Kevin Drum 🕸

Donald Trump offers up a thoughtful critique of Chinese control over social media: If you are going to do it to TikTok, do it to Facebook. And what you can do is let them sell TikTok. Let them sell it in the market.... Take it away from China control. But I think China controls Facebook, ...continue reading "Donald Trump wants China to sell Facebook"

It's sort of remarkable how many of Donald Trump's former aides now oppose his reelection. Here's a list. These are only principal officers, not the dozens of deputies and assistants who have also turned on him, and all of them were initially appointed by Trump himself: 1. Vice President Mike Pence 2, 3. Chiefs of ...continue reading "People who have worked for Trump don’t like him much"

Here is Hilbert, tail in the air, exploring the front yard garden. In a minute or so he will flop on ground and roll around in the warm, sunshiny dirt. At the bottom is some bonus catblogging. This picture was sent to me by a regular reader and has some advice for the royal family: ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 15 March 2024"

The New York Times reports that although anti-TikTok fever is high in the United States, China is taking a low-key approach to things: The fervor has not yet triggered a high-alert response from China’s leaders or prompted retaliatory threats against American companies. Instead, officials in Beijing have blasted the bill but largely reiterated common criticisms ...continue reading "We should ban TikTok as pure trade retaliation"

New tracking polls have started coming out and they pretty consistently show that Joe Biden didn't get a bounce from his State of the Union address. But even if that's true, I think it misses the real impact of the speech. State of the Union addresses never have much effect on a president's approval ratings. ...continue reading "Biden’s SOTU flipped the media narrative"

The judge in the Fani Willis case ruled today that Team Trump failed to prove a conflict of interest because of her romantic relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade: But the judge also found a “significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team” and said either Willis and her office must ...continue reading "Fani Willis allowed to stay on Trump election case"

The United States Congress is mysterious as hell: Speaker Mike Johnson told Politico that he expects to pass a future Ukraine assistance bill with Democratic votes, an acknowledgment of the persistent resistance to any new aid within the GOP.... “I think it is a stand-alone, and I suspect it will need to be on suspension,” ...continue reading "Mike Johnson says he’ll allow vote on Ukraine"

Matt Darling writes today that although the unemployment rate is low, the length of unemployment spells has gone up. This is probably true over the very long term, but it doesn't really seem to be true over the past couple of decades: I didn't put in trend lines since it would have made the chart ...continue reading "Long-term unemployment has been pretty steady recently"

This is the surprisingly colorful view from Mesa Verde National Park, looking west toward the Ute Mountain Reservation. I don't know what the purple and green and yellow vegetation is, but it's pretty striking.

A group in California is hoping to make financial literacy a requirement in high school: The plan is to make all high school students, as a condition of graduation, take at least a one-semester class in financial literacy.... Petition organizers said Tuesday that they are submitting nearly 900,000 signatures to county registrars across the state ...continue reading "Do we really need a financial literacy requirement in high school?"

More bad news on the inflation front. The Producer Price Index, which measures wholesale prices, surged in February. Goods remain below their peak prices of 2022 but spiked up 15.5% between January and February on an annualized basis. Services continued their steady rise and were up 3.6%. PPI tends to be volatile, and two-thirds of ...continue reading "PPI inflation index jumps in February"

The primary objection to Chinese ownership of TikTok is based on stats showing that something like a third of teenagers "regularly" get news from TikTok—which could make them targets for Chinese propaganda. But this is based on survey data, and most people have a very wide definition of news. It includes celebrity news, sports news, ...continue reading "America’s teens probably don’t get very much real news from TikTok"

Denmark has given us Legos, Earth Shoes, Danish pastry, Google Maps, the Egg chair, Scanpans, Carlsberg beer, C++, Christmas plates, the international wheelchair symbol, open-faced sandwiches, and Ozempic. Clever people, those Danes.

Fishing off the Seal Beach pier on an overcast winter day.

Comments are back up! Apparently some kind of noaccess code got mysteriously added to the site, but Bluehost deleted it and now everything is fine.

After being let go from CNN, Don Lemon cut a deal with Elon Musk for a show on Twitter. Lemon's first episode was an interview with Musk, after which the deal was abruptly canceled. Why? His approach was basically just “CNN, but on social media”, which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN ...continue reading "Elon Musk says Don Lemon is a Jeff Zucker sock puppet"

Among the various ways of estimating worker pay, one of the most accurate is the BLS calculation of employer costs. This is released quarterly, and in Q4 of 2023 wages and salaries for civilian workers increased by a whopping 10%: From Q3 to Q4, wages increased 3.1%. Adjusting for inflation and then annualizing the quarterly ...continue reading "Worker pay increased 10% last quarter?"

Today the House passed a bill to effectively ban TikTok unless it's acquired by an American company: Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate, and it passed on a lopsided vote of 352 to 65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year. ...continue reading "Banning TikTok might very well make things worse"

Did you know that Ukraine has destroyed a third of Russia's Black Sea fleet, nearly half of that just since September? I didn't: The victories have been all the more surprising because Ukraine does not have a traditional navy or a fleet of warships. Instead, Ukraine has used sea drones and missiles to attack Russian ...continue reading "Ukraine has sunk a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet"

You're aware of the practice of judge shopping, right? Most often it's used by conservatives, who file suits in specific locations where they're guaranteed to get a wingnut judge who will issue a nationwide injunction based on even the flimsiest evidence. Favored judges include Matthew Kacsmaryk (mifepristone, "Remain in Mexico"); Drew Tipton (immigration); Mark Pittman ...continue reading "Conservative judge shopping finally gets banned"