Pun Salad

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.