Kevin Drum

This is a late afternoon view from Angeles Crest Highway up near Mt. Wilson.

In a new report, the International Energy Agency predicts that renewable electricity will grow considerably by 2030 but won't hit its goal of tripling worldwide. Among large users, only China and India are forecast to triple:

Virtually all of this growth is in solar, with about a quarter in wind. Everything else is a rounding error.

POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that the IEA is notoriously conservative in its forecasts, revising them upward nearly every year. So there's actually a pretty good chance that their projections are wrong and renewable electricity will meet its 3x growth goal.

The YouGov weekly tracking poll stubbornly sticks with a 3-point Harris lead this week:

Donald Trump is exactly where he was in July with 44% of the vote. It seems like this is pretty much his ceiling. But the undecided/other vote is still around 8%. Harris has made a bit of progress over the past couple of months but hasn't sealed the deal.

Marjorie Taylor Greene says that recent hurricanes are the result of weather control technology being wielded (presumably) by the Biden/Harris administration. Josh Marshall comments:

Is this true? I'm not one to let a good joke go to waste—if joke it is—so I checked in with Google Trends:

As you can see, there has been a spike in searches for weather control. It's about as big as recent interest in both Al Pacino and newly crowned Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. It's essentially zero compared to, say, Taylor Swift or the Lakers on any ordinary day. You may decide for yourself if this makes it big or small.

You know, this is a pretty big deal:

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday announced a plan for Medicare to cover long-term-care services at home, a significant expansion of the program that would be aimed at helping tens of millions of Americans who are caring for aging parents.

....Under Harris’s plan, Medicare would cover services such as in-home aides so seniors could stay in their homes rather than move to nursing homes or long-term-care facilities. One goal, Harris said, is to make it easier for caregivers to continue working, as taking care of aging parents with growing limitations can become all-consuming.

The only downside of Harris's proposal is that Medicare ought to pay for any long-term care, whether it's at home or not. But half a loaf is better than none.

What's really notable about this, though, is that it got hardly any attention from a media that's allegedly hungry for serious policy news. It's halfway down the page at the Washington Post. It's a tiny blurb at the Wall Street Journal. It's nowhere to be found at the New York Times and LA Times. CNN has nothing. CBS News has a tiny blurb, but the other networks have nothing.

Is it because Harris announced this on The View? Because it's just boring policy wonkery? Because it's girl stuff? wtf?

California has a housing shortage. As a result, rents are high and vacancies are low. And yet:

Housing construction has surpassed population growth and is within a hair's breadth of keeping up with job growth. So where does the shortage come from?

A "ghost gun" is basically a kit: you get a box full of parts, make some tiny modifications, and then put it together. Today the Supreme Court pondered whether ghost guns could be regulated like regular guns—i.e., require serial numbers, background checks, etc.

Early in the argument, while Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was making the government’s case, Justice Samuel Alito asked her a series of hypotheticals about incomplete objects. Is a pen and a blank pad of paper a “grocery list?” Does a bunch of uncooked eggs, ham, and peppers constitute an “omelet?” Alito’s point appeared to be that, just like untouched ingredients don’t constitute an “omelet,” an incomplete firearm is not a gun.

Huh. I sure wish Alito could bring the same analytical power to bear on the question of whether an embryo is a baby. After all, the difference between a fertilized egg and a baby is far greater than the difference between a ghost gun and a gun. But I don't imagine he'll ever admit that, will he?

This is a Komodo dragon at the LA Zoo, using its tongue to check things out:

As with many other reptiles, the Komodo dragon primarily relies on its tongue to detect, taste, and smell stimuli, with the vomeronasal sense using the Jacobson's organ, rather than using the nostrils. With the help of a favorable wind and its habit of swinging its head from side to side as it walks, a Komodo dragon may be able to detect carrion from 4–9.5 km (2.5–5.9 mi) away.

That's a whole lot more than my tongue does these days.

CNN's Joan Biskupic reports that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn't understand why people were upset about his presidential immunity ruling earlier this year:

Roberts was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.

Is Roberts serious? He invented a sweeping presidential immunity out of whole cloth. It has no basis in either the text of the Constitution, statutory law, or our nation's history. It has never been applied to any of our previous 44 presidents. Every lower court rejected it. Roberts's ruling is so preposterous that it forbids prosecutors from even mentioning conversations a president might have had about committing crimes. And all of this was plainly the work of justices who had bought into right-wing grievances about Democratic "lawfare" against a Republican president.¹

But Roberts is upset that people don't realize it was actually just a modest little ruling that affects all presidents equally? You've got to be kidding me.

¹"Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws). An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine."

Early ballots have been mailed out to everyone in California, so it's time for my traditional recommendations about how to vote on the ballot initiatives. As usual, keep in mind a couple of things:

• I don't like ballot initiatives because they lock things into the state constitution that shouldn't usually be locked in. So my standards are high for a Yes vote.
• I especially hate ballot-box budgeting. It's a cancer.
• I believe the point of ballot initiatives is to give grass roots activists a chance to pass legislation opposed by moneyed interests. However, modern initiatives are largely the handiwork of corporations and the ultra-wealthy. I will almost never vote for an initiative sponsored primarily by businesses or billionaires.

That noted, here are my recommendations:

Proposition 2: NO. This is a school bond initiative. There's not much harm if you want to vote Yes, but I'm opposed to all bond measures, especially small-bore stuff like this that ought to funded out of the normal budget.

Proposition 3: YES. This protects same-sex marriage in the state constitution. It's not really necessary, but it's best to be sure, I guess.

Proposition 4: NO. Water bonds.

Proposition 5: YES. Allows local communities to approve housing and infrastructure bonds with a 55% majority instead of the current two-thirds. This change can only be made via initiative, so this is the way to do it. NOTE: I misread this initially and recommended a No vote. Fixed now.

Proposition 6: YES. This is an odd duck. It bans prisons from requiring inmates to work—aka ENDING SLAVERY, as its backers put it. I'm not sure this is quite the moral issue of our time, but there's no opposition even from conservatives. So sure.

Proposition 32: NO. This would raise the minimum wage slightly, from about $16.50 to $18, and index it to inflation. But the minimum wage is already indexed to inflation in California and the $1.50 increase itself doesn't strike me as anywhere near important enough for a ballot initiative. Let the legislature handle it.

Proposition 33: NO. This is yet another initiative from Michael Weinstein that would widely allow rent control in California. But California doesn't need rent control. It needs more housing, something that rent control would hurt, not help.

Proposition 34: NO. This is ostensibly a measure about prescription drug discounts. In fact, it's a punitive measure aimed solely at Michael Weinstein from folks who are tired of his rent control initiatives. Whether you love Michael Weinstein or hate him, this is preposterous.

Proposition 35: NO. This would extend a tax on health insurers that provides extra money for Medi-Cal payments to health workers. That's fine, although the tax will get extended regardless. But it would also designate which health workers get more money—and those groups are different from the ones who are set to get money in the state budget. In other words, this is basically a fight between different big health care providers and I'm not excited about this kind of ballot box budgeting. If the legislature was clearly acting in bad faith to divert funding, that would be one thing. But it's not.

Proposition 36: NO. This would repeal a reduction in penalties for certain drug and theft crimes that was passed a decade ago. It's a dumb, panicky, "tough-on-crime" measure based on a nonexistent crime wave supposedly sweeping California. There isn't one. The old reforms were good ones and we should keep them.