President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with “aggressive” metastatic prostate cancer. My heart goes out to him and his family.

According to the American Cancer Society the incidence of prostate cancer per 100,000 population rises with age:

While that’s still far from a certainty, it’s yet another reason that we should avoid electing men over 70 to the presidency.

In an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune Mayor Johnson’s erstwhile opponent for the job of mayor, former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools Paul Vallas, provides his assessment of the first two years of Mr. Johnson’s term as mayor:

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first two years in office can best be described as delusional. Even from a progressive perspective, there is a glaring disconnect between his rhetoric and reality. 

Johnson has declared his tenure the most accomplished of any mayor in Chicago history and claims the city is now a national model for building a worker-centered, safe and affordable city. But his proudest accomplishments amount to little more than a progressive Potemkin village.

He goes on to catalogue the mayor’s putative accomplishments and, needless to say, finds them lacking.

My own view is that there’s plenty of delusion to go around—being delusional is not limited to the mayor. I have no idea what Chicago voters, the Chicago Teachers Union, or the major media outlets are thinking.

Chicago has the worst credit rating of any major U. S. city. There isn’t even any real competition. Chicago has the highest real estate tax of any major U. S. city and the highest sales tax.

Here is Mr. Vallas’s statement of the present Chicago budget deficits:

Johnson or his administration has done nothing to address the financial storm engulfing the city, schools and public transit system — each faces historic deficits in the coming year. The city projects a budget shortfall exceeding $1 billion. The new teachers contract pushes Chicago Public Schools’ deficit to more than $800 million, and the CTA faces a $600 million revenue shortfall. Meanwhile, the mayor’s backing of a $1.5 billion contract with the Chicago Teachers Union makes it virtually impossible to balance either the city or CPS budget without major tax hikes.

For those not residents of Illinois, the state has more independently taxing entities than any other. It’s not just the state and local legislatures that levy taxes but school districts, park districts, sanitary districts, and many other entities have independent power to levy taxes.

My question is how did any Chicagoan expect Mr. Johnson to do anything else? He has not even attempted to economize.

And how does the CTU expect to boost the incomes of Chicago teachers into the top 10% of income earners while teaching fewer students and evading scrutiny?

While I’m reflecting on delusion what has Gov. J. B. Pritzker accomplished that he promised when he first ran for governor? Illinois’s credit rating is only slightly better than that of New Jersey—it’s the second worst in the nation. Also, Illinois’s contribution to public education is among the lowest of any state.

It hasn’t always been this way. Chicago’s credit rating used to be pretty good and the state of Illinois’s credit rating used to be quite good. The last twenty years have been disastrous.

This memo from the Democratic polling organization Impact Research (PDF) for the progressive activist organization End Citizens United provides some advice for Democrats that I wish they would take but doubt that they will. Here are some of their takeaways:

1. Keep the focus on Congress, more than Trump or Elon. For these swing participants, their views on Trump and Elon are complicated and still forming. Trump retains some inoculation on corruption issues. His longstanding “drain the swamp” rhetoric combined with the way he’s messaging DOGE through the framework of ridding waste and corruption gives him some credibility. Likewise, while participants had real concerns about Elon’s role, they were ill-formed, and they saw some positives from his cuts. They are not positive towards either person, but candidates should note that only utilizing corruption framing against Trump and Musk will present some barriers. However, members of Congress are ripe targets for corruption messaging – voters view all (nameless) politicians as corrupt, focused on self-enrichment and gaining power. They attach a lot of the problems facing the country to these ills, and while they are not necessarily able to articulate specific examples of corruption, they are certain that corruption is rampant in Washington.

and

2. Focus on self-enrichment and the influence of special interests and lobbyists as the leading examples of corruption in Washington. More so than past cycles, these participants were fluent in ways that members of Congress use the office for personal gain – they cite examples of members who go into office “with no money” and come out “millionaires.” They are aware that members make less than $200k and assume their net worths increase due to self-dealing. Relatedly, they see lobbyist influence on behalf of special interest as corrupting – buying off politicians to get their own deals. They see this as connected to their own problems – when elected leaders are focused on lining their own pockets, they make decisions based on that, not what is best for people. They want to see action to address this.

When there is no such thing as real privacy and everyone is carrying a videocamera, it’s a lot harder to get traction by complaining about the other guy’s corruption while engaging in corrupt practices yourself than it used to be.

I don’t think I’ve ever read an article at The Daily Wire before let alone linked to one. But if this piece there by Luke Rosiak on the abuses revealed by going through the books of the African Development Foundation unit of the USAID is even approximately accurate it’s not merely an outrage and a scandal but a crime and calls the probity of the entire federal government into question. Here’s a snippet:

By law, the agency is only allowed to give grants to Africa-based groups. But to keep more of that money for its own employees and officials’ friends, while concealing how much money actually went to overhead, it would require Africans to send money back to the United States at its direction, employees said.

Until shortly before DOGE gained access to the building with the assistance of U.S. Marshals, the agency was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after a stint at USAID as a Joe Biden political appointee. An assistant to Adkins said that after she asked why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins informed her that the remainder would be coming from an overseas account.

I have been calling out official corruption at the federal, state, and local level for a long time. That’s why I think, for example, that even if Mr. Trump’s solicitation of a new 747 from Qatar to be used as Air Force One be legal and necessary it is certainly unseemly and provides the impression of corruption. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

It also calls into question Democrats’ full-throated defense of the shuttering of USAID. It’s no accident that the anti-insider trading bill making its way through Congress is called “the PELOSI Act”.

I encourage you to read Yascha Mounk’s post at The Dispatch. Here’s the opening passage:

Largely unnoticed by the general public on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean is a particular way America has pulled away from Europe: The average American is now vastly more affluent than the average European. The difference is not only reflected in the overall sizes of their respective economies but by the much more practical metrics of disposable income, living space, and accessibility to basic services.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, though, the idea that Americans are better off than their European counterparts is an unpopular sentiment. I casually mentioned on a recent episode of Paul Krugman’s interview show that, whereas both continents were similarly affluent a few decades ago, America is now nearly twice as rich as Europe. Cue a flood of outraged emails.

The strength of this reaction may have had something to do with Krugman’s audience, which skews progressive and American. But I’ve had similar reactions from very different audiences in the past. When I cited the same stat to a center-right member of the European Parliament a few months ago, he insisted that such stats just weren’t meaningful; in all of the metrics of life quality that truly mattered, such as disposable income and access to good housing, Europeans were surely doing at least as well as Americans. But they are not.

The discrepancy cannot be explained away by claiming that American prosperity is a statistical fiction produced by some people being extremely wealthy:

America is indeed somewhat more unequal than Europe. But the difference is not nearly as stark as some people on both sides of the continent seem to assume. Indeed, the GINI coefficient (a standard metric economists use to measure inequality) for the United States, at 0.39, is only modestly higher than that of Britain, at 0.36, and only moderately higher than that of Germany, at 0.29. As a result, metrics that aren’t skewed by outsized wealth at the top, like household income at the median, still show a vast divergence between the two continents.

or by appealing to quality of life issues:

Since home prices are very expensive in the United States, many Americans might imagine that Europeans can afford to live in nicer apartments despite their nominally lower incomes. But the figures paint a different picture. The average home size in the United States is about 2,200 square feet. In Germany, it is 1,200 square feet. In the United Kingdom, it is 800 square feet. This extra space translates into all kinds of everyday amenities: Americans, for example, have about double the number of bathrooms per resident, enjoy much bigger refrigerators, and are much more likely than Europeans to have a dryer or a dishwasher in their home.

Dining out tells a similar story. The numbers are a little less exact, but estimates suggest that Americans eat out at a restaurant, have food delivered to their home, or order takeout about twice a week on average. According to a 2022 Gallup poll focusing exclusively on takeout food, for example, about 3 in 5 Americans say that they order food for pickup at least several times a month. Eating out is far less common in Europe, where there is a smaller number of restaurants per capita, and the percentage of income people are able to devote to eating out is significantly lower.

I suspect that throws a certain amount of sand at the claim that our European allies will soon be carrying the weight of their own defense. Even if they’re able to afford it that probably won’t be politically possible.

Although I acknowledge this:

But even on the American right, many have now become convinced that the global system built by America has turned to its disadvantage. They see the country, as President Donald Trump did in his first inaugural address, as the land of American carnage, with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities [and] rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”

I think I see that a bit differently than President Trump does. I think our prosperity means that we can afford to be taken advantage of a little by our European allies. All the more reason for us to maintain that prosperity which I believe means that we need to produce more of what we consume.

Once upon a time both of our major political parties were what were called “catch-all parties”. They both had liberals, moderates, and conservatives and their leaderships reflected that.

Over the last 50 years both parties have moved more in the direction of programmatic parties and their leaderships have come to be dominated by the most radical 10% of the population. Republican and Democratic National Committees of the sort that run the parties now would have been unthinkable. In a parliamentary system that may make a certain amount of sense but it makes no sense at all in a large, diverse country like the United States with a “winner take all” and “first past the post” electoral system like we have. The outcome is that most people are effectively disenfranchised. That is reflected in the waning popularity of our political parties. Forty years ago Americans were divided roughly evenly among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Now independents outnumber either Republicans or Democrats.

In those olden days laws were enacted either by persuading legislators to vote for them or by compromise. Both persuasion and compromise are rooted in reason. Increasingly, laws are only enacted by mustering, at the most extreme, 50%+1 of the legislators to vote for them, generally along party lines. That is not rooted in reason but in tribalism.

In reaction to several stories over the last few days in wildly different areas. There is no such thing as a permanent ban. There is no such thing as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

In a recent post economist Bob Graboyes lists twelve strategies that won’t work for persuading him to vote for you:

1. If your message only works when shouted, you won’t persuade me.


“DONALD TRUMP IS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!!!!!” is a message that only tends to be delivered loudly and angrily—and shouting almost never persuades. (Say that sentence softly, with a smile, and you’ll sound a bit unhinged.) If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, calmly itemize his behavior on January 6, his unsettling third-term chatter, and his suggestions that the U.S. take Greenland by force. To help you distinguish between these modes of communication: Bernie Sanders, AOC, Chuck Schumer, and Jasmine Crockett always shout. Josh Shapiro, Ro Khanna, Abigail Spanberger, John Fetterman, and Ritchie Torres tend to discuss.

2. If you reflexively ignore or reject what I say, you won’t persuade me.
   I agree that President Trump’s behavior on January 6 was deeply unsettling, but, personally, I’m just as bothered by President Biden’s decision to allow protestors to surround the private residences of Supreme Court justices, day and night, for months. Dismiss my view out-of-hand, and your power to persuade evaporates. Acknowledge that my point is legitimate—even if you disagree—and you may still sway me.

He continues with ten more. Appealing as I might find his list, I’m afraid he’s whistling past a graveyard. If you don’t understand that expression, it means persisting cheerfully with a hopeless task. It’s hopeless for reasons I explained at length more than twenty years ago. Before smartphones.
Before X or Instagram or Facebook had the reach they do now. Relatively few of the brains of people under 60 work that way. Agonistic (that means combative, emotional) modes of expression work where logical discourse does not. The written word is becoming less and less meaningful.

Trump communicates the way he does because it works. Others are communicating that way because it works. It isn’t an Atlantic world any more. It’s an Instagram and X world.

Nearly everything he describes as something that won’t persuade him is an artifact of the modes of communication that are effective in this post-literate world. I despair of anyone taking his advice and, indeed, of democracy itself. I don’t believe it can survive in the post-literate world.

I haven’t written about the kerfuffle surrounding President Trump’s soliciting and the Qatari royal family, apparently, offering a new Boeing 747-8 aircraft to be used as Air Force One because it is a kerfuffle. Have we learned a thing that is new from it? Donald Trump has little understanding or even patience with the niceties of protocol or the law and has gauche tastes. We’ve known that for a long time. Indeed, his indifference/impatience with the law is one of my main reasons for consistently opposing his election to office. We haven’t learned a thing about the Republicans, the Democrats, or even the media. The Democrats and major media outlets hate Trump and the Republicans love him or, at least, are afraid to oppose him.

What I miss in all of the coverage is any intellectual curiosity. Air Force One is a Boeing 747-200BC. That’s a more than 40 year old aircraft. Why is the president of the United States flying around in a 40 year old aircraft?

Furthermore, Boeing has been under contract for new 747-8 aircraft to replace the old crates presently being used for Air Force One since 2016. And it’s my understanding that the 747-8 is already obsolete. Fewer than 40 747-8 passenger aircraft were built. Why is it taking Boeing so long?

IMO these are the questions that real reporters should be asking. Why aren’t they asking these questions?