Author: Kevin Drum

This is an (extremely) abandoned gas station in Desert Center, an abandoned town on Interstate 10 about halfway between Indio and Blythe. I'm not sure what the history is here, but I suspect that a better question than "why was it abandoned?" is "why was it ever built in the first place?"

In any case, this is the turnoff that gets me to my favorite desert astrophotography spot. I haven't resumed my astrophotography yet, but it isn't because I'm not yet strong enough to haul everything out and set it up. I've just been very tired and sleepy lately and I'm not sure I can safely manage the 3-hour drive. Maybe in another month or so.

According to a USDA report released on Monday, the number of unauthorized crop pickers on US farms has gone down substantially since 2007:

The is largely because the number of guest workers has skyrocketed:

Add this all up, and the share of foreign-born workers on US farms (including US citizens) has dropped from 75% to 70% between 2007 and 2020. The share of US-born workers has increased from 25% to 30%.

The latest on Twitter:

The special counsel served Twitter with a warrant for Trump's account information in January. Twitter resisted, and was fined $350,000, an appeals court ruling reveals.

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) August 9, 2023

This is fairly misleading. Twitter had no problem producing the information but objected to a nondisclosure order that prevented them from informing Trump about the warrant. They duked it out in court for a while, and eventually produced everything the special counsel wanted—but were three days late. That's all the $350,000 fine is about. It seems kind of excessive, no?

UPDATE: I originally said that Twitter won its battle over the nondisclosure, but it turns out this was only much later. I'm not clear about precisely what happened, so I've removed everything about it.

Well, I see that Ohioans have overwhelmingly rejected the right-wing attempt to change referendums from simple majority vote to needing 60% to pass. This means that November's abortion rights referendum will be decided by a normal majority vote.

So why the huge rejection? Is it a harbinger of the abortion vote? Or is it just that most Ohioans like their referendums and don't want them effectively taken away since almost nothing can get attract 60% support?

Anyway, good news. Nice work, Ohio people.

Today I came across a reference to something I hadn't heard of before. It was some kind of conservative meme about how "the Biden family" had created 20 shell companies that funneled $10 million their way, mostly during the time that Joe was vice president. What was this all about, and how had I missed it?

It turns out that it's yet another belch from the dog and pony show run by Rep. James Comer as chair of the House Oversight Committee—this year's version of Trey Gowdy's jihad against Hillary's email in 2016. The shell company stuff was announced on May 27, the day after I returned home from the hospital, and I guess I wasn't paying a lot of attention to things at the time.

Anyway, a few minutes of googling informs me that there's nothing to this. The "Biden family," in this case, turns out to be just the usual suspects: Hunter Biden, Joe's brother James Biden, and their wives and children. And the money is just payments from their clients in China and Romania, part of the sleazy lobbying operation that we all know about. As usual, there's no evidence of lawbreaking; no evidence that Joe Biden either knew or benefited from any of this; and just generally, nothing either new or interesting.

But as I was learning all this, I came across something else I didn't know. This is from the New York Times:

Bank records obtained by the committee show the receipt of money from a foreign company connected to Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania. In 2015, Mr. Popoviciu retained Hunter Biden, who is a lawyer, while his father was vice president, to help try to fend off charges. That effort was unsuccessful and, in 2016, Mr. Popoviciu was convicted on charges related to a land deal in northern Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

Mr. Comer has also focused on John R. Walker, an associate of Hunter Biden who was involved in a joint venture with executives of CEFC China Energy, a now-bankrupt Chinese conglomerate....CEFC had hoped to invest in a liquefied natural gas venture in Louisiana, but that deal ultimately flopped.

So Hunter Biden's lobbying wasn't just sleazy, it was completely inept. One client got convicted while another went bankrupt. And we all know that Hunter's work for Burisma Holdings, a Ukranian energy company, accomplished nothing except to get a friendly prosecutor fired due to pressure from Joe Biden and the Obama administration.

That's a pretty shoddy track record. You'd think he could have done better if he really had any influence with his father. But hey: maybe he didn't, eh?

Politico reports that Rep. Matt Rosendale is ruining the GOP's strategy to beat Sen. Jon Tester in Montana by making plans to run in the Republican primary:

GOP leaders launched a concerted campaign to box out Rosendale and clear the path for Tim Sheehy, a Navy SEAL-turned-business executive who launched a Senate bid in June. Their fear was that Rosendale would prevail in a primary, given his statewide name recognition, but flub a general election against Tester — just as he did in 2018. With a narrow deficit in the Senate, winning in Montana is a linchpin in the party’s broader 2024 strategy.

Ha ha ha. Right-wing loons are never deterred and never care whether party leaders oppose them or not. Rosendale will probably pick up a Trump endorsement and never look back.

As for the general election against Tester, Rosendale has a chance. He only lost to Tester by a few points in 2018, which was a very strong year for Democrats. With any luck, though, he'll continue the proud Republican tradition of blowing winnable elections by nominating MAGA-style nutballs who can't win a general election even in a deep red state.

I was reading an article this morning that, in passing, blamed the slowdown in world trade on a switch in spending among consumers from goods to services. But not really:

It's true that spending on goods has been flat since mid-2021 while spending on services has continued to rise.¹ But trade is all about absolute numbers. Despite the difference in growth rates, spending on goods continues to be above its pre-pandemic trend while spending on services is below it. The big growth in spending on goods during the pandemic may have gone away, but it's come to rest at a very high level.

In a nutshell: Compared to spending just before the pandemic, goods are up 14% and durable goods are up 24%, while services are up only 2%. Whatever the reason for the slowdown in trade, it's not because we aren't buying dishwashers anymore.

¹These figures are for the US only, but I imagine consumer spending in Europe has followed a similar trajectory. Unfortunately, I can't find an EU breakdown by goods and services, so I'm not 100% sure about this.

This is a happy looking dog, no? And it's no wonder since he was getting his walkies at the Balboa Fun Zone. Who wouldn't be happy?

A few days ago the LA Times passed along survey data from UCLA that says kids in California aren't having sex anymore:

In 2021, the survey found, the number of young Californians ages 18 to 30 who reported having no sexual partners in the prior year reached a decade high of 38%. In 2011, 22% of young people reported having no sexual partners during the prior year, and the percentage climbed fairly steadily as the decade progressed.

But why? One expert says it's because kids aren't growing up as fast as they used to. Or maybe it's social media? Or the rise in antidepressant use?

Maybe! Or maybe the UCLA survey is just out of date. Apparently things turned around massively last year:

Shazam! Suddenly young adults are shagging at the same rate as ever. As with so many things, we just had to wait a bit to see some reversion to the mean.

It's suspicious, though, isn't it? Did things really turn around this dramatically in just one year? Sadly, the answer will have to wait two years for the next round of GSS questioning about our private lives.

Atrios on the Wall Street Journal:

Regularly people are shocked to discover that the WSJ editorial page is as loony as Fox News....But they rarely take the next step and consider the likely consequences of that being pumped into the heads of the richest people in the country daily. There's this odd belief that those people must just read it for the news, that they are smart enough to chuckle at the opinion page.

The Journal's editorial page is, in some ways, loonier than Fox News. Fox is mostly about outrage, which means it's ideologically flexible at times. The Journal editorial page isn't. They have firm beliefs and always twist their words to fit them—somehow.

But they aren't stupid, as Fox News sometimes is. For the most part, they don't flatly lie or say transparently dumb things. Their pieces are subtler than that. They know that good propaganda is often more about what you don't say than what you do, which is what makes even smart people vulnerable to their deceptions. Their readers want to believe, of course, which makes them easy marks in the first place, and even diligent readers are seldom knowledgeable enough to realize what's being left out when they read a WSJ editorial or op-ed.¹

So it all gets gobbled up by people who might be smart enough to see through some of Fox's more transparent idiocy but aren't smart enough to know what the Journal editorial page isn't telling them. This has been their MO for more than five decades (ever since Robert Bartley took the helm in 1972) and it's never changed.

And why should it? It works great on their (very influential) audience. They have no idea they're being conned, so they'll lap it up forever.

¹For an excellent example of this, click here.