May
9
2025

And There's a Local Angle, Granite Staters!

Dave Barry writes, hilariously, on Influencers at Sea.

This is just a short breaking Substack to bring you up to speed on the near-tragedy that we almost potentially had here in Miami over the weekend.

What happened, according to the Miami Herald, was that a yacht carrying 32 social-media influencers sank near Miami Beach. Unfortunately, they all survived.

No! Sorry! I of course mean fortunately they all survived. The yacht was in only nine feet of water, which is 12,491 feet shallower than the water where the Titanic sank. Also they were close to land, and the Coast Guard was nearby.

But still, it makes you think about the physical risks that our influencers take on our behalf in their selfless efforts to influence us by taking pictures of themselves making pouty faces in front of scenic views.

For some reason, Dave devotes a good deal of attention to …

The good news was, the influencers did not panic when near-tragedy struck; they remained calm and continued courageously taking selfies. The Herald states that "Former Miss America participant Regan Hartley was seen holding a $350 bottle of Clase Azul Gold Tequila as the yacht’s passengers were moved to safety."

That's right: If not for the bravery and quick thinking of Regan Hartley (Miss New Hampshire 2011; also, according to her website, "Singer/Songwriter, Actress, Model, Anti-bullying activist, and Inspirational Speaker") we might have lost the Clase Azul Gold.

Regan's Facebook page also claims she was "Miss America 2012", but the relevant Wikipedia page doesn't support that. She may have stuck that in under the influence of Clase Azul Gold.

(In case you're wondering if you can get Clase Azul Gold Tequila for less up here in NH: nope.)

Also of note:

  • Good for Noah Smith. He's a Democrat, Kamala voter, backed Biden's "industrial policy", but there's a line he will not cross.

    When you've lost Noah, choo-choo fans, it's time to pack it in.

  • Not even trying to make a good argument. James Freeman "hails" the Champions of the Donor Class.

    A few Republican members of the House are using bogus Democratic talking points to get tax breaks for rich liberals while discouraging blue states from enacting pro-growth reform. Now these rogue GOP lawmakers are even threatening to trigger nationwide tax hikes if they don’t get their way.

    Tobias Burns reports for The Hill on a group of five Republicans who are demanding that the state and local tax (SALT) deduction be raised above its current cap of $10,000:

    The lawmakers are saying they’re prepared to vote no as a group on the wide-ranging tax and spending cut package key to President Trump’s agenda if they don’t get the raise they want.
    The group consists of Reps. Andrew Garbarino (N.Y.), Nick LaLota (N.Y.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Young Kim (Calif.) and Tom Kean Jr. (N.J.) — Republicans from wealthier suburban districts of major U.S. metropolitan areas, where higher property taxes make the increased cap especially valuable to taxpayers.

    The federal SALT deduction is terrible policy because it takes the pressure off profligate state governments run by Democrats to restrain their own taxes. A proper cap would be set at zero, so that Americans nationwide would not have to subsidize the high-tax policies of New Jersey, New York and California. Without the ability to deduct heavy state and local taxes on federal returns, citizens of blue states would be fully accountable for their bad political choices and would be motivated to demand reform at the state level.

    Just a note if you missed it back in February: Tom Kean Jr. has the "distinction" of being the only GOP CongressCritter representing one of the top 15 richest districts in the US.

AIsplaining

Well, I thought I had come up with a clever new term. Turns out it's old, maybe already tired. From a year ago:

But I did find a pretty good example. Starting from this morning's Bleat from James Lileks, which dug out this old newspaper clipping:

Interesting, because I used to live in Nebraska, and zoomed back and forth on I-80 quite a bit.

James also provides a recent Google Street View of "Erma's Desire", one of the sculptures:

But I wanted to see the rest of that article! Where's page 14B?! So I googled the headline "Bicentennial art fails Nebraska road test" and … failed, alas.

But I did check Google's "AI Mode". Which contained (among other things) an indication of what the AI thought might be the Real Issue:

"Lack of Understanding: Some residents struggled to grasp the meaning or artistic merit of the modern sculptures, fueling criticism and debate."

Reader, that's AIsplaining.

For the record, I can no longer duplicate that result. But I swear it's accurate!

(It turns out "Erma's Revenge Desire" is eminently Googleable, so if you're interested…)

May
8
2025

"He Said He Was From the Government, and Was Here To Help!"

And we know how that movie turns out, don't we?

At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. gives two big thumbs-down for Trump’s Bad Hollywood Trade Movie (gifted link).

The stock market was apparently recovering too much confidence in the Donald Trump administration. He fixed that with his spontaneous 100% tariff on foreign movies.

No, it wouldn’t land on Americans the way some of his other tariff acts would. But his Sunday social-media post was an especially shimmering, Technicolor example of Mr. Trump messing with the economy and people’s livelihoods on whim, to satisfy his daily need of attention.

It isn’t what industry representatives were seeking to put U.S. production on an even tax footing with foreign locations.

It’s not practical—movies are digital services whose physical production process, to the extent it still exists, takes place everywhere and anywhere. How even to identify and tax the foreign content of intermediate products as they fly back and forth on the internet?

The instant outcome is already the opposite of the one intended. Nobody will finance a movie until the questions are answered.

This, from Giancarlo Sopo at NR, also explains a lot: Netflix’s CEO Wants You Lonely and Miserable. Excerpt (one that doesn't have much to do with that headline):

Box office returns are hardly a reliable measure of artistic value, but they do speak to our drift. In 2024, domestic ticket sales sank to $8.7 billion, a 23.5 percent drop from 2019, the last pre-pandemic benchmark. Annual admissions plummeted from 1.3 billion to just 800 million. Even the momentum of smash hits like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine faded fast. Theaters are open — but, more and more, they echo.

Ironically, Netflix helped build the very void it now treats as inevitable — a cultural ecosystem built not to nourish but to numb. This is the same company that lobbied to sideline The Count of Monte Cristo — a film that could have galvanized audiences beyond Europe — to prop up its gaudy narco-musical Emilia Pérez. Meanwhile, it relegates pre-1970 films — the golden age of cinema — to a digital shredder. In their place, with some exceptions, the platform is dominated by anti-art: focus-grouped “content” engineered for short attention spans.

Consumer note: I have purchased a ticket for the new live-action Lilo & Stitch, two weeks from today. In 3D! This will be the first time I've been to a theater since (see above) Twisters, back in July of last year.

I know: Disney. But the trailer made me laugh, and I have fond memories of the original animated version. So here's hoping it doesn't suck.

Also of note:

  • Sorry, Don: 50% is not a passing grade. Jonah Goldberg points to a continuing problem with Team Orange: Right Ends, Wrong Means.

    Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

    This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

    For instance, I’ve argued for decades that liberal media bias is real and a problem. I think you can exaggerate the problem, particularly these days (Fox has dominated cable news for decades). But, yes, the MAGA crowd is right that much of the “legacy” media is often reflexively hostile to Republicans. But that doesn’t mean I support the way Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is bullying various media organizations for being critical of Trump, or that I applaud Trump’s jihad against the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

    Did anyone notice when Governor Ayotte started calling the "Gulf of Maine" the "Gulf of New Hampshire"? No? Maybe that was a dream I had.

  • But the real problem is neither means nor ends. It is, as Kevin D. Williamson says: Trump Is a Socialist.

    Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state. You don’t need socialism to have a portfolio of social-welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the postwar decades: In the high-tax European countries that so many of our progressive friends profess to admire, the trend for a generation has been away from state enterprise and central planning and toward privatization, trade, and investment. American progressives say they envy European health care systems they generally know nothing about; their European counterparts sincerely envy an American entrepreneurial ecosystem that they understand all too well but remain unable to replicate. It’s a funny old world.

    Socialism does not mean government-funded education and retirement benefits and health care subsidies—those things are simply welfare, and there are better and worse ways to go about doing such things. Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises. Food stamps are welfare—socialism can mean state-owned farms and grocery stores, but more often it means a state apparatus that runs the farms and grocery stores as though it owned them, setting prices, negotiating the terms of employment, and determining how business is to be done—a little more of this crop, a little less of that commodity, etc.

    V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor.

    And of course KDW gets around to Trump's comment about America being a "department store", characterizing it accurately as "quasi-monarchical Leninism".

    Yes, I'm willing to grant that Kamala would have been worse.

  • "Dad, why did we get off at the "Serfdom" exit?" Jared Dillian also notes the Lenintastic Lunacy at the top: Trump’s 'they can have 5' moment is an attack on capitalism.

    While recently aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump told reporters that "a young lady—a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl—doesn't need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five." He doubled down in an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker, saying that Americans "don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five."

    Trump is referring to the economic hardship that is inevitable due to his tariffs. Toys are a particular focus, many of which come from China and are subject to the highest tariffs. Trump is asking Americans to make sacrifices, and not with the eloquence of John F. Kennedy—the sacrifices we make are simply to satisfy his pride.

    "OK, OK, I'll go to six pencils, kid. You drive a hard bargain."

  • A very slick visualization reminding us that we're doomed. Well, not me. My kids maybe. From Cato: Social Security's Financial Crisis: The Trust Fund Myth Uncovered.

    There’s a big problem with Social Security.

    Most people misunderstand its trust fund, believing it holds real financial assets that ensure future benefits—the equivalent of a piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills.

    Yeah, it ain't that.

    On that topic, Dave Burge is righteously pissed enough to speak truth to power at Twitter:

    It's a thread, and it's no contest: David can out-f CongressCritter Pocan. Pocan apparently got the memo that Democrats should cuss a lot more than they used to.

Recently on the book blog:

May
7
2025

Hey, Let's Pay More For Less Reliable Electricity!

Oh, wait. That sounds like a bad idea.

And there's more to come for countries on the right edge of the chart, according to this Reuters report: EU power grid needs trillion-dollar upgrade to avert Spain-style blackouts.

Europe's ageing power grid and lack of energy storage capacity will require trillions of dollars in investments to cope with rising green energy output, increasing electricity demand and to avoid blackouts.

A week ago, Spain and Portugal lost power in their worst blackout. Authorities are investigating the cause, but whatever the findings, analysts and industry representatives say infrastructure investment is essential.

My translation of what "authorities" are saying: "We're still checking, but we're pretty sure the answer is that you need to give us a lot more money."

Also of note:

  • She's the grift that keeps on grifting. Jonathan Turley notes an unintentional good idea from an unexpected source: NPR’s Katherine Maher Continues to Make the Case for Defunding.

    Recently, we discussed how National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher made the conclusive case before Congress why funding for NPR should be terminated. Not to be outdone, Maher seemed to return to CBS to build her case further against her state-sponsored media outlet. Objecting to President Donald Trump’s criticism of NPR, Maher explained that “from my perspective, part of the separation of the First Amendment offers is to keep government out.” Precisely.

    The portrayal of NPR as unbiased and balanced is laughingly absurd. Indeed, many of us objected to Maher’s selection after years of declining audiences and increasing criticism. Maher had a long record of far-left public statements against Republicans, Trump, and others.

    This is the same CEO who attacked a respected senior editor who tried to get NPR to acknowledge its bias and restore greater balance on the staff.

    That respected NPR senior editor is Uri Berliner, and his essay last year at the Free Press ("Here’s How [NPR] Lost America's Trust") preceded his suspension and resignation from NPR by a few days.

  • I used to be an annoying grad student, but I recovered. Jeff Maurer doesn't care for the Bernie/AOC messaging: The Problem With “Oligarchy” Is That It’s Annoying-Grad-Student Coded. Leading with an amusing anecdote:

    Last week, Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan got into a public spat with Bernie Sanders about the latter’s use of the word “oligarchy”. In an interview with Politico, Slotkin said that the party should say “kings” instead of “oligarchy”. Sanders — who, by the way, is on a tour called the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” — replied that Americans “are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.”

    As of press time, Senator Slotkin has not clarified exactly how dumb she thinks the American people are. Though I wish that she would — I’d like to see her give a press conference and say “Senator Sanders, with all due respect: Take a gander at these freaks. You ever go to a swap meet? Walk around one of those for a bit and then tell me that you don’t think that even words like ‘red’ and ‘the’ might be too much for these half-apes. This country is one big fucking Tard Farm, and we need to speak in the guttural burps that they understand.”

    Senator Slotkin has not said that. As of press time.

    Click over for more, including a lot more bad words. Jeff's (still) a Democrat, but I heartily agree with his attitude: "I’m less worried about people who don’t know the word “oligarchy” than people who do."

  • Magic 8 Ball says: "Ask again later." Tyler Cowen wonders: Is Classical Liberalism for Losers?

    Are classical liberals a bunch of pathetic losers? Losers both because they have lost in the political realm, while simultaneously handing over key institutions to the illiberal left?

    That is a common charge you hear from right-wing intellectuals these days, as exemplified by commentators such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, Christopher Rufo, and others.

    Their argument is twofold.

    First, they say that classical liberals are temperamentally incapable of putting up much of a fight when faced with threats from the far left. And they don’t struggle to find examples: Harvard, all of the Ivy League, our major publishing houses, and most of the nonprofit ecosystem, for starters.

    The second part of the argument is that there is something inherent to liberalism itself that makes it vulnerable to its own collapse. In other words: The freedom liberalism facilitates is also its weakness. It is so free, so open, and so tolerant that it is vulnerable to attack by people who seek to destroy it, whether that be religious fundamentalists, the most extreme element of woke, or other intolerant movements.

    Eh. Losing is no fun, but sometimes you just have to be satisfied with being right about everything, all the time.

  • From a most unexpected source. Matthew Continetti recounts The Wisdom of The Donald.

    You may have noticed that Donald Trump is not the most self-reflective person. At least, not in public. But last week at the University of Alabama, Trump delivered a commencement address that revealed more about his mind than any speech since taking office. Naturally, the press missed the story.

    Trump “weaved” together talking points and ad libs with something novel and unexpected: a 10-point distillation of his personal philosophy. If you watch or read the full speech, you get to know what Trump values, and what he believes is behind his success in business, entertainment, and politics. Such insight is fascinating—or should be to anyone interested in the psychology of the world’s most powerful man.

    And, guess what? Goodness knows I am no Trump fan, but each one of his 10 points looks pretty good to me.

  • So, naturally, I have to point out… this WSJ editorial which discovers A Tariff Lesson at the Nucor Steel Mill (gifted link).

    When JD Vance visited a Nucor steel plant in South Carolina last week, did the company take it as an opportunity to press the Vice President for a tariff exemption? That dismally hilarious question comes to mind after listening to the steel maker’s first-quarter earnings call.

    Nucor loves the tariffs that President Trump has imposed on its competition from imported steel. But the company also warned about the ways that Mr. Trump’s global tariffs will increase its costs for both equipment and raw materials, specifically pig iron and direct-reduced iron, or DRI.

    Who could have seen that coming? Not Donald or JD, I guess.

May
6
2025

Now Do Marvel v. DC, Andrew

I think this is missing some important features of both franchises. But who cares, it's funny.

Mini review: The first 12 minutes of Andor season two were fantastic. But since then: way too many hushed conversations between coiffed and clad characters on well-designed sets.

I'll keep watching, though.

Also of note:

  • His latest stupid idea.

    Liz Wolfe comments on the news: Trump declares he will impose 100 percent tariffs on all foreign films.

    "Other nations have been stealing the…movie-making capability of the United States. I said to a couple of people, 'What do you think?' I have done some very strong research over the last week, and we are making very few movies now," [Trump] told reporters over the weekend. "Hollywood is being destroyed. Now you have a grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen, so I am not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. If they are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money. They are supporting them financially. So that is sort of a threat to our country in a sense."

    Stealing is an odd way of putting it. Did he just learn that other countries make movies too? And, yes, other countries will give special breaks to their film industries, in much the same way U.S. states already do: They vie for business, offering tax credits and other incentives to try to get movie production to their states. (This is why plenty of headlines have heralded Georgia, specifically Atlanta, as "Hollywood of the South.")

    And that's just for starters. As for "propaganda", I'm pretty sure there's plenty of it in domestically-produced movies too. And (as Liz notes) Trump has been dilly-dallying about enforcing the TikTok ban, arguably an impeachable offense. And TikTok is an actual foreign product. Liz comments, probably accurately:

    This leads me to suspect that he's not actually worried about propaganda, but is just experimenting with using "national security" justifications for all manner of big-government interventions—a time-honored American tradition, but not a good one. Regardless, it is not the government's job to shield us from ideas, even propagandistic ones.

  • As with so many other things… Dan McLaughlin reveals Trump Has Hollywood's Foreign Propaganda Problem Backwards (gifted link). He notes that Hollywood has been all-too-willing to dink its movies to avoid Chinese censorship. And:

    In short, China has leverage over our movie industry precisely because we have a trade surplus in exporting our films to China. That’s the exact opposite of the problem Trump claims to be fighting. If there’s good news to be had, it’s that American film revenues from China have been in sharp decline for several years now from their peak of a decade or so ago (and China is cracking down on them further in retaliation against Trump). But our problem isn’t too much buying from China — it’s too much selling to China.

    For the record, I've just watched one actual movie so far this year, The Electric State. Apparently filmed mostly in Georgia, some in California, with (according to IMDB) "additional photography" in France and Brazil. How big a tariff, Donald?

  • If only we could put a hefty tax on arrogance. Jonathan Turley writes on The Cost of Arrogance: NPR’s Undoing is a Cautionary Tale for the Media.

    NPR was ultimately undermined by its own arrogance. Editors and journalists did not have to worry about the fact that its shrinking audience was overwhelmingly white, liberal and affluent. Due to its support in Congress, it could make the vast majority of the country, which does not listen to its programming, help pay for its programming.

    It will now have to choose between sustaining its bias or expanding its audience. It certainly has every right to be a left-leaning outlet (as do right-leaning outlets), but it has to sustain itself in the marketplace. It is the same question that other media outlets must face as more Americans turn to new media. With polls showing the press at record lows in trust, media companies are increasingly writing for each other rather than most of the public.

    I note that Viking Pundit tried to listen to NPR and gave up in disgust after four minutes. I'm wondering if I could do that well.

  • Throw them a concrete life preserver, maybe. Jim Geraghty has some news. Good? Bad? Your call: The Obamas Aren't Going to Rescue the Democrats.

    Let’s begin with the full quote, in context. Former first lady Michelle Obama appeared on a podcast hosted by British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett, discussing a wide variety of topics. At one point, she addressed her fears when her husband chose to run for president, and won:

    How do you raise kids in the White House? It’s dangerous. As the first black potential president, we knew there would be death threats. There were just all the — how would we afford it? Because it’s, it’s expensive to live in the White House! As many people don’t know, I mean, much is not covered. You’re paying for every food — every bit of food that you eat. You know, you’re not paying for housing and the staff in it, but everything, even travel if you’re not traveling with the president if your kids are coming on a Bright Star, which is the first lady’s plane — we had to pay for their travel to be on the plane. It is an expensive proposition, and you’re running for two years, and not earning an income. So, all of that was in my mind. How would we manage this?

    Jim's rebuttal is dead solid perfect:

    You know who else pays for “every bit of food” that their children eat? Just about every other family in the country.

  • I suspect Alinsky's "Rule #13" is involved. Bryan Caplan wonders how their minds work: Koch vs. Trump: A Puzzle of Leftist Demonology.

    Ten years ago, the Koch brothers were clearly the left’s most-hated “right-wing billionaires.” It’s not totally clear that Trump even ranked #3. Only in 2016 did Trump attain the top spot in leftist demonology. Even today, Charles Koch (brother David died in 2019) probably retains the #2 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Billionaires. Which plausibly gives him the #3 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Americans after Trump and Vance. And conceivably even the #3 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Living Humans, though I guess Putin and Netanyahu now outrank him.

    Last Thursday, I saw Charles Koch win the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Mid-ceremony, a well-camouflaged group of about fifteen leftist protestors crashed the party, waving signs like “Can’t take blood money to hell.” Which reminded me of a question I’ve long asked myself: What the hell is wrong with leftist demonology? How can Charles Koch and Donald Trump possibly be on the same list?!

    Bryan goes on to compare and contrast Trump and Koch. Trump fans will not like his observation #9:

    1. In starkest contrast, whatever you think about Trump’s ideas, he is obviously an absolute pig of a human being. To paraphrase Tolkien’s Treebeard, “There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men” to describe how loathsome the man is. The way he talks! The way he treats people! If a family of staunch Trump supporters contained a person who acted like Trump, he wouldn’t even be allowed to come to Thanksgiving. Unless, of course, he was rich and famous enough to implicitly bribe his family to endure his presence. (If you are reading this, Donald, I am only a messenger. Repent).

    (Alinsky's Rule #13: ""Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.")


Last Modified 2025-05-06 11:37 AM EDT
May
5
2025

I Don't Want To Get All Lois Lerner On You, But…

Ira Stoll has a good question at the WSJ: Is Harvard Complying With the Tax Code? (gifted link)

President Trump’s announcement Friday that he plans to take away Harvard’s tax exempt status prompted me to do something I never did while working there or serving as an alumni volunteer: actually read the plain text of the tax code that covers the tax exemption for Harvard and most other charities.

The law—Section 501(c)3—says the tax exemption applies to a corporation “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes . . . no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda . . . and which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” Courts have struggled for a century to distinguish “educational” from “propaganda” for tax purposes. In Bob Jones University v. U.S. (1983), the Supreme Court even ventured beyond the statutory language and upheld the Internal Revenue Service’s decision to pull a tax exemption “where there is no doubt that the organization’s activities violate fundamental public policy.”

With respect to Ira, this really does sound like the flip side of the IRS going after conservative 501(c)3 groups in the last decade. (If you need a partisan refresher on that, here's a timeline compiled by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee. If you'd like to see how Wikipedia whitewashes the scandal, here you go.)

But speaking of political activities from 501(c)3 corporations…

I've been visiting some "public media" websites, partially taxpayer-funded, also claiming tax-exempt 501(c)3 status. On the "propaganda" front: going to New Hampshire PBS's site, nhpbs.org will assault the surfer with an initial popup:

The advertised website, "Protect My Public Media" does the standard stuff: forms to contact your CongressCritters, a petition you can sign, get on their mailing list, follow them on social media.

If you skip past the popup, there are still ads for protectmypublicmedia.org on the page.

Lobbying? Enough to yank their tax-exempt status? Probably not. Still, the "keep the taxpayer money coming, sucker" posturing is … unseemly. Or so it seems to me.

Also of note:

  • Who you gonna believe? Me or your own ears? NHJournal describes the (Chico) Marxist defense from the state's public radio: NHPR Denounces Trump's 'Campaign Against Press Freedom,' Denies Any Partisan Bias.

    Executives at New Hampshire’s taxpayer-subsidized media outlets are responding to President Donald Trump’s attempts to end federal funding by claiming he’s attacking “all independent reporting.”

    And the head of New Hampshire Public Radio denied suggestions his programming has a left-of-center political bias, claiming the outlet can “ensure editorial integrity, balance and objectivity.”

    That's NHPR's President/CEO Jim Schachter, protecting his $260K yearly compensation. There's kind of an iffy relationship between "independent reporting" and "demanding continued taxpayer subsidies", isn't there?

  • Need a short class in how to dodge questions? NHJournal also presented a Q&A: NHPR's Schachter On Why Taxpayers Should Keep Paying. Sample:

    [NHJournal:] While NPR/PBS provides a solid lineup of liberal news content, from “Morning Edition” to PBS “News Hour,” would it be accurate for NHJournal to report that you have no center-right content broadcasting in NH? If you do, could you please identify the program and the host(s)?

    [Schachter:] Your question wrongly assumes that all journalism is biased. Our public service missions are clear that our content is designed to inform and educate, so that people can make up their own minds about where they stand on issues. We believe that spending time with our news and public affairs programming will confirm that we serve everyone in our communities.

    In addition, we are dedicated to accountability and engage in regular reviews of practices and standards to ensure editorial integrity, balance, and objectivity. We are also responsive to our local community through our Community Advisory Boards, which are open to all.

    I don't want to belabor the obvious, but Schachter failed to answer a pretty direct question there.

    But: Accountability? Integrity? Balance? Objectivity? To adapt one more movie quote: "You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean."

  • News You (Probably) Can't Use. Peter Suderman asks and answers a very relevant question: What if Trump doesn't want to spend money allocated by Congress?

    Imagine, for a moment, a president who doesn't want to spend money. Given the last several decades of presidential history, this may sound fanciful. But assume that a president has successfully campaigned on spending less money, and perhaps even balancing the federal budget, and then, once in office, has decided to try to carry out that program. What would such a president do?

    If a president wants the federal government to spend less money, then somewhere, somehow, at some time, someone with appropriate authority needs to actually stop spending money.

    This is even more difficult than it sounds.

    It's not just that in Washington, plans to spend more, but less than otherwise expected, are frequently denounced as debilitating cuts. Nor is it simply that bureaucrats stamp their feet and leak stories of supposedly draconian spending reductions to friendly media outlets. Nor is it even that the voting public, in its mass incoherence, seems to prefer a mix of high spending and low taxes—a luxury government lifestyle that it literally cannot afford.

    There is an underrated impediment to spending less: the Constitution itself, at least if you're the president. The Constitution grants Congress the sole power of the purse. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. If Congress passes a law saying jump, it's the president's job to jump. And if Congress passes a law that says spend, it's the president's job to spend.

    Peter does his usual diligent job of historical and legal analysis. But if you like the Constitution…

  • And now for something completely different. I'm pretty interested in the philosophy and science involved in "free will". So I'm linking to a Yascha Mounk interview with Kevin Mitchell on Free Will. (Determinists will argue that I had no choice but to do so.)

    It's long, but there's a transcript. Sample:

    If you look at the philosophical or theological literature, there’s a lot of armchair thinking, trying to divine from logical postulates how we could have free will given a particular supposed state of the universe and so on. My own feeling is that we don’t have to think about this issue in these really abstract terms. We can actually get quite concrete. If we’re asking, Do we really make decisions? or Are we in control when we make decisions?—those are actually biological questions. We can get into the neuroscience of decision making, and the biology of control more generally, and explore how these kinds of systems could have evolved.

    How could it be that living things can act in the world in ways that non-living physical things can’t? There are some deep metaphysical questions there, but you can get a handle on them by really getting into those biological details and making the discussion a lot more concrete.

    If I urge you to read or listen to the interview and make up your own mind on the issue, is that prejudicial?

    [UPDATE: Oops, forgot to mention that I read Kevin Mitchell's book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will back in 2023, and my report is here.]


Last Modified 2025-05-05 10:27 AM EDT
May
4
2025

Is Polling Considered Haruspicy or Anthropomancy?

I was today years old when I learned these two words:

  • Haruspicy is divination via the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry; while
  • Anthropomancy is the same thing, except with sacrificed people.

Nate Silver is—let's be charitable—a notable haruspex when it comes to examining polling data, and if you want to know whether Americans approve or disapprove of Trump…

After hitting a new approval low just a few days ago, Donald Trump closed out the week with some of the best polls he’s seen in awhile. The most recent Emerson College poll shows him at -1 net approval. Yesterday’s RMG Research poll had him at +1. And today’s InsiderAdvantage/Trafalgar Group poll has him +2. Now he’s also had some bad polls — from Navigator Research (-10) and J.L. Partners (-9) — but on balance, Trump has slightly improved in the Silver Bulletin average.

As of this update, 44.2 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance and 51.8 percent disapprove. Now a net approval rating of -7.6 still isn’t great, but it’s better than his low of -9.7 on Tuesday.

But Mr. Ramirez's cartoon was wondering about Rs and Ds generally. So we have recent polling reported by Newsweek: Republican Support Collapses Under Donald Trump. Excerpt:

An April 16 poll of 1,000 registered voters conducted by RMG Research, a public opinion research firm founded by conservative pollster Scott Rasmussen, for Napolitan News Service found that if an election for Congress were held today, 48 percent would vote for the Democrat on their ballot, while 44 percent would vote for the Republican.

When including those who would lean Democratic or Republican, the Democratic lead increased to 50 percent, while Republican support increased to 45 percent.

This marks a seven-point swing since February, according to the pollsters. Before Trump was inaugurated on January 20, Republicans had a seven-point lead of 51 percent to the Democrats' 44 percent.

And for the Democrats we have (also in Newsweek): Democrats Face 'Major Wake-up Call' as Trump Trounces Them in Polling. Excerpt:

According to an NBC News poll from March 7-11, 55 percent of respondents said they had a negative view of the Democratic Party, while 27 percent said they had a positive perception. That is the lowest level recorded since NBC News began asking the question in 1990.

What does it all mean? I'm self-polling and show a 50/50 tie between "I don't know" and "I don't care". How about you?

Also of note:

  • Need a reason to hate Republicans? Well, it depends on your attitude toward government spending. Kim Strassel says that for many Rs, it's Spend, Baby, Spend (gifted link).

    It’s go time in Washington for the GOP reconciliation bill, as House committees this week begin to flesh out their respective pieces of a plan to cut both taxes and spending. Which means Republicans finally must grapple with an ugly truth within the party of “limited government”: Most of them don’t want to cut spending on anything.

    But it’s the cuts that must come first. Republicans have a solid idea of what needs doing in the tax realm, yet the final configuration will hinge on what they drum up in new revenue or offsets. Committees have each been assigned spending reduction targets, with an aggregate goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts (over 10 years). This is paltry: Federal spending has soared more than 50% since 2019, and the pandemic emergency is long past. Democrats bet that Republicans would lack the courage to dismantle their blowouts on entitlements, infrastructure, green energy, semiconductors and the like—and the left is again showing which side is smarter at the long game.

    Kim goes on to list a number of issues where powerful Republicans are wimping out on spending cuts. Make sure you've got plenty of blood pressure meds stocked up, and check it out.

  • Who do you want to play Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan in the Netflix movie? Kevin D. Williamson doesn't weigh in on that issue, but provides a title: Judge Dread.

    “I am the law!” declared Judge Dredd, the cinematic supercop played by Sylvester Stallone in the eponymous 1995 film. Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan seems to have come to a similar conclusion, and she has been charged with a felony and a misdemeanor in the matter of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal immigrant who was scheduled to appear before her on domestic battery charges and whom—according to the federal police agencies today under control of people who won their positions by insisting we should not trust federal police agencies—the judge tried to help evade arrest and presumable deportation. 

    Let us assume, arguendo, that Judge Dugan does not have a special place in her heart for supposed domestic abusers. If she is, as it seems, engaged in the same proud tradition of civil disobedience as such heroes as Henry David Thoreau, then she should go to jail for it as happily as Thoreau did when he observed:

    Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her.

    As you might suspect, Kevin does not let Trump or his minions off lightly. Bottom line:

    This is, for the moment, a minor kerfuffle. But if Congress does not step up, be sure that someone will. If you think Judge Dugan is being irresponsible and reckless, then you almost certainly are not going to like who and what comes next as the lawlessness and chaos continues. Chaos begets chaos. And the hard part for honest and intelligent Americans will be that, whatever dumb and destructive excesses Trump’s opponents get up to, nobody will be able to say that they don’t have a point.

  • And maybe lower education too? One thing at a time, and Dominic Pino made the easy call: Let’s Cut All Federal Funding for Higher Education.

    On today’s edition of The Editors, National Review Rhodes Fellow Dominic Pino said the administration should “treat universities like we treat churches.” This comes on the heels of President Trump’s vow to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status and the outrage from the university.

    Pino isn’t thrilled about the administration’s approach to the issue, and said it “would be on much better grounds” if it said, “‘We’re going to treat universities like we treat churches. They’re going to be tax exempt, but we’re not going to give them federal funding. And we’re going to force them to stand on their own.’”

    Probably not politically possible, but I like the libertarian take: separation of school and state.

  • Do they realize how ludicrous they sound? Ashley Belanger writes at Ars Technica “Blatantly unlawful”: Trump slammed for trying to defund PBS, NPR. It's pretty much follows the usual script, but this stuck out for me:

    For example, Ed Ulman, CEO of Alaska Public Media, testified to Congress last month that his stations "provide potentially life-saving warnings and alerts that are crucial for Alaskans who face threats ranging from extreme weather to earthquakes, landslides, and even volcanoes." Some of the smallest rural stations sometimes rely on CPB for about 50 percent of their funding, NPR reported.

    Will nobody think of the Alaskans facing volcano threats? We'll have more on that after this story from All Things Considered movie reviewer Bob Mondello.

    But seriously, move the emergency warning and alert capabilities to the Department of Homeland Security.

    (By the way, Ed pulls down a cool $181,735 yearly compensation as President/CEO of the tax-exempt Alaska Public Media Inc.)

  • There are many reasons: laziness, sloppiness, narcissism, … At Cato, Terence Kealey wonders: Trump’s Cuts to Federal Science Budget Are Justified, So Why Doesn't He Justify Them (Properly)?

    President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal science budgets have provoked vast alarm, yet the cuts are justified. Unfortunately, though, Trump has not justified them, at least not properly. This blog post will do so by rebutting three myths of government science funding: 1) the supposed economic benefits, 2) the supposed health benefits, and 3) the supposed technological benefits. There is little evidence to justify the claims of big benefits from government funding of science.

    It's an interesting counter to…

May
3
2025

The Way Life Should(n't) Be

The way life should be

I live very close to Maine; walking distance from Pun Salad Manor across the bridge to South Berwick is, according to Google Maps, about 0.9 miles.

Also, it turns out the most direct route to the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library takes me down Maine State Route 236. Where I swear the most common phrase on the roadside signage these days is "Recreational Cannabis".

A few years back, Maine's official tourism slogan was "The Way Life Should Be". (Pic at your right.) Which I always thought was kind of arrogant for a state in 43d place among the 50 states in terms of personal and economic freedom.

They have recently changed their tourism motto to the less offensive "Welcome Home". (And every time I see it, I mutter "I'm just going to Portsmouth, OK?")

They are insufferably statist, have been for a long time, but even that didn't prepare me for the recent news, as described by Emma Camp: Maine Legislator Barred From Voting Over Social Media Post.

A Maine state legislator has been prohibited from speaking or having her votes counted—all for a social media post critical of transgender athletes participating in women's sports. Rep. Laurel Libby (R–Auburn) has attempted to challenge the legislature's actions against her in court but has faced several defeats. This week, Libby filed an emergency injunction asking the Supreme Court to intervene.

"If this statement were made by a non-member of the legislature . . . it would clearly be constitutionally protected," Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tells Reason. "So the only argument they can possibly make is that somehow you have fewer First Amendment rights when you are an elected member of a state legislative body than an ordinary citizen would have, which is completely counterintuitive and counter to not only fundamental First Amendment principles but fundamental principles of representative government."

In February, Libby made a post on Facebook and X criticizing the state's decision to allow a transgender girl to compete in a high school track championship. The post included the name and an unblurred photo of a transgender athlete who had won the girls pole vault after previously competing as a boy.

The usual progressive sites that are (often rightly) irate over the Trump Administration's efforts to suppress free speech are, as near as I can tell, silent on this. Dissent from transgender ideology is effectively heresy for progressives. And must be punished by whatever sanctions are at hand.

At National Review, Dan McLaughlin calls it: Maine’s Shocking Assault on Democracy & Free Speech. Sorry, no gifted link. You can get the gist from his headline, though.

But Laurel Libby did not call for a killing spree on her political opponents. That would be a different Maine resident, as reported by Jonathan Turley: “Take out Every Single Person Who Supports Trump”: Maine Teacher Calls for the Secret Service to Go on a Killing Spree.

We have been discussing the increasing political violence on the left. That includes a student who published a column recently on “when must we kill them?” I noted that such views are often reflections of the many extremists currently in teaching. That was evident this week in Maine, where English teacher JoAnna St. Germain of Waterville Senior High School called upon the Secret Service to kill Trump and his supporters.

On Tuesday, St., Germain called on Facebook for the Secret Service to “step up” and avoid a civil war by killing Trump and his supporters. She insisted that it would not constitute an assassination because Trump is not a legitimate president “duly elected by the American people.”

She explained that “If I had the skill set required, I would take them out myself.”

Whatever “skill set” St. Germain possess, sanity does not appear to be part of it.

St. Germain later responded to the shock of many that a teacher would be advocating murder, posting “People are quite angry with me for stating openly that Trump and his cronies need to die […] If you’re mad that I’m speaking truth to power? F**k you.”

Yes, an updated Ring Lardner witticism: "F**k you, she explained."

Maybe I should stay on this side of the state line for awhile.

Also of note:

  • Boon, meet doggle. The Daily Wire reports on a small part of Uncle Stupid's business-as-usual: Federal ‘Job Corps’ Spends Up To $764K Per Graduate. Participants Go On To Earn $17K Annually.

    A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average — raising questions about whether it should continue to exist.

    The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695 per year on average after leaving the program, according to new government data.

    Nearly $2 billion in federal taxpayer money is spent annually on residential Job Corps campuses, a boon for the for-profit contractors who run them. But the dismal statistics about the program’s efficacy have never been fully public until the Trump administration released a “Transparency Report” last week.

    A sweet deal for those "for-profit contractors", in other words.

    The New Hampshire Job Corps campus is pictured here. I have no idea whether they have any more cost-effective results than the US average, but I have my doubts. I assume it's yet another example of the Pun Salad adage: When Uncle Stupid starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets.

  • Well (ahem) I believe it. Steven Davidoff Solomon, lawprof at UC Berkeley, has the clickbait headline: You Won’t Believe the Tax Breaks for Professors (gifted link).

    Stanford brags that “it’s pretty ‘sweet’ to be connected with Stanford” thanks to the perks its professors and staff receive. Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes.

    Need I confess: the tuition discount was a perk Mrs. Salad and I took advantage of for our kiddos when they attended the University Near Here.

    To be honest, I thought of it as more of, um, a scholarship. Yeah, that's the ticket! But Steven's right: it's an income transfer from ordinary joes and jills to some pretty well-off folks. Should go away.

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Last Modified 2025-05-04 3:19 AM EDT
May
2
2025

One Small Cheer for Trump…

Let us go direct to the NPR site for the good news: Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS.

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters. Trump contends that news coverage by NPR and PBS contains a left-wing bias. The federal funding for NPR and PBS is appropriated by Congress.

The executive order, like many that have been signed by the president, could be challenged in court.

"Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter," the executive order says. "What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens."

The article goes on to note that NPR stations get about 10% of their funds from federal funding. For PBS stations, it's about 15%. So this isn't a death sentence ("unfortunately").

Let me recycle a couple quotes from a Pun Salad article last month from Michael Chapman at Cato: End All Taxpayer Funding of CPB, NPR, PBS.

President Donald Trump is not a libertarian, but some of his policies for downsizing the federal government certainly fall in the libertarian column. This is true, for instance, of the administration’s drive to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps to fund PBS and NPR. Scholars at the Cato Institute have called on Congress for decades to stop subsidizing the CPB. With enough political momentum behind them, perhaps Congress can get it done this time.

“Republicans must defund and totally disassociate themselves from NPR & PBS,” said Trump on Truth Social on April 1. In late March, he told reporters that he “would love to” defund PBS and NPR. “It’s been very biased. The whole group … and it’s a waste of money especially,” he said.

And later in the article:

“We wouldn’t want the federal government to publish a national newspaper,” Cato’s David Boaz testified before Congress in 2005. “Neither should we have a government television network and a government radio network.” Congress should “terminate the funding for CPB,” he added.

Boaz, author of The Libertarian Mind and former Distinguished Senior Fellow at Cato, further testified, “If anything should be kept separate from government and politics, it’s the news and public affairs programming that informs Americans about government and its policies. When government brings us the news—with all the inevitable bias and spin—the government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. Journalists should not work for the government. Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize news and public affairs programming.”

I also pointed out that back in the previous century we really did have a (sorta) national newspaper sponsored by the "Committee on Public Information". Like many bad ideas of the era, it was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson and (Wikipedia says) "the first state bureau covering propaganda in the history of the United States."

But not the last. Yesterday's news also brought word of the modern "national newspaper" published by Uncle Stupid: the White House Wire. It's the only newspaper Trump needs to read!

And four boos for Trump:

  • George Will is on target: The Trump GOP’s attacks on universities advance the left’s agenda (gifted link).

    Even academics are educable, so universities might emerge from their current travails improved — more willing to include intellectual diversity on campuses, or at least be more circumspect about impeding it. This is the good news.

    The bad news: Republicans rejoicing about breaking academia to the saddle and bridle of federal government supervision demonstrate that we have two parties barely distinguishable in their shared enthusiasm for muscular statism. As “conservatives” mount sustained attacks on left-dominated educational institutions, they advance the left’s perennial agenda — the permeation of everything with politics.

    Such statism will extinguish the core conservative aspiration: a civil society in constant creative ferment because intermediary institutions — schools, businesses, religious and civic organizations — are given breathing room, and are free to flourish or fail without supervision from above by a minatory central authority.

    Will is in favor of "protecting Jewish students from campus antisemitism." I'd go a little farther to expose and fight universities' race-biased admissions and hiring.

  • Is Trump a RINO? It's getting tough to tell, according to Jim Geraghty: Trump Echoes Bernie Sanders in Opposing Consumer Choices. He resurrects Bernie's horror about the capitalist cornucopia encountered at Walgreens and Foot Locker: "You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country."

    I can't imagine how nonplussed Bernie was when…

    Taking questions during a cabinet meeting, President Trump shrugged off the possibility of empty shelves or limited selection as a result of a trade war with China:

    I told you before, they’re having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. Uh, they made a trillion dollars when, with Biden, a trillion dollars even a trillion one with Biden, selling us stuff — much of it we don’t need. You know, somebody said, “oh the shelves are going to be open.” Well maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

    This is a really, really bad defense of the likely economic consequences of the tariffs and trade war with China. Remember, the ships stopped leaving from China to America’s West Coast ports, and the amount of trucks leaving Los Angeles last week was comparable to Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, usually the lowest-volume days of the year.

    Bernie: "Those putzes stole my shtick!"

    More economic incoherence to come, unfortunately…

  • Sounds like the worst Marvel movie ever. Veronique de Rugy imagines this supervillain team-up: The Doll Tyrants and the iPhone Fantasists (gifted link).

    The first degrowth president  of the United States, President Trump, recently defended his tariffs with this gem: “They have ships that are loaded with stuff we do not need” and “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” Meanwhile, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, lamented: “We invent the iPhone, which is awesome. Why do we let everyone else build it? Why can’t we build it here? . . . We need hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in those factories.”

    \

    It’s hard to overstate how economically ignorant, politically tone-deaf, and philosophically tyrannical these statements are.

    Note the "gifted link", number one for the merry month of May. Vero does not hide her disdain.

  • And for more on that… Liz Wolfe is also unimpressed with the administration's efforts to drive us down the Road to Serfdom: Howard Lutnick wants more Americans to work in factories.

    I am not cut out for the factory life: Sorry to disappoint Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who apparently has big plans for us all.

    "You go to the community colleges, and you train people!" he says, before listing two universities—Arizona State University and Grand Canyon University—that are decidedly not community colleges. "It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. You know, this is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. You know, we let the auto plants go overseas. Now you should see an auto plant, it's highly automated but the people, the 4-5,000 people who work there, they are trained to take care of those robotic arms."

    Not just you working there, but your kids and grandkids! Is that what you always dreamed about, or was it a nightmare?

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May
1
2025

Um, OK, Apology Accepted

Noah Smith saith: I owe the libertarians an apology. You can click through to read his continuing problems with libertarian ideology; being only about 68% libertarian these days, I see his point about (say) foreign policies.

So let's get down to his apology:

The most obvious thing that has prompted me to make this apology is Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policy. While some progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders, Gretchen Whitmer, and Chris Deluzio have equivocated on tariffs — criticizing the implementation but not the basic idea — it has been the libertarian Rand Paul who has come out as one of the tariffs’ strongest rhetorical opponents in Congress:

Many Republican lawmakers lie low when they have differences with President Trump. Sen. Rand Paul has taken the opposite approach.

“Congress needs to grow a spine, and Congress needs to stand up for its prerogatives,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters…His comments came just days after he was one of only two GOP senators to vote against the party’s budget framework that is key to Trump’s tax cuts, saying it didn’t do enough to reduce the deficit…

[N]ow major parts of Trump’s agenda could hinge on whether the senator sticks to his guns or folds…The conflict over tariffs could come to a head soon. A measure Paul is co-sponsoring to end Trump’s tariffs is set to come to the floor when the Senate returns next week.

The spectacle of a libertarian Republican standing up to a President who holds near-absolute power within the GOP is inspiring, while it’s shameful to see some Democrats take only weak swipes at policies that threaten to do great harm to America’s middle class and working class.

Unfortunately, Senator Paul's "grow a spine" resolution to terminate the "emergency" under which Trump claims authority to set tariffs failed to get a majority in the Senate yesterday. And even if it had prevailed there, its prospects in the House were dismal. And Trump promised a veto in any case.

Also of note:

  • And why would you expect otherwise? Jonah Goldberg points out: There’s Nothing Conservative About Donald Trump’s Trade Philosophy.

    In an interview with Time magazine, President Donald Trump explained how he approaches tariffs and trade negotiations. I use the word “explained” with some trepidation, because explanations imply a certain delineation of reasoning, facts, and logic along with opinion and perspective. If you ask me to explain my support for abolishing rent control and I respond, “Because vests have no sleeves and turtles smell of elderberries,” have I really offered an explanation? Or have I merely revealed what passes for my thinking?

    “We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history,” Trump “explained” at great length. “Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They’re going to come in and they’re going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things.”

    “I own the store, and I set prices,” Trump says. He will set those prices based on “statistics” and whatever else he—and he alone—deems relevant.

    Now, suffice it to say, department stores don’t work like that, America is nothing like a department store, and the president is in no way the owner of America or its economy. Countries trading with America don’t “take” our treasure. They sell us things that millions of consumers and businesses need or want. Trump believes that because we buy more foreign goods (he ignores our trade surplus in services) than foreigners buy from us—i.e. trade deficits—is proof we’re being “ripped off.” If that were true, every time you handed over your money for a coffee or a car, you’d be robbed. But you’ve heard these arguments before.

    Yes, he really did say "I own the store."

  • They should have put Bizarro Superman in one of the movies. But we'll have to settle for an unfortunate real-world example, according to Robert Corn-Revere: Brendan Carr’s Bizarro World FCC.

    Carr, who has been an FCC commissioner since 2017, used to say things that reflected an understanding that the government’s authority to regulate the media is sharply constrained by the First Amendment. When Democratic congressmen tried to exert political pressure on broadcasters over their coverage of COVID-19 and the 2020 election, for example, Carr called it “a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys,” adding in no uncertain terms, “a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.” Or when members of Congress urged the FCC to reject a Miami radio station transfer based on the political viewpoints of the proposed new owner, Carr rebuffed this effort “to inject partisan politics into our licensing process,” correctly calling it “a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC’s status as an independent agency.”  

    Less than a year ago Carr proclaimed the United States does not need “the FCC to operate as the nation’s speech police,” adding, “if there ever were a time for a federal agency to show restraint when it comes to the regulation of political speech and to ensure that it is operating within the statutorily defined bounds of its authority, now would be that time.” Back then, Carr wore an American flag lapel pin, suggesting a commitment to the Constitution he swore to uphold. He’s since traded that for a Donald Trump lapel pin that looks like a prize fished out of a cereal box, and it suggests an allegiance to … something else. 

    Unacquainted with Bizarro Superman? Wikipedia has you covered. (I was there at the creation, seven-year-old me buying Superboy No. 68. (Which cost me 10¢, and … whoa, look at what a copy would cost you today.)

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