Sigh. They better stop watching PBS’s Nova, too, because David Koch supports it.

In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation gathering, Darcy Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former Microsoft MSFT +0.51%programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservativebillionaire industrialists Charles and David Kochwere behind a product on the shelves.

Burner figured the average supermarket shopper had no idea that buying Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups meant contributing cash to Koch Industries through its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. Similarly, purchasing a pair of yoga pants containing Lycra or a Stainmaster carpet meant indirectly handing the Kochs your money (Koch Industries bought Invista, one of the world’s largest fiber and textiles companies, in 2004 from DuPont).

All agree that the IRS scrutiny of only conservative “social welfare” groups applying for tax-exempt status is inexcusable. What is tragically being lost is that all these groups, along with liberal ones, deserve to be targeted.

Why should our tax dollars be diverted from seniors, defense, infrastructure, education, aid for low-income individuals and other vital programs and agencies to give anyone a tax break for engaging in political activities? No one I know actually believes that any of these groups have been formed for anything other than divisive political purposes.

Congress should get rid of this tax break for all such political groups.

Chris Soltow

Thousand Oaks

So not taking someone’s or some group’s money via taxation = diverting it from the public good. In short, what’s yours is the government’s. Anything not taken is a giveaway to you.

You’re welcome.

Apparently these blabbermouths have not heard of Psalms, which Romney was quoting.

You have to listen closely to the choice of words liberals use. They’re often loaded.

Example #1. This week an NPR report on the effects of the sequester focused on a woman who will not get her free housing because of the cutbacks. They said (paraphrasing) “In 2008 she lost her job, her apartment and found herself homeless and pregnant.”

Wait: she “found” herself pregnant? Was this immaculate conception or did she mate carelessly? There are old and infirm people who truly need this program. She’s not one of them.

Example #2. President Obama called to congratulate NBA player Jason Collins for his bravery in coming out as gay. Obama referred to Collins as a “young man.” Collins is 34, which used to be regarded as nearly middle aged. Is 34 the new 20?

Example #3. Kathleen Parker noted…”repeatedly in the past several days, we’ve heard the argument that any interference with the over-the-counter sale of Plan B to any female of any age is blocking a woman’s right to self-determination. Fifteen-year-olds, where the Obama administration wants to set the limit, are girls, not women. And female parts do not a woman make any more than a correspondingly developed male makes the proud possessor a man.

So, in Obamaland, a 15-year old girl is a woman, but a 34 year old NBA player is a young man.

The 15-year old age limit for the Plan B ill is odd because it is below the age of consent. If a 15-year old is pregnant, someone committed statutory rape.

Aren’t liberals against rape?

Delicious.

The PTA at Point Dume Elementary in Malibu is a fundraising machine. Parents collected about $2,100 per student in the 2009-10 school year, money that helped pay for music and art programs, as well as a dedicated marine science lab.

But now the Santa Monica-Malibu school board wants to funnel much of that money away and, in the name of educational equality, give it to other district campuses.

The move has sparked an effort in Malibu to secede from the district, igniting a battle between one wealthy community and its less wealthy neighbor that echoes across the state.

The district’s effort to redistribute PTA money adds to the trend in California since the 1970s to equalize funding between rich and poor schools. Gov. Jerry Brown rolled out a new plan earlier this year that would radically alter the status quo, moving the lion’s share of educational dollars to poor schools.

Some Malibu parents are just fed up.

“It’s not fair,” said Maria Kuznetsova, who has a 6-year-old son at Point Dume. “You don’t want to donate to somebody else. You know how it goes. It disappears.”

Sister, head on over to Reason.com and learn.

Deborah Allen, who has two sons in the district and helps run Malibu High’s booster club, said she has no problem with the policy that will send money her school raises to students who need it most.

“Some of the kids in Santa Monica, the only hot meal they get each day is lunch,” Allen said. “So if half of my money, or whatever portion, goes to them, I’m OK with it.”

Really? With food stamps kids can’t get a hot meal except at school?

Only in this awkward marriage between two beach cities could Santa Monica be considered the poor spouse. Its median household income is 27% higher than the rest of the county. Its ocean-front homes are the stuff of California dreams, although there are less affluent pockets inland.

Poor is relative. Progressives are knee-jerk levelers and redistributionists.

Walter Russell Mead on “gentry liberals”:

If Maureen Dowd’s evisceration manqué of President Obama’s gun control strategy in the New York Times is any indication, Ms. Dowd is in the wrong line of work. She doesn’t understand American politics. She doesn’t know how votes are gained and lost, she doesn’t know what presidents do or understand what powers they have, and above all she doesn’t understand how politicians think.

Column writing is dangerous work and long success in the game can lead to the stifling of that Editor Within who keeps you from looking too stupid in print. A rich self esteem, fortifed by decades of op-ed tenure and dinner party table talk dominance, has apparently given Ms. Dowd the confidence to believe that she is a maestro of political infighting, a Clausewitz of strategic insight and a Machiavelli of political cunning rolled up into one stylish and elegant piece of work. From the heights of insight on which she dwells, it is easy to see what that poor schmuck Barry Obama can’t: those 60 votes on gun control were his for the taking, if he was only as shrewd a politician as Maureen Dowd.

The President needs to get his hands dirty, our genteel and accomplished op-ed writer advises the ex-community organizer and Chicago pol. He needs to get real, get down in the dirt, muck around with the senators and exercise raw power. Don’t make empty gestures and don’t give up, she advises him: fight! fight! fight!

Perhaps because she fears that the President is too stupid to understand what she means, or simply out of her benevolent desire to show her readers just what brilliant political insight looks like, she vouchsafes us some examples. Here’s how she sees the President twisting the arm of North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp:

Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”

If only Lyndon Johnson had understood the art of political pressure as well as Maureen Dowd. “You work with us, we’ll work with you.” It’s… brilliant! Reminding her about her six year term… if that doesn’t swing her around, nothing will. “You’re a mother…” This is a set of brass knuckles no one could resist. The NRA must be thanking its lucky stars that a bumbling amateur like Barack Obama is in the White House instead of the arch-politician Maureen Dowd; Heidi Heitkamp would have been putty in her elegantly manicured hands.

This is a politician getting down to what the New York Times editorial page seems to think is a particularly fetching set of brass knuckles: reciting liberal talking points one after another in rapid fire sequence. That’s hardball, that’s brass tacks at least in the mind of Maureen Dowd, a woman who on the evidence of this column could and would teach her own grandmother to suck eggs.

But lest anyone miss the full range of her strategic insight, Dowd gives us another example. This is how she tells us that Obama could have won over one Republican Senator:

Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill.

Obama should have pressed his buddy: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”

Don Corleone should put it this well. This is how minds are changed, votes are swayed and history is made. Use your male bonding skills for the power of good: “Press your buddies,” liberals, a bright new future awaits.

Dowd still has one Big Idea to share with us: the masterstroke that would have turned it all around and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat:

Couldn’t the president have given his Rose Garden speech about the “shameful” actions in Washington before the vote rather than after?

Yes! Presidential eloquence, better timed.  That would have done the trick. Those mangy Republicans and cowardly blue dog Democrats could never have resisted that nuclear weapon of American politics, a well timed Rose Garden speech. (Ms. Dowd also suggested that the President make some gun control speeches in blue states represented by GOP senators; a somewhat more practical suggestion but one unlikely to sway any votes.)

The Times apparently thinks it has readers who find columns like this either useful or diverting, so we say nothing about whether this is the caliber of political thought that ought to appear at the Newspaper of Record. But the paper may want to recalibrate its intellectual void detectors just a bit; it is hard to read anything this vapid without questioning the judgment of everyone involved.

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse…

Megan McArdle explains to the likes of MoDo that politics isn’t like TV.

…The American President and The West Wing are not searing portrayals of effective political management.  They’re drama.  The first question a dramatist asks is not “Is this how it really works?” but “Is it entertaining?”  And the second is “Can the audience understand this in less than thirty seconds?”  Veracity is way, way down the list.  If you want a clue to how realistic it all is, consider that Aaron Sorkin awarded Jed Bartlett the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Then go interview some Nobel Prizewinning Economists and ask yourself whether a single one of them would have the desire, or the ability, to run for president.  

Jed Bartlett doesn’t win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness.  He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues.  Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don’t have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.

Now that the Boston bombers turned out not to be white, Tea Party or militia nuts, the news media twits are trying themselves in knots trying to be reasonable.

Powerline has a great post on the subject. Here’s a taste:

This piece in The Atlantic is a good exemplar of the mushy liberal commentary that has proliferated in recent days. Authored by one Megan Garber, it is titled: “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” Before taking a close look at Ms. Garber’s article, let’s advise The Atlantic not to put away that headline. It could come in handy so often. “The Cole Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Embassy Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The First World Trade Center Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The September 11 Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Madrid Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The London Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Shoebomber Was Muslim: So?” The Underwear Bomber Was Muslim: So?” “The Fort Hood Shooter Was Muslim: So?” “The Beslan Child-Murderers Were Muslim: So?” “The Times Square Bomber Was Muslim: So?”

Bob Stock comments

Rule #1: If, say, a cell of some ideologically motivated, foreign-trained jihadists launch a deadly attack and kill some innocent kids as part of a long-running global conspiracy, the best response is for us to simply go about our business as if nothing happened — if we change our laws or way of life, they win! The less we know about these terrorists, the better. Above all, we MUST NOT PROFILE over what must surely be just a few bad apples.

Rule #2: If, say, a lone, insane, suicidal nutcase shoots up a school, breaking dozens of existing laws in the process, the best response is to call for sweeping national cultural changes, dig deeply to discover the root causes for the acts of a madman, and above all, scapegoat millions of law-abiding gun-owners through punitive new regulations with no other purpose than to simply PUNISH them for their COLLECTIVE GUILT.

Wait, what?

Why are college kids so liberal (besides being naturally naive when young)?

Robert Tracinski at Real Clear Politics:

…I take up the first of the paradoxes: Why do the young vote for dependency—when the essence of youth is a quest for independence? My purpose for now is mostly just to solve the paradox, to explain the reason for the apparent contradiction, and to indicate what this implies for how the right should change its message and its sales tactics. When I am done looking at all three paradoxes, I will look in greater depth at an agenda of reform for the political strategy of the right.

First, let me explain why I do not include women among the main demographic groups the right needs to reach. Despite the left’s rhetoric on this issue, women are not a monolithic voting bloc. If you break down the numbers for last fall’s election, for example, Mitt Romney won the vote of white women by 56 to 42 percent. President Obama only won the women’s vote on the strength of his enormous advantage among racial minorities. The “marriage gap” was equally striking. Romney won 53% of the votes of married women, while Obama won 67% of the votes of unmarried women.

You can see how these voting patterns connect to issues that are uniquely important to women; abortion and contraception are of much more direct, practical interest to young, unmarried women. But women do not align their political preferences primarily by gender, but by other factors such as race and age, with age being obviously correlated with marriage. Much of the “gender gap,” therefore, is subsumed under the other issues we are discussing, including youth.

Of young voters, by far the largest constituency for the left is college students and recent college graduates. They made up the core of Obama’s non-minority support, and this includes an especially influential cohort: upper-middle-class elites who went to graduate school. (Obama won their votes last year by 57 to 39 percent.) This group provides the left with a huge source of fundraising and a large pool of activists. More important, this group dominates the arts, the media, Hollywood, and the universities themselves, perpetuating the left’s outsized cultural influence.

If we ask why this group leans so far to the left, on one level the answer is simple. College students and recent graduates lean left because of what they were taught in the universities, which are notorious as one of the last domains for Marxist theories and

(more…)

The local high school is collecting electronic waste this weekend. I am jettisoning two old Windows machines that have been shoved under my desk for a few years.

As I removed the hard drives (to protect personal data) I thought about the advance of technology and our relative sense of value.

My first personal computer was a Zenith Z-89, purchased by my partner and I for our Miami PR firm. At the time Lanier, Wang and IBM sold stand-alone Word processing machines for $15,000 and up.

We bought the Z-89, a line printer and a copy of WordStar for $7,000. This was so cutting edge we were featured in the Miami Herald business section. “Local PR firms buys computer” was the headline. This was 1981.

The computer had one large floppy drive (8″ and truly floppy) and 48k of RAM. To write a document, we had to insert the floppy, boot the computer and load WordStar, then swap in a floppy to save our document. After a few minutes of writing and saving, we’d get prompted to re-insert the WordStar disc so it could fetch some code, then switch back.

We loved this machine. It saved us the cost of a typist.

My latest Windows machine cost $800, came with 12 gigabytes of RAM and a 2-terabyte hard drive.

In between came various computers, each faster and more capable. Those I’m giving away are ten years old. Ten years ago, I reveled in their power and functionality. There is nothing wrong with them. They can still do the same work.

And yet they are junk to me. But what about someone in the Third World? Might not a 10 year old Pentium computer, compared to having no computer, be a great blessing? It sure was to me at the time. I wish I could deliver my junk to them.

We measure things in relative terms. My junk computers are only junk compared to my newest machine. In absolute terms, those old computers are not junk at all. They are orders of magnitude better than the Z-89, the machine that thrilled us in 1981.

Progressives apply the same approach to “social justice.” In relative terms, I am dirt poor compared to Warren Buffet or Michael Bloomberg. So what?

In absolute terms, a poor person in the USA today is wealthy by international standards. And he’s well off compared to American standards of just 50 years ago. Yet by progressives’ relative yard stick, he’s to be pitied.

Progressives focus on gaps. Gaps between the 1% and the 99%. Gaps in wages. Gaps in technology (remember the fretting about the “digital divide?”) Gaps in access to broadband.

This has its place, I suppose. But if we only evaluate ourselves based on what others have, we’ll always feel poor. Politically this is useful. In 2012 Obama demonstrated the power of stoking and exploiting a sense of grievance.

But if we’re not careful, we can make ourselves miserable. For most of us, someone will always have more money and better stuff. There’s wisdom in the adage that poverty isn’t a matter of what you have, it’s about what you still want.

James Taranto on Gabby Giffords, a lesson in logical fallacies.

…If Alter meant it when he said he hoped Giffords would become a “referee” of public discourse–an advocate for reasoned civility–he ought to feel terribly disappointed. She has instead turned out to be a practitioner of incivility and unreason.

That’s a harsh but justified appraisal of her op-ed in today’s New York Times, titled “A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip.” It’s a reaction to yesterday’s failure of President Obama’s gun-control proposals in the Democratic Senate. Giffords’s 900-word jeremiad should be included in every textbook of logic and political rhetoric, so rife is it with examples of fallacious reasoning and demagogic appeals. Let’s go through them:

• The argumentum ad passiones, or appeal to emotion. She leads with this one: “Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.”

• The appeal to motives. Giffords claims that the senators who voted against the measures “looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby” and “made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association.” She also asserts that “their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest” and on “cowardice.” These characterizations are mutually inconsistent–can a senator’s decision have been based on both unreasoning fear and a cold (but erroneous!) calculation of self-interest?–and they are also entirely unsubstantiated. So is her assertion that “the status quo” is “desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation.”

• Guilt by association. See the references to the “gun lobby” in the preceding paragraph.

• Poisoning the well. She reveals that some of the senators who voted against the amendments “have met with grieving parents” and that some “have also looked into my eyes . . . and expressed sympathy” for her and other Tucson victims. Her purpose in citing these facts is to impugn the senators’ sincerity: “And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.” In reality, they didn’t “do nothing”; they rejected particular legislative proposals. It does not follow, and indeed it seems unlikely and is boorish to assert, that their expressions of sympathy were not heartfelt.

• Begging the question. Giffords characterizes the proposed amendments as “common-sense legislation” that “could prevent future tragedies.” She also describes them as “these most benign and practical of solutions.” She pretends that the central matter in dispute–whether the benefits would outweigh the costs or indeed whether the proposals would have yielded the benefits their advocates promised at all–has already been settled in her side’s favor.

• The no-true-Scotsman move. “These senators have heard from their constituents–who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks,” Giffords writes. She ignores the possibility that those polls are flawed and that the senators are hearing a different message from their constituents. Then she qualifies her claim of public unanimity: “I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth . . .” See what she did there? (The switcheroo to every reasonable American reminds us of a probably apocryphal tale about Adlai Stevenson. A woman is supposed to have said to him, “Governor, you have the support of every thinking American,” to which he replied: “But madam, I need a majority.”)

• The argumentum ad baculam, or argument from the club. This consists in attempting to persuade by making threats. Giffords urges “mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote” and in other ways for those who agree with her to work for the lawmakers’ defeat–a call to action, not an argument. There is, of course, nothing objectionable about citizens in a democratic republic engaging in such action, but that goes for those on the other side as well. And it’s worth recalling that the “civility” hypocrites back in the day proclaimed themselves troubled and outraged by the phenomenon of citizens confronting their elected representatives at public meetings.

• The argumentum ad miserecordiam, or appeal to pity. “Speaking is physically difficult for me,” she writes. “But my feelings are clear: I’m furious.” It should be obvious that this in no way speaks to the merits of the legislation or even the character of its supporters and opponents.

• The false dilemma. This is Giffords’s closing gambit: “To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.”

• The appeal to authority. That would be Giffords’s own authority as a former lawmaker. “I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress,” she writes. “I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither.” Perhaps her legislative experience gives her some insight into the senators’ state of mind, but if so, she does not share it with readers, whom she expects to accept her conclusion unquestioningly.

She makes one other appeal to authority, writing of the senators who voted “no” that “they will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done–trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you.”

But the appeal to authority isn’t always fallacious. In this case, Giffords has earned her readers’ trust. The op-ed itself demonstrates her total command of how politicians talk when they want to distract you.

This one is especially creepy:

A Bloomberg editorial, meanwhile, asserts that “if the nation’s laws fail to represent the views of the overwhelming majority of its people, representative democracy becomes a shallow and unsustainable exercise.” The premise is highly questionable–see “The no-true-Scotsman move,” above–but the conclusion is appalling.

If Bloomberg–a media company owned by one of the two leading antigun politicians in America–thinks representative democracy is “unsustainable,” what does it propose as an alternative?

When people become absolutely convinced they are right (“the overwhelming majority…”) they can become dangerous. Every zealot is 100% convinced of his righteousness, even as he plants bombs or usurps personal freedom. Witness Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground.

As for Bloomberg, first a nanny, then a dictator.

Barney, the slushy-mouthed POS, exploits a tragedy:

CNN host …The response yesterday was so remarkable. They stopped the marathon mid-point and calmly moved some 5,000 people from the racecourse. There were moments of chaos right there, but they were able to clear the scene fairly well. What are your impressions of the response in Boston so far?”

“I’m glad you raised that, because it gives me a chance to make a point I’ve felt strongly about,” said Frank. “In this terrible situation, let’s be very grateful that we had a well-funded, functioning government. It is very fashionable in America, and has been for some time to criticize government, belittle public employees, talk about their pensions, talk about what people think … of [their] health care. Here we saw government in two ways perform very well. … I never was as a member of Congress one of the cheerleaders for less government, lower taxes. No tax cut would have helped us deal with this or will help us recover. This is very expensive.”

Blood still stains Boston streets, and Frank attacks a straw man to score political points.

No reasonable person objects to essential government services such as police, firemen, schools etc. This is not big government.

As co-author of the 2319-page Dodd-Frank Act, he should know the difference.

“Reality has a liberal bias,” says Stephen Colbert, only half joking. Liberals actually do believe themselves on the side of reason and science.

Well, that ends with their obsession over genetically modified food. Loud liberal “activist” mouths have convinced many in the business to stop R&D on GMO crops because it isn’t worth the hassle. The US can get along fine without them.

Who loses? The poor, the hungry– the very people progressives claim to care about.

…America’s farmers might also find an acceptable workaround. Currently 98% of their soy and 88% of their corn is already employed as feedstock for biofuels or as animal feed, neither of which requires a label. But there would be a large downside in poor countries for moving further along this path.

Developing countries have significant unmet food needs, and GMO food crops are positioned to help. In Asia, poor consumers who currently don’t get enough vitamin A from their rice-only diets could be better protected against blindness if their farmers had permission to plant so-called Golden Rice, which has been genetically engineered with high beta-carotene content.

Farmers and consumers in India currently exposed to toxic insecticides when they grow and eat eggplant could reduce their exposure if farmers had access to a GMO eggplant, Bt brinjal, that needs fewer chemical sprays. Farmers and consumers in East Africa currently vulnerable to hunger and destitution when drought hits their maize fields would be more secure if growers had permission to plant GMO drought-resistant varieties of white maize.

But if America, through a labeling system, joins Europe in embracing a new norm against the cultivation of GMO crops for human food, governments in developing countries, already skittish thanks to activist campaigns, will likely follow suit. The result would be a needless setback for the world’s poorest and hungriest people.

George Skelton in the LAT

Maybe Gov. Jerry Brown has been in China too long. Because some presumably serious comments by him while riding a bullet train were amusing head-shakers.

“People here do stuff,” the governor marveled, according to an article by Times reporter Anthony York. “They don’t sit around and mope and process and navel-gaze.”

Compared to California, Brown continued, “the rest of the world is moving at Mach speed.”

I almost spit out my cornflakes reading that this morning. Two things:

One, it exposes the dictator hidden within every progressive. If the guv could just rule by decree, boy he could really make California great again. We’d have a bullet train and who knows what other nifty ideas.

Two, it exposes the obliviousness of Brown and his fellow progressives. They have no clue how the constant accretion of rules and regulations — rules they promulgate– strangle business in California.

My neighbor grew up in California. He’s a builder, a jack of all trades who has done it all, from building custom homes for movie stars to managing multimillion dollar airport renovations.

When I speak to him, he talks about escaping California because the taxes and burden of complying with more regulations is strangling him.I’ve heard this from half a dozen contractors in the last year. They want out.

Jerry Brown and his ignorant ilk make it very hard for “people to do stuff.”

The Skelton column goes into great detail about the current projects Brown is stitting on.

Let’s back up. In 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark two-piece water package passed by the Legislature that is still far from being implemented.

One part, among other things, provided a pathway for construction of two 40-foot wide, 35-mile long tunnels carrying fresh Sacramento River water under the brackish delta to aqueducts headed south into the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.

The $14-billion tunnel construction would be paid for by water users. But, politically, the tunnels can’t be built unless a water bond is passed to finance ecological restoration of the delta. Federal and state agencies wouldn’t permit it.

The second piece of the water package was an $11.1-billion bond that reeked so badly of rancid pork that the politicians, fearing voter rejection, have twice pulled it off the state ballot. It’s currently slated for the November 2014 ballot.

But everyone agrees it’s dead without a substantial pork paring. They’re waiting for the governor to decide how he wants to reshape the bond.

“He hasn’t spent a moment engaging” legislative leaders, complained one, a Democrat who didn’t want to be identified for fear of suffering the governor’s wrath.

With North Korea threatening a nuclear missile attack, it’s nice to know we have an anti-missile defense, thanks to Ronald Reagan.

John Kerry, now Secretary of State, did everything he could to kill the program in its infancy.

In the 1980s, when now- Secretary of State John Kerry was a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts, he criticized the Reagan administration’s plan for a missile defense system — known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — calling it a “cancer on our nation’s defense.”

According to an Aug. 5, 1986 storyfrom the Associated Press, then-Sen. Kerry wanted to cut funding for SDI — critically known at the time as ‘Star Wars’– and called the program a “cancer.”

“In debate, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called Star Wars ‘a cancer’ and said ‘what we must do is deny this program the funds that would enable this cancer on our nation’s defense to grow any further,’” the 1986 AP report said.

At the time, the Senate narrowly rejected an attempt to cut SDI funding by $3.2 billion for the upcoming fiscal year.

One year earlier in June 1985, AP reported that Kerry was advocating the same position of limiting funding to SDI, calling it, “a dream based on an illusion.”

Kerry and his Democrat ilk will never acknowledge they were wrong.

The mere threat of an effective missile defense led the Soviets, who could not compete due to their top-down sluggish economy, to cry uncle and hastened the end of the Cold War.

Does Reagan get any credit from the Dem Cong? Hardly.

Just as Margaret Thatcher, who saved Britain from itself, gets no respect from the left.

It’s one thing to disagree with ideology in the abstract. But when the left cannot even acknowledge the historical facts of what Thatcher/Reagan achieved, one despairs of ever reaching common ground.

Remember when bums were called bums?

Mark Steyn:

He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace:

“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”

For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the chief justice, Warren Burger, declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.

Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick’s “vigilance” is a revealing glimpse of where we’re headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one-third of 1 percent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they’re denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more “vigilance” from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.

Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: Just as everything any conservative says about anything is racist, so now it will also be homophobic. It will not be enough to be clinically neutral (“homosexual”) on the subject — or tolerant, bored, mildly amused, utterly indifferent. The other day, Jeremy Irons found himself musing to a reporter on whether (if the issue is unequal legal treatment) a father should be allowed to marry his son for the purpose of avoiding inheritance taxes. The vigilance…

Progressives are always busy saving the world or saving us from ourselves. Or both. Stridency never seems to tire them.

The bleat goes on.

Stanley Kurtz:

A sad and at times bizarre story out of Vassar shows how profoundly troubled America’s colleges now are. The campus fossil-fuel divestment campaign that’s swept across the nation over the past few months has intensified the atmosphere of leftist indoctrination now typical of many schools, turning classic notions of education as the free exchange of ideas into a distant memory. In the blink of an eye, fossil fuel producers have been turned into the equivalent of apartheid enforcers, while the Occupy movement has risen from the dead to become a free-ranging campus mob.

Our harrowing tale of political correctness run amuck will show Vassar’s fossil-fuel divestment campaign stoking a climate of fear that touches not only conservative students, but even moderates, who dare not draw the ire of this new campus crusade.

Yet a climate of political intimidation was present at Vassar well before the advent of the divestment movement, and it’s worth attending to that background before turning to today’s divestment debate.

Consider a September 2012 opinion piece by sophomore Luka Ladan in Vassar’s student paper, The Miscellany News. Ladan tells of election-year political science classes that regularly devolve into snickering sessions aimed at Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and other Republican candidates. Professors take the lead, teaming up with liberal students to mock Republicans and anyone else who leans right. The Vassar students I’ve contacted (some afraid to speak for attribution) largely confirm this picture. Sophomore computer science major Jarret Holtz, told me, “I don’t feel that [conservative students at Vassar] are able to freely express their views at all.”

How could they be, when Vassar has found semi-official ways of engaging in partisan politics. Take Vassar’s “College Committee on Sustainability” (CCS), part of the school’s official structure of governance. About a week before the 2012 election, the CCS website pointed to the upcoming vote and told students to educate themselves on the issues by following the news. CCS then suggested that students consult three leftist sources of national news and opinion (no other national sources were provided), Grist,Mother Jones, and Aljazeera. Following-up just before election day, CCS remindedstudents about these outlets and urged them to vote. CCS did add that it was not the place of Vassar’s sustainability committee to endorse particular candidates. Yet given its recommendations for reading, few can doubt which political party this official arm of the college was supporting.

Vassar’s fossil-fuel divestment movement is a product of this thoroughly politicized campus atmosphere, where students feign boldness by inching just a bit to the left of the school’s semi-official political posture…

This isn’t exactly news, but a new book goes into more detail about FDR’s attitudes about Jews.

Rafael Medoff:

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called “the best way to settle the Jewish question.”

Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins UniversityPresident Isaiah Bowman) “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” The diary entry adds: “The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia [where Roosevelt lived in the 1920s] and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”

Roosevelt’s “best way” remark is condescending and distasteful, and coming from anyone else it would probably be regarded as anti-Semitism. But more than that, FDR’s support for “spreading the Jews thin” may hold the key to understanding a subject that has been at the center of controversy for decades: the American government’s tepid response to the Holocaust.

Here’s the paradox. The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants. For example, starting in 1941, merely leaving behind a close relative in Europe would be enough to disqualify an applicant — on the absurd assumption that the Nazis could threaten the relative and thereby force the immigrant into spying for Hitler.

Why did the administration actively seek to discourage and disqualify Jewish refugees from coming to the United States? Why didn’t the president quietly tell his State Department(which administered the immigration system) to fill the quotas for Germany and Axis-occupied countries to the legal limit? That alone could have saved 190,000 lives. It would not have required a fight with Congress or the anti-immigration forces; it would have involved minimal political risk to the president.

Every president’s policy decisions are shaped by a variety of factors, some political, some personal. In Roosevelt’s case, a pattern of private remarks about Jews, some of which I recently discovered at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and from other sources, may be significant.

In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In (more…)

As the leftists took over California, they marched to the beat of their public union overlords, jacking up salaries and benefits for government workers. Now cities are broke and barely able to provide the basics.

So who gets screwed? The poor.

Christian Science Monitor

On the streets of Oakland, budget cuts have made the beat cop a rare breed, and some of the city’s wealthy neighborhoods have turned to unarmed security guards to take their place.

After people in Oakland’s wealthy enclaves like Oakmore or Piedmont Pines head to work, security companies take over, cruising the quiet streets to ward off burglars looking to take advantage of unattended homes.

“With less law enforcement on the streets and more home crime or perception of home crime, people are wanting something to replace that need,” says Chris de Guzman, chief operating officer of First Alarm, a company that provides security to about 100 homes in Oakland. “That’s why they’re calling us and bringing companies like us aboard to provide that deterrent.”

Long known for patrolling shopping malls and gated communities, private security firms are beginning to spread into city streets. While private security has long been contracted by homeowners associations and commercial districts, the trend of groups of neighbors pooling money to contract private security for their streets is something new.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Dennis Prager

You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the Left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and — of course — Big Government are left-wing angels.

And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the Left fear big corporations but not big government?

The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca-Cola kill 5 million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad things big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist (more…)

How amusing that “progressives” are so attached to 19th century technology. Could it be that, as incorrigible meddlers and know-it-alls, they just hate the idea of people going where they feel like it, when they feel like it?

So much better to jam them on trains.

Ann Coulter

The New York Times caused a sensation with its kazillion-word, March 17 article by Michael Luo on the failures of state courts to get guns out of the hands of men in domestic violence situations.

The main purpose of the article was to tweak America’s oldest civil rights organization, the National Rifle Association, for opposing some of the more rash anti-gun proposals being considered by state legislatures, such as allowing courts to take away a person’s firearms on the basis of a temporary restraining order.

It’s a new position for liberals to oppose the rights of the accused. Usually the Times is demanding that even convicted criminals be given voting rights, light sentences, sex-change operations and vegan meals in prison.

Another recent Times article about communities trying to keep sex offenders out of their neighborhoods quoted a liberal saying: “It’s counterproductive to public safety, because when you have nothing to lose, you are much more likely to commit a crime than when you are rebuilding your life.”

But that was about convicted child molesters. This is about guns, so all new rules apply.

As is usually the case when liberals start proposing gun restrictions, they assume only men will be disarmed by laws taking guns from those subjected to temporary restraining orders. But such orders aren’t particularly difficult to get. It doesn’t occur to liberals that an abusive man could also get one against his wife, whether or not his accusations are true.

Rather than helping victims of domestic abuse, this — and other Times’ proposals on guns — only ensures that more women will get killed. A gun in the hand of an abused woman changes the power dynamic far more than keeping a gun out of the hands of her abuser, who generally can murder his wife in any number of ways…

Read it all.

I love Maher’s “I just saw these statistics…” Just now? Perhaps it’s best to know a few things before commanding a soap box.

President Obama’s relationship with the truth gets much less truthier.

President Obama urged House and Senate leaders to bring the assault weapons ban and other measures introduced in response to the Newtown, Conn., school shooting up for a vote.

“These weapons of war, when combined with high-capacity magazines, have one purpose: to inflict maximum damage as quickly as possible,” Obama said in a statement. “They are designed for the battlefield, and they have no place on our streets, in our schools, or threatening our law enforcement officers.”

Weapons of war? Does he believe that members of the Marine Corpse (his pronunciation) go to war with AR-15 rifles?

Does he know the difference between an automatic and semi-automatic weapon? Sure, but he knows many dumbo voters do not.

By now, anyone who cares saw Senator Diane Feinstein get pissy when Senator Ted Cruz pestered her about the 2nd Amendment.

She insisted she wasn’t a sixth grader and didn’t need this newcomer lecturing her because she’s been there a long time. Did she learn about the logical fallacy of “appeal to authority” which boils down to, “Don’t argue with me, I know more than you.”

Guess not.

Then:

“I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons,” the bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, told Senate Judiciary Committee colleagues. “How many times does this have to happen?”

How many foolish laws must be passed that accomplish nothing, Diane? Like your last “assault weapons” ban that did zilch.

Besides, who cares if she’s seen dead bodies? That doesn’t constitute a good reason for passing a law. Furthermore, if she means the two dead San Francisco politicians–Moscone and Milk–they were not killed with rifles.

And, in today’s USA, very few are: per the FBI in 2010, there were 358 people murdered with rifles versus 6,009 with handguns.

(CNSNews.com) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance.”

Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., has received two grants administered by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity.

Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today,” the description of the grant reads. “Racial and socioeconomic disparities in the determinants, distribution, and consequences of obesity are receiving increasing attention.”

“[H]owever, one area that is only beginning to be recognized is the striking interplay of gender and sexual orientation in obesity disparities,” it states. “It is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic, with  it continues.

Lesbians are now an identified minority group?

Thomas Sowell:

Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among races, nations, and civilizations have been the rule, not the exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope of rational thought — and perhaps even some constructive efforts to help everyone advance.

Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, “We owe London to Rome” — an acknowledgment that Roman conquerors created Britain’s most famous city at a time when the ancient Britons were incapable of doing so themselves.

No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of that era was likely to imagine that someday the British would create an empire vastly larger than the Roman Empire — one encompassing one-fourth of the land area of the earth and one-fourth of the human beings on the planet.

History has many dramatic examples of the rise and fall of peoples and nations, for a wide range of known and unknown reasons. What history does not show is what is so often assumed as a norm today: equality of group achievements at a given point in time.

The Roman conquests had historic repercussions for centuries after the Roman Empire had fallen. Among the legacies of Roman civilization were Roman letters, which produced written versions of Western European languages centuries before Eastern European languages were written. This was one of many reasons why Western Europe became more advanced than Eastern Europe, economically, educationally, and technologically.

Meanwhile, the achievements in other civilizations — whether in China or in the Middle East — surged ahead of achievements in the West, though China and the Middle East later lost their leads.

There are too many zigzags in history to believe that some single overriding factor explains all or even most of what happened, either then or now. But what seldom, if ever, happened were equal achievements by different peoples at the same time.

Yet today we have bean counters in Washington turning out statistics that are solemnly presented in courts of law to claim that, if the numbers are not more or less the same for everybody, that proves that somebody did somebody else wrong.

If blacks have different occupational patterns or different other patterns from those of whites, that arouses great suspicion among the bean counters (more…)

Recently a 26-year old tech genius hanged himself before being tried for hacking.

His name was Aaron Swartz, and in some quarters he’s being lionized as the victim of an overzealous prosecution that drove him to suicide.

I had no interest in the story until I read the fine piece by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker. The whole article is available online.

To summarize: Swartz had long been mentally fragile, irresponsible, borderline messianic, physically ill with ulcerative colitis and brilliant.

Per his messianic side, MacFarquhar had this remarkable insight, excerpted below. I read it, re-read it and then read it aloud to my wife. She brilliantly sums up something essential about the liberal, reformist mind.

To think continuously about changing the world is to spend your life looking at what is bad in it. To be attached to the world is to be attached to the world as it is, and not for any reason, because reasons can always be countered.

To consider the world from first principles, to think about how well it would work if everything were different, is to be ready to throw away everything you know. Radical idealism and a sense of limitless possibility are the brighter facets of absolute rejection.

Hard core progressives seem sour and fundamentally unhappy. They project this onto the imperfect world we all inhabit.

Good and necessary social and political reform can and has come of it.

But progresses often don’t know when to quit.In practical terms, this adds up to ever growing government meant to bring about worldly perfection that can never be attained, and which often has the opposite effect.

Shouldn’t public safety be a top priority of state government? Not in progressive, ultra-blue California.

LA Times

State trying to count parolees who have ditched GPS trackers

California corrections officials, expressing concern over a rise in paroled sex offenders disabling their GPS tracking devices, said Monday that the problem may be larger than they believed.

On Sunday, The Times reported a 28% rise in warrants issued for GPS tampering since October 2011, when the state reduced penalties for parole violators and made counties responsible for them.

Officials in the Department of Corrections had stated for months that such cases numbered in the hundreds. Then, earlier this month, they said they knew of 3,200 cases from October 2011 through December 2012.

On Monday, department spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman said that because that tally included only cases in which parole revocation hearings were held, the actual number of incidents may be larger.

The state’s figures “also may not include those [GPS violators] still on the loose,” she added.

This is of a piece with this story, which we noted

California unable to disarm 19,700 felons and mentally ill people

California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.

My very liberal close friend regularly rails about “obscene” gaps in income in the USA. I always ask:

• What income ratio (poor vs. rich) defines obscene?
• Is it published or is it something you just know in your gut?
• Is this ratio confined geographically? Because a poor American is rich by comparison in many Third World countries. Is their relative wealth also obscene?

He always shifts the debate. I argue that in dynamic economies, a huge income gap is a sign of health.

Richard Epstein

One month into the second term of the Obama administration, the economic prognosis looks mixed at best. On growth, the U.S. Department of Commerce reports the last quarter of 2012 produced a small decline in gross domestic product, without any prospects for a quick reversal. On income inequality, the most recent statistics (which only go through 2011) focus on the top 1 percent.

“Incomes Flat in Recovery, But Not for the 1%” reports Annie Lawrey of the New York Times. Relying on a recent report prepared by the well-known economist Professor Emmanuel Saez, who is the director for the Center of Equitable Growth at Berkeley, Lawrey reports that the income of the top 1 percent has increased by 11.2 percent, while the overall income of the rest of the population has decreased slightly by 0.4 percent.

Growth vs. Equality

What should we make of these numbers? One approach is to stress the increase in wealth inequality, deploring the gains of the top 1 percent while lamenting the decline in the income of the remainder of the population. But this approach is only half right. We should be uneasy about any and all income declines, period. But, by the same token, we should collectively be pleased by increases in income at the top, so long as they were not caused by taking, whether through taxation or regulation, from individuals at the bottom.

This conclusion rests on the notion of a Pareto improvement, which favors any changes in overall utility or wealth that make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off. By that measure, there would be an unambiguous social improvement if the income of the wealthy went up by 100 percent so long as the income of those at the bottom end did not, as a consequence, go down. That same measure would, of course, applaud gains in the income of the 99 percent so long as the income of the top 1 percent did not fall either.

This line of thought is quite alien to thinkers like Saez, who view the excessive concentration of income as a harm even if it results from a Pareto improvement. Any center for “equitable growth” has to pay as much attention to the first constraint as it does to the second. Under Saez’s view of equity, it is better to narrow the gap between the top and the bottom than to increase the overall wealth….

And some “locovore” rule (the way the founders intended)?

Daniel Henninger in the WSJ

…At the July 2010 signing ceremony for the Dodd-Frank law’s 2,300 pages, Mr. Obama announced: “It provides certainty to everybody, from bankers to farmers to business owners to consumers.” That’s right, universal certainty. Still, the massive law’s iconic centerpiece, the Volcker Rule, doesn’t exist. And what’s the one word seen nonstop after Dodd-Frank in The Wall Street Journal? Un-certainty.

Conservatives predictably object to all this, but one has to ask: How did liberals, especially on the left and without exception, become such mute footmen for Barack Obama’s faceless conglomerate politics?

Years back, a popular notion among liberal thinkers was something called “imperial overstretch.” This was the idea that America’s far-flung foreign-policy commitments could bankrupt the country. Mr. Obama believes this, and before Chuck Hagel started talking the other day, he was supposed to explain it. In his State of the Union speech next Tuesday, Mr. Obama will say again that Washington, after Iraq and Afghanistan, needs to “invest” at home. But isn’t the federalization of pretty much everything in a diverse country like the U.S. just another exercise in imperial overstretch?

In their own lives, the men and women of the left are all about keeping things simple. Back in the ’70s, they were early adopters of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful.” Today the watchwords are “handcrafted” and “artisanal.” How about some artisanal government?

Don’t worry, we get it. This is politics, ergo the goal is to acquire and exercise colossal power, at least for the pros at the top of the Democratic food chain. Still, the evidence piles up daily that what Barack Obama is producing with his countrywide “investments” is a blob, a morass, a mess. In the 2012 presidential election, nearly 66 million people voted for Barack Obama. We’re waiting for one Democrat in Congress to express doubt in the president’s pixie dust.