The New York Times reports today that our commander-in-chief uses a personal iPhone that’s insecure and routinely surveilled by Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. Despite being warned repeatedly about this, he continues to use it to call up his friends and yak all night long:

White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them….They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

My spirit has been crushed over the past two years and I am no longer truly surprised by anything Donald Trump does or by how the Republican Party collectively shrugs about it. I meet each new revelation with a thousand-yard stare and then a robotic move of the mouse to see if there’s any other news I might be interested in.

And yet. Occasionally something still produces a tiny flicker of neurotransmitters somewhere in the vicinity of my amygdala. When that happens, I blink my eyes as if awakening from a stupor and take a closer look at the text on my computer screen. Text like this:

White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Trump is a Republican, right? This is the party that spent two years pretending to be outraged that Hillary Clinton used an unclassified network to respond to an email about a phone call to the newly-elected president of Malawi. But their reaction to the president of the United States chatting merrily away on a phone that we know the Russians and Chinese are listening in on? Apparently nothing.

But, you know, President Obama once saluted a Marine while holding a coffee cup in his hand. So I guess there’s plenty of justified outrage on both sides, amirite?

The S&P 500 is now officially down for the year, ending today about 2 percent under its value at the beginning of January:

How big a deal is this? I don’t know, though I’m a little surprised that investors couldn’t stay excited about a big corporate tax cut for more than a few months. However, President Trump is pretty sure he knows what’s going on. As usual, it’s a personal attack, this time from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell:

“Every time we do something great, he raises the interest rates,” Mr. Trump said, adding that Mr. Powell “almost looks like he’s happy raising interest rates.”

….The president’s caustic comments about Mr. Powell came as Mr. Trump repeatedly described the economy in personal terms. He referred to economic gains during his time in office as “my numbers,” saying, “I have a hot economy going.” He described his push for growth as a competition with former President Obama’s record, saying that increases under his Democratic predecessor were skewed because of low-interest rates.

Poor Donald. Everyone has it out for him, even the conservative Republican millionaires that he’s personally appointed.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s odd that Trump’s normally excellent attack-dog instincts have failed him on this topic. The self-evident explanation for the stock market decline is that fake news has been excitedly reporting a “blue wave” for the upcoming election, which makes investors nervous that Democrats will take over and ruin the economy. I’m not sure how Trump has missed something so obvious.

UPDATE: Now we’re talking:

Stocks are falling due to fear that Democrats will win midterms and end “pro-growth policies,” according to White House advisor Larry Kudlow. https://t.co/3F5M2boykL

— CNBC (@CNBC) October 23, 2018

It struck me yesterday that this blog could use some bright blues, so here you go: a peacock from the Prospect Park Zoo. Peacocks are useless and annoying animals, but they sure are pretty.

Just to follow up on my previous post, here’s a Trump tweet from early this morning:

Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2018

Obviously Trump is lying about this, but that’s not my point. What he’s doing is branding both parties. It doesn’t matter which individual happens to running in your district, he’s saying, all Republicans will protect pre-existing condition and all Democrats won’t. This is an unusually brazen lie even by Trump standards since Democrats have already protected pre-existing conditions with the hated Obamacare that he’s been trying so hard to tear down. But Trump, as usual, is counting on the fact that a lot of people don’t know that and will simply believe whatever he says.

Except for the lying part, which they don’t need, Democrats should be doing the same thing. Who will volunteer their Twitter feed for this task?

Doesn't everyone look excited? Can you see the cheering? The sign waving? Do you believe that these people are going to leave this rally all charged up to tell their friends who to vote for?Larry Burton via ZUMA

Here’s Barack Obama yesterday:

I believe in a fact-based reality and a fact-based politics. I don’t believe in just making stuff up. I think you should, like, actually say to people what’s true.

I’m assuming there are some compassionate Republicans out there who think there’s nothing American about ripping immigrant children from their mothers.

It is not a Democratic or Republican idea that we are not supposed to pressure the attorney general or the FBI to us the criminal justice system to try to punish political opponents. That’s not how America works.

Yawn. Does this kind of stump speech work? I suppose it’s good for Democrats who are already planning to vote for Democrats anyway. It makes them feel better about their party, after all. But does it do anything else? Does it motivate the base? Does it pull in moderate conservatives? Does it get news coverage? Does it appeal to young voters? Or Hispanics? Does it make the lines of battle clear?

Not really. I understand that Obama is an ex-president and feels the need for a certain decorum, but times have changed. Decorum isn’t a big part of national politics these days. How about this instead? When you read it, try to imagine it in Obama’s voice:

The entire Republican Party is dedicated to lying all the time. Climate change is a hoax. Sexual assault victims are making stuff up. Tax cuts are for the middle class. Heh. That’s because the closest they ever come to a real middle class voter is some Wall Street broker making a million dollars a year. And now they’re lying about terrorists marching their way up through Mexico to kill us all. They’re all just lies and everyone knows it. The Republican Party has turned into the party of lies.

There used to be at least a few Republicans compassionate enough to feel bad about ripping immigrant children from their mothers. Not anymore. The ugliest, meanest parts of the Republican Party love it when Jeff Sessions takes those babies away. It gets big cheers at all those creepy rallies that Donald Trump puts on for Fox News. The Republican Party has turned into the party of hate.

Democrats believe in the rule of law. Donald Trump believes the attorney general’s job is to help his friends and punish his enemies. And what do Republicans think of this? Well, the ones in Congress sure don’t seem to have any problem with it. The Republican Party has turned into the party of corruption.

Fine. Obama isn’t going to hire me as his speechwriter anytime soon. But his kind of namby-pamby speeches just aren’t having any effect and aren’t getting any coverage. He needs to be a champion for the Democratic Party, not just for civic virtue in general. He’s in a unique position to make a single speech that can persuade people to vote for Democrats nationwide, and he’s not taking advantage of it. This was one of his biggest failures in office, and now he’s repeating it.

Obama needs to stand up for his party and start really telling the truth about Republicans. Why won’t he?

This is a special post for California readers. The rest of you may safely ignore it.

This year we have four bond issues and seven initiatives on the California ballot (Propositions 5-12 minus Proposition 9, which was removed by the California Supreme Court). As longtime readers know, my default position is to oppose all initiatives. Here’s the nickel version of a longer rant about this: (1) Most initiatives these days are funded by corporate interests, not the grassroots, and corporate interests don’t really need yet another avenue to work their will on the public; (2) generally speaking, laws should be laws, not constitutional amendments or initiative statutes, where they’re essentially etched in stone forever; and (3) ballot box budgeting is a curse. So keep my biases in mind as you read this.

If you’re too lazy to read even this brief summary, just vote yes on the bond issues and no on everything else. You won’t go too far wrong.

1. $4 billion veterans housing bond. YES. Sure, why not.
2. $2 billion housing bond for the homeless and those with mental illness. YES. This money already exists (from the Mental Health Services Act) but a lawsuit has prevented it from being used on housing. So why not ask voters if they want to allow MHSA money to be used for housing? It seems like a good idea to ask, and it seems like a good idea to say yes. Housing is a critical part of any mental health program.
3. $8.8 billion water bond. TOSSUP. This would fund a bunch of worthy water projects, but it’s yet another hodgepodge sponsored mostly by special interests. I’ll probably vote NO, but you might reasonably decide that this is just how politics works, so let’s keep this stuff funded.
4. $1.5 billion children’s hospital bond. YES. Come on. It’s for children’s hospitals.
5. Allows people over 55 to sell their home but keep their Prop 13 assessment from decades ago. NO. This is yet another extension to Proposition 13, sponsored by people who are never going to be
   

   

   satisfied until they get away with paying no property taxes at all. It’s especially annoying because it hides under the cover of helping the disabled, even though affluent old people are by far its biggest beneficiaries. More details here if you’re interested.

6. Repeals a 12-cent increase in the gas tax passed last year. NO. The gasoline tax increase was perfectly reasonable and will be used entirely for transportation infrastructure. Prop 6 also requires voter approval for all future gas tax increases, which makes no sense since tax increases already require a two-thirds majority in the legislature.
7. Allows permanent daylight saving time. NO. This is practically the definition of a stupid initiative. I like daylight saving time, but all this does is allow the legislature to adopt year-round DST if Congress ever decides to allow it—which it doesn’t and never has. We should hold on and debate this if and when Congress ever changes its mind.
8. Caps prices at private dialysis clinics. NO. This is one of those rabbit holes that gets more complicated the farther down you got. In a nutshell, here’s the deal. Medicare pays for most dialysis no matter your age. However, private insurance pays for new dialysis patients during a transition period, and dialysis clinics charge insurance companies high rates in order to make up for low Medicare reimbursements. There are also allegations of steering patients away from Medicare in order to increase private clinic revenue, but this is too complicated and unproven to get into. (More here if you want the gory details.) Labor unions oppose all this for murky reasons and lobbied the legislature earlier this year to pass a bill that regulates how much dialysis clinics could charge. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, so they put Prop 8 on the ballot. I don’t really see the case, however. It’s a piecemeal kind of thing, and it’s not clear why dialysis is suddenly a nationwide target compared to everything else in the health care business, which works pretty much the same way (i.e., high private insurance payments making up for low Medicare rates). The dialysis market is controlled by two big firms, and after looking at their financials I’d say they’re both doing fine, but they aren’t insanely profitable or anything. This just doesn’t pass the bar to be set in stone. It should go back to the legislature.
9. —
10. Allows local governments to enact rent control. NO. This is a close call. On the one hand, all it does is strike down a law that forbids rent control on new construction. It’s then up to individual cities to do what they want. I’m generally in favor of giving authority to towns and cities, but I’m not a big fan of rent control, which has never struck me as a good way of keeping down housing prices. In the end, I figure that it was the legislature that prohibited rent control, and they’re the ones who should un-prohibit it. If progressives can’t get the legislature to agree even though Democrats control two-thirds of both the Senate and the Assembly, something is wrong.
11. Requires EMTs to remain on call during meal breaks. NO. This is sort of a WTF initiative. Why do we suddenly care about meal breaks for ambulance workers? The answer is that ambulance workers are generally required to stay on call even during breaks, but a recent court decision makes it likely that this will have to change. In anticipation of this, the ambulance industry sponsored Prop 11 to keep things the way they are now. I’m not sure how much I truly care about this, but meal breaks for ambulance workers are definitely not something that should be carved in stone forever. If ambulance companies want this, they should get it the old-fashioned way, by bribing the legislature.
12. Confinement of farm animals. YES. This is a fairly minor initiative that adds some detail to Proposition 2, which was passed in 2008. It seems OK.

How can you tell he's lying? Because his mouth is open.Song Qiong/Xinhua via ZUMA

Well, we’ve now sailed far beyond the Isle of Lies and straight into the Maelstrom of Making Shit Up:

Trump tells my WSJ colleagues that the 10% tax cut will be revenue-neutral “based on certain things.” He won’t say what those certain things are.
https://t.co/T7oVpvnQzP via @WSJ

— Richard Rubin (@RichardRubinDC) October 23, 2018

There is no tax cut planned. There’s never been a tax cut planned. Trump just tossed this out while he was in a lather about something else and noticed that it got a good reception. So he repeated it. And why not? Republicans love tax cuts. Now everyone is starting to get aboard, and we’re even getting some fake details about this fake plan. It’s going to be revenue neutral! It will be for the middle class—honest! It will be paid for by Mexico!

I dunno. Once again, the campaign press is in its usual bind. I’m sure every campaign reporter out there knows this is just another one of Trump’s fantasies, spun out solely to get attention from campaign reporters. And yet … he is the president of the United States. Whatcha gonna do?

From Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s low-IQ son-in-law and Middle East czar, on the murder of Jamel Khashoggi:

We’re getting facts in from multiple places. Once those facts come in, the secretary of state will work with our national security team to help us determine what we want to believe.

I know, I know: just a slip of the tongue. Sure it is.

Overexposed LA™ continues today with a late-night portrait of the famous Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry. Today is the 15th anniversary of its opening—I think. Various sources say that it opened on October 22, 23, or 24, but in its timeline of the hall the LA Times marks the 23rd as the day it “of­fi­cially opens with celebrity-heavy gala cel­eb­ra­tions.” The Times also says that the opening was spread over three con­certs, which in­cluded Strav­in­sky’s “The Rite of Spring,” John Adams’ “The Dharma at Big Sur” and a piece by movie com­poser John Wil­li­ams. This might explain the confusion over the date.

Matt Yglesias is upset today about the hack gap. That’s also a favorite of mine, but I think he makes a mistake here when he notes that no one is paying much attention to the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa:

There was a time when TV news covered Ebola in Africa a lot: in the immediate runup to the 2014 midterms, when Republican Party political operatives decided that trying to alarm people about Ebola would be a good way to win votes….Coverage then immediately plummeted when it no longer served the tactical interests of the Republican Party, with just 50 segments airing over the two post-election weeks.

Today, of course, a new ongoing Ebola outbreak that happens to coincide with a US midterm election is not something the Republican Party wants to emphasize in its midterm messaging….What Republicans want to scare people about instead is a group of a few thousand Central Americans who are currently in Southern Mexico….Consequently, television news is doing a lot of coverage of this issue rather than of Ebola.

So far, fair enough. But then there’s this:

I would urge people involved in the industry to think about this question honestly. When Barack Obama proclaimed that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” television news did not respond with weeks of nonstop climate coverage. When Obama was president, TV news took its assignments from Republican congressional leaders.

It’s fine to criticize the news media for spending too much time on whatever the Republican Party is trying to scare people about. At the same time, it’s just the nature of the news business that it covers things that are new. The Ebola outbreak was new. The migrant caravan is new. Climate change is old. If Democrats want equal time in the news media scare-a-thon, they need to at least find something new for the media to cover.¹ For good or ill, that’s politics 101.

FWIW, I’d note that Brett Kavanaugh got a lot of coverage a few weeks ago, and Jamal Khashoggi is getting a lot of coverage now. Both of those are helpful to the Democratic cause as long as Democrats play their cards right. What they have in common is (a) they’re new, and (b) fresh revelations dripped out daily, giving reporters something to cover every day. In the Khashoggi case, the drip-drip-drip is being coordinated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for reasons of his own. I don’t know what those reasons are, and Erdogan’s motivations in this whole affair remain kind of murky, but Democrats could definitely take some media lessons from him.

In any case, the key to hijacking the news media is to pound on a story where there’s fresh news to report every single day. Republicans are pretty good at this, Democrats less so. But it’s not rocket science.

¹They also need to be hackier about agreeing to yell and scream in unison about whatever the scary issue of the day is. This is the hack gap in its purest form. If Fox News says the migrant caravan is big news, then the entire Republican messaging apparatus can be counted on to scramble aboard. Democrats, as the herd of cats they’re reputed to be, are less likely to do this. In fact, as we hack gap lamenters have lamented before, a fair number of Democrats would take the other side just to demonstrate their intellectual integrity.