Kevin Drum 🕸

Are Republicans weird? Minnesota governor Tim Walz started this meme and Republicans are steaming about it. Their response has mostly been, "No, you're weird." The best way to settle this is to go to the tape. Here's a list—by no means exhaustive—of things that various Republicans have proposed recently. You be the judge. The FBI ...continue reading "20 things that make Republicans weird"

This is a Union Pacific freight train passing through Banning. It's a meh kind of picture that normally wouldn't make the cut for the blog. Except for one thing. When I shot this I framed it poorly and the left edge of the photo stopped right at the signal. That was too tight, so I ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Hiring fell by more than 5% in June: That's a pretty considerable drop, equal to 50% if it kept up for a full year (which it won't). Hiring has declined 17% in the past two years and nearly 10% over the past year. Over the past two years, hiring has dropped about 200,000 more than ...continue reading "Hiring declines yet again in June"

Alex Thompson informs me today that Kamala Harris no longer supports Medicare for All; says she won’t ban fracking; wants to increase funding for the border; and doesn’t want to require people to sell their assault weapons back to the government. Obviously this means that Harris has wisely decided to shift a bit toward the ...continue reading "Kamala Harris would be wise to shift slightly to the center"

Google is running an ad during the Olympics. Perhaps you've seen it. A little girl wants to write a fan letter to her hero, 400-meter-hurdle world-record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. So Dad suggests she have Google's AI write one for her. He even makes up the prompt for her. The first time I saw this ad, ...continue reading "Dear [insert name here] . . ."

Consider the following chart. It shows the value of commercial property under foreclosure: What conclusion do you draw from the right edge of the chart, which shows foreclosures going up? Here's what the Wall Street Journal says: Surge in Commercial-Property Foreclosures Suggests Bottom Is Near In previous downturns, comparable surges in foreclosure activity has signaled ...continue reading "How long will the office building crisis last?"

Here's a remarkable headline from NBC News: These claims are repeated in the text, so it isn't just a matter of the headline being imprecise in order to save space. And all of them are wrong: Inflation has nothing to do with this. The cost of childcare has grown less than overall CPI and less ...continue reading "Childcare in America: The real story"

Did I visit the Sahara Desert recently? No, just the Cadiz Dunes Wilderness near sunset, right here in Southern California. It's out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, sort of between Barstow and Needles. I was there to see if it would be a good place for astrophotography and Milky Way pictures, which it ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Here's a chart showing how many of us have either gotten COVID or been vaccinated against it: (Note that the line on the chart shows inverse seroprevalence. That is, the number of people who haven't had COVID and haven't been vaccinated. This allows me to draw a proper trendline, but you have to subtract the ...continue reading "We’ve finally reached herd immunity! But it doesn’t matter."

Over the weekend, Jack Herrera had a piece in Politico that provides an interesting perspective on the Biden administration's immigration policy. It's true that illegal border crossings soared after Biden took office, but expulsions soared too, starting from his first day: Most Americans don’t understand how many people the Biden-Harris administration has removed from the ...continue reading "Joe Biden has expelled nearly 7 million illegal immigrants"

The latest micro outrage on the right is about a performance at the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies. It involved some drag queens at a table full of people that supposedly resembled The Last Supper, and the New York Times says that organizers "have remained largely vague about the references associated with the images." Then there's ...continue reading "Dionysus inspires protests on the right"

Here are a few assorted short takes that are on my mind right now. They are worth exactly what you paid for them. Is Donald Trump losing his edge? Kamala Harris has been the Democratic nominee for a week now, and she's hardly immune from criticism. But so far Trump has called her a "bum" ...continue reading "Sunday miscellany"

Today Donald Trump promised to create a strategic bitcoin reserve if he's elected. Even for Trump, does this make any sense? Put aside the question of whether bitcoin is a real thing or just a mass delusion. Let's assume it's real. We still don't stockpile every real thing. We don't have a strategic Lego reserve ...continue reading "What’s next from Trump? A strategic golf ball reserve?"

What's up with the widespread mispronunciation of Kamala Harris's name? The origin is simple enough. In English it's most common for the stress to be put on the second-to-last syllable of a word. This means a two-syllable word most often has the stress on its first syllable. A three-syllable word most often has it on ...continue reading "It’s not hard to say Kamala Harris’s name right"

The Washington Post has a story today about the fact that medical providers are now required to make test results accessible to patients as soon as they're available (generally via phone or online portal). This is a very popular rule, but it can cause problems if the results are (or seem) scary and it takes ...continue reading "Here’s why your doctor doesn’t call you back"

From Donald Trump during a rally in Florida: I'm not Christian. I'm sure he meant to say "I'm a Christian," but his mind's not really all there these days. Alternatively, this is what's known as a Kinsley gaffe, where you accidentally tell the truth. This was all part of a passage in his speech where ...continue reading "Quote of the day: Donald Trump on religion"

Here's an intriguing little factoid: I was prompted to look this up by a Wall Street Journal article claiming that Botox was on the rise among Washington DC politicians. As usual, though, it provided no evidence for this aside from two (2) doctors who said business was good. But if ISAPS is correct, we're in ...continue reading "Botox use skyrocketed after the pandemic"

J.D. Vance has been running for vice president less than two weeks and has already racked up an impressive list of recently uncovered greatest hits: Suggested that parents should get more votes than people without children. Said Kamala Harris is part of the community of "childless cat ladies" who want to make the country as ...continue reading "J.D. Vance is . . . kind of a weird guy"

This is Hilbert on the front lawn getting ready to eat some grass. He likes grass because it clears out his digestive system, which then ends up on our floor. I wouldn't mind so much except that he always heads for a carpet instead of just barfing on the hardwood floor where it's easy to ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 26 July 2024"

The New York Times informs us today that the latest trend is not to buy stuff just because you saw it on TikTok. Brett House, an economics professor at Columbia University, says this is probably thanks to bad economic times: After years of being told what to buy, TikTok users are trying something new: buying ...continue reading "Are teenagers really buying “only what they need”?"