Kevin Drum 🕸

This is an iris alstroemeria in our front yard, taken at dusk with fill flash. I don't especially like the look, but it's still interesting occasionally to see the difference between artificial and natural lighting.

Mitch McConnell is stepping down as Republican leader in the Senate. Good riddance to him. Still, his departure reminds me of the resignation/firing of Jeff Sessions as attorney general in 2018. When Sessions was initially appointed he seemed to us liberals like pretty much the worst, most ultra-conservative, quasi-racist attorney general imaginable. Then he got ...continue reading "Can we do worse than Mitch McConnell?"

*Not really. But he does say he can't post his $454 million bond unless he sells off some property: Donald J. Trump offered a New York appeals court on Wednesday a bond of only $100 million to pause the more than $450 million judgment he faces in his civil fraud case, saying that he might ...continue reading "Donald Trump says he’s broke*"

Klarna is a Swedish e-shopping site that I had never heard of until yesterday. I remain slightly unsure of what they actually do, but they claim to handle 2 million transactions per day for half a million merchants. This means they employ a lot of customer service agents in their call center. At least, they ...continue reading "Ecommerce giant now using AI for most customer service"

In our last episode, the Alabama Supreme Court effectively abolished in-vitro fertilization by ruling that frozen embryos are human beings, thus making the loss of any embryo a potential murder or manslaughter. Now, in our latest episode, the Alabama legislature is fighting back. Embryos are still human beings, as any God-fearing Alabamian knows, but new ...continue reading "Alabama is loco"

Hey, have you heard that an illegal immigrant killed a nursing student in Athens, Georgia? Maybe not, says Bob Somerby: On one channel, this topic drove eight hours of primetime reporting and discussion. On the other channel, the topic doesn't exist. However you may assess the dueling news judgments, our tribes are now living in ...continue reading "It’s all theater for Republicans"

The good ol' Wall Street Journal reports today on the travails of the hotel industry: Even after clawing back hundreds of thousands of jobs during the past two years, the industry is still light on staff and often struggling to adapt.... At the same time, hotels across the U.S. have held their daily room rates ...continue reading "Here’s the non-fantasy story of how hotels are doing"

Back in 2015, the NIH started a longitudinal research program called All of Us with the goal of collecting genome data from a million Americans of every possible ancestry. The goal was to improve health care by figuring out how best to treat diseases in people of different backgrounds. The program is up to 413,000 ...continue reading "Sorry, but population groups are real"

This is the Russian Orthodox Holy Trinity cathedral in Paris.

From the Wall Street Journal: Eating rice and beans instead of meat. Planning out meals a month in advance. Trying to raise more food in backyard gardens. Americans are changing the way they eat, shop and live to cope with a stretch of record food inflation. For chrissake, can we stop this nonsense? Here is ...continue reading "Food inflation is not a problem anymore"

Didn't House Republicans already agree to spending guidelines for the federal budget? So why are they still haggling? Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, announced on Sunday that leaders had failed to reach a deal over the weekend because “House Republicans need more time to sort themselves out.” Speaker Mike ...continue reading "Here’s how the budget negotiations are going"

Today Paul Krugman discusses a new book by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. In particular, Krugman agrees that rural areas have hemorrhaged jobs, leaving behind a loss of purpose and dignity: This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long ...continue reading "White rural rage isn’t about economics"

I didn't have a hemorrhoid after all. I had an epidermal abscess. All hail Dr. Kim at the Kaiser ER in Irvine, who lanced it and drained it a couple of hours ago. Ten days of antibiotics and I should be right as rain. If I had had any clue what this was, I would ...continue reading "Health update"

This is a street in Ubaté, a town about 40 miles north of Bogotá in Colombia. It's my last picture from Colombia, and for some reason it's taken me the better part of five years to get around to posting it.

I am pleased to report that Google's Gemini AI says I'm not as bad as Hitler: OK, Gemini wasn't explicitly willing to say I'm better than Hitler, but it does suggest that disagreeing with me isn't as bad as killing six million Jews, and any comparison of me to Hitler is harmful.¹ I'll take it. ...continue reading "Good news: I am not as bad as Hitler"

The United States is famously violent and awash in guns. Racism is practically a national creed. Drug abuse is rampant. We have the highest income inequality in the developed world. Our mass transit is laughable. We spend half our time in court suing each other. Our system of government is literally designed to make it ...continue reading "America is a wreck. America is great."

Today the Wall Street Journal reports: Peter Thiel’s $100,000 Offer to Skip College Is More Popular Than Ever More Americans are rethinking the value of a college education That's the headline. What the article actually says is that Thiel backs about 20 kids per year and will do so again this year. Why the lack ...continue reading "20 kids per year are taking Peter Thiel’s money"

Back in the day, we all worked for the same company our whole lives. Today, though, we job hop like frenzied rabbits. Right? Apparently not. Median job tenure has increased considerably over the past 50 years, though some of that is due to the aging of society (older people have longer job tenures than younger ...continue reading "Raw data: How long do we stay in our jobs?"

The New York Times writes today: In May 2023, Senator Charles E. Grassley, a chief antagonist of President Biden, strode to the Senate floor with some shocking news: He had learned, he said, of a document in the F.B.I.’s possession that could reveal “a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden.” This, of course, turned out ...continue reading "Who was Chuck Grassley’s leaker?"

Republicans have now had a full week to stick their fingers in the wind and decide how they're supposed to feel about Alabama's ruling that IVF embryos are God's children the same as the rest of us. But they still haven't figured it out. Donald Trump wrote a screeching post in favor of IVF today, ...continue reading "Republicans can’t tap dance around IVF"