Pun Salad

I'd like to see Mr. Ramirez do one with Wheezy as Scarlett O'Hara, saying "Fiddle-dee-dee! Debt crisis, debt crisis, debt crisis; this debt crisis talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides... there isn't going to be any debt crisis."

And as for our regular Sunday feature…

So the great winnowing seems to have occurred, with Nikki, Newsom, and RFKJr all dropping below our 2% threshold. Michelle's still hangin' in there, though. The rumors are rife! For example, the NY Post's Cindy Adams reported: Michelle Obama may already be working on a 2024 White House bid. Excerpt:

So that's a lot of speculation, but here's an actual assertion:

Mrs. Obama’s team has already sent a survey to heavy-duty donors asking how they’d feel about her as the candidate.

Oh oh. As they say: big, if true.

Also of note:

• Donald Boudreaux advises the candidates: Buying Votes With Your Own Money Is Illegal; Buying Votes With Other People's Money Is Good Politics. (It's a letter sent to the WSJ editors.)

  You report that “The Biden administration, eager to highlight a signature economic initiative as elections approach, is expected to award billions of dollars in subsidies to Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, and other top semiconductor companies in coming weeks to help build new factories” (“Eager for Economic Wins, Biden to Announce Billions for Advanced Chips,” Jan. 27).

  Let’s rewrite this sentence so that it more accurately reveals reality:

  “The Biden campaign, eager to highlight a signature economic initiative as elections approach, is expected to buy votes by giving away taxpayer dollars to successful corporations in coming weeks to help bribe wealthy investors and CEOs as it simultaneously bamboozles voters into thinking that they are enriched when government forces resources into uses not justified by market signals.”

  It's that time of year when I recall my similar insight: The town's plow guy moves piles of snow from the street onto my driveway, and that's part of his job. Me throwing the snow from my driveway onto the street is illegal.

  Not that I'd want to actually do that.

• Who knew? Well, I did. But in case you didn't, the College Fix reports: Professors rip Haley’s, Ramaswamy’s ‘colorblindness’: gives credence to white supremacy. Examples:

  For Drew University’s Sangay Mishra […], it can’t be that Haley, Ramaswamy and other minority Republicans actually believe in colorblindness, but “how close [they can] take themselves to the idea of racial anxiety that [white conservative voters] are experiencing.”

  Haley and Ramaswamy “want to appear as somebody who is willing to be in defense of white dominance or white supremacy [and] to communicate that they are not too far from where Trump is in terms of invoking white racial anxiety and white racial resentment,” Mishra said.

  Mishra, whose specialties include “immigrant political incorporation, transnationalism, and racial and ethnic politics,” added that Haley noting how she and her parents overcame “racism and xenophobia” allows Republicans to believe their party is not racist.

  It's not new. From August 2020 in the WaPo, Frank J. Cirillo claimed: Colorblindness has become a conservative shield for racial inequality. Not mentioning Nikki or Ramaswamy, but…

  Time and again, President Trump and the Republican Party have invoked the idea of colorblindness to stifle meaningful reform proposals aimed at achieving racial equality. In July, Trump dismissed a reporter’s question about the vastly disproportionate rate at which African Americans are killed by police officers by noting that police kill White people, too. America, he is suggesting, is a post-racial society where racial injustice is an irrelevant and defunct issue, long since relegated to the past — and, by implication, where further action in that direction is no longer necessary.

  Yes, Trump too. In fact the entire GOP, the bastitches.

  Frankly, Frank: we've been immersed in non-colorblind "proposals aimed at achieving racial equality" for over fifty years. Maybe it's time to try something else.