Inflation in July rose 2.9 percent, its highest level in seven years. Core inflation, which doesn’t include food and energy, rose 2.33 percent, its highest level in ten years.

This is not cause for panic, but there’s unquestionably some acceleration in the inflation numbers now. This means two things. First, the Fed is now more likely to tap on the brakes a little harder, which will cause the economy to slow down. Second, since employers seem to have no intention of ever raising nominal wages more than about 2 percent, the real earnings of blue-collar workers are going to continue to fall behind. Here this is in chart form:

No matter what the inflation level is, employers raise wages between 2-2.5 percent. They seem to be stuck on this as a “reasonable” number after experiencing years of the great moderation during the 90s and aughts. But as inflation goes up, this means that workers are getting no real wage increases at all. Or, even worse, they’re getting effective pay cuts, as they did in June and July.

Think about this. The economy is growing at its fastest rate in years. Unemployment is below 4 percent, its lowest point in years. Corporate profits are breaking records. By any normal measure, this is a very high-pressure economy. And yet blue-collar workers have gotten a pay cut over the past two months. Anyone care to explain that?

As a sort of PS to my post yesterday about the decay that’s overtaken the Republican Party, I’d like to make clear just how long this has been brewing. I know this is hardly news to anyone who reads this blog, but as I approach my 60th birthday I can say that half my life has now been marked by Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, Newt Gingrich, the Vince Foster suicide, Whitewater, the Rose law firm, Filegate, the Christmas card list scandal, Fox News, Monica Lewinsky, impeachment, the Florida recount, Swift boating, the GOP’s partywide effort to suppress black votes via photo ID laws, birtherism, the unanimous Republican rejection of the 2009 stimulus, Benghazi, Emailgate, Merrick Garland, and now the endless haze of racism, bigotry, and corruption surrounding Donald Trump.

This is very much a non-exhaustive list. But every one of these things is either a baseless “scandal,” an example of ethical rot, or part of a deliberate media effort to lie and mislead. These are the highlights of the Republican Party over the past three decades. No political party with a rap sheet like this deserves to be walking around free.

GOPus delendus est.

The Holy Fire—which sounds a bit too much like punishment from God for my taste—is on the other side of the foothills from me, so I’m fine and nowhere near anyplace dangerous. However, here’s what the sky looked like around here at about 4 pm today.

(I don’t know how they name fires. The Holy Fire started in Holy Jim Canyon, but maybe fires are limited to single-word descriptors?)

This little girl is obviously pretty intrigued by the camera. She’ll probably grow up to be a model. Or a photographer.

By chance I’ve gotten a couple of similar questions lately. Don’t I agree, asked a friend, that Democrats should give Brett Kavenaugh an honest chance at confirmation to the Supreme Court? We liberals believe in fair play, after all. This was followed by another friend suggesting that liberals shouldn’t actively defend Sarah Jeong’s mocking anti-white trollery on Twitter from a few year ago. That was some pretty illiberal stuff, she said.

Well, let’s talk about this. For many decades the Republican Party built its brand by appealing to white Southerners who had left the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Era. However, the GOP’s appeal to whites inevitably became more muted as times changed and overt racism became less and less acceptable. Finally, when Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the party wrote a post-mortem that admitted they’d taken things as far as they could. The white vote was tapped out, and if they wanted to get to 51 percent in the future they needed to dial back on the racial appeals and instead learn how to attract Asians and Hispanics who were natural constituencies for a fiscally conservative, church-friendly party.

I cheered. But only for a few days. A year earlier the party had fired its first black chairman, and in 2012 they tossed their post-mortem into the dustbin almost as soon as the ink was dry. Then it nominated Donald Trump for president on a platform so viciously racist and bigoted it was like watching an old Ken Burns documentary. The entire party quickly fell in line behind Trump, whose entire campaign was based on his disdain for (wink wink) “political correctness.” Two years later the GOP—including most of the original never-Trumpers—is even more solidly behind him: Mexicans are rapists; there are good people on both sides of Charlottesville; Obama was born in Kenya; Democrats love MS13; we need to prevent Muslims from entering the country; parents and children should be separated at the border; Southern secession was just like 1776; all’s fair in efforts to prevent blacks from voting; and white nationalists are to be coddled, not ridden out of town on a rail.

So this is where we are. The Republican Party can’t win using ordinary methods. On the process side, they can win only by inflating the white vote via gerrymandering, cracked-and-packed districts, and ruthless black voter suppression. On the policy side, they can win only with heavy dollops of strident and outright bigotry against Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and anyone else who comes along. Even Canadians will do in a pinch.

Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.

Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place. This new party should be conservative; brash; ruthless when it needs to be; as simpleminded as any major party usually is; and absolutely dedicated to making Democrats look like idiots. There should be no holds barred except for one: no appeals to racism. None. Not loud ones, not subtle ones. Whatever else it is, it should be a conservative party genuinely open to any person of any color.

When that happens, I will change my mind about how we should fight the Republican Party. Until then, no, I don’t think Brett Kavanaugh deserves any help from Democrats and I don’t think liberals should waste any time tut-tutting over Twitter mockery from 2013 that all of us know perfectly well doesn’t represent any genuine anti-white sentiment.

That’s it. Whatever works best, I’m in.

Remember the good old days when OPEC members would all agree to lower production but then all of them would cheat because they needed more revenue? Apparently those days are back:

The world’s largest oil exporter has told OPEC it cut output in July, according to delegates, but estimates from the U.S. government and independent agencies say it boosted production—amounting to a huge difference of as much as half a million barrels a day….According to New York-based S&P Global Platts, a provider of energy information, Saudi production increased to about 10.6 million barrels a day last month. The Energy Information Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, arrived at the same estimate.

….Iraq, OPEC’s second largest producer, is also disputing independent assessments showing it only respected 12% of its agreed cuts in June. “We are going to refuse these figures,” Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization said in a letter to at least three independent agencies earlier this month.

So OPEC members are cheating on their quotas because they need the extra revenue. And anyway, the United States is probably pushing them to make up for cuts in Iranian production. “They are extending their hand of support to Trump,” says Iran’s OPEC envoy. “It’s a very hostile attitude against us.” Indeed it is.

Mother Jones; J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Devin Nunes has no peer in Congress. He sees his job as protecting President Trump under any and all circumstances, regardless of what Trump may or may not have done. A couple of days ago, in a secret recording made during a fundraiser, he basically admitted this:

The most objective way to describe this is: @DevinNunes has acknowledged that he knowingly, willfully, repeatedly and with glee, uses his considerable power to destroy civic institutions that exist to hold powerful interests accountable. That is the _least_ biased way to put it. pic.twitter.com/s2fOKAkOc7

— Marc Ambinder (@marcambinder) August 9, 2018

In a nutshell: If Sessions refuses to fire Mueller, and if Mueller concludes that Trump broke the law, there’s only one defense left: Republicans in Congress. No matter what happens, we can keep Trump in office as long as we’re in the majority.

This is the modern Republican Party. More about this later this morning.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

While I was catching up on some stuff I missed during my weekend dex haze, Steve Benen alerted me to the fact that a federal judge, once again, told the Department of Homeland Security that it couldn’t rescind DACA, the mini-DREAM act that President Obama put in place in 2012. At first glance, that sounds uninteresting: DHS tried to rescind DACA, they got sued, a judge ruled against them but gave them a second chance, and then ruled against them again. Tough luck.

But that’s not the whole story. You see, in its second hearing DHS decided to simply stand by its original decision with only a few desultory additions. The judge noted that this put them in a pickle:

By choosing to stand by its September 2017 rescission decision, DHS has placed itself in a dilemma. On the one hand, it cannot rely on the reasons it previously gave for DACA’s rescission, because the Court has already rejected them. On the other, because “an agency’s action must be upheld, if at all, on the basis articulated by the agency itself” … DHS also cannot rely on new reasons that it now articulates for the first time.

Huh. It can’t rely on its old reasons and it can’t invent new ones either. It turns out, however, that there is one option still open: it can do a better job of explaining its old reasons. But not only did they fail to do this, they apparently dredged up even worse explanations than before. Check this out:

The memo’s second “policy” justification asserts that “DHS should only exercise its prosecutorial discretion not to enforce the immigration laws on a truly individualized, case-by-case basis.”…In essence, the Secretary claims that even though DACA “on its face . . . allow[s] for individual considerations,” it should nonetheless be rescinded because its programmatic nature somehow misleads those charged with its implementation into applying it categorically.

As an initial matter, this rationale strikes the Court as specious. It would be one thing for a challenger other than DHS to claim that although DACA calls for case-by-case discretion in theory, its application is categorical in practice. Indeed, this argument was made by the plaintiffs in the Texas litigation. But when made by the agency itself, the argument becomes a non sequitur: if Secretary Nielsen believes that DACA is not being implemented as written, she can simply direct her employees to implement it properly. An agency head cannot point to her own employees’ misapplication of a program as a reason for its invalidity.

That’s a hell of an argument, isn’t it? My own people might misapply DACA and there’s nothing I can do about it! Unsurprisingly the judge was not impressed by this. There were several other passages as bad as this one, but it turns out the biggest problem is that back in 2014 Obama’s OLC wrote a detailed brief explaining why DACA was legal. Apparently DHS didn’t even bother addressing it. They just submitted a short letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions asserting that DACA was illegal and that was that:

The Nielsen Memo provides almost no meaningful elaboration on the Duke Memo’s assertion that DACA is unlawful. The Nielsen Memo again ignores the 2014 OLC Memo laying out a comprehensive framework for evaluating the lawfulness of nonenforcement policies in the immigration context—an omission that plaintiffs properly characterize as “mystifying”….Thus, like the Duke Memo before it, the Nielsen Memo offers nothing even remotely approaching a considered legal assessment that this Court could subject to judicial review.

Here’s my question: The DHS brief was pretty obviously deficient even by the standards of a first-year law student. Was DHS even trying to defend themselves? Or had they given up and were just going through the motions? Alternatively, maybe they don’t care because they plan to appeal to the Supreme Court and figure that the court’s five conservatives will rule in their favor no matter what? This whole thing is damn strange.

POSTSCRIPT: Without diving into the details, this case is a good example of how hard it is to repeal an executive order, especially one that was crafted carefully and has been in place for several years. It’s not just a “stroke of a pen.” If DHS submitted a persuasive argument for the legality of DACA back in 2014, it can’t just turn around and ignore it in 2018. It has to explain equally carefully why the previous argument was wrong. What’s more, after hundreds of thousands of people have been relying on an executive order for many years, you can’t just yank it out from under them for no good reason. You need to present a strong policy rationale. Like it or not, that’s how the law works.

Being careful doesn’t guarantee success. However, it certainly makes success more likely, and the Obama administration was careful. The Trump administration, by contrast, is a clown show that’s repeatedly demonstrated that it doesn’t understand administrative law at all. Trump apparently thinks he can just issue orders, and that’s that. They are slowly learning otherwise.

This is a day lily in our backyard. They only bloom properly for a single day, according to Marian, so I hustled out on D-Day and got this picture.

In reality, this flower is pure yellow, but I dehazed it to get the deep orange in the middle. Dehazing has gotten something of a bad rap for being overused, but that’s mainly because too many people use it to actually dehaze hazy photos. Generally speaking, if you have fog or haze in a landscape, you should leave it there. It’s part of the scenery, and trying to remove it doesn’t improve things. However, I occasionally find it useful in modest quantities for pictures where the lighting is just a little too drab. This very much includes portraits of people taken indoors in very flat lighting. Today’s picture is sort of the flower equivalent of that, except that I felt free to use more than the usual level of dehazing because it’s just a flower and I didn’t care about hurting its feelings.

Women do more household chores than men. But how about teenage girls? Here’s the New York Times:

One recent analysis, for example, found that boys ages 15 to 19 do about half an hour of housework a day, and girls about 45 minutes. Although girls spend a little less time on chores than they did a decade ago, the time that boys spend hasn’t significantly changed.

For some reason this got me curious, so I clicked the link and got this very brief note in the PAA Affairs newsletter from last summer:

Huh. Girls appear to spend a higher percentage of something doing a higher percentage of something, but beyond that it’s not clear what this chart shows. I wonder what the Times reporter took from it?

Well, it’s just data from the American Time Use Survey. I can recreate it myself pretty easily. So I did:

So there you have it. On average, girls spend more time on household chores and caring for household members, while boys spend more time on work and school. In the broad category of “not goofing off,” girls spend 5 hours and 26 minutes per day, while boys spend 5 hours and 47 minutes. In case you’re interested, the other seven categories, which I bundled together under “goofing off,” include:

• Personal care, including sleep
• Eating and drinking
• Purchasing goods and services
• Civic and religious activities
• Leisure and sports
• Phone calls, email
• Other

What does it all mean? I dunno. Adolescent girls do perform more time on household chores than boys but less time on education. So is our problem that girls need to spend more time on school? Boys need to spend more time on household chores? Or what?

In any case, I have no idea how the top chart persuaded the Times reporter that “boys ages 15 to 19 do about half an hour of housework a day, and girls about 45 minutes.” Perhaps both the y-axis and the labels are supposed to be minutes, not percentages? That must be it. But the raw data says the actual number is 63 minutes vs. 32 minutes. It is a mystery sometimes where the Times gets its information