Blinders On? Check! Fox News isn’t giving Rand Paul’s campaign a very enthusiastic send-off, some have noted. So which candidate is highly influential (on the right) Fox favoring? Seems like a big part of the story! You’d think a political site like Daily Caller would want to cover it. But no! …. OK, that just popped out. We’re moving on here. … For sure. ….Yessiree!….

Green vs. Green? California, where I live, is in the middle of a bad drought. The governor has ordered unprecedented mandatory water restrictions with the aim of reducing water use by 25 percent.  Restrictions on watering lawns, washing cars, and even showering are expected, as well as price hikes.

Here’s another potential water-saving idea: A moratorium on mandatory recycling. I would guess at least 10% of my water use comes from washing/rinsing all the recyclables I am required to separate out from the regular trash. We single yuppies use a lot of plastic take-out containers. Rinsing them makes recycling them easier and, more important, avoids having the recycling bins become a magnet for rats. All that rinsing is a huge hassle. I assume it is normally worth it because it cuts down on land fill use and conserves raw materials like aluminum.

But are those worthy ends more important, right now, than saving us from running out of one of the necessities of life? Seems like a no-brainer: It’s more important to save the water. We could start recycling again when it starts raining again.

Why hasn’t there been conspicuous talk by politicians of a pause in recycling? I don’t know. Maybe because environmentalists have too much invested in the recycling-industrial complex to even admit there are higher priorities. Maybe because greens don’t like to fight greens. Maybe nobody wants to depart from the pat, moralistic narrative of humans using too many resources and now paying the price. Or maybe there is some technical problem I don’t know about.

It seems worth at least discussing. Wouldn’t we make more progress fighting the drought if we made it the easy thing to do — i.e. by simply  not doing something most people don’t like doing anyway. “You don’t have to eat your spinach!” is apt to find a more receptive audience than “Stop taking showers.” Or do environmentalists only know how to hector?

Poll questions can be biased, especially on immigration (where, as with welfare, the results are very sensitive to changes in wording).“But when you ask the same question over time,” notes Mark Krikorian, “you get a sense of trends, and these don’t look good for the anti-borders crowd.” He has the details. …

“That’s not a starting point for dialogue with conservative voters. That’s more like a middle finger … You couldn’t pick two more resonant issues for Republican primary voters than immigration and Common Core. … Jeb says to them, ‘Not only do I not agree with you, I don’t agree with you at all — and I don’t really respect your views on it.'” [E.A.]

Good sum-up of Jeb Bush’s message — from, yes, Tucker Carlson — in this Tampa Bay Times article …

My robot will eat your wage subsidy: Don’t think the Earned Income Tax Credit plus more easily-licensed hairdressers is an adequate response to the Rise of the Robots, in which  “super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task,” as James Pethokoukis puts it.  …. (Won’t robots make pretty good hairdressers? They’ll also probably write think pieces with falsely optimistic policy recommendations.) . … Pethokoukis shies away from confronting the potential social disaster of having the vast majority of Americans effectively on the dole, or employed in fake WPA-like makework,  as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. … P.S.: The solution is definitely not more immigration. ... [via Drudge]

‘I was hopin’ you wouldn’t ask me that one, Guv’nor. That’s where my case falls completely to the ground’:  Byron York reports that ex-Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is enough of a serious challenger to Hillary that the Cinton camp is issuing vague, ominous threats. But how dirty do the Clintons have to play to beat O’Malley? Under his administration, Maryland was supposed to show that a state with a Democratic governor committed to Obamacare could make it work. Instead, he implemented it so badly the state had to give up on its site and start over a year later. People were forced to re-enroll. Seems like he’s a feisty challlenger who can be knocked out with one punch. And we know what the punch is. And he’s leaning into it, running in part on his skill as a “manager.” What am I missing here? …