Daily Clips: March 9th, 2016
Bernie shocks the nation in Michigan: I’ll let FiveThirtyEight do the talking.
Both the FiveThirtyEight polls-plus and polls-only forecast gave Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance of winning. That’s because polling averages for primaries, while inexact, are usually not 25 percentage points off. Indeed, my colleague Nate Silver went back and found that only one primary, the 1984 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, was even on the same scale as this upset.
Even if you support Hillary Clinton, I hope all Democrats (and Americans) take a moment to stand in awe of what Bernie Sanders just did last night. It was monumental. And yes, Hillary absolutely trounced him in Mississippi and won the overall delegate count on the night. There’s no denying she also had a good night. But no one can dismiss the historic nature of Bernie’s upset last night.
Thomas Friedman rails on the modern GOP: Friedman’s anger is palpable in this column. He, unlike his colleague David Brooks, can see that one of America’s great parties has completely rotted to the core. What has this decline brought us? The GOP now thinks “climate change is a hoax; abortion, even in the case of rape or incest, is impermissible; even common-sense gun laws must be opposed, no matter how many kids get murdered; taxes must always be cut and safety nets shrunk, no matter what the economic context; Obamacare must be destroyed, even though it was based on a Republican idea; and Iraq was a success even though it was a mess.”
Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug. Despicable. 19,000 Americans died from overdoses linked to legal opioid painkillers. Now tell me again why marijuana should be illegal.
Universities are becoming billion-dollar hedge funds with schools attached:
Though the exact figure is hard to determine, experts I consulted estimate that over $100 billion of educational endowment money nation-wide is invested in hedge funds, costing them approximately $2.5 billion in fees in 2015 alone. The problems with hedge funds managing college endowments are manifold, going well beyond the exorbitant—some would say extortionate—fees they charge for their services.
