Pun Salad

I'm glad Mr. Ramirez didn't use my headline for a punchline, though.

But here are some words on that topic, from Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon at Cato: Meet the New Steel Tariffs, Same as the Old Steel Tariffs.

As near as I can tell, explicit references to "Won't Get Fooled Again" lyrics are only in the article's headline. I hope, reader, you stocked up on steel and aluminum.

Also of note:

• Time will tell. As it usually does. That doesn't stop Jeffrey Blehar from asking: What Did Elon Musk Actually Accomplish, Except His Own Downfall?.

  As most are no doubt already aware, yesterday Elon Musk broke his silence about the “big, beautiful” spending bill that is currently wending its way through a Republican Congress. Calling it a “disgusting abomination,” he added, “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.” This bill, of course, is likely to end up being the primary legislative accomplishment of Donald Trump’s first year back in office. He pushed the House Republican caucus furiously to get it across the finish line there, to the point where its passage by a few votes felt — despite the seeming last-minute drama of it all — a bit like scripted kabuki theater.

  One can only imagine how unhappy the Trump administration is with this, especially since several Senate lawmakers have used the opportunity afforded by Elon’s apostasy to poke their heads out from behind his protective skirt and chip in with their own reservations. (Profiles in cowardice, nearly all of them, with Rand Paul as a notable exception.) The Trump administration has, as of this writing at least, held its fire — uncharacteristic when a former ally directly criticizes it. It’s easy enough to grasp why in this case: Nobody wants to anger the world’s richest man, especially when he also happens to own and control the world’s most relevant social media site. Perhaps Trump may just let Elon stew online, rather than provoke a MAGA civil war. Perhaps not. Regardless of whether fireworks follow, this was always the way the story was going to end.

  That last link goes to Jeffrey's February post, which was headlined How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End. He now reveals that the "Probably" was demanded by his editors. I think he got a bunch of "toldya so" credits.

• Violent rhetoric from local Democrat. New Hampshire House Democratic leader Alexis Simpson talks tough in my lousy local paper: Fight now for NH public schools before it's too late.

  Over the past few months, in Rindge, school officials warned they might need to cut their championship winning sports programs entirely just to balance the budget. In Wolfeboro, part of the ceiling at the high school literally caved in. And in Manchester, the state’s largest school district, administrators say they can’t afford to replace retiring teachers or move forward with long-planned expansions to athletic programs.

  This is not a dystopian projection; it’s happening right now in New Hampshire. While communities are scraping together every last local property tax dollar to keep public schools running, the state is already pouring tens of millions into a school voucher program to pay for private and religious schools with virtually no oversight — even subsidizing private ski passes, music lessons, and undisclosed Amazon and Walmart purchases.

  Yes, it's another broadside against the proposal to expand New Hampshire's Education Freedom Account (EFA) Program. Making the usual arguments. Some observations:

  • Can you read Alexis's first paragraph and not get the niggling thought: "Gee, Rindge, Wolfeboro, and Manchester schools are really poorly managed."
  • Apparently New Hampshire Dems have given up arguing what's good for students and parents. It's all about what's best for "public schools". Not exactly the same thing.
  • Alexis uses the term "voucher" twelve times in her short column. Voucher, voucher, voucher! Apparently, that's a word that focus groups have found has unfavorable connotations among the citizenry.
  • Alexis fails to deal with a pretty obvious point: if "public schools" were doing a decent job of meeting the needs of students and parents, there would be no use of the EFA program. Nobody would bother with the extra work involved.

  Which brings us to our next item.

• Doing less with more. Above, Alexis relies on rabble-rousing rhetoric. At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Andrew Cline has some facts: Per-pupil spending in NH nearly doubles from 2001-2024 as district public schools spend $1.25 billion more on 54,000 fewer students.

  Average per-pupil spending in New Hampshire district public schools has nearly doubled this century, as student enrollment declined sharply and reading and math assessment scores fell, a new Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy study finds.

  Total public school district spending in New Hampshire increased by an inflation-adjusted $1.25 billion, or 45%, from 2001-2024 as enrollment fell by 54,381 students, or 26%, state data show.

  The large increase in total spending combined with the large drop in enrollment caused a near doubling of average per-pupil spending, the new study shows. Total per-pupil spending in district public schools rose by an inflation-adjusted 96% from 2001-2024, meaning that the average district public school student in New Hampshire had 96% more in real resources devoted to his or her education in 2024 than in 2001.

  It's not a pretty picture, Emily Alexis.

• I've noticed this mysel… Oh, wait, you said "cents". Max Raskin bids farewell to a small bit of hard money: As We Get Older and Stop Making Cents. (WSJ gifted link)

  It’s wise for the U.S. Mint to stop putting pennies into circulation next year. President Trump’s decision will save taxpayers money: The penny cost about 2 cents to make in 2007, and costs nearly 4 cents today. But the death of the penny says something unfortunate about our economy. The 1-cent piece is an important barometer of monetary health.

  Hard currency is a check on government profligacy. Government prefers cheaply produced money, which has a high seigniorage: the difference between the face value instrument and its production costs. The greater the seigniorage, the more money politicians have to spend. In the U.S., this means a preference for paper bills. According to the U.S. Mint, the production costs of American currency vary from a few cents to print small paper bills to about 15 cents to mint a quarter. Even the costliest greenback, the $100 bill, costs only 9 cents. And the penny has the worst seigniorage of the bunch.

  It will save taxpayers money; but (as I have previously said): it's not a lot of money.

Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to "Deniz Güneş”, [not really] the director of the Center for Public Information at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deniz posts for an admirable reason: The CDC Would Like to Get Ahead of RFK Junior’s Future Statements.

And there's more. Much more. Deniz tries to cover the obvious bases, but with Junior, who knows?

Also of note:

• Gutting, slashing, cutting, … Reporters are working their thesauri overtime looking for description of budget decreases. Liz Wolfe goes with the G-word: The Gutting of the National Park Service.

  Why should the National Park Service be funding so many sites? And what would happen if some of those properties were transferred to state or tribal management?

  The Trump administration is asking those sensible questions, and is proposing to cut $1.2 billion from the agency's budget, "mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management" per Bloomberg. This is a pet issue of mine: It's always been unclear to me why we expect taxpayers across the country to pay for the upkeep and management of so many designated sites, including ones they will never visit and have never heard of. Do you really need to be paying for New York City's Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site? Or North Dakota's Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site?

  I say this as a nature and history appreciator. My interest is not in having these places razed; it's in making sure the federal government is careful about where its money goes and what's actually in the national interest.

  "The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not 'National Parks,' in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks," reads a federal memo on the matter. Hear, hear! "The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system." Though an official list of sites whose management will be shifted is not yet available, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (whom you may remember from the 2024 Republican presidential primary) says that only the 63 "crown jewel" national parks will remain under NPS control.

  That link in the second paragraph goes to a story with the headline "Trump Plans to Offload National Park Sites, But States Don’t Want Them". Gee, that's a shame. Maybe auction them off to see if anybody wants them.

  I know: the NPS is one of the more sacred of cows in the federal barnyard, and any discussion of budget cutting will automatically be characterized as putting a waterslide on El Capitan. So I'm not optimistic that's a fight that Burgum will win.

• The nation that controls drone batteries will control the world! Noah Smith sees cause for alarm in Ukraine's drone strike against Russian bombers: How Chinese drones could defeat America. And it quickly turns into a blame-Trumpfest:

  The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV [First-Person Vision] drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.

  Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.

  In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.

  Noah's plenty worried! And (aside from his TDS) he makes some good points. But I would hope that our military bases and warships already have decent defenses against FPV drones. (If not, it's probably time to fire some more generals.)

• Insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader. In Trump's eyes, that's enough to put the Federalist Society in the Crosshairs. Jonah Goldberg:

  Last week, the Court of International Trade delivered a blow to Donald Trump’s global trade war. It found that the worldwide tariffs Trump unveiled on “Liberation Day” as well his earlier tariffs pretextually aimed at stopping fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada (as if) were beyond his authority. The three-judge panel was surely right about the Liberation Day tariffs and probably right about the fentanyl tariffs, but there’s a better case that, while bad policy, the fentanyl tariffs were not unlawful.

  Please forgive a lengthy excerpt of Trump’s response on Truth Social, but it speaks volumes:

  How is it possible for [the CIT judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be? I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. … In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own ‘thing.’ I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!

  Let’s begin with the fact that Trump cannot conceive of a good explanation for an inconvenient court ruling other than Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s irrelevant that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 law the administration invoked to impose the relevant tariffs, does not even mention the word “tariff” or that Congress never envisioned the IEEPA as a tool for launching a trade war with every nation in the world, “Penguin Island” included. Also disregard the fact that the decision was unanimous and only one of the three judges was appointed by Trump (the other two were Reagan and Obama appointees).

  Trump is the foremost practitioner of what I call Critical Trump Theory—anything bad for Trump is unfair, illegitimate, and proof that sinister forces are rigging the system against him. No wonder then that Trump thinks Leonard Leo, formerly a guiding light at the Federalist Society, the premier conservative legal organization, is a “sleazebag” and “bad person.” Note: Leo is neither of those things.

  Uncoincidentally, the WSJ reported on Leonard Leo the other day, and found This Conservative Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You, After Getting Dumped by Trump (WSJ gifted link).

• To make it even more socialistic? Were it not for Jonathan Turley, I probably would not have known what Michael Moore was up to these days. As it turns out, it's baking Pie-Crust Patriotism: Michael Moore Rewrites the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Rev. Francis Bellamy would not likely be won over by the Moore remake. (The phrase “under God” was incorporated later into the Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954). Here is the new version:

  “I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America. And to the democracy for which we all stand: One person, one vote, one nation, part of one world, everyone! A seat at the table! Everyone! A slice of the pie! With liberty and justice, equality, and kindness and the pursuit of happiness for all.”

  As an initial matter, I fail to see how the nation is embodied by a run-on sentence that has more exclamation marks than a pre-teen’s text to bffs.

  In case you haven't heard my rant about Pledge: its original author, Francis Bellamy, was a Christian socialist, and inveighed against the evils of capitalism from his Baptist pulpit in Boston. I'm in agreement with Gene Healy's Cato essay What's Conservative about the Pledge of Allegiance?, in which he deemed it "a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people."

I'm sure that serious point is in here somewhere, but there's also an appeal to my inner 14-year-old. Thanks, Remy!

For a flatulence-free explanation, see this March article from Jack Nicastro: What will Trump's strategic crypto reserve look like?

And, yes, Fartcoin is real. For a sufficiently hand-waving definition of "real".

Also of note:

• A newfound respect. Katherine Mangu-Ward's lead editorial in the July issue of Reason is Welcoming Anti-Trump Liberals to the Free Trade Club.

  After decades of shouting into the void that free trade is good, those of us in the "eliminate tariffs, embrace comparative advantage, and let me buy my haggis-flavored chips online without an import tax" crowd are experiencing something that hasn't happened in a while: new friends. Things have been especially lonely in recent years, as the right veered away from offering even lip service to free trade while the left coasted on the fumes of its union-driven protectionist past.

  But a recent poll from the Polarization Research Lab shows those same lefties making a sudden and striking turn. At the start of 2024, liberals and conservatives were nearly identical in their lukewarm support for unrestricted trade—about 20 percent each in favor. Following President Donald Trump's electoral win and renewed protectionist rhetoric, liberal support has more than doubled to over 40 percent.

  And, yes, like Fartcoin, haggis-flavored chips are real. KMW's bottom line:

  If you're ready to get serious about dismantling the tariffs that strangle global exchange, grab a seat. (Or in the immortal words of Mean Girls: "Get in, loser. We're going shopping.") But if you're just here to score points in the tribal partisan war of the moment, don't expect us to hand over the aux cord. You can sit with us and listen—but the playlist is Milton Friedman, Frédéric Bastiat, and David Ricardo. And we're playing it on repeat.

• We haven't said this enough lately. Robert Tracinski writes at Discourse: End the FCC.

  Like free trade, Trump's weaponization has awakened liberals to the danger of "unfettered power" in the executive branch.

  There are many chickens coming home to roost in the second Trump administration. For more than a century, we have been creating weak spots in our constitutional system that pose a huge potential for abuse by a power-hungry chief executive. Now Donald Trump is seeking all of them out and using them.

  Let’s zero in on one particularly dangerous area: his abuse of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulator for the airwaves and therefore for broadcast media.

  Shortly after taking office, Trump went on social media to direct his new FCC chair, Brendan Carr, to punish CBS because Trump didn’t like reports about Ukraine and Greenland on “60 Minutes.” He said that the network “should lose their license,” and he urged Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” The FCC does not license the network itself, as Trump seems to think, but it does control the licenses for the network’s individual local TV stations.

  Robert goes into the long history of FCC abuses, with Trump's only the most recent. His specific proposal: "Shrink it down into a technical office for the registration of broadcast rights." Not quite drowning it in the sink, but that works for me.

• It's not rocket science, but it is physics. Bjorn Lomborg takes to the WSJ to reveal The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout (WSJ gifted link).

  When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate.

  Spanish authorities were warned. They kinda knew. They are, even now, averting their eyes.

• This one simple trick will solve everything. Eli Lehrer at the Dispatch advocates Harm Reduction to Heal America.

  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that 5G causes cancer. He has alleged that vaccines are part of a vast pharmaceutical industry conspiracy. He’s questioned the safety of fluoridated water, food dyes, and weed killers. Some of his claims are demonstrably false, others speculative, and a few—like the health effects of food additives and ultra-processed diets—deserve a careful look. But set aside the conspiracies for a moment, and Kennedy is onto a real issue: Americans are dying younger not because of poor doctors or bad hospitals, but because of the way they live.

  For all the nation’s medical innovation and spending (both lead the world), U.S. life expectancy currently trails nearly every other wealthy country. An American born today can expect to live about 78.4 years, compared to 81.1 in the United Kingdom, 83.1 in France, and 84.1 in Japan. And the gap isn’t because of less access to care or lower-quality doctors—on measures of medical treatment from cancer to acute hospital care Americans fare much better than the rest of the world.

  And serious research from dozens of sources confirms this. A landmark report from the National Academy of Sciences found that Americans die younger than people in peer nations not because of inadequate medical care, but because they suffer more from what is called “adverse health-related behaviors.” A 2023 study from the Bloomberg American Health Initiative drilled deeper and found that the bulk of the U.S.-U.K. life expectancy gap is explained by just four factors: cardiovascular disease (resulting from obesity and work stress), drug overdoses, car accidents, and gun deaths (overwhelmingly suicides)—all of which are lifestyle- or environment-related, not failings of the health care system. Even where Americans already have made a lifestyle change for the better, they’ve generally done so later than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. Thus, even though American smoking rates today are about average for rich places, the damage resulting from historically higher rates of smoking continues to impact mortality figures.

  Well, that's sobering news. Albeit not sobering enough to get me to stop drinking wine.

  As stated in the headline, Eli recommends "harm reduction", a non-nannying approach to decrease the damage Americans are doing to themselves. He outlines various approaches to ameliorate obesity, opioid addiction, smoking, traffic fatalities, and more. Interesting!

I responded to a recent tweet from my state's (very) senior senator:

Actually... https://t.co/uAzaYOpJSZ

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) June 1, 2025

As an unknown genius observed: "It ain’t so much the things that people don’t know that makes trouble in this world, as it is the things that people know that ain’t so."

Also of note:

• Let's get them on the record. Eric Boehm says Congress must vote on Trump’s tariff policy.

  President Donald Trump's unilateral attempt at imposing tariffs has evolved into a quantum state.

  You probably already know that Trump has repeatedly threatened, imposed, paused, delayed, raised, lowered, and "chickened out" on various tariff plans. In the past 48 hours, things got even crazier. The Court of International Trade blocked most of Trump's tariffs with an injunction issued Wednesday, but that injunction was temporarily paused by a federal appeals court on Thursday. Meanwhile, a second federal court also ruled Thursday that the tariffs are unlawful.

  The tariffs, which constitute one of the largest tax increases in American history, are simultaneously active and unlawful, subject to change at the president's whim, and could be turned off once again within weeks (when the appeals court's temporary stay will be reviewed).

  As of this moment, that means an American importer doesn't know whether it is due a refund for tariffs already paid, or whether it will owe more taxes for the next shipment of goods.

  This is, obviously, no way to run tax policy.

  To be honest, I'm not sure what Eric's "quantum" comment refers to, except both tariff policy and quantum physics use the word "uncertainty" a lot.

• It's where you learn how to be a good party member, I guess. WSJ reporter Chun Han Wong reports Harvard Has Trained So Many Chinese Communist Officials, They Call It Their ‘Party School’ (WSJ gifted link).

  U.S. schools—and one prestigious institution in particular—have long offered up-and-coming Chinese officials a place to study governance, a practice that the Trump administration could end with a new effort to keep out what it says are Chinese students with Communist Party ties.

  For decades, the party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top “party school” outside the country.

  It would be nice if they returned to China as dedicated champions of liberty, but there's no evidence that a Harvard education provides that.

• Live not by lies. Jack Butler fantasizes about: The Commencement Address Harvard Needs.

  These ought to be exciting times for attendees of a certain school in Boston. Perhaps one could call Harvard University’s ongoing conflict with the Trump administration exciting. But certainly not in the way that its graduates this year would have expected by the time of their commencement this past Thursday.

  The institution is coping as it knows best: through self-congratulation. Abraham Verghese, this year’s commencement speaker, assured graduates that “more people than you realize are grateful for Harvard for the example it has set” and praised the school’s “clarity in affirming and courageously defending the essential values of this university, and indeed of this nation.”

  [I assume he didn't mention that Harvard was the favorite school of Chinese Communists -- pas]

  Harvard’s attitude is that it has done nothing wrong, either lately, or in the past several decades. This is not the kind of honest introspection that aids the pursuit of the Veritas the school claims to seek. For that, we must turn to a Harvard commencement speaker from decades past. He used the occasion to deliver a righteous philippic that transcended his immediate audience, and the time in which he gave it.

  As you might have guessed, that speaker was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

• How about just anti-authoritarian? I read the The UnPopulist, even though it sometimes seems to just be a reflexive anti-Trump site.

  For example, their recent criticism of Trump's efforts to get NPR and PBS off the taxpayer tit didn't really object to Trump's stated rationale, but instead imagined the real reasoning was that those outlets "don't parrot MAGA talking points".

  But this article from self-described Bleeding Heart Libertarian Matt Zwolenski has some thoughtful points: To Fight Authoritarianism, Libertarians Need to be More Pro-Liberty, Not Just Anti-State.

  Recently, the center-left economic blogger Noah Smith apologized to the libertarian movement. This caught me by surprise. My own estimation of that movement, of which I’ve long considered myself a part, has taken a sharp downward turn over the last few years. Lured by a vague hope of deregulation and the more immediate pleasure of sticking it to the woke left, too many libertarians set aside their commitment to the rule of law and soft-peddled Trump’s threat. Some even threw their weight fully behind him. The Libertarian Party in particular experienced a takeover by a reactionary wing and is now an eager foot solider in MAGA’s culture wars against the left, as The Unpopulist has been chronicling.

  So this was a strange moment to be issuing an apology to the libertarian movement when even many libertarians are souring on it. But Noah’s piece was of course not issuing an apology to the MAGAfied libertarian movement or the Libertarian Party but the libertarianism that steadfastly stood for relatively free markets, free trade, and limited government even when these ideas weren’t popular anywhere else on the political spectrum. These commitments played a crucial role in keeping a lid on some rather reactionary right-wing tendencies and left-wing excesses. In his words, “Free-market ideology, for all its flaws, was keeping a lid on the right’s natural impulse toward Peronism” in addition to serving as “the proper foil for progressivism.”

  As I've said before: we'll just have to settle for the simple pleasure of being right about everything, all the time.

Recently on the movie blog:

At National Review, Michael Washburn requests Sympathy for the Unpublished Young White Male Author (NR gifted link). After some discussion of "Conduit Books", a UK effort to publish "the work of male authors", he gets to the reason some might find such things necessary or desirable:

I discussed this issue a few times in recent years, examples here and here.

Today's data point: of Kirkus Reviews' Best Debut Fiction of 2024 list. Here are titles, authors, and (after a little Googling) my pigeonholing on their race, sex, ethnicity, and other relevant info:

• LET THE GAMES BEGIN by Rufaro Faith Mazarura (Black female, "British Zimbabwean")
• THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley (White female from Britain)
• MARTYR! by Kaveh Akbar (Iranian American male)
• GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Vinson Cunningham (Black male)
• HOUSEMATES by Emma Copley Eisenberg (White "American queer writer", apparently uses "she/her" pronouns)
• WHAT KINGDOM by Fine Gråbøl (White female from Denmark)
• JELLYFISH HAVE NO EARS by Adèle Rosenfeld (White female from France)
• HOMBRECITO by Santiago Jose Sanchez ("queer Colombian American writer and artist")
• YR DEAD by sam sax (White guy, lowercased name, self-identified as "a queer, jewish [sic], writer and educator")
• THE HISTORY OF SOUND by Ben Shattuck (Hey, an apparently straight white guy, married to onetime SNL cast member Jenny Slate)
• GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER by Joseph Earl Thomas (Black male)
• THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden (Dutch female)
• OURS by Phillip B. Williams (Black male)

I actually read one of those! Report here; executive summary from this Philistine: Meh.

But out of that baker's dozen titles, I count one unambiguously straight, white male. Back in my day, sonny, we'd call that guy a "token".

So (as I said before): aspiring authors who are in the wrong pigeonhole would be advised to have a backup career plan, unless you are married to a Saturday Night Live comic.

I should also mention that there's an attempted rebuttal to the Joseph Savage article linked above by Alex Skopic at Current Affairs: The White Male Writer is Fine, I Promise. It's long, wide-ranging, well-written, and … not that convincing.

Also of note:

• Hey, you got your subtext on my context! Jonah Goldberg writes on Pretext Upon Pretext. And what is a pretext? Jonah has examples from the world of politics:

  In his first term, Donald Trump used Covid as a pretext to deport illegal immigrants. Biden kept that pretext going for a while too. He tried over and over to cancel student loans invoking all sorts of arguments that were just obviously pretextual—including Covid. Biden also used Covid as a pretext for extending a moratorium on rental payments, which Trump had issued on a pretextual basis as well. The rent freeze and eviction ban made sense when the country was on lockdown, but keeping it around long after the lockdowns was simply politics.

  I focus on the Covid stuff because crises are the mother of pretextual politics. In our system, the only time a president has the ability to assume quasi dictatorial powers and subvert the rule of law, checks and balances, etc., is during a national emergency, especially a war.

  This is not new to Trump or Biden. The founders, having lived through the impotence of the federal government under the Articles of Confederation, recognized that the government needed the ability to deal with emergencies. “The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed,” Alexander Hamilton writes in Federalist 23.

  And, as, Jonah goes on to note: "[V]irtually the entire agenda of the second Trump administration is grounded in pretextual arguments."

  Contra Jonah, I think there are pretty good arguments for some of the stuff Trump wants to do, like defunding NPR and PBS; the relevant executive order makes those arguments pretty well.

  But on (say) tariffs, Jonah's pretty on target: the crazy-quilt nature of the implementation belies any principled rationale Trump might claim.

• Irony, on the other hand, is alive and well. Andrew Follett claims Another Harvard Scandal Proves That Science Is Broken.

  Aonce-prominent Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired this week for outright fabricating data on numerous academic studies of dishonesty and unethical behavior. The timing couldn’t be worse for Harvard: The troubled university currently faces a critical dispute over funding and foreign student visas with the Trump administration.

  Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by prominent left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times. Both outlets now admit that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer review, but by a series of posts by science bloggers.

  One can almost imagine ex-prof Gino muttering in her best Scooby-Doo villain voice: "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for these blasted science bloggers."

• LFOD shows up at TechDirt. And Tim Cushing's headline is appropriately dirty: Trump, Republicans Have Fucked This Nation So Hard We’ve Created A New Class Of Refugees. It's largely based on this Guardian article we discussed back in April.

  We’ll start with the story of a teacher who abandoned New Hampshire for Vermont because of the state’s efforts to erase critical race theory and other things that might inform students that white doesn’t always mean right.

  John Dube, a high school teacher with 35 years of teaching under his belt, went up against local lawmakers’ attempts to ban CRT theory from being discussed in public schools. This put him in the crosshairs of far right activists, who engaged in a campaign of harassment so worrisome federal and local law enforcement stopped by to warn the teacher of what they had observed online..

  The backlash was instant. Granite Grok, a local rightwing website, posted the names of all New Hampshire signatories, and within hours of that Dube received a Facebook message that read: “Whats up homo? I heard your teaching Marxist commie CRT in your classrooms. You can fuck right off you garbage human.”

  Dube calmly replied that he would not be intimidated.

  Within days, police officers turned up at his house, having been dispatched by the FBI. Dube’s name was circulating on obscure chatrooms frequented by violent militia members. He was urged to install security cameras at home, but when he asked why the police didn’t arrest the perpetrators of the threats, he was told that was impossible on free speech grounds.

  So much for the “Live Free or Die” state. It’s now just the “Fuck Off and Die” state, heavily populated by people who believe your rights (and possibly, your life) end where their beliefs begin.

  Dube has since relocated to Vermont to teach. He’s not the only one fleeing persecution and/or prosecution in his former home state due to legislation passed by Trump sycophant’s or the disturbing actions of those who support Trump and his rampant destruction of constitutional rights.

  I won't repeat my previous comments here, except: (1) it's regrettable that people can get harassed for their political beliefs, although (2) the harassment in Dube's case didn't appear to rise to the "true threat" level that would trigger law enforcement; and (3) Dube seems to have made his Vermont getaway during the Biden Administration. Tim's effort to link it to Trump is kind of stretchy.

  I'll also note that most data on interstate migration flows typically show a net inflow to New Hampshire, and an outflow from Vermont. How many "refugees"?

Recently on the movie blog:

Unfortunately, that's unlikely, but we can fantasize:

Also of note:

• I sometimes say I aspire to be a dilettante. Kevin D. Williamson thinks it's an insult, though. He writes: Trump and Musk: Billionaire Dilettantes.

  “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Elon Musk, the billionaire dilettante tasked by that other billionaire dilettante with reforming the federal bureaucracy, said earlier this week. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.” The Tesla boss is out of DOGE and out of the administration and has announced a general retreat from political engagement, having discovered—as one will—that all this “easy” and “obvious” and “common sense” stuff turned out to be … hard.

  Welcome to the party, you plank.

  We’ve been here before, of course. Donald Trump and his team have been three weeks away from announcing a groundbreaking new health care plan for … what, just about a decade now? Donald Trump’s confidence in addressing a complex subject has a linear relationship to his ignorance regarding that subject, and so we have got gems like this presidential declaration of ineptitude: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” It isn’t the case that nobody knew—lots of people knew. Some of those people had good ideas, some had terrible ideas, but they knew it was complicated. The guy who didn’t know? The one who spent most of his life as a Manhattan gadfly, a game-show host with side hustles in pro wrestling and porn. That guy didn’t know.

  The problem—one of the problems—is that that guy doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

  Aw, KDW would probably say the same thing about the little girl in our Eye Candy above. He's mean.

• You know, Bobby, Harvard fires people for doing this sort of thing. Jim Geraghty reports: RFK Jr.’s “Healthy” Report Cites Fake Studies, Gets Busted.

  I was never a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The guy with brain worms who dumps baby bear carcasses and decapitates whales always seemed like an odd fit at best at the Department of Health and Human Services and a potentially catastrophic one at worst. It was not reassuring when Kennedy strode into his confirmation hearing and made clear that he didn’t know which one was Medicaid and which one was Medicare. (Those programs make up 85 percent of the budget at HHS.) Nor was it comforting when Kennedy assured Dr. Phil McGraw and his audience that he thinks the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind the phenomenon of “contrails” and that “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.”

  But President Trump picked him for the job, and 52 Senate Republicans voted to confirm him, and so the country is stuck with him, at least for the time being.

  On May 16, the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled “The MAHA Report,” and a few days later, in a ceremony with President Trump standing beside him, Kennedy boasted, “This is a milestone. There’s — never in American history has the federal government taken a position on public health like this. . . . It’s not just one cabinet secretary, it’s the entire government that is behind this report.”

  But alas, it was sloppy and lazy, riddled with errors. Jim suspects an AI in full-hallucination mode might have been at work.

  But good old Karoline Leavitt blamed it on "formatting issues".

  Confession: I voted for her back in 2018 when she was running against Chris Pappas for CongressCritter. I regret that now.

• And don't tell the Conway Roadside Art Patrol about their acronym. Jeff Maurer has advice: Don't Tell Trump About "TACO", "POTATO", "CASPER CORP" or "CART O’ PENIS BACON, MEL"

  Recently, Wall Street coined a term: “TACO trade”. “TACO” stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out”, which is the mantra for traders who have noticed Trump’s pattern of threatening astronomical tariffs, seeking a “deal”, and then backing down. The traders are right, of course: Trump is rattling the global economy and causing damage, but the sturm und drang usually culminates in a press release along the lines of “DEAR LEADER SECURES GLORIOUS TWO PERCENT DISCOUNT ON GLUE STICKS IMPORTED FROM BOLIVIA!!!”

  Disastrously, though, Trump recently found out about “TACO”. A reporter — presumably from the NARC Daily News — asked Trump about the term, and Trump reacted badly. He began by describing his master negotiating strategy of opening with a ridiculous bluff, even though one could argue that announcing “I’M BLUFFING” to a group of reporters is not something a master negotiator would do. But the bigger problem was the way that Trump bristled at the question: “That’s the nastiest question,” he said, “Don’t ever say that”. There’s a danger that Trump might react to the TACO talk by obstinately not backing down, at which point our problems would grow even larger.

  As one commenter put it: “The first rule of TACO trade is that you don’t tell Trump about TACO trade.” Hear hear. A defiant Trump set on seeing his idiotic schemes through to their disastrous conclusions is a clear and present danger. It’s bad enough that Trump found out about “TACO” — if he finds out about POTATO, CASPER CORP, or CART O’ PENIS BACON, MEL, then we’ll have real problems.

  I hope you don't have to subscribe to find out about the penis bacon one.

  [BTW, my most recent take on the Conway Roadside Art Police is here.]

• Nellie Bowles is a great national resource. Her TGIF "week in review" column is full of chuckles and insight. For example, yesterday's comments about the Scammander in Chief.

  → I can’t afford a pardon: The White House vending machine is giving out pardons this week! Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff convicted of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery for accepting piles of cash in exchange for letting rich folks have fake sheriff’s badges, got a Trump pardon. So did reality show stars and fraudsters Todd and Julie Chrisley, who’d initially been sentenced to 12 and 7 years, respectively, for conspiring to commit bank fraud and (obviously) conspiracy to commit tax evasion. And a random tax criminal has also been pardoned—right after his mother gave Trumpo $1 million at a fundraising dinner. That gentleman had been ordered to pay the state $4 million restitution alongside his prison sentence, so the $1 million payment to the president is a better deal in many ways.

  At this point, paying your taxes directly to the Trump family is a better deal and probably safer than using the IRS. Trump wanted to slash red tape, and slash red tape he has. Now he just puts a briefcase on the table and nods. I pay my cleaning lady in cash, and that’s how I will probably pay my taxes now too. Every April, I will throw wads of dirty bills in a brown paper bag, scrawl my Social Security number (666-66-6666) on it, and leave it at Tiffany Trump’s door. How do I calculate what’s owed? Well, it’s based on my income, of course, plus extra in my case for being a blue state libtard and for not losing the baby weight. Deductions offered for pictures of a local ballot showing Trump written in for every option, especially library board; being a guy with beer cozies and acceptably strong biceps because we need more of you fellows; and being a woman with anything above a B-cup. I get two of three deductions this year!

  After Trump held a crypto dinner last Thursday night, crypto moguls who paid to be there felt scammed that the president didn’t even stick around at the event they’d hoped to do their own scams at. I saw someone describe him as the apex scammer. Our Scammander in Chief. Give me a pen and a ballot for the Upper West Side library committee because I need to add one more name.

  Indeed. Maybe more on this tomorrow.

Recently on the book blog:

The WSJ headline is: We Made This Film With AI. It’s Wild and Slightly Terrifying..

Okay, but I'd add "amazing", "beautiful", "funny", and "eye-opening". In case you were unaware of what the kids are doing in their labs and studios…

Thought experiment: probably today it would take at most a few months to write and shoot a sequel to… oh, let's say Casablanca. Starring, as far as anyone could tell, perfect re-creations of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Paul Henreid. Oh, yeah, Dooley Wilson too, somehow.

"Rick, the Germans have captured Victor! Can you help?" "I'll see what I can find out, kid. Louie, who do you know in the resistance near that prison camp?"

The biggest expenses would probably be a first-rate screenplay and evocative music. (But you don't have to pay royalties for "La Marseillaise" do you?)

Who could possibly complain? Well, the Screen Actors Guild, probably.

Also of note:

• It's hard to sympathize. Karl Rove thinks Tariffs May Cost the GOP in 2026 (WSJ gifted link).

  The [tariff] story isn’t good for the GOP. While President Trump’s general job-approval numbers in the RealClearPolitics average on Wednesday were 47.8% approve to 49.7% disapprove, on handling the economy he was at 42.3% approve to 52.8% disapprove.

  His tariff demands are weighing him down. Only 37% of Americans told a May 15 Marquette Law School poll that they approve of tariffs, while 63% disapproved. Fifty-eight percent said tariffs hurt the U.S. economy; a mere 32% believe they help. That starts to explain why stock markets drop when Mr. Trump rattles his trade saber and rebound when he walks back his tariff threats.

  The president’s frenetic back-and-forth on the subject, declaring a trade war one day then postponing new tariffs the next, leaves voters confused. Early Friday, the president posted on Truth Social that discussions with the European Union were “going nowhere” and announced a 50% tariff on all EU goods. Later that morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox News to reposition the comment, saying the president was trying to “light a fire” under the EU to accelerate a trade agreement. Americans are left wondering what the White House’s real policy aims are.

  Another example: Last month Mr. Trump acknowledged tariffs would mean higher prices for Americans. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30,” he said, admitting they’d “cost a couple of bucks more.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later contradicted him, saying, “Don’t buy the silly arguments that the U.S. consumer pays.” Instead, “businesses and the countries” exporting to the U.S. will “primarily eat the tariff.”

  Maybe these apparent flip-flops were all planned by the master of the Art of the Deal. But to many, it looks like cleanup on aisle six.

  If you've been paying attention to the news… you probably know more than I about what's going on.

• An early Thanksgiving. Declared by Dominic Pino: Thank Goodness for Libertarian Law Firms. But first, let's note the scorn heaped upon cowards and toadies:

  On April 2, Donald Trump unilaterally imposed tariffs on all imports, in violation of the Constitution. The law he cited to do so, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, had never before been used to impose tariffs. Article I of the Constitution clearly grants the tariff power to Congress, which was not involved in creating the original policy.

  The unconstitutionality was plain as day, but the president went through with the policy anyway. The question became: Who will do something about it?

  One might think Congress would. Its authority was usurped, and it has the legislative power to do something about it. It could assemble a veto-proof majority to force the president’s hand.

  That assumes Congress is actually interested in using its constitutional authority. It isn’t. A handful of lawmakers introduced resolutions to terminate the bogus national emergencies that Trump declared to impose the tariffs, and those efforts failed.

  With Congress impotent, one might think that business groups would challenge the tariffs. Some of America’s largest corporations, including Walmart and Amazon, rely heavily on international trade. They would face enormous tax bills and would likely have to pass the costs on to their price-sensitive customers. Cash-strapped small businesses that import could face extinction.

  Yet there were no lawsuits from Walmart, Amazon, the Chamber of Commerce, or the National Federation of Independent Business. Big businesses seem to have calculated that they are better off trying to kiss up to Trump than to challenge him. Small businesses often lack the resources to bring a major lawsuit on their own.

  Therefore, the most likely candidates to stop the unconstitutional tariffs are out of commission. Thankfully, there are libertarian public-interest law firms to pick up the slack.

  It's like we're living in an Ayn Rand novel. (This comment also left on the article.)

• How about 'Make America Free Again'? You may not have noticed, but Jeffrey A. Singer, Terence Kealey, and Bautista Vivanco did. At Cato they find Premade Conclusions, Post-Hoc Data: The Problem with the MAHA Report.

  The MAHA Report, released by Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in late May amid much fanfare, was produced by the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which was established under President Trump’s executive order issued on February 13, 2025. This order required the commission to develop a “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” within 100 days of the order’s date.

  Again? Make America Healthy Again? It’s an odd slogan in a country that has long ranked last in health outcomes among its peers. If the United States were merged with Canada, Greenland, and Panama, our average health statistics would improve overnight. […]

  Happily, the Commission already knows why US children are uniquely unhealthy. By a strange coincidence, these reasons happen to be the ones the Commission’s chairman, one Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been trumpeting for years. They include US children’s consumption of ultra-processed food, their use of smartphones, the chemicals in their environment, their lack of exercise, their stress levels, their lack of sleep, and their overmedicalization, especially with those pesky vaccines.

  Oddly, however, the data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions. For example, the first sentence of the introduction reads: “Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on healthcare, the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high-income countries—and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.” But the graph the Commission supplies shows that, dating back to 1970, the US has always ranked last in life expectancy among comparator nations. Were Americans back in 1970 dying sooner than Canadians, Europeans, or the Japanese because of ultra-processed food, smartphones, chemicals, a lack of exercise, stress levels, a lack of sleep, and overmedicalization? Probably not.

  The authors note many, many additional problems with the report. As did (eventually) the report's authors as well. A site called "NOTUS" (News Of The United States) reports: The MAHA Report Has Been Updated to Replace Citations That Didn’t Exist

  The White House is downplaying the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report’s citation issues, even as it scrambles to fix them.

  A NOTUS investigation published Thursday found that at least seven of the report’s citations appeared to not actually exist. The White House publicly blamed any problems with the report on “formatting issues.”

  "Hey, we didn't think anyone was gonna actually read this."

• Need a couple more things to fret about? Veronique de Rugy notes something that should have been fixed after the previous disaster, wondering Are We Headed for Another Disaster With Fannie and Freddie?

  The movie The Big Short—dramatizing the reckless behavior in the banking and mortgage industries that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis—captures much of Wall Street's misconduct but overlooks a central player in the collapse: the federal government, specifically through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

  These two government-created and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) encouraged lenders to issue risky home loans by effectively making taxpayers cosign the mortgages. This setup incentivized dangerous lending practices that inflated the housing bubble, eventually leading to catastrophic economic consequences.

  Another critical but overlooked factor in the collapse was the Community Reinvestment Act. This federal statute was intended to combat discriminatory lending practices but, starting in the 1990s, instead created substantial market distortions by pressuring banks to extend loans to borrowers who might otherwise have been deemed too risky. Under threat of regulatory penalties, banks significantly loosened lending standards—again, inflating the housing bubble.

  After the bubble inevitably burst, Fannie and Freddie were placed under conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The conservatorship imposed rules aimed at preventing future taxpayer-funded bailouts and protecting the economy from government-fueled market distortions.

  Now President Donald Trump's appointee to lead that agency, Bill Pulte, is considering ending this conservatorship without addressing the core structural flaw that fueled the problem in the first place: implicit government guarantees backing all Fannie and Freddie mortgages. If Pulte proceeds without implementing real reform, taxpayers on Main Street are once again likely to be exposed to significant financial risks as they are conscripted into subsidizing lucrative deals for Wall Street.

  Without genuine reform, the incentives and practices that led to the crisis remain unchanged, setting the stage for a repeat disaster.

  Oh goody.

• How dumb does she think New Hampshire Democrats are? NHJournal reports the bold stand taken by recently-announced Congressional candidate: Stefany Shaheen Supports Males in Women's Sports on 'Case by Case' Basis.

  In a rambling, difficult-to-follow answer to a direct yes-or-no question, Democratic candidate for Congress Stefany Shaheen said she supports allowing biological males to compete in girls’ sports on a “case-by-case basis.”

  “It depends on the situation. It depends on the sport. It depends on the athlete. And I think we need to make these on a case-by-case basis,” Shaheen said regarding her view of transgender athletes (biological males who identify as female) playing on girls’ sports teams.

  You can read Stefany's rambling and vacuous response on this issue here.

  Journalist Hanna Trudo, a New Hampshire native and progressive Democrat who briefly considered entering the race, told NHJournal she was unimpressed by Shaheen’s answer.

  “I’m not a sports person, but I can’t stand these types of non-answers framed around ‘fairness.’ We hear them a lot now,” Trudo said.

  “New Hampshire is the ‘Live Free or Die’ state. Last time I checked, that includes freedom for trans people. How is it fair to exclude them? Why would any Democrat want to limit freedoms for our most marginalized?

  You can use LFOD to support just about any position.

Recently on the book blog:

George F. Will knows it when he sees it: The Trump administration is pure progressivism in action (WaPo gifted link). Lightly edited to HTMLize GFW's list:

GFW goes on to outline possible political futures. He's not a fan of J.D. Vance, who (he says) "shares the current president’s comprehensive hostility to actual conservatism: government limited by respect for its Madisonian architecture — the separation and enumeration of powers, and judicial review."

Also of note:

• An amusing juxtaposition. Philip Greenspun digs out the quotes I couldn't lay my hands on yesterday: Media that isn’t state-affiliated can’t survive without state funding.

  NPR in 2023, about quitting Twitter over being labeled (first) "state-affiliated media" and (then) "government-funded media":

  The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

  That was then. This was two days ago:

  [Trump's executive order defunding NPR] threatens the existence of the public broadcasting system, upon which tens of millions of Americans rely for vital news, information, and emergency alerts.

  "How much do you need for just the emergency alerts?"

  I looked, and (indeed) NPR hasn't posted to Twitter since April 2023, when it breathlessly covered Alvin Bragg's indictment of Donald Trump and Disney's live-action remake of Moana.

• Gutsy move. Steven Kurtz takes to the NR Corner to write Harvard University Is Illegitimate: A Reply to Steven Pinker.

  This past Sunday’s New York Times opinion section featured a long op-ed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in defense of his university. A frequent internal critic of Harvard, Pinker acknowledged real problems at the school. Yet he also went after those supposedly afflicted by what he calls Harvard Derangement Syndrome, a disorder that causes critics to lose all perspective, seeing only evil where a mixture of good and bad exists.

  Pinker’s piece is heartfelt, thoughtful — and off target. Harvard has rightly lost legitimacy in the eyes of a goodly portion of the American public. The school has betrayed its very motto and purpose — the search for truth, veritas. Harvard has become an effectively partisan institution, undeserving of public support.

  This does not mean that important scientific research and valuable, apolitical instruction in introductory languages and basic sciences does not also take place at Harvard, as Pinker says. Nor does it prevent the occasional plucky conservative student from running the gauntlet of opposition and emerging the better for it. The existence of these goods may pose practical challenges to a complete cutoff of federal support. Yet none of that gainsays the fact that Harvard has sacrificed its legitimate claim on the public purse.

  I'm sure I've said this before, but you know that concept of "separation of church and state"? That's a pretty good idea. And the same argument holds for the separation of education and state. It's something to strive for generally, rather than targeting one lousy hive of scum and villainy.

• But if you do want to target that hive of scum and villainy… Tyler Cowen has a suggestion: There’s a Better Way to Fight Harvard.

  If you hold some grudges against Harvard, what else might you do instead of trying to wreck it? How about trying to beat it for influence?

  You could support institutions of higher education that deviate from the standard orthodoxy, such as the University of Austin, the departments of economics and law at George Mason University, or Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala (disclaimer: I have affiliations with all three).

  Or how about right-leaning podcasts and YouTube channels? They too compete with Harvard, and very often they have more influence on how people actually think. Comedy is another institution that often is right-leaning. I’ve also spent significant time with the leading AI models, and find they are considerably more centrist and objective than our institutions of higher education.

  Interesting! Especially the AI part.

• The Antiplanner has a plan. Specifically, one for California high-speed rail: Give It to Brightline.

  He links to recent advocacy to keep throwing money at the project, and his response is golden:

  Are these people on the payroll of the companies earning millions in profits building rail lines that few people will ever use? Or are they just train lovers with no conscience who think everyone else owes them a heavily subsidized ride on trains that will travel less than half as fast as and cost more to ride than airliners?

  Never mind that costs have quintupled. They admit they don’t care how much cost they are imposing on taxpayers. Neve mind that ridership estimates for the California line are at least four times too high. They don’t care if anyone else rides it; they just want to be there for the first trip. Never mind that the steel, concrete, and petroleum required to build it spews trillions of grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If it will get just one car off the road, one advocate told me, it will be worth it.

  Advocates act like fiscal conservatives have some sort of double standard when it comes to rail vs. roads. But 96 percent of the cost of driving is paid for by the users while only half the cost of Amtrak, and far less than half the cost of high-speed rail, would be paid for by riders. Don’t forget, the same fiscal conservatives who oppose California high-speed rail also opposed things like the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska.

  If a (semi) private firm like Brightline can't make it work, the Antiplanner suggests perhaps "it could be used as special truck lanes for moving produce out of the Central Valley."

News from NHJournal about another candidate who wants to be my CongressCritter: Stefany Shaheen Steps Into NH01 Dem Primary.

Stefany's campaign website is here. Her Facebook page has the video:

Her key campaign planks seem to be:

• Outrage!
• Fighting!
• Medical research!
• Because her daughter has diabetes!

I find the exploitation of her daughter's illness (including heart-tugging pics of her in a hospital bed) to be more than a little creepy, but that's me.

My previous take on Stefany was a couple years ago, when she was Chair of the Portsmouth Police Commission. Back then, her thing was gun control, and I fisked the op-ed that appeared in our local newspaper, where (among other things) she advocated a "mandatory assault weapon buyback program."

Didn't work as an issue for Beto O'Rourke, and I wouldn't be surprised if Stefany's decided to emphasize less controversial positions?

Also of note:

• It's kind of amazing that they thought otherwise. At the Free Press, Jed Rubenfeld points out: NPR and PBS Aren’t Entitled to Your Tax Dollars.

  National Public Radio is suing the Trump administration for cutting off its federal funds, which, according to NPR’s complaint, is a “blatant,” “textbook” First Amendment violation.

  But NPR seems to have forgotten some free speech basics. As the District of Columbia District Court—the court where NPR filed suit on Tuesday—stated just a few weeks ago, “the government does not abridge the right to free speech by choosing not to subsidize it.”

  Amusingly, PBS's twitter self-description touts its "editorial independence" and "unbiased reporting".

  Not to be outdone, NPR claims to be "an independent news organization".

  So they're both big on "independence"… except when it comes to funding.

• Gee, ya think? Jim Geraghty wonders if the blinders are coming off" Trump Starts to Suspect that Vladimir Putin Isn’t Such a Swell Guy. To go along with his classless Memorial Day post…

  […] this weekend, President Trump jumped onto Truth Social to announce to the world, “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”

  Trump has given this topic some thought; earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump asked advisers if they thought Putin “has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children.”

  While speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One Sunday, Trump reiterated how surprised he was by the way Putin and the Russian forces are fighting the war:

  Trump: I’m not happy with what Putin’s doing. He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all. Okay? We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don’t like it at all.

  Q: Mr. President, what do you want to do about that?

  Trump: I’m surprised. I’m very surprised. We’ll see what we’re gonna do.

  Got that? Trump is “very surprised” by Putin’s actions.

  What will Trump be surprised at next? That tariffs don't work? The First Amendment? Measles outbreak?

• A sensible recommendation. You might think Megan McArdle's advice would be uncontroversial: If Trump’s health declines, the GOP should take its own medicine (WaPo gifted link).

  When I decided to write a column on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the many people who covered for him, I anticipated pushback from my more liberal readers. As you can see from comments on that column, they delivered, in the thousands.

  Wasn’t Biden a great president? Didn’t I know he’d just been diagnosed with metastatic cancer? Why kick a man when he’s down? More important, why pick on Biden? Wasn’t Ronald Reagan suffering from Alzheimer’s during his time in office? Isn’t the current occupant of the Oval Office — in addition to his many offenses against our democratic norms — acting a little addled?

  This deflection is not good for the country or for the Democratic Party, which remains less popular than the Republican Party despite Trump’s erratic, cruel and occasionally unconstitutional policies. Democrats must rebuild trust with the public, and it’s not enough to shout “But what about Trump?” and hope the current president will do the job for them.

  Nor is it true that Biden is just one of many presidents who were similarly diminished. Watch Reagan’s final news conference from December 1988 and you’ll see him give sharp answers to questions for a good half hour, something the Biden of 2024 couldn’t seem to manage for five minutes. As for Trump, a good deal of what he says is nonsense. But it’s mostly the same kind of nonsense he’s been spewing for years.

  I especially like that last bit: Trump's not demented, he's the same.

• It's crazy, but it just might work… Oh, wait, no it won't. Jeff Maurer wonders Could a Wickedly Ribald Zinger Take Down Trump? But Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies:

  How does a man attract a woman? That’s simple: Acquire. Goats. Acquire goats to signal that your farm is prosperous, and that a woman will not want for fig wine or turquoise-encrusted finery should she come to be under your roof. If you acquire the goats through battle, all the better, and be sure to place your enemies’ heads on spikes outside your hut so that all may know your prowess as a warrior. Chicks dig that.

  You might be thinking: “Jeff, that advice seems pretty specific to ancient Mesopotamia — I’m not sure it applies today.” To which I say: Your racism against ancient Mesopotamians has gotten out of control — I have reported you to BlueSky, and their agents will be knocking on your door soon.

  But I suppose I’ll allow that — in theory — something that works in one time and place might not work in another. And I’m willing to concede that point because I recently read a column by Nicholas Kristoff about how humor (and other actions) can undermine authoritarian governments. Kristoff cites the work of a political scientist named Gene Sharp, who recommended 198 nonviolent actions that activists can take against authoritarian rulers. Sharp’s work helped take down dictators in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and Kristoff believes that the same “tool kit” could work against Trump.

  Jeff illustrates why it won't with the (heh!) "Laugher Curve":

  

And I think he has a point.

Tweeting "Happy Memorial Day" is like tweeting "Happy 9/11" https://t.co/P1iYuJXy3t

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 26, 2025

You would think that even Trump might take Memorial Day to be an opportunity for somber, non-partisan, reflection and gratitude for past sacrifice. But nooooo…

Ann Althouse also comments:

I especially like the all caps and the "21,000,000 MILLION." That's 21 trillion.

Also of note:

• Doesn't sound like a good idea. Dirk Auer observes a disturbing trend at Reason: Courts Are Quietly Taking Over the Internet.

  Who do you think decides what you see and how you interact on your favorite online service? Most would point to Silicon Valley engineers and product managers tinkering behind the scenes. However, an underappreciated reality is emerging: judges and regulators are increasingly the ones who decide how online platforms operate. The blueprint for tomorrow's internet is being drawn up in courtrooms and government offices. This should concern us all.

  Today's leading tech platforms were initially shaped by market forces. Governments did not tell Google to display blue links, Apple to invent the App Store, or Amazon to introduce the "Buy Box." But legal battles and regulations are now redefining how platforms are built and run. This includes deciding how firms can monetize their services, how they display content to users, and which features can be rolled into a single service.

  It should disturb democracy fans, since our judicial branch is the least democratic.

  Not that either the executive or legislative branch would be any more likely to wisely dictate how businesses should work online. Unfortunately, laissez-faire has largely gone out of favor.

• Unclear on the concept. Matthew Hennessey notes many peoples' misapprehensions about "markets". Including (unsurprisingly) one person near the top: JD Vance Is Wrong: The Market Isn’t a ‘Tool’ (WSJ gifted link).

  On a recent podcast, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked Mr. Vance for an example of how his Catholicism influences his politics. His first instinct wasn’t to cite the social issues typically associated with conservative Catholic political concerns—abortion, immigration, sexual ethics—but to launch a missile at the market. “Well, I think one of the criticisms that I get from the right is that I am insufficiently committed to the capital-M market,” he answered. “The market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics.”

  Mr. Vance indulges here in some sneaky sleight of hand. His answer to Mr. Douthat’s question combines an obvious (though irrelevant) truth about the purpose of American politics with a total falsehood about the nature of the market. Nobody, not even these editorial pages—whose longstanding motto is “free people, free markets”—capitalizes the “M” in markets. The market isn’t a proper noun, and it also isn’t a tool. The market simply is. Nobody controls it. Nobody worships it, but only a fool ignores it.

  Mister, we could use a man like Ronald Reagan again.

• Also out of favor: fiscal sanity. Kevin D. Williamson writes on Unmet Obligations.

  There’s a story about Donald Trump—who knows if it is true?—teetering on the edge of one of his many bankruptcies and using the occasion as a teaching moment for Ivanka on the streets of New York: “See that bum over there?” he supposedly said, pointing out a vagrant sleeping on the street. “He is worth $1 billion more than me.” In Trump’s own telling, his unpaid debts added up to a sum of not $1 billion but billions.  

  New York City knows Donald Trump: a deadbeat, a frequent filer in bankruptcy court, a gonif who often couldn’t pay his bills and often refused to pay them even when he could. He calls himself “the king of debt” and wrote (“wrote”) this about his unpaid debts: “I figured it was the banks’ problem, not mine. What the hell did I care? I actually told one bank, ‘I told you you shouldn’t have loaned me that money.’”

  Memo to the bond market: “I told you you shouldn’t have loaned me that money.”

  Of course, the word needed in that sentence isn’t me—it is us. 

  You see that bum over there? He’s worth $37,000,000,000,000.00 more than we are. 

  Make that $37 trillion and counting. 

  KDW's near-bottom line: "In the short term, you can get a lot of juice out of rage and stupidity. In the long term, math always wins."

• Historical note. I recently watched a 39-year-old movie, Sweet Liberty, link to my report is below. In an early scene, Alan Alda's character notes John Adams' use of the phrase "the sweets of liberty". Which sent me to the quote farms, and I happened across this letter, archived by (who else) the National Archives: John Adams to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776. Which contains this, sadly relevant to current events:

  Statesmen my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. . . . The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.—They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

  Given recent history, who can say he wasn't totally prescient?

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