FRIDAY short TAKES.

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.

I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are… pic.twitter.com/oAuTnxZldf

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 11, 2022

Note, the former representative implicitly rejected the false binary, unlike useful idiot James Wigderson, who writes "I'm voting for Mandela Barnes and Tony Evers," in the naïve faith that the policy battles can wait.  Crime is up in Milwaukee.  "Crime and the economy will be the top issues in November, as most major cities have seen a surge in crime, and residents don’t feel safe anymore, while middle-class families’ pockets have been hit the hardest under the Biden administration."  As we keep reminding you. What if the little people refuse to go along?  [The nomenklatura] just have to be defeated.

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Biden knows he wrecked the economy by deliberately surging oil prices in pursuit of the Left’s utopian green nightmare.  So it always is with utopians. "Greens want to make your life worse."

2.  Utopians, by the way, that are incapable of making coherent arguments.   “The enemy is not refuted, enough to unmask him as a bourgeois.”

3.  The hair of Gavin Newsom's dog:  "'Relieving' inflation with free money is like treating a headache with a ball-peen hammer."  (With a shout-out to Milton Friedman.)

4.  Expect political words to be polysemous.

5.  Don't lead new grand causes, just mind the store.

6.  Great moments in intersectionality!  "A protected class going after a couple of protected classes."

7.  Turf the Donks out for the Gipper.  "Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive."

8.  The Tragic Vision.  "The challenge for policymakers is to craft those policies in a way that minimize tradeoffs."

9.  The Tragic Vision, with an impossibility theorem.  "The study of political institutions is, at least in part, an attempt to understand how to get good government even if we can’t guarantee good politicians."

10.  Cowardly wokeness, redux?  "[C]onformity, hamstringing the talented."

11.  Can, road, foot.  "Medicare is funded through 2028 and Social Security through 2035, according to government projections."

12.  Obviously not.  "What has [China or Russia] done since going communist that helps its leadership woo others?"

13.  We can do better without experts.  "[I]f the pandemic taught us anything, it's that degrees and area expertise don't necessarily lead people to good decisions or sound interpretations of data."  Plus advice on avoiding a repeat.  "[The] book is full of examples of public institutions failing, yet [the author's] answer is more public institutions with more resources."

14.  The feminist way.  "Fight back for your right to have unprotected sex with some girl you just met in a bar, knowing she can always get an abortion if she 'accidentally' gets pregnant."

15.  Where there’s smoke, there’s normally fire.

16.  Editorialize much? "[Davante] Adams, 29, has retained J.R. Hobbs, a well-known Kansas City-area defense attorney for the rich and powerful."

17.  Reject the false binary!  "Are Americans getting tired of the 'choice' between dictatorial Democrats and control-freakish Republicans?"

18.  Yes.  "It’s time to take the mask off your face or face the fact that you look like a fool."