Pun Salad

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.