The Center for Media Engagement at UT Austin has released a report on TV coverage of the coronavirus. Here's their breakdown of how often partisans were mentioned:
Broadcast news and CNN mentioned Democrats and Republicans about equally, demonstrating their desire for even handedness. Fox and MSNBC, by contrast, both mentioned their ideological opposites at a higher rate. Why? Because both networks are dedicated less to defending their own side than they are to stoking outrage about what the other side is doing. On this score, MSNBC is bad and Fox is even worse.
The report also takes a look at how well each network did on providing accurate mask information following the CDC's change of heart in April. They found that broadcast networks and CNN were very accurate; MSNBC was slightly worse but still pretty good; and Fox was terrible. Apparently toeing the Trump line prevented them from taking the plunge and just telling people they should wear masks.
By the way, this is why I continue to defend the "objective" media. For all their faults, they still tend to be more accurate than explicitly partisan media.
This is the interchange from the 55 to the 405 freeway in Costa Mesa. It was taken at 3 am during the early stages of the COVID-19 shutdown when I could do a 30-second exposure and still have no cars in the picture.
Of course, at 3 am I might be able to do that anytime, which makes this a pretty humdrum image. However, for nearly a year it's stayed in my queue without being deleted, which means I kinda like it for some reason. The colors are nice. The arc of the onramp is nice. The emptiness of a normally bustling road is nice. I'm not sure what else attracts me to it.
What happens if we increase the federal minimum wage to $15? The Wall Street Journal says we don't know for sure:
Economists are divided on the effects of the $15 minimum wage. Some have looked at the patchwork of state and local increases and found little job loss relative to nearby areas with lower minimums. But others say jobs losses tied to a $15 minimum wage could be more severe, especially in states with a relatively low cost of living.
The impact would be felt in more rural states, such as Mississippi, the opponents say. Half of all workers there earned $15 an hour or less in 2019, according to the Labor Department. That includes dishwashers, cashiers, firefighters and construction laborers. Nearly half of workers in Arkansas, West Virginia and Louisiana made less than $15 an hour.
I'm not sure there's really much of a question about this. What would happen is that wages would go up for nearly everyone, but there would also be employment losses. However, we don't know for sure how big the employment losses would be since we've never enacted a national minimum wage hike this big.
Right now median annual earnings in the United States come to $36,000 according to the Census Bureau. A minimum wage of $15 is equivalent to annual earnings of about $31,000. That's a very high minimum wage. We really have no idea what effect that would have outside of high-wage cities like New York and Seattle.
Right now, the plan on the table calls for the minimum wage to rise to $12.50 by 2023 and $15 by 2025. My preference would be to stop at $12.50 and then link further increases to inflation. We should see what effect this has before jumping off into the unknown. As always, states and cities with generally higher wages could enact higher minimums if they choose to.
As investigations of the 1/6 insurrection continue, one thing that's become clearer is the key role played by an organization called Women For America First, run by Amy Kremer.
Kremer is an old hand at this stuff. She was an early Tea Party activist and in 2016 founded a couple of Super PACs dedicated to electing Donald Trump, one of them in partnership with Roger Stone's wife, Ann. The PACs raised little money but she stayed in the fight, spending the next couple of years supporting far-right candidates in both primaries and general elections. Then she switched gears and founded WFAF in 2019. It was originally aimed at protesting the Trump impeachment; then at COVID-19 restrictions; and finally, after the 2020 election, at promoting "Stop the Steal," which claimed the election had been stolen by Democrats.
As Mr. Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.
As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
It was Kremer who got the permit for the 1/6 rally at which Trump spoke. However, although they've done their best to hide this, she had the help of several people close to Trump himself:
Megan Powers was listed as one of two operations managers for the Jan. 6 event, and her LinkedIn profile says she was the Trump campaign’s director of operations into January 2021....Caroline Wren, a veteran GOP fundraiser, is named as a “VIP Advisor” on an attachment to the permit that Women for America First provided to the agency....Maggie Mulvaney, a niece of former top Trump aide Mick Mulvaney, is listed on the permit attachment as the “VIP Lead.” She worked as director of finance operations for the Trump campaign, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Wren was no ordinary event planner. She served as a deputy to Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at Trump Victory, a joint presidential fundraising committee during the 2020 campaign. The Justin mentioned in her text was Justin Caporale, a former top aide to first lady Melania Trump, whose production company helped put on the event at the Ellipse.
Text messages and an event-planning memo obtained by ProPublica, along with an interview with Chafian, indicate that Wren, a Washington insider with a low public profile, played an extensive role in managing operations for the event. The records show that Wren oversaw logistics, budgeting, funding and messaging for the Jan. 6 rally that featured President Donald Trump.
On Saturday, Jan. 2, Kylie Kremer posted a promotional video for Wednesday’s rally on Twitter, along with a message: “BE A PART OF HISTORY.”
The president shared her post and wrote: “I’ll be there! Historic day.”
Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production....New planners also joined the team, among them Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump fund-raiser and partner of Donald Trump Jr. The former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson was the liaison to the White House, a former administration official said. The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.
This all leads us to the key question: How much did Donald Trump know about all this, and when did he know it? Trump, of course, insists that he knew nothing, and given his hummingbird-like attention span this could well be true.
On the other hand, Kremer was a longtime activist, well known and friendly with Trump's friends. Lots of Trump's campaign people apparently assisted with the planning of the 1/6 rally. And Trump's interest in having the Senate overturn the Electoral College results is a matter of record.
Given that, what are the odds Trump knew nothing about the rally and had no plans to use it as a last-ditch effort to bludgeon the Senate into carrying out his will? I'd say it's unlikely he was totally in the dark, but you can take a look at the evidence and decide for yourself.
This is Romanesco cauliflower, courtesy of our weekly produce box. According to some random guy I found in a Google search, "Romanesco’s flowering head grows in a naturally occurring fractal" and "is described as possessing a somewhat earthy taste that meshes elegantly with other flavors like garlic, white wine and even chili peppers."
This picture has been modified using the Photoshop poster edge filter. I know that many people hate hate hate all this filtering nonsense, but once in a while I think it looks good. I've even got another one in the queue for later in the year.
About a week ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to our state's slow vaccine rollout by doing away with "tiers" and going to a purely age-based system. This is what lots of people have been recommending, but every decision like this leaves someone out in the cold:
“They act as if we do not exist. Or if we do, we’re expendable,” said [Ntombi] Peters, who uses multiple inhalers and daily medications to control her severe asthma and is on immunosuppressant drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, both of which put her at severe risk from COVID-19. “It’s very disheartening.”
....“Clearly, we are living in a culture that still sees people like me as disposable,” said Alice Wong, 46, a disabled activist in San Francisco, who created the hashtag #HighRiskCA in response to the change. “This is clearly erasure, this is eugenics, and I consider this a form of violence. It is a form of violence against the most marginalized communities.”
The problem, of course, is that someone has to make up rules about which disabilities qualify you for an early vaccination, and then someone else has to verify that the people applying really do have the disabilities they say they do. This is a huge amount of work that generates ever yet more blowback from whatever group finds itself on the wrong side of the line, and in the end it slows down the vaccine rollout.
This is the dilemma, and I can't pretend to have the answer. One thing I'll say, though, is that I think activists would have more success if they'd drop the pseudo-academic language of "erasure" and "eugenics" and "violence." It's none of that, and it accomplishes little except to make people less sympathetic to their cause. It's just a very difficult problem.
I woke up around the crack of noon today. Apparently the Evil Dex has completed its transformation from a drug that keeps me up all night into a damn sleeping pill. I was asleep for nearly ten solid hours last night.
In any case, since this is officially an old-school blog, I was pleased to be greeted by one of the oldest-school blog debates around: why do Democratic presidents outperform Republican presidents on the economy? David Leonhardt provides us with the following ranking:
For starters, I'll say that it's a little unfair to begin with FDR, since growth rates were fundamentally higher in the era of 1945-1970, which featured almost exclusively Democratic presidents. On the other hand, the one Republican president during that time, Eisenhower, presided over a series of recessions and ranks pretty low even though he was smack in the middle of the high-growth era. And it's not just GDP and jobs:
It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”
....The big question, of course, is why. And there are not easy answers. First, it’s worth rejecting a few unlikely possibilities. Congressional control is not the answer. The pattern holds regardless of which party is running Congress. Deficit spending also doesn’t explain the gap: It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.
That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.
For what it's worth, my explanation has always been a bit different. Republicans spent years wedded to austerity economics while Democrats, largely thanks to broad support from unions, were explicitly dedicated to job growth for the middle class and high taxes on the rich. After 1980 Republicans finally gave up on austerity, but instead of focusing on the middle class they adopted policies aimed at making life easier for corporations and the wealthy. Democrats, by contrast, continued to focus on the poor and the working class even as their union support dwindled.
Neither party was consistently successful in meeting its goals, but both were successful enough that over time their policies had a broad effect that was obvious in historical retrospect. This isn't because Democrats are especially more virtuous about "heeding economic and historical lessons," but simply because their goals were more genuinely aimed at building a strong economy, while Republican goals were aimed primarily at helping the rich.
One more thing: if you're wondering how Ds and Rs do on average over the entire period, I have the answer for you. For the sake of fairness I started in 1961, thus cutting off all the high-growth New Deal Democrats, but it hardly matters. On GDP growth over the past 60 years, Democratic presidents averaged 3.5 percent growth vs. 2.5 percent for Republican presidents. On jobs growth, Democratic presidents averaged 2.2 growth vs. 1.2 percent for Republicans.
Back in the day I would have also calculated these numbers using a lag, on the assumption that a president's policies didn't have any effect in the first year or two of office. But that never made any difference, so I'm not going to bother.
Anyway, the message is clear: if you want real economic growth for the middle class, vote for Democratic presidents. If you want low taxes for the rich, vote for Republican presidents. It's pretty easy.
The pandemic news has been relatively good lately. After the holiday surge, cases started declining in January and deaths started to follow suit three weeks later. Most places are now showing a sustained decline—or at least a plateau—from their peak of a few weeks ago. If we can manage to keep this up, we should be in good shape to accelerate the decline as more people get vaccinated.
The bad news, of course, was that so many countries, including the US, had a holiday surge in the first place. I wonder how many people were killed because we collectively decided to visit our relatives come hell or high water—with full and conscious knowledge of what we were doing?
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Vox and Data for Progress have teamed up to conduct a new poll on a variety of issues that have been in the news recently. Many of them are related to the coronavirus bill, but not all. Here's how they fared among Republicans:
If these issues become live, the right-wing media machine will be able to knock 15-20 points off any of them if they choose to. For that reason, I'd rank the top five issues as having fairly solid Republican support; the next three having a bare majority; and the rest not really having much Republican support at all.
The takeaway here is that the top five are all COVID-19 related and even Republicans mostly support them. (The exception is allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices, which has strong support even though it's unrelated to the pandemic.)
Among the COVID-related issues that don't receive strong GOP support are a moratorium on evictions and continued unemployment bonuses. Why? Probably because most of the respondents aren't unemployed and aren't in danger of being evicted. Conversely, many of them do have kids in school and would receive $1,400 checks sent out to everyone. So they're in favor of those.
And the free vaccines and free testing? Well, everyone could use those too, couldn't they?
The basic message is Politics 101: Republican voters tend to support things that will benefit them personally, but aren't that thrilled about things that only benefit other people. The same is true of other voters as well, but not nearly as strongly.
