Pun Salad

And so does Don Boudreaux, who tells us What the Economics of Envy Can't Answer.

I guess I'm not surprised by the Pope, but hasn't he heard of the Tenth Commandment?

Anyway: Don proposes a number of "probing questions" to ask folks whose go-to solution to every social woe is "tax the rich". Here's one:

Maybe not a question to pose at the holiday table, but you be you.

Also of note:

• Could be a good title for a Bon Jovi song. Veronique de Rugy thinks the US is Living on Borrowed Credibility.

  New research by Zefeng Chen, Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Mindy Xiaolan on three centuries of fiscal history offers a sobering lesson for today’s United States.

  The Dutch Republic, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and the modern United States all became dominant safe-asset suppliers in their eras. In each case, investors – both domestic and global – were willing to hold more of the hegemon’s debt than its future primary surpluses could justify. The bonds of a hegemon carry a convenience yield (a premium investors pay for safety and liquidity), making them overvalued relative to their fiscal backing. The hegemon can thus run persistent fiscal gaps without immediate consequences. In fact, the overvaluation itself temporarily functions as an extra source of revenue, meaning that unfunded spending might not generate inflation in the short run. For a time, markets behave as if the government has a larger stream of future surpluses than it actually does. Until it doesn’t.

  … and when it doesn't, the history says things get ugly very quickly.

• I'll stop posting about the drug boat stuff someday. But today is not that day. Not if Jacob Sullum has anything to say about it. And he does: Boat strike commander says he had to kill 2 survivors because they were smuggling cocaine.

  If we call a cocaine smuggler an "unlawful combatant" in an "armed struggle" against the United States, the Trump administration says, it is OK to kill him, even if he is unarmed and poses no immediate threat. And according to Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the newly controversial September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump's deadly anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, it is still OK to kill that cocaine smuggler if he ends up in the water after a missile strike on his boat, clinging to the smoking wreckage, provided you determine that he is still "in the fight."

  Bradley, who answered lawmakers' questions about that attack during closed-door briefings on Thursday that also included Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine, knew that the initial missile strike, which killed nine people, left two survivors. But because the survivors had radioed for help from their fellow drug traffickers, The New York Times reports, Bradley ordered a second missile strike, which blew apart both men. That second strike was deemed necessary, according to unnamed "U.S. officials" interviewed by the Times, to prevent recovery of any cocaine that might have remained after the first strike.

  On its face, the second strike was a war crime. "I can't imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water," former Air Force lawyer Michael Schmitt, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told the Associated Press. "That is clearly unlawful….You can only use lethal force in circumstances where there is an imminent threat."

• But, hey, what about… Andrew C. McCarthy wonders Is Trump Following the Obama Drone Strike Model? (archive.today link)

  My friend Marc Thiessen makes some excellent points in his Washington Post column today (which I recommended to listeners of our podcast during my discussion with Rich Lowry this morning). He defends the Trump administration against war crime allegations related to the now infamous “double tap” strike that killed two alleged drug traffickers who were shipwrecked (because of the first missile strike) off the coast of Venezuela.

  Relying on David Shedd, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Marc observes that double taps are not unusual. In combat, initial strikes often do not eliminate the threat and additional strikes are necessary to destroy the targeted enemy asset. This is obviously why, as I noted on Tuesday, the Trump administration has tried to shift the focus of the second strike from the shipwrecked people (the focus of media coverage initially, to which the administration did not effectively respond) to the remnants of the ship and its cargo.

  Marc also points out that, in targeting cartels that it has designated as foreign terrorist organizations, the Trump administration is closely following the playbook of President Barack Obama […]

  Andrew notes one legalistic detail: Obama was operating under a Congressional "authorization of military force" (AUMF). Something that Trump lacks! And, for that matter, …

  You know how you know the cartels are not conducting terrorist activity? As we discussed on the podcast today, if the cartels had conducted terrorist mass-murder attacks against the United States, rather than shipping cocaine to the lucrative American market for that drug, we wouldn’t be talking about double taps and Trump’s lack of congressional authorization. If a terrorist ship was loaded with explosives and guns rather than bags of cocaine, everyone would agree that our armed forces would need to strike the target as many times as it took to destroy it. And Trump would already have congressional authorization because, as was the case after 9/11, lawmakers of both parties would be demanding to vote in favor of military force; they would enact an AUMF even if Trump didn’t ask for it.

  Which brings us to…

• Time to simply declare defeat. At Cato, Jeffrey A. Singer calls it An Incoherent Encore in a Failed Drug War.

  With Secretary of War Pete Hegseth embroiled in controversy over the extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers operating a small, short-range boat off the coast of Venezuela, it’s worth examining how this all began.

  President Trump has repeatedly claimed that “narcoterrorists” are on these boats, transporting large quantities of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the US to poison Americans, and he wants them obliterated. He asserts that each boat destroyed by the Navy with missiles saves 25,000 lives. As of this writing, 22 boats have been sunk, which amounts to 550,000 lives saved since early September—more than five times the nation’s annual overdose toll.

  First, drug smugglers do not sneak into the US, abduct random Americans, and forcibly inject them with fentanyl. They sell products to willing customers. These are voluntary commercial transactions, not acts of terrorism. If Americans did not want to buy illicit substances, traffickers would not profit from smuggling them and would quickly stop.

  Well, at least it seems to have gotten the Epstein stuff off the front pages. I guess that really did turn out to be a nothingburger.

• A lesson for all bloggers. Jeff Maurer is probably wishing he hadn't: I Have Hired A "Disabled" Columnist Who Will Probably Never Write a Column.

  I Might Be Wrong is pleased to announce a new addition to our staff: Cameron Este is our new columnist covering health and well-being. Cameron will join Ethan Coen, our Junior Assistant Film Critic, Jacob Fuzetti, an award-winning war correspondent who covers Hollywood gossip, and Paula Fox, who writes about tech issues and the naughty MILFs who will be joining her live on webcam to dine on her sopping undercarriage.

  Cameron’s credentials are impeccable: He recently graduated magna cum laude from Stanford with a double major in Journalism and Nutrition Science. Of course, I wish I had hired him after I had read Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic article about disability inflation at top universities. Horowitch’s eye-opening finding is that disability claims have skyrocketed at elite universities: The number of students claiming disability at the University of Chicago has tripled in eight years, and it’s quintupled at UC Berkeley in 15 years. Most of the “disabilities” involve lightly-scrutinized claims of sometimes-blithely-diagnosed conditions like ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and they generally require accommodations like receiving extra time on tests or being allowed to use otherwise-prohibited technology. Astoundingly, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates this year are registered as having a disability.

  Immediately after being hired, Cameron informed me of the flotilla of maladies he possesses that require accommodation. He has ADHD, anxiety, dyslexia, autism, hypertension, a gluten allergy, shape blindness, and Stage 4 Restless Leg Syndrome. He has something called “Sarcastic Bowel Syndrome”, which is apparently when your digestive system responds to certain foods by flooding your brain with sassy put-downs that shatter your self-esteem. He has a wallet full of cards that say things like “I am having a seizure, please keep me away from sharp objects” and “I am experiencing echolocation hypersensitivity, please strangle any bats or dolphins that come near me”. I don’t know how he’s supposed to quickly find the right card in an emergency, especially since he apparently suffers from Sudden Onset Digital Paralysis, a.k.a. “finger narcolepsy”.

  I, for one, have a severe procrastination disability. You might get my Christmas cards before MLKJr's birthday, if I can manage it.

Veronique de Rugy doesn't care for either end of the horseshoe: The American Experiment Isn't What's Failing.

Politicians on the horseshoe ends are awful. But to a certain extent, they're just responding to the sour and resentful moods of their spoiled-brat voters. (I can say that because I'm not running for office.)

Also of note:

• Unlike a sinking drug boat, it's a moving target. Jim Geraghty has been paying attention to The Trump Team’s Convoluted, Conflicting Accounts of the Drug-Boat Sinking. After liberally quoting what Trump, Rubio, Hesgeth, et al. have been saying over the past few weeks…

  Depending upon which administration official you’re listening to or when, the boat was “headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” and it was also “an immediate threat to the United States.” It remained an “immediate threat” even after it turned around. The president said that Hegseth told him a second strike on survivors “didn’t happen.” Hegseth said he “watched that first strike live” and also said he “did not personally see survivors.” Hegseth is “going to be the one to make the call” and also simultaneously, “Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.” The target of the second strike was the cargo, or the target of the second strike were the survivors, to ensure they did not call anyone to pick them up and retrieve the cargo. Also, President Trump said he wouldn’t have wanted a second strike on survivors.

  And the entire narrative of a second strike is “completely false,” according to the Pentagon spokesman, except for the parts that were later corroborated.

  No doubt, there are plenty of Democrats and members of the media want to create as many headaches as possible for the Trump administration. But the administration creates problems for itself when it does not give a straight story, based upon verifiable facts, from day one. And unsurprisingly, members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — get hostile quickly when they feel like their requests for additional information are being ignored or rejected.

  I can't exactly blame people who pick and choose what they want to believe out of this morass of probable lies.

• The "MRGA" hats are probably being made as I type. Jeff Jacoby looks at Putin's number one fanboy: Trump's Ukraine 'peace' plan makes Russia great again.

  RUSTEM UMEROV, the head of Ukraine's security council, did his best to put on a brave face. "US is hearing us," Kyiv's lead negotiator said to reporters in Florida, where Ukrainian and American officials held four hours of talks on Sunday. "US is supporting us. US is working beside us," he said, as if he were willing those words to be true.

  Alas, they aren't true. Under the Trump administration, the United States is not supporting Ukraine as it fights for its survival, and it is certainly not working beside those who have been valiantly defending their sovereignty against a ruthless aggressor.

  There has never been much question where President Trump's sympathies lie. From blaming Ukraine for having "started" the war to fawning endlessly over Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, from insulting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as an incompetent and an ingrate to using his bully pulpit to reinforce the Kremlin's talking points, Trump has left little doubt that he is drawn irresistibly to the American enemy who launched this war and indifferent to the pro-Western nation resisting it.

  But now the administration's betrayal of Ukraine has reached a shocking new extreme. The White House is pressing for a "peace" that would amount to Ukrainian surrender and a Russian victory — a Munich for our time.

  Jeff repeats the "old maxim": "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but fatal to be its friend."

• Thanks of a grateful nation. Bjørn Lomborg speculates in the WSJ: Climate Change Might Have Spared America From Hurricanes. (WSJ gifted link)

  The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended on Sunday, and not a single hurricane made landfall in the continental U.S. this year. This is the first such quiet year since 2015; an average of around two hurricanes strike the U.S. mainland annually. You’d think this would be cause for celebration—or at least curiosity about what role, if any, global warming played. Instead there has been resounding silence.

  We heard plenty about Hurricane Melissa, the monster storm that hit Jamaica in late October with 185-mile-an-hour winds and flooding, causing roughly 100 deaths across the Caribbean. Headlines screamed that climate change was to blame. Attribution studies quickly followed, concluding that human-induced warming made Melissa more likely and worse.

  Yes, the narrative must be promoted: Climate change can only make things worse, never better.

Calling it as he sees it: A sickening moral slum of an administration. (WaPo gifted link) After looking at the Venezuelan drug boat survivor-shooting and the handling of Putin's wishlist for Ukraine, he makes a more general point:

I fear he's right. More on the drug boats below.

Also of note:

• We have moved on to the ass-covering phase of the operation. Andrew C. McCarthy has been my go-to guy for honest coverage. Here's his update from last evening: Pete Hegseth Says He Ordered & Observed First Missile Strike, Not Second. (archive.today link) After quoting from Hesgeth's tweet:

  As we’ve said before, vessel strikes on narco-terrorists will continue until their the poisoning of the American people stops.
  
  Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist… pic.twitter.com/gQF9LpSjqD

  — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) November 7, 2025

  Andrew comments:

  I get it that Hegseth sees his job as pleasing the president, who revels in this style of tough-guy, take-no-prisoners, death-to-all-the-seditionists BS. If you’re going to play that game, however, and especially if you’re going to play it for the ostensible purpose of “defending” yourself from war crimes accusations, you can’t be too surprised if people suspect that you just might have given an order to kill everybody.

  And bigger picture: We are dealing with an activity — cocaine trafficking — that is not an act of war, is not terrorism, is not killing thousands of Americans (that’s fentanyl), and is traditionally handled in the United States by criminal prosecution under an extensive, decades-old set of laws. Yet, President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and the administration have speciously claimed that cocaine shipments — many of which are not even destined for our country — are the functional equivalent of mass-murder attacks; that, they claim, authorizes them to invoke the laws of armed conflict so they can kill people rather than prosecute them.

  Under the circumstances, it is hardly unreasonable for people to conclude that the administration is not especially fastidious about who is and is not a legitimate target under the laws of war.

  The things the administration is not "fastidious" about seems to grow daily.

• Closed, locked, key thrown away. John McCormack & Michael Warren bemoan The Closing of the Conservative Mind. (archive.today link)

  Last April, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute invited eight college students to what an ISI staffer described in an email as an “exclusive retreat and dinner with Tucker Carlson” in Florida.

  Founded nearly 75 years ago, ISI is a prominent conservative collegiate intellectual institution in the United States. ISI also runs the Collegiate Network, a collection of alternative conservative newspapers on college campuses across the country, and the eight student journalists had been selected by ISI to attend the retreat and dinner because their campus newspapers were top-performing publications. After a Journalism 101 session at the Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota, the students filed into a shuttle for a 90-minute trip to Carlson’s home on Gasparilla Island, where Carlson dispensed career advice.

  “Thanks to @TuckerCarlson for joining three generations of @amconmag editors/executive directors for a dinner with campus journalists from @ISI’s @collegiatenet,” ISI President Johnny Burtka posted on Twitter alongside a photo of himself, Carlson, then-Collegiate Network Executive Director Dan McCarthy, and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “It was an unforgettable evening that our students will cherish for years to come.”

  One person left out of Burtka’s photo was Carlson’s special guest at the dinner that night: Alex Jones, who appeared on Carlson’s podcast that aired the next day, April 9.

  Back in my college days, I was sorta involved with ISI. A long time ago. Sad to see what it's become.

• Sometimes only a Hayek quote will do. And Eric Boehm deploys one early: Trump's deals with Intel and others are a form of socialism.

  One danger of nationalism, Friedrich Hayek warned in 1960, was the "bridge" it provides "from conservatism to collectivism."

  "To think in terms of 'our' industry or resource," he wrote, "is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest."

  That's a short step that President Donald Trump has eagerly taken. In the first nine months of his second term in office, the president has overseen a giant government leap into the boardrooms of strategically important businesses.

  In June, Trump demanded (and the federal government received) a so-called golden share in U.S. Steel, which effectively gives the White House veto power over much of the company's future. Two months later, the Trump administration purchased a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, the once-dominant and recently struggling American chipmaker. Similar stakes in at least four other companies followed, including ones that produce nuclear power or mine metals such as lithium and copper that are necessary for building high-tech chips and advanced batteries.

  I must recycle my ChatGPT cartoon from back in August:

• To be fair, most economic doom will be in the future. But Jeff Maurer looks at today's whining and wonders: What Causes Economic Doomerism? And I will steal his impressive graphic:

  Here are some charts that most people probably assume are hallucinated bullshit, like when you ask AI to design a house and it puts the toilet in the middle of the kitchen:

  

  These charts are real…but how can they be? We’re constantly told that we’re living in tough economic times — I hear that the middle class has been “hollowed out”, and that you have to perform sexual favors on your local Albertson’s manager just to buy a dozen eggs. Generation Z — the story goes — is beyond screwed; the only jobs for them will be OnlyFans modeling and gig work delivering bubble tea to robots. These beliefs are so widespread that in a recent conversation between Sam Harris and George Packer — in which they spoke intelligently on many topics — the notion that Gen Z is struggling economically went unchallenged. It was like hearing two physicists discuss the finer points of quantum field theory and then reveal that they think that thunder is caused by a giant farting dragon in the sky.

  Jeff has possible theories aplenty.

• But some (relatively) good news The Fraser Institute has released its report on the Economic Freedom in North America, which analyzes and compares US and Mexican states, Canadian provinces. And…

  In the all-government index—which takes account of federal as well as state/provincial policies—the most economically free jurisdictions in North America are New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Idaho.

  The data Fraser used is from 2023, so I assume the demise of New Hampshire's Interest & Dividends Tax will keep us well in front of South Dakota and Idaho in the near term.

Recently on the book blog:

Katherine Mangu-Ward reveals something about the inner workings of the magazine she edits in her latest print-edition editorial: Friedrich Hayek's 'socialists of all parties' quote is apt today.

I'll be pointing out "nearly every essay" as each one emerges from behind the paywall. And I may include a Hayek quote here and there.

But, for today, here's a reasonable article not from Reason, in which Daniel J. Smith explains Why Modern Socialists Dodge Definition.

As Hayek would say: Bingo!

Also of note:

• In the land of obfuscation, finger-pointing, and whataboutism… Andrew C. McCarthy notes there is a New Explanation: Hegseth Did Not Order That All Boat Operators Be Killed. (NR gifted link)

  (Caveat Lector: Andrew's article is (as I type) 24 hours old; by the time you read this, it might be wildly out of date.)

  In a post on Saturday evening, I contended that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first “defense” of a second U.S. missile strike on September 2, which killed two shipwrecked survivors of an initial missile strike, was more like a guilty plea. With indignation, but without trying to refute any of the factual claims in a Washington Post report about the strikes, Secretary Hegseth asserted, “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’” But the laws of armed conflict prohibit lethal, kinetic strikes against combatants who’ve been rendered hors de combat (i.e., out of the fighting); hence, it is not a defense to say, “But it was our intention all along to kill them.”

  Not surprisingly, the White House figured out that this wasn’t going to fly, so we now have an actual defense. According to President Trump, Hegseth now says he didn’t order what the Washington Post’s unidentified sources say he ordered — to wit, that everyone on the vessel suspected of trafficking illegal drugs on the high seas was to be killed.

  I hope that’s true. Of course, if it is true that he didn’t give the order, how odd was it that Hegseth’s first two responsive posts over the weekend were exactly what you would expect from someone who did give such an order: first, the above unflinching declaration of intention to execute “lethal” strikes, and second, the cruder, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

  I hope that’s true. Of course, if it is true that he didn’t give the order, how odd was it that Hegseth’s first two responsive posts over the weekend were exactly what you would expect from someone who did give such an order: first, the above unflinching declaration of intention to execute “lethal” strikes, and second, the cruder, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

  Almost certainly there will be more to come. Sorry.

• One of the few things I remember from Confirmation classes. The English word "love" is very, very, ambiguous. Translations of the New Testament map four different Greek words into one hunka hunka burnin' "love" in English. Including one I hope Noah Smith isn't using in his headline: I love AI. Why doesn't everyone?

  New technologies almost always create lots of problems and challenges for our society. The invention of farming caused local overpopulation. Industrial technology caused pollution. Nuclear technology enabled superweapons capable of destroying civilization. New media technologies arguably cause social unrest and turmoil whenever they’re introduced.

  And yet how many of these technologies can you honestly say you wish were never invented? Some people romanticize hunter-gatherers and medieval peasants, but I don’t see many of them rushing to go live those lifestyles. I myself buy into the argument that smartphone-enabled social media is largely responsible for a variety of modern social ills, but I’ve always maintained that eventually, our social institutions will evolve in ways that minimize the harms and enhance the benefits. In general, when we look at the past, we understand that technology has almost always made things better for humanity, especially over the long haul.

  There are always those who will proclaim "This time is different." Maybe. But that's not the way to bet, I'm pretty sure.

• I've been wondering about this myself. Arnold Kling notes the funny way people think about one specific service: What's Different about Health Care?

  When it comes to health care policy, you can try to sound sophisticated by citing “asymmetric information” as an explanation for why government intervention is appropriate. But I think that those rationalizations are off base.

  The reason that we have government intervention in health care is that we have an instinct that making an individual pay for health care is immoral. It is taking advantage of the individual’s misfortune.

  When someone is desperately poor and needs to borrow money to keep from starving, charging interest is regarded as immoral. Back in the day, that is what made usury a sin and made Shylock a villain.

  When someone is suffering from illness, making them pay for treatment is analogous to usury. Still, we understand that health care providers deserve to get paid. So we turn payment for treatment into a collective problem, to be dealt with by insurance or, ultimately, by socialism (government).

  I think that the moral intuition that an individual suffering from a health problem should not have to pay for treatment is something that we need to re-think. In the 21st century, the array of medical services is so vast and so varied that it is no longer appropriate to take away the individual’s responsibility for paying. As an individual, you think you have “good” health insurance if it pays for eyeglasses and teeth cleaning and for every precautionary MRI. But for society as a whole, it is not good.

  Arnold goes on to mention the weirdness of the term "health insurance", which, in practice, works totally differently from other types of insurance.

• A palate-cleanser? Not really. But Brian Philips The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined. It's pretty R-rated funny the whole way through.

  There’s no way around it. If you read this article, you are going to have to imagine Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of health and human services, having an absolutely eyeball-melting orgasm. You’re going to have to imagine a sweaty, leathery man in his early 70s, the scion of the celebrated Kennedy political dynasty, bellowing like a Spartan as his body yields to the sweet, sweet release. Knees buckling. Sinews straining. What does it sound like when RFK Jr. bellows? I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s gritty. His normal speaking voice is basically a garbage disposal. When the big one hits, it must be like tossing a fork in.

  I’m sorry for this, truly. I would protect you from these images if I could. But in the latest, grossest plot twist in the ongoing saga of RFK’s affair with the acclaimed political journalist Olivia Nuzzi, RFK appears to have written a poem to his lover about—and please remember that I hate my own life as much as you’re about to hate yours—his own ejaculation. He calls it “my harvest.” Lines from the poem were published Saturday on the Substack of Nuzzi’s ex Ryan Lizza, who is also a political journalist and who was engaged to Nuzzi at the time of the alleged affair. Lizza has launched a multipart Substack series chronicling Nuzzi’s infidelities, to counter what he claims are Nuzzi’s misrepresentations in her forthcoming memoir, which was recently excerpted in Vanity Fair, where Nuzzi currently works.

  It's sordid and also hilarious. Except you might choke back some laughter when you remember that Junior's current job requires sound, sober judgement.

I was gonna make a "filled with hot air" joke, but elementary Googling informs me that Macy's balloons are inflated via helium.

No clue about how Marx would have felt about being filled with a noble gas. One that makes you talk funny.

Also of note:

• Apocalyptic Prophecy from the Book of Williamson. Specifically, Kevin D. He warns of The Four Schmucks of the Apocalypse. (archive.today link)

  The Trump administration is always good for a curveball: It put out a peace plan that was originally written in Russian when I was expecting one that was originally written in crayon.

  Talk about “the soft bigotry of low expectations”! You couldn’t see my expectations from the third sub-basement of Challenger Deep right about now.

  “The matter is delicate,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said of European engagement with the United States on the Ukraine matter, “because nobody wants to discourage the Americans and President Trump from ensuring that the United States remains on our side.”

  What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the Europeans’ side now? He sure as hell is not on the Ukrainians’ side.

  More to the point: What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the American side? The conspiracy-theory corner is chock-full of amusing little notions about why it is that Donald Trump so energetically and self-abasingly serves the interests of Vladimir Putin: sex tapes of a nature as to embarrass even such a man as Trump, who has appeared in no fewer than three pornographic films; dirt relating to his Slovenian-born wife’s dodgy family or to his sons’ personal and financial shenanigans; possibly some heavy off-the-books loans from state-controlled Russian banks or the Russian mob. All fun parlor-game stuff, but, as far as I can tell, all of the available hard evidence points toward my pet theory of the case, i.e. that Donald Trump is a punk and a coward who, like most weaklings of his kind, instinctively takes on the subordinate role in relationships with hard men such as Putin. I enjoyed The Manchurian Candidate, but, in a sense, it does not matter whether Donald Trump is some kind of a Russian asset under the influence of kompromat—he would not be doing anything different if he were.

  Russia has launched a war of aggression against a European democracy, and the president of the United States of America is on Moscow’s side: All pretense and political window-dressing to one side, that’s how it is. Trump means to give Putin what Putin wants. Fortunately for the cause of the Free World, Donald Trump does not run U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, some combination of Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner does—freedom is in the greasy paws of a quadrumvirate of self-serving grifters, phonies, cowards, and imbeciles.

  KDW sounds pessimistic, right? Am I detecting some pessimism there?

• A question the great minds of science will debate for the next century. Becket Adams wonders How Did Katie Couric Become an Elder Stateswoman of Journalism? (archive.today link)

  You have to hand it to Katie Couric.

  Unlike disgraced former anchor Dan Rather, who was drummed out of the news business in 2006, she has never faced any serious professional consequences for her shoddy, dishonest brand of journalism.

  In fact, despite a thoroughly blemished record, she has managed, late in her career, to reinvent herself as a kind of elder stateswoman of the news media, explaining to her loyal following everything that’s wrong with modern journalism. Leading Democrats, journalists, and pundits are all too eager to do interviews on her podcast or Substack to talk politics and the culture wars.

  This is despite the long list of people Couric has mischaracterized, misreported on, and mistreated. Instead of pariah status, she receives expressions of tribute and respect, all while criticizing those she deems unworthy of the title she has wielded unworthily for more than four decades.

  Becket has the receipts, as the kids say. He is especially hard on Katie's creative editing of her interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

• No fair! Hors de Combat is in a foreign language! Jed Rubenfeld, legal correspondent at the Free Press contends Killing Narco Speedboat Survivors Is a War Crime. (archive.today link)

  On September 10, eight days after the first U.S. bombing of a “narco” speedboat in the Caribbean, The Intercept—a left-wing news site—reported that there were people on board who had survived the initial air strike, but were then killed in a “follow-up attack.” No details were offered, no such second strike was shown in the video of the bombing posted by President Trump, and the allegation seemed to vanish. But yesterday, The Washington Post made the very same accusation, this time filled in with explosive details.

  After the first bomb struck the boat, the Post reported, a drone video feed showed two survivors “clinging to the smoldering wreck” in the open sea. According to the Post, mission commander Admiral Frank Mitchell Bradley then ordered a second strike specifically to kill the two survivors.

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called the Post story “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory,” reiterating that the speedboat attacks have been approved “by the best military and civilian lawyers.” But Hegseth did not specifically deny any of the particulars in the Post’s account.

  If the Post is right—and we don’t know yet whether it is—Bradley committed murder. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

  This is turning otherwise reasonable conservatives into defenders of the indefensible. Sad!

• Tyler Cowen piles on. Specifically, shooting the fish in the barrel: The Myth of the $140,000 Poverty Line. (archive.today link)

  When a flood of people start emailing me the same article, I know something is afoot. That is the case with Michael W. Green’s “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 is the New Poverty,” which was recently adapted from his Substack and published in The Free Press. Green’s core argument is that participating in the basics of American life costs much more than it used to, and as a result, we should set a new poverty line: up from about $32,000 a year for a family of four with two kids, to $140,000 a year.

  Fortunately for us, this is all wrong. The underlying concepts are wrong, the details are wrong, and the use of evidence is misguided. There are genuine concerns about affordability in the United States, but the analysis in this article is not a good way to understand them.

  Green goes off the rails right away when he defines the poverty line by quoting a statement based on a 1965 research paper by Mollie Orshansky: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” He uses this sentence as the foil for his own analysis, noting that rising costs of healthcare, housing, and other factors mean that food is a rapidly decreasing proportion of a household’s overall costs. Orshanksy’s formula, therefore, is outdated.

  The problem is that this mischaracterizes how the poverty line is calculated today.

  I am feeling sorry for Michael W. Green.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Today's Eye Candy is the first panel of today's Calvin and Hobbes comic, as preserved and resurrected by the Andrews McMeel syndicate. Click over, and you'll see the remainder of young Calvin's complaint about the poisonous zeitgeist generated by "talk show hosts, political candidates, news programs, special interest groups", who vie for attention by reducing discourse to "shouted rage".

Reader, credible sources date Bill Watterson's original to October 2, 1995. In other words, it's thirty years old.

So my (admittedly, fingers-crossed) attitude is expressed in the headline above. I wouldn't blame you for drawing a more pessimistic conclusion, though.

Also of note:

• The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley. As do poorly laid anti-capitalist schemes like the one pushed by Democrat State Rep Ellen Read from Newmarket, NH. As expressed in her tweet from a few weeks back:

  No one is coming to save us... it's up to us to take the power back.
  
  Nov 25-Dec 2 (https://t.co/oJCYoCPgHa), don't work if you can at all help it, and definitely don't spend one red cent unless it's life or death.

  — Rep. Ellen Read 🍉 (@Ellen4NH) November 11, 2025

  She is referring to the bold Blackout The System action, demanding that "We The People" "withdraw our labor & spending" from the economy between November 25 and December 2 of this year.

  So how's that going? Well, according to news reports…

  U.S. BLACK FRIDAY SALES HIT RECORD HIGH
  
  U.S. online Black Friday sales reached a record $11.8 billion, up 9.1% from last year, according to Adobe Analytics. Adobe expects Americans to spend $5.5 billion on Saturday and $5.9 billion on Sunday.
  
  Salesforce reported $18 billion in…

  — *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) November 29, 2025

  Yeah, people are doing what they want. Eat it, Marxists.

  Obligatory Disclaimer: this is just one isolated factoid. There are a whole bunch of ways to spin/rebut/disbelieve this. But imagine how Ellen and her "progressive" buddies would gloat if the headlines went the other way.

• Andrew C. McCarthy draws one. He points out that Military Lawfare Is a Red Line. (I'm out of NR gifted links for November, so here is a archive.today link.)

  Mark Kelly and the Seditionist Six sounds like a bad lounge act. That, at any rate, is how I decided to treat it — which is to say, ignore it. After all, it’s Thanksgiving. As we enter the holiday season, it’s time for not just good cheer but introspection: how blessed we are to be alive at a time of such abundance. It shouldn’t be the occasion for the week’s third or tenth or whatever episode of Trump-era sound and fury.

  But it is.

  This one, you’ve no doubt heard, involves a half dozen Democratic lawmakers who starred in a craven but legally unimpeachable video reminding our troops that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. I have to say “remind” because it has already been drilled into our troops — the best trained fighting force in the world, more thoroughly tutored in their legal and ethical duties than any fighting force in history — that the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) obliges them to disregard orders that are manifestly unlawful.

  But:

  Now, let’s not get deep into every constitutional patch here. To my mind, members of Congress should not be subject to executive control. The specter of punitively applying the UCMJ to Kelly effectively does that. But that’s an issue for another day. For the moment, the point is that Kelly knows he should stay a million miles away from a stunt like this video.

  That’s not because it was criminal; it wasn’t, the theatrical rage of the president and his apparatchiks notwithstanding. It’s because the video was a politicization of our armed forces at a time when we desperately need them to be kept out of the political fray.

  And as Kelly knows, when Democrats poke another hole in another norm, the president’s MO is to drive a truck through it.

  And, as Andrew shows, that's exactly what Trump has done.

• Free legal advice from Andrew. Specifically, Andrew McCarthy (yes, his second link today): ‘We Intended the Strike to Be Lethal’ Is Not a Defense (and, yes, an archive.today link)

  An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them.

  If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict. (See my Saturday column, with links to prior posts on this subject.)

  Nevertheless, even if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors (i.e., suspected members of drug cartels that the administration has dubiously designated as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)), the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting) — including by shipwreck.

  Reader, I hope you had "Committed War Crimes" on your Trump Impeachment Bingo Card.

• But if you want to read the other side… John Hinderaker calls it The Democrats’ Latest Faux Scandal. Maybe! His four-point rebuttal:

  1. The story is based on anonymous “sources,” i.e., deep state leakers. Unless and until someone steps forward, identifies himself, tells us what he knows and how he knows it, and takes responsibility for his statements, I assume everything in the story is probably a lie.
  2. Given the lack of regard for the “law of armed conflict” that is consistently shown by our enemies, my reaction is: boo hoo.
  3. Is there really a “law of armed conflict” that says you can only shoot at a target once? And if someone escapes an initial bombing, or burst of fire, or whatever, he is home free and can’t again be targeted? I’d like to see that law. I haven’t seen any news source cite to it.
  4. If such a rule exists and applies in the present context, it is stupid. If it applies, and one were determined to follow it, it would incentivize a massive first strike that would eliminate any chance of survivors. And would also increase the risk of collateral, unintended damage.

  To me, it appears John has caught a bad case of confirmation bias, but I could (as always, of course) be wrong, and Trump, Hesgeth, et. al. have truth and law on their side. But…

• And where, exactly, is this mentioned in the Constitution? This is way more offensive than Drunk Aunt spouting off about toxic masculinity at the dinner table: America's Politicized Holiday Dinner.

  In recent weeks, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised that the forthcoming revised U.S. Dietary Guidelines—spearheaded by his agency alongside the Department of Agriculture—will be released in December. As the deadline approaches, holiday hosts could be feeling understandably queasy about how thoroughly food policy now intrudes on what we serve and how we eat.

  The dietary guidelines are revised every five years, and they've seen their share of controversy. In the past few decades, the federal government scrapped the infamous food pyramid (which allegedly could be making a return) and has notoriously issued poor dietary advice on more than one occasion. In the 1980s, the federal government urged Americans to shift away from saturated fats and meat and toward carbs. Under the food pyramid—unveiled in 1992—Americans were further encouraged to eat less animal fats and consume copious amounts of bread and cereal. Americans did not get healthier, and obesity rates skyrocketed.

  "It's not as if we're suddenly eating a lot of lentils and kale," Yale School of Medicine's David Katz told the Huffington Post back in 2017. "We replaced the fat with low-fat junk food."

  Enter RFK Jr., who argues that America's food system is corrupt and "poisoning" Americans with hyper-processed additives. He advocates for increased saturated fat consumption—even recommending turkey deep-fried in beef tallow.

  Mmmmm... tallow!

And that time is when The Dave Barry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide is published. It is on Dave's substack, and I have not checked how much, if any, of it is behind a paywall. (I am a paid subscriber, and you should be too, sourpuss.)

My Eye Candy du Jour is available at Amazon, but Dave got his from the somewhat more authentic source, Norsland Lefse. They are based in Minnesota (of course), but it appears the fish balls are authentically imported from Norway.

However, they also sell lefse, and they are offering a free joke book if you buy a 3-pack. And lefse is actually good! With enough butter and sugar.

Also of note:

• Us Me too. Via Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: Hollis Robbins proposes A We-free December.

  I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media posts, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.

  No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”

  Why am I calling a halt? First, to see if it is possible. Second, because of the excellent new Apple TV show Pluribus, about a virus that turns almost everyone on Earth into one collective “we.” The hero is one of eleven individuals who seem to be immune. The show is all about I versus we. Watch if you can.

  A we-free December would make these New York Times sentences impossible: “We need to change how we build housing.” “We’re not warriors clashing, we’re sojourners exploring.” “Each of us longs to grow, to become better versions of ourselves.” “How far we have fallen!”

  I have been guilty a lot of gussying up my posts with the "royal we", but it's a habit I'm trying to break. (This item's headline is meant to be amusingly ironic.)

  And I've also been watching Plur1bus.

  So I'll see how December goes.

• 

  Happy Anniversary! Just kidding. Because 'twas 96 years (and, um, one month) ago today, October 29, 1929, that common wisdom says the "Black Friday" stock market crash triggered the Great Depression.

  But Amity Shlaes rebuts that common wisdom, specifically that expressed in a recent book (Amazon link at your right): Sorkin Rounds Up the Usual Suspects . (NR gifted link) She notes that Sorkin's book is "an artful reprise" of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929. And:

  In that 1955 book, Galbraith argued that unregulated speculation, exacerbated by lazy statesmen and the greed of the rich, caused the Great Crash. Galbraith’s choice of a narrow time frame — one short year, 1929 — helped him to capture the drama of the crash.

  According to Galbraith, quoted approvingly as “seminal” by Sorkin, the worst day of the Great Crash — Tuesday, October 29 — was “the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market,” and “may have been the most devastating day in the history of markets.”

  The stunning story of the market’s plummet, however, also emboldened Galbraith to moot, without seeing any necessity of proving, a second thesis relating to years outside the scope of his title: that the 1930s policy applied by President Roosevelt, the New Deal, somehow made matters better, or could have, had the crash not been so violent.

  Amity does a fine job of debunking both Galbraith and Sorkin. If you need to read a book about the Great Depression, I recommend her 2007 history, The Forgotten Man, on which I reported here.

• Also debunking economic bullshit… is Michael R. Strain: No, the Poverty Threshold Is Not $140,000 (Good Grief). (archive.today link)

  Portfolio manager Michael W. Green begins his much-discussed essay in the Free Press:

  For my whole career in finance, I have distrusted the obvious. And yet, for many years there was one number I assumed was an actuarial fact: the U.S. poverty line. Yes, I saw Americans feeling poorer every year, despite economic growth and low unemployment. But ultimately, I trusted the official statistics. Until I saw a simple statement buried in a research paper.

  And I realized that number—created more than 60 years ago, with good intentions—was a lie.

  Well. Where to start? Herewith, six points of response.

  1. Green engages in a series of calculations that would earn a D in my master’s class. He concludes: “So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative.” Of course, poverty thresholds are inherently arbitrary. You’re free to argue that three-quarters of households are living in poverty — but that argument is absurd on its face.

  Why? Because any poverty threshold that finds most households living in poverty is not analytically serious or practicable. The economist Ernie Tedeschi computes that around 75 percent of households earn less than $140,000. Moreover, as Tedeschi shows, if that’s your threshold, then you should be feeling good about the nation’s progress!

  $140,000 is not a useful poverty threshold to be clear, but the long-run story it tells is pretty unambiguously positive.
  [Edited to adjust for household size and to add a slightly clearer methodology] pic.twitter.com/q6mZ4KKw4c

  — Ernie Tedeschi (@ernietedeschi) November 26, 2025

  And Michael, as noted, provides 5 more points of contention.

  If you prefer a more liberal take that Michael's, Noah Smith is also not buying it: The "$140,000 poverty line" is very silly. (archive.today link) He includes a telling graphic from Our World in Data, something like this:

  Note that Norway's food insecurity rate is nearly double the US's. I blame fish balls.

  More at the link, quite a bit before you hit the paywall. I was reminded of my own minor detective work when I read (three Thanksgivings ago) in the student newspaper at the University near here:

  More than half of college students suffer from malnutrition, according to Medical Daily

  Does that sound reasonable to you?

• And debunking literary bullshit… Neal Stephenson couldn't help but respond to A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z.

  A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containing recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read. Some of my books are listed. Since this is the season of Thanksgiving, I’ll start by saying that I genuinely appreciate the plug! However, I was taken aback by the statement highlighted in the screen grab below:

  [… screen grab elided, but the claim is that, of the five books recommended…]

  “…most of these books don’t have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence).”

  I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this. But even then it would be crazy wrong.

  Neal does a bit of detective work, and his best guess is: AI slop. Perhaps he'll work it into his next book.

The WePo editorialists examine Trump’s in-kind contribution to Mark Kelly ’28. (WaPo gifted link)

As long as it was just words—stupid, provocative, risky, Constitution-trashing words—we were fine. Bringing the Fibbies into it should be impeachable.

And, lest there be any doubt about the risk, lawprof Joshua Braver spells it out at the WSJ: Disobeying Military Orders Is Full of Risk. (WSJ gifted link)

And (to repeat) neither Maggie Goodlander, nor any of her five video buddies, will be volunteering to testify in the court martials for any hapless service members that took their legal advice seriously.

Also of note:

• Good question. And Kevin D. Williamson asks it: What About the Poor? (archive.today link)

  The comedian John Mulaney tells a funny—and terrible—story about trying to cure himself of his cocaine addiction by instructing his financial manager to keep cash out of his hands. No cash, no coke—I guess his dealer didn’t take Venmo. What happened next was a predictable series of shenanigans in which the comedian thought up ways to, in effect, embezzle from himself, e.g., buying a $12,000 watch and selling it for $6,000 on the same day. Mulaney’s story of desperate addiction offers a good example of one of the common mistakes we make in our current econo-political debate: trying to use economic means to solve non-economic problems. Mulaney’s problem was not economic: He has been very, very successful and probably could blow $6,000 a day for a very long time without endangering the mortgage payment. His problem was that he loved cocaine.

  There are a great many modern pathologies and problems that often are described as results of capitalism or as aspects of capitalism—of “late capitalism,” as the pseudointellectuals sometimes put it. For example, as formerly poor and hungry countries have become more prosperous and better-fed, they have seen an increase in obesity and diabetes, and, in some cases, they have seen higher levels of alcohol and tobacco use as increased private incomes enable the consumption of what had been unobtainable luxuries. Use of some other drugs has increased, in some places, with wealth: You need a little bit of money to have John Mulaney’s former bad habits. There are increased environmental pressures and externalities associated with increasing wealth, too, as the newly affluent consume more energy, food, and petroleum products (plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals—the list is long) than they had. When poor people leave farming villages for higher-paying jobs in urban environments, there are new pressures put on everything from utilities to transportation networks to housing.

  Capitalism becomes a go-to bogeyman, the witch behind every contemporary malady: “Blame capitalism for men’s loneliness,” etc.

  For some reason, discussion at the Thanksgiving table last night turned to potatoes. Which turned to the Irish Potato Famine. Which turned to someone blaming capitalism for it. I refrained from pulling out my phone and digging out the rebutting URL from the Mises Institute: What Caused the Irish Potato Famine? (Didn't stop me from digging it out for you this morning, though.)

• Fun Reason factoid: In her lead editorial in the January issue of Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward reveals there are some things you can't say in her magazine:

  Reason has a rule against starting essays with quotes from Friedrich Hayek. After all, one could start nearly every essay in this magazine with a bon mot from the Austrian-born economist and classical liberal hero. But sometimes things get bad enough that only a Hayek quote will do.

  I assume that rule also applies to article headlines, for example, J.D. Tuccille's: Mamdani and Trump prove that there are two paths toward socialism. Otherwise those last three words coulda been "roads to serfdom".

  About five years ago, the comedian Ryan Long posted a video in which a woke progressive and an old-fashioned racist meet and, much to their astonishment, discover that rather than being bitterly opposed, they agree on pretty much everything.

  There was a strong echo of that convergence in last week's White House tete-a-tete between Republican President Donald Trump and New York's new socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Anticipated to be a grudge match, it instead turned into something of a lovefest. Well, of course it did. As fans of horseshoe theory accurately point out, control freaks from the political extremes might differ on details, but they have more in common with each other than they do with people who respect each other's liberty.

  (And, sure enough, J.D. eventually gets around to citing The Road to Serfdom. Just not early enough in his article to run afoul of KMW's rule.)

• Whew. Noah Smith sets my mind, and maybe yours, at ease: No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land. It involves some brutal honesty:

  The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came into existence; the U.S. used force to displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

  This was also true before the U.S. was born. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

  If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore, for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say, “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

  I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.

  [Oops! It turns out I blogged Noah's article last year! Well, it still works, and is a good remedy if you were bullied into a Thanksgiving-table "land acknowledgement" yesterday.]

• Embodied inanity is the worst kind of inanity. And David Harsanyi has an example: Marjorie Taylor Greene Embodies the Inanity of Populism.

  During a recent stop on her image rehab tour, Marjorie Taylor Greene told CNN's Dana Bash that she is sorry "for taking part in the toxic politics." It has been, she added, "bad for the country." A week later, Greene finally did something patriotic by announcing her retirement.

  It's fair to say Greene is one of the most well-known GOP House members in the nation. Greene, though, is famous because her nitwittery has been endlessly highlighted by the media and Democrats to cast the Republican Party as one of hayseeds and conspiracists.

  And, in all fairness, Greene might be one of the biggest ignoramuses to ever serve in Congress, which is no small achievement when one considers the "Squad" exists. If I asked you to name a single piece of legislation Greene has sponsored, you would probably be at a loss. If I asked you to name an important policy she has championed, an uplifting speech she has delivered or an area of expertise she has mastered, you would not think of any because there have been none.

  Let's not spare the voters of MTG's congressional district (GA-14), who returned her to her seat, the one she's decided she didn't want after all, giving her 64.4% of their votes.

Kevin D. Williamson has a long, personal essay at the Dispatch and it's highly recommended, reminding us that We Are Pilgrims, Still. You should subscribe! But if not, here is your (archive.today link). Starting from two lines of that hymn they (allegedly) played on the Titanic as it sank.

For the nth time: I am not very religious. But…

Also of note:

• Quitcher bitchin', OK? Megan McArdle also has thoughts on this day: How to pay this great American inheritance forward. (WaPo gifted link)

  This year, however, I’ve been reflecting on another thing we ought to be more grateful for: America herself. We have been taking her too much for granted recently, assuming that she will keep showering her gifts upon us without so much as a thank-you note. We’re like trust-funders who slander capitalism and squander their incomes, secure in the knowledge that the checks will keep coming.

  They will not, unless we once again start treating America as something we have to earn, rather than something we’re entitled to.

  A point well taken, Megan.

• Also thankful is … Veronique de Rugy! She is Giving Thanks for Our Sometimes-Maligned Constitution and Creed.

  Thanksgiving invites us to pause and consider the gifts we often overlook. This year, at a moment of rising political unease and ideological confusion, I am especially grateful for one extraordinary inheritance: a nation and its creed brought into being by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

  Why, in addition to family, friends and a feast, is this on my mind today? In certain circles, especially among "postliberal" thinkers on the right, it's now fashionable to claim that the Constitution has failed. Some argue that the country's founding was overly individualistic or insufficiently moral, that our constitutional structure prevents the pursuit of a unified national purpose, or that what we need instead is a more powerful state headed by a muscular executive and a more cohesive cultural or religious identity enforced from above.

  Vero was born in France, and became an American in 2012. We are lucky to have her.

• On a less thankful note. New Hampshire's own Jason Sorens observes that Thanksgiving traffic shows the Highway Trust Fund is running on empty.

  The American Automobile Association predicts that nearly 82 million Americans will travel more than 50 miles from home over Thanksgiving—a new record if it pans out. Almost all the travel increase, it projects, will be by car.

  Whether you take a train, plane, or automobile to your holiday festivities, your income tax dollars are subsidizing drivers on the road. Most Americans assume that gas taxes and tolls fund highways. That used to be the case, but it's no longer true.

  Gas taxes and user fees haven't fully funded the federal highway system since 2007. In 2021, Congress authorized roughly $181 billion in transfers to the highway account—money paid for by debt and general revenues.

  Even with that added cash, the federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF) will run out of money again in 2027. By 2033, it will need an extra $250 billion from taxpayers. That's nearly $2,000 per American household over the next eight years.

  Jason's libertarian credentials are impeccable, but he realizes that if we're gonna have roads and highways, the more equitable way to fund them would be to raise the gas tax.

• Like I ignore Season Five of Justified… Jeff Maurer thinks The Next President Should Ignore Trump's Ukraine "Peace Plan"

  Neville Chamberlain gets a bad rap: We think of him as the doe-eyed naif who got suckered by a tyrant, but he’s really a doe-eyed naif who got suckered by a tyrant. What happened to him happens all the time – the historical examples of leaders blowing off international agreements are too numerous to count. World War I started when the German Chancellor dismissed the treaty that said “No starting a World War I” as “a scrap of paper”; the treaty that supposedly ended the Vietnam War just let the NVA break for lunch before pushing on to Saigon. Often, international agreements are like traffic rules in Boston: violated so egregiously that you wonder why they exist at all.

  If Trump strong-arms Ukraine into accepting his “peace plan” – which, in its initial form, would really be a surrender – the next president should not consider themselves bound by that agreement. You might be surprised to hear me say that, since LOLing at a treaty is usually the provenance of dictators, not pointy-headed liberals. But I think it’s time for liberals to wake up and acknowledge the way that treaties are and always have been used.

  I think Jeff might be skimming over the difference between a (hypothetical) "agreement" and a full-fledged treaty ratified by Congress, which becomes the Law of the Land. Still, check it out.

• What, again? According to Yuval Levin, the GOP is Limping into Another Health Care Debate. (archive.today link) He notes "two kinds of problems" that Republicans have in the area:

  The first is just the sheer absence of any Republican health care agenda, which has been a persistent problem for more than a decade now. Republicans have honed the habit of starting sentences they can’t finish when it comes to health care, promising all sorts of action if only they could get the leverage to advance it, but then turning out to have no particular policies in mind — or at least none they agree about.

  […]

  The second problem revealed by the Republican fight over health care is one the GOP has been even more eager to obscure this year. It is the great and growing frustration with the Trump administration among congressional Republicans.

  At this point, I'd be happy (and thankful!) if the GOP just managed to avoid making things worse.

• In case you thought cancel culture had run its course. Jonathan Turley notes that its alive and well in one of the its strongholds. “Fight Fiercely Harvard”: Harvard Club of New York Cancels Dershowitz Book Event.

  The Harvard Club of New York is being accused of censorship after abruptly cancelling a book event featuring famed Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. In a statement, Dershowitz says that invitations were sent out and the event was approaching when he was suddenly told that the Harvard Club would have none of it. He blamed his representation of President Donald Trump for the cancellation.

  For a club that bills itself as offering “unique experiences,” it appears that hearing from opposing or different views is not one of them.

  Dershowitz has been associated with Harvard for over 60 years and remains one of its best known law faculty members.

  Jonathan doesn't mention Dershowitz's connection to Epstein, which might also be a factor.

I tweet-snarked at the NH Democratic Party last night from my sofa:

No parent would bother sending their kid to a private school (or homeschooling) if public schools were doing as good a job for "free". Public schools should try doing that.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) November 25, 2025

That link in the Dems' tweet goes to a Garry Rayno report at InDepthNH.org: Public School Advocates Decry State’s Education Freedom Account Program. That site claims to provide "unbiased nonprofit watchdog news", but that's very much a Chico-Marxist joke: "Who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?"

No big deal: InDepthNH.org is simply the funhouse-mirror image of NH Journal. But at least NH Journal hasn't, as near as I can tell, claimed to be unbiased. And, no surprise, Raymo's article doesn't bother to find one advocate for the state's EFA program. Those "watchdog" eyes aren't watching everything.

Also of note:

• Two words, Michelle: "Nikki Haley". Jeff Jacoby rebuts a former First Lady: Wrong, Michelle Obama. Of course America's ready for a woman president.

  I'VE NEVER had any particular interest in women's fashion trends. Like professional sports, heavy-metal bands, and superhero movie franchises, it's a subject that I know millions of people find fascinating but has never really appealed to me. Under normal circumstances, therefore, the release of former first lady Michelle Obama's new book about the "beauty and intrigue of fashion" and the evolution of her clothing style — a coffee table volume titled "The Look" — wouldn't have registered on my radar.

  But something Obama said while publicizing the book caught even my attention.

  Asked during an on-stage interview last week about first ladies being seen as "an archetype of wifedom and femininity," Obama briskly dismissed the notion, saying it has "no current status in how women actually show up in the world today." But a follow‑up question about how much "room" there is for an American woman to become president triggered a heated response:

  "Well, as we saw in the past election, sadly, we ain't ready," Obama said. "That's why I'm, like, don't even look at me about running, because you all are lying. You're not ready for a woman. You are not! So don't waste my time! You know, we've got a lot of growing up to do, and there's still, sadly, a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman, and we saw it."

  Then, seeming to catch herself, Obama paused, looked at the interviewer, and asked: "What was the question?"

  I think Kamala lost not because she was a woman, but because she was (accurately) perceived as a phony nitwit:

  Nikki Haley would not have had that problem. In an alternate universe.

• "This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you." That was Mr. Burns in a 1990(!) Simpsons episode. Thirty-five years later: Trump’s habitual 'treason' charges reflect his authoritarian impulses.

  President Donald Trump says six members of Congress are "traitors to our Country" who "should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL" because they produced a video reminding members of the armed forces that they "can refuse illegal orders." Trump's over-the-top reaction epitomizes his longstanding tendency to portray criticism of him as a crime against the state, which reflects his disregard for freedom of speech as well as his narcissism.

  In the video, which was posted online last week, two senators and four representatives, all Democrats with intelligence or military backgrounds, allude to Trump's controversial uses of U.S. forces, including his domestic military deployments and his summary executions of suspected drug smugglers. "Americans trust their military," they say, "but that trust is at risk."

  Trump is not alone! Granite Grok guy Steve MacDonald takes on one of those videoed Dems, New Hampshire's own Maggie Goodlander: Jake Sullivan's Wife Can Be Tried and Sentenced for Sedition.

  "Can"? Well, anything's possible.

  Not to let the Dems off the hook. Their "just stating the law" defense is just way too cute, similar to the conspiracy theorists' hiding behind a "just asking questions" defense.

  David R. Henderson points to analysis from Ted Galen Carpenter which points out the iffy status of their "refuse illegal orders" diktat:

  Slotkin and other critics contend that enlistees in the military take an oath to obey the Constitution, not the commander-in-chief or any other official.  That point is true to some extent, but the concept of “unlawful orders” is not objective or self-defining.  Even the oath of enlistment itself is somewhat murky.  Personnel taking the oath swear both to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies” and to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Military officers swear the oath of commissioned officers, which contains very similar language.

  The oaths do not directly address the problem of how to deal with a situation when an order from the president or another military official might violate the Constitution. The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) requires members of the armed services to obey all lawful orders but also obligates them to disobey any unlawful order.  Those twin requirements would seem to create a conceptual mess for anyone not having a law degree and an extensive background in the specifics of military law.

  The language of the UCMJ and other relevant statutes also seems to leave a person in the military adrift about what exactly to do if he or she concludes that an order is indeed unlawful.  If the individual disobeys an order that authorities later determine to be lawful, that person risks being court martialed.  Conversely, if one abides by an unlawful order, that person might be deemed to have violated the oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

  I'm also in agreement with James Freeman of the WSJ, who finds the Dems "reckless" in starting a "poisonous controversy". And also Jim Geraghty of National Review:

  If you’re going to create a video accusing the president of the United States of making unlawful orders, you probably should have at least one or two solid and recent examples in mind before you do so, but apparently that’s just too much to ask from the likes of Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow. But that doesn’t get President Trump off the hook for his unhinged raging that Crow and other Democratic lawmakers ought to be tried and executed for sedition. Still, maybe every incumbent in Washington would prefer to be talking about treason and insurrections than the economy.

  It's really tough to follow the path of Elvis these days.

• Your tax dollars not at work. Jeff Luse reads an Inspector General's report so you don't have to: Taxpayers still paying for Hurricane Sandy relief mismanagement 13 years later, new report finds.

  In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey. The storm would bring severe flooding to the East Coast—particularly New Jersey and New York City—and go down as the fifth-most-expensive tropical cyclone in U.S. history ($88.5 billion in damages), per a 2024 estimate by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But the costs of the storm are still being realized, and more than 13 years later, taxpayers are still footing the bill for the federal government's mismanagement, according to a recent report from the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG).

  In January 2013, Congress approved over $50 billion in aid for Sandy relief. The bill, which included bailouts for wealthy Connecticut residents, appropriated $10.9 billion to the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) Public Transportation Emergency Relief Program, $10 billion of which the FTA gave to states for hurricane recovery and resilience projects.

  Portions of this money have, unsurprisingly, been spent wastefully, and the OIG report identifies more than $95 million in questionable costs. One example of wasteful spending comes from an awardee that, in June 2017, was given an $88.9 million grant for "design and construction for replacing commuter and light rail signal, power, and communication systems." The project was originally supposed to end in May 2018, but was granted an extension to operate through December 2021. Even with this extension, the project was not finished when the OIG conducted its audit. As a result, the recipient had incurred "approximately $52.5 million in project activity costs" since its 2021 deadline. And because the project never received an extension from the FTA, these expenditures are "ineligible." However, the recipient is working to extend its grant period with the agency, which would allow the contractor to be reimbursed for these cost overruns.

  Later in the article, Jeff highlights $773.1 million designated for "replacement of a new passenger and freight rail service bridge". Initially scheduled to be finished last year. Now rescheduled with a "deadline" of July 2030.

• Apologies to DOGE. We bemoaned its demise yesterday. But they claim, like the guy in the Monty Python movie…

  As usual, this is fake news from @Reuters. President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to modernize the federal government and reduce waste, fraud and abuse. Just last week, DOGE terminated 78 wasteful contracts and saved taxpayers $335M. We’ll be back in a few… https://t.co/S1pSmx26s0

  — Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) November 24, 2025

  I'll believe it when they kill off that $773.1 million replacement bridge project.