Kevin Drum 🕸

Lara Trump is stepping down from her position as RNC chair, apparently in hopes that Ron DeSantis will choose her to fill the Senate seat being vacated by Marco Rubio. The Associated Press comments: The idea of placing a Trump family member in the Senate has been lauded in some Republican circles. Among the people ...continue reading "I don’t care what Elon Musk’s mother thinks about anything"

I happened to read my millionth tweet this evening about how wildly inept the federal government is, and that suddenly got me curious: how do we compare with our peer countries? I'm talking about non-tiny, non-poor countries. There's no concrete measure of this, but the World Bank has a measure of government efficiency that they ...continue reading "American bureaucracy is pretty good"

Tyler Cowen is a fan of using AI to answer questions of all sorts: I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author referenced the Morley reforms of 1909. I did not know what those were, and so I posed a question and received a very good answer, read those here. I simply ...continue reading "AI is good, but not all the time"

Here's a nerdy puzzle for you. See if you can figure out the answer before I tell you. "Checkable" deposits represent money you can get your hands on quickly—like a checking account—as opposed to things like CDs, which you can access only when they mature. Here are checkable deposits per household: During the pandemic, what ...continue reading "Why did checking accounts surge during the pandemic?"

Yegor Denisov-Blanch, a researcher at Stanford University, says that 10% of all software engineers are "ghosts" who basically do nothing. This is based on data he's collected on 50,000 engineers at hundreds of companies. But the number varies with work arrangement. Only 6% of engineers who work at the office do nothing, compared to 14% ...continue reading "Working at home produces both better and worse software engineers"

Jennifer Doleac says we need more cops on the street. One reason is that we're not good enough at catching criminals: Right now, the probability of getting caught across the United States is low and falling. Clearance rates — in simplified terms, the number of arrests per reported offenses — were just 41 percent for ...continue reading "We have plenty of police officers in America"

Is Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, the latest tech billionaire to be consumed by the broke mind virus? Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, has announced plans to incorporate an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” into the newspaper’s coverage. ....The “bias meter”, Soon-Shiong said, will be integrated into articles ...continue reading "LA Times announces plan to undermine its own coverage"

Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump: President-elect Donald Trump said members of the now-defunct House select committee tasked with investigating the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol should be in jail. ....In the interview with Kristen Welker, Trump also claimed he would not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden.... “I’m not ...continue reading "Pardon them all. Do it now."

In the same way that Afghanistan suddenly collapsed in 2021, it looks like Syria has suddenly collapsed in 2024. The insurgent group HTS, which for the past few years has effectively ruled a small province in the north near the border with Turkey, took over Aleppo and then headed south along the conveniently located M5 ...continue reading "In an instant, Syria is now free of Bashar al-Assad"

It's not your imagination: the number of events at the Olympics really does keep going up every year.

According to, um, everyone, the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson has sent corporate executives into shock. After all, anyone could be next: Those who advise companies on security issues say threats against executives are rising.... “The environment is explosive right now,” said former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, who now consults with large companies ...continue reading "Is Brian Thompson a canary in the coal mine?"

With Donald Trump back in office, there's a pretty good chance that he'll open up the ANWR refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. In particular, he'd open up what's known as the 1002 area, a parcel of 1.5 million acres near Prudhoe Bay: ANWR totals 19 million acres, much of it wilderness, but the 1002 ...continue reading "Raw data: All the oil in ANWR"

Gallup reports today that Americans' rating of US health care quality is at its lowest point since they started keeping records. That's true, but as usual it doesn't tell the real story: Among Democrats, satisfaction with the quality of health care has been dead flat for 20 years. Among Republicans, satisfaction dropped a bit when ...continue reading "Trust in health care quality is down, but that’s not the real story"

Now this is a chart: This comes from a 2014 paper by Manuel Eisner called "From Swords to Words: Does Macro-Level Change in Self-Control Predict Long-Term Variation in Levels of Homicide?" Eisner's paper is stuffed with estimates of murder rates across Europe during the past millennium. But I'm more fascinated by the estimate of regicides, ...continue reading "The regicide rate is way down over the past millennium"

This is a wild story. It's about Sameera Ali, a Virginia lawyer, and Thomas Cullen, a Virginia judge: One of Cullen’s clerks repeatedly asked her to represent a youth charged with a felony and two misdemeanors when no other attorneys were available, according to a court filing from her attorney. Ali agreed, if a preliminary ...continue reading "Lunatic judge threatens saintly lawyer with contempt"

This is Hilbert looking at the camera from a spot on our (entirely unused) patio table. He looks menacing, but actually he spent most of his time up there twirling around and begging me to pet him. He was probably purring loudly when I took this picture.

As I've mentioned, I'm a little skeptical of any theory about why there was a big turn against Democrats in 2024 because, in fact, there wasn't a big turn. There was a normal, moderate turn. But in one place there was a huge turn: Hispanic voters. Here's the Democratic winning margin among Hispanics going back ...continue reading "Kamala Harris bombed with Hispanic voters. That’s the whole story."

The American economy gained 227,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 137,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate rose to 4.2%. This report is something of a mirage. The number of employed workers dropped by 355,000 and the ...continue reading "Net jobs were up in November, but . . ."

Elon Musk has been blathering lately about cutting all spending for unauthorized federal programs. At first glance, that sounds great. Why are we spending money on unauthorized programs, anyway? How can that even happen? The answer is a little hazy, but it boils down to this: Constitutionally, Congress doesn't need to "authorize" anything. All they ...continue reading "Why does Congress spend so much unauthorized money?"

After every election loss—among both Democrats and Republicans—we're treated to an argument about whether the loss was due to too much extremism or too much centrism. In the Washington Post today, Perry Bacon summarizes the lefty case for too much centrism in the 2024 race: People who support defunding the police have almost no power ...continue reading "Here’s how wokeness hurts centrist Democrats"