Free Community College

Community college isn't free. Someone has to pay for it.

When I first went to Santa Ana College in 1979, I paid just $5.00 for the health fee, plus whatever nominal cost for books.

But, while the cost of college was virtually free to me, the student, it's the taxpayers who finance the education, because it costs a lot of money to pay for all the teachers, bricks and mortar, and all the other expenses. And in fact, I'm not against free community college. If the state promises to provide public education for all who might profit from it, at public expense, then the state should keep its promise. California and other states haven't kept their promise for free community college for decades. But they haven't renounced the promise.

Indeed, President Obama has been campaigning for free community college for some time now, and yesterday the White House released a new report on the initiative, "America’s College Promise: Progress Report on Free Community College."

Long Beach City College is cited at the report:

Long Beach College Promise: Long Beach City College (LBCC), California StateUniversity-Long Beach (CSULB), Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) and the City of Long Beach have collaborated to provide a free semester of tuition to all localhigh school graduates, with guaranteed transfer admission to CSULB for those interested in completing a bachelor’s degree program. To date, the program has provided a free semester for more than 7,000 local students. This month the Long Beach College Promise will announce that it will extend the free tuition scholarship to one full academic year at LBCC. The success of the program has become a model for other California schools. In 2013, Cuesta College announced that it would eliminate the first semester of tuition for incoming San Luis Obispo County students.

Plus, lots about this in the news.

At the Washington Post, "Obama on free community colleges: 'This isn't rocket science'."

And at the PBS News Hour, "The free community college experiment everyone is watching."

But see Reason, "Obama's Grandiose Plan Will Give Community College Administrators the Last Laugh at Our Expense," and the Daily Signal, "Five Caveats to Obama’s ‘Free’ Community College Proposal."

Evelyn Taft's Got Your September 11 Forecast

Clear and bright, just like that fateful day 14 years ago.

A few degree cooler than earlier this week as well.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake Will Not Seek Reelection (VIDEO)

She's toast.

Probably the worst mayor in America.

She creates safe zones for criminals, not citizens.

At the Baltimore Sun, "Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to announce she won't seek re-election."

Student Charged with Felony Assault After Punching Substitute Teacher at Fresno's Roosevelt High (VIDEO)

It's a black girl.

A freshman apparently.

She's a big kid too, just waling on the substitute, a white man who tries to walk away, but is followed out into the hallway, to be punched some more. The teacher took the student's cellphone away after trying to restore order.

A total nightmare.

I saw this first at the Los Angeles Times, and it's shocking, "Video shows Fresno student punching teacher in cellphone dispute."

And at KSEE News 24 Fresno, "Student arrested for attack on teacher: 15-year-old student at Roosevelt High School faces three criminal charges," and "Roosevelt High School Student Attacks Teacher, Arrested."

That's terrible quality video, unfortunately. (There's a YouTube clip here, "Student punches teacher repeatedly.)

Also at the Fresno Bee, "Roosevelt High student arrested after videos show her punching teacher."

In the Mail: Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes, Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America

Boy, I've had more books shipped this last week or so than I've had in a long time.

I've got a lot of reading to do this weekend!

Here's the new book, in the mail yesterday, and it looks great: Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America.

Obama the Villain in Exceptional

Here's the book, which I hope to start reading as soon as this weekend, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.

And at the New York Times, "Review: In ‘Exceptional,’ the Cheneys Make Obama the Villain":

Former presidents may keep quiet about those who occupy the White House once they leave, but the code clearly does not extend to vice presidents. Nearly seven years after leaving office, Dick Cheney has produced a book that amounts to a stinging indictment of President Obama as an ineffectual, America-hating, military-destroying, soft-on-terrorism appeaser whose tenure has damaged the country.

It is a case he prosecutes relentlessly. To the witness stand, Mr. Cheney and his daughter and co-author, Liz Cheney, summon the ghosts of presidents past, including Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan, to testify to the greatness of America and what they call the bipartisan postwar tradition of muscular leadership on the world stage.

This is a tradition Mr. Obama has shirked, the writers argue, making him a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. “The damage that Barack Obama has done to our ability to defend ourselves is appalling,” they write in “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.” “It is without historical precedent. He has set us on a path of decline so steep that reversing direction will not be easy.”

But while styled as a condemnation of Mr. Obama, this book — appearing just as the Republican primary contest is getting underway in earnest — is actually a prod to the Republicans seeking to succeed him. Although Mr. Cheney noted during a speech in Washington this week that he is no longer running for office, he clearly is seeking to influence those who are.

The Cheneys are championing a strain of national security conservatism that waned even within their own party because of the flawed intelligence leading to the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the later travails of the occupation. Even Mr. Bush’s brother Jeb Bush has said that if he had been president, he would not have authorized the invasion had he known then what he knows now, a position shared by other Republican candidates.

And yet, the post-Iraq isolationist streak that seemed on the ascendance for a while has also begun to fade with the rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria and Iraq and Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Although today’s candidates are not showcasing the unpopular Mr. Cheney in their campaigns, they are, to some extent, voicing a more hawkish message on foreign policy, especially amid the debate over Mr. Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.

Whether Mr. Cheney is the right messenger for the moment is open to question. While even some Democrats agree with his criticisms of Mr. Obama — that he has given away too much to Iran, that he has not done enough to help Ukraine against Russia, that his withdrawal from Iraq paved the way for the Islamic State — Mr. Cheney all but invites the “well, what-about-you” counterargument...

Okay, yeah, what about you?

The Bush administration's foreign policy looks better with each passing day. For example, see Glenn Reynolds, "SO THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DID ALL THE STUFF THEY ACCUSED BUSH OF DOING. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE IS, BUSH WON THE WAR, AND THEY LOST IT."

They lost it alright.

But back to the New York Times.

ICYMI, Ed Gojek, Marijuana Debunked

I need to plug this book again, especially since I haven't had time to finish it and write a review. And I don't when I'm going to get the time, shoot!

Check it out: Marijuana Debunked: A Handbook for Parents, Pundits, and Politicians Who Want to Know the Case Against Legalization.

Pharmacy Records from 1888 Found at Watson's Drugstore in Orange

Watson's Drugstore is a kind of local institution. Located on the Circle of Orange, they boast a soda fountain and sidewalk dining. It's a real cool place.

And now an historic find in the basement of the establishment, at the O.C. Register, "Found in Watson's Drug & Soda Fountain's basement: Hidden 1888 pharmacy records and more."

There's No Limit to a Radical Lesbian Blogger's Absolute Hatred of Motherhood

From Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "‘Feminist Motherhood Has Failed’."

Robert digs down deep into the demonic belly of radical feminism, and the results aren't pretty.

Read it all at the link.

BONUS: At the Lonely Conservative, "Feminism Today: Throw Men in Prison Camps & Scrap Heterosexuality."

Two Texas Football Players Kicked Off Team, Suspended from School, After Assaulting Referee

They blindsided the dude. It's horrible!

Watch, at CBS Evening News, "School investigates assistant coach in referee tacklegate."

Green Marxist 'Gas Restriction Act' Pulled from California Climate Change Bill

This legislation was so whacked that even Democrats bailed out on the proposal.

The background is here, "Green Marxist Nutjobs Push Radical California Gas Restriction Act of 2015 (VIDEO)."

And from yesterday, at the Los Angeles Times, "Gas reduction dropped from California climate change bill."

Is the West Dead Yet?

From VDH, at National Review, "The West - Is the Decline Cyclical?":

The West is paradoxically dominant on the global stage and eroding from within.

Never has Western culture seemed so all-powerful.

Look at the 30 top-ranked universities in the world; they are all American, British, or European — albeit these rankings are based largely on the excellence of their science, engineering, medicine, and computer departments rather than their English and sociology departments.

The American West Coast changed the world’s daily lifestyle with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.

The worldwide reach of schlock American pop culture is frightening. Hollywood psychodramas, rap vulgarity, reality TV, crude body tattooing and piercing, and the sorry, unhinged Miley Cyrus find their way up the Nile and around Cape Horn.

The United States, even with recent defense cuts, has more conventional military power than nearly the rest of the globe combined. American oil entrepreneurs have changed the global energy calculus.

Millions flee their homes to enter Europe — not Russia, China, or India. Ten percent of Mexico lives in the United States. Polls in Mexico suggest that half the remaining Mexican population would prefer to head north into the U.S., a nation to which, polls also suggest, they of course are hostile.

Immigration is a one-way Western street. Those who, in the abstract, damn the West — as much as elite Westerners themselves do — want very much to live inside it. The loudest anti-Western voices in the Middle East are usually housed in Western universities, not in Gaza. Jorge Ramos is a fierce critic of supposed American cruelty to illegal immigrants — so much so that he fled Mexico for America, became a citizen (how is that possible, given American bias against immigrants?), landed a multimillion-dollar salary working for the non-Latino-owned Spanish-language network Univision, and then put his kids in private school to shield them from hoi polloi of the sort he champions each evening. Now that’s the power of the West.

The alternatives are uninviting. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Pervez Musharraf, and Mohamed Morsi all resided in the West for long periods of time until political power beckoned at home. Putin’s Russia is a geriatric and unhealthy kleptocracy. China will never square the circle of free-market capitalist consumerism and Communist state autocracy. India, like Brazil, is always corrupt and always said to be full of potential. Neo-Communism has all but wrecked Latin America. The African nations are still tribal societies beneath a thin statist veneer. The Middle East is now mostly pre-civilized. (The Asian Tigers have escaped these fates by becoming mostly Westernized.) And, in our wired age, the maladies of the Third World are all instantly known and contrasted with the civilized alternative in the West.

But as in mid-fifth-century Athens and late-republican Rome, there are signs that the West is eroding — and fast. The common Western malady is age-old and cyclical. It was long ago described, over some thousand years of decline, by an array of Classical scolds, from Thucydides and Aristophanes to Tacitus, Petronius, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Procopius. In the case of modern America, Britain, and Europe, the sheer material bounty spawned by free-market capitalism and legally protected private property, combined with the freedom of the individual, creates a sort of ennui. Boredom is the logical result of that lethal mix of affluence and leisure.

It is not just that Westerners forget who gave them their bounty, but they tend to damn anonymous ancestors who worked so hard, but without a modern sense of taste and politically correct deference. Of course, so far, Western civilization presses on, despite the periodic sky-is-falling warnings that echo the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and H. G. Wells. But does it press on as it did before?

 Still more.

Nina Agdal on Instagram!

I thought Instagram cracked down on nudity at their site.

Perhaps, although bare backsides must be perfectly fine, by the looks of this Nina Agdal post from the other day.

She's one of my favorites.

Has the New York Times Dismissed Bernie Sanders?

But of course.

The Old Gray Lady's in the tank for Hillary.

But see ombudswoman Margaret Sullivan, "Has the Times Dismissed Bernie Sanders?":

First, some numbers. Mr. Sanders, since his announcement on April 30 until the end of August, has been the subject of 59 Times articles (opinion pieces are not included here, nor are wire-service reports). This includes not only those on the news pages of the paper but also those in such mainly online homes as The Upshot and First Draft. Of those, 12 have been straight news coverage. And five Sanders articles have been on the front page since he declared.

How does this compare with the coverage of some of the other candidates, particularly Mrs. Clinton? Looking at August alone, The Times ran 14 articles on Mr. Sanders, compared with 54 on Mrs. Clinton. Donald Trump – like Mr. Sanders, also considered by many an extreme long shot for his party’s nomination – got the most coverage last month: 63 articles. Other Republican candidates received far less ink than Trump: Jeb Bush was the subject of 18 articles in August, and Marco Rubio, 10. (Of course, not all press is good press for any of the candidates. In Mrs. Clinton’s case, for example, many of the August articles dealt with her questionable email practices as secretary of state.)

So, in terms of numbers alone, The Times certainly has not ignored Mr. Sanders. The Times did get off to a very slow start with its Sanders coverage but has responded as the crowds at his events have grown...

Huh?

Fourteen to 54? Well, if they're not ignoring him, he's sure got a ways to go before catching up to Hillary's wall-to-wall saturation coverage. Sheesh. And remember, I like Bernie Sanders for the lulz. I mean, the guy's an out-in-the-open socialist and he's leading the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire? You'd think that would be leading the news. But, Hillary Clinton partisans with bylines. You know the story.

Jackie Johnson's Tropical Heatwave Forecast

This weather has been downright unreal.

One hundred degree heat with torrential downpours. It's wild.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Obama Administration Under Increasing Pressure to Change Syria Strategy

Well, yeah.

The refugee crisis is the product of the administration's global appeasement policies, and particularly this clusterfuck president's abandonment of the Middle East.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S. faces pressure to change its strategy in Syria":

The Obama administration is under increasing pressure from allied leaders to expand military action in Syria, as Russia funnels in more arms and troops, Islamic State militants seize new ground and waves of Syrian refugees fleeing the bloody conflict head toward European cities.

The pressure to change the United States' approach comes one year after President Obama said at a White House news conference that the U.S. did not yet have a fully developed strategy for dealing with the Syrian war. Obama has been repeatedly criticized for failing to set a clear strategy to deal with Islamic State militants who have taken control of large swaths of Syria and Iraq. But so far, he has resisted calls to commit American forces to the front lines in another prolonged war.

European officials have grown pessimistic about the U.S. strategy amid the daily influx of tens of thousands of migrants, many fleeing the Syrian fighting, and the failure of the U.S.-led coalition to dislodge Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group also known as ISIS or ISIL.

"We are not winning this at the moment," a senior Western diplomat told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. "We need to redouble our efforts collectively to see whether there isn't more that we can do to solve these dual problems: the humanitarian crisis and the growth of ISIL terrorism."

The advances by Islamic State and other opposition groups have rattled the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, causing him to rely increasingly on support from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia has sent a detachment of marines to Syria, U.S. officials say, adding to an escalating military presence that includes increased flights of Russian cargo planes into an airport in western Syria, stepped-up deliveries of armored fighting vehicles and other weapons and the construction of housing for further Russian forces.

U.S. officials and allies do not yet know what Russia's intentions are in Syria, but fear its involvement could extend Assad's military capabilities and prolong a civil war that has killed more than 300,000 people over the last four years...

More at that top link.

And flashback: "Obama's Pathetic Bombing Campaign Hasn't Stopped Expansion of Islamic State in Syria."

Jeb Bush Gun Control Question Edited from Stephen Colbert's Late Show Premiere

It's not just that it's politically corrupt, it takes the actual good stuff out of TV.

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "VIDEO: Mangled Response by Jeb! to Gun Control Question was Edited from Late Show Premiere."

Madeleine Behr, USA Today Reporter Covering Scott Walker Campaign, Signed Recall Petition in 2011

Democrat Party activists with bylines.

From Kimberlee Kaye, at Legal Insurrection, "USA Today Reporter Covering Scott Walker Campaign Signed Recall Petition."

Cool Off with This Lasko 2551 Wind Curve Platinum Tower Fan with Remote Control and Fresh Air Ionizer

Sounds pretty snappy, and goodness it's hot out there. Pump up your cooling devices!

At Amazon, Imported 3-Speed Oscillating Tower Fan: Lasko 2551 Wind Curve Platinum With Remote Control and Fresh Air Ionizer.

Plus, here's Donald Trump's new book, Time to Get Tough: Make America Great Again!

Lindsey Pelas Hilarious Bikini Blooper Video at Playboy

This is a follow-up to Playboy's, "Keep Your BBQ's Going With Lindsey Pelas."

Watch: "Lindsey Pelas' Behind the Scenes and Bloopers of Her Playboy Shoot."