Over at New York, Olivia Nuzzi speculates about why Donald Trump has been so quiet lately. One possibility, of course, is that he literally doesn't know what to do now that he's been kicked off Twitter and Facebook. That seems unlikely, though. Nuzzi suggests that Trump is just angry and dejected and not in the mood to fight, which also strikes me as unlikely. Then there's this:
His avoidance of the press seems like a means of avoiding acknowledging the reality of how this ended. Though, I’m sure, his advisers and his new lawyers (and his old lawyers before that) have made the case that he won’t be helping anything if he rambles for 45 minutes on the air with Maria Bartiromo or whatever low-rent propagandist equivalent they have hosting a show at OANN or Newsmax. All it would do is remind any Republicans on the fence about their votes what a nuisance he is.
Obviously this is just a guess on my part, but in the past there's been only one way of successfully getting Trump to shut his yap: warning him that he might be in legal trouble if he says anything publicly. Trump has a lifelong addiction to the legal process, and advice from lawyers actually seems to get through to him sometimes.
I have a hunch that Trump remains scared of the impeachment trial coming up and is taking his attorney's advice to say nothing until it's over. It's an unusually wise move from a man not noted for his wisdom.
Here's the usual way for a private company to go public:
Hire an investment bank to manage the process.
Create a "book" of investors who want to buy shares of stock issued by the company.
On Der Tag, open for business on the stock exchange of your choice.
The investment bank makes money by charging for its services. The private company makes money by selling shares of stock. Investors hope to make money when the stock opens at a higher price than they paid for the company stock. All nice and tidy—but also sort of a pain in the ass. The company has to write a prospectus and reveal all sorts of private information. Investors have to be rounded up. Quiet periods often prevent the company from normal marketing activities.
Enter the SPAC, aka a "blank check" company. A SPAC is basically just a pile of money, maybe a few billion dollars or so, that's already a public company. Now the process of going public is different:
The SPAC noses around and finds a private company that looks interesting.
The SPAC merges with the private company.
The merged company is now basically the private company + cash + a listing on a stock exchange.
The private company now has access to a big pile of money. SPAC investors make money when the value of the company goes up. And it's all done quietly with none of the nonsense of prospectuses and road trips and worrying about the SEC. It's become a very popular way of taking a company public. Perhaps too popular? Check out the recent story of Lucid Motors:
When news emerged in December that Churchill Capital Corp, a blank-check company with no assets beyond its $2 billion in cash, had made an offer to acquire DirecTV, its stock barely moved. After a report in January that Churchill was in talks to merge with the buzzy electric-vehicle startup Lucid Motors Inc., it was a different story.
....The stock has surged more than 220% since the report last month, the biggest-ever stock increase of a special-purpose acquisition company before announcing a merger, according to SPACinsider.com. Talks between the two companies are continuing, though a deal isn’t imminent, according to people familiar with the matter.
Zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds! And all for the low, low price of $161,500.
Now, you might be wondering how a "company" that consists of nothing but cash can surge 220%. Cash is cash, and the value of the company is the value of its cash, full stop. What's more, even if Churchill does end up merging with Lucid, it will do so at a (supposedly) fair market price, which means the value of its stock shouldn't change. At most, buzz over the deal might move its stock a few percentage points, but it certainly wouldn't double its value.
The Journal article acknowledges this and attributes it to "the extraordinary appetite among stock-market investors for electric-vehicle startups," but that doesn't really make any sense. Cash is still cash, and it would only be worth twice its value if investors think Churchill is somehow going to merge with Lucid on fantastically favorable terms. But no one thinks that.
So rather than demonstrating the thirst for electric vehicle startups, perhaps this is more a sign that SPAC mania is finally reaching its frothy top. Bewarned.
UPDATE: Want to learn more about the exciting world of SPACs? David Dayen has you covered here.
Over at his new Substack home, Will Wilkinson suggests that Americans have been unhappy for a while. Here's his evidence:
Regular readers know that I'm not a stickler about charts having y-axes that start at zero. Still, this chart is pretty determined to show a tiny decline as a huge one. A careful look at the y-axis shows that general happiness has recently gone down from about 2.22 to 2.18. This is not a gigantic change.
I wouldn't bother pointing this out if it weren't for the fact that I think this is an important argument. As near as I can tell, Americans aren't especially unhappy these days. Here's the same GSS data plotted slightly differently:
The percentage of people who say they're happy declined from 90 percent in 2000 to 85 percent in 2010, and then bounced back to 87 percent in 2018. That's a net drop of three percentage points, which is barely even noticeable. (Note that all of this is pre-COVID.) Here's similar data from the World Values Survey:
Again, there's a slight decrease between 2000 and 2010, bringing us back to about the same level as the late '80s.
There's other data you can look at that's more specific—financial satisfaction, personal satisfaction, job satisfaction, etc. They all show much the same thing: either no change at all or else a very small change over the past couple of decades.
You can make a case that Americans are slightly less happy today than in the past. You can also make a case that happiness has dropped more dramatically for certain specific subgroups. But that's about it. In general, the changes are small and far from historically unprecedented. The real mystery is why Americans are so angry and frustrated despite being about as happy as ever. There's an answer to that question, I think, but in any case it's the question to ask.
The Center for Media Engagement at UT Austin has released a report on TV coverage of the coronavirus. Here's their breakdown of how often partisans were mentioned:
Broadcast news and CNN mentioned Democrats and Republicans about equally, demonstrating their desire for even handedness. Fox and MSNBC, by contrast, both mentioned their ideological opposites at a higher rate. Why? Because both networks are dedicated less to defending their own side than they are to stoking outrage about what the other side is doing. On this score, MSNBC is bad and Fox is even worse.
The report also takes a look at how well each network did on providing accurate mask information following the CDC's change of heart in April. They found that broadcast networks and CNN were very accurate; MSNBC was slightly worse but still pretty good; and Fox was terrible. Apparently toeing the Trump line prevented them from taking the plunge and just telling people they should wear masks.
By the way, this is why I continue to defend the "objective" media. For all their faults, they still tend to be more accurate than explicitly partisan media.
This is the interchange from the 55 to the 405 freeway in Costa Mesa. It was taken at 3 am during the early stages of the COVID-19 shutdown when I could do a 30-second exposure and still have no cars in the picture.
Of course, at 3 am I might be able to do that anytime, which makes this a pretty humdrum image. However, for nearly a year it's stayed in my queue without being deleted, which means I kinda like it for some reason. The colors are nice. The arc of the onramp is nice. The emptiness of a normally bustling road is nice. I'm not sure what else attracts me to it.
What happens if we increase the federal minimum wage to $15? The Wall Street Journal says we don't know for sure:
Economists are divided on the effects of the $15 minimum wage. Some have looked at the patchwork of state and local increases and found little job loss relative to nearby areas with lower minimums. But others say jobs losses tied to a $15 minimum wage could be more severe, especially in states with a relatively low cost of living.
The impact would be felt in more rural states, such as Mississippi, the opponents say. Half of all workers there earned $15 an hour or less in 2019, according to the Labor Department. That includes dishwashers, cashiers, firefighters and construction laborers. Nearly half of workers in Arkansas, West Virginia and Louisiana made less than $15 an hour.
I'm not sure there's really much of a question about this. What would happen is that wages would go up for nearly everyone, but there would also be employment losses. However, we don't know for sure how big the employment losses would be since we've never enacted a national minimum wage hike this big.
Right now median annual earnings in the United States come to $36,000 according to the Census Bureau. A minimum wage of $15 is equivalent to annual earnings of about $31,000. That's a very high minimum wage. We really have no idea what effect that would have outside of high-wage cities like New York and Seattle.
Right now, the plan on the table calls for the minimum wage to rise to $12.50 by 2023 and $15 by 2025. My preference would be to stop at $12.50 and then link further increases to inflation. We should see what effect this has before jumping off into the unknown. As always, states and cities with generally higher wages could enact higher minimums if they choose to.
As investigations of the 1/6 insurrection continue, one thing that's become clearer is the key role played by an organization called Women For America First, run by Amy Kremer.
Kremer is an old hand at this stuff. She was an early Tea Party activist and in 2016 founded a couple of Super PACs dedicated to electing Donald Trump, one of them in partnership with Roger Stone's wife, Ann. The PACs raised little money but she stayed in the fight, spending the next couple of years supporting far-right candidates in both primaries and general elections. Then she switched gears and founded WFAF in 2019. It was originally aimed at protesting the Trump impeachment; then at COVID-19 restrictions; and finally, after the 2020 election, at promoting "Stop the Steal," which claimed the election had been stolen by Democrats.
As Mr. Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.
As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
It was Kremer who got the permit for the 1/6 rally at which Trump spoke. However, although they've done their best to hide this, she had the help of several people close to Trump himself:
Megan Powers was listed as one of two operations managers for the Jan. 6 event, and her LinkedIn profile says she was the Trump campaign’s director of operations into January 2021....Caroline Wren, a veteran GOP fundraiser, is named as a “VIP Advisor” on an attachment to the permit that Women for America First provided to the agency....Maggie Mulvaney, a niece of former top Trump aide Mick Mulvaney, is listed on the permit attachment as the “VIP Lead.” She worked as director of finance operations for the Trump campaign, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Wren was no ordinary event planner. She served as a deputy to Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at Trump Victory, a joint presidential fundraising committee during the 2020 campaign. The Justin mentioned in her text was Justin Caporale, a former top aide to first lady Melania Trump, whose production company helped put on the event at the Ellipse.
Text messages and an event-planning memo obtained by ProPublica, along with an interview with Chafian, indicate that Wren, a Washington insider with a low public profile, played an extensive role in managing operations for the event. The records show that Wren oversaw logistics, budgeting, funding and messaging for the Jan. 6 rally that featured President Donald Trump.
On Saturday, Jan. 2, Kylie Kremer posted a promotional video for Wednesday’s rally on Twitter, along with a message: “BE A PART OF HISTORY.”
The president shared her post and wrote: “I’ll be there! Historic day.”
Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production....New planners also joined the team, among them Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump fund-raiser and partner of Donald Trump Jr. The former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson was the liaison to the White House, a former administration official said. The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.
This all leads us to the key question: How much did Donald Trump know about all this, and when did he know it? Trump, of course, insists that he knew nothing, and given his hummingbird-like attention span this could well be true.
On the other hand, Kremer was a longtime activist, well known and friendly with Trump's friends. Lots of Trump's campaign people apparently assisted with the planning of the 1/6 rally. And Trump's interest in having the Senate overturn the Electoral College results is a matter of record.
Given that, what are the odds Trump knew nothing about the rally and had no plans to use it as a last-ditch effort to bludgeon the Senate into carrying out his will? I'd say it's unlikely he was totally in the dark, but you can take a look at the evidence and decide for yourself.
This is Romanesco cauliflower, courtesy of our weekly produce box. According to some random guy I found in a Google search, "Romanesco’s flowering head grows in a naturally occurring fractal" and "is described as possessing a somewhat earthy taste that meshes elegantly with other flavors like garlic, white wine and even chili peppers."
This picture has been modified using the Photoshop poster edge filter. I know that many people hate hate hate all this filtering nonsense, but once in a while I think it looks good. I've even got another one in the queue for later in the year.
