Kevin Drum

Conservatives sometimes say confusing things. I'm here to help with a short, and sadly incomplete, primer on conserva-speak.

What They Say	What They Mean
14th Amendment	Complete ban on abortion from the moment of conception. Usage: "We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights."
Bad apples	People we support shouldn't be criticized. Usage: "We can't condemn all police for the actions of a few bad apples."
Capital formation	Low taxes on investment income. Usage: "We need fiscal policies that encourage greater capital formation."
Consumer welfare	Leave big companies alone. Usage: "The goal of antitrust policy should be maximizing consumer welfare."
CRT	Acknowledgement of past or present racism. Usage: "Kids can be harmed when critical race theory is allowed in schools."
Death tax	Inheritance levies on heirs of millionaires. Usage: "Death taxes are un-American."
Deep state	The federal government. Usage: "The deep state is the enemy of all free men."
DEI hire	Dumb Black person. Usage: "Kamala Harris was obviously a DEI hire."
Dynamic scoring	Tax cuts are free. Usage: "Tax reduction actually improves the deficit if you properly account for the growth effects of dynamic scoring."
Energy independence	Oil drilling in national parks. Usage: "Our goal should be permanent energy independence."
Evidence-based medicine	Anti-vaccine. Usage: "I like RFK Jr. because he believes in evidence-based medicine."
Groomers	Gay people (or trans people). Usage: "Keep groomers away from our kids!"
Hoax	Any inconvenient scientific finding. Usage: "Climate change is a hoax."
MAGA	Nostalgia for the era when white men ran things and women were housewives. Usage: "Remember when America was a great country?"
Nanny state	Workplace safety rules. Usage: "The nanny state forces construction workers to wear expensive and complicated hard hats."
Originalism	A preference for the social values of 200 years ago. Usage: "An originalist interpretation clearly supports the belief that gay marriage is bad for society."
Premium support model	Higher payments for Medicare. Usage: "We propose replacing the current fee-for-service design of Medicare with one that incorporates a premium support model."
Red tape	Any regulations you don't like. Usage: "Red tape is strangling America."
Right to work	Non-unionized. Usage: "In the South we're committed to right-to-work workplaces."
Social discount rate	Climate change is no big deal. Usage: "If you use an appropriately modest social discount rate, the high cost of addressing climate change is plainly not warranted."
Social engineering	Improving things for minorities and the poor. Usage: "The military is no place for social engineering."
Virtue signaling	Opinions that make you feel guilty. Usage: "Liberals don't really care about racism. It's all just virtue signaling."
Waste fraud and abuse	I'm pretending to care about the deficit. Usage: "If we want to tackle skyrocketing spending, we need to start by reining in waste, fraud, and abuse."
Work disincentives	Welfare spending. Usage: "Payments to low-income individuals are disincentives to work."

On Sunday our planet broke its old temperature record, set just a year ago. We have about 450° to go before we set a record for the solar system, but this is still impressive performance.

Today I got test results for my other cancer. It turns out the news on the multiple myeloma front isn't especially good or bad:

After shooting up from zero to 0.31 last month, my M-protein level increased to 0.38 this month. Going up is obviously bad, but at least it slowed down a lot.

I'll probably be heading back to City of Hope again in a month or two for yet another multiple myeloma treatment. The most likely candidate is a new drug called a bispecific, which is sort of like CAR-T except that it attacks two antigens, not just one, and it requires no genetic engineering. It has a moderate success rate.

The Washington Post reports today on a new project to reduce the national debt. It comes from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which asked seven think tanks to propose detailed plans for cutting the deficit.

This sounds like typical think tank wankery, but I suppose the seven tanks should be praised for being willing to put concrete numbers on the table. I was especially interested in Peterson's own plan:

Set aside their proposal to raise the retirement age, which is a weird obsession of deficit hawks that will never go away. Instead, just look at the totals: they propose $3.2-3.8 trillion in tax increases compared to $0.2 trillion in benefit cuts. For a center-right organization, this is surprisingly sensible. In the real world there's zero support among the public for significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare. There's zero support for cuts to the defense budget. And despite big talk, the rest of the budget is too small to make much of a difference even if you slash it. That leaves only social welfare, and the truth is that even among the most hard-hearted MAGA jerks, there's hardly any stomach for balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.

Bottom line: You can raise taxes or you can run big deficits. That's it. There's no magic economy booster that will do the job and no sizeable amount of waste fraud 'n' abuse to cut painlessly. Outside of fantasyland, this is all there is.

From CBS News:

The number of migrants unlawfully crossing the U.S. southern border has continued to drop markedly in July, nearing a threshold that would require officials to lift a partial ban on asylum claims enacted by President Biden, according to internal government data obtained by CBS News.

For the record, this means the month of July will end up looking approximately like this:

But this isn't what I'm really interested in. What I want to know is why Camilo Montoya-Galvez is always given early access to these numbers. Is it a leak, and Border Patrol officials can't figure out who's the mole? Is Montoya-Galvez just the only person who asks? And if the figures are maintained on a daily basis, why not release them on a daily basis? Or monthly but, say, two days after the end of the month since they're apparently available then?

What's the deal with this?

Another year, another Surface. Microsoft introduces a new Surface Pro every year or so and I dutifully buy a new one every time. I've lost count of how many old ones I have stuffed into a filing cabinet in my study.

Why do I buy a new unit so often? In general, it's because I spend at least six or seven hours using it every day, so I want to have the latest and greatest. More specifically, it's because I get suckered endlessly into hoping that the latest model will finally have decent battery life.

They never do. Every new generation of Intel processors is slightly more efficient, but that only produces about 30 minutes of extra life per generation. Last year Microsoft switched to an ARM processor and I was hopeful that would finally do the trick. It didn't.

Ditto for the Surface Pro 11, the second generation to use an ARM processor. And while all of these small improvements have added up over the years, the Pro 11 still gets only 7-8 hours of real-life use.

But! Microsoft made another change in the newest Surface: it now has an OLED screen instead of the older LCD screen. As near as I can tell, the screen looks about the same but it's considerably brighter. That means I can turn down the screen brightness compared to the older models.

And that finally made the difference. Combined with years of incremental improvements, the lower screen brightness means I finally get about 9-10 hours of use on a single charge. That's almost always enough to get me through an entire day.

So that's that: After eleven iterations the Surface Pro is finally an all-day tablet. Huzzah!

POSTSCRIPT: Anything else to say, Kevin? Not really. I guess it still doesn't play games very well, but I wouldn't know. Aside from that, everything works fine aside from a few minor bugs in handling touch input. The new Snapdragon processor is noticeably faster than the Pro 10, which is nice. The screen looks good, as always. It's also still heavy, as always.

This is the zeppelin field in Nuremburg, where Adolf Hitler conducted his big rallies. Below it is a picture of what it looked like in 1938.

Here are the UN reports on Gaza's food situation for two months ago compared to today:

Apparently the situation has improved. In May OCHA reported that 1.1 million Gazans were projected to face the worst level of famine. Today it's 495,000. Likewise, the number facing Level 4 famine is down by 100,000.

Virtually all of Gaza is "projected" to "face" food insecurity of some level—the same as in May and previously. However, it's unclear exactly what that means. Presumably it means Gazans aren't starving right now but might in the future. I think.

*It's remarkable how fast Republicans have pivoted from Biden is decrepit and brain dead to Biden was ousted in a coup by anti-democratic elites! I mean, I would have figured it would take at least a few days.

But no. No matter how cynical you get, Republicans can keep surprising you.

Here is the employment rate for Black men and women during (a) 2019 and (b) the past 12 months:

For both men and women, employment has been higher over the past year than it was during the final pre-COVID year of Donald Trump's presidency.