Kevin Drum 🕸

You're aware of the practice of judge shopping, right? Most often it's used by conservatives, who file suits in specific locations where they're guaranteed to get a wingnut judge who will issue a nationwide injunction based on even the flimsiest evidence. Favored judges include Matthew Kacsmaryk (mifepristone, "Remain in Mexico"); Drew Tipton (immigration); Mark Pittman ...continue reading "Conservative judge shopping finally gets banned"

Hum de hum. A couple of reasonable folks have recently weighed in on the question of whether TikTok should be banned in the US. The first is from Noah Smith, who says it should be and points to two pieces of concrete evidence: (1) a study showed that TikTok suppresses videos China doesn't like, and ...continue reading "Is TikTok an existential threat to American society?"

It's time for some zoo pictures. The LA Zoo, for some reason, requires you to walk several hundred yards up a "promenade" after you get your ticket but before you get to the zoo itself. This is boring because there's very little along the way except for a few little pop-up shops. But. There is ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The Justice Department has released a transcript of Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur, and the Wall Street Journal has read it: Other news outlets basically agree, mostly opting to present their findings as "nuanced" or providing "context." But they fundamentally say the same thing: Biden was being Biden. He joked, he veered ...continue reading "Transcript shows Biden was fine during Hur interview"

Yikes! The BLS reported CPI inflation of 5.4% in February. Core CPI was lower at 4.4%: This is a big increase, driven by inflation in services and an increase in gasoline prices over the past month. Other commodities were either flat or down, including food, which showed no price increase from last month. On a ...continue reading "CPI inflation surges upward for fourth month in a row"

The Stormy Daniels hush money trial is scheduled to begin in two weeks. Naturally this means that Donald Trump's legal team is just now getting around to asking for a delay while we wait for the Supreme Court to rule on whether Trump is automatically immune to prosecution for anything he did while president. The ...continue reading "Trump makes a desperate bid to delay his hush money trial"

The whole Kate Middleton Photoshopping scandal is bizarrely inexplicable. Journalists have now identified nearly two dozen edits to the Mother's Day picture, and the inexplicable part is that they're both clumsy and pointless. Kate says she did the edits herself, which is kind of believable. Certainly no expert did this stuff. And why? The edits ...continue reading "The Kate Middleton scandaloid is truly strange"

This is from an article Derek Thompson wrote for the Atlantic last month: 3) In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with ppl than pets. By 2022, this flipped. Today, the avg woman w/ a pet now spends more time “actively engaged” with her pet than she spends hanging out ...continue reading "Women and their pets"

Sometime in the next few months a star called T Corona Borealis is going to explode. How do we know this? Because T CrB isn't going to be a supernova—which would be unpredictable and destroy the star for good. In fact, T CrB isn't even a single star. It's a binary star: a white dwarf ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

In case you're curious, here's a breakdown of the president's FY25 budget proposal: The two pink regions represent approximately 5% of the defense budget and 5% of the domestic discretionary budget. The whole interminable fight before we finally agree on a budget will be entirely about those two slivers—or less. Those fights will seem very ...continue reading "A preview of next year’s budget fight"

President Biden released a new campaign pledge federal budget today: President Biden on Monday called for major new spending initiatives to lower costs for health care, child care and housing and enough new taxes on the wealthy and major corporations to pay for those proposals and also shave $3 trillion off the national debt over ...continue reading "Yet another budget tome lands in Washington DC"

A couple of days ago TikTok's users were greeted with an unusual welcome screen when they logged in: a message from the company warning that Congress was trying to shut them down and asking its fans to call their senators and representatives about it. I remain ambivalent about TikTok, but the reaction of the right ...continue reading "TikTok is an ordinary youthful fad. Convince me otherwise."

Paul Krugman says that recent job growth is all about migrant labor. Immigration hawk Mickey Kaus isn't amused: And the hell with marginally employed native minorities, high-school dropouts and ex-offenders who might have been hoping that a tight labor market would finally offer them a good shot at steady, decently paid employment .... Anti-immigration folks ...continue reading "Does immigration bring down wages?"

Earlier today Kensington Palace released the first picture of Princess Kate since her abdominal surgery earlier this year. But today AP and two other wire services withdrew the photo because of evidence that "the source has manipulated the image": ZOMG! What did the palace do?!? Put Kate's head on someone else's body? Broaden her smile ...continue reading "Scandal!"

One of the things that continues to boggle me is the breathtaking extremism on both sides of the Gaza conflict. On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist—a position that even the PLO abandoned 30 years ago. On the right, ...continue reading "The pro-starvation wing of conservatism is alive and well"

Atrios links today to a Wirecutter piece that says you no longer need to worry about turning off the lights when you leave a room. Modern bulbs are so energy efficient it barely makes any difference. This reminded me of the great Obama light bulb panic of 2011, highlighted by Michele Bachmann (remember her?) and ...continue reading "We are living in a golden age of light bulbs"

Sen. Katie Britt has gotten a lot of grief for her melodramatic response to the State of the Union address, but it turns out she was also recklessly misleading about a woman she met on a visit to Del Rio, Texas, last year: That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with ...continue reading "The tale of Katie Britt and the sex trafficking victim"

Why did Republicans vote down the bipartisan immigration reform bill? Because Donald Trump told them to. However, serious border hawks really did have some substantive complaints as well. Two of them were the most significant. First, the bill did nothing about President Biden's CHNV parole program, which allows residents of four countries (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, ...continue reading "Why did Republicans vote down the immigration reform bill?"

Hey, check out Mayor Secretary Pete on childhood lead poisoning: The benefit of *not being lead poisoned* is not speculative. It is enormous. And because lead poisoning leads to irreversible cognitive harm, massive economic loss, and even higher crime rates, this work represents one of the best returns on public investment ever observed. https://t.co/uFVsTCebwt — ...continue reading "Secretary Pete endorses the lead-crime theory"

Donald Trump's latest loss in a British court prompted me to make a list of all the Trump court cases since he first ran for president. These are personal and business cases of substance, not trivial things or routine actions against Trump for his actions in office. Remarkably, out of all of them, he's only ...continue reading "Raw data: All the major Trump court cases since 2016"