Kevin Drum

From the editor of National Review:

It’s amazing that Biden and his team feel comfortable lecturing us about the rule of law and the Constitution without feeling the slightest self-consciousness about his having just lawlessly spent up to $1 trillion…

They think they can get away with it—and they’re right

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) September 2, 2022

I swear I will never understand this kind of thing. NR is institutionally anti-Trump. They are specifically opposed to Trump's disdain for the law and his Big Lie about winning the 2020 election. So even if there are things about Biden's speech Lowry dislikes—Biden's a liberal, Lowry's a conservative, so it's no surprise if there are—it's still the case that it was mostly an anti-Trump speech that specifically called out Trump's disdain for the law and his Big Lie about winning the 2020 election.

That sounds great. But what does Lowry spend his time on? His pique over Biden "lecturing" us and his outrage over Biden "lawlessly" cancelling some student debt. For chrissake. There's nothing lawless about it. This is just a routine disagreement that will be settled in court. Maybe Biden will win, maybe he'll lose. But either way, presidents do this kind of thing all the time, and they're forced to defend it in court all the time.

So why not spend more time on the core of the speech instead? Would it kill Lowry to say that Biden is basically right and then add some caveats? How are Republicans ever going to rid themselves of Trump if no one with an audience is willing to do even that much?

This is Honey Island swamp in Louisiana. I took this picture at the end of the tour as the sun was going down, which helped provide an interesting sky. I wish I could have taken it an hour later, but you take your pictures at the tour times you have, not the tour times you wish you had.

How are Democrats doing at the moment? Here are three takes on the generic congressional ballot during the last week of August:

Morning Consult has Democrats ahead by four points. The two aggregators have it at about a tie. All three show Democrats doing about four points better than a couple of months ago.

Conventional wisdom says that congressional balloting is so skewed these days that Democrats need to be winning the generic ballot by 6-7 points before they have a chance of winning the House. So we're still not there yet. But at least we're making progress.

Do you need a good job but don't have any skills? Move to California! We just passed a bill that sets up a Fast Food Council, and among other things it's tasked with setting a new minimum wage for the industry. The legislation caps the minimum wage at $22 per hour in 2023, which presumably means the minimum wage will be $22 per hour.

That's not bad. It's only a couple of bucks short of what a beginning teacher makes. It's 25% higher than the individual median income. It's more than a bookkeeper makes. It's more than a lab tech makes. It's more than a delivery driver makes. It's more than an EMT makes. It's more than a construction worker makes. It's more than a carpenter makes.

Anyway, it seems a wee bit high to me. Maybe the new council will keep it lower than $22. Or maybe Gov. Gavin Newsom won't sign the bill. Who knows?

My plea for everyone to react calmly to the NAEP's test scores of fourth-graders during the pandemic has apparently been ignored:

These headlines are technically correct: Scores declined to the level of 1999, which is indeed "decades." (Two of them.) But that was possible only because we had made such small gains since then in the first place.

I predict that on the 2024 NAEP test we will make up almost all of the progress "lost" during the pandemic. Kids are pretty resilient when it comes to stuff like this.

The only exception I'd point to is the astonishing 13-point drop among Black kids on the math test. That's pretty serious stuff, and it won't be easy to make up.

Earlier this year the Department of Education conducted a "special administration" of the long-term NAEP test for 9-year-olds. Why the long-term test instead of the main NAEP test? Because by chance they had conducted a long-term assessment in 2020, which meant that a 2022 retest would tell us a lot about how the COVID-19 pandemic affected elementary school students.¹

So how did our fourth-graders do? In a word, badly. Here are the topline results:

The usual rule of thumb is that ten points on the NAEP equals one grade level. This means that in reading, kids in fourth grade this year were about half a grade level behind the fourth graders of 2020. In math they were about three-quarters of a grade level behind.

But it gets worse. The best students lost only 2-3 points in both reading and math while the worst students lost 10-12 points. Low-income students (-6 in reading, -8 in math) lost more than non-poor students (-3 in reading, -5 in math). Students in the West (-1 in reading, -5 in math) fared considerably better than students in every other region (-7 in reading, -8 in math). Black, white, and Hispanic kids all lost about six points in reading. In math, everyone lost a lot but Black kids lost a catastrophic 13 points. Oddly city kids didn't lose anything in reading. Aside from that, kids in suburbs did a little worse than kids in cities, towns, and rural areas.

That's the basics. I'm sure there will be plenty of analysis over the next few weeks, but for now the basic results are all we have. I also suspect there's going to be a very great deal of shrieking and moaning about how our children are all doomed to a future of failure, but please don't join in. These things tend to wash out in later school years, and I very much doubt that by the time our fourth graders graduate from high school they'll be noticeably different from any other graduating class.

¹The long-term assessment is a special version of the NAEP that's been designed to stay the same from year to year, thus making it highly useful for comparisons over time. However, over the course of two years it's no different than the main NAEP test. It's just chance that it happened to be the only test given in 2020.

The main NAEP test was given to 9-year-olds in 2019. It seems to me that 2019-22 would have been a perfectly useful comparison period, but I guess 2020-22 gives a slightly better focus on precisely the pandemic years.

Jim Geraghty is afraid that maybe we didn't win the Cold War after all. Sure, he says, it seems like we won:

And yet… Putin-era Russia doesn’t look all that different from the bad old days of the Soviet Union, particularly this year.

The Russian army invaded neighboring territories....horrifying brutality and the deliberate targeting of civilians....mercenary forces deployed to Syria, Libya, and the Central African Republic....“spheres of influence.”

....Just about all dissent in modern Russia is gone; pro-state propaganda dominates all forms of media....Russia is no longer interested in engaging with the West if that engagement requires them to abandon their dreams of an expansionist empire.

....Putin’s Russia has a different style than the Cold War-era Soviet Union, but it remains the same in most of the ways that matter most: totalitarian, brutal, aggressive, expansionist, habitually deceitful, paranoid, devious, and controlled by men whose blood is almost as cold as the country’s winters....In light of all that… did we really win the Cold War? Or did we just win the first round?

Oh, we won. But as George Kennan tried to tell us 70 years ago, Russian conduct is rooted in centuries of autocracy, inferiority complexes, and difficult relations with Western Europe. Communism wasn't responsible for that, it was just the latest veneer on top of it.

Winning the Cold War was never likely to change Russia's temperament significantly, though we had high hopes at the time. And if things had gone just a little differently, we certainly could have done better than Vladimir Putin. Still, winning the Cold War didn't mean turning Russia into Switzerland. It meant freedom for Eastern Europe and the end of communism as a serious alternative to free-market capitalism.

Thirty years later, both of those victories are almost entirely intact. Hell, most of Eastern Europe is part of NATO and the EU. And communism is dead no matter what China calls its government. There are still plenty of autocracies around, with many of them trying to manage their economies, but that's neither new nor significant.

The great ideological war of the 20th century is over. Capitalism won a rousing and complete victory. Just don't mistake that for an end to brutality, war, and tyranny. It'll take a lot longer than 50 years for those to be tossed onto the ash heap of history.

Sarah Palin has lost the special election for Alaska's House seat. So sad. Better luck in November, Sarah.

The good people of Michigan recently gathered a huge number of signatures to put an abortion-rights measure on the November ballot. The Bureau of Elections examined the petitions and found that the vast majority of signatures were valid. So, the citizens having spoken, they duly recommended it be put on the ballot.

But wait. The Board of State Canvassers has final say and its Republican members voted against allowing it on the ballot. Did they have a reason?

The board’s GOP members voted against approving the measure for the ballot after the anti-abortion group campaigning against the amendment, Citizens to Support MI Women and Children, argued that spacing and formatting errors in the text circulated to voters for their signatures rendered the effort invalid.

Say what? Spacing and formatting issues? Is this a deliberate joke? An explicit "fuck you we just don't want it on the ballot"? Here's the entire text:

It's easy to see what happened here. The text is right-justified, and the word-processing program did a lousy job of it. Because of this, there are a few passages where the spacing between words is so small that it's hardly visible.

Nonetheless, it's easy to read and the text is clear. But this is what things have come to. The Republican board members are, indeed, explicitly saying "fuck you we just don't want it on the ballot." So now it's on to the Michigan Supreme Court.

This is—finally!—the first real picture I've taken with my new telescope. It's an image of the Iris Nebula (NGC 7023), a reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus. It's blue thanks to the romantically named SAO 19158, the young star in the center that illuminates it.

This is not a bad image, but it's not as sharp as it should be because, for some reason, I was unable to get autoguiding to work. Once I debug that problem, I'll try again and post the results.

I chose the Iris Nebula for my first serious image because (a) it's very pretty, (b) it's currently high in the sky, and (c) I wanted a nebula that was nice looking and fairly easy to photograph, but wasn't something you've already seen a thousand times. But I'll try some of the more famous ones later.

TECHNICAL INFO: This image is the product of 51 separate exposures of 60 seconds each. It was stacked and processed in Astro Pixel Processor and then finished up in Photoshop. It's remarkable how much better APP was compared to ASTAP, the other stacking/processing program I tried. Like night and day.

I used the defaults in APP because I don't yet understand its options. I just pressed the "Integrate" button and let it run.