Pun Salad

It’s not just health care.  Consumers buying cars are ripped off by a car dealer cartel, which prevents direct sales from manufacturers.  The fireman industry is a huge rip-off, with America having roughly twice as many fire stations as needed, as a huge cost to taxpayers.  Young homebuyers are ripped off by older homeowners who prevent new construction in towns like Reston, Virginia. There are similar examples in dozens of other industries, perhaps hundreds of others.

Politicians often complain that middle-class Americans are lagging behind because the system is rigged against them.  They are right.  But the politicians don’t tell the entire story.  Only a modest portion of the rigging is done by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.  The biggest problem is various interest groups comprised of middle class people, who rip off the general public.

You can argue that Trump richly deserves to be the third president to face an impeachment trial, that we should be impeaching all the presidents all the time, or that Trump is actually the victim of a coup. You might even win those arguments. But none of that matters if you really care about restraining the size of government. Come the end of the Senate trial that starts today, Trump will almost certainly still be in office, Democrats and Republicans will hate each other even more, and trust and confidence in Washington will be even lower than it already is.

And the spending of the federal government, what Milton Friedman said was the purest measure of its power, will continue to set new records. All impeachment will have done is add more fuel to the perpetual dumpster fire that is Washington and pushed the calendar back a month or so when it comes to the fiscal reckoning that awaits us in the new decade.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is resetting its “Doomsday Clock,” which has stood still since 2018 at two minutes to midnight. I was a member of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors for a dozen years and chaired it from 2009 through 2018, and I think it’s time to retire the clock.

The Bulletin was founded by group of scientists who had participated in the Manhattan Project and wanted to inform the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons. The clock, set at seven minutes to midnight, appeared on the cover of its first issue in 1947. Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer set up the Board of Sponsors in 1948 to help guide setting the clock’s time.

With the New Hampshire primary less than three weeks away, no clear front-runner has emerged. Democratic party insiders, who confidently made predictions in years past, dare not project a winner. With polling sparse and inconsistent, well-connected Granite Staters are relying on their personal networks to get a sense of the race.

Gray Chynoweth, a Democratic business executive in Manchester who ran for Executive Council in 2018 and recently endorsed Pete Buttigieg, described the Democratic primary contest as “fluid.”

Dear Super Bowl Visitor,

Welcome to Miami! Or as we say down here in an expression that we use all the time because of our Latin culture: “¡Feliz Navidad!”

That is our way of expressing how excited we are to once again be hosting the Super Bowl. The National Football League took it away from us for a few years, but we got it back by improving our stadium, upgrading our infrastructure and acquiring photographs of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell naked with a llama.

Ha ha! We are joking. It was an ocelot. But the specific mammal doesn’t matter. What matters is, the Super Bowl is finally back in Miami where it belongs. Because this is a city that truly knows how to throw a party. We hosted 10 previous Super Bowls, and they were extremely festive events as measured by the number of arrests. And those were just the players!