Pun Salad

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.