The Post, dismayed about super PACs, reports “a rarefied group of millionaires and billionaires acting as kingmakers in the GOP contest, often helping to decide, with a simple transfer of money, which candidate might survive another day.” Kingmakers? Where’s the king?

If kingmaking refers to, say, Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino owner, keeping Newt Gingrich’s candidacy afloat with large infusions to the super PAC supporting Gingrich, then kingmaking isn’t what it used to be.

He also defends the constitutionality of campaign funding.

… The court’s unremarkable logic was that individuals do not forfeit their First Amendment speech rights when they come together in corporate entities or unions to speak collectively. What is the constitutional basis for saying otherwise?

… Actually, Citizens United has nothing to do with Adelson and others who are spending their own money, not any corporation’s. People have done this throughout the nation’s life, and doing so was affirmed as a constitutional right in the court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision.

And he defends the right of relative outsiders to influence the political process.

Critics of super PACs — critics who were remarkably reticent in 2004 when George Soros was lavishing his own money on liberal advocacy — often refer to them as “outside groups,” much as Southern sheriffs used to denounce civil rights workers as “outside agitators.”

Pray tell: Super PACs are outside of what? Is the political process a private club with the parties and candidates controlling membership?

It might be more wholesome for the speech-financing money that is flowing to super PACs to go instead to the parties and candidates’ campaigns. But the very liberals who are horrified by super PACs (other than Barack Obama’s) have celebrated the laws that place unreasonable restrictions on such giving.

The whole thing is worth reading and pondering.

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The Democratic Senate has not adopted a budget in three years. This is not only flagrantly irresponsible, it is a violation of federal law. Outgoing Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, who is retiring at the end of the year, apparently felt pangs of conscience, because he decided it was finally time for his committee to mark up a budget. He announced that the committee would do so, starting tomorrow.

A standard markup process begins with the committee chairman laying out a proposal, with the chairman and the ranking minority member giving opening statements. This is followed by an amendment process, in which amendments to the proposed legislation (here, the budget resolution) are offered and voted on. The markup process concludes with a committee vote on the bill or resolution as amended. In this case, Conrad assured ranking Republican Jeff Sessions that amendments would be allowed, and as recently as a few hours ago, Conrad’s and Sessions’s staffs were working out details of the amendment process.

Then, earlier this afternoon, Conrad gave a press conference in which he made the stunning announcement that there will be no budget markup after all. Instead, he will present a budget to the Budget Committee tomorrow. There will be no amendments and there will be no votes; not, at least, until after the election. Apparently Conrad had been proceeding on his own initiative, and at the 11th hour Harry Reid–supported by members of his caucus who do not want to have to go on record in favor of any budget–shut down the process.

Even though Republicans are more than happy to vote “on the record about” budgets, never fear. It’s Republican obstructionism and a “do nothing” Republican Congress that’s keeping Washington paralyzed.

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If there were some kind of award for the most misleading statements in a single four-minute speech, President Obama would have earned it with his weekly address this weekend, timed for tax day.

“We can’t afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. Obama said.

This is really something. First of all, who is the “we” in that sentence? The many Americans who don’t pay any income taxes at all, or who take more from the government in welfare or entitlement benefits than they pay in taxes? Second, it’s great to see Mr. Obama start to crack down on unaffordable government spending. But it’s hard to define tax cuts as spending unless you start from the concept that all money belongs to the government to begin with. It’s one thing to conceive of some special tax break as a “tax expenditure.” But it’s not “spending” for the government to allow an individual to keep money that the individual earned or owned in the first place.

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The evidence that Romney is lagging in the polls because voters are upset about a “war on women” — rather than because of a bruisingly negative primary campaign or the recovering economy — is pretty thin. But Republicans are responding not just to the polls but to the persistent mythology of the gender gap.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post recently fell prey to this conventional wisdom, writing that “the GOP has suffered from a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980.” Suffered? Of the eight presidential elections from 1980 to 2008, Republicans won five four if you exclude 2000. Republicans carried women, albeit narrowly, three times; Democrats carried men twice. Republicans can lose even while winning men, as in 1996. Democrats can lose while winning women, as in 2004.

The evidence suggests that women are more inclined than men to vote for Democrats, but this gap doesn’t consistently help either party. It isn’t the case that the larger the gender gap, the worse Republicans do. Republicans did seven points better among men than women in 2004, when they won. They did five points better in 2008, when they lost.

Obama barely won men in 2008. If this race is at all competitive, he will lose them this time. And that’s not all we can predict. Romney will win among large subgroups of women: those who are married, those who are white, those who go to church regularly. Gender isn’t the principal determinant of women’s votes any more than it is of men’s.

I love reading about the inside baseball of politics.

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Hence, a bipartisan health-care agenda at the federal level will necessarily look quite different than one at the state level. If liberals had bothered to ask, they could easily have elicited bipartisan support for a proposal that did the following: (1) set up the Obamacare exchanges for those under 400% of FPL; (2) applied the Ryan reforms to Medicare and Medicaid (or, alternatively, folded in Medicare and Medicaid acute-care into the PPACA exchanges); (3) equalized the tax treatment of employer-sponsored and individually-purchased insurance; and (4) not increase taxes or the deficit.

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Because the budget is so far from being sustainable, budget rhetoric needs to be re-interpreted.

When their side refuses to cut spending because it would be “cruel,” they are ensuring that future spending cuts will be even crueler.

When our side refuses to raise taxes, we are ensuring that future tax increases will be higher.

Until the baseline is a sustainable budget, the rhetoric will be the opposite of reality.

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In Wisconsin, the political silly season has been with us for the past 15 months and looks to stay with us straight through November. (In case you haven’t heard, we’ve had recall elections for six senators and a hotly contested Supreme Court election. We have another 4 senate recall elections and a gubernatorial recall election scheduled.)

Politicking is off the charts and everyone is inclined to believe the absolute worst about everyone else. At times like this, I remember one of my favorite quotes (I have many) from Robert Heinlein, from The Green Hills of Earth.

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

In every party, most politicians are just plain dumb. Freely criticize every politician with whom you disagree. But don’t degrade yourself by ascribing evil motives to people who are well-intentioned. It’s usually wrong, it’s uncharitable, and it reflects poorly on your own character. Instead, criticize the lack of knowledge. And then help the situation along by offering your own knowledge to fill the lack.

With the supporter’s permission, I’m reprinting it here.

You need to understand something about 702 Vermont Street and Wise Ahadzi. Firstly, Mr. Ahadzi left his home in early 2009. According to neighbors, the home became rodent-infested and was being used for criminal activity. Neighbors were very upset to be living next to an abandoned house. Mr. Ahadzi went into hiding. He was being chased by creditors, not just Countrywide Mortgage, but the utilities, credit cards. His business was trading in and writing about penny stocks. That was bankrupt as well…and god only knows who he owed money to from that business.

The house, being abandoned, was ransacked for anything valuable. Long before Occupy moved in, the appliances were stolen. There was no kitchen on Dec 6, 2011. There was lots of water damage in the kitchen. Occupy removed heavily damaged drywall from the kitchen.

Mr. Ahadzi showed up one day after the big hoopla on the news. He had been unreachable by Occupy and by Bank of America, successors to Countrywide. That’s why they hadn’t yet foreclosed. He is still the rightful owner of the property and could have asserted that right on December 7, but he is “negotiating” with Occupy, and with Countrywide.

Don’t get sucked into the simple narrative of hippies trashing stuff. There’s more at work here.

I’ll just say that even with all of that information—OWS still didn’t actually manage to do much with the house. By this account, OWS managed to remove some drywall from the house. Given that Habitat for Humanity can manage to build a house in a matter of days (or hours, in some cases), that’s not especially impressive.

First, agencies often fail to follow basic decision-making principles and assume that more regulation is always necessary. Back in March, my colleague Jerry Ellig testified before the House Judiciary Committee and made the point that the regulatory system suffers from systemic institutional problems. For example, there is a broad-based consensus on what regulatory analysis should involve and what its role in agency decision-making should be (as I described in my prior post), yet academic research shows that, more often than not, agencies do not produce or use thorough regulatory analyses. This is true regardless of what party is in charge of the executive branch.

The second core problem with the current system is that the more regulation agencies generate, the harder it is for individuals and businesses to comply. In many cases, no one knows for sure how many of the regulations we have on the books are really necessary or effective.

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Occupy was being criticized — even from the left — for being vague in its goals. The signs railed against bailouts and the greed of the 1%, but protesters coalesced around no legislation, no candidate, no reforms. Everyone agreed that inequality is bad, but what to do about it?

“Occupy Our Homes” was that idea. The group would take over an empty house, foreclosed on by a bank, fix it up and provide shelter to a homeless family.

Last week, Wise Ahadzi opened the door to the house he still owns, 702 Vermont Street in East New York.

Inside is a war zone. The walls are torn down, the plumbing is ripped out and the carpeting has been plucked from the floor. It’s like walking through a ribcage.

Garbage, open food containers and Ahadzi’s possessions are tossed haphazardly around the house.

“This is where my kitchen was,” Ahadzi says. There is no sink, no refrigerator and no counter space. Instead there are dirty dishes piled high waiting for a dip in three large buckets of putrid water that serve as the dishwashing system.

That’s not even the worst part. No, the worst part is the way that Occupy took over Ahadzi’s house (the guy who was kicked out of his house in 2009, after he fell behind on mortgage payments) and gave it to another guy that they liked better and knew personally. That, right there, is pretty much everything that’s wrong with a populist mob, in just one story.

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