Part 1:

COMMUNISTS DON’T LIKE HIM? NY TIMES GIVES RUBIO CANDIDACY MORE HELP: “By publishing a piece that focused on the reactions to Rubio’s candidacy in Cuba from the communist government’s functionaries or ordinary people whose only knowledge of the senator is from Castro regime propaganda, the Times has once again given him an unwitting boost.”

Related:

Communist dictatorship hates US Presidential candidate. NY Times thinks this makes him look bad pic.twitter.com/Dud0l9lppc

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) July 5, 2015

Part 2

Meanwhile on Twitter:

weird how all the people who hate israel are most excited about this deal that supposedly helps protect israel.

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) July 14, 2015

ANDREW MORRISS LOOKS AT TAXATION through the lens of James Scott’s excellent Seeing Like A State.

Scott offers four big ideas that shape his analytical framework. First, he argues that a fundamental need of a state is to make its population “legible.” In essence, a legible population is one in which the relevant characteristics for state purposes are defined and known. Second, he contends that by doing so, the state changes the nature of the activities the population carries on, the culture, and the society as a whole. In other words, you get more of what you measure. Third, he attributes social engineering projects in part to what he terms “high modernist ideology,” in which scientific and technical models are uncritically applied to societies, encouraging government actors to believe they can significantly change societies through administrative fiat. Fourth, when this ideology is married to a state with significant coercive power and civil society lacks the capacity to resist, the state does considerable harm by forcing an agenda on society without considering all the costs. Let’s consider each.

To the ruling class, the “considerable harm” is offset by even-more-considerable opportunities for graft.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Obama Administration Refuses To Follow Law Banning Government Contracts To Companies Who Engaged In Tax Inversions. And notice how quick President Goldman Sachs is to protect the fatcats’ interests when it matters.

: New Docs Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Colluding to Prosecute Obama Opponents.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Wisconsin’s Friend at the IRS: Emails Show a Common Cause in Restricting Political Speech:

MIDNIGHT RAIDS, SECRET SUBPOENAS: IRS’ LOIS LERNER CLOSE FRIENDS WITH LEADER WHO TARGETED SCOTT WALKER.

ANDREW MORRISS LOOKS AT TAXATION through the lens of James Scott’s excellent Seeing Like A State.

Scott offers four big ideas that shape his analytical framework. First, he argues that a fundamental need of a state is to make its population “legible.” In essence, a legible population is one in which the relevant characteristics for state purposes are defined and known. Second, he contends that by doing so, the state changes the nature of the activities the population carries on, the culture, and the society as a whole. In other words, you get more of what you measure. Third, he attributes social engineering projects in part to what he terms “high modernist ideology,” in which scientific and technical models are uncritically applied to societies, encouraging government actors to believe they can significantly change societies through administrative fiat. Fourth, when this ideology is married to a state with significant coercive power and civil society lacks the capacity to resist, the state does considerable harm by forcing an agenda on society without considering all the costs. Let’s consider each.

To the ruling class, the “considerable harm” is offset by even-more-considerable opportunities for graft.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Obama Administration Refuses To Follow Law Banning Government Contracts To Companies Who Engaged In Tax Inversions. And notice how quick President Goldman Sachs is to protect the fatcats’ interests when it matters.

: New Docs Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Colluding to Prosecute Obama Opponents.

Maybe if Bernie says it people will finally listen

PARTY OF SCIENCE: Bernie Sanders Once Blamed Cervical Cancer on a Lack of Orgasms.

On Facebook, Stefan Sharkansky snarks: “He and Todd Akin should go up against each other in a gynecology quiz match.”

from Rick Wilson at the Federalist, who among other things correctly notes that “The Media Loves Acela Republicans Until It Hates Them:”

Acela Republicans are creatures of the media, from beginning to end. Acela Republicans are always the smartest, tallest, most articulate, most handsome fellows in the room. Just ask the people at The New York Times or MSNBC or The Washington Post, who have adopted them like exotic pets. “Oh, look,” they coo, “This one doesn’t bite or have any of those ugly, primitive conservative policies. We shall feed it, caress it and keep it for our own.”

“SOCIAL JUSTICE” CULTURE: THE ACTUAL STALINIST VERSION: “It’s all here,” Cathy Young writes:

It’s all here: the casual, innocuous remark interpreted as offensive; the demand for confession and repentance; the notion that maintaining one’s innocence or trying to minimize the “offense” compounds guilt; the escalating, absurdly ballooning accusations in which everything the accused says or does is taken as further proof of guilt; the pressure on members of the community to join the mob to demonstrate their own allegiance to the One True Ideology; the lack of human sympathy elevated to a virtue; the notion that proper “humanism” is not manifested in compassion but in “relentless war on all manifestations of hostile ideas.”

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: CNN’s Chris Cuomo: Sanctuary Cities Are A ‘Misnomer:’

SORRY, CHUCK TODD, BUT REPORTERS ARE NOT THE REFEREES OF POLITICS.  Makes it pretty clear why they do what they do though, doesn't it?

a few more observations on the fruits of Obergefell ... no pun intended

Here's What John Roberts and Salon.com Have in Common

[Eugene Volokh] Why may the government ban businesses from saying “we won’t bake cakes for same-sex weddings”?  

Note: this is NOT the same as denying service to a gay couple.  The bakery MAY bake them a birthday cake, a graduation cake, or any of several other cakes.  It simply des not wish to be forced to contribute to the wedding.

Some good reads on Obergefell.  I support SGM.  I do NOT think this is the optimum way to achieve it, due to the establishment of precident.  Although with Windsor being overruled so quickly one wonders what effect precident has any more.

[Sasha Volokh] Is marriage really a liberty right?

[Ilya Somin] Of marriage and liberty – some thoughts on Justice Thomas’ Obergefell dissent

2 QUESTIONS FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE CASE.

1. Will you pledge that religious organizations that refuse to perform same-sex marriages will not lose their tax-exempt status?

2. Who do you think should prevail if there is a conflict between the interests of gay people — as they engage in commerce and seek full membership in society — and the interests of religious people — as they try to frame their conduct to accord with the tenets of their religion?

[David Post] A few words on Obergefell and the countermajoritarian tendency (with my favorite quote from The Notorious RBG)

Marriage and the Constitution: What the Court Said and Why It Got It Wrong

an finally, two things: “You Can’t Compromise with Culture Warriors,” Jonah Goldberg

and

June was a rough month.  Helbig case gave us John Roberts telling us that the phrase "established by the state" actually means "NOT established by the state."  If I'd told you after Windsor was decided that it would be overturned within two years those of you favoring SGM would've been desponant.  It was.  You arent.  Then there's Hillary's daily twisting, turning and corruption of the English language.

Then there's this:  State Department Officially Calls Iran’s Forced Sex Change Surgeries ‘Confirmation:’

By referring to the surgeries as “gender confirmation,” rather than the much more widespread and morally neutral “sex reassignment surgery,” the State Department seems to be siding with the Iranian government’s false “cure” for homosexuality.

John Kerry never got the memo that Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not a how-to guide.

Also now meaningless? 

Religeous Freedom.  The ACLU Now Opposes Religious Freedom Because Christians Need It

Press Briefing.   State Dept threatens to arrest Washington Free Beacon reporter for covering Iran talks

Legislature now means voting population: The Founders weren’t perfect but they were more precise wordsmiths than the average Supreme Court Justice. For example, when they meant “the people,” they wrote “the people.” So when they wrote “the legislature,” confidence is high that they meant “the legislature.”

Jimmy Carter no longer means "worst president ever:   Jimmy Carter: Obama’s Foreign Policy Accomplishments ‘Minimal’.

YUVAL LEVIN: King v. Burwell and the Law:

PATTERICO: KING V. BURWELL: INTENTIONALISM TRUMPS TEXTUALISM, AND THE RULE OF LAW DIES:

This reminds me of a hypothetical I offered in 2010:

Assume you make $50,000 a year. The legislature passes a law imposing a hefty tax on “people making over $100,000 per year.” Since the law does not apply to you, by its plain terms, you do not pay the tax. However, you are convicted after a judge finds irrefutable contemporaneous evidence showing that all legislators who voted for the tax intended to impose it on people making over $10,000 a year. The judge, an “intentionalist,” finds that the intent of the legislature controls, regardless of the plain meaning of the law.

Under the plain language of the law, the tax does not apply to you. Applying the intent of the legislators, it does. Which is the better interpretation?

Read the whole thing.

Also, the progressive left’s belief that “law is politics” is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out in NRO this weekend, there was no speculation about whether one of the four liberal/progressive Justices would vote in any of the recent high profile, controversial cases precisely because liberal/progressive Justices don’t “wander off the reservation.”

For some reason, it’s the GOP-nominated Justices who turn out to be unpredictable.

And then there was this: HOW TO TALK TO A NON-LEFTIST THE OTHER 364 DAYS A YEAR: Taking Mr. Obama’s advice and planning to pitch your relatives on the many wonderful benefits of Obamacare tomorrow? What happens the other 364 days? Robert Tracinski of the Federalist offers some advice for his friends on the other side of the aisle to try breaking the ice, including — and I know this will be very difficult for many leftists — “Talk to people beneath your station:”

At a university or in an urban hipsterville neighborhood, you may think that everyone around you is on the same page ideologically. But you are almost certainly wrong. Part of the problem is that a lot of the people who differ from you on politics are the people you don’t notice. They’re not the professors or administrators or graduate students, or the performance artists, and baristas, and artisanal vegan sriracha curators. They are receptionists and groundskeepers and especially small business owners who run some of the stores and shops and restaurants you go to.

Some university employees might be on the right, but I’m afraid they probably won’t talk to you about it. Why? Because they are afraid of losing their jobs. They are afraid that if word gets around about their retrograde views, people will show up with mattresses demanding that they be fired. At the very least, their bosses will quietly disapprove and their potential for advancement and new opportunities will shrink. Maybe they would open up if you talked to them nicely, but chances are that they just don’t trust you.