Pun Salad

The WSJ editorialists ask if we're really going there: The Nationalization of Intel?. (WSJ gifted link)

They mention air-traffic control, but there are so many things they could have mentioned. Amtrak, the USPS, the Federal Reserve, Fannie and Freddie, the Export-Import Bank, …

Eric Boehm waves what should be the reddest of red flags: Trump's Intel proposal takes a page from Bernie Sanders' playbook.

Jack Salmon is equally aghast, charting the path From Subsidies to Shareholding: America’s Dangerous Turn Toward Industrial Policy.

But I guess there's a chance increased government meddling will turn Intel's fortunes around!

Disclaimer: Fidelity tells me I own (as I type) $537.83 worth of Intel stock. I assume as a tax-loss harvesting strategy.

Also of note:

• Hey, let's push around some nuns! The NR editorialists are rightfully upset about The Persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor. (And, even though I'm not Catholic, I've been describing myself as Catholic-adjacent for decades.)

  There are times when it is perfectly acceptable to judge a book by its cover, and, in the case of the Democratic Party’s relentless persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor, observers would be well within their rights to indulge the urge. For twelve years now, the Catholic order of nuns — whose sole purpose is to provide care to destitute elderly people — has been dragged through America’s courts by a series of monomaniacal ideologues. The nuns’ crime? Objecting to a provision in Obamacare that required nonprofits to provide contraceptives — directly or indirectly — as part of their federally approved health insurance plans. The position of the nuns was that any participation in the distribution of contraception represented a grave violation of their religious beliefs and that, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, the federal government was obliged to find another means of achieving the same end. The position of the Obama administration was that it had “compelling health and gender equity goals” to achieve, and that it didn’t care who was cast aside in that pursuit. In a country founded by dissenters, this position was jarring in the extreme.

  Ultimately, the Obama administration lost its case — although it took until the end of Donald Trump’s first term for the Little Sisters to prevail. By that point, litigation on the matter had been ongoing since 2013 and, at various points, had been addressed by the Supreme Court — which punted it back down to the lower courts; by the Third and Ninth Circuits — both of which, astonishingly, prevented the Trump administration from providing an exemption; and by a host of states — some of which, disgracefully, chose to channel President Obama’s illiberalism and continue to press the issue. Happily, in July 2020, the Supreme Court finally permitted the Trump administration’s accommodation to take force. The case, Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania, was decided 7–2.

  By rights, this should have been the end of the affair. And yet neither of the states that had lost at the Supreme Court — Pennsylvania and New Jersey — was willing to let it go. Worse still, they were joined in the endeavor by California, New York, Massachusetts, and others. Clinging to a tendentious argument that the Supreme Court did not address on the merits, those states insisted that the Trump administration’s modifications had been “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. This month, a district judge in Pennsylvania concurred and struck down the rule. (Because nationwide injunctions are countenanced by the APA, this decision was not foreclosed by the Court’s Casa opinion earlier this year.) Once again — twelve years after their case was opened — the Little Sisters of the Poor were informed that they must choose between their consciences and the law.

  I have to admit that I do not understand the mental processes at work in the Democrat brains here.

• This Democrat ploy is pretty understandable though. They want to make the District of Columbia a state. Jonathan Turley proposes a solution they will find unacceptable: Want to Restore Voting Rights for D.C. Residents? The Solution is Waiting Just Over the Maryland Border.

  Over the years, I have testified five times in the House and Senate to argue for the restoration of full representation for residents in Washington, D.C. Residents could have a governor, two real U.S. senators, a voting representative in the House, a state legislature, and every other trapping of statehood. It needs only to go back whence it came.

  D.C. needs to return to Maryland through “retrocession.”

  In academic writings, I have advocated for what I called “modified retrocession” where Maryland would take back the land given initially to create what was called “the federal city.”

  It's a pretty good solution to an uncomfortable problem: DC residents really are victims of taxation without representation. (On the other hand, nobody is making them live there.) But what Democrats really want is two more Democrat senators, so retrocession is off the table for them.

• But speaking of taxation without representation… The default D.C. license plate bitches about it in uppercase: "END TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION". This came up in a recent City Journal podcast and there was a brief discussion of the best license plate motto from Ilya Shapiro.

  he other thing is, know, D.C.’s slogan, right, taxation without representation, which is on the license plates. Although I tested this, right, because of that New Hampshire “Live Free Or Die Case” from the 70s, you don’t have to accept any slogan. So when I moved to D.C. in 2004, as I mentioned, I said, I don’t want that slogan on my license plate. And so the clerk at the DMV was like, fine, I got to go into the back room. I’m like, okay, I’ll wait. And he comes back and I got a license plate. In fact, I’ll be right back with it. I can show it. I have it hanging here.

  Ilya has a vanity plate, shouting out to that classic Federalist Paper: "FED 51".

  But he slightly misstates the "LFOD case": Wooley v. Maynard said that New Hampshire couldn't compel car owners to display the motto, but removing or obscuring it was left as a DIY thing.

• Our very own socialist. At Granite Grok, Steve MacDonald notes a Democrat running against Chris Pappas for the US Senate seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen: Progressive Karisham Manzur Challenges Pappas for US Senate.

  New Hampshire’s Democrats, the ones who show up for primaries at least, have a thing for far-left nutjobs. They belong in Vermont, truth be told, where they have political “parties” to the left of the already far-left Democrats. They belong there, because some of them came here from there.

  And when Vermont sends one here to campaign, Bernie Sanders, for example, they love that. And maybe that’s the chance Karishma Manzur is hoping for. Despite the Dems’ dislike for primaries, she is challenging milquetoast Pajama Boy Chris “Norovirus” Pappas for the opportunity to warm the retiring Granny Shaheen’s US Senate seat.

  Karisham apparently wants to start at the top; I don't see any indication that she's been elected, or even been a candidate for, any public office, anywhere. She claims to be a "science writer", but can you find any of her science publications? I can't. (New Hampshire Bulletin has a couple tedious opinion articles she wrote back in 2024.) She has a substack, but the latest post there is from March.

  (I also found references to research papers on which she's listed as an author or co-author, apparently from her academic days going for her Ph.D.)

  But she has a slick campaign website, where you can read her horrible, utterly predictable, positions on the issues.

  Someone should tell her that "Defend First Amendment freedoms" is a very uncomfotable fit with "Overturn Citizens United." Yes, both positions appear on her site.