Pun Salad

… I assume some of the electrons powering my blog-authoring computer come from there. Just a reminder from Ron Bailey: Nuclear Energy Prevents Air Pollution and Saves Lives.

Bottom line: "They estimate the U.S. lost 141 million life years due to the slowdown in nuclear power deployment." So this is your usual reminder: governments kill people, while pretending they are doing you a favor by keeping you "safe".

Also of note:

• I'm thankful for Nellie. She's married to Bari Weiss, and she writes a funny TGIF weekly for the Free Press. Her post-Thanksgiving column is especially heavy on the thanks, including:

  → The Kamala Harris campaign: I’m thankful for Kamala Harris’s campaign. First of all, they raised $1.5 billion dollars and spent it in 15 weeks. It sounds wasteful. But in fact, taking $1.5 billion dollars from some of America’s silliest people and then giving it away to hardworking ones is what I call distributive justice. Just think of the caterers who had to work around literally dozens of Kamala staff’s allergies and gluten intolerances. They deserved that cash. Think of the event planners, young women who want to save up for their own extravagant eco resort weddings. Kamala gave them a shot at Hawaii instead of the Dominican Republic. Think of the driver of that abortion van clocking overtime during the DNC who just told himself “eyes ahead, not your problem, eyes ahead.” So many worthy Americans.

  But most importantly: I’m grateful that this movement refuses to accept they could have done anything better. Anything at all.

  That last link goes to a YouTubed "Pod Save America" podcast running about 90 minutes, featuring Kamala's campaign staffers, which I didn't watch, but if you're into schadenfreude you might enjoy it.

  I'm currently reading Ms Bowles' book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, and it's also good. My report will eventually show up at the book blog.

• It has failed so much that I'm already sick of failing. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. points out that Antitrust Is the God That Fails and Fails.

  As taxpayer, consumer or citizen, don’t expect any benefit from the government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google. Given much precedent, however, it will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in billing and career advancement for the antitrust bar.

  Two Brookings Institution-affiliated economists asked 20 years ago whether antitrust improved consumer welfare. “The empirical record . . . is weak,” they said, and the record is hardly better now that courts have been routinely throwing out case after case on which taxpayers have spent millions.

  Which brings us to Google. I rarely use its search engine anymore. Instead of a list of documents in which I might or might not find my desired answer, now a chatbot supplies an answer plus a list of supporting documents.

  Google’s search engine also increasingly fails as a navigation tool, trying to propagandize or distract me when I only want to be directed to a web document that I know exists.

  Ah, these kids today with their "chatbots" and "skynets" and "terminators"…

  We've long inveighed against so-called "hipster antitrust" as exemplified by Lina Khan and her retinue. But Jenkins seems to be making a good case that even non-hipster antitrust is an idea whose time has passed.

• We knew this already. But it never hurts to be reminded, and Tyler Cowen does so: Massachusetts has occupational licensing for fortune tellers. He has a link to the mass.gov page: Massachusetts law about fortune tellers. Which itself has links to laws, cases, and articles.

  We looked at this back in 2007 concentrating on (of course) Salem MA: I See a Licensed Psychic in Your Future. (Sadly, after 17 years, many of the links are non-workies.)

  After all, you wouldn't want to be scammed by a fake psychic.

• As a final act, they can arrange for transportation of fired employees back to their home states. Christian Britschgi takes aim at another obvious target in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the Department of Transportation.

  "Who will build the roads?" That's the classic gotcha question posed to libertarians, who do in fact have a lot of answers for who will build the roads. The most straightforward retort is "not the U.S. Department of Transportation, which doesn't even build the roads now."

  Of all the organs of the federal government, the Department of Transportation (DOT) is the most like the gallbladder: a useless sac that, when inflamed, prevents proper circulation in the rest of the body. It should be abolished.

  To understand why it could be safely eliminated, consider what it actually does now.

  First, it provides infrastructure grants to state and local governments. Second, it owns and operates the nation's outdated air traffic control system, in which floppy disks are still essential. Finally, it acts as a safety regulator for the various modes of transportation, from cars to buses to trucks to trains. None of these functions requires the existence of a federal, cabinet-level department, which serves mostly to increase costs and reduce efficiency.

  ‥ and provide Mayor Pete with something to do for a few more weeks.

It's early, but (via Ann Althouse) I have a feeling this is the most amazing thing I'll see today:

Ann also has a short video response from some guy named Roger Daltrey.

Also of note:

• A modest proposal. Arnold Kling recommends separation of University and State.

  I am fond of saying that government involvement in an industry typically consists of subsidizing demand and restricting supply. In the case of higher education, supply is restricted by requiring schools to be accredited, and then turning the accreditation process over to the incumbent institutions. Naturally, this leads to a strong barriers to entry.

  To subsidize demand, the government provides all sorts of loans and grants to students and faculty. Higher education is one of the most powerful lobbies in the country. Because the public is lulled by the non-profit status of universities, there is no outcry over “Big Higher Ed” the way that there is about Big Pharma or Big Tech or Big Finance.

  Universities claim to be essential to upward mobility. They have lobbied for “college for everyone” as a goal. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into this.

  I believe that we need many fewer people going to college, many fewer professors, and many fewer administrators. Instead, we need many more alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, online education, innovative teaching models, and even far-out ideas like a network university.

  Couldn't happen too soon. Helping along (as reported by Cory Stahle at Hiring Lab: Educational Requirements Are Gradually Disappearing From Job Postings.

  And we also need undoing of Occupational Licensing.

• Jay's Journey. It's been interesting to witness Jay Bhattacharya's odyssey From “Fringe” to Mainstream. As described by John Tierney at City Journal:

  Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.”

  Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”

  Also optimistic about Bhattacharya's prospects is John Sailer, writing in the WSJ: Jay Bhattacharya Can Bring Science Back To NIH.

  The distorted priorities of American academia often have roots in the federal government. The National Institutes of Health pours millions of dollars into universities for large-scale hiring efforts based on diversity, equity and inclusion. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, can put an end to it.

  The NIH’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First, bars universities who receive its grants from hiring on the basis of race, but my reporting shows that many schools do it anyway. In one galling example, a grant recipient stated bluntly via email: “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.” The First program is modeled on the NIH’s own “distinguished scholars program.” Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I acquired records that show how the NIH makes these selections. Application reviewers repeatedly highlight candidates’ sex and minority status and favor those fluent in the vocabulary of progressive identity politics.

  On paper, the program doesn’t involve racial preference. As Hannah Valantine, former NIH Chief Officer for Academic Workforce Diversity, described it in a lecture, the program aims to “change the culture” by recruiting “a critical mass” of scientists “committed to diversity, to inclusion, to equity, and to mentoring.” “Notice that I did not say any particular racial, ethnic or group or gender,” Ms. Valantine added, “because legally we cannot.”

  The implied unvocalized addon to that quote: "… but, trust me, we're doing whatever we think we can get away with."

  For another example, see the "Statement on Race-neutral Admissions" on the "Diversity, Equity, Access & Inclusion" page at the University Near Here.

• A belated Thanksgiving link. The Miami Herald excavates a twenty-year old Dave Barry column: We'd rather eat turkey.

  Thanksgiving is that very special holiday when we take a break from our hectic everyday lives to spend quality time with our loved ones, rediscovering all the reasons why we don't actually live with them.

  But Thanksgiving is also a spiritual time of quiet reflection - a time when we pause to remember, as generations have remembered before us, that an improperly cooked turkey is - in the words of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - "a ticking Meat Bomb of Death."

  Yes, it is a tragic but statistical fact that every Thanksgiving, undercooked turkeys claim the lives of an estimated 53 billion Americans (source: Dan Rather). Sometimes the cause is deadly bacteria; sometimes - in cases of extreme undercooking - the turkey actually springs up from the carving platter and pecks the would-be carver to death.

  One interesting thing to note here is that Dan Rather was a credibility punchline twenty years ago, thanks to "Rathergate".

• A long tradition of failure. Jacob Sullum probably has the most predictable recommendation among Reason's many targets for abolition: Abolish the DEA.

  In 1973, the year the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was born, the federal government counted about three drug-related deaths per 100,000 Americans. By 2022, when the DEA had been waging the war on drugs for half a century, that rate had risen tenfold.

  That does not look like success. Nor do trends in drug use. In a 1973 Gallup poll, 12 percent of Americans admitted they had tried marijuana. According to federal survey data, the share had risen fourfold by 2023, when the percentage reporting past-year drug use was more than double the 1995 number.

  What about drug prices, which the DEA aims to boost through source control and interdiction? From 1981 to 2012, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average, inflation-adjusted retail price for a pure gram of heroin fell by 86 percent. During the same period, the average retail price for cocaine and methamphetamine fell by 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively. In 2021, the DEA reported that methamphetamine's "purity and potency remain high while prices remain low," that "availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady," and that "availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased."

  The inability of our elected representatives to recognize a failed policy has caused me to be bitterly sarcastic at times.

  I can't promise I'll improve anytime soon.

As we look around the news today, searching for things to be thankful for, this might seem to be an odd choice. Noah Rothman was confused by the Israel/Hezbollah "cease-fire deal", but: Now It Makes Sense.

And at Patterico's Pontifications, JVW is even less complimentary: History Repeats Itself: Outgoing Democrat Administration Petulantly Screws Israel.

By "history repeating itself", JVW is recalling the 2016 US abstention from a UN Israel-condemning resolution by the outgoing Obama/Clinton/Kerry Administration, widely (and accurately) seen as a stab in the back.

And now…

You may recall that Oval Office pic we posted just last week:

Yes, that's FDR in the large middle portrait, surely it was Biden's decision to feature him so prominently.

Say what you will about FDR, at least he knew which side had to be ground into dust in World War II. Another area where Biden is hopeless.

So here's what I'm thankful for: in a few weeks, he, and Kamala, and Blinken, and Kerry will be headed out the door.

Also of note:

• Just a reminder. We should Abolish the FCC. TechDirt's Mike Masnick points out, the next FCC chair is already giving us new reasons to do that ASAP: Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He’s Eager To Be America’s Top Censor.

  When Donald Trump announced that he was appointing current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to be the next chair of the FCC, it was no surprise. Nor was it a surprise that Trump tried to play up that Carr was a “warrior for free speech.”

  Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy.

  However, this is all projection, as with so much in the upcoming Trump administration. In reality, Brendan Carr may be the biggest threat to free speech in our government in a long while. And he’s not being shy about it.

  Carr is abusing the power of his position to pressure companies to censor speech he disagrees with, all while cloaking it in the language of “free speech.” As an FCC commissioner, he has significant regulatory authority over broadcasters, and he’s wielding that power to push his preferred political agenda. He has no real authority over internet companies, but he’s pretending he does. He’s threatening broadcasters and social media companies alike, telling them there will be consequences if they don’t toe his line.

  Well, that's a shame. Masnick's article is long and detailed, and the only glimmer of good news is that Carr won't actually have the power to do any of the things he threatens to do.

• Well, I guess she has experience. Monica Crowley's in a sycophantic swoon about our probable next Attorney General: Pam Bondi Is the Perfect Pick to End the Fentanyl Crisis.

  Um, not so fast, says Jacob Sullum, somewhat more believable: Florida Drug Deaths Rose Dramatically as Pam Bondi Did Her 'Incredible Job' of Reducing Them.

  […]Trump says she did "an incredible job" in "work[ing] to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs and reduce the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths." Fox News likewise notes that when Bondi took office as attorney general in 2011, she "quickly earned a reputation for cracking down on opioids and the many 'pill mills' operating in the Sunshine State." It quotes state prosecutor Nicholas Cox, who notes that Florida "was the epicenter of the opioid crisis" at the time. Aronberg "credits his former boss as being the person 'most responsible for ridding the state of Florida of destructive pill mills.'"

  The implication that Bondi's anti-drug efforts succeeded in reducing overdose deaths does not find much support in data reported by the Florida Department of Health. The age-adjusted rate of "deaths from drug poisoning" did fall a bit after she took office, from 13.7 per 100,000 residents in 2011 to 12.1 in 2013. But then it resumed its upward trajectory, reaching 25.1—nearly double the 2011 rate—by the time Bondi left office in 2019. The death rate rose sharply in 2020 (as it did across the country), rose again in 2021, and declined slightly in 2022, when it was 34.9 per 100,000.

  In 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Florida ranked 20th on the list of states with the highest drug death rates, down from 15th in 2011. But despite that relative improvement, Florida's rate as reported by the CDC rose by 66 percent during that period. In absolute terms, the number of drug deaths rose by more than 80 percent.

  Fun fact: in that same (2019) CDC data set, New Hampshire nabbed tenth place in the "Drug Overdose Death Rate", beating the pants off Florida.

  Further Fun Fact: More recently (2022 data), we've dropped to 21st place. But not because the OD death rate dropped in those three years.

  It rose, from 32 deaths/100K to 36 deaths/100K.

  It's just that many states are doing (even) worse and passed us in the rankings.

• To be fair… this is a Trump appointment I kind of like: Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH. According to Tyler Cowen:

  Trump has announced the appointment, so it is worth thinking through a few matters. While much of the chatter is about the Great Barrington Declaration, I would note that Bhattacharya has a history of focusing on the costs of obesity. So perhaps we can expect more research funding for better weight loss drugs, in addition to other relevant public health measures.

  Bhattacharya also has researched the NIH itself (with Packalen), and here is one bit from that paper: “NIH’s propensity to fund projects that build on the most recent advances has declined over the last several decades. Thus, in this regard NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects.”

  I would expect it is a priority of his to switch more NIH funding into riskier bets, and that is all to the good. More broadly, his appointment can be seen as a slap in the face of the Fauci smug, satisfied, “do what I tell you” approach. That will delight many, myself included, but still the question remains of how to turn that into concrete advances in public health policy. Putting aside the possibility of another major pandemic coming around, that is not so easy to do.

  Bhattacharya has made a number of Pun Salad appearances over the years. Most recently, I linked to his Reason review of Anthony Fauci's memoir, headlined Anthony Fauci, the Man Who Thought He Was Science.

• In case you were wondering if women were better than men at long-distance swimming… I suggest you read Jeff Maurer's take: The “Women Are Better at Long-Distance Swimming” Talking Point Is Basically Bullshit.

  Gender denialism is currently the fuzzy testicle drooping out of the intellectual left’s gym shorts: it’s obvious, embarrassing, and people are wondering “are you gonna do something about that?” The debate over trans women in sports has made it clear that some on the left not only deny that male physiology confers advantages that perhaps can’t be reversed with hormones: They deny that male physiology confers any advantage in sports whatsoever. They seem to think it’s mean to admit that the average man is bigger, stronger, and faster than the average woman, even though everyone knows that, and it feels like we’ve suddenly decided to debate whether five is bigger than three.

  The latest clown to step into the biology denialist dunk tank is — oh, God, this one hurts — Neil deGrasse Tyson. That really sucks — I like Neil deGrasse Tyson! He produces the Carl Sagan-type wonderment that I often enjoy after a long day in the comedy mines.

  Maurer provides a clip of NdGT on Bill Maher's HBO show, where he attempted an argument from (scientific) authority. Maurer debunks convincingly, and amusingly.

• Whoa, really? Well, maybe. A few of the entries from Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue are out there. In the sense that (a) nobody's talking about them and (b) they probably won't ever happen. Still, Matthew Petti, Reason's lefty peacenik, advocates that we Abolish the Army.

  The people who created the U.S. Army did not want it to last forever. George Washington, the first commander of the Continental Army, wrote that "a large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country," though he supported a small frontier force. Other Founding Fathers struck similar notes.

  "Standing armies are dangerous to liberty," wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 29. "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home," warned James Madison at the Constitutional Convention. "What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty," said Elbridge Gerry during the debates over the Bill of Rights.

  No wonder, then, that they put an expiration date on any American army. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 12 of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress has the power "To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." The next clause, authorizing the U.S. Navy, imposes no limits on spending. The message was clear: America needs a peacetime defense force at sea, not on land.

  A standing army might be useful if Canada ever gets obstreperous. But otherwise?

I subscribe to Jonah's take here:

this is ungood. It feels like a QVC segment where it ends with her finishing her margarita and saying, “that’s why our healing crystals are 50% off for the first 100 callers.” https://t.co/XyZ4Ak5tgv

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) November 27, 2024

But I also hold out the possibility that we are looking at the result of more than one edible.

If you'd like more reasons to be Thankful, Scott Johnson of Power Line has a longer video: A message from Kamala Harris. His preview/review:

Who knew that Marianne Williamson would not be the weirdest Democrat running for President this year?

Also of note:

• But the cartoons are still good, right? At Tablet, Armin Rosen is impressed as he watches a printed parade go by: The New Yorker’s Cavalcade of Ignorance. Twelve essays covering twenty print pages in the mag, and the summary is: "Some of the greatest minds in America have gathered in the pages of the country’s leading weekly to declare how little they understand things now, and how little they care to understand them moving forward." Example:

  “American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”

  I shall not deploy my George Orwell quotes on "fascism" today. You're welcome.

  But if you missed them the first N times, here's my latest.

• "May you live in interesting times." As we've noted before, that's not a Chinese curse. But nevertheless someone seems to have loosed it upon us. Kevin D. Williamson looks at one symptom: Procedure or Chaos?

  If you will forgive a ponderous opening question, I have one:

  What is justice?

  […]

  One of the sharp bright dividing lines between populists—right and left—and conservatives and traditional liberals is that very question. It comes down to matters of procedure vs. matters of outcome, and how we weight those respectively. The economic case is the simplest to understand. The classical liberal-conservative view emphasizes procedure: If the rules have been followed, if nobody has been deprived unjustly of his property or his ability to work and earn and trade, if property rights and contract and the rule of law all are respected, then the distribution of wealth and income that resorts of this is just, or at least not positively unjust, even when the results are not precisely what we would like. The populist view often emphasizes the role of luck and happenstance in economic life—some people have natural talents, some are born to better-off parents, some people just have bad luck, some people are victimized by callous employers or other economic actors whose deeds may technically satisfy the formal rules of the system but are infused with an underlying malice or inhuman indifference. What matters from their point of view is the justice or injustice of the outcome—if Elon Musk is a wicked man (says the lefty populist), then he does not deserve to be so wealthy, especially when there are more deserving people who have less. Populists will point out that the system is far from perfect; the classical liberal-conservative view is that the justice of the system doesn’t depend on its being perfect, only on its being applied to everyone equally, and those rules of course are subject to revision, but only carefully. 

  Populists feel aggrieved by the state of things—the state of their own lives or the state of the republic—and their grievances are central to their understanding of the world. About 89 percent of populism comes down to a conviction, however vaguely stated, that the wrong sort of people are on top, and that the more deserving people are being kept from rising. There’s a lot of “Rich Men North of Richmond” in that. When I ask my right-populist friends (and some who are not my friends) what it is they want to do or what they want the government to do, the answer is almost always some form of: “I want them to act like they care more about the kind of people I care about and give less weight to the priorities and preferences of the sort of people who go to fancy schools, get advanced degrees, run tech companies, swan around Davos, and that sort of thing.” There rarely is any very coherent sense of what would come out of that listening—of what the government might actually do differently—as though the act of listening more to x and less to y were a whole and complete political goal in and of itself. And I suppose it may be: As I have been arguing for a long time (and the argument is hardly original to me) in a society as wealthy and blessed as ours, there is a tendency to switch from fighting over scarce material resources to fighting over status, which is one of the few truly zero-sum games in town, being entirely relative. The idea is that if Mitt Romney had become president, then that would have been a collective victory for the private-equity guys and McKinsey types and the Harvard Business School graduates—and that the status elevation of that group is an issue entirely independent of anything that a President Romney would have wanted to do as a policy initiative. 

  There's much more, of course, but Dispatch-paywalled, I assume. I think KDW is more on-target with his criticism than those twelve New Yorker essayists.

• Another modest abolition. C. Jarrett Dieterle suggests we Abolish the Federal Alcohol Tax and Regulation System.

  When the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933, ending America's "noble experiment" with nationwide alcohol Prohibition, it supposedly meant the federal government was getting out of the business of regulating booze. But few governments willingly give up power, and even fewer give it up absolutely.

  In 1935, Congress passed the Federal Alcohol Administration Act (FAA Act), allowing the feds to collect alcohol excise taxes, prevent unfair trade practices, and protect consumers. Determining which agency should administer the FAA Act has been quite a journey—the Internal Revenue Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); and, for the last 21 years, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) have all taken turns. But one thing hasn't changed: The FAA Act still remains the main authorizing legislation empowering the federal government to regulate alcohol markets.

  Dieterle notes the TTB is also in charge of "notorious alcohol labeling regulations". So let me (once again) point out one my oldie but goldie posts: my objection to that GOVERNMENT WARNING on your beer and wine containers.

Recently on the book blog:

Well, this finishes off my mini-project to read the New York Times Best Mystery Novels of 2021. It was the only book on that list that the Portsmouth (NH) Library didn't own, so I splurged on a used copy at Amazon ($6.08).

The usual clichés apply: Wish I had liked it better. Not my cup of tea. Your mileage may vary.

The author is Willa C. Richards. The book My Antonia is referenced at one point, so I'm wondering if that middle initial stands for "Cather"? Maybe.

The book is narrated by Peg, member of a very dysfunctional family. It is set in Milwaukee, and jumps (mostly) between two timelines, one in 1991, the other in 2019. What makes this book a "mystery" is the 1991 disappearance of Dee, Peg's sister. This happens during a whirlwind of bad decisions involving infidelity, kinky sex, copious substance use, and firework displays.

As a backdrop, Dee's disappearance is overwhelmed by another horror: 1991 Milwaukee is also the setting of the discovery of Jeffrey Dahmer's string of grisly murders. (The Milwaukee cops are not only preoccupied with Dahmer, they are also defensive about their ineffective and corrupt behavior.)

In 2019, Dee's trail is colder than ever, but the family is driven to hire a very expensive psychic. Who (eventually) presents his theory of the case, spurred by an object Dee once owned. Peg is more broken than ever.

Sample of Ms. Richards' prose as Peg and Dee watch that 1991 fireworks display:

The first firework was a ghoulish green that turned us both fluorescent. I imagined we were divers swimming in a bioluminescent bay. The night felt heavy anyway, like water pressure bearing down on us. I imagined we were anywhere but Milwaukee. I didn't know what to say to Dee, so I started making promises.

Fairly or unfairly, I think of this as "Look, Ma, I'm writing!" style.

… or just sell the buildings to the highest bidder. I'm OK with that too.

We look at various abolition arguments today, including the one from Neal McCluskey at Reason: Abolish the Department of Education.

McCluskey notes that the Feds contribute a small fraction of educational funding, but not small enough that localities can afford to run afoul of its regulations and "guidelines".

David Friedman examines multiple approaches to implement Trump's promise to "ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education".

Over at the Federalist, Auguste Meyrat eyes bigger plans: Abolishing The Ed Dept. Is Just The First Step In Fixing Schools. He likes Linda McMahon, Trump's nominee for secretary of the department. But

And of course, there's Student Loa… oops, sorry, Dominic Pino says we should Stop Calling Them ‘Student Loans’. Some history you may have forgotten:

Politifact—yes, even Politifact—called Obama's 'If you like your health care plan, you can keep it' pledge its 2013 Lie of the Year. Certainly "we’ll save American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years" should qualify for runner-up.

And finally: Jessica Gavora pens a scary tale at the Dispatch: The Revenge of the Title IX Dads.

Title IX became a cudgel for Uncle Stupid forcing whatever progressive nostrums came into vogue. (We also saw this at the college level, where it was used to eliminate due process protections for college men accused of sexual misbehavior.

Also of note:

• This should not stand. The WSJ editorialists weigh in on how the Biden Administration is Punishing Google for Its Search Success.

  How badly does the Biden Administration want to punish Google? So much that the Justice Department’s antitrust cops are now asking a federal court to hobble the search giant, even though their proposals would hurt consumers and could benefit China. That’s only the start of the reasons to be skeptical of this government market meddling.

  In a court filing last week, the DOJ proposed a slew of remedies for Google’s alleged antitrust violations. Federal Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google had maintained an illegal search-engine monopoly by paying web browsers and device manufacturers to be featured by default, even as he acknowledged this wasn’t the primary reason for its success.

  “Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions,” Judge Mehta wrote. “The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”

  No matter, the government now wants to degrade Google’s search-engine quality to help less successful rivals. Start with its proposal to require Google to divest its popular Chrome browser, which by default uses the company’s web search. DOJ says Chrome lets Google collect more data on users to better target ads and refine search results. Yet if advertisers and users benefit from this product integration, what’s the antitrust problem?

  As previously noted, I use Google as my default search engine, but also Chrome, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Translate, Drive, their online "office" apps, their Password Manager, … and probably some other stuff. I'd be really pissed if this stuff starts breaking by some cockamamie Federal decree.

It's that time of year again, and in case you're wondering what to get for that special someone, there's Dave Barry’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide. It is the usual list of classy stuff that you didn't know someone else needed. And:

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour is on Dave's list. Who knows how long it will remain at Amazon? Spare your giftee the heartbreak of being left out at the next bug-kissing party. (And click over to view that fine print on the container, it's pretty funny.)

And now on to the slightly more serious stuff:

• She never saw a successful business on which she didn't want to crack down. Ars Technica takes a look at the latest totalitarian efforts from you-know-who: Elizabeth Warren calls for crackdown on Internet “monopoly” you’ve never heard of.

  US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s prime real estate.

  In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.

  In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms on how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since hiked prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, though its service remains identical and could allegedly be provided far more cheaply by others.

  The article links to VeriSign's rebuttal, Setting the Record Straight. I found it pretty convincing.

  And for that "hiked prices by 30 percent" since 2018 zinger: that's not too far out of line with the overall CPI increase since then.

  I can't imagine there's anything wrong with VeriSign's management of the .com TLD that Warren, Nadler, and Uncle Stupid can't make much worse.

• He read it so you and I don't have to. Phillip W. Magness loves to poke holes in works of lefty claptrap. For example, his review of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right by David Austin Walsh is pretty good.

  Walsh's monograph is an oddity. It mainly consists of scattershot vignettes about the racist and antisemitic figures who hovered around the American far right of the mid–20th century. The closest the text comes to a thesis statement is this: "All of the principal protagonists in this book—Merwin K. Hart, Russell Maguire, George Lincoln Rockwell, Revilo Oliver, Pat Buchanan, and Joe Sobran—have something in common," he writes. "They were all connected in some way to William F. Buckley, Jr."

  Walsh views Buckley, the "respectable" founder of National Review, as an arms-length partner of the aforementioned "crackpots" in what he dubs a conservative "popular front" against Roosevelt's policies. As in many works of this genre, the New Deal never faces meaningful interrogation. Its policy prescriptions are seen as obvious "democratic" correctives to capitalist excesses; the only conceivable motive for opposing it, Walsh apparently believes, is the reentrenchment of wealth and power.

  Buckley tapped the brakes against the excesses of the far right, nominally "purging" them when they became a liability, as with his 1962 denunciation of the John Birch Society. Meanwhile, the fringe elements festered in the background and, per Walsh, transmitted a lineage of racism and antisemitism to the present day. Those elements, Walsh argues, gained the upper hand after Buckley's death in 2008. Donald Trump followed, and with him a fascist undercurrent that seized control of the American right. This story somehow places the culpability for the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol on Buckley's shoulders, thereby bringing Walsh back to the object of his spite. In his telling, Goldberg created the "'liberal fascism' trope" to "obfuscate historical and contemporary connections between the conservative movement and American fascism."

  I am somewhat surprised that the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library doesn't own a copy of the Walsh book; usually they are a reliable source of anti-conservative diatribes. Ah, well, I won't ask them to get it.

• A myth is as good as a mile. Jeff Jacoby writes on The myths that cover up why Social Security is crashing.

  TO TEST your understanding of Social Security, try this short quiz:

  1. How much money is in the Social Security trust fund?
  2. How much money have you saved in your Social Security retirement account?
  3. How much money are you guaranteed to receive in monthly benefits when you retire?

  Reader, not to brag, but I knew the answer to all three questions right down to the penny. And I bet you do too. Click through for Jacoby's explanations. And this factoid is telling:

  Perhaps the most important change of all would be to acknowledge that Social Security has outlived its original purpose. When the program began in 1935, the elderly were the poorest age group in America. Today they are the wealthiest. As [Dispatch writer Brian] Riedl points out, "seniors have the lowest poverty rate of any age group and their average household incomes have grown four times as fast as the average worker since 1980." In FDR's day, there were no IRA and 401(k) accounts, few Americans owned stocks, and the average lifespan was too short for most people to accrue significant wealth. Now that that has changed, does it really make sense to keep taxing younger, poorer workers in order to pay benefits to retirees who are far better off than they are?

• So Jack Nicastro grasps the third rail. As part of Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue, he says we should Abolish Social Security. Expanding on the point made above:

  Social Security is not a retirement fund—it's a transfer program, taking income from the payrolls of current workers and giving it to retirees. Generally, these retirees are already wealthier than the workers subsidizing them. Social Security's retirement payments (Old-Age and Survivors Insurance) should be phased out because of the program's unsustainable and regressive nature, freeing workers to better use their earnings to plan for their own retirement.

  This should be easy to grasp: Retirees have had a lifetime to work, pay off their mortgages as their homes appreciate in value, and let their retirement accounts grow. Meanwhile, young workers are starting at the bottom of the labor market, have much less in savings to draw on in case of emergency, and often struggle to make rental payments or find an affordable home to buy. The median household wealth of those under 35 years old is $30,500, compared to $341,400 for the 65- to-69-year-old age group, according to the latest Census Bureau data from 2021.

  The plain truths about Social Security are easy to grasp. But it is to the advantage of a lot of people that those truths not be grasped, and replaced by demagoguery, lies, and fear.

  And so far that's been working just fine.

Well. You know how that saying plays out. Enjoy this longish but very watchable video from the good folks at Reason, explaining Why These D.C. Workers Want a Lower Minimum Wage.

It looks at the controversy between those who want to "help" tipped restaurant workers, and … well, actual restaurant workers. This bit was pretty amusing:

We should give the One Fair Wage folks credit for trying to put their ideas into practice. But then take back that credit, and some more, for not drawing obvious conclusions from those failures.

Also weighing in on the video is Daniel J. Mitchell: Government Intervention and (Convincing People about) the Unintended Consequences of Good Intentions. Who is about as charitable as I am:

It's probably a mixture of those things. The video shows that she's … not good about presenting data accurately and fairly, even after errors are pointed out.

Also of note:

• Blast frrom the past. Terri Schiavo died back in 2005; the Mayo Clinic dubs that event "the final complication of a cardiac arrest on February 25, 1990." At National Reivew, Wesley J. Smith complains, accurately: The Media Still Can't Get Facts about Terri Schiavo Right. There's a connection to current events:

  Terri Schiavo was cruelly dehydrated to death almost 20 years ago, and the media still can’t get the facts right.

  Terri’s case has come up again in media stories discussing the nomination of former congressman Dr. David Weldon to head the CDC. As usual, there are misreporting and wrongful implications when Terri’s case is discussed. Thus, the Raw Story report stated:

  He is also well known for his role in the Terri Schiavo controversy, where after a Florida woman suffered brain death, Congress attempted to intervene against her husband’s right to terminate life support. Weldon in particular used his credentials as a doctor to dispute Schiavo’s diagnosis.

  Terri was never diagnosed as brain dead, which is legally deceased. She was either in a persistent or minimally conscious condition, which is very much alive.

  […]

  Meanwhile, the Washington Post story also goes astray:

  Weldon, who served in Congress for 14 years from 1995 to 2009, attracted national attention for his involvement in the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman whose family’s attempts to remove her feeding tubes and end her life attracted national attention — and prompted interventions by congressional Republicans. The attempt to remove Schiavo’s feeding tubes was a “grave injustice,” Weldon said on the floor of Congress in 2003. He petitioned her family in 2005 to personally review her case.

  No, her family — siblings and parents — fought valiantly in the courts to keep her alive. Her estranged husband fought to hasten her death by removing her feeding tube. Why do I say estranged? At the time of the legal battle, he was living with a woman he called his “fiancé” (whom he later married), during which time she bore his two children. If that isn’t marital estrangement, I don’t know what is. At the very least, it created a profound personal conflict of interest between Michael and Terri that received far too little shrift.

  As to the supposedly controversial legislation and “intervention by House Republicans”: Weldon’s bill was among the most bipartisan laws passed during the George W. Bush presidency. In the House of Representatives, 45 percent of the House Democratic caucus who voted supported the bill. It received unanimous consent in the U.S. Senate, including from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Tom Harkin (who was a prime mover in support of the bill), Harry Reid, and Dianne Feinstein, etc. If only one senator had objected, the bill would have failed, but none did.

  I wrote about Terri Schiavo just a few days before she died, back when this blog was young: An Inconvenient Woman. (I even fixed a broken link.)

• And a blast from the … future? You may remember that a Sunday feature here at Pun Salad featured probability-harvesting from the Stossel/Lott Election Betting Odds site.

  No, I'm not going to start that up again. But EBO is publishing probabilities for the 2028 horse race. Yes, if you can wait four years for your payoff (and you can evade the legalities), you can plunk down your cash right now on who you see to be the winner. Spoiler: J.D. Vance is currently the top pick of the punters with a 25.7% probability of winning.

  Followed by (in decreasing order of probability): Newsom, Shapiro, Buttgieg, Whitmer, Vivek, Michelle Obama, DeSantis, Trump Junior, RFKJr, AOC, Kamala(!), Ivanka, Nikki, Tucker Carlson, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Kristi Noem, Andrew Cuomo, Tom Cotton, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary(!!).

  Bernie will be 87 years young on Election Day 2028.

  Oh, but I kinda lied when I said Vance was leading with 25.7%. Because EBO currently has "Other" with a 30.9% shot.

  Kang? Kodos? I dunno.

• Among many other problems… Christine Rosen notes The Democrats Have a Woman Problem (gifted NR link). For those of us who didn't like Kamala, it's very entertaining. An excerpt that I really enjoyed, since it validated my priors:

  She was condescending to women. In the aftermath of the election, the New York Times hosted a roundtable with young voters to understand why they cast their votes the way they did. Abigail, a 23-year-old woman who had voted for Biden in 2020, explained her 2024 vote for Trump as follows: “The ad where there are two married couples and the two wives went in to vote secretly and they glanced at each other and then both voted for Kamala Harris — oh, my gosh. Is that what you think of married women, that we don’t have the confidence to marry men who are our equal partners? I cannot vote for a party that thinks that poorly of me.”

  The ad, narrated by Julia Roberts and produced by the progressive group Vote Common Good, ended with Roberts intoning, “Remember, what happens in the booth stays in the booth. Vote Harris-Walz.” The ad was notable not only for its condescension toward women, who, in its telling, lack the courage to tell their significant other whom they support in a presidential election, but also for its bleak view of marriage. In that sense, it was revelatory about both Harris and the people running her campaign.

  Did I mention that Ms. Rosen validates my priors? Two days before the election, I remarked on the smirking condescension of the Julia-narrated ad.

• Another candidate for the Reason chopping block. Peter Suderman suggests we Abolish Obamacare.

  So after President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, they began working on a health care law that was constructed entirely defensively. They wanted something that people could easily understand, and they wanted something that wouldn't upset existing arrangements that people liked.

  That meant writing legislation that left most of the existing health care system in place. Aside from some cost changes that were used to help foot the bill for the law, Medicare, the health care entitlement for seniors, was mostly left alone, despite its looming long-term fiscal challenges. Medicaid, the jointly financed federal-state program for the poor and disabled, was expanded despite its poor track record on health outcomes. Employer-provided health coverage, which had been subsidized through the tax code since World War II, leading to vast distortions in the market and headaches when changing jobs, was left largely untouched, aside from a new tax on very expensive "gold-plated" plans—a tax that was to be phased in over years, and which was delayed even further because it was too disruptive.

  Democrats and backers of the health law, including Obama, frequently referred to Obamacare as a "starter home," the idea being that it would be renovated and expanded over time. A more apt metaphor would have been a new addition on an old and creaking house—an addition that left the shaky foundation in place.

  In their quest to write legislation that wouldn't disrupt anything, Democrats ended up writing a law that didn't fix anything.

  Suderman's recipe: "start over on health care reform." Something that is not on anyone's agenda, as near as I can tell. I think he'll have to be satisfied with being right.

Robert Graboyes is a reliable interesting read. His current substack article rejiggers his presidential rankings, but this is what I really found amusing:

Graboyes recommends Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man for a warts-and-all-but-mostly-warts view of FDR. I would toss in The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights for an additional angle.

And another excerpt. First, noting the NYT's ranking of Biden as the 14th-best president of all:

I guess the NYT will have to adjust its rankings too.

Also of note:

• I can count the number of times I've watched "Morning Joe" on the fingers of one hand. Even if all the fingers on that hand had been amputated. But nevertheless, Eric Wemple of the WaPo lists: Five reasons Democrats should turn off ‘Morning Joe’.

  And (spoiler alert), they all are: "You’re better off reading a newspaper."

  Yes, that's more than a little self-serving for a newspaper columnist. But he almost makes a good point down at item number three:

  Special counsel Robert K. Hur in February released a report outlining his conclusions that charges were not warranted in the classified documents case involving President Joe Biden. Among other claims, Hur found that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

  Scarborough exploded. “So bizarre,” railed the host on “Morning Joe.” “So many people immediately heard these random conclusions, irrelevant conclusions, politically charged, Trump-like ramblings. Why in the world would he put that in a report? His neurological assessment of Joe Biden and secondly why Merrick Garland would release garbage like that in the Justice Department.”

  Stalwart behavior of that sort was no surprise, considering that Biden has been a devotee of the program and Scarborough has served as a sounding board for the president in private calls. That’s not to suggest that a cable-news host would allow proximity to power to cloud his news judgment in any way on any occasion.

  Missing is any indication that you would have been "better off reading a newspaper". Yeah, maybe if that newspaper was the Wall Street Journal. Still it took them months after the Hur report was publicized to publish their article Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.

• 

  Speaking of bad presidents… George Will reviews a recent book: At last, Woodrow Wilson’s reputation gets the dismantling it richly deserves.

  In “Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn,” [author Christopher] Cox, former congressman and former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, demonstrates that the 28th president was the nation’s nastiest. Without belaboring the point, Cox presents an Everest of evidence that Wilson’s progressivism smoothly melded with his authoritarianism and oceanic capacity for contempt.

  His books featured ostentatious initials: “Woodrow Wilson Ph.D., LL.D.” But he wrote no doctoral dissertation for his 18-month PhD. He dropped out of law school; his doctorate of law was honorary. But because of those initials, and because he vaulted in three years from Princeton University’s presidency to New Jersey’s governorship to the U.S. presidency, and because he authored books, he is remembered as a scholar in politics. Actually, he was an intellectual manqué using academia as a springboard into politics.

  Good news: Portsmouth Public Library has a copy of Cox's book on order, and I didn't even have to request it. (Amazon link, if you'd like, on your right.)

• Uncle Stupid tries to make my life worse. I am an enthusiastic user of Google's browser, search engine, mail service, maps, calendar, cloud storage,… and maybe some other stuff that doesn't come to mind right now. And it's all free to me.

  So I'm dismayed at the recent legal attacks from the Department of Justice. At Reason, Jack Nicastro is also peeved: Forcing Google to Sell Chrome and Android Won't Make its Search Engine Less Popular.

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) is trying to force Google to sell Chrome after a federal judge ruled that the tech giant had monopolized the search market. Making Google divest itself from Chrome and Android won't significantly reduce Google's share of the market for general search services, it will just harm consumers.

  Oh yeah: my phone's OS is Android. I probably pay something for that, indirectly.

• Why are we here? I recently read a book titled Why?, which drew grand conclusions from the so-called "fine turning" of physical constants that seemed to only give a vanishingly small probability for a universe that might support life.

  But now comes a sorta-rebuttal to that argument, as described at Ars Technica: Our Universe is not fine-tuned for life, but it’s still kind of OK.

  Physicists including Robert H. Dickle and Fred Hoyle have argued that we are living in a universe that is perfectly fine-tuned for life. Following the anthropic principle, they claimed that the only reason fundamental physical constants have the values we measure is because we wouldn’t exist if those values were any different. There would simply have been no one to measure them.

  But now a team of British and Swiss astrophysicists have put that idea to test. “The short answer is no, we are not in the most likely of the universes,” said Daniele Sorini, an astrophysicist at Durham University. “And we are not in the most life-friendly universe, either.” Sorini led a study aimed at establishing how different amounts of the dark energy present in a universe would affect its ability to produce stars. Stars, he assumed, are a necessary condition for intelligent life to appear.

  I'm kind of relieved. That book was … pretty out there.

• Tired of all the abolition? Sorry, I've got a lot more for you. Today's is from Reason's C.J. Ciaramella who says we should Abolish FOIA.

  Over the past decade I've submitted hundreds of records requests to federal agencies through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I've written extensively about the law, taught college students how to file requests, and evangelized the importance of having a statutory right to inspect public records.

  I love FOIA. And I hate it. The federal FOIA law is broken and should be replaced with something better.

  FOIA requests can take years to fulfill, unless you can afford to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit. Agency FOIA officers routinely abuse exemptions to hide records. The process is difficult even for experienced reporters to use for newsgathering.

  Don't worry: Ciaramella advocates for a more open and automatic process to replace FOIA.

Recently on the book blog:

Back in October, I linked to this Free Press article, which described how an advertisement for this book, Israel Alone, was initially accepted by a booksellers' trade publication, Shelf Awareness. only to be abruptly cancelled. Apparently too pro-Semitic.

My reaction: "I think I'll ask the Portsmouth Public Library to get this."

And I did. And they did. Good for them. It's a valuable counterweight to (for example) Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (which, according to the online catalog is available both at PPL and Portsmouth High School), and similar titles.

The author, Bernard Henri Lévy, centers his book on the Hamas pogrom of October 6, 2023; he calls this an Event-with-a-capital-E; it was "unprecedented in form". And, it is strongly suggested, going back to business as usual is no longer an option. His descriptions of the Event are stomach-turning, and dare you to shudder and avert your attention in horror. In case you missed them the first time around.

We'd like to report that the world came together afterward to aid Israel in obliterating the barbarians of Hamas. That happened to a certain extent. Initially. But what also happened, to a surprising and outrageous extent, was a resurgence of explicit anti-Semitism, both in Europe and America, sometimes leading to violence. And, as the initial shock wore off, the default behavior re-established itself: attempts to hold Israel to impossible and dangerous standards, with (at best) perfunctory requests made of the terrorist organizations and gangster countries to stop being so mean. And the latest indignity: the UN-backed "International Court of Justice" issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Lévy makes the case for Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state; he has long supported a "two-state solution" for the conflict, and continues to do so, even as that hope seems increasingly forlorn.

The one sour note comes on page 91, where Lévy pooh-poohs "evangelical Christians" who are "nominally 'Zionists'". Ah, but "only to the extent that they expect on Judgment Day to take Israel's place on the very land where the Jewish state presently and provisionally stands."

It's much more common to see this bit of theological trivia deployed as an anti-Israel argument. "You know they were big supporters of moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, right? The better to bring about Armageddon, my dear!"

There's also a drive-by slamming of embassy-mover Donald Trump as a false friend of Israel. Because he (allegedly, over 30 years ago) said he preferred to have "short guys wearing yarmulkes" counting his money. Again, Bernard, that's the best you can do? When the alternative was Kamala "I've studied the maps" Harris?

And now that she's been blackballed from participating in the Trump Clown Show Administration, she's speaking her mind: ‘Disgusting’: Nikki Haley Condemns Two Trump Cabinet Picks.

Nikki also had disparaging comments on Junior, as reported at Politico:

“He's a liberal Democrat, environmental attorney trial lawyer who will now be overseeing 25 percent of our federal budget and has no background in healthcare,” Haley said. “So some of you may think RFK is cool, some of you may like that he questions what's in our food and what's in our vaccines, but we don't know, when he is given reins to an agency, what decisions he's going to make behind the scenes.”

Or will it be the brain worm pulling his strings?

[Headline reference, if you're interested, here.]

Also of note:

• Some plain speaking at the Federalist. And it's from Beth Brelje, chronicling a recent ghoulish honor ceremony: Biden Fetes Baby Murder, Planned Parenthood Abortion Priestess.

  Established by John F. Kennedy in 1963 to honor civilian service, the award took the place of Harry S. Truman’s Medal of Freedom and was intended to honor “any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

  It is fair to say that Richards helped change American culture. Without her work, there would be so many more people creating art, inventing gadgets, falling in love, and making even more babies, as God intended.

  On her watch, more than 13.3 million babies were killed before their births in the United States during the 13 years she led the organization, according to the Guttmacher Institute. And, although most of those babies were killed through Planned Parenthood abortion mills, Richards has boosted the entire industry through her advocacy for laws allowing more abortions, or, as she would say it, “access to women’s health care.”

  It used to be a progressive cliché: "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

  And, guess what? Now it is a sacrament.

• It's hard not to be disgusted. My state's senior senator sides with Hamas, as reported in NHJournal: Shaheen Votes to Block U.S. Arms Sales to Israel.

  U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) threw her support behind three resolutions late Wednesday night to block the sale of U.S. military weapons to Israel as that nation wages a war against the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah.

  The three resolutions were sponsored by Vermont Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, and they were overwhelmingly defeated by the Senate.

  Shaheen has repeatedly supported policies like the Obama administration’s Iran deal that aided the Islamist regime in Tehran, which is the primary sponsor of terror targeting the nation of Israel. She was one of just 18 U.S. Senators who supported Sanders’ resolutions.

  The article notes her current term is up in two years, she's old and may not run for reelection, and perhaps sees that as freedom to vote how she really feels.

• Whither the 'Emerging Democratic Majority'? Megan McArdle says 'Thither': The ‘Emerging Democratic Majority’ is no longer emerging. Now what?.

  For most of my working life, the Democratic Party has counted heavily on demographics. Its theory of politics had different names — the “Emerging Democratic Majority” that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote about in 2002, or Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — but the idea was the same: Demographic shifts meant Republicans would be stuck with a rump of aging White voters while Democrats built a dominant coalition from all the groups that were growing: the young, the college educated, the LGBTQ+ community, and the non-White working class, particularly Hispanics.

  Over time, this idea became somewhat unmoored from its roots. Judis and Teixeira had envisioned the party holding a healthy chunk of the White working class, but a lot of the later progressive versions envisioned a kind of demographic destiny in which the party, no longer hostage to its culturally conservative voters, would be free to move significantly leftward. (Judis and Teixeira have been trying for several years to stop this mutant version of their thesis from distorting Democratic politics.) It all seemed plausible at the time, but history has decisively falsified that thesis, as Donald Trump steadily attracted more working-class voters, particularly among Hispanic communities.

  Also see chapter nine in Yascha Mounk's book The Great Experiment.

• If you gaze long into the FTC, the FTC gazes also into you. Yeah, Nietzsche didn't exactly say that. But Veronique de Rugy nevertheless wonders: Will Trump Turn His 'Fix It' Gaze Toward FTC, DOJ Abuses?

  At now-President-elect Donald Trump's 2024 campaign rallies, attendees would hold "Trump Will Fix It" signs. Here's hoping the antitrust policy that President Joe Biden excessively politicized is one of those "its." Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance, previously said he believes that Biden's appointee as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has done a good job with antitrust policy. I disagree.

  For nearly 40 years, most antitrust scholars sensibly agreed that the government should base its treatment of potential corporate monopolization, mergers and related issues on these actions' effect on "consumer welfare." This standard ensures that antitrust is used only to prevent businesses from undermining economic competition, preserving a market that drives prices down and product quality up on behalf of us consumers. Antitrust should not protect businesses from competition.

  Upon taking control of the FTC, Khan discarded this standard and, along with it, decades of bipartisan agreement. Biden's Department of Justice and FTC quickly morphed antitrust into a tool for helping the White House achieve political aims that have nothing to do with keeping markets competitive.

  Lina is associated with what used to be called "hipster antitrust". But the relevant Wikipedia article deems that it must be deemed the more respectable "New Brandeis movement".

• A reading suggestion for DOGE. Eric Boehm advocates saving some taxpayer money: Abolish the Department of Commerce.

  If the Senate goes along with President-elect Donald Trump's pick, then financier Howard Lutnick will be the next secretary of the Department of Commerce.

  He should also be the last.

  On Tuesday, Trump nominated Lutnick, a personal friend with deep ties to Wall Street who is also co-chairing Trump's transition effort. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump said Lutnick would "will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda," and Politico notes that Lutnick has been a defender of Trump's plans to impose across-the-board tariffs. During an appearance on CNBC in September, Lutnick spelled it out clearly, saying "we should put tariffs on stuff we make and not put tariffs on stuff we don't make."

  In other words, Lutnick aims to make it more difficult and expensive for many American businesses and consumers to engage in commerce, the very thing that he's supposed to be overseeing. That contradiction reflects the Commerce Department's own confused status—an amalgamation of programs and agencies that often have little to do with the exchange of goods and services, or seem determined to make the process more complicated than it needs to be.

  Boehm advocates splitting out a couple of agencies currently hiding under Commerce (the Census Bureau and NOAA). I'd save the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); they do good stuff.

There's a current imbroglio going on between the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). We won't go into the history, but you can dig it out from this article by Greg Lukianoff, head of FIRE: The fall of the AAUP.

It is long and (to my mind) devastating. He provides "a non-exhaustive list of how the AAUP have become a threat to academic freedom and free speech" and "direct responses to the false claims" made in the recent debate. We will skip to the bottom line:

[Consumer note: Our Eye Candy du Jour is described at Amazon as an "George Orwell Quote". It is not. The actual quotee has an amusing article at American Thinker: George Orwell is stealing my work.]

Also of note:

• Trump pays attention to warnings, right? Well, my advice to him would be to pay attention to Charles C.W. Cooke anyway: Biden’s Fate Is a Warning to Trump (gifted link!).

  It is common at present to hear that the president-elect has a “mandate.” If Trump is smart, he will remove that word from his vocabulary. Instead of a “mandate,” he ought to have goals, and those goals ought to line up with those that are shared by the public. Economic growth is a shared goal; ramming Matt Gaetz into the attorney general’s office is not. Renewing his signature tax cuts while avoiding inflationary pressure is a shared goal; treating the other party as if it were filled with traitors and the Constitution as if it were optional is not. Securing the border is a shared goal; indulging the worst whims of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not. International peace is a shared goal; feuding with other Republicans in pursuit of “loyalty” is not. Joe Biden won in 2020 on the back of a promise to restore normalcy. Once in office, he threw all that out. Joe Biden is a warning. Donald Trump would do well to heed it.

  This is not to say that, as president, Trump should feel obliged to discard every one of his foibles. The man is an eccentric, and his eccentricity is a crucial part of his enduring appeal. Nevertheless, he should understand that the public will tolerate idiosyncrasies from a politician it believes is doing a good job far more readily than from a politician it considers to be feckless, selfish, or distracted from the bread-and-butter of his post. Simply put, Donald Trump’s quirks do not enable his accomplishments; his accomplishments enable his quirks. Latitude is earned, not given. Had the economy been roaring and the world been calm, the Democratic Party might have been able to make “Dark Brandon” happen. Harsh reality put paid to that dream.

  To say, again, the thing I've been saying too much: We will see how that turns out.

• The only problem with Jacob Sullum's headline is its tense: We Are Going To Learn More About Matt Gaetz's Sex Life Than We Wanted.

  Specifically, its future tense. I'm pretty sure I already learned more than I wanted about that. But anyway:

  The fact that former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz lacks relevant legal experience should be enough to kill his nomination as attorney general. The poor judgment he has repeatedly demonstrated, including pointless stunts and intraparty squabbles that irritated his Republican colleagues, only lengthens the odds of his confirmation. But the clincher may end up being the salacious details of a House Ethics Committee report that Gaetz would like to keep under wraps.

  The committee reportedly looked into several possible ethical violations by Gaetz, including allegations that he had sex with an underage girl, used illegal drugs, accepted prohibited gifts, misappropriated campaign funds, and shared sexually explicit videos with his colleagues on the House floor. The New York Times describes the resulting report as "highly critical."

  But, as you may have heard, that report has leaked. Hence, as Bette Davis said in All About Eve: "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

  Here's a cheap shot I took on Twitter:

  It's not nice to make fun of someone's appearance! That said: Gaetz looks like Colin Jost after a botched plastic surgery procedure.

  — Paul Sand (@punsalad) November 20, 2024

• What is the opposite of the Golden Rule? Byron York, I think, spies it in the sermon provided by about-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:

  So this week, Schumer went to the well of the Senate and addressed some remarks to his Republican colleagues. "Another closely contested election now comes to an end," he said. "To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith: Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We've seen that happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power. So, instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it's bipartisan. If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation."

  The short version of that is: Please don't do to us what we were going to do to you. Schumer is obviously concerned that Republicans might embrace a scheme to eliminate the filibuster and pass all sorts of consequential legislation with no Democratic input at all. That wouldn't be bipartisan! Fortunately for Schumer, Republicans have been more principled than Democrats when it comes to the legislative filibuster, and to the filibuster in general. Republicans realize that even though they will have the majority for the next two years, they might be back in the minority at any time after that. So Schumer will not get it good and hard the way he planned to give it to Republicans.

  It will be interesting to see how Schumer's plea for bipartisanship will translate into votes on Trump's cabinet picks.

• Good news for Amtrak, amirite? The AntiPlanner notes: Amtrak Ridership Up in September. Ah, but there's a catch! Actually, a bunch of catches. Excerpt:

  Amtrak earned $2.5 billion in ticket revenues and food & beverage sales in F.Y. 2024. That works out to about 38.4¢ per passenger-mile. For comparison, commercial airline fares averaged 20.1¢ per passenger-mile in 2023.

  Amtrak also collected $314 million from the states to subsidize passenger trains. It calls these state subsidies “passenger related revenues,” but they are really just subsidies in the same way that dollars provided by the federal government are subsidies.

  Amtrak says that its 2024 operating costs were $4.3 billion or an average of 66.1¢ per passenger-mile. However, this does not count depreciation, which it says was $966 million or 14.8¢ per passenger-mile. Some of its operating costs were covered by state subsidies; some by federal subsidies. The depreciation wasn’t covered at all, which is why Amtrak’s infrastructure is in such poor shape.

  The reason why railroads and other companies measure depreciation is so they can show investors that they are earning enough revenue to replace their infrastructure when it wears out. Amtrak can’t so it pretends depreciation doesn’t count and then demands government bailouts when its infrastructure is falling apart.

  In case you missed it when we linked to it a few days ago: Jason Russell's brief argument at Reason as to why we should Abolish Amtrak.

• And while we're at it… Katherine Mangu-Ward says we should Abolish FEMA.

  … FEMA has given Americans every reason to believe it is highly politicized, a poor steward of federal resources, bad at establishing priorities, and often unable to communicate clearly to people in distress.

  Since it was created in an act of bureaucratic centralization in 1979, FEMA has done little to earn Americans' trust and much to earn their suspicion and scorn. The agency's track record over the last 20 years is a case study in bureaucratic mismanagement, with repeated highly public failures.

  "Other than that, though, it's fine."

Reality:

And only slightly modified by Mr. Ramirez (I recommend clicking on it to get to a big beautiful version):

Not that it matters, but I assume Trump will be changing some of the portraits and busts.

Also of note:

• To be fair, it was justifiable homicide. Jeff Maurer continues to take on the loons on his own side: Activists Continue to Murder Left-Wing Thought. He provides clips of John Oliver (on a show called "Last Week Tonight") and Jen Psaki (on a show called … well, I don't know what the show is called, it's on MSNBC) using the same phrasing to advocate for "trans women" being on female sports teams: “no evidence that trans women in sports threaten safety or fairness”.

  Jeff (I call him Jeff) traces this back to "a document called “Transgender Athletes: A Research-Informed Fact Sheet” from the University of Kansas’ Center for LGBTQ+ Research & Advocacy." He shows this 2017 "fact sheet" misrepresented the research behind the specific claim. And furthermore:

  The University of Kansas’ “Research-Informed Fact Sheet” is quite a piece of work. Almost all of its links are dead. One of the academic resources it cites is this “fact sheet” from the ACLU, which was the subject of a rim-rattling social media dunk fest a while back, because it included obvious non-facts like “FACT: Trans girls are girls.” and “FACT: Trans people belong on the same teams as other students.” The Kansas document also prominently features a pull quote from a professor who — whoa, coincidence alert! — teaches at the University of Kansas! That professor, Kyle Velte, specializes in research on transgender issues, and I would put the odds that Kyle Velte wrote this fact sheet and cited herself as an expert without acknowledging that she is the author of the fact sheet at around 99.999999999999999%.

  In short: This is joke scholarship designed to trick people. This is like when the religious right used to dig up some crackpot professor who would argue that evolution can’t be true because kangaroos are too rad, and that Jesus buried all those fossils as a prank. The contention that there is “no evidence” that physiology confers an advantage in sports — despite the fact that there is extensive research measuring differences in sports performance between men and women and that this obvious reality underlies the very existence of women’s sports — isn’t an argument so much as a dare. Activists are spouting bullshit and daring you to admit that you know what they’re saying isn’t true.

  Jeff's closing comment:

  Many activists have falsely asserted that a robust scientific consensus supports their views on trans women in sports and youth gender medicine, and they’re clearly hoping that that lie is repeated by the credulous and/or obsequious. They’ve had some success. But when people with influence repeat those lies to an American public who clearly aren’t buying, they do further damage to our already-degraded institutions. Which plays into the hands of people who are determined to burn our institutions down.

  Although they probably believe they're being "compassionate", Psaki, Oliver, etc. are probably overall harming trans people.

• Now that the election's over… Jim Geraghty notes Biden’s Wishy-Washy Support for Ukraine Reaches Its Final Months.

  I don’t love the Biden administration waiting until after the election to make this move, or the announcement that “President Biden has committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20,” as secretary of state Antony Blinken put it on November 13.

  First, all this stuff they’re sending is long overdue. Second, it makes it look like these were long-planned moves that had to be hidden from the electorate, lest they make people less inclined to vote for the president’s party. An incumbent administration’s foreign policy and decision-making after Election Day shouldn’t look all that different than it looked before Election Day.

  But that would imply that their policies were principled, not simply politically expedient.

• When you've lost Ars Technica… Beth Mole has some advice to help mend self-inflicted wounds: Trust in scientists hasn’t recovered from COVID. Some humility could help.

  Scientists could win back trust lost during the COVID-19 pandemic if they just showed a little intellectual humility, according to a study published Monday in Nature Human Behavior.

  It's no secret that scientists—and the science generally—took a hit during the health crisis. Public confidence in scientists fell from 87 percent in April 2000 to a low of 73 percent in October 2023, according to survey data from the Pew Research Center. And the latest Pew data released last week suggests it will be an uphill battle to regain what was lost, with confidence in scientists only rebounding three percentage points, to 76 percent in a poll from October.

  So I guess the science is settled: scientists shouldn't be so arrogant in claiming the science is settled.

  Surprisingly, Dr. "I am the Science" Fauci goes unmentioned in the article.

• Also unmentioned: Laura Helmuth Jesse Singal tells her story at Reason: How Scientific American's Departing Editor Helped Degrade Science.

  Earlier this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. "I've decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief," she wrote on Bluesky. "I'm going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I'd like to share a very small sample of the work I've been so proud to support (thread)."

  Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn't be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected.

  In it, she accused her generation, Generation X, of being "full of fucking fascists," complained about how sexist and racist her home state of Indiana was, and so on.

  "Fuck them to the moon and back," she said of the dumb high school bullies supposedly celebrating Trump's victory.

  Ms. Helmuth is, from what I can find using the Google, in her mid-50s. And still working out those high school traumas.

• Another thing to abolish. Emma Camp finds a tempting target: Abolish Federal Student Loans.

  When it was created in 1965, the federal student loan program was pitched as a way to make college accessible for Americans who couldn't afford to pay tuition out of pocket. The program would supposedly rocket millions into the middle class by helping them obtain college degrees.

  Instead, easily accessible loans led to skyrocketing tuition—and gave schools an incentive to create low-value programs accepting students unlikely to graduate, all to absorb government money.

  At this point, there are more than $1.6 trillion in outstanding federal loans. The Biden administration has turned to student loan forgiveness to solve the problem, but that's an ineffective Band-Aid for this giant hemorrhage—one that gives colleges no reason to lower their prices or stop exploiting high-risk students.

  Uncle Stupid should get out of the loan business altogether. If they had more print pages in the magazine: the Export-Import Bank, Freddie Mac, … (But the Small Business Administration is on their list and will be showing up here at some point.)

Recently on the book blog:

For longtime Connelly readers: this is cover-billed as a "Ballard and Bosch" novel. More accurately, it's a "Ballard, Bosch, and also another Bosch" novel. It's mostly Renée Ballard. Harry Bosch does make some critical appearances. But I think his daughter Maddie actually shows up on more pages.

There are multiple plot threads. First, Ballard returns from her morning surfing to find that her car's been burgled, with the perpetrator stealing her wallet, cop badge, and gun. This is terrible news, because she has enemies in the department just waiting for her to make a mistake like this, using it to stymie her career. So she has to solve this on her own… or maybe call in some assistance from an ex-cop who had similar battles in the past! And it's not long before her off-the-books investigation leads to much more serious criminality.

Second thread: Renée heads up the LAPD's "Open-Unsolved Unit", tasked with using new investigative techniques on crimes that stumped previous investigators. And they have discovered a DNA link to the "Pillowcase Rapist", who had a reign of terror over LA a couple decades back. That link turns … complicated, uncovering a lot of scandalous and unsavory behavior in Pasadena.

And one plot thread doesn't start up until page 147 or so, and I won't spoil it. But it's a biggie.

One cute thing when Renée is searching through a storage locker, and finds a book collection containing "several authors she recognized, including some she had even read: Child, Coben, Carson, Burke, Crumley, Grafton, Koryta, Goldberg, Wambaugh,…"

Notice anyone conspicuous by their absence? Yes, I guess in the parallel universe where Ballard and the Bosches exist, Michael Connelly cannot.

(For Tom Petty fans: yes, it's the hardest part. Says so on page 142.)

I approached this book with some trepidation. I haven't had a lot of luck with nonfiction authors whose first names begin with Y. Good news: this one, by Yascha Mounk, is pretty good; his prose is clear and interesting, and he makes a lot of sense.

His title is taken from an interview he did with a German TV news show, referring to the unprecedented influx of immigrants of different religions, races, and ethnicities into democratic countries worldwide. He noted the accompanying stresses on previously monocultural countries, many of which were becoming more authoritarian in response. And he dubbed the overall process "a historically unique experiment."

Well, that did it. Opponents of immigration seized (yes, seized) on that word "experiment". And they pounced. Boy did they ever pounce. Because when you've got an experiment, that implies experimenters. Who are the white-coated pulling the strings clandestinely? It's a conspiracy, I tells ya! Using our countries as guinea pigs!

Mounk denies a conscious conspiracy. The mass migration is the result of unforeseen forces, and took everyone, even those in charge, by surprise. Fine. But now what? Are we (here in the US) doomed to follow many European countries into authoritarianism? (Usually this is dubbed "right-wing" authoritarianism, but that seems inaccurate.) Or can we look forward to increased animosity and possible violence between the incoming minorities and the intolerant majority?

Yeah, "probably" on the authoritarianism, "maybe" on the violence. But Mounk makes the argument that bad things need not happen. His arguments are straightforward; examples (good and bad) are drawn from worldwide history.

I'll just mention one bit: one chapter is titled "Demography isn't Destiny", and it's dedicated to debunking the notion that US population trends will inevitably relegate white people into permanent minority status, and that will, in turn, put the Democratic Party in the unassailable driver's seat, forever. Mounk calls this "the most dangerous idea in American politics"; it's a recipe for that resentment and possible violence mentioned above.

This book was written in 2022. Given the 2024 election results, his argument here seems prescient, especially given the inroads the GOP made into the people-of-color vote.

Now Mounk is a Democrat, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that his "what is to be done" concluding chapter doesn't reflect that. Although (good news) he rejects the dreadfulness of race-conscious government programs, that just means they should be aimed at everyone. And paid for by taxes on (who else but) the rich. We need to improve the education of minorities? Why, just send their government schools more money!

This seems to be aimed at reassuring his fellow party cohort: hey, I'm still one of you! I wish he'd look at tearing down some of the government-created barriers to social mobility: mostly regulations that protect incumbent positions at the expense of strivers: land-use restrictions, occupational licensure, environmental rules, business regulation, etc. And (of course) a hefty dose of school choice policies, giving low-income families the freedom to escape dysfunctional government schools. (A freedom better-off families have always had.)

But in other bad news, Jacob Sullum reports: Trump's Pick To Run the FCC Wants To Restrict the Editorial Discretion of Social Media Platforms.

To his credit, Carr is a foe of Network Neutrality, which is pissing off some of the right people. (Example, Karl Bode at Techdirt: Trump Tags Brendan Carr To Dismantle What’s Left Of Broadband Consumer Protection At FCC)

But apparently, as Sullum details, that's not due to Carr (or Trump) having a principled bias against big-government regulation. That goes out the window when you can use "regulation" as a weapon against your political enemies.

The right answer is provided by Thomas W. Hazlett in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the FCC.

The FCC was a bad idea back then, created amidst the increasing popularity of progressive/socialist/fascist reactions against free-market liberalism. Time for it to go, not look for new ways to boss private companies around.

Also of note:

• Newsflash: Old dog still performing old tricks. James Freeman notes that Biden Still Hasn’t Learned.

  How much damage can a president do in two months? America may be about to find out as the man considered mentally unfit to be prosecuted or run for re-election embarks on a mad dash to advance a failed agenda.

  Fatima Hussein, Matthew Daly and Collin Binkley reported on Friday for the Associated Press:

  Biden administration officials are working against the clock doling out billions in grants and taking other steps to try to preserve at least some of the outgoing president’s legacy before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

  Also in the works: another unconstitutional end run around Congress on student loan "forgiveness".

• We have met the enemy and he is us. Kevin D. Williamson fingers Public Enemy No. 1. And that would be the Federal Debt. Excerpt:

  At the end of Trump’s first year in office, federal debt was 102 percent of GDP; by the time Joe Biden was elected, debt was 122 percent of GDP. Pandemic-related spending accounted for much of that spike, sure, but the debt was on its way up in the years leading up to COVID-19, too. The Biden administration has been no great shakes on spending, but it is worth pointing out that debt as a share of GDP is slightly lower today than it was at its peak during the first Trump administration. Of course, presidents are not uniquely responsible for debt and deficits—Congress has a say, too. But what congressional Republicans mainly have said to Trump is: “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

  How many days in a row have I been saying this? We'll see how that turns out.

• Ssh. Don't tell them. If the MSM were smart, they would listen to Megan McArdle: Liberal media bias is hurting Democrats. Really.

  I used to spend a lot of time complaining that liberal media bias hurt Republican politicians and conservative causes. I no longer make that argument.

  Oh, I still agree with conservatives that the mainstream media is biased toward the left. It could hardly be otherwise, given the political leanings of journalists: A 2022 survey showed that fewer than 4 percent identified as Republicans. In the worst cases, this leads to reporting that treats “Republicans like a crime beat and Democrats like friends in need.” More commonly, it subtly affects what stories journalists choose to cover, what angle they take, whose experts they give more credence and whose feelings they are careful not to hurt.

  This effect has grown pronounced over the past decade, in part thanks to pressure from progressive staffers at media organizations. But along the way, something ironic happened: I started to believe that media bias had stopped helping Democrats. Instead, it started to hurt them, along with the institutions themselves.

  During this election cycle, I watched in astonishment as left-wing critics complained that the mainstream media was botching this election by “sanewashing” Trump, failing in our duty to cover “not the odds, but the stakes” and trading in false equivalence. I was not astonished that progressives wanted us to spend more time criticizing Trump and less time pointing out the flaws of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. I was amazed because they were talking as if this might affect the election’s outcome.

  I assume Megan's under no illusions that her criticisms will affect the trajectory of MSM distrust in the general population.

I was (briefly) amused by this "obvious" botch from the NYT:

Spitting out my coffee after reading this NYT "fact check" of RFK Jr. pic.twitter.com/sqL9jaeUR1

— Brad Cohn (@BradCohn) November 17, 2024

But then I read about what Junior was claiming: RFK Jr. claims Canadian Froot Loops have 3 ingredients. They have 17.

So the NYT was right, Junior (in this specific claim about the number of ingredients) was wrong. And I was wrong to unskeptically believe Brad Cohn that the NYT would say something so self-evidently ludicrous; they're always much more subtle about it!

Also dumping on Junior, the WSJ editorialists, who venture into The Strange World of RFK Jr..

The editorial goes on to mention that HHS could use someone to shake up the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC, given (especially) their COVID botches.

But not Junior.

Well, maybe Trump will do better with other picks. Jeopardy! guy James Holzhauer has some fake news on that score:

Donald Trump has nominated Brad Rutter for Secretary of the Treasury pic.twitter.com/0BOacvMLtW

— James Holzhauer (@James_Holzhauer) November 15, 2024

But seriously, folks. George F. Will is hopeful that chex-n-balances thing will improve things, via The Senate’s Madisonian opportunity on those nominations.

And, yes, once again: we'll see how that turns out.

Also of note:

• It's so crazy it just might work. At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Drew Cline outlines five Populist policy solutions to empower outsiders. His article is pretty insightful about what's really bugging voters about "the system", but let's excerpt two of his proposals:

  1. Reduce state and local land use and development regulations. Our 2021 study of local land use regulations showed that New Hampshire is more heavily regulated in this category than most other states. Regulations that needlessly restrict development are not only the primary cause of the state’s housing shortage, but they prevent developers from creating the kind of communities people prefer, price lower-income families out of neighborhoods and communities, worsen labor shortages, and generally replace individual preferences with choices made by small groups of insiders.
  2. Increase access to educational options. Nearly everyone agrees that a child’s zip code shouldn’t determine his or her educational opportunity. Our current public education structure locks children in to a boundary-based model that creates insiders and outsiders by its very design. Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs), universal open enrollment and charter schools eliminate that structural flaw. Curiously, news reports on Education Freedom Accounts continue to omit the fact that EFAs can be used to attend public schools. Only by empowering families to shop for an education can we generate the public education improvements parents have demanded for decades.

  So click on over to read items 3, 4, and 5. All good.

• Anyone remember Al Gore? The Antiplanner does! He provides a Memo to Musk & Ramaswamy: Incentives Count!

  As co-leaders of a “Department of Government Efficiency,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are tasked by President-elect Trump with finding ways to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Judging from recent tweets from Musk and others, this effort will be all about finding and cutting government waste.

  We’ve been down this road before and it leads to a dead end. Back in 1993, less than two weeks after Bill Clinton took office, Penguin books released Reinventing Government, a book that promised to “transform the public sector.” Clinton was so enamored with the ideas in the book that he quickly created a National Partnership for Reinventing Government whose goal was to make a government that “that works better and costs less.” Clinton placed his vice-president, Al Gore, in charge of the “partnership.”

  Over the next several months, Gore held numerous town hall meetings seeking ideas from the public on how to reinvent government. In September, just six months after the partnership was created, he issued a 175-page report that contained 384 general recommendations and 1,250 specific proposals aimed at improving dozens of government agencies.

  And then… well, you probably noticed that government was not reinvented under Clinton/Gore. Click over for the depressing details.

  Will "this time be different"? I am neither predicting nor betting.

• Something for Joe to do. We've kind of forgotten that he's still president, but Jeff Jacoby has a suggestion for something he should do before January 20: Apologize to Georgia, Mr. President.

  ONE OF the most outrageous political falsehoods told by Democrats in recent years was that the changes made to Georgia's election law in 2021 were intended to make it more difficult for people to vote and in particular to disenfranchise Black citizens. From President Biden on down, Democrats relentlessly characterized the new rules, which were passed by Georgia's majority-Republican Legislature and signed by Republican Governor Brian Kemp, as a nakedly racist gambit to revive the hateful bigotry of the pre-civil rights South.

  The new law, Biden repeated again and again, was "Jim Crow on steroids" and "Jim Crow 2.0." Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, layering election denial on top of the slander, called Kemp "the Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams's chair" and said his goal was to "take Georgia back to Jim Crow." The Southern Poverty Law Center characterized the new law as "old Jim Crow, wrapped up in a new package."

  Yet Kemp insisted all along that the changes would expand access to the ballot, not constrict it, and he was right. When Georgians voted in their state's first primary election under the new rules, the early voting turnout broke every previous record. During the subsequent November general election, voter enthusiasm was again off the charts. When researchers at the University of Georgia surveyed voters statewide after the 2022 midterm election, they found that more than 96 percent of Black voters reported having an "excellent" or "good" experience when they voted; 99 percent said they felt safe while waiting to cast their ballot; and 99.5 percent said they encountered no problem while voting.

  I doubt that any of Biden, Warren, or the SPLC will apologize. And I assume that (at least) Warren and the SPLC won't let being wrong discourage their future demagoguery.

• Another Abolitionist heard from. Today it's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who says we should Abolish Antitrust Law.

  Antitrust law has a storied place in modern American history, where it allegedly allowed authorities to thwart big bad monopolies out to bilk and milk consumers. But many of these past victories are more hollow than historic lore lets on.

  Take the iconic Standard Oil case, launched in 1906. The company would eventually be found guilty of abusing monopoly power in the petroleum industry. But while some of Standard Oil's practices may have harmed its competitors, they led to lower prices for consumers and a more efficient distribution process.

  Or take the case where charges were filed in 1937 against the Aluminum Company of America, which had cornered most of the virgin aluminum ingot market. A federal appeals court found the company had not become a monopoly through some nefarious scheme or used its dominant position to charge excessive prices. Nonetheless, it unfairly excluded competition by "progressively [embracing] each new opportunity as it opened, and [facing] every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, thanks to having the advantage of experience, trade connection and the elite of personnel."

  More recent cases—from the IBM and Microsoft suits launched in the latter half of the 20th century to the Trump- and Biden-era efforts against Amazon, Google, and Meta—tend to be based on similarly flimsy premises.

  We might hope that government clean up its own "bilk and milk" practices first. And last.

And if the folks at Wikipedia are wondering why their contributions are down—I'm still getting heartrending messages when I go over there—they should read Matt Taibbi: How America's Accurate Election Polls Were Covered Up. Specifically: Wikipedia scrubbed the "Real Clear Politics National Average" numbers from its poll-reporting page. Gee, wonder why?

Well, you can guess before clicking over. But here's an excerpt containing a clue:

Taibbi's article is mostly paywalled, but what you can see is bad enough.

What's Ms Maher worried about these days? Well, as of a couple days ago: NPR CEO warns of ‘hostile environment’ ahead for journalism,

Pun Salad says: "Here's hoping!"

Also of note:

• That's incredible! Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist musters up some Gaetz defense: House Gaetz Probe Relies On Witnesses DOJ Found Not Credible.

  Many Americans are sick and tired of elected officials and media pundits doing nothing as DOJ attempted to destroy the country with its abuse of the rule of law. Among the many powerful figures in Washington, D.C. opposed to the Gaetz nomination are some who are attempting to thwart it by releasing a report from the House Ethics Committee that will attempt to tie Gaetz to salacious allegations involving child sex trafficking.

  The report comes years after DOJ dropped its investigation into the same claims on the grounds that the two central witnesses had serious credibility issues. Yet these are the same two central witnesses the House Ethics Committee has relied on for its critical report of Gaetz—the same report it is leaking to compliant reporters as part of a coordinated effort to thwart his nomination as President-elect Donald Trump’s next attorney general.

  Why is it this reminds me of a quote from Addams Family Values?:

  Debbie Jellinsky: Isn't he a lady-killer!
  Gomez: Acquitted!

• So I lean more toward that whole checks-and-balances feature, and as Yuval Levin says: Senate Republicans Have a Job to Do. After disrespecting Tulsi, RFK Jr, and Hegseth, he moves on to…

  A similar logic applies to Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Here, too, the familiar measures of qualification would already point to trouble. Gaetz has very little experience as a lawyer, none in law enforcement, and has never run anything. But he has been a legislator for 14 years, which is certainly meaningful experience. In traditional terms, he might be borderline approvable. But again, as with Kennedy, the fundamental problem is a matter of character, and in ways that directly bear on the job Gaetz is seeking.

  Even putting aside various serious accusations about his private behavior, his public actions as a member of Congress show that he is unprincipled and irresponsible, and refuses to be bounded by any sorts of rules or norms. Gaetz has shown an exceptional ability to operate within an institution without in any way being constrained or shaped by its purpose or by his role in it. That is exactly the opposite of what you would want in the leader of the federal agency most responsible for the facilitating and administering of the rule of law. It’s precisely how DOJ has gone wrong when it has gone wrong in recent years, and the idea that Gaetz could fix that is thoroughly belied by simply everything about him.

  This resistance to institutional roles, along with his bottomless fealty to Trump, is again precisely why he must have seemed to the president like a good fit. But the Senate should want to avoid an AG who would simply be the president’s “obsequious instrument,” and more generally should be looking for a good fit for the job, not for the president. No senator could seriously believe that Gaetz is such a fit. And it is simply and plainly their job to say so.

  As I seem to be saying a lot lately: we'll see how that works out.

• Waiting for the call. Christopher Freiman says J'Accuse!: You're Probably Willing to Price Gouge (and That's OK!)

  Imagine that Walt is gently swaying in a hammock on a well-deserved vacation day when his phone rings. It’s his boss. She tells him that his co-worker has an emergency and can’t come into work. Although it’s last minute, she asks if Walt would be willing to work today—otherwise, the store will be too short staffed to open.

  Walt says, “Look, I’m enjoying my time off even more than I thought I would. And, as you know, I’ve been looking forward to this vacation day for a month and I’d really rather not come in. But I’ll tell you what—if you give me double pay for the day, I’ll put down the lemonade and get to work.” His employer agrees given that the benefit of opening the store exceeds the cost of Walt’s extra pay.

  I suspect that most of you can relate to Walt and, indeed, find yourself sympathetic to his situation—it doesn’t seem like it’s wrong for him to insist upon something extra for breaking up his vacation to clock in at work.

  Notice, though, that Walt is guilty of “price gouging.” A wage is just the price of labor, after all. And here Walt is taking advantage of the shortage of labor and raising his “price.” But it also seems like he is making a reasonable ask.

  If she was going to sell her modest home in Cambridge, I'm pretty sure even Liz Warren would not shy away from charging whatever the market would bear.

• Being human, it would be expected. So I'm sure you won't be surprised by Joe Lancaster's headline: Starlink 2024 Election Fraud Claims Show Democrats Aren’t Immune to Conspiracy Theories.

  After the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump and his allies floated numerous hypotheses to explain his loss. One theory, which came to be known as "Italygate," posited that Italian military satellites had interfered with American voting machines and switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Though far-fetched, multiple government agents looked into it: Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller called U.S. officials in Rome to ask about the theory, and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, asking him to investigate.

  Like all of Trump's other allegations about voter fraud in 2020, Italygate had no basis in reality. But just one election cycle later, on the opposite side of the aisle, a very similar conspiracy is taking shape.

  "Swing states were able to use Starlink in order to tally up and to count ballot votes, or voting ballots, in their state," claimed TikTok user Etheria77 in a video that was also cross-posted to X last week, where as of this writing it has more than 4.5 million views. (TikTok removed the original video.) Over the course of the nine-minute video, Etheria77 posits that Elon Musk sent Starlink satellite internet terminals to swing states for use with vote tabulation, a task the terminals are not equipped to perform.

  "There [are] absolutely zero reasons as to why those systems were connected to the internet," Etheria77 says. "[Voting] machines have absolutely no problem tallying up votes like they have done since the beginning of time."

  By the way, Lancaster notes that Elon Must was pushing a debunked Dominion Voting Machine theory last month.

  Elon, STFU; you'll get sued, and Dominion will wind up owning Tesla and SpaceX!

• But without Amtrak, how will all the fired NPR employees be able to leave D.C.? Nevertheless, Jason Russell takes on that easy target in Reason "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish Amtrak.

  Who can resist the romance of the rails? The glorious train halls of old; the art deco travel posters; the hourslong stoppage between towns while the train has dysfunctional Wi-Fi, the cafe car is closed, and the stink of the bathroom by your seat is inescapable.

  Such is often the reality on Amtrak these days. One January 2023 trip from the Washington, D.C., area to the Orlando area, scheduled for 17 hours, turned into a hellish ordeal: "Passengers had been cooped up in their seats or compartments for 37 hours, complaining of stale air, dwindling food supplies, trash piling up in the aisles and a lack of timely information from the crew," read the New York Times report.

  So (again) here's hopin'.

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book, by Booker Prize winner John Banville, on my get-at-library list thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's Best Mystery Books of 2023. I get that: it's very literary! The reviews are uniformly positive! But it just wasn't my cup of tea.

(I previously read Banville's The Black-Eyed Blonde, a Philip Marlowe novel commissioned by Raymond Chandler's estate. I thought it was OK.)

Part of my problem (and it is my problem) is exemplified by sentences like this (page 89):

She was wearing too much makeup, and specks of face powder clung to the tips of the tiny, colorless hairs on her upper lip.

Banville is describing a flight attendant on a plane about to land in Dublin, who has just denied a request for a brandy from an arriving passenger, one of the main characters. It is an irrelevant and uninteresting detail. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. We never see the lady again.

Banville does a lot of this.

One of the protagonists here, Dr. Quirke, is a long-running Banville character. This is the third book that also involves Detective Inspector John Strafford. Some references to events in previous books are made.

But anyway: the book opens with a sad Nazi at the end of World War II, trying to escape, well, justice at the hands of the Allies. He succeeds with the help of the head of a local Catholic monastery in the Italian Alps. Then we are taken to 1950s Ireland, where the cops are looking at Rosa Jacobs, who has been found in her car in the titular "lock-up" rented garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. An obvious suicide? Not so fast, says pathologist Dr. Quirke; he's detected indications that it was actually murder.

Eventually, we find out the perpetrator. At the very end of the book.

But along the way, the characters have a pretty miserable time of it. Everyone has rocky relationships with each other, due to loads of psychological dysfunction. Strafford and Quirke are not a classic detective duo; in fact, they don't like each other very much. The crime investigation seems half-hearted at best; instead we get a lot of damaged people fumbling their relationships. Nobody here is that interesting or likeable.

No spoilers, but if you prefer the kind of mysteries where diligent detective work finally uncovers the evil-doers, you may find this book disappointing.

Jeff Maurer's headline is a little gross, but anyway: Trump's Appointments Are Like When You Buy Bread, Eggs, and Shampoo to Hide the Fact that You're Also Buying Porn and a Big Tub of Vaseline.

Yeah, but let's skip down to the appointment porn. Sure, Pete Hegseth was bad, but…

But I'm sure Kevin D. Williamson has a more balanced take… oh, I guess not. He imagines some nominees on The Mount Rushmore of Putzes.

And further down:

And finally a less colorful take from the NR editorialists: Senate Should Reject Matt Gaetz Attorney General Nomination.

As I've been saying for a number of days now: we'll see how that works out.

Also of note:

• "We'd tell you about our successes, but then we'd have to kill you." On Reason's abolition kick, Ronald Bailey says: Abolish the NSA and CIA.

  In his 2020 book The Spymasters, journalist Chris Whipple quotes one former agency director as saying, "A president would never abolish the CIA because then he would have no one to blame." And the agency is colossally blameworthy.

  The CIA failed to anticipate North Korea's invasion of the South, the Vietcong's Tet Offensive, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the USSR, the 9/11 terror attacks, the Arab Spring uprisings, and Russia's invasion of the Crimean peninsula. The agency's fingerprints were on the Bay of Pigs fiasco and on specious reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Blowback from the CIA's covert political meddling gave us an Islamist regime in Iran and its concomitant support of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, not to mention the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. And then there's the agency's brutal, useless, and illegal post-9/11 torture program.

  As for the NSA: Americans should be grateful to Edward Snowden for revealing how that agency misused Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on our telephone and internet communications. The unconstitutional bulk collection of domestic telephone records finally ended when Section 215 expired in 2020. But in April 2024, Congress further abetted warrantless NSA domestic spying by expanding Section 702 powers to require data centers, cable companies, and even landlords to give the agency access to our private communications.

  The good news is that Tulsi, should she be confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, would have a lot less on her plate.

• And when liberalism has problems, we all do. Bob Ewing says Liberalism Has a Communications Problem. You'll want to read the hair-raising story of his wife's difficult pregnancy, that (whew) turned out OK. Lesson learned:

  Maryrose and Pearson are alive and healthy today because a vast network of people cooperated across time and space to save them. Virtually all our ancestors throughout history who were in my wife’s situation died, and so did their babies. But today, nearly all of them survive.

  This vast global collaboration would not have been possible without a society based on classical liberal principles: the specialization of labor based on individuals’ desire and aptitude, the freedom for people to start businesses and research new ideas, the ability for nations to trade freely with each other and exchange information and so on.

  As you read that previous sentence, the list of principles may have seemed dry and irrelevant. But if our society didn’t operate according to those principles, my wife and son might not have survived.

  It's an excellent article. The only drawback is it may make you more likely to slug the next person you hear use "liberal" (or variants) as a slur.

• It's not as if they were good at it. I'm turning into a minor Yascha Mounk fanboy. His latest advice column: Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy. I'm going to snip off his lead anecdotes about working for the International Herald Tribune.

  This nicely sums up the bygone attitude of journalists. As a group, they have always skewed left, and perhaps always will. But they also had a strong conception of their role and the professional standards it entails: Their job was to be fair arbiters, reporting without fear or favor. This involved posing tough questions to everyone and about everything. And to accomplish that, they needed to cultivate a strong bullshit detector, starting from the premise that anyone they talk to has their own story to spin. To be sure, journalism, even in its halcyon days, never fully lived up to these aspirations; but the existence of these aspirations did do a lot to curtail the profession’s partisan lean and preserve some modicum of trust in mainstream news outlets.

  All of that went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist. Faced with what they regarded as a genuine emergency, many younger and more progressive journalists came to believe that they needed to revolutionize their profession’s traditional conception of its mission. Rather than eschewing the spirit of party, they now openly advocated for taking the side of the angels. And far from striving for objectivity, they resolved to offer their readers “moral clarity.” The Washington Post was merely formalizing the emerging consensus when, in February 2017, it adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

  I'm currently reading a book by Mounk, and it's pretty good. Look for a report in a few days.

• “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” That's an appropriate Orwell quote to go with John Cochrane's take on a Nobel economist: A distillation of nonsense. Looking at Daron Acemoglu's recent interview:

  Given the potential for AI to exacerbate inequality, how can we redirect technology?

  We need to actively steer technological development in a direction that benefits broader swathes of humanity. This require a pro-human approach that prioritises enhancing worker productivity and autonomy, supporting democracy and citizen empowerment, and fostering creativity and innovation.

  To achieve this, we need to: a) Change the narrative around technology, emphasising societal control and a focus on human well-being. b) Build strong countervailing powers, such as labour unions and civil society organisations, to balance the power of tech companies, and c) Implement policies that level the playing field, including tax reforms that discourage automation and promote labour, data rights for individuals and creative workers, and regulations on manipulative digital advertising practices.

  Cochrane lets loose:

  The language alone is infuriating. Who is this “we?” “A pro-human approach that prioritizes…” just who is doing what here?

  The invisible subject is obvious. “We” and the hidden subject of passive voice means state control. And since AI development is an international competition, it means somehow stopping other countries from allowing their AI to develop in the direction of greatest usefulness.

  Productivity is exactly what all profit-driven innovation achieves. But how do “we” increase productivity while simultaneously “discourag[ing] automation?” “Supporting democracy?” The same “we” who “steers” the private efforts, private investments, and private property of others to “democracy” is about the most anti-democratic vision I can imagine. Does anyone need to “steer” technology to “foster creativity and innovation?”

  The tool is the regulatory state, law, and the industrial policy state. The first two can only forbid activity, reduce the choice set. The third can subsidize, but in practice serves to protect the status quo and political goals.

  Cochrane is a self-described "grumpy economist", see if he can't make you grumpy too.

Also acceptable: "Whoa." "Yikes." "Holy         !" (Fill in the blank as desired.)

I asked AI to imagine the Trump Biden lunch at the White House today and it did not disappoint! pic.twitter.com/gNrJc0s7Hm

— Ari K (@arikuschnir) November 13, 2024

But I would imagine some people are saying "Uh-oh."

The video's creator—one guy—says it took him "2-3 hours to do the whole thing" with AI assistance. Something to think about while you watch the hundreds of names roll by in the credits at the end of Hollywood movies. What career advice would you give to those people?

Also of note:

• Choose the form of the Destructor. Roger Pielke Jr. takes a look at a report commissioned by Your Federal Government: Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment. There are classes of catastrophes:

  • The term ‘‘existential risk’’ means the potential for an outcome that would result in human extinction.

  • The term ‘‘global catastrophic risk’’ means the risk of events or incidents consequential enough to significantly harm or set back human civilization at the global scale.

  • The term ‘‘global catastrophic and existential threats’’ means threats that with varying likelihood may produce consequences severe enough to result in systemic failure or destruction of critical infrastructure or significant harm to human civilization.

  And here's Pielke's summary of how the report classifies six possible future threats:

  

  None of the threats are something to ignore, but let's have some proportion. And also some R&D. Ask the dinosaurs how they feel about asteroid and comet impacts… oh, wait, you can't, they're all dead.

• A proposal unlikely to fly in Trump Part II. Nevertheless, one of Reason's modest proposals for shrinking government, from Fiona Harrigan: Abolish ICE.

  Federal agencies created in times of crisis are rarely well thought out, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is no exception. ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, was created in 2002 in reaction to the previous year's September 11 attacks. The federal body tasked with handling all things national security was empowered, via ICE, to target and deport the country's largely peaceful population of undocumented immigrants—and ICE has operated as if those missions are two sides of the same coin.

  But (given recent headlines) the Federalist's John Daniel Davidson manages to outdo Ms. Harrigan: Trump Shouldn’t Hire Kristi Noem For DHS. He Should Abolish It. He doesn't care for Noem, thanks to her transgender waffling, but:

  All that said, the debate over whether Noem or someone else should run DHS is missing the forest for the trees. No one should run DHS because the entire department should be abolished. Trump rightly pledged to abolish the Department of Education in part because it’s been a failure. Well, not only has the Department of Homeland Security been a failure, it’s been worse than a failure. DHS was created after 9/11 for the explicit purpose of making Americans safe from foreign terrorist attacks, but it has turned out to be an instrument of domestic tyranny, a giant panopticon of surveillance trained on American citizens that serves no purpose except to censor, spy, and propagandize the very people it was meant to protect.

  More abolition proposals in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

• It was a very good year. Nate Silver's capsule review of 2024: It's 2004 all over again. Specifically, Silver lists ten reasons Trump II will get lousy reviews. Here are his first four:

  • Most incumbents are unpopular these days, especially in their second terms. The incumbent party has now lost three presidential elections in a row.

  • According to the national exit poll, Trump was elected with a tepid 48 percent favorability rating. However, he actually won 9 percent of voters who had an unfavorable view of him. These people may have seen Trump as a superior alternative to Harris but will be less tolerant now that he has no more elections to run in. In the same poll, 44 percent of voters have a very unfavorable view of Trump, so the ceiling on his popularity is likely to be fairly capped.

  • Trump’s most likely successor, vice president-elect JD Vance, is also unpopular.

  • Trump’s plan to enact tariffs may significantly increase inflation, which we know voters are highly sensitive to.

  Silver doesn't mention how likely Trump is to shoot himself in the foot with stupid cabinet picks. Turns out the probability of that is 100%. (More on that coming up tomorrow.)

• Hope Elon and Vivek are paying attention. Chris Edwards also lists ten things, specifically: Ten Spending Cuts for President Trump. Like we did for Silver, we'll list his top four:

  1. K‑12 public school subsidies. President George W. Bush favored federal subsidies and top-down rules for the nation’s K‑12 schools. That approach failed, and Republicans now know that the future of K‑12 is state-driven school choice. The pandemic-era public school shutdowns bolstered the case for choice. The time is ripe to zero-out federal aid for public schools to save more than $30 billion a year.
  2. Urban transit subsidies. Many urban rail systems attract few riders and cost far more than promised. Locally funded bus systems are a more efficient solution for moderate-income commuters. Trump should zero out $20 billion a year in federal subsidies for urban transit.
  3. Foreign aid. The federal budget includes $47 billion for international aid programs in 2024. There is a lot of waste in foreign aid that should be cut. Poor countries grow their economies by market-based reforms, not by aid.
  4. Green subsidies. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is costing the budget about $100 billion a year in green energy tax breaks and subsidies. The expected cost of the bill has ballooned since it passed, and we are finding out that wind power, solar power, lithium batteries, and electric vehicles themselves cause environmental harm.

  And I recommend you click over for cuts 5-10.

• My bet is the opportunity will be wasted. But Veronique de Rugy outlines it anyway: The GOP's Gigantic Opportunity.

  Donald Trump won the election. The House and Senate are in Republican hands. That means the GOP now owns the debt and its consequences. This responsibility, while too much for past politicians, presents the opportunity of a lifetime: namely, to be the ones who put the government back on fiscal track and, among other things, save entitlement programs from long-term disaster.

  As a reminder, our debt is huge. It's the size of the annual economy and is set to reach at least 166% of GDP in 30 years. Interest rates are high and have driven interest payments on that debt to levels not seen in a long time. These payments will eat up 20% of government revenue next year. If we exclude revenue earmarked for Social Security and, hence, already committed, that number is over 27%. It grows going forward and may even explode if interest rates end up higher than projected.

  This isn't just a government problem; it's a you-and-me problem. A large body of literature shows that rising debt leads to higher interest rates and slows economic growth. The indebtedness crowds out private investment, reduces the ability of businesses to expand, innovate and hire, and ultimately harms the very people policymakers aim to protect.

  I hope we'll eventually muddle through this, as we've done in the past. But it will be painful.

Kevin D. Williamson's post-election analysis is headlined The Agony of the Semi-Switcheroo.

I suppose in theory, I should be pulling for Democrats to regain some semblance of sanity, because Our Two-Party System Requires Two Healthy Parties.

But in practice, I have to admit that two parties trying to outdo each other on batshit insanity also has some appeal as sheer entertainment value. As always, Pun Salad is guided by the wisdom of Elvis: try to be amused.

Also of note:

• Welcome to the jungle. George F. Will is not a huge fan of government schools, but he notes: The world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education.

  Being aggrieved is his pursuit of happiness, so 2020’s sore loser is 2024’s sore winner. Hence his announcement that his administration’s adult supervision will not come from Mike Pompeo (West Point, four-term congressman, CIA director, secretary of state) or Nikki Haley (two-term governor, U.N. ambassador). Both have been excommunicated from the Church of Trump for unspecified (but easily imagined) deviationism.

  Donald Trump, whose election owed much to inflation, ran promising to increase living costs. His favorite word is (“freedom”? “justice”? don’t be silly) “tariff,” and the point of tariffs is to increase prices of domestically produced goods by depressing competition from foreign goods. (A truism: Protectionist nations blockade their own ports.)

  Elon Musk’s reward for services rendered to Trump’s campaign will be leadership of a commission to slice waste from and infuse efficiency into government. The world’s richest man is about to get a free public education. He will learn this truism: Life is not one damn thing after another; it is the same damn thing over and over.

  I don't know if Nikki Haley was ardently hoping for a position in the adminstration. Either way, I think they did her a favor by not giving her a ticket to this Titanic sequel.

• Makes sense. Which is why it won't happen. Like George Will, Eric Boehm has done the simple arithmetic, and concludes the new sheriffs in town have placed handcuffs on themselves: Musk and Ramaswamy Must Take on Entitlements To Succeed at Cutting Government.

  Possibly the biggest pile of waste in the federal government is the amount of "improper payments" made every year by the Medicare and Medicaid programs. In 2023, for example, those mistakes cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

  This is worth noting for two reasons in the wake of the news that President-elect Donald Trump has asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Despite the name, the DOGE looks to be more of an unofficial advisory board that will work with the White House's Office of Budget and Management (OMB), and Trump says it will help "drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout" the government's $6 trillion budget.

  First, it's not as if there is some secret knowledge to be uncovered by the DOGE when it comes to fixing the rampant inefficiencies of the federal government. Those Medicare and Medicaid overpayments are documented annually, for example. The Government Accountability Office and various inspectors general file regular reports. The Congressional Budget Office maintains a list of things that could be cut to reduce the deficit. Various members of Congress—most prominently, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.)—periodically publish lists of silly, wasteful, or dubious government spending.

  What's lacking, in short, is not ideas but the political will to act on them.

  How hard could it possibly be to cut (in the GAO estimate linked above) $236 billion in "improper payments"? I wonder if we will find out?

• Another doubting Thomas. Except his name is Jacob. Mr. Sullum is also dubious that we're going to enter a rosy world of fiscal sanity: Trump Has No Discernible Interest in Fiscal Responsibility: The President-Elect's Record and Campaign Positions Belie Elon Musk's Talk of Spending Cuts.

  Elon Musk, President-elect Donald Trump's bounciest adviser, thinks he can identify "at least" $2 trillion in federal budget cuts. Although critics derided the billionaire entrepreneur's suggestion as improbably ambitious, that assessment hinges on political assumptions rather than a cleareyed understanding of what could be accomplished if Trump were serious about restoring fiscal discipline.

  Unfortunately, there is little reason to think he is. Trump's record during his first term and his positions during his 2024 campaign suggest he will continue the federal government's longstanding pattern of unrestrained borrowing even as the imbalance between revenue and spending becomes increasingly dire.

  Cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, which totaled $6.8 trillion in fiscal year 2024, would return us to the level of spending recorded just five years ago, which gives you a sense of how quickly things have gone from bad to worse. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual deficit, currently $1.6 trillion (5.6% of GDP), will reach $2.6 trillion (6.1% of GDP) by 2034.

  Again, you want to ask how hard could it possibly be to ratchet back to the pre-pandemic spending level? Well, we'll find out.

• Sorry, UNH. I have a suggested budget cut. The University Near Here calls attention to Uncle Stupid's business-as-usual spending: New Project Turns to Nature for Climate Resilience.

  Extreme weather events caused by climate change pose risks to everyone, but low-income and marginalized communities that lack the resources to improve living conditions suffer disproportionately. A new $6 million project led by the University of New Hampshire will create a three-state partnership to design and apply Nature-based Solutions (NBS) — strategies that mimic or enhance natural ecosystem processes — for climate resilience. Manchester will be the site of one of the projects’ hubs for designing and implementing NBS.

  Called Equitable Nature-based Climate Solutions (ENACTS), the project will focus on three common types of NBS — tree programs, public parks and stormwater control — in medium-sized cities with vulnerable populations who suffer from climate-related flooding and heat island problems.

  I can't help but wince at what that $6 million will buy:

  In Manchester, one of ENACTS’ three distinct “living hubs,” researchers will train local community ambassadors, working closely with them to recruit participants for meetings at which they will help to inform and shape the design and implementation of socially equitable NBS for their communities. Other ENACTS hubs are in Rhode Island and Kentucky.

  So: grant recipients will train "ambassadors".

  Who will help recruit "participants".

  And they will participate in "meetings".

  And they will "help".

  To do what? "Inform and shape".

  Inform and shape what? "Design and implentation" of those "Nature based solutions".

  Which will be "socially equitable".

  And yes, it is a huge boondoggle, designed to keep people busy, and also paid.

Recently on the book blog:

Another entry on the "wish I had liked it better" list, which is pretty long this year. I was tempted to grab the Kindle edition thanks to Iona Italia's long review at Quillette a couple months back. I think I should have read her review more critically before I sent my $10.49 off to Amazon.

The author, Derren Brown, is apparently very famous in England.

It's long, 491 pages of main text in the print version. Affer a pretty decent beginning, I found it a slog, I kept finding things to do other than reading it. Putting it off until bedtime reading, and pretty much immediately dozing off.

But that's me. You could like it better. Most of the reviews I've seen are very complimentary.

Things start off well, with a debunking of a couple flavors of popular self-help nostrums. And there's a whirlwind tour of the past 2000 years or so of philosophy and psychology, concentrating on stoicism, the philosophy closest to Brown's heart. (He has some minor criticisms later in the book.)

But most of the book is a rambling, not particularly coherent, self-help text, full of Brown's advice on how to pursue happiness. Near the end, Brown lays out five numbered bits of advice, one paragraph each. I'll just quote the first sentence of each:

1. If you have something to "come out" about, come out.
2. You'll never regret falling in love.
3. If you work in a creative field, and you are faced with a choice of doing a job for the money or doing a job for the fun of it, take the fun one whenever you can.
4. Don't be a dick.
5. Look at what takes up your time and see what is worth doing and what is not.

Fine. I might have found these bromides insightful when I was (say) sixteen in Omaha. Now they just seem like clichés, sorry.

Brown devotes an entire chapter to issues of fame. about 40 print pages. Mostly, whether to pursue it; it's not all it's cracked up to be. But also how to deal with fame once you attain it. Might be useful to the 0.01% of the population in that boat.

On page 443, part of his (very) long musings about death:

Dying (and taxes, according to Woody Allen) is something we all must face.

Um. I know he's a Brit, but has Brown never heard of Ben Franklin? And, according to Wikipedia, this observation wasn't even original with Ben! But a decent editing job would have caught the misattribution. Also would have caught the misuse of "begs the question" on page 214.

Some months back, I reported on the books The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen and America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson. Both very good, but they left me … apprehensive I guess is the best word. Both books did an excellent job of describing the political philosophies of America's founding fathers and the pamphleteers of the day. What was most impressive was the depth of knowledge involved. The Founding Fathers, especially, were steeped in the works of ancient Greeks and Romans.

And it's really hard to imagine any politico of our day with anywhere near that knowledge. Frankly, I wonder if Donald Trump or Kamala Harris read serious books at all. Did anyone ask them during the campaign?

About the only recent pols I can imagine with comparable depth: Mitch Daniels, Ben Sasse, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, … and now I'm coming up empty.

And Sasse and Daniels are no longer in politics, Moynihan's no longer with us. Sigh.

I can imagine the thoughts of the Founding Fathers as they look at you and me in Michael Ramirez's cartoon: We pledged our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. And these are the bozos you've chosen to lead you?

Also of note:

• And abortion is their sacrament. William McGurn notes that instead of political philosophies, we got religions these days. He concentrates on one side, though: The Democrats’ Religion. I'll just excerpt one major article of faith:

  Even on economics a quasi-religious view holds. In this view, policy is a struggle between good and evil. So if there is inflation, it isn’t because of any government spending or policies but because the evildoers are “price gouging.” This is also why, more than four decades after Reagan was first elected, no one has ever specified a percentage for the fair share of taxes the villainous wealthy ought to pay. In economic theology, “fair share” always means “more.”

  … an observation I've made (somewhat tiresomely, I'm sure) many times here at Pun Salad.

• Just five? Michael R. Strain limits himself to rattling off Five Reasons Harris Lost. And here is number one:

  First, macroeconomic management. High consumer prices were a huge drag on support for President Biden. Voters correctly blamed Mr. Biden’s policies for materially contributing to inflation. Of course, we still would have experienced some inflation without the president’s policies. But his policies made it materially worse.

  The lesson for Democratic policymakers: Don’t enact policies that are as reckless and irresponsible as the American Rescue Plan of 2021. It is quite plausible that Ms. Harris would today be president-elect if inflation had peaked at six percent rather than nine percent.

  Click over for reasons 2-5.

• So let's ban the playing of "Friday I'm in Love". Oh, wait. That's not what Jeff Maurer is talking about: Some Democrats Think the Disease is the Cure.

  Working class voters are moving towards the GOP. Democrats are the Frasier Crane party, and Republicans are the party of Homer Simpson. This is bad for Democrats because Frasier Crane-types are small in number, and also because Frasier is a hit character because “life kicks pompous windbag in the nuts” is a classic comedy bit. We’re in our fifth decade of laughing at Frasier Crane’s version of that bit, so Democrats shouldn’t assume that people will tire of seeing uppity blowhards get their comeuppance anytime soon.

  How can Democrats appeal to working class voters? There are two schools of thought. The first is that the problem is that Democrats are culturally out-of-step, and we’ll do better if and when we stop acting like America’s HR department — I’m firmly in this camp. The second is that Democrats have abandoned the economic interests of the working class; this view has been expressed by folks like Bernie Sanders and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who just had a tweet thread on this topic go viral. I have to say: The economic argument is moving. It’s a heart-wrenching tale of honest folks done wrong — it’s basically a Bruce Springsteen song come to life. And the only quibble I have is that it is completely and demonstrably false.

  Jeff (I call him Jeff) is also brutal on the musings of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, specifically:

  2/ The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us.

  — Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 10, 2024

  Jeff's bottom line:

  What’s killing the Democratic Party isn’t a lack of concern for the working man — it’s adherence to coture ideologies that toss around faux-intellectual buzzwords like “neoliberalism”.

  Since I'm not a Democrat, I hope that Democrats don't take Jeff's advice.

• Don't let the screen door hit you where the good Lord split you. At City Journal, Corbin K. Barthold bids Farewell to a Norm-Buster.

  Right after Lina Khan was confirmed to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission, the Biden administration announced that (surprise!) she would chair the agency. This bait-and-switch was a shameless breaking of norms—and a sign of things to come. Khan wanted to shake things up. Not unlike one of her Big Tech nemeses, Mark Zuckerberg, she wanted to move fast and break things. And that’s what she did. But her time is up. Now that her tenure as chair is about to end, we can start assessing the wreckage. How much damage has Khan done? Fortunately, less than you might think.

  The simple truth is that Khan wasn’t very good at her job. She broke things that she needed. She could and should have viewed the FTC’s career attorneys—most of them, presumably, Biden voters—as allies in her quest for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. But as FTC veterans Howard Beales and Timothy Muris write, “the new Chair’s relationship with the career staff began with a series of insults.” Khan stood by President Biden’s side as he maligned their work. She ordered them to cancel all public speaking engagements. She elevated individuals from the office of outgoing commissioner Rohit Chopra—who approached the agency and its personnel with immense disdain—into key positions. At meetings, she reportedly criticized the agency in fulsome terms. Khan treated staff as “part of the problem.” Morale cratered, and many experienced employees rushed for the exits.

  I thought she did a lousy job too, but (I confess) I didn't even know about some of the stuff Barthold describes.

  The (further) good news is that, as populist as Trump is, he probably could not find anyone comparable to Khan.

• Bullet dodged. Shameless Democrat hypocrisy will be underreported in the MSM, but Eric Boehm will point it out at Reason: Democrats Are About To Rediscover the Value of the Filibuster.

  Three years ago, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.) and nearly 100 of her House colleagues signed a letter urging top Democrats in the Senate to take radical action.

  "This is an existential moment for our country," Jayapal and the other House Democrats wrote. "We cannot let a procedural tool that can be abolished stand in the way of justice, prosperity, and equity."

  But that "existential moment" was then, this is now:

  Asked Tuesday whether she would still support ending the filibuster in this new political dynamic, Jayapal gave the obvious answer in a bit of an unexpected way.

  "Am I championing getting rid of the filibuster now when the [GOP] has the trifecta? No," Jayapal said, according to HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery. "But had we had the trifecta, I would have been."

  Boehm awards her points for her honest hypocrisy.

  But I hope someone will get my state's Senators on the record too. As NHJournal reported back in 2022: Hassan, Shaheen Complete Filibuster Flip Flop, But Effort Defeated 52-48.

  At that time, they (and all but two other Senate Democrats) favored dumping the filibuster. Now? The only question will be whether they'll be as honest as Jayapal when they flip-flop back again.

Our headline is a quote from an old SNL sketch. Apropos of nothing, except the FDA might swoop down on Lorne Michaels and demand that future showings of that sketch include a warning for folks with milk allergies.

Because, as Dominic Pino points out: the FDA Thinks You Don't Know Butter Contains Milk.

I ran upstairs to check whether my butter had the life-saving label. Whew, it does.

And, dear reader, even the label on the half-gallon of milk I picked up last week has the inconspicuous, but potentially life-saving text:

CONTAINS: MILK.

Yes, Dominic Pino: the FDA thinks you don't know that milk contains milk.

Elon, abolishing the FDA outright may not be on your radar (although it should be). But maybe hack off some employees whose job it is to ensure grocery stores don't try to bamboozle us by not telling us that milk contains milk.

Not for the first time, I recalled my GOVERNMENT WARNING post from 2012, "inspired" by the GOVERNMENT WARNING Uncle Stupid requires on all adult beverage containers. I suggested the following be prominently displayed on every government building, project, TSA checkpoint, or publication. Every speech by a government employee would need to include it at the end. Because if they can require political ads to say "… I approved this message" in their taglines, they can certainly require this at the end of (for example) the State of the Union Message:

The problem is knowing where to stop.

Also of note:

• All I ask of you Is make my wildest dreams come true. Bryan Caplan asks the musical question: Whose Standards Are Too High?

  In my eyes, every election is a trainwreck. Two proudly irrational tribes rally behind two self-congratulatory demagogic mediocrities as if they were the Second Coming. Listening to any “serious” candidate speak is torture. It’s like sitting in on the class presentations of C students, knowing that one of these C students will, on the basis of their half-baked words, become the most powerful person on Earth. What a disgraceful system.

  You can tell me “One of these candidates must be the lesser evil” from dawn to dusk. But I just can’t stop thinking, “They all make my flesh crawl — and if you don’t feel the same way, there is something very wrong with you.”

  Bryan makes the eminently reasonable request: hold government action to the same standards you think ought to apply to the private sector. An attitude that fits in well with our lead item above.

  And it is literally a revolutionary attitude.

  (Headline reference explained here.)

• The future has friends. Virginia Postrel has long been one, and she writes about Abundance, Progress, and the Future of American Politics.

  As a Never Trumper, I find myself strangely hopeful—not optimistic, but hopeful—about the election results. For starters, while the race was close, the results were unambiguous, saving the country the trauma of court cases, lawfare, riots, and further civic unraveling. Unable to tell themselves that Trump didn’t really win, serious Democrats are opting for normal post-election self-examination rather than Resistance and Russia-blaming. And, of course, since Trump won, he and his followers won’t be attacking Capitol Hill this time around.

  The primary source of my hope lies elsewhere. I spent October immersed in the growing intellectual and political movement in favor of progress and abundance. People of both parties and none—and non-Americans like my U.K. friends at Works in Progress and the European ecomodernists at WePlanet—are working to counter today’s widespread cynicism, discontentment, and frustration with ideas that emphasize innovation, growth, and an expansive future. Instead of preaching zero-sum politics, where the difference between parties lies the targets they choose to demonize, they emphasize creating a widespread sense that life is getting better.

  VP sees the potential for a comeback of … well, I can't think of any better word than "neoliberalism": an appreciation of free markets, deregulation, and (above all) government minding its own business.

  They will probably have to come up with a better label than "neoliberalism", though. That's a red flag for too many folks these days.

• Francis Fukuyama is no Bryan Caplan. He's pretty reasonable and mellow as he pens A Letter To Elon Musk. He's not a fan of brute force hacking away entire swaths of departments and bureaucrats, and here's his bottom line:

  So here’s the deal. You will never be able to run the government the way you run your companies. But you can do a lot to make it more efficient. The trick is to avoid simplistic moves like mass layoffs and the closing of entire agencies. Remember that Donald Trump’s appointee Rick Perry wanted to close the Department of Energy, not realizing that one of its most important functions was to run the system of national laboratories that were responsible for, among other things, research on nuclear weapons and energy. You will also run into the problem that Congress has a say in how the government operates. Even if that branch is controlled by Republicans, they will have equities in different parts of the American state, and may not allow you to violate statutes that they had earlier endorsed.

  We need to cut back government regulation of many parts of the private sector. But we also need to deregulate the government itself, and allow those who work for it to actually do their jobs. If Donald Trump wants to help the American people, he needs to see the government not as an enemy to be dismantled, but as an effective and indeed necessary means of doing so.

  So we'll see what happens. I, for one, would mostly prefer that Trump and Musk err on the side of draconian hacking away. I could be wrong.

And now, here to tell you everything about anything is Mr. Know-It-All :

• Naming and shaming. Jeff Jacoby makes his way toward a famous, but apocryphal, Groucho quote: For many leading conservatives, 'Never Trump' didn't mean never. Who are those guys (and gals)?

  The conservatives and Republicans I have in mind are the ones who were adamant and very public about being Never Trumpers because anything else — so they said — would violate their moral convictions or betray their conservative values or bring shame on the Republican Party. Individuals like the high-profile radio host Glenn Beck, for example, who in 2016 told his huge audience that Trump was "an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity" and that opposing him was the only "moral, ethical choice." Just three years later, Beck was a full-throated Trump supporter, insisting that he would "gladly" vote for him in 2020 because a Trump defeat would mean "the end of the country as we know it."

  Or like Dennis Prager, the prolific conservative writer, broadcaster, and public moralist who began by declaring that Trump's vulgar words "render him unfit to be a presidential candidate, let alone president," but switched 180 degrees to claim that it is "childish" to oppose a candidate merely because of his odious personal traits.

  There is an abundance of additional examples, from the evangelical leader Albert Mohler to Daily Wire cofounder Ben Shapiro to the renowned economist Thomas Sowell. Of the 22 notable conservatives who contributed to National Review's much discussed "Against Trump" special issue in 2016, at least half reversed themselves within a few years. Many of Trump's most vehement backers in 2024 were once among his most vehement foes.

  What explains it?

  That apocryphal Groucho non-quote: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them I have others."

• We're all doomed, so see you at the party! Philip Greenspun notes that some rhetoric got memory-holed post-election: The fascist dictatorship looms, but Democrats expect to overpower it in 2026.

  Friends on Facebook who have posted for 6-9 months about how the election of Trump v2.0 would mean the end of American democracy are now posting about how they expect to retake the U.S. in 2026 and 2028 via selecting candidates who aren’t as brain dead as Biden-Harris-Walz.

  The mind of the typical Democrat seems to be summed up in this tweet from Kerry Kennedy, sibling of the traitor RFK, Jr.:

  Yesterday was a bad day for our country, for our democracy, for our economy, for our party, for our family, and for ourselves. I’ve lived through 15 presidential elections, and this is not different because it is amplified or more extreme, but because it is fundamentally different. We are facing an incoming president and administration that have developed multiple, detailed plans for a fascist takeover of every department of the federal government. … But I’ve felt beat down before. And despite all of this, I’m confident we will survive. … We have two years until midterms, when we can make a comeback.

  Donald Trump will be a dictator. As commander of the U.S. military, the FBI, etc. he will have practical powers to implement a police state that previous dictators worldwide could never have dreamed of. Yet at the same time, there is no doubt that free and fair elections will be held in 2026 and 2028 during which time Democrats can regain power.

  Philip (I call him Philip) extracts some amusing 2021-2022 quotes from AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib demanding abolition of the filibuster, SCOTUS term limits (and associated court-packing), and other "reforms". Have you heard those demands at any point in the past few days?

  And for an actual filibuster, Philip includes a video clip of the stylings of Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, asked to square President Biden's pre-election insistence that a Trump win would bring the end of democracy, with his post-election optimism that "America is going to be OK".

  It's a performance for the ages. Video at the link, and text transcript here. (Search for 'how do you square that')

• And a Star Wars reference for the win. Robert F. Graboyes has some worthwhile thoughts too: Winning by Losing, Losing by Winning. I'm going to do multiple excerpts:

  Today, my best guess for 2028 is J.D. Vance versus Josh Shapiro. Philosophically, I have major disagreements with both, but either would be an able and attractive face for America on the world stage. Their debates would feature two young, articulate, cerebral, amiable, accomplished leaders—far from the cacophonous brawls between Trump and the trio of Clinton/Biden/Harris. In other words, less “Garden of Earthly Delights,” and more “Peaceable Kingdom.” Less “Night on Bald Mountain,” and more “Ave Maria.”

  You heard it here first. Unless you read Graboyes' substack, in which case you probably heard it there first.

  I also got a chuckle from:

  Recently, Democrats shook their fists and bellowed to the Heavens about the need to expand the Supreme Court, abolish the filibuster, override state abortion laws via federal legislation, and choose presidents by popular vote. All to save Our Democracy. So far as I can tell, all such talk has ceased—as if there were a great disturbance on the Left, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. It’s never wise to seek powers that you would fear in the hands of your adversaries.

  Yup, there's Star Wars.

  And finally, a bit of election analysis:

  Trump and Vance won every single swing state, and lost New Mexico, Virginia, New Jersey, Minnesota, and New Hampshire by under 6%. Add those five states to 2024’s haul and the 2028 Republican electoral vote jumps from 312 to 358. Trump and Vance lost New York, Colorado, Illinois, and Maine by under 12%; add those to the pile and the Republicans win 418 electoral votes. These aren’t predictions—just warnings that Democrats had best rethink their strategies. Podcaster and Obama alum Jon Favreau has said that Biden’s internal polls, in fact, showed Trump winning over 400 electoral votes, had Biden remained in the race.

  Fun fact: Kamala's narrowest margin of victory was here in New Hampshire, about 2.7 percentage points. (50.9%-48.2% according to the Google). It's difficult to game-play alternate universes, but I can't help but think just about any less (um) controversial GOP candidate (cough—Nikki—cough) would have walked away with a landslide.

… while reading this news story in the WSJ on Friday: Racist Text Messages About Slavery Sent to Black People in Several States

The CNN story thought it relevant to imply possible connections (emphasis added):

Children, college students and working professionals have received the mass texts from unrecognized phone numbers in the wake of the presidential election. The hate-filled rhetoric reminiscent of the country’s painful and bigoted past has been reported in at least 30 states from New York to California, and the District of Columbia.

Now, this could be exactly what it appears to be, and what some people seemingly desperately want it to be: a bigoted mastermind somehow obtaining cell phone numbers of only black people, hate-spamming them from behind an anonymous account set up from behind a VPN.

But my question is: has anyone kept track of what Jussie Smollett is up to these days?

Also of note:

• From beyond the grave, unfortunately. Dominic Pino finds the election was, in part, Milton Friedman’s Revenge.

  “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” said then-candidate Joe Biden in early 2020, and he got elected and proved it. Never mind that Milton Friedman was never running the show — the federal government has by and large ignored his policy advice for decades. The Biden years generated takes like “The End of Friedmanomics” at the New Republic in 2021, or the retrospective “When Milton Friedman Ran the Show” from the Atlantic in 2023.

  Democrats’ economic agenda the past four years was about as anti-Friedman as possible, and they implemented it successfully. This is a key point — Democrats can’t accurately say that their agenda was not tried.

  The key tenets were government spending and regulation. The spending was to boost demand. Sometimes it was to boost demand for specific goods, such as electric vehicles or higher education. Overall economy-wide demand was boosted by massive budget deficits. Even with a growing economy, soaring stock market, and low unemployment, Biden wanted — and got — budget deficits as a share of GDP greater than those during the Great Depression.

  The Biden administration’s regulatory burden far exceeded even the Obama administration’s. According to Dan Goldbeck of the American Action Forum, at this point in Obama’s first term, final rules imposed by his administration had cost $490 billion. Final rules imposed under Biden so far have cost $1.7 trillion.

  … and much more.

  So there's something to be optimistic about on spending and regulation.

  

  Now if only someone could get Trump's attention long enough to read him Friedman's thoughts on free trade from his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Amazon link at your right:

  Given that we should move to free-trade, how should we do so? The method that we have tried to adopt is reciprocal negotiation of tariff reductions with other countries. This seems to me a wrong procedure. In the first place, it ensures a slow pace. He moves fastest who moves alone. In the second place, it fosters an erroneous view of the basic problem. It makes it appear as if tariffs help the country imposing them but hurt other countries, as if when we reduce a tariff we give up something good and should get something in return in the form of a reduction in the tariffs imposed by other countries. In truth, the situation is quite different. Our tariffs hurt us as well as other countries. We would be benefited by dispensing with our tariffs even if other countries did not. We would of course be benefited even more if they reduce theirs but our benefiting does not require that they reduce tariffs. Self-interests coincide and do not conflict.

  I believe that it would be far better for us to move to free trade unilaterally, as Britain did in the 19th century when it repealed the Corn Laws. We, as they did, would experience an enormous accession of political and economic power. We are a great nation and it ill behooves us to require reciprocal benefits from China, Mexico or Europe before we reduce a tariff on products from those countries. Let us live up to our destiny and set the pace not be reluctant followers.

  It would be great if Trump could give Friedman even more revenge.

• If you don't hear screaming, you're not doing it right. Over at Reason, Veronique de Rugy has advice: How Donald Trump and Elon Musk Could Cut $2 Trillion in Spending.

  The best way to cut $2 trillion out of the budget is to ax everything the federal government does that it shouldn't be doing in the first place. It's time we rediscovered the exercise of thinking critically about government and the role it should or shouldn't play in our lives. Questions like, "Is that the role of government?" or "Should the federal government pay for that?" haven't been seriously considered in years. The muscle of fighting for first principles has atrophied among Republicans as it's no longer in style to call for small government.

  Once you ask these questions, it's obvious that most of what the government does, it shouldn't. For instance, there's a lot of spending that goes to activities that are supposed to be the states' responsibility under our federalist model of government. Thus, federal grants-in-aid to the states are the first programs I would cut. These grants assault federalism, create perverse incentives, and reduce state and local government efficiency and accountability.

  Take, for example, federal grants to state education departments. Federal aid incentivizes schools to shift their priorities to meet federal grant requirements rather than local educational needs. Schools also waste time and money complying with these complex federal requirements. Another example is federal transportation grants, which prompt states to build mass transit systems to get federal matching funds when roads might better serve their communities. There are plenty more examples.

  It's a long article, and Vero has more worthwhile ideas. Maybe Elon could put her on the team?

First, a quick aside on the miracle of free-market capitalism quickly responding to perceived consumer needs: When looking for appropriate Amazon Product Eye Candy this morning, I discovered that there are already scads of signs, buttons, and stickers you can purchase saying "Don't blame me, I voted for Kamala". And various variations thereon.

But the main reason I was searching Amazon was to find something to illustrate our lead item. It's from Jeff Maurer, who is Playing the Blame Game to WIN.

Jeff (I call him Jeff) is particularly bemused/amused at:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.

And they’re right. pic.twitter.com/lM2gSJmQFL

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 6, 2024

He comments:

I swear that Jeff Maurer is just an ideological smidgen away from becoming a contributor to Reason, National Review, or the Wall Street Journal.

Also of note:

• "Cool, I broke his brain." I doubt that Trump reads Jonathan Rauch, and I doubt he could do a decent Bart Simpson impression. But I can fantasize his response to Rauch's recent screed on Tuesday's Moral Catastrophe. Sample:

  We on the liberal-democracy side need to recognize the implications. We lost more than the election. We also lost the standing to claim that our values represent the moral mainstream. We now must function in a world where MAGA not only controls the country’s government but defines its norms—more, at least, than we do.

  This will make it harder to hold ground from which to criticize Trump and MAGA, no matter what they do or say. When we protest the latest Trump outrage (and there will be many), we will be accused of elitism and irrelevance. “If you’re the moral arbiters,” MAGA’s allies will say, “why can’t you persuade anybody? Why is it that no one cares about your indignation? Might it be because the public is tired of your moral grandstanding? Might it be because you’re wrong?” We’ll have to fight for moral oxygen these next few years, and it’s a fight we might not win.

  Complicating matters further: In the teeth of the election’s permissioning of grotesque political behavior, those who have stood firm against MAGA’s depredations will feel even more pressure to give way or stand down. Some will lack the energy to keep insisting that MAGA is not morally normal; others will conclude that criticizing MAGA is futile or counterproductive, and also potentially dangerous; yet others will, as Tocqueville warned, internalize the electorate’s verdict, concluding that the majority of American voters can’t be wrong. However it happens, we must expect a struggle to maintain our own moral confidence—again, a fight we might not win.

  If you browse the Twitter fever swamps, you will have already seen a whole bunch of videos of Kamala supporters breaking down, screaming, and crying. Rauch provides a more respectable text version of the same.

  And, yes, he sure says "MAGA" a lot.

  The funny thing (for sufficiently small values of "funny") is that Rauch is very good when he's not doing politics. When I read his book The Constitution of Knowledge a couple years ago, I observed that, yes, Trump broke his brain. And, as a result: "[he's] strident, unbalanced, and didactic when [he] should be mellow, even-handed and persuasive."

  For example, I don't think he's sufficiently critical of the illiberalism of the people on his political side. Some examples at the link above, but also…

• AKA, destroying the village in order to save it. Robby Soave visits Progressive MediaLand, and discovers: To Fight Donald Trump, the Media Contemplates Vast Censorship.

  The explanation that Harris lost because the voters are too racist to accept her will always have a certain amount of appeal among the progressive pundit class. Of course, this theory runs into obvious trouble: Harris seemingly lost ground with virtually every demographic, including black and Latino voters. As for the argument that the electorate is biased against woman candidates, there may be some underlying truth to that—but it's important to note that Harris lost even more spectacularly than Hillary Clinton. Either the voters became much more sexist—not entirely persuasive—or there is something else going on.

  What is that other thing? The explanation likely to receive star billing from progressives is an increasingly familiar one: social media misinformation. MSNBC host Jen Psaki cited the dangers of disinformation and propaganda on X—the site run by ardent Trump backer, adviser, and billionaire Elon Musk—as a reason to fear Musk's influence over Trump. And earlier in the week, before she knew Harris would lose, Psaki advised Democrats to take action against social media companies in order to "limit the lies that they can spread."

  The hosts of The View sounded a similar note on their postelection episode.

  "It would help if we could regulate social media," said Sara Haines. "DC and Congress have not been able to do one thing in regard to the rogue corporations of social media."

  As evidenced by this clip, the stridency was strong:

  The View: We must censor social media to prevent this from happening again pic.twitter.com/JjwM8YQwqN

  — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 6, 2024

  Robby Soave notes the self-serving nature of the pleas from "legacy" media pundits, who are typically being paid by corporations (like Disney/ABC) operating under the umbrella of the First Amendment, wanting to deny that protection to people saying things they don't like.

• Plenty of blame to go around. Nick Catoggio, the onetime Allahpundit, analyzes the "it's all Biden's fault" claim: Burning the ‘Bridge’. It's a long, meandering, look at the Rube Goldberg machinery that brought us to Trump II. But:

  Culpability for Trump’s victory lies not with Biden or Harris, but with the unserious, irresponsible, malevolent American voter. Some supported Trump’s fascist vision of government enthusiastically because they believe in it, while others supported it reluctantly because they believe they’ll fare better economically under it. But everyone who cast a ballot for Trump did so because they’re comfortable with the high likelihood that he’ll abuse his powers as president unlike anyone before him.

  I'm a fan of voter-blaming, too. We could be looking forward to Nikki Haley's inauguration, but… voters said no.

• Missing some data points, I'm afraid. I used to read William A. Jacobsen's Legal Insurrection blog, but it dropped off my radar for some reason. I was called back due to its appearance in my Google LFOD News Alert mail which pointed me to this article from Mike LaChance:. It’s Time to Accept the Fact That New Hampshire is a Blue State.

  I was one of the people holding out hope that New Hampshire would go red in the 2024 presidential election. The state has not done so since the 2004 election of George W. Bush. If ever there was a year when the Granite State might go red again, this was it.

  But no. Kamala beat Trump here (according to the Google as I type) 50.9%-48.2%.

  Yes, Republican Kelly Ayotte beat Democrat Joyce Craig (53.6%-44.3%). That proves nothing according to LaChance, because she's "moderate". Doesn't count.

  Unmentioned by LaChance:

  • The NH Executive Council remains 4-1 in favor of the GOP.
  • Republicans, who already controlled the Senate 14-10, will now hold a 16-8 majority.
  • In the 400-member General Court, it looks like Republicans are going from a slim majority (201-199 at one point) to a stronger 222-178 majority.

  This is not what a "blue state" looks like.

  New Hampshire voters are pretty good at ticket-splitting. Sorry.

  I left a comment on the article at Legal Insurrection, but… now I'm beginning to realize why it might have dropped off my blogroll.

Our Amazon Product du Jour advocates a good first step. But you know what really needs to be abolished? Time zones. As I ranted 11 years ago: The Right Number of Time Zones is Zero.

Since then, I discovered an unexpected ally on the other side of the political spectrum, Matthew Yglesias, who joined the party in 2014: The case against time zones: They're impractical & outdated

It's an idea whose time (heh) has come.

Which brings me to Katherine Mangu-Ward's lead editorial in the current print Reason: The Next President Should Abolish Everything.

Reason has a couple dozen small articles advocating specific abolitions, and I'll probably blog them all when they come out from behind the paywall.

Also of note:

• Please make it stop… The WSJ's tech columnist, Joanna Stern, has a tale of woe: I Replied ‘Stop’ to a Political Text Message. I Got 100 More.

  Friday, 12:05 p.m.: “Pres. Trump’s Sec. of State here!”

  I might have actually bought that Mike Pompeo was texting me from his fave lunch spot, if it weren’t for the survey link and donation request that followed. I replied, firmly, “Stop.”

  Friday, 1 p.m. until midnight: “It’s JD Vance.” It’s Don Jr.” “Ted Cruz here.”

  Twenty-seven more text messages took over my inbox, all claiming to be from various Republican candidates and political-action committees. On Saturday, 28 more arrived. On Sunday, another 29.

  In the game of political texts, “Stop” apparently means “Go! Go! Go!”

  This happened to me as well! I contributed to Nikki Haley's campaign, and I made the dreadful mistake of providing her my cell number. Which got put on a list. And then I made what turned out to be the same mistake Ms. Stern made: I replied "STOP" to some of them. Which only made things worse. Much, much worse.

  Fortunately, my Android phone has a pretty good spam filter for texts. Ms. Stern wound up paying money for one on her iPhone.

  Jim Geraghty also noted the issue: Yes, the Political Spam Texts Were Out of Control This Year.

  The past few months, my Three Martini Lunch podcast co-host Greg Corombos and I have traded stories about the increasingly frantic tone from the political organizations that send spam fundraising texts to our phones. For some reason, some groups think Greg is “Doris,” and a liberal group that should be tried at the Hague thinks that I am “Diane,” and the right apoplectic tone will get us to donate just $5 now.

  “DIANE, WE’RE ALL STANDING OUT ON THE LEDGE WE SWEAR WE MEAN IT DON’T TEST US DONATE JUST $5 NOW OR OUR PLUMMET TO OUR DOOM IS ON YOUR CONSCIENCE”

  “DIANE, WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE AND WHERE YOUR CHILDREN LIVE DON’T TEST A DESPERATE MAN JUST SEND $5 NOW AND NOBODY GETS HURT”

  “DIANE, WE’RE AT THE CRITICAL FUNDRAISING DEADLINE AND THE VOICES ARE GETTING LOUDER AND ARE TELLING US THEY WANT BLOOD, BUT THEY’RE WILLING TO BE SATIATED IF YOU JUST SEND $5”

  I exaggerate . . . slightly. My guess is you’ve gotten similar messages. I suspect the folks running these organizations saw the legendary National Lampoon cover and thought, “What a great idea!”

  Yeah. When I look at the stuff stuck in the spam filter, they range from offensive to pathetic. An example of "pathetic" but also unintentionally amusing:

  We've texted 21+ times & you STILL won't respond, Paul! Will you PLEASE take a minute to fill out our GOP Leadership survey?

  "We are idiots who won't take a hint."

• It turns out there's a pony amidst all this horse manure after all. Elizabeth Nolan Brown bids an unfond farewell: Good Riddance, Lina Khan.

  No one was sure what a Kamala Harris presidency would mean for Lina Khan, the controversial chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointed by President Joe Biden. But with Harris, too, on her way out, and Republicans slated to take over the White House, we can probably say goodbye—and good riddance—to Khan's reign.

  With Khan heading the agency, the FTC has taken an aggressive stance against mergers and acquisitions, an aggressive stance against big tech companies, and an odd view of the agency's purpose and authority.

  "Khan has framed several regulatory issues in the dramatic terms of someone facing an emergency that cannot wait for congressional action," noted Kevin Frazier, an assistant professor at St. Thomas University College of Law, in a recent Reason piece. But "the FTC does not have any emergency powers. Congressional inaction does not increase the FTC's jurisdiction. Judicial opposition does not excuse the FTC's experimentation with novel theories of enforcement. Even economic upheaval doesn't change anything about when and how the FTC may fulfill its finite mandate."

  Of course, there are downsides. For example, Trump will probably call in an airstrike against CNN headquarters in Atlanta on January 20.

• Hooray for Milei. Jeff Jacoby also notes a very small pony in a different pile of horsehit, specifically a large building on Turtle Bay, NYC: Argentina against the world: The country's leader announces a new foreign policy: 'Long live freedom, damn it!'

  ARGENTINA'S PRESIDENT Javier Milei, an outspoken champion of free markets and human liberty, proved his bona fides again last week. He dismissed Foreign Minister Diana Mondino after Argentina voted in the United Nations to condemn the US economic embargo on Cuba. The vote was 187-2 — only Israel stood with the United States — and it marked the 32d time that the General Assembly had denounced an American policy initiated by John F. Kennedy.

  It isn't often that a foreign minister gets sacked for aligning with the views of nearly every government on earth. Then again, it isn't often that a country elects a president like Milei, who is prepared to stand against the world if that is what freedom and morality require. And when it comes to Cuba and the US embargo, what freedom and morality require is that censure be directed at the most entrenched dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere — not at the nation that for decades has provided safe haven to millions of refugees fleeing that Caribbean tyranny.

  Gee, I wonder who's responsible for Cuban misery?

• Continuing our fecal theme. Veronique de Rugy notes a turd in the punchbowl: Election Night's Least Surprising Result Is a Bipartisan Bummer.

  Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris are surely experiencing disappointment, but one of the Biden-Harris administration's pillars — "industrial policy" — won big on Tuesday. That's because it's already been embraced by both parties. President-elect Donald Trump loves expensive tariffs, and Harris loves big subsidies to big businesses, and to some degree vice versa.

  That, my friends, should disappoint us all. Industrial policy represents one of the most dangerous economic illusions of our time.

  Often presented as a populist program, it's usually implemented in a way that makes it no different than the worst crony programs. According to my friend Sam Gregg — an expert on the issue for the American Institute for Economic Research and author of the excellent book "The Next American Economy" — industrial policy "involves trying to alter the allocation of resources and incentives in particular economic sectors that would otherwise transpire if entrepreneurs and businesses were left to themselves."

  So we got at least four more years of doubling down on bad policies. Enjoy!

Nevertheless, I couldn't help but be amused at this:

Trump could also throw Democrats an olive branch by supporting a longstanding progressive priority: the elimination of the filibuster.

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) November 6, 2024

I wonder if anyone's asked Senator Wyden if he plans to push this "overhaul" now. I'd love to see a video of his answer.

Also of note:

• We won't gloat, but … we'll link to the NHJournal, which kinda does: NH Dems Lost The Old-Fashioned Way. They Earned It.

  The depth of the Democrats’ disaster is still unfolding. The best estimates are a 16-8 GOP state Senate and more than 220 Republicans in the House. Coös County, once a blue bastion of Bernie voters, is now Democrat-free.

  But the biggest blow was the blowout victory of Kelly Ayotte over Joyce Craig.

  Ayotte deserves credit for the aggressive and disciplined campaign she ran. In the final weeks of the gubernatorial primary, when it was clear that former state Senate President Chuck Morse (R-Salem) was destined for defeat, she kept up the attack ads. Other candidates may have been tempted to hoard their cash, take their foot off the gas. She didn’t.

  Instead, Ayotte sent the message that she didn’t like losing in 2016 and she was going to do whatever it took — and then some — to make sure it didn’t happen again.

  Fun fact: the only person I voted for who won yesterday is our state's next governor, Kelly Ayotte. (Further fun fact: she got more votes than any other Republican in my little, heavily Democrat-leaning, town.)

  Also, allow me once again to once again show my age: NHJournal recycles the tag line uttered by John Houseman in TV advertising for the investment company Smith Barney, running from (wow) the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. (Details and a couple videos here.)

  Now, sadly, Mr. Houseman is dead, and so is Smith Barney.

• We won't gripe much, either, but… we will link to Abigail Anthony, who (in turn) links to a whole bunch of gripers: The Best Worst Election Takes. She roamed the fringes of Twitter, picking the most overwrought. Sample:

  • “This is unironically worse than 9/11.”
  • “This is not Kamala’s fault btw. She worked her ass off to a beautiful campaign with the ~100 days she had. She’s arguably the most qualified US presidential candidate ever, with prior experience in all 3 branches of government. Americans simply voted against their best interest.”
  • “There will be some people that try to say this election was about trans people, but I think that misses something much deeper. We are in a country that craves fascism, that is tired of a Washington that does nothing, and is willing to follow whoever Trump blames.”
  • “At this point it’s abundantly clear that it was never really ‘But, her emails’ it was ‘But, they’re females.’”
  • “Toxic masculinity won last night.”

  If you want to wallow in schadenfreude, and who doesn't, Abigail's your go-to girl.

• More specifically, she admitted she was bullshitting. At the Federalist, Brianna Lyman keeps up the opposition research, even after the election: Kamala Harris Admits Everything She Said About Trump Was A Lie. Specifically, in her concession speech last night.

  “To the young people that are watching, it is okay to feel sad and disappointed,” Harris said. “But please know it’s going to be okay.”

  It’s going to be okay?

  How can it be okay when Harris told us that her opponent is a fascist? She said a Trump victory would be “dangerous” and a “huge risk for America.” Harris claimed that Trump “wants to send the military after American citizens” and that “he is out for unchecked power.” She painted him as an existential threat to “democracy” itself.

  To be fair, much of what Trump (et al.) said about Kamala was also bullshit. Flight 93 rhetoric was flying by pretty thick from both sides.

• Fortunately, a sober look from… George F. Will, of course: Republican self-degradation continues. Democratic self-sabotage helped. I hope you can RTWT, but here's an excerpt:

  Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. And then, via Democratic Party high-handedness, foisted her on the nation as the party’s nominee. She did not pass through the toughening furnace of competition that reveals mettle, or its absence.

  Her campaign, although short, was too long for her talents. They do not include the skill of making her synthetic centrism — her repudiation of her entire public profile prior to July — seem authentic.

  A wit once asked, can the phrase “insipid beyond words” be applied to words? Harris segued from vapidity (“joy!”) to hysteria (“fascism!”), from Beethoven (“Ode to Joy,” without the music) to Wagner (“Götterdämmerung,” staged for swing states). She mocked Trump for being such a feeble president that he could not even build his border wall. Simultaneously, she intimated that in a second term the triumph of his Hitlerian will would steamroller America’s democratic institutions. Perhaps voters detected a contradiction.

  If "democracy" means that "the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard", fine. But we don't deserve George F. Will, and we're blessed to have him.

• Why Kamala really lost. National Review's perennially dyspeptic movie reviewer, Armond White, takes on an American idol: Julia Roberts Kamala Harris Ad Promotes Movie Star's Anti-American Revolt.

  Actress Julia Roberts has clarified the class war. Negative response to her ad endorsing Kamala Harris has been greater than the reaction to any of her largely ignored recent movies, including the odious Obama production Leave the World Behind.

  Call it “Your Turn, Honey,” which is the opening line of the 40-second political spot in which Roberts narrates the story of a wife not divulging her presidential-election vote to her husband. It contrasts with 57-year-old Roberts’s rom-com filmography (Pretty Woman, My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, Conspiracy Theory), supposedly a career all about trust and fidelity. Whatever following Roberts has secured, the actress can no longer be trusted. The treacherous “Your Turn, Honey” plants seeds of mistrust, enmity, and home-wrecking marital division.

  That wouldn’t be news in a Michael Haneke or Paul Verhoeven Eurotrash satire, but it is shockingly cynical from Roberts, raising suspicion that the Harris campaign’s last-minute slogan, “A New Way Forward,” actually promotes marital faithlessness, betrayal, and nation-wrecking disloyalty.

  I looked at Julia's intelligence-insulting ad last Sunday. I assume that's why (as the New Republic says) White Women Doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats—Again. You have to make your smirking condescension less obvious, Julia.

• I hope he cools off, but… Jacob Sullum notes danger signs: Trump Has Many Grudges. Now He Has a Chance To Act on Them.

  "If there is an advantage to electing a preening, petty, thin-skinned, whiny, vindictive, vacuous, mendacious, boorish bully" to the White House, I wrote in November 2016, "it may be that he prompts a reconsideration of the absurd hopes and cultish veneration that surround the presidency." I suggested that "a ridiculous president will encourage Americans to take the presidency less seriously."

  That did not quite work out as I hoped. Although Trump was predictably ridiculous as president, the comedy turned to tragedy by the end of his term, when rioters outraged by his stolen-election fantasy stormed the U.S. Capitol, interrupting the congressional ratification of Joe Biden's victory. To this day, Trump insists, against all evidence, that he actually won reelection in 2020. The voters who returned him to office this week either agree with him or think it does not really matter whether the president is dishonest or deluded enough to stick with that preposterous story four years later.

  I looked at my post-election 2016 posts. They held up pretty well, but like Sullum, things did not work out as I hoped. Or feared either, so…

Again, virtually no free country has a direct popular vote for their leader. The problem with endlessly repeating that we live in a "democracy" is that ppl start to believing all political and legal legitimacy comes from 50 percent +1.

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) November 4, 2024

For better or worse, it appears (as I type) that Trump has won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Not a lot of people saw that coming.

You won't find either petulance or gloating at Pun Salad today. I didn't care for either of 'em. (I was one of 15 "undervotes" for President/Vice President here in Rollinsford NH.)

But I do detect petulance at the Washington Post; again, as I type, one of their front-page headlines reads:

Becomes second president to win nonconsecutive terms, first felon

"Gee, didn't we mention that felon thing enough during the campaign? Better get it in one more time."

And I also detect some amused gloating from M.D. Kittle at the Federalist, who headlines: 'Ann Selzer’s Wrong!': Pollster Misses Bigly On Trump In Iowa. Ms. Selzer does the polling for the Des Moines Register, and her final poll reported over the weekend had Harris leading 47%-44% in Iowa,

As I type, the WaPo shows Trump ahead in Iowa by 14 percentage points with 95.3% of the votes counted.

Wassup, Ann?

… and maybe she's also thinking about getting out of the polling biz.

At Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown seems to have a balanced take: Voters Didn't Reject Women, They Rejected Kamala Harris.

And that's all for today. Almost certainly, more tomorrow.

This would have been much better Eye Candy for my RFKJr item.

I plan on avoiding election coverage tonight on both TV and Internet. For the usual reason: the talking heads keep talking even when they don't have anything interesting to say.

But I'll check when I get up tomorrow morning, and I sincerely hope the election will be settled by then. Which will make Mr. Ramirez's cartoon either irrelevant or a dire warning of things to come.

I still plan on following the quick-and-EZ voting algorithm I described last month. And I share the sentiment expressed in Chris Freiman's tweet:

By not voting, I’m increasing the power of your vote—you’re welcome

— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) October 31, 2024

But note that only applies if you're voting for president in New Hampshire.

Also of note:

• Don't blame me either. In his election-eve GOTV effort, Nick Gillespie sez: Trump and Harris Are Terrible. Don't Blame Me for Not Voting for Them.

  With a day left before the 2024 polls close, I'd like to say something to the Republicans and the Democrats, the Trump chads and the Harris stans: Don't blame me for not voting for your shitty candidate.

  There's a reason why presidential contests have been as tight as they have been for a while, and why control of Congress has flipped back and forth so much over the last couple of decades. It's not because of voters like me, who just want to vote for politicians and policies that won't bankrupt the country or rob me of the ability to make meaningful decisions in my life. It's not too much to ask for candidates who aren't colossal assholes, mental incompetents, or fakers that routinely lie and dissemble about all sorts of stuff. Your parties don't stand for anything consistent or appealing or responsible or responsive. You're not going to win elections easily until you stand for something consistent, productive, and respectful of the people you seek to govern.

  But apparently that's too much to ask from our major political parties.

  Nick wrote in Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Party candidate. Back in May, I found him to be Unacceptably Stupid on Israel and foreign policy generally. At the time, writing in Nikki Haley was something I considered, but… hah.

• I like his Menckenesque headline. Gerard Baker in the WSJ: America Will Get What It Votes For—Good and Hard. His interesting observation:

  Increasingly rigid party discipline, growing partisan ideological cohesion and institutional changes like reducing the scope of the Senate filibuster have moved the U.S. closer to a parliamentary system, in which electoral victory results in the execution of a broad political agenda.

  But elections are supposed to have consequences for losers too. Voters not only select the way ahead for the country. They tell one of the parties: “We don’t want you. Change.”

  Losing political parties that want to win again heed the electorate’s verdict and change accordingly—their leadership (usually), and, without abandoning their core values and philosophy, the policies and programs they offer.

  At some point in the coming days or weeks, one side or the other will have to acknowledge (or maybe not—we’ll come to that later) that the choice it presented this time was rejected by the voters—and that it needs a new one.

  The self-mortification will be especially painful because on both sides there is a strong sense that this was a very winnable election. Losing when you think the other team isn’t even fit to take the field offers a sobering message: You’re even worse.

  Will that self-mortification bring beneficial change? It's a free link, click through to find out what Baker thinks.

• Meanwhile at the University Near Here… My campus spy forwarded me email sent to (apparently) all UNH faculty, students, and staff by UNH President Elizabeth Chilton. Key paragraph:

  In the days ahead, as election results come in and the outcomes of both national and local races become clear, I encourage everyone to continue fostering a campus atmosphere of respect and civility. Our community encompasses a broad spectrum of perspectives, experiences, and political views; this diversity enriches and strengthens our educational environment. To support these important conversations, NH Listens will host a Post Election Healing & Dialogue space on November 6th from 11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. in the Memorial Union Building, Room 330/332.

  Healing and dialogue. Very touchy-feely!

  Depending on the trauma, I'm not sure MUB 330/332 will be a large enough space for healing.

  And UNH apparently will not attempt to compete with Georgetown U. The Free Press reports on Legos, Cocoa, and Coloring Books for Georgetown Students.

  On Wednesday, the day after the election, most of us are going to roll out of bed, have our breakfast, and get on with our day—no matter which presidential candidate wins. But students at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy—where diplomats and policymakers are molded—have another option: They can play with Legos. Seriously.

  In an email to McCourt students, Jaclyn Clevenger, the school’s director of student engagement, introduced the school’s post-election “Self-Care Suite.”

  “In recognition of these stressful times,” she wrote, “all McCourt community members are welcome to gather. . . in the 3rd floor Commons to take a much needed break, joining us for mindfulness activities and snacks throughout the day.”

  Agenda at the link. If you're in the area. Maybe they won't check ID; I hear they're loose about that down in DC.

• A news story? This story, by Molly Ball, was on the WSJ front page yesterday: America Faces a Third Referendum on Trump’s Dark Message. Sample:

  As Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, make their final pitches to a divided nation, Trump’s essential argument has changed remarkably little over the course of three presidential campaigns: that the system is rigged and foreign invaders threaten the nation. What has changed is the context, as Trump’s decadelong dominance of American politics has rearranged the electorate in response. Now, an election that stands on a knife’s edge is poised to settle the central question—whether a discontented country will endorse or reject another installment of his destabilizing vision.

  I am far from a Trump fan, but this is remarkably slanted for a news story, especially in the WSJ. We just got through a bunch of people asserting that Trump's Madison Square Garden rally was a replay of the pro-Nazi rally there in 1939; and it's Trump who has the "dark message"?

  To be fair, there are (as I type) 2445 comments on the online version. Many of them making the same point.

• Ain't that peculiar, baby? Peculiar as can be. Brian Doherty examines The Peculiar Phenomenon of Libertarians Supporting Donald Trump.

  Former President Donald Trump's sketch comedy portrayal of a would-be authoritarian, filtered through his antic norms-busting style, gives his fans an out: Libertarians nervous about Trump are just too uptight and antiquated to understand his appeal in this comedy podcast age, they might say. Being sincerely alarmed about Trump makes you the yokel—a deluded victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

  But Trump, through the insult comedy and random ravings, is consistently a man of authoritarian temperament: He craves using government power to punish media that displeases him (including threatening broadcast licenses); desires legal immunity from accountability for himself and all government law enforcement; and most significantly, his prime campaign action point is launching an unprecedented in this century police/military action against millions of people living peacefully and productively in America.

  (Headline inspiration here.)

• But Elvis Costello said… Bryan Caplan is not amused: I Don't Find the Election Funny at All, and I Have a Great Sense of Humor.

  Don’t I at least see the entertainment, the hilarity, in this situation? No. I don’t find the election funny at all, and I have a great sense of humor.

  American democracy was already a disgrace when I wrote The Myth of the Rational Voter back in 2007. Readers often ask me if anything that’s happened in the meanwhile has changed my mind.

  Answer: While my expectations were already very low, politicians and voters have worked in tandem to make my pessimism look like optimism. Much of the American left somehow managed to play Dr. Frankenstein with the corpse of socialism, while figuring out how to invent and propagate a new secular religion that is Orwellian and Kafkaesque at the same time. Much of the American right, similarly, has forgotten whatever half-hearted appreciation they ever had for free markets in favor of xenophobic scapegoating of immigrants and international trade. Perhaps the Republican shift is largely rhetorical, but it’s still grotesque to hear.

  I still "try to be amused", Elvis.

Recently on the book blog:

Once again, a loosely-themed book from "America's funniest science writer", Mary Roach. And that loose theme is humanity's love/hate struggles with the other living species with which we share our planet.

Mary bounces around a lot. The first chapter ("Maul Cops") has her attending a training session (given by Canadians in a Reno casino) on predator attacks on people. (What's the best way to shoot a bear who's trying to eat your father-in-law? How do you tell if a victim has been mauled by a bear, cougar, or wolf?)

You may remember a few years ago I reported on the book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear; the author had a great deal of fun with the onetime libertarian-dominated town of Grafton NH, which tried to draw a cause-and-effect arrow from the town's budget-cutting to its difficulty dealing with bears. Reader, Mary travels to Aspen CO, not known for its libertarian leanings (except for drugs), and describes bear problems there. Bottom line: if they live near your town, they are gonna visit your town, looking for pic-a-nic baskets. Stay clear.

But bear problems in America are nothing compared to elephant problems in India. They kill about 500 humans every year. Mary travels to investigate. And discovers monkey bites. And dog bites. And (whoa) snake bites kill 40,000 Indians per year. (She's usually funny; she isn't here.)

And lest you think she concentrates on the animal kingdom… well, OK, she does. But she also has a chapter on killer trees. A lot of people die because they are in an unfortunate spot when a tree decides to die and take someone with them. And there's another chapter on killer beans.

Fun fact: the CDC estimates that 10,000 Americans are killed or injured every year in trying to avoid hitting an animal. Next time you see a squirrel in the road ahead, just say Sorry little feller, it's either you or me and keep driving.

The one yarn I especially liked was the US Navy's battle against Midway Island albatrosses. Worried about birds that might have a fatal encounter with arriving or departing planes, they tried all sorts of abatement procedures over years, some of them quite amusing. (But, often, not for the albatrosses.)

Bottom line: "Naval Air Station Midway" closed in 1993. It is now "Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge". Yes, the gooney birds defeated the might of the United States Navy.

My previous reports on Mary's books: Gulp, Grunt, Spook, My Planet, and Packing for Mars. I still have a couple to go: Stiff and Bonk. Portsmouth Public Library has them both, so maybe I'll be getting to those next year. And maybe she'll come out with something new. I hope so.

About that "America's funniest science writer": I'm pretty sure she's the world's funniest science writer. Prove me wrong.

A short (albeit dense) book that's a very mixed bag.

The author, Philip Goff, starts from the observation that the fundamental physical constants that govern how the universe behaves seem to be "fine-tuned" to support the presence of life on our planet. (And, although I don't think Goff makes this argument, probably other planets too.) If, for example, the "strong nuclear force" were a little bit weaker than it is, we'd have no atomic nuclei at all, just protons whizzing around. And if it were a little bit stronger, then stellar nuclear fusion would have burned up all the hydrogen, leaving nothing for blimps. Or water.

If you're a believer, the reason behind this is pretty straightforward: thank God. Or some other intelligent designer. See the Discovery Institute for their take.

Goff is not convinced by that, devoting a chapter to why God (who he calls the "Omni-God") probably doesn't exist. He also mentions alternate efforts to explain fine-tuning: the anthropic principle, multiverses, and explains why he doesn't like them.

Instead, he is a fan of panpsychism, which is the notion that the concept of "mind" is present in all things, down to the lowliest neutrino. For elementary particles, and simple arrangements thereof, their "mind" is limited to minding the physical laws we know and love. Once things get more complex (nervous systems, for example), the idea that things have a mind of their own grows more plausible.

And, of course, once you get to really complex things, like the whole universe, the associated "mind" gets really sharp and powerful. And can be said to have the ability to engage in purposive behavior.

At which point I was dubious. Thinking that it's pretty amazing the lengths to which even smart people will go in order to avoid the God explanation. Still, Goff presents his argument well, deals with objections, honestly says why he prefers his viewpoint. Even while admitting any actual evidence for it is lacking.

But, sad to say, things kind of crash and burn in the last part of the book, which veers into politics and economics for some reason. It's a pretty much standard progressive/democratic socialist jeremiad against free-market capitalism, with the usual swear words: "Reagan", "Thatcher", "neoliberalism". etc. This argument would not survive two minutes in the ring with (for example) The Myth of American Inequality by Phil Gramm et. al. Goff should not have even tried.

But as an entertaining aside, he puts in a plug for legalizing psychedelics. Saying, "I took psychedelics a lot when I was a teenager." Bravely daring readers to even think about thinking: Well, geez, that explains a lot.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of legalizing psychedelics too. I'm just dubious of getting profound insights that way.

Things really fall apart in a final postscript, titled "Is Taxation Theft?" Spoiler: his answer is "no". But his argument is hand-wavingly poor. A natural, obvious, question behind "Is taxation theft?" is (or should be) how is taxation different from theft?

Obviously: taxation is accomplished under the political authority of the state, and theft is not. That's pretty much the only difference.

But what is the justification for the political authority of the state? Since I read Michael Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority back in 2013, I'm pretty sure there isn't one. What I said then:

We would not tolerate our next-door neighbors suddenly assuming powers of taxation, legislation, punishment for misbehavior, etc. Especially if (at the same time) they claimed that we had some sort of patriotic duty to submit to their demands and dictates.

In fact, we'd consider our next-door neighbors to be crazy and dangerous.

So don't we need at least a good yarn about how existing states might have justifiably claimed the same powers?

And we simply don't get one from Goff. I'm unsure whether he even notices the problem.

Funny story: I had forgotten why I'd put this on my get-at-library list. And for the first 66 pages or so, it seemed to be mostly a gentle sendup of pretentious, earnest guerilla gardeners in New Zealand.

And then on page 67, things take a sharp right turn into thriller territory. And (as it turns out) the reason I put this on my get-at-library list was its presence on the WSJ's Best Mysteries of 2023. If you click over to the Amazon page, you'll note other raves as well.

It's a thriller, sorry for the spoiler, although it's described that way on the book flap. But it's a very literary one. In fact, it will probably be the only one where John Rawls' views on equitable wealth distribution are briefly derided (page 146).

Another literary feature: at the end, you'll find there are unanswered questions and loose ends aplenty. A lot of action happens off-page, left to your imagination. In fact, I went to the Google with my questions; had I just missed something? No, as it turns out.

David Harsanyi notes one small problem with the guy Trump recently promised to let "go wild" on health, food, and medicine issues. And that problem would be: RFK Jr. is a dangerous quack.

Just the kind of guy you'd want "going wild".

Fun Wikipedia fact about the alleged traditional Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times":

Despite being so common in English as to be known as the "Chinese curse", the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced.

That does not make it any less ironically apt to our time.

Also of note:

• For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!' If GOP primary voters had been just slightly less enraptured by Trump this year, I'm pretty sure Nikki Haley would be cruising to an easy win tomorrow. Instead, she has an op-ed in today's WSJ, claiming Trump Isn’t Perfect, but He’s the Better Choice.

  I don’t agree with Mr. Trump 100% of the time. But I do agree with him most of the time, and I disagree with Ms. Harris nearly all the time. That makes this an easy call. Here are the facts most relevant to me.

  Americans today on average face some $13,000 in higher annual costs than they did four years ago. Prices on nearly everything—food, gasoline, utility bills, insurance—have gone up. This is the direct result of the Biden-Harris agenda, which stoked inflation and stuck families with the bill. Americans are stuck with another bill, too: the national debt. It has reached nearly $36 trillion, thanks in part to Ms. Harris’s tie-breaking votes on the grossly misnamed American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act. Despite its title, the latter is still boosting inflation. Its estimated price tag has more than doubled since President Biden signed it, and it is funding projects that are largely stalled. As president, Ms. Harris would make America’s fiscal crisis even worse.

  Then there’s national security. The Biden-Harris agenda has made the world far more dangerous. Our southern border is our most pressing security threat; Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have made it dramatically worse. Their debacle in Afghanistan not only created a new terrorist state; it also signaled weakness that sparked Russia’s war against Ukraine. Their appeasement of Iran has enriched that despotic regime and emboldened it to pursue war with Israel through its terrorist proxies. And the administration’s weakness toward China has done nothing to impede the communist power’s expansion at our expense. This is the world that Biden-Harris failures have given us in four short years.

  If you need excuses to ink in the Trump oval, Nikki's got 'em.

  (This item's headline source.)

• It's not dead! It's probably just pining for the fjords! Philip Greenspun, nevertheless, has an autopsy: Why traditional small-government conservatism is dead in the U.S.

  “High Taxes, Big Spending, Low Unemployment: Tim Walz’s Economic Record” (Wall Street Journal, a purportedly conservative newspaper, August 2024):

  [Walz] also pushed through a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill—the largest in state history—that will benefit residents and businesses.

  This is a news article, not opinion. So the Wall Street Journal reports it as an established fact that taking $2.6 billion from individuals who would have invested it or spent it privately and giving it to government contractors “WILL benefit” residents. In other words, the WSJ is certain that the government will spend this money better than individuals would have. Therefore, a Reagan-style appeal to shrink government should be rejected by essentially all American voters (readers of Democrat-affiliated media, such as the NYT, certainly aren’t going to argue that limiting government spending is beneficial).

  Well, at times the WSJ's news coverage has me shaking my head, but I'll plead mitigating context and possible infelicitous phasing. The full paragraph:

  His backers point to the 2023 passage of the nation’s highest state child tax credit, which reduced taxes for lower-income Minnesota families. He also pushed through a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill—the largest in state history—that will benefit residents and businesses.

  So (arguably) the article meant to say the alleged "benefit" is something "his backers point to", not as established fact.

  Although (admittedly) if that's what the writer was trying to convey, he could have been clearer about it.

  (I also left a comment on Mr. Greenspun's blog to this effect.)

• I'll take whatever arguments I can get at this point. At City Journal, Gregory Conti provides A More Practical Argument for Free Speech.

  One of the most persistent pitfalls in political argumentation is a version of the fallacy of false equivalence. A friend dubs it the fallacy of ripe apples and rotten oranges. In a political context, it's when an advocate compares an idealized or best-case version of his preferred position with a realistic—or perhaps even exaggeratedly negative—version of his opponent’s. We see this often in debates over grand economic models. Capitalists accuse socialists of overlooking the actual record of socialist regimes and judging capitalism’s inadequacies not against a probable alternative but a utopian image. Socialists are charged with setting up a target that is always moving; if objectors point to the defects of, e.g., Maduro’s Venezuela, the reply that “that’s not true socialism” is sure to come. Likewise, libertarians often find themselves criticized by everyone from centrists to Communists for holding up an idealized, unfalsifiable characterization of the benignity of exchange and the free market and then criticizing the regulations and redistribution that characterize the modern state for falling short of this condition. Every social ill, their critics charge, is thereby allowed to be traced back to our not having a really free market, while the real-life deficiencies of markets go unexamined.

  As the broad American consensus in favor of free speech erodes, we have seen a similar unsatisfactory form of disputation proliferate. Critics of “free speech absolutism,” as it is condescendingly dubbed—we don’t refer to “rule of law absolutists” or “separations of powers absolutists,” for example—highlight all manner of alleged deficiencies with the status quo and trace them to an alleged excess of free speech. If we could just get rid of free speech, then the ills associated with this “unmitigated disaster,” as one dyspeptic left-wing journalist calls it, would vanish, with apparently none of the good things we might wish to retain being threatened.

  Conti has a good point. Some people are not persuaded by arguments from lofty principles. For example, in the tweet he links to:

  “Free speech” was, and is, an unmitigated disaster.
  
  I know it sounds inflammatory, but every piece of evidence points to the fact that we need really aggressive government regulation of speech platforms. The free market doesn’t work and it never will. https://t.co/S2bfDHoE4y pic.twitter.com/IWYLmZDECQ

  — Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) October 11, 2024

  ... the claim is a "practical" one. And the "practical" response to "The free market doesn’t work and it never will." is something like "It works far better than anything we've seen in the past, and that will likely continue into the future."

  Or: "Any cure you advocate is almost certainly gonna be worse than the disease you imagine."

• A timeless reminder. A warning from Nathan J. Robinson Beware Government Bullshit. (Originally published in February, but it's new to me.)

  “All governments lie,” I.F. Stone said, and he was right. But they also do an awful lot of bullshitting.

  Harry Frankfurt’s famous difference between the “liar” and the “bullshitter” is that a liar knows they’re saying something untrue, while a bullshitter simply doesn’t care whether what they’re saying is true. That’s an interesting distinction, but when it comes to government bullshit, we’re dealing with something slightly different: statements that may be technically true but are totally useless, evasive, and meaningless. In fact, government spokespeople are often extremely concerned with not saying anything provably false, which is why they end up using mountains of words that don’t say anything at all. 

  Everyone should watch a few government press conferences to see this in action. Interestingly, in 2024 we’ve actually come a long way from the Bush years, when journalists were insufficiently skeptical toward government claims. In White House, Pentagon, and State Department press conferences, journalists like Matt Lee of the Associated Press and Ryan Grim of the Intercept actually do a very good job of pressing spokespeople. But sometimes the response from the Biden administration’s press liaisons is such empty bullshit that it’s hard to see why the reporters even bother.

  Robinson goes on to analyze some bullshit emanating from John Kirby, Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. He may be criticizing them from the left, but that doesn't make him wrong.

  And I'm pretty sure Kamala also attended the seminar where Kirby and Jean-Pierre learned their bullshitting tactics.

• It's not me, is it? Please say it's not me. John Tierney wonders about the F-word: Who’s the Fascist? He has a likely candidate:

  For an alleged wannabe dictator, Trump badly blundered in his choices for the Supreme Court. Those three conservative justices went on to help form majorities in landmark decisions limiting the power of the federal government and the president. The rulings shifted authority back to the states and severely curtailed the power of the executive branch—much to the dismay of Harris. In her criticism of the court’s decision last June overturning its 1984 Chevron decision, which makes it easier for citizens to challenge regulations by federal agencies, she warned that it would limit the power of “federal experts” to issue “commonsense rules.”

  Harris’s idea of commonsense rules presumably includes mandates from the Green New Deal, which she co-sponsored in the Senate. The plan to eliminate fossil fuels never had any chance of being passed by Congress, but the Biden administration has quietly advanced this agenda by creatively using federal agencies to promote and subsidize “sustainable energy,” stymie oil and gas production, and force automakers to switch to electric vehicles. Harris is firmly committed to the goal of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, which would be the most costly project in history and give central planners vast new powers to manage the economy and the lives of citizens.

  Whether or not you want to call that fascism or just plain old authoritarianism, it would probably appeal to Mussolini.

  Whew, it's not me. Not this time.

The smirking condescension of Julia Roberts' Kamala ad is off the charts:

Impressive, in a way. Julia murmurs to her audience: “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want.”

Yep. We let the ladies out of their Handmaid's Tale dystopia for a few minutes every four years to go down to the one place they can finally wiggle out from under the oppressive thumbs of their slack-jawed, stubble-chinned, vaguely homicidal-looking husbands and ink in the Kamala oval.

Damn! What were we troglodytes thinking when we allowed this?

Commentary from Liz Wolfe at Reason (part of her news roundup): Democratic Strategists: Husbands Are Bullying Wives To Vote For Trump.

David R. Henderson comments: Julia Roberts Makes a Ridiculous Statement. Yes, her ad is ridiculously patronizing. But also:

Well, actually, a lot of guys are uglier than their wives. That's one reason they're called "my better half".

But, yes, it seems that Julia, and anyone involved in producing this ad, don't get outside of their bubble much. Was there nobody saying: "Well, wait a minute…"?

Finally, Jim Geraghty notes The Julia Roberts Political Ad Is a Jenga Tower of Faulty Assumptions. Prefaced with: "I presume Lyle Lovett will not be giving the rebuttal."

(In case you had forgotten: Lyle and Julia were married for nearly two years back in the 1990s.)

Anyway, Jim presents an interesting factoid:

The whole Handmaid's Tale narrative explains that, of course.

Let's pull up, one last time for this election, the current state of the betting market:

The Donald lost a lot of ground, mostly since yesterday. So it's back to basically a coin flip.

Also of note:

• Readers of 1984 will recall this was Winston Smith's job. James Freeman looks at Biden, Harris and Misinformation. And he even uses the O-word (emphasis added):

  The White House’s alleged rewriting of the official record of the president’s remarks probably won’t go down in history as Joe Biden’s most consequential manufacturing of misinformation. That distinction likely belongs to his denial and suppression of accurate reports about his family business, his pressuring of social media firms to enforce his Covid narratives, or perhaps his habitual telling of an economic fairy tale. As for perhaps the greatest misinformation of the Biden-Harris era—that he remains sharp as a tack behind closed doors and is fully capable of handling the rigors of the presidency—Mr. Biden’s level of involvement in that particular manufacturing process remains unclear. Nevertheless, this week’s Orwellian story of allegedly editing a White House transcript invites further scrutiny of the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to control and manipulate information.

  We have always been at war with Eastasia. Or maybe Eurasia. It's hard to recall…

• Unfortnately, there's no widely used term for "government by bullshitters". So we'll have to go with the more popular term used by Noah Smith: Trumpism is kakistocracy.

  One particularly noteworthy thing about Donald Trump is how almost all of the people who work for him seem to end up hating him. When Trump was in office the first time, he hired a bunch of military and ex-military men (despite being a draft dodger himself). Almost all of these men ended up despising him.

  Hey, but Nikki Haley likes him!

  Smith inserts numerous quotes from men and women who worked for President Bone Spurs, uniformly negative.

  Well, "negative" is an understatement.

  The only thing missing: a convincing argument that Kamala would be better.

• "Dangerous" meaning … Kevin D. Williamson is suitably ominous in describing The Most Dangerous Job in the World.

  Specifically:

  Not for the one who wins the election—for the rest of us.

  So, what do you think, KDW?

  Donald Trump cannot legally own a firearm. There’s a good reason we bar felons from doing so. And next week, Americans might very well give him the keys to the most dangerous arsenal in the world—the one belonging to the U.S. government.

  Nuclear weapons? I don’t think the man should be allowed to vote.

  Partisan feelings are running strong right now, with the election coming on Tuesday. But I’d like to invite readers to set aside those sensitivities for just a few minutes and think about the presidency itself.

  Many Americans—somewhere between most and practically all, depending on whom you ask—believe that the coming election will be the most consequential of their lifetimes. According to Rasmussen, only 16 percent of Americans think otherwise. I’m in that 16 percent—a percentage that may very well make that the most popular political position I hold. There are many Americans who sincerely believe (and many more who pretend to believe) that this election is in fact an existential crisis, that, should it go the wrong way, that’s the end of the republic, of American democracy, of the Constitution, etc. 

  If you believe that this election could mean the end of the country, then you should conclude, as I have: The United States does indeed have a Donald Trump problem or a Kamala Harris problem, but those are near-term and relatively minor. The long-term, major problem is the presidency itself. 

  Yes. I will spare you the usual libertarian lecture on this. KDW is more eloquent on this that I could be, anyway. Subscribe if necessary and Read The Whole Thing.

• Bone Spurs said what now? Trump’s ‘Chickenhawk’ Attack on His GOP Critics Is Dumb, but Not Evil. Noah Rothman makes that distinction:

  Donald Trump has once again deployed an asinine attack against his detractors — one that was formerly a staple of Democratic rhetoric and doesn’t get any sharper when it comes out of Republican mouths. But we’re in the incandescent heat of the final days of a general election, and spectators to it demand partisan superlatives. Nothing can simply be stupid. It must be dangerous, inciting, and a reflection not just of the rottenness of the candidate’s soul but of the malignancy of his movement and all its works.

  That’s roughly how Democratic loyalists responded to Trump’s latest jab at his most vociferous Republican critic, Liz Cheney. She is “a very dumb individual, very dumb,” Trump said. More to the point, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it — you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

  "Dumb but not evil" isn't exactly the best slogan for a political campaign.

  Also weighing in is Jacob Sullum at Reason: No, Trump Didn't Say Liz Cheney Should 'Go Before a Firing Squad'

  Trump's remarks about Cheney reflected a standard complaint about armchair interventionists: that they are insulated from the consequences of the wars they support and do not give adequate consideration to the human costs. Although he may have expressed that point in especially vivid terms, he did not argue that Cheney deserved to be shot or killed.

  Cheney nevertheless joined other Trump critics in portraying his comments as a death threat. "This is how dictators destroy free nations," she wrote on X. "They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant."

  The blatant distortion of Trump's comments is part of a pattern, and it reflects a broader problem. With four days to go before the presidential election, people who rightly worry about what a second term for Trump could mean might have a chance to persuade on-the-fence voters that his authoritarian instincts, reflected in his frequently expressed desire to punish his political opponents after he regains power, make him unfit for office. But when Trump's critics try to do that by misrepresenting easily checked facts, they encourage potentially persuadable voters to dismiss the case against him as mendacious fearmongering.

  Reminder: William F. Buckley Jr's PBS show was titled "Firing Line". Nobody managed to accuse him of wanting to shoot liberals.

• In other news, Trump has proposed changing the Great Seal of the United States to a cuckoo clock. Ronald Bailey is dismayed and impatient. One More Damned Time: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.

  Yesterday, Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team, revived the myth that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorders (ASD). During an interview with CNN's Kaitlan Collins about what role Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might play in a future Trump administration, Lutnick took a strange detour into the bogus claims that childhood vaccinations cause autism:

  I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy and it was the most extraordinary thing because, let's face it, we've all heard on the news all sorts of snarky comments about him. I said, "So tell me how's it going to go?" And he said, "Why don't you just listen to me?" And what he explained was that when he was born, we had three vaccines and autism was one in ten thousand. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines because in 1986, they waived product liability for vaccines. And here's the best one, they started paying people at the [National Institutes of Health], right? They pay them a piece of the money from the vaccine companies. Wait a minute, let me finish. And so all of these vaccines came out without product liability. So what happened now is that autism is now 1 in 34. Amazing.

  During a Fox News interview in 2023, Kennedy reiterated, "I do believe that autism comes from vaccines." Despite the claims by Kennedy, now being echoed by Lutnick, years of research have turned up no evidence that childhood vaccinations cause autism spectrum disorders. Of course, nearly any medical treatment will have some adverse side effects in some people. However, a 2021 comprehensive analysis of vaccine safety by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found "no new evidence of increased risk for key adverse events following administration of vaccines that are routinely recommended for adults, children, and pregnant women."

  And of course:

  At his Madison Square Garden campaign rally, former President Donald Trump said he is going to let Kennedy "go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on the medicines."

  I am sorely tempted to drive down to East Coast Cannabis and stock up on edibles for the next few days. Or weeks. Or…

One of the participants, Bryan Caplan, shares a very impressive rap battle video: Battle of the Borders.

No, that's not really Professor Caplan in the video.

I recommend it even if you're not someone who instinctively watches rap battle videos. But unless you have a really good ear, I also recommend you turn on the closed captioning.

I was on the fence about immigration… and I still am. What do you do when both sides have pretty good arguments?

Also of note:

• Like the circles you will find / in the windmills of Jonah Goldberg's mind. In his G-File, The Fox vs. the Hedgehog, He quotes Isaiah Berlin:

  If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.

  Jonah follows that with:

  And that brings me to why our politics are so gross.

  True dat.

• They may have us beat on cheerleaders, but… Drew Cline passes along the news from the Tax Foundation: New Hampshire passes Texas on tax competitiveness.

  New Hampshire this year slipped ahead of Texas to claim the No. 6 spot on a national index of state tax competitiveness published by the Tax Foundation.

  Formerly the Business Tax Climate Index, the newly redesigned 2025 State Tax Competitiveness Index combines the Tax Foundation’s indexes for corporate, individual income, sales, property and unemployment insurance taxes.

  New Hampshire ranked No. 1 on sales taxes, 12 on individual income taxes, 27 on unemployment insurance taxes, 32 on corporate taxes and 39 on property taxes.

  That was good enough to place New Hampshire sixth overall, behind perennial top-five states Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Florida and Montana.

  Texas, previously in the sixth spot, fell to seventh, with New Hampshire edging up one spot by a fraction of a point.

  Apparently this year's Democratic candidates for NH state offices see this as a problem.

  Cline doesn't link to the Tax Foundation's study, it seems. It is here.

  And not that it matters, but NH >> TX as far as official state mottos go.

  It's "Live Free Or Die" vs. "Friendship".

  Come on, Texas. It's like you're not even trying!

It would be nice to find out. Matt Welch says good riddance: Newspaper Endorsements Die in Daylight.

I never knew I was a triple hater.

Also of note:

• We're number … five? That's where my country falls on the list provided in this year's edition of Economic Freedom of the World from the Fraser Institute. Behind Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and Switzerland. This is an improvement from the 2022 report which had us in seventh place, behind Australia and Denmark.

  Is our economic liberty improving? Or are we getting worse, but slower than other countries?

  Anyway, Veronique de Rugy offers one obvious lesson from the report: Countries With Economic Freedom Are Far Better Off.

  The ability to choose your job, start a business, own property, or decide how to spend your paycheck may seem natural to most Americans. Yet for billions around the world, the most basic economic freedoms remain out of reach. The latest Economic Freedom of the World index, just released by the Fraser Institute, reminds us why freedom matters for everyone, whether you're a factory worker in Michigan, a tech entrepreneur in Austin, or a farmer in Niger.

  Economic freedom isn't just some wonky concept debated in academic halls. It's about whether a government protects property rights or seizes assets at will; whether regulations are sensible or suffocating; whether you can trade freely or face a maze of obstructions; whether your money holds its value or your purchasing power gets eroded by government mismanagement; and whether you can count on courts to enforce contracts fairly.

  Note: the Institute's current report reflects 2022 data. If you want to know where we stand currently, you'll have to do your own research.

• Seriously, they'll be inheriting an unsustainable mess. James Freeman says Whoever Wins Next Week will have to unpromise some things, spending-wise.

  There’s only one more week to enjoy the soaring inspirational messages of this year’s campaign season. As satisfying as it’s been there remains just one little missing ingredient in America’s nearly perfect election discourse. Both major parties have essentially agreed to ignore Washington’s World War II levels of debt and gargantuan annual deficits in the absence of a national emergency. After next Tuesday Americans will need to come together to pressure the winner to consider fiscal sanity before global investors start applying their own kind of pressure. Investors already seem to be sending a message. The Journal’s Sam Goldfarb reports:

  The prospect of a rising federal budget deficit is fueling a sharp climb in bond yields, with investors betting a challenging fiscal situation will only get worse after the election.

  Treasury yields, which rise when bond prices fall, jumped Monday after a $69 billion government auction of 2-year notes attracted tepid demand from investors. That marked the latest leg in a weekslong bond-market selloff that began after a run of strong economic data undercut bets on rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

  The auctions aren’t poised to get smaller soon. When the Treasury Department releases its quarterly borrowing plans on Wednesday, it will almost certainly maintain record-large debt sales over the next three months. There is also a chance that it could hint that further increases are coming next year, according to some analysts.

  Most investors expect the budget deficit to remain elevated no matter who wins in next week’s elections, with the cost of spending programs such as Medicare and Social Security climbing faster than federal revenues.

  The world’s largest economy and custodian of the world’s reserve currency cannot allow itself to become Argentina.

  If Kamala wins, she will find herself inevitably burdened by what has been: specifically, the past few years' spending spree, and those "promised" entitlements.

• Pretty sure it's not me. Arnold Kling asks his musical question: What's Holding Up Progress? He mostly reports on what other people are reporting. For example, Scott Alexander:

  Self-driving taxis have a big advantage over self-driving self-owned-cars: they can operate 24-7 and never have to park. If you can switch half the car-using population to robotaxis, you can convert half the parking lots into green space or homes. Nobody wants to ban self-driving car ownership, but some people do want to nudge the marginal commuter into robotaxis so they can reclaim slightly-more-than-half of the parking lots instead of slightly-less.

  As Glenn Reynolds says every so often: Faster, please.