Cats, charts, and politics
I suppose it's just a coincidence that these three headlines all appeared on the same day from major new outlets:
Republicans are "divided" about impeaching President Biden. Sure. Is it possible that this is because he's obviously done nothing wrong aside from pursuing policies that many Republicans don't like? Is it possible that modern Republicans are stone cold lunatics? Surely it's time to hide the matches from them?
The Supreme Court ended its term with a flurry of important decisions that covered a lot of important ground. How did it do? There are some clunkers on the list, but overall I think their performance was better than most liberals give credit for.
Out of nine major decisions, I'd say the ending score is five correct; two close calls; one wrong but modestly so; and one plainly wrong. That's . . . not bad, all things considered.
I've been thinking all evening about just how crazy this latest court order from Louisiana is. You really have to read it to believe it. The whole 155-page opinion is an insane, rambling stew of right-wing paranoia about "mass censorship" and "unrelenting pressure" from an Orwellian White House that you'd sooner expect to see at Gateway Pundit than in an opinion from a US judge.
As recently as a few years ago this case would have been dismissed with extreme prejudice and the lawyers told they'd be held in contempt if they ever wasted the court's time again with stuff like this. Today it produces a bizarre injunction against half a dozen agencies—the entire Census Bureau! all of the CDC! the Surgeon General!—along with several dozen named Biden officials prohibiting them from entirely voluntary interactions with a specific set of 21 social media platforms plus "like companies." Has there ever been a court order like this before? Maybe. I've never heard of one, though.
It's nuts. The whole thing is just lunacy. I barely even know what to think of this stuff anymore.
A federal judge ruled that the Biden administration likely trampled on the First Amendment in trying to eliminate what it saw as disinformation on social media, issuing a broad preliminary injunction limiting the federal government from policing online content.
In a 155-page ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana barred White House officials and multiple federal agencies from contacting social-media companies with the purpose of suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from government censorship.
Oh Christ. Yet another district judge has issued a sweeping national injunction on some topic that has him¹ exercised. I don't suppose I even need to tell you anything about the guy, but I will anyway:
Judge Doughty, who was appointed to the federal court by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, has made the court a sympathetic venue for conservative cases, having previously blocked the Biden
administration’s national vaccination mandate for health care workers and overturned its ban on new federal leases for oil and gas drilling.
But let's not jump to conclusions too quickly. Let's first take a look at the forceful and reasoned arguments in Doughty's 155-page tome. Mostly it's a long, familiar conspiracy-esque recitation of right-wing hobbyhorses about efforts from public health officers to highlight COVID misinformation, with a bit of Hunter Biden and election integrity thrown in. The key question, apparently, is whether the federal government "significantly encouraged" social media companies to toe the government's lefty line or else, and Doughty has no doubts on this score:
What is really telling is that virtually all of the free speech suppressed was “conservative” free speech. Using the 2016 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government apparently engaged in a massive effort to suppress disfavored conservative speech.
....The White House Defendants made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed and what they wanted amplified. Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied.
....The VP, EIP, and Stanford Internet Observatory are not defendants in this proceeding. However, their actions are relevant because government agencies have chosen to associate, collaborate, and partner with these organizations....Flagged content was almost entirely from political figures, political organizations, alleged partisan media outlets, and social-media all-stars associated with right-wing or conservative political views.
....The Plaintiffs have outlined a federal regime of mass censorship, presented specific examples of how such censorship has harmed the States’ quasi-sovereign interests in protecting their residents’ freedom of expression.
....The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign.
This is Deep State derp all the way down. I wonder if Doughty also wants to prevent the White House from talking to newspapers, TV reporters, talk show hosts, radio chatterers, podcasters, newsletter writers, labor leaders, CEOs, climate activists, and bloggers? It's going to be mighty lonely in the White House press office before long.
¹It's always a him.
The Wall Street Journal concedes that remote work is down since 2020, as are job listings that advertise remote options. But remote work is "sticking" anyway:
Many lower-wage office and call-center jobs went remote at the onset of the pandemic. Business executives viewed the shift as a temporary emergency measure, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at jobs site ZipRecruiter....“Many employers were surprised to discover that remote customer support agents and freight dispatchers, for example, were often just as effective and productive working from home, if not more so,” Pollak said.
Thanks to those productivity gains, as well as improved recruitment and retention, reduced absenteeism and lower real-estate costs, companies decided to keep offering remote options for some lower-wage staff long after offices reopened, she said.
Oh please. This article is based heavily on data from the American Time Use Survey, so let's see what ATUS says about remote work. I've put this up before more generally, but here it is for different professions:
On average, across every profession, people who work at home put in way fewer hours than people who work in an office. The average difference is nearly three hours, and this is true for every other type of measurement too. Full-time vs. part-time. Men vs. women. High school grads vs. PhDs.
These figures are not averages for everybody. They are solely for employed people who "worked at their workplace on an average day" or "worked at home on an average day." And if these numbers are even in the ballpark of being correct, they mean that workers at home spend a ton of time goofing off just because they can. There's no other conclusion to draw. Is it any wonder they love working at home?
Flags waving in the breeze at the United States of Ikea.
I've been obsessing over an obscure part of the Supreme Court ruling on student loan forgiveness. The relevant text of the HEROES Act says the Secretary of Education can "waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV," but Chief Justice Roberts makes a startling claim about this:
The Secretary does not identify any provision that he is actually waiving. No specific provision of the Education Act establishes an obligation on the part of student borrowers to pay back the Government. So as the Government concedes, “waiver”—as used in the HEROES Act—cannot refer to “waiv[ing] loan balances” or “waiving the obligation to repay” on the part of a borrower. Tr. of Oral Arg. 9, 64.
Huh. Students have been paying back loans for many years under threat of late fees; credit score downgrades; garnishment of wages, tax refunds, and Social Security; and court action. Given this, it sure seems like the law must establish an obligation to repay loans. And yet Roberts not only says it doesn't, he says the government "concedes" this point. He points to oral arguments, so let's go there:
GENERAL PRELOGAR: The relevant decision memo specifically says, I hereby issue waivers and modifications of the relevant provisions of Title IV.
....JUSTICE BARRETT: And just to be clear, waiver in the statute refers to waiving the statutory and regulatory provisions, not waiving the obligation to repay?
GENERAL PRELOGAR: That's correct. So, if you kind of trace through the specific provisions that he invoked, they are statutory and regulatory provisions and they establish the terms of the student loan program and then also deal with discharge and cancellation authority. And he said that he was issuing waivers and modifications of — of all of those provisions.
So you have to "trace through" all the provisions. And what are those provisions? The Office of Legal Counsel said this:
The provisions requiring individuals to repay student loans are...set forth in the U.S. Code and the Code of Federal Regulations. See, e.g., 20 U.S.C. § 1087dd(c) (requiring loans agreements to “provide[] for repayment of the principal amount of the loan”); 34 C.F.R. § 685.207 (“[a] borrower is obligated to repay the full amount of a Direct Loan”); id. § 682.102 (“[a] borrower is obligated to repay the full amount” of a loan under the FFEL Program); id. § 682.209 (“Repayment of a loan.”).
And they are “applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV” because they direct how financial assistance provided under title IV should be repaid. The Secretary may accomplish the cancellation or reduction of student debt by “waiv[ing] or modify[ing]” these provisions.
Sure enough, this all seems legit. The first statutory cite says loans "shall" be governed by a note that "provides for repayment of the principal amount of the loan, together with interest thereon, in equal installments." The second says, "A borrower is obligated to repay the full amount of a Direct Loan, including the principal balance, fees, any collection costs." The third says, "Generally, the borrower is obligated to repay the full amount of the loan, late fees, collection costs chargeable to the borrower." The fourth says, "For a Consolidation loan, the repayment period begins on the date the loan is disbursed [and so on for other types of loans]."
So Roberts is being pretty disingenuous when he says repayment can't be waived because there's no payment requirement in the first place. This is too clever by half. As common sense dictates, of course the law says loans have to be repaid—multiple times. This is true even if the repayment requirement isn't directly adjacent to other provisions and even if repayment happens to be to a third party servicer rather than directly to the government.
This kind of game playing makes me less sympathetic to Roberts's overall argument that "waive or modify" was never meant to be so expansive as to include outright cancellation of student loans. If his case were as strong as he thinks, he wouldn't need to include this kind of nonsense. But I still think the decision overall is a close call.
I've been aware of the "odd" anti-gay video that the Ron DeSantis campaign promoted on Friday, but I hadn't bothered to actually watch it. A few minutes ago I finally did.
It is not "odd." It is completely, beyond-all-parody batshit deranged. What the possible fuck could any of these people have been thinking? Be sure to watch to the end:
To wrap up “Pride Month,” let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it…
— DeSantis War Room ???? (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023
My jaw hasn't picked itself off the floor yet. I get that DeSantis is willing to say or do anything to show his anti-woke credentials, but this? What is he trying to prove, anyway?
The Wall Street Journal reports that inflation expectations are down:
Consumers expect to see 4.1% inflation a year from now, the lowest such reading in two years and down sharply from its recent peak of 6.8%, according to the median response to the New York Fed’s May survey, for example.
A year from now? The most conventional measure of inflation is year-over-year headline CPI. In May it clocked in at . . . 4.1%. That's down from 8.9% a year ago. I'll be shocked if it isn't below 3% a year from now, and 2% wouldn't surprise me.
Our long national egg nightmare is over:
Well, mostly over: There's been a brief spike upward in June for some reason. However, the average since 2022 is $2, and that's exactly where we are now.
METHODOLOGY NOTE: For some reason the USDA's weekly price survey occasionally covers only a tiny number of stores, which produces odd massive spikes just due to sampling errors. I've limited the data points in this chart to weeks in which the USDA sampled at least 100 stores.