Kevin Drum

After spending literally decades trying to get access to Alaskan wilderness areas, it turns out that oil companies don't really want it after all. This is from the Anchorage Daily News on Thursday:

Another oil company backs out of leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

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The only oil company that bought a single lease in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge early last year has canceled its lease, according to the U.S. Interior Department.

The move by Regenerate Alaska is the latest example of the industry stepping away from possible oil and gas development in the 19-million-acre refuge. Hilcorp and Chevron have also canceled their interest in separate, older leases, on a small tract of Alaska Native corporation-owned land within the refuge’s boundaries.

Regenerate Alaska was the only company to bid on ANWR leases in the waning days of the Trump administration. None of the majors showed any interest, and now, even the companies that already have leases are getting out. This is partly because the Biden administration hasn't been friendly toward ANWR leasing, but it's also because ANWR was never a huge pot of gold in the first place.

This has long been my main gripe about ANWR: Both sides have invested way more into the fight than they can justify. On the one hand, ANWR doesn't really have all that much oil,¹ and it's expensive to get out. On the other hand, a pipeline wouldn't do all that much damage to the caribou.² I'd just as soon not drill in ANWR, partly because we need to stop opening new oil fields regardless, but it's just not a big deal either way.

¹EIA estimates that over the period 2031-2050, ANWR would increase US production about 4% and world production by about 0.2%.

²You'll have to check this out for yourself. There are hundreds of assessments, almost all of them coming from organizations with an axe to grind, and my meta-sense is that taken together they suggest only moderate effects. But reasonable people can differ about this.

I've seen a lot of stuff like this since yesterday:

I am a bit stunned that more journalists aren't outraged and stunned by the Heard/Depp verdict.

In addition to being a disaster for domestic abuse survivors, it is a disaster for a publication's ability to tell truth to power.

— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) June 2, 2022

I have no independent opinion about this since I didn't follow the trial and know almost nothing about what kind of evidence each side produced. But there are a few things I do know:

• Plenty of seemingly rational observers believe that Amber Heard presented a lousy case with virtually no good witnesses and no good documentary evidence.
• This was strictly a defamation case between Depp and Heard. It was based largely on an op-ed published in the Washington Post, but it didn't involve the Post or any other news outlet.
• Seven jurors who did hear the entire case voted unanimously in Depp's favor on the main defamation charges.

The fact that one woman lost one defamation case doesn't mean the end of #MeToo. Nor does it mean that Heard was railroaded. Nor does it have anything to with whether Johnny Depp is, in general, a good human being. It just means that in one particular case, involving one particular charge, a woman was unable to convince a jury that she could back up defamatory things she had said in public.

I dunno. As I said, I'm, no expert on this case. But we can't go all to pieces every time a woman loses a defamation or sexual assault case. That happens sometimes. Sometimes women exaggerate. Sometimes they lie. Sometimes they just present a lousy case. Taking women seriously doesn't mean they automatically win every time they go to court.

The American economy gained 390,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 300,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate remained absolutely flat at 3.62%.

As usual these days, nearly all of the job gains were in the service sector. The service sector accounted for 70% of all new jobs in May, about the same as it's been all year.¹

Weekly earnings of blue-collar workers were up at an annualized rate of 6.9% over April, which is nearly a 3% rise after adjusting for the recent inflation rate.² For the year, wages were up 5.8%, which is a 2.4% decline after adjusting for annual inflation.

So how are workers doing? One thing for certain is that they mostly have jobs if they want them. In May the labor force participation rate ticked up yet again from 62.2% to 62.3%, just as it's been doing for the past year.

Wages are a more complicated story. They've been falling for a while after adjusting for inflation, which means there's no sign of a wage-price spiral. That's good for inflationary expectations but not so good for workers. In the past month or two, however, real wages have been going up. Needless to say, this is good for workers but bad for inflationary expectations.

In other words, who knows? The past couple of months might be a fluke, or it could be that employers are only now finally responding to high inflation with high wage hikes. Stay tuned.

¹This should come as no surprise since the private service sector accounts for about 70% of all American jobs.

²The annualized inflation rate from March to April was only 4.2%.

Our apartment is right near Église Saint-Augustin de Paris, but like many large churches its rose window is partly covered by its organ. However, this was no problem: The window is symmetrical, so I cut out a pie-shaped piece from the top, inverted it, and plopped it into the space blocked by the organ at the bottom.

Is this cheating? Sure! But at least we all get to see what the full rose window probably looks like if we were able to climb up behind the organ and take a look.

I managed to make it two weeks in good health, but today my lucky streak ended. I woke up with a cold and a terrible sore throat and stayed in most of the day.

In other news, my cell phone got pickpocketed on the metro. I'm mad about this less because the phone itself was so valuable and more because I'm an idiot who failed to take even the most obvious precautions against theft.

And how are my eyes doing? I'm glad you asked. They definitely aren't getting better. In fact, they may even be getting worse, especially when I'm reading at night and they're tired.

Based on all this, you might think I'm having a lousy time. Not so! Colds are a routine hazard of travel, here today and gone tomorrow. This is why I planned a three-week trip, after all, so that a day or two with a cold wouldn't have a big impact. As for the phone, I miss having Google Maps while I'm roaming around, but I'm so old I still know how to read paper maps. Nor was there was anything sensitive on the phone—though I called T-Mobile anyway and had them brick it for me. And the state of my eyes is nothing surprising. I hoped for—but didn't really expect—improvement.

In fact, we're having a great time. Our apartment in the Madeleine neighborhood is great. The weather is spectacular. We've visited everything we wanted so far with no long lines and no problems. I've taken so many pictures I had to make room for them by clearing out space on my 500 GB tablet. Best vacation ever!

Just another street scene in Paris.

Did I wake up on Mars today?

Last September Texas passed a law that allowed the government to enforce speech codes on private companies like Facebook and Twitter. These companies would be required to host speech they didn't want, a bit of state coercion so wildly unconstitutional it was a wonder the ghost of James Madison didn't strike the entire Texas lege dead on the spot.

In December a district court rightfully and quickly declared that the law violated the First Amendment.

Then, astonishingly, in May an appellate court ruled that the law could go into effect after all.

Then, today, the Supreme Court overruled the appellate court and blocked enforcement. But that's not the news. The news is that is that three justices would have allowed the law to take effect.¹ Here is what Sam Alito wrote:

The law before us is novel, as are applicants’ business models.... It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies, but Texas argues that its law is permissible under our case law. First, Texas contends that §7 does not require social media platforms to host any particular message but only to refrain from discrimination against a user’s speech on the basis of “viewpoint.”

....I have not formed a definitive view on the novel legal questions that arise from Texas’s decision to address the “changing social and economic” conditions it perceives....But precisely because of that, I am not comfortable intervening at this point in the proceedings

Am I crazy or is this beyond belief? Alito writes that Texas "only" wants to regulate speech based on "viewpoint," but viewpoint regulation is specifically and emphatically the very thing the First Amendment prohibits. And it's Texas that's bound by the First Amendment, not Facebook, regardless of the brand of sophistry Alito or any other judge engages in.

Neither Alito nor anyone else should have any trouble forming a "definitive view" of free speech rights just because they happen to come in the form of pixels instead of ink. But these days, all you need is a vague and paranoid belief that Republicans aren't getting their way and you can persuade not one, not two, but three Supreme Court justices to toss out the First Amendment like a piece of moldy bread.

This isn't the Texas legislature speaking. Or its governor. Or a lobbying group or a random judge somewhere. It's the Supreme Court of the United States. Their job is to enforce the Constitution by tossing out partisan pandering like this quickly and with extreme prejudice. It's appalling that this no longer happens.

This should be today's top story in every newspaper in the country. Why isn't it?

¹Four, actually, but Elena Kagan likely voted for tactical reasons, not because she supported the law in question.

America's latest independent prosecutor fiasco continues to roll along.¹ Trump fans are desperately hoping that US Attorney John Durham will prove that Russiagate was a Democratic ratfuck from the start, but Durham has now failed to prove even the trivial nano-charge that he finally brought against a guy nobody's heard of. That guy is Michael Sussmann, who was accused of the most inconsequential action possible: bringing information to the FBI but failing to tell them he was working with the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I mean, who cares, right? But it was all Durham had, and it gave him a vehicle for writing indictments that mysteriously implied greater crimes in the background. In the end, though, the jury unanimously voted against even the one trivial charge Durham thought he could prove. Sussmann is a free man today.

The era of the hyperpartisan special counsel really needs to come to a close. In particular, their endless investigations need to be limited not just in time but also in scope. They should be appointed with specific goals in mind, and not allowed to wander off into unrelated territory just because somebody who was related to someone did something vaguely unlawful.

In this case, Sussmann had nothing to do with starting the FBI's Russia investigation and, it turned out, nothing to do with keeping it going. Sussmann just passed along a tip, hoping it might go somewhere, which the FBI promptly looked into it and then killed. He should never have been in court, racking up God knows how much in attorney fees, in the first place. Durham is a disgrace.

¹Sorry, "special counsel" fiasco. Gotta get the lingo right.

President Biden has approved a program of student loan cancellation up to $10,000. Matt Yglesias isn't happy about it:

The student loan cancelation issue is white collar nonprofit workers making the transition from class-in-itself to class-for-itself.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 28, 2022

I get Matt's irritation about this. It really is a triumph of relatively privileged young activists who are demanding cancellation of debts that they went into with their eyes open and with signatures on loan documents saying they'd pay them back.

On the other hand, Biden's $10,000 program is also the best compromise available here. It means that by far the biggest share of the money will go not to MBA students and Harvard grads, but to folks who went to community colleges, trade schools, and state universities. These are people who ran up big debts they might not have fully understood in return for fairly workaday degrees. I can live with that.

But there's one piece of this that I continue to think isn't as appreciated as it should be: this is really not a federal problem. If there's a presidential election in progress, then sure, you lobby the president. Anyone would do the same. But the federal government can't cancel pieces of student debt forever, so this is merely a one-time benefit, not a solution to the high cost of university education.

For the vast majority of students, this is a state problem because they're attending state universities. That's who liberals should be lobbying. Conservatives are very good at grinding out policy victories state by state, but it's hard, often unrewarding work. That goes with the territory, though, and this is a case where states are the ones who raised university costs and they're the only ones who can lower them. Anything else is just a bandage on a suppurating wound.

Let's get back to some straight-up tourist stuff, shall we? This, of course, is Notre Dame cathedral photographed late in the afternoon, and from the front it looks like it's never been damaged at all. But perspective isn't everything: I photoshopped out both a big, ugly crane and a big, ugly fence that runs along the entire entrance, so now it looks pristine. The fusion of medieval architecture and 21st century high tech is a grand thing indeed.