Nov
18
2024

And Don't Bug Him About Cochineal Extract

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

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

Kennedy, who is fiercely critical of the federal government’s handling of child health, including rising childhood obesity rates, has wrongly claimed that Froot Loops sold in Canada have just a few ingredients, compared with those sold in the United States.

“Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients, and you go to Canada and it’s got two or three?” he said in an interview with MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard last week while criticizing the Food and Drug Administration.

Kennedy, known for his debunked medical claims, was wrong about the numbers of ingredients in Canadian and American Froot Loops, which are similar: 17 and 16, respectively. The biggest difference is the dyes, which in the American version are known as Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 and Blue 1. Canadian authorities limit the use of those dyes.

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..

Donald Trump II is a brave new world, and look no further than his strange choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department. Only months ago Mr. Trump was calling the Kennedy family scion a “liberal lunatic,” yet now he wants to hand RFK Jr. the power to “make America healthy again.” Good luck making sense of this nomination.

“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation,” Mr. Trump said in his nomination statement. HHS “will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives.”

Say what? That riff could have been written by leftist activists who view corporate America as the root of every public-health ill. Mr. Kennedy comes out of that movement, whose goal is to ruin the U.S. drug, agriculture and grocery industries—not improve or reform public-health agencies.

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:

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.

Accelerant: noun. A substance used to aid the spread of fire.

Donald Trump, a political accelerant, has ignited, with malice aforethought, a conflagration that will singe him. And because of him, the hard, gemlike flame of James Madison’s intellect will again illuminate Washington, if the Senate is provoked into rediscovering its role.

Some of Trump’s nominees for high executive branch responsibilities radiate contempt for everyone except the small American minority that resides on the wilder shores of MAGAdom. His coldest contempt is for the Senate. Like King Ferdinand VII, who upon regaining Spain’s throne in 1813 vowed to end “the disastrous mania of thinking,” Trump expects the Senate to tug its forelock and forgo independent judgment.

Some of his nominees are so ghastly they could be salutary. They might jolt the Senate, united in nausea, into a declaration of independence. Which is what Madison, the Founders’ best mind, had in mind in Federalist 51.

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.