Month: December 2023

Hold on a second:

As dawn broke at a frigid Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday morning, workers using a crane and harnesses began to take down a controversial statue that had stood there for more than a century.

Hours earlier, a federal judge had ruled an effort to halt the removal of the towering Confederate Memorial had no merit, and the contractors hired by the cemetery moved quickly to get the statue down and into custom-built wooden crates.

Last week the Post reported that taking down the statue would cost $3 million. But once they started, it was down and into its packing crates in a few hours. So what's the other $2.95 million for?

This is a.......yellow flower of some kind. It seems like it should be easy to identify, but I tried a couple of flower ID sites and they didn't help. Any ideas? I took the picture in southern Colorado.

For the record, I'm not keen on the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment bars Donald Trump from office. My reason is simpler than most: unless you were an officer of the Confederacy, I think the 14th Amendment should apply only if you've been convicted of some insurrection-like act. Trump hasn't—not yet, anyway.

A few days ago the Washington Post ran an instructive piece on the history of the clause. Outside of its original purpose of barring Confederates from office, it's been used a grand total of twice. The first was a congressman convicted of disloyalty during World War I and the second was last year: a county commissioner convicted of personally participating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

The WWI case was bogus, but nonetheless there was a conviction. And Jack Smith has every hope of convicting Trump of insurrectionish activity sometime soon. But he hasn't yet, and until then Trump should be allowed to run. Outside of the Civil War, "self evident" insurrection just isn't good enough. Our country's long history of hysterically abusing supposedly self evident beliefs should be enough to give us all pause, even if Donald Trump is the beneficiary.

How about yet another different look at inflation? Here is inflation in goods (top) and inflation in services (bottom):

As you can see, inflation in goods has been right around zero for a full year.  Inflation in services has been more stubborn: it's come down from its peak but has remained about 1% above its long-term average for the past six months.

This is what you'd expect from inflation induced by supply chain problems. It would (a) hit goods harder, (b) come down quickly when things ease up, and (c) take a little while longer to come down for services.

That said, back to average for goods and one point above average for services isn't bad. There's only a little more inflation to be squeezed out of the economy.

According to FBI data through September, violent crime is down 15% in big cities and down 8% overall:

Murder is down 25% in big cities and down 16% overall.

Property crime is down 6% so far this year. Burglary is down 12%.

Both property crime and violent crime are on track to be at their lowest levels in more than 50 years.

This is the Eglise Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris and it's one of the great things about a city like Paris. It isn't a cathedral. It isn't a basilica. It's just a parish church that happens to have been built in the 13th century and is about the size of Notre Dame. Just your ordinary old parish church.

So here I am this morning, reading an LA Times piece about people migrating out of California to places like Texas. This is old news, but the twist this time is that affluent people are moving away at higher rates than before. This is chalked up to California's high tax rates, but I'm thinking: hold on, isn't it more the housing market than taxes? So I head over to FRED to check things out:

It turns out that home prices in LA and San Francisco have gone up less than home prices in Dallas.¹ Did you know that? I didn't. Whatever happened to Texas's famously reasonable housing market, thanks to wide-open plains and lax zoning rules? Gone, I guess. This is why it's good to check your assumptions every once in a while. Things change.

¹Although keep in mind that while home prices may be rising in Dallas, they're still way lower than LA ($400,000 vs. $1 million). Taxes in Texas aren't really as low as they like to claim, but homes really are a lot cheaper.

If you're a young lefty who supports the Palestinian cause, it's natural that you'd be critical of Joe Biden. But Summer Jennings is a young Republican who supports Israel:

Though Mr. Biden’s policies may favor Israel, she said she believed that Mr. Trump would take the same approach, but with more muscle: “As much of a jerk as Trump was, I feel like Biden is very weak,” Ms. Jennings said.

I wonder what that even means? It's a little hard to imagine a more muscular support of Israel than Biden's. But then again, Trump blames Iran for starting the whole thing; doesn't whinge on about civilian deaths; and says he'd ban Muslim immigrants and Gaza refugees from the US. So, not just endless bloodshed, but endless bloodshed with no hint of remorse. That's muscular, I guess.

NBC News has yet another story out today about young voters who supported Biden in 2020 but aren't sure they will again. They all have their reasons, some more sensible than others, and sure. Whatever. It probably doesn't matter much because most of them will come back home once the campaign starts.

But there's one complaint that continues to boggle me. I get that lots of people don't follow all the ins and outs of who did what to whom, and lots of people also don't seem to understand that a president isn't a king. But in the particular case of student loans, it's something that got a lot of attention and there were no subtleties involved: Biden kept his campaign promise and the Supreme Court killed it. End of story.

But even kids who know this don't care. They really wanted it to happen and it didn't, so they're mad at Joe. End of story.

I just don't get this.

ProPublica continues its investigation of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas today. It unearthed some records from around 2000 suggesting that, following his appearance at a "conservative thought weekend" on Sea Island, Thomas had threatened to quit the court unless he got a pay raise:

After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.

....He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress [Cliff Stearns] on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign. Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.

....Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”

“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.”

Needless to say, conservatives didn't want to risk the departure of either Thomas or Antonin Scalia (the other justice who was unhappy), and thus began decades of big donors making sure that Thomas remained "comfortable" despite his pittance of a salary. He only made the equivalent of $300,000, you see, and now he had a child to raise. How could he possibly make ends meet?

I get that law is a lucrative profession at the top, and $300,000 is nothing compared to, say, being partner at a top firm. Still, it's $300,000! That's a lot of money.

But not enough to support a lifestyle of constant travel to five-star resorts, which is apparently what Thomas wanted. In the end, he had to get that another way.