TWEET OF THE WEEK: “Taxes are the price we pay for 7 of the 10 richest counties being within commuting distance of DC.”

JAMES TARANTO: Race Against Time: Is there a high-minded justification for Dems’ divisive rhetoric?

This column probably isn’t the first to notice a recent intensification of liberal and Democratic rhetoric about race. Last month Paul Ryan was the object of a Two Minutes Hate for some comments on the culture of poverty “in our inner cities,” which, as The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial, were no different in substance from things President Obama had recently said.

This Sunday, as Politico notes, Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told CNN’s Candy Crowley that “to a significant extent, the Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism.” He did allow that “not all” House Republicans are racist, though he didn’t specify how many or which ones he thinks are.

Last Wednesday Eric Holder, in a speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, complained that he had faced “unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive adversity,” ABC News reports. “Look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House committee. What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?”

Although Holder didn’t specifically accuse his adversaries of racial motives, others, including Crowley, assumed that was what he meant. Politico reports that in her interview with Israel, “Crowley said that Holder believes ‘the treatment he has received in the House . . . would not have happened if he were not African-American.”

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, appearing on Sharpton’s MSNBC show, went so far as to suggest that Republicans had been soft on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius because she’s white, as the Daily Caller reports incredulously.

For this rise in the racial temperature we blame not global warming but political cooling. As November approaches, Democrats face not only an unfavorable election map but an increasingly chilly electorate. From last month’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza pulled presidential approval numbers for four key Democratic constituencies. Obama was below 50% among three of those groups: single women (48%, to 45% disapproval), Hispanics (49% to 46%), and voters under 30 (45% to 48%). Only among blacks was approval still strong, 78% to 12% disapproval.

By way of comparison, in 2012 Obama won the votes of 67% of single women, 71% of Hispanics, 60% of under-30 voters and 93% of blacks. It’s reasonable to surmise that the racial appeals are a reaction to this desperate political situation, an effort to minimize Democratic losses by motivating the party’s base to turn out.

My advice to Republicans is to target the Dem base with ads showing how they’ve been betrayed. The truth should be enough to get them to stay home.

AUSTIN BAY: Russian Provocateurs Prepare Ukraine Battlefield.

Plus, a flashback to Milosevic and Croatia: “We’ve seen this script before, in another Slav-versus-Slav war featuring calculated, creeping aggression in pursuit of coveted territory.”

ROLL CALL: Immigration Overhaul: Democrats Look to Flip 30 House Republicans.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Case for a Little Sedition: The Bundy standoff reminds us that government is our servant, not our master.

A great deal of the discussion about the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada has focused on the legal questions — the litigation between Mr. Bundy and the BLM, his eccentric (i.e., batzoid) legal rationales, etc. But as Rich Lowry and others have argued, this is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. John Hinderaker and Rich both are correct that as a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.

Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition; Mr. Gandhi himself habitually was among the first to acknowledge that fact, refusing to offer a defense in his sedition case and arguing that the judge had no choice but to resign, in protest of the perfectly legal injustice unfolding in his courtroom, or to sentence him to the harshest sentence possible, there being no extenuating circumstances for Mr. Gandhi’s intentional violation of the law. Henry David Thoreau was happy to spend his time in jail, knowing that the law was against him, whatever side justice was on.

But not all dissidents are content to submit to what we, in the Age of Obama, still insist on quaintly calling “the rule of law.” And there is a price to pay for that, too: King George not only would have been well within his legal rights to hang every one of this nation’s seditious Founding Fathers, he would have been duty-bound to do so, the keeping of the civil peace being the first responsibility of the civil authority. Every fugitive slave, and every one of the sainted men and women who harbored and enabled them, was a law-breaker, and who can blame them if none was content to submit to what passed for justice among the slavers? . . .

If the conservatives in official Washington want to do something other than stand by and look impotent, they might consider pressing for legislation that would oblige the federal government to divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year for the foreseeable future through an open auction process. Even the Obama administration has identified a very large portfolio of office buildings and other federal holdings that are unused or under-used. By some estimates, superfluous federal holdings amount to trillions of dollars in value. Surely not every inch of that 87 percent of Nevada under the absentee-landlordship of the federal government is critical to the national interest. Perhaps Mr. Bundy would like to buy some land where he can graze his cattle.

Prudential measures do not solve questions of principle. So where does that leave us with our judgment of the Nevada insurrection? Perhaps with an understanding that while Mr. Bundy’s stand should not be construed as a general template for civic action, it is nonetheless the case that, in measured doses, a little sedition is an excellent thing.

I think the problem is that the government hasn’t gotten enough pushback. The phrase “the country wouldn’t stand for it” has gone out of the political lexicon. I think it needs to go back in.

It does seem as if we’re seeing more resistance.

HEH: In Swipe At Harry Reid, Josh Romney Shows Father Paying Taxes. I’d like to see pictures explaining how Harry Reid became a very rich man while spending a lifetime in “public service.”

WAR ON WOMEN: Obama talks about pay gap, but then punishes working mothers. “New rules issued by Obama’s Treasury Department force many department employees with kids to burn a vacation day or take unpaid leave whenever snow shuts down the district. For a childless worker, on the other hand, a snow day means a free day off. The rules behind this cruel dynamic make some sense, but not if you care about helping women achieve pay equity.” Mitch McConnell and Kelly Ayotte want to fix, but Obama is talking veto.

UPDATE: From the comments:

There’s something even more revealing. Yesterday, I did my taxes with Turbotax. Part of the warnings that come with using the home office deduction are what that room cannot be used for. One was that it couldn’t contain a crib for a baby.

If a young mother is running a business out of her home, why shouldn’t she be able to have that baby sleeping alongside her as she works? How does that differ from having the baby in the next room?

I’m sure that idea flows from the nasty, Democratic-tilting little minds of the IRS rather than formal legislation. But it also offers the Republicans an excellent opportunity to offer practical help. Pass legislation that allows child-centered activities for either parent in a home office. Not only allow it to be OK, mandate that it is OK.

It’s not a bad idea.

SKYNET WILL NOT BE AMUSED: Humans Taking Jobs Back From Robots In Japan.

WHY DO YOU THINK THE DEMOCRATS AREN’T RUNNING ANYONE AGAINST HIM? Mickey Kaus: Eric Cantor — The New “Mr. Amnesty”?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Oregon Law Prof Objects to Shifting Funds for Faculty Raises to Public Interest Jobs for Students. The “jobs” appear mostly designed to improve the school’s U.S. News rankings. Funny, I proposed a similar nonprofit-based scheme to a colleague in jest a while back. Instead, I was ahead of the curve.

Plus: “As soon as money got tight, we seem to have turned on one another as if this was a zero-sum game.” That’s a serious risk for any institution in hard times.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Coalition of the Disappointed: Obama fires up racial and gender resentments to get out the vote. Telling, isn’t it, that at this point in his Presidency he doesn’t have any actual, you know, achievements to stress?

If I were the GOP, I’d be targeting Obama’s base with ads and messaging stressing how much worse off they are than they were six years ago. It wouldn’t be hard. That said, the GOP hasn’t been very smart about such things — ironically, because they’re afraid of being called racists.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED TO SEE CORRUPTION GOING ON: Chevron, Dole cases expose lawyer corruption: Foreign legal systems and American lawyers are found to cheat big business out of millions. “California courts found the litigation to be a ‘heinous conspiracy’ orchestrated by lawyers in the U.S. and Nicaragua who recruited fake plaintiffs, coached them to lie, forged documents, falsified lab results and threatened witnesses. One of the ‘sterile’ victims fathered three children, according to DNA tests.”

AMERICA IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Can the US Government Confiscate a Citizen’s Passport for No Apparent Reason? It Just Did.

SOMEHOW I MISSED THESE COMMENTS BY RICHARD FERNANDEZ A COUPLE OF WEEKS BACK. BUT THEY’RE STILL WORTH REPEATING:

America was founded on the notion that most politicians can only be expected to be ornery, low-down, crooks. Nobody in those days was fool enough to believe they could be Light-workers, Messiahs and create a world without guns. Thus in the Founder’s view the only way to guard against rogues was to ensure that government remained as small as possible relative to its essential jobs; to change those in office frequently and often, like we change underwear.

The Founders saw roguery as the byproduct of high office. And so they wrote a constitution — you know, the document more than a hundred years old that nobody smart reads any more — to keep the weeds down. For they knew better than our modern enlighteneds that any politician sufficiently powerful to disarm the people is sufficiently powerful to sell missiles bought from Russia to Muslim rebels in Mindanao.

Unless one remembers this there is no defense against crooks in high places.

Indeed.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Orin Kerr bursts the sunny bubble inhabited by Erwin Chemerinsky and Carrie Menkel-Meadow.

BILL DE BLASIO’S class warfare against poor immigrants.

UPDATING THE TAXI INDUSTRY: USA TODAY EDITORIALIZES IN FAVOR OF UBER: “It’s no surprise that the industry has long been ripe for disruptive competition. The surprise is that it took so long.”

MAN CHARGED WITH FELONY CHILD ABUSE for slapping unruly teen.

A TAX DAY LAMENT FROM VIRGINIA POSTREL: Bring Back Income-Averaging.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Your Spouse May Be ‘Hangry’ for a Fight. I pretty much only get angry when I’m hungry. I think the reason my Scots-Irish ancestors had such a tetchy reputation is that they were always hungry.

APPARENTLY, YOU CAN BE A HEARTBEAT AWAY AND BRAIN-DEAD AT THE SAME TIME: Biden: Boston Bombing was ‘Worth It.’

OBSERVATION: “There are a LOT of similarities between fitness culture in DC and religious culture in The South.”

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WIRED: Out in the Open: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA. “Originally developed as a research project by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Tor has been used by a wide range of people who care about online anonymity: everyone from Silk Road drug dealers, to activists, whistleblowers, stalking victims and people who simply like their online privacy. Tails makes it much easier to use Tor and other privacy tools. Once you boot into Tails — which requires no special setup — Tor runs automatically. When you’re done using it, you can boot back into your PC’s normal operating system, and no history from your Tails session will remain.”

PAUL MIRENGOFF: Is Scott Walker on his way to 2016 front-runner status? “Revealingly, Walker fares well in an electorate that does not seem particularly conservative and that, if anything, appears to be slightly to the left of American voters in general.” It’s at least a year until anyone can be called a “front-runner.” But I like Scott Walker.