Kevin Drum

We all know that Donald Trump loves the Bible. No one has ever loved the Bible more than Trump. He even loves both the Corinthians.

But it turns out that Trump especially loves one particular Bible: the large-print King James "God Bless the USA Bible" from singer Lee Greenwood, which can be yours for only $59.99. And worth every penny:

So there you have it. Trump has sold his name and likeness to a Bible the same way he does to Asian hotels and Indonesian golf courses. Trump explained further in a promotional video:

Christians are under siege, we must protect content that is pro-God. We love God and we have to protect anything that is pro-God. We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor, or discriminate against us.... I’m proud to partner with Lee in this offering.... He’s very, very special and I think you all should get a copy of God Bless the U.S.A. Bible now and help spread our Christian values with others. There you have it. Let’s make America pray again. God bless you and God bless the U.S.A..

I wonder what Trump's cut from each Bible is?

Good news today:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed unlikely to limit access to a key medication used in more than 60 percent of U.S. abortions and first approved more than two decades ago.

A majority of justices from across the ideological spectrum expressed skepticism that the antiabortion doctors challenging the government’s loosening of regulations have sufficient legal grounds — or standing — to bring the lawsuit.

One of the issues at question is whether the folks proposing to overturn the FDA's approval of mifepristone have any standing to bring suit. In cases like this you have to show a genuine injury to someone, but the Christian group that brought the case couldn't do that. Their argument is that easy availability of mifepristone could cause psychic harm to doctors who oppose abortion but have to treat a patient suffering complications in an emergency room. That's too thin even for most of the conservatives on the Court.

But of course, there's also this:

The toughest questions for the Biden administration and the drug manufacturer came from the court’s two most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Alito will never vote for a "Democratic" win. The substance of the case doesn't really matter.

How much is Donald Trump's social media company, Truth Social, really worth? It's never made money, so you can't judge it that way. But lots of startup companies are unprofitable in their early years, and venture capitalists figure out values for them anyway.

The most common alternative is to look at net sales. Generally speaking, a startup with slow growth might be valued at about 3x revenue while a startup with faster growth would be around 7x or so. A skyrocketing startup might command 15x.

Truth Social only has three years of results with inconsistent growth. In 2022 growth was negative and in 2023 it grew 200%. Investors are hoping that Trump will win the presidency and growth will continue at a high rate. Based on that, you might aggressively but plausibly value Truth Social at 15x revenue, or around $70 million. If you're a real true believer you might push that as high as $100 million. That's kind of crazy, but social media is a crazy kind of space.

Now, pay attention to some arithmetic. Today Truth Social will merge with a vehicle called DWAC, which currently has $300 million in cash and nothing else. So it's worth $300 million. Truth Social is worth (at a stretch) $100 million.

After the merger DWAC will have 188 million shares of stock outstanding. This means the cash is worth $1.60 per share and Truth Social is worth about $0.53 per share, for a total share value of $2.13. And yet the stock is currently trading at nearly $50 per share:

Question: Since the value of the cash is $1.60 per share no matter what, this means that Truth Social is being effectively valued at $49.95 - $1.60 = $48.35 per share. This is nearly 100 times its maximum plausible value. Why?

Once you figure that out, you know who's being scammed in this deal. The answer is: anyone who buys stock in DWAC.

UPDATE: After DWAC stock began trading on Tuesday morning under the DJT ticker symbol, the price soared above $70. In other words, Truth Social is now trading at an implicit value of 131 times its maximum plausible value.

It's long been a truism in hard right-wing circles that the harder you hit the better. This has produced a culture in which they believe they can say anything they want with impunity. What are you gonna do? Sue 'em?

Actually yes. Over the past year or so a whole bunch of right wing actors have been successfully sued for making shit up:

• Rudy Giuliani lost $148 million in a defamation case over his claims that a pair of Georgia poll workers had rigged the 2020 election in the state.
• Donald Trump lost two defamation suits worth $88 million for lying about his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll.
• Fox News paid a $787 million settlement for claiming on air that Dominion voting machines had been rigged to steal the 2020 election.
• National Review was hit with a $1 million award for saying that climate scientist Michael Mann had engaged in fraudulent research.
• Pillow king Mike Lindell was ordered to pay $5 million to a cyber forensics expert who entered the "Prove Mike Wrong Challenge." The challenge was to show that Lindell was wrong about his frequent claims of election fraud, and indeed, it turned out he was wrong.
• Alex Jones was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after spreading conspiracy theories that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax.
• Project Veritas settled a lawsuit on undisclosed terms for accusing a Pennsylvania postmaster of voter fraud.
• Kari Lake admitted she defamed Maricopa County election official Stephen Richer when she said he stuffed thousands of fake ballots into counting machines. Damages have yet to be determined.

Does this mean that the era of just spewing out any old thing you want is over? Maybe—though I'm not sure I've noticed any decline yet. But at least conservative nutcases have been put on notice.

UPDATE: Project Veritas and Kari Lake have been added to this list.

A new study published in JAMA shows that the informal health care network¹ increased its provision of abortion pills following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. Here's a summary of their findings:

The average provision of abortion pills increased by about 4,500 per month nationally following the Dobbs decision.

But this is not what interests me. Rather, it's the furious reaction of Michael New over at National Review, who insists that the "purported" results are unreliable:

The data that appears in the JAMA article are self-reported by organizations that...have an interest in showing that there is a high demand for self-managed chemical abortions when strong pro-life laws are passed. Furthermore, taking the data at face value, we see that chemical-abortion pills ordered does not necessarily equal chemical abortions obtained.

Of course the data is self-reported. How else can you do a survey? And as New himself admits, the authors adjusted their findings for average usage rates, which ranged from 86% to 99%. I agree that the study is a little on the patchy side, but it's basically OK.

But New says this is just part of a trend of pro-choice organizations fudging the data. In particular, he points to a New York Times piece from last year about the Texas Heartbeat Act. The article says that in-state abortions went down dramatically in Texas, but the reduction was offset by increases in medication abortions and out-of-state abortions. But here's the weird part. The Times analysis suggests the net number of abortions in Texas went down by about 750 per month. New thinks the liberal Times got it wrong because his preferred analysis suggests the birthrate in Texas went up by about 1,000 per month. My own quickie analysis bears this out:

But what this means is that both measures are in pretty good agreement, especially given the inherent fuzziness of short-term data. There's nothing to complain about here.

Anti-abortion folks are just hellbent on trying to prove that Dobbs, along with subsequent state laws banning abortion, had a huge impact on abortion. But there's now a mountain of data all pointing in the same direction: The impact has ranged from nothing to small. Even in red states, people who want abortions are willing to go to significant lengths to get them.

¹Community networks, telemedicine providers, and online vendors.

This is a picture of the Christmas Tree Cluster and the Cone Nebula (upside-down at at the top), jointly catalogued as NGC 2264. It's a star-forming region containing both young and old stars.

I took this picture last month and it plainly didn't have enough exposure time. I had planned to do it over when I had an entire night at my disposal, but by the time a month had passed it was even lower in the horizon and my window had passed. I'll give it another try in autumn or winter, when it will be visible all night.

For no particular reason, here's another health care chart. This one shows how much people spend each year personally on professional health care. It doesn't count aspirin or massages or stuff like that. It's the personal share of employer premiums plus out-of-pocket costs not covered by insurance. This is per-person; spending per family is higher but the trend is the same.

Note that this number hasn't gone up for the past six years.

Donald Trump has been let off the hook for the full amount of the $454 million bond he was ordered to pay in his business fraud case. An appeals court cut it to $175 million.

This is disappointing for those who enjoy watching Trump squirm, but it's probably reasonable. The court gave no reason for its decision, but more than likely it's because they thought the original penalty was excessive and was likely to be reduced. And since they're the ones who would reduce it, who would know better?

When you see figures for K-12 teacher pay it's normally an average of all teachers, including those who have master's degrees and PhDs, or specialized skills such as ESL. But what about your garden variety fourth-grade teacher with a BA? They now make less than the average for all workers:

The average base pay for teachers with a BA is $53,000, with a range of $42,000 to $59,000 depending on experience. This doesn't count potential extras, like pay for coaching or for teaching summer school. It's also for a 37-week year.

Note that $53,000 is a national average. Pay ranges from a low of $37,000 in Missouri to a high of $69,000 in California.

I don't really know anything about Candace Owens. I gather that she's a fairly standard issue MAGA lunatic, but she drew attention recently for parting ways with the Daily Wire following some arguably antisemitic comments. So what's made her so popular?

This reminds me of a theory I've long held: everyone believes that the intelligence needed for political office (or political commentary) is whatever their own intelligence happens to be.

This is a corollary of the fact that we don't take politicians seriously. The same belief, for example, isn't true of doctors or quantum physicists. Most people are happy to admit they aren't brainy enough for those occupations. But politicians aren't viewed as people who need to know things. They merely need to have political views, and nearly all of us base our political views on emotion, not thinking.

So if your favored politician isn't smart enough to know the elements of the nuclear triad, what of it? If you didn't know it either, it hardly seems disqualifying. In fact, smarter politicians are annoying because they're always trying to explain things and all they do is confuse you.

If I'm watching Jeopardy and I happen to know an answer that no one on stage knows, I immediately think what a bunch of idiots! But if they know something I've never heard of, I immediately think how can they expect anyone to know that??? In other words, the ideal level of knowledge is whatever my knowledge happens to be. It's the same way on the freeway: there are people who drive too fast and people who drive too slow, and I'm the only one driving at the perfect speed.

Politics is the same way. As long as you're not stupider than me or smarter than me, you're fine.