Kevin Drum 🕸

I headed out to the desert on Saturday with the promise of good, cloud-free skies. Ha. As I drove east, I could see huge black thunderheads covering half the Mojave Desert, so I stopped to check things out. The normal weather report said everything was clear. Uh huh. Then I looked at a Doppler radar ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

As always, there's a lot you can say about the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. But one of the things you can say is this: After holding them prisoner for 11 months, Hamas decided last week to murder six of them in cold blood rather than take the chance they might be rescued. Condemn Israel ...continue reading "Hamas murdered six hostages in cold blood"

Regular readers know that I've long been annoyed by the relentless use of the word chaotic to describe the Afghanistan withdrawal. Of course it was chaotic. It's like saying the D-Day landings were chaotic. There's no way anyone conducts an airlift of 100,000 people in a neat and orderly way from a city that's just ...continue reading "Don’t send the Afghanistan withdrawal down the memory hole"

Donald Trump is still obsessed with Hillary Clinton: Trump: Bleach bit… it’s basically acid pic.twitter.com/NXSZ8UqLEQ — Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2024 For chrissake. Will anyone ever have the guts to tell Trump that BleachBit is just an ordinary piece of open source disk management software that was used by Platte River Networks, Hillary's email hosting ...continue reading "What is BleachBit?"

Just sayin'. In case you're curious, real GDP per capita for the US increased at an annual rate of 0.84% during Donald Trump's four years in office. It has increased in California at an annual rate of 2.8% during the five years Gavin Newsom has been governor.

This is by no means exhaustive. It's just a short collection of some of the extremely presidential things Donald Trump has said recently. Needless to say, none of it is even remotely true. "The transgender thing is an incredible thing. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation." ...continue reading "A brief look at stuff Donald Trump has said lately"

The New York Times has an astonishing story today about the amount of money college football players are paid these days in NIL (name image and likeness) fees. Here are averages for the Power 4 conferences: The SEC now pays its players three times more than any other conference. SEC quarterbacks are paid an average ...continue reading "The price of college football: $14 million per team in the SEC"

Why have we mostly given up on ornamentation in architecture? Ross Douthat correctly says today (based on an essay by Samuel Hughes) that it's not because ornamentation got too expensive. Just the opposite: we can mass produce high-quality ornamentation today far more cheaply than any previous era—both in absolute and relative terms. So what is ...continue reading "Maybe we build more beautifully today than we think"

I went down a little rabbit hole this afternoon, so I'm going to drag you all down with me. You're welcome. It started with this: J.D. Vance’s D.C. Suburb Is Only ‘Hate-Free’ If You Agree With Democrat Authoritarians https://t.co/X4IlAoQQLD — Mollie (@MZHemingway) August 29, 2024 Democrat authoritarians! I knew it was clickbait, but I clicked ...continue reading "A case study in propaganda"

Donald Trump keeps digging himself into an ever deeper hole in the Cemeterygate scandal: Trump claimed that he didn’t know “anything about” the use of the images on his campaign social media. “We have a lot of people, we have TikTok people,” he said. “You know, we’re leading the internet.” Pressed on it again, Trump ...continue reading "Trump blames families for Arlington debacle"

I see that Donald Trump has finally decided how he's going to vote on an initiative that would repeal Florida's six week abortion ban. He doesn't like six weeks, but he's voting No anyway. Why? Because Democrats in other states are crazy. OK, sure, whatever. In reality, the Florida initiative would allow abortion until viability, ...continue reading "Trump will vote for 6-week abortion ban"

Today brings another edition of Wall Street Journal Watch™. The topic this morning was people who have to work two jobs to stay afloat: Sam Lalevee was scraping by in his job at a call center in Raleigh, N.C., when his rent jumped to $1,000 a month from $800. So he got a second job ...continue reading "There is nothing unusual about the number of people with multiple jobs"

I've finally gotten around to watching the entire CNN interview with Kamala Harris. For the record, it was half an hour long. It struck me as fairly ordinary, with Harris performing just fine. She didn't make any waves, but neither did she stumble or have trouble with any of the questions. Nor did she filibuster. ...continue reading "Rating the CNN interview(er)"

Charlie would like you to please admire his lovely, furry tummy. Thank you.

What was the original idea behind Donald Trump's visit to Arlington Cemetery? Was it just intended as an excuse to bash Biden and Harris for not showing up? I don't know. But Fox News is sure making it seem plausible: Biden, who skipped Arlington event for vacation, trashed Trump in June for declining cemetery visit ...continue reading "Fox News: Biden “skipped” Arlington “event”"

Welp, it only took 50 years, but here we are: In a milestone breakthrough, more than half of Caltech’s incoming undergraduate class in the fall will be women for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated its first class of undergraduate ...continue reading "Caltech has come a long way since 1976"

PCE inflation remained subdued this month, with both core and headline numbers right around 2%: On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE clocked in at 2.5% and core PCE at 2.6%.

I caught a few minutes of the commentary after CNN's broadcast of the Kamala Harris interview and got annoyed all over again by Scott Jennings blathering about "Biden's inflation." I realize that I'm going to convince approximately no one, but it wasn't Biden's inflation. It was Trump's inflation. Our recent surge in prices was not ...continue reading "Just stop it. It wasn’t “Biden’s inflation.”"

Josh Marshall says that Donald Trump's campaign event at Arlington Cemetery was even worse than you think: The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice ...continue reading "Trump’s secret Arlington Cemetery plan"

Here's another poll of swing states, this time from Bloomberg/Morning Consult: This is even more optimistic than this morning's Emerson College poll, though note that the margin of error is about 4% in each state. NOTE: We're close enough to the election that from now on I'll be reporting the results of likely voters whenever ...continue reading "Maybe Kamala Harris is actually ahead in swing states"