Cheap Shots

 

Ioffe's Russian-themed title is the best part of her blog. I guess the martini is OK too, at least it seems to be a real one, with an olive. I haven't found out how to navigate it, the blog I mean, but she emails me the installments one at a time, which must be why I spend so much time talking about her. I think she's just toying with me, though, and I'm getting fed up.

There are actually some signs that tomorrow might be marginally better, but don't get too excited.

There are now an unprecedented almost nine million stories in the Naked City, according to the 2020 Census, 8.8 million residents, up 629,000 from 2010. Making nonsense out of pundits' belief that New York was getting emptied as folks fled the taxes and viruses. New York State is losing a congressional seat, but it's going to be a Republican one in the western part of the state.

“The city’s growth actually outpaced the growth of the nation,” said [chief demographer Peter] Lobo. “That is unusual for a mature city like New York.”

The great thing is the city managed to make what appears to be the most accurate count in its history in the face not only of a pandemic but also the determination of the Republican federal administration to make it fail:

For the first time, New York City funded a census outreach effort, spending $40 million and coordinating with dozens of local community groups who had close ties to populations that often go undercounted. This appears to have overcome the apprehensions of many immigrants and marginalized populations as well as a once-in-a-century pandemic that left millions of residents shut indoors, as well as efforts by the Trump administration to end the census count early and to not include non-citizens in the count.

It's as if the attacks and machinations by Trump and Wilbur Ross had had the effect of rousing resistance on the part of the census takers, and the shier respondents as well, inspiring them to stand up and be counted.

I wonder if something like that might have happened, in fact, all over the country, where the population has grown markedly more urban and more diverse, as Latin and Asian groups expand and whites shrink, and more divided on red-state blue-state lines into those where the concentration of white people has increased and those where it has diminished:

The data — which will be used to redraw congressional and legislative districts in the country just one year before the 2022 midterms — indicates growth among Latino, Asian, and multi-racial Americans, the Los Angeles Times reports. White people are still the largest racial or ethnic group in the United States, comprising 57.8 percent of the total population, down from 63.7 percent in 2010. Latinos are the second largest group, making up 18.7 percent of the population. 

The national population rose by 7.4 percent over the last decade, the second slowest rate of growth in U.S. history. About 80 percent of urban areas saw population gains, as more people are leaving rural regions, and more Americans who are on the move are choosing homes in the West and South, compared to the Midwest and Northeast.

Lots more from Brookings.

These population shifts are going to make gerrymandering harder, I think, for Republicans designing the new congressional seats in Texas (adds 2),  Florida (adds 1), and North Carolina (adds 1), as well as Georgia and Arizona. Arizona's redistricting will also be done by an independent commission, along with Michigan and Missouri, while Wisconsin and Pennsylvania will have to make compromises between Republican legislatures and Democratic governors.

Bonus rant:

He wasn't talked out of it every time he made the decision. He made a formal agreement with Taliban that we would withdraw in May 2021. You must have heard about this. It's the agreement Biden is carrying out after a three-month postponement.

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2021

I'm not doing the research, but I'm pretty sure he decided to do it at least three times and only got talked out of it twice.

In any case, if he and his minions had been trying to run the evacuation, it would have BEEN bloody murder, like the vaccine rollout, handled by incompetent private contractors under Jared Kushner and making last week's two-day SNAFU look like a church picnic.

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2021

When you talk about "his plans" you are talking about a man who sincerely believed, on the advice of his drunk lawyer, that he had a plan to convince Congress to keep him as president after he lost the election.

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2021

It's really literally painful to me. Ioffe used to be a particularly good reporter, before she got confirmed in the Church of Savvy. Now she is a co-founder of a new organ archly calling itself Puck (after the Mickey Rooney character, I guess), which makes its formal début after Labor day, and keeping a kind of blog in which she does meta-interviews of her meta-friends—

Julia Ioffe: It’s been nearly a decade since This Town came out. How has this town changed and how has it remained the same?

Mark Leibovich: In my more self-congratulatory moments, I would say that that book—and it really was a long time ago—was about the swamp that Trump was kind of vowing to drain. Not that I think for a second that he read the book or had any sort of nuanced sense of what that world like was like, but he definitely picked up on a very palpable disgust that a lot of people out in the country had for what they perceived Washington to be, which was this kind of one-world government, bipartisan racket in which everybody stays and everybody’s friends, and everyone gets rich while America keeps crumbling. But again, he was not the first to discover the boogeyman value of the swamp. Nancy Pelosi, in 2006, was talking about draining the swamp. This is not a coinage that he should get any credit for.

—and I just want to scream at her. So I did, not that she'll listen.