Jan
5
2026

Nothing About Venezuela!

I'm already bored. Maybe tomorrow? We'll see. Instead:

If you prefer words, the WaPo has a "Republicans pounce" headline: Tim Walz was a Democratic hopeful. Now, he’s a Republican punching bag. (WaPo gifted link)

MINNEAPOLIS — Just a few months ago, Larissa Laramee would have encouraged Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to run for president. She admired the man who helped lead the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024 — and who once taught her social studies.

But Laramee’s feelings have changed as a years-long welfare fraud probe in Minnesota becomes a national maelstrom. Prosecutors say scammers stole brazenly from safety net programs, taking hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding — potentially billions — for services they never provided while Walz led the state.

“I like him as a person. He’s fantastic,” said Laramee, 40, who works at a Minnesota nonprofit for people with disabilities. Walz, as her high school teacher, helped inspire her career, she said. “But with all of this that’s happened, I’m struggling with seeing a path forward for him.”

Reading through the long article seems to indicate that Minnesota's anti-fraud efforts were largely reactive, once the scams got too big to ignore. Not too good on the proactive side, checking that things were kosher before the checks went out. Tsk!

Also of note:

  • It's a must-miss! Andy Kessler takes a look at a butchering operation: Painting ‘Animal Farm’ Red. (WSJ gifted link)

    You can’t hate Hollywood enough. Last month a trailer dropped for “Animal Farm: A Cautionary Tail,” an animated retelling of George Orwell’s 1945 book. It stars Seth Rogen and his infectious chuckle as the pig Napoleon. What could go wrong? Everything, it turns out.

    Orwell’s original book was an allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution, communism and its inevitable descent into totalitarianism. I read it in high school. You probably did too. The allegory was pretty transparent: Napoleon was Stalin, Snowball was Trotsky, Farmer Jones was Czar Nicholas II, and Old Major was a combination of Lenin and Marx.

    Forget all that. While only a trailer is available, the film was reviewed after appearing at a festival last June. Remarkably, instead of Stalin, the antagonist is a tech billionairess who drives a Cybertruck knockoff. Really! She bribes Napoleon with fast cars and credit cards and, as one reviewer put it, her “methods mimic the hostile-takeover techniques of big banks and monopolistic companies.” Hilarity ensues. Yes, capitalism is the villain. Hollywood strikes again.

    Andy notes that the movie's release date is that Commie holiday, May 1.

  • But will Tariff Man read it? Don Boudreaux writes Another Open Letter to Tariff Man. AKA Donald J. Trump. And I'm just gonna quote the whole thing:

    Mr. Trump:

    On New Year’s Eve your office released a “Fact Sheet” stating that you “imposed reciprocal tariffs to take back America’s economic sovereignty, address nonreciprocal trade relationships that threaten our economic and national security, and to remedy the consequences of nonreciprocal trade.”

    Your only possible retort that would retain as much as a tenuous connection to logic would be to insist that foreigners regularly dupe us Americans into buying things that we don’t want to buy – that is, to insist that we Americans are incurably stupid at conducting our own economic affairs, while foreigners are so astonishingly clever that they routinely swindle us out of our own money. Do you, sir, really believe that your fellow Americans are generally the intellectual inferiors of foreigners?

    Second, by obstructing each of your fellow Americans’ voluntary, peaceful trades with foreigners you diminish the economic sovereignty of each and every one of us. What (il)logic leads you to conclude that by obstructing – with your taxes on our purchases of imports – the economic sovereignty of 340 million Americans, you thereby “take back America’s economic sovereignty”?

    Your tariffs do for us Americans the opposite of what you assert: they diminish our economic sovereignty and, in this sorry bargain, also make us poorer than we’d otherwise be.

    Well, there's always the possibility that SCOTUS will save us. Although, as Politico's legal analyst Ankush Khardori writes: Trump Is Raging at a Looming Supreme Court Loss on Tariffs. He’s Got a Point.

    The fate of the Trump administration’s tariff regime hangs in the balance before the Supreme Court, and no one seems more concerned about the likelihood of a major defeat than President Donald Trump himself.

    “Evil, American hating Forces are fighting us at the United States Supreme Court,” Trump recently wrote on his social media site. “Pray to God that our Nine Justices will show great wisdom, and do the right thing for America!”

    SCOTUSblog has a long list of the "evil, American hating" folks who have submitted amici curiae briefs in the case. Like the Cato Institute, the Goldwater Institute, and (I am not making this up) Princess Awesome.

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