Kevin Drum

Here's the latest Trump-Biden polling:

It's impressive that Joe Biden has durably sustained only a 2-point drop since the debate. That's not good enough to maintain a serious chance of winning, but it's still kind of remarkable.

Need another reason to stay up to date on your COVID vaccination? Here are the results of a new study on the incidence of long COVID:

You are about half as likely to get long COVID if you've been vaccinated. If that's not sufficient motivation, I don't know what is.

BY THE WAY: It turns out the official name for long COVID is postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2. How about that?

I watched some of J.D. Vance's speech tonight at the Republican convention, and it was full of all the usual red meat about Democrats and Joe Biden. That's pretty normal for a convention speech and nothing to get too riled up about. But there was one small bit that truly threw me for a loop.

Towards the end, Vance reeled off a list of terrible things Biden had done, and one of them was that he supported the Iraq War. This earned Biden a big round of boos. Boos! From Republicans! Does anyone remember this?

Back in the day, Republicans were the ones who drove us to war. They favored it by 84% to 14%, a net favorability of 70%. This was the era of freedom fries and aluminum tubes. It was gonna be shock and awe against Saddam Hussein, and it was fashionable among Republicans to accuse anyone who opposed the war of treason and soft-headedness.

Now, 20 years later, here is J.D. Vance at a Republican convention blaming it all on "Joe Biden and the elites." You'd think George W. Bush had never existed. I have to say, I was shocked and awed.

Would you like something to take your mind off of politics? I've got just the thing.

You've probably noticed that lots and lots of cars are white today. But how many? And has it really increased lately? Here's my best guess at an answer for North America:

The '70s were an era of colorful cars, but white started to take over toward the end of the decade. Green and silver had brief flings in the '90s and noughts, and finally in 2010 white surged into the lead permanently.

Taken as a whole, color has gone the way of the dinosaur in the car world. Neutral tones—white, black, gray, and silver—now account for 78% of all sales in North America. Blue is the only actual color that breaks single digits at 11% of sales.

Around the world, white, black, and gray/silver hold the top three spots in every single region. White is the most popular color in every region except Europe, where gray holds the #1 spot.

I recently bought a couple of minor new doodads for my telescope, but they were just—barely—important enough that I figured I should test the whole setup and make sure everything still worked. So I hauled everything into the backyard and connected it.

On a scale of Bortle 1 to Bortle 10, I live in approximately a Bortle 11 area. This means the light pollution is so bad that practically everything is too washed out to photograph. What's more, my backyard is hemmed in by trees, so I have only a small part of the sky visible. But I wanted to run a real test on a real object.

I ended up with M71, a smallish globular cluster also known as the Angelfish Cluster. Since a globular cluster is just stars, they're visible even in lousy light. All things considered, it didn't turn out too badly, and all my new stuff worked perfectly. Huzzah.

California has 11.7% of the nation's population. It has 10% of the votes in the Electoral College.

Just saying. If we switched to a straight popular vote for president, big states would have only slightly more influence than they do now.

Under ordinary circumstances, Joe Biden's latest speaking gaffe wouldn't be a big deal. But these aren't ordinary circumstances:

It doesn't matter if Biden had trouble reading the teleprompter. Maybe he needs glasses. Who cares?

But he shouldn't need a teleprompter to know that his own policy, which he was announcing for the first time, was to limit rent increases to 5%, not $55. How could he possibly not remember that?

Coming a day after he mumbled his way through an interview with Lester Holt, this very much suggests that Biden's debate performance wasn't just "a bad night." He needs to face up to facts and resign the presidency before it's too late.

In the last quarter, the earnings of men working full time suddenly skyrocketed 8.9% at an annual rate. Earnings of women dropped 4.3%.

Perhaps this is some kind of artifact? No obvious reason comes to mind for men's wages to have gone up so much.

The stock market isn't the economy, but it does represent a big part of the economy. And it's going gangbusters:

Even after accounting for inflation, the S&P 500 is 25% above its level when Donald Trump left office and is growing at a faster pace.

Let's tally up the score so far. Joe Biden's Department of Justice has now secured convictions against two Democrats:

• The president's son, thanks to pressure from Republican lawmakers.
• Robert Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey.

In addition, they have indicted one other Democrat:

• Henry Cuellar, a Democratic member of Congress from Texas.

Meanwhile:

• A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump has dismissed charges he's clearly guilty of, based on reasoning that would make a 1L blush.
• The Supreme Court, with three members appointed by Donald Trump, has quashed two of the four charges against him for trying to overturn a legal election. They then granted him immunity so broad that it jeopardizes the other two charges, very likely killing the entire case.

Now can we talk again about how the federal court system has been weaponized?