What I have been seeing lately are story after story reported substantially differently in different news outlets depending on the outlet’s ideology. I’ll give a couple of examples.

One took place in Texas. A guy was shooting at targets in his backyard, neighbors complained, guy went over to the neighbor’s house and shot five of the neighbors dead. I’ve seen this story told at least five different ways, depending:

• Private ownership of assault weapons should be illegal.
• Isn’t Texas horrible?
• We have too many immigrants.
• Illegal ownership of guns results in a lot of violent crime.
• People are too afraid.

I think there’s a kernel of truth in each of those renditions except the last. In this particular instance it seems to me the opposite was the case—I see no signs of fear on the part of any of the parties. I would add one account I haven’t heard but would suggest is more relevant to this and other tragedies than fear: sense of entitlement. “The mofo dissed me and I offed him.”

A key problem is that facts in the story were reported selectively depending on ideology. If you only accept reports from your own favored sources as evidence, in all likelihood you’ll only get part of the story.

Here’s another one. The use of facemasks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The versions are:

• Masks are useless.
• Masks should be mandatory.
• Masks are helpful in reducing the risk of spreading COVID-19 but the marginal benefit is low.
• Masks are helpful in reducing the risk of spreading COVID-19 and the marginal benefit is high.

There are probably some more versions and we’ll probably be hearing this debate for the next 20 years. I’ve read studies reporting from 10% effectiveness in reduction to 40%. I don’t believe I’ve read any studies which found a total end to spread due to wearing facemasks, at least not ordinary masks, N95s, or KN95s.

David Greising of the Better Government Association takes note of the lessons which Chicago Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson has yet to learn in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune:

The truth is hard to discern in the rhetorical arm wrestle between a progressive-minded prosecutor like Foxx, the pragmatists like Lightfoot and the law-and-order absolutists like many of Chicago’s cops on the beat.

That struggle between the ideals of the progressive agenda and the complexities of actual governing are worth keeping in mind as Johnson prepares to take office on May 15. The platitudes about Chicago’s role as an economic engine for Illinois and progressivism as a panacea for the state quickly will run into the real-world struggle to get legislation passed in Springfield.

If Johnson expects to implement his real estate transfer tax for homes worth $1 million or more, he’ll need Springfield’s help. If he hopes to begin taxing securities trading, he’ll need to outmaneuver Chicago exchanges that previously have beat back such measures — and persuade Gov. J.B. Pritzker to reverse a publicly stated aversion to the idea.

Perhaps Johnson is right that, with his election, Illinois has established itself in the vanguard of progressive politics. He need look no further than the experiences of Lightfoot and Foxx to see what that means in practice. Lightfoot compromised abundantly, lost her progressive support and lost her job. Foxx’s steadfast refusal to compromise brought on pressures and criticism that may have contributed to her surprise decision to exit office.

Progressive principles will take Johnson only so far. Decisions he makes and actions he takes when his progressive ideals crash into the reality of governing will determine his legacy in office too.

If experience is any gauge, he will take those lessons to heart no more than did Lori Lightfoot, the mayor whom he succeeds, and Kim Foxx, the Cook County States Attorney, who presided over a substantial increase in violent crime in Chicago. If Mr. Johnson is lucky, the crime will subside on its own but luck is a risky basis for an incoming administration.

Quite a few people are chiming in against the debt ceiling. Most of them are supporters of President Biden but there’s something they seem to have forgotten: President Biden opposes eliminating the debt ceiling, characterizing that as “irresponsible”. I should add that I see no difference between abolishing the debt ceiling and the House automatically approving raising the debt ceiling. Perhaps there is one that has eluded me.

I would say it is incumbent on those who want to abolish the debt ceiling to accept one or more of the following:

1. They disagree with President Biden
2. There is a difference between abolishing the debt ceiling and Congress’s automatically approving an increases in the debt ceiling and it is [fill in the blank]
3. President Biden and/or Sen. Schumer are being irresponsible by not negotiating with the House

For the first century of the U. S.’s existence there was no debt ceiling. It was adopted a little over a century ago. The explanation I’ve read is that it provided more flexibility in financing America’s participation in World War I. That doesn’t actually make sense to me. Someday perhaps I’ll summon up enough energy to dredge up the contemporaneous arguments in favor of imposing a debt ceiling. I suspect it was adopted for precisely the reason that we’re seeing now—it provides Congress with additional power over spending.

An additional thing I wanted to add. Decisions like the one in Train v. City of New York has placed the president in something of a bind. Once the Congress has appropriated money the president must spend it as the Congress has directed. That means the only courses of action open are for Congress to raise taxes or to “borrow” which in this case mostly means to extend credit to ourselves.

One final note. My own preference would be for the Congress to be limited in its ability to appropriate. Every appropriation above the revenue anticipated should explicitly “borrow”, raising the debt ceiling.

At MedicalExpress there’s a report on an interesting study:

The team randomly sampled 195 exchanges from AskDocs where a verified physician responded to a public question. The team provided the original question to ChatGPT and asked it to author a response. A panel of three licensed health care professionals assessed each question and the corresponding responses and were blinded to whether the response originated from a physician or ChatGPT. They compared responses based on information quality and empathy, noting which one they preferred.

The panel of health care professional evaluators preferred ChatGPT responses to physician responses 79% of the time.

“ChatGPT messages responded with nuanced and accurate information that often addressed more aspects of the patient’s questions than physician responses,” said Jessica Kelley, a nurse practitioner with San Diego firm Human Longevity and study co-author.

Additionally, ChatGPT responses were rated significantly higher in quality than physician responses: good or very good quality responses were 3.6 times higher for ChatGPT than physicians (physicians 22.1% versus ChatGPT 78.5%). The responses were also more empathic: empathetic or very empathetic responses were 9.8 times higher for ChatGPT than for physicians (physicians 4.6% versus ChatGPT 45.1%).

“I never imagined saying this,” added Dr. Aaron Goodman, an associate clinical professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and study co-author, “but ChatGPT is a prescription I’d like to give to my inbox. The tool will transform the way I support my patients.”

which confirms something I’ve been saying for some time.

My prediction is not that computer programs will replace flesh and blood physicians but that they’re going to make human physicians more productive. Such programs will also affect what skills are emphasized in the selection and training of physicians. We need physicians who are more human rather than more machine-like. Machines will beat human physicians at being machine-like every time. The challenge is for them not to be more human as well.

I struggled with writing this post a good deal of yesterday, ultimately discarding what I had done, reaching the conclusion that it would take a lot more than a blog post to express what needed to be said.

Let me give a quick summary. Reducing the amount of stuff we’re producing along with consolidation in the defense sectors is leaving us vulnerable. Imagine the situation where some commodity critical to defense is only produced by a single supplier in a single facility and an accident takes that facility offline. That’s exactly what happened when an accident in a blackpowder facility in Louisiana shut down production there. We haven’t produced the material which is still used in bullets, etc. for more than two years. We’ve been burning through stockpiles and relying on imports from Germany, Poland, etc.

The problem is that measures to mitigate the risks of accidents or deliberate sabotage are unappealing, too. Stockpiles large enough are expensive. Intellectual property may be involved. The DoD is tough to do business with. Preventing consolidation outright is impractical.

I’ve made my view clear many times. I think we need to be producing a lot more of what we consume. It’s hard to make that happen but that’s what we need to do.

I guess the story most worthy of comment today is the debt ceiling. The House has passed a bill raising that debt ceiling that also reduces spending to 2022 levels and caps spending growth at 1% per year, repealing some renewable energy tax incentives and stiffening work requirements for antipoverty programs. The bill isn’t expected to pass the Senate.

As you might expect there are differences of opinion about the bill. By and large Democrats want a “no strings attached” increase of the debt limit. The editors of the Washington Post largely concur:

In an ideal world, House Republicans would do their duty and lift the debt limit without exacting a ransom. This is about paying the money that Congress — in a largely bipartisan fashion — already committed to spend. This is also about reassuring a fragile world that the U.S. government can still do something as basic as pay its bills. A potential debt-limit catastrophe is lining up to hit just as the U.S. economy flatlines. The latest report on gross domestic product on Thursday showed a slowing economy in which businesses have already cut back sharply on spending in the face of high uncertainty. On top of that, China and Russia are making a push to get other nations to sign on to alternatives to the U.S. dollar. A U.S. default would enhance their cause.

It’s true that President Biden and Congress need to discuss spending. The nation is on a fiscally unsustainable course. Social Security and Medicare costs are rapidly escalating, along with interest expenses as the debt grows. But holding the debt limit hostage to impose blunt spending cuts would only backfire. A default — or even a near-default — would lead to higher borrowing costs. That’s exactly what happened in the 2011 debt-limit standoff.

It would be best if Republicans agreed to raise the debt limit and Mr. Biden and Congress launched a separate, parallel process to negotiate how to stabilize the budget. Mr. McCarthy likes to tout that his bill would save nearly $5 trillion over the next decade. But here’s the catch: House Republicans do not specify where $3 trillion of those cuts in discretionary spending would come from. It’s far easier to talk about general budget cuts than to spell out how much less funding they want for roads, schools and the military.

Mr. Biden’s insistence that House Republicans pass a clean debt-limit increase without any strings attached is the morally and economically correct course of action. But reality has to sink in. It would be wise for Mr. Biden to start talking seriously with Mr. McCarthy. Budget talks can remain on a separate path, but they need to commence.

while the editors of the Wall Street Journal are more sympathetic with the House Republicans:

Mr. Biden doesn’t seem to have figured out that the House vote changes the balance of negotiating power. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer needs at least nine GOP votes to pass any debt limit increase, and that means he needs help from GOP leader Mitch McConnell. With the House vote in his back pocket, Mr. McConnell isn’t going to provide those votes for free, even if he had the power to do so on his own.

What part of divided government and bicameral legislature doesn’t the President understand? Perhaps he’s still under the illusion that he can refuse to negotiate and cause Republicans to panic as the debt deadline looms. No doubt the press corps will try to give him cover.

But Wall Street will grow increasingly anxious, and even some Democrats have noticed that Nancy Pelosi is now a backbencher. “While I do not agree with everything proposed,” Sen. Joe Manchin said of the House plan, “it remains the only bill moving through Congress that would prevent default and that cannot be ignored.”

Mr. Biden’s refusal even to meet is weird given his long record as a politician willing to talk to the opposition. In 2012 as Vice President, he negotiated a deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” after President Obama’s haughty approach stalled. Mr. Biden reminisces occasionally about his younger years in the Senate, sparring with segregationists like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland. “We’d debate like hell on the floor of the Senate,” Mr. Biden said last year, “and go and have lunch together.”

Yet Mr. Biden won’t meet with Mr. McCarthy to hash out a debt deal? Ms. Jean-Pierre said Thursday that Mr. McCarthy’s plan is “an extreme MAGA wish list,” and Republicans are “saying to the Senate, they’re saying to the President, that we have to go with this agenda in its full form.”

No, they’re simply saying that the House has passed a bill to lift the debt limit, and Mr. McCarthy would like to negotiate a final deal with Mr. Biden that can get through both chambers and signed into law. If Mr. Biden won’t work with Republicans in the House and Senate on a compromise, then he’ll be responsible for the financial calamity he’s been warning about.

I think we need to take a lot of what the editors are saying with a substantial helping of salt. The Congress that committed to the spending (“This is about paying the money that Congress — in a largely bipartisan fashion — already committed to spend”) was a different Congress and Congresses’ ability to bind future Congresses is limited.

I also found the WaPo editors’ “in a perfect world” trope amusing. My version of perfection is obviously different from theirs. My version would include provisions like requiring the Congress to raise revenue when they increased spending beyond some percentage, e.g. the rate at which aggregate supply is growing.

However, the base purpose of the Congress is legislating negotiated deals. That’s what should happen here, too. I don’t know whether the House’s demands are a “MAGA wish list” or not. I’m open to suggestions one way or the other on that although I suspect that’s how the White House would characterize anything that passed a House with a Republican majority.

Like the editors of the Washington Post I think the White House should be open to negotiations with the Congress. If it takes “holding the debt ceiling hostage” to accomplish that, so be it.

Today closing arguments in the trial of the “ComEd Four” began. The “ComEd Four” are four ComEd executives presently on trial for conspiring to bribe former and long-time Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan to get favorable treatment for the utility from the state. Steve Daniels opens his report at Crain’s Chicago Business:

Liars on the witness stand attempting to run away from their roles in a criminal conspiracy. Or, four defendants who are “collateral damage” in a prosecutorial obsession to put Mike Madigan in jail.

Closing arguments in the “ComEd Four” trial Monday presented starkly different interpretations of six weeks’ worth of evidence from nearly 50 witnesses, dozens of wiretapped recordings and hundreds of emails that jurors will begin to sift through, likely late Tuesday.

What follows is a lengthy exposition of the closing arguments of the defense and prosecution.

I have no idea of what the jury’s verdict or the outcome of the trial will be. I wish I were able to find some good and unbiased commentary but I have found that extremely difficult.

I have speculated that, if they are found guilty, we may see the largest civil suit in the history of the United States.

Now the case has gone to the jury.

Let’s consider some potential outcomes (or lack thereof) in Ukraine:

1. Ukraine wins outright between now and November 5, 2024 (ED)
2. Ukraine loses outright between now and ED
3. The war continues to drag on past ED

Here are my questions:

1. Which is best politically for Joe Biden?
2. Which is worst politically for Joe Biden?
3. Which is best for the United States?

I don’t think there’s any question that Ukraine winning outright sooner rather than later is better for Ukraine while Ukraine losing outright sooner rather than later is best for Russia.

Would many people doubt that Ukraine winning outright before ED would be the best political outcome for Joe Biden?

Would Ukraine losing outright before ED be better or worse for Joe Biden politically than the war continuing to drag on?

I think that what’s in the best interest of the United States depends on what you think those interests are. If you think the U. S. interest in the war in Ukraine is degrading Russia, wouldn’t the war continuing to drag on be most in the U. S. interest?

In his announcement that he was running for re-election, President Biden said he was running “for the soul of America”:

President Joe Biden made it official Tuesday morning: The 80-year incumbent is running for reelection, setting up what could be a rematch of the ugly and tumultuous 2020 campaign against Republican Donald Trump.

In a three-minute video posted to his social media accounts, Biden asked Americans to help him “finish the job” and cast the race as a referendum on freedom and democracy itself.

“When I ran for president four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are,” Biden says in the video, which was posted four years to the day after he announced he would run for president in 2019. “That’s why I’m running for reelection.”

Opening with scenes of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and segueing quickly to scenes of abortion rights protesters, Biden warned against the rights that would be rolled back if Republicans were to take charge.

“Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love – all while making it more difficult for you to vote,” Biden warned in the ad.

as quoted in a piece at Newsweek by Susan Milligan. I have no idea what that means. 20 years ago I thought I might have been able to tell you. Not only that but that to the degree that America’s values had changed over the last 80 years, the change had been for the better.

Now not only do I not know what is meant by “the soul of America”, more Americans than ever before think our values are deteriorating as noted by Gallup:

and here’s what they found as the relative priorities:

That’s from June of last year. We’ll need to wait until June for an update.

Does what President Biden said align with that or not?