Month: February 2022

Are you wondering how the Ukraine crisis is playing out in Russian media? LA Times staff writer Nabih Bulos reports from Kyiv:

To hear Russian media tell it, the government of Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Russians in the country’s east, where Moscow-backed authorities regularly uncover mass graves full of the corpses of women and children with bound hands and bludgeoned heads even as they face the hell of constant shelling.

Such false images and narratives have become a daily staple in Russia....The Russian media have gone into overdrive with stories depicting a government in Kyiv so cruel that Moscow has no choice but to swoop in and protect the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

“It’s a war between the Ukrainian government and its own people.... People are dying there every day. Thousands of civilians died there. Thousands of children lost their limbs there, buried in little coffins,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded broadcaster RT, said on a talk show on the Russia-1 channel.

I think living in Russia is what it would be like in the US if every channel were Fox News and every newspaper were the New York Post.

As we all know, the number of job openings has soared over the past year:

But how are individual states doing? Here are the top and bottom ten:

Alaska and Wyoming are begging for workers and not getting them. Those are presumably good states to go to if you want to start fresh and find a new job. Washington and New York, by contrast, are apparently having a much easier time filling their open jobs. You'll have a good deal less leverage if you look for a job there.

Things I didn't know until last night:

Buddhism had first arrived in China during the Han....Eunuchs proved enthusiastic converts, comforted by the promise of reincarnation; they carried their severed parts, their "precious," băobèi, in a special container so that they could be reunited with them in the next life.

OK then.

The Electoral Count Act is a 19th century relic that provides rules for how to count electoral votes in presidential elections. Unfortunately, it's so vague and poorly drafted that, in practice, it's close to worthless.

The reason it's back in the news these days is obvious: after the debacle of 2020—and with a potentially worse debacle heading our way in 2024—we could really use something like an Electoral Count Act that actually works. What's more, there's a possibility of getting bipartisan support for an ECA reform, which means this isn't just hot air. We might actually be able to pass something.

But Yuval Levin points out that there are some fundamental disagreements about exactly what needs to be reformed:

This debate is a function of a very basic question so far left unresolved in the bipartisan effort to reform the ECA: Should we be worried about members of Congress trying to undermine the certification of elections or about state officials doing so?

There are reasons to worry about both kinds of scenarios, but ECA reforms could not easily take up both at once because the kinds of changes that would help address one kind of concern would tend to make the other worse. Averting shenanigans in Congress would mean constraining Congress to an essentially ceremonial role and leaving the substantive work of finalizing election results more fully up to the states. But averting shenanigans in the states would mean giving Congress more of an oversight role over the particulars of state certification. You can’t really do both at the same time.

I have an idea to toss out. American law has a thing called a "three judge panel," created in 1910 for reasons that need not detain us. They aren't used a lot these days except in voting rights cases, but they're fairly simple: a panel of three federal district judges hears a case and hands down a ruling, which can then be immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. The idea is that a three-judge panel is more reliable than a single judge, who might be a wacko, and the immediate appeal to the Supreme Court means cases can be decided quickly.

However, as Levin points out, there's a problem with federal judges hearing electoral vote cases, which are solely about state law as passed by state legislatures: "Giving federal courts original jurisdiction over disputes that basically involve how state officials enforce state laws is constitutionally dubious at best and could easily create more problems than it solves." The same is true of a normal three judge panel.

That made me wonder: could we create a different kind of three-judge panel? In this case, it would consist of three state judges and be immediately appealable to the Supreme Court. This would keep state judges as the finders of fact, while the immediate appeal is ideal for cases that need to be handled quickly. And as far as I know, nobody denies that the Supreme Court has final authority over these cases.

Anyway, this is just an idea, and there's more to ECA reform than figuring out how to handle judicial oversight. But maybe something along these lines is worth thinking about?

Here's a heron standing around doing nothing on Lake Martin. I suppose it's waiting to catch sight of a fish to gobble up, isn't it?

Wait. Interest rates are low? This isn't what you're hearing on the news.

That's true, but as usual nothing is being adjusted for inflation:

The bank prime rate is currently at about 3%, which means that in real terms it's at -4%. This is why inflation is typically good for the economy. By making real interest rates low, it makes business expansion cheap. If you can get a business loan for a couple of points above prime—which would still be negative in real terms—why wouldn't you expand?

The answer, of course, is twofold. First, you might believe that inflation is transitory and your 5% loan will soon really be a 5% loan. Second, you just might not believe there's going to be more business in the future. If that's the case, there's no point in expanding no matter what kind of loan you can get.

Anyway, this is a good time for inflation hawks to cash in. If you think high inflation is going to last a long time, then buy a house! The 30-year fixed rate is negative when you account for inflation, so it's a huge bargain. And if you're a dove who thinks high inflation won't last very long? Then maybe an ARM is a better choice.

Andrew Prokop writes today about the fact that the president's party usually loses midterm elections:

So why does this happen? There are a few clues that can rule out possible explanations. The trend predates World War II, so it’s not about recent developments. It happens in states (the governor’s party usually loses seats in off-year legislature elections), so it’s not just about the presidency. It’s not just an American phenomenon, either. “It also occurs internationally in systems where there is a chief executive election separate from a midterm,” says Matt Grossmann, a professor of political science at Michigan State University.

And the trend usually reverses itself — at least partly — by the time the next presidential election rolls around, since most presidents get reelected and their party’s down-ballot performance usually improves relative to the midterms.

I'll toss out an explanation: lots of people vote against presidents, not for them.

For example, suppose you voted against Donald Trump in 2020. He's not on the ballot in 2022, so your incentive to vote is low. Conversely, if you voted against Joe Biden, he's on your TV all the time and still out there to be voted against. So you do. The result, regardless of motivation, is that lots of Biden supporters stay home while Trump supporters are still eager to vote.

How would you test this theory? I'm not sure. I suppose I'd predict that midterm shifts would be especially strong if the previous presidential election was especially polarizing. Unfortunately, that just replaces one problem with another. How do you measure how polarizing a presidential election was?

Anyway, I happen to believe that much of presidential politics makes more sense if you view it through a lens of who people vote against, rather than who they vote for. This is why negative campaigning usually works so well.

Over at New York magazine, Eric Levitz offers up a lengthy column titled, "Ibram X. Kendi Does Not Run the Democratic Party."

It's difficult to excerpt, but he's basically taking on a recent Matt Bai column that excoriates leftists for their unhinged levels of identity politics and—sorry, but I can't think of a better word—semi-insane levels of wokeness. Levitz's argument is that even if this accurately describes certain quarters of the left, the mainstream of the Democratic Party remains doggedly mainstream:

My argument here is not that the worldview referenced by Bai is powerless....The problem with Bai’s piece is not that he criticizes some left-wing ideas despite knowing the GOP is the greater threat to liberal ideals. Rather, the problem is that he (1) falsely asserts that “mainstream” Democrats have abandoned liberal universalism for a doctrine of “vengeance” against white people and (2) suggests it would be rational for liberals to respond to this by withholding support for Democratic candidates, even as he produces no evidence to support either contention.

In a hyper-technical sense, Levitz is right. Most Democratic politicians—with Joe Biden very much in the lead—really are middle of the road. As much as Fox News would like to pretend otherwise, conservative attacks on wokeness almost never implicate actual members of Congress or other prominent Democratic politicos. That's because most prominent Democrats aren't big fans of wokeness.

But this misses the point. Mainstream Democrats might not believe this stuff, but they also aren't willing to loudly criticize it. And without that, Fox News has the stage all to themselves. They can run a segment about some writer or activist or school board member who has crackpot ideas and then just leave it dangling. Their audience will assume this is the direction liberals are going and nobody will step up to plainly say it's wrong.

As an example, consider everyone's favorite boogeyman, "defund the police." It became famous during the BLM protests in 2020, but is it a mainstream Democratic position? Absolutely not. There's not a single member of Congress who believes it in its literal sense, and very few who even believe it in its "clarified" sense of being merely a call to reduce or redistribute police funding.

Great! So dozens or hundreds of Democratic pols immediately stepped up to angrily denounce the idea and the people who backed it. Right?

Of course not. Your average Democratic mayor or governor or senator just kept their mouth shut. After all, why take the chance of becoming a target of woke activists and the Black community? They figured it would just fade away before long anyway.

On an individual level, that might be the smart play. But when everyone makes the smart play, it means that "defund the police" is left hanging out there with only the slightest pushback from the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Is it any wonder that Fox News gleefully takes advantage of that? Or that centrist voters end up vaguely thinking that Democrats are anti-police even as murder rates are soaring?

If mainstream Democrats are afraid to call out the worst excesses of their own party for fear of being called racist if they make even a slight mistake in how they do it, then they can hardly blame anyone for believing that the party embraces those excesses. Is this fair? Maybe, maybe not. But who cares? Fair or not, it's the way things are.

In the New York Times today, M.T. Anderson poses a question:

Fascinating! Anderson starts off with a potted summary of the Black Death in Britain, with its subsequent labor shortages and bouts of inflation, followed by the brutal revenge of the land-owning classes. Then he segues into modern life, but not before he offers up the understatement of the millennium:

We have not suffered as brutal a demographic blow during Covid...

Indeed not. I shall present the difference in handy chart format:

This actually overstates things since we're talking about labor. Among working-age people, the COVID death rate is more like 0.02%.

Come on, folks. Maybe we're going to have a few more zoom meetings or something, but that's about it. Comparing COVID to the Black Death is beyond ridiculous no matter what point you think you're making.

This is an apse in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. It was a very inviting little nook with lots of light and nice, warm colors.