This is what Brett Kavanaugh has looked like most of the day.Alex Edelman/CNP via ZUMA

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

This has been a weirdly rushed day for me. I had the whole 5-hour infusion thing going, which slows me down to begin with, but then I decided to produce a whole bunch of charts about the auto industry for no particular reason, and that took a bunch of time. I finally finished, and then decided to write a long post about different measures of inflation. Why? I’ll explain in the next post. But it took forever, and I kept making mistakes, and by the time the infusion was done and I’d had lunch I still wasn’t done. So I plodded along after I got home and finally finished the damn thing around 3 pm.

In the meantime, I don’t really know what’s going on in the rest of the world. People are still blabbing about the anonymous op-ed, which I don’t really care about since it’s kind of a publicity stunt and doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know before. And I really don’t care who wrote it.¹ Come on, folks.

So that leaves Brett Kavanaugh. Tell me if I have this right: Democrats are doing a pretty good job of going after him and leaving an impressive amount of chaos in their wake, and Kavanaugh is mostly responding like a deer in headlights. This is pretty interesting, but it also doesn’t matter. Unless Kavanaugh turns out to be the Zodiac Killer, Republicans are going to confirm him and that’s that—even if they have to keep half his career hidden from view in order to pull it off. Democrats can squawk and complain all they want, but in the end Kavanaugh will be a conservative Supreme Court justice who will probably serve for 30 or 40 years. Nothing else matters.

So now I’ll go ahead and write the post I was planning to write about wage growth over the past year. Believe me, you will be so fascinated you’ll barely be able to remove your eyeballs from your screen. It’s coming up soon.

¹Unless it turns out to have been written by someone really high up. That would be super interesting. Maybe Vladimir Putin can tell us?

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate