Pun Salad

Take it away, Remy!

Want to sing along? Lyrics are here.

If you want a crackpot solution to gerrymandering, I proposed one nine years ago. Which was greeted with a total lack of interest, but I still like it.

Also of note:

• Kevin D. Williamson is anything but merciful. Especially when he observes President Bone Spurs: Trump Is Anything but Unpredictable. (archive.today link)

  The Iranians do not have very many advantages in the war the United States has launched on them, but they do have a few. One is a willingness to suffer and die and to pay economic costs that evidently exceeds the present American capacity for such sacrifice; the second, unexpected though the fact may be, is a critical edge in the matter of political intelligence: Washington has consistently misunderstood the nature of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran for going on 50 years now, but the Iranians seem to have a reasonably good handle on the character of the current U.S. administration.

  For lo these many years, I have been advising observers not to make the mistake of overcomplicating Donald Trump. The ayatollahs, of all people, seem to have got to the core of the issue before most American political commentators.

  Trump describes himself (and his admirers describe him) as pragmatic, a man of common sense, which is the nice way of saying that he is a man without principles or fixed moral commitments, and even the single limited virtue to which he occasionally pays tribute is a one-way street: Loyalty to Trump is all-important, but loyalty from Trump—ask Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump about that. Some simple men are saints and may be most easily understood in terms of their saintly virtues: St. Francis was good and gentle because he was good and gentle. Trump is the mirror image of the simple saint: He’s a simple man whose actions are most directly and accurately described as the ordinary daily application of his vices: laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity. He is a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools and a vulnerability to manipulation by men who are similarly vicious but more capable: Vladimir Putin, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, even one or two of his idiot children. Stronger men can push him around, and weaker men succeed by flattering him. His enemies can manipulate him at least as easily as his allies.

  I suppose it's possible that we could get good results out of our Iran escapades, but that's not the way I'd bet.

• Who will be our Pun Hero today? George Will! His column is headlined: An unpardonable abuse of presidential power with only one solution. (WaPo gifted link)

  Unpardonable, get it?

  

  Oh, well. GFW reports on a recent book by Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History, Amazon link at your right. Some recent history:

  Bill Clinton greased the downward slide. He pardoned his half brother (Secret Service code name: “Headache”), who then made a fortune lobbying his sibling, the president, to pardon, among others, a Gambino mob associate. As Hillary Clinton began seeking a U.S. Senate seat, her husband commuted the sentences of 16 members of a Puerto Rican group that had detonated more than a hundred bombs in the United States. He pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive who owed $48 million in taxes. Rich’s ex-wife made a $450,000 contribution to Clinton’s presidential library, gave $100,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign, and $1 million to the Democratic Party.

  This was unseemly enough, but Prakash says, “Something has qualitatively changed over the past two presidencies.” Leaving office, Biden gave preemptive pardons to a slew of family members. Prakash: “For many years, Joseph Biden had been involved in a sordid business, where he was the product.” Family members charged for access to him. He gave preemptive pardons to two brothers, his sister and her husband, and a sister-in-law. Before the 2024 election, he said, regarding his egregiously corrupt son Hunter, “I will not pardon him.” After the election, he did.

  In Trump’s first term, he pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, who, for vengeance against his brother-in-law who had testified against him, hired a prostitute, filmed her encounter with the brother-in-law, and mailed the tape to his sister. Having, consecutively, the two seediest families in presidential history has besmirched the practice of pardoning.

  So what's the "solution" promised in the headline? Alas:

  So, the remedy for tawdry pardoning is not this or that institutional gambit. The only feasible solution is the election of presidents who are not louts. This, however, becomes less likely as voters are made ever more cynical by loutish pardons.

  Cynical? Moi?

• "I'll take 'Speculating on stuff that won't happen' for $1000, Ken." Still, I appreciate that Eric Boehm is asking something close to the right question: What if Social Security was capped at $100,000 annually?

  Capping annual Social Security payments at $100,000 per household (or $50,000 per individual) would help extend the program's solvency without raising taxes on workers or cutting benefits to retirees who actually depend on the program to make ends meet, according to a report published last month by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). The so-called "Six-Figure Limit" on Social Security payments would save an estimated $190 billion over ten years and would close nearly half of Social Security's long-term fiscal shortfall.

  Eric notes the pluses and minuses. A big minus is that it only fixes "nearly half" of the problem. And an even bigger problem: try to find any pol running for election that supports the idea.

• Counterpoint. Back last week, I linked to a different Eric Boehm article/video, which described Total Boomer Luxury Communism. One of his big bugaboos was "Medicare Advantage" plans, which involved Uncle Stupid paying for pickleball fees and Kitty Litter. Honest!

  The WSJ editorialists have leapt to the defense: The Truth About Medicare Advantage (WSJ gifted link). They don't mention pickleball, but here's their bottom line:

  Insurers are a bipartisan scapegoat for rising Medicare spending. But it’s notable that overall Medicare spending last decade totalled $431 billion less than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2010, even as the share of beneficiaries in Advantage increased by half.

  Democrats dislike Advantage because they prefer government-run healthcare, though the latter has higher costs. The opposition to Advantage is ideological, no matter the facts.

  Not a Disclaimer: I have "supplemental" Medicare coverage, not Advantage.

• "Um." That's probably the intended reaction to the headline on Wesley J. Smith's NR Corner post: Allow Euthanasia for the Mentally Ill or They Will Commit Suicide. That turns out to be the assertion of a "Canadian activist" advocating "Medical Assistance in Dying" (MAID).

  The idea here is that a “suicide” will be potentially messier and/or perhaps less successful than a doctor or nurse administering a lethal jab. Or that a person will take his own life earlier than he might otherwise if he knew a doctor would do the deed for him.

  Well, this much is true. Being MAIDed is not suicide. Euthanasia is a homicide, and doctors or nurse practitioners are the killers.

  Hey, here’s an absurd notion: How about trying to prevent these deaths instead of facilitating them? Crazy, right?

  I've thought for a long time that medical personnel shouldn't be killing patients. (Shocking, I know.) Instead, suitably gowned specialists—call them "Reapers"—should do the deed.

• And congratulations are in order. For NASA's successful Artemis II mission, which didn't kill its astronauts. I haven't heard anything about how well the capsule's heat shield held up.

  Artemis is still a waste of taxpayer money, and an unscalable, unsustainable approach to manned spaceflight.