My D-party CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, looks to be a shoo-in for re-election in a couple weeks, but he's campaigning anyway. His recent brag of bringing home some pork is a "frequent irritation". And it drew my Frequent Response on Twitter:
The DC Shuffle (a periodic observation): (1) take our tax $; (2) send some of it back; (3) act like they've done us a favor.
— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 21, 2024
Somewhat longer response: even though it's nonsensical, people tend to have a mystical magical belief that dollars dropped in from Your Federal Government are "free money".
Manchester is not a poor community; if it chose to, via whatever democratic government procedures it follows, it could fund those additional firefighter jobs itself. (Twelve of them, according to the Pappas press release.)
(And, of course, it may have to come up with the cash in the future if those 12 additional firefighters are to be retained.)
And do you think that taxpayer cash went though with none of being scraped off at the federal level? Come on.
Also of note:
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A burning question. I found the answers interesting anyway: How Are Reason Staffers Voting in 2024?
Peruse the varying rationales. I have to admit, my own preferences were ably represented by the venerable Robert Poole:
Who will get your vote in the 2024 presidential election? Because Florida is not a swing state this year, I am spared the horrible choice between two unsuitable candidates—both protectionists, both with loony tax ideas, and both ignoring out-of-control peacetime federal spending and the looming national debt disaster. In a number of previous presidential elections, I've voted for the Libertarian candidate. Not this time: I cannot vote for a defense-policy isolationist who mimics Neville Chamberlain's response to Hitler's invasion of other countries. I will write in a qualified candidate, Nikki Haley.
Well, I probably won't write in Nikki. Right now I'm looking at leaving that line on the ballot blank.
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Despite how they act. Or how they're treated. Kevin D. Williamson alleges: Voters Are Not Babies.
You, American voter, are not a baby.
The American voter does not have that excuse—not that anybody would know it from observing him, listening to his absurd and incompatible demands, enduring his temper tantrums. You know the classic case: “I want lots of spending, low taxes, and a balanced budget.” Populism is a way of trying to accommodate that infantile mentality by means of dishonesty: “Of course we can have lots of spending and low taxes without ballooning the debt—we’ll just arrange things so that we spend the money on you rather than on those undeserving people and then put the taxes on those undeserving people rather than on you.”
Donald Trump’s imbecilic views on tariffs are based on the same refusal to accept inevitable trade-offs as is my hungry infant’s demand for his bottle before it is ready. Trump insists that the tariffs will generate tons of revenue and that they will protect domestic industries from foreign competition, but, of course, only one of those things can be true: If the tariffs are being paid, that means the imports are still coming in, because people are still buying them; if the tariffs succeed in keeping imports off the U.S. market, then they aren’t generating any revenue, because you don’t pay taxes on imports that don’t happen. Trump is too much of an ignoramus and too fundamentally stupid to work through that, but my friend Larry Kudlow doesn’t have that excuse. Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to understand basic economics, but surely she has someone around her—I assume Jamie Dimon has her phone number—to explain that while she says she wants house prices to come down the policies she is pushing would cause them to increase: lower mortgage interest rates and easier access to credit, large subsidies for purchasers, etc.
Well, it goes on from there, but I have to stop someplace. You want to subscribe to the Dispatch, don't you?
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Not me, Ms. India. But, at After Babel, Freya India notes a disturbance in reality: We Live In Imaginary Worlds.
There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic”, apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.” In other words, your own imaginary ‘X’, with infinite “simulated fictional characters”. You, alone, in a vast social network of AI bots.
I have to admit that I was oh-so-slightly tempted. Even as I was shaking my head in disbelief. Some of my most brilliant tweets have gone out with zero response! Woe!
But, yeah, I think I can manage without imaginary followers.
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Ironically, "Chronic" is Kamala's brand of weed. But that is not to what Jim Geraghty is referring in his Morning Jolt, headlined The Chronically Underestimated Kamala Harris.
It is almost required in conservative circles to insist that Kamala Harris is stupid. And Lord knows, speaking off the cuff, she serves up some stinkers. Since she was handed the Democratic Party’s nomination without any competition, even her prepared remarks have been mostly anodyne fluff. She still regularly demonstrates the political instincts of a lawmaker shaped by the far-left environs of San Francisco, oblivious to what constitutes the political center in swing-state America. In just the past week, she skipped the Al Smith Dinner, told a heckler shouting “Jesus is Lord” that he’s at the wrong rally, and responded to another heckler who accused her of “billions of dollars invested in genocide” in Israel that “what he’s talking about, it’s real, and so that’s not the subject I came to discuss today, but it’s real, and I respect his voice.”
But there’s this nagging complication — if Kamala Harris is as stupid as her critics claim, why does she have the Democratic presidential nomination and a roughly 50–50 shot of being the first female president in U.S. history? Do you know how many ruthlessly ambitious Democratic men and women have desperately yearned to get where she is? How many smart, tough, shrewd, often underhanded and cold-blooded pols have tried to claw their way up the greasy pole and fallen short?
Geraghty's column contains a mini-biography of Kamala's career. There's a Clint Eastwood connection:
The first time Kamala Harris’s name appeared in her hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, was in March 1994, when legendary Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote about a surprise 60th birthday party for then-speaker Brown. “[Clint] Eastwood spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris, an Alameda [county] deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl. And she’s black.”
Well, I'll be darned. What if he hadn't spilled the champagne? What sort of alternate reality would we have?
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Part 956 of "Why I Stopped Watching CBS News." It's supplied by Jeffrey Blehar, who recounts the latest stonewall. 60 Minutes Officially Announces: Yes We Edited the Harris Interview and We’re Proud of It. He recounts the situation, and his bottom line is excellent:
Let us set aside the fact that it is in fact of great and newsworthy importance if Kamala Harris cannot answer a simple question about her Middle East policy without backfiring like an old gasoline-powered lawn mower. Let us forgive the obvious exercise of “news judgment” in a manner so clearly prejudicial in favor of Harris, concealing her most glaring weakness — her vacuous incoherence. Let us instead ask why CBS News and 60 Minutes still refuse to release an unedited transcript of their interview with Harris, despite having done so when Catherine Herridge interviewed Trump for them back in 2020. Imagine what it must conceal.
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