“The Next America” on Hiatus. This just in: “White Out: Where the Democrats Lost the House,” by Ronald Brownstein. … Shorter version: They read too many columns on the “coalition of the ascendant” by Ronald Brownstein. …
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Ah-choo! Paul Krugman (interviewed by Ezra Klein) says he worries that “global integration” will produce deadly epidemics:
“If you look at the long sweep of history, global integration has tended to bring mass pandemics in its wake. My understanding is that you basically got waves of major plagues in the ancient world, pretty much whenever somebody controlled the steppes of Central Asia well enough that substantial commerce between China and the West could take place. Pretty soon afterwards, lots of people died. In the opening of the New World, it wasn’t the conquistadors, it was the microbes that really did it here.
“Now we have this very integrated world with very uneven levels of public health. You have to think that a pandemic is at least a possibility …”
Makes sense to me! So tell me again why we can’t we worry that the young Central American migrants President Obama sent fanning out into America last summer were unwittingly responsible for the enterovirus that showed up in disparate places a few weeks later. That’s the same mechanism that produces pandemics, right? … So far more than 100 children are paralyzed and a dozen have died …
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“No Amnesty, Period.” Here’s the ad Mark Zuckerberg’s outfit ran to help get Rep. Renee Ellmers reelected. Last week Ellmers was one of a handful (7) Republican votes to uphold President Obama’s executive amnesty. She has come out on the GOP’s pro-amnesty fringe.
If Zuckerberg ran an ad that deceptive for one of his products, he’d be looking at a fraud prosecution, no? …
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The Politico Siren is a Very Sensitive Instrument: Politico has installed a siren in its newsroom because, according to executive editor Jim VandeHei, Politico’s leaders:
want people jacked when we break news, whether it’s a quick hit from one of our policy teams or a holy-crap scoop …
Huh. A “quick hit from on of our policy teams” is enough to send the siren over the top? OK! The Politico siren is a cheap date. … Here at kausfiles the siren goes off for cheap anti-Vox sneering from anyone old enough to remember when Gary Hart won the California primary! “It has been and always will be our core strength.” …
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Where is Operation Choke Point when you need it?
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Good that leftish analysts like David Dayen aren’t buying the old Jim Johnson if-only-we’d-loosen-racist-lending-standards solution to housing affordability. As Dayen writes, “increasing mortgage lending to below-prime borrowers got us into the housing mess in the first place.” …
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From Neil Munro’s piece on the GOP Senate putting up a “listless,” not-even-strong-enough-for-show fight against Obama’s executive amnesty:
The [GOP] leaders’ underlying goal, the [unnamed Hill] staffer said, is to get the immigration issue out of the news before it transforms [t]he 2016 primaries into a populist battle between the GOP establishment and GOP voters.
“The goal is to find a path to victory [in 2016] without the base, and the best way to do that is to make the [campaign] issue about anything other than immigration,” the staffer said.
Hmm. Some problems with this theory! 1) Even if a GOP nominee could win the Presidency “without the base,” how does he or she get to be the nominee without the base? Is Jeb going to cancel the primaries? 2) Burying the fight over Obama’s executive amnesty might get immigration out of the news for a while. But continuing Boehner’s push for “piece by piece” legislative amnesty will put it right back in the news, no? If the GOP leadership really were pursuing the “staffer’s” strategy, wouldn’t it drop all the ongoing hints that it’s still planning to sneak through some kind of broad legalization? …
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Too Bad to be True: Looks like WaPo‘s education reporter Lyndsey Layton (in the most charitable scenario) fell for an inflated interest group stat about a majority of American public school kids being in poverty. Turns out you don’t have to be poor to get free school lunches. Breitbart has the story. … as does Marginal Revolution (with a useful chart) … P.S.: Marginal Revolution‘s chart shows that about 21% of school age children are from poor families. But of course the percentage of public school kids will be higher than that, as the middle and upper classes opt for private schools. …
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If Ford designer Freeman Thomas is a founder of the purist classic Porsche club R Gruppe, how did he let the Mustang get so cheesy-looking?
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The Adult Table Speaks: Les Gelb writes that Obama must immediately fire his entire foreign policy staff, except for that nice Tony Blinken fellow who is really rather good. …
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