Kevin Drum

I missed the Super Bowl on Sunday because I was driving out to the desert for my latest astronomy session. It was a dog's breakfast.

I set everything up normally, but for some reason neither the mount nor the focuser would work. After hours of investigation I discovered that, for some reason, the computer's virtual serial ports had been shut down last Thursday and then reinstalled when I turned on the laptop on Sunday. I have no idea how or why this could happen since the laptop wasn't even running on Thursday. It just sits around in sleep mode in between astronomy sessions.

In any case, the ports were somehow reinstalled differently or wrong and wouldn't communicate with either the mount or the focuser. Finally, with no idea what else to try, I rolled back everything to a week ago, and it worked! Unfortunately, it also wiped out all the settings from my astronomy program, which I slowly figured out and had to reset from memory.

Yeesh. But finally everything worked and, for the first time, I took a picture of a globular cluster. I've never done it before because globular clusters are boring: they are, as the name implies, just a glob of stars.

Still, they're some of the oldest stars in the galaxy. The cluster below is M5, aka the globular cluster in Serpens. It contains about 100,000 stars (out of 100 billion in the galaxy) and is about 10 billion years old. The bright star in the upper left is known as 5 Serpentis. It's a close star, only about 80 light years away (M5 itself is more than 20,000 light years from us).

I may try this one again someday. I cut the exposure time to 2 minutes per frame, but that might still have been too much. I also imaged it for only 90 minutes. It might be better with a shorter exposure to resolve the stars better and a much larger stack to resolve out the noise and (possibly) bring out the star colors better.

The Senate passed an aid bill today for Ukraine and Israel (and Taiwan). Mitch McConnell hopes that Speaker Mike Johnson will allow the House to vote on it:

Mitch McConnell in an interview Tuesday urged Speaker Mike Johnson to allow a vote on Ukraine aid, though the Senate minority leader said he would not be “so presumptuous as to tell him how to do it.”

....“We’ve heard all kinds of rumors about whether the House supports Ukraine or doesn’t. It seems to me that the easy way to solve that would be to vote. And I hope the speaker will find a way to allow the House to work its will on the issue of Ukraine aid and the other parts of the bill as well,” McConnell said.

So far Johnson has suggested he'll block consideration, which means Republicans will have refused to pass an aid bill that includes immigration reforms and refused to pass an aid bill that doesn't include immigration reforms.

Mickey Kaus suggests passing an aid bill that includes one, single immigration reform that's a plain and unmistakable win for the right. Nothing complicated. I myself would be in favor of that if the single reform were passage of nationwide mandatory E-Verify along with effective funding and enforcement.¹ This is because it's simple, it would work, and I support it anyway.

This would lose some Democratic votes, of course, but ironically, it would probably also lose some Republican votes since the business community doesn't like E-Verify. That's because they know it would work, and they don't really want anything that works.² They're willing to tolerate lots of right-wing threats and blather, but only as long as they don't do anything that would truly put their flow of cheap foreign labor at risk.

Also, of course, I assume the House wouldn't accept even a simple carrot like E-Verify since they've made it clear that they don't actually want any immigration reform until Donald Trump is in office.³

¹I'd also like to see funding for more asylum judges since that seems like such a simple and obvious measure. But if I only get one thing in the name of simplicity, I'd choose E-Verify.

²Although the Chamber of Commerce supports it, so....

³Although who knows? They might change their tune when the January immigration numbers are released. I suspect they're going to be well under the December record. If Republicans start to fear that the immigration surge at the border is waning, which would rob them of an issue, they might be more willing to deal.

LZ Granderson writes about housing in the LA Times today:

There is another migrant crisis brewing. Unlike the one at the southern border, this one will be all over the country.

A recent Harvard study found that half of the country’s renters are spending a third or more of their income on housing.... Combine the rent line item with the soaring cost of child care, and don’t forget groceries, and … well, you can understand why evictions have spiked and homelessness has reached a record high.

The "Harvard study" in question always predicts an eviction crisis now that the COVID-era moratoriums have been lifted. But it keeps not happening. There are no reliable nationwide figures for evictions, but here are the results from the past couple of years of the Census Bureau's Pulse survey:

There's no spike and the trend is downward. Unfortunately, the most recent Pulse survey is from October, but there's no special reason to think the past three months have suddenly spiked upward. On the contrary, as even the Harvard study says, the rental market has cooled recently. Combine that with rising incomes, especially among the poor, and there's nothing to see.

It's time to ditch the eviction hysteria. Rents did increase during the pandemic, and the rental market is a tough one for low-income workers. But they aren't being evicted at unusual rates.

POSTSCRIPT: And while we're at it, can we also put a stake in the lazy canard that child care costs have skyrocketed? It's not hard to get the real numbers:

Since just before the pandemic, child care costs have risen less than overall inflation and considerably less than wages, especially wages among the lowest paid workers.

This doom mongering stuff is so tiresome. It gets repeated over and over and over based on nothing but vibes. Or something. It sure isn't based on facts.

The BLS reported CPI inflation of 3.7% in January. Core CPI was higher at 4.8%:

Inflation has been ticking upward for the past three months, though it remains relatively restrained.

On a year-over-year basis, CPI clocked in at 3.1% and core CPI came in at 3.9%.

Vox joins the disturbing trend of news outlets that insist on finding disturbing trends everywhere:

Car crashes are killing too many young Africans like Kelvin Kiptum.... His death reflects a broader epidemic of preventable car crash deaths in the Global South — a pattern that has intensified in recent years.... Last year, the World Health Organization reported that traffic fatalities had increased by 17 percent in Africa over the past 10 years.

WHO reported a 17% increase from 2010-2021. During that period Africa's population grew 32%. Per capita traffic deaths decreased by 11%.

It would be great to cut down on traffic deaths in Africa and everywhere else. But come on. Not everything has to be a news hook for some specious trend.

Bob Somerby objects to my headline saying that Donald Trump "is losing it":

We're sorry, but no. Donald Trump isn't "losing it" at the present time. He plainly lost it long ago, but our politically hapless blue tribe doesn't seem to know how to convince enough voters of that fact, and so we've decided to go with a big pile of ridiculous bullsh*t.

Two things. First, Trump really is deteriorating even compared to his previously sorry state. Second, this is poetic license. Sure, Trump lost it long ago, but "Trump continues to have lost it" isn't much of a headline, is it?

Beyond this, there's a political purpose here. It's fairly obvious that our biggest problem is that people aren't scared enough of Trump. Think of it this way. Half the Republican base is MAGA fans who actively like Trump's message of retribution and revenge. They're untouchable. But there's another half that like Trump's policies but not his message. They say this all the time. The problem is that they don't take it seriously. They think, with some justice, that Trump is a blowhard and none of the bile that he spews is serious.

So they fear Democrats and their endless identity politics, and they fear Biden's obvious appearance of oldness, but they don't fear Trump. That has to change. There's not much to be done at this point about either Biden's appearance or the wilder precincts of liberal wokeness, so the only way to defeat Trump is to make center-right voters more scared of him than they are of Democrats. I'm not precisely sure how to do that, but one way is to keep banging on what he says until swing voters take it seriously and realize they really can't put the country in his hands again.

So that's what we need to do, even if it's not precisely accurate to say that Trump is only now losing it. One way or another, Trump's moderate fans need to start fearing him the way they should.

Ten years ago California banned lightweight single-use plastic bags in supermarkets. Since then, the gross tonnage of plastic bag waste has increased 47%.

Huh? Long story short, supermarkets switched to heavyweight plastic bags that are theoretically reusable but not really. These bags are about three times heavier than old school thin plastic bags, so even though fewer of them are used their total weight is higher than before.

The lesson is either (a) beware of unintended consequences or (b) never listen to industry lobbyists even when they seem to be sincere. Take your pick.

You may have heard about the atmospheric river that recently passed over Southern California and flooded the whole place. It also dumped lots of snow on our mountains, and Saturday was a beautiful, clear day to capture them. This picture was taken a few minutes walk from my house.

Here was Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago when an American base was attacked by an Iranian proxy drone:

This brazen attack on the United States is yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender…. This attack would NEVER have happened if I was President.... This terrible day is yet more proof that we need an immediate return to PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.

Hmmm. Remember this?

President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.

As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike.... Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.

That was our tough guy president in 2019. Trump talks a big game. In real life he's just another blowhard.

In the past few days and weeks, Donald Trump has:

1. Pointed at Matt Gaetz and repeatedly called him Rick Gates.
2. Confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.
3. Claimed that Obama was still president.
4. Said that Russia should feel free to attack NATO if they "don't pay."
5. Posted an endless stream of unhinged rants on Truth Social.
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6. Snidely asked why Nikki Haley's husband is never around (he's stationed overseas).
7. Explicitly told Republicans to kill an immigration bill so things would stay chaotic during his presidential campaign.
8. Confused E. Jean Carroll with Marla Maples, his ex-wife.
9. Asserted that the United States is "an institute in a powerful death penalty," whatever that means.
10. Said that Viktor Orbán is the head of Turkey (he's the prime minister of Hungary).
11. Claimed that Jeb Bush started the Iraq war.
12. Said that Nancy Pelosi started the January 6 insurrection.
13. Insisted that he never endorsed James Lankford (he did).

I know how dispiriting it would be if the presidential campaign devolved into a battle over which candidate is the worst dotard. But it's absurd to obsess over Joe Biden's age just because a partisan special counsel decided to cover his ass by highlighting a couple of occasions where Biden momentarily couldn't remember a date.

It's true that Biden looks old and has trouble enunciating certain sounds. But look below the surface. Every personal report about Biden is the same: he's engaged, knowledgeable, lucid, and in charge.

By contrast, we've heard an endless stream of personal reports about Donald Trump's behavior when he was in office, and they were also all the same: he watches a lot of TV, can't be bothered to do any reading, flies off the handle routinely, and lacks understanding of even simple issues. This comes from Republican loyalists who worked directly with him. Adjectives include: unhinged, idiot, off the rails (John Kelly), has the understanding of a fifth grader (Jim Mattis); racist, misogynist and bigot (Omarosa Manigault Newman); dumb as shit (Gary Cohn); dope, intelligence of a kindergartner (H.R. McMaster); wholly unfit to be in office, the most divisive president in history (Cassidy Hutchinson); idiot (Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus); like an 11-year-old-child (Steve Bannon); moron (Rex Tillerson); detached from reality, shouldn't be anywhere near the Oval Office (Bill Barr); fucking liar (John Dowd); threatens our democracy (Mark Esper); laughing fool (John Bolton); failed at being the president (Mick Mulvaney); utter disgrace (Tom Bossert); racist, conman, cheat (Michael Cohen); wholly unfit to hold office ever again (Sarah Matthews); has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself (Ty Cobb); shown time and time again that he's willing to put his political ambitions ahead of what's best for the country (Alyssa Farah Griffin); doing great and irreparable harm to my country (Gen. Mark Milley); undermine[d] a peaceful transition in accordance with our Constitution (Gen. Joseph Dunford); threat to democracy (Miles Taylor); very little understanding of what it means to be in the military (Richard Spencer); off the rails, crazy, nihilistic (Anthony Scaramucci); cares about no one but himself (Stephanie Grisham); absolutely failed (Elizabeth Neumann); flat-out disregard for human life (Olivia Troye); has no principles. None. None. (Maryanne Berry Trump); fucking maniac (Mary Trump).

How much clearer can things get?