Pun Salad

The WSJ brings some worrisome news: Many Democrats Break With Israel, Back Measure Stripping Military Aid. (WSJ gifted link)

All 104 supporters of the aid cut were Democrats, save for the measure's author, Thomas Massie. The WSJ article names them for your convenience. My CongressCritter, Chris Pappas voted against. [UPDATE: Now that I looked at the roll call, it turns out Pappas actually voted "Present". Accordingly, my estimate of his spinelessness has been increased by a few points.] Somewhat surprisingly, New Hampshire's other CongressCritter, Maggie Goodlander, voted in favor of eliminating the aid. She tweeted her excuse:

My statement on Rep. Massie’s amendment to H.R. 8595.https://t.co/PHxcP6rHLQ pic.twitter.com/wXs5Xxg9dk

— Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander (@RepGoodlander) July 16, 2026

As I don't need to tell you: make your own judgment about Maggie's tergiversation. I assume she is feeling some heat from her primary opponent. NH Journal includes that angle in its story: Centrist No More? Goodlander Votes to End Israel Aid.

Paige's campaign website's issues page is here, and … well, immediately after I looked at it, I read Jeff Maurer's recent post about a different campaign, which contained the capsule summary: "It’s a hodgepodge of shallow sound bites that appeal to morons[.]"

Also of note:

• Pirates of the Strait of Hormuz? Kevin D. Williamson belittles Trump's inconstant and whimsical approach to Strait Gangsterism. (archive.today link)

  Iran is being swept by a wave of nationalism, while the United States is being swept by a wave of explosive diarrhea—do you ever get the feeling that Hegelian capital-H History is laughing at you?

  In a war with a filthy little junta in Tehran, Donald Trump has managed to make the United States of America the bad guy. If you are looking for a quick-and-easy definition of shmuck, there you go. Of course, it doesn’t help that it is an illegal and immoral war being waged by an incompetent game show host.

  What did it take to get Iran’s former dissidents to line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the ayatollahs who have been murdering and torturing them? A former opponent of the ruling cabal in Tehran—one who had been tear-gassed and beaten so badly that “he couldn’t move for days” during the 2022 protests—tells the Wall Street Journal: “They said that a civilization was going to be destroyed, not a regime.” You’ll remember that post, no doubt. I guess the Iranians haven’t heard whatever the Persian is for “take him seriously, not literally.” It is a pity that Lindsey Graham, the Rudy Giuliani of the Senate, is no longer around to explain it to the long-suffering Iranian people, who surely would have benefited from the wisdom of his experience and the constancy of his judgment.

  Let me put on my Pollyanna hat and say: It could still work out well, eventually, because Trump might accidentally hit on a working strategy.

  Still, we wouldn't be in this situation under President Nikki Haley.

• Send in the clown. Jacob Sullum observes; During His Confirmation Hearing, Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement'.

  "I'm his lawyer," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: "Was his lawyer," he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche's nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump's personal interests?

  Probably the latter, judging from Blanche's central role in Trump's brazenly corrupt "settlement agreement" with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the "improper" product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers' expense.

  One more Article of Impeachment, assuming that CongressCritters grow a spine. But …

• Worrying about what people will think. Audrey Fahlberg looks at the possibilities: A Third Trump Impeachment? Some Democrats Aren’t So Sure.

  If the Democratic Party is united on one issue, it is opposition to President Donald Trump. Yet despite their shared desire to impede the president’s policies and reclaim the White House in 2028, Democrats are deeply divided about how far to go in fighting Trump in the meantime. A struggle among Democratic factions could determine whether Trump will be impeached for a third time.

  This debate is playing out behind closed doors. Back in March, House Democrats gathered in Seattle for a policy retreat organized by the party’s campaign arm. At one point, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, warned his colleagues that impeaching Trump again would be a mistake—and could backfire on the party politically. Most people in the room applauded, according to two people who attended.

  For Smith, the political calculus is straightforward. Polls consistently suggest that Democrats will claim a House majority after this year’s elections and regain the power to launch impeachment proceedings. Yet doubters such as Smith believe that impeaching Trump a third time wouldn’t make him go away; it would only rerun a failed political playbook that previously benefited Republicans. “We impeached him twice last time; both times he got stronger after we did it,” Smith said in a recent interview with The Free Press.

  This is not going to merit a new chapter in Profiles in Courage, in other words: Democrats worrying less about the country, more about possibly jeopardizing their political future.

Recently on the book blog:

I got a bargain on the Kindle version: $4.99. My reader reports main text (not counting footnotes and references) is 1012 pages, so that works out to be slightly under a half cent per page! What a deal.

As you can deduce from that page count, however, it is a meticulously detailed biography. For example, at one point it reports: "From 1933 through 1938 the seminar met at 2:15 on Mondays…". And Hayek was only one of the three seminar conveners!

And the book only goes up to 1950. Volume II is apparently in process.

So I confess: I skimmed a lot along the way. Still, I got a pretty good picture of Hayek's life: his family and friends (and some enemies), his intellectual development, his professional odyssey, and ongoing controversies. And a lot of history, economic and otherwise.

I was especially taken by the book's description of the economic climate that caused Hayek to write his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, a jeremiad against socialist central planning. I did not fully appreciate how many "men of science", especially in Britain, advocated strongly for a "planned economy" during and after World War II. (They were also pretty moon-eyed about Stalin and the USSR.) Hayek and a few others were pretty lonely in their advocacy of free markets, private property, and liberalism in general. Arguably, Hayek's book saved the US (and eventually other countries) from disaster. (At least until now.)

The book also discusses Hayek's troubled love life. His first marriage to Hella was continually roiled by his infatuation with his first love (and distant cousin) Lenerl. Who was married to someone else. Hella was adamantly opposed to divorce, which caused Hayek no end of professional, romantic, legal, and financial woes. Eventually, the divorce happened, but Hayek doesn't come off well, even in the book's sympathetic retelling.