Month: November 2024

Donald Trump's campaign spokesperson is Steven Cheung, who routinely provides irrelevant and frequently nasty responses whenever he's asked to comment on something. Here's his latest:

Jen O'Malley Dillon is Kamala Harris's campaign manager. Her husband, Patrick Dillon, worked in the Obama White House. They've been married for 17 years and have three kids.

But true to form, in response to a very mild tweet from Patrick, Cheung instantly belches up a juvenile and stupid personal attack. It's no wonder Trump likes him. Reformed Republican Stuart Stevens decided Cheung needed a taste of his own dog food:

I've worked in campaigns for a long time, and known so many operatives in both parties.  There has never been a collection of just awful human beings assembled around one candidate like the Trump campaign. Here you have a 42 year old obese incel @TheStevenCheung, who never did anything of note in politics before the Trump garbage truck picked him up, writing stuff you'd find on a bathroom wall at a truck stop.

Like deadbeat dad Jason Miller, Lewandowski, Bannon. The whole crew. All of these people tried to work in presidential politics before 2016 and no one would come near them. These same freaks will surround Trump if he wins. And they are one of the reasons he will lose.

Keep your fingers crossed that Stevens is right.

This Twitter post has been viewed by 6 million people over the past week:

The "guy" was indeed just a postal carrier delivering a single plastic bin of mail-in ballots. The Washington Post reports that this video is part of a widespread and well-organized effort to promote a far larger and better coordinated version of 2020's hastily created "Stop the Steal" movement:

X has also rolled out new features, such as its “Election Integrity Community,” the feed on which Matlack’s video of the mail worker gained viral attention. The feed, which has more than 50,000 members, promotes tweets showing “potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities,” regardless of their accuracy.

The feed is run by America PAC, Musk’s $118 million pro-Trump super PAC, which shared a since-deleted digital ad calling Harris “a big ole C-word” — they said it meant “communist” — and has boosted claims that Trump’s opponents have tried to “take him out for good.”

....About 12 hours after the Northampton video started exploding on X, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. … Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” The top comment on it, from a user named “Patriotic Marine,” showed the postal worker’s face and license plate and urged viewers to find him and “prosecute him for Treason.” It was liked more than 1,000 times.

This stuff has likely been under your radar so far, circulating only among MAGA cultists, but that's likely to change tomorrow. Prepare yourself for a tsunami of idiotic claims like this if Kamala Harris wins.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Russia is now trying to bring down American airplanes using incendiary devices hidden in packages:

The devices ignited at DHL logistics hubs in July, one in Leipzig, Germany, and another in Birmingham, England. The explosions set off a multinational race to find the culprits.

....Security officials say the electric massagers, sent to the U.K. from Lithuania, appear to have been a test run to figure out how to get such incendiary devices aboard planes bound for North America.... But the head of Poland’s foreign-intelligence agency, Pawel Szota, said Russian spies were to blame and such an attack, if carried out, would have represented a major escalation in Moscow’s campaign against the West.

....Szota’s comments echo what other Western intelligence officials said, indicating that Russia, and specifically its military-intelligence agency, known as the GRU, was responsible.

If this is true, it's an astonishing and reckless escalation from Vladimir Putin. Does he really have no idea of the shitstorm he'd release if one of these things brought down a US passenger jet?

Election Day is tomorrow, so here's a repeat posting of my traditional recommendations about how to vote on California's ballot initiatives. As usual, keep in mind a couple of things:

• I don't like ballot initiatives because they lock things into the state constitution that shouldn't usually be locked in. So my standards are high for a Yes vote.
• I especially hate ballot-box budgeting. It's a cancer.
• I believe the point of ballot initiatives is to give grass roots activists a chance to pass legislation opposed by moneyed interests. However, modern initiatives are largely the handiwork of corporations and the ultra-wealthy. I will almost never vote for an initiative sponsored primarily by businesses or billionaires.

That noted, here are my recommendations:

Proposition 2: NO. This is a school bond initiative. There's not much harm if you want to vote Yes, but I'm opposed to all bond measures, especially small-bore stuff like this that ought to funded out of the normal budget.

Proposition 3: YES. This protects same-sex marriage in the state constitution. It's not really necessary, but it's best to be sure, I guess.

Proposition 4: NO. Water bonds.

Proposition 5: YES. Allows local communities to approve housing and infrastructure bonds with a 55% majority instead of the current two-thirds. This change can only be made via initiative, so this is the way to do it.

Proposition 6: YES. This is an odd duck. It bans prisons from requiring inmates to work—aka ENDING SLAVERY, as its backers put it. I'm not sure this is quite the moral issue of our time, but there's no opposition even from conservatives. So sure.

Proposition 32: NO. This would raise the minimum wage slightly, from about $16.50 to $18, and index it to inflation. But the minimum wage is already indexed to inflation in California and the $1.50 increase itself doesn't strike me as anywhere near important enough for a ballot initiative. Let the legislature handle it.

Proposition 33: NO. This is yet another initiative from Michael Weinstein that would widely allow rent control in California. But California doesn't need rent control. It needs more housing, something that rent control would hurt, not help.

Proposition 34: NO. This is ostensibly a measure about prescription drug discounts. In fact, it's a punitive measure aimed solely at Michael Weinstein from folks who are tired of his rent control initiatives. Whether you love Michael Weinstein or hate him, this is preposterous.

Proposition 35: NO. This would extend a tax on health insurers that provides extra money for Medi-Cal payments to health workers. That's fine, although the tax will get extended regardless. But it would also designate which health workers get more money—and those groups are different from the ones who are set to get money in the state budget. In other words, this is basically a fight between different big health care providers and I'm not excited about this kind of ballot box budgeting. If the legislature was clearly acting in bad faith to divert funding, that would be one thing. But it's not.

Proposition 36: NO. This would repeal a reduction in penalties for certain drug and theft crimes that was passed a decade ago. It's a dumb, panicky, "tough-on-crime" measure based on a nonexistent crime wave supposedly sweeping California. There isn't one. The old reforms were good ones and we should keep them.

After listening to 680 people in 61 focus groups over three years, Patrick Healy of the New York Times thinks Donald Trump has a good chance of winning. Inflation is one of the big reasons, but immigration might be even bigger:

What I’ve heard has left me thinking that Democratic Party leaders have deeply underestimated the mood of the electorate on immigration — that more people than Democrats realize want something serious, even draconian, done to remove undocumented migrants and secure the border. If it takes an authoritarian Trump administration to do it, then so be it, some of these voters feel. The degree of their anger can be unsettling to contemplate.

....That could look like Mr. Trump getting re-elected this week and, using any means he can, perhaps including the military, rounding up undocumented immigrants, putting them in militarized camps and deporting them, with more Americans than you would think going along with it. Such a move would devastate our sense of America as a sanctuary, erode our norms, fracture the tacit acceptance that immigrants do a lot of jobs that many Americans don’t want to do. It would redefine us as a society.

I think Healy is half right: Democrats have seriously blown it on immigration over the past decade, but it won't ultimately doom Harris.

Democrats haven't always been as soft on immigration as they've become. Without adopting Donald Trump's ruthless methods, Barack Obama kept a fairly tight lid on illegal immigration. In fact, border encounters were lower under Obama than they were under Trump:

Now, Obama had an easier job than either Trump or Biden. Coming off the Great Recession, job demand was negative or zero for Obama's entire term, so there just wasn't a lot of pressure on the border. But job demand grew during Trump's administration until the pandemic killed it, and then skyrocketed during Biden's term.

That said, Democrats overreacted to Trump's immigration hawkery in 2016, moving way to the left and adopting positions nearly indistinguishable from open borders. Ironically, in 2020 Biden remained moderate on immigration, but pressure from the Democratic base kept him from responding aggressively to the huge surge on the border after he took office.

It could be that there wasn't much Biden could do. When job demand surges, the market is going to find a way to satisfy it. And it's true that some kind of comprehensive reform is the only real answer. Still, none of that defends Biden's unwillingness to at least acknowledge the surge in illegal immigration and try to do something about it. This is the minimum the public expects.

My rule of thumb—like it or not—is that people will accept annual migration rates of about a quarter of a percent of the country's population. In the US that comes to 800,000 or so. Legal immigration is already above that, so when you add a big surge of illegal immigration an angry tribal response is almost inevitable. Democrats make a big mistake when they try to pretend this away.

A week ago, Vote Common Good released an ad narrated by Julia Roberts telling women they could vote for anyone they wanted and their husbands would never know:

Today, the Washington Post reports that the ad was inspired by a grassroots campaign carried out via sticky notes posted in women's restrooms:

In swing states and Republican strongholds, on college campuses and in sports arenas, sticky notes have appeared reminding women that their votes are confidential — kept private even and especially from the men in their lives.

The origins of the trend are unclear, but the co-founder of Women for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group supporting the vice president’s campaign, says her members have been sticking notes in bathrooms and similar spaces for months, encouraging women to vote their own minds and reminding them that their ballot is secret.

But Clara Jeffery tells us that this samizdat network goes back much further:

This is news to me—but it would be, wouldn't it? Maybe this is why it was only men who were surprised or offended by the TV ad. Women already knew it all along.

The New York Times has a story today about a tiny radio station in Krakow, Poland. How tiny? Its listenership was "close to zero."

So with literally nothing to lose, the manager of the station decided to convert it into a pure AI production: no human announcers, just AI generated hosts. Among other things, they created a show in which an AI host interviewed an AI reconstructions of famous dead people. The audience grew to 8,000 overnight, but:

Less welcome than the audience surge, however, has been a barrage of abuse directed at the public broadcasting system and accusations that it was sacrificing humans on the altar of technology.

“I have been turned into a job-killing monster who wants to replace real people with avatars,” said Mariusz Marcin Pulit, the editor in chief of Radio Krakow and of niche stations operating under its umbrella, like Off Radio Krakow.

....An online petition drafted by Mr. Zaleski, the terminated culture show host, and Mateusz Demski, a fellow presenter who also lost his job, warned that “the case of Off Radio Krakow is an important reminder for the entire industry” and a “dangerous precedent that hits us all.”

The use of A.I.-generated presenters, the petition warned, “is opening the door to a world in which experienced employees associated for years with the media and people employed in creative industries will be replaced by machines.”

The station was so small it had hardly any hosts to begin with—and they were all part-timers with other day jobs. But public outrage was strong enough that the experiment was quickly ended and the station returned to playing ordinary music written and performed by humans.

Is this a sign of things to come? It's one thing when taxi drivers lose their jobs, but quite another when creative types with big megaphones are the ones whose ox is being gored. This is all going to start playing out sooner than most people think.

As of this week, the price of gasoline is below the pre-pandemic average during Donald Trump's administration.

Here's the latest from RFK Jr.:

This probably seems like just more crankery from RFK, but it's not.......quite. The science around fluoride is currently in flux.

Some background: The EPA already places a limit on fluoride in drinking water of 4 mg per liter. The level recommended by HHS for tooth protection is well below that at 0.7 mg/l. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires EPA to review its standards every six years, and the most recent review was published three months ago. It recommended no changes.

However, a long-awaited report from the National Toxicology Program was finally released a couple of months ago, and it concluded that fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/l might be associated with IQ losses in children. It came to no conclusions about levels of 0.7 mg/l.

A federal judge took note of this last month and ordered the EPA to address it. The judge also took note of a separate small metastudy suggesting fetal IQ losses at low fluoride levels among pregnant mothers. This metastudy examined three primary studies. Two of them, from Canada and Mexico, showed an IQ loss of 2-3 points at a fluoride level of 0.7 mg/l. The third, from Denmark, showed nothing. Previous studies have also been equivocal about effects at low fluoride levels.

So things are in flux. There's good reason to think that fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/l are probably dangerous, but the research is more ambiguous about typical levels of 0.7 mg/l. In other words, RFK Jr. is being hyperbolic but, that said, things are not quite open and shut. There are legitimate reasons to think this is worth more research.

Yesterday I wrote about E-Verify, the website that allows employers to quickly and easily make sure new hires are legally allowed to work. Today¹ Don Lee at the LA Times writes all about it:

Even though E-Verify is free for employers, with more than 98% of those checked being confirmed as work-authorized instantly or within 24 hours, the program is significantly underused.

....In its earlier years E-Verify was riddled with errors, but today is seen as highly reliable. Of the 10 million employees checked through E-Verify in the first quarter of this year, fewer than 2% were flagged as mismatches. Of those, about 18,000 employees, or only 0.2% of the total, were later confirmed as work-authorized.

In other words, it's 98% accurate within 24 hours and 99.8% accurate overall. And it's easy to use. Despite this, few businesses use it and it's not mandatory. Why?

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), with Republican colleagues including Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump’s running mate, in June introduced a bill to make E-Verify mandatory across the country. But similar efforts in the past have repeatedly failed to win enough bipartisan support.

....In Washington, many Democrats have indicated they will support a national requirement only if it is part of an overall reform that includes legalization of undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S., which most Republicans oppose.

Republicans also face resistance from some employers and special interest groups, whether farming or construction or other service sector that relies on immigrant labor. For them, it’s a bottom-line issue.

The not-so-secret truth is that nobody really wants to get rid of undocumented workers:

One key reason: There are simply not enough “legal” workers to fill all the jobs a healthy, growing U.S. economy generates. And that’s especially so in low-wage industries.

Employers say that requiring E-Verify — without other overhauls to the immigration system, including easier ways to bring in workers — would be devastating.

“I think you would see a general overall collapse in California agriculture and food prices going through the roof if we didn’t have them do the work,” said Don Cameron, general manager at Terranova Ranch, which produces a variety of crops on 9,000 acres in Fresno County.

....It’s not simply a matter of not having enough workers to do the hard, often dead-end and low-wage jobs that most U.S. citizens don’t want to do. It’s the shortage of workers overall, experts say.

For decades, birth rates in the U.S. have been declining, as they have in most of the economically developed world. Today, the birth rate among American women of childbearing age has dropped below the level needed to meet the country’s replacement rate. California’s birth rate is at its lowest in a century. If the economy is to grow and prosper, as almost all Americans say they want it to, additional workers must come from somewhere else.

All of this could be solved relatively easily by a compromise that increased border security and increased legal immigration. But Republicans are dead set against it. It's too good a campaign issue.

¹Actually, the article is ten (!) days old, but only showed up in the print edition today. This is typical of the LA Times, for reasons I don't understand.