Access to Porterhouse is as important to an American as the right to breathe

The "common wisdom" -- at least the variety now peddled by the Lamestream Media -- holds that Republicans "can't win" in the current Washington contortionist sideshow over birth control mandates, since American women will vote against anyone who wants to restrict access to birth control.

But the real question here is whether a working plurality of Americans, regardless of their gender (frankly, I always thought men tended to shy away from the responsiblities of family life slightly more than women) can be convinced to accept a new Democrat definition of the word "access."

If it's perfectly legal to buy something, and it's readily available from multiple sources at a modest price which reflects a reasonable markup over production and distribution costs, that thing has generally been judged, up till now, to be "accessible."

If you want to make birth control pills more "accessible," I suppose we could do away with the remaining requirement for a doctor's prescription, which would be fine by me. (For the record, some women are not good candidates for the pill, due to blood pressure or other indicators. Best to check.) But I don't see congressional Democrats demanding that this AMA pay-off be waived, the only step that would really, substantially cut cost and inconvenience and thus improve "access," albeit with new health risks to a small number of users.

Instead, what Democrats in Washington are trying to do now is convince voters that if the law does not require a couple hundred dollars per year in birth control (including the "morning-after pill") be provided FREE by the employer, by government, by someone, then those who oppose such welfare-state cost-shifting are attempting to block "women's access to birth control," despite the fact people are perfectly free to buy any of several effective methods of birth control all by themselves. (And the poor already have Medicaid.)   

"This is about one thing: Providing preventive care for women to ensure that they have basic access to health care," Las Vegas Democratic Congresswoman Shelley Berkley told the Associated Press, Thursday. "This is as fundamental to women as breathing."

Really. The need to get someone else to pay for your birth control is "as fundamental as breathing." Congresswoman Berkley — the wife of a doctor, who should know that "preventive" care is the kind that prevents a disease, and pregnancy is not a disease -- said that. 

Republicans should get smart and submit a bill shifting the entire current budgets of the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency into a new program designed to provide free steak dinners to every American, every Friday night. Should Democrats balk at this proposal, Republicans could then accuse them of trying to "starve the poor by cutting off their access to steak," further asking "Why do Democrats think poor people don't deserve to eat the same fancy steak dinners THEY eat? Talk about being out-of-touch! They're cutting off access to BEEF! Are they un-American?!"

Democrats could then not only be branded the "Starve-the-Poor Party," they could also be accused of being against COWBOYS!

I feel sure the Beef Council would cooperate.

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I see where the Nevada Policy Research Institute has finally decided life is short; you might as well send the wide receivers deep.

The free-market think tank Thursday released its "Solutions 2013 Guide," which calls for a halt to the huge waste of resources involved in enforcing anti-drug laws. The plan also calls for joining Utah in making a concentrated effort in Congress to end the legal fiction that the federal government has any delegated power to manage, control, fence us and our cattle off 87 percent of the land area of Nevada; and for repealing Nevada's feel-good, vastly expensive, "renewable energy" requirements.

Younger people are allowed to say "Yay!" You will allow a Libertarian grown old and creaky to say "Duh." While most of Nevada's business and political leaders wring their hands, wondering "What on earth can we do?" about falling revenues and ongoing economic bad news, these simple solutions sit staring us in the face.

I hope I don't need to waste much space detailing what it does to the business climate to double our electric rates paying for ridiculous windmills, Chinese crony capitalist solar projects that can be divided between those that go bankrupt and those that are never built, geothermal plants that seem to have a slight seismic problem, and giant treadmills full of gerbils on Ritalin.  

Meantime, the Constitution says that, excepting the District of Columbia, the federal gubbimint can own and exercise exclusive legislative authority over land inside the several states only for "arsenals, dock-yards and other needful buildings," and that it can acquire such land only by buying it from a given state with the perimission of the "state" — not territorial — legislature.

If they can't show us their signed bill of sale, get 'em out of here, and tell them to take their ticket books with them. Whether the land is opened to homesteading or simply sold off piecemeal, Nevada shouldn't have to collect any taxes from its existing residents for the next 70 years. Put the cattlemen back on the land; watch the deer and tortoise herds explode. (Hint: Cattlemen shoot predators.) 

The Drug War, meantime, does far more harm than good. Legal hashish bars and bordellos (Nevada currently has the latter only in the rural "cow counties," which is not a comment on the ladies) would put Nevada back on the tourist map -- the way legal casino gambling did 70 years ago. Yet the last time the Review-Journal polled on these questions (summer 2010, at my behest), 64 percent of Southern Nevadans opposed legal brothels here; 79 percent opposed legal hash bars.

You'd rather get laid-off and try to sell your underwater house while the collection agents prowl the front yard? Fine. We can wait for the Californicators to go home, or we can simply de-annex Clark County south of Ann Road and ask the Caifornians if they'd like it. To much of the rest of Nevada, "Solutions 2013" looks like plain common sense.