MEGAN MCARDLE: What Big Campaign Donations Can’t Buy:

By June, Jeb Bush was the GOP PACman; he had raised more than $100 million, and spent over $10 million of it. Second in such fundraising is Ted Cruz, who raised $38.4 million in outside money. The two of them together have 60 percent more cash than all the other candidates combined. They are currently tied for fourth place in polling.

Meanwhile, Scott Walker, who used to be running third in the PAC race, has already dropped out, as have Rick Perry and his $13.8 million worth of outside funds. Marco Rubio, with a comparatively dainty $17.3 million, is doing better than the three early leaders in outside fundraising — and yet he’s still being blown away in polling by Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who have raised, to a first approximation, zero in outside funds.

As Paul Blumenthal, Sam Stein and Scott Conroy write at the Huffington Post: “According to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, outside groups — super PACs and political ‘nonprofits’ — have already poured in more than $33 million to promote Republican candidates in the primary campaign through mass communication like television, radio, online advertising, direct mail and phone-banking. … Meanwhile, two candidates whose most significant source of outside help has been free media attention — Trump and Carson — have consistently remained the top two candidates in both national and statewide polls.”

Where are all those shadowy billionaires we were warned out?

Well, if they were smart, they’d be buying media companies. But we’ve been over that one before.

ROGER SIMON PREVIEWS A CHAPTER FROM DONALD TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY FOR DUMMIES: How to bluff, bluster, and blunder your way through any TV interview!

THANKS FOR THAT GUYS. NOW PLEASE STOP SCREWING UP EUROPE WITH GUILT-INDUCED IMMIGRATION POLICIES. Germany Clarifies: We’re Responsible for the Holocaust.

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WELCOME TO THE INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PROBLEMATICS: I give the transgression of letting sexist pancake bros work your pancake social media account four problematics.

THE HILL: Ryan Has The Votes For Speaker.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Only Global Warming Chart You Need from Now On.

Still though, it can’t hurt to tax the blue zones to be on the safe side — just ask them, right?

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: UWM says ‘politically correct’ is no longer politically correct — the phrase ‘politically correct’ is now a microaggression according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Related: English Schools Instructed to Ban ‘Sexist’ Words Like ‘Cupcake.’

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” as Syme bragged to Winston.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

ASHE SCHOW: Congressional staffers briefed on campus due process needs.

Because due process rights aren’t apparently considered when discussing campus sexual assault, congressional staffers on Monday had to be briefed about them by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

FIRE staffers Joseph Cohn, Shelby Emmett and Samantha Harris met with congressional staffers to discuss the lack of due process rights afforded to college students accused of sexual assault, and provided analysis of current legislation on the subject.

FIRE discussed the need for accused students to have access to the evidence against them (because such an obvious right is currently not afforded to college students) and the elimination of conflicts of interest among campus investigators. Currently, the person investigating a sexual assault claim can also be an advocate for the accuser, producing a clear bias for an allegedly impartial investigator.

FIRE also asked the staffers to reconsider the “preponderance of evidence” standard, which requires campus adjudicators to be only slightly (50.01 percent) sure that an assault happened to deliver a guilty verdict. This means that they can find a student responsible when they’re 49.99 percent sure the assault didn’t happen.

And then people wonder why male students are scarce, to the point that colleges are becoming finishing schools for girls.

THIS IS CNN: CNN spent 7(!) minutes decrying B-roll footage, immediately followed by, and I’m not kidding here, B-roll footage.

Related: Video: CNN’s Chris Cuomo nails the Benghazi committee… while being wrong on everything.

TRUMP V. THE BUSHES: AN OLD ANIMUS.

DAVE KOPEL: 2nd Circuit upholds N.Y. and Conn. arms bans; contradicts Heller and McDonald.

On Monday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld most of the 2013 arms prohibition laws enacted in New York and Connecticut. The circuit issued a joint opinion in two related cases, New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Cuomo, and Connecticut Citizens’ Defense League v. Malloy. The decision was written by Judge José Cabranes, who was appointed a federal district judge by President Carter and elevated to the 2nd Circuit by President Clinton. The opinion was joined by Judges Raymond Lohier (a President Obama appointee) and Christopher Droney (appointed to the district bench by Clinton and to the 2nd Circuit by Obama). . . .

The 2nd Circuit decision exemplifies the pattern in many lower federal courts of defying the Supreme Court’s admonition in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment is not “a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.” The approach of some lower courts seems to be that Heller stands for little beyond its holding that handgun bans are unconstitutional. In Heller, the court chastised lower courts for having “overread” the court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller; the Miller court had upheld the federal tax and registration system for sawed-off shotguns, but many lower courts asserted that Miller had ruled that the Second Amendment is a “collective right” that no individual can assert. Among the lower courts which, according to Heller, placed “erroneous reliance” on an incorrect interpretation of Miller, was the 2nd Circuit, in United States v. Scanio, No. 97–1584, 1998 WL 802060 (2d Cir., 1998).

Today, the trend is opposite, with some courts, including the 2nd Circuit, straining to under-read Heller. It seems that Heller is not a well-liked opinion among some federal judges, and, for some of them, barely a controlling opinion.

This is an unfortunate area for judicial lawlessness; it will not go unnoted, and it will undermine the position of the courts.

STEVEN SPIELBERG’S PARANOID STYLE: Spielberg’s early movies depict the Carter administration gassing American citizens and covering up man’s first encounter with alien visitors, and FDR and his infamous “Top. Men.” similarly burying proof that God exists inside a warehouse that’s symbolic of the infinite Kafka-esque bureaucratic maze that was the New Deal. In sharp contrast, as Sonny Bunch writes in the Washington Post, in Bridge of Spies, Spielberg’s latest film, “Rather than the government being treated with suspicion by Spielberg, it’s the common folk who let the viewers down.”

And “the common folk” are happy to return the bad feelings the best way they know how: Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ latest film “grossed only $15.3 million its opening weekend,” John Nolte writes at Big Hollywood, despite “reviews weren’t just good, they were glowing” (including Nolte’s own take).

Perhaps with the growing threat of nuclear war in the Middle East, Bridge of Spies’ Cold War analogy hits a bit too close to home for viewers looking for escapism from the debacle created by Spielberg and Hanks-supported President Obama.

MARINE DROPS OUT OF RACE, WON’T SEEK PAJAMA BOY PARTY’S NOMINATION: Investor’s Business Daily notes that “Jim Webb dropped out of his party’s primary race, leaving a field of candidates so extreme that none could have won the Democratic nomination as recently as 2000*. The party has lurched left, hard:”

Conceding that his “views on many issues are not compatible with the power structure and base of the Democratic Party,” Webb, a U.S. senator from 2007 to 2013, left the race Tuesday.

Webb’s differences with the party are not entirely about policy issues.

He’s just too much of a traditional man to suit the tastes of today’s Democrats.

To illustrate that point, IBD created this jarring visual comparison:

Nobody loves a good juxtaposition than me, and the side-by-side images that IBD mashed together are damning. But Webb and Footie Obamacare Pajamas Boy are more related than they first seem. Webb opportunistically changed parties in 2006 to run against then-Sen. George Allen of Virginia. Webb’s victory was assured when in service to Webb’s campaign, the Washington Post ran an estimated 100 articles beginning in mid-August of 2006 until the end of the election in November casting a harsh Klieg light upon Allen’s “macaca” quip when pointing out his omnipresent Mohawk-wearing video tracker from the rival Webb campaign.

But while Webb has had a vastly different career arc from Vietnam War Marine to Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan to Democrat senator and quixotic presidential candidate than young Ethan Krupp, the self-described “liberal fuck” who posed for the now infamous Footie Pajamas Boy photo, Webb is directly responsible for that image in one real sense. Webb voted for Obamacare, and upon retiring in 2012 after his single term as senator told fellow Democrat Chuck Todd of MSNBC that he had no regrets voting for the now-disastrous bill.

As Phil Kerpen of AmericanCommitment.org tweeted when Webb quit the presidential race, “Contrast Webb’s sad bolting today with the coulda been drama of him voting no on Obamacare and walking across the aisle, Christmas Eve 2009.”

IBD’s requiem for Webb’s presidential bid concludes, “Webb’s departure shows, and polls confirm, the extremists in 2015 are the Democrats, not the Republicans. This is exactly why a socialist can generate such heavy support in the party. The roots have been severed.” And Webb himself played no small role in their destruction.

* Wait, how much further to the left could the Democrats have moved since Al Gore, master of the “digital brownshirts” and purveyor the “Ecological Kristallnacht,” won the nomination in 2000?

STEPHEN MILLER: How to Build a Digital Elephant: The GOP’s Biggest Obstacle in 2016.

Last week saw the Democrats, the purported party of Youth and Diversity, turn their first primary debate into a joyless slog that quickly devolved into a pitiless deathmarch to see which aging, pasty-faced candidate could stay awake past their bedtime the longest. It took less than five minutes for the Democratic candidates to start yelling at, and about, everyone watching. As VOXDOTCOM noted, the Democratic party is in ashes on a state and national level outside of the presidency, and they have no candidates in the post-Obama era worth offering so hey: Lincoln Chafee will have to do! The best they are offering is a 74-year-old socialist (who, a week after the debate ended, is probably still on stage screaming about communitarian economics in a darkened auditorium) and a 70-year-old oligarch with the lowest likability ratings of any presidential candidate in modern history…who also just happens to be the target of a FBI investigation for gross mishandling of classified information.

And yet, in the end none of it may matter.

The gaffes. The staged media events. The bursts of random cackling that repel voters like garlic repels vampires. The scandalous indifference to, and insolence toward, federal law. All of it may very well be utterly inconsequential in the final analysis because more and more these days it’s data and analytics that decide elections. And numbers don’t care about likability or traditional electability. The 2016 election, more than 2012 or 2008 before it, will be an election decided on data and outreach, and as of right now the GOP and its candidates are woefully underequipped and underprepared. Some of this is completely beyond their control at this early point in the primaries. But some of it is not; it is very much under their control, and the current structure of GOP campaign operations suggest that the candidates are simply choosing not to emphasize it.

Here is a simple fact: right now, the GOP is on the road to defeat, set to be overwhelmed by a superior digital voter microtargeting operation on the other side, and hamstrung by a refusal to focus on the future of predictive analytics and Big Data application technology. These are the things which translate through e-mail and online contacts, into both donations and (even more importantly) boots on the ground in the thick of a general election campaign: door-to-door mobilization. Everything else — the theater, the social media back-and-forths, the SNL appearances and Sunday morning show interviews — is almost meaningless. The 2016 pool of potential GOP nominees represents the deepest reserve of young Presidential-level talent the Republican Party has had in ages, and none of it may matter because while the engineers and developers on the Democratic side aren’t necessarily personally invested in Hillary or Bernie, they do believe in the greater Cause. And, more to the point, these are the sorts of people who simply enjoy solving equations and problems.

GOP candidates are facing a mammoth two-pronged problem: 1) the failure of will and lack of funds to field large data-driven get-out-the-vote operations, and; 2) Hillary Clinton’s well funded allies in Silicon Valley, specifically Eric Schmidt and Google. On top of that, this is a party whose candidates look like they are playing catch-up in the areas of digital operations and field mobilization.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, if the GOP were smarter it would be pushing Google-unfriendly changes in tax and IP law, and couching them in Democratic buzzwords to make it hard for Obama to veto them. That would encourage Google to back off of the partisanship.

THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS:

● Shot: Meet Canada’s Prime Minister Zoolander.

● Chaser: England’s New Labour Party PR Chief Is a Soviet Apologist:

So phase two of our conspiracy, in which the Tory plotter manipulates the not-quite-radical-enough Corbyn into hiring a swivel-eyed fanatic as the party’s “executive director of strategy and communications.” Someone whose ideas are so far outside the mainstream, that the usual excuses (“I wasn’t defending the IRA! I was supporting the peace process!”) wouldn’t wash. Could we find a jug-eared revolutionary who attended an elite boarding school? A Soviet nostalgic whose father once ran the BBC?

Of course we can. And there was only one obvious candidate.

Wherever there’s an aggrieved terrorist or an undemocratic regime engaged in an existential struggle with the West, you can rely on Seumas Milne, Oxford-educated warrior for the Third World and former comment editor of The Guardian, to offer a full-throated, if slightly incoherent, defense. If your country’s constitution mandates the burning down of orphanages and the conscription of 6-year-olds in to the army, Milne will likely have your back, provided you also express a deep loathing for the United States and capitalism. So yesterday, in a signal to party moderates that he intends to burn Labour to the ground, Jeremy Corbyn appointed Milne his head of communications.

It simply has to be a Tory plot.

* * * * * * * *

Earlier in his article on Milne, Reason alumni Michael Moynihan posited:

Here’s a conspiracy theory worth considering: In a plot to wreak havoc on Britain’s Labour Party, a Conservative Party operative scanned the opposition’s parliamentary delegation, spotted the MP with the wooliest beard and wooliest sweater, and deduced that he was also likely be its wooliest thinker. Through a series of backroom deals, MP Jeremy Corbyn was elevated to the leadership of the Labour Party, effectively casting the opposition further into the political wilderness.

As Robert Conquest’s Third Law of politics states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

That helps to explain the chaos that both of America’s political parties are current undergoing as well.

THEY PROMISE THE BLESSINGS OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN, BUT THEY PLAN TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD INTO A GIGANTIC POST OFFICE: Bernie Sanders: let’s turn the Post Office into a bank!

Related: Rebranding Socialism.

(Headline by Ludwig von Mises, by way of Michael Walsh’s must-read new book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.)

A LOOK AT THE FACTS on gun-free zones.

STEPHEN HAYES ON WHAT TO EXPECT AT HILLARY’S BENGHAZI HEARING.

PFUI: Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox”.

PROTECT THE LITTLE SNOWFLAKES: Conservative female author of ‘The War on Men’ disinvited to speak at Williams College after protests.  Apparently because it might “upset” some students, forbid the thought!

BRITISH LABOUR PARTY SUICIDE WATCH: Corbyn appoints terror apologist to top advisory post.

LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT: Works on Cancer cells. Who knew? Cancer Treatment Breakthrough: Researchers Engineer A Way To Make Leukemia Cells Kill Each Other.

THE PLANET COOLS, THE PLANET WARMS: The left screams for more government control.  I remember when this was a thing and the “solution” was exactly the same as for global warming  climate change today.  It’s almost like all this is an excuse for naked will-to-power. University Of Colorado 1972 : New Ice Age Coming.

NOW HOW TO GET OUT TO THOSE PLANETS: Astronomers find the first planet known to orbit a white dwarf.