Kevin Drum 🕸

Oh great, Democrats now have two people on their ticket with names that are easy to mispronounce. For the record, our new VP-to-be is Tim WALLZ, not WALTZ or anything like that—though God only knows what Fox News will decide to call him. In any case, welcome to the show, governor. It's gonna be an ...continue reading "Tim Walz is Kamala Harris’s running mate"

Just in case you care, today is the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It happened at 8:15 am on August 6 in Hiroshima, which is 7:15 pm on August 5 in Washington DC. It is nearly conventional wisdom these days, certainly on the left, to say that the attacks on Hiroshima and ...continue reading "Today is the 79th anniversary of Hiroshima"

Paul Krugman says today that the economy is looking "pre-recessionary." He blames the Fed: What’s especially galling about the current situation is that we may be about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As of right now, America has basically achieved what many economists had considered impossible: a soft landing, in which we ...continue reading "Pre-recessionary? That’s probably an understatement."

Google lost the first round of its antitrust suit today. As you may recall, there are two big things you have to prove in order to find a company guilty of antitrust violations. The first is that the company is a monopoly, and Judge Amit Mehta made quick work of that: Plaintiffs easily have demonstrated ...continue reading "Judge finds that Google is a very, very evil monopolist"

Behold the Lagoon Nebula, M8, one of the biggest and brightest nebulas in the Northern Hemisphere. It is, unfortunately, only visible for a few hours each night in July and August, and it's low in the sky. However, I trekked out even farther into the desert than usual this weekend and got some very dark ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Wall Street is panicking over the stock market. Here's what it looks like at the moment I'm writing this: This is not yet even in "correction" territory, let alone a full-blown collapse. But a headline in the New York Times says traders are so panicked they think the Fed might hold an emergency meeting to ...continue reading "Yes, the Fed should lower rates. But not because of the stock market."

Is California a high-tax state compared to red states like Texas and Florida? It depends! Here's what things look like if you're rich: California is a ball-buster, with the second highest tax rates in the country. Texas and Florida are way down the list. But what if you're working class? Let's take a look: California ...continue reading "Raw data: Tax rates in California, Texas, and Florida"

It's sort of fascinating to watch The Big Lie unfold in real time. In this case I'm talking about Donald Trump's assertion that Kamala Harris used to identify as Indian and then switched to being Black when it became politically expedient. Usually there's some small kernel of truth to these kinds of attacks, but this ...continue reading "Trump’s attack on Kamala Harris’s blackness was very precisely aimed"

A couple of days ago I posted a chart showing that Democrats were more likely to be childless than Republicans. I thought this was mainly due to religiosity, but I wasn't sure. However, a friend emailed me a link to Ryan Burge's substack, called "Graphs About Religion." This is an admirably clear name, and it ...continue reading "Cooked data: Another look at childless families by political party"

Just for the record, it really is true that sometime soon Kamala Harris is going to have to (a) put up a few policy positions on her website, and (b) start giving interviews to the national media. It doesn't have to be tomorrow, but it ought to be pretty soon.

US conservatives are in a remarkable lather over the results of a women's boxing match between an Algerian and an Italian. The Algerian is Imane Khelif, a journeyman welterweight with a lifetime record of 38-9, who suddenly might or might not be 100% female depending on who you listen to. Here's what happened. Khelif was ...continue reading "The strange tale of Imane Khelif"

Donald Trump recently proposed eliminating income taxes on Social Security benefits. Why? No one knows. Maybe because low-income seniors already pay no tax on benefits, so it would mostly benefit the well off. And what Republican ever passed up the chance to make a regressive tax even more regressive? In any case, let's see what ...continue reading "The stupidest man in the world strikes again"

Five weeks down, one to go. I'm almost done with my radiation treatment. I'm pleased to report that the "super sunburn" pain I was warned about hasn't materialized. So far I've gotten a very minor bit of soreness in one or two places, and that's it. With only four treatments left it looks like I ...continue reading "Health update"

Yesterday morning I was wondering why I hadn't seen any new reporting about the prisoner swap the previous night. Charlotte Klein has the answer: For days, various media outlets had been aware — through their own reporting and as information trickled out elsewhere — that a prisoner swap involving American journalists and dissidents was in ...continue reading "Why did Bloomberg break the prisoner swap embargo?"

According to the Wall Street Journal, the key figure in the recent prisoner swap with Russia was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That's because the main sticking point was the release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany for gunning down a Chechen exile in Berlin: During a meeting in Saudi ...continue reading "Putin’s prisoner strategy: Just keep kidnapping Germans until they give in"

This is Charlie pretending to go to sleep. He was fooling no one.

The American economy gained 114,000 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 a meager 24,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate jumped up to 4.3%. The number of unemployed workers increased by 352,000 in July while the number of ...continue reading "Net new jobs in July drops almost to zero"

Frank Bruni asks us today to spare a thought for Pete Buttigieg: In 2020, when he was still in his 30s and his main political credential was two terms as mayor of a Midwestern city with only about 100,000 people, he won the most delegates in the Iowa caucuses, placed a close second in the ...continue reading "Pete Buttigieg for veep?"

Are you curious about whether Democrats really are a party of childless cat ladies? We know that both women and cat owners are more likely to be Democrats, but how about childless people? Here you go: Childlessness has gone way up among Democrats over the past three decades while it's gone down among Republicans. I'm ...continue reading "Raw data: Childless families by political party"

LA Times columnist Anita Chabria ponders what Donald Trump was really up to in his disastrous interview with Black journalists yesterday: Trump offended his Black audience. Mistake or part of the plan? At best, Trump was grabbing headlines that in recent days have slipped out of his grasp.... At worst, the whole thing was meant ...continue reading "No, Trump’s insults yesterday weren’t deliberate"