MICKEY KAUS: “You say Latinos are key swing voters in swing states? How about lower-income whites? Fivethirtyeight.com‘s Nate Silver notes that ‘low income whites are concentrated in swing states ….’ If a presidential candidate loses these voters by, say, Hispandering on immigration, he loses, no? Maybe Mitt Romney’s strategists have seen the same numbers. . . . I’m not saying that a candidate should choose immigration policy on the basis of what will win him an election. It’s supporters of an immigration amnesty who are constantly and unashamedly urging that calculation.”

I THOUGHT THIS MEME WAS PLAYED OUT. I guess not.

BEWARE OF “Taxation-Shock Syndrome.”

CHANGE: Montgomery College forced to revamp ‘Occupy’ class. “Montgomery College is revising plans to offer a summer class on the Occupy Wall Street movement — geared toward high school students — after residents complained that the class is promoting the Occupy movement’s agenda to students.”

I’ve got an alternative syllabus.

DAVID BROCK explains it all.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT:

I just found (via Overlawyered.Com) that the New Orleans Rave prosecution has ended in humiliating defeat for the prosecution, with the plea-bargain they managed to extort now being struck down. I consulted on some earlier proceedings in this case with the ACLU and the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund. (Here’s an earlier story by Janelle Brown of Salon, and here’s a piece Dave Kopel and I wrote in National Review Online calling for President Bush to fire the U.S. Attorney involved — he quit first.)

The entire prosecution was a disgrace — and proof that the New Orleans U.S. Attorney’s office has too much time on its hands, or a deeply distorted sense of priorities, something that I hope Congress will remember at budget time.

Accountability is for the little people, alas.

AT AMAZON, loads of coupons.

THE HILL: Critics say Obama doesn’t speak for all women on birth control.

NOW HOW ABOUT AMERICA? How the European Internet Rose Up Against ACTA.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland sent a letter to his fellow leaders in the EU Friday urging them to reject ACTA, reversing Poland’s course with the controversial intellectual-property treaty, and possibly taking Europe with them.

“I was wrong,” Tusk explained to a news conference, confessing his government had acted recklessly with a legal regime that wasn’t right for the 21st century. The reversal came after Tusk’s own strong statements in support of ACTA and condemnation of Anonymous attacks on Polish government sites, and weeks of street protest in Poland and across Europe.

The seeming overnight success came after both years of work by European NGOs, and the spark of the SOPA/PIPA protests in America (which included Wired.com).

ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is an international treaty that was negotiated in secret over the span of four years. While the provisions are currently public, their genesis was hidden from democratic scrutiny, and most nations signed on to ACTA without any chance for their citizenry to review or comment on the process. Beyond its undemocratic origins, it’s often unclear how ACTA’s requirements would be implemented, or could be implemented without creating a technical architecture online that restricts speech. For instance, ACTA’s harsh DMCA-like provisions against anti-circumvention could effectively render some free software, which by its nature can’t support DRM, illegal in the Western world.

A cynic would suspect that was much of its purpose. How about making this a campaign issue?

ROGER KIMBALL: The Great American Novel?

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: A Ring On A Guy’s Right Hand: What Does It All Mean?

BILL QUICK RELUCTANTLY CONCLUDES THAT it’s time for Newt to bow out. I have to say, though, I’m surprised at the number of Newt signs I’m seeing around here all of a sudden.

IN EUROPE, excluding free software?

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Do Competitive Eaters Have Unusual Stomachs?

BARACK OBAMA: The Greatest Gun Salesman in American History?

UH OH: New research on Japanese quake ominous for Pacific Northwest.

Detailed analyses of the way the Earth warped along the Japanese coast suggest that shaking from a Cascadia megaquake could be stronger than expected along the coasts of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, researchers reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“The Cascadia subduction zone can be seen as a mirror image of the Tohoku area,” said John Anderson, of the University of Nevada.

Anderson compiled ground-motion data from the Japan quake and overlaid it on a map of the Pacific Northwest, which has a similar fault – called a subduction zone – lying offshore.

In Japan, the biggest jolts occurred underwater. The seafloor was displaced by 150 feet or more in some places, triggering the massive tsunami. But in the Northwest, it’s the land that will be rocked hardest – because the Pacific coast here lies so close to the subduction zone.

“The ground motions that we have from Tohoku may actually be an indication that there could be much stronger shaking in the coastal areas of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon,” Anderson said.

Cities like Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, B.C., are far enough from the coast that they might dodge the most violent hammering. But all of the urban areas sit on geologic basins that can amplify ground motion like waves in a bathtub.

And remember — earthquake concerns aren’t just for the West Coast, what with recent East Coast shocks, and of course the threat of a big New Madrid quake.

Here’s my earlier post on earthquake preparedness. More here. Plus, some recommended gear. More here. Also, here’s some advice from the LAFD, although their excellent PDF booklet seems to have vanished.

UPDATE: Here’s the LAFD booklet, thanks to reader Tim Ryan.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why They Seem to Rise Together: Federal Aid and College Tuition.

Long before I knew it was called the “Bennett Hypothesis” I knew that colleges and universities increase tuition to capture increases in federal and state financial aid. I attended numerous meetings of university administrators where the topic of setting next year’s tuition was discussed.

The regnant phrase was “Don’t leave money sitting on the table.” The metaphoric table in question was the one on which the government had laid out a sumptuous banquet of increases of financial aid. Our job was to figure out how to consume as much of it as possible in tuition increases. This didn’t necessarily mean we were insensitive to the needs of financially less well-off students. A substantial portion of the money we captured would be reallocated as “tuition discounts” or “institutional aid.” That is to say, just as Andrew Gillen observes, we combined Bennett Hypothesis-style capture of external student financial aid with “price discrimination.”

And we did all this in the pursuit of educational excellence. It was a large private university in the shadow of world-ranked neighbors and it was attempting to pull itself up in the world of prestige and influence by its bootstraps. There were townhouses that needed buying; laboratories that needed building; faculty stars that needed hiring; classrooms and residence halls that needed refurbishing; symphonies that needed performing; grotesque modern sculptures that needed displaying; and administrators that needed chauffeuring.

Increasingly that last.

HAMMER AND TONGS: Newt Gingrich Goes After Obama.

SO IF THE PRIMARIES ARE HURTING REPUBLICANS SO MUCH, WHAT EXPLAINS THIS? Rasmussen tracking poll shows Romney and Santorum within 2 points of Obama.

It’s not just the Republicans who have a weak field, I guess . . .

RULES FOR BACKSEAT DRIVERS.

Most people don’t like it.

LOVE WILL FIND A WAY: It’s the only way you’ll get Britain’s only woman commando out of her green beret – marry her!

AT AMAZON, IT’S the Home Improvement value center.

OUT OF TOUCH? Richard Lugar: Earmarks are “bogus issue.”

THE JOY OF Steak ‘N’ Shake.

OUT: UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS.

IN: Social Security Disability.