Month: June 2022

Here's an excerpt from a Vox piece about the upcoming congressional hearings on the January 6 insurrection. It's typical of dozens of others I've read:

The committee is going to great lengths to make the primetime presentation compelling , including bringing in former ABC News president James Goldston as a consultant.

They will gather Thursday in the Cannon Caucus Room, an ornately decorated space that is rarely used for hearings. Using live witnesses as well as video, images and other documents, it will represent an opening argument by the January 6 Committee, as it shares the fruits of over 1,000 depositions and interviews it has conducted and 140,000 documents that it has gathered since it was established by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last summer.

The impact of these hearings is reduced because Democrats are all but bragging that they're basically a scripted show, not real hearings. Compare this to the current Republican campaign to shame the media for not giving more attention to the guy who approached Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house this morning and later called police to turn himself in for thinking about killing Kavanaugh. There's never even a hint of acknowledgment that Republicans are following each other's lead to put on a show. They play it straight, as if their outrage over media priorities were entirely genuine.

Democrats could really learn a lesson from this.

While we wait for new inflation numbers to be released on Friday, here's a quick look at the inflationary pressure facing the economy right now:

This is based on core PCE inflation, the Fed's preferred measure. However, instead of showing year-over-year inflation, it uses month-over-month in order to get a sense of how inflation is rising or falling at any given moment. Unfortunately, because month-over-month figures are volatile, the number for any single month is pretty meaningless. The only way to extract anything is to look at the longer term trend.

So that's what this is. Since core inflation peaked in April 2021, the trendline has gone down from about 6% to 4%. This represents, I believe, the fading away of fiscal stimulus and the recovery of supply chains, both of which should continue.

Food and energy, though, will probably remain volatile, and that's what most people care about. Unfortunately, there's nothing much the Fed or anyone else can do about that. Monetary policy mostly affects core inflation, which is already trending down, and presidential policy doesn't affect much of anything at all.

This is an allegedly famous house in the town of Vernon, but I suspect "famous" should be taken in the same sense you'd take "World Famous Burgers" at your local diner. Maybe it's locally well known, but it probably ranks about 100,000th on the global list of famous things.

Pretty, though.

Here in the western United States, everything is drying up. Just about everyone is familiar with time-lapse photographs of Lake Mead, the reservoir created by Hoover Dam, showing how its water level has been steadily falling for decades. It's down 160 feet since 2000, and if it drops another hundred feet the lake will no longer have enough water to drive the turbines that produce 4 billion kWh of clean electricity every year.

But it's not just Lake Mead that's drying up. Utah is facing big problems too:

If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:

The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.

Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.

Here is what the Great Salt Lake looked like as of 16 hours ago:

Do you see that big chunk of land in the lower left that's connected to Ogden by a bridge? It's called Antelope Island. You know why? Because it used to be an honest-to-God island. Today you can just about walk to it if you wear a pair of good waders.

Why the change? Partly because of Salt Lake City's exploding population and partly because of climate change. Or, more accurately, because of our collective unwillingness to either fight climate change or even adapt to it. In a few decades, if this keeps up, Salt Lake City may become a new Dust Bowl.

While I was away, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel posted a joke on Twitter:

This is a tasteless joke and I have no idea what prompted Dave to retweet it. A little too much to drink? A recent breakup? Beats me. I hope his editors tell him that this was inappropriate and he needs to knock it—

Wait. What's that? This retweet caused an enormous backlash among some of his fellow reporters and then went viral? And the Post then suspended Dave for a month without pay—the equivalent of a five-figure fine?

WTF? There has to be something more to this. What is it that we're all missing?

I couldn't help myself. I had to take a quick look at the headlines to see what had happened while Air France was flying me home. Imagine my surprise when I saw this one in the Washington Post:

If we just give them another few days, they'll put together a deal for sure! Sure they will.

Home to good ol' hazy Los Angeles, that is. Perhaps tomorrow I'll check to see what I missed out on today.

This is the famous I.M. Pei pyramid, built as a new main entrance for the Louvre in 1988. You've seen it a thousand times before, so what makes my version different? First, there's the moon in the background. Second, I took the photo, not some other hack. Enjoy!

Because the Supreme Court is likely to overrule Roe v. Wade this summer, Josh Marshall says it makes sense for Democrats to turn the 2022 midterms into a referendum over abortion. But only if they can make it into a serious issue:

You can’t make an election into a referendum on an issue if you can’t point to anything winning the election would accomplish. To make the 2022 elections a referendum on Roe, Democrats have to put protecting Roe and abortion rights on the table.

Here’s one way to do that: get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass [a bill protecting Roe] and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.

IANAL etc. etc., but my reading of Justice Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe made it fairly clear that it took courts firmly out of the abortion picture and placed states—and only states—in the driver's seat. In the text of the opinion there is no positive mention of the federal government having any authority over abortion. There is no mention of the Constitution giving the federal government any such authority. And there are several holdings that explicitly suggest that abortion regulations of any variety have not been federalized by the 14th Amendment.

As with many other things, the federal government would have authority over abortion in areas normally recognized as federal in nature: interstate commerce, federal funding, and so forth. But given the aggressive tone of Alito's opinion, I imagine that he expects even those exceptions to be sharply limited.

My sense is that the Court majority very clearly expects abortion to become a state issue, and only a state issue. They believe it is no more a legitimate area for federal preeminence than, say, murder, which is governed by state law unless you do something like kill a postal carrier or conspire across state lines.

Am I missing something here? Do legal scholars have a different reading of Alito's opinion than I do?

I've been yelling at CNN all evening, demanding that they stop building up fake suspense about Boris Johnson's no-confidence vote in Parliament. There was no way his party was going to chuck him out.

Which they didn't. But I admit it was closer than I counted on—though this hardly matters to a guy like BoJo. He could win by one vote and he'd declare it a massive victory and a mandate for his enduring leadership.

I'll confess something, though: I kind of enjoy watching this stuff. It comforts me slightly that there's at least one other country that's as bollixed up as we are.