Pun Salad

The Indispensable One mostly writes about Francesca Hong’s Bad Night. But I liked his lead-in anecdote:

Ladies and gentlemen, the New Hampshire Secretary of State has provided sample ballots for the state's primary election next month. In my case:

… the only contested races are for the big offices: Governor, US Senator, US House.

Let's take the easy one first. There are only three GOP candidates for Governor (with links to each campaign website): Kelly Ayotte, Shaun Fife, and Bob Wayne McClory.

Who's the craziest son of a bitch? Bob has a strong argument with his 6 Point Patriot page. He is not a fan of the 5-pointed stars on Old Glory. Instead, the "Timeline we should be on":

But Shaun counters with his "Free Energy Solutions":

[Yes, I pointed this out two years ago, Shaun's previous run for Guv. As in 2024, I can't find anything comparable on Kelly's website.]

I might look at the other contested races at some point. Stay tuned!

Also of note:

• Elon Musk can't make me buy a Tesla. David R. Henderson summarizes a recent lecture he gave at the Naval Postgraduate School, with a cogent observation: Hayek on Power.

  I noted Hayek’s statement that the government’s power “is a power which is newly created and which in a competitive society nobody possesses.” This is one of his most important insights and it’s often lost sight of, even by some libertarians. When government takes over, it’s not simply a redistribution of existing power. It’s a creation of power where it had not existed.

  Hayek makes another important point. The power a multimillionaire “who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer” has over him “is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.”

  If only one candidate for governor was crazy enough to quote Hayek!

• All things considered, I too would rather be in Hawaii. James Freeman's "Best of the Web" WSJ column is mostly about Minnesota’s Referendum on Woke 1. But he squeezes in this tidbit, quoted from a Los Angeles Times story:

  As public spending on homelessness has come under increasing scrutiny, a nonprofit that runs domestic violence shelters in Southern California has paid its CEO, who lives in Hawaii, more than $1.6 million in salary, vacation pay and other compensation for the last two years of tax filings, a sum that is several times larger than the compensation of executives running similar organizations.

  Not too shabby! But she has a way to go to catch up with the CEO of ("nonprofit") AARP Jo Ann Jenkins. The AARP's Form 990 filings report her compensation of

  • $2,746,855 in 2024
  • $2,384,335 in 2023
  • $1,444,575 in 2022
  • $2,575,415 in 2021
  • $1,335,714 in 2020
  • … and I'm tired of typing.