Sep
17
2024

It Came With an Expiration Date

Just over a month, as it turned out:

But now…

Gee, Tim, the hardest conversation I've had in my grocery store lately was about the baseball cap I was wearing. Long story.

But if you prefer text over tweets, the Federalist's Jason Miyares notes that Tim Walz Brags About Passing Laws That Restrict Speech.

This week, a federal court will take up a case challenging a 2023 Minnesota law that prohibits employers from discussing religious or political matters at required meetings, including meetings on elections, regulations, and whether employees should join a union.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., bragged about the impact of the new law, saying that employers will either have to toe the line or be sent to jail.

Making matters worse, Walz also personally appointed all the members of Minnesota’s teacher licensing board, which recently instituted new rules restricting and coercing teachers’ speech. These new regulations “require educators to ‘affirm’ their students’ gender identities, have ‘racial consciousness,’ and learn to ‘disrupt oppressive systems,’” according to Fox News. Count me in as one of those who are shocked yet perhaps not terribly surprised that Walz believes that there should be no guarantees to free speech in America.

That's not "Minnesota Nice"; it's Minnesota Authoritarian.

(It's Constitution Day, by the way. Maybe someone could give Tim one of those pocket-size versions, with the First Amendment bookmarked?)

Also of note:

  • Consigned to the Memory Hole. Megan McArdle recalls the good old days when Democrats weren't shy about expressing their fondest desires for the country. But now: Democrats downplay extremist positions. Do they even remember them?

    The correction is the most underrated journalistic form. Almost no one reads them except other journalists. But read properly, each one tells a little story not just of what the journalist got wrong, but how they missed it. Sometimes that story is pretty dull: Names can be spelled many ways! But sometimes it’s a revealing tale, and that’s what you’ll find in the whopper of a correction that Time issued last week:

    “The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump’s statement in the presidential debate accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of supporting ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’ As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.”

    The mistake is understandable, to a point, because it sounds too bizarre to be true. (It also slipped past the legendarily persnickety fact-checkers at the New Yorker.) The fact that Kamala Harris endorsed a policy so extreme that it sounds like an urban legend tells you just how badly Democratic politicians misunderstood their voters in 2019 — just as its peremptory dismissal by two publications tells you how badly many of those voters still misunderstand their politicians today.

    If you notice Kamala saying that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and the WaPo and the New Yorker agreeing, … then you'll know we got trouble. Right here in River City.

  • A good question, well put. And it's posed by J.D. Tuccille: How Much Will the Major Presidential Candidates Steal From You?

    We know that taxation is theft, and we also know that whichever political candidate wins the upcoming presidential popularity contest will steal from us. The question is, how much will a President Kamala Harris or a President Donald Trump take—information we need to help us appropriately choose our fate? Fortunately, the candidates have told us something of what they have in mind, sometimes grudgingly, so we can compare their effects on the economy and our personal finances.

    After some number-crunching, the bottom line: "For the short term […] Trump's tax and revenue plans look preferable—especially if he can resist his urge to erect tariff barriers that would spark a trade war."

    That's a mighty big if, considering Trump's loose-cannon whims.

    But note that "for the short term" caveat. Both candidates' policies would cause, according to the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, Uncle Stupid's inevitable default on debt. And that would be very bad.

    That's the long term, though. And you know what Keynes said about that. (I plan on leaving apology notes to my kids: sorry we wrecked your country!)

  • I've heard it said that video killed the radio star. Maybe so. But Joe Lancaster says: Prohibition Killed Matthew Perry.

    Last month, federal prosecutors indicted five people for the overdose death of a celebrity the previous year. Three have pleaded guilty so far, and this month, a trial date was set for the other two. Many of the details certainly reveal heinous behavior, but the case makes clear that prohibition itself bears the most responsibility.

    On October 28, 2023, Matthew Perry—the actor best known as Chandler Bing on the long-running sitcom Friends—died at his Los Angeles home. The county medical examiner announced in December that Perry's death primarily resulted from "the acute effects of ketamine"; the full autopsy indicated that he drowned in his hot tub when a sizable dose of the drug depressed his breathing and caused him to slip into unconsciousness.

    Lancaster's account of Perry's demise is unsparing; the five people indicted are truly wretched people. But so was Perry. And the only speck of coercion was Perry's demands on his "personal assistant", who administered the dose that knocked him out. With the implicit "… or I'll fire you."

    Lancaster's right to blame prohibition, which caused Perry to deal with some unsavory characters. But how would things have been different in the absence of prohibition?

  • They don't even look alike. Martin Gurri writes on Mistaking Leviathan for God. Specifically. "demanding personal validation from an institution [the modern "democratic" state] explicitly designed not to provide it."

    Let me suggest a medical name for this cognitive disorder: “Greta Thunberg Syndrome.” Young Thunberg was one of Haidt’s sufferers, healed by the miracle of environmental activism.

    “Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat at home, with an eating disorder,” she tweeted. “All that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.”

    Thunberg is a fairly typical specimen of those who confuse politics with redemption. With an almost gnostic fervor, she hates the society in which she lives quite comfortably, and keeps breathlessly anticipating its doom. She’s wholly focused on personal theater—not surprisingly, her father is an actor, her mother an opera singer—with few, if any, perceptible consequences. She’s sustained by the absolute certainty that she embodies Truth in the eternal war against Falsehood. Above all, she needs the fuel of rage to lift her spirit above this meaningless world—the angrier she gets, the happier she is.

    Greta's transformed herself into a full-on Hamas cheerleader, by the way. We should not have expected different.

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