Kevin Drum 🕸

Apologies for dropping the ball on this. I had to make an urgent IT house call on my mother, so I spent the afternoon in Garden Grove. But it's not too late to catch up now with Donald Trump's racism fest at Madison Square Garden. "America is for Americans and Americans only" -- Stephen Miller ...continue reading "MSG report #2"

How is Donald Trump's big rally at Madison Square Garden going? Looks like it's gonna be a barn burner. Here's an early update: Speaking before Trump at Madison Square Garden, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe says: “These Latinos love making babies, there’s no pulling out, they cum inside, just like they do to our country” Calls Puerto ...continue reading "MSG report #1"

I did not know this: Since people seem to have missed this one, unsealed in the Smith filing: -Trump used a burner phone, routed through a foreign country to contact Michigan house speaker. -He tried to pressure the speaker in this off book call. -Speaker McCarthy knew about the burner phone line. -The phone showed ...continue reading "Trump used burner phone to pressure Michigan speaker over vote"

Israel announced today that it is carrying out strikes against Iran in response to an Iranian attack last month in response to Israel's murder of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in response to Hezbollah border attacks in response to Israel's war in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 in response to Israel's ...continue reading "A history of Israel in one sentence"

The New York Times reports on a "torrent" of threats against election officials as Election Day approaches: “Our polling places have become battlegrounds,” Isaac Cramer, executive director of South Carolina’s Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections, said in congressional testimony this year. He described one particularly unnerving practice being employed against his poll ...continue reading "Election threats pouring in from party that begins with R"

We took Charlie to the vet last week and the diagnosis was that he had an infection. So Charlie got an antibiotic shot and we got a tube of goop that we spread daily on the sore spot on his leg. He has to wear the cone for an hour after we put on the ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 25 October 2024"

The LA Times won't be endorsing for president this year. Neither will the Washington Post. Bill Gates has "quietly" donated $50 million to Kamala Harris. Jamie Dimon "privately" supports Harris but won't say so publicly. This is all because prominent billionaires are afraid of retribution from Donald Trump if he wins the election. Not social ...continue reading "Who’s afraid of Donald Trump?"

This is the aptly named red ape, having a bit of lunch at the LA Zoo.

Robert C. O’Brien, who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser in 2019 and 2020, explains why things were so great under Trump: When Iran got out of line, we eliminated an Iranian general of some note. We heard, “ISIS is an idea. It can’t be defeated,” but we sure as hell defeated them. So ...continue reading "Trump foreign policy folks are living inside a fantasy bubble"

Home sales were up very slightly in September. Existing home sales continued to decline, dropping by 20,000, but new home sales continued their recent upward march, increasing by 30,000. However, we're still more than a million homes below the pre-pandemic level and probably won't recover until the Fed lowers interest rates to their pre-pandemic level.

From the Wall Street Journal today: There are 27 million paid content creators in the U.S., and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found. This is simple enough. It means there are about 12 million full-time social media content creators (FTSMCC) in the US. But does ...continue reading "Are there more social media content creators than teachers?"

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 ...continue reading "New study says Black drivers ticketed at 3x the rate of white drivers"

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 ...continue reading "Abortion bans have mostly backfired"

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 ...continue reading "Vladimir Putin continues his campaign to elect Donald Trump"

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? About the funeral for a soldier killed at Fort Hood: “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican! Don’t ...continue reading "Donald Trump’s contempt for the military, quote by quote"

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 ...continue reading "What arrows are left in the anti-Trump quiver?"

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 ...continue reading "College tuition is down 40% over the past 10 years. That’s not a typo."

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