Pun Salad

Via PowerLine, a couple telling tweets:

REPORTER: What's the message to Americans who did not attend college or take on student loan debt?

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Too bad pic.twitter.com/XUpKCxiIPw

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 22, 2024

And:

Karine Jean-Pierre gets a difficult question about student loans.

"Why don't those individuals who didn't receive $35,000 in debt cancellation deserve a $35,000 check from other Americans for whatever means they would want to use it?"

Listen to her attempt a reply 😂 pic.twitter.com/7snGH5PhjY

— Julia 🇺🇸 (@Jules31415) May 22, 2024

Not that it matters, but: Extra credit for the reporter in the audience who called out KJP when she talked about "folks who are in debt who are literally being crushed".

I'm with this guy on that: If People Literally Don’t Stop Saying Literally So Much, I’m Literally Going to Lose My Mind.

Also of note:

• Bearing false witness is a sin, Rev. A couple days back, we looked at an op-ed from a group (including "The Rev." David Grishaw-Jones) who got arrested (and immediately released) for refusing to leave the local office of our mutual CongressCritter, Chris Pappas. I didn't excerpt this bit:

  Since our first visit in November, Congressman Pappas has refused to answer our call and defiantly voted for billions of dollars of deadly aid—aid that wins approval from lobbyists in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) but little satisfaction from constituents in his own district. [Emphasis added.]

  … basically accusing Pappas of dancing on the strings of AIPAC against the wishes of the NH-01 Congressional district voters. (As opposed to the wishes of the five Hamas-cheerleading op-edders.)

  A recent UNH Survey Center poll indicates it's not that simple:

  Most Granite State residents want a ceasefire in Gaza but majorities believe returning all Israeli hostages and Hamas being removed from power in Gaza should be required. Four in ten New Hampshire residents feel the United States is providing too much aid to Israel. With respect to that last datum: 47% of the poll respondents said either the US was providing "about the right amount" (22%) or "too little" (25%) aid.

  Goodness knows I'm not a Pappas fanboy, but he seems to be more or less in line with his constituents on this issue.

  Jerry Coyne reports on some nationwide polling results: Harvard/Harris Poll shows unexpectedly high sentiment for Israel (but some bad news for Biden)

  It’s “common knowledge” that in the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, younger Americans (say, below 30), tend to favor Palestine, while older ones favor Israel. And that’s what I’ve thought for a long time—until I saw this poll highlighted at the Elder of Ziyon site. The poll, taken by by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies collaborating with the Harris organization, was done by legitimate organizations, and for me it paints a more optimistic picture of Americans’ views about Israel. And that even includes young people. There’s a lot of different questions asked that I haven’t discussed here, but I’ll concentrate on the news on Israel, throwing in a bit of polling on Biden and Trump.

  I'm old enough to remember Nixon talking about the "silent majority". It's easy to get distracted by, and get the wrong impression from, the noisemakers.

• Nothing illustrates that more than… Noah Rothman notes: Joe Biden’s Anti-Israel Friends Prove More Trouble Than They’re Worth.

  The Biden administration has spent the last several months contorting itself into logical pretzels to communicate to observers that its post-10/7 dalliance with the Israeli government has come to an end.

  The administration established contradictory conditions for an Israeli incursion into Rafah that were unmeetable, which only make sense if they’re viewed as an effort to prevent Israel from executing an operation aimed at clearing Hamas from its final holdout in the Gaza Strip. It betrayed the Jewish State by allowing the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” while Hamas remains the nominal authority in Gaza. It castigated Israel for following its own advice, the result of which was to allow Hamas to reconstitute in the territories the Israel Defense Forces evacuated. Its officials have called on Israel to “get out of Gaza” even as it insists it has not abandoned support for our “shared objective to defeat Hamas.”

  Biden’s confused approach to maintaining America’s wartime relationship with Israel lacks strategic and moral clarity because it is driven not by battlefield conditions but domestic political concerns. The Biden team is alarmed by the polls that show the president losing to Donald Trump in November, and its members attribute their political misfortunes to the handful of left-wing malcontents who would prefer to see Israel lose its war of self-defense. It has made itself and U.S. national interests hostage to the shadows that danced across the walls of the impenetrable progressive bubble.

  And of course, everything else Biden touches is going swimmingly. For example, Gaza Pier: Food Aid to Gaza Is Getting Stolen as Fast as It Can Be Delivered.

• Right here in River City. Thomas Winslow Hazlett says TikTok's Got Trouble.

  A social media app from China is said to seduce our teenagers in ways that American platforms can only dream of. Gen Z has already wasted half a young lifetime on videos of pranks, makeup tutorials, and babies dubbed to talk like old men. Now computer sorcerers employed by a hostile government allegedly have worse in store. Prohibit this "digital fentanyl," the argument goes, or the Republic may be lost.

  And so President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024, which requires the China-based company ByteDance to either spin-off TikTok or watch it be banned. Separating the company from the app would supposedly solve the other problem frequently blamed on TikTok: the circle linking U.S. users' personal data to the Chinese Communist Party. The loop has already been cut, TikTok argues, because American users' data are now stored with Oracle in Texas. That's about as believable as those TikTok baby talk vignettes, retorts Congress.

  Like much really bad legislation, the bill had "broad bipartisan support" and was passed in an atmosphere of moral panic.

• Why don't they just embezzle from the Federal Reserve, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? The WSJ editorialists note a violation of the Law of Holes: The IRS Money Hole Gets Deeper.

  The Internal Revenue Service can’t write its own checks, which means it has to ask Congress for funding like any other agency. But if lawmakers have been tracking its misspending, they’ll turn down the tax collectors’ new $104 billion budget request and demand an audit instead.

  Commissioner Danny Werfel appeared before the House Appropriations Committee recently and told legislators that the IRS faces financial collapse. “Resources are limited,” he said, and the agency “will likely use them entirely before the funding expires.” In other words, the IRS doesn’t think the $60 billion bonus it received from Congress in 2022 is enough, though it is supposed to last through 2031.

  The IRS has a brilliant solution for this cash burn: Add more to the pile. Instead of explaining where the money went, Mr. Werfel asked the House to look away and grant his team another massive funding boost, this time through 2034. The extended bonus he seeks would bring total supplementary funding to $104 billion over 10 years.

  I'd say "your tax dollars at work", except that it's more like: "Your previous tax dollars weren't at work, I'm sure we'll get it right this time."