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The Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez has a great article on the left’s hysteria over the Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial over the weekend. Noting first Clive Crook’s curious assertion in The Atlantic that the rally was a love-fest for Glenn Beck. Fernandez pinpoints the problem with the liberal perspective:

But the cause of Crook’s perplexity is equally obvious. He’s starting off at the wrong end of the argument. While Glenn Beck may have genuine fans, the attendance at the “Restoring Honor” rally wasn’t driven by people running to Beck so much as propelled by people running away from “the uncomprehending godless elite”. If Brook wants to understand why so many he should look in the mirror and ask, ‘why so few’?

The Washington elite sees everything through its particular prism. Nancy Pelosi, for example, called for an investigation into whoever was ‘ginning up’ opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque because in her universe, no grass grows unless it is astroturf. Similarly Crook cannot imagine the such crowds at the Mall as drawn by anything other than mass hysteria and ignorance. It may never occur to him to recall the words, ‘therefore send not know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

Just as I cautioned my fellow conservatives not to despair over the left’s huge success in 2008, we may be faced with despondent liberals who fret that the human race has descended into darkness in late 2010. My distaste for the Beck-types in the conservative media, who appear hysterical over the normal swings in political moods in this country, extends to the left’s purveyors of gloom as well. They poison the well with alarmism and historical comparisons stripped of context.

The American people are better than all of the pundits, right and left. The people at the Restoring Honor rally are American people, just like the people at any campaign rally for candidate Obama during the last election. They are not devotees of a new secular religion or anti-American nutjobs hoping to usher in a theocracy or socialist utopia. They are Americans.

This election will be a course correction because the Democrats misread their “mandate”. Running as a moderate, “let us all get along” unifier, Obama proved to be a doctrinaire liberal, unwilling to compromise with the minority party. In the confusion after the financial crisis, with the salve of the bank bailout already applied by the last Congress, the Democrats pushed through a pork-laden stimulus bill, and they thought the voters would confuse the two. Now, with the public’s attention focused on huge debts, they resort to the bankrupt meme “but Bush passed the bank bailouts!” to try and perpetuate the confusion. But there is no confusion.

The Democrats took over the Congress in 2006, and deficits ballooned after that. Bush issued his first vetoes, but the tide was rising. The financial crisis presented a horrible scenario of complete collapse, and the bank bailouts, as distasteful as they were, did avoid a calamity. The ensuring stimulus and health care bill in 2010 were opportunistic and unnecessary. The Democrats thought the people weren’t looking.

But the American people are smarter than that. They routinely remake their government every two years, and most times, they vote their assent to their legislature and send incumbents back to Washington. 2010 will be different because, well, 2008 and 2009 were different.

The Democrats forgot the American people. But the American people have not forgotten the Democrats.

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Colleges provide low cost health services for their generally healthy population of young people, including low cost health insurance.

The policies match the needs of the population, the members of which are more likely to injure themselves kite surfing than suffer the effects of a chronic disease. But alas, the student population, who voted overwhelmingly for candidate Obama, may be heading straight for a real-life education on unintended consequences:

Without a number of changes, it may be impossible to continue to offer student health plans, says a letter that the American Council on Education sent Aug. 12 to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, signed by 12 other trade associations that represent colleges.

Additionally, the colleges say that some provisions of the law don’t apply to their policies, including those that require insurers to spend at least 80 percent of their revenue on medical care and that bar them from setting annual coverage caps.

At issue is the way the policies are made. You see, these policies are intended to meet the customer’s needs, not Washington’s requirements. Damn those evil marketers! NY Attorney General General Andrew Cuomo has been investigating them:

His investigation has found that policies offered to New York students were inexpensive, ranging from as little as $100 a school year to more than $2,500, but that the benefits also vary widely, with some capping annual coverage at $25,000 or setting per-illness caps as low as $700.

“Buying these kinds of low-quality products with low premiums enables colleges” to keep students’ costs down. “But the problem is the protection provided students under the plans isn’t sufficient,” said Mark Rukavina of the Access Project, an advocacy group in Boston that’s studied student health plans. “If you are a student who needs care, given the caps on benefits, you are in trouble.”

The solution, of course, will be to ensure the students have full coverage, and increase taxes on college graduates to compensate for the increased cost of coverage. Someone will have to pay for it, and I propose that we abandon the idea of taxing the uneducated to support those in college. Instead, let’s tax the educated elites, who benefit the most from our emphasis on higher education. “Educated elites” are defined as those with more education than me.

Perhaps a top rate of 78% would suffice for all phDs, 60% for those with Masters degrees, and 48% for Bachelor’s degrees. Because society has bestowed respect, an invaluable gift, upon those with degrees, we should tax all income of individuals with degrees at those rates rather than enriching them further with a graduated income tax. After all, some graduates have artificially reduced their income by pursuing careers in lower paying jobs in non-profits, volunteering their talents to help third-world victims and assisting the inner-city poor. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

It might be nice to present each new graduate with a pro-forma invoice showing their future tax burden, based upon annual expected earnings rather than actual earnings. Or better yet, let’s provide the young college-bound student, before his 18th birthday, with his expected future tax bill should all his proposed idealism be enacted into law.

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Like many libertarians, I’m not impressed by efforts to resist the tide of change in social mores, especially in the arena of so-called “gay rights”. George Will expressed it best when he said that to the coming generation, being gay is about as remarkable as being left handed. I am more concerned about the traditional … yes, traditional … threats to liberty. As I noted when an anti-gay activist was booed at a Conservative Action Political Committee event:

Finding the right balance between maximum freedom, smallest government, and social order is difficult. But if the choice is between limiting the reach of government into our daily lives and limiting access to political activism by gay people, it might be instructive to take this simple three question test:

Choose one answer in each question:
Within the last 500 years, which one of the following groups has wrongly imprisoned, tortured, and executed people in violation of natural law:
A. Governments
B. Gay people

Within the last 500 years, which one of the following has extracted onerous taxes from people, often without giving them the right to be represented:
A. Governments
B. Gay people

Within the last 500 years, which one of the following has restricted various liberties, including property rights, religious liberty and freedom of speech:
A. Governments
B. Gay people

My conservative tendencies recoil at a judge invalidating a vote of the people, although the rationale of doing so to prevent a “tyranny of the majority” is a sound one. Proposition 8 is a study in conflict for me. I didn’t like the state supreme court declaring gay marriage a right because we were very close to deciding the issue through our elected legislature (California’s legislature had passed a gay marriage bill, but it was vetoed — improperly, in my view — by the governor). I opposed Proposition 8 on the grounds that we had 5 months of gay marriage, and outlawing it would produce an untenable situation. You simply cannot have two classes within the same group of people, those lucky enough to fall in love and marry during the five months of legal gay marriage, and the rest of the gay community that would not be allowed to marry.

My concern with the courts usurping the issue is that it prevents rational discourse of the issue on its merits. Instead, you have dogmatic and extreme statements from both sides of the issue, comparing the decision to to either Brown v Board of Education or Dred Scott. Like Roe v Wade, I worry that the court’s intervention will stall a political decision that would be accepted by all the people as a natural outgrowth of our democracy.

There are some voices I agree with, like Jonathan Adler writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, who comes close to my view:

Marriage, in my view, is first and foremost a private institution and insofar as the state has anything to say in who gets married, I don’t think it should distinguish between gay and straight couples. If two men or two women want to solemnize their love for one another, the government should not stand in their way. I’ve also been convinced by Dale Carpenter’s arguments that recognizing gay marriage is the prudent — and dare I say “conservative” — thing to do. But I am not convinced that gay marriage is required by the 14th Amendment, and Judge Walker’s opinion has not changed my view. He makes many sweeping pronouncements and factual findings with which I agree, but I don’t think his opinion rests on particularly solid legal ground, let alone a proper interpretation of the constitution’s text.

I would expand it to say that the only reason for government to recognize marriage is because of the benefits it provides to the population at large, as married people are generally more stable, provide better homes for children, and drain the least resources from society. Those benefits flow from both heterosexual and homosexual unions, with the possible edge going to homosexual unions (if the stereotype of the promiscuous male homosexual is to be believed).

For some legal analysts, the decision will reside in one man: Supreme Court Justice Kennedy. He is the most likely one to get an appeal request if the 9th District refuses to overturn the decision. As Prof. Rick Hasen at the Election Law blog notes:

I have little doubt that if the Ninth Circuit denies a stay, that a stay request will be filed with Justice Kennedy, who will then refer the matter to the whole court.

Getting an emergency stay request before Justice Kennedy during the Court’s summer recess is going to put a lot of pressure on the Justice to decide this matter quickly, and without the opportunity for the reflection that we’ve heard Justice Kennedy engages in when considering more difficult cases. The pressure of time could lead him to grant the stay, and to be put off by the plaintiffs for having brought the case in the first place.

With a h/t to Eugene Volokh for the reference above, and Volokh blogger Orin Kerr for the quote below, I have to say the libertarians have the right perspective on this one. Kerr examines Kennedy’s ruling in a past case that is on point with Judge Walker’s “fact finding” in striking down Proposition 8:

If the standard of review ends up being “rational basis,” the factual record is largely beside the point. Here’s how Justice Kennedy described the role of the factual record in conducting rational basis review in Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312 (1993), with citations omitted and emphasis added:

A State . . . has no obligation to produce evidence to sustain the rationality of a statutory classification. “[A] legislative choice is not subject to courtroom factfinding and may be based on rational speculation unsupported by evidence or empirical data.” A statute is presumed constitutional, , and “[t]he burden is on the one attacking the legislative arrangement to negative every conceivable basis which might support it,” whether or not the basis has a foundation in the record. Finally, courts are compelled under rational-basis review to accept a legislature’s generalizations even when there is an imperfect fit between means and ends. A classification does not fail rational-basis review because it “ ‘is not made with mathematical nicety or because in practice it results in some inequality.’ “The problems of government are practical ones and may justify, if they do not require, rough accommodations-illogical, it may be, and unscientific.”

Given that the rational basis standard “is not subject to courtroom factfinding,” the Court isn’t likely to pay much attention to Judge Walker’s courtroom factfinding if the law is subject only to rational basis scrutiny. It’s a different story if some heightened scrutiny applies — at that point the factual record really matters.

By short circuiting the legislative process, heretofore headed inexorably toward securing rights to gay marriage, Judge Walker may have delayed the very thing he sought. If the rhetoric from either side is any indication, rational discourse and the ultimate resolution may take another generation instead of a few years.

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I am the guy with an NRA sticker on the back of my Prius. Some people say I’m conflicted, but I see no problem with frugality.

But I’m paying the “hybrid premium”, you say? Let’s examine that common objection to the Prius.

My daily commute is 90 miles round trip, about 20,000 miles a year just back and forth to work. My Prius has 125,000 miles on it, and I’ll probably trade it in sometime in the next two years. There are at least two ways to approach the cost of driving; one is to buy a more economical car, even if it doesn’t eke out the 51 miles per gallon I get with my Prius. The other is to calculate the total cost of ownership. So I sat down and did some calculations, with just the vehicle purchase price and gas cost in mind (both cars can be expected to have about the same cost of maintenance over 150,000 miles).

The 2012 Ford Focus looks to be a great economy car. It is expected to cost in the $18,000 range, and should get somewhere around 28 MPG. Great mileage. I calculated the total cost of driving 150,000 miles — my average mileage when I trade a car in — at a cost of $3.50 a gallon. The Focus would use 5,357 gallons of gas at a cost of $18,749. That makes the total cost, car purchase plus gasoline, at $36,749.

The 2011 Toyota Prius will be the same as this year’s model, and pricing is expected to be similar at $23,000. At 51 MPG I’m getting with my current Prius, it will burn 2,941 gallons of gas over its 150,000 mile life. Applying that $3.50 cost shows the Prius total gas cost to be $10,294. Add that to the purchase cost of the car, and the Prius costs $33,294 over its life.

The more expensive Prius ends up costing less … $3,455 less … than the less expensive Focus.

Americans don’t buy cars just with personal economics in mind; the ride, comfort, handling and status of a car all figure into the equation. So cost alone won’t be the determining factor.

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The Daily Caller continues its expose of the media’s suicide pact, as found in the archives of the Journolist. Sarah Spitz, a “producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center” spewed what can only be considered a craven, despicable and immoral fantasy about watching Rush Limbaugh suffering a heart attack:

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.

Her vile hatred now laid bare, Spitz doesn’t deny writing it, but issues this lame apology:

I made poorly considered remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private email discussion group from my personal email account. As a publicist, I realize more than anyone that is no excuse for irresponsible behavior. I apologize to anyone I may have offended and I regret these comments greatly; they do not reflect the values by which I conduct my life.

Evidently, the “values by which I conduct my life” do not include apologizing honestly for mistakes. She tips her hand that the comments were meant to be kept among her friends … the phrases “private email discussion group” and “personal email account” are in this vein. This implies that it is not the words themselves that were wrong, and that she is sorry she said them, but simply that no one except fellow haters should have seen them.

The weasel words “as a publicist” and “anyone I may have offended” show that Ms. Spitz is not repentant about anything. Like any other person engaging in hate speech, she is still rationalizing away the horrible truth: she is filled with destructive hate, and should seek counseling.

A truly repentant apology would acknowledge that the statements were wrong, and not merely “regrettable”. It would have started with a phone call or email to the person she wronged, apologizing directly. And the public apology would be unequivocal:

“I am sorry for my comments. I have reached out to Rush Limbaugh and apologized to him, and I apologize to his family, friends and fans via this public forum. I can imagine how offended and hurt I would feel if I read something similar about me, or about any one I loved. I was wrong to even contemplate such thoughts, much less express them in an email list among colleagues. We all share a common humanity, and we all deserve more respect than I showed. While I know an apology is a poor substitute for inflicting the pain I caused, I hope that those I have hurt can forgive me.”

But that’s not the “apology” she wrote. Instead, she plays the Muszak of modern political apologies, and wants us to believe it is Mozart.