Pun Salad

Don't want to make a big deal about this, but I was in the mood for some semi-violent mindless fun, and this popped up on Amazon Prime. And I've always enjoyed Awkwafina's movies. So…

Set in the near future, California has taken a desperate step to deal with the fiscal crisis they so richly deserve. Their "Grand Lottery" has a twist: if you murder the lottery winner, you get the jackpot. Guns are disallowed, but otherwise thumbs up. Bolt guns to the forehead seem to be the method of choice, but edged weaponry is also populaar.

Awkwafina plays Katie, who accidentally wins. And near-immediately, and cluelessly, finds herself in deep doo-doo. Literally hundreds of people are looking to do her in. Onto the scene pops Noel (John Cena), who offers her protection. But can she trust him?

Also showing up (eventually) is Simu Liu, who was great in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Uh, playing Shang-Chi. (It appears he also played a Ken in Barbie, which I have yet to see.) (And, oh, it appears that John Cena also played a Ken in Barbie.) (And Awkwafina was also in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.)

MPAA: "Rated R for pervasive language, violence, and sexual references". Also some smoking.

The WSJ editorialists note the dog that won't hunt: The Electric Vehicle Transition That Isn’t.

For the record, today's Getty Eye Candy is last year's news: A truckload of Tesla Model Ys caught fire in Turkey. (That article reassures: "Electric vehicles don’t catch on fire at a rate higher than gasoline-powered vehicles, but they do catch on fire for different reasons.")

Also of note:

• Join us at the picnic! You can eat your fill of all the food you bring yourself! Honest, I think I rewatched The Music Man last week instead of the Democrat's convention. But at City Journal, Fred Bauer describes how I could have gotten mixed up: The Music Man Convention.

  Watching the Democratic Convention, I was reminded not so much of Chicago 1968—a replay of which some feared—as River City 1912. In Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, the traveling salesman Harold Hill comes to the fictitious Iowa town to sell music instruments for a boys’ band that he has no intention of forming. He has to save them from the moral danger of the pool table, after all: “Trouble, with a capital ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘P’ and that stands for “Pool.” The Music Man celebrates these twin American loves of small-town life and customer service. Hill is a master of delay and promising substance that is—don’t worry—just around the corner.

  This DNC could be seen as the Music Man convention. When the former players of his championship-winning high-school football team came out in their jerseys to introduce Walz, I almost expected to hear “Seventy-Six Trombones” play. Instead of the pool table, the great threat to America was Donald Trump: we’re not going back, with a capital “B” and that rhymes with “T” and that stands for “Trump.” Harris has avoided on-the-record interactions with the media, and even her policies get adjudicated mostly through spokesmen. As Nevada senator and Harris ally Catherine Cortez Masto told RealClearPolitics, “we need to continue to ensure that we are flexible when it comes to solving the problems of this country.” The Harris campaign has so far angled to keep her policy program in the same place as Harold Hill’s music lessons: the imagination.

  (This article's headline from Iowa Stubborn. A very strained metaphor, but your money back if unsatisfied.)

• I used to save campaign allegations of phoniness until Sunday. But they come too thick, fast, and obvious this year. Rich Lowry accuses: Democrats Mislead on Rhetoric of Freedom, Offer Fake Libertarianism.

  

  To listen to the speeches from the podium at the Democratic National Convention, you’d think Democrats were handing out Friedrich Hayek’s libertarian classic, The Road to Serfdom, on the floor.

  In recent weeks, Democrats have made a hard pivot to adopt the rhetoric of freedom, and the tack was particularly pronounced in Chicago.

  The anthem of the convention was the Beyoncé song “Freedom,” and the Harris campaign unveiled a new ad, “We Believe in Freedom.”

  [Examples elided]

  There are a couple of things to say about this rhetorical maneuver — one is that it might work in sheer political terms by associating Democrats with a deeply held traditional American value; the other is that it is utterly cynical and runs completely counter to the progressive mode of governance.

  It’s as if the pioneering English socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb made their slogan, “Live free or die.” Or if the 20th-century socialist intellectual Michael Harrington began to insist he was a fan of the work of Milton Friedman. Or if Bernie Sanders displayed the revolutionary-era Appeal to Heaven flag once favored by Tea Party activists.

  Borrowing an old Republican chestnut, Oprah Winfrey said, “Freedom isn’t free.”

  I, for one, an not hoodwinked. And I will never miss a chance to link to Hayek's The Road to Serfdom at Amazon.

  One could ask Kamala (with respect to the first item above): "Will you give American consumers the freedom to buy the cars they want, and give manufacturers the freedom to make them?"

• Who's on first? Kevin D. Williamson thinks we should be Getting Past ‘First’. But first (heh):

  My favorite thing about Kamala Harris—and the list is not very long—is that she never held that silliest and most un-republican of all titles in American public life: first lady.

  Harris seems likely, at the moment, to become our first female president. We might have done worse—and almost did. 

  [Clinton stuff elided. Wonderful as it is.]

  Harris, as she will tell you—and tell you, and tell you—checks some other boxes. She wouldn’t be the first black president (she would be the second black president with no ancestral connection to the larger African American community composed of the descendants of slaves, which will be of interest to somebody somewhere, I am sure) but she would be the first president of Indian background and of Caribbean background. So she’d be putting points on the board for two increasingly important minority constituencies simultaneously. (Colin Powell, our first black secretary of state and the man who might have been our first black president, if he had desired to be, also was of Jamaican ancestry, a child of immigrants raised in the South Bronx.) This state of affairs seems to have confused Trump, possibly because he is a rage-addled ignoramus, but if you’re looking for a political class that—pardon the odious expression—“looks like America,” Kamala Harris and Tim Walz together cover a lot of ground. 

  But I wonder: Are her indelible characteristics still all that interesting? Kamala Harris does not seem to me a very interesting sort of person in general, but, if I were making a list of interesting things about her, her sex and her ethnic background—and the fact that she was the first person with such characteristics to hold certain offices—still wouldn’t be very high on the list. (Top of the list? Her pissy authoritarianism.)

  That last link goes to a near-forgotten pro-freedom 6-3 SCOTUS ruling. One that didn't go the way Kamala wanted.

• Beware the seed oils! You may have heard that RFKJr dropped his candidacy and endorsed Trump. But Christian Britschgi looks at the story under that headline: At Rally, RFK Jr. Says He'll Stop Forever Wars, Seed Oils From Trump's Cabinet. The very first sentence provides indications that he's delusional:

  "In an honest system, I believe I would have won the election," Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a press conference in Phoenix today, where he announced he would be suspending his campaign in 10 battleground states. He urged his supporters in those states to vote instead for former President Donald Trump.

  Kennedy blamed media and government censorship for suppressing his campaign message and attacked the Democratic Party's legal efforts to keep him off the ballot.

  While the two men still had major disagreements, Kennedy said that Trump would be the superior candidate on his three major, "existential" issues of "free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children."

  In a long, wide-ranging speech, Kennedy reiterated many of the heterodox concerns that had motivated his campaign, including that processed foods, seed oils, and pharmaceuticals were causing an explosion of chronic disease in children, that the U.S. was "addicted" to forever wars, and that the government was weaponizing agencies to suppress free speech and independent messages like his.

  RFKJr tried and failed to get any traction with Democrats ("Harris, he said, had refused to speak with him.") and the Libertarian Party. So Trump was kind of his last resort. And:

  Kennedy said he had several meetings with Trump, in which the former president committed to giving him a role in his administration.

  Well, another sign that a second Trump Administration would be even crazier than the first.