Kevin Drum 🕸

Stormy day in LA.

When the New York Times famously covered its entire front page in 2016 with reports about the FBI's last minute investigation of the "existence of emails," you could at least argue that this really was news. The Times overdid things, that's all. Behold the front page of Politico today: This is all about fake Republican ...continue reading "Politico floods the zone over fake “garbage” outrage"

The law says you can't purge voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Nevertheless, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has been removing suspected noncitizens from voter lists ever since August. This runs the risk of leaving people with too little time to fix things if an inevitable mistake is made. In any case, it's ...continue reading "Republicans on Supreme Court rule that the law doesn’t apply to Republicans"

In the final YouGov poll before the election, Kamala Harris is leading Trump by only one percentage point: This strikes me as overly pessimistic, possibly because it's a poll of registered voters, not likely voters. But we'll find out for sure in six days.

The Atlanta Fed's forecast was spot on: real GDP grew 2.8% in the third quarter: This is an ideal reading. Growth remains strong, but not so strong that the Fed goes all aflutter about the economy overheating.

Here is Donald Trump's apparent governing plan so far: Enact 20% tariffs on all imports.¹ Cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.² Let RFK Jr. "go wild" on health, food, and medicine.³ Mass deportation of illegal immigrants.¹ ² Big tax cuts for corporations and the rich.¹ Abandon Ukraine. Maybe Taiwan too.4 Use the military to ...continue reading "A brief summary of Donald Trump’s plan for America"

In an apparent attempt to lose whatever international support they still retain, Israel voted overwhelmingly yesterday to kick out UNRWA from Gaza. UNRWA distributes the vast majority of aid to Gaza, and no other organization has the know-how and the personnel to take its place. They're indispensable. But everybody's most loathed prime minister just shrugged: ...continue reading "Israel decides to cut off aid to Gaza"

Paul Krugman put up this Gallup chart today with the comment "Crime is way down; Ds are right": In reality, this chart shows that nobody is right. Here's the actual crime trend since the start of the century: Violent crime dropped steadily through 2012 and has been flat ever since. Property crime dropped through 2020 ...continue reading "Here’s the boring truth: Crime is neither up nor down"

Despite the Fed's September rate cut, along with promises of more, 30-year mortgage rates began rising abruptly in early October and spiked above 7% today: What’s going on? Mark Zandi explains: First, the strong economy is even stronger than anticipated, causing investors to re-think how quickly the Fed will cut rates. Equally important is investors’ ...continue reading "Mortgage rates have spiked up to 7%. It’s a warning from Wall Street."

The Atlanta Fed has published its final forecast of third-quarter GDP before the official numbers are released tomorrow. Following a disappointing export report this morning, their model now projects a Q3 growth rate of 2.8%.

This is Schönlaterngasse in Vienna ("Street of the Beautiful Lantern") near the Jesuit church and the Gutenberg monument. The Truth and Dare bar is up ahead, and it was a nice night so people were congregating outside.

Noted without comment:

The job market continued to normalize in September: Unfilled job demand—openings minus hires—has receded from its 2022 peak and dropped another 430,000 last month. It's now close to its normal pre-pandemic level. Note that unfilled job demand is the main driver of migrant surges into the US, so this is good news for the likelihood ...continue reading "Job demand is almost back to normal"

It's only 209 weeks until Election Day 2028. Get cracking, people.

The white working class has been trending Republican for a long time, but Donald Trump seems to be doing especially well with them this year—and especially among men. Why? A bunch of reasons, but this is probably one of them:

The US is energy independent, but for economic and strategic reasons we continue to import a moderate amount of crude oil. Most of it comes from Canada, followed by Mexico. Here are imports from OPEC, nearly all of it from Saudi Arabia these days.

Let's do some arithmetic. On October 3rd I received an 80 gram dose of Talvey. It has a half life in the body of 8.4 days. So the effective amount remaining is: October 3: 80 grams October 11: 40 grams October 20: 20 grams October 28: 10 grams November 6: 5 grams November 14: 2.5 ...continue reading "When will I recover my taste buds?"

The 2024 CES pre-election survey, based on a huge sample of nearly 80,000 adults, puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump 51-47% among likely voters. She's ahead 52-46% among very likely voters. Here's their breakdown by age and gender: Harris is tied or ahead with every single group except one: old men, where she's behind ...continue reading "CES says Kamala Harris is comfortably in the lead"

For the past week I've had a houseguest, an old friend who inherited a big pile of old tickets to Disneyland a few years ago. So on Thursday that's where we went. This was a mistake. The day before I walked around for an hour and felt fine. I took this to mean that plain ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Taylor Telford has a piece in the Washington Post today about office workers no longer knowing how to act at work: More than two years after employers began urging white-collar workers back to offices, Americans are still reckoning with the ripple effects of pandemic-induced disruption when it comes to workplace behavior. The years spent apart ...continue reading "Have our social skills rotted away?"