Julie Swetnick says she attended house parties in the early 80s with Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. Swetnick claims that the pair drank to excess, targeted girls to take advantage of, and then made them the victims of "gangs" or "trains" of boys who raped them.Photo provided by Mark Avenatti

Well, um, celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti has entered the Brett Kavanaugh sweepstakes this morning with a written affadavit from Julie Swetnick, who says she attended many house parties in the early 80s with Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. She describes them as “joined at the hip.” And her affadavit is a barnburner: “I fully understand the seriousness of the statement contained within this declaration,” she says:

And then this:

You can read the full thing here. This certainly marks a major turn in the Kavanaugh affair if Swetnick turns out to be credible and if anyone else steps up to corroborate what she says. I guess today isn’t going to be a boring day.

The Brett Kavanaugh firehose is still spewing at full strength, but there’s nothing new coming out and I need a break. So, via James Pethokoukis, here is the Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom for the United States over the past 50 years:

In 2016 we ranked 6th in the world. For some reason, our economic freedom improved all the way through 2000 and then suddenly took a steep dive that didn’t stop until 2011. I don’t really know why, and the report doesn’t explain much. Maybe it has something to do with laws and regulations passed after 9/11?

These kinds of indexes may or may not have any value, but for some reason I’m often curious about why the US allegedly improved or declined. According to the underlying spreadsheet, here are the ten subcategories of economic freedom that showed the biggest improvement between 2015 and 2016:

Odd. There were big improvements in 2016 in two categories related to courts, but I can’t think of any real reason why that should be. Ditto for our attitude toward bribery. And then there’s overall business regulation, which improved in three different areas: administrative requirements, bribery, and bureaucracy costs. But this was during the Obama era, when Republicans kept telling us that liberal regulations were stifling the country and ruining the economy. This is just the opposite of what the Fraser folks think. They say that in the overall category of business regulations, we improved about 6 percent between 2009 and 2016. How about that?

The full Fraser Institute report is here.

This is a Geoffrey’s marmoset at the Prospect Park zoo. He looks sad, doesn’t he? But don’t worry: that’s just his normal resting face. All of us with dour resting faces can sympathize.

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

The Kavanaugh affair has produced millions of words of comment and gone down so many different rabbit holes that it’s hard to keep track of where it is from moment to moment. At this point, it’s a purely partisan fight with almost no one left who really cares about the truth of what happened.

And the hell of it is that I think pretty much everyone—Democrat and Republican alike—does know the truth of what happened. It’s simple: Christine Blasey Ford has no reason to make anything up, and her allegations are basically true. It’s also true that they happened 35 years ago, when Brett Kavanaugh was 17 years old. In a normal universe, Kavanaugh would have acknowledged what happened, apologized sincerely, and attributed it to “sort of a wild youth.”

And that would have been the end of it. Lefties probably would have tried to keep the outrage going, but I don’t think public opinion would have followed. The vast majority of the country would have figured that, in the end, nothing serious happened and we shouldn’t blacklist people for stupid teenage activity that happened long in the past.

So why didn’t it happen that way? I can think of a few reasons, but the main one is that we now live in the era of Trump—and in Trumpland you don’t explain past problems. You simply deny them. That’s what Roy Moore did, despite the masses of evidence against him. That’s what Trump himself does, even if there’s literally video evidence showing he’s wrong. And so that’s what Kavanaugh did. He just denied anything happened, full stop.

Did he do that because it’s his natural instinct? Or because that’s the advice he got from the Trump team? Maybe Bob Woodward will tell us someday, but until then we don’t know. All we know is that this is the path he chose.

But even after all that’s happened, I wonder if he could help his cause by coming clean? Get up in front of the press and declare that things have gone off the rails and he wants to clear up the record. Admit that he just panicked a bit when he denied Ford’s allegations, and fess up that it happened. Apologize sincerely, deny all the other stuff, and throw himself on the mercy of the court.

Would it work?¹ It might. Either way, it would certainly be refreshing.

¹And by “work,” all I mean is that it gets him 51 Republican votes in the Senate. The question for Kavanaugh is which strategy is most likely to get those 51 votes, and I’d say it’s genuinely not clear right now.

Over the years, American presidents have been both booed and cheered at the United Nations. But I don’t think they’ve ever been laughed at. Until now:

At his rallies, this nonsense gets a huge round of applause. Among people who know better, it just gets snickers.

But I’ll give Trump credit for one thing: he joined the laughter even though it was directed at him. I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen him do that before. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him laugh at anything before. So that’s two firsts for Trump today.

Leonard Ortiz/The Orange County Register/ZUMAPRESS

Sarah Kliff reports a sighting in the wild of the most endangered species of them all: a bipartisan proposal in Congress that would actually do some good. In this case, it’s a bill that puts a stop to surprise out-of-network billing in emergency rooms, which can cost patients tens of thousands of dollars without their knowledge:

The policy proposal, which you can read here, essentially bars out-of-network doctors from billing patients directly for their care. Instead, they would have to seek payment from the insurance plan…which would pay the greater of the following two amounts:

• The median in-network rate negotiated by health plans
• 125 percent of the average amount paid to charged by similar providers in the same geographic area

The Senate proposal would also require out-of-network doctors and hospitals to tell patients that they are out of network once their condition has stabilized, and give them the opportunity to transfer to an in-network facility.

Of the many outrages in our health care system, there are some that seem especially designed to make your blood boil. For example, the fact that people without insurance—who are plainly the ones least able to afford it—are charged hospital rates far higher than those with insurance.

ER surprises are another one. In a genuine emergency, patients are barely thinking straight, and they’re lucky if they even direct the paramedics to a hospital in their insurance network. But even if they remain lucid enough to do that, it might still turn out that, say, the anesthesiologist on duty is a free agent who doesn’t work for the hospital and isn’t part of your insurance network. But you’ll only find that out a few months later when he directly bills you for $20,000.

Only in America, you say, and you’d be pretty much correct. It’s just too absurd for any other country to allow something like this. After all, the widespread approval of out-of-network billing is bad enough, but in an ER? Where the patient may be literally unconscious, or at best, tied up in knots over what’s wrong and whether it’s anything serious? These are obviously not people who are going to stroke their chins and carefully ask every doctor who enters the room, “Are you part of the Aetna Choice POS II network?”

The out-of-network scam is not just an outrage, but an obvious outrage designed solely to stuff dollar bills into the pockets of favored doctors. No one, Democrat or Republican, should have any sympathy for it, and hopefully this bill will put an end to it.

The latest crime figures are out from the FBI, and both murder and violent crime in general ticked down in 2017 after rising for a couple of years:

Property crime (burglary, theft, etc.) was also down, continuing a steady downward trend of over two decades:

Crime data always has some noise in it, and small spikes up and down generally don’t mean anything. There really was a small spike in murder rates in 2015 and 2016, mostly due to sudden large increases in a handful of big cities, but we still don’t really know what caused it. However, it appears that the spike is over, and murder is probably now returning to its old trendline.

BY THE WAY: Since someone is bound to ask, none of the recent data has anything to do with lead. The decline in lead poisoning of small children was responsible for much of the overall decline in crime from 1991 to 2010, but it has nothing to do with small spikes from year to year or city to city. At this point, lead has probably had all the effect it’s going to have, and further changes in the crime rate have other causes.

I’ve got no special reason for posting this, but if you’d like a 30-second break from the insane tawdriness of the Kavanaugh affair, here’s a chart about oil prices:

The two most widely traded grades of oil are Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate. Most of the time their price in the global market is close to identical, but for the past year Brent has been selling at a significant premium. That premium has bounced up and down, but for most of September it’s hovered just under $10 per barrel. Why?

No one knows for sure. There are some fundamental differences between Brent and WTI, but they’re small and haven’t really changed much lately. The best guess seems to be that Brent commands a premium when traders are nervous about the Mideast oil supply—though I’ll confess that the explanations for this don’t make a lot of sense to me. Regardless, that seems to be the conventional wisdom: when things get worse in the Middle East, both the Brent premium and the price of oil in general get higher. And right now they’re both getting higher.

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

This is from an interview with Sen. Susan Collins recorded a few days ago:

.@SenatorCollins on Brett Kavanaugh: “First of all, I do not believe he’s going to repeal Roe v. Wade.”

She says she’s “very close” to a decision. https://t.co/OKQXwpmzBl

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 24, 2018

Well, of course he’s going to repeal Roe. That doesn’t mean he’s literally going to be the author of an opinion that explicitly makes abortion illegal, but it does mean that everyone with a pulse knows perfectly well that he’ll be part of a reliable five-justice majority that will steadily dismantle abortion rights until Roe is repealed in all but name. That much is obvious. The part that puzzles me is what Collins really thinks. Is she really so credulous that she believes Kavanaugh will be a vote for reproductive rights? Does she know he isn’t, but doesn’t want to admit it in public? Or what?

Beats me. But there’s a second implication of this tweet too—one that’s so subtle it might not even be there. And yet, the “very close” phrasing somehow gives me the feeling that Collins—along with plenty of other Republicans—is actually more likely to vote for Kavanaugh because of the attempted rape allegations against him. In Collins’ mind, it’s turned the whole thing into a deeply unfair and partisan attack on Kavanaugh, and that raises her hackles. It would certainly raise mine if the tables were turned. That in turn makes her determined not to get conned by a liberal lynch mob, and thus more likely to vote for Kavanaugh.

This is just a guess on my part. Of course, I always figured she was a Yes vote on Kavanaugh from the moment he was announced, so maybe none of this has made any difference at all.

To me, this has the look of a picture taken in a small Mexican fishing village. But I’ve never been in a small Mexican fishing village, so what do I know? In reality, it’s the moon rising over the Pacific Ocean, taken from the only place around here where the moon rises over the Pacific Ocean: the southern tip of the San Pedro peninsula, near Point Fermin Park. Someday I’d like to get a sharp moonrise picture right at the horizon, but around here there’s just too much low-lying haze. Maybe I’ll manage it somewhere else eventually.