On Thursday, word circulated that Senate Democrats — and in particular Sen. Dianne Feinstein — sent a “secret letter” to the FBI which contained an undisclosed allegation by an undisclosed person regarding an undisclosed offense supposedly committed by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

When Kavanaugh was in high school, apparently.

“This matter has been referred to the FBI for investigation,” Sen. Dick Durbin told BuzzFeed News when asked about the letter on Thursday. In a statement later Thursday, Feinstein confirmed that she had referred the letter to “federal investigative authorities.” “I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Feinstein said. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”

The gist of this allegation appears to be that when Brett Kavanaugh was 17, he and a friend supposedly tried to trap a girl his age in a room at a party in an effort to initiate sexual contact of some kind. But so far as we can tell nothing sexual actually happened.

If this is all they have on Brett Kavanaugh, it’s time for the Democrats to admit they’re beaten on this nomination.

What an embarrassment to a major political party that 11th-hour surprises involving behavior as a high school student that was never brought to the attention of the police, and for which the statute of limitations would certainly have run even in the event a crime was committed, are where we are.

And for Dianne Feinstein to be trafficking in this, after surviving — thanks to the atrocious refusal of the legacy media to report it — a major scandal involving her employment of an aide who was a Chinese spy as a staffer for some 20 years is nothing short of shameful. One would think Feinstein would lie low after the disclosure of such careless and incompetent mismanagement of her office — but we already know that Democrats don’t take their responsibilities seriously where information is concerned. We know that thanks to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, we know it after the House Pakistani IT fiasco, we know it from the OMB hack, the DNC email leak, and countless other examples where corruption, incompetence, and disrespect for the law, our state secrets, and the American people have surfaced.

In Feinstein’s case, her compromised status with respect to China goes back two decades. Paul Sperry exposed it at the New York Post a month ago…

One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet. After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash. Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein. In speeches on the Senate floor and newspaper op-eds, she shamelessly spun China’s human-rights violations, as when in 1997 she compared Beijing’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of young demonstrators to the 1970 Kent State shootings, calling for the presidents of China and America to appoint a human-rights commission “charting the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years,” that “would point out the successes and failures — both Tiananmen Square and Kent State — and make recommendations for goals for the future.” Feinstein also led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 1999, which gave Beijing permanent normal trade relations status and removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records. Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year. Joining her on those trips is her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, who has seemingly benefited greatly from the relationship. Starting in 1996, as China was aggressively currying favor with his wife, Blum was able to take large stakes in Chinese state-run steel and food companies, and has brokered over $100 million in deals in China since then — with the help of partners who sit on the boards of Chinese military front companies like COSCO and CITIC. China investments have helped make Feinstein, who lives in a $17 million mansion in San Francisco and keeps a $5 million vacation home in Hawaii, one of the richest members in Congress.

And yet we’re supposed to give credence to Dianne Feinstein when she circulates last-minute surprise allegations against what is clearly an honorable man.

What is beneath this Democrat Party? What tactics of personal destruction for petty political ends go beyond a line they will not cross?

We don’t have an answer. At this point the Democrats have made the abyss their home. It’ll be up to the voters to impose the limits the Democrats so badly require.

…

Anybody see, earlier this week, the New York Times’ admonition to Donald Trump not to get involved in efforts at regime change in Venezuela?

America shouldn’t be in the coup business. Period. It’s a relief, then, to learn that the Trump administration chose not to aid rebellious leaders in Venezuela seeking to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro. But it’s worrisome to think that President Trump and his advisers made the right call for the wrong reason — lack of confidence in the plotters to succeed in a risky operation rather than principled concern about intervention. … Given the turmoil in Venezuela, it is not unreasonable for American diplomats to meet with all factions, including mutinous military officers, to learn their thinking. For instance, who would be in charge in a political transition process? What kind of government do they aim for? But holding multiple meetings with the plotters begins to look like collaboration. The news was bound to leak out, as it has.

America shouldn’t be in the coup business?

Well, neither should the New York Times.

To the Times, you people can admonish Donald Trump not to act to end the suffering of the Venezuelan people when you stop helping to overturn a duly-elected American president.

By the way, the best possible service Trump and the American people can do for the starving, oppressed people of Venezuela would be to effect an end to the Maduro regime and its continuing betrayal of its people to their Cuban occupiers in as bloodless a fashion as possible. If an opportunity to do that should arise behind a Venezuelan leader committed to freedom, human dignity, and the availability of basic items like aspirin and toilet paper for the masses. The Times, which has a history of coddling leftist tyrants going all the way back to Walter Duranty and his cover-up of the Holodomor in the 1930s, has no moral standing to attack Trump’s consideration of efforts to aid the Venezuelans.

…

Last week, Fox Business had an article about the increasing trend whereby major companies are no longer demanding college degrees for jobs which used to require them.

No diploma? No problem. More and more companies are scrapping college degree requirements for jobs. They’re not saying you shouldn’t seek higher education, but not having a degree won’t be a barrier for you to work in certain jobs at their companies. Some of the 15 big companies saying “no bachelor’s degree is fine” include Google, Nordstrom, Bank of America, Ernst & Young, IBM and Apple. The changes are coming as job seekers, as well as high school graduates, consider whether college is worth the skyrocketing cost.

You’re going to hear more and more about this. It’s partially explained by the fact we’re in a serious labor shortage now, but not completely.

A significant piece to this trend is that colleges simply don’t prepare kids for employment the way they did 20 or 30 years ago. Talk to business owners, and they will pull their hair out over how often their straight-out-of-college new hires are completely lost when it comes to the culture of the workplace — the demands they make, the things they can’t handle, the inability to just shut up and do what they’re assigned, and so forth.

So more and more companies are going to attack that problem by identifying bright kids out of high school they can train, and then molding them to be the employees they want while paying them much less in initial salary than they’re currently paying to college graduates.

Once that takes hold, look out — because lots of kids will realize an entry-level paid internship job is a whole lot better investment in a career than 150K in debt for some college degree that guarantees nothing.

When you hear again and again that higher education is a bubble waiting to burst, this trend is quite likely the pin which will pop it.