It has attracted national media attention. Politico calls it “a bitter campaign”. The Washington Post calls it a “soap opera”. Candidate Matt Bevin calls it a “food fight”:
This kind of shady back-room dealing sounds like something out of House of Cards.
Conservative Review’s Nate Madden and National Review Online’s Brendan Bordelon have been doing some old-fashioned investigative journalism. Here’s the background: Under Obamacare, if Congress had to get health insurance through a government “exchange” like ordinary Americans, it would mean
giving up government-subsidized health-care contributions of between $5,000 and $10,000 per person. The White House scrambled to find a way to allow congressional employees to keep those subsidies. In Washington, D.C., only the small-business exchange allowed them to do so. After secret meetings with House speaker John Boehner in 2013, President Obama instructed the Office of Personnel Management to allow Congress to file for classification as a small business, despite the fact that the law defines a small business as having no more than 50 employees and the House and Senate together employ tens of thousands.
‘unlike entities supported by government “investments” . . . Walmart reliably keeps its end of the bargain’
May 6, 2015
Kevin Williamson at NRO has a good line about the comparative behavior of the free market and the government:
A poor black man from Baltimore, or a poor white man from eastern Kentucky, would have to jump through a great many hoops before he would be granted a job interview with Professor Hyman’s former colleagues at McKinsey or his current colleagues at Cornell. But a man with $10 in his hand is the same as any other man with $10 in his hand, regardless of race, background, or accent, when he is standing at the register at Walmart or Target. And unlike entities supported by government “investments” — like Atlanta’s schools or Baltimore’s police — Walmart reliably keeps its end of the bargain: You pay Walmart $20 for a pair of shoes, you get the shoes.
‘Jihadist Flypaper’
May 5, 2015
Continuing the discussion of the weekend’s victory for free speech in Texas, Jim Geraghty gets in some good lines.
Is it just me, or have we just invented a form of Islamist/jihadist/ISIS flypaper?
They wore body armor. They carried assault rifles. And one had declared loyalty to ISIS.
This is very good news. Ten years after the Danish newspaper the Jyllands-Posten took a stand for freedom by publishing a dozen drawings of Mohammed, America has produced some high-profile public Mohammed drawings of our own: The American Freedom Defense Initiative organized a big Mohammed Art Exhibit & Contest in Garland, Texas on Sunday, May 3rd (you heard it here first). See some of the drawings here (warning: some rude content). Via Creeping Sharia, Breitbart has some more of the drawings. (Apparently they received hundreds of entries in all.)
Enjoyment and Contemplation 