Kevin Drum

This is an Andean condor at the LA Zoo. It's the largest flying bird in the world.

As long as we're all doom scrolling our days away anyway, here's something else to worry about: We might be about to find out there are worse Republican leaders than Mitch McConnell.

Whatever else you can say about him, McConnell is an institutionalist. He believes in Senate rules, and in particular he believes in the filibuster. But his replacement might not. And his replacement might be majority leader if Republicans win the Senate.

If they also win the House and the presidency, a new majority leader might decide to formalize the end of the filibuster—which currently exists in name only, but does still exist. If that happens, there would no longer be any roadblocks to, say, banning abortion nationwide.

Oh, there might be some. There are a few Republicans who might vote against an extreme abortion ban. And the Supreme Court is a question mark. Alito's opinion in Dobbs gave the states unlimited power to regulate abortion but was a bit cagey about how much power Congress had.

There's also Donald Trump. He obviously couldn't care less about abortion as a moral issue, but politically his message to the Republican base could hardly be clearer: We got rid of Roe v. Wade. States can now do whatever they want. Take the W.

But the base may feel differently, and a Republican Congress would be under enormous pressure to ban abortion nationwide even if Republican leaders know it would be a political disaster. I don't know what odds I'd put on it, but it's hardly inconceivable.

Anyway, this is something to think about in the rare moments when you briefly start feeling slightly optimistic about things. You're welcome.

Retail sales declined slightly in June, continuing their downward trend of the past two years. However, they're still above their pre-pandemic trend:

Retail sales are now 5% below their level of mid-2022 but 10% above their level of January 2020.

Marian and I were watching a program on Amazon Prime during dinner when it suddenly froze. When the show started back up the sound was muted and nothing seemed to fix it. So I gave up and shut it off.

When the TV returned to cable it was broadcasting the Republican National Convention. The headline speaker was Teamsters president Sean O'Brien and I felt like I'd been catapulted into a mirror universe.

He started out with the obligatory shout out to Donald Trump as a great human being, which I suppose is the price of entry. Then he switched to a fairly conventional union leader speech—but with subtle changes. The enemies he named were "elites" and "the media," not just big business, and that got the crowd cheering.

Fine. But then he took direct aim at big corporations. They cheat and prevent workers from organizing. Big cheers. Amazon refuses to negotiate. Big cheers. We need to do away with right-to-work. Big cheers. The Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce are the enemy. Big cheers. Unions are the only organizations that protect ordinary workers. Big cheers.

And I'm sitting there wondering: do these people on the convention floor know that they're Republicans? Because this is all stuff that Republicans have fought tooth and nail for decades. Organized labor is bad. The Chamber of Commerce is good. Freedom from union bosses is part of the Ten Commandments. As for right-to-work, Republicans wouldn't support a union shop if Jesus descended from heaven and ordered them to.

But no matter. They cheered for everything O'Brien said anyway. It was eerie. Do Republicans in the era of Trump even have any idea what they supposedly stand for?

This is getting to be sort of old news, but a few weeks ago some professors from the University of Reading published the results of a comparison they did between students and GPT-4 on a set of psychology exams. Others have done similar things, but these guys went whole hog: the professors had AI produce answers to actual exams and then slipped those answers in with everyone else. The grad students marking the test papers had no idea this was going on.

Long story short, AI did well and the markers didn't. Here's the average grade distribution for the five exams:

Roughly speaking, the AI exams averaged a B+ while the actual students averaged a B-. Out of 63 phony exams, the markers flagged a problem with only four—and only two of those mentioned a suspicion of AI.

That's about it. The researchers concluded that this was bad, but not much else. However, I was personally fascinated with another chart in the study. Check out the letter grades given to students in British universities:

There are a full two grades above A+! You can get an A++ or an A*. On the other end, you can get an F-. And in between D and F there's a grade of E. I've always wondered what happened to the E. I guess we Americans dropped it along with all the U's in labour and colour and so forth.

In the wake of President Biden's executive order banning asylum for people who cross the border illegally, total border encounters continued to drop substantially in June:

CBP recorded 130,000 crossings in June, down by more than 40,000 from May. Of those, 88,000 were illegal crossings and 42,000 were asylum requests, mostly scheduled via the CBP One app.

It's a truism that nobody ever gets fired from a government job. But is it actually true? I was curious.

The BLS tracks job separations for both private industry and the federal government, but unfortunately they don't break layoffs and discharges apart. This makes comparison difficult since the federal government doesn't really have layoffs.

But there are estimates of layoffs in the private sector, and if you subtract those from the BLS numbers you get a rough estimate of the number of people fired. Here it is:

(Note that I've eliminated the 2010 and 2020 numbers for the federal government because they include huge spikes for census workers let go after the counting fieldwork is done.)

So the answer is that the truism appears to be true. Private companies fire about 1% of their employees every year while the federal government lets go only about 0.3%. That's a big difference, though I'll bet you're surprised at how low the private sector number is. Very few people ever get outright fired even in famously at-will America.

This is Peterskirche in Vienna. It's not an especially famous church, but it's impressive for the sheer amount of Baroque festoonment that adorns it. Highly recommended for a short visit.

A month ago I wrote that Donald Trump's VP choice would be guided by what he was looking for in a running mate. Ass kissing? Retribution? General shittiness? Here was my entry for the primary virtue of the senator from Ohio:

• Willingness to pretend to be an idiot: J.D. Vance

So I guess that's what Trump values the most. He wants someone who shows his loyalty by a willingness to say anything, no matter how dumb or obviously untrue he knows it to be. Congratulations, J.D.!

Sigh. This is from the Wall Street Journal today:

Eviction filings over the past year in a half-dozen cities and surrounding metropolitan areas are up 35% or more compared with pre-2020 norms, according to the Eviction Lab, a research unit at Princeton University.

This includes Las Vegas, Houston, and in Phoenix, where landlords filed more than 8,000 eviction notices in January. That was the most ever in a single month for the county that includes the Arizona capital.... Overall, eviction notices were up 15% or more compared with the period before the pandemic for 10 of the 33 cities tracked by the Eviction Lab, which looked at filings over the past 12 months.

If you look at a list of major US cities, on any metric, there will always be some at the top and some at the bottom. It takes less than ten seconds to hop over to the Eviction Lab website and see this chart front and center:

As you can see, the national average for evictions is consistently less than their old average. You have to read to the seventh paragraph of the Journal article to learn obliquely that "evictions more broadly have settled to roughly where they were before the pandemic."

Over the past year or so progressives have been hellbent on promoting the idea that we're barreling toward an eviction crisis now that pandemic protections have mostly been loosened. But at least their motivations are clear. What's the Journal's excuse?