Kevin Drum

Are Black drivers ticketed by police more than white drivers? A new study suggests they are. It compares tickets given via police vs. tickets given by speed cameras and finds that cameras treat everyone about the same while police decidedly don't. Here's the key chart:

The red and blue lines are for camera tickets. They're very close, suggesting that, objectively, Black and white drivers are driving about the same.

The green and magenta lines are for police tickets. Black drivers are ticketed at rates above speed cameras, but more notably, white drivers are ticketed at rates way under speed cameras. This gap is more noticeable the whiter an area is.

The study estimates the race of drivers based on where they live, which is obviously not 100% accurate. However, over the course of thousands of observations it probably averages out about right.

The best conclusion from this study is not that Black drivers are ticketed way more than they should be. It's that white drivers are routinely treated leniently in ways Black drivers aren't. You may be tired of the phrase "white privilege," but this is what it is.

This is an apartment building under construction near my mother's house. The framing used metal girders, not wood, and glowed in the light of the setting sun. It's long since finished and now looks like a boring old apartment complex.

The weekly YouGov poll shows the race tightening slightly, just like everybody else:

According to the Society of Family Planning, the number of abortions in the US went up after a dozen different states passed near-total abortion bans. The increase is entirely due to the growth of telehealth:

What's more surprising is that abortion bans haven't even reduced abortions in the states where they're banned. Women in those states have either traveled out of state or obtained abortion medication. The New York Times has the data:

Abortion bans produced a rush to make telehealth and medication easier and cheaper to get. Ironically, the result seems to have been a higher awareness of these alternatives and a net increase in abortions. The Supreme Court should never have poked the bear.

Vladimir Putin is doing whatever he can to help Donald Trump win:

U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday said Russians seeking to disrupt the U.S. elections created a faked video and other material smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz.... They added that Russian government agencies and contractors, which generally seek to boost Republican former president Donald Trump’s campaign, are considering trying to instigate physical violence in the fraught period after voters cast their ballots.

....Russia is “potentially seeking to stoke threats towards poll workers, as well as amplifying protests and potentially encouraging protests to be violent,” the official added.

Why is Putin so enamored of Trump? Lots of reasons, but I suppose the biggest one right now is that he thinks Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine and guarantee a Russian victory. If I were Putin, I suppose I'd prefer Trump too.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a long piece in the Atlantic today about Donald Trump's enduring contempt for the military. But maybe you're too busy to read the whole thing. So how about just the quotes?

1. About the funeral for a soldier killed at Fort Hood: “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican! Don’t pay it!”
2. About the supposedly shaky loyalty of his top officers: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
3. About the Presidential Medal of Freedom: “It's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor — that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
4. About military service: “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”
5. About the dangers of promiscuous sex: “It is a dangerous world out there. It's like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider.”
6. About the George Floyd protests: “The Chinese generals would know what to do.”
7. About his generals after they resisted shooting protesters: “You are all fucking losers!”
8. About his generals again: “My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”
9. About Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”
10. About John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
11. About lowering the White House flag to half staff after McCain's death: “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser.”
12. About soldiers who volunteered for service in Afghanistan: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
13. About a visit to a WWII cemetery in France: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
14. About wounded veterans appearing in parades: “I don’t want them. It doesn’t look good for me.”
15. About a wounded veteran singing "God Bless America" at the installation ceremony of Mark Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Two weeks to go.

There aren't a lot of undecided voters left at this point, but there are some—and they might end up being decisive if they can be turned against Donald Trump. So I keep wondering: What could we tell them about Trump that they don't already know?

In other words, forget about the fascism, the lying, the racism, and the bizarre rally speeches. They probably already know all that stuff and it hasn't done the trick. So what's left?

College Board has just published its latest university tuition figures, which gives me an excuse to post one of my favorite charts. This time I'll just look at the past decade:

Average tuition actually charged after standard discounts has dropped 2% since last year and has gone down 40% over the past ten years.

For private universities, actual tuition has gone down 12% over the past ten years.

College Board has been publishing these figures annually for a long time, but you've probably never seen them anywhere but here. Why?

POSTSCRIPT: Just to be clear, the "actual cost" in the chart is an average based on outright grant awards that offset published tuition prices. For public universities, the average grant in 2024 was about $9,000, but that varies. Poor people get more and rich people get less.

The price of gasoline has dropped 14% over the past six months.

Two views of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. The top one is a panoramic shot taken from about ten feet away—or so it seemed. The square surrounding the cathedral is a very tight space. I shopped the image massively to eliminate keystoning (converging vertical lines due to aiming the camera upward).

The bottom image was taken from inside the Prater wheel.