The billionaire chief executive of Tesla Inc. last posted on June 21, marking Thursday as the most extended silence since October 2017. Normally a serial tweeter, he hasn’t gone more than six days without tweeting since January 2018, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of tweet data.
Click the link and you'll get 500 words and a chart about Musk's Twitter habits. American journalism is on the job.
Last night, like thousands of nights before it, USC was part of the Pac-12 conference when I went to bed. This morning, I woke up, came downstairs, and immediately crashed. When I finally woke up for good this afternoon, USC was a member of the Big Ten.
A few days ago I wrote about an AP study showing that over the past year about 1 million voters had switched their party registration to Republican compared to 600,000 who had become Democrats.
This was based on a party switching report from L2, which combined actual data from states that report it with modeling from states that don't. Today, a competing firm, Catalist, claims that L2 is wrong: using its own actual data from all states—no modeling!—party defections have been about equal.
I can't say for sure who's right, but there are about 170 million registered voters in America. The L2 study shows a net difference in defections of about 400,000, which amounts to 0.2% of all registered voters. The Catalist report, depending on how you read it, shows a net difference of 0.1% or less.
In other words, (a) the two reports aren't really all that different, and (b) the numbers are too small to be meaningful anyway—which should have been my conclusion from the start. AP's big problem wasn't so much that they used terrible data from L2, but that they drew sweeping conclusions from tiny net movements.
When the price of gasoline goes up, it's all over the news. When the price of gasoline goes down, crickets. Guess what?
Yep, the price of gasoline has gone down for the past couple of weeks. And just like that, it's suddenly out of the news.
Of course, it didn't help that the EIA website has been down. It was still down on Monday, but when I checked today EIA said they were "continuing to restore our systems." I'm still not sure just what happened to take them down for so long, but at least the price of gasoline is back.
As expected, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling today that limits the EPA's authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Needless to say, liberals were appalled:
Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, said in a statement that by insisting that an agency “can promulgate an important and significant climate rule only by showing ‘clear congressional authorization’ at a time when the Court knows that Congress is effectively dysfunctional, the Court threatens to upend the national government’s ability to safeguard the public health and welfare at the very moment when the United States, and all nations, are facing our greatest environmental challenge of all: climate change.”
I haven't said much about this until now because I'm conflicted about it. On the one hand, we are literally frying our planet and this is hardly the time for courts and legislatures to be playing stupid logic games about what we're "allowed" to do about it.
On the other hand, we are a nation of laws, and interpreting those laws often becomes a logic game. In this case, the primary question is the breadth of EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate new (and upgraded) power sources. Can they regulate only the power sources themselves, or can they mandate a shift in power sources (from coal to natural gas, for example). In dissent, Elena Kagan is clear:
The majority says it is simply “not plausible” that Congress enabled EPA to regulate power plants’ emissions through generation shifting. But that is just what Congress did when it broadly authorized EPA in Section 111 to select the “best system of emission reduction” for power plants. The “best system” full stop—no ifs, ands, or buts of any kind relevant here.
By contrast, the majority opinion says this language is a mere "gap filler" (it's contained in a definition section that precedes the statutory language) and that the Clean Air Act nowhere authorizes generation shifting. What's more, history shows that the EPA knows this perfectly well:
Prior to 2015, EPA had always set Section 111 emissions limits based on the application of measures that would reduce pollution by causing the regulated source to operate more cleanly—never by looking to a “system” that would reduce pollution simply by “shifting” polluting activity “from dirtier to cleaner sources.”
Their conclusion is that generation shifting is too big a deal to infer from throw-away language. If this is what we want to do, it needs authorization from Congress, not a federal agency feverishly parsing generic language to give itself huge, highly specific new authority.
The EPA wants less of this and more natural gas.
This doesn't strike me as unreasonable, though it's obviously tricky to figure out just how broad a grant of authority Congress gave to EPA in this case. Unfortunately, the liberal position on this is done no favors by the Lazarus argument: namely that the Supreme Court knows Congress is paralyzed right now, so they have to allow EPA to step in and take action.
This is sophistry, and no court in the world would pay any attention to it. On the contrary, it would be taken for what it is: a tacit admission that EPA doesn't have the authority it wants, but we should all agree to pretend otherwise because the stakes are too high to waste time with the doofuses in Congress. Like it or not, this is never going to fly.
As many legal observers have pointed out, this case is not really about the EPA or about climate change. (In fact, the EPA plan at the core of the case has been on hold for a while as the Biden administration crafts its own plan.) It's about how much deference we should pay to federal agencies who are exercising authority delegated to them by Congress. Liberals generally want agencies to have lots of interpretive authority while conservatives want to rein it in. This case is yet another example of conservatives reining it in.
The good news here is that, by itself, this case doesn't set any big new precedent—not that I see, anyway. Like last week's decision in American Hospital Association, it merely prohibits a specific action without taking a sledgehammer to current rules about agency deference in general.
The bad news is that the Court's conservatives are obviously working themselves up to swing that sledgehammer eventually. It's still unclear just how much wreckage they plan to leave behind when they're done.
This is Monet's lily pond. As you can see, there are no lilies blooming in this picture, so it's basically just a pond.
When you're on an eight-day cruise, it's inevitable that some of your tours will be on weekends. That was the case here, and Monet's garden was jammed—though you can't tell in this picture thanks to a strategic angle of view and a little bit of strategic photoshopping. I avoided the line (and some of the crowds) by spending half our allotted time walking around in Giverny and only about an hour at Monet's garden itself. And of course I avoided the cottage altogether (I've seen it before). In the end I only got two pictures worth keeping, and this is one of them.
Both the biggest and smallest pay increases seem to be scattered pretty equally around the country, so no interesting conclusions about this spring to mind. I will say that only in the yellow cities has pay even come close to keeping up with inflation. Every other city has seen a net pay decrease, and the red cities have seen a massive pay decrease.
I really wish that BLS offered a map like this with pay adjusted for inflation. They don't do this, however, so I added a second legend that at least gives you an idea using the national inflation number. It's likely that nearly every single metro area in the United States has seen a net pay decrease.
Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them after a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure.
....Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the U.S. were searching for clarity around abortion access....In an email, a Meta spokesperson pointed to company policies that prohibit the sale of certain items, including guns, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company did not explain the apparent disparities in its enforcement of that policy.
Let's get real. You can get a gun on Instagram easily and they know it. And until Friday you could get abortion pills too, prescribed legally by a board certified medical doctor.
But now suddenly you can't because it's illegal in some states? There's no logic here except kowtowing to vengeful Republican politicians. What a bunch of weenies.
In his opinion in Dobbs, Sam Alito took great pains to say that nothing in it threatened any other rights. This was primarily because abortion kills an unborn child, which makes it unique.
Clarence Thomas disagreed, but he's always disagreed and no one joined him. So the question is, was Alito sincere, or was it merely a fiction he made up to make his opinion more palatable?
Progressives, needless to say, are convinced that conservatives on the Supreme Court are ready to begin striking down rights en masse, and I can hardly blame them for thinking so. But the best way to think about this is not speculation, but examination of actual conservative activism over the past few decades:
They have spent the past 40 years loudly and unanimously opposed to abortion.
The have also been unanimously in support of gun rights.
And cutting taxes, especially for the rich.
And suppressing Black voting because Black voters mostly support Democrats.
And (a little less loudly and unanimously) opposing restrictions on campaign funding.
This makes both Dobbs and red state restrictions on abortion unsurprising. It makes Heller and the recent gun case, as well as red state laws on gun ownership, unsurprising. It makes the 2017 tax act unsurprising. It makes Shelby unsurprising. And it makes Citizens United unsurprising.
So what about the rights that liberals are concerned about?
Republicans have not spent the past 40 years fighting contraception laws.
Nor fighting interracial marriage.
Nor, more recently, of fighting same-sex marriage, though they did fight it before Obergefell.
For this reason, I doubt that the Court will take on Griswold or Loving. The Supreme Court has always been sensitive to public opinion, and overturning these cases would simply be too much of a disaster.
Same-sex marriage is not on such sure footing. Its protection is more recent, for one thing, and although it was accepted remarkably quickly, there's still a lot of opposition to it among social conservatives. I'm not at all sure that the conservative justices have much motivation to take it on, but it's true that sending it back to the states would fit well with the reasoning in Dobbs.
Generally speaking, I'm more concerned with yet more action on the top list, not new activity on the bottom list. As usual, though, I could be wrong. The current set of conservative justices is a real shitshow.
But how long has this Twitter holiday been? Inquiring minds want to know and the Journal is here to tell us:
