Pun Salad

I'm already bored. Maybe tomorrow? We'll see. Instead:

If you prefer words, the WaPo has a "Republicans pounce" headline: Tim Walz was a Democratic hopeful. Now, he’s a Republican punching bag. (WaPo gifted link)

Reading through the long article seems to indicate that Minnesota's anti-fraud efforts were largely reactive, once the scams got too big to ignore. Not too good on the proactive side, checking that things were kosher before the checks went out. Tsk!

Also of note:

• It's a must-miss! Andy Kessler takes a look at a butchering operation: Painting ‘Animal Farm’ Red. (WSJ gifted link)

  You can’t hate Hollywood enough. Last month a trailer dropped for “Animal Farm: A Cautionary Tail,” an animated retelling of George Orwell’s 1945 book. It stars Seth Rogen and his infectious chuckle as the pig Napoleon. What could go wrong? Everything, it turns out.

  Orwell’s original book was an allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution, communism and its inevitable descent into totalitarianism. I read it in high school. You probably did too. The allegory was pretty transparent: Napoleon was Stalin, Snowball was Trotsky, Farmer Jones was Czar Nicholas II, and Old Major was a combination of Lenin and Marx.

  Forget all that. While only a trailer is available, the film was reviewed after appearing at a festival last June. Remarkably, instead of Stalin, the antagonist is a tech billionairess who drives a Cybertruck knockoff. Really! She bribes Napoleon with fast cars and credit cards and, as one reviewer put it, her “methods mimic the hostile-takeover techniques of big banks and monopolistic companies.” Hilarity ensues. Yes, capitalism is the villain. Hollywood strikes again.

  Andy notes that the movie's release date is that Commie holiday, May 1.

• But will Tariff Man read it? Don Boudreaux writes Another Open Letter to Tariff Man. AKA Donald J. Trump. And I'm just gonna quote the whole thing:

  Mr. Trump:

  On New Year’s Eve your office released a “Fact Sheet” stating that you “imposed reciprocal tariffs to take back America’s economic sovereignty, address nonreciprocal trade relationships that threaten our economic and national security, and to remedy the consequences of nonreciprocal trade.”

  Your only possible retort that would retain as much as a tenuous connection to logic would be to insist that foreigners regularly dupe us Americans into buying things that we don’t want to buy – that is, to insist that we Americans are incurably stupid at conducting our own economic affairs, while foreigners are so astonishingly clever that they routinely swindle us out of our own money. Do you, sir, really believe that your fellow Americans are generally the intellectual inferiors of foreigners?

  Second, by obstructing each of your fellow Americans’ voluntary, peaceful trades with foreigners you diminish the economic sovereignty of each and every one of us. What (il)logic leads you to conclude that by obstructing – with your taxes on our purchases of imports – the economic sovereignty of 340 million Americans, you thereby “take back America’s economic sovereignty”?

  Your tariffs do for us Americans the opposite of what you assert: they diminish our economic sovereignty and, in this sorry bargain, also make us poorer than we’d otherwise be.

  Well, there's always the possibility that SCOTUS will save us. Although, as Politico's legal analyst Ankush Khardori writes: Trump Is Raging at a Looming Supreme Court Loss on Tariffs. He’s Got a Point.

  The fate of the Trump administration’s tariff regime hangs in the balance before the Supreme Court, and no one seems more concerned about the likelihood of a major defeat than President Donald Trump himself.

  “Evil, American hating Forces are fighting us at the United States Supreme Court,” Trump recently wrote on his social media site. “Pray to God that our Nine Justices will show great wisdom, and do the right thing for America!”

  SCOTUSblog has a long list of the "evil, American hating" folks who have submitted amici curiae briefs in the case. Like the Cato Institute, the Goldwater Institute, and (I am not making this up) Princess Awesome.

Recently on the book blog:

I almost feel like I have to apologize to the Child brothers for not liking their latest Reacher novel very much. They've done everything "right": they stuck to their tried-and-true script, they turned in the contractually obligated number of words, and Jack Reacher is pretty much the same character as seen in the 29 other books you'll find at Amazon.

But this one, I thought, was padded mercilessly in order to accomplish that word count. Need more pages? Add another character, another plot complication, another fight scene, a dead body or two! Eventually you'll get there.

Unfortunately, you also get a book that is the literary equivalent of a Rube Goldberg invention.

As often happens, Reacher gets sucked into this adventure via the usual amazing coincidence: he just happens to be drinking his favorite beverage in a Baltimore coffee shop, when he witnesses the setup to an obvious scam, a shabby-looking couple about to lose their life savings to a team of grifters. Reacher resolves that with a little timely violence, but that also makes him a target for revenge by the grifters' boss.

But wait, that's not all! There's been a grisly murder at the Baltimore Port Authority! It's been written off as an "accident" by the cops, but employee Nathan Gilmour knows otherwise, and (moreover) knows that he was the intended victim. His survival strategy sounds unlikely to work, but that doesn't matter, because (via a different amazing coincidence) it involves the same coffee shop that Reacher is inhabiting, and Reacher receives Gilmour's misguided plea for help. Thanks to (more coincidences) an unfortunate heart attack and mistaken identity.

Eventually, rough justice is delivered unto the bad guys, but it takes a large number of words.