Pun Salad

Unlike general elections, which are public contests and must be funded and administered by public officials, primary elections are essentially private functions.

They should be paid for with private funds and conducted under private supervision. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party (and the Libertarian, Green, and other minor parties) are not public-sector organizations. They are private corporations created to influence elections and public policy.

In the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s passing, journalists have discussed President Biden’s meetings with her. And they always quote the advice he says he got from his mother: “Don’t you bow down to her.”

His mother was right. This is a republic. Americans are citizens, not subjects. We don’t bow or curtsy to any fellow Americans, much less to foreign monarchs. (If you don’t believe me, ask Miss Manners, repeatedly.)

A trip to the grocery store costs considerably more than it did a year ago. Now Florida's congressional delegation wants to inflate prices even more.

On Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) led a bipartisan group of lawmakers—all of them from Florida—in submitting a petition to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai seeking "an investigation" into what the lawmakers call "the flood of imported seasonal and perishable agricultural products from Mexico." They ask Tai to invoke Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose "trade remedies" that will protect American growers from the scourge of…low-priced produce.

While they don't come out and say it directly, it's obvious from the letter that Rubio and his colleagues are seeking tariffs on Mexican produce. Section 301 is the same mechanism the Trump administration used to impose wide-ranging tariffs on goods imported from China. It's a law that grants the executive branch broad, unilateral power over trade.

On Monday, US President Joe Biden will announce more information on his plan to end cancer. The president will use the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy's legendary speech about putting a man on the Moon to name a director for a new agency to make this happen, adding yet one more acronym to the US biomedical research enterprise. The new agency is intended to improve the "government’s ability to speed biomedical and health research," and will be led by Dr. Renee Wegrzyn.

And as was the case in 2016, it still appears to suggest that the federal government is wasting money on the National Cancer Institute, which despite receiving almost $7 billion a year, apparently needs an entirely new agency—the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health—to actually cure cancer. What is especially troubling is that those concerns were evident in 2016 when then-Vice President Biden first proposed the idea, […]

The Jetsons was not science fiction any more than The Flintstones was archeology. It was, like its Stone Age partner, a midcentury family sitcom—I Love Lucy/The Honeymooners/Father Knows Best with different backdrops and dumber jokes. The commentary (such as it is) about technology mostly consists of complaints about devices breaking down and costing too much. Automation also means George and Jane Jetson do nothing all day except push a few buttons. If real, their lives would incredibly boring. (The Feminine Mystique was a bestseller for a reason.) The show is definitely not Star Trek.