Pun Salad

The WSJ brings some worrisome news: Many Democrats Break With Israel, Back Measure Stripping Military Aid. (WSJ gifted link)

All 104 supporters of the aid cut were Democrats, save for the measure's author, Thomas Massie. The WSJ article names them for your convenience. My CongressCritter, Chris Pappas voted against. [UPDATE: Now that I looked at the roll call, it turns out Pappas actually voted "Present". Accordingly, my estimate of his spinelessness has been increased by a few points.] Somewhat surprisingly, New Hampshire's other CongressCritter, Maggie Goodlander, voted in favor of eliminating the aid. She tweeted her excuse:

My statement on Rep. Massie’s amendment to H.R. 8595.https://t.co/PHxcP6rHLQ pic.twitter.com/wXs5Xxg9dk

— Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander (@RepGoodlander) July 16, 2026

As I don't need to tell you: make your own judgment about Maggie's tergiversation. I assume she is feeling some heat from her primary opponent. NH Journal includes that angle in its story: Centrist No More? Goodlander Votes to End Israel Aid.

Paige's campaign website's issues page is here, and … well, immediately after I looked at it, I read Jeff Maurer's recent post about a different campaign, which contained the capsule summary: "It’s a hodgepodge of shallow sound bites that appeal to morons[.]"

Also of note:

• Pirates of the Strait of Hormuz? Kevin D. Williamson belittles Trump's inconstant and whimsical approach to Strait Gangsterism. (archive.today link)

  Iran is being swept by a wave of nationalism, while the United States is being swept by a wave of explosive diarrhea—do you ever get the feeling that Hegelian capital-H History is laughing at you?

  In a war with a filthy little junta in Tehran, Donald Trump has managed to make the United States of America the bad guy. If you are looking for a quick-and-easy definition of shmuck, there you go. Of course, it doesn’t help that it is an illegal and immoral war being waged by an incompetent game show host.

  What did it take to get Iran’s former dissidents to line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the ayatollahs who have been murdering and torturing them? A former opponent of the ruling cabal in Tehran—one who had been tear-gassed and beaten so badly that “he couldn’t move for days” during the 2022 protests—tells the Wall Street Journal: “They said that a civilization was going to be destroyed, not a regime.” You’ll remember that post, no doubt. I guess the Iranians haven’t heard whatever the Persian is for “take him seriously, not literally.” It is a pity that Lindsey Graham, the Rudy Giuliani of the Senate, is no longer around to explain it to the long-suffering Iranian people, who surely would have benefited from the wisdom of his experience and the constancy of his judgment.

  Let me put on my Pollyanna hat and say: It could still work out well, eventually, because Trump might accidentally hit on a working strategy.

  Still, we wouldn't be in this situation under President Nikki Haley.

• Send in the clown. Jacob Sullum observes; During His Confirmation Hearing, Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement'.

  "I'm his lawyer," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: "Was his lawyer," he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche's nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump's personal interests?

  Probably the latter, judging from Blanche's central role in Trump's brazenly corrupt "settlement agreement" with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the "improper" product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers' expense.

  One more Article of Impeachment, assuming that CongressCritters grow a spine. But …

• Worrying about what people will think. Audrey Fahlberg looks at the possibilities: A Third Trump Impeachment? Some Democrats Aren’t So Sure.

  If the Democratic Party is united on one issue, it is opposition to President Donald Trump. Yet despite their shared desire to impede the president’s policies and reclaim the White House in 2028, Democrats are deeply divided about how far to go in fighting Trump in the meantime. A struggle among Democratic factions could determine whether Trump will be impeached for a third time.

  This debate is playing out behind closed doors. Back in March, House Democrats gathered in Seattle for a policy retreat organized by the party’s campaign arm. At one point, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, warned his colleagues that impeaching Trump again would be a mistake—and could backfire on the party politically. Most people in the room applauded, according to two people who attended.

  For Smith, the political calculus is straightforward. Polls consistently suggest that Democrats will claim a House majority after this year’s elections and regain the power to launch impeachment proceedings. Yet doubters such as Smith believe that impeaching Trump a third time wouldn’t make him go away; it would only rerun a failed political playbook that previously benefited Republicans. “We impeached him twice last time; both times he got stronger after we did it,” Smith said in a recent interview with The Free Press.

  This is not going to merit a new chapter in Profiles in Courage, in other words: Democrats worrying less about the country, more about possibly jeopardizing their political future.

Recently on the book blog:

This is making the rounds.

In the Senate primary, Michigan Democrats have a choice between a candidate who wants to abolish prisons and campaigns with Hasan Piker and whatever Haley Stevens is doing. pic.twitter.com/UqZeXy2BoA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 13, 2026

Some people think of "Pat", Julia Sweeney's androgenous character from the early 90's. I'm not really seeing it. ("Pat" is an example of SNL's past tendency to feature characters long past their expiration date.)

I'm also seeing people suggesting "Matt Foley". Yes, definitely! Although that's not too complimentarry to CongressCritter Stevens… I don't care. If the shoe fits, ma'am.

However the first character I thought of was Molly Shannon's Sally O'Malley. Just sayin'. (If Sally and Foley had a baby…)

And some cads out there are making predictable comments about SNL not being funny any more. Pshaw! I think it's never been funnier!

Let's skip over to more serious analysis from David Drucker, who wonders rhetorically: Do Michigan Democrats Want Populism or Pragmatism?

So Sally Haley might actually be the better choice. I'm just considering myself lucky to not being a Michigan Democrat.

Also of note:

• No, she's not talking about socialism. Ann Althouse's headline is pretty dire: Get ready. It's coming. That thing you thought you wanted. Illustrated with a tweet:

  This will be such a nightmare. pic.twitter.com/qrD03wxEdl

  — Julian Mille☈ (@ATLAreaWx) July 14, 2026

  Ann's commentary:

  Children going to school in the dark. Dangerous. It will become obvious. A child's name will be on the repeal legislation.

  I'll dissent: Ann is assuming that people won't demand that work and school schedules be adjusted so that kids don't go to school (and adults to work) in the dark.

  As usual, I will link back to my own crackpot idea from 2013: The Right Number of Time Zones is Zero. Wherein I call for the separation of time and state!

• Let's stay off the Road to Serfdom. Emma Camp thinks Capitalism Gets a Bum Rap. (WSJ gifted link)

  Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.

  Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.

  As Matthew Yglesias argued recently, when many people say “capitalism,” they mean “the status quo,” even if that status quo involves a lot of problems caused not by free markets, but by government regulation and cronyist intervention. The housing market, he notes, is the most obvious example of this: “Younger people’s lived experience of ‘capitalism’ is of central planning and massive shortages of the single most important item they consume.”

  The result is that anything that seems to be going wrong in American life, no matter how large or small, no matter how unrelated to free markets, will pretty reliably be blamed on capitalism.

  One major component of the satus quo is, of course, Donald Trump. Barring unforeseen events, we've got him status quoing for (as I type) 920 more days.

• Are we sure the doctors got all the brain worms? Somebody in the Reason offices has to pay attention to the stupid news, and I guess Marc Oestreich has that job this week. He notes: RFK Jr. wants the government to teach everyone how to cook again.

  In a recent interview with U.S. News, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services laid it out. Medical students will take cooking classes, then "go out into the communities and teach people how to cook in a mobile unit." The roughly 5,000 uniformed officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps are "taking nutrition classes and developing teaching kitchens." A new federal platform will post recipes for eating well on $10 a day, plus videos on grocery shopping and—his words—"how to use cutlery and cutting boards." The diagnosis behind the whole program, offered at a conference in March: "people have forgotten how to cook."

  Maybe some have. Americans could certainly stand to cook more. But the institution volunteering to teach them has spent 46 years issuing dietary instruction with total confidence, reversing much of it, and responding to each failure by extending its reach.

  You may have thought we libertarians were kidding about the encroaching nanny state.

A recent example:

The Washington Post editorial page made a public pivot to "personal liberties and free markets," and then you go to the comments, and the readers are obviously BlueSky types leftover from the woke era. Not sure if this will work -- it feels like Antiques Roadshow pivoting to…

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) July 13, 2026

The tweet-embedder clips off Jeff's final words: "… being a kickboxing tournament."

I hope it works. For today's example of the WaPo editorialists kickboxing a bad policy, see: Tariffs are (still) taxes on Americans. (WaPo gifted link)

I assume the "BlueSky type" commenters will go easier than usual on the editorialists for this take, since it's Trump-critical.

Also of note:

• My diagnosis: they take John Lennon's "Imagine" way too seriously. Kevin D. Williamson thinks The Socialists Don’t Really Want Socialism. (archive.today link)

  George Orwell was a man of the left who was clear-eyed about socialism and its practitioners: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England,” he wrote. In the U.S. context, he’d have had to have added “Jew-hating weirdos” and a few other categories.

  The Democratic Socialists of America, which has a foothold in the Democratic Party and is earnestly—and, at the moment, successfully—working to take it over, offers one of the all-time great motte-and-bailey propositions: When it is time to talk to normie voters, it’s all: “Oh, pish-posh, ‘socialism’ just means things like public roads and public schools, and those right-wingers who say that we’re a front for a bunch of communists kowtowing to Mao are just trying to scare you.” That’s the motte; the bailey is ... well, here is a screenshot of the homepage of the DSA’s “liberation caucus” you probably heard Jonah Goldberg talking about:

  [screenshot elided]

  Not every member of the DSA is a confessing Maoist or Leninist. All of them make common cause with confessing Maoists and Leninists, and with other advocates of a political movement that killed some 100 million people in the 20^th century. That isn’t the same thing as admiring Denmark or enjoying public libraries.

  If everything government does from sidewalks to national security is socialism, then socialism does not really mean anything. Happily, we do not have to entertain seriously that canard. Allow me to revisit some territory that will be familiar to longtime readers but maybe new to a few of you. The work of education is never completed.

  

  KDW goes into the econ-textbook description of "public goods", and how a lot of people get it wrong.

  Not that it matters, but I'm currently finishing up reading a Hayek bio (Amazon link at your right.) It only goes up to 1950, but covers the origin of the Mont Pelerin Society, designed to defend free markets and personal liberty (see above) against the attractions of post-WW2 socialism. One of the tales associated with the society's first meeting involved Ludwig von Mises stomping out of the room, declaring "You're all a bunch of socialists!"

• Will you guess correctly? Matt Welch makes a pretty obvious choice in his article, headlined The most corrupt presidency in American history. You might remember Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich; Matt does and describes its sordidness well. But…

  You have likely never heard the name Trevor Milton, yet in a couple of key respects his 2025 pardon by President Donald Trump was worse. The founding CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola Corporation, Milton in 2022 was convicted on three counts of investor fraud that could have brought him four years in prison and a staggering $676 million worth of mandated restitution to shareholders. Among his more notorious stunts was a 2018 promotional video of a supposedly functional prototype Nikola truck that was not in fact operational but had instead been rolled down a desert hill. Milton, represented in court by the brother of then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, was still awaiting final sentencing when he got the call from Trump announcing an unconditional pardon, no restitution (or remorse) required. When asked about the clemency, the president said: "They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president….He supported Trump. He liked Trump." Milton and his wife, The Wall Street Journal reported, had donated "at least $3.2 million to Trump's 2024 election and to political groups and people in Trump's orbit." The couple had not previously demonstrated a financial interest in politics.

  `

  Milton's family paid more in political donations than Rich's. He had exponentially more in fines and restitutions taken off the table, and he has spent his post-clemency life not in humiliated exile but in lavish Washington excess, hobnobbing with the president and Cabinet members at investment conferences and black-tie events to gin up interest in his latest schemes. Such is the rule, not the exception: When it comes to plausibly pay-for-play pardons, Trump in his second term makes Bill Clinton and every other president look like pikers.

  Just one more item to add to next year's articles of impeachment. And Matt has more.

• A little less carnage. Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, summarizes Highway Accidents Killed 36,640 People in 2025.

  In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that motor vehicle accidents killed 36,640 people in 2025, a 6.7 percent decrease from 2024. Last week, the agency released a breakdown of 2025 fatality data for various categories. For example, urban freeway fatalities were down 10 percent; urban arterials down 12 percent; pedestrians down 8 percent; but bicycle fatalities were up 4 percent.

  A further fun fact:

  Although fewer people died in each of the years between 2009 and 2015 than in 2025, 2025’s fatality rate per billion vehicle-miles of travel is almost the lowest it has ever been. While more than 100 people died per billion miles of travel in every year from 1900 to 1945, only 11.0 people died per billion in 2025. Out of the 125 years for which records have been kept, the only year that was lower was 2014, when 10.8 people died per billion vehicle-miles.

  Amazingly counter-intuitive: judged by fatality rate, Massachusetts is one of the safer states to drive in: 5.7 fatalities per billion vehicle-miles. New Hampshire is blood-soaked in comparison, with 9.9 fatalities per billion vehicle miles. (The worst state: New Mexico, 15.9.)

• Mister, we could use some painters like Church and Cole again. Megan Pidcock writes in the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter: Up the Hudson and Into the Heart of America.

  The Hudson River School, widely recognized as America’s first major artistic movement, holds a special place in my heart. Growing up, I often visited the movement’s collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was drawn to the intricate landscapes and gorgeous skies painted carefully by human hands, as in “The View of Schroon Mountain” by the movement’s founder, Thomas Cole. It depicts the vastness of the Adirondacks with a burst of fall colors and detailed foliage. A group of Native Americans blends into the foreground and, if you squint, a canoe rests on the water at the mountain’s base. Though I traveled somewhere a few hours north (and a few months off) of this particular scene, it was thrilling to see scenery so similar to one of my favorite paintings in the world.

  The Hudson River School started in 1825 when Cole traveled to Catskill, N.Y., from New York City. After dabbling in portraiture, he wanted to make it as a landscape artist. Cole’s student, Frederic Edwin Church, carried on the tradition after Cole’s death in 1848. The style peaked in popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, capturing America’s fascination with nature untouched by man at a time when Romanticism was in its prime and “Manifest Destiny” reigned.

  I had my jaw-dropping intro to the Hudson River School when meandering through the Smithsonian's National Gallery of Art back in the 1970's, and perused The Voyage of Life, Thomas Cole's four paintings showing… well, the voyage of life. As my friend Emden Gansner asked, as I stared: "Where are you today?"

  I'm also a fan of Cole's less allegorical Notch of the White Mountains, an 1839 painting of Crawford Notch, viewed from the north. And driving on US 302, you can see what it looks like today.

  Crawford Notch was also the scene of the avalanche that killed the Willey family in 1826. By utter coincidence, the street on which Pun Salad Manor sits is named after them.

'Twas only five years ago:

Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit https://t.co/bql36iSbig to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec pic.twitter.com/ZwJp5h5bWD

— FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2021

For the record, the snitchy URL is now a no-workie. Memory hole!

But imagine the progressive freakout if the Trump Administration/FBI Director Kash Patel posted something similar today.

Just kidding. I have no idea, maybe they have posted something similar, and it's just escaped my notice amidst the usual torrent of wannabe fascism.

But anyhow that was from my five-year-ago post, which also looked at the bad vibes from Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel, CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, the United States Postal Service, and the Federal Trade Commission. Enjoy!

Also of note:

• Mass Incompetence. An op-ed authored by one Mindi Messmer appearing in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat carried the ominous headline: The Merrimack sewage disaster was not an accident.

  On June 27, a severe storm overwhelmed Haverhill's wastewater system, and a 1970s-era 42-inch sewer force main cracked in two places. For days, roughly 8 million gallons of raw sewage poured into the Merrimack River daily. Bacteria counts at some locations reached 40 times the safe level. Forty-one Massachusetts beaches were closed. Shellfishing beds from Gloucester to Salisbury were closed. A temporary bypass stopped the discharge on July 1, but the river remains contaminated. Beaches remained closed through the July 4th holiday weekend, during a record heat wave, as families who just wanted to swim were told to stay out of the water.

  Mindi says "not an accident." So… sabotage?

  Nah. It was an accident, of the "Gee, we were hoping that wouldn't happen" variety. According to Mindi, it's due to …

  This is a funding crisis masquerading as a management crisis. The federal government's combined sewer overflow grant program, intended to serve more than 800 communities nationwide with aging combined sewer systems, has $41 million in funding. When municipalities cannot afford the fixes, the EPA moves the deadline. What should take 5 years takes 20 or 30. The infrastructure failure at the heart of this crisis belongs to both parties, across decades of governance at every level. The consent decree was signed under a Democratic administration. The grant program has been chronically underfunded through Republican and Democratic Congresses alike. The people who coulden't [sic] take their children to Crane Beach this July 4th were not checking which party is in power. They were checking whether it was safe to go into the water and were told no.

  Ah, it's Uncle Stupid's fault for not funnelling more cash to Haverhill!

  Or maybe it was Haverhill's (or the state of Massachusetts') fault for relying on the D.C. Shuffle.

  Look: Massachusetts has the highest per capita income among the 50 states. And the state has an income tax! There is no reason that the state couldn't fund this local infrastructure itself, especially since the eminently foreseeable "disaster" disproportionately affected other Massachusetts locales.

  Federal aid might be justifiable to fund projects in (say) Mississippi or West Virginia, poorer states that arguably need a fiscal handout. Demanding that poorer states, on net, fund Massachusetts repairs should be a non starter.

• Unfortunately, neither party wants to change its name. Issues & Insights awards dunce caps: Minimum-Wage Bill Shows Yet Again That Congress Is A Refuge For Know-Nothings.

  Democrats have many problems, not the least of which is an inability to understand, and for some the refusal to accept, basic economics. If they did, there wouldn’t be proposals to raise the federal minimum wage to a preposterous $25 an hour.

  House Resolution 8555 would “place the federal minimum wage on a durable path toward a living wage,” requiring “large, highly profitable corporations to lead the transition.” Under its yoke, large employers would have to raise their lowest wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour on Jan. 1, 2027, a more-than-double spike that would shock the market.

  You can track H.R.8555's progress here. It shows 30 cosponsors, all Democrats. Amusingly, AOC is not on the cosponsor list. Neither is either NH CongressCritter.

• But let's sling some insults the other way too. From across the pond, the Daniel Hannan of the Institute for Economic Affairs reports: Donald Trump goes full Third World. That sounds bad! And it is:

  America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies – Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism – are hideously unappealing.

  Yet, at the same time, the US is starting to behave like a tinpot autocracy. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader; the successful attempt to bully FIFA over a red card. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.

  Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a Father of the Nation type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a form of treachery, other things follow.

  Daniel goes on to look at Trump's kleptocracy. Not a pretty picture, Emily.

• Attention should be paid. Alex Tabarrok is not one to succumb to Trump Derangement Syndrome, so take his post seriously: The Nationalization of American Science

  OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.

  American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

  Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

  All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.

  Alex has more in a followup post: The Trump Administration's Threat to Scientific Research

• Maybe reading the Book of Isaiah? Jeff Maurer guests over at the Dispatch, soliciting: Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless? (Dispatch gifted link) Excerpt:

  I’m a comedian, but I did not find Donald Trump’s political ascendence funny. Funny is a monkey in a tuxedo; funny is a cartoon skunk with pre-MeToo values pursuing a cat. Choosing a president who has all of the qualities of the president in Idiocracy except for the good ones isn’t funny; it’s just a bad idea.

  When Trump became supreme leader of the GOP, I felt schadenfreude watching some conservatives—many of whom are now Dispatch readers—react with revulsion. That was petty on my part, and I don’t defend it, but please remember: I, an Obama liberal, had many erudite, all-caps shouting matches with those folks on Facebook message boards. Remember Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”? Remember Barack Obama’s tan suit? Oh, we had fun back then! It’s odd to have sepia-toned memories of calling someone “Super Hitler” in a fight about Obama’s mom jeans, but here we are.

  Now, Democrats are going through something a lot like what happened to Republicans a decade ago. The left’s online id has taken corporeal form and scored a few primary wins. Now, the takeover is far from complete; it’s not guaranteed that the 2028 nominee will be either Lenin’s reanimated corpse or someone even worse. But for the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.”

  It's free of Jeff's usual smutty vocabulary, so if that's what's been keeping you away from my links to his substack, click away!

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

As seen in Power Line's "Week in Pictures":

These days you take your patriotism as you can find it. As the WSJ editorialists point out, you might need to look elsewhere than in those museums on the National Mall: How the Smithsonian Lost America’s Plot. (WSJ gifted link)

You can download "Saving America's Story" here. The Trump Administration does a lot of stupid and despicable stuff, and there's a lot of Trumpish crap on that page, but the document itself is pretty convincing.

Also of note:

• It's a high bar, but they're trying to clear it. George Will notes Democrats’ extremism and stupidity are catching up with the GOP’s. (WaPo gifted link)

  Platner’s campaign was born of the cynicism that permeates the Democrats’ devotion to identity politics. Never mind that Platner is a lout whose work résumé is thinner than his record of sponging off his parents. Rather than assess him as — Heaven forfend! — an individual, Democrats anointed him the embodiment of a category: the working class. He could be their favorite thing, a victim. He could make vivid their simpleminded binary of “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Oblivious of their insult to America’s working class, Democrats wonder why what once was their base has abandoned them.

  Republicans, however, should shed any post-Platner delusions of moral superiority. Ten years ago, they turned the louche star of the “Access Hollywood” tape, and the payer of hush money to his porn star paramour, into a president. Conjured from the populism of celebrity worship, he today is frighteningly out of his depth, dumbstruck that his son-in-law, in tandem a New York real estate crony, cannot pacify Iran and end the war against Ukraine.

  America’s still-multiplying embarrassments are rank weeds fertilized by the manure of populism. And by populism’s inherent, aggressive disdain for the importance of character in politics. Populism is almost everything rejected by America’s unsentimental Founders, who, a few days ago, the nation briefly, and often uncomprehendingly, celebrated.

  "Manure of populism" is a slightly nicer way of saying "populist bullshit."

• Gratitude is fine, but she could also use my Amazon links. David Harsanyi has some advice: AOC Should Thank Baby Boomers for the World They Left Her. (I assume the same advice applies to any boomer-basher.)

  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she knows why socialism is on the rise: Blame it on the boomers.

  "Millennials and Gen Z combined, now for the first time, are eclipsing the number of baby boomers," she explained recently. "Young people overall feel a tremendous amount of betrayal about the world we've been left."

  It's inarguable that younger generations feel this way. The notion that millennials and Generation Z are toiling in a uniquely grueling economic era, however, is utterly delusional.

  But convincing young people they've been handed a broken world only fostered an unprecedented sense of hopelessness. You are not victims of "oligarchs," unfettered capitalism or any other imaginary monsters.

  And our periodic reminder to the youngs: yes, we Boomers got wealth, but we are not taking it with us. We haven't figured out how to do that.

• As it turns out, there was another lie involved. As reported by NPR (and many others) back in 2013: Obama's 'You Can Keep It' Promise Is 'Lie Of The Year'.

  But calling it the "Affordable Care Act" was apparently another fib, as the WaPo editorialists document: Of course ACA premiums are rising. (WaPo gifted link) Using small words where possible:

  If it wasn’t obvious before that the famous bill passed to make health care more affordable has done anything but, it should be now: Individual plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges are projected to spike by about 14 percent in 2027, according to recent insurer filings.

  The ACA imposed a wide array of mandates on health insurance. Those mandates are expensive. To make up for the increase in costs, the ACA distributes subsidies so consumers don’t feel the impact of the increase.

  Unfortunately, the editorial writers leave some room for blaming private insurers for the unaffordability. If you missed it, here's Noah Smith's take (blogged here last month): Insurers aren't the main villain of the U.S. health care system.

• Aw, say it ain't so, Chris. The Free Beacon's headline puts my current CongressCritter (and possibly my state's future Senator) in the spotlight's glare: 'Anti-Corruption' Senate Candidate Chris Pappas, Whose Ex-Lobbyist Husband Works for Uber, Sits on House Transportation Committee That Uber Heavily Lobbies.

  Rep. Chris Pappas (D.), running for Senate in New Hampshire on an "anti-corruption" agenda against "corporate special interests" in Washington, serves on a House committee that oversees Uber, where his husband, a former lobbyist, serves in an executive policy role.

  Pappas, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is married to Vann Bentley, a policy manager for cybersecurity and privacy at Uber who previously worked as a lobbyist for Amazon, according to his LinkedIn profile.

  I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway.

  Interestingly, the article mentions that Pappas is "running against former senator John Sununu". Who hasn't actually won the nomination yet. But his primary opponent, Scott Brown, goes unmentioned in the article.

… he just keeps on demonstrating it:

In case you'd like to check out his inspiration:

[Click the pic for the Wikipedia article. Don't contribute if asked.]

Also of note:

• Add this to the list. Veronique de Rugy points out: We Should Still Abolish the SBA: The $45 Million "Small Business" Edition. (Apologices, it's kind of a belated Independence Day link.)

  On the Fourth of July, because nothing says “Liberty!” like a bigger federal subsidy, the Small Business Administration doubled the ceiling on its guaranteed loans to $10 million, the most it has ever offered. The symbolism is almost too perfect. Few phrases in American politics are as sacred as “small business.” It conjures images of corner hardware stores and family farms. What it protects is something else.

  Consider – as Wharton’s Brian Feinstein did in the WSJ – what Washington means by “small.” A homebuilder pulling in $45 million a year qualifies. So does a manufacturer with 1,500 employees. In the median industry, the revenue ceiling runs around $21 million; in some it reaches $47 million. That $45 million builder is larger than 99 percent of American firms with any employee other than the owner, and at construction’s typical margins, its proprietor clears roughly $2.7 million a year. This is not the plucky underdog of campaign ads. It’s a prosperous, established company collecting benefits that most Americans believe are going to the underdog.

  Both Vero's article and the WSJ op-ed she links to are eye-opening and sensible. Abolition is unlikely, however, thanks to (as she points out) the sacredness of that particular cow.

• Try guessing the answer. John C. Goodman asks, rhetorically: Why Do Democrats Hate Medicare Advantage?

  A bill introduced by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) and co-sponsored by more than 40 House Democrats would sharply reduce government payments to Medicare Advantage plans—private policies for Medicare enrollees. The bill purports to end practices of questionable value, and the press announcement makes the bill out to be an effort at saving taxpayers money.

  Mr. Doggett’s floor speech introducing the bill suggested a different motive. He said it would “level the playing field” between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans.

  It is no secret that many congressional Democrats dislike private health insurance even though private insurers were heavily involved in designing ObamaCare. Politicians on the left often speak about the desirability of a “public option.” But Medicare has already had a competing public option for more than two decades. It’s called traditional Medicare, and it has been losing the competition. More than half of all Medicare enrollees are in private plans.

  The bill is now up to 48 co-sponsors as I type, all Ds. Neither New Hampshire CongressCritter has signed on, but a lot of Usual Suspects have: AOC, Ilhan Omar, Chellie Pingree, Ro Khanna, … Here's hoping it goes nowhere. I'm not in a Medicare Advantage plan, but (generally speaking) I'm satisfied with my situation, and there ain't nothing wrong with it that these jokers won't make worse.

• "If we wanted to take some hobbits to see a Komodo dragon…" Ars Technica adds some science to the Bob and Ray sketch: Flores Hobbits' eating habits offer clues about their evolutionary past.

  Until about 60,000 years ago, diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats.

  Based on the presence of hominin and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment, it originally looked like the Hobbits had hunted and butchered dwarf elephants—an impressive feat for such a tiny hominin. But according to University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch and her colleagues, it was the Komodo dragons that were the hunters, while the Hobbits only showed up to scavenge what was left.

  If Veatch and her colleagues are right, their findings may challenge some of the assumptions we’ve made about Homo floresiensis—and about which hominin species was the first to venture into the wider world beyond Africa.

  `

  Yery interesting, because science, of course. But for me it's just an excuse to repost this:

• Sucks to be UK. Our excerpt from this week's TGIF:

  → Hell yeah, America: In great news, the International Monetary Fund has released updated growth predictions for 2026. America’s economy is forecast to grow 2.3 percent, nice and steady, just what we like to see. France: 0.6 percent. The UK: 1.0 percent (you get ’em, lads!) Basically, Europe is a lemonade stand compared to our 24/7 lemonade factory. The real economic growth comes from China, which is projected to grow 4.6 percent, and India, projected to grow 6.4 percent. Okay, whoa, take it easy there, China and India. Smell the roses for once. Me, I like the idea of us as somewhere between India (crazy!) and France (dead). America is full of stories like this one:

  [WSJ headline: He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire.]

  This Costco cashier worked a steady job, saved money, and has a good life. The forbidden truth is that things are pretty good here, and if you work hard, even as a cashier, you can earn beyond what an entire European village does in a decade, probably. Our healthcare is pretty good too—our cashier’s wife had brain cancer, and her surgeries were covered by Costco’s insurance plan, and he even took a year off (paid). With his salary, he has taken the family on European vacations (two in the last decade!). When you’re done with that story, I recommend this phenomenal Atlantic piece as a chaser:

  [Atlantic headline: How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi]

  Paraphrasing the piece: The NHS has a backlog of 6 million patients. It spends more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than providing maternity care. One in 10 Brits have taken to doing their own dental work, including tooth extractions, because the wait is too long for a dentist. I won’t remove my own split ends, and these people are taking molars out by the root.

  In short: I love it here. For me, every day is the Fourth of July.

  Indeed. But read Nellie's entire thing, OK?.

Recently on the book blog:

Whether you watch the video or read the text, feel free to draw your own conclusions. Excerpt:

Other words appearing in Brown's text: "fairy-tale", "deceptive", "untrustworthy", "poor data quality", "elementary accounting error", "misunderstands", "misinformation", "misconceived". That's a lot of misses!

Also of note:

• "All we are sayyying is…" Sing it with John Hinderaker and me: "Give War a Chance."

  As Scott [Johnson] noted [Wednesday] morning, President Trump has given up on dealing with Iran. I take it that he will now do what we recommended a long time ago: bomb for a while to complete the degradation of Iran’s military, and then go home.

  As for the Strait of Hormuz, we can leave that problem to the countries in Europe and Asia who depend on oil from that source. We don’t. If it turns out that they collectively don’t have the military power to deal with the IRGC, they can learn a lesson from that.

  The prices of Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate spiked a little over 5% on the news. Prices at the pump will now resume an upward trend rather than declining, and I assume that means the midterms are lost for the Republicans. They probably were lost anyway. Trump might be able to help the cause by going on television and addressing the nation from the Oval Office, specifically addressing gas prices–something he should have done, but unaccountably didn’t, before the conflict began.

  Both Brent and WTI Crude futures have declined a bit since John made that glum assessment. And (at least as I type) AAA says the US average regular gasoline price is $3.8840/gallon, compared to … $3.8230/gallon a week ago. Up, but not that much.

• And stupid. Don't forget stupid. Noah Smith is not wrong: JD Vance's crusade against GDP is wrong and bad.

  Free trade usually raises GDP. Immigration, done right, raises GDP [footnote elided]. Rightists in America want less free trade and less immigration. But every time they propose restricting trade and immigration, someone — either libertarian business/econ types on their own side, or moderate liberals on the other side — says “That will make America poorer!”. So they want some way to neutralize this objection, so they can do things that will, in fact, make America poorer.

  So America’s right borrowed an argument from the European left. The European left favors degrowth, and another term for degrowth is “making GDP go down on purpose”. So naturally, they’re always trying to find reasons to denigrate GDP as a metric of human flourishing (see here, here, and here for examples). The American right is simply tweaking these arguments to make them more appealing to their own base.

  Noah goes on to deal with Vance's specific arguments. Which are, to repeat: wrong and bad.

• On a related note… Phil Gramm And Donald J. Boudreaux take to the pages of the WSJ to save the reputation of the guy on the $10 bill: Hamilton Was No Protectionist. (WSJ gifted link)

  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have invoked the policies of the first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, as precedents for President Trump’s trade agenda. Hamilton, the finance wizard of George Washington’s administration, “touched the dead corpse of the public credit, and it sprung upon its feet,” in the words of Daniel Webster. He is the most respected financial officer in U.S. history. Enlisting him in support of the president’s trade policy would certainly lend credibility to a policy that so far, by most economic measures—including economic growth and real disposable personal income—has failed.

  Since Hamilton can’t defend himself, we’d like to defend him against the claim that he would support Mr. Trump’s protectionism. In Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, he made the case for government encouragement of American manufacturing in a world dominated by European powers that, he worried, could easily refuse to export their manufactured goods to America in exchange for American agricultural products. As Hamilton explained, “if Europe will not take from us the products of our soil, upon terms consistent with our interest, . . . there is no other expedient, than to promote manufacturing establishments” at home. Promotion of U.S. manufacturers could be provided by protective tariffs or, even better in Hamilton’s view, by subsidies.

  Messrs. Bessent and Greer claim that the Trump administration is simply reviving the Hamiltonian trade policy that created the American economic colossus. But in the 21st century, when the average trade-weighted tariff rate of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries was below 3% and almost identical to that of the U.S., and the OECD found that the nontariff barriers of U.S. trading partners aren’t significantly higher than America’s nontariff barriers, it’s highly doubtful that Hamilton would support Trump policies. Hamilton in essence rejected Mr. Trump’s tariffs when he argued in his report that “if the system of perfect liberty to industry and commerce were the prevailing system of nations, the arguments which dissuade a country in the predicament of the United States, from the zealous pursuits of manufactures would doubtless have great force.”

  Whenever I see Phil and Don's names together, I think "Everly Brothers". I grew up not far from their childhood home in Shenandoah, Iowa.

  And now I can't get "Wake Up, Little Susie" out of my head…

• Go back and read that First Amendment again, SCOTUS. George Will claims The Supreme Court hasn’t fully atoned for its campaign finance sins. (WaPo gifted link)

  Any adequate history of human shortsightedness, which would pretty much encompass all of human history, would mention America’s half-century dalliance with “campaign finance reform.” The Supreme Court recently issued another decision distancing itself, but not nearly enough, from its original 1976 sin of not invalidating limits on coordinated expenditures by parties when it invalidated expenditure limits on candidates.

  Academia has been egregious in diminishing the First Amendment, but this began in Congress. All campaign finance laws are written by incumbent legislators, and, unsurprisingly, serve their interests. Ostensibly responding to Watergate, but primarily codifying its members’ interests, Congress imposed limits on the quantity, content and timing of political (campaign) speech, the First Amendment’s core concern. Limits on campaign contributions and spending magnify the importance of incumbents’ many communications advantages.

  Commenters, according to the WaPo's AI summary, predictably babble about "money". This recent tweet in response to Gavin Newsom was eloquent:

  Let's be precise, Governor, since precision is your enemy here.
  
  Donating to a candidate you believe in isn't "buying an election." It's called speech, and the First Amendment protects it. Money allows someone the ability to spend their time convincing you they are right. Money… https://t.co/uVVaLSME1g

  — The Rational Animal 🤔 (@theobjectivist) July 10, 2026

  In full:

  Donating to a candidate you believe in isn't "buying an election." It's called speech, and the First Amendment protects it. Money allows someone the ability to spend their time convincing you they are right. Money cannot vote. Only individual citizens push the button, and every one of them is free to take a billionaire's ad and vote the other way.

  The proof is a graveyard of rich men who thought otherwise. Bloomberg spent over $1 billion of his own money in 2020 and won a grand total of one contest: American Samoa. Harris outspent Trump $875 million to $355 million in 2024 and lost. If money bought elections, you'd be praising President Bloomberg. Voters decide. Wallets don't.

  Now the part you're counting on people to miss. "Dark money" is election spending funneled through nonprofits and shell companies that legally hide their donors, so no one can see who's paying. You shriek about "buying elections" while your own side ran the largest dark-money operation in history, $1.9 billion of it in 2024, the majority backing Democrats, spent by people whose names you'll never know. Meanwhile Musk disclosed every dollar he gave. You want to jail the man who spent in the open, then rob the taxpayer to fund candidates through public financing. Force to silence the transparent, force to bankroll the hidden.

  You don't fear money in politics. You fear speech you can't control. The Constitution protects the donor's voice. It was never written to protect the politician from hearing one he dislikes.

  … and "Rational Animal" didn't even mention Tom Steyer!

• Why, it's almost as if their real aim is power. James B. Meigs is more diplomatic: Democrats Forget the Supreme Court’s Purpose. (WSJ gifted link)

  Left-wing leaders have been gunning for the Supreme Court for years. The dependably wrongheaded Sen. Ed Markey, for example, rails against “MAGA extremist justices.” During the Biden presidency, he twice introduced legislation to add four justices to the court, which would help Democrats dilute conservative influence. Sen. Elizabeth Warren also backs the court-packing plan, complaining that some court decisions ignore “widely held public opinion.” Mr. Sanders said the court is “out of control” and has flirted with a wacky plan to curtail the justices’ power by “rotating judges to the appeals court” and “bringing in new blood.”

  James makes a pretty simple Civics 101 point:

  The court isn’t intended to be a third body that reflects the will of the people. It’s certainly not meant to be under the direct control of another branch of government. Rather, the court is designed to be a check on Congress and the White House when they overstep the Constitution or misapply the law.

  Enough said?

  [James also notes that he attended a Fourth of July parade starting in "Live-Free-Or-Die New Hampshire". Good for him.]

• Everything old is new again. Dave Barry has a good point concerning the…

  recent concerted effort to reduce the pesky federal budget deficit, which, shockingly, continues to mount despite the fact that both major political parties have issued sternly worded position papers against it. Day after day, week after week, the top brains of Congress and the […] administration sat in a conference room, eating prune Danish supplied by the Prune Danish Division of the Bureau of Pastries of the U.S. Department of Refreshments at a cost of $2,350 per slice.

  "What should we do about this pesky budget deficit?" the leaders asked, crumbs of concern dribbling from their mouths. "How can we reduce it? If only we had an idea! If only we could think of . . . "

  "SPEND LESS MONEY, YOU CRETINS!!" shouted a group of cockroaches, who had been listening from the floor and managed to figure out the solution despite the handicap of not being top political brains. Unfortunately, however, our political leadership is not responsive to cockroaches, unless of course they operate savings-and-loan institutions.

  Does that seem like a fresh take to you? Ah, reader, I originally posted that quote 15 years ago today.

  And it is from Dave's Nov 4, 1990 then-syndicated column.

… at least not above the fold. Instead let's sing A Song of FIRE and ICE (archive.today link), inspired by Kevin D. Williamson.

If you'd like to show your support for Mr. Streever's Constitutionally-protected speech (and also Pun Salad, for that matter), an Amazon link to his book is over there on your right.

Also of note:

• An inexplicably uncommon pun. I shoulda been all over this months ago: Jeffrey Blehar at the NR Corner: Democrats Suddenly Hobbled by a Bad Case of Platner Fasciitis. (archive.today link) Heh!

  But other than that, Google only coughs up the Nation from last October: Maine’s Case of Platner Fasciitis (archive.today link)

  Instead let's look at the always-correct Erick Erickson. Are we looking at the Dog That Didn't Bark, or The Fire Alarm They Refuse to Hear?

  For years, conservatives warned that something was wrong with Joe Biden. We were told we were cruel, ableist, cynical — that we were seeing decline where there was only a stutter, a lifelong tendency to misspeak, the ordinary friction of a long day. The people telling us this were not only Democratic politicians. They were the anchors, the fact-checkers, and the explainer-journalists whose entire professional identity rests on knowing better than the rubes. And when anyone of note confirmed what we had been saying, he had to be destroyed.

  Robert Hur was not a Fox News contributor. He was a special counsel appointed to examine Biden’s handling of classified documents. He declined to bring charges, and in explaining why, he wrote the sentence that detonated Washington: a jury, he judged, would see “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

  For that act of professional candor, Hur was accused of gratuitous cruelty, of auditioning for a MAGA job, and of smearing a good man. The president summoned the cameras to prove his sharpness and promptly confused the leaders of Egypt and Mexico. The message to every Democrat watching was unmistakable: the penalty for telling the truth about Biden is excommunication.

  And the Platner parallel? Well, it's an example of Karl Marx being half-right about something: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second as farce.

  Only half-right? Yeah, both times were pretty farcical.

• And also the fool. The great Jimmy G provides today's final commentary on a non mea culpa: Graham Platner Plays the Victim. But he's pretty brutal on a side issue:

  In a June 5 Fox News appearance, Maine Wire editor in chief Steven Robinson told Laura Ingraham that Platner’s business is “a campaign prop. . . . The oyster business, totally fake.”

  Now, calling Platner’s oyster business “totally fake” is hyperbolic; he does sell oysters to a restaurant his mother owns. But Platner had told the New Republic that he hadn’t paid himself a salary from his oyster business for the past five years. It would be interesting to see if Platner’s business has ever generated any profits after expenses, and whether the Internal Revenue Service would classify it as a hobby or a business for the question of deducting business expenses. (“The IRS safe harbor rule is typically that if you have turned a profit in at least three of five consecutive years, the IRS will presume that you are engaged in it for profit.”)

  PolitiFact rated Robinson’s statement “false,” based on his company’s having filed the proper paperwork with the state. Well, that’s one way to measure the legitimacy of a business, but the “no salary for five years,” “not making a living at it,” and “just one customer that is his mom” facts complicate the picture.

  Almost everybody, including the self-anointed fact-checkers, has a bad habit of seeing what they want to see.

  Gee, could Politifact be biased? Big if true.

Today's Eye Candy is Planned Parenthood's campaign rally for Graham Platner back on June 22. (Where's Graham? He's the one with facial hair.) Just a few weeks later, I wonder how many of those ladies are continuing to stand by Platner?

National Review editorializes: Democrats Run Out of Excuses for Platner. Because of the latest revelations:

Meanwhile, Jeff Maurer invokes Occam's Razor, plausibly: The Simplest Explanation for Platner Is That the Far Left Has Awful Judgement.

I am, as usual, following the Elvis Costello advice: Try to be amused. But if you're leaning toward disgust, you'll find plenty to go around, because, as Erick Erickson points out, Platner is The Man They Wanted.

And, finally, an op-ed from columnist Douglas Rooks that appeared in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, just last month, after Platner won the Democratic primary: Generational change is finally coming to Maine politics. Finally! Key paragraph from the Platner tonguebath, emphasis added:

Reread Erick Erickson's excerpt above, and ask yourself how "extensively vetted" Platner was at that point.

I can't help but wonder if Douglas Rooks will revisit his opinion here. And maybe apologize to his readers for his spectacularly poor call.

Also of note:

• Nominations for "Cliché Most Deserving of Retirement" award are open. I'd be OK with never having to read about someone who "says the quiet part out loud" again. But Issues & Insights notes a Democrat doing just that: Ro Khanna Says The Quiet Part Out Loud About His ‘Billionaire’ Tax.

  It took less time than we would have imagined, but proponents of the “billionaire wealth tax” have already given the game away.

  Anyone who knows any history about taxes knows that the left always uses “tax the rich” as a cover to raise taxes on the middle class. Because, as Willy Sutton observed in another context, that’s where the money is.

  But we were surprised to see Rep. Ro Khanna admit as much, even before he and his socialist pals get their coveted wealth tax on the boards.

  “The tax should not stop at billionaires,” he wrote on his Substack. “The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up.”

  Once again, from Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

  That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

• When you are spending other people's money… The AntiPlanner reports: Despite $25M Grant, Brightline Still Dangerous.

  As of June 23, 2026, Brightline trains had killed 214 people, an average of one every 13 days since the passenger trains began operating in 2017. Make that 215, as Brightline killed a pedestrian on July 2.

  In August 2022, Brightline announced that it had received a $25 million federal grant to fence its lines and make them safer. The state of Florida also contributed $10 million and Brightline itself agreed to match that, providing a total of $45 million for safety.

  Now, nearly four years later, Brightline says it is still “in the midst” of installing those safety measures. There is no explanation for why this is taking so long or why it is spending money on some measures, including “No Trespassing” signs and suicide prevention signs, that seem unlikely to do much.

  The latest death does appear to have been a suicide.

• When "compassion" means screwing over the young. At RealClear Politics, Sam Russ makes a bold proposal: Don’t Lock Young Americans Into Social Security.

  As lawmakers debate how to preserve the program, most proposals focus on raising payroll tax revenue or making other budgetary adjustments. But these discussions miss a larger point: The program itself is increasingly ill-suited for younger generations. Rather than forcing Americans into a system that may not deliver on its promises, policymakers should allow young workers to opt out and prepare for retirement in their own way.

  America’s younger generations are coming of age amid an affordability crisis. Housing costs, groceries, health insurance, transportation, and higher education consume a growing share of household budgets. In such an environment, financial flexibility matters more than ever.

  Yet every paycheck is hit by a 6.2% Social Security payroll tax, withheld with the promise that workers will receive benefits decades later when they reach retirement age. For many millennials and members of Generation Z, that promise appears increasingly uncertain.

  Ackshually, the paycheck hit is 6.2% on the paystub, but your employer is required to kick in another 6.2%. And if you're self-employed, you have to pay 12.4% all by yourself.

  It's a lousy deal, and the real outrage is that today's young aren't more irate about it.

Headline source below, but right here we got Mr. Ramirez:

President Trump got some predictable pushback on his July 4 National Mall speech from an array of [Dd]emocratic [Ss]ocialists. (Choose capitalization as you prefer.) At the WSJ Free Expression newsletter, Matthew Hennessey pushes back on the pushback: When the Red Shoes Fit. (WSJ gifted link)

Over across the Salmon Falls River, US Senate candidate (at least as I type this) Graham Platner is not a DSA member, although Google's AI claims his "political rise was strategically engineered and advised by former DSA organizers." Good job, former DSA organizers! As Robby Soave reports at Reason: Graham Platner accused of sexual assault, campaign likely doomed.

Is it too late for Kamala Harris to establish Maine residency? She has experience in getting into a race where most Democrats pressured the previous candidate to drop out, after the flaws that were completely obvious to everyone else became impossible to ignore.

An excerpt from Jeffrey Blehar's take in his Carnival of Fools newsletter:

Jim Geraghty is the one who came up with the headline quote above. (It was uttered by Will Smith in I, Robot.) And if anyone could say I Told You So, it's Jim: The Nazi Tattoo Guy Is Exactly Who You Thought He Was.

Bonus excerpt, citing a guy whose bio I'm currently reading:

F. A. Hayek figured this out decades ago, and Lord Acton long before him. Power does not just attract “good” people. Lots of bad people want to be elected to high office, because they want all the things that come with power.

Jim also points out that we shouldn't let Maine Democrat voters off the hook, almost 120,000 of whom voted for Platner in the primary.

Also of note:

• One more July 4 leftover. Erick Erickson says it so well: The Shining City on the Hill. That's an image passed along from Jesus → John Winthrop → Ronald Reagan → Erick. (And now from Pun Salad → you, I guess.)

  A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Winthrop said it to a boatload of Puritans before they’d even landed, and here is the part people forget: it wasn’t a boast. It was a warning. The eyes of all people are upon us. If we deal badly, we become a story and a byword through the world. He was telling them that being watched is a burden before it is an honor. Reagan understood that. When he called us the shining city, he wasn’t puffing out his chest. He was telling us that the light we throw off lands on other people, whether we mean it to or not, and we had better mind what kind of light it is.

  Now, here is what makes ours the shining city and not just another lamp. Go back and look at the revolutions. Ours in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949. Four revolutions, four attempts to tear down the old order and build something new. And here is the thing I need you to sit with: only one of them ended in liberty. Only one.

  The French stormed the Bastille shouting about the rights of man, and within five years, they had the Terror, the guillotine running like a factory, Robespierre feeding his own friends to the blade until the blade came for him too. They wanted to remake mankind, and when mankind wouldn’t cooperate, they started shortening people by a head. The Russians promised bread, peace, and land, and they delivered famine, the Cheka, the Gulag, and a man named Stalin who murdered more of his own people than Hitler managed to murder of anyone. The Chinese promised the workers a paradise and gave them Mao, the Great Leap Forward that starved forty million human beings, and the Cultural Revolution that turned children into informants against their own parents. Terror. Mass murder. Dictatorship. Every single time.

  I note that a self-described "leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture" is named Jacobin. Nothing to worry about there!

  (As near as I can tell, there are no right-wing mags named Sturmabeilung, but maybe give them time.)

• I'm so old, I remember when Slate was worth reading. In his Wanderland newsletter, (Dispatch gifted link) Kevin D. Williamson deftly demolishes their attempt to deflect accountability from a lefty favorite:

  As some of you will know, on Tuesday NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg wrongly reported that Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito had announced his retirement. It was an epic blunder. And, bearing in mind that Steve Hayes has asked me to stop using so much profanity, take a gander at the [impeccably punctuated and baroquely complex chain of expletives deleted] that Slate published in response:

  [W]as it an egregious, personal error, akin to Totenberg stealing into Alito’s hotel room and absconding with an internal organ, as it has been widely treated? We don’t think so. Indeed, what has been grievously missed in the melee is that this is not really a press story at all—it is a story about court transparency and hubris. This mistake reveals an institution that has repeatedly and systemically sidestepped public accountability by making itself impossible to cover by human reporters and, in so doing, has made itself vastly harder to understand by the very public it is meant to serve.

  That is baloney. There are lots of human reporters who cover the Supreme Court without making up stories about things that did not happen. We employ a few here! But if you have ever read Slate’s Supreme Court coverage, then you will understand why Slate’s writers and editors do not believe that the Supreme Court can be competently covered—they have never seen it done.

  But maybe even that is too generous: I believe that somebody can do 20 pull-ups.

  There is also a discussion of J.D. Vance's efforts to promote the "Railway Safety Act of 2026", now folded into the "BUILD America 250 Act". It's a spendathon that will probably make rail less safe, but will make some unions happy.