Pun Salad

Apparently, "Dr Arlene Unfiltered" put this up on Election Day, early evening:

She was so spectacularly wrong it is hilariously awesome pic.twitter.com/FRHQfKoWNu

— The Best Ball Junkie (@BestBallJunkie) December 30, 2024

Yes, of course: as "The Best Ball Junkie" says: spectacularly wrong, hilariously awesome. I have additional observations:

• Like Kamala, she laughs inappropriately. At what? Her imaginary cleverness?

• If smug condescension could be monetized, she'd be a millionaire.

• I am skeptical about how accurate and honest her description of her conversation with the poor sap she ran into at the liquor store is. But (assuming it happened at all) this sounds real, when she asks him, rhetorically: "You do realize you wasted your vote, right?"

  Dr Arlene, as a "political scientist/analyst", your criteria for a "wasted" vote are elusive to me. Simply because you imagine he cast his vote for a losing candidate? Where can I read more about this?

• Dr Arlene's further musings on politics are easily Googleable. She seems to invariably start her TikTok videos with "OK, so…". Irritating tic, or does she perceive it as some kind of endearing trademark?

Also of note:

• Except how to fix it. Daniel J. Mitchell presents (ta-da): In One Chart, Everything You Need to Know about America’s Fiscal Mess. And here 'tis:

  

  You won't see a better illustration of Robert Higgs' thesis laid out nearly 40 years ago in his Crisis and Leviathan: Governments use crises as excuses to expand their scope and spending, and that expansion doesn't go away when the crises end.

  Daniel quotes from a recent WSJ op-ed from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI):

  Federal spending is out of control. In fiscal 2019, which ran from Oct. 1, 2018, to Sept. 30, 2019, federal outlays totaled $4.447 trillion. In fiscal 2020, federal outlays jumped to $6.554 trillion because of the pandemic spending spree. …Even if you think Covid relief spending levels were appropriate (I don’t), there was no justification for maintaining that level of spending once the pandemic was over. Yet we’ve turned pandemic spending into the new baseline, spending $6.6 trillion… In a sane world, Covid spending levels would have been an extreme aberration, and we would have already returned to a more reasonable level of spending. …I think most people would agree that if you were able to grow your family budget based on the increase in your family size plus the rate of inflation… Why not apply that same discipline to the federal budget? …Using 2014 outlays as a base would establish a 2025 budget of $6.2 trillion with a deficit of $700 billion. Using 2019 outlays results in a 2025 budget of $6.5 trillion with a deficit of $1 trillion. …setting baseline spending to one of those budget years isn’t only reasonable but doable.

  Unfortunately… not a dime in that graph above gets spent without Congressional approval. And as this OpenSecrets page discloses, the re-election rate for House CongressCritters in 2024 was a (typical) 98.5%. And 90.9% of incumbent Senators were re-elected.

  So, who killed fiscal sanity? As Mick Jagger observed so long ago: "After all, it was you and me."

  But mostly you.

• Is a dream a lie if it don't come true? Or is it something worse? Well, it's pretty bad, according to Jeff Jacoby, who disagrees with Politifact about The real 'lie of the year'.

  You may have heard: their choice for LotY was the Trump/Vance yarn about culinary choices of immigrant Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Didn't happen. But:

  The most consequential lie of the year was the one peddled again and again by the Biden White House and the president's political and media allies: the lie that the 82-year-old president was as intellectually sharp and mentally focused as ever and that claims to the contrary — even video to the contrary — were nothing but "cheap fakes." Everyone with access to Biden knew better, yet most of them brazenly denied it.

  As they say, Jeff has the receipts. Also piling on Politifact is Robby Soave at Reason: Joe Biden's decline was the biggest lie of 2024.

  The lie, peddled at the behest of Biden's aides and advisers, and sold by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to a gullible and incurious mainstream media, was that President Biden remained fit for office—and that mounting public concerns about his age-related decline were based on misinformation. Well before Biden's historic collapse at the June presidential debate, a majority of Americans expressed serious reservations about Biden's ability to serve. When reporters pressed Biden's media surrogates about these polls, they insisted that the supposed evidence of the president's decline was being fabricated by his political enemies. Jean-Pierre thunderously attacked conservative media, and Fox News in particular, for circulating what she described as misleading videos that appeared to show Biden out of sorts.

  At the highest levels of the Biden administration, the official word was: Don't believe your lying eyes. And for the most part, the mainstream media bought it.

  I am pretty sure you will scour Politifact in vain for its evaluation of Biden's heartfelt 2021 promise to uncover the origins of COVID-19:

  The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.

  And there's his heartfelt promise in his 2024 State of the Union address about the American hostages held by Hamas:

  I pledge to all the families that we will not rest until we bring their loved ones home.

  I'm pretty sure that Biden has rested since.

• Speaking of lies… Bjørn Lomberg dons his "green" (heh) eyeshade, and writes in the WSJ: Green Electricity Costs a Bundle.

  As nations use more and more supposedly cheap solar and wind power, a strange thing happens: Our power bills get more expensive. This exposes the environmentalist lie that renewables have already outmatched fossil fuels and that the “green transition” is irreversible even under a second Trump administration.

  The claim that green energy is cheaper relies on bogus math that measures the cost of electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Modern societies need around-the-clock power, requiring backup, often powered by fossil fuels. That means we’re paying for two power systems: renewables and backup. Moreover, as fossil fuels are used less, those power sources need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power.

  I've already shown you one graph today, so I'll ask you to click over to see the striking positive correlation between contries' fraction of solar/wind-produced electrons, and the cost paid by consumers for those electrons.