I had heard a great many rumors about a great many things. All I know to be a fact is that she claimed some Native American ancestry, which is true. The more lurid rumors about what else she claimed, or whether she took unfair advantage of this fact, as best I have been able to determine, were false. It's true that if enough people believe them, they could well damage her 2020 run -- though the sort of people who would believe such things on the available evidence wouldn't vote for her anyway.

Well, yes. I believe in human moral agency. Old fashioned, I know.

What does it mean that Elizabeth Warren (like every other native Oklahoman I have ever met) has some Native American ancestry? It means nothing. It's just a fact. The people who deny that it is a fact, or make an issue of the fact, or make false claims that Warren took advantage of the fact, are the people responsible for this being a thing.

By and large, I don't think the hardest-throwing starters are throwing any harder than the hardest-throwing starters 40 years ago. (A few relievers, like Chapman, seem to throw harder than anyone used to.) But now most teams seem to have a couple of starters who can consistently hit 95-plus, when there used to be two or three in all of baseball.
I've always been fond of mid 1970's-1980's baseball because there were so many different ways to win.

You can spend a couple of decades in prison for rape based on he-said, she-said. A relative of mine just did. Most prosecutors, who like winning, want more than that for obvious reasons, and will often shy away from bringing cases where they don't have more, but if the jury credits the accuser's testimony, that is legally sufficient.

Frum's Republican New Deal is indistinguishable from centrist democratic thinking, quite possibly somewhat to the left of it. Most Democrats, even those considerably to the left of that position, would take it in a heartbeat over the current alternatives.

I fail to see how the ACA supports either of those claims.

That's a statement about the acuity of your vision, not about the state of the world.

The problem is that these policy choices are poisonous from a liberal perspective.

Huh? They're just plain poisonous to just about everyone. Do you think Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani want divorce to be more difficult? Do you think anyone wants punitive taxes on single parents, including all the single-parent families in Kevin Williamsonville? And do you really think it's liberals who have a problem with same-sex couples raising children? Who wants them out of the business altogether?

And they never will tell us.

That's his whole game. You'd be spoiling his fun.

Every time I hear the neutral umpire calling balls and strikes schtick, I remember Hall of Fame umpire -- and serious drinker -- Bill Klem, who got into it with some of his fellow umps at a bar. The first boasted: "I calls 'em as I sees 'em." The second said: "I call them as they are." Klem sneered at them both and said: "They ain't nothing 'til I call 'em."

Well, I guess that settles it then.

You say yet again that LBJ was "afraid" of something. Repetition doesn't make it so. I asked for some basis for the assertion that a perfectly sensible technical tax change was actually a well-hidden attempt to stop black pastors from talking politics. I'm still waiting. It must be very well-hidden. I don't recall Martin Luther King, Jr., or anyone else who would have been affected and would have suspected such a plot if it existed, calling LBJ out on this.
And just what is the threat of the English Department?

OK, now we know what you think you know. How about how you think you know it? And how it relates to my point?

LBJ proposed a perfectly sensible technical correction, well explained in the source you cite, for something that was utterly uncontroversial at the time, as is also explained in the source you cite. I'm pretty sure I'm older than you -- I actually remember Lyndon Johnson -- and I've read a fair bit about him. I have no basis whatever to think that this was anything other than what it seemed to be. If you're "pretty sure what was in LBJ's mind," I'd be interested in what you think you know and how you think you know it. Maybe then I will be able to understand why you think it is responsive to my point.

Registration could be triggered by any number of things, like Social Security applications or a tax return or a driver's license application, plus arithmetic if you're not of voting age,since both the federal and state governments know when we were born and often where we live. I leave purging duplicate registration and address changes to the techies in IT. (Do I know for a fact that, although I have lived in NYC since late 1979, I'm not still on the voter rolls in Syracuse, where I originally registered? No, but how big a problem is that if I'm still listed there?) Mail voter security? Well, maybe we could experiment in some state or other and see what happens. What? They do it in Oregon? Maybe we can see how it works there.

I don't know what was in LBJ's mind, but I do know the publicly-offered explanations for the Johnson Amendment, all technical and uncontroversial at the time.

How about universal automatic registration with a nice, free, high-tech voter ID, early voting, and Oregon-style vote-by-mail?
But this assumes, as I do not assume, that there is someone on the other side of the table, looking for a compromise solution.

It’s the media. It’s Hollywood. It’s college professors. Do you know how scary that is? It’s really, really scary.

No, seriously, I don't know how scary that is. An otherwise not very memorable book by Joe Queenan, entitled Imperial Caddy, about, of all things, Dan Quayle made the point in memorable language that I wish I had at hand, but the point was -- even back then -- that the right got the military, fossil fuel industries, Big Pharma, agribusiness, insurance, Big Tobacco, cops, Wall Street, the judicial system, most of the media except certain prestige outlets, the NFL, etc., and the left got -- the English Department. Just how scary is it for you? And why?

Maybe you would, but can you deliver anyone? Is there someone on the other side of the table who is willing to accept this platform?

I suppose that depends on what proposition you're advancing. If it is that people in the sticks are in fact being fleeced by the urbanites, that "refrain" is just false. If the proposition is that there are explanations beyond the obvious for why they believe it, maybe there isn't a disagreement.

It's easy to make a laundry list of compromise positions. What's hard is to find someone on the other side of the table. It wasn't that long ago, right after Obergfell, when social conservatives were whining that there should have been a compromise along the lines of civil unions, but the mean lib'ruls rammed gay marriage down their throats.
I'm old enough to remember when that very compromise was being offered. There was no one (literally, there is always someone, but you know what I mean) on the anti-SSM side of the table who would take it.
You can't negotiate with yourself.

I honestly don’t know that they are being diverted, but it is the refrain I hear.

The "refrain I hear[d]" growing up in Central New York decades ago was that "our" tax money was being sucked into NYC for Those People. It was never true. NYC has almost always been a net exporter of tax revenue to the rest of the state. Once in a blue moon, the Rochester area would generate more tax revenue than it consumed, but that was small and rare.

That's certainly true. Being in business does not innoculate you from greed or stupidity. But someone who makes money without knowing money is particularly vulnerable.

One of my discarded ambitions is to produce an actual Springtime For Hitler.