Minor Thoughts from me to you

Veronique de Rugy is worried that Romney / Ryan's talk about "protecting Medicare" means that they won't really push to reform it.

The only way to ensure that Medicare is there “for my generation, and for my kids and yours,” reform it. If when Representative Ryan says “protect” and “strengthen” he means “reform Medicare,” great. Reform can take many forms, obviously. But, then we can believe Ryan when he says “ladies and gentlemen, our nation needs this debate. We want this debate. We will win this debate.”

She lays out all of the reasons why Medicare desperately needs to be reformed, if it's to survive at all. It's worth a read, especially if you're not convinced about the necessity of reforming Medicare.

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on Saturday, the Obama campaign came out with a new ad, approved by the President, claiming that Mitt Romney’s Medicare plan could require seniors to pay $6,400 more a year for health insurance. That claim is not only false, but brazenly and incontrovertibly so. Indeed, almost everything in the ad is wrong except for the phrase “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”

Democrats making things up about Republican reform plans? I'm shocked, simply shocked!

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In the end, Rector thinks he knows why he hasn’t been contacted by fact checkers. “They didn’t want the answer. .  .  . If they really wanted the answer, all they had to do was pick up the phone and I would talk to them until they would fall asleep,” he says. “I have the lowest possible expectations for these people.”

Mark Hemingway writes at The Weekly Standard about the media fact checkers and the debate over the Obama Administration's changes to welfare work rules.

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The evidence that Romney is lagging in the polls because voters are upset about a “war on women” -- rather than because of a bruisingly negative primary campaign or the recovering economy -- is pretty thin. But Republicans are responding not just to the polls but to the persistent mythology of the gender gap.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post recently fell prey to this conventional wisdom, writing that “the GOP has suffered from a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980.” Suffered? Of the eight presidential elections from 1980 to 2008, Republicans won five four if you exclude 2000. Republicans carried women, albeit narrowly, three times; Democrats carried men twice. Republicans can lose even while winning men, as in 1996. Democrats can lose while winning women, as in 2004.

The evidence suggests that women are more inclined than men to vote for Democrats, but this gap doesn’t consistently help either party. It isn’t the case that the larger the gender gap, the worse Republicans do. Republicans did seven points better among men than women in 2004, when they won. They did five points better in 2008, when they lost.

Obama barely won men in 2008. If this race is at all competitive, he will lose them this time. And that’s not all we can predict. Romney will win among large subgroups of women: those who are married, those who are white, those who go to church regularly. Gender isn’t the principal determinant of women’s votes any more than it is of men’s.

I love reading about the inside baseball of politics.

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Ramesh Ponnuru ponders what a Sarah Palin vs. Mitt Romney primary battle would look like.

He thinks it would probably be an ugly battle that could injure the party in a general election.

I think it'd be nice if neither one of them won. The one doesn't realize that she gives half of the country the screaming heebie-jeebies. The other can't admit that RomneyCare was a bad idea and is virtually indistinguishable from ObamaCare.

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Mitt Romney recently wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal comparing his own healthcare plan to Hillary Clinton's plan. He tried his best to present his plan as a small-government solution to the healthcare problem.

As governor of Massachusetts, I led the fight for reforms that used free markets and innovation, rather than big-government control, to lower health-care costs and cover the uninsured. I recently proposed a federalist reform plan that will use these principles to improve America's health-care system.

There's only one problem with his editorial. It's misleading. The Cato Institute explains why RomneyCare and HillaryCare are really two sides of the same (bad) coin.