Pun Salad

The WSJ brings some worrisome news: Many Democrats Break With Israel, Back Measure Stripping Military Aid. (WSJ gifted link)

All 104 supporters of the aid cut were Democrats, save for the measure's author, Thomas Massie. The WSJ article names them for your convenience. My CongressCritter, Chris Pappas voted against. [UPDATE: Now that I looked at the roll call, it turns out Pappas actually voted "Present". Accordingly, my estimate of his spinelessness has been increased by a few points.] Somewhat surprisingly, New Hampshire's other CongressCritter, Maggie Goodlander, voted in favor of eliminating the aid. She tweeted her excuse:

My statement on Rep. Massie’s amendment to H.R. 8595.https://t.co/PHxcP6rHLQ pic.twitter.com/wXs5Xxg9dk

— Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander (@RepGoodlander) July 16, 2026

As I don't need to tell you: make your own judgment about Maggie's tergiversation. I assume she is feeling some heat from her primary opponent. NH Journal includes that angle in its story: Centrist No More? Goodlander Votes to End Israel Aid.

Paige's campaign website's issues page is here, and … well, immediately after I looked at it, I read Jeff Maurer's recent post about a different campaign, which contained the capsule summary: "It’s a hodgepodge of shallow sound bites that appeal to morons[.]"

Also of note:

• Pirates of the Strait of Hormuz? Kevin D. Williamson belittles Trump's inconstant and whimsical approach to Strait Gangsterism. (archive.today link)

  Iran is being swept by a wave of nationalism, while the United States is being swept by a wave of explosive diarrhea—do you ever get the feeling that Hegelian capital-H History is laughing at you?

  In a war with a filthy little junta in Tehran, Donald Trump has managed to make the United States of America the bad guy. If you are looking for a quick-and-easy definition of shmuck, there you go. Of course, it doesn’t help that it is an illegal and immoral war being waged by an incompetent game show host.

  What did it take to get Iran’s former dissidents to line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the ayatollahs who have been murdering and torturing them? A former opponent of the ruling cabal in Tehran—one who had been tear-gassed and beaten so badly that “he couldn’t move for days” during the 2022 protests—tells the Wall Street Journal: “They said that a civilization was going to be destroyed, not a regime.” You’ll remember that post, no doubt. I guess the Iranians haven’t heard whatever the Persian is for “take him seriously, not literally.” It is a pity that Lindsey Graham, the Rudy Giuliani of the Senate, is no longer around to explain it to the long-suffering Iranian people, who surely would have benefited from the wisdom of his experience and the constancy of his judgment.

  Let me put on my Pollyanna hat and say: It could still work out well, eventually, because Trump might accidentally hit on a working strategy.

  Still, we wouldn't be in this situation under President Nikki Haley.

• Send in the clown. Jacob Sullum observes; During His Confirmation Hearing, Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement'.

  "I'm his lawyer," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: "Was his lawyer," he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche's nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump's personal interests?

  Probably the latter, judging from Blanche's central role in Trump's brazenly corrupt "settlement agreement" with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the "improper" product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers' expense.

  One more Article of Impeachment, assuming that CongressCritters grow a spine. But …

• Worrying about what people will think. Audrey Fahlberg looks at the possibilities: A Third Trump Impeachment? Some Democrats Aren’t So Sure.

  If the Democratic Party is united on one issue, it is opposition to President Donald Trump. Yet despite their shared desire to impede the president’s policies and reclaim the White House in 2028, Democrats are deeply divided about how far to go in fighting Trump in the meantime. A struggle among Democratic factions could determine whether Trump will be impeached for a third time.

  This debate is playing out behind closed doors. Back in March, House Democrats gathered in Seattle for a policy retreat organized by the party’s campaign arm. At one point, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, warned his colleagues that impeaching Trump again would be a mistake—and could backfire on the party politically. Most people in the room applauded, according to two people who attended.

  For Smith, the political calculus is straightforward. Polls consistently suggest that Democrats will claim a House majority after this year’s elections and regain the power to launch impeachment proceedings. Yet doubters such as Smith believe that impeaching Trump a third time wouldn’t make him go away; it would only rerun a failed political playbook that previously benefited Republicans. “We impeached him twice last time; both times he got stronger after we did it,” Smith said in a recent interview with The Free Press.

  This is not going to merit a new chapter in Profiles in Courage, in other words: Democrats worrying less about the country, more about possibly jeopardizing their political future.

Recently on the book blog:

I got a bargain on the Kindle version: $4.99. My reader reports main text (not counting footnotes and references) is 1012 pages, so that works out to be slightly under a half cent per page! What a deal.

As you can deduce from that page count, however, it is a meticulously detailed biography. For example, at one point it reports: "From 1933 through 1938 the seminar met at 2:15 on Mondays…". And Hayek was only one of the three seminar conveners!

And the book only goes up to 1950. Volume II is apparently in process.

So I confess: I skimmed a lot along the way. Still, I got a pretty good picture of Hayek's life: his family and friends (and some enemies), his intellectual development, his professional odyssey, and ongoing controversies. And a lot of history, economic and otherwise.

I was especially taken by the book's description of the economic climate that caused Hayek to write his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, a jeremiad against socialist central planning. I did not fully appreciate how many "men of science", especially in Britain, advocated strongly for a "planned economy" during and after World War II. (They were also pretty moon-eyed about Stalin and the USSR.) Hayek and a few others were pretty lonely in their advocacy of free markets, private property, and liberalism in general. Arguably, Hayek's book saved the US (and eventually other countries) from disaster. (At least until now.)

The book also discusses Hayek's troubled love life. His first marriage to Hella was continually roiled by his infatuation with his first love (and distant cousin) Lenerl. Who was married to someone else. Hella was adamantly opposed to divorce, which caused Hayek no end of professional, romantic, legal, and financial woes. Eventually, the divorce happened, but Hayek doesn't come off well, even in the book's sympathetic retelling.

This is making the rounds.

In the Senate primary, Michigan Democrats have a choice between a candidate who wants to abolish prisons and campaigns with Hasan Piker and whatever Haley Stevens is doing. pic.twitter.com/UqZeXy2BoA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 13, 2026

Some people think of "Pat", Julia Sweeney's androgenous character from the early 90's. I'm not really seeing it. ("Pat" is an example of SNL's past tendency to feature characters long past their expiration date.)

I'm also seeing people suggesting "Matt Foley". Yes, definitely! Although that's not too complimentarry to CongressCritter Stevens… I don't care. If the shoe fits, ma'am.

However the first character I thought of was Molly Shannon's Sally O'Malley. Just sayin'. (If Sally and Foley had a baby…)

And some cads out there are making predictable comments about SNL not being funny any more. Pshaw! I think it's never been funnier!

Let's skip over to more serious analysis from David Drucker, who wonders rhetorically: Do Michigan Democrats Want Populism or Pragmatism?

So Sally Haley might actually be the better choice. I'm just considering myself lucky to not being a Michigan Democrat.

Also of note:

• No, she's not talking about socialism. Ann Althouse's headline is pretty dire: Get ready. It's coming. That thing you thought you wanted. Illustrated with a tweet:

  This will be such a nightmare. pic.twitter.com/qrD03wxEdl

  — Julian Mille☈ (@ATLAreaWx) July 14, 2026

  Ann's commentary:

  Children going to school in the dark. Dangerous. It will become obvious. A child's name will be on the repeal legislation.

  I'll dissent: Ann is assuming that people won't demand that work and school schedules be adjusted so that kids don't go to school (and adults to work) in the dark.

  As usual, I will link back to my own crackpot idea from 2013: The Right Number of Time Zones is Zero. Wherein I call for the separation of time and state!

• Let's stay off the Road to Serfdom. Emma Camp thinks Capitalism Gets a Bum Rap. (WSJ gifted link)

  Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.

  Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.

  As Matthew Yglesias argued recently, when many people say “capitalism,” they mean “the status quo,” even if that status quo involves a lot of problems caused not by free markets, but by government regulation and cronyist intervention. The housing market, he notes, is the most obvious example of this: “Younger people’s lived experience of ‘capitalism’ is of central planning and massive shortages of the single most important item they consume.”

  The result is that anything that seems to be going wrong in American life, no matter how large or small, no matter how unrelated to free markets, will pretty reliably be blamed on capitalism.

  One major component of the satus quo is, of course, Donald Trump. Barring unforeseen events, we've got him status quoing for (as I type) 920 more days.

• Are we sure the doctors got all the brain worms? Somebody in the Reason offices has to pay attention to the stupid news, and I guess Marc Oestreich has that job this week. He notes: RFK Jr. wants the government to teach everyone how to cook again.

  In a recent interview with U.S. News, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services laid it out. Medical students will take cooking classes, then "go out into the communities and teach people how to cook in a mobile unit." The roughly 5,000 uniformed officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps are "taking nutrition classes and developing teaching kitchens." A new federal platform will post recipes for eating well on $10 a day, plus videos on grocery shopping and—his words—"how to use cutlery and cutting boards." The diagnosis behind the whole program, offered at a conference in March: "people have forgotten how to cook."

  Maybe some have. Americans could certainly stand to cook more. But the institution volunteering to teach them has spent 46 years issuing dietary instruction with total confidence, reversing much of it, and responding to each failure by extending its reach.

  You may have thought we libertarians were kidding about the encroaching nanny state.

A recent example:

The Washington Post editorial page made a public pivot to "personal liberties and free markets," and then you go to the comments, and the readers are obviously BlueSky types leftover from the woke era. Not sure if this will work -- it feels like Antiques Roadshow pivoting to…

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) July 13, 2026

The tweet-embedder clips off Jeff's final words: "… being a kickboxing tournament."

I hope it works. For today's example of the WaPo editorialists kickboxing a bad policy, see: Tariffs are (still) taxes on Americans. (WaPo gifted link)

I assume the "BlueSky type" commenters will go easier than usual on the editorialists for this take, since it's Trump-critical.

Also of note:

• My diagnosis: they take John Lennon's "Imagine" way too seriously. Kevin D. Williamson thinks The Socialists Don’t Really Want Socialism. (archive.today link)

  George Orwell was a man of the left who was clear-eyed about socialism and its practitioners: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England,” he wrote. In the U.S. context, he’d have had to have added “Jew-hating weirdos” and a few other categories.

  The Democratic Socialists of America, which has a foothold in the Democratic Party and is earnestly—and, at the moment, successfully—working to take it over, offers one of the all-time great motte-and-bailey propositions: When it is time to talk to normie voters, it’s all: “Oh, pish-posh, ‘socialism’ just means things like public roads and public schools, and those right-wingers who say that we’re a front for a bunch of communists kowtowing to Mao are just trying to scare you.” That’s the motte; the bailey is ... well, here is a screenshot of the homepage of the DSA’s “liberation caucus” you probably heard Jonah Goldberg talking about:

  [screenshot elided]

  Not every member of the DSA is a confessing Maoist or Leninist. All of them make common cause with confessing Maoists and Leninists, and with other advocates of a political movement that killed some 100 million people in the 20^th century. That isn’t the same thing as admiring Denmark or enjoying public libraries.

  If everything government does from sidewalks to national security is socialism, then socialism does not really mean anything. Happily, we do not have to entertain seriously that canard. Allow me to revisit some territory that will be familiar to longtime readers but maybe new to a few of you. The work of education is never completed.

  

  KDW goes into the econ-textbook description of "public goods", and how a lot of people get it wrong.

  Not that it matters, but I'm currently finishing up reading a Hayek bio (Amazon link at your right.) It only goes up to 1950, but covers the origin of the Mont Pelerin Society, designed to defend free markets and personal liberty (see above) against the attractions of post-WW2 socialism. One of the tales associated with the society's first meeting involved Ludwig von Mises stomping out of the room, declaring "You're all a bunch of socialists!"

• Will you guess correctly? Matt Welch makes a pretty obvious choice in his article, headlined The most corrupt presidency in American history. You might remember Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich; Matt does and describes its sordidness well. But…

  You have likely never heard the name Trevor Milton, yet in a couple of key respects his 2025 pardon by President Donald Trump was worse. The founding CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola Corporation, Milton in 2022 was convicted on three counts of investor fraud that could have brought him four years in prison and a staggering $676 million worth of mandated restitution to shareholders. Among his more notorious stunts was a 2018 promotional video of a supposedly functional prototype Nikola truck that was not in fact operational but had instead been rolled down a desert hill. Milton, represented in court by the brother of then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, was still awaiting final sentencing when he got the call from Trump announcing an unconditional pardon, no restitution (or remorse) required. When asked about the clemency, the president said: "They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president….He supported Trump. He liked Trump." Milton and his wife, The Wall Street Journal reported, had donated "at least $3.2 million to Trump's 2024 election and to political groups and people in Trump's orbit." The couple had not previously demonstrated a financial interest in politics.

  `

  Milton's family paid more in political donations than Rich's. He had exponentially more in fines and restitutions taken off the table, and he has spent his post-clemency life not in humiliated exile but in lavish Washington excess, hobnobbing with the president and Cabinet members at investment conferences and black-tie events to gin up interest in his latest schemes. Such is the rule, not the exception: When it comes to plausibly pay-for-play pardons, Trump in his second term makes Bill Clinton and every other president look like pikers.

  Just one more item to add to next year's articles of impeachment. And Matt has more.

• A little less carnage. Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, summarizes Highway Accidents Killed 36,640 People in 2025.

  In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that motor vehicle accidents killed 36,640 people in 2025, a 6.7 percent decrease from 2024. Last week, the agency released a breakdown of 2025 fatality data for various categories. For example, urban freeway fatalities were down 10 percent; urban arterials down 12 percent; pedestrians down 8 percent; but bicycle fatalities were up 4 percent.

  A further fun fact:

  Although fewer people died in each of the years between 2009 and 2015 than in 2025, 2025’s fatality rate per billion vehicle-miles of travel is almost the lowest it has ever been. While more than 100 people died per billion miles of travel in every year from 1900 to 1945, only 11.0 people died per billion in 2025. Out of the 125 years for which records have been kept, the only year that was lower was 2014, when 10.8 people died per billion vehicle-miles.

  Amazingly counter-intuitive: judged by fatality rate, Massachusetts is one of the safer states to drive in: 5.7 fatalities per billion vehicle-miles. New Hampshire is blood-soaked in comparison, with 9.9 fatalities per billion vehicle miles. (The worst state: New Mexico, 15.9.)

• Mister, we could use some painters like Church and Cole again. Megan Pidcock writes in the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter: Up the Hudson and Into the Heart of America.

  The Hudson River School, widely recognized as America’s first major artistic movement, holds a special place in my heart. Growing up, I often visited the movement’s collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was drawn to the intricate landscapes and gorgeous skies painted carefully by human hands, as in “The View of Schroon Mountain” by the movement’s founder, Thomas Cole. It depicts the vastness of the Adirondacks with a burst of fall colors and detailed foliage. A group of Native Americans blends into the foreground and, if you squint, a canoe rests on the water at the mountain’s base. Though I traveled somewhere a few hours north (and a few months off) of this particular scene, it was thrilling to see scenery so similar to one of my favorite paintings in the world.

  The Hudson River School started in 1825 when Cole traveled to Catskill, N.Y., from New York City. After dabbling in portraiture, he wanted to make it as a landscape artist. Cole’s student, Frederic Edwin Church, carried on the tradition after Cole’s death in 1848. The style peaked in popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, capturing America’s fascination with nature untouched by man at a time when Romanticism was in its prime and “Manifest Destiny” reigned.

  I had my jaw-dropping intro to the Hudson River School when meandering through the Smithsonian's National Gallery of Art back in the 1970's, and perused The Voyage of Life, Thomas Cole's four paintings showing… well, the voyage of life. As my friend Emden Gansner asked, as I stared: "Where are you today?"

  I'm also a fan of Cole's less allegorical Notch of the White Mountains, an 1839 painting of Crawford Notch, viewed from the north. And driving on US 302, you can see what it looks like today.

  Crawford Notch was also the scene of the avalanche that killed the Willey family in 1826. By utter coincidence, the street on which Pun Salad Manor sits is named after them.

'Twas only five years ago:

Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit https://t.co/bql36iSbig to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec pic.twitter.com/ZwJp5h5bWD

— FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2021

For the record, the snitchy URL is now a no-workie. Memory hole!

But imagine the progressive freakout if the Trump Administration/FBI Director Kash Patel posted something similar today.

Just kidding. I have no idea, maybe they have posted something similar, and it's just escaped my notice amidst the usual torrent of wannabe fascism.

But anyhow that was from my five-year-ago post, which also looked at the bad vibes from Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel, CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, the United States Postal Service, and the Federal Trade Commission. Enjoy!

Also of note:

• Mass Incompetence. An op-ed authored by one Mindi Messmer appearing in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat carried the ominous headline: The Merrimack sewage disaster was not an accident.

  On June 27, a severe storm overwhelmed Haverhill's wastewater system, and a 1970s-era 42-inch sewer force main cracked in two places. For days, roughly 8 million gallons of raw sewage poured into the Merrimack River daily. Bacteria counts at some locations reached 40 times the safe level. Forty-one Massachusetts beaches were closed. Shellfishing beds from Gloucester to Salisbury were closed. A temporary bypass stopped the discharge on July 1, but the river remains contaminated. Beaches remained closed through the July 4th holiday weekend, during a record heat wave, as families who just wanted to swim were told to stay out of the water.

  Mindi says "not an accident." So… sabotage?

  Nah. It was an accident, of the "Gee, we were hoping that wouldn't happen" variety. According to Mindi, it's due to …

  This is a funding crisis masquerading as a management crisis. The federal government's combined sewer overflow grant program, intended to serve more than 800 communities nationwide with aging combined sewer systems, has $41 million in funding. When municipalities cannot afford the fixes, the EPA moves the deadline. What should take 5 years takes 20 or 30. The infrastructure failure at the heart of this crisis belongs to both parties, across decades of governance at every level. The consent decree was signed under a Democratic administration. The grant program has been chronically underfunded through Republican and Democratic Congresses alike. The people who coulden't [sic] take their children to Crane Beach this July 4th were not checking which party is in power. They were checking whether it was safe to go into the water and were told no.

  Ah, it's Uncle Stupid's fault for not funnelling more cash to Haverhill!

  Or maybe it was Haverhill's (or the state of Massachusetts') fault for relying on the D.C. Shuffle.

  Look: Massachusetts has the highest per capita income among the 50 states. And the state has an income tax! There is no reason that the state couldn't fund this local infrastructure itself, especially since the eminently foreseeable "disaster" disproportionately affected other Massachusetts locales.

  Federal aid might be justifiable to fund projects in (say) Mississippi or West Virginia, poorer states that arguably need a fiscal handout. Demanding that poorer states, on net, fund Massachusetts repairs should be a non starter.

• Unfortunately, neither party wants to change its name. Issues & Insights awards dunce caps: Minimum-Wage Bill Shows Yet Again That Congress Is A Refuge For Know-Nothings.

  Democrats have many problems, not the least of which is an inability to understand, and for some the refusal to accept, basic economics. If they did, there wouldn’t be proposals to raise the federal minimum wage to a preposterous $25 an hour.

  House Resolution 8555 would “place the federal minimum wage on a durable path toward a living wage,” requiring “large, highly profitable corporations to lead the transition.” Under its yoke, large employers would have to raise their lowest wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour on Jan. 1, 2027, a more-than-double spike that would shock the market.

  You can track H.R.8555's progress here. It shows 30 cosponsors, all Democrats. Amusingly, AOC is not on the cosponsor list. Neither is either NH CongressCritter.

• But let's sling some insults the other way too. From across the pond, the Daniel Hannan of the Institute for Economic Affairs reports: Donald Trump goes full Third World. That sounds bad! And it is:

  America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies – Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism – are hideously unappealing.

  Yet, at the same time, the US is starting to behave like a tinpot autocracy. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader; the successful attempt to bully FIFA over a red card. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.

  Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a Father of the Nation type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a form of treachery, other things follow.

  Daniel goes on to look at Trump's kleptocracy. Not a pretty picture, Emily.

• Attention should be paid. Alex Tabarrok is not one to succumb to Trump Derangement Syndrome, so take his post seriously: The Nationalization of American Science

  OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.

  American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

  Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

  All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.

  Alex has more in a followup post: The Trump Administration's Threat to Scientific Research

• Maybe reading the Book of Isaiah? Jeff Maurer guests over at the Dispatch, soliciting: Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless? (Dispatch gifted link) Excerpt:

  I’m a comedian, but I did not find Donald Trump’s political ascendence funny. Funny is a monkey in a tuxedo; funny is a cartoon skunk with pre-MeToo values pursuing a cat. Choosing a president who has all of the qualities of the president in Idiocracy except for the good ones isn’t funny; it’s just a bad idea.

  When Trump became supreme leader of the GOP, I felt schadenfreude watching some conservatives—many of whom are now Dispatch readers—react with revulsion. That was petty on my part, and I don’t defend it, but please remember: I, an Obama liberal, had many erudite, all-caps shouting matches with those folks on Facebook message boards. Remember Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”? Remember Barack Obama’s tan suit? Oh, we had fun back then! It’s odd to have sepia-toned memories of calling someone “Super Hitler” in a fight about Obama’s mom jeans, but here we are.

  Now, Democrats are going through something a lot like what happened to Republicans a decade ago. The left’s online id has taken corporeal form and scored a few primary wins. Now, the takeover is far from complete; it’s not guaranteed that the 2028 nominee will be either Lenin’s reanimated corpse or someone even worse. But for the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.”

  It's free of Jeff's usual smutty vocabulary, so if that's what's been keeping you away from my links to his substack, click away!

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

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I found myself in the Noir mood, and this oldie from 1947 was available (free-to-me-with-ads) on the Tubi service, so… It's the real deal, with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Lizabeth Scott providing a lot of black and white chemistry.

Burt plays Frankie Madison, just out of the slammer after 14 years. He didn't squeal on his criminal partner, Noll Turner (Kirk) back then, and he's looking to redeem a promise Noll made to him just before he was nabbed about being 50-50 partners.

After escaping the law, Noll did OK for himself, acquiring a fancy nightclub and a sultry blonde singer/girlfriend, Kay. (That is, of course, Lizabeth Scott.) Only problem is that Noll is kind of a greedy, manipulative weasel; he has no intention of making Frankie his co-partner. If only Frankie had paid attention in Criminal School, where they taught that there's no honor among thieves!

The movie details Frankie's efforts to get what's coming to him, involving shifting alliances with Kay, and also Noll's bookkeeper, Dave (Wendell Corey!). Eventually there's a savage beating (delivered mainly by Mike Mazurki!), a murder, a frame-up, a shootout, …

So, pretty standard fare, but I stayed awake.

In my youth, I was a physics major, and my graduate career, such as it was, was at the University of New Hampshire. (I got my Masters degree before flaming out pre-PhD.) I try to keep up with the field at a dilettante level, and pay some attention to the doings at UNH's Department of Physics. Which is how I became aware of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (CPW); she is (now) a tenured Associate Professor in the department, and also in Women's and Gender Studies. I reported on her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, here.

Back in the day, physics "survey" courses were labeled, somewhat disdainfully, "Physics for Poets". (The geology version: "Rocks for Jocks".) Especially in the early going, this book reads like transcribed lectures from CPW's "Physics for Poets" course, if she had ever given one. (That hypothesis is strengthened by the book's subtitle.)

And there's nothing wrong with that! CPW is enthusiastic about the field, and she does a decent job conveying the mysteries and weirdnesses that abound in modern physics and cosmology. But one of the constraints of a "for poets" course (or book) is math: you can't write a freaking formula, lest >90% of your students (or readers) zone out (or stop reading). Alas, the only tool we have to describe such phenomena accurately is math. Without that, you're mostly handwaving, albeit in an entertaining way.

CPW's shtick is to interlace her physics with hard-left ranting; odd and irrelevant observations; plugs for her favorite authors poets, and TV shows; and occasional f-bombs (keeping it real!). This may work better for some readers than it did for me. Unfortunately, the rant/physics ratio seems to go up as the book moves along. Genocide, the Middle Passage, Colonialism, capitalism (with its associated evil, neoliberalism), etc., etc., etc. are continual targets of CPW's drive-by commentary.

She is a big fan of the late thug/poet Nikki Giovanni; this made me recall what I wrote about her back in 2009, when UNH invited her to keynote its 2010 Martin Luther King "celebration". (Which they stopped celebrating a few years ago.)

CPW does not like Erwin Schrödinger, avoiding terms like "Schrödinger's Cat" and "Schrődinger Equation". Even though she's complimentary about "queer" manifestations of sexuality, it seems that Erwin's type of queerness was a bridge too far.

Some things just made me wonder what point CPW was trying to make. She identifies Plato as "a philosopher from the Balkan peninsula of Asia." She's talking about Greece! (A couple pages later, Aristotle is "another Balkan peninsula philosopher.")

CPW refers throughout to the "nightmare global-warming scenario", seemingly unaware that even its past advocates have given up on its plausibility.

A trip to Dodger Stadium would not have been complete without the mention of the "mostly Mexican-American families" that Los Angeles kicked out of Chavez Ravine for its construction.

For same reason, CPW can't help but observe that John Stewart Bell (he of Bell's Inequality) "absolutely comes off like a bit of a queen."

Some outright bloopers seemed to have been missed. Ones I noticed: a footnote on page 80 uses the word "acceleration", which should have been "direction"; there's a missing minus sign on an exponent on page 86; the word "enormity" is misused on page 176; and this discussion of a plot point on Star Trek: Discovery on page 250 is truly mystifying:

But it turns out while Dr. Culber was dying at the end of set nonbreaking space between his husband—ship's engineer Paul Stamets (beautifully played by Anthony Rapp)—unintentionally transferred Culber's essence to a fungal network with a kiss.

Nonbreaking space: the final frontier!

As seen in Power Line's "Week in Pictures":

These days you take your patriotism as you can find it. As the WSJ editorialists point out, you might need to look elsewhere than in those museums on the National Mall: How the Smithsonian Lost America’s Plot. (WSJ gifted link)

You can download "Saving America's Story" here. The Trump Administration does a lot of stupid and despicable stuff, and there's a lot of Trumpish crap on that page, but the document itself is pretty convincing.

Also of note:

• It's a high bar, but they're trying to clear it. George Will notes Democrats’ extremism and stupidity are catching up with the GOP’s. (WaPo gifted link)

  Platner’s campaign was born of the cynicism that permeates the Democrats’ devotion to identity politics. Never mind that Platner is a lout whose work résumé is thinner than his record of sponging off his parents. Rather than assess him as — Heaven forfend! — an individual, Democrats anointed him the embodiment of a category: the working class. He could be their favorite thing, a victim. He could make vivid their simpleminded binary of “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Oblivious of their insult to America’s working class, Democrats wonder why what once was their base has abandoned them.

  Republicans, however, should shed any post-Platner delusions of moral superiority. Ten years ago, they turned the louche star of the “Access Hollywood” tape, and the payer of hush money to his porn star paramour, into a president. Conjured from the populism of celebrity worship, he today is frighteningly out of his depth, dumbstruck that his son-in-law, in tandem a New York real estate crony, cannot pacify Iran and end the war against Ukraine.

  America’s still-multiplying embarrassments are rank weeds fertilized by the manure of populism. And by populism’s inherent, aggressive disdain for the importance of character in politics. Populism is almost everything rejected by America’s unsentimental Founders, who, a few days ago, the nation briefly, and often uncomprehendingly, celebrated.

  "Manure of populism" is a slightly nicer way of saying "populist bullshit."

• Gratitude is fine, but she could also use my Amazon links. David Harsanyi has some advice: AOC Should Thank Baby Boomers for the World They Left Her. (I assume the same advice applies to any boomer-basher.)

  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she knows why socialism is on the rise: Blame it on the boomers.

  "Millennials and Gen Z combined, now for the first time, are eclipsing the number of baby boomers," she explained recently. "Young people overall feel a tremendous amount of betrayal about the world we've been left."

  It's inarguable that younger generations feel this way. The notion that millennials and Generation Z are toiling in a uniquely grueling economic era, however, is utterly delusional.

  But convincing young people they've been handed a broken world only fostered an unprecedented sense of hopelessness. You are not victims of "oligarchs," unfettered capitalism or any other imaginary monsters.

  And our periodic reminder to the youngs: yes, we Boomers got wealth, but we are not taking it with us. We haven't figured out how to do that.

• As it turns out, there was another lie involved. As reported by NPR (and many others) back in 2013: Obama's 'You Can Keep It' Promise Is 'Lie Of The Year'.

  But calling it the "Affordable Care Act" was apparently another fib, as the WaPo editorialists document: Of course ACA premiums are rising. (WaPo gifted link) Using small words where possible:

  If it wasn’t obvious before that the famous bill passed to make health care more affordable has done anything but, it should be now: Individual plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges are projected to spike by about 14 percent in 2027, according to recent insurer filings.

  The ACA imposed a wide array of mandates on health insurance. Those mandates are expensive. To make up for the increase in costs, the ACA distributes subsidies so consumers don’t feel the impact of the increase.

  Unfortunately, the editorial writers leave some room for blaming private insurers for the unaffordability. If you missed it, here's Noah Smith's take (blogged here last month): Insurers aren't the main villain of the U.S. health care system.

• Aw, say it ain't so, Chris. The Free Beacon's headline puts my current CongressCritter (and possibly my state's future Senator) in the spotlight's glare: 'Anti-Corruption' Senate Candidate Chris Pappas, Whose Ex-Lobbyist Husband Works for Uber, Sits on House Transportation Committee That Uber Heavily Lobbies.

  Rep. Chris Pappas (D.), running for Senate in New Hampshire on an "anti-corruption" agenda against "corporate special interests" in Washington, serves on a House committee that oversees Uber, where his husband, a former lobbyist, serves in an executive policy role.

  Pappas, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is married to Vann Bentley, a policy manager for cybersecurity and privacy at Uber who previously worked as a lobbyist for Amazon, according to his LinkedIn profile.

  I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway.

  Interestingly, the article mentions that Pappas is "running against former senator John Sununu". Who hasn't actually won the nomination yet. But his primary opponent, Scott Brown, goes unmentioned in the article.

… he just keeps on demonstrating it:

In case you'd like to check out his inspiration:

[Click the pic for the Wikipedia article. Don't contribute if asked.]

Also of note:

• Add this to the list. Veronique de Rugy points out: We Should Still Abolish the SBA: The $45 Million "Small Business" Edition. (Apologices, it's kind of a belated Independence Day link.)

  On the Fourth of July, because nothing says “Liberty!” like a bigger federal subsidy, the Small Business Administration doubled the ceiling on its guaranteed loans to $10 million, the most it has ever offered. The symbolism is almost too perfect. Few phrases in American politics are as sacred as “small business.” It conjures images of corner hardware stores and family farms. What it protects is something else.

  Consider – as Wharton’s Brian Feinstein did in the WSJ – what Washington means by “small.” A homebuilder pulling in $45 million a year qualifies. So does a manufacturer with 1,500 employees. In the median industry, the revenue ceiling runs around $21 million; in some it reaches $47 million. That $45 million builder is larger than 99 percent of American firms with any employee other than the owner, and at construction’s typical margins, its proprietor clears roughly $2.7 million a year. This is not the plucky underdog of campaign ads. It’s a prosperous, established company collecting benefits that most Americans believe are going to the underdog.

  Both Vero's article and the WSJ op-ed she links to are eye-opening and sensible. Abolition is unlikely, however, thanks to (as she points out) the sacredness of that particular cow.

• Try guessing the answer. John C. Goodman asks, rhetorically: Why Do Democrats Hate Medicare Advantage?

  A bill introduced by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) and co-sponsored by more than 40 House Democrats would sharply reduce government payments to Medicare Advantage plans—private policies for Medicare enrollees. The bill purports to end practices of questionable value, and the press announcement makes the bill out to be an effort at saving taxpayers money.

  Mr. Doggett’s floor speech introducing the bill suggested a different motive. He said it would “level the playing field” between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans.

  It is no secret that many congressional Democrats dislike private health insurance even though private insurers were heavily involved in designing ObamaCare. Politicians on the left often speak about the desirability of a “public option.” But Medicare has already had a competing public option for more than two decades. It’s called traditional Medicare, and it has been losing the competition. More than half of all Medicare enrollees are in private plans.

  The bill is now up to 48 co-sponsors as I type, all Ds. Neither New Hampshire CongressCritter has signed on, but a lot of Usual Suspects have: AOC, Ilhan Omar, Chellie Pingree, Ro Khanna, … Here's hoping it goes nowhere. I'm not in a Medicare Advantage plan, but (generally speaking) I'm satisfied with my situation, and there ain't nothing wrong with it that these jokers won't make worse.

• "If we wanted to take some hobbits to see a Komodo dragon…" Ars Technica adds some science to the Bob and Ray sketch: Flores Hobbits' eating habits offer clues about their evolutionary past.

  Until about 60,000 years ago, diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats.

  Based on the presence of hominin and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment, it originally looked like the Hobbits had hunted and butchered dwarf elephants—an impressive feat for such a tiny hominin. But according to University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch and her colleagues, it was the Komodo dragons that were the hunters, while the Hobbits only showed up to scavenge what was left.

  If Veatch and her colleagues are right, their findings may challenge some of the assumptions we’ve made about Homo floresiensis—and about which hominin species was the first to venture into the wider world beyond Africa.

  `

  Yery interesting, because science, of course. But for me it's just an excuse to repost this:

• Sucks to be UK. Our excerpt from this week's TGIF:

  → Hell yeah, America: In great news, the International Monetary Fund has released updated growth predictions for 2026. America’s economy is forecast to grow 2.3 percent, nice and steady, just what we like to see. France: 0.6 percent. The UK: 1.0 percent (you get ’em, lads!) Basically, Europe is a lemonade stand compared to our 24/7 lemonade factory. The real economic growth comes from China, which is projected to grow 4.6 percent, and India, projected to grow 6.4 percent. Okay, whoa, take it easy there, China and India. Smell the roses for once. Me, I like the idea of us as somewhere between India (crazy!) and France (dead). America is full of stories like this one:

  [WSJ headline: He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire.]

  This Costco cashier worked a steady job, saved money, and has a good life. The forbidden truth is that things are pretty good here, and if you work hard, even as a cashier, you can earn beyond what an entire European village does in a decade, probably. Our healthcare is pretty good too—our cashier’s wife had brain cancer, and her surgeries were covered by Costco’s insurance plan, and he even took a year off (paid). With his salary, he has taken the family on European vacations (two in the last decade!). When you’re done with that story, I recommend this phenomenal Atlantic piece as a chaser:

  [Atlantic headline: How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi]

  Paraphrasing the piece: The NHS has a backlog of 6 million patients. It spends more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than providing maternity care. One in 10 Brits have taken to doing their own dental work, including tooth extractions, because the wait is too long for a dentist. I won’t remove my own split ends, and these people are taking molars out by the root.

  In short: I love it here. For me, every day is the Fourth of July.

  Indeed. But read Nellie's entire thing, OK?.

Recently on the book blog:

Back in the 1980s I read the legal thriller/mystery Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, his first novel. At the time, it was a blockbuster. It got made into a Harrison Ford movie!

I read maybe a couple more Turow novels after that, but kind of lost interest.

But a few weeks ago, I noticed that Turow's latest novel Presumed Guilty was nominated for a "Best Novel" Edgar Award. And (as it turns out) the protagonist from that first book, lawyer Rusty Sabich, is featured in it.

Ah, but (also as it turns out) this book, Innocent, came out back in 2010, also featuring Rusty. So I decided I'd better read this first.

[By the way, reader, if you're wondering if you have to read Presumed Innocent before Innocent, I'd say no, you don't have to. I don't think there are any spoilers for that book in this one. I recommend it though.]

Page one spoiler: Rusty finds his wife, Barbara, unexpectedly dead next to him in bed. Inexplicably, he waits for nearly a day before even notifying their (now grown) son, Nat about her death. Why? His explanations are poor. And it doesn't take long before suspicion falls upon him. You see, in that previous book, Rusty was put on trial for the murder of a different woman, but the prosecutors failed to make their case. Could he be trying to get away with murder again?

The book's style is tricky, some chapters written with a few different first-person narrators. And some chapters third-person. There's also some jumping back-and-forth in time. What is completely obvious is that Rusty isn't telling us all he knows in his narrative. (Geez, just like that first book.)

And there's a lot of (what I call) navel-gazing, even in the third person. We get to know a lot about everyone's motivations, flaws, opinions, etc. Just not everything.

Plot twists abound; there's always one around the corner. Just when you thought things couldn't get any more byzantine, another trap door opens under your feet. Turow is a master at that.

Reader, I thought I had a good idea about What Really Happened. I didn't.

Whether you watch the video or read the text, feel free to draw your own conclusions. Excerpt:

Other words appearing in Brown's text: "fairy-tale", "deceptive", "untrustworthy", "poor data quality", "elementary accounting error", "misunderstands", "misinformation", "misconceived". That's a lot of misses!

Also of note:

• "All we are sayyying is…" Sing it with John Hinderaker and me: "Give War a Chance."

  As Scott [Johnson] noted [Wednesday] morning, President Trump has given up on dealing with Iran. I take it that he will now do what we recommended a long time ago: bomb for a while to complete the degradation of Iran’s military, and then go home.

  As for the Strait of Hormuz, we can leave that problem to the countries in Europe and Asia who depend on oil from that source. We don’t. If it turns out that they collectively don’t have the military power to deal with the IRGC, they can learn a lesson from that.

  The prices of Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate spiked a little over 5% on the news. Prices at the pump will now resume an upward trend rather than declining, and I assume that means the midterms are lost for the Republicans. They probably were lost anyway. Trump might be able to help the cause by going on television and addressing the nation from the Oval Office, specifically addressing gas prices–something he should have done, but unaccountably didn’t, before the conflict began.

  Both Brent and WTI Crude futures have declined a bit since John made that glum assessment. And (at least as I type) AAA says the US average regular gasoline price is $3.8840/gallon, compared to … $3.8230/gallon a week ago. Up, but not that much.

• And stupid. Don't forget stupid. Noah Smith is not wrong: JD Vance's crusade against GDP is wrong and bad.

  Free trade usually raises GDP. Immigration, done right, raises GDP [footnote elided]. Rightists in America want less free trade and less immigration. But every time they propose restricting trade and immigration, someone — either libertarian business/econ types on their own side, or moderate liberals on the other side — says “That will make America poorer!”. So they want some way to neutralize this objection, so they can do things that will, in fact, make America poorer.

  So America’s right borrowed an argument from the European left. The European left favors degrowth, and another term for degrowth is “making GDP go down on purpose”. So naturally, they’re always trying to find reasons to denigrate GDP as a metric of human flourishing (see here, here, and here for examples). The American right is simply tweaking these arguments to make them more appealing to their own base.

  Noah goes on to deal with Vance's specific arguments. Which are, to repeat: wrong and bad.

• On a related note… Phil Gramm And Donald J. Boudreaux take to the pages of the WSJ to save the reputation of the guy on the $10 bill: Hamilton Was No Protectionist. (WSJ gifted link)

  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have invoked the policies of the first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, as precedents for President Trump’s trade agenda. Hamilton, the finance wizard of George Washington’s administration, “touched the dead corpse of the public credit, and it sprung upon its feet,” in the words of Daniel Webster. He is the most respected financial officer in U.S. history. Enlisting him in support of the president’s trade policy would certainly lend credibility to a policy that so far, by most economic measures—including economic growth and real disposable personal income—has failed.

  Since Hamilton can’t defend himself, we’d like to defend him against the claim that he would support Mr. Trump’s protectionism. In Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, he made the case for government encouragement of American manufacturing in a world dominated by European powers that, he worried, could easily refuse to export their manufactured goods to America in exchange for American agricultural products. As Hamilton explained, “if Europe will not take from us the products of our soil, upon terms consistent with our interest, . . . there is no other expedient, than to promote manufacturing establishments” at home. Promotion of U.S. manufacturers could be provided by protective tariffs or, even better in Hamilton’s view, by subsidies.

  Messrs. Bessent and Greer claim that the Trump administration is simply reviving the Hamiltonian trade policy that created the American economic colossus. But in the 21st century, when the average trade-weighted tariff rate of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries was below 3% and almost identical to that of the U.S., and the OECD found that the nontariff barriers of U.S. trading partners aren’t significantly higher than America’s nontariff barriers, it’s highly doubtful that Hamilton would support Trump policies. Hamilton in essence rejected Mr. Trump’s tariffs when he argued in his report that “if the system of perfect liberty to industry and commerce were the prevailing system of nations, the arguments which dissuade a country in the predicament of the United States, from the zealous pursuits of manufactures would doubtless have great force.”

  Whenever I see Phil and Don's names together, I think "Everly Brothers". I grew up not far from their childhood home in Shenandoah, Iowa.

  And now I can't get "Wake Up, Little Susie" out of my head…

• Go back and read that First Amendment again, SCOTUS. George Will claims The Supreme Court hasn’t fully atoned for its campaign finance sins. (WaPo gifted link)

  Any adequate history of human shortsightedness, which would pretty much encompass all of human history, would mention America’s half-century dalliance with “campaign finance reform.” The Supreme Court recently issued another decision distancing itself, but not nearly enough, from its original 1976 sin of not invalidating limits on coordinated expenditures by parties when it invalidated expenditure limits on candidates.

  Academia has been egregious in diminishing the First Amendment, but this began in Congress. All campaign finance laws are written by incumbent legislators, and, unsurprisingly, serve their interests. Ostensibly responding to Watergate, but primarily codifying its members’ interests, Congress imposed limits on the quantity, content and timing of political (campaign) speech, the First Amendment’s core concern. Limits on campaign contributions and spending magnify the importance of incumbents’ many communications advantages.

  Commenters, according to the WaPo's AI summary, predictably babble about "money". This recent tweet in response to Gavin Newsom was eloquent:

  Let's be precise, Governor, since precision is your enemy here.
  
  Donating to a candidate you believe in isn't "buying an election." It's called speech, and the First Amendment protects it. Money allows someone the ability to spend their time convincing you they are right. Money… https://t.co/uVVaLSME1g

  — The Rational Animal 🤔 (@theobjectivist) July 10, 2026

  In full:

  Donating to a candidate you believe in isn't "buying an election." It's called speech, and the First Amendment protects it. Money allows someone the ability to spend their time convincing you they are right. Money cannot vote. Only individual citizens push the button, and every one of them is free to take a billionaire's ad and vote the other way.

  The proof is a graveyard of rich men who thought otherwise. Bloomberg spent over $1 billion of his own money in 2020 and won a grand total of one contest: American Samoa. Harris outspent Trump $875 million to $355 million in 2024 and lost. If money bought elections, you'd be praising President Bloomberg. Voters decide. Wallets don't.

  Now the part you're counting on people to miss. "Dark money" is election spending funneled through nonprofits and shell companies that legally hide their donors, so no one can see who's paying. You shriek about "buying elections" while your own side ran the largest dark-money operation in history, $1.9 billion of it in 2024, the majority backing Democrats, spent by people whose names you'll never know. Meanwhile Musk disclosed every dollar he gave. You want to jail the man who spent in the open, then rob the taxpayer to fund candidates through public financing. Force to silence the transparent, force to bankroll the hidden.

  You don't fear money in politics. You fear speech you can't control. The Constitution protects the donor's voice. It was never written to protect the politician from hearing one he dislikes.

  … and "Rational Animal" didn't even mention Tom Steyer!

• Why, it's almost as if their real aim is power. James B. Meigs is more diplomatic: Democrats Forget the Supreme Court’s Purpose. (WSJ gifted link)

  Left-wing leaders have been gunning for the Supreme Court for years. The dependably wrongheaded Sen. Ed Markey, for example, rails against “MAGA extremist justices.” During the Biden presidency, he twice introduced legislation to add four justices to the court, which would help Democrats dilute conservative influence. Sen. Elizabeth Warren also backs the court-packing plan, complaining that some court decisions ignore “widely held public opinion.” Mr. Sanders said the court is “out of control” and has flirted with a wacky plan to curtail the justices’ power by “rotating judges to the appeals court” and “bringing in new blood.”

  James makes a pretty simple Civics 101 point:

  The court isn’t intended to be a third body that reflects the will of the people. It’s certainly not meant to be under the direct control of another branch of government. Rather, the court is designed to be a check on Congress and the White House when they overstep the Constitution or misapply the law.

  Enough said?

  [James also notes that he attended a Fourth of July parade starting in "Live-Free-Or-Die New Hampshire". Good for him.]

• Everything old is new again. Dave Barry has a good point concerning the…

  recent concerted effort to reduce the pesky federal budget deficit, which, shockingly, continues to mount despite the fact that both major political parties have issued sternly worded position papers against it. Day after day, week after week, the top brains of Congress and the […] administration sat in a conference room, eating prune Danish supplied by the Prune Danish Division of the Bureau of Pastries of the U.S. Department of Refreshments at a cost of $2,350 per slice.

  "What should we do about this pesky budget deficit?" the leaders asked, crumbs of concern dribbling from their mouths. "How can we reduce it? If only we had an idea! If only we could think of . . . "

  "SPEND LESS MONEY, YOU CRETINS!!" shouted a group of cockroaches, who had been listening from the floor and managed to figure out the solution despite the handicap of not being top political brains. Unfortunately, however, our political leadership is not responsive to cockroaches, unless of course they operate savings-and-loan institutions.

  Does that seem like a fresh take to you? Ah, reader, I originally posted that quote 15 years ago today.

  And it is from Dave's Nov 4, 1990 then-syndicated column.

… at least not above the fold. Instead let's sing A Song of FIRE and ICE (archive.today link), inspired by Kevin D. Williamson.

If you'd like to show your support for Mr. Streever's Constitutionally-protected speech (and also Pun Salad, for that matter), an Amazon link to his book is over there on your right.

Also of note:

• An inexplicably uncommon pun. I shoulda been all over this months ago: Jeffrey Blehar at the NR Corner: Democrats Suddenly Hobbled by a Bad Case of Platner Fasciitis. (archive.today link) Heh!

  But other than that, Google only coughs up the Nation from last October: Maine’s Case of Platner Fasciitis (archive.today link)

  Instead let's look at the always-correct Erick Erickson. Are we looking at the Dog That Didn't Bark, or The Fire Alarm They Refuse to Hear?

  For years, conservatives warned that something was wrong with Joe Biden. We were told we were cruel, ableist, cynical — that we were seeing decline where there was only a stutter, a lifelong tendency to misspeak, the ordinary friction of a long day. The people telling us this were not only Democratic politicians. They were the anchors, the fact-checkers, and the explainer-journalists whose entire professional identity rests on knowing better than the rubes. And when anyone of note confirmed what we had been saying, he had to be destroyed.

  Robert Hur was not a Fox News contributor. He was a special counsel appointed to examine Biden’s handling of classified documents. He declined to bring charges, and in explaining why, he wrote the sentence that detonated Washington: a jury, he judged, would see “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

  For that act of professional candor, Hur was accused of gratuitous cruelty, of auditioning for a MAGA job, and of smearing a good man. The president summoned the cameras to prove his sharpness and promptly confused the leaders of Egypt and Mexico. The message to every Democrat watching was unmistakable: the penalty for telling the truth about Biden is excommunication.

  And the Platner parallel? Well, it's an example of Karl Marx being half-right about something: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second as farce.

  Only half-right? Yeah, both times were pretty farcical.

• And also the fool. The great Jimmy G provides today's final commentary on a non mea culpa: Graham Platner Plays the Victim. But he's pretty brutal on a side issue:

  In a June 5 Fox News appearance, Maine Wire editor in chief Steven Robinson told Laura Ingraham that Platner’s business is “a campaign prop. . . . The oyster business, totally fake.”

  Now, calling Platner’s oyster business “totally fake” is hyperbolic; he does sell oysters to a restaurant his mother owns. But Platner had told the New Republic that he hadn’t paid himself a salary from his oyster business for the past five years. It would be interesting to see if Platner’s business has ever generated any profits after expenses, and whether the Internal Revenue Service would classify it as a hobby or a business for the question of deducting business expenses. (“The IRS safe harbor rule is typically that if you have turned a profit in at least three of five consecutive years, the IRS will presume that you are engaged in it for profit.”)

  PolitiFact rated Robinson’s statement “false,” based on his company’s having filed the proper paperwork with the state. Well, that’s one way to measure the legitimacy of a business, but the “no salary for five years,” “not making a living at it,” and “just one customer that is his mom” facts complicate the picture.

  Almost everybody, including the self-anointed fact-checkers, has a bad habit of seeing what they want to see.

  Gee, could Politifact be biased? Big if true.

Today's Eye Candy is Planned Parenthood's campaign rally for Graham Platner back on June 22. (Where's Graham? He's the one with facial hair.) Just a few weeks later, I wonder how many of those ladies are continuing to stand by Platner?

National Review editorializes: Democrats Run Out of Excuses for Platner. Because of the latest revelations:

Meanwhile, Jeff Maurer invokes Occam's Razor, plausibly: The Simplest Explanation for Platner Is That the Far Left Has Awful Judgement.

I am, as usual, following the Elvis Costello advice: Try to be amused. But if you're leaning toward disgust, you'll find plenty to go around, because, as Erick Erickson points out, Platner is The Man They Wanted.

And, finally, an op-ed from columnist Douglas Rooks that appeared in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, just last month, after Platner won the Democratic primary: Generational change is finally coming to Maine politics. Finally! Key paragraph from the Platner tonguebath, emphasis added:

Reread Erick Erickson's excerpt above, and ask yourself how "extensively vetted" Platner was at that point.

I can't help but wonder if Douglas Rooks will revisit his opinion here. And maybe apologize to his readers for his spectacularly poor call.

Also of note:

• Nominations for "Cliché Most Deserving of Retirement" award are open. I'd be OK with never having to read about someone who "says the quiet part out loud" again. But Issues & Insights notes a Democrat doing just that: Ro Khanna Says The Quiet Part Out Loud About His ‘Billionaire’ Tax.

  It took less time than we would have imagined, but proponents of the “billionaire wealth tax” have already given the game away.

  Anyone who knows any history about taxes knows that the left always uses “tax the rich” as a cover to raise taxes on the middle class. Because, as Willy Sutton observed in another context, that’s where the money is.

  But we were surprised to see Rep. Ro Khanna admit as much, even before he and his socialist pals get their coveted wealth tax on the boards.

  “The tax should not stop at billionaires,” he wrote on his Substack. “The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up.”

  Once again, from Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

  That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

• When you are spending other people's money… The AntiPlanner reports: Despite $25M Grant, Brightline Still Dangerous.

  As of June 23, 2026, Brightline trains had killed 214 people, an average of one every 13 days since the passenger trains began operating in 2017. Make that 215, as Brightline killed a pedestrian on July 2.

  In August 2022, Brightline announced that it had received a $25 million federal grant to fence its lines and make them safer. The state of Florida also contributed $10 million and Brightline itself agreed to match that, providing a total of $45 million for safety.

  Now, nearly four years later, Brightline says it is still “in the midst” of installing those safety measures. There is no explanation for why this is taking so long or why it is spending money on some measures, including “No Trespassing” signs and suicide prevention signs, that seem unlikely to do much.

  The latest death does appear to have been a suicide.

• When "compassion" means screwing over the young. At RealClear Politics, Sam Russ makes a bold proposal: Don’t Lock Young Americans Into Social Security.

  As lawmakers debate how to preserve the program, most proposals focus on raising payroll tax revenue or making other budgetary adjustments. But these discussions miss a larger point: The program itself is increasingly ill-suited for younger generations. Rather than forcing Americans into a system that may not deliver on its promises, policymakers should allow young workers to opt out and prepare for retirement in their own way.

  America’s younger generations are coming of age amid an affordability crisis. Housing costs, groceries, health insurance, transportation, and higher education consume a growing share of household budgets. In such an environment, financial flexibility matters more than ever.

  Yet every paycheck is hit by a 6.2% Social Security payroll tax, withheld with the promise that workers will receive benefits decades later when they reach retirement age. For many millennials and members of Generation Z, that promise appears increasingly uncertain.

  Ackshually, the paycheck hit is 6.2% on the paystub, but your employer is required to kick in another 6.2%. And if you're self-employed, you have to pay 12.4% all by yourself.

  It's a lousy deal, and the real outrage is that today's young aren't more irate about it.

Headline source below, but right here we got Mr. Ramirez:

President Trump got some predictable pushback on his July 4 National Mall speech from an array of [Dd]emocratic [Ss]ocialists. (Choose capitalization as you prefer.) At the WSJ Free Expression newsletter, Matthew Hennessey pushes back on the pushback: When the Red Shoes Fit. (WSJ gifted link)

Over across the Salmon Falls River, US Senate candidate (at least as I type this) Graham Platner is not a DSA member, although Google's AI claims his "political rise was strategically engineered and advised by former DSA organizers." Good job, former DSA organizers! As Robby Soave reports at Reason: Graham Platner accused of sexual assault, campaign likely doomed.

Is it too late for Kamala Harris to establish Maine residency? She has experience in getting into a race where most Democrats pressured the previous candidate to drop out, after the flaws that were completely obvious to everyone else became impossible to ignore.

An excerpt from Jeffrey Blehar's take in his Carnival of Fools newsletter:

Jim Geraghty is the one who came up with the headline quote above. (It was uttered by Will Smith in I, Robot.) And if anyone could say I Told You So, it's Jim: The Nazi Tattoo Guy Is Exactly Who You Thought He Was.

Bonus excerpt, citing a guy whose bio I'm currently reading:

F. A. Hayek figured this out decades ago, and Lord Acton long before him. Power does not just attract “good” people. Lots of bad people want to be elected to high office, because they want all the things that come with power.

Jim also points out that we shouldn't let Maine Democrat voters off the hook, almost 120,000 of whom voted for Platner in the primary.

Also of note:

• One more July 4 leftover. Erick Erickson says it so well: The Shining City on the Hill. That's an image passed along from Jesus → John Winthrop → Ronald Reagan → Erick. (And now from Pun Salad → you, I guess.)

  A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Winthrop said it to a boatload of Puritans before they’d even landed, and here is the part people forget: it wasn’t a boast. It was a warning. The eyes of all people are upon us. If we deal badly, we become a story and a byword through the world. He was telling them that being watched is a burden before it is an honor. Reagan understood that. When he called us the shining city, he wasn’t puffing out his chest. He was telling us that the light we throw off lands on other people, whether we mean it to or not, and we had better mind what kind of light it is.

  Now, here is what makes ours the shining city and not just another lamp. Go back and look at the revolutions. Ours in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949. Four revolutions, four attempts to tear down the old order and build something new. And here is the thing I need you to sit with: only one of them ended in liberty. Only one.

  The French stormed the Bastille shouting about the rights of man, and within five years, they had the Terror, the guillotine running like a factory, Robespierre feeding his own friends to the blade until the blade came for him too. They wanted to remake mankind, and when mankind wouldn’t cooperate, they started shortening people by a head. The Russians promised bread, peace, and land, and they delivered famine, the Cheka, the Gulag, and a man named Stalin who murdered more of his own people than Hitler managed to murder of anyone. The Chinese promised the workers a paradise and gave them Mao, the Great Leap Forward that starved forty million human beings, and the Cultural Revolution that turned children into informants against their own parents. Terror. Mass murder. Dictatorship. Every single time.

  I note that a self-described "leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture" is named Jacobin. Nothing to worry about there!

  (As near as I can tell, there are no right-wing mags named Sturmabeilung, but maybe give them time.)

• I'm so old, I remember when Slate was worth reading. In his Wanderland newsletter, (Dispatch gifted link) Kevin D. Williamson deftly demolishes their attempt to deflect accountability from a lefty favorite:

  As some of you will know, on Tuesday NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg wrongly reported that Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito had announced his retirement. It was an epic blunder. And, bearing in mind that Steve Hayes has asked me to stop using so much profanity, take a gander at the [impeccably punctuated and baroquely complex chain of expletives deleted] that Slate published in response:

  [W]as it an egregious, personal error, akin to Totenberg stealing into Alito’s hotel room and absconding with an internal organ, as it has been widely treated? We don’t think so. Indeed, what has been grievously missed in the melee is that this is not really a press story at all—it is a story about court transparency and hubris. This mistake reveals an institution that has repeatedly and systemically sidestepped public accountability by making itself impossible to cover by human reporters and, in so doing, has made itself vastly harder to understand by the very public it is meant to serve.

  That is baloney. There are lots of human reporters who cover the Supreme Court without making up stories about things that did not happen. We employ a few here! But if you have ever read Slate’s Supreme Court coverage, then you will understand why Slate’s writers and editors do not believe that the Supreme Court can be competently covered—they have never seen it done.

  But maybe even that is too generous: I believe that somebody can do 20 pull-ups.

  There is also a discussion of J.D. Vance's efforts to promote the "Railway Safety Act of 2026", now folded into the "BUILD America 250 Act". It's a spendathon that will probably make rail less safe, but will make some unions happy.

Christian Britschgi continues Reason's look at America's All-Stars: George Washington Was a Model of Restraint.

We ain't likely to see a guy like him again.

Also of note:

• I repeat: “Oh GOD no.” James Lileks asks and answers: A DSA America? Not Okay. (NR gifted link)

  When I got off the T in Boston last Sunday, I saw a table near the exit with some fliers and signs. A cheerful young lady handed me a piece of paper, and as I took it, she asked, “Considering voting socialist this November?” The flier had a red rose, the symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I handed it back as if it was a piece of blotter paper soaked with Ebola and said “Oh GOD no.”

  “That’s okay!” she chirped as I walked away. Glad to know. Of course, it won’t be okay if the DSA takes over everything, because then every area of life will be a miserable struggle session to ensure uniform purity. People will be trashing grocery stores and destroying all the eggs because the Chicken-American Community has not expressed the right opinion on Gaza. That will be Monday; Tuesday, they will burn cars to protest inflation-adjusted rent hikes. Wednesday, they will want to throw eggs at a rally of fascists — you know, the people protesting a mandate to install a drag queen in every elementary school to lead everyone in a fierce rendition of The Internationale every morning — except of course the eggs were all destroyed in the prior protest. Thursday, they will occupy the offices of all the grocery store chains to protest Egg Insecurity.

  I have a long-standing aversion to collectivists and socialists and other flavors of Marxism, because A) it’s dreary, boring nonsense cranked out by a hairy fool who probably had the B.O. of a donkey in August; B) it views humans as vast murmuring mobs, devoid of individuality; and C) I’m supposed to follow some 19th century white guy instead of a 20th century black intellectual like Thomas Sowell? Fine, racist.

  At the heart is the hammer and sickle, which terrified me as a child. It was a good symbol of the enemy: They either want to cut your throat or hit you on the head. It’s like a political movement whose symbols are a straight-edge razor and a claw hammer.

  James and I were in Beantown at roughly the same time, but I did not see him.

• Hayek called it the "Fatal Conceit". And, as Andy Kessler points out, it's a Conceit on both ends: Different Parties, Same Folly. (WSJ gifted link)

  Comedian Adam Carolla has a routine about how the very wealthy and very poor do the same things. Some printable examples: never eat at an Outback steakhouse, take outdoor showers, have lunch with Bono, drive a make of car that no longer exists.

  Annoyingly, it’s the same for politicians. They all end up doing the same things—the horseshoe theory has become reality. The left and right, progressives and MAGA, bend around and almost touch. To me, it’s more like a teething ring, going round and round in a politician’s mouth with government power constantly biting down and inflicting pain on all of us. Or an M.C. Escher drawing with everything confusingly connected. I don’t like it one bit.

  Who said this? “Today I’m announcing new tariffs in key sectors of the economy that are going to ensure that our workers are not held back by unfair trade practices. They include a . . . 25% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum products . . . a 100% tariff on electric vehicles made in China . . . a 25% tariff on electric vehicle batteries from China and a 25% tariff on the critical minerals that make those batteries.”

  Donald Trump? Nope, Joe Biden in May 2024. Eleven months later, “Tariff Man” Trump declared, “Effective at midnight, we will impose a 25% tariff on all foreign-made automobiles.” Clang goes the horseshoe.

  Horseshoes? You've seen them, right? Never far away from horses' asses.

• I'm a sucker for AI/George Orwell mashups. Richard Dooling points out the modern parallel to Orwell's most famous essay: AI and the English Language. (WSJ gifted link)

  George Orwell closed his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” with six rules for writers, the first of which commands: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” It is the rule against clichés—don’t beat dead horses, cry over spilled milk or freeze like a deer in the headlights.

  “The fight against bad English,” Orwell wrote, “is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” Authors and academics are often the worst abusers of ready-made phrases and buzzwords. They put their readers to sleep by deploying trite phrases in the passive voice. Good, honest writing isn’t only hard work; it can get you canceled for being direct about a controversial topic.

  Enter artificial intelligence, which can flag clichés by analyzing the frequency at which figures of speech occur in data sets. But replacing clichés with something vivid and original is a harder task. In Orwell’s parlance, large-language models show us what they are used to seeing in print. These models are like giant looms. They select complementary textual threads from vast data warehouses and weave them together to create tapestries of prose.

  Orwell called this approach “modern writing” and complained that it “does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

  Data point: when I asked the Google for replacements for "Every cloud has a silver lining," one of the (many) suggestions was "At least the worst-case scenario makes for a great story."

  Pun Salad's new motto?

I hope you had an enjoyable Fourth of July. I did! And I have some leftovers.

First up is a replay of the Bragg/Heaton Partisan Press Conference.

Lest we forget:

• Neal Stephenson is not too cool to love America. He has thoughts on The Sting in the National Anthem’s Tail.

  Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
  O’er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?

  Our national anthem is unusual in that it ends with a question, which can be read in at least three ways.

  The way in which Francis Scott Key obviously meant it was: “America is the land of the free and the home of the brave; is the flag still waving over it, or did it get destroyed (or did the defenders of Fort McHenry surrender, and haul it down) ?”

  Nowadays, of course, that thing is flying all over the place. So the question is no longer “is it still waving?” The question is “is the place it’s waving over yet the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?”

  Click over to find the other reading of Key's query. You know, I wouldn't have expected Neal Stephenson to have thoughts and concerns about America and its anthem, but I'm glad he does.

• Whoa, Nellie! Ms. Bowles' TGIF column for the week is the usual wonderful hodgepodge o' stuff. Excerpt concerning the Zohran's "rent freeze":

  He will freeze the rent, as promised. But will he freeze costs for landlords? Will he freeze the cost of a plumber who comes to service the unit? The cost of a roofer coming to patch? Materials for necessary construction? Noooo, silly. And thus will begin a cycle of disrepair and hostility. It’s irrational. Which, you need to understand, is entirely the point. Mamdani’s people are smart—they know the math doesn’t math, nor does it need to. The goal is to get to a position where government housing is better than private housing. So you must first destroy private housing. Only when your apartment roof has collapsed, the pipes have burst, and your broke landlord’s best financial decision is burning the building down, then. . . a-ha! A-ha! The government will arrive. Look at these Soviet-style blocs we have for you, they will say. How nice is that, they will say, ours comes with a concrete stairwell! Capitalism was terrible, wasn’t it? And you’ll be like, I guess it was. You’ll eat your little climate cube of grasshopper asses (the abdominal segment goes to party leaders) and sit in a sweltering 90-degree dorm room. And you’ll be happy. No matter what suckage the commies incur, the blame will never be on them.

  Much, much more at the link.

• Only because they had no way to record negative customers. Nicholas Anthony has an obituary at Cato: Postal Banking Has Died With Zero Customers in Years.

  The United States Postal Service has finally laid the postal banking pilot program to rest. However, it’s unlikely anyone noticed. The program didn’t have a single customer from April 2022 to September 2025.

  [Table elided]

  The close of the program is welcome news, but it should never have gotten off the ground to begin with. Postal banking ended in 1966 for a simple reason: it wasn’t popular. There was no reason to think that had changed in 2021 when this program kicked off, and the data confirm this.

  This will come as sad news to nobody except Elizabeth Warren. From back when she ran for president:

  I’ve spent years advocating for postal banking—allowing the United States Postal Service to partner with local community banks and credit unions to provide access to low-cost, basic banking services. As President, I’ll make it happen by appointing people committed to the cause.

  — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 18, 2019

  Sure, Liz. The problem was that USPS had no "people committed to the cause."

  And also, of course, Senator Bernie:

  Did you know that from 1911-1967, Americans could bank at their local post office?
  
  At one point our postal banks serviced 4 million customers.
  
  We must ensure all Americans can access basic financial services by allowing every post office to offer basic banking services again.

  — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 11, 2019

  To put it mildly, Sanders, Warren, et al. totally misjudged the 21st-century demand for postal banking. If only other socialist nostrums were so easy to ignore!

• At least for now, it's pretty good on ideology-free topics. At the Dispatch Jonathan Gibson wonders: What’s Going on With Wikipedia?

  In 2024, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) published a report claiming Wikipedia entries show a consistent anti-Israel bias, pointing to examples such as the “Zionism” page, which reflects a one-sided narrative in its opening two lines alone:

  Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

  The same year, an investigation by the Times of London suggested that entries have been systematically edited to downplay Iranian atrocities, with editors reportedly facing bans for minor challenges to the anti-Israel narrative. More recently, both [ex-Wikipedian Larry] Sanger and [Jimmy] Wales have spoken out against the site’s “Gaza genocide” page, arguing that the page presents the information as factual and conclusive, rather than debatable.

  I'd trust Wikipedia to tell me the surface temperature on Venus. Surface temperature in Gaza? Nah, probably not.

• And just for the LFOD record. When he's right, he's right. From President Trump's July 4 speech on the National Mall:

  From the beginning, we were a nation that lived by the motto, “Victory or death,” and “Live free or die.” One out of every 100 Americans gave their lives in the fight for independence. To remind us of who these heroes were and what they gave us, we are honored to have here tonight, in the heart of our nation’s capital, one of the very first American flags ever to exist.

  Is it a bid to improve his image in New Hampshire, a state he lost by 0.37% in 2016, 7.35% in 2020, and 2.78% in 2024? Unlikely, since he can't run again. Right? I mean, right?

Mr. Ramirez gets it right:

And, for that matter, so does Nikki Haley: We Are Blessed to Live in America. RTWT, but here's her bottom line:

I always get a little dismayed when I read about polls asking people if they're "proud to be Americans". As someone who's been Catholic-adjacent for many years, I'm pretty sure that:

1. Pride is a sin;
2. In fact, it's one of the deadly ones;
3. But even if it wasn't, it would be tough for me to be proud of being an American;
4. Because being an American isn't something I did;
5. Without going into details about what Mom and Dad did back in 1950, I had zero control over the result: Me, American.

So "blessed" is the right word. Nikki likes it too; her 2024 presidential campaign made it donor t-shirt swag, and it's my attire du jour, modeled for you on your right.

Also of note:

• Being blessed doesn't mean we can't gripe. Kyle Smith is old enough to remember: The Bicentennial Was a Better Birthday Than This. (WSJ gifted link)

  The grocery store brands were bursting with red, white and blue. CBS, during commercial breaks, ran brief public-education spots called the Bicentennial Minute. The Sears catalog—the analog Amazon of the day, the Aladdin’s Cave of consumer wonders—put out a bicentennial edition. Kids pedaled around on bicentennial bikes. Special-edition bicentennial coins were the pride of every pocket, when dealing with change was something we all did every day. The joy of being an American was everywhere.

  In my little hometown of East Longmeadow, Mass., a wall opposite a gas station in the center of town sported a large fresco modeled on Archibald Willard’s iconic 1875 painting “Spirit of ’76,” with three musicians on the march and the flag in the background. My family had a huge picnic in the backyard, featuring appearances by many seldom-seem cousins from out of town, that turned out to be the only one of its kind we ever hosted. Late in the day we turned on a little black and white TV to watch the magnificent parades of tall ships in New York and Boston.

  Ah, well. 250 is just another number, I suppose.

• Among the many things about which the Founders would be appalled… Jonathan Turley thinks The Founders Wouldn’t Back a ‘Billionaire Tax’. (WSJ gifted link)

  Was James Madison the Zohran Mamdani of his time? Gavin Newsom seems to think so. In joining the growing number of Democratic leaders supporting a wealth tax, the California governor claimed that the U.S. Constitution and our Founders were all about wealth distribution: “The system America’s founders built,” he said, “was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades.”

  But Madisonian democracy is designed to avoid the concentration of political power, not the concentration of wealth. The Founders were great believers in capitalism and the free market. This isn’t the 250th anniversary only of the Declaration of Independence but also of the publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” which the Founders embraced. Many of the Founders were themselves quite wealthy, including banker Robert Morris Jr., who was known as the “Financier of the Revolution” and would be a billionaire today.

  I fantasize that a time-traveling James Madison would take a few minutes to size up Gavin Newsom, and be struck with wonder at how such a transparent glib phony made it into a position of power.

• 

  I judge the mixture to be about 70/30. Stephanie Slade has a Fourth-relevant article in the July Reason: America's Founders Blended Liberalism and Religion.

  In "Why I Am Not a Conservative," the economist F.A. Hayek averred that "what in Europe was called 'liberalism' was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built." He was neither the first nor the last to see America primarily as a nation rooted in individual liberty.

  Yet to think the United States is purely a liberal country is to take a truth too far. The Founders drew on a panoply of sources, from classical philosophy to biblical theology, from the natural and common law traditions to the ideas of the Enlightenment. They took from each the insights that seemed best-suited to their project, and in doing so they created something at once revolutionary—a novus ordo seclorum—and rooted in the wisdom of the past.

  In championing "Fusionism", Ms. Slade is following the argument of Frank S. Meyer, one of National Review's best writers in its early days. I remember checking out Meyer's book, In Defense of Freedom, from the Omaha Public Library at some point in the 1960s, and it made a lasting favorable impression to this impressionable youngster. I'm glad to see him, and his political philosophy get some respect and attention at Reason.

  Ms. Slade has a book coming out on September 1, and I've pre-ordered at Amazon. Should you be so inclined, the convenient link is at your right.

• Vivre libre ou mourir! Kevin D. Williamson appreciates the help: Vive la France! (archive.today link)

  When I was 19 years old, I was drinking Shiner Bock in Austin, writing newspaper editorials, and going to see punk shows at Liberty Lunch—a full schedule, but somewhat short of the ambitions of Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, the young French aristocrat who, being inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution, bought a ship and sailed to the New World in order to present himself to the Continental Congress and offer his services. Congress was in Philadelphia, and Lafayette landed in South Carolina—he was an idealist, not a geographer.

  But with a letter of recommendation from Ben Franklin in his hand, he made his way up to Philadelphia, where Congress, grateful for the services of an enthusiastic young aristocrat who had the good taste to bring along his own money, commissioned the 19-year-old as a major general. Contrary to what probably was Congress’ intent, Lafayette took his commission seriously—not merely as an honorary title. The revolution was to be a grand adventure, to be sure, but also a hard one: Lafayette was wounded at Brandywine, endured the hardships of Valley Forge, and was one of the key players when the tide was turned at Yorktown. Lafayette also provided a critical channel between the upstart Americans and the French monarchy, whose financial and naval power were simply indispensable to the project of American independence.

  No Lafayette, no United States of America.

  Fun fact: US Route 1 is named "Lafayette Road" in most NH towns, because Lafayette took this route when visiting America in 1824-5.

And it's from Jim "Indispensible" Geraghty: No Politician Is Coming to Save You. More on that in a bit, but here's a reminder from Robby Soave that one politician is especially not coming to save you: J.D. Vance hates Milton Friedman. Illustrated with:

JD Vance is so frustrating. Here he takes gratuitous shots at Milton Friedman as a bad model for Republican economic thinking.

With Friedman as the guiding light, Ronald Reagan won 49 states and ushered in a decade of unrivaled prosperity. pic.twitter.com/MX2MmY9Qta

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) July 2, 2026

From the accompanying article:

Going back to Jim Geraghty's point:

Well, it should. Jim's "Morning Jolt" contains a lot to dislike about both sides.

[For the record, I was unimpressed by the Mark Manson book I read last month.]

Also of note:

• From the "Ackshually…" files. Stu Smith only needed a bit of researching to determine: Actually, a Lot of DSA Members Are Communists.

  At the Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington last week, President Trump warned that many Democratic Socialist candidates “are not social democrats. These are hardcore, godless Communists. . . . This is the most serious threat to our Country since its existence.” Trump’s remarks sparked a wave of condemnations, including from CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who said that “socialism, much less democratic socialism, is not communism.”

  Statements like Collins’s highlight how little attention the press has given to the Democratic Socialists of America and its national leadership. The majority of the DSA’s governing board, the National Political Committee (NPC), openly identifies with Communist ideology.

  It's refreshing to point out the rare occasions when Trump was right about something.

• What they're teaching the kids. As James B. Meigs points out, it is too often Howard Zinn’s Horrible History. (WSJ gifted link)

  In the film “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon’s character looks with disdain at a U.S. history book he spots in the office of his therapist, played by Robin Williams. “You want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ ” Mr. Damon’s character says. It will “knock you on your a—.”

  When that movie came out in 1997, Zinn’s ruthlessly negative alternative history was poorly regarded by professional historians but beloved by legions of left-leaning readers. First published in 1980, “A People’s History” became popular mostly by word of mouth. It was the sort of book that a cool Marxist social studies teacher, the kind who sat cross-legged on his desk and asked kids to call him by his first name, might’ve slipped to his brighter students.

  With periodic updates over the decades, Zinn’s opus ballooned to more than 700 pages. But its message could be summarized in two words: America stinks. The author believed most history textbooks offered only a whitewashed “nationalist glorification of country,” he told the New York Times. In response, he oversimplified the story in the opposite direction. America’s Founding Fathers? Just wealthy white men guarding their fortunes. Abraham Lincoln? A half-hearted abolitionist who was concerned about protecting “the interests of the very rich.” World War II? Sure, the Nazis were bad, Zinn concedes, but the U.S. and her allies didn’t really “represent something significantly different.”

  If you're interested, I reported on Mary Grabar's book Debunking Howard Zinn here.

  And to go along with the previous item, see Ronald Radosh on Zinn: Aside from That, He Was Also a Red.

• A tough diagnosis. It's from unmerciful Bryan Caplan: Socialism: Better Never to Have Been.

  If I were a socialist, I’d be desperate to deny that the Nazis were socialists. Why? Well, it’s bad enough that:

  • The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics turned out to be a nightmarish totalitarian despotism, a dystopia of mass slavery and mass murder.

  • The USSR, by conquest and imitation, spawned dozens of additional nightmarish totalitarian despotisms.

  • These despotisms included the jaw-dropping hellscape of Maoist China, the world’s most populous country at the time.

  Yet as long as Nazi Germany was not socialist or even anti-socialist, the socialist can find solace in the fact that the Soviet Union was the primary agent in the defeat of an even more nightmarish totalitarian despotism. While there’s some dispute over whether the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany had the higher body count, Nazi Germany definitely had a higher annual murder rate for territory under its control. As long as you charitably interpret the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as “Stalin was just buying time to prepare for the inevitable war,” you can tell yourself that socialism saved civilization despite its Dorian Gray-level transmogrification.

  I'm currently reading a biography of Hayek, and it's describing the enthusiasm 1930's-40's enthusiasm in Britain and America for a scientific, rational, planned economy. Often accompanied by praise for Uncle Joe Stalin's socialist paradise. It's difficult not to see parallels with current events.

• James Lileks is going through a rough patch. But today's Bleat contains his hilarious "AI end-of-billing-cycle credit use" videos, featuring "Betty Furness, for Westinghouse!"

  And there's other good stuff too. Check it out.

• From the Archives. It's been twenty years since Alaska's Senator Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes." And my post from back then linked to some of the commentary I found (variously) insightful, amusing, or mean-spirited. Some of the links have rotted away over the years, but some still work.

  But what really amused me about the archived post was the bit about the "62-year-old Rolling Stone" Keith Richards adding his guitar licks to My Soul is a Witness, a collection of African-American spirituals.

  Who would have thought, back then, that Keith would have made it to 82?

  And you can still get My Soul is a Witness at Amazon.

Via Power Line:

Powerful winds reaching 131 mph tore through parts of South Dakota, leaving a trail of destruction that included heavy damage to a wind farm. 🌬️ pic.twitter.com/o2x8wWU6ke

— AccuWeather (@accuweather) June 30, 2026

Today's headline from Airplane II, as delivered by … well, you know:

Also of note:

• Not fooling anyone, perhaps except himself. Tosin Akintola, for example, sees it clearly: Trump scapegoats gas companies for price hikes caused by his Iran War.

  On Monday, President Donald Trump renewed his threats to the oil and gas industry, telling gasoline retailers they "must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY!" to around $2.50 per gallon. The president first threatened the "big Oil Companies" last Wednesday, when he ordered the Justice Department to investigate whether they were engaged in price gouging.

  "Price gouging" is a standard tactic of the populist demagogue, and it's (of course) bipartisan. Why, 'twas only a few weeks ago I linked to Nancy Pelosi's press release describing her 2006 call for a "New Direction for America". Which, among many other promises, pledged to "Crack down on price gouging" to "Lower Gas Prices and Achieve Energy Independence".

• But other goats needed presidential scaping! John R. Puri noticed more of the same from the "It's not my fault!" President: The Government Gives Away Its Beef-Price Fiction (archive.today link)

  The president wants beef prices to fall to relieve consumers, except when he wants them to rise to aid cattle ranchers. He is learning through interventionism that every price paid is someone else’s income. Therefore, the administration is seeking a scapegoat.

  It has found one in meat processors — the companies that slaughter, butcher, and package beef. Last November, the president directed his subordinates to investigate potential collusion or price-fixing among the four firms that account for 85 percent of the beef-processing market. It was a conclusion in search of evidence. The Department of Justice is currently investigating the four major companies, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche believes he has unearthed “anti-competitive activity.”

  Shocker! He 'unearthed' exactly what Trump wanted him to unearth!

  John goes on to note that the administration is also giving a half-billion dollars to keep meat processors in business.

  So if they are price gouging, they're doing a lousy job of it.

  Or maybe Trump's first instinct when faced with bad news is to revert to a fact-free accusation about shady others.

• Good advice, part I. It's from (a)Bill Maher, directed to (b) politicians, relayed from (c) Kevin D. Williamson: Stop Being Funny. (Dispatch gifted link)

  When politicians are being ridiculous, Maher said, “I put them in jokes—jokes that work.” Jokes that work is the key thing. It is axiomatic in comedy that the way to kill a joke is to explain it, but it is worth thinking about why and how Maher’s jokes, and other jokes about politicians, work. If politicians are to stop being funny, then they will need to answer the question: When are politicians funny?

  For one, politicians are funny when they are needy—especially when they show themselves to be in desperate need of attention and adulation. Pete Hegseth’s risible workout videos are an example of this. Bill Clinton’s general neediness was both pitiable and funny as he tried to fill whatever awful vacancy is at the center of him with junk food and junk sex. Donald Trump’s pharaonic megalomania is both disturbing and hilarious, even if the scolds insist that there is nothing to laugh about in such times as these. Jill Biden’s insistence upon calling herself “Dr. Biden” is funny. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s need to swan around at the Met Gala while pretending to be an in-the-trenches class warrior is funny. European Central Bank boss Christine Lagarde’s constant sophomoric LinkedIn posting, which makes her look like she is desperately seeking employment, is eminently mockable.

  Beyond neediness, politicians—and media figures and activists—also are funny when they are unreasonable. Ross Perot’s mania was a gift to Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey and other satirists. There is a reason everybody makes fun of vegans, Bible-thumpers, libertarians, and the fading memory of Greta Thunberg. Humor is one of the ways we try to keep politics inside the 40-yard lines—extremists are inviting targets for satire. About half of The Blues Brothers is an extended riff on the ridiculousness of George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party.

  KDW's article doesn't mention Ronald Reagan, who knew how to deliver a line, punchlines included.

• Good advice, part II. It's direct from Erick Erickson, aimed at you and me: Calm Down.

  Well, more aimed at you, maybe. I'm always pretty calm.

  Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the immigration policies on citizenship of the last 140 years will continue.

  Today, you’d think the nation was coming to an end. We’ve literally been implementing the 14th Amendment this way for, again, 140 years.

  Having now read the full decision, did you know there were up to eight votes for the idea that illegal aliens could become citizens by being born in the United States? There might have been a ninth. As it were, there were six, not five, votes for the decision.

  I bet you heard 5-4, but the people spinning you up did not tell you that even Clarence Thomas raised the possibility that an illegal alien born in the United States could be a citizen.

  Six Justices, not five, definitely held that a child born in the United States to illegal aliens was a citizen. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch both, in their dissents, noted that a large number of children of illegal aliens would also most likely be citizens. Even Justice Alito suggested an unquantifiable number of children of illegal aliens would be citizens.

  Erick's got an interesting take, as usual.

• Mea Culpa, I guess. At least according to Leonora Barclay at Persuasion: Reading Is Dead. And We Killed It.

  Earlier this year, publishing house Hachette pulped the upcoming horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, following allegations that Ballard relied on artificial intelligence to write the book. Meanwhile, half of novelists in the UK fear they will be completely replaced by AI. As artificial intelligence continues to replace creative activities previously considered uniquely human, there’s a fear that fiction will grow ever more distant from the human experience, with predictable plots and simplistic dialogue and characters. Literature will start to function as synthetic junk food for the brain.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t need AI to do this. Literature has been functionally artificial for a number of years now, since long before ChatGPT came on the scene. It wasn’t computers that did this, it was us—publishers, agents, writers, and readers. Over the last 20 years, modern novels have become shorter, with simpler language and shorter sentences. At the same time, people are reading less. In 2023, the number of Americans aged 15 and older who read for more than 20 minutes a day was 15 percent, compared to 22 percent in 2003. In some ways, shorter novels can be a blessing (I know it’s supposed to be Charlotte Brontë’s best novel, but I spent most of Villette wishing the main character would just get on with it), but it’s worrying that authors are now writing for diminished attention spans.

  Well, maybe. But (since I am old) I hold Sturgeon's Law in high regard. ("Ninety percent of everything is crap") Are things worse now than they were in the 1950's, when Sturgeon proposed it?

I'm with Mr. Ramirez; it's time to make the "Death to America" mullahs an endangered species.

Also of note:

• The bogosity is strong with this one. Especially when he's trying to defend the indefensible. Rich Lowry examines Zohran Mamdani’s Bogus Explanation for Opposing Israel. He claims that he refuses to support "any state that privileges one religion over another." For an example of his "fairness", he cites Saudi Arabia.

  Well.

  Israel doesn’t have an official religion — repeat, it has no state religion.

  Instead, it is the homeland for Jews. Its Basic Law says that Israel is “the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination.”

  In other words, Israel is for the Jews in much the same way, say, that Poland is for the Poles or Japan for the Japanese.

  That these countries have distinct national identities defined by the peoples that live in them doesn’t mean they aren’t free societies.

  The Israeli Declaration of Independence says the Jewish state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”

  And, indeed, there is freedom of religion in Israel. Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Baha’i communities maintain their own religious institutions and are free to worship as they please. The wrinkle is that — in an inheritance from the Ottoman Empire — Israel recognizes various religions and gives their courts authority over matters such as marriage and divorce.

  For the record, Wikipedia tries very hard to lump Israel into the (many) other countries with a state religion, it has to admit that "Judaism is not the state religion". Buried in a lot of handwaving meant to persuade the reader otherwise.

• The horseshoe's ends are getting closer every day. Meagan O'Rourke reports on Democrats' first 'Project 2029' proposal: More government control over social media.

  Democrats are gearing up for the 2028 election and preparing a list of policy priorities—dubbed "Project 2029"—should they retake the White House. The first Project 2029 proposal is not about affordability, healthcare, or foreign policy. No, the Democrats' first proposal concerns children's online safety: the issue fueling lawmakers' bipartisan push to impose greater government control over the internet.

  Semafor's Nicholas Wu first reported on the "Kids Over Clicks" proposal on Monday. The proposal, Wu wrote, advocates for "narrowing protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that shield platforms from some liability," banning social media accounts for kids under 16, "designing safer internet platforms," and more.

  "It's for the kids" is, unfortunately, a too-effective thought-terminating cliché.

• Also on the censorship front. There was something for everyone at SCOTUS yesterday. Let me link to something the WSJ editorialists (and I) liked: Political Speech Wins Again at the Supreme Court. (WSJ gifted link)

  One laudable project of the current Supreme Court has been incrementally restoring the First Amendment right of Americans to spend on political campaigns. A 6-3 majority on Tuesday took another step toward that end by overturning federal limits on coordinated spending by candidates and parties (NRSC v. FEC).

  Political parties are weaker than ever, and one reason is a 1974 campaign finance law that limits how much parties can spend in coordination with candidates. “For nearly 200 years after the ratification of the First Amendment, parties could spend freely to support their candidates during campaigns and could do so in coordination with the candidates,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh writes for the majority.

  It's dispiriting how many Democrat candidates want to "overturn Citizens United". Now they will have something else they want to overturn! Even my "moderate" CongressCritter Chris Pappas, now running for Senate, wants Citizens United overturned.

  Fun fact: his campaign website features his "Anti-Corruption Agenda". Which proudly announces that "Pappas doesn’t take a dime of corporate PAC money."

  But as it turns out, Pappas takes a lot of dimes of union PAC money. Which is not corrupting at all, apparently.