Kevin Drum

David Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years, ever since Donald Trump appointed him US Attorney for Delaware. Apparently he requested special counsel status on Tuesday, and today Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he had granted it.

This is a very strange story. Last month Weiss wound up his investigation and agreed to a plea deal with Hunter. Then a Trump-appointed judge raised questions about a minor element of the deal, causing Hunter to reverse course and enter a plea of not guilty to the charges against him. For some reason this has prompted Weiss to not only continue the investigation, but to do so as a special counsel.

What's happened over the past two weeks to cause this change? As far as I know there have been no new revelations about Hunter. Is this purely political, motivated by recent Republican hollering over Weiss's independence coupled with news about Hunter's offshore accounts that's months old and has been well known to Weiss since it was made public?

There are no answers—yet. I assume Weiss will hold a press conference at some point, but I also assume he'll decline to say much. It's all very mysterious.

The producer price index is our glimpse into the future: Changes in the PPI are usually reflected in the consumer price index a few months later. July's PPI wasn't good news:

The overall PPI was up 3.6% in July compared to -0.5% in June. The component indexes were also up. We can hope for better news next month.

We keep asking when driverless cars will "really" be here, but it's an odd question. They already are:

California regulators agreed on Thursday to the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco, despite the safety concerns of local officials and community activists. In a 3-to-1 vote, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates self-driving cars in the state, gave Cruise and Waymo permission to offer paid rides anytime during the day throughout the city.

OK, this doesn't mean we have full-fledged driverless cars capable of going anywhere at anytime. But it does mean we have driverless cars capable of driving around the city anywhere at anytime—and if that's not "really" here, I'm not sure what is.

If Waymo and Cruise can pilot their driverless cars reliably around San Francisco, 100% autonomous cars can't be too far away. Highway driving isn't a big deal compared to city driving, and that takes care of all driving on streets. All that's left is non-street driving: parking lots, drive throughs, dirt roads, and so forth. I'm not sure how hard that is to automate, but I'm willing to bet that my longtime prediction of 2025 for honest-to-God driverless cars is pretty close to the mark.

This is a panoramic view of the Orangerie, part of the gardens of Versailles, looking southwest from the palace toward the Swiss Lake. It's certainly an impressive bit of craftsmanship, but I can't bring myself to love it. Even to my OCD-inflected mind, it seems just a little too overplanned and sterile. But I guess Louis XIV liked it, and that's all that matters.

From Vox today:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is tripling down on his state’s newly approved social studies curriculum guidelines that erroneously teach students that enslaved people “developed skills” that they could use for “personal benefit.”

I've had enough of this. There are plenty of problems with Florida's Black history curriculum,¹ but the "skills" passage isn't one of them. It is:

• A single footnote to a single standard in the curriculum.
• True. (In fact, not even controversial.)
• In no way minimizes the evil of slavery.

This is an example of the way liberals spend way too much time focusing on the wrong stuff whenever race is in play. We are still claiming that cops shot a defenseless Michael Brown in Ferguson even though this was debunked years ago. We insist that police kill lots of unarmed Black suspects even though the actual rate is extremely low and declining (a grand total of seven in 2022). We blame standardized tests for low Black admittance to selective high schools instead of accepting the fact that we do a lousy job of educating them. We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men.

Conservatives are so horrific on race that it's only natural for liberals to feel that they can never cede even the slightest ground to them. I get pissed off all the time at the fact that conservatives virtually never even acknowledge racism aside from the occasional pro forma "Of course...." As in: "Of course racism is still around, but ________ is not the right way to deal with it [followed by 3,000 words on why we shouldn't do anything]." In these kinds of constructions, _______ is every single racial remedy ever proposed in American history.

But spending time on ridiculous stuff does nothing but give right-wing apologists more ammunition. We really need to be more serious about where we focus our energy.

¹Among them: (a) It spends too much time telling kids that American slavery was unexceptional because everyone did it; (b) It spends too little time describing the actual conditions of North American slavery; and (c) It significantly overplays the virtue of white abolitionism.

ProPublica today provides us with the fullest accounting yet of the endless largesse provided over the years to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas from his cadre of billionaire friends:

Their gifts include: At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

....The pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”

The gifts were provided by David Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway; the late H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of AutoNation and Waste Management; Paul “Tony” Novelly, an oil baron; and, of course, the ubiquitous Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate.

But did Thomas violate any laws by hoovering up all these private gifts? Maybe! Can anyone do anything about it? Probably not. As near as I can tell, a Supreme Court justice could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and then just disappear safely into his chambers and refuse to ever talk about it.

This whole story gets sleazier and harder to believe with every new revelation. Thomas makes Hunter Biden look like a piker. But apparently nobody either can or will do anything about it. Welcome to America.

Adjusted for inflation, the BLS measure of average hourly earnings increased last month at an annualized rate of 3.3%. However, average hours worked continued its downward trend:

As a result, weekly earnings were flat from last month:

Weekly earnings have been flat for the past year and are now 0.4% above their pre-pandemic level from three years ago. Tight labor market, anyone?

The BLS released its July CPI numbers today, and they're down a smidge from last month:

On a month-over-month basis, headline CPI is at 2.0% and core CPI is at 1.9%. On a trend basis, headline CPI is at zero.

This is two months in a row that core CPI has been below the Fed's target of 2%. I'm really not sure what more they want to see before they stop raising interest rates.

I was puttering around looking for some abortion stuff when I ran across a 2018 Wall Street Journal editorial confidently proclaiming that abortion rights were safe no matter who Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court:

The reason is the power of stare decisis, or precedent, and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law....Our view, supported by more than a little reporting, is that even though they think Roe was wrongly decided, most of the current conservative Justices would shy from overturning it and handing abortion law entirely to the states. The exception is Justice Clarence Thomas, who has made his intentions clear.

I love the patronizing use of "supported by more than a little reporting," as if we benighted souls in the cheap seats couldn't possibly have an opinion as informed as the Journal editorial board.

That editorial board was sure that conservative justices would all shy from overturning Roe v. Wade. Four years later, every single conservative justice voted to overturn it.

I wonder: Was the Journal just making shit up, as usual, to justify their view that everyone should remain sanguine about appointing conservative justices to the Court? Or did they actually believe what they wrote even though it was ridiculous? Beats me. But it sure isn't a bit of gaslighting that's aged well.

I have now figured out the timeline and details for the Twitter contempt saga. Here it is:

January 17: Special counsel Jack Smith gets a warrant ordering Twitter to turn over all records for Donald Trump's account. Marcy Wheeler guesses that it's because Smith is trying to figure out which January 6 tweets Trump himself wrote. The warrant includes a nondisclosure order forbidding Twitter to tell anyone about it for 180 days.

January 27: Twitter says the records are available but misses the first deadline to turn them over.

February 1: Twitter raises a legal objection.

February 2: It turns out Twitter is not objecting to the warrant but to the nondisclosure order. It's not clear why, since nondisclosures are fairly common and are routinely upheld in court.

February 7: Judge rules against Twitter. However, Twitter fails to turn over the records by 5 pm and is fined $50,000 for contempt.

February 8: Twitter is fined $100,000.

February 9: Twitter is fined $200,000. They finally turn over Trump's account data at 8:06 pm. The total fine for contempt is $350,000.

March 3: The district court formally denies Twitter's motion to vacate the nondisclosure and upholds the contempt fine.

March 4: Twitter appeals.

June 20: At the request of the special counsel, the nondisclosure order is partially withdrawn.

July 18: The appellate court rules against Twitter, upholding both the contempt order and the fine:

Civil-contempt sanctions..."must be calibrated to coerce compliance."...While a geometric schedule is unusual and generally would be improper without an upper limit on the daily fine, we nonetheless uphold the district court's sanctions order based on the particular facts of this case. (a) Twitter never raised any objection to the sanctions formula, despite having several opportunities to do so....(b) Moreover, the $350,000 sanction ultimately imposed was not unreasonable, given Twitter's $40-billion valuation and the court's goal of coercing Twitter's compliance....(c) Finally, we note that Twitter assured the court that it would comply with the warrant by 5:00 p.m. on February 7.

....We affirm the district court's rulings in all respects.

Today: The appellate ruling is unsealed and we finally learn all this stuff.