Via Vanderleun.

From Galt’s Gulch:

This is a true story. It happened exactly as described.

It was around noon on election day, November 6, 2012. I was sitting in McDonalds. A group of old retired men were enthusiastically talking about the election. …

A couple was waiting in line. They were a typical, mid-forties, white, middle class couple. They were listening to the old guys discussing the election and the state of the union in general.

One of the retired guys said something negative about “Obama-Care” and the middle-class white guy in line turned to him suddenly and said, “Oh yeah, well I’ll have you know that if it wasn’t for Obama’s healthcare plan, I wouldn’t have any health insurance right now.”

This silenced the old guys. He continued, appearing to speak to the room in general, “Obama made it possible for me to cut the cost of my insurance by over 80%, so I voted for him again.”

The entire room was silent. Nobody said a word. Before I knew what I was doing, I heard myself addressing him.

“You actually sound like you’re proud of that”, I said.

“You’re damn right I am,” he replied indignantly.

“In other words, you’re proud of the fact that instead of paying for your health insurance yourself, you and Obama have ganged up on ME and have forced me, at the point of a gun, to pay for part of your health insurance. You’re actually PROUD of the fact that you are mooching off of me and all those people working behind the counter in McDonald’s… that you’re part of a gang that is using the power of the government to FORCE us to pay for your healthcare. Instead of feeling ashamed… instead of bowing your head and cowering in front of all the people you are depending on to pay for your healthcare insurance… instead of meekly thanking them for the sacrifices they are being forced to make in order to benefit YOU… instead, you stand there claiming that you’re PROUD! What do you have to be PROUD of? Are you proud of the fact that you’re unable or unwilling to take care of yourself? Are you proud of the fact that you’re stealing part of their wages for your own personal greed? No… shame is what you should feel. Disgrace… embarassment… and gratitude… along with a strong dose of remorse… because YOU can’t or won’t take care of yourself and so you joined a mob of others who can’t or won’t take care of themselves… and together you’ve figured out how to force US to take care of you. Shame on you.”

Nobody said a word. The guy was stunned and his wife stood there mortified. The room was absolutely silent for a moment, then one of the retired guys started clapping… and within a few seconds, he was joined by another… then by someone across the restaurant… and pretty soon it sounded like the entire restaurant was applauding.

I had delivered my little sermon while still seated at my table. I remained seated and looked down at my meal… angry at myself for having lost my temper and butting in rather than minding my own damn business.

Within a minute or so, the room quieted down again and everyone went about their business, pretending nothing had happenned.

Then I heard the guy quietly say to the McDonald’s counter person, “Can I change my order… I’d like that, to-go please.”

Life in America gets more like living in an Ayn Rand novel every day.

A line of blue counties stretches across the usually red-voting South which parallels curiously enough an ancient sea coast from 100 million years ago. Why?

Dr. M. explains:

Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart. Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American. The median households and per capita incomes are well below their respective state’s median, in Hale nearly $10,000 less. Both were named after confederate officers–Stephen Fowler Hale and Francis Marion Bamberg. And although Hale’s county seat is the self-proclaimed Catfish Capitol, pulling catfish out of the Edisto River in Bamberg County is a favorite past time. These two counties share another unique feature. Amidst a blanket of Republican red both Hale and Bamberg voted primarily Democratic in the 2000, 2004, and again in the 2008 presidential elections. Indeed, Hale and Bamberg belong to a belt of counties cutting through the deep south–Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina–that have voted over 50% Democratic in recent presidential elections. Why? A 100 million year old coastline.

During the Cretaceous, 139-65 million years ago, shallow seas covered much of the southern United States. These tropical waters were productive–giving rise to tiny marine plankton with carbonate skeletons which overtime accumulated into massive chalk formations. The chalk, both alkaline and porous, lead to fertile and well-drained soils in a band, mirroring that ancient coastline and stretching across the now much drier South. This arc of rich and dark soils in Alabama has long been known as the Black Belt. But many, including Booker T. Washington, coopted the term to refer to the entire Southern band. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, “The term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the color of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil…”

Cretaceous rock units (139-65 million years old) are shown in shades of green. Older rock units are in gray, younger ones in yellow. From Geology and Election 2000.

Over time this rich soil produced an amazingly productive agricultural region, especially for cotton. In 1859 alone a harvest of over 4,000 cotton bales was not uncommon within the belt. And yet, just tens of miles north or south this harvest was rare. Of course this level of cotton production required extensive labor.

As Washington notes further in his autobiography, “The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.”

Readers can compare 2012 results using individual state maps at Politico.

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, defines George McGovern’s contribution to American politics.

One might say McGovern reinvented the Democratic Party by putting identity politics at its center–by encouraging members to think of themselves first in terms of sex or age or skin color (or, later, by sexual orientation). E pluribus, multis.

In the 1973 book “Sexual Suicide,” George Gilder speculated that such an approach “would find its reductio ad absurdum in a President who is an exact ethnic and sexual composite of the American demography–some kind of multiracial hermaphrodite from Kansas City.”

When Gilder wrote that, Barack Obama was 12.

Hat tip to Clarice Feldman.

The Nation’s David Corn revealed at Mother Jones this “secret video, in which “Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters.” and in which (supposedly) “When he doesn’t know a camera’s rolling, the GOP candidate shows his disdain for half of America.”

The far left seems to think that the startling revelation that Republicans, including Mitt Romney, look down upon the democrat philosophy of entitlement and government dependency is a terribly effective attack meme. Sure, spongers and looters are going to be offended by being identified as what they are, but they weren’t really going to be voting for Mitt Romney anyway.

It’s not like anything Romney said is untrue:

Mark Steyn puts Sandra Fluke’s speech to the DNC into perspective, identifying exactly which plimsoll mark Fluke represents as civilization sinks beneath the liberal waves. He also rather amusingly compares her to Lola Montez.

Sandra Fluke… completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.

So this is America’s best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” – and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. …

Any space aliens prowling through the rubble of our civilization and stumbling upon a recording of the convention compatible with Planet Zongo DVD players will surely marvel at the valuable peak airtime allotted to Sandra Fluke. It was weird to see her up there among the governors and senators – as weird as Bavarians thought it was when King Ludwig decided to make his principal adviser Lola Montez, the Irish-born “Spanish dancer” and legendary grande horizontale. I hasten to add I’m not saying Miss Fluke is King Barack’s courtesan. For one thing, it’s a striking feature of the Age of Perfected Liberalism that modern liberals talk about sex 24/7 while simultaneously giving off the persistent whiff that the whole thing’s a bit of a chore. Hence, the need for government subsidy. And, in fairness to Miss Montez, she used sex to argue for liberalized government, whereas Miss Fluke uses liberalism to argue for sexualized government.

But those distinctions aside, like Miss Fluke, Miss Montez briefly wielded an influence entirely disproportionate to her talents. Like Miss Fluke, she was a passionate liberal activist who sought to diminish what she regarded as the malign influence of the Catholic Church. Taking up with Lola cost King Ludwig his throne in the revolutions of 1848. We’ll see in a couple of months whether taking up with Sandra works out for King Barack.

Ann Coulter at a Catskills vacation place we used to own.

Where Democrat National Conventions are concerned, I definitely subscribe to the Alice Longworth Roosevelt school of thought: “If you can’t say anything nice, come sit here next to me.”

I discovered via an indignant HuffPo posting that Ann Coulter had been in rare form on Twitter last night, commenting upon the democrat convention, and I really need to quote several of her best lines.

18 hours ago: Bill Clinton just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage…

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17 hours ago: To get Bill Clinton to speak at the convention, Obama had to agree to carry his bags.

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17 hours ago: They’re spicing things up with a live abortion on stage!

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17 hours ago: If I were the RNC, I would put a tape of the D’s God vote on a commercial and broadcast it nonstop for the next two months.

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16 hours ago: Sandra Fluke wants speech class paid for by taxpayers.

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16 hours ago: Sandra Fluke: Republicans would redefine rape. Later that night, shakes hands with Bill Clinton and cannot get smell off her.

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16 hours ago: Sandra wants taxpayers to pay for her tanning appointments.

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Ann Coulter retweets Jim Treacher 16 hours ago: I think it’s a good idea to put Bill Clinton in front of a blue background with white stuff on it.

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15 hours ago: There’s not a chick in that audience that Bill wants in kneepads. That’s ugly.

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15 hours ago: Monica Lewinsky somewhere, sobbing, clutching stained dress and eating Haagen Das by the Tv light… Four cats yawning.

Exactly how pro-choice are democrats really?

Hat tip to Diane Ellis.

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Democrat economics: DNC delegates and attendees contemplate the concept of corporate profits. They’re basically averse.

The democrats came up with an unfortunately memorable line in this video from last night’s convention.

Referring to “belonging to” the Government provokes in libertarians like myself a kneejerk reaction of antipathy to being classified as a serf. Of course, our democrat friends did not really mean to imply that we belong to the Government, in the sense that the Government owns us and we are its slaves.

No, they meant to describe us as belonging to the Government in the way one belongs to a club or to one’s parish church, as a nice, positive communitarian sort of thing.

The problem is that clubs and even churches are voluntary associations. If I get fed up with the BPOE, if I decided that I’m not getting enough of a benefit from my annual dues to the Shenandoah Fish & Game Club or the Yale Club of New York City, I can resign. I can quit attending St. George’s Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church any time I feel like, and join the Primitive Baptists or simply stay home and sleep in on Sunday as I please.

Belonging to the Government obviously does not work that way. Back in 1969, when I received a letter headed with Greetings, and signed by Richard Nixon, I did not really have the option to leave the club. If I didn’t show up for the meeting being held at 5:30 AM at the Draft Induction Center in Mahanoy City, they would have come looking for me. It’s the same way with club dues. Americans are not able to send the IRS a letter on April 15th informing them that we’ve decided to resign our membership this year and won’t be paying any dues.

Democrats seem to differ fundamentally from the rest of us in how they look at things. Myself, I find it impossible to feel very positively about any club that conscripts me into membership whether I like it or not, and which collects its dues at bayonet point. One might paraphrase the late Groucho Marx, and say: “I don’t particularly want to be a member of any club which forces me to join and which will not allow me to skip meetings or resign.”

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Mitt Romney responded: