In the latest issue of New York, E. Jean Carroll says that Donald Trump raped her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-90s:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates.

This episode hasn’t gotten an awful lot of attention. This is the first I’ve written about it, for example. Why? I don’t think it has anything to do with media outlets not taking rape allegations seriously. The real answer is almost worse: (a) everybody just assumes the story is true and (b) everybody knows that it will have no effect on either Trump’s fans or his Republican Party colleagues. Trump will issue a pro forma denial; nobody will take it seriously; and that will be that. Just like the other 15 times.

Even after more than two years, I wake up every morning and I can’t believe that Donald Trump is the president of the United States. It’s a stain we’ll never live down.

Nir Alon/ZUMA

Ten days ago:

While I very much appreciate P.M. Abe going to Iran to meet with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I personally feel that it is too soon to even think about making a deal. They are not ready, and neither are we!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2019

Today:

President Trump, who says he made an eleventh-hour decision last week to call off a retaliatory military strike against Iran, declared in an interview aired Sunday that war would mean “obliteration” for the Islamic republic. But he also said he was open to talks without preconditions with Tehran.

Ten days ago Iran wasn’t ready and neither were we. Today, apparently, we’re ready. What happened?

Two things. First, Iran attacked two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Second, they shot down an American drone. I guess now we know what it takes to get Trump to talk.

Margot Sanger-Katz and Aaron Carroll write about the kids these days:

You wouldn’t know it from “Euphoria,” but today’s teenagers drink less than their parents’ generation did. They smoke less, and they use fewer hard drugs. They get in fewer car accidents and fewer physical fights. They are less likely to drop out of high school, less likely to have sex, and less likely to become pregnant. They commit fewer crimes. They even wear bike helmets.

Across a wide range of classically risky teenage behaviors, today’s teenagers are getting tamer and more responsible, making better decisions and eschewing the dangerous choices that, for many adults today, defined youth.

That’s true! For example:

Among teenagers, arrest rates have plummeted by 50-70 percent since the “superpredator” era of the early 90s. Generally speaking, teenagers today are nicer, politer, and less likely to get in trouble than at nearly any time in the postwar era. It’s amazing what happens when you halt the practice of poisoning kids with lead fumes and turning them into monsters, isn’t it?

Hey, look. I finally got around to picking up my new glasses. They’re just like Elizabeth Warren’s!

And my, what a large forehead you have, Kevin. Quite so. All the better to slap my palm against these days. And believe it or not, I even reduced its size using some fancy Photoshop filtering, just like they do for all the Vogue models. In real life it’s about the size of the Half Dome.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

For years, opponents of Obamacare have been exercised by President Obama’s supposed “Lie of the Year” for 2013: If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. This turned out to be untrue in a specific sense: you could keep your plan if your insurance company continued to offer it. However, many insurance companies decided to cancel their existing plans and replace them with new ones that conformed to Obamacare’s rules. In 2013 the cancellation letters went out and Republicans pretended to be outraged.

Fast forward to 2019. The Trump administration has just issued a final rule governing HRAs and is busily promoting it. An HRA is a Health Reimbursement Account, and what it means is this: your employer can now decide to cancel its group plan and replace it with an HRA that reimburses you for an individual plan that you buy in the open market. There are various rules in place about how much employers have to spend and who can qualify, but the nut of the thing is simple. It’s a new policy that actively appeals to employers to ditch their group plan—most likely for an assortment of individual plans that provide worse coverage.

This will spawn outraged coverage from Fox News and the rest of the conservative noise machine, right?

Here is Hopper showing off her superlative snoozing skills in her new favorite place. In case you can’t quite tell, she’s on top of a blanket that’s draped over the back of the sofa. Sometimes she sleeps like this, other times she burrows behind the quilt hanging on the wall and only her paws and her tail give her away. Oddly enough, this has not yet attracted Hilbert’s attention. Usually we can count on him to try to take away Hopper’s sleeping place, whatever it happens to be, but I guess he has no interest in trying to balance himself on top of the sofa.

BY THE WAY: If Hopper were awake, she would ask you to contribute to our Corruption Project—if you haven’t already. Just click here.

During an interview with several reporters and a photographer from Time magazine, President Trump showed them a letter from Kim Jong Un and then asked to go off the record. The photographer took a picture of the letter, was told he couldn’t do that, and said “OK.”

Later, one of the reporters asked about the Mueller investigation: “You dictated a letter to Corey Lewandowski telling him to tell [former Attorney General Jeff] Sessions to limit the investigation [to future Russia meddling]. He testified under oath, under threat of prison time, that that was the case Mr. President.” Trump went ballistic:

TRUMP: Excuse me — Under Section II — Well, you can go to prison instead, because, if you use, if you use the photograph you took of the letter that I gave you —

TIME: Do you believe that people should be —

TRUMP: confidentially, I didn’t give it to you to take photographs of it — So don’t play that game with me. Let me just tell you something. You take a look —

TIME: I’m sorry, Mr. President. Were you threatening me with prison time?

TRUMP: Well, I told you the following. I told you you can look at this off-the-record. That doesn’t mean you take out your camera and start taking pictures of it. O.K.? So I hope you don’t have a picture of it. I know you were very quick to pull it out — even you were surprised to see that. You can’t do that stuff. So go have fun with your story. Because I’m sure it will be the 28th horrible story I have in Time Magazine because I never — I mean — ha. It’s incredible. With all I’ve done and the success I’ve had, the way that Time Magazine writes is absolutely incredible.

There’s more in the same vein. Go ahead and click if you can stand to.

Yesterday I wondered if Joe Biden’s remarks about working with segregationists would hurt him with African Americans. Not so far, it appears:

VIDEO: Rep. John Lewis with a powerful defense of @JoeBiden: “I don’t think the remarks are offensive. During the height of the civil rights movement we worked with people and got to know people that were members of the klan…We never gave up on our fellow human being…” pic.twitter.com/NvkmurjsBG

— Alan He (@alanhe) June 21, 2019

Rep. Jim Clyburn has defended Biden too. Is this just an age thing? Maybe, but under normal circumstances John Lewis’s opinion on race issues is hailed as nearly definitive. Why not this time too?

I’m not thrilled about the prospect of Democrats nominating a candidate of Biden’s age. But I’m also not thrilled with a bunch of Democrats pretending to be outraged that Biden is condoning racism or dog whistling to bigoted whites. It’s only June, and this is already turning into a very ugly primary race.

Gatik

A while back I mused about the possibility of driverless trucks that performed only the middle part of long-haul journeys. Basically, they’d operate from depot to depot, with ordinary human-driven vans filling in for the last mile of local delivery. Apparently this future is nearly here for Walmart:

As the buzz about human-carting robo-taxis starts to short-circuit, an unheralded segment of the driverless future is taking shape and showing promise: goods-moving robo-vans. Rather than serving up hot pizza pies or deploying headless robots to carry groceries to the doorstep, robo-vans travel on fixed routes from warehouse to warehouse or to a smaller pickup point, transporting packages to get them closer, but not all the way, to consumers.

This may be the least glamorous part of the driverless delivery business, but the market for these monotonous “middle miles” could reach $1 trillion and may provide the fastest path to prosperity, analysts say….Driving the demand is the boom in online shopping that has helped cause a severe shortage of truck drivers that tops 60,000 unfilled long-haul positions, according to the American Trucking Assns. That has sent costs soaring for a job that is among the most dangerous because of the risk of wrecks and long periods spent on the road.

“This middle mile is the most expensive part of the whole supply chain; it’s a huge pain point,” said Gautam Narang, CEO of Gatik, which is attempting to automate Walmart’s “hub and spoke” warehouse system. “This fills a big gap in the market.”

Does this count as driverless cars “taking away” jobs? Yep. By itself it’s not a huge threat to trucking jobs, but it will be pretty soon. There are about 2 million long-haul truckers in the US, and I’ll bet that half of them will be out of work by 2025.

In the LA Times today, Josh McGee makes a commonsense observation about the retirement crisis: “To qualify as a crisis, the situation today should be dramatically different than in past decades.” But there’s compelling evidence that nothing much has changed at all. Sure, we rely more on 401(k) accounts and less on old-school pensions, but the actual amount we save for retirement doesn’t seem to have changed much. The “crisis,” as near as I can tell, is mostly an invention of Wall Street firms, which churn out an endless supply of “studies” with scary headlines but not much in the way of facts on the inside.

This might not matter so much except that it distracts us from some real problems:

Many aspects of our retirement system need to improve, chief among them the large underfunding of Social Security and state and local pension systems. Policymakers and other advocates should also find ways to help more people achieve a secure retirement by enhancing Social Security benefits for low-income workers, improving retirement plan coverage and savings rates, and increasing the availability of lifetime payment options in retirement.

Raising a furor over a nonexistent retirement crisis is diverting attention away from these and other important issues. We need to get beyond the doomsday approach to retirement savings policy so that we can pragmatically tackle the real issues at hand — and leave the next generation of American workers with a more stable retirement system.

I’d add to this that we need to do something about long-term nursing costs for retirees, which can bankrupt middle-class families in less than a year. Personally, I’d expand Medicare to cover it and be done with it. Have any of the Democratic candidates for president proposed this? It’s not only good policy, but also good politics since it would attract the votes of middle-class retirees.