Pun Salad

Unfortunately, Jonathan Turley thinks it's a bad thing: The Chilling Jurisprudence of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. It's about her dissenting opinion in Trump v. CASA. Just a slice:

James Taranto also comments on Ketanji:

An underappreciated passage of Justice Jackson's dissent in CASA is her appeal to the authority of a fictional space alien. pic.twitter.com/IEzqHgIn7j

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) June 28, 2025

Sorry, the Twitter embedding code does some unfortunate clipping. The full paragraph:

A Martian arriving here from another planet would see these circumstances and surely wonder: “what good is the Constitution, then?” What, really, is this system for protecting people’s rights if it amounts to this—placing the onus on the victims to invoke the law’s protection, and rendering the very institution that has the singular function of ensuring compliance with the Constitution powerless to prevent the Government from violating it? “Those things Americans call constitutional rights seem hardly worth the paper they are written on!”

I take issue with the Martian arriving here "from another planet". Almost certainly, he'd be coming in from Mars, right?

Also of note:

• What would Ketanji's Martian think about this? Veronique de Rugy notes an entirely predictable upcoming disaster: Social Security and Medicare are racing toward drastic cuts—yet lawmakers refuse to act.

  Considering recent news, you may have missed that the 2025 trustees reports for Social Security and Medicare are out. Once again, they confirm what we've known for decades: Both programs are barreling straight toward insolvency. The Social Security retirement trust fund and Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund are each on pace to run dry by 2033.

  When that happens, seniors will face an automatic 23 percent cut in their Social Security benefits. Medicare will reduce payments to hospitals by 11 percent. These cuts are not theoretical. They're baked into the law. If nothing changes, they will be made.

  I have nothing against cuts of this size. In fact, if it were up to me, I would cut deeper. Medicare is a terrible source of distortions for our convoluted health care market and needs to be reined in. Social Security was created back when being too old to work meant being poor. That's no longer the case for as many people.

  I don't want to toot my own horn (too much) but this is the twentieth-year anniversary of this blog post in which I linked to this (still-online!) Will Wilkinson article at the American Spectator. Which (in turn) noted then-Senator Barack Obama demagoguing away at then-President Bush's proposal to (among other things) establish personal retirement accounts, deeming such things "Social Darwinism".

  Gee, whatever happened to that Obama guy, anyway?

• Tomorrow is Bastiat's birthday! And, at the Unseen and Unsaid substack, Jack Salmon notes we now have Eight Years to Fix Social Security.

  There is a line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s the perfect epitaph for America’s entitlement crisis.

  According to the Social Security Administration’s newly released “Trustees Report,” the retirement trust fund — the pool from which benefits are paid — is set to be depleted in 2033. When that day comes, retirees will see a mandatory 23% cut in their checks, regardless of income, need, or political promises made on the campaign trail. The rapidly depleting trust fund is partly due to the misnamed Social Security Fairness Act, which increases benefits to state employees with already generous pensions. Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund will also dry up in 2033, with an 11% cut to payments for seniors.

  We’ve known for years that the system is paying out more than it collects. That’s what happens when you design a pay-as-you-go pension scheme in a country with falling birth rates, rising life expectancy, and a Congress that treats long-term actuarial projections like unread user agreements.

  And yet, Washington remains in a state of wilful paralysis. Former President Biden pledged never to touch a penny of Social Security. President Trump has promised the same. Neither party wants to face the fact that if nothing is done, today’s 59-year-olds will reach full retirement age just in time to receive a quarter less than what they’ve been promised.

  It's easy, and somewhat appropriate, to blame the politicians. But to reiterate a point I made in a different post back in 2005: this is a democracy, we're the ones electing these cowards and demagogues. The finger always points back at us.

• Reading the by-line, checking it twice. The WaPo headline puts it plainly: Zohran Mamdani’s victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party. (WaPo gifted link)

  And it's not from George Will, Megan McArdle, or Jim Geraghty. It's from the frickin' Washington Post Editorial Board.

  Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic 33-year-old who is now the front-runner to be the next mayor of New York, might seem like a breath of fresh air for a Democratic Party struggling to move past its aging establishment. In fact, New Yorkers should be worried that he would lead Gotham back to the bad old days of civic dysfunction, and Democrats should fear that he will discredit their next generation of party leaders, almost all of whom are better than this democratic socialist.

  […]

  Now, a man who believes that capitalism is “theft” is in line to lead the country’s biggest city and the world’s financial capital. His signature ideas are “city-owned grocery stores,” no bus fares, freezing rent on 1 million regulated apartments and increasing the minimum wage to $30 an hour. No doubt these might strike some voters as tempting ideas. But, as with so many proposals from America’s far left, the trade-offs would hurt the people they are supposed to help.

  Fun fact: over 4000 comments on the editorial, and my non-AI summary of the WaPo's AI summary: the readers don't like it.

  For not the first time, and probably not the last, this Menckenim: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

• And about those city-owned grocery stores… Joe Lancaster checks the history, and finds: America has plenty of experience with government-run stores, and it isn't pretty.

  Some have come to Mamdani's defense, saying city-owned grocery stores are not as radical as they sound—in fact, some states already have them, without becoming socialist hellscapes. Some have compared this plan to states that control liquor sales. But in each case, the comparison is unflattering to Mamdani's proposal.

  When I lived in the D.C. area back in the 1970s, we had the socialist-sounding "Peoples Drug" chain. Despite the name, it was privately owned, but I always told Mrs. Salad I was headed there with a bad Russian accent: "I'm off to Pipples Drugs, dollink. You is needing anything?"

  Here in the Live Free or Die state we have those state liquor stores. Which aren't bad. But if you like the occasional gin-and-tonic, you have to go to two different stores, one for the gin, one for the tonic. Or jump across the border to Maine.

Recently on the movie blog:

Please note the "2" exponent. That's how it shows up in the movie itself, I looked up the Unicode, and I think it looks cooler than just a bare "2".

I watched the previous movie in this series back in 2017 My report here, but I thought it was pretty good. Unfortunately, a major bright spot in that movie, the pride of Portland ME, Anna Kendrick, does not show up in this sequel. But the other bright spot, J.K. Simmons, does! Uh, briefly.

Oh, heck, this isn't much of a spoiler: Simmons' character, Ray King, gets pretty much killed right at the beginning, but he leaves a clue scrawled in pen on his arm: "FIND THE ACCOUNTANT". That's Ben Affleck, whose on-the-spectrum skills serve both to uncover financial skulduggery and other misbehavior. He also is pretty good at fisticuffs, gunplay, explosions, and fast driving. He must have picked that up from being, occasionally, Batman.

He gets help from his estranged, equally skilled hit-man brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal). (Sorry, a spoiler from the first movie.) All this in support of a thin but complex plot involving a hit woman, her kidnapped child, money laundering, … I had a difficult time figuring that out.

The movie is very violent, but also funny in spots. The chemistry between The Accountant and his brother generates some chuckles.