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

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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