"When I say that the article of religion is deemed a trifle by our people in the general, I assert a known truth."

"But when we suppose that the poorer sort of European emigrants set as light by it, we are greatly mistaken."

Patrick Henry, 1766.

"Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?"

"To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil and be called by no name except deportees?"

"Why Conservatives Say No."

"Opposition to amnesty and same-sex marriage isn't bigotry, it's a fear of unintended consequences."

"It may be just me, but the Drive-Bys are not talking about the amnesty bill vote from yesterday very much."

Said Rush Limbaugh today. (Drive-Bys = mainstream media.)

I think they don't want to report what's in this bill. They don't want people concerned with Alec Baldwin's latest rant to know what's in this. They don't want people occupied, focused on Paula Deen to know what's in this. They don't want people who can't believe the star witness at the Zimmerman case....

The latest is that it was reported by some British newspaper that Alec Baldwin's wife was tweeting smoothie recipes at the funeral for James Gandolfini.... Paula Deen said the N-word 30 years ago, and has probably cried 15 buckets of tears about it all week long...

"The Senate on Thursday approved the most significant overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws in a generation with broad bipartisan support..."

"... sending the bill to the Republican-controlled House, where there is significant opposition from conservative members and where the fight could extend into 2014."

But given the strong 68-to-32 vote, with 14 Republicans voting in favor, the Democratic leadership and the bipartisan group of eight senators who drafted the original bill seemed determined to savor the moment. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. presided over the vote as senators announced their positions from their desks, in a ceremonial procedure reserved for special occasions.

"If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example."

"As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word 'Hispanic' to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group."

“The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center....

“There is no coherence to the term,” says Marta Tienda, a sociologist and director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even though it’s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather than race — after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race — the term “has become a racialized category in the United States,” Tienda says. “Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category.”...

If most Hispanics are united in something, though, it’s a belief that they don’t share a common culture. The Pew Hispanic Center finds that nearly seven in 10 Hispanics say they comprise “many different cultures” rather than a single one. “But when journalists, researchers or the federal government talk about” Latinos, Lopez acknowledges, “they talk about a single group.”

If it's an invented, created category, the questions become: Who is using this category and for what purpose? What are the alternative categories, and who has something to gain/lose from using those categories? What is the political dynamic that feeds the dominance of this political categorization and suppresses the alternatives, and what changes would cause those alternative categories to become prominent?

Female politicians "have resorted to flexing their womb-manhood."

Writes Kathleen Parker, riffing on Sarah Palin's statement that "goes something like this: 'I’m more fertile than you are.'"

(If you scroll down you'll get to the actual quote: "I say this as someone who’s kind of fertile herself." Palin was reacting to Jeb Bush's recent awkward reference to the fertility of immigrants. Parker seems to like to rewrite quotes: What Jeb said "sounds an awful lot like, 'Hotahmighty, those people can’t tie their shoes without getting pregnant.'")

It wasn't just Sarah Palin who flexed her womb-manhood to make a political argument. Parker also points to Nancy Pelosi:

When challenged about the difference between late-term abortion and the killing of babies who survived late-term abortions at the hands of the convicted murderer Dr. Kermit Gosnell, Pelosi hid behind the skirt of her own bassinet.

Rather than answer the question, she invoked her five children and declared any discussion of abortion “sacred ground” to her Catholic sensibilities. Fecundity, apparently, triumphs over moral reasoning.

Parker acts as if Pelosi were claiming authority solely by virtue of her motherhood and declined to engage in "moral reasoning," but Pelosi was saying I believe in Catholic doctrine. She didn't just say she had 5 children. She said "my oldest child is six years old the day I brought my fifth child home from the hospital." That's offered as proof that she believes the doctrine — including the proscription against birth control. In my book, that translates into a statement of morality. Maybe some people don't think that's "moral reasoning," because it's the acceptance of religious doctrine (and not individual philosophizing). But clearly Pelosi was saying: I have very deep beliefs about morality here and my life as I've lived it vouches for the sincerity of these beliefs.

Parker's next sentence is:

Most likely, Pelosi is deeply troubled by what her politics requires and what her Catholic mother-heart tells her is true. 

Catholic mother-heart? Pelosi claimed she is a believing Catholic. Beliefs exist in the brain as well as in the emotions. You can call the emotions "heart," but it's still not just something her heart is telling her. It's religious doctrine that she knows and purports to accept. Now, of course, it's very easy to say that Pelosi cannot square her support for abortion rights with her Catholic beliefs. And Pelosi deserves that hit because she did have a how-dare-you shaming tone in her voice and she refused give an elaborate response to the questioner who wanted to hound her about Gosnell.

But I know what the answer is. It's that when the question is about enduring a pregnancy, the beliefs of the woman within whom that pregnancy exists are what matters. The true moral answer is that you should never have an abortion — that's the Catholic's religious belief — but the legal answer is that every woman has freedom of belief and her own beliefs control what she does with her body.

I think this is like what Jesus said about divorce:

The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?”

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?”

He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”

I know that Moses didn't say it, but one might say abortion is permitted because of the hardness of your hearts.

With 2 references to hearts — Parker's "Catholic mother-heart" and Jesus's "the hardness of your hearts" — I am reminded again of the Supreme Court's notion of what it called "the heart of liberty": "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." That's the basis of the right to have an abortion: the individual's freedom of belief.

But where was Kathleen Parker going with this column? Two highly partisan women used their own personal fertility to leverage a political argument. Noted. The 2 women are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but they were arguing about different issues: immigration and abortion. Now, we know Palin is pro-life, and Parker declares Palin's position "more palatable," but she proceeds to knock her for "her coquettish reminders that her field is still tillable," which, Parker says, "diminishes her credibility as anything other than a one-liner comedienne." I take it that's Parker's way of stating the conclusion that women ought to refrain from flexing their womb-manhood.

I think it's fine to include one's own personal experience as part of a political argument. It's a problem if you do it badly. (You don't want your audience to perceive you as coquettish!) And it shouldn't be your only argument. (You don't want to seem to be saying I have more children then you, so shut up.) But talking about real-world experience gives depth, color, and credibility to a politician's speech. As with any political speech, you need to do it well.

"Rubio has killed himself with his base through a classic example of hubris and Freshman overreach."

"He could have gotten behind an immigration bill, but getting behind this immigration bill, another cooked-up-in-a-backroom you’ve-got-to-pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it monstrosity was a mistake. His second mistake, and the really fatal one, has been expressions of contempt toward his base. Suggesting that people who don’t support his bill are racist, and that American workers are dumb, is political poison. And his staff should know better than to say this kind of thing to any journalist, however friendly-seeming. All in all, a really disappointing performance from Rubio."

Writes Instapundit.

But why did the Freshman arrive at this hubris? How did he get into this position in the "Gang of 8" from which he could do this overreaching?

Seeing where he is and knowing that it was the insane, inane hopes that conservatives reflexively projected onto him, he understandably views this base as at least rather dumb and a tad racist.

"Speak English" rhetoric that you'd better not try unless you're a Democrat.

1. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "I’ve said this a thousand times, if you don’t speak good grammar – English with good grammar – you’re not going to get the kinds of jobs that you want.... If there’s a lot of jargon, double negatives, and things like that, they hurt your career prospects... People think its cute to jive, and it may be for entertainment, but ya just still have to have great command of the english language."

2. U.S. President Barack Obama: "This bill would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally--a pathway that includes passing a background check, learning English, paying taxes and a penalty, and then going to the back of the line behind everyone who's playing by the rules and trying to come here legally."

3. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: "We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto... Second … we should establish that citizenship requires passing a test on American history in English."

4. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: "And Reagan would have never offended Hispanics as Gingrich did when he said Spanish is the language of the ghetto."

"Youth gang riots in the Swedish capital Stockholm have entered fifth straight night."

"Hundreds of mostly immigrant teenagers tore through the suburbs, smashing windows and burning cars in the country’s worst outbreak of violence in years."

“The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people,” [said Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist]. “The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don’t like Sweden. They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society: Working, paying taxes and so on.”

“The people come here now because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing. They don’t have to work, they don’t have to pay taxes – they can just stay here and get a lot of money. That is really a problem,” Carlqvist added.

“The police could do so much, [instead] they have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible. But they could go there and use water cannons, they could not let people out onto the streets at night. There are so many things they could do within the law – but they don’t do it,” she said.

The police won't protect the people who work and have their money redistributed to people who don't work and don't even like Sweden. It's the taxpayers who should be protesting, but they're humbly cowering hoping for police protection, and they can't even get that.

1. Chelsea Clinton running NYU's "multifaith" institute. 2. The Harvard Kennedy School granting a PhD for a dissertation about the IQ of Hispanic immigrants.

1. We learn today that Chelsea Clinton will take on "a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of [NYU's] brand-new Of Many Institute, a program to "develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders." It should be noted, in this context, that Chelsea Clinton's degree is a Master's of Public Health, and that she has been teaching at the graduate level at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

2. Yesterday, we were talking about the Harvard students who are petitioning for an investigation into how the Harvard Kennedy School accepted a dissertation that reached conclusions that the students regarded as unethical, because it supported discrimination against persons of a particular ethnicity on the ground of purported lower intelligence.

Let's talk about these 2 stories together. Here are 3 highly prestigious institutions — NYU, Columbia, and Harvard — and schools/institutes within them that most of us would assume have a political slant in the liberal direction:  NYU's Of Many Institute, Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, and Harvard's Kennedy School.

Both stories make the institutions look weak — NYU and Columbia for taking in the Clintons' daughter — and Harvard for awarding degrees for weak dissertations.

Be clear what I'm saying about Harvard. I mean to express no opinion about Jason Richwine's "IQ and Immigration Policy" dissertation. I haven't read it, and I'm not an expert in the field. I can't believe the professors at the Kennedy School liked where Richwine was going with his research, but I suspect that they went forward, approving his dissertation, because it wasn't any worse than the many  left/liberal dissertations they've approved over the years.

ADDED: Why is NYU's multifaith institute called "Of Many"? Is it based on "Out of many, one" — E pluribus unum?



AND: Do students at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health take courses with Chelsea because of the value of networking the Clintons? That's pretty valuable! Inference: you're a chump if you're paying high tuition and not buying access to power.

"Sorry, gays. Obama prefers Latinos to you."

"But thanks for all the contributions!"

"Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community."

"However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination."

A petition with 1,200 signatures collected by Harvard students, who seem to want an investigation targeting this one case, because the conclusion offends them. It seems to me the investigation ought to be much broader, into what the general standards are at the school. The students have a big interest in whether the degree means what it's supposed to mean, but the one dissertation they loathe ought to be presented as evidence that the school has low standards, and the investigation ought to range across the political spectrum. But the students are speaking in terms of which policies are ethical, and that sounds like they want a political standard to restrict research, which, ironically, would not be an ethical policy.

The Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative action case is now the only undecided case argued in October.

SCOTUSblog tells us, after live-blogging the announcement of Moncrieffe v. Holder this morning. Moncrieffe, a case about the meaning of "aggravated felony" under the immigration law, was written by Justice Sotomayor, and that makes it extremely likely that Justice Kennedy is writing the hotly anticipated Fisher case:

[T]he Court tries very hard to distribute the authorship of majority opinions evenly not just over the course of the Term, but also within a sitting (the two-week periods from October through April when the Court hears oral argument). So going into today, Justices Kennedy and Sotomayor were the only Justices without majority opinions in October.... Now he's the only one without an October opinion, which leads to the assumption that he is writing Fisher. 

Does this help predict the outcome of the case? Here's my effort, from last October, to read Justice Kennedy at the oral argument. Remember, Texas has a very odd kind of affirmative action, adding an individualized approach, with race as a plus factor, after a facially neutral program that admits the top 10% of students from every Texas high school. At oral argument, Kennedy focused on the detail that the additional race-based selection was done to bring in more privileged black and Hispanic students, because the 10% program tended to admit underprivileged blacks and Hispanics (which reinforced a stereotype about black and Hispanic people). I said at the time (referring to the Court's most recent affirmative action case, Grutter):

So, it seems, the additional affirmative action is needed to get a more varied group of minority students, in which case, the point is to bring in privileged minority students, because these are the students who — in Grutter terms — might provide the classroom benefit of teaching all the students that minority students don't have "some characteristic minority viewpoint." ...

I'm not taking a position on whether UT's admissions policy is good or whether it's constitutional.... All I am saying is that if Grutter is to be applied (and not limited or overruled), an affirmative action program that's all about boosting the most privileged minority students actually makes sense.

Kennedy seemed to have trouble seeing the sense of that at oral argument. He said "So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all," which is missing the point. I'm sure he ultimately understood the point, but I think we saw — in real time — that the point isn't intuitively appealing to him.

That said, Fisher could narrowly reject the odd UT program and leave the more typical Grutter-style affirmative action alone. But Fisher presents an opportunity to overturn Grutter, and Kennedy dissented in Grutter, which was a 5-4 decision with Justice O'Connor casting the deciding vote. O'Connor's successor, Justice Alito was instrumental at oral argument — as I said at the time — in extracting that point about privileged minority applicants receiving the advantage.

So I'll make a rash prediction: a narrow decision, determined by Kennedy and Alito (and maybe Roberts), striking down only the Texas program. Scalia and Thomas concur, complaining that Grutter should have been overruled. Everyone else dissents.

Rand Paul demands that the immigration debate focus on terrorism.

"I believe that any real comprehensive immigration reform must implement strong national security protections. The facts emerging in the Boston Marathon bombing have exposed a weakness in our current system. If we don't use this debate as an opportunity to fix flaws in our current system, flaws made even more evident last week, then we will not be doing our jobs.... [N]ational security protections must be rolled into comprehensive immigration reform to make sure the federal government does everything it can to prevent immigrants with malicious intent from using our immigration system to gain entry into the United States in order to commit future acts of terror."

Why wasn't Tamerlan Tsarnaev on the FBI's watch list when he returned after 6 months in Russia?

On Today's Fox News Sunday:

CHRIS WALLACE, host: What do you make of the fact, because of a Russian request, the FBI interrogated the older brother Tamerlan back in 2011 about his ties to radical Islam. They found out he was not a threat.... [W]hat do you make of the interrogation? And what about the fact that when he returned after six months in Russia, he apparently was not on an FBI watch list?

CONGRESSMAN PETER KING: ... [W]here the FBI is given information about someone as being potential terrorists, they look at them, and then they don't take action. And they go out and carry out murders after this. So, again, I'm wondering, again, is there something deficient here? What was wrong? Again, there was nothing they could find in 2011. He goes to Chechnya in 2012. He has statements up on his Web site. He's talking about radical imams. Why didn't the FBI go back and look at that?... [I]s far as getting information in advance and not seeming to take proper action, this is the fifth case I'm aware of where the FBI has failed to stop someone who ultimately became a terrorist murderer....

Later in the show, Wallace interviews Philip Mudd, a terrorist expert with experience in the CIA, the National Security Council, and the FBI.

WALLACE: Was there any kind of a breakdown here in our national security operation, and specifically with regard to the FBI? Are you troubled by the fact that they were alerted by the Russians to the older brother, they interviewed him, decided he was not a threat, he goes to Russia, he comes back, and they don't seem to have him on a watch list?

PHILIP MUDD: No, I'm not troubled by this for several reasons. First, people fail to consider the implications of false positives. You look at one guy we could have gotten, but you forget the other 10,000 that would have come into the net if we look at a person like this every day. So, I look at this and say, you know, these kinds of things happen, but I suspect it wasn't a dropped ball here.

10,000 caught in the net every day? Every year? Every decade? When the FBI goes as far as it did on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, shouldn't the case be tagged in a way that would cause it to reopen when something happens that is as significant as 6 months in Russia — even if there would be 10,000 files subject to reopening? If we have to worry about "sleeper cells," why don't we monitor these characters and do something  when they engage in behavior typical of planning or training? But I don't know that the FBI doesn't do these things. Mudd seems intent on deflecting our attention from past FBI failings.

Wallace presses him: "[D]o you see any way you could have prevented these two guys?"

MUDD: Well, I mean, we're going to have to see what kind of foreign connections they have, whether the travel to Russia last year actually meant something. But what I see so far says we've got two kids who are in a closed radical circle. Breaking that circle in a state like ours that is an open society is virtually impossible.

WALLACE: What is your sense -- and I understand this is speculation, but informed speculation -- were they acting alone, part of a group, and do you see any Al Qaeda fingerprints on this?

MUDD: The only fingerprint I've seen might possibly have been ideology, but not operations. Every step of the way was pretty rudimentary. For example, if you look at some of those initial photos, you've got a kid with a hoodie and a cap. If he wants to obscure himself, the hoodie goes on, and the cap goes forward. If he had operational training, I want to know who did it because they were amateurs.

Two kids who are in a closed radical circle... An open society....

Don't expect the government to protect you from everything in our free society. That's a talking point. I heard it from Senator Dick Durbin this morning on "Meet the Press":

GREGORY: Do you have questions about the FBI’s tracking of the older suspect here who is now dead and whether something was missed?

SEN. DURBIN: Of course I do. And I think we should ask those questions. That’s our responsibility. But I listened to [Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee] Mike Rogers and I thought he laid it out as a former FBI agent himself as to what we were faced with when we were asked these hard questions. We’ve got to make sure as well, let me add David, that we give to the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, federal, state, and local, the resources they need to keep America safe. We live in a dangerous world. We live also in a free and open society, which we value very much. In order to keep Americans safe at the marathon, at every other public event, we need to invest the resources that are necessary for law enforcement.

I laughed at this point, because it was such knee-jerk Democratic Party response: We need to invest the resources. Spend more money. No one on their side ever fails. They were always only deprived of enough money. The FBI has been well-funded over the years, though presumably they could always hire more people and so forth. But the question is whether they did enough here and are doing enough in similar cases.

GREGORY: Is that a call in fact for re-examination of whether additional resources are needed to-- to look at homegrown terror and the potential for smaller boar attacks that can only be deterred by the strength of law enforcement and engaged citizenry?

Smaller boar attacks! Gregory didn't transcribe his own question, but somebody at NBC doesn't know enough about guns.





Gregory is responsible, however, for the inanity of his question. Is this a call for more money? Durbin's answer — "It is" — is as short as he can possibly make it, and Gregory doesn't stop him from gratuitously plugging in his prepared remarks about immigration. This is really shameless:

SEN. DURBIN: It is. But let me add one other element. Let me bring it up to date with the agenda of the Senate. I’ll return tomorrow for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s second hearing on the new immigration reform bill. Let me put it in context. There are four specific provisions in this immigration reform bill that will make America safer. We are going to have a stronger border with Mexico. We are going to have 11 million people come forward and have an opportunity to register with our government, out of the shadows. We’re going to have verification of employment in the work place. And we’re finally going to have a system where we can track visa holders who visit the United States to make sure that they leave when they’re supposed to. So this is part of the ongoing conversation about a safer America and the immigration reform bill moves us closer.

Does that have anything to do with terrorist attacks? Gregory gets his next question right:

GREGORY: Do you fear an impact similar to what we saw after 9/11 that derailed immigration reform. Already, you’ve heard Senator Grassley talk about, you know, loopholes in the immigration system, whether, you know, leniencies of student visas. Are there going to be concerns here related to the Boston attacks that you think impact the immigration debate?

Of course, the immigration proposal, the next item on the legislative agenda, just happens to answer these questions Durbin would have us believe:

SEN. DURBIN: I’ll just put it on the line. I’ve been involved with the eight senators who have put this bill together, Democrats and Republicans. The worst thing we can do is nothing. If we do nothing, leaving 11 million people in the shadows, not making our border safer, not having the information that comes from employment and these visa holders, we will be less safe in America. Immigration reform will make us safer. And I hope that those who are critical of it will just come forward and say what their idea is. We’ve come up with a sound plan to keep this country safe.

The worst thing we can do is nothing. So the best you've got is the assertion that your plan is better than nothing — is it? — and the baseless insinuation that the 11 million people in the shadows are central to the fight against terror.

It's been a bad first quarter of first year of the second term for President Obama.

1. It's been so bad that the media dropped their erstwhile foible of talking about everything that happens in terms of what it means for Obama. And here it is, the first lap of his new term, when there's more reason than usual to talk about how things are working out for the President.

2. Obama made gun control his big issue leading into the new term. He tried so hard to deploy his speaking skills to channel the nation's emotion after the Sandy Hook massacre, and in the end he couldn't even wrangle all of the Democrats in the Senate, and he was reduced yesterday to surrounding himself with human vessels of tragedy and "a scowling Vice President Biden" and pronounce it "all in all...  a pretty shameful day for Washington." The media offered weak support by describing him as passionately angry, but I watched the video and found it surprising dull. I couldn't motivate myself to go over to my computer to blog about it last night. Obama knew he was going to lose. The theater of sympathy and outrage had gone on far too long, the show was a flop, and the leading man was obliged to take his curtain call.

3. North Korea apparently has a nuclear weapon and the nerve to use it (or to pose as if it does), and the new Secretary of State, the exceedingly dreary John Kerry, is sojourning in the general area nattering about global warming —  "the Foreign Minister and I agreed to raise the initiative above the level that it is today" — and meanwhile, back in the United States, it's really cold.

4. Obama's efforts to get some lightweight good press over basketball failed. His bracket was busted, and a cutesy photo-op produced an embarrassing video in which he went 2 for 22. That he could play basketball was an element of his legend, and now it's that video that comes to mind when we think of Obama and basketball. Does he even have another sport? Golf? Golf, unlike basketball, never worked as an element of the Obama legend.

5. He shut off White House tours, presumably on the theory that it would spark outrage at the sequester (and those terrible Republicans), but that gesture clashed with his own fun in the White House. Ordinary kids had their field trips canceled, while Obama's daughters got Justin Timberlake to come to the White House and perform right in front of them. It was another of the many parties. Wasn't Beyonce just there? And then she and Jay-Z went to Cuba, and, when criticized, Jay-Z put out a pissy rap tune that (I think) insulted Obama.

6. George Bush is making a comeback, with some charming new elements: He's a granddad and he paints pictures of dogs. The big library is opening. And then there's the new disaster in Waco, just 45 miles from his Crawford ranch, giving Bush reason to do a low-profile but touching trip to comfort the injured and the bereaved. So now does that mean Obama has to go to Texas? He's already going to Boston for a memorial service. How can he not go to Texas? But Texas is not comfortable territory for Obama.

7. Margaret Thatcher up and died. What rotten luck! What a platform for the promoters of the ideology in opposition to his! And then idiots take to the streets with all that "Ding, Dong the Witch Is Dead" childishness and disrespect, damaging the left-wing brand. Should Obama attend the funeral? Ah, at least send the Vice President. At least send somebody! No. He sends nobody.

8. What's the legislative agenda? Immigration reform? WaPo headlines: "Obama isn’t leading on immigration, and that’s a good thing." The media's attempts to help are getting really embarrassing. He's not leading, but, see, that's a good thing. Let us explain why: "Presidential leadership is a polarizing force...." Blah blah blah. What really matters are the 2014 elections. Just hang back and wait. Nothing but weakness and failure might just be a devious strategy for winning 565 days from now.

9. What's happening with Obamacare? That was the achievement of Obama's first term. If there's one thing he ought to do with this second term, it's make sure that thing gets implemented in a way that works with some degree of smoothness, at least enough that — when people finally notice what's been in the works for so long —  we don't freak out entirely. But: "A senior Democratic senator who helped write President Barack Obama’s health care law stunned administration officials Wednesday, saying openly he thinks it’s headed for a 'train wreck' because of bumbling implementation.'"

10. The trial of Kermit Gosnell is fogging up the clarity achieved in 2012 victory in the War on Women.

The Supreme Court declines to resolve a difficult 1-person-1-vote question.

The Court denied cert. in Lepak v. City of Irving, which presented "the long-standing issue of which population basis should be used in deciding whether a redistricting plan violates the one-person, one-vote mandate."

The dispute is between using an area’s total population in equalizing districts, or using only the total of eligible voters. In a dispute over city elections in Irving, lower courts used total population, which meant that one district which had a larger number of non-citizen Hispanics would nevertheless have them included in its count.

"Nearly two-thirds of Americans favor giving illegal immigrants in the country an opportunity for legal status with a path to citizenship..."

"... according to a poll published Thursday by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. Support for an earned path to citizenship for those immigrants came from 71 percent of Democrats and also a majority, 53 percent, of Republicans, the poll found."

"Immigration reform will not occur until conservative Republicans, like myself, become part of the solution."

"I am here today to begin that conversation... Let's start that conversation by acknowledging we aren't going to deport... My plan will not grant amnesty or move anyone to the front of the line... But what we have now is de facto amnesty."

Rand Paul.