Pun Salad

A Democratic Los Angeles County official dined outdoors at a Santa Monica restaurant just hours after she voted to ban outdoor dining, Fox 11 Los Angeles reported Monday. 

At a county board meeting on Nov. 24, Los Angeles County supervisor Sheila Kuehl voted to ban outdoor dining, which she called "a most dangerous situation" for spreading the coronavirus. After the vote, which passed 3-2, Kuehl stopped by Il Forno Trattoria, an Italian restaurant she frequents, before the outdoor dining ban took effect the following day. 

Van Morrison knows what censorship means even if Internet mobs don’t. He has released three new songs, “No More Lockdown,” “As I Walked Out,” and “Born to Be Free,” that movingly speak against the new autocratic culture that too many people — especially trusted media figures, particularly left-leaning pop artists — accept without flinching.

The hysterical social-media response castigating Morrison’s compassionate new music (a fourth song, “Stand and Deliver,” is promised) only proves his point: We are deep into a second wave of undemocratic submission. It’s taken such a strange turn that Twitter thugs set out to rewrite cultural history, denying Morrison’s expressive genius in songs such as “Gloria,” “Brown-Eyed Girl,” “Domino,” “Moondance,” “Into the Mystic,” and the masterpiece albums Astral Weeks and Irish Heartbeat. The hecklers are trashing his musical legend (“He was never any good!”) merely to explain their own unease. Morrison’s anti-lockdown songs — his freedom songs — disturb their willing obedience to political authority.

I have a running theory that government officials, and the policies they support, are often disconnected from reality. Politicians on both sides of the aisle tend to do what they always do, no matter the current state of the world. They use the same policy tools, whether appropriate or not. They use every opportunity and emergency to push the same old policies they always peddle. And even when they claim they are reforming a program or an agency, they continue to serve the same special-interest groups. This alleged $908 billion compromise deal that includes state, Amtrak, airlines bailouts, unemployment bonuses, childcare subsidies, and a renewal of the PPP is a good example of that.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the Democrats’ Heroes Act — its size, its design, and the programs it includes — is oblivious to the improved economic conditions. They have been pushing this package when the unemployment rate was 14 percent, when unemployment rate was 10 percent, and when, at the end of October, the unemployment rate had fallen to 6.8 percent. They will continue pushing the same package of large unemployment bonuses, individual checks, and state and airline bailouts even if unemployment falls to 5 percent or less. The White House at the time seemed willing to go along with a big chunk of that Democratic wishlist.

The Democratic Party is not known for its sense of humor, but news that Joe Biden will appoint longtime Center for American Progress chief Neera Tanden to his government qualifies as a rare, well-earned laugh line.

Tanden is famous for two things: having a puddle of DNC talking points in place of a cerebrum, and despising Bernie Sanders. She was #Resistance’s most visible anti-Sanders foil, spending awe-inspiring amounts of time on Twitter bludgeoning Sanders and his supporters as a deviant mob of Russian tools and covert “horseshoe theory” Trump-lovers. She has, to put it gently, an ardent social media following. Every prominent media figure with even a vague connection to Sanders learned in recent years to expect mud-drenched pushback from waves of “Neera trolls” after any public comment crossing DNC narratives. No name in blue politics is more associated with seething opposition to Sanders than Tanden.