Ross Douthat lays down some inconvenient truth.

The leading gun control chorister was Michael Bloomberg, and this was fitting, because on a range of issues New York’s mayor has become the de facto spokesman for the self-consciously centrist liberalism of the Acela Corridor elite. Like so many members of that class, Bloomberg combines immense talent with immense provincialism: his view of American politics is basically the famous New Yorker cover showing Manhattan’s West Side overshadowing the world, and his bedrock assumption is that the liberal paternalism with which New York is governed can and should be a model for the nation as a whole.

And, in a town that has had the Sullivan Act, used as a model for ‘gun control’ laws throughout the nation, needs to walk around with 24/7 armed guards. By their fruits ye shall know them. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Read it.

If ‘gun control’ worked, of course, they wouldn’t need such protection.

 Both Bloomberg and Cuomo come from the jurisdiction where major gun control legislation was established by New York State Democratic Senator Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan. Sullivan became known as a Tammany Hall crook intent on protecting his mobsters from prosecution and disarming innocent civilians in New York State.

The Sullivan Act was passed in 1911 after a murder suicide shooting in Gramercy Park. The law mandated that New York residents must have police issued licenses for concealed handguns, otherwise it would be considered a felony.

…

Thousands of gun control laws later, politicians like Mayor Bloomberg walk the streets of New York with armed security.

The mayor of Dallas, for contrast, has no police protection — nor needs it.

Freeberg once again brings up an important question. (He does that a lot.)

As I’ve observed before about liberalism: The irony of it is, they want to make an egalitarian world, one in which every cog is in place and spinning smoothly, producing effects that are equally beneficial for everybody concerned, in which everybody has a voice. But on the way to that plane of perfection, they are curiously obsessed, at the perceptible expense of the attention they can pay to all other things, with figuring out who should not have a say in how it all works. Show me ten pages written by liberals and I can show you eight or more pages that are nothing more than “so-and-so needs to be shown the door so us smarty-pants types can finish drawing up our plans.” For egalitarians, they are curiously captivated with the idea of the few unilaterally dictating the tastes and obligations of the many.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the left is that anyone who is not of the left is automatically an enemy, not just wrong but malevolent and malignant. ‘We know we’re right, because we’re the smartest people in the room; you’re either too stupid to be of any account or you know we’re right, too, and are therefore evil to oppose us.’

Out of all the destructive statements we are somehow obliged to avoid viewing in any way as destructive statements, one of my favorites has long been: “These rules are put into effect in order to foster/create a work environment that is safe and non-threatening to everyone…it is also important to keep in mind that in evaluating a gesture or statement as potential sexual harassment, the intent of the person making the gesture is entirely irrelevant, the perception of the offended person decides everything.” Holy shit. Perhaps there is some other written statement, equally concise, that would be more effective in making the work environment threatening. But I honestly cannot think of what that might be. And the double-speak involved in here is something that could only be produced by lawyers looking for ways to produce new revenue. It completely blows my mind, and it’s not just me, all men can see what’s wrong with this, along with not too few common-sense women as well. And yet, the ritual endures…because, and only because, some among us toil under an obligation to avoid acknowledging, let alone defending ourselves from, enemies.

Any environment in which one must always be on guard that something one says or does might be ‘suspicious’ under some standard that is unknowable in advance is functionally indistinguishable from living in a police state. America is rapidly approaching that condition.

Read it.

The spraying campaigns that ended U.S. epidemics of malaria and dengue in the 1940s turned out to be only a temporary solution. National eradication programs petered out in 1972, and the main dengue vector, Aedes aegypti, quickly returned; it is now in 23 states and ranges as far north as New York City.

Thank you, Rachel Carson.

Ann Althouse blows the whistle.

“Santa is a role model, and kids don’t want to have a role model that’s fat.”

Kids don’t want? Has any kid ever complained about Santa being fat? But various adults are keen on controlling the messages that reach kids, and in this light, Santa needs to be thoroughly examined for inappropriate messages.

Read it.

Nothing has been more central to America’s self-confidence than the faith that robust economic growth will continue forever. Between 1891 and 2007, the nation achieved a robust 2% annual growth rate of output per person. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests to me that future economic growth will achieve at best half that historic rate. The old rate allowed the American standard of living to double every 35 years; for most people in the future that doubling may take a century or more.

A find dose of pessimism to start your Christmas season off right.

Read it.

Los Angeles County Assessor John Noguez has been in jail since mid-October because a campaign fundraiser allegedly bribed him to lower property taxes for his individual clients, but the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday decided they will not remove him from office and continue paying his $197,000 annual salary, which has already increased by $5,000 since July due to a cost-of-living adjustment.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

According to the Times, “elected officials in California typically can’t be removed from office unless they are convicted of a job-related crime or voted out in a recall.” And Los County officials were reluctant on Tuesday to invoke a rarely used “provision that would have allowed them to remove Noguez for failing to perform his duties for three consecutive months.”

As Jerry Pournelle never tires of saying, the function of government is to hire and pay government workers; in blue states, criminality is no bar to government employment.

Read it.

Secretary Clinton’s “Accountability Review Board” (ARB) declared multiple times in its unclassified report that although there were multiple failures in leadership, “management ability,” allocation of security resources and communication, the board could not find “reasonable cause” to discipline (or even name) one person in the State Department.

I can see Hillary’s t-shirt now: ‘Four people, including the Ambassador, were murdered in Benghazi and all I got was this lousy concussion.’

But that’s life in the Obamanation.

Read it.

The school board in Alisal Union School District in Salinas, California, is going to name a new elementary school after Tiburcio Vasquez, a man who was convicted of killing at least two people and as many as six and was hanged in 1875.

Hey, one man’s murderer is another man’s freedom fighter, don’t you know — after all, who are we to judge?

And Identity Politics trumps truth, justice, and the American Way in blue states.

Read it.

Let the finger-pointing begin.

Why is it that mass murderers are almost always young men?  Why don’t young women behave the same way?  Sadly, Adam Lanza and James Holmes are just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem in our society.  Our young women vastly outperform our young men in almost every important statistical category.  Young men are much more likely to perform poorly in school, they are much more likely to have disciplinary problems and they are much more likely to commit suicide.  In the old days, our young men would gather in the streets or in the parks to play with one another after school, but today most of them are content to spend countless hours feeding their addictions to video games, movies and other forms of entertainment.  When our young men grow up, many of them are extremely averse to taking on responsibility.  They want to have lots of sex, but they aren’t interested in marriage.  They enjoy the comforts of living at home, but they don’t want to go out and pursue career goals so that they can provide those things for themselves.  Our young men are supposed to be “the leaders of tomorrow”, but instead many of them are a major burden on society.  When are we finally going to admit that something has gone horribly wrong?

Read it.

The more government covers the cost of college, the more people can afford, and want, to go to college. Duh.

The more people want to go to college, the higher the price colleges can charge, since the supply of ‘accredited’ colleges is effectively fixed. Duh.

Our politicians and educators are substantially ignorant of elementary economics. Duh.

Read it.

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer said today that state pension funds should stop investing in companies that produce guns that can’t be sold in the state legally. He has asked his staff to review all state investments.

Which is stark ‘progressive’ feel-good-ism masquerading as concern — once they’ve sold the stock, the company doesn’t give a shit what they think any more. If they were really interested in affecting what gun companies do, they’d buy up their stock and exercise their rights as shareholders to affect what the company does. But no. it’s all about the SWPL desire for self-esteem in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Despite its heavy gun restrictions, California  ranks fourth in the nation in gun homicide rate, and leads the nation by a wide margin in terms of absolute number of homicides.

Unfortunately there isn’t anybody in the state with sufficient intelligence to draw the obvious conclusion.

Read it.

Erik Loomis is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Rhode Island. He also blogs at “Lawyers Guns and Money” blog.

In reaction to the murders in Connecticut, Loomis tweeted that he had never been so angry except maybe for the invasion of Iraq (I guess 9/11 was chopped liver to him), and that he wanted the NRA chief’s “head on a stick”….

These guys are teaching your children. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Read it.

Of course. Students vote Left, so they’re in the bag — the important thing is to use tax money where it counts, to buy votes from the underclass.

Joe Engel is tired of people obsessing about race.

Black people don’t eat Ritz crackers and cheese?  That’s news to me, same as it would be to Fuzzy Zoeller, if he still had a career after making “racist comments” about Tiger Woods’s presumed culinary preferences.

So apparently Jamie Foxx wants the craft services people to lay out a platter of fried chicken and watermelon.  Uh, no, not that either.

In the same vein he explained that if he turned up to the photo shoot and there was fried chicken and watermelon, he would also be annoyed at the stereotype.

Which is the same as saying that there’s no pleasing Jamie Foxx, not with that concrete chip on his shoulder. Indeed:

Jamie also admitted that he feels that he must act and talk in a certain way around white people and in his day-to-day job as an actor.

So there’s a black way of being and a white way of being.  Good to know. I eagerly await my updated 2013 manual.

How tiresome this has become.

Read it.

Amid the push for more gun control in the wake of the Conn. shooting, it’s important to remember the lesson gun control laws have taught us in other countries — namely, that less guns lead to more crime.

We saw this clearly in Australia when Aussies were disarmed by de jure measures in 1997.

To accomplish this, the Australian government sponsored a $500 million buyback on all privately owned firearms that led to a ban. Australian politicians who supported the move “promised a lower crime rate once the ban was in place.”

Did lower crime result? No. Instead armed robberies rose significantly and home invasions rose as well.

Moreover, assaults involving guns rose more than a 25% and murders with a gun rose nearly 20%.

Read it.

The ugly chickens launched by the hatching of ObamaCare are beginning to come home to roost.  More and more workers are having their hours cut to below 30 per week because full-time workers must receive health insurance, the cost of which cripples small businesses. The double whammy is this: not only are hours being cut, but jobs in general are being cut, as businesses that employ more than 50 people must also comply with ObamaCare regulations requiring health insurance for employees.

Those who lose their full-time jobs will have to look for two part-time jobs, which will enable the Obama Administration to claim that there are more jobs being created.

“The biggest and most deadly “tax” rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits– food stamps, housing subsidies and the like– if their income goes up.

Someone who is trying to climb out of poverty by working their way up can easily reach a point where a $10,000 increase in pay can cost them $15,000 in lost benefits that they no longer qualify for. That amounts to a marginal tax rate of 150 percent– far more than millionaires pay. Some government policies help some people at the expense of other people. But some policies can hurt welfare recipients, the taxpayers and others, all at the same time, even though in different ways.”

— Thomas Sowell

Read it.

The weapons used in Friday’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., were legally purchased and registered to Nancy Lanza, the mother of the gunman, Adam Lanza, two law enforcement officials told NBC News.

In other words, her son stole them. So much for your strict gun control laws.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

What would the University of Chicago do with this property if it was Barack Obama’s childhood home? Museum? Shrine?

Read it. And watch the video.

BLUF: Crapitalism.

Read it. And watch the video.

My, what a surprise@! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

As the union members attacked the Americans For Prosperity tent, a woman cried out “there are people under there, oh my God” (at 1:20). At 1:40, as union members start walking on top of the collapsed tent, a man shouted “hey, there are people in there” but again the crowd didn’t stop, and the union members continued walking on the collapsed tent defiantly as the crowd shouted obscenities and cheered.

Look for … the Union label…. (It’ll be on the brown shirt….)

Read it.

And, of course, government regulations are the vehicle of choice.

Mike Masnick explains what’s going on:

There’s a myth out there that businesses hate regulations. That’s only partially true, and it’s only true in limited cases. In many industries — especially highly regulated ones — the incumbents often love regulations because (a) they have enough power to control the regulations, (b) they know their way around those regulations better than anyone else, (c) those regulations quite frequently limit competition and (d) those regulations quite frequently effectively block out any form of disruptive innovation by stopping it entirely.

The whole point is that none of this would be effective were not government grasping the power to regulate every nook and cranny of what people do in their daily lives. If it didn’t pay to bribe leglators, either through the old-fashioned kind of bribes or the modern equivalent, campaign contributions, then lobbyists wouldn’t do it.

Read it.

Jobs First, Kids Last. Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

For folks who recoil at the thought of hunting animals, progressives sure do enjoy stalking human prey, especially the female of the species.

An Informative Chart

Read it.

Even as the nation teeters on the edge of the fiscal cliff, the feds have found $30 million in extra lunch money to shower on city schoolchildren in the name of hurricane relief.

New York City’s 1.1 million public-school students can each get a free school lunch every day in December (and could have last month, too) — even if their homes were undamaged by the superstorm or they have no financial need.

The need here is on the part of the Crust for people to look to the government for their daily bread. Financial need is not even on the radar.

Read it.

You don’t have to be a fan of Fox News to realize that this makes a mockery of the rule of law. Instead of letting anyone who wants to buy a newspaper or a television or radio station do so, or even instead of setting up some rules that take into account modern technology like cable television and Internet video and that would apply equally to everyone, the Senate Democrats, or the Independent Vermont Socialist-caucusing-with-Democrats and his Democratic pals, want to write the country’s media ownership rules starting from the premise of how can we prevent Rupert Murdoch from buying anything else.

Senator Sanders, or someone on his staff, is apparently familiar enough with new media that his press conference is available on YouTube. The idea that ownership of a television station or two in the same market as a newspaper or a radio station amounts to a media monopoly in the age of YouTube and the Internet is laughable. It shows that what they are really out to do is not fight against media monopolization — a straw man — but to try to restrain the influence of Mr. Murdoch. If that’s really their goal, a more appropriate way of pursuing it in a free country would be for them to quit the Senate and go buy or start media companies to compete with Mr. Murdoch. The best check on a media monopoly, after all, isn’t regulation, it’s competition.

Read it.

Although California state law says it’s unjust, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12-1 to keep ticketing drivers who park at broken meters. This flies in the face of the state law, which says there have to be notices on meters if they are broken in order for the city to issue a ticket.

Blue state. Coming to a neighborhood near you a lot sooner than you think.

Unless you move to Texas, of course. Just sayin’.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

Good thing they banned guns. Just imagine how worse it would be if they hadn’t.

Read it.

Waters will be the ranking member on the committee that deals with banking issues. Last year, the House Ethics Committee investigated Waters, one of the most partisan members of the Congressional Black Caucus, for allegedly using her position in Congress to bail out a bank in which her husband owned $350,000 worth of stock.

I guess that constitutes qualifications for Democrats. Cheat on your taxes? Become Treasury Secretary! Use your power as Congresscritter to arrange for your own bank to be bailed out? Get put in charge of bank bailouts! Have a long history of unsafe driving? Be in charge of driving safety for the entire state!

I suppose next we can anticipate a crook being named Attorney General. Oh, wait, we’ve already got one….

Read it.

The fact that the Senate wasn’t in recess might have something to do with it.

Not that Obama cares about the Constitution, of course, but there are those pesky judges who refuse to get with the Obamassiah’s program….

Read it.

To say that Google’s high-speed Internet and television service has been warmly received in Kansas City is probably an understatement. But why didn’t the search giant take a stab at disrupting phone service, as well? As it turns out, it wasn’t due to lack of vision. A report from the Kansas City Business Journal reveals that Google thought long and hard about rolling out VoIP service to go with its Fiber data service before eventually balking at the regulatory headache it would have to deal with.

“We looked at doing that. The cost of actually delivering telephone services is almost nothing,” said Milo Medin, Google’s VP of Access Services at a conference in Kansas City. “However, in the United States, there are all of these special rules that apply.”

And that’s the flavor of the Obamanation: ‘Company X was going to do Y but decided not to, because of the regulatory headaches it would involve.’

Way to get the economy moving, guys. Forward into the past….

Read it.

“I was put on YouTube, I was put on everything without permission. What do I get?” he said. “This went around the world, and I want a piece of the pie.”

And that tells you everything you need to know about the Obamanation.

Read it.

Prominent gender and media studies professors from across the country converged recently to help host what was dubbed by organizers as a “Feminist, Anti-Racist Wikipedia Edit-a-thon” to create or influence dozens of entries on the online encyclopedia.

A Claremont Graduate University endowment fund sponsored the effort, which promoted creating and “improving” entries dedicated to: feminists; feminist theories; science studies; science, technology and society; human sexuality; artificial intelligence; and film theory; according to an email that announced the event to the Claremont Colleges community, as well as the “Edit-a-thon Wikipedia Page.”

God forbid that anyone, anywhere, should get information that wasn’t approved by the thought police.

Read it.

There’s just no pleasing some people.

The posters were designed to foster conversation about the domestic use of drones by law enforcement. Instead, it looks like we will be having the same old conversation about the limits of free speech.

Better not do it with posters.

Read it.

Software that lets drivers unlock car doors and even start their vehicles using a mobile phone could let car thieves do the very same things, according to computer security researchers at iSec Partners.

Don Bailey and fellow iSec researcher Mathew Solnik say they’ve figured out the protocols that some of these software makers use to remote control the cars, and they’ve produced a video showing how they can unlock a car and turn the engine on via a laptop.

This could have a great deal of entertainment value, since it affects people who have SMS enabled on their phones and those who are too fargin lazy to use a key. I cannot weep for either of those groups.

Read it.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the fact that the American Progressive regime has a volunteer thought police.

Most regimes have had to pay or threaten citizens into acting as thought police. However, many American Progressives take to the internet every day looking (far and wide, it would seem) for things to be offended by. What motivates these people?

All ideological regimes cultivate such proclivities, starting with Useful Idiots and hopefully winding up with Petains and Quislings; the ultimate poster child is the kid who rats out his parents to the Authorities for thinking unauthorized thoughts or failing to get with the state’s programs.

Activities during the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution’ under Mao are, tellingly enough, matched by some of the activities of children under Islamist tutelage — totalitarians have a standard toolbox that they all wind up using, no matter what the Clever Plastic Disguise might be.

Steve Sailer explains the facts of life to you.

 This is all part of Sailer’s Rule of Unions that unions are strongest for the guys who seemingly need them the least: baseball players, Chicago Symphony musicians, and so forth.

The Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach represents an enormous fixed investment that can’t be easily replaced anywhere (although the government of Mexico has been trying to build a competitor for many years now, and the government of Panama is expanding the Canal to siphon off business). Therefore, the Harbor generates huge amounts of wealth and the various parties involved clash over how to divvy it up. The dockworkers are a tough bunch  and when they are not happy, unfortunate things seem to happen. When the workers are unhappy you should probably, you know, watch your step, because accidents can happen. Thus, they get paid well.

Look for … the Union label….

 Public sympathies have turned very anti-union over my lifetime. In fact, I’m not sure they were ever all that pro-union. Strikes are extremely agitating for 3rd parties, partly because they happen on the strikers’ schedule, not the bystanders. Presumably, the dock clerks picked the Christmas Rush for a strike precisely because so many businesses across the country are desperate to get deliveries before December 24.

Similarly, if you own a business, you don’t want to be in a perfectly competitive market, either. You want to figure out a way to grab a little bit of monopoly power. You want to be Apple not Dell, Microsoft not Digital Resources, Carlos Slim not some unconnected telecom entrepreneur.

I know they teach you all about the wonders of perfectly competitive markets in Econ 101, but, you know what? You don’t want to be stuck competing in a perfectly competitive market. You want to be well set up in a defensible corner where you aren’t facing perfect competition.

Read it.

The settlement was a bonanza for those who negotiated it. The dominant tobacco companies, especially Philip Morris (now Altria) got a virtual cartel that allowed them to immediately raise cigarette prices without facing competition from smaller companies, since the AGs wrote into the pact clauses that required new companies to pay into the settlement even though they had nothing to do with the alleged behavior behind the lawsuits. The private lawyers who represented the states are still pulling several hundred millions of dollars in fees a year from the settlement, which is scheduled to run at least through 2023. Other winners included the states, which are still getting billions of dollars in additional revenue from mostly lower-income smokers (although they could have gotten that without paying private legal fees, simply by raising tobacco taxes), and the National Association of Attorneys General, which negotiated its own $103 million payment that has since grown into a pool of money that funds much of the AG professional association’s budget.

The same old story: Big companies don’t mind regulation; big companies LOVE regulation (like Warren Buffett loves high tax rates), because they can afford it and their smaller competitors can’t.

It’s not about health; it’s about MONEY — money for the tobacco companies, and money for the government. (And money for the criminals who smuggle cigarettes when taxes go up and up and up.)

Steve Sailer has the scoop.

The big money conservative press is starting to get alarmed by all the in-yo-face-white-boy chest-thumping since the election (much of it coming from white boys, of course).

Democrats have been trying to racialize American politics ever since they pulled the wool over the eyes of black people about who was actually responsible for segregation and Jim Crow, with notable success. As long as it keeps working, they’ll continue to do it.

Indeed, the Lamestream Media are trying to convince people that Hispanic is a ‘race’ and Muslim is somehow a ‘race’, with some success (at least among the purported victims). As with ‘white Hispanic’ in the Trayvon Martin case, if there isn’t a racial angle to a story, they’ll be happy to manufacture one. Can anyone seriously pretend that Barack Obama would be anything at all, much less President, if he wasn’t half-black?

Read it.

So now John Boehner is angry that the White House leaked a one-sided version of his latest conversation with President Obama to the press:

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and Republican leaders are fuming after a late night phone call with President Barack Obama was leaked to the press, despite an agreement that it would not be, according to several GOP aides.

As if this should come as a surprise! It sounds as though Boehner and his aides are starting to get a clue:

Republicans believe the president is more interested in raking them over the coals publicly than striking a deal privately.

Really! They’ve figured that out, have they? I guess they noticed that the Democrats never put forth any sort of plan to deal with the nation’s collapsing finances, but instead demagogue the issue by pretending that the only thing going on is that Republicans are trying to protect rich people.

Of course the Democrats aren’t serious about “reaching a balanced deal.” Of course they don’t have any intention of cutting either discretionary spending or entitlements. Is John Boehner really the last person in the world to figure this out? Nevertheless, despite the blindingly obvious fact that the Democrats are incapable of acting in good faith, Boehner says “he remains hopeful that a deal can be reached in the coming weeks.”

Being a slow learner is almost the definition of Republican Congressman these days. One wonders when they’ll get tired of playing Charlie Brown kicking the football.

Read it.

But who cares? The ethanol lobby and the ‘progressive’ eco-nazis own more Congressmen than you do. Suck it up.

Read it.

Look at the history of most progressive charters and you’ll find they are initiated by white people who fit into one or more of the following categories:

Unnerved by the high percentage of low-achieving, low-income kids at their neighborhood school.
Unwilling to risk the lottery system for the good schools in their district.
Unable to afford private school, or a house in a homogenous suburb.
Unsure their kids are going to be able to compete with the top kids in their neighborhood school (particularly in high school)
Unhappy with the public school’s treatment of their idiosyncratic little snowflake.

These are people who would move to homogeneous environments, but can’t.

Welcome to the world of SWPL rationalization.

Using taxpayer dollars for upscale liberals (they are, usually, liberals) who don’t want their kids in the overly “diverse” local schools or have a little snowflake who just isn’t good enough to compete in a more competitive public school.

Say it ain’t so, Joe….

Read it.

…where, of course, it has always felt right at home.

“Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi matter,” the letter states. We noted Tuesday with some amusement that Rep. Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, was claiming that “incompetent” was the latest code word for “black.”

I’m sure fellow lifelong Democrat Bull Connor would have agreed with him. Good to see enemies agreeing on something.

Let’s examine this argument carefully. The Post acknowledges that “we can’t know their hearts.” But it finds a (literally) prima facie reason to suspect them of invidious motives: Almost all of them are persons of pallor. The Post is casting aspersions on Duncan and his colleagues based explicitly on the color of their skin. And it is accusing them of racism!

And employees of the Post would respond to this reaction with stunned incredulity — after all, everybody knows that only white people can be racist! (Don’t you know anything?)

The trouble with a diverse coalition based on ethnic or racial identity is that solidarity within each group can easily produce conflicts among the groups. Permissive immigration policies, for example, may be good for Hispanics and Asians but bad for blacks. Racial preferences in college admissions help blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asians.

One way of holding together such a disparate coalition is by delivering prosperity, so that everyone can feel he’s doing well. Failing that, another way is by identifying a common adversary–such as the “white male.” During Obama’s first term, the demonization of the “white male” was common among left-liberal commentators, especially MSNBC types. The Post has now lent its considerably more mainstream institutional voice to this form of bigotry.

David Horowitz wrote a very revealing book on the subject.

The danger for the country is that a racially polarized electorate will produce a hostile, balkanized culture. In 2008 Obama held out the hope of a postracial America. His re-election raises the possibility of a most-racial America.

Not that Obama cares….

Read it. And examine the chart.

As quantitied, and explained by Alexander, “the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045.“

Your tax dollars at work. Welcome to the Obamanation.

Read it.

Because, you know, Republicans are too dumb to know who to kill, so they need explicit guidelines and firm rules. The Obamassiah, not so much.

Read it.

Why do some societies maintain institutions that cause economic backwardness? This is the vital question that MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard economist James Robinson asked in their seminal 2006 article, “Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective” in the American Political Science Review. Their analysis concluded that all too many rulers have clearly calculated that it’s better to keep their people in poverty than risk losing the privileges of political power.

Or, in the case of Democrats, reduce a previously prosperous people to penury in order to pursue progressive policies and, incidentally, promote their own privileges and political power.

The answer to this puzzle is what the two economists call the “political replacement effect.” As they explain, “Political elites will block beneficial economic and institutional change when they are afraid that these changes will destabilize the existing system and make it more likely that they will lose political power and future rents.” Rent in this case is the wealth that political elites divert from the productive parts of society to themselves via taxes, corruption, exclusive licenses, import restrictions, monopoly ownership, and the like.

In other words, Democrats.

However, innovation is stifled in those regimes where the elites are somewhat entrenched but fear replacement. In such cases, the elites calculate that economic liberalization might empower rivals and end up depriving them of the looted wealth their current political position affords them.

I’m thinking Congressional Black Caucus, here; New York being the poster child, but any major metropolitan area will probably do.