Internet Scofflaw

David Gregory tries to trap Rand Paul into playing into the Democrat-media complex’s “war on women” narrative. Paul will have none of it. I hope other Republicans learn from his example.

The New York Times reports that Republican dominance in the House is mostly not the result of gerrymandering:

The problem for Democrats is that they have overwhelming majorities not only in the dense, poor urban centers, but also in isolated, far-flung college towns, historical mining areas and 19th-century manufacturing towns that are surrounded by and ultimately overwhelmed by rural Republicans.

A motivated Democratic cartographer could produce districts that accurately reflected overall partisanship in states like these by carefully crafting the metropolitan districts and snaking districts along the historical canals and rail lines that once connected the nonmetropolitan Democratic enclaves. But such districts are unlikely to emerge by chance from a nonpartisan process.

So Republican dominance results not from Republican gerrymandering, but from the lack of Democratic gerrymandering. If you group nearby people together, Republicans win.

That’s interesting, but what I found particularly telling is how the NYT introduced these results:

The results were not encouraging for reform advocates.

If the results — showing that reform wouldn’t help Democrats — were not encouraging to reform advocates, that tells us what the actual goals of “reform advocates” are, doesn’t it?

(Via Instapundit.)

Barack Obama:

There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues.

It can be particularly hard to disentangle those issues when your party and you personally are doing everything you can to entangle them!

Then he does that thing (he used to do it a lot, back when he was doing the unity schtick) where he gives lip service to the other side before expounding his own, far-left view:

. . . I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history . . .

The key point that Obama leaves out here is that history of criticisms against those “trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans” is the history of the Democratic party!

Now that the Democratic party has made its 11th-hour transformation from an anti-minority racist party to a pro-minority racist party (no exaggeration), they want to project their own evils onto their opponents, who have (more or less) been arguing for a color-blind society all along.

New Jersey’s “bridgegate” scandal (in which the state government intentionally snarled traffic as political payback) has certainly captured the media’s imagination. The big three networks dedicated over 34 minutes of airtime to it in a single day, which is 17 times as much as they dedicated to the IRS scandal over the past half year.

And with good cause; the allegation is very serious indeed.  Chris Christie stands accused . . . of behaving like a Democrat.

Dealing out political retribution has been the Democrat playbook going all the way back to Martin Van Buren, who — with Andrew Jackson — founded the modern Democratic party. (Jackson himself was more direct. When he was particularly incensed with someone, he would shoot him.)

Today’s Democratic party is rife with this sort of thing. The closest analogue is Seattle’s Democratic mayor closing city streets, out of an explicit desire to inconvenience drivers.

But a better example of callous political retribution was Barack Obama’s shutdown theater last year. During the government shutdown, the Obama administration directed the government to “make life as difficult as possible“. And so they did:

• They stopped an individual from mowing the lawn at the Lincoln Memorial.
• They barricaded wheelchair ramps.
• They removed handles from water fountains.
• They (illegally) closed Alaskan lands.
• They closed the Grand Canyon, and refused to let the state reopen it at state expense.
• They sent armed rangers to lock tourists into a Yellowstone lodge and ensure they could not see Old Faithful.
• They closed the only safe road through Blount County, forcing parents to take their kids to school on “white knuckle” routes.
• They shut down the AMBER alert web site.
• They (illegally) evict elderly people from their own homes.
• They closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, which isn’t even government property.
• They barricaded highway viewing areas at Mount Rushmore.
• They cut off cancer treatment for children.
• They closed the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, which received no government funding and is operated entirely by volunteers.
• They barricaded national open-air monuments, and closed privately operated parks.

None of these (save one) were mandated by the shutdown; they actually cost the government money to perpetrate. (The exception, cancer treatment for children, Republicans sought to fund, but the Democrats refused.)

The most recent example to come to light is how the White House took extraordinary steps to ensure that the budget sequester hurt rural schools. (Via Instapundit.) In this instance, the Agriculture Department had already determined that the sequester would have no effect on funds already disbursed the previous year. However, the White House overruled that determination, and ordered them to claw back the money they had already spent.

It’s wrong for anyone to behave like this, and we do expect better from Republicans. Christie ought to be in hot water over it. But all the furor from the Democrats and their media allies over this is very much the pot calling the kettle black.

The governor of New York says if you don’t agree with him on social issues, you have no place in his state:

The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

To be clear: when Democrats talk about uniting red America and blue America, they don’t mean by respecting diversity of thought. They mean that red Americans must become blue, or else.

(Via Hot Air.)

UPDATE: Cuomo: I never said what I said. I would have thought it hard to accuse people of being “entirely reckless with facts and the truth” when they quote you verbatim, but he’s up for it.

This is why the government cannot be trusted with information. They will abuse it:

The Environmental Protection Agency has told farmers and ranchers it is sorry for handing private information about them over to environmental groups, but agriculture advocates who fear attacks from eco-terrorists say it’s like closing the barn door after the horses escaped.

In response to Freedom of Information Requests, the federal agency released information on up to 100,000 agriculture industry workers, including their home address and phone numbers, GPS coordinates and even personal medical histories.

Whether this was accidental or not is beside the point. If they face no consequences, it will keep happening.

In 1974, the polar vortex phenomenon was evidence of global cooling. Now it’s evidence of global warming.

(Via Best of the Web.)

Maybe the reason New York state officials are so anti-gun is they think that gun owners are as irresponsible with them as they are:

Jerome M. Hauer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s director of homeland security, took out his handgun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a foreign delegation, according to public officials. . . These officials, one of whom claimed to be an eyewitness, said that three Swedish emergency managers in the delegation were rattled when the gun’s laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point.

[Hauer] isn’t a law enforcement official. He carries the loaded 9-millimeter Glock in a holster into state buildings, an apparent violation of state law barring state employees from bringing weapons to the workplace. . .

Appalling. He should be required to take an NRA gun safety class. Perhaps the version for kids.

(Via Instapundit.)

I frequently see it alleged by liberals that getting health universal coverage is as simple as expanding Medicare so that it covers everyone. Many of them probably actually believe it, so I want to explain some basic economics.

The reason Medicare’s cost to the government is as low as it is (which is not all that low, by the way) is because Medicare’s reimbursement rate is just barely above marginal cost. That means that it is barely profitable to treat them, given that — and this is the key point — all the fixed cost has already been paid for by other patients.

In other words, Medicare is cheap (that is, cheaper than it would otherwise be) because its share of the cost of all our health care infrastructure (hospitals, equipment, etc.) is shifted onto other patients.

But you cannot shift the fixed cost off of everyone! For Medicare to work, there need to be people left off of it to bear Medicare’s share of the fixed cost. Try to put everyone on Medicare and the whole thing collapses.

This is nothing more than elementary economics. Whenever you see a politician proclaim we should have “Medicare for all”, they are proclaiming that they don’t understand economics. Or, if they actually do (I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman and Robert Reich) then they’re engaging in pure demagoguery.

This is interesting:

The FBI’s creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists “national security” as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001. . .

After noticing the change, [lawyer Kel] McClanahan reviewed his records and saw that the revised fact sheets began going out this summer. “I think they’re trying to rebrand,” he said. “So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security.”

(Via Hot Air.)

Officially the filibuster is only partly dead, but Reid is hinting at changing that:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Sunday said he was not currently considering an elimination of the filibuster for legislation, but he warned that the country could not remain “paralyzed” by Republican obstruction. . .

[Democrats] left in place a 60-vote threshold for legislation. But in a rare Sunday television interview, Reid stopped short of categorically ruling out such a move in the future.

What he’s trying to do is get the benefit of abolishing the filibuster without actually doing it, by pressuring the opposition into giving him what he wants in return for keeping the filibuster. That worked once last year (once more than it should have), but when Democrats kept doing it, Republicans caught on and declined to play along.

When the Democrats abolished the filibuster, they did it narrowly, for only the things (presidential nominations) they wanted to do that very day, and pretended to leave it in place for other things, such as legislation and Supreme Court nominations. No matter; the filibuster is dead now and everyone knows it. From now on, there will be a new exception whenever anything is filibustered.

If you’re on the Obamacare exchanges, don’t have a baby. There’s no way to add a baby to your plan:

Insurers say computerized “change in circumstance” updates to deal with family and life developments were supposed to have been part of the federal system from the start.

But that feature got postponed as the government scrambled to fix technical problems that overwhelmed the health care website during its first couple of months.

Maybe this is why they are so concerned about contraception. . .

(Previous post.)

According to NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, make a new law that turns hitherto law-abiding persons into criminals, then arrest those people. Voila, people are safer!

Don’t ask whether there’s been any improvement in actual crime statistics. That would be rude.

The EU is banning cinnamon rolls.