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Mary Clare Amselem:
“…Americans have long suspected that, for many, a college degree simply isn’t worth the price.
American taxpayers – two-thirds of whom do not have a college degree – are likewise increasingly skeptical of the notion that they should pay off loans that someone else made the decision to take out.
With recently published College Scorecard data, American students and taxpayers have more reason than ever to reject the left’s “college for all” agenda.
The College Scorecard recently released program-level data on individual schools. Students can now go online and see how much debt the average student graduates with in a certain degree program, along with expected starting salaries.
The results indicate that choosing a major matters immensely, especially when relying on federal student loans to finance one’s education.
According to The Wall Street Journal, 15 percent of programs graduate students who carry more federal student loan debt than their annual income.
Interestingly, graduate programs – which are generally perceived to be good investments – are some of the worst offenders.
Students who graduate from the University of Miami Law School, for example, hold a median total debt of $150,896, but earn a starting salary of just $52,100. Even more problematic, students who obtain a master’s degree from New York University in film/video and photographic arts graduate with a median total debt of a whopping $168,568, but earn a median starting salary of $29,600.
Those findings are particularly concerning, considering that there is virtually no cap on how much students can borrow for graduate school under the PLUS loan program…”
Scott Jennings:
“…So here we are, headed for a rushed, hyper-partisan (and futile) exercise put on by the very elites Trump railed against to get himself elected in the first place. But for all the relief they might feel in finally striking this blow against Donald Trump, I wonder: have these Trump opponents even considered what this impeachment signals to the American people? That partisanship is more important than policymaking? That House Democrats have no confidence in their party’s ability to beat Donald Trump in an election? And, perhaps most alarmingly, that impeachment — once reserved for the gravest of situations — is now just another tool to inflict damage on their political opponents…”
Stephen Kruiser:
“…Democrats all over Outrageville were no doubt thrilled on Thursday when Nancy Pelosi slurred her instructions to the House Judiciary Committee to proceed with articles of impeachment against President Trump.
The leftist fantasy about this toilet-paper-thin case for impeachment ends with the president being removed from office once all of the Republicans in the Senate are body-snatched and replaced by liberal aliens, after which Mike Pence vanishes into thin air and Hillary Clinton rides triumphantly into Washington on a gender-neutral unicorn to be installed upon her throne.
The reality — an area most Democrats haven’t visited in years — is that this hyperpartisan political assassination attempt is firing a lot of blanks.
In fact, the impeachment circus has been making some serious bank for the president.
Time:
In the weeks since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Sept. 24 decision to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump for using the power of his presidency to press a foreign country–Ukraine–to investigate a political rival, the Trump campaign hasn’t run from Pelosi’s impeachment push or settled into a defensive crouch. Campaign officials instead are leaning into the impeachment threat, using it to mobilize supporters and try to extract a political price–and millions of dollars in fundraising–from the Democrats’ move. The article notes that the Trump campaign took in $15 million in small-dollar donations in the first three days after Pelosi announced the inquiry.
Impeachment is also spurring donations from donors in Republican strongholds like Texas, where Trump has raised more money than all of the Democratic candidates combined. So much for the narrative about Texas soon flipping blue.
I have some personal, anecdotal experience with the full-throttle fundraising effort this past month. During the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I made the mistake of making a couple of donations via text. Now my phone number has been pimped out to every Republican fundraising group on the planet. My phone has been lighting up with requests in the past few weeks.
The timing is really impressive. The sound from Pelosi’s voice had barely died down after her announcement yesterday when I got two texts asking me for money to help fight the impeachment witch hunt.
It doesn’t take a lot of deep political thought to see where this is headed. Even if the Democrats in the House vote to impeach — and it still isn’t a given that they’ll have the votes — the Senate will never convict.
The president, however, may end up with a campaign war chest the likes of which no incumbent has ever seen…”
NY Post Editorial Board:
“,,,Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepped out from behind the curtain Thursday to order up articles of impeachment against President Trump — once again exposing the official process as merely a show.
Her approach has been cavalier from the start, when she announced an “official impeachment inquiry” back on Sept. 24 — yet didn’t allow an actual House vote to make it official until Oct. 31, after weeks of leaked testimony from closed-door hearings had ensured that she’d have the votes.
And it’s only gotten worse. “The facts are uncontested,” she said Thursday — then whipped off “facts” that in reality are vigorously contested.
Namely: “The president abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of our national security by withholding military aid and a crucial Oval Office meeting in exchange for an announcement of an investigation into his political rival.”
That is indeed what Democrats say Trump did. But they haven’t remotely established it as fact, and certainly aren’t trying all that hard to do so. Most important, as law professor Jonathan Turley testified Wednesday, they haven’t shown his intent was corrupt, rather than a sincere effort to get to the bottom of scandals he believed had been covered up. Which means that they haven’t shown he abused his powers in any way…
…For all Democrats’ pretense to be engaging in a solemn constitutional process, they’re turning impeachment into a purely political stunt — an abuse of power worse than what they claim the president’s done…”
JONATHAN TURLEY:
“…In my testimony Wednesday, I lamented that, as in the impeachment of President Clinton from 1998 to 1999, there is an intense “rancor and rage” and “stifling intolerance” that blinds people to opposing views. My call for greater civility and dialogue may have been the least successful argument I made to the committee. Before I finished my testimony, my home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University for arguing that, while a case for impeachment can be made, it has not been made on this record.
Some of the most heated attacks came from Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Representative Eric Swalwell of California attacked me for defending my client, Judge Thomas Porteous, in the last impeachment trial and noted that I lost that case. Swalwell pointed out that I said Porteous had not been charged with a crime for any conduct, which is an obviously material point for any impeachment defense.
Not all Democrats supported such scorched earth tactics. One senior Democrat on the committee apologized to me afterward for the attack from Swalwell. Yet many others relished seeing my representations of an accused federal judge being used to attack my credibility, even as they claimed to defend the rule of law. Indeed, Rachel Maddow lambasted me on MSNBC for defending the judge, who was accused but never charged with taking bribes, and referring to him as a “moocher” for the allegations that he accepted free lunches and whether such gratuities, which were not barred at the time, would constitute impeachable offenses.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank expanded on this theme of attacking my past argument. Despite 52 pages of my detailed testimony, more than twice the length of all the other witnesses combined, on the cases and history of impeachment, he described it as being “primarily emotional and political.” Milbank claimed that I contradicted my testimony in a 2013 hearing when I presented “exactly the opposite case against President Obama” by saying “it would be ‘very dangerous’ to the balance of powers not to hold Obama accountable for assuming powers ‘very similar’ to the ‘right of the king’ to essentially stand above the law.”
But I was not speaking of an impeachment then. It was a discussion of the separation of powers and the need for Congress to fight against unilateral executive actions, the very issue that Democrats raise against Trump. I did not call for Obama to be impeached, but that is par for the course in the echo chamber today in which the facts must conform to the frenzy. It was unsettling to see the embrace of a false narrative that I “contradicted” my testimony from the Clinton impeachment, a false narrative fueled by the concluding remarks of Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York quoting from my 1998 testimony. Notably, neither Swalwell nor Nadler allowed me to respond to those or any other attacks. It was then picked up eagerly by others, despite being a demonstrably false narrative…”
https://youtu.be/wMrPiZslFdo
Kurt Schlichter:
“…Well, the gibbering, babbling left wanted an impeachment, and now they’re getting it good and hard. To the surprise of no one who isn’t a blue city pol, a media hack, or an insufferable Fredocon sissy, the American people are not particularly impressed by the genius idea of replacing our president a year before an election because he allegedly expressed curiosity about why the coke-sniffing, stripper-impregnating, dead brother’s wife-trifling, Navy-rejected loser son of Vice President Gropey O’Definitelynotsenile scored a $50K+ a month gig on a Ukrainian gas board. And it’s just dawning on some of them they maybe this impeachment brainstorm was not the bestest idea there ever was…”
My title is not entirely true, but pretty close
Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds