Via the Corner. I’ve been looking for a palate cleanser all day for you guys but until now none of the offerings were up to snuff. Rand Paul claiming that the billions in federal money that New Jersey got after Hurricane Sandy basically bought the election for Christie? Nah. There’ll be time to blog that when Christie fires back and then Paul responds with another crack about “bacon.” McCain suggesting that he’s tired of being asked about Palin? Tempting, but no. He was polite to her in most of his answer, and everyone surely grasps by now that the two of them disdain each other politically. He’s King RINO; she’s the queen of the tea-party “hobbits.” Of course he doesn’t want to be asked about her anymore. He’s lucky she doesn’t primary him herself in 2016.

So we’re left with this guy, who, after listing a bunch of Democratic senators, mused about the challenges of governing in a “gerrymandered world.” People are goofing on him on Twitter because, of course, gerrymandering is a House phenomenon, not a Senate one. The “gerrymander lines” for a senator are the, um, state borders. Here’s what I want to know, though: What was he trying to say? The point he’s making, as I understand it, is basically the opposite of the criticism that’s usually made about gerrymandering. He seems to be saying that red-state Dems have no choice but to push a mildly conservative critique of O-Care since, after all, they do come from red states. If you’re a Democrat who wants to get reelected by a mostly Republican electorate, you’ve got to pander to voters in the other party a little. The knock on gerrymandering, though, is that you never have to pander to the other party. By drawing district lines irregularly to aggregate a huge majority of voters who are either Democrats or Republicans, you’re guaranteeing that the House member they elect only needs to appeal to that majority. That’s (allegedly) one of the sources of gridlock in the House: You don’t see many swing votes in the middle because most reps come from districts where there’s already a solid majority from one party or the other, which forces them to do their party base’s bidding. Landrieu, Begich, et al. are in the opposite situation. They wish they were gerrymandered somehow so that they could go face-first into the tank for ObamaCare and never worry about paying a price for it. So … what on earth is Toure talking about? Dude?