Pun Salad

Background: I have taken to following my Congresscritter/Toothache Carol Shea-Porter on Twitter. There's no doubt a certain amount of masochism involved there, but there's also a bit of fun in occasionally Speaking Truth To Power, like yesterday.

A number of her tweets follow a certain formula: (a) link to an article containing some morsel of left-wing Democrat outrage (pretty thick on the ground these days); (b) prepend the comment: "Republicans, speak up. Now!"

I don't know about you, but I find this remarkably petulant and tone-deaf. CSP is a "public servant". (If you don't believe that, just read her press releases.) Where does she get off making demands of her constituents? And not all her constituents, mind you: just a subset of them: Republicans.

It's especially mystifying in a practical-politics sense: consider CSP is only in office by capturing a bare plurality (44.2%) of votes, eking out a 1.9% win over a weak, ethics-challenged GOP opponent, Frank Guinta. Can she really afford this kind of strident hyper-partisanship?

So I attempted to squeeze all that into a tweet:

@TeamSheaPorter Did some PR guru suggest that tweeting imperious orders to GOPers would make your constituents like you better? Not working.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) January 31, 2017

How's that? The 140-character limit is tough for me.

Trying hard to find the reasonableness. Only occasionally succeeding.

• Mr. Charles W. Calomiris shares "A Neutral Voter’s Lament"

  As someone who supported neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton during the recent election, I find myself surprisingly repulsed by the anti-Trump protests on Inaugural weekend, and I’ve been puzzling over why. Part of the answer is that I don’t accept the caricature of the Trump administration that the mainstream media and the Democrats supply, and I’m bothered that the masses are so willing to do so. The campaign is over, and now Trump and the talented people he has assembled deserve a chance to show us how they will govern before they’re dismissed as monsters.

  He recommends Proverbs 29:11. As do I.

• James Lileks also reflects my own attitude:

  Reading Twitter for the last 72 hours proves my lame adage: nothing is true and everything is plausible. It’s like events are a high-speed train moving on tracks that occasionally narrow, diverge, and cross - everything keeps moving forward, somehow, but there aren’t any straight rails. The calm voices make sense. The skeptical voices make sense. The furious voices make sense. You feel as if you should be more suspicious of what you think you know, just to keep yourself honest. You feel as if you should resist doubting what you believe because there’s pressure to conform.

  I especially enjoyed untangling that last sentence.

• But enough mournful angst about the state of American political discourse. Kevin D. Williamson has an idea we can all get behind: a blue-state tax hike:

  Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration will disagree about many things, but it is rare to find a Republican of almost any description who will turn his nose up at a tax cut of almost any description. As Robert Novak put it: “God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes. If they don’t do that, they have no useful function.” And tax cuts are coming. But there are two proposals in circulation that would constitute significant tax increases — tax increases that would fall most heavily on upper-income Americans in high-tax progressive states such as California and New York. The first is a proposal to reduce or eliminate the mortgage-interest deduction, a tax subsidy that makes having a big mortgage on an expensive house relatively attractive to affluent households; the second is to reduce or eliminate the deduction for state income taxes, a provision that takes some of the sting out of living in a high-tax jurisdiction such as New York City (which has both state and local income taxes) or California, home to the nation’s highest state-tax burden.
  
  Do not hold your breath waiting for the inequality warriors to congratulate Republicans for proposing these significant tax increases on the rich. Expect lamentations and the rending of garments, instead.

  Well, that lamentations thing has much to recommend it. Given that the blue states shout the loudest about Inequality and the Desperate Need for Tax Revenue, it's far past time to make them put their money where their speaking orifices are.

• But enough about politics. I'm so steeped in it these days, that when I saw a headline about "Instant Pot", I assumed it was related to Maine's recent legalization of "recreational" marijuana. But no.

  Chances are you or somebody you know has recently become the owner of an Instant Pot, the multifunction electric pressure cooker that can produce fork-tender pot roasts in less than an hour, as well as brown meat, cook beans without soaking, and even do the job of a rice cooker or crockpot. The Instant Pot­­ isn't advertised on TV or in the newspapers, and yet it's become a viral marketing success story, with owners often describing themselves as "addicts" or "cult members." That's the kind of word-of-mouth publicity Instant Pot founders dreamed of when they first began designing the countertop appliances.

  Whoa, I want one! But (Mrs. Salad reminds me) we already have a crockpot and a rice cooker. And, in our decades of cohabitation, we've never, ever, needed a pressure cooker. Still… buttons! LEDs!

• But as long as I was talking about "recreational marijuana": that adjective has always seemed a little off to me. Like you should at least be playing badminton or something, concurrently with consuming. Will use be regulated by towns' Recreation Departments? I swear, you don't have to be stoned to ask these questions!

• Another culinary item: Mr. Likeks muses on the Zen of Taco Bell and Chinese takeout menus. At the Bell:

  […] It's all the same stuff. Really. They remix the same five or six ingredients into something new every other month. "Announcing the Quesodillorita Crunch Supreme! Two Flavors: Ranch and Bold, neither of which are really flavors at all! New! Limited Time! We'll yank it away for no reason and never explain why! We will deny it ever existed!"

  I don't really get to go to Taco Bell as much as I'd like. Which is probably why I'm blogging instead of in cardiac rehab.