Alex Edelman/CNP via ZUMA

Donald Trump tweeted today that he’s the guy who “saved Pre-Existing Conditions in your Healthcare.” Even conservatives can’t bring themselves to defend this. Here is NR’s Robert VerBruggen:

Trump didn’t “save” these protections; to the contrary, the GOP’s various failed replacement bills would have weakened them to a debatable extent, and the administration has (to its credit!) expanded the availability of plans that don’t comply with Obamacare’s regulations. Further, if the Trump-backed lawsuit aiming to eliminate Obamacare succeeds, the direct effect will be, uh, to eliminate Obamacare, including those popular preexisting-condition provisions Trump is trying to take credit for….It’s hard to say you support the current preexisting-condition protections when you’ve signed onto a lawsuit that will destroy them if it succeeds.

This goes into the same bucket as Iran supposedly targeting four American embassies for imminent attack: not only is it obviously something Trump just invented, but it’s so preposterous that even his own people aren’t willing to back him up. They aren’t quite willing to tell the truth about the embassies, either, but the lie is dumb enough and checkable enough that they’re all either playing mum or else saying they “didn’t see” the intel on the embassy attacks—but hey, maybe the boss saw something I didn’t.

As usual, none of this matters to Trump. The content of his tweets and his rallies is aimed solely at his base, which will simply take him at his word. The rest of us don’t matter. If we ignore him, that’s great. If we fact check him, that’s great too since it exposes more people to the lie.

But here’s the part I still wonder about: what about people who are on the fence over Trump? Do they think Trump’s lies are unfortunate, but not a dealbreaker? Do they think Trump’s lies aren’t much different from the lies every president sometimes tells? Do they not realize that Trump lies constantly? Or is Trump losing potential support because ambivalent voters do know he lies constantly and it turns them off? I would sure like to see some kind of survey focused on this question.

Here’s a supertanker at anchor off the coast of Hermosa Beach. I assume it’s waiting for some kind of lovely petroleum product from one of Southern California’s many fine oil refineries, bound for one of our friends across the Pacific. Then again, maybe not. I can’t say I really know anything about the most likely use of supertankers off the coast of California.

UPDATE: I knew the locals would come through! This is from comments:

As folks have pointed out below, it’s unloading crude oil through an offshore transfer point connected to the El Segundo refinery. It’s pretty cool when you’re at Manhattan or Dockweiler beach some times and you can see a supertanker start out really low in the water and gradually rise as the tanks are emptied. IIRC, most of the crude for west coast refineries used to come from Alaska, but I’m not sure these days.

I guess I didn’t realize that California refineries received crude oil via ship. I’d have thought they used either local crude or else crude delivered via pipeline. Shows how much I know.

Are you on Team Harry¹ or Team Royals? My household is split. However, the royal dustup has now produced one undeniable triumph: this listicle from BuzzFeed, which might be the greatest listicle of all time. Of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I, as a Team H person?

¹By which we mean Team Harry/Meghan, of course.

David Becker/ZUMA

I was thinking the other day about people whose top two choices in the Democratic primary are Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. How bizarre! I mean, are you a centrist or a progressive? How can those two be your top choices? Do people even know what the candidates stand for?

But it turns out there’s a pretty easy way to get there. First off, suppose that you don’t think any of the candidates is likely to get their proposals enacted thanks to a Republican Senate. And then suppose further that you don’t think a 37-year-old mayor of a small town is qualified to be president. And you think Bernie is unelectable.

Those are all reasonable beliefs. And among the leading candidates, they leave you with Biden and Warren. And since you figure that both of them will be hamstrung by Mitch McConnell, you just shrug and figure that both are OK.

But then what? Who’s your top choice? Biden or Warren? Jonathan Capehart reminds us that poll after poll shows Biden as the favorite of black voters:

No candidate will win the Democratic presidential nomination without significant support from African Americans. They are the foundation of the party, and black women are its backbone. And the Post-Ipsos poll, like many national polls before it, makes it clear that they want Trump defeated and they think former vice president Joe Biden is the person to do it.

I’ve been a little surprised that white progressives have ignored this so consistently. I get why they don’t like Biden ideologically, but at the same time it seems like the views of African Americans should make a difference. It’s true that their views are split by age, just like the rest of the lefty vote, but Biden still has pretty massive black support overall. Does that deserve more consideration than it gets?

If it does, then you end up supporting Biden with Elizabeth Warren as your #2 choice, and it all makes perfectly good sense. You just have to see things from a different perspective than you might be used to.

The Wall Street Journal reports that American manufacturers are having a hard time finding workers:

Half a million U.S. factory jobs are unfilled, the most in nearly two decades, and the unemployment rate is hovering at a 50-year low, the Labor Department said Friday. At the same time, Americans are moving around the country at the lowest rate in at least 70 years.

To entice workers to move, manufacturers are raising wages, offering signing bonuses and covering relocation costs, including for some hourly positions….“We’ve had to get very aggressive with talent acquisition,” said Michael Winn, chief executive of Columbus Hydraulics Co., which makes parts for Doosan Bobcat Inc. and The Toro Co. “We are having to draw people in from distant places.”

….“The war on talent: It’s there. It’s real,” said Brad Kendall, a human-resources executive at Allegion.

Well, offering higher wages ought to do the trick. But is that really happening? It sure doesn’t look like it:

I get that the bonuses and moving expenses aren’t available to everyone. Ditto for the higher wages. But generally speaking, blue-collar manufacturing wages have been growing more slowly than overall blue-collar wages for the past two years. It’s hard to believe that the manufacturing sector is truly “getting aggressive” or waging a “war on talent” if they aren’t even keeping up with the overall economy, let alone beating it.

A basic look at wages is something you should always see in articles about employers having difficulty recruiting workers. The Journal article includes a chart that shows manufacturing wage growth, but it very deliberately doesn’t adjust for inflation and doesn’t compare manufacturing to overall wage growth. Why? Probably because it would ruin the story, or at the very least, add some work to demonstrate that there’s been strong wage growth in some specific subsector of skilled manufacturing jobs. Or maybe only in certain cities. Or maybe only for managers and IT professionals. Or something. Either way, the lack of such a chart is a tipoff that something doesn’t add up.

Today in the New York Times, Dana Goldstein compares the California and Texas versions of the same high school history text and mostly concludes that the California versions like to emphasize LGBTQ issues while the Texas versions like to downplay the effects of racism. Here’s my favorite excerpt:

Even the California textbook can’t quite bring itself to talk plainly about white flight, saying only that it was driven by families that wanted to escape “culturally diverse” neighborhoods. I wonder where that wording came from?

I also wonder why California and Texas apparently demand different fonts for their history texts?

Completely aside from all this, I hate both of these textbooks. I hate all textbooks these days. Cut them all in half! Get rid of the endless boxed inserts and stupid “discussion points.” But add more charts! If I had been forced to learn American history from one of these overstuffed, chopped-up monstrosities, I’d probably hate history too.

Apparently we’re all supposed to show off our refrigerators now? Or something? I don’t get it, but I don’t want to miss out on any memes, so here’s ours. What do you think of it?

Today brings us closure on the fate of the cardboard cat house. Just to remind you, here’s what it looked like when we first put it together:

Here’s what it looked like a week later:

And here’s what it looks like now, after it’s been so thoroughly trashed that the cats have lost interest in it:

US helicopters attacked a convoy carrying Qassim Soleimani Thursday.Abaca via ZUMA

Here are the explanations so far for why we had to kill Qassim Soleimani:

Story #1: He was planning “imminent strikes” on American targets and we had to stop him.

Story #2: But we don’t know when or where.

Story #3: Wait, he was planning to bomb our embassy in Baghdad.

Story #4: Well, really, we killed him as revenge for the demonstration against our embassy in Baghdad.

Story #5: Hold on. He was planning to bomb four American embassies.

By no means do I think this covers all the explanations we’ve gotten. These are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. The last two are from President Trump himself.

It’s insane. And so far, the Trumpies have refused to provide even the slightest bit of evidence to back this up, even to the Gang of Eight in Congress.

Apparently the “kill Soleimani” option presented to Donald Trump was a little more expansive than we’ve been told:

On the day the U.S. military killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad, U.S. forces carried out another top secret mission against a senior Iranian military official in Yemen, according to U.S. officials. The strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, a financier and key commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force who has been active in Yemen, did not result in his death, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

….“If we had killed him, we’d be bragging about it that same night,” a senior U.S. official said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified military operation.

Was anyone else on the list? Exactly what was the “extreme” option presented to Trump in hopes that he’d pick one of the moderate ones?

In related news, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been taking lessons from Don Rumsfeld. Asked by Laura Ingraham to define “imminent,” he replied, “There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks being plotted by Qassem Soleimani. We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.” Republicans have a real problem with that word.

As an added bonus, note Laura Ingraham’s derisive air quotes at the start about Iran downing a Ukrainian airliner “by accident.” Apparently she thinks they shot it down deliberately.