The Producers at the Muny in 2008. Photo by Meetmeatthemuny. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

“The White House budget office,” CNN reports, “is telling federal agencies to prepare plans for mass firings in the event of a government shutdown …”

Programs that these fake “shutdowns” don’t normally affect would “be targeted for sweeping reductions in force that could permanently eliminate jobs that are deemed ‘not consistent’ with President Donald Trump’s priorities.”

The headline characterizes Trump’s latest move as a “threat” intended to encourage Democrats to capitulate, and dissident Republicans to get back on side, in the latest fight over government spending.

Threat?

Maybe to Democrats who can’t bear the thought of any reduction, in any government function, ever.

Maybe to Republicans who have pet programs they know would be affected by “reductions in force.”

The rest of us should reply as Br’er Rabbit did to Br’er Fox’s threat to cook him and eat him: “Oh, Br’er Fox, I don’t care what you do with me, so long as you just don’t throw me in that briar patch over there.”

The two wings of America’s single-party state, and their pet media, treat the threat of a “government shutdown” as existential, and spend a lot more time trying to pre-emptively apportion blame to each other than trying to do a deal.

In reality, these “shutdowns” are pure Hollywood magic, all special effects — “no animals or bureaucrats were harmed in this production.”

Supposedly “non-essential” government operations shut down, raising the question of why, if they’re not “essential,” taxpayers subsidize them in the first place, and making it clear that “non-essential” actually means “provides the best material to elicit public notice.  “You can’t visit your favorite museum … THIS week.”

When a deal gets made, all those “non-essential” operations re-open, complete with turning the government employees’ time off into a retroactive paid vacation.

And the “spending exceeds revenues, guess we have to borrow!” can gets kicked down the road some more.

Trump’s “threat” is that instead of temporarily shutting down some “non-essential” fat, he’ll carve some real meat off the federal government bone.

Good! Do it!

For once, let’s see how small the federal government can get before anything “essential” actually stops happening.

My guess is that if a black hole opened up beneath the District of Columbia and sucked the entire federal government into non-existence, we’d suffer a very short period of re-adjustment before most people realized we’re better off that way.

Please, Br’er President, anything but the briar patch!

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A senile reality TV star and a publicity-seeking nepo baby walk into a press conference and announce that a widely used pain reliever may cause autism …

Punch line? No punch line. It really happened, though few would have noticed if the senile reality TV star (Donald Trump) wasn’t the president of the United States and the publicity-seeking nepo baby (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) wasn’t a member of that president’s cabinet.

Because of their identities, I guess we need to talk about whether what they’re saying is true, and about why they’re saying it now.

Guess what? What they’re saying MAY be true.

At least some studies have indeed found at least some correlation between acetaminophen use by pregnant women and subsequent diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in their children.

Correlation is not the same thing as causation, and studies have yet to establish the latter at any significant level of confidence. It might well turn out that the underlying causes of the pain, rather than effects of the drug used to alleviate the pain, are responsible. Or the correlation could just be random statistical noise.

But it does seem like an investigation that’s worth pursuing.

And it does seem like a legitimate reason for pregnant women to consider solutions other than acetaminophen for their pain relief needs.

In fact, it’s just one more in a long line of reasons for everyone to avoid acetaminophen. The drug has been CONVINCINGLY linked to liver damage (especially among drinkers) and kidney damage (among long-term users).

Maybe there’s really no  causal link to autism/ADHD; maybe there is. But with any number of pain relief options out there, does it really make sense to continue using a drug we already knew was bad for us?

While a senile reality TV star and publicity-seeking nepo baby might not be the best spokesmen for an anti-acetaminophen advocacy campaign, those of us who care about our own health and the health of our loved ones should probably just take the “I learned something today” win here.

As to reasons for the sudden, and obviously fast-tracked, rollout of the Trump/RFK campaign, we can plausibly infer that it’s of a piece with other recent publicity plays, from Trump’s murder campaign in the Caribbean, to the making of a podcaster into a partisan martyr, to the “cancellation” campaigns against anti-Trump media.

What ties all those things together? Donald Trump’s quest for distractions from the matter of his close personal relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

He’s “flooding the zone with sh*t,” as Steve Bannon put it, in hope of making that controversy go away.

Release the Epstein files.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Brendan Carr said on September 17. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“This” #1 was talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s claim that “the MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who [allegedly] murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

“This” #2 was Carr’s threat, as chair of the US Federal Communications Commission, against the broadcast licenses of the 200+ television stations which, as affiliates of Disney-owned ABC, carried Kimmel’s show.

Within hours, two multi-station ABC affiliates — Nexstar and Sinclair — fled in terror, announcing that in the future they would pre-empt Kimmel’s program with other content. Shortly after that, Disney capitulated to Carr’s extortion and suspended the show “indefinitely.”

There’s nothing new about “jawboning,” the practice of politicians and bureaucrats using political condemnation, often coupled with regulatory or legal threats, to bludgeon private sector actors into submission.

The term comes from the Bible. Samson, we’re informed in Judges 15, “found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.”

The Biden administration jawboned social media platforms, in public and secretly, to suppress dissenting opinions (supposed “misinformation”) on the COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting that refusal might jeopardize those platforms’ liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Everyone with so much as a smidgen of morality and/or common sense — and even most Republicans! — condemned that kind of jawboning when Biden and Co. did it.

Everyone with so much as a smidgen of morality and/or common sense — and even most Democrats! — condemns it when Trump and Co. do it.

It doesn’t matter whether the ass is Biden or Trump.

It doesn’t matter whether the ass’s jawbone is Jen Psaki or Brendan Carr.

It doesn’t matter whether the target is famous or unknown, rich or poor, right or wrong, good or evil.

Using government threats to suppress discussions the government doesn’t want us to have is both an evil in itself and a reversal of proper roles. It’s not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to decide what the rest of us may think or say, it’s our job to tell the politicians what they may or may not do.

Carr’s ability to take down — or, more likely, temporarily inconvenience — someone Donald Trump doesn’t like, because Trump doesn’t like him, belongs in the “may not do” category.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY