Vice President Mike Pence is really letting his inner asshole fly free:

Thank you to Justice Anthony Kennedy for your long career of service on the SCOTUS. @POTUS Trump will nominate a strong conservative, in the tradition of the late Justice Scalia, who will uphold all the God-given liberties enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) June 27, 2018

Translation: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Tony. We’re finally going to replace you with someone who doesn’t regularly betray our constitutional liberties.

So how is Obamacare doing? We already know that it ended the 2018 enrollment period with only slightly fewer signups than 2017. That’s not bad considering the relentless campaign of sabotage that Donald Trump engaged in.

But how about insurers? They didn’t abandon the Obamacare exchanges in nearly the numbers some people were afraid of. The Kaiser Family Foundation gives us an idea why:

When Obamacare started up, insurers on average charged premiums that were only about $600 per year more than medical claims. That’s not enough for them to stay profitable in a broad market where they’re required to cover anyone who applies.¹ Last year, however, they charged about $1,200 more, and this year they’re charging $1,800 more. That’s plenty to stay in the black:

The medical loss ratio is the percentage of premium dollars paid out in claims. For ordinary employer health insurance it’s around 90 percent. The individual market has more overhead, so maintaining profitability requires a lower MLR—somewhere in the range of 80-85 percent, which is what Obamacare mandates.

In its first three years, the MLR for Obamacare insurers was barely in that range, which meant insurers were on rocky ground. Last year, after big premium increases, the MLR dropped to 75 percent, and this year it’s down to 68 percent. That’s plenty to maintain profitability. It’s so good, in fact, that most insurers will be required to rebate some of their premiums in order to maintain the 80-85 percent level required by Obamacare.

In other words, the sabotage isn’t working. Consumers continue to enroll and insurers have enough experience under their belts to do their underwriting more accurately. This means that Obamacare really shouldn’t see big premium increases in most states this year. We’ll see.

¹Though it’s enough in a market where you insure only healthy people and turn down anyone with a pre-existing condition.

Helmut Fohringer/APA Picturedesk via ZUMA

I had lunch with a friend yesterday. I’ve known him for a long time, and he’s a smart, politically engaged, moderate conservative. He’s not a big Donald Trump fan and certainly not a Fox News drone. Just an ordinary center-right guy.

And yet, he told me the following things during the course of a one-hour conversation:

• Roe v. Wade is in no danger because it’s already been settled. The Supreme Court can’t just change its mind about it. Reality: The Supreme Court can overturn an old case anytime it wants, and it happens all the time. The most recent example happened yesterday in the public-sector union case.
• American cars cost twice as much in Europe as they do here. Reality: Most American cars sold in Europe are made in Europe. Imports are subject to a 10 percent tariff.
• If nothing changes, our trade deficit with China will keep going up forever. Before long it will be trillions of dollars. Reality: the US trade deficit with China has been flat for more than a decade.
  

  

• We’re “finally” talking to North Korea. Reality: We’ve talked to North Korea many, many times in the past. So far, there’s nothing new happening except that Donald Trump decided to personally do the talking this time around.
• Public-sector unions shouldn’t be allowed to make members pay union dues that are used for political lobbying. Reality: This has been illegal for 40 years. Anyone who wants to opt out of political activities is required to pay only a smaller “agency” fee, which is used to fund ordinary collective bargaining activities. Yesterday’s court case abolished even those. Workers can now enjoy the benefits of union representation without paying dues of any kind.

My friend also suggested there was a 50 percent chance that North Korea will give up its nukes. This strikes me as wildly improbable, but strictly speaking it’s merely an opinion, not a statement of fact.

I’m not quite sure what my point is here. Lots of people are misinformed about lots of stuff. But this a pretty spectacular list coming from a smart, moderate guy. And there was no malice or la-la-la-la involved. It was just honest misinformation.

Where did it all come from? And how is it that he’s apparently never heard the truth? It’s something for the mainstream media to think about.

Julian Stratenschulte/DPA via ZUMA

I suppose the headline to this post seems like non-news. Lots of companies aren’t opening new plants, after all. Why single out US Steel?

You can guess the answer: because for the past month Donald Trump has been claiming that they’re opening six or seven new plants. This is ridiculous, of course. Why not a hundred plants? Or a thousand?

There’s no telling. But what’s interesting here is not that Trump is making up random shit. He does that all the time. The interesting thing is that US Steel’s CEO, Dave Burritt, is terrified of contradicting him. Glenn Kessler explains:

One would think this would be easy to clear up. But the White House did not respond to a query. Burritt also did not respond to an email from The Fact Checker asking him to confirm the conversation. Meghan M. Cox, U.S. Steel’s spokeswoman, simply offered this response: “To answer your question, we post all of our major operational announcements to our website and report them on earnings calls. Our most recent one pertained to our Granite City ‘A’ blast furnace restart.”

Translation: The president is wrong. But apparently U.S. Steel is afraid to say that out loud.

This is the point of Trump’s bluster and his threats and his Twitter rants. By scaring everyone into silence, he’s basically scaring them into complicity. If CEOs and Republican politicians are afraid to challenge him; the mainstream media mostly produces he-said-she-said thumbsuckers; and Fox News and the conservative noise machine loudly back up his lies—then why wouldn’t most people believe him? People like me can yell and scream all we want, but people like me are just partisan hacks, right? We’re only mad because we’re out of power.

I’l have more about this later backed up by some deep investigative reporting (aka lunch with a friend yesterday).

The New York Times reports that the great European migrant crisis lasted about one year and has basically been over since the beginning of 2016:

On the beaches of Greece, thousands of migrants landed every day. In the ports of Italy, thousands landed every week. Across the borders of Germany, Austria and Hungary, hundreds of thousands passed every month. But that was in 2015.

Three years after the peak of Europe’s migration crisis, Greek beaches are comparatively calm. Since last August, the ports of Sicily have been fairly empty. And here on the remote island of Lampedusa — the southernmost point of Italy and once the front line of the crisis — the migrant detention center has been silent for long stretches. Visitors to the camp on Monday could hear only the sound of bird song. “It’s the quietest it’s been since 2011,” said the island’s mayor, Salvatore Martello. “The number of arrivals has dramatically reduced.”

Here’s a chart:

It was only a coincidence that the Brexit vote ended up being held shortly after the peak of the crisis while memories were still fresh. A year earlier or a year later and it probably would have lost.

When the histories are written, 2016 won’t be remembered as the start of an era of right-wing populism. It will be remembered as an example of the contingency of events. Brexit passed—barely—because the vote happened to come right after a short-lived refugee crisis. Donald Trump was elected president—barely—because James Comey happened to re-open Hillary Clinton’s email case ten days before the US election. Those two things were the shocks that launched a thousand op-eds about the end of liberal democracy in the West.

But it was all a mirage. The world hadn’t suddenly undergone a sea change. It had just suffered from a pair of unlikely coincidences that we humans—as we do—insisted on interpreting as a pattern. Then we looked around—as we do—for confirming evidence and came up with Marine LePen and Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński. This despite the fact that LePen lost by a landslide and both Orbán and Kaczyński had been in and out of government for over a decade and didn’t truly represent anything new. They just enjoyed a short-lived return to power thanks to memories of a crisis.

I may yet be proven wrong. Maybe 2016 really was the start of a new era of harsh, right-wing populism in the West. But I don’t think so. Donald Trump and the others will go away, Brexit will get watered down, and liberal democracy will basically be fine.

For the next decade, anyway. Then the robots will start to take away jobs in large numbers and liberal democracy really will face a crisis. But it’s one we can overcome if rich people decide to pursue their own enlightened self-interest instead of being assholes. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I want to put money on that bet.

Olivier Douliery/CNP via ZUMA

As you all know by now, Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement. He will be replaced by a hard-right justice and there’s nothing Democrats can do about it. This means two things are true:

• There will soon be five votes on the court to repeal Roe v. Wade.
• This should be enough to motivate Democrats to turn out in a massive wave even for a midterm election.

If it’s not enough to produce a blue tidal wave, I suppose we lefties might as well give up. Between this and everything else going on, what more can the leadership of the party want in order to finally produce a big midterm turnout?

This bird puttering around our lake looking for bugs is a least sandpiper. Personally, I think that’s a pretty demeaning name for the poor thing, and I wish the ornithological community would show a little more respect to the least among us. Besides, what if we discover an even smaller sandpiper? What are we going to call it?

UPDATE: I was misinformed. This is a spotted sandpiper.

The Congressional Budget Office published its latest forecast of the national debt yesterday. Before we get to that, though, let’s take a little trip down memory lane:

For the past 40 years, the Republican playbook has been straightforward: they take office, cut taxes on the rich, and run up the national debt. Each time, Democrats have dutifully cleaned up their messes, only to watch them retake power and use the newly cleaned-up budget as yet another excuse to cut taxes on the rich and run up the national debt. Now Donald Trump has done it:

Needless to say, each time this happens Republicans start issuing dire warnings about the evils of a rising national debt as soon as the tax cut has passed. You’d think people would start cottoning to this eventually, but so far the con just keeps working. I wonder how much longer they can pull it off?

Nancy LeTourneau reminds us today that Donald Trump’s travel ban was always supposed to be temporary:

The administration claimed that the Muslim ban was necessary while they set up their “extreme vetting” system. The 120 days they set out for that to happen was up well over a year ago.

….What’s up with that? This so-called “temporary pause” to allow the secretary of homeland security to make lists and develop procedures for extreme vetting seems to have turned into something more permanent. Did John Kelly and his successor Kirstjen Nielsen fall down on the job? Have they been too busy implementing Trump’s “deport ’em all” and “zero tolerance” policies to get to this one? Or was the idea that the travel ban would be temporary simply another lie among the thousands this administration has told?

Can I go with (d) all of the above? It was a lie, they’re incompetent, and they got distracted. I’m just using Occam’s Razor here, folks.

The Supreme Court decided to crush public-sector unions today by restricting their ability to collect dues. Can you guess how the vote went? Huh? Can you?

The court in a 5-to-4 decision overturned a 40-year-old precedent and said that compelling such fees was a violation of workers’ free speech rights. The rule could force the workers to give financial support to public policy positions they oppose, the court said.

Yeah, that’s a shocker. Who would have guessed that the court’s Republicans would endorse the long-cherished Republican goal of decimating unions that support Democrats? They can add this to the list: refusing to halt gerrymandering that hurts Democrats; refusing to halt race-based redestricting as long as it’s only meant to hurt Democrats; refusing to halt voter ID laws designed to hurt Democrats; and now dealing a fatal blow to union groups that traditionally support Democrats. Republicans have sure gotten their money’s worth out of the Supreme Court lately. Donald Trump understands completely:

Supreme Court rules in favor of non-union workers who are now, as an example, able to support a candidate of his or her choice without having those who control the Union deciding for them. Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2018

“Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!” That’s the whole point, and as usual, Trump isn’t afraid to say it out loud. On the bright side, I suppose it’s one more reason for liberals to mobilize and vote in November.