Month: August 2023

Adjusted for inflation, the BLS measure of average hourly earnings increased last month at an annualized rate of 3.3%. However, average hours worked continued its downward trend:

As a result, weekly earnings were flat from last month:

Weekly earnings have been flat for the past year and are now 0.4% above their pre-pandemic level from three years ago. Tight labor market, anyone?

The BLS released its July CPI numbers today, and they're down a smidge from last month:

On a month-over-month basis, headline CPI is at 2.0% and core CPI is at 1.9%. On a trend basis, headline CPI is at zero.

This is two months in a row that core CPI has been below the Fed's target of 2%. I'm really not sure what more they want to see before they stop raising interest rates.

I was puttering around looking for some abortion stuff when I ran across a 2018 Wall Street Journal editorial confidently proclaiming that abortion rights were safe no matter who Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court:

The reason is the power of stare decisis, or precedent, and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law....Our view, supported by more than a little reporting, is that even though they think Roe was wrongly decided, most of the current conservative Justices would shy from overturning it and handing abortion law entirely to the states. The exception is Justice Clarence Thomas, who has made his intentions clear.

I love the patronizing use of "supported by more than a little reporting," as if we benighted souls in the cheap seats couldn't possibly have an opinion as informed as the Journal editorial board.

That editorial board was sure that conservative justices would all shy from overturning Roe v. Wade. Four years later, every single conservative justice voted to overturn it.

I wonder: Was the Journal just making shit up, as usual, to justify their view that everyone should remain sanguine about appointing conservative justices to the Court? Or did they actually believe what they wrote even though it was ridiculous? Beats me. But it sure isn't a bit of gaslighting that's aged well.

I have now figured out the timeline and details for the Twitter contempt saga. Here it is:

January 17: Special counsel Jack Smith gets a warrant ordering Twitter to turn over all records for Donald Trump's account. Marcy Wheeler guesses that it's because Smith is trying to figure out which January 6 tweets Trump himself wrote. The warrant includes a nondisclosure order forbidding Twitter to tell anyone about it for 180 days.

January 27: Twitter says the records are available but misses the first deadline to turn them over.

February 1: Twitter raises a legal objection.

February 2: It turns out Twitter is not objecting to the warrant but to the nondisclosure order. It's not clear why, since nondisclosures are fairly common and are routinely upheld in court.

February 7: Judge rules against Twitter. However, Twitter fails to turn over the records by 5 pm and is fined $50,000 for contempt.

February 8: Twitter is fined $100,000.

February 9: Twitter is fined $200,000. They finally turn over Trump's account data at 8:06 pm. The total fine for contempt is $350,000.

March 3: The district court formally denies Twitter's motion to vacate the nondisclosure and upholds the contempt fine.

March 4: Twitter appeals.

June 20: At the request of the special counsel, the nondisclosure order is partially withdrawn.

July 18: The appellate court rules against Twitter, upholding both the contempt order and the fine:

Civil-contempt sanctions..."must be calibrated to coerce compliance."...While a geometric schedule is unusual and generally would be improper without an upper limit on the daily fine, we nonetheless uphold the district court's sanctions order based on the particular facts of this case. (a) Twitter never raised any objection to the sanctions formula, despite having several opportunities to do so....(b) Moreover, the $350,000 sanction ultimately imposed was not unreasonable, given Twitter's $40-billion valuation and the court's goal of coercing Twitter's compliance....(c) Finally, we note that Twitter assured the court that it would comply with the warrant by 5:00 p.m. on February 7.

....We affirm the district court's rulings in all respects.

Today: The appellate ruling is unsealed and we finally learn all this stuff.

This is an (extremely) abandoned gas station in Desert Center, an abandoned town on Interstate 10 about halfway between Indio and Blythe. I'm not sure what the history is here, but I suspect that a better question than "why was it abandoned?" is "why was it ever built in the first place?"

In any case, this is the turnoff that gets me to my favorite desert astrophotography spot. I haven't resumed my astrophotography yet, but it isn't because I'm not yet strong enough to haul everything out and set it up. I've just been very tired and sleepy lately and I'm not sure I can safely manage the 3-hour drive. Maybe in another month or so.

According to a USDA report released on Monday, the number of unauthorized crop pickers on US farms has gone down substantially since 2007:

The is largely because the number of guest workers has skyrocketed:

Add this all up, and the share of foreign-born workers on US farms (including US citizens) has dropped from 75% to 70% between 2007 and 2020. The share of US-born workers has increased from 25% to 30%.

The latest on Twitter:

The special counsel served Twitter with a warrant for Trump's account information in January. Twitter resisted, and was fined $350,000, an appeals court ruling reveals.

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) August 9, 2023

This is fairly misleading. Twitter had no problem producing the information but objected to a nondisclosure order that prevented them from informing Trump about the warrant. They duked it out in court for a while, and eventually produced everything the special counsel wanted—but were three days late. That's all the $350,000 fine is about. It seems kind of excessive, no?

UPDATE: I originally said that Twitter won its battle over the nondisclosure, but it turns out this was only much later. I'm not clear about precisely what happened, so I've removed everything about it.

Well, I see that Ohioans have overwhelmingly rejected the right-wing attempt to change referendums from simple majority vote to needing 60% to pass. This means that November's abortion rights referendum will be decided by a normal majority vote.

So why the huge rejection? Is it a harbinger of the abortion vote? Or is it just that most Ohioans like their referendums and don't want them effectively taken away since almost nothing can get attract 60% support?

Anyway, good news. Nice work, Ohio people.

Today I came across a reference to something I hadn't heard of before. It was some kind of conservative meme about how "the Biden family" had created 20 shell companies that funneled $10 million their way, mostly during the time that Joe was vice president. What was this all about, and how had I missed it?

It turns out that it's yet another belch from the dog and pony show run by Rep. James Comer as chair of the House Oversight Committee—this year's version of Trey Gowdy's jihad against Hillary's email in 2016. The shell company stuff was announced on May 27, the day after I returned home from the hospital, and I guess I wasn't paying a lot of attention to things at the time.

Anyway, a few minutes of googling informs me that there's nothing to this. The "Biden family," in this case, turns out to be just the usual suspects: Hunter Biden, Joe's brother James Biden, and their wives and children. And the money is just payments from their clients in China and Romania, part of the sleazy lobbying operation that we all know about. As usual, there's no evidence of lawbreaking; no evidence that Joe Biden either knew or benefited from any of this; and just generally, nothing either new or interesting.

But as I was learning all this, I came across something else I didn't know. This is from the New York Times:

Bank records obtained by the committee show the receipt of money from a foreign company connected to Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania. In 2015, Mr. Popoviciu retained Hunter Biden, who is a lawyer, while his father was vice president, to help try to fend off charges. That effort was unsuccessful and, in 2016, Mr. Popoviciu was convicted on charges related to a land deal in northern Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

Mr. Comer has also focused on John R. Walker, an associate of Hunter Biden who was involved in a joint venture with executives of CEFC China Energy, a now-bankrupt Chinese conglomerate....CEFC had hoped to invest in a liquefied natural gas venture in Louisiana, but that deal ultimately flopped.

So Hunter Biden's lobbying wasn't just sleazy, it was completely inept. One client got convicted while another went bankrupt. And we all know that Hunter's work for Burisma Holdings, a Ukranian energy company, accomplished nothing except to get a friendly prosecutor fired due to pressure from Joe Biden and the Obama administration.

That's a pretty shoddy track record. You'd think he could have done better if he really had any influence with his father. But hey: maybe he didn't, eh?

Politico reports that Rep. Matt Rosendale is ruining the GOP's strategy to beat Sen. Jon Tester in Montana by making plans to run in the Republican primary:

GOP leaders launched a concerted campaign to box out Rosendale and clear the path for Tim Sheehy, a Navy SEAL-turned-business executive who launched a Senate bid in June. Their fear was that Rosendale would prevail in a primary, given his statewide name recognition, but flub a general election against Tester — just as he did in 2018. With a narrow deficit in the Senate, winning in Montana is a linchpin in the party’s broader 2024 strategy.

Ha ha ha. Right-wing loons are never deterred and never care whether party leaders oppose them or not. Rosendale will probably pick up a Trump endorsement and never look back.

As for the general election against Tester, Rosendale has a chance. He only lost to Tester by a few points in 2018, which was a very strong year for Democrats. With any luck, though, he'll continue the proud Republican tradition of blowing winnable elections by nominating MAGA-style nutballs who can't win a general election even in a deep red state.