Pun Salad

"So you're just gonna have more problems down the road. Who sold you this lemon, anyhow?"

Also of note:

• A spot of good news. Jacob Sullum looks at a relatively unheralded win for the Fist Amendment: This Ruling Does Not Bode Well for Trump's Attempt To Portray Journalism as Consumer Fraud.

  Last January, Dennis Donnelly, a longtime Des Moines Register subscriber, sued the newspaper and pollster Ann Selzer, alleging that they had committed multiple torts by conducting and publicizing a poll suggesting that the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in Iowa was much closer than expected. On Thursday, a federal judge in Iowa dismissed that lawsuit with prejudice, deeming it inconsistent with the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger also concluded that Donnelly had failed to properly plead any of his claims.

  That decision in Donnelly v. Des Moines Register and Tribune Co. does not bode well for a similar lawsuit that Trump filed against Selzer and the Register last December. "A party cannot evade First Amendment scrutiny" by "simply labeling an action one for 'fraud,'" Ebinger notes. Yet that is exactly what Trump is trying to do when he portrays "fake news" as a form of consumer fraud.

  So it appears that newspapers like the Des Moines Register will be able to continue meandering down their self-destructive path on their own, without the "assistance" of politically-motivated lawsuits.

• Speaking of politically-motivated lawsuits… Andrew C. McCarthy looks at Trump DOJ’s Vindictive Reply to Comey’s Claim of Vindictive Prosecution. (archive.today link)

  The point of lawfare, we’ve now seen all too often, is to punish and humiliate the target, not vindicate the rule of law. That’s not to say that President Trump and his minions wouldn’t love to convict Jim Comey of a crime. But if that’s not an available option — which appears to be the case in the prosecution the president has goaded his Justice Department into bringing against the former FBI director — the punitive application of the legal process and the stigma of criminal charges will do.

  This week thus produced one of the most bizarre submissions to a court that I’ve seen from the Justice Department (which is saying something after more than 40 years of working in and then closely following the DOJ’s doings).

  Andrew's article is long and meticulously argued. And convincing. Not only that the DOJ's persecution of Comey is vindictive. (It is.) But also that its attempts to argue otherwise are self-refuting.

• It's a dumb idea. David Harsanyi points out what should be obvious: Trump's Filibuster Nuke Would Hand Democrats the Keys To Remake America.

  There are no saviors or happy endings in politics — just a grueling, soul-sucking, forever war of attrition.

  Everyone in power seems to forget this detail. That includes President Donald Trump, who has again decided to exert pressure on Republicans to overturn the legislative filibuster and end the Democrat-generated government shutdown.

  "Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW," Trump posted on Truth Social.

  "We have to get the country open. And the way we're going to do it this afternoon is to terminate the filibuster," the president reportedly told Republican senators at a breakfast this week.

  Nuking the filibuster is unprincipled, but it also makes little political sense. Trump would be doing Democrats a huge favor by greasing the wheels for exploiting fleeting one-party national majorities in the future, which will allow them to shove through massive generational "reforms" without any national consensus. And they would be able to do it without taking any political heat for nuking the filibuster.

  Trump wants wins "NOW". Like a child with a short time horizon. And poor impulse control.

• Ah, to be young, gifted, and nerdy again. Suzy Weiss reports on The Playboy Mansion of Nerds.

  Down the block from Elon Musk’s old house, about 10 minutes from San Francisco International Airport, there’s an 18,000-square-foot mansion with a pool, a bocce court, and a koi pond that absolutely no one is enjoying. That’s because the property—which is sprawling, lush, and gated—is the home to 10 or so young men and women who rarely step outside, because their worlds are on their monitors.

  They call the place AGI House—as in, artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical point where machines can outdo humans in all mental tasks—and here, wannabe tech titans sweat over their ideas for companies, attend networking events, sit through research summits on agenticism, and decline alcohol at happy hours—they’re there to discuss cybersecurity.

  Essentially, it’s the Playboy Mansion for nerds.

  Interesting! Suzy also goes on to talk about Sydney Sweeney’s new movie (Christy, about a lady boxer) and more on her run-in (discussed yesterday) with the AWFL GQ interviewer.

• A classy dame. Deirdre McCloskey cheers the choices: Nobel 2025.

  Economists once thought that capital accumulation was the cause of the wealth of nations. It’s an ancient and obvious truth that you can be enriched by stealing from your neighbor. That’s the attraction. Even Adam Smith, who fiercely opposed stealing, enslaving, and conquering by you or by the state, believed that what made for national wealth was accumulated capital. After all, he noted, Holland in 1776 was rich and had massive amounts of physical capital, while the Highlands of Scotland was poor and had little.

  It took two and a half centuries for economists to escape from this apparent truth. Marx, a follower of Smith in many ways, believed that “surplus value” extracted from the working class was re-invested by the capitalists, and thereby enriched the nation, and especially the capitalists. The French Marxist, Thomas Piketty, built his sensational book in 2013 about inequality on the belief. Yet not only Marxists continued to believe that capital accumulation—the piling of brick on brick, or university on university degree—is the source of our riches. The orthodoxy of the World Bank for decades after its founding in 1944 was the recipe, “Add capital and stir.” It didn’t work. Ghana received massive foreign aid, but did not become rich. During the 1990s, the Bank therefore shifted to its new recipe: “Add (good) institutions and stir.” It doesn’t work, either.

  What the economists and their followers failed to see is that the bizarre Great Enrichment of the world since 1776 involved innovation. Innovators, I’ve explained to you, think up new ways of doing things. Railways. Electric motors. The modern university. The internet. Letting women work for pay. Ending tariffs on foreign trade. And on and on, in billions of innovations unique to the modern world. Capital was sometimes necessary, of course, especially for example in railways. But so also were necessary all manner of conditions that are not in themselves creative of new ways of doing things, such as having a labor force, or obeying laws. What’s sufficient, the secret sauce in modern economic growth, is human creativity.

  So Deidre is encouraged by the Nobel going to Aghion, Howitt, and Mokyr. I think that the committee could have also thrown McCloskey in too; that would have been a real first for the prize, I think.

• Look out below! I am slightly amazed by this, from the WaPo editorial board: Zohran Mamdani drops the mask. (archive.today link)

  A new era of class warfare has begun in New York, and no one is more excited than Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani. Witness the mayor-elect’s change of character since his Tuesday election victory.

  Mamdani ran an upbeat campaign, with a nice-guy demeanor and perpetual smile papering over a long history of divisive and demagogic statements. New Yorkers periodically checking in on politics could understandably believe that he simply wanted to bring the city together and make it more affordable. That interpretation became much harder after his victory speech.

  Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies — from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers — and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.

  Whoa. Whoa! They're right, of course. But this is something that would not have been out of place in National Review.

  The editorial has accumulated (as I type) 5,203 comments. The AI-generated summary notes that "many participants [express] strong disapproval of the piece's tone and language." Because the truth hurts, and they don't like being hurt.