Pun Salad

Well, at least the WaPo editorialists are noticing Maine’s race to the top on taxes. (WaPo gifted link)

Leading off with a loaded question:

Gov. Janet was wary in the past about boosting Maine's tax burden further. (As pointed out yesterday: by one measure, it was already fifth-highest among the states.)

But that was then. She signed the "Millionaire's Tax" into law on Friday. And:

The AI summary of comments on the editorial contains the expected demonization: "Many comments criticize the Washington Post's editorial stance, suggesting it aligns with the interests of billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who allegedly oppose higher taxes on the wealthy."

Also of note:

• The long-awaited sequel to Cats? Well, probably not. Kevin D. Williamson provides advice to a has-been grifter: Beware the Stranger, Professor Kendi. (archive.today link)

  

  It's a sort-of take-no-prisoners review of Ibram X. Kendi's latest book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, Amazon link at your right.

  Americans could use someone to do what it is Prof. Kendi seems to want to do, but doing it in a constructive way is going to require a more open, more genuinely liberal, and more humane approach to the tangle of human affairs than what is on offer in this book. Prof. Kendi often seems not to have so much an idea as an enemies list, and, even though some of his enemies deserve to be all of our enemies, that is not enough. The job at hand will require someone who can answer T. S. Eliot’s question:

  When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
  Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
  What will you answer? “We all dwell together
  To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
  Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
  Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

  (The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library has a copy of Kendi's book, of course, and I might give it a try.)

• You'll get tired of all the booming. David Harsanyi takes the Milei-haters to school: Argentina Is Booming.

  In 2023, over 100 leading economists from around the world, including progressive darling Thomas Piketty, signed a letter warning that "far-right" Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei's policies, which were "rooted in laissez-faire economics," would cause "devastation," spike inflation, expand poverty and worsen unemployment.

  Celebrated economists never penned any open letters warning that the preceding Peronists' or Kirchnerists' perverse blend of fascism, socialism and unionism would drive Argentina — once one of the world's wealthiest nations — into destitution, unemployment, soaring inflation and bankruptcy.

  But that's how it always goes.

  And you'll never believe what happened next!

• They're over there, behind the fat guy buying Coca-Cola with his EBT card. Nick Gillespie asks the musical question: Why Is It So Damn Hard To Find Sympathetic Student Loan 'Victims'?

  Is any subgenre of journalism more debased and alienating than the student-loan sob story? If paying for college with heavily subsidized, federally backed loans was in fact the cause of the new, universal serfdom we hear so much about, you'd think that places like The New York Times would be able to scare up highly sympathetic young adults who tug at readers' heartstrings like orphans in a Dickens novel.

  Instead, in stories like last week's "Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying," you get characters like 37-year-old Amanda Lynn Tully, who "graduated in 2017 with a master's degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field." Tully, reports the Times, "felt misled" and so "made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn't made a payment in over seven years."

  Right off the bat, something seems off. Tully, the Times tells us, grew up in Colorado and "spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life." That sounds like an incredibly rough way to start out, but how did we get to Oregon and graduate school so quickly? And then there's this:

  Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.

  Click through, but if your opinion of Ms. Tully dropped below zero right when you read "psychologically burdensome", join the club.

• Good advice to Mamas, and also Papas. From Robert Graboyes: Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Disgruntled, Underemployed PhDs.

  A year or so ago, a friend wrote to ask advice, saying that her son, a 16-year old rising high school senior, was “obsessed with being an economist” and whose dream was to work for the Bank of England. In response, I sent a bullet-list of grumpy warnings whose overriding message was that such a goal is fine, as long as he treats it as merely one possibility on a sizable list of wildly divergent career paths. This echoed advice I’ve offered for decades to young proteges. (See my earlier essays, “Overcoming College: Getting a Job In Spite of Your Education” and “20 Job Tips for 2020s 20-Somethings: Plus, with sheep comes optimism.”)

  I have a PhD in economics from Columbia University and have enjoyed a long and interesting career. For over 25 years, one part of that career has been teaching and mentoring grad students working on their PhDs. So, why did I offer my friend caveats regarding her son’s deeply admirable, highly focused ambition?

  Robert asks ChatGPT for less risky career paths, and it's quite interesting.

  As someone whose higher-ed path terminated with an ABD (all but dissertation) degree in physics, I wish a 1970 version of Robert's advice was provided to me. Things worked out OK, eventually, but there was a lot of angst along the way.

So I'm currently reading an old (© 1960) book, Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, Amazon link at your right. My report will be upcoming on the book blog eventually. Consider this a preview, a sentence from Chapter 20:

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.

Obvious, when you think about it.

Spoiler: Chapter 20 is titled "Taxation and Redistribution". And the quoted sentence is in the course of Hayek's argument against tax "progressivity".

Unfortunately, the Washington Post has yet to change its motto to "Democracy Dies in the Imposition of a Progressive Income Tax."

Coincidentally, that state across the Salmon Falls River just thumbed its nose at Hayek. News report: Gov. Mills signs budget featuring millionaire's tax, free community college & more.

And as predictable as the tides off Short Sands Beach, the local op-ed writer Douglas Rooks confirmed (in my awful local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat) that the true "progressive" motto is "Never Enough": 'Millionaire's tax' just the start of needed tax reform in Maine. (archive.today link)

Rooks is all in favor, in other words. Not going after the millionaires for more money means you have "failed to act". No argument necessary!

I keep going back to that recent WalletHub study, detailing the Tax Burden by State in 2026. Reader, as a percentage of total personal income, Maine was already taking the fifth-highest fraction. Behind only Hawaii, New York, Vermont, and New Mexico. Where, I wonder, will they be next year?

The Tax Foundation argued (futilely) against the move on pragmatic grounds: Maine’s Proposed Millionaire’s Tax Would Harm the State’s Economy.

A note to those "2,631 filers": Should you get tired of yet another "infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself", a reasonable facsimile of Galt's Gulch is conveniently located on the other side of the bridge between South Berwick and Rollinsford.

Also of note:

• Claude, could you summarize this article for me? Never mind, I'll do it myself. Jack Nicastro writes in the May issue of Reason: Both parties in Congress want to regulate AI. Here's where they differ.

  At the federal level, Republican-written AI bills tend to be less concerned with policing how individuals use the technology than with regulating the development and deployment of the underlying technology—large language models (LLMs). Democrat-written bills tend to focus on individual malfeasance rather than the tech itself.

  Accordingly, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) was so outraged last year by a (hilarious) deepfake of herself that she called on Congress to affirm "the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness." In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills in 2024 that restricted the use of AI to create political content deemed deceptive in advance of elections.

  On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) doesn't just want to ban driverless cars to protect unionized truck drivers from automation or ban minors from accessing AI companion chatbots; he wants frontier AI developers to submit their models to the Energy Department for potential nationalization before they're granted permission to deploy their models commercially.

  But it's not like there's no overlap. Each of these bills is co-sponsored by at least one senator from the other party.

  I'd imagine things will eventually result in a "bipartisan comprimise", featuring the worst ideas from both sides.

  But since Jack pointed it out, here's that deepfake of Senator Amy:

  Check it out before it's censored!

• It's far from supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Nellie Bowles had a brief note in her weekly "TGIF" column at the Free Press concerning the latest Acronym of Oppression: MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+

  On my last Canadian note—it’s a 20! I’ll be here all week!—New Democratic Party MP Leah Gazan expressed her frustration at budget cuts by saying: “They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.” Them’s a lot of letters. I thought that surely had to be a joke. So I googled the phrase and sure enough, it’s real. I really try not to make too much fun of the alphabet soup stuff. It’s too easy. It’s played out. I’m better than it. But then a member of parliament drops MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ on us. What are we supposed to do here, guys? When will the letters end? Is there pi of letters? Why two Q’s?

  Indeed. And is the Bablylon Bee simply being funny or prescient in their take: Here's What Each Of The 73 Letters In Canada's New LGBT Acronym Stands For.

  If you haven't heard, Canada has officially dropped a new acronym for the LGBT movement with many, many new additions. The LGBT community in Canada is now:

  MMBJOUQTJLAYAWD40ROOMDCF+SVPWIZ¯\_(ツ)_/¯BFJTWLEGOBLT£LADBOSUBDDBLAGF+>:-(

  It's quite the mouthful, so to get you up to speed, here are what each of the 73 characters in the acronym stand for:

  No spoilers. Click over.

Take it away, Remy!

Want to sing along? Lyrics are here.

If you want a crackpot solution to gerrymandering, I proposed one nine years ago. Which was greeted with a total lack of interest, but I still like it.

Also of note:

• Kevin D. Williamson is anything but merciful. Especially when he observes President Bone Spurs: Trump Is Anything but Unpredictable. (archive.today link)

  The Iranians do not have very many advantages in the war the United States has launched on them, but they do have a few. One is a willingness to suffer and die and to pay economic costs that evidently exceeds the present American capacity for such sacrifice; the second, unexpected though the fact may be, is a critical edge in the matter of political intelligence: Washington has consistently misunderstood the nature of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran for going on 50 years now, but the Iranians seem to have a reasonably good handle on the character of the current U.S. administration.

  For lo these many years, I have been advising observers not to make the mistake of overcomplicating Donald Trump. The ayatollahs, of all people, seem to have got to the core of the issue before most American political commentators.

  Trump describes himself (and his admirers describe him) as pragmatic, a man of common sense, which is the nice way of saying that he is a man without principles or fixed moral commitments, and even the single limited virtue to which he occasionally pays tribute is a one-way street: Loyalty to Trump is all-important, but loyalty from Trump—ask Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump about that. Some simple men are saints and may be most easily understood in terms of their saintly virtues: St. Francis was good and gentle because he was good and gentle. Trump is the mirror image of the simple saint: He’s a simple man whose actions are most directly and accurately described as the ordinary daily application of his vices: laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity. He is a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools and a vulnerability to manipulation by men who are similarly vicious but more capable: Vladimir Putin, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, even one or two of his idiot children. Stronger men can push him around, and weaker men succeed by flattering him. His enemies can manipulate him at least as easily as his allies.

  I suppose it's possible that we could get good results out of our Iran escapades, but that's not the way I'd bet.

• Who will be our Pun Hero today? George Will! His column is headlined: An unpardonable abuse of presidential power with only one solution. (WaPo gifted link)

  Unpardonable, get it?

  

  Oh, well. GFW reports on a recent book by Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History, Amazon link at your right. Some recent history:

  Bill Clinton greased the downward slide. He pardoned his half brother (Secret Service code name: “Headache”), who then made a fortune lobbying his sibling, the president, to pardon, among others, a Gambino mob associate. As Hillary Clinton began seeking a U.S. Senate seat, her husband commuted the sentences of 16 members of a Puerto Rican group that had detonated more than a hundred bombs in the United States. He pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive who owed $48 million in taxes. Rich’s ex-wife made a $450,000 contribution to Clinton’s presidential library, gave $100,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign, and $1 million to the Democratic Party.

  This was unseemly enough, but Prakash says, “Something has qualitatively changed over the past two presidencies.” Leaving office, Biden gave preemptive pardons to a slew of family members. Prakash: “For many years, Joseph Biden had been involved in a sordid business, where he was the product.” Family members charged for access to him. He gave preemptive pardons to two brothers, his sister and her husband, and a sister-in-law. Before the 2024 election, he said, regarding his egregiously corrupt son Hunter, “I will not pardon him.” After the election, he did.

  In Trump’s first term, he pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, who, for vengeance against his brother-in-law who had testified against him, hired a prostitute, filmed her encounter with the brother-in-law, and mailed the tape to his sister. Having, consecutively, the two seediest families in presidential history has besmirched the practice of pardoning.

  So what's the "solution" promised in the headline? Alas:

  So, the remedy for tawdry pardoning is not this or that institutional gambit. The only feasible solution is the election of presidents who are not louts. This, however, becomes less likely as voters are made ever more cynical by loutish pardons.

  Cynical? Moi?

• "I'll take 'Speculating on stuff that won't happen' for $1000, Ken." Still, I appreciate that Eric Boehm is asking something close to the right question: What if Social Security was capped at $100,000 annually?

  Capping annual Social Security payments at $100,000 per household (or $50,000 per individual) would help extend the program's solvency without raising taxes on workers or cutting benefits to retirees who actually depend on the program to make ends meet, according to a report published last month by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). The so-called "Six-Figure Limit" on Social Security payments would save an estimated $190 billion over ten years and would close nearly half of Social Security's long-term fiscal shortfall.

  Eric notes the pluses and minuses. A big minus is that it only fixes "nearly half" of the problem. And an even bigger problem: try to find any pol running for election that supports the idea.

• Counterpoint. Back last week, I linked to a different Eric Boehm article/video, which described Total Boomer Luxury Communism. One of his big bugaboos was "Medicare Advantage" plans, which involved Uncle Stupid paying for pickleball fees and Kitty Litter. Honest!

  The WSJ editorialists have leapt to the defense: The Truth About Medicare Advantage (WSJ gifted link). They don't mention pickleball, but here's their bottom line:

  Insurers are a bipartisan scapegoat for rising Medicare spending. But it’s notable that overall Medicare spending last decade totalled $431 billion less than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2010, even as the share of beneficiaries in Advantage increased by half.

  Democrats dislike Advantage because they prefer government-run healthcare, though the latter has higher costs. The opposition to Advantage is ideological, no matter the facts.

  Not a Disclaimer: I have "supplemental" Medicare coverage, not Advantage.

• "Um." That's probably the intended reaction to the headline on Wesley J. Smith's NR Corner post: Allow Euthanasia for the Mentally Ill or They Will Commit Suicide. That turns out to be the assertion of a "Canadian activist" advocating "Medical Assistance in Dying" (MAID).

  The idea here is that a “suicide” will be potentially messier and/or perhaps less successful than a doctor or nurse administering a lethal jab. Or that a person will take his own life earlier than he might otherwise if he knew a doctor would do the deed for him.

  Well, this much is true. Being MAIDed is not suicide. Euthanasia is a homicide, and doctors or nurse practitioners are the killers.

  Hey, here’s an absurd notion: How about trying to prevent these deaths instead of facilitating them? Crazy, right?

  I've thought for a long time that medical personnel shouldn't be killing patients. (Shocking, I know.) Instead, suitably gowned specialists—call them "Reapers"—should do the deed.

• And congratulations are in order. For NASA's successful Artemis II mission, which didn't kill its astronauts. I haven't heard anything about how well the capsule's heat shield held up.

  Artemis is still a waste of taxpayer money, and an unscalable, unsustainable approach to manned spaceflight.

And now on to the daily hodgepodge:

• I really hesitated to post this. At the Free Press, Frannie Block is asking "out loud" about what a lot of people are probably thinking: Could Artemis II Burn Up on Reentry?

  The two most dangerous moments in space flight are the launch and the reentry. The launch of Artemis II went smoothly, but on Friday, when the four-person crew reenters the earth’s atmosphere, significant danger lurks.

  As it begins its reentry, the spacecraft Orion will enter what’s called the thermosphere, where they will travel through heat that can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “You’re in the middle of a fireball for about 15 minutes,” Charlie Camarda, a retired astronaut and senior engineer at NASA, told me.

  Artemis I had some pretty nasty erosion on its heat shield on its reentry. Camarada has been out of NASA since 2019, but "he doesn’t trust NASA’s engineers to have fully understood, and rectified, the heat shield’s problems." And

  Even if the heat shield holds this time, Carmada thinks disaster at NASA is inevitable. “We’re just playing with the odds, and the odds are going to get us, because we’re not fixing the real problem,” he said, “and that’s the culture.”

  Complaints about NASA's "culture" are mandatory after astronaut-killing disasters (Apollo 1 in 1967; Challeger in 1986; Columbia in 2003). Recommended reading: Richard Feynman's "Appendix F" to the Rogers Commission report on the Challenger accident, which contains the bottom line:

  For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

  We've seen a lot of "public relations" over the past few days.

  My (admittedly cynical) view: socialism doesn't work in space any better than it does on Earth. I'll be watching the coverage on TV tonight, with all my hopes and fears turned up to 11.

• Speaking of socialism on Earth… The CBS News show with a "long-standing tradition of existence", 60 Minutes, devoted about 13 minutes on Sunday to…

  The AntiPlanner, Randal O'Toole, watched and concluded: 60 Minutes Misses the Point.

  Californians are fed up with high-speed rail. And no wonder: the state has spent $18 billion so far and hasn’t laid a single mile of track; the whole project is approximately four times over budget; it is expected to be done 20 years late; and all the state has to brag about is the jobs that have been created doing nothing. If you don’t believe people are fed up, just read all of the responses made to the jobs tweet.

  Unfortunately, when 60 Minutes asked why the U.S. doesn’t have high-speed passenger trains when so many other countries do, it completely missed the point. It’s answers were things like the Eisenhower administration building the Interstate Highway System, thus “fueling the world’s proudest car culture”; farmers objecting to having their farms cut up for a high-speed rail line; and “California’s exacting environmental regulations.”

  But those aren’t the reasons we don’t have high-speed rail. The real reason is that high-speed rail is a high-cost solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. That problem is how to get people from one urban area to another and we already have two solutions to that: airlines that can move people faster and at a lower cost than trains; and highways that give people more flexibility to reach more destinations at a lower cost than trains. Between those two answers, there really isn’t a need for high-speed trains.

  For the record, Elon Musk is tweeting his solution:

  The @BoringCompany could build a Hyperloop tunnel from downtown SF to downtown LA for <5% of this cost and it would be a technological marvel exceeding any high speed rail on Earth https://t.co/2WwQuDVIAV

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2026

  True? We'll probably never know.

• Hey, kids, what time is it? Vero de Rugy says It's Time to Take Unserious Presidential Budgets Seriously.

  The president's fiscal 2027 budget is out, and I have two reactions. The first will sound familiar: Like so many budgets before it, this is not a serious effort to put America's government on a sustainable path. The second is more important: It would be a mistake to dismiss it as just another unserious document. That is exactly how we got here.

  Start with what the new budget does and does not do. It's not a comprehensive fiscal plan. It covers only about one-third of federal spending, focusing heavily on discretionary choices and largely ignoring the autopilot spending that drives our long-term debt.

  The headline item is defense spending. The administration proposes a jump of $445 billion to reach $1.5 trillion. That's a 42% increase in one year, the largest since the Korean War, raising defense spending to roughly 4.4% of GDP.

  Well, that's a lot. In Trump's defense (heh), he's been blowing up a lot of stuff over the past year or so.

• Disappontment! Usually the Josiah Bartlett Center is a reliable and moderately sensible conservative/libertarian voice. So I was a little shocked at the headline on a recent article: SNAP candy & soft drink ban would hurt retailers.

  Um. May I suggest a fix: "SNAP candy & soft drink ban would help taxpayers."

  The article summarizes a study by Zachary Cady, which you can read here. Like the article, the study doesn't consider taxpayer benefits.

• On the LFOD watch. Whitney Curry Wimbish's American Prospect article has a pretty dire headline: Live Tax-Free and Die. Eek!

  Late last year, the godfather of supply-side economics dropped in on a Georgia state Senate special committee hearing. He spoke of the urgent need to dump their income tax, a “killer, killer, killer,” akin to “a nuclear weapon,” that has destroyed the 11 states that have instituted it as of 1960: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

  “Each and every one of those states in population has had a cataclysmic decline relative to the rest of the nation. It’s just amazing,” said Arthur Laffer, inventor of the “Laffer curve,” the discredited theory that claims lowering taxes raises tax revenue. Georgia could avoid the same fate if they got rid of their income tax, which funds nearly 60 percent of the state’s entire $34.8 billion budget.

  This was a familiar refrain from a conservative anti-tax champion. But before Laffer left, he asked to make one more point, something that staked out new territory for his movement.

  “I know I’m pushing on my time on you, but I got one thing else I’d like to mention, and it’s very important in Georgia, and in all the states except for one,” he said. “You have a big, big, big … big property tax problem.” That’s the real policy holding the state back from prospering. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Freezing those property taxes would bring Georgia all the way back, Laffer counseled.

  According to Whitney, things get apocalyptic really fast:

  THIS IS MAGA’S NEW FRONT in the war on working people, falsely packaged as a boon to the poor and an answer to the affordability crisis. It expands the GOP’s half-century-long project to reduce taxes of all kinds to deprive governments of raising money to pay for services, saddling citizens with unsafe roads, traffic congestion, canceled traffic projects, lower teacher pay, higher teacher turnover, larger class sizes, ruined parks, and people losing their health insurance. Twenty-six states have cut their personal and/or corporate income taxes since 2021, and four intend to reduce them to zero: Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

  I was reminded of those classic Ghostbusters lines: A "disaster of biblical proportions!" "Real wrath of God type stuff!" "Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!" "Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes..." " Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!"

  I boogied on over to the WalletHub study to find out where Georgia ranked tax-burden wise. It turns out they're … mediocre: in position #30 overall, with the state grabbing 8.15% of its taxpayer's personal incomes. Pretty far away from both New Hampshire (5.38%) and Hawaii (13.30%). Still, plenty of room for improvement, but also plenty of room for plunder!

Bryan Caplan has an interesting approach to some thorny questions: The Philosophy of Bah. And I'll boldface the one I'm most interested in:

What does he recommend?

It's interesting that the most steadfast free-will deniers ("determinists") don't seem to also buy into those other beliefs: solipsism, radical skepticism, memory skepticism, self-dissolution, eliminative materialism, moral nihilism.

Is the reality of free will somehow different from the other things Bryan lists that we can't "prove"? Something to think about when I'm having difficulty falling asleep, I guess.

Also of note:

• Fortunately, I'm not in the market yet. George Will sometimes can't resist tweaking the statists: A casket cartel tries to bury the competition.

  “You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma!” — Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (1943)

  No, you’re not. The waving wheat might sure smell sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain, but there is an unpleasantly pungent aroma surrounding the rent-seeking you allow. Would that Oklahoma’s legislators took the U.S. Constitution as seriously as they take caskets.

  In the town of Calvin, the married couple Candi Mentink and Todd Collard conceived an entrepreneurial idea that their state’s law says is forbidden. They sell inexpensive caskets wrapped in vinyl graphic designs depicting hunting, fishing, religious motifs, sports teams’ logos, perhaps even the likeness of famous Oklahomans. Imagine whiling away eternity in a Mickey Mantle casket. Heavenly.

  I have no idea what New Hampshire's casket regulations are. I hope I won't need to find out.

• No Queens? That would seem to be an issue over in Maine, as Jonathan Turley narrates The Maine Event: Shenna Bellows Runs for Governor on Unconstitutional Effort to Bar Trump from Ballot.

  Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is actually running for governor on her willingness to take flagrantly unconstitutional action. Bellows is touting her removal of Trump from the ballot, an effort that led to a unanimous Supreme Court swatting down Colorado and Maine. Bellows is virtually giddy recounting her efforts to stymie democracy and prevent voters from casting their ballots for the man who ultimately won the election.

  Democrats have been running this year on the pledges to launch a virtual roundup of Trump officials and supporters for investigations and impeachments. New York congressional candidate George Conway is pledging to change impeachment rules to secure the removal of President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. However, Bellows, the former ACLU executive director in Maine, is parading her willingness to do things barred by the Constitution.

  Campaigning on an unconstitutional act rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court (including three liberal justices) truly captures this age of rage. It is the equivalent to how mobsters “make their bones” by whacking someone. Bellows is effectively saying that she was willing to do what other Democrats were unwilling to do: violate the Constitution.

  The spittle-flecked folks outraged (with reason) about Trump's various efforts to skirt the Constitution seem to be pretty quiet about Shenna.

• Sorry for the repetition, but: No Queens! At Cato, Norbert Michel and Nicholas Anthony offer some advice to Fauxcahontas: Leave MrBeast Alone, Senator Warren!

  Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is the latest target in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D‑MA) crosshairs.

  For anyone who might be unfamiliar, MrBeast has built an empire on YouTube. He got his start with gaming videos and silly stunts like counting to 100,000, but he has since changed the lives of countless people for the better. In addition to giving away hundreds of millions of dollars, MrBeast has built 100 wells in Africa, paid for thousands of people with disabilities to receive medical treatment, and much more.

  Yet, it’s his latest venture that has caught Senator Warren’s attention. Senator Warren is concerned that MrBeast is expanding to financial services after purchasing the banking app Step. MrBeast said he started the venture because he wanted “to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.” Senator Warren wants to know how the North Carolinian entrepreneur plans to make that work—asking for answers about how the company markets to younger audiences, its approach to cryptocurrency, and its banking partners.

  Is there any innovative venture out there that she won't look to shut down?

Our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour is the cover of JD Vance's forthcoming book about his spiritual journey. Intrepid WaPo reporter Danielle Paquette smelled a rat, and traveled 331 miles southwest of DC, to Elk Creek, Virginia to un"cover" (heh) a scurrilous scandal: JD Vance’s new book has a photo of their church. They don’t know Vance. (WaPo gifted link)

They don't know him! Cue ominous music! Perhaps dink the lyrics to that old Lesley Gore song!

Danielle apparently attended a potluck dinner at the pictured Mount Zion United Methodist Church and brings the shocking news about it, and the local bumpkins:

Gasp! Just what are you trying to pull here, JD?

That link in the paragraph above goes to a Daily Beast article with the rather florid "gotcha" headline: Embarrassing Blunder on JD Vance’s Catholic Book Cover Exposed. Also see the even more deranged report at MSN: JD Vance humiliated after botching cover of new book on faith conversion with bizarre picture.

Egads. This is why words like "nothingburger" were coined. Even though the WaPo story claims that "Vance chose" the cover picture, there's no evidence provided for that, and I doubt it's true: I'd bet it was the publisher's pick. There is no reason to be embarrassed about putting a picture of a bucolic, albeit generic, Christian church on a book about the author's Christian faith.

Disclaimer: Goodness knows, I'm no JD fanboy. Although I thought his first book was pretty good, and I have no gripes with his religion, certain features of his political odyssey have been problematic at best.

But, in the spirit of Christian charity, he deserves better than this. So do, especially, the readers of the Washington Post.

Also of note:

• Speaking of Christian charity… Christian Britschgi looks at Zoning's war on cuddly animals, cute kids, and Christian charity. Click through for the story on kids and animals, but here's the scoop on charity:

  This past week, an Ohio judge dismissed a civil lawsuit brought by the fire chief of Bryon, Ohio, against a local church that had been letting people stay on its property during its overnight ministry.

  Fire Chief Douglas Pool's suit argued that local church Dad's Place had converted its property to a residential use by allowing nightly stays without getting the proper zoning approvals or adopting all the fire safety measures required of residential properties.

  His lawsuit demanded that Dad's Place stop its nighttime ministry until it installed a sprinkler system.

  Dad's Place, and its pastor, Chris Avell, contended that the expense of installing a sprinkler system was cost-prohibitive for the church. The requirement to install one was thus an effective demand to shut down their nighttime ministry, which the church argued violated their Free Exercise rights.

  The case only got as far as that Ohio county judge, but Byron city officials are also warring with Dad's Place on non-zoning grounds.

• "We didn't mean to" is not a good defense. Jacob Sullum has a story about applications of the Constitution's "Takings" clause in Indiana and California:

  In 2022, police caused extensive damage to Amy Hadley's home in South Bend, Indiana, because they mistakenly believed a fugitive was inside the house. That same year, a Los Angeles SWAT team wrecked Carlos Pena's print shop while trying to arrest a fugitive who had barricaded himself inside.

  Through no fault of their own, Hadley and Pena were stuck with the tab for the havoc wrought by police operations — a plainly unfair but increasingly common situation that could be rectified by the "just compensation" that the Fifth Amendment requires when property is "taken for public use." In petitions filed this week, Hadley and Pena are asking the Supreme Court to recognize that remedy.

  Hope that works out for them. (Click through for the horrific stories.)

Noah Smith succumbs to a temptation we all feel at times: I told you this would end badly.

Noah posts a couple recent Truth Social Trump rants, and I'll do them from authoritative sources at Twitter:

pic.twitter.com/hjaounz3yh

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 5, 2026

“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…” - President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/aPYmL0qspa

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 31, 2026

Yeah, that's awful. We'll see what happens.

Noah's "I told you so" includes the fact that he encouraged people to vote for Kamala back in 2024. I didn't go that far; Kamala would have been awful, just in a different (and probably incommensurable) way.

But I continue to think that we would have been in better shape if Nikki Haley had prevailed over Trump during primary season.

Also of note:

• So long, Blondie. Er, sorry, "Bondi". Kevin D. Williamson bids farewell to Pam Bondi who delivered Justice, Upside Down. (archive.today link)

  What should a self-respecting republic do with a figure such as Pam Bondi, assuming that horse-whipping is, for whatever strange reason, off the table?

  Bondi, lately the attorney general of these United States, is an exemplary specimen of the sort of people who thrive in Donald Trump’s orbit: She is in a profound moral sense a criminal, but we lack an appropriate law under which to prosecute her.

  Bondi’s 14-month career at the Department of Justice was, as a matter of her official duties, a crime spree. Her legacy is that she used the DOJ to launch a series of pretextual criminal investigations and prosecutions targeting the president’s political enemies, even when there was not the hint of an actual legal case to be made against them. Those targeted by Bondi’s DOJ as a matter of political vendetta include: Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, all of Minnesota; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey; St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her; Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan; Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania; Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona; Sen. Adam Schiff of California; former FBI Director James Comey; former CIA Director John Brennan; Attorney General Letitia James of New York. (The prosecution of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, no less political and pretextual where Bondi was concerned, is more complicated in that it is not solely the work of the Trump administration.)

  That is quite a list—other than printing up a bunch of fake “Epstein files” binders, Bondi seems to have done very little with her time in office other than abuse the awesome powers of the DOJ to abuse, harass, and conduct retribution against the president’s political enemies.

  Pam probably made the next round of Donkey-on-Elephant lawfare inevitable.

• Who, exactly, are they serving? The Antiplanner, Randal O'Toole, says we are Destroying the Forest Service. (And the Forest Service seems to be taking it out on the trees.)

  In the two decades I spent critiquing the Forest Service on behalf of environmental groups, I learned several things. I learned that the people who run the national forests were good people who truly loved the land and wanted to do the right thing for the American people. I learned that the managers of each of those national forests believed that their forests were particularly special and unique. And I learned that these good people managing unique resources somehow all decided to do exactly the same thing: clearcut as much of the timber as they could get away with each year.

  Randal notes the latest budgetary efforts by the Trump Administration to make things worse.

• Nearly the entire story is in the headline. Brittany Bernstein's latest "Forgotten Fact Checks" column at National Review says NPR Ran Multiple Stories on the Michigan Synagogue Attack — but Couldn’t Be Bothered to Interview One Victim. But there's one more telling detail:

  The outlet did, however, air a soft feature radio segment in which NPR reporter Hadeel al-Shalchi traveled to the small village in Lebanon where the attacker, Ayman Ghazali, was born.

  I'm not sure who listens to NPR any more, but I can't imagine it's good for anything except confirming the priors of its progressive donors.

Recently on the book blog:

But that's not bad news. Scott Lincicome plugs a WSJ story:

"More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class: Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk" 😲 https://t.co/XSDJbAgPI3 pic.twitter.com/k5X3QK7UjJ

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) April 5, 2026

… and so will I: More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class (WSJ gifted link). After some human-interest anecdotal stuff:

For all the moaning about a "hollowed out middle class", most honest observers realize that the big changes are caused by people moving up.

That "right-leaning American Enterprise Institute" report is here: The Middle Class Is Shrinking Because of a Booming Upper-Middle Class. The abstract:

The authors point out this marginally coherent 2023 Joe Biden speech, given to the "North America's Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference", containing the usual populist bullshit, which the union guys eagerly consumed:

Instead, the AEI report indicates pretty steady, inexorable improvement since 1979, no matter who's "in charge" of the economy. (Sorry, partisans.)

We aren't without problems, of course, but a "hollowed out middle class" ain't one of them.

Also of note:

• As noted above, we got some problems. At the WSJ, Chris Jacobs points out a biggie: The Democrats’ ObamaCare Quagmire. (WSJ gifted link)

  One has to admire Democrats’ chutzpah. In a recent letter, Ron Wyden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, and 11 of his Democratic colleagues outlined a series of healthcare principles, so the Senate is ready “to take action on these issues the next time” Democrats are governing. The letter amounts to a simultaneous admission of ObamaCare’s failures and promise to go even further the next time Democrats have power.

  To “make health care simpler for families,” the lawmakers would “make sure people can get the insurance they are eligible for through a one-stop shop,” and “simplify and standardize plans and benefits.” ObamaCare already created government-run exchanges to shop for coverage—years after private companies had created comparison-shopping tools online. The law also standardized benefits, imposing new coverage requirements that more than doubled individual insurance premiums in ObamaCare’s first four years. Why are Democrats suggesting policies they enacted in 2010?

  The letter’s vow to “get rid of junk insurance plans” hints at the senators’ true motivation. Democratic lawmakers appear to want to regulate ObamaCare off-ramps like short-term limited-duration plans and catastrophic insurance out of existence. Much as the East German government created the Berlin Wall—officially known as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart—to “protect” people by preventing them from leaving, Democrats want to enact stronger so-called consumer protections that eliminate any exit from the ObamaCare morass.

  So that's something to look forward to in 2027: ObamaCare 2.0, designed by Bernie Sanders and Graham Platner.

• No Wizards!

  Tornado, balloon, … gotta be a Wizard of Oz reference, right? And isn't it appropriate to have Trump in a hot air balloon?

  

  But that's the cover story on the May issue of Reason, by Gene Healy, expert on the Imperial Presidency: Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him? His intro:

  Karl Marx said that when history repeats itself, we're supposed to get tragedy first, then farce. But Donald J. Trump has spent his life flouting all the rules. Why should we expect him to obey the historical dialectic?

  In Trump's two presidencies, farce came first. From the jump, his first turn at the helm was a head-spinning spectacle. He talked like a caudillo crossbred with an insult comic and seemed like a strongman auditioning for the part. In practice, however, Trump proved something of a "low energy" authoritarian. Very few of 45's autocratic fancies—from unilaterally revoking birthright citizenship to"hereby order[ing]" American companies out of China—ever made the transition from tweet to law of the land.

  Trump 1.0 arguably ended up a less imperial president than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Even on COVID-19—a workable excuse for an executive power grab if ever there was one—45 proved the rare president willing to let a good crisis go to waste.

  Midway through Trump's shambolic first term,I warned in these pages that we should count ourselves lucky things hadn't gone worse, and should "set about reimposing limits on the office's powers before a competent authoritarian comes along."

  I never imagined it would be the same guy. And yet it's Trump's second presidency that's delivered a mix of tragedy and genuine peril. Somehow, during the interregnum, Trump discovered you can just do things. In the process, he's revealed just how few meaningful constraints remain against one-man rule.

  It's a long article, and worth your attention. So: "Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

Recently on the book blog:

Specifically, for this:

A correction will appear in tomorrow's print edition:
"A headline with an article on Friday about President Trump’s threats to leave NATO misstated the full name of the body. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North American Treaty Organization."

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) April 3, 2026

"Some say" that the Times editors got too caught up in the headline's "American"/"America" cutesiness, bypassing their critical faculties. I buy that.

Also of note:

• Sinister, or just stupid? Well, let George Will explain why he thinks The verdict against Meta and Google carries sinister implications. (WaPo gifted link)

  The most sinister idea in modern politics has received a California jury’s endorsement, and much applause. It contradicts democracy’s foundational belief in individual agency.

  This concept presupposes that individuals can, in common parlance, “make up their minds.” They can assemble and edit their beliefs and convictions. When this idea is diluted, government expands its ambition to curate the public’s consciousness.

  As Congress did when banning Chinese-owned TikTok, ostensibly for “national security” reasons. For the first time, Congress targeted a specific speech forum because of conjectural harms that might result from what a congressional committee called “divisive narratives.”

  Hey, maybe the WaPo could change its motto from "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to "Democracy Dies in an Ambitious Government Curating the Public's Consciousness".

  (I realize that doesn't exactly sing.)

• But in case you didn't know… David Harsanyi thinks Everyone Knows What the Democrats' AIPAC Obsession Is Really About. Starting off with failed presidential candidate Tom Steyer's claim that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "is a dark money organization that should have no place in our politics." And it's not just Steyer.

  The Democrats' new AIPAC obsession is just a convenient way to tap into some ugly conspiracies and fearmongering about Jewish money and its alleged control over our politics. Democrats are increasingly, as The New York Times might put it, "J-pilled."

  There are, of course, wholly legitimate criticisms of American foreign policy. But Jew-baiting progressives such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) don't merely argue that AIPAC sits on the wrong side of a foreign policy issue but that it wants to steal constituents' health care and child care to enrich war profiteers and genocidal maniacs.

  Data point for Granite Staters: Democrat Senate candidate Chris Pappas and Democrat Congressional candidate Maggie Goodlander have accepted AIPAC donations, and the "Jew-baiting progressives" running against them have made it a campaign issue. As have the "Jew-baiting progressives" at the anti-Israel Track AIPAC site.

• Delusional or demented? Javier Milei has changed his mind about that:

  Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.”
  
  “But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred,… pic.twitter.com/e7NzxNinSM

  — Javier Milei Quotes (Fan) (@MileiSays) April 3, 2026

  

  Coincidently weighing in on that topic is Jonah Goldberg, who sermonizes insightfully on this Easter Sunday: Man, Sin, and the Modern Lens. He plugs a recent essay in National Affairs by Steven F. Hayward & Linda L. Denno: Envy and Social Justice. Which (in turn) plugs  Helmut Schoeck's 1966 book Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour. (Amazon link at your right)

  In these days of modern times, these authors point out that envy is an unappreciated sin. And there's a reason for that. Jonah:

  [Envy] stopped being a serious subject of study because the progressive “social agenda” depends heavily on envy. I’m willing to concede that the obsession with income inequality and the desire to “ban” billionaires is about more than envy. But if you’re not willing to concede that envy plays a major part in the rhetoric and politics of these programs, you’re either lying or in denial. Conceding that a political project is grounded in one of the seven deadly sins is problematic. As Schoeck writes:

  The aversion of the radical left-wing writer to any consideration of the problem of envy is comprehensible. This is a sphere that must be made taboo, and he must do all in his power to repress cognition of envy in his contemporaries. Otherwise he might lose the support of serious-minded people, who, while sharing his views for sentimental reasons, and even following him in his demands for a policy and a political ethic dependent upon common envy's being regarded as an absolute, yet are aware how little esteemed envy is and how little it is capable of legitimizing itself openly in most Western societies even today.

  Jonah goes on to mull on the other Deadly Sins, and I agree it's time to (heh) resurrect them as underlying your modern progressive's "disease of the soul."

Recently on the book blog:

Andrew Heaton brings his usual video mixture of hilarity and wisdom to a persistent myth, pointing out America still makes stuff!

There's no accompanying text at the Reason website to go with that, so instead I'll offer Jason Furman's recent NYT op-ed: Every President Tries It. It Never Works. (NYT gifted link) Want to guess what "it" is?

Jason was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017. Appointed by one of the guys he's implicitly criticizing in that last paragraph.

Also of note:

• Yum! John R. Puri says this like it was a bad thing: Seniors Are Devouring the Federal Budget. (NR gifted link)

  The excellent Penn Wharton Budget Model has a new report on how federal spending is distributed by age. It shows you where the government’s priorities lie: seniors front of the line, everyone else a distant second.

  In 2025, the federal government spent $7.1 trillion overall, of which only $2.6 trillion went to broad public goods such as national defense and transportation (as well as interest on the debt). The remaining $4.4 trillion was attributable to benefits for individuals: entitlements, income security, health-care and education subsidies, and veterans’ programs. That amount was broken down to see how much in outlays each age group in America receives.

  Children and adults under 26 received what seems like a fair chunk of change: $449 billion, concentrated in family welfare programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and education funding. But that amount was just 10 percent of age-assignable spending last year. “Working-age adults,” ages 26 to 64, received a lot more: $1.2 trillion. Much of that came from means-tested welfare programs, too, but also health and income benefits for disabled workers and veterans. In total, working-age adults claimed 28 percent of age-assignable spending.

  Where did all the other money go? To the last age group — seniors 65 and older — who took home $2.7 trillion, or 62 percent of federal spending on individuals. That’s nearly 40 percent of the entire federal budget. Like working-age adults, seniors receive a good amount in means-tested welfare and veterans’ benefits. The vast majority of the spending they receive, however, is in entitlement programs tailored to retirees: Social Security and Medicare.

  Depending on your own age, read it and feel irate. Or (as in my case) slightly ashamed.

  John plugs the proposal from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). Which, in a nutshell, caps Social Security benefits for a couple at a nice round $100,000 per year. (Single recipients: $50K) Economist Scott Sumner also likes it; in fact his headline describing the proposal is Too good to be true.

  Unfortunately, he quickly adds:

  The plan is so good that I see almost no prospect for it ever being enacted by our Congress, an institution that has fallen to a sadly dysfunctional state.

  So something much worse will probably happen.

• If I had known, I would have scheduled a party. At the WSJ, Joshua Jamerson notes the confetti and piñatas: Drivers Celebrate the Demise of the Most Hated Feature in Their Cars. (WSJ gifted link)

  The hated feature is "stop-start", which automatically shuts off your engine when you stop at (say) a red light or stop sign. Unsurprisingly, it got help from the nanny-statists under you-know-who:

  Drivers have long wanted to put a permanent stopper on stop-start. Designed to lower auto emissions by temporarily shutting off the engine while the brake is engaged, it also makes driving feel unnatural, jerky and unenjoyable, Donio and his fellow stop-start haters argue.

  The technology was developed decades ago, but federal incentives during the Obama administration kicked U.S. adoption into high gear. The Environmental Protection Agency began tracking stop-start technology in 2012 car models, less than 1% of which had the feature. By 2024, roughly 58% of new gasoline non-hybrid cars had the systems installed.

  I have stop-start on my Impreza. I don't hate it enough to turn it off.

• I knew they were out there somewhere. Kevin D. Williamson writes on an (apparently) endangered species: The Last Conservatives.

  Like most other numbskulls, Donald Trump is a profoundly incurious man, and so it probably is the case that he wandered down to the Supreme Court as another halfhearted attempt at bullying the justices, who, thanks in part to their individual characters and in part to constitutional design, are very hard to bully. But maybe he really did simply want to know what the hell is going on with the Supreme Court, which has left the president both perplexed and irritated by doing the one thing Donald Trump never has and never will do: its job.

  Ideological progressives and partisan Democrats have been engaged in a shameful yearslong smear campaign against the Supreme Court, an intellectually dishonest attack on the institution’s legitimacy. I have written from time to time about the “Supreme Court legitimacy watch,” i.e. the habit our friends on the left have of declaring that the high court’s legitimacy is at stake every time it looks like it might not give them their way on a policy question. The runup to Dobbs may have been the high-water mark of “legitimacy” hysteria, but the habit endures.

  That a policy question is not the same thing as a legal or constitutional question is something that vexes and confuses progressives from both directions: How could the arch-conservative Antonin Scalia be on the ACLU’s side of a flag-burning case? How is it possible that most of the court’s liberal justices sided with the conservatives in an 8-1 ruling in the recent “conversion therapy” case? The answer is the same in both cases: The First Amendment protects speech, including—especially!—speech that powerful people do not like.

  Even though I'm a fan of that checks-and-balances thing, I was not panic-stricken by Trump's visit to SCOTUS during the argument about birthright citizenship. Just call me Pollyanna: I thought there was a chance that he might have been impressed, if not convinced, by the arguments on the opposing side.

• You're GO for article deployment, Dave. Mr. Barry writes on The Moon Mission.

  Yay! We’re going back to the Moon! And we’re taking a Canadian!

  It has been a long time coming, but finally, on Wednesday evening, after years of preparation and a brief launch delay caused by a long line at the TSA checkpoint, NASA’s Artemis II spacecraft — named for Artemis II, the Greek goddess of large federal contracts — blasted off, with a crew of four, from what is currently named the Kennedy Space Center, although that could change if the president finds out about it.

  And for my followup comment… oh, you've already clicked over to Dave's article, haven't you?