THAT'S THE WAY THE INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLES.

Never mind the political posturing.  "I scoff at the Jarrett regency touting the 'Bipartisan Infrastructure Appropriations' as a victory, as the current ration of pork doesn't even make good this year's wear and tear on the roads, bridges, and mains previous rations of pork made possible."

Look no further afield than Marengo, Illinois, where a referendum adding a local sales tax to pay for street repairs was on the ballot.

I have reservations about any vote of general interest being part of a primary election ballot, with elaborations to come anon.  Think of it this way, dear reader, if the only contested primary is among tax-'-spend Democrats, a referendum to, well, tax-'n-spend is going to have a pretty good chance of passing.

That complaint noted, the recognition of reality is refreshing.  "The alternative to assessing the residents for street repairs is hoping that there will be another transportation porkulus and that your Member of Congress has enough juice to put your broken road into the list of projects."

WHAT'S DISGUSTING? BRACKET BUSTING!

Before a single basketball was tossed, Kentucky coach John Calipari expressed reservations about the size of the tournament field.

Speaking Wednesday from Pittsburgh ahead of his No. 3-seeded Wildcats' first-round matchup against No. 14-seed Oakland, Calipari urged officials to keep the tournament from ballooning past its current 68-team format.

Sources told ESPN's Pete Thamel last week there are ongoing discussions about expanding the men's tournament to one featuring no more than 80 teams.

"I hope it stays where it is," Calipari said. "You know, I know people get mad. They get mad at the committee. You won't believe this. I've been mad at that committee a few times. But you may be mad because of your seed or where they've shipped you to. ... But it doesn't matter who the committee is. We're all going to be upset."

"Upset" is exactly his state of mind a few hours later.

Eight-time national champion Kentucky is struggling to survive the NCAA tournament's opening round, let alone halt its nine-year Final Four drought. A Wildcats program that lost in the round of 64 one time from 1988-2022 now has done so twice in the past three seasons.

On Thursday, it was a catch-and-shoot specialist who played for Division II Hillsdale College last season who added to Kentucky’s misery. Jack Gohlke came off Oakland's bench to bury 10 threes, one shy of the single-game NCAA tournament record, propelling the 14th-seeded Golden Grizzlies to a stunning 80-76 upset over the heavily favored Wildcats.

Mr Gohlke played his high school basketball for Pewaukee, and all of Wisconsin has been wondering how none of Wisconsin, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, or Marquette signed him.  It is not, though, whether this coach or that should take his pension, that concerns us today.  Rather, it is whether that expansion of the tournament field isn't part of that evolution of College Sports, Inc. into four power conferences of sixteen teams.  Goodbye, Shawnee Mission.

IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WEATHER, WAIT.

At the end of February, the Snow Moon got a chance to show its stuff.  The snow, not so much.  By March 2 there was another early warm spell, felicitously timed for a waterfront family gathering in the next subdivision to the west.

For the most part, March has offered near normal rainfall and temperature ranges, although that early warm spell got the daffodils in a protected spot that gets midday and afternoon sun started, just in time for last Friday's return of snow.

Hereabouts, that cover didn't stay too long, simply making for a drab day of watching more brackets being broken.  A few miles to the north, though, came a band of serious snow.  "Rockford officially observed 5.6" of snow at Rockford Airport, breaking its daily snowfall record for March 22nd (previous record, 5.0" in 1916). Chicago officially observed 1.0" of snow at O'Hare Airport."

To the north, the recreational areas of Wisconsin also received snow, probably not enough to salvage the winter season, but perhaps an opportunity for people to get a little snowmobiling or skiing in before fishing and sailing seasons begin.

At least the National Weather Service has not gone on record, the way some environmentalist wackos have, about snowfalls being a thing of the past.  That daily snowfall records for late winter or early spring might come over a century apart (and Friday's anomaly was not the usual sort of Panhandle Hook low that can bring the largest snowfalls any time of the winter, but more commonly in February through April) suggests that attempting to infer any sort of climate change from a few warm days in February isn't scientific.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The model railroad swap meet and show season, which runs from November through March, is winding down, although the continuation of wintry conditions in the State Line make working on the railroad rather than doing yard work a better use of time.

The Gloucester Branch was available for layout tours on the Sunday last, as the Chicago area O Scale meet wound down.  Despite the competition of St. Patrick's Day events, Selection Sunday, and several other swap meets in Rockford and Lena, some 25 visitors looked in.  The powered display track was at work, along with more operable tracks than were on offer a year ago.

EXCELLENCE IS THE BEST RESPONSE TO RACISM.

We noted, previously, how Detroit mayor Coleman Young knew that maxim yet decided that accusing his detractors of racism whenever something went wrong in the hopes that the criticism would go away was the better strategy.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Believe your eyes.  "He was shouting at me!  He looked crazy."  The company he keeps, ditto.  "The Democratic Party has gone batshit crazy, and most young voters aren’t that nuts... The Democrats’ obsessions with transsexuals, illegal immigrants, reparations and squelching free speech offer nothing to blue-collar voters, especially minorities. The real question isn’t why voters are abandoning the Democrats, the real question is why it isn’t happening faster."  Faster, please.  "These people are nuts and they must be defeated."  Before the critical legal theorists annul the Constitution.  "Casual disregard for the Constitution is pervasive in the Democratic Party."  Strongman rule is a fantasy.  "The vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it."  I underestimated the mendacity of these people.

What were we saying about sniveling brats?  "The final aim of the liberal agenda is, therefore, not to have a free and open society but to have a society in which everything is subservient to liberal dogmas. Consequently, the existing rules and practices can always be suspended and restructured."  Not if the Militant Normals have anything to say.  "Voters do not buy the Left's and media's lies about Trump anymore."  No more bull****!  "Context is really overrated when there's a false narrative to be created."

Thanks for noticing, Politico.  "Trump is not Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini."  The lawfare is backfiring.  "No American election has featured this much meddling by the judicial system, and this much naked partisanship from the Justice Department and its proxy, the state of New York. It does not sit well with the American sense of fair play. You blew it. You threw it all against the wall and nothing stuck."  The Narrative is backfiring.  "Such is the media’s contempt for Trump, it seems they’re prepared to consciously distort what he’s actually saying. This will cost them in the long run, as yet more people come to doubt their credibility. And such blatant bias will also benefit Trump, whose support grows with every attack on him from America’s media elites. Whether Donald Trump can make it to the White House again remains to be seen. But if he does, these fake-news merchants will have helped him along the way."  The punishment cycles continue.  "Each step of the way, participants felt they had every excuse and perhaps no choice but to ignore the rules of the game that might otherwise have reined in the excesses of the day."  As might the rising rage of the Militant Normals.  "By continuing to push this 'threat to democracy' nonsense, they are telegraphing to Americans that their problems don't matter. High prices? High interest rates? Rising crime? Illegal immigration? Democrats are too busy breathlessly shouting yet again about how Trump is Hitler to care about any of that stuff."  Let them keep up the breathless shouting.  "The sane have had enough about being pushed around by the insane."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

STOP CRYING WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL.

Last week's story of voter discontent in Sheboygan elicited a very different reaction, "Strange things are afoot at the Sheboygan Piggly Wiggly," from Daily Kos diarist Hunter.

I almost love this story. Almost. Published by the Washington Post on Monday, the article is the latest in a long, noble tradition of "political journalist goes to random grocery store or diner to tell us what random passersby are thinking." But it's not often that you find a piece that really brings home the American Gothic tinge to all of it. You can almost hear it: the souls of the damned, crying out from behind the reporter's keyboard. The haunting wails of Americana as it shops for pork at the Piggly Wiggly.

Hunter's snark will likely elicit a few "preach it" responses from his fellow cosmopolitans.  Whether it will change any minds in Sheboygan, or among Cold Spring Shops readers, is another matter.

Aaaaah, that's the stuff. Just good old-fashioned Trump-supporting Americans, voters who don't mind migrant concentration camps or the undoing of democracy itself if it means bringing the price of a bottle of Coca Cola back under three bucks.

There's nothing in his article about Team Biden engaging in lawfare to keep the Greens off state ballots, which looks a lot like undoing democracy, but I digress, and the "migrant concentration camps" are crowding out youth sports in Chicago, but I digress some more.

THAT'S WHY THEY PLAY THE GAMES.

Five years ago, neurophysiologist Gregg Nigl cobbled together a bracket, then went on a ski trip.

Nigl always filled out a few men's brackets, deploying the same basic philosophy that so many people use -- a little strategy, a little eye test, a little wishful thinking.

For his 2019 brackets, he went heavy on his favorite team (Michigan) and his favorite conference (the Big Ten, except for Ohio State). He had always liked Gonzaga and hoped the school would win a title sometime, so he rode the No. 1-seeded Zags to go all the way. He even sprinkled in the time-honored tradition of picking a random school he had a loose tie to; in this case, he knew someone who lived near the UC-Irvine campus, so he went with the 13-seed Anteaters to upset Big 12 champ Kansas State in the first round.

We're not talking about purely random events, and people filling out brackets can rely on their information, their biases, who has the cutest cheer team, and yet, getting all 67 games right isn't easy.

The possibility of getting every game right is often reported as 1 in 9.2 quintillion. But that figure is slightly hyperbolic. It's computed by assuming all 63 games are coin flips, when, in reality, quite a few NCAA games have much higher percentages in favor of one team. The actual odds of a knowledgeable person picking a perfect men's bracket are closer to 1 in 120 billion.

And guess what? It's not getting any easier. Despite advances in analytics, accessibility of watching games and more experts than ever, the variance of men's college hoops has never been higher. The rise of the 3-point shot has played a huge part, for sure, but so has the transfer portal and NIL. A No. 1 seed hadn't ever lost in the first round of the tournament, then it happened in 2018 and 2023. A 15-seed has won in the first round three straight years, a first in NCAA tournament history. And last year's men's tournament featured a Final Four of no 1, 2 or 3 seeds, which hadn't happened before.

San Francisco State professor Paul Beckman did a study of every men's and women's bracket since 2000, primarily relying upon seeding of teams that made it to the Sweet 16. He found the women's tournament to be slightly more predictable (the odds of picking a perfect women's bracket are still something like 1 in 100 billion) and that the men's tournament has been wildly variable, even from year to year. For example, from 2018-20, the men's tournament Sweet 16 team total seeds went from 85 to 49 to 94. Even the predictability of the tournament is unpredictable, let alone picking individual games.

I'm still not sure how the pools handle those first four games, and with those pairings sometimes involving middling seeds, the rules for treating those teams as wildcards must be arcane.

A PLATINUM JUBILEE, MORE OR LESS.

The California Zephyr made its first trip on March 20, 1949.  Seventy-five years later, Amtrak held a rolling anniversary party on-board.

Passengers who drifted in to the westbound California Zephyr’s crowded Sightseer Lounge leaving Chicago on Tuesday found themselves in the middle of an Amtrak-sponsored onboard event commemorating the first runs of the original Burlington-Rio Grande-Western Pacific streamliner on March 20, 1949.

They were treated to an informative lecture by Thomas Whitt, director and president of the Illinois-based Burlington Route Historical Society. He brought along a generous supply of detailed handouts tracing the pre-Amtrak history of the CZ, and its speedy shovel-nosed predecessor, the Pioneer Zephyr.

Both onboard and at Galesburg, Ill., where Whitt repeated his talk for a large crowd that included the mayor of nearby Macomb, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari filled in developments from 1971 on. His audience included some behind-the-scenes company employees and members of the Young Professionals in Transportation Chicago Chapter who came along for a trip on the Zephyr,with a return on the Illinois-sponsored Carl Sandburg.

Souvenirs for passengers included individually numbered “proof of travel” certificates signed by Amtrak’s top management. The handout was accompanied with stickers and pins featuring original branding artwork.

But the big surprise was the Zephyr’s brief stop at Princeton, Ill., where a raucous crowd of more than 50 townspeople sang “Happy Birthday” as the train pulled in. They presented Magliari with two boxes of Princeton tote bags, which the onboard crew promptly passed out to coach passengers.

I included that "more or less" in the title as the original California Zephyr made its last run in the spring of 1970,  being replaced by a "California service" of a tri-weekly extended Nebraska Zephyr to Denver, the also tri-weekly Rio Grande Zephyr continuing the daytime crossing of the Rockies, but without any sleeping cars, and a cross-platform connection to Southern Pacific's City of San Francisco, also tri-weekly, but with sleeping car space.  Upon Amtrak gaining control of the passenger trains, a through sleeping car returned, although the train was sometimes referred to as the City of San Francisco, on Southern Pacific and Union Pacific as far as Denver via Cheyenne, thence on Burlington.  That Rio Grande Zephyr remained as a day train until 1983, when Rio Grande joined Amtrak, and the through train regained its California Zephyr name and the Rio Grande routing between Salt Lake City and Denver.

IF EVER A VOTER HAD A GOOD REASON TO REJECT THE FALSE BINARY, THIS IS IT.

Here I stand, I can do no other.

Chris Christie is simultaneously helping Donald Trump and helping Joe Biden.  Sorry, no.  He's part of the Coalition of the Unwilling, which I would like to see get bigger.  "The so-called binary choice is only a binary choice if voters vote with the expectation that other voters are treating the choice as a binary choice. In the states and districts that skew strongly one way or the other, if you're going to be disappointed with the outcome anyway, at least vote for the choice you want, rather than vote the Nash strategy."  And in a battleground state, or a close district, should you vote your conscience and someone slag on you for spoiling their preferred candidate's chances, your response ought be, "Offer me a bundle with more policies I want."  Governments are supposed to derive their just powers from our consent, and if they don't, they ought to be gridlocked anyway.

None of which has yet had any effect on the sort of paid pundits who break down the ways the major parties will attempt to win over those Schrödinger voters.  Consider Matt Lewis for the Daily Beast, which is to say, one of those people who argues with but mostly votes for Democrats.

In case you missed the memo, “double-haters” are voters who don’t like either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. This is an emerging cohort that many of us can identify with (although I try not to venture into “hate” territory).

Every year, we are treated to a plethora of news stories about undecided voters. You know the cliché: people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Because these voters (who somehow manage to make it through life without picking a team) are persuadable, they get a ton of ink and disproportionate attention from politicians. If you like receiving voter mail, tell a canvasser you’re not sure which candidate you like—but that you definitely plan on voting.

That "socially liberal and fiscally conservative" includes Reason readers and other libertarian-minded folk.  There might be some socially conservative and fiscally liberal people left, although whether those are ancien regime Democrats kicked to the curb by the McGovernites or are numbered among the RINOs the Trumpies squawk about I'm not sure.  But in a political environment where what the True Believers want determines the candidates, and there has to be some Serious Thinking about whether party primaries mean Reform, and where the political bundles, particularly at the national level, are too big, perhaps the only sane thing to do is to go through life without picking a team.  And perhaps Mr Lewis has identified the hill I would choose to die on.  "Still, if you put a gun to my head, I would give Biden the slight edge to win double-haters and, therefore, the election. That’s because, when push comes to shove, Trump is easier to hate."  If I'm told, pick Trump or Biden in a poll, or be shot, perhaps it would be better to be shot, or perhaps, with Abraham Lincoln, to request a one-way ticket to Tomsk, "where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."  Surely it is not a democracy if I am told I only get two choices, and the lawyers representing those parties are keeping their rivals off the ballot.  "For example, my theory assumes the election will be a binary choice. It might not be. As such, it’s vital for Biden that double-haters do not have a strong third-party candidate to choose from, especially in key states that could swing the electoral college."  It might be more vital for Trump, as in several of the battleground states, the Libertarian tally (socially liberal and fiscally conservative, pay attention!) exceeded the Biden margin of victory.  Republicans, though, tend to prefer having more parties on the ballot for the pragmatic reason that if you put two leftists in a room, you get six political parties, each of which has, as we shall see, its own reason to entice voters away from Democrats.

NOT THIS VALUE PROPOSITION EITHER?

With the basketball tournaments under way, the continuing quest for fans in the seats in the women's game pivots to ... diversity.  "Women's basketball needs faces of future to be Black."  We're not dwelling on the memory-holing of great players in the era before the NCAA became the governing body this time, although that remains germane.  "Giving the talented players a chance to compete is one thing; giving spectators a reason to attend the games or watch them play on television is quite another.  The story of women's basketball is one combining Horatio Alger and Technocratic Impulses."  It's not as if the sport hasn't appealed to the Woke in as many ways as the most creative of promoters can conceive.

TODAY IN THE TABLOIDS.

There is no end to the creative titles people bestow on their leaders, or perhaps on each other:  Grand Poobah of the Water Buffaloes.  The Patriarch of Constantinople.  The Tsar of All the Russias.  The Nizam of Hyderabad.  Then there's the Marchioness of Cholmondeley.  Yes, that is a hereditary title.

It seems that this time, Rose Hanbury isn’t messing around. For years now, people have been convinced that something has been going on between Hanbury and Prince William. And with Kate Middleton not performing royal duties or making public appearances, the rumors have increased tenfold. With the rumors hitting mainstream media, like during one of Stephen Colbert’s jokes on his show, it seems Hanbury is officially tired of this conspiracy.

Good.  And no matter how blasé the Europeans might be about side chicks, especially those who might be described as having a "good personality," the Prince would be very foolish to go tomcattin' around on the Princess.  "William’s lawyers reportedly issued a legal warning, but until now, Hanbury never responded to the rumors."

It's not as if there aren't lots of other People Behaving Badly for the scandal machinery to follow around, nicht wahr?

IF ANYONE IS UNHAPPY, NOBODY CAN BE HAPPY.

P. J. O'Rourke grasped the Woke Hive Mind years ago.  "At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, iII-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats."  All that misery is apparently making the unsatisfied sniveling brats miserable themselves.  "‘Woke’ people more likely to be unhappy, anxious and depressed, new study suggests."

WHEN POLITICIANS PANICKED.

In Reason, John Stossel offered up an ambulance-load of candidate Friday short takes in one article.  "'15 Days To Slow the Spread': On the Fourth Anniversary, a Reminder to Never Give Politicians That Power Again."  A sampling of bon mots:

Days turned into months and then years, while officials chipped away at our freedoms.

I have long been wary of politicians, but even I was surprised at how authoritarian many were eager to be.

Some demanded police to go after people surfing. They took down the rims of basketball hoops. Children's playgrounds were taped up like crime scenes. They told people in rural Utah and Wyoming to stay in their homes.

In the name of safety, politicians did many things that diminished our lives, without making us safer.

They complied with teachers unions' demand to keep schools closed. Kids' learning has been set back by years.

Politicians destroyed jobs by closing businesses. Some shutdown orders were ridiculous. Landscaping businesses and private campgrounds were forced to shut down.

I had hoped that by the end of March 2020 the fashionable nonsense would end.  Sadly, it was not to be.

It's clear now that restrictive rules were not the best way to protect people.

Sweden took a near opposite approach. They mostly left people alone.

Swedish officials encouraged the elderly and other at-risk people to stay home.

But beyond that, they let life carry on as normal. Sweden didn't impose lockdowns, school closures, or mask mandates.

They followed standard pre-COVID wisdom that the best protection is what epidemiologists call "herd" or "collective" immunity. Once a critical mass of people are infected and recover, collective immunity will reduce the total number of infections.

Arrogant American politicians and media "experts" sneered at Sweden's approach.

He counts coup throughout the article; it's a series of reinforcements of the same gripes I've offered all along about Officialdom.

It's another presidential election this year.  Vote as though your freedom depends on it.  It does.

Four years later, have media blowhards who were wrong apologized? Corrected their stories? No.

Have American politicians apologized and begged forgiveness for their arrogance, for destroying jobs, restricting our freedom, and needlessly pushing us around? No.

Let's not give politicians power like that again.

In the absence of a critical mass of voters rejecting the false binary, the best outcome we might expect is for gridlocked governments, state-by-state and in Washington.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

That's what I keep telling you.  Now Dementia Joe confirms it.

Biden is randomly yelling again 😬 pic.twitter.com/EO4QFJenUy

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 19, 2024

His minders filled him up with triple espresso again and set him loose to yell "FIVE HUNDRED BILLION" as if that was meaningful.  Red State's Nick Arama quips, "You don't make America great again by taking more of Americans' money."

It's worse than that, dear reader.  Assuming people don't adjust their behavior in response to the new taxes, which is what they will do, over the next ten years the tax will bring in enough money to offset about half a year of the money-printing the Jarrett regency are currently engaging in to pay off their moocher base favored constituents.

Moreover, the way to reduce your tax bill is to engage in less-productive, nay, money-losing activities, which means there will be less money for the government to tax away, and less stuff to trade with others.  On the other hand, there might be some gifts of appreciated securities to preservation railways.

WHY NOT KEEP THE RUN GOING?

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education breaks down the basketball tournament brackets by academic performance rates.  I'm not sure whether it's for fun or for calling attention to the distortion of the higher education venture by beer-'n-circuses.

VOTERS, ADVISE CONGRESS WHAT CUTS TO MAKE, BEFORE THE BOND TRADERS MAKE THEM.

The college basketball tournament brings with it all sorts of knock-off brackets.  The Cato Institute offers their 2024 Spending Madness.  "Thirty‐two unaffordable federal spending programs are going head‐to‐head in a classic, single‐elimination tournament format. And you get to decide the worst of the bunch."

Note, should you choose to participate, your selections at each round are the expenditures you would rather do without.  Submit your cuts for the first round by Friday (much like the real tournament) or have somebody else make the cuts for you.

Or, opt to do nothing, and wait for the bond traders to concentrate minds in Washington by not bidding at the Treasury bill auctions.

SHOP THE PIG.

Remember, after Donald Trump surprised the Political Class by carrying Wisconsin and Michigan, how the sleazy pontificators on the coasts mused about establishing a Racine bureau?

And perhaps Chuck "Chipmunk" Todd was right about wanting to establish a news bureau in Racine.

What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.

We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.

On the other hand, it's so much easier to sip those appletinis somewhere near Grand Central Terminal, than to actually journey to Racine.

At Reason, David Harsanyi keeps it pithy.  "The left is so enveloped by its identity politics that it may not understand that the other half of the country is sick of it."  There's more, but that's the key. A few more episodes of the Student Affairs weenies going after college football teams, and the schism between the gentry and the proletariat of color will emerge.

The corona tyranny and a few arrests gone wrong changed the timeline on that dynamic, although it is still with us.  As are the aftereffects of all the money printing during both previous presidencies.  A Washington Post reporter even went to Sheboygan to talk with shoppers.

Dawn Mohr stopped by the local Piggly Wiggly to pick up $6 worth of pork steaks last week and immediately remembered just how much she’s grown to hate grocery shopping.

“Everything is so damn high,” she said, shaking her head at $3.09 bottles of Coca Cola. “Good ol’ Biden.”

Mohr, a 54-year-old home health-care aide, mostly shops the clearance aisles. Her $17 hourly paycheck, which inched up 80 cents in the past two years, is hardly enough to cover the basics anymore. She says there’s no question she’ll vote for Donald Trump again. Every trip to the supermarket cements her resolve.

“When Trump was president, there wasn’t inflation,” she said. “We could afford food.”

The mood around the sodas past Aisle 9 of the Piggly Wiggly is a stark reminder of what matters most to Americans this election year. In poll after poll, voters say inflation — and grocery prices in particular — is a leading concern.

That’s true in this Midwestern manufacturing town overflowing with well-paying jobs, rock-bottom unemployment and some of the lowest gas, food and housing prices in the nation. Kitchen and bath product maker Kohler Co. and food manufacturers Johnsonville and Sargento Foods are all headquartered nearby, providing a steady stream of stable careers. The unemployment rate, at 2.1 percent, is one of the lowest in Wisconsin.

Still, Sheboygan residents have one persistent gripe: As in the rest of the country, grocery prices have risen 25 percent in four years, driving much of their economic discontent.

It's worth remembering, whether general economic conditions are good or not, that the equilibrium consumer is indifferent at the margin between buying another package of bratwursts or not, or heading to the fish fry on Friday or not.  That's how allocating scarce resources work, and, thanks to the money printing and all the subsidies to rent-seekers, the equilibrium consumer notices.

“Even though inflation is coming down, prices are still up and people feel it,” said Stefano Viglietti, who owns three area restaurants and a specialty Italian market with his wife. “There’s still a fair amount of angst about prices. People here aren’t bazillionaires. They’re working middle class, and when the price of eggs or milk goes up, they have to make adjustments for everything else.”

In interviews with more than three dozen shoppers at three stores, almost all cited high food prices as a major financial hurdle. Many said they were sticking with the candidate they voted for last time — either because Trump was better for the economy, or because they valued President Biden’s position on other issues like abortion rights. But nearly a third said inflation had led them to revise their opinions, and some were even considering voting for the first time because of food prices.

It's also worth remembering that voter participation increases in difficult times.  When Washington is not a drag on daily life, people are content to leave Washington alone and hope Washington reciprocates.

THE BIG DANCE, EVIDENTLY NOT BIG ENOUGH FOR THE GIRLS?

After the weekend's bloodbath of favored teams in the Mid-American conference women's basketball tournament, with Kent State surviving and advancing to play in South Bend, usually there's a flurry of participation trophies Women's NIT bids handed out to the Mid-American failed-to-qualify teams.

A CAT DOES NOT HAVE A BEAGLE'S SLEEPING SKILLS.

This feline's attempt to emulate Snoopy didn't work out so well.

Nothing happened.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/Fh9G47g3VJ

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 17, 2024

Yes, that's from the Pajamas Media morning briefing series.