Pun Salad

I'm not a huge fan of DHS, but I have a long list of agencies that should be a higher priority for defunding. (One will show up later in this very post.)

Also of note:

• But keep your pants on. Kevin D. Williamson advises: Take Your @#$%&! Hat Off, Mr. President. (archive.today link)

  Perhaps the most grotesque image of the second Trump administration—so far!—has been the ghastly face of the commander in chief, slathered with apricot-colored makeup, hovering above the caskets as the draft-dodging coward saluted the corpses of dead American soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base while he was wearing a Trump-branded “USA” baseball cap from his online souvenir shop.

  I will get to the hat directly, but first, that salute.

  It is always improper for a civilian to offer or return a salute, though the practice became universal among U.S. presidents from Ronald Reagan’s presidency onward. It is probably a little bit worse when Trump does it for the same reason it was gross to watch Bill Clinton do it: He is a draft-dodger. The salute is a courtesy offered by on-duty, uniformed members of the military service to other military personnel or by a member of the military to certain civilian leaders, notably to presidents in their role as commanders in chief but also, at certain times, governors in their role as commanders in chief of their respective National Guard forces. Earlier in our history, when military service was very common among presidents, they knew better than to return a salute while holding a civilian office and wearing civilian clothes: President Dwight Eisenhower, for example, had held the exalted rank of “General of the Army” when serving as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, and he made a rule of not returning salutes while serving as president.

  I confess I was unaware of that rule, but I'll be more careful to obey it in the future. I liked Ike.

  But KDW is just getting warmed up, and I encourage you to click over (using the archive.today link if necessary) to see his diatribe on the baseball cap. Masterful!

• Et tu, WSJ editorialists? GOP partisans will be aghast, but they describe, convincingly, Why the SAVE America Act . . . Won’t. (WSJ gifted link)

  For partisan hype, it’s hard to beat the Senate debate this week on the SAVE America Act. President Trump says the legislation is a salvation from mass voter fraud. Sen. Chuck Schumer says it’s an effort at mass voter suppression, “Jim Crow 2.0.” Neither is reality. Also, Republicans don’t have the votes to clear the Senate’s filibuster. And if they bully the bill through anyway, Democrats eyeing the end of the 60-vote rule will quietly celebrate.

  The House version of the SAVE America Act, which passed last month, has two main planks. First, people registering to vote would be asked to show proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or naturalization document. Many driver’s licenses wouldn’t qualify. While the bill says it would accept a REAL ID “that indicates the applicant is a citizen,” standard license designs often don’t say. Legal immigrants can get REAL IDs, too.

  Senate Republicans should hold the cloture vote, fail, then move on.

  (That's not to say that I'm a fan of voter fraud.)

• My answer is "probably not", but see what you think. John Sexton wonders: Could AI Undermine Hayek's Point About the Limits of Central Planning.

  Thomas Edsall is sort of the hype man for doomerism of all kinds, especially when the doom can be connected to conservatives in general or President Trump in particular. Still, he's often interesting to read. That's the case today where he has written a typical column about how AI could in fact go horribly wrong in the hands of bad people.

  He of course thinks the bad people are billionaires in Silicon Valley but his points are more widely applicable. The most interesting thing in the column is a point he makes about central planning and Hayek's insight into its limitations.

  “If we stay on the current path, the risk of extreme concentration — both economic and political — is very real,” Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of economics and director of the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford, wrote by email...

  I found a 2025 paper by Brynjolfsson and Zoë Hitzig, a junior fellow at Harvard, “A.I.’s Use of Knowledge in Society,” to be exceptionally informative.

  Brynjolfsson and Hitzig showed how the ability of A.I. to collect, manage, gain access to and store information upended Friedrich Hayek’s classic economic argument that free markets are inherently superior to the central planning of socialism...

  “Hayek’s famous insight,” they wrote, “was that central planning — even if economically efficient — is not feasible because the necessary knowledge is inherently dispersed throughout the economy.”

  My (very uneducated, off the top of my head) guess is that if AI could outperform the free market, the first place it would be deployed would be stock-picking. And I'm wondering if that's not happening already.

• As promised above. Jacob Sullum joins the chorus of old fogies like me who object to this sort of thing: Brendan Carr's Crusade To Reshape TV Journalism Is Blatantly Unconstitutional.

  On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump criticized a Wall Street Journal article about an Iranian attack on U.S. refueling planes in Saudi Arabia. Three hours later, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), responded to the president's complaint by warning broadcasters that they "will lose their licenses" if they fail to "operate in the public interest."

  Why did an allegedly misleading newspaper article prompt a regulatory threat against TV stations? Because Carr is eager to advertise his crusade to restore "faith and confidence in the media"—a megalomaniacal mission that is neither part of his job description nor consistent with the First Amendment.

  So—here's an idea—let's put him out of a job by eliminating his department!

  I'm gratified (and a little surprised) that that eminently respectable Washington Post, the very definition of Beltway-insider, has joined the abolitionist mob: Brendan Carr, minister of truth. (WaPo gifted link)

  This isn’t the first time an administration has tried to wield the FCC to suppress disfavored points of view. Historian Paul Matzko has described how President John F. Kennedy’s administration, incensed by right-wing radio’s coverage of his Cold War policy, deliberately used the fairness doctrine to drive stations off the air.

  Conservatives learned from that experience — and many others — the dangers of an overzealous administrative state. In a perfect world, liberals would take the same lessons from Carr’s attempted abuses, and a bipartisan coalition would vote to abolish the FCC.

  Emphasis added. To quote John McClane: "Welcome to the party, pal!"