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Matt Yglesias informs me today that there is something called the Sohn Investment Conference, which, according to Reuters, "gets big name hedge fund managers to share their 'best ideas' with other wealthy investors." The hedge fundies, it turns out, are really unhappy with Ben Bernanke's monetary policy, and Matt provides a fairly philosophical explanation for why this is. I suppose he might be right, but I'm going to take a wild guess that the real reason is much simpler, summarized here by Reuters:

The Fed's easy money policy has helped boost riskier assets such as equities, with the S&P 500 up 14 percent this year. Both the S&P and Dow Jones Industrials have set a string of all-time highs.

In contrast, the average hedge fund is up only 4.4 percent.

So there you have it. In Ben Bernanke's America, hedge funds aren't doing so well. And guess what? Billionaire hedge fund managers aren't very happy about that. It's not complicated at all.

By the way, I love the scare quotes the Reuters reporters put around "best ideas." I'm guessing they're a little skeptical that these billionaires are truly sharing anything remotely approaching their best ideas. I would be too.

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U.S. President Barack Obama announces Gina McCarthy as his nominee to head the EPA in a March 4 ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

The Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted a Thursday morning meeting in which they were supposed to vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans on the committee complained that she had not yet adequately responded to their questions.

The vote had been scheduled for 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, but none of the committee's Republican members showed up.

Politico reports on what transpired:

Committee ranking member David Vitter (R-La.) announced the boycott by all eight GOP members around 8:30 a.m., saying they would deny the panel a quorum because McCarthy and the EPA haven't provided answers to the questions they'd posed.

Democrats have noted that the questions totaled more than 1,000 — what they call a record. Republicans also had five "requests" for EPA on issues such as how the agency handles outside groups' threats of litigation — though Democrats said the GOP senators were actually asking the agency to offer major concessions in how it conducts public business.

Democrats on the committee were quick to attack Republicans for this "obstruction." Committee chair Barbara Boxer noted that the vote had already been delayed for three weeks to accommodate the panel's Republican members.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid railed on the effort to block McCarthy in a statement on Thursday, noting that the GOP has also blocked President Obama's nominee to head the Department of Labor, Thomas Perez. "This type of blanket, partisan obstruction used to be unheard of," Reid said. "Now it has become an unacceptable pattern."

The blockade on McCarthy is even more noteworthy because, as we've reported here before, she worked for Mitt Romney back when he was governor of Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut's Republican former Gov. Jodi Rell.

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I don't want to spend too much time diving down the Benghazi rabbit hole again—seriously, I think I'd rather have my big toe cut off—but I do think it's worthwhile to very briefly recap the three basic phases of Benghazi and what questions we have about them:

The months leading up to the attacks. Should the State Department have approved more security for both the Tripoli embassy and the Benghazi compound? Were they incompetent not to?

Quite possibly. Certainly, the State Department's own investigation was scathing on this score ("Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels…resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place"). But there was nothing new about this in yesterday's hearing, and certainly no evidence of cover-up or scandal. At worst, it was misjudgment that reflects badly on State's security operations. At the same time, it's worth keeping in mind that hindsight is always 20-20. There were also plenty of legitimate resource constraints, budget shortfalls, and deliberate policy choices that contributed to this.

The night of the attacks. Was the military response to the Benghazi attacks incompetent and chaotic? That's possible, but like everyone else, I've read through the timelines and the evidence is thin. Republican investigators have continually dug up examples of things they think the military should have done (scrambled F-16s, dispatched FAST teams, etc.) and in every case the military has explained why they made the decisions they did. Gregory Hicks repeated many of these charges yesterday, and he's obviously angry about what happened that night. But the fact that he's angry doesn't make him right. So far, anyway, the military's explanations have always struck me as pretty reasonable. They certainly sound as though they understand the military realities better than Hicks and the other Monday morning quarterbacks do.

It's also worth noting that there was simply no conceivable motive for the military not to respond forcefully to the Benghazi attacks. Maybe there was confusion and maybe there were bad decisions, but nothing more.

The months after the September 11 attacks. Did the Obama administration try to cover up what really happened in Benghazi? This is the deepest rabbit hole of all, and the conspiracy theories have flown faster and thicker than I can keep track of. But after eight months of throwing mud against the walls, nothing has stuck yet. For several days after September 11, the intelligence community said that the attacks were preceded by protests, and that turned out to be wrong. But it was just wrong, not a cover-up. The intelligence community also believed—and still does—that the attacks were essentially opportunistic, not the results of weeks or months of planning. And Susan Rice, in her Sunday interviews, infamously mentioned the role of the "Innocence of Muslims" video that had sparked the Cairo protests earlier that day, and it's fair to say that she probably put too much emphasis on that. But only a little. There was, and maybe still is, evidence that the video played a supporting role.

And of course there are the notorious talking points, which have been subject to a deconstruction effort that would make Jacques Derrida proud. Did the interagency process sand them down a bit too much before the intelligence community released a public version? Perhaps. Were they wrong not to mention the role of Ansar al-Sharia? Perhaps. Should they have been more forthright about calling the attackers "terrorists" rather than just "extremists"? Perhaps.

But again: At most, this is evidence of misjudgment, not cover-up or scandal. And frankly, there's not much evidence even of serious misjudgment. Nor any motive for it. The Republican theory has always been that Obama didn't want to admit terrorist involvement because this would reflect badly on him, but this has never made any sense, either politically or practically. There's just no there there.

Finally, we did hear one new thing yesterday: Gregory Hicks' claim that he was demoted after he spoke with congressional investigators and questioned the State Department's handling of the crisis. If that happened, it was wrong and Hicks is right to be angry about it. But I'd remain cautious about this. Hicks is pretty obviously bitter, but even with only his side of the story available to us, we have very little solid evidence of mistreatment. Was he asked not to speak to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) without a lawyer present? Probably, but that's pretty normal. Did he do it anyway? Apparently so, and it's not clear why. Did he get an irritated phone call about it from Hillary Clinton's top aide? He says he did, but that wouldn't be surprising, and we have only Hicks' characterization of the conversation so far. Was he demoted to a desk job in retaliation? Maybe, or it could be a routine, temporary assignment while his superiors wait for something to open up for him.

We don't have the State Department's side of this because, of course, it's a personnel matter and they aren't allowed to talk about it. So I suppose we'll have to wait on the inevitable leaks. But I'd be very cautious about swallowing Hicks' story whole. It simply didn't strike me as wholly credible. But we'll see.

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Felix Salmon draws our attention today to a new study by Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation about Pell Grants and low-income college students. The news is grim. More and more universities, he says, have joined the "high tuition, high aid" brigade:

In theory, the structure should work well. Rather than charge every student the same amount, have a high rack rate, paid by the richest students, and then use the proceeds to put in place a generous scholarship system which will help support the poorest students.

In practice, however, that doesn’t happen. The scholarships go towards “merit aid”, which is often, dismayingly enough, a polite way of saying that the college is helping to pay for wealthy kids to attend, even if they’re not particularly smart. Some 20% of students with GPAs below 2.0, for instance, receive merit aid. And at the same time, the “need aid” is carefully calibrated so that poor kids won’t take the colleges up on their offers

Apparently this called "gapping," or "admit-deny," which is the practice of offering "a financial-aid package that is so rotten that you hope they get the message, ‘Don’t come,’” Mark Heffron, a senior vice-president at the enrollment management firm Noel-Levitz, told The Atlantic Monthly back in 2005. ‘They don’t always get the message.’"

More and more, the whole structure of Pell Grants, and financial aid in general, looks broken. Increased financial aid doesn't make college more affordable for poor students, it just allows universities to charge ever higher tuition rates. So what's the solution? Burd recommends a carrot-and-stick approach:

The carrot is to help schools that simply don’t have the resources to keep down the net prices of the low-income students they serve. The plan would offer Pell bonuses to financially strapped public and private four-year colleges that serve a substantial share of Pell Grant recipients (more than 25 percent) and graduate at least half their students school-wide.

....The stick is for wealthier colleges that have chosen to divert their aid to try to buy the best students....These schools, which generally enroll a relatively small share of low-income students but charge them high net prices, would be required to match at least a share of the Pell dollars they receive.

I'm not sure this is enough, but it's a start. One way or another, this is a broken system that needs to be fixed. It's great for universities, and it's pretty good for upper middle-class and wealthy families. For everyone else, it just doesn't work.

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