Month: September 2023

Language nerds have long railed against the use of podium to refer to the thing you stand behind when you're talking to people. That's a lectern, dammit. But no, language nerds! According to the folks at Merriam-Webster it's perfectly OK to call that thing a podium, and has been for half a century.

Why do I care? Because I just learned this in the course of getting myself acquainted with Podiumgate, which is all about an alleged $19,000 podium/lectern that Sarah Huckabee Sanders bought a few months ago. You will recall Sanders as Donald Trump's former press secretary and now the governor of Arkansas.

Your first thought about this should be obvious: $19,000 for a podium? Is it made out of gold leaf or something?

And that's a good question. The backstory behind Podiumgate is that muckrakers in Arkansas think Sanders really spent the money on some kind of fishy purchase from an event and travel company, but covered it up by having the company—run by a pal of hers—invoice it as a podium. Then, for good measure, she asked the legislature to pass a bill exempting the relevant records from FOIA. Finally, having gotten nervous that someone was onto her, she had the Arkansas Republican Party reimburse the state on the grounds that the podium was meant all along to be used for party-sponsored events. Putting it on a state credit card months earlier was an "accounting error."

The problem with all this is that, first, podiums don't cost $19,000; second, it was purchased from an event/travel company that has no history of selling things like podiums; and third, an "accounting error"? Seriously? There are weeks of emails about this purchase.

So what was the money actually spent on? That's the million-dollar question. The best current gossip suggests it funded a trip to Paris for a friend or two. But no one knows. All we know is that the podium story really doesn't hold water.

For some reason, this question has suddenly become the new hotness among economists. But why? Paul Krugman notes that bond yields were pretty steady for a while in late 2022 and early 2023:

Over the past few months, however, the bond market has, in effect, capitulated, sending the signal that investors expect rates to stay high for a long time. Long-term interest rates are now higher than they have been since the 2008 financial crisis.

Well sure, but this is hardly surprising since Fed rates are now at 5.33% compared to zero during most of the Great Recession. Plus there's this:

Long-term yields spiked right after the first Fed hike in March 2022. Since then they've increased at a pretty steady rate as the Fed has continued to hike short-term rates. 10-year yields are now above their trendline, but only barely and only for the past couple of weeks. This doesn't strike me as something to panic about. And there's this:

The yield curve remains inverted, a sign that bond markets still expect a recession that will lower interest rates. It's true that the yield curve isn't quite as inverted as it used to be, but that doesn't mean much.

Krugman says: "My instinct is to say that the bond market is overreacting to recent data and that high interest rates, like high inflation, will be transitory." I'd go further: I'm not sure the bond market is really telling us very much in the first place. But yes, to the extent that it is, it's overreacting.

Unlike Krugman, I don't have an economic argument to make for believing this—aside from the fact that I suspect a recession is on the horizon. Mainly, my argument is that everyone, everywhere, at all times overreacts to everything that's new, and this goes double for financial markets. Fed rates have been above 4% for—hold onto your hats!—ten whole months. That exhausts our patience and must mean it's time to give up and assume that rates will be high forever.

Spare me.

It looks like there will be no government shutdown. Kevin McCarthy caved in at the last minute and submitted a "clean" 45-day continuing resolution in the House. Clean enough, anyway. Every Democrat but one voted for it and it passed by a huge margin, 335-91.

Now it goes to the Senate, where it should pass easily. All that's left is to figure out whether McCarthy can produce a few actual FY24 appropriations bills over the next 45 days.

Oh, and also whether McCarthy will still be Speaker of the House in 45 days. Stay tuned.

A regular reader asks if I can post a chart of gasoline prices over my lifetime. Of course. In fact, I can do better:

I was born right in the middle of that warm postwar summer of ever-declining gasoline prices—which ended abruptly in 1973 with the first oil embargo. And then again in 1979 with the second oil embargo. And again in 2002-08 during the Iraq War. And again in 2011 because of turmoil in the Middle East. And then finally yet again in 2022 thanks to the Ukraine War.

Will gasoline ever get down to $2 again? Probably not. OPEC countries need a higher price than that to avoid bankruptcy. But it will probably recede to $3 one of these days.

New York City is suffering through yet another thousand-year flood.¹ They sure seem to happen more often than once every millennium, don't they? Based on some probably unreliable googling here and there, here's how many we've had recently in the US:

Take a look at the trendline: In a very short time the number of huge floods has quadrupled from 0.7 to 3.1 per year. But global warming is just a hoax, right?

¹A "thousand-year" flood is one that has a 0.1% chance of happening. This probability is extrapolated from records over the previous century or so.

Things haven't been going well for Team Trump in the Georgia election fraud case. Several attempts to move the trial into federal court have failed, and today one of the co-defendants broke ranks and agreed to a plea deal:

Scott Hall, a 59-year-old bail bondsman from the Augusta area who prosecutors alleged played a wide-ranging role in efforts to overturn Trump’s loss in Georgia, pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.

....Prosecutors had alleged in a 98-page indictment unsealed last month that Hall served as a linchpin of a secretive effort to access and copy elections software in remote Coffee County, working alongside pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who allegedly retained the forensic data firm that accompanied Hall and others to Coffee County....Prosecutors say that on Jan. 2, 2021, he had a 63-minute phone call with Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department official accused of plotting to delegitimize the vote in Georgia and other states and galvanize slates of contingent pro-Trump electors.

....Hall was sentenced to five years probation with a $5,000 fine.

Hall also agreed to testify in upcoming cases, which is certainly bad news for Sidney Powell, and possibly for others as well. This doesn't have much to do with Trump, however, so it probably doesn't affect his case very much.

Over at National Review, Jeffrey Blehar says he's stunned at how decrepit Joe Biden has become. It was bad enough two years ago, but:

That was in 2021 — the man practically looks whipcrack-smart and youthful by comparison with today. The decay from that day to now (even just the public collapse from early 2023 to the present moment) is shocking. The visible aging, the increasing unsteadiness in gait, the sagging posture, the depressingly accelerating mental dissipation in all public appearances: Joe Biden is simply withering away before our eyes, as though he drank from the wrong grail at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I have to admit that I don't actually see Biden much on TV, but I know he gave a speech in Arizona yesterday to honor the McCain Institute and Library, so I decided I should watch it. You can too:

Biden seems fine to me. He doesn't enunciate as well as he used to, and in particular he seems to have some trouble with voiced fricatives. This is most likely because his vocal cords aren't as lively as they used to be and don't vibrate fully. Aside from that his speaking was normal; he obviously knew what he was talking about; and he handled the heckler a few minutes into the speech just fine.

I'm not thrilled at having an election between two geriatric politicians, but conservative hysteria over Biden's age is way out of hand. Regardless of whether you like his policies or not, he seems to be running the country perfectly well.

Here is Charlie on the landing of our stairway. He likes to sit here so that he can keep track of everyone who goes up and down.

Back in 2015 Jake Tapper moderated a Republican primary debate in which nearly every question was framed in terms of something "Donald Trump recently said..." And this was back when Trump wasn't even leading in the polls and certainly wasn't a former president.

Today there's way more justification for doing this, but instead it's disappeared as an art form. Why? Trump recently implied, for example, that Gen. Mark Milley should be executed for treason. I'd like to know what Ron DeSantis thinks of this! If I cared what Vivek Ramaswamy thought about anything I'd be curious to know his reaction too.

But nobody asked this at Wednesday's debate. Why not?

The Washington Post tells us today about Jennifer Petersen, a Virginia mother who's a serial book challenger. She has so far challenged 73 books in the Spotsylvania school district, all for sexual content. The Post confirmed that this had nothing to do with race or sexual orientation: Petersen objects to any book containing graphic descriptions of sex.

Why? A couple of years ago she attended a school board meeting where parents denounced a couple of books for their sexual content:

Petersen, too, was alarmed. If children under 18 read about sex, she worries, they will be more likely to engage in unsafe sex or fall victim to sexual predators.

Hmmm. YA literature has generally gotten more graphic over the past couple of decades. Here's the result:

To the extent we can measure it, both teen sex and risky teen sex have gone down. There's no telling what's caused this, but if sexually explicit books are producing more teen sex of any kind, it sure doesn't show up in the numbers.

As it happens, I have my own pet theory about this. I've perused current YA books from time to time, and they are bleak as hell. If I were brought up on a diet of this stuff I'd probably swear off sex forever. Neither side in this debate realizes it, but I suspect the combination of graphic sex and disturbing stories has contributed to less sexual activity, not more.

I don't suppose very many people will buy this theory, but give it some thought! It might grow on you.

And just so you know, here's an estimate from the American Library Association of the spike in school book challenges over the past couple of years. Please don't blame me for the hideous shadowing on the numbers.