URLs du Jour

2017-12-30

Proverbs 17:20 is pretty standard stuff:

20 One whose heart is corrupt does not prosper;
    one whose tongue is perverse falls into trouble.

Yeah, but you can still be POTUS.


■ An annual event continues: Dave Barry’s 2017 Year in Review. Sample, in January…

… which begins with the nation still bitterly divided over the 2016 election. On one side are the progressives, who refuse to accept Donald Trump as president, their reasoning being that:

  1. He is Hitler.
  2. He is literally Hitler.
  3. He is LITERALLY WORSE THAN HITLER.

On the other side are the Trump supporters, whose position is:

  1. You lost!
  2. You whiny liberal pukes.
  3. SHUT UP, LOSERS.
So there does not appear to be a lot of common ground between these positions. Nevertheless as the year progresses, the two sides will gradually find a way —call it the open-minded generosity of the American spirit — to loathe each other even more.

Yeah, that's about right.


■ Andrew Klavan honors us with his Predictions For 2018

The Super Bowl will be played between the New England Patriots and some other team. Approximately 76 people will attend the game, but the audience will be boosted by the hundreds who tune in for its live broadcast on Spike TV. The halftime show will feature Chelsea Handler singing her new hit, "Screw You, America, And Your Stinking Flag Too," and will include a massive dance number representing the United States Army's oppression of indigenous peoples around the world. After the Patriots win, NFL executives will hold a meeting to discuss the mysterious decline in their ratings. They will conclude they need more outreach to transgender people.

I'll add a prediction of my own: the Patriots' win will be followed by accusations that they did so by violating some rule of which nobody was previously aware.


■ At NRO, Yuval Levin analyzes Presidential Word Salads. After quoting a 182-word Trumpspeak excerpt from an interview with an NYT reporter, Yuval notes:

After reading this, it is advisable to take a moment to wonder at the absurdity of life, to offer a quiet prayer of thanks for the fact that any of us is still alive, and then to pursue—yet again, and surely not for the last time—that recurring question of our era: What in the world is the president talking about?

It's about health care. And:

  1. Although the President says "I know the details of health care better than most."…
  2. The rest of his answer makes it completely obvious he doesn't know much about the details of health care.


■ At Reason, Veronique de Rugy has unsurprising news: Warren's Regulatory Expansion Is Wrong Answer to Equifax Breach. She has proposed a bill cleverly entitled the "Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act" (FREE Act, get it?)

The implication is that this incident is unique among all other cybersecurity breaches in that Equifax and the credit industry at large are the source of the problem. The truth is much more mundane. Equifax fell victim to an unpatched vulnerability installed by a contractor, and now a politician is exploiting the issue to increase government control over an industry.

This is not to say that Equifax deserves no blame. Quite the contrary. Not only was its response after the incident widely condemned as ham-fisted but also the vulnerability itself was disclosed months before the attack and should have been patched. But that kind of mistake is quite common, and the FREE Act would do nothing to fix it.

NH's Senator Shaheen is a co-sponsor of this power-grabbing bill.


■ But you know what, Senator Shaheen made the Russians mad, and that raises her score a bit in Pun Salad's eyes. Politico has the story: Senators scrap Russia trip after Kremlin snubs Shaheen.

Two Republican senators have called off a planned trip to Russia after the Kremlin denied a visa to a Democratic colleague, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

Shaheen, an outspoken backer of a Russia sanctions bill that Congress approved overwhelmingly earlier this year, had been scheduled to visit Russia along with GOP colleagues Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and John Barasso of Wyoming. But a Shaheen spokesman said the senator believes the Kremlin has placed her under a travel sanction, prohibiting her visit.

The Russians are scared of Jeanne Shaheen. Wow.


■ The New Hampshire cell of Commie Radio asks and answers the musical question: Why Do All New Hampshire Bars Have To Sell Food?

[…] after Prohibition ended, legislators didn’t want bars or saloons opening up willy-nilly around the state. So, they only gave licenses to restaurants.

Eventually, they made a more relaxed license for places that wanted to serve beer and wine. But if you wanted to serve the hard stuff - you had to to meet the food requirement.

And you still do.

Today, 50 percent of sales has to come from food if you want a full liquor license. Alternatively, your establishment has sell at least $75,000 worth of food every year.

The question is, in a state known for its “Live Free or Die” attitude, how has this law survived for so long?

Indeed. Having state-owned-and-operated liquor stores (which are, with few exceptions, dingy and depressing) in a freedom-loving state is… incongruous.


■ And a New Year-relevant xkcd:

[xkcd on 2018]

Mouseover: "We should really start calculating it earlier, but until the end of December we're always too busy trying to figure out which day Christmas will fall on."