Kevin Drum

Over at the Free Press, the editors use the LA wildfires as an excuse to run that most tedious of genres: how California went from being great to being a progressive hellhole that spends all its money on woke frivolities:

But they’ve neglected the basics: crime (the murder rate is up more than 15 percent since Newsom took office); public education (per-pupil spending has gone up under Newsom even as test scores have plummeted); and now firefighting. The Pacific Palisades fire alone has consumed some 17,000 acres as of this writing. The whole island of Manhattan is 14,000 acres.

As usual, all of this is untrue. Here's crime:

California's violent crime rate is lower than the national average and has been since 1996—about the time that California turned solidly blue.

On education, you have to disaggregate by race to see what's going on. Here are state rankings on the NAEP reading test for white, Black, and Hispanic students:

California is above average everywhere. Finally, here are natural disasters:

It's ridiculous to rate states on natural disasters, which obviously depend on geography and climate, but I'm including it since the FP brought it up. The most disaster prone states are places like Texas, Florida, and, yes, California, but that's only because they're big. Adjust for population to get a true picture and they all look pretty good.

Are conservatives ever going to tire of playing this juvenile game? California is fine. It has its problems, just like any state, but the main one is a housing shortage and the related epidemic of homelessness. Go ahead and criticize on that score if you have to. But leave the rest of the nonsense for Fox News.

The American economy gained 256,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 166,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.1%.

There were no gotchas in the December report. Employment was up and unemployment was down. It was a very solid holiday season.

Apparently the Trumpies don't plan to bother making even a pretense of following the law:

And they really are looking. Immigration hardcase Stephen Miller is in charge of this operation, and even before COVID hit he apparently tried to use a minor outbreak of mumps to justify a border shutdown. That didn't fly, so he and his allies have moved on:

They have looked at tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases as options and have asked allies inside the Border Patrol for examples of illnesses that are being detected among migrants.

....[Miller] said the new administration intended to use the law, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.V. and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”

They aren't being creative enough. Colds can be dangerous, after all. Shingles, ebola, HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, syphilis, bubonic plague, West Nile, zika, measles, MRSA, bird flu. Pretty much anything will do. All you have to do is convince a judge in the eastern district of Texas, right?

Donald Trump has lost his last appeal. He will be sentenced tomorrow in his hush money/business fraud case and officially become the first convicted felon to hold the US presidency.

The LA wildfires are already the third costliest fire disaster in recent history:

The current estimate of around $55 billion is almost certain to increase, which will place LA in second place all time. That's in three days. The only bigger disaster, the 2019 Australian bushfires, lasted five months.

The Laken Riley Act requires ICE to detain illegal immigrants who have committed theft, burglary, or shoplifting. I suppose that's fine. But the Republicans who wrote the bill weren't satisfied with just that:

The bill also authorizes state governments to sue for injunctive relief over certain immigration-related decisions or alleged failures by the federal government if the decision or failure caused the state or its residents harm, including financial harm of more than $100. Specifically, the state government may sue the federal government over a

• decision to release a non-U.S. national from custody;
• failure to fulfill requirements relating to inspecting individuals seeking admission into the United States, including requirements related to asylum interviews;
• failure to fulfill a requirement to stop issuing visas to nationals of a country that unreasonably denies or delays acceptance of nationals of that country;
• violation of limitations on immigration parole, such as the requirement that parole be granted only on a case-by-case basis; or
• failure to detain an individual who has been ordered removed from the United States.

"Financial harm of more than $100" is essentially an open door for state attorney generals to sue the federal government over any immigration policy they dislike.

"Non-U.S. national" includes legal as well as illegal immigrants.

"Stop issuing visas" means an end to legal immigration from unfriendly regimes—some of which are the most politically repressive countries around.

"Case-by-case basis" puts a stop to humanitarian parole programs for countries like Ukraine, Cuba, Haiti, and others. It also could mean the end of DREAMers, who are technically illegal immigrants allowed en masse to stay in the country.

All of this is just vague enough to make it unclear what the law would actually do. But it would certainly go far beyond the detainment of illegal immigrants convicted of theft. That's the bumper sticker Republicans are selling, but it's pretty far from the whole story.

It's almost always a bad idea to vote for a bill named after a person. That's probably the case here as well.

Sunset over the Mojave Desert.

Apparently the Fed has grown a little skeptical of inflation indexes that rely partly on "imputed" measures of things like rent. Instead, they're starting to look at pure market-based indexes:

This is a 3-month rolling average, partly just to smooth things out and partly because it's my favored measure. In November, the plain old monthly number stood at 1.6%. Core market-based PCE was at 1.4%.

On a year-over year basis, market-based PCE was 2.0% in November. Core market-based PCE was at 2.4%.

If this is truly a better way of measuring underlying inflation, it's yet more evidence that inflation is well and truly over.

Here's the latest from Elon Musk about the LA wildfires:

Every single thing on this list is either badly misleading or flat-out wrong:

1. Reservoirs and emergency water tanks were all full before the fires started.
2. The fire budget was increased by $50 million.
3. The donations to Ukraine were in 2022 and included only small amounts of unused surplus equipment such as boots, hoses, nozzles, body armor and medication. None of this had any impact on current fire fighting.
4. A grand total of 12 LAFD workers were fired for neither getting a COVID vaccine nor requesting an exemption. They have long since been replaced.
5. Brush clearing is problematic for sure, but I'm not sure who "they" is in this sentence.
6. California has a poor record of doing prescribed burns. That said, only the US Forest Service—not California—halted prescribed burns temporarily in October. Everyone else, including Cal Fire, the US Park Service, BLM, native tribes, and private property owners, kept on burning. Overall, California burns about 125,000 acres per year and increased that to 250,000 acres in 2023 with plans to burn 400,000 acres in 2025.
   
7. Storm water has always drained primarily to the sea in order to prevent flooding, especially in rainy years that produce too much water to be captured. However, a significant amount is captured to recharge groundwater aquifers, and that amount has been growing ever since LA voters approved a tax levy in 2018 that goes toward storm water capture projects.

As for climate change: yes, virtually all of the increase in California wildfires is due to warming. There's overwhelming evidence for this. Here's the conclusion of a recent study:

It was found that nearly all the observed increase in burned areas over the past half-century is due to human-caused climate change. It is estimated that from 1971 to 2021, human-caused climate change contributed to a +172% increase in burned areas, with a +320% increase from 1996 to 2021. In the coming decades, a further increase in annual forest burned areas is expected, ranging from 3% to 52%.

This is what Musk has become: a machine for reposting red meat for the MAGA base that he almost certainly knows to be bogus.

But he doesn't care. In addition to having an audience about a thousand times the size of mine, it took him only five seconds to repost that comment. It took me two hours to write this one. It's not possible to keep up with his firehose of lies and misinformation.

Another note about the Pacific Palisades fire. You may have seen pictures of roads choked with cars and wondered why there wasn't better evacuation planning. Maybe there should have been, but here's what the Palisades looks like:

There just aren't very many ways out. Aside from tiny Bowdoin St., there's Sunset Boulevard running through the middle and Pacific Coast Highway to the south. That's pretty much it. In the event of a massive evacuation, there just aren't many options for moving a lot of people to safety.

But it's worth noting that, despite some apparent mistakes, they got everyone out. Not a single person died during the evacuation.