Kevin Drum 🕸

The judge in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has issued a summary judgment that Fox did, indeed, lie about Dominion's voting machines: In his ruling, Davis determined that the conservative cable-news network had undeniably broadcast falsehoods when it allowed allies of Donald Trump to float baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion supposedly rigging voting machines ...continue reading "Judge rules that Fox News lied*"

Noted without comment: It is not hard to imagine a conservative local prosecutor trying to charge President Biden with, say, failing to adequately guard the border. “This presents the opportunity for potentially thousands of state and local prosecutors to investigate and charge a president without the impediment imposed by D.O.J.’s policy against indicting sitting presidents,” ...continue reading "No, it’s not hard to imagine at all"

This chart shows total household financial assets through the end of 2022: The basic story is easy to see. In 2020 assets grew above normal as spending slowed and the COVID rescue bill started putting money in people's pockets. This peaked in late 2021 at about $13 trillion above the pre-pandemic trend. Then, as the ...continue reading "Raw data: Household financial assets"

It's a showdown on the fenceline. Charlie and our squirrel are having a staring contest, which the squirrel won on sheer speed. It scampered over to the bush near Charlie and then zipped down. It happened so fast Charlie hardly had time to blink. Those squirrels are quick little beasties.

NBC News reports on Audrey Hale, the shooter in the Nashville school shooting earlier this week: Even before authorities said Hale was transgender, users on extremist websites spent hours sharing their hopes that the shooter was trans or nonbinary, the primary targets of hate and harassment campaigns by the infamous extremist site 4chan over the ...continue reading "Audrey Hale might not be transgender at all"

Good news on the inflation front today. The Fed's Favorite Measure of Inflation™ was down from its spike in January: The core rate of PCE inflation is still too high, but the headline rate clocked in at 3.2%, which isn't bad. On a trendline basis, it was around 2.9%. On a year-over-year basis, headline PCE ...continue reading "PCE inflation fell in February"

Over at National Review today I came across a link to a "massively researched, thoroughly reported, and well-thought-out essay" that is "an early contender for essay of the year." NR is a nice, mainstream conservative publication, so I clicked the link to find out what mainstream conservatism finds interesting these days. Here is one paragraph: ...continue reading "How the deep state controls social media and censors conservatives"

Earlier today I came across a tweet from Kristen Soltis Anderson about a Pew Research poll asking people which federal agencies they viewed favorably.¹ Her primary takeaway is that between 2019 and 2023 Republican views of nearly every federal agency have cratered. I was noodling around with this, and finally decided that much of it ...continue reading "Raw data: What Democrats and Republicans think of federal agencies"

Despite all the rain, it doesn't seem like we're in for a poppy superbloom this year. But the sunflowers are looking terrific. Here's a few of them out in the desert near Indio.

As we all know, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took revenge on Walt Disney Co. last year after its CEO dared to criticize DeSantis's anti-gay stance. Unfortunately for DeSantis, he didn't really think things through. First he decided to get rid of the special assessment district that Florida granted to Disney World back when it was ...continue reading "Ron DeSantis is not a smart man"

We have a few months to go before we hit the federal debt ceiling and the United States goes up in smoke because it can't pay all its debts. Republican leadership agrees that we shouldn't let the country go up in smoke and that increasing the debt ceiling is therefore imperative. There's an obvious way ...continue reading "A conversation about the debt ceiling with my GPT twin"

Here is Tucker Carlson following the mass shooting in Nashville at a Christian school: The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy. How appalling does Carlson have to get before Rupert Murdoch finally pulls him off the air? Is there literally nothing he can say that crosses the line ...continue reading "Tucker Carlson descends ever further into the muck"

Reed O'Connor is the go-to judge if you want to get a ruling against Obamacare. O'Connor hates Obamacare. As near as I can tell, he'll rule against it no matter what's at stake or what the legal justification is. So guess what? A federal judge in Texas said Thursday that some Affordable Care Act mandates ...continue reading "Obamacare hating judge rules yet again against Obamacare"

You've all seen plenty of punditry about GPT-4, almost all of it based on the generic version available to plebs like us. But that's nothing. There are also dozens of companies that have been building specially trained versions of GPT-4 for different industries ("vertical markets," or "verticals," if you want to sound like you know ...continue reading "GPT-4 will (almost) be your next doctor"

This is the St. Martin Canal in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. I believe the view is looking north from the bridge at Rue Léon Jouhaux.

The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is the gift that keeps on giving. New stuff keeps dripping out every week that's catnip for both ordinary media and social media alike. Ironically, this is the usual Republican MO for things like Hillary's emails or the IRS jihad against tea party groups: they leak tidbits relentlessly to ...continue reading "Fox News CEO: Stop with the fact checks. Our viewers hate them."

A new AP/NORC poll includes one of our favorite questions: Which government programs do we spend too much on? Here are the results: The only program that a majority wants to cut back is good ol' foreign aid, which now has a thousand-year streak of being disliked even though it accounts for—let's see here—0.9% of ...continue reading "Americans are pretty satisfied with federal spending priorities"

News reports based on leaks from the Fed have said that Silicon Valley Bank was called out in 2021 for some poor governance practices but that warnings about financial risk didn't come until late 2022. However, testimony yesterday by Michael Barr, the Fed's vice chair for supervision, paints a slightly different picture: Near the end ...continue reading "Yesterday we got a little more detail about the Fed’s supervision of SVB"

This is how it starts: A woolly mammoth meatball has been created from the animal’s DNA — 4,000 years after the beast went extinct. It gets worse: Vow, the Australian company that created the food, made the meat by isolating genetic material found in mammoths that gives flavor to red meat and filled in gaps ...continue reading "Mammoth meatballs—no, wait—meatballs *from* mammoths, are on the menu"

This is a picture I took in the Tuileries in Paris. In France, even the pigeons are elegant looking creatures.