AT THE STATE LEVEL, the GOP is quietly amassing a decisive majority. “Since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Republican candidates in the states have promised that they would show the country another way of governing. They’ve delivered, and voters have responded. Judging by the evidence of 2014, the insurgency isn’t over.”

WHEN YOU LOOK AT OUR POLITICAL CLASS TODAY, who, really, are the “crazies?”

YOU KNOW, BACK IN THE 1970s, VANS WERE CONSIDERED SEXY: The 2015 Ford Transit 350 Wagon EcoBoost V-6: The alternative to contraception.

DANGEROUS SECRETS: Mark Thiessen: “Obama’s Secret Iran Deals Exposed.”

The agreements were uncovered, completely by chance, by two members of Congress — Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) — who were in Vienna meeting with the U.N.-releated agency.

In an interview, Pompeo told me that he and Cotton were meeting with the deputy director of the IAEA and the agency’s two top Iran negotiators just days after the nuclear accord was announced, when they asked how the agency will carry out verification at the Iranian military complex at Parchin. IAEA officials told them, quite casually, that the details were all covered in agreements negotiated between the IAEA and the Iranian government. It was the first they had heard of the side deals.

Pompeo says they asked whether they could see those agreements. He says IAEA officials replied, “ ‘Oh no, of course not, no, you’re not going to get to see those.’ And so everybody on our side of the table asked, ‘Has Secretary Kerry seen these?’ ‘No, Secretary Kerry hasn’t seen them. No American is ever going to get to see them.’ ”

It turns out that only the two parties — the IAEA and Iran — get to see the actual agreements (though you can see a picture of Iranian and IAEA officials holding up what appear to be the secret accords here).

In other words, Obama is gambling our national security and handing over $150 billion in sanctions relief to Iran, based on secret agreements negotiated between the IAEA and Iran that no U.S. official has seen.

Cutting a nuclear deal with Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, without either realizing or revealing that there are “side deals” with the IAEA is treasonous. Members of Congress who now vote to support it without knowing the full terms of these side deals are likewise traitors.

ARE WE MERGING ONTO THE HIGHWAY ALL WRONG?

JOEL KOTKIN: Putting climate change ahead of constituents. “Racial and economic inequality may be key issues facing America today, but the steps often pushed by progressives, including minority politicians, seem more likely to exacerbate these divisions than repair them. In a broad arc of policies affecting everything from housing to employment, the agenda being adopted serves to stunt upward mobility, self-sufficiency and property ownership. This great betrayal has many causes, but perhaps the largest one has been the abandonment of broad-based economic growth traditionally embraced by Democrats. Instead, they have opted for a policy agenda that stresses environmental puritanism and notions of racial redress, financed in large part by the windfall profits of Silicon Valley and California’s highly taxed upper-middle class.”

AT AMAZON, IT’S THE TV DEAL OF THE WEEK: Up to 57% off on Classic TV Favorites.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Politicos Put Graft Before Progress.

Cynical or not, these statements accurately describe why economic progress is so much harder today than it once was. But why is it so much harder? And why are so many politicians coming out against innovative new services such as Uber or Airbnb? The answer, I think, is simple: Those new services offer insufficient opportunities for graft. The old services they compete with — hotels or taxi companies — offer politicians a better deal, even if the deal they offer for consumers often isn’t as good. And politicians back the companies because — and be clear about this — politicians don’t care about you, they care about using their positions to accumulate money, power and prestige. . . .

One of the reasons that America enjoyed such tremendous growth over the past century was that technology outran regulators’ ability to keep up. Will that remain true over the coming decades? Let’s hope so. We can’t make it in the 21st century with a 1950s economic model, however appealing that approach might be to politicians.

Read the whole thing, to coin a phrase.

HOUSE GOP TO SENATE: We’re Not Taking Up Your Highway Bill.

PROGRESS: Currently, Quantum computers might be where Rockets were at the time of Robert Goddard.

DOWAGER EMPRESS OF CHAPPAQUA’S ‘CAMPAIGN’ GETS MORE BAD POLLING NEWS.

CHANGE: Americans Are Finally Eating Less. “Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago. The number of calories that the average American child takes in daily has fallen even more — by at least 9 percent.”

Well, you know, calorie consumption probably fell during the Great Depression, too. But people also tend to eat less as they age, and the population is getting older; I can’t tell if the study addressed that.

FREE THE CHILDREN!: Lenore Skenazy in the New York Post, “Give Parents Back Their Rights to Let Their Kids Walk Free.”

I’m so old that when I was growing up, my stay-at-home mom stayed at home.

She didn’t take me to school. She just waved goodbye and off I walked, starting at age 5. When I got to the one suburban street I had to cross, who was there to ensure my safety?

A 10-year-old in an orange sash. The crossing guard.

No one witnessing this adult-unsupervised scene called 911 because — well, first of all, no one had a cellphone, and second, no one thought it was weird or wrong.

But today, we fear for kids any time they’re on their own. So even though crime is at a 50-year low — lower than when most of us parents were kids — only about 13 percent of American children walk to school. . . .

But in part it’s also because it has become downright unusual — and sometimes illegal — to let kids go outside unsupervised.

Illegal?

Well, you’ve probably heard about the Meitiv family in suburban Maryland. Parents Danielle and Alexander let their kids, 10 and 6, walk home from the local park and were investigated not once but twice for child neglect.

Eventually they were cleared of all charges.

But that wasn’t before one incident when the cops picked up the kids and held them for five hours without letting them call home.

Or how about the case just last month of Nicole Jensen in Westbrook, Maine? Her 7-year-old daughter was playing for an hour in the playground down the block — you can see it from the family’s porch. But someone called 911 to report an unsupervised child, and the cops swooped in.

I confess that I would never have allowed my child to walk to school, even though we live in a very safe community with sidewalks. But it would also never occur to me that allowing a child to do so should warrant an investigation by protective services.

I’ve written about this before.  In a zeal to “protect” the children, some adults are becoming super-nannies, swooping down to call protective services anytime they spy your child alone in a playground, saying the wrong words, with dirty clothes, living without modern amenities, or getting the “wrong” medical care.  They think they know how to raise your kids better than you, so your children become “the State’s children” until you can wrestle them back. We are punishing parents, too often, for being poor or bucking cultural norms rather than being physically or emotionally abusive.  The constitutional “right” to raise our children is being eroded–a goal political leftists have long sought.

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Studies supporting efficacy of “deworming” campaigns in impoverished countries turn out to be crap.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Politicos Put Graft Before Progress.

ANNALS OF IMPLAUSIBLE CLAIMS: Obama Claims Country Better Off Today?

Last week President Obama told a small group of wealthy donors that by almost every metric, the U.S. is significantly better off under his leadership than under Bush’s. Oh dear God this is just getting embarrassing! Can we please have a little reality check here?

The most basic metric for how well the country is doing is median household income – are families making more today than in years past? Errrr, not so fast there Mr. President. As the chart below shows (the red line) we are still well below we were when you took office… and that is despite the massive amount of government spending and monetary policy stimulus! Or perhaps, this is in fact because of all that insanity? In fact, median household income, after taking inflation into account, is where it was back in 1989, twenty-six years ago!

One of the reason household income is so low is that despite the often touted “unemployment rate” the more important number, the percentage of people in the country actually working is down to levels not seen since the early 80s and well below the ratio during George W Bush’s Presidency.

How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

SHOULD WE REALLY TRUST THAT DNC-MSM JOURNALISTS CAN SAFELY RUN WITH THEM WITHOUT HURTING OTHERS? The NH College Republicans are giving journalists “First Amendment Scissors” to cut any white rope that may appear.

FIRST THE VIDEO, NOW THIS: Anti-abortion hackers claim to have breached Planned Parenthood.

I think I’ll keep all my records on paper, and write with a mechanical typewriter.

THIS BALLOON HAS SECONDS TO LIVE! Before and after photos of a target balloon’s last moments on a timed course in Glen Rose Texas, organized yesterday by the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association:

I used a Panasonic Lumix camera with the focus racked out on a 60 frames per second burst mode; the dust and gunpowder inside the event made for lots of haze. (The faux-snapshots and woody-looking background is a slightly modified Shutterstock.com image.) The event was held this weekend at the Somervell County Expo Center, in Glen Rose, about twenty minutes from the Bullets & Bourbon event in December with Glenn Reynolds, Roger L. Simon, Stephen Green, Dana Loesch, Ed Morrissey and Mark Rippetoe. More details about Bullets & Bourbon here.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 809.

THE IRAN DEAL: WEIMAR DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN, Roger Simon writes. “Only this time the final solution will be written in Farsi.”

Read the whole thing.

THE FOUR MOST EMBARRASSING THINGS CECILE RICHARDS SAID IN DEFENSE OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD: “Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards gave her first interview this weekend, to George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Considering Stephanopoulos is a longtime buddy of the Clintons, who are devoted to Planned Parenthood, the interview wasn’t as servile as you might expect. Richards was unrelenting in her robotic repeating of a few talking points, but Stephanopoulos tried in his own way to push back a bit,” Mollie Hemingway writes at the Federalist. “Amidst a flurry of words, the main point Richards said over and over and over and over again was that Planned Parenthood’s top doctors only appear monstrous because of entrapment and the magic of video editing. ‘Yeah, that’s the ticket!’ she should have added.”

And as Mollie notes, “One major difference between Jon Stewart, who actually doctors videos, splicing answers from one question to a completely separate question, and the undercover journalists hitting Planned Parenthood hard is that only one releases full footage for all to see.”

Read the whole thing.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Coming — And Hilarious — Democrat Implosion. “Republicans fear a repeat of 1992, with a squishy Bush at the head of the ticket watching helplessly as some populist businessman/novelty act hands the election to a Clinton. But Democrats should fear the far more likely repeat of 1968. . . . Nineteen sixty-eight was the year normal Americans saw the Democrats for what they were, and that’s the danger for them in 2016 too.”

Plus: “Hillary is America’s First Wife, a sour, sexless, disapproving presence eager to spend the next eight years telling us all how we are failing to measure up to her exacting standards.”

IT’S AMAZING THAT HILLARY, WITH HER EXTENSIVE PRIVATE-SECTOR EXPERIENCE, DOESN’T GET THIS: What Clinton’s Capital Gains Plan Won’t Do:

On the margin, it’s probably going to affect investment if you raise capital gains taxes by a lot — and nonetheless, this is not going to do much to shift the incentives toward longer-term thinking at companies. That’s because Clinton seems to fundamentally misunderstand the reason that public companies are so focused on short-term results that impact their stock price, rather than longer-term growth. To the extent that you think this phenomenon is real, and a problem, the issue is not that American investors, for reasons known only to themselves, have developed the attention spans of gnats. Instead, I’d argue that the problem is the massive shift toward institutional management of equity assets.

Here’s SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar on this phenomenon in 2013: “The proportion of U.S. public equities managed by institutions has risen steadily over the past six decades, from about 7 or 8 percent of market capitalization in 1950, to about 67 percent in 2010.” Stocks used to be the province of affluent people who might hold them for decades — and might well take it into their head to show up at your shareholder meeting and delicately inquire why the chief executive officer is getting paid so much when quarterly results look pretty dismal. Now they’re the province of everyone — and everyone is in the hands of professional managers who don’t care how much the CEO is getting paid, would rather sell and buy something else than chivy the board into doing its job, and need to deliver price appreciation pretty regularly, lest their Morningstar profile become tarnished, or the regulators start asking the company to increase contributions.

Add to that the fact that you can now log in every day to see exactly how your 401(k) is doing, and you can see how short-termism might come to dominate executive offices.

But whether or not you think that institutional management is actually unleashing a great plague of short-termism upon the land, the important point is that the prevalence of institutional management will prevent you from fixing this problem by manipulating the capital gains rates. Pension funds do not pay taxes on the assets in their funds. Neither is your tax-deferred retirement fund subject to these taxes. And even taxable mutual funds are probably not going to be very responsive to this change, for a few reasons.

How are cattle futures treated under her plan?