Kevin Drum - June 2012

The War Against the Young

| Tue Jun. 26, 2012 1:05 AM EDT









Advertise on

Romney to Base: I Hate Obama As Much As You Do

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 8:47 PM EDT





Why I Hate Social Media, Part 387

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 7:15 PM EDT

The latest from Facebook:





Quote of the Day: Why Republicans Like Voter ID Laws

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 3:55 PM EDT





(Via Steve Benen.)

Chart of the Day: September Best Month to Put Your Money Under a Mattress

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 1:16 PM EDT

UPDATE: It turns out there's nothing to this after all. Joshua Hedlund has the whole story here.

Here's the weirdest chart you're likely to come across today. It comes from a paper by Luc Laeven and Fabián Valencia and shows the starting month of all modern banking crises (i.e., those after 1970). By a huge margin, banking crises mostly start in the second half of the year, and the overwhelmingly most dangerous month is September.

Greg Ip tentatively suggests this might have something to do with the fact that October 30th marks the fiscal year-end for American mutual funds, but he's not really convinced, and I don't think I am either. Perhaps we could get a better answer if we grouped crises not by month, but by astrological sign. Are all those September crises in Virgo or Libra? Inquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE: I suppose there are lots of other things that show a similar pattern and thus might be related, but a reader sends along this one, which is sort of interesting. Maybe it's all about the oil!

Save the Planet: Tint Your Car Windows

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 11:36 AM EDT

I'm feeling a little under the weather today—don't ask, you don't want to know—though on the bright side Kaiser Permanente tells me that I passed my recent stress echo with flying colors. So I guess my heart will continue beating properly for another few years anyway. Still, I'm afraid I just can't spend the entire day blogging about the Supreme Court. Can't. Do. It. So instead, here's a bit of trivia from Climate Progress:



Last year, Marian decided to buy a Prius. This was, unfortunately, right after the earthquake in Japan, and Priuses were in short supply, making it a seller's market. Not only were no discounts available, but dealers were charging well above list price. However, because Toyota doesn't allow dealers to just baldly mark up their cars above list, they instead loaded a bunch of accessories onto every car on the lot and then charged highway robbery prices for them. So here's the way car shopping worked: Instead of going to several dealers and dickering over price, we went to several dealers and compared the crap that they added to the car. At one dealer it was LoJack and a chassis "undercoating." I practically laughed at that one. I didn't realize anyone still had the balls to try selling undercoatings anymore, especially in Southern California. At another dealer, it was a (supposedly) super-duper GPS and a few other doodads. Then, finally, we found a dealer who had added only one thing to their cars: window tinting. And they were only charging about twice what it was worth, which really wasn't bad under the circumstances. So we bought one of their cars.

All I can say is that I was mightily impressed. This wasn't dark tinting like celebrities get so you can't see into their cars, it was just a modest gray tint. But it lowers the temperature of the car by a good 5 or 10 degrees when it's sitting out in the sun. It's really a big difference, much bigger than I would have guessed. I'll never get another car without it. And if I'm helping save the planet at the same time, that's a pretty nice bonus.

Front page image: ronfromyork/Shutterstock

Advertise on

A Hodgepodge From the Supreme Court

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 10:09 AM EDT

So we have three Supreme Court rulings today. In a nutshell:

  • The court mostly overturned Arizona's immigration law, but let stand the provision allowing police to ask for immigration papers if they have a "reasonable suspicion" someone is in the country illegally.
  • The court stuck down a Montana campaign spending law, essentially reaffirming Citizens United.
  • The court banned sentences of life without parole for minors.

Can we read any tea leaves here? Probably not. The immigration ruling was a patchwork compromise. The campaign spending ruling is conservative but unsurprising. The sentencing ruling is basically liberal, but also unsurprising given past rulings. There's not much insight here into how they might rule on Obamacare. But we'll know soon enough anyway.

UPDATE: More on the Montana campaign finance law here from Andy Kroll.

The Future of Cyberwarfare

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 9:40 AM EDT

Tyler Cowen has a question:


I do understand that these are fairly superficial questions and that I do not have the expertise to write a detailed and insightful blog post on these topics. Still, it seems odd not to mention them at all. While I read in limited circles, I do not see many writers devoting much attention to the matter. Shouldn’t this have set off a large-scale national debate?

My take is this: we've all but declared war on Iran already, and everyone knows it. We've assassinated their scientists, imposed crippling sanctions, and essentially declared that we're ready to mount a massive air strike against them in the near future. Under those circumstances, a bit of cyberwarfare hardly seems like a huge escalation.

What's more, we all assume that other countries, China especially, are already hard at work on digital weapons. Our intelligence services have been warning about a "cyber Pearl Harbor" since before 9/11. It's not a taboo area. So when the open secret that we're working on this stuff becomes an even more open secret, hardly anybody really cares about this non-news.

They probably should, though.

Optical Illusion of the Day

| Sun Jun. 24, 2012 1:48 PM EDT


Chris Hayes Wins the Wonk Marathon

| Sun Jun. 24, 2012 12:25 AM EDT


