Gathered from a variety of sources, here's a list of corporations that have promised to assist employees who live in states affected by the Supreme Court's eradication of abortion rights. The type of assistance varies, but generally includes travel costs and sometimes additional help.
If you're wondering what you can do right now to fight for abortion rights in the wake of the Dobbs decision, this is one of those things: If you have a sizeable company headquartered nearby that isn't on this list, start up a lobbying and protest movement to get them on our side. You can be sure the anti-abortion folks are already doing it.
Here's a quick look at the federal judiciary as of today:
Aside from the Supreme Court, it's pretty close to 50-50 even after Mitch McConnell's four-year demolition derby. By the time Joe Biden's first term comes to an end Democrats will probably control a majority of the seats at all levels of the judiciary except the Supreme Court.
But that's the rub, isn't it? The Supreme Court. Still, I'm not sure the story of the highest court in the land is quite what most progressives think it is. Here's what's been filling up my Twitter feed today:
Democrats don't care as much about the judiciary. This is true, and yet judgeships are split pretty evenly despite Democrats holding the presidency for only nine of the past 21 years. Caring more doesn't really seem to matter that much.
Democrats aren't ruthless enough. Mitch McConnell's refusal to hold hearings for Merrick Garland was surely a new level of ruthlessness. But when Republicans continually blocked Democratic nominees in 2013, Harry Reid nuked the filibuster. I'm not so sure Democrats lack ruthlessness.
We have to expand the Court. Sure, except we don't have 50 votes to do it. This is just pointless jibber jabber at the moment.
Here's what I'm not hearing:
We need to do whatever it takes to keep control of the Senate. Like it or not, this means moderating some progressive views in order to win seats in purplish states. We don't seem willing to do that.
More of us should have voted for Hillary. I don't care if she doesn't quite tick all your boxes. If there had been less Hillary loathing among liberals she would have won the presidency and the Supreme Court would currently be majority Democratic.
We are now paying the price of not doing these things. You can carry your AR-15 openly anywhere you want. The government can't mandate COVID vaccinations in the workplace. Women in red states have lost control over their own bodies. And God only knows what's next.
So that's that. You may now all proceed to get pissed off at me.
This is Charlie posing next to our new drapes. They are still tied up at the bottom because, apparently, we need to "set the pleats." This sounds ridiculous to me, but Marian knew all about this concept and accepted it without question. So set them we will.
Note that this is a pinned tweet, as if EIA expects it to stick around for a long time. And it will! Until Monday at least.
So what's going on? And why won't EIA tell us—aside from explaining that it's not a hack, so it must be some kind of internal fuckup? I mean, what kind of "systems" issue can bring their IT infrastructure to its knees so fully that they can't even manage to post new gasoline prices for a full week?
A couple of weeks ago I said that gun regulation would never pass, but here we are: a bipartisan gun bill has passed the Senate and will pass the House today. It will then become law whenever President Biden decides to schedule a bill signing ceremony.
So Sen. Chris Murphy proved me wrong after all. Good for him! At this point, then, I guess I wonder what happened. Why did a bunch of Republicans suddenly decide to support a gun bill? It's not much of a gun bill, but that's never made a difference before. Why give Democrats a win of any size?
One possibility is that after Uvalde Republicans genuinely thought they needed something to keep middle-class suburban women in the fold, and this would do it. Or maybe they were attracted by the fact that the bill deals mostly with juveniles, who aren't exactly a big GOP constituency. Or maybe they felt like they needed a pre-election deal that proved they weren't just a bunch of obstructionists.
I don't know. Everything is a mystery these days. I feel like I don't know anything anymore.
The FDA has ordered Juul to take its vaping devices off the market due to "insufficient and conflicting data" about the safety of its e-liquid pods. This has prompted another round of arguing about whether or not vaping is, on net, a public safety improvement, especially among teens. But I think the data is in on this:
Most teen vaping (roughly 80%) is nicotine vaping, and it's obviously bad to get kids hooked on nicotine. On the other hand, vaping is better than cigarette smoking, so if more vaping leads to lower cigarette use then it might be a net positive.
But as the chart shows, that's not the case. Teen cigarette smoking has been declining steadily for the past couple of decades and doesn't appear to be influenced even a tiny bit by vaping. This means that vaping has gotten more teens hooked on nicotine with no corresponding drop anywhere else to make up for it.
This doesn't mean you have to support a ban on vaping, or even a ban on non-prescription nicotine vaping. But as you think about it, this is the factual background to consider.
I got aimlessly directed to the latest Fox News poll this morning, and as I was browsing through it I came across its results for the generic congressional ballot ("Would you vote for the R or D candidate in your district?"). Here it is:
For some reason I was under the impression that Democrats were way underwater right now, but the difference is actually only three points. FiveThirtyEight has it at two points.
Obviously that's hardly good news for Democrats, who need to be well ahead to retain their majority, but it doesn't quite sound like a disaster either. And who knows? Maybe Dems can get their act together and improve on this. It's not the craziest idea in the world.¹
This is sunrise on the Seine, somewhere near Les Andelys. For some reason—probably jet lag, I suppose—I was up every morning during our Seine cruise and spent my time on the sun deck taking pictures and watching the crew. There were never more than one or two other passengers there. Just not an early-rising bunch, I guess.
Today is ATUS day, the day when the BLS releases the latest numbers from the American Time Use Survey. I was looking forward to comparing 2021 with 2020, but I forgot that ATUS had been suspended in 2020 due to COVID.
Still, we have charts. Here's one for the percentage of people who worked at home in 2021:
According to the BLS, this compares to 24% who worked at home in 2019. Unfortunately, this particular statistic doesn't appear to be available in their database tool, so I can't get a time series for it. However, you'll be unsurprised to learn that working at home is primarily an elite activity:
And here are a couple of old favorites. First, the amount of time spent in various activities for men and women:
Second, the number of men and women engaged in household work:
As usual, when you add up hours worked outside the home and hours engaged in housework (childcare, cleaning, food prep, etc.) they come out nearly the same for men and women. I put it at 6.82 hours per day for men and 6.93 hours for women in 2021, but if I chose a slightly different set of activities the numbers would change.
(These are averages for working-age people. It doesn't include retirees, but it does include people who don't work or who work part-time. This is why the numbers seem low: Men worked an average of 5.23 hours per day and women worked an average of 3.83 hours.)
I might have more later if I dig up anything that seems especially interesting.
Everything here is nuts. The Black maternal mortality rate is nearly 3x higher than the white rate. And the maternal mortality rate for everyone has nearly tripled since the late '90s. Meanwhile, in Europe, the maternal mortality rate has been steadily dropping and is now about one-third the US rate.
The big kicker is this: No one knows anything. No one knows why the rate has been skyrocketing. No one knows why the Black rate is so much higher than the white rate—while the Hispanic rate is a bit lower. In fact, we don't even have good data for the period from 2005-2018, so you'll see lots of different estimates for those years. (However, the big spike over the past three years comes direct from the CDC, which finally released new data a couple of years ago. It was the first in over a decade.)
And we're still in the dark about why Black women suffer such an astonishingly high rate of maternal mortality. As I said three years ago:
Poverty, education level, drinking, smoking, and genetic causes don’t seem to explain the black-white difference in maternal mortality. The timing of prenatal care doesn’t explain it. Medically, the cause of the difference appears to be related to the circulatory system, which is sensitive to stress. This makes the toxic stress hypothesis intuitively appealing, but it has little rigorous evidence supporting it. There’s some modest evidence that wider use of doulas could reduce both infant and maternal mortality, but no evidence that it would reduce the black-white gap.
It's the damnedest thing. The US rate of maternal mortality is crazy in multiple ways, and no one can produce a credible explanation. Every avenue of study turns up almost totally empty. I've rarely seen anything like it.
