HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: In Wake Of 67% Decline In Enrollment, Western Michigan-Cooley Law School Cuts Tuition 21%, Closes Auburn Hills Campus.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Muscle Building Can Be Possible At Old Age With Resistance Exercises, Study Finds.

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Also, Men’s Swimwear.

TWEET OF THE DAY:

No one, not even Trump, has ever successfully trolled at this level before.

I am in awe.

DAVID HARSANYI ON THE EAGER PROMOTION OF FAKE NEWS BY CNN AND MSNBC.

DICTATORSHIPS GONNA DICTATE: Hong Kong lawmakers Jeremy Tam and Au Nok-hin arrested, as police continue round-up of democrats.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT HOW I’D HOPED: “We’re embarrassed”: US is close to losing measles-elimination status. “Health experts blame vaccine misinformation—and themselves.”

QUESTION ASKED: Can we find Bill Kristol a new job?

SHE USED TO WORK FOR MITT: ‘She Was a Spy From Day One:’ Trump Assistant Out After Discussing President’s Family with Press.

REVIEW: Kimber EVO SP.

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I CERTAINLY HOPE SO: The worst is still to come for Jim Comey. “Rushing into victimland is a common strategy for the cornered. Another is staking out an imagined noble duty to a contrived higher authority — one that looks strikingly similar to the image he sees in the mirror each morning. But here in the real world, this is what the IG’s investigation has confirmed: James Comey, as FBI director, created and maintained a separate record system that he kept in a desk drawer. He then also took most of those official records home. If that wasn’t enough recklessness, he leaked some of those records to the press after he was fired.”

NOT REALLY. IT’S JUST A USEFUL SMEAR. The Left Still Thinks the Tea Party Was All About Racism.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Joe Biden and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Gaffetastic Week. “The nicest take is that Biden did nothing worse than ‘conflate details’ from different stories, or maybe he’s just playing it as fast and loose with the facts as ever. But the whole thing stank so much that it caused Esquire’s politics editor, Jack Holmes, to wonder if ‘Biden is legitimately confused,’ and that his ‘more recent episodes seem different,’ and ‘worse.’ By that, Holmes means, Biden ‘is struggling to place people and events within space and time,’ like someone who might no longer be firing on all cylinders. And poor Joe only started out with three.”

HMM: Biden’s Best Bet Is a Front-Porch Campaign.

In most sports, when you’re ahead by double digits, the smart (though boring) strategy is to play it safe and sit on your lead. Getting into arguments with political Lilliputians such as Senator Corey Booker and Andrew Yang elevates their profile while lowering Biden’s. And if Biden loses his cool and starts shouting, “And you can take those ducks to the bank!” or “My pants are made of iron!” the game is over.

He should borrow a page from Beto O’Rourke and release videos on Instagram or Facebook on his terms. Yes, I know that strategy isn’t working for O’Rourke, but that’s because O’Rourke isn’t the front-runner, and his videos are a cry for attention from a hipster doofus. The front-runners always get attention because they’re the front-runners.

The media and the activist base of the Democratic party want a lot of drama and ideological radicalism — partly because both groups are well to the left of not just the average American but the average Democrat, and partly because drama makes for better ratings. But most voters are sick of all the drama, and they’re turned off by calls for socialism and the like.

This isn’t an endorsement of Biden — I can’t go there — but rather an endorsement of a more elevated and dignified form of presidential campaigning.

Those are all solid reasons, I suppose. But the real reason is that the last couple of weeks have shown that Biden doesn’t seem to be up to the rigors of a traditional campaign.

FASTER, PLEASE: Porsche Claims It Can Double Tesla’s Fast-Charging Rate.

AND OUGHT TO BE FACING CHARGES: James Comey was the Bad Guy in the ‘Russia Collusion’ story. “He lied to the President, lied about lying to the President, leaked government information to cover up his lying, and lied to the public about his lying.”

“EXTREME SELF-CITATION.” Some of The World’s Most-Cited Scientists Have a Secret That’s Just Been Exposed. Hey, if you won’t cite yourself, who will?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Bret Stephens Is Not a Bedbug. He’s a Delicate Snowflake.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Biden Keeps Forgetting People’s Names. “Can’t somebody please help Joe Biden? Parading him around in public like this isn’t doing anybody any good. Is this a presidential campaign or the world’s biggest case of elder abuse?”

Yes. Embrace the healing power of “and.”

BECAUSE OF COURSE: Making a ‘Gunlike Hand Gesture’ Is a Crime, Pennsylvania Court Rules.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Rehab program reduces chance of another heart attack, cardiac event.

BLUE ON BLUE: AOC rips Barbara Boxer for helping Lyft fight California bill.

#JOURNALISM: 24 Hours Of Media Malpractice.

Late Tuesday afternoon, some conservatives on Twitter started grumbling about an article the Washington Post published that morning. The op-ed in question accused best-selling conservative author J.D. Vance of being racist, and otherwise tried dubiously to connect the dots between mainstream pro-life advocates and white supremacists. At a speech in July, Vance said the following: “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.” Washington Post contributor Marissa Brostoff characterized the remark by saying, “Vance did not spell out exactly who was included in the word ‘our.’ He didn’t need to.” Her clear implication was that Vance was referring to the fact he only wanted to have white children. This would be news to Vance, since he’s married to a woman of color, and his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” ­– a movie version, directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, is in post-production – is a very critical look at the mores of poor white Americans.

And Vance did, in fact, spell out exactly what his pronoun referred to. A couple of sentences earlier in his remarks, which Brostoff didn’t bother to read closely, he makes it clear he’s referring to all Americans. Low birth rates are a serious concern in Western countries for many reasons, including the need to sustain liberal welfare policies, which have nothing to do with racism.

The Post printed a correction after all this was pointed out, but that doesn’t answer the question of how it got published in the first place. Once upon a time, accusing people of racism was a serious matter. If you were going to do it in print, editors would demand it was sufficiently backed up by evidence. But if Brostoff is to be believed, “my editor suggested that Vance’s comments might be added to the list of evidence being marshaled” and “we both did our due diligence in putting them in context.” Perhaps it’s telling that this op-ed appeared in a section of the Washington Post’s website called “Post Everything,” a title that, based on many other ill-advised opinion pieces that have run under that heading, appears to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The whole point of journalism is that you don’t post everything – you make sure it’s fair and accurate first.

A few hours after the controversy over Brostoff’s article flared up, on Lawrence O’Donnell’s 10 p.m. MSNBC show he delivered a blockbuster report that a Russian oligarch co-signed loans Trump took out. O’Donnell apparently kept repeating “if true” in regard to the assertion throughout the segment.

And that’s just the beginning. Related: J.D. Vance just the latest right-thinker to be smeared by leftist lies.

If you want to understand the power of social media in weaponizing and accelerating the left’s attack on truth and ­decency, look no further than The Washington Post’s false accusation this week that J.D. Vance, author of the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” is a closet white supremacist.

This is the anatomy of a Twitter lynching, a good man’s reputation strung up and beaten to a pulp. In the impressionistic half-life of ­social media’s attention span, the damage can never really be undone.

Marissa Brostoff’s column trying to link the pro-life movement to white nationalism was stupid enough to have been rejected by a proper newspaper, but it is astonishing that the smear against Vance made it through any honest editing process.

Her thesis is that pro-life conservatives oppose abortion not because they believe every human life is sacred, but because they fear that abortion will accelerate the demographic “replacement” of white people by nonwhite immigrants.

It’s a stupid argument, considering black babies are aborted at five times the rate of white babies in America, as even the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute ­admits.

Brostoff arrives at the point only in her final paragraphs, in what amounts to a rhetorical drive-by shooting of Vance, whom she introduces as her sole example that white-supremacist ideas have become mainstream conservative thought.

She’s a lefty hack boosting a political agenda, without principles or morals. Or, in other words, a typical journalist today.