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“I was born and raised a Catholic. I am completely pro-life, and I don’t apologize for it. While I’m at it, I’ll tell you that I’m not woke, I don’t support affirmative action, and I can tell the difference between a man and a woman. I’m on the right side on all of the culture war stuff, and I’ll never change my mind on any of it.

But we have to realize that a substantial majority of Americans don’t accept our position on abortion. The idea of a national ban is consequently horrible politics. Furthermore, how are we going to ram our position down their throats when their state governments refuse to cooperate with a federal ban? Is it going to be like Prohibition? Are we going to declare martial law? Are we going to hire hundreds of thousands of new federal law enforcement officers to enforce the law? Give me a break!

Abortion is, and should remain, a state issue. If Alabama and Oklahoma want to ban it altogether, God bless them. Just don’t try to impose a ban on blue states unless you want to lose more elections. I’m in it to win.”

If he didn’t before, he does now.

“I told you in 2016 that Social Security and Medicare were getting close to insolvency, and that something needed to be done. Nobody paid any attention to me. Today, the problem is still there, except it’s worse. The two current frontrunners for the nomination have no plan to fix it, or even any apparent desire to do so. That puts the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk. It’s completely irresponsible.

It’s too late to solve the problem by raising the retirement age–many of the Boomers have already retired, and more are retiring every passing day. We can’t cut their payments, because too many of them are completely reliant on them. So what can we do?

There are two things we can do right away. First, we can change the cost of living formula for Social Security to be more realistic. That will save some money. Second, with my carbon tax, and with the elimination of the Biden subsidies, there will be plenty of money in the overall budget to fill in the gaps. That’s exactly what we’ll do until we can come up with a long term bipartisan fix.

That’s my plan. Without one, our retirees are going to be facing a roughly 20 percent cut in income in the foreseeable future. You need to be asking the other people on this stage what they’re planning to do to solve the problem. If you don’t vote for me or hold them accountable, you have only yourself to blame when the cuts come.”

Every now and then, you hear something that is so stupid or cynical, it takes your breath away. That happened to me yesterday while I was watching the NBC News. During a story on the soaring cost of property insurance in Florida, the state’s CFO blamed the problem on “woke” insurance companies.

That’s right. Insurance companies aren’t raising rates because the cost of tropical events is increasing due to the state’s failure to deal with climate change; they’re doing it because they’re “woke.” Ignore the bottom line and stick with the narrative, guys!

Apparently the plan here is to “solve” the problem by making you hate your insurance company. That may win DeSantis some votes in the short run, but it certainly isn’t going to decrease the cost of property insurance.

Nancy Mace has come to McCarthy’s office to talk strategy.

MACE: Help me out, Kevin. I’m a little confused about something.

MCCARTHY: Sure. Whatever I can do to help.

MACE: Our ultimate objective is to keep control of the House next year, right?

MCCARTHY: Of course.

MACE: And to do that, we need to hold the Biden districts we managed to win last year, right?

MCCARTHY: Right again.

MACE: And a logical way to do that is to look moderate, constructive, and reasonable to the average swing voter, right?

MCCARTHY: Can’t argue with that.

MACE: Then why are we threatening to pass federal abortion legislation, holding up the defense bill, talking about budget cuts that weren’t in your Biden deal, and openly looking at impeachments that are going nowhere?

MCCARTHY: I have to keep the party united. That means appeasing the crazoids and the base.

MACE: But we can’t win doing that. We’ve shown that over and over again. As they say about Twitter, the base isn’t America.

MCCARTHY: No, but it’s a huge part of the Republican Party, and it demands red meat. It’s very hungry. I have to keep it happy.

MACE: So we’re going down the same path as before. Most of America thinks the base is nuts. How is that going to lead to a better result?

MCCARTHY: Something will turn up. We’ll be OK.

MACE: Like what?

MCCARTHY: I don’t know. Maybe Putin will win in Ukraine. Maybe we’ll have a big recession. Something good will happen. Trust me.

MACE: So our plan is to wait for a miracle?

MCCARTHY: They happen more often than you think. Remember, God is on our side. We’re Republicans, after all.

Mace leaves, not looking very happy.

“I know more about fighting crime than the rest of the people on this stage combined. I was a prosecutor, you know. I was also the governor of New Jersey. You might have heard that we have some experience with organized crime up there.

In 2016, Donald Trump ran as some sort of Batman figure who would stamp out crime in America. You know what actually happened? The increase in crime that we are experiencing today started under his presidency! You can look it up. He wasn’t to blame for that–no president is. But he was just blowing smoke when he said he could stop crime by himself.

The fact is that crime is primarily a state and local issue, and each jurisdiction is different. Some places have very effective law enforcement agencies; some don’t. What the federal government can do is leave the effective ones alone, and try to help the ones that aren’t with money and expertise. That’s it.

The bottom line is that anyone on this stage who claims he has a plan to eliminate crime is lying to you, and you should treat them accordingly. That’s just the way it is.”

Imagine that you are Chris Christie, and you are running for president. It won’t be enough for you to take down Trump and DeSantis; you need to prove to a large segment of GOP voters that a more Reaganesque approach to politics is both prudent, from a policy perspective, and an electoral winner. What would you say?

On climate change, an answer to a debate question would run something like this:

“I know there are plenty of people in our party–some of whom are on this stage–who either believe that climate change is a hoax, or that we shouldn’t do anything to try and stop it. I’m here to tell you that climate change is real, folks. Those images of hurricanes and wildfires and floods you see every day on TV aren’t fake. I should know. I was the governor of New Jersey during Superstorm Sandy, and I’ve seen the evidence first hand.

We can either ignore the problem and watch as hundreds of people die and countless billions of dollars in property is destroyed every year, and call that acceptable collateral damage, or we can take steps to mitigate the issue up front, and reduce the cost and misery in the long run. The question is how to do it.

The Democrats have done it with wasteful public spending and regulations. They would, wouldn’t they? A true Republican plan would give individual people and the private sector the freedom to find their own best solutions. That means a carbon tax.

I know we hate taxes, but a carbon tax would take the government mandates and spending out of the equation, and it would permit us to cut income tax as an offset. That is the tax that reduces incentives and makes us less productive. It would also give us the basis to impose tariffs on exports from countries that don’t have carbon taxes. That would raise other revenues that could be rebated to American consumers, and would protect us from the avalanche of Chinese goods that we have today.

It’s a win-win. Many Republican economists support it. I’m asking you to support it, too.”

A group called “No Labels” is considering running a candidate for president on a platform that supposedly represents the consensus, centrist position of the American people. For example, “No Labels” supports a package of immigration reform which includes both stronger enforcement and a wider path to citizenship. Does this make sense?

Forget the fact that Biden has largely operated as a “No Labels” president, and agrees with much of the centrist agenda. Ignore the fact that, for the last two years, Joe Manchin has been the most powerful Joe in Washington, anyway. Just think about what it would mean if Manchin were somehow elected president. What power would he have to force the MAGA extremists in Congress to buy into a moderate, constructive “No Labels” agenda? You already know the answer to that one.

“No Labels,” as far as I know, isn’t proposing to run centrist candidates for Congress in the most crimson areas of Alabama. Until it does, and has a reasonable chance of success, this is a waste of time that is only likely to get Trump elected.

The Supreme Court has delivered on the reactionary Christmas list from 2016. Abortion as a constitutional right–gone. The left-leaning administrative state–shackled. Christian culture war carve-outs–created and expanded. Gun ownership rights–unleashed. Affirmative action–eliminated. What more could a reactionary want?

Quite a lot, actually; the terms of the argument are about to change. Up until now, the reactionary agenda has been to limit government actions which negatively impact straight white Christians; if Trump or DeSantis is elected, however, we will see attempts to strengthen the powers of the government to oppress sexual and racial minorities and to limit “woke” speech. There will be plenty of discussion about incorporating “common good constitutionalism” into our jurisprudence; originalism will be out of style, at least for the far right. There is plenty of reason to believe that Thomas and Alito will support this. Can they get three more votes? I doubt it, but it isn’t out of the question.

A botched campaign rollout. A horribly misguided decision to chase committed Trump voters instead of undecideds. Another horribly misguided decision to emulate the failed Cruz campaign by running to Trump’s right. A refusal to take positions that are popular with the electorate as a whole. A foolish passive-aggressive approach to the campaign. Sagging polls. Lost influence with Fox News. By any account, the DeSantis campaign to date has been a DeSaster.

Can he turn it around? He still has some time, plenty of money, the debates, and some lingering connections with Fox News on his side. In order to do it, however, he’s going to have to make his case forcefully and unequivocally against Trump from this point forward regardless of the sensitivities of a portion of the base. That case is that Trump, in spite of what the right would say were good intentions, was a complete failure as president due to his innumerable personal shortcomings, and an irresponsible loser afterwards. He will inevitably lead the party to yet another loss if he is the nominee as a result of his unpopularity among independents. Hence, the need to try something new.

Will this work? Probably not at this stage, but the alternatives are worse. Parroting Trump’s views, refusing to launch meaningful attacks on him, and hoping that someone else (Jack Smith? Chris Christie?) will destroy the man on golf cart for him has been an abject failure thus far. There is no reason to believe that will change between now and the middle of 2024.

Per the NYT, PepsiCo increased its profits significantly even though its sales, by volume, decreased. The reason: price increases well in excess of inflation. Or, if you like, greedflation, the phenomenon The Economist says doesn’t exist.

I have no idea why consumers view Pepsi products as premium products, but for now, it appears they do. Greedflation will continue as long as it works. At what point will consumers wise up and switch to equivalent, cheaper products? Your guess is as good as mine, but I don’t think it will take too long.

Being ideologically aligned with business interests, and desperate to justify its most recent price increases, The Economist argues in its latest issue that the current level of inflation is caused by excessive government overspending, not greedflation. As evidence of this, it points to falling profits in America and European energy subsidies. Is the argument valid?

No. American profits are still very high, historically speaking; the stock market reflects this. The European energy subsidies just had the effect of offsetting what would have been the equivalent of a large tax increase. They did not provide the opportunity for a wave of increased consumer spending on other goods and services.

The reality is that the two principal drivers of today’s inflation are a tight labor market and greedflation. The latter is only possible because wealthy people in America and Europe have plenty of savings, partly due to the enforced inactivity during the pandemic, and the willingness to use them. That condition will continue indefinitely unless there is some sort of massive external shock that destroys asset values and consumer confidence. What would that be? Other than a massive surprise increase in interest rates, it would be something that is unforeseeable and beyond our control.

The facts and the controlling law in the social media censorship case are not much in dispute. The difficulty derives from the application of the facts to the law. I have skimmed the lengthy opinion, and find large parts of it unpersuasive.

After you separate the wheat from the chaff, there are two fundamental questions posed in the case:

1. Did the government’s use of its unquestioned First Amendment right to express opinions on social media posts it viewed as creating a danger to the public health and safety cross the line into coercion of the tech companies?
2. How much legal protection are posts which spread dangerous factual misinformation entitled to under the First Amendment?

As to the first issue, the record clearly shows a long list of attempts by various government officials to persuade the tech companies to do more to stop the spread of misinformation–most notably, on the virus. With the exception of a few scattered comments about amending Section 230 and looking at antitrust action, however, I don’t see anything in the lengthy record that approaches coercion in the opinion, and those issues were already on the table, anyway. The judge doesn’t really focus on the second point; he appears to think that the dispute between the CDC and people spreading medical misinformation about masks, vaccines, and alternative virus treatments, for example, is a mere matter of opinion in which the truth is unclear and the views of dissenters are entitled to equal weight.

I expect this opinion to be substantially modified when it is considered on appeal. Will it be completely overturned? Probably not.

Bruce Rattner argues that we need to embrace AI, as it is the key to increased economic growth in the foreseeable future. He acknowledges, however, that AI will create millions of losers, and notes that the previous wave of globalization and technological change that started in the 1990s led to higher levels of inequality and a dangerous populist backlash. He consequently thinks we need to plan to redistribute the wealth added by AI in order to prevent another backlash. Is he right?

In order to answer that question, we need to consider why efforts to redistribute the wealth created by the last wave of change were a failure. The GOP was, and still is, essentially a coalition of businessmen and retirees. The former group views taxation as theft and any effort, however paltry, to redistribute wealth as socialism; the latter group lives on existing government transfer payments and investments and is consequently insulated from the impacts of creative destruction. Neither has any incentive to support programs that help the victims of technological change. Together, they fought off attempts to expand the welfare state by using culture war issues to flip the votes of just enough reactionary white workers to win elections. The losers fought back; hence, the growth of right-wing populism in America and in Europe.

What part of that equation has changed? If anything, it’s worse today than it was 20 years ago. What Rattner is proposing makes economic sense, but is impossible in the real world, at least in the absence of a major change in the GOP.

The central dilemma of the GOP is that its extremists turn off moderate swing voters, but it does not think it can win without them. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, in other words.

How is the party dealing with this dilemma? By preparing to nominate the guy who cost them the last three elections, of course.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A.