Pun Salad

A public service spot from Dave Rubin:

Supercut of NPC’s being programmed to say “weird.” pic.twitter.com/ehOg48ZiJZ

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) July 30, 2024

Someone with more programming smarts than I should write a bot to scour MSNBC, CNN, and other likely suspects to find which talking points have been issued to the NPCs.

(Need to brush up on the NPC meme? Here you go. This Wikipedia page contains the term "far-right" seven times, because six probably was considered too few.)

If you'd prefer text, here's Minnesota not-so-nice Governor Tim Walz quoted by Ann Althouse:

AA also has multiple links, including to a three-day old NYT article noting the emergence of the disparaging-adjective-du-Jour. And notes that it used to be an indicator of cool inclusiveness: "Keep [Your City] Weird".

I also want to point out Joseph Heath's essay at Persuasion: Illiberal Liberalism.

I know I've said this before: politicians, especially "successful" ones, are very likely to be several sigma off the mean on a large number of psychological traits. So you should expect weird. And also dangerous.

And I hasten to add: nobody's using the word in the sense Joseph Heinrich did in his great book, The WEIRDest People in the World : How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. There, it was an acronym: "Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, Democratic". Nothing wrong with that!

Also of note:

• Um. James Freeman notes a Washington Times story: Audit Shows IRS Employees Are Mostly Law-Abiding.

  Dozens of IRS employees who have “willfully” cheated on their taxes remain working for the agency, and some have even been hired back after evasion, an inspector general reported… According to the audit, 5% of the IRS’s workforce failed to pay their taxes in full and on time at some point while working for the agency. Most of those were deemed mistakes.

  Still, 70 current employees were found to have intentionally cheated. Of those, only 20 were ousted. Most of the rest remain on the job after a short suspension. Under the law, all of them should have been fired unless they received a special exemption from the commissioner.

  The IRS also rehired nearly 400 former employees despite red flags in their files. They included 85 who failed to pay their taxes in full and on time and 34 who were deemed to have peeked at taxpayers’ secret information.

  Freeman further notes and comments:

  Preferring to see the glass as half-full, the website of the Treasury inspector general for tax administration announces the audit results with the following headline:

  Ninety-Five Percent of IRS and Contractor Employees Were Tax Compliant; However, There Were Some Tax Delinquencies or Prior Conduct/Performance Issues

  Yes there were. Taxpayers reading this may be tempted to gather at the agency’s D.C. headquarters and engage in a mostly peaceful protest, or perhaps a demonstration that is 95% vandalism-free. But violence is not the answer, even if some people are still permitted—in 2024, not 2020— to tear down and burn American flags in front of government buildings at the foot of Capitol Hill and assault police officers as long as their progressive protests target America’s democratic friends.

  IRS keeping tax cheats on the payroll? In Washington, that's not weird at all.

• Just a reminder. Jacob Sullum provides it: Trump's Favorite Justice Was One of Those 'Stupid People' Who Think Flag Burning Is Protected Speech. And Trump's favorite justice said:

  Scalia later cited the flag-burning cases to illustrate how his textualist approach to constitutional interpretation sometimes led him to rule against his personal inclinations. "If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag," he said in a 2015 speech. "But I am not king."

  Scalia's distinction between what the Constitution requires and what he might otherwise prefer probably would be lost on Trump, who seems to value freedom of speech only to the extent that it protects him and his allies.

  Yes, he said "weirdo". I think this means we have an unintentional theme going today…

• A guest post at National Review And it's from an unexpected author: Why I Have Changed All My Policies by Kamala Harris.

  My fellow Americans. I want to take this opportunity — and it is an opportunity — to share with you why I have moved past many of the policies I have had a long history of exhibiting, now that I am running to be president of the United States. Think about that. This is a moment of extraordinary courage and leadership, and, as many of you know, the voice that I am carrying — and continue to carry — is a voice for all of us, with all the permeations and ramifications that it brings. This is a moment for me to be truly intentional in my approach to the future, and the past.

  We talk a lot about opportunity. But opportunities are not guaranteed until they become guarantees, and then, sad as it can be, they stop being opportunities. Okay? They stop being opportunities. So I want you to imagine a Venn diagram. You know Venn Diagrams, with the three circles? Okay? In one of them, we have the words, “My policies from 2019.” In another, we have the words, “What I actually believe.” And, in the third, we have the words, “My personality, unfiltered through the media.” Hahahahaha. And if you look closely, you’ll see, on the Venn Diagram, that instead of the middle section that looks like a shield saying “Kamala Harris elected president,” it says “Disaster!”

  So what we’re trying to do — and trying to do every day — is create a new Venn Diagram where the upside-down-shield part says “Kamala Harris elected president.” And that’s how we build the middle-class and make sure that leadership from our leaders is about leading, instead of, instead of not leading. So, to get there I’ve had to replace the “My policies from 2019” circle with “Donald Trump is lying about my record”; to replace the “What I actually believe” circle with “Did you know I was a prosecutor?”; and to replace the “My personality, unfiltered through the media” circle with “Fake version of Kamala Harris, invented by the media in 2024.” And if we do all that, you’ll see the middle bit now says “Kamala Harris elected president.” Hahahaha.

  I think we might have saved that until Sunday. Ah, well, too late now.

• I'm on Team Twitter Too. Jeff Maurer explains Why I Won't Stop Dead-Naming Twitter.

  As you may have noticed, I call Twitter “Twitter” — I don’t say “X”. This isn’t a deep conviction; I wasn’t raised in a religion that demands that I call companies by the name they were incorporated with in front of God and the State of Delaware. It’s just a thing that I do and plan to keep doing, and the reason is pretty simple:

  I’m going to call Twitter “Twitter” because “Twitter” is a word, and “X” fucking isn’t.

  Ah, we almost got through the post without gratuitous gutter language.

And it's from the lovely, talented, and apparently ageless Mary Katherine Ham:

Gentle parenting people confused by your white-people meetings. https://t.co/gdtgurLV5O pic.twitter.com/lw3UZuetyq

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) July 30, 2024

You also won't want to miss the video linked below MKH's, apparently a sample of the white ladies' Zoomage. It would take a better philosopher than I to classify it: creepy, cringe, or airheaded?

Also of note:

• Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Charles C. W. Cooke imagines a day when people discover Kamala Harris’s Policy Problem.

  If one strips away the many glittering layers that have been added to her avatar by the operators and sycophants of America’s contemptible national press, one soon notices that Kamala Harris has a policy problem. Politics, even now, is about more than baubles and encomia, and in their obstinacy, most voters remain at least somewhat interested in the policies that each candidate brings to the feast. It would no doubt suit Kamala Harris down to the ground if she could spend the next 100 days being hysterically feted with visions of “Kamalot” — dispiritingly, that’s a real neologism — but, at some point, she’s going to have to answer a smattering of substantive questions, and, when she does, she’ll have three realistic options from which to choose: (1) Run on the radical agenda that she adumbrated in 2019; (2) embrace the array of positions that have made the Biden–Harris administration one of the least popular in modern memory; or (3) cut the president she serves loose and gesture at a contrived moderation in which she does not in any sense believe. None of these is ideal.

  Thus far, it seems as if Harris is being forced by gravity to plump for Option 2. Last week, her campaign vowed that she would seek to impose no new taxes on individuals who earn less than $400,000 per year. That, verbatim, is President Biden’s position. Soon afterward, the campaign not only reversed Harris’s 2019 position on fracking — which was to ban it completely — but insisted that those who had seen the many videos in which she had made her toxic vow were guilty of making “false claims,” and it confirmed that, henceforth, “she would not ban fracking” if given the chance. That, too, was President Biden’s effective approach, right down to the immediate attempt to change the subject to “climate-change legislation.” Given that 2019-era Harris wanted to kick 150 million people off their private health insurance, make an open border a matter of explicit policy, extend Medicaid to illegal immigrants, ban modern sporting rifles by executive order, consider racial reparations, and pass the Green New Deal in its entirety, it seems likely that this reflex will persist.

  CCWC assumes (1) those "substantive questions" get asked; (2) Kamala responds with something other than her usual word salad; (3) anyone pays attention. I'm pretty doubtful about all of that.

• OK, so it's a rhetorical question. Still it's worth asking, and Brendan O'Neill at Spiked asks it: Why is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates?

  Everyone’s fretting over an ‘escalation’ in hostilities following the Majdal Shams massacre. ‘Diplomats [are] scrambling to prevent a surge in fighting’, says the NYT. Too late. The surge in fighting already happened. It happened on Saturday when Israel lost 12 of its children to the rocket fire of radical Islamists. There are widespread ‘fears of escalation’ after Saturday, says Reuters. That it printed these words next to a photo of a row of small white coffins containing the remains of the kids murdered by Hezbollah is extraordinary. There’s your ‘escalation’, Reuters. It has already occurred.

  The foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, India and the US issued a joint statement after the massacre, saying ‘We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating’. Likewise, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said ‘we are deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation’. These are warnings to Israel, aren’t they? These powerhouses of Western diplomacy, with their noisy teeth-gnashing over ‘escalation’, are essentially telling Israel to chill out. Indeed, one US security analyst told the Guardian that ‘the most pressing task for US officials’ is to ‘delay any Israeli retaliation’ in order that we might ‘achieve de-escalation’. Relax, Israel – it’s only 12 kids.

  I made similar comments yesterday about the WSJ coverage. O'Neill's conclusion: "The West’s viewing of the Middle East through identitarian goggles has blinded it to the truth – and to morality."

• J.D. Vance is proving himself to have been a poor pick. No, not the cat ladies comment, although that was bad too. Eric Boehm looks at Vance's 2021 comments about tax policy: J.D. Vance Says Childless Americans Should Pay Higher Taxes. They Already Do.

  Duh, right?

  In comments from 2021 that resurfaced last week, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) said that childless Americans ought to pay higher taxes than those who have kids.

  "If you're making $100,000 [or] $400,000 a year, and you've got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you're making the same amount of money and you don't have kids," Vance said back then, during an interview with conservative activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk.

  Here's the good news for Vance: It's already true that childless Americans pay higher taxes than most of those who reproduce. That was true in 2021, and it is true today.

  Boehm points out that Vance not only ignored the status quo, he made his argument in the most hamfisted way:

  Parents should pay lower taxes than nonparents […] because policy ought to "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad."

  Nonparents are bad! Punish them!

  Yes, as Boehm says: Vance expressed this in "the most politically toxic way" possible. Bottom line: Vance "revealed a nasty part of his character and his views on how government should work. Americans should notice that.

  And of course, this also reveals something about Donald Trump: he makes bad decisions (in this case, his VP pick) for the wrong reasons.

Seen on the Wall Street Journal website, reporting on the latest atrocity: Deadly Strike on Soccer Field Raises Risk of Escalation Between Israel and Hezbollah.

Apparently in the minds of the WSJ reporters, firing a rocket into the midst of "mostly children and teenagers", killing 12, is just maintaining the status quo.

But if Israel responds? Ah, that would be escalation! Can't have that!

That seems to be the spin of the news-side of the WSJ. That side is usually good and professional, but sometimes the mask slips.

Fortunately, the opinion-side of the newspaper is more honest: Weakness Won’t Deter Hezbollah After Its Soccer-Field Attack.

Israel has retaliated according to news reports. Won't bring those dead kids back, but hopefully will "alter Hezbollah’s calculus". I'd say it needs a lot of altering.

Also of note:

• Unburdened by what has been. Becket Adams notices some major image surgery in the works, as the MSM is Inventing Kamala. After noting her anointment as the Democrat's nominee "without a single pledged delegate":

  Even crazier than Harris’s political ascent, however, are the press’s efforts to reinvent her for the general election, fashioning her into a completely unrecognizable version of the woman who first came to Congress in 2017. To this end, journalists are going beyond merely bending the facts or misrepresenting truths for the vice president’s general-election glow-up. Some have resorted to outright lying, pumping out political disinformation that’d make even the North Koreans blush.

  A Minnesota CBS News affiliate, for example, published a fact check last week titled, “Trump falsely accuses Harris of donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out ‘dangerous criminals.’”

  In 2020, then-senator Harris’s official Twitter account said, “If you’re able to, chip in now to the [Minnesota Freedom Fund] to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” The CBS News affiliate even asked her about her support. Harris’s tweet, which includes a link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund’s donation page, has been shared more than 15,000 times.

  Yes, really. CBS’s point is that Harris didn’t donate to the group that posted bail for dangerous criminals but merely fundraised for it. Oh, okay. Thank you for that clarity.

  Adams also looks into the "border czar" imbroglio. It's my final NR free link for the month, so dive in.

• Like Consumer Reports, but more trustworthy. Sabine Hossenfelder The Trouble With Heat Pumps. "Let's have a look."

  Bottom line: you might need upgraded insulation, different radiators, … But even if you're not in the market, Ms. Hossenfelder does a fine job of debunking some shoddy "fact checking" by careless advocates.

  Disclaimer: I have no idea how practical it would be to replace my (relatively new) oil burner with a heat pump. I'm in New Hampshire, which gets cold, and also hot.

• Continuing on the consumer beat… Megan McArdle comments on J.D. Vance's elegy for old refrigerators: J.D. Vance can’t go back in time — and neither can the rest of us.

  For one of the youngest vice-presidential candidates ever nominated, J.D. Vance sounds a little crotchety. His convention speech last week pined for an America that the 39-year-old himself never knew — a land before drugs and deindustrialization ravaged the Rust Belt, when housing was cheap and families were intact, and proud American craftsmen made the world’s best products with their own hands.

  Of course, there’s nothing wrong in wishing for things you don’t remember — if they were really good, as many things were during the United States’ manufacturing boom: There were job opportunities, families formed easily and people felt support from society. I have sympathy for Vance’s desire to “put people to work making real products for American families.”

  The problem is that Donald Trump cannot bring those days back. And I suspect Vance is too smart to truly believe the former president could.

  Oh, right, refrigerators:

  It’s not just that economies have become too complicated to take apart and reassemble in some simpler, more desirable form. It’s also that American voters would never stand for it. To see what I mean, consider a talk that Vance gave last February in which he suggested that “economics is fake” — based on his experience owning a 40-year-old refrigerator.

  “The refrigerator we had,” he told the audience, “you would put lettuce in the icebox and it would be good a month later. … You cannot at any price point buy a refrigerator today that can do that.”

  During Vance’s more recent convention speech, the Lettuce Fountain of Youth surfaced on social media to much giggling — because it sums up both the hazy appeal and the implausibility of “Make America Great Again.” Yet there is some truth in Vance’s remark, which is more than a lament for the country’s lost manufacturing might. It’s also a complaint about the way society has become monomaniacally focused on consumer prices, to the detriment of many other things that make our lives better.

  Ms. McArdle does some research on what you could buy from Sears back in 1966 and today.

  However, with apologies to Steven Wright: I do not recommend you buy a heat pump and refrigerator and let them fight it out.

Yes, another lyric snippet from the old Eric Clapton song, "Crossroads" in today's headline.

The last verse also contains an unintentional reference to Kamala:

Yeah, probably not that Willie Brown.

Our weekly look at what the bettors are saying.

Gee, last week our table (compiled pre-pullout) contained Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Gavin Newsom: all contenders considered to have a 2% or greater shot at winning last Sunday, now gone. And … sigh … now it's just Bone Spurs and Cackles.

Is it time for Republicans to despair yet? Recall that back in June Trump was at 50.8%, Biden at 40.7%, not that different.

But I'm not making any predictions.

Also of note:

• No competition for Simone Biles, though. Matthew Continetti judges The Biden-Harris Mental Gymnastics.

  The Paris Olympics began on July 26, and Democrats were ready. They’ve been performing mental gymnastics for the last month.

  The party and its media allies deserve medals in political contortion. In the space of a few weeks, they’ve gone from saying that Joe Biden is the next FDR, to Biden is fine, how dare you question his age, to Biden is incapable of serving a second term, to Biden is a stubborn old man who will sink the party, to Biden is a demigod whose selflessness will be recalled for centuries.

  Keeping up with the changing party line is exhausting. Not long ago, remember, it was considered a slur to suggest that Joe Biden was too old and infirm to be reelected president.

  In June, when the Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on Biden’s memory loss and confusion, the White House denounced the paper and its parent company. Biden’s BFFs on MSNBC called the article “a Trump hit piece.”

  Continetti is pretty good at detailing the triple flips involved in the MSM coverage.

• Advice from Kevin D. Williamson for … Kamala? Yes, because he despises Trump even more: If It Has to Be Harris ….

  Let’s get the to-be-sure stuff out of the way: As I have written before, I have a pretty low opinion of Joe Biden, but even if he were literally brain-dead, I think he’d be less of a threat to the country in the presidency than Donald Trump would. I believe Kamala Harris has a better chance of beating Trump than Biden did, but I also believe that Harris has less of a chance of beating Trump than a half-dozen other Democrats—Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Jared Polis, Wes Moore, Willie Nelson’s weed guy’s chauffeur’s personal masseuse, etc. If I were betting my own money on it today, I’d bet on Trump to beat Harris in November. 

  All that being stipulated, a few thoughts on how the Harris campaign might improve its odds. 

  Presidential elections in the United States are pure Kulturkampf. If they were about policy, Donald Trump would be another retired game-show host with a very active Twitter account, slightly to the left of Pat Sajak, and of no great interest. We have made the presidency into a kind of sacral kingship based on the idiotic notion that the president personifies the spirit of the nation in the way the British monarch does. (Formally, at least: King Charles the Mundane is no Elizabeth II.) The president has become a democratic idol in which the demos worships itself. But the demos is divided, with each half defining itself exclusively in opposition to the other half. Hence, the current situation in which alternating halves of the country believe we are in a state of existential crisis owing to the fact that the wrong kind of priest-king (Republican/Democrat, Catholic/Protestant, Hutu/Tutsi) occupies the national priesthood.

  KDW's advice is good, albeit paywalled. Basically: try to persuade the persuadeables, Kamala, that you are not a doctrinaire leftist. Or…

  Or she could take her chances on running an exclusively pump-up-the-base campaign, trying to beat Donald Trump in an outrage contest, and see where that takes her. My guess would be back to California.

• Let's see if Kamala can thread this needle. Zachary Faria's headline is incendiary, but (I think) clear-eyed about what her recent statements on Israel and Gaza amount to: Kamala Harris wants to keep Hamas in power.

  Harris offered a condemnation of sorts of Hamas after her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a bit of throat-clearing before she articulated her actual position that Hamas should be allowed to remain in power.

  “I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” Harris said of a ceasefire, which would allow Hamas to remain in power after the terrorist organization has promised to carry out more massacres like the Oct. 7, 2023, one that started this war.

  Harris ("and her ilk") place 100% of the responsibility for Gazan suffering on Israel.

  And similarly, their demands are entirely aimed at Israel, none at Hamas.

  And, following Rule 13 from Alinsky's playbook (""Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.") their "personalized" target is Bibi Netanyahu.

• It sucks and it blows. As foretold by Bart Simpson, J.D. Tuccille observes: Even After the Harris-Biden Substitution, the Presidential Race Still Sucks.

  An old joke frames Washington, D.C. as Hollywood for ugly people. But it's more accurate to say it's Hollywood for horrible people who make you want to back away slowly in search of an exit. To notice the unattractiveness of members of America's political class, you need to be dangerously close to their sociopathy and hunger for power, and who wants to enter that orbit? And that brings us to Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States and savior (they hope) of Democrats' dreams of retaining the White House against a challenge by famously flawed former President Donald Trump.

  "Famously flawed" is putting it mildly, but…

• In his defense, Trump's had some contact with violence of late. Jacob Sullum drops a truth bomb: Promising To Restore 'Law and Order,' Trump Falsely Claims Crime Is Rising.

  "Our crime rate is going up," former President Donald Trump claimed during the Republican National Convention last week, when he vowed to "Make America Safe Once Again." Yet the most notable recent increase in the homicide rate happened on Trump's watch, and violent crime has been falling since then.

  That gap between Republican rhetoric and reality corresponds with long-standing public perceptions of crime, which Americans routinely say is going up even when it is going down. Trump is hoping to capitalize on that misperception as he campaigns on a promise to reverse a nonexistent trend by "restor[ing] law and order."

  And, to be fair, this has been a truth-challenged campaign on both sides. (Yes, that's both-sidesism; sue me, it's obviously true.)

• Don't we all have Constitutional amendments we'd like to ignore? Emma Camp noticed: Trump Calls For Jailing American Flag Burners.

  In reaction to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress on Wednesday, raucous anti-Israel protests erupted across Washington, D.C. Protesters vandalized statues outside D.C.'s Union Station with phrases like "Hamas is comin" and "long live the resistance." At one point, protesters replaced the American flag with a Palestinian flag and then burned the American flag.

  In response to the flag burning, former President Donald Trump told Fox and Friends on Wednesday that he believed those who burn or damage the American flag should face jail time. Trump also brushed off those who would point out that flag desecration is First Amendment-protected speech.

  If anything, flag-burning should be encouraged: nothing says "I am an idiotic asswipe" more clearly than flag-burning, and such clarity is welcome in these murky times.

And it's kind of genius:

Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY pic.twitter.com/5lBxvyTZ3o

— Mr Reagan 🇺🇸 (@MrReaganUSA) July 26, 2024

Also of note:

• I don't think I've ever asked a single question about Harris and race. Nevertheless, John McWhorter claims We’re Asking the Wrong Question About Harris and Race.

  In the wake of Joe Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, a great deal of attention has focused on whether America is ready for a Black female president. Unmentioned is a question of equal complexity: Why is Harris Black? Hear me out.

  As she has proudly recounted, the vice president is the product of an interracial, intercultural marriage between a mother who emigrated from India and a father who emigrated from Jamaica. So in terms of her ancestry, she is as much South Asian as she is Black. By widespread convention, however, people refer to her not primarily as a South Asian presidential candidate, nor even a mixed-race candidate, but rather a Black candidate.

  It’s not just Harris. Barack Obama, with one Black and one white parent, is called Black. Imagine how strange it would be if someone called him white. Imagine how strange it would be if he called himself white. Harris often mentions the South Asian half of her heritage, but in traditional American discourse, it feels off to categorize her as simply South Asian — like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling — and leave it there. Yet calling her just Black, as a kind of shorthand, feels right. Blackness is treated as blacking out, so to speak, whatever other race is involved. Most people default to this perspective — myself included.

  This approach contradicts not just logic, but also itself. In contrast to the centuries-old “one-drop rule” that segregationists have invoked to describe the indelible ancestral stain of so-called Black blood, enlightened people are supposed to believe that race is purely a social construct, with no biological basis. If so, then why does having some Black forebears make you Black, regardless of the rest of the family tree?

  McWhorter's "wrong" question seems to be the one implied in sentence one above: "Is America ready for a Black female president?"

  My answer, sure, if Condi Rice were on the ballot.

  But McWhorter's right to note the weird way "we" pigeonhole people racially. I'll try not to do this.

• They are wind instruments, mostly. Jonah Goldberg claims: The Media Are Not Instruments of the Parties.

  Whenever Katy Tur or Chuck Todd are trending on Twitter, I check out why. It turns out that progressives are convinced that Tur and Todd are Trump boosters, something literally no conservative thinks is true, let alone Trump fans. As best I can tell, the only reason lefties loath [sic] Tur and Todd so much is that they occasionally ask questions or make observations that deviate from the prevailing progressive storyline.

  One incident—an April interview with Nancy Pelosi—looms particularly large with MSNBC’s core audience. The former speaker was laying into Trump for having “the worst record of job loss of any president. So we just have to make sure people know.”

  At that point, Tur interjected: “There was a global pandemic.” Pelosi went silent for a moment, staring daggers at the anchor, and then said, coldly, “He had the worst record of any president. We’ve had other concerns in our country. If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role, but it ain’t mine.”

  This elicited—and continues to elicit—all sorts of “slay queen” praise for Pelosi and unhinged outrage at Tur.

  But Tur was obviously right. I mean, totally and irrefutably right. Tur’s sin was simply that she got in the way of a very cheap talking point that persuades no one who isn’t already 100 percent in the anti-Trump column. 

  I know it's tiresome when I say this but: I noticed this too. For some reason I noticed that "Katy Tur" was trending on Twitter X, and I clicked to find out why, and noticed the vituperation. (If you want to check for yourself: here you go; most of it's still up.)

  And, by the way, I expect to be using that word "vituperation" a lot in the coming months.

I never thought of myself as "old-guard", but after reading Henry Olson, I'm afraid the shoe fits pretty well: Trump-Vance Ticket Puts Old-Guard Conservatives at a Crossroads.

Olson's advice to the old guard: learn to compromise with the populist demagogues. You might not always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

Fortunately, as a crabby blogger, I don't have to compromise with anyone.

Also of note:

• Vero does it right. In her column, Veronique de Rugy points out: The 'Pro-Worker' GOP Is Anti-Worker

  Members of the new right wing of the Republican Party have proclaimed themselves the champions of the working class. I am sure they mean it, despite many of them being among the elite of the elite. And because so many are lawyers—including those like vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance who come from an elite Ivy League school—we can forgive them for failing to understand that their economic policies would hurt, not help, the working class.

  Part of the shift is because Republicans don't believe they should continue as the so-called party of big business. They are correct. It's a sad fact that traditional Republican politicians have often confused being for free markets with propping up and protecting big banks and other companies with subsidies and other handouts. The fact that Democrats do the same doesn't excuse Republicans' behavior.

  A first essential step to earning the moniker of the party of the people is ending all subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, and other government-granted privileges to big corporations. That will undo much of the bias toward businesses while allowing markets to do their jobs and raise all economic boats.

  I doubt the new populists will do it. Instead, expect more counterproductive "pro-worker" policies like raising the corporate income tax. Taxes are paid only by flesh-and-blood people, and corporations, well, are not people.

  I think this is a good response to Henry Olson. "Compromising" with fundamentally unsound economic policies won't help "workers", and you'll wind up being blamed for the resulting mess anyway.

• What do you mean, "we", white economist? Noah Smith has the bad news for Universal Basic Income supporters: Yes, we still have to work.

  In my roundup this week, I flagged some disappointing results for a basic income experiment. When people got $1000 a month, 2% of them stopped working. That’s a significant amount, considering that $1000 a month is not enough to really support anyone by itself. It suggests that a much larger UBI would cause a much larger percentage of people to stop working. That would increase the costs of the program, and probably doom it politically — the idea of having the government pay a large portion of the citizenry not to work is likely to be very unpopular.

  When I posted the result on Twitter X, however, I got some interesting reactions. A number of people told me — often in angry, indignant terms — that paying people to take leisure is the whole point of basic income, and is a good and desirable thing. [Examples elided]

  From an economic standpoint, this argument is unpersuasive. Yes, taking more leisure time is valuable — even if you drop out of the labor force entirely, you’re still presumably doing something you like with all those spare hours. But the benefit of that leisure has to be weighed against the cost of the lost production when the people stop working, plus the monetary cost of providing the UBI in the first place, and the deadweight loss of whatever taxes you had to use to transfer the money. A welfare program that causes a significant number of people to stop working entirely is unlikely to pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

  But what’s interesting here is the deep antipathy to the idea of work that seems to have taken root among some on the political left. Not everyone on the left, of course — back in the late 2010s there were fierce battles between supporters of UBI and supporters of a federal job guarantee. But I notice a bunch of leftist types these days basically saying that work — or at least, most work — is useless and pointless and should be abolished.

  Marx—I think I remember—thought that work in a capitalist system was fundamentally exploitative. That attitude's reflected in some of the vituperation Smith received.

  But as J.K. Galbraith is said to have said: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

• Try to make me care. You might have noticed people—young people—using the word "brat" in no sense with which you are familiar. Fortunately, Jeff Maurer has Jacob Fuzetti on hand to do the research and type up his findings: “Brat” Explained by a Veteran Journalist Who Has to Accept Whatever Assignment We Give Him.

  This week, Benjamin Netanyahu toured the U.S., a software failure threw the global economy into chaos, and a singer called Kamala Harris “brat”. I begged my editor to assign me to one of the first two stories, but he assigned me to the “brat” story. So, I will attempt to elucidate the meaning of “brat”, place that meaning into context, and to do all that without collapsing into utter despair over the state of journalism and also my life.

  “Brat” — pronounced like the word meaning “unruly child”, and not like the German sausage — is a word repurposed by a British “popular music” star known as Charli [sic] XCX. Despite the masculine first name, Ms. XCX is female, and her honorific is pronounced “ex, see, ex” — the letters do not connote Roman numerals. Last month, Ms. XCX released a record album entitled “Brat”, and The Guardian reports that “brat” also refers to “a lifestyle inspired by noughties excess.” The meaning of that phrase could not be determined as of press time.

  Jacob gives it the old college try, as members of his generation are wont to do.

• Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, prats gotta… Jim Geraghty muses on the lonely lives of fack checkers: Fact-Checkers' Pratfall on 'Border Czar'

  Is it just me, or has every big media fact-checker for the past 24 hours sounded like, “Well, Wolf, we’ve checked this out thoroughly, and it turns out that a ‘czar’ is a title historically used by Slavic monarchs. The term is derived from the Latin word ‘caesar,’ which referred to a ruler with the same rank as a Roman emperor. ‘Czar’ is spelled two ways, and its variants were the official titles in the First Bulgarian Empire, which existed from the year 681 to 1018. Not only would Kamala Harris not be born for nearly another millennium, she’s not even Bulgarian. What’s more, there’s no evidence that Harris ever wore a crown, sat on a throne, or carried a scepter. So we’re giving the Republican claim that Harris was Biden’s so-called border czar a rating of ‘Pants on Fire,’ because it’s not even remotely true.”

  Fine. Could someone deal with the simple truth that she was given an allegedly important role concerning illegal immigration, and she did nothing useful?

And it seems to be getting pretty gassy around here, innit?

The media fix is in:
- Axios deletes calling Harris the border czar
- GovTrack deletes calling Harris the most liberal Senator
- Harris was a shining example of DEI; now calling her a “DEI candidate” is false and racist pic.twitter.com/s4fLon6rj5

— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) July 24, 2024

On that DEI bit, David Harsanyi wonders, perhaps with a smidgen of disingenuity: Why Is It Offensive To Call Kamala A DEI Hire?

As the tweet above shows, and Harsanyi documents, four years ago there was no controversy that Biden was picking his veep via DEI criteria; in fact, he bragged about it.

And with respect to another claim in the LeFevre tweet: At least for now, Wikipedia helpfully links to GovTrack's archived page: Sen. Kamala Harris’s 2019 Report Card. Which named her the "most politically left" among other senators, the least likely to join bipartisan bills among her fellow Democrats, and the 3^rd most absent for votes among all senators.

But she did manage to get one bill through the meat grinder: the Saint Francis Dam Disaster National Memorial Act!

And yes, GovTrack has apparently consigned all that to the Memory Hole.

(Headline du jour is a movie quote, of course.)

Also of note:

• I served with George Washington. I knew George Washington. George Washington was a friend of mine. And Mr. President, you're no George Washington. Jeff Jacoby takes aim at a large fish in a small barrel: Joe Biden's flatterers compare him to George Washington. That's ridiculous.

  After briefly debunking the (now inoperative) Biden/FDR hagiography:

  But now, in the wake of Biden's decision to abandon his reelection campaign, his partisans and sycophants are comparing him to an even more towering predecessor: George Washington.

  Biden "gets to go out as the George Washington of his party," NPR's Mara Liasson said as she reported the news Sunday evening. The same Alter who formerly ranked Biden with FDR assured NBC that he "will be remembered as a great president" and "mentioned in the same sentence as George Washington" for "selflessly leaving power." Jon Meacham, a presidential biographer and sometime Biden speechwriter, gushed that Biden's decision to abandon his bid for a second term is "one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington." Multiple politicians, including Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Angus King of Maine, made similarly fawning declarations.

  Have Biden's flatterers learned nothing from their recent debacle? For months they loudly insisted that the president was in fantastic shape. He was so vigorous, they claimed, that people "can't even keep up with him" — not just mentally sharp but "better than he's ever been" and any video evidence to the contrary was nothing but "cheap fakes." Then came a debate performance so ghastly that all those lies were abandoned overnight.

  The president ended his campaign this week because he had no choice. It had become clear that he had no path to victory and leading Democrats made it clear that the pressure on him to bow out would keep intensifying until he did. Biden deserves full credit for facing reality and withdrawing from the race with a graceful statement. "I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down," he wrote. For someone who had craved the presidency for so long, to be forced to give it up prematurely was undeniably painful. But that put Biden in company with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — not George Washington.

  Also, George Washington never told a lie. At least according to Parson Weems.

• Why are you hitting yourself? No, I mean really: why are you hitting yourself? Robert F. Graboyes examines The Self-Harm of Economic Populism.

  Democrats want to punish the rich with taxes, and Republicans want to punish China with tariffs. The two are analytically equivalent, and both bring to mind H.L. Mencken’s chestnut, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” Maybe six weeks into an Economics 101 course, one encounters the “incidence of taxation” and learns why tax-the-rich and tariff-the-Chinese are fallacious and self-harming strategies. For the past 250 years or so, political leaders have gone through an endless cycle of learning this logic and then forgetting it.

  With respect to "Economics 101": Apparently this news came too late for Graboyes to include in his article: Vance, Like Biden, Flunks Econ 101: Backs Hiking Federal Minimum Wage.

• Ready for some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious news? The original conspiracist, Eugene Volokh, looks at a recent legal decision: Nina Jankowicz's Libel Lawsuit Against Fox News Network Dismissed by Federal Judge. He mostly quotes the decision, here's the summary:

  The judge concludes Fox's statements about Jankowicz's plans as Executive Director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, and the circumstances of her leaving the position, were constitutionally protected opinion—and, even if they were viewed as factual assertions, were substantially true.

  Amazingly, this news seems not to be mentioned at all at Jankowicz's American Sunlight Project. I guess it's stuck somewhere the sun don't shine.

• Alternate title suggested: Take the Money and Run. That state to our south continues to be a bad example, as reported by Joe Lancaster at Reason: Netflix's 'Don't Look Up' Got $46 Million From Massachusetts Taxpayers.

  Newly released state revenue data shows that Massachusetts taxpayers played a major role in funding a mid-budget Hollywood movie about climate change.

  The dark comedy Don't Look Up premiered on Netflix in December 2021. In the film, a team of scientists discovers that an asteroid will soon hit the Earth and destroy all human life, but they find that nobody wants to heed their warnings. A blunt allegorical tale, the movie tries to do for climate change what Dr. Strangelove did for nuclear war.

  The film grossed less than $800,000 worldwide against a budget estimated between $75 million and $110 million. (Since the film debuted on a streaming service, box office receipts matter less than viewership numbers: Viewers streamed the film for 111 million hours in its first two days and then for another 152 million hours over the following week.)

  Variety reported that stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence received $30 million and $25 million, respectively, {…]

  I'm sure some of that cash eventually trickled down to … somewhere in California.

'Donald Trump Will Destroy Democracy,' Says Party Nominating Candidate No One Voted For https://t.co/NRkJesaPVf pic.twitter.com/7koWOD8Ob7

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 23, 2024

It would be nice if this observation stopped the prattle about "democracy" from the usual suspects. Maybe the WaPo will take down its insipid "Democracy Dies in Darkness" slogan, and replace it with … I don't know, maybe "Suck it up, Buttercup"?

But the slogan still graces (for example) the top of the page containing George Will's latest, with his advice: Democrats, fear not an open convention.

It is a duty the party delegates will shirk, undoubtedly, and only people like Will will call them on it.

On the other hand, Jim Geraghty has a pretty good point, which is: no sane politician wants to get in front of a steamroller: You Can't Have a Competition If No Other Candidate Shows Up.

I'm pretty sure that, for a lot of people, "democracy" means "let's vote on stuff as long as we get the results we want".

Also of note:

• Remarkable agreement on the obvious. Headline from Dan McLaughlin at National Review: Kamala Harris Still a Dangerous Authoritarian. (Gifted link)

  Which Kamala Harris will run for president? We’ve seen two different versions of Harris. It would be premature to dismiss either, but we also should not let one obscure the risk of the other.

  On the one hand, there’s the Harris we saw as California attorney general, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That Harris was a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith, or reputations of anyone in her way.

  On the other hand, there’s the Harris we have seen as vice president: bluntly, an idiot. That Harris is a figure of fun and hardly seems in danger of accomplishing anything. She’s been endlessly compared to the Julia Louis-Dreyfus character on Veep, with her speeches full of empty cliches and time-filling blather. She has hemorrhaged staff. The Biden White House never assigns her anything but hopelessly lost causes and impossible tasks while endlessly leaking about the low regard in which she is held.

  These two pictures are not necessarily inconsistent. Power hunger is not limited to the smart, the competent, or the eloquent. Incompetence is not limited to the meek. Disregard for America’s Constitution, laws, and basic civics can proceed as much from ignorance as from malice. Harris, raised in the progressive hothouse of the San Francisco Bay Area, is reflexive rather than considered because she has never really had to engage with opposing ideas, win the support of people who disagree with her, or pay a political price for disregarding their rights.

  Headline from David Harsanyi at the Federalist: By The Way, Kamala Harris Is A Dangerous Authoritarian. And a sample from that:

  Like any good authoritarian, Harris enforces whatever laws she sees fit to enforce whenever she sees fit. One of the reasons Kamala allegedly opposed the nomination of Neil Gorsuch was that the judge “consistently valued legalisms” — which is to say, respected the Constitution — “over real lives.”

  Kamala was never one for legalism. When candidate Biden argued that Harris’ promise to issue an executive order unilaterally banning access to certain guns would be unconstitutional, she retorted: “I would just say: Hey, Joe, instead of saying ‘No we can’t,’ let’s say yes, we can,'” before cackling at the very notion that presidents couldn’t do whatever they wanted.

  As a national candidate, Kamala said she believed immigration laws should be treated as civil, rather than criminal, offenses. So, of course, Biden gave Kamala the job of border czar — she did not perform admirably, to say the least — where she noted that one of the “root causes” of the problem was a “lack of climate resilience,” before sending corrupt regimes hundreds of millions of dollars.

  So which is it? Harsanyi's and McLaughlin's articles overlap a little, but not as much as you might expect. There's plenty of evidence for those headlines out there. And probably more to come.

• Hey, WaPo! How about "Democracy Dies with Noble Lies"? Bari Weiss writes on our current age: The Era of the Noble Lie.

  The reason there is no Democratic presidential nominee right now—27 days before the party’s convention in Chicago begins—is because of a lie. The reason the Democrats are going to scramble to whip a majority of their 3,936 delegates into line behind Vice President Kamala Harris—the reason the most basic elements of the Democratic (and democratic) process are being so dramatically challenged—is because of the lie that everyone around Joe Biden told themselves and then told the public.

  By now, there is no denying that that’s exactly what happened.

  Once the reality of Biden’s deteriorating condition became plain on that CNN debate stage, the question was only who was going to admit what they knew and when.

  To choose just one example: George Clooney, who had been onstage with Biden at a fundraiser on June 15, wrote in The New York Times on July 10 about what he had actually seen when he was hauling in checks for Biden’s second term. “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote, referring to the disastrous June 27 CNN debate that led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

  It’s not just that they knew about Biden’s condition and lied about it. They knew they were lying and believed they could dupe their supporters at least through November 5, 2024. In other words: double talk. One message in public. A different message in private. Until it became impossible to sustain.

  And the Free Press paywall (somewhat ironically) cuts in shortly after that.

  But it's worth remembering: these are the folks who were lying to you before. Why believe them now?

Mr Ramirez seems dubious that it's entirely voluntary: Jeff Maurer urges patience, fruitlessly: Democrats Get out of Bad Relationship, Immediately Rebound While Still Emotional.

There, I quoted three whole paragraphs without a single dirty word! Unusual for Jeff.

Also of note:

• Fifty seconds of cringe. Here's one of the things Jeff cites as an example of "Kamala fan art that makes North Korean state media look subtle."

  My TikTok feed is covered in Kamala fancams. I've never seen anything like this (a thread) pic.twitter.com/fVozbh9W4L

  — Joe (@JoePostingg) July 22, 2024

  As Abe Lincoln probably did not say: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

• This doesn't appear to be all that likely a prediction. But nevertheless, a must-read from Kevin D. Wilson: And Now, Dump Harris.

  All the Democrats really need to have a real shot at beating Trump (again) is to nominate someone halfway normal and competent. They have many promising options from which to choose. Kamala Harris, whatever her virtues as a human being, is not one of them. She’s damaged goods from an unpopular administration that effectively has just come to an early end, a California weirdo who talks like some weird mix of yoga instructor, horoscope, and vice principal. Biden’s withdrawal is one piece of evidence that at least some Democrats really believe what they say they believe: that Donald Trump is a unique threat to the republic. If it is really the case that Democrats sincerely believe that, then they should act on that belief.

  And that means dumping Harris, too.

  Harris, if she were smart, would save them the trouble. California has a governor’s race coming up in 2026. And who knows, Harris might actually turn out to be good at that job. But she could do her party, her country—and, realistically, herself—a favor by following the boss’ lead one last time and getting out of the way.

  You may have noticed: unlike, KDW, I try not to give advice to pols or parties. Why would they take advice from someone who despises them so much?

• A reminder: Joe came in fifth place in the 2020 New Hampshire Primary. Jim Geraghty looks at The End of an Error. It's a long essay, but here's what I want to excerpt:

  As I wrote in November 2021, “Harris’s presidential campaign ran into trouble in part because of flip-flopping on big issues — abolishing ICE, sanctuary cities, Medicare for All, independent probes of police shootings, banning fracking. Flip-flopping on issues is ultimately a reflection of a political leader who isn’t entirely certain what he or she wants.”

  When she withdrew from the presidential race, our Charlie Cooke concluded, “Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question.”

  Kamala Harris wants to be popular and great, and her first instinct is to push the country further to the left.

  So we'll see how that works out for her.

• And now for something completely different. You may have heard about the event: Blue Screens Everywhere Are Latest Tech Woe for Microsoft. You can find all sorts of finger-pointing and recommended remedies that uncannily resemble remedies that people were advocating before the outages.

  But this little nugget was buried at the end of the WSJ article linked above:

  A Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets.

  The Register has slightly more: EU gave CrowdStrike keys to Windows kernel, Microsoft claims.

  Y'know, it might not be a great idea to enable bureaucrats to make design requirements for AI software.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

A collection of five short stories from Ian Fleming. James Bond appears in all of them, but in varying roles. The Wikipedia page will tell you how much of the stories made it into movies over the years.

"From a View to a Kill"

Bond is sent to France to investigate the murder of a NATO motorcycle courier, and the theft of his "despatch" bag. M and Bond are relatively contemptuous of NATO's investigation. On site, Bond decides to ride the same route to see if he can flush out the evildoers. Turns out he can! He finds himself a little over his head, but is saved by a plucky female spy with a target pistol.

"For Your Eyes Only"

An escaped Nazi wants to buy a Jamaican estate that suits his fancy. When the owners don't want to sell, he has them murdered; maybe their heir will be more agreeable. Bad news for the Nazi: the victims were friends of M. He sends Bond on a freelance mission to take out the bad guy and his crew, who are hiding out in northern Vermont. (I think this is the closest Bond has ever come to my house.)

Trivia: when Bond is packing for his mission, one of the items is a large aluminum flask, which he fills with a 3:1 bourbon-to-coffee ratio. Nothing like being stinkin' drunk when you're trying to sneak up on the evildoers!

"Quantum of Solace"

Here, Bond has just blown up a couple of boats, for some reason, but that's all done before the story starts. He's bored out of his skull at a dinner party put on by the Governor of the Bahamas, but (eventually) gets interested in a story the Governor tells about a nebbish civil servant who gets married to a fetching stewardess. Which doesn't work out well. But there's a surprise twist at the end!

Yes, I think this has nothing at all to do with the movie of the same name; they just used the title. Probably paid millions to the Fleming estate for the title.

"Risico"

Bond is sent to investigate a drug smuggling operation targeting the British. His initial contact is Kristatos. Who points Bond at Columbo, a smuggling rival. But wait, who's the actual bad guy here?

Trivia: I'm pretty sure they'll never title a 007 movie "Risico". Too obscure. But elements of this story made it into the movie For Your Eyes Only.

"The Hildebrand Rarity"

Another title fated to never be attached to a movie, I'm afraid. The "Hildebrand Rarity" is a fish, and Bond has been wangled into helping the millionaire Milton Krest capture a member of the species. It turns out that Krest is a boor, dishonest, and a wife abuser.

The back cover of my copy of the book calls this story "an old-fashioned murder mystery", so I was kind of expecting Bond to do some Holmes-style deduction. Wrong, and a spoiler coming up: the murder doesn't happen until the last few pages of the story, and we never find out for sure who committed it.

Since I watched the first two entries in this Big Dumb Movie series (Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen), I figured I should complete the set. Unfortunately, my brain rebelled a little, asking "Why didn't they just…" a lot.

Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) has made it to the presidency! Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is still in the Secret Service, being considered for the top job. (And he would certainly be more competent than the current occupant, amirite?)

But Mike has continuing physical woes, after beating would-be assassins in previous movies, and losing to the Persian Empire in 300. And (as usual) the bad guys have a nefarious scheme that involves presidential assassination, and (as a bonus) framing Mike for it. A lot of Mike's agents get blown up, President Trumbull goes into a coma, Mike gets arrested. Will Mike escape, save the President, and clear his name? Sure, but it takes a while.

Hey, is that Nick Nolte underneath all that hair and wrinkles? Yes it is!

Jada Pinkett Smith has a small role as an FBI agent who (eventually) uncovers the truth about the murderous gang of assassins. Her response is to chopper into the gang's headquarters with one (1) other agent, with no weapons drawn, engaging in some chitchat with the gang's leader, making it obvious she knows what's going on. This does not work out for her.

Warning: Wikipedia says three more movies are in the works. And maybe a TV series. Maybe multiple TV series!

My former CongressCritter, and continuing toothache, Carol Shea-Porter, was briefly on fire yesterday afternoon in the wake of Biden's pullout announcement. Her bright idea, expressed in multiple tweets was… well, here it is, just one example, with my snarky response:

Give it up, Carol. She wants to be unburdened by what has been. https://t.co/DMae9l6gyL

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) July 21, 2024

This struck me as nutty, even for Carol. But I suppose that's why I still follow her, for the entertainment.

Also of note:

• Nobody could disrespect Kamala more than I. But Elizabeth Nolan Brown comes pretty close: It's Been Easy To Forget How Bad Kamala Harris Is.

  Kamala Harris the horrible campaigner and Kamala Harris the cop can be easy to forget if you're only considering what Harris has done lately. Her tenure as vice president has been almost entirely unremarkable. The most distinguishing feature has been a series of bizarre but benign word salads. And political memory is short.

  So Harris isn't the best orator? Surely that's surmountable. Besides, the lack of distinguishing actions during her vice presidency could even be to her advantage. She's basically a blank slate, at least if you don't look back too far.

  But what if you do look back?

  The first thing you'll see is Harris' shambolic 2020 campaign for president. She wouldn't commit to policy positions. She couldn't defend her past actions. There were ongoing stories about her poor treatment of her staff. She entered the race as a top-tier candidate, with glowing press and some big-time backers, and dropped out two months before the Iowa caucuses, polling at just 3 percent nationally. She wasn't even polling as a top-tier candidate in her home state of California.

  More at the link; I try to restrict myself to fair-use excerpts.

• Let's hope there aren't any bad dudes out there who see this as an opportunity. Maybe President Dotard should take the advice of the NR editorialists: Joe Biden Should Resign Presidency.

  Joe Biden did the right thing in ending the charade of asking the American public to believe that he was capable of serving another four years as president.

  This was preposterous, and the public, as the polling has consistently shown for a long time, didn’t believe it.

  Now, Biden has issued a statement dropping out of the race and has endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris.

  Biden should take the next logical step and resign the presidency. It’s possible to imagine a president not being able to campaign but still being capable of carrying out his official duties — say, if he had a serious physical impairment. And it is even possible to imagine a president who could serve for another six months but not another four and a half years. But such scenarios do not apply to Biden.

  Biden's withdrawal statement said his motive was "in the best interest of my party and the country".

  We'll ignore the significance of putting "party" before "country".

  Also, why "the country"? Why not "my country"?

  Ah well. The point is: if he really wants to do what's best for our country, he should transfer power to Kamala. That would still suck, but it would make the next few months less worrisome.

• Let's not let the GOP off the hook. Jack Butler read the Republican platform, and he's kind of cheesed off about GOP’s Latest Obamacare Surrender.

  Beneath the placid surface of this year’s largely successful Republican National Convention, some discontent has lurked. Occasionally, it has come into public view. Consider the new Republican Party platform. The platform heavily bears the imprint of Donald Trump, now firmly ensconced as the party’s leader, even down to its bullet points and serial capitalizations.

  But it’s a Trumpian platform in more than just style. The substance also reflects his vision for the party. Conservatives have already noticed its moderation on abortion and marriage versus past platforms. Less remarked upon is the lack of any mention of a government program that conservatives had opposed since the early years of the Obama presidency, before it was even passed: the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. The apparent absence of official opposition to Obamacare comes as the program continues to distort our health-care system and serve the Left in the culture war. It also raises the worrying possibility that Republican concern for limited government and traditional values will atrophy in tandem.

  Butler notices that Obamacare has never worked as promised, and it's getting worse.

Recently on the movie blog:

Pun Son and I were big fans of the movie Twister back in (whoa) 1996 when he was just a young 'un. So going to see this sorta-sequel was a must.

Showbiz note: For a "blockbuster", the 7:30pm Saturday show at Regal Cinema in Newington (NH) seemed pretty sparsely attended. Tickets were expensive, though; might be that people were at cheaper theaters.

The heroine is Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones); in a short opening scene, she's looking to get her research funded by doing a proof-of-concept of a method to defang tornadoes by releasing some gunk into their funnels. This leads her to take enormous risks which lead to the scary deaths of most of her team. She's left with a lot of guilt.

Five years later, she's on the staff of a weather channel in New York City, far from any likely tornado action. But she's enticed back into the game by Javi (Anthony Ramos), the surviving member of her team. He's well funded, always a sign of something sneaky going on. When she arrives, she catches the notice of Tyler (the ubiquitous Glen Powell), a slick, handsome cowboy type, making a sensationalistic TV series.

In a shocking plot twist, Tyler is not the bad guy.

What follows is a lot of dazzling special effects, and a reminder that, yes, tornadoes cause massive destruction and death. Will Kate finally get her chance to deflate a twister? Come on, you've seen more than three movies, right?

We had a lot of fun.

UPDATE: As I mentioned below as a possibility, this post went partially out of date about 1 hour and 43 minutes after it went up:

pic.twitter.com/RMIRvlSOYw

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024

"But otherwise it seems to hold up well." Except the first sentence below really should follow the headline above.

Alas, we can only imagine via Mr. Ramirez:

I don't want to overuse the word "volatile" but it has been a … well, crazy week with the election betting odds folks. Here is an as-I-type snapshot:

I was shocked and stunned by the reappearance of Hillary! This reeks of desperation. (As does everything else in that dismal D list, but especially Hillary.)

And I emphasize: it all could be different by the time you read this. In fact, this post could be out of date before I actually post it.

Also of note:

• It's difficult to imagine what inspires the modern Democrat. Jeff Maurer wonders Will Biden's "Bite Me, It's Too Late" Message Inspire Democrats?

  Democrats want Biden off the ticket. Democratic voters want him off the ticket by a margin of two to one, and most Democratic office holders see Biden’s campaign as an asteroid hurtling towards their careers. Biden needs a miracle to win back his party’s support. And the message that he seems to have settled on to achieve that miracle is: “Lick my hairy balls, I’m the nominee and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Maurer posted that on July 18, three whole days ago, but it's still relatively not-inaccurate. Plus, I like quoting his imaginative salty humor, which, given Scranton Joe's legendary gutter mouth, is probably not that different from what he's actually saying.

• You got trouble right here in River City. Dan McLaughlin, I think, is hitting it on the head here: Donald Trump & The Music Man’s Last Act.

  I was going to quip that while everybody wants American politics to be Hamilton or 1776, what’s really going on in mid-2024 is that one party is staging a production of The Music Man while the other one is staging King Lear. But mulling it over, I came back to a point I observed on the liveblog during Thursday night’s interminable Trump acceptance speech, particularly Donald Trump’s affecting tribute to fallen supporter Corey Comperatore and his insistence on doing a full Trump rally speech instead of a more focused speech pitched to a general election audience. Maybe the Music Man analogy is more apt than I realized.

  Recall the story of The Music Man, the 1957 Broadway musical that was made into a 1962 film starring Robert Preston and a 2003 film starring Matthew Broderick. “Professor” Harold Hill is a con artist who has managed to be run out of Illinois (this is how you can tell the show is set over a century ago), and he shows up in the sleepy Middle America town of River City, Iowa. He claims — in a falsehood that turns out to be provable — to have graduated from a music conservatory in Gary, Indiana. He actually knows very little about music, but he is remarkably persuasive and talks the townspeople into making him a youth bandleader. It will be good for the moral fiber of the boys of this heartland town, he tells them. It’s actually a scheme to collect money to buy band uniforms and then skip town with the cash. The con is not just what he does; it’s who he is.

  […]

  But a funny thing happens along the way: He becomes a mark for his own fraud. He falls in love with a local woman. He gets emotionally attached to the boys in the band who look up to him. Then, it all catches up to him, and he gets caught and arrested. But the fake band is real. The townspeople decide that Harold Hill is what he pretended to be all along, even though they know he’s a phony — and he decides to be what he pretended. In the end, they spring him from jail and put him at the head of a surprisingly adequate marching band.

  Could the Baseball Crank have it right? I don't know; I went to see Twisters last night, and I'm pretty sure I can't hammer out a better political analogy from that source. But stay tuned, I might try.

• Just a reminder. And it's from Ilya Somin, blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy. GOP VP Nominee J. D. Vance is an Enemy of Free Markets.

  Ohio Senator J.D. Vance just became Donald Trump's running mate. If you care about free markets and liberty generally, he's just about the worst person the Republicans could have chosen, among those who got serious consideration.

  Since being elected to the Senate in 2022, Vance has become one of the GOP's leading champions of protectionism, economic regulation and planning through "industrial policy," restrictions on foreign investment, and—of course—immigration restrictions. As Alex Nowrasteh and I explained in our article "The Case Against Nationalism," these right-wing forms of central planning have most of the same weaknesses as their socialist counterparts. These policies create terrible incentives, and predictably make the nation poorer and less innovative.

  This won't bother at least one of the folks at Granite Grok who is fond of referring those favoring economic liberty as "fwee-marketeers".

  It does kinda bother me. Given Trump's age and propensity to draw gunfire, a President Vance could do some serious damage.

• This ain't the dawning of the age of Aquarius. What we got here, according to Christian Britschgi, is the year of The Chaos Election. After summarizing the campaign so far:

  It seems increasingly likely then that this election will be determined as much by a slight turn of Trump's head and a few misfiring neurons in Biden's as it will be by either man's record in office or plans for a second term.

  The takeaway from the 2024 election being the chaos election isn't that nothing matters. Rather, it's that the result should matter a lot less.

  If the next president isn't the person who won the argument, assembled a die-hard coalition, or forged a new consensus for governing the country, it stands to reason that that next president should command a lot less control over the government and individual citizens.

  If, as [NYT columnist Ross] Douthat muses, "there is no obvious next political stage for a civilization's development," then maybe the next president should give up on trying to impose whatever that next civilizational stage might be.

  To be sure, chaotic, random politics doesn't equal libertarianism or even suggest growing support for libertarian ideas. Seemingly the opposite is true.

  But it does mean people will quickly come to reject and resent the next administration's efforts to govern the country and control their lives, regardless of whether that attempted control comes from Team Red or Team Blue.

  I don't have a dog in this fight. As long as the argument is over who gets to torment their enemies, Barney and I are tapping out.

Recently on the book blog:

One thing was obvious from the get-go: the author, John Strausbaugh, is no fan of the Soviets, or Communism in general. Great! Neither am I. As (even) the cover and the title indicate, this is a warts-and-all look at the history of the Soviet space program. And it turns out to be mostly warts.

It's been a few years since I read Stephen Walker's Beyond, a history of the events leading up to and including Yuri Gagarin's slightly-under-one-orbit flight in April 1961. Safe to say that Strausbaugh's take is less respectful, less academic (no index or endnotes), and more of a (somewhat guilty) pleasure to read.

We know that the Soviets had their share of space disasters, notably Soyuz 1 (killing Vladimir Komarov) and Soyuz 11 (killing Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev). Strausbaugh goes into the gritty details of those failures. But, as he tells the whole story, it's pretty amazing that the body count isn't much higher; the Soviets were very slapdash, explicitly trading off cosmonaut safety against scoring propaganda victories. Example: Gagarin's flight was nearly a disaster due to the failure of his Vostok's reentry module to cleanly separate from its service module. This was a continuing problem with the Vostoks, and continued into the Soyuz spacecrafts.

The book might be a little slapdash itself. Page 107 puts the Apollo 1 disaster (which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White) in 1963. (It was 1967.) Strausbaugh knows better, and he gets it right later in the book, but (come on) a light fact-check would have caught this.

In other spots, gratuitous and strained US/USSR comparisons are made. Gagarin's post-flight parade placed him and Nikita Khrushchev "in a convertible Zil with the top down, like the Kennedys in Dallas." Wha…?

Strausbaugh does a good job of giving the Soviets personalities, not always complimentary ones. After his flight, Gagarin mishandled his fame, turning into a drunk and a womanizer. His friend/rival Gherman Titov, also succumbed. The famous "chief designer", Sergei Korolev, suffered in Stalin's Gulag for six years before his "meteoric" success in getting the space program off the ground. But he failed dismally in his design of the N-1 rocket, a rough equivalent to the American Saturn V. It never worked, blowing up a lot.

Strausbaugh does pay some respect to Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who might be the closest to Tom Wolfe's famous "Right Stuff". He nearly got killed doing a spacewalk stunt (an impromptu effort to upstage Ed White's upcoming Gemini EVA); he got along famously with his American counterparts during the planning and execution of the Apollo-Soyuz stunt mission.

The Soviets were also notoriously secretive, which caused a lot of speculation they were covering up some cosmonaut deaths. One of the rumor-mongers was Pun Salad fave, Robert A. Heinlein, who penned an article for American Mercury recounting his trip to the USSR with his wife, Virginia; he reported rumors that the May 15, 1960 flight of Korabl-Sputnik 1, the first test flight of the Vostok craft, was actually manned. Nope.

In short, an entertaining read, guaranteed to wipe away any misty watercolor memories of the way the Soviets were. You'd never know from reading it, however, that the American astronaut body count is much higher than Russia's. NASA is also a socialist enterprise, and its safety tradeoffs were merely different in details.

This is the second volume in Sean Carroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series. I reported on the first one, Space, Time, and Motion here.

My comments there apply, more or less, to this one: (1) There's a lot of math (and Carroll kind of assumes you've mastered the classical topics, like the Langrangian and Hamiltonian); (2) Like the first book, I got lost at many points, finding myself totally out of my depth. Although (good news) I was often pulled back into more accessible territory.

The basic idea is simple enough to express, even when you don't really understand it, can't visualize it, don't get the math. At bottom, just about everything is a "quantum field" of one sort or another. What we experience as particles, working their way up to atoms, molecules, etc., are excited states of those fields. This is easiest to describe with electromagnetic fields, which (when poked) produce photons.

I liked his description (it's near the end) of why we experience (some) matter as solid. When most of the "space" in an object is taken up by very unmassive electrons, why don't we (for example) just fall through the mattress when we hit the hay at night. Or fall through the floor when we walk to the bedroom. Or fall through the earth's surface and, … well, you get the idea.

The answer is a "force" that's not one of the Big Four Forces you heard about as an undergrad (gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear). It's the "Pauli repulsion" force, brought about from the fact you can't have two electrons in the same quantum state. And Carroll explains that, if you'd like.

And Kevin D. Williamson is the right person to do it: Government Isn’t Your Mamaw.

Okay, I'll quote one more paragraph…

Vance had a grandmother who encouraged him—and, perhaps equally important, discouraged him—in the right ways. And Vance did what poor white trash types who do not wish to remain poor white trash do: He got out, in his case by joining the Marine Corps, one of the great exemplars of American meritocracy. He went to a good state college and an Ivy League law school, he married a woman from an immigrant family with values superior to the ones exhibited by the Real Americans™ who brought him into the world, took a job that paid a lot of money, and made the kind of social and economic connections that give a man options in life. He rails against multinational corporations and “woke” colleges and then goes home to his wife, a lawyer whose clients have included the Walt Disney Co. and the University of California; he himself is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not a small-town hardware-shop owner. He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter Thiel scratches him behind the ear.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, even if that involves you subscribing to the Dispatch.

Also of note:

• At least he didn't say 'needs to be shot in the face.' Greg Lukianoff wants something terminated with extreme prejudice: Why the ‘words are violence’ argument needs to die. Just a snippet:

  Equating words and violence is a rhetorical escalation designed to protect an all-too-human preference which Nat Hentoff, a dearly departed friend and a great defender of freedom of speech in the 20th century, used to call “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

  Under this logic, my speech — even if sharp, brutal, and filled with invective — is still simply speech. Indeed, it might be commendable, righteous rage. But their speech, even if it’s similarly sharp and brutal, is violence — and I am therefore allowed to respond with violence. It is the kind of bad idea that can only be generated in an environment of low viewpoint diversity and highly moralistic ideological rigidity, which of course we see in too many corners of campus today.

  It's a long and thoughtful essay, with examples of Lukianoff's experience with actual violence. And makes the further point that equating speech with violence shows a profound disrespect to victims of actual violence.

• Fortunately, it's a metaphor. J.D. Tuccille echoes a complaint I've made myself: Libertarians Are More Politically Homeless Than Ever.

  For libertarians, modern American politics makes for a lonely place. Lonelier than usual, that is. Democrats are doubling down on their longtime taste for government control of the economy while replacing vestigial civil liberties concerns with a mania for policing political discourse. Republicans want to close the doors of the land of opportunity so they can dole out jobs to supporters in the not-very free economy they plan to manipulate for their own purposes. The major parties strongly agree on one point: State power should be enhanced and wielded for their own ends.

  That leaves little room for free minds and free markets.

  And if you're thinking "But what about…?"

  Normally, I would drop in a mention here that at least we can park our votes with the Libertarian Party. But that column of smoke you see in the distance is the dumpster fire it has become after an influx of populist trolls. Oh, well, it was nice-ish, and often amusing, while it lasted.

• Also a little depressed about the options is… George Will, who observes: This election is Democratic progressivism vs. GOP progressivism-lite. Alas.

  (Yes, that "alas" is in his headline. Does he write his own headlines? Sounds like him.)

  The consensus that the nation is politically polarized is indisputable only because it is undisputed. Granted, there is cultural polarization about this and that — pronouns, bathrooms, indoctrination masquerading as education, etc. Politically, however — regarding government’s proper scope and actual competence — there is deepening bipartisan agreement. Unfortunately.

  Concerning the broad contours of public policy, there is a disturbing convergence. Programmatically, the parties are more aligned than they have been since the 1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower caused Republicans to accept the permanency of the New Deal’s legacy: a transfer-payment state (Social Security, soon to include Medicare and much more) and federal supervision of the economy. The Republicans’ 1964 nominee, Barry Goldwater, expressed a growing exasperation with ideological homogenization, promising “A choice, not an echo.” He initiated an epochal divergence between the parties, which culminated 16 years later.

  Today, beneath the frothy partisanship, Republican progressivism echoes the Democrats’. Both parties favor significant expansions of government’s control of economic activity and the distribution of wealth. Both promise to leave unchanged the transfer-payment programs (Social Security, Medicare) that are plunging toward insolvency, and driving unsustainable national indebtedness.

  But at least there's a chance we'll live long enough to say: "Told you so."

Recently on the book blog:

An impulse pick off the "New Fiction" shelves at Portsmouth Public Library. I liked the previous Andrew Klavan book I read—whoa—back in 2012, Empire of Lies. More recently, I grew disenchanted with his lliberal political commentary a few years back, and as often happens, I lost interest.

But never fear, this is pretty good. The protagonist is Cameron Winter, ex-spy, current English professor. His previous undercover career involved him in some unsavory acts, and caused him ongoing psychological difficulties. He unburdens himself to an understanding shrink, but as another symptom, he finds himself drawn to investigate a multiple-murder, accompanied by arson. Along the way, he finds himself beset by gangsters, an obviously dirty cop (but is there more than one dirty cop?), and people that don't want to tell him the truth. And his own inner demons.

Klavan's fiction style is ornate, maybe not to everyone's taste. The first-person narration means we spend a lot of time inside Cameron's troubled head.

Consumer note: This is Klavan's third novel featuring Cameron Winter, but it seemed relatively stand-alone to me, even the flashbacks to his spy career. I'll probably make a point of reading the previous entries in the series.

Well, sad news. Bob Newhart passed away. Sharing a video that I haven't seen anyone else share yet:

And, even though I've seen it many times, I laughed once more.

Back in 2005 (19 years ago!) Cathy Seipp wrote a column celebrating Bob's 76th (!) birthday: No Sideshow Bob. (Gee, Bob was older then than I am now.)

Opening paragraph:

And speaking of great talents no longer with us, National Review provides a Cathy Seipp archive.

Also of note:

• As Bob would say: "Stop it!" Robby Soave has a demand: Stop Blaming the Attempted Assassination on Heated Anti-Trump Rhetoric.

  A consensus is swiftly forming among Republican politicians, activists, and media figures that the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump can be blamed on the heated, occasionally violent anti-Trump rhetoric deployed by President Joe Biden, leading Democrats, and mainstream media pundits.

  This is a deeply cynical and misguided tactic—and Republicans are well aware of it, since they have rightly criticized their political opponents for doing the exact same thing.

  Soave has plenty of examples. And notes that people aren't making the (fair and valid) point about there being a double standard at play. But these guys (Republicans these days) aren't objecting to the double standard; they're wallowing in it.

  However, I don't think he'll go so far as to threaten pols with being buried alive in a box.

• "Let's refute something you never claimed." It's a bizarre debating tactic, but Politifact tries it anyway. Ramesh Ponnuru looks at Politifact’s Latest Logic- and Evidence-Free ‘Fact Check’ on Abortion.

  Politifact pulls the same old bait-and-switch on J. D. Vance.

  “Donald Trump is running against a Joe Biden president who wants taxpayer-funded abortions up until the moment of birth,” Vance said.

  This is False and misleads about how rarely abortions are performed later in pregnancy.

  Vance supposedly misled people about the frequency of abortions late in pregnancy by . . . not saying one word about the frequency of abortions later in pregnancy.

  I've noticed people, mainly pols, doing this. I'm only slightly more surprised seeing it coming from "unbiased" Politifact.

• Live by the DEI hire, die by the DEI hire. The Daily Caller is one of many noticing this: Biden Calls His Defense Secretary ‘The Black Man’ After Appearing To Forget His Name.

  President Joe Biden appeared to call U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “the black man” after forgetting his name during an interview Tuesday with Black Entertainment Television (BET).

  The now-viral clip shows Biden preaching about how best to treat others.

  “And so, it’s all about, it’s all about treating people with dignity. And it’s about making sure that — look, I mean, for example — look at [the heat I’m getting] because I named a, uh, the secretary of defense, the black man,” Biden says, though part of his statement sounded garbled.

  “I named Ketanji Brown, I mean, because of the people I’ve named,” Biden continued. It is unclear who was referring to when he made the accusation above.

  The clip in question:

  Biden Calls His Defense Secretary 'The Black Man' After He Appears To Forget His Name pic.twitter.com/6RFBxBtged

  — Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 18, 2024

  Biden can't even do racial condescension coherently any more.

• Gold-plated anyway. Robert Graboyes reminds us: The Economics Nobel Is a Gold Disk, Not a Crystal Ball.

  For those who trust markets, businesses, and individuals more than government, there’s plenty to dislike in the economic policies of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That said, the most unhelpful piece of campaign literature this year is from the Biden side, not so much for its content, but rather because it undermines the scientific reputation of economics and the integrity of its highest honor—the Economics Nobel. It’s a letter from sixteen Nobelists arguing that, “Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s.” The letter offers ideologically skewed ad hockery as economics and commandeers the Nobel’s prestige. (The letter is here.)

  The letter says Biden would bring Americans lower inflation, stronger growth, and greater stability than Trump. Biden repeatedly whispers of his endorsement by “Sixteen NOBEL prizewinning economists … … SIXXTEEEN.” His reverential tone recalls some clergyman proclaiming, “The Bible refers to God by SIXXTEEEN different names,” and the press plays the role of enraptured congregants.

  The Nobelists’ letter deserves no more attention than would a similar letter from sixteen winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, or sixteen dentists, or sixteen poets at a kombucha bar in Greenwich Village. I say that as one who has the highest respect possible for the Economics Nobel and confidence that all sixteen signatories deserved their prizes.

  Graboyes (who owns an Econ PhD) explains this shocking assertion, and convinces me that I'd rather get my political recommendations from those kombucha bar poets. At least they might rhyme.

  Fun facts about the Nobel disk:

  Up to 1980 the “Swedish” medals, each weighing approximately 200 g and with a diameter of 66 mm, were made of 23 carat gold. Since then they have been made of 18 carat recycled gold. The weight is set to 175 g for all medals, except for the medal for economic sciences. Its weight is set to 185 g.

  Another reason to go into econ instead of physics: an extra 10 grams on your Nobel!

Sounds as if Iowahawk has seen In the Line of Fire. (Great movie.)

"Whoa there Boss, I only said I would be willing to take a bullet, nobody in Secret Service HR said anything about going up on a slopey roof" https://t.co/DHzgBe1Xpq

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 16, 2024

I haven't seen Kim Cheatle's sloped-roof excuse clarified or corrected anywhere.

For additional amusement, the Secret Service came up in Lester Holt's interview with President Biden. From NBC's transcript:

This is the difference between me and Lester Holt. That last question from me would have been something like

That said, it seems the best thing we can say about Secret Service protective service is: you're probably safer with it than without. A pretty low bar.

For folks who want to wallow in Secret Service incompetence, though: Power Line is a pretty good mudhole. I'll just say that Kim Cheatle is no Sam Campagna . And, fortunately, Thomas Crooks was no Mitch Leary. This time.

Also of note:

• I'm open to that characterization. Jeff Maurer feels that J.D. Vance Might Be a Straight-Up Policy Moron.

  When I worked in a congressional office, we would get faxes (yes, faxes — I am 97 years old). It turns out that there are self-styled geniuses across the country who will fax in “solutions” to intractable problems; we’d get detailed plans for balancing the budget, restructuring health care, or achieving Middle East peace. Most of these plans were — to be polite — nonsensical garbage from self-important loons. I suspect that many of these people had seen the movie Dave, in which a small-town accountant balances the budget with some common sense and a TI-81 graphing calculator, and thought: “That’s probably how stuff really works.”

  I was thinking about those faxes when reading about J.D. Vance’s economic vision. Vance — whose background is in law, not economics — thinks that he sees something in economic policy that all the ivory tower eggheads have missed. He told Ross Douthat:

  “…I think the economics profession is fundamentally wrong about both immigration and about tariffs. Yes, tariffs can apply upward pricing pressure on various things — though I think it’s massively overstated — but when you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects.”

  This is just part of an economic vision Vance spells out in that article and several others. It’s a vision that people are giving credence, probably because Vance seems like a smart guy. And I agree that Vance does seem smart — he’s articulate and wrote a book that he tricked a bunch of big-city liberals into buying, which is something that I hope to do someday. Of course, being smart is not the same as knowing what the fuck you’re talking about. And from where I’m sitting, Vance’s economic vision is small-minded gibberish that I’d expect to find in an all-caps fax titled “A COMMON-SENSE PLAN TO QUADRUPLE GDP AND END UNEMPLOYMENT!!!”

  I, for one, can't wait to be ruled by a set of people with different crackpot ideas than the ones we're getting now.

• In "these people's" defense, sometimes it's "Racism", "Misogyny", "Flat-Eartherism", … But Rich Lowry has the right question otherwise: Why Is It Always ‘Fascism’ and ‘Theocracy’ with These People? Sampling:

  The debate about the extent to which the Heritage Foundation–crafted agenda speaks for Donald Trump aside, the attacks on it are hilariously irrational and unhinged.

  California representative Jared Huffman, creator of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, calls the agenda “a dystopian plot” and “an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism.”

  According to the New Republic, Project 2025 sets out a “Christian nationalist vision of the United States,” and, if implemented, centers of government power “would all be marshaled to ensure our acquiescence in this dictatorial male supremacist society.”

  Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has fulfilled her professional obligation to warn that, via Project 2025, “Christian Nationalists will trample the wall of church-state separation and upend our democracy.”

  No less an authority than Seth Meyers warned, “Donald Trump and his allies have a deeply deranged plan for a far-right authoritarian government that will jail opponents, wage a full-scale war on reproductive rights, and dismantle American democracy.”

  I've been jousting a bit with a Facebook friend who keeps posting wild charges about what P2025 says. Just responses containing the relevant paragraphs from the actual P2025 playbook.

• A voice of sanity, that will be ignored. And it belongs to Veronique de Rugy, who has some ideas on How to Pay for Trump's Tax Cuts.

  Considering that there seems to be general bipartisan agreement on keeping a majority of the tax cuts and maintaining growth, let's focus on the deficit question. I firmly believe that any new costs or extensions of current policies must be paid for. We simply cannot afford to keep adding to our debt without considering the long-term consequences.

  A sensible place to start is by examining the myriad tax expenditures that have turned our tax code into Swiss cheese. According to the Treasury Department, there are 165 tax expenditures (think revenue losses due to tax carveouts), which is up from 53 in 1970.

  We should start by eliminating the ones that distort economic decision-making. The goal is a neutral tax system that doesn't favor certain activities or industries over others. That's one reason tax expenditures aimed at social engineering should be on the chopping block. Tax expenditures that add complexity to the tax code should be prime candidates for elimination too. Simpler tax systems reduce compliance costs and are more transparent.

  Click through for the deets. Summary: dump the mortgage interest deduction, state and local tax deduction, tax-free municipal bonds, tax exemptions for non-wage employee compensation, many business subsidies.

  (Disclaimer: I've got a chunk of my investment portfolio in tax-free bonds, so … I'd be willing to sacrifice if we got the other stuff too.)

• Why are we in this mess? A perennial question. Jacob Sullum provided a large piece of the answer in the current print Reason: Congress 'Can Regulate Virtually Anything' by Abusing the Commerce Clause. Part of the judicial history:

  In 1941, an Ohio farmer named Roscoe Filburn violated federal law by growing too much wheat. Specifically, Filburn sowed 23 acres of winter wheat, a dozen more acres than he had been allotted under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. The penalty was 49 cents for each of 239 unauthorized bushels, totaling $117.11 (about $2,500 in current dollars).

  Filburn refused to pay. The recalcitrant farmer argued that Congress had exceeded its constitutional authority by telling him how much wheat he could grow, especially for his own use on his own property. Since he used the extra wheat to feed his family and his livestock, he said, it never left his farm and therefore was never part of interstate commerce.

  According to the Supreme Court, that didn't matter. Five years before, the justices had narrowly upheld the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, ruling that the Commerce Clause reached economic activities, such as hiring and firing practices, that were "intrastate in character when separately considered" if they had "such a close and substantial relation to interstate commerce that their control is essential or appropriate to protect that commerce from burdens and obstructions." The Court extended that logic in the wheat case, Wickard v. Filburn.

  And since then… In these reality-challenged times, it is (apparently) enough for legislation to claim that it's related somehow to interstate/foreign commerce in order to get a green light from the judicial branch.

Recently on the book blog:

I got into reading (in cheapskate non-subscriber mode) C. Bradley Thompson's substack, The Redneck Intellectual a few months ago. That, and his articles I've noticed at other sites, encouraged me to grab this book via the Interlibrary Loan service of the University Near Here. It is a detailed analysis of the first part of the Declaration of Independence, discussing the origins of its political and moral assertions.

It's a scholarly work (Professor Thompson may be a redneck, but he's also a professor at Clemson), but also a straightforward piece of advocacy for the "self-evident" truths claimed in the DoI.

Chapters examine, in minute detail, each revolutionary claim: the source of our rights in our human nature; what it means for a truth to be "self-evident"; what it meant for men to be "created equal", and how that could be reconciled with slaveholding (spoiler: poorly); what's meant by the triad of natural rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; why governments exist; what "consent of the governed" means.

And, of course, why it's a people's right and duty to "throw off" a government that runs roughshod over those principles.

Thompson set me straight on one issue: for years, I thought claiming that a truth was "self-evident" meant that trying to argue against such a proposition unavoidably led to self-contradiction. There's no support for that bright idea in this book.

The book is long, and dense. Along the way, I got the impression of repetitiousness: didn't he already say this a few times before? Well, yes: I think I was kind of missing the point. The DoI was not simply a dashed-off Jeffersonian diatribe; Thompson's main effort is to show that its underlying philosophy was ubiquitous throughout the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s. This involves going through a lot of essays and pamphlets of the era. And, yup, the DoI sentiments, were indeed widely promulgated and advocated by a wide range of American thought leaders. And, bless them, that involved saying a lot of things over and over again.

A final section deals with the post-Revolution challenges to the DoI's philosophy of individualism, liberty, equality, limited government, etc. The first coming from apologists for slavery; Thompson deftly details their Hegel-inspired arguments, drawing fair comparison with developing arguments made for socialism and Marxism around the same time.

Hegel?! Who knew?

After the pro-slavery argument was defeated via violence, the next challenge (still being promulgated today) was that of progressivism, the denial of the DoI's timeless and universal truths. Advocates included William James, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Carl Becker, and (boooo) Woodrow Wilson.

Our Eye Candy du Jour is the graphic that was one part of the spectacular fold-out cover in the current Reason:

(Full size, it's 871x2560 pixels, so please feel free to embiggen, and get even more depressed.)

The associated article is by Brian Riedl, who poses the musical question: Why Did Americans Stop Caring About the National Debt?.

Riedl says the only solution is one everybody will hate: spending restraint and tax increases. And that probably won't happen until after a painful fiscal crisis leaves us with no choice.

Sorry to darken your day.

Also of note:

• Ignorance of economics is no excuse.

  Trump: 10% tariffs on everything!
  
  Eye rolling economists: That’s, like, the worst policy anyone has proposed in decades.
  
  Biden: Hold my beer. https://t.co/A6kVRiAvPN

  — Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 15, 2024

  Election-season "do something" cards played by demagogues.

• But, hey, what about that J.D. Vance? Kyle Smith sums it up in a short tweet:

  The pillars of conservatism are limited government, economic freedom, and the rule of law. JD Vance seems to have contempt for all three.

  — Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) July 16, 2024

  If you'd prefer a slightly longer-winded analysis, let's hand the mic to Kevin D. Williamson: The Infinitely Plastic J.D. Vance.

  Whatever one makes of Vance as a potential future president, he is nonpareil as a candidate for the vice presidency. He has no legislative record to speak of, and—if we can set aside the fact that he once very publicly held the view that Donald Trump is an amoral lunatic utterly unfit for office—his rhetorical record isn’t much trouble, either. Not that he hasn’t said a lot of outrageous and stupid things. Vance is a Putinist social-media troll who described entitlement reform as a plot to “throw our grandparents into poverty … so that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht.” But nobody takes anything he says seriously—he is so transparently a man who will say whatever his betters require him to say to get what he wants from them. Telling people with money and power what they want to hear is the only consistent throughline in his career, from Hillbilly Elegy to the present day. Once an appendage of Peter Thiel’s, now he is an appendage of Donald Trump’s after a long and bitter apprenticeship of sycophancy.

  As another warning signal, Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes that J.D. Vance Thinks Lina Khan Is Doing a Great Job.

  Under President Joe Biden, the FTC—headed by Lina Khan—has aggressively pursued an anti-innovation, anti-tech, anti-big business, and anti-consumer agenda. Khan and her allies in the Biden administration think the consumer welfare standard that has guided antitrust law for decades needs to go. Rather than focus on whether a company's actions or a particular merger will raise prices for consumers, they think antitrust regulators should be concerned with some amorphous concept of "competition," with making sure businesses don't get bigger, and with helping competitors to big businesses (especially big tech companies) get a leg up.

  Khan's is a profoundly anti-free markets agenda, punctuated by attempts to bypass Congress and the legislative process and simply set policies administratively. Her vision seems to be of an all-powerful FTC able to target business practices and private companies based on partisan political goals, instead of the neutral arbiter of business that it is supposed to be.

  J.D. Vance loves it.

  "I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job," Vance said in February.

  In the likely event you've not been paying attention to what I've posted about Lina over the past few years, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here,… Oh, heck, that's a lot, and I only grepped pre-2023. I am not a Khan fan.

  But speaking of non-fans Donald Boudreaux has his collection of Vance barbs from George Will, Stephanie Slade, the WSJ editorialists, and Phil Magness. (The latter seems unavailable, unfortunately.)

• Feelgood LFOD du Jour. Boston.com reports some impressive local news: A N.H. motorcyclist was clocked at 158 mph, with a passenger on the back, police say.

  A 21-year-old Farmington, New Hampshire, man is facing a slew of charges after allegedly driving his motorcycle in the Live Free or Die state at speeds up to 158 mph Sunday, and fleeing from police in the process.

  Zachary Dionne was eventually arrested after stopping at a gas station off Portsmouth’s Exit 3 on Interstate 95. He was charged with felony reckless conduct — deadly weapon, reckless driving, making an unsafe lane change, disobeying an officer, resisting arrest, failing to display plates, and having an unregistered vehicle, State Police said.

  To quote Mr. David Barry: soon we will have no constitutional rights left.

Recently on the book blog:

Consumer note: Holy cow, I do not recommend that you pay (as I type) $39.99 at Amazon for the mass market paperback in "Used: Acceptable" condition. (Original price $2.95) It's a good book, but…

My edition is an Ace 95¢ paperback, purchased … long ago, I guess. I'm pretty sure I read a school library version back sometime in the 1960s, and not since. I remembered some, not a lot.

It is one of Heinlein's later juveniles, originally published in 1955. The protagonist is Rob Walker, who is looking to take his "Advanced Survival" class final. Which involves being transported via a titular "tunnel" to an uninhabited planet with only whatever supplies he can carry. But the test only lasts a few days, so fatalities are rare.

But not this time. An exploding nova screws up the interstellar pathway; Rod and his classmates are stranded with no indication whether they might be rescued anytime, or at all. Not all the local fauna is friendly, but much of the real danger is (dun dun DUN) some of Rod's fellow students.

So there's a lot of Heinlein tropes here: not one, but two, wisdom-dispensing mentors. A lot of Heinlein dialog. A lot of implicit commentary on political authority and stable community building. It's like a fictional version of John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government! But there are also overtones of Lord of the Files, albeit with older kids.

And it really shows Heinlein's struggle with 1950s "juvenile" straightjacket. There's a surprising amount of adult behavior going on. (Hey, where do you think those babies are coming from.) And Rod is far from perfect: he's occasionally hot-headed, petulant, and careless.

Overall, I'd rank it just below the top tier of Heinlein's juvies. (But much of that is due to personal taste, not cosmic critical faculties.)

Our Eye Candy du Jour is provided by those Reason cutups with the latest episode of Great Moments in Unintended Consequences.

In a departure from the usual: no US-based politicians are lampooned. I await episode 17.

Also of note:

• Still got a bee in my bonnet about "student loan forgiveness". Fresh off yesterday's fisking of a semi-literate reality-challenged advocacy, we have Peter Jacobsen's analysis of the latest orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: Student Loan Payment Freeze, Debt Forgiveness Becoming Permanent. He's been following the labyrinthine schemes to shift debt from the debtors to oblivious taxpayers, and has the latest:

  […] we’re seeing another sign of the permanent shift caused by the pandemic payment freeze. Just this month, Biden’s Department of Education froze loan payments for millions of borrowers while the department continues to recalculate their payments to be only 5 percent of their income. This is down from 10 percent.

  That’s right, the generous SAVE plan just got even more generous, which means that the future taxpayer will be responsible for picking up the slack of higher tax payments when interest income falls.

  Why do the payments need to be frozen while the recalculation is processed? Why not have all borrowers make their payments up until the new payment amounts are calculated? Because temporary Covid policies instituted during the Trump administration have become the permanent norm for the Department of Education.

  And note that all this jiggery-pokery was originally invoked as an emergency temporary measure to deal with hardships caused by the pandemic. Which Biden has proclaimed that he saved us all from. As Jacobsen notes, it's an instance of Milton Friedman's general rule: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

• When you believe the rabble can be easily swayed by seductive verbiage. Paul D. Miller describes The Problem With Blaming Words for Political Violence.

  Blaming words for the violence that follows sets a bad precedent. This would become an all-encompassing tool of censorship. If any criticism is the moral equivalent of incitement, we have no free speech. We’re obligated to self-censor; we sacrifice speech to eliminate even the smallest possibility that violence might follow from the extremists and the unstable among us.

  Of course, criticism is allowed, and the assassination attempt on Trump does not inoculate him against criticism any more than the pipe bombs inoculated Obama. Trump is a threat to democracy and we shouldn’t stop ourselves from saying so. We shouldn’t let the threat of terrorist violence have a heckler’s veto over our speech. Trump’s brush with an assassin’s bullet does not turn him into a saint or a hero.

  Disclaimer: unlike Miller, I don't think Trump is much of a threat to democracy. But (warning: possible gun imagery ahead) he's on target when he points out that we shouldn't refrain from criticism because it might set off some lunatic. Like that mythical Brazilian butterfly causing a Texas tornado.

• A useful explanation. Kat Rosenfield has a credible one: How Culture Got Stupid. A key point blames:

  The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:

  • All art was political, and always had been;

  • Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;

  • And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.

  The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. “It’s fun to think about this stuff,” pleaded one representative essay at the viral trend site Uproxx, begging readers to devote themselves to woke critique with the same enthusiasm with which they once debated the bloodlines of the Targaryen dynasty. “Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an ’80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.”

  Ms. Rosenfield's essay is wide-ranging and insight-filled. Also, she has recommendations for us media-consumers. (I really have to watch Ricky Stanicky, I guess.)

Confession: I love The Big Bang Theory and thanks to TiVo, I'm working on watching all 279 episodes, in order.

But in just about every episode, there's this stuff that makes my physics major brain hurt a bit:

Reader, as Wolfgang Pauli allegedly said: "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong." Electrons are not shiny balls; they do not orbit atomic nuclei on shiny rails. (They don't make whooshing sounds, either, but that's even more of a quibble.)

Now: at a certain level, attempting to visualize what atoms "really look like" is futile. It's just math down there, solutions to the Schrödinger equation, or some other formulation.

But they could at least try to get the scale right.

Or, more accurately, once you try to get the scale right, you can see why they didn't.

Let's imagine—because we're not going to actually do it—building a scale model of a good old water molecule, H₂O: an oxygen atom, with two hydrogen atoms hanging off to one side.

A hydrogen atom nucleus, a single proton, has a radius "root mean square charge radius") 8.4e-16 meters.

Let's say our scale model uses a ping-pong ball to represent a proton. A ping-pong ball's radius is 20 millimeters, or 2.0e-2 meters. (Fascinating fun fact from the link: "the size increased from 38mm to 40mm after the 2000 Olympic Games." I did not know that!)

So for our scale model, we have to multiply atomic/molecular distances by a scale factor of (2.0e-2/8.4e-16) = 2.38e13 (I.e., just under 24 trillion.)

The radius of an oxygen atom's nucleus is generally reported to be 2.8e-15 meters. Multiplying this by our scale factor, gives 2.8e-15 * 2.38e13 = 6.7e-2 meters, or 67 millimeters, about the size of a medium grapefruit.

So: to start building our scale model, gather together a grapefruit and two ping-pong balls. Where do we put them?

This page reports the distance between the oxygen nucleus and the hydrogen nuclei is 0.943 angstroms, or 9.43e-11 meters.

This scales up to 9.43e-11 * 2.38e13 = 2244 meters. Or about 1.4 miles. So:

1. Put your grapefruit down;
2. Walk 1.4 miles in a straight line;
3. Drop one ping-pong ball;
4. Return to the grapefruit;
5. Turn approximately 106° from your original direction;
6. march another 1.4 miles, and drop your other ping-pong ball.

That completes placement of the nuclei. Now we have to consider the electrons (ten of them) that swarm around the nuclei. Where do they go, and how do we represent them?

Reader, the best thing I can think up, visualization-wise, is a fuzzy cloud. That Schrödinger equation thing I referred to above would (if we solved it) give us a probability of finding an electron within a certain hunk of space. That probability is relatively high close to the nuclei, and gets much smaller as you get further away. And, as an added complication, the electrons have a higher probability to flock around the oxygen nucleus than the hydrogen nuclei. Visualize that however you'd like. The page referenced above does it with color.

The page referenced above talks about the "Van der Waals" diameter of the water molecule, which is as good a size estimate as we are likely to get; that's about 2.75e-10 meters. Scaling that distance up gives 2.8e-10 * 2.38e13 = 6664 meters, or about 4.14 miles.

So, to summarize: our scale model water molecule is a fuzzy cloud over 4 miles in diameter, in which is hiding a grapefruit and two ping-pong balls. And I admit, this would be difficult to picture on the TV screen in a way that might appeal to viewers. Still, it would be better than what they did.

Another fun fact: the electrons make up only 0.03% of the mass of the water molecule. For your typical Poland Spring 500 milliliter (16.9 oz) water bottle, that means most of the volume is those fuzzy electrons. Their total mass, however, is a mere 150 milligrams or so; the remaining 499.85 grams resides in those tiny nuclei.

Here's one thing that does not scale well. How fast do water molecules typically move? Much faster than the "atoms" you see on The Big Bang Theory. Googling will tell you that they exhibit a range of speeds (a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, approximately) and for water molecules at (roughly) room temperature, the average speed works out to 590 meters/sec (≈1300 mph).

So be glad that the water molecules in that Poland Spring bottle don't suddenly ("at random") decide to start moving in the same direction.

Yeah, that's impossible. Conservation of momentum saves us there.

But scaling that to our model, we get 1.4e16 meters/sec.

Which is (um) 47 million times the speed of light.

Very difficult to visualize!

It was this, posted in all serious earnestness:

I was sorely tempted to snark at this on FB. Unfortunately, it was posted by a wonderful lady I went to high school with, and had a major (unrequited) crush on back then, over a half-century ago.

In fact, I still kind of have a crush on her. I don't want to hurt her feelings.

So I'll retreat to snarking here. I'm pretty sure she doesn't read Pun Salad. I'll use my Fisking template: The dumbness is reproduced in its entirety on the left with a lovely #EEFFFF background color; my remarks are on the right.

Disclaimer: Lacking a reliable crystal ball, I don't know the answer to either question posed in today's headline. Sounds as if Trump had a pretty good claim to "more endangered" yesterday, though. I'll get to that, but first, via Ann Althouse, Maureen Dowd took to her NYT perch to urge President Dotard to hang it up:

Ms. Dowd had experience dealing with her aging mother, movingly told.

Our weekly look at the betting odds, and calling them "volatile" is an understatement:

Deskchair analysis: Biden's intransigence about staying in the race caused him to improve his odds vis-à-vis the other Democrats. Getting shot (or at least getting shot at) was a big boost for Trump.

So what about that shooting. Well, the WaPo had a "Republicans Pounce" article about it pretty quick: Trump allies immediately blame Biden, Democrats for their rhetoric.

Yeah, maybe, J.D. You have to go down a few paragraphs to find some perhaps-inciting rhetoric straight from the horse's … um, mouth:

[Trump advisor Chris] LaCivita’s [now-deleted social media] message pointed to words Biden had used earlier in the week when he told a group of donors about shifting his campaign to attack Trump’s policy record, including his record on abortion and Project 2025, a policy document drafted by some former Trump advisers. “So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye,” Biden had told donors in the private call, which was reported publicly.

Which brought to mind the famed effort by the NYT editors to blame Sarah Palin for the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. A 2017 look back from the WaPo Fact Checker: The bogus claim that a map of crosshairs by Sarah Palin’s PAC incited Rep. Gabby Giffords’s shooting.

Note: that was from 2017, in response to the softball-field shooting of GOP Congressman Scalise. The NYT editorial led to a defamation lawsuit from Palin against the NYT which is apparently still ongoing, despite Palin's loss in U.S. District Court in 2022.

I suppose "Flight 93" storm-the-cockpit rhetoric will continue to come at us from all sides. I'm dubious that it causes dangerous wackos to grab guns, but maybe.

Also of note:

• A pretty good title for a bad science fiction novel. Martin Gurri reflects on Joe Biden and a Tear in the Fabric of Things.

  Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the tender age of 30. He looked like a president, he felt like a president and he fully expected to rise to the top. His formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: Find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities.

  Virtually every time a vacancy arose, Biden, by his own admission, considered running for the presidency. In 1988, at the age of 46, he actually did so—and failed. Biden may look and feel like a president, but he has never sounded like one. Long before old age turned him into a bleary-eyed mutterer, he tended to get lost in his own verbiage. He told fantastic stories about his personal life that could be easily disproven. He plagiarized bits from Bobby Kennedy and an entire speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden, it seems, was as needy as he was ambitious. His campaign resembled a prolonged pratfall. He dropped out before the first primary.

  Gurri's take on history and current events (pre-assassination attempt, at least) is well worth a read.

• A very bad title for a bad political novel. Kerry Jackson, writing at the Pacific Research Institute says that one of the guys in the betting table has, perhaps, overestimated odds: President Newsom, For The Power And The Glory

  Biden’s troubling performance in the June 27 CNN debate fueled the ongoing discussions of who could and should replace him as the Democratic candidate. Of course every list included Newsom, who was a Biden surrogate at the debate and obviously has his eye on the White House even as he pretends to avert his gaze every time he’s asked about it.

  The numbers, however, indicate that he’d be a poor choice. A CNN poll taken three days after the debate showed Trump by five points over Newsom. A Data for Progress poll taken the day after had Trump up by three.

  Multiple polls have Trump also beating Vice President Kamala Harris, though the gaps are closer and in some cases within the margin of error. Interestingly, the gamblers like Harris, who is extraordinarily unpopular, over Newsom. The RealClearPolitics betting odds average shows Trump at 56 percent, Harris at 15.7 percent, Biden at 12.2 and Newsom at 4.7.

  The explanation is pretty simple:

  It was under Newsom and no other governor that California lost population. The same goes for the loss of a congressional seat. That happened on his watch. It’s no mere coincidence that the human flight from the state corresponded with some of the most harsh, pointless, counterproductive and we’re-just-guessing pandemic lockdown policies in the country.

  … and more.

• Maybe the assassination attempt will change him, but… as of a few days ago, Jonah Goldberg was on target (or is that too assassin-encouraging now?): Trump Is Loyal Only to His Own Ambition.

  Trump has always wanted the party to be his pool of Narcissus, reflecting his personal glory and dominance. That’s why he supported candidates who hewed to his lie that the 2020 election was stolen, preferring that the party lose with loyalists than win with truth-tellers. That’s why he no longer cares about the Federalist Society, which produced judges who rejected his false election claims. Oh, and last month, the guy who infamously called for a ban on Muslim immigration said he wants to give every foreign-born graduate of a U.S. college a green card.

  The problem with the search for an intellectually serious Trumpism is that Trump has no use for ideas except as expedients of his ambition. The instrumentalism that paved the way for Trump sought to make him the right’s tool. Instead, it made a lot of right-wingers look like tools.

  Sorry, Donald. But I earnestly hope you get better soon. In all senses of that term.

Stolen from Josiah Bartlett:

Man, this really makes me wish I got up to speed on one of those AI image generators. It illustrates Mitchell Scacchi's article chronicling the latest bit of pork arriving in our state: Feds devote another $19 million to save declining Manchester bus service.

Our state's junior senator claims a bit of credit for that (click through for what the other pols have to say):

Manchester & Durham are receiving federal funding to improve public transit, which helps people get to work, reduces traffic & strengthens our economy.

I worked to help develop & pass the bipartisan infrastructure law to make projects like these possible.https://t.co/wpxCIMIE1e

— Sen. Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan) July 12, 2024

But here's Scacchi's relentless refutation:

The University Near Here is getting $2.7 million "to replace diesel-powered buses with compressed natural gas buses for its Wildcat Transit service." This is for a service that (at last report) had yet to recover to pre-pandemic ridership. (And last year was forced to terminate its service to neighboring Newmarket,)

Also of note:

• Bad news for the looters. Noah Smith says There's not that much wealth in the world. It's a tutorial on wealth vs. income, and why taxing the former is such a lousy idea. He approvingly quotes:

  Your periodic reminder that the government could seize all of American billionaires’ wealth and it wouldn’t be enough to fund its spending for a single year

  — Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) July 9, 2024

  Freiman is correct. The wealth of America’s billionaires was estimated at around $5.2 trillion in 2023, while federal government spending was about $6.4 trillion. Confiscating every last penny from Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and all the other billionaires wouldn’t fund the U.S. government for one year. And of course you could only do it once.

  Something to remember when folks like Joe Biden (a) confuse income and wealth; and (b) demand that the rich "pay their fair share."

• You're out of control! Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein take on that awful NYT op-ed by Tim Wu: The First Amendment ISN'T out of control.

  Professor Wu's recent piece, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” was in this troubling tradition of free-speech catastrophizing. He opened the article by arguing that "[n]early any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment."

  Well, yeah. Fear of government power over the free flow of information was a big part of the reason why "Congress shall make no law."

  Indeed, that's also a big part of why the founders included "the press" in the First Amendment. And by “the press,” they didn't mean institutional journalism (although the First Amendment clearly protects that as well) — they meant the literal biggest information moving technology of the day: the printing press.

  When people like Wu gripe that the 1A is "out of control", read for the obvious implication: people are out of control.

• A surprising bit of good news. I'm a non-fan of "national conservatism", so didn't have much to say about their recent convention. But Stephanie Slade was paying attention to this ray of sunshine: Vivek Ramaswamy Debuts 'National Libertarianism' at NatCon 4.

  "I think it's been decided, as obviously as it possibly can be, that America First is the future direction of the Republican Party," former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy tells me.

  Given the close association of "America First" with tariffs, industrial policy, and calls to close the borders, even to legal immigration, this might not seem to augur promising things for libertarians. But Ramaswamy sees two distinct live possibilities for what the phrase should actually mean. "From where I sit," he says, "the most important debate for the country to have is the intra–Republican Party and even intra–America First debate between the national protectionist and national libertarian wings."

  During an evening keynote at the fourth National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., this week, Ramaswamy laid out these alternatives in some detail—and gently made the case that attendees of the nationalist event should rethink their indulgence in protectionism.

  And I really liked this bit:

  "I don't care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state," Ramaswamy declared at NatCon. Or as he puts it during our follow-up conversation: "I think that's a mistake the left has long made, using the administrative state as a way to coddle certain groups of Americans. And I don't think we're going to beat the left by becoming the left."

  At some point in the last year Vivek said some stuff that irked me. It's possible I may need to forgive him.

NH Journal can barely contain its glee: Hassan Is 'Ridin' With Biden,' Says Biden 'Most Successful POTUS in my Lifetime'.

Maggie, that's real Manchurian Candidate stuff, there. To recycle a tweet from April:

"Joe Biden is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) April 28, 2024

I can't tell if the amusement contained in this New York Times headline is intentional or not: On Capitol Hill, Democrats Panic About Biden but Do Nothing.

Left unsaid: because he's not up to doing any of that.

Jeff Maurer is getting pretty frustrated: “Let Biden Prove Himself” Is a Fig Leaf for Inaction. In response to that NYT headline and article:

I was thinking about making some sort of snark about Maggie and "Dicklessness", but you'll just have to imagine I did that, and it was both hilarious and tasteful.

Rich Lowry has, I think, his tongue firmly planted in his cheek: Maybe Biden Isn’t Such a Kind-Hearted, Wise Statesman after All.

… and Lowry quotes additionally from Maureen Dowd, Chuck Todd, et al.

Also of note:

• With eyes wide shut, I think. Megan McArdle describes How the media sleepwalked into Biden’s debate disaster.

  In my 20 years of writing right-leaning columns at mainstream publications, I’ve made two arguments over and over. First, I’ve tried to convince my fellow journalists that liberal media bias is real. And second, I’ve tried to convince conservatives that, though it’s real, it’s not the conspiracy they imagine.

  This is a hard moment to make that latter point. Frankly, if we had been colluding to cover up the decline of a Democratic president, who then undid all our efforts by going on national television and breaking the story himself … well, how much different would our coverage have looked? And if he hadn’t self-immolated at the debate, wouldn’t our readers still be in the dark?

  That said, it really wasn’t a conspiracy. For one thing, mainstream outlets did report on the president’s age, even if too gently. Why were we so gentle? Well, there’s a broad journalistic norm against picking on physical characteristics (which is why even certified Donald Trump-hating columnists have made remarkably few cracks about his comb-over).

  Obviously, it was a mistake to treat age, which affects job performance, like hairstyling, which doesn’t. But that error was bipartisan — over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about Trump’s senior moments without ever putting those thoughts on the page.

  She has a point, of course. But her employer, the WaPo, was (and is) relentless in its Trump-trashing. Adding in the combover critique would seem gratuitous.

  And you don't have to posit a "conspiracy"; willing participants don't need to meet in secret, they can pick up their marching orders by just subscribing to a few newspapers and watching a few news channels.

• Like me, BART is showing its age. At some point in the early 1970s I visited San Francisco with friends, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit system was shiny, new, futuristic in fact. I remember that a train arrived at the station without me noticing, it was so quiet. It was like Disneyland's Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow for reals!

  But, fifty years on, the bloom is off the rose, and BART is a grumpy, neglected, geezer demanding its entitlements. The Antiplanner has some sad analysis: BART: Give Us More $ So We Can Do Less.

  Before the pandemic, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) earned more than 70 percent of its operating costs out of fare revenues, more than any transit agency in the nation other than CalTrain. Ironically, this also made it most vulnerable to a ridership downturn, while agencies like San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority, which covered only 9 percent of its operating costs out of fares (the fourth worst among the nation’s transit agencies), were relatively immune. Now BART is pleading for more money so it won’t have to dramatically reduce service as it exhausts federal COVID relief funds.

  As part of that plea, BART published a report on its role in the Bay Area earlier this week. The report admits that BART’s ridership has dropped — as of May, it carried less than 45 percent as many riders as before the pandemic — due to increases in remote work. “BART ridership is closely linked to office occupancy rates,” says the report, with an accompanying graphic showing that ridership has moved in almost exact parallel to San Francisco-Berkeley-Oakland office occupancies.

  Despite the increase in remote work, the report notes, “traffic is back, but people are traveling in ways that result in uneven ridership retention.” In other words, they are no longer traveling in directions that BART can take them.

  Enshrining half-century-old patterns of commuting literally in concrete turns out to have been a bad idea.

• Shame on SCOTUS. Since I am a troglodyte right-winger, at least 40% of the time, I thought there were a lot of good Supreme Court decisions this term. But I'm also 60% raving libertarian, so I'm in agreement with Philip Hamburger's take: Why The Court’s Murthy Ruling Is Probably The Worst Free Speech Decision In History.

  In the recent Murthy v. Missouri decision, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.

  […]

  All along, there were some risks. As I pointed out in an article called “Courting Censorship,” Supreme Court doctrine has permitted and thereby invited the federal government to orchestrate massive censorship through social media websites. The Murthy case, unfortunately, confirms the perils of the court’s doctrines.

  Yes. So I had to find out what Nina Jankowicz thought about it. What was that group she's with again? Oh, yeah, the "American Sunlight Project". And, yes, here it is: Nina Jankowicz Statement on Murthy v. Missouri Decision.

  Yes, unsurprisingly, Nina thought the pro-censorship ruling was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Sure, as Mr. Ramirez implies, there are big problems in his brain.

But today is the one-year anniversary of Charles C. W. Cooke's norm-breaking National Review headline: Joe Biden Is an Asshole.

A year later, and the big difference is that Joe's personality flaws are biting Democrats in the rear. And before you can say "We gotta protect our phony baloney jobs here, gentlemen", the patently obvious fact that CCWC pointed out last year is now an acceptable talking point in the MSM and among more honest Democrats.

A couple articles from Issues & Insights bring us up to date on character/policy issues:

• Joe Biden Is A Good Man? Please Don’t Insult Our Intelligence
• Now They’re Gaslighting Us About Biden’s ‘Accomplishments’

Fair? Probably not. But if you're a Democrat looking for talking points to urge Joe to take "more time with his family", there they are.

And, for the rest of us, the first article quotes an amusing array of independent minds singing off the same page of the hymnal: "Joe Biden is a Good Man".

Also for our amusement (or disgust, if you're so inclined): Robby Soave notes Biden's BFFs Knew the Cognitive Decline Was Real. Some powerful Democrat pols are jumping off the sinking ship, but…

But that deep concern? Not so much for the country. That kind of patriotic concern coulda/woulda/shoulda been expressed weeks ago.

No, this was a "oh oh, this is something that could make us lose if it got out" concern.

Gee, I wonder if Nina Jankowicz will be covering this disinformation effort?

And for the record, George Clooney was excellent in Gravity.

Also of note:

• Nirvana: Gateway to Serfdom. George Will cheers while progressives moan: Whoops, the progressive road to nirvana ran into a Supreme Court detour.

  Should progressives be more alarmed by Donald Trump’s threat to the Constitution or by the Constitution’s threat to progressivism? For the answer, read on.

  Woodrow Wilson, a progressive and the first president to criticize the Founding, considered the Constitution’s essence — the separation of powers — an impediment to a modern necessity: encompassing government wielded by an unimpeded executive. Progressives’ dismay about two of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings illustrates how far their criticism of the Constitution goes beyond Wilson’s.

  When a federal agency ordered four small fishing companies to pay the estimated $700-a-day cost (reducing their profits 20 percent) of on-board government inspectors, the companies sued, arguing that no statutory language explicitly authorizes the agency to impose this burden. The agency invoked Chevron deference, a court-created (in 1984) doctrine that says when Congress uses ambiguous legislative language, or is silent on a subject, a court reviewing an agency’s disputed action should defer to the agency, if its action is “reasonable.”

  Spoiler: the answer to the question posed by GFW in the first paragraph is "the latter".

• Yes, he's irritating. But… Kat Rosenfield defends an actor that doesn't get a lot of love from conservatives: The Warped Case Against Alec Baldwin.

  Picture this: you’re hanging out at a Fourth of July barbecue when your friend hands you a stick of dynamite. Not real dynamite, obviously—that would be insane, and dangerous!—but a harmless facsimile, a piece of clay with a lil’ sparkler stuck in the end. “Go on, light it,” he says, and you do, laughing, before passing the fake dynamite to your friend, who also laughs.

  He’s still laughing when the dynamite—which is, as it turns out, real—explodes in his face.

  He’s still laughing when the dynamite—which is, as it turns out, real—explodes in his face.

  It’s a question that brings us to the trial of actor Alec Baldwin, which began today, nearly three years after he shot and killed a woman on a movie set outside Sante Fe. The charge is involuntary manslaughter, not murder; Baldwin, who fired the reproduction revolver that killed Rust’s cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, had been told the weapon wasn’t loaded. But through some combination of negligence and incompetence, there was one real bullet in the gun’s chamber.

  For the record, Mr. Baldwin was excellent in The Hunt for Red October.

• News you can't use, at least not yet. I've been pretty blithe about looking at issues of free will and consciousness over the years. But here's an Ars Technica article that points to the strong possibility that in a short time we may be confronted with an issue with which we have no idea how to deal: Could AIs become conscious? Right now, we have no way to tell.

  Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between uniquely human behaviors and those that can be replicated by machines. Should artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrive in full force—artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence—the boundary between human and computer capabilities will diminish entirely.

  In recent months, a significant swath of journalistic bandwidth has been devoted to this potentially dystopian topic. If AGI machines develop the ability to consciously experience life, the moral and legal considerations we’ll need to give them will rapidly become unwieldy. They will have feelings to consider, thoughts to share, intrinsic desires, and perhaps fundamental rights as newly minted beings. On the other hand, if AI does not develop consciousness—and instead simply the capacity to out-think us in every conceivable situation—we might find ourselves subservient to a vastly superior yet sociopathic entity.

  Neither potential future feels all that cozy, and both require an answer to exceptionally mind-bending questions: What exactly is consciousness? And will it remain a biological trait, or could it ultimately be shared by the AGI devices we’ve created?

  If you're interested, I strongly recommend the excellent book The Weirdness of the World by Eric Schwitzgebel.

Jeff Maurer's journey into himself might take him to the heart of darkness, aka MAGA Republicanism!

Well, probably not.

But he is refusing to go along with "The President is Just Fine" crowd: I Won’t Pretend That Maybe Biden WAS the First Black Female President.

Maurer goes for the "thousand times worse" explanation.

And—wait, there's more—you may have heard that ABC News "tweaked its transcript" of Biden's interview with George Stephanopoulos. From:

"I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about."

to:

"I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about."

Maurer isn't having that either:

At some point, Maurer will probably start noticing that he's not getting invited to as many swanky Georgetown cocktail parties as he used to.

Also of note:

• Fact-checking: It's not just for Trump any more. At least not at the Gray Lady. At least for now. Heather MacDonald reports: The Times Turns on a Dime. She's looking at this NYT story: Fact-Checking Biden’s ABC Interview. Not just that he "downplayed and misstated polls", but also:

  But it is Biden’s invocation of a classic anti-Trump meme that incurs the most surreal of all Times responses. Biden had said during the Stephanopoulos interview: “This is a guy who told us to put bleach in our arms to deal with Covid, with a million—over a million people died.”

  The Times is withering. Exaggerated! it proclaims. Trump did not “instruct people to inject bleach but suggested that doing so with a disinfectant was an ‘interesting’ concept to test out.” The Times notes the context for Trump’s alleged bleach-injection instruction: in April 2020, a member of the federal coronavirus task force had reported on ongoing experiments regarding the use of light and disinfectants to kill the virus. Trump then speculated, as the paper reports:

  Mr. Trump responded: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”

  The Times’s current distinction between suggesting that a concept be tested and suggesting that a concept be implemented was missing in its contemporaneous coverage in 2020. The paper ran thousands of words implying that Trump had likely triggered a public health emergency of MAGA bleach drinkers. Reporter Matt Flegenheimer, then on the Covid hysteria beat, reported that Trump had “suggested that injections of disinfectants into the human body could help combat the coronavirus.” Such a suggestion “did not sound like the work of a doctor, a genius, or a person with a good you-know-what,” sneered Flegenheimer, throwing a loose version of Trump’s comments about himself back at him.

  But that was then. The NYT's agenda changed, so must its reporting.

• Come on, New Hampshire Democratic activist! He, or she, is quoted in the NH Journal story: Pappas Case Highlights Success of Biden's Strategy to Stay on Ticket. The topic is my Congresscritter's refusal to say anything definitive on that topic.

  “He got the message: ‘Fall in line, Buttercup,’” a New Hampshire Democratic activist told NHJournal on background.

  Of course, the actual message was delivered by "former New Hampshire Democrat state chair", Kathy Sullivan just after the debate:

  “Suck it up, Buttercup.”

  Kind of a cliché, but at least it rhymed!

  So I'd suggest to the unnamed and possibly non-existent New Hampshire Democratic activist: how about "Fall in line, Valentine!" or "Fall in line, Porcupine!" or … well, you know how to use a rhyming dictionary.

• Another good question from Kevin D. Williamson. Recent remarks at a gathering causes him to wonder: What Are Senators For?

  What do GOP Sens. Rick Scott, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson have in common? All three of them wish that they knew somebody in Washington with some real power.

  There is nothing quite as magnificent, quite as magisterial, as watching former Sen. Jim DeMint interview a panel of senators and listening to those august worthies complain that somebody in Washington—you know: somebody!—should … do something!

  Not them, of course. It was the weirdest thing: They were speaking Tuesday before an audience of would-be rightist insurgents at this year’s gathering of so-called national conservatives known as NatCon4, and they got an honest-to-goodness standing ovation for spending the better part of an hour declaring that they don’t do jack all day and can’t do jack and nobody should expect them to. “They tell us when to work, what we’re voting for, everything,” Scott said. It is as though he has never heard of the word “no.” The senator should think about expanding his vocabulary.

  Apparently none of these three are on Trump's VP list. Hey, if they were VP, they could break Senate tie votes! That's power, right?

• Pun Salad is a sucker for a Hayek shout-out. And Michael F. Cannon provides one: The End of Chevron Deference: Tapping the Brakes on the Road to Serfdom. (Gifted link.) Cannon is very cautiously optimistic:

  Those who advocate massive government intervention in the economy are apoplectic. They believe that if Congress cannot delegate such massive powers to executive agencies, then the federal government cannot competently direct the economy, redistribute income, and enrich their favorite special interests.

  And they are right.

  The uncomfortable truth that Chevron supporters do not want to admit is that their desire to control so much of other people’s lives is inconsistent not only with liberalism but with that most magnificent manifestation of liberalism, the U.S. Constitution. In Loper Bright, the Supreme Court faced a decision between liberalism and the rule of law on the one hand, and an anti-liberal ideological agenda on the other. It made the right choice.

  And not a moment too soon. In his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek explained that when legislatures attempt to direct the economy, their incompetence will increasingly lead to calls to concentrate power in the hands of government officials who have increasingly less regard for liberal values such as individual liberty, the separation of powers, the rule of law, or democratic accountability. Loper Bright restores the separation of powers and thereby strips power from any bureau-cum-auto-crats.

  Loper Bright does not dismantle the administrative state. It does not even mean we are no longer heading down the road to serfdom. But it does tap the brakes.

  "Tapping the brakes" is probably the best we can do in our state-besotted era.

One of my guilty pleasures is the 24/7 SNL Vault channel on my Roku: a random selection of Saturday Night Live sketches, only a few interspersed commercials. The politics are occasionally tedious, especially from the last decade or so.

So this gem from Christmas season 2016 popped up last night: Hillary Actually.

If you don't want to play the clip: It's a parody of a scene from the 2003 romcom Love, Actually, where the guy from Walking Dead woos Keira Knightley (who's married his best friend) via a succession of cue cards displayed at her doorway.

It shows Hillary Clinton (Kate McKinnon) importuning (via those cue cards) an Electoral College elector (Cecily Strong) to cast her vote for "literally anyone else" than Donald Trump, who apparently won the elector's state.

And yes, although it didn't affect the overall result, there was an earnest effort to generate "faithless electors" in 2008; there's even a Wikipedia page about it: Faithless electors in the 2016 United States presidential election.

So much for shattering democratic norms!

Also of note: Hillary/Kate's final two cue cards: "If Donald Trump becomes President/He will kill us all".

Which kind of puts this year's hysteria in context, and explains why people seem so unmoved by it: it's just a Saturday Night Live rerun. One we've seen before, not that funny, tedious, predictable, going on way too long.

Also of note:

• Use your imagination, Harsanyi! David Harsanyi did something I was too lazy to do: I Read The ‘Project 2025’ Playbook, And I Couldn’t Find A Single White Christian Nationalist Policy.

  Project 2025, a suggested roadmap for a second Trump Administration pulled together by the Heritage Foundation, is a nearly 1,000-page document written by a bunch of think tankers and right-wing policy experts running the gamut of conservatism.

  President Joe Biden says the document “should scare every single American.” Democrats, one strategist told the Washington Post, need to “instill fear in the American people.” Donald Trump and his surrogates are already distancing the candidate from the effort.

  So, I decided to read it. Listen, it wasn’t easy. I did plenty of skimming. But the chances that Biden, or any of the Democrats who are fearmongering about its contents, understands what’s in it is highly doubtful.

  Let me (once again) quote from the Underground Grammarian essay titled "The Answering of Kautski", which (in turn) quoted Lenin on dealing with his political opponent Karl Kautski:

  Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.

  Substitute "Heritage Foundation" for "Kautski" and "dangerous Christian Nationalists" for "traitor to the working class" and voila…

• All the cool kids are doing it. If you're feeling like a political orphan these days, Philip Klein will make you feel even more orphany: Republicans Make Fiscal Irresponsibility Part of Their Official Platform.

  For decades, the criticism of Republicans among limited-government advocates was that the party would talk a big game about balancing the budget and reducing the debt when seeking power, only to toss aside those goals once in power. Ever since the party was taken over by Donald Trump, Republicans have backed away from speaking of debt reduction as an important goal — even as the situation has deteriorated. Now, they have made that fiscal irresponsibility part of their official platform.

  On Monday, Republicans released a skimpy platform that brings the party into conformity with the Trump campaign. There may be reasons for the lack of details compared with previous versions of the document, as party platforms are rarely read, mostly do not translate into actual policy, and typically make news only when they provide fodder for opponents.

  Summary: the GOP is promising tax cuts and more spending. I'm wondering whether they think they can outdo the Democrats on shameless pandering; seems like a misguided strategy to me, but….

• Not yet, anyway. The WSJ editorialists think The 25th Amendment Isn’t for Joe Biden.

  The omerta has broken, and worrying anecdotes about President Biden’s age are now common. He used a teleprompter while speaking to about 30 donors in a living room. Prep materials for an event include photos of the hallway to the stage, with an instruction in large font: “Walk to podium.” Voters already think Mr. Biden is too old to be President for another four years.

  But is he too old to make it for another six months, until the end of this term? That’s what Republicans will be asking as they try to press their advantage. Talk is circulating again about using the 25th Amendment to remove the President posthaste, on the theory that his incapacity is a danger to the country. The argument is that Mr. Biden blamed his bad debate performance on “a bad night,” but next time it could be during some geopolitical crisis.

  As bad as Biden is, it's an argument for withdrawing "voluntarily" from the race, and maybe also "voluntarily" resigning ASAP. Putting on their big-boy pants, the WSJ editorialists say attempting an involuntary Section 4 remedy would be futile and more country-damaging. Even as I might enjoy the spectacle, they're probably right about that.

• Also, rock and roll. Speaking of withdrawal, George Will is… um… also speaking of withdrawal: Biden might exit, but rising distrust of institutions seems here to stay.

  The leakage of trustworthiness from American institutions began with the lies that enveloped Watergate and Vietnam. It accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis, when cynicism (“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”) fueled the government’s indiscriminate and lawless response: The law restricted bailouts to financial institutions? Declare automobile manufacturers to be such. The leakage became a cataract during the pandemic because of the public health establishment’s plucked-from-the-ether edicts (about masks, social distancing, which political gatherings should be exempt from social distancing, etc.) and the sacrifice-the-children opportunism of the most powerful segment of organized labor (teachers unions).

  Now the world’s oldest political party and its media accomplices have effected a gigantic subtraction from trust: Leaders of the former lied about President Biden’s condition until, on June 27, continuing to do so became untenable. The latter had allowed the lying because they believe Donald Trump’s many mendacities are an excuse for theirs.

  One example: The bleating sheep on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” reminiscent of a chorus of quadrupeds in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” were vehemently wrong in denouncing (“so tilted,” “shocking,” “a classic hit piece,” etc.) the Wall Street Journal’s meticulously reported June 4 catalogue of the abundant evidence of Biden’s decline. That the sheep are still on the air, dispensing undiminished certitudes, is evidence of two things. That — outside of a few bastions of meritocracy and accountability, such as professional sports — there is no penalty for failure in contemporary America. And that many prominent people have the scary strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment.

  Fun fact: George Will is about a year and a half older than Joe Biden. I'd love to see 'em debate.

Recently on the book blog:

I heard good things … somewhere … about Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorsokigan Saga". This book was billed as #1 (of 16) in the series, the Kindle version was relatively cheap, so:

Bottom line: not my cup of tea. It's billed as a "science fiction romance", which might have been a red flag if I'd been willing to pay attention to it.

In the future, humans occupy numerous star systems, but they're always on the look for more. Unfortunately, they've also splintered into warring factions, each with its governing system (the ones described in detail here are lousy) and cultural oddities.

Cordelia Naismith leads a survey team from Beta Colony checking out a new planet, when—darn!—her crew's site is attacked by a strike force from Barrayar, led by the mysterious Aral Vorkosigan. As it happens, Vorkosigan is betrayed by his own side, leaving him, Cordelia, and an injured Betan crewman to hike 200 peril-filled kilometers to a Barrayaran encampment to set things right.

Wouldn't you know it, during this trek Cordelia and Vorkosigan develop a grudging respect. And yes, it eventually turns gooey. This doesn't end the peril for either.

There is a lot of political intrigue, painstakingly described. Most of which I found boring. (Hey, we've got plenty of that in the Summer of 2024 USA.) Other than a few violent encounters, there's a lot of talking.

Nate Silver responds to this tweet:

I was curious just how many stories the @nytimes has done on Biden's debate performance so I counted. Between the end of the debate & 8am this morning, it was a staggering 192 pieces. 192. That is mind boggling. 1/

➡️142 news stories
➡️50 opinion pieces
➡️13 non-debate news pic.twitter.com/gOXVQqDw9L

— Jennifer Schulze (@NewsJennifer) July 5, 2024

Silver chastises Ms. Schulze: Blaming the media is what got Democrats into this mess.

Silver goes on to provide six reasons the story is important, followed by six reasons why it's compelling.

By the way, Jennifer Schulze wrote last month about a news story she didn't like: OPINION: The WSJ attack piece is a reminder to beware of political attacks masquerading as journalism. Her first paragraph:

The Wall Street Journal this week featured a news story about President Joe Biden that reads like a Republican attack ad. This article appears to be about the president’s declining mental acuity, but it’s really Trump campaign propaganda.

Needless to say, this take did not age well.

Also of note:

• It's difficult to "fact check" incoherent babble. But Jim Geraghty dug and dug into the Stephanopoulous interview, and he's Fact-Checking Some of Biden’s Interview Answers. In the Disconnected From Reality Department:

  Mind bogglingly, Biden could not clearly answer whether he watched the debate afterwards.

  GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And– did you ever watch the debate afterwards?

  PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don’t think I did, no.

  Either the president did, or he didn’t, or he watched excerpts. This is not testing the president’s memory from months or years ago. This is asking a basic question about the past two weeks, and Biden cannot say for certain that he watched the debate.

  Biden then claimed, “After that debate, I did ten major events in a row, including until 2:00 in the morning after the debate.”

  No, Biden did not. Biden did an event at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta at 11:10 p.m. Eastern Thursday night, and then just after midnight, the president made his appearance at the Waffle House, where, despite suffering what he now calls “a really bad cold,” he shook everyone’s hands.

  The president’s next event was at 12:30 p.m. Friday, the rally in Raleigh, N.C. At 4:30 p.m., the Bidens flew to New York City, where they delivered remarks at the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center opening ceremony. At 8:30 p.m. Eastern, Biden attended a campaign reception in New York City.

  So, if you want to count the Waffle House stop, Biden had four events in the following 24 hours. On Saturday, at 1:20 in the afternoon, Biden attended a campaign reception in East Hampton, N.Y.  At 6:20 p.m., the Bidens attended a campaign reception at the residence of New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, in Red Bank. They arrived at Camp David about four hours later.

  In other words, Biden had six events over the next two days, mostly closed-door campaign receptions where the president made brief remarks to the friendliest crowd imaginable. As the Washington Post summarized on Wednesday, July 3, “Biden, 81, has appeared in public four times since a rally Friday in North Carolina — for remarks on a Supreme Court decision, on extreme weather, at Stonewall National Monument in New York and at a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on Wednesday — to speak for a total of 32 minutes, exclusively while using teleprompters.”

  In his own mind, a "major event" may include bodily functions. And perhaps also malfunctions.

• Idiocracy, too, of course. Kat Rosenfield remembers it well: ‘Dave’ Predicted the Biden Debacle.

  Ever since the Great Debate Debacle—and its successor event, the Stephanopoulos Sit-Down That Could Have Gone Better—Joe Biden’s most fervent supporters have chosen one of two tacks. The first is full-on denial: the president is doing fine, they say! Amazing, even! Any blips in his performance were merely the result of poor preparation, or a cold, or some secret saboteur inside CNN who installed a “ghastly pallor and verbal incoherence” filter on the camera in front of him.

  But in the second camp, the one not completely disconnected from reality, an arguably more disturbing idea has emerged: that Biden's fitness for office actually doesn’t matter and never has, because he has good people around him.

  Is the president sane? Competent? Entirely alive? You need not ask yourself these questions, because the president is not the president; he’s just a figurehead, more of a mascot, really—like the Geico Gecko of the executive branch. The actual presidency consists of somewhere between five and 50 people, whose identities may or may not be public knowledge, who stand behind or around or sometimes on top of the president and execute the duties of the office according to their collective wisdom. Did you think, when you pulled the lever for Joe Biden in 2020, that you were actually voting for Joe Biden the singular human being? You fool. You absolute imbecile.

  Dave posited a stroke-impaired president whose chief of staff hires Dave (Kevin Kline) to pose as the head of state; the chief of staff deviously pulls strings from behind the curtain. I remember that it was very earnest in its moderate leftism; Ms Rosenfield reminds us that it was probably also prescient.

• You probably had already daubed this on your Biden impeachment bingo card. It's a pretty broad category: "Breaking the Law". Jerry Coyne, hardly a right-winger, looks at ht latest WSJ report: the National Institutes of Health, in complicity with universities, appears to be breaking the law by using ethnicity as a criterion for hiring.

  I guess I have to give the usual disclaimers here: yes, John Sailer is a conservative, and yes, it’s an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, whose op-eds are reliably on the Right. But of course where else will you learn things that the MSM won’t tell you? In this case, we learn that the National Institutes of Health, the largest government dispenser of research funds in America, is apparently funding hiring initiatives involving racial preferences. But how can they do that given that such hiring is illegal under Title VII? (And accepting students on the basis of race was recently deep-sixed by the Supreme Court.)

  The way around this, according to Sailer’s article, is simply to fund “cluster hires,” which gives an institution a pot of money to hire several faculty at once, in hopes that doing so will bring in underrepresented minorities. Well, that’s fine (it casts a wider net), so long as people aren’t hired on the basis of their ethnicity itself.  But in the case of the National Institutes of Health, cluster-hire funding also requires that candidates proffer diversity statements, which of course allow universities to pick and choose using race, which is easily determined from diversity statements. (The University of Chicago prohibits this explicitly based on the Shils Report: our hires and promotions are to be based solely on research, teaching, contribution to the intellectual community, and university or department service).

  Further, beyond the NIH’s end-run around race-based hiring, universities are making their own goals much more explicit, as Sailer found out by using the Freedom of Information Act to see what universities are doing vis-à-vis hiring.

  Professor Coyne provides extensive quotes from the article, but if you would like to RTWT, here's what the WSJ claims is an unlocked link. If you are deeply cynical about Your Federal Government and academia, you may be disturbed, but you won't be surprised.

• The latest scare tactic. John Hinderaker writes about the Democrat pretend-freakout about "Project 2025": Demonizing Heritage.

  In an odd tactical decision, the Biden-Harris campaign has chosen to demonize the Heritage Foundation and tie that organization to Donald Trump. Heritage has published the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. It is a compendium of recommended conservative policies, intended to be “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.”

  Donald Trump has nothing to do with the Heritage Foundation, and had nothing to do with Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. Some of the policies recommended by Heritage, such as free trade, reduced tariffs, and nationwide limitations on abortion, are at odds with Trump’s policies. Nevertheless, the Biden campaign finds it worthwhile to demonize Heritage:

  Statement from President Biden on Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda pic.twitter.com/4wtIJRdiDY

  — Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) July 6, 2024

  I thought Heritage had gone full-MAGA, but as Hinderaker notes, they seem to be unafraid of (for example) free trade.

  The Project 2025 PDF book runs to 922 pages. The "Contributors" section runs to 7 single-spaced pages on its own. I haven't read it; I doubt any of the freaked-out critics have either.

Recently on the book blog:

An impulse grab off the "New Books" shelf of the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. Author Eric Schwitzgebel's overall thesis is expressed in the title: the world is weird. Since he is a philosopher, he rigorously defines his terms:

Weird:

contrary to the conventional, ordinary, and well-understood.

Bizarre:

contrary to common sense—i.e., something that people without specialized training confidently but perhaps implicitly believe to be false

Dubious:

doubtful in the sense that we are not epistemically compelled to believe it

Wild:

both bizarre and dubious

Theoretical wilderness:

a topic on which every viable theory is wild

You get the idea: Professor Schwitzgebel is kind of out there, but in a way that's entirely plausible. And a lot of fun. One of his chapters argues, from materialistic precepts, that the United States of America is a conscious entity; this manages to be both hilarious and profound.

Do we live in a simulation, run on a supercomputer by an alien nerd, just for fun? (Illustrated with a figure captioned: "God stumbles over the power cord". Oops!)

One chapter is "The Loose Friendship of Visual Experience and Reality". Which has the launching point expressed in federal regulation:

Each convex mirror shall have permanently and indelibly marked at the lower edge of the mirror's reflective surface, in letters not less than 4.8 mm nor more than 6.4 mm high the words “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.”

Don't think about this too hard while driving; could be fatally distracting. Schwitzgebel argues that the required wording is wrong. At length.

He writes on his experience with ChatGPT, and observes: "The darn thing has a better sense of humor than most humans."

And in a very thought-provoking chapter, he considers what our moral obligations should be toward AIs that develop consciousness. Snippet:

Or suppose we could create an AI system so cognitively superior to us that it is capable of valuable achievements and social relationships that the limited human mind cannot even conceive of—achievements and relationships qualitatively different from anything we can understand, sufficiently unknowable that we cannot even feel their absence from our lives, as unknowable to us as cryptocurrency is to a sea turtle.

Maybe that won't keep you awake at night, but it's something to think about in the dark when you can't sleep.

I'm kind of used to the world's "weirdness", since I studied me some quantum mechanics back in the day. Here's the relevant Feynman quote, from one of his lectures (to a general audience) on quantum electrodynamics:

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school—and you think I'm going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you're not going to be able to understand it. Why, then, and I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won't be able to understand what I'm going to say? It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

Ah, but "the market" knows how. And does so, cheaply and in abundance.

So: A wonderful book. I found it tough going in spots, but in most parts wonderfully accessible and insightful.

Well, nowadays, she's Megan McArdle (quoted tweet continues after embed):

Watching a split emerge between the knowledgeable observers who think Biden will almost certainly have to step down (from the candidacy, if not the presidency), and equally knowledgeable observers who think he’ll probably ride it out, and eight years ago I would have had a very…

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 7, 2024

…strong opinion but now I’m just resigned to the fact that my mental models have zero predictive validity when applied to the sort of people who want to occupy the Oval Office.

Yes. I've noticed that. Their brains work funny.

In fact here are a few guidelines I'm trying to follow in current and future blogging about politics:

• Megan's avoiding predictions about presidential candidates. I'm trying to avoid predicting voter behavior too. I shoulda learned my lesson back in 2016.
• In fact, maybe I shouldn't make predictions at all, about anything.
• I will not advise Biden to drop out. Why would he take my advice?
• Same for Trump, whom I find at least as reprehensible and unsuited.
• I won't even advise my fellow voters, for that matter. I'm pretty sure you won't listen either.
• I won't even say: "If you voted for either Biden or Trump in the primaries, maybe you should just stay home and watch West Wing (Democrats) or Blue Bloods (Republicans) reruns instead of going into the voting booth.

Maybe more as things occur to me.

While I was searching the Pun Salad archives for what I said about Biden in the past, I came across a lengthy quote from Andrew Ferguson's mass review of candidate campaign bios from 2008. Biden's was Promises to Keep (Amazon/Kindle link at your right). Ferguson's review was in the Weekly Standard, now defunct, but the Washington Examiner reproduced the relevant bits a few months later. Can't-say-we-weren't-warned excerpt:

In the 2008 campaign (a mere 16 years ago), Joe dropped out after finishing fifth in Iowa. This was a followup to his 1988 campaign, 20 years before that, where he dropped out very early, dogged by (accurate) claims of plagiarism and lying about his past. (plus ça change…)

Okay, so no predictions from me. I'll continue to post the amassed predictions of others as revealed by wagering their own money:

My rudimentary analysis, for what it's worth: bettors seem to be warming to a future where (a) Kamala replaces Joe on the ballot (somehow); (b) Trump wins anyway.

Also of note:

• How about George Soros? Or the Ghost of Christmas Future? Biden's expressed criterion for withdrawing from the race:

  It depends on-- on if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that, I might do that.

  Yes, "might".

  The WSJ editorialists mock: The Almighty Calls for Biden.

  Mr. President, the Almighty is on the line. Not the Deity you invoked Friday night in your interview on ABC. The Big Guy appears to be sitting out this presidential race. We mean the closest thing to the Almighty in American politics: the Democratic-media establishment. They want you gone, sir, and the question is when you admit it and oblige.

  President Biden’s interview on Friday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos was a portrait in defiance that won’t stem the establishment campaign unfolding against him. The media that covered for him has turned with a vengeance. The sleuths at the New York Times and Washington Post have suddenly discovered that the debate wasn’t merely a “bad night.” This week they tell us that there have been many such episodes of demonstrable cognitive decline. Who knew?

  Well, the American people knew, since they are not oblivious to evidence they can see. They have said so in every poll for a year. Special counsel Robert Hur knew. (See our editorial, “A Tipping Point on Biden’s Decline,” Feb. 10, 2024.)

  Which brings us to…

• I don't think Rich Lowry will be invited on MSNBC soon. Actually, I don't know if he ever appeared there, but this seems to be a deal-breaker: Morning Joe's" Dishonorable Attacks on Biden Truth-Tellers.

  Acouple of months ago, Joe Scarborough warned his viewers, and especially his critics, that he was about to unleash a truth bomb.

  The former Republican congressman wanted everyone to know not that Joe Biden had lost a step but was still okay, not that Biden was better than Trump regardless of his physical and mental state, and certainly not that he had heard some concerning things about Biden but he didn’t want anyone to draw premature conclusions.

  No, no — he wanted everyone to know that Joe Biden was more impressive than ever.

  This was ludicrous at the time but has been exposed as propagandistic dreck in light of Biden’s debate debacle that appalled even Scarborough himself.

  “Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth,” Scarborough said directly to the camera on his March 6 program, “and F you if you can’t handle the truth.”

  Liar? Fool? Maybe both?

  Note: Scarbourough's paean was made about a month after Robert Hur recommended against prosecuting Joe Biden due to his doddering-old-foolishness.

• Just pants? Issues and Insights draws attention to Biden’s Pants-On-Fire Lie That Nobody Noticed In His ABC News Interview.

  “One thing I’m proudest of,” he said, “is, remember when my economic plan was put forward, a lot of the mainstream economists said it’s not going to work. Well, guess what? We now have 16 Nobel laureates, 16 of them in economics, saying Biden’s next term would be — based on what he wants to do, an enormous success.”

  I&I notes that at the time the "plan was put forward", Biden was claiming "major economists — left, right, and center — support this plan.”

  I can't even keep all Biden's "plans" straight, let alone what economists said about them when. All I'm (relatively) confident about is that the bill will come due, probably after November, at which point Biden won't care, one way or another.

• Do stampeding herds typically produce avalanches? Or is this just a really bad mixed metaphor? Ann Althouse's headline: "[American media] have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away..." Quoting from a Guardian article, which continues:

  "... at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: 'As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.' They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away 'would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment' and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment. Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits."

  Ann criticizes the author on a number of points, but she is on her firmest ground drawing on her lawprof cred:

  Solnit writes "Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup," but she's not talking about the stampede that seems to have begun mid-debate. She's talking about the 25th Amendment. That does, indeed, require the VP to participate in a constitutional procedure (not a coup!).

  I knew I'd eventually come across the 25th Amendment today!

• <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">good news, everyone!</voice>. And Twitchy has it: THE CANDIDATE WE NEED: David 'Iowahawk' Burge Declares He Is Running for President. And, apologies in advance, he's not holding back the language:

  Sometimes the right person emerges. When we needed a person to see us through the War for Independence and to serve as this new nation’s first president, Washington emerged. When Britain found itself fighting for its life against Nazi Germany, Churchill emerged. When our country was tearing itself apart over the slavery question, Lincoln emerged.

  And now, in our troubled times, David ‘Iowahawk’ Burge has emerged.

  Write me in, motherfuckers

  — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 28, 2024

  (Am I wrong to fantasize about Nikki Haley tweeting the same thing? Yeah, probably.)

  Ahem: Dave, if you need a veep who will balance the ticket with an "elderly dork" vibe, I'm available, and I pledge to take our campaign as seriously as you do.

Well, I scanned through the transcript of George Stephanopoulos' interview with President Biden. Among all the verbiage, this stuck out:

I didn't even have to go to the How Many Days Until...? Calculator page. As I type, Saturday morning, there's a little note at the top of ABC's page:

122 DAYS TO ELECTION DAY

So yesterday, that number was 123. Not "over 125 days", Joe.

Anyway: the President's responses were (unlike Thursday's debate) not totally incoherent. He did have some talking points. He referred to his "bad night" four times. He called Trump a "pathological liar" twice, and "congenital liar" once.

But "more coherent than Thursday" is a pretty low bar. Read the transcript for yourself. Sample, when Stephanopoulos asks if he knew how badly he was doing in the debate:

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Yeah, look. The whole way I prepared, nobody's fault, mine. Nobody's fault but mine. I, uh-- I prepared what I usually would do sittin' down as I did come back with foreign leaders or National Security Council for explicit detail. And I realized--bout partway through that, you know, all-- I get quoted the New York Times had me down, at ten points before the debate, nine now, or whatever the hell it is. The fact of the matter is, what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times. I couldn't-- I mean, the way the debate ran, not-- my fault, no one else's fault, no one else's fault.

You can almost see the thoughts bouncing around his brain, tiny ping-pong balls fighting to be let out his mouth.

And (by the way) there's no New York Times poll that had him down "ten points before the debate". The Real Clear Polling archive shows the NYT polling had Biden down 3 percentage points pre-debate, and 6 percentage points post-debate.

Also of note:

• A Dune reference from KDW? Maybe he doesn't write his own headlines: The God-Empress of Washington. And games out an ideal scenario for Kamala:

  Kamala Harris can have anything she wants—except one thing.

  The only way Kamala Harris becomes president of these United States is if Joe Biden vacates the office before Election Day. Were that to happen, it is almost certain that her sole memorable act in office would be handing the keys over to Donald Trump, who is set to thrash Biden in the election and who might very well thrash Harris worse if the polls taken before 11 minutes ago are to be believed. With my usual caveat that the man is unfairly maligned, Biden and Harris would end up with something like Neville Chamberlain’s reputation if they usher Trump back into the Oval Office.

  If Harris could admit to herself the reality of her political position—she isn’t going to be elected president in the foreseeable future and currently is pointed like a rocket at a career-and-reputation-ending disaster—then she would appreciate that she is in a terrific position nonetheless. She ought to be the happiest person in Washington because she has two things in her pocket: the capacity to drive Joe Biden off the ticket, and the opportunity to benefit from this mightily.

  You can imagine the press conference: “It has been my honor to serve with such a great and honorable man as Joe Biden, but I can no longer ignore his rapid decline in recent months, and the country cannot afford to risk …” blah, blah, blah. And, then: “I am honored that so many people in my party—people at the highest level—encouraged me to seek the presidency on my own, in part because of what that would mean to women and people of color. But I have decided that I can best serve my country by …”

  Only problem being: she would need to be considerably less delusional about her political prospects that is Joe Biden about his.

  Fun fact: I was not a fan of Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune.

• Speaking of delusions… The WSJ editorialists point out yet another one: The IRS Has a High-Earner Delusion.

  Unlike bank robbers, IRS auditors tend to look where the money isn’t. That’s what happened after the agency started scrutinizing more tax returns from the wealthiest Americans. A new report says increased targeting of these taxpayers was hugely ineffective.

  The policy, launched in 2020 by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, required the IRS to audit 8% of taxpayers each year who earned more than $10 million. To hit that quota, the agency started examining returns with fewer irregularities. The efficiency drop was steep, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, or Tigta, which recently reviewed the results.

  The average dollars assessed per return above $10 million “was nearly six times more productive prior to the 2020 Treasury Directive,” meaning the average examination recovered six times as much in unpaid taxes. Or to put it in terms of IRS productivity, after the policy change the money that auditors assessed per hour from this income group dropped 93%.

  So don't worry: the IRS is not just bad at finding tax cheats, they get worse when they try to do better.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Yes, it probably is a cold-hearted attempt to grab my eyeballs, thanks to my (whoa!) 40-year-old fond memories of the original movie. Returning: Eddie Murphy, of course. But also: Bronson Pinchot, John Ashton, Judge Reinhold, even Paul Reiser. And also Kevin Bacon, who might as well be wearing a sign saying "BAD GUY" in his first scene. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a major role! And the great Luis Guzmán in a minor role!

I don't want to take this too seriously, but Axel is up to his old loose-cannon tricks, not playing by the rules, giving his superiors headaches, putting his friends into mortal danger, and every other cliché you can think of. After an initial action scene where a robbery of the Detroit Red Wings hockey arena is foiled, Axel heads out to Beverly Hills, where his estranged daughter is a defense attorney handling the case of an alleged cop-killer. She's doing too good a job of that, putting her in the sights of, yes, Kevin Bacon. Will Axel save her, and also defeat the bad guys? Do you even have to ask?

It was fun, seeing how the old-timers are, or are not, well-preserved. It's forgettable fun, though.

This was on the WSJ's Best Mysteries of 2023 list. I've read and liked a couple of Laura Lippman's books in the past (By A Spider's Thread, Lady in the Lake). This one did not impress me that much. The back cover has laudatory blurbs from Emma Straub, Megan Abbot, and Alison Gaylin; this tells me that you might like it better than I did if you are a lady.

Back in 1997, Amber Glass inveigles Joe Simpson into taking her to their Baltimore-area high school prom. Little does anyone know that the night's events won't go as planned; Joe ditches Amber in a hotel room to take up once more with the girl that had dumped him. And in the morning—I am not making this up—Amber is found with a dead baby. She becomes tabloid fodder, see the title. And Joe gets tagged as "Cad Dad", but escapes any sort of serious critical publicity.

Fast forward to 2019; Amber returns to Baltimore, and opens an art gallery, concentrating on the oeuvre of the recently incarcerated. And Joe is also in the area, trying to make a successful career in commercial real estate, married to a successful plastic surgeon. Do they meet up? Of course.

Where's the mystery? Where is even the crime? Could be that dead baby, given that Amber's memory of what happened that night is hazy. But that's left unexplored for nearly the entire book. (Sorry, semi-spoiler there.) Instead there are hundreds of pages filled with, to my male eyes, boring and irrelevant detail. (Page 74: "In her shotgun rental house back in New Orleans, she had painted the front room coral, her bedroom navy blue, and the kitchen butter yellow." Zzzz.)

Arguably, suspense builds throughout, as we discover just how big a cad the Cad Dad is. But not much happens, or is revealed, until the last 20 or so pages.

Just getting around to noticing:

Biden at 81: Sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful https://t.co/PhTx6aK0lW

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 4, 2024

I can imagine the AP headline writers agonizing … oh, for 2-3 milliseconds … about that headline: "Should it be 'Biden at 81: Confused and forgetful but sometimes sharp and focused'? No, no! Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you."

From the story:

Okay, probably not what you want to see in a sitting president. Missing from the AP story is prognosis: is he likely to get better or worse in the next four months? How about the next four years?

Bonus, a snippet from a recent campaign speech in North Carolina:

“I give you my word as a Biden. I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job,” he told supporters. “Because, quite frankly, the stakes are too high.”

I observed just a few days ago: "My word as a Biden" is a pretty reliable signal for any adjacent words being howling falsehoods. I guess I have to adjust that: I'm pretty sure he does believe that with all his "heart and soul".

Does he believe it with his brain, though? Or has that organ gone offline permanently?

From Jeff Maurer, imagining how the future will judge President Dotard: The Silly Old Man Who Fumbled the Presidency Back to Trump

In the New York magazine's "Intelligencer" column, Olivia Nuzzi, we get a look at The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.

Now it can be told, I guess. Better now than later.

But Charles C. W. Cookie has a pertinent question for the MSM: You Gonna Investigate That?.

Obvious answer: no, probably not. Because they were in on it.

Also of note:

• Hey, kids! What time is it? Margot Cleveland says It's Time To Invoke The 25th Amendment. (That's her original headline. It's been changed.)

  The Democrats’ public struggle session over what to do with the problem of Joe Biden must end. They know, we know, and, most terrifyingly, America’s enemies know that our commander-in-chief is mentally incompetent. As such, the answer is clear, and the Constitution provides it: Joe Biden must be removed from office and the vice president sworn in as president.

  The only (proper) question for Biden and his party is whether the removal will be voluntary, under Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, or forced, under Section 4. Will Biden transmit “his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” to Congress? Or will the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet inform Congress of President Biden’s incapacity and remove him from office?

  A day or two to decide is reasonable. A week stretches the bounds. But we are now at the point where the inaction by Vice President Kamala Harris and Biden’s Cabinet constitutes a violation of their oath of office. They solemnly swore they would “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution and that they would “faithfully discharge the duties of the office.” That oath mandates they provide Congress “their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office…”

  That would be nice, but these guys have spent the last 1,258 days largely ignoring their oaths of office. I don't expect them to start taking their Constitutional duties seriously now.

That doesn't mean I can't complain, or observe (with Mr. Ramirez) that we are in serious trouble:

For example, John Stossel points out an inconvenient fact about three names likely to be on my ballot in November: Biden, Trump, and RFK Jr. Are All Anti-Freedom

Drew Cline has thoughts along that line as well: Freedom Is the Foundation for Everything Else.

So at some point today, go outside and take a deep breath of air that probably won't kill you.

George Will is upbeat today: Don’t despair, ‘normal’ U.S. politics are abnormal. Happy Fourth!.

Yikes!

Also of note:

• You say that as if it were a bad thing, Tim. Tim Wu, who coined the dreadful term "net neutrality", takes to the NYT to (I guess) warn us: The First Amendment Is Out of Control.

  The First Amendment was written in the 18th century with the noble and vitally important goal of ensuring robust political debate and a free press. For much of American history, First Amendment cases involving speech typically concerned political dissenters, religious outcasts, intrepid journalists and others whose ability to express their views was threatened by a powerful and sometimes overbearing state. The First Amendment was a tool that helped the underdog.

  But sometime in this century the judiciary lost the plot. Judges have transmuted a constitutional provision meant to protect unpopular opinion into an all-purpose tool of legislative nullification that now mostly protects corporate interests. Nearly any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment.

  Monday’s Supreme Court decision in the two NetChoice cases greatly adds to the problem. The cases concern two state laws, one in Florida and one in Texas, that limit the ability of social media platforms to remove or moderate content. (Both laws were enacted in response to the perceived censorship of political conservatives.) While the Supreme Court remanded both cases to lower courts for further factual development, the court nonetheless went out of its way to state that the millions of algorithmic decisions made every day by social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment. It did so by blithely assuming that those algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.

  It should be pointed out that Wu has had qualms about the First Amendment for years. Back in 2021, Pun Salad pointed out a warning from Matt Taibbi: A Biden Appointee's Troubling Views On The First Amendment. Taibbi pointed to an article Wu had written in 2017: Is the First Amendment Obsolete?

  But for a detailed rebuttal, let's look at Mike Masnick at TechDirt, who asserts, reasonably enough: Tim Wu Is Out Of Control.

  I’m confused about where Tim’s mind is at lately, as he seems to have embraced multiple ridiculous, dangerous, authoritarian policy ideas that would be incredibly damaging to the public, almost all of which involve suppressing speech in pursuit of policy goals that Wu supports, without even the slightest concern about the damage it will do to people.

  We saw it last year, when he publicly supported having Congress move forward with KOSA, despite dozens of civil liberties and LGBTQ groups noting how its “duty of care” would be used to harm LGBTQ youth, blocking them from accessing information. Then, earlier this year, he signed onto an absolutely ridiculous amicus brief in support of Texas’s social media content moderation law. That brief was full of confused or misleading statements. He’s also been strongly supportive of banning TikTok, which is another attack on the First Amendment.

  With all of these instances in the past few years, in each of which he dismisses of basic First Amendment principles, you might have been tempted to think that Wu hates the First Amendment. But even I had thought that would have been a bridge too far for Wu.

  That is, until he published his latest op-ed in the NY Times: a full frontal attack on the First Amendment, entitled “The First Amendment is Out of Control.”

  Even if he didn’t write that headline (at major publications, editors often write the headlines, rather than the authors themselves), the article is yet another horribly confused, badly argued, fundamentally ridiculous attack on the First Amendment.

  The First Amendment is not out of control. Tim Wu is out of control.

  Ouch.

• Hey, kids! What time is it? Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the clock on the clubhouse wall and announces: It’s Time for President Kamala Harris.

  Consider the reporting. The White House has said that Biden is “engaged” between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. This is not a credible defense but a condemnation. Four reporters from Politico describe the functioning of the chief executive and his staff this way:

  During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.

  “It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared sh**less of him.”

  Again, for anyone who has witnessed an elder’s struggling with senility, dementia, or Alzheimer’s, this kind of intemperate outburst is deeply familiar. But it is precisely those familiar with the rage of the aged and addled who know that such individuals are not in a position to lead.

  Yes, even with all her phony word-salad profundities and inappropriate cackles, she'd be a safer choice for the country for the next few months.

• But President Kamala should fire the fools. Josh Barro points out: The Same Fools Telling Us Not to Panic About Biden Are the Ones Who Let Him Get on That Stage.

  Back in April, David Frum wrote an essay for The Atlantic arguing that President Biden should not debate Donald Trump because Trump violated his oath of office by trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election. Frum argued that sharing a debate stage with Trump would constitute “normalization” of him and his coup attempt, and that the best way Biden could convey that Trump is beneath consideration for another term as president was to refuse to debate him at all.

  I disagreed with Frum’s essay when it ran, and indeed I still disagree with it now. Whether we like it or not, Trump is the Republican nominee, he may well become president again, and it’s in the voters’ interest to see a direct confrontation between them. But for today’s newsletter, what’s important about Frum’s argument is not whether it’s right or wrong. All I want to note about Frum’s argument is that it was available — if Biden wanted to duck the debates, this is an explanation he could have given for why, even if his real reason was something else.

  There would have been a penalty for ducking the debates, but it would not necessarily have been very large. The press wouldn’t have liked it, and there might have been more skeptical coverage about the president’s age and acuity than we’d been seeing before Thursday. And some voters who worry about Biden’s age and fitness for office might have drawn negative inferences about that from his refusal to debate — but largely, Biden’s polling problems have been with less-engaged voters who are less likely to pay attention to debates, let alone to debates about debates, so I’m skeptical about how much that would have mattered.

  Uh huh. Barro kind of dodges the issue that the major "fool" making the decision to "get on that stage" was… Joe Biden. From back in May:

  Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020. Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate.
  
  Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again.
  
  Well, make my day, pal. pic.twitter.com/AkPmvs2q4u

  — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 15, 2024

  Consider your day made, Joe.

• Couldn't have happened to a nicer person. And I mean that precisely. This couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Jeff Maurer: Identity Politics Have Undercut Kamala Harris.

  Harris was picked largely because of her race and gender. It’s important to note: Vice President has always been a job where a person’s bio matters at least as much as their political skill. Presidential candidates usually seek to “balance” the ticket by choosing someone who is — at least in some ways — the opposite of themselves. That’s why Kennedy chose a southerner, Obama picked an old white guy, and McCain selected a walking joke who was respected by nobody. For all the harrumphing about how Harris’ contributed to her getting the job, we should acknowledge that that’s basically the norm. And we should also acknowledge that that’s probably how we got so many uninspiring dolt Vice Presidents in the first place.

  Even so, the way that Harris’ race and gender factored into her selection was particularly acute. In a gambit to take the wind out of Bernie Sanders’ sails, Biden pledged to chose a woman as his VP. Most Americans consider this type of identity-based proclamation to be cringeworthy, but progressives think it’s awesome and cool. The single biggest disconnect between progressive America and the rest of America might be in how differently announcing “I’m going to hire a woman!” or “I’m going to hire a non-white person!” is received. Progressives don’t realize that people see that as tokening and condescending. Which is why Hollywood keeps making movies with cookie-cutter girlboss protagonists, and when the movie loses a hundred million dollars, all Hollywood can think is: “I guess the hero wasn’t girlboss enough.”

  Note: Maurer confesses that he wants Kamala to win, if she runs.

I get the feeling this post could be obsolescent practically any minute. So I'll try to type fast.

But the general theme today is: these people were shamelessly lying to you. And maybe to themselves too; that's a well-known mental malady.

First up, a chorus singing from the same page of the hymnal:

A rebuttal from Mr. F. Leghorn:

You may remember that on June 4 (June 5 print edition) the WSJ published a scary story: Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping. First couple paragraphs:

The reaction was brisk! From Media Matters on June 6: The Wall Street Journal’s story about Biden “slipping” is comically weak.

OK, Media Matters is obviously partisan. But how about CNN? On June 6: The Wall Street Journal’s story about Biden’s mental acuity suffers from glaring problems.

That's from Oliver Darcy's Reliable Sources. Also amusing from Oliver pre-debate: Right-wing media figures are desperately pushing conspiracy theories about Biden ahead of the debate.

Oliver, it turns out they didn't set it low enough.

Also "debunking" was Tom Jones at Poynter. The Wall Street Journal’s story on Biden’s mental fitness: fair or foul?. He leaves little doubt where he stands:

Well, that was then. And now? As Jim Geraghty says, the "respectable" sources are fessing up: Now It's Okay to Talk About Biden's 'Cognitive Decline'.

Click over for more "news" that CNN et al. now feel it's safe for you to hear. Example from Carl Bernstein, yes that one:

So [checks news sites] we'll see what happens next. As if I needed to say that.

Also of note:

• Also: Is our children learning? Randal O'Toole has a good insight into the Bureaucratic Mind, Transportation Divison. Asking a reasonable question: Is Bicycling Improving?

  One of my many beefs with government planning advocates is that they tend to judge success by measuring inputs rather than outputs. A case in point is a group that calls itself People for Bikes that issued a report last week that claims that Bicycling Is Improving in Cities Across the U.S.

  Does it measure that improvement by the number of people cycling in those cities? Or by a reduction in bicycle fatalities and injuries from traffic accidents? No, it instead measure the miles of bike lanes, the reallocations of street space to dedicated bicycle use, reductions in automobile speed limits, and changes to intersections favoring bicyclists. The fact that these “improvements” have been accompanied by increased bicycle fatalities and reductions in bicycle commuting aren’t considered.

  People for Bikes ranked 2,300 U.S. cities by these measures and encourages cities to “improve their ranking” by doing more. But if doing these things doesn’t increase cycling or bicycle safety, there isn’t much point.

  The Census Bureau says that 731,272 people commuted to work by bicycle in 2022, down from 785,665 in 2012. That’s not an improvement.

  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality and Injury Reporting System says that 907 bicycle riders lost their lives in urban traffic accidents in 2022, up from 506 in 2012. That’s not an improvement either.

  But the important thing is money, Randal!

He's otherwise on target:

The Dispatch editors point out, probably futilely: It’s Democrats’ Turn to Make the Hard Decision.

I, like many people, am having a difficult time following the wise example of Elvis Costello. Amusement is in short supply these days, grounds for disgust are plentiful.

But at least we can engage in R-rated talk about it, like Jeff Maurer: Biden Is Going Down and He’s Taking the Mainstream Left’s Credibility With Him.

Well, he's not actually R-rated there. Pretty mild for Jeff. (The "cupid shuffle" reference is to a "shut up and live with it" memo sent out from Biden's Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty.)

And Arnold Kling makes the case: The U.S. is in a Crisis.

Stay tuned. If you can stand to stay tuned. Me, I'm watching streaming reruns of The Big Bang Theory, Futurama, Rules of Engagement, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, …

Also of note:

• No, sorry, we're still talking about this. No, Americans Aren’t Voting for an ‘Administration’.

  My sense is that if something dramatic doesn’t happen this week, then nothing is going to happen. Indeed, even now one already senses that the moment has passed, that any sense of urgency there was has dissipated. Inertia is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, right up there with greed and stupidity. One suspects that if Biden were going to have a come-to-Jesus moment, he’d have had it by now. Biden doesn’t seem to be one of those guys who wants to slow down and spend more time with his family—and, given the family, it is difficult to blame him: He is a patriarch of putzes. One might be tempted to appeal to his patriotism, but Joe Biden is, first and foremost, a textbook example of the stunted sort of man who has never discovered anything he cares about more than himself. Of course, the irony of such a man losing his position to Donald Trump would be practically Shakespearean.

  Democrats are already wandering onto the path of least resistance: the “parliamentary” strategy.

  Democrats terrified by Biden’s obvious disability and dreading his likely—at this point, very likely—loss to Trump but too cowardly to do the right thing and put the (political) knife in his back have a comforting story to tell themselves: “We don’t have to convince Americans that Biden is up to the job. We have to convince them that a Biden administration would be up to the job, that the Democratic agenda is preferable to the Republican agenda, that—the country having failed to collapse since 2021—there is no reason to suspect that it would collapse under a second Biden term. We’d have such figures as Antony Blinken and Janet Yellen keeping steady hands on the tiller while Rudy Giuliani and Peter Navarro languish in bankruptcy or jail or whatever, kept at a respectable safe remove from the levers of power. It’s us or those mean Republicans.”

  KDW goes on to explain that we're not living in a parliamentary democracy.

• But in the meantime… Katherine Mangu-Ward asks a burning question in her leadoff editorial in the current print Reason: Does Anyone Care About the National Debt?

  There's a weird little bus stop at the corner of 18th and K streets in Washington, D.C. On the inside, a ticker tallies the national debt in real time, the glowing numbers whizzing by too quickly for the naked eye. On the outside, there's a printed poster with a round number for the total debt: $34 trillion at press time.

  I've lived in D.C. long enough to remember when changing that poster was a special occasion. But lately I've been checking regularly on my commute, since the trillions are racking up more quickly than they used to. The ink is barely dry on the current poster, yet the folks at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the fiscal responsibility nonprofit that maintains the display at the bus stop, will be due to roll out $35 trillion quite soon.

  The bus stop is a semidesperate attempt to convince Washingtonians to care about—or at least give a passing thought to—the national debt as we go about our business. The debt has become an alarm bell ringing in the distance that people are pretending not to hear, especially in the city that caused the problem.

  If, instead of making your way to 18th and K, you'd like to see the numbers rack up in real time, there is the U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time.

• And finally A recent WSJ LTE. from Mr. Jeff Sourbeer from Belleair, Fla.

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren believes that the nation would be better off if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were to cede 2% of their wealth annually to her control. She wants us to believe that, somehow, she’ll spend it more productively than they would.

  This makes as much sense as believing that the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive productivity would benefit from giving her 2% of Patrick Mahomes’s allotted snaps from center.

  Stay in your lane, Ms. Warren.

  Good advice that (sigh) will not be heeded.

Noah Smith is (even post-debate) a Biden fan. But he reminds me why I like him anyway in exposing The elemental foe.

I recommend his entire essay. The slightly surprising thing is that the word "capitalism" doesn't appear even once.

Also of note:

• Channelling Edith Wilson… Jim Geraghty is (it's fair to say) aghast at Saturday's comments from Jill Biden: My Husband 'Is the Only Person for the Job'. Introducing him at a Long Island "tony fundraiser":

  “Joe isn’t just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job,” she declared.

  JG comments:

  I’m trying to think of a bigger metaphorical middle finger to Vice President Kamala Harris, and I’m coming up empty.

  Joe Biden is the only person for the job if your primary criteria for “the job” is keeping Jill Biden as first lady of the United States.

  Bottom line, or close to it::

  Forget being atop the ticket at the Democratic convention in Chicago; between the president’s doddering performance Thursday night, and the [Axios] description of his limited lucid hours, Kamala Harris should be president right now.

  Even with her brainless word salads, semi-profundities, and inappropriate cackling… she'd at least be more competent than Joe on a 24/7 basis.

• But about that "metaphorical middle finger"… You have to wonder about Kamala's innermost feelz about Jill accidentally implying the stone cold truth: Dear, we never seriously considered you to be fit to replace Joe; you were just the right sex and color.

  The WSJ editorialists aren't quite that blunt, but almost: The Mess Democrats Have Made, Kamala Harris Edition. They essentially agree with Dr. Jill:

  The path out of this nightmare might be easier if not for another problem the press refused to recognize—that Kamala Harris wasn’t remotely qualified to be Vice President when Mr. Biden chose her. He had promised to pick a woman as his Vice President, and Mr. Biden selected Ms. Harris because she was a woman of color, not because of her qualifications.

  Ms. Harris had bombed as a presidential candidate, washing out after she couldn’t defend her own Medicare plan at a primary debate. She had risen to the Senate based on patronage. Yet she was hailed by Democrats and the press as the first woman of color on a national ticket, as if this were more important than someone who could do the job. Criticism of her failures on immigration, or of her frequent word salads, was said to be racist or sexist.

  It seems that Biden has decided to muddle on with his campaign. Even the MSM might be watching with heightened scrutiny, so I'm not sure if that can possibly work out for him. I guess we'll see.

• A quick refresher from the Blogfather. Glenn Reynolds, of course, posting on a topic in his wheelhouse: Chevron, The Supreme Court, and the Law.

  Goodbye, Chevron deference. Larry Tribe is already mourning the Supreme Court’s overturning of NRDC v. Chevron, in the Loper Bright and Relentless cases, as a national catastrophe:

  The ones I feel sorry for are my administrative law colleagues who built their courses and careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference.

  — Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) June 28, 2024

  Oh, the humanity!

  Well, speaking as a professor of Administrative Law, I think I’ll bear up just fine. I’ve spent the last several years telling my students that Chevron was likely to be reversed soon, and I’m capable of revising my syllabus without too much trauma. It’s on a word processor, you know. As for those academics who have built their careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference, well, now they’ll be able to write about what comes next. And if they’re not up to that task, then it was a bad idea to build a career around a single Supreme Court doctrine.

  The snark is enjoyably classic, but Glenn goes on to explain what the SCOTUS decisions actually mean without all the heavy breathing from the supporters of unaccountable bureaucracy.

• Hayek the what now? Among the many things I never saw coming: a New Yorker essay entitled Hayek, the Accidental Freudian. It's by Brooklyn College Professor Corey Robin, and he claims this is his "favorite part":

  The great trial of Hayek’s life was his twenty-four-year marriage to Helena (Hella) Fritsch, much of which he spent trying to get out of. Caldwell and Klausinger devote the last three chapters of their biography to the divorce—and for good reason, even if they can’t see it. In Hayek’s anguished bid to end his marriage, we find, just as Freud would have anticipated, the private pathology of the public philosophy, the knowledge problem in practice. That we should discover those pathologies in a marriage is less remarkable than it might seem. From the treatises of antiquity to the novels of Jane Austen to the economics of Thomas Piketty, writers of all sorts have understood the overlap between unions of soul and contracts of need.

  Uh, fine. It will be interesting to see commentary from my fellow Hayek fans about the essay.