Kevin Drum

In polls, about half of Americans think Joe Biden's age would affect his ability to do the job. As usual, though, it's instructive to see how this breaks down:

It's not "Americans" who think Biden is too old. It's Trump supporters.

A Boeing 737 lost a fairing in flight today between San Francisco and Medford, Oregon. Joe Weisenthal has questions:

I'm curious about this too. So I went to Wikipedia's "List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft," which doesn't include every single in-flight incident but does include every "notable" incident for large commercial airliners. Then I went through each one involving either a Boeing or an Airbus commercial jet. For the past ten years, here are the number of incidents that were caused by a mechanical failure of some kind (i.e., not weather, maintenance, or pilot error):

The two Boeing incidents this year are the door plug that blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight in January and then today's incident. The two incidents involving the MCAS system on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 are in 2018 and 2019.

There are two main takeaways from this:

• There hasn't been any kind of increase in Boeing failures. In fact, the past three years have been pretty quiet.
• However, over the past decade there have been 22 Boeing failures compared to 7 Airbus failures. Both companies have roughly the same number of airplanes in service.

So Boeing planes are pretty safe, but Airbus planes are even safer. OTOH, while I was going through the list I did notice a surprisingly large number of Airbus incidents involving bombs, hijackings, and missiles. Take your pick.

Donald Trump offers up a thoughtful critique of Chinese control over social media:

If you are going to do it to TikTok, do it to Facebook. And what you can do is let them sell TikTok. Let them sell it in the market.... Take it away from China control. But I think China controls Facebook, also. Because they have tremendous power in that company.

Set aside Trump's screw-loose maundering about China controlling Facebook. The more fascinating question is: Do what to Facebook? What precisely does Donald have in mind?

And also: Do interviewers even bother with followup questions any longer when they talk to Trump? Or is the pretense that he makes any sense not worth the trouble anymore?

It's sort of remarkable how many of Donald Trump's former aides now oppose his reelection. Here's a list. These are only principal officers, not the dozens of deputies and assistants who have also turned on him, and all of them were initially appointed by Trump himself:

1. Vice President Mike Pence

2, 3. Chiefs of Staff John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney

4, 5. Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo

6, 7. Secretaries of Defense Mike Esper, Jim Mattis

8. Attorney General Bill Barr

9. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos

10. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao

11. HHS Secretary Alex Azar

12, 13. National Security Advisors John Bolton, H.R. McMaster

14. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley

15. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats

16, 17, 18. Directors of Communications Stephanie Grisham, Anthony Scaramucci, Alyssa Farah Griffin

Here is Hilbert, tail in the air, exploring the front yard garden. In a minute or so he will flop on ground and roll around in the warm, sunshiny dirt.

At the bottom is some bonus catblogging. This picture was sent to me by a regular reader and has some advice for the royal family: If you're going to Photoshop something, do it right.

The New York Times reports that although anti-TikTok fever is high in the United States, China is taking a low-key approach to things:

The fervor has not yet triggered a high-alert response from China’s leaders or prompted retaliatory threats against American companies. Instead, officials in Beijing have blasted the bill but largely reiterated common criticisms of U.S. policy as unfair to China.

....“China is not ready to pull the trigger outright for a full scale retaliation against what the United States is doing,” said Scott Kennedy, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Retaliate? What can they do? Ban Facebook and Twitter and Gmail and Google and YouTube and Instagram and Bloomberg and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and WhatsApp and Reddit and LinkedIn and Wikipedia?

Oh right. They've already done that. In fact, even TikTok is banned in China.

This is the one reason for banning TikTok that I have a lot of sympathy for. Dangerous or not, why should we allow Chinese social media companies to operate freely in the US when US social media companies are universally banned in China? TikTok earned about $16 billion in the US last year, and I can't think of any good reason to allow that when US companies aren't allowed to earn a penny in China.

Oddly, this is not something that seems to bother most people. Instead, it's all about the Chinese Communist Party turning our teens into socialist zombies, which is faintly ridiculous. Why not just make this a standard trade dispute, where pretty much everything supports the US position?

New tracking polls have started coming out and they pretty consistently show that Joe Biden didn't get a bounce from his State of the Union address. But even if that's true, I think it misses the real impact of the speech.

State of the Union addresses never have much effect on a president's approval ratings. But this one had a big impact on the media narrative. When was the last time you saw a story about Biden being too old and infirm for the job? About a week ago Wednesday, I'd say. Outside of Fox News, they just disappeared after Biden's address.

So was the speech a big win? Oh yes indeed.

The judge in the Fani Willis case ruled today that Team Trump failed to prove a conflict of interest because of her romantic relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade:

But the judge also found a “significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team” and said either Willis and her office must fully leave the case or Wade must withdraw.

Sigh. The "appearance" of impropriety is mostly because the Trumpies yelled and screamed about it.

So now Willis has to find a new prosecutor, a job that no one wants because it will put them in Trump's crosshairs—which, these days, means doxxing, harassment, and having your past examined under a microscope for anything that might prove useful to the opposition. Who needs it?

The United States Congress is mysterious as hell:

Speaker Mike Johnson told Politico that he expects to pass a future Ukraine assistance bill with Democratic votes, an acknowledgment of the persistent resistance to any new aid within the GOP.... “I think it is a stand-alone, and I suspect it will need to be on suspension,” Johnson said of foreign assistance.

Why would a Ukraine bill have to be on the suspension calendar? This is a procedure that fast tracks a bill by eliminating committee approvals and debate, at the cost of requiring a two-thirds vote.

But I don't get why Johnson needs to do this. He can move a bill anytime he wants, and Ukraine aid would surely get out of the Rules Committee pretty easily. Its chair, Rep. Tom Cole, supports it, and a normal rule wouldn't allow much more debate than suspension.

I'm sure there's some parliamentary minutiae I'm missing, but what? Ukraine aid has broad bipartisan support, so all Johnson has to do is get out of the way and let it come up for a vote. What's the deal here?

Matt Darling writes today that although the unemployment rate is low, the length of unemployment spells has gone up. This is probably true over the very long term, but it doesn't really seem to be true over the past couple of decades:

I didn't put in trend lines since it would have made the chart too busy, but all of them are absolutely flat. I'm not sure there's really much to see here.