Jan
13
2026

Take It Away, Jerome

I'm not a huge fan of the Federal Reserve; at best, it's a clumsy fit into the US Constitutional order. But I'm even less of a fan of Trump's obvious lawfare to get his way on Fed-set interest rates. So let's take a look at some of the reactions, ranging from the semi-humorous to the spittle-flecked:

Jeff Maurer manages to link the Fed stuff with another top story: Trump Should Just Charge Jerome Powell with the Minnesota Shooting.

How to describe the rule of law under Trump? I’d say it’s a lot like this video:

@espn Every time you watch, focus on a different kid 😅 (via estheticsbyryan/IG) #softball #funny #kids ♬ original sound - ESPN

That seems about right: No discernable rules, lots of people getting hurt. Each day, the administration constructs a new castle of bullshit seemingly designed to validate the most hysterical things being written in all caps on BlueSky. The administration says that Renée Good was a “domestic terrorist” and that her shooting was self-evidently justified. It argues that Jerome Powell is a career criminal on the level of Tony Soprano or possibly The Joker. And all of this is happening while Trump is amping up the weird dictator behavior, like proposing a coin with his face on both sides, planning a triumphal arch, and trying to name the Kennedy Center after himself. It’s like the Sacha Baron Cohen movie The Dictator, only not funny, like the Sacha Baron Cohen movie The Brothers Grimsby.

So, I get it: Trump is dragging us into thuggish authoritarianism just as fast as his flabby little arms will allow. He wants one standard of justice for his allies and another for his enemies. Roger that…I don’t think the signals could be any more clear — we’re basically living the “just give me a sign” joke from The Man with Two Brains. And I really don’t need more information confirming something I’ve known for a long time.

And Jeff's suggestion is… well you see his headline up there. Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess.

John R. Puri goes (accurately) metaphorical: Trump Sets the House on Fire with Himself Locked Inside. (NR gifted link)

First off, let’s get some things straight.

The chances that Trump would investigate Federal Reserve officials like Chairman Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook if they were acquiescing to his demands instead of resisting them are zero — zilch, nada, none. Potentially negative, thus shattering the laws of mathematics. Everybody knows this.

A second undeniable fact is that Trump is trying to dominate the Fed — to break it to his will. That he doesn’t control the Fed already infuriates him. He would seek to subjugate it even if he sought no changes in the monetary policy it sets.

But, oh, does he seek changes to policy. Destroying the central bank’s independence would be terrible enough in itself. As my predecessor Dominic Pino has documented, it extinguishes confidence in the currency and unmoors the money supply from empirical concerns in favor of political expediency. What Trump wants from the Fed in particular, however, makes his gambit all the more destructive. And obscenely stupid.

That's a free link, so continue reading about the obscene stupidity.

Alex Tabarrok comments on Chairman Powell's Statement.

Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.

What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.

For a good example of "toadies and ideological loyalists", see… well, Trump's cabinet. (Has Pam Bondi quit in disgust yet?)

There is a new substack, apparently set up to hold a single article: a Statement on the Federal Reserve from (in alphabetical order): Ben S. Bernanke, Jared Bernstein, Jason Furman, Timothy F. Geithner, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Glenn Hubbard, Jacob J. Lew, N. Gregory Mankiw, Henry "Call me Hank" M. Paulson, Kenneth Rogoff, Christina Romer, Robert E. Rubin, and Janet "Can't you hear me" Yellen.

The Federal Reserve’s independence and the public’s perception of that independence are critical for economic performance, including achieving the goals Congress has set for the Federal Reserve of stable prices, maximum employment, and moderate long-term interest rates. The reported criminal inquiry into Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell is an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine that independence. This is how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions, with highly negative consequences for inflation and the functioning of their economies more broadly. It has no place in the United States whose greatest strength is the rule of law, which is at the foundation of our economic success.

As noted above, I am not the Fed's biggest fan, but … it's what we got.

Also of note:

  • Without even mentioning the Fed. David Bahnsen looks at The Saddest Part of This Recent Economic Lunacy. (archive.today link)

    Economic conservatives find themselves increasingly isolated in today’s politics as the reality of horseshoe theory plays out in the current populist moment. This past week, President Donald Trump explicitly suggested all four of the following policy ideas, some taken verbatim from the policy portfolio of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren:

    1. An outright ban on institutional buying (if those investors own more than one hundred properties) of single-family residential real estate
    2. Government control of executive compensation at defense and aerospace companies, along with, under loosely defined circumstances, a ban on such companies’ returning capital (whether by share buybacks or dividends) to investors
    3. The implementation of quantitative easing by ordering the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities
    4. A federally imposed limit of 10 percent on the interest rates that credit cards can charge borrowers

    Of that list, only No. 3 is arguably allowed within the powers of the presidency (and even that only because the federal government has foolishly maintained the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie 17 years past their demise). To the president’s credit, his Truth Social announcement regarding No. 1 (a ban on institutional ownership of residential real estate) acknowledged a need to get the codification of Congress. But even if all of these ideas go the way of his 50-year-mortgage idea of not that long ago (it has already been abandoned), even mere ideation on social media carries consequences. Not only do these proposals stroke the emotions of his populist base that demands that the government “do something,” but they offer credibility and support to future endeavors to do the same thing that may prove more serious and substantive.

    "Other than that, though, they're fine!"

  • Pun Salad endorses. Since 2008, I've been on record as agreeing with people who find the Pledge of Allegiance "kinda creepy". Nikolai G. Wenzel joins the club, and describes his own solution: Why I Pledge Allegiance to the Constitution.

    I don’t much care for the pledge of allegiance. This got me into a bit of hot water when I was the convocation speaker at Hillsdale College, standing on the stage right next to the flag, silent and polite, while the assembled faculty and studentry recited the pledge.

    Don’t get me wrong. I love the “standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” And I confess I’ve gotten misty-eyed when I’ve seen Old Glory flown around a rodeo arena, as the sun is setting over the Rocky Mountains.

    Alas, the pledge of allegiance had an ugly midwife: the Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy, who was kicked out of his Boston pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism. Not for me, the pledge to a symbol or the Hegelian nation. And not for me a pledge that was accompanied by the Bellamy salute, until it was quietly dropped during World War II because it looked a little too much like Nazi theatrics.

    The pledge was a clever work of Progressivism. It inculcated allegiance to the state and the abstract patria, while ignoring the bedrock of American liberty, the US Constitution — because its pesky constraints might otherwise thwart wise leaders who can fix all of our problems with the stroke of a regulatory or legislative pen. 

    I am, however, ready to pledge allegiance to the Constitution.

    Nikolai doesn't even mention the inherent idolatry; as a moderate fan of the Ten Commandments, that's another thumb on the anti-Pledge side of the scale.

Recently on the book blog:

Jan
12
2026

On the LFOD Watch

Found thanks to my Google LFOD News Alert, which pointed to this Times of India story. Specifically, from their Sports Desk!

French No. 1 chess grandmaster Alireza Firouzja gained global attention after a social media post. The post on X (formerly Twitter) read, “Long live Iran.”

The message spread quickly online. Many fans linked it to unrest in Iran. Firouzja also shared the monarchial-era Iranian flag with the caption: "Live free or die". Many see this flag as a sign of resistance. Many also see it as a symbol of hope.

I am impressed with the multi-culturism involved: an Indian newspaper with a story about a French chess champ pleading for the liberation of Iran, using our state's motto. (Which, in turn, probably derived from a French revolutionary motto: "Vivre Libre ou Mourir".)

Firouzja is originally from Iran. According to Wikipedia, he "left the Iranian Chess Federation in 2019 because of the country's longstanding policy against competing with Israeli players." And he became a French citizen in 2021.

It appears that Iran is having a deadly-serious LFOD period, its citizens putting themselves in actual peril in protest against their tyrannical regime. Hundreds have been killed in response.

In contrast, I'm safe and snug here at Pun Salad Manor, content with displaying the motto on my Impreza's plates. Iran puts that in perspective.

Also of note:

  • I used to raise my eyebrows, now I just roll my eyes. Like me, Virginia Postrel isn't a fan of the New Crudity:

    I'd add "politicians" to that.

  • But enough seriousness. I replied to @GovernorAnne, who tweeted about a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix with an interesting name:

    I don't often drive through Gonic on NH's Route 125, but I usually smile a bit when I pass by Just Oil and More. I've never stopped by, though. Maybe I should pop in and ask if they have tacos.

  • He is 82, but Michael Palin can still make me laugh. A recent appearance on the "No Such Thing As A Fish" proved it:

    In which he reveals the word the BBC would not allow on-air during the All England Summarize Proust Competition.

Jan
11
2026

Of Course, This Doesn't Apply to Me

Megan McCardle explains: Why people see what they want in protests and police shootings. (WaPo gifted link)

“Who, whom?”

It’s a famous formulation, originally attributed to Vladimir Lenin. It is a formula that abjures any principle in favor of raw power: Actions are justified not by abstract rules but because they are done by the right people, for the right people and to the wrong people.

Clearly, this is a formula for a police state, not a democracy where we are all equal before the law and where government power rests on the consent of the governed. But though we ought to know better, “Who, whom?” thinking pops up in democracies all the time.

Megan's column is very good. Even if you've picked your side on the Renée Good, check it out and beseech yourself, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

And while you're at it, ponder Mr. Ramirez's cartoon; it never hurts to wonder if we can do better.

Jan
10
2026

Anyone "Out" There Have a Recipe For "Savage Sausage Salad"?

I miss Mrs. Salad, my dear wife, every day, but I miss her even more when I see articles like this on at the College Fix: ‘Queer food’ course at Boston U. explores what ‘polyamorous’ and ‘non-binary’ people eat.

I would have loved to see her reaction. There's a video, and it's kind of a hoot:

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

That's Boston University Metropolitan College Gastronomy Director Megan Elias, and BU's description says she "explores just what makes some food 'queer,' and explains the way food studies can help us interrogate gender roles and norms in societies, and even the wider world."

You might be asking: are they kidding? I know I was.

But apparently not. There's an actual book, co-edited by Megan, at Amazon (link at your right). And here's YouTube's transcript of the BU video:

What is queer food? This is a question that's coming up a lot lately. And when I'm asked this question, what I always say is I'm not interested in making a definition of queer food, but a recognition. So to understand that uh queer food has always been, right? That um queer people have always been cooking. They have always been eating. They have always been part of the food landscape. And so to acknowledge that is really to show us a new way of thinking about food. Now, I teach about food and gender and I write about food and gender. And when I'm doing that, and I guess why I'm doing that is because the way that we think about food, preparation, provisioning, all tends to get entangled with um gender norms. So, even the idea that there's a mom's home cooking, right, really leaves out any household um where there isn't a mom, right? And it it it also sort of creates the person who is doing the cooking in this particular mold, right? This this this the mom p persona. And we know that if we talk to people um we find that there's a whole range of people doing home cooking. And so to acknowledge that, to recognize the range of people who are involved in food is what thinking about queer food can do for us. As I teach food um food studies classes, as I talk with our amazing food studies students here and our faculty, we all find that questioning the assumptions about gender and food really help us to see a wider world of food. So thinking about, you know, just things that might seem silly at first, which is like what would you eat on a first date, right? We talk about those kinds of things. How are how is your food choice sort of representing your um your your your gender identity? Um how is that different if you're gay? How's that different if you're non-binary? How is that different if you're polyamorous? Right? We really feel that talking about queer food is a way to disrupt um kind of ideas about food that really obscure human experience. And that is what we do in food studies, right? We use food to understand the bigger picture of human experience, right? You can look at food and see so many things more than just the food. Oh, this wonderful book that I love that we have in our cookbook collection. You look at this book and you see this great thing is called the Savage Sausage Salad. And we don't even need to read the recipe to understand that someone is having fun with food. We can understand the humor of the the era when this book was written. we can understand what made people laugh, what they took seriously, what was available to them in the marketplace, what was available to them as as ideas of what they should look like, right? Or how they should behave. Um, and how they challenge those ideas.

For those keeping score at home: I count 9 occurrences of "right". That's a lot, right?

And the handwaving, both figuative and literal? Off the charts!

My own reaction is (mostly) amazement that BU thought the Whole Wide World would be favorably impressed with their example of what their "amazing food studies students" are being taught. But (as I do not need to tell you) make up your own mind on that.

Also: Gastronomy Director Elias waves the book containing the "Savage Sausage Salad" recipe at the camera, but not closely enough so we can get the title. Sounds as if it might be tasty, though I can't promise that making it would make me interrogate gender roles.

Also of note:

  • Speaking of interrogating gender roles… John R. Puri notes the latest transition: And Now Trump Is Taking Over Defense Contractors. (archive.today link)

    People say this administration is anti-trans, but the president himself is rapidly transitioning into a woman. Namely, Elizabeth Warren.

    First, he went after institutional investors buying up homes, a longtime bugaboo of the Massachusetts progressive. Warren was quick to take credit for Trump’s proposal to ban large landlords from the rental market, and she’s right to claim it. But, just like the president’s campaign pitch to exempt tips from income tax, mindless economic policies tend to jump the fine line between right-wing and left-wing populism.

    Now, Trump is embracing another of Warren’s favorite premises: that private companies that do business with the government should therefore be controlled by the government. If corporations depend on the government for revenue or assistance, she believes, public officials should be able to set the terms of their existence. With a federal bureaucracy as expansive and intrusive as ours, that means a lot of firms are eligible for manipulation. Under this formulation, contractors aren’t just service providers; they are the rightful domain of the state.

    First, he went after institutional investors buying up homes, a longtime bugaboo of the Massachusetts progressive. Warren was quick to take credit for Trump’s proposal to ban large landlords from the rental market, and she’s right to claim it. But, just like the president’s campaign pitch to exempt tips from income tax, mindless economic policies tend to jump the fine line between right-wing and left-wing populism.

    OK, the trans stuff is funny, but probably unwarranted. Where Senator Liz and President Bone Spurs are truly akin is in their naked desire for power and control over what we used to call the "private sector".

  • Or for a different sort of transitioning… Is the president turning into a different species? A cuter one? George Will notes that we have A president who treats Washington like his chew toy. (WaPo gifted link)

    It is incongruous that Donald Trump, who advertises his disdain for things European, wants to give us something that no one in his or her right mind wants: a knockoff of France’s Arc de Triomphe. Which is bad enough.

    Worse, he wants to situate it on a Washington site where it will clutter one of the world’s great urban vistas. He would place it on the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge, below the Custis-Lee mansion, which sits on high ground in what became Arlington National Cemetery.

    […]

    Given Trump’s gargantuan exercises of executive discretion regarding great matters of state, it might seem quaint to wonder why he cannot be stopped from treating Washington as his chew toy. This would be unworthy of our nation if he had exquisite taste. The fact that he revels in being a vulgarian takes a toll on the nation’s soul.

    Back when I lived in the D.C. area, the Kennedy Center (aka the "Shoebox on the Potomac") was everyone's favorite example of lousy local architecture. Trump seems to be saying "Hold my beer."

  • Nuuk is lovely this time of year. Tyler Cowen says ‘Buying’ Greenland Is Not an Option. Or at least it shoudn't be. But:

    After catching President Donald Trump’s eye in his first term, Greenland has reemerged as a prospect for U.S. acquisition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers that the U.S. seeks to buy the island, Trump asserts that we need it for defense reasons, and White House adviser Stephen Miller insists that Greenland should “obviously” be part of the United States.

    Overall, I am becoming more nervous rather than pleased, as I hold two views firmly: The United States eventually should come into possession of Greenland; and right now, the United States should back off altogether.

    Where do those views—seemingly at odds—come from, and how do they fit together?

    Tyler envisions the best case for Greenland as eventually getting a similar status as Puerto Rico enjoys today. I'm inclined to agree, because he's thought about it, and I haven't. (I'm a little puzzled as to why Denmark wants to hold onto it.)

  • A side effect of electing "fighting fighters that fight". As Jim Geraghty points out, Elected Officials Don’t Really Want Peace or Calm. He compares the statements made out in Portland, Oregon in response to a shooting incident. Contrasting the just-the-facts remarks of (unelected) Portland Police Chief Bob Day and (unelected) DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin with (elected) Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, (elected) Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, (elected) Oregon State Senator Kayse Jama, and (apparently also elected) chair of Multnomah County, Jessica Vega Pederson.

    Read for yourself! Jim's conclusion:

    To sum up, right after the police chief called for calm, the mayor warned that “reckless” “militarized agents” who cannot be trusted are bringing violence to the streets “all across America.” The governor warned that “lawless,” “reckless,” untrustworthy agents of the federal government “are hurting people and they are destroying day by day what we hold dear.” The state senate majority leader declared his intention to legislatively impede the federal agents, pledged to “fight” for it, and told federal agents they need to “get the hell out of our community.” And the county chair accused federal agents of shooting people, causing “terror and violence,” called them “a threat that is growing every day,” and says they are “cruel and authoritarian.”

    Good to see everyone is on the same page urging the public to “remain calm,” right?

    None of these elected officials really want the public to remain calm or peaceful. Mumbling some brief pro forma call for peace does not mitigate the lurid demonization of federal law enforcement officials. If you consistently describe U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as an illegitimate occupation force committing acts of violent terror against innocent people, then not every last member of your citizenry is going to respond peacefully.

    Jim further observes that public officials "show up to the fire with a firehose full of gasoline." That's what you get with demagogues. Their first instinct.


Last Modified 2026-01-12 9:29 AM EST
Jan
9
2026

First-Person Plural Pronouns Are Often Lies

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Fun fact: Amazon has a dizzying array of mugs that refer to pronoun usage, including today's Eye Candy. Without downloading them all, a sampling of other messages you can buy:

  • "What a Beautiful Day to Respect Other People's Pronouns"
  • "She/Her/Hers/Respect my pronouns"
  • "They/Them"
  • "He/Him/He/Him/He/Him/He/Him/He/Him"
  • "I Identify as a Conspiracy Theorist/My Pronouns are Told/You/So"
  • "I Identify as a Threat/My Pronouns are Try/Me"
  • "I Identify as Bacon/My Pronouns are Fat/Salty"
  • "My Pronouns are He/Hee"

… and many more. Why do I get a vision of an early morning department meeting where all the participants bring in their dueling pronoun mugs, conducting silent passive-aggressive arguments up and down the conference table?

Well, that's probably not what Jeff Maurer has in mind when he makes his plea: I’m Begging the Media to Start Unpacking the Word “We”.

It’s crystal clear that Trump not only thinks of the world as “us versus them”: He also doesn’t have a clear sense of what, precisely, “us” and “them” mean. Trump thought that Mexico could be bullied into paying for a border wall because of their trade deficit, thinks we have to invade Greenland to “get” their resources (you can “get” things by buying them), and claims that it’s crucial that “we” get Venezuela’s oil. Individuals, companies, and governments get blended together under “we” and “they” labels that become fuzzy, amorphous, grey blobs in the fuzzy, amorphous, grey blob that is Trump’s brain.

Fox News indulges this idiocy. They frequently pee their pants over the “deals” Trump strikes with other countries, using language that makes it sound like the American people are about to receive a duffel bag filled with money, or possibly pirate treasure. The truth, of course, is that foreign governments and/or companies will make investments in the US, or, ya know…say they’re going to make investments and then not. But I don’t expect better from Fox News, which is a Pravda-type operation designed to: A) Trick the gullible, and B) Sell the gullible ergonomic pillows.

But I’d like to see news outlets that aspire to be more than rage fodder for the 75 percent deceased to push back against the collapsing of the word “we”. “We” should not mean “the United States government, or an American company, or an American person, but it’s unclear.” And the problem isn’t just the word “we” — it’s any word that blurs the reality of who, precisely, is performing the action. And I know that I’m declaring my candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Pedantry here, but this really bothers me.

Me too, and for a long time. My main irk-cause is the "warm collectivism" blanket that people want to sneak into the conversation: "Our homes"; "Our bodies"; "Our data"; and (especially) "Our children".

Which brings to mind this old Jonah Goldberg excerpt:

It’s almost obligatory to mention the Phil Gramm story here. Roughly, it goes like this: Phil Gramm was talking to a group of voters. He was asked what his educational policies were. He replied, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.”

A woman interrupted and said something like, “No, you don’t. I love your kids too.”

Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?”

Also of note:

  • And about time, too. Veronique de Rugy Minnesota Welfare Scandal Is the Fraud Warning Americans Finally Noticed.

    Growing national outrage over Minnesota's welfare fraud is justified, but not because of where it took place or because it implicates members of any immigrant community. It's much more than a "Minnesota" story.

    The outrage is justified because Americans are finally getting a concrete look at what happens when pushing public money out the door matters more than verifying the eligibility of the recipients, confirming services were delivered or, ultimately, being a good steward of taxpayers' money.

    Since 2022, investigators have uncovered a staggering amount of fraud, including $250 million siphoned from pandemic-era child nutrition programs to a network of individuals and shell companies, and have secured dozens of indictments with more prosecutions underway. But it goes beyond that.

    Way beyond. Vero's near-bottom line rings true: "If we want less fraud, we need less government."

  • These people are unwell. And the major problem is at the top. Noah Rothman notes something that may have been missed in all the Venezuela/ICE/Minnesota/Epstein hoopla: Trump Administration Goes Full Tinfoil Hat in Revisionist History of January 6. (archive.today link)

    He's talking about the White House's "j6" page. And:

    The document goes off the rails at the outset — in the introduction, to be exact. In it, Trump’s aides hail the president’s “blanket pardons” of the January 6 convicts. Trump “ordered immediate release of those still imprisoned, ending years of harsh solitary confinement,” the White House’s account reads, “denied due process, and family separation for exercising their First Amendment rights.”

    In fact, the majority of the January 6 convicts were found guilty of misdemeanors and sentenced only to probation. The only people that Trump could spring from prison were those who had been convicted of more serious, even violent, offenses. And there were a lot of them. As I wrote at the time:

    Devlyn Thompson attacked a police officer with a metal baton. Robert Palmer bludgeoned another officer with a fire extinguisher, among other items of debris he could find strewn about the ransacked Capitol steps. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the faces of three Capitol Hill police officers. David Dempsey used all these weapons and more in his frenzied attack on law enforcement. They are free today, along with those who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for the preparation and planning that culminated in that premeditated act of mass violence.

    In addition, federal courts have rejected the claim that some of the criminal charges brought against the rioters represented a violation of their First Amendment rights. As U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote in the case of the Proud Boys defendants, “There were many avenues for defendants to express their opinions about the 2020 presidential election.” Whatever the “expressive aspect” of protests might have been, “it lost whatever First Amendment protection it may have had” at the outset of the violence.

    Adjectives like "shameful" and "delusional" are simply way too mild.

  • They banned Mickey Mouse's dog? Oh, never mind. The College Fix headline is referring to a different beast: ‘Ban on Plato’: Professor says Texas A&M censored materials in contemporary morals class.

    A philosophy professor says Texas A&M University recently demanded that he remove sections about “race” and “gender ideology” – including readings by Plato – from his spring “Contemporary Moral Issues” class to comply with a new course review directive.

    “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented,” Professor Martin Peterson wrote in a letter to his department chair, which he shared with The College Fix Wednesday.

    I strongly suspect we got a good example of malicious compliance here. Bolstered by paragraphs further down in the story:

    At the center of the matter is a new syllabi and course review directive that the university’s Board of Regents adopted in December. It requires deans and department leaders to flag “material advocating race or gender ideology or sexual orientation” for “adjustments,” starting with classes in the spring semester.

    The move followed the regents’ November approval of a civil rights policy that states, “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.”

    The actions relate to larger efforts by Texas conservatives to crack down on diversity, equity, and inclusion and other political and ideological advocacy in the classroom.

    It's tough to "crack down" on DEI/woke indoctrination without also hitting Plato, I guess.

  • I can't go with the "crime" part. So I disagree with James Piereson's headline at the New Criterion: Socialism is a hate crime.

    It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, at least judging by the cult status of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now an avowed socialist has been elected mayor of New York, the commercial capital of the United States and home to that great capitalist institution, the stock market. Even more recently, socialists here and around the world have spoken out in unison against the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela.

    It is ironic that these socialists, along with their supporters and fellow travelers, like to censor conservatives for, allegedly, promoting “hate” and “division.” On that basis, they have banned conservative speakers from appearing on college campuses, and just a few years ago urged Twitter and Facebook to close the accounts of conservatives who spoke out against socialism.

    This raises the question: given the historical record, why don’t we label socialism as a hate crime?

    Well, James, it's because "isms" are not crimes. At least not in America.

    Even though I mostly agree with everything else you're saying.

Recently on the book blog:

Jan
8
2026

Thanks to "Western Lensman"

He was alert enough to find and tweet this:

The "Lensman" (an E.E. "Doc" Smith fan?) paraphrases Senator Kelly's wordy response to Jake Tapper's simple questions, perhaps unfairly. Somewhat more convincingly, Matt Margolis at PJMedia ("Jake Tapper Accidentally Exposed Mark Kelly’s ‘Illegal Orders’ Hypocrisy") is a little more substantive:

Kelly's answer was a mess of semantic gymnastics. "So what we were talking about in the video is about a service member being given a specific order and having to make a decision about whether this is lawful or not," Kelly stammered. "And this is like the reasonable person theory. What you're getting at is constitutional questions. Can a president try to do a law enforcement action on a head of state, but use 150 airplanes and the full force of the U.S. military to do that? So these are two different things."

No, they’re not, actually. Kelly is trying to have it both ways. He participated in a video telling troops that they could refuse orders they deemed illegal, yet when Tapper asked point-blank about an operation his fellow Democrats are literally calling illegal, he suddenly discovered a buttload of nuance.

If Senator Kelly, who claims to have given much thought to these questions, can't give a straightforward answer, how does he expect some lowly grunt in the trenches to do any better, probably at risk of his career and freedom?

Also of note:

  • A handy guide. Charles C.W. Cooke offers advice on How Not to Think About the ICE Shooting in Minnesota. (archive.today link)

    I am not entirely sure what I think about what happened in Minnesota yesterday. On balance, I think that the ICE officer was likely legally justified in his actions, even if I wish that it had turned out differently, but I am always open to counter-arguments, as well as to the emergence of new evidence. These cases are always difficult, and they usually revolve around minutiae. That the crucial details of the event have immediately been swallowed up by maximalist sloganeering is unhelpful in the extreme.

    Charlie lays out seven (!) possible psychological traps to avoid. I have one simple guideline, furnished by Yeats:

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    So don't be like those guys.

  • Not so fast, I still have cousins there! But (on the other hand) I can understand Jeffrey Blehar's attitude, even if it seems to be "full of passionate intensity": To Hell with Minnesota. (archive.today link)

    It is late and I am tired. Specifically, I am tired of Minnesota.

    Others, both here at National Review and across the media, are currently talking and writing about today’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE officer. Was it a “good shoot,” or a blatant crime? Will the city burn once more? Are these the inevitable results of federal intervention? What’s the Somali angle in all this? These are good and important questions, and everyone here — and I hope at least a few elsewhere — will have smart and informed takes. Not me, though. Me? I don’t care.

    … or maybe he lacks all conviction. I can see that too.

  • Letting the door hit them in the ass on the way out. Issues&Insights has thoughts on U-Haul data: The Great Divorce Continues.

    When U-Haul released its latest “Growth Index” this week, it made us wonder if blue states will ever get a clue.

    Once again, the index found a strong migration out of blue states and into red states.

    “Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee follow Texas as prime destinations. It’s the same top five from 2024 and 2023, although in a different order,” the company said.

    The biggest losers: California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.

    Of the top 10 growth states, nine voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 and seven currently have Republican governors.

    Disappointing: New Hampshire is closer to the "wrong" end of the list (32nd place). Even though Massachusetts is even closer to the bottom (46th place), it appears Bay State emigrés mostly aren't coming here, apparently preferring Vermont (24th place) or Maine (15th place).

  • The official diagnosis of the National Review editors: Mamdani Housing Official Cea Weaver Is a Lunatic.

    If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States. She believes that “rent control is a perfect solution to everything” — not least because it is an “effective way to shrink the value of real estate.” She considers that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy,” she believes that “homeownership is racist,” and she holds that the highest aim of government ought to be to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” And they say that ambition is dead in America!

    And that's not all the symptoms they found! I hate beating up on the mentally ill, but is she really the best choice even a commie like the Zohran could make?

  • OK, let's beat up on Cea just one more time. Or we can let the WSJ editorialists do it: Cea Weaver and the Socialist Crybullies. (WSJ gifted link)

    It’s been a tough week for Cea Weaver, the socialist activist appointed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to lead his Office to Protect Tenants. First her old tweets began to recirculate, including previous assertions that “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy” and calls to “seize private property.”

    Then on Wednesday news reporters confronted Ms. Weaver on the street and asked if she wanted to comment on her mother’s ownership of a home in Nashville that the Daily Mail said is valued at $1.4 million. “The 37-year-old began running down the street,” the paper’s Natasha Anderson wrote, “then said ‘No’ through tears.”

    Tina Fey would have been a better choice, I think. She wouldn't run away or cry, anyway.

  • Best of luck in your future endeavors! Dominic Pino, from his Washington Post perch bids farewell and… Good riddance, Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (WaPo gifted link)

    If an organization cannot survive without federal funding, it isn’t really private. This truth is lost on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which saw its taxpayer funding eliminated by Congress in 2025 and said on Monday that it had formally disbanded.

    Despite being established by Congress, receiving its funds from taxpayers and having the word “public” in its name, the CPB says it is a “private corporation funded by the American people.” Its statement announcing the decision to dissolve the organization called the CPB a “private, nonprofit corporation.”

    It’s true that the CPB was not a government agency. But it only existed as a conduit for government money to flow to PBS and NPR stations. When Congress rescinded that money, the CPB began to wind down. Now, that process is complete.

    Dominic makes a pretty standard libertarian argument against the CPB. What's really amusing is the continuing freakout among the readers in the Comments section. As I type, the top "Recommended" comment (picked from the 1691 entered as I type, with 987 upvotes) begins:

    Dominic Pino's association with the National Review tells you everything you need to know about his worldview, and the hard-right turn the Washington Post has taken in the past year. Bezos and his minions are presiding over the destruction of a once-great American institution.

    That's everything you need to know, readers! Don't bother with understanding, let alone rebutting his argument!

    Yet another favorite Pun Salad quote, this one from Comrade Vladimir Lenin:

    Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.

Jan
7
2026

It Kinda Looks Like a Creepy SF Book Cover

That's what came to my mind, anyway. Jeff Maurer had a similar reaction: It’s Getting Hard to Take the Fifa Peace Prize Seriously.

These days, it’s easy to feel unmoored. Everything in the digital age seems up for debate, and few things are permanent. In such a fast-changing world, I increasingly find value in the touchstones that give this mad world some grounding.

For me — like so many people — one of those touchstones has long been the FIFA Peace Prize. Founded in the mid-2020s and presented by FIFA — the soccer governing body whose name is synonymous with integrity — this august award recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of soccer peace. Past winners include Donald Trump. The award recognizes leaders who inspire us, those who embody the better angels of our nature and give hope that the human spirit might soar to lofty new heights. It also features a trophy in which several ghoulish, severed hands are dragging the world to hell:

But recently, President Trump — in my opinion the most distinguished recipient of the award — has acted in ways that could tarnish the good name of the FIFA Peace Prize. After ordering a military operation that toppled the president of Venezuela, Trump issued a series of threats against countries including Columbia, Mexico, and Iran. He threatened further military action against Venezuela if they “don’t behave”, and has generally acted more like Machiavelli than Mandela.

I think Jeff wrote this before Trump mentioned his ongoing Greenland obsession:

During our call, Trump, who had just arrived at his golf club in West Palm Beach, was in evident good spirits, and reaffirmed to me that Venezuela may not be the last country subject to American intervention. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” he said, describing the island—a part of Denmark, a NATO ally—as “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships.”

Rand Simberg embeds this perspective-jarring tweet, as he pleads Stop Using Mercator Projection:

I got nothin' more to say about that.

Also of note:

  • Pursued by a pheasant? Kevin D. Williamson notes a recent stage direction, perhaps as imagined by Chuck Jones: Exit Fudd. (archive.today link)

    Republicans are easily gobsmacked by celebrities—no matter how minor, from Ted Nugent to Scott Baio—but Democrats, perhaps more disturbingly, are easily ensorceled by another kind of exotic specimen: a white man with a gun. 

    The Minnesota governor who (you may have forgotten) was on the 2024 ballot as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick excited Democrats because he was a pheasant hunter. A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds.

    Walz was an evolution of the type: In 2004, when Democrats were trying to make an everyman of Sen. John Kerry, the haughtiest New England snoot ever to mount a sailboard, they put a gun in his hands and stuffed him into a camouflage jacket. When observers noted that the aristocratic senator apparently was too good to carry his own bird, he protested that his mind was elsewhere, thinking about some regular-guy stuff: “I’m still giddy over the Red Sox,” he said. “It was hard to focus.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat and veteran who represents the Boston suburbs, talks about constantly having a rifle in his hand as a Marine and recently declared: “Selling AR-15s at Walmart to teenagers is not just dangerous, it also undermines the military ethic.” Rep. Auchincloss might be happy to know that, here in the real world, Walmart does not sell AR-15s to teenagers—or to anybody else—and hasn’t for more than a decade. Democrats can never get this stuff quite right.

    For fun, imagine Governor Walz at some future press conference: "Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet, I'm hunting fwauds!"

  • What's "rugged" about it anyway? Jonah Goldberg has thoughts: About That ‘Rugged Individualism’ …. (archive.today link) Inspired by Mayor Mamdani's inaugural promise: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

    The term “rugged individualism” was coined by President Hoover in 1928. But we have Democrats to thank for its immortality because Democrats—and democratic socialists—have been running against it, and against Hoover, ever since. FDR campaigned in 1932 by denouncing Hoover’s “doctrine of American individualism” and never really stopped suggesting that Hoover and his party were fanatically anti-government, favoring “devil take the hindmost” capitalism.

    The attacks on Hoover and conservatives generally as libertarian zealots remain ingrained in the popular, journalistic, and academic imagination to this day. And they were unfair from the start. A progressive Republican who’d served in the Wilson administration, Hoover was never the heartless advocate of do-nothing austerity his opponents painted. Indeed, government spending during Hoover’s four years in office nearly doubled in real terms (and, yes, Republicans controlled Congress).

    Jonah's plea, guaranteed to fall on deaf ears, is for political rhetoric to avoid easy caricature of opponents, and deal with the country as-is.

  • Speaking of reality-based, I've been waiting for Andrew C. McCarthy to weigh in. And, sorry Nicolás, he has bad news for you: Legal Questions over the Maduro Extraction Won’t Help Him in Court. (NR gifted link)

    There are significant legal questions about the legitimacy vel non of the dictator Nicolás Maduro’s forcible extraction by U.S. armed forces, working in tandem with American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It is unlikely, however, that the federal criminal case against him in Manhattan’s Southern District of New York (SDNY) will be an effective forum for pressing any objections.

    As a matter of American law, unadorned by any treaty obligations, Maduro really hasn’t a leg to stand on. Even if illegality has attended the arrest of an accused, including any unlawful search of his person or premises, that would not vitiate the charges in an indictment. It would, at most, give the accused grounds to challenge the admissibility of any statements he may have made, or any evidence seized, at the time of arrest.

    Andrew also has a probing query for the Donald: What’s the Plan in Venezuela? (archive.today link) His bottom line:

    What’s the president’s plan? It’s not obvious that he has one. I don’t see how you restore deterrence by taking apparent ownership of (by leaving in place) the anti-American Marxist regime that was the supposed rationale for removing Maduro, while simultaneously encouraging China and Russia to believe they may be able to invade their neighbors with impunity.

    President Trump with a plan? To quote Hemingway one more time: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

  • We're not sending our best. The WSJ editorialists are not impressed with the bouts further down on the card: The Kelly-Hegseth Grudge Match Helps No One. (WSJ gifted link)

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Pentagon is looking to punish retired Navy captain and now Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. His offense: appearing in a partisan social-media video warning troops not to obey illegal orders. This episode reflects well on nobody, and it will further poison the chances of a national defense consensus the country needs.

    Mr. Kelly isn’t an innocent here. He and five other Democratic lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds last year produced a video montage speaking “directly to members of the military.” The “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad,” the lawmakers said, “but from right here at home.” Sen. Kelly says specifically: “Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders.”

    Another quote from the past: "It's a pity they can't both lose." Instead, it's us.

Jan
6
2026

A Day Late

(But Not a Dollar Short)

I'm somewhat ashamed of missing this yesterday:

More information? Keith Whitaker writes In Defense of the Constitution of 1776.

[The New Hampshire State Constitution] was enacted on January 5, 1776, thirteen years before the United States Constitution, and, indeed, before any other state constitution in the emerging nation. It was the first.

And yet, the Constitution of 1776 gets little respect. The State’s own website does not include a page for it. There appear to be no events planned to celebrate its birth. Historians call it a “woefully makeshift” piece of machinery. It was replaced by a completely new constitution on June 2, 1784.

Whitaker notes the bumpy road of New Hampshire government after the last royal governor, John Wentworth, fled to Long Island in 1775. (He wound up in Nova Scotia.)

As long as we're talking about New Hampshire, Ronny Chieng's comedy bit about state mottos is pretty funny, and guess which one he leads with:

There are some F-bombs in there, so use your own judgment on playing it within earshot of sensitive souls.

Continuing in the Granite State vein, I wondered a couple days ago how CongressCritter Maggie Goodlander (D-NH02) would square her gripes about the "legality" of Trump's Venezuela Venture with her previous demand that soldiers "refuse illegal orders". A CNNdroid made a feeble attempt to pin her down on what should have been a pretty straightforward question:

Sure, Maggie.

Also of note:

  • These dots need connecting. Jeffrey Miron makes a good libertarian point about Maduro, Venezuela, and the Drug War.

    Set aside the legal issues raised by the U.S. removal of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro (but see here and here for perspectives that make sense to me);

    And assume, as asserted by the Trump administration, that Maduro has been involved or complicit in the illegal drug trade, with adverse consequences for the United States such as violence, corruption, and overdoses.

    Under these -- the best case -- conditions, is removing Maduro good policy?

    Not even close.

    Removing Maduro might shift underground drug markets from Venezuela to other countries, temporarily, but even that is unlikely. And any disruption of the Venezuelan black market will likely exacerbate the adverse impacts of underground markets.

    The right policy is for the U.S. to legalize all currently prohibited drugs. This will eliminate underground drug markets, which are the real reason for most adverse consequences typically attributed to drugs.

    I'm ambivalent about Miron's foreign policy stance, but I think he's got a valid point about the drug war.

  • Pun Salad gets results! I have little doubt that my posting of this cruel-but-true Michael Ramirez cartoon yesterday pushed Tim over the edge:

    Robby Soave is also happy about it: Tim Walz drops out of Minnesota governor race. Good riddance.

    With dark clouds gathering over his previously sunny reelection bid, Tim Walz has had enough. Minnesota's Democratic governor announced Monday he would abandon his pursuit of a third term following widespread negative publicity due to his mishandling of welfare fraud allegations.

    Walz has not been accused of personal wrongdoing, but the buck stops here, as they say. Walz was the man in charge while fraudsters stole millions, or perhaps billions, of taxpayer dollars by setting up fake charities, ransacking the medical system, and operating dubious child care services. The sheer amount of plunder has attracted national media attention in recent weeks, with even The New York Times throwing Walz under the bus.

    The governor's response has not reassured his critics that he is laser focused on restoring credibility to these programs and mercilessly prosecuting thieves. It is fine to insist, as Walz has, that the entire Somali diaspora not be smeared for the criminal behavior of some community members, but the governor has made a habit of trying to redirect blame to other groups, such as white men. This is unpersuasive, since the accusations against the Somalis are about proportionality, not absolute levels of crime. Moreover, saying that we must be color-blind with respect to the ethnicities of the fraudsters while also calling for more white men to be held accountable is totally incoherent.

    Totally incoherent? Well, he probably took lessons for that from Kamala.

  • "Crime is common. Logic is rare." Allysia Finley speaks the truth: The Scandal of American Welfare Goes Beyond Fraud. (WSJ gifted link)

    Economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that the government pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up. This is an apt metaphor for progressive government these days: It creates social dysfunction, then shovels out money to correct it. Dredge, fill and repeat.

    Healthcare and social assistance added more than 1.6 million private-sector jobs between June 2023 and June 2025, according to comprehensive data from employer payrolls published by the Labor Department in December. Yet the U.S. gained only 1.3 million private jobs during that period, meaning there was a net loss of jobs in other industries.

    These two industries accounted for more than half of the new establishments (businesses and nonprofits) created over those two years. Minnesota’s welfare-fraud scandal make you wonder: How many of these new entities and their employees are actually helping people, and how many are merely looting the government?

    In case you aren't tired of it yet, one of Pun Salad's adages applies: "When Uncle Stupid starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets."

    (Headline quote source: Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches")

Jan
5
2026

Nothing About Venezuela!

I'm already bored. Maybe tomorrow? We'll see. Instead:

If you prefer words, the WaPo has a "Republicans pounce" headline: Tim Walz was a Democratic hopeful. Now, he’s a Republican punching bag. (WaPo gifted link)

MINNEAPOLIS — Just a few months ago, Larissa Laramee would have encouraged Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to run for president. She admired the man who helped lead the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024 — and who once taught her social studies.

But Laramee’s feelings have changed as a years-long welfare fraud probe in Minnesota becomes a national maelstrom. Prosecutors say scammers stole brazenly from safety net programs, taking hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding — potentially billions — for services they never provided while Walz led the state.

“I like him as a person. He’s fantastic,” said Laramee, 40, who works at a Minnesota nonprofit for people with disabilities. Walz, as her high school teacher, helped inspire her career, she said. “But with all of this that’s happened, I’m struggling with seeing a path forward for him.”

Reading through the long article seems to indicate that Minnesota's anti-fraud efforts were largely reactive, once the scams got too big to ignore. Not too good on the proactive side, checking that things were kosher before the checks went out. Tsk!

Also of note:

  • It's a must-miss! Andy Kessler takes a look at a butchering operation: Painting ‘Animal Farm’ Red. (WSJ gifted link)

    You can’t hate Hollywood enough. Last month a trailer dropped for “Animal Farm: A Cautionary Tail,” an animated retelling of George Orwell’s 1945 book. It stars Seth Rogen and his infectious chuckle as the pig Napoleon. What could go wrong? Everything, it turns out.

    Orwell’s original book was an allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution, communism and its inevitable descent into totalitarianism. I read it in high school. You probably did too. The allegory was pretty transparent: Napoleon was Stalin, Snowball was Trotsky, Farmer Jones was Czar Nicholas II, and Old Major was a combination of Lenin and Marx.

    Forget all that. While only a trailer is available, the film was reviewed after appearing at a festival last June. Remarkably, instead of Stalin, the antagonist is a tech billionairess who drives a Cybertruck knockoff. Really! She bribes Napoleon with fast cars and credit cards and, as one reviewer put it, her “methods mimic the hostile-takeover techniques of big banks and monopolistic companies.” Hilarity ensues. Yes, capitalism is the villain. Hollywood strikes again.

    Andy notes that the movie's release date is that Commie holiday, May 1.

  • But will Tariff Man read it? Don Boudreaux writes Another Open Letter to Tariff Man. AKA Donald J. Trump. And I'm just gonna quote the whole thing:

    Mr. Trump:

    On New Year’s Eve your office released a “Fact Sheet” stating that you “imposed reciprocal tariffs to take back America’s economic sovereignty, address nonreciprocal trade relationships that threaten our economic and national security, and to remedy the consequences of nonreciprocal trade.”

    Your only possible retort that would retain as much as a tenuous connection to logic would be to insist that foreigners regularly dupe us Americans into buying things that we don’t want to buy – that is, to insist that we Americans are incurably stupid at conducting our own economic affairs, while foreigners are so astonishingly clever that they routinely swindle us out of our own money. Do you, sir, really believe that your fellow Americans are generally the intellectual inferiors of foreigners?

    Second, by obstructing each of your fellow Americans’ voluntary, peaceful trades with foreigners you diminish the economic sovereignty of each and every one of us. What (il)logic leads you to conclude that by obstructing – with your taxes on our purchases of imports – the economic sovereignty of 340 million Americans, you thereby “take back America’s economic sovereignty”?

    Your tariffs do for us Americans the opposite of what you assert: they diminish our economic sovereignty and, in this sorry bargain, also make us poorer than we’d otherwise be.

    Well, there's always the possibility that SCOTUS will save us. Although, as Politico's legal analyst Ankush Khardori writes: Trump Is Raging at a Looming Supreme Court Loss on Tariffs. He’s Got a Point.

    The fate of the Trump administration’s tariff regime hangs in the balance before the Supreme Court, and no one seems more concerned about the likelihood of a major defeat than President Donald Trump himself.

    “Evil, American hating Forces are fighting us at the United States Supreme Court,” Trump recently wrote on his social media site. “Pray to God that our Nine Justices will show great wisdom, and do the right thing for America!”

    SCOTUSblog has a long list of the "evil, American hating" folks who have submitted amici curiae briefs in the case. Like the Cato Institute, the Goldwater Institute, and (I am not making this up) Princess Awesome.

Recently on the book blog:

Jan
4
2026

Venezuela!

Today's Eye Candy is explained at GettyImages: "Venezuelan citizens living in the city of Medellin, Colombia, celebrate the capture of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, following an attack by the United States."

The young lady's sign, fed to Google Translate, seems to be something like: "We want to return home, away from the dictatorship."

It was just a few days ago I mentioned my weakness on foreign policy stuff, "torn between a sensible isolationism on one hand, and not wanting to see bad guys win on the other." Add in an old-fashioned fealty to the Constitution, which (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11) says that war-declaration is a Congressional power, not the President's.

And of course, Maduro is one of the baddest of the bad guys. Shorn of other concerns, it's a win when he's taken off the board.

I am idly wondering what any of the six Democrats who gratuitously urged the military to "refuse illegal orders" back in November are saying now. Do they consider Trump's action illegal? Do they think the troops involved should have Just Said No?

One of those D's: New Hampshire's CongressCritter, Maggie Goodlander. Here's her Official Tweet:

Any service member looking for guidance from Maggie about whether to "refuse illegal orders" in this case will not find any definite advice here.

So, as I've said many times in the past: I link, you decide. First up is Clark Nelly from Cato: Venezuela—Indictments, Invasions, and the Constitution’s Crumbling Guardrails.

Last night, US forces attacked various locations in Venezuela in an operation to capture the loathsome President Nicolás Maduro and bring him to New York to face federal weapons and drug-trafficking charges for which he and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020. Much ink has already been spilled regarding the legality of that operation and whether it transgresses the allocation of power over foreign affairs between the legislative and executive branches.

The short answer is that while the operation, which appears to have been more about regime change than law enforcement, raises profound constitutional concerns, the courts will almost certainly bless the ensuing prosecution and leave to Congress the decision whether to punish the president for overstepping his authority or claw back its war-making and foreign-policy responsibilities from an increasingly ambitious executive.

Nelly notes that the United States (under George H.W. Bush) did something similar to Panama's Noriega back in 1989, and that precedent might apply here. (Noriega died in prison back in 2017. I had to look that up.)

Jonathan Turley is OK with it: The United States Captures Nicolás Maduro and his Wife. He also invokes the Noriega Precedent.

Democratic members quickly denounced the operation as unlawful. They may want to review past cases, particularly the decision related to the Noriega prosecution after his capture by President George H.W. Bush in 1989.

Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass) declared:

“Without authorization from Congress, and with the vast majority of Americans opposed to military action, Trump just launched an unjustified, illegal strike on Venezuela. He says we don’t have enough money for healthcare for Americans—but somehow we have unlimited funds for war??”

Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation. Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this “kill list” policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.

But check out George Will's take: Trump goes monster-hunting, untainted by a whiff of legality. (WaPo gifted link) Skipping down to the bottom line:

Meanwhile, the Trump administration must devise justifications for the Venezuelan intervention without employing categories by which Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping can give a patina of faux legality to forcibly ending nearby regimes they dislike. The Trump administration’s incantations of its newly minted and nonsensical phrase “narco-terrorism” will not suffice.

Andrew C. McCarthy, the conservative lawyer who prosecuted terrorists convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, says this phrase “has no standing as a legal term — no significance in the extensive bodies of federal law defining narcotics trafficking and terrorism.”

As Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) said, “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” Narcotics trafficking is a serious crime. It is not a terrorist activity. Neither is the self-“poisoning” of Americans who ingest drugs.

And perhaps with this: When Theodore Roosevelt asked Attorney General Philander Knox to concoct a legal justification for the unsavory U.S. measures that enabled construction of the Panama Canal, Knox replied, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

Speaking of Andrew C. McCarthy: I don't think he's weighed in yet over at National Review. As I type, anyway.

Also of note:

  • Steven Greenhut urges New Year Resolutions for the GOP: In 2026, Republicans will have to decide what comes after Trump.

    We've become numb to narcissistic rage posts from our president, but the highly publicized Turning Point USA convention last week offers a preview into where the Republican Party is going after Donald Trump exits the stage. It's not pretty. As we've seen recently in other squabbles within the conservative movement, the fireworks centered on the rhetoric of some conspiracy minded—but highly popular—right-wing personalities. TPUSA had it all: in-fighting, name-calling and innuendo.

    In the old days, the conservative movement tried to police itself, as it shoved authoritarians and conspiracy theorists to the sidelines. Buckley took on the John Birch Society, which in its zealous anti-communism argued the United States government was controlled by communists. Standing up to the Evil Empire was a core part of conservative philosophy, but Buckley realized that allowing the fever swamps to engulf his movement only tarnished that goal.

    Some critics argue Buckley wasn't all that successful, but he was successful enough to keep the party from becoming what it has become now—where reasonable voices are drowned out by the likes of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. If there are no adults in charge—and the party's leader acts like a toddler, as he savages his foes in petty tantrums, renames buildings after himself and adds insulting White House plaques below the portraits of former presidents—then the whole trashy movement will one day be heaved into the dumpster.

    I'd only make the point that to a limited extent the MSM are also guilty of amplifying the kooky/evil volces of Fuentes, Carlson, Owens, et al. They love to showcase those guys. (Much like, back in 2015-6, they loved to cover Trump, to the detriment of the less wacky candidates.)