Kevin Drum

Apparently the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed yesterday was the victim of Russian anti-aircraft fire. The flight was headed from Baku to Grozny—a milk run of about 30 minutes—when it entered an area of drone conflict. Russian air defense was busy shooting down Ukrainian drones and an errant shot hit the plane.

However, Grozny refused permission for landing, so instead the plane wobbled across the Caspian Sea to Aktau. It almost made it, but lost control a few miles from the airport and crashed.

Why did Grozny refuse permission for an emergency landing when that was the flight's scheduled destination anyway? We don't know that yet.

Tom Friedman says China feels different:

In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China.

He's right:

The pandemic is over, but travel to China is still less than a quarter of what it was five years ago. And that's despite the fact that international travel in general has fully rebounded. Xi Jinping's China apparently doesn't feel very welcoming to Americans these days.

The Guardian reports on plans for Donald Trump's coronation inauguration:

America's business elite won't just break the old record, they'll pulverize it. There's no definitive source for the cost of inaugurations, but the estimates are all pretty close. Here they are:¹

Aside from Trump's own previous inauguration, his 2025 blowout is budgeted to be twice as expensive as any other inauguration in history.

Trump's 2017 inauguration was famously puzzling because no one could figure out what he spent all his money on. He only held three parties and a lunch, and the entertainers were the likes of The Piano Guys, Lee Greenwood, and DJ RaviDrums. So where did it go?

Presumably Trump will host a more ostentatious show this time around. But all the money in the world still won't get Beyoncé to sing for him. Obama will always have that.

¹This is the cost of all the balls and parties, using funds raised privately. It doesn't include the cost of security or the ceremony itself, both of which are paid for by the federal government.

Eggs are expensive again this Christmas. Why? The usual reason: bird flu. This year marks the seventh major avian flu pandemic since 1980.

Poultry is a global market, so even pandemics outside the US can affect egg prices here. The biggest impact, however, comes from local avian flu outbreaks, as happened before in 1983, 2015, and 2022.

Merry Christmas from Charlie, Hilbert, and the whole gang.

From the LA Times this morning:

Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America are being sued by the embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over alleged unchecked fraud on the Zelle payment app.... The result, according to the lawsuit, was fraud-related losses of more than $870 million over the last seven years.

And from the Wall Street Journal:

Evolve Bank at its peak managed around $10 billion for financial technology firms, including Stripe and Affirm.... Problems at the bank spilled into the open when a software company called Synapse went bankrupt in April.... A month later, a court-appointed mediator disclosed that as much as $96 million in fintech customer funds might be missing from accounts at Evolve and other banks.

This isn't as bad as crypto, which seems to literally require a foundation of fraud just to exist, but it's yet another example of the risks involved in allowing companies to engage in bank-like activities without actually being regulated like banks. "Even though Evolve is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.," says the Journal, "the bank isn’t the one that failed, so deposit insurance doesn’t apply." Quite so. But maybe that's a problem for consumers who assume all this bank-like stuff comes from actual banks?

Continuing our theme about loss of trust, here's the partisan breakdown of a recent poll about health care:

It's not "Americans" who have lost trust in mainstream health care. It's specifically Republicans—who have decided instead to trust Donald Trump. Fox News whipped them into a frenzy over masks and lockdowns and vaccine conspiracies and Chinese lab leaks, and that eventually turned into a wholesale rejection of reality.

But it didn't affect everyone. Those who stayed away from Fox News remained immune to the madness.

Just by coincidence, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen today announced a big new defense package for Greenland:

Poulsen said the package would allow for the purchase of two new inspection ships, two new long-range drones and two extra dog sled teams.

Okey doke. That should put Donald Trump on notice.

Joe Biden signed 50 new bills into law this Christmas Eve, including this one:

A measure (S. 4077) — opposed by several dozen House Republicans — to name a post office in California after the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D).

They just can't help themselves, even during Christmas. What a pack of assholes.

The battle over contraception continues:

The Biden administration is withdrawing a proposed set of regulations that aimed to improve access to contraception by narrowing the ability of employers to opt out of covering birth control for their employees.

....Conservative organizations celebrated the news. In a post on X, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents an order of nuns that has repeatedly challenged the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate in court, wrote: “Christmas came a little early this year.”

This whole endless controversy increasingly seems like a relic of the past. Oral contraception has been available without a prescription for a couple of years and it's hardly a wallet buster:

That's $16 per month. Lots of people spend more than that on heartburn meds.

Inserting an IUD still needs to be covered by insurance since a doctor has to do it,¹ but I wonder if it's time to stop fighting over "free" oral contraceptives. They're now so cheap and easily available that maybe we should let insurance off the hook and just have people buy them on their own.²

¹Though the cost is equally low. IUD insertion typically costs $500-$1,000 and lasts five years. That's about $10-16 per month.

²As always, there are exceptions for people who need a specific type or brand of contraceptive that still requires a prescription.