Pun Salad

Jacob Sullum has an explanation: Why we are still arguing about the health effects of moderate drinking.

And (as Jacob notes) there's that usual problem with self-reported alcohol consumption: people (perhaps especially Canadians) lie about it.

At National Review, Christian Schneider unleashes his inner libertarian. Alcohol Warning Labels Are Nanny Statism at Its Worst. And also a hefty dose of "This is America, Dammit!" patriotism:

And I can't resist another excerpt:

A "gifted" link from me to you. Click away.

Also of note:

• Another reason to wish its demise. Kevin D. Williamson continues his series on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Too: The ATF Is a Tax Collector.

  For about 200 years, the United States of America got along without the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And, for much of that history, most Americans lived under a firearms-regulation regime that was relaxed or, in many places, effectively nonexistent. It is worth considering that there is a parallel between the Second Amendment and the First Amendment, with early firearms regulations often taking the same form as permissible restrictions on speech and other communication: time, place, and manner regulations. Americans had generally unrestricted rights to acquire firearms but might have been prohibited from carrying them in certain urban areas or restricted places (such as saloons) or while drunk, which was a real consideration in the hard-drinking 19^th century.

  The progenitors of the ATF were all fundamentally tax collectors and assistants to tax collectors. The earliest bureaucratic ancestor of the modern ATF was the Revenue Laboratory established within the Treasury by Congress in 1886, whose role was to examine alcoholic products (and suspected alcoholic products) to ensure that all of the necessary duties had been paid and that the products were otherwise in compliance with federal regulations. 

  So it's a big source of government revenues, right? Well…

  Of course, the revenue isn’t the point—ATF collects only about $100 million a year in revenue from taxes authorized by the National Firearms Act but has a budget of $1.4 billion. The point is creating regulatory burdens to keep Americans from doing things certain people in the government don’t want Americans to do without explicitly prohibiting those things, i.e. treating the power to tax as a backdoor to the power to regulate where that regulation might not otherwise pass constitutional muster.

  That's at the Dispatch, which has no gifting links. Tsk!

• George: That’s specious reasoning, Joe. Joe: Thank you, George. George Will can spot speciousity from a mile away, especially when Biden’s ‘security’ concern about TikTok and U.S. Steel is doubly specious.

  When, on Friday, the Supreme Court hears the Biden administration defend the law that bans TikTok, the justices should remember what the administration said the previous Friday: “National security” justifies the president’s blocking the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon Steel of Japan. Formulaic uses of that phrase give a patina of respectability to government’s abuses — concentration camps in the past, control of the internet in the future.

  Oscar Wilde was said to have remarked that anyone who could read Charles Dickens on the death of Little Nell (in “The Old Curiosity Shop”) without laughing “must have a heart of stone.” Anyone who can read with a straight face Joe Biden on his “solemn responsibility” to protect U.S. “security” from a privately held corporation, almost a quarter owned by non-Japanese, must be incapable of laughter.

  "Of course, Trump will be better, right?" "No, sorry. Probably worse."

• GOVERNMENT WARNING: They lie a lot. The other Christian, Britschgi, explains Why building a lot of 'affordable' housing is bad news for affordability.

  On New Year's Eve, the Boston city government issued a press release touting the good work of its newly reorganized Planning Department at approving new development. The city reports that 3,575 net residential units were approved in 2024, of which a little over a third were "income-restricted."

  That top-line number is not necessarily anything to brag about. Despite having some of the highest home prices and rents in the country, Boston is permitting fewer homes than less-expensive peer cities with equivalent populations.

  […]

  Even more concerning than Boston not permitting a lot of new homes is how many of the homes it is permitting are "income-restricted."

  Those are units (often also just called "affordable," "below-market," or "deed-restricted" units) that are reserved for lower-income residents and where rents are capped at steeply discounted below-market rates. Despite the city's celebratory touting of that figure, such a high share of new housing being income-restricted housing is very bad news.

  It is unsurprising that governments use pleasant-sounding, but dishonest labels to describe policies that will have the opposite effect. (Also see: the "Inflation Reduction Act")

• Hey, look us over. Boston-based Jeff Jacoby looks north and attests to The growing appeal of the 'Live Free or Die' state.

  AT THE stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, New Hampshire stopped taxing interest and dividends. At that moment, the Granite State — which has never imposed a tax on wages — became a true no-income-tax state, one of only eight in America.

  That means that one of the best things about living in Massachusetts — its proximity to New Hampshire — is now even better.

  New Hampshire is not the lowest-taxing state in the union, but it has by far the lightest tax burden in the Northeast. It also boasts a more favorable return on investment than any other state. As Andrew Cline of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy in Concord, N.H., recently wrote, "We get very high quality services at a relatively low cost."

  Is it any wonder that so many Massachusetts residents yearn to live in New Hampshire? "In the Granite State, ordinary citizens are entrusted with considerable authority and government is restricted," I wrote in a 2023 column. "In the Bay State, by contrast, residents are allowed only what the state permits — and woe to those who buck the system." Moreover, New Hampshire is safer than Massachusetts, it imposes fewer regulatory burdens, and it has two competitive political parties. All that, and lower taxes too.

  The real fear up here is that migrants from Massachusetts might bring their big-government voting habits along with them.

• How well do you know your US history? Robert Graboyes looks at the latest craze: Manifest Destiny 2025.

  Donald Trump has launched the reboot of Manifest Destiny—the 19th-century notion that an expanded United States was the natural order of things. Like his predecessors, he wishes to change the map of North America. The components of his vision range from silly to sublime.

  A hundred and fifty years ago, the goal of Manifest Destiny was to push the nation’s boundaries and the trappings of modernity west to the Pacific. As noted in Wikipedia, the idea was “rooted in American exceptionalism and Romantic nationalism” and believed to be “both obvious (‘manifest’) and certain (‘destiny’).” Some harbored the broader ambition of annexing the entire Western Hemisphere. As my Inauguration Day post this month will discuss, that hemispheric vision still lingered at William McKinley’s 1901 Inauguration, along with some curious and amusing parallels with 2025.

  Click over for Robert's takes on "silly to sublime" components. And his slight modification to:

  

Recently on the book blog:

The author of this Woodrow Wilson biography, Christopher Cox, went literary with his subtitle; it's from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem "Ichabod", which (it says here) was intended as an attack on Daniel Webster, and his advocacy of the Fugitive Slave Law. And (further) "Ichabod" means "inglorious" in Hebrew. I did not know that!

I would have gone with something more concrete subtitle-wise: maybe "Raging Racist, Sexist Scumbag".

Cox had a long career in politics, including a 17-year stint as a GOP CongressCritter from California. His Wikipedia page goes into the details, mentioning his successful 1980 appearance on the game show Password Plus, but not, as I type, his authorship of this book.

A major theme of the book is Wilson's reluctance to support women's suffrage. He offered a number of excuses for his opposition; later, when that opposition became politically unpopular, he offered excuses for keeping his support merely tepid. But it seems that he was simply disdainful of the ladies intruding on a male bastion of power and privilege.

There are a number of "the more things change…" moments here. For example, there was a massive pro-suffrage demonstration the day before Wilson's 1913 inauguration. Which recalled this and (of course) this.

Another major theme was his undimmed, virulent, apparently lifelong, racism. He was a child of the Confederacy, despised Reconstruction, and was a big fan of the KKK. He was a good buddy of Thomas Dixon, author of (most notably) The Clansman, a novel that formed the basis of the classic pro-Klan silent movie The Birth of a Nation. Which featured Wilson quotes in intertitles. And was the first movie ever screened at the White House.

But the suffrage struggle takes center stage in Cox's telling. Unfortunately, to the exclusion of (in my opinion) matters of equal or greater importance. Cox goes into great detail on the trampling of the suffragists' civil liberties, which (among other things) involved sending off lady protestors to a rural Virginia prison/workhouse/hellhole for daring to unfurl banners in front of the White House.

But this was just one example of Wilson's suppression of dissent. For example, Eugene Debs goes unmentioned here except for being one of the presidential candidates in 1912. Reader, the Wilson Administration had him jailed for making rabble-rousing speeches.

Also unmentioned by Cox (unless I missed something): the infamous Palmer Raids; the mass deportation of left-wingers, including Emma Goldman.

Other topics are mentioned, but woefully unexplored. Wilson's re-election campaign in 1916 pictured him as a peacenik: "He kept us out of war", while his GOP opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, was pictured as a warmonger. This, while Wilson privately acknowledged that, yeah, we were gonna get into the war. And we did; Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany only a month after his 1917 inauguration.

World War I was also the excuse for Wilson to assume control of large swaths of the domestic economy. The Federal income tax was barely out of diapers; originally aimed at "the rich", the brackets multiplied, raised, and were unindexed for inflation, which raged. Price controls generated scarcity.

And Wilson demanded, and got, the power to deny any person to depart the US.

So, in short, this book is a very good resource if you want to know (roughly) everything about the campaign for the (eventual) 19th Amendment, and Wilson's interactions with that campaign. Beyond that, you might want to get some supplementary texts.