Month: June 2024

The American economy gained 272,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 182,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate increased to 4.0%.

The net number of new jobs isn't bad. However, the total employment level was down 408,000 and the number of unemployed was up 157,000. Not so good.

Average weekly wages were up 4.9%, which is a little over 1% in real terms. That's fairly good, though I imagine the Fed would prefer it to be lower.

The Washington Post writes today about the eight leading contenders to be Donald Trump's vice president. Here's my ranking:

Greatest willingness to kowtow: Tim Scott

Overall pure shittiness: Elise Stefanik

Nonentity award: Doug Burgum

Willingness to pretend to be an idiot: J.D. Vance

Actual idiot: Ben Carson

Most pathetically ambitious: Marco Rubio

Strong right arm of retribution: Tom Cotton

Freedom Caucus true believer: Byron Donalds

So what does Trump want in a veep. Someone who will sing his praises endlessly? Scott. Someone spineless? Rubio. Just a generally horrible person? Stefanik. Someone who will eagerly help him in his campaign for revenge? Cotton. All of these have obvious appeal to Trump, so it's hard to predict what he'll do. Wait and see.

The Washington Post reports that the freedom-loving free marketeers at the Heritage Foundation are suggesting that Donald Trump should regulate insurance companies more heavily if he wins. In particular, they shouldn't be allowed to pay for out-of-state abortion:

The Heritage Foundation, which has been heavily involved in policy proposals for a Trump second term, has recommended that the Labor Department and Congress “should clarify” that federal labor regulations for employer-sponsored health-care plans “should not be allowed to trump states’ ability to protect innocent human life in the womb.”

If Dobbs is to be taken seriously, there's no way the federal government has the power to do this. On the downside, if Dobbs is to be taken seriously, state insurance authorities might very well have this power.

In any case, this is yet another indication—as if we needed any more—that social conservatives are in no way willing to abide by the federalism in Dobbs. They support it insofar as it killed Roe v. Wade, but their goal is to ban every abortion of any type for any resident of the United States. No surgical abortions, no pills, no traveling to other states, no traveling out of the country, nothing. That's the goal, and there's no way to stop them except to vote their asses out of office when they try to pull this stuff.

An organization called Fix the Court has published an estimate of all gifts received by Supreme Court justices since 2004. Their figures show Clarence Thomas way out in front, but this is obviously unfair since Thomas has been on the court longer than most justices. When you adjust for gifts per year, you get something totally—

Actually, you get exactly the same thing. Thomas has raked in a dozen times the volume of gifts of the next highest justice. It's basically Clarence Thomas and the eight dwarfs.

I don't really care very much about Sam Alito hoisting an upside-down flag after the January 6 insurrection. I already assumed he was an ardent Stop the Steal fan anyway. But Clarence Thomas's buck raking is really and truly corrupt. And yet there's nothing to be done about it short of impeachment, which Republicans will never support because Thomas is one of them. If they continue to support Donald Trump, they're certainly not going to do anything about Thomas.

POSTSCRIPT: Fix the Court estimates that, on average, justices have reported only 28% of the gifts they've received. Among sitting justices, this ranges from 83% for Sonia Sotomayor to 8.5% for Thomas.

(Kavanaugh and Barrett are technically at 0%, but that's for a grand total of four gifts totaling $600.)

This is a World War II cemetery in Normandy. It holds the remains of British troops who stormed Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches on D-Day.

I didn't notice this when it was published, but I see that polling from the New York Times confirms the YouGov results I mentioned yesterday. Donald Trump's conviction on felony charges has moved voters only slightly:

The Times interviewed some of the folks who were previously Trumpish or undecided. Here are their complaints about Biden:

Jack: Earlier this year, he said he considered himself a Trump voter primarily because of his anger over Mr. Biden’s economic policies.

Eric: Mr. Tabor said he had turned to Mr. Trump after Mr. Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was rejected by the Supreme Court, and Mr. Tabor was left with the feeling that the president was getting little done.

Jamie: She blamed him for not saving abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Carla: She watched Mr. Biden perform the job as president and could not envision voting for him again. “Sometimes Biden says things without thinking,” she said.

This is all crazy. The economy is great under Biden. Biden has gotten a ton of things done. It makes no sense to blame him for a conservative Supreme Court that Trump appointed. As for saying things without thinking, has Carla ever listened to Trump?

But crazy or not, this is how a lot of people think. You just have to figure out a way of getting through to them.

I was browsing through the press highlights of the April trade report and learned that we set a new record for imports from Ireland. But what the hell do we import from Ireland? Whiskey? Shamrock-themed tea towels? The answer turns out to be drugs. Now you know.

Over at National Review, Michael New says Democrats were "grandstanding" with their bill yesterday that would have protected the right to contraception:

The aim of the bill was to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

First, contraceptives are widely available.... Furthermore, more contraceptive use would not necessarily reduce the number either of abortions or of unintended pregnancies.... The legislation contained no conscience protections.

This is weak tea. The aim of the bill, needless to say, is to make sure access to contraceptives doesn't become a problem. Contraceptives shouldn't just be "widely available," they should be universally available, and we should make sure to keep things that way.

As for contraception not reducing abortions or unintended pregnancies, that seems a wee bit unlikely, doesn't it? I mean, obviously they do something or else millions of women wouldn't use them.

And conscience protections are embedded in other laws and in Supreme Court rulings. There's no need to repeat them.

New's piece is a good example of why Democrats are grandstanding about this: it's a winning issue. Even Republicans can't really come up with any good reasons against it.

Here's the headline on a Jim Geraghty post at National Review:

President Biden to Time Magazine: ‘(Unintelligible)’

What is with these people? Geraghty isn't one of the insane ones at NR, but here he is trying to push the conservative narrative of Biden's mental decline by pointing to (a) one word (b) during a one-hour interview (c) while Biden had a cold and had apologized for his voice.

But maybe Geraghty should have pointed out something else: Time's fact check of their interview with Donald Trump was seven times longer than their fact check of Biden (about 4,000 words vs. 600 words). Time had to correct 33 Trump claims compared to seven for Biden. And a large number of the Trump claims were serious lies designed to mislead. Biden's were exclusively small misstatements.

I dunno. Maybe that's more important.

Has Donald Trump's felony conviction hurt him? Naturally I was curious to see the results of the first post-verdict weekly poll from YouGov.

The answer is "slightly." YouGov finds that the verdict made 5% of the electorate less likely to vote for him and 2% more likely to vote for him. That's a net loss for Trump of 3%. On the question about vote intent, Trump registered a net loss of 1%.

These are small numbers and may not hold up. But it's pretty safe to say that if the trial had any effect at all, it was pretty small.

But take a look at this chart, which breaks down vote intention by gender:

Trump gained four points among men and lost five points among women. The trial verdict made Trump even Trumpier, which apparently men liked and women didn't.

Likewise, the verdict made conservatives more likely to vote for Trump and liberals less likely. Self-IDed moderates didn't move at all.