Jan
17
2026

I'm a Little Iffy on George's Metaphor

GFW treats this as good news: Congressional Republicans might finally jump off the hamster wheel. (WaPo gifted link)

The 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast made the elephant the Republican Party’s symbol, but today the hamster would be more suitable for congressional Republicans. The phrase “hamster wheel” is an American idiom for energy expended pointlessly.

Now, however, some of those Republicans might have managed to reach a destination: exasperation with their role as ratifiers of presidential whims. Perhaps Donald Trump has at last gone too far for those legislators weary of going nowhere.

He wants to prosecute Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, his pretext being cost overruns on the remodeling of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. This is one of Trump’s especially pointless tantrums, given that Powell’s term as chair ends May 15. Trump has, however, clarified the debate about the Fed’s “independence.” And he has perhaps finally provoked a Republican recoil against his ambitions to control everything, including interest rates. He seems to want them low, at every point of the business cycle, forever.

I'm in broad agreement with GFW that it would be a bad thing if Trump's Fed-controlling fantasy came to pass. From last August, my ChatGPT effort is on your right. (Click over for my Seussian efforts.) [If I Ran the Fed]

But I think the "hamster wheel" is a weak metaphor. First and foremost, hamsters seem to really enjoy running in their wheels. (Getty's description of today's Eye Candy notes the hamster pictured above is missing a paw! That's an indication that there's some fun involved.)

Unlike Congressional Republicans, who seem to be spineless, cowardly, clueless, and miserable. Come up with an animal metaphor for that, George.

Also of note:

  • Break out the electron microscpe! You would need one, Jeffrey Blehar imagines, if you wanted to observe the soul of Our Impossibly Small-Souled President. (archive.today link)

    This week the president of the United States finally achieved a lifelong dream, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not from the Nobel Committee — they will never give anything to Donald Trump. Instead, Trump did what he is naturally best at: He extorted it from its rightful owner, and then posed with it as a trophy.

    Recall that even before the Nobel Peace Prize was announced in October of last year, Trump was notably and publicly peeved at the idea that it might go to someone less deserving than him, namely the anti-Maduro Venezuelan politician and activist Maria Machado. How outrageous an attempt to deny the president his preeminence, when he was the one who bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, moved battleships into the Caribbean, threatened to annex Greenland, pondered the dissolution of the Western alliance, and visibly failed to secure peace in the Russo–Ukrainian War. The positively European ingratitude of it all was undeniable: How many penny-ante countries does a man need to use military force against to win a peace prize, after all?

    If (on the other hand) the Presidential vanity were a viewable object, it would probably block out the sun itself.

  • Protecting you from Wrongthink is a 24/7/365 job. Jacob Sullum has a long article from the current print Reason, describing How the FCC became the speech police.

    In 1964, journalist Fred J. Cook published Barry Goldwater: Extremist of the Right, a 186-page attack on the Republican candidate in that year's presidential election. As economist Thomas W. Hazlett notes in his history of broadcast regulation, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) "arranged for Grove Press to publish the book," which portrayed Goldwater as "so extreme that he cuts a positively ridiculous figure." The general public bought 44,000 copies. The DNC bought 72,000.

    Conservative criticism of Cook's book resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision that upheld federal regulation of broadcast speech—a power that several presidents had used to target their political opponents. Although the Reagan administration repudiated that illiberal tradition, President Donald Trump has revived it, as illustrated by the 2025 suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, the ongoing transformation of CBS News, and Trump's habitual threats against TV stations that air news coverage he views as unfair or unbalanced.

    Disclaimer: I liked Goldwater a lot, and I'm a fan of neither Kimmel nor CBS News. But I'm still in agreement with the Jack Shafer article posted on Slate 19 years ago today: The case for killing the FCC and selling off spectrum.

  • Our state's junior Senator makes the Federalist! They are not a fan of Maggie Hassan's recent shrugging off of coercion: Forced Abortions Are Just ‘Part Of History,’ So We Might As Well Let Abusers Access Mifepristone

    Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan showed little care for victims of forced abortions on Wednesday when she accused her Republican colleagues on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee of “gaslighting” Americans on the dangers of mail-order mifepristone and claimed violence against pregnant women is a “longstanding part of human history.”

    The GOP senators who called the hearing titled Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs spent much of their two hours invoking an uptick in coerced pill-induced abortions as one of the many reasons the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should restore the mifepristone safeguards stripped by the Biden administration, such as an in-person doctor visit.

    She's not too choosy about the details, as long as those pesky babies get killed.


Last Modified 2026-01-22 6:12 AM EST