Kevin Drum

COVID-19 is on the rise:

Test positivity is at about half the level of the big Omicron surge in January 2022. The good news is that thanks to the high rate of vaccinations and previous infections, the death rate from COVID remains pretty low:

Keep in mind that "low" is relative. COVID-19 continues to kill five times more people than the flu. Y'all stay safe out there.

H-1B visas are issued to skilled workers. The vast majority go to people with bachelor's or master's degrees, with a heavy tilt toward tech fields. Only 85,000 are admitted each year, but anyone can apply who wants to—and lately there are lots of people want to: The number of applications to work in the US has nearly quadrupled since 2020. We are apparently still the land of opportunity.

This is hardly the craziest thing Donald Trump said today in Iowa, but it struck me because I happen to live in California:

[Joe Biden] never sticks up for Washington. You know, they've taken the name George Washington off many schools. Can you believe it, the name George Washington is coming down from many schools, many in California.

This is not even remotely true. One (1) school in California, Berkeley's Washington Elementary, is slated to be renamed because Washington was a slaveowner. That's it.

San Francisco considered renaming Washington High School in 2021 but ditched the idea within a couple of weeks. And Washington Middle School in Pasadena was renamed a couple of years ago, but it had nothing to do with disapproval of George Washington. It got a new name to honor the late science fiction novelist Octavia Butler, who grew up in Pasadena and attended the school.

POSTSCRIPT: As for Biden "never sticking up for Washington," this is just fantasy. Trump was referring to Biden's speech earlier today at Valley Forge, which was almost embarrassingly hagiographic toward Washington. I think Biden's paean managed to include practically every notable Washington cliche this side of the cherry tree.

Here's the address on democracy that Joe Biden delivered today. It's about half an hour long. Go ahead and watch the whole thing and then tell me if Biden seems cognitively limited. There are a few minor stutters here and there, but cognitively he's fine.

Skip ahead to 5:30 if you want to get directly to his attacks on Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election. For example, there was this about all the court cases: "The legal path just took Trump back to the truth: I won the election and he was a loser." Or, on Trump's laughter about the assault on Paul Pelosi: "What a sick—" with the f-word only barely left unsaid. Or: "When he visited a cemetery, he called dead soldiers suckers and losers."

Let's check in on what Republicans are saying these days:

Donald Trump, about 40 times over the course of a single hour: "Except for a Fraudulent Case against me, I had no idea who E. Jean Carroll was. She called her African American Husband an ‘ape,’ and named her Cat ‘Vagina.’ Look at her Tweets, Stories, and the CNN Interview about her. The Judge on the Case is another Highly Partisan Clinton-Appointed Friend. He should have recused himself long ago!"

Trump lawyer Alina Habba on Trump's insurrection case before the Supreme Court: "You know, people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up. Those people will step up."

Rep. Troy Nehls (R–Texas), who supports increased border security: "Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating."

Fox News prime time wit Greg Gutfeld: "It's almost three years to the day since January 6 and Biden is still flapping his toothless gums about it. Probably since it's also the date of his last solid bowel movement."

Charlie is still restricted to the house, but Hilbert gets let out occasionally just to confirm that he's the senior cat around here. He looks like a cat on a mission in this picture, and his mission was: find Marian and tell her to stop gardening and instead pay attention to Hilbert.

The Justice Department is nearing the end of its long pondering about whether to sue Apple over antitrust issues:

Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple’s payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services.

....The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products. Rivals have said that they have been denied access to key Apple features, like the Siri virtual assistant, prompting them to argue the practices are anticompetitive.

These kinds of actions aren't illegal per se but they are illegal if you have a monopoly in the market, so the key to all this is whether Apple is a monopoly. Here is Apple's market share of the smartphone market:

Apple has controlled more than half of the smartphone market for the past decade and currently has about 57% market share. Is that enough to brand them as a monopoly? It's lower than IBM's share of the mainframe market while it was being sued for similar bundling practices, but not a lot less—so I'd say yes. But obviously Apple will argue otherwise.

It's finally time to check in on the prediction of weak holiday hiring by the National Retail Federation. With December numbers finally in, how did we do?

In one sense, the NRF was wrong. They projected 345-445,000 retail workers would be hired, a 40% decrease from 2021. In reality, hiring was nowhere near that bad. It came in at 564,000, down only 11%.

On the other hand, hiring was clearly weaker than the non-recession average of the past couple of decades. In fact, aside from the recession years of 2008-09, it was the second weakest holiday hiring season since 2000.

Overall, I'd say the NRF was too pessimistic, but nonetheless pessimism was the right call. Holiday hiring wasn't disastrous, but it was still fairly bad.

A few miscellaneous thoughts on former Harvard president Claudine Gay:

• An awful lot of conservatives have attacked Gay as unqualified for the Harvard presidency because she isn't an academic star. This is crazy. Presidents of R1 universities aren't hired for their academics. They're hired to raise money and run the place. Big university presidents aren't commonly academic stars.
• On the other side, a lot of liberals are agog that Christopher Rufo publicly explained his strategy to target universities generally and to get Gay fired specifically, but everyone fell for it anyway. But politicos on both the left and right do this all the time and then crow when they succeed. It's not as if it's a big mystery anyway. Everyone knows which side supports what stuff.
• There's nothing new to this attack on universities. Conservatives have been gunning for academia for the past 60 years, ever since academia broadly turned from being conservative to liberal. Remember William F. Buckley's famous comment, “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty"? That was in 1961.
• There's a narrative on the left that Gay was attacked not primarily for plagiarism but because she's a Black woman. Gay herself nods in this direction. This is supposed to be part of a broad attack on women and minorities in positions of power, and that might be true. But I'd sure like to see some evidence.
• It doesn't matter if Gay's plagiarism was uncovered by conservatives with ulterior motives. That happens all the time with whistleblowers. What matters is whether they uncovered something true. In this case they did, though I continue to have doubts about whether sentence-level copying should be such a big deal.
• Computers make it fairly easy to search documents for potential plagiarism. I would like to see this done for all the dissertations and publications of every president of an R1 university—or maybe even more broadly than that. I'm curious whether Gay's plagiarism really is an outlier.

Today's jobs report also included wage data for blue-collar workers. Adjusted for inflation, weekly wages were up 0.9% from last year and down -0.5% from last month (at an annualized rate):

As usual, this can be interpreted as good news. If wages are under control it should reassure the Fed that inflation is moderate and interest rates can be eased. Maybe.