Author: Kevin Drum

LA Times columnist Mark Barabak comments on the victory last night of Adam Schiff in the primary race for US Senate in California:

By choosing Schiff, a Burbank congressman who was the most moderate of the major Democratic candidates — and thus most Feinstein-like — [voters] rejected the leftward swerve promised by two more liberal alternatives, Reps. Katie Porter of Irvine and Barbara Lee of Oakland.

I don't think this is quite right. It's true that, objectively speaking, Schiff is more centrist than Porter or Lee. But Schiff made his name by leading the Democratic investigation of Russiagate, sparring with conservatives like Devin Nunes along the way, and soon after as the lead prosecutor in the first Trump impeachment. Then, in a stroke of great timing, he was censured by House Republicans last June in a party-line vote that made him a Democratic hero:

When it was time for Schiff to come to the front of the chamber to be formally censured, immediately after the vote, the normally solemn ceremony turned into more of a celebratory atmosphere. Dozens of Democrats crowded to the front, clapping and cheering for Schiff and patting him on the back. They chanted “No!,” “Shame!” and “Adam! Adam!”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., read the resolution out loud, as is tradition after a censure. But he only read part of the document before leaving the chamber as Democrats heckled and interrupted him. “Censure all of us,” one Democrat yelled.

Schiff's moderate views helped him raise lots of money, but his public persona is much more combative and liberal. Add to that the fact that he and Porter barely disagreed about anything and I'm not so sure that Schiff's moderation was really a big factor. He had better name recognition than Porter; more money than Porter; a cynical campaign to boost the Republican candidate and box out Porter; and a reputation among voters as a fighter. That was probably what did it.

Today brings yet more handiwork from a Texas judge:

U.S. District Court Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that the Minority Business Development Agency’s presumption that businesses owned by Blacks, Latinos and other minorities are inherently disadvantaged violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. He permanently enjoined the agency’s business centers, which have assisted minority-owned businesses in accessing capital and government contracts, from extending services based on an applicant’s race.

“If courts mean what they say when they ascribe supreme importance to constitutional rights, the federal government may not flagrantly violate such rights with impunity,” Pittman wrote. “The MBDA has done so for years. Time’s up.”

Pittman was so eager to rule in favor of white people that he resolved this case on summary judgment:

While the Agency’s work may help alleviate opportunity gaps faced by minority business enterprises, two wrongs do not make a right. And the MBDA’s racial presumption is a wrong. “Legislation should never be designed to punish anyone.” While the Agency may intend to serve listed groups, not punish unlisted groups, the very design of its presumption punishes those who are not presumptively entitled to MBDA benefits.

This gets to the heart of conservative opposition to any kind of minority benefit: it's designed by liberals to punish white people. Pittman says the federal government has been punishing white people for 55 years via this program, and "time's up."

Pittman, needless to say, was appointed by Donald Trump. He's the district judge who killed Joe Biden's student debt relief, as well as the guy who ruled that Texas couldn't ban teenagers between 18-20 from carrying concealed weapons. As usual, this case will be appealed to the 5th Circuit, which will almost certainly uphold Pittman. Then, presumably, it will go to the Supreme Court, where its fate is probably poor, but perhaps not hopeless.

There wasn't much change on the hiring front in January:

Hires continue to decline and are now at about their 2019 level. And just for laughs, here are the winners and losers in January compared to December:

Is it true that the United States has the lowest inflation rate of any major economy? Not quite, but it's close:

China's economy is suffering, and they're starting to experience a bad bout of deflation. Aside from that, the US has the lowest inflation rate of the ten biggest economies in the world.

For no particular reason I got interested today in our long decline of trust in major institutions. Which party has seen the biggest decline in trust, Democrats or Republicans?

That depends on the institution. But what if you took the average level of confidence in all institutions? Here it is for the forty years between 1978-2018:

Surprise! Overall confidence is the same for both parties and the trendline is quite stable. But now let's tack on a few years at the beginning and end:

Average confidence has dropped from 35% to 15%, but all of the decline is concentrated in the post-Watergate era and the Trump era—and about equally for both parties. In other words, our decline in confidence isn't just a general malaise that's played out over the years. It takes specific events to trigger it.

NOTE: The charts show average trust in all institutions surveyed by the GSS. These include big business, organized religion, the military, education, all three branches of government, banks, organized labor, medicine, the press, the scientific community, and television.

This morning I read a piece in the New York Times about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. I had never heard of it before. In a nutshell, a group of scientists announced in 2007 that they had discovered evidence of a group of meteor impacts dating to about 12,900 years ago. They believed these impacts explained the sudden cooling period known as the Younger Dryas, which lasted for a little over a thousand years.

It was an intriguing hypothesis, but the geological community fairly quickly poked a whole bunch of holes in it, and it's not widely accepted these days.

But that's not what interests me. The YDIH is an extremely complex theory that involves detailed knowledge of obscure fields. What's more, it obviously has no political valence. It is neither liberal nor conservative.

But about a year ago a guy named Graham Hancock promoted the theory in a Netflix documentary series called “Ancient Apocalypse.” The Times reports what happened next:

Articles rebutting (or ridiculing) the show appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The Nation and a host of other left-leaning publications. Conservative media outlets ran glowing reviews. “The propaganda press may not care about science, but they do care about controlling the public discourse for the benefit of the political left,” a reporter wrote in The Federalist, in an article titled “The Lying Media Told Me Not to Watch Netflix’s ‘Ancient Apocalypse,’ So I Did.” The Daily Caller, the conservative website co-founded by Tucker Carlson, declared the Society for American Archaeologists an “elitist, closed-minded cabal,” linking its unchecked power to the “collapse of the American idea.” The debate over the show focused largely on Hancock’s lost civilization, including his discussion of Atlantis, which was wiped out, he said, during the Younger Dryas.

It's flatly inconceivable that a layman could have an independent opinion about the YDIH. It's vastly too arcane. The only thing you can do is accept the conclusions of people who are experts.

And on that score, liberals generally accepted establishment science while conservatives widely insisted the establishment was corrupt and in service to the left. This despite the fact that there's no plausible way in which a meteor impact thirteen millennia ago could possibly be left coded.

So why the popularity of the YDIH among conservatives? Just a general fondness for conspiracy theories, I suppose. If the establishment is corrupt, then everything the establishment says is corrupt, even if it's just about a flock of meteors thousands of years ago.

These are the cliffs off the Dana Point headlands. The headlands are home to a nature preserve plus a few very expensive homes. The cliffs themselves aren't normally ruddy red except for a few minutes near sunset, which just happened to be exactly when I was there.

Greg Sargent comments today on a poll saying voters aren't really aware of Donald Trump's most incendiary comments:

Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution.

....The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more. Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump.”

Only 31%? Compare that to various questions asked in recent YouGov polls:

Hell, only 34% had heard about the Hur report. Only 24% knew we were striking back against the Houthis. And the fact that a star witness had lied about bribes paid to Hunter and Joe Biden? Only 22%.

Most people don't know anything about anything. In fact, I'll bet that even these numbers are inflated, with lots of respondents saying they've heard a lot about these things because they watched a segment on the evening news or got pointed to a Facebook post.

This is why I think Biden has a fair amount of upside in the presidential race. In September, when people start paying attention, what are they going to learn? Mostly bad stuff about Trump and good stuff about Biden's little-known positive accomplishments. That's where the greatest ignorance is right now, so it's also where there's the greatest potential for change.

Is Bitcoin the longest lasting true bubble in history? By "true bubble" I mean one based on something that's essentially valueless. Not homes or dotcom companies. Think tulips or meme stocks.

The Bitcoin bubble is now going into its fourth year, outpacing the South Sea bubble, the Mississippi bubble, and the tulip bubble. Its latest rise began a year ago and was supercharged at the beginning of January when the SEC approved the first spot Bitcoin ETF. Since then, Bitcoin ETFs have accumulated more than $50 billion in assets.

The total value of all Bitcoin in circulation is over $1 trillion. That's nothing compared to, say, the Japanese property bubble or the dotcom bubble. But it's still pretty impressive for a commodity that literally has no value except as a collectible.

A few days ago I wrote about Donald Trump's plan to take his Truth Social network public. But one crucial point was a little buried, so I want to repeat it on its own. To start, you have to understand that even after three years of operation Truth Social is still essentially worthless:

It's not just that these numbers are negative. They're also tiny. Truth Social has total revenues of a few million dollars, about the size of a smallish dental practice.

Everybody involved in taking Truth Social public knows this. It's right in their S-4 filing. So why is anyone sinking money into this loser? Because of this:

Trump and his investors are counting on his mom-and-pop fans to buy stock in the company acquiring Truth Social. As long as they keep the stock price high, Trump will be able to slowly cash out his holdings and make a few billion dollars. With luck, by the time the bubble bursts Trump and his investors will be fully divested at a huge profit. The only losers will be the moms and pops who bought the stock.

In other words, the whole thing is a shabby scheme designed to extract billions of dollars from Trump's MAGA fans, who will be left holding the bag when Truth Social collapses. The whole thing is pretty sickening.