Pun Salad

Having worked for some time now in the foreign policy world that revolves around Washington DC, I can assure you that whatever your feelings about that tentacled city squatting itself on America’s mid-Atlantic coast, it’s probably worse than you think. I don’t care whether you are on the Right or the Left. The limitless narcissism and navel gazing, the gaslighting and dissimulation, the illiteracy and greed of the place is surpassed perhaps only by the weight of its decadent banality – by the same painfully shallow ideas (and people) circulating ceaselessly through an incestuous and wholly unaccountable apparatus insistent on regurgitating them over and over again in entitled cries for more money and power and attention.

The pandemic has eased, but not the compulsion of many Americans to cover their faces. Fully vaccinated adults are still wearing masks on their solitary walks outdoors, and officials have been enforcing mask mandates on airline passengers and on some city-dwellers and students. (Though today’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa, declaring the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation unlawful, comes as welcome news.) Maskaholics in the press are calling for permanent masking on trains, planes, and buses. High school students in Seattle staged a protest demanding that a mask mandate be reinstated, and psychologists now deal with the anxieties of children who don’t want their classmates to see their faces. They’re suffering from “mask dependency,” as this psychological affliction is termed in Japan, where a long tradition of mask-wearing during flu season has left some individuals afraid at any time to expose their faces in public.

It’s a difficult addiction to overcome, according to the Japanese therapists who specialize in treating it—but a simple remedy might help some maskaholics. It’s a graph that should be required viewing for everyone still wearing a mask and every public official or journalist who still insists that mask mandates “control the spread.”

The day before President Joe Biden’s scheduled visit to Portsmouth, Gov. Chris Sununu joined a group of GOP governors calling out the president’s proposed restrictions on public charter schools.

“It is a certainty that the expansion of such burdensome regulations will make it more difficult—if not impossible—for independent and smaller charter schools to access federal funds,” they wrote.

At issue are Biden administration rules requiring charter schools to undergo a “community impact analysis” to qualify for federal funding. Only charter schools in areas where there is “unmet demand” would be eligible.

It’s a rare day when I get the chance to cheer for something the Biden administration does, but I will do so today without reservation. One of the best things to come out of last year’s infrastructure bill was a plan to ensure the viability of American nuclear power plants that have run into economic trouble over the past decade or more. Yesterday, the White House announced the availability of $6 billion in relief for plants that have announced early closure dates driven by economic concerns. A second round of funding will then be made available for plants that have not yet announced an early closure date but anticipate doing so in the near future. Of course, there is still more to be done to improve our nuclear energy position, but this is a very good start. (Associated Press)

“Democrats are the party of working people.” So states Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) in a “guest essay” — it isn’t an essay at all; it is ordinary campaign literature — in the New York Times. Senator Warren could have used some editing. The first thing her New York Times editors should have asked:

Is that true?

Let’s think about that phrase, “working people.” You would think that “working people” would mean “people who work,” but that is not what Senator Warren wants it to mean. Hedge-fund managers are working people — it is fashionable to sneer at people working in finance, but if you think that it isn’t work, try doing it. You think they’re giving all that money away? Doctors are working people. Lawyers are working people. College professors and novelists and movie producers are all working people, too. Even some journalists are working people, though not very many of them.

So, if “working people” does not mean “people who work,” what might it mean?