Dec
21
2025

I Regret Wasting my Vote on This Guy

Specifically, Mitt Romney in 2012. He's 78 now. Slightly younger than Donald Trump, not that it matters. But I suppose that makes him an "elder statesman". And he's now expressing opinions that the New York Times finds fit to print:

Mitt's NYT article is here, and the folks at (not shut down yet) archive.today have it for non-subscribers here.

He's not wrong about the problem:

In 2012, political ads suggested that some of my policy proposals, if enacted, would amount to pushing Grandma off a cliff. Actually, my proposals were intended to prevent that very thing from happening.

Today, all of us, including our grandmas, truly are headed for a cliff: If, as projected, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out in the 2034 fiscal year, benefits will be cut by about 23 percent. The government will need trillions of dollars to make up the shortfall. When lenders refuse to provide the money unless they are paid much higher interest rates, economic calamity will almost certainly ensue. Alternatively, the government could print more money, inducing hyperinflation that devalues the national debt — along with your savings.

Mitt has a one-paragraph nod toward raising the starting age for Social Security payouts, and imposing means-testing (but without "cutting benefits for current or near retirees".) The entire rest of his proposal involves:

And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.

His tax-increase proposals are varied. They sound impressive! But Dominic Pino, currently with the Washington Post calls foul at Twitter, in a masterful thread, which I am gonna blog in its glorious entirety.

Dominic is a monster. The WaPo is lucky to have him.

Also of note:

  • In case you've been wondering if Trump has the authority to categorize fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction… Andrew C. McCarthy has your answer: Trump Has No Authority to Categorize Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. (NR gifted link)

    Law school is a three-year grind. But 40 years later, while I couldn’t tell you a thing about, say, the “rule against perpetuities,” I did internalize the most valuable lesson, which came in the first three hours. It wasn’t a precedent or a statute, just a bit of folk wisdom you mightn’t think would need teaching. But it does, now more than ever.

    It’s this: If you hang a sign that says “horse” on a cow, that doesn’t make it a horse.

    Get it? If you do, then you’ll quickly grasp that a Latin American dope dealer is not an alien enemy combatant. The Defense Department, a creature of statute, does not become “the Department of War” by a presidential decree that sends Pete Hegseth to the front of the Pentagon with a plaque and a screwdriver. A foreign terrorist organization does not, by the abracadabra of “designation,” become an authorization for the use of military force — even if we generously assume that a drug gang is the same thing as a terrorist organization. Lindsey Halligan is not the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Riots are neither patriotic nor mostly peaceful. The congressionally established John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is not, by dint of wand-waving by a crony committee, the Trump . . . anything.

    And fentanyl is not a weapon of mass destruction, even if the “horse” sign in this instance happens to be an executive order.

    This is probably not, technically, on its own, an impeachable offense. It's just another case of Trump torturing language to put a thin veneer of pretend-legality on his other impeachable offenses.