Month: October 2024

Conservatives are in endless denial about their own movement:

The "planted disinfo" in question is a nutbag conspiracy theory from a Twitter troll called Black Insurrectionist. He's the guy who last month circulated an obviously fake claim from a "whistleblower" that the ABC presidential debate had been rigged for Kamala Harris. Now he's back:

This time, Black Insurrectionist says he received an anonymous email on August 9 from someone claiming they’d been sexually assaulted as a minor by Tim Walz. “I did indeed call the person making the claims,” Black Insurrectionist wrote. “He laid out a story that was very incredulous. I told him he would need to lay everything out in writing for me. In depth and in detail.” Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported first email; as thousands of people immediately noted, the image had a cursor at the end of the last sentence, making it obvious that he’d written it himself.

Undaunted, Black Insurrectionist went on to post dozens of tweets outlining the claim, including relaying another written “statement” from the victim claiming that Walz has a “raised scar” on his chest and a “Chinese symbol” tattooed on his thigh.

Black Insurrectionist knows his audience. He understands that the MAGA crowd will believe literally anything juicy, no matter how ridiculous it is. It will generate attention and clicks and advertising dollars as long as he keeps up the scam. This is what Donald Trump has taught his followers.

But no. Eli Lake agrees with the loathsome Jack Posobiec that Kamala Harris (a) hired an actor who would pretend to be a molestation victim, (b) decided to funnel this fake story through Black Insurrectionist, (c) all for some unfathomable reason. I mean, what's their theory here for the endgame? That Walz will triumphantly strip down and show everyone he has no tattoo on his thigh, thus destroying the credibility of Black Insurrectionist?

Guys, the real story is simple: your movement is brimming with liars, crackpots, grifters, charlatans, and conspiracy theorists, all feeding the vast maw of credulous Trump followers. That's it. That's all there is.

In the current issue of Texas Monthly Jack Herrera has a top notch story about illegal immigration in Texas. After a portrait of a Honduran migrant who's chased away from home by rising gang violence and is desperate to land a construction job in the US, he writes about the main reason for the recent spike in border crossings—one that I've also tried to highlight:

Arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Hererra then focuses specifically on worker shortages in Texas's booming construction business:

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures.... Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.

....The industry also faces a labor-force problem it cannot address quickly simply by raising pay. For two decades, the number of U.S.-born workers entering the construction trade has nosedived.... Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber.

....Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including [Governor Greg] Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

Herrera's main takeaway is that Texas politicians deliberately do things that get public attention—Project Lone Star, high profile disputes with the feds, busing immigrants to New York—but that won't make a dent in the numbers. That's because the business owners who really control Texas politics won't abide anything that actually works. So the charade continues.

In 2017, after Donald Trump first moved into the White House, his acting ICE chief, Thomas Homan, declared that he intended to increase worksite enforcement by “four hundred percent.” He largely succeeded. By the end of 2018 ICE had quadrupled investigations of undocumented workers, and agents had arrested seven times as many immigrants in workforce raids compared with the year before.

But one metric stayed virtually static: the number of managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants. In 2019 the Associated Press reported that convictions of managers who hired workers without legal status had even declined.

Williams made an argument I heard from Marek and others: that the government doesn’t have an interest in shutting down construction projects, which is what would happen if it required contractors to hire only legal workers. Of all the immigration-related crimes to prosecute, why go after those building the houses the country so badly needs?

It's not just construction, of course. And there's an obvious solution: mandatory E-Verify and real penalties for employers who violate it. But precisely because it would work, Republican business donors oppose it and Republicans, therefore, aren't much interested in it.

The simple truth is that there aren't enough legal residents to fill all the jobs in the US. Everyone knows this. When Donald Trump thunders about deporting every illegal immigrant in the country, it's just empty talk, red meat for the rubes. In reality, our economy would collapse without immigrants, and no one wants to risk that. So we continue appealing to xenophobia with walls and agents and raids, but it's all theater. As Herrera notes, it's just enough to keep illegal immigrants scared and exploitable, but always stops carefully short of making any meaningful dent in their numbers. Quite the coincidence.

I'm going to keep trying with the comet, but it's just too faint to capture well. I took this one at the Huntington Beach pier, just before the comet dropped below some developing fog and disappeared. This is a composite picture since I needed a long exposure for the comet but a shorter exposure for the pier. It's also been processed to within an inch of its life and it's still barely visible. I never saw it with my naked eye even though the preview photos told me exactly where it was.

In a couple of days maybe I'll try again in a darker spot.

Kamala Harris introduced an economic plan today designed to help Black men, but as you might expect it's really a laundry list of stuff that will be available to anyone. She's just pitching it as aimed at Black men.

Anyway, this buries the lede:

Under the plan, Ms. Harris also pledges to legalize marijuana nationally and to ensure that Black men, who were once disproportionately jailed for using and distributing marijuana, can benefit from its business potential.

This is pretty big news, no? It's oddly MIA in the headlines of news stories about this.

Here is the Atlanta Fed's latest projection for real GDP growth in Q3:

Donald Trump beat 3% growth only five times before COVID hit. Joe Biden beat it seven times in his first three years. This will be his ninth overall.

Likewise, GDP grew a total of 8.2% during Trump's first three years and 7.1% overall. It grew 9.0% during Biden's first three years and is on track to grow 12% by the time his term ends.

The Washington Post has heroically scoured campaign finance reports to figure out what politicos of different parties like to eat:

Fast food in general appears to be a Republican thing: Overall, GOP campaigns outspent Democrats about 18-to-1 at fast-food joints of all stripes.

As best I can tell, Republicans outspent Democrats about 2:1 on food in general. So the relative fast-food divide is probably really around 9:1. That's still a lot!

This is probably not just a coincidence. Here is the very first comment on the article:

Real democrats like me don’t eat sugary and fatty fast food. We understand the externality associated with obesity. I’m still ashamed of urban Democrats for feeding their kids fast food and making them obese.

The rest go on and on and on in this vein. We liberals really are a pain in the ass, aren't we?

This is nuts:

The new round of October polling from the Senate Leadership Fund shows all but one Republican candidate running behind Donald Trump in battleground states.

Trump is more popular than conventional Republicans. Republican voters actively prefer a lying, ignorant, whining, vengeful racist to an ordinary person with conservative views.

I guess we already knew this since Trump won the Republican primary handily, but still. Do any Republicans watch his rallies and understand just how far he's melted down since he was president? Or do they really prefer lying, ignorant, whining, vengeful, and racist to ordinary?

I've posted this before, but I feel like putting it up again for all the folks who think illegal immigrants are taking away all the jobs:

In 2021-22 there was a huge demand for workers, and that really did produce a rise in illegal immigration. But this was only because the high demand was still there even after companies had hired every last native-born worker they could get their hands on.

The chart tells the story. Among prime-age native-borns, the labor participation rate after 2021 rose to its highest level in 20 years. It was maxed out. Everyone with even the slightest interest in working had a job.

So companies began hiring foreign-born workers—many of them here illegally—in a desperate attempt to fill open spots. The participation rate for prime-age foreign-borns also rose to record levels.

This is all the result of a red hot labor market. Everyone got jobs: natives, foreign-borns, and illegal immigrants alike. Nobody's jobs were taken away by anybody.

Atrios thinks it's weird that there isn't more discourse over the possibility of war with Iran. I get that, although since the discourse would be dominated by hawks (it always is) the ongoing silence might not be such a bad thing.

Part of the reason, I think, is that "war with Iran," if it comes, would be a strange creature indeed. Neither Israel nor the US can invade Iran even if they wanted to. Nor can Iran invade Israel. It's 600 miles through Jordan and Iraq to get to Israel from the border of Iran.

The only thing left is an air war, and that wouldn't be easy. Most of Iran is only barely in range of either Israeli fighters or American carriers in the Med. Carriers in the Persian Gulf could do better, but fighters don't carry big payloads in any case and can inflict only limited damage. Heavy bombers can fly from the mainland US, but it's not easy and we couldn't support very many missions.

Plus it's risky. Iran has legit air defenses and can shoot stuff down.

That leaves two things. First, we could wreak hell on Iran's Persian Gulf oil facilities. However, that risks both serious retaliation and damage to shipping channels that would cut off world oil supplies. Purely for reasons of our own national security, it's pretty unlikely.

Second, both sides have missiles. And missile defenses. How much damage could the US and Israel do with a serious commitment to a missile war with Iran? I don't know, but that would be one weird war if it were just two sides launching waves of missiles at each other. We could obviously keep this up longer than Iran, but it's unclear how much it could accomplish.

Right now, Israel's war with Iran is limited to proxies (mainly Hezbollah), cyberattacks, sabotage, and so forth. A real live hot war with Iran would increase that intensity, but mostly via missile attacks unless both sides decided to risk turning the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz into wastelands.

In other words, my best amateur guess is that a full-scale war with Iran isn't really possible short of a provocation that provoked a truly massive commitment from the US—something on the order of the Gulf War or Vietnam. That's hugely unlikely, and short of that Israel and Iran are just too far apart to do much damage to each other. So there's really no prospective war for the discourse to obsess about.

POSTSCRIPT: This is all unrelated to the possibility of a sustained American campaign to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities. That would be hard but probably doable if we put our minds to it. Israel, on the other hand, doesn't have the military resources to pull this off. It's the US or nobody.

But I have no taste buds and no interest in food. I eat a couple of small meals a day because I have to, and I snack a little bit during the day. I'd put my intake at about 800 calories or so, which is fine in the short run but obviously not sustainable in the long run.

I also have dry mouth, trouble swallowing, and shortness of breath. At this point I doubt I'm going to continue the Talvey, and definitely not until my taste comes back—which I'm optimistically assuming it will eventually. All of this is officially Not Good since there are very few multiple myeloma treatments left to me and I'm ineligible for clinical trials of new drugs thanks to my prostate cancer.

We'll see. The best possibility is that I'll recover from the Talvey side effects and then continue the treatment, which will affect me for a few days every two weeks but nothing more. Nobody knows how likely that is, so all I can do is try it and see what happens.

Man do I miss food. Pizza. Chocolate. Hamburgers. Spaghetti. Tacos. I don't care. Anything. A bag of Fritos. A can of peanuts. A pork chop. An apple. A BLTA. Kung pao chicken. A donut. Carnitas. A baked potato. You name it.