If you stop and listen, you can hear it: The country yearning, praying, hoping for some sign that our political leaders can get their acts together and get something done, something constructive that will solve real problems and move the country forward again. In 2001, in the wake of 9/11, that something was the No Child Left Behind Act, which was the umpteenth renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). A reauthorization of the ESEA (on its fiftieth anniversary no less) could play the same role again: showing America that bipartisan governance is possible, even in Washington.
The fiasco of "Rolling Stone" magazine's apology for an unsubstantiated claim of gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house — and the instant rush to judgment of the university administration in shutting down all fraternities, when those charges were made — should warn us about the dangers of having serious legal issues dealt with by institutions with no qualifications for that role.
Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive mythology. Or rather a particular cast of “truth tellers,” victims, supposed whistle blowers, and popular liberal icons who spin tales for a supposedly higher good, on the premise that untruth for a cause makes it sort of true.
This year, Christmas shopping may be an especially welcome respite from the ugly events going on across the country, as mobs take to the streets because grand juries that examined evidence reached different conclusions from those reached by mobs who made up their minds without examining that evidence.
The internet troll army’s selling of the Kremlin’s parallel universe to the Russian people and to a skeptical Western audience is a matter of life and death for the Putin regime. If the Russian people do not buy their story, Putin loses the high “ratings” on which his regime rests. If he cannot convince his Western audience, Europe and the United States will take actions that spoil his Novorossiya ventures and threaten his regime. Trolling is a high stakes business that Putin takes seriously and the West must not underestimate.
The Daily Caller reports that Columbia University Law School has agreed to postpone final exams for students traumatized by the recent grand jury non-indictments in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City. The DC also reports that students at Harvard and Georgetown law schools would like the same consideration from their institutions of higher learning.
Hoover fellow and Stanford Business School professor Ed Lazear and BlackRock Investment Institute senior director Peter Fisher discuss the labor economy and immigration reform on Bloomberg TV's Market Makers.
