Author: Kevin Drum

This is a coast prickly pear cactus highlighted by the midday sun. It grows only in a 20-mile-wide coastal strip that extends from Los Angeles to San Diego in the US and down to Baja California in Mexico. You can, apparently, cook the fruit like a pumpkin and mill the seeds into flour. Handy!

Are you looking for the latest and greatest in lab leak journalism? Check out Katherine Eban's 12,000-word magnum opus in Vanity Fair this month. It is a tale of international intrigue, lies, coverups, dueling scientists, and so much more.

In the end, I'm not quite sure it really changes the conversation, though. For example, Eban dives deep into the fights between US scientists from different parts of the State Department. On one side you had officials who thought that virologists were actively covering up evidence of a lab leak because they didn't want their own research jeopardized. On the other side you had officials who thought the lab-leak folks were presenting evidence so thin it "makes us look like the crackpot brigade."

As one senior government official with knowledge of the State Department’s investigation said, “They were writing this for certain customers in the Trump administration. We asked for the reporting behind the statements that were made. It took forever. Then you’d read the report, it would have this reference to a tweet and a date. It was not something you could go back and find.”

After listening to the investigators’ findings, a technical expert in one of the State Department’s bioweapons offices “thought they were bonkers,” [Chris] Ford recalled.

It's a good piece with tons of detail, but in the end we're left mostly where we started: there's circumstantial evidence all over the place, but no smoking gun on either side. It's not clear if that's likely to change anytime soon.

Joe Biden, apparently showing that his desire for a bipartisan infrastructure bill is genuine, has proposed a huge compromise that not only cuts new spending in half, but does it without raising the corporate tax rate:

President Biden signaled at a private meeting on Wednesday that he would be open to significant revisions on the size of his infrastructure package and how it would be paid for in order win Republican backing, outlining a plan for about $1 trillion in new spending financed through tax changes that do not appear to raise the top corporate rate.

....At issue is the component of Biden’s original infrastructure plan that would raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent....In its place, Biden emphasized a different part of his proposal, which would amount to a new, minimum corporate tax of 15 percent.

Biden has cut the total amount of his proposal by more than half, and plans to finance it solely with a minimum tax rate on large corporations. He is, basically, calling Republicans' bluff. This is about as big a compromise as any minority party could reasonably expect.

Will ten or a dozen Republicans sign up, so that this can pass via regular order? Or will Mitch McConnell, as yet another "personal favor," lobby his fellow Republicans to deny Biden anything that might be interpreted as a bipartisan victory?

I'd guess the latter, of course, but I'm a cynic. We should know shortly.

Does Donald Trump really believe that he will be "reinstated" as president by August? Charles Cooke confirms that the original reporting about this was correct:

I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the hero of the Republican Party, the man that everyone fears to cross. And the fact that he's obviously delusional? Apparently that just doesn't matter much.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 2. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

If we're suffering a bit right now from spot shortages and labor tightness, it's only because the economy is growing so fast that it's hard for everyone to keep up. The Wall Street Journal writes today about our unprecedented economic rebound:

New businesses are popping up at the fastest pace on record. The rate at which workers quit their jobs—a proxy for confidence in the labor market—matches the highest going back at least to 2000. American household debt-service burdens, as a share of after-tax income, are near their lowest levels since 1980, when records began. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up nearly 18% from its pre-pandemic peak in February 2020. Home prices nationwide are nearly 14% higher since that time.

....“We’ve never had anything like it—a collapse and then a boom-like pickup,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist and strategist at Decision Economics, Inc. “It is without historical parallel.”

Needless to say, this is all because Congress acted with a bigger and faster rescue package than ever in history—and the Fed cooperated during the entire downturn with loose monetary policy. Among other things, that makes the next couple of years a terrific experiment in monetary and fiscal policy. If we recover faster than ever, and do so without sparking an inflationary spiral, it will be a strong indication that our past responses to economic downturns have been routinely too timid. Stay tuned.

My homework assignment today was to figure out if COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and other countermeasures have been effective in reducing COVID-19 cases. I spent some time googling around, and what I discovered is that (a) conservative publications all have charts showing there's no correlation, while (b) academic papers all show a positive correlation. Hmmm.

The problem is that there are a million ways to measure this, and it's pretty easy to keep slogging away until you find one that fits your ideology. So for better or worse, I decided to try the simplest possible scatterplot and publish it regardless of how it turned out. On the horizontal axis I've used WalletHub's scores for how restrictive each state is. The vertical axis shows the cumulative percentage of each state's residents that have contracted COVID-19 as of June 1. Here's the result:

There are some interesting things here. For starters, the correlation is indeed positive: more restrictions generally lead to a lower case rate. But there are some high-profile exceptions. Texas and Florida both had very few restrictions, but their case rate is only slightly higher than California and New York, which both had lots of restrictions.

My conclusion is twofold. First, restrictions matter, but maybe not all that much. Second, you'd need to do some serious analysis with proper controls to really be confident in these results. In the meantime, this bloggy horseback estimate will have to do.

Want more? Here's a WalletHub analysis showing that blue states have been safer than red states. Here's a study in the Lancet showing that increased use of face masks leads to lower COVID-19 infection rates. Here's a study in PLOS One that divides states into buckets and finds that the bucket with the highest mask-wearing does better than the bucket with the lowest mask wearing. And here's a study from the Baker Institute showing that the correlation between openness and death rates has increased over time:

For what it's worth, I don't trust any of these studies, including mine. Still, the bulk of the studies do indeed seem to show a modest positive correlation between COVID-19 countermeasures and case rates. That's certainly the way to bet at the moment.

This is the new Gerald Desmond bridge that I've posted pictures of before. I converted this shot to high-contrast black-and-white, which gives it a very 1930s vibe—though I'm not sure why. Someone with better knowledge of the grammar of design might be able to explain it.

Republicans have been passing—or trying to pass—voter suppression laws with stunning frequency over the past few months. Most of the press attention has been focused on the simple stuff that restricts where and when people can vote, but most of these provisions aren't really that important. The evidence suggests that even when you add them all up they aren't likely to have a large effect on turnout.

What might have a large effect is the Republican effort to undermine the administration of elections. Donald Trump was hellbent on getting election administrators to recount the 2020 vote until they could figure out a way to declare him the winner, but they unanimously refused to do it. Now, Republicans are working to make sure that they can eject future election administrators who don't play ball.

Yesterday's letter from a hundred political scientists is clear about what's happening:

Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations should Democrats win more votes.

Ron Brownstein writes that the Biden team agrees. They feel that they can overcome minor rules changes here and there without too much trouble, but not wholesale corruption in election administration:

The White House does see a risk in the possibility that Republicans—whether local election officials, GOP-controlled state legislatures, or a potential Republican majority in the U.S. House or Senate—will refuse to certify clear Democratic wins in the 2022 and 2024 elections. The senior Democrat told me, “Given how things have developed since January 6, if the situation is not brought under some control and this isn’t countered effectively, then I think there is a significant risk” that “Republican officials, unlike the ones we saw standing up to pressure in 2020, are going to decline to certify Democratic victories.” If Republicans hold the House, Senate, or both after the 2024 election, that could allow Congress to try to install a GOP president even if clear evidence exists that the Democrat won.

Democrats need to focus all their attention on this. Lots of people hear about the water bottle stuff or the voter ID rules and just shrug. It doesn't strike them as all that big a deal. But they don't know about the movement to allow Republican legislatures to remove election administrators and replace them with faithful party operatives. When they do hear about it, even many conservatives are outraged at the idea.

So forget all the other stuff. This is the real threat to democracy, and the public needs to be aware of it clearly.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.