Month: April 2023

Every year, Bud Light spends more than $100 million on marketing. Of that, maybe a few million goes to social media. Of that, a small fraction goes to deals with social media influencers. And of that, a few thousand dollars recently went to Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman who racked up something like 10 million followers on TikTok by putting up daily videos of her transition during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year, after a meeting with Joe Biden, Mulvaney became a right-wing target. So she was already on their radar two weeks ago when she posted a cutesy Instagram video for Bud Light during March Madness. This led to a week of outrage from Fox News and calls for a conservative boycott of Bud Light. National Review editor Rich Lowry says there's a lesson to be learned:

It would be a good outcome here if it becomes obvious to everyone that Bud Light made a mistake, and if big companies resolve not to do the same in the future.

Just so I have this straight: Lowry's view is that no American corporation should ever hire a transgender person as part of a promotional campaign. Or am I missing something? Are there any other demographic groups that corporate America should also steer clear of?

Back in 2004 the LA Times reported that Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas had been accepting lavish vacations for years from his billionaire "dear friend" Harlan Crow. These vacations seemingly stopped after that, but a few days ago we learned that, in fact, Thomas had merely stopped disclosing them.

This was all "personal hospitality," which Thomas insists is entirely legal and fine. Maybe so.

But it turns out Thomas also accepted free rides on Crow's private jet and didn't disclose those either. That's rather more of a problem, no?

Finally, today, another shoe dropped. ProPublica reports that a few years ago Crow bought some of Thomas's property in Savannah at what looks to be a considerably inflated price. One of the properties is the house Thomas's mother lives in. Crow upgraded it significantly; tore down the annoying party house next door; and doesn't appear to be charging Thomas's mother any rent. Thomas disclosed none of this.

Who knows? Maybe there are innocent explanations for Thomas's silence. But I doubt it. It has all the appearance of plain old lawbreaking. Thomas was required to disclose all this but instead chose to keep it hidden. Why? And what does the Supreme Court intend to do about it?

Yesterday a friend asked if I wanted to comment on National Review's editorial about the national abortion pill ban.¹ I didn't, really. NR is, obviously, institutionally anti-abortion, and I didn't have much interest in reading a bunch of pro-life boilerplate for the thousandth time in my life.²

But eventually my curiosity got the best of me, and I have two comments. First, kudos to NR for acknowledging that the bulk of the ban was wrongly decided "given that the six-year statute of limitations passed between the FDA’s belated 2016 ruling on that approval and the filing of suit." This is true. Mifepristone foes like to point out that the FDA waited 14 years to rule on a legal challenge filed in 2002, but that doesn't matter anymore. The FDA re-issued and updated their rules in March 2016 and the lawsuit challenging them was filed in November 2022. This was the first time the original approval of mifepristone was challenged, and by then the statute of limitations had expired. This should have gotten most of the lawsuit thrown out immediately.³

Most partisans these days are unwilling to acknowledge any interpretation of the law that works against them, so due credit here.

But I also have a second comment. I am (already!) sick and tired of reading stuff like this:

From the beginning, the pill was given favored regulatory treatment, with accelerated approval under Subpart H, a program designed for emergency AIDS drugs. Utilizing this fast-track approval process required the FDA to characterize pregnancy, preposterously, as a “serious or life-threatening illness.”

This just isn't true. Mifepristone was approved under normal procedures. Subpart H was used only to accelerate rules that limited how it could be used. KFF explains:

In the case of mifepristone, Subpart H was originally used to restrict the dispensing to prescribers who agreed to dispense it in certain health care settings, by or under the supervision of a qualified physician who attested to the ability to accurately date pregnancies and diagnose ectopic pregnancies.

This whole thing reminds me of the conservative myth that Obamacare was "rammed through" under reconciliation rules. It wasn't. Obamacare was passed under regular order. After that, a small "sidecar" of mostly minor revisions was passed under reconciliation, but that's all. Nonetheless, the conservative myth persists.

Subpart H "acceleration" looks like it's going down the same path. It's quickly congealing into accepted wisdom even though it's simply not true that mifepristone got any special treatment by the FDA. It's safe, reliable, and legal, and there's no reason it shouldn't have been initially approved and shouldn't now be widely available.

¹Which has since been partly stayed.

²I imagine the editors of NR feel the same about reading anything I write on the subject, and I don't blame them.

³In addition to a few minor things, there's a different part of the lawsuit that challenges the FDA's 2021 ruling that made mifepristone available by mail. These items are not affected by the statute of limitations. However, the basic approval of mifepristone is.

Spring has sprung, and that means our front garden is in its glory. Not only do we get something nice to look at, but the cats get an even better playground than usual. Charlie in particular loves to scamper around, chase birds and butterflies, and then hop up on one of the rocks like a tiger scanning the horizon for prey.

NOTE: No animals are harmed in this garden unless you count lizards, which have small but nonzero odds of having their tails bitten off.

I haven't been following the leak of the Ukraine files super closely, but here's the latest news:

Around a half-dozen F.B.I. agents on Thursday pushed onto the property of a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard who is linked to an online group at the center of a trove of leaked classified U.S. intelligence documents that have upended relations with American allies and exposed weaknesses in the Ukrainian military.

This is the infamous leader of Thug Shaker Central, an online group of gamers. And like everyone else, I don't get it. I've read about the elaborate precautions taken by people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden in order to download intel files and make them public, but it sounds like this guy did nothing special at all. He's 21 years old, a member of the National Guard, and he just casually downloaded some explosive files and took them home.

Is it really that easy? Why would a National Guard member even have access to stuff like this? What's going on?

Yesterday was CPI day, which means today is PPI day. Here is the producer price index through March:

Since last June, headline PPI has risen at an annualized rate of 0.7%. Core PPI has risen at an annualized rate of 2.6%.

Both the headline and core PPI rates are considerably lower than the CPI rates. Since lower producer prices eventually feed through to consumer prices, it means there's still downward pressure on CPI. In addition, the shelter index will begin to drop later this year. Unless there's another energy spike, CPI is likely to drop to 2-3% by the end of summer.

UPDATE: I am forgetful these days. Here's the PPI for the dreaded services sector, down almost to zero.

Welp, the Fed has changed its mind:

Fed staff projected that the economy would enter a "mild recession" later this year....That's a shift from recent months, where staff just expected slower growth and "some softening" in the labor market — conditions that would allow the economy to dodge a recession.

They've finally put the whole delusion of a "soft landing" behind them. Give it another couple of months and maybe they'll admit that "mild recession" is just wishful thinking too. I wonder if that will finally be enough to get them to quit raising rates?

As for me, I continue to believe in what used to be conventional wisdom:

• The Fed started tightening in May 2022, when it first announced an interest hike bigger than a quarter point.
• The steep increases since then have not yet had a significant effect.
• The best evidence suggests it takes about a year for interest rate increases to hit the broader economy.
• This means we should expect the economy to run into a pretty big headwind in a couple of months.

I hope I'm wrong. But this sure seems like the way things have worked in the past, and I can't think of any reason this time will be different. We had a non-monetary bout of inflation that would have mostly gone away on its own, but the Fed treated it like a normal bout of monetary inflation. We are about to pay the price for this mistake.

I was diddling around this afternoon and came across this:

Business formation dipped at the very beginning of the pandemic but then spiked enormously in the summer of 2020. It went up and down a bit and then stabilized in 2021 at a noticeably higher rate than before the pandemic.

I'm not sure what accounts for this, but it got me curious about business formation on an industry basis. Here it is:

Utilities!?! Business formation in the utilities sector is currently more than double its rate before the pandemic. I really don't know what accounts for that.

Note that this is just new business formation. It doesn't include businesses that have closed, so it's not a measure of the net number of businesses. Still, it's kind of interesting.

Boaters out on the Grand Canal at the palace of Versailles.

Yesterday the judge in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, Eric Davis, learned something new:

Fox Corp. had asserted since Dominion filed its lawsuit in 2021 that Rupert Murdoch had no official role at Fox News....But on Easter Sunday, Fox disclosed to Dominion’s attorneys that Murdoch also is “executive chair” at Fox News.

Davis was clearly disturbed by the disclosure, coming on the eve of the trial. “My problem is that it has been represented to me more than once that he is not an officer,” the judge said....In response, Carter said he believed Murdoch’s title at Fox News was only “honorific.”

There is no such thing as "honorific." Legally, Murdoch is either an officer of Fox News or he isn't. He is.

Today, it got worse:

The judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News said on Wednesday that he was imposing a sanction on the network and would very likely start an investigation into whether Fox’s legal team had withheld evidence, scolding the lawyers for not being “straightforward” with him.

The rebuke came after lawyers for Dominion, which is suing for defamation, revealed a number of instances in which Fox’s lawyers had not turned over evidence in a timely manner.

....He also said he would very likely appoint a special master to investigate Fox’s handling of discovery of documents and the question of whether Fox had inappropriately withheld details about Rupert Murdoch’s role as a corporate officer of Fox News.

I am thrilled that this lawsuit is turning into such a shitshow for Fox. It's exactly what they deserve.

*I am paraphrasing.