Oct
28
2025

A Bun Dance?

Scott Lincicome provides us with our lead item for the second day in a row. Want to try for three, Scott?

My natural instinct, and probably yours, is to find my own state in the rankings. Result: New Hampshire is right in the middle, not great, not awful.

And I was going to say: at least we're doing better than those other New England states.

And we are. Except for Connecticut, which is way further down in the list. Good for them, but what's their deal?

I asked the Twitterverse in a comment to Scott's post; I've received a couple of responses, but they look like guesses to me. ("They put them on a bus and send them to NY!" Yeah, well, maybe.) Some rudimentary Googling doesn't show any obvious clues. The Cato Institute's Freedom in the 50 States (from 2023) doesn't reveal any smoking guns either.

I'm currently reading Ezra Klein's and Derek Thompson's much-hyped book Abundance, in which they blame (with some justification) blue-state housing policies for homelessness. But again, that doesn't explain Connecticut, as blue as states can be.

So, it's a mystery to me.

Also of note:

  • Still waiting for that Conservatarian utopia. Charles C.W. Cooke writes in the 70th anniversary issue of National Review on The Great Derangement. (archive.today link)

    And Charlie's attitude toward Trump is very, very close to mine:

    There is no doubt that Trump was — is — an aberration. He is disruptive, in ways both salutary and disgraceful. He is incoherent, in ways that attract the disaffected but can wear on the nerves of the politically systematic. He is capricious, in ways that sit uneasily within our Newtonian Constitution and sometimes challenge it outright. Famously, this magazine did not want him to become the Republican nominee in 2016, and, long after he prevailed, it has continued to find fault with many of his actions. At discrete points in time, Trump has made us glad, sad, optimistic, angry, ashamed, frustrated, and amused. At no point, however, has he made us deranged. That, mercifully, has been a fate reserved for others.

    And boy have they leaned into it! Properly understood, one’s feelings about a political candidate ought to become less binary once his election has been confirmed. Prior to the count, the key question for commentators is “Yes or no?” Afterwards, it is “What now?” Like it or not, Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and that he is now the president of the United States is not a preference or an opinion or a willingness of the heart; it is a stone-cold fact of the universe. Under our system of government, Trump took office on January 20, 2025, and, unless he dies or resigns or is impeached, he will remain there until January 20, 2029. As opinion writers, our role is neither to sanctify him nor to chase him to the gates of hell but to push him toward decisions that comport with our conception of virtue. If he does things we like, we ought to praise him. If he does things we dislike, we ought to criticize him. Throughout this work, we ought to strive to stay consistent with our stated convictions and to say only what we believe to be true.

    My report on Charlie's great 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto is here. Still holds up.

  • What's the matter with Florida? Couldn't the Republicans find someone better to send to Congress than Anna Paulina Luna, deemed by Michael Warren at the Dispatch to be Putin’s Useful Influencer? (archive.today link)

    Call her a useful idiot for the modern age. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s Instagram story on Sunday documenting her meeting this weekend with a Vladimir Putin ally had all the familiar hallmarks of social-media-influencer content.

    There was the cloying cover of a popular song—in this case, the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”—playing throughout the video. There were the various flattering shots of Luna wearing a stylish white suit and black heels. And in a voiceover, the Florida Republican affected the disinterested, monotonous tone (with just a hint of vocal fry) that accompanies so many of those “A Day in My Life” posts.

    “Today, I had an incredible opportunity to meet with Kiril Dmitriev, the special envoy to the president of Russia,” Luna said as the camera captured her and Dmitriev walking through corridors at a hotel in Miami Beach, sitting at a conference table, and speaking together to Russian state-owned media during their meeting.

    Luna, Warren points out, has "consistently opposed American aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia."

    Coincidentally, Luna has also been at odds with Jumpin' Jay Nordlinger, confronting him with that most dishonest of queries: ‘You Don’t Want Peace?’. Which was in response to Jay's tweeted response to her Kremlin kowtow:

    Jay, at his substack:

    There are many things to say in response to Luna’s tweet. For years, people on the nationalist-populist right have said to me, “Don’t you know the Cold War’s over?’ I often reply, “Does Putin?”

    The old KGB colonel is continuing business as usual.

    But on this question of peace: I do indeed want peace. But “whose peace? Poland’s? Bulgaria’s? The peace of the grave?”

    That was Margaret Thatcher speaking, during her premiership—when such nations as Poland and Bulgaria were under the boot of the Kremlin.

    Nobody's going to confuse CongressCritter Luna with Maggie Thatcher.

  • As if we needed further proof. At Reason, Joe Lancaster asserts: Trump's tariff tantrum against Canada proves he shouldn't have that power.

    President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on nearly every other country earlier this year, seemingly based on little more than his own misunderstanding of how trade works. Officials in the U.S. and Canada recently engaged in negotiations aimed at potentially reducing those rates—until Trump, in a fit of pique, terminated the talks and raised rates further.

    As the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about whether Trump's actions are constitutional, this scenario perfectly illustrates why a president should not have this power.

    The government of Ontario started airing a commercial last week that featured audio from a 1987 radio address by then-President Ronald Reagan. "High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars," Reagan said, presciently. "Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs."

    Trump took such offense at the ad that he cut off talks with Canada. Ontario agreed to pull the ad from the air this week, but when it aired again Friday night during Game 1 of the World Series, Trump said he would raise tariffs on Canada even further.

    We wouldn't have this sort of thing happening if we'd elected Nikki Haley last year.

  • And now a palate cleanser… Substacker Christian Schneider presents multiple words of wisdom at Poor Christian's Almanack. Just a snip from the middle that made me chuckle:

    1. If you consider your time in terms of its cash value, the time it takes to extract all the jelly from an almost empty jar is equivalent to the cost of buying a whole new jar.

    My observations:

    1. I knew that.
    2. God help me, I'm going to keep doing it anyway.


Last Modified 2025-10-28 11:15 AM EST