Month: September 2024

Today brings good news and bad news. The good news is that Morning Consult polling shows Kamala Harris behind in only one battleground state. The bad news is that she's lost ground from two weeks ago:

This is one tight race, folks. Even Florida is within two points (49-47 in favor of Trump).

This goes into the file of sentences you never expected to see:

The Springfield Police Division said Monday morning they have received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten.

If you have no idea what this is all about, count your blessings. It means you're a normal person who doesn't chase right-wing memes down rabbit holes. Naturally I'm now going to ruin this for you.

The Springfield in question is Springfield, Ohio, about 15 miles from Dayton. Something like 15,000 Haitian refugees have resettled there recently, and a year ago one of them ran into a school bus and killed an 11-year-old student. J.D. Vance made hay with this and everything spiraled from there. A few days ago someone in a Springfield Facebook group claimed that Haitians were catching and butchering local ducks and cats. America 2100, an anti-immigrant organization, followed up with a Twitter thread about the horrors of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, which was then picked up by Benny Johnson, Breitbart, Elon Musk, the GOP, and a vast host of others. Within a couple of days it had all gone viral.

Aside from the brutal racism involved in all this, it's ironic for two reasons. First, until recently Springfield was a dying town. Ten years ago it began a program to attract new business and it was stunningly successful: before long it had produced more jobs than the town could fill. According to the New York Times, "Many young, working-age people had descended into addiction. Others shunned entry-level, rote work altogether, employers said."

The Haitian community heard about this and rescued Springfield. They migrated from other states and filled the jobs, doing them so well that more and more businesses set up shop. By all accounts, the Haitian settlers were hard working, law abiding, and healthy. “It was incredible to witness the transformation of our community,” said Horton Hobbs, vice president of economic development for the Greater Springfield Partnership, which executed the plan.

The second point of irony is that this has nothing to do with either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Most of the Haitians were already in the country thanks to the Cuban Haitian Entrant Program of 1980. They moved to Springfield because they learned that it had lots of good jobs. "Haitians who heard that the Springfield area boasted well-paying, blue-collar jobs and a low cost of living poured in, and employers were eager to hire and train the new work force."

Now, there's no question that the influx of refugees over the past five years has taken a toll. Clinics and schools have been overwhelmed, and it's taken a while to adjust. Housing prices have gone up. Crime spiked in 2021, but that appears to be mostly a statistical artifact due to changes in how aggravated assault was defined.

So who's behind the viral meme about the immigrant horrors of Springfield? Good question. Semafor has reported on a secretive group being paid considerable sums to create right wing social media memes. Russia paid $10 million to create Tenet Media, a fake news outlet that released thousands of right wing videos. The FBI recently seized 32 websites that were part of a Russian disinformation program called Doppelganger, which produced realistic looking fake news sites as part of its “Good Old USA Project.”

So who knows? The Springfield meme could be one of those or it could be some other freelance group. In any case, there's very little about it that's truthful. The Haitians are in Springfield essentially because they were invited. Most of them had nothing to do with Joe Biden's Haitian parole program. Real-life crime doesn't appear to be up much. The Haitian immigrants are highly valued by local employers. It is true that the influx has strained public services, but even that is being steadily addressed.

But it doesn't matter, does it? Thousands of people have seen the viral Springfield stuff. Maybe millions. Conversely, probably a few hundred will see this post. The damage is done.

This is a picture of Highway 177 looking north on a day with 120° temperatures. It may be only the edge of the Mojave Desert, but it's still pretty hot.

I see that Kamala Harris now has an extensive issues page on her website. People have been whining about its absence forever, and now that it's here I predict that about 17 people will bother reading it.

My favorite is this one:

Politically, I'm sure this is a winner. Logically, not so much. It is, unfortunately, all but impossible that we'll ever seriously tackle climate without some kind of carbon tax or cap-and-trade. Even the solar revolution won't be enough to do it on its own.

Bruce Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, has joined the multiple myeloma brigade that includes me, Tom Brokaw, Steve Scalise, Karen Tumulty, and maybe even Queen Elizabeth II. I wish her the best of luck.

Semafor published a story this evening about a mysterious right wing financier who organized a secret¹ group of conservative influencers to smear Kamala Harris with sexual innuendo:

This influencer network was organized over emails and Zoom calls....The money was good: One participant made more than $20,000 for several weeks of boosting assigned messages, according to the Zelle receipts.

....An invitation to a call on Monday, July 22, arrived under the subject line “War Room — Kamala Messaging”....The influencers’ marching orders were clear: make a series of lurid sexual jibes aimed at Harris, the least crude of which was comparing her to Haliey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah girl” who became a viral sensation over a video of her discussing oral sex.

But wait. There's a punch line. Nobody knows who was on these calls, with one exception:

Semafor was able to identify one of them: former New York Republican Rep. George Santos, who spoke up on one conference call to object when the parties discussed making sexual allegations against Harris.

In other words, this operation was so disgusting that even George Santos refused to be a part of it. And Semafor was too embarrassed to describe it. But apparently everyone else had no problems at all. They happily took the money and followed their marching orders. Welcome to right wing social media.

¹Really secret: "None of the participants identified themselves by name, and all joined calls with their cameras off to preserve their mutual anonymity."

What's the single best metric for the health of an economy? Conventionally it's GDP growth, and there's nothing really wrong with that.

But if I had to choose one thing it would be median income. In particular, market income before taxes or government benefits. Here it is:

Compared to GDP, income is a better measure of what actually matters to people. Compared to per capita, median is a better measure of how the economy is working for the average person, not millionaires. And compared to other measures of earnings, market income is the best measure of how the underlying economy is really doing.

Now, it may be that we're better off allowing market income to grow slowly for the middle classes and then making up for it with government transfers. But I've always thought that was a distant second best. An economy that's really working should produce strong direct growth in wages instead of trying to make up for lopsided growth with unpopular welfare programs. Maybe someday we'll figure out how to do that.

TECHNICAL NOTE: Market income is regularly calculated by the Congressional Budget Office, but they don't actually produce a median. However, they do produce an average of the middle three quintiles, which is very close to the same thing. That's what I used here.

Government bureaucrats say the unemployment rate last month was 4.2%. Donald Trump says the real unemployment rate was 7.9%.

Please. In August the United States had 161 million workers out of a total population of 337 million. That's an unemployment rate of 52.1%.

Why won't the lamestream media tell you that more than half of all Americans are out of work? Even Donald Trump is afraid to tell the real truth. Wake up, sheeple!

What do you make of this?

If you start at 2009, suicidal thoughts reported among teens have gone up by more than half. But if you look at the entire data series, suicidal thoughts declined by half during the '90s and aughts and have now merely reverted to their historical average.

It's all especially hard to figure out when you add this:

The number of teens who seriously attempted suicide has been roughly flat for 30 years. There's a bit of a dip in the aughts, but that's about it. Even the COVID pandemic appears to have had only a small effect.

Finally, the actual number of suicides is also fairly stable. It spiked in 2014-17 but has been declining ever since. COVID had no effect at all.

I'm not sure what to think of this, but it's the kind of thing that makes me a little skeptical of the whole teen mental health crisis narrative. If, over the past decade, teens say they think about suicide more but they don't actually attempt suicide more, what's the explanation? A genuine increase in depression? A culture that encourage teens to talk about depression more? Just a bit of random movement in a data series that goes up and down over time? I don't know.

This data comes straight from the CDC:

Nuff said. This is a crisis, people.