Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

ASAP Rocky has just gone on trial in Sweden:

When Rocky went on trial here on Tuesday along with two members of his entourage, few were very surprised when Robert C. O’Brien took a seat in the courtroom, joining the journalists and a handful of teenage rap fans and curious onlookers already assembled there.

Mr. O’Brien is the president’s special envoy for hostage affairs. “The president asked me to come here and support these American citizens,” Mr. O’Brien said in an interview. “I’ll be here until they come home.”

Man, Trump is really jonesing for the Kim Kardashian vote, isn’t he? That’s no surprise, I guess, and who knows? Maybe it’s even smart. Who wants to be on Kim Kardashian’s bad side?

Last night’s scrum over health care was a pretty good example of the narcissism of small differences. Among the candidates who are polling above 0 percent, there’s universal agreement that we need to move toward universal health care. The argument, roughly speaking, is over:

• How fast should the transition be?
• Should private insurers have no role or a small, regulated role?
• Should consumers have small deductibles and copays or no deductibles and copays?

There’s not really a whole lot more to it, and these are truly minuscule differences. But the truth is that Democrats don’t have an awful lot to argue about, so they have to turn molehills into mountains wherever they can. It’s the only way to stand out from the crowd.

For what it’s worth, I’d point out that most European countries adopted universal health care bit by bit, not via a single big bang; they vary in their use of private insurance; and they don’t pay 100 percent of health care costs. Here’s the latest OECD data on average out-of-pocket costs in rich countries:

On a percentage basis, the US is actually pretty good on this score. The problem is that our health costs are so high that even a low percentage of OOP spending translates into a pretty high absolute dollar amount. And needless to say, this chart shows only averages. The real problem with the American health care system is that it works OK if you’re not sick but turns brutal when you are. In other countries, your OOP spending is generally pretty limited no matter how high your bill. In the United States, conversely, a big bill can often turn into a household catastrophe.

In any case, while it’s fine to argue about the minutiae of different health care plans, we should all keep in mind that at its core this is a fairly technical policy discussion. You don’t lose your progressive membership card because you support one over another.

Julien Behal/PA Wire via ZUMA

Apparently Donald Trump plans to take his usual sober and considered approach to health care policy during campaign season:

White House advisers, scrambling to create a health-care agenda for President Trump to promote on the campaign trail, are meeting at least daily with the aim of rolling out a measure every two to three weeks until the 2020 election.

….Some, however, are doubtful a flurry of executive orders and new regulations would have an immediate effect on consumers’ pocketbooks. What is clear is that the approach, which includes White House support for a bipartisan Senate bill to cap Medicare drug price increases to the rate of inflation, is putting congressional Republicans in a tough spot: Embrace Trump’s agenda and abandon conservative precepts about interference in the marketplace, or buck the president on one of his top priorities.

….One lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described being stunned at a recent White House meeting when Domestic Policy Council Director Joe Grogan said the administration would not let Democrats run to the president’s left on lowering the prices of prescription medicines. In another tense meeting, top pharmaceutical executives were told bluntly “it wasn’t in the industry’s best interests” to block the bipartisan Senate bill backed by Trump. If it failed, they were told, they’d see “the president of the United States negotiating with Nancy Pelosi [on allowing the government to negotiate drug prices in Medicare],” said a person familiar with the meeting.

Uh huh. That’s a tough one. Should Republicans blithely abandon their principles and do what Trump wants or—or what?

Of course, this isn’t a matter of sitting back and letting Trump attack brown or black or yellow people. This is a matter of by god interference with corporate interests, which really does put Republicans in a tough spot. They’re perfectly happy to let Trump tear into America’s oldest racial wounds, but reducing the profits of pharmaceutical companies by a few points? That’s a genuine chin scratcher. What’s a Republican to do?

I don’t have even a post-debate roundup this time. As far as I’m concerned, CNN earned an F and all the candidates get an Incomplete.

I get that the cable nets have been dealt a bad hand with these huge debate stages full of people no one has ever heard of. But CNN took a bad hand and turned it into a farce with its constant and aggressive interruptions to keep everyone down to 15 seconds for anything other than an initial question. 15 seconds! Hell, the moderators couldn’t even ask their questions in 15 seconds. The whole thing felt more like a Roman spectacle than a debate among 21st century adults.

High point: Marianne Williamson talking about the “dark psychic force” of Donald Trump’s presidency. She almost won my vote with that.

Best prepared: Elizabeth Warren, who actually knew what the rules were and was prepared to provide very short, compact answers. Of course, as a frontrunner she could probably afford this more than the also-rans.

Wiktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via ZUMA

Please excuse me while I get something off my chest. Maybe writing about it will help.

I’ve been really angry lately. The proximate cause has nothing to do with the world at large, but with the fact that I had to start up the dex again. Almost instantly it took hold in the usual way, compromising my sleep at night and making me tired and fatigued during the day. At least three or four days a week I end up in a daytime coma for 1-3 hours, and the rest of the time I feel crappy. This shortens my temper in the obvious way, but it also just pisses me off. There’s nothing rational about that, but there you go.

But that’s not the whole story. This is my fourth round of dex, and it hasn’t made me angry at the world before. So what else is going on?

Well, there’s Twitter, but I don’t know if that’s cause or effect. I normally don’t engage much on Twitter, but lately I’ve not only been doing it more often, but doing it stupidly. I’m angry, so I launch off a snarky/snotty tweet and then watch the whole conversation go downhill. Needless to say, I’m angrier at the end than I was at the beginning.

I could just hide my mentions and stop engaging, but that would be annoying to other people who find Twitter a good way to communicate with me. And that’s only a band-aid anyway.

Then there’s Trump, of course. Or, more accurately, the entire Republican Party. This is a little hard to describe since it’s hardly news that Trump is a boor and Republicans are the party of the rich and powerful. But during one of my recent Twitter squabbles, it all hit me a little harder than usual. The argument was about—well, that doesn’t matter. It was an essentially minor issue of fact that probably wasn’t going to change by much no matter which of us was right. And I realized just how much time liberals spend on this kind of thing—myself very much included. We call each other out constantly on the precise truth of some fact or policy position. Can Bernie really pay for his health care plan? Can we really blame the latest huge storm on climate change? Is middle-class income growth really stagnant or merely sluggish?

Meanwhile, the Republican Party and Fox News are peddling an entire alternate reality. Global warming is due to sunspots. Donald Trump isn’t a racist. Tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the economy. Benghazi was a deliberate setup. Undocumented immigrants are murderers and rapists. Social Security is going bankrupt. Voter fraud is rampant. China pays for tariffs.

They aren’t arguing about whether it’s unfair to say that Mexican immigrants commit 1.2 murders per 100,000 because it’s really 1.1 if you control for age and gender. They just follow whatever lead Trump provides and run ads with grieving white families and gritty mug shots of some dark-skinned assailant. Done.

I’m saying absolutely nothing original here. And I like the fact that liberals are sort of obsessed with keeping everyone honest even on fairly minor details. But there’s definitely something a little deck-chairish about it these days.

This is a mishmash, but the result is that it’s made me a little sloppy lately. Given everything going on around us, it’s hard to feel like it’s worthwhile sweating every detail and making sure I haven’t skipped a step or two. And then I get beat up about it—sometimes fairly, sometimes not—and I spend more time on the damn topic than I would have if I’d just done it right the first time. And I’m angry about that, and I’m angry that I/we are wasting our time on this kind of stuff while Republicans are gleefully gerrymandering, repressing votes, trying to destroy Obamacare, passing huge tax windfalls for the rich, cutting food stamps, demanding investigations of Robert Mueller, pissing off every ally America has, and just generally doubling down on their commitment to race baiting and winning the white vote.

I don’t know. I’m not sure this helped after all. Maybe I need to take up yoga.

Here is a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. It is signed by 21 Republican senators:

Sometimes the old songs are the best. Conservatives have been trying to enact a stealth cut in the capital gains tax via inflation indexing for as long as I can remember, but they’ve never been able to get it passed by Congress. So now, encouraged by President Trump’s belief that the executive can do anything he wants, they’ve decided to skip the whole tedious lawmaking thing and just ask Mnuchin to do it by fiat.

I learned about this via Michael Hiltzik, who passes along this analysis from the CBPP:

CBPP estimates that indexing capital gains would cut taxes on the rich by $100-200 billion over ten years. This actually isn’t a huge sum, but in a way that makes this even worse. Are Republicans really this desperate to pander to the rich? They’re really willing to emasculate their own branch of government just for a pitiful little tribute like this? It’s kind of embarrassing.

But you know what they say: a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Keep pushing through little tax actions like this and the rich and powerful will know that you’re doing everything possible to keep them happy.

BY THE WAY: I guess it says something—though I’m not sure what—that only 21 Republicans signed this letter. This means that 32 Republicans declined to sign a letter in support of a tax cut. That probably shows just how bad an idea this is.

So many questions in this picture. Where is that jet headed? Who’s on it? Are they visiting grandchildren? Going on their honeymoon? Desperately hoping to find a lifesaving cure at one of the country’s most renowned medical centers? Taking their first trip outside the United States?

Or—nah. It’s probably just a bunch of tired business folks heading to Cleveland for another week of gladhanding. Boy, that just sucked all the romance right out of it, didn’t it?

I’ve been arguing for a while that Donald Trump’s strategy of appealing to the racism of his base isn’t likely to work. It only barely worked in 2016, and things are different now that he’s been spewing his filth into our homes for more than two years. Basically, his race baiting might attract a few more votes from his white working-class base, but it’s going to lose him more votes among whites and others who are disgusted by his demagoguery.

Like all of us, I love it when some research comes along to confirm my point of view, and yesterday a couple of Cornell professors who work at the Roper Center did just that. Peter Enns and Jonathon Schuldt present a couple of charts that I’ve combined into one. They polled about 1,400 people in battleground states last July and asked a series of questions about racial resentment along with some questions about support for Trump. Here are the results:

Their basic point is simple:

Those who strongly approve of Trump — represented by the red bars in the graph below — mostly indicate higher levels of racial resentment. This can be seen in the height of the bars clustered toward the right side of the scale.

Hoever, among those who strongly disapprove of Trump in these [swing] states — the blue bars — even more likely voters indicate strongly benevolent attitudes on race and immigration, as indicated by the height of the bars clustered near zero. These are the voters who are likely to be offended by Trump’s racist remarks, perhaps becoming more motivated to turn out on the Democratic side as a result.

Among independents, they say that about 60 percent have racial views on the “benevolent” side of the scale. These people are also likely to be turned off by Trump’s racial rhetoric, while only 40 percent are likely to appreciate it.

Now, this is fairly thin stuff, and I’d take it as suggestive only. That said, it is suggestive that Trump has worn out his race-baiting schtick with a good 50-60 percent of the population. If that’s really the case, then every time he unleashes a tirade about rats and shitholes and sending them back, all he’s doing is costing himself votes. As long as Democrats don’t take the bait and go crazy, Trump is digging himself a hole he can’t get out of.

Ha ha ha:

President Trump will be ineligible for California’s primary ballot next year unless he discloses his tax returns under a state law that immediately took effect Tuesday, an unprecedented mandate that is almost certain to spark a high-profile court fight and might encourage other states to adopt their own unconventional rules for presidential candidates.

This will go to court instantly, of course, and I have no idea what the law says about this. And of course, it would be more meaningful if it came out of a swing state like Florida or Pennsylvania. And it would matter yet more if it applied to the general election, not just the primary. Still, it helps lock in place California’s role as chief troll to the president.

One of my regular readers emailed this morning to say that “Surely the rat population of American cities needs to be graphically represented!” Obviously he’s got my number, but rats? Where the hell am I going to find data about rat infestation?

Well, bizarrely enough, this is a question on the American Housing Survey. Here are the top 15 cities plus Baltimore:

Sadly, intellectual honesty forces me to publish this chart even though it confirms Baltimore as one of the rattiest cities in America. However, I’d add that two of the top five are New York, where Donald Trump lived in the past, and Washington DC, the city where he lives now. I guess rats only count if they live somewhere that a TEOC (Trump enemy of color) lives.

UPDATE: The AHS also asks about cockroaches. Oddly enough, Baltimore does much better on this measure. I suppose it must all be weather related or something.