THE COLLEGE LOAN CRISIS THAT ISN’T: The Manhattan Institute’s Beth Akers dove deep into the data on Millennials, college loan debt, and household incomes and family wealth, and concluded there is no crisis. At least not like the one claimed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and most of the rest of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contenders.

IT’S PAY-TO-PLAY TIME IN CONGRESS AND IT’S ALL LEGAL: Doesn’t mean it’s honest or ethical, however, as these eight case studies by OpenTheBooks.com make crystal clear.

FUNDING, DECEPTIVE TACTICS BEHIND LOCAL ‘EQUITY’ CAMPAIGNS EXPOSED: Taxpayers in dozens of cities and counties across the country have been victimized in recent years by local elected officials and bureaucrats who fell for a radical left con job carried out behind the guise of ensuring “racial equity.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation’s (DCNF) Luke Rosiak — who previously exposed the Democrats’ shameful Imran Awan scandal in Congress — dug into the documents and came back with a huge pile of damning details about the deceptive campaign being carried out repeatedly across the country by an interlocking directorate of radical left groups, much of it with funding from George Soros.

Using Fairfax County, Va., as an illustration of how it works, Rosiak explains:

“The [equity] policy required every other county policy to be drafted through the ‘lens’ of racial ‘equity’ in order to do away with differences in wealth and achievement throughout the 1.2 million-person county.

“The policy is seven pages long and uses the words ‘race’ 12 times and ‘equity’ 24 times. ‘One Fairfax’ can only be realized with an intentional racial and social equity policy at its core for all publicly delivered services. A racial and social equity policy provides both the direction and means to eliminate disparities,’ it said.

“After economic and academic arguments attributed to a university led to a vague policy, the complexity of the network of interconnected groups allowed those to be subtly switched with activism when it came time to telling the county what this equity policy should actually mean in practice.”

It’s all based on far left ideology and junk science economics. As Glenn says, this is one you’ll want to “just keep scrolling” on today.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I hired Rosiak for the investigative reporting teams I assembled at the Washington Examiner and the DCNF. As editors and reporters sometimes do, we had some rough spots, but Luke is one of the finest – and unfortunately least heralded – investigative reporters in America.

THIS IS HOW THEY GET SCOOPS? Daily Caller reports an FBI agent admitted accepting tickets from CNN and the New York Times.

GUY IN UKRAINE ADMITS TRYING TO HELP HILLARY BY HURTING TRUMP: It was big news over there. Wonder why not here?

TEACHERS’ UNFUNDED BENEFITS KEEP SALARIES DOWN: What? Daniel DiSalvo of the Manhattan Institute explains how the “legacy costs” of those excessively generous health care plans and defined benefit retirement programs influence compensation. But don’t expect to hear anything about this from the NEA or AFT.

KANYE WEST MAY BE A CANARY IN THE POLITICAL COAL MINE: Something is going on with this guy, not the least of which is he’s the most visible contemporary Black entertainment celebrity to stand up for President Donald Trump.

HOW PELOSI IS GRUBERING AMERICA WITH IMPEACHMENT: Sundance at The Last Refuge explains it all. If a formal House vote is taken on opening an official impeachment, which affords a semblance of due to process to the president and legislative procedural fairness to the minority, then Pelosi will have at least the appearance of a genuine search for the truth. Until then, it’s all manufactured obstruction and story-telling.

THERE’S THE IMPEACHMENT NARRATIVE AND THEN THERE’S THE FACTS: Former U.S. Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker’s closed-door testimony before Congress can now be read in full by anybody who wishes to do so. You should wish to do so and you can, courtesy of Sean Davis and The Federalist.

Davis, by the way, is tearing it up in reporting on Ukrainegate. He’s also got a story up on the fact the director of investigations for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and the House Select Committee on Intelligence is a former MSNBC legal analyst. That explains a lot by itself.

IMPEACHMENT QUOTES DEMOCRATS WANT YOU TO IGNORE: Joe Biden quoting Brett Kavanaugh on why a partisan impeachment is wrong? Jerrold Nadler explaining why impeachment is a substitute for assassination? Chuck Schumer defending censure instead of impeachment for presidential wrong-doing? I’m not making these up and neither did the editorial board at Issues & Insights, which helpfully compiled these gems and many more.

WHY HAND $50 BILLION TO STATE-RUN CHINESE FIRMS THAT ADVANCE BEIJING’S INTERESTS? That question is being asked by Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) because officials with the Federal Retirement Thrift Savings Board (FRTSB) plan to use a stock market index that includes multiple Chinese “companies” controlled by the Beijing government, including, to cite just one of many examples, AVIC.

Along with its multiple subsidiaries, AVIC develops and produces manned and unmanned aircraft, missiles and other weapons for the People’s Liberation Army, Air Force and Navy. Perhaps the more important question is why does that question have to be asked of any federal official in the first place.

WHAT KIND OF IMPEACHMENT SCHEDULE IS PELOSI PURSUING? Do you recall how long the Clinton and Nixon impeachment processes ran? I didn’t either, but Matt Mackowiak, a very sharp GOP campaign strategist, remembers and he sees a big timing problem for the Democrats.

HOW DOES AN ATHEIST COMEDIAN FROM SOUTH-SIDE CHICAGO END UP AS A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN? Be sure and catch the Ayn Rand reference. This is cultural commentary delivered like you’ve likely never before heard.

SENATE HEAD-COUNT JUST DOESN’T ADD UP TO TRUMP IMPEACHMENT: An informal head-count on how Senate Republicans would likely vote today on an impeachment conviction motion shows little chance that President Donald Trump will be removed from office.

DID THE INTEL IG STAFF HELP THE ‘WHISTLEBLOWER?’ – It certainly appears that somebody helped the “whistleblower” research and compose the complaint that is based on hearsay. Margot Cleveland argues familiarity with federal whistleblower law points directly at somebody with the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community.

FYI: Having worked as a journalist with dozens of federal whistleblowers over the years, my immediate reaction to the complaint was it was not the product of the typical government worker who has been unfairly disciplined for calling attention to wrong-doing within an agency. They tend to be obsessive, poorly organized and extremely impatient, characteristics that are nowhere evident in the complaint. Just the opposite.

HAVE DEMS CONSIDERED THE WORST IMPEACHMENT ‘WHAT IFS?’ – Probably not, so I’ve helpfully listed and described the three they should worry most about.

80 YEARS-WORTH OF CLIMATE APOCALYPSE PREDICTIONS: If you read the Harrisburg (Pa.) Sunday Courier in 1939, you were told “all of the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting.” That’s just one of dozens of such gloomy predictions from decades ago that never came true, according to The Epoch Times, reporting a Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis. But don’t worry, they come up with new ones about every decade.

HERE’S A GREAT QUESTION FOR DEMOCRATS ON TRUMP: Issues & Insights poses it this way: “Of course there is no evidence that Trump is a racist or white supremacist. If he is, why wasn’t this fact made known over his more than three decades as a public figure; when he was registered as a Democrat in the first decade of this century; when he was friends with the Clintons; and when he donated money to Hillary’s Senate campaign, several other Democrats, and the Clinton Foundation?”

Read the whole thing.

SOMETHING IN THE IOWA WATER? How else to explain why the state has produced anti-waste crusader Republicans like Sen. Charles Grassley and Rep. H.R. Gross? Especially now that Sen. Joni Ernst is mounting a serious, multi-pronged legislative assault on strongholds of government waste and fraud.

LGBTQ BOYCOTT IS A BOON FOR CHIK-FIL-A: Sales data shows advocates for boycotting Chik-Fil-A because the Georgia-based fast food outlet’s president expressed support seven years ago for traditional marriage might want to re-think their strategy.

“Sales for the quick-service eatery totaled $4.6 billion in 2012, the same year CEO Dan Cathy voiced his support for the Biblical definition of marriage and family, comments that caused proponents of gay marriage to call for boycotts,” Faithwire reports. “In 2018, sales reached an astounding $10.46 billion, making Chick-fil-A the third-largest restaurant chain in the U.S., right behind McDonald’s and Starbucks.”

MASS HOCUS-POCUS IN THE MIDDLE EAST? There are new reports from devout Muslims living in the most repressive and intolerant corners of Islam of appearances of Jesus. These aren’t from people in “backwater fundamentalist, snake-handling freak shows,” either. And people are converting to Christianity, even when the penalty for doing so is death, according to Reuters, NPR, NBC, etc.

AIDE WHO CARRIED NUCLEAR FOOTBALL WARNS TRUMP ABOUT ‘CIVIL SERVANTS,’ ‘OBAMA HOLDOVERS: Former presidential military aide Buzz Patterson carried the bag with the big red button for President Bill Clinton for three years. He lived and worked in the White House throughout those years and when everybody else left for the day, he was the guy who screened incoming calls from all over the world.

Patterson told The Epoch Times’ Patrick Howley President Donald Trump should be especially wary of two classes of officials around him: “There are a lot of Obama holdovers who are still working in the State Department, White House, Pentagon. They’re not happy their team didn’t work. I was a commander for civil service people in 20 years.

“It is really hard to root out civil servants. Hard to root out people who are counter-productive. I think Trump has a lot of people still that don’t want him to last, or be successful in 2020. That’s how DC works,” Patterson said. As Glenn says, read the whole thing.

‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ JUST ANOTHER WAY TO SAY ‘SOCIALISM:’ The Issues & Insights crew digs deep into the darkest recesses of global warming alarmism and comes up with, among much else, Al Gore’s daughter explaining why capitalism must go if the environment is to be saved.

WOMAN-MAJORITY OMAHA CITY COUNCIL OUTLAWS ABORTION: That’s Omaha, Texas, not the slightly larger jurisdiction up north in Nebraska.

SAY NO IF SOMEBODY FROM QATAR OFFERS YOUR SCHOOL MILLIONS: Andrew Kerr of the Daily Caller News Foundation explains the deadly strings that come with saying yes.