On Thursday we learned that Clarence Thomas's billionaire friend, Harlan Crow, had bought some of Thomas's property at an above-market price and then spruced it up for Thomas's mother. Thomas disclosed none of this. Seems like an important story! Nevertheless, the Washington Post ran only a short online AP dispatch about it that day¹ and didn't bother mentioning it at all in the print edition.
Today we learned that for many years Thomas has been reporting income from Ginger Ltd., a defunct company. He should have been reporting income from its successor, Ginger Holdings, LLC. This seems like a very trivial story, but the Post ran it at the top of its front page in the print edition.
Why the difference? Because the first story wasn't originally reported by the Post. The second one was.
So stupid.
¹A staff-written reaction piece was posted online the next day, but still nothing in the print edition.
After the pandemic started we immediately passed a $3.5 trillion rescue bill. Later we passed two more rescue bills, bringing the total to over $6 trillion. Was that responsible for the spike in inflation that began in 2021?
Yes and no. It was responsible for some of the inflation, but for a very specific reason: it kept consumer spending strong at a time when supply was constricted. Take a look at consumer spending during the pandemic vs. the Great Recession:
Following the Great Recession, nominal consumer spending grew slowly for many years thanks to inadequate stimulus. Conversely, consumer spending during and after the pandemic grew nicely, keeping the economy in good shape and helping millions of people avoid poverty and homelessness. So hooray for the COVID rescue packages!
We gave too much money to people who didn't need it: middle and upper-middle class folks who hadn't lost their jobs. The lower half of the income spectrum never had a lot of excess savings in the first place, and in any case they mostly spent it on things like food and rent, which had little effect on inflation. The upper half, by contrast, peaked at close to $2 trillion in excess savings. And since they already had money for food and rent, they mostly bought consumer goods and services that were constrained by supply. So inflation shot up.
This was a situation that screamed out for means testing. We could have easily cut payments to the upper half by a trillion dollars with no adverse effects on either the economy or the individuals themselves. And on the upside, we would have created less inflationary pressure.
Inflation is declining now as supply constraints disappear and even high-income consumers eat through their excess savings. But we probably could have avoided our inflation spike altogether if we had been more careful about who we gave rescue funding to. Giving it to the well-off did nothing but cause problems.
For the last couple of years, consumer expectations of inflation a year away exactly matches whatever the inflation rate is right now. In other words, it's completely useless.
Every year, Bud Light spends more than $100 million on marketing. Of that, maybe a few million goes to social media. Of that, a small fraction goes to deals with social media influencers. And of that, a few thousand dollars recently went to Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman who racked up something like 10 million followers on TikTok by putting up daily videos of her transition during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, after a meeting with Joe Biden, Mulvaney became a right-wing target. So she was already on their radar two weeks ago when she posted a cutesy Instagram video for Bud Light during March Madness. This led to a week of outrage from Fox News and calls for a conservative boycott of Bud Light. National Review editor Rich Lowry says there's a lesson to be learned:
It would be a good outcome here if it becomes obvious to everyone that Bud Light made a mistake, and if big companies resolve not to do the same in the future.
Just so I have this straight: Lowry's view is that no American corporation should ever hire a transgender person as part of a promotional campaign. Or am I missing something? Are there any other demographic groups that corporate America should also steer clear of?
Back in 2004 the LA Times reported that Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas had been accepting lavish vacations for years from his billionaire "dear friend" Harlan Crow. These vacations seemingly stopped after that, but a few days ago we learned that, in fact, Thomas had merely stopped disclosing them.
This was all "personal hospitality," which Thomas insists is entirely legal and fine. Maybe so.
But it turns out Thomas also accepted free rides on Crow's private jet and didn't disclose those either. That's rather more of a problem, no?
Finally, today, another shoe dropped. ProPublica reports that a few years ago Crow bought some of Thomas's property in Savannah at what looks to be a considerably inflated price. One of the properties is the house Thomas's mother lives in. Crow upgraded it significantly; tore down the annoying party house next door; and doesn't appear to be charging Thomas's mother any rent. Thomas disclosed none of this.
Who knows? Maybe there are innocent explanations for Thomas's silence. But I doubt it. It has all the appearance of plain old lawbreaking. Thomas was required to disclose all this but instead chose to keep it hidden. Why? And what does the Supreme Court intend to do about it?
Yesterday a friend asked if I wanted to comment on National Review's editorial about the national abortion pill ban.¹ I didn't, really. NR is, obviously, institutionally anti-abortion, and I didn't have much interest in reading a bunch of pro-life boilerplate for the thousandth time in my life.²
But eventually my curiosity got the best of me, and I have two comments. First, kudos to NR for acknowledging that the bulk of the ban was wrongly decided "given that the six-year statute of limitations passed between the FDA’s belated 2016 ruling on that approval and the filing of suit." This is true. Mifepristone foes like to point out that the FDA waited 14 years to rule on a legal challenge filed in 2002, but that doesn't matter anymore. The FDA re-issued and updated their rules in March 2016 and the lawsuit challenging them was filed in November 2022. This was the first time the original approval of mifepristone was challenged, and by then the statute of limitations had expired. This should have gotten most of the lawsuit thrown out immediately.³
Most partisans these days are unwilling to acknowledge any interpretation of the law that works against them, so due credit here.
But I also have a second comment. I am (already!) sick and tired of reading stuff like this:
From the beginning, the pill was given favored regulatory treatment, with accelerated approval under Subpart H, a program designed for emergency AIDS drugs. Utilizing this fast-track approval process required the FDA to characterize pregnancy, preposterously, as a “serious or life-threatening illness.”
This just isn't true. Mifepristone was approved under normal procedures. Subpart H was used only to accelerate rules that limited how it could be used. KFF explains:
In the case of mifepristone, Subpart H was originally used to restrict the dispensing to prescribers who agreed to dispense it in certain health care settings, by or under the supervision of a qualified physician who attested to the ability to accurately date pregnancies and diagnose ectopic pregnancies.
This whole thing reminds me of the conservative myth that Obamacare was "rammed through" under reconciliation rules. It wasn't. Obamacare was passed under regular order. After that, a small "sidecar" of mostly minor revisions was passed under reconciliation, but that's all. Nonetheless, the conservative myth persists.
Subpart H "acceleration" looks like it's going down the same path. It's quickly congealing into accepted wisdom even though it's simply not true that mifepristone got any special treatment by the FDA. It's safe, reliable, and legal, and there's no reason it shouldn't have been initially approved and shouldn't now be widely available.
¹Which has since been partly stayed.
²I imagine the editors of NR feel the same about reading anything I write on the subject, and I don't blame them.
³In addition to a few minor things, there's a different part of the lawsuit that challenges the FDA's 2021 ruling that made mifepristone available by mail. These items are not affected by the statute of limitations. However, the basic approval of mifepristone is.
Spring has sprung, and that means our front garden is in its glory. Not only do we get something nice to look at, but the cats get an even better playground than usual. Charlie in particular loves to scamper around, chase birds and butterflies, and then hop up on one of the rocks like a tiger scanning the horizon for prey.
NOTE: No animals are harmed in this garden unless you count lizards, which have small but nonzero odds of having their tails bitten off.
Around a half-dozen F.B.I. agents on Thursday pushed onto the property of a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard who is linked to an online group at the center of a trove of leaked classified U.S. intelligence documents that have upended relations with American allies and exposed weaknesses in the Ukrainian military.
This is the infamous leader of Thug Shaker Central, an online group of gamers. And like everyone else, I don't get it. I've read about the elaborate precautions taken by people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden in order to download intel files and make them public, but it sounds like this guy did nothing special at all. He's 21 years old, a member of the National Guard, and he just casually downloaded some explosive files and took them home.
Is it really that easy? Why would a National Guard member even have access to stuff like this? What's going on?
