Pun Salad

Just a couple of months ago, having a press secretary sneer at reporters constituted an attack on the First Amendment and qualified journalists for hazard pay. When House Democrats attempt to take news channels off of cable and satellite systems through intimidation, suddenly the story becomes — wait for it — “Republicans pounce!”

In Politico’s case, it’s that the GOP outrage over the letter from Anna Eshloo and Jerry McNerney might “sidetrack” Congress’ look at misinformation during the election. Their report even accuses Republicans of “tarring” Eshloo and McNerney over their intimidation campaign[…]

The latest illustration is an attempt to jack up the minimum wage to $15 per hour as part of another COVID-19 relief bill. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., recently declared on CNN's "Inside Politics" that small businesses wouldn't struggle under a federal mandate to pay employees $15 an hour, even during a recession. To support his claim, he pointed out that Target and Amazon, two of the greatest beneficiaries of the lockdown, raised their lowest hourly wage to $15 voluntarily. He later asserted that he doesn't want small businesses that are underpaying workers and that $15 is very reasonable. How he knows this is a mystery, but this arrogance demonstrates an ignorance of basic economics.

Most critics of Amazon and other world-bestriding technology companies focus on their size and market share, but another problem is their opacity: We still do not know, and may indeed never know, why Amazon has decided to ban Ryan Anderson’s book on the transgender controversy. Inquiries from National Review and from Anderson’s publisher, Encounter Books, have been met with Bourbon haughtiness: Le marché, c’est moi, says Jeff Bezos.

The book, published in 2018, recently has been removed from Amazon, as well as from Amazon subsidiaries Kindle, Audible, and AbeBooks. Amazon maintains, in theory, a policy of contacting publishers and discussing the removal of controversial books before acting, but Amazon has not followed that policy in this case. At least the traditional sort of book-burners felt the need to explain themselves.

“Union, Justice and Confidence” has been Louisiana’s motto for more than a century. But that would change if a state lawmaker gets his way.

A bill from state Rep. Richard Nelson (R-Mandeville) would change the state motto to “We live and die for those we love.”

Nelson — who holds a law license and spotted the engraving upon taking office in 2020 — likened the sacrifices made during the COVID-19 pandemic and recent hurricanes to what Louisiana’s state flag portrays: a mother pelican feeding her chicks her own blood.

“This last year has really called people to do something greater, and what I’m proposing as the new motto really speaks to that,” he said. “Everybody in the country knows New Hampshire’s motto: ‘Live free or die.’ I think we can be on that same tier.”

Now the efforts to inject a discussion of racism into every aspect of American life have reached a game that most Americans have cherished for decades: Monopoly.

In a piece for The Atlantic titled, “The Prices on Your Monopoly Board Hold a Dark Secret,” and subheaded, “The property values of the popular game reflect a legacy of racism and inequality,” author Mary Pilon writes that a 1930s New Jersey realtor named Jesse Raiford “affixed prices to the properties on his board to reflect the actual real-estate hierarchy at the time. And in Atlantic City, as in so much of the rest of the United States, that hierarchy reflects a bitter legacy of racism and residential segregation.”