil of privacy, since it’s not really in the public interest to get some random person’s private information.

Just imagine if the situation was flipped. Someone with liberal views posts a wrestling GIF of a Democratic politician beating up a man whose head is the Fox News logo. The liberal politician then picks up this wrestling GIF, tweeting it. A background check of this Reddit user then reveals he’s made some ugly comments in the past — about conservative female politicians and journalists in particular.

Should Fox News be allowed to tell this Reddit user that they will release his private information if he doesn’t behave as Fox News wants? Should Fox really be a gatekeeper of what goes up on Reddit and other social media? Should people trust Fox News or any other media outlet with this kind of power?

My guess is many liberals wouldn’t appreciate Fox News doing this. And they shouldn’t.

That’s different because Fox.

GOOD: As Trump Visits, U.S. Agrees to Sell Missile Defense to Poland.

Trump’s visit also strengthened Poland’s defense. Wednesday night, the U.S. agreed to sell Patriot missile defense systems to Poland in a memorandum, Poland’s Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said.

“A memorandum was signed tonight that the U.S. government has agreed to sell Poland Patriot missiles in the most modern configuration,” Macierewicz said in a news conference broadcast on public television Thursday morning.

“I am glad that I can pass on this information on the day of President’s Trump visit to Warsaw,” Macierewicz added.

President Obama was caught off mic promising Vladimir Putin “more flexibility” on missile defense after his reelection. Trump is delivering Patriot missiles to Poland.

Tell me again who the Kremlin stooge is?

FUNNY, BUT CNN ISN’T INTERESTED IN TALKING ABOUT WHO “INCITED” THIS ACTUAL VIOLENCE: Attorney General Jeff Sessions condemns NYPD cop killing as ‘latest in troubling series of attacks’ on police.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday condemned the killing of New York City police officer Miosotis Familia as a “cowardly, unprovoked attack.”

“This murder in cold blood is a tragedy, and sadly it is the latest in a troubling series of attacks on police officers over the past two years. These attacks must stop and we must honor the service of every law enforcement officer and the memory of those we have lost in the line of duty,” said Sessions in a statement.

The 48-year-old New York City Police Department officer was shot early Wednesday by a two-time convict.

Familia was sitting in uniform with her partner in a marked, temporary control unit in the Bronx when she was shot through the window by the shooter just after 12:30 a.m. According to reports, the mobile unit was there due to a recent shooting, and police were taking extra precautions for the Independence Day holiday.

The gunman, identified by the police as Alexander Bonds, 34, had voiced anger at law enforcement on social media before the shooting. Two responding officers shot and killed Bonds.

According to Familia’s LinkedIn page, she was a former Red Cross medical assistant and a nurse at New York University Hospital before joining the NYPD. Assigned to the 46 Precinct in the Bronx, she was also a mother of three children.

I think that the DoJ should investigate this.

MISSING IN ACTION: That “Hacked” DNC Email Server That Law Enforcement Was Never Allowed To See.

BY THE NUMBERS: How Many Jobs Does ObamaCare Kill?

The ACA includes a penalty on employers that fail to provide “adequate” insurance for full-time workers. Thanks to the ACA, hiring the 50th full-time employee effectively costs another $70,000 a year on top of the normal salary and benefits.

Many business owners have described how this penalty prevents them from hiring and has caused them to reduce work hours to below the full-time threshold. ACA supporters dismiss these statements as “mere anecdotes” not corroborated by national sampling and statistical analysis. But did any of them rush out to gather the national samples, especially after Jan. 1, 2016, when the employer penalty took full effect?

If you have to ask…

More:

In partnership with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in March 2017 I was able to commission Hanover Research to survey small businesses nationwide regarding their hiring and compensation practices. The result was a sample of 745 small businesses, representing every major industry and together employing almost 50,000 people.

We asked managers (almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans) how many people each business employed and whether it offers health insurance. Many businesses, when they do not offer coverage, keep their payrolls just below 50 full-time employees and thereby narrowly escape the ACA’s penalty. This pattern is not visible among businesses that offer coverage.

When we followed up, the businesses employing just fewer than 50 often said the ACA caused them to hire less and cut hours below the full-time threshold. The penalty caused payrolls to shrink or prevented them from growing.

Nationwide, we estimate the ACA-inspired practice of keeping payrolls below 50 has cost roughly 250,000 jobs. This does not count jobs lost when businesses close (we didn’t survey closed businesses) or shrink because of other ACA incentives.

The tally of lost jobs is bound to grow because the penalty itself automatically grows and the IRS is still learning how to enforce it.

tl;dr: Yes, ObamaCare is a jobs killer and it doesn’t save any lives.

Thanks, Obama.

WELL, NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY WOULD BE BETTER, BUT SURE: The Hill: Time to pass National Concealed Carry Reciprocity.

STEVE SCALISE IS BACK IN ICU, CNN IS BACK TO PLAYING THE VICTIM CARD, AND SOUTH PARK IS GOING BACK TO ITS ROOTS: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

U.S. GENERAL WARNS NORTH KOREA: ‘Self-restraint’ only thing keeping us from war.

This might be a good time for President Trump to play to his loose cannon reputation — a milder version of Frank Fleming’s “Nuke the Moon” strategy.

UPDATE: Never mind?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Brown Is Completely Off the Table:’ Private counselors report that, since the election, more parents are ruling out their children applying to some colleges, based on political reputations.

The parents were distraught. Their daughter, a top student, had her heart set on a college that was, in their view, dangerously liberal, an institution to be avoided. They wanted options besides her daughter’s choice at the time … Yale University.

This was the situation a private college counselor shared here at the annual meeting of the Higher Education Consultants Association, one of the two national associations for private counselors. Others in the audience nodded their heads in agreement. Parents were vetoing children’s choices based on the parents’ (not the would-be applicants’) perceptions of the campus political climate. The situation has gotten worse, many said, since last year’s election.

Well, it should.

UPDATE: A lot of people in the comments at Inside Higher Ed trying to pretend that this is about people on the right being close-minded. But there’s also this:

The lesson we get from this is: “Don’t trust guidance counsellors; they don’t know what they’re talking about and give bad advice.” I’m a Yale alum and a college professor, and I, in sadness, told my daughter not to apply to Yale last year. I discovered that Baylor, despite lower prestige, has an amazing Honors Great Books program and probably is better than Yale for any student, liberal or conservative, interested in the humanities. She did apply to U. Chicago and Princeton, but was rejected and so didn’t have to make a hard prestige decision. She was accepted to Hillsdale, Wash. U., St. Olaf’s, Carleton, Baylor, and Virginia, I think, but Hillsdale and Baylor were really the only contenders there. Quality of students, prestige, and intelligence of professors are three important criteria, but all college profs are pretty intelligent and how they use their brains in teaching dominates research reputation.

Indeed.

AYAAN HIRSI ALI: Spending the legacy of freedom.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen some worrying indications that the kids are not alright. Fundamental elements of our society like free speech are increasingly under attack from a kind of weaponized identity politics whose goal is not to introduce and debate new ideas but to silence voices that they find threatening or offensive (often those are assumed to be one and the same).

Recently, I came across an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in which she spoke about the inability of many in the West to realize that the foundational ideas of freedom are not a default state but a legacy handed to them by previous generations. I’m jumping into part 2 of a longer interview, all of which is worth watching. Hirsi Ali was discussing the principles of freedom, equality, and tolerance for differing views that she believes results in the beautiful outcome of freedom for millions of people. “You’re free to do what you want and life is stable and it’s predictable,” she says. . . .

The problem as she sees it is a failure of many in the West to recognize how valuable their cultural inheritance is. “I remember being in Holland and seeing this idea of freedom, it was the identity of the Dutch man, almost a biological identity,” Hirsi Ali said. He continued, “People took it so for granted. They couldn’t understand why people didn’t just adapt. They didn’t see that it was something that they had learned from their parents and their environment…their parents had learned from their parents.

“I always compare it to wealthy—children of wealthy family businesses. First generation is the one that makes the money. Next generation kind of knows what the first generation went through, they are conscious of the fact they have to carry these responsibilities forward. But ultimately a generation comes that spends and doesn’t know where it all comes from.”

Well, they’ve been terribly educated. And that’s not an accident, but deliberate Gramscian Damage.

HMM: Tesla Sales Fall Flat, Clouding Outlook for Musk’s Bold Targets.

The maker of Model S sedans and Model X sport utility vehicles has reported quarter-by-quarter shipment declines for the second time in the past year. In addition to stoking fear about whether demand has peaked, these figures cast doubt on whether Musk can pull off a steep production ramp for his most ambitious offering yet, the cheaper Model 3 sedan.

“Tesla’s Q2 production and deliveries report raised more questions than answers, particularly about Model S and X demand,” Toni Sacconaghi, a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst, wrote in a report Wednesday. “The Tesla investment thesis hinges on the success of Model 3, and the ability for the company to ramp production, make the car profitably and deliver good initial build quality.”

Musk blamed the flat quarter not on weak demand, but on battery supply issues. But Tesla can’t afford supply issues on their most critical component at boutique volumes if they’re going to make the promised leap to mass manufacturing.

VIDEO: Paul Ryan’s Dem Challenger Says He Might Raise Taxes by $32 Trillion.

The global total of gross domestic product was about $77 trillion last year, so there’s a chance that something not too far from $32 trillion was raised in 2016 by all governments at all levels.

Clearly, the smart way to pay for expanding our domestic programs is to start taxing foreign governments.

THE STORY IS THAT TRUMP IS DUMB, NARCISSISTIC, AND PRONE TO LASH OUT WHEN CHALLENGED, BUT LOOK AT CNN NOW: Roger Kimball: Trump Provokes CNN’s Self-Immolation, America Relieved.

A couple of weeks ago in this space, I speculated that CNN, the Crackpot News Network, had reached the terminal stage of malevolent implausibility. “[I]t would be a good thing,” I wrote, “were CNN humiliated and sued out of existence. It performs no journalistic function, merely a destructively partisan one.”

As usual, I was too kind. CNN will not have to be sued out of existence, as Gawker Media, another disgusting purveyor of malicious gossip and fake news, was a year or so back. No, CNN seems to be performing a species of hara-kiri or seppuku in public.

Actually, CNN’s behavior is closer to the behaviour of the fanatic Naphta in his duel with the suave humanist Settembrini in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The two antagonists confront each other, pistols in hand. Settembrini calmly delopes; Naphta screams “You coward!” and shoots himself in the head. Everyone is happier.

Several people have suggested to me that the whole travel ban drama, in which Trump’s legally formed and disseminated executive order was stomped upon by a couple of grandstanding district judges run amok, was actually a cunning plan™ devised by Democrats. The idea, the hope, was that Trump would be so enraged by the obvious affront to his constitutional authority that he would overreact, do something legally culpable, and thus give his enemies grounds to call for his impeachment.

It didn’t work. Trump did issue his ill-formed “so-called judge” tweet, but beyond that, he sat back, fumed, and let his lawyers loose on the preposterous temporary restraining orders. Last week, the Supreme Court vindicated Trump (more or less), allowing a modified version of the travel bans to proceed (which they did as of last Thursday).

But two can play at the provoke-your-enemy-into-doing-something-stupid strategy. The media keep telling us how thin-skinned and volatile Donald Trump is. Just about everybody wishes he would Tweet less and enjoy it more. But when it comes to the art of provocation, Trump is a Supreme Galactic Master and the media are weenie pikers.

Indeed.

LIKE POOR AFRICA HASN’T SUFFERED ENOUGH BY IMPORTING THE WEST’S DUMBEST IDEAS LIKE MARXISM: Model Cara Delevingne Wants to Export ‘Gender Fluidity’ to Africa.

INTERSTELLAR SNUFF PORN? Astronomers are psyched they get to watch this galaxy die.

IN THE EMAIL FROM JOHN TALONI: The Compleat Martian Invasion: Earth’s Defense Awakens.

RIBBIT: Dinosaur Extinction Allowed Frogs to Conquer the Planet.

THIS MAN IS GOING TO LIVE A LONG TIME AND BE UNABLE TO PREVENT HIMSELF FROM BERATING AND HECTORING US: I’m starting to think he’s a millstone around the left’s neck. Obama warns Americans about too much patriotism — on July 4th weekend!