Last Call For A Coaled Shoulder For Hillary

Over in the eastern part of the state, the Clinton campaign released details of a $30 billion plan to help Coal Country, but short of shutting down the EPA entirely, voters here simply do not care for national Democrats anymore.

The state's eastern coalfield is suffering through a sharp downturn in the coal industry that long underpinned the economy. Coal jobs have dropped by half since 2011.

There are a number of reasons for that, including competition from cheap natural gas and cheaper coal from other regions; the depletion of large seams that were less expensive to mine; and tougher environmental rules aimed at protecting air and water quality.

However, many people in the region blame the downturn mostly — or entirely — on environmental rules.

Harlan County Judge-Executive Dan Mosley, a Democrat, said it appears Clinton's proposal includes some good initiatives that could help his home region, and that Clinton deserves credit for paying attention to problems in coal country.

But what many people want is regulatory relief for the coal industry. That would be the quickest way to put miners back to work, Mosley said.

"Anybody's plan that doesn't address that is not going to be well received in my area," he said Thursday.

Clinton's plan certainly didn't mention backing away from environmental rules.

And Clinton's campaign said she supports what the Obama Administration calls the Clean Power Plan, which would mandate significant cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants.

The plan itself is a good one, designed to get jobs to eastern Kentucky to replace coal jobs that aren't coming back.  It includes infrastructure projects and using an existing $2.5 billion environmental fund paid by coal companies to reclaim land, fund schools, and to get federal money to these areas for job training and business grants.

Republicans don't care, the only answer for them is to magically create coal jobs here that don't exist by throwing out environmental regs.

Republicans quickly blasted Clinton's proposal. A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said Clinton would continue Obama's failed environmental policies that are killing jobs, and Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short said "if Hillary Clinton were truly on the side of coal country, she would stand up to extreme anti-energy environmentalists that run the Democrat Party instead of embracing their agenda that is killing jobs and driving up costs."

We've already proven that Kentuckians will literally vote against their own health care to stick it to the ni-CLANG! president, so why would we embrace Hillary Clinton for any reason?

It's a nice plan, and it's what Coal Country needs.  Who knows, we may even get the help here someday, but no matter who wins the Democratic nomination in 2016, they're losing the Bluegrass State by 20-25 points next November.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/11/12/4134970_hillary-clintons-plan-to-help.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/11/12/4134970_hillary-clintons-plan-to-help.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Poll Positioning In Louisiana

Two new polls out this week show Democrat John Bel Edwards with a massive lead over Sen. David Vitter to succeed Bobby Jindal in the Louisiana gubernatorial race. Market Research has Edwards up by 14, 52-38%, and a University of New Orleans poll has Edwards up by an even larger 18-point margin, 54-36%.

Here's the question though: considering the polls in Kentucky were universally off by 14 points, where a 5-point Conway lead turned into a substantial 9-point Bevin victory, are these two polls anywhere near being close to correct?

I think there's considerable doubt in an off-year, low-turnout runoff that's not even being held on Election Day, that a Democrat is winning in Louisiana in 2015 by 14 to 18 points.  The people who actually vote aren't the people who are being polled, and that shift towards Vitter will only be magnified by the low turnout.

Do not be surprised if Vitter makes this a nailbiter, or if he manages to pull out a win.  Polling across the board in 2015 has been rotten.

Cruz Missile Attack, Con't

Over in the GOP Clown Car death match arena, Ted Cruz is going after fellow GOP senator Marco Rubio over immigration and it's going to get ugly, fast.

Mr. Cruz was asked Wednesday night by a reporter in Kingston N.H., if there was still a distinction between his position on immigration and Mr. Rubio’s. 

“It is not complicated,” Mr. Cruz said, then paused before adding, “that on the seminal fight over amnesty in Congress, the Gang of Eight bill that was the brainchild of Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama, that would have granted amnesty to 12 million people here illegally, that I stood with the American people and led the fight to defeat it in the United States Congress.” 

Mr. Cruz said: “In my view, if Republicans nominate for president a candidate who supports amnesty, we will have given up one of the major distinctions with Hillary Clinton and we will lose the general election. That is a path to losing."

With it clear that attacking Rubio on his use of a GOP party credit card really isn't going anywhere fast, we turn to the assault on Rubio's immigration Gang of Eight efforts, something that Greg Sargent notes was in the works for some time now.

Cruz’s broadside contains two key ingredients. The first is the suggestion that Rubio’s support for Obama/Schumer comprehensive reform shows that his current posture on immigration is not to be trusted. Rubio has retreated to the position that the border must be fully secured before we can even discuss legalization. And Rubio has also sought to reassure conservatives with a careful straddle: he doesn’t support Donald Trump’s call for deportation of the 11 million, but neither does he align himself fully with Jeb Bush’s and John Kasich’s forceful moral and practical criticism of Trump’s vow of mass removal. However, conservatives are not convinced: they want him to fully rule out any future “amnesty,” which (by their lights) he has not done yet. Cruz may also press Rubio to say whether he’d immediately end Obama’s executive action protecting the DREAMers from deportation. It’s a point on which Rubio has fudged, and it’s a legitimate question. 

The second key ingredient in Cruz’s monologue goes to the heart of competing theories of the 2016 presidential race. Cruz is claiming that only a GOP nominee who is unequivocally opposed to “amnesty” can draw the sharp contrast with the Democratic nominee that is necessary for a Republican to win the White House. (This is of a piece with a broader belief that Republicans must break their addiction to nominating squishy moderates rather than Real Conservatives.) 

This theory is diametrically opposed to the prevailing theory among many GOP strategists (including, at one point, the RNC), which holds that to win in future national elections, the GOP must embrace meaningful immigration reform that reorients the party as more culturally welcoming and inclusive, broadening its demographic appeal. It’s hard to say where Rubio now stands on this spectrum — the hedging in his immigration pronouncements seems designed to keep that vague. But Rubio strategists are reportedly convincedthat his ability to maintain mainstream appeal will be key to his success, which suggests he hopes to reserve room to pivot back to a more pro-reform posture later, if he wins the nomination. Cruz may challenge Rubio in ways designed to foreclose that possibility.

In other words, the biggest difference among Trump, Carson, Cruz and Rubio, the four leading GOP candidates in the polls right now, is that Rubio is the establishment candidate.  What makes him the establishment candidate more than anything else is his position on immigration.  If Rubio is forced the publicly scrap that position (and he will), the GOP will almost certainly nominate a candidate whose stated position is mass deportation of Latinos. The only difference is how many and how quickly the deportations begin.

Republicans believe they don't need Latino voters in order to win the White House in 2016.  At all.

We'll find out if it's true.

StupidiNews!

• Pentagon officials say a drone airstrike in Syria may have taken out ISIS spokesman Mohammed Emwazi, aka "Jihadi John", featured in several graphic ISIS execution videos.
• A White House Secret Service agent has been fired after being arrested in a child sexting sting, allegedly sending naked pictures of himself to someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl.
• For the first time in 20 years, Swedish border police have started to check incoming trains for migrants, a move criticized by both the socialist left and nationalist right.
• 80-year-old alleged mobster Vincent Asaro was found not guilty in a Brooklyn courtroom this week on charges of planning the infamous "Goodfellas" Lufthansa JFK terminal heist of 1978.
• The American Medical Association is warning that two proposed health insurance mega-mergers could badly damage the insurance market and lead to much higher costs.

Last Call For Voting At The Kiddie Table

It's amazing how far we've come on the Republican idea of limiting voting only to those worthy (you know, Republican voters) and how it's considered perfectly reasonable.  Voter ID suppression tactics, calls to limit voting to property owners (an oldie but goodie) and now Glenn Reynolds has decided that college kids are no longer worthy of being considered adults and that we should raise the voting age to 25.

Consider Yale University, where a disagreement over what to do about — theoretically — offensive Halloween costumes devolved into a screaming fit by a Yale senior (old enough to vote, thanks to the 26th Amendment) who assaulted a professor with aprofane tirade because the professor's failure to agree with her made her feel ... unsafe. 

As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf writes: “Erika Christakis reflected on the frustrations of the students, drew on her scholarship and career experience, and composed an email inviting the community to think about the controversy through an intellectual lens that few if any had considered. Her message was a model of relevant, thoughtful, civil engagement. For her trouble, a faction of students are now trying to get (her and her husband, also a professor there) removed from their residential positions, which is to say, censured and ousted from their home on campus. Hundreds of Yale students are attacking them, some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming. In doing so, they have shown an illiberal streak that flows from flaws in their well-intentioned ideology.”

This isn’t the behavior of people who are capable of weighing opposing ideas, or of changing their minds when they are confronted with evidence that suggests that they are wrong. It’s the behavior of spoiled children — a characterization that Friedersdorf, perhaps unconsciously, underscores by not reporting the students’ names because, he implies, they are too young to be responsible for their actions. And spoiled children shouldn’t vote. 

This isn't tongue-in-cheek humor here, this is Glenn's "serious" weekly USA Today column.  He really is calling for the disenfranchisement of everyone age 18-25 because he doesn't agree with some college students.

The only person here showing an appalling lack of judgment that should preclude them from voting is Glenn Reynolds, with this ridiculously proto-fascist nonsense.

But he's considered a serious conservative voice with a weekly column in USA Today.

Go figure.

Welcome To Bevinstan, Con't

Today's dispatch from the front lines in the war on sanity includes Matt Bevin realizing just how quickly he can move when he realizes his administration could be indicted at light speed.

Republican Gov.-elect Matt Bevin has updated his transition website to clarify that everyone is welcome to apply for jobs in his administration.

The website, http://bevintransition.com , originally said Bevin wants to hire people who "share his traditional values." Bevin opposes same-sex marriage and supports Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who is seeking a religious exemption from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The website now says Bevin wants to hire people who "share his conservative values." Bevin spokeswoman Jessica Ditto said Bevin's team made the change after a reporter asked about the language. She said Bevin wants to be "abundantly clear" that his administration will be "inclusive, transparent and dedicated to the betterment of our state."

Or maybe Bevin realized that only asking for people sharing his "traditional values" is a massive, massive hiring practices indictment waiting to happen.  Considering how quickly Ernie Fletcher, the state's last Republican governor, was indicted in his first (and only) term for giving out jobs to his Republican buddies, Bevin did an immediate about face.  I'll give him this much, he's smarter than Fletcher was. Having a hiring investigation for your transition team is just...amateurish.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/11/11/4132690/gov-elect-bevin-starts-website.html#storylink=cpy

He's still just as crooked however.  Trust me on this.

Operation Hairpiece

I'm really, really beginning to think there's something to the whole perverse theory that Donald Trump is a Democratic plant working for the Clintons.

Trump appeared Wednesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to defend his proposal, which he compared during the GOP presidential debate the previous evening to a policy similar to one employed by President Dwight Eisenhower.

That controversial program — Operation Wetback — resulted in the roundup and deportation in the 1950s of 1.5 million people, many of them legal American citizens, and dropping them off by the busload in remote areas along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump, who did not invoke the controversial program by name, said his plan would somehow avoid the tragic consequences of Eisenhower’s — which resulted in human rights abuses and deaths.

“You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely,” Trump said. “Look, we have to do what we have to do, and Ike did it and other people have done it.”

He didn’t describe how his program would preserve the illegal immigrants’ humanity — but he said it would somehow also be “cheap” to round up and deport millions of men, women and children living in the U.S.

It all starts with a wall that he has suggested he could force Mexico to build.

“It’s going to be a Trump wall,” Trump said. “It’s going to be a real wall, and it’s going to stop people and it’s going to be good.”

At this point Trump has so poisoned the well with Latino voters that I just have to laugh.  A lot of people say Eisenhower was the last decent Republican president we've had, but the guy rounded up hundreds of thousands of US citizens and dumped them in Mexico.

Thing is, that *does* make him arguably the least awful Republican president in the last century or so.

StupidiNews!

• Kurdish forces have launched an offensive to retake the town of Sinjar in western Iraq from ISIS, hoping to take control of a key road into ISIS territory in Syria.
• Russia says that DNA analysis confirms the discovery of Tsar Nicholas II's remains, in response to a dispute with the Orthodox Church over relics from his reign. 
• As many as 25 people are dead after an attack by Boko Haram militants in western Niger, including 20 militants killed by Niger soldiers.
• The suspected bombing of a Russian Metrojet flight in Egypt has some US lawmakers demanding answers to "insider threats" to airport security. 
• A new study finds that a single course of oral antibiotics can damage the balance of helpful microbes in the gut for up to a year.

Last Call For Pissed Christie, Con't

Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Christie presents your Republican minority voter outreach from the GOP governor of a blue state, 2015 GOP primary season edition.

Later in the town hall, when a mother of two police officers asked about how Christie would support law enforcement, the governor let loose fiery attack on the Black Lives Matter movement in general and in particular, on Clinton's willingness to meet with representatives of it.

"I think all lives matter," said Christie, who was standing in a cafe where a lever-action rifle hung inside its entrance with the words "We Don't Dial 911" above it.

"But let me tell you this: When a movement like that calls for the murder of police officers...no President of the United States should dignify a group like that by saying anything positive about them, and no candidate for president, like Hillary Clinton, should give them any credibility by meeting with them, as she's done."

Last month, Clinton had met privately with members of the Black Lives Matter movement while in Washington D.C. for the National Council of Negro Women.

Christie vowed never to do so.

"I want the Black Lives Matter people to understand: Don't call me for a meeting. You're not getting one."

"Black Lives Matter called for the murder of police" is the new  "Black Panthers are attacking white voters at polling places" baloney and it will be repeated for years.

And believe me when I say as far as GOP voters are concerned, every black voter is a "Black Lives Matter thug".

All Around The World The Same Song

Republicans are trying to repeal Obamacare yet again (attempt number 54, by my math) this time with a couple of differences: they are using budget reconciliation, and they are including cutting all funding for Planned Parenthood.

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that defunding Planned Parenthood can be part of a special Republican package repealing parts of ObamaCare, The Hill has learned. 

The parliamentarian on Tuesday gave word that the provision passes muster under the Senate’s Byrd Rule, which means it can be attached to a reconciliation package that cannot be filibustered on the Senate floor.

Some Senate sources had raised questions over whether the reconciliation bill passed by the House — which strips funding from Planned Parenthood — was even eligible for the reconciliation process. 

That question is now settled, which means the Senate can begin debating the measure once GOP leaders round up enough votes to bring it to the floor. 

“The House of Representatives passed important legislation that ripped out the core pillars of ObamaCare and fully complies with the House’s budget rules. Today the Senate Parliamentarian advised us that their ObamaCare repeal bill can proceed under the rules of reconciliation,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

“The Parliamentarian also confirmed that the restrictions on payments to certain health care providers in section 201 of the House bill can be accomplished consistent with the Byrd rule,” Stewart added, referring to language defunding Planned Parenthood.

So this is all great fun for the GOP, but it's going to run into a guaranteed veto by President Obama. The question is will this legislation get attached to must-pass legislation?  The budget deal has already been signed, so where does this bill go?

It's a definite boon to the four Senate Republicans running for President in 2016. If this does get past the Senate, these four can say "I proved the only thing keeping Obamacare and Planned Parenthood alive now is Obama, and once I win in 2016 we can and will end his legacy."

Of course, that goes for Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Jeb! and the rest of the pack too.

Short of a piping hot plate of red meat for the base, this accomplishes nothing.

That appears to be the point, however.

The Great Debate Debate, Con't

A couple of points raised in last night's GOP debate that I wanted to bring up, first Trump on the minimum wage:

But, taxes too high, wages too high, we're not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we can not do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can't do it.

Considering Trump inherited his millions from his dad, that's a hell of a thing to say.  The greatest capitalist country on earth has businesses that can't afford to pay taxes or to pay workers?  Ben Carson was even more nuts.

As far as the minimum wage is concerned, people need to be educated on the minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.

It's particularly a problem in the black community. Only 19.8 percent of black teenagers have a job, who are looking for one. You know, that -- and that's because of those high wages. If you lower those wages, that comes down.

What?  Black teenagers are making too much money?  People should be grateful for the experience, Carson said.  You don't need to be paid.  Does anybody actually agree with that?  Rubio weighed in too:

If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that's replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.

Here's the best way to raise wages. Make America the best place in the world to start a business or expand an existing business, tax reform and regulatory reform, bring our debt under control, fully utilize our energy resources so we can reinvigorate manufacturing, repeal and replace Obamacare, and make higher education faster and easier to access, especially vocational training. For the life of me, I don't know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

You should be grateful for the experience, you don't need to be paid, and you should be lucky we don't replace you with a robot.  Amazing.

That's where Republicans are on the working poor.  You make too much money and you're ruining it for the rest of us.

StupidiNews!

• Multiple anonymous threats were made on social media against black University of Missouri students in the wake of the ouster of UM officials over failing to deal with incidents of racism.
• A new report by a California think tank finds half of the state's undocumented immigrants are poor enough to qualify for Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.
• Libyan forces faced off in Benghazi against Islamic State fighters leaving 16 dead as Libya remains divided among two competing government armies and ISIS militants.
• New York AG Eric Schneiderman has classified daily fantasy sports illegal gambling under state law in the latest blow to DraftKings and FanDuel.
• A bipartisan House bill aims to increase business opportunities in space, allowing companies to claim asteroids for mining rights and indemnify commercial space launches through 2025.

Last Call For The Christmas Taliban Strikes Again

It's that time of the year again where the Christian outrage police go after businesses for not being Christian enough when it comes to the holiday season, because as we all know any business that doesn't put Jesus on everything after Halloween must hate Christians and must be destroyed.

Starbucks, on Sunday, addressed criticism for removing symbols of the Christmas season from its cups, and making them just plain red with the company logo. Starbucks reportedly came under fire from a Christian group in the U.S. which accused the coffee company of waging a "war on Christmas." 

Starbucks removed the usual array of decorative images such as Christmas trees and snowflakes that adorned the cups in previous holidays with a simple red cup with their green and white logo. 

Starbucks reportedly said in a statement Sunday that it tries "to create a culture of belonging, inclusion and diversity," adding that the cup is meant to be a "blank canvas" that encourages "customers to tell their Christmas stories in their own way." 

Joshua Feuerstein -- a former pastor who calls himself a "social media personality" -- posted a video on Facebook last week, criticizing Starbucks for removing "Christmas from their cups because they hate Jesus." 

In an email to CNNMoney Sunday, Feuerstein noted that his video has had more than 10 million views. 

"I think Starbucks has gotten the message that the Christian majority in this country has awakened and are demanding that our voice be heard," Feuerstein reportedly wrote.

These of course are the same evangelical Christians who say they are being victimized by the evil gay mafia over same-sex marriage, victimized by schools for not teaching Bible classes, victimized by other religions for being allowed to exist in a "Christian country" even though the Constitution expressly forbids such things, and on and on.

We've gotten to the point now where a red coffee cup is "anti-Jesus"

If this is your Christianity, I want no part of it.

Welcome To Bevinstan, Con't

A whole bunch of Kentuckians didn't think Matt Bevin would ever take Medicaid away from people like them, but that's exactly who and what they voted for last week.  Now that Bevin plans to make good on his promises, they're pretty damn scared.

Dennis Blackburn has this splintered self-interest. The 56-year-old mechanic hasn’t worked in 18 months, since he lost his job at a tire company that supplies a diminishing number of local coal mines. “The old guy had to go home,” Blackburn says of his layoff. 

He has a hereditary liver disorder, numbness in his hands and legs, back pain from folding his 6-foot-1-inch frame into 29-inch mine shafts as a young man, plus an abnormal heart rhythm — the likely vestige of having been struck by lightning 15 years ago in his tin-roofed farmhouse. 

Blackburn was making small payments on an MRI he’d gotten at Pikeville Medical Center, the only hospital in a 150-mile radius, when he heard about Big Sandy’s Shelby Valley Clinic. There he met Fleming, who helped him sign up for one of the managed-care Medicaid plans available in Kentucky. 

On Election Day, Blackburn voted for Bevin because he is tired of career politicians and thought a businessman would be more apt to create the jobs that Pike County so needs. Yet when it comes to the state’s expansion of health insurance, “it doesn’t look to me as if he understands,” Blackburn said. “Without this little bit of help these people are giving me, I could probably die. . . . It’s not right to not understand something but want to stamp it out.”

Well sorry Dennis.  You voted for the guy who ran on taking health care away from you.  Steve Benen isn't exactly sorry for Dennis here either.

My point is not to be unsympathetic. It seems this man is facing serious health issues and I can only hope he, and others like him, receive the assistance they need. 

But Matt Bevin did not hide his intentions, and Kentucky will now try to live with the consequences of the voters’ decision. The state was a model for the nation; Kentuckians had an opportunity to keep that model in place; and now they’ve chosen to go in a very different direction. 

I should note that the future isn’t entirely clear. Bevin ran on an anti-healthcare platform, but he’s begun to hedge on some of the details, vowing to come up with a new, as-yet-unstated plan, which will likely cost more and cover less, but which may prevent hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians from losing their health security altogether. 

In the meantime, however, a lot of families are worried about just how much damage a Bevin administration will do, and by all appearances, those fears are well grounded.

And before anyone starts thinking Bevin is the one who is going to burn for this, let's understand that all Bevin has to do is say that Medicaid expansion was always going to go away because Obamacare was always broken, and to blame Obama and the Democrats.

And Dennis here?  That's exactly what he'll do.

He will continue to vote against his self-interests.  He wanted his Medicaid, but he wasn't going to admit that the ni-CLANG! president was helping him.  So he voted for the other guy and thought he would be able to tell Obama to go to hell and keep his Medicaid.

A lot of people did.

Guess what?

Welcome to Bevinstan.

University Of Hard Knocks, Con't

Well it turns out University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe stepped down over an insufficient response to a number of racist incidents on campus this year, and now the bullseye is on university Chancellor Bowen Loftin.

The same day University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe announced his resignation, the deans of nine different MU colleges requested the dismissal of Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.

In a letter sent Monday to Wolfe and the UM Board of Curators, the deans said they wanted to express "our deep concern about the multitude of crises on our flagship campus" and call for Loftin's dismissal.

The nine deans met with Wolfe on Oct. 9 and on Oct. 13 met with Wolfe, Loftin and Provost Garnett Stokes to express their concerns, according to the letter.

"The issues we raised in those meetings have continued to deteriorate into a campus crisis that demands immediate and decisive action," they wrote. "It is the Chancellor’s responsibility as the Chief Executive Officer of the campus to effectively address these campus issues."

Loftin, the former president of Texas A&M University, has been chancellor at MU since February 2014.

The letter is signed by Daniel Clay, dean of the College of Education; Kristofer Hagglund, dean of the School of Health Professions; David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism; Judith Miller, dean of the Sinclair School of Nursing; Gary Myers, dean of the School of Law; Neil Olson, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine; Michael O'Brien, dean of the College of Arts and Science; Thomas Payne, dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources; and Barton Wechsler, dean of the Truman School of Public Affairs.

The deans said Loftin has shown failed leadership through a number of instances, including the elimination and eventual reinstatement of graduate assistant health insurance and the elimination of the vice chancellor for health sciences position. The deans claim Loftin created a "toxic environment through threat, fear and intimidation."

"It is imperative to take immediate action to begin the process of resolving the issues and improving the environment," they wrote.

On Sunday, faculty members of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures sent a letter to the Curators saying they had no confidence in Loftin's leadership. The letter said 28 faculty members in the department expressed no confidence in Loftin; two abstained from the vote.

The faculty members said Loftin's leadership has created a "climate of mistrust, miscommunication, chaos, despair, and anger."

"The demoralizing campus climate under his lack of leadership is no longer conducive to our fundamental duties of teaching, research and service," the letter said. "We believe that the only way out of this impasse is to find a new Chancellor who … will find the resources needed to increase rather than dismantle the excellence of our institution."

So it turns out that yes, the problems at the University of Missouri have been ongoing for some time now, enough for multiple college deans to call for a chancellor's ouster.

But the backlash from the dregs of the Confederacy is pretty vocal.

This controversy, as with the current upheaval at Yale, suggests aggrieved students most desperately want administrators to acknowledge their pain and tell them they have a right to live free of emotional turmoil. But no competent administrator can provide them with this false sense of security, since the proper role of a university education is to help students overcome (rather than sidestep) challenges. 

In any case, Wolfe’s resignation also means that hyper-offended students are not as powerless as skeptics of the campus speech wars claim they are. I'm often told by these skeptics that the actions of outraged students are harmless because they never amount to anything, but this development at Missouri is a significant contrary example. 

I would be disheartened, but not at all surprised, to see more professors and administrators driven from campus for the crime of failing to erect suitable safe spaces.

How ridiculous, according to the right, that colleges and universities should work to actually do something about racism, sexual assault, and abuse on campus, when America, the greatest nation on earth, is full of racism, sexual assault, and abuse.