Month: October 2022

Mike Huckabee explained to Sean Hannity on Wednesday why polls are underestimating the MAGA vote:

Right now if you’re pro-life, if you’re Christian, if you’re a conservative, if you are a MAGA Republican, which means you just think that America’s a great country and we ought to preserve it and protect it and pass it on that way.

If you’re one of those people, you’re kind of thinking that any given day the FBI may show up, bang your door down, and haul you in. If not, they may put you on a list, call you a domestic terrorist, a threat to democracy. So, conservatives simply don’t answer polls. So, I think we’re seeing something that really can’t be factored in.

Huckabee then quoted a conservative pollster who allegedly told him that "no white men between 30 and 50 will answer a poll question." That strikes me as pretty unlikely, but the rest of the stuff about MAGA Republicans sounds unnervingly plausible—at least a little bit, anyway. Sadly, many of them do think that way.

Who says the Dodgers lost tonight? I mean, some of the Dodgers lost, but the concession workers had a pretty good day:

The wages for almost every one of the more than 1,500 workers covered under the contract will increase at least $10 per hour over the next two years, said Susan Minato, co-president of Unite Here, Local 11.

....With a minimum guaranteed income from tips now added to wages, examples for hourly pay raises from 2020 to 2024 include $18.14 to $30.94 for concession stand employees, $19.76 to $30.96 for stadium club host, $25.50 to $34.70 for pastry chef, and $19.96 to $32.66 for beer tapper, according to a contract summary provided by the union.

Damn. That's a nice contract. I hope the Fed doesn't hear about it.

In the bellwether region of Southern California, home prices just keep on dropping:

In September, the typical home price for the six-county region dropped 0.6% from August to $817,316, marking the fourth consecutive month that prices declined from the prior month.

....Other measures of home prices, including data from mortgage services firm Black Knight and John Burns Real Estate Consulting, show similar or even greater declines from peak prices, providing further evidence the recorded drops aren’t a data anomaly.

And yet, here's the official measure of housing inflation for the Los Angeles region:

This is a good example of how far behind the official measure of CPI is. In reality, home prices dropped about 7% last month (on an annualized basis) but the official measure says prices are up by 10%. It will probably be 6-12 months before it catches up.

This is one of the entrances to the Madeleine metro stop in Paris. I was fascinated by the three-tier escalator and tried over and over to get a picture of it. The problem is that it had to be a panorama, and Photoshop continually refused to stitch all the individual shots together. Eventually, on about my fifth try, I finally took a series of photos that Photoshop was able to figure out.

The stitch is far from perfect, though. On the left you can see half a person walking up the escalator. On the right, the handrail goes off to nowhere. I could probably fix this stuff if I really had a mind to, but I don't. Not tonight, anyway.

Jon Chait attended this year's National Conservatism Conference in Miami and reports that the American right has gone gaga over Hungary's Viktor Orbán and his brand of semi-fascism:

Almost every speaker repeated a version of the following: The “woke” revolution has captured the commanding heights of American education, culture, and even large businesses, from which positions it is spreading and enforcing a noxious left-wing ideology. This poses an existential threat to conservatism, culturally and politically. Conservatives must therefore fight back by using state power to crush their enemies on the left.

This has been the heart of hardcore conservatism since at least World War II: not authoritarianism for its own sake, but because conservatives are terrified that the left-wing locomotive is barrelling implacably along and will destroy them if they keep playing by playground rules that liberals laugh at. This is why they act the way they do: they're scared of us and believe we're the ones who are destroying America. The only way to stop this is to take off the gloves and do unto liberals as they are doing unto us.

The quote that best captures this combination of charming naiveté and witless belligerence comes from Hillsdale professor David Azerrad:

“Imagine if we had a core of Republicans who were committed to defund and humiliate the institutional-power sectors of the left.”

Azerrad is apparently unaware that we don't have to imagine Republicans doing this. They've been dedicated to an institutionally aggressive version of it for decades. They've aimed their guns at trial lawyers. Labor unions. Teachers. Minority districts ("Project Ratfuck"). Universities. ACORN. Black voters (via stringent voter ID laws). The arts. Mainstream media. Silicon Valley. And more.

But Azerrad and his fellow conservative are blind to this. Some of them have never known about this stuff. The name Karl Rove means nothing to them. Or Grover Norquist. Or Thor Hearne. Or Benjamin Ginsberg. Or Lee Atwater. Or Paul Weyrich (cofounder of ALEC).

Others once knew this history but have since conveniently forgotten it. Yet others see that liberals still aren't crippled and assume that Republicans have playing patty cake all along, not ruthlessly fighting the folks who are destroying America.

I've seen liberals act the same way: ultrasensitive to the tactics of conservatives but with no notion that liberals were sometimes the ones who did it first. It's basically motivated ignorance.

There's no real answer to this except to keep fighting. Forever. That's just the way the world is.

Yesterday at National Review I saw yet another denunciation of Joe Biden's savage assault on the Constitution. The guy is taking a torch to it! The country is doomed if he keeps it up!

Sadly, I had run out of my free access to NR articles for the month—seems a little early for that, doesn't it?—so I wasn't able to find out what the latest outrage against law and morals was. Not from NR, anyway. Fortunately, a quick bit of googling informed me that our current constitutional crisis is over something called the "family glitch."

As it turns out, the family glitch is so complicated I'm not sure I understand it. But apparently the fix is designed to allow family members to receive Obamacare subsidies even if one family member is covered by an employer plan. I'm not sure why this was an issue before, but I gather it's yet another one of the sloppy drafting errors that seems to have infected the entire law.

Anyway, the IRS has changed its rules to allow uncovered family members to receive Obamacare subsidies if they qualify by income. It will help about 5 million people.

Republicans are up in arms about this. It defies the plain reading of the law. The IRS is only doing it under political pressure from Biden. It's all part of the Democratic plan to shred the Constitution and seize the power to . . .

what? Help a few people get cheaper health insurance, I guess. The fiends.

POSTSCRIPT: This will be resolved, as usual, by a tedious court case that will probably take a few years. In the end, maybe it will turn out to be unconstitutional. But we'll all survive regardless.

Tomorrow is inflation day! But while we all wait anxiously for the latest CPI numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is teasing us today with PPI numbers. That's the producer price index, and it estimates the prices companies have to pay for their raw inputs. Here it is:

Overall PPI growth returned to positive territory in September while core PPI was basically flat. On a trended, annualized basis, PPI was around 2% and core PPI was around 3%.

In theory, PPI is forward looking: the numbers we see today feed into consumer prices a few months down the road. So if PPI is trending down today, CPI will keep trending down through the end of the year. We'll see.

This is Los Angeles City Hall at night in a photo taken from Union Station.

After I finished looking up data for employment levels this morning I decided to browse through all the various measures of unemployment just to see if there was anything interesting there.

And there was! As you know, the headline unemployment rate has already dropped to an all-time low:

The same is true no matter how you slice up the data: by race, by sex, by age, by type of unemployment, etc. Everything is at an all-time low. Except for one thing:

The average length of unemployment is currently about 20 weeks. This is higher than the peak of previous recessions.

This might not mean anything. The average length of unemployment has been steadily increasing over the past 50 years, and it shot up to unheard-of levels during the Great Recession. Maybe it just takes longer to get back to normal these days.

Maybe. Still, the unemployment rate has been at historically low levels for the past year. Why is the average length of unemployment such a laggard?

Is this new news, or have I just never noticed it before?

The president absorbed withering criticism for visiting Saudi Arabia in July and giving a fist bump to its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman....While no specific announcements were made during his visit to Jeddah in July, American officials said at the time that they had an understanding with Saudi Arabia that it would increase oil production in the fall and thus lower gasoline prices heading into the crucial congressional elections.

The Saudi decision to do the opposite last week in defiance of American entreaties was a blow to Mr. Biden and opened him up to further criticism even from fellow Democrats who argued that Saudi Arabia should be punished. Three House Democrats announced legislation requiring the removal of American troops and defensive systems from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Retaliating against Saudi Arabia for taking Russia's side in the Ukraine war seems fine to me. Hell, retaliating against Saudi Arabia just for the lulz seems fine to me. Whatever you have in mind, count me in.

But retaliating against them because they declined to help Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections? I suppose this kind of thing happens all the time and I'm just naive about it, but it hardly seems like a legitimate use of foreign policy pressure. Anybody care to explain this?