Month: May 2024

Sunset at the Dana Point marina.

It is quickly congealing into conventional wisdom that Joe Biden's big economic problem is not the current inflation rate, which is fairly moderate, but the fact that prices are still higher than they were a few years ago. People have memories of those lower prices, so they're unhappy with the current higher ones. It's only BLS nerds who care about the precise level of the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average.

Fair enough, I suppose, except that prices never go down after an episode of inflation. In particular, here's a comparison of inflation now with inflation 40 years ago during the Reagan presidency:

These are both three-year periods that end in April of the election year. In Reagan's case, prices were 15.9% higher than they were 36 months before. In Biden's case they're 17.4% higher.

In other words, almost identical. But Reagan turned this into Morning in America, while Biden is suffering through a vibecession. Why the difference? I think there are two reasons:

• The media was far less partisan in Reagan's day. Today, Fox News and its allies have been relentless about focusing on high prices. This is why Republicans are far more unhappy about the economy than Democrats.
• Reagan's bout of inflation started under Jimmy Carter and the public didn't blame him for it. They just gave him credit for bringing it down. Conversely, our current epsisode of inflation started under Biden, so he's not getting much credit for bringing down something that people think was his fault to begin with.

That second item is obviously unfair: Biden had almost nothing to do with the inflationary spike in 2021-22. But life isn't fair. It happened on his watch, so it's his fault. He's just not going to get a lot of huzzahs for fixing his own problem.

OK, it's official. Donald Trump's "other crime"—the one that turns a falsification of records from a misdemeanor into a felony—can be anything from a menu of three choices. CNN has a good description of the judge's instructions to the jury this morning:

Judge Juan Merchan explains that the jury must determine whether Trump conspired to promote a person to or prevent a person from public office by unlawful means. They must be unanimous on that fact but not on the unlawful means. Merchan explains the prosecution has three theories of those unlawful means:

• Violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act, otherwise known as FECA
• Falsification of other business records
• Violations of tax laws

Merchan then explained that different jurors can have different opinions about which of those three laws Trump intended to break. All that matters is that all 12 jurors agree about Trump's intent to violate at least one of them. They don't have to be unanimous about which one.

I've just spent the past hour reading half a dozen reports about the closing arguments in Donald Trump's hush money case. And I'm confused.

As you all know, Trump is accused of ordering his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pay off Stormy Daniels in order to keep her quiet about an affair they had. This happened during the 2016 campaign. Trump later reimbursed Cohen but recorded the repayment as a "legal expense," which is an illegal falsification of business records.

But it's just a misdemeanor. In order to become a felony, it has to be done in furtherance of another crime. So what exactly is that other crime?

The press reports barely even mention it—because, I gather, the prosecution barely mentioned it. Instead, prosecutors spent nearly their entire 5-hour closing argument trying to convince jurors that Stormy Daniels really was paid off and that Trump really did order the payments recorded as legal expenses. I'm no lawyer, but that strikes me as odd since the evidence supporting this seems pretty voluminous. It also lines up with common sense. Why would you spend five hours going through this while jurors are starting to doze off?

I'm not sure. By contrast, the "other crime" seems like something you really need to convince the jury about. So what is it?

There are some hints. The Wall Street Journal gives it a single sentence: "Prosecutors’ second crime—a state election-law offense that makes it illegal to conspire to promote or prevent a candidate’s election through unlawful means—factored prominently in Tuesday’s proceedings."

It certainly doesn't factor prominently in the Journal's coverage, but at least they mentioned it. They say definitively that the second crime is a vaguely described New York State election law.

Conversely, National Review's Andy McCarthy says, "it is quite amazing how explicitly the state is relying on violations of FECA as the 'other crime' that Donald Trump was allegedly concealing by causing his business records to be falsified." FECA is a federal law.

Rachel Scharf of Law360 provides this explanation of what assistant DA Joshua Steinglass told the jury:

Aha! An unlawful campaign contribution. I believe this would be a violation of FECA, so we're still on federal law. But CNN says this:

Joshua Steinglass moves on to tax fraud violations. "Listen carefully to the judge’s instruction," the prosecutor says. "It’s a crime to willfully create false tax forms," even if they don’t lead to the willful false payment of taxes, he says.

Donald Trump had an incentive to keep the Stormy Daniels story quiet in 2018 and Steinglass says he was still actively trying to prevent his catch-and-kill scheme from going public.

...."Any single one of those unlawful means is enough for you to conclude the Trump Tower conspiracy violated New York state election law," Steinglass says. "You don’t have to agree" on which part of the law was violated, he notes.

Tax fraud?!? Where did that come from? In any case, in this passage the prosecution clearly says it's alleging violation of New York state law. How? Who cares. Steinglass tells the jury to pick any of the things they've talked about. They're all violations.

Finally, there's this from The Hill:

Prosecutors had long suggested four crimes that could be used as the so-called “bump up.”... But now, Joshua Steinglass is making clear that the district attorney’s office intends to move forward with only one of those remaining theories to the jury: that Trump intended to violate a state election law making it a crime to conspire to promote a political candidate by “unlawful means.”

Those unlawful means, Steinglass said, includes violations of federal campaign finance law, among others.

Oh come on. Steinglass says they've zeroed in on the state law, but that this might include violations of federal law.

This is all confusing as hell. What's not clear is whether it's confusing because prosecutors told the jury to pick any old violation and go with it, or because the press reports spend almost no time explaining the prosecution's theory of the case. Stay tuned.

This is Angela, a young gorilla on a mission. I don't know what her mission is, but apparently it involves some sticks and she's obviously determined to see it through.

The bottom photo is Kelly, the tribe's silverback. He's keeping a close eye on things because you never know what Angela might be up to.

From the Washington Post today:

In communities of color, long-covid patients are tired of being sick and neglected

It has been four years since covid began burdening people with lingering symptoms often dismissed by mystified medical providers who were dubious and unwilling to help — especially when treating patients of color, according to clinicians and public health researchers. For patients of color, it is an all-too-familiar — and maddening — story.

....It’s bad enough patients of color are coping with a debilitating illness, they said. It’s all the more devastating, they said, to feel like they’re being erased — from medical records, public imagination and policy considerations. Researchers say that in many cases, people are not even being formally diagnosed, meaning they’re suffering and not getting help.

This story is one that I've seen a thousand times: someone (or some group) claims that doctors are ignoring their valid medical complaints of one kind or another. In this particular story, it's Black people and long COVID.

But go ahead and read the story. As usual, it provides literally zero evidence of either disparate treatment or widespread ignorance. On the contrary. One of the few statistics in the piece is a confirmation that Black people and white people "received medical care for symptoms associated with long covid" at about the same rates:

Aside from this, there are some anecdotes about people being misdiagnosed—all of them from early 2020—which is completely natural when you're dealing with a new and mysterious disease like long COVID that has a panoply of different symptoms in different people.

So: are Black people being "erased"? It's possible. But the anecdotes in the story were almost certainly supplied to the reporter by activist groups, so they're essentially meaningless. It's quite likely they could find plenty of identical stories among Hispanics and white people.

This is bad journalism. If it's true that Black people face undue skepticism when they report long COVID, they deserve something better than this. If they aren't, the story should just be spiked.

Here's the latest YouGov test matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump:

I could have picked any other poll. They all look roughly the same. I want to point out two things:

• It's close!
• Only 81% of voters expressed an opinion. The other 19% said neither, or RFK Jr., or don't know.

This gets to the heart of why I'm not panicking over Biden's polling numbers. Not yet, anyway. I keep asking myself who those other 19% are eventually going to vote for, and I think the answer is: not Trump. More even than Biden, people know Trump. They've had eight years of loud, chaotic, everpresent Trump, and there are no fence-sitters anymore. If they aren't planning to vote for him now, they just aren't going to vote for him.

That doesn't mean Biden will get all their votes. But I suspect it means Trump will get only a little more as time goes by and most of the rest will end up voting for Biden. That's especially true of the young and Black voters who are currently claiming they won't vote for Biden.

I don't mean this to be a Pollyanna view of things. Biden has his problems, obviously. But this really is something of a unique race that's effectively between two incumbents, and I don't think a lot of the usual conventional wisdom means a lot.

Nor do I think the "vibecession" is going to hurt Biden very much. A good economy favors the incumbent not through the media, but simply because it makes people feel good. Polls show repeatedly that almost everyone thinks their own personal finances are fine, and that's going to help Biden.

Maybe I'm lost in my own personal bubble, but if I had to guess I'd say Biden wins the two-party vote by about 52-48, maybe even a little better—and the electoral college along with it. We'll see.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

Republicans want to extend the Trump-era tax cuts that lapse after 2025. A big point of debate now: Should they cover any or all of the $4 trillion cost—and how?

Etc.

Spare me. Republican concern over the federal debt is no more real than it's ever been—which is to say, nonexistent. If they control Congress and the presidency, they'll extend the tax cuts and do nothing to offset them, end of story.

I get that the Journal has to pretend that this is some kind of live issue, but surely they know better? Republicans have been passing unpaid-for tax cuts since Reagan took office, and the only offsets they've ever been interested in are spending cuts on the poor. That's it. There's nothing more.

Glad I could shed a little light on this.

It's worth keeping in mind that, as near as I can tell, American conservatives don't have any moral qualms about Israel's war in Gaza. In fact, they're livid whenever Joe Biden so much as says that maybe Israel should be just a wee bit more careful about killing civilians if it wouldn't be too much trouble.

On the contrary: They think Israel should be bombing Gaza more; completely ignoring civilian casualties because they're all Hamas anyway; stopping aid trucks entirely; and turning the whole place into rubble.

I get it if you think Biden is just moving his lips but not really planning to ever put any real pressure on Netanyahu. I get it if you think Israel is in the right but needs to care more about noncombatants. But what I don't get is Republicans who apparently think it really would be OK to commit genocide and simply wipe Gaza off the map. Where does this bloodlust come from?

Am I being unfair? Surely this isn't true of all Republicans. But it sure seems to be true of a lot of them.

Andrew Van Dam, head of the Washington Post's Department of Data, routinely does interesting data-driven pieces, and he's out with another one today. This time it's a survey asking people about the best decade of the last century. Here are the results:

Obviously much of this is a matter of opinion, but most of it is surprisingly defensible. Good economies in the '50s and '90s; good music in the '70s; close-knit families in the '50s, etc. The two most interesting, I think, are about political division and reliable news reporting: both of which are relatively flat, suggesting that people don't think there's been a lot of change.

But now comes the truly fascinating part of this. You see, it turn out this survey is all about the framing. The charts above are from asking people about the best decades. But what about if you ask them about the worst?

Overwhelmingly, the worst decade is . . . right now. We even beat out the Great Depression for worst economy! The only things people seem to have gotten right is that life expectancy was shorter in the '30s and both racial and gender equality were worse. They also managed to figure out that the '40s had a lot of war, but obliviously put the current decade in second place—entirely ignoring Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.

In fact, if you remove the '30s, which are sort of a stand-in for "a long time ago," our current decade is the absolute worst on every single metric except for war. We're just barely better than the decade of World War II.

The takeaway from this is that the vast majority of people think current times are just about the worst on nearly every metric. That's crazy beyond belief, but it fits with the endless claims from left and right about "losing our country," democracy in free-fall, racism worse than ever, trans people making a mockery of traditional morality; the economy being in recession; genocide in Gaza; Fox News/mainstream media ruining journalism; rap music turning teens into hoodlums; social media turning us lonely and atomized; etc.

In other words, people always think they have it the worst. This is sort of "meh" except for two things:

• Is it always true, or just on an uptick at the moment?
• Why is that people were moderately historically literate when asked about the best decades, but completely out to lunch when asked about the worst?

This, by the way, is what I'm fighting against when I continually tell you that things are better than most people think. That's not because there are no bad things; it's because too many of you think the world today is mired in unprecedented polycrisis and decline. It's crazy. Neither data nor common sense supports this. And yet it's an awfully common belief.