Month: April 2021

A friend of mine who lives on the East Coast and therefore wakes up earlier than me emails to say that I really need to check out Politico's excerpt of John Boehner's new memoir. You bet! Let's take a look:

In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called “a shellacking.” And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.

Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who’d never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way.

And that's just the first two paragraphs. It's safe to say that Boehner has decided to really get a few things off his chest. Roger Ailes, for example:

At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes....[He went] on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.

“They’re monitoring me,” he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a “safe room” built so he couldn’t be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like he’d been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.

And Ted Cruz:

Under the new rules of Crazytown, I may have been Speaker, but I didn’t hold all the power. By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash. And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz. He enlisted the crazy caucus of the GOP in what was a truly dumbass idea. Not that anybody asked me.

It's obvious that Boehner was an old-school pol caught in an insane world he had no hope of understanding. His bottom line is pretty simple: Following the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party was no longer driven by ordinary political considerations. It was driven by Fox News—now under the control of a paranoid lunatic—and the rest of the conservative media outrage caucus.

I will continue to repeat this forever: Facebook may have some impact on the spread of political misinformation, but it's a gnat compared to Fox News. It is Fox News that has destroyed the American political system over the past two decades.

Some wisdom from Michael Linden:

I really feel like a lot of people never grappled with the fact that in 2017 Congress enacted a massive corporate tax cut, including a 14 point cut in the marginal rate and it had no discernible positive effect on the macro economy.

— Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) April 2, 2021

Quite so. For example:

Still, it's not fair to say the tax cut had no effect on the economy:

Want more? I recommend my very thorough look at the Republican tax cut here. It is literally true that the tax cut did absolutely nothing that Republicans had promised before they passed it. Nothing.

The American economy gained 916,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate declined slightly to 6.0 percent.

As usual, this is more a reflection of the pandemic than it is about the underlying strength of the economy, but for the first time in a while I'd say it represents genuinely good news. The increase in jobs is significant enough that it suggests the economy is now truly starting to recover. Unsurprisingly, the job gains were led by leisure and hospitality as people started taking vacations again.

(But it's not unambiguous good news. It's great that people are going back to work, but it might have been better if we had put this off for another month or so.)

Adjusted for inflation, average weekly earnings are up 5.5% since last March. As you can see, people who kept their jobs during the pandemic saw a sharp increase in earnings, and so far they've managed to hold onto them.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through April 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is, I think, an ancient bristlecone pine, but it's a little hard to tell for sure. I took this picture on the road to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, where there are indeed many bristlecone pines, but is this one of them? Or is it just an old, weathered tree stump?

Any expert opinion out there?

There's been a flurry of excellent vaccine news lately:

• A new CDC study suggests that people who are vaccinated don't carry the coronavirus and can't spread it.
• The Pfizer vaccine appears to be 100% effective in teens all the way down to age 12.
• In preliminary testing, the Pfizer vaccine was very effective against the South Africa variant.
• The Pfizer vaccine remains at least 90% effective after six months.

Most of this news is specifically about the Pfizer vaccine, but I'll bet that in a few weeks we'll get similar news about the Moderna vaccine and then about the others.

All that's left now is to get everyone vaccinated before the idiots who insist on celebrating early manage to produce yet another surge—though in some places it may be too late for that already. Sigh.

Yesterday the stuck ship in the Suez Canal was a symbol for the immense fragility of the global trade system. Today it's suddenly a nothingburger:

"Even" the Suez debacle can't hold back global trade!

Come on, folks. The Suez blockage was a minor mishap that produced lots of funny memes and will cost insurance companies a few million dollars. That's it. It is not a metaphor for anything and it doesn't mean we need to rethink the entire operation of the canal or the size of container ships or our dependence on foreign trade or anything else. OK?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.