Dick Durbin: Senate Democrats will block House DHS bill.

Right ?

So there's this: WATCH: This Impoverished City Hiked Spending to $25,000 per Student to Fix Its Schools. And Nothing Changed. – Hit & Run : Reason.com.

and there's Free College:

A MODEST PROPOSAL TO REDUCE “INEQUALITY:”

So Obama has had to abandon his plan to tax 529 college savings plans to pay for his “free” community college proposal, because lo and behold lots of middle class people are 529 savers. But Republicans could still enable Obama to pay for this proposal with a tax that actually hits the genuine rich: a surtax on large private college endowments—say on all endowments that are more than something like $1 million per student. This would hit the ivy league schools that these days are raking in nearly $1 billion a year in contributions according to the latest reports. (I recall an old line from Conan O’Brien—a Harvard grad—about Harvard’s donor pitch: “We’re Harvard. We don’t need your money. We just want it.”) Or instead of a surtax directly on endowments, reduce the tax deductibility of donations to college endowments above a certain level.

And if Republicans really want to start riots in faculty clubs, they should pass Obama’s community college plan with one proviso: that all community college credits be fully transferrable to any four-year college that accepts any federal funding (which is every institution of higher learning except Hillsdale and one or two others). Watch the four-year colleges sputter with indignation. Watch Obama veto the bill.

More suggestions at the link.

In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling, a federal district court, applying the principle of Dred Scott, enjoins a northern state from enforcing a law providing that a slave who is voluntarily taken by his master into the state thereby becomes free. Must state officials comply with the injunction?

If your answer to the question is no (or maybe not), then you agree (or might agree) that state officials have a right to resist federal orders they regard as constitutionally unsound (even as you of course might disagree about his application of that principle).

Now assume that the Supreme Court affirms the lower court’s order. Must state officials then comply with the injunction?

Why do I ask?  Alabama chief justice Roy Moore’s resistance: 

That'd be Uncle Joe.  But ya gotta admit, when he's right, he's right.

Joe Biden: Biden: ‘The Past Six Years Have Been Really, Really Hard For This Country.’

How to reduce the amount of air in a football without letting any air out

Take the Patriots and lay the points.  

O/U is 47 1/2.  Take the under.

Prediction - 

NEP 24

SSH 21

Really?  REALLY??  U.C. Berkeley Students Complain About Having To Read Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault. In course on classic social theory. And if that makes it hard for you to focus on the course material, cupcakes, you don’t belong in college.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today Show How Far American Educational Standards Have Declined.

of "I'll believe it's an emergency ...."

Obama Films Anti-Oil-Drilling Video . . . From A Jet With A 53,000 Gallon Fuel Tank. “On Saturday, Obama flew Air Force One over 8,000+ miles to India to discuss global warming and other issues.”

and in another venue: WHY ARE LEFTY INSTITUTIONS SUCH HOTBEDS OF RACISM AND SEXISM? Female, Minority Professors Are Paid Less Than White Male Professors at UC-Berkeley.

No.  Don't.  Just don't.  It's a moderately interesting one trick pony that Mad About You did better two decades ago.  Waste of a pretty good cast.  One good speech - from "The Critic" - that pretty much abuses the audience for even being there.  

I'll give it one star.  

Birdma of Alcatrez?  Three 1/2.

JAKUB GRYGIEL: Know Thy Enemy: The modern Western penchant for trusting in the equal rationality of all is strategic folly. Aeschylus understood this well.

The modern Western penchant for trusting in the equal rationality of all suggests otherwise. According to this conceit, there is no reason to plumb the nature of an enemy’s thinking because it is no different in essence from one’s own. But this is wrong. A rival’s response to one’s strategy is not predictable as a simply rational and universal reaction that can be generalized and grasped with relative ease. Rival states or groups respond to similar actions in different ways based on their culture, worldview, history, and the proclivities of their leaders. Good strategy, as Bernard Brodie once put it, “presupposes good anthropology and good sociology.”

Despite their superficial attachment to multiculturalism, our elites don’t really want to think of other cultures as, you know, thinking differently, for fear that it might somehow be racist to take that into account.