Month: August 2024

Here is tonight's headline in the Washington Post:

The GOP nominee has grown increasingly upset about Kamala Harris’s surging poll numbers and media coverage since replacing Joe Biden on the ticket.

Poor baby. There's more, of course:

“It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her, too,” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend.... He has grown annoyed with some of the media focus on his campaign staff.... He has asked why Harris is raising so much more money than him, people familiar with the comments say. Trump has also repeatedly raised the large crowds that Harris is getting compared with Biden, people who have spoken to him said.

Awww. And here's the pièce de résistance. It's about Trump's ill-fated appearance before a group of Black journalists last week:

He did not know that Harris was not going to appear, that the journalists were going to ask such tough questions and that there would be a fact-checking component to the event, one person who spoke with him about it said.

He didn't know there would be tough questions. What a petulant little prick. How does anyone put up with him?

You know, I realize Trump's background was litigated thoroughly in 2016, but if there's a debate I sure wish Kamala Harris would bring it up again. I mean, this is a guy who was brought up as a spoiled rich kid attending a string of private schools and then avoiding Vietnam because of bone spurs that mysteriously appeared in his heels. His millionaire father installed him as president of the family real estate business and bankrolled his ventures, but within a few years he blew it all by wildly mismanaging a football team, the Plaza Hotel, the Eastern Shuttle, a string of casinos, and more. He was forced into multiple bankruptcy proceedings and his banks put him on a strict allowance until he clawed his way barely back to solvency—leaving behind a trail of unpaid bills and fleeced mom-and-pop investors. Finally he inherited more money when his father died and has lived in luxury ever since. He has a cook to prepare his meals, a butler to serve them, servants to make his bed, a chauffeur to drive him around, and personal flight attendants to fetch him Diet Cokes on his plane. His golf courses are money losers, his "charitable foundation" was shut down for fraud, Trump University was a con, he owes nearly $100 million to a woman he sexually assaulted, and he owes $500 million to the state of New York for systematically lying to banks about his wealth. Now he wants to be president again.

Seriously?

A recent paper by Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia quantifies the value of various efforts to combat COVID-19 in the US. The headline result is a composite score for different states based on what kinds of restrictions they imposed, but I found the detailed national breakdown more interesting. Here are his estimates of how various interventions affected death rates:

By comparing excess death rates in different states with different restrictions in place, Ruhm estimates how effective each one was. The results are pretty simple:

• Vaccines work great.
• Mask mandates work OK.
• Prohibitions on mask and vaccine mandates are terrible.

Nothing else has much impact. The effects are all fairly small and in many cases aren't even statistically significant. Restaurant closures are minimally effective, but probably not worth it (though it's almost certainly a good idea for wait staff to wear masks).

This is one study, and its results are hardly the last word. Still, it's striking that an awful lot of research has now been done and it mostly finds that hardly anything makes much of a difference. Masks help a little bit, but aside from that it's vaccines or nothing.

Note, however, that there are several interventions that weren't measured in this study: social distancing, better ventilation, UV light, and remote work. All of these are things that likely have some impact.

I suppose everyone has already noticed this, but it's remarkable to see how much laser-focused pandering Donald Trump has been doing lately:

• He attended the Libertarian Party convention and suddenly announced he would pardon their hero, convicted internet drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht.
• After a call from billionaire mega-donor Jeff Yass, an early investor in TikTok, he suddenly pulled a 180 and said that he opposed a TikTok ban.
• He attended a Bitcoin conference in Nashville and suddenly announced that he favored a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
• After months of railing against electric cars, he suddenly switched gears and said, "I'm for electric cars" because "Elon endorsed me very strongly."
• He met a waitress in Las Vegas and suddenly had a brainstorm that he could win votes by endorsing a policy of no tax on tips.
• After polls showed that he was losing support among seniors, he suddenly announced that “SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!”

Everyone does some of this. Ethanol becomes very popular in Iowa every four years. But Trump is certainly carrying it to cynical new heights.

A pair of bored chimps at the LA Zoo.

In the latest YouGov poll, Kamala Harris is two points ahead of Donald Trump, the same as last week. I think she might get another little bump out of Tim Walz and the Democratic convention, but from here on out it's mostly just going to be a three-month grind. The big spikes from newfound Democratic enthusiasm have probably played themselves out.

But I was browsing the poll while I was killing time in the waiting room this morning¹ and found a few other interesting tidbits. One fascinating and promising result is that although Harris is only two points ahead of Trump in voting intent, she's five points ahead when people are asked, "Who would you prefer to have as president?" This suggests that Harris has several points of upside between now and November.

On another subject, Joe Biden's proposals for Supreme Court reform may not be going anywhere, but they're popular. Term limits are supported 67%-23% and a code of ethics is supported 72%-15%. Even Republicans support both of these proposals.

Finally, you'll be unsurprised to learn that inflation is still rated as the most important issue. However, it turns out this is mainly among Republicans. A third of Republicans rate it as the most important issue but only 15% of Democrats. As usual, the two parties are in different universes on the issues they care about. Among Republicans, the most important issues are inflation, immigration, and jobs. Among Democrats, the most important issues aside from inflation are health care, abortion, and climate change.

¹Only one more day of radiation to go!

By now you know everything about Tim Walz. Grew up in Nebraska. Joined the National Guard and eventually rose to the rank of command sergeant major. Moved to Minnesota and became a schoolteacher and high school football coach. Ran for Congress and won. Ran for governor and won. Two kids via IVF. Got his son a dog after winning the governorship.

But there's more!

That's Honey, the cat the Walz family adopted last year after their old cat ran away. So now, when Walz comes home after a hard day at the office and says, "Honey I'm home!" there's no telling who he's actually talking to.¹

¹Marian's late aunt once had a cat she named Honey just so she could say "Honey I'm home" when she walked through the door.

A few weeks ago House Republicans released a 40-page report blasting GARM and its parent, the WFA, for illegal collusion and restraint of trade. The report—

Wait. Who is GARM? I'm glad you asked. GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an initiative of the World Federation of Advertisers. The Republican report is here.

Second question: should you care? The answer is pretty definitively no. I read the report when it came out—most of it, anyway, until I couldn't take any more—and there's nothing there. Oh, there are lots and lots of words, but when you try to boil them down into actual allegations of misconduct, almost nothing is left. A member once asked a question at a meeting. GARM's head once made an equivocal statement about something. A company once asked for guidance about advertising on Twitter.

Hold on. Twitter, you say? Yes indeed. You might wonder why House Republicans care about GARM in the first place, and the answer is that Elon Musk is mad at them because lots of companies belonging to GARM have stopped advertising on Twitter. So Republicans did Elon a solid by using their congressional subpoena authority to dig up some dirt.

In other words, it's not a coincidence that today, four weeks after the report was released, Twitter has sued GARM for harming their business via an allegedly coordinated advertising boycott. Republicans had already done the oppo research for him.

And you'll never guess where Twitter filed its lawsuit. Are you ready? The Northern District of Texas! Specifically, Wichita Falls, where it will be heard by Republican favorite Reed O'Connor. O'Connor has ruled in the past against gay marriage, Obamacare, COVID vaccines for Navy SEALS, religious nondiscrimination, and, notably, is already the judge in Elon Musk's lawsuit against Media Matters:

The most significant thing about X's lawsuit against GARM are not the allegations, but the Texas judge: Reed O'Connor. He also is overseeing X's Media Matters suit and, in an extraordinary move, allowed discovery to start BEFORE a motion to dismiss was ruled on. That allowed for vast amounts of broad and costly data collection from Media Matters, which the group compared to "harassment," leading to layoffs due to crushing litigation costs — again, before the suit's merit's were even decided.

This whole thing is yet another fusillade in the endless Republican war against supposed censorship of conservative speech. There never turns out to be anything to it except for the fact that Republicans rely so heavily on disinformation these days that even modest fact checking is bound to hit them a lot harder than Democrats. As for Twitter, advertisers have obviously backed off the platform because Musk has turned it into a risky cesspool that they're afraid could backfire on them at any moment. Nor do I imagine it helped when Musk told advertisers "Go fuck yourself" if they didn't like his inflammatory posts.

So that's that. Musk was mad about his loss of advertising. Republicans came to the rescue by issuing subpoenas. And now Musk is using the information they uncovered to file a suit in front of a notoriously right-wing judge. Nice little racket, no?

On our recent Danube cruise the ship stopped briefly at a town called Weissenkirchen. Sure enough, there was a white church at the top of a hill in the center of town. Marian and I walked up and down and all around to find a way in, but all the streets went in circles around the church. None led up to it.

Then we accidentally discovered how to get there: via a covered stairway that's by no means conspicuous. The top photo shows the stairway from the outside. The bottom photo shows what it looks like from halfway up looking down. Both photos are compositions of two images taken at different exposures.

Over at National Review, Hadley Arkes says Donald Trump has been terrible on abortion, but you can hardly blame the poor guy:

Trump and Vance are dealing with a bad hand that has been dealt them by the Supreme Court.... The most striking thing about the holding of the Court in the Dobbs case is that it slew the Great White Whale of Roe v. Wade, while going out of its way to say nothing about the most central and decisive point in the case: the standing of the unborn child in the womb as a small human being, who would claim the protections that would flow to any other human being under the laws.

....The conservative justices then returned the matter of abortion to the political arena, to a culture that had been tilted radically against the pro-life movement. And they returned it to a Republican political class that had always been skittish and nervous in dealing with the issue. Donald Trump has been nothing but a confirmed marketer, and when abortions surge to over a million a year, Trump takes it as a blaring sign that people want them. Never once has he taken the moment to point out to his listeners that all of this talk about 15 weeks or six weeks was really talk about when to protect a small human being about to be killed.

Poor Donald. He wouldn't be in this mess if the Supreme Court had just banned abortion completely from the start. Of course, left unsaid here is that Trump is an adult who can take any position he wants no matter how the Court ruled. But the obvious truth is that Trump simply doesn't believe that life begins at conception. He doesn't really believe anything.

More generally, this essay is a remarkable, if ordinary, demonstration of what conservatives really want from the Supreme Court. They simply want it to rule in their favor, full stop. Legal considerations play no role.

How else could Arkes take the position he does? The Constitution, after all, is silent on abortion and silent on the beginnings of human life. Likewise, murder is defined by statute and always has been. Not even in the most radical conception of the Constitution is it possible to say that it takes any view on either the definition or penalty for murder. But Arkes wants the Supreme Court to say so anyway.

And why not? Arkes maintains that the question of whether a fetus is a human life is a "long-settled, empirical truth" that's "found in all of the textbooks of embryology." This is sophistry. By this definition a brain-dead patient in the ICU is also a human life: it has human DNA, after all, and continues to respirate—sometimes on its own, sometimes with mechanical assistance.

But the question of whether something is a human life that deserves protection isn't—and never has been—an empirical question. It's a legal question, a religious question, and a philosophical question. Science has nothing to say about it. And since religion, law, and philosophy all disagree wildly, it's up to society to adjudicate it in all its usual messy glory. So that's what we're doing.

Oh great, Democrats now have two people on their ticket with names that are easy to mispronounce. For the record, our new VP-to-be is Tim WALLZ, not WALTZ or anything like that—though God only knows what Fox News will decide to call him.

In any case, welcome to the show, governor. It's gonna be an exciting three months.