Pun Salad

Amazon has an astounding variety of Biden/Blue Ribbon merch. Just one example on your right. Never underestimate the alacrity of capitalists to try to make some money off someone else's misfortune.

But in the interest of equal time, journalist Taylor Lorenz extends her own best wishes:

Hopefully he rots in hell and rests in piss pic.twitter.com/pohF5pJYSJ

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 19, 2025

Classy!

Jim Geraghty has thoughts on A Spectacularly Ill-Timed Decision to Halt PSA Testing in Joe Biden.

Jim's post also examines an under-reported story from that Tapper/Thompson book everyone's talking about: the Biden family's (and their doctors') lies and obfuscations about Beau Biden's ultimately fatal brain cancer. Example:

[Neurologist Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung] told the public that they had removed a “small lesion” from Beau’s brain. In fact, it was a “tumor slightly larger than a golf ball,” Biden later revealed.

This, while Beau was Delaware Attorney General.

Megan McArdle prescribes a course of treatment for the guilty: The Biden cover-up demands deep soul-searching (gifted link). .

All the time we were being assured …

But speaking of dereliction of duty, which I guess we were, James Freeman takes a look at Harris, Biden’s Cabinet and the 25th Amendment.

Not only did our "public servants" fail to do their due diligence, the self-righteous "Democracy Dies in Darkness" journalists didn't exactly cover themselves in glory either.

And on the legal news front:

• Anyone else reminded of that Beastie Boys album title? Jonathan Turley writes on The Red Line: Democratic Officials Claim a Dangerous License for Illegality.

  Across the country, a new defense is being heard in state and federal courtrooms. From Democratic members of Congress to judges to city council members, officials claim that their official duties include obstructing the official functions of the federal government. It is a type of liberal license that excuses most any crime in the name of combating what Minn. Gov. Tim Walz called the “modern-day Gestapo” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

  The latest claimant of this license is Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), who was charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers during a protest at Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. McIver is shown on video forcing her way into an ICE facility and striking and shoving agents in her path.

  Where was the horn guy when LaMonica needed him?

  (Headline reference if you want it.)

• She's no RBG. Dan McLaughlin looks at Justice Jackson’s Strange Agnosticism About Precedent and Democracy. She was on the "2" end of a 7-2 SCOTUS ruling in favor of Maine legislator Laurel Libby:

  The Supreme Court has rightly moved to order, in Libby v. Fecteau, that Maine state representative Laurel Libby be restored to her voting rights while the First Circuit considers her appeal. Libby was suspended from speaking or voting in the Maine House because of her public speech on Facebook criticizing the participation of biological males in women’s sports.

  The pretext for the suspension was that Libby’s Facebook post “identified the student’s high school, identified the student by their current name and previous name, and posted photos of the student, embellished with yellow lines encircling them from head to toe.” The Maine House Speaker, Ryan Fecteau, claimed that this was a violation of the student-athlete’s safety. But this is a viewpoint-based rule: the press routinely publishes the names, images, and schools of high school athletes, and Fecteau himself has done so in the past. The entire basis for the demand that Libby apologize or face suspension was that the name and image were presented with a viewpoint about transgender athletes, with which Fecteau and the Maine Democrats disagree. And the images of athletes are very much germane to the question of whether biological males have, in fact, an unfair biological advantage over females and whether it is unsafe for them to compete together. In response to a district court’s buying the Maine Democrats’ claim of legislative immunity from suit — a contention that collides with prior Supreme Court precedent — the attorneys general of West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia filed a joint amicus brief debunking the notion that allowing lawsuits simply to vindicate federal First Amendment rights by restoring a legislator’s power to vote would be any sort of infringement on federalism.

  I think Representative Libby would have gotten a lot more sympathetic treatment from Justices Jackson and Sotomayor if she'd tried to deck out some ICE agents.

• And for another free speech victory… Emma Camp notes the good news from my Live Free or Die state: Judge rules in favor of New Hampshire bakery in fight over donut mural.

  A New Hampshire bakery has won a crucial victory in its fight to preserve a mural of donuts and other baked goods above its storefront. While town officials have attempted to force the bakery to remove the mural, citing zoning regulations, a federal court ruled on Monday that the city cannot enforce its sign rules against the bakery.

  In 2022, Sean Young, the owner of Leavitt's Country Bakery, a popular bakery in Conway, New Hampshire, collaborated with a local high school art class to paint a mural for the bakery's storefront. The students' mural depicted baked goods forming the shape of a mountain range, with a multicolored sunrise in the background. Initially, the mural didn't cause any controversy—and it was even covered positively by local media. However, about a week after being installed, Conway's Code Enforcement Officer Jeremy Gibbs told Young that the mural violated town zoning rules.

  We previously covered the antics of the Conway Roadside Art Police (CRAP) here and here.

Recently on the book blog:

Coming up to the last few books on my Bond/Fleming reading project. Kind of a lackluster title. Another title might have been Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I suppose that was taken.

As the book opens, Bond has composed his resignation letter from the spy game. The architect of the "Thunderball" caper, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, escaped at the end of that book. Bond and the entire British intelligence apparatus have tried to track him down to no avail. So 007 is down in the dumps, until (Chitty Chitty!) his Bentley gets passed by a gorgeous girl in a hot car (specifically, a "Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder"). The race is on! The girl is Tracy, troubled daughter of a Corsican crime lord. Bond falls hard for her.

But in the meantime, there's a lead to Blofeld's current location, a remote ski resort in the Swiss Alps. Bond goes undercover to confirm his identity, and to suss out his current nefarious scheme. Which involves a bevy of different beautiful women, a harrowing, narrow escape, and an off-the-books paramilitary operation with plenty of gunplay, explosions, and another harrowing chase.

And finally the ending (Bang Bang!). No spoilers, even for a 62-year-old book. But I remember reading this as a young 'un (my mother hadn't issued her 007 book ban yet), being very shocked at the conclusion, and having my appetite seriously whetted for the next book in the series.

[I seldom recycle Amazon Eye Candy, but this is the third time around for today's. I'll also recycle my previous Consumer Note: it is described at Amazon as a "George Orwell Quote". It is not. The actual quotee has an amusing article at American Thinker: George Orwell is stealing my work.]

All that for a bit of outrage, exemplified by an excerpt from a National Review editorial on Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis.

Wait a minute, Jake. The White House was lying? No.

Instead, it's Jake Tapper who's lying. Or at best, intentionally obfuscating the facts. Houses don't lie, people do. What are their names? What exactly did they say? When did they say it?

Ah, well. Let's skip over to Brianna Lyman at the Federalist who nails it: Biden Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jake Tapper’s Anonymous Sourcing Even More Scandalous. About Tapper's book (with co-author Alex Thompson), Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, out today:

Ah, the "White House" not only lies, it also strategizes! Deliberately!

I remember Senator Howard Baker's famous drawled query during the Watergate hearings back in 1974: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

OK, I realize Biden "knowing stuff" might be an iffy concept. I still want names of the actual liars and conspirators. It doesn't seem that information will be forthcoming from Jake Tapper.

Also of note:

• Hanna Trudo, all is forgiven! Hanna's thinking about running for US Congress from my district (NH-01), and she recently tweeted:

  As a 4th generation Granite Stater, I take our state motto in N.H., Live Free or Die, seriously.
  
  Under Donald Trump, we are no longer free.
  
  Dems need to stop chasing the magical land of bipartisanship. We need to fight NOW.#nhpoliticshttps://t.co/NBBA6Dc4GK via @nbcnews

  — Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) May 5, 2025

  The "we are no longer free" thing kinda seemed like an exaggeration.

  But maybe less free, something J.D. Tuccille writes about at Reason: Americans, especially women, feel less free. They're not wrong.

  "For the third year in a row, Americans are less satisfied with their personal freedom than the rest of the world, including their peers in other wealthy, market-based economies," Gallup's Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray reported of survey data on May 14. "While Americans have been less satisfied in recent years, satisfaction with personal freedom has remained higher and steady worldwide. A median of 81% across 142 countries and territories expressed satisfaction with their freedom in 2024."

  Specifically, Americans' satisfaction "with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives" started falling after 2020, when it was 85 percent; this was comparable to the peak 87-percent median recorded in the 38 developed, democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a bit higher than the 80-percent median recorded globally. U.S. satisfaction peaked several times over the past two decades at 87 percent, making 2020 unremarkable.

  As of 2024, after a brief and mild pandemic-era dip, OECD residents' satisfaction with their freedom stands at 86 percent and the global median is at 81 percent. Satisfaction with freedom among Americans, by contrast, has plunged to 72 percent.

  Note the data J.D. is working from is pre-2025, so not directly related to Hanna's Trump-blaming. Still…

• But when they get behind closed doors… Jesse Singal blabs an open secret: Of Course Liberal Institutions Are Engaging In Illegal Hiring Practices On The Basis Of Race.

  Harvard University initially received plaudits for its resistance to the Trump administration. After all, the list of demands the administration sent Harvard — apparently accidentally — was insanely onerous. They weren’t the sort of demands Harvard, or any university, could actually accede to while remaining a center of learning in any real sense.

  Last week, though, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is escalating its conflict with Harvard (or as I call it, Tufts on the Charles), perhaps most menacingly with the potential of a federal civil-rights violation investigation.

  The turnaround has been quick:

  Harvard has basked in acclaim from White House critics for fighting back so far. After Mr. Trump threatened the school’s federal funding, Harvard sued the administration, and legal experts said the university has a strong case.

  But behind closed doors, several senior officials at Harvard and on its top governing board have acknowledged they are in an untenable crisis. Even if Harvard quickly wins in court, they have determined, the school will still face wide-ranging funding problems and continuing investigations by the administration.

  Some university officials even fear that the range of civil investigations could turn into full-blown criminal inquiries.

  "Tufts on the Charles", heh!

  I won't be happy until I see Steven Pinker perp-walked into a Federal courthouse.

• As opposed to Democrats, who aren't expected to take the national debt seriously at all. Eric Boehm observes: Not Even the Moody's Downgrade Can Make Republicans Take the National Debt Seriously.

  In a world where federal policymakers were treating America's national debt with the seriousness it deserves, Friday might have been a crucial turning point in Washington.

  First, the House Budget Committee voted down President Donald Trump's tax proposal when four Republican members of the committee broke ranks over concerns about how the bill is projected to increase the budget deficit and the debt. "This bill falls profoundly short," said Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), one of those four GOP members, during the committee's debate on the bill. "It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits."

  Hours later, Moody's Ratings seemingly agreed with those objections when the credit rating agency downgraded the federal government's debt—a signal to investors that buying Treasury bonds is a riskier bet than it used to be. In a statement, Moody's said that the downgrade reflected the fact that Congress and the president "have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs," and noted that "current fiscal proposals under consideration" would not do anything to reduce spending and deficits.

  Also not taking the national debt seriously: American voters, who keep reelecting incumbents anyway.

• Mister, we could use a man like … Ebenezer Scrooge again. Jeff Maurer speaks wisely: "Some People Are Lazy Dirtbags" is the Magic Phrase that Lets Democrats Talk About Medicaid Work Requirements.

  Republicans in Congress are making work requirements for Medicaid part of their budget bill. This is popular; 62 percent of Americans support work requirements for Medicaid. And, honestly, I’ll bet that number would be higher if a lot people weren’t thinking of Medicare and wondering “how do you force a bunch of 85 year-olds back to work — how many greeters does Walmart need?”

  Many on the left think that Medicaid work requirements are bad policy; their main point is that the cost “savings” come overwhelmingly from eligible Medicaid recipients who fail to navigate bureaucratic hurdles. I agree with those analyses — adding a work requirement to Medicaid is like “family style” dining in that it sounds great but sucks in practice. A lot of deserving people will get hurt by the effort to root out the undeserving, and the government won’t reduce costs so much as move them around.

  Jeff is convinced that implementing a work requirement for the able-bodied moochers wouldn't be worthwhile. I'm open to that argument, but see Cato: Medicaid’s Funding Formula Rewards Overspending and Fuels Fraud

Recently on the book blog:

Inspired by a WSJ review, I put this on my "Things to Check Out" list. (That review is from January 2019, which should give you some indication of the slow churn of my TtCO list. Fortunately the topic is timeless.)

As you can tell from the book's subtitle, the authors believe that the effort to use scientific insights and objective facts to illuminate and discover a solid foundation for human morality has been, and will continue to be, an utter failure. Not for lack of trying; the book describes efforts going back centuries by very smart people: Grotius, Mill, Herbie Spencer, Hume, and many more.

Speaking of Hume, there have been attempts to refute or evade his classic "Is–ought problem", essentially the linguistic observation that you can't proceed from statements about what reality "is" to deduce what people "ought" to do.

But people try. The authors note, usefully, different "levels" of possible scientific explication. The gold standard is "Level One": science settling longstanding moral questions unambiguously. Somewhat weaker is "Level Two": science providing solid evidence of some outstanding moral claim or theory. Finally, there's "Level Three": science indicating the origins of some aspect of our moral sense in the raw facts of evolution, neurochemistry, etc.

Scholars in the field are so far stuck on Level Three, although there are aspirations and claims otherwise. For example, the evolutionary explanation for "altruistic" behavior, where individuals self-sacrifice for the betterment of their community gene pool. Fair enough.

It would seem that, from a 100% "science" view, the "moral nihilists" have the high ground in this discussion. When you consider the fundamentals, it's all just interactions of mindless particles and fields, physics and chemistry. The authors helpfully list some concepts that (from a "disenchanted" viewpoint) are, at best, illusory: purposiveness, consciousness, the self, free will, intentionality, and (gulp) life itself.

But never say never; maybe someday "science" will suss things out.

(Obtained via the University Near Here's Interlibrary Loan wizards from Brandeis University. Thanks as always.)

We don’t need @jaketapper or anyone else to tell us Biden has been increasingly senile since the 2020 election. We need them to tell us who was actually running the federal government from 2020-2024 and how they did it. You’re not coming clean until you come clean about that.

— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) May 17, 2025

But was Biden's senility the only thing they were hiding?

This is the Most Dangerous Cover-up in the History of the Presidency:

Last summer, White House Physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor swore to the American people that Joe Biden was “completely fit for the Presidency” — no issues, nothing to see.

Now we learn Biden has “advanced”prostate… pic.twitter.com/JryrV92wXv

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 18, 2025

You'll want to click over to read Benny's tweet in its entirety.

I don't want to either (a) bore you or (b) gross you out, but I can personally attest that if you are a male of a certain age, doctors pay special attention to that particular gland, sometimes in ways that you might just as soon they didn't.

And, as one urologist cheerfully told me: even if they detect prostate cancer, it's usually slow-moving enough so that something else will kill you first.

But it sounds as if Joe might be an exception? Well, I'm sure we'll be reading and hearing more than we want to about that.

Also of note:

• And then he started singing Lou Christie's "Two Faces Have I". Speaking of Presidential health woes, the WSJ editorialists note an indication of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Donald Trump Plays Walmart CEO (gifted link).

  Which American politician said the following?

  Item one: “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should . . . EAT THE TARIFFS, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”

  Item two: “After causing catastrophic inflation, Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls . . . Her plan is very dangerous because it may sound good politically . . . This is Communist; this is Marxist; this is fascist.”

  If you guessed that both are statements by Donald Trump, you have broken the code on the bizarro world of the President’s second-term economic policies. Last year he blasted Kamala Harris’s proposal for price controls on groceries. But now he is attacking Walmart for warning that it will have to raises prices in the wake of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

  The only sour note here is the bottom line:

  Mr. Trump is trying to duck the political fallout for his misguided tariff policy by blaming everyone else. Americans are too smart to fall for it.

  I'm not sure about that.

• The good news is that the question is posed in the past tense. Noah Smith wonders: So why *did* U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years?

  A week ago I wrote a post arguing that globalization didn’t hollow out the American middle class (as many people believe): [link].

  After I wrote the post, John Lettieri of the Economic Innovation Group wrote a great thread that strongly supports my argument. He showed that the timing of America’s wage stagnation — roughly, 1973 through 1994 — just didn’t line up well with the era of globalization that began with NAFTA in 1994. In fact, American wages started growing again right after NAFTA was passed. Check it out!

  

  It's a long post that examines various likely and unlikely explanations. But Noah doesn't find any of them particularly believable.

  I'll note that people are still griping about stagnant wages, pretty much ignoring the last thirty years.

• Don't fight the future. Tyler Cowen observes: Everyone's Using AI To Cheat at School. That's a Good Thing.

  Accurate data is hard to come by, but one estimate suggests that up to 90 percent of college students have used ChatGPT to do their homework. Rather than debating the number, professors and teachers simply ought to assume (and I do) that your students have an invisible, very high-quality helper. As current norms weaken further, more students learn about AI, and the competitive pressures get tougher, I expect the practice to spread to virtually everyone.

  This state of affairs has set off a crisis among educators, parents, and students. There has been a flurry of recent stories capturing how the cheating is done, how hard it is to catch, and how it is wrecking a lot of our educational standards.

  Unlike many people who believe this spells the end of quality American education, I think this crisis is ultimately good news. And not just because I believe American education was already in a profound crisis—the result of ideological capture, political monoculture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs.

  That's at the Free Press, and I hope you can figure out a way to read the whole thing. Tyler foresees a radically changed future for higher ed, and he's pretty convincing.

• Speaking of wretched hives of scum and villainy… The Issues & Insights editorialists say it's time to nuke the site from orbit: Medicaid: End It, Don’t Mend It.

  As soon as Republicans mentioned cutting spending on Medicaid as part of their “reconciliation” bill, the usual suspects started rolling out their standard talking points. They’re cutting health care for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich! Millions will lose coverage! The disabled will suffer! Oh, the humanity!

  Well, if the GOP is going to be accused of destroying Medicaid when all they are proposing is a minor haircut, why not go all out and scrap this hopelessly flawed, fraud-riddled, budget-busting disaster of a program and start over from scratch?

  First, let’s dispense with the claim of “devastating” cuts to Medicaid. The House reconciliation bill would reduce Medicaid spending by $625 billion. That might sound like a lot, but it’s stretched out over 10 years, at a time when Medicaid is on track to spend $8.6 trillion. Medicaid spending will still go up every year under the House bill, just a tiny bit more slowly.

  Yes, I know I mixed my SF movie quotes there.

  But I&I is asking this of Republicans. The same party who came into power in 2011 promising to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. With a much larger legislative majority in the House than they do now.

In words, the NR editorialists find nothing to like either: Prescription Drug Price Controls Are Wrong Approach

The problems are easy to foresee, and the editors describe them further.

Also of note:

• It has a long tradition of existence. My local paper's occasional columnist, Douglas Rooks, doesn't adapt that classic Animal House line in his recent column about the USPS, but he comes pretty close, in Reversing the Postal Service’s ‘inevitable’ decline. I won't excerpt the whole thing, but I have a few comments:

  One little-noticed departure was Louis DeJoy, the logistics expert hired during Trump’s first term to oversee the nation’s oldest public service, existing under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution was ratified.

  See? "A long tradition of existence."

  DeJoy, like his recent predecessors, positioned the post office to compete with UPS and FexEx for the growing package business, while ignoring the only thing it’s constitutionally required to do: deliver the mail.

  Ackshually, the Constitution merely grants Congress (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7) the power to "establish Post Offices". It's not a requirement, any more than granting "Letters of Marque and Reprisal" (a few clauses down) is a requirement.

  But he went to greater extremes, relentlessly increasing the price of a First Class stamp while steadily decreasing service provided, a sure-fire formula for continued decline in mail volume leading to extinction unless halted and reversed.

  Ackshually, first class postage has lately kept pace with overall inflation pretty well. See the graph here, which goes up to 2023.

  But what is to be done?

  First, create several public and consumer slots on the Postal Board of Governors, which generally rubber-stamps whatever the postmaster general wants. The postal unions that have seats seemed all too willing to indulge DeJoy’s shenanigans as long as he didn’t cut their pay.

  More importantly, we have to reverse the trend to fewer and fewer places handling the mail. It’s as if government responded to the first PCs by mandating that everyone had to continue to use IBM mainframes that would get larger and larger as time goes by.

  Decentralized processing – yes, bring back the Augusta and Lewiston [Maine] centers and add local sorting at every sizeable post office, and we’d drive down costs while increasing the speed of delivery. We have smartphones at our fingertips; surely we can phase out giant but ineffective sorting machines.

  The decline in First Class volume has clearly become a self-fulfilling prophecy under DeJoy and likely his successor. Americans still want to mail things, and they should be able to expect they are delivered promptly.

  Rooks provides no evidence for his dubious assertion that adding USPS sorting/routing centers (with no doubt unionized staffing) will "drive down costs". It's likely that will just cause an increase in USPS losses, which will need to be covered by… guess who?

  Also not in evidence: any indication that "Americans still want to mail things." In fact, the decline in moving paper from one point to another is a global phenomenon.

  Most importantly, Rooks never provides good reason for his advocacy other than good-old-days nostalgia.

• What are the impeachers waiting for? Andrew C. McCarthy is disgusted by The $TRUMP Meme Coin Scheme (gifted link). And I dare say, unless you're a cheerleader for the team, you will be too:

  On January 17, 2025, Donald Trump took to social media with an announcement that was as dumbfounding in its crassness as it was unprecedented in the history of American presidents-elect — to say nothing of presidents-elect less than 72 hours from being inaugurated to hold the most powerful political office in the world.

  In the announcement, Trump urged the public, in the United States and across the world, to buy his new meme coin, $TRUMP. In his four ensuing months in office, the president has made a fortune on these sales. The exact amount is hard to quantify because, as we’ll see, meme coin values fluctuate wildly and Trump has partners in the venture. Still, Forbes has assessed that “it’s safe to assume the president walked away with at least $110 million after tax.” And that was in early April, before some more recent and significant revenue-raising developments.

  Much of this haul has come from foreign sources. Just this week, while the president was spinning as a triumph his face-saving retreat from the trade war he’d started with China, an obscure tech company tied to China announced that it would buy a mind-blowing $300 million of Trump’s meme coin. And although investors in these digital tokens may make or lose money — mostly lose because, as we’ll see, meme coin marketing often operates like a pump-and-dump scheme — the marketing of $TRUMP is structured to earn the Trumps a transaction fee: i.e., they make money every time the tokens change hands. They appear to have cleared between $320 and $350 million in transaction fees so far.

  "Sleazy" is too mild a word.

• Why wasn't the 25th amendment used on Biden, anyway? Jonathan Turley listens so you don't have to. “For Posterity’s Sake”: Why the Biden-Hur Tapes is a Virtual Racketeering Indictment.

  “For posterity’s sake.” Those words from President Joe Biden sum up the crushing impact of the leaked audiotapes from the interview between then-President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur. Not only did they remove any serious doubt over Biden committing the federal crimes charged against President Donald Trump, but they also constituted what is akin to a political racketeering indictment against much of the Washington establishment.

  The interview from Oct. 8-9, 2023, has long been sought by Congress, but was kept under wraps by the government even as Biden campaigned for a second term.

  Many of us balked at Hur’s conclusion that no charges were appropriate despite the fact that the President removed classified material for decades, stored it in grossly negligent ways, and moved it around to unsecure locations, including his garage in Delaware.

  Bottom line:

  The real indictment that comes out of these tapes is a type of political racketeering enterprise by the Washington establishment. It took a total team effort from Democratic politicians to the White House staff to the media to hide the fact that the President of the United States was mentally diminished. If there were a political RICO crime, half of Washington would be frog-marched to the nearest federal courthouse.

  Of course, none of this complicity in the cover-up is an actual crime. It is part of the Washington racket.

  After all, this is Washington, where such duplicity results not in plea deals but book deals.

• She's better looking than Bernie, anyway. One possible candidate for my CongressCritter in the midterm election is Hanna Trudo. The Daily Caller has (it's fair to say) a hit piece: Journalist-Turned-Would-Be-Democrat Congressional Candidate Exposed For Allegedly Hiding Luxurious Elite Lifestyle. Sample tweet and Hanna's deflecting response:

  Sorry gentlemen, I like fashion AND Medicare for All! $15 minimum wage.
  
  You can try and shame me into not running for #NH1 because you hate progressives, but not for being a fabulous woman
  
  Live Free or Die #nhpolitics https://t.co/7NxPKLSEAB

  — Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) May 16, 2025

  I suppose if AOC can get elected, this could work too.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog: (Yes, I watched an actual movie! Second one this year!)

True story: I got this book from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. But only after failing to find it in the "New Non-Fiction" area, but noticing that it had been placed on the "New Fiction" table. I assume that was due to some jerkwad Portsmouth atheist thinking he was clever.

But for the rest of us, this is a really excellent book. The author, Ross Douthat, is not some Bible-thumping yokel, but a columnist for the New York Times (and movie reviewer for National Review). He can, and does, speak the language of urban sophisticates. Although, thank God (or whoever), I'm not one of those.

Douthat's argument for "believing" is laid out carefully in stages. In the early going, he makes some powerful points that indicate a universe, planet, environment, and nature that screams "not an accident". If the fundamental physics of reality were just slightly different, there could be no elements, no galaxies, no biology, … And even if you accept that dice-throw, there are further unlikely happenstances: the complex interactions between life and environment involving convoluted biochemical pathways to keep things moving and procreating.

And don't get me started on free will, consciousness, and the moral sense most of us have.

And we are supposed to believe that all this sorta fell together by sheer chance and accident? Brother, pull the other one.

After that, Douthat starts moving up the mountain of faith. He notes the prevalence of seeming inexplicable occurrences of the mystic and supernatural. He argues against exploring the spiritual on your own; that would be like trying to conduct particle physics research from scratch. Instead, be like Newton, and "stand on the shoulders of giants", taking the accumulated wisdom of millennia as a given.

And finally, he recounts his own path, from childhood Episcopalianism to his mainstream Roman Catholic faith today.

All in all, a fine read. I'm not going back to the pews myself this Sunday morning, but I look at the folks who do with considerable extra respect.

I remember watching this movie at some point in my youth—it's only one year older than I am—and enjoying it a lot. Have decades of cynical existence since caused that enjoyment to slacken? Heck, no. If anything, I liked it better this time around.

Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) lives in a nice house with his sister Veta (Josephine Hull) and her daughter Myrtle Mae (Victoria Horne). Veta and Myrtle Mae despair of leading a normal social life due to Elwood's firm insistence on the existence of Harvey, a six-foot talking rabbit. Elwood and Harvey are the best of friends, but he's invisible to most of the rest of the world. And most of the rest of the world thinks Elwood is insane. Pleasant, but entirely cuckoo. And the movie revolves around Veta and Myrtle Mae plotting to have Elwood committed to the local booby hatch, so Veta can get Myrtle Mae married off to some sucker eligible bachelor.

Hilarity ensues. It really does. Josephine Hull won an Oscar for her performance, and Jimmy Stewart got nominated for Best Actor. (José Ferrer won for playing another seeming lunatic, Cyrano de Bergerac. Irony?)

I was going to briefly rant about how streaming services tend to ding you a few bucks for watching older movies. But as I type, Harvey is available for no additional charge on Prime Video for a short time. (I went old-school and borrowed the DVD from Portsmouth (NH) Public Library.)

There's no mystery (heh) why I checked out this book at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library: it won the 2025 Edgar Award for "Best Novel". And (for once) I agree with the Mystery Writers of America: it's pretty good.

But while I was verifying that, I came across this abject apology:

Mystery Writers of America wishes to clarify the use of images of Humphrey Bogart and Edgar Allan Poe in a video shown at our recent Edgar Awards. Member authors wrote the script, but AI tools were used to animate the images of Bogart and Poe. Such use is inconsistent with our otherwise staunch support of our members’ fight against unauthorized use and potential for piracy of their work through AI. We apologize and have taken steps to assure this won’t occur in the future.

I get that some writers are upset with their works being used to train AIs. They are fine with people reading their books; they're unhappy with non-people reading their books. Or something.

Anyway: the main character here is British police detective ("DI" or "Detective Inspector") Caius Beauchamp. He and his team work on two unlikely cases: the more recent one being the discovery of that lady whose hand appears on the cover, drowned in the Thames; she's connected to a long-ago embezzlement of a company's pension fund.

And there's the matter of another dead body that shows up at a play Caius is attending; the victim appears to have been obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of a teen girl from a boarding school.

And, in the meantime, Caius has met a possible new romantic interest at that play: Calliope, milliner to the posh.

Could all these things be connected somehow. Sure, in some ways, not in others. Advice to readers: pay particular information to the party blather in Chapter One: you'll know things that don't become apparent to the principals until much later in the book.

Lots of Britishisms, which you, American, may have to either look up, figure out, or ignore. (Or, if you watch enough Britbox, maybe you know.)

Andrew Heaton asks and answers in a pretty funny, but also insightful, video: What happens to your kids if we abolish the U.S. Department of Education?.

As one of those shoe companies says: just do it, already.

Also of note:

• I'm pretty sure you've already guessed the answer here. And Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply.

  Nate Silver's headline asks: Did the media blow it on Biden?

  Beginning in 2023, I repeatedly criticized both the media and Democratic partisans for failing to take former President Biden’s age and fitness for office seriously enough. This was not exactly a popular opinion at the time: the more common complaint, at least until Biden’s disastrous debate, was that the press was covering the story too much.

  So I’ve been pleased to see two new high-profile books on Biden, Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which include extensive reporting on his struggles to hold onto the Democratic nomination and — no less importantly — to manage his presidential duties.1 If you read these books, it’s pretty clear that Biden was not fit for the presidency by the end of his term — it is, after all, the hardest job in the world. With limited uptime and sometimes more severe symptoms like an inability to recall basic names and facts — Original Sin reports that Biden couldn’t even recognize George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser — his Cabinet worried about his capacities in a crisis.

  When it comes to criticizing Democrats, you probably can't distrust the mainstream media enough. I've found myself pretty confortable with Democrats like Nate.

• If KDW was wrong, I was probably wrong too. Kevin D. Williamson is another example of out-of-the-MSM thinking, and he's willing to call a foul on himself: Why I Was Wrong About Head Start.

  One should always be open to reevaluating long-held beliefs—and an especially good time to reevaluate them is when a guy with a Nobel Prize in the relevant subject tells you that you’ve got it wrong. 

  In at least a half a dozen articles and speeches, probably more, I have repeated something that I’ve understood to be a well-established fact for so long that I do not even remember when or where I first learned it: that Head Start does not work, that it provides no meaningful lasting results. Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago, inconveniently enough for my longstanding belief, not only was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (that is, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, as Jay Nordlinger taught me) but was so honored specifically for his work on developing rigorous methods for the evaluation of social programs. I do not immediately knuckle under to appeals to authority, but I am inclined to listen to guys who have equations named after them.

  […]

  Heckman, who does not want for confidence in his convictions, rejects the notion that randomized trials should be understood as the “gold standard” and mocks those who believe otherwise as a “cult.” But, as he tells the story, even if we were to accept the primacy of randomized trials here, we’d want them to be good randomized trials. “This all really comes from one experiment,” he says, referring to the 2005 Head Start Impact Study. “Students were randomized out of Head Start, and the ones randomized out were the control group. But what were they randomized out into?” Head Start, and pre-K education more generally, is a varied and decentralized enterprise, and many of the students randomized out of Head Start in the experiment in question ended up attending other Head Start programs or other kinds of preschool. “Some of them went to Head Start elsewhere. Some of them went to something better.” Better data from a better sample produces different results—results that point to a different outcome about Head Start’s efficacy.

• But speaking of Jay Nordlinger… He's separated from his longtime perch at National Review, where he was a reliable voice for liberty and decency. And (at least for now) he's started a substack. A recent article shows what he's up to: War and Peace, &c.

  One of the most loaded words I know is “pro-war.” It was used by Peter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, yesterday. I have written a fair amount about Szijjártó. As Viktor Orbán’s emissary, he has nurtured relations with Russia, Iran, and China. In late 2021, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, Szijjártó received the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship from the hand of Putin himself.

  In a tweet, Szijjártó said that Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, was “pro-war”—one of “the most pro-war politicians.” Oh?

  A couple of years ago, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, responded to a critic by saying, “You support this war. I don’t.” He was talking about the Ukraine war.

  Let me quote from a post of mine, please:

  I once wrote a book about war and peace. For a meditation on peace—an essay drawn from that book—go here. The terms “pro-war” and “anti-war” are bizarre. No one supports war, except for psychopaths. (There are more than a few of those, to be sure.) As a rule, debates are between those who think that war is necessary, or just, and those who do not.

  Do the Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves against invasion and subjugation? Should the United States support them? This is what people are talking about.

  Um, bingo. That's why I've liked Jay in the past. And why I like Mike Lee (and others) a lot less than I used to.

• GFW says the bloom should be off the Rose, and stay off the Rose. We're talking baseball, and specifically Pete Rose (gifted link).

  Our polymath president should concentrate on his fields of intellectual mastery — geopolitics, macroeconomics, renaming mountains and gulfs — and spare a smidgen of American life from his perfectionist interventions. Including baseball.

  Does anyone believe that Major League Baseball would be reinstating Pete Rose if one of the president’s whims had not demanded it? Never mind MLB’s lawyerly rationale that the rule against gambling by baseball people need not protect the game from deceased gamblers. MLB has aligned baseball with the zeitgeist, which is no longer persnickety about lying and contempt for norms. Exhibit A is Rose’s twice-elected rehabilitator.

  Since we're talking about people I trust to tell it to me straight… yeah, George Will is one of those.