Pun Salad

Posted on Facebook by a friend from high school…

And, yes, it's been well over a half-century since high school, but I still didn't want to comment about this on Facebook. Don't want to lose a friend.

Let's get the cheap shot out of the way: Stacey Sobelman sort of self-refutes her argument by misspelling "populace". And a Trumplike devotion to uppercasing at will.

But even if she had gotten that right, let's not ignore her implied message. Which seems to be: "I'd do a better job teaching your kids if you paid me more money." Is that really an attitude she wants to reveal to parents? To school administrators? I can imagine other teachers reading this and sighing: "Stacey, honey … shut up!"

And (for that matter) does spending more money on schools improve student outcomes? Even the liberal Brookings Institution finds that relationship to be weak.

But getting past that implication, Ms. Sobelman posits a Massive Conspiracy Theory, without evidence. "They" want to keep your kiddos dumb! Intentionally! But not only are "they" sly and nefarious enough to pull this over on us: they are also big scaredy cats, who are "TERRIFIED" of education. Because if the "populous" were better educated, they would be a "threat" to those with "power"!

And the cure? "Read the books. Do the work." What books? What "work"? (One wag in a comment thread about this suggested the works of the late John Taylor Gatto. Hey, I'm a fan, but I'm not sure Ms. Sobelman would be.)

If you're interested, she is apparently on Instagram: "Ms. Sobelman's School of Wizardry". Yes, she is a "Harry Potter enthusiast."

And for some fun facts that challenge her "defunded" narrative, I suggest the Reason Foundation's recent report: K-12 Education Spending Spotlight 2025: Annual public school spending nears $1 trillion. Further fun fact: the FY2026 budget request for the Department of Defense/War (whichever you prefer) is "only" $892.6 billion.

Also of note:

• And it seems to be working. Kevin D. Williamson notes that perpetual outrage can wear on one, and that's the plan: Exhaustion Is (Still) the Strategy. (archive.today link)

  If I may quote myself: “Exhaustion is a strategy.”

  And trying to meet Trump’s daily barrage of high crimes and misdemeanors with rational analysis is exhausting. For example, how weird is it that the administration has dispatched thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minnesota in response to a welfare-fraud scandal that seems to have been carried out almost entirely by people legally present in the United States, including citizens and those on temporary protected status? It surely is not because the state has an unusually large population of illegal immigrants: The illegal-immigrant share of the labor force in Texas is more than three times what it is in Minnesota; 1 of every 11 households in Texas includes an illegal immigrant, while the figure for Minnesota is 1 in 32. If you wanted to investigate welfare fraud being carried out in Minneapolis and environs—and even if you wanted to concentrate on welfare fraud being carried out specifically by Somali Americans and/or Somali immigrants—yanking Renee Nicole Good out of her car (as that ICE agent apparently intended to do before shooting her in the head) would be a very, very weird way to go about that. But if you try explaining the non-sequiturity of that non sequitur to a 65-year-old golfer who has Fox News on 16 hours a day, he’s going to start rambling about George Soros or your testosterone level.

  Once a week, the Trump administration does something that would get an ordinary president impeached in sane times: cooking up a ridiculously pretextual criminal investigation to try to bully the Fed chairman into cutting interest rates leaps to mind, as does murdering scores of seafaring South Americans on similarly thin pretexts. Consider the fact—which would be unbelievable in normal times—that NATO countries are sending troops to Greenland because NATO—a U.S.-led alliance—is worried that the United States is about to carry out an act of war against Denmark.

  I understand the exhaustion. I'm pretty down on my daily looks myself; I can't see any way this works out for the better. At least I can talk about other stuff too, and that helps. For example…

• It shrank when I left. Veronique de Rugy asks Is the Middle Class 'Shrinking' or 'Struggling'? The Difference Is Important.

  "The middle class is shrinking" might be the assertion of the decade. Progressives and populists alike use it to justify nearly all government interventions, from tariffs to minimum-wage hikes to massive spending to income redistribution. But before we accept its validity, we should ask a simple question: shrinking how?

  Is the number of Americans considered part of the middle class diminishing? Or the amount of wealth they can realistically build? Or the value of what they can buy?

  A new study by economists Stephen Rose and Scott Winship usefully reframes the debate. Most studies define the middle class relative to the national median, which makes the dividing line between haves and have-nots rise automatically as the country gets richer. Rose and Winship instead use a benchmark of fixed purchasing power, so that if real incomes (those adjusted for inflation) rise, more people are shown moving into — or beyond — the middle class in a meaningful sense.

  Link to the study Vero cites: The Middle Class Is Shrinking Because of a Booming Upper-Middle Class. Check it out, or (see above) just continue to moan about Trump.

• Nobody would bother deepfaking Pun Salad. But Thomas Sowell found "himself" saying all kinds of stuff on the Interwebs that he didn't actually say. He relates his Experience With AI Deepfakes at the WSJ. (WSJ gifted link)

  Artificial intelligence may present many expanded opportunities for advancement in many fields. But it can also present expanded opportunities for deceptive and dangerous frauds. Here I can speak from personal experience, as a target of such frauds.

  AI has created imitations of my voice, to accompany photographs of me, saying things in various parts of the internet. These include both things I have never said and things the direct opposite of what I have said.

  Under current rules and practices, people can do such things anonymously. Even after the fraud has been discovered and shut down, the same anonymous people can do the same thing elsewhere on the internet.

  Which brings us to the Quote Investigator's research on "Believe Nothing You Hear, and Only One Half That You See". Popularized (but not originated) by Edgar Allen Poe. In 1845.

  I suppose in the deepfake era, we'll be needing to increase that fraction from one half to … something much closer to 100%.

• There's another thing you should be skeptical about. And that's the panacea offered by some economists for climate change, carbon taxes. Samson McCune says Carbon Taxes Are More Problematic Than They Seem. After describing the pros, he digs into the cons:

  Firstly, the basic assumption that there is an optimal carbon tax rate is, quite simply, false. To determine this, one needs to determine the social cost of carbon, which is the cost faced by society from excess carbon emissions. The price society would be willing to pay to remove all pollution could change from region to region and from day to day. Prices, in free markets, are volatile, and to set a specific social cost of carbon would be no different from setting a price control on carbon emissions. Price controls are broadly harmful as they work against natural market mechanisms, creating inefficiencies at worst, and doing nothing at best. From a more empirical perspective, each researcher has his or her own method for estimating the social cost of carbon, which can lead to computations that result in hugely different prescriptions for optimal carbon tax rates.

  But take this, for a moment, as a non-issue. Suppose statistical models and computer programs become precise enough that they can account for this problem. Carbon taxes would still have a myriad of problematic results. One of the most prominent issues in the conversation surrounding their implementation is that they are regressive in nature. This means that they disproportionately have greater negative effects on poorer people than wealthier people, as they are a flat tax on carbon emissions, and the wealthy can afford to offset their usage toward other energy generation methods with lower carbon emissions. Take, for example, a tax on emissions from a vehicle. A wealthy person and a poorer person might drive the same, but the percentage of their incomes that they spend on gas varies wildly. The poorer person would spend comparatively a much larger amount on fuel, and thus on the carbon tax, than the richer person, making the policy regressive.

  Suppose, too, that this wasn’t an issue. Carbon taxes would still be problematic as they lead to something known as carbon leakage. This is when economic agents notice that carbon is cheaper in another country and expend resources to produce carbon there instead, with hopes of decreasing costs below what they would be by staying and paying for the full carbon tax. Note that for this to happen, the cost of importing only needs to be just below the cost of the carbon tax for it to be economically rational.

  I kind of suspected that was too facile a solution.

J.D. Tuccille is pretty steamed at recent developments in an ongoing fight, pitting Trump vs. Free Markets.

Further along in J.D.'s article there are further grounds to make a free marketeer groan:

I used to point out that Democrats seemed to believe there wasn't a single dollar in private hands that they imagined the government couldn't spend more wisely and justly.

For Trump and his toadies the null set is: private businesses which would be illegitimate to bully into submission.

Also of note:

• A worrisome trend? Or internal sabotage? Jonah Goldberg warns: Beware the New Americanism. (archive.today link)

  I went down an ugly rabbit hole the other day. In case you didn’t know, the Department of Labor is pursuing a … novel digital marketing campaign. It posts pictures of 1930s-style graphics of clean-cut young white men with captions like “Build Your Homeland’s Future!” “Your Nation Needs You!” and “American Workers First!” Maybe because I recently rewatched The Man in the High Castle, I’m a bit over-primed to find them creepy.

  The department has been doing this for a while, and I’ve largely ignored the posts, intentionally. So much of what this administration does is a kind of trolling. They want people to complain so they can then say, “See! Our critics are anti-white!” or “Look at what their TDS has caused them to get mad at now! These are inspired by Norman Rockwell!”

  But then over the weekend Labor put out this doozy with the tagline “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

  As many have noted, this was awfully close to “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer.” And then there was what seems to be a dog whistle to Which Way Western Man?, a tract by Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist William Gayley Simpson.

  So, are there some serious wannabe fascists in the Department of Labor?

  Or (alternatively) are there malicious Department of Labor employees who want to paint the Trump Administration as being fascist-adjacent, and nobody in a position to stop them has noticed?

  Neither explanation is good, but fingers crossed it's the latter.

• Those horseshoe ends keep getting closer. New Hampshire Journal notes a local pol who probably has one of those big corkboards filled with newspaper clippings, pushpins, and yards of dot-connecting red yarn: NHDem Chair Buckley Spreads Conspiracy Theory That 2024 Was Stolen From Harris.

  Before the Trump era, claims of stolen presidential elections were largely the domain of the Democratic Party.

  In 2000, prominent Democrats declared George W. Bush “selected, not elected.” Four years later, a conspiracy theory involving Diebold voting machines inspired 31 House Democrats to vote against certifying Bush’s victory in Ohio.

  In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton and allegations of Russian collusion.

  But in the wake of President Trump’s 312-226 Electoral College victory in 2024— including wins in all seven swing states — theories of election theft have largely been relegated to the fringes of the internet.

  And Ray Buckley’s social media feed.

  And darned if those new allegations don't bear serious resemblance to Trump's raves about 2020's "stolen" election.

• But are they really? Aporia Magazine wonders Why are intelligent people more liberal? The answer is obvious if you're a liberal. (I'm not, unless you stick "classical" in front.) But:

  In an 1866 debate in the House of Commons, Sir John Pakington called out a fellow member of the House, John Stuart Mill, over a statement he had made in his book Representative Government.

  Pakington noted that “we, the Conservative party, by the law of our existence, and as a matter of necessity, are what he calls the stupidest party in the State”. Mill replied: “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant that stupid persons are generally Conservative.” He then added, “I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any Honourable Gentleman will question it.”

  While the concepts of IQ and general intelligence would not be invented for another 40 years,1 Mill was onto something. Studies consistently find that intelligent people are more socially liberal. Though the effect isn’t huge, it shows up in practically every dataset. Intelligent people are less racist, sexist and homophobic. They are less religious and less nationalistic. And they’re more likely to support free speech, immigration, sexual freedom, abortion rights, gay marriage and legalisation of marijuana.2

  The author notes that the correlation is significant, but weak: there are plenty of smart conservatives, and plenty of dumb liberals. (Like Ray Buckley.)

  But he also attributes some of the effect is due to "cognitive error". So you'll want to avoid that.

• USPS delenda est. It can't happen soon enough. Reason's Jack Nicastro reports: The new USPS electric vehicles cost $22,000 more than other electric vans.

  In 2014, the United States Postal Service (USPS) began replacing its fleet of delivery vehicles. In the almost 12 years since, only about 6 percent of its 51,500 custom-built delivery vehicles have been delivered. The Postal Service says the rollout will last at least two more years.

  The signature USPS delivery truck is the Grumman Life Long Vehicle (LLV), which first entered service in 1986. Designed to last over 20 years, some have now been in service for twice as long, and don't include many modern amenities, like air conditioning and airbags. Maintaining the LLVs beyond their best-by date involved reverse-engineering the 130,000-strong fleet for discontinued parts, according to The Washington Post. In 2014, the USPS began its $9.6 billion fleet upgrade by announcing the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) program.

  Oshkosh Defense, which produces rather mean-looking tactical vehicles for the American military (and has never before produced a delivery van), was awarded a multibillion-dollar contract in February 2021 to produce the NGDV for the Postal Service over 10 years. The Post details the production nightmare that ensued. After repeated delays, setbacks, and quadrupling the minimum number of electric NGDVs, thanks to a generous $3 billion subsidy from the Inflation Reduction Act, Oshkosh had only delivered 612 of 35,000 e-NGDVs by November 2025, and only 2,600 of the 16,500 internal combustion engine NGDVs.

  The word "boondoggle" appears later in the article. I wonder whose congressional district Oshkosh Defense is in.

• Happy Feet! James Lileks observes that Hep Sheiks Love That Hot Tuba. But that's just an excuse to embed:

  James calls the video "insane", and that's an understatement. What drugs were these people on back then?

Recently on the book blog:

Last month on the blog I linked to a George Will column that favorably referenced this book by Michael W. McConnell ("Stanford law professor and former federal judge"). So I put in an Interlibrary Loan request at UNH, and voila, A few days later Tufts sent it up to Durham.

Very on-topic, given the recent "No Kings" theme adopted by recent anti-Trump street protests. It is ©2020, and a continuing thought as I read was how much more McConnell could have written on his topic based on the Biden years, and (so far) Trump II.

One example of McConnell's current thoughts is seen in the amicus brief he signed onto, along with a bunch of other Constitutional scholars in support of the plaintiffs challenging the legality of Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs. One of the attorneys involved, Ilya Somin, excerpts at the Volokh Conspiracy:

What unites these amici is a shared conviction that process matters—that how we govern is as vital as what we decide. The powers to tax, to regulate commerce, and to shape the nation's economic course must remain with Congress. They cannot drift silently into the hands of the President through inertia, inattention, or creative readings of statutes never meant to grant such authority. That conviction is not partisan. It is constitutional. And it strikes at the heart of this case.

This dispute is not about the wisdom of tariffs or the politics of trade. It is about who holds the power to tax the American people. May a President, absent a clear delegation from Congress and without guidance that amounts to an intelligible principle, unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs under laws never designed for that purpose? This is not a debate over outcomes but a test of structure. It asks not what should happen, but who decides.

McConnell's book is an impressive piece of scholarship, going back to the origins of the country's governmental design. Appreciate the difficulty the Founders faced; it wasn't as if they had a lot of good examples around the world to choose from! The prime example they had to work with was: England, as ruled by George III. You might remember from your history books that they were not fans.

But (on the other hand) they had a pretty decent grasp of what powers and duties were involved in ruling a country, and many of them were steeped in the works of Montesquieu, Blackstone, Locke, et al.

That said, it's surprising they did as well as they could, given interstate rivalries and suspicions, the continuing threat of slavery, and so on. Their only major botch was their design of presidential elections, which only survived until 1804.

(Minor botch: the Constitution left unspecified about which branch of government had the power to recognize foreign countries. This was sort of "settled" in 2015's Zivotofsky v. Kerry; McConnell's not a fan, calling the SCOTUS ruling in that case "less-than-obvious".)

That said, most of today's controversies about presidential powers aren't new at all. The Constitution kept some issues ambiguous! And some of SCOTUS's decisions come in for McConnell's withering criticism. Most notably, for its relevance to current events, is Humphrey's Executor, which limited the President's power to dismiss officials in "independent" agencies. McConnell is pretty convincing there.

But as legal scholarship goes, I'm not even at the "junior dilettante" level. Many of the issues McConnell discusses are currently under debate; to his credit, McConnell deals with opposing views respectfully, but also forcefully.

Kat Rosenfield is insightful: Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie. (archive.today link)

Kat goes on to observe Rebecca Good's later wail at the ICE agents: “Why did you have real bullets?”

Kat is sympathetic, and good for her on that front. I'm less so.

My Google LFOD News Alert brought up a related story from my local drama-queen front: Episcopal Bishop Tells Clergy To Write Their Wills, Prepare To Become Martyrs Over Stopping ICE.

"Stark warning"? I'm not sure if that wordplay was intended, but the Bishop did, indeed, apparently invoke General John Stark's most famous quote:

You have been created wholly in the image of the divine. Whatever race, whatever gender, whatever orientation, straight, queer, trans, you have been made in the image of the divine. God has always and will always protect you no matter what happens. So live in that fear. God supports you, protects you, and loves you with a power and a presence that is stronger than death. That is how we live free or die. Amen.

Here's hoping his flock does not take him seriously, imagining themselves in a movie.

Also of note:

• An unexpected place to see LFOD. It's Architectural Digest, for goodness' sake. When Politics Drives You From Home: 5 Americans Who Uprooted Their Lives Because of the State of the Nation. Their reasons are varied. But here's a guy who (now) lives just a few miles down the road from me:

  When Eric Brakey moved to Maine in 2011 to work for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, he was thrilled to be part of a grassroots movement. That run “cemented a real Libertarian wing of the Republican party in Maine,” Brakey, 37, remembers. Paul lost, but Brakey was inspired by the effort and ran for local office in Auburn, serving three terms in the Maine State Senate as a Republican—though, like Paul, he identifies as a Libertarian (they typically believe in limited government intervention, free-market economies, and individual sovereignty).

  Over the past decade, Brakey grew disheartened as he watched out-of-staters move to southern Maine, and felt that the state was “lurching very aggressively in a more progressive direction.” After COVID, when Maine and many other nearby states enacted policies around masking, vaccines, and social distancing, Brakey saw New Hampshire as his out, or as he calls it, “the only state in New England moving in a direction of freedom.” He was particularly interested in the Free State Project, a movement to establish a voting bloc large enough to have a significant political impact. “It seemed to me to be the only Libertarian strategy working in the country,” he says.

  And, yes, here it is:

  It’s not all welcome wagons and easy politicking, though. Brakey knows there is “tension, primarily with left-wing progressives who would like New Hampshire to be more like its neighboring states.” He prescribes a love-it-or-leave-it approach. “They want it to be a progressive state, to which we say, ‘If you really don’t like the live-free-or-die spirit of New Hampshire, there’s every other state in New England.’”

  Eric is now the FSP's Executive Director. We haven't met, but I will keep my eyes open.

• If only it were that easy. Frederick Alexander offers a decoded version The DEI Phrasebook. He lists 10 phrases and what they really mean. I have a comment about this one:

  4. “Educate yourself”

  You’ve probably come across this rebuke in a comment section at some point. Perhaps it was directed at you after saying “all lives matter” in what you thought was a noble, unifying sentiment we can all agree upon. Educate yourself.

  This is a phrase professional activists and scolds deploy when they can’t defend their position. It’s the go-to for transforming intellectual laziness into moral superiority.

  What “educate yourself” really means is this: read the approved texts so as to arrive at the conclusions I agree with – what we used to call indoctrination. Any other outcome is seen as proof of moral and intellectual deficiency.

  Real education, of course, involves weighing evidence, considering counter-arguments, and risking being wrong, which is why the progressive ideologues hate it.

  I picked this one thanks to some opinionated signage I saw this morning on Maine Route 236 coming north out of Kittery: "Educate before you vaccinate". Which is not a slogan commonly employed by "progressive ideologues". But Frederick's characterization holds true otherwise, I think.

• Just a reminder. There will be plenty of one-year summaries of Trump II coming to your local media outlets. Brian Doherty is a few days early with his unsparing take: Year 1 of Trump's second term was a libertarian's nightmare.

  A decade into his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first, and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk, descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know.

  Near the end of the first full year of his second administration, Donald Trump has demonstrated his core authoritarianism so completely and consistently that his personal character and comportment peculiarities lose significance.

  Just in the past week, since his piratical and unconstitutional imperial conquest of Venezuela, he's declared that he, from his own personal ukase, is taking command of a dizzying range of economic and foreign policy matters, from his planned further imperial conquest of Greenland (accompanied by declarations from his satrap Steven Miller and himself that no external force or authority holds back his powers to conquer and wreak destruction on the world) to dictating how weapons contractors can compensate their executives or deal with their stocks, the interest rate credit card companies can charge, and whether certain companies can buy houses.

  He doesn't sound like a fan.

• Attack of the killer tomatoes? No! According to the Ars Technica headline, the real threat is from a different phylum altogether: Wild mushrooms keep killing people in California; 3 dead, 35 poisoned.

  A third person has died in a rash of poisonings from wild, foraged mushrooms in California, health officials report.

  Since November, a total of 35 people across the state have been poisoned by mushrooms, leading to three people receiving liver transplants in addition to the three deaths. Health officials in Sonoma County reported the latest death last week.

  When you're immersed in MSM headlines that begin "Guns kill…" it is only a baby step to headlines that imply evildoing to mushrooms.

  Consumer tip: don't eat death cap mushrooms. There, that was easy.

Recently on the book blog:

I'm really straining for the proper words to describe Steve Martin's writings here. Maybe an example? I stuck a Post-It next to this paragraph, which describes a New York City party attended by Mirabelle, the heroine of Steve's novel Shopgirl:

As the evening loosens, confounding the normal progress of a party, the conversations gel into one, and the topic, rather than jumping wildly from politics to schools for kids to the latest medical treatments, also gels into one. And the topic is lying. They all admit that without it, their daily work cannot be done. In fact, someone says, lying is so fundamental to his existence that it has ceased to be lying at all and has transmogrified into a variant of truth. However, several of them admit that they never like, and everyone in the room knows it's because they have become so rich that lying has become unnecessary and pointless, Their wealth insulates them even from lawsuits.

What do you think? Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, right? But it is (I think) witty and sharply observed. That's probably as close as I can get to a book description. While adding in that the book often leans toward the offbeat and ludicrous.

The book collects some previous work, including two novels, Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company.

I had previously read Shopgirl in pre-blog days. It's the story of Mirabelle, who sells gloves at the Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. She has artistic aspirations, but her life is otherwise pretty barren. Until she meets Ray Porter, a rich but lonely businessman. The rise and eventual fall of their relationship is chronicled. As mentioned above, it's rarely laugh-out-loud funny, although one bit revolving around mistaken identity is pretty good.

I found The Pleasure of My Company to be more accessible and interesting. The protagonist, and first-person narrator, is Daniel Pecan Cambridge, living in a downscale Santa Monica apartment, and sufferer of some pretty serious neuroses. For example, he cannot navigate curbs. To cross a street in his neighborhood, he has to find two driveways exactly lined up on either side. He has obsessions: magic squares, counting ceiling tiles, making sure the illumination in his apartment is a certain wattage. He's somewhat obsessed with three women: Clarissa, a shrink-trainee who comes periodically to (unsuccessfully) counsel him; Dorothy, a real estate agent trying to lease apartments in the complex across the street; and Zandy, who works at the pharmacy he frequents. Of these, only Clarissa knows Daniel exists. Although that changes as the book progresses.

Interspersed with the two novels are some short pieces, some old (and published in the New Yorker), and some not previously published. These are often bizarre. Example: "Shouters" imagines people who (unrequested) follow people around and shout works of literature at them. Like "Airport" or "Being and Nothingness". Okay. Glad Steve didn't expand that into a novel!

I'm not a huge fan of the Federal Reserve; at best, it's a clumsy fit into the US Constitutional order. But I'm even less of a fan of Trump's obvious lawfare to get his way on Fed-set interest rates. So let's take a look at some of the reactions, ranging from the semi-humorous to the spittle-flecked:

Jeff Maurer manages to link the Fed stuff with another top story: Trump Should Just Charge Jerome Powell with the Minnesota Shooting.

And Jeff's suggestion is… well you see his headline up there. Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess.

John R. Puri goes (accurately) metaphorical: Trump Sets the House on Fire with Himself Locked Inside. (NR gifted link)

That's a free link, so continue reading about the obscene stupidity.

Alex Tabarrok comments on Chairman Powell's Statement.

For a good example of "toadies and ideological loyalists", see… well, Trump's cabinet. (Has Pam Bondi quit in disgust yet?)

There is a new substack, apparently set up to hold a single article: a Statement on the Federal Reserve from (in alphabetical order): Ben S. Bernanke, Jared Bernstein, Jason Furman, Timothy F. Geithner, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Glenn Hubbard, Jacob J. Lew, N. Gregory Mankiw, Henry "Call me Hank" M. Paulson, Kenneth Rogoff, Christina Romer, Robert E. Rubin, and Janet "Can't you hear me" Yellen.

As noted above, I am not the Fed's biggest fan, but … it's what we got.

Also of note:

• Without even mentioning the Fed. David Bahnsen looks at The Saddest Part of This Recent Economic Lunacy. (archive.today link)

  Economic conservatives find themselves increasingly isolated in today’s politics as the reality of horseshoe theory plays out in the current populist moment. This past week, President Donald Trump explicitly suggested all four of the following policy ideas, some taken verbatim from the policy portfolio of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren:

  1. An outright ban on institutional buying (if those investors own more than one hundred properties) of single-family residential real estate
  2. Government control of executive compensation at defense and aerospace companies, along with, under loosely defined circumstances, a ban on such companies’ returning capital (whether by share buybacks or dividends) to investors
  3. The implementation of quantitative easing by ordering the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities
  4. A federally imposed limit of 10 percent on the interest rates that credit cards can charge borrowers

  Of that list, only No. 3 is arguably allowed within the powers of the presidency (and even that only because the federal government has foolishly maintained the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie 17 years past their demise). To the president’s credit, his Truth Social announcement regarding No. 1 (a ban on institutional ownership of residential real estate) acknowledged a need to get the codification of Congress. But even if all of these ideas go the way of his 50-year-mortgage idea of not that long ago (it has already been abandoned), even mere ideation on social media carries consequences. Not only do these proposals stroke the emotions of his populist base that demands that the government “do something,” but they offer credibility and support to future endeavors to do the same thing that may prove more serious and substantive.

  "Other than that, though, they're fine!"

• Pun Salad endorses. Since 2008, I've been on record as agreeing with people who find the Pledge of Allegiance "kinda creepy". Nikolai G. Wenzel joins the club, and describes his own solution: Why I Pledge Allegiance to the Constitution.

  I don’t much care for the pledge of allegiance. This got me into a bit of hot water when I was the convocation speaker at Hillsdale College, standing on the stage right next to the flag, silent and polite, while the assembled faculty and studentry recited the pledge.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love the “standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” And I confess I’ve gotten misty-eyed when I’ve seen Old Glory flown around a rodeo arena, as the sun is setting over the Rocky Mountains.

  Alas, the pledge of allegiance had an ugly midwife: the Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy, who was kicked out of his Boston pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism. Not for me, the pledge to a symbol or the Hegelian nation. And not for me a pledge that was accompanied by the Bellamy salute, until it was quietly dropped during World War II because it looked a little too much like Nazi theatrics.

  The pledge was a clever work of Progressivism. It inculcated allegiance to the state and the abstract patria, while ignoring the bedrock of American liberty, the US Constitution — because its pesky constraints might otherwise thwart wise leaders who can fix all of our problems with the stroke of a regulatory or legislative pen. 

  I am, however, ready to pledge allegiance to the Constitution.

  Nikolai doesn't even mention the inherent idolatry; as a moderate fan of the Ten Commandments, that's another thumb on the anti-Pledge side of the scale.

Recently on the book blog:

I've been a Dave Barry fanboy for a Real Long Time Now. I snapped up his early Rodale Press books as he emitted them. (Earliest: The Taming of the Screw, from 1983. Forty-two years ago! Beat that!) My first blog reference to Dave was when Pun Salad was less than a month old in March 2005, and I grep about 150 references here since then.

I haunted his Miami Herald website, and now subscribe to his Substack. As far as his books go, I'm not a completist, but I'm on the edge.

His latest book is a memoir, and it is pretty good. It is deeply personal in spots, for example in detailing the health woes of his parents. (Dad was an alcoholic; Mom was funny, but also suffered from chronic depression, eventually committing suicide.) Other areas are off-limits: nothing about his first two wives, other than to point out he's not writing anything about his first two wives.

Like me, he's a boomer (only a few years older than I). So there are a number of shared experiences, at which I nodded my head in recognition. Like, we both went to college.

The book is peppered with sharp observations, like this, on the state of the book biz:

Guess how many copies a book has to sell in a week to make it onto a [New York Times] list. Never mind, I'll tell you: a thousand books, give or take. That's right: If, in a given week, the number of people in the entire world who buy your book is slightly less than the average attendance at a single game of the Central California minor league baseball team the Modesto Nuts, then your book could be a New York Times bestseller.

This is supported by a definitive-looking footnote.

But there are also plenty of anecdotes. many hilarious. For example, the tales surrounding the "Rock Bottom Remainders", the sub-mediocre band composed of relatively famous authors. They occasionally drew actual musicians as temporary members, like Bruce Springsteen. (Yes, Dave recounts, the Boss was his backup singer on "Gloria". That would have been something to experience.)

He also excerpts a lot from his past writings. Which is a cheap way to get your page count up there, but I'm not complaining. His example "Mr. Language Person" column was funny enough to bring tears to my eyes.

There's a chapter devoted to politics; for a few election cycles, Dave followed the candidates even up to the frozen wasteland that is New Hampshire during the primary season. His odyssey over the years went from mildly Democrat to mostly-libertarian (with a very small l). (I'm pretty much a mirror image. A funhouse mirror.) He observes, correctly, that politics ain't that funny any more.

پاینده ایران ❤️🤍💚 pic.twitter.com/JScg6D0mah

— Alireza Firouzja (@AlirezaFirouzja) January 10, 2026

Found thanks to my Google LFOD News Alert, which pointed to this Times of India story. Specifically, from their Sports Desk!

I am impressed with the multi-culturism involved: an Indian newspaper with a story about a French chess champ pleading for the liberation of Iran, using our state's motto. (Which, in turn, probably derived from a French revolutionary motto: "Vivre Libre ou Mourir".)

Firouzja is originally from Iran. According to Wikipedia, he "left the Iranian Chess Federation in 2019 because of the country's longstanding policy against competing with Israeli players." And he became a French citizen in 2021.

It appears that Iran is having a deadly-serious LFOD period, its citizens putting themselves in actual peril in protest against their tyrannical regime. Hundreds have been killed in response.

In contrast, I'm safe and snug here at Pun Salad Manor, content with displaying the motto on my Impreza's plates. Iran puts that in perspective.

Also of note:

• I used to raise my eyebrows, now I just roll my eyes. Like me, Virginia Postrel isn't a fan of the New Crudity:

  The world would be safer if protesters and law enforcement officers of all types would refrain from saying "fucking" all the time.

  — Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) January 9, 2026

  I'd add "politicians" to that.

• But enough seriousness. I replied to @GovernorAnne, who tweeted about a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix with an interesting name:

  Perhaps we could establish NH-AZ trade relations. pic.twitter.com/KsBNr8YB8b

  — Paul Sand (@punsalad) January 11, 2026

  I don't often drive through Gonic on NH's Route 125, but I usually smile a bit when I pass by Just Oil and More. I've never stopped by, though. Maybe I should pop in and ask if they have tacos.

• He is 82, but Michael Palin can still make me laugh. A recent appearance on the "No Such Thing As A Fish" proved it:

  In which he reveals the word the BBC would not allow on-air during the All England Summarize Proust Competition.

Megan McCardle explains: Why people see what they want in protests and police shootings. (WaPo gifted link)

Megan's column is very good. Even if you've picked your side on the Renée Good, check it out and beseech yourself, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

And while you're at it, ponder Mr. Ramirez's cartoon; it never hurts to wonder if we can do better.

I miss Mrs. Salad, my dear wife, every day, but I miss her even more when I see articles like this on at the College Fix: ‘Queer food’ course at Boston U. explores what ‘polyamorous’ and ‘non-binary’ people eat.

I would have loved to see her reaction. There's a video, and it's kind of a hoot:

That's Boston University Metropolitan College Gastronomy Director Megan Elias, and BU's description says she "explores just what makes some food 'queer,' and explains the way food studies can help us interrogate gender roles and norms in societies, and even the wider world."

You might be asking: are they kidding? I know I was.

But apparently not. There's an actual book, co-edited by Megan, at Amazon (link at your right). And here's YouTube's transcript of the BU video:

For those keeping score at home: I count 9 occurrences of "right". That's a lot, right?

And the handwaving, both figuative and literal? Off the charts!

My own reaction is (mostly) amazement that BU thought the Whole Wide World would be favorably impressed with their example of what their "amazing food studies students" are being taught. But (as I do not need to tell you) make up your own mind on that.

Also: Gastronomy Director Elias waves the book containing the "Savage Sausage Salad" recipe at the camera, but not closely enough so we can get the title. Sounds as if it might be tasty, though I can't promise that making it would make me interrogate gender roles.

Also of note:

• Speaking of interrogating gender roles… John R. Puri notes the latest transition: And Now Trump Is Taking Over Defense Contractors. (archive.today link)

  People say this administration is anti-trans, but the president himself is rapidly transitioning into a woman. Namely, Elizabeth Warren.

  First, he went after institutional investors buying up homes, a longtime bugaboo of the Massachusetts progressive. Warren was quick to take credit for Trump’s proposal to ban large landlords from the rental market, and she’s right to claim it. But, just like the president’s campaign pitch to exempt tips from income tax, mindless economic policies tend to jump the fine line between right-wing and left-wing populism.

  Now, Trump is embracing another of Warren’s favorite premises: that private companies that do business with the government should therefore be controlled by the government. If corporations depend on the government for revenue or assistance, she believes, public officials should be able to set the terms of their existence. With a federal bureaucracy as expansive and intrusive as ours, that means a lot of firms are eligible for manipulation. Under this formulation, contractors aren’t just service providers; they are the rightful domain of the state.

  First, he went after institutional investors buying up homes, a longtime bugaboo of the Massachusetts progressive. Warren was quick to take credit for Trump’s proposal to ban large landlords from the rental market, and she’s right to claim it. But, just like the president’s campaign pitch to exempt tips from income tax, mindless economic policies tend to jump the fine line between right-wing and left-wing populism.

  OK, the trans stuff is funny, but probably unwarranted. Where Senator Liz and President Bone Spurs are truly akin is in their naked desire for power and control over what we used to call the "private sector".

• Or for a different sort of transitioning… Is the president turning into a different species? A cuter one? George Will notes that we have A president who treats Washington like his chew toy. (WaPo gifted link)

  It is incongruous that Donald Trump, who advertises his disdain for things European, wants to give us something that no one in his or her right mind wants: a knockoff of France’s Arc de Triomphe. Which is bad enough.

  Worse, he wants to situate it on a Washington site where it will clutter one of the world’s great urban vistas. He would place it on the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge, below the Custis-Lee mansion, which sits on high ground in what became Arlington National Cemetery.

  […]

  Given Trump’s gargantuan exercises of executive discretion regarding great matters of state, it might seem quaint to wonder why he cannot be stopped from treating Washington as his chew toy. This would be unworthy of our nation if he had exquisite taste. The fact that he revels in being a vulgarian takes a toll on the nation’s soul.

  Back when I lived in the D.C. area, the Kennedy Center (aka the "Shoebox on the Potomac") was everyone's favorite example of lousy local architecture. Trump seems to be saying "Hold my beer."

• Nuuk is lovely this time of year. Tyler Cowen says ‘Buying’ Greenland Is Not an Option. Or at least it shoudn't be. But:

  After catching President Donald Trump’s eye in his first term, Greenland has reemerged as a prospect for U.S. acquisition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers that the U.S. seeks to buy the island, Trump asserts that we need it for defense reasons, and White House adviser Stephen Miller insists that Greenland should “obviously” be part of the United States.

  Overall, I am becoming more nervous rather than pleased, as I hold two views firmly: The United States eventually should come into possession of Greenland; and right now, the United States should back off altogether.

  Where do those views—seemingly at odds—come from, and how do they fit together?

  Tyler envisions the best case for Greenland as eventually getting a similar status as Puerto Rico enjoys today. I'm inclined to agree, because he's thought about it, and I haven't. (I'm a little puzzled as to why Denmark wants to hold onto it.)

• A side effect of electing "fighting fighters that fight". As Jim Geraghty points out, Elected Officials Don’t Really Want Peace or Calm. He compares the statements made out in Portland, Oregon in response to a shooting incident. Contrasting the just-the-facts remarks of (unelected) Portland Police Chief Bob Day and (unelected) DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin with (elected) Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, (elected) Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, (elected) Oregon State Senator Kayse Jama, and (apparently also elected) chair of Multnomah County, Jessica Vega Pederson.

  Read for yourself! Jim's conclusion:

  To sum up, right after the police chief called for calm, the mayor warned that “reckless” “militarized agents” who cannot be trusted are bringing violence to the streets “all across America.” The governor warned that “lawless,” “reckless,” untrustworthy agents of the federal government “are hurting people and they are destroying day by day what we hold dear.” The state senate majority leader declared his intention to legislatively impede the federal agents, pledged to “fight” for it, and told federal agents they need to “get the hell out of our community.” And the county chair accused federal agents of shooting people, causing “terror and violence,” called them “a threat that is growing every day,” and says they are “cruel and authoritarian.”

  Good to see everyone is on the same page urging the public to “remain calm,” right?

  None of these elected officials really want the public to remain calm or peaceful. Mumbling some brief pro forma call for peace does not mitigate the lurid demonization of federal law enforcement officials. If you consistently describe U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as an illegitimate occupation force committing acts of violent terror against innocent people, then not every last member of your citizenry is going to respond peacefully.

  Jim further observes that public officials "show up to the fire with a firehose full of gasoline." That's what you get with demagogues. Their first instinct.

Fun fact: Amazon has a dizzying array of mugs that refer to pronoun usage, including today's Eye Candy. Without downloading them all, a sampling of other messages you can buy:

• "What a Beautiful Day to Respect Other People's Pronouns"
• "She/Her/Hers/Respect my pronouns"
• "They/Them"
• "He/Him/He/Him/He/Him/He/Him/He/Him"
• "I Identify as a Conspiracy Theorist/My Pronouns are Told/You/So"
• "I Identify as a Threat/My Pronouns are Try/Me"
• "I Identify as Bacon/My Pronouns are Fat/Salty"
• "My Pronouns are He/Hee"

… and many more. Why do I get a vision of an early morning department meeting where all the participants bring in their dueling pronoun mugs, conducting silent passive-aggressive arguments up and down the conference table?

Well, that's probably not what Jeff Maurer has in mind when he makes his plea: I’m Begging the Media to Start Unpacking the Word “We”.

Me too, and for a long time. My main irk-cause is the "warm collectivism" blanket that people want to sneak into the conversation: "Our homes"; "Our bodies"; "Our data"; and (especially) "Our children".

Which brings to mind this old Jonah Goldberg excerpt:

Also of note:

• And about time, too. Veronique de Rugy Minnesota Welfare Scandal Is the Fraud Warning Americans Finally Noticed.

  Growing national outrage over Minnesota's welfare fraud is justified, but not because of where it took place or because it implicates members of any immigrant community. It's much more than a "Minnesota" story.

  The outrage is justified because Americans are finally getting a concrete look at what happens when pushing public money out the door matters more than verifying the eligibility of the recipients, confirming services were delivered or, ultimately, being a good steward of taxpayers' money.

  Since 2022, investigators have uncovered a staggering amount of fraud, including $250 million siphoned from pandemic-era child nutrition programs to a network of individuals and shell companies, and have secured dozens of indictments with more prosecutions underway. But it goes beyond that.

  Way beyond. Vero's near-bottom line rings true: "If we want less fraud, we need less government."

• These people are unwell. And the major problem is at the top. Noah Rothman notes something that may have been missed in all the Venezuela/ICE/Minnesota/Epstein hoopla: Trump Administration Goes Full Tinfoil Hat in Revisionist History of January 6. (archive.today link)

  He's talking about the White House's "j6" page. And:

  The document goes off the rails at the outset — in the introduction, to be exact. In it, Trump’s aides hail the president’s “blanket pardons” of the January 6 convicts. Trump “ordered immediate release of those still imprisoned, ending years of harsh solitary confinement,” the White House’s account reads, “denied due process, and family separation for exercising their First Amendment rights.”

  In fact, the majority of the January 6 convicts were found guilty of misdemeanors and sentenced only to probation. The only people that Trump could spring from prison were those who had been convicted of more serious, even violent, offenses. And there were a lot of them. As I wrote at the time:

  Devlyn Thompson attacked a police officer with a metal baton. Robert Palmer bludgeoned another officer with a fire extinguisher, among other items of debris he could find strewn about the ransacked Capitol steps. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the faces of three Capitol Hill police officers. David Dempsey used all these weapons and more in his frenzied attack on law enforcement. They are free today, along with those who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for the preparation and planning that culminated in that premeditated act of mass violence.

  In addition, federal courts have rejected the claim that some of the criminal charges brought against the rioters represented a violation of their First Amendment rights. As U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote in the case of the Proud Boys defendants, “There were many avenues for defendants to express their opinions about the 2020 presidential election.” Whatever the “expressive aspect” of protests might have been, “it lost whatever First Amendment protection it may have had” at the outset of the violence.

  Adjectives like "shameful" and "delusional" are simply way too mild.

• They banned Mickey Mouse's dog? Oh, never mind. The College Fix headline is referring to a different beast: ‘Ban on Plato’: Professor says Texas A&M censored materials in contemporary morals class.

  A philosophy professor says Texas A&M University recently demanded that he remove sections about “race” and “gender ideology” – including readings by Plato – from his spring “Contemporary Moral Issues” class to comply with a new course review directive.

  “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented,” Professor Martin Peterson wrote in a letter to his department chair, which he shared with The College Fix Wednesday.

  I strongly suspect we got a good example of malicious compliance here. Bolstered by paragraphs further down in the story:

  At the center of the matter is a new syllabi and course review directive that the university’s Board of Regents adopted in December. It requires deans and department leaders to flag “material advocating race or gender ideology or sexual orientation” for “adjustments,” starting with classes in the spring semester.

  The move followed the regents’ November approval of a civil rights policy that states, “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.”

  The actions relate to larger efforts by Texas conservatives to crack down on diversity, equity, and inclusion and other political and ideological advocacy in the classroom.

  It's tough to "crack down" on DEI/woke indoctrination without also hitting Plato, I guess.

• I can't go with the "crime" part. So I disagree with James Piereson's headline at the New Criterion: Socialism is a hate crime.

  It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, at least judging by the cult status of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now an avowed socialist has been elected mayor of New York, the commercial capital of the United States and home to that great capitalist institution, the stock market. Even more recently, socialists here and around the world have spoken out in unison against the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela.

  It is ironic that these socialists, along with their supporters and fellow travelers, like to censor conservatives for, allegedly, promoting “hate” and “division.” On that basis, they have banned conservative speakers from appearing on college campuses, and just a few years ago urged Twitter and Facebook to close the accounts of conservatives who spoke out against socialism.

  This raises the question: given the historical record, why don’t we label socialism as a hate crime?

  Well, James, it's because "isms" are not crimes. At least not in America.

  Even though I mostly agree with everything else you're saying.

Recently on the book blog:

This book by Peter Swanson was on Tom Nolan's WSJ list of the Best Mysteries of 2025 (WSJ gifted link). Tom's not always a reliable guide for me, but he got it right this time.

It does require a pretty capacious definition of "mystery", though. Not much whodunit content here. Sentence one is: "The first attempt at killing her husband was the night of the dinner party." That's Wendy, her perhaps-doomed husband is Thom.

I've read a few of Peter Swanson's novels, and (looking back at my book reports) the word that sticks out is "gimmick". Usually that's not a compliment, but Swanson makes his gimmicks work. Here, it's that Wendy's and Thom's story is told in reverse-chronological order, starting in 2023, going all the way back to 1982. Hints and references are made along the way about sordid past events, which will be described in subsequent chapters. That's kind of the opposite of foreshadowing; is "backshadowing" a word? "Aftshadowing"?

Reader, if you don't want the book spoiled, do not even glance sideways at the last page. You may not find that ending satisfying, but I did.

He was alert enough to find and tweet this:

Question: Democrats have said the Venezuela operation was illegal. Should service members have refused to obey those orders?

Kelly: That’s different from what I meant. pic.twitter.com/auUAhRmtJ2

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 7, 2026

The "Lensman" (an E.E. "Doc" Smith fan?) paraphrases Senator Kelly's wordy response to Jake Tapper's simple questions, perhaps unfairly. Somewhat more convincingly, Matt Margolis at PJMedia ("Jake Tapper Accidentally Exposed Mark Kelly’s ‘Illegal Orders’ Hypocrisy") is a little more substantive:

If Senator Kelly, who claims to have given much thought to these questions, can't give a straightforward answer, how does he expect some lowly grunt in the trenches to do any better, probably at risk of his career and freedom?

Also of note:

• A handy guide. Charles C.W. Cooke offers advice on How Not to Think About the ICE Shooting in Minnesota. (archive.today link)

  I am not entirely sure what I think about what happened in Minnesota yesterday. On balance, I think that the ICE officer was likely legally justified in his actions, even if I wish that it had turned out differently, but I am always open to counter-arguments, as well as to the emergence of new evidence. These cases are always difficult, and they usually revolve around minutiae. That the crucial details of the event have immediately been swallowed up by maximalist sloganeering is unhelpful in the extreme.

  Charlie lays out seven (!) possible psychological traps to avoid. I have one simple guideline, furnished by Yeats:

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst
  Are full of passionate intensity.

  So don't be like those guys.

• Not so fast, I still have cousins there! But (on the other hand) I can understand Jeffrey Blehar's attitude, even if it seems to be "full of passionate intensity": To Hell with Minnesota. (archive.today link)

  It is late and I am tired. Specifically, I am tired of Minnesota.

  Others, both here at National Review and across the media, are currently talking and writing about today’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE officer. Was it a “good shoot,” or a blatant crime? Will the city burn once more? Are these the inevitable results of federal intervention? What’s the Somali angle in all this? These are good and important questions, and everyone here — and I hope at least a few elsewhere — will have smart and informed takes. Not me, though. Me? I don’t care.

  … or maybe he lacks all conviction. I can see that too.

• Letting the door hit them in the ass on the way out. Issues&Insights has thoughts on U-Haul data: The Great Divorce Continues.

  When U-Haul released its latest “Growth Index” this week, it made us wonder if blue states will ever get a clue.

  Once again, the index found a strong migration out of blue states and into red states.

  “Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee follow Texas as prime destinations. It’s the same top five from 2024 and 2023, although in a different order,” the company said.

  The biggest losers: California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.

  Of the top 10 growth states, nine voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 and seven currently have Republican governors.

  Disappointing: New Hampshire is closer to the "wrong" end of the list (32nd place). Even though Massachusetts is even closer to the bottom (46th place), it appears Bay State emigrés mostly aren't coming here, apparently preferring Vermont (24th place) or Maine (15th place).

• The official diagnosis of the National Review editors: Mamdani Housing Official Cea Weaver Is a Lunatic.

  If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States. She believes that “rent control is a perfect solution to everything” — not least because it is an “effective way to shrink the value of real estate.” She considers that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy,” she believes that “homeownership is racist,” and she holds that the highest aim of government ought to be to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” And they say that ambition is dead in America!

  And that's not all the symptoms they found! I hate beating up on the mentally ill, but is she really the best choice even a commie like the Zohran could make?

• OK, let's beat up on Cea just one more time. Or we can let the WSJ editorialists do it: Cea Weaver and the Socialist Crybullies. (WSJ gifted link)

  It’s been a tough week for Cea Weaver, the socialist activist appointed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to lead his Office to Protect Tenants. First her old tweets began to recirculate, including previous assertions that “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy” and calls to “seize private property.”

  Then on Wednesday news reporters confronted Ms. Weaver on the street and asked if she wanted to comment on her mother’s ownership of a home in Nashville that the Daily Mail said is valued at $1.4 million. “The 37-year-old began running down the street,” the paper’s Natasha Anderson wrote, “then said ‘No’ through tears.”

  Tina Fey would have been a better choice, I think. She wouldn't run away or cry, anyway.

• Best of luck in your future endeavors! Dominic Pino, from his Washington Post perch bids farewell and… Good riddance, Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (WaPo gifted link)

  If an organization cannot survive without federal funding, it isn’t really private. This truth is lost on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which saw its taxpayer funding eliminated by Congress in 2025 and said on Monday that it had formally disbanded.

  Despite being established by Congress, receiving its funds from taxpayers and having the word “public” in its name, the CPB says it is a “private corporation funded by the American people.” Its statement announcing the decision to dissolve the organization called the CPB a “private, nonprofit corporation.”

  It’s true that the CPB was not a government agency. But it only existed as a conduit for government money to flow to PBS and NPR stations. When Congress rescinded that money, the CPB began to wind down. Now, that process is complete.

  Dominic makes a pretty standard libertarian argument against the CPB. What's really amusing is the continuing freakout among the readers in the Comments section. As I type, the top "Recommended" comment (picked from the 1691 entered as I type, with 987 upvotes) begins:

  Dominic Pino's association with the National Review tells you everything you need to know about his worldview, and the hard-right turn the Washington Post has taken in the past year. Bezos and his minions are presiding over the destruction of a once-great American institution.

  That's everything you need to know, readers! Don't bother with understanding, let alone rebutting his argument!

  Yet another favorite Pun Salad quote, this one from Comrade Vladimir Lenin:

  Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.

That's what came to my mind, anyway. Jeff Maurer had a similar reaction: It’s Getting Hard to Take the Fifa Peace Prize Seriously.

I think Jeff wrote this before Trump mentioned his ongoing Greenland obsession:

Rand Simberg embeds this perspective-jarring tweet, as he pleads Stop Using Mercator Projection:

Greenland - As viewed from a proper map

Why Greenland? Well because Moscow bases almost all of their strategic military assets on the Kola Peninsula next to Finland. This is where the Russian ICBM silos, submarine bases, and their strategic bombers are.

If you look at the… pic.twitter.com/z6qECCJ3u5

— Object Zero (@Object_Zero_) January 6, 2026

I got nothin' more to say about that.

Also of note:

• Pursued by a pheasant? Kevin D. Williamson notes a recent stage direction, perhaps as imagined by Chuck Jones: Exit Fudd. (archive.today link)

  Republicans are easily gobsmacked by celebrities—no matter how minor, from Ted Nugent to Scott Baio—but Democrats, perhaps more disturbingly, are easily ensorceled by another kind of exotic specimen: a white man with a gun. 

  The Minnesota governor who (you may have forgotten) was on the 2024 ballot as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick excited Democrats because he was a pheasant hunter. A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds.

  Walz was an evolution of the type: In 2004, when Democrats were trying to make an everyman of Sen. John Kerry, the haughtiest New England snoot ever to mount a sailboard, they put a gun in his hands and stuffed him into a camouflage jacket. When observers noted that the aristocratic senator apparently was too good to carry his own bird, he protested that his mind was elsewhere, thinking about some regular-guy stuff: “I’m still giddy over the Red Sox,” he said. “It was hard to focus.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat and veteran who represents the Boston suburbs, talks about constantly having a rifle in his hand as a Marine and recently declared: “Selling AR-15s at Walmart to teenagers is not just dangerous, it also undermines the military ethic.” Rep. Auchincloss might be happy to know that, here in the real world, Walmart does not sell AR-15s to teenagers—or to anybody else—and hasn’t for more than a decade. Democrats can never get this stuff quite right.

  For fun, imagine Governor Walz at some future press conference: "Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet, I'm hunting fwauds!"

• What's "rugged" about it anyway? Jonah Goldberg has thoughts: About That ‘Rugged Individualism’ …. (archive.today link) Inspired by Mayor Mamdani's inaugural promise: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

  The term “rugged individualism” was coined by President Hoover in 1928. But we have Democrats to thank for its immortality because Democrats—and democratic socialists—have been running against it, and against Hoover, ever since. FDR campaigned in 1932 by denouncing Hoover’s “doctrine of American individualism” and never really stopped suggesting that Hoover and his party were fanatically anti-government, favoring “devil take the hindmost” capitalism.

  The attacks on Hoover and conservatives generally as libertarian zealots remain ingrained in the popular, journalistic, and academic imagination to this day. And they were unfair from the start. A progressive Republican who’d served in the Wilson administration, Hoover was never the heartless advocate of do-nothing austerity his opponents painted. Indeed, government spending during Hoover’s four years in office nearly doubled in real terms (and, yes, Republicans controlled Congress).

  Jonah's plea, guaranteed to fall on deaf ears, is for political rhetoric to avoid easy caricature of opponents, and deal with the country as-is.

• Speaking of reality-based, I've been waiting for Andrew C. McCarthy to weigh in. And, sorry Nicolás, he has bad news for you: Legal Questions over the Maduro Extraction Won’t Help Him in Court. (NR gifted link)

  There are significant legal questions about the legitimacy vel non of the dictator Nicolás Maduro’s forcible extraction by U.S. armed forces, working in tandem with American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It is unlikely, however, that the federal criminal case against him in Manhattan’s Southern District of New York (SDNY) will be an effective forum for pressing any objections.

  As a matter of American law, unadorned by any treaty obligations, Maduro really hasn’t a leg to stand on. Even if illegality has attended the arrest of an accused, including any unlawful search of his person or premises, that would not vitiate the charges in an indictment. It would, at most, give the accused grounds to challenge the admissibility of any statements he may have made, or any evidence seized, at the time of arrest.

  Andrew also has a probing query for the Donald: What’s the Plan in Venezuela? (archive.today link) His bottom line:

  What’s the president’s plan? It’s not obvious that he has one. I don’t see how you restore deterrence by taking apparent ownership of (by leaving in place) the anti-American Marxist regime that was the supposed rationale for removing Maduro, while simultaneously encouraging China and Russia to believe they may be able to invade their neighbors with impunity.

  President Trump with a plan? To quote Hemingway one more time: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

• We're not sending our best. The WSJ editorialists are not impressed with the bouts further down on the card: The Kelly-Hegseth Grudge Match Helps No One. (WSJ gifted link)

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Pentagon is looking to punish retired Navy captain and now Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. His offense: appearing in a partisan social-media video warning troops not to obey illegal orders. This episode reflects well on nobody, and it will further poison the chances of a national defense consensus the country needs.

  Mr. Kelly isn’t an innocent here. He and five other Democratic lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds last year produced a video montage speaking “directly to members of the military.” The “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad,” the lawmakers said, “but from right here at home.” Sen. Kelly says specifically: “Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders.”

  Another quote from the past: "It's a pity they can't both lose." Instead, it's us.

I'm somewhat ashamed of missing this yesterday:

250 years ago today, New Hampshire was the first state to ratify its own constitution.

From the Pine Tree Riot to the presidential primaries, our First in the Nation legacy is still going strong — Live Free or Die! pic.twitter.com/sh5U3NQ6K3

— Governor Kelly Ayotte (@KellyAyotte) January 5, 2026

More information? Keith Whitaker writes In Defense of the Constitution of 1776.

Whitaker notes the bumpy road of New Hampshire government after the last royal governor, John Wentworth, fled to Long Island in 1775. (He wound up in Nova Scotia.)

As long as we're talking about New Hampshire, Ronny Chieng's comedy bit about state mottos is pretty funny, and guess which one he leads with:

There are some F-bombs in there, so use your own judgment on playing it within earshot of sensitive souls.

Continuing in the Granite State vein, I wondered a couple days ago how CongressCritter Maggie Goodlander (D-NH02) would square her gripes about the "legality" of Trump's Venezuela Venture with her previous demand that soldiers "refuse illegal orders". A CNNdroid made a feeble attempt to pin her down on what should have been a pretty straightforward question:

Democrat Maggie Goodlander refuses to answer if arresting narcoterrorist Nicolas Maduro was a good thing.

CNN: Do you think it’s a good thing that Maduro is no longer in power?

GOODLANDER: “…Here in New Hampshire we’re celebrating the 250th anniversary of our constitution.” pic.twitter.com/Qv85y6I3rr

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 5, 2026

Sure, Maggie.

Also of note:

• These dots need connecting. Jeffrey Miron makes a good libertarian point about Maduro, Venezuela, and the Drug War.

  Set aside the legal issues raised by the U.S. removal of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro (but see here and here for perspectives that make sense to me);

  And assume, as asserted by the Trump administration, that Maduro has been involved or complicit in the illegal drug trade, with adverse consequences for the United States such as violence, corruption, and overdoses.

  Under these -- the best case -- conditions, is removing Maduro good policy?

  Not even close.

  Removing Maduro might shift underground drug markets from Venezuela to other countries, temporarily, but even that is unlikely. And any disruption of the Venezuelan black market will likely exacerbate the adverse impacts of underground markets.

  The right policy is for the U.S. to legalize all currently prohibited drugs. This will eliminate underground drug markets, which are the real reason for most adverse consequences typically attributed to drugs.

  I'm ambivalent about Miron's foreign policy stance, but I think he's got a valid point about the drug war.

• Pun Salad gets results! I have little doubt that my posting of this cruel-but-true Michael Ramirez cartoon yesterday pushed Tim over the edge:

  

  Robby Soave is also happy about it: Tim Walz drops out of Minnesota governor race. Good riddance.

  With dark clouds gathering over his previously sunny reelection bid, Tim Walz has had enough. Minnesota's Democratic governor announced Monday he would abandon his pursuit of a third term following widespread negative publicity due to his mishandling of welfare fraud allegations.

  Walz has not been accused of personal wrongdoing, but the buck stops here, as they say. Walz was the man in charge while fraudsters stole millions, or perhaps billions, of taxpayer dollars by setting up fake charities, ransacking the medical system, and operating dubious child care services. The sheer amount of plunder has attracted national media attention in recent weeks, with even The New York Times throwing Walz under the bus.

  The governor's response has not reassured his critics that he is laser focused on restoring credibility to these programs and mercilessly prosecuting thieves. It is fine to insist, as Walz has, that the entire Somali diaspora not be smeared for the criminal behavior of some community members, but the governor has made a habit of trying to redirect blame to other groups, such as white men. This is unpersuasive, since the accusations against the Somalis are about proportionality, not absolute levels of crime. Moreover, saying that we must be color-blind with respect to the ethnicities of the fraudsters while also calling for more white men to be held accountable is totally incoherent.

  Totally incoherent? Well, he probably took lessons for that from Kamala.

• "Crime is common. Logic is rare." Allysia Finley speaks the truth: The Scandal of American Welfare Goes Beyond Fraud. (WSJ gifted link)

  Economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that the government pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up. This is an apt metaphor for progressive government these days: It creates social dysfunction, then shovels out money to correct it. Dredge, fill and repeat.

  Healthcare and social assistance added more than 1.6 million private-sector jobs between June 2023 and June 2025, according to comprehensive data from employer payrolls published by the Labor Department in December. Yet the U.S. gained only 1.3 million private jobs during that period, meaning there was a net loss of jobs in other industries.

  These two industries accounted for more than half of the new establishments (businesses and nonprofits) created over those two years. Minnesota’s welfare-fraud scandal make you wonder: How many of these new entities and their employees are actually helping people, and how many are merely looting the government?

  In case you aren't tired of it yet, one of Pun Salad's adages applies: "When Uncle Stupid starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets."

  (Headline quote source: Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches")

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

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

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

Also of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Mr. Trump:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recently on the book blog:

I almost feel like I have to apologize to the Child brothers for not liking their latest Reacher novel very much. They've done everything "right": they stuck to their tried-and-true script, they turned in the contractually obligated number of words, and Jack Reacher is pretty much the same character as seen in the 29 other books you'll find at Amazon.

But this one, I thought, was padded mercilessly in order to accomplish that word count. Need more pages? Add another character, another plot complication, another fight scene, a dead body or two! Eventually you'll get there.

Unfortunately, you also get a book that is the literary equivalent of a Rube Goldberg invention.

As often happens, Reacher gets sucked into this adventure via the usual amazing coincidence: he just happens to be drinking his favorite beverage in a Baltimore coffee shop, when he witnesses the setup to an obvious scam, a shabby-looking couple about to lose their life savings to a team of grifters. Reacher resolves that with a little timely violence, but that also makes him a target for revenge by the grifters' boss.

But wait, that's not all! There's been a grisly murder at the Baltimore Port Authority! It's been written off as an "accident" by the cops, but employee Nathan Gilmour knows otherwise, and (moreover) knows that he was the intended victim. His survival strategy sounds unlikely to work, but that doesn't matter, because (via a different amazing coincidence) it involves the same coffee shop that Reacher is inhabiting, and Reacher receives Gilmour's misguided plea for help. Thanks to (more coincidences) an unfortunate heart attack and mistaken identity.

Eventually, rough justice is delivered unto the bad guys, but it takes a large number of words.

Today's Eye Candy is explained at GettyImages: "Venezuelan citizens living in the city of Medellin, Colombia, celebrate the capture of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, following an attack by the United States."

The young lady's sign, fed to Google Translate, seems to be something like: "We want to return home, away from the dictatorship."

It was just a few days ago I mentioned my weakness on foreign policy stuff, "torn between a sensible isolationism on one hand, and not wanting to see bad guys win on the other." Add in an old-fashioned fealty to the Constitution, which (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11) says that war-declaration is a Congressional power, not the President's.

And of course, Maduro is one of the baddest of the bad guys. Shorn of other concerns, it's a win when he's taken off the board.

I am idly wondering what any of the six Democrats who gratuitously urged the military to "refuse illegal orders" back in November are saying now. Do they consider Trump's action illegal? Do they think the troops involved should have Just Said No?

One of those D's: New Hampshire's CongressCritter, Maggie Goodlander. Here's her Official Tweet:

My statement on American Military Action in Venezuela⬇️ pic.twitter.com/cLDmkJnwIL

— Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander (@RepGoodlander) January 3, 2026

Any service member looking for guidance from Maggie about whether to "refuse illegal orders" in this case will not find any definite advice here.

So, as I've said many times in the past: I link, you decide. First up is Clark Nelly from Cato: Venezuela—Indictments, Invasions, and the Constitution’s Crumbling Guardrails.

Nelly notes that the United States (under George H.W. Bush) did something similar to Panama's Noriega back in 1989, and that precedent might apply here. (Noriega died in prison back in 2017. I had to look that up.)

Jonathan Turley is OK with it: The United States Captures Nicolás Maduro and his Wife. He also invokes the Noriega Precedent.

But check out George Will's take: Trump goes monster-hunting, untainted by a whiff of legality. (WaPo gifted link) Skipping down to the bottom line:

Speaking of Andrew C. McCarthy: I don't think he's weighed in yet over at National Review. As I type, anyway.

Also of note:

• Steven Greenhut urges New Year Resolutions for the GOP: In 2026, Republicans will have to decide what comes after Trump.

  We've become numb to narcissistic rage posts from our president, but the highly publicized Turning Point USA convention last week offers a preview into where the Republican Party is going after Donald Trump exits the stage. It's not pretty. As we've seen recently in other squabbles within the conservative movement, the fireworks centered on the rhetoric of some conspiracy minded—but highly popular—right-wing personalities. TPUSA had it all: in-fighting, name-calling and innuendo.

  In the old days, the conservative movement tried to police itself, as it shoved authoritarians and conspiracy theorists to the sidelines. Buckley took on the John Birch Society, which in its zealous anti-communism argued the United States government was controlled by communists. Standing up to the Evil Empire was a core part of conservative philosophy, but Buckley realized that allowing the fever swamps to engulf his movement only tarnished that goal.

  Some critics argue Buckley wasn't all that successful, but he was successful enough to keep the party from becoming what it has become now—where reasonable voices are drowned out by the likes of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. If there are no adults in charge—and the party's leader acts like a toddler, as he savages his foes in petty tantrums, renames buildings after himself and adds insulting White House plaques below the portraits of former presidents—then the whole trashy movement will one day be heaved into the dumpster.

  I'd only make the point that to a limited extent the MSM are also guilty of amplifying the kooky/evil volces of Fuentes, Carlson, Owens, et al. They love to showcase those guys. (Much like, back in 2015-6, they loved to cover Trump, to the detriment of the less wacky candidates.)

So we're gonna talk about something else instead. Take it away, Mr. Heaton:

And I am not a fan of "studies show" arguments, but…

The Piketty-Zucman crowd has been telling us for over a decade that "inequality" is the main source of every social ill and malady on earth - even the fake ones that they imagine for political reasons.

Reality: inequality barely even registers as a sign of anything. https://t.co/kbcsJBpdvD

— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) January 2, 2026

Still, progressives don't really need even a "studies show" excuse for their eat-the-rich proposals. Instead, undisguised envy and resentment explains a lot.

The WaPo editorial board looks at a recent left-coast proposal and speculates: California will miss billionaires when they’re gone. (WaPo gifted link)

"One-time" and "just on the billionaires" are obvious foot-in-the-door tactics.

John Gustavsson also comments perceptively on the proposal: California, and the Worst Wealth Tax in the World. (NR gifted link)

John notes that it's much easier to move yourself and your assets from California to (say) New Hampshire than "from Sweden to Spain".

Also of note:

• We're still pretty steamed at the Zohran. Nellie Bowles' TGIF column talks not only about the wealth tax proposal, but also Minnesota's "Quality Learing Center"; the Epstein files; her wife's (Bari Weiss) battles with 60 Minutes; a Kenyan sex chatbot; last year's Palisades fire; and a David Mamet cartoon.

  But:

  So far our new Mayor Mamdani has announced: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” We’re doing communism, baby! It’s never been done before! Mamdani is everything we imagined. He’s the villain in an Ayn Rand novel, perfectly concocted. (My favorite part of his inauguration was Iris Schumer, whom I adore, sitting behind Mamdani with what the Daily Mail describes as “a face like thunder.” Me too, Iris. All I ever wanted was to live in a world run by Chuck and Iris, whatever new Bush family member Bohemian Grove selected, and Hillary Clinton. Instead, I’m going to be paying taxes to Zohran, who is immediately marching me to jail. Which one of you told him I was a debutante? You monster.)

  And more. I'm a Free Press subscriber. I don't know how much, if any, of Nellie's column is paywalled, so … here is an archive.today link. But you should subscribe.

• Also jeering the Zohran's inaugural address… Noah Rothman: One Man’s ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Is Another’s Inferno. (Here's another archive.today link)

  The nauseating draft managed to marry the gauzy romanticism of America’s aged flower children with the monomania of the Red Guards. It is a small comfort that the authors of that speech appear to genuinely believe true socialism has never been tried or else they would not have exhumed from their deserving graves so many threadbare socialist nostrums that reached their sell-by date on December 26, 1991. It’s not unreasonable to expect that this collection will prove to be about as good at governing as they are at speechwriting. Indeed, Mamdani himself tended with care to the trap he and his speechwriters set for his administration.

  In his address, the mayor chided the unnamed doubters who said that he should manage the sky-high expectations he himself had set. “The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations,” Mamdani declared. “Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously.” He would make New York City into a place where “there is no need too small to be met, no person too sick to be made healthy.” Indeed, in pledging to “govern without shame,” Mamdani made perhaps the only promise that he is all but certain to fulfill.

  So: if you want me, I'll be up here in New Hampshire.

• Did you have "Lawless and Indiscriminate Murder" on your Impeachment Bingo Card? Fill in that square, my friend. Jacob Sullum points out that Cocaine smugglers who don't get bombed often aren't even charged by the DOJ.

  The U.S. Coast Guard is still intercepting boats suspected of carrying illegal drugs, as it did for decades before Trump deemed that strategy insufficiently violent. Between September 1 and November 30, The New York Times reports, "the Coast Guard interdicted 38 vessels suspected of smuggling drugs." During the same period, the U.S. military blew up 22 suspected drug boats, killing 83 people. The smugglers who were lucky enough to be caught by the Coast Guard met a strikingly different fate: By and large, they were returned to their home countries because the Justice Department declined to prosecute them.

  Under U.S. law, the death penalty generally is not available in drug cases. But the Trump administration says cocaine couriers deserve death, delivered without legal authorization or any semblance of due process, because supplying Americans with the drugs they want is tantamount to murder. It also says cocaine couriers are committing crimes so minor that prosecuting them would be a waste of Justice Department resources. That blatant inconsistency exposes the fallacy of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression.

  I'll probably have something to say about Venezuela and Iran tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Ann Althouse captures a quote from "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

And she's not alone. Mediaite has a "pounce" headline: Conservatives Hit the Roof Over Mamdani’s Inauguration Day Vow to Bring ‘The Warmth of Collectivism’ to NYC. But they, to their credit, quote a number of tweeted reactions from Our Side. Picking a good one:

No, actually, we are Americans and we don’t believe in that shit https://t.co/o2QHKu8blV

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 1, 2026

Well, best of luck to NYC. Get used to hearing that Mencken quote quite a bit in the coming months:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Also of note:

• Now he tells us. Jason Willick points out The Epstein files fiasco was completely foreseeable. (WaPo gifted link)

  Who could have foreseen that the bipartisan trashing of hundreds of years of legal norms to satisfy political demand would not bring the catharsis supporters hoped for?

  Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) was the single member of Congress out of 535 to vote against the ongoing exercise known popularly as “releasing the Epstein files.” As Higgins — a former sheriff’s deputy — noted last month, the indiscriminate release of investigative material to the public “abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America.”

  That didn’t concern Higgins’s colleagues with fancy law degrees. They stampeded to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the Justice Department to release any information in its possession — real or fake, confirmed or unconfirmed — related to the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail in 2019. The Justice Department also has to publish any material, again regardless of its veracity, about anyone “referenced” in legal proceedings involving Epstein, and any “entities” with “ties” to Epstein’s “networks.” The bill authorizes redactions for information that could identify victims or interfere with current investigations.

  Needless to say, the Justice Department is not set up for document dumps. It’s set up to investigate crimes, build cases and punish those responsible. But now Congress’s herd of independent minds has ordered the department to toss its records into the political maelstrom, overriding grand jury secrecy and witness expectations of privacy. The result so far is an inconclusive muddle that has predictably satisfied no one. Consider what this pursuit of “transparency” has accomplished so far.

  I am not holding my breath until someone finds a pony amongst the piles of horseshit.

• It's a devouring black hole. Jeff Jacoby writes the obvious: Trump's ego isn't just unpresidential. It's un-Republican.

  DONALD TRUMP'S obsession with putting his name and face on things long ago passed the point of parody. So far in his second term as president, Trump has moved to affix his name or picture to public buildings and government websites, to national park passes and a savings account for babies, and to a special $1 million visa, the so-called Trump Gold Card, for rich foreigners. The Treasury Department plans to mint a commemorative $1 coin depicting Trump next year. There is even a proposed "Trump class" of US Navy warships.

  The president's "long love affair with his own name and likeness," as The New York Times recently described it, is certainly vulgar and narcissistic. But more than that, it is utterly at odds with the Republican presidential tradition. For most of the party's history, Republican chief executives generally refrained from personal self-glorification; many of them regarded it as a vice — something corrosive to judgment, dignity, and republican government itself.

  In that sense, Trump's self-worship, besides being a severe character flaw, amounts to a repudiation of one of the most consistent and admirable moral instincts of GOP leadership.

  Jeff doesn't even mention the Kennedy Center renaming.

  Really, there's something wrong with that guy.

• Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Veronique de Rugy asks the musical question: Should We Listen When Wealthy People Offer to Pay More in Taxes?

  There is something emotionally satisfying about watching a wealthy person call for higher taxes on people like himself. It feels civic-minded, even noble. A recent commentary by former Utah senator, Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney fits squarely into this tradition. Faced with a looming fiscal cliff, Romney concludes that entitlement reform is unavoidable and that higher taxes on affluent Americans must be part of the solution.

  Don't be fooled, though. Yes, the status quo is unsustainable, and pretending otherwise is reckless. But taxing the rich can't meaningfully solve our underlying fiscal problems. Worse, pursuing that illusion risks making those problems harder to fix while foreclosing opportunities for the next generation.

  Start with a basic arithmetic problem that never goes away: High-income households already shoulder a disproportionate share of the federal income-tax burden. The top 1% pay roughly 40% of income-tax revenues; the top 10% pay well over two-thirds. And when taxes and other transfers of wealth are factored in, the system has become increasingly progressive over time.

  Vero points out that the current wealthy class has already "made it", and can absorb any realistic tax increase pretty easily. But it will make it harder for everyone else to prosper when you take entitlement means-testing off the table for current and near-future recipients.

• Something I Kinda Got Wrong in 2025. Looking back at my early-April reaction to Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement, I was pretty pessimistic about the economic future. (I wasn't alone in that.) I pretty much expected the stock market swoon to be the New Normal. But it wasn't.

  Don't get me wrong: Trump's tariffs are still stupid.

  But Don Boudreaux is a devout free trader, and so his headline commands attention: The National-Security Exception to Free Trade Is Real. So Are Its Tradeoffs.

  The most credible exception to the case for free trade policy is rooted in concerns about national security. If complete freedom of trade jeopardizes our national security, some protectionism arguably is justified because, as even Adam Smith insisted, although free trade is enriching and important, “defence … is of much more importance than opulence.”

  As Smith’s statement implies, protectionism pursued for purposes of national defense will reduce the country’s material well-being, but this cost is worth paying if the protectionist measures result in a large enough enhancement of national security. (Caleb Petitt argues, not implausibly, that Smith really didn’t believe that national-security concerns justify a retreat from free trade. But that’s a topic for another time.)

  While most free traders today admit the national-security exception, they also warn that it’s very easy to abuse, as shouts of “national security!” are given enormous deference by the public and politicians. Free traders also warn that, even when the national-security exception isn’t intentionally abused, extraordinary care is required to prevent its application from undermining its goal of promoting national security. The surprising practical difficulty of identifying trade-policy measures that are most likely to adequately protect national security is revealed by two recent developments regarding US trade with China.

  Don looks at Nvidia selling AI chips to China, and us getting "rare earth" minerals from them.

• It impresses the TSA folks, though. C.J. Ciaramella notes recent courtroom testimony: DHS says REAL ID is too unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship.

  Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn't even work as a national ID.

  But that's what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.

  In a December 11 court filing, Philip Lavoie, the acting assistant special agent in charge of DHS' Mobile, Alabama, office, stated that, "REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship."

  The argument that REAL ID was necessary to prevent terrorism was always bogus.

[A New Year's Day tradition, adapted from past years.]

Just in case you're interested in what I found informative, interesting, thought-provoking, etc. last year. The cover images are Amazon paid links, and clicking on them will take you there, where I get a cut if you purchase, thanks in advance. Clicking on the book's title will whisk you to my blog posting for a fuller discussion.

I am restricting the list to the 17 books I rated with five stars at Goodreads. Nota Bene: Goodreads ratings are subjective; they do not necessarily reflect a book's cosmic quality, just my reaction. And perhaps also my mood at the time, grumpy or generous. In other words, don't take this too seriously. A lot of the four-star books there are pretty good too.

The complete list of books I read in 2025, including fiction, is here.

In order read:

	The Indispensible Right — Free Speech in an Age of Rage by Jonathan Turley . A detailed and powerful discussion of "free speech", its long history, and why it should be considered a natural right, interpreted widely, up to and including "sedition".
	We Have Never Been Woke — The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi . The author is an honest, sharp-eyed observer of the self-proclaimed "woke" fractious faction. And he makes a convincing case that their nostrums are ineffective at solving the problems they describe.
	The War on the West by Douglas Murray . A fine job of demonstrating just how nuts we went just a few years ago, as summed up in the book title. It became extremely fashionable to attack All Things West. (And, often, its associated evil, "whiteness".)
	John Adams by David McCullough . Even though John Adams gets a (somewhat deserved) bad rap for the Alien and Sedition Acts, this biography is balanced with showing his deeply patriotic side as well. Get to know him, and also his Mrs., Abigail, as real people.
	Bad Therapy — Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier . The subject is the psychological damage to children caused by mental health professionals, semi-professionals, and (yes) even some parents. Parents beware of shrinks bearing the latest nostrums!
	Build, Baby, Build — The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation by Bryan Caplan . A comic-book coverage of the various governmental barriers to housing construction. Bryan makes his convincing case: most zoning and building regs are a net negative to prosperity and a cause of homelessness.
	Believe — Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat . The first of two books I read this year that encourage the secular reader to consider the reality of the divine, and the possibility that the bible-thumpers might have a point.
	Freedom Regained — The Possibility of Free Will by Julian Baggini . A very detailed philosophical/scientific discussion of (yes) the possibility of free will, taking seriously the objections, and showing why they are flawed.
	Stiff — The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach . One of Mary Roach's pop-science books that lean toward the morbid. As with her other books, she likes to explore the areas that polite people don't discuss. (Her newest book, Replaceable You, also overlaps some with the topics covered here. Where do you think they get "replacement" parts?)
	Challenger — A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham . An impressively researched, detailed look at the 1986 destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Also an indictment of NASA's deadly combination of hubris and sloppiness.
	The Essential Scalia — On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law by Antonin Scalia . Opinions and articles from the late, great SCOTUS justice. A great overview of a fine legal mind.
	Hope I Get Old Before I Die — Why Rock Stars Never Retire by David Hepworth . Insightful and witty takes on the methods rock stars use to maintain their marketability after their initial rise to fame and fortune.
	Let Colleges Fail — The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education by Richard K. Vedder . A painfully brutal advocacy of true reform of American universities, by cutting them loose from government subsidy and regulation. "Creative destruction" isn't a lot of fun for the formerly comfortable, but it's a necessary step for getting innovation and improvement, as we see in the private sector.
	Tribalism is Dumb — Where it Came From, How it Got So Bad, and What To Do About it by Andrew Heaton . A funny (but also wise) look at how our long-ago evolution in Africa is working somewhat to our detriment today.
	Taking Religion Seriously by Charles Murray . My second book this year about religion, pretty good for a guy who only enters churches for weddings, funerals, and concerts. Murray's take is similar to Douthat's above, but covers other issues too.
	The War on Science — Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process edited by Lawrence M. Krauss . Bad news: the "war" considered here is not the usual one conducted by knuckle-dragging right-wing know-nothings, but is coming from internal sources, primarily from the left. Science just can't catch a break, can it?
	The Parasitic Mind — How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad . A wide-ranging diatribe against all thinks "woke". But also Islamism.

We'll see how mangled Uncle Stupid looks 365 days from now.

Also of note:

• A history lesson from David Burge.

  in fairness the last PhD we elected was a KKK-supported racist, shoved us into WW1, hailed the Russia revolution, was a 2nd term drooling vegetable, and inspired Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party, so maybe you can understand our reluctance to go there again https://t.co/wqjsjsZIZl

  — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 29, 2025

  The Hawk didn't mention some of the PhD's other accomplishments: the Federal Reserve, imprisoning and deporting dissidents, a botched peace treaty, resegregation of the Federal workforce, imposition of the income tax, his disrespect for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, …

  Twitter commenters also point out that Vladimir Putin has a PhD in economics from Saint Petersburg Mining University of Empress Catherine II. (Although many sources view that degree as "controversial".)

• Perhaps your first chuckle of 2026. Wesley J. Smith observes that famed philosopher Peter Singer Decries AI "Speciesism"

  Princeton “moral philosopher” Peter Singer has co-authored a piece decrying the “speciesism” of AI. What is speciesism, you ask? The misanthropic argument made by many bioethicists and animal rights activists that treating an animal — like an animal — is an evil akin to racism. In other words, herding cattle is as depraved as slavery.

  And now AIs are being programmed to promote speciesist immorality. Oh, no! From “AI’s Innate Bias Against Animals,” published in Nautilus.

  Even though significant efforts are being made to reduce the harmful biases in LLMs [large language models] against certain groups of humans, and other kinds of output that could be harmful to humans, there are, so far, no comparable efforts to reduce speciesist biases and outputs harmful to animals.

  When an AI system generates text, it reflects these biases. A legal AI tool, for instance, might assume that animals are to be classified as property, rather than as sentient beings entitled to have their interests considered in their own rights. Most legal texts throughout history have made this assumption and frequently reinforced this perspective.

  So, Singer is upset because AI systems accurately describe the status of animals in law when they should regurgitate his ideological obsessions instead. But that would be disastrous for the sector, making AI responses untrustworthy and biased against humans.

  Wesley gently suggests that Singer "learn to code" and develop his non-speciesist AI to give the canned responses he wants.

• Kat Rosenfield looks at boycotts and quislings. It has to do with The Trouble with Quitting the ‘Trump-Kennedy Center’.

  It began early this year, when Trump ousted the center’s bipartisan board and replaced them with his own people, who immediately elected him chairman. Changing the building’s name was an insult heaped on an already substantial injury—and also probably illegal, given that altering the name of a federal memorial is supposed to require an act of Congress—and so Trump’s name on the building is probably going to last only as long as it takes either for an unfavorable court ruling (a lawsuit is pending), or for the next Democratic president to take a ceremonial sledgehammer to it, whichever comes first.

  As such, one might wonder why the president bothered—except as part of a trollish campaign to enrage Washington’s liberal apparatus by dismantling, disfiguring, or otherwise marking his territory on as many of its cultural landmarks as possible. In which case, mission accomplished. The Kennedy Center’s ticket sales immediately tanked once Trump took an interest in it, as journalists decried the move as an “attack on the arts” and applauded artists like Redd for refusing to participate in “the regime’s new fascist vision” for the venue. Overall, the discourse more or less suggests that people would rather see the center stand vacant for the next three years—or better (worse) yet, play host to a rotating series of Kid Rock tribute bands—than have its stage graced by a single moment of artistic brilliance for which Trump could take credit.

  Critics of the president present this as a binary choice for artists: cancel your Kennedy Center appearance as an act of resistance, or take the stage and be labeled a collaborator. But this Manichaean worldview misses the existence of a third option, one that allows artists to step outside the binary, and outside politics. Which, in truth, is where they belong.

  Kat, as usual, makes a lot of sense. And I see she's got a new book coming out in March. Goody!

• Noah Smith's got opinions! And (despite his D-team membership) they're pretty good: At least five interesting things: Buy Local edition (#74). His second item is: “Luxury” houses reduce rents for people who live in “affordable” houses. Love those sneer quotes!

  Speaking of abundance, the quest to lower rents by building more housing is starting to bear a little fruit. Emily Flitter and Nadja Popovich report that a few big American cities have built a bunch of housing, and that almost all of these cities have seen big drops in rent. Meanwhile, the cities that build less housing have seen much less of a drop:

  

  Now, correlation isn’t causation, as we all know. But reverse causation is probably not happening here — it makes absolutely no sense that falling rents would spark a building boom. And what other thing could be causing cities like Austin, Raleigh, Phoenix and Denver to both build more housing and have lower rents at the same time? If rents were falling because demand for housing in these cities were falling, we would probably not see housing booms there (and we can just look and see that all of these cities have growing populations anyway).

  So unless this pattern is purely random chance, or there’s some other factor that’s hard to imagine, it means that building more housing lowers rents. Which is exactly what the simple, “Econ 101” theory of supply and demand would predict. And which is exactly what careful studies of natural experiments have shown again and again.

  Note that as Flitter and Popovich report, the housing being built in these increasingly affordable boom-towns is almost entirely market-rate housing, or what anti-housing activists often pejoratively refer to as “luxury” housing. The activists have trouble understanding how building housing for high-income yuppie types could possibly lower rents. But it’s very simple — if you build places for high-earning yuppies to live, they don’t go bidding on older housing and sparking a price war that pushes middle-class and working-class people out of their homes.

  Essentially, high-end housing acts as a “yuppie fishtank” that prevents an influx of high earners from raising rents for everyone else[…]

  A long excerpt, sorry, but I did want to get in that "yuppie fishtank" phrase.

• Just 40? At Issues & Insights, James D. Agresti provides 40 Examples of Fake News in 2025. Let's go all the way down to … number two:

  PolitiFact claimed that a Republican bill to reform Food Stamps “would bar increases to monthly SNAP benefits” for “inflation” and “in effect become cuts.”

  In fact, the Republican bill barred presidents from increasing SNAP benefits above and beyond the rate of food inflation, like Joe Biden did for the first time in the history of the program.

  As detailed by the Government Accountability Office, the Biden administration raised SNAP benefits by “21 percent compared to the previous inflation-adjusted” amounts without adequate “economic analysis,” “disclosure,” or “documentation.”

  My prediction for 2026: Politifact will keep its name, despite my suggestion that it go with "PolitiMindlessRegurgitationOfDemocratTalkingPoints".