What is it that gets so many conservative whites so enraged about immigration? Are they afraid immigrants will take away their jobs? Or do they just not like non-white people very much?

Steven Miller, a political science professor at Clemson, decided to test this using data from election surveys going back to 1992. I don’t want to keep you in suspense, so here’s the basic answer:

Nothing related to economic anxiety has any correlation at all with attitudes toward immigration—and it never has. Going back 25 years, the correlations are barely different from zero in practically every year.¹ But the correlation with racial resentment is both consistent and sky high. If you don’t like brown people, you don’t like immigration.

This is hardly news. Liberals have been mocking “economic anxiety” as an explanation for Donald Trump’s victory ever since Election Day. Still, for something this incendiary, it’s a good idea to test it as many ways as possible and over as much time as possible. This is just one more confirmation that when Trump rails about Mexico and the wall, he’s appealing almost purely to racism, not to working-class anxiety over job loss.

It’s worth noting that this forces us to face another question: was Trump’s anti-immigrant message responsible for his victory? My take is that the evidence shows us two things:

• “Build the wall” appealed exclusively to racist sentiment.
• With a few minor exceptions, racist sentiment was no stronger in 2016 than any other recent year. If you dial it up, you gain some voters at the bottom but lose at least as many from the middle.

In other words, Trump’s immigration message didn’t help him and, on net, probably actually hurt him. Outside of Trump’s base, I think most people understand perfectly well that anti-immigrant sentiment is basically driven by racism, and they want no part of it. Democrats should use this to their advantage by baiting Trump into getting ever louder and more putrid about immigration. The racist core of his base is already as fired up as it’s ever going to get over this, but the rest of the country becomes queasier the more he yells about it. In the Trump era, toleration for immigration isn’t just good policy, it’s almost certainly good politics too.

¹In fairness, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that there’s some economic variable somewhere that’s related to anti-immigration sentiment. Miller was limited to what was in the election surveys, so technically we can draw conclusions only about those particular variables. But in addition to the ones I show above, there’s also no (or barely any) correlation with gender, education, income, and being unemployed. So if there is some economic variable related to being anti-immigrant, it’s pretty well hidden.

It says something weird that this news is getting only slight attention:

President Trump escalated his trade war with China Tuesday, identifying an additional $200 billion in Chinese products that he intends to hit with import tariffs. The move makes good on the president’s threat to respond to China’s retaliation for the initial U.S. tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods, which went into effect on Friday and would eventually place nearly half of all Chinese imports under tariffs.

….Trump’s latest action will hit consumer products, such as televisions, clothing, bedsheets and air conditioners, which were spared from the first import levies….Chinese officials are expected to retaliate in other ways, hitting U.S. firms in China with unplanned inspections, delays in approving financial transactions and other administrative headaches.

Meh. What’s $200 billion these days? In any case, I suppose all these TVs and 600-count satin sheets are national security threats, right? That’s why Trump can slap tariffs on them just because he feels like it. Or is it that the original tariffs were related to national security, and these are retaliatory tariffs intended only to retaliate against the original retaliatory Chinese tariffs—and thus don’t need any particular justification? I get so confused these days.

This really needs no description or explanation, does it? A perfect red rose was just opening up in our backyard; it rained during the night; and I snapped a picture of it in the morning. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

“Wingnut welfare” has now reached the parody stage:

Former national security adviser Mike Flynn has a new job: He has joined a global lobbying and investment advisory firm. As he awaits sentencing for lying to federal investigators, he is going into business with Washington lobbyist Nick Muzin and his New York partner Joey Allaham with a new firm called Stonington Global LLC, they told The Wall Street Journal.

….Stonington Global will provide consulting and lobbying services for U.S. and foreign clients, Messrs. Muzin and Allaham said in a statement. The firm also will “help private investors and sovereign-wealth funds develop and execute investment strategies.”

Flynn didn’t just “resign in disgrace” or “leave the Trump administration under a cloud.” He committed a felony and pled guilty to it. Nor has he “paid his debt to society.” He hasn’t even been sentenced yet. Nor is he otherwise an upstanding member of the intelligence and foreign policy community. He’s a conspiracy theorist who’s widely believed to have gone deranged during and after his tenure as DIA director—“right-wing nutty,” as Colin Powell called him.

But the paychecks just keep rolling in anyway.

UPDATE: Whoops, I guess the deal is off. Flynn’s lawyer tells the Journal, “He was aware that a statement was being drafted, but he did not intend that it be issued at this time.” I guess judges get annoyed when you issue statements about future work that basically assume you’re going to get off scot free.

UPDATE 2: Or, as Marcy puts it:

Rushing out to influence peddle again prolly wasn’t going to help sentencing in an influence peddling felony. https://t.co/ohMg1EOuTj

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 10, 2018

The “liberal case” for Brett Kavanaugh is the same as the liberal case for every other Republican judicial nominee: he is smart, highly qualified, open to changing his mind based on evidence, and definitely not an ideologue.

In fact, it is just an immense coincidence that this brilliant, centrist, pragmatic man happens to have ruled without exception in favor of rich people, big corporations, and social conservatives in the past. That’s just where the evidence has taken him! Nobody should assume that he’ll do the same thing in the future, and liberals should be ashamed of themselves for getting all shrill about this.

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:

Rising wages are beginning to eat into the profits of some U.S. companies. Businesses from dollar stores to hotel operators to fast-food chains have warned in recent months that higher labor costs have been a drag on their profits—a potential headwind for the nine-year stock-market rally as it struggles for momentum ahead of the second-quarter earnings season.

Today in the Wall Street Journal:

Corporate earnings are poised to extend a run of double-digit growth in the second quarter, providing a balm for a stock market that has languished as investors have grappled with threats ranging from fractious trade relations to tightening monetary policy. Analysts expect earnings from S&P 500 companies to grow 20% in the second quarter from the year-earlier period, according to FactSet

And just for the record, here is wage growth over the past few years:

The markers show inflation-adjusted hourly wages in May 2017 and May 2018. As you can see, wages have skyrocketed over the past year. Clearly something must be done about this grave threat to corporate America’s 20 percent profit growth.

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Newscom via ZUMA

The GOP’s shiny new tax law has a glitch:

The new tax law would have let White Castle and other companies deduct their renovation costs immediately, rather than over many years, providing an incentive to do such work….Instead, as written, White Castle and other companies must depreciate building-renovation costs over 39 years—a less favorable rule than existed before Congress changed the law.

Well, that’s no problem. Congress will just pass a minor technical correction and everything will be fine. Right?

The process of fixing this flaw and other technical problems in the law is moving slowly, weighed down in part by lingering partisan bitterness over the crafting of the tax law, which passed without a single Democratic vote. Democrats, who recall Republicans’ reluctance to help make technical changes to the Affordable Care Act, aren’t necessarily eager to quickly correct flaws that stemmed in part from the speedy tax-bill-writing process they criticized in 2017.

“Reluctance.” Yeah, that’s the word.

In any case, goose, meet gander. This is the government that corporate America has happily gone along with and could put an end to anytime they really felt like it. But they don’t feel like it. Dysfunction, rage, and vicious racism are all OK as long as they get some tax cuts and regulatory relief now and again. This is the world they created.

Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

As you all know by now, President Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh to take Anthony Kennedy’s place on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was one of Ken Starr’s lead attorneys in the impeachment case against Bill Clinton, where he demonstrated his intense dedication to the rule of law:

While working for Ken Starr in 1998, Kavanagh routinely skirted or violated Rule 6 (e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure by leaking details of Lewinsky probe.Mueller’s team obeys the law; Starr’s didn’t. Reporters didn’t bust Brett because they benefitted. Will one now?

— Jonathan Alter (@jonathanalter) July 10, 2018

Quite the contrary! Every reporter loves a blabbermouth. The fact that Kavanaugh routinely flouted the law to bring more tittle-tattle to their attention makes him a friend, not a lowlife. If anything, this should guarantee him better treatment among the press than he’d otherwise get.

Andy Nelson/The Register-Guard via ZUMA

This isn’t especially important, but just for the record:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned a pair of ranchers convicted of arson on federal lands where they had grazing rights for their cattle, a case that aggravated long-simmering tensions over land use in the Western U.S.

I don’t know or care whether Dwight and Steven Hammond were unfairly sentenced. What I do know is that their case eventually led to the Bundy brothers taking over the Malheur wildlife refuge headquarters in Oregon, becoming a cause célèbre among the “sovereign citizens” and other assorted militia nutballs out here in the West. These folks were all being oppressed by The Man—and the Hammonds in particular were oppressed by Barack Obama—so pardoning them is a politically useful stunt.

Trump appears to be on the lookout for people he can pardon as a way of firing up his base. Who’s next? I’ll put my money on some white cop who was convicted of shooting a black guy. That’s assuming any exist, of course.

This is a picture of an ordinary irrigation canal in northern California, but I like it for the play of its deep blues and greens. I used a polarizing filter to kill the early-morning reflection from the water, and I had to squash my head into the grass and shoot blind to keep my own shadow out of the frame. I shot several dozen versions of this from different angles and heights, but in the end the simplest and most straightforward framing worked the best.