Pun Salad

Number of times I've heard that I turn the world on with my smile: zero.

Number of times Mary Tyler Moore heard the same: maybe 103,982? More?

• JPod on "Mary Tyler Moore: the greatest woman TV star ever".

  Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at the age of 80, did something no one else ever did in the history of television: She starred in two landmark sitcoms playing two very different characters.

  FactCheck: true! The only woman I can think of that's close is Patricia Heaton, but even as hugely talented as she is, you'd have to stretch about the "landmark" bit.

• Don't want to be politically tedious about MTM, but at the Daily Signal, Genevieve Wood tells us "Why Mary Tyler Moore Refused to Join the Feminist Movement". Key para:

  In an interview in 2009, Moore told Parade magazine, “When one looks at what’s happened to television, there are so few shows that interest me. I do watch a lot of Fox News. I like Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly.”
  
  When asked if that meant she was a “right-winger,” Moore replied, “Maybe more of a libertarian centrist.”

  Aw, I'm in love all over again.

• Last but not least, the immortal Lileks checks out some of 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' Minneapolis locations on a short video. Hat throwing, he points out, is not something Minnesotans are prone to do.

• But it's not all MTM at Pun Salad today. Andrew Napolitano is a notoriously difficult guy to please, but (at Reason) he finds President Trump's initial moves to unwind Obamacare to be "breeze of freedom on a sea of regulation."

  He ordered that regulations already in place be enforced with a softer, more beneficent tone, and he ordered that no penalty, fine, setoff or tax be imposed by the IRS on any person or entity who is not complying with the individual mandate, because by the time taxes are due on April 15, the IRS will be without authority to impose or collect the non-tax tax, as the individual mandate will no longer exist. Why take money from people that will soon be returned?
  
  Then he ordered a truly revolutionary act, the likes of which I have never seen in the 45 years I have studied and monitored the government's laws and its administration of them. He ordered that when bureaucrats who are administering and enforcing the law have discretion with respect to the time, place, manner, and severity of its enforcement, they should exercise that discretion in favor of individuals and against the government.

  Credit where credit is due.

• Writing at one of our other libertarian go-tos, the Cato Institute, Randal O'Toole compares and contrasts Trump's "infrastructure" proposals with the Democratic alternative.

  [… T]the Trump plan is more bottom-up than top-down, as most if not all of the projects on the possibly fake priority list are supported by state and local officials. And while Trump brought a new idea to the table, the Democrats’ plan is the same old borrow-and-spend formula that they have used in the past. This is actually worse than tax-and-spend because taxing and spending doesn’t leave huge debt problems and interest payments for the future.
  
  While we can hope that Trump’s projects will rely more on user fees more than taxes, at the moment the score has to be Trump 1/2, Democrats minus 1.

  As said above: credit where credit is due. But "better than the Democrats" is kind of a low bar to clear.

• News you can use from Kevin D. Williamson: "How to ‘Resist’ Trump". Seriously good advice, and I'll quote this gem:

  If you opposed (and oppose) Donald Trump, then you have a couple of options. One is to make an ass of yourself by dressing as a set of genitals and vandalizing a Starbucks in Oakland. (The Keynesians may thank you, but Bastiat will not.) But we really shouldn’t pretend that that is politics — it is only adolescent self-gratification, and those engaged in it aren’t the Resistance, but the Nursery.

  The next paragraph begins "The more intelligent option is…" but those intelligent to care enough will have already clicked over.

• Google presents "The Year in Language 2016". They make a living out of the data they scrape out of people's searches, but this is non-commercial and fascinating. Example, what words puzzled people enough to ask the big G for a definition?

  In 2016, these 10 words led the pack: Triggered, Shook, Juju, Broccoli, Woke, Holosexual, Shill, Gaslighting, Bigly, and SJW.

  I think I'm OK on most of those. But "broccoli" has some new meaning? I guess this. And I'm OK with not ever knowing what a "holosexual" might be.