The “hugest” could be considered the election of a Republican Tea Partier as governor of Kentucky.

Matt Bevin, a Republican political novice, wealthy Louisville businessman and Tea Party favorite, was elected Kentucky’s next governor on Tuesday and swept fellow Republicans into statewide office with him. The stunning victory heralds a new era in a state where Democrats have held the governor’s mansion for all but four of the last 44 years.

In beating his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Jack Conway, by almost nine percentage points, Mr. Bevin, 48, shocked people in his own party, who believed that the climate in Kentucky was ripe for a Republican but feared that Mr. Bevin, a charismatic conservative with a go-it-alone style, was too far out of the mainstream and too inexperienced to win.

A few things about this. First, I have noted before that when Democrats get to run places like the big cities of Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore for decades, with few to no Republicans in that time, and when we see these cities crumbling when they have this free hand, it’s hard to understand why the voters in those cities keep electing folks from the same party over and over. It’s like they think that the same guys who got them into this hole can now dig them out of it using the same shovels. I’m hoping that this signals a change in the voters of Kentucky; that they’ve finally said, “Enough is enough.”

Bevin, as noted above in the NY Times article, was a Tea-Party-type. The Republican establishment was concerned that he was too conservative, or “too far out of the mainstream” to win. It appears that perhaps the “mainstream” isn’t necessarily where those pundits think it is. It may be running more to the political Right.

How far to the Right? This is one of the major issues Bevin ran on:

Mr. Obama’s health care law was an especially contentious issue in the race, and some see the Bevin victory as a rebuke to Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, who expanded Medicaid under the measure. An estimated 420,000 Kentuckians, nearly 10 percent of the state’s population, now have coverage as a result. Mr. Bevin, a fierce opponent of the health care law, at first said he would reverse it, but has since softened his position and said he would stop enrolling new people but would not take coverage from those who had it.

And this position even won over some reliable Democratic voters.

Michelle Zimmerman, a 43-year-old nurse, said she voted Democratic in the last two governor’s races but had voted for Mr. Bevin this time; she found his views more in keeping with her values. “I’m pretty conservative,” she said. One factor in her decision: She and her husband say they can no longer afford their health insurance because the premiums have gone up since the Affordable Care Act went into effect.

Broken promises tend to do that. ObamaCare is not really an issue Democrats can afford to run on.

And this is another reason I’m always very leery of polls, in spite of the statistical analysis that they can back up their numbers with. In this case, Bevin was behind in every poll right up until the end. And then he won by 8 percentage points. Keep that in mind as you see the endless stream of polling data for the 2016 Presidential election.

One more thing about the Kentucky election is that Bevin’s lieutenant governor running-mate, Jenean Hampton, is now the first African American elected to statewide office ever in the state’s history. And she’s a Republican. Just sayin’.

In other results, the Sheriff of San Francisco, Ross Mirkarimi, was defeated. This news report shows that his defeat probably came as the result of a number of incidents of incompetence, not the least of which was this:

Mirkarimi was the subject of national criticism after Mexican illegal immigrant Francisco Sanchez allegedly shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on San Francisco’s waterfront July 1. Sanchez had been released from Mirkarimi’s jail in March even though federal immigration officials had requested he be detained for possible deportation.

For the 6th time. It may not have been the “sanctuary city” issue that removed him, but at least he won’t be there to continue the lawlessness. Ignoring federal law is not on any city sheriff’s list of duties.

In Ohio, voters shot down a proposal to legalize medical and recreational marijuana 65% to 35%. This had two strikes against it, in my mind. By including recreational use, it got more No votes. I’m betting that Ohioans understand the need for medial marijuana, but don’t want to swell the ranks of the pot-heads. In Georgia, our legislature passed a medical marijuana bill last session that had wide support. Also, there was this.

Failure of the proposed state constitutional amendment followed an expensive campaign, a legal fight over its ballot wording, an investigation into petition signatures — and, predominantly, a counter campaign against a network of 10 exclusive growing sites it would have created.

A state-created oligopoly is generally not a good thing. I think  that if you get rid of those two things, it, too, passes by a wide margin.

In Houston, a measure was defeated (quite soundly; two-to-one) that would … well, I’ll let Erick Erickson describe it.

In Houston, TX, perverts and the mentally ill worked together with the gay rights lobby to let men use women’s bathrooms. They called anyone who disagreed with them “bigots.” They harassed preachers. The Mayor of Houston, an aggressive gay rights activist, demanded preachers’ hand over their sermons.

Tonight, the people of Houston fought back and rejected the attempt to allow perverts, the mentally ill, liars, and others who want to get in to opposite sex bathrooms.

Christians and common sense won. Perverts, the mentally ill, and the gay rights mob lost.

It was billed by its supporters to be more about equal rights, but opponents, by zeroing in on one of the results of this measure, showed that what is considered a “right” by liberals has expanded to the absurd. Houston recognized that.

In Virginia, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and the state’s governor got something of a slap in the face.

Republicans held onto the Virginia Senate in fiercely contested elections Tuesday, leaving Gov. Terry McAuliffe without legislative leverage or political momentum as he works to deliver Virginia for his friend and ally Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016.

The outcome was a blunt rebuke to McAuliffe (D), who had barnstormed the state with 24 events over the past four days and who portrayed the elections as a make-or-break moment for his progressive agenda.

And some moderate Republicans were replaced by more conservative ones, as well.

Overall, a good night for Republicans and conservatives. Erick Erickson summed it up this way.

Across the country last night, voters rejected not just Barack Obama’s party, but also his party’s ideology. The voters rejected candidates who advocated for gun-control, they rejected candidates who sought the expansion of Obamacare, they rejected the Democrats’ environmental policies, and they rejected the secularist, gay-rights agenda. The Republican Party, at one time, was allegedly a party that could not win in New England. Now, Republicans control 68 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the United States, 33 of 50 Governor’s Mansions, the United States House of Representatives, and the United States Senate.

But he also finds that the Republican party still doesn’t seem to get the lesson.

The only thing more amazing than the sweeping scope of Republican wins and the rejection of the left’s agenda is that Republicans in Congress continue to cave to Barack Obama and refuse to use their constitutional powers to restrain him.

Conservatives should be feeling good about this. I think it may show, however, that the national establishment Republican party isn’t really all that conservative. It needs to be if it is to properly reflect it’s constituents, and indeed most of the country.

In a new memoir titled "Secretary of Peace: 25 years with the Nobel Prize," Geir Lundestad, the non-voting Director of the Nobel Institute until 2014, writes that he has developed doubts about the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to grant Obama the Nobel Peace Prize over the past six years. While the prize was designed to encourage the new president, it may have not have worked out as intended.

When I posted this on the “Consider This!” Facebook page (my podcast), listener Pil Orbison said that, while President Obama wasn’t a Helen Keller or Indira Ghandi, no two Nobel prizes are alike. She said that what Obama did for the economy and healthcare certainly gave others a better outlook on our nation, and no other President could have done that.

Let’s set aside whether or not what Obama has done has improved either the economy or health care. The Nobel Peace prize is for what you actually have accomplished, not for what the committee hopes you will accomplish. That standard isn’t applied to any other Nobel Prize. They don’t give out the Chemistry award for what someone might discover, or to someone who shows promise in that field. The Peace Prize has, or should have, the same criteria.

Sure, the Nobel committee can have whatever criteria they want, but this article shows what can happen when you pin your hopes on a guy just because of his politics or the promises he made on the campaign trail. Politicizing the prize cheapens it for those who truly deserve it; people like Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malala Yousafzai, or PLO terrorist Yassar Arafat. Oh yes, he got one too.

Just 6 hours after the shooting, and when details about it were still very sketchy, President Obama came out with guns blazing, so to speak, pushing for more gun control. We didn’t know the name of the shooter, we didn’t know how he got the guns, and we weren’t even sure of the casualty count. But none of that mattered to him. I understand and share his anger and frustration at the various mass shootings in this country, but even before we knew any relevant details, he was out there calling again for “common-sense gun-safety laws”.

This is a classic mistake that politicians of both parties make; jumping the gun, so to speak, in order to make political points while the emotions are high. They propose new laws in order to be seen as doing something, even if that something would have done nothing to solve the problem at hand. They try to get their agenda passed because something must be done, and this is something, so it must be done.

Those who despise the Patriot Act should realize that part of the reason it passed was because it was “something”. I think the Patriot Act has actually kept us safer, but it did indeed go too far in certain areas and needed to be scaled back. Passing gun control while emotions are high, and before we even know where our current laws failed, would make the same exact mistake. Keep that in mind. The President said that he thought this issue should be politicized. Sorry, but that’s the worst idea ever.

One thing I’m concerned about is that banning or confiscating all guns would result from a too-quick reaction. Now, before you say, “Come on, no one’s suggesting banning guns”, let me give you a quote from President Obama’s press conference.

We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.

So then, what were Great Britain’s and Australia’s answer to the problem? Banning and confiscating guns. So yes, people are talking about it. The President himself is talking about it. So you can’t just dismiss that argument.

And has it worked for those countries? No, it hasn’t. In the case of the UK, a decade after a near total ban on guns, gun crime had doubled. And what about Australia, where they banned many guns and did a forced buy-back program? From 1997 until 2003, gun murders did in fact drop. Three percent. After 6 years, they dropped just 3%. Is it working for them? I guess it depends on your definition of “working”. Oh, and during that same time period, firearm deaths in America drop by 10 times as much.

And one more thing to consider regarding gun control laws; these mass shootings keep happening in gun-free zones. Some on the Left have tried to argue that the UCC campus was not a gun-free zone, because Oregon law allows those with state concealed-carry permits to bring them on campus. But campus rules don’t allow you to bring them into buildings, which is their right. And if you don’t have a concealed carry permit, the school doesn’t allow you to have a gun without their expressed permission. So it’s as gun-free as they could possibly make it, legally.

The bottom line: Gun control isn’t working. Criminals choose the path of least resistance, and gun-free zones, and unarmed citizens, are right in the middle of that path.

So the obvious question is; what does work? Well, if you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, you probably know what I’m going to say. So instead of rehashing my thoughts, you can click here to hear or see (via full transcript) any episode where gun control is mentioned. In that category you’ll find episodes talking about how Israel has stopped school shootings by allowing teachers who have served in the Israeli Defense Force to carry guns at school and on field trips, or the result of the Washington, DC gun ban, or the Harvard study showing that banning guns doesn’t decrease the murder rate, or the UN maps showing that where gun ownership is higher the homicide rate is lower, or how relaxing some of the incredibly restrictive gun law in Chicago dropped the homicide rate to record lows.

Dispute the facts presented if you like, but the President appealed to the authority of opinion polls rather than the facts. He mockingly asked whether people really believe what we need are more guns. He also said, “We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.” Yes, well tell that to the people in the cities of Chicago, or Baltimore, or Washington, DC, or any of a number of other cities where gun restrictions have served to only increase the deaths.

You know what 9 dead and 7 wounded is called in Chicago? Saturday. The facts are out there, Mr. President, if you have the courage and honesty to deal with them. Otherwise, you can go off half-cocked, so to speak, appeal to emotions, and pass bad legislation. Your choice.

I share the President’s frustration regarding mass shootings in this country. I also see how the steps we’ve taken to reduce them have failed miserably; something he apparently doesn’t notice. Or won’t.

You’re the loan officer. What do you do? The guy’s telling you he needs the money to eat and to pay his other bills. But he didn’t change his free-spending ways like he promised and now he’s in a bind again. Is it prudent to give more cash to a guy who can’t change his spending habits, and can’t repay what you’ve already given him?

No, it’s not. That’s not being heartless; that’s just being a good steward of the bank’s money. And if you keep giving this guy money, and he doesn’t repay it, what about the depositors who’s money it is that you’re handing out? When they need their money, where will it be?

The guy I’m talking about is the country of Greece. And just like Margaret Thatcher’s description, their socialism was working great, right up until they ran out of other people’s money. You can only soak the rich for so long, and so they went to the European and international banks for bailouts. And more bailouts. But each time, though they promised to mend their free-spending, socialist ways, they didn’t and wound up in the same situation.

There are 2 major problems that this situation has highlighted. First, the European Union has certainly caused state sovereignty to seep out of the individual countries, such that it’s understandable why citizens of Greece would be insisting that the EU be held at least partially responsible. If Greece must bow to the EU on some matters, the EU must be willing to help. With great power-grabs come great responsibility.

But the other major problem is one that our own country needs to come to terms with. The Greek government got in over its head with promises it made to various groups. Welfare, pension, and other government payments got to the point where merely servicing those was drowning the country in debt. They made the promises, so they had to keep them. And when the government over-promised, the people voted in politicians who would give them more stuff, until the government had to tax and tax, and borrow and borrow, to keep up. And all that taxing and borrowing reduces economic growth and devalues the currency. So more taxing and more borrowing, and the death spiral continues.

So then, who should pay for the bad choices of the Greek people? Should we allow the Greeks to default on their obligations, and then have the German and the French people have to bail out their banks? How in the world is that fair? “But what about the Greek people?”, those on the Left were asking when those Greek people voted to stiff their creditors. “Why should they be punished for the actions of their government?” Well, because they voted for the guy who squandered the money and walked into the bank to ask for more. And if the Greeks are let off the hook, there are other European countries looking to try the same ploy. I’m looking at you, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The problem is that the Greeks poked a big hole in their own boat, and no amount of bailing by themselves will keep them afloat. More bailers, if you will, would help, and the EU is going to continue to help in the bailing, but the Greeks need to agree to quit making the hole bigger, and take steps to plug it. That’s going to take some hard choices on their part, but that’s the problem with socialism. Once you get used to the idea of free money and benefits, you get to thinking that they are your “right”. Going back to fiscal responsibility is a much harder road to travel.

The Greeks are learning that lesson. Well, I hope they are. I’m not so sure after they voted to default on their loans. I also hope that we’ll learn it, too. But I begin to wonder about my fellow countrymen when I see how popular presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is, who is an avowed socialist. “Ignore the News, Vote for Sanders!”

Two years to the day later, those same liberals overrode those immensely important marriage laws in 14 states and proclaimed same-sex marriage from the federal bench. And it once again proves something I’ve said on this podcast so many times; for the Left, it is all about politics. Constitutional matters, federalism, and some supposed regard for the rule of law, all of it, take a back seat in order to get their political agenda passed. The individual state’s ability to define what marriage is, is of central relevance, right up until it isn’t.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his dissent, noted this, "This court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us.” Right, that’s what states were allowed to determine on their own, and in fact it was going that way with, as I said, only 14 states left holding on to traditional marriage.

I will say, as an aside, that this thought by Roberts – that the court is not a legislature – was rather ironic, given his previous rewriting of ObamaCare. It’s like two, two, two Supreme Court chief justices in one!

Let me ask you this; which would have been better? Should the Court have allowed same-sex marriage to work its way through the culture, gaining support as it had been doing, or do what it did and just impose it by judicial fiat? Before you answer, consider how well that worked for abortion. It is still a hard fought battle in the culture, and in the state legislatures as well. Rather than let it organically happen democratically, abortion was imposed, and the backlash has been with us ever since. I oppose abortion, and I also oppose a government that will override me and my state’s rights to govern ourselves. I oppose same-sex marriage, but again, the Court’s liberals (and if I may, it seems that liberals in general) have no problem holding state law immensely important one day, and the next day overruling them, so long as their political agenda is served. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the process is just as important as the outcome, and the process, both here and with the ObamaCare ruling, are deeply flawed and set a bad precedent for future courts to reinterpret words, and override the will of the people.

There have been many predictions about what comes next. Some, on the pages of TIME magazine, are already pushing polygamy. That effort has been going on for years, but it got a boost with this ruling. There are those already calling for the abolishing of tax exempt status for religious institutions – churches and religious schools – that won’t teach the liberal orthodoxy about same-sex marriage or won’t perform them. These are likely coming down the road. But, as Erick Erickson noted, the first thing to come will be … silence. The day of the ruling, a newspaper in Pennsylvania said they wouldn’t print letters to the editor on the topic anymore. I have a friend who, when asked what the Bible says about homosexuality, gave a straight answer (so to speak) and was immediately pounced on for being bigoted and hateful. You don’t have to thump anyone with a Bible anymore; it just has to be in the room for someone to claim you’re evil.

So silence will fall, but just because you don’t hear a particular opinion anymore doesn’t mean it’s not there. However, if a baker or a photographer can be put out of business for not participating in a same-sex wedding, how much more of a target are those churches that won’t perform them for what 5 justices have now deemed is a “fundamental right”?

With the ObamaCare and the same-sex marriage rulings, the court has done two things. It has taken power away from you at both the federal and state level.

If you ever complained that Washington, DC was unresponsive to the needs of the people, the ObamaCare ruling should bother you, at the very least. That is, unless you’re celebrating the topic of the ruling, then the process is likely nothing you’re concerned about. I’ve seen it in my Facebook feed. However, from this day forward, federal agencies like the IRS, and all the way up to the President, don’t have to restrain themselves to the actual wording of the laws Congress passes. ObamaCare said you got subsidies through exchanges established by the states, but an unelected federal agency changed that. Your representatives, and by extension you, have lost more influence. The government can do what it wants.

And if you ever complained that your state government was unresponsive to the needs of the people, the same-sex marriage ruling should bother you, too. But again, the winners are too busy celebrating to see how this, too, has erased their influence and yours at the state level. It just takes 5 Supreme Court justices to invalidate anything a state does. Vote however you want, call your state representative as much as you want, but in the end, a majority of 9 unelected justices get the final say for over 320 million people. One man, one vote, indeed.

If you celebrate these rulings, and if you’ve ever been a proponent of power to the people, or you’ve ever put forth the idea that every vote should count, you either have not been paying attention, or have no idea at all what those phrases even mean. At least, I’d really hope that this can all be explained by ignorance and apathy, because the alternative is worse; willful misuse of the founding principles of this country, and that will bring us down faster than any law you can pass.

The Left loves the platitude “Government is just another name for the things we choose to do together.” Of course, by the phrase “choose to do together”, they mean “use a panel of 9 lawyers to force everyone to do what they want”. Platitudes are useful in the meantime, but in the end, for the Left, it’s all about politics.

Chicago, Illinois; the safest city in the US because of its strict gun control laws. Heh, no, not really. It’s got some of the highest gun crime in the country in spite of, or perhaps because of, it’s strict gun control laws. Gun control is one of those things that liberals insist works in spite of the reality to the contrary.

Here’s another: in spite of Chicago being a liberal paradise – not having a single Republican governor for over 80 years since 1931 – somehow the city’s economy is crumbling. It’s Democrats who keep insisting that they, and not Republicans, know how to bring the poor out of their situation, and believe that if we only spend enough money on a problem, it’ll get solved by government. And yet Moody’s Investor Service, which rates, among other things, the municipal bonds of cities, has downgraded Chicago’s credit rating to junk level. It also said that the city’s future outlook is negative, which I guess means that someday the credit rating could drop to “extra junk”, “junkier”, or maybe “double secret junk”.

I’ve mentioned Detroit, Michigan in the past. They’ve had Democratic mayors since 1962; about 30 years less than Chicago, but still over half a century. And yet the economy and infrastructure have seen better days. The city of Baltimore, Maryland was in the headlines for riots over the death of a black youth in police custody, and the state of its economy came to the fore during that; an economy where poverty was still rampant. And its mayors? Only 1 Republican since 1947.

In all these cases, and many others, the promise of liberal policies has not lived anywhere close to expectations. It has been said (a lot) that one definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Now, this might be a crazy idea, but what if cities like these started voting in Republicans for a change? If half a century of single (or nearly-single) party rule hasn’t helped, how about giving some new ideas a chance? This would mean giving them a shot for more than 1 or two terms, of course. Decades of mismanagement won’t be overturned overnight.

Will Republicans screw it up? Could be. Maybe. But how will you know until you give it a try? They might just start to turn things around. Or you could just keep doing the same thing you’ve done for two generations, and hope against hope for a different result.

President Obama recently announced that his Presidential Library will be built on the south side of the bankrupt city of Chicago. I can’t help but think that’s fitting.

The Obama administration has been touting any good news they can find about the economy, but in Los Angeles, California, things aren’t going well for the city’s poor.

Los Angeles County’s homeless population has grown by 12 percent during the past two years amid a sluggish economic recovery that has left the poorest residents of the second-largest U.S. metropolitan area falling farther behind, a study released on Monday found.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s report cited stagnant or falling wages among the lowest-income earners, a local jobless rate that remains above state and national averages, and a worsening lack of affordable housing.

I note this for two reasons. Number one, if the President of the United States was a Republican, this would be national news. It’s always amazing how homelessness supposedly rears its ugly head during those administrations, but wire reports like this Reuters one get ignored during Democratic administrations.

And number two, Los Angeles has had only1 Republican mayor since 1961. Just sayin’.

Are we spending enough on education? The money going toward it keeps getting higher and higher, but the test scores don’t get any better. The governor of Maryland recently decided not to take $67 million that state lawmakers set aside as an increase to education spending, and instead use it to shore up the state’s pension system. Public employee pensions – those hard-bargained union benefits – have been literally bankrupting cities across the country, and the governor is trying to keep the promise the state government made to state workers. But at the price of children’s education?

Well, consider this. Other state agencies are getting their budgets cut at a time when Maryland’s education spending, now at $7.5 billion, is a record amount for them. And here are some details from the governor:

Hogan suggested Baltimore mismanaged the resources it already had. He accused officials of “losing” $70 million over the course of a year and cited a Baltimore Sun investigation that showed schools paid out $42 million in generous leave policies. He also pointed out that many local governments spend roughly half their budgets on education, but the city spends less than 15 percent of its budget on schools.

“Baltimore City, unlike the rest of the state, is underfunding education,” Hogan said.

A governor calling for fiscal responsibility before throwing more money at a problem. Could it be that he’s…why yes, he’s a Republican.

But Democrats run the city, and in spite of getting $467 million from Obama’s stimulus package earmarked specifically for education, they’re still trying to convince you that Republicans hate children and don’t care about education because they won’t let the city just keep wasting what they have and getting more. Just a reminder; only 1 Republican mayor since 1947.

So am I just trying to point a finger of blame? Well, the problems are quite evident, and there’s been 1-party rule in these cities for at least a generation, so the way I see it, the finger points itself. All I’m saying is that if the same remedies are tried that have failed for so long, how can anyone with a new idea be considered “hateful”, especially if it hasn’t been tried?

Some might put the word “science” in the phrase “science of polling” in scare quotes, not convinced that it’s much of a science at all. I do have some respect for those whose lives are in various statistical occupations. It seems like a black art, but, for example, one pharmaceutical client I worked for years ago had a Quality Assurance group that tested the products coming into the warehouse before they could be shipped out, and they explained quite a bit to me.  I couldn’t relate what they said now – I really can’t remember it all – but basically, given a good random sample, they could give you a good reading on whether or not the batch that just came in was good enough to ship out. Yeah, the only way to be totally sure was to test it all, but to get close enough to 100% sure without going overboard, there was a lot of science backing up their procedures.

Sampling people, on the other hand, is nowhere near as straightforward as sampling pharmaceuticals. People can say one thing, and yet do another. Which apparently happened in a big way over in the UK recently, when the conservative Tories trounced the liberal Labor Party in national elections, gaining their first outright majority since 1992. This even though Nate Silver, the US polling expert, had a look at all the UK polls and proclaimed that a Tory win of a majority of seats in Parliament was “vanishingly small when the polls closed – around 1 in 500.”

So much for that prediction. But the predictive value of polls is lessened when the pollsters themselves hide some of their results. It happened in the UK, and it happens quite a bit, apparently. No pollster wants to publish results that wind up being way out of line with those from other polls. No one wants to be the outlier, but that’s what happened in the UK. A last-minute poll by one group got the percentages virtually dead on to what the voting results were, but they didn’t publish it, “chickening out”, as the group’s CEO explained. It’s a herd mentality that we see in news coverage as well.

What this herd mentality gets us are reporters that cover stories because other reporters are covering them. And because journalists tend to lean liberal and vote Democratic, it’s stories on the Left that get more coverage. That’s where the herd migrates. As I’ve mentioned before, that situation is fertile ground for a network like Fox News that will get the scoop on stories on the Right, because the herd is busy elsewhere.

So then, do pollsters migrate that way? Turns out, yes, they do. In the UK, polling companies have consistently exaggerated the liberal side of the equation since the 1970s. Try as they might to correct for this, it just keeps happening. Is this a liberal bias, exactly? Well, my question would be that, if it isn’t bias, wouldn’t you think that errors like this would happen in both directions and equalize themselves out? But it so often seems to get tilted one direction. If it’s not bias, then what is it?

In the UK, they have a group of voters they call “shy Tories”; people who give politically correct answers to pollsters, but then vote conservative anyway. This is one of the problems with the speech police that shun those who don’t tow the PC line; polls get skewed. This is not just a problem in the UK, either. Silver notes that it’s happening more and more across the globe. Not surprisingly, the Western World’s culture keeps getting more and more liberal, and while those on the Right may wish to say the right to avoid the hassle, at least voting is still done by secret ballot.

But can “shy conservatives” really explain decades of error that are so lopsided in showing an advantage to the Left? The big question is; if it isn’t pollster bias, how would all this look any different if it was?

Given such problems with polling, whatever the reason, how does this affect our politics? James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has speculated that liberal bias in news reporting can cause liberal politicians to underestimate the problems that their policy decisions are causing. The same thing goes for polling that tends to hide the conservative displeasure at those policies. Liberal politicians get an overly rosy view of how things are going, and thus, as Taranto suggests, make unforced errors regarding policies or campaigning because they don’t have a true picture.

Skewed polling can cut both ways, and is a disservice to all voters. An inflated poll number for a liberal politician could cause liberal voters to stay home, thinking their guy is inevitable, or it could cause conservative voters to stay home, thinking their guy is already doomed. Or both these conditions could occur, depressing voter turnout in general, and giving the few who do show up control over the many.

Of course the lesson there is, forget the polls and get out there and vote.

Another lesson is that commentators aren’t the best people to be telling political parties what lessons to learn. Here’s NBC’s Chuck Todd noting some of them.

If the Republicans should have learned a lesson if the UK conservatives lost, what should they learn if the UK conservatives won a major victory? Since the UK liberals lost, should the Democrats learn something? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

One problem I have with polls is when they ask people questions for which those people have no expertise. “What is the current state of the national economy?” is a pointless question to ask of those of us who have no economic expertise. It’s about like asking “How far is the Sun from the Earth?” In either case, the poll result doesn’t change reality, and reality can be discovered by means much more reliable than a poll.

States have been doing this ever since a Supreme Court decision said that the federal RFRA didn’t apply to the states. Most of the states that have one use language identical to the one Clinton signed. But while religious freedom used to be supported by Democrats, the rise of a particular protected class (and reliable Democratic voting bloc) changed all that; homosexuals. Once again, as we have seen so many times, politics trumps everything else for the Left, even, apparently, the Bill of Rights.

The fear being stoked is that this will allow Christian businesses to turn away gays just for being gay. Here are a couple of articles that are lists of frequently asked questions about the Indiana RFRA, and they explain, no, that sort of discrimination is not protected. If a Christian denies service to someone simply because they are gay, on the grounds that it’s a sin according to Christian doctrine, you would have a tough time proving those religious grounds in court. According to Christianity, we are all sinners. None of us are perfect. So that business owner would have to deny service to everyone, including him- or herself.

Participation, one way or another, in a same-sex marriage ceremony has been the typical cause of contention. And all of the examples that I’ve seen that have been taken to court are regarding business owners that would bake cakes, take pictures, or arrange flowers for a gay customer for any purpose other than a same-sex wedding ceremony. This is most definitely not discrimination against gays because they’re gay. It is, however, a religious objection to a ceremony that the business owner does not wish to participate in.

Let’s be clear. The purpose of these laws based on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act is simple. When you go to court, you can claim freedom of speech in your defense. You might not win, but it is something that you can claim and upon which you can make a case, and it must be taken into consideration. All RFRA does is ensure that you can claim freedom of religion, either individually or as a “closely-held corporation”, as the Supreme Court has put it. (If you believe corporations aren’t part of that freedom of religion, I wonder how you feel about corporations like the NY Times and CNN having freedom of speech.)

RFRA allows a person’s free exercise of religion to be “substantially burdened” by a law only if the law furthers a “compelling governmental interest”, and in the “least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” It does not invalidate all of Indiana’s other ordinances about discrimination based on sexual orientation. You don’t get to yell, “RFRA!”, and get magically exempted from them. This is not open season on anyone; gay, Jew, woman, what have you. And the best proof of that is that none of the states or the federal government, for almost a quarter of a century, have gone down anything like a slippery slope. All opponents of Indiana’s RFRA have are hypotheticals that have failed to materialize since 1993. The only discrimination so far has been against Christian business owners who would rather not participate in a specific ceremony, or in the instance of the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, not contribute to what they considered the taking of a life. This is not about gays, it’s about marriage. It’s not about women, it’s about abortion. It’s about religion, and the free exercise thereof, in spite of the efforts of celebrities like Apple’s Tim Cook, or actor Ashton Kutchner, to deflect blame and paint this as bigotry against individuals. It is denying a First Amendment protection that has been with us since the founding.

And I know there are Christians who would bake a cake or take pictures of a same-sex wedding ceremony. If they are OK with that, more power to them. There are different ways to make a moral statement. All I’m saying is that the government doesn’t get to decide how I act out my morality. They may decide that my morals don’t line up with community standards, but folks in Indiana can at least make the case that they otherwise could not, and the same case they could make today at the federal level.

President Bill Clinton, speaking at the 1993 RFRA signing, and about the Founding Fathers, said this, “And one of the reasons they worked so hard to get the first amendment into the Bill of Rights at the head of the class is that they well understood what could happen to this country, how both religion and Government could be perverted if there were not some space created and some protection provided. They knew that religion helps to give our people the character without which a democracy cannot survive.” Today, his party is now trying to sacrifice those protections on the altar of politics. I love the irony of that analogy, but I fear that they don’t fully understand the god they’re now serving.

Being argued today at the high court is King v Burwell, a lawsuit against ObamaCare (also known in some circles as the Affordable Care Act). This is a set of questions and answers that I imagine many people have about this.

Q: What is this case all about?

A: The crux of the issue is a 4-word phrase inside the massive law; “established by the States”. The subsidies supplied by the IRS, according to the text of the law, were to only go to those who applied for insurance via exchanges “established by the States”. If they used the federal exchange (HealthCare.gov), that is not “established by the States” so the subsidies wouldn’t apply.

That’s according to the plain language of the law, and according to Jonathan Gruber, a major influence in the creation of the law.

What happened was that the IRS gave out subsidies to those without state exchanges anyway. The lawsuit is saying that the government broke the law in doing so.

Q: What case is the government making?

A: That the rest of the law, taken as a whole, makes it clear that withholding subsidies from those who didn’t get their insurance via exchanges “established by the States” was not the intent.

Q: Does it actually say in the law somewhere, specifically, that those people should get subsidies?

A: Not that I’ve read. In fact, those articles I’ve seen that have written in defense of the subsidies (like this article by Robert Schlesinger in USA Today) don’t cite any other text that would buttress that opinion. Rather, they argue about the results if the subsidies were overturned.

To me, that sounds like they’re arguing that a law should say what the implementers want it to say, regardless of what the law itself says. That’s a precedent I don’t think we want to create. For example, if a Republican President vetoes legislation, and a Democratic Congress overrides that veto, is the President free to implement the provisions of the law he or she likes and ignore others? I’d say No, and I think those arguing for the ObamaCare interpretation would agree with me if the parties today were reversed.

The IRS did issue a ruling saying that they would, in fact, give subsidies to those in states without exchanges, but as far as I’m aware, the IRS is not part of the legislative branch.

Q: Chief Justice John Roberts is a jerk if he agrees to stop the subsidies.

A: That’s not a question.

Q: OK, wouldn’t John Roberts be a jerk if he agrees to stop the subsidies?

A: No. Recall that when ObamaCare was first argued at the Supreme Court, he did something few, if any, court observers predicted. He split the difference between the two sides and considered ObamaCare penalties to be a tax rather than some novel reading of the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. That was different than this case. In that case, he was ruling on whether Congress had the power to pass the law in the first place. In this case, the court is ruling on whether the law is what it says it is in the text.

Democrats praised Roberts as going beyond partisan politics, as if the measure of partisanship is whether or not you agree with Democrats. But Roberts had this warning after the first case, “We do not consider whether the act embodied sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders.” Basically he was saying that, short of a constitutionality question, the Court is not the place to argue what should be done. But, in judging constitutionality, the Court is the place to argue how it should be done. Yes, an unconstitutional law can be thrown out, but you can’t argue that a law is unconstitutional just because you don’t like it. That’s a policy question. If Roberts votes against ObamaCare this time, it is for a fundamentally different reason.

I still think that ObamaCare is unconstitutional, because regulating commerce and forcing commerce are two very different things. But we are where we are.

Q: Shouldn’t the Supreme Court go with intent rather than letter? What about you “original intent” Constitution guys?

That’s a very good question. Let me start with an example of the two types of interpretation. The Second Amendment says:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Looking at just the word “infringed”, we know that there has been debate, even from the beginning, about what that really means. Some have argued that it means Congress can not pass any bill regulating guns in any way. Some have argued that we don’t use militias, so that infringement is OK outside that context. And there are arguments on the spectrum in between. But the idea that there were some instances where the right to keep and bear arms should not be infringed is something that is indeed true. The intent is at question; what are those instances?

Looking at just the word “not”, however, requires a different tact. You can’t really debate the intent of the word “not”. You can’t take that single word out and argue that the rest of the meaning of the Second Amendment stays intact (whatever you believe it’s saying in the first place). For this, the letter of the law is paramount.

What those arguing against this lawsuit are saying is that an exchange “established by the States” is exactly the same as an exchange not “established by the States”. It is not (and by that, I do not mean to say that “it is”).

Q: Wouldn’t this destroy ObamaCare and leave people with huge bills that the subsidies were going to pay for?

Those against this lawsuit would certainly like you to believe that chaos will ensue. It will certainly kick back the question to Congress (which is where legislative issues ought to be decided). In the above-mentioned USA Today article, Schlesinger says, “Hey, great – the deans of dysfunction would no doubt swing right into inaction”, which is to say that the same group of people he extolls for passing this is all of a sudden dysfunctional when they have to make changes he doesn’t like. I think you’ll find this is a common theme for liberal pundits.

In reality, however, there are many ways to handle this, and Avik Roy writing at Forbes brings some common sense to the argument that this will somehow destroy ObamaCare completely. (Hint: It won’t.)

Further, Republicans John Kline, Paul Ryan and Fred Upton, chairmen, respectively, of the House committees on Education and Workforce, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce, have an article in the Wall St. Journal with their plan to replace ObamaCare with one that would lower prices on a much larger scale with increased competition and letting you choose your own coverage (instead of some government mandate), while still providing many of the benefits of ObamaCare (subsidies for those who need it, eliminating caps, etc.), all without upending an entire industry.

Thanks for reading this far. If you have other questions, please put them in the comments below. I’m no expert, but I’ll try to answer them.

Liberal columnist Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post, June of 2009:

If you ordered America’s different health systems worst-functioning to best, it would look like this: individual insurance market, employer-based insurance market, Medicare, Veterans Health Administration.

Yeah, he really said that, and it was obviously untrue back then. But that didn’t stop his love of socialized medicine. Here he is again in 2011:

The thing about the Veteran’s Administration’s health-care system? It’s socialized. Not single payer. Not heavily centralized. Socialized. As in, it employs the doctors and nurses. Owns the hospitals. And though I think there’s some good reason to believe its spending growth is somewhat understated — it benefits heavily from medical trainees, for instance — accounting for that difference still means a remarkable recent performance.

He also called the VA system, “the program is one of the most remarkable success stories in American public policy.” Of course now everyone’s saying that the system has been awful for decades, so you can’t blame Obama for it. While that’s certainly true, you can blame liberal pundits who have been trying to suggest for years that the performance of the VA means that ObamaCare ought to work. It seems like they’ll say anything to get their policies enacted. Never mind reality.

And they’re making the same claim as a certain presidential candidate did 6 years or so ago. So in a sense, you can blame the President for foisting on us a system based on one that was, and is, a money pit and an abject failure, and which is utterly dishonest about those failures. They can, or should, be able to see what works and what doesn’t, but I guess Obama is going with the idea that this time, it’s gonna’ work.