Pun Salad

Mitch Daniels was on a very short list of politicians I liked. Which made his exit from politics to be president of Purdue U kind of a bummer. But he reappears now and again, and his latest wisdom is in the WaPo, and it's about a guy I also liked a lot: America needs its pretension punctured. It needs a P.J. O’Rourke.

That's a free link. Recomended, perhaps doubly so if you are as sour on pols as I am.

Also of note:

• Or in German: Der Münchner Verrat. Kevin D. Williamson notes a certain historical resemblance of recent events: Mnichovská Zrada. And in case your Czech, mate, is a bit rusty…

  “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” J.D. Vance said in 2022 as he was running for the U.S. Senate. Now the vice president, he has been dispatched to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Munich. And it just had to be Munich, didn’t it? Where better to surrender to a tyrant without a fight? Mnichovská zrada, the Czechs call it—the Betrayal at Munich. 

  But Donald Trump is no Neville Chamberlain—Chamberlain was an intelligent, accomplished, self-made man, and a patriot, albeit one who made a terrible error in judgment. He didn’t try to stage a coup when the British people voted him out in disgust.

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was possibly not drunk at the time, also weighed in earlier this week: Ukraine must hand over territory to the Russian invaders, NATO membership is off the table, and Ukraine cannot count on the United States for security guarantees. Zelensky knows what that means. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,” he told The Guardian in an interview. Hegseth is at the “clarifying” stage of this particular avalanche of baloney.

  All of this is to say that Moscow is being rewarded for its brutality and aggression, while Ukraine is being punished for its petty and mulish insistence on surviving as a nation and a people. Vis-à-vis Moscow, the Trump administration is not even a paper tiger: A paper tiger might at least give you a papercut. Vance is also doing some clarifying and insisting that some of his earlier marks were misrepresented.

  KDW is also pretty rough on Mike Pence. And the proposed GOP budget. And today's poets. So I hope you can either subscribe or evade the Dispatch paywall to RTWT.

• But about that budget. Jessica Riedl isn't impressed with The Republicans’ Underwhelming Budget.

  After much fanfare, the House GOP majority has released its latest 10-year budget blueprint. Up until now, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have controlled Washington’s fiscal narrative with high-profile attempts to cancel government contracts, remove federal employees, and shut down the agency in charge of distributing international aid assistance. While DOGE has trumpeted its (unverified) claims of saving a few billion dollars here and there, the new House budget resolution would likely add $3.3 trillion to 10-year deficits. These costs will dwarf the largely symbolic DOGE budget savings and show a Republican government once again dramatically driving budget deficits upward.

  The Congressional Budget Office’s latest baseline projections show Washington running $21 trillion in budget deficits over the 2025-2034 period covered in the Republican budget proposal, pushing the federal debt held by the public from $29 trillion to $50 trillion. That rosy scenario assumes no wars, no recessions, low interest rates on the federal debt, and nearly unprecedented limits on discretionary spending.

  Against that baseline, the House GOP blueprint claims to save $1.1 trillion over the decade. In reality, it will likely add $3.3 trillion in debt. Specifically, tax cut extensions will cost $4.5 trillion but are offset only partially, with $1.2 trillion in mandatory program savings. The blueprint also includes promises of $2.6 trillion in additional tax revenues based on economic growth and $1.8 trillion in future discretionary spending savings, but those should be classified as gimmicks.

  Jessica's final word: "Is this really the best they can do?" Sadly, the answer seems to be yes.

• Kind of sounds like a discarded Indiana Jones movie title. Megan McArdle writes a downer: Elon Musk and his doomed quest to find magic money. (Another gifted link from the WaPo.)

  Elon Musk is the latest in a long series of government reformers to go on the quest for the magic pot of money.

  The magic pot of money is a Washington evergreen. Some politician or policymaker theorizes a fantastically large sum of government spending that can be easily excised from programs without affecting deserving beneficiaries or angering powerful interest groups. The belief in its existence has inspired many a politician to go on the hunt, but thus far, the quarry has proved elusive: The Reagan administration failed to find the “future savings to be identified” that its budget counted on to balance massive tax cuts. The architects of the Affordable Care Act failed to find the fabulous cost savings they believed to be hidden in the byzantine recesses of our health-care system.

  Yet every generation, a new hero sets out to find these mythical riches so that they can be returned to their rightful owner, the American taxpayer. Musk thinks he is that hero, having suggested that with the support of the president, we can find $1 trillion in deficit reduction. And hey, he has certainly performed many epic feats. So perhaps he will finally slay the dragon of government inefficiency and liberate this pot of money from its hoard.

  Note to Elon: don't bother looking in my sofa cushions. I've checked, there's nothing there.

• I'm worried many students and administrators will read this as a how-to. Sean Stevens and Greg Lukianoff team up to describe an "unholy alliance": How college administrators and students unite to silence speakers. (With a really creepy AI pic, so you'll want to check that out.)

  Last month Olivia Krolcyzk, a women’s rights advocate and ambassador with the Riley Gaines Center, was scheduled to give a talk at the University of Washington titled “Protect Women from Men: The Threat of the Trans Agenda,” at an event organized by the campus Turning Point USA chapter.

  The event never happened.

  Just as it was about to begin, some student protesters became disruptive. One of them pulled the fire alarm. Windows were broken and objects, including noisemakers, were thrown into the room. Krolczyk and members of the Turning Point USA chapter barricaded themselves inside until they were escorted out by university police and security.

  This week, Krolcyzk filed a Title IX complaint against the University of Washington with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights as a result of the disruption and cancellation of the event.

  Despite the chaos, University of Washington spokesperson and Assistant Vice President for Communications Victor Balta contends that “the TPUSA organizers made the choice to suspend the event.” In a statement sent to The Center Square, “The Jason Rantz Show,” and other outlets who reached out for comment, Balta said that “[i]nformed discussion and debate are encouraged on our campus, however, it is clear that presenters and disruptors are, in some cases, seeking to antagonize one another in ways that provide dramatic content for their social media feeds,” and that Krolcyzk was “excited” that the event got shut down.

  In other words, according to the University of Washington, the fault lies with Krolcyzk, Turning Point USA, and the individual protesters. “Those seeking to disrupt and shut down speakers are ultimately responsible,” Balta noted, “and will face legal and disciplinary action if they are identified.”

  Hm, the University of Washington. Haven't we seen something about them recently? Oh, right: that's where Stuart Reges works. Which is another lawsuit in the works for UWash.

• I'm doubtful this will work for everyone, but… Via GeekPress: Quanta magazine has an inspiring story for us computer nerds: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture.

  I won't go into detail on Andrew Krapivin's discovery, it has to do with hash tables, which is a computer science thing. But here's the sentence that leapt out at me:

  Krapivin was not held back by the conventional wisdom for the simple reason that he was unaware of it.

  Hm. I'm unaware of tons of stuff. And yet, I've never managed to upend even one long-held conjecture.