Pun Salad

… because he noticed Abigail Adams' headline query at National Review: Do Ballerina Androids Dream of Electric Nutcrackers? Inspired by this post from "gorklon rust":

pic.twitter.com/ZbrZmfjHpd

— gorklon rust (@elonmusk) May 14, 2025

Being a philistine dance-wise, I was mainly creeped out by Optimus's resemblance to the Empire's killer droids I'd just seen in Andor Season 2, Episode 8. Eek! They're here already!

Also of note:

• One must have a heart of stone to read of the negation of the earlier election of David Hogg without laughing. Jonathan Turley tells the story while keeping a straight face, though. Circling the Firing Squad: The Democratic Party Moves to Negate Earlier Election of David Hogg.

  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is about to show the perils of circling a firing squad. In its announcement that it will nullify the election of David Hogg and another Vice Chair, the DNC reminded the public why they have left the Democratic Party. The sudden decision that there were procedural irregularities in the election (after Hogg said that he would target older Democratic incumbents) leaves the DNC looking more like the CCP. However, it gets worse.

  Hogg caused a controversy by announcing that he will work to primary older Democratic incumbents through his group, Leaders We Deserve, to bring young candidates into the party. The leadership ordered him to retract the pledge or resign. He did neither.

  Then, the DNC announced that there were “irregularities” in how he and Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta won two of the three vice chair positions.

  The reason? One of the losing candidates, Kalyn Free, filed a complaint during the original election alleging that the DNC failed to follow rules on gender diversity.

  For additional amusement, click over for video of DNC leaders trying to explain those rules.

• Well, I got mine anyway. I was wondering if we'd have (additional) airport chaos last week as TSA's "deadline" for REAL ID compliance hit. Jim Harper was paying attention, and… REAL ID Day After-Action Report: Stalemate.

  On May 7, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was scheduled to attack American air travel. Terrorism works by inducing overreaction from victim states. So, yes, the TSA’s work to restrict travel by law-abiding Americans gives a win to the 9/11 attackers, nearly a quarter-century on. No doing business in other states, no visiting the new grandbaby—unless you have enrolled in the national ID system created by the REAL ID Act.

  But the attack didn’t come. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced the day before that American travelers would not be turned away. As The Wall Street Journal’s travel columnist reported, lines were shorter at many airports. My experience flying on May 9 without a federally compliant ID was smooth. I decline strip-search machines, so I already get a pat-down (or “freedom massage”) each time I fly, which is probably what travelers with noncompliant IDs got.

  But internal contradictions exist with the policy, Jim thinks, and he predicts "collapse, sooner or later, of the national ID project." So, good.

• You don't have to be a moron to understand it, but it helps. Jeff Maurer sees a silver lining: The Qatari Plane Scandal is Different Because Morons Understand It.

  Those of us who have spent years stunned by Trump’s flagrant and frankly kind of impressive corruption often ask ourselves: “Why does nothing ever stick to this guy?” Trump is so corrupt that corruption seems to be the only thing he devotes energy to other than sexual harassment and golf. Most of us have forgotten Trump scandals that would have sunk any other president; if George H.W. Bush had run for office while hawking $100,000 watches from a personal merch store, there would be a chapter in every civics textbook titled “Watchgate”. But when Trump does it, we laugh it off as Dennis the Menace-esque hijinks.

  The simplest explanation for why Trump gets away with so much is that most of his scandals are just barely too complex to put the national panties in a twist. Many people seemed to view the Mueller Report as a report on whether or not prostitutes peed on the president, and when the answer was “no”, tales of obstruction of justice felt like a bait-and-switch, a bit like luring people into a porno theatre and then showing My Dinner with Andre. Trump’s first impeachment included the phrase “Ukrainian Prosecutor General”, which must be one of the most brain-numbing three word phrases possible, right up there with “Consumption Tax Study” and “Canadian Sorghum Yields”. January 6 might have sunk Trump had his timing not been perfect; Republicans skipped impeachment because they thought Trump would just go away, and by the time Trump ran again, the public forgot where things left off, like that SNL sketch where no one on The Sopranos can remember what happened on the previous season of The Sopranos.

  In this morning's news: Democratic congressman pushes Trump impeachment but backs down from vote. Come on, you guys!

• Speaking of morons… Saul Zimet (who is not a moron) notes the ends of the horseshoe keep getting closer: MAGA Adopts One of Karl Marx’s Key Misconceptions.

  “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

  When a government deploys mass coercion against peaceful people, as we have seen under Trump’s trade and immigration policies (which is not to say that all illegal immigrants are peaceful), the government’s representatives and apologists tend to roll out a series of moral justifications. These arguments can elucidate the character of the political faction in power, and MAGA has been no exception. Throughout the last few months, one of their defenses of Trump’s trade and immigration policies, contrary to the pre-MAGA Republican Party’s free market rhetoric, has frequently been the allegation that low wages for voluntary labor are exploitative.

  “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

  When I was a youngster reading about Marx's ideas, I couldn't help but notice his "exploitation", shorn of moralistic language, essentially meant nothing more or less than "paying people market wages".

I assume this is in response to Trump's May 4 interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. From the (slightly reformatted) transcript:

I get what Trump is trying to say: he considers the actual legal issues to be unresolved.

But—geez, Donald: When you are asked whether you need to uphold the Constitution, you simply answer, "Yes, of course."

Also of note:

• Another mile down the Road to Serfdom. Gee, we didn't have to wait very long to get (as the WSJ editorialists say) Trump’s Worst Idea Since Tariffs (gifted link).

  President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it. To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.

  Trump officials are pitching Republicans on a “most-favored nation” drug-pricing regime for Medicaid. While the details are hazy, the idea is for Medicaid to pay drug makers the lowest price charged by other developed countries. Mr. Trump proposed a similar scheme for Medicare Part B drugs at the end of his first term, and it was a bad idea then too.

  That's an older article, but things did not get better, according to Michael F. Connon at Cato more recently: Trump Attempts Price Controls on Prescription Drugs.

  I’m usually the guy reminding everybody, “It is not a ‘price control’ when the government reduces the prices [it] pays for drugs.” I expected that I would be singing that tune again this morning when President Trump released an executive order on drug pricing. To my knowledge, Trump has never taken any steps to impose actual price controls on prescription drugs (read: coercive restraints on pharmaceutical transactions outside of government programs).

  I was wrong. Unlike the Inflation Reduction Act or Trump’s past proposals, Trump’s executive order is an attempt to impose government price controls on pharmaceuticals.

  I'm (I guess) amused at the efforts of Trump cheerleaders to find some way to shake their pom-poms at this. Example at the Federalist: Dems Sworn To Oppose Trump Land Awkwardly On The Side Of Higher Drug Prices.

• But to be fair… Jacob Sullum, in a Reason post timestamped one minute after midnight today: Trump rightly decries "absurd and unjust" overcriminalization in federal regulations. So yay!

  After mountain runner Michelino Sunseri ascended and descended Grand Teton in record time last fall, his corporate sponsor, The North Face, heralded his achievement as "an impossible dream—come true." Then came the nightmare: Federal prosecutors charged Sunseri with a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail for using a trail that the National Park Service described as closed, although it had never bothered to clearly inform the public of that designation.

  Sunseri unwittingly violated one of the myriad federal regulations that carry criminal penalties—a body of law so vast and obscure that no one knows exactly how many offenses it includes. An executive order that President Donald Trump issued last week aims to ameliorate the injustices caused by the proliferation of such agency-defined crimes, which turn the rule of law into a cruel joke.

  The Code of Federal Regulations "contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages—far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand," Trump's order notes. "Worse, many [regulations] carry potential criminal penalties for violations."

  Good job, Team Orange. But…

• With Trump, the bad news is never far away. In a post timestamped at 5:50pm yesterday (so just 6 hours and 11 minutes before the one linked above) Jacob Sullum brings it: Since immigration is an 'invasion,' a top Trump adviser says, the president might suspend habeas corpus.

  The writ of habeas corpus, a right deeply rooted in English common law and recognized by the U.S. Constitution, allows people nabbed by the government to challenge their detention in court. That complicates President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Last month, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that foreign nationals who allegedly are subject to immediate deportation as "alien enemies" have a right to contest that designation by filing habeas petitions. And foreign students have used the writ to challenge the claim that they are "subject to removal" because their political opinions undermine U.S. foreign policy interests.

  Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has a potential solution to this inconvenience. Last Friday, he told reporters that Trump is "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus to facilitate the deportation of unwanted foreigners. "The Constitution is clear," Miller said. "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion."

  I am not a lawyer, but, yeah, that sounds … unconstitional.

• Not being British, we have no excuse. Kevin D. Williamson attempts to jog our American memories. The Forgotten Word: Sex.

  “There are only two genders!” Up goes the battle cry from certain quarters of the right and from the president whose line they toe with such perfect servility. Over at Facebook, it was 54 genders before it was 72 before it was … whatever it is today.

  In reality, the number of genders is neither two nor 72 nor anything in between: The number of genders, outside of grammar textbooks, is zero. “Gender” is a grammatical term that became, over time, a figure of speech masquerading as an indelible (for purposes of discrimination law) yet infinitely fluid (for other rhetorical purposes) personal trait, one that is conflated—often intentionally, with its less malleable non-synonym, sex.

  As George Orwell observed in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” the corruption of language goes hand-in-hand with the corruption of thought. One of the reasons we have such an excruciating time talking our way through sensitive questions about sex and about what we call “gender” is simple linguistic imprecision. The activists on the progressive side of this issue never cease shouting that sex and gender are not the same thing, and, in that much at least, they are correct–and we should start acting like it.

  Headline explanation, if you want it,A here. (And KDW refers to it too, so subscribe, hippie.)

• Advice about which I have mixed feelings. Robert F. Graboyes offers it to the Democrats: Persuasive Beats Abrasive.

  Here are my dozen suggestions for how Democrats might persuade my hand (and the hands of similarly-minded Americans) to gravitate toward the “D” on the 2028 ballot. Consider this in the vein of a “Chautauqua”—the social movement that encouraged discourse even between those who disagreed with one another and which Theodore Roosevelt referred to, near the movement’s peak, as “typical of America at its best.”

  [1] If your message only works when shouted, you won’t persuade me. “DONALD TRUMP IS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!!!!!” is a message that only tends to be delivered loudly and angrily—and shouting almost never persuades. (Say that sentence softly, with a smile, and you’ll sound a bit unhinged.) If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, calmly itemize his behavior on January 6, his unsettling third-term chatter, and his suggestions that the U.S. take Greenland by force. To help you distinguish between these modes of communication: Bernie Sanders, AOC, Chuck Schumer, and Jasmine Crockett always shout. Josh Shapiro, Ro Khanna, Abigail Spanberger, John Fetterman, and Ritchie Torres tend to discuss.

  … and there are eleven more suggestions at the link. All good ideas. It's hard to imagine Democrats taking many of them.

Via Paul Hsieh at GeekPress:

A mathematician Pope going up against a machine god superintelligence is the most cyberpunk thing ever. https://t.co/NBLRRyCf9f

— Will Kinney (@WKCosmo) May 11, 2025

Complete text of the Vatican News tweet:

Explanation (that I had to look up): He was a math major at Villanova.

But (ahem): "defence"? "labour?" Your Holiness, I thought you were an American?

Also of note:

• Also, don't call me Shirley. Jonah Goldberg suggests you watch your language: Don’t Call This Conservatism.

  Is the “New Right” conservative?

  If you spend any time following the most vocal defenders of Donald Trump or various populist causes generally, some version of this question may have occurred to you. If you find yourself listening to defenders of a supposedly extreme right-wing Republican president’s signature policies, and then wondering aloud, “Wait, I thought conservatives were in favor of free markets?” you have an idea of what I am getting at. If you’re perplexed by the way many on the right celebrate and lionize a rogue’s gallery of libertines, scapegraces, sybarites, caitiffs, roues, abusers, and cads, you might wonder why you didn’t get the memo explaining that the right no longer cares about “moral rearmament,” or “family values.”

  In short, if you’re a lifelong conservative, you might be struggling with the question of whether “the right” is where you belong. If being a principled defender of the constitutional order, limited government, free markets, traditional values, and an America-led world still makes you a conservative, are you still on “the right” when the loudest voices on the right reject most or all of those positions?

  Confession: I had to look up a couple of those words.

• Just say no. Jim Geraghty channels his inner Laocoön: Beware of Foreign Powers Bearing Gifts. And cleverly juxtaposed with with past GOP outrage over the Chinese "donations" to the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania…

  We all agree that backdoor payments and cash contribution to the president and his family are bad, right?

  Right?

  Because while we’re at it . . .

  . . . the president of the United States should not be accepting a “new Air Force One” from the government of Qatar:

  In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

  The gift is expected to be announced next week, when Trump visits Qatar on the first foreign trip of his second term, according to sources familiar with the plans.

  Trump toured the plane, which is so opulently configured it is known as “a flying palace,” while it was parked at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.

  ABC News reports, “The highly unusual — unprecedented — arrangement is sure to raise questions about whether it is legal for the Trump administration, and ultimately, the Trump presidential library foundation, to accept such a valuable gift from a foreign power.”

  "What do I have to do to put you into this slightly used, but very opulent, 747 today?"

• I suppose I should post something about New Hampshire's own David Souter. All seemed to agree he was a nice guy. Damon Root has analysis: David Souter shaped the Supreme Court through the backlash he inspired.

  Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who died last week at age 85, will probably not be remembered as the author of any truly momentous majority opinions, because he never really wrote any of those. Nor will Souter be remembered as one of the Court's great dissenters, because none of his dissents inspired the next generation to keep the faith about unpopular ideas. Souter's career will likely be remembered for a more unusual reason: the severe and enduring backlash that he inspired.

  Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1990 by Republican President George H.W. Bush, Souter quickly emerged as a consistent "liberal" vote in high-profile cases about hot-button issues such as abortion and affirmative action. This was supremely disappointing to conservative legal activists, who had hoped Bush would pick someone in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken conservative tapped four years earlier by President Ronald Re[a]gan.

  But…

• Worst rom-com ever. Paul G. Kengor recalls: When Biden and Rudman Wept. Recounting NH Senator Warren Rudman's tireless push to get Souter confirmed:

  Rudman had pushed the Souter nomination. He ensured [sic] liberal colleagues that Souter was their guy. Rudman, a pro-choice Republican, had been Souter’s boss at the New Hampshire office of attorney general. He privately concluded that Souter would not vote against Roe. Rudman’s reasons, which he acknowledged only after he left the Senate, ranged from the legal to humanitarian: Given that Souter was “a compassionate human being,” averred Rudman, he would naturally support continued legalization of abortion—which has produced the deaths of over 40 million unborn babies since 1973.

  But Rudman’s allies on the Democratic side weren’t so sure. And Rudman had to walk a fine line, since his pro-life president wanted a pro-life justice. So, Rudman quietly sought to assuage liberals. He urged them to trust him.

  That silent trust was critical, since Souter’s position on abortion had to be dealt with stealthily. In fact, it was handled so delicately that the nominee’s true thinking was apparently unknown even to the White House.

  Alas, with Casey v. Planned Parenthood, America had its answer, as Souter authorized the sanctity of Roe v. Wade.

  As fate would have it, on that same day Senator Rudman and Senator Joe Biden bumped into each other at the train station, not in Washington, DC but in Wilmington, Delaware.

  “At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform,” Rudman later recorded in his memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. “Joe had agonized over his vote for David, and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying.”

  An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over and over: “You were right about him [Souter]! … You were right!”

  The two men were so jubilant, so giddy—practically dancing—that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “[B]ut we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings.”

  Except for all those dead babies, who didn't even get beginnings, let alone happy endings.

• Lest we forget… Tyler Cowen provides Sentences to ponder, excerpting from. Richard Hanania's substack.

  In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk [gain of function] studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017. At the time, outlets like Scientific American and Science covered the decision, in articles that quoted scientists talking about what could go wrong.

  To be fair, "was lifted" points to an NIH press release authored by Francis Collins, and the first person singular pronoun is prevalent there. Sure, it happened under Trump, but …

I can't recommend our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour; the author, John Quiggin, is an Aussie economist whose blog claims he writes "from a socialist and democratic viewpoint". So, no. But it's nevertheless a good illustration of Andy Kessler's WSJ op-ed: The New Right’s Zombienomics (gifted link).

Jeff Jacoby is also kinda hacked off at the Doll Commissar: The tone-deafness of 'just two dolls'. But he does resurrect a fond memory of funnier times, Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man:

In words:

Also making cameo appearances later in the column: P.J. O'Rourke and Boris Yeltsin. Check them out.

Also of note:

• But Gorsuch! Billy Binion recounts an amusing exchange at SCOTUS: Government Argues It's Too Much To Ask the FBI To Check the Address Before Blowing Up a Home.

  The Supreme Court last week heard a case from a family whose home was wrongly raided by the FBI, after which they were barred from bringing their civil suit to trial. Before the Court: Should the plaintiffs have been able to sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA)?

  Oral arguments got into the weeds of the FTCA, under which plaintiffs Curtrina Martin and Toi Cliatt were prohibited from suing, even though Congress revised that law in the 1970s to give recourse to victims of federal law enforcement misconduct. But there was one particularly instructive exchange between the Court and Frederick Liu, assistant to the solicitor general at the Justice Department—a back-and-forth that is decidedly less in the weeds.

  Liu: The officers here were weighing public safety considerations, efficiency considerations, operational security, the idea that they didn't want to delay the start of the execution of the warrants because they wanted to execute all the warrants simultaneously. Those are precisely the sorts of policy tradeoffs that an officer makes in determining, 'Well, should I take one more extra precaution to make sure I'm at the right house?' Here, Petitioner suggests, for example, that the officer should have checked the house number on the mailbox.

  Justice Neil Gorsuch: Yeah, you might look at the address of the house before you knock down the door.

  Liu: Yes. And, and, as the district court found at 52(a), that sort of decision is filled with policy tradeoffs because checking the house—

  Gorsuch: Really?

  Liu: —number at the end of the driveway means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire from the windows.

  Gorsuch: How about making sure you're on the right street? Is that…you know, asking too much?
  

  This case is pretty horrific, hope it works out well for the victims.

• Political science. Jerry Coyne is righteously irked: Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article.

  Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

  […] If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

  1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
  2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

  I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

  The two-page PDF of the Nature article is here.

• Hey, I noticed! Christopher Caldwell writes at the Dispatch about The Consequential Trump Move No One’s Noticed.

  Three weeks ago, Donald Trump struck another blow to the civil-rights regime. It was easy to miss, given he did so through an executive order aimed at a legal concept. But the president has taken another step toward uprooting the second constitution that has been in place since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  Trump’s Executive Order 14281, aimed at “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” targets the judicial doctrine of “disparate impact,” which has stood since the 1970s.

  You may not know the ins and outs of disparate impact, but you’ve surely seen its effects. Under disparate impact, a business owner can be found guilty of discrimination even if he did not intend to discriminate. An aptitude test that winds up narrowing the pool of eligible black candidates, height requirements that exclude women from a police force, a job application that asks about criminal records—any hiring process that produces a lower-than-random number of protected minorities is suspect. Such actions and institutions might carry no ill intent, but they can put an employer on the wrong side of civil-rights law.

  Christopher's not quite right about the "no one's noticed". We blogged about this last month!

  At the time, the WaPo claimed that Trump's EO would "repeal key components of the Civil Rights Act of 1964". That was nonsense, and remains so. But Christopher points out:

  That disparate impact is reaching the end of the line is far from certain. Civil-rights law is a collection of public authorizations and private sector incentives. Trump can take the government out of the business of suing, regulating, and jawboning businesses for the next few years, but civil litigation will likely continue. George H.W. Bush’s Civil Rights Act of 1991 introduced disparate impact into black-letter U.S. law. It would have to be repealed to bring about the meritocracy Trump seeks. That would require more skepticism about civil-rights law than currently exists in Congress. But perhaps minds are changing, now that Trump’s executive orders are showing both parties what a devastating weapon civil-rights law can be—and, indeed, always has been.

  Christopher does a great job in documenting the history of this pernicious concept. There's still work to do on getting rid of it.

Today's Getty Eye Candy has the description:

Ah, good times. But I wanted to point out the "HANDS OFF OUR MONEY!" sign. Being held up by (it appears) a masked man, appropriately. And… well, see my headline.

In the present day, James Freeman is not sympathetic to the plight of the masked men. He thinks Washington Needs a Lot More DOGE (gifted link).

But there's plenty of delusion.

Also of note:

• Who made him the Doll and Pencil Commissar anyway? Emma Camp speaking truth to power: Trump is wrong. Cheap goods are awesome.

  Donald Trump doesn't think Americans deserve stuff. The right number of pencils for a family? Five. The right number of dolls for a little girl? Two, maybe three. His comments in recent interviews bear a striking similarity to those of left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who in 2015 famously bemoaned that consumers have too many deodorant options.

  How did Trump—who campaigned on a promise of reducing inflation—become so eager to have Americans pay more for everyday commodities? While Trump may have made overtures to reducing prices, he's long supported the kinds of economic interventions most likely to lead to inflation. And if you believe that protectionism is the path to prosperity for everyday Americans, your definition of prosperity starts to change pretty quickly.

  Just a few months into his second term, Trump has so far enacted a sweeping protectionist agenda. He's levied staggering tariffs that have hiked prices on everything from mattresses to cars to strollers and tanked the stock market. However, Trump and his defenders have remained strident, arguing that Americans just don't need affordable imported goods.

  I guess you don't get to the top of either party these days without being an arrogant asshole, eager to assume you're the best person to determine what Americans "really need".

• Achtung, kinder! Wie viel uhr ist es? At Skeptic, Gerald Posner answers: It’s Time for Papal Transparency on the Holocaust.

  The Catholic Church has a new leader—Pope Leo XIV—born in 1955 in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost is the first American to head the church and serve as sovereign of the Vatican City State. Many Vatican watchers will be looking for early signs that Pope Leo XIV intends to continue the legacy of Pope Francis for reforming Vatican finances and for making the church a more transparent institution.

  There is one immediate decision he could make that would set the tone for his papacy. Pope Leo could order the release of the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank, the repository with files that would answer lingering questions of how much the Catholic Church might have profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and if it acted as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds. By solving one of last great mysteries about the Holocaust, Pope Leo would embrace long overdue historical transparency that had proved too much for even his reform-minded predecessor.

  I would like to think the church has nothing to hide. But if so then why so secretive?

  But my main takeaway from the article is: Whoa, I am older than the Pope.

• Jonah Goldberg says "shibboleth", I say … how do you pronounce that anyway? Before you answer, be glad you don't live in Ephraim.

  But back to Jonah, who writes on The ‘Neoliberalism’ Shibboleth.

  My friend Cliff Asness is fond of tweeting his dismay over the horseshoeing of American politics when it comes to economics (and other things). One of his pithier expressions of this lament: “We now have two economically far left (and economically ignorant) parties, they just differ in their preferred pronouns.”

  Now, Cliff isn’t using “pronouns” literally. His point is that the fringier economic policies of the left and the fringier economic policies of the right are substantially similar but culturally or stylistically opposed to each other. If you’re an advocate for industrial policy on the left, you’ll use different buzz-phrases and shibboleths than an advocate of industrial policy on the right will. But you’re still for industrial policy. You might have different winners and losers in mind, but you’re still picking winners and losers. Then again, sometimes, both the left and right are just haggling over the same constituency, making losers of everybody else.

  Might be paywalled. Subscribe, hippie.

Background for people (understandably) not paying attention to New Hampshire politics: Our state's senior senator, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, is not running for reelection in 2026. So my CongressCritter, Democrat Chris Pappas is running to replace her. Which means New Hampshire Congressional District One is up for grabs. Which (in turn) is drawing clowns eager to join the DC circus.

And it appears one of those clowns is…

I haven’t decided yet about a run in #NH1, but as we see, the right is already on the attack.

I’m not afraid to take this message anywhere: Democrats must forcefully oppose Trump. #nhpolitics https://t.co/vXETOHLuUb

— Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) May 5, 2025

Let's give Hanna credit for linking to a National Review article by Brittany Bernstein: Reporter Moves from Covering Dems to Running as One. (Here's a gifted link if you need it.)

There's a certain amount of self-dramatization here. Hanna's not afraid! Even though she's being attacked by the right!

In fact, Brittany's article is pretty far from an "attack"; it consists mainly of sketching Hanna's journalistic career, and quotes her extensively and accurately. (I left a comment on Hanna's tweet to that effect, with no response.) Let's take a look:

Writing with fire! And spitting it!

Continuing the rhetoric:

Well, you get the idea. The closest Brittany comes to an "attack" is pointing out the thinly disguised partisanship of her past journalism.

If you're interested, this NHJournal article has more on Hanna and the local political scene. As I type, the only announced Democrat candidate for NH01 is Maura Sullivan.

Also of note:

• Sorry, Mark, you lost this one. The last time Pun Salad featured NH pol Mark Fernald was back in 2011 when he penned a silly op-ed column with a bunch of ideas on how to balance the federal budget. Which involved tax increases, and no spending decreases.

  Mark's op-ed silliness continues, years later, in my lousy local paper: How vouchers will destroy public education. It's the usual, mostly. For example:

  The voucher system advocated by New Hampshire Republicans is a dagger aimed at the heart of public education—and therefore, at the heart of our democracy—by creating a system that disfavors our public schools.

  The public schools are subject to minimum standards set by the state; they must provide special education services; they must accept all comers; they are free; and they administer standardized tests each year in grades 3 through 8.

  Schools taking the voucher money have no such requirements. There are no rules, no accountability, and they are free to reject students who are difficult or expensive to educate.

  Note that Mark has the usual Democrat definition of "free": paid for by taxpayers.

  But his claim that non-government schools have "no rules"? That's a lie. Tsk. In just a few seconds of Googling, I found New Hampshire's Office of Nonpublic Schools which contains (among other resources) a 19-page PDF CHAPTER Ed 400 APPROVAL OF NONPUBLIC SCHOOLS which has plenty of rules.

  But what really gets my goat:

  With new money being offered for private school education, you can be sure the market will respond. New private schools will open, and existing private schools will expand, to take advantage of the free state money.

  And therein lies the danger.

  Public school enrollment will decline, as middle class families choose the voucher money. As families leave the public schools, support will dwindle at the polls, and school budgets will be cut, causing more middle class families to leave the public schools.

  Mark avoids the issue. If public schools were as great as he claims, parents would not send their kiddos to private schools even under a "voucher" system. Why would they bother?

  Mark is essentially admitting that given even minimal incentives, parents would choose to yank their children out of public school, and undergo the hassle and additional expense of private (or home) schooling.

  Meanwhile, as our local TV station reports: NH Republicans advance bill to expand Education Freedom Accounts

• Contra Fernald. The Josiah Bartlett Center has FAQs about "Education Freedom Accounts", the school choice program at issue here in NH. For example: Is an EFA a voucher?

  No. A voucher is a payment from the government directly to an education provider. With an EFA, the state approves a list of providers, but does not pay the provider directly. Each student’s state adequate education grant amount is deposited in an account managed by a state-approved vendor, in this case the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH. When a parent chooses a provider from the approved list, the parent submits an invoice to the Children’s Scholarship Fund for payment. The payment can be for tuition or tutoring services, or for individual educational expenses allowable by law under RSA 194-F:2. The payment is made from the Children’s Scholarship Fund to the vendor. Every payment is scrutinized for compliance with state rules.

  Or: Would EFAs defund public schools?

  Opponents of school choice have long predicted that giving parents the option to leave their assigned public school would trigger a mass exodus that would collapse school budgets. That low opinion of district public schools is not shared by most parents. “As yet, the growing trend of giving parents public funds for private education hasn’t decimated school budgets,” Education Week reported last year. “Even in states where private school choice is open to all students, the overwhelming majority of K-12 students still attend public school.” A New Hampshire state representative opposed to EFAs acknowledged in legislative testimony this year that “very, very, very, very few students are actually leaving their public school district to take a voucher.” Data compiled by EdChoice show that at the start of 2025 only 2.2% of students nationwide participated in a school choice program. In Florida, which has the highest school choice participation rate, 82.5% of students have enrolled in a public school of some kind, whether a district, magnet or charter school. In Arizona, 86.3% of students have chosen public schools. Just as public schools aren’t a good fit for every child, neither are EFAs. The EFA program is designed to be an alternative for students who need it, not to replace public schools.

  I'm pretty sure Josiah Bartlett has the better of this argument.

• Just another reminder of what a jerk President Biden was. Kimberley A. Strassel tells of Biden’s Energy-Loan Free-For-All (gifted link).

  It’s no secret Joe Biden’s team spent its final days shoveling money out the door, and in ways designed to limit Donald Trump’s ability to claw it back. Officials working under Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright have now completed a review of the Loan Programs Office (LPO)—the government entity that brought you Solyndra— and the extent of the shenanigans is remarkable.

  Figures and documents provided to me show a loan free-for-all: More than $90 billion showered on entities in a matter of months, a lot of it to companies of questionable taxpayer value. The highlights of DOE’s review:

  Unprecedented sums: LPO was created in 2005 under George W. Bush, though it was ramped up by Barack Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” package (which funded Solyndra, Abound Solar and other failures). Biden built on that history, earmarking hundreds of billions from his Covid-era spending packages for green-energy loans. After Kamala Harris lost the election, LPO went in overdrive. From 2009 to the final quarter of 2024, LPO had obligated some $42 billion in loans. From Election Day 2024 through Inauguration Day 2025, LPO closed on $53 billion in loans and made an additional $40 billion in commitments—or more than double what it has spent over the prior 15 years.

  As Kimberly goes on to point out, some of those "loans and commitments" have gone to firms that are already in danger of going belly-up. But not before absconding with the taxpayer largesse.

Dave Barry writes, hilariously, on Influencers at Sea.

For some reason, Dave devotes a good deal of attention to …

Regan's Facebook page also claims she was "Miss America 2012", but the relevant Wikipedia page doesn't support that. She may have stuck that in under the influence of Clase Azul Gold.

(In case you're wondering if you can get Clase Azul Gold Tequila for less up here in NH: nope.)

Also of note:

• Good for Noah Smith. He's a Democrat, Kamala voter, backed Biden's "industrial policy", but there's a line he will not cross.

  These incompetent people haven't built a single mile of working train, and they're telling us there won't be a single mile of working train for 20 more years.
  
  DEFUND THEM. https://t.co/mK6bdEbIjK

  — Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) May 7, 2025

  When you've lost Noah, choo-choo fans, it's time to pack it in.

• Not even trying to make a good argument. James Freeman "hails" the Champions of the Donor Class.

  A few Republican members of the House are using bogus Democratic talking points to get tax breaks for rich liberals while discouraging blue states from enacting pro-growth reform. Now these rogue GOP lawmakers are even threatening to trigger nationwide tax hikes if they don’t get their way.

  Tobias Burns reports for The Hill on a group of five Republicans who are demanding that the state and local tax (SALT) deduction be raised above its current cap of $10,000:

  The lawmakers are saying they’re prepared to vote no as a group on the wide-ranging tax and spending cut package key to President Trump’s agenda if they don’t get the raise they want.

  The group consists of Reps. Andrew Garbarino (N.Y.), Nick LaLota (N.Y.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Young Kim (Calif.) and Tom Kean Jr. (N.J.) — Republicans from wealthier suburban districts of major U.S. metropolitan areas, where higher property taxes make the increased cap especially valuable to taxpayers.

  The federal SALT deduction is terrible policy because it takes the pressure off profligate state governments run by Democrats to restrain their own taxes. A proper cap would be set at zero, so that Americans nationwide would not have to subsidize the high-tax policies of New Jersey, New York and California. Without the ability to deduct heavy state and local taxes on federal returns, citizens of blue states would be fully accountable for their bad political choices and would be motivated to demand reform at the state level.

  Just a note if you missed it back in February: Tom Kean Jr. has the "distinction" of being the only GOP CongressCritter representing one of the top 15 richest districts in the US.

Well, I thought I had come up with a clever new term. Turns out it's old, maybe already tired. From a year ago:

AIsplaining: is a pejorative term meaning for an AI to explain something, to a human, in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner" https://t.co/x42ZepFbvS

— Jeff Saucerman (@jsauce7) May 10, 2024

But I did find a pretty good example. Starting from this morning's Bleat from James Lileks, which dug out this old newspaper clipping:

Interesting, because I used to live in Nebraska, and zoomed back and forth on I-80 quite a bit.

James also provides a recent Google Street View of "Erma's Desire", one of the sculptures:

But I wanted to see the rest of that article! Where's page 14B?! So I googled the headline "Bicentennial art fails Nebraska road test" and … failed, alas.

But I did check Google's "AI Mode". Which contained (among other things) an indication of what the AI thought might be the Real Issue:

Reader, that's AIsplaining.

For the record, I can no longer duplicate that result. But I swear it's accurate!

(It turns out "Erma's Revenge Desire" is eminently Googleable, so if you're interested…)

And we know how that movie turns out, don't we?

At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. gives two big thumbs-down for Trump’s Bad Hollywood Trade Movie (gifted link).

This, from Giancarlo Sopo at NR, also explains a lot: Netflix’s CEO Wants You Lonely and Miserable. Excerpt (one that doesn't have much to do with that headline):

Consumer note: I have purchased a ticket for the new live-action Lilo & Stitch, two weeks from today. In 3D! This will be the first time I've been to a theater since (see above) Twisters, back in July of last year.

I know: Disney. But the trailer made me laugh, and I have fond memories of the original animated version. So here's hoping it doesn't suck.

Also of note:

• Sorry, Don: 50% is not a passing grade. Jonah Goldberg points to a continuing problem with Team Orange: Right Ends, Wrong Means.

  Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

  This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

  For instance, I’ve argued for decades that liberal media bias is real and a problem. I think you can exaggerate the problem, particularly these days (Fox has dominated cable news for decades). But, yes, the MAGA crowd is right that much of the “legacy” media is often reflexively hostile to Republicans. But that doesn’t mean I support the way Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is bullying various media organizations for being critical of Trump, or that I applaud Trump’s jihad against the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

  Did anyone notice when Governor Ayotte started calling the "Gulf of Maine" the "Gulf of New Hampshire"? No? Maybe that was a dream I had.

• But the real problem is neither means nor ends. It is, as Kevin D. Williamson says: Trump Is a Socialist.

  Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state. You don’t need socialism to have a portfolio of social-welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the postwar decades: In the high-tax European countries that so many of our progressive friends profess to admire, the trend for a generation has been away from state enterprise and central planning and toward privatization, trade, and investment. American progressives say they envy European health care systems they generally know nothing about; their European counterparts sincerely envy an American entrepreneurial ecosystem that they understand all too well but remain unable to replicate. It’s a funny old world.

  Socialism does not mean government-funded education and retirement benefits and health care subsidies—those things are simply welfare, and there are better and worse ways to go about doing such things. Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises. Food stamps are welfare—socialism can mean state-owned farms and grocery stores, but more often it means a state apparatus that runs the farms and grocery stores as though it owned them, setting prices, negotiating the terms of employment, and determining how business is to be done—a little more of this crop, a little less of that commodity, etc.

  V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19^th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor.

  And of course KDW gets around to Trump's comment about America being a "department store", characterizing it accurately as "quasi-monarchical Leninism".

  Yes, I'm willing to grant that Kamala would have been worse.

• "Dad, why did we get off at the "Serfdom" exit?" Jared Dillian also notes the Lenintastic Lunacy at the top: Trump’s 'they can have 5' moment is an attack on capitalism.

  While recently aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump told reporters that "a young lady—a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl—doesn't need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five." He doubled down in an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker, saying that Americans "don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five."

  Trump is referring to the economic hardship that is inevitable due to his tariffs. Toys are a particular focus, many of which come from China and are subject to the highest tariffs. Trump is asking Americans to make sacrifices, and not with the eloquence of John F. Kennedy—the sacrifices we make are simply to satisfy his pride.

  "OK, OK, I'll go to six pencils, kid. You drive a hard bargain."

• A very slick visualization reminding us that we're doomed. Well, not me. My kids maybe. From Cato: Social Security's Financial Crisis: The Trust Fund Myth Uncovered.

  There’s a big problem with Social Security.

  Most people misunderstand its trust fund, believing it holds real financial assets that ensure future benefits—the equivalent of a piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills.

  Yeah, it ain't that.

  On that topic, Dave Burge is righteously pissed enough to speak truth to power at Twitter:

  If I get hit by a car the day before I turn 65 who inherits my fucking money https://t.co/wxvY1OBAou

  — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 7, 2025

  It's a thread, and it's no contest: David can out-f CongressCritter Pocan. Pocan apparently got the memo that Democrats should cuss a lot more than they used to.

Recently on the book blog:

Bryan Caplan fanboy here. I picked up this book from Amazon back in March, 2024. Last October I drove up to the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine to see Bryan participate in its President’s Forum and I got him to sign it. And now I finally got around to reading it.

It is a (literal) comic book, and I mean no disrespect by that; its fantastic, clever illustration is by Ady Branzei. Bryan appears as a chacter, explaining his thesis to the reader.

And that thesis is straightforward and ably presented: deregulation of housing policy is pretty close to a panacea. It would not only solve the obvious problem (often described as a "housing crisis" here in New Hampshire), but also help ameliorate a host of associated social woes. Although the book is published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Bryan notes that such deregulation should appeal to other factions in the political landscape: egalitarians, for example, should like that it gives the less well-off a better chance at decent shelter. It has environmental benefits! It would facilitate people moving from low-productivity, low-wage areas to better their economic situation! It would make having babies more practical, staving off demographic collapse! ("It slices! It dices!")

Of course, the deregulation Bryan champions has its problems with political feasibility. Making housing "more affordable" translates to, for existing homeowners, a decline in their property values. And homeowners tend to vote their pocketbooks. (This March 2025 story from our local TV station shows how this is playing out in New Hampshire.)

Oh, wait. That sounds like a bad idea.

The cheap green lie

You are told that solar and wind are cheap

But cramming in more solar and wind just makes electricity more and more costly

because solar and wind are worthless when not sunny and windyhttps://t.co/Fu6eY3AKx1 pic.twitter.com/Zc1Jk7m8X3

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) May 4, 2025

And there's more to come for countries on the right edge of the chart, according to this Reuters report: EU power grid needs trillion-dollar upgrade to avert Spain-style blackouts.

My translation of what "authorities" are saying: "We're still checking, but we're pretty sure the answer is that you need to give us a lot more money."

Also of note:

• She's the grift that keeps on grifting. Jonathan Turley notes an unintentional good idea from an unexpected source: NPR’s Katherine Maher Continues to Make the Case for Defunding.

  Recently, we discussed how National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher made the conclusive case before Congress why funding for NPR should be terminated. Not to be outdone, Maher seemed to return to CBS to build her case further against her state-sponsored media outlet. Objecting to President Donald Trump’s criticism of NPR, Maher explained that “from my perspective, part of the separation of the First Amendment offers is to keep government out.” Precisely.

  The portrayal of NPR as unbiased and balanced is laughingly absurd. Indeed, many of us objected to Maher’s selection after years of declining audiences and increasing criticism. Maher had a long record of far-left public statements against Republicans, Trump, and others.

  This is the same CEO who attacked a respected senior editor who tried to get NPR to acknowledge its bias and restore greater balance on the staff.

  That respected NPR senior editor is Uri Berliner, and his essay last year at the Free Press ("Here’s How [NPR] Lost America's Trust") preceded his suspension and resignation from NPR by a few days.

• I used to be an annoying grad student, but I recovered. Jeff Maurer doesn't care for the Bernie/AOC messaging: The Problem With “Oligarchy” Is That It’s Annoying-Grad-Student Coded. Leading with an amusing anecdote:

  Last week, Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan got into a public spat with Bernie Sanders about the latter’s use of the word “oligarchy”. In an interview with Politico, Slotkin said that the party should say “kings” instead of “oligarchy”. Sanders — who, by the way, is on a tour called the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” — replied that Americans “are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.”

  As of press time, Senator Slotkin has not clarified exactly how dumb she thinks the American people are. Though I wish that she would — I’d like to see her give a press conference and say “Senator Sanders, with all due respect: Take a gander at these freaks. You ever go to a swap meet? Walk around one of those for a bit and then tell me that you don’t think that even words like ‘red’ and ‘the’ might be too much for these half-apes. This country is one big fucking Tard Farm, and we need to speak in the guttural burps that they understand.”

  Senator Slotkin has not said that. As of press time.

  Click over for more, including a lot more bad words. Jeff's (still) a Democrat, but I heartily agree with his attitude: "I’m less worried about people who don’t know the word “oligarchy” than people who do."

• Magic 8 Ball says: "Ask again later." Tyler Cowen wonders: Is Classical Liberalism for Losers?

  Are classical liberals a bunch of pathetic losers? Losers both because they have lost in the political realm, while simultaneously handing over key institutions to the illiberal left?

  That is a common charge you hear from right-wing intellectuals these days, as exemplified by commentators such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, Christopher Rufo, and others.

  Their argument is twofold.

  First, they say that classical liberals are temperamentally incapable of putting up much of a fight when faced with threats from the far left. And they don’t struggle to find examples: Harvard, all of the Ivy League, our major publishing houses, and most of the nonprofit ecosystem, for starters.

  The second part of the argument is that there is something inherent to liberalism itself that makes it vulnerable to its own collapse. In other words: The freedom liberalism facilitates is also its weakness. It is so free, so open, and so tolerant that it is vulnerable to attack by people who seek to destroy it, whether that be religious fundamentalists, the most extreme element of woke, or other intolerant movements.

  Eh. Losing is no fun, but sometimes you just have to be satisfied with being right about everything, all the time.

• From a most unexpected source. Matthew Continetti recounts The Wisdom of The Donald.

  You may have noticed that Donald Trump is not the most self-reflective person. At least, not in public. But last week at the University of Alabama, Trump delivered a commencement address that revealed more about his mind than any speech since taking office. Naturally, the press missed the story.

  Trump “weaved” together talking points and ad libs with something novel and unexpected: a 10-point distillation of his personal philosophy. If you watch or read the full speech, you get to know what Trump values, and what he believes is behind his success in business, entertainment, and politics. Such insight is fascinating—or should be to anyone interested in the psychology of the world’s most powerful man.

  And, guess what? Goodness knows I am no Trump fan, but each one of his 10 points looks pretty good to me.

• So, naturally, I have to point out… this WSJ editorial which discovers A Tariff Lesson at the Nucor Steel Mill (gifted link).

  When JD Vance visited a Nucor steel plant in South Carolina last week, did the company take it as an opportunity to press the Vice President for a tariff exemption? That dismally hilarious question comes to mind after listening to the steel maker’s first-quarter earnings call.

  Nucor loves the tariffs that President Trump has imposed on its competition from imported steel. But the company also warned about the ways that Mr. Trump’s global tariffs will increase its costs for both equipment and raw materials, specifically pig iron and direct-reduced iron, or DRI.

  Who could have seen that coming? Not Donald or JD, I guess.

I think this is missing some important features of both franchises. But who cares, it's funny.

Mini review: The first 12 minutes of Andor season two were fantastic. But since then: way too many hushed conversations between coiffed and clad characters on well-designed sets.

I'll keep watching, though.

Also of note:

• His latest stupid idea.

  pic.twitter.com/1gBo8jYAZR

  — Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) May 5, 2025

  Liz Wolfe comments on the news: Trump declares he will impose 100 percent tariffs on all foreign films.

  "Other nations have been stealing the…movie-making capability of the United States. I said to a couple of people, 'What do you think?' I have done some very strong research over the last week, and we are making very few movies now," [Trump] told reporters over the weekend. "Hollywood is being destroyed. Now you have a grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen, so I am not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. If they are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money. They are supporting them financially. So that is sort of a threat to our country in a sense."

  Stealing is an odd way of putting it. Did he just learn that other countries make movies too? And, yes, other countries will give special breaks to their film industries, in much the same way U.S. states already do: They vie for business, offering tax credits and other incentives to try to get movie production to their states. (This is why plenty of headlines have heralded Georgia, specifically Atlanta, as "Hollywood of the South.")

  And that's just for starters. As for "propaganda", I'm pretty sure there's plenty of it in domestically-produced movies too. And (as Liz notes) Trump has been dilly-dallying about enforcing the TikTok ban, arguably an impeachable offense. And TikTok is an actual foreign product. Liz comments, probably accurately:

  This leads me to suspect that he's not actually worried about propaganda, but is just experimenting with using "national security" justifications for all manner of big-government interventions—a time-honored American tradition, but not a good one. Regardless, it is not the government's job to shield us from ideas, even propagandistic ones.

• As with so many other things… Dan McLaughlin reveals Trump Has Hollywood's Foreign Propaganda Problem Backwards (gifted link). He notes that Hollywood has been all-too-willing to dink its movies to avoid Chinese censorship. And:

  In short, China has leverage over our movie industry precisely because we have a trade surplus in exporting our films to China. That’s the exact opposite of the problem Trump claims to be fighting. If there’s good news to be had, it’s that American film revenues from China have been in sharp decline for several years now from their peak of a decade or so ago (and China is cracking down on them further in retaliation against Trump). But our problem isn’t too much buying from China — it’s too much selling to China.

  For the record, I've just watched one actual movie so far this year, The Electric State. Apparently filmed mostly in Georgia, some in California, with (according to IMDB) "additional photography" in France and Brazil. How big a tariff, Donald?

• If only we could put a hefty tax on arrogance. Jonathan Turley writes on The Cost of Arrogance: NPR’s Undoing is a Cautionary Tale for the Media.

  NPR was ultimately undermined by its own arrogance. Editors and journalists did not have to worry about the fact that its shrinking audience was overwhelmingly white, liberal and affluent. Due to its support in Congress, it could make the vast majority of the country, which does not listen to its programming, help pay for its programming.

  It will now have to choose between sustaining its bias or expanding its audience. It certainly has every right to be a left-leaning outlet (as do right-leaning outlets), but it has to sustain itself in the marketplace. It is the same question that other media outlets must face as more Americans turn to new media. With polls showing the press at record lows in trust, media companies are increasingly writing for each other rather than most of the public.

  I note that Viking Pundit tried to listen to NPR and gave up in disgust after four minutes. I'm wondering if I could do that well.

• Throw them a concrete life preserver, maybe. Jim Geraghty has some news. Good? Bad? Your call: The Obamas Aren't Going to Rescue the Democrats.

  Let’s begin with the full quote, in context. Former first lady Michelle Obama appeared on a podcast hosted by British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett, discussing a wide variety of topics. At one point, she addressed her fears when her husband chose to run for president, and won:

  How do you raise kids in the White House? It’s dangerous. As the first black potential president, we knew there would be death threats. There were just all the — how would we afford it? Because it’s, it’s expensive to live in the White House! As many people don’t know, I mean, much is not covered. You’re paying for every food — every bit of food that you eat. You know, you’re not paying for housing and the staff in it, but everything, even travel if you’re not traveling with the president if your kids are coming on a Bright Star, which is the first lady’s plane — we had to pay for their travel to be on the plane. It is an expensive proposition, and you’re running for two years, and not earning an income. So, all of that was in my mind. How would we manage this?

  Jim's rebuttal is dead solid perfect:

  You know who else pays for “every bit of food” that their children eat? Just about every other family in the country.

• I suspect Alinsky's "Rule #13" is involved. Bryan Caplan wonders how their minds work: Koch vs. Trump: A Puzzle of Leftist Demonology.

  Ten years ago, the Koch brothers were clearly the left’s most-hated “right-wing billionaires.” It’s not totally clear that Trump even ranked #3. Only in 2016 did Trump attain the top spot in leftist demonology. Even today, Charles Koch (brother David died in 2019) probably retains the #2 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Billionaires. Which plausibly gives him the #3 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Americans after Trump and Vance. And conceivably even the #3 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Living Humans, though I guess Putin and Netanyahu now outrank him.

  Last Thursday, I saw Charles Koch win the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Mid-ceremony, a well-camouflaged group of about fifteen leftist protestors crashed the party, waving signs like “Can’t take blood money to hell.” Which reminded me of a question I’ve long asked myself: What the hell is wrong with leftist demonology? How can Charles Koch and Donald Trump possibly be on the same list?!

  Bryan goes on to compare and contrast Trump and Koch. Trump fans will not like his observation #9:

  9. In starkest contrast, whatever you think about Trump’s ideas, he is obviously an absolute pig of a human being. To paraphrase Tolkien’s Treebeard, “There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men” to describe how loathsome the man is. The way he talks! The way he treats people! If a family of staunch Trump supporters contained a person who acted like Trump, he wouldn’t even be allowed to come to Thanksgiving. Unless, of course, he was rich and famous enough to implicitly bribe his family to endure his presence. (If you are reading this, Donald, I am only a messenger. Repent).

  (Alinsky's Rule #13: ""Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.")

Ira Stoll has a good question at the WSJ: Is Harvard Complying With the Tax Code? (gifted link)

With respect to Ira, this really does sound like the flip side of the IRS going after conservative 501(c)3 groups in the last decade. (If you need a partisan refresher on that, here's a timeline compiled by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee. If you'd like to see how Wikipedia whitewashes the scandal, here you go.)

But speaking of political activities from 501(c)3 corporations…

I've been visiting some "public media" websites, partially taxpayer-funded, also claiming tax-exempt 501(c)3 status. On the "propaganda" front: going to New Hampshire PBS's site, nhpbs.org will assault the surfer with an initial popup:

The advertised website, "Protect My Public Media" does the standard stuff: forms to contact your CongressCritters, a petition you can sign, get on their mailing list, follow them on social media.

If you skip past the popup, there are still ads for protectmypublicmedia.org on the page.

Lobbying? Enough to yank their tax-exempt status? Probably not. Still, the "keep the taxpayer money coming, sucker" posturing is … unseemly. Or so it seems to me.

Also of note:

• Who you gonna believe? Me or your own ears? NHJournal describes the (Chico) Marxist defense from the state's public radio: NHPR Denounces Trump's 'Campaign Against Press Freedom,' Denies Any Partisan Bias.

  Executives at New Hampshire’s taxpayer-subsidized media outlets are responding to President Donald Trump’s attempts to end federal funding by claiming he’s attacking “all independent reporting.”

  And the head of New Hampshire Public Radio denied suggestions his programming has a left-of-center political bias, claiming the outlet can “ensure editorial integrity, balance and objectivity.”

  That's NHPR's President/CEO Jim Schachter, protecting his $260K yearly compensation. There's kind of an iffy relationship between "independent reporting" and "demanding continued taxpayer subsidies", isn't there?

• Need a short class in how to dodge questions? NHJournal also presented a Q&A: NHPR's Schachter On Why Taxpayers Should Keep Paying. Sample:

  [NHJournal:] While NPR/PBS provides a solid lineup of liberal news content, from “Morning Edition” to PBS “News Hour,” would it be accurate for NHJournal to report that you have no center-right content broadcasting in NH? If you do, could you please identify the program and the host(s)?

  [Schachter:] Your question wrongly assumes that all journalism is biased. Our public service missions are clear that our content is designed to inform and educate, so that people can make up their own minds about where they stand on issues. We believe that spending time with our news and public affairs programming will confirm that we serve everyone in our communities.

  In addition, we are dedicated to accountability and engage in regular reviews of practices and standards to ensure editorial integrity, balance, and objectivity. We are also responsive to our local community through our Community Advisory Boards, which are open to all.

  I don't want to belabor the obvious, but Schachter failed to answer a pretty direct question there.

  But: Accountability? Integrity? Balance? Objectivity? To adapt one more movie quote: "You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean."

• News You (Probably) Can't Use. Peter Suderman asks and answers a very relevant question: What if Trump doesn't want to spend money allocated by Congress?

  Imagine, for a moment, a president who doesn't want to spend money. Given the last several decades of presidential history, this may sound fanciful. But assume that a president has successfully campaigned on spending less money, and perhaps even balancing the federal budget, and then, once in office, has decided to try to carry out that program. What would such a president do?

  If a president wants the federal government to spend less money, then somewhere, somehow, at some time, someone with appropriate authority needs to actually stop spending money.

  This is even more difficult than it sounds.

  It's not just that in Washington, plans to spend more, but less than otherwise expected, are frequently denounced as debilitating cuts. Nor is it simply that bureaucrats stamp their feet and leak stories of supposedly draconian spending reductions to friendly media outlets. Nor is it even that the voting public, in its mass incoherence, seems to prefer a mix of high spending and low taxes—a luxury government lifestyle that it literally cannot afford.

  There is an underrated impediment to spending less: the Constitution itself, at least if you're the president. The Constitution grants Congress the sole power of the purse. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. If Congress passes a law saying jump, it's the president's job to jump. And if Congress passes a law that says spend, it's the president's job to spend.

  Peter does his usual diligent job of historical and legal analysis. But if you like the Constitution…

• And now for something completely different. I'm pretty interested in the philosophy and science involved in "free will". So I'm linking to a Yascha Mounk interview with Kevin Mitchell on Free Will. (Determinists will argue that I had no choice but to do so.)

  It's long, but there's a transcript. Sample:

  If you look at the philosophical or theological literature, there’s a lot of armchair thinking, trying to divine from logical postulates how we could have free will given a particular supposed state of the universe and so on. My own feeling is that we don’t have to think about this issue in these really abstract terms. We can actually get quite concrete. If we’re asking, Do we really make decisions? or Are we in control when we make decisions?—those are actually biological questions. We can get into the neuroscience of decision making, and the biology of control more generally, and explore how these kinds of systems could have evolved.

  How could it be that living things can act in the world in ways that non-living physical things can’t? There are some deep metaphysical questions there, but you can get a handle on them by really getting into those biological details and making the discussion a lot more concrete.

  If I urge you to read or listen to the interview and make up your own mind on the issue, is that prejudicial?

  [UPDATE: Oops, forgot to mention that I read Kevin Mitchell's book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will back in 2023, and my report is here.]

I was today years old when I learned these two words:

• Haruspicy is divination via the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry; while
• Anthropomancy is the same thing, except with sacrificed people.

Nate Silver is—let's be charitable—a notable haruspex when it comes to examining polling data, and if you want to know whether Americans approve or disapprove of Trump…

But Mr. Ramirez's cartoon was wondering about Rs and Ds generally. So we have recent polling reported by Newsweek: Republican Support Collapses Under Donald Trump. Excerpt:

And for the Democrats we have (also in Newsweek): Democrats Face 'Major Wake-up Call' as Trump Trounces Them in Polling. Excerpt:

What does it all mean? I'm self-polling and show a 50/50 tie between "I don't know" and "I don't care". How about you?

Also of note:

• Need a reason to hate Republicans? Well, it depends on your attitude toward government spending. Kim Strassel says that for many Rs, it's Spend, Baby, Spend (gifted link).

  It’s go time in Washington for the GOP reconciliation bill, as House committees this week begin to flesh out their respective pieces of a plan to cut both taxes and spending. Which means Republicans finally must grapple with an ugly truth within the party of “limited government”: Most of them don’t want to cut spending on anything.

  But it’s the cuts that must come first. Republicans have a solid idea of what needs doing in the tax realm, yet the final configuration will hinge on what they drum up in new revenue or offsets. Committees have each been assigned spending reduction targets, with an aggregate goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts (over 10 years). This is paltry: Federal spending has soared more than 50% since 2019, and the pandemic emergency is long past. Democrats bet that Republicans would lack the courage to dismantle their blowouts on entitlements, infrastructure, green energy, semiconductors and the like—and the left is again showing which side is smarter at the long game.

  Kim goes on to list a number of issues where powerful Republicans are wimping out on spending cuts. Make sure you've got plenty of blood pressure meds stocked up, and check it out.

• Who do you want to play Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan in the Netflix movie? Kevin D. Williamson doesn't weigh in on that issue, but provides a title: Judge Dread.

  “I am the law!” declared Judge Dredd, the cinematic supercop played by Sylvester Stallone in the eponymous 1995 film. Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan seems to have come to a similar conclusion, and she has been charged with a felony and a misdemeanor in the matter of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal immigrant who was scheduled to appear before her on domestic battery charges and whom—according to the federal police agencies today under control of people who won their positions by insisting we should not trust federal police agencies—the judge tried to help evade arrest and presumable deportation. 

  Let us assume, arguendo, that Judge Dugan does not have a special place in her heart for supposed domestic abusers. If she is, as it seems, engaged in the same proud tradition of civil disobedience as such heroes as Henry David Thoreau, then she should go to jail for it as happily as Thoreau did when he observed:

  Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her.

  As you might suspect, Kevin does not let Trump or his minions off lightly. Bottom line:

  This is, for the moment, a minor kerfuffle. But if Congress does not step up, be sure that someone will. If you think Judge Dugan is being irresponsible and reckless, then you almost certainly are not going to like who and what comes next as the lawlessness and chaos continues. Chaos begets chaos. And the hard part for honest and intelligent Americans will be that, whatever dumb and destructive excesses Trump’s opponents get up to, nobody will be able to say that they don’t have a point.

• And maybe lower education too? One thing at a time, and Dominic Pino made the easy call: Let’s Cut All Federal Funding for Higher Education.

  On today’s edition of The Editors, National Review Rhodes Fellow Dominic Pino said the administration should “treat universities like we treat churches.” This comes on the heels of President Trump’s vow to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status and the outrage from the university.

  Pino isn’t thrilled about the administration’s approach to the issue, and said it “would be on much better grounds” if it said, “‘We’re going to treat universities like we treat churches. They’re going to be tax exempt, but we’re not going to give them federal funding. And we’re going to force them to stand on their own.’”

  Probably not politically possible, but I like the libertarian take: separation of school and state.

• Do they realize how ludicrous they sound? Ashley Belanger writes at Ars Technica “Blatantly unlawful”: Trump slammed for trying to defund PBS, NPR. It's pretty much follows the usual script, but this stuck out for me:

  For example, Ed Ulman, CEO of Alaska Public Media, testified to Congress last month that his stations "provide potentially life-saving warnings and alerts that are crucial for Alaskans who face threats ranging from extreme weather to earthquakes, landslides, and even volcanoes." Some of the smallest rural stations sometimes rely on CPB for about 50 percent of their funding, NPR reported.

  Will nobody think of the Alaskans facing volcano threats? We'll have more on that after this story from All Things Considered movie reviewer Bob Mondello.

  But seriously, move the emergency warning and alert capabilities to the Department of Homeland Security.

  (By the way, Ed pulls down a cool $181,735 yearly compensation as President/CEO of the tax-exempt Alaska Public Media Inc.)

• There are many reasons: laziness, sloppiness, narcissism, … At Cato, Terence Kealey wonders: Trump’s Cuts to Federal Science Budget Are Justified, So Why Doesn't He Justify Them (Properly)?

  President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal science budgets have provoked vast alarm, yet the cuts are justified. Unfortunately, though, Trump has not justified them, at least not properly. This blog post will do so by rebutting three myths of government science funding: 1) the supposed economic benefits, 2) the supposed health benefits, and 3) the supposed technological benefits. There is little evidence to justify the claims of big benefits from government funding of science.

  It's an interesting counter to…

I live very close to Maine; walking distance from Pun Salad Manor across the bridge to South Berwick is, according to Google Maps, about 0.9 miles.

Also, it turns out the most direct route to the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library takes me down Maine State Route 236. Where I swear the most common phrase on the roadside signage these days is "Recreational Cannabis".

A few years back, Maine's official tourism slogan was "The Way Life Should Be". (Pic at your right.) Which I always thought was kind of arrogant for a state in 43d place among the 50 states in terms of personal and economic freedom.

They have recently changed their tourism motto to the less offensive "Welcome Home". (And every time I see it, I mutter "I'm just going to Portsmouth, OK?")

They are insufferably statist, have been for a long time, but even that didn't prepare me for the recent news, as described by Emma Camp: Maine Legislator Barred From Voting Over Social Media Post.

The usual progressive sites that are (often rightly) irate over the Trump Administration's efforts to suppress free speech are, as near as I can tell, silent on this. Dissent from transgender ideology is effectively heresy for progressives. And must be punished by whatever sanctions are at hand.

At National Review, Dan McLaughlin calls it: Maine’s Shocking Assault on Democracy & Free Speech. Sorry, no gifted link. You can get the gist from his headline, though.

But Laurel Libby did not call for a killing spree on her political opponents. That would be a different Maine resident, as reported by Jonathan Turley: “Take out Every Single Person Who Supports Trump”: Maine Teacher Calls for the Secret Service to Go on a Killing Spree.

Yes, an updated Ring Lardner witticism: "F**k you, she explained."

Maybe I should stay on this side of the state line for awhile.

Also of note:

• Boon, meet doggle. The Daily Wire reports on a small part of Uncle Stupid's business-as-usual: Federal ‘Job Corps’ Spends Up To $764K Per Graduate. Participants Go On To Earn $17K Annually.

  A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average — raising questions about whether it should continue to exist.

  The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695 per year on average after leaving the program, according to new government data.

  Nearly $2 billion in federal taxpayer money is spent annually on residential Job Corps campuses, a boon for the for-profit contractors who run them. But the dismal statistics about the program’s efficacy have never been fully public until the Trump administration released a “Transparency Report” last week.

  A sweet deal for those "for-profit contractors", in other words.

  The New Hampshire Job Corps campus is pictured here. I have no idea whether they have any more cost-effective results than the US average, but I have my doubts. I assume it's yet another example of the Pun Salad adage: When Uncle Stupid starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets.

• Well (ahem) I believe it. Steven Davidoff Solomon, lawprof at UC Berkeley, has the clickbait headline: You Won’t Believe the Tax Breaks for Professors (gifted link).

  Stanford brags that “it’s pretty ‘sweet’ to be connected with Stanford” thanks to the perks its professors and staff receive. Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes.

  Need I confess: the tuition discount was a perk Mrs. Salad and I took advantage of for our kiddos when they attended the University Near Here.

  To be honest, I thought of it as more of, um, a scholarship. Yeah, that's the ticket! But Steven's right: it's an income transfer from ordinary joes and jills to some pretty well-off folks. Should go away.

Recently on the book blog:

I'm not proud of reading this book, but it was available at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, and I guess I was in kind of a trashy mood, so…

The author, Maureen Callahan, has a simple theme: women who get involved with Kennedy men (and also women born into the Kennedy family) are destined for various kinds of misery and tragedy. Some picks are obvious: Jackie, Mary Jo Kopechne, Marilyn Monroe. Others are slightly more obscure (if you, like me, don't peruse the gossip mags and tabloids): Carolyn Bessette, Mary Richardson Kennedy, Joan Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy, "Kick" Kennedy, Martha Moxley, the matriarch Rose, Pamela Kelley, Mimi Beardsley, Diana de Vegh.

Callahan leads off with an apt quote from The Great Gatsby, the one about "careless people". And she proceeds to provide plenty of examples of that carelessness, and shows in great detail just what that carelessness leads to. Some of these details are cringe-inducing: Jackie getting splattered with JFK's blood and brains; a clinical description of Rosemary's lobotomy; JFK Jr's plane crash, killing himself and wife Carolyn; Mary Jo Kopechne's probable lengthy struggle to survive in the back seat of Teddy's sunken Oldsmobile; … Yeesh!

The plain "everyone knows" facts are bad enough, but Callahan dips at times into rumor, speculation, and amateur (probably simplistic) psychosocial analysis of the participants and their milieu. Her prose is lurid; but to be fair, she's describing some pretty lurid behavior.

The book could have used some fact-checking; for example, Callahan claims that JFK set the goal of a 1960s American manned moon landing in his inaugural address; it was actually in September 1962. Also copy-editing: Callahan misuses "passive voice" and "begs the question". Neither being a big deal, but makes one wonder how solid her more serious claims are.

Let us go direct to the NPR site for the good news: Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS.

The article goes on to note that NPR stations get about 10% of their funds from federal funding. For PBS stations, it's about 15%. So this isn't a death sentence ("unfortunately").

Let me recycle a couple quotes from a Pun Salad article last month from Michael Chapman at Cato: End All Taxpayer Funding of CPB, NPR, PBS.

And later in the article:

I also pointed out that back in the previous century we really did have a (sorta) national newspaper sponsored by the "Committee on Public Information". Like many bad ideas of the era, it was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson and (Wikipedia says) "the first state bureau covering propaganda in the history of the United States."

But not the last. Yesterday's news also brought word of the modern "national newspaper" published by Uncle Stupid: the White House Wire. It's the only newspaper Trump needs to read!

And four boos for Trump:

• George Will is on target: The Trump GOP’s attacks on universities advance the left’s agenda (gifted link).

  Even academics are educable, so universities might emerge from their current travails improved — more willing to include intellectual diversity on campuses, or at least be more circumspect about impeding it. This is the good news.

  The bad news: Republicans rejoicing about breaking academia to the saddle and bridle of federal government supervision demonstrate that we have two parties barely distinguishable in their shared enthusiasm for muscular statism. As “conservatives” mount sustained attacks on left-dominated educational institutions, they advance the left’s perennial agenda — the permeation of everything with politics.

  Such statism will extinguish the core conservative aspiration: a civil society in constant creative ferment because intermediary institutions — schools, businesses, religious and civic organizations — are given breathing room, and are free to flourish or fail without supervision from above by a minatory central authority.

  Will is in favor of "protecting Jewish students from campus antisemitism." I'd go a little farther to expose and fight universities' race-biased admissions and hiring.

• Is Trump a RINO? It's getting tough to tell, according to Jim Geraghty: Trump Echoes Bernie Sanders in Opposing Consumer Choices. He resurrects Bernie's horror about the capitalist cornucopia encountered at Walgreens and Foot Locker: "You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country."

  I can't imagine how nonplussed Bernie was when…

  Taking questions during a cabinet meeting, President Trump shrugged off the possibility of empty shelves or limited selection as a result of a trade war with China:

  I told you before, they’re having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. Uh, they made a trillion dollars when, with Biden, a trillion dollars even a trillion one with Biden, selling us stuff — much of it we don’t need. You know, somebody said, “oh the shelves are going to be open.” Well maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

  This is a really, really bad defense of the likely economic consequences of the tariffs and trade war with China. Remember, the ships stopped leaving from China to America’s West Coast ports, and the amount of trucks leaving Los Angeles last week was comparable to Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, usually the lowest-volume days of the year.

  Bernie: "Those putzes stole my shtick!"

  More economic incoherence to come, unfortunately…

• Sounds like the worst Marvel movie ever. Veronique de Rugy imagines this supervillain team-up: The Doll Tyrants and the iPhone Fantasists (gifted link).

  The first degrowth president  of the United States, President Trump, recently defended his tariffs with this gem: “They have ships that are loaded with stuff we do not need” and “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” Meanwhile, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, lamented: “We invent the iPhone, which is awesome. Why do we let everyone else build it? Why can’t we build it here? . . . We need hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in those factories.”

  \

  It’s hard to overstate how economically ignorant, politically tone-deaf, and philosophically tyrannical these statements are.

  Note the "gifted link", number one for the merry month of May. Vero does not hide her disdain.

• And for more on that… Liz Wolfe is also unimpressed with the administration's efforts to drive us down the Road to Serfdom: Howard Lutnick wants more Americans to work in factories.

  I am not cut out for the factory life: Sorry to disappoint Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who apparently has big plans for us all.

  "You go to the community colleges, and you train people!" he says, before listing two universities—Arizona State University and Grand Canyon University—that are decidedly not community colleges. "It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. You know, this is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. You know, we let the auto plants go overseas. Now you should see an auto plant, it's highly automated but the people, the 4-5,000 people who work there, they are trained to take care of those robotic arms."

  Not just you working there, but your kids and grandkids! Is that what you always dreamed about, or was it a nightmare?

Recently on the book blog:

Another book for which many readers had a different experience than I did. Although you can read much praise for it at Amazon, I didn't care for it at all. (The readers at Goodreads seem to be much more critical, but they're not trying to sell you anything.) I liked two other books by the author, Alex Finlay (my reports here and here), well enough to pick this one up at the library.

The book opens with a grim scene: five kids from the "Savior House" foster home each firing one .22 bullet into a corpse in a makeshift grave in a dark and rainy forest. Making a pact to stay mum about it, of course.

But twenty-five years later, the kids seem to have become the target of assassins. Concentrating on three of them: Grown-up Donnie is an alcoholic rock star on decline; Nico is a reality-TV producer; Jenna is a retired contract killer with a devoted husband and a resentful teenage stepdaughter. All have near-misses with death, and must hustle to find out what's going on.

The dialog is wooden, characters are cardboard, the prose is padded and leaden, the plot is super-contrived, and lazy clichés abound. One "climactic" sequence near the book's end reads like a parody: people sneaking up behind other people, betrayals, characters-not-who-they-seem, … Everything in the book seems to be a random selection of stuff from other books.

I'll be generous and give this two stars at Goodreads.

Noah Smith saith: I owe the libertarians an apology. You can click through to read his continuing problems with libertarian ideology; being only about 68% libertarian these days, I see his point about (say) foreign policies.

So let's get down to his apology:

Unfortunately, Senator Paul's "grow a spine" resolution to terminate the "emergency" under which Trump claims authority to set tariffs failed to get a majority in the Senate yesterday. And even if it had prevailed there, its prospects in the House were dismal. And Trump promised a veto in any case.

Also of note:

• And why would you expect otherwise? Jonah Goldberg points out: There’s Nothing Conservative About Donald Trump’s Trade Philosophy.

  In an interview with Time magazine, President Donald Trump explained how he approaches tariffs and trade negotiations. I use the word “explained” with some trepidation, because explanations imply a certain delineation of reasoning, facts, and logic along with opinion and perspective. If you ask me to explain my support for abolishing rent control and I respond, “Because vests have no sleeves and turtles smell of elderberries,” have I really offered an explanation? Or have I merely revealed what passes for my thinking?

  “We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history,” Trump “explained” at great length. “Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They’re going to come in and they’re going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things.”

  “I own the store, and I set prices,” Trump says. He will set those prices based on “statistics” and whatever else he—and he alone—deems relevant.

  Now, suffice it to say, department stores don’t work like that, America is nothing like a department store, and the president is in no way the owner of America or its economy. Countries trading with America don’t “take” our treasure. They sell us things that millions of consumers and businesses need or want. Trump believes that because we buy more foreign goods (he ignores our trade surplus in services) than foreigners buy from us—i.e. trade deficits—is proof we’re being “ripped off.” If that were true, every time you handed over your money for a coffee or a car, you’d be robbed. But you’ve heard these arguments before.

  Yes, he really did say "I own the store."

• They should have put Bizarro Superman in one of the movies. But we'll have to settle for an unfortunate real-world example, according to Robert Corn-Revere: Brendan Carr’s Bizarro World FCC.

  Carr, who has been an FCC commissioner since 2017, used to say things that reflected an understanding that the government’s authority to regulate the media is sharply constrained by the First Amendment. When Democratic congressmen tried to exert political pressure on broadcasters over their coverage of COVID-19 and the 2020 election, for example, Carr called it “a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys,” adding in no uncertain terms, “a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.” Or when members of Congress urged the FCC to reject a Miami radio station transfer based on the political viewpoints of the proposed new owner, Carr rebuffed this effort “to inject partisan politics into our licensing process,” correctly calling it “a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC’s status as an independent agency.”  

  Less than a year ago Carr proclaimed the United States does not need “the FCC to operate as the nation’s speech police,” adding, “if there ever were a time for a federal agency to show restraint when it comes to the regulation of political speech and to ensure that it is operating within the statutorily defined bounds of its authority, now would be that time.” Back then, Carr wore an American flag lapel pin, suggesting a commitment to the Constitution he swore to uphold. He’s since traded that for a Donald Trump lapel pin that looks like a prize fished out of a cereal box, and it suggests an allegiance to … something else. 

  Unacquainted with Bizarro Superman? Wikipedia has you covered. (I was there at the creation, seven-year-old me buying Superboy No. 68. (Which cost me 10¢, and … whoa, look at what a copy would cost you today.)

Recently on the book blog: