Pun Salad

I'm not proud of my lazy reply, but my state's senior senator served up a fat pitch hanging right over the plate:

"... everyday Americans will be forced to foot the bill for skyrocketing health care costs."

Instead, you'd prefer that everyday American taxpayers be forced to foot the bill. Be honest and say that.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 8, 2025

Unfortunately, it appears this morn that, as Noah Rothman says, The GOP Is Letting Democrats Win the Shutdown.

Why couldn't MTG have been satisfied with exposing the Jewish space lasers?

Also of note:

• To be fair, it's pretty easy to lose tiny things. Ed Morrissey points out something Too Fun to Miss: CBS, Progressives Lose Their Minds Over Bari. Triggered by this tweet:

  I mean the amazing thing is that they mentioned Dan rather
  
  There are at least a dozen other reporters they could’ve named. Ffs, they used to have Walter Cronkite. Instead they named the guy who resigned in disgrace after peddling fake documents. https://t.co/4FKvXjk6ST

  — (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) October 7, 2025

  Ahem. Bari Weiss now runs CBS News in large part because of Dan Rather. The decision by CBS News and 60 Minutes II to use fabricated Texas Air National Guard documents was an attempt to throw a presidential election by using a bad campaign smear to impugn George W. Bush's military record -- just a few years after cheering on an admitted draft dodger in Bill Clinton. Dan Rather fronted that segment, and then refused to admit the corruption behind it, even after CBS News repudiated it. 

  Dan was occasionally fun to listen to for his faux-folksy quips. E.g., "Don't taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek."

• Not a Gilligan's Island joke. Well, not a direct one, anyway. Thomas W. Hazlett declares Brendan Carr Veers off Course in the Manner of the SS Minow. (WSJ gifted link)

  Brendan Carr wasn’t the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to threaten broadcasters with losing their licenses over programming he didn’t like. In the most famous speech ever delivered by a U.S. regulator, Newton Minow stood before the Las Vegas convention of the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961, complained about the state of television, and demanded that broadcasters shape up.

  Minow declaimed against what he called the “vast wasteland”: “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” He told the broadcasters ominously: “Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue. . . . There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license.”

  The next morning, the front page of the New York Times blared: “F.C.C. Head Bids TV Men Reform ‘Vast Wasteland’: Minow Charges Failure in Public Duty—Threatens to Use License Power.” Minow’s attack generated no First Amendment kickback. The only dissent came from “Gilligan’s Island,” the 1964-67 CBS sitcom that depicted the SS Minnow as a vessel gone wildly off-course on its three-hour cruise.

  Instead Minow was treated as a hero, winning the George Peabody Award in 1961 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. (He died in 2023 at 97.)

  Ah, the good old days, when government bureaucrats were able to threaten broadcasters, with the implicit approval of other news outlets.

  Not that it matters, but: I'm pretty sure I never watched a single episode of Gilligan's Island all the way through.

• And in more recent abuses… It can now be told (by J.D. Tuccille): TSA watchlists were used as tools of political warfare.

  The Trump administration receives well-justified criticism for using government power to punish political foes such as former FBI director James Comey, funder of left-wing causes George Soros, and law firms linked to the Democratic Party. But don't forget that former President Joe Biden's administration also weaponized the state against its enemies. It just did so quietly, behind the scenes, and with the approval of much of the media. The Biden administration not only leaned on tech companies to muzzle critics of the powers-that-be, but it also turned due-process-free watchlists into means of harassing people it didn't like.

  On September 30, "the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the results of an internal investigation uncovering widespread abuses committed by Biden administration officials, who weaponized the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) against innocent American citizens," according to a TSA press release.

  The Biden administration is accused of adding people who "resisted mask mandates on airplanes nearly six months after the CDC relaxed its indoor mask mandate" to watchlists that subjected them to extra security. It also watchlisted not just participants in the January 6, 2021 riot, but also those merely suspected of traveling to the Washington, D.C. area in sympathy with the protesters. "This targeted campaign of harassment continued through June 2021, six months after the events in question, despite no clear or immediate threat to aviation security." (Emphasis in original.)

  Nothing about this, as near as I can tell, at Techdirt. Doesn't fit their narrative, I guess.

• In case you were getting too cheerful… George Will wonders: What if a Russian victory in Ukraine were only the beginning? (WaPo gifted link)

  So, here are 119 pages of wartime reading: “If Russia Wins: A Scenario” by Carlo Masala, professor of international politics at Munich’s Bundeswehr University, which serves Germany’s armed forces. An immediate bestseller in Germany and then the Netherlands, the booklet has been published in London but not yet in America. His scenario is a literary device to frame a question: Suppose Russia’s victory in Ukraine “is only the beginning”?

  Masala’s scenario begins in March 2028, when two Russian brigades surge into Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city (population 57,000), on Russia’s border. Eighty-eight percent of the residents are Russian-speaking, and many have been supplied with smuggled small arms and machine guns.

  Simultaneously, Russian soldiers disguised as tourists take ferries to seize the Estonian coastal island of Hiiumaa. The attack on the three Baltic states, each a NATO member, has begun.

  GFW notes that we're not sending the right signals:

  Putin strolled down Donald Trump’s red carpet in Alaska, then took none of the steps regarding Ukraine that Trump said were necessary for Russia to avoid “very severe consequences.” Instead, Putin intensified Russian attacks.

  A connoisseur of Western dithering, Putin probably anticipated the response his current flurry of contemptuous aggressions has elicited. Trump has said: “I don’t love it.”

  Can you still get a Nobel Peace Prize if your foreign policy "dithering" encourages Putin?

• A heartfelt wish. Martin Gurri says We must resist the moral rot that has the left cheering for the death of its opponents.

  If we gaze down at the bloody ground, there is much to fear and much to regret.

  And it’s hard to tear our eyes away from the carnage and the moral madness around it.

  A young woman, Iryna Zarutska, while riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, was slashed to death by a multiple repeat offender. Because the perpetrator was black and homeless, and the young woman white, the city’s progressive mayor showered compassion on the killer but said not a word about the victim.

  A young man, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated as he engaged in open debate with students at a college in Orem, Utah. Because Kirk was a conservative MAGA activist, the left side of the web lit up in celebration over the death of a husband and father of two.

  In Dallas, Texas, a sniper targeted an ICE facility, killing one nameless detainee and severely wounding two others. Although the shooter left behind a trail of angry anti-ICE exhortations, the liberal media declared his motives to be a profound mystery.

  I can easily summon additional incidents, additional deaths — children at prayer in a Catholic school in Minneapolis, a health insurance executive going to work in Manhattan, two young persons employed by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.

  In every case, the blood on the ground was that of innocents. Ordinary human beings — people with families, jobs, loves and hates, future dreams — were slaughtered for reasons comprehensible only to the politically deranged.

  Kirk’s murder evoked a standing ovation from the left. Zarutska’s violent death elicited a creepy and contemptible silence. Some lives, it’s clear, are valued less than others.

  Click over for Martin's sensible recommendations.

Recently on the movie blog:

Co-written and directed by Ethan Coen, half of the genius behind The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Blood Simple, etc.! What could go wrong? Especially since it's free-to-me on Peacock?

Well, I liked it OK, but only because I've inured myself to tolerate all the stuff you can read about in the IMDB "Parent's Guide". (Not everyone has the same attitude, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes are pretty brutal.)

Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a private eye out in Bakersfield. Things kick off when a prospective client, Mia Novotny, is found dead from an apparent auto accident, her car busting through the guardrails on a lonely desert road. But Honey had promised to help Mia, so she feels duty calls on her to do at least a perfunctory investigation.

Which opens a can of worms. For example, Honey's led to the "Four-Way Church", run by a charismatic priest (Chris Evans), who's quickly revealed to be sleazy in multiple ways. (A total inversion of Captain America.) She makes the acquaintance of MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who manages the evidence room, and… that relationship develops pretty quickly.

Honey utters some very good lines that made me smile, straight out of the hard-boiled shamus handbook. The plot is twisty. (I had a lot of "I didn't see that coming" moments.) Things get personal when (near the end) Honey's niece goes missing. Given all the other bodies that have piled up at that point (this YouTuber counts eight in all) , Honey's more than slightly concerned.

Now, of course, I have that old Carl Perkins song stuck in my head.