Kevin Drum 🕸

Ha ha ha: A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a Republican National Committee lawsuit alleging that Google’s email spam filters illegally suppressed their missives, dealing the campaign group a crushing blow in a lengthy battle that has riled conservative lawmakers in Washington. U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta wrote that while it was a “close ...continue reading "Judge tosses Republican whining about Google spam filters"

Last night at the Republican debate Martha MacCallum asked: "Do you believe human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do." No one raised their hand. Luckily for all of them, Ron DeSantis immediately interrupted to pretend he was offended by the whole "raise your hand" trope, which got everyone off the ...continue reading "Picture of the day: Do you believe in climate change?"

Here's a popular tweet making the rounds: How populist "entrepreneur" Vivek Ramaswamy got rich: 1. Found biotech firm with hedge fund/venture capital $ 2. Buy patent for Alzheimer's drug that had failed 4 trials, raise more $ to take to market 3. Take company public, cash out 4. Drug fails 5th trial, investors wiped out. ...continue reading "How did Vivek Ramaswamy become a billionaire at age 38?"

Sunset over Indio.

There was a lot of blather at the Republican debate last night about the need to supercharge our energy production, all of it centered on fossil fuels. (For some reason Republicans have no apparent interest in supercharging any other type of energy production.) This makes me think that a lot of people don't realize just ...continue reading "US fossil fuel production has skyrocketed over the past 20 years"

Here are the counties that saw the biggest average pay increases in 2023: Clayton County, a suburb of Atlanta, is some kind of weird outlier with 18% real wage growth since last year. I have no idea why. After that, everything looks fairly normal with no special geographic focus.

Yes, I watched the Republican debate. Not all that closely, but I did watch it. It was a shitshow. With the exception of Chris Christie, every candidate on the stage seemed to think the key to victory was to talk really fast and stuff as much as possible into every answer. Add to that an ...continue reading "Republican debate roundup: It was a shitshow"

A new paper estimates the number of gender surgeries performed over the period 2016-2020. Here's the breakdown by age: The total number of gender surgeries in the 12-18 age group was 3,678, nearly all of them breast/chest surgeries. The annual number of surgeries started at 200 in 2016 and rose steadily through 2019 before dropping ...continue reading "Raw data: Gender surgeries in the US"

This is the 405-105 interchange near LAX. I've posted this photo before, and the only real difference is that I kept this one in color instead of desaturating it to black-and-white.¹ You wouldn't think that would matter much since it's not a colorful picture in the first place, but it does change the feel and ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Politico reports today on the strange partnership between progressives and hard right-wingers who don't want to reauthorize FISA Section 702, which has been routinely and massively abused in the past to spy on Americans. Until recently, the two sides mainly wanted to reform Section 702 so that the FBI requires a warrant before it's allowed ...continue reading "FISA reform now a hostage of right-wing conspiracy theories"

A while back I watched a TV show with a plot point that featured a government agency bringing down an airplane just to kill a single person on board. Has fiction turned into real life today? Reuters has reported that the Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed as a passenger on a private jet ...continue reading "Head of Russian private military force killed in plane crash"

The federal fiscal year begins on October 1st and goes through September 30th. We are currently in FY23, which began in October 2022 and will end in a few weeks. But why? What's the deal with starting our fiscal year in October? I'm glad you asked. Here's the answer. For our first 50 years, we ...continue reading "Why does the government’s fiscal year begin on October 1st?"

A paper released today documents one of the most impressive uses of AI language models yet. A woman with ALS who was physically unable to speak—but still had a normally functioning language center in her brain—was fitted with electrodes that fed their output into a large language model similar to ChatGPT. It was able to ...continue reading "AI allows woman with ALS to speak again"

The BLS reports today that it has revised its employment figures for the past year. Between March 2022 and March 2023 we produced 300,000 fewer jobs than we originally estimated. This is about 0.2% of all jobs, which isn't a lot. Here's what it looks like: Meh. The biggest loser was transportation and warehousing, which ...continue reading "We have (slightly) fewer jobs than we thought"

The Wall Street Journal reports that we have 97 fewer nursing homes than we did last year. What struck me about this number was how small it was. Not 97 thousand or 97 million. Just 97. That's not very much, is it? Naturally I was curious about this, but it turns out there's not much ...continue reading "Long-term care is falling way behind the growth of the elderly population"

The House Freedom Caucus has issued its demands for the upcoming FY24 budget year: We remain committed to restoring the true FY 2022 topline spending level of $1.471 trillion without the use of gimmicks or reallocated rescissions to return the bureaucracy to its pre-COVID size while allowing for adequate defense funding. Right off the top, ...continue reading "The House Freedom Caucus is eager to shut down the government"

This is a bearded iris growing in the Canadian WWII cemetery in Bény-sur-Mer. The cemetery is near Juno Beach, about ten miles north of Caen in Normandy. The stark background of the flower is not due to any kind of photoshopping. It was growing against a white gravestone, and in the sunlight it was bright ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I don't have any special reason for posting this, but it's something I noticed a while back and felt like sharing: The thing I noticed is that even during recessions consumer spending barely changes at all. Half the time it actually goes up, and the other half of the time it declines only slightly. The ...continue reading "Raw data: Consumer spending during recessions"

For what it's worth, here's a chart showing the latest on the inverted yield curve, a condition where the yield on long-term bonds is lower than the yield on short-term bonds: As you can see, the inverted yield has a perfect track record of predicting recessions over the past 50 years. However, it takes 1-2 ...continue reading "The yield curve remains strongly inverted. This is bad news for the economy."

For some reason the BLS does an annual report about people who were born from 1957-1964. Why? It's a bit of a mystery. But since that cohort includes me, let's see what they have to say. Between the ages of 25-56, the average person in this cohort held 7.1 jobs. This makes me below average ...continue reading "Here’s how young baby boomers have been doing"