Pun Salad

That's from a Philip Greenspun compilation of video clips, this one showing Kackling Kommie Kamala's response to a question about "reparations" from Al Sharpton. Phil wonders: Why does Kamala Harris laugh so often?

Maybe check her entourage for hash oil vape cartridges? Just a thought.

Also of note:

• 

  Oooh, a scandal! Christopher F. Rufo substacked a few days ago about Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem. What problem? Well:

  At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

  However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

  What quickly transpired was a New York Times "debunking", with the headline "Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book"

  Seizes!

  The NYT's online subhed contained the "move along, nothing to see here" sentence: "A plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious."

  Which, in turn, caused the WSJ's James Freeman to wonder: "What Would the New York Times Do Without Experts?" And brought out this fun fact about the NYT's "plagiarism expert" Jonathan Bailey:

  Some news consumers may wonder who elected Mr. Bailey to decide the acceptable amount of plagiarism in a book written by a presidential candidate. Consumers are also free to question the preliminary judgment rendered by the Times-anointed expert. It seems that Mr. Bailey does too, as he writes this week on X:

  For those coming here from the NY Times Article. I want to be clear that I have NOT performed a full analysis of the book. My quotes were based on information provided to me by the reporters and spoke only about those passages.

  In a subsequent post Mr. Bailey notes that he’s been out of the office “and have not been able to follow the coverage. When I’ve had more time, I’ll likely have more thoughts. I’d expect something [Tuesday] or Wednesday on the site depending on client work.”

  And (as of Thursday morn) you can read Mr. Bailey's more complete take here: The Kamala Harris Plagiarism Scandal. Yes, the passages Rufo called a "problem" have been upgraded to "scandal"! By an expert!

  But to my mind, the most insightful commentary on the matter comes from Jeffrey Blehar at the NR Corner: Kamala Harris's 'Plagiarism Scandal' Isn't Her Fault. Why Can't the New York Times Just Admit the Issue?

  In 2009, a district attorney and Willie Brown protégé from San Francisco named Kamala Harris “wrote” a book, Smart on Crime, as part of her preparations for her 2010 bid for state attorney general. You remember it, right? Aside from its remarkable smartness about crime, it was also a literary work of such surpassing majesty and grace that it not only immediately rocked the firmament of English letters but also became part of the syllabi for an entire generation of children, next to King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Or perhaps I misremember and it was just another boring campaign book, churned out to give Harris name recognition in advance of a statewide campaign. (Harris, hilariously, only won that race — in California in 2010, mind you — by a miserable 0.8 percent, a historical factoid I’ll happily plop on the table for my progressive readers to ponder in silence.)

  Well, apparently, several sections of Smart on Crime turn out to be have been plagiarized from Wikipedia, which doesn’t seem terribly smart to me at all. The matter is not really up for dispute: Rufo has the goods this time on what is clearly a series of near-verbatim lifts. So it’s tempting to default to plagiarism jokes for the remainder of this Corner hit and call it a day’s work. (After all, we are talking about a woman who was selected for her present job by a man who was bounced from an earlier attempt at his current job for plagiarizing another man’s life story in his stump speeches, like Steve Martin declaring himself the son of poor black sharecroppers.)

  But let’s not kid ourselves, here: The fault lies with Harris’s ghostwriter, not with Harris herself, not this time. All politicians use ghostwriters to draft their useless (and almost always unread) campaign biographies, and this is universally acknowledged, however much people want to feign outrage about it now. (J. D. Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy all on his own, but you must remember that Vance was an author long before he became a politician.)

  Goodness knows I am not the person to cut VP Harris the slightest amount of slack, but: Yes, let's throw Joan O'C. Hamilton under the bus. I'm sure that 2009 Kamala was equally likely to turn out 248 pages of coherent prose as she is to improvise a few coherent sentences in response to softball interview queries. I.e., not at all. She wasn't the plargiarizing perp.

  But Kamala must be pissed at Joan about this, 15 years later. ("How much did I pay you?")

  Amazon link for Smart on Crime up there on your right. Looks like the Kindle version will set you back $9.99, and the hardcover… whoa, "from $395.00", as I type.

• Break out the tar and feathers. The New Hampshire Business Review hosts some special pleading for fat-cat corporate welfare (seen thanks to my trusty LFOD Google News Alert): Shot on location.

  When the production crew of last year’s blockbuster “The Holdovers” needed a home for their fictional New England boarding school, they scouted out filming locations across many institutions. The film’s interior shots could be mistaken for portraying schoolhouse scenes from 1970s New Hampshire, but “The Holdovers” was not shot here.

  It was shot in Massachusetts.

  Portsmouth-based filmmaker Chris Stinson, owner of Live Free or Die Films, was involved in that production, which he says he wishes could’ve been made locally. But when movie crews look toward the northeast, the Granite State isn’t in their sights.

  “We tried to bring ‘The Holdovers’ to New Hampshire because some of the boarding schools would have been really great locations for it,” Stinson said recently. “Ultimately, the studio wouldn’t allow us to do it, and it’s their money. They get to tell you how they want to spend it.”

  New Hampshire had its "Bureau of Film and Digital Media", with a $264,350 two-year budget, but it was eliminated in the 2021 budget, its duties (such as they were) folded into the "Division of Travel and Tourism Development".

  I'm not one for class warfare, but I'm looking at that and saying "good riddance". A few months back, Reason's Joe Lancaster looked at how that worked for that state that got to warm itself, briefly, in the star power of Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence: 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.)

  I watched Don't Look Up back in 2022, and found it to be a mixed bag. I'd no doubt have reacted more negatively if I were a Massachusetts taxpayer.

  Lancaster's article takes a look at state film subsidies, and it should cure you of any regret that we didn't get to have Paul Giamatti hang out in some scenic NH prep schoolyard.