Kevin Drum

What is Trump even saying here?

On his good days, Trump is still fine. On his bad days he can barely string two sentences together.

Still, his meaning is clear: America is going completely to hell. It's doom porn. For some reason, there's a big audience of people who just can't get enough of this stuff. Like Ted Johnson, who was profiled today in Politico:

“People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”

What's remarkable is this description of Johnson:

He’s 58. He’s married to his second wife and has three young adult sons. He was in the Army for 22 years — he retired as a lieutenant colonel — and now he is a senior project manager for an IT security company and works from home. He lives in a classic three-bedroom house he bought almost four years ago for $485,000 that’s now worth roughly a quarter-million dollars more.

This is not some discouraged working class guy who lost his job to outsourcing and has never been able to recover. Johnson is married, upper middle class, makes good money, and lives in a nice, safe small town where almost everyone has a college degree. But after watching Fox News he went from thinking he'd vote for Nikki Haley to being a die-hard Trump supporter. Because Democrats are destroying the country and someone has to take a wrecking ball to it before we can rebuild.

I know that not everyone is as well off as me. Still, it's just a fact that the vast majority of Americans are in pretty good shape and the country as a whole is as strong as any country in the world. The burning desire among many conservatives and liberals to believe that everything is horrible—and getting worse—is nothing short of inexplicable.

How many people were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally in December? We don't know yet because CBP hasn't yet released its monthly update.

Why? Literally on January 1st there were news reports saying that border apprehensions reached a record 300,000 in December. This was based on "internal government data," which isn't really a surprise since CBP keeps daily counts for its own use. They could routinely release the monthly numbers on the first of the month if they felt like it.

But not only do they not do this, it's actually taking them longer and longer to publish each month's figures. Because I'm a huge dork, I herewith present a chart showing the day of the month that border numbers are released:

As you can see, CBP used to release updates around the tenth of each month. Then, in mid-2021, the releases got later and later until they were coming out a full week later on average.

I say "on average" because CBP has no published schedule for these releases. They basically appear randomly between the 14th and 24th of the month.

Now, you might wonder why I care. It's not as if anything important hinges on this, after all. And that's totally fair. It's just that as a numbers nerd it offends me that CBP is so sloppy with this stuff. What's the explanation?

POSTSCRIPT: Do you wish this chart went further back? Of course you do! The reason it doesn't is that CBP, for reasons known only to God and its comms shop, provides access to press releases only from the current administration. So February 2021 is the earliest they have. (I tracked down a few miscellaneous ones from 2020, but that was all I could find.)

They do have an archive from previous administrations. But it doesn't work. That is, it literally does nothing. No matter what you do, it presents you with the last few press releases of the Trump administration and that's it. Your tax dollars at work.

A couple of years ago I tossed out a perfectly good printer. It was an HP, and I had signed up for their Instant Ink "subscription" service, which allows you to print a set number of pages for a flat monthly fee. This caused some problems, so I canceled it. But that bricked my printer because I was no longer paying for continued use of the ink cartridges already in it. Then, when I tried to replace the ink cartridges with non-HP cartridges, it became permanently bricked because HP doesn't allow this. There was more to this whole sorry tale, but I'll spare you the details. In the end, I was so pissed I got rid of the printer and resolved never to buy another HP product in my life.

I'm reminded of this today because I learned about this laughable explanation for HP's policy:

Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company's controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink. Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, "We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network."

As this Ars Technica piece points out, HP's policy of prohibiting third-party cartridges started in 2016 but it wasn't until 2022 that they found this alleged vulnerability. What's more, it's a highly theoretical hack that's never been seen in the real world. And it's doubtful it could do any real damage anyway. And HP fixed the bug shortly after they found it. But they continue to claim that third-party cartridges are unsafe. This is highly unlikely—and anyway, as Ars Technica says, "Its response is to inconvenience customers rather than beef up HP printers to be invulnerable to remote code execution via ink cartridges."

What a crock of shit. I don't expect everyone to be as peeved as I am over HP's rigid ink policies, but this kind of corporate deceit displays a contempt for its customers that no one should have to put up with.

We have some sensible news out of the Supreme Court today:

The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration on Monday and cleared the way for border patrol agents to remove razor wire Texas officials installed along a busy stretch of the southern border until the legality of the barriers is resolved in court.

I don't have any strong opinions about exactly what kind of barrier we should have along our southern border. But no matter your own thoughts on this, it seems open and shut that border protection is up to the federal government, not the states. And yet a district court, an appellate court, and four Supreme Court justices disagreed. The Supreme Court's order in the government's favor was a bare 5-4.

So: sensible news, but only barely.

Here are a few charts that I created for no real reason. I was just fiddling around. The first shows real GDP per worker hour:

I tossed in a few big inventions just to drive home the point that practically nothing affects the growth rate of productivity more than a tiny bit. However, it's not quite the same if you look at GDP per worker:

The period from 1973 to 1982 was dead flat. We eventually made up for it, but not another 20 years.

Finally, here's a comparison of GDP with corporate profits:

For 50 years after World War II, corporate profits (adjusted for inflation) grew at a rate of 2% per year. Then, starting in the early 90s, profits suddenly took off, growing at a rate of more than 4% per year.

What happened in 1993 to cause this? In only 30 years corporate profits per hour worked have tripled. That's quite a trick.

Here's another one of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. This one is called Cliff Palace, and you can see a tour group at center right. But I didn't have a reservation and probably couldn't have made the hike down there anyway. So a long distance view at midday is all I got.

Kevin Morris, a wealthy friend of Hunter Biden, was recently forced to testify behind closed doors before the House Oversight Committee, led by serial liar and attack dog James Comer. As usual, after Morris finished his testimony Comer immediately released an absurdly deceitful "readout" of his testimony.

Both Philip Bump and Steve Benen have reported on this. Both write at length about Comer's track record with this kind of thing, but because they work for serious media organizations they feel obligated to say that maybe, just maybe, Comer isn't lying this time.

That's absolutely the responsible thing to do. But I don't work for anyone, so I have no obligation to join in this nonsense. Comer is lying, period. He's been lying for months about Hunter Biden and he's still lying. Literally everyone knows this. Republicans adopted a strategy of immediately releasing deceptive summaries of interviews back in the Benghazi days, knowing that by the time a transcript was available—if ever—no one would care anymore. The Fox hits would have long since shaped the discourse. Bill Barr put this tactic to famous use in his insta-summary of the Mueller investigation.

We all know that Hunter Biden traded on his name, but he otherwise did nothing worth more than a misdemeanor charge. He's now under federal indictment for felonies solely because the special prosecutor caved into intense pressure from Republicans. As for Joe Biden, he's literally done nothing wrong and everyone knows this too. But that doesn't stop scum like Comer and never will.

I know I'm tiresome on this point, but this is your regular reminder that the stock market did not, in fact, break any records today—regardless of what the Wall Street Journal mindlessly regurgitates. Here is the S&P 500:

The S&P 500 peaked in late 2021, fell throughout 2022, and has not yet made up that loss. It still has about 300 points to go before setting a genuine record.

Atrios today:

You can't expect people to get excited about modest improvements, even if they are improvements. One can accept the very real constraints of our political system — even, perhaps, understand them — while also wondering why it is the apparent outer limit of what Biden wants.

I don't get this. Biden took office and immediately passed a gigantic $1.9 trillion spending bill that included a historic increase to the Child Tax Credit. He tried to pass a multi-trillion dollar BBB package that was probably the most ambitious social spending proposal since the New Deal. It failed only because Congress couldn't come together—and eventually because of Joe Manchin. Biden withdrew completely from Afghanistan despite strong pressure to leave troops there. He ordered a huge student loan relief, which failed only because the Supreme Court killed it. He has been absolutely steadfast in his support of Ukraine and Israel—for better or worse. He has appointed 165 judges, 90% of whom are not white males.

Whatever else you can say about Biden, he's shown that his outer limits are pretty far out there. He hasn't succeeded at everything, but he's pushed the envelope pretty hard.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, my beef isn't with the notion that most people don't know what Biden has done. Of course not. It's specifically with the claim that Biden hasn't even tried to do anything big.

The Republican primary is now officially a two-person race: Trump vs. Nikki Haley. But Trump is ahead by 15 points in the New Hampshire polls and by 30+ points in South Carolina and Nevada.

It's Trump vs. Biden in November, just like it's been all along. Assuming nobody drops dead, of course.