Kevin Drum

I learned something new today from Marcy Wheeler. The conventional wisdom about the Hunter Biden case is that his plea deal fell apart because of a disagreement over the scope of Hunter's immunity from further prosecution. The government thought immunity was narrowly tailored to the specific charges at hand: guns, drugs, and taxes. Hunter's team wanted a broader immunity.

But that's not why things fell apart. This was a point of disagreement, but during the hearing over the plea agreement the judge gave both sides a few minutes to hash things out. Hunter's lawyer then agreed to the narrower immunity:

THE COURT: All right. So the defense agrees that the agreement not to prosecute only includes the time period from 2014 to 2019, it only includes tax charges in that time period, drug charges in that time period, and the particular — the firearms charges that relate to this particular firearm?

MR. CLARK: Yes, Your Honor.

So what happened? It's a little complicated. The deal had two parts: a Plea Agreement and a Diversion Agreement. The immunity provisions were in the Diversion Agreement.

This matters because it allows the Plea Agreement to be a "B agreement." Under a B agreement, the judge has no authority to accept or reject the plea. All she does is sentencing. However, if the immunity provisions were placed within the Plea Agreement—which is normal—then it would be an "A agreement" and the judge would have more authority over it.

The judge in the case implied that this was a bit of slick lawyering. She has no authority over the Diversion Agreement, which is solely a contract between Hunter and the government, and, because the immunity provisions were moved, she has no authority over the Plea Agreement either. So she's just a rubber stamp.

And there's more. The judge has no authority and no input into the Diversion Agreement, but it nonetheless includes a clause that makes her the arbiter of any alleged breaches in the agreement:

THE COURT: I'm concerned that that provision makes me a gatekeeper to criminal charges and puts me in the middle of a decision as to whether to bring a charge. And we already talked about separation of powers and that choice as to whether to bring charges is not — that's the executive branch, not the judicial branch, so is this even constitutional?

Hunter's lawyer explains that the case has become very politicized and they wanted a neutral arbiter. That's why they're asking her to do this. The judge says she understands, but is still concerned that she's effectively exercising a veto over future prosecution, which is supposed to be exclusively up to the Department of Justice.

The two sides discuss alternatives, and then ask the judge to approve everything else while they hash out this one issue. She declines, and sets the whole plea deal aside until she can hear further briefings.

But that never happened. A few days later House Republicans launched an investigation into Hunter's "sweetheart deal" and started a pressure campaign on prosecutor David Weiss to drive a harder bargain—something that Speaker Mike Johnson has bragged about:

The whole plea deal crashed completely in just a few more days. The prosecution team proposed removing the judge as arbiter and killing all immunity, which Hunter's team didn't accept. Prosecutors then threatened to revoke all the agreements, but before they could negotiate further Weiss—now a special counsel—withdrew the agreements and later insisted on felony pleas going forward.

So that's what happened. The judge had some arcane concerns about the deal, but before they could be adjudicated David Weiss pulled out and decided to take the cases to court. The end.

According to the International Energy Agency, we are soon to be awash in oil. Supply will grow every year for the rest of the decade—led by the US—while demand will slow and finally turn down in 2030.

Their 2024 report is the damnedest thing I've ever seen, with starting points and ending points and hints along the way, but no explicit forecast for annual supply between now and 2030. Here's the best I can do:

If you're the betting type, this is a pretty clear suggestion that oil prices are going to decline over the next few years.

Most of the increase in supply comes from outside of OPEC. Russian supply is projected to be flat while Saudi Arabia is down. The slowing rate of demand comes mainly from the rise of electric cars.

WARNING: I'm not sure the IEA has a great track record for its forecasts, so take this with a grain of salt.

The floating pier we built to get humanitarian aid into Gaza has had its problems. The Wall Street Journal provides some details:

The hastily constructed pier was never designed to handle the Mediterranean Sea’s rough waters.... The floating structure broke apart late last month after 10 days of operation, something defense officials privately described as all but inevitable, and some humanitarian organizations have all but given up making longer-term plans around the pier.

....Military guidance on the pier, known as Joint Logistics Over the Shore or JLOTS, says its usage is “weather-dependent,” and it can’t operate in conditions beyond sea state 3.... The Mediterranean Sea is often at sea state 4.

I'm curious. Were any of these "private" concerns made clear to President Biden and his staff before the decision was made to build the pier?

In any case, I imagine the pier will become more reliable as we get more experience with it. But issues with the aid program go way beyond a few civil engineering problems:

On Sunday, the U.N. World Food Program said it paused delivery of aid from the pier after two of its warehouses were hit by rockets during one of the deadliest days of the war.

Why is Israel shooting rockets in the vicinity of the pier and the nearby warehouses? And of course there's this:

If the pier shuts down permanently, the aid could end up being delivered by sea to the Ashdod port in Israel, and then sent along the very land routes the maritime corridor was meant to bypass.

Exactly. The pier never should have been necessary. Israel should have allowed aid into Ashdod (just north of Gaza) and then through the Erez crossing in the first place. It's only four miles of travel within Gaza from Erez to the location of the floating pier. Surely the IDF could have figured out a way to provide safe passage along that route?

I suppose they just didn't care very much.

This is a perfect yellow rose blooming in the Volksgarten in Vienna. The whole park is covered in roses this time of year. Lucky us.

Michael Hiltzik decided to ruin my day by pointing to yet another COVID vaccine conspiracy theory I hadn't heard of before. This time it comes from the British Medical Journal, which published an article stating that excess deaths remained high in Western countries in 2021 and 2022 even after the COVID vaccine was introduced. There's nothing new about this observation, but then they go a step further:

The next step concerns distinguishing between the various potential contributors to excess mortality, including COVID-19 infection, indirect effects of containment measures and COVID-19 vaccination programmes.

The authors suggest the possibility that COVID vaccines are killing people in large numbers, and naturally this has been picked up by the usual suspects. But as Hiltzik points out, the researchers' own chart shows that excess deaths closely followed the known waves of infection:

A more sophisticated critique of this chart is here. The main point, as Hiltzik says, is that excess deaths were high in 2021 because that was the peak year for COVID. What's more, vaccines were rolled out slowly:

Far more people were exposed to COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020.... Furthermore, the COVID variants that appeared in 2021 — the Delta and Omicron waves — were far more transmissible and virulent (causing more hospitalization and death) than the initial variants.

....As for the vaccines, the Dutch authors seemed to conjecture that vaccination happened as if with the turning of a switch in January 2021. Of course that’s untrue.... The vaccines were rolled out only gradually through 2021. By mid-year, only about 20% of the population of countries that submitted figures had received even a single dose; by the end of 2021, nearly 50% were still unvaccinated.

Naturally I'd like to add a chart of my own to this discussion:

This is only for the US, and it doesn't rely on any kind of sophisticated model. It just shows total deaths. As you can see, all-cause mortality did indeed peak in 2021, but has since declined. In 2023, deaths were precisely back on the trendline of the previous decade.

The BMJ article has come under withering criticism from all sides. The authors' suggestion of vaccine mortality is largely based on reports of "adverse events" in the original clinical trials, but those have obviously been known for years and aren't deaths. What's more, clinicians don't even know if they're related to the vaccine in the first place.

There's just nothing here. COVID vaccines continue to be remarkably safe while COVID itself becomes ever more worrisome as the effects of Long COVID become more evident. Get your jab.

This is a bit of a hyperlocal story, but the LA Times today writes about the horror of flying in and out of LAX:

Alexa Woodward arrived in California for the first time and was immediately lost. Outside Los Angeles International Airport, she and a friend tried unsuccessfully to order an Uber. The hum of jackhammers added to the anxiety, and except for the smell of weed in the air, this wasn’t the introduction she had expected.

“It’s not super clean, there’s lots of construction, and we don’t know where to go,” the North Carolinian said, before a Times reporter led her to the shuttle for the designated taxi and ride-share lot.

For decades, the trip in and out of LAX has been one of the most challenging parts of a journey. The serenity of the Pacific Ocean is only two miles away, but that can be difficult to remember as travelers spend an hour on the nightmarish horseshoe loop known as 1 World Way.

I've read about a thousand different versions of this story, and it's true that LAX is no fun. That horseshoe loop gets pretty crowded.

But I've flown in and out of LAX dozens of times, as well as plenty of other airports. It's not that bad. I don't know why Alexa Woodward was "immediately lost" since there are all the usual signs pointing you to rental car lots, long-term parking, hotel shuttles, and so forth. Nor does it take an hour to navigate the loop. I suppose it might at absolutely peak times during the holidays, but in my entire life it's never taken more than ten minutes to make a complete loop. I'll grant that it seems longer, but it's not. And exiting from the central parking lot has always been pretty quick.

The appearance of LAX can be daunting. That loop really is crowded. And yes, there's a lot of construction at the moment. But you basically get in and out the same way as any other airport, and it doesn't really take much longer than it does in any big city.

The only real problem with LAX is that it doesn't have any convenient way of getting from terminal to terminal. That would be a bigger problem if LAX were a popular connecting airport like O'Hare or DFW, but it's not.

So why the hate?

Inflation all but disappeared in May according to the latest figures from the BLS:

Headline inflation dropped to 0.07%—zero for all practical purposes—and core inflation dropped to 2.0%. Inflation in services also dropped, coming in at a very respectable 2.4%. That's good news since services inflation has been stubbornly high.

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline inflation was down to 3.3% and core inflation was down to 3.4%.

If somebody steals your credit card and runs up a huge bill, you can only be held responsible for $50 in damages. Your bank has to eat the rest.

The reason for this is that Congress passed the Fair Credit Billing Act in 1974. That's where the $50 maximum comes from.

Can you imagine such a bill being passed today? Why not?

Here's a remarkable image:

In 1987 we signed the Montreal Protocol to ban CFCs, which were producing a hole in the ozone layer. In 1992 the ban was extended to HCFCs. Both of these are powerful greenhouse gases that trap sunlight and contribute to global warming. The amount of warming they cause is called "radiative forcing."

It took until 2021, a third of a century later, to start reducing the radiative forcing of HCFCs in the atmosphere. That's a combination of how long it took to actually get rid of HCFCs and how long it took for existing HCFCs to start breaking down.

A third of a century. And carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming, takes much longer to break down than HCFCs. This is why addressing climate change is so urgent. Even if we banned carbon emissions tomorrow, the earth would continue to warm for decades. And we're not anywhere close to banning carbon emissions.

This is Schönbrunn, my favorite European palace thanks to its famous yellow exterior. However, this was not its original color. It went from light orange initially to golden ochre under Maria Theresa and finally to "Schönbrunn Gelb" in the mid-1800s. Our guide claimed that this color was chosen because money was tight at the time and it was the cheapest available. However, I haven't been able to dig up any confirmation of that.

In any case, Schönbrunn is often called a "mini Versailles," which is fair, I suppose. The palace is about half the size of Versailles and the gardens are considerably smaller. For my money, though, the view up to the Gloriette (bottom picture) outclasses anything at Versailles.

NOTE: I oversaturated the palace to bring out the yellow. It's not really that striking in real life. But it's my blog, and if I want to make Schönbrunn prettier than real life then I can.