Pun Salad

Why do Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries, despite paying so much more for health care? 

The short summary of what I will discuss below is that Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare means Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.

Why people continue to trust government officials is a mystery. Often disconnected from the problems at hand, their policies also often contradict their supporters' frequently expressed beliefs. While suffering from cost overruns and increasing budget deficits, these policies handsomely reward their cronies, too.

A good example is the latest attempt to pass yet another COVID-19 relief bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Republicans' failure to agree to her $2.2 trillion bill "malfeasance." Never mind that the White House's $1.8 trillion proposal was right up there with hers.

I predict that—regardless of the outcome of the election—Covid-policy discourse in leftist media will change not long after the election. The Covid propaganda will start to fade away. It won’t happen over-night, but, I predict, that from, say, November 20 the insanity will begin to recede and that thinking and policy will start going back to normal. The main impetus of the propaganda and wreckage will have passed.

“Anonymous,” the unnamed Trump administration official who claimed in an infamous New York Times op-ed that he was secretly trying to “thwart” Trump’s policies, turned out to be . . . Miles Taylor, a former policy adviser and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson, and eventually chief of staff in the department, although not until after the op-ed was published.

This revelation shouldn’t be a huge deal, and yet it feels like it just broke something important. It feels like the editors of the New York Times chose to play a massive prank on us. They watched the fervent Washington speculation that it was Mike Pence, James Mattis, Jared Kushner, Victoria Coates, and all along they knew it was . . . just some guy. We’ve seen other people conspire to try to pull off hoaxes and stir up frenzies and use the media to do it . . . but this time, one of the biggest voices in the media decided to facilitate the erroneous perception.

The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

• United States v. Trump, 6-3 ruling -- Determined that Trump has already won reelection
• Walsh v. Dweedlestein, 5-4 ruling -- We are to be a theocracy under God
• United States v. Trump, 5-4 ruling -- Trump is now the Galactic Emperor Of Man
• Acosta v. Elisha, 9-0 ruling -- All journalists shall be thrown into a pit with a she-bear