IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Bernie Sanders is cool with capitalism for himself, but no one else.

Of course, he is exactly like other wealthy Americans: You provide a service or produce something people want to buy, and you go from ­disheveled lawmaker from Vermont to millionaire disheveled lawmaker from Vermont.

Only in America!

Other millionaires and billionaires can explain their riches like Bernie does. “I started a Web site that sold books, and now we sell everything.” “I invented a way to search the Internet with ease and accuracy.” “I invested in companies and helped them grow.” “I run a pharmaceutical company that cures diseases and produces medication so sick people can live better lives.”

Bernie’s book-writing, in other words, isn’t any nobler than the paths taken by other millionaires.

Au contraire. Sanders got rich telling people how bad rich people are, giving him a richness of spirit those other, nasty rich people will never have. Or something.

OPEN SECRETS: New Revelations on Donations and Admissions: UCLA knew in 2014 about gifts that were perceived to assure admission of athletes. And its officials talked to Rick Singer, ringleader in Operation Varsity Blues, about such concerns.

Plus: “Harvard University is investigating reports that a wealthy man bought the fencing coach’s house, apparently overpaying significantly, never living in the house and then selling it for a loss. After the purchase, the man’s son was admitted to Harvard and joined the team.”

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Trump Insists He Has Legal Right to Move Detainees to Sanctuary Cities, and He’s Probably Right.

“NAZI-PUNCHING” IS STILL A BAD IDEA EVEN IF CBS IS ENCOURAGING IT: I don’t watch “The Good Fight” on CBS’s online network, so I don’t know the full context of this clip. Maybe the main character monologuing here is shown to have done the wrong thing, or is the bad guy. I can hope, anyway. But apparently the episode aired the very same evening that a protester at the University of Missouri-Kansas City engaged in his own version by spraying chemicals on Daily Wire writer Michael Knowles for giving a speech titled “Men are Not Women.” We’re going to live to regret this cultural moment.

GOOD QUESTION: Why isn’t Assange charged with ‘collusion with Russia?’

In a nutshell: Knowing that Russia had the capacity to hack the DNC and perhaps Clinton herself, WikiLeaks urged it to come up with new material and vowed to help bring it maximum public attention. By necessity, this desire to hurt Clinton would inure to Sanders’s benefit. And sure enough, WikiLeaks eventually published tens of thousands of the Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence.

So . . . I have a few questions.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated.

If only there had been some sort of warning.

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LEOPARD ON THE PROWL AT HOHENFELS: Perhaps the headline should be “Germany once again has tanks that manage to work.” Except a few months ago I linked to a photo of German Leopard 2s on an exercise in Norway, so we’ve visual evidence that the Bundesweht has at least six or seven in running condition. This Leopard 2 is participating in a large exercise at the U.S. Army’s Hohenfels training center (southeastern Germany). I’ve been there and done that.

BACKGROUND: From December 2017, a StrategyPage update discussing Germany’s woeful tank force and the belated decision to reactivate 104 Leopard 2A7Vs. However, the Leopard 2A7Vs “won’t begin arriving until 2019 and it will take until 2023 to complete the process.” The Leopard 2A7V variant is a fine tank. However, if the Germans really want to help deter Russia I think they need at least 300. Ah — here’s the report I was looking for –an oldie but a goodies from June 2010. This is contemporaneous background on the decision to upgrade the Leopard 2A7. (Dubbed 2A7+ at the time, now the 2A7V.)

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Thou Shall Not Talk About 9/11 and Much, Much More. “Recently, a video was revealed of Jew-hater Rep. Ilhan Omar dismissively talking about the 9/11 attacks carried out by Islamic terrorists, describing the perpetrators as ‘some people’ who did ‘some things.’ The attack left almost 3,000 people dead, and many first responders sick and dying. But, you know, just ‘some things.’ Omar was properly admonished by a horrified public. But, wait. Not everyone was horrified by Omar’s remarks, they were horrified that people were horrified by Omar’s remarks. ”

They’re providing cover for a fellow Democrat, no matter how odious.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Pay attention to how tight the messaging is in defense of Ilhan Omar and how precise and consistent the wording is from media, politics, academia, etc.

VOA’S IMAGE ESSAY ON LIBYA’S LATEST STRONGMAN: 46 seconds long, images and text, no voice over. Most of VOA’s quick takes hit the essential details. This one strikes me as a reasonably quick intro to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar. His forces are now preparing to attack Tripoli.

RELATED: StrategyPages’ April 11 update on the looming battle for Tripoli. Note StrategyPage uses the spelling “Hiftar.”

A few of the complexities to ponder:

The LNA (Libyan National Army) and its commander Khalifa Hiftar are on the verge of taking the capital and ending eight years of factional fighting that has left Libya broke and chaotic. Haftar has the support of most Libyans along with Russia, most Arab states (especially Egypt and the UAE) and a growing number of European countries. The UN opposes Hiftar, as does ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), the Moslem Brotherhood and pro-brotherhood nations like Turkey, Qatar and Iran.

Another:

There have been two rival governments in Libya since 2015. The GNA (Government of National Accord) has since late 2018 become more amenable to working with Hiftar. But the many militias the GNA presides over wanted nothing to do with losing their power to a unified government.

Possible collusion?

Hiftar had been an early supporter of Kaddafi and was a colonel in the Libyan army when, in the late 1980s, he and Kaddafi became enemies and Hiftar was declared a traitor. Hiftar got support from the CIA to form an opposition force (the first LNA) but no African nations were willing to host it for long and by 1990 Hiftar was living in the U.S. and seeking citizenship. Hiftar spent 20 years living in the West before returning to Libya after Kaddafi was overthrown in 2011.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Hillary and Obama’s record on Libya: From “Responsibility to Protect” to Slave Markets.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL:

There’s been a lot of accusations of incitement by elected Democrats and the media this week. Here’s a video of real incitement, elected Democrats and Media should know what it looks like since they’ve engaged in it for three years now.

Video by @MarkDice pic.twitter.com/YyufGDJE3s

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) April 14, 2019

Related:

Plus: Pay attention to how tight the messaging is in defense of Ilhan Omar and how precise and consistent the wording is from media, politics, academia, etc.

HMM: California must invest in workforce to meet housing goals.

Even under the rosiest of regulatory scenarios, California’s residential construction industry needs at least 200,000 new workers to produce enough new housing to improve affordability.

But it is struggling to compete for them. Industry leaders often claim it’s because “Young people don’t want to get their hands dirty;” “Parents are pushing college instead of vocational training;” or because “Schools have abandoned shop classes.”

Actually, research shows that the seeds for today’s housing construction labor shortage were planted by the homebuilding industry itself — more than three decades ago.

The last time California produced housing on a scale that state leaders say is needed to boost affordability today was the 1970s. During those years, residential and non-residential construction wage rates were equal. Builders routinely employed apprentices and made binding commitments — often through collective bargaining — to fund skilled trade apprenticeship programs.

During the 1980s, homebuilders refused to renew collective bargaining agreements and began replacing higher skilled crews with lower skilled workers. As land and regulatory costs grew, contractors relied on a strong supply of young men without a college degree and a growing pool of immigrant laborers to offset these burdens by working for less.

Construction labor productivity began to shrink alongside these shifts, but it has taken decades for annual deficits in housing supply to reach a crisis point. Today, we need to double our housing production just to tread water. To boost affordability, we need to produce even more. Either scenario demands more workers.

In the meantime, where will they live?

CHANGE: Trump outrage at support for ‘executing babies’ driving new anti-abortion campaign.

SCOTT ADAMS: “There’s no news. Have you noticed that?… There’s no news. How much better a President can you be than to make the news go away?” “This is something no President has ever done before…. Name another President who’s so good, he made the news go away.”

WHY AREN’T THE REPUBLICANS DOING THIS 24/7? Small Business Owners Push Back Against Mischaracterization of Trump’s Tax Cuts.

FLASHBACK:

Congrats to Vox.com’s Matt Yglesias, who just admitted ‘in one tweet’ how progressives lie about Trump’s tax cuts:

THREAD: Pay attention to how tight the messaging is in defense of Ilhan Omar and how precise and consistent the wording is from media, politics, academia, etc.

Ilhan Omar isn’t an outlier. She’s the soul of the new Democratic Party.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: GOP Fears Mueller’s Collusion Bias Lives On in Final Report.

ROGER KIMBALL: Pursue Those Indictments! “As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only. . . . Some people think that it would be best if we put this whole episode behind us, that we sharply limit any investigations into wrongdoing and that, especially, we refrain from punishing the highly placed actors who leaked, lied, and conspired against the president. I am not of their number. What just happened in the United States represented an existential threat to the integrity of our institutions. It happened because highly placed individuals had cultivated a sense of entitlement and presumption of higher virtue—what James Comey called a ‘higher loyalty’—which they believed exempted them from the constraints and procedures that the rest of us must observe. They broke the law because they believed that they answered to a ‘higher’ law. Out of such convictions are revolutions born and countries destroyed.”

Once, the FBI fought organized crime. Then the FBI became organized crime.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “It is almost unbelievable that the Democrats and their media adjunct are trying to deny that the Obama administration spied on the Trump presidential campaign. Are they unaware of the multiple FISA warrants obtained to spy on Carter Page? Do they not know that the fake Fusion ‘dossier’ was the basis for those FISA warrants, thus eliminating any question about whether the point was to spy on the Trump campaign? Are they unaware of many news reports of federal agencies recruiting multiple human intelligence assets to report on the Trump campaign? And if they are aware of those generally-acknowledged facts, what on God’s green Earth are they talking about? The issue has almost become one of epistemology. The Democrats and the liberal press are committed to a narrative that turned out to be wrong. Nevertheless, facts that run counter to the cherished narrative somehow turn into a ‘debunked conspiracy theory.'”

Well.

OOPS: Facebook accidentally put hidden messages like ‘Big Brother is Watching’ and ‘The Masons Were Here’ in ‘tens of thousands’ of VR controllers.

UGH: Petting Zoos May Be Chock Full of Superbugs.

Researchers in Israel, including veterinarians, collected samples of poop, skin, fur, and feathers from over 200 animals across 42 species who lived in one of eight petting zoos in the country. They then tested the samples for bacteria resistant to more than one class of antibiotics.

The team was interested in spotting two groups of highly multidrug-resistant bacteria known as extended spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) Enterobacteriaceae and AmpC-producing Enterobacteriaceae (AmpC-E). These bacteria are some of the most feared superbugs around, largely because they carry mutations that make them resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics. Some of these mutations can also easily be passed to other species of bacteria, through mobile bits of DNA called plasmids.

Even scarier is that many resistant bacteria first evolve in animals and then go on to infect people. These sorts of outbreaks typically originate in livestock, but they’re occasionally caused by cuddlier animals, too. And it’s the infection risk posed by these animals that the researchers, led by Shiri Navon-Venezia, a microbiologist at Ariel University, were hoping to get a grasp on.

Years ago I had a friend who kept a couple of terrariums with scorpions and tarantulas, which we referred to as “R.J.’s No-Petting Zoo.” But apparently not even the goats are all that safe.

FROM GEORGE SCOVILLE: Purged by Press Release: First Responders, Free Speech, and Public Employment Retaliation in the Digital Age.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Here’s the stunning percentage of Millennials who regret taking a loan for college. 42 percent.