Kevin Drum 🕸

We admit about a million lawful permanent residents every year: Of these, about two-thirds are eligible to be naturalized and about half eventually become US citizens.

Apparently the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed yesterday was the victim of Russian anti-aircraft fire. The flight was headed from Baku to Grozny—a milk run of about 30 minutes—when it entered an area of drone conflict. Russian air defense was busy shooting down Ukrainian drones and an errant shot hit the plane. However, Grozny refused ...continue reading "Russian AA probably brought down Azerbaijani airline"

Tom Friedman says China feels different: In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China. He's right: The pandemic is over, but travel to China is still less than a quarter of what ...continue reading "Travel to China has cratered"

The Guardian reports on plans for Donald Trump's coronation inauguration: America's business elite won't just break the old record, they'll pulverize it. There's no definitive source for the cost of inaugurations, but the estimates are all pretty close. Here they are:¹ Aside from Trump's own previous inauguration, his 2025 blowout is budgeted to be twice ...continue reading "Trump’s inauguration will cost twice as much as any other president’s"

Eggs are expensive again this Christmas. Why? The usual reason: bird flu. This year marks the seventh major avian flu pandemic since 1980. Poultry is a global market, so even pandemics outside the US can affect egg prices here. The biggest impact, however, comes from local avian flu outbreaks, as happened before in 1983, 2015, ...continue reading "A brief history of egg prices"

Merry Christmas from Charlie, Hilbert, and the whole gang.

From the LA Times this morning: Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America are being sued by the embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over alleged unchecked fraud on the Zelle payment app.... The result, according to the lawsuit, was fraud-related losses of more than $870 million over the last seven years. And from ...continue reading "Merry Christmas to payment apps"

Continuing our theme about loss of trust, here's the partisan breakdown of a recent poll about health care: It's not "Americans" who have lost trust in mainstream health care. It's specifically Republicans—who have decided instead to trust Donald Trump. Fox News whipped them into a frenzy over masks and lockdowns and vaccine conspiracies and Chinese ...continue reading "Americans haven’t lost trust in medicine. Republicans have."

Just by coincidence, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen today announced a big new defense package for Greenland: Poulsen said the package would allow for the purchase of two new inspection ships, two new long-range drones and two extra dog sled teams. Okey doke. That should put Donald Trump on notice.

Joe Biden signed 50 new bills into law this Christmas Eve, including this one: A measure (S. 4077) — opposed by several dozen House Republicans — to name a post office in California after the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D). They just can't help themselves, even during Christmas. What a pack of assholes.

The battle over contraception continues: The Biden administration is withdrawing a proposed set of regulations that aimed to improve access to contraception by narrowing the ability of employers to opt out of covering birth control for their employees. ....Conservative organizations celebrated the news. In a post on X, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which ...continue reading "Contraceptives are cheap and easily available"

The Washington Post has a story today about NewsGuard, a service that rates the reliability of news outlets. It's the usual thing: conservatives are upset because lots of conservative sites are flagged as unreliable. Imagine that. As it turns out, NewsGuard doesn't publish its ratings. You have to pay for them. But the Post provides ...continue reading "Which chatbot will rule them all?"

This is the Thunder Mountain ride at Disneyland. Since I now have a camera that can do this, I played around with zooming the lens while exposing the image. This turned out to be trickier than I had supposed. You have to time everything just right; zoom the lens at the right speed; and make ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I noted the 2023 violent crime rate from the NCVS survey back when it was released, but here it is again: To recap: violent crime didn't go up during the pandemic. Only homicide did. In fact, overall violent crime rates haven't changed more than slightly for over a decade. But just to show how hard ...continue reading "Violent crime victimization revisited"

Just how many people work from home these days? This question has puzzled me a bit, but a team of St. Louis Fed researchers may have the answer. They combined data from several sources to come up with overall estimates for 2020 through 2024. One thing they discovered is that a lot of the disparity ...continue reading "Working from home is . . . only kinda popular"

Brendan Karr is Donald Trump's pick to head the FCC. Naturally this means he has to write threatening letters to media outlets Trump has beef with—like ABC: The letter, which was obtained by CNN, begins, “Dear Mr. Iger, Americans no longer trust the national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly.” ....“My understanding is ...continue reading "Americans have not lost trust in the media. Republicans have."

Today's big news is the House Ethics Committee's report into the relentless sleaziness of (former) Rep. Matt Gaetz. Naturally you want to see this in chart form: According to the report, these are all the women Gaetz paid for sex. "Woman 1" isn't included because she was Gaetz's long-term girlfriend and therefore "some of the ...continue reading "Matt Gaetz by the numbers"

Fatal occupational injuries were down by about 200 last year, representing a rate decline from 3.6 per 100,000 to 3.4. As you can see, occupational deaths declined steadily through 2009 and then abruptly flatlined. There's been no progress since 2010. Here's how everything broke down in 2023: Most of the deaths by violence were during ...continue reading "Workplace deaths were down slightly in 2023"

Sunrise over the Danube near Regensburg.

According to the Census Bureau, the median selling price of new homes plunged nearly $25,000 in November. The price of a new home is now exactly the same as its pre-pandemic average: Over the longer term new home prices are still up considerably. Adjusted for inflation, a new home costs about $100,000 more than it ...continue reading "New home prices tumble in November"