Month: August 2024

I don't subscribe to or read any of the morning political newsletters because I've never felt the need to be told what's important and what isn't. I'll make up my own mind, thank you very much.

But this afternoon I happened to get referred to Politico's "West Wing Playbook," where I came across the following jaw-dropping item:

OUR DEEPEST APOLOGIES TO LYNN SWEET… In yesterday’s edition of West Wing Playbook, we wrote that LYNN SWEET of the Chicago Sun-Times and other reporters cut the long security line at the United Center. But Sweet reached out to say that we got it wrong. After waiting in line for 30 or 40 minutes with a Sun-Times intern, Sweet told us that she spotted someone she wanted to talk to and jumped ahead, but she ultimately went back to her place in line.

Seriously? They wrote an item yesterday about a reporter cutting the security line at the DNC? Are we all still in middle school?

God knows I'm OK with a break from endlessly earnest stories. Have some fun! But passing notes about how Lynn got backsies in the playground line—that's not even middle school. It's second grade. What the hell is wrong with these people?

From longtime Biden aide Anita Dunn on how The Godfather can teach youngsters about the uses of power:

Some very invaluable lessons in it that I just thought people should carry forward and the most surprising — and very upsetting — thing was how many people on this staff had never seen the movie.

It's very upsetting that so many aspiring young Machiavellis have never seen The Godfather! Hell yes.

I believe this area of the Mojave Desert is zoned for single-family homes, but it looks like a pair of enterprising critters have decided to build a duplex anyway. They probably did this before SB9 got struck down.

Gaza is back in the political news thanks to protests at the DNC, which mostly seem to have fizzled out. I guess Killer Kamala doesn't have quite the same ring as Genocide Joe.

But I remain puzzled not by opposition to the Gaza War per se, but by the seemingly relentless, intransigent opposition to Israel having responded to October 7 at all. Where does this unquestioning sympathy for Israel's enemies come from?

For more than 70 years Arabs (and Iran) have been relentlessly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Over the decades this has taken the form of conventional wars, guerilla wars, blockades, terrorist attacks, organic uprisings, suicide bombers, and rockets from neighboring territories. When Arab nations effectively gave up, the PLO took over the killing. When the PLO gave up, Hamas and Hezbollah took over. No matter what Israel did or didn't do, someone remained fanatically devoted to killing Jews.

If you're one of the lunatics who thinks Israel is an illegal colonial settler on Palestinian land and it's therefore righteous to seek its destruction, go block a freeway or set up a bunch of tents or do something else stupid and pointless.

On the other hand, if you're someone who thinks the West Bank settlements are wrong and Israel has a lot to answer for—well, I agree. If you think Benjamin Netanyahu is an odious piece of shit, preach it. If you think Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, abused Palestinian prisoners, cavalierly bombed civilians, killed aid workers, and turned the entire region into a wasteland, you'll get no argument. If, in general, you think Israel could have done a whole lot of things better and more humanely over the years, you're right.

And yet, all that stuff didn't pop up out of nowhere. It happened because no matter how many wars they won or how many peace settlements they agreed to, their enemies single-mindedly kept trying to annihilate them. So what do you expect them to do? Is there a less brutal course that would ever get Israel's enemies to stop?

Maybe there is. But what? What precisely is it that Palestinian protesters want?

I've been waiting for this:

ZOMG! They are lying liars telling lies!

Oh ffs. Walz usually talks about the "fertility treatments" he and his wife got in order to have children, but occasionally refers to it by the common term IVF. In fact, as the New York Times reports, the Walzes actually used IUI, a different kind of treatment that's often casually referred to under the IVF umbrella but isn't technically IVF.

So now you know. This is a bit like saying you got pulled over by a police officer when it was really a sheriff's deputy. But of course the nitwits on the right have to insist that it's a big fat lie and Walz has been exposed as trying to fool everyone. Jesus.

I've heard rumors that people are well and truly beaten down by the cost of groceries and just want inflation to Finally. Go. Away. Is this true?

Well I come bearing good news: Food inflation has been gone for a year and a half. Here's what a $100 basket of the four major food groups costs compared to 18 months ago:

A $100 basket of meat costs $100.57 today. A $100 basket of dairy items costs $98.16.

Grocery store inflation is gone. And it's been gone for 18 months. Is everyone happy now?

Donald Trump says that our supply chains are "still crashed." That's just normal Trump idiocy, of course, but it got me curious: how are our supply chains doing these days? So I checked in on our old friend from the New York Fed, the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index. Here it is through July:

It's right at zero, just as normal as can be.

The Washington Post writes today about the decline of DEI initiatives in Silicon Valley:

Despite these initiatives, the tech industry’s demographics remain largely stagnant. In 2022, 26 percent of science, tech, engineering and math workers were women, an increase of one percentage point from the year 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

It's actually a lot worse than that. Here's the share of women specifically in computer related jobs:

Despite decades of DEI programs, the share of women in computer-related jobs has plummeted. The share getting bachelor's degrees in computer science has rebounded a bit over the past decade but is still well below its level in 1990.

Conservative attacks on DEI may have triggered the recent corporate surrender on these programs, but only because the timing was good. After years and years of trying every new thing and seeing only meager results, even a lot of liberals are in a mood to move on. It's one thing to put in the work and tolerate a certain amount of performative BS if you're making progress, but if you're not it's hard to justify. Eventually, after many years of being told "You're doing it wrong," there comes a time when the excuse wears thin.

This particular story is largely about women in IT, but I imagine things are pretty similar for other marginalized groups. We're not making much progress and everyone is running out of patience. If everything we've tried is doing it wrong, then what's right?

Here's a pair of pictures of the River Princess, our cruise ship on the Danube. They were both taken near sunset from a bridge that crossed the river right next to our mooring.

A while back I mentioned that there's no such thing as "immaculate inflation reduction." That is, the Fed doesn't magically bring inflation down with interest hikes. It slows the economy with interest rate hikes, and the slowing economy then brings down inflation. But the economy hasn't slowed recently, which means the Fed wasn't responsible for inflation going down.

But! Maybe the Fed did slow down the economy. Maybe the economy would have run even hotter if the Fed hadn't acted.

Maybe. But here's a remarkable chart that you don't see very often:

Potential GDP is the CBO's estimate of what GDP could be if the economy were running flat out. Obviously it's not sustainable for the economy to run above that for very long, but it's possible for limited periods. Check out the recent times when this briefly happened:

• 2000, at the tail end of the dotcom boom.
• 2006-08, the tail end of the housing boom.
• 2019, the tail end of the Obama-Trump expansion.
• 2023-24.

GDP has been running well above potential for the past four quarters. In other words, it's unlikely in the extreme that the Fed has meaningfully slowed down the economy. So far, anyway.

POSTSCRIPT: This really ought to be causing some head-scratching among economists. How is it that the Fed can sharply raise policy rates and yet the economy is running red hot two years later? It's a mystery.