I don’t have much use for his pacifistic, isolationist, hippy dippy approach to Foreign Policy, but I think you have to give him credit for being spot on right about tax reform.

Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski.

Allahpundit says Paul dropped an Ayn Rand truth bomb on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Anyone who’s savvy on building issues knows that a brisk trade in second-hand toilets has developed in recent years, simply because new toilets, built in accordance with federal water conservation standards, do not flush very well. The knowledgeable consumer avoids purchasing a new conventional toilet, and either buys a premium imported model or seeks out an older model from a junk yard or plumbing shop.

Low-flush toilets made national news recently when it was revealed that they caused the San Francisco sewer system to block up, winding up costing that city $114 million dollars for repairs, upgrades, and added chemicals. There is federally-mandated economy and conservation in action for you.

Senator Rand Paul brought up this problem and the broader issue of consumer choice in a Senate hearing in which Kathleen Hogan, the deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency at the Department of Energy, was testifying.

ABC News’ Matthew Jaffe did not even try to conceal his ideological biases in reporting on the exchange between Senator Paul and Deputy Secretary Hogan. His news report opens with a feigned air of gaping astonishment that a US senator would even consider discussing such a subject. Senator Paul’s rather intelligent remarks are dismissed from the get-go as a “tirade.” Kathleen Hogan is not a high-level bureaucrat presiding over an empire of regulation reaching aggressively into such intimate aspects of Americans’ lives as their bathroom appliances. She is an “unwitting victim.”

“I missed him even before he was gone.” Steve Bodio remembers long-time Audubon magazine editor Les Line, who evidently had a Weatherby cartridge board and a poster of a Smith & Wesson Model 29 in his Manhattan office.

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Progressive Amnesia: James E. Calfee responds to the attacks on Rand Paul for “not understanding” that state coercion of private businesses was necessary to end segregation by pointing out that the system of racial segregation in public accomodations known as “Jim Crow” was not created by the individual decisions of private business owners. It was put into effect by government through a series of laws passed by Progressive era legislators which were then upheld by the Supreme Court.

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NYT: White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race.

18 USC Section 600: Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

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Peggy Noonan:

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”