Pun Salad

The author argues, sometimes in unattractive academic jargon, that many of the strip’s “most recognizable devices were born out of Cold War anxiety.” Linus’s “security blanket,” for instance, originates from a term first used in World War II to describe the “military’s secrecy surrounding troop movements in Europe.” Yet Schulz moves the phrase’s meaning from “an exterior confrontation of military maneuvering” to an idiosyncratic strategy for “containing one’s own mental and emotional ‘weaknesses’ for the good of a stable and prosperous democratic society.” Lucy’s psychiatry booth (“The Doctor Is ‘In’ ”) is another brilliantly realized device, and rich in ambiguity. Readers identified with the “openness and vulnerability” of Lucy’s most trusting patient, Charlie Brown, but also with Lucy’s savvy cashing-in on the postwar vogue for analysis instead of running a “more conventional childhood lemonade stand.”

Joseph Bishop-Henchman resigned Friday as chair of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC), after a controversy that began three months ago with provocative tweets, intensified two weeks ago with an attempted schism of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party (LPNH), and has now turned into a battle for the soul of America's third-largest political party.

Two other members of the 17-person LNC, Tucker Coburn and Francis Wendt, have also resigned in wake of the tumult. The long-influential Pragmatist Caucus, associated with the two presidential campaigns of Gary Johnson, has dissolved as a direct result. And one of the party's few elected officials, DeKalb, Illinois, City Clerk Sasha Cohen, resigned from the national Libertarian Party (L.P.) in protest, saying in an LNC Zoom meeting that "we are a big tent party, but no tent is big enough to hold racists and people of color, transphobes and trans people, bigots and their victims."

WHEN THE NATION'S highest court issued a 9-0 decision last week upholding a Catholic social-service agency's right to participate in Philadelphia's foster care program, it provoked a mordant comment from Case Western law professor Jonathan Adler:

"Supreme Court rules UNANIMOUSLY against Philadelphia in Fulton religious liberty case; opinion by [Chief Justice] Roberts," Adler tweeted. "So tell me again, who are the extremists?"

It was an apt comment. Throughout this case, Catholic Social Services and its supporters had been portrayed as the aggressors, hostile to gay and lesbian equality and outrageously demanding the right to be closed-minded and intolerant. By their unanimous verdict, the justices made clear just which side they thought had behaved outrageously. It wasn't the church.

During a White House press briefing earlier this week, a reporter asked Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki a most verboten question: Does President Biden believe “that a 15-week-old unborn baby is a human being?”

The nerve.

Psaki, who is skilled at nothing if not the art of the dizzying pivot, responded, “Are you asking me if the president supports a woman’s right to choose? He does.”

The reporter was not, of course, asking Psaki if Biden supports the “right to choose.” She asked something entirely different, a very clear question: Does the president subscribe to the belief that an unborn child — or, if one prefers, a fetus — is a human being, at least at some stage of pre-birth development? Put another way: Is the president willing to acknowledge a basic fact of biology, or does his ideology preclude him from doing so?

In the event that a group of U.S. senators cannot agree on committing enough money to a bipartisan infrastructure plan, Democrats are reportedly considering a $6 trillion plan of their own. It would probably be best described as a package full of progressive items wrapped in magical thinking paper.

Most people would consider $6 trillion a lot of money to drop on infrastructure. That's because most of us still have an outdated notion of what infrastructure is. In fact, for most people, the word infrastructure conjures up images of roads, bridges, dams and waterways. However, as we've discovered during the last few weeks of discussions, for elected Democrats, infrastructure can be so much more than that.

Not long ago, for instance, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., tweeted: "Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure." So it's not surprising to see Politico report that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., hopes to include an expansion of Medicare in the Democrats' plan. That expansion would include, among other things, a reduction of the Medicare eligibility age to 60 or even 55.