Kevin Drum

There's nothing new in this week's YouGov poll of the presidential race:

YouGov still has Harris two points ahead of Trump in national polling. Oddly, Harris continues to lead by four points when people are asked who they'd prefer to have as president. Perhaps the "Not Sure" vote breaks heavily for Harris?

Also, Black support for Trump suddenly jumped from 12% last week to 18% this week, while white and Hispanic support jumped a couple of points for Harris. Odd.

Paul Krugman's column today is about "left behind" places in the US. Exhibit A is West Virginia, which indeed has the lowest level of prime-age men's employment in the country:

But here's the thing: West Virginia has always been poor. Personal income in 1950 was a dismal 32% lower than the US average and central Appalachia was practically the poster boy for American poverty in Michael Harrington's famous 1962 study, The Other America. Personal income is still dismal today, but it's actually gotten a little better:

Likewise, employment in West Virginia has been lower than the US average forever. But it's also gotten steadily better. This chart is for all workers, not just prime-age men, because that's what the BLS gives us:

In 1990 the participation rate in West Virginia was 12 points less than the national average. Today it's only 7 points less.

So yes: West Virginia is poor. But it's always been poor. And recently it's gotten a bit less poor. This obviously can't explain why it's changed from a reliably Democratic state up through 2000 into a state that gave Donald Trump 69% of its vote in 2020.

So if poverty and unemployment aren't the answer, what is? Have Republicans gotten more sympathetic toward the working poor? Hardly. Have Democrats given up on them? Obamacare, the EITC, and Biden's Child Tax Credit say no.

So I guess it's just the usual racial and culture war stuff. There's certainly no "left behind" factor that can explain the change.

This has become a weirdly popular right-wing meme lately on Twitter—amplified, of course, by Elon Musk:

This interview clip is from 2019 and has nothing to do with shutting down Twitter. It took place during Trump's first impeachment inquiry after he had threatened the whistleblower who revealed his conversation with Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy—the one where he pressured Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in return for military aid. Trump wanted the whistleblower treated as a traitor:

“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Mr. Trump said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Harris argued that this should be taken seriously and Twitter should take down Trump's account:

You have to take seriously witness intimidation. You have to take seriously an attempt to obstruct justice. You have to take seriously a threat to a witness and really to their safety and potentially their life.

....And we're talking about a private corporation, Twitter, that has terms of use, and as far as I'm concerned and I think most people would say, including members of Congress who he has threatened, that he has lost his privileges and it should be taken down.

....He does not have a right to commit a crime because he is president of the United States.... And anyone who wants to say, well, this is a matter of free speech, you are not free to threaten the life of a witness. That is a crime.

You may, of course, think that Harris was wrong to urge Twitter to shut down Trump's account. But that's all it was. She believed Trump had pretty plainly violated Twitter's terms of service by threatening official retribution against the whistleblower who had reported his misconduct. And I hardly need to point out that the whistleblower turned out to be right, do I?

I see that Rep. Jamie Raskin is trying to follow up on a weird Washington Post story from a month ago:

Democratic leaders on the House Oversight Committee released a letter Tuesday asking former president Donald Trump if he ever illegally received money from the government of Egypt, and whether money from Cairo played a role in a $10 million infusion into his 2016 run for president.

I don't know if Trump will bother responding, but if he does his answer will be "No." And that will be that.

This whole episode is kind of weird. I read the Post story about this a month ago, and wrote the following timeline about it:

September 2016: Trump meets Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on the sidelines of a UN meeting.

October 2016: Trump gives his campaign $10 million.

January 2017: Sisi withdraws $10 million in cash from Egypt's central bank.

"Early" 2017: CIA receives report that Sisi sought to send $10 million to Trump.

Spring 2017: Robert Mueller sets up Team 10 to investigate. They subpoena Trump bank records from 2016.

2019: Case turns cold. FBI agents ask permission to subpoena Trump banking records from 2017. They are denied.

I never bothered publishing this, and it's pretty obvious why: there's nothing there. There's a "report" that Sisi wanted to send $10 million to Trump, but no evidence that he did. And over the past month the Post has failed to move the story beyond that.

So there's maybe some slight interest here for conspiratorial types, but exactly zero in the way of concrete evidence. Until and unless that leaks out, Trump merely has to deny everything and there's nothing more to say.

POSTSCRIPT: From a purely political viewpoint, there may be some value in forcing Trump to issue a denial. Maybe. But I imagine the reason it took so long for anyone to do even that is because they were waiting for more evidence. That never came.

Rolling Stone has published a list of the 100 best television episodes ever, and there's not much point arguing over it.¹ It's a matter of taste, right?

But there's one thing that bugs me. If your reviewers are all people whose TV experience goes back only to the '80s, that's fine. I get that it's pretty tough to find a 90-something who can tell you about the great TV episodes of the '50s.

But if that's that case, then don't pretend this is an all-time list. By my count, there are only a few '70s shows on the list and a grand total of six from the '50s and '60s—and only two in the top 50.

That's not very likely, is it? Nothing—not a single episode—from Gunsmoke, Get Smart, Gilligan's Island, Mission Impossible, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver, Bonanza, The Addams Family, The Prisoner, Maverick, Dragnet, Bullwinkle, or Perry Mason?

This is really the Top 100 Episodes of the Past 50 Years. Why not just call it that?

¹Except for #3, that is. I liked The Leftovers, but there's no way any of its episodes, let alone the pointless, hallucinogenic one chosen, is the third best of all time. Come on.

Today is a do-over. Allow me to explain.

Nebulas in the night sky are basically just clouds of gas made luminous by starlight. They consist of hydrogen alpha gas (red), sulphur (a slightly different shade of red), and oxygen (blue). Serious astrophotographers capture this by using monochrome cameras and a set of narrowband filters that allow only the light from those three gases through. They take one batch of pictures with each of the filters and then combine them to get a color image.

You can combine the colors in various ways, called palettes. The best known is the Hubble palette, which is used by the Hubble telescope and gives its pictures their distinct look.

I can't do this because I have a color camera and those filters are expensive. However, I do have a single dual-band filter that allows only the hydrogen alpha and oxygen through. This helps the colors pop and reduces light pollution.

But today I discovered by accident that my software can mimic the palette process. You take your set of images captured with the dual-band filter and run it through the software three times, each pass extracting a different color. Then you recombine them using the palette of your choice.

I have no idea how this works. Magic? Algorithms beyond human ken? In any case, the software pulls the images apart and then puts them back together. It's not as good as doing it the real way, but it's better than nothing.

So I did this to yesterday's photo. Remember I mentioned that my image failed to produce the blue color of the bubble at the center of the Bubble Nebula? With a bunch of trial and error plus some photoshopping, I managed to bring it out. I don't think it's very good, but I imagine it could become pretty good once I learn more about this.

The top photo is the recombined image. The bottom photo is the original from yesterday. You'll notice that the top image not only captures the blue bubble, it also captures more definition throughout the rest of the nebula. This seems sort of magical since it's using the exact same data as the other picture. So where does the additional detail come from?

Are you curious about how Truth Social stock is doing? Sure you are.

DJT got a little bounce when the Republican convention started, but that wore off quickly and the stock has tanked completely ever since Kamala Harris entered the race. It's down 40% from its pre-convention price.

Mind you, it's still selling for about 500% more than it's worth, but it's obviously fragile because investors¹ are having doubts about whether Trump can win in November. It's probably a better weathervane for Trump's reelection odds than actual polls.

¹That is, MAGA fans and other suckers who Trump has conned into buying the stock and holding onto it.

Residential construction spending dipped slightly last month, but take a look at the longer term:

The pre-pandemic growth trend is strong because it was a rebound from the 2006-09 housing bust. But post-pandemic growth is even stronger. Adjusted for both inflation and population growth, residential construction is 20% higher than in 2002 and 28% higher than just before the pandemic.

Everybody is promising to build more houses, and that's a good idea. But the free market is already doing a decent job of responding to demand. A little nudge is probably all it needs.

I was diddling around this evening and accidentally typed books into FRED. I discovered two interesting things. First, there's been zero book inflation over the past quarter century:

In fact, books today cost a little less than they did in 1998. At the same time, consumption of books has gone up considerably:

We buy twice as many books as we did four decades ago. And this is only physical books. Add in e-books and the total would be even higher.

Now, this doesn't automatically mean we're reading more. It just means we're buying more. Still, it probably means we're also reading more. I guess I'm surprised by that.

For something a little less surprising, compare this to newspaper revenue over just the past 15 years:

Newspapers are a dying breed. But you already knew that.

I headed out to the desert on Saturday with the promise of good, cloud-free skies. Ha. As I drove east, I could see huge black thunderheads covering half the Mojave Desert, so I stopped to check things out. The normal weather report said everything was clear. Uh huh. Then I looked at a Doppler radar map, and it showed a few scattered clouds and nothing more.

So I forged on, hoping the clouds would break. They didn't. There was no point in setting up the telescope, so instead I took out my regular camera and diddled around for a while with the Milky Way and the clouds. By the time I was done, I could see lots of stars, so I set up the telescope after all.

And it was great! A couple of weeks ago I adjusted the backlash on my mount, and it turned out I didn't really have any. I made a slight adjustment, but figured it wouldn't make much difference.

But it did. For the first time in forever, I did a successful calibration, and even with a longish exposure time (five minutes) the guiding was good and the stars were excellently round. Because of one thing and another I only got about three hours of imaging time, which is too bad, but things turned out OK anyway.

This is the Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635, and it's pretty easy to see why it's called that. Unfortunately, my camera didn't resolve the lovely blue color of the bubble itself, but that's a normal problem. I may try this again to see if I can do better.