Apr
14
2025

Message to Librarians Imitating Chicken Little

And it's from Arlene Quaratiello, a fellow Granite Stater: The Sky Is Not Falling!. A former librarian, she gets how the DC Shuffle works:

In the past few weeks, there has been a massive outcry from the public library community that the defunding of a recent target of DOGE – the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) – will lead to the obliteration of library services that patrons have come to depend on and that the IMLS has helped fund since 1996. If you google imls, all that comes up, not surprisingly, are negative reactions to the defunding of this organization as if the sky will fall if the IMLS is not adequately funded. As a former librarian, I hold an unusual position as a supporter of defunding the Institute of Museum and Library Services. As a conservative, I wonder why a federal-level agency that oversees local public libraries even exists.

Up until 1996, libraries provided adequate services to patrons without the help of the IMLS. Skeptics must ask, “At what cost are these services provided?” This agency spent $24 million in administrative expenses last year with 38 employees, more than half the staff, earning over $100,000 annually. Whenever a federal agency becomes involved in the affairs of local institutions, it sucks money from local taxpayers that could have stayed in their states. The reasoning behind defunding the IMLS to promote efficiency is similar to that of dismantling the Department of Education. These federal organizations do nothing but cost the taxpayers more money due to unnecessary administrative costs; they perform services that should remain at the state and local level because there is no Constitutional mandate to justify their existence.

There are a lot of reasons to defund IMLS, some common to all Federal agencies operating outside Constitutional bounds, some IMLS-specific. (It's very wedded to woke ideology, unsurprisingly.)

Past Punsalad takes on IMLS here and here.

Also of note:

  • Significantly less amusing than your usual clown show. Kevin D. Williamson gives hints on Understanding the Trump Show.

    One way of understanding Donald Trump’s erratic presidency is to assume that he is trying to generate chaos. But that is not quite it.

    What he is trying to generate is storylines.

    And he knows which direction plots move: forward.

    Donald Trump was never much of an executive, a fact attested to by his many high-profile failures (the casinos, the Plaza, etc.) and his scams (Trump University, the accounting shenanigans, etc.). He likes to present himself as the ultimate deal-maker, but he is not much of a negotiator, as Vladimir Putin knows. He likes to play at being a tough guy, but he is easily backed down by opponents ranging from Canadian politicians to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and his weak character makes him vulnerable to flattery. His gift isn’t for business or hardball politics or the Machiavellian exercise of hard power—his gift is for storytelling.

    Narrative is one of the most powerful mental forces in human life. Trump’s career has involved a lot of raw spectacle, but even the most primitive kind of spectacle requires a narrative context. As I have noted from time to time, the great political champion of American evangelicals was, among other things, a cameo performer in a series of pornographic films—and even in pornography, the most elemental form of spectacle, storylines are part of the package. In addition to his career in pornography, Trump was a recurring character in the world of professional wrestling, in which the homoerotic spectacle is largely subordinate to the sprawling soap-opera plot. Add a storyline to a beauty pageant and you get reality television, which is where Trump made his money and built the foundation of his political career.

    As usual, I try to reproduce the links when I excerpt an article, but I can't recommend you click on that last one, unless you want to hear Joe Rogan say the f-word a lot.

  • After yesterday's tariff vacation… … we're back to covering the clown car, this one's swerve covered by Jim Geraghty: Life and the Markets Come at You Fast. It's from last Friday, but this observation is timeless:

    By the way, a hard lesson for the Twitter/X left and assorted progressive Democrats during the Biden years was that when you mock or deny other people’s economic pain, you lose. Every time someone complained about inflation and the cost of living during the Biden years, some snot-nosed punk on X would argue the problem was that the person was shopping at expensive places. These days, it’s not that hard to find some random person on X scoffing, “I don’t have a 401(k), so I don’t care.” Well, congressional Republicans don’t have the option of not caring, because a whole lot of their constituents do have such accounts. About 62 percent of U.S. adults have money invested in the stock market, including individual stocks, a stock mutual fund, or a retirement savings account.

    I’ve seen a few people who think of themselves as conservatives echoing Bernie Sanders’s arguments that the top 10 percent of Americans own 93 percent of all U.S. stocks. Well, when a guy watches his 401(k) shrink by 15 percent in three months, knowing that the millionaire on the other side of town lost even more is cold comfort. Some other guy losing a chunk of his wealth doesn’t mean you get any more wealth. Rooting for financial pain for someone wealthier than you is a bitter loser’s mentality. Every day, the net worth of the world’s richest billionaires goes up and down by vast fortunes, sometimes billions of dollars in one day. Does that make you any richer or poorer? Does the incline or decline in their fortunes change your income, your savings, your net worth? If not, why worry about it?

    (You can also find Trump supporters — in some cases, self-described Marxists — arguing, “President Trump screwed over Wall Street to bail out Main Street.” Hey, where do you think Main Street businesses get loans from? Where do you think they keep their money? About 4 million American small businesses run their finances through Bank of America. When a big bank like Bank of America or PNC makes a loan to mom and pop’s restaurant or a downtown boutique, is that Wall Street at work or Main Street at work? They’re interconnected and symbiotic.)

    A note for pundits, pols, and the rest of the public: if you find it clever to make the "Wall Street/Main Street" dichotomy, you've pretty much thrown away any chance that I will take you seriously in what follows.

  • Called it. Only four days ago, I wondered "How noisy will Tim Cook's smooch on Trump's posterior need to be to snag that [tariff] exemption?" Not the hardest prediction to make, and I guess it worked, as noted by the WSJ editorialists: On Tariffs, It’s Good to Be Tim Cook.

    Tariffs are advertised in the name of helping American workers, but what do you know? They turn out to favor the powerful and politically connected. That’s the main message of President Trump’s decision to exempt smartphones and assorted electronic goods from his most onerous tariffs.

    Customs and Border Protection (CBP) late Friday issued a notice listing products that will be exempt from Mr. Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs that can run as high as 145% on goods from China. The exclusions apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives, computer processors, servers, memory chips, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and other electronics.

    And, OK: notwithstanding the point I tried to make in the above item, there is a useful dichotomy (as the WSJ notes) between manufacturers who can afford a "K Street lobbyist" and those who can't.

  • Kaboom! Rich Lowry is also shaking his head: Trump Blows a Hole in His Own Tariff Regime. (Slightly reformatted)

    The Trump administration has exempted a swath of electronics from most, if not all, of his tariffs in a big victory for the likes of Apple and Dell. A couple of points [four, actually — PS]:
    • If tariffs weren’t harmful to American business and consumers, Trump wouldn’t need to hand out exemptions.
    • This process is inherently unfair insofar as companies that can get Trump on the phone are likelier to get relief than smaller companies no one has heard of.
    • It makes no sense to exempt finished goods largely manufactured in China, while continuing to put maximum tariffs on inputs that U.S. manufacturers need to make things here.
    • Obviously, this entire process is arbitrary and poorly thought out.

    I see DJIA is on a roller coaster again today. I sometimes wonder if Trump is getting jollies from watching it gyrate.

  • The grand conspiracy to take over government and leave you alone. My eyeballs were grabbed by this Concord Monitor op-ed from Weare NH resident William Politt: The Free Stater threat.

    Threat?!

    Well, after a number of autobiographical paragraphs…

    Curiously, there are a number of mostly recent arrivals who manage to slip under the Granite State’s xenophobia radar. I refer to the Free State Project, a loosely (dis?)organized group of extremists who chose to relocate to New Hampshire with the express purpose of taking over the state’s institutions and remaking them into an everyone-for-themselves libertarian paradise.

    Ominous! There's a Wikipedia page for the FSP, that notes it was founded in 2001. (For the record: I've been living here since 1981, not really a "recent arrival" myself.) And there's a website. They've had a mission statement since 2005:

    The Free State Project is an agreement among 20,000 pro-liberty activists to move to New Hampshire, where they will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property. The success of the Project would likely entail reductions in taxation and regulation, reforms at all levels of government to expand individual rights and free markets, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and the world

    Sound threatening to you?

    Politt has scare stories, and lots of loaded language (E.g., "Free-Staters seldom reveal their affiliations…" Like Commies!) Nowhere does he manage to actually deal with FSP's libertarian goals. Sad!