Kevin Drum

The Washington Post has a front page story this weekend about the Biden administration's tentative approach to border security and how it's prompted a huge surge of refugees and asylum seekers. It's getting a lot of pushback from progressives, who point out correctly that the surge started before the election and was partly the fault of new policies in Mexico, which we had no hand in.

Fine. If you don't like the Post story, read the LA Times story instead. It's better anyway—and, if anything, makes it even clearer that Biden's election and his shifting stance on the border is responsible for a big part of the current surge:

The belief that the end of the Trump administration has opened the border has spread throughout the region alongside another rumor: Young children are the ticket in.

....The increase is evident in the streams of families trudging north through the jungles of southern Mexico, in the crowded shelters of northern Mexican border cities and in southern Texas, where in recent days a constant flow of people has crossed the swiftly moving Rio Grande on rafts and turned themselves in to federal authorities.

....“The president helped us,” said Luis Enrique Rodriguez Villeda, a 31-year-old from Guatemala who crossed from Tamaulipas into Texas on a plastic raft this past week with his 2-year-old daughter, Ariana. “I’ve seen how he opened the border and gave people permission to come for a better life.” Rodriguez said he had traveled with his daughter because smugglers offered him a discount and told him it would help his chances of being allowed to stay.

This is not the first time there's been a surge of migrants on the southwest border. There was one in 2014 during the Obama administration, one in 2018 during the Trump administration, and now one in 2020-21, spanning the Trump and Biden administrations.

If you believe in more-or-less open borders, none of this will bother you. But if, like most people, you believe the border ought to be secured, this is a big problem and Biden isn't doing a good job of addressing it. Progressives shouldn't kid themselves about this.

Sen. Susan Collins has long been friendly with Joe Biden, but says it was disappointing that he never negotiated with Republicans over the coronavirus bill:

She was part of a group of Republicans invited to an early meeting with President Biden in the Oval Office over coronavirus aid. But their proposal was never seriously considered by Democrats, who passed their own $1.9 trillion bill without a single Republican vote. Ms. Collins said she was frustrated by the brushoff and subsequent interactions.

“Why they would want to alienate the Republican most likely to work with them to find common ground is truly a mystery to me. And it’s obviously a very poor strategy,” she said in an interview.

I get why Collins is frustrated. From her point of view Republicans were steamrolled by an administration that claims to value bipartisanship.

But I wonder if she even realizes what really happened? And whose fault it was? Collins, as part of a group of ten Republican senators, came into negotiations with a proposal of $600 billion, about one-third of the Democratic number. There's no way that Democratic leaders could have considered this serious. To them, an opening bid so plainly out of sync with reality was nothing but an invitation to waste time on negotiations that would never go anywhere. So they bailed.

If Collins and the rest of her group had started out at, say, $1 trillion, and made it clear that they could be talked up, it's possible that Democrats would have been willing to meet with them, perhaps with the goal of ending up at $1.5 trillion or so. But $600 billion was a joke, maybe even a bit insulting. Collins really needs to understand what Democrats have been through with Republicans in the past before she complains that they decided not to waste time on an obviously unserious proposal from them yet again.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 19. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Atrios today:

I Was Proved Fucking Right

Peak "driverless car discourse" was a few years ago. Some subjects don't just bring out disagreement, civil or otherwise, but extreme condescension....A bit like "Iraq war is a bad idea, yo," "driverless cars aren't going to work" brought out the kind of "you just don't know how the world works, silly child" haughty responses. And then once everyone (not everyone, but more people) realized Elon's cars were never going to work as promised, and even Waymo, which is doing it more sensibly, stopped promising the future was already here, people just stopped talking about it.

....The fatal flaw in the concept is even if they work surprisingly well - and even watching scary videos of them not working, they still do work surprisingly well - they absolutely require the thing that they are supposed to free us from. They require 100% driver attention for the moments when they fail, perhaps even more so than normal driving, which after awhile does become somewhat instinctive.

Well, now, hold on there. It's true that we haven't heard a lot from Waymo lately, but that's because they suspended testing during the pandemic. They may have lost a year, but as near as I can tell they're still basically on track. They're just more realistic about it than Elon.

But here's the part I don't get. I'm not trying to start a blog fight—I kind of miss them, but there aren't enough blogs left to risk one—but I find it odd that Duncan keeps talking about the "fatal flaw" being that driverless cars have to work perfectly, more or less. That's true, but far from being a deep secret that he alone has figured out, it's something that every single person who works on driverless technology is keenly aware of.¹ It's precisely the thing they're trying to accomplish. I think it's fair to say that it's turned out to be harder than anyone thought, even after they admitted it was harder than they thought, but 2025 isn't here yet! We still have a few years to go before the current predictions about fully driverless cars have to be shitcanned.

As for "people stopped talking about it," that's wildly the opposite of the truth. Not only are people still talking about it, but every car manufacturer on the globe has jumped on board. Maybe this hasn't produced banner headlines on a monthly basis in the New York Times, but the auto industry is completely abuzz about it. Just last month we were all talking about Apple and Hyundai in negotiations to build a plant to manufacture driverless cars.

Anyway, the general chatter about driverless cars has been muted lately because of the pandemic and also because it's been overshadowed by the boom in electric car hype, but it's still out there. I continue to predict that by 2025 I will be able to tell a car to take me to Duncan's address, and then sit back and take a nap until we get there.²

¹Except maybe Elon, of course.

²Though I suppose I'll still have to wake up once in a while to pump some gas. I don't think anyone has automated that yet.

Quick note for those of you who are leery about the side effects of getting a COVID-19 vaccination: I had none. No sore arm. No "flu-like symptoms." No headaches. Nothing.

Maybe you'll be different! But since first-person accounts almost unanimously seem to be written by people who suffered from something or another, I just thought I'd let you know that it's not inevitable. If you're one of the lucky ones, you'll feel no side effects at all.

Here is Hopper in a sack, illuminated by the morning sun. As you can see, she is peering at her tail, apparently wondering what it is. I don't know if she ever figured it out.

I know nothing about contemporary music, so I decided to read a profile of Megan Thee Stallion in the Guardian. It filled me in:

Her punchline-rich lyrics are wittily self-confident, humiliating men for their sexual failings and dismissing female rivals as “bitches thinkin’ they the shit when they really toilet water.”

Damn. That's poetry, folks.

Is Joe Biden the most progressive president ever? Is he maybe even the second coming of FDR? Will he permanently change the face of the nation?

These are all actual questions that I've seen highlighted in recent articles or op-eds. I say: settle down, folks. So far Biden has passed a big stimulus bill and hired a fairly progressive bunch of folks to run the government. That's it. And he's had the good fortune to face no new crises during his first couple of months, which has kept his approval level high.

But the hard stuff comes next. Republicans aren't going to allow any further legislation to pass, and there's a limit to what Biden can do via executive order. Anybody's who's expecting the dawn of a new age really needs to think again.

Historically, there's one thing that determines how effective a Democratic president is: the size of his majority in Congress. Wilson, FDR, and LBJ all had huge majorities and got a lot done. Obama had a big majority and got a few things done. Biden, by contrast, has a 50-50 tie in the Senate and a bare majority in the House. Filibuster or no, this is just not the makings of a progressive revolution.

It's remarkable to me how quickly people can overreact to political news. Is it because they're bored and feel like they need to write something exciting? Or do they really believe this stuff? Either way, take it with a huge shaker of salt. Biden may turn out to be a pleasant surprise for progressives, but he's not the leader of a revolution.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 18. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Have hate crimes against Asian Americans increased? FBI data for 2020 isn't yet available and won't be for quite a while, but a few large cities have released figures already. The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at CSU San Bernardino has gathered up what's available and compiled this table:

As the Center notes, this large increase comes against a background of decline in overall hate crime between 2019 and 2020.

This is obviously pretty stark data, and it's been widely disseminated, but it's worth keeping in mind that it's still preliminary. It's based on only a few large cities and the absolute numbers remain small. We might get a very different picture when nationwide figures are available later this year.