Kevin Drum

Joe Biden's press secretary says he is "constantly working every day to get things done." National Review's Charles Cooke isn't buying it:

This line reflects unmitigated contempt for her audience — which, given KJP’s job, is the entire American public. She knows what she’s saying isn’t true. And she knows that everyone knows that what she’s saying isn’t true. 77 percent of Americans — including 69 percent of Democrats — believe that Joe Biden is “too old to be effective for four more years.” They believe that because they can see it. Of course Biden is not hard to keep up with. Of course Biden is not constantly working every day. He’s barely alive. Who, exactly, are these lies supposed to move?

The level of Cooke's invective is both astounding and offensive. It's one thing to say that Biden is 80 years old and not exactly bouncing around on a trapeze all day. Nor does he have a youngster's silver tongue. But he's plainly cogent and plainly busy, as conservatives implicitly acknowledge all the time when they complain about his nearly daily flood of legislative proposals, executive orders, and progressive announcements of one sort or another. Hell, the man is so busy doing stuff they hate that House Republicans want to impeach him.

Here is an excerpt from Franklin Foer's book about Biden's first two years in office. The subject is former ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass, who led the evacuation effort when we withdrew:

Biden would shower Bass with ideas to evacuate more people. “The president’s instinct was to throw himself into the intricacies of troubleshooting,” Foer writes. “‘Why don’t we have them meet in parking lots? Can’t we leave the airport and pick them up?’ Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low. Still, he appreciated Biden applying pressure, making sure that he didn’t overlook the obvious.”

I get it. Politics ain't beanbag, and conservatives will use whatever's at hand to gain an advantage. But I haven't seen or heard one single report from inside the White House about Biden not being able to keep up with a normal presidential schedule. In fact, Biden runs just about the most buttoned-up White House in recent memory.

We don't need a hyperactive president. We just need one who has good judgment and stays on top of things. Biden easily qualifies on both counts.

For your amusement here are some details about consumer spending in the second quarter of the year. This chart shows the 15 biggest gainers and losers compared to the first quarter:

We started buying eggs again! Sports and air transportation were up considerably too. The biggest loser, for some reason, was audio discs and downloads. Day care, clothing, and used cars were also down.

NOTE: I ignored some obscure stuff like sales commissions and auto leases in favor of ordinary categories that everyone has heard of. As always, click the chart to see a bigger version.

Brian Merchant defends the Luddites:

They were not opposed to progress, and certainly not to technology; most were skilled technicians themselves, who spent their days working on machines at home or in small shops. It is true that the Luddites hammered certain machines to pieces, but it wasn’t technology itself they were protesting — it was the bosses that were using those machines to cut their pay and shepherd them into factories.

That sure seems like a distinction without a difference to me. Merchant is saying that the Luddites didn't oppose new technology, they merely opposed other people using new technology in ways they disliked. OK.

It turns out this is all in service of defending modern writers who are outraged because ChatGPT has been trained on their books:

The reason that, 200 years later, so many creative workers are angry and unnerved by AI is not that they fear it will become so good, so powerful that they may as well up and quit writing, drawing, or acting. It’s that, like the Luddites, they are painfully aware how bosses will use AI against them. To most working authors (and artists, screenwriters, illustrators, and so on) the fear over AI is not philosophical; it is economic, and it is existential.

The only way that bosses can use AI against writers is if AI, in fact, becomes so good and so powerful that it performs as well as humans. There's really no difference here.

In any case, the writers are supposedly put out by the fact that ChatGPT and similar apps have been trained on their copyrighted works. But so what? Copyright is just what it sounds like: it prevents you from copying a work and selling it without permission. It doesn't prevent you from reading a book and reviewing it, even if you haven't purchased it. Likewise, it doesn't prevent either a human or a computer from ingesting a work in order to index it or summarize it or do research with it.

ChatGPT cannot spit out a copy of a book upon demand. Or, if it can, it can be legally enjoined from doing so. But merely reading a book in order to get better at its job? There's nothing either wrong or illegal about that.

Here's the latest from Russia:

Russia has got to be the whiniest warmonger in history. They are constantly "accusing" Ukraine of one thing or another, as if it were somehow unfair that they're fighting back.

It's a war, Vladimir, and you started it. Don't try to act offended because Ukraine is trying to win.

Consumer spending accelerated to an annualized growth rate of 7.7% in July:

Spending growth was up 3.0% from a year ago. This is all good news for soft landing fans, since it suggests that consumer spending remains healthy even as the rest of the economy slows a bit.

I've mentioned before that consumer spending almost never goes down, even during recessions, so don't take this news too seriously. If we do end up entering a recession, spending is likely to stay strong right up until the minute growth turns down.

For the second month in a row, PCE inflation stayed below 3%:

Both core and headline PCE came in at 2.6% on a month-over-month basis. On a year-over-year basis, headline PCE was 3.3% and core inflation was 4.2%.

Core PCE, which is the Fed's favored measure, shows every sign of being well under 3% on a steady basis. It's at 2.9% over the past three months. If this holds up, the Fed's inflation fighting job is done.

POSTSCRIPT: I notice that our nation's news media barely even reported this. When inflation is up, it's big news. When it's down they can hardly be bothered to take notice.

This is the Southern California shoreline around Santa Monica near sunset. I took it out of the airplane window on our flight out of LAX to France last year.

When Janet Protasiewicz ran for a seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, she campaigned on an explicit promise to reconsider the state's egregiously gerrymandered legislative map. Voters approved and swept her into office by a wide margin.

This gave Democrats a majority on the court, which means there's a chance of drawing fair districts after years of Republican abuse. Naturally this has infuriated Republicans in the legislature, who are now threatening to impeach Protasiewicz. This would be nothing more than blather except for one thing: Republicans hold a supermajority in the state Senate and might actually be able to pull it off.

How is it possible for Republicans to have such a huge majority in a state that elected a Democratic governor in 2018; voted for Joe Biden in 2020; and overwhelmingly chose a Democrat for the Supreme Court just a couple of months ago? That's easy: state Senate districts are wildly gerrymandered.

It's the circle of life. Gerrymandering gives you the power to keep everything gerrymandered. End the gerrymander, and you lose the power to gerrymander. Funny how that works.

A few weeks ago Rudy Giuliani entered a stipulation in a defamation case against him from two Georgia election workers. The stipulation stated that he had indeed said false things about them, but it was followed by a bizarre effort to claim that the stipulation didn't really mean he had said anything wrong. He was just doing it to save money. Or something.

Today a federal judge, tired of his antics, told Giuliani to pound sand:

The ruling by the judge, Beryl A. Howell in Federal District Court in Washington, means that the defamation case against Mr. Giuliani, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after his election loss, can proceed to trial on the narrow question of how much, if any, damages he will have to pay the plaintiffs in the case.

....Judge Howell’s decision to effectively skip the fact-finding stage of the defamation case and move straight to an assessment of damages came after a protracted struggle by Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss to force Mr. Giuliani to turn over evidence they believed they deserved as part of the discovery process.

....“Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straightforward defamation case,” Judge Howell wrote.

The remedy for all of this, she added, was that Mr. Giuliani would have to pay nearly $90,000 in legal fees Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had incurred and would suffer a default judgment on the central issue of whether he had defamed the women.

I think it's safe to say Giuliani defamed the two election workers with extreme prejudice, and it's good to see that he's going to have to pay the piper for doing it. The MAGA clowns need to learn that they can't just say anything they want and not suffer any consequences for it. If you publicly claim that someone pulled thousands of votes out of a suitcase, it's libel unless they actually did pull thousands of votes out of a suitcase.

Which they didn't. They deserve whatever they end up getting from Giuliani.

Nonfinancial corporate profits remained elevated in Q2 but were flat compared to Q1:

The pandemic turned out to be great for corporations, if for no one else, but the last few quarters have shown a slow decline since profits peaked in mid-2022. I wouldn't be surprised to see a further decline in Q3.