Rand Buys An Election, Con't

Kentucky Republicans have given Rand Paul what he wanted, the ability to compete for the state as 2016 GOP nominee in a caucus and then remain on the ballot as Senator when he loses the presidential nomination.

The Kentucky GOP’s central committee voted Saturday to adopt a presidential caucus system next year, clearing the way Republican Sen. Rand Paul to run for president and reelection at the same time.

Paul, who is in his first term, had pushed Kentucky Republicans to move from a primary to a caucus system as a way to get around a state law forbidding candidates from appearing twice on the same ballot. He has pledged to pick up the tab for holding the caucuses, which could run $500,000 or more.

The motion to adopt a caucus system required a vote of at least two-thirds of the committee vote to pass. It was approved with 76 percent of the vote, according to a video of the announcement posted online, on the condition that Paul transfer $250,000 to a state GOP account next month. POLITICO reported this week that Paul told the member in a letter on Monday that he had transferred $250,000 into a state party account, but Paul had not actually done so.

Paul applauded the committee’s decision — which still must be approved by the Republican National Committee — after the vote.

“The people of Kentucky deserve a voice as the GOP chooses their next nominee, and holding a caucus will ensure that Kentucky is relevant and participates early in the process,” he said in a statement. “I am also grateful for the Republican Party’s trust in me, allowing me to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate and seek the nomination for the presidency of the United States.”

The vote was also a victory for House Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had endorsed the switch to caucuses.

“Look, all we cared about is giving Rand a chance in his presidential race,” McConnell told reporters on Tuesday. “Because of the peculiarities of Kentucky law, all I asked of him was to defray the cost and he’s indicated he’s going to do that and so I think we’ll go ahead and do the nomination for president by caucus.”

You know what they say in situations like this: now that we've established that the Kentucky GOP is willing to take money, it was just a question of price.  A pretty good deal for Rand at the low, low price of a quarter-million, too.

Over at Outside The Beltway, Doug Mataconis calls it what it is.

It’s hard not to walk away from this with anything other than the impression that Paul is buying a method to get himself around a law that would otherwise bar him from running for President while also running for what most every observer believes would be a safe bid for his party’s nominate for Senate. Other than the purpose of allowing Paul to get round the law, there doesn’t seem to be any other logical reason for the Kentucky Republican Party to agree to a caucus rather than a primary. For one thing, as I’ve noted before, caucuses are an inherently flawed way to pick nomineeswhen compared primaries. Because they often take place in the evenings, the number of people who are even able to show up is dramatically smaller than the number of people able to show up to vote in a primary. Caucus schedules are also difficult for people who have to work in the evenings, and families with children who can’t find a babysitter. Additionally, there is no absentee voting in a caucus so anyone who is out of state on caucus day will be unable toa vote, as will residents of Kentucky who are in the military and stationed out of state. Beyond these concerns, switching from a primary to a caucus arguably dilutes Kentucky’s importance in the Presidential race. Add into this the fact that holding a caucus deprives the Kentucky GOP of voter data that they could use in the General Election, and it’s hard to see exactly why they would have agreed to do this.

They did it because Rand is paying them, and Mitch McConnell told them to do it, and that's that.  Since when was this about anything other than the aggrandizement of my two embarrassments of senators that "represent" me as a constituent?

Clowns.  But clowns with money and power.

Sunday Long Read: Tools Of The System

Bernie Sanders supporters do not come off looking very credible in this Buzzfeed News article from Evan McMorris-Santoro about the conspiracy theories some of them have involving Black Lives Matter activists, when the reality is a lot more easily explained.

At a recent Bernie Sanders event, Dave, a white fiftysomething in a Grateful Dead hat, offered an explanation for Black Lives Matter, the activist group that had interrupted Sanders just hours earlier in Seattle.

They weren’t activists. They were “agent provocateurs,” Dave said, sent by the Democratic establishment to quash the Vermont socialist’s message.

His mother, who was standing next to him across the temporary fence separating the press from the crowd at a large Sanders rally on the University of Washington campus, interrupted. “He’s a conspiracy theorist,” she said.

He’s not the only one. The conspiracy theories are hiding in plain sight at Sanders’ giant rallies. The crowds are mostly white and mostly frustrated by the confrontations with black activists some Sanders supporters say are doing nothing but tearing down the only candidate who truly believes in the Black Lives Matter cause. But some of Sanders’ backers even take it a step further. Online and in person, this set of white Sanders fans wonder aloud if there’s some outside force causing the protest movement to target the senator. 

The basic mythology is that someone — maybe frontrunner Hillary Clinton, maybe the Republicans, maybe her billionaire backers, maybe even the FBI — is using Black Lives Matter to tear Sanders down, to diminish an insurgent candidacy that, the supporters say, is viewed as a real threat by the establishment.

It's a ridiculous notion, but there you have it.  And the great thing is that the conspiracy itself is tailor-made to split the Obama coalition and help the GOP win in 2016.  It's amazing how obvious that is to any objective observer, but hey, it's not like this kind of nonsense didn't happen before.

Last Call For The End Of The Clinton Email Idiocy

The Clinton "email scandal" has just jumped the shark.

As Brian Fallon, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s press secretary, defended her on Wednesday during a conference call about her email use, he made a novel argument that got lost in the haze of questions. 

Mr. Fallon spoke to reporters after Fox News had reported that two of Mrs. Clinton’s aides while she was secretary of state had sent her classified information over her private email server. 

Mr. Fallon insisted that the report constituted a “watershed” moment that helped identify which emails an inspector general had flagged as containing classified information. That’s because, he argued, the definition of what is classified is subjective, and the emails weren’t marked as classified at the time they were sent. The inspector general referred to four classified emails in a letter to the F.B.I. about the security of Mrs. Clinton’s server. 

Then Mr. Fallon tried to turn the theoretical tables on Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, which has focused in recent months on Mrs. Clinton’s email use. If she was at fault for having classified information on her server without her knowledge, Mr. Fallon suggested, then aren’t other people in the same boat? 

Uh-oh.

“Just as an aside, for the I.G. to now declare the material as classified, since it was provided by State to the House Benghazi committee earlier this year in unredacted form, presumably that means that members of the House Benghazi committee may have unwittingly handled classified material on unclassified systems within the House of Representatives,” Mr. Fallon said. 

“Now, I don’t think that anybody here at the Clinton campaign is going to say that members of, say, Chairman Gowdy’s staff should have their computers confiscated for having possibly trafficked in classified material,” he said. “I don’t think we would say that. But that is, fundamentally, the same logic behind the I.G.’s referral to the State Department with respect to Mrs. Clinton’s server, since she was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified. Let’s raise that as an aside.”

And this is the moment where quite suddenly the Clinton email scandal ceased being anything close to a real issue, and officially became a partisan witch hunt like Benghazi and everything else.

On Thursday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the House committee said that “The Committee has taken a year to complete all of the complex procedures required by the Executive Branch for review and certification of its systems to manage and handle classified information in electronic form. Despite the substantial complication and inconvenience to complete all of the necessary requirements, the most important thing was to make sure we did it right.”

When does Trey Gowdy's computer get confiscated in order to make sure?

FBI might want to have a little talk with him about unsecured "classified" material.

Your move, Republicans. This scandal is 100% over and done.

Fighting The Battle Of Who Could Matter Less

I've talked about how both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have been less than stellar on the issue of Black Lives Matter, and then Scott Walker comes along to remind me that there are much, much worse people who are running for president.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker sidestepped 'ridiculous' questions on Friday about whether he would be willing to meet with organizers of the 'Black lives Matter' movement, saying he would limit his time in New Hampshire to commenting on 'things that matter.' 

'I'm going to meet with voters. I mean, I've said, it's not just – who knows who that is?' Walker said of the amorphous civil rights group, following his breakfast speech at a 'Politics and Eggs' forum in Manchester, New Hampshire. 

The presidential candidate likened the prospect of a sit-down with the aggressive civil rights group's loudest voices to the idea of meeting with top representatives from a leaderless movement on the political right. 

'I'm going to talk with American voters. Period. It's the same way as saying you're going to meet with the tea party,' he said in a rare moment of agitation. 'Who's the tea party? There's hundreds of thousands of people out there.'

So the question of meeting with black activists is "ridiculous."  Then he literally says it's ridiculous because all voters matter, like the Tea Party, which apparently matters because there's hundreds of thousands of them.

Never mind that the guy is running for president when 17.8 million black votes were cast in 2012 and 93% went to the dude who won.  We literally don't matter.

I may have issues with Clinton and Sanders, but they are infinitely better than the asshole Republicans who literally could not give a damn about black voters, period.

Finding Fault Of Fools

Jeff Greenfield over at WIN THE MORNING decides that this whole “President Obama kicking ass for the last year or so” thing is getting boring, and giving a black President a positive can’t possibly be right, so we’re back to everything is Obama’s fault as to how he has destroyed the Democratic party.

Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.” 

The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come. 

The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.

The really weird part is that nowhere in the entire piece do I see the words “Debbie Wasserman Schultz” who, as chair of the DNC, would ostensibly be the person in charge of the election strategies and GOTV tactics that Greenfield is complaining about, but I guess Greenfield has never met her or something.

Also, there is the small matter of the impressive number of Democrats who lost by running as far away from Barack Obama as possible in 2010, 2012, and 2014 but no, the problem is of course Obama.

That’s the Beltway wisdom, and it will be for a very, very long time.

Sweet Home Trumpabama

You know what they say, in politics, you play Peoria to Peoria, and you play bigot protectionist jackass to Mobile as The Donald held a Friday pep rally at a football stadium in Alabama.

Trump fans came by the thousands, driving from the Florida panhandle, from Mississippi, from Tennessee and Texas. Traffic was backed up for more than a mile.

On the street, Olaf Childress, a neo-Confederate activist, gave out copies of “The First Freedom” newspaper, which had headlines about “Black-on-white crime,” “occupied media” and “censored details of the Holocaust.”

The most-enthusiastic Trump backers began arriving at the stadium at dawn, hoping to get a spot close to the stage. The first in line were Keith Quackenbush, 54, and Bill Hart, 46, co-workers at a retail giant in Pensacola, Fla.

“I’m telling you, everyone who is a worker at our store, they’re excited about Trump,” Quackenbush said. “I don’t care what race or gender, whatever age — they love Trump. This is a movement.”

It's a movement alright, one as old as America itself.  And it's one hell of an ugly one.

But none has put on a show like Trump. The scene Friday night resembled something between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and the Daytona 500.

People came to see a celebrity, Trump, but also to hear his fiery call to revolutionize the nation’s politics. Many folks here said they had never before attended a presidential campaign event.

Cheryl Burns, 60, was on a road trip from California when she heard that Trump would be in Alabama. She turned her car around and got in line, warning people of what happened to states when liberals took them over.

“There is no more California,” Burns said. “It’s now international, lawless territory. Everything is up for grabs. Illegal aliens are murdering people there. People are being raped. Trump isn’t lying about anything — the rest of the country just hasn’t found out yet.”

Pretty sure the rest of the country has found out about Trump at this point, and what he stands for: Punishing those people whenever possible.  Sticking it to China, "illegals" and "inner-city gang members".  Of course he's doing well in Alabama.  Well enough to make these lovely "patriots" ignore his record and go all in for his dangerous rhetoric on immigration and race.

It's what they want, to lash out and "make them pay" so they can "take back our country".  And those who are not like them aren't welcome at all.

Last Call For Trumping Of Compassion

As The Donald keeps saying, “We gotta take our country back.”

The homeless man was lying on the ground, shaking, when police arrived early Wednesday. His face was soaked, apparently with urine, his nose broken, his chest and arms battered. 

Police said two brothers from South Boston ambushed the 58-year-old as he slept outside of a Dorchester MBTA stop, and targeted him because he is Hispanic. One of the brothers said he was inspired in part by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

This will end well.

Trump, told of the alleged assault, said “it would be a shame . . . I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

Other “passionate” things include rabid wolverines, angry mobs, and racist beatings administered by a couple of assholes from Southie.

Alerted by witnesses, troopers arrested the brothers, and said the men continued to be disorderly in custody. Steve Leader allegedly urinated on his cell door, and both brothers allegedly made threats to staff members. 

Police said Scott Leader, 38, told them it was OK to assault the man because he was Hispanic and homeless. 

“Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” he allegedly told the police.

Whether or not you think Trump is a colossal cosmic joke inflicted on the body politic, the hatred he’s stoking is very real, and has very real consequences. This is apparently what Trump’s campaign is inspiring in some people, and I’m only surprised that it took this long to manifest. Trump is far from alone, but the nasty secret of the GOP is that he's the most hateful of the bunch and that's why he's ahead.

“Making America greatly racist again” is a hell of a campaign slogan, Donny.

Taking Their Country Back

This is the kind of thing we're fighting against in 2015, and things simply have not changed from 1965 in places like Georgia.

Effingham County High School’s mascot was the focus of a heated school board meeting held in Springfield Tuesday night.

A small group of people, led by the NAACP, want the mascot changed from the “Rebels”, usually pictured as a Confederate soldier holding a Confederate Flag.

"We have come to make a petition to right the wrong that should have been corrected 60 years ago,” said Leroy Lloyd, president of the Effingham NAACP.

The petition - made by the local NAACP - is for the school board to remove the use of all confederate symbols used by the school. This includes the Rebel mascot, the use of the Confederate flag, and the school's "Dixie" fight song.

Some say the history and hate associated with these symbols cannot be severed.

Pastor Franklin Blanks, Jr., First Union Baptist Church, said, "We should do better. We cannot ignore this practice any longer. We ask you to do the respect of representing all citizens. Do what is fair and honest concerning this practice."

But the overwhelming majority of people who attended Tuesday’s meeting disagreed.

Stanley Carter, resident, said, "You try to erase my heritage, you try to erase anything you think is racist. But the whole time you were up here, sir. I apologize, but everything you said was racist."

Cheers and boos rose from the crowd of hundreds throughout the meeting, some people were nearly escorted out by law enforcement for speaking out of turn.

"Everything you said is racist" says the angry white man to the black man who dares ask why the symbols of racism are being used in a public, taxpayer-funded high school. And these guys will go to the polls and vote Republican every damn time.

Rand Paul Buys An Election

If there's any doubt as to whether or not Rand Paul is scared of losing both the GOP 2016 nomination and his Senate seat, what he's doing in here in Kentucky to literally buy a caucus system for the state GOP proves it.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul has transferred $250,000 to the Republican Party of Kentucky as a down payment on the presidential caucuses he has asked the party to conduct in March, he told members of the state party's central committee in an email Monday. 

Paul is seeking the party's help in bypassing a state law that prohibits him from running for president and for re-election to his Senate seat on the same ballot next year. He wrote to the party's state central committee, which has nearly 350 members, in an effort to quell concern about the cost of a caucus. 

In his email, Paul repeated his promise that he "will fully fund this caucus." 

"I wanted to formally ask you once again to vote for this plan," he wrote. "Before you do, I wanted you to hear straight from me about the plan to fund it." 

Paul said "numbers aren't 100 percent final," but estimates put the cost of a caucus at $400,000 to $500,000. 

In addition to the $250,000 payment, Paul said he would "raise or transfer" $200,000 more "at a date agreed upon by my team and RPK, roughly midfall after all the budgets and rules are finalized, the RNC (Republican National Committee) accepts our plan, the caucus is an absolute legal certainty and the funds are shown to be needed." 

Additionally, Paul said he expected that $150,000 to $225,000 would be raised by charging every presidential candidate who wants to participate in the caucus a $15,000 filing fee. 

"As you can see, this requires a lot of funds and effort by my team and myself," Paul wrote. "We are ready to do it right now, and with your vote on Aug. 22, we will all move forward, together."

So yeah, the guy is literally buying a caucus system win, so he can win at least one state and then run on the ballot for his Senate seat when he loses the GOP nomination next July.  It's a complete joke.

And yet in this state, who's going to run against him?  Grimes?  Jack Conway?  Hell, me?

C'mon.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/08/17/3992690_rand-paul-makes-250000-down-payment.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• In an Atlantic hurricane season dampened by El Nino effects in the Pacific, Danny is the first hurricane to form this year as a Category 1 storm heading for the Caribbean.
• As record wildfires continue to torch five Western US states, disaster officials are calling in firefighting crews from Canada and the US Army to assist.
• Tensions between North and South Korea are rapidly growing as North Korea is calling on Seoul to halt propaganda loudpseaker broadcasts or face military action.
• US stocks took their biggest dive in years on Thursday as all the major indices lost more than 2% on continued Chinese volatility and economic concerns of a global slowdown.
• A second data dump from the hackers behind last month's Ashley Madison hack was published online yesterday, including what appears to be sensitive email from the company's CEO.

Last Call For Trumping Your Logic

How Donald Trump's mind works:

1. "Illegal" immigrants are criminals.
2. Inner-city black people are criminals.
3. Therefore, black people are "illegal" immigrants.

“You know, a lot of the gangs that you see — this doesn’t hopefully pertain to you guys so much — when you look at Baltimore, when you look at Chicago, and Ferguson a lot of these areas,” Trump said on FM Talk 1065AM on Thursday. “You know, a lot of these gang members are illegal immigrants. They’re gonna be gone. We’re gonna get them out so fast, out of this country. So fast.”

Trump was appearing to discuss his recent immigration plan ahead of an appearance Friday at Ladd Peebles Stadium, which has a maximum capacity of 50,000.

He's saying this in Alabama, of course.  Really not sure what's worse, his rampant xenophobic spew or his complete lack of knowldge of how people of African descent arrived in America. (PS, our ancestors weren't "immigrants".)

Good luck with that, Donny.

Greek Fire: Tsipras Steps Aside

With Germany voting to approve the first payment in the Third Great Greek Bailout, PM Alexis Tsipras was allowed to stay until the check cleared today before his Syriza party made it clear that his time was over.

Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is set to call a snap election for 20 September, according to Greek media. 

Mr Tsipras has faced a rebellion within his ruling hard-left Syriza party over a new bailout deal which has been agreed with international creditors. 

Greece received the first €13bn ($14.5bn) tranche on Thursday, allowing it to repay a debt to the European Central Bank and avoid a messy default. 

But the austerity measures needed for the deal angered many in his party. 

Mr Tsipras had to agree to further painful state sector cuts, including far-reaching pension reforms, in exchange for the bailout - and keeping Greece in the eurozone. 

The overall bailout package is worth about €86bn over three years. The payment of the first tranche was made on Thursday after the bailout deal - Greece's third in five years - was approved by relevant European parliaments. 

Mr Tsipras is to make a televised state address later on Thursday. 

He is set to submit his resignation to the president to clear the way for the elections, the media reports said. 

Energy and Environment Minister Panos Skourletis said on state TV: "The certainty is that the need for elections has arisen."

It was a done deal and apparent ever since that Tsipras convinced enough in the Greek parliament to vote for the bailout package that he would in exchange fall on his sword, and tonight he does just that.   The alternative was a vote of no confidence that he clearly would have lost, and so after 8 months the tale of the man elected to stand up to the Troika ends with his complete defeat.

We'll see where Greece goes from here, but the idea that things will be better after a month from now is silly.

Leading The Way

The Army is expected to graduate the first two women from Ranger School in Fort Benning, Georgia this week, as the Pentagon is set to open a variety of combat jobs to women across the US military.

For more than 120 days, Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver have ground it out at Ranger School, the Army’s famously difficult school designed to build elite leaders capable of withstanding the rigors of combat. They’ve withstood fearsome weather, exhausting hikes, sleepless nights and simulated combat patrols designed to test their reaction time, teamwork and tenacity under fire. 

On Friday, the two women will become the first female soldiers ever to graduate from the course at Fort Benning, Ga., receiving the coveted black and yellow Ranger Tab alongside 94 male counterparts. Griest, a military police officer from Orange, Conn., and Haver, an Apache helicopter pilot fromCopperas Cove, Tex., are among a group of 20 women who qualified to attend the first gender-integrated Ranger School beginning April 20, and the only two female soldiers to complete it to date. 

The graduation of Haver and Griest, both in their 20s and alumnae of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., increases pressure on the Army to integrate women into more combat jobs. They have not previously been identified by the Army, but The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Georgia were able to do so after observing Ranger School training several times this year. 

Ranger School was opened to women for the first time in April as the Army assesses how to integrate women into more jobs in combat units across the service. That followed a January 2013 decision by senior Pentagon leaders to open all jobs to women, with the services granted until this fall to make recommendations on whether anything should remain closed. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter is expected to rule on each request by Jan. 1.

Don't care who you are, getting through this training is an achievement for the ages.  I freely admit that I wouldn't last 30 minutes and these soldiers survived for months and didn't break.  Rangers Lead The Way is their motto, and these two soldiers are certainly proving that.

Well done.

StupidiNews!

• South Korea has exchanged artillery fire with North Korea as tensions have remained high after two South Korean soldiers were injured by landmines earlier this month.
• Infections of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, have spiked in Saudi Arabia as an outbreak in a Riyadh hospital has infected 46 and killed three.
• US military researchers are working with law enforcement to neutralize commercial drones and track down their operators based on the number of incidents involving drones.
• Islamic State's Egyptian affiliate is claiming responsibility for a car bombing of a security building in Cairo that has injured 29.
• Retailer Target has reached a $67 million settlement with Visa for the 2013 security breach that compromised 40 million credit cards compromised.

Last Call For Minding The Gap

One of the biggest criticisms that people have when saying systemic racism somehow doesn't exist is that America is the land of boundless opportunity, and that higher education is key to being able to take advantage of that opportunity.  If poor black kids choose to not learn to read or write or do math correctly, then no wonder they remain in poverty.

If that's true, then what explains the massive and continual wealth gap for black and Hispanic folks who do graduate college and still make far less money?

From 1992 to 2013, the median net worth of blacks who finished college dropped nearly 56 percent (adjusted for inflation). By comparison, the median net worth of whites with college degrees rose about 86 percent over the same period, which included three recessions — including the severe downturn of 2007 through 2009, with its devastating effect on home prices in many parts of the country. Asian graduates did even better, gaining nearly 90 percent.

This statistic actually makes me physically ill.  It's gut-wrenching.

To understand just how disappointing these results are, look at the impact during this period on comparable groups without college degrees. Blacks without degrees, in large part because they had much less to lose, experienced a 3.8 percent drop in wealth. Whites who didn’t graduate from college lost nearly 11 percent. The wealth of Asian nongrads fell more than 44 percent. 

There is not a simple answer to explain why a college degree has failed to help safeguard the assets of many minority families. Persistent discrimination and the types of training and jobs minorities get have played a role. Another central factor is the heavy debt many blacks and Hispanics accumulate to achieve middle-class status. 

The collapse of the housing bubble played havoc with college-educated black and Hispanic families, who on average accumulated a huge amount of debt relative to the size of their paychecks. They borrowed a lot to buy homes, only to see them plunge in value during the mortgage crisis. While the average value of a home owned by a white college graduate declined 25 percent, homes owned by black and Hispanic grads fell by about twice that. 

This loss was made more devastating by the fact that blacks and Hispanics tended to have more of their wealth concentrated in their homes than whites and Asians, who, on average, accumulated more assets in the stock and bond markets, primarily through retirement accounts. 

The housing boom and bust particularly whipsawed college-educated Hispanics: From 2007 to 2013, their net worth fell a whopping 72 percent. 

One lesson, according to economists at the St. Louis Fed, is that borrowing too much to get a piece of the American dream often undermines any hope of sustaining it.

This is why college affordability should be of primary importance to black and Hispanic families, and why I'm very glad to see such plans come from Democratic candidates.

It also explains very much why Republicans want to slash university funding and refuse to do anything about student loan debt.  If you have to literally mortgage a home in order to afford college, in the long run you're breaking even at best.

This is why Republicans want to limit college to those who already have the wealth to be able to afford it.