Just Because Ronald Reagan Never Said This Doesn't Make It Untrue

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Consumer note: Sometimes you'll see the "quote" on our Amazon Product du Jour prepended with "Keep voting Democrat." And sometimes it will have a credibility-enhancing date appended, 1987. But (yeah) it's bogus. So even though that's a paid link, I don't recommend you buy it.

Ah, well. As Abraham Lincoln cautioned: "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."

Let's go to a more credible source: John Lehman, Navy secretary, 1981-87: Reagan Would Never Vote for Trump.

Reagan’s 11th Commandment was “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican,” but Donald Trump is no heir to Reagan’s legacy. He is an insult to it. The Reagan I knew would be appalled that someone as unfit as Mr. Trump had become the GOP’s standard-bearer. Reagan would also deeply oppose President Biden’s agenda, and he never trusted or cared much for then-Sen. Biden.

The most fundamental difference between Reagan and Mr. Trump is that Reagan knew America’s friends from its enemies. He would be horrified by the Republican Party’s abandonment of Ukraine at Mr. Trump’s behest. He would recognize Russia’s invasion for what it is: a brutal attempt to reassert its old Soviet dominance on a free people, no matter how many innocents die. Reagan would recognize that supporting Ukraine is both morally correct and good realpolitik, a chance to bog an adversary down. He would find Mr. Trump’s naked admiration of our enemies incomprehensible and dangerous. The man who told Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” wouldn’t understand how an American president could congratulate a Russian dictator for “winning” a sham election.

Lehman is currently affiliated with "No Labels", which is casting about for a presidential candidate. Like Nikki, I am disclaiming my interest.

Also of note:

  • In our "Shut up, they explained" department… Jacob Sullum notes the "news" story (Section A, Page 1, in the Sunday paper): The New York Times Again Worries That Free Speech Endangers Democracy.

    On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, which raises the question of when government efforts to suppress "misinformation" on social media violate the First Amendment. Neglecting that central question, The New York Times portrays the case as part of a conspiracy by Donald Trump's supporters to undermine democracy by promoting false claims that mislead voters and threaten the peaceful transfer of power.

    "In a world of unlimited online communications" where "anyone can reach huge numbers of people with unverified and false information," Times reporters Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers ask, "where is the line between protecting democracy and trampling on the right to free speech?" This is not the first time that Myers has described freedom of speech as a threat to democracy. Last year, he worried that "the First Amendment has become, for better or worse, a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle a problem that, in the case of a pandemic, threatens public health and, in the case of the integrity of elections, even democracy itself." The purported conflict between free speech and democracy is a bizarre and highly misleading way to frame the issues raised by Murthy.

    We linked to George Will's column on this case a couple days ago.

    The NYT is properly jealous of its own rights under the First Amendment. Their contempt for the free expression rights of others is (at best) remarkably short-sighted.

    As Sullum notes, the NYT article goes to great lengths to tie the case to those icky MAGA Trump fans. (Headline: "How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation"; Subhed: "Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online."

    Matt Taibbi was one of the "Twitter Files" whistleblowers on the Biden Administration's censorship-by-proxy effort. And he's prominently mentioned in the NYT story. His reaction: On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece.

    In advance of oral arguments tomorrow in the Supreme Court for Murthy v. Missouri, formerly Missouri v. Biden, the New York Times and authors Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers wrote a craven and dishonest piece called, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

    The Times implies both the Twitter Files reports and my congressional testimony with Michael Shellenberger were strongly influenced by former Trump administration official Mike Benz, whose profile occupies much of the text. Benz is described as a purveyor of “conspiracy theories, like the one about the Pentagon’s use of Taylor Swift,” that are “talking points for many Republicans.” They quote Shellenberger as saying meeting Benz was the “Aha moment,” in our coverage, and the entire premise of the piece is that Benz and other “Trump allies” pushed Michael, me, and the rest of the Twitter Files reporters into aiding a “counteroffensive” in the war against disinformation, helping keep social media a home for “antidemocratic tactics.”

    If you had "Subverted the First Amendment" on your Biden Impeachment Bingo Card, I think you can daub that off, if you hadn't already.

  • Is it too early to work up a Trump Impeachment Bingo Card? Rich Lowry wonders: How Would Donald Trump End American Democracy? (That's my final "gifted" National Review link for this month, so don't let it go to waste, readers!)

    If there’s one thing that we’re supposed to know about this election, it is that democracy is on the ballot.

    Joe Biden and other Democrats say it all the time, and so does Liz Cheney. According to the former congresswoman, the U.S. is “sleepwalking into dictatorship,” and the accomplished author and historian Robert Kagan wrote a much-discussed piece for the Washington Post contending, as the headline put it, that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.”

    It’s understandable that people are alarmed by Trump. His conduct after the 2020 election was appalling and impeachable, and he, of course, exhibits zero regret — in fact, the opposite. It is not to defend anything he’s done or said, though, to point out that it is beyond his, or anyone else’s, power to end democracy and establish a dictatorship — at least, not without a whole lot of help that won’t be forthcoming.

    Lowry has an interesting array of scenarios. None of which seem remotely plausible, but are pretty entertaining, assuming they remain fictional. His bottom line:

    Those most fearful of Trump seem to think that we are in a state equivalent to the Weimar Republic, with the regime so weak that it just needs a good push to collapse. But the American constitutional system has been remarkably enduring and stable, and it still retains broad and deep public support. It obviously survived a civil war. Frontal assaults on it will engender a fierce reaction. Also, pretty much every power center in the system would, once again, be hostile to a President Trump.

    In short, most of what we are likely talking about is forms of threats to the legitimacy of the electoral system and to the rule of law — in spirit or actuality — that we’ve already seen for a decade and a half or more. That’s not good, obviously. What we should want is someone who will slam the brakes on this slide toward an unmoored executive. But that option isn’t on the ballot this year.

  • This will not end well. Jennifer Huddleston has a suggestion: Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech. After describing the EU's (successful) decree that Apple use USB-C for its iPhone charging connection:

    Many Americans first experienced the impact of the European regulatory approach in May 2018, when they started noticing more click-through requirements to accept cookies and updated privacy policies. All those annoying security pop-ups and repeated notice of updates to terms of service on websites were the direct result of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an E.U. policy that required companies to adopt specific practices around interactions with user data and users' rights related to those data.

    The GDPR didn't just bring a bunch of annoying pop-ups, it also caused huge corporate compliance costs. When the GDPR went into effect in 2018, companies reported spending an average of $1.3 million on compliance costs. A Pricewaterhouse-Coopers survey found that 40 percent of global companies spent over $10 million in initial compliance. These weren't one-time costs; some companies spend millions annually to comply.

    Unsurprisingly, some organizations decided to pull out of the E.U. market entirely rather than comply with these rules. Others chose to deploy these changes all around the world rather than try to tailor compliance to the European Union. In other words, they treated the E.U.'s rules as global requirements.

    This is a common result of tech regulations: Laws passed in one region end up affecting citizens located in other areas as companies standardize practices.

    Some of those regulatory costs are visible ("annoying pop-ups"), but most are well-hidden, passed along to shareholders and consumers. And even less visible is innovation-stifling; good ideas whose implementations are economically unfeasible, thanks to high bureaucratic hurdles.

  • It needs to be said. And Kevin D. Williamson says it: There Is No Labor Shortage.

    Our friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce occasionally publish reports arguing that the U.S. economy is being held back by a “labor shortage.” They just came out with one in February, in fact.

    But there isn’t any labor shortage. The Chamber of Commerce does a lot of very good work as an advocate for U.S. businesses, but its views on labor tend to be distorted—for entirely understandable reasons—by self-interest. What we need isn’t more workers willing to take low-wage jobs—what we need is better wages for those jobs.

    As the Chamber’s own findings confirm, healthy industries offering high-paying jobs do not have much trouble getting workers off the sidelines and into the game. Whether measured by the “quit rate” (the share of workers leaving their jobs) or by the industry-specific unemployment rate, the issue of relatively intense labor scarcity is concentrated—this will not surprise you—in largely low-paying hospitality and retail jobs. There’s no urgent labor shortage on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood, in Big Law, or in manufacturing. In the Chamber’s report, we read that the quit rate in hospitality (4.3 percent) is more than three times what it is in manufacturing (1.3 percent). The Chamber of Commerce’s analysis reflects these facts: “Workers in traditionally lower paying industries, including leisure and hospitality and retail, have been most likely to quit their jobs. Meanwhile, in more stable, higher paying industries, the number of employees quitting has been lower.” While the workforce participation rate has declined, there are still workers out there: The unemployment rate in hospitality (4.8 percent) is two-thirds more than it is in financial services (2.9 percent) and more than twice what it is in manufacturing (2.1 percent). That means there are many workers looking for jobs in those industries but not taking the jobs on offer.

    Conclusion: Put that filthy lucre on the table and watch those supply curves slope upward like that’s what they were born to do, because they were.

    KDW's article has one of those annoying little padlocks, so you should subscribe.


Last Modified 2024-03-18 8:05 AM EDT

We All Live in Red States Now

Roger Ream sounds a call to action: Both Parties Are Abandoning Free Markets. It’s Time for Voters to Push Back. This won't be news to many Pun Salad readers:

Now, Trump is apparently considering a new flat 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, and has also floated a 10 percent “universal baseline” tariff on trade with all countries, including trading partners and allies. These tariffs and trade restrictions simply raise costs for Americans while doing little to increase domestic production of goods and services.

Both parties also seek to use government power to regulate private industry in new ways that inject uncertainty into the market and make it harder to do business. The Biden administration recently gave in to climate activists by pausing federal approvals for new liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) export projects — hindering a growth market where the U.S. has become the world’s No. 1 supplier. The administration has also stopped private businesses from merging with one another through an unprecedented use of antitrust review of proposed corporate deals.

Meanwhile, prominent congressional Republicans are supporting a variety of proposals — including clawing back executive pay at failed banks, eliminating noncompete agreements, and subsidizing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing — that restrict private commerce, distort the market, and let the federal government pick winners and losers.

I agree with just about everything Ream is saying, but: It's all well and good to demand that voters "push back" on the decay of free markets, but when both parties are abandoning it, how are voters supposed to do that?

Our regular Sunday look at the betting odds:

Candidate EBO Win
Probability
Change
Since
3/10
Donald Trump 47.7% -3.9%
Joe Biden 37.1% +3.4%
Michelle Obama 4.0% +1.6%
Robert Kennedy Jr 2.7% +0.5%
Gavin Newsom 2.6% +0.5%
Kamala Harris 2.4% ---
Other 3.5% -4.5%

The oddsmakers apparently think that Team Orange had a bad week, as the gap between Trump and Biden shrank by over seven percentage points. Michelle, RFKJr, and Newsom also made slight gains. And (even) Kamala managed to break our 2% probability inclusion threshold; she hasn't managed to do that since last November.

It's enough to make me wonder, "Did I miss something in the news last week?" Always a possibility.

Also of note:

  • Possibly the last commentary on President Dotard's SOTU speech. And possibly because I just like William McGurn's headline: Joe Biden, Old Yeller.

    Joe Biden now has two faces he shows in public. He unveiled the newer one during Thursday’s prime-time State of the Union address. Call this Angry Joe.

    The other is “dithering and diminished,” the words Sen. Katie Britt used in the official Republican rebuttal to the president’s speech. This is the Joe Biden Americans have been seeing for the past few years—the 81-year-old who often seems lost at the podium, who falls off his bicycle or says he’s just spoken to some long-dead French president or German chancellor.

    We used to call our Sunday feature the "Phony Campaign". But, among other difficulties, it's difficult to say anything interesting or new about the phoniness of the candidates when that phoniness is expected, taken for granted, even praised.

  • Hey, but I can always vote Libertarian, right? That's been my fallback strategy in the past. G. Patrick Lynch takes a look at the LP's issues, and wonders: are they Too Principled to Win?

    Throughout US history, none of the dominant parties have held consistent beliefs about much of anything, let alone individual liberty. Rather, the major parties have shamelessly chased voters in ragtag coalitions with little concern for a philosophically grounded vision of the good society. Today’s Democratic party of racial diversity and wokeness was once the party of racial segregation and Roman Catholicism in the mid 20th century and prior to that the Confederacy. Today’s Republican Party, which is now largely white, and more committed to government intervention in the economy, was once the party of Lincoln and later the party of Reagan and free markets. The two party duopoly is blissfully free of ideological consistency over time.

    And yet while one set of consistent principles animates the LP, that hasn’t had much resonance with the voting public. Perhaps that’s understandable since voters themselves typically don’t have strong or consistent philosophical views. And of course the single member, winner take all districts in the American political system discourage third party success. But more recently the party with one set of principles is in the midst of a sectarian conflict over the essence of those principles and how they should be achieved. Unsurprisingly libertarianism attracts strong individualists who believe that cooperative solutions to social problems are possible except apparently for themselves.

    Lynch looks at the rift between the currently ascendant "Mises Caucus" and the "Old Guard". Both have their problems. The Caucus seems more intent on purging heretics from the LP than presenting a broadly appealing pro-liberty vision. And the Guard nominates people like William Weld.

  • I was unaware of this proposal. But Andy Craig spotted it: The Proposed Toxic Marriage Between RFK Jr. and the Libertarian Party Could Hurt Trump.

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. initially tried to run for president as a Democrat. When that went nowhere, he announced he would instead run as an independent. Now, the environmental-lawyer-turned-anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is flirting with a possible third change in partisan affiliation. The nephew of the former president is now hinting that he may seek the Libertarian Party nomination.

    The potential combination offers a compelling demonstration of the horseshoe theory, namely, that despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, far-left and far-right movements can often converge into illiberalism.

    Craig documents just how awful, crazy, and irrelevant the LP has become. Grabbing onto RFKJr? Hey, why not?

Maybe Doggerel Will Make Him See the Error of His Ways

Well, it's worth a shot:

My CongressCritter must have noticed that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey, and (of course) President Dotard have been promising to "crack down" on one thing or another. All the cool kids are doing it!

The legislation Pappas is touting will declare xylazine a Section III Controlled Substance, joining a long list.

Neither for the first nor last time, I shall deploy this Thomas Szasz quote:

The FDA calls certain substances “controlled.” But there are no “controlled substances,” there are only controlled citizens.

Also of note:

  • Hey, let's tax the income you haven't actually received. Vance Ginn at AIER points out a wee issue with President Dotard's latest budget proposal: Unrealized Gains Tax is an Economic Fallacy.

    Taxing unrealized capital gains on property, stocks, and other assets is not just a bad idea, it’s an economic fallacy that undermines economic growth and personal liberty. Unfortunately, President Biden’s $7.3 trillion budget proposes such a federal tax. Vermont and ten other states have made similar moves.

    This tax should be rejected, as it is fundamentally unjust, likely unconstitutional, and would hinder prosperity and individual freedom.

    "Other than that, though, it's fine!"

    According to one of those links, going to a CNBC story, the proposal is likely to go nowhere. Billionaire Biden voter Leon Cooperman is quoted saying the plan is “DOA and stupid to boot,

    Too stupid and unconstitutional for Congress? That's an impressive feat.

  • Among the great many things government has no business doing… George Will deals with one of them: Government has no business bullying social media platforms on speech.

    Legal briefs are usually dry as dust, so delighted laughter is an unusual response to reading one. You can, however, bet dollars to doughnuts that the Supreme Court justices allowed themselves judicious private chuckles when they read one particular amicus (friend of the court) brief in the case concerning for which they will hear oral arguments on Monday.

    At issue is government behavior that is no laughing matter: secret pressure to suppress speech by, and deny access to speech by, Americans, thereby violating the First Amendment. The brief is from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which devotes much time to reminding academics of the First Amendment’s existence. FIRE notes that some people supporting FIRE’s side of the argument are “oblivious to the irony” of their doing so: Their “head-spinning inconsistencies” involve favoring state governments’ behavior that is similar to the federal government’s behavior that they are deploring.

    GFW notes the Biden Administration invoked Teddy Roosevelt's term "bully pulpit" to justify its actions. The Wikipedia page notes that TR used "bully" "as an adjective meaning 'superb' or 'wonderful', a more common usage at that time." Biden probably thinks TR was recommending today's meaning: coercion, intimidation, threatening, …

  • Also bullying… The NR editors describe a new low: Chuck Schumer Attacks Israeli Democracy.

    We are tempted to refer to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s call for the ouster of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition as “election interference” — but that would require the existence of an actual election. Given that there are currently no elections scheduled in Israel, what Schumer did on Thursday was nothing short of calling for the collapse of the democratically elected government of a close American ally during a time of war.

    This is stunning and outrageous. It is also an indication of just how hard it is to actively support Israel in today’s Democratic Party.

    You'd think Chuck could tell the pro-Hamas faction in his party to go pee up a rope, but no.

    Also commenting is Scott Johnson, who wants to popularize the phrase "Doesn’t know Schumer from Shinola".

    Jonathan Tobin places Schumer in the context of his career to date: “He’s been in public office continuously since the age of 25, and the 73-year-old Senate Majority Leader has spent his adult life grandstanding for the cameras and the press while always seeking some momentary political advantage as he schemed, back-stabbed and bloviated his way to the top of his profession.”

    We can infer that Schumer now approves of foreign interference in another country’s elections. Only yesterday that was a big no-no for purported thought leaders toeing the Democrat Party line.

    In this case the government Schumer seeks the replacement of a government that was democratically elected and formed by a close American ally fighting for its life under extremely difficult circumstances. That’s no way to treat a friend.

    Back in 2015, the WaPo looked at what, even back then, was a common joke:

    “The most dangerous place in Washington,” the joke goes, “is between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.”

  • And in other broad bipartisan news… Matt Taibbi explains Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous. Specifically:

    As Newsweek reported, the bill was fast-tracked after a secret “intelligence community briefing” of Congress led by the FBI, Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The magazine noted that if everything goes as planned, the bill will give Biden the authority to shut down an app used by 150 million Americans just in time for the November elections.

    And (generally) any future President will have the power to shut down any app decreed to be dangerous. What could go wrong there?

Is the SAT Racist?

Reader, you've come to the right place to find an answer to that question.

Well, more accurately, you've come to a website that will link you to John McWhorter's answer to that question: No, the SAT Isn’t Racist. Colleges, after making the SAT optional, are reversing course. It turns out that the SAT does a pretty good job of predicting academic success and (even better) can do a decent job of finding "diverse" applicants that might not otherwise be evident.

But McWhorter oh-so-diplomatically scorches the self-described "anti-racists":

Many might find it an awkward fit to label requiring the SAT for college admissions as antiracist. But we must attend carefully to what racism and antiracism actually are, as the words have come to occupy such broad swatches of semantic ground. In this light, the tacit sense of the SAT and similar tests as somehow anti-Black is dangerous.

This is because ideas have a way of undergoing mission creep. What an unspoken idea implies, a resonance in the air, eventually manifests itself as an openly asserted new position. In that vein, there is a short step between acknowledging that disadvantage makes it harder to ace the test — which is self-evidently true — and a proposition that is related but vastly more questionable: that Blackness is culturally incompatible with the test.

This is the ultimate source of the idea getting around in the education school world and beyond that it is “white” to cherish hard work, objectivity, the written word and punctuality. This conviction reveals itself both among white people (as in the creator of a graphic to this effect that the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture put online for a spell during the pandemic) and among Black people (such as a Black parent recalling a Black co-worker openly saying that standardized tests are unfairly imposed on Black kids because they “can’t do math,” with the implication of this as a general assumption).

We've put that graphic up before, and I'm pretty sure it's the most racist thing we've ever displayed:

[Aspects and Assumptions]

Also of note:

  • In Biden's brain, literacy loses. Veronique de Rugy takes a look at Biden's Corporate Tax Hike: Populism Versus Economic Literacy.

    In the latest volley of policy proposals that seem more rooted in populist rhetoric than economic knowledge, President Joe Biden's budget plan to hike the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% strikes me as particularly misguided. This move, ostensibly aimed at ensuring a "fair share" of contributions from corporate America, is a glaring testament to a simplistic and all-too-common type of economic thinking that already hamstrings our nation's competitiveness, stifles innovation, and ultimately penalizes the average American worker and consumer.

    Beyond the president's class warfare rhetoric, the lure of putting his hands on more revenue is one of the factors behind the proposal. Biden likes to pretend he is some sort of deficit cutter, but his administration is the mother of all big spenders. He's seeking $7.3 trillion for next year without acknowledging the insolvency of Social Security coming our way or addressing what happens when Congress makes the Republican tax cut permanent in 2025 for people earning less than $400,000 a year.

    Unfortunately, no fiscally irresponsible budget is complete without soothing individual taxpayers by promising to tax corporations. Never mind that the burden of corporate income tax hikes isn't shouldered by corporations. Yes, corporations do write the checks to the Internal Revenue Service, but the economic weight will be partially or fully shifted to others, such as workers through lower wages, consumers through higher prices, or shareholders through lower returns on investment. That means that many taxpayers making less than that $400k will be shouldering the cost of the corporate tax hike.

    It's great for demagoguery, though. Those taxpayers won't notice it on their 1040s.

  • It's a nice round number. Ars Technica reports that the FCC has officially made me behind the times: FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps.

    The Federal Communications Commission today voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds.

    An FCC press release after today's 3-2 vote said the 100Mbps/20Mbps benchmark "is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs," such as those used to distribute funding to expand networks. The new benchmark also reflects "consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by Internet service providers," the FCC said.

    The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There's been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised.

    My informal feeling about Pun Salad Manor's Internet connection is that it's "plenty fast enough."

    But there are easy-to-find "speed test" sites that will put a number on that. This morning, I'm consistently getting 75-80 Mbps down, 12 Mbps up. And the sites that bother to describe that result say it's "very fast".

    I predict Democrat-mandated higher speeds will result in higher costs. Which Democrats will then loudly denounce.

Funny Because True

Also of note:

  • Just another stop on the Road to Serfdom. Bjørn Lomborg in the WSJ claims that ‘Follow the Science’ Leads to Ruin.

    More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office. It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction. Yet politicians widely employ the same one-sided reasoning in the name of fighting climate change. It’s simply a matter, they say, of “following the science.”

    That assertion lets politicians obscure—and avoid responsibility for—lopsided climate-policy trade-offs. Lawmakers contend that because climate change is real and man-made, it is only scientifically logical that the world end fossil-fuel use. Any downsides are a mathematical inevitability rather than something politicians chose to inflict on constituents.

    Sobering factoid: "Add the billions of people dependent on fossil-fuel heating in the winter, along with our dependence on fossil fuels for steel, cement, plastics and transportation, and it is no wonder that one recent estimate by economist Neil Record showed an abrupt end to fossil fuel use would cause six billion deaths in less than a year."

  • "Follow the science" Part II. Ronald Bailery looks at Official Government Figures, and finds: CDC Vastly Overestimated U.S. Maternal Death Rates, Says New Study.

    "U.S. maternal deaths keep rising," reported NPR last year. PBS similarly observed, "U.S. maternal deaths more than doubled over 20 years." CNN also reported, "US maternal death rate rose sharply in 2021, [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)] data shows, and experts worry the problem is getting worse."

    The increase in maternal deaths is a statistical illusion argues a new study just published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. "Our study, which identified maternal deaths using a definition-based methodology, shows stable rates of maternal mortality in the United States between the 1999–2002 and 2018–2021 periods," conclude the authors. That's wonderful news but what accounts for the headlines that cited a steep rise in maternal deaths?

    It was just this one weird little check box, it turns out. Click over for the details.

  • Another bit of bad advice: trust Wikipedia. Bryan Caplan looks at a clear instance of Wikibias: The Noble Truth of the Model Minority.

    I recently stumbled upon Wikipedia’s article on the “Model minority myth.” Which instantly raises the question: “What precisely is mythical about this ‘myth’?”

    The article’s bias is so astounding that I shall critique it line-by-line.

    The model minority myth is a sociological phenomenon that refers to the stereotype of certain minority groups, particularly Asian Americans, as successful, and well-adjusted, as demonstrating that there is little or no need for social or economic assistance for the same or different minority groups.

    “Demonstrating” is too strong. How about “raising strong doubts about the need for social or economic assistance”?

    The model minority stereotype emerged in the United States during the Cold War in the 1950s and was first explicitly used as a term in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement as an antithesis to African American claims of racial oppression and has perpetuated notions that other minority groups can achieve the same success through hard work…

    Why shouldn’t the existence of successful minorities “perpetuate notions that other minority groups can achieve the same success through hard work”? It’s a timeless truth, so shouldn’t it be “perpetuated”?

    Clicking around seems to show that the article was "editied" (created) by a single student at Rice University as part of a "Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment."

  • Following the orders of the teachers union? Mitchell Scacchi takes a look at some Granite State legislative mischief: House takes up two bills that would yank Education Freedom Accounts from kids.

    This week, two bills that would take Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) away from children enrolled in the program will be considered in the state House of Representatives.

    We previously summarized a group of bills that would heavily regulate the EFA program to the point that its functionality and growth would be severely curtailed. The House will vote on two of those bills on Thursday. They are House Bills 1512 and 1594.

    HB 1512 would limit funding for the EFA program from the Education Trust Fund to so-called budgeted amounts. Specifically, the bill states that Education Trust Fund payments for EFAs “shall not exceed $19,800,000 for fiscal year 2024, and in subsequent fiscal years shall not exceed the amounts appropriated for such purpose in the biennial state operating budget.”

    Good news: HB 1512 appears to have been "indefinitely postponed", which I think means "killed". It was a squeaker, though, 187-185. HB1594, which would have required families to financially qualify every year for an EFA was also narrowly killed.

  • But how about getting rid of this old-style anti-Catholic bigotry? At City Journal, Tim Rosenberger and Nicole Stelle Garnett write about New Hampshire’s Religious Freedom Revival.

    In the aftermath of the Civil War, some voters and elected officials feared that rising Catholic immigration would transform American Catholicism from a small minority faith, with adherents largely confined to Maryland and Louisiana, into a nationwide political force. Nativists, seeking to “Americanize” Catholics, tried to amend the U.S. Constitution to mandate nationwide free public schools and ban public funding of faith-based schools. Supporters of the amendment sought to undermine Catholic, or what they called “sectarian,” schools. The amendment, proposed in a speech by President Ulysses S. Grant and championed by Congressman James Blaine, quickly passed the House before failing narrowly in the Senate.

    The amendment’s supporters then turned their sights away from Washington and toward the states. They began a concerted campaign to ensure that Catholic institutions, particularly nascent Catholic schools, would never receive public funding, describing these institutions (and, to a lesser extent, those associated with other non-Protestant religions) as “sectarian.” Their efforts culminated in several state laws that explicitly disfavored faith-based organizations, including schools, because of those institutions’ “sectarian” nature. Some states included a prohibition on the funding of “sectarian” schools and other institutions as a condition of entering the union; many others did so voluntarily. All told, 38 states adopted a Blaine Amendment in their constitutions, and enacted other religious-institution funding bans in the same spirit.

    A recent series of Supreme Court rulings have deemed Blaine Amendments, and states’ efforts to penalize faith-based organizations, unconstitutional. Yet many of these historic anti-Catholic laws remain on the books. Too few states have taken appropriate action to ensure that their laws and public programs eliminate the vestiges of our nation’s history of anti-Catholicism and conform to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause.

    One state, however, has proved an exception: New Hampshire. The Granite State’s legislature recently enacted legislation that removed the words “sectarian” and “nonsectarian” from its lawbooks and, in so doing, largely eliminated laws that unconstitutionally discriminate against religious organizations. By removing the requirement that services provided in public programs be “nonsectarian,” New Hampshire has broadened the opportunities for the state to cooperate with faith-based organizations and brought its law in line with current First Amendment doctrine. These efforts signal the state’s desire to honor the Free Exercise Clause and ensure that its laws conform to constitutional principles.

    Well, good for us. And bad for President Grant. That speech, linked above, is a pretty nasty bit of bigotry wrapped up in patriotic rhetoric.

Recently on the book blog:

The Cold Cold Ground

(paid link)

I can't for the life of me remember why I bought this book. Amazon tells me it was $5.50 used; the stickers on it tell me it used to belong to the Sedro-Woolley Library out in Washington state. And Google Maps tells me that Sedro-Woolley is about halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, a few miles off Interstate 5.

Anyway, it's pretty good. And just the first entry in (Amazon claims) a seven-book series. So far. I'll have to think whether I want to invest the time.

It's first-person narrated by Sean Duffy, a detective in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the year 1981. And it's very much the Bad Old Days in Northern Ireland. Part of Duffy's daily routine is to check his Beemer to make sure that nobody's attached a mercury tilt-switch bomb in its undercarriage. Riots, bombings, and arson: business as usual. Hunger strikes by Irish inmates in the Maze prison outside Belfast stir up more trouble. So it's almost a relief when there's a murder that seems to be a straight-up case of homophobic rage. Clues abound: the body has a bit of sheet music stuffed up where the sun don't shine, his hand has been cut off, the killer sends Duffy a deranged note, and (soon enough) another body is found with the same MO.

The Constabulary is largely Protestant, and Duffy is a Catholic. Not a devout one, but that doesn't seem to matter much. Corruption is taken for granted. Nobody seems to respect them; it's clear that the paramilitary forces on both sides wield the real power, thanks to their general ruthlessness.

It's a challenging case, and Duffy is driven to the edge of sanity by it. He also has to confront personal issues, including an out-of-the-blue revelation in Chapter 13. (No spoilers, but I did not see that coming.) There are violent showdowns, and a very dizzying plot twist as the killer is finally tracked down and confronted.

Asking, and Answering, the Important Questions

Slightly relevant to last month's post about alleged Fox News brain-rot.

Also of note:

  • Coulda put a period after "Think". I keep linking to Jeff Maurer because he's funny, and willing to take on the fools on "his side" of the political divide. Today's lesson: Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman Demonstrate How to Not Think About Economics.

    The bill is called the The Living Wage for Musicians Act, though a better name would be the Shitty DJs Unite To Reduce Access To Music People Actually Want To Listen To Act. The bill is inconsequential and won’t pass — Tlaib and Bowman are marginalized loons who exist to be thwarted by people who know stuff. But the bill is worth looking at because it’s a museum piece demonstrating the flawed economic thinking that’s common on the far left.

    The bill targets Spotify and its competitors (mostly Apple Music and Amazon). In a statement, Tlaib said that an artist would need more than 800,000 Spotify streams a month to earn the equivalent of a full-time $15/hour job. The bill seeks to triple payments to artist from 0.3 cents per stream to 1 cent per stream (Tlaib’s numbers are debatable but whatever — let’s make this simple and just use her numbers). Tlaib and Bowman would fund this increase in payments in two ways: 1) Subscription fees would rise by 50%, and 2) Payments would be capped at one million streams, and revenue beyond that would go into a fund to pay out the low-earners.

    By my math [footnote elided], this would cost Taylor Swift at least $78 million a year (and probably much more than that). Swift had 26.1 billion streams in 2023, and under Tlaib and Bowman’s plan, she’d make absolutely zilch on 26.088 billion of those. She’d rake in a handsome $10,000/month, and I find it funny to imagine Taylor Swift interacting with an amount of money that is — by her standards — pocket change. If Taylor Swift saw $10,000 on the sidewalk, would she stop to pick it up? If Denny’s overcharged Taylor Swift by $10,000 — as in “whoops, sorry hon, that should be $18.42, not $10,018.42” — would she say something or just pay it? These are interesting thought experiments. But what’s not an interesting thought experiment is what Swift would do if Congress passed a bill requiring a 99.85% reduction in her Spotify revenue: She would take her music off the service, which she’s done before.

    I imagine that could be a task for "dynamic pricing"; dink your prices up by $10K during the few seconds in which Taylor's bill is being calculated.

    And Maurer gets this exactly right:

    I used to think about wages in terms of fairness. I noticed that some people make a lot of money and some make a little, and I also noticed that some of the people who only make a little work very hard. It seemed unfair, and, of course — in a cosmic sense — it is unfair. I’ve worked at Wendy’s, and I’ve written for television, and I worked twice as hard at Wendy’s despite making a fraction of the TV wage. In a similar way, it seems ridiculous that Taylor Swift — whose music I would only listen to as some sort of CIA black-ops site “enhanced interrogation” — should be a billionaire while bands I like struggle.

    When you see the world this way, it’s tempting to pass a law that says “make things fair”. Tlaib and Bowman’s bill is surrounded by the language of fairness — they use terms like “deserve”, “economic justice”, “fair share”, “fair wage”, and “fair compensation”.

    But what do those words mean? They mean nothing in this context. “Fair” is in the eye of the beholder, and every push for more money in human history could be framed as a push for “fairness”. Everything in this area is subjective: Maroon 5 can argue that they deserve a lot of money because people like their music, I can argue that they deserve to be pelted with rotten fruit wherever they go because their music sucks donkey ass, and neither of us is really wrong. “Living wage” is a strange concept because the cost of living depends on your situation. “Hourly wage” is a bonkers concept in music because Paul McCartney woke up with the tune for “Yesterday” in his head, while Guns ‘N Roses spent 17 years making “Chinese Democracy”. Arbitrariness is everywhere in this bill — why is one cent the “fair” rate for a stream? Why is anything over one million streams “too much”? The answer, of course, is that those are meaningless numbers that Tlaib and Bowman are declaring “fair” just because they’re nice and round.

    The minor only sin here is one of omission: Maurer could have, but didn't, note that President Dotard used some variation of "fair" 17 times in his SOTU speech last week.

  • On the crack-down watch. As long as I'm control-Fing the SOTU transcript: I see three Presidential promises to "crack down" on

    1. "big landlords" (over six feet?);
    2. "corporations that engage in price-gouging and deceptive pricing";
    3. "gun crime, retail crime and carjacking."
    .

    I have no idea what that last one means; it seems "stop letting these people back on the street" might be an effective strategy.

    But there's also those fees. At Cato, Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley check out The Incoherence of the White House’s Anti- “Junk Fees” Agenda. They outline three areas in which coherency is lacking:

    First, there is no firm definition of “junk fees” the administration is sticking to. The White House blog says “junk fees” “are fees that are mandatory but not transparently disclosed to consumers,” for example. Yet airline baggage fees are not mandatory. Nor overdraft fees. Nor credit card late fees. Nor even early termination fees. They are either payments for services or fees charged for breach of contract.

    It would clearly be more accurate to say that “junk fees” as weaponized by the White House are any fees the administration identifies some customers might dislike or find annoying. That means this war on prices is likely to create substantial uncertainty for a raft of businesses in the future.

    In addition: the policies are "often explicitly contradictory" and the administration "remains highly economical with the truth" about the costs to the consumer of those fees.

  • And then? Jim Geraghty notes that Donald Trump’s Plan on Ukraine Is to Just Let Russia Win. Which is not great, but what I want to quote is a bit further down in the column, where Orange Man was asked by CNBC interviewer Joe Kernan, "Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120% of debt to GDP forever."

    And Trump's answer was…

    So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy. When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help. You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929 type depression. And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything. This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.

    Geraghty's commentary: "That’s the Republican nominee. Great call, everybody."

  • I'll try not to stand too close, but I'm standing pretty close… to Arnold Kling, who posts on a topic dear to my heart: Where I stand on libertarianism. He outlines five issues on which he agrees with what he perceives as the libertarian consensus, and five where he disagrees. Example of the latter:

    I do not agree with total passivity in foreign policy, and I do not agree with libertarians who take the progressive view that America and Israel are bad actors. I do take a libertarian view that nation-building is way outside the competence of government. But I don’t like watching the Houthis sink ships. We should protect freedom of the seas, and if that means killing a lot of Houthis, so be it. I also trust the average American’s instinct about who is right and wrong in the world more than I trust “elite opinion.”

    Not that you should care, but my lists are slightly different (and I reserve the right to change my mind on it): I'm in libertarian agreement on school choice, free trade, small government, deregulation, drug legalization. Disagree on isolationist foreign policy, abortion, "open borders", privatizing security, taking order for granted.

It's a Pity Both Sides Can't Lose

Perceptive post-SOTU imagery from Iowahawk:

That's sort of a rosy picture, because it's easy to imagine that eventually a dying mall will be repurposed to some more productive use, and those dead-end employees will shake their heads, slink off, and learn to code, or something. Schumpeter's creative destruction, you know? You might not like the destruction, but something better might come out eventually. So, analogously, you might hope and expect our current political situation to return to sanity. But "eventually" can take a long time to get here.

David Harsanyi has a small example of Spencer Gifts leading off with a low blow from its chief blowhard: Biden Is Spreading Hamas Propaganda.

The Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers, incessantly repeated by our media, are fake.

Anyone with an ounce of sense or basic comprehension of the situation knows they’re fake. They have always been fake. So, we must assume one of three things about people who spread Hamas’ claims: They are 1) irredeemably stupid, 2) propagandists for terrorists, or 3) both.

Make what you will of the president, but in a speech celebrating Ramadan, Biden repeated the claim that “30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.” The president of the United States now not only rejects the claims of our allies in Israel but accepts the declarations of a group that is not only on the Justice Department’s terror list — one that recently murdered, raped, and kidnapped American citizens.

Harsanyi notes a recent article by Abraham Wyner at Tablet that lays out the case pretty convincingly for Hamas fakery. Harsanyi quips: "Indeed, while Islamists excel at sexual torture and theocratic repression, they are less proficient at math." His bottom line:

None of this is to say that civilians aren’t dying or that war isn’t gruesome. It is a tragedy what Palestinian leaders, who have refused to make peace with Jews for over a century, have brought on their own people. The operative difference is that Hamas (and PLO and Islamic Jihad, etc.) targets civilians, and Israel targets terrorists. No amount of propaganda can change that reality.

So Team Radio Shack must have it pretty easy, right? Just point out Spencer Gifts' dangerous (at best) credulity. Some on-the-fence spectators might start cheering for you. But they went another way, and Jeff Maurer has a question about what their choices say about their future prospects: I Wonder Why Republicans Keep Having Candidate Quality Problems.

Senator Katie Britt’s State of the Union response made the Space Shuttle Challenger launch look like a rousing success. At times, Britt seemed like a Tobias Fünke-level actor auditioning for the role of PTA Mom Who Just Dropped An Edible; other times, she seemed like someone telling a ghost story to a dog. Britt’s performance was a failure unless her goal was to portray the GOP as The Party of Inauthentic Weirdos. One of her anecdotes also turned out to be extremely misleading, as revealed not by a Woodward-and-Bernstein-style months-long investigation, but by a journalist who bothered to google “hey is that bullshit-sounding story bullshit?”

I watched the SNL Scarlett Johansson parody on TiVo-delay, and it was pretty devastating. The Arizona Republic quotes:

“First and foremost, I’m a mom,” Johansson’s Britt said. “And like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking. And rest assured, every detail about it is real, except the year, where it took place, and who was president when it happened.”

(Our headline du jour is from Henry Kissinger, on a different topic.)

Also of note:

  • A good question. And Robert Tracinski has it at Discourse: What Would a Pro-Free-Market 'Industrial Policy' Look Like? Boy, that question nearly answers itself, doesn't it? It's difficult to excerpt, but here's a slice:

    The lesson of the pandemic and the big stimulus packages has been distilled by the “supply-side progressives,” who discovered—well, it’s new to them, at least—that there’s no point subsidizing what you can’t produce. You can write a lot of checks, but that’s not the same as getting things built.

    They have drawn attention to the need for permitting reform, particularly focusing on NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires extensive environmental impact reviews and gives activist groups the ability to file lawsuits that add years of delay. The peculiar paradox of NEPA is that it only applies to projects that receive federal funding—which means that the more the government subsidizes a project, the less likely it is to get built. Similarly, a pioneering zoning reform in Minneapolis—which increased housing supply in the city by 12% and kept rents flat while they soared nationwide—has been put on hold by a federal judge in response to an environmental lawsuit.

    This kind of regulatory drag suppresses housing, suppresses infrastructure, and of course, it suppresses manufacturing. You can’t hire factory workers if you can’t build the factory—or if the workers can’t find affordable housing, or if you can’t build highways, rail lines, power plants and other infrastructure manufacturers need.

    A four-word summary of Tracinski's answer to the question posed in his headline: Get out of the way.

  • It's easy to claim there's no such thing as cancel culture when… you make sure people don't hear about it from experts such as Rikki Schott, who writes at the NYPost: I was canceled by trendy SXSW film festival bosses … for criticizing cancel culture.

    It appears that I’ve been canceled … for speaking up about cancel culture.

    Organizers of the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival declined to approve my participation in a panel of speakers.

    The reason? Concern that I’d dared to speak out against cancel culture.

    An email from SXSW staff, shared with me by the panel’s organizer, reveals the festival was “hesitant to approve” my participation because my commentary has been “focused on the idea of cancel culture.”

    Oh, the irony!

    Ms. Schlott co-wrote the excellent book The Canceling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff. Now she's even more of an expert, thanks to SXSW.

  • Also on the cancellation beat… Jonathan H. Adler reports: Guernica Cancels an Inconvenient Essay.

    Guernica, a non-profit journal publishing work at the intersection of art and politics, published a powerful essay by a literary interpreter working in Israel and her experience in the wake of October 7 and the resulting war between Israel and Hamas. The essay, "From the Edges of a Broken World," by Joanna Chen, provides a first-hand account of how life has changed for the author. It is deeply personal, and perhaps challenging in that it does not hew to a "side" in the current conflict–and perhaps that was the problem. Not hewing to the proper side's perspective, the essay was too challenging for some portion of Guernica's readership.

    Although Guernica proclaims that it is "a home for singular voices, incisive ideas, and critical questions," this essay apparently crossed the line. The article has been removed from the journal's website. In its place reads the message: "Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow."

    I'm pretty sure "fulsome" is not the best word they could have used there. But they definitely wouldn't have used any of the adjectives that I might suggest.

Reader, Suppose You Were a Shameless Lying Demagogue. And Suppose You Were A Politician.

But I Repeat Myself.

Apologies for slightly altering a Mark Twain quote. But it was brought to mind by a Don Boudreaux post at Cafe Hayek, which begins: The Experience of an Economist....

… listening to typical politicians discuss economics is like what I imagine would be experienced by a skilled physician listening to witchdoctors discuss human diseases and methods of healing the human body. These politicians, like witchdoctors, are not merely ignorant about that on which they hold forth, they are so utterly ignorant of the subject matter that they cannot conceive that they might be misinformed and mistaken.

This morning I had the misfortune to hear on NPR Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) pronounce on ‘shrinkflation.’ The very fact that someone so ignorant of economics has power over the economy – combined with the fact that, among successful politicians, Casey is the norm rather than the exception – is sufficient to render any case for government intervention into the economy ridiculous. Just as we would be out of our minds to trust witchdoctors to discover new modern medical treatments and to administer these in healthful ways, we are out of our minds to entrust resource-allocation decisions to politicians.

Boudreaux made the fatal mistake of listening to NPR. I sympathize. I listened to the five-minute interview; the NPR Droid, Ayesha Rascoe, did not ask any skeptical questions of the senator. Like: "Isn't 'shrinkflation' just a symptom of inflation? And isn't inflation a pretty direct result of government policies?"

If you don't hit that NPR link above, you can check out Senator Casey's press release on his bill: Legislation to Crack Down on Big Corporations Shrinking Products Without Reducing Prices.

Yes, like Elizabeth Warren, Casey's a big fan of cracking down. On everything except runaway government spending.

Bill empowers Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to crack down on corporations reducing product size without a reduction in price…

Today, U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee on Children & Families, introduced the Shrinkflation Prevention Act to crack down on corporations…

"I’m fighting to crack down on shrinkflation and hold corporations accountable for these deceptive practices."…

In February 2024, Casey introduced legislation to protect American families from greedflation by banning grossly excessive price increases and crack down on corporate price gouging.

Like "fair share", that phrase must focus-group well.

Back to Don Boudreaux, who penned a letter to NPR in response, observing: None of These People Put Their Money Where Their Mouths Are.... Proposing a real tough question for the down-crackers:

Interviewed this morning by Ayesha Rascoe, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) repeated the economically nonsensical claim that today’s inflation is caused by greed (“What to know about the ‘shrinkflation’ bill mentioned in the State of the Union”). To support his assertion – and his pending legislation to empower government to police against ‘shrinkflation’ – Mr. Casey asserted that corporate profits are unusually high.

How refreshing it would be if at least once your reporters would ask people, such as Sen. Casey, who assert that corporations have unchecked power to raise prices or shrink package sizes this question: “If what you say is true, why don’t you start a company that charges more reasonable prices or offers larger portions? You’d make a fortune by attracting away from the price-gougers all the consumers who you assert are now suffering terribly. Rather than siccing the government on the alleged price-gougers, if you instead went into competition with them you enrich yourself and consumers! Can you explain to me why you don’t put your money where your mouth is?

Well, Don, the obvious answer is that politicians like Casey and Warren have no discernible talent at business-running. In fact, no discernible talent for running anything except their mouths.

(The above is a mutated quote from Marion Barry, not quite as famous as his classic "Bitch set me up".)

Anyway: of course, some savvy businessperson with appropriate talent could do what Boudreaux describes, undercutting the "price gougers", and making big bucks. Or an existing candy company, one of these guys, could do it. Why doesn't that happen?

I'm pretty sure you can come up with a plausible explanation.

It is unsurprising for government-subsidized NPR to act as a cheerleader for increasing government "crack down" power. We previously looked at Cookie Monster doing his part on that front too. Jack Butler chimes in there as well: Cookie Monster: Biden Flack?.

It was strange for a character from a children’s TV show to weigh in on this subject in a manner remarkably similar to current White House messaging and preoccupation. Reporting on this, the Washington Free Beacon noted that Sesame Workshop, the organization behind Sesame Street, receives 5 percent of its revenues from the federal government, and that some of its leaders are Democratic donors.

But even if there hasn’t been deliberate coordination between the Biden administration and Sesame Workshop, the unseemliness of Cookie Monster’s apparent politicking ought to renew skepticism of the government funds going to the organization. It may be a small amount, and a small portion of Sesame Workshop’s overall revenue. But the latter fact should make us more willing to end the funding. And amid an only worsening fiscal crisis, the former fact should make us look anywhere we can for items to excise.

As Butler notes, Casey's proposed legislation was promoted by the shameless-lying-demagogue-in-chief in the SOTU speech last week. The MSM fact-checkers were not diligent about his relevant remarks:

In fact, the snack companies think you won’t notice if they change the size of the bag and put a hell of a lot fewer — (laughter) — same — same size bag — put fewer chips in it. No, I’m not joking. It’s called “shrink-flation.”

Pass Bobby Casey’s bill and stop this. (Applause.) I really mean it.

You probably all saw that commercial on Snickers bars. (Laughter.) And you get — you get charged the same amount, and you got about, I don’t know, 10 percent fewer Snickers in it. (Laughter.)

But, via Hot Air's Karen Townsend, it turns out Joe Biden is Lying About the Size of Your Snickers Bar. Quoting a tweet from someone who actually checked with the manufacturer:

Well, shoot. Now I'm craving… you know what.

You can look at Senator Casey's proposed legislation here. Nine co-sponsors, none from New Hampshire. Too stupid even for Maggie and Jeanne?

Also Acceptable, But More Obscure: Picasso's "The Clown"

Curious about the headline? Here you go:

That's more cheery! I think.

But if you're more in the Munch mood, Charles C. W. Cooke has a prediction: the Loser of This Election Will Be Forever Stained

If he loses, Joe Biden will no longer be the guy who beat Donald Trump. He will be the guy who beat Donald Trump, was president for four years, and then, because he could not accept that he was an unpopular, senile failure, allowed Donald Trump to become president again. At present, both the Democratic Party and the broader center-left are pretending manfully that Biden is a brilliant and spritely young lad, whose stewardship of the United States has inspired awe in everyone to the left of Ted Nugent. If he loses, this will change instantly. Like the GOP’s, the Democratic Party’s coalition is chaotic and irrational, and thus primed to fracture badly in defeat. Should Biden’s astonishingly selfish decision to run for a second term result in the return of Donald Trump, the recriminations will be swift and the internecine warfare will be brutal. At the very least, such a result will lead to a loss of trust in the party’s establishment of the sort that the Republicans have suffered. “You gave us Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden,” the cavilers will say, “and in exchange we got two terms of Trump.”

And if Donald Trump loses? Well, then he will no longer be the guy who beat Hillary Clinton and prevented her from turning the country to the left, but the guy who beat Hillary Clinton, did some good things, and then handed control of the country over to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for eight years — during which time his achievements were mostly undone. As a political proposition, “but Gorsuch” is a good argument — especially when it is accompanied by “but Kavanaugh,” “but Coney Barrett,” “but tax cuts,” and “but border security.” It will be less persuasive if the influence of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett has been wiped out by two new Democratic appointees; if the tax cuts that Trump signed are slashed to pieces in 2027; and if the border remains wide open by design. At present, Trump’s many flaws do not seem to matter much to his popularity, but this is mostly the result of the mistaken belief that he is a winner. Should Trump lose for a second time in a row, the re-evaluation will come more quickly than he expects, and it will not be kind.

That's a "gifted" link, so feel free to check it out.

As for our regular Sunday look at the betting odds:

Candidate EBO Win
Probability
Change
Since
3/3
Donald Trump 51.6% -0.6%
Joe Biden 33.7% +2.3%
Michelle Obama 2.4% -2.4%
Robert Kennedy Jr 2.2% ---
Gavin Newsom 2.1% -0.5%
Other 8.0% -1.0%

Executive summary: no doubt due to his shouty, non-drooly, State of the Union speech, Biden improved his odds a bit. The big loser is… well, as Democrat stalwart Renée Graham says in her Boston Globe column: Michelle Obama is not coming to save us.

But, perhaps as a result of Michelle's drop, RFKJr popped back above our 2% threshold. Perhaps buoyed by the recent news, as reported at Axios: RFK Jr. nears major ballot wins in 3 battleground states.

And, as usual, there's still a significant fraction for "Other". Wagering, I assume, on that always-possible "actuarial event".

Also of note:

  • We are used to deranged people talking about this. But David Friedman is not deranged, so attention should be paid: Trump’s Threat to Democracy.

    Suppose that, despite any legal tactics of the opposition, Trump ends up in the White House, in control of both the federal legal apparatus and, through his supporters, those of multiple states. After the repeated use of lawfare against him by his opponents it is hard to imagine Trump refraining from responding in kind or his supporters expecting him to.

    At which point we are getting close to the situation in a variety of nominally democratic states, most obviously Putin’s Russia, where the ruling party stays in power by weaponizing the legal system against its opponents, relying on its control of law enforcement to deal with any hostile response.

    The scholars also warned that serious political instability and violence could ensue. That possibility was on Raskin’s mind, too. He conceded that the threat of violence could influence what Democrats do if Trump wins. But, Raskin added, it wouldn’t necessarily stop them from trying to disqualify him. “We might just decide that’s something we need to prepare for.” ("How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t," Russel Berman in The Atlantic.)

    Trump may end up responsible for the destruction of democracy in the US — through things he scared his enemies into doing.

    An all-too-credible scenario.

    In other depressing news: Trump praises ‘fantastic’ Viktor Orbán while hosting Hungarian autocrat at Mar-a-Lago for meeting and concert.

  • Worse than Obama? About the SOTU yell-in, Philip Klein notes Biden Delivers The Most Anti-Israel Presidential Speech In History.

    In the early days of the war, Biden claimed that Hamas needed to be destroyed, but tonight that got downgraded to saying that Israel has the right to “go after” Hamas.

    Yet each day, Biden undermines Israel’s ability to go after Hamas. He has warned Israel not to go into Rafah, the part of southern Gaza where the last remnants of Hamas are hiding, and each day he demands a cease-fire deal. But his constant attacks on Israel are actually making Hamas dig in. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier, “Egyptian officials said [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar believes Hamas currently has the upper hand in negotiations, citing internal political divisions within Israel, including cracks in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wartime government and mounting U.S. pressure on Israel to do more to alleviate the suffering of Gazans.”

    The overarching message was clear: The October 7 attacks were bad, but Israel’s response has been worse. Palestinians deserve our support, but Israel does not.

  • What could go wrong? The architect of the Afghanistan debacle unveiled another plan in his SOTU shoutfest. Luther Ray Abel takes a hard look: Biden's Pier in Gaza Portends Disaster.

    President Biden, during his State of the Union address, announced an effort to create an aid corridor to Gaza that will include a U.S.–constructed pier for shipments of food and other supplies to reach Palestinians. This “temporary” construction would be a significant expansion of the Biden administration’s aid measures and no longer done at arm’s length, whatever promises of “no American boots on the ground” the president might make. As with all else, there are only tradeoffs. In this case, it’s almost all bad. The president’s design will create a locus of aid transfer that endangers American servicemen while failing to ensure the aid cannot be appropriated by Hamas.

    The most recent efforts, air-dropping aid in collaboration with the Jordanian air force, resulted in a reported five Palestinian deaths (per Hamas-compromised Gaza Health Ministry) after a parachute failed to deploy correctly on one parcel. The pallet in question was not a U.S.-dropped aid parcel, according to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). The White House’s proposed pier solution would endanger American lives, almost certainly experience mission creep that turns temporary into tem-permanent, and, because of Biden’s promise of “no boots” would require a third party to handle dissemination of supplies — Qatar has volunteered to bankroll much of it.

    As Abel goes on to note, Qatar has long been Hamas-friendly.