I once talked to an elected judge here in Texas about voter ignorance. And if you want to find real voter ignorance, look at judicial elections in Texas. One of my favorite poll results of all time comes from an exit poll conducted in Lubbock in 1976. 66% of respondents favored Texas’s system of partisan judicial elections, but 86% could not name a single judicial candidate.

Anyhow, back to the judge I was talking to. In looking at other judicial races, he would attribute victories and losses to silly things, like the name of the candidate (”Cambell sounds like the soup, and people like to vote for food names”), scurrilous and unbelievable rumors that had circulated during the campaign, or supposed vote buying or other sorts of fraud. But as to his personal election, he seemed to sincerely believe that the voters had rewarded his years of public service.

I’m with Somin on the virtues of rational ignorance, and having seen the inside of the Texas judiciary, I’m still a big fan of partisan judicial elections. At the end of the day, I believe that Churchill had it right, and that democracy remains the worst form of government except for all the others.

What a wondrous age we live in.

One of the reasons I’ve come to utterly despise the left is that they hold their countrymen in the lowest of esteem and believe that their motives are always suspect. Here were people taking at face value the words of this imam that he was building a mosque, near a location where Muslims killed a bunch of people in the name of Islam, in order to enhance dialogue. But those same people who were so credulous regarding the imam’s motives simply presumed that those who opposed the mosque did so out of abject bigotry. Their countrymen, they seemed to believe, needed nothing so much as to be lectured that not every Muslim is a terrorist.

Standing up to bigotry is generally a worthwhile activity and a noble impulse. Being so anxious to denounce bigotry that you ignorantly label the well-intentioned as bigots is an epic failure of self-awareness.

Locals know that in DC, there are two endorsements that can really swing a race: that of the Washington Post, and that of the former mayor-for-life, Marion Barry.  The Post’s endorsement is key in Wards 2, 3, and 6 (aka the white belt) and Barry’s is key everywhere else (aka the black belt).

The Post has endorsed Fenty.

Barry has endorsed Gray.

This should be fun to watch. . .

Ay, caramba! Those dark-skinned foreigners are now severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they’re also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.

There was, of course, nothing about hair or skin color in what the governor said.* If Milbank would get out of his Beltway bubble, where most “Mexicans” are in fact Guatamalans or Salvadorans with very dark skin, he’d know what those of us in the southwest know, which is that a very large number of Mexicans are not dark-skinned at all. A couple of hours watching Telemundo would leave you to believe that Mexicans are as white as the king of Spain. Certainly there are tons of Mexicans here in Austin who, at the end of a Texas summer, are whiter than me.

Mexico is a racially diverse country, ranging from tall and pale people of pure Spanish decent to short, dark people of unbroken Mayan lineage. Arizona and Texas border the northern, whiter regions of Mexico – except for their, um, different driving style, it is difficult to tell these people from native Texans. In large part, because there’s very little difference. Those of us who have daily interaction with actual Mexicans fully understand this, and don’t stereotypically think of them as “dark-skinned.”

That’s just the editorial overlay of a jackass east coaster who thinks so poorly of his countrymen that he believes opposition to illegal immigration simply must come from a bunch of racist bumpkins. Few things so greatly display one’s ignorance as to incorrectly presume the ignorance of others.

*Indeed, she claimed that bodies were being found without heads, so we would have no clue what color hair they had. But a good journalist should never let details get in the way of a race mongering cheap shot.

In 1789, the Constitution was an exceptional document in almost every way. With the expansion of liberty worldwide, some of its most notable features are now fairly normal and mainstream: a bill of rights, [theoretically] limited government, representative democracy, separated powers.

What remains most exceptional about the American regime, and what is never explicitly stated but only hinted at in the Constitution itself, is the degree of autonomy local and state governments possess. There is perhaps no better example than this: Gerald Fox, elected to a two-year term to prosecute state criminal laws in a piss ant county in a backwater state, is free to enforce laws based on his own interpretation of the Federal Constitution. Indeed, it is his sworn duty to do so. And for how he fulfills this duty, he is answerable only to the citizens of the county that elected him. If the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court were unanimous that Mr. Fox was wrong about this, they would be powerless to force him to prosecute laws that he believed were unconstitutional. And every judicial district in this country is free to elect such a man.

In a nation of over 300 million diverse souls, each of us is constantly subjected to rule by a majority with whom we disagree. That’s simply the nature of such a large nation. But it would be nearly impossible for a genuine tyranny to take root here, mostly because it would have to take over not just the federal and state governments, but the Gerald Foxes of this country – the tens of thousands of local officials who genuinely believe in liberty.

From David McCullough’s biography of our most famous native son:

But when on Friday, June 30… a small delegation of town leaders made a formal call on Adams, he received them in his upstairs library seated in his favorite armchair. They had come, they told the old patriot, to ask for a toast that they might read aloud at Quincy’s celebration on the Fourth.

“I will give you,” Adams said, “Independence forever!” Asked if he would like to add something more, he replied, “Not a word.”

Five days later, on July 4, 1826 Adams died at home in Quincy, aged 90. More than 500 miles away and only a few hours earlier, his friend Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello. It was 50 years to the day since the signing of the Declaration that Jefferson had written and that Adams had made possible.

The Provincetown school system will revisit its controversial policy of making condoms available to all students, with no age restriction, after Governor Deval Patrick expressed concern yesterday that very young children would have access to them.

A day after the new policy caused a media firestorm, School Committee chairman Peter Grosso said that Provincetown would probably limit condoms to fifth-graders and older. His stance stemmed from a conversation he had with Superintendent Beth Singer, author of the rule set to take effect this fall.

“She said the School Committee is going to have to revisit the policy and definitely reword it so it’s self-explaining, and possibly wording it so that maybe there would be an exclusion of the real young grades,’’ Grosso said.

Provincetown is, of course, somewhat what Massachusetts is to the rest of the country.  But still…