Pun Salad

And today's headline is an apocryphal quote often attributed to Dwight Eisenhower. Certainly there's some wisdom to be found there.

Also of note:

• Is there a lonelier voice in the Senate than Rand Paul's? He's kind of a stickler for getting Congressional OK first: The Constitution Does Not Allow the President To Unilaterally Blow Suspected Drug Smugglers to Smithereens.

  Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that "killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military."

  When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he "didn't give a shit."

  Sometimes in fits of anger, loud voices will say they don't care about niceties such as due process—they just want to kill bad guys. For a brief moment, all of us may share that anger and may even embrace revenge or retribution.

  But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial.

  Senator Paul also points out that in the American legal system, drug smugglers do not face the death penalty. (He adds the word "generally", but … when was the last drug smuggler executed?)

  Apparently there's been talk of using Congress's Constitutional power to grant letters of Marque and Reprisal against drug smugglers. That would be kind of cool, but (unfortunately) the actual legislative proposal shuffles this Congressional power over to the President. Turning a Cool Idea into Bad Idea! And probably Constitutionally dubious.

• For those claiming that Bari Weiss's Free Press is just another MAGA site. Tina Brown explains Why America Doesn’t Care About Trump’s Graft. After righteously lambasting the comics going to the murder/torture regime of Saudi Arabia …

  What boggles me is why MAGA adorers, and the American populace in general, seem to care so little about the raging kleptocracy that is business as usual in the Trump circle. The president’s net worth has nearly doubled in the eight months since he returned to the Oval Office.

  In May, the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family deposited $2 billion into the crypto fund co-founded by Eric and Donald Trump Jr. with, among others, the Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff’s fresh-faced son, Zach, and a fourth musketeer, Zak Folkman, who used to run a company for men called Date Hotter Girls—and lo!—two weeks later, the White House gave the UAE access to a payload of the world’s most advanced and scarce artificial intelligence (AI) computer chips, despite national security concerns that they might be shared with our biggest adversary, China. A New York Times investigation described the transaction as “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.”

  He's a crook. It was nice that he seems to have helped get Israeli hostages released, though.

• Good ideas that will not be enacted. Veronique de Rugy writes a needed revelation: Dems' Shutdown Demand Won't Lower Health Care Costs. Here's What Will.

  At the heart of the budget standoff that has the government shut down is Democrats' insistence on extracting a laundry list of policy changes, including locking in the supposedly temporary, COVID-19-era expansion of Obamacare premium tax credits (or "Biden COVID-19 credits"). In essence, Democrats think the best way to lower health care costs is to direct more funding to insurance companies. This idea could not be more wrong. The credits are costly, poorly targeted and riddled with fraud, and do nothing to stop rising premiums.

  Start with the price tag. Based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, permanently extending the Biden COVID-19 credits would cost about $410 billion, including interest, over the next decade. Total spending over 10 years would amount to $488 billion. Funds would go straight to insurance companies to mask the real cost of coverage.

  And let's be clear: Those insurance premiums are rising for reasons subsidies can't fix. According to the Economic Policy Innovation Center's Gadai Bulgac, insurers themselves say individual-market premiums are on track to rise by roughly 18% in 2026, driven by the familiar culprits: soaring medical care costs, nurse and physician shortages, expensive specialty drugs like Ozempic, an aging population, wider use of high-end diagnostics, new tariffs on pharmaceuticals and the lingering effects of inflation.

  Vero advocates, instead:

  1. Let the pandemic add-on expire as planned. The original Obamacare subsidies will remain, and taxpayers will still cover most of the premiums for low- and moderate-income enrollees.
  2. Address the root causes of high costs. Expand the supply of care by modernizing scope-of-practice rules to reflect what nurses and physicians' assistants do well. Adopt site-neutral payments to even out billing in different settings. Remove tariffs and trade barriers that raise drug and equipment costs. Speed approval of biosimilar and generic drugs.
  3. Restore the exchanges' integrity. End the auto-enrollments without verification, reconcile advance credits promptly and recover improper payments.
  4. Bring back consumer pressure and patient choice. That means improving price transparency and expanding access to more affordable alternatives such as association health plans and short-term renewable policies.

  I would add: "Require that high school graduates be able to explain the acronym 'TANSTAAFL'".

• Could we just abolish the FCC, already? David Beito writes on its censorious use by FDR and the Quashing of Free Radio.

  Roosevelt was determined to silence dissenting voices on the radio. He adeptly manipulated the revolving door of regulators and industry executives and executed behind-the-scenes intrigue using intermediaries to conceal the appearance of censorship while embracing its effects. 

  By 1933, big broadcasters eagerly aligned themselves with the new administration, and in many cases became regulators themselves. Former FRC commissioner — CBS vice president — Henry A. Bellows was a Democrat and Harvard classmate of FDR’s. In his official role, he promised to reject any broadcast “that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration,” and announced that all stations were “at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration.” Bellows specified that CBS had a duty to support the president, right or wrong, and privately assured presidential press secretary Stephen Early that “the close contact between you and the broadcasters has tremendous possibilities of value to the administration, and as a life-long Democrat, I want to pledge my best efforts in making this cooperation successful.”

  My report on Beito's book, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, is here.

• A thorny topic. It's that time of year again, and later today I expect to see greater-than-usual self-righteous posturing at my local library. Like me, John Geradi is not a fan of The Anti-Democratic Streak of ‘Banned Books Week’. (archive.today link)

  It’s Banned Books Week, the celebration of blue-haired librarians cosplaying as champions of the First Amendment against evil conservatives who dare question the appropriateness of sexually explicit, pro-trans literature for five-year-olds. To summarize some of the silliness ably highlighted by NR’s Vahaken Mouradian on the subject: No “Banned Book” in America is actually banned; we still have an operative First Amendment, and every book on the American Library Association’s list of the top ten “Challenged Books” of 2024 is readily available on Amazon or at thousands of libraries and bookstores throughout the country. ALA’s “Banned Books” appellation gets applied not merely to books that are actually removed from library shelves, but to books that receive mere complaints or “challenges,” in the ALA’s parlance.

  But there’s an underdiscussed element to “Banned Books Week” and its focus on “challenges”: an anti-democratic streak. In public libraries and schools throughout the country, the argument is being advanced that government-run libraries should be floating fiefdoms with no accountability to anyone: not the taxpayers, not the voters, not the representatives whom they elect to run libraries. The “Banned Books” debate is yet another front in the war between ordinary citizens and the professional managerial class.

  Here in the Granite State, we had our own library brouhaha down in Rye earlier this year. See if you can follow the tortured trail!

Recently on the book blog:

I like books about language, and this one's back-cover blurbs include praise from people I've heard of and like: Matt Ridley and John McWhorter. And yet, I found it kind of a slog. The author, Laura Spinney, occasionally tells some interesting parts of the story, but there are long stretches of dull. (I hasten to say: that's probably on me, not her.)

The ancient language that went global isn't Fortran, surprisingly, it's "Proto-Indo-European", born in the Ukrainian steppes thousands of years ago. No written records exist, and its features and vocabulary are reconstructed via (very) educated guesses from the myriad languages descended from it. In addition to the classic methods of anthropology and linguistics, modern researchers can now work with a powerful new tool: analysis of DNA extracted from tombs and graves show, roughly, who's descended from whom, and patterns of human migration over the centuries.

That's not always an easy collaboration, because according to Spinney, "linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists are barbarians to each other." (The image that generated for me was the opening battle of Gladiator.) The fields are occasionally influenced/polluted by racial/national politics. (And Spinney's concluding chapter discusses the damage done to research by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)

The book is full of "didja know" snippets. E.g., ancient Hungarians used cow bones for ice skates. The reason major rivers flowing into the Black Sea begin with "D" (Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, Don) is due to an ancient Iranic word for "river", danu. And more. But alas, these nuggets are buried in a lot of stuff I didn't find of interest. (To repeat: me, not Spinney.)