Pun Salad

I'm OK with anything on Andrew Heaton's…

Also of note:

• Especially if that party's name begins with a "D". Jim Geraghty detects some buyer's remorse on the left coast: California Democrats Belatedly Realize the Consequences of a One-Party State. A link-heavy excerpt:

  Let’s begin by granting that California, as the most populous and richest state, is always going to have some unique and larger-scale problems compared to other states. But its modern political leaders have also inherited some unique advantages — some of the best and most productive farmland on earth, the innovations and the economic engine of Silicon Valley, two of the biggest ports in the country, the glamorous dream machine of Hollywood, and plenty of highly respected universities. Companies can choose to relocate out of California, but some of these features, like farmland, ports, and sunny weather, cannot move to other states.

  Current Governor Gavin Newsom and the heavily Democratic state legislature have squandered all those advantages. As I wrote earlier this year, U.S. News and World Report ranks each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment, California ranked dead last in opportunity, dead last in affordability, 47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education. The Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in its most recent State Tax Competitiveness Index. For five straight years, California has ranked highest in people moving out of the state, according to U-Haul’s data. BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement. California ranks fifth-worst in roads and third-worst in drivers, second-highest in accident rate, and second-worst in drunk driving.

  About one of those state rankings: Here's BankRate's America’s Best States To Retire In 2025. Slightly more recent data than Jim quotes: CA moved up to #43. Want to guess which state is #1 before you click over?

• If this blog's name gets changed to "The Donald J. Trump Pun Salad Blog" soon, I'll be pissed. The WSJ editorialists weigh in on the Great Renaming: The Donald J. Trump Center for Everything.

  President Trump’s desire to have his name on everything, preferably in gold, is well-known, and at first we thought the addition of his name to the John F. Kennedy center for the arts in Washington, D.C., was ignorable as familiar Trumpian news. But there is the matter of the law.

  Under 20 U.S.C. § 76i(a), Congress in 1964 established the Kennedy Center as “a building to be designated as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” The title of the building isn’t a casual naming of the kind that happens when philanthropists donate to a museum and are honored with a wing named after them. The name is enshrined in statute as a memorial to the assassinated President.

  The Kennedy Center’s board of trustees was also created by statute, in 20 U.S.C. § 76 (j), which enumerates the responsibility of the officers, including to present music, opera, drama and dance, to contribute to performing arts education and to provide “facilities for other civic activities.” The board is also tasked with ensuring the facility received “necessary maintenance” and had “safe and convenient access” for pedestrians.

  So: yet another impeachable offense. Didn't have it on my bingo card, though.

• That explains why I can't get my poetry published. The National Review editorialists have additional commentary on Jacob Savage's "landmark article for Compact" (mentioned at Pun Salad last week): When White’s Not Right. I especially liked this nearly-forgotten anecdote:

  One infamous story from the woke cultural revolution era is the story of Yi-Fen Chou, whose poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was selected for the Best American Poetry collection in 2015. The editors didn’t know that the same poem had been rejected 40 times by poetry journals when submitted under the name of its real author, Michael Derrick Hudson. The very same work that had been rejected by even obscure publications was suddenly one of the country’s best poems once the author was assumed to be a Chinese woman.

  If you notice at some point in the future that this blog suddenly seems to be written by "Pablo Sanchez" or "Bǎo Shān", you'll know what happened.

• Tsk! Dominic Pino has bad news for St. Nick: How Santa landed on Trump’s naughty list. (WaPo gifted link)

  Millions of American children are looking forward to Santa Claus’s visit and his sleigh full of presents. Timeless tradition? Harmless fun?

  Not anymore. The United States has adopted a new philosophy about foreign trade under President Donald Trump, and jolly old St. Nick is desensitizing American kids to the dangers of trade deficits.

  Here’s how Claus gains an illicit advantage and creates a trade deficit. Claus is not an American, and he brings his gifts from the North Pole (which is suspiciously close to Canada, a country that threatens U.S. national security). The gifts are produced by elves who don’t have the protections of U.S. labor laws in workshops that aren’t subject to U.S. environmental or safety standards. Claus has stolen jobs from American workers with his industrial policy, which uses Yuletide magic to subsidize the manufacturing and transportation of his exports. This unfair competition allows Claus to flood our country with toys priced lower than anyone else can produce them: $0.

  American children have been trained not merely to accept but to celebrate the dumping of foreign goods, directly from Claus’s bottomless sack into their homes, without any government efforts to level the playing field for American producers. Fun as it may be, the Santa Claus tradition damages our national solidarity in the struggle for fair trading relationships. The gleeful acceptance of low-priced imports is only one of many symptoms of the failed neoliberal mindset wrecking this great nation.

  Note the "gifted" link. From me to you.