Over at National Review, Philip Klein comments on Mike Johnson's plan to force a vote on Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid: It appears that House Speaker Mike Johnson is at his breaking point. Like prior Republican leaders in his position, most recently Kevin McCarthy, Johnson was willing to humor the pugilistic members of his caucus for a certain ...continue reading "Running the House of Representatives is like running a kindergarten class"
This tweet was posted a few days ago: Half of U.S. homeowners and renters (49.9%) sometimes, regularly or greatly struggle to afford their housing payments—and many are making big sacrifices to cover their costs, per Redfin and Axios: pic.twitter.com/pFLPhLuOEl — unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) April 15, 2024 Matt Darling reposted it but then added: These numbers are ...continue reading "Don’t believe everything you see on the internet"
Sales of existing homes took a big tumble last month: That's a 4.3% decline from February. However, even though these numbers are seasonally adjusted, it looks like every year sales peak in January or February and then drop off the following month. So this might just be normal seasonal behavior.
Donald Trump and a host of other scared Republicans would like Arizona to repeal its brutal 1864 ban on abortion. Here is the text of the legislation introduced in the state Senate: Now that's a clean bill. However, while it has a chance of passing the Senate, it's already failed four attempts to pass the ...continue reading "Today in politics: abortion is in, immigration is out"
CBP released border numbers last Friday and they were once again about the same as last month: Total encounters in February came to 189,000, of which 44,000 were migrants who made appointments for asylum through CBP's mobile app. The number apprehended crossing illegally was 137,000.
The modern Trump empire is built mostly around licensing Trump's name to midrange Asian hotels and overpriced Bibles. So why not do the same in politics? As Trump struggles to close his own fundraising gap with Biden, his campaign sent out a letter this week asking down-ballot candidates for 5% of the proceeds when they ...continue reading "Trump shakes down the neighborhood for a 5% cut"
Look at this cute little guy. It's a peninsular pronghorn, and he looks like he wants me to offer him a bit of kibble or something. Sadly, I don't know what pronghorns eat, peninsular or otherwise. Plus I didn't have any food anyway. And the zoo doesn't want you to feed the animals. The deck ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"
It's remarkable how many of Donald Trump's policy positions are driven by personal pique: He opposes aid to Ukraine because they resisted his extortion attempts in 2019 and got him impeached. He hates wind turbines because they ruined the view from one of his Scottish golf courses. He wants to repeal Obamacare because President Obama ...continue reading "Donald Trump and the policies of personal pique"
Part-time work has been steadily decreasing since the end of the Great Recession, but at the end of last year it suddenly started to spike: I'm not sure what to make of this, if anything.
I've ignored this until now, but polyamory has been all over the discourse lately. Why? Is there any evidence that polyamory has increased? I took a look around to find out. Scott Hocker pointed me to Bedbible.com, a site that publishes "product reviews of sex toys and personal lubricants that have been personally tested"—as well ...continue reading "The polyamory BS just won’t stop"
I'm sitting in a waiting room with nothing better to do, so here's how Truth Social is doing: Keep in mind that the actual value of TMTG is about $2 plus the value of the Truth Social platform. In other words, about $2. Maybe $3-4 if we're being generous. In other words, it still has ...continue reading "Truth Social continues to plunge amidst new weirdness"
It's April and we've had a lot of rain this year, so I figured I should go out and take some pictures of the local wildflowers. They are pretty much the same wildflowers as always, but they're new pictures of the same old wildflowers. This one is a white morning glory, also known as a ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"
A team of researchers says the global economy is becoming more fragmented: To measure this phenomenon, we introduce an index of geopolitical fragmentation distilled from diverse empirical indicators. To do so, we rely on the use of a flexible, dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility. Then, we employ structural vector autoregressions and ...continue reading "The global economy is becoming more fragmented"
Every once in a while, when I'm bored, I'll pull up some big information source and just browse randomly to see if I find anything interesting. I was doing this a couple of nights ago and came up with this: The death rate from Alzheimer's disease has increased about 10% since 2000. This is age-adjusted, ...continue reading "Why have Alzheimer’s deaths increased among women?"
Madeleine Kearns says this about abortion over at National Review: The pro-life side can afford to acknowledge the best pro-choice arguments — a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, the intense difficulties an unplanned pregnancy can cause, the asymmetry of reproduction between the sexes, etc. They have counter-arguments for each of them. But the pro-choice side ...continue reading "I acknowledge that pro-life folks think abortion is murder. I just don’t believe it."
Wheel of Fortune has been on for something like 40 seasons, and you'd think that by now the basic strategies would all be no-brainers. And yet, you'll constantly see this dumb move. You're in the bonus round and the category is "What Are You Doing?" The puzzle looks like this: E __ T __ N ...continue reading "A Wheel of Fortune question"
I don't remember what got me interested in this, but here are the unit costs for the most popular (and expensive) fighter jets in the world: These are "flyaway" costs. That is, the cost per unit of the latest batch on the assembly line. It is not the total procurement cost, which includes the entire ...continue reading "Raw data: The cost of fighter jets"
For reasons of geometry, there aren't a lot of nebulas visible in spring. But there are plenty of galaxies around, which is why it's called galaxy season. Unfortunately, I've already taken pictures of most of the galaxies big enough to capture with my telescope, so there's not much to do in spring. Last year I ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"
According to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, here's what the US tax system looks like today compared to 1980: For most people in the middle and upper middle classes, not a lot has changed. Tax rates are a few points lower than they were in 1980, but that's it. There are two big changes: Tax ...continue reading "Raw data: Tax rates since 1980"
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