Ho hum, numerous polls (even ones done by "liberal" media outlets!) find that viewers thought Bernie Sanders "won" Tuesday night's Presidential debate, and by landslide margins, but "liberal" media pundits mostly claim that Hillary Clinton "won" it. We should speak as little of "winning" as possible, since this is not a sporting event, but it does behoove us to note that Our Glorious Elites do seem to grade Their Preferred Candidates on a curve.
Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post tells us that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders "need each other" for Democrats to succeed. Which anyone knows, if they've attended how Republicans have used their "Tea Party" and "establishment" "wings" to transmute governing failure into electoral success. But don't miss Mr. Meyerson's excellent analysis of why "social benefit" programs do better in Europe than here. It has less to do with everyone in America thinking we're temporarily-embarrassed millionaires and more to do with workers getting major representation on foreign corporate boards.
The Columbus Dispatch finds Ohio charter schools performing rather less well than the Ohio Department of Education said they were in a federal grant application. The corruption revealed within is truly breathtaking -- even the man who resigned two days after "scrubbing" data in the application still looks like a crook. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with accountability? Besides the fact that it makes it harder to steal taxpayer money for doing a bad job, I mean.
Zeke Faux at Bloomberg Business writes about two formerly ultrareligious Jewish men from Brooklyn who made millions in the "merchant cash advance" business, where you loan money to small businesses at usurious rates but get around the law by not calling what you're giving out a loan. The two gentlemen are mildly interesting, I suppose -- they were dirt poor growing up, got cynical about religion like most teenage boys do, and enjoyed working with developmentally-disabled adults in their early 20s -- but they morphed into the kind of bosses who'd steal your chair if you weren't making them enough money, which is, I suppose, what making tons of money without doing any real work will do to you.
Radley Balko asserts that the proliferation of methamphetamines doesn't argue for making drugs illegal so much as it argues for legalizing them -- not only with data showing that cracking down on meth hasn't reduced meth use (or, more specifically, meth lab raids), but with a new finding that meth prices go down in Kentucky counties that prohibit alcohol. As the late Sam Kinison once said, "if you give us back the pot, we'll forget about the crack." Drug addiction does take away your freedoms as surely as any government or corporation, but a civilized society could manage drug addiction in more or less the way Mr. Balko describes.
Finally, Fox News's Andrea Tantaros says waitstaff won't "work their tail off" if they get a higher wage instead of getting tips. She seems to have a very low opinion of people, if she thinks a living wage will represent the end of most people's ambitions (what, no waiter ever wants to become a manager? Or a restauranteur, even?) -- and what she might call "ambition" I might call desperation. But Jesse Watters's answer -- "I like to be able to slap down a fat tip to impress the waitress. Don’t take that away from me. I like to be able to show off a little bit" -- is considerably worse. Conservatism was not, last I looked, about "whatever gets you hard."
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