The governor has picked a fight without a strategy.

Texas attorney general Greg Abbott claims Eric Holder and the Obama administration are “using the Voting Rights Act for partisan, political purposes” by pushing the state to seek preapproval for changes to its voting laws. Holder asked a court to require Texas to go back under “pre-clearance” status following last month’s Supreme Court decision that struck down that provision of the law.

Abbott said that Holder’s requirement was the latest in a string of efforts by Democrats to flip the solidly red state to a blue one. Along with the president’s national field director visiting the state for that purpose, Abbott also pointed out that the Department of Justice is working with and joining Texas’s Democratic party in a lawsuit against the state under the Voting Rights Act.

“This is an affront to that Supreme Court decision; it’s a direct assault on the United State Constitution,” he said on Fox News this morning.

Holder announced his plans at the National Urban League conference yesterday, claiming the state’s laws discriminated on the basis of race. Abbott, who recently announced his candidacy for Texas governor, immediately responded to the news on Twitter, vowing to “fight Obama’s effort to control our elections.”

If it were possible to use the “continuing resolution” that Congress will soon have to pass to keep the government funded to stop Obamacare, I’d be for it. But I think this is a strategy that cannot work and will likely inflict some damage on conservatives–and maybe the country too. I explain why in a new Bloomberg View column. My main point: While the politics of Obamacare are generally bad for Obama and the Democrats, this particular way of fighting it will play to their strengths.

One point I did not make in the column: Even if there were a way to get a continuing resolution that has no funding for Obamacare, which I don’t think there is, it’s not clear that it would stop the administration from continuing to implement the law. You’d have to have very strong legislative language to keep the administration from moving money around to get what it wanted–and I think we have now gotten a pretty good sense of how resourceful it can be, at least in this regard.

Last year, supporters of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign took over the Iowa Republican party. Their rise has frustrated allies of Republican Terry Branstad, Iowa’s longest serving governor:

These days, relations between the two camps are as messy as eating a deep-fried Snickers bar at the Iowa state fair. Iowa Republicans increasingly find themselves either part of Big Liberty, the libertarian bloc led by Spiker and Fischer, or members of Branstad’s center-right circle.

Confidants of both groups say the tensions have nearly crippled the party, which is known for hosting the Iowa Republican caucuses. Branstad doesn’t trust the co-chairmen, and the co-chairmen don’t trust the governor. Behind the scenes, they quarrel constantly over cash and politics, and many veteran Iowa Republicans fear the infighting will embarrass them, especially as presidential contenders start to fly in for appearances.

My full report is here.

Photo via TheIowaRepublican.com

Representative Steve King of Iowa isn’t backing down from his controversial remarks about the children of illegal immigrants, saying Friday that he is guilty only of offering “an objective analysis.”

King has come under attack from politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle for his comment that, among the children of illegal immigration, for every valedictorian, there are another one hundred who have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

The Iowa congressman doubled down on that claim on radio talk show host Laura Ingraham’s show. She told him that his remarks have given Democrats “ammunition” and advised him to be “smarter” in his use of language.

“I have been saying this a different way for 10 years and they’re not paying attention,” King replied, arguing that his controversial characterization came from “many days down on the border, sitting with the border patrol” witnessing drug busts.

While House Speaker John Boehner and others are calling on King to apologize for his remarks, King maintained they are asking him to apologize because he “offended their agenda.”

In my NRO piece “Maid in D.C.: Eva Longoria’s Powerful Friends,” I mistakenly said that MALDEF received government funding. They do not. I apologize for the error. 

The Evolution of Wolverine: From 1974 to 2013.  And here’s a Supercut of Wolverine’s Claws Coming Out.

Slate has a Carlos Danger Name Generator.

10 Weirdest Mythological Creatures In the World.

AK-47 being shot underwater, in slow motion, with bonus science lesson.

Gallery of Sinkholes.

No, but seriously. If sharknadoes were real, where would they strike?

New Jersey governor Chris Christie said yesterday that a current “strain of libertarianism” was “a very dangerous thought.”

“This strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought. … You can name any number of people and he’s [Rand Paul] one of them,” Christie said at a panel of Republican governors in Aspen, Colorado.

“The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people whoare having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put …” Christie remarked, leaving his thought unfinished. 

Paul shot back on Twitter today, tweeting, “Christie worries about the dangers of freedom. I worry about the danger of losing that freedom. Spying without warrants is unconstitutional.”

Audio of Christie’s comments (via Dave Weigel):

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Barack Obama came to Washington saying he would bring “change you can believe in.” If you are one of his campaign donors, he has delivered on that promise. He has dramatically increased the number of our ambassadors serving overseas who are political appointees. 

Ever since Ronald Reagan, presidents have filled about 70 percent of ambassadorial posts with career diplomats and the remainder with political types, a.k.a Those Who Need to Be Rewarded.

But the Los Angeles Times now reports:

Since the beginning of his second term, President Obama has appointed campaign fundraisers, party allies and other political figures as ambassadors at a level that is now almost double what has prevailed in the last few administrations.

More than 56% of Obama’s 41 second-term ambassadorial nominations have been political, compared with an average of about 30% for recent administrations, according to U.S. government figures compiled by the American Foreign Service Assn. Of the political nominees, at least half have had fundraising roles.

Even when fundraising is behind an Obama political appointment, the contrast with previous ambassadors can be jarring. Patrick Gaspard, the Obama White House’s former political director is the nominee to become ambassador to South Africa, a post which at least half the time in the past has gone to a career diplomat. Gaspard is anything but that. Before his White House stint he was political director of a top Services Employees International union local, an official in Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, and a left-wing community organizer working with New York’s left-wing Working Families Party. 

In the past, a key ally such as Japan has often been sent envoys who were political figures. But they were usually of very high caliber: Mike Mansfield and Howard Baker were distinguished former Senate majority leaders. Obama’s new appointee is Caroline Kennedy, a former book editor who doesn’t speak Japanese and has no special knowledge of Asia. When she was considered briefly as someone who could be appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in 2009, she was revealed as an inarticulate, shy woman who was simply not up for the job. 

Douglas Paal, a former U.S. diplomat in Asia now with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, told the Times that given Japan’s importance and the growing tensions it has with China and North Korea it is ”a bit of an unusual time to send a person whose value is more symbolic than substantive.”

Hmmm . . . after five years that description could be used about President Obama himself. Maybe he’s just appointing people he can identify with to represent us overseas.  

The Manhattan Institute fellow and editor of MindingTheCampus.com took to his Facebook page to blast the Gawker attack on Victor Davis Hanson

Disagree with the left and you risk being denounced as racist. Today’s example here is the attack on Victor Davis Hanson, the best writer the conservatives have, a brilliant and fair man and no racist, for mentioning the high black crime rate as a factor in white apprehension in being approached by young black males. Gawker call this “an anecdotal justification for blanket racism” and appeals to a headline implying that Hanson is about to be fired by National Review over it. Untrue. Alleged grown-ups on the Left are endorsing all this. Where is the responsible Left?”

With the unicorns John. Meanwhile, Victor’s response to attacks can be found here.

More thoughts here.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cinna the poet is mistaken for a conspirator in the assassination of the play’s eponymous character. He’s killed by a violent mob, even after protestations of his innocence and true identity.

Well, we’re not quite there in Florida yet, but George Zimmermann, a 78-year-old retired preacher who lives in Deland, Fla., has been receiving death threats. Some of the numbers are listed as coming from out of state, but most have apparently come from Florida. USA Today transcribed one call, which was left on Zimmermann’s answering machine the day the verdict was handed down: 

Hey [expletive], you’re the one who killed Trayvon Martin, when your [expletive) get out, you’re dead. Wherever you go, you’re dead. Wherever you’re trying to hide, you’re dead. Watch your [expletive] move. You think you’re free. You’re not. You better get ready to dig a six-foot hole, ’cause you know you’re fixing to go,”

Thankfully, Zimmermann has changed his number and has not received any death threats since July 14. However, he’s not the only person unaffiliated with Zimmerman to suffer intimidating calls and threats: That unfortunate group includes a recently released inmate who’d been assigned Zimmerman’s old cell-phone number, a lady whose number was one digit off from Zimmerman’s, and a man by the name of Jorge Zimmerman living in Rhode Island (he was accused through his Facebook page of murdering Martin).

Editor’s Note: This post has been amended since its initial posting.

Charles Krauthammer defended the constitutionality of voter-ID laws and criticized Attorney General Eric Holder for seeking to re-establish Justice Department review of Texas election law under the Voting Rights Act. “It seems utterly logical that you would have to ask for a simple demonstration that you are of age, that you live where you live, you aren’t a felon, and in fact that you haven’t voted an hour and a half before,” Krauthammer said.

The syndicated columnist also argued that case law is on the side of the states; he referred specifically to the 2008 Supreme Court case Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, in which a six-justice majority led by John Paul Stevens found that an Indiana law requiring voters to show an official photo ID was not unconstitutional. “What Holder is doing is, he wants to stigmatize [mandatory voter ID] and to go after any state that actually institutes it,” Krauthammer said, adding, “I think he’s got a very weak case.”

Senator Ted Cruz has issued an appeal to conservatives across the country: Demand that their representatives in Congress defund Obamacare.

On Sean Hannity’s radio show Thursday, Cruz criticized Republicans who “want meaningless show votes” to repeal Obamacare when they could actually defund the law’s implementation. If every GOP member in the House and Senate gets on board to defund the Affordable Care Act, Cruz said, “we don’t need a single Democrat vote.”

Cruz praised Senator Mike Lee’s campaign to defund the law, saying that Lee has led the effort to “stop talking about it and do it.” And “if we don’t do it now,” he added, “Obamacare will very likely never be repealed.”

“There a lot of Democrats and folks in the media who like their Republicans timid [and] house-trained,” Cruz said, but his party should not continue to appease them and let Obamacare become a reality.

The only way that Republicans will step up to the plate, the freshman senator said, “is if the voice of the people becomes so deafening that for incumbent politicians it becomes dangerous to do the wrong thing.”

Cruz’s brand of conservatism is carving him a defined niche in the 2016 GOP field — according to the latest PPP poll, he is leading in national primary polling among those who call themselves “very conservative.”

Men who grew up with more sisters than brothers are disproportionately conservative, according to a study released on Tuesday and slated for publication in The Journal of Politics. Authors Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra say that they were surprised by their finding. “We might expect that boys would learn to support gender equality through interactions with their sisters,” Healy says. “However, the data suggest that other forces are more important in driving men’s political attitudes, including whether the family assigned chores, such as dishwashing, according to traditional gender roles.”

The authors home in on four kinds of household chore for their explanation of why a boy who has more daily interaction with girls (his sisters) is more likely to grow up to be Republican and retrosexual: Does the child straighten his own room? Does he keep the rest of the house clean? Does he do the dishes? Does he cook?

A boy is less likely to do any of those things if he has sisters. Healy and Malhotra conjecture that his gendered modus vivendi in childhood imprints on his developing psyche a lasting notion that the drudgery of housekeeping is women’s work — and that, if you follow their reasoning, makes him conservative, although they graciously add that his “political and social attitudes related to the role of women in society” do not “apply to men’s empathy toward women more broadly.”

Is that boy taking out the trash, though? Doing yard work? The authors don’t say. They do say that “girls tend to be assigned feminized chores and shielded from masculine chores regardless of the gender composition of the household.” Ah.

And notice the asymmetrical language — masculine chores are masculine chores, but there are no corresponding feminine chores, only chores that have been “feminized,” meaning that they’re not inherently feminine but only stereotyped as such. Presumably, then, they’re neuter and should be shared equally by both sexes. It’s unclear whether the authors think that “masculine chores” (which they don’t specify) should be shared equally too. Or do they assume that it’s inappropriate for girls to be made to do any heavy lifting?

While this is helpful, this consideration of how a man’s politics may be influenced by his sisters’ doing housework that they might never have thought to invite him to join in on, at some point a focus becomes a fixation. A boy’s experience of being a boy among girls involves more than watching them bond over the kitchen sink. It involves the experience of being excluded generally, and that in turn tends to sharpen his awareness of the difference between them and him. And if you think that a heightened awareness of the difference between males and females is good, that makes you a conservative in that department, at least by contemporary standards.

Healy and Malhotra report that the boy in a sister-intensive environment is more likely to agree with the following question when he grows up: “Mothers should remain at home with young children and not work outside the home.” The odd syntax obscures what common sense dictates the authors must have been asking: “Should mothers with young children remain at home?” In any case, agreement with the idea however it’s expressed is obviously countercultural and not something most people would admit to in polite company, although the percentage of people who agree — secretly, not openly — with that particular vision of femininity and domesticity may be higher than will ever be captured by surveys that rely on self-reporting. More to the point, you can disagree with the statement strictly interpreted but agree emphatically with the worldview that the statement is assumed to represent. Complementarity between the sexes in all dimensions, social and economic as well as biological, exists. Some would go so far as to say that it’s natural and should be cultivated, not repressed.

“Let’s go to this gender aspect of” sexting, Chris Matthews proposed to two of his guests this evening. ”You’re both women and I’m a male. Let me ask this question, I’m wide open on this. Is this only something that only men do?” Matthews asked. “Is there any recorded in our modern technology of women doing this tweeting, naked tweeting? ‘Digital streaking,’ that’s what I call it. Does anybody of your side of the gender argument — and it is an argument — do it?”

Both of his guests, doctors Jennifer Berman and Sherry Blake, laughed in response and answered in the affirmative.

“So this isn’t a feminist issue, this is just a general problem? Okay, let me ask you this, ’cause I’m loving this — this part I’m going to love.” He asked his guests what Anthony Weiner and his wife needed to do to “kill this problem, at least so we won’t know about it ever again.”

“Therein lies the problem,” Dr. Jennifer Berman answered. “If the Internet and social media did not exist, we would not know about this! And I guarantee you, a lot of the other politicians have other issues that they’re doing in private. The problem is this man’s compulsion [and] addiction involves the Internet. So he needs to find other tools, other outlets, other ways of coping.”

The embattled Anthony Weiner is having a difficult go of it these days. He has now been accosted by a man attired in Zorro-like clothing, claiming that he is “Carlos Danger.” 

“Weiner, why did you steal my name? I am Carlos, why did you steal my name?” the seemingly distraught, costumed “Carlos” asked Weiner earlier today. 

Via Gateway Pundit.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi offered comments on the latest Anthony Weiner scandal at a press conference today. She called the New York City mayoral candidate’s actions “reprehensible” and “disrespectful of women.”

Pelosi criticized Weiner as well as San Diego mayor Bob Filner; both men are former Democratic colleagues of hers who are embroiled in sexual scandals. She remarked that the two have “admitted they need therapy” and therapy “could better be accomplished in private.”

“What’s really stunning about it is they don’t even realize. They don’t have a clue,” the minority leader said of Weiner and Filner’s inappropriate conduct. “If they’re clueless, get a clue,” she added.

When asked whether Weiner should drop out of the race, Pelosi said it was “up to the people of New York.”

It is now being reported that Eric Holder plans to bring voting-rights actions not only against Texas, as was announced earlier today, but against a number of other states, too. This suggests one of two things, neither of which is particularly good for the administration. If Mr. Holder thinks he can win these lawsuits by proving actual racial discrimination in these states, then this is strong evidence that there is no need to add more provisions to the Voting Rights Act, the gloom-and-doom protestations of the critics of the Supreme Court’s recent Shelby County decision (like the attorney general and President Obama) to the contrary notwithstanding. If, on the other hand, he doesn’t think he can win these lawsuits, then they are being brought as a sop to the administration’s political base, which is an irresponsible action by our nation’s top law-enforcement official. 

The good news is that I understand that NRO’s own Hans von Spakovsky will be discussing all this on PBS’s NewsHour tonight.