Well, so much for “We respect your sovereign decision to order our departure”:

The State Department on Friday rebuffed the Iraqi government’s request to begin discussions on pulling out troops, saying that any American officials going to Baghdad during a state of heightened tensions would not discuss a “troop withdrawal,” as the Iraqi prime minister had requested. Instead, discussions would be about the “appropriate force posture in the Middle East.”

So . . . that means it’s officially an occupation again?

The American economy gained 145,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 55,000 jobs. That’s not so great. The headline unemployment rate remained steady at 3.5 percent.

Hourly earnings of blue-collar workers increased about 1 percent, but inflation has been running at 2 percent lately, which means that real earnings declined about 1 percent. This is only a single month of data, but even so it’s kind of astonishing: the unemployment rate is at a record low, but blue-collar wages during the holiday season declined. That hardly seems possible. And yet it happened.

These are the famous pink streetlights of Venice, taken during our 2002 vacation to Italy. The original has a construction crane in the background, but thanks to my improved Photoshop skills that was easily taken care of.

And for your throwback listening pleasure, how about a bit of Paganini? Enjoy.

Kevin Drum

Should California eliminate environmental reviews of homeless shelters?

Aiming to speed up the construction of affordable housing and homeless shelters in California, new legislation would make all new low-income housing projects exempt from a key environmental law that has been used to restrict development….“People are homeless, rents are too high and we just can’t sit here and say the status quo is working,” said Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles), the bill’s author. “We have to push hard to get affordable housing done, emergency shelters and permanent supportive housing. We’ve got to say enough is enough.”

CEQA requires developers to disclose a project’s potential environmental effects on the surrounding community and take steps to reduce or eliminate them. Doing so is often a time-consuming and costly process made longer by lawsuits that can last years.

This is a terrible idea. Construction projects don’t suddenly become harmless just because they serve a good cause. Should we also eliminate environmental review for hospitals, concert halls, and animal shelters?

Likewise, CEQA is either a reasonable law or it isn’t. If it is, it should stay. If it’s not, it should be reformed. But if it’s reformed, it should be reformed for everyone. Environmental reviews should be focused on legitimate environmental impacts—impacts that are real regardless of how virtuous your construction project is.

What’s happening here is that progressives are being hoist by their own petard. CEQA in recent years has become an all-purpose roadblock to new construction of all types, something that liberals mostly celebrate when it’s holding up an office building or a housing development they don’t like. But now it’s turning out that CEQA can also be used by NIMBYs to block construction of things that liberals do like. Imagine that. So their answer is to carve out exemptions for the stuff they like and leave everyone else in a legal morass.

I’m in favor of reforming CEQA. California should require rigorous environmental reviews of construction projects, but the requirements for a proper review should be clear and reasonable, not the basis for endless litigation. And this is a pretty good time to do it. If we can find a compromise that both developers and do-gooders can live with, we’ll probably have a pretty good law.

NBC News

Why did Donald Trump decide to kill Qasem Soleimani? The White House has been all over the map on this, but mostly focused on the idea that Soleimani was preparing an “imminent” attack on . . . something. However, they have consistently refused to produce any real evidence for this. Today, VP Mike Pence “explained” things:

Appearing on the “Today” show, Pence said the Trump administration actually did not share some of the most important information, because of its sensitivity. “Some of the most compelling evidence that Qasem Soleimani was preparing an imminent attack against American forces and American personnel also represents some of the most sensitive intelligence that we have,” Pence told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. “It could compromise those sources and methods.”

Pence added on Fox News that “we’re simply not able to share with every member of the House and Senate the intelligence that supported the president’s decision to take out Qasem Soleimani,” but “I can assure your viewers that there was — there was a threat of an imminent attack.”

Uh huh. It’s common practice to share this kind of information with the leaders of Congress, the so-called Gang of Eight. Their reputation for keeping secrets is pretty spotless. And yet, Trump still hasn’t done this. He just insists that the evidence is bulletproof and we should take him at his word.

I sure don’t. I think he’s lying, just like he always does. He killed Soleimani in a fit of pique and now he’s trying to invent some kind of massive attack on American forces that’s entirely out of character for Iran.

I might be wrong about that. But given Trump’s track record, anyone who doesn’t start out by doubting him is either an idiot or a shill.

Another state expands Medicaid:

Kansas’ Democratic governor and a top Republican lawmaker on Thursday outlined a new proposal for expanding the state’s Medicaid program….The plan from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning would give Kelly the straightforward expansion of state health coverage that she has advocated, covering as many as 150,000 additional people. But Denning would get a version of a program that he has proposed for driving down private health insurance premiums to make it less likely people would drop existing private plans for Medicaid.

If Kansas passes this proposal, we’ll be down to 13 states that are still holding out against Medicaid expansion. With only a couple of exceptions, basically every state in the union has expanded Medicaid coverage except for the states of the deep South. Dave Weigel comments:

The onward march of Medicaid expansion also suggests that people are expecting SCOTUS to laugh away Texas’s anti-Obamacare lawsuit. https://t.co/HhVZHL6Tfh

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) January 9, 2020

Matt Yglesias passes along an interesting study that grew out of the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak, which was big news around here in 2015 as Southern California Gas employees spent months trying to plug a well that had blown out. As a precautionary measure, air filters were installed in schools within five miles of the leak even though measurements showed little deterioration of air quality. This provided Michael Gilraine of New York University with a natural experiment: did the air filters change student performance when you compared schools that were just inside the five-mile boundary with schools that were just outside? Gilraine concludes that the filters had a substantial effect. Here’s the raw data:

Hmmm. I can’t say that I see much difference in student performance between the schools within and without the five-mile boundary. However, that’s because I modified Gilraine’s chart to show just the data points and nothing else. Here’s the original chart:

This is known as a discontinuity test, but you can color me skeptical that there’s anything going on here. The sample size is small (about 20 schools on each side of the boundary); the discontinuity is based on a trendline even though there’s no reason to think that student performance should change with distance; the discontinuities are invisible to the naked eye; and only one of them is statistically significant in the first place—and that one just barely.

I’ve come across these kinds of discontinuity tests before, and I’m usually not very impressed with them unless the discontinuity is fairly large and obvious. That said, this result is intriguing and cries out for a more rigorous followup. Unfortunately, this would be fairly expensive: the filtering system runs about $1,000 per classroom, and in the Aliso Canyon schools the cost came to about $100,000 per school. Are there any billionaires out there who’d like to fund this?

This is a golden eagle at the Orange County Zoo. Check out the shoulders on this guy! If he wanted to tear you to bits, I’ll bet he wouldn’t have much trouble doing it.

Asking Americans to identify ______ on a map is an evergreen source of amusement. Today, Morning Consult does it for Iran:

About half managed to place Iran vaguely in the Middle East, so not bad, America!

On the other hand, several dozen seem to have placed it in Greenland, and an equal number guessed that it was somewhere in the vicinity of Missouri. Come on, people. These aren’t even good guesses. Basically, every continent except Antarctica got quite a few hits, and my guess is that Antarctica was spared only because Morning Consult didn’t put it on their map.

It’s been a while since I’ve caught up with the latest polls in the Democratic primary race, so let’s take a look:

Nationally, both the Warren surge and the Buttigieg surge seem to have run out of steam, leaving Joe Biden still in the lead by a fair amount. In Iowa, Buttigieg has lost a bit of his late-2019 surge while Biden has made up a bit of his late-2019 decline. So now it’s basically a three-way tie with a little less than four weeks to go.