Jul
15
2026

Which SNL Character Does She Remind You Of?

This is making the rounds.

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?

FERNDALE, Michigan—Abdul El-Sayed’s signature policy pitch as he seeks the Democratic nomination for Senate is “Medicare for All,” a universal health insurance program that would be administered by the federal government. Just don’t ask the progressive populist for the cost to the average taxpayer. He knows; he just isn’t going to tell you.

“I’m not going to give you that number because it’s going to be used against me, because you’re going to say: ‘He wants to spend X amount of money in taxpayer dollars.’ And it’s going to be meaningless to most people,” El-Sayed told reporters last week following a rally with roughly 200 voters in suburban Detroit, responding to a question from The Dispatch. The former Wayne County health director would say only that his plan eliminates all co-pays, premiums, and deductibles, and would be subsidized strictly through higher “FICA” rates—the federal payroll tax on wages typically deducted from paychecks. El-Sayed claims that whatever the price tag—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts it at $2.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion annually—individuals and families would save money: “I think that’s a great trade-off.”

El-Sayed, 41, is like many modern populists left and right, President Donald Trump most prominently. He has a habit of embellishing his résumé and proposing ambitious reforms while providing few key details and maligning critics as being bought off by so-called special interests. Healthcare is one example. Similarly, El-Sayed’s call to abolish, rather than overhaul, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to Trump administration abuses offers no blueprint for enforcing border security without the federal agency. “ICE exists to make an argument to the American public that all immigration is bad,” he said.

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:

    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.