MICKEY KAUS: A Fundraising Appeal. Here’s his donation page.

STEVE MALANGA IN CITY JOURNAL: The Beholden State: How Public-Sector Unions Broke California.

STEVE CHAPMAN: Give non-physicians more freedom to help patients.

UPDATE: Physician reader Tim Johnson isn’t buying it:

I saw your link to the article calling for more “non-doctors.” As a physician and person with common sense, this is ludicrous. Doctors aren’t valuable for knowing how to deal with the normal. Anyone can google “How to treat a headache”. Docs are valuable because they are trained for years to know when something isn’t normal. 1 in 100 patients doesn’t have a headache. Instead he has a brain tumor, a bleed, or even a parasite from Mexico. I agree that non-physicians are great for the 99 of 100 patients. But it sucks if you’re the 1. But when we’re discussing socialized medicine, those 99 are more valuable than the 1.

My sister-in-law spent a semester last year in France. She had to go to a pharmacist for a “sprained ankle”. The pharmacist gave her a cream. When she went back, he gave her some pain pills. Finally, on the third try, she got an X-Ray which showed a fracture requiring a cast. But those three pharmacist visits sure were cheap.

Good point — though, alas, I’ve had plenty of similar experiences with physicians. It took them months to diagnose Helen’s heart attack, for example, even in the face of atypical EKG readings that the expert system flagged as post-MI. They just saw a slim, athletic woman in her mid-thirties and ruled out a heart attack.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “It is deeply ironic that Democrats are trying to sell the idea that Republicans are somehow violent and unAmerican, when in fact, every actual violent incident is perpetrated by liberals, usually union thugs, against Republicans. It happened again in New Orleans following a fundraiser for the Louisiana Republican Party. Governor Bobby Jindal’s chief fundraiser, Allee Bautsch, left the event with her boyfriend, Joe Brown. They were attacked by a gang that reportedly prefaced their assault with racial and political insults. The attack was extraordinarily vicious.”

A MANUAL for civilization.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Moe Lane. And I’m not sure if Moe Lane is referencing this interview, but it’s on point.

OBAMA’S JEWISH SUPPORT drops 36 points. Don’t worry, though — he’s still got Joe Klein’s undivided loyalty.

UPDATE: Byron York: An Alarming Outbreak of “Regime” Amnesia. Remember — leaking military secrets to the New York Times is not seditious. Criticizing ObamaCare is.

SUNSPOTS, volcanoes and risk.

MARKDOWNS on GPS.

KA-CHING: Wall Street Cashes Out Investment In Chris Dodd. “The financial industry built Dodd’s career, so why shouldn’t it profit from the demise of it? It’s like a political credit-default swap. It’s a perfect fit for the Goldman Sachs era on Wall Street: No matter who loses, they win.”

FRANK RICH will be lecturing tonight at the University of Tulsa. To judge from his recent columns, you’d think he’d be too frightened to visit the benighted flyover country, but I guess where speaking fees are concerned he can find the courage . . . .

A “PERFECT STORM” of public distrust and unrest.

RELIGION: In Iran, adultery causes earthquakes. In the West, it’s Global Warming.

MICKEY KAUS: “This weekend was the state Democratic Party convention–the one where they wouldn’t let me speak. I went anyway. . . . In general, the big-deal party assembly seemed a bit smaller and more insular than I’d expected. And my expectations were that it would seem small and insular!”

Plus, see Kaus on Greg Gutfeld’s Redeye right here.

PROF. JACOBSON: Finally, A Real White Supremacist Rally And Almost No One Notices. “How curious. Tea Party events which are not white supremacist events are met with derision and abuse, while a real white supremacist rally is met mostly with silence. There is a lesson here. The attacks on the Tea Parties have nothing to do with stamping out white supremacy and everything to do with shaping the political dialogue to stamp out legitimate opposition to Obama administration policies.”

CAN I CALL ‘EM, OR WHAT? (CONT’D): Instapundit, April 15, on new data showing Tea Partiers wealthier, better educated than average: “Old spin — they were dumb ignorant hillbillies. Predicted new spin: Just a bunch of overeducated fatcats!”

And, right on cue, from predictable Administration spinmonger E.J. Dionne: The Populism of the Privileged.

DANIEL MITCHELL: Awful Tax System Causing a Growing Number of Americans to “Go Galt”.

CRYSTAL-GATE? “Politically connected staffers in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department twisted arms to steer a $5.4 million contract for crystal stemware to a tiny interior-design firm without putting it out for bid — a move that shut out a well-known New York glassmaker, a department whistleblower told The Post.” (Via JWF).

DAVID BOAZ: Robert McCartney’s Love Affair with Government.

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF, THIS TIME AS FARCE: Read this Virginia Postrel piece from 1995 and compare it to the latest “narrative” being peddled in Washington. Excerpt:

I wrote that in April 1990. In April 1995, it would have gotten me declared an enemy of the state, an inciter of violence, and for all intents and purposes the murderer of babies.

Which, in the eyes of E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Bill Clinton of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I apparently am. After all, in REASON’s May issue, which subscribers received in early April, I suggested that Americans are rightly afraid of government power, and I criticized Washingtonians for being too cool to use the word tyranny in polite conversation.

Back then, it was gauche to point out that Washington rules by force–that lawmakers’ symbolic gestures, from drug laws to wetlands regulations to the Americans with Disabilities Act, are enforced by government agents backed by guns. It was gauche to suggest that many government actions are unjust. It was gauche to tell Washington that the rage of the powerless was building in the land.

Now it’s not just gauche, it’s criminal. It makes you a terrorist, guilty by association. . . . Many commentators have noted that Clinton can’t tell the difference between talking and acting. They mean that he substitutes words for deeds, especially in foreign policy, and is shocked when his yammering has no effect.

In the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy, we have seen a different side of that confusion–the deliberate conflation of his opponents’ words with the deadly deeds of a handful of vicious, isolated individuals. Using tactics that would make Joe McCarthy sit up and take notes, Bill Clinton has sought to intimidate critics of government policy by branding them as terrorists.

Dionne, of course, was a reliable narrative-peddling tool then, as now, and Bill Clinton was, well, just a tool. Then as now. But read the whole thing. Some background here.

HEH: “Somebody should tell these people that the droit du seigneur – the sexual ‘rights’ of a feudal lord over his vassals – DIDN’T ACTUALLY EXIST.” Well, not back then.

EXAMINER COLUMNIST: Hannity was a no show. The Tea Party rolls on.