Kevin Drum

It looks like Pete Hegseth has survived:

It's a tie, so vice president J.D. Vance gets to break it, making it 51-50. Please give a warm welcome to the most aggressively unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history.

More idiocy from Donald Trump:

For starters, "recommend" is all Trump can do. FEMA is enshrined in law and only Congress can eliminate it. Fat chance of that.

Still, I can see people thinking, why not? Keep the funding but send it to the states when they have an emergency. They're closer to events on the ground and can handle the local response better.

Sure. Except it's not just money. You also need an army of people, and states can't afford to maintain big armies that sit around most of the time and leap into action only for occasional disasters. Only a national agency can do that. FEMA has upwards of 20,000 people who can be surged into a disaster zone when states are overwhelmed, and because they serve the whole country they're always kept busy. More than busy, in fact, since climate change has steadily increased the number and size of national disasters, and FEMA is chronically short of staff.

In any case, lots of FEMA money already goes to states. Why? Because they're closer to events on the ground etc.

I dunno. Sure, it's just Trump blathering about whatever pops into his brain. But isn't there anyone on his staff that he trusts who could keep him within shouting distance of the real world?

When Paul Krugman left the New York Times last year, it was kind of weird. He wrote a column saying the next one would be his last and then just disappeared. Did he suddenly learn he had six months to live? Was he unwilling to endure four years of column writing under Donald Trump? Or what?

We finally know. Here it is from an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review:

Krugman agreed that he could have stayed at the paper. But in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, [Patrick] Healy told him the newsletter was being killed.

Why would the Times want to do that? It's basically free extra content from a star columnist that costs them nothing. It makes no sense. Krugman continues:

“I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”

“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman continued, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.

Ah. This I get. I had the same complaint toward the end of my tenure at Mother Jones, though it wasn't the main reason I left. But it's worth admitting up front that this can be very personality driven. I can easily see an editor making changes that, to him, seem fairly minor, but to Krugman seem like the absolute key to the whole column. I'm the same way. I hate being edited even when I know perfectly well it improves the end product. In the past, when I got back the edits for a magazine piece, it would send me into a tizzy and I'd have to wait two or three days to calm down before I went through them. This is despite the fact that I suspect my pieces were pretty lightly edited compared to most.

This is, needless to say, prima donna behavior. Hopefully I never let it show, since it's sort of embarrassing it happened at all, regardless of whether my cooling-off periods brought it under control.

As it turns out, though, Krugman just loves to write. After he quit the Times he immediately began writing long pieces every day at his substack. He even writes on weekends, which is the real mark of someone who writes because they love to. And it's obvious that he enjoys writing whatever he feels like, without having to worry about whether it's suitable for a mainstream newspaper.

On the other hand, he no longer has an audience of millions. Thete's a price to pay for everything.

Elon Musk recently sent an email update to the staff of X:

Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.

I'm . . . impressed. Seriously. Sure, this is all pretty lousy, but I thought X was losing considerable sums of money. If they're genuinely breaking even they've exceeded my expectations.

Donald Trump is in town (i.e., California) today to kvetch some more about how we need to "open the spigot" and let more water flow from north to south. I gather that yesterday he even talked about "the snow caps and Canada," whatever that means. Canada is a thousand miles away and we certainly don't get any water from there.

But we do get water from the Sierra Nevada snow melt, some of which is diverted south through the San Joaquin Valley and then to Los Angeles. Would you like to see how? If you're not from California it might surprise you a little bit:

The original pumps, built 50 years ago, suck in water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and then route it south through a labyrinthine network of levees and rivers. Eventually it gets to a couple of pumping stations near Tracy, where local canals deliver it to the California Aqueduct.

Needless to say, this massive pumping does nothing good for the environment of the delta, and that's been at the core of the water wars in California ever since it started. This has taken two forms. First, the original pumping plan also called for the construction of a peripheral canal, which got killed by an initiative in 1982; followed by a proposal for two giant tunnels; followed yet again by a proposal for a single tunnel. The tunnel would take water directly from the Sacramento River before it ever gets to the delta and shunt it directly to the aqueducts. This effort to build something has been going on for about 40 years—or 80 depending on how you count.

Second, there's the ecology of the delta. Generally speaking, the tunnel wouldn't increase water deliveries. However, the delta pumps are shut down periodically when environmental conditions in the delta deteriorate.¹ The idea behind the tunnel is that it can be used during pump shutdowns to keep water flowing south. Environmentalists aren't happy about this since it's not clear if it's any better to take the water before or after it gets to the delta. Either way, the delta gets starved of freshwater.

In any case, it will take upwards of 20 years to build the tunnel, so it's a moot point for now. For now, we have pumps; we have farmers in the delta who want to keep their water; and we have farmers in the Central Valley who want water and don't care about the health of the delta.

Trump's opinion appears to be fuck the delta, just keep the water flowing. Why? Beats me. The whole thing is purely an irrigation and drinking water issue and has nothing to do with fighting fires. We have plenty of water for that and always have.

It's all genuinely complicated. We really do need to keep the delta healthy and we really do need irrigation water farther south. It's not clear what the right balance is.

¹This is where the infamous delta smelt comes into the picture. Central Valley interests have been pretty successful in framing pump shutdowns as merely a way of saving the tiny delta smelt, an endangered species. It's just a stupid little fish! This is true but misleading. The smelt is basically used as a canary in the coal mine: when smelt populations dwindle it's a sign that the delta ecology is failing. That's the real reason for focusing on the smelt.

Charlie in the late afternoon shadows.

This is a scarlet pimpernel, described by Wikipedia as a "weed." That seems ungenerous, doesn't it? It's a perfectly nice looking little flower.

Nothing big today. I got a new PSA test and it's nice and low:

I think anything under 3 or 4 is fine, but still, the lower the better. Everything seems to be going nicely on the prostate front.

President Trump has ordered a temporary hiring freeze throughout the federal government. That's not too unusual. Within HHS he's also ordered a halt to all external communications. That's a little more unusual, but not unheard of.

But keep drilling down and you get to the National Institutes of Health, the country's premier medical research center. It's loathed by RFK Jr. because it doesn't fund the kind of crackpot research he's fond of, so it's getting far more serious treatment:

The new administration [is] imposing a wide range of restrictions, including the abrupt cancellation of meetings such as grant review panels.... Today, for example, officials halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.

....NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS.

....NIH today canceled meetings of advisory councils at its dental and bioengineering institutes. The council meetings include a closed-door session where grant proposals from extramural researchers that have already been approved by peer-review panels undergo a final review before the awards are made. It is not clear what will happen to those grants if the council meeting to finalize the review is canceled. Many more councils for NIH’s 24 grantmaking institutes and centers are scheduled to meet in the coming weeks.

Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.

No travel, no meetings, and no research grants. That seems . . . excessive, doesn't it? More like punitive retaliation from someone holding a grudge than a mere desire to take a short breather while everyone gets settled. As far as I know, no one else has gotten this treatment and Trump himself has never bad-mouthed the NIH. So I assume he did this at RFK Jr's request. This doesn't bode well for his future stewardship of HHS.

How long will it take LA to rebuild in the aftermath of this month's wildfires? Here are a few comparisons from recent fires:

Three years after the Marshall Fire destroyed 1,105 homes in Boulder County, about two-thirds have been rebuilt....

It took nearly seven years to completely rebuild after a 2012 fire that destroyed hundreds of homes in Colorado Springs, and homebuilders are still finishing up work after a 2017 fire in Santa Rosa, Calif....

In August 2023, wildfires devastated the island of Maui, completely destroying the town of Lahaina.... As of last week, roughly a year and a half since the fires, a total of three of those homes have been rebuilt....

In Paradise, 90% of the town, including 18,000 structures, was destroyed and 85 people were killed.... Six years later...the city is constructing around 500 homes a year and has rebuilt a third of its homes....

It's gonna be a while. Hell, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston eight years ago and they're still fighting over recovery funding.